by Inês Pedrosa
I died in an echo, reduplicated. I died when a drifter got lost on the way to my uterus; I died because my body decided to produce a new life and screwed it up. I saw death open the floodgates of my blood, but it was only at the end of that red river that I saw I’d been carrying an impossible child. The first sensation I experienced, after passing out from the pain, was the intense smell of infant, the hot, sour scent of vomited milk. The swing of God’s smile suddenly caught me in a gash of light, and resting on my thighs was a sort of tiny baby, practically just a baby’s smile that seemed to have emerged straight from my belly onto my lap. A seed, a stone, a warm thing emanating happiness, stripping away my pain. And then undone in a blue light, with a sigh of relief. Then the swing became weightless and started spinning for what seemed like an eternity inside a rose of white light. The waves of light of that spiraling rose explained everything I didn’t know about my death, and much of what I’d forgotten about my life. Simple things, like that child I’d been producing in an unviable part of my body, in the blind wisdom of unawareness. And things even simpler than that, ineffable things, like the snags in the fabric of my friendship with you. Irremediable, tranquil things. My God, let me perfect in them the first concert of my eternity. He softened the heat of his smile, the solar petals of the rose I was climbing retreated, and I, now only a breath of wind, slowly descended over our city.
My perspective wasn’t that vantage of intelligent disdain learned in airplane windows, no. I already suspected that the rectangular glance we cast over the frenzied movements of human ants bears no resemblance to the compassionate tilt of God’s gaze. In this first pleat of transcendence, in this nolus in the gap between your time and my eternity, my orbitless gaze fixes on maximal enlargements of minimal details. From the child trying to be a pigeon to the closed windows of your house, which lies empty because you’ve gone to sit with my body. You’ve left the bathroom light on, the wardrobe doors flung open, and a pair of dark-red briefs balled up on the floor beside the bed. How unlike you.
2
Did you think about me as you were dying? I’d pay a lot of money to know the answer to that—as long as it was true. Because the truth does exist—everything’s not all relative like you insisted. There is a truth, and that’s what united us—that there was truth, a steadfast ship. Some people agreed with us, but at a distance. The distance of conviviality and cocktails that became a new intimacy. For you, the truth was never out of reach—were you already with me on that childhood morning when I tried to swim out to the ship of the horizon? They fished me out before I got there, with a rowboat and a couple of sharp slaps—are you nuts, kid?
A person lives better, or so I’m told, when he invents the truth every day. Pretend you haven’t died. Just pretend. The two of us tried to invent everything but the truth. Even when the truth was our enemy. Especially when it was our enemy. We wanted to kill bad truth and spread good truth—are we nuts, kid?
How can I kill your death? In dreams, you come looking for me, take me with you down a long, dark corridor. Why are there so many corridors in our dreams, and all of them so dark? But in the end you look at me, and it’s no longer you. A skull with scraps of flesh in its eye sockets laughs at me and goes neener-neener-neener the way kids do—ha ha, fooled you. When I wake up, I have a hard time separating you from the skull. I see your bones, nerves, and decaying skin in pictures of you, a caustic smile floating in the silence of the room. And everything reeks of old age, the instant putrefaction you became. You didn’t want me to see you dead—is that why you’re punishing me?
Seeking the truth turns us into punishers. I tripped over your little lies so often. They stung me deeply. I’d lie right back, a little more vehemently, so you’d notice. Lies. You took a witticism that had been mine and made it yours, and that anecdote found its way back to me, expanded, made meaner by bits of humor you’d added at my expense. You weren’t like that when we met. You used to quote me. With quotation marks and everything. Your charm lay in the way—the exceedingly rare way—that quote marks shone around your statements. “So-and-so told me,” you’d say. “What’s-his-head said.” You highlighted the insight and beauty of other people’s words. Once you went into politics, you shed that precision like an uncomfortable skin. The names were eclipsed, swept beneath the solemn rug of “reliable sources.” Later, as you gained confidence, you eventually did away entirely with citing sources. So many sentences that left my lips for your ears, crafted for the purpose of making you laugh, made their way back to me in the newspapers, as “quotes of the week” that had issued from your noble brain.
That’s not to say I question the brilliance and vastness of your intelligence. You were an existential doctoral dissertation in motion. Did I ever tell you that? You thought so much and so well that you always inserted the citations in the right places. You didn’t need to swallow them and then disgorge them as if they were your own pearls. But you turned into an oyster—a mollusk, less of a person.
At first, I’d get offended, lash back—I’d make a scene. But then I’d stop myself—you never made scenes. “What difference does it make?” I’d say instead. “You aren’t seriously throwing a fit because I forgot a story came from you.”
Lia was like that. The party structure was like that: a club where the person who managed to hunt down and consume other people’s qualities the fastest got ahead. And that, you used to explain, wasn’t lying. You’d entered a specialized world where omission didn’t count as lying. And betrayal counted only when it was repeated many times, in the same places, with the same people. Everything else—indiscretions, sex, conspiracy, complaints—was just human antics.
Your moral code became bureaucratic; there were subheadings for every infraction. And even the biggest ones ceased to matter much. You learned that there’s not much distance between a slipup and a crime. That all of us are capable, at any point, of sliding into darkness. One drink, two, a drunk, a murderer; a joint, a line of coke, an addiction, a thief. That’s how life was. Unfamiliar. At once enormously simple and enormously complex. Music growing ever louder, until it was deafening. Without any truth as a starting point.
“What difference does it make? It’s way worse when those guys steal one of my projects and take credit for it. And I’ve gotten used to that—they’re men, there are a lot of them, that’s how they’ve always run things. War is fought with missiles, so it’s no use wearing yourself out hurling rocks.”
You had an answer for everything, damn you. Back when you were studying history, you’d specialized in questions. You interrogated the past, earnestly, methodically: Why was this like that? Why didn’t the other possibilities come to pass? Where was the truth, regardless of the facts?
People used to laugh when you talked about truth. They’d insist there was no such thing; that’s what passed for truth in the splinter of time we happened to inhabit. But you never settled into our time. And you were always worrying about settling into some other time, turning into an anachronism.
“I don’t care if they think I’m old-fashioned. But it bugs me to think that my ideas might just be reactions, rather than a self-sufficient philosophy. We can’t let ourselves drift into enemy territory, darling.”
Enemy territory. You could sketch it out with the clarity of a soccer match. You liked soccer because it resembled the truth. Even when the referees were corrupt and banknotes flowed in greasy rivers under the tables of accountants, businessmen, lawyers. Even when it turned into a business. Good and bad, pure and impure—yes, the flow of cash did make it harder to draw such distinctions. But the sun on the field determined everything—men’s legs racing after the ball of truth.
“It’s so clear which players are giving everything they’ve got and which are just using their bodies,” you’d say. “Why isn’t life as transparent as soccer?”
3
Whose death is this, laid out in a coffin? Where does it come from, this icy fever sealing my mouth? I struggle to escape this box where
they’ve put me on display to be mourned. If only they knew how to pray. Our Father, I no longer want to go to heaven. The smell of the dead unsettles the living, so they smother it with flowers, incense, candles, anything to keep that smell far from the actual body, still flesh, still warm. In the dead person’s place is a dazed, dizzying fear. Fear of me, of the future that I, in my burial garb, portend. That fear creates waves of heat, somber waves that expand in the candlelight, the slavering whispers.
Are you afraid of me too? I lie motionless here, my eyes closed, looking at you to avoid looking at myself, to forget the smell of fear that may be the final scent. I concentrate on you, on the smell of the beach, seaweed and rocks, the smell of the sea we used to plunge into together, the smells of life that rescue me from this dense fog, from this swell of irremediable pity. Our Father, let me look at him. Let my dead eyes rise on the candlelight, slowly, to look at him.
Finally, I see you. I never dreamed I’d see you in mismatched socks—one gray, the other black. I noticed when you crossed your legs and straightened your spine with a sigh, lolling your head back, and only then did I feel a pang. Because that suffering pose of yours, sitting for an hour with your chin lowered, might not have meant anything. Or, rather, it might have meant so many things that it became a blank, with a somber elegance that remained immensely remote from me.
I spent my whole life trying to interpret you—what a delightful waste! It wasn’t even out of love. At least, not that phenomenon that pushes people to an exalted state of possessiveness and lust. Through you, I existed before I was even born, in the harsh, secret vocabulary of a war that no longer belonged to me: no can do, bullshit, whatever. We never felt vertigo, not even momentarily, not even that night we chugged your prized bottle of aged Irish whiskey and stayed up to watch the sun rise over Lisbon’s rooftops. In a way, we knew each other’s bodies by heart; we swapped inhibitions and gaffes the way kids swap trading cards. It wasn’t just happiness; it was a kind of astonished pride in our exchange of dismal intimacies. Without sleeping with you, I learned from you about a man’s triumphs and tribulations, the turbulent brutality of pleasure, the terror of failure, the multiplicity of surrenders as a rule of absolute surrender.
Most of all, I liked watching you. Selecting Italian silk scarves, for example, opening and closing the drawers organized by color. You could have lived off bread, water, and cigarettes, but you never left the house without a pure silk scarf around your neck. I found your scarves so embarrassing at first, wrote you off as profligate because of them. I was the opposite: appalled that it was possible to spend a month’s salary on a scrap of cloth. I bought my clothing out of baskets at the market in colors reminiscent of 1950s movies, left it heaped on the back of the chair in my room for weeks on end. But you liked looking at me. You liked my white sneakers amid all those high heels, the circle of my pink skirts among the navy-blue suits. I was always what I seemed, and you were everything you seemed. I think that’s why we were so close—and why we pulled so far apart.
When, in a flicker of candles, your face appeared above mine, I hadn’t seen you for almost a year. With what you used to call my naughty sense of humor—and here I’ll pause to confirm that, yes, it’s the last thing to go—I felt like laughing at your woebegone demeanor. Had I been able to, obviously. What were you pondering there, with a widower’s eloquent composure? A list of your girlfriends? The theme for your next party? A trip to New York? And then you crossed your legs. You remained sitting with them crossed for a good half hour and never noticed your terrible blunder. Nobody was relaxed, not you or anybody else—the light at a wake is dim, and the deceased, despite our efforts, are too present. Now I was the deceased. I’m still so unaccustomed to it that the word deceased doesn’t fit. That’s why I’m seeking you with words of life, the words with which you recognized me and loved me. But what do I know of the hours you spent at my wake, what do I know of time, now that life is unspooling before me like a far-off film?
In this place without place, past present and future are simultaneous. They tumble into the depths of their own overabundant existence. But the ache persists, glows amid the chaos. My eyes that are no longer mine now see all that was, all that could be, all that is. I focus on what is—I’m dead, everyone’s crying over me, stripped of the trite, continual, mineral malice that the living wield as a law of survival. This was the glory I dreamed of as a teenager: to gather everybody’s sadness and longing around my own absence.
Everybody’s? I’m missing somebody who is not you. I’m missing the place of my own death—the darkness of a staircase where you can hear the rain falling, a staircase where I learned to cry. I was that place, the antechamber of passion. I was the inside of a man who can’t bear to see me dead. At the moment, he’s lying on the floor in the place where he killed me many years ago. I know he’s there, in that now-abandoned house, that house he kept for himself. That house I loved, still love, which he kept for me. I lean against the door of the cockeyed house that contains everything you don’t know about me, all that I never wanted to know and was. I can never knock on that door again, never cry so the door will open and show me, through the blur of my tears, the place of love. I’m dead. Everybody’s crying over me. He’s crying. There’s no rain, just the sound of his tears. There was never any rain, only our tears, the tears I am once more fleeing for the glimmering lap of our immanent, moribund, immortal friendship. Don’t let me go to heaven, darling. I was always so scared you were right. What if heaven is the disillusionment that serves as the cornerstone of your beliefs? What if our misspent friendship is out of place in the perfection of heaven? Let me be your life’s throbbing beauty, to the extent that life can actually be yours.
3
I was in a funk when I met you. One of the few periods like that in my life. My second divorce, retirement, the death of a close friend. I wallowed in the easy enumeration of those reasons. But getting divorced had been my idea, and I’d requested early retirement because I was sick of the bank. Only Alexandre’s death went against my own desires. Suddenly, I was almost old—like I’d wanted to be all my life. With the right to grumble, to be pompous and irascible, to have my ideas respected, just like anyone who has nothing more to hope for from life. And I found myself hollowed out, without knowing why. Wanting to complain for no reason, to pontificate senselessly. To experience once more the afflicted arrogance of youth. I signed up for the history class to fill that hole. I needed the blood of endless battle. I needed the blood of other people’s ideas, the blood of the history of the future that flows through university classrooms, through the turbulent margins of books. I’ve been fascinated by history since I was a boy. It seemed like a good time to cultivate that old interest. And it was also a way of paying posthumous homage to my mother, who’d always lamented that I never pursued higher education.
I didn’t hear a word you said the whole first class; I was hypnotized, so to speak, by your extraordinary sweater. Electric-blue wool with sailboats and dolphins. You looked about fifteen years old—and that’s not a compliment. I couldn’t believe a high school girl from the suburbs had anything to teach me. In the following weeks, I amused myself by turning your youthful buzzing into words. You drove me crazy. According to you, the entire history of civilization was built on the systematic objective of discriminating against women. Lou Salomé, as it turned out, was the author of Rilke’s poems and Freud’s psychoanalysis; Alma Mahler had composed her husband’s symphonies; Camille Claudel was the spirit of Rodin’s sculptures; and so on. You were pissed when I said the course should be renamed History of Muses instead of Great Thinkers of the Western Tradition. Far from being cowed, you assigned me an extra paper on muses’ influence on the Great Thinkers. In it, I argued that muses functioned merely as a mirror that amplified the creator’s light. You gave me a 9 out of 10 and decided to ignore me. This game brought color back into my life. I came out of my blue period and entered one that was ruby-colored, which hadn’t happened to me since the g
lory days of the revolution. I started reading stacks of books, collecting arguments I could use to crush you. But I also enjoyed discovering the constellation of women you were introducing me to. I became smitten with the black eyebrows—so similar to your own—of Frida Kahlo. Her glorious, raw self-portraits. You remained immune to my attempts at charm. To tell the truth, I wasn’t used to women resisting the natural magnetism of my blue eyes. My good looks, which had brought so much trouble into my life, left you cold—you, a girl of modest physical attributes, wearing a sailboats-and-dolphins sweater and spouting theories about liberation. And that intrigued me.
4
There are so many things I never told you—and you used to say I talked too much. I float through this nolus in search of those missing words, which stretch between us like the long corridor of a prison. When I was alive, I used to say I couldn’t forgive you for how much you didn’t know about me. Here in this nolus, I now see the unassailable truth: I can’t forgive myself for how much I was unable to pour into you. You should have been my heir, the prolongation of my light. At midnight, as 1990 turned over into a new year, we paused our game of mah-jongg and you hugged me tight. “If I’m not here in the year 2000,” you murmured, “you play for me. And do me a favor and win for a change, kid.” Neither of us considered the alternate possibility—you were fifty-three at the time, and I was just twenty-eight. I thought I wanted to change the world; I thought you just wanted a change of scenery. I thought I was thinking—that’s why I learned so little about unthinkable us. Faith can become a sort of arrogance, and you knew it, though you were always tactful enough not to tell me. You used coarseness as a scalpel, going after the tumors in my understanding and excising them with swift brutality so I wouldn’t get tangled up. But you never came close to my central nervous system.