Daria

by Irene Marques

  The people observing Camila’s behaviour, including the priest, stood in disbelief at what was happening inside the sublime cathedral. They became frozen for what seemed to be an eternity, staring at Camila and her depraved, shameless actions, as if they had lost the capacity to think or act. It was as if they had entered another realm, a dream zone where they did not know that they were dreaming and felt incapable of moving their own bodies. It was as if everyone was being magically manipulated by a great manipulator, tricked by the clown of clowns, who put before their very eyes the image of the impossible uncanny, the image of the stunningly beautiful, the beautifully ugly. Then, suddenly recovered from their apathy, they ran to the altar. Some covered Camila, dressed her, and then removed her from the church, and others picked up Jesus and placed him high up on the altar, in his usual pose of bleeding martyrdom. Camila’s husband, being the brute and insensitive man that he was, took her home and gave her a beating, accusing her of being a wretched whore from Galilee. Arsénio was only seven years old then, but this scene has stood engraved in his mind and body ever since. Even though the way his father treated his mother has always evoked sadness, whenever he thinks about that day he also feels a great sense of joy and astonishment. He remembers it was the first time he felt very happy inside the church. He remembers how he’d felt at home when the congregation was singing “Ave Maria” and when the priest and his helpers were going around inside the church with their lanterns and baskets of burning incenses, bringing to the people the light and the smell of God. He remembers closing his eyes, inhaling the incense, and feeling the hand of the priest touching his, blessing his existence and making him a true son of God. He was in a trance of light and feeling and sensation, lulled by the music and the smell and the priest’s touch. And then, as he opened his eyes, he saw the stained glass images everywhere in the church, illuminating images of that charitable woman smiling a pure smile, opening her mantle and throwing pieces of bread to the people. He saw that as the bread entered people’s mouths, it became white and red roses, and he saw how the people became happy as they ate the roses, how their faces became fuller and their eyes shinier. They then began to sing and dance, and hold hands, and then, when fully satiated, they approached Queen Saint Isabel and lifted her up, raising her above their heads and chanting in a thunderous chorus: Saint, Saint is the Madonna, Saint, Saint is the one who gives bread and roses to the people. Saint, Saint is the one who makes me see that this world smells of perfume… Arsénio was bewildered by the beauty of the scene. He felt at home in this place, and this place felt as real as anything else he had ever seen. It was a place that reminded him of the beauty and magic of the world, of what things were and what they could become, a world where the verbs to be and to become were all that mattered, and where one would easily lead to another. It was a place where the priest’s readings and words possessed a miraculous power of incantation that spoke to your mind and soul and made you see deeply, very deeply, into things, making you dwell in being so that you felt grander and smaller at the same time. It was a world beyond this world and yet very much in this world. This experience was then completed by the happiness he felt during the procession, which took place before the communion. As per the custom, the saints were put in the beautifully decorated biers and carried by the stewards around the village, everyone following them in a romaria that passed through every street of Vimieiro. The streets themselves went back to the Roman times and beyond, and they were full of rough and irregular stones that would make the saints fall off the pier, were it not for the diligence and care of the stewards carrying them. Arsénio vividly recalls how the piers were magnificent that day; he remembers the variety, freshness, and colours of the flowers: wild carnations, hydrangeas of all tonalities, and white and red roses, endlessly beautifying the already beautiful and adding more grace. The patron saint, Queen Saint Isabel, was the most beautifully decorated. White and red roses had been placed on her exquisite pier, which his father was helping carry that year as one of the four designated stewards, an honour to be celebrated. That made Arsénio even happier, happier and prouder and he thought that such beauty could not pass unnoticed by his father, unseen by his heart of stone. He thought it would make his father a better and softer person, someone who would kiss him at night, someone who would speak tenderly to his mother even when she became unbearably restless and took off to places unknown to them to find what she was missing. He recalls the red colours of the stewards and the colours of the piers and the colours of the quilts that the women had put in their windows to honour the procession and the saints, and he sees the showers of flowers falling down on them from the windows: love and beauty coming together in a perfect, perfect day, a saintly day. It was all colour and perfume and bread and roses. People with people, and people with God, with nothing between them. No one can ask for more than that. But then, as they went back to the church to finish the mass on that grand day when the Queen Saint Isabel was being celebrated and remembered, and just as the most sacred act of communion between all there is was taking place, his mother had one of her episodes and the magic was broken. She was shouted at. She was accused. She was beaten by his cruel father. And the next day in school, the children mocked him again, calling him names, bad names. They accused him of being a marrano, someone who carried in him the seed of those who killed Jesus Christ, the true saviour of this world. They had heard some dark tale here and there—improperly told, lacking crucial details—about the past of the family, and they were now regurgitating and adding to it, as children often do.

  One day, when Camila was bathing Arsénio, when he was just an infant of three months, she had a powerful out-of-body experience. As she was moving her infant around in the aluminum basin where she was bathing him, she felt the fluidity of the water awaken in her being a lightness she had never before experienced. The more she touched her baby’s soft flesh and the more she felt on her hands the perfumed water where she had soaked petals of white and red roses, the more detached she felt. She saw a rose on her left hand, and then that rose gave birth to many other roses and she saw roses everywhere: on herself, on her baby’s naked body, on the walls and floor of the house, and even floating in mid-air like sublime presents brought to her for her own pure enjoyment. She felt she had fallen into a garden of colour and aroma and utter beauty, and she knew that she had to fully enter it, that there was no way to turn away from it. She saw her soul leaving her body, mixing with the floating roses and rising to the ceiling of that old house, a house blackened by smoke and years of suffering, the same house where she had given birth to her baby just three months ago after an agonizing pregnancy. Just before she had started bathing her baby boy, she had been immersed in sadness, engulfed by the depths of the dark well, thinking about her life since she had married her husband. She saw before her the life she had been living with this man ever since he became her husband, how much he had beaten her, how he demanded to use her body for his own needs wherever, however, and whenever he fancied, even when she was heavily pregnant and feared for her health and that of the baby. He was a very, very rude man, a monster who made her feel like she was worth nothing. He said she should be happy that he had married her for no other man would touch her since she had already given it away to God knows how many men, during her crazed episodes when she’d become possessed by the devil. She had always been very attracted to him. He was a tall and muscular man with an angular nose, sharp features, and piercing eyes. Whenever he had looked at her, she had gazed back at him, her eyes immobile and unafraid, and imagining how it would be to make love with this man. She loved men. She loved their hands on her and the intensity of the sexual encounters when she took charge and made them scream with pleasure, but sometimes her sexual needs were so great that she became afraid of herself. Their first time together had been a fiery one, and for a few nights after the wedding, her husband had been controlled by her sexual prowess. He would treat her well because he did not want to lose what she was giving hi
m. But shortly after things changed: he became impossible to satisfy in any aspect. He accused her of being a whore, of not knowing how to cook, how to work the land, or how to treat a man. He called her a possessed lunatic who could only go to hell for no God would ever forgive the sins she carried in her blood. Her pregnancy was full of pains: she was beaten and raped many times by her husband, and she stopped feeling anything towards him. She could not bear to be touched by him, but she had no power to refuse him and so she endured it. Often, she found ways to exit her body when he was doing those things to her. After she gave birth to Arsénio, things got even worse. He had no respect for her body and the healing it needed before he made use of it. She endured and endured, and then she became numb. Now, as she was bathing her baby boy, her first-born, alone in her house, she felt relaxed for the first time in a long time; the water and her baby’s fresh body danced in her hands like soft remembrances, telling her the world was still salvageable, that tenderness and beauty did exist. In that newly rediscovered awareness, she saw herself as a free woman again, walking or flying through the world and meeting many men and women who would give her soft kisses and a hand when she was about to fall. With her hands still securely holding her baby so that he would not drown, she saw her body ascend to the ceiling. When she got there, she felt she could go much farther. She could leave the house and walk through the clear fields; she could fly to the high mountains to feel the kiss of time and space upon her starved soul. And if she persisted in her flight, she could go to other countries, other villages, in search of men who would make tender love with her, men who would respect her breasts, her thighs, and that incendiary rose she had between her legs that always screamed for much more than it could get. After this astounding experience, she did just that, returning to her life before she was married: she would take off, body and soul, whenever she could, so that she could find life and love, so she could find a reason for eating bread and drinking water every day. These episodes became more and more frequent and often would be preceded by something very nasty her husband had done to her. She would often see herself as a breeze running away somewhere or an ancient bird that could cross the vast Atlantic in one single flight, staring at the waters below and the silvery fishes, all free creatures, all things of God.

  When the Gypsies, whom Camila called the Romani, insisting that was their proper name, came to Vimieiro in their colourful carriages pulled by white donkeys selling pots and pans, quilts for the winter, illustrated books for children, and other paraphernalia, like a circus of magic life, she would run off with them and disappear for weeks or months on end. She saw these men and women as ingenious mavericks, capable of the most intriguing acts of love and grace. She loved the long dresses and braids of the women, the colours and lengths of their earrings, and she was fascinated by their ability to see into her future just by staring at the intricate lines of her palm. She loved the intensity of their dances and the longing of their songs, and, most of all, she felt helpless when a pair of deep and dark Romani eyes stared at her, asking for love. She would love these Romani men like she never loved anyone else, and at the end of their time together she felt appeased for a long time, the demanding rose between her legs calmed down and satiated. She was told by several Romani women that she was of their clan and that her ancestors had been forced to adopt the sedentary and boring life of Vimieiro. They told her that now she had the chance to correct that wrong by joining them in their nomadic life, selling odds and ends here and there, waking up in a different place every day to smell the rain and the thunder or peek at the wonders of many regions. She thought that made a lot of sense, for she always felt that Vimieiro was too small for her, too confined for her grand desires. So she would take off with them and then come back with another caravan, weeks or months later. She came back mostly because she missed her son. She thought of his little body changing, his hands and his feet growing, and his face becoming that of a man day by day, month by month, year by year, and her heart started to cry for him. She could not stay away longer than a couple of months at a time because her son came out of her: he was her flesh and her blood and her bone, and she was his mother. She would come back with her heart throbbing in love and guilt, and she would take care of Arsénio with more tenderness than before, singing him new lullabies, telling him new stories that she had heard while away, offering him little toys or trinkets for him to play with. Every time the boy saw her returning, his eyes became engulfed by hope and he ran to her, calling her a minha mãe. It was clear from his voice that he could never forget her, that he would always know who she was, even if she were to forever disappear. She was imprinted in his cells, and the body never lies or forgets. She would hug him tightly, her eyes watery, kissing each of his chubby boyish cheeks with a noisy long kiss. Then she would lift him up, holding him high above her head, shouting out loud o meu filho. Arsénio would feel very happy and secure as if he had an abode covering him, an abode made of love and tenderness, which is hard to destroy even when there are heavy thunderstorms coming down from the heavens. He tried to always be close to her, and even during the night he insisted on sleeping with her, his hand closely wrapped around hers, like a sentinel that cannot let go. He savoured her voice, her closeness, her smell, her breast milk, her food, the water cup that she had scrubbed clean. He took into himself all she could give him, to the fullest, until the time she left again, without warning, abandoning him to the ill temper of his father and the jokes of the children at school. Every time she came back, her husband showered her with a deluge of insults and a heavy beating. Like her son, he would be very vigilant, watching her every movement for a while, but when the need came to her, she always found a way to escape and go search for happiness again. Deep down, all she wanted to be was a vagabond, crossing the world from corner to corner, never settling down anywhere. Sometimes, when the guilt assailed her, she would tell herself that the reason she was a drifter was so that she could get to know the world and then die informed. She imagined that she could take her knowledge to the other side, where God lives, so that He could be aware of the many miseries that still abound in the home he created, so that He could understand how important it was for him not to abandon it to the faith of men. But the truth was that she missed the faraway lands with their starry night skies; she missed sleeping outside, in open air, warmed up by a blanket, with a passionate and tender Romani man beside her. She missed cooking outside in open fires, the smoke rising and bringing earthy smells to her nose on cold crisp days, a red shawl on her shoulders, her wavy black hair falling down freely. Her soul yearned for the pleading flamenco guitars that made the people dance in a frenetic, demanding, contorted motion, as if this music and this dance were embedded in their blood from birth. Even the young boys knew it by heart and could sing it with the maturity of old men. She missed their life, their passion, and their colours. She missed everything about those feared and often persecuted people who had been walking the continent on foot, or donkey, or horse, for centuries, refusing to be tied down by the laws of any land. She missed the sounds of the Spanish language, which had first entered her eardrums as both a familiar and foreign tongue—like lullabies she once knew but had forgotten or sent back to her deepest self—when the band crossed the border in Vilar Formoso. There, they bought contraband clothes to be sold in fairs throughout the many villages of Beira Alta and beyond. And sometimes the band would cut across Spain to reach France, Germany, and beyond, knowing no borders, crossing frontiers by night without a passport, perpetual vagabonds in search of a home. She missed the novelty of the different landscapes and the physiognomy of the many peoples, the way each pronounced the words water or sky or air, the way they stared at the world when they were sad or happy or simply asking for answers from an unseen force. She missed the colours of their hair and the tones of their skin, their heights, their chubbiness and their thinness, and the intensity of the bluish veins in their old hands, those powerful and mysterious body parts that had moved mountains and t
hrown love or hate to the world depending on the current of the wind.