Daria

by Irene Marques

  TELLING HIM. The next day, in the early morning, Daria found the courage to go to the hospital to be examined. She felt weak, devastated, and broken, but she possessed in her that strength of a young girl who wants justice to prevail and who believes the ugliest acts can be forgiven, perhaps even forgotten. The nurse at the hospital was very kind. She told Daria that she ought to tell the police right away and that, given the gravity of the assault, Daria would be entitled to a lofty sum as compensation. Daria felt strange, confused, and uncomfortable when the nurse mentioned monetary compensation. She thought of how her mother had always told her never to accept money from any man, advice that Daria had always followed. She thought that if she were to accept money from Vasco, she would feel like a prostitute; she would feel dirty, and her mother would surely think the same even in these circumstances. A puta, her mother would say in her crude and direct way. She felt money does not, cannot pay for these things. Money just makes you feel dirtier and guiltier. She told the nurse that all she wanted was an apology from the person who did this to her, an admittance that he had done something very wrong, something he ought to try and retract somehow. The nurse smiled and said that though that was a very kind gesture on Daria’s part, from her experience, and she had seen a lot, these types of men are not very willing to admit their guilt and much less apologize for what they did, unless they are forced to. Still, Daria felt she ought to give Vasco a chance to explain, to tell her face to face, eye to eye why he would do something like that to her when he had said all along that she was just like his daughter. Just like his daughter. Just like Santeria. Daria took all the medical precautions, including the morning after pill. The nurse also referred her to a counsellor in the Portuguese community, thinking she would be more at ease with someone from her own cultural background, but Daria protested right away and said she would rather go to someone else. She did not want to share her sad story with a person who spoke the same language, a language where there are some words that have certain connotations, a language that would bring her too close to her emotions, not to mention those of her mother who had entered her in many ways, good and bad. She told the nurse how, back in Portugal, she had almost been raped by a man who had offered her a job as a model. She had been a fool and had gotten into the car of this unknown man. He had approached her in Rossio, downtown Lisbon, and told her he needed to take her to his studio, but instead he drove off to the outskirts of Lisbon and tried to assault her. She had begged the man to let her go, and then, in a moment of courage and salvation, she had managed to get out of the car when he stopped, running to the side of the road and climbing a cliff at the end of which she found a home—a light that would rescue her. She knocked on the door of this home, feeling very relieved she had been spared, but when she relayed her story to the lady who appeared behind the door, the first thing she said was: “Menina, if you have a boyfriend he will be very upset and he may leave you.” At the time, Daria had felt very confused about what the woman said, for she believed she had not done anything wrong and didn’t understand why her boyfriend, had she had one, would be upset at her. But she did not say anything to this woman and thanked her for helping her get to the train station safe and sound. The nurse said she understood her reasons for not wanting to see a counsellor in her own community and gave her another name, an anonymous name that sounded like nothing she had ever heard, nothing she could place anywhere. She liked that anonymity. The anonymity of that name and that possible relationship with the therapist created a distance between her and the incident, a distance between her and her mother, between her and her father, between her and Francisco, between her and Vasco. And she thought that perhaps, in that distance, she would be able to find the truth as to why this had happened to her, the reason why a man takes a woman as his even when that woman does not offer herself and never gave any indication that she wanted to be taken, even when that woman is like that man’s own daughter, is the same age as that man’s own daughter. She then went home and did not go to work that day, calling in and telling the secretary that she was not feeling well. She called Francisco and told him he needed to come see her as soon as he could, for something very bad—and she repeated very bad four times—had happened. Francisco asked what it was about, but she said the matter was grave and could not be disclosed over the telephone, through those strange and defective waves that are able to transport sound but cannot fully carry the truth of what is being told and felt by both the teller and the listener. He told her she was frightening him with her philosophical proclamations about telephone waves, which sounded like very bad omens. He told her he was extremely busy but would come as soon as he could. He did come a few hours later when the sun was about to set, entering the house with a very worried face, not knowing what to expect. Given that he was a man used to very grave and ugly events and circumstances, a man used to expecting the worst, his worried demeanour seemed to reveal that he really cared about Daria. He often hid his true feelings behind a blank mask—the mask that he had learned to put on to hide his secret, his beautiful idea—so the present nakedness of his face told Daria that she occupied a central place in his life, that she was indeed his finally found home. His expression confirmed what he had told her before through the title of the poetry book he said he would write about her and for her, or about her and him: Beautiful Daria, My Finally Found Home. It was a title full of softness, kindness, and dreams, with open endless vowels and alliteration, which Daria found appealing and appeasing to the ear, to the body, to the soul.

  Telling him was hard. She was worried that he would be disappointed, that he would think less of her, that he would blame her. She felt guilty for giving him news that would bring him sadness, that would further burden him. He was a man who had suffered enough; he had paid his dues and did not need any more ugliness in his life. She also worried that he would love her less, even though, deep down, she knew she was not the one who should be blamed or punished. She knew she did not ask for it, like Vasco’s defence lawyer would try to imply later in court. And then she also thought that she should have trusted her intuition, trusted that voice that was telling her earlier that Vasco da Gama might not quite be who he says he is, might not quite act as he says he acts, might not be worthy of the name and the title that he carries—and she would get confused again and blame herself some more. She had had a dream the night after the ugly event. The dream was mostly negative, but there had also been a moment of clarity and insight that had told her, without a shadow of a doubt, that she was clean, that she had not done anything wrong, just like Ana Magalhães had not done anything wrong when she suffered at the hands of Arsénio and his aids. In this dream, or rather, at this moment in the dream, she saw herself being born, she saw herself coming out of her mother’s thunderous thighs. At first she thought she was ugly and dirty and born out of sin, but then she saw herself clean and naked and beautiful, her mother speaking to her in tender tongues and repeating, “She will be my last child because my womb is already tired. She will be named Daria. She is clean and beautiful, clean and beautiful, will always be clean and beautiful. Those are her possessions, and no one can take them away from her.” That moment of the dream gave her confidence and assurance, the clear certainty that she was not to blame for the ugly dirt that had come her way, a dirt that was trying to bring shame to the shameless, to that which is clean a priori. Still, now that she had Francisco in front of her, telling him was hard. She felt that perhaps he would no longer want to marry her and have babies with her, and that she would never experience a perfect love, a perfect marriage, a perfect life. She had wanted to be his woman, only his, and now this had happened and she felt that the damage may be irreparable. She had already imagined her wedding day, her wedding dress, and she had discussed that glorious day many times with Francisco. They had decided that the day would come in a very near future, as soon as Francisco managed to secure an important trade contract between Canada and Mozambique and his divorce papers were finalized. The latter w
ere being delayed, he had said, because of the inefficiencies of the Mozambican bureaucracy. The clerks of the civil registry office in Maputo had not yet been able to locate Ana and Francisco’s marriage certificate. It had been lost in the massive annals where all the marriages—all the love stories between men and women that said yes to one another in that city of light by the Indian Ocean, yes, till death do us part—were dully annotated, like immortal witnesses to love. Francisco had also added that the Portuguese colonial government had never been interested in developing the infrastructure of Mozambique or in teaching Black people how to run an independent country since only a handful of them had become assimilados and had had access to the colonial education system. He said this was to blame for the current inefficiency in record keeping. The colonialists, he had gone on to say, trying to give Daria a history lesson, were only interested in taking out the country’s wealth and bringing it to their own nation to enrich and develop it. Daria smiled and said that, yes, many of his points about colonial history were well taken, but she did not quite agree with this last statement because no infrastructure was ever really developed in Almores either, since the village still had no central sewage system or running water in most of the homes. She argued that Portugal continued to be at the bottom of the European ladder, a member of the group that had recently been given the insulting label of PIGS. They both laughed and jokingly blamed it all on Salazar’s peasant background, his habits of washing and peeing in the river, and his lack of knowledge about the direct relationship between good hygiene and health. But then Daria added that, as he well knew, the situation was much more complex and should really be blamed on the politics of transport, otherwise known as triangular mercantilism, practised during much of the Portuguese colonial era. These practices consisted of bringing the raw materials from the colonies and then selling them to the wise, pragmatic, and rationalist English, who pretty much controlled the entire scene. The English would then sell back finished products to Portugal or the colonies at exorbitant prices. Francisco counter-argued by noting that the situation had not been as clear-cut as she was implying and that the blame was to be found everywhere since the Portuguese also practised the politics of transport and in fact benefitted a great deal from it—and an ugly transport it was. They were, after all, the fathers of the transatlantic slave trade. But indeed, they may not have been as wise as the Englishmen and may have indulged in too many wasteful behaviours, making chairs and cartwheels out of, or even padding the ceilings of their houses with, pure gold. The salty sweat of Black people could still have been tasted in that precious metal, or on the walls, ceilings, and marble floors of imponent cathedrals, convents, and abbeys, had the colonizers not carefully cleaned it off, plunging thousands and thousands of Africans into oblivion, dumping them into an unconscious blind denial. The conversation had gone in many directions at the time, and many angles of the matter were explored, including the fact that African chiefs had also sold their own people to the European slave traders and had been slave traders themselves. They may not have been fully aware, however, of what was awaiting the slaves on the other side of the Atlantic under the whip of the master and the unforgiving sun of the coffee plantation. The slaves would become beings without a nation, deracinated, and dehumanized to the core. In the end, both Francisco and Daria agreed that power and too much material wealth always corrupt and that Karl Marx was indeed right when he said that a revolution is the only way to take away the wealth from those who have stolen it but think they legitimately got it—those who think they were born with it like a gift from a God, when in fact we were all born naked. Naked and beautiful.

  Telling him was hard. She kept imagining her wedding day and her wedding dress, and she felt that that day and that dress may very well never come. She saw herself in an imaginary land, a land full of mountains and valleys all covered in yellow genistas, and then she saw herself inside that land, dressed as a bride, her dress also yellow. It was yellow inside yellow, a never-ending circle that confounded you, but in that confounding whirl you could find the most agreeable solace, the most agreeable realization. She saw the image of that land and herself inside that land in front of her. It was a vision inside a vision, as clear and beautiful and perfect as they could ever be. But the vision, the visions, the perfect whirl, which she had seen and felt clearly before, was now graspable for a moment only. As she tried to hold on to it, it would slowly walk away from her, leaving her destitute. She now saw herself in doubles: in the valley and at the top of the mountain, and in both places she was dressed in her stunning yellow bride dress. As she tried to ascend the mountain by climbing a ladder that had been placed there, she sensed that the ladder was infinite and that she would never get to the top. She saw herself climb and climb and then climb again, desperately trying to attain the highest point of herself, the happy bride at the peak of the mountain, but the journey was hard, impossible to conclude. It was as if it had been interrupted by the voices and deeds of the people who remained at the bottom of the mountain, or by her own self, that double of her that had stood motionless in the depression of the valley. The valleys and mountains were no longer dressed in yellow genistas; they had become desolate lands. The only thing that was now yellow and beautiful in that land was her in her dress. And she did not seem to be able to reconcile her two stranded selves, one at the bottom in the depressed valley and the other calling to it from the top of the mountain. She felt lost, without a secure ground to walk upon; she had been doubled, fragmented, broken into pieces by the many voices inside her head, inside her body, all confusing and tormenting the clean beautiful naked self she had been born with—that most precious possession. She was herself in herself, but she was also outside of herself trying to see the future. She wanted to know whether that future would hold after she disclosed to Francisco what had happened between her and Vasco. He took her hand in his, locking her in his magnetic pulse, and he looked her in the eye. He stared at her, immobilized in a prolonged and silenced stillness. She felt he already knew about the ugly incident. But he did not know.

  My darling Francisco, what I am about to tell you may break your heart, but I hope it does not do so. I hope that it only makes you love me more and want me more. I hope that reminding you of this ugliness may also make you more forgiving, more loving towards me, towards love, love that calls itself love. I feel strange and uncomfortable telling you this, but deep down, in the clean part of myself, I do know that I am not guilty, that I did not do anything wrong. I did not ask for anything, did not provoke anything. And so I feel like a beggar who should not be begging, but I cannot stop myself from begging. It’s as if I am commanded by an invisible force, a force that has shaped me and that I cannot shake off. Last night, when Vasco dropped me off at my place, after he left you at yours, he did something to me, something that is very difficult to describe to you. He did to me what Arsénio and the guards did to Ana in that dungeon of slow death.

  She tried to say more, but her mouth could not speak those words. She went into a poetic ramble, where psychosis and metaphor become beautiful haunting images of the wounds of the human soul, those created by us and those we allow others to create for us. She became hysterical, a child wanting to recount the lullaby or the fairy tale she had heard to her prince, to convince him that happiness is still possible and that all one has to do is to believe. Belief is the mother of all, the sister of the spring, the cousin of the summer. She told him a beautiful story. She had composed it in her head a while ago under other circumstances, but it applied to this circumstance just as well as it had applied to the other; the story had helped Daria when she was searching for meaning, meaning behind the pulsating world, the water that runs and bathes and cures. The story was called “The Revelation of Camilla,” otherwise known as “Rescuing the Divine.” She recited it word by word, syllable by syllable, like she had the other time, trying to find meaning, convey meaning, find love in sorrow, life in death, clarity in confusion:

  She
was a fool, or at least that was what some thought. But God, how wrong they were. The first time I met her I was only a girl of eleven. A mere little girl, so much closer to infancy than adolescence. Unlike many of my age, I wanted so much to delay my womanhood. I wanted to impede my body from growing so that the young boys, or worse yet, the older men would not look at me with lust and unkind wonder in their eyes. I wanted to delay my age so that my legs would stay thin, my behind in the shadow of the invisible, and my breasts just little roses in a state of perpetual buds. I wanted to remain here, between all the seasons, perhaps with a hint of spring. I wanted to imagine, always from afar, what I could be and what I may be. I never wanted to be one thing only, caught between the dreams of many people, the seasons of many centuries. I wanted to stay young so that my eyes would forever stare with wonder and wander about, taking in everything around and about me. I wanted to stay young, young, and so, like God’s gift, this secret wish of the most intimate part of myself, materialized when I saw her. Lady Camilla was her name. She became my friend forever, my invisible friend who would appear to me when I most needed her. She would give me dreams and make me walk in astounding beauty in those large, unending lavender fields. She would sing me songs. She would call me to the many things that there are in this world and the world beyond this. I was not alone. I was not poor. I was.