by Inês Pedrosa
22
Lia. In a black Chanel suit, at my funeral. President of the administrative council of the Portugalideal holding company. Leader of the National Women’s Movement for Life. A practicing Catholic and converted democrat. Telling reporters that “though we did not always share the same ideas, we were bound by an unshakable loyalty.” And that, without me, “democracy is the poorer.”
I picture her on the night of the party vote on the abortion bill. I was giving a speech in a stifling room. I was gazing out at those rows of men drumming their fingers on their chairs, eager to leave, impatient to be wasting so much time on the pointless topic of women’s abdomens. I was looking at the inextinguishable shine of Manuel’s eyes when I heard a hiss, sharp as a needle: “I don’t see why we’re wasting time listening to this stupid extremist. We have to do what the people want, otherwise they’ll crucify us.” It was Lia’s voice, followed by one of her strident laughs.
A few days later, I came out publicly in favor of the bill, against the referendum, and against voting in lockstep, and she called me irresponsible, a fossilized feminist and abortionist. That was yet another step in her meteoric rise in the party. And it was also the last interaction we ever had.
22
Your body, still so warm. Dust—according to your Bible it’s now dust. That idea should be comforting, but it’s not for me. I scratched your hand, hoping that a drop of you might still escape from your death to my life, bind us in a blood pact, with the brave levity of children. The heat still rising from your skin—could it be your desire for my blood? I finally understood our old buddy Camilo Castelo Branco; I wanted to profane you—if that verb can capture the urge to lacerate your skin so I might set it alight with the suffering of life, to bring you back to life with kisses or accompany you down the dank tunnel of death.
It was at the movies, remember? Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, an astoundingly kitschy film. You arrived late, appearing during the final swells of Michel Legrand’s score, and I was indulging in the pleasure of tears. I used movies about quotidian tragedy as a semiannual catharsis. I’d disconnect my brain’s fuses and weep in the darkness like a little girl, then emerge cleansed and lucid. You came in late and dropped, panting, into the seat next to me. Later, you told me it was in that moment that our eyes met. But I don’t remember your eyes. I do remember the scent of your body, an arousing blend of roses, cinnamon, and sex. Maybe you were still covered in the smell of one of your lovers—you were a veritable archive of love affairs, and you were always ready to go dig for some forgotten information in an old file.
But I didn’t know any of that then. And I’d never been so close to your body before. Your scent surprised me with its delicacy and its erotic charge. I propped my arm up beside yours and started to sweat. I felt an overpowering urge to fall on top of you. No, it wasn’t about making love. There’s no such thing as making love, damn it—love isn’t something you make. Love crashes down on us fully formed; we don’t control it—that’s why our systems get so tired of replacing it with sex, a graphic, seemingly moldable thing. Nor was it about fucking, fornicating, copulating—those violent words we use in an attempt to destroy love. As if that were possible. As if love were not precisely that metaphysical fornication that has nothing to do with us—we merely suffer its splinters, which rob us of vigor and desire. I wanted to offer you my body so you could absorb it into yours. So you could make me disappear into your eyes. I, who’d been inculcated with the alimentary notion that boys eat girls, after an entire lifetime of controlling the cutlery, now wanted to be eaten by you. I wanted to put myself in your hands.
And I did—did you notice? I forgot who I was. Even now, I need you in order to exist. In order to sleep. One day, I admitted to you that I had insomnia. Did I ever tell you that Bach’s Goldberg Variations were born out of a request from Count Kaiserling, who asked the composer for a cure for insomnia? That’s why Bach wrote the variations in accordance with a formula that required “the relentless invariability of the core harmony.” We used to talk late at night at your house, until you could barely keep your eyes open. I’d ask you to let me stay a little longer, and you’d take my hand—
“Come with me.”
—and lead me to bed. You’d curl around me and start stroking my back very slowly. We slept like that many times—and we never, not for a second, thought of having what fools call sex. We talked a lot about it, sure—about the act that people call sex or love depending on convenience or circumstance. The act that people perform over and over again unto absolute solitude. But we couldn’t do without each other. We couldn’t enter into the infinite finite game of bodies. On countless nights, I poured my fleeting perfect loves, detail by detail, into your life. And you poured into mine your impossible, inextinguishable passions. And still I want you so much.
23
I see the wind stirring up the trees’ spirits, pushing clouds along, cleansing the heavens—but I can’t feel it. You hunch your shoulders against it in your jacket. If only I could control it, even just for a second, could give it the shape of my dead fingers and slowly stroke your tousled white hair. I follow you so that time will exist. Because you walk and look up at the sky and sometimes find that it’s black, or glittering like a dark sea of jewels, or rainy, or sun parched, I know that the days are passing.
But I know less and less all the time. Suddenly, that passing grows elastic, and you, ponytail and all, become my first boyfriend, pointing out constellations in a distant firmament. I can’t make out the contours of that boy during that period when I loved him, short-haired and perpetually dressed in black. But I am swept by a sudden vertigo because of those beloved bodies; you stand before me with the features, the movements, the gait of other men I loved in other ways. Oh, if I’d experienced this vertigo in life, I could have gone far.
Open up a book, please. Open Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair and read me that scene where the two lovers separate after the first time they’re reunited. Maurice lets go of Sarah’s hand and walks away, without looking back, as if everything of any importance in the world exists in that other, nonexistent place toward which his steps are carrying him. But Sarah coughs, and, to fend off the hollow sound of that repeated cough, Maurice tries to imagine a melody that might drown it out, but he can’t do it. I have no ear for music, he thinks, I think now, on the verge of the tears spinning on the CD player. “People can love without seeing each other, can’t they?” Sarah used to ask, having left you in order to save you. Left Maurice, I mean. Same difference.
We can love in the dark, yes; we can love in the somnambulant light of absence: we invented God, after all. You used to say God was your favorite fictional character. But you refused to understand that fictional characters exist just as thoroughly as you do. Sometimes, many times, even more so. Read me the end of Tolstoy’s Resurrection, tell me that Maslova went back to being Katusha, wearing a white dress with a blue sash, surrounded by candles, on the fervent night of that Easter mass when Nekhludoff loved her in her immovable eternity.
Read me the María Zambrano essays I taught you to love, tell me that “the heart is the drinking glass of love” and pour your blood into my dead, undying heart. You haven’t learned everything yet, friend—you’re taking too long. You still haven’t learned to kill me. Everybody else buried me in the brightly lit cemetery of the TV news, effusively praising my dignity. May fame be gentle with them—I will be resting here in peace to forgive them that minute of glory. It looks so good on the screen, the grieving of the dead. But once that brief commercial known as life is over, everybody ends up here. The microphones swarming you: “I know it’s a difficult time, but I’m told you were one of her best friends.” You confirmed it: “That’s why I don’t talk about her. I just talk to her.”
23
You died without a mother, without a father, without me. You died so alone. So full of love. I’d gotten out of the habit of you. At first, that break with habit was agonizing. I was dependent on yo
ur moods, your dreams, your inexhaustible activity. I was tired of depending on you so much, tired of having you do so much for me. I was tired of your red carnations, your swift, violent passions, the constancy of your so-certain love for me. I didn’t know how to live like that. Nobody knows how to live like that, apparently: you died.
Did you die quickly, at least? I pray to gods I do not know that you did—quickly. An efficient angel to close your eyes like a puff of air, the brief opening and closing of a window.
You expected too much of me. You expected too much of life. You lived a high-speed Sebastianism I sometimes found exasperating. Nothing was going to change for the better—not civil institutions, or justice, or the Algarve landscape, or my face in the mirror. You loved me tremendously for what I wasn’t; you pushed me to follow through on the crazy projects I dreamed up. And I enjoyed imagining things that would never exist.
My mother’s house. I used to say I’d stopped visiting her much because I loved her and couldn’t bear to see what she no longer was. She was dead five days without anyone noticing—it was Easter, the neighbors thought she was visiting us, and nobody called. Only when the bags from her morning bread deliveries piled up at the door did the neighbors reach out to us. I let the woman who brought me into the world die alone. She died suddenly. Deaths like that—swift, contemporary—are so easy. She was lying across a plate of potatoes. She didn’t bother cooking anymore. The television stayed on, the sound turned way up, for five days in front of her dead body. Did I tell you I hadn’t called her in more than a week? Neither had my Catholic siblings. One of them is a volunteer for a charity organization because he believes people’s souls can be saved. How am I supposed to believe in an almighty creator when men (as in humanity, kid, please excuse the chauvinism) so closely resemble virus-infected computers?
“How can you talk about selling Mother’s house?” the Good Samaritan asked me. He wanted to refurbish it, but I objected to that plan. Our mother had liked those stained pink walls, the creaking stairs, the persistent drip in the iron bathtub. Everything that had existed when we were children. Nobody visited her because her house was exactly what it had always been, but older, like her. She aged along with the house—she asserted her right to grow old, as you always put it during that phase when you were advocating a harmonious recalibration, in which everything in the world rested on the acceptance of each individual’s rights. The right to die. The right to loneliness. The right to individualism, as long as it’s orderly.
One day I asked you to host a French friend of mine who needed to get out of Paris to recover from a love affair gone wrong. Or at least to get a change of scenery. Love ends always and especially on tissue-paper stages that we cut to our own measure.
“I just can’t right now,” you said.
And I heard a piece of glass shatter. Somewhere in my body. With a nineteenth-century slowness.
“I just can’t right now, you know. I have to prepare a motion for Parliament.”
—Chantal’s tears at having been traded in for a younger woman after twenty years—
“And anyway, I don’t even know this friend of yours! We’re not twenty years old anymore.”
At twenty, our friends’ friends were ours too. But now it was time to hear pieces of glass shattering, like tears, in my body’s interstices.
“Why don’t you cancel your little musical adventure and console your friend yourself? Come on.”
I was silent; you must have heard the sound of the final piece of glass shattering through the telephone line, so you said it would be OK for a day or two. And since I’d already assured Chantal that you’d love to show her the castle, the light on the river, the Gulbenkian gardens, the enigmatic panels in the Museum of Ancient Art, and the new stars of fado, I seized on your reluctant charity and told Chantal she could come. But I think it was around then that I stopped wanting to call you. The joyous glow of our twenties had faded. I’d conjured another youth for you alone, one without betrayal or forgetting, without my so-certain death. I would survive in you, on the eternal battlefield of your memory. You would talk about me to successive generations of students, and I would live on in your stories when not even the dust of my bones remained.
You used to collect letters. Photographs. You underlined your books in green and red ink. You wrote in the margins. You weren’t one to agree easily. You had an internal barometer that was pretty accurate in distinguishing between praise and flattery, provocation and offense. You seldom forgave. Though you were more forgiving with me than with others—at least that’s what people said. There was a fundamental complicity between us: a loathing of ostentatious display. I might go overboard with my silk shirts and scarves, but you were just as snobby when it came to decrying contemptuous glamour. We used to delight in watching the parade of gluttons hopping from branch to branch, squawking an old-fashioned “Hell’s bells” when they pricked themselves on a thorn, today forgetting yesterday’s idols, perpetual fans of the next big thing, loving those who despised them and disdaining those who were fond of them. Or the wallowers, a gaggle of geniuses hamstrung by Portugal’s small size. They always insisted that if this city were at least London or, ideally, New York, their talents would find real appreciation. We used to savor the green hue of the envious, the dark world of favors and ventures in which they moved, trading promotions and cursing other people’s luck. How we laughed at those herds of highway robbers.
Now it’s your absence that’s laughing at me in the silence of my house. When you were alive, you could always come back. You hung in suspended existence over all the days we were apart. You were breathing somewhere in the same city. We might run into each other by chance one afternoon, in a garden, standing before a still life by your beloved Josefa de Óbidos. Sometimes I’d go out looking for you in the bars we used to frequent. And I’d return home certain that the sky would devise the exact time and light for that encounter.
I stopped answering the phone. With you, I’d lost the feminine vice of long conversations, reconstituting a body through its voice. I lost the habit of talking—I could write emails, but, with you, I didn’t even do that. I miss you—have I told you that already? I read the Dostoyevsky novels you never had time to read, make you offerings of the torrents of guilt that flood my bloodstream with a hallucinatory anesthetic. It was fate, that grotesque swindler you called God. You studied so much history, so many ways of scientifically shattering the blind cycle of eternal return, and there you are above the earth, absent from this spring that, without you, illuminates everything you loved. “But seeing everything means seeing nothing / Losing the thread at daybreak / With your soul all curled up / Like bait on a curved hook / In the clouds I see / A row of castles made for dreaming / Boxes of love where I can store / The things I no longer know about you / And my dark heart / Recites in future compassion / The pure poem / That time has placed in you.”
24
You’re the only one who still talks to me. Your fingernails scratching the skin of my hand—do you think I didn’t feel that? That’s crazy talk, of course. How can a dead body feel anything? But I’m so dead at this point that nobody will notice this madness. So dead that you no longer hear me, and I can tell you now that my bodiless body glows with desire for you. It happened in the candlelight. At that pragmatic hour when the crowd of sudden mourners of my absence headed to a restaurant near the church to mingle and you stayed with me, alone. You scratched my hand, seeking the blood I had traitorously allowed to dry. You scratched my hand and the guitar-playing fingers of my most intimate lover awoke in yours. In the skin where I no longer dwell, all the hours of mortal pleasure are kindled with ice. You stroked what was left of my now-vanished face, and the white blaze of the kisses that set it on fire so many nights vibrated among the candles.
Is the dead’s desire for the living called necrophilia too? The candlelight, your face aflame above my remains. I had to die to desire you, I had to die to see the color of desire, that it’s white, white and
irreparable, like you, like the two of us. Like us. You were still caressing me when Isabel came in and whispered to Luísa, whom she never liked: “Look. He’s just like her. Or she’s just like him. Like an old married couple, a pair of obedient dogs.” Bitches. They’re completely untrustworthy, but they can see things they don’t know. That’s why I defended them so fiercely. That’s why I got so sick of them.
Now I don’t know how to get free of the fog your eyes have trapped me in. Cry for me and then forget me, darling, like everybody else. Cry for me and let me go. A lot of time has passed—I see it in your wrinkles, the way your body grows thinner as it dances on my memory. The way you look at that cheery girl in the photos, the girl I used to be. I died on you—that’s why you look at me the way you did only that first time.
24
You used to think you were fooling me when you lied about your accomplishments and fame. You were hurt by the omniscient smile with which I greeted news of your disappointments. You told me you’d gotten tired of your last lover. You didn’t want to see the bitter, contrary truth reproduced on my face: he was the one who’d gotten tired of you, more than once. The bastard. You were fooling yourself, kid.
You fooled yourself a lot when it came to people. You sketched everything in black and white. A moment of irritability, a regrettable choice of words—that person went straight into the trash can. Some of the women you brought me didn’t deserve you. As soon as they stretched out on my sheets, they set to work trying to diminish you. They said you had delusions of grandeur. Considered yourself the ultimate arbiter of virtue. Couldn’t keep a secret. Never shut up. As I felt them contort themselves, eyes intent and tongues like daggers, toward the beauty of my love for you, I lost all sexual interest in them.