I never took care of my hair the way I did during the autumn when Mila lost her mind. I also didn’t learn anything at all during these months spent sleeping, or else in front of the mirror undertaking a deranged toilette, eating toothpaste behind the bathroom door, listening to the helicopters land on the other side. Belonging to a large family can distract us from our predictable woes. It’s no use waiting for genetics to rear its head. I had dealt with this possibility with the reserve of new parents poking fun at the overeagerness of family members to discover some resemblance in their newborns. My own madness would appear at the moment when I finally came to the conclusion that I didn’t look like anyone. We never have such a strong resemblance to others as when we believe ourselves to be independent. The blow, then, resides in shedding light on the way that our life began before our inception, a finding we can live only passively.
I’d had my inception a century earlier, drooling all over a pillowcase in which I thought I recognized alleyways from my neighborhood, familiar features, clapping my hands for no good reason or preoccupied with a change in the light, like some great-great-grandmother in an insane asylum in Porto. What followed would not, however, be an opportunity to get to know myself but an occasion that would bring an end to my faith in the possibility of coming to know myself on my own. There isn’t much to learn from the lion’s share of things that happen to us, despite what we hear said about how everything makes us better people. Much less is there anything that we can learn alone, though we exalt lone wolves and their solitary callings, which nonetheless cannot conceal the pouty lips they got from their grandparents, or the noble self-reproach inherited from their mothers.
It’s often said that everything happens for a reason, but this is nothing more than a way for human horror to grapple with injustice. There’s a pettiness in our needing to learn that justice does not exist, pettiness in the sense of being proportional to our minority position vis-à-vis the grandiose scale of the world around us. If injustice results from the lack of meaning in the events that happen to us and that we have trouble accepting, it also offers the possibility of staking a claim to a certain share of grace in our lives. For this reason, redemption resides not in our finding a meaning for everything but in the possibility of wonder in the face of the grace to be found in the arbitrary. And yet the path is not open to us to seek it.
During the months I believed I was a vampire or Joan of Arc, finding rhyme and reason in everything, impeccably coiffed and made up to visit the doctor and scrawling out plans on napkins at the table of a neighborhood tavern, an auspicious parapet, fifteenth-century battle plans to face the apathy of regular customers whose eyes were glued to the Correio da Manhã all the while thinking we were actually in the fifteenth century, neither made me a better person nor brought me closer to discovering who I am. Losing my mind represented the possibility of reclaiming my nationality, though it didn’t spare me the irony of there being little in my mode of suffering that set me apart. Autumn marched on for the old folks at the tavern, with day after day of sporting championships and violent crimes; it marched on at home, too, with chores, meals, finances, and the election of Barack Obama. I was stuck in the past. “You don’t know yourself,” I repeat today as though convinced, to only later hit up against my curiosity about myself with each step I take. I was not the wonder that I had anticipated but the question that I set in my path. I watched my disincarnate heart pass by atop a crude reliquary fashioned from crepe paper and wood glue on a quiet Sunday morning in the neighborhood. The year’s work of a scouting troop: a peculiar sculpture brought before the public for a few brief, if anxiously awaited, moments, and later stuffed into a damp basement. “Why do people hang blankets from the windows?” a child who watched a procession with me once asked. “Because it’s tradition,” I replied. “What’s that?” the child asked. I didn’t notice that I could not run from confronting who I am—even if who I am is something I can see only from a far and misleading distance. I learned not to fear plunging deep into myself, an experience that can feel like a personal victory. That autumn interlude led me back to the time when I once again became a letter learned from a school primer, something we never stop being, even if we become experts in speaking on our own behalf. I say “I,” “I myself,” but mastering the ability to say it is like going back to being a letter on a school chalkboard, an ability I’d neglected. This “I” comes to us at the moment we recognize on the written page things we already knew how to express. It is a playground where I am allowed to try out not only new words but expressions learned long ago.
I repeat “I,” “I myself,” trying to find myself around the house on a dark night. At this moment, I am an ancient old hunchback seated at the hearth next to the fire, back in Seia before my Portuguese family made for Mozambique halfway into the fifth decade of the twentieth century. This old woman would spend the night nodding off in front of the fire, seated imperceptibly in an armchair and seeping into the darkness from which she emerged to call after the children of the house, who lived in fear of her. This was in the time when they still couldn’t find their way alone through the dark. They were unfamiliar with the angle of the furniture and not yet able to pick out the shadows, which they didn’t connect with the objects as seen in the light of day. The hunched old woman would call to them, “Come here,” in her faded voice, sitting them on her lap, pulling them close and then shaking them until in the distance the sound of tiny footsteps could be heard. Then she’d ship the little ones off from her lap, saying, “Get, get, get,” as though she feared they would carry her off, and then she returned to the same position, settling back with her faraway gaze into the chair, becoming the chair, leaving the little ones to make sense of this change in disposition. I note in her the calling of the past urging me to come closer to give me a thwack, offering me a glass of warm milk, ears attuned to the activity in the hallway and attention divided.
The people we were one day do not always call to us with such conviction but rather, at times, exhibit the bashfulness of estranged family members listening in on our conversations, waiting for the right moment to engage us. This past is not independent of me when I rouse my shadow and come to the kitchen to look for the old woman who I thought was looking for me. Watching as the reliquary passed by was to learn to walk in the dark, to trust in the stranger at home who, after all, was only me, the two of us thinking that we had been carrying on this romance because we had been waiting for one another, seeking an opening in the adults’ attention. The old woman sitting in front of the chimney in Seia thought it was she who summoned the children and was lord over her tender little thwacks, when it was the children who had gone looking for her, understanding, without knowing how to explain it, the elusive nature of her affection and in fact having no fear of her at all, but rather the sort of curiosity one has for a salamander or a stove: a curiosity similar to the old lady’s for the touch of a tiny nose or the children’s sweaty necks at nighttime. When we reach each other without having sought each other out, we come face-to-face with our share of grace.
“Where did I leave Mila?” I ask myself, as though looking for the house keys. Will I have stayed behind in Beira, in ’77, reading a newspaper out loud in the shadow of a papaya tree, or will I be that paint smudge on the photograph of a dam, also in Mozambique? Will I be the water stains on my Grandpa Manuel’s desk; a pen in Grandpa Castro’s suitcase; a flea in the mattress in São Gens? Finding someone may be a sign that we had been looking for them. Still, it seems to me that “finding” isn’t a given result of “looking” when we’re speaking of people. Finding myself is closer to finding a flea while looking for a blot of paint; finding a water stain when we were looking for a key; finding a pen when we were looking for a person. What is found reconfigures what was sought. The search for an origin and an identity doesn’t reconstitute my origin or uncover my identity. A person finds herself only by chance.
“Where did I leave Mila?” The time spent searching coincides with the time spent discovering, exactly as if I realized the purpose of what I write in the course of writing it. The person I found by chance is intertwined with the result of my search only in the sense that, if we use a shovel to unearth a chest, the shovel will sometimes leave a mark on the chest. Such a conclusion shows me that this is my hair only by chance. Who we become in writing is as different from who we are as a water stain is different from a key.
What would my street look like on a winter morning, on the way to school, seen by a pigeon perched atop a lamppost? The pigeon may see me, observing my reflection in the rare vitrine along the Cesário Verde Promenade I took each morning. I would think about how I looked in a new pair of shoes given me by Grandma Lúcia, one size too big. The pigeon would launch some excrement my way, which would fragment in the air. On that cold, dark path where you couldn’t find a living soul, we were, the pigeon and I, the only discernible forms of life: I, completely self-absorbed, learning about solitude in solitude—seeking life within; the pigeon trembling with cold to the beat of its tiny heart, a negation of the mind: a heart with feathers. Perhaps we didn’t even notice one another. Above the pigeon, rain falls on certain mornings, without our being able to determine its origin. An origin has no desire to know where it originates—it doesn’t know what an origin is. Starting from this abstract point, my hair is mere movement, a sign of life that in no way sets itself apart from the other bodies caught in the rain. The Oeiras of my childhood and the inner realm of its inhabitants are, for the rain, not so much a place as an arbitrary destination. This indifference that characterizes nature, to which we are the only exceptions, pains me each time I see how far my mind has come, the only redeeming aspect of my hair’s vagaries, its successive cuts and neglect a futile reminder. I’m assailed by the shock and the despair that at times distress me, walking today along the street, in the face of the evidence that each person whose path I cross carries a life within them. So many, so many, so many people, so much life, I think before retreating into myself.
I play no part in the pigeon’s life. I am merely a living body passing by. The person I might have been is not the caricature I yearn for. It is a person. That person would say: “So many, so many, so many people, so much life.” I might, perched atop my lookout, or even in the midst of a crowd, contemplate my origin, and in bearing witness to it find myself as lost for words as the pigeon watching me on the way to school. From my lookout, I am perhaps a harebrained observer of my mind’s expansion. I could not observe my passage while in motion myself. The rain, meanwhile, wants nothing to do with us—it doesn’t choose its fools—and is, seen from a distance, a tiny thing.