Daria

  Your father and Abassi. Intertwined in your mind as seekers of the same truths, guards of the same fortress, and you, alone in this new world of the Americas. Alone, young, and beautiful, eager to open your soul and your legs to whatever came your way so that you could feel pregnant with fulfilment, know all there is to know, and attain perfection and completion. You still believed that total happiness could be attained and that one only needs to take the right steps—one only needs to grasp it and grow up to be able to attain it. As a child, you believed that things were not yet perfect because you were a child and were not yet formed, but that they would become perfect as you grew older, because you yourself would become perfect. He, Abassi, was another Francisco. Or he was what Francisco could not be for you. You felt you ought to try again and recreate the beautiful. It was as if you felt guilty about something, and you wanted to make up for it. You believed Vasco da Gama’s claims, and then you believed the profoundly disappointed voice of Francisco when the judge asked him to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. Tell the truth and nothing but the truth, for that is love. Love bigger than the earth, love bigger than the sea, love bigger than the sky, the kind, the king you truly need, we truly need, if only we were not blind. And so you loved Abassi totally only to discover that he too could not give you what you had to find for yourself, in yourself. No one could give you something that you could not get yourself, especially when that something is love, love and forgiveness for yourself. Only when you have those, love and forgiveness for yourself, can you move ahead and look at the stars and cry with gratitude, with your full body, your full being. You were a fool, Daria. You were always looking for the beautiful, the perfect, the total, the big, the wide, that which contains all and everything. That splendid, brilliant vacuum, opening itself in front of you to take you into its immensity. Just like Abassi. And that’s why you loved him, wanted to love him, wanted to believe his thesis of true collectivity. But as Hegel reminds us, and as Marx also believed, there is always an antithesis to a thesis to allow for the formation of another thesis. And the entire process is so dynamic that the past cannot really ever be recovered, at least not in palpable terms. Perhaps it is made alive only through beautiful words, through beautiful paintings, or in the stunning stories of Adam and Eve before the fatal fall. And so you yearn, constantly.

  ANOTHER SESSION. Today I called Ms. Gloria Bollatti, my therapist, to ask her if she could see me pronto, for I was having a particularly bad week. My emotions were being triggered by everything and anything under the sun, and I felt like I needed to see her straight away if I was going to survive another day. I was wearing my emotions on my sleeve, as they say in English. My mother tells me a similar thing in Portuguese: “Your emotions are always at the flower of the skin, and we can’t tell you anything because everything brings you to convulsive crying.” And yes, everything was coming to me, like a torrent of salty, very dirty, and heavy water. My body had been carrying this water like an immense sea, but it could no longer hold its weight and I bent down to the floor, my legs suddenly seized by its force.

  She sits there patiently listening to me. Today I need her to listen, only listen and not give any opinion about what she listens to. I need to get clean, to ejaculate the filth. I speak to her in sentences that make sense, and then I move to the senseless, as if I am a patient at the Hospital of the Soul and I am transcribing myself. I am both the transcriber and the transcribed, and perhaps, given my experience, there will be little discrepancy between the message and the messenger. My case is unlike that of Mackenzie, who was a being outside of myself, whom I had to capture as faithfully as I could in my report, which I then passed on to the doctor for the proper diagnosis. I was only an intermediary in an interaction that was already mediated by the cadences of his convoluted speech, words trying to find the true meaning that only exists beyond words.

  I speak to her in tongues, sometimes my own, sometimes another’s. I speak to her in short diary entries that I had written inside of me but had never put down on paper as if afraid to see what I had been carrying. Sometimes my entries are longer and go on and on about this or that, as if I am distracted or afraid to get straight into the matter and need to find preambles or metaphors to make it less crude and more beautiful than it is. Or perhaps, just like the medieval shoemaker, I see that everything is linked and that in order to really see the nature of the shoe, I need to talk about the shoelaces, the soles, the sides of the shoe, and the cow that made possible the existence of the entire shoe. I am me, but I am also the many others that are in me, that have entered me and made me very heavy. I vacillate under the pressure of every corner that I try to cross, in my brave attempt to see another street, another curve that might be gentler to my limbs.

  At the Police Station. I summoned the courage to go the police station eventually, after Vasco fired me and said I was a liar who was working illegally in Canada. He said I was spreading rumours about him, dragging him through my own mud, that cow dung that I grew up with in the mountains of Caramulo. I went to the station with my Portuguese friend, who had also come to Canada as a nanny, like me and the many thousands of Filipina women whose own children grow up without a mother. I told the story to a young policeman who spoke immaculate English. He listened attentively to what I had to say. At the end of it all, he said nicely, “Miss, I am very sorry that you had to go through all of this. I would be very upset if someone had done it to my sister. I am very sorry, miss, but I cannot do anything about this. We cannot do anything about this, miss.”

  The Police Chief. I went to the police station again, his time with a paralegal, who, I later found out, also had his own agenda and almost coerced me into launching a civil lawsuit by telling me that it was the best way to make money. He charged me for his work when I refused to give in to his coercion, despite the fact that he had initially told me to apply for legal aid and said that that money would cover all the costs. He was not a doctor even by Portuguese standards since he only had a college diploma, but I remember that when I was in his office, waiting to see him, the people who came to consult with him—mostly Brazilian and Portuguese immigrants without status, who worked from dawn to dusk building and cleaning houses in Toronto—called him Doutor. He did not correct them, though I thought he ought to correct them. In Portugal, everyone who has a university degree is called a doctor. This practice might be changing though: my sister told me that the current Portuguese minister of economy, who has a PhD from Simon Fraser University and lived in Canada for some time, tells everyone to call him Álvaro, simply Álvaro, and not Dr. Álvaro Santos Pereira, even if in this case he could rightfully be called a doctor. Perhaps then there is a chance that he will be able to straighten up the economy so that there will be no P in the PIGS, and we’ll end up with just IGS, and there will be no need to bring back Salazar—no need for the world to put the country’s credit in the junk bin.

  Both the paralegal and I are escorted to office of the chief of police by a young and friendly officer. The chief is a tall, middle-aged, handsome man. His name, Lawrence Maclluren, seemingly denoting he’s of Anglo-Saxon origin. I tell him the story with some help from the paralegal—he who has mastered the acceptable legal jargon, which gives more weight to the truth of my story. At the end, the chief says, “It is evident that you are a very attractive young woman and it is evident that he, Mr. da Gama, wanted to get into your panties.” I remember becoming very red in the face because I did not like that expression. The choice of words sounded inappropriate, dirty, and sordid, and made me feel invaded again. Not to mention I never liked the word panties. I much prefer the word underwear—a word that is less personal, less intimate, and less dirty (even though it shares some linguistic traits with underdog, or at least it has the same prefix). I should also mention that my mother never used the words panties or underwear; she always referred to them as pants despite the fact that I tried to correct her many times.

  The Human Rights Commission. I called the hu
man rights commission from a public phone to tell them my story. I don’t recall why I used a public telephone; it may have been because I had just seen someone about the matter and it had not gone well and I was desperate to do something, to get an answer from someone that seemed right, that felt right. I spoke to a male agent, relaying, with an insecure and afflicted voice, the events that had taken place as accurately as I could recall them, and he listened in silence on the other end of the line. At the end he told me, “Ms. Mendes, I have a lot of experience in these types of cases, and I must tell you that you won’t be getting a lot of money from this.” I said, “What? Money?! Can I tell you the story again? Or perhaps I should have an interpreter with me because I think you have misunderstood what I was trying to say.” He said that would not be necessary for my English was quite good, or good enough, in any case. I hung up, went home, and cried until my eyes were swollen and hurt from my constant wiping.

  The Portuguese-Canadian Human Rights Commissioner. After attempts to get through the Human Rights Commission by myself failed—perhaps because I did not communicate in the same language as the agents had been trained to communicate in, or because rumours had spread in the Portuguese community about me and my case—I was contacted by a nice Portuguese-Canadian woman, named Carmina Fraga, who had worked for the Human Rights Commission and knew how the organization worked. She told me that she could help me prepare my case to present to the Commission. She was very kind and supportive. I met her many times, and we did prepare the report. She told me I must ask for monetary compensation in order to repair the damages inflicted. I said that I did not want that, that I only wanted Vasco to apologize, to admit that he had made a grave error in his life, in his judgment. He ought to admit to it, for only then could he heal as a human being and only then could I find a way to forgive him and move on with my life. Carmina Fraga became livid when I said that. She said that in that case she could not, would not help me. I did not quite understand her reaction, and I felt confused again, like I had felt when the nurse had told me that I should denounce Vasco to the police and that, given the gravity of the crime, I would get a lot of money; or when the first agent had told me the opposite of that, that I wouldn’t get very much out of this. But Camila Fraga was changeable like a chameleon, and a few days later, after reflecting on the matter, she called me back and told me she would still help me despite my refusal to ask for monetary compensation. I felt understood and thought, Here is a woman who can understand my ways, a woman who went back to her previous life in the other country, when she was younger and more beautiful, and was able to still rescue the philosophy she grew up with. A woman who does not think that money can solve matters, or at least not all the matters. Five years later, after repeating my story to several agents of the tribunal, the case was finally resolved, or I should say, put to rest. Vasco was asked to make a donation of five thousand dollars to a woman’s shelter where I had worked for some time. He never apologized openly and never admitted that he had done what he did. It was my word against his, and God, as always, was mute and did not appear in court to testify, straighten things up, or scream at the criminal. And since I’d decided to pursue the matter only after Vasco had fired me and refused to apologize, and because the nurse who treated me at the hospital had lost my file, I had no physical evidence to prove that he indeed had done what he did to me in my basement apartment that day, that evening, that summer, after I’d listened to Ivan Lins’s beautiful song. My lawyer, a stylish young Black woman who had been appointed by the Commission, told me I was a very brave young lady and that my mother should be very proud for having raised such a decent human being. I did feel proud when she said that, proud of my mother, proud of myself, proud of Almores and its ways. But I did not tell my mother about any of this. She would not have understood and likely would have reacted the same way as the other woman on the outskirts of Lisbon had, when she opened the door to find me on her doorstep, scared, after I had run away from the other cannibal who had tried to hunt me down.

  The Immigration Agents. I had not told Vasco that I had a restricted work permit when he offered me the job—but he also never asked, blinded as he was by what he thought he saw. And the truth was that I just couldn’t have worked as a nanny for two or three years up there in Richmond Hill. I had been young and restless. I wanted to do things, many things, and those two kids, Albert and Justin, had been in my way, waking me up every day at five o’clock and jumping on my bed demanding breakfast, demanding my life, my youth, demanding that I sacrifice my dreams and remain a maid, a maid all my life, like my sisters, my mother, and my grandmothers, women who never had a minute for themselves, who were always running after other people’s desires. I did not tell Vasco, but he also did not ask. He asked only after the incident, after he knew that I was very upset about what he had done to me, after I’d demanded an apology and he’d said in wretched mockery, a mockery of my self, my reason, my sanity, my right to choose, “I don’t know what you are talking about. I made a mistake assessing your personality.” He asked only after I’d talked to him about what happened, after he suspected that he might not get away with this one so easily like he had gotten away with what he did and likely was still doing with Helena, the Azorean woman who suffered from a profound complex of class and region. After sensing that something had taken place between me and Vasco, and because she had already sensed Vasco’s interest in me and was jealous, Helena told me that he had kissed her on the mouth too. She told me that when she said she wanted something more than a simple affair, he had replied that anything more would never work because they belonged to different social classes. I was livid when she told me that. I thought I had to tell her what he had done to me so that she would gain courage and slap him hard in the face or kick him right between the legs—advice my mother always gave me—next time he tried anything with her. Sadly though, when the matter went to criminal court and then to the Human Rights Commission, Helena Santos denied everything, including having told me what Vasco did and said to her. I was furious with her. I cursed her and all the women like her, women who, instead of standing up for themselves and their kind, lay down under the men and open their legs to them freely. And they, the men, don’t even have the decency to thank them for the good time.

  When I was fired from the Lusitanian Social Service Centre, I went from immigration office to immigration office, trying to locate my file and get an answer as to when I should have my open work permit, when I could be free—free to work wherever I wanted without the constant fear of being caught by the immigration officials, whom I had heard could come in the middle of the night, arrest you like a true criminal, and deport you back to your country of origin. I was supposed to have had my open work permit a year before, but because of the backlog at Immigration, they kept telling me, my file was taking a long time to be dealt with. They could not even locate it. I would go from office to office and beg the receptionist to allow me to speak with an agent, and I would explain my plight, often in tears, but I received no sympathy. After many attempts, I went to the office in Scarborough where my file was finally located, and I told the receptionist, a Filipina woman, that I was not leaving until she allowed me to speak to an immigration official. She understood my plight and gave in, perhaps thinking of when she herself was restricted to nanny’s work and could not take care of her own needy children, those beautiful boys and girls she had left behind in the Philippines. I went upstairs to see the nice Canadian agent with an English last name. She opened one of her drawers and, misunderstanding my last name, pulled out a file of someone called Dania Mendez. I corrected her and said that my name was Daria, Daria Mendes—Mendes with an s not a z. I told her that the z generally indicated that the name was Hispanic, and that that would include not only names from Spain but also names from the many countries that Spain had colonized, including the Philippines. She looked at me with surprise, smiled, and apologized in a seemingly embarrassed way, and then she pulled out another Mendes, this time
the right one: me. She looked at the file for a few minutes and then said, “I am very sorry, Ms. Mendes, that you had to wait so long to get your open work permit. I really am very sorry. Because of your long wait, I am going to issue your landed immigrant papers right away. We’ll forgo the open work permit step. I apologize again, but you seem very young, Ms. Mendes, and this country is open to all your dreams. I wish you the very best.” I hugged this nice woman and told her how much her actions meant to me. She hugged me back, a little hesitantly at first, but then fully accepting the embrace of this stranger who had come her way. I came out elated with that paper in my hands, feeling a freedom that I had never felt before; feeling like the police or the immigration officials, or Vasco and his lawyers, were not going to call me an alien anymore; feeling like I was not a liar or a criminal as they had insinuated in court over and over again, trying to discredit my case. They wanted to apply the Socratic generalizing rule—She has lied one time, therefore she always lies—and it seemed to me that their method was similar to that of Strauss-Khan’s lawyer when he and the judicial team tried to discredit his accuser. But the truth is that even though we may sometimes lie or not reveal the entire truth, we are not always liars. Remember Jesus Christ’s saying? He who is without sin may cast the first stone.