Daria

by Irene Marques

  Grândola, Vila Morena, Grândola, Swarthy Town

  Land of fraternity

  It is the people who lead

  Inside of you, oh city

  Inside of you, oh city.

  Immediately afterwards, the church was invaded by military men and women, all singing this song and carrying red and white flowers in their berets and in the barrels of their boots. The church dwellers all joined in to chant “Grândola, Vila Morena” for a long time, and then, after a while, they all left the church. They walked first through the streets of that land and then far beyond the confines of that land. They followed the same river that Ana had followed, going back the way she had come. They reached the island of Santiago and then went even farther to Luanda, Maputo, and many other places. It was a beautiful scene. It was as if the people were going on a pilgrimage—the most fantastic, the most audacious romaria—to honour the promise they had made long time ago to God or the gods. When this pilgrimage reached Galinhas’s island in Guinea Bissau and liberated all the political prisoners held there, Ana woke up. She opened her hand and read the doctor’s note: Tomorrow at precisely midnight you will wake up to the beautiful song “Grândola, Vila Morena.” It is a message, my sister. It is the message. Then she heard the song and a lot of commotion in the compound. The lyrics penetrated her slowly, and she felt the poetry, wisdom, and emotion that they carried. Her body was suddenly cured from the perils it had endured, and her mind saw clearly the love of the world and the will of the people. She regained herself, fully aware that the hour of the star had arrived, and her body received its light through the thousands of rays illuminating her cell. The song and its words became benevolent rain, a bath that washes away loneliness and the dirt she had been carrying:

  In the shadow of a holmoak

  which no longer knew its age

  I swore as my companion,

  Grândola, your will

  Grândola, your will

  I swore as my companion

  In the shadow of a holmoak

  Which no longer knew its age

  The compact door of her cement cell opened, and Ana saw in front of her the two guards who had raped her the day before. They entered the cell, and she noted that they too had red and white roses on them. They extended their hands to help her get up from the cold floor, offered her two roses, and asked her for forgiveness, kneeling down before her.

  Francisco’s novel in progress ended there and having read it, Daria felt more in love with him than she had had ever felt.

  IVAN LINS AND THE STITCHED QUILT. When Vasco da Gama found out that Daria and Francisco were dating, he became mad. He would not show that madness or discontent directly to Daria, but she noticed that he was unhappy with the turn of events. He felt he had lost his chance to sleep with Daria and break away the hymen she had been keeping between her tightly closed legs. When the Lusitanian Centre was accepted as a member of the United Way, he felt very accomplished and proud. The acceptance meant that the centre would be receiving more funding, and it was also a sign that Canada was really interested in looking after its newcomer citizens from the many Portuguese-speaking countries worldwide. Vasco invited everyone to go out and celebrate. They all went to The Boat, a splendid restaurant that served outstanding and mouthwatering Portuguese fish dishes, and then they went dancing at Copacabana, a well-known Brazilian samba and bossa nova place. The club was playing melodious vibrations for the soul and body, and the sounds of the Portuguese language became a singing, penetrating, and docile chant that made the crowd break down. When they were playing Ivan Lins and Adriana Calcanhoto, Daria became very emotional and started crying uncontrollably. Francisco, who had been dancing with the other women working at the centre and seemed at home on the dance floor, came back to the table and saw Daria in this convulsive state. He did not know quite what to think, and he was worried that perhaps she was upset about him dancing with other women. He had left her alone at the table because she was not such a good dancer and always felt sort of embarrassed when dancing. She was especially uncomfortable with the samba, which sometimes turned into frantic sexualized rapper’s movements—the crotches of men and women coming dangerously close together, shamelessly entangled in one another—making her feel very inappropriate, very ashamed. When she told him the real reason for her crying, he said, “Meu amor, you are very sensitive. That is beautiful,” and he kissed her forehead. They sat together having an intimate conversation, that tête-à-tête that only very close lovers can have, and she told him exactly the lines from Ivan Lins that had made her cry. She had never heard Ivan Lins before, and though she was used to the mournful and deeply melancholic sounds of fado music that often made her cry, she had never ever felt as touched by the sound of music as she did with Lins. She repeated the lyrics of the song she had heard:

  The colour of the sunset

  Is this Fellini or is this our lives?

  In what film did our love happen?

  In what port did we say goodbye?

  Cagliari?

  Gênova?

  What is it that illuminates our film?

  From what sunset comes that colour?

  What pasts does passion inhabit?

  Évora?

  Córdoba?

  From theatre to theatre,

  We will love each other throughout life.

  One more hour

  One more scene… I don’t know

  Happiness is a series of nuances.

  From what dawn is romance born?

  Is the time I will have you, everything?

  Mônaco?

  Málaga?

  She dwelt incessantly on the first lines of the song, as if she could not stop asking questions that did not really have an answer but for which she expected one: Is this Fellini or it this our lives? In what film did our love happen? He heard her repeating the song and then crying and crying some more, and he felt more in love with this woman than ever. He wanted to calm her down; he wanted to ease her pain. He wanted to possess her body and soul right there in front of everyone so that they would know that she was his and that she wanted to be his. And so he did. They made love right there, and everyone was in awe at the lovers’ movements. They went at each other like never before, seemingly unable to attain satiation, commanded by the thirst that ran deep in their veins. And as they made love, the audience of Copacabana sang Ivan Lins’s beautiful song in chorus: “Is the time I will have you, everything? From what dawn is romance born?” Everyone was feeling the love that Daria and Francisco felt; everyone was entangled in the words of Lins and in the actions of the lovers. It was as if everything and everyone had become one and the same thing, one and the same feeling, one and the same person, except for Vasco. Vasco da Gama did not feel the love or the entanglement or the happiness that everyone else felt. He was visibly upset, visibly livid. At the end of the night, when no one could take any more love, people started to leave. As they dispersed, they each became their own person and returned to their usual loneliness. Vasco drove Daria and Francisco home, leaving them at their respective places because the next day was a work day and there was no more time for play. He dropped Francisco off first and then Daria, even though Daria lived closer to Copacabana. Before Francisco got out of the car, he gave Daria a wet kiss, vigorously taking in her tongue and the freshness of her mouth, evidently incapable of satisfying his desire for her. They arranged to meet the next day after work at the Communal Mule. The next day, June 25, was a big day for Mozambique, for it was the anniversary of the country’s independence from Portugal, and the Mozambican consulate was marking the date with several events. First, there would be a recital of Mozambican poetry at the Communal Mule by expatriates—Daria did not like this word, and she often told Francisco that he should call them Mozambican-Canadians—and then there would be an elaborate dinner at the Communist’s Daughter restaurant with traditional Mozambican food and music. Whe
n they got to Daria’s street, Vasco stopped the car completely and asked if he could use her bathroom. She hesitated. Her basement apartment was not very nice, and she was worried that Vasco might think less of her if he saw her present living conditions. She also felt uncomfortable because a part of her was concerned that he wanted something from her, but again she rationalized her worries away. She told herself she was being foolish since Vasco was old enough to be her father, he was a man of standing in the community, and he therefore ought to be a man of sense. Because of all that, and also because she did not want to disappoint him or prevent him from exercising his basic need of using a bathroom, a universal and warranted right for everyone, she brought him inside the apartment and showed him to the bathroom. When he came out, he walked slowly towards Daria and said her place was very nice, very intimate and romantic, and that it truly reflected Daria’s way of being, her tender and genuine sensibility. He praised her incorruptible naïveté, which he attributed to the fact that she had been raised high up in the mountains of Caramulo—with goats, harsh winters, and splendid springs of yellow genistas and wild lavender—witnessing the harshness of the lives of those rude peasants who had to work very hard to make ends meet. She smiled but felt uncomfortable with his labelling, with the fact that he called her people rude peasants. She thought of her grandmother’s great sensibility. She was a woman who spent her free time putting together beautiful quilts, each one telling a story of her ancestors or those still living. She stitched intricate, deeply penetrating patterns performed in colourful metaphor. For fabric, she used old clothes that she found here and there in her own house or by going around the village and asking the inhabitants of Almores for their relatives’ tattered, unusable pieces. Daria thought of how happy her grandmother had been when engaged in this task, how she would smile to herself, or to whomever happened to pass by and see her in concentrated awe. Daria thought of how her grandmother would slip into a prolonged storytelling mode when stitching these quilts and would start reciting the stories of the lives of many of the people she knew or had heard about and whose clothes she now had in her possession. When she got a piece of tattered clothing from a certain person, and as she stitched it into a quilt, she would describe the life of the respective person in great detail, qualifying that person as good, on the way to becoming good, wretched, on the way to becoming wretched, or perfect. “Five types of people, that’s all there is in this world,” she would say. And she added that she was stitching clothes of people with different degrees of goodness and badness together so that they would all be joined. In that communion, she said, the perfect ones would transmit their qualities to the other ones and the end result would be a beautiful, enchanted, and colourful quilt that she would then offer to the villagers of Almores. She hoped that, in looking at the quilt, they could see in it the mirror of their souls and realize how those souls had the potential to attain greatness when under the right company. Some of the villagers mocked her attempt to make the world better and rejected her offer. They argued that her method would fail because many of those people she was stitching together were already dead or were in fact mortal enemies, and some had even killed one another. To this, she would say that her work was of great magnitude and the quilts of great length, its effects going well beyond the here and now, to resolve the most unthinkable hatred. She would then open one of the quilts and point to the lines and colours that had the power to travel at the speed of light and reach those who were now beyond the visible horizons in heaven, hell, or purgatory. She believed the pattern had the power to bring them and God together in a fully honest and merciful conversation, giving the bad ones another chance to be allowed into heaven and to live forever in green fields, among birds, sheep, goats, and the Lord. When Daria was little, she would look forward to these sessions with her grandmother, and she would listen to her stories in expectant wonder. She thought her grandmother was the wisest person alive; she was a true philosopher, the kind that is rare today in this age of simplified psychics and capitalism; this age of toy mountains and smiling restless children with their hands always extended, eager to receive; this age that forges in us a vacuous desire for the material. This age has created an unhappiness, a void that was not there before when the world was barer and we did not eat lobster every day, when one molecule simply said yes to another and the world was born, like Clarice Lispector, one of her favourite writers, has said. Deeply entangled in all these thoughts, she attempted to explain to Vasco that the people she grew up with in the mountains of Almores were in fact full of poetry and sensibilities, and she told him about her grandmother. He smiled, listening and taking in the beauty of the story Daria was recounting, perhaps recognizing that, indeed, these people had a magnificent poetic soul. If they could engender a creature like Daria—so beautiful, so superior, and so capable of awakening one’s desires when one thought they had all been spent over the years—then these people must have been special, very special indeed. Then he came very close to Daria and kissed her on the mouth. She was very surprised and immediately pushed him back, asking him what the hell was he doing. He said he was just trying to show the deep affection he felt towards her, which she thought was strange. She said that he did not need to kiss her on the mouth like that to show his affection. Maybe not in Almores, he replied, but Canada was a new country with many new habits, and this was one of those habits. She became more and more upset, furious in fact, like someone who had been betrayed in a very deep way, for she thought this man was mocking her, treating her like a simpleton. She felt especially hurt because he did what he did and said what he said right after she had told him the beautiful story of her grandmother. It was a story one tells out of pure love, out of pure wisdom, out of a pure need to show how we are all special beings, in our own ways. The story tells us that the barriers that we erect between us are just symbols of our fear—that fear of those who are different from us, yet also fundamentally beautiful, fundamentally human. They argued for some time, and then he said, “How could you kiss Francisco? How could you do shameful things with him? How could you? And with a man as black as my pants?” She said she was an adult and she could kiss and make love with whomever she pleased and that whomever happened to be Francisco.

  “Francisco, not you!” she repeated loudly. She felt violated to the core in body and soul, but Vasco did not stop there. He grabbed her with more intensity, seemingly surprised that Daria could actually take such a strong stand, that she could have such a strong and sure will. He also felt upset that he seemed to have made a mistake assessing her personality, for he always told himself that he could know people well, know them better than they knew themselves. His disappointment turned into a rage, and he pushed her down onto the floor and did to her what depraved or lost men do to women. She struggled and screamed and she asked him to stop, but it was all to no avail for Mr. Vasco da Gama was in a frenzy and seemed to be in another world, travelling waters that he had never travelled but which his tired and old soul had been craving for eternities. He was a navigator sailing the waters of an unknown beautiful sea, just like the other Vasco da Gama, his forefather, did five hundred years ago to meet his promised bride—that splendid India ful of colour and flavour. He smelled all her colours and ate all her spicy delicious food, in that other vast and rich continent, far away, by the Indian Ocean. When Vasco finally left, Daria was not herself and entered a state of deep-seated melancholia. She felt dirty in body and soul. She felt guilty, but mostly she felt painfully disappointed with life, with the forces commanding the world. She was invaded by a profound disenchantment. She was an idealist and wanted to live in a beautiful world; a world she had imagined as a little girl, playing games with Isabel; a world she could grasp because it was as near as the sky of Almores. And now this thing, this ugly thing had happened to her. And it had happened at a moment in her life when everything was perfect, when she had found Francisco and he had found her. How could she get up in the morning to face the world? How could she tell Franci
sco and denounce Vasco? She did not know if she would be able to do that, and all she wanted was to stay in that dark place with no windows and no light. She started singing Ivan Lins’s song again. The words and the melody came out jumbled, as if she could not find any meaning in it anymore. She murmured it like a sad lullaby, mourning the day that had passed: “Cagliari? Fellini or it is our lives? In what film did our love happen? One more hour. One more scene … I don’t know. Happiness is a series of nuances.” She cried and cried again, like she had at Copacabana, but this time she knew that her crying had a real identifiable source. In the club, she had felt sad but happy, happy but sad; her tears hadn’t been for anything in particular, but rather for many entangled memories of people and places and feelings not quite her own—like fado music.