by Unknown
Petrúcio liked to spend some of his free time watching the street, sitting at the window. A cigarette in his left hand, the twists of smoke transformed into talons, while his right hand curled and uncurled the hair of his own moustache. His eyes deep in the stones, corners, animals. In those moments, he smoked too much, even for a man! thought Teresa.
Soon after their children had left home, the two of them put themselves on ice; that old, anxious silence of waiting returned, this time transformed, calcified; the silence, after having been smothered by the playing, the rushing about, the crying, the sicknesses and studies of the three sons, returned at full strength when the beginnings of age surprised Teresa and Petrúcio. Alone, again: waiting again.
Teresa usually does the washing-up from breakfast and lunch. She feels that this way she is paying back the charity of her son and daughter-in-law, ever nocturnal and discreet. Next it will be the laundry.
The birds never come into the apartment, they perch on the posts and cables. When she finishes her housework, Teresa retreats into the room at the back: a little mirror in an orange frame; a photograph album, the only one that wasn’t taken by the water; the surviving book; the photo of Petrúcio; a photo with the children, cousins, uncles, aunts and siblings.
She sits down on the bed, closes her eyes and remembers. She can’t avoid this, it’s almost as though she has not yet woken. Closing them allows her to awake in another life, which is not better than this now-life; on the contrary, there is the mud, the hundreds of bodies. Her dreams these past days are upside-down memories, hanging by the heel. At last, when the sun cools and the birds calm their spirits, Teresa will go down the stairs.
In all her years of marriage, Teresa used to serve the dinner plates cold. In the first months after the return from the South, having become so attached to those feelings of missing one another, there were still some discoveries, but it soon became obvious to Teresa that in bed the two of them would never meet. Each body was trying to find a different place. Petrúcio’s kisses and his attempts at affection seemed to be expectations that something else, the real thing, should be made manifest. While there was still strength enough for sex, Teresa made choices and took the lead. Petrúcio allowed everything to progress without his having to interfere. This is how the invitation came: twice a month, she would light a candle in the living room. The other lights in the house would be out, the boys would be sleeping, the radio clicked off – only the shadows were not asleep. Teresa would lie in bed and wait, her back to the door of the room. Spirals of smoke: between curtains and picture frames, the footsteps would creep towards her.
The stones and the clay shone like the talons of the harpies. Sitting at the window, his moustache full of smoke, Petrúcio moved his eyes over towards Teresa, but only because it’s just necessary to move from time to time. That afternoon he’d already given up.
On the wall, a Sacred Heart. She was standing – the blue of her dress was touching the table, which was covered in a flowery yellow fabric. Three little boxes of trinkets rested on top of that table, which also held rings, coins, two pearl necklaces and a photograph album. Teresa, who was stepping through some good memory, a little girl’s memory, was smiling. In her right hand she was holding a small pair of scales, which she was trying to balance. Petrúcio, his eyebrows unkempt, followed the scales like a hypnotized snake, as they stopped moving and remained frozen in a space that was divorced from time.
TERESA: ‘A great drought. The rivers and lakes had dried out and there were many animal bones on the banks. The prophet-prince Elias had been journeying for several weeks. Covered in dust, the prophet’s hands trembled, his face damaged by the heat. Around him, he could recognize nothing but thorns and snakes. Anyone would have succumbed when faced with conditions as extreme as those he had met on his journey, but he was the son of a king and of a lion. When he was close to Sarepta, he saw a woman gathering firewood at the entrance to the city. Elias approached her and asked for water.
‘Weeping, she said: “I know you are a prophet. My son died this morning, and I am going to burn him.” “No!” said Elias, gripping the woman’s wrist. “Take me to your son.” Elias went to the room where the boy’s body was resting, knelt down and began to pray. After opening his eyes, still kneeling, he caressed the boy’s hair, brought his lips close to the boy’s ears and began to speak: “If you come back, boy, tomorrow morning you can play again. You will grow, and, apart from a small accident when you’ll be rewarded with a little scar on your right thigh, you will turn into a healthy lad and the city will call you up to be a soldier, someone to protect her from her enemies. You will live through three battles, and I shall tell you of two of them now: men, their wives and daughters will perish on the edge of your sword. Your sandals will be stained with blood. You will be married to a beautiful woman, who will betray you with your best friend, but the city will take your part and she will be stoned, while he will be cast out into the desert. After you have returned from the second battle of your life, two young women, at different times, will bare their breasts for you to kiss them. These women will be yours. If you return, boy, you will be able to hear those little birds that you love. If you return, boy, you will bury your kindly mother in the third year. If you return, boy, you will be able to experience that invisible pleasure, which you barely perceive and which you will never mention, not because it is secret but because it is so natural: feeling the day coming down to rest on your shoulders.”
‘For hours, Elias continued to teach the dead boy what his life would be like, if he were to raise his eyes. The end, however, he kept from him: in a few years, less than ten, after all the things he had recounted had already taken place, Elias’s own people would advance on Sarepta and would conquer it. The boy would defend it, but without glory. He would be wounded by one of the first arrows from the invading army, an arrow that would pierce his right eyeball, throw him backwards and with all its strength would drag his body towards death. The prophet placed his right hand on his own breast: how far should this Revelation go? He fell silent, at last. The boy’s mother was in the living room, waiting. Elias watched, his hands held out over the body, until the boy moved.
‘The whole village celebrated the God of Elias, a God who brings people back from the dead. However, when they asked him to visit another man who was lately deceased, a few days later, the prophet still bore the wounds left by the first miracle. When he reached the second house, Elias repeated the same ritual, this time at the body of one of Sarepta’s oldest and most important leaders. There was not much to tell him about the life that he would have, if he decided to return; there was little he could say about it and the greatest praise would be just to assert: it exists.
‘Hours later, having been expelled from the city, Elias, wandering, would spend the days that followed trying to understand whether he should serve the miracle, or the truth.’
The mud, the stones and an open hand, buried. It is no longer raining. Two hungry dogs are looking for something in the middle of the wreckage: it’s hard to make out if it’s a bit of pipe, palm leaves, wood, bricks, roots; everything has been transformed into the same tint, a mixture of bone colour, the colour of things buried. Above the wreckage, a yellowing mattress is hanging from the electrical cables. Houses in pieces: of one of them, all that remained was one wall of white tiles, which are now covered in mud, like everything else after the water, like a thing possessed, invaded the streets. The muzzle of one of the dogs nudges at the muddy fingers. On the index finger it is possible, still, to see the wedding ring, which the animal’s muzzle is touching now. It sniffs, sniffs, sniffs. Until its mouth opens at the moment when the cries can be heard.
The dust rose up from the counter when Teresa put down the books from the library. Petrúcio didn’t move. There was nothing to suggest that he had taken any notice of the arrival of the children, led by Teresa out into the yard. The little greengrocer’s had gone under years earlier; Petrúcio dragged the haberdashery store along
like a second body, behind which he hid each morning, Monday to Friday. Now Teresa was supporting the household with a job at the municipal library and the help of their sons.
After lunch – his wife left food on the table – he would close the shop and head out into town, but his walk, people said, wasn’t like the aimless wandering that madmen do. Petrúcio walked like a man who knows where he is going. ‘I’m going to get a copy of the front-door key made,’ ‘I’m going to have a little flutter,’ his certain steps seemed to be saying.
At night, he would return home, sit in his armchair and smoke. It was only when he went into the bedroom that he would see Teresa, who read every night before going to sleep. When the book closed – words weakened by sleepiness, transformed into something less than the subtlest of sounds – and the pages bore the only light that was still on in the house, the light of the little standing lamp, only then would Petrúcio turn his gaze away from the ceiling.
Teresa couldn’t bear to live in that house any longer, unless the streets were, with some regularity, invited inside; on two Fridays of the month, it was the turn of the children, freed from their day’s lessons if they attended those storytellings. Having met them in front of the library, she would lead them to the yard of the house, where they would sit, laugh and swing their arms; as Teresa told the stories, with the books in her hand or from what she remembered having heard as a child, they would settle down. The spirits that haunt the local mythology, the ghosts, the saints, the princesses, the enchanted stones, the dragons and the Moors, the perils of sword and of death and of love, the metamorphoses and wings open in the sky – there would be a multitude to fill the afternoon.
TERESA: ‘Elias is an old man now and this is his final miracle. When he reaches a distant village on the edges of the kingdom, a family asks him to meet a man called Trasilau. An honest merchant, he had gone mad with no explanation. A sudden punishment from God, perhaps, who could tell? Could Elias intercede with the Lord to rescue him from madness, that was what the madman’s family, abasing themselves, asked him, promising to perform countless Mass sacrifices and songs of praise to the Lord. Trasilau said he was a king and that his own shadow covered the mountains, the roads, the walls of the city – his kingdom, cried Trasilau, was in everything that breathed! Elias left the city and went to meet him under a nearby fig tree. When the prophet arrived, he was dancing naked around the tree, singing chants of praise. His expression was serene. With stones that he’d tied to one another and piled up, he had made two crude constructions that resembled a throne and an altar. Elias ignored that king, tore little branches off a nearby tree and thrashed Trasilau. “Awake, man!” At that moment, the Lord returned his sight to him. Cowering, head hanging low, Trasilau, who could barely contain his tears, gathered up his belongings. As though his dignity had been restored in the blink of an eye – a second miracle – Trasilau, still naked, stood in front of the prophet and said: “Enemy prophet! Why did you take me away from the only kingdom that does not weigh on the heads of men?” Elias did not reply – his body was already rising, like a bolt of light, to the centre of heaven, carried off in a chariot of fire.’
The mud, the stones and an open hand, buried. It is no longer raining. Two hungry dogs are looking for something in the middle of the wreckage: it’s hard to make out if it’s a bit of pipe, palm leaves, wood, bricks, roots; everything has been transformed into the same tint, a mixture of bone colour, the colour of things buried, the colour of something that compresses, that accumulates. Above the wreckage, a yellowing mattress is hanging from the electrical cables. Houses in pieces: of one of them, all that remained was one wall of white tiles, which are now covered in mud, like everything else after the water invaded the streets, like a thing possessed. The stretch that can be seen on the right is a newborn river filled with bits of cloth and shoes, mixed with hundreds of books; a single, dead, viscous mass. The muzzle of one of the dogs nudges at the muddy fingers. On the index finger it is possible to see the wedding ring, which the animal’s muzzle is touching now. It sniffs, sniffs, sniffs. Until its mouth opens at the moment when Teresa’s cries can be heard shooing them away from Petrúcio’s body. On her knees, she cleans her husband’s face with a piece of paper that is dirty, stained, crossed out, blotted, crumpled, torn; shroud-paper.
There, Teresa vomited up the birds.
They rise up into the sky, like vultures.
When she tries to read in her bedroom, in the afternoon, the birds start singing very loud, they abandon their posts and cables and hurl themselves towards the apartment; Teresa puts down her book and runs to close the windows and the veranda doors; still they insist, beat their heads against the glass, scratch, flap their wings, scatter feathers like tears through the air. Teresa gives up on reading, she goes back to her room and lies down.
She cannot concentrate on the television or on the music from the radio. All that remains is the street, the leave-taking of the sun. The neighbours arrive home from work and from the activities that the city demands of them; Teresa, however, does not see them. When her son arrives, before his wife, it’s already that time of night when the traffic has eased up. He takes her by the hand, sighs and leads her with all care to the room at the back. He turns on the light, and after Teresa has lain down, he combs her hair. He covers her with a white sheet, puts the book down into his mother’s lap and at last he will say:
‘Goodnight.’
The birds desert the street. They float happily, swarm-dense, a thick shoal above the town.
GRANTA
* * *
THAT WIND BLOWING THROUGH THE PLAZA
Laura Erber
TRANSLATED BY ANNA KUSHNER
* * *
LAURA ERBER
1979
Laura Erber was born in Rio de Janeiro, and is a visual artist and a writer of short stories, essays and poetry. Her four books of poetry include Os corpos e os dias (2008), which was shortlisted for the Jabuti Award. She has collaborated with Italian writer Federico Nicolao on the book Celia Misteriosa (2007) and with artist Laercio Redondo on the video project The Glass House (1999–2008), and has exhibited her work across Europe and Brazil. Her book on the Romanian theorist and poet Ghérasim Luca is forthcoming this December. Erber is currently working on her first novel, Os esquilos de Pavlov, to be published in 2013. ‘That Wind Blowing through the Plaza’ (‘Aquele vento na praça’) is a new story.
I didn’t go for the dental treatment, or for the gypsy dancing, or for the tuicâ, or for Bran Castle. Nor did I go to settle old scores, to do genealogical searches or to buy rare copies of avanguardea literarea romaneasca. I wasn’t interested in the breeze over the Dâmboviţa River, the nocturnal song of the strigoi or the wildlife in the Danube Delta. I went because I was asked to, and I met Martina. The bestsmelling locks in the East, the Caravaggio-esque locks of Martina Ptyx. They confused and attracted me. Was it a fetish? Maybe. But none of that matters much now. I went to Bucharest for Neagu’s boxes, I met Martina and returned with old Stefan’s things.
Last Thursday, at age 66, the Romanian-born artist Paul Neagu, a resident of Holloway, in the north of London, passed away. Born in Bucharest in 1938, he moved to the British capital in the seventies. A fan of bicycling, yoga and swimming, Neagu liked to show off his enviable physical form in arduous performances that he had named post-apocalyptic rituals. Still, in the last years of his life he faced many health problems, aggravated by his excessive consumption of coffee and unfiltered cigarettes. In 1989, his sister gave him a kidney. He was stubborn and persistent: the more his illnesses spread, the more monumental his sculptures became. Under Victor Brancusi’s influence – and perhaps that of his father, a shoemaker who specialized in women’s footwear – he moved from painting to three-dimensional forms. In his famous series of sculptures Hyphen, he represented the geometric trinity made by a triangle, a square and a spiralling circle. He studied that sacred geometry intensely, to the point of believing that basic forms determine all aspects of lif
e. In 1969, he met Richard Demarco, who introduced him to Tadeusz Kantor and Joseph Beuys, with whom he later became great friends. To get by in London, he taught at various art schools (Hornsey, Slade, Chelsea, Royal College of Art), where artists like Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor and Rachel Whiteread took his classes. In 2001, he had a stroke that affected his speech, but all the same he continued to work and to communicate his ideas. In 2003, the Tate did a show commemorating the acquisition of an important part of his body of work. Neagu was seen for the last time on the night of the opening with an iridescent silk kerchief tied around his neck.