It’s August and the smell of fireworks is in the air. Somewhere, the band that will play at the dance is doing a soundcheck.
At the kitchen table, Paula takes a handful of her daughter’s hair, straightens it with a straightening iron, rests it on her daughter’s shoulder, and then picks up another. She takes her time, and these are the only gestures I see her make that aren’t impatient.
Twelve-year-old Ana has painted her nails and her eyes are made up beneath her thick brown eyebrows. The only childlike thing about her is her Hello Kitty watch. She wears a top just like her mother’s, with a wide neckline and metallic detail on the shoulder. She wears beige, her mother blue. Arm in arm, they walk down the street.
But, no, it wasn’t like that. I’m getting mixed up. It wasn’t on the night of the dance that you could smell fireworks, but the next day, when the family gathered for lunch, and there were all kinds of meat roasting over a wood fire from eight in the morning, and potatoes seasoned with savory and fresh thyme. In the closed café, the small tables had been pushed to the side and replaced with a larger one covered in a white, embroidered cloth. The family gathered inside the cool, dark café at the hottest time of day, when the light is blinding: mother, stepfather, the aunt who lived in Porto, the firefighter brother, and the emigrant brother who had traveled from Belgium. Ana was as busy as the older women, carrying trays from one side of the street to the other, from the house to the café. Luís, the youngest, barely ate. He was distracted, his eyes glued to the television and his thoughts somewhere far away, in America.
And then, looking back again, this lunch could easily be another, held two months later, on the day they harvested the grapes from Paula’s vineyard: Casimiro, her husband, grabbing beers from the freezer; the men and women who worked the harvest still drinking, as they had all morning, under the sun, which beat down mercilessly despite the calendar claiming fall had arrived. They spoke of the longevity of trees. They spoke of the long list of medicines taken by their respective husbands and wives who would not live as long as the trees. At that lunch, Paula barely ate; she’d recently been to the dentist – the culmination of a series of tooth extractions required by her chemotherapy – and the anesthetic made her nauseous. She seemed even more irritable at that lunch than at the one in August, when her husband, children, and siblings had all been around and she’d had no time for herself, and had focused every minute on being alive.
Then there was the lunch by the river, after a fishing contest, where we ate bean stew, and the money collected for food and drink was set aside for the festival thrown in August in honor of Our Lady of Good Health, the village’s patron saint. It was June, and hot for spring. Paula wore a sun hat and spoke of the river and of village life. It was only when she became annoyed with her youngest son, who kept running about too close to the water, or with her husband, because of some harmless gesture he made, that the effort in her happiness became noticeable.
That was the day Paula introduced me to her husband and children, the day she showed me the family café, open now only to friends, and the village. Peredo da Bemposta was at the end of a very long road – a good twenty minutes from the highway that connects Mogadouro to Miranda do Douro – and it was on the drive home from Peredo that I realized it is impossible to travel to the end of the world without wanting to go back there. I would want to go back over and over because time and again I would want to recover what, in my world (the center?), seemed to have been lost: a certain way of demonstrating love.
That Sunday went by quickly. Before I returned to Miranda do Douro, we stopped at Algosinho, the village next to Peredo, where Casimiro was born. We stopped there to visit a church that is a kind of stone palimpsest: the Star of David beneath the Cross of Christ.
Nearby stand the graves the villagers claim date from the time of the Moors, sculpted in the shape of the bodies underneath: two graves side by side – for a couple – and a smaller grave a few feet away, the size of a child no more than two years old. It was strange being there with that family, contemplating the graves of another family from another, distant century like they would any other monument, as if death were just a spectacle, something that happens to other people – or rather, something very ancient.
I left with the sunset in the rear-view mirror, as Paula and her family drove away in another car along another road. I think it was on that day, or perhaps the next, when, unable to stop thinking of that couple’s grave, I decided to patch things up with my partner.
I went back there in the autumn, on the day of Paula and Casimiro’s grape harvest, around seven in the morning, and I parked the car next to the church with the Star of David. There was nothing but the sound of dogs barking and a few birds singing. I was alone, and yet I was never alone anymore now that there was another life growing inside me. I watched the sunrise throw the land into light, a daily, perhaps even trivial, sight, but one that just then seemed to me unique. This is what we humans are like. After watching the universe materialize as if I were the only person in the world, I fell asleep, and then woke up again, the sun high and the harvested grapes in their baskets.
But it is in August that Paula attends the procession. Her daughter, dressed for the occasion, follows her at a distance, almost as if watching over her, one hand holding on to one of the purple ribbons attached to the figure of Christ being carried solemnly along the village streets. Her husband, in his Sunday best, follows the procession from afar, smoking heavily. From the windows, beautiful bright drapes and immaculate white curtains stream down the walls. The priest’s voice echoes through the loudspeakers and the village, preaching that parents must look after their children so that later on their children might look after them. ‘God be with us. Amen.’
Paula walks barefoot over the hot and dusty August street. She has delicate feet, long and thin, and her toenails are painted. The procession continues up the last street and ends at the small chapel by the graveyard with the best view in the village: seen from here, the land seems to run on like time itself.
In the chapel there is only enough room for the Christ figure and for a couple of benches, where Paula now sits. Ana kneels down and helps her mother put on her shoes. They don’t speak. Their eyes aren’t wet with tears. Their expressions don’t change.
And it was there, by the chapel, when the procession was finished and the vows made, that the men launched the fireworks, painting the clear August sky with fleeting clouds that concealed small, contented, finite gods.
The dance, then, had actually been the night before the procession, the night before hope. The lights that bounced off the stage swept the tarmac while the younger children chased the white, red, and blue spots. The speakers, distorting the music, made even our bones quiver, and the singer changed her costume as often as if she were in a 1950s vaudeville show.
Mother and daughter danced in their identical tops without looking each other in the eyes. They twirled around one another, neither shy nor brazen. They danced as if they spent every night on a dance floor, as if each knew with absolute certainty that she would hold the other in her arms forever. As if it weren’t August and as if August, especially this August, weren’t flying by far too quickly.
Later, August had come and gone. Paula seemed thinner in the face, wearier, yet also more serene. In their house in the town, Mogadouro, where the family spends the school year, Ana did her homework in her room, decorated on one side with Hello Kittys and on the other, Luís’s side, with Spidermen. Paula, alone in the living room, the tv on in the background, did not wrinkle her nose, nor were there creases around her closed mouth. Her face, now relaxed, revealed how wounded she was.
I thought of the bullfights at the festival in Trás-os-Montes in August, of how the bulls fought, of how the more they suffered, the fiercer they were, wowing the crowd with their apparent invincibility – dying in the arena they are, at least briefly, immortal.
Whenever I try to remember Paula’s face, I see it as it was in August, with the obstinate expression of one who refuses to accept defeat. Even now, when I think of her, I always think of August and I believe I’ll think of her every August, and of her village, beating like a fragile heart.
Night is falling by the time Luís comes home from school. He scatters his notebooks on the living-room table and shows his grades to his mother, who scolds him for his poor marks. Not long after, Casimiro comes home from work. Ana, who is still doing her homework in her room, doesn’t come down. Casimiro takes a beer from the fridge. Paula sets the table and finds something to talk about, as if for her the day had been very eventful. Whenever there’s a lull in the conversation, Paula glances at the muted television and Casimiro lowers his eyes to his beer. They can hear the ticking of the wall clock painted with two skyscrapers lit up in the night.
this summer I let everything go: I spent time with my family – with my husband and my kids – and I didn’t feel a thing, I mean, sure, sometimes I’d be in a bit of pain, so I’d take something, ’cause the pain was in my bones, and your body can feel the lack of chemo, but I just gritted my teeth, and even then… it was like there was nothing wrong with me, and now it’s hard to start the chemo again, but if that’s what I’ve gotta do… ’cause they can’t make any guarantees, even if you do get your treatment it’s still there inside you, they can’t guarantee it won’t come back, but it’s something, I guess. It’s like everyone says, if you do the chemo then even if it does come back, it won’t be as bad, but if you don’t get any treatment at all, it might come galloping back even harder
life changes completely from one day to the next, and that’s when you realize that there’s no use fighting wars, there’s no use getting annoyed – life’s too short – and it changed my way of thinking, my way of being… now I live more for my children, I pay closer attention to what people tell me, everything’s different now, I try to make the most of things, to have more fun, and, sure, I used to be more cheerful, but back then I had my whole life ahead of me… not anymore though, now I know I’m sick, I know I might have another two or three years left, or maybe just a few months, and so I’m trying to take life one day at a time, I’m trying to give the best of myself to my husband, to my children, ’cause I want to make my kids as happy as I can, for as long as I can
I don’t like sitting still, I want to be out doing things and I know I can’t, it’s so frustrating… we used to own this café in the village, it was my mom’s, but then we had to close it… I met my husband at that café… She bought it when I was eighteen years old and that’s where we met and where we started dating, we dated for a whole six years before we got married, I was twenty-four and he was twenty-six… I’d had boyfriends before, I wasn’t the sort to just watch life go by, and I dated this one boy my mom really liked… me and my husband, we dated in secret – our moms didn’t want us seeing each other so that’s why we dated for so long, although then we broke up and I got back together with the other guy for a bit, but finally I ended up with Casimiro… that other boy really liked me – he liked me so much that even when I was handing out wedding invitations, he went and he talked to my mom and he told her not to let me get married ’cause he was the one I was supposed to marry… he’s in Lisbon now, he’s a police officer, and I guess love really is blind, because he was richer, but I was in love with Casimiro, so what could I do? We were married for three years before we had children, we’d go to all these parties, I had all the fun I’d missed out on when I was single, then Ana was born and we didn’t have Luís until five years later, ’cause we had all the time in the world, we had all the time in the world ahead of us and we weren’t in a hurry to do anything at all
it was an adventure, it really was – I was sixteen, and four of us girls went away to Macau, one of them was my husband’s sister, but I didn’t know my husband back then, I’d only seen him around… they wanted to open a restaurant out there and this cousin of mine, who was a priest in Macau, he said he’d get hold of four girls from here to take over there – I didn’t even think twice about it, all I wanted was to go and my mom let me, so I went… I really liked Macau, it’s somewhere I’d go back to, it’s a seventeen-hour trip so we stopped in Frankfurt to switch planes and we couldn’t really speak the language, we didn’t know anything at all, but luckily we met this woman who was going to Macau too, to meet her husband who was a vet over there, and she helped us get there, that’s the kind of adventure it was… later that woman moved from Macau to Porto, and when I was sick I found out she was a volunteer at the oncology hospital in Porto, she pushes the tea cart… we go years without seeing each other and then that’s where we end up meeting… in Hong Kong we took a boat to Macau and the four of us shared an apartment there, but then the restaurant didn’t work out… it was so great out there, though, I can’t even describe it, I loved everything about it – that’s where I tried Chinese food for the first time, and we traveled, the priest took us traveling to China, to Thailand – in Thailand, we visited this really tall hotel that had this area where you could sit at a table and just watch, and then, after a little while, you were suddenly looking at something else, another view, it was great, really great, even though the Chinese were dirt poor, it wasn’t as bad in Macau – they ate rice with every meal there and sometimes I ate with them, but I used a knife and fork… I was sorry to leave, but I had to… I missed home, sure, but when you’re that age you barely feel it, you just want to go out all the time and that’s it. Those days, talking on the phone was a luxury, so we’d write lots of letters and send photos, I have a lot of photos from back then… I wish I’d traveled more, but who’s got the money? Nobody we knew had the money for that kind of thing
my stepdad is like a father to me, his first wife died of the same thing I have and I think he’s hurting as if he was my own dad… when he was sick just now, when he was in a coma, they told me I could go see him and so I did and when I sat next to him, it was… because we’re real close it was disturbing to see him like that… the nurse asked if I was ok and I said, sure I am, except then I started crying, I said I am, but I won’t come see him again while he’s like this and she said, but you can hold his hand, you can talk to him, so I held his hand and I talked to him, but he didn’t react, he just lay there… when he woke up from his coma and came home he told me what I’d said: so, honey, I guess you didn’t want to see me, he said, and I said, what do you mean I didn’t want to see you? I did want to see you and I went and I saw you… then he said, the first time you visited you told the nurse, I won’t come see him again while he’s like this, and you started crying… and I asked, oh, who told you, and he said no one told me, I heard it, like I heard it when you were holding my hand and you said Claudino, Claudino don’t leave me, I’ve already lost one father, I can’t lose another
I lost my dad seventeen years ago, I’m forty now so I would’ve been twenty-three then, he died very suddenly – a heart attack – it was totally unexpected, he’d never been sick, he’d always been so healthy, but one day when he was getting out of bed, he just keeled over and that was it
I had the operation on July 23, 2008, I was thirty-seven years old… my son was turning four on July 28 and I was in the hospital, the poor boy… my kids, they wanted to come see me in the hospital, and I wanted to see them, too, but I was plugged into a serum drip and into all these machines and I asked them to take it all out, so that at least they wouldn’t have to see me like that, plugged in, and the nurses took it all out, and the kids came, and their mom was lying in bed and she couldn’t move, but at least they didn’t have to see all those machines plugged into me
they only found the tumor when I was on the operating table… I’d been admitted to the hospital for a minor appendix operation, I was in a lot of pain, but they thought it was my appendix, and the doctor said, it’s a minor operation – so minor I woke up in the middle of it and they had to give me more anesthetic and the whole thing lasted six hours… I had it done in Bragança, and the doctor who operated on me died two days later, something about a plane crash and the doctor just disappeared – they never found the body, it was all anyone talked about back then… they even said that the doctor had planned it himself ’cause he’d been having some personal problems and he’d wanted to disappear, and they never did find the body… he was the one who had started operating on me first, but then, when he found more than he’d bargained for he called in someone else ’cause he couldn’t do it all on his own, and when he was explaining what was going on to the other doctor, this Spanish doctor, that’s when I woke up, and I heard him telling him how it was supposed to be a minor appendix operation, but it was more complicated now, he said, she’s got a tumor, and the tumor’s been punctured, we’ve got a lot of work to do, but then maybe I moved, I’m not sure, I just know that he said, quick, quick the patient’s waking up, the anesthetic’s wearing off, we’ve got to give her more, but make it a stronger dose this time ’cause it’s more complicated now and I don’t know how long we’ll be operating for… and I heard everything… I think those must have been the worst days of my life… when I got out of surgery, my son’s godmother was there with one of my friends, they were both there and the doctor said he could only talk to family members, and they said, look, her husband is with the kids, but we’re here on his behalf, we’d like to know, and the doctor told them. He told them what was happening, but they didn’t tell me, instead my son’s godmother told me, everything’s ok, Paula, and I said, don’t tell me everything’s ok ’cause I know it’s not, I know what’s up, and she started crying, and I said, you don’t have to lie to me, I know what’s going on, and she just stood there with her mouth open, ’cause how could I know what was going on if I’d just got out of surgery? The day after the operation, the doctor came to talk to me and I said to him, tell me everything, don’t try hiding anything from me, ’cause I heard you, and he said, we still don’t know if the tumor’s malignant or if it’s benign… then they put me in the isolation ward, I was there for five days, and I wasn’t allowed any visitors, they only let me see my husband and the priest – the one who took us to Macau – and my brother, the firefighter, he came in his uniform, but apart from them I didn’t see anyone… when they let me out of isolation I was taken to a room and some nurses came with some paperwork from the oncology hospital, and they had a lot of questions for me and that’s when it really hit me, ’cause when you see the word oncology you picture it all, you imagine the worst-case scenario, all kinds of things go through your head… when they got the results, the doctor, the Spanish one, he came and told me that they had the test results, but that it was treatable, he tried to make things sound less bad: it’s treatable, he said, I got everything out, everything’s clean, I didn’t leave any of it in there, and… everything was clean in my intestines, but it’d already reached my liver by then… when you hear something like that, you think all kinds of things… why me? What did I do? You think… before this kind of thing happens, you think it’s something that happens to other people, but never to you – it’s something that happens to so-and-so, to someone else, but not to you, nothing’s ever supposed to happen to you
this kind of thing is just so terrible that maybe it’s better not to talk about it at all… I don’t mind if other people do, but I try not to… when people ask me if I’m doing better now I say I’m fine, I always say I’m doing just fine, even though sometimes I’m not feeling all that great… and people say you don’t even look sick, look at your complexion, you look really good, and I say, I’m not sick, I’m not sick at all, ’cause if you start saying you’re sick, I think it’s even worse then, you feel worse, and your friends, even your closest friends, they feel worse too – if there’s anything we can do to help, anything at all, they’ll say… and then it’s harder for whoever’s around, so it’s better to always say you’re ok, sometimes you might not be doing that great, but you still say you’re doing just fine
I’ve got used to the idea of having this illness and it’s just something I’ve got to deal with, it’s not like it’s going away… in the beginning, when it was only in my intestines, all I wanted was for it to go away, but then it reached my liver and that was it, the doctor told me the cancer had metastasized in my liver and it was there to stay… they explained that it was gonna keep growing, even if they cut it out, it would just keep growing… I was hoping they’d cut the root of it outta my liver and that that would be the end of it, but that’s not what happened, so I had to get used to living with it, for however long I had left… I’d have to live with it and that was that. I got used to it, I’ve gotta get used to it
we go to bed, I wait for my husband to fall asleep, and then I get up and I walk downstairs, especially when I have an appointment the next day, and all kinds of things go through my head, everything, absolutely everything… what if something happens, what are we gonna do about the kids? When I’m down here on my own, I think of them, of how they’ll manage if I’m not here
sometimes, you think you can’t do it, that you can’t take it, but then somehow or other you find the strength to keep going
we have to have faith and strength and we have to carry on and that’s what we’re gonna do
you only know what it’s like when it happens to you
Paula still managed to go to the festival in August 2012. Even in her weakened state, with help from the team of palliative home-care nurses, she attended the procession. She wanted to say goodbye to all her friends. She died at home, surrounded by her family, at the beginning of September 2012.