by Inês Pedrosa
When your parents died, people told you that faith is what saves us. What faith will save me from your death? You should see them, full of faith, on the via crucis to their offices, bent to their bosses’ wills, ruminating on the coming Judgment Day, when the Lord will roll up his sleeves to avenge their interwoven humiliations. By declaring him dead at the top of their lungs, atheists made God a martyr—and up there, down here, everywhere in our lives, he is laughing at us, gnawing at your tender bones, gnawing at my body in which you breathe, drowning out the earthly music of your laughter with the thunderclaps of his boundless injustice.
If only I’d written down every day of our lives together, transcribed our conversations, grabbing hold of the time that was stolen from us. A narrative, an illusion of order that would stanch the inconsequential fluid of life. Just in case, see if you can make your Bewhiskered Imperialissimo understand that nobody liked you as much as I did. Maybe Mr. Big will settle you far away from the ungrateful schmucks you used to call lovers and will place me at your table instead, where I’ll beat you at cards, as usual.
19
The friend with whom I was happy comes home, strips off her seduction uniform, folds it neatly, dons workout clothes, turns on the TV, and exercises on the stationary bicycle for half an hour. I asked her so many times to buy a real bike and go ride outside. And to try closing doors quietly instead of slamming them and accidentally waking me up. And to stop humming when I was watching the news. She’d laugh and keep doing all of those things. I think she thought they made her unique. Or maybe she enjoyed the rage those habits provoked in me. Whenever my irritation reached a boiling point, she’d start cracking up and I would soften. Nothing I did or said could drive her away—that was her power, a malign power that tested my limits.
We didn’t last a month on our own. In a tribe, my desire to tear open that indestructible love slumbered in a timeless cocoon. I believed that I would find in friendship the mythic flavor of absolute correspondence, the synchronous happiness that love only approximates. But friendship also proved vulnerable to boredom and disappointment. Everything we touch falls apart. And then we become addicted to decay, the intoxicating perfume of dead things. You can sleep on someone’s shoulder your whole life and live in other, separate bodies that never touch. Dreaming. That was always my greatest experience. I loved my dead parents much more intently than the real ones I’d had for fourteen years. That’s what the dead are for: we can construct them to the measure of our despair.
I turned my back on the man who showed me the core of happiness because neither of us could embrace the vertical light of the proffered sky. We found ourselves in a culture that didn’t believe in lasting relationships. We understood each other completely, and were amazed by that intimate understanding, which felt like a victimless crime. We were totally unfamiliar with the enigma of married life, its routines, the way passion is tempered by boredom. Being lovers, though, we couldn’t live fraternally, nor, being soul siblings, could we live as lovers. Together, we were a single person amplified at least two hundred times. We didn’t need anybody else. That’s why it was so easy for us to take on new lovers so we could pretend that existence was continuing its usual course. I contemplate the improvised map of my body over time, and I can clearly make out its trajectory, the underwater organization of its movements, the black corridor of multiple deceptions.
I aspired so much to transcendence—and what for, when I can’t even stroke the ears of the people I loved with the memory of my voice? Supreme Architect of the Universe, Babelic God of all bibles, grant me the blessing of a new life. Even if it’s just on the back stairs of this painful, chaotic world I knew. Even if you increase the obstacles and disappointments I face. Even if you fool me again—the way you fooled yourself in sketching that life that could have been my child. You fooled yourself, didn’t you?
19
Friendship, an endless history of forgiving. After a while, we lose patience with history, and we no longer care about forgiving or being forgiven. It’s an exhausting internal aerobics, kid. You were so obsessive about everything. I wanted to filch that obsessiveness, to be twentysomething again, like you. But I was already old enough that I was becoming young again, like a child, trading one toy for another, drawn to the gleam in someone else’s hand, existing on the surface of things, tactile. The sagacity of enjoyment, rather than the science of pleasure. Happiness wore you out, and suffering got you worked up; nothing was easy for you. “How have you lived so long and you’re still so chipper?” you’d ask me. I’d just smile in response. Oh, if only you’d gotten to discover that living too long means ceasing to live. Children die in an instant. They don’t hurt as much; they have no idea death exists. That’s why I can’t forgive your death. It pierces my bones. I am your death so that you can keep living. I needed a child who would make me mortal instead of just dead. A creature without past or future, today, here, in my arms that are swamped in your shadow. What of you will live on when I die?
I was bad at loving you, Tink. I wasn’t everything you dreamed I might be. If only you’d taken my deficient love away with you to that land where you no longer are anything. But you insist on staying here with me, attacking me with the bared teeth of madness. Your silence crushes me. I no longer know how to seek out laughter, pursue momentary trickles of joy. I’m your victim, now to blame for everything I didn’t do. If only you’d appear to me, just once. Turn into a ghost, sneak onto my balcony, show me your crumpled face. For many years, I longed to leave the country and become a foreigner. But now that my country is you, I have no way out. There are a hundred million stars in our galaxy alone. And your gaze exists in all of them, the cold glitter of the falsehood of me. Who am I, in this stupefying hell, black with your absence?
I pulled away from you because we were immortal; we would always return to each other. “I don’t want children. It would be like being held hostage by someone else’s life,” you used to say. A child’s death was the only thing you found unthinkable. You could have gotten past it if you’d found the right man. You were absolutely unbending on that score: a child needed a father and mother. And you detested women who got pregnant on purpose, with a criminal’s calculated determination. Above all, you respected other people’s freedom. But what is freedom? I don’t believe in your God—I flee from gods who sketch all of life’s sad thoughts on our newborn faces. I don’t believe in anything that mars the smooth surface of life. You believed in everything, for better and for worse. My love for you is now reaching its apex. I have nothing left that I can grab on to. Not your body, not my mind, not life out there. The people who knew you are useless to us now. They remember you the way people recall a dead person. They make you up. I miss you. I can’t manage to make you up.
Story lines, even the flimsiest, are rituals for escaping boredom. I used to tease you just to watch you squirm. I got bored listening to you. You got on my nerves tremendously, and I couldn’t resist ribbing you. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, I can no longer hear your plaints. You never used existential hypochondria as a seduction technique—in fact, you detested it, got almost aggressive when anybody tried to sway you with imaginary complaints or maladies. “The only place I put up with that is in Woody Allen films. He uses hypochondria as background music, almost like he’s apologizing for being so perfectly intelligent. Whereas most people use it instead of intelligence. Especially women, however hard it is for me to admit it.” And you’d laugh. How I miss that laugh of yours. Almost obscene. It blotted out the daylight, the thrum of boredom, the shrieking of the kids downstairs. Later, you tamed it for politics—your smile had been dead for years when you died. There was something tragic in your laughter, a displeasure that the world was so unlike it. A whirling dance sweeping across pomp and poverty. A musty love that a person could dive into like an ocean of warm clouds. The eternal face of life was in that laugh that died.
20
“Keep the desires of my luckless body / The future of my warm blood / Th
e soft light of my dreams / The space-time of undying passion.” Pascoal was sitting on the seawall at Falésia, holding his notebook, looking for a new song, and I gave it to him. He scribbled it down as I dictated. Everything I didn’t write, everything I could have written, the equation of the intransitive moment, was dictated to me by him. On the other side of the ocean, on a cold Canadian beach, my first boyfriend looks up at the stars, hearing me. Why can’t you? I whisper Pascoal’s song in his ear, and he murmurs my name. Without even knowing that I died. We no longer had any friends in common, and I never went to Canada. I ended things because I was too busy—we wrote each other often for a few years, then you showed up, and then politics. He leans his head on his shoulder as if he can hear my breathing. He’s let his hair grow long—he looks blonder, less adult. I would go back to being something more than a sister to him if I could. I’m alive in every gesture he makes. But I can’t be with him: I’m dead. Only in you, who returned after my death, am I unable to die.
20
Weddings, like funerals, are days for forgetting. We get drunk on champagne or tears, we drown ourselves in the ruin-filled riverbed where our blood usually flows, and suddenly it’s nighttime and we don’t really know what happened. Only afterward, from photographs, do we realize we were there—but nobody takes pictures of funerals. There are some photos of you from newspapers, a few seconds of video from a TV show, interspersed with archival images—politics has its perks. Then you appear, already transformed into a black box with Portugal’s green-and-red flag draped over it—tacky to the end, even in the mystery of mortality. You sometimes lamented your lack of mystery, Tink—did I ever tell you that transparency was infinitely more seductive than all the layered veils of the divas you envied?
My dear indefatigable exterminator. You established a center for combating injustice, some bullshit department with a very proper-sounding name, the Equity Office, and what did it get you? It got you a rising flood of pain, dozens and dozens of women, beaten to a pulp, clinging to abused children, all coming to you for miracles—and you, inconsolable, inventing houses and schools and jobs that didn’t exist, that never exist for unfortunate souls like them, you sleeping on the office floor, again and again, buoyed by the joy of other people’s happiness, that fierce joy that was your greatest addiction. “Tonight, at least, they’ll sleep easy. Tonight at least these women know somebody’s protecting them,” you’d tell me, in a sweet murmur, over the phone.
Eventually, you started receiving threats. Once, someone even tried to send a message by taking a shit in your bedroom. You laughed nervously: “Don’t worry, these installations of outsider art don’t scare me.”
And so you’ll become a gravestone etched with your name and two dates separated by a dash. At the stone’s unveiling, somebody will call you a “notable figure.” And nobody will mention the things that truly defined you: how you always went to bed really late because you loved the taste of tired words, the looseness of time uncorked by wine, and the darkness that allows laughter to flow. How you discovered, one sizzling summer back in high school, your calling as an out-of-work La Pasionaria, one of those people who, lacking a righteous war, devote themselves to nurturing their fellow citizens. How, in that role, you’d become addicted both to loving and to being loved, and how, like old Mother Teresa, whom you couldn’t stand, you never doubted that Saint Peter would have a luxury suite reserved for you.
In the newspaper clippings, beside the black box in which they’re carrying you, now turned to stone, I spot the shattered face of your friend Lia. In the caption, mechanical words of modesty or survival. In her eyes, the scorched gunpowder of shame. She voted against you, probably voted against her own past, when you pushed a bill legalizing abortion. And you never forgave her for that blatant betrayal. Yet you forgave, brick by brick, towering edifices of minor, repeated betrayals; are you not now capable of forgiving the wildly impassioned betrayal of that woman who put you at the center of her orbit? Didn’t your Christ forgive the friend he loved most? Or are you unable to forgive her for the love you never felt for her—the love you wasted on incubated hearts like mine?
21
How rapturously we delude ourselves. I felt so selfless and pure when I joined the party the day after a brutal electoral defeat. “I’m in, whatever it takes,” I said. I don’t think anybody, least of all me, expected that ten years later, when we won the majority, I’d become an assembly member. You must have thought it was power or status that drew me. It never was. At least it wasn’t fundamentally that. But it wasn’t just loving one’s neighbor either. Initially, it was more that variety of neighborly love that consists of failing to love oneself. Growing disillusionment with my little world pushed me toward virtue. After all, was God acting out of pure magnanimity when he created us?
I was fed up with the static poetry of coffeehouse revolution—I needed to act. I humbled myself in discipline and silence, acquired questionable business skills that made me proud. I learned, which is another form of teaching. A new indulgence of passion—the days passed without my noticing. Time, which had so often seemed lazy—though never circular, as you claimed—now came to me in pieces, a puzzle we could put back together with our little hands. An excess of historical study leads to passivity—at least, that’s how it worked with you. The characters repeat, disappointments recur; human activity is just a pool full of showy fountains in which the water never changes. I analyzed laws, compared systems, planned endless projects, consoled by the well-being my efforts would bring to the world.
I withstood the soft fires of envy, machinations that interfered with my work and made the pages wither, but I kept going. When I stood up to speak at meetings, a buzz would run through the room; my comrades were affronted to hear a young woman demanding change with such conviction. Tensions would rise, and the murmurs along with them. On one occasion, I simply stopped talking midsentence, waiting for silence to silence them. Then I added, “As my comrades’ attention span is very short today, I’ll hand out copies of my speech instead so they can read it when they’ve settled down.” I wrote a scathing opinion piece and submitted it to the press, accusing my party leaders of gender discrimination, which turned out spectacularly in my favor. It was an era that generously rewarded victims’ heroic gestures.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Health needed an image consultant, and Lia, on my recommendation, got the job. The government was trying to hire as many women as possible, and Lia had a background in advertising. Things were looking desperate for her: her daughter’s father had disappeared months earlier, the agency where she worked had gone under, and she couldn’t pay her rent and support her mother and daughter. I warned her about the political arena’s bizarre quirks, but it soon became clear that Lia didn’t need my advice. She was an Olympic medalist when it came to survival.
Within a month, she’d started dating the prime minister’s chief of staff. And with such a degree of professionalism that she convinced herself it was love. Come summer, she bought a house in Cascais and appeared on the cover of a magazine, daughter on her lap, effusing about the glories of motherhood. I recalled her words at lunch when she’d told me she was pregnant: “I’m going to get an abortion, of course. I’m not about to screw up my life because of a few careless hours of fun. I’m just asking you to come to the clinic with me.” I’d accompanied her once before, years earlier, when what Lia had thought would be her first date had turned into a forest full of famished wolves. A classmate had taken her on his motorcycle to 2001, the rock club, and at the end of the night had joined four other young men in raping her in an isolated area of Guincho. They left her stranded by the side of the road, warning her they’d kill her if she went to the police. Lia was fifteen at the time, and she didn’t go to the police. The rapists were rich kids, the sons of prominent generals and lawyers. I paid for the abortion with what I’d saved of my allowance, and I didn’t go camping that summer. I joined a women’s movement and spent my vacation handing out pamphlets about
family planning and rape culture.
Corália spent her vacation, as always, working as a waitress at a beachside café. She felt happy in the yellow-and-white uniform that made her exactly as pretty as any other girl her age. And she was saving money for her brilliant future.
21
Your fingers—could they be tangled in the wind, your fingers that no longer exist? When you did exist, the wind was just the wind. Everything had an exact form and a history of enduring beingness. I lost the toughness that enabled me to endure when I lost you—or, rather, when you disappeared and I lost myself in you. I scoffed at God despite all the fat, bearded things you swaddled yourself in, yet now I believe that the caress of your fingers is in the wind, the sparkle of your black eyes in the tears of a forlorn friend, in the stars, or in the sun’s rays reflecting on the river. Friendship. I sketch your laughter onto that word and see you, all of you, in its place.
I spend my days rereading your favorite novels, the pages we underlined together. Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, which I found lying open, its cover torn, on an airplane seat many years ago on a trip to Goa. The girl sitting next to me discovered that someone she knew was on the plane and changed seats, leaving the book behind. It seemed that fate was smiling on me, because I’d forgotten to bring a book and I can’t sleep on planes.
I’d never read Graham Greene, and after that, I read everything he wrote. But in no other book did I find the unspoiled amazement of that one, which spoke to me of a strange world—your world, where faith blossoms in a muted dance of subtle sorceries (you called them miracles). Your world, a world in which sin works as delicately as a makeup artist, transferring souls’ dusky glow to the skin’s warmth. A world in which evil, a gentle kind of vaccine, only makes the fever of human passions more beautiful—attenuating their traces, underscoring their risk and sacrifice. The girl left the plane without looking back, and I kept the book to reread it with you, years before we met.