Daria

by Irene Marques

  He would sometimes call me Ms. Mendez, and I would correct him straight away and say, “Please sir, I ask you to call me by my rightful name. It is Ms. Mendes.” I would pronounce the word Mendes several times, very slowly, asking the lawyer to repeat after me until he got it right, but he would often forget or get confused and go back to committing the same crime. When I tried to think about why I had sat in the front and not in the back with Francisco, I could not come up with anything specific, except that perhaps I had done so out of respect for Vasco so that he would not appear to be the chauffeur. Or perhaps, I thought, he had asked me to sit there. Or perhaps I just took the seat without giving any conscious thought to the matter, because really there was nothing to the matter. I kept saying this or that and repeating the word or to go from one possibility to the other, and Mr. Ketsukiapolous was clearly frustrated with me and kept trying to make me stick to one possibility. He accused me of wanting to confuse the courtroom and all the officials of justice present, including the jury members who had had to take the day off work to be present and allow me to have a fair trial. I got nervous and started to cry, at which point the judge stopped Mr. Ketsukiapolous from asking the same question, accusing him of being either a parrot or hard of hearing, for it was quite evident that I had already provided an answer. We could hear laughter in the courtroom when the judge said that, and then Mr. Ketsukiapolous had to find another line of argumentation and defence. He was sweating more and more. He was a stocky man with a heavy moustache. I had been told that he was one of the highest paid lawyers in the field of criminal law.

  She is an alien. “Your Honour, esteemed members of the jury, there is no doubt that Ms. Mendes is an opportunist, a woman who tries to entice wealthy, powerful men, decent men, men of letters such as Mr. da Gama and Mr. Motumba. She uses her physical attributes to get their attention and then she cries victim and accuses them of abusing her. The entire thing was premeditated, from beginning to end. I ask you, your Honour and esteemed members of the jury, to think very carefully about how Ms. Mendes came to this country, how she lied to be able to work wherever she wanted without any regard and respect for our sacred Canadian laws. I ask you to consider how she played both Mr. da Gama and Mr. Motumba. I ask you to consider, as our evidence—including the deeply moving accounts by both Mr. da Gama and Mr. Motumba, the true victims in this whole affair—has amply demonstrated, how Ms. Mendes holds deep within herself the idea that that these men are not on the same level as she is, simply because they are not white. These, my dear friends and esteemed colleagues, are crimes of high gravity, which require a punishment of the same order. She is a racist, my dear friends. And an opportunist. I have done my job, and now I leave it all up to your consciences.” He sat down, and my lawyer took centre stage. He argued that I was a young woman of morals, a very hardworking young woman who came to this country by herself at the tender and innocent age of twenty, who was not afraid to work, as her many jobs here and there demonstrate. “She is good Portuguese stock, like many other people of this ethnicity, whom we’ve all met in this wonderful city of ours, cleaning and building our skyline and homes. This woman has guts. This woman has courage, for even though she had some immigration issues that may have given her a bad image and play against her, something that would scare other women and force them to remain silent in the face of the abuse, she took action. [Pause.] She took her life into her own hands and denounced Mr. da Gama’s heinous crime. [Pause.] She denounced his unacceptable abuse of power. [Longer Pause.] I ask you all, your Honour and respectful members of the jury, to carefully think about all the evidence that has been presented here today. If you do that, you cannot, you cannot, in good conscience, consider this young woman guilty and let the dishonourable Mr. da Gama go. You simply cannot. If the Canadian judicial system cannot protect the needy and helpless, who can it protect? If it cannot protect those victims, who need the most protection, what, I ask you, is its point, its reason for being? This woman, my dear friends and dear colleagues, is a victim. Nothing more, nothing less. [Very long pause.] To suggest that Ms. Mendes is a racist just because the accused is not white is a short-sighted, ludicrous argument. On that note, I shall conclude my defense with a very insightful passage from an excellent novel, My Father’s Wives, by Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa, which I just finished reading last night: “To accept that one cannot criticize someone just because that someone is Black is an act of paternalism. Paternalism is the elegant racism of the cowards.” He then sat down and unbuttoned his navy-blue suit jacket. He was a handsome man with a shaven, clear face, and clever, clean eyes.

  I am not. I am not a victim. I am not guilty or innocent. I may be both. I am much more than what they say here, and much more than what they have said all along. I am me and the many others that I carry within me. My reasons cannot be summed up in legal jargon, a language that compartmentalizes me and breaks my being into disjointed pieces, as if the shoe were not a shoe but rather a series of separate parts that have nothing to do with the cow who gave its life for the shoe to fully exist. I wanted to scream at them and tell them they are playing this all wrong. I wanted to say that a true tribunal has to be able to see the beautiful truth beyond any shadows of doubt; they must see the intact person that we all have deep down inside, beyond the line that protects our body from cold. Any true tribunal has to be like God, or a good novel—it has to show, beyond any doubt, the true mirror of our conscience. It has to be a true play. I wanted to say all this, scream all this, but my legs were frozen and my throat was dry. I felt like I was in a dream where a thief is after me and I know I have to run but my legs cannot move and I will soon be under the predator’s paws. Despite all the hardships, the difficulties in being heard, I felt proud to be up there telling my story. I felt proud that I was facing Vasco and Francisco. I felt like I had had to withhold my voice too many times before and that this time the bag was full so I had to take everything out, I had to scream the scream that would allow me to continue living in this world without feeling that I was to blame, that I had asked for it—like I often had felt when I passed by a group of men who said dirty things, or like I felt when that woman in Portugal opened the door to me only to condemn me with her old words, stale verbs pulled from a priest’s pockets.

  His words hurt the most. I had not spoken to Francisco in weeks. After I told him what Vasco did, his eyes rolled to his sad side and he ceased to see me as I was, as I wanted to be seen, as I thought he had seen me before. Beautiful Daria, my finally found home. Beautiful Francisco, my finally found home. There was no home anymore. (Perhaps there had never been.) Not in his body and not in my body. Not in his soul and not in my soul. We became separated from our home, anchored in a nothingness that made us sink deep into an ocean that had no bottom and no algae. Our eyes were blind to the marine beauties, the corals and the scintillating fish that emit a light that takes you to the end of the world, allowing you to see the sunset and the sunrise at the same time. We could not experience those underwater dances where speech is paramount and mute and where the whales tell you there is another world above this one and then another world above that one, and then another one and another one, ad infinitum. Their calls are like a cadence of music or silver spirals that are both songs and visible, true things that can be touched, seen, tasted, heard, smelled. Francisco testified in court about me and Vasco—about the ugly affair, the alleged incident of rape, as he called it, as the defence lawyer Mr. Ketsukiapolous called it. He took a stand. He made a choice. Tried to make a choice. I looked at him and tried to meet his eyes to tell him that what he was doing was only hurting his soul, that his patterns—those that were dancing in his brain’s intricate design, those that would lead him to his true soul—were deadly dangerous and that he was going against his beautiful idea. He was allowing Tarrafal to win. What will become of the world, of me and you, if we allow Tarrafal to take over? What do you want from life? What do you truly want? Do you remember our love? Do you remember the dances
we danced and the sound of the whales calling us from afar? I asked him these questions with my eyes, sending these words to him through his irises, where I thought the shining darkness might still reside. But Vasco’s lawyer and mine were distracting him and pulling him into other waves, other seas, and so he could not see his full self, my full self, the world’s full self—his potent black matter was seemingly absent, momentarily deceased or blindfolded. They broke him like Arsénio wanted to break him in Tarrafal. They asked him childish questions that prevented him from giving mature answers, and he got lost in the game. It seemed as though he was tired of life, of its tricks and trends. He did not possess the same strength he had when Arsénio’s heavy paws tried to step all over him to kill his spirit. He could not see the whales in those waves within the sea where we swam together. He could not hear their song, their deep language calling us to the world beyond this. He was going to be lost; he was going to drown amidst dead bodies like his ancestors had, those men and women who had been sold and bought by my people and some of his, and then forced to endure the voyage. “Mr. Motumba, did Ms. Mendes have an affair with you?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “Did she want to marry you?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “Did you consider marrying her?”

  “Down the line perhaps, but at the time we were just enjoying each other’s company. And we were enjoying it very much, I must add. I am still a young man and I have needs. She is a young woman. And look at her.”

  “Please, Mr. Motumba, just say yes or no to my questions—do not add anything else. Just yes or no.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she ever show an interest in your finances? Did she ever show any signs of being racist? Did she ever tell you she was an alien in this country working in places she ought not to?”

  “Yes and no, since you are asking too many questions at the same time—and complicated questions, I might add. She did say she was happy that I was a successful man, especially because I had endured too much in my life fighting Salazar, often going on bread and water only for days on end in the forests of Mozambique and Tanzania, inside the dark cement cells of Tarrafal, fighting for the beautiful cause. She did say that she had some unresolved immigration matters, but she added that these matters would be resolved at any moment and that Immigration Canada was a very slow institution that made people wait and wait to become true Canadians. I asked at the time if she needed any help from me, as I had some friends in high places, but she said that it would not be necessary.”

  “Please sir, limit your answer to yes or no, or at least try to avoid unnecessary explanations. We are after the truth here and nothing but the truth.”

  “Yes. In relation to your last question, she did stare at the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet when we first started our encounters. She said she had heard a story about why the palms and soles of Black people were white. The story claimed that Black people’s hands were white so that when white people looked at us, Black people, they would see themselves in us and would therefore not be abusive towards us. This story could easily mean that indeed Daria, Ms. Mendes, that is, suffered from what I often call the exotification of the Other. It could also mean, as we would all easily agree, that she is in fact a kind woman who was trying to get away from stereotypes, especially since the version I told her I knew claimed the reason we have white palms and soles is because God was in a hurry when he made us. This version is less kind, of course, because it implies that God had less interest in us than in the rest of humanity. It implies that we were just an afterthought, that God did not feel we were a priority and that he could just rush our creation. All this also implies, and this is a very important point, that this God is a Western God, a God who presupposes that white people are the norm and Black people are the exception, the bad copy of the model, the secondary design—the Other of the Self, in the often overly complicated jargon of some postcolonial critics that confuses more than it enlightens. This is similar to that sign they used in South Africa and also in my own country: Non-whites not allowed. Note the use of the double negative here.”

  “Mr. Motumba, I have to remind you again not to speculate about the reasons behind Ms. Mendes’s actions, extrapolate about any other conclusions, or go into unnecessary digressions. So please just say yes or no.”

  “Yes.”

  The matter went on and on, and at the end of it all, no clear conclusion could be reached. I was not guilty. I was not not guilty. Vasco was not guilty. He was not not guilty. Francisco confused everyone in the courtroom, including myself. He should have known me because I showed myself to him as I was, or at least, as I understood I was. Why was he giving answers that were full of doubt? I was not a chameleon. I did not vacillate between a plague and a salvation. I was mostly good. I wanted to be mostly good. I was mostly one person and mostly good. He was mostly good. I wanted him to be mostly good. Vasco was mostly good. I wanted him to be mostly good. I wanted him to apologize, to say he was sorry for what he’d done. I didn’t want this circus that we all put on in the name of law and justice and honour.

  When I read Francisco’s answers to the Human Rights Commission I was truly hurt:

  Yes, I could see that Ms. Mendes, a woman of a certain condition, was taken with my status. Being the general consul of Mozambique in Canada and a man of letters seemed to have made quite an impression on her, and she was very drawn to me. We did have a brief and intense affair, but the truth is that I am a married man, and I love my wife dearly. I also have no reason to think that Mr. da Gama would do to Daria what she claims he did. He is a man of high standing. And a man of letters, like me. I also cannot quite grasp, rationally or otherwise, why Daria, Ms. Mendes, would invent such a story, but then again we never really know people, even the ones we think we know quite well. We never really even get to fully know ourselves, and that is why Mr. Rembrandt, the famous painter we all ought to appreciate for his superb aesthetic and deep concern for ontology, kept creating caricatures of his own self and caricatures of others, whether he was on commission or not. It was as if he suffered from an incessant, deep-seated obsession with the person he carried in himself and all the persons humans carry in themselves. These persons are always trying to fully emerge at the window, to have real conversations with the street passersby, but they are only able to peek through sporadically, when we, the observers, are the most distracted. And so Rembrandt never found what he was after, the real portrait; he always ended up with a caricature.

  His sentences were long and difficult to follow, as if he himself were emulating Rembrandt’s art, as if both, in their attempts to find truth and meaning, were only able to remind us that there is nothing but mystery and doubt. Mystery and doubt. And very long sentences, attempts to crack the code. He was being mimetic, parallel to the other soul, the soul of the artist. He wanted everything—the sun and what is beyond the sun—because life on this earth can be so lonely. He was a cad. Men are cads. They want the prodigious rivers between women’s legs, where the world is born. They are eternal eaters of the sacred.

  Abassi and Francisco. Ms. Bollatti, can you believe that Abassi knew Francisco quite well? Can you believe that Abassi was in fact Francisco’s therapist, the one who was working on The Collectivity Systems in Pre-colonial Africa, the one who eventually came to the realization that he had to fire his entire dissertation committee because they were not getting his point? Can you believe that when I met Abassi, he already knew who I was but did not tell me? Can you believe that? And I gave myself to him fully, still trying to recover Francisco, to make up for whatever harm I may have caused him. And for what? Another vain love affair that did not amount to anything. I am still alone. I am still searching for my full self, still trying to find my home. Beautiful Daria, my finally found home. Beautiful Francisco, my finally found home. Beautiful Abassi, my finally found home. Daria, Abassi, Francisco. Francisco, Daria, Abassi.

 
THE NANNIES AND ME. I am going to the park with Albert and Justin, the children. I am wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and I am fully aware of my thighs. In Portugal, my mother would call me names every time I wore shorts like these—and every time I wore a sleeveless shirt. The same would happen if I bent down and she could see my back because the shirt was too short, even though it was far from being a midriff. I would look at my mother and her big swelling body, the protruding varicose veins ready to burst into blood and inundate the world with more pain and suffering, and I would say to myself: My body will never become my mother’s body. Never. I am going to tame it into order. I am going to prevent it from becoming out of control, occupying more space than it ought to occupy, making itself fully visible to the passersby, too visible, as if there is nothing else in the world to stare at other than a woman’s body. I would look at my mother and the long line of children that she had, and I would repeat to myself: My body will be mine first, first and foremost, and then I will give it to others, to men, to children, to the world. Only after I am satisfied with it and have spent enough time alone with it to get tired of myself will I share it, will I open it to men, to children, to the world. I would listen to her and her mother, my darling grandmother, I would listen to them telling their stories and those of others like them, and I would pray in my head to solidify my conviction: My body is my own, first and foremost. I listened to them, I listened, and I saw them, their bodies, their wrinkled hands and their twisted arthritic fingers and toes, and when I had listened and seen enough, I ran away. I took a plane to the other side of the world, crossing the Atlantic on that February day, afraid but exhilarated. The cold of the winter made my body recoil, taming it into an order that I had devised, dreamed up out of need or sickness, a sickness that comes not from the body itself but from a truly polluted place. For isn’t the body born naked and beautiful? I got out of the plane, and I felt the biting Canadian frost on my starved body, a body that had been expelling food voraciously for a few years now, as if I were trying to get rid of my mother’s own body and her mother’s body, lines and lines of swollen women. I knew I carried their bodies in my own, dragging them with me like weights that I could not leave behind, implacable currents preventing me from walking the free walk, from running to the sun or to the peak of the hill. The weight of their bodies stops me from doing somersaults like I do in my dreams, when the thieves are not after me and I sense that the world is all mine, that it is all there to hug me and allow me a dance in midair, akin to my soul, akin to my full self, reaching for the gods with a small g.