Chronicle of the Murdered House

by Lúcio Cardoso

  You know what happened after that. I don’t want to describe here all the difficulties I experienced at the time, a time when I often felt completely lost. (And I would have been, had someone not said to me: “Nina, let us make a pact. The power of the Meneses is a terrible thing.”) And when, exhausted, I finally decided to leave the Chácara, you were the only one I could turn to. It was raining, and, standing there on the deserted platform, I thought for a moment that you had perhaps not received my letter. How I suffered during those long seconds—an accumulation of years of hopeless suffering—thinking I was all alone, until I saw you peering anxiously into all the carriages, looking for me. My sister-in-law Ana had come with me, and I introduced you to her as my best friend. I can still remember the look on her face. When I announced to her that I would not be going back to the Chácara and intended to make a go of life on my own in Rio, she said simply: “I know, with that friend of yours.” And the worst of it was, she said this without a hint of irony in her voice.

  We have reached the point I wanted to reach, Colonel. Having fulfilled her mission, which was to take my son away with her, Ana left for the Chácara. Alone and utterly lost, there was nothing then that I would not have promised you—or not in so many words, because nothing was ever said, only silences, unspoken agreements. I know that, later on, you said that by refusing nothing, I had tacitly accepted everything. And it’s true, I did accept your proffered hand, but how could I have done otherwise? I knew what your feelings were and, knowing that, I could not have failed to be aware that I was committing myself to repaying your kindness in some other way. Yes, maybe I was fickle and frivolous, but I was never cruel on purpose. I think I’m right in saying that it was around this time that I fell ill and seriously considered taking my own life. The image is still clear in my mind: me sitting in an armchair, you standing by the window. We said nothing and just let time pass. You would occasionally offer me a glass of water or some other drink. You would suggest cooking something, or else warming up some tea long forgotten in the pot, or bring me some biscuits. And one afternoon, unable to bear it any longer, I ran away. I returned in the early hours, extremely drunk, my hair all over the place, and collapsed onto the bed, retching. And without a word, you took care of me as if I were a child. And I liked that. Other similar nights followed, and I never heard an angry word from you. On the contrary, it was as though caring for me brought you a certain peace of mind, as if playing the part of angel of mercy suited certain aspects of your nature. It was probably my fault that we never went any further than that, but then again, you never made any attempt to get closer. Once you had administered your help, you would simply observe me from afar, and that made my blood boil. I have always found indecisive men infuriating, indeed, I think that was the main reason for the failure of my marriage. (Because there’s no point in hiding the fact that our marriage did fail, and not just once, but twice. And the reason it failed was because I felt he succumbed too easily to his family’s narrow-minded spirit, which appeared to be far more important than me, and to exert a far stronger influence. When Valdo had a chance to leave the Chácara and make a new life at my side, he chose to go in the opposite direction and made a ridiculous suicide attempt.) Your relationship with me, as I’m sure you would agree, was limited to you giving me gifts and flowers, which, while it was clear proof of great constancy, went no further than that. You occasionally lent me large sums of money, and I know that, in exchange for such fundamental favors, I could have broken the ice myself and embraced you or kissed you, thus occasionally showing myself capable of an enthusiastic display of gratitude. For some reason, though, your presence always made me feel strangely cold. Often when I was with other people, having fun, laughing, telling stories—in short, giving every appearance of being happy—you only had to enter the room for the smile to vanish from my face, my enthusiasm to die, and I would start to complain of headaches, a lack of air, and a thousand and one other imaginary ailments. One night, I even said to you: “I can’t stand the sight of your face. I don’t even like you.” We were in a bar, surrounded by other people, celebrating some anniversary or other. You said nothing, but looked desperately around you, finally fixing your gaze on the stained tablecloth. Then, unable to contain my irritation any longer, I said: “What are you looking at? What are you waiting for?” And when you continued to sit there, head bowed, I added: “Get out of my sight—now.” But you didn’t dare to move, as if you were nailed to the floor. I waited one, even two minutes, and all around us absolute silence reigned. Finally, I found the courage to get up and throw the contents of my glass in your face. The wine dripped slowly down over your white shirt, like a huge bloodstain. Only then did you turn and almost run out of the bar. (Forgive me: we never hurt those about whom we care nothing, only those who, for one reason or another, touch our hearts most deeply.)

  For a few days, I was free of your presence, but eventually you came back, your coat over your arm, two pools of water in the spot where you were standing. “What are you doing here?” I screamed. You merely smiled, having completely forgiven me.

  As I say, it was sheer cussedness on my part. If I was happy, I would try to conceal the fact. If I was sad, I would pretend to be even sadder than I was. I disliked the aftershave you used, which had a musty smell about it, your brusque, cutting manner, acquired in the barracks, your anecdotes, which I considered absurd, your tastes, which I thought vulgar. If you suggested going for a walk or to some bar or restaurant, I would immediately suggest the exact opposite, just to underline how wrong your suggestion had been. In the end, you didn’t dare suggest anything, you merely followed me meekly around, gazing at me with sad, faithful eyes. I don’t know what egotistical demon made me behave like that.

  We are nearing the end, and, besides, these recollections are pointless now. However, through them, and after so much time has passed, you will doubtless have learned who I really am: a foolish, volatile creature, whose cries of feigned pleasure sometimes became mixed up with the genuine sort. Be assured, Colonel, despite everything you saw and everything that happened, the only feelings in my heart for you were ones of affection and gratitude; I would embrace you now, fall at your feet, kill myself, if you asked me to. Do you doubt me? Then all I can say is that much of what happened already carried within it the seeds of this letter. Sooner or later, you would have understood the true nature of my feelings.

  The day has come, Colonel. Here I am, stripped of all artifice. I know full well that without your help I would have perished. And perhaps what irritated me so much was knowing how important you were, how irreplaceable, but I promised myself long ago that I would, at some point, tell you everything. It would coincide with the moment when, once again, I said: I’ve had enough. I have no one to turn to. The walls of this house are pressing in on me. Your help is even more precious now, and this might well be the last time I come knocking at your door. Does it surprise you to hear me talking like this? Don’t worry, I’m not considering suicide again. No. You cannot imagine how ardently I cling to life, yes, me, the one who once tried to flee from it for the stupidest of reasons, and yet now I feel its worth, minute by minute, and I grow pale and tremble just to imagine that one day I will be cut off from its light. Yet despite this sudden rapture of mine, I sense that my days are numbered and that the time is fast approaching when I will have to pay my debts. (I see you smiling and murmuring: “She never changes” and recalling other conversations in which I also talked of death and repentance.) But, Colonel, we never really invent anything, we merely anticipate a scene that we will later be obliged to play for real. And I feel that my role would lack veracity if I did not settle accounts with certain people—you being the first among those.

  This letter, then, is a declaration. I find myself suddenly free to speak. For once in my life, Colonel, I want to show you that I do know what love is. At the time, I was a child and could not return the fire of your passion. Let my hand not tremble when I dare to write that word and let it not
awaken in your heart some very cruel memories. Let us be simple and human within our own very human limitations, and let us try to do right after so many years of doing wrong, convinced that we can enjoy another kind of happiness in completing, in our maturer years, something we tried in vain to throw away during our less enlightened youth. I swear that you will find in me the seed that, while it did not germinate at the time, has since borne fruit a thousandfold. And in quite a different way from anything you might have imagined, I will be yours, entirely yours, and so definitively that, for as long as you live, the memory of me will be the one thing to illumine your thoughts.

  36.

  André’s Diary (vi)

  Undated – Something incomprehensible is happening between us, because I feel we are different somehow. I’ve been aware of this for some days now: firstly, there is a certain lassitude and a vagueness when she speaks, as if she wasn’t very interested in what she has to say, and was only speaking because she felt obliged to; secondly, there’s a genuine absence of anything to say, a silence interspersed with sighs, a lack of energy which is not like her at all. Others might not notice these changes, or might attribute them to a momentary indisposition, but I am so used to observing her every mood that I can spot the slightest alteration. And I confess that I tremble, not knowing what to do—could she have grown tired of me? The usual confidences and promises and smiles have all vanished, as have the secret, knowing signals made behind other people’s backs, a way of facing down the danger and, at the same time, providing proof of our closeness. Her usual mocking self has disappeared or is disappearing; even when she’s with me, she seems preoccupied, almost sad, her thoughts always elsewhere. One evening, I came across her in the hallway, reading a letter. “What’s that?” I asked, but she said only: “Oh, it’s nothing.” I stood in front of her to stop her going into the drawing room. “You’ve changed,” I said. She pulled an angry face: “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Not far off, a door slammed, and, afraid that someone might be coming, I blurted out: “I want to see that letter.” She said bluntly: “Never.” I moved toward her, intending to snatch the letter from her, but she pushed me out of way: “You’re such a child.” And she walked past me into the drawing room. Left alone, I was filled with spiteful rage and, in revenge, I decided not to appear at supper that evening and locked myself in my room. Betty came and knocked on my door. “I don’t want any supper,” I told her. “Is something wrong?” she asked. “No!” I roared. But I spent the whole of suppertime in my room, with the lights out, my ear pressed to the wall, trying to hear what was going on in there. How it pained me not to be at the table. She had said the same thing to me on other occasions—“you’re such a child”—but always in an affectionate way, so affectionately that, up until that evening, when she had spoken those same words with such evident anger, I had felt that the fact of my being a child was what most interested her about me—not that I had ever paid much heed to this possibility. Coming away from the wall, through which I could hear only a confused murmur of conversation and the clink of cutlery, I reminded myself that I had often been told how capricious and unpredictable women can be. Perhaps she was going through one of those phases. And I thought sadly that I should give her a rest, avoid her, make myself conspicuous not by my constant, solicitous presence, but by my absence. I swore that I would adopt this plan of action—because humans are limited beings and tire of everything, even love—and I even came to idealize the days that I would spend away from her side and what I would do in the meantime. My rifles had grown rusty and urgently needed cleaning. I could even go into town and see what was in the shops and buy a book or two. These thoughts, however, lasted only a moment, and reality immediately regained its hold on me; and yet, anxiously going over in my mind everything that had happened recently, I could still find no explanation for the present situation. A thousand possibilities occurred to me, including that of a definitive rupture between us, a return to square one, motivated by fatigue or by late-flowering feelings of remorse. Then I recovered and invented all kinds of reasons that would redeem her for her behavior. After all, she was under no obligation to show me any letters she received. Could I not control my jealousy and realize that my loving her did not mean that she belonged to me body and soul? I went further, imagining that the crisis was already over and that she was waiting for me, possibly ready to explain herself. Borne along on that thought, I left my room and began wandering about the house, in the hope of finding her. That, at least, had the merit of partially salvaging my dignity: if I saw her, it would seem like an accidental encounter and not a deliberate ploy on my part. Immersed in its customary stillness, the house revealed nothing to me, afforded me no explanation. How vast and useless those rooms seemed! Heavens, the things men invented! The very walls seemed impregnated with a habitual, everyday life that felt quite alien. I went over to the verandah and lay down in the hammock and swung gently back and forth, gazing up at the star-filled sky. A single milky stripe traversed the heavens from side to side. A smudge of red on the horizon suggested that summer was on its way. I imagined that, in years to come, that same sky would shine just as brilliantly, and she would perhaps no longer be at my side; a sharp pain pierced my heart then, and I told myself that she had no idea how much I truly loved her. I forgot everything else, who she was, what she had been, what she represented for me and for others, in order to concentrate solely on the extraordinary times we were living through. Losing her would be like losing the light of the world. And however hard I tried to remember the person I had been before she appeared in my life, I could come up with nothing real or substantial, only an obscure, will-less individual. She had created me, given me the power to analyze things, to say what I liked and didn’t like; she had given me my identity, making me a man capable of despising anything that did not contribute directly to increasing or clarifying the feelings that inhabited me. The hammock creaked on its hinges as I tried to recall certain particularly charming details—her satin skin, her way of laughing, the inimitable curve of her breasts—and I did so slowly and with infinite care, so that those details did not become distorted or contaminated by images created by my own imagination, and I asked myself, although without receiving a satisfactory answer, if all women were as strange and perfect as her. There was about her something so special, so mysterious, something that made her utterly different from any other woman I could possibly imagine. No other woman had that firm, velvety skin, the subcutaneous light that seemed to illumine her from within, and which had so often made me think of her as a star glowing softly and serenely in the dark. I was always astonished by her lack of modesty—she would happily stand naked before me, with the ease and aplomb of an animal accustomed to a life free of malice or sin. Then there was the way she walked, swaying her hips, confident of her own grace and femininity. I remembered other details too: on one of our encounters in the cellar, I had found her already undressed, lying face down on the straw mattress. She did not just lie down, as others might do, she literally embraced the mattress, surrendering to it, as if wanting to become one with its old and rather musty stuffing. There was nothing superficial about any of her actions, she did everything wholeheartedly, with a passion that was a guarantee of the depth of her impulses, a passion that lent dignity to the way she chose to live her life. For a moment, holding my breath as if afraid I might wake her, I contemplated those magnificently free curves. In the end, though, I went over to her, and she, pretending to be asleep, closed her eyes, which was another way of offering herself up to my gaze.

  So powerful and incisive is the effect of her presence that I feel close to her even when she isn’t with me; I walk, and my steps seem to correspond to a hidden music that binds us together, and then I know that she belongs to me, as I do to her, and that this is a law no power on earth could ever take away from us. Ah, how strong and powerful we were in our love! And yet, oddly, I cannot describe her as “that woman,” still less as “my mother.” She is neither one thing nor the other.
She is neither a woman who exists outside of me, who can be designated as “this one” or “that,” nor the woman who gave birth to me, nourishing me with her blood and her sap. Perhaps I could never feel so closely identified with any other woman. We are not different people, that is the reason, we are one and the same. (Because the god of love is a hermaphrodite god—by bringing together two different sexes in one creation, he created the image of a wise and knowledgeable being, which, in its duality, is the paradigm of perfection.) Woman and mother, what other hybrid being could better contain the force of our feelings? Loving her means becoming easily, seamlessly reunited with the person I was. It’s a return to my country of origin. Loving her as a man, I feel that I cease to be myself in order to complete the whole being we must have been before I was born. There can be no shame in this urge to be conjoined, because there’s nothing immoral about it. When she isn’t there or seems bored with me, I feel as if a part of me had been stolen from me, I feel lacking, incomplete. A whole part of myself is left blind. The stars could plummet from the sky, and the colors of nature promise entirely new seasons, and my eyes would be oblivious to such phenomena. That is why I feel my way about the house, touching the objects around me and failing to recognize them, like a man who has lost his own shadow.