by Inês Pedrosa
Look at you. Your body covered with white fuzz. Up close, you look like a charred forest. You’re snoring—you don’t exactly sound like Bach. Your mouth gaping, a thread of saliva dampening the pillow. Six white plastic teeth, plus a bunch of black ones. The loose flesh around your navel rising and falling to the sound of the hollow music of your slumber. Your tobacco-stained fingers, your eyes hidden behind sleep. Your bushy, crooked eyebrows. Your pleated elbows. Four large black moles around your nose. A bald spot on the back of your head. The pockmarked intimacy of your beauty.
You used to get mad when I’d leave around piles of old magazines that cluttered the living room. But you always left the bathroom littered with your hair from shaving. You’d say you were going to set the table and then sit down to read the newspaper. You’d say, “I’ll be right down,” and I’d wait in the taxi, watching the meter tick up, picturing you leisurely choosing a coat or flipping through the TV channels one last time.
The two of us really did live outside of time. We once arranged to meet for dinner next to the movie theater at eight, and we both showed up at the box office breathless and panting, simultaneously, at a quarter past nine. “I had a hard time being a soldier—I’m not cut out for military discipline,” you’d say. If you didn’t keep opening those photo albums, if you didn’t reread my letters so many times, it would be hard for me to remember the rest of it, the immense rest of it that was our happiness.
The way we could sit in silence, reading side by side on warm Alentejan afternoons. Or recall the same phrase at the same time. Or, with the exchange of a single glance, communicate our opinions of somebody in the clearest terms. You used to identify everybody with characters from Eça de Queiroz’s novels—Gouvarinho, or Pacheco, or Dâmaso, or João da Ega. Our constant laughter at other people’s expense refreshed us most of all. We couldn’t have been more Queirozian, lolling on our bellies and demanding the utmost excellence from our country. I wanted to escape from that impasse, and came to regret it. Public life wasn’t the solution either—Eça’s books could have told us that too.
42
Why is everybody trying to force me to be happy? They issue a series of warnings: if I don’t leave the house, if I don’t dispel the silence you’ve left me in, if I don’t learn to forget, everybody will forget about me. I’ll end up without any friends, without a cup of tea in the extended nighttime of modern old age, without the human warmth I never deserved. I don’t give a crap about deserved warmth. Contrary to popular belief, friendship isn’t something a person deserves.
Love is, though: we gain twenty pounds, lose our teeth, copulate a few dozen times, and there goes our love, sailing through the sky, off to greener pastures. Love is a matter of weights and dumbbells, feathers and kindlings—oh, how well I remember. A tedious hassle of flowers and poems, studied absences and enigmatic presences, an endless reenactment of the tale of Little Red Riding Hood. The decanted discoveries of love seemed to me to be nothing but gymnastics of the imagination. Bonus: when love fails, we get to blame it on fate—that circumspect bureaucrat in your God’s employ. With alpaca-wool sleeve protectors and briefcases full of forms to be filled out in case of divorce: the books to me, the record collection to you, the dishware divided between us, and that’s that. Fate files the paperwork and accepts the blame, our weakness shielded under the heavens, and sends down a few more cupids so the show can go on.
So all our mistakes pile up against the curved haunch of that vague, silent fate, now carved into a spiral’s black aesthetic. We justify our mistakes in love by pointing to the senselessness that provokes them—as if love didn’t always burgeon and then subside on the basis of the color of a pair of eyes, the curve of a waist, the specific chemistry of sex. Any additional mistakes are attributed to friendship. They spread across the world in geographies of sharing or antagonism. And we justify them by humans’ inability to perceive things clearly in a universe that’s been forsaken by the gods, that is awash in chaos. We end up thinking our mistakes are destiny. Such a notion leads to places where good conscience and deficient willpower conspire to keep us immobile in the face of enormous atrocities. But who’s willing to subject himself to endless talk of good and evil, who’s willing to commit to someone else’s flaws and characteristics till death do they part, merely in exchange for that vast void known as friendship?
Why did I choose you? Why was I always at your side? Because both of us believed in the transformative power of each human being on this earth. That fundamental ethical choice pushed us toward each other. But the endurance of that choice through the unfortunate happenstances of daily life—that’s what I can’t explain. Being born on the same side of the bridge of our fundamental choices doesn’t explain everything. Because there is, despite everything, a multitude around us. There is a multitude of chorusing voices in every arena of the ethics by which we choose our friends. I chose you, yes, because of one or two core affinities—but affinities don’t tell the whole story.
If you’d ever started defending dictatorships, erasing faces from photos, or relativizing the value of freedom, I wouldn’t have been able to keep calling you my friend. And even then, I’d attempt to garb your transformation in the mantle of illness, find a psychiatrist who could treat you—and I don’t believe in psychiatry! But if you killed, betrayed, or stole without renouncing our fundamental credo, I would swear, my eyes swimming with tears, to your innocence.
In Africa, I saw plenty of incorruptible men commit crimes out of fear, throwing bombs with their backs turned to death, buying women because faraway girlfriends had fallen silent. And those very same men hurled themselves in front of younger soldiers to protect us during ambushes. Or ran into burning huts because they heard screaming. I saw how brightly human goodness shone amid the horror it created. I saw the shit I’m made of in that moment when I paused to rest and my platoon-mate set off the land mine that should have been for me.
I also saw betrayal after the war, carried out in cold blood, in the most routine way. During the transition to democracy known as the Ongoing Revolutionary Process, for example, the father of one of my comrades died. That father, whom I never met, was apparently an obscure defender of Marcelo Caetano, the last leader of the authoritarian Estado Novo. Standing next to the coffin, the son harshly criticized his father, pointing out his failures and amplifying his faults. The political comrades of my brother-in-arms applauded what they called impartial justice and what sounded to me like ingratitude. So I turned away, at the end of that funeral and for good, from ongoing revolutionaries—who swiftly changed tracks anyway so they could snag the best seats on the trains of the counterrevolution. I know you were next to me in that cemetery at the moment when, beneath a punishing sun, I allowed my comrade to insult the father who was sinking into the earth.
I know you were next to me, even though you were just thirteen and I’d already entered midlife—like your parents, whose death was looming. I picture you, a piece of chewing gum in your mouth, playing tag with other kids your age—and you were already my friend.
It’s hard not to get to see you grow old, hard not to be able to tell you that I’d love you exactly the same. Toothless, addled, wrinkled—my friend. A woman born with the exact right amount of laughter in her. My accomplice, even against the two of us. I never loved another woman like that. You got a little greedy, a little tipsy on the champagne of power, but you never fell into the vicious circle of bad faith. You were able to preserve that innocence through which sincere volition is able to achieve the impossible.
43
If I hadn’t been so caught up in what you called public life, maybe I’d have noticed the new self that was being born in the wrong place inside me. I never realized I was pregnant—the pregnant women I’d known talked about other kinds of symptoms: an uncomfortable mix of overwhelming nausea and sudden cravings.
Some of them, the spiritual types, swore they could tell they were pregnant as soon as they conceived. They claimed child-producing orga
sms had a special quality to them. I was dumbstruck by their belief in the fecund power of pleasure. If that were really the case, how did humanity reproduce before the twentieth century, in eras when the female orgasm was a heresy—or, in the most generous interpretation, a well-guarded secret? Plus, had it been the case, I’d have had a house full of children.
But these philosophers of intuition talked about an immediate inner peace, an instantaneous wisdom that guided them to the uterus as soon as the task was completed. Needless to say, I didn’t put a lot of stock in it. I’m sure you’ll remember Lígia, my colleague in the sociology department, who practiced tarot and Reiki, declared herself an absolute pacifist, and spent her life trying to educate me. She thought I was too competitive, insisted that I was wasting my “psychic gifts,” that I was being carried along by ignorant pragmatism. She once got really upset with me because I told her during a public debate that I was grateful to the English for not offering Hitler their other cheek. In her view, if we refused to respond to aggressors’ attacks, the universe would be plunged into perpetual harmony.
But when her husband traded her in for another woman ninety pounds of pacifism lighter, that angel of kindness hired a bulldog of a lawyer to extort him for all he was worth. For the good of the children, naturally—two boys, eight and ten, who showed up at court in tears to confirm their father’s betrayal. She got mad at me because I refused to testify against the cheater—and, ever the pragmatist, I seized the opportunity to tell her what I thought of mothers who turned their children against their fathers. You always said I didn’t know how to get along, that I shouldn’t say everything I thought out loud—but you loved me, still love me, for my relentless disregard for those and other niceties.
I got pregnant pragmatically too, and I didn’t even realize it. A week before I died, I felt sharp pains in my belly, but I didn’t connect the dots. I took deep breaths and figured it was just a product of the stress I was under because all my projects seemed fated to languish and die under my parliamentary coalition’s insistent neglect.
It was the beginning of March, Women’s History Month, when politicians and journalists rediscover a mostly dormant interest in women for a few weeks, and I received a number of invitations from different cities to give a talk on the status of Portuguese women. I accepted them all. I took particular delight in accepting invitations from municipalities run by other political parties. I was determined to prove that I wasn’t just valuable as a party-line vote, as my peers obviously believed. So I ignored the sudden pangs gnawing at my entrails like wolves.
Two days before I died, I started bleeding—but I was in a remote part of Beira and figured I’d just go to the doctor when I got back to Lisbon. I also felt vaguely guilty because Pascoal, who’d been my friend since high school, had wanted to meet up before I left on my tour, and I’d put him off. Now I hadn’t seen him in six months, and our reunion was going to have to wait another month. He told me he’d split up with Augusto, but that wasn’t what he wanted to talk about.
How is it that I couldn’t bring myself to call off a lecture that ended up being attended by half a dozen women, more as a break from their rural solitude than for any other reason, and rush to the aid of a friend going through an emotional crisis? What was I becoming? I believed, you see, that those agonizing stabs of pain were a punishment from God. I preferred the vanity of friendship—however much I hid that fact with the velvety kindnesses of altruism, it was the truth.
Pascoal called again, an unaccustomed agitation in his voice; I was somewhere in Ribatejo. “Come on, ditch that crap. I really need you here. Are you sure you’re OK?” Not wanting him to worry, I didn’t tell him about the pain. I figured I had an ectopic pregnancy. I knew what an ectopic pregnancy was.
No, it wasn’t your fault, Pascoal. Can anyone be at fault for what never comes to pass? Whose fault was the flood of desire that drew me to the skin enfolding the lover who was never actually mine? Whose fault was that carnivorous intimacy that pushed us toward the silence of pleasure before we even met? Maybe it was our neglect of the body that was to blame.
We met at Frágil; I must have been twenty and he twenty-eight, and we were pretty much the only ones there who weren’t dancing. I found them ridiculous, all those peacocks with their exaggeratedly sexual movements. Maybe I wasn’t being fair—we rarely are when we join the frieze of clinical observers. But I couldn’t imagine living as a mere testimony to my own body, adopting a corporal lifestyle of vigorous, gymnastic health, rituals of dress and movement—in other words, I was completely unfashionable. As was he, hunched over the bar, drinking and smoking cigarette after cigarette, watching. We hardly spoke. My eyes were held captive by his mouth. Large, fleshy lips, almost obscenely motionless. The flirtatious conversations around the bar provoked a faint smile on his face that was reflected identically on mine.
I went back to Frágil a week later. The third week, I followed him out as he was leaving. Only when I woke up the next morning did he ask, “What’s your name?”
I told him I didn’t know anymore. That’s the sort of thing you say only at twenty, even if it continues to be true. He immediately told me his full name, as a warning. We couldn’t pretend to be lost. Perdition was written in his blood, but not in his life. He took off and left me there in bed.
At fifteen I used to dream of the day when I’d lose all fear, claim possession of immense clarity. That’s how adults seemed to me—people who weren’t afraid of the dentist, didn’t have to pass exams, and had no trouble sniffing out romantic fakery. Ultimately, that day didn’t exist. Darkness grows with us—the only difference is that some people eventually realize that nothing matters, or they come to consider all love the finite progeny of a boundless fraud.
That wasn’t the case with me—God refused to let my heart rest. As a child, I was never able to see clouds in the clouds and grass in the grass. I couldn’t help questioning first principles and still can’t separate the parts from the whole. He took off and left me in bed, the man that God sent to kill me. We met up like that for the rest of my life. When I couldn’t find him, I’d wait on his doorstep—he lived in an attic apartment, so it was impossible to tell when he was home.
The first time, he enjoyed the surprise. The first time, he found me sitting on the stairs, which was actually the tenth time I’d been there, waiting on the dark street, with my feet frozen and a desperate joy like that of a child in danger. He laughed, stroked my face, took my hand, and led me up the stairs. The second time, his brow furrowed chidingly, but his eyes were still laughing. He didn’t take my hand, but he invited me up. The third time, he turned on his heel and went to hail a cab on the next block. Between the second and third times, I’d committed a fatal error: I’d introduced him to some friends of mine at Frágil. He fled after the introductions. So I gave up on him.
Three months later we ran into each other at the entrance to the university. He told me the friend he’d come to see was out and took me for coffee. We’d always get to this point where I’d attempt to become part of his everyday life, and he’d back away. I’d pound on the door of his house. And I’d pound on him too, sometimes. I left him for good four or five times. I don’t know how he always managed to run into me right as my normal relationships were entering that most excruciatingly normal phase of all—death.
One night I walked into Frágil and he was pouring that toxic smile of his onto Florbela, a nice girl whom God gave an immersion blender instead of a brain, probably to make her life as soft as mashed potatoes. To little avail—God likes fooling himself too, otherwise he wouldn’t have constructed a world that is a spiral of deceptions to relieve our boredom.
Simple Florbela was always moaning about how complicated life was. She found everything complex: faucets, relationships, computers, the lunch menu, the simplest conversation. You’d ask her if she was OK, and she’d furrow her brow as she weighed the question. There were only two certainties lurking behind that furrowed brow: that she was prett
y and that men, in general, liked sleeping with her. But even those certainties were disjointed, disconnected. I knew Florbela well because she was the secretary in my department. I joined her for a lot of fruit salads, her primary food group. She was always either really, really in love or really, really distraught—and sometimes the two conditions overlapped, which was really, really complicated for Florbela. She’d appear, pleading, over my shoulder: “Would you like to come eat a salad with me?”
The morning after that night I saw her emerge, smitten, with my lover, lovely Flor dragged me out for one of her urgent salads. She told me how my lover had spent hours kissing her fingers, one by one, with the slowest, wettest tongue in the solar system. She told me about all the positions he’d put her in, how many times he’d set her on fire, and how long each of his ecstasies lasted. She felled an entire forest of details and then finished it off, swelling with radiant pride, the silicone of her breasts ready to burst under her low-cut blouse, licking her bowl—she always licked the bowl when she finished her salad:
“And he’s coming, he’s coming by the university to see me this afternoon.”
What a pig. Rotten hunk of apple—who did he think he was poisoning? And me there, so intelligent, so kind, so learned, nurturing the cheerful passions of the fairy Florbela, who had a blender for a brain and had turned the most interesting challenge of my life into mashed potatoes. That afternoon, I didn’t teach my classes. I said I wasn’t feeling well, and Florbela pouted: she’d wanted to introduce her boyfriend. I never told you this—it would have been too humiliating to repeat it, even to my other half. You knew Florbela, and I was afraid you’d stop liking me if you knew that we’d fallen for the same guy. And that, to top it off, he’d preferred scrawny Florbela. I imagined your wicked laugh ascending the folds of a resolute disdain. Besides, I was too sad.