The Piano Cemetery

by José Luís Peixoto

  Marta was the first to arrive. My wife was no longer in the yard. She’d gone up the steps with the potato skins in her apron folded up over her belly and she had come back to fetch the basin. She had gone through the ribbons of the door. Marta arrived laughing and talking loudly. Behind her came Elisa, little, saying:

  ‘Oh, Uncle,’ and she ran to Francisco.

  Behind them, slowly, came Marta’s husband.

  I came down the ladder to greet them, and because I’d finished I put down the pruning shears. Francisco was playing around with Elisa. Marta’s husband and I talked about nothing. Marta said things we didn’t hear and tried to get into the conversation. The morning passed.

  At a certain point Maria arrived with her husband. Marta’s voice faded. Her expression turned heavy. As they approached we could see the husband, and Maria’s face behind him, taller. In greeting we spoke mingled words, diluted words, words that were whispers, grunts, that were not words. When Maria made as if to approach Elisa, Marta rushed over and picked her up in her arms:

  ‘Go on now, let your uncle rest.’

  But Francisco wasn’t tired and he didn’t need to rest.

  There was a silence in Maria’s footsteps, that lost their meaning and stopped. Our daughters’ husbands didn’t interrupt their conversation; Francisco made the most of it to fold up the stepladder, but I noticed. I wasn’t sure what, but I had no doubt that I’d noticed something.

  My wife appeared through the ribbons, at the door, at the top of the stairs, smiled gently, spoke some childish syllables to Elisa and called our daughters to help her lay the table. Maria went up the steps and into the house. Marta, with Elisa in her arms, kept looking at us, as though my wife hadn’t spoken to her, as though she was ready to continue with the conversation we weren’t having. We stared at her, uncomprehending. She held out for a moment, but ended up putting Elisa down and, thwarted, went into the house.

  As we had lunch, I had the flagon of wine at my feet. I’d lift it up to fill my glass. Sometimes Maria’s husband or Marta’s husband would hold out their glasses and I’d fill them, too. Discreetly, head down to my plate, I lifted my gaze to confirm that Marta wasn’t addressing a single word to Maria. I made the most of a moment when everyone was distracted by something funny that Elisa had said — sitting on a chair on two cushions, bib tied round her neck — to touch my wife’s arm with my elbow; I pointed at our daughters with my chin and raised my eyebrows in a question. My wife, as though surprised at my silent question, said in a low voice:

  ‘Just leave them be.’

  And there was a moment of loose phrases, unconnected.

  Someone said:

  ‘Elisa’s already becoming a little rascal.’

  Or:

  ‘We should have set the table out in the yard.’

  Or:

  ‘It’s good, the cod.’

  There was a tragic moment. We had already finished eating when my wife sat down. She stuck her arm out to reach the cruet and knocked over my full glass. A lake of wine spread across the tablecloth, over the napkins, between the plates, and ran in red threads over the table’s edge.

  Still sitting, I moved myself away, dragging the chair with an abrupt shove of my legs, but I still got stained by the wine. I said:

  ‘What a damn mess!’

  My wife got up, went to fetch an old cloth, rags. My voice became thick and harsh. My voice was used for asking her questions that she didn’t answer. She kept cleaning, as though I wasn’t saying anything, as though I didn’t exist. I got up, stood behind her and shouted into her ears as she twisted the cloth over the sink. Still she was impassive. I grabbed her by the arm. I shook her.

  ‘Don’t you hear me? Don’t you hear me?’

  As I let go of her, she gave up on eating and began to clear the table. The plates piled up in her hands. The top plate had the cutlery and the fish-bones, tipped from the other plates. There was silence. Still she didn’t look at me, as though I didn’t exist. I waited for her to approach the sink, and with a slap knocked the plates from her hands.

  Elisa began to cry. Our daughters’ husbands looked at places that didn’t exist. Francisco looked at his mother. Our daughters got closer to one another, sisters again, as though whatever had separated them had lost any significance. In Marta’s face, next to Maria, I could see that she had forgiven whatever secret had hurt her, she hadn’t forgotten, but she had forgiven. And she was looking only at me. My wife, crouched down, was gathering up dirty cutlery and shards of broken plates.

  I had only been ill a few months, but already I wasn’t working. At the workshop I’d sit on a pile of planks of wood. Francisco was slowly ceasing to be a lad and starting to be a man. His age was like that diffuse time of day when afternoon begins to mingle with night, it seems like it’s afternoon, it seems like it’s night, and it’s no longer afternoon, and it’s not yet night.

  There was one day I left the workshop to make my way slowly homewards to rest. I stopped at the taberna. I drank. Weeks had passed since my last glass of wine, the doctor forbidding me, the doctor looking me in the eye and forbidding me. I drank three glasses, four, and for a moment it was like when I still had a future. I arrived home, avoided my wife, and went into Francisco’s room because I knew no one would come to look for me there. I lay down on his bed. The pillow was too low.

  When Francisco arrived, after his run, he found me sleeping. He woke me, and from my breath or my voice, or from what I said to him, he knew right away that I had been drinking. Against my grumbles, he helped me up. And he seemed to be already a man, because he said to me:

  ‘Are you afraid of dying?’

  And he seemed to be still a boy because, when I was up on my feet, he wanted to hug me. I said to him:

  ‘I don’t really hug.’

  We stood there facing each other, still in conflict, with our arms out, impossible to make out which of us was the man and which the boy, almost hugging.

  Even Íris, little, concerned with her dolls, knows that a day that moves as this one does towards evening can only be a Friday. She doesn’t know the word ‘Friday’, but she knows what it means. It is the end of the afternoon — the apotheosis. Maria has arrived, with all the strength in her body fading. Standing under my wife’s arms, Ana takes off her smock. Ana has her exercise books on the kitchen table to solve some divisions. On top of the refrigerator, the wireless pours out piano music. It is like an open tap, forgotten, losing a thread of water that isn’t noticed, that can barely be seen. Maria’s husband has arrived, short and angry, enemies watching him from all directions. He has enemies on top of the kitchen cupboards, he has enemies behind the plates drying over the sink, he has transparent enemies that mingle with the tulle curtains and tremble with them, passed through by the breeze that the windows let in — the end of the afternoon.

  It has always been like this. For some incomprehensible reason, my wife doesn’t like — has never liked — to talk about what she’s got heating up in the pans on the stove. Maria, with her thin voice, asks:

  ‘What’s for dinner?’

  My wife replies:

  ‘Look, it’s food, all right?’

  Maria says nothing, because she knows it has always been like this. She forgets about it. She walks over to some place she knows in her thoughts. All through the kitchen there is the smell of food being made. She remembers. She approaches the stove, lifts the lid off a pan, and without any expression looks inside.

  Íris is leaning right up against Ana because she is waiting for her to finish her homework so that they can play together. Her father, passing her, trips, and shouts:

  ‘Leave your sister in peace.’

  Maria is startled by the shout, but she says nothing. She raises her eyes, and lowers them. She walks towards the door and pulls Íris by the arm. She wants to take her to the living room. Íris is small and stabs her buckle-shoes into the floor, she objects and flails around. On the other side of the kitchen Maria’s husband raises his c
hin and his voice gets thicker:

  ‘What is it you’re doing?’

  It has begun.

  Maria could have told him with all sincerity that she is taking her to the living room, which was what she understood he wanted, but she is unable to because his voice has wounded her. This is why she also has to reply to him rudely, she has to hide the fact that she has been hurt and she has to hurt him, too. This is why she replies with some haughty phrase, rudely, to provoke him, to strike him.

  Piano music fills the few empty corners of the kitchen. Maria’s husband, as if threatening, says:

  ‘Well, well, well.’

  The piano music changes colour. It turns red. Maria doesn’t let it rest.

  ‘Well what?’

  Ana gets down from her chair. The exercise book is left open on the table. She takes her sister’s hand and the two of them leave the kitchen.

  Maria’s husband has blood flowing through the veins in his temples. He is alive. As if trying to restrain himself:

  ‘You’re not talking to your father now, you know.’

  My wife can’t keep silent:

  ‘And what does her father have to do with anything?’

  He turns his head the other way:

  ‘Now it’s both of you? You keep quiet! No one’s talking to you.’

  My wife can’t, she demands a reply, pulls him by the arm:

  ‘What does her father have to do with anything?’

  He frees himself:

  ‘Ai ai ai. .’

  My wife can’t, she approaches him again:

  ‘Well? What does her father have to do with anything?’

  He turns suddenly — fury — and pushes her. My wife knocks into the sink with her waist, falls. She’s sitting on the floor.

  ‘Leave me alone!’

  Maria crosses the kitchen to where he is, grabs his arm and twists it behind his back. At the same speed she takes him out to the corridor. Taller, stronger, she takes him. He is like a muted, anxious child, afraid of speaking and making it worse, afraid of reacting and making it worse. Maria opens the front door and throws him out into the shadows of the staircase. She bangs the door closed, as though firing a shot.

  She waits. Her breathing. Maybe he’ll knock at the door. He didn’t take his key, he didn’t take his jacket, he didn’t take his wallet. She waits. She hears the banging of the door to the street. She lowers her eyelids. Her breathing. She walks slowly towards the kitchen and finds my wife on her feet already. They don’t say anything. Maria knows that if she were to go to the window she would see her husband heading away in one direction or other. She doesn’t want to, she’s no longer interested. It’s still rage, burning. After a time she goes to the window. Perhaps she’ll still see him. She doesn’t see him. He has disappeared. The street is deserted. And that’s that.

  When Marta became pregnant, we were pleased. Marta was twenty years old, she still believed in everything and she was thin. Marta’s husband was little more than a boy, he didn’t look at other women and he smiled a lot when he heard the news. My wife and I received the news that we were going to be grandparents very naturally. We had a twenty-year-old daughter, and we were going to be grandparents.

  At four months, the doctor recommended rest. That was he word he used. To my wife’s satisfaction, for the remainder of the time Marta moved to our house. Her husband would arrive at night and have dinner with us, and we would have solemn conversations, and then he would go to bed with Marta. For those months Maria left her bed to sleep in Francisco’s room.

  Marta spent most of her days in bed. Maria would sit by her and read her romance novels, and they would talk in low voices. Sometimes Marta would come into the kitchen in her dressing-gown and sit by the fire. It was the last months of autumn, then it was the months of winter. Elisa was born at the start of spring.

  Marta’s belly was round and even. Marta would carefully tie the belt of her dressing-gown over it. Francisco would rest his hand on its shape to feel Elisa’s kicks.

  ‘She’s moving.’

  Maria was not yet quite sure that she was pregnant when she came to tell us. She was. Her eyes were at the bottom of a well, small, and there was a childish tenderness on their surface. It was as though the baby’s eyes existed within them. Nobody knew then that Ana’s eyes would be exactly the same, as though they were the same eyes.

  Some afternoons Simão would go and visit her. Nobody told me, but I was sure of it. He brought her old peanuts that he took out of his pocket. He held out the palms of his dirty hands to her, with peanuts.

  Her husband treated her with care. Francisco would go by her house after work. They would talk, and at those times they were the same age. After going to the market, my wife would stop by her house to take her gifts of kale, vegetables, greens.

  ‘Make a soup. Do you want me to make it? It’s no trouble.’

  Marta had already started to get fat. It could be seen, week after week, as she came in through the front door a little heavier. Elisa ran through the house and kissed her aunt’s belly. There was true peace between the sisters, there were healed wounds, there was a good silence and eyes that looked on the past without resentment.

  Maria’s belly. She wore a blue flannel dress to wait for her husband. She rested her hands on her belly, as though she were carrying it. She smoothed out the dress, and with this gesture emphasised the belly. Her cheeks were flushed, her face affectionately expectant.

  When Marta became pregnant for the second time I was already sick, my wife had already lost all possible consolation; Francisco was trying to look after the workshop and ran aimlessly through the streets of Lisbon in the late afternoons; Simão had disappeared even more from all the places where he’d never been, where he had really never been; Maria fretted and wept for no concrete reason, which she couldn’t qualify with any words she knew; Marta was fat, she was of a delicate nature; Marta’s husband had his own thoughts, he had women he looked at and touched, whom he called by names that Marta could only imagine being whispered, perhaps affectionate or perhaps feigning affection, which, at the moment when they existed, in that mirror, were still the same as true affection.

  When Maria became pregnant for the second time, everyone wanted to be hopeful.

  Now it’s Saturday. Maria woke up alone, and light. She’s in the kitchen, and she’s thinking that tomorrow Francisco is going to run in the Olympic Games. Maria confuses tenderness with pity. She feels tenderly towards her brother, but believes she feels some pity. She can’t stop remembering when he was little. She always remembers him laughing or smiling. And she feels tenderness, calling it pity inside her thoughts. And she remembers Simão. The image of her brother, blind in one eye, is veiled by a curtain of pity, real pity, the pity of not having seen him for so long, of never hearing any word of him. She throws out some questions, inside herself — where might he be? Is he well? Who’s taking care of him? And the cries of the girls in the living room catch her attention. Her attention is a floating boat, rudderless, ruled by the wind and the currents.

  In the living room Maria’s daughters are playing, and they don’t worry because they are children and they can’t conceive of anything destroying what they know and expect from every gesture or unknown moment passing: Ana and Íris. My wife is sitting next to them on the sofa. It has been many days, or months, since she has been like this, without any chores, simple and blank. She too is unworried. She is a child in a different way.

  The doorbell. Always the same agitation, feverish anxiety, even when they know who it is. And now they don’t know who it is. Maria thinks it might be her husband. My wife thinks it might be the gypsy. Always the same agitation — the doorbell. My wife doesn’t think about this, but if she did, she could have remembered that it was like when she still used to drink coffee and afterwards had to sit down until the feeling of unease went away. Neither Maria nor my wife try to avoid what they know is inevitable. They are afraid, they are people, but they always confront it, and thus
weaken it, destroy it. This is why Maria and my wife come into the corridor at the same time. It’s Maria who arrives first as she is closest. A single, firm movement of her arm opens the door.

  Marta, Elisa to one side of her, Hermes to the other. Marta — huge — is holding a little suitcase and two plastic bags. All this weight pulls her body down towards the floor and turns her into a gigantic mountain of flesh, in a nearly new fabric dress. And her face — eyes smiling or sad, cheeks reddened by two powder stains, the hairdo that she arranges with water when she leaves the house to get the train. Elisa, a well-behaved little girl, doesn’t understand and doesn’t ask, she trusts. Hermes wants to play.

  Maria and my wife go into the kitchen with Marta, just listening. Her voice. It is outside them, and at the same time it exists within them, too. It is as though they have within their thoughts a kitchen just like the one they’re in, with the same gentle lightness, the same serenity, and Marta’s voice using the same words to speak of the lack of surprise, vaporous and breathable, that she is speaking of here. My wife and Maria had been expecting to hear those words in that voice for a long time. They couldn’t have predicted that she would leave home. They don’t remember imagining her talking with such peaceful acceptance, neither sad nor disappointed. Marta tells them her story wearily, using phrases she constructed on her train journey as she watched the landscape. After each word she can see that they know just which word she is going to say next, and she gets wearier. Then she tells them about the decision she has taken. Finally she says:

  ‘I’m never going back.’

  And both my wife and Maria can see that, sooner or later, she will go back home. They don’t know how long it will take her to go back, but they know she will.

  In the living room neither Ana nor Íris ask Elisa or Hermes any questions. They’re glad at their arrival and immediately begin playing.

  And Saturday passes with a sunny calm, like a day for bicycling without going anywhere, a day for taking a walk, for going round the lake in the park just because it’s a route without any problems, just like any other. My wife and my daughters do simple chores, understanding one another. When they pass, their voices are young and they have the resigned wisdom of a lack of urgency. There is plenty of time, and harmony. The hours float by. All the hours float by, and they are identical. The children play and laugh, as though my daughters or my wife could laugh too whenever they felt like it. It is Saturday, and on this day the world has uncomplicated itself.