Daria

by Irene Marques

  But before I met the nice immigration agent who gave me what was owed to me, I met another one who was also trying to get into my underwear. When I was desperately trying to locate my file, I met a very handsome agent at one of the immigration offices. I told him my plight, crying hysterically like a little girl, and I begged him to try and locate my file, that piece of paper lost somewhere in the thick annals of the Canadian immigration backlog. I told him I was without a job now and that I needed to get my open permit to be free, free to earn a living and pay my tuition fees. He listened to me attentively, his face serious and concerned, and he tried to console me, promising he would locate my file. He asked me if he could call me at home, and I said, “Sure, you can. Please do.” I left feeling hopeful that I would indeed get my open permit and that freedom would soon appear before me. Two days later he called me at home. He asked me how I was doing, and I said I was fine. I didn’t say much more; I was speaking in short sentences, in yeses or noes, waiting between silences for him to tell me he had found my file. But he did not do that; instead he asked if I wanted to go for a coffee with him. Smelling another rat, I froze when I heard that and immediately said, “I don’t see why I should go for a coffee with you.” He changed his approach and said, “Okay, okay, but you know I have not been able to locate your file.” I said thank-you and hung up the phone. I was trembling. I felt very alone, very far from my dream. I thought it would never come. My dream. I felt like most of us feel when the heavy and stark darkness falls upon us—before a ray of gentle moonlight starts peeking through and announcing, little by little, atom by atom, that love still exists in the world we walk upon, that people truly care about one another.

  António Salgado. It so happened that Francisco Motumba and Fernando Montenegro were board members of the Lusitanian Social Service Centre, though they were now mortal enemies and hated each other quite viscerally. But this centre had been created to accommodate all those who spoke the language of Camões, and so they had to pretend that the past was behind them, at least during the monthly meetings. It was as if, being brought back together in Canada, Francisco and Fernando had been given a second chance to make Salazar’s proclamations about a truly multiracial Lusitanian nation into a reality, to establish a place where everyone would really have the same rights no matter their creed, colour, sex, or religion—like Pierre Elliott Trudeau had passionately championed, and with the best of intentions, it seems.

  It also so happened that Mr. Palavreiro, the current mayor of Toronto and that fellow I’d met a while ago in a Portuguese literature class at the Northern University, was also a board member. I was right when I told you I did not like him and that he was not a properly educated man. You tried to dissuade me from that narrow and stubborn view, insisting that he could very well be a different man today, now that he had more years on his belt and, perhaps, more wisdom. When I went to the board with my plight and told them that Mr. da Gama was a man of evil and amoral inclinations, Palavreiro was not receptive at all. He had grown up in Canada, but he still had the conservative outlook of a mama’s boy. A child of peasants—just like me, but a boy—he could note only certain injustices in the world, the ones that affected him or those like him directly, those people who carry a stick between their legs and think that, because of that mere fact, they are superior by natural right. He reminded me of Abassi and of Francisco. They were all men who were deeply affected by and sensitive to the issues of race and class, deeply affected by the scars and labels with which the ignorant world had burdened them, but who were ignorant of the woes of women, ignorant of the very fact that their everyday, unquestionable behaviour towards the other sex was a sad mimicry of everything that had been done to them, of what they so vehemently rejected. I have written poems and manifestos about this elsewhere, asking humans of all casts and origins to think, and think deeply, about what has made them suffer and who has made them suffer. I have asked them to learn from that suffering. I have said this using many different words, some deep and bleeding, others philosophical and mystical, others tender and refulgent—all of them inspired by the same urgent personal call to action. I have asked these men—in direct and dynamic verbs, direct and piercing adjectives—to transcend the narrow walls of their individual egos so that they could grow wiser, so that they could develop a heavy, matured soul. I encouraged them to find a kind of forgiveness that can see in the suffering other their own self, and that can, in that seeing, put an end to their own cruelty. I encouraged them to stop the atrocious movement that they had been following as if they were automatons pulled only by the weight and wills of evil mechanisms—a bloody fatalistic fallacy. When I was younger and more beautiful, I used to think oppressed peoples were the only ones who were pure. I used to think they had the key, the key to humanity’s salvation. I used to believe, like a Marxist of sorts (before I even read Marx), that the oppressed were the ones who could, who would, make the world perfect, perfectly communal. I believed in a world in which my mother and father and those of their sort could stop carrying other people’s weights. I used to think that. The first time I doubted that belief was when my brother-in-law—who used to be a Marxist and hippie in the ’60s and continuously sang “o povo unido nunca mais será vencido”—started saying that all Romani and Black people were nothing but scum and that he was working like a dog so that the government could give them free houses. He, my brother-in-law, became very rich, and every time I went to Portugal and heard him, I was reminded of what I used to believe about poor oppressed people being the key to human salvation, the key to the true, beautiful revolution and revelation. It was as if he, my brother-in-law, suffered from a never-ending thirst that drove him to accumulate wealth and show off that wealth to the world, a world that mocked him before, a world that had placed him at the bottom of the scale like a scoundrel, when in fact it was the world that was committing the crime.

  And so António Palavreiro, whose real name is António Salgado, preached about bringing the Portuguese community out of the shadows and making us full participants in the Canadian dream, but he was not a good man. He only saw with one eye, and he had forgotten the womb where he came from. Mr. Palavreiro did not believe me when I came to the board and told them what the executive director had done to me. He then testified in court and at the Human Rights Commission, saying I was just one of those women without a proper foundation who had run away by herself to another country. I was uma qualquer. When I heard and read his comments, I could not help but think this man was being vindictive. He wanted to get back at me because I was the best student in that Portuguese literature class we had taken together, and the professor, who may have also wanted to get into my pants, would often say that out loud in class. Mr. Palavreiro could not stand the idea that a woman, and especially a woman of his tribe, could surpass his intellect. He was one of those men who would like to have fun with what he called the Canadian women, but who when it came to settle down wanted a proper Portuguese woman, a virgin still, one that he could enjoy fully, one who hadn’t been spoiled (he seemed to have that in common with Francisco)—one that knew her place well. When I worked at a café mostly frequented by Southern Europeans, I heard comments like that all the time from those guys who still carried the heavy marks of the old country. Some of them, seeing me working there until the small hours of the morning, made very hurting remarks and took actions that the café’s owner, who also carried his own cross and that of his very religious mother, did not care to stop. They would grab my behind without my permission, and sometimes they would stare at me with those eyes of depraved soulless dogs and mumble viciously that I was “excellent for a good fuck.” I stopped serving them. I guess they saw me as a loose woman too, closer to the Canadian women and not so Portuguese anymore. They were like the parents of that friend I had, who did not want me to be their daughter’s friend, for they looked at me through their narrow lens, a stagnated and dirty lens reflecting a world that no longer existed—that place they had left forty years a
go, escaping the tentacles of Salazar and his close associates, the cardinals, still stuck in their memory, unwilling to let go. I felt like I was living in a world that no longer existed, and even though my mother was a fierce traditional woman, who always warned me of the evil that men can cause and the sorrows that can come from opening your legs freely without a proper contract and the blessing of a priest—like her own mother did in the 1920s when she got pregnant twice, only to be despised by my great-grandmother and everyone in the village and surroundings—she seemed more modern than these people I was meeting in this new country, people stranded between two shores, incapable of fully setting their feet on either one.

  The reporter. A man identifying himself as a community reporter working for the newspaper The Voice/A Voz called me after he had heard on the mainstream news that I had been assaulted. I don’t know how he got my name and my number because the news only noted that a Portuguese woman working illegally in Canada had been assaulted by the executive director of the Lusitanian Social Service Centre. He asked me if I could give him details about what had happened. He was writing a detailed article on the subject, he said, as a way to encourage other women in the Portuguese community to come forward when things like that happened to them, for, apparently and unfortunately, they happened quite frequently. Like the paralegal instructed me, I told him I could not share any details with him as the case was now before the courts and that any information about the matter should be obtained from my legal representative. Later on, the paralegal, my legal representative—the doctor who was not a doctor—said the journalist did contact him and told him I was “very savvy in the matter and knew exactly what to say.” He said this was “a sure sign” that I had “made a career out of this.” At the time, I cursed the reporter and equated him with all the other pigs that I had met in my life. Later I realized that the reporter may not have said this at all, that the paralegal may have just invented the whole story to fuel my rage and manipulate me into pursuing the matter in the civil courts, where real money was to be made, as he had put it. When I refused to launch a civil lawsuit, this paralegal also told me that with my newly acquired reputation, I would have a lot of difficulty finding a job. I was infuriated by his comment and replied that as long as I was healthy, I could find a job as this was not Portugal but Canada where jobs were there to be had, even in the ’90s when the country was facing a recession. Shortly after, he gave me a bill for his services, saying that the legal aid money only covered the lawyer’s fees and not his since he was not a lawyer. I paid him fully.

  On the matter of race. “Why do you, Mr. da Gama, think that Ms. Mendes has launched this dirty campaign against you, a man of standing in the community, a man of law, and a man of letters?” asked Mr. Ketsukiapolous, his defence lawyer, a renowned legal expert who graduated from Harvard summa cum laude and often appeared on national TV to give his legal opinion about the worst of Canadian crimes, including the ones committed by Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. “There is no other explanation but to say that Ms. Mendes holds deep in her being a racist belief, like her ancestors who went to my mother country over four hundred years ago, raping it like savages with their dirty phalluses. She is a racist who does not want to see a man of colour running the Lusitanian Social Service Centre. That is my firm belief.”

  Mr. Horatio Cunningham, my attorney, argued with Mr. Ketsukiapolous and Mr. da Gama, trying to discredit the serious implications of the remarks, and asked the following question to Mr. da Gama: “Are you, sir, not a man of mixed race, a man with an Indian mother and a Portuguese father? And do you not, sir, often identify yourself as being Portuguese rather than Indian? By looking at you, sir, I could not tell the difference. In fact, I could not tell the difference between you and me, as we both have dark hair and that nice tanned skin tone, like thousands of citizens in this world of ours, and especially in this magnificent city of ours, Toronto.”

  Da Gama replied, “No, I am a coloured Indian man first and foremost—my Portugueseness is secondary to my Indianness.” They argued and argued over this issue, and then my lawyer presented evidence that indeed da Gama often presented himself as Portuguese, omitting his Indian ancestry. He brought to the table, as evidence, a document that showed just that: it was the application that da Gama had sent to the board of the Lusitanian Social Service Centre when he applied for the job of executive director. In his cover letter, da Gama stated: Being a Portuguese man myself, I am very familiar with the barriers faced by our community, and it is my intention, as the executive director of the Lusitanian Social Service Centre, to break down these barriers so that my fellow countrymen can all access the Canadian pie and taste its sweetness. I have a deep passion for the Portuguese underdog. Da Gama’s lawyer tried to argue that my lawyer was just playing the rhetorical game that lawyers are often forced to play. He said that comment was being taken out of context, and that if we read the entire cover letter, we would find more evidence that would show that Mr. da Gama fully accepted and claimed his Indian or mixed heritage. My lawyer then read the entire cover letter to the court, and there was no clear indication that da Gama was a man of Indian or Portuguese descent, or that he belonged to one more than the other. There was no concrete evidence of da Gama advocating for his Indian heritage, even if we were to spend time analyzing the many ambivalent passages in the letter, such as: Having seen the world from both angles, the angle of the dog and the underdog, I am in a perfect position to run this great institution that is the Lusitanian Social Service Centre or I have felt in my skin the wounds of prejudice. Both lawyers tried to argue their case to the best of their abilities, and I sat there observing this event as if I were observing an unconvincing play. It was like a dramatic scene in which the players had no intention of putting their real selves on display and were poorly hiding behind the roles assigned to them by the director, who, for his part, had failed to fully understand the characters of the actors and had assigned them random roles that had nothing to do with their true personhood, their true passion. My mind travelled to the mourning sounds of Ivan Lins’s song and, rather than hearing what was happening in the courtroom, which directly concerned my life and reputation, I heard in my head, over and over again, Lins’s beautifully haunting lines: Is this Fellini or is this our lives? In what film did our love happen?

  My dress. Mr. Ketsukiapolous was sweating in the court room, breathing hard, mind and body trying to stay alert, asking me pointless questions that had nothing to do with the matter at hand: “What were you wearing, Ms. Mendes? Can you describe for us, in detail, your outfit? Can you also tell us, Ms. Mendes, why you made the decision to sit in the front seat with Mr. da Gama even though you were dating Mr. Motumba and it would have made more sense to sit in the back with him so that you could stay closer to one another?” I said I was wearing a long dress, almost to my ankle, and that this dress was my favourite because it made me feel taller and thinner, and it reminded me of the beautiful dresses my aunt Maria dos Anjos used to make for me back in Portugal. These dresses were always made out of patterned fabrics bought at the open market fairs from the Romani women, who were always singing as if they were always happy. This, despite the fact that they often became victims of the market police who conducted regular surprise raids to catch the outlaws trying to sell their products without the proper licences, just like they had caught my mother when she was selling cheese from town to town. The Romani women would chant, “Hey darling, come look at this stunning tecido I have here! Come, my beautiful one, come. I guarantee you can’t find quality and prices like these anywhere else.” These flowery flowing dresses were made to hug my own body and nobody else’s; they were dresses that gave me the sensation that I could fly and that it was always spring, always beautiful, always sunny. The judge, Mr. Smitherman, a nice Jewish man with an inclination toward the lyric, seemed taken by my intricate description of my dress.

  Even though he wanted to prevent me from answering—the question “What were you wearing?�
�� was already beginning to be considered problematic in those days—he did not stop me in time and so, when I finished, he addressed the jury: “Dear members of the jury, I order you to disregard the answer given by Ms. Mendes to the question just posed by the defence counsel about her manner of dress on the day of the alleged incident. The question has nothing to do with the matter at hand, and Mr. Ketsukiapolous ought to be ashamed of himself for asking such a question. We all should know that women’s bodies, including their hair, are essentially good and do not cause the fall of men. If I did not know you better, Mr. Ketsukiapolous, I would say you have some affiliations with radical Islamists or that you have been reading outdated religious books and misinterpreting its metaphoric language. Yes, if I did not know you better, I would say just that…” The judge allowed me to answer the second question, though I could not quite give a convincing answer, at least not according to Mr. Ketsukiapolous, who kept asking me the question over and over again, in slightly different words. It was as if he thought my English was not good enough and that he ought to repeat it several times, each time louder than before, and change the wording a little like we do with youngsters who are learning the language we want them to learn.