now-and-at-the-hour.html

First published in English translation in 2015 by And Other Stories
Los Angeles – High Wycombe
www.andotherstories.org

First published as Agora e na Hora da Nossa Morte in 2012 by Edições Tinta da China, Lisbon, Portugal

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

The right of Susana Moreira Marques to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Lines from Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’ were taken from The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: the Centenary Edition (Orion). Lines from Philip Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb’ were taken from The Whitsun Weddings (Faber).

ISBN 9781908276629
eBook ISBN 9781908276636

Editors: Ana Fletcher and Stefan Tobler; Copy-editor: Lucie Elven; Proofreader: Alex Billington; Typesetting and eBook production: Tetragon, London; Cover Design: Hannah Naughton; Cover Photograph: André Cepeda.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s PEN Translates! programme. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly co-operation of writers and the free exchange of ideas. www.englishpen.org

Supported using public funding by Arts Council England. Also funded by the Direção-Geral do Livro, dos Arquivos e das Bibliotecas.

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For László

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In 2009, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation launched a home palliative care project in the Planalto Mirandês, in Trás-os-Montes, a remote region in the north-east of Portugal.

A doctor, nurses, and other healthcare professionals travel from village to village helping dozens of patients of varying age, social class, and family circumstances to live the end of their lives in as much comfort as possible, and to die in company, at home.

This book is the result of several visits to this project and to these people, which all took place between June and October 2011.

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‌Travel Notes
about Death

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Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI
‘Up-hill’

And Death is an eagle
whose cries no one describes.

CECÍLIA MEIRELES
‘Posthumous Song’

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There are things that can’t be written about as they have been in the past. Something changes. First the eyes, then the heart – or senses, or whatever our ancestors called the soul – and, finally, the hands.

The first notes I take are about a man who was born, grew up, worked, was married, had a daughter, grew old, and died in the same village. These notes are not actually about the man, or his life, but about his death. They go like this:

Life in this house and with this family takes place entirely in this ground-level room, which is pleasingly dark and cool, and where there is a stove, a large table, an escanho – a long wooden bench common to Trás-os-Montes – and a door that leads to the pantry where they keep their produce.

It was April, the fireplace was not lit, but it was beside the fireplace that the man would often tell stories and where, all of a sudden full of life, he told stories that night. He said goodbye to his family – his daughter and granddaughter had come from the city. He said goodnight. He reminded the woman he’d been married to for sixty years to take her medicine.

The village where the man was born, grew up, worked, was married, had a daughter, grew old, and died is quaint, with its sculpted cross and renovated stone houses. It is tidy, clean. Quiet and very empty. It resembles a museum.

The widow, black shawl and unreadable face, moves slowly, bent by arthritis. She walks the streets like a shadow. She knows she is living the end of an era, of a way of life. When we are all gone, she says – meaning the old people – the shadows, the deserted houses will fall, slowly, and there will no longer be a village.

‘We have a great history, the best weather in the world, and the best people in the world,’ says a listener on the radio. ‘We will raise our country up.’

The road runs on, spent. Old paths and, in the distance, the border. More and more, I have the feeling of being on an island. It was easier to get here than it will be to leave.

A.’s house or place of rest: an unmade bed, a cluttered bedside table, a radio, dirty laundry; a sheet hung from a rope separates the toilet from the rest of the room, whose floors and ceiling are bare.

A., or a man simply passing through life: parka, baseball cap, cheeks ruddy from drinking, steady eyes, hands rolling a cigarette, gauze covering the lower half of a face wrecked by cancer.

Survival guide:

1. Stop. Listen to the beating of your heart. Look out at the wild cherry trees laden with fruit.

The swallows have already built their nests above the back door; this is how, every year, H. notices the coming of spring. They are useful birds, and beautiful, and have always been a favorite of his. But now he watches them as he never has before, because he might not see another spring.

But what is frightening is not the thought of the unknown: it is the thought that there may not be an unknown, only an end.

In the village square, under what is now a small public garden there once stood a cemetery. It grew too small for so many deaths, so they built another. The dead remained where they were buried and in the new garden – a sort of communal grave – they placed a small stone plaque:

O ye who enter here,
remember your
forefathers, parents,
grandparents, and friends
who are buried here

After many, many kilometers, the villages are all one.

She wakes up in the morning, has breakfast with her husband, sits to make lace, cooks lunch, then eats with her husband; in the afternoon, when she can, she rides down the hill in the tractor her husband drives, tends to her garden, and, when she can’t, sits once again to make lace; she has dinner with her husband, talks to her children on the phone, watches a bit of tv, the lace in her lap.

On the living-room table lies a doily and on it a candlestick and a small statuette of three dolphins. The backs of the couches are also covered in lace.

Everything is clean, tidy. She smiles the whole time. Some would say a smile doesn’t suit her. Even as her immaculate living room is filled with the sound of her colostomy bag, she smiles.

PALLIATIVE: 1. Serving to palliate. 2. A treatment that does not cure, but that assuages the illness. 3. Something to weaken the pain or postpone a crisis; postponement. 4. A disguise.

He’s been bedridden for so many years that death is no longer a novelty. His skin is the thinnest white and, from his bed, he asks that the window always be left open. In the springtime, echoes of joy enter, and in the winter, snow. He has surrounded himself with saints to comfort him in sickness, as they previously had in poverty. Above the door, through which he will never walk again, is written:

God
Grant me the serenity
to accept the things
I cannot change,
The courage to change
the things I can,
And the wisdom to know
the difference.

AGONY: 1. Last struggle against death. 2. [Figurative] Anguish, affliction. 3. An imminent conclusion (preceded by a great disturbance).

‘Agony,’ the dictionary does not note, is a technical term.

On his first day of work, the nurse arrived at three in the afternoon and at four a patient died. He no longer knows how many deaths he has witnessed – on many nights he sleeps at the bedside of the dying – and yet he knows each death is different and that some are more difficult to manage than others. The hardest was that of a woman who, barely younger than his mother, had died of cancer. When he first started visiting her house, she could still cook for her children, who were not much younger than he was and had lost their father the previous year. When she stopped getting out of bed, the nurse started going there every day. He took care of her up until the moment they put her body in a coffin, and then he attended her funeral, where he laid his hands on the shoulders of her sons, who could have been his own brothers.

It was then that he made a pact with himself: every time a patient died, he would stop to think a moment. Now, when a patient dies, he sets aside at least fifteen minutes and asks himself: could I have done better?

Any resemblance between these characters and real people is no mere coincidence, and it is highly likely you know someone in the same situation.

Last year, it took an average of thirty-eight days for a person to die in their home, in those villages and small towns spread across an area of 1,728 square kilometers.

If you don’t want to know the answer, don’t ask the question.

The road, the road, the road, the road, the road, the road, the road, the road, the road, the road, the road, the road, the road… A bird of prey snatches her kill off the tarmac then flies away… The road, the road, the road, the road, the road, the road, the road, the road, the road, the road, the road, the road, the road, the roa

The hunter who liked flowers also liked collecting animals and displaying them above the living-room cabinet. The hunter who liked flowers also liked his wife to feel like his prey: frightened and cornered. He had been unhappy for most of his life in a city in another country; he had suffered humiliations, but he also liked to humiliate others. The last time, using only his eyes, he had made his wife feel as if she should be the one to die first. When he knew he would not survive his illness and that he would no longer be able to walk through the vast field in front of his house, the hunter who liked flowers begged for mercy, begged them to kill him quickly, please. He died in bed having said no meaningful last words and, that day, in the yard, a pup that would never grow up to be a hunting dog was born. The hunter was carried to a coffin and his wake was held in his living room – the stuffed birds with their fanned-out wings watching from their perch above the cabinet. The porch overlooks a view of the land that had been his greatest pride and that he had hoped to enjoy in his old age. On it stood his favorite flowerpot, in which flowers bloomed even in the spring after his death.

Whenever the wife of the hunter who liked flowers glances through the bedroom door, she sees her husband climb into bed, lie down, die. She sees him dying over and over and not once does he ask for her forgiveness. She still sleeps beneath his accusing eyes, and asks herself why, if it had indeed been her duty, she had not gone first. She lives alone now and the flowers he left behind are of little comfort to her.

An island, but instead of sea, land.

The swimming pool is empty. This somehow makes it seem bigger. The woman looks out at the pool from her window and thinks of the years that have passed since it was last filled with water and people – so many people, from so many villages (where have they all gone?) – and of how she would keep the bar open into the night, as long as there were customers to serve. From her window she sees the loneliness of the land. When she speaks to her neighbors, she yells to make sure she is heard. Her husband died deceived, blessedly deceived: he never knew what he suffered from, never knew he was condemned. She lied to him every day with conviction: it was the best way she knew of protecting him and she does not regret it. But she suspects that death begins long before we fall ill, with neither suffering, nor drama, nor a single memorable occurrence.

CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE: 1. Technical term used to describe a situation in which family members will conceal the patient’s illness from the patient. The doctor is either persuaded to do so as well or will suggest maintaining the illusion. 2. Term also used in situations where the patient will pretend not to know what he or she knows about his or her illness and, thinking that their family members know nothing, will ask the doctor to conceal this information from the rest of the family. 3. In which the patient pretends not to know the gravity of the situation and pretends he or she doesn’t know that the family knows.

As the sun sets over the plateau, white houses gleam momentarily then settle into darkness. Later, there will be those who sleep while others do not. It is always worse at night, when the sick become agitated and their families wake up and spend the night fearing it might be the last. And if it isn’t, in the morning they realize they do not feel relieved.

At the end of the road is a village from which the children have disappeared. And at the end of another road, another village from which the children have disappeared.

In the village there is a chapel, a communal oven, eight lived-in houses. There is no café, grocery, post office, town hall, or bus stop. On one side of the village, there is a hill that caught fire last summer, an event remembered not only for the alarm it caused, but also for its beauty. On the other side snakes a steep road that freezes in the winter and is often impassable. People here live their lives between their homes and their gardens, inhabitants of a Pompeii that has suffered no such natural disaster.

There are metaphors along the road: ripe fruit falling from trees; paths cut off abruptly; and the journey itself, an age-old metaphor for life and for the end of life. And yet, the surest metaphor for death is war: a person struggling in bed for years and years until their breathing is finally mistaken for moaning.

We obsess over lasts as we do over firsts. Last days, last images, last words. We want signs.

I knock on the door of a man who knows he will die, hoping he’ll tell me how it feels to be a man who knows he will die. He has prepared his family for their mourning so that it is easier on them; he has said goodbye to those he wanted to say goodbye to.

The nurse shaves his beard so that he may appear dignified despite the pajamas, the diapers, the drool. For a few seconds, the man, his eyes bulging, looks at me, a stranger. His eyes roll back into his head. I haven’t made it in time. The man can no longer speak. He is focused solely on dying, a task that seems to require a tremendous effort.

Survival Guide:

2. Think of death in detail. Don’t think of the whole.

There are crosses on the way, marking car crashes. There are crosses on the way, marking people who fell off horses. There are crosses on the way, marking people who died while walking along its edge. The crosses are made of stone, some are very old and others ghostly new.

All that survived in the fire that began with an electric blanket and ended with a wrecked room was a Bible. This was considered a miracle, a sign that God is vigilant and watches over us despite all proof to the contrary. The woman who kept the Bible that survived the fire as a talisman lives with her widowed sister and with a niece who neither talks nor walks; who spends days on end in a windowless room; who, at fifty-seven, still cries and is easily startled; who is scared of strangers and for whom the world – she was very young when she once went to see a doctor in a neighboring country – is no more than those two or three streets.

God visits in the spring, and in the winter, perhaps having forgotten, He does not watch over her to see if she rolls her wheelchair into the light.

The same road does not seem the same, and yet every road seems the same. We move in circles, like eagles.

Up until just two months ago the shepherd, accompanied by his mad and lovesick wife, would walk every day to the São João fountain to drink water, striving for his miracle. Now he no longer leaves the back room of the retirement home; the room’s windows look out onto the yard and have been blacked out with plastic. He lies shrunken in bed, with an oxygen tank by his side, in a blue robe the color of his eyes. That is where they hid him from his wife who, at the age of eighty, still insisted on trying to sleep with him, which is how he fell out of bed and ended up in the hospital. But his wife, who now sits in the waiting room, sometimes more and sometimes less absent than the rest of the home’s elderly, has already forgotten him. She has forgotten she had a husband who she’d been madly in love with from the age of eighteen, and who made her violently jealous. She no longer asks about him and, when asked herself, answers she was never married. When he dies, she might not even realize and might not even cry.

Perhaps the shepherd, lying in bed with eyes closed, has flashes of his childhood raising sheep on the hill behind the home. At the top of the hill sit the ruins of a castle, proof of the village’s former importance, proof that nothing important lasts.

On the hill there is a sculpture trail that re-enacts the Passion of Christ, and maybe that’s why the shepherd believed there was something sacred in that spot where he would spend nights sleeping under the open sky.

In the same way that some will wait their whole lives to win the lottery, playing the same numbers over and over, week after week, the shepherd repeated the prayers his grandparents had taught him, hoping he might see the Virgin – as Francisco, Jacinta and Lúcia had in Fátima. He was intensely devoted to the three little shepherds and had visited the shrine there three times. He thought those kinds of miracles, real miracles, were the privilege – the only privilege – of the poor. After growing up and becoming a father, after growing old, and even up until just a few weeks ago, when his cancerous lung still allowed him to walk to the São João fountain to drink water, striving for his miracle, he would look towards the hilltop and it would seem to him that She was there. Watching.

And at night, in dreams, the old are young and the sick, healthy; in our minds we are no more than ourselves and in our dreams the best of ourselves.

The blinds on the upper floor are drawn, the tables and chairs wrapped in plastic. Her husband proudly shows off their large living room, as well as the other fully furnished rooms and their fully equipped bathroom. He built all this for his wife, even though she can no longer walk up the stairs and they are now both confined to two or three rooms on the ground floor.

Man is not God. Man is not God. Man is not God. Man is not God. Man is not God. Man is not God. Man is not God. Man is not God. Man is not God. Man is not God. Man is not God. Man is not God. Man is not God. Man is not

We should scrawl this in notebooks, filling page after page. We should be punished for thinking we can control everything, even death; for thinking that we can foresee it, and, who knows, maybe even avoid it.

The eagle soars in circles high above the river bluffs. Standing beside the water, with our feet planted on the earth, we are tiny; we are creatures governed by fear.

Survival Guide:

3. Make people into characters.

4. Don’t stop crying over characters.

She wore black for years before she died because in the end it was her husband, who had fallen ill after her, also with cancer, who died first. She even lived to see her great-granddaughter baptized; it happened in August, the month of saints, promises, and celebrations. This was her first great-grandchild and her emigrant son had wanted the baby to be baptized in his parents’ village. She’d had many children, but only the ‘girl,’ her handicapped daughter, was still with her. Before she died, they assured her that the ‘girl,’ by then thirty-nine years old, would be looked after at an institution. They came and took her. Her mother told her it wouldn’t be for long.

And so, before she died, she found herself alone. She’d already stopped tending to her garden, then she stopped sitting at her front door, in the shade of her flowers, from where she used to like looking out at the other side of the street, at the house that belonged to her son who lived abroad – a large, freshly painted house. She would come to forget those she had recently met, but she never forgot any of her children, even those who had died as babies – on the fingers of one hand she counted the children she still had and on the fingers of the other the ones she had lost. It was strange that a body that was once so fertile could now be so barren. Before she died, she underwent so many operations that there was now nothing in her belly but the pains she felt like rocks in her gut. She was left with a scar that gave her the inhuman appearance of possessing two bellies, and she carried a bag for her needs. Not long before she died, she stopped getting up because when she did she would feel dizzy and fall and one day she even banged her head. She spent her days in bed in a room that was cool and dark in the summer, and cold and grim after it, and in which still stood the bed that had once belonged to the ‘girl.’

O blessed Mother, who in your voyages have known weariness and the dangers of travel, protect these your children who are now embarking on a journey, be with them always, watch over their well-being and their needs, and help them arrive safely at their destination. Let it be so.

In the café they don’t talk about people who are bedridden or in homes, of the old slowly vanishing. They talk about sudden and unexpected deaths, which are considered events. They talk, for example, about a boy who died just hours after he turned eighteen. He died on a distant foreign road, but was buried in his parents’ village. The motorcycle he crashed was a birthday present. There was not a single visible scratch on his body, the café owner explained, so they held an open-casket wake.

Immortal in the morning. At night, the fear of never waking.

And yet another metaphor: the border. The eagle crossing it, circling. How easy it is to believe in the immortality of eagles.

I return to the first village. Daughter and granddaughter have gone back to the city and so the widow is now alone. She goes to the cemetery every day, where not only her husband but also her parents and siblings are buried. Her husband asked that, instead of a tombstone, a simple cross be placed over his grave, and she respected his request. Our Lady didn’t heed the wish she made before he died – that she be taken three days after him, since she didn’t want to be left behind – but she continues to pray, with discipline, and goes to church every day. She is not sure her husband can hear her but she prays that God will pass her message along.

The empty house seems to breathe. When she lies down, the iron bed she shared with her husband for over sixty years creaks loudly. In the dead of night, it is almost as if the figures in the framed black-and-white photographs that hang above the dresser were shifting.

Even though she’s been afraid of being on her own ever since she heard about the burglars, she refuses to move to the city. She does not want to leave behind her village or her home, her bed and her photographs, the cherry orchard, her vegetable garden, the olive grove and chestnut trees, her ancient donkey, or her family’s graves in the cemetery.

It is in her village and in her home that her husband lives on. For her, as well as for telephone companies:

‘Hello?’

‘…’

‘He isn’t home. He’s in heaven.’

‘…’

‘Look, my daughter will be here tomorrow or the day after and can talk to you then.’

Her daughter always visits. An only child, she was always close to her parents. She looks like her mother, with a long face and a stoic air. On one of her visits, she brought along the book she was reading, The Kite Runner, and said the greatest gift her father, who was illiterate, had given her was the ability to read books like The Kite Runner, and to know where faraway cities like Kabul were. As she said this, she cried, even though the doctors had told her before her father died that she would no longer be able to produce tears.

In the cemetery: a photograph and at times no more than a name. Names may survive, but they were never what made us unique.

The photograph of the great-grandfather who traveled the world hangs on a wall in the hallway. In the picture stands an elegant man in a suit with an antique traveling bag and an old-fashioned mustache. The family walks through the hallway, carrying trays of food for the dinner party. They no longer glance at their great-grandfather. He is distant in the way someone whose voice you’ve never heard is distant. Pictures also die.

At the entrance to each village, right before or right after the exit off the main road, there is typically a Virgin. Normally, she is inside a bell jar, as if needing special care; as if, without the glass, and unprotected by people, she in turn would be incapable of protecting them.

The boy skates from one end of the empty café to the other, pretending not to hear the conversation taking place between his parents and the nurse. They are talking about medication, about nutrition, about how much longer his father will have to wait for a liver transplant. His mother speaks loudly, and briskly, having decided to spare her husband the need to discuss his own health. The boy’s skateboard makes a monotonous sound on the café floor reminiscent of a fan or any machine that, when left on in an empty room, amplifies the silence. Out there runs a wide road, but there are few cars. A client comes into the café for coffee. The boy stops skating, goes to the counter, serves him; the man leaves again. Out there might lie a continent of wide-open spaces, yes, of large deserts. The boy resumes skating, resumes his role as just another teenager, pretending once again to feel alienated and unconcerned with the passing of time.

ILLUMINED: 1. One who cannot be dazzled. 2. One who is not blinded by too much light, and will not allow themselves to be enthralled. 3. One who sees the world lucidly, as equal parts pain and joy.

The nurses and social workers who work with the terminally ill have the look of those who have dedicated their lives to something larger than themselves (as it sometimes is with monks, who renounce their very identities), or of those who hold convictions they deem unshakable (as it sometimes is with Muslims). They do not seem cynical or guarded, as you might expect from those who live with death on a daily basis.

Land, roads, people, time, time, people, roads, land. What matters here is different, very different.

‘Be quiet, or the doctor will take you to the hospital,’ she says, and her husband stops groaning. He hasn’t talked or walked for a year now and only eats when she threatens him with a trip to the hospital. What is it he sees as he lies in bed? Or does he simply keep his eyes closed and live in other images?

When our legs stop working, we will walk through our memories. When our legs stop working and our eyes stop seeing, we will walk through our memories and they will be clear. When our legs stop working, our eyes stop seeing and our ears stop hearing, we will walk through our memories and they will be clear, and forgotten voices will recount everything once more.

Articulated beds, diapers, morphine, gauze, creams for cuts and abrasions, serum drips, tubes, needles – illnesses come with practical problems that need solving; and death is chiefly a physical process. There is little that is literary about death.

On the road, ‘25 Minutes to Go’ – Johnny Cash singing like a doomed man.

In any case, our lives are all on a timer, and it would be best not to forget it.

When the tour boat glides by, the river hides itself.

A. died. And so his family, finally free to lend a hand, came together. A. left behind a daughter he’d barely seen. She lived far away and would probably not make it in time for the funeral.

A GOOD DEATH: 1. A peaceful death, with minimal suffering. 2. A death in which both the dignity and identity of the dying are maintained up until the last moment. 3. A death in which the person dying is surrounded by family.

There’s something of the missionary in the way the doctor makes her way by road, tracing circles, not only caring for the ill at each turn, but also spreading the word about the good death.

Hers is a big soul. Not like the strangler character in Miguel Torga’s Trás-os-Montes story ‘Alma Grande,’ as terrifying as the very fear of death, but someone who will hold your hand as she chases away that fear.

The families are grateful, and years later will still tell her their news, as they would someone they’d shared a sacred moment with, as, for example, with a midwife.

There’s a cross by the road. By the road, there’s a cross.

Throughout the house are paintings, saints, flags from far-flung countries. She has never left the village. Her children traveled once they’d grown up. Her husband also traveled, spending most of their marriage abroad. He would only come home on holidays, and, even so, she never left him. He only came back for good once he’d grown old. He was out of his mind, yelling at her, threatening her. He can no longer remember this, but his eyes are still full of rage and the desire to harm. He has stopped eating, which is perhaps another way of hurting her. Or perhaps, in his dementia, he knows she has more than enough reason to poison him. Maybe he doesn’t think any of this; the bad man has simply lost his appetite.

On bedside tables, clocks mark the times for their medications. No one seems to notice the irony in having clocks at the bedsides of the dying.

In the country she emigrated to, they say people go to heaven. At home, as a child, she would hear them say: he’s dead, and he won’t be coming back. She chooses to come die at home.

Man has blood on his hands, but God has more. Man has the dead on his mind, but God does, too. Man has nightmares, but God does not sleep.

Fear in the eyes of the man who will not walk. He fears falling. He fears staying fallen and looking up from all the way down there, at the books he can no longer read, on their tall shelves; or falling in the yard, lying on the cold ground and looking up at the tips of fruit trees and at birds hopping towards his eyes. He thinks his wife wouldn’t be able to lift him; that she would have to call for help and that others would see him, fallen; that they would have to then pick him up and wipe the bird droppings off, or, if he was in the house, drag him towards the sofa, which was actually so very near. As he pictures this, he shakes even more. He stops talking to keep from shaking. He stops thinking to keep from shaking. Later, he will come to forget the word Parkinson’s.

… pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

The little boy rides his bike down a carless street that seems very long to him. At the end of one street is another, and then the field: the world in all its possibility and impossibility. When he returns to his village many years from now, if there is still a village, he will see how small that street really was, and the field, just a little larger than a backyard. Perhaps, many years from now, he won’t see any children drawing their whole wide worlds and he will feel like an endangered species.

Now and at the hour of our death.

During the last week of his life, she thought every night would be his last; that the following day, she would no longer hear her husband breathing. After a while, she was so tired she started hoping it would happen quickly. Then she would feel guilty and start crying because he had not eaten his yogurt at breakfast.

Now.

The last notes I take are about a man who sings to his wife. After she was diagnosed with leukemia, he began to play the guitar again. When she came home from the hospital one year ago, M. thought she would die soon after. But she got better once she was home, and so they began their second life together.

‘Todos me querem eu quero algum / quero o meu amor / não quero mais nenhum.’ He played and sang as she tapped her feet and hummed along from the living-room sofa because, even though her memory sometimes failed her, she could still remember the melodies. Whenever he played on local radio stations, he dedicated every song to her.

They never had kids. When they got married, she was already nearing the age when women no longer have children. Being so much younger than she was, he must have known that one day he would end up taking care of her, but perhaps he had never realized how difficult it would be. He is all she has.

In these last notes, M., weak after spinal surgery, no longer plays the guitar. He now lives each day with the fear that something might happen to him and that she will then be left alone. But he doesn’t say this. He says he promised Our Lady a hundred euros – he saw Her over the door to the operating theater – and that the operation had gone well, so now everything could go back to being as normal, as alive, and as musical as ever. M. plays a recording of his own voice on an old hand-held recorder so that he does not have to speak.

And even if words survive, they’ll be too old to comprehend.

The girl walks down the steps, slowly, her legs like a ragdoll’s, with one hand held up to her chest. She leaves the house, slowly, and comes outside to sit on the bench in the sun with the old women.

Survival Guide:

5. Shadow the circling eagles. Imagine their nests.

Where is Ivan Ilyich? Where is the agony Tolstoy wrote? Where are the men who look back at the moment they became men? Where are regret and forgiveness? And the fulfillment, if there was any, felt in those joyful years? The sick suffer, and then have no strength left to think or to ask themselves those moral questions – nor do they even seem concerned (is this unique to our time?) with heaven, hell, or the Last Judgment. They just want a little more life, they want just a little more time to believe that the body can triumph; everyone wants, with disproportionate and perhaps delirious intensity, to carry on living.

And then love, the great survivor of all disaster.

If I were to go back there and knock on the door once more, and then again and again; if I had time, unhurried time, and pretended I wasn’t born in the city; if I knew how to listen more carefully, every word acknowledged and cared for; if I knew what to do with my hands and how not to take notes: would people open up and tell me what they really think about in those slow and lonely nighttime hours?

And finally, hands writing against hoarded images.

Grass as tall as children, on the roadside, dancing. In the horizon, hills meeting like lovers. All this in the deepest purple, seconds after the sun sets.

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‌Portraits

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Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

DYLAN THOMAS
‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’

Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

PHILIP LARKIN
‘An Arundel Tomb’

Contents

‌Travel Notes about Death

‌Portraits

‌Travel Notes
about Death