by Inês Pedrosa
How I long for a heaven to place you in. They look good in heaven, your too-long skirts and those wool sweaters you knitted. But night hems in my attempts to think about you, swaths them in the world’s darkness. Maybe you’re still right, even now that you aren’t anything. You used to tell me I thought too much—now I can’t even think about you. I always thought about you all these years. I thought about your smile when happiness eluded me; I recalled with delight your inappropriate phrasings, which instead of gaffes became bright candle flames during dark dinners. My friends thought you were an old man’s fantasy, an inconvenient extravagance. Me defying the vast gulf of age that united us.
Maybe there’s no such thing as age, just dead people echoing down the channels of time, dead people who, like magnets, move close and then away from those who have not yet died. You carried so many dead in the shadow of your smile. A woven tapestry of the dead. Your passionate fury was like a vast funeral pyre, your surrender like that of bodies to the flames, a knowledge of ashes.
This night is studded with jewels, as you used to say. You always used over-the-top images—it is only in that excess that I now find a whiff of peace. Studded with jewels, the sky, above the delinquent sea of my youth. You weren’t yet born when I used to dive into those cold waves at night to prove my manhood to the girls on summer vacation.
With you I could be everything I had it in me to be, before and after and on the margins of that task of being a man. Be or not be your friend, for example. Once we hit thirty, we stop paying any attention to the people who cross our paths. Like putting a sign up: APPLICATIONS NO LONGER ACCEPTED. In childhood, all it took was a kid liking the same kind of candy for us to ask, “Do you want to be my best friend?” Later, bestness ceases to exist—we enter the age of equivalencies. But for you there was always such a thing as better and worse. Well, fine, Tink, I do think too much, but you always judged too much. You believed in virtue, gave speeches about courage and generosity, dignity and humanity. My friends found you naïve, tiresome and naïve. You were tiresome, yes, but precisely because you didn’t waste time being naïve. You carried your judgments, which could be cruel and unfair, to their natural conclusions in an effort to unravel the meaning of life more swiftly.
You weren’t a good teacher—I can tell you that now. You failed to account for the slowness of other people’s reasoning, the mental somnolence in which most of your students were accustomed to living. You made giant epistemological leaps, and anyone who didn’t follow was left behind. You had a restless mental agility. I confess that often I myself didn’t follow you, but I at least understood that there was no point in telling you that. Not even you could have explained those leaps; you soared over your subjects like an intrepid sparrow with aspirations to eaglehood. Yes, you were a sparrow convinced it was an eagle. Don’t get huffy. The rest of us hop from twig to twig like sparrows; few dare attempt an eagle’s plunging dive. I miss your daring. I miss you. I teach amateur liars—I can’t tell you lies.
12
A tiny part of me is still trembling with passion behind a door where nobody lives anymore, where I never died. In these rooms where you never set foot lived a man, and his body was my dwelling place. But I didn’t know. And here in this nolus, I can no longer do anything about that ignorance; I have no way of honoring the fleshly habitation contract we unwittingly established. Do you imagine a nonbody and beg for kisses, saliva, sweat, and skin? My only shelter is you, friend without a place of perdition. In you, the ultimate escape, beacon of safety, I flee from the passion that ripped me from life.
I don’t seek out any of the other men I loved, maybe because none of them will have retained more than the fleeting taste of my body. They loved the newness of our pleasure, my smile, my passion, what I had to give.
Soberly, you loved what I didn’t give: resentment, insecurity, motherliness. You liked seeing me fail, and it wasn’t out of vanity or pity, as is often the case between friends. My mediocre side didn’t rouse your noblest instincts. You simply loved the soil of me the way a child loves a pebble, a bite of gingerbread, a teddy bear with missing eyes. It’s that love I’m missing now—yours, the everyday love of unhappy moments, gibes, absences. You used to take pictures of me when I was angry, disheveled, sleeping with my mouth open, licking the lid of a yogurt container. Or, all too often, with my eyes swollen from crying. And I looked good in those photos.
They’re so ephemeral, those joyous complicities. Skin, ideas, atmospheres coming together, floating like clouds toward the paradise of forgetting. I used to believe that my life’s meaning lay in those encounters, and I’m faced now with how much I miss you. You rob me of meaning, and I’ve become addicted to that theft—maybe that, too, is an addiction to meaning, the ultimate one. We were never accomplices—we knew each other too well. We were promiscuous. We challenged each other’s mind-sets in order to touch the fog of humanity. You betrayed me—you betrayed me so many times and never even grazed the edge of betrayal. People used to say I forgave you everything. They were wrong. I never had anything to forgive you for, as I see now with impossible clarity. You enjoyed discord, which is a sort of instantaneous intimacy. As did I. We were unforgivable; we will remain unforgivable each to the other, shipwrecked hulls on the black conflagration of the sea.
12
Nobody remembers you the way I do. Your friends describe you as cold, stern, always swifter to criticism than to praise. And immensely concerned with image. They place in your dead mouth statements that seem impossible and then sigh pityingly: “Deep down, she was a fragile person. It’s to be expected—she lost her parents so young.” Summing you up in the space of three old postcards makes you easier to file away. Luísa, who was hired on your recommendation, now tells anyone who’ll listen that she remembers when you arrived at the university. And nobody sets her straight. This feasting on your decomposed flesh is going to turn me misanthropic. I’d rather hang out at my club of old snobs—at least aesthetes respect statues’ silence. Nobody talks about the way you smoked, cigarette held between the middle and ring fingers of your left hand. Nobody can describe the curve of your fingers, spirits in marionette motion. They taught you to talk without your hands; in TV debates, you’d shackle those spirits to a fountain pen. I used to stare at them tethered there, impatient to leap in concert with your words, to dance, transparent bodies inebriated with dreams. With those hands subdued, your speech became flatter, but I don’t think I ever had the chance to tell you that.
13
I need to say good-bye to you, or accept death, which is the same thing. I was never able to say good-bye to anybody, not ever. My parents crashed on a curve in the road; I was fourteen and wanted to lose faith in God. I’d been taught that God gave in proportion to our effort—and God gave me his oscillating smile in exchange for my incomprehensible sorrow. The worst had happened; nobody else could take anything away from me. God had offered me the searing light of pain to intensify my life.
Pain needs a body. Boundaries of skin, nails, snot, sweat. The inability to leave, the irremediable courage to live time’s passage. Patience, weight, brain on fire. I don’t accept the death of immortality, and I don’t hear my father’s warm, singsong voice. It was so hard for me not to have a father when I started to become beautiful. A father with whom I could leap into the mystery of womanhood, a father I could butt heads with and then soften, bring boys home to and ask for help. At fourteen I was told I had no father or mother, told that nobody can claim to have the love she needs most. I called to them across the nights’ saturated void and never heard their voices.
I hear them now, those inflexible voices, stripped of the relativizing veils of time. My mother tells my father, “I want a divorce from you. And from the kid. She’s more yours than mine, anyway. The two of you have robbed me of the right to live my own life.” God, why don’t you rob me of my right to know this truth that never came to be?
I was treated well, extremely well, as people generally are when others feel
sorry for them. Nobody ever scolded me; the world tried to be gentle with me. You were the first person to be rough on me. You told me everything you were thinking, especially when it was unpleasant. You even made up bad things to tell me—you enjoyed seeing me speechless, at a loss. But you never prodded the tender core of my weakness—you never told me, “You, too, lie and fail; you, too, betray and flee—you, too, are imperfect.” You accused me only of being too naïve—and, occasionally, intolerant. You kept people who liked me away from me. Only now do I see that you deliberately shooed them away, impelled by the wretched, awful, emotional vulture of jealousy. Especially women. You used to say that women’s affection for one another is artificial, and maybe you were almost always right. “Oh, sure, ngela,” you’d say mockingly, “her name might be angelic, but you’ll see she’s anything but.”
And I started becoming suspicious of people in the shadow of your words; you cast darkness over others’ every gesture toward me. “She gave you a blue dress even though that’s your worst color. And no, it wasn’t because she didn’t realize—it was deliberate. She wanted people to look at you and think the blue of that dress would work better on her body, with her eyes.” I came to see ngela as you did, lashed out, and ended up without her. Later, after we’d fallen out, I found the two of you dancing in each other’s arms on a night out at Lux.
I’d stopped talking to her because of you. One night you were arguing with her about a play she was in, a collage of texts by Camões and Pessoa that you deemed pompous, hollow, mediocre, and ridiculous. You always went all out when it came to insulting adjectives. ngela’s temper flared, I intervened, and she accused me of always defending you, no matter what.
The play really was mediocre. There wasn’t much left of Camões, and Pessoa came off as an idiot, recited in those apathetic voices, clumsily sketched, a succession of white hands grasping teacups and wineglasses, rising and falling against the blackness of the stage like fat spiders. The director, in a dull, very young voice, argued that Pessoa hadn’t had a body. Now Pessoa had a body, and it had come for all of us, unfolding multiplied, and it was that body that fed us; I found it in so many houses drawn by Pomar, by Almada, a bourgeois, status-building substitute for the Last Supper, taking the mental place of the Ches and Xananas for luckier generations. Pessoa may not have ever experienced sex, but why don’t we consider him a superbody, a body in stereo, concentrated in its own dense eroticism? Why do we refuse to understand experiences that stray from the calcinated paths of action?
No, not that Pessoa, cut up and sewn into an inhuman spectacle, shackled to a naked Camões, with too much body for someone who had so little, who poured it into a fire that burns unseen. But I never could have told ngela that. Out of friendship—or out of that cowardice we call friendship. When I failed to defend her, she turned on me with terrifyingly true aim: “You know the difference between good and bad! You just don’t have any standards—that’s why you hang around with an old coot like him!”
So I cut off my relationship with one of the women I liked most. ngela became famous after that play, so I never got the chance to make up with her. It’s always easier to make overtures to somebody everybody’s forgotten, at least for me. I would see her glowing on magazine covers, and I’d feel the pang of that assertion: “You just don’t have any standards.” For you, insults were like burns: as time passes, a scar forms, and it’s as if nothing happened. For me, though I was always so quick and impatient in everyday life, it was the opposite: the injury intensified with time, expanded, swallowed me up. You used to tell me, “Kid, you’re so good that you provoke other people to be bad.” I hadn’t yet realized that badness is never other people’s. You always adopted a jocular tone when you spoke—and the more honest you were being, the more you joked.
I gave myself to people back then; I gave the best I could, which is why I reacted so badly to signs of mistrust, malice, suspicion. I gave myself to other people because of you—yes, just to throw you off balance. When you admired a man, I had to seduce him. When you retreated into solitude, I had to set you up with somebody. I developed a group of friends to match your preferences, dropping anybody I thought you wouldn’t approve of. I threw myself into everything you loved and pretended I was innocent, or at least perverse, so as not to lose you. Later, I threw myself into the resentment of not having you, into cursing you, not knowing how to be indifferent to you. And now I’m giving you my death too, so you’ll stay by my side at last.
13
I’m tired of you. Tired of being tired of you. You wore me out, in life—you never stopped being, existed too much in everything, demanded of me at every moment. You were omnivorous, wanting to devour life in every way possible. I’ve gone out with so many women because of you—like that ngela chick you tried to hook me up with, a C-rate actress who saw herself as a sort of intellectual Greta Garbo—oh, the long, boring hours I spent in theaters to avoid disappointing you! And yet you profoundly disappointed me when you got into politics. You didn’t even ask my opinion. That was the only time you didn’t ask my opinion—you knew I’d say being an assemblywoman was beneath you. When you decided the country needed you, you stopped needing me. At least that’s how it felt. Your phone was always busy. After three days without talking to you, I started getting used to that new silence. I got used to it bitterly—and that bitterness became part of me. Your voice grew decentered, melodic. I couldn’t stand the marketing-smooth tone with which you now defended the great causes of the universe. Where was my friend? Where was the intemperate, out-of-tune braying that used to serve as my rising sun?
Go ahead, find me a girlfriend. Come back to my life and set up your little matchmaking business—go on. Introduce me to yet another of those vulnerable Electras—make one of your shameless sales pitches, damn it. I’ll be good; I’ll take the girl to bed at your command, give her the best of myself to avoid disappointing you. The things I’ve done to boost your pride—poor goddess of our tiny urban Eden, poor, poor dear. I didn’t want lovers or female friends or nights on the town. I just wanted to share with you the quiet domesticity of the two of us. I wanted to sit next to you, on a balcony overlooking the sea, and write a novel that you might admire. That was our shared project: writing parallel novels, our eyes mingling in the same sea. Because the story that brought us together, thoroughly wrung out, is good only for bad novels. Soap operas exploiting dead neurons.
You had talent, sure. The cruel light of talent shone in those half dozen stories you wrote—though you thought they were awful. “Terribly stilted,” you’d say. “Every sentence in there cost me a life—and it wasn’t even one of mine.” You had so many lives. Sometimes it seemed I’d known you since high school. Often, I found you even further back, cradling my very first dreams, and I’d be tempted to call you Mother. The mother I wished I’d had—why is it we can’t choose? My mother did me so much harm, and I could never choose her. If God existed, the bond between mothers and children would be something much more momentous than that cord of blood and grit. The maternal love I was given tasted like blood. It was a blind beast that trampled everything around me, all the loves I chose in life. As a kid, I was ashamed—all the boys knew how to run, swim, talk to girls. Except me. My siblings were born years after me, one right after the other, inseparable and pragmatic. We grew up without a father; my mother used to tell me he hated us, that he’d ditched us because he hated us. When I found the bundles of letters she’d saved, I wanted to kill her.
I tracked him down a few days before he left for good. He was headed to Sweden, where he’d gotten a job at an engineering firm. I wasn’t able to challenge him—for him, I only conjured up memories of a docile child. My father had stopped imagining me a long time before. My siblings never wanted to meet him. He’d had another daughter and moved away with her and the woman he’d left my mother for. He had no desire to return. He was bored by Portugal; he’d participated in a few subversive plots against the dictatorship, but he’d ditched that too. “Dic
tators don’t come out of nowhere,” he told me. “They’re earned. And we’ve definitely earned this one. People are still grateful to him for staying neutral during the war.” He lived in a large, luminous house. I remember the windows were all open—I’d never seen so many windows, and so wide open. I cautioned him about catching cold from a draft of chilly air, and he chuckled: “Don’t worry, Son. There’s no air in this country, despite all the drafts.” The furniture was made of blond wood. The walls were white, and there wasn’t a knickknack in sight, just colorful canvases on the walls’ broad expanses, many of them painted by him. And books, books scattered throughout the entire house, emitting a papery smell I never forgot.
It was an unusual house at a time when carpeting and flowery, baroque wallpaper had taken over the aesthetics of the bourgeoisie. My mother’s house reflected an absolute terror of empty space: the antique sideboards gleamed with countless boxes made of gold lacquer, porcelain, crystal; the small tables in every corner were crowded with framed photos of all our relatives. We didn’t have friends, just relatives, almost all of them dead or very far away. She’d carefully erased my father from all the photos, cutting them down to fit the tiny frames and encircling the remaining human beings in pink tissue paper, turning everybody into a sort of vaguely terrifying saint. I was particularly drawn to one of those images because of its bizarre composition: there I was, just two or three months old, smiling into the void, suspended in nothingness, wrapped in a blanket with a cutout of two absent hands. On my face, turned toward that absence, a besotted smile—a floating baby surrounded only by the faded pink of tissue paper.