Now and at the Hour of Our Death
Page 4
this kind of thing is just so terrible that maybe it’s better not to talk about it at all… I don’t mind if other people do, but I try not to… when people ask me if I’m doing better now I say I’m fine, I always say I’m doing just fine, even though sometimes I’m not feeling all that great… and people say you don’t even look sick, look at your complexion, you look really good, and I say, I’m not sick, I’m not sick at all, ’cause if you start saying you’re sick, I think it’s even worse then, you feel worse, and your friends, even your closest friends, they feel worse too – if there’s anything we can do to help, anything at all, they’ll say… and then it’s harder for whoever’s around, so it’s better to always say you’re ok, sometimes you might not be doing that great, but you still say you’re doing just fine
I’ve got used to the idea of having this illness and it’s just something I’ve got to deal with, it’s not like it’s going away… in the beginning, when it was only in my intestines, all I wanted was for it to go away, but then it reached my liver and that was it, the doctor told me the cancer had metastasized in my liver and it was there to stay… they explained that it was gonna keep growing, even if they cut it out, it would just keep growing… I was hoping they’d cut the root of it outta my liver and that that would be the end of it, but that’s not what happened, so I had to get used to living with it, for however long I had left… I’d have to live with it and that was that. I got used to it, I’ve gotta get used to it
we go to bed, I wait for my husband to fall asleep, and then I get up and I walk downstairs, especially when I have an appointment the next day, and all kinds of things go through my head, everything, absolutely everything… what if something happens, what are we gonna do about the kids? When I’m down here on my own, I think of them, of how they’ll manage if I’m not here
sometimes, you think you can’t do it, that you can’t take it, but then somehow or other you find the strength to keep going
we have to have faith and strength and we have to carry on and that’s what we’re gonna do
you only know what it’s like when it happens to you
Paula still managed to go to the festival in August 2012. Even in her weakened state, with help from the team of palliative home-care nurses, she attended the procession. She wanted to say goodbye to all her friends. She died at home, surrounded by her family, at the beginning of September 2012.
João and Maria
He pulls down his light, well-ironed shirt over his urine bag. He flicks his hat up, uncovering his eyes. He smiles. Finishes the card game. Wins. Smiles. He gets up and pays for the bottle of water. Says see you tomorrow. Smiles. He leaves the café. With his slim legs and slight swagger, he has the grace of vast landscapes. He pushes open the small gate that leads to his front yard, climbs the step to the porch and sits on a bench facing west, like in an old cowboy movie, the evening sun falling across his face. He smiles.
The woman walks out of the house, slowly, her legs swollen. She has tended to her garden and left everything ready in the kitchen so she can start cooking dinner later. She adjusts her headband on her graying hair and sits beside her husband. She doesn’t lean back, but instead rests her hands on her knees, as if poised to get up again at any moment.
They greet the passers-by. They wait. Usually, nothing special happens. They wait. Together, they watch the sun set. The next day will be like this one, which has been just like the previous one.
Nearly every time I visited Santulhão, I’d found Senhor João and Senhora Maria sitting on their front porch. Except for the first time, when they’d been in their house. A folder containing the paperwork for the farm they had once owned in Angola lay on the kitchen table, beside boxes of medicines, as if placed there by chance. Inside was a document that read: ‘Angola, Huíla province, 1965, João Manuel Fernandes, 35 years old, Originally from Santulhão, Farmer by trade, is hereby certified, having paid 300 escudos for this license, Hoque, Municipality or District of Lubango.’ And from that moment on, in my mind Santulhão became linked to Angola.
I returned time and again to Santulhão. I was intrigued by Senhor João, a man who had clearly been a hypochondriac his whole life and who now had a very real and serious illness, cancer, but who smiled as he spoke melodramatically of how he suffered, of how little time he believed he had left.
Every time I went back there, I wanted to ask Senhor João if he was afraid of dying. I wanted to ask him what it was like to be eighty years old, what it was like to reach the end of your life: if he had any regrets, if it had all been worthwhile, and, if so, what exactly had been worthwhile? But instead I always ended up asking him about Angola, about how they had made it from there, Santulhão, in the Municipality of Vimioso, in Trás-os-Montes, to Hoque, Lubango, in the Huíla Province, in Angola; when, and why? How had they come back, how had they readjusted, and what place did those particular memories occupy in their minds?
They were rusty when it came to talking about their memories and about themselves. Like many from Trás-os-Montes, Senhor João and Senhora Maria would sometimes use third-person verb tenses when speaking in the first person. Instead of ‘I have done’ they would say ‘I has done,’ which gave the impression their lives could have been lived by someone else. Their story may not have been unique, but it was long. It would have to be reassembled with some perseverance, with a willingness to merge certain decades into others and with particular attention to sowing and to harvesting, to rain and to drought. Their story, to be honest, was never complete. Last time I visited, we spoke for so long that I ended up watching the sun set with them. I didn’t know what so many hours of recorded material might be worth, but I thought of how my own grandfather always said that history is written by the rich, and I wanted to give Senhor João and Senhora Maria a right to theirs. And anyway, what sense does it make at the age of eighty to speak of death without speaking of everything you have lived? It would be like visiting your hometown without setting foot in your house.
It was clear, and did not have to be discussed at length, that their greatest fear was not death – that was for the young – but being left alone. Beyond that, it terrified them that they might lose their senses, and with them their memories, and with their memories the story of their lives. They don’t want – Senhor João repeats, still smiling – to die in poor health. Because you could end up spending years lying in a bed or, if you’re unlucky, in a bed in a home, or worse still, in a hospital bed, hooked up to machines and to tubes. Was it just their impression, or did people use to be healthier when they died?
When I visited them in August, illness was not their only company. The porch was no longer still, with children and grandchildren constantly coming in and out of the house. Their eldest son, who has since spent time in Angola trying to reclaim his parents’ farm, and the emigrant son, who lives in France and who, that year, was a mordomo – one of the organizers of the August festival – were both in Santulhão. Their granddaughters, skinny little things from the city in skin-tight clothes, would get up late, wander to the kitchen and pick at the food left in their grandmother’s pots and pans, their eyes feverish with both the doubts and the certainties of their futures. The grandchildren, more grown-up and more nostalgic by the year, wanted to talk about their childhood: about how they ran through fields, falling into ponds, then laughing into the night so they could stay awake and stretch out those long Trás-os-Montes summers.
In the house that belonged to their daughter-in-law, the wife of their eldest son, there was a large yard that had once been a corral. There, they barbecued Mirandesa steak and lean cuts, and the table was very long so everyone, family and friends, could fit around it. Senhor João and Senhora Maria ate calmly and spoke little. No one asked them much, but this didn’t seem to bother them. On the contrary, they enjoyed listening to the loud muddled voices and observing the youthfulness that surrounded them, the spectacle of the different generations. At dinner they talked about the festival and about money, of which
there was less and less for performances that were increasingly sophisticated; they talked about emigration: France, Angola, Brazil, the United States, Canada. After the meal, Senhor João and Senhora Maria did not go see the band play since the music would only begin after midnight, which was too late for them. Later, though only the faintest of sounds reached the porch, they could still feel the night’s euphoria in their chests.
One time, after visiting Santulhão and hearing Senhor João talk about the dreams he’d had in which he returned to Angola, to farming and to hunting, I also dreamt of Angola. I went back there with my father and brother, we walked along a beach, and in my dream I was aware we were only visiting; we would soon leave. When I woke up the next morning, I couldn’t stop thinking of the trip I’d taken to Luanda, years earlier, without my family. The cemetery, perched above the city, had impressed me. As I read the names on the tombstones a mother’s voice cried out in the background, and I thought of how lucky we were that no one in our family had stayed behind, that none of us were buried there. ‘Mommy has to leave you now, my love. Mommy has to go.’ And as two men dragged the woman out of the cemetery, carrying her out in their arms, I finally understood how tragic it is to leave the dead behind, to leave them alone.
Now that their children have started traveling back to Angola, to try to reclaim the farm that was once theirs, in the south of the country, I wonder if Senhor João and Senhora Maria ever think of the possibility of their children moving so very far away, and then of their grandchildren leaving too; of how, after they die, the younger generations might never visit Santulhão again. The cemetery, which is just there, you can see it from their porch, to the left of the house and in front of the café – will it become a place exclusively for the dead?
It doesn’t make Senhor João and Senhora Maria unhappy to spend their old age in the place they were born, and yet they can’t but help feel that they’ve lost part of their identity to history and that there is more defeat in life than there ever will be in death.
Senhor João crosses his long, tanned hands over his belly, his urine bag pushed to one side, and turns to face the sun, the west, looking out into the distance. Senhora Maria looks out at her vegetable garden in their front yard, at the road, at her husband.
As they sit on the porch, at the end of the day, Senhor João and Senhora Maria see what the younger generations do not: bygone landscapes. In their eyes, the sun slowly bruising through long months of unbearable heat, there is still time to hope everything ends there, on that purple horizon.
HIM: I dream more than I sleep. Or maybe it’s all jumbled up. I don’t know.
HER: Sure he dreams, and sometimes he kicks me, too. I ask him what’s wrong and he says: oh, I was just hunting in Angola.
HIM: In Angola, we’d go hunting every week, sometimes even two, three times. There was wild goats, antelopes, game. Soon’s the dry season hit, they’d come searching for drinking water.
HER: Goats, they’d come in bean season. One day he asked me: what we got for lunch tomorrow? ’Cause we had so many chickens and pigs and—
HIM: One year we killed eighteen of them!
HER: He said: look, there’s a goat eating the beans. Gonna see if I can grab him. I hadn’t even finished washing the dishes and there he was bringing in two of them goats. The blacks, they knew the sound of his gun and so they’d come knocking at my door the next day, saying I’m here to help with the skinning, Senhora. And I’d say, alright then, cut here and cut there and take this here for you. They’d be so darn happy! Senhora, you give us balela today?
HIM: They called meat balela.
HIM: I’m eighty now. And here I am, fearful I might fall sick before I die. My kids, they tell me: you gotta try taking it one day at a time now.
When I got back from Angola and had this operation in Vimioso, the doctor said to me: oh, you’ll live to see eighty yet! But I felt downright bad. I don’t know if it was because of how I had to leave Angola that I felt so bad, but I asked him, me, eighty? And now I’ve made it to eighty, you know what I’m hoping for? To make it to ninety. You know what makes me really happy? It’s not doing the living myself, it’s getting to see the family, the kids, the grandkids. My oldest grandson, he’s a mechanical engineer, another one’s studying to be an architect. The daughter of our eldest, she’s a nurse. Another granddaughter, she’s finishing up school to be a scientist. And she’s already making a living at a university in France…
HER: She’s doing her PhD.
HIM: And my youngest son’s kid, he’s a police officer. I got no great-grandchildren yet. That’s why a person’s got to keep going.
HER: Our oldest grandkid is twenty-six, but he ain’t given any thought to marriage yet.
HIM: It ain’t easy living in the city. Here, in the village, we’ve got a house, a vegetable patch, and we just keep on.
HER: There ain’t a day goes by we don’t eat what our garden grows.
HIM: And then there’s even some left for the kids.
HER: Folk don’t go hungry here. Everyone’s growing things. There’s always enough.
HIM: But back in the day, the houses was full of people. Now everywhere’s empty. There’s some’s left, others died. There’s only five, six kids in the school now and they go to Vimioso, ’cause there ain’t no schools in Santulhão anymore.
HER: Back then, families were big, they’d have ten, twelve kids, and you needed a plentiful garden to fill the pot. Folks went hungry. There was lice, and there were ticks. We were dirt poor back then.
HIM [pointing at the houses opposite]: Over there, where them houses are now, there was mud. And you mixed it in with straw and you had yourself some fertilizer.
HER: My ma was real sick, and truly devoted to the saints. She went down to Mirandela one time to pray, and me and my brother, we went with her and we saw this bicycle. We just stared at it, ’cause we’d never seen one before. No one bought us kids bikes, there wasn’t any money for presents.
HIM: When I was about ten, we had a pair of stilts…
HER: They used to get all banged up.
HIM: …and we’d strap our feet into them and walk all over the place.
HER: We had seven kids. The first two died: one at five and a half months, the other when he was born. I cried and cried thinking that maybe none might survive… The best thing in life’s your kids. Everything else is just… We left everything we had behind in Angola. But our kids, thank the Lord, they make enough to keep themselves afloat. They’re smart and they’ve got skills enough to work. There never was much, but we sent them to school with the little we had.
HIM: There ain’t a thing I regret selling.
HER: I would’ve sold our land so the kids could go to school. If we’d gone to school ourselves, we wouldn’t’ve held onto our land like we did, we would’ve got jobs. He had to finish elementary school to get his driver’s license in Angola.
HIM: Who finished elementary school round here back then? We worked like slaves.
HIM: When I went to Angola, there was lots of folks here and almost nowhere to harvest grain. Before that, I even tried getting to France. I gave a doctor from Bragança one and a half contos (speaking in contos, which is what we used back then). The doctor said he got people across the border and he had this middleman in Vimioso. The plan was that after he got me papers, I’d give him another one and a half contos. But time passed, and then some more… He must’ve conned ’bout six hundred people. There was lots of us waiting to go to France. And then in the end not one of us did. Those days, there wasn’t any tv, but I heard this broadcaster say on the radio: come to Angola, my brothers, hardworking men of Trás-os-Montes. I had a cousin of mine in Angola and he was a sergeant in the army, and I wrote him a letter and then he wrote me back saying: cousin, you’re not going to believe it! They harvest twice a year out here! First, two guys from over here went there, then me, then three more. Then it was like a flood: more than thirty folk from here went over.