Daria

by Irene Marques

  I am twenty years old. It is a sunny spring day in Richmond Hill, and I am fascinated by the intensity with which the spring arrives in this country. I am in awe and think that just the other day it was white with the winter snow and today it is all sun, April, and green. I see this intense green everywhere, bursting out of this earth that has been gelid for months, refusing to give birth, shrinking its body into a discreet nothingness. The earth has been gelid and dormant and dark, sleeping the long sleep, but is now suddenly ready to ejaculate life into the planet on this side of the Northern Hemisphere, where the Indians who are not Indians have lived since time immemorial, these shamans of other times dancing in smoke. (Or at least, those are the Indians many of us have in mind, which may not correspond to the real ones who pass us on the street, whom we do not recognize.) On the other side of the world, things were much slower. It started in February, little by little, a bud here, a flower there, a leaf here, a sprout there. But here the intensity astounds me. It is as if the earth is too fertile and the sun too potent, penetrating her, its sperm impatient to create instant life everywhere. A tropical north, luscious and unbounded. I observe the shrubs, the leaves, and the flowers around me and touch them too to determine whether they are like the ones I am familiar with on the other side of the ocean. I look for something that I know as the kids—Albert and Justin, three and four respectively—ride their tricycles in front of me, screaming in bursts of happiness, like children ought to do. I am twenty years old. They speak to me and show me the trees on the side of the road and the lush purple flowers that I have never seen before. I can’t name them, even though I think they are somehow close to me and must surely have a Latin name, like all plants seem to. It is as if, when it comes to plants, humans all speak the same language; whether we are Inuit or Greek, Syrian or Sudanese, our tongues and souls understand the same sounds. It is as if we are all akin to one another, daughters of the same current, sons of the same molecule: the yes that said yes to another yes. But I am only twenty years old. I may not yet know the full story. I may not yet know the true full story of this continent, where Amerigo Vespucci arrived centuries ago. He named it after his own name, his own garden, for he brought with him his own dictionary, full of arrogant adjectives and verbs and nouns. He had been ready to teach his religion, like his ancestors had when they went to Iberia and built beautiful arched bridges and aqueducts, when they had killed the pagan Lusitanian gods—or at least sent them into hiding.

  They, Albert and Justin, speak in their beautiful, childish way, helping me improve my English. We become three children learning how to pronounce the syllables of the English language, feeling its pauses, its running or lazy vowels and consonants. We learn to speak so that the world around us will understand us and respond to the needs of our souls and bodies, so that it will allow us to mature and become older fulfilled beings, with no regrets, because we were loved and cared for. Beings who, at the hour of the scorpion, will truly feel that they’ve made friends and that life has been good. At home, we sing and dance to “Yellow Submarine” around the living room. I try to become excited, joining them in this dance, jumping up and down in freedom, for even though I am not a good dancer, I feel no judgment from them. I suddenly allow my body, my thighs, to move like freed, happy butterflies. I dance with them in frantic excitement after our communal meal, and after I eject mine into the toilet bowl, sending it down the drain to feed the worms and Pluto, the greedy god of the underworld, who is tormenting my soul and eating me alive. Sometimes Albert, the little one, follows me into the bathroom and catches me in the act. He asks me if I am sick, his worried, slanted eyes afflicted by my gasps—a child attempting to take care of another child. Like a hypocritical criminal stealing food from the Ethiopian children, whose eyes are larger than the moon and whose bellies are rounder than the globe, I tell him that, yes, I am sick, my stomach is not happy with the food I ate. He asks me if I need mickie and cokes, milk and cookies, to feed my body and soul, to feel better so that we can go to the park and play on the swings again, flying our legs in midair, feeling the sunlight shine on our bones, staring at the incandescent marvel that is the spring—the spring with its incendiary green of tropical lushness.

  They ride in front of me, and I look at my thighs now and then. We pass house after house, all like one another. Large, green, tidy lawns. Everything is contained. And the sidewalks are new and wide as if they were just built yesterday, as if this land has space to give and sell and everyone has access to it. The suburbs are dead on this spring day, and I see only a couple of people here and there, mowing the lawn or doing something else they could not have done in the heights of the winter when the cold cuts across your bones. I am twenty years old. I look at my thighs, obsessed as I am with those of my mother and her own mother. Even though they are on the other side of the Atlantic, one still standing and the other rotting inside the coffin in the cemetery of Almores, they walk with me here on this side. They are here with me on this spring day, when I ought to dance with the sun freely and lift my body in lightness, gay with drunkenness, like a stunning butterfly that can carry its wings to the stratosphere and beyond to intermingle with stardust and lost broken comets.

  When we reach the park, the children push me to the swing, eager as they are to experience the somersault they have been trying to keep in since they got up this morning at six o’clock and jumped onto my bed screaming, “Daya, my cereal, Daya, I’m hungie.” I am twenty years old and I want to sleep in. I was never a morning person. I ignore them as they jump up and down on my bed, but eventually I cannot be oblivious to my duty. Carolina, their mother, who is a nurse, came to this country when she was sixteen years old. She worked hard, very hard. She did what she had to do to make it. She first worked as a cleaning lady and then moved up. She worked very hard to be able to leave behind the old granite house without running water back in Portugal, to start anew here in this spacious house built for her and her family, built out of the newest and most modern material, with a sink and running sparkling water. And a bathroom to cleanse the tired body at day’s end. A ticket of a lifetime, she thought, like I thought too, when we had both left those villages on top of the mountains, those villages that seemed stopped in time, stuck in the Middle Ages, frozen by the ambitious adventures of Salazar. She then married a Russian engineer. They made a good life together: a big house in the suburbs, two kids, and a nanny brought directly from Portugal just to take care of them. Back in Portugal, she had gone to school with my older sisters, as I did with her younger siblings. Both of us came from large, poor families, and our parents had helped one another many times, borrowing cows from each other to carry loads of this or that when it was time to harvest hay or corn or grapes. I remember a line of cow carts directed by many men that went on for many kilometres. I remember this long line of carts pulled by cows and the cows being guided by the men. I remember how my father would spend days in his forja preparing the wheels before events like these, a blacksmith sweating with pride, pounding heavily on burning red metal. I would watch, fascinated with his abilities, stunned by the hard metal that could turn into dripping red honey in my father’s hands, malleable like water, adjusting to the dreams of humans. I remember the musical symphony that the carts made. It was a collective singing, the souls of men and cows merging together to create an amicable embrace—food for the bones. A reminder that life was indeed worth living because God was always singing in the background, even if He was often mute, immersed in prolonged silences, just watching how His children made a life for themselves. These cow freight events were a show for all of us. We would watch the carts come nearer and nearer, entering the village in an order that they knew by heart. We would try to discern which cart made the unpleasant screeching noise because it was not properly cared for, properly oiled, and then we would gossip about that person who had no pride in his job. My father would boast about the clear singing of his cart and the beauty of his cows. We were in awe watching these shows, watching
carts being pulled by cows and cows being pulled by men. And then we would make fresh wine, jumping into the lagar ourselves and smashing the grapes with our own feet. And in the winter, when the snow covered Almores and its surroundings—leaving us inside a white, lonely, and recondite sanctuary—we fed the cows and the sheep and the goats with that fresh hay that had been carried by the cows in these carts, the carts pulled by cows, cows led by men. And then we witnessed the births of little calves and sheep and goats: the prodigious and the sublime right before our astonished eyes.

  At the park, I see all the Filipina nannies with their blondish white children. When I first started going to the park, I did not quite know that these women were the nannies and that the children were not their own. I was in a new country where all kinds of people lived together, made babies together, and so it did not cross my mind that these women and these children did not share the same bloodline. Later on, I came to understand the matter much better. I came to see that these women, like me, had come from far away to reach their own dreams and get away from their own stories, that many of them had left their own children in their home country and would not see them until much later, when they were eventually able to bring them over here for a full piece of the Canadian dream. I was shy around them. They seemed to be so sure about themselves and so nice to the children: patient, always smiling. Tender. They seemed to be fashionable and thin. I would look at them and then at my thighs and feel like I was not pretty. They were friendly with me, but they remained distant for reasons that I could not quite understand. One day, one of them, Raquel, came to me and introduced herself. We became friends and went out a few times. She then told me that when she first saw me, she asked herself “Who is that beautiful European woman who comes here every day?” When she told me that I was surprised, surprised that she would think I was beautiful, surprised that she would think of me as European because mostly I thought of myself as Portuguese. She was surprised herself to discover that I was not the mother or the blood relative of the children but rather the nanny. The nanny. Just like her. Sometime later, she told me she had called at the house where I worked and asked for me only to be told by the house mistress that I was not there and not to call again. I was surprised that Carolina—the woman I worked for who went to school with my older sisters, whose siblings I went to school with, and who had come from the same mountains I did—would do something like that. Raquel said she likely had done so because she knew that the Filipina nannies had formed an organization to fight for the rights of all foreign live-in nannies, and she did not want me to be part of it because then I would demand to be treated with respect, I would know I had rights. I was not sure whom and what to believe, and I found the situation very odd, especially because when I told Carolina the story, she said this Filipina woman was an impostor and probably a lesbian who liked me and was trying to start a feud of some sort in the hopes of getting into my underpants. I left my nanny work after five months and never saw Raquel or Carolina again, so I could never find out who was telling the truth and who was lying. And then many other things happened to me.

  OF PSYCHICS, SEASONS, AND OTHER DOCTORS. The other day I watched a show on TV that addressed the strange, obsessive habit that many women have of going to female psychics to ask for counsel instead of going to real therapists, professionally trained people who are well versed in the science of the human mind and behaviour. They usually end up being robbed of thousands of dollars and not cured of their illness. Unable to stop their actions and the need to consult these charlatans, the women seeking help become addicted to their advice, falling victim to their scams and developing yet another type of obsessive compulsive disorder. One of the women being interviewed—who went to a psychic several times a week, or sometimes every day—claimed that the reason she felt more comfortable with the psychic was because the psychic told her what to do and what would happen if she did what she told her to do, similar to that witch doctor Arsénio’s mother went to. The therapist, on the other hand, was always too detached and just sat there listening, never telling her exactly what to do. She saw no point in these encounters. The psychic acted like her friend and the therapist acted like a rigid professional who seemed to have no feelings, no thoughts, no humanity, and no desire to help her client. She seemed to be sitting erect behind her professional code. I couldn’t help but think that what this woman was saying was true, or at least partially true, for I remembered going to therapists who did not seem to be there, who withheld their views so much that I couldn’t have a conversation with them and felt no alleviation after the session. That was why I finally picked Ms. Bollatti. She had a different approach, a more direct one; she spoke her mind when she thought it necessary, since I was there for direction. I also thought, though, that the psychics of today are not like the shamans of bygone days, or the idea that I have about many of them. It occurred to me that they too, have fallen victim to the evils of capitalism. They tell you the story you want to hear because they want to profit. The message then is that we ought to be more careful about both the psychics and the therapists of today. And the message is also that if we had more friends, real men and women friends, we may not need to go to psychics and therapists as much as we do. And if we accepted sadness and suffering as part of being human, as part of finding one’s full humanity and true illumination, then we may be better off. We might not run to a helper each time, expecting her to fix it all for us, to take it all away, because we suffer from this delusion that life ought to be only roses and sun. Only roses and sun. And yet we all know that each season brings us new feelings, allowing us to savour the entirety of the year. We have pears in the summer and apples in the fall and persimmons in the winter—at least in some countries. Without these seasons, there would be no fruit.

  THE RUSSIAN STUDENT. He who lacks completeness and purity does not deserve to be called beautiful. My Russian student writes like this, in big grand metaphors that try to awaken your dormant self, that vein that has been tamed by rational knowledge and the silver factory toys that numb our children. I want to listen to her as much as I can when marking her assignments. I feel like she speaks from a part that is bigger than the world we live in, bigger than what it allows for. There is a battle between my professional duty, which tells me that I ought to teach her how to write clear, direct, and unflowery sentences, lines of thought that will call an apple an apple and will get her a real job in the real world, and my deeper calling, which murmurs to me, in stubborn persistence, that the true masters of the universe are those who can go beyond the silvery visible lines to reach the start of the sun and dance in the volcanic lava—the vulva of the vulva, where the word yes resides. The latter wins. The course coordinator or the dean may fire me for this. They may determine that my marking style does not adhere to the very rigid rubric they have prescribed to all of us teaching this first-year course in Rhetoric and Composition, which expects very specific outcomes in relation to the following four points: Ideas and Insights, Research, Evidence and Structure, and Style and Mechanics. We’ll keep it a secret, she and I—Daria Mendes and the Russian student. While I read her paper, I mumble to myself—she who lacks completeness and purity cannot be called beautiful—so that I do not forget.

  OF WORDS AND MEANING. Sometimes I have fights with my husband. His parents are Nigerian and strict Anglicans, but he himself grew up in London and then in the U.S. We have fights about the meaning of the word sad. When something happens to me that irritates me, contradicts my ideals, or makes me believe less in the world, myself, or others, I invariably say that I am sad. When something happens to him under what I consider to be very similar circumstances, he always says he is disappointed and then tells me in detail the reasons for his disappointment. When he is done, I say to him, “Don’t be too sad about it.” He states he is not sad but only disappointed, and then we get into a senseless long debate and heated argument about the meaning of this small word: sad. At the end of this long debate, our thoughts and explanations
have gone in so many directions that I no longer know why we are fighting and feel this heavy sense of unease. I feel that he and I share different values, that we have fundamentally different beliefs about words and what they exist for. And sometimes the feeling is so unsettling that I think divorce is the only option, for how can two souls truly meet if they use language in such different ways?