by Inês Pedrosa
My mother’s room was her sanctuary. It was decorated with photos of me and my siblings, from every age. Often, they were just of me, abruptly alone. When she didn’t like how she looked in a photo, she’d excise herself from it. She was meticulous about posterity and about appearances. I looked awful in many of the photos—wearing puffy shorts in one, a ruffled shirt in another—but she insisted on showing them off to anybody who came over. Few people ever did. I was terrified to introduce her to my friends, once I finally started having any. In that room, the images of my lonely youth were interspersed with pictures of Sãozinha, the folk saint of whom my mother was a devotee, and some portraits from her childhood as a Hungarian aristocrat.
She used to say that if she hadn’t married my father, she’d have written a great work of literature about her beloved and long-suffering Hungary. It’s true that when she married him, hastily, already pregnant with me, she didn’t speak much Portuguese, and she did once win a literary prize in some kind of high school competition. But my father always encouraged her to keep writing. I remember stray exchanges—brusque, insistent. I would have been about four or five years old. “If you want to write, why don’t you?” he’d ask. “What am I supposed to write in this deadly dull country?” she’d retort, irritated. I didn’t understand those words—maybe that’s why I remembered them. Maybe because the weight of resentment they held was too heavy for my age. Then my mother would slam a few doors, shut herself up in her room to listen to Hungarian music and cry. I felt really sorry for her. I felt so sorry for her that it took me years to realize that love wasn’t an amplified sort of compassion.
Of course I loved her. Maybe my love for her was similar to hers for me: a bender of self-congratulation. Loving her despite all her faults, recognizing her pettiness and moral shortsightedness, made me a better person. Love as a means to self-aggrandizement. Even so, it was hard to listen to her interminable rants about her superiority and my genius. Embarrassing to hear her tell any woman holding a child by the hand that, when I was that age, I’d already known my times tables and been able to read. More wishful thinking.
That over-the-top mother of mine ended my first marriage. She used to write me endless letters in neat handwriting—she was immensely proud of her handwriting—complaining that my wife wasn’t domestic enough and encouraging me to “be a man and put her in her place.” My wife, who had the patience of a fisherman and was always sympathetically reminding me how lonely my mother was, read two of those awful letters and was never the same again. She was furious I’d never put a stop to those missives, that I’d let them go unanswered, as if I agreed. She accused me of refusing to take sides. Silence, intimacy—for me, that was taking sides. I was on hers. I never felt like that with anyone again. Despite what your friends say, sex loses us only when it is tainted by that addictive substance we call love. And in that sacred mystery—the only sacred mystery, at least before your death came along—there are no men, no women, no positions, no assembly instructions, no hotness ratings, no Kama Sutras, no yoga, none of that stuff. Just sweat, morbid substances, bodies in the surf, nothingness. Nothing that can be uttered, not even really remembered. I was effortlessly faithful to her, probably because she was so different from my mother.
Oddly, after reading those letters, she started resembling my mother more. She obsessed over domestic tasks. Her attention split; she wanted to be the ultimate housewife, not just a mathematical genius. It was the genius that fascinated me. If I’d stayed with her, I’d have moved to New York, where she was invited to join a research team—and I’d never have met you. And I’d be somebody else—so many shards of you are part of me.
Your joy was an incurable disease. I used to call you Tinker Bell because, like Peter Pan’s fairy, you were sassy and sprinkled golden dust on everything you touched. But you were also temperamental and weepy, hypersensitive. And you had a vengeful streak, which eventually got on my nerves. But even what I resisted in you became flesh of my flesh. I adopted your loves and hatreds. I was your friend. I never got tired of you, only of your own exhaustion with yourself.
You changed. I don’t know if it was politics, success, the mediocrity around you, or something else entirely. Your voice changed, your joy cooled, and I wanted you the way you used to be. You even changed your house. One of those celebrity decorators designed a new apartment for you. I never felt comfortable in that magazine home, all done up in white, blue, and yellow, right downtown. I still dream of your two-room apartment on the edge of the city. The musty odor in the stairwell. The back windows that looked out on a cement courtyard where the kids used to kick a ball around, ringed by other buildings with balconies full of canaries and clotheslines. All your old furniture expanded and shrank; the coffee table unfolded and rose to become a dining table as needed. Then you had to shove the sofas back to fit the folding chairs around the table. The sofas were upholstered in thick fabric with green-and-pink boughs. You’d bought them on sale at some department store. But you’d replaced the sofa-bed frame, made of sagging wire mesh, with wood so your friends could sleep comfortably.
There were always lots of people crashing in that tiny house. People would knock on the door and come up at all hours of the day and night. You would supply tea, cookies, comforting words. The walls were full of art, the frames almost touching—countless little drawings, watercolors, the occasional oil painting. Many of them were clumsy, amateurish. You said they’d been done by friends, lovingly dedicated, and that was enough for you. You even had a couple of sketches hastily drawn on restaurant napkins, and a collage I’d made as a joke one day with your old magazines, and which I begged you not to hang. Built-in bookshelves with a sliding door divided the living room from the kitchenette. On the right side of the tiny hall was the bathroom, then your room, with a bed perched high on drawers to make full use of the space.
I spent hours talking with you in the armchairs by the windows that looked out onto a field. You’d managed to squeeze in a little table with an electric heater. You used to claim you couldn’t live without a space heater. A holdover from childhood. But when the decorator for the new phase of your life convinced you there was no room for the table, which was tacky anyway, you caved immediately. In that final political period of yours, the word tacky, which you’d previously enthusiastically embraced, made your hair stand on end.
14
Is it you I miss, or my own innocence when I met you? Suffering anticipates the pleasure of death, say the living, just to say something, when the inevitable draws near. And pain gradually separates people from one another. I didn’t return the last kiss you gave me, the last kiss my father deposited on my forehead—
“You behave yourself, kid. I’ll be back tomorrow. Don’t get involved in politics.”
That kiss you were unaware of sears the interior of your forehead; inside your head, I’m not dead, I wear micro miniskirts to piss you off, I seduce you and then tell you to get lost, I’m fourteen years old and I want you to die, then come back to life when my allowance runs out or I fall off my boyfriend’s motorbike. I’m fifteen and nobody yells at me when I fall off that forbidden motorbike, when I lie and say I fell into the swimming pool; if I died, there wouldn’t be any more need to honor my dead parents’ memory—
“Be more careful next time, sweetie. Think of your poor parents.”
I think about you, my poor friend, slowly devoured by ghosts, shedding the fear of death like snakeskin. When God gets distracted, pain falls on people’s incandescent contours, transforming them into something else. A feeling of resentment. Leftover food after a party’s ended. A poisoned pigeon in the grass. A flock of pigeons scavenging the city’s remains. An armchair with a rats’ nest inside it. The space they once had for surprise swells with heavy mud. All I know, all you know, are things like this: Once bitten, twice shy. Love hurts. Locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen. We are locked in the heat of stagnant waters, in the avoidance of life—and where is our light? Where is the
pleasure of plunging into cold waters, of letting ourselves drift on the confidence of the sea? What distance is there between dislikes, which give the soul flavor, and the disappointments that gently devour it?
You’re traveling. I’m accompanying you, in the place of death, along a truck-pocked road to that dusty village where they used to make drinking glasses. What are you looking for in that factory that no longer belongs to you?
“Do you need something, sir?”
You’re looking for life before me. You’re forgetting me. People used to say we talked the same, like an old married couple. I’d become crude, sailor-inflected. You were waxing lyrical and using aphorisms for everything, those sayings of mine you’d initially found so irritating. I could look at you and know the exact color and shape of your thoughts. Or at least I thought I could, which is the same thing.
I can’t lift my hand to your face anymore—and I no longer have any idea what you’re thinking. If only you’d look up at the sky, your eyes inflame this faraway nolus. Take me to your beach. Take to me the beach of your adolescence, while I was being born somewhere else. Take me to that beach where we were never together—we both loved the beach, remember? We’d set up a grill at the seaside, paging through newspapers, looking for tasty tidbits to make each other laugh. And how we laughed. You said that humor was humanity’s defining quality—cats don’t laugh, but even a member of the most remote indigenous tribe knows how to laugh at himself. You enjoyed laughing at me. It cracked you up to see me getting annoyed at gooseneck barnacles, the way they slipped between my fingers. In the shade of the boardwalk, the late afternoon floated, in a red slowness, around our warm skin. I never wanted you, but I liked imagining the pleasure of your body in other bodies, liked providing you with love affairs, introducing you to people who transformed you into a euphoric, obsessive child—someone more like me.
In you, passions grew like cacti—the contours of a face were enough to kindle your glow. And they transformed into cacti too, once the illusion had passed. “Women take longer to fall in love, but they’re also more reluctant to end a relationship,” you’d say, in a clinical tone you didn’t usually apply to generalizations. But maybe you were right. Women work at everything, even love. They demand endless rituals, conversations, a certain familiarity with mystery. They’re much less tolerant of everyday unpredictabilities and face enormous disappointment with extreme calm. I used to get irritated by a myriad of tiny things that you’d gently take care of. But I was incapable of lying, cheating, deviating from my own truth, not even in order to brighten my life with a new face.
One day you almost vacated my heart entirely. You had a girlfriend I liked a lot who was far away, studying in Berlin. In the meantime, you were engaging in a quick, arid affair with a girl you’d met on a night out. You’d call your distant girlfriend at the appointed hours, repeating words of love and longing—and it was painful to witness how much the words of truth resembled those of dissembling. But one day you worked up the courage to tell her: “I’ve been going out a lot with a new friend, this girl I met at Frágil who’s writing her dissertation on the image of Portugal in the nineteenth century. She’s a real bore, poor thing. I even almost told her that, but I feel sorry for her, and I’ve been trying to help. Don’t worry, there’s nothing for you to worry about. She’s got one of those awful mannequin bodies, you know. I’m not the least bit interested.” We all lie, sometimes out of charity. But assaulting someone’s trust so brutally—that can only be an act of malice. What you were violating was not just your girlfriend’s trust but also the faith she’d placed in you. Ashes, a desert of parched sand—anybody who treats another person so badly doesn’t deserve love at all.
Would you be capable of treating me that badly? Why do I still wonder that? Because I mistreated you too, egregiously. Your ideas, your past, the way my youth heightened your melancholy. I copied your essays, draped myself in their laurels, and forgot they were yours. And yet you loved me even more when I took you and consumed your soul, when I denied you in order to affirm myself.
14
The day disappears red on the horizon—another day of my life gone means I’m that much closer to you. “I can’t answer the phone right now, but leave a message and I’ll call as soon as I can. Thank you.” I recorded your voice mail message before somebody shut it off for good. I was afraid of losing your voice. But it grows with your absence—entire sentences, stray bits of rage or happiness. And your smell. I gave the perfume you used to wear to a friend of mine. She put it on, and it wasn’t the same. I left her and came home to weep for your irreplicable body. The gift of tears, which I lost in Africa and found again with you. You left it to me as an inheritance.
I’d like to write your life story, but what do I know about your life? While you were alive, I didn’t need your story. But stories console us. I went back to Pinheirais looking for my own. The house that once belonged to my grandparents and my mother is now a supermarket. Instead of the rabbit hutches and the chicken coop, the blue and pink hydrangeas and the goldfish pond, they now park cars and shopping carts. The factory is still there, despite being on the verge of closing so many times. But it’s run by Germans now, and I don’t know anyone there. I prowl around it all afternoon and end up making myself look suspicious.
“Do you need something, sir?”
I tell him that, yes, I’d like to see inside the factory, I used to run it for five years. The guard is wary. He looks me up and down, gets my name, goes to ask. It takes him a while to come back—it must be hard to find somebody who remembers that time. Twenty years have gone by. What do twenty years mean? They usher me in. There are no longer men blowing glass—there are hardly any men at all, just machines. And they no longer make my mother’s drinking glasses there, just endless lines of identical bottles. One of the old operators recognizes me, gives me a hug, thanks me. I look like an old man, I am an old man; you’re right, I’ve lived to be much older than you at this point. Regardless, though, I’m touched by this gratitude, however much it’s always made me squirm.
It cost me my second marriage, this factory did—at least, that’s what I like to think. Though if it hadn’t been the factory, it would have been something else. I was probably already tired of married life when I decided to become the communist Quixote, as my mother dubbed me. Yes, I was concerned about my nation’s poor families. The idea of saving them was seductive, sure. But most of all I was driven by the need to keep my parents’ legacy alive.
I offered to run the glass factory for a lower salary than I was earning at the bank as a lowly department head. Like you, I cared more about power than about money. I was already aware that my attitude would hurt my career at the bank—but in 1975, a career didn’t mean anything. That was one of the good things about that tumultuous year—see how, deep down, though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was already with you ideologically? My siblings wanted to take what our grandparents had built and sell it for a song; I managed to save it. We did sell it later, to the French, who later sold it to the Germans—but I managed to protect the factory’s jobs and my family’s name. And to sell the factory for a good price. I assumed that, in portioning out the money from the sale, my siblings would give me a larger percentage in recognition of my effort and sacrifice. But they didn’t even mention it—and I didn’t say anything. I never said anything to them again, actually—there were no more Christmases or birthdays together, and I never again heard the roughhousing and laughter of my nieces and nephews.
My mother was already dead when we sold the factory. Afterward, her house sat vacant for many years, slowly falling apart, without any talk about divvying it up. I gradually retrieved photos, books, letters—memories that nobody wanted and that had been disintegrating in the damp. Then one day a neighbor called to tell me a group of drug addicts had moved into the house. They’d chopped up the furniture for firewood, and the piano had disappeared.
For years I saw that house’s suffering. Again and again I drea
med that the family had gathered in its ruins, lighting candles and building a fire in the fireplace, with the children leaping from beam to beam upstairs, the floor practically gone, the babies swaddled in blankets against the cold seeping through the drafty walls. We were pretending the house was alive and we were still the happy family of many Christmases ago. We would bring picnics, prepared foods in plastic containers; the house no longer had water or electricity, and plaster fell from the ceiling, snowdrifts of misery, of melancholy. My mother was alive and kept saying, “Isn’t my house cozy?” She kept saying, “It’s so good to have you here together.”
In the final years of her life, my mother stopped lighting the fireplace. She said it was too much work to clean. She’d turn on a small space heater by her feet; the room was freezing. Dust had settled in a blanket of snow over the furniture. The house was starting to fall apart, which she knew but refused to admit. She spent entire days in front of the television, waiting for the phone to ring. And when one of us called, she’d lash out, her words caustic, about how lonely she was. Loneliness is contagious—it’s a disease. And there is no cure. We started avoiding her—her and the house, so we didn’t have to see them in that state. We stopped sleeping there. The bed linens were always damp with cold, the heaters didn’t work, water seeped in through the cracks in the walls, and the wiring had become hazardous. We talked about fixing things up, but she refused. She didn’t want to have the walls painted, said everything had to stay as it had always been—but nothing had stayed as it once was; none of us was the same anymore.
Only by living suspended above change could a person avoid pain; only by circumventing the monstrous perfection of time could one vanquish it. That’s what I used to think—and I was deluding myself, because time is not thinkable. I focused on ceasing to be in order to be everything, on forgetting in order to control my existence. I am time; I am nothingness, the swift, still nothingness that shapes the body of time. Ceasing to be is still abiding by the implacable rules of being. I’m worn out from racing against pain, against memory, against childhood, against love and hate. I set a goal of tranquility that recedes as I run toward it. There is no peace in the moment, and I live from moment to moment. I’ve started to fear that peace feeds on the blood of the passion I have renounced.