by Inês Pedrosa
You might tell me, “You think you’re better than other people because you’re protected by a God they do not know.” It was absolutely true, but my own past wouldn’t have allowed me to recognize it. And then you’d laugh and fall silent. I’d say barbaric things, like “I want to change the world; you just want a change of scenery,” and your face would dim, fall, and your mouth would let out a harsh guffaw, and you’d say, “Amen.” I nestled inside my noble conscience—mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s got the purest sentiments of all?
Don’t cry for me, darling: the best of me lives on in you—it will always be alive in that knowledge of fragmentation I lacked, in that courage of incompleteness I can see only now, at last, from this nolus. I was your professor at the university; I was never able to be your mentor, but I found in you a privilege greater than that of teaching: a soul that added color to the canvas I provided. “Your Jesus is the militant revolutionary who drove the money changers out of the temple,” you once told me, when I first got into politics. “That sort of God, the tempestuous kind, draws crowds and amplifies the power of sacred texts. As a teacher, though, you were more like the Jesus who forgave Judas, the one who graced Judas with that ladder of love we call forgiveness. That Jesus was just a man capable of unforgivable things, one in solidarity with human weakness. That’s the only Jesus I’m interested in.”
I thought you were saying it out of envy, you know. In small countries, envy takes on a huge, mystifying quality, and conspiracy theories bloom in the flower beds of our impatience. Lacking ingenuity and skill, we barricade ourselves in impatient theories. My transition from teaching to politics was always a theoretical insubordination—and I thought I was fleeing from theory toward the greater art of living.
What is it I taught you, in the end? Everything original in my doctoral dissertation was written and thought by you. Instead of encouraging you to pursue an academic career, I cheated off you, copied your essays on the paradoxes of feminist ideals, won praise at the expense of your anonymous creativity. And I convinced myself that it had all been just the opposite, that I was the one who’d put the ideas in your head that you then returned to me, slightly expanded. I was, by definition, perfect, chosen by God. If I’d at least just said thank you. God of my imperfection, pour a dram of my dead voice into my friend’s dreams; let me give him the thanks I so badly owe.
4
And to think I used to say you talked too much. It’s true you never stopped talking. Even or especially without words, with the movement of your body, the force of your hugs. I didn’t know how to hug like you—sometimes I’d shake you, just out of distress—you know, fits of shyness that set my molecules boiling. The hug you gave me that New Year’s Eve, a decade ago now—did I know how to receive it? Did I ever hug you the way you deserved?
When you were alive, I could believe in souls, moles, intergalactic bowls—whatever you wanted. Because people looked at you and saw something transparent and solid, that knot of blood, secretions, and light pulsing like a beacon. Now, everything and everybody talks about “the spirit that remains.” Your parents invoke you, you and dozens of other residents of Paradise, as a way of moving on—church masses are supposed to be quick, efficient, by the book. But I can’t quite believe in abstract souls, discreet air bubbles belched up between a cup of tea and two sighs.
I miss you, damn it—have I said that already? Why doesn’t your seraphic Jesus come to succor me? Why won’t he bring you back to life—just for a few hours, Lord; what’s a few measly hours for a guy who’s basking in eternity?
Oh, kid. The world sorely misses your absolute certainties about good and evil. Even if they were pretty simplistic and full of holes. Your soul always had a bit of a limp, muddy pant cuffs, a hastily packed suitcase, the rumpled clothing of the inveterate traveler. But it limped so gracefully, honey. You swiped some of my papers on sublime womanhood—and I thoroughly enjoyed how tormented you were by that shameless act. I never accused you, never teased you about it—not even once. To make you suffer, I confess, to show you I’d noticed. Oh, puerile, pathetic stratagems.
How I wish I could give you now the vast, childlike love I had for you. I rationed it my whole life like a goddamn candy bar. Why do we live as if we had infinite amounts of time, as if we could do it all over again, as if we could do anything at all? I hope you haven’t carried that foolish guilt with you in death. I hope you know I was proud of you, puffed up and preening when you incorporated my lowly essays into your dissertation. If it weren’t for you, I never would have studied all those warrior women—and now that nobody’s listening, I’ll admit that your heroines helped enliven my existence. No question.
Omnipotent God I don’t believe in, wake from your eternal slumber and go give my friend the thanks I was never able to whisper in her ear. Don’t pretend not to hear me, cruel, lazy God. Watch out, I could destroy you. And I’ll do it, but first I’ll destroy your fame and glory. Or do you think I’ve forgotten the hell you rained down on me in Africa? If I survived that, hard-hearted God, I’ll survive you too.
5
I wish I could stop seeing you. You’ve started growing a beard again, like the one you had when we met. It never suited you. You loll in bed for hours in the mornings, listening to the songs I used to love and you despised—“That’s not music, man, it’s a way for soulless losers to pass the time.” You never listen to your classical music, the great operas sung by the great vocalists, the great symphonies by the great maestros. I used music as a soundtrack, songs made to the measure of every mood: Chico Buarque, Joni Mitchell, Sérgio Godinho, Serge Gainsbourg, and even—to your immense horror—the fados of Amália Rodrigues, which only reminded you of the dreary country into which I’d not yet been born, the misery of the war that crushed your idealism.
Please stop. Being here, so far away, so far from my hand on your head, I can’t stand hearing that song of Pascoal’s: “I want the dark light of contagious dreams / The scraps of the souls we invented / The burning heart of old flames / The stories we never ended up telling.” I first heard it ages ago, back when the song was new and I was in love with an astrophysicist I didn’t marry only because he couldn’t bear Portugal’s mediocrity and I couldn’t stand the idea of living far from Lisbon, however mediocre it was.
We were very young; we knew everything. To us, life was a multimedia installation created by our hands for our own glory. We believed we all had our own paths. And look at me now. You can’t see me, of course; most likely you’re already forgetting the color of my skin, my faded scars. I’m close to you, hovering above the roof of your house, beneath the airplanes’ dreamlike trails, in these wispy clouds that offer a narrow view of everything. I can see you, your neighbors, your street. I can choose whatever streets I want—they’re all identical now that I’m not in them. The city’s streets served as our mirror, remember? Uneven sidewalks, unspooling hills offering a bonus glimpse of river blue, battered tiles from other lives, avenues that suddenly expanded but somehow remained lackluster. My steps make no echo; my voice casts no shadow. It’s you I see because I can’t stop thinking about you. I want to unwrap the Great Mystery: What’s your life like now, so far from me? I find you living the way I used to live—except for that Pascoal song. You weren’t around the first time I heard it. I was holding hands with the young astrophysicist who should have married me. Pascoal was singing almost in a whisper, accompanied by just a viola. He was rehearsing, making sure the song was perfect. He used to invite a few friends to secret pre-shows sometimes, where he would appear with a birdlike, almost timid nervousness, as if he, too, were very young and everything might be immensely important. You weren’t around then, but later, when you were, I used to sing that song to you as you walked me home at dawn. We’d stroll through the city at that hour when the sunlight mingles with the yellow cinders of the streetlamps. We’d breathe in the clean air of those early hours, a damp air that made the streetcar tracks glisten and soaked the lowered shades to a dusty pink. Yo
u were afraid of the dark. That’s why you used to lie down in the morning, while I often didn’t even do that—I’d take a shower and head out into the world. Now I can’t sleep anymore—I watch over your slumber without knowing whom to watch over. You fall asleep to the sound of my songs—after Pascoal, then Brel, Aznavour and his Venice of dead loves, light songs, little ditties to touch housekeepers’ emotions, you used to say, ditties that now slake your secret housekeeper heart and shout that there’s no longer anything I can do for you, for me, for all those hours we forgot to live.
5
How many days will it take me to forget your face? I remember you constantly. Detail by detail, so as not to lose you. So as to lose myself, all of me, in the mutable object that was you. Your deep-black eyes, perpetually dark-circled. Those Kahlo eyebrows. The aquiline nose that made you self-consciously avoid showing your profile in photos. The birthmark on the right side of your neck. Your long, bony arms. Your hands, square like your fingernails, which were always clipped short. No polish. A matter of principle: nail polish was just another blatant symbol of women’s subjugation, or worse, because of the time it took. I agreed with your aversion, but for aesthetic reasons: for me, sharp, brightly colored claws evoked barbaric customs, shantytown odors, primitive rituals. The grace of your pointy elbows resting on the table, your hands shredding the night faster than your words. Your wide mouth, with its row of large, uneven teeth, always poised for your next laugh.
You once tracked me down at an art opening, your eyes swimming with tears because some marquise or other upper-crust dame had told you, with a beneficent smile, that she knew a great dentist and recommended that you go get your teeth fixed. You retorted, apparently, that your teeth were just fine, that their crookedness was part of your unique charm, to which the marquise responded, sneering in C minor, how marvelous it was that some people are happy the way they are. You told me all this in a rush, whispering in my ear in a tremulous voice, and I was furious. I gave you my arm, and we marched over to the woman, whereupon I looked her scornfully up and down and said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but there are treatments nowadays for those ugly age spots on your hands. I’d be happy to give you the name of a great dermatologist. She’s really a miracle worker.”
I didn’t just do it for you, kid. I took a wicked pleasure in cutting such people down to size; their swift transit from surprise to horror disfigured them, revealing their scaly, interplanetary crocodile heads. We became experts at that game of truth-telling, drawing inspiration from John Carpenter’s They Live, one of the many movies we went to see together.
Initially, you declared it a lesser work, entertaining but crude. As you sank into the mire of politics, though, you came to see it as a documentary. They really do live, and it’s only with special sunglasses that some of us are able to see them. Others, like you, fight to eliminate them so the world can be the humane place it hasn’t yet become. The problem, my dear, is that those who fight the hardest seem doomed to burn themselves out.
Your God’s lightning, if he exists, is much more of a threat than the two of us put together. Since you kicked the bucket, all I see are crocodiles. And you’re right: they wear Hugo Boss suits, Ralph Lauren shirts. Even, I’m forced to admit, Italian silk scarves like mine. Identification by accessory, you used to joke. Like in primitive communities. But aren’t we all, even those of us who know, tribal beings governed by the principle of participation? What logic is there in this chaotic discourse that binds me to you, that makes me look for you in the cruel green of this false spring?
I don’t believe in gods or devils. And yet I receive your signals, locked in solitude and listening for you. There you are: “I want the dark light of contagious dreams / The scraps of the souls we invented / The burning heart of old flames / The stories we never ended up telling.” The voice of your friend Pascoal, one of the lucky guys you fell in love with before me.
Yesterday I had the distinct impression you were asking me to play a bunch of those songs you used to love so that you could listen to them. It’s weird, but I obeyed—even though I despise that crap. You used to say that if music were a great art, there’d be a panoply of female composers. But there’s not a single woman among the greats. What’s more, dictators are all music lovers. For you, this was irrefutable proof that music was a trivial, everyday kind of art. Strangely, if you’ll forgive the observation, your own favorite singers were almost all men, my dear. Worse than that, even: sensitive men.
6
If only I could occupy you without the strangeness of pain, wake up again inside your head, so deep inside my own that you don’t even sense I might be about to disappear. It was Pascoal who introduced you to me. Pascoal, whose life is half melodies and half cries of pain; Pascoal, the doctor who traded salvation for emotion and who falls asleep every night with at least one dead soul burdening his dreams. He wanted to save me, I wouldn’t let him, and now he’s swamped with regret—survival’s persistent prize. You keep insisting things like, “There wasn’t anything you could do, forget about it.”
You’re the only one who can’t forget me. Do we ever forget a part of who we are? We forget only what we can isolate in our memory—and for a long time now, you haven’t even been remembering me. If I look at your present self, I find you wallowing in the hangover of our friendship, talking about my overweening ambition or my cheesy tastes with some distant acquaintance. Or letting them do it, which is the same thing. That’s why I can’t look away from what we were, both together and apart. Trying to wipe the heavens clean of the cruel words I also said or let be said about you. So many words, so pathetic in their tattered cloaks of cowardice.
I carry you in our stifled laughter, the tears you wept over me, a fire escape to the wisdom of happiness, in skin scalded by the night’s glow after hours at the beach. We’ve talked too much for me to remember what we talked about, lived too many lives for me to be able to separate them. To be able to separate myself from you. Memory tends to unravel like old viscera in this space I will call merely incorporeal so as not to frighten you. I see everything, continuously; the spectacle of life interferes with the routes of my wanderings into the past. But what is the past? Only for the living do the dead have a past—the worst thing about death is this obligatory present, this suspended nolus.
In this obligatory present, I see my mother: tired, not just of my father but also of me, sobbing with rage on the telephone for having fallen into the trap of becoming pregnant and getting married. And for the first time, I doubt this God who refuses me the mercy of altering the images of the past. Or at least blocking my access to them. One day I’ll look at you, and I won’t even know who we were. Understandings, misunderstandings, rage, resentment—everything becomes a dull, heavy mass that I’ll gradually leave behind.
I start seeing you outside of time, strain to review what brought me here, hanging practically over your shoulder. I’d like to be able to stroke your long gray hair, touch your slender hands, hug you—all those things we used to think were so corny. I lean over your head, but I can’t decipher your thoughts—remember Wenders’s angels, hunched by the powerlessness of omniscience? The state I find myself in is even more excruciating: as if I were drowsily watching a movie I can no longer re-create, seeing it all, the past and the future, which ultimately are a single hermaphroditic creature, and learning too late what I was unable to see. This must be limbo.
God will come looking for me—or, more humbly, will send someone else to look for me—to lead me to another dimension. Will you come? Are you so human, God of my faith, that you seek people’s love only to forget them? If so, maybe I deserve to be appointed your guardian angel. It would be a divine bit of vengeance, my friend. Or, seriously speaking, it would be a restoration of the justice of things. And especially of peace—the peace that won so little of our respect.
That photo of me on the bedside table in your bedroom—was it already there, or did you pull it out when you heard I’d died? They matter so
little, these pinpricks of emotions. Slow childhood cruelties. My mother’s shrieking eyes when she caught me dissecting silkworms. I just wanted to see what they were made of. How that spongy thing turned into a butterfly. I wanted to see what stuff your love for me was made of. I needed to compress your heart to fit it inside mine. And now I have to take it out again so I can leave this limbo. But I don’t know how. Without your heart, I’m unable to love—don’t abandon me again. And to think I used to love everybody. Loving in the abstract is much more agile than loving concretely.
It’s clear now that my dedication to Important Causes grew in inverse proportion to my disappointment with the Important People in my life. I thought of friendship as a grown-up, sanitized version of love, so I transferred the heavy artillery of my affections to its armory. I swapped out Prince Charming for Friend Wonderful, which was you. You could have been my father; you were my disciple. Nothing could tear us apart: we were naturally free of the pitfalls of desire, the via crucis of possession and sacrifice. So naïve. An entire life wasted being naïve—and I didn’t even have time to change the world.
God is merciful; he’s put me here with you instead of sending my soul to one of those countries where mothers mutilate their own daughters, slicing their genitals with a knife and stitching them up with thorns. I hear those girls’ screams constantly—they woke me up my whole life. I’d open my eyes hearing those screams issuing from Somalia or Sudan, those screams that could have been mine. I thought I possessed all the keys to suffering. You used to call me presumptuous, and maybe you were right. There’s no such thing as a true understanding of another’s suffering—only that paternalistic distance known, in fortunate cases, as compassion. And that can be enough as a guerrilla tactic, but not as a theory of triumph. And without the sere blood of theory, the grace of Possible Paradise remains out of reach. Without theory, I, the everyday infiltration of your soul, do not exist.