Daria

by Irene Marques

  My Dearest Cousin Arsénio,

  It is with love and tenderness that I write you this letter. And it is also with a great urgency that I come to tell of the things that are happening here in the metropolis, things that make me fear that our great nation has reached the brink of doom. There are many people who want to destroy us, and I am even afraid of those who claim to be our friends, like the Americans and the British. It seems to me that everyone is looking after their own interests. They want the base in the Azores to attack the Axis. They also want to stop our trade with the Germans, a trade that we need very much for fuel. We sell the Germans wolfram, and they give us coal; as much as I want to stay neutral in this ugly war and avoid the massacre of my brothers and sisters, I still have to run my country and save my empire. I never forget that I have to work very hard because I am poor and the son of the poor. I am being pulled from everywhere and by many—and with strings of many kinds. I even fear the Allies’ connection with the communists, those red devils who are infiltrating our provinces in Africa, bringing arms and irrational ideas to our darker brothers and sisters. I feel pulled in too many directions, all at once. I am never certain of the nature of the wind pulling me, but I do know that we do not have much time to save the nation from all of those who have an eye on it, on us. The Americans even want to bring Coca-Cola into our nation to spoil our serenity and make us drunkards of modernity. Can you believe that? I want to preserve the bittersweet taste of our Vimieiro wine. I want to keep my garden with its beautiful wild flowers and the naked granite rocks that served as our seat in our childhood, when we conversed like true brothers and made plans for the future. The other day I received a letter from an American impresario asking permission to introduce the drink into our nation. He sent me a sample in a nice glass bottle that had the shape of a woman’s body and wrote, This drink, sir, is the drink of the future of all nations: cool, brown, and with a zesty taste. This drink, sir, is the best invention since the invention of electricity, and it will make many countries rich. I tasted it, and I could not stand its sweet, biting, gassy feel on my gustative glands. I spit it out right away on the floor of my office. This is how I replied to the ignorant and audacious impresario: Dear Mr. Anderson, you do not understand my nation, nor do you understand my own temperament. You should know that, above all, I detest modernism and its avant-garde daughter, Damsel Efficiency, with whom you Americans are so in love. I tremble with fear and raging disgust at the idea that your large, loud, clumsy, and unattractive trucks would invade, at high velocity, our old cities, changing, as they pass, the sacred rhythm of our secular habits. We have a long history, sir, a very long history—a history of commanders-in-chief and discoverers. As long as I live, sir, I will not allow your second-rate mass-produced junk into my nation—as a long as I live, sir. But the other day, I had a gentle visitor from America. A certain rabbi, by the name of Solomon Lapin, dropped by to thank me and my people for the help that we have provided to the Jews by making Lisbon a city that welcomes them, a place where they can safely live or just pass through en route to the Americas. He took my hand and thanked me profusely, calling me his brother. At that point I could not help myself. I pulled up my sleeve and said, “Rabbi Solomon Lapin, see these veins? Here runs real Jewish blood from my great-great-great-grandmother Catarina de Coimbra!” We looked at each other with tears in our eyes, and we hugged in a tight embrace, staying intertwined for a long while, mourning the ashes of the brothers and sisters annihilated by that damned Hitler. And then, dear cousin, that night I had the most frightening dream. I dreamed that I was in Hitler and that Hitler was in me—and I felt like I was killing myself over and over again. In the dream, I saw mountains of gold in front of a concentration camp. When I looked more carefully, I saw, mixed with the glittering gold, thousands and thousands of Jewish (and other undesirables like the Romani) bodies, men and women, little boys and girls, with their thin twisted legs, skeletal bodies, dwindling away into a desecrated nothingness. And then I saw myself rummaging through the piles of people and gold, stealing the gold away, filling my pockets and all the bags I had with me. There were sacks and sacks full of that glittering substance all around me, all mine, intoxicating me with an ugly blindness. As I removed the gold, the mountains of skeletal people became ashes: ashes upon ashes upon ashes. I was in a barren land. I had never seen anything like it before—it was burned to the core and could never again produce crops to feed anyone. When I looked again at the mountain of ashes, I saw in the middle of it, trying to stay adrift amidst that hideous nothingness of grey, my great-great-great-grandmother, Catarina de Coimbra, screaming at me, pointing her finger and saying, “You savage soul, you, body of my body, blood of my blood, you are nothing but greed, nothing but greed—rapacious of the rapacious. Let it go. Let the gold go. Let the nations become. Let the Jews find their true place. Let it be. Let all of them be. Do not send boys down to Africa to steal the gold and the yams from the people. Do not sell wolfram to Germania—the Germans are depraved to the core. Do not kill the blood of your blood. Do not eat the carcass of your own soul. Be who you are. You are poor and the son of the poor.” As she screamed these insults in a passionate and raging outburst, she pointed to a burning cross on the side, and I saw myself inflamed and disappearing into a vacuum of ashes. As you know, I am a fairly rational man, but that dream has stayed with me. I have not had a single good night sleep since then, and just yesterday I called Joachim Bienbach, the German impresario, and told him that no more Portuguese wolfram will be sold to Germania. I told him that the mines are running out of the mineral, and furthermore that I have family members who work in those mines in Loumão and Carvalhal do Estanho, just around the corner of Vimieiro, in conditions that are deplorable, and I don’t want them to die of intoxication and cancer or be buried alive under the earth, like many others have. He did not receive the news well and tried to persuade me to continue the exploration and export of the mineral. He even promised to improve the working conditions of the miners and double the buying price. I replied that I had made up my mind and that certain things cannot be bought with money or gold. He argued more and more, presenting rhetorical stratagems that I could not buy into. Finally, I had to put a firm end to the conversation by saying I am still the leader of my nation, and that, as such, I have the right to decline certain business endeavours that I see as damaging to my welfare and that of my people. And furthermore, I said my nation is neutral regarding this war and that therefore I have the absolute responsibility to do what is expected. He hung up the phone and said rudely, “Jude, der Hurensohn!”

  The very next day I received a very warm letter from Franklin Roosevelt: Dear friend, I write to tell you that I am very happy with your recent decision to rescind your commercial contracts with Germania in respect to the wolfram affair. I want to assure you, once more, that in the opinion of the government of the United States, the continued exercise of unimpaired and sovereign jurisdiction by the government of Portugal over the territory of continental Portugal, the Azores, and all its African colonies, offers complete assurance of security to the Western Hemisphere, and that we stand firmly with you. It is, consequently, the desire of the United States that there be no infringement on the Portuguese sovereign control over those aforementioned territories. We are ready to offer our multifaceted support in that regard, should the need arise. And then I got a letter from Winston Churchill echoing the same sentiments. It was as if they had had a chat about the matter the night before to discuss how the letter should be worded. Still, my dear cousin, I have a lot of doubts and fears. I fear that the Allies are getting too close to the communists—these are the real devils creating havoc in our great overseas empire, as you well know. I fear, dear cousin, that times are changing and I do not know whom to trust any longer. I urge you, dear cousin—for we do not have much time and the hour has come—to do whatever it takes to save our nation and make our brave ancestors proud. I am counting on you, dear cousin, and the miracle that you can prod
uce to stop our doom. And you know what the reward is. You know what your reward is.

  On another note, I want to tell you that I am a man in love. I am falling in love with Marianinha, but Godmother noticed it and reminded me: “António, do not forget your crocks.” See, dear cousin, ours is a very sad country where people always remind you where you came from. It is as if we are doomed to determinism, falling straight into Darwin’s fatalisms. That is why, dear cousin, we must work very hard to prove them wrong, we must work very hard to keep the empire. We will show them, all of them, who has the power and who does not and how power is attained and kept. We are the sons of the poor, but we do not have to be poor like Godmother says. I am telling you, dear cousin, that we do not have much time. The time has come to do whatever it takes to save our nation and make our brave ancestors proud. I urge you, cousin. I still go to Vimieiro frequently even though it’s far from the capital and the roads to get there are bad. I go to our garden there, and I sit on the granite stones, where we sat together so many times. I can never forget that land, those people, my mother, my father, how hard they worked to make me into what I am today (even though Godmother always says that if it weren’t for her, I would always be a Zé Povinho, a simpleton from Beira Alta). I must go now, dear cousin, for duty is calling me, but I am telling you, we do not have much time and the time has come to do whatever it takes to save our nation and make our brave ancestors proud. I urge you to do this, and I know you will not disappoint. I have all my faith in you.

  With love and tenderness,

  Your cousin, António

  TRUTH OR DARE. As time passed inside Tarrafal, and as each day did not bring to Arsénio what he was looking for, his methods became graver, more inhumane—his punishments revealing the wickedness of the human spirit, the suffering that it must have had to endure to come to such extreme of evil execution. The compound doctor visited the chief’s chamber frequently, often only to use his stethoscope to see if he could detect a heartbeat in the victim, who was invariably lying immobile on the floor after enduring Arsénio’s physical punishment or severe psychological coercion. Or he would come to stop a bleeding vein, to attempt to save an eye, or to give a dose of Haldol to someone who could no longer withstand the mind games and had finally fallen into a dark well, howling unstoppably to the moon or to the scalding sun or ravaging his own body like a truly mad person. The doctor was a nice man from Lisbon from a wealthy upper-class family, a man used to the nice advantages that status can bring. He later became an acclaimed writer, unveiling in his sombre, existential, and psychotic pages some of the most atrocious miseries of the human soul, his books acting as mirrors of what we can become when possessed by the unmeasured corruption that power brings, or when abused by that power. They revealed that no matter what side one is on, one is always a victim, a victim to the fallibility and shortcomings of human nature. These were powerful books, treatises, which can hopefully teach some of us to see what we could become, to not repeat history. In his book, The Asses of Men, which has received high acclaim recently in Israel, he recounted tales of the horrors that he witnessed in Tarrafal. He described monstrosities that were comparable to those inflicted upon the Jews in Germany or Poland, and later on many others in Rwanda, or Syria, or Libya, or Afghanistan—that land of rugged mountains and very old customs where women still cannot learn the alphabet, cannot learn a truly beautiful lullaby to sing to their daughters just before they fall asleep. The Israeli literary judges described his writing as That magic sorrowful voice that touches us in the deepest part of ourselves and makes us want to become better. It is a universal voice that makes humans from all walks of life stop and consider their doings, whether these doings are doing something or simply undoing the human race. This man is brilliant. Deep. A voice to be cherished. A bible for our times. The doctor had reddish hair and freckles. In Tarrafal, he had to be both a surgeon and a psychiatrist, though he was trained as a psychiatrist and was therefore more familiar with the pains of the mind than the bloody lacerations of the body. He was not there because he wanted to be there, and he was not there because he was a friend of the regime. He was there because he was sent as a military doctor, like many others were sent as soldiers to fight and kill. He had no choice. He had a long name—Carlos Cabral Abreu Abrantes Antunes Montealva—a very long name that indicated the endless line of influential people from whom he’d descended. But he disliked being called all of those names. He even disliked being called doctor and insisted that people, all people, whether chiefs or prisoners, peasants or urbanites, call him Carlos. Despite the fact that he came from a wealthy family with royal-like dwellings and grew up in a beautiful vast mansion that looked like a medieval castle in the green region of Sintra, on the outskirts of Lisbon, being attended to by maids from Beira Alta or Trás-os-Montes, he had always felt a deep sympathy towards the oppressed, the underdog, the one who does not have luck on her side. He had always been very respectful towards the young maids he grew up with, treating them with dignity and never groping their behinds, or worse, forcing them into a corner of the house to ask for something very dear to them, which they wanted to give only to those they loved, at the right time, like their mothers had taught them to do. This was something that his father had done quite frequently and it had made Carlos deeply despise him, ever since he’d become aware of it at the tender age of four. Since then, whenever he thought of his father he saw an ugly, fat, well-cared-for pig, dressed in an expensive black silk suit with a white red-dotted bowtie around his short flabby neck. This image always came accompanied by a scary mocking voice that said, very loudly, like a bell that did not wish to go unnoticed, “Throwing pearls to the pigs.” The image and the voice came to him often, even in his dreams. Whenever that happened, his body experienced a deep-seated nausea, and he had to run to the bathroom to vomit whatever was inside him. He made all efforts to keep the image and the voice buried inside him, but his mind kept calling it to the surface and putting it right in front of him—like a revolving, revolting mirror, its reflections ugly and unstoppable. He became obsessed with the image and the mocking voice, and as a way to try to tame them, he had decided at a very young age to become a psychiatrist. He wanted to understand. He now understood that the image and the voice were his consciousness telling him he could not be like his father, that he had to aim to become a better man. At the early stages though, when the image and the voice started to come to him, his family had thought he suffered from schizophrenia like a great-great grandfather on the mother’s side. They had taken him to a psychiatrist. But the psychiatrist did not believe in genetic fatalisms and had basically said the boy was too lonely and that, as a result, he was imagining things that did not exist to have some company. Carlos’s mother had asked, “But doctor, if that’s the case, wouldn’t he imagine little boys and girls of his age—nice, friendly creatures that he could play and be happy with—rather than an ugly pig with a bowtie and a scary mocking voice?” The doctor replied that the mind of a child is not yet sophisticated enough to discern between benign images and malignant ones and that it just picks random things from here and there. Still, Carlos’s mother could not quite understand where he had picked up such things—she did not remember ever having read him a story of a pig in a bowtie. The psychiatrist advised the parents to have a few more children to keep the boy company, and so they did. They had four more boys and two more girls in the hopes that Carlos’s visions would go away. But the arrival of siblings did not help, and after a while his parents gave up. Carlos also disliked his mother profoundly, for she knew that her husband was abusing the maids and did not do anything to stop it. She did not even confront him about it. She just acted like a nice upper-class lady who knew her station very well and was quite aware that maids were what they were: maids for all services. He tried to be all that his parents were not, and he had treated all the maids with the utmost respect and distinction. He had insisted they call him by his first name, Carlos—just that, simple, direct, human, an
d right—instead of Menino Carlos, as was customary in the deferential context of maid and master. This was quite ironic if one really thinks about it, for being called Menino forever could be taken as a sign that one has never managed to reach full adulthood, forever stuck in a stage of arrested development. Carlos often leaves the chief’s chamber in a dark mood, murmuring the same words over and over again: “I am not here to cure the sick. I am here only to sign death certificates. Those who come here come to die. I am not here to cure the sick. I am here only to sign death certificates.”