Now and at the Hour of Our Death

by Susana Moreira Marques

  Perhaps the shepherd, lying in bed with eyes closed, has flashes of his childhood raising sheep on the hill behind the home. At the top of the hill sit the ruins of a castle, proof of the village’s former importance, proof that nothing important lasts.

  On the hill there is a sculpture trail that re-enacts the Passion of Christ, and maybe that’s why the shepherd believed there was something sacred in that spot where he would spend nights sleeping under the open sky.

  In the same way that some will wait their whole lives to win the lottery, playing the same numbers over and over, week after week, the shepherd repeated the prayers his grandparents had taught him, hoping he might see the Virgin – as Francisco, Jacinta and Lúcia had in Fátima. He was intensely devoted to the three little shepherds and had visited the shrine there three times. He thought those kinds of miracles, real miracles, were the privilege – the only privilege – of the poor. After growing up and becoming a father, after growing old, and even up until just a few weeks ago, when his cancerous lung still allowed him to walk to the São João fountain to drink water, striving for his miracle, he would look towards the hilltop and it would seem to him that She was there. Watching.

  *

  And at night, in dreams, the old are young and the sick, healthy; in our minds we are no more than ourselves and in our dreams the best of ourselves.

  *

  The blinds on the upper floor are drawn, the tables and chairs wrapped in plastic. Her husband proudly shows off their large living room, as well as the other fully furnished rooms and their fully equipped bathroom. He built all this for his wife, even though she can no longer walk up the stairs and they are now both confined to two or three rooms on the ground floor.

  *

  Man is not God. Man is not God. Man is not God. Man is not God. Man is not God. Man is not God. Man is not God. Man is not God. Man is not God. Man is not God. Man is not God. Man is not God. Man is not God. Man is not

  We should scrawl this in notebooks, filling page after page. We should be punished for thinking we can control everything, even death; for thinking that we can foresee it, and, who knows, maybe even avoid it.

  *

  The eagle soars in circles high above the river bluffs. Standing beside the water, with our feet planted on the earth, we are tiny; we are creatures governed by fear.

  *

  Survival Guide:

  3. Make people into characters.

  4. Don’t stop crying over characters.

  *

  She wore black for years before she died because in the end it was her husband, who had fallen ill after her, also with cancer, who died first. She even lived to see her great-granddaughter baptized; it happened in August, the month of saints, promises, and celebrations. This was her first great-grandchild and her emigrant son had wanted the baby to be baptized in his parents’ village. She’d had many children, but only the ‘girl,’ her handicapped daughter, was still with her. Before she died, they assured her that the ‘girl,’ by then thirty-nine years old, would be looked after at an institution. They came and took her. Her mother told her it wouldn’t be for long.

  And so, before she died, she found herself alone. She’d already stopped tending to her garden, then she stopped sitting at her front door, in the shade of her flowers, from where she used to like looking out at the other side of the street, at the house that belonged to her son who lived abroad – a large, freshly painted house. She would come to forget those she had recently met, but she never forgot any of her children, even those who had died as babies – on the fingers of one hand she counted the children she still had and on the fingers of the other the ones she had lost. It was strange that a body that was once so fertile could now be so barren. Before she died, she underwent so many operations that there was now nothing in her belly but the pains she felt like rocks in her gut. She was left with a scar that gave her the inhuman appearance of possessing two bellies, and she carried a bag for her needs. Not long before she died, she stopped getting up because when she did she would feel dizzy and fall and one day she even banged her head. She spent her days in bed in a room that was cool and dark in the summer, and cold and grim after it, and in which still stood the bed that had once belonged to the ‘girl.’

  *

  O blessed Mother, who in your voyages have known weariness and the dangers of travel, protect these your children who are now embarking on a journey, be with them always, watch over their well-being and their needs, and help them arrive safely at their destination. Let it be so.

  *

  In the café they don’t talk about people who are bedridden or in homes, of the old slowly vanishing. They talk about sudden and unexpected deaths, which are considered events. They talk, for example, about a boy who died just hours after he turned eighteen. He died on a distant foreign road, but was buried in his parents’ village. The motorcycle he crashed was a birthday present. There was not a single visible scratch on his body, the café owner explained, so they held an open-casket wake.

  *

  Immortal in the morning. At night, the fear of never waking.

  *

  And yet another metaphor: the border. The eagle crossing it, circling. How easy it is to believe in the immortality of eagles.

  *

  I return to the first village. Daughter and granddaughter have gone back to the city and so the widow is now alone. She goes to the cemetery every day, where not only her husband but also her parents and siblings are buried. Her husband asked that, instead of a tombstone, a simple cross be placed over his grave, and she respected his request. Our Lady didn’t heed the wish she made before he died – that she be taken three days after him, since she didn’t want to be left behind – but she continues to pray, with discipline, and goes to church every day. She is not sure her husband can hear her but she prays that God will pass her message along.

  The empty house seems to breathe. When she lies down, the iron bed she shared with her husband for over sixty years creaks loudly. In the dead of night, it is almost as if the figures in the framed black-and-white photographs that hang above the dresser were shifting.

  Even though she’s been afraid of being on her own ever since she heard about the burglars, she refuses to move to the city. She does not want to leave behind her village or her home, her bed and her photographs, the cherry orchard, her vegetable garden, the olive grove and chestnut trees, her ancient donkey, or her family’s graves in the cemetery.

  It is in her village and in her home that her husband lives on. For her, as well as for telephone companies:

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘…’

  ‘He isn’t home. He’s in heaven.’

  ‘…’

  ‘Look, my daughter will be here tomorrow or the day after and can talk to you then.’

  Her daughter always visits. An only child, she was always close to her parents. She looks like her mother, with a long face and a stoic air. On one of her visits, she brought along the book she was reading, The Kite Runner, and said the greatest gift her father, who was illiterate, had given her was the ability to read books like The Kite Runner, and to know where faraway cities like Kabul were. As she said this, she cried, even though the doctors had told her before her father died that she would no longer be able to produce tears.

  *

  In the cemetery: a photograph and at times no more than a name. Names may survive, but they were never what made us unique.

  *

  The photograph of the great-grandfather who traveled the world hangs on a wall in the hallway. In the picture stands an elegant man in a suit with an antique traveling bag and an old-fashioned mustache. The family walks through the hallway, carrying trays of food for the dinner party. They no longer glance at their great-grandfather. He is distant in the way someone whose voice you’ve never heard is distant. Pictures also die.

  *

  At the entrance to each village, right before or right after the exit off the main road, there is typically a V
irgin. Normally, she is inside a bell jar, as if needing special care; as if, without the glass, and unprotected by people, she in turn would be incapable of protecting them.

  *

  The boy skates from one end of the empty café to the other, pretending not to hear the conversation taking place between his parents and the nurse. They are talking about medication, about nutrition, about how much longer his father will have to wait for a liver transplant. His mother speaks loudly, and briskly, having decided to spare her husband the need to discuss his own health. The boy’s skateboard makes a monotonous sound on the café floor reminiscent of a fan or any machine that, when left on in an empty room, amplifies the silence. Out there runs a wide road, but there are few cars. A client comes into the café for coffee. The boy stops skating, goes to the counter, serves him; the man leaves again. Out there might lie a continent of wide-open spaces, yes, of large deserts. The boy resumes skating, resumes his role as just another teenager, pretending once again to feel alienated and unconcerned with the passing of time.

  *

  ILLUMINED: 1. One who cannot be dazzled. 2. One who is not blinded by too much light, and will not allow themselves to be enthralled. 3. One who sees the world lucidly, as equal parts pain and joy.

  *

  The nurses and social workers who work with the terminally ill have the look of those who have dedicated their lives to something larger than themselves (as it sometimes is with monks, who renounce their very identities), or of those who hold convictions they deem unshakable (as it sometimes is with Muslims). They do not seem cynical or guarded, as you might expect from those who live with death on a daily basis.

  *

  Land, roads, people, time, time, people, roads, land. What matters here is different, very different.

  *

  ‘Be quiet, or the doctor will take you to the hospital,’ she says, and her husband stops groaning. He hasn’t talked or walked for a year now and only eats when she threatens him with a trip to the hospital. What is it he sees as he lies in bed? Or does he simply keep his eyes closed and live in other images?

  *

  When our legs stop working, we will walk through our memories. When our legs stop working and our eyes stop seeing, we will walk through our memories and they will be clear. When our legs stop working, our eyes stop seeing and our ears stop hearing, we will walk through our memories and they will be clear, and forgotten voices will recount everything once more.

  *

  Articulated beds, diapers, morphine, gauze, creams for cuts and abrasions, serum drips, tubes, needles – illnesses come with practical problems that need solving; and death is chiefly a physical process. There is little that is literary about death.

  *

  On the road, ‘25 Minutes to Go’ – Johnny Cash singing like a doomed man.

  In any case, our lives are all on a timer, and it would be best not to forget it.

  *

  When the tour boat glides by, the river hides itself.

  *

  A. died. And so his family, finally free to lend a hand, came together. A. left behind a daughter he’d barely seen. She lived far away and would probably not make it in time for the funeral.

  *

  A GOOD DEATH: 1. A peaceful death, with minimal suffering. 2. A death in which both the dignity and identity of the dying are maintained up until the last moment. 3. A death in which the person dying is surrounded by family.

  *

  There’s something of the missionary in the way the doctor makes her way by road, tracing circles, not only caring for the ill at each turn, but also spreading the word about the good death.

  Hers is a big soul. Not like the strangler character in Miguel Torga’s Trás-os-Montes story ‘Alma Grande,’ as terrifying as the very fear of death, but someone who will hold your hand as she chases away that fear.

  The families are grateful, and years later will still tell her their news, as they would someone they’d shared a sacred moment with, as, for example, with a midwife.

  *

  There’s a cross by the road. By the road, there’s a cross.

  *

  Throughout the house are paintings, saints, flags from far-flung countries. She has never left the village. Her children traveled once they’d grown up. Her husband also traveled, spending most of their marriage abroad. He would only come home on holidays, and, even so, she never left him. He only came back for good once he’d grown old. He was out of his mind, yelling at her, threatening her. He can no longer remember this, but his eyes are still full of rage and the desire to harm. He has stopped eating, which is perhaps another way of hurting her. Or perhaps, in his dementia, he knows she has more than enough reason to poison him. Maybe he doesn’t think any of this; the bad man has simply lost his appetite.

  *

  On bedside tables, clocks mark the times for their medications. No one seems to notice the irony in having clocks at the bedsides of the dying.

  *

  In the country she emigrated to, they say people go to heaven. At home, as a child, she would hear them say: he’s dead, and he won’t be coming back. She chooses to come die at home.

  *

  Man has blood on his hands, but God has more. Man has the dead on his mind, but God does, too. Man has nightmares, but God does not sleep.

  *

  Fear in the eyes of the man who will not walk. He fears falling. He fears staying fallen and looking up from all the way down there, at the books he can no longer read, on their tall shelves; or falling in the yard, lying on the cold ground and looking up at the tips of fruit trees and at birds hopping towards his eyes. He thinks his wife wouldn’t be able to lift him; that she would have to call for help and that others would see him, fallen; that they would have to then pick him up and wipe the bird droppings off, or, if he was in the house, drag him towards the sofa, which was actually so very near. As he pictures this, he shakes even more. He stops talking to keep from shaking. He stops thinking to keep from shaking. Later, he will come to forget the word Parkinson’s.

  *

  … pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

  *

  The little boy rides his bike down a carless street that seems very long to him. At the end of one street is another, and then the field: the world in all its possibility and impossibility. When he returns to his village many years from now, if there is still a village, he will see how small that street really was, and the field, just a little larger than a backyard. Perhaps, many years from now, he won’t see any children drawing their whole wide worlds and he will feel like an endangered species.

  *

  Now and at the hour of our death.

  *

  During the last week of his life, she thought every night would be his last; that the following day, she would no longer hear her husband breathing. After a while, she was so tired she started hoping it would happen quickly. Then she would feel guilty and start crying because he had not eaten his yogurt at breakfast.

  *

  Now.

  *

  The last notes I take are about a man who sings to his wife. After she was diagnosed with leukemia, he began to play the guitar again. When she came home from the hospital one year ago, M. thought she would die soon after. But she got better once she was home, and so they began their second life together.

  ‘Todos me querem eu quero algum / quero o meu amor / não quero mais nenhum.’ He played and sang as she tapped her feet and hummed along from the living-room sofa because, even though her memory sometimes failed her, she could still remember the melodies. Whenever he played on local radio stations, he dedicated every song to her.

  They never had kids. When they got married, she was already nearing the age when women no longer have children. Being so much younger than she was, he must have known that one day he would end up taking care of her, but perhaps he had never realized how difficult it would be. He is all she has.

  In these last notes, M., weak a
fter spinal surgery, no longer plays the guitar. He now lives each day with the fear that something might happen to him and that she will then be left alone. But he doesn’t say this. He says he promised Our Lady a hundred euros – he saw Her over the door to the operating theater – and that the operation had gone well, so now everything could go back to being as normal, as alive, and as musical as ever. M. plays a recording of his own voice on an old hand-held recorder so that he does not have to speak.

  *

  And even if words survive, they’ll be too old to comprehend.

  *

  The girl walks down the steps, slowly, her legs like a ragdoll’s, with one hand held up to her chest. She leaves the house, slowly, and comes outside to sit on the bench in the sun with the old women.

  *

  Survival Guide:

  5. Shadow the circling eagles. Imagine their nests.

  *

  Where is Ivan Ilyich? Where is the agony Tolstoy wrote? Where are the men who look back at the moment they became men? Where are regret and forgiveness? And the fulfillment, if there was any, felt in those joyful years? The sick suffer, and then have no strength left to think or to ask themselves those moral questions – nor do they even seem concerned (is this unique to our time?) with heaven, hell, or the Last Judgment. They just want a little more life, they want just a little more time to believe that the body can triumph; everyone wants, with disproportionate and perhaps delirious intensity, to carry on living.

  *

  And then love, the great survivor of all disaster.

  *

  If I were to go back there and knock on the door once more, and then again and again; if I had time, unhurried time, and pretended I wasn’t born in the city; if I knew how to listen more carefully, every word acknowledged and cared for; if I knew what to do with my hands and how not to take notes: would people open up and tell me what they really think about in those slow and lonely nighttime hours?