by Inês Pedrosa
The insignificant things are easy in their repetitive litany. Pascoal wrote that song for you, the one you liked so much about “The Shadow of the Clouds on the Sea.” It’s jam-packed with goddamn significant things—those huge goddamn significant things, which can be captured only in novels. And then only intermittently.
You’ve disappeared—I can’t fictionalize you anymore. You’re enveloping me like a cloud—I can’t see outside of you or into you. And I don’t know what to do with what I see inside of me—dispirited substance, stuff of sadness and remorse.
Maybe I could escape this fog with an essay on the fragility of life and the blindness of ambition, but that wouldn’t be us. Besides, I inherited from you the kind of pure enjoyment of life that runs out in just one page. I’d rather forget, forget you as much as necessary, to live as you lived, appreciating each moment—especially the painful ones, for the clarity they bring as a bonus—of this unreliable marvel we call existence.
I often counseled you on the virtues of silence. I wanted to shut you up to protect you. Few people are equipped for the truth—not even us. How many times did we keep our most cutting little truths under lock and key so as not to wound each other? I think you go shhhhhh—like that, with a lulling slowness—whenever the voice of my conscience (whatever that is) pipes up and criticizes me for all the things I failed to give you.
I believe without believing, like a condemned man. Ultimately, I have nothing to lose. Angels may not exist, but the wings I see, as you perch on the edge of my bed in the delirious heights of my insomnia, look better on you than any outfit you ever wore in life. I exert my imagination, stretch it out toward your fingers, but all I manage is the faintest caress of wings. It’s just the bedsheets as I move them, I know, but won’t you grant me the grace of transforming the hem of my sheet into your fingertips?
30
Listen. They’re about to kill a little girl next door to you. Listen, please. LISTEN. You’re engrossed in a TV special on Pinochet’s crimes. You’re horrified by the story of that four-year-old girl who was tortured for days in front of her mother in a Chilean prison. But it’s just the surface of your soul that’s horrified—you know there was nothing you could have done.
You take comfort in the conviction that you live on the side of good: you pay your taxes, help those in need, were willing to sacrifice your career for the sake of a bunch of glassmakers and your family’s honor. You even give free classes to success’s castoffs, those who rob and kill and take drugs and are in jail because they don’t have enough money to buy freedom. You used to call me utopian because I wanted to refashion the entire world. But I didn’t see you that way—I wanted you to remain small and contented so I could console myself with the idea that I was better than you.
You know it’s not true that nothing changes. The world doesn’t retreat every time it advances, following a fixed, chaotic order. One less death makes a difference. Turn down the TV—there’s a two-year-old girl next door to you, screaming for help, though she doesn’t know the words yet. And I can’t do anything—I’m not anything. But you can, you son of a bitch. Get up out of that armchair, turn off the TV, please, and go to her. Do that for me.
The little girl’s father hurls her against the wall, and she keeps saying, “I wa’ go Grammy.” The little girl’s brother is hiding under the bed, quietly sobbing. He’s five years old. The father pulls off his belt and lashes the girl, first on her diapered rump and then on her back, her belly, her plump little legs. He holds the girl with his other hand so she won’t run away, and she says, “I wa’ go Grammy.” He beats her some more. He throws her against the wall and curses her. The little girl’s crying is barely audible now, and you’re completely oblivious. Everybody’s oblivious, and she’s going to die. But she’s dying slowly. She says again that she wants to go to her grandmother; as long as she keeps repeating that sentence, the grandmother exists, and maybe the father who’s drunkenly beating her will vanish into thin air, like in the movies she watches at her grandmother’s house.
The little girl’s mother isn’t back from work yet—she’s a night-shift janitor at a government ministry. The father will stop the beating only when the little girl goes quiet. The father’s been beating the girl a long time—I don’t know how many hours, but I know that time has started existing again.
People say we die when we want to. This theory always used to drive me crazy. I never wanted to die, my parents never wanted to die, nor does the young woman who right this moment has stopped her car on the 25 de Abril Bridge and is leaping off the railing onto the black cement of the river—she just wants to stop living, which isn’t the same thing.
Get up, asshole. Turn down the volume on that sewer of images that’s preventing you from seeing and hearing. Save the little girl who wants to go to her grandmother’s, where Snow White and the Seven Dwarves live. Save her from the monster who gave her life and who tomorrow morning will go to the hospital to try to convince the doctors she fell during the night.
30
At least come and taste one of these tears I’m crying. Over you, over me—what difference does it make? I dried your tears so many times, damn it. Find a way to stroke my face with what’s left of your hands—icy, blue, rotting; do you think any of that bothers me?
31
Children take a long time to die. Why do children take so long to die, God?
“It’ll be over soon,” repeats the brother, in the dark, kissing her, drinking her blood.
“It’ll be over soon,” repeats the brother, who’s five years old and has an unrumpled faith in the healing power of words.
The little girl moans softly. She’s already realized that the grandmother isn’t coming, that the dwarves’ house is too far away and they can’t hear her, that her brother’s words are going to remain alone with him. She’s already realized everything, because she’s dying.
“We’re all dying,” you used to say. But children die more slowly, forsaken by fairies and brave princes, in the pitch-blackness of a deranged forest.
There’s a quiet police station on the corner, three houses down. Across from the window of the dark room where this girl is dying, there’s a window all lit up. Inside, a little girl is playing with a cat as her grandmother works at her tatting and cries feebly while watching a soap opera. You chose to live in Bairro Alto because of this village feel: swallows in the eaves, geraniums in the windows, the sweet Portugal you lived in during your Salazar-era grade-school days. Later, you rejected that slow gentleness, calling it mediocrity. And later still, you grew nostalgic for the slatted blinds, the fado clubs, the inevitable old ladies sitting in windows—the good folk of Portugal.
Why is this death more agonizing than my own?
“It’ll be over soon, it’ll never be over, don’t worry, every night is racked with violence, somewhere on earth, from the beginning of history to its end and its resumption.”
31
Since you died, death has been hovering around me like an obsessive girlfriend. The kind that takes cruel pleasure in destroying our lives, sowing disasters in any space that doesn’t belong to her, in the vague hope that one day we might understand that our peace depends on her whim. I couldn’t save you.
Yesterday, my next-door neighbor killed his two-year-old daughter, and I didn’t even notice what was happening. I couldn’t even save a little girl screaming on the other side of my own wall—I had the TV turned up too loud. If it hadn’t been the TV, it would have been a record, the radio, anything to fill the house with music or words. That’s the first thing I do when I get home: turn on sound, doesn’t matter what kind. I’m the ideal neighbor for a criminal. The perfect alibi. The affable executioner who until yesterday lived next door could spank and rape his daughter, the daughters of all the fathers in the neighborhood, with the protective complicity of my Bach or my nightly newscast.
Where did that little girl’s future life go? What about the friends she never had, the loves she never knew, th
e particular projects of her singular brain—how will they grow up without her? Where do dreams that were never born reside? I’d stopped asking these questions after the war, questions that come to us, under the fire of all wars, when we see death dive-bombing bodies brimming with potential life.
I remember lying in the grass, gazing up at the majestic African sky and imagining that each star contained the energy of one life to use up, and that one day the stars would no longer fit into the night and would once more spill onto the earth in the form of a human race more perfect than the one we know.
I’ve never believed in any sort of God—particularly since, if I did believe, the two of us would have to settle accounts, which would mean immediately cutting off relations with him. But I believed intensely in the ontological talent of the human species. War taught me that too, taught me that above all: man (in the sense of humanity, of course, as I always have to specify with you) is the only animal that will die to save a stranger’s life. I saw displays of true courage, generosity, and heroism, the kind we give kids to read about with their milk and cookies. I was pleased to confirm that such tales weren’t pious fabrications. That’s how I was able to share with you so many moments of amazement and rage, that vacillating, rapturous faith that constitutes happiness on this earth.
32
The purest nights. Those nights when I loved the greatest of my loves, the one who was never mine, the one to whom I never belonged because I withheld myself from him.
“Take and eat; this is my body, the one that belongs to the I that remains, dead and nameless, or maybe just decaying.”
I decayed in that love, darling; it is in true love that we rot: ignorant, fleshless, stripped of experiences and dreams, rising in the air like bone dust. I didn’t come back from that love, nor will I. I’m not looking for it now, my dear, because I know I’m contained in the hugs he gives his one late-born daughter; I know I lurk in the sex—so sexual, so sad—he has with the woman he chose for life. I know I’m in him like a luminous trace of death, and I don’t wish to see him in life because his life never had anything to do with me. “That man’s so dead he’s killing you,” you told me one day—but I’m the one who was dead, dying at a rapid clip, greedy firewood, impatient to heat the world faster than any other fire.
He slowed my combustion. He could spend a whole night kissing just my pinkie finger. And that after an entire evening of leisurely conversation, savoring old stories. He always said that people who talk about themselves too much wear themselves out faster. And so I started to wear him out. I wore him out to the point that, after me, he started looking for a life. A history that would allow him to end ours. When we made love, it wasn’t time that stopped. We were the ones who were already dead, infinitely dead, floating inside each other in a blue without sky or gravity.
He’d retreat and then seek me out. I’d retreat and then call him. He never called me—he’d pretend to run into me. He picked apart my words, one by one. After a while, I talked only so that he could destroy me, letter by letter, and his animal laughter drove me far away from men. He laughed like a cat—Alice’s cat, a whereless smile. The smile of someone who was never a child and so never leaves the place of childhood, which is the place of death, the place without a yesterday or a tomorrow.
He is in me and in the death of the little girl whose father killed her; he is in me and in the death that his daughter is painting on white construction paper—here is a house, a dog, a garden bench. He is in me and in the son who killed me. Here we were happy; here we learned that we could never be anything again. I loved you with the scraps of that happiness, dear friend, which I accumulated like old clothing, notes passed in class, yellowing ticket stubs.
32
Blue, icy, washed by a distant sun—I’m going back to your cemetery today. True cold: the caress of the dead we loved dearly, and almost always inadequately. It’s impossible to love completely except in memory. The stories we shared with the people we loved are reborn in slow motion on the vapor of our breath. Icy stars melting at the touch of your fingers. You never felt cold and saw shivering as a sign of spiritual weakness. You hated coats and scarves. You never got sick. You liked diving into gelid waves, your voice booming with the power of the sea itself. Near your still-fresh grave, the epitaph of a man who should have been me: “Here lies someone who never wanted to die, who had the misfortune to be born a man, not a god.”
33
Only by listing dead things can one avoid dying. Our dead friendship, look: an unblemished photograph. What’s left of it is everything we never said. Everything that kept us apart, the period in which we no longer existed. That’s what never dies—what never existed.
That little girl’s childhood didn’t exist. The blood dried; the body cooled, livid as marble, trapped in dreams that have already been dreamed. This little girl who yesterday, right next to you, was sobbing for her grandmother—only now do you discover her, in the TV news shows’ gallery of horrors, on display for the posthumous pleasure of noble sentiment. I was told that these tragic cases were the exception, the unpreventable exception. I slowly got used to incorporating them into the order of things, that immutable order.
Too many children are murdered every day for us to be able to do anything about it. Everything that’s written, thought, done—all of it runs on a parallel track, the relentless track of frame construction. On television, a phalanx of veteran sociologists, psychologists, and therapists frame the little girl’s death all night. They explain it, their voices hushing. They think the grandmothers of little girls who haven’t yet ended up dead will stay quieter if offered these explanations. Sprawled at the base of the cliff of explanations, the little girl is still dead, violently dead, from a death that—like true love—will never stop happening, never stop haunting the fears of the living, their loneliness, their infinite capacity for killing slowly.
The difference between life and death may be a TV with its sound turned up loud enough to drown out another death. If I hadn’t died, you wouldn’t have turned the volume up so high. And you would have heard the child’s screams, and she wouldn’t have died.
33
I’m giving you my Venetian pitcher—I bought it to remind me of you, but it never did. Back then, I thought your house was primitive, with its hodgepodge of expand-and-shrink furniture. I liked giving you things. Or, rather, I liked giving you objects, indulging in the illusion of beautifying the lives of the people close to me and deepening my presence in their homes.
I gave you so many things: Visconti’s The Leopard, which I’m not sure you ever watched; Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, which elicited shrieks of delight when you opened it, saying you loved waltzes and weren’t familiar with those. I found the record two months later, its plastic wrapper still intact, a virgin stone in the endless Tower of Pisa of your record collection. You blushed and stammered a shameless kicker: “Oh! That’s weird! It’s sealed. Even though I’ve listened to it a million times!” I gave you a beautiful edition of Mariana Alcoforado’s Letters, which you lent to a friend and never got back. And a letter from Virginia Woolf, which cost me an arm and a leg at an auction in London, and which I ended up finding in one of your drawers, mixed in with bank statements, floppy disks, keys, candy, and internal party memos.
I wanted to take you to Venice, but you never seemed to have time. You never redeemed the travel IOU I gave you for your birthday. Days and months passed, and my desire to make that trip with you waned. I ended up going with Fish Stick and Little Pig One instead, the kind of erratic outcome that tended to happen with you. In a way, though, I was still honoring you. And I bought you this pitcher that I’m leaving on your grave—now, at least, you can’t let it walk off in some chick’s claws.
So you’re dead. All that energy wasted, kid. You wore yourself out with political infighting—what for? I warned you: “The word state is masculine for a reason, and it’s the real loser-y type of dude too—why would you want to get involved in that?”
You replied that freedom is feminine. Just like revolution. And democracy. And equality. I could add: and envy, and intrigue, and betrayal. Words, balloons that add color to the void. But I didn’t even feel like teasing you anymore. Pity. You were pretty when you got annoyed. Or embarrassed.
You were happier at the university than you ever were in the legislature. Silly girl, you thought you could create a more just world through sheer force of will. You weren’t motivated by power itself, though some status symbols did reel you in. Small but fundamental things like that battalion of secretaries who used to call and leave me messages. When I objected, you lost your temper—you had a lot to do, you needed to use your time efficiently, that was the kind of trivial thing secretaries were for. Politics altered your voice: it got rough and rapid-fire, your laughter curt and forced. Another reason I stopped wanting to call.
Your body is feeding the earth now—it will exist in the green of the leaves. And in the scent of the wind, the physical substance of days and nights. I look at your grave and feel your black eyes being devoured by maggots, your bright smile rotting moment by moment, your hands decomposing, disappearing forever from this world that still belongs so much to you. Sunlight no longer caresses your skin, and few people remain to truly mourn you—a handful of friends. Nobody who saw you crawl, babble your first words. Your childhood sailed off many years ago, in the accident that killed your parents.
Was I your father? Could I be your son? What do you want from me? You come to salvage the pathetic disarray of my love for you. I wasn’t able to dissolve into you—but I also never dissolved you. Did you at least know that, kid?