I arrived just a short time ago and yet I’ve only the vaguest memory of having come here. My one clear recollection is of the man about to be run over, and of the hands of the driver who brought me, big and white and with short, almost nailless fingers, limp on the steering wheel, like starfish washed up on the sand. Two bloodless hands. And yet the owner of those hands was very much alive. He even insulted the old man when he suddenly appeared there, in front of his car. Just as happened to me all that time ago. “Get some specs, you old fool!” The man looked lost, his eyes blank and faded. It was as if he were somewhere very far from the street his body was walking along and where he was now standing and receiving, without hearing, the insults of the driver and the laughter of the people who had stopped simply in order to laugh. “Cat got your tongue, old fellow, or did you just have one too many?” He was so alone, the poor man, so alone!
Did I really go to the doctor? Did I really leave the house? I must have. I still have beside me my suitcase and, on my lap, the hat I bought six years ago and that, as I’ve only just noticed, has a couple of moth holes in it and a ridiculous feather on the righthand side. It doesn’t suit me, and I don’t suit it. How could it be otherwise?
The world is suddenly a pile of strange things that I’m seeing for the first time and whose existence has an unexpected potency. The peach tree in the garden about to burst into flower, the battered old armchair where I usually sit, the bed with the carved headboard that once belonged to Dona Glória’s mother. Tremulous images that finally plunge into the sea of my tears.
There are so many things that we never think about for lack of time! About hope, for example. Who is going to waste five or ten minutes thinking about hope, when they could make better use of that time reading a novel or talking on the phone to a friend, or going to the movies or firing off memos at the office? Thinking about hope, really, how absurd! It’s enough to make you laugh. Thinking about hope, honestly, some people… And yet hope is always there like sand in the folds and hems of the soul. Years pass, lives pass, then along comes the last day and the last hour and the last minute and hope turns up to make what we were hoping for hopeless, to make what was already bitter still more bitter. To make things more difficult.
The consultant asked if I had any family. I told him No. He seemed slightly put out, as if my being single were the most serious factor in what was about to happen and about to be said, the first pebble on the otherwise smooth path of my illness. He was looking at me, the results clutched in his hand. No one at all? he asked, as if appealing to my better nature. I shook my head, and, in the beige-framed mirror behind his reddish neck, I saw myself smile gravely. The feather on my hat moved from side to side. And for some reason, I suddenly felt very ashamed of that feather. He said: Right… He had just re-read the results. So why this whole performance? Perhaps he didn’t know how to begin… But how could he not know? He must have had plenty of practice. Why all the delays? Perhaps he just wanted to spend a few more minutes with me. That was possible. After all, I’d handed over 500 escudos when I arrived—and it had been no easy matter scraping together those 500 escudos!—to the pretty receptionist with the technicolor face, immaculate gown, and conventional smile that she could turn off like a flame being extinguished when it was no longer needed. “The doctor hasn’t arrived yet; please take a seat…” Perhaps it wasn’t as serious as suggested by the other doctor’s silence, by what he left so encouragingly unspoken, by his broad, smug smile, as false as Judas. Who knows. Perhaps…
One could always hope.
Again the receptionist’s red-and-white smile, her large eyes rimmed with mascara.
“Senhora Dona Mariana Toledo.”
There he was before me, the great Cardénio Santos, once again studying those complicated hieroglyphs, those mysterious numbers, which are only for the initiated and are like a code for death. I found myself studying his face intently, as if that were the most important thing in the world, more so than the words he was preparing to throw over the truth like a veil. A pink, moon-like face, two small piercing eyes embedded in soft flesh. Nothing more, apart from being the face of a good doctor, one of those rare geniuses who has never made a wrong diagnosis. Never. As far as one knows, of course.
He said:
“Well, your situation certainly isn’t desperate, far from it. What we need…”
But all I needed was the truth. I managed to dredge up another smile and showed him my sandalled foot.
“That’s good, because I’m all set to go on a trip. I just need to buy my ticket, but I didn’t want to do that without coming here first.”
I could see he was surprised. I knew that, even without actually looking, he had noticed my faded jacket, the feather on my hat, the darned underwear, the general air of neglect.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” he said at last.
“I’m a brave woman, doctor. How long do you give me? Without being hospitalized, of course. If I’m not contagious, then I want to die in my own house, or, rather, in the house where I’m living now.”
The tip of my blade had hit home, because he wasn’t expecting it. Naturally, he fought back. He laughed, and I was filled with admiration, because his laugh seemed genuine.
“You’re not one for half-measures, are you? You immediately assume you’re going to die…”
“Please, doctor. It’s very, very important. You can’t imagine just how important. I’m not going anywhere. You just have to look at me. Do I look like a traveler? It’s just that…when you’re alone as I am, with no one, you can’t allow yourself the luxury of being deceived. You need to be prepared.”
He mumbled a “Yes, well…”
Then he presented me with a very grand truth, laden with difficult, highly technical words. When I unwrapped it, I found myself face to face with death, and face to face with the hope that I would survive despite all, screaming to myself that it simply wasn’t possible. Perhaps he was wrong; you never know. Everyone makes mistakes, even professors at the School of Medicine. The very idea! How could he be wrong when the numbers were all clearly there in the results? And what about the laboratory? It wouldn’t be the first time they’d made a mistake. I remember reading about just such a case in the papers… Oh, who am I fooling! It’s all true, both what the doctor said and what’s written in those reports. It’s hope…not wanting to lose hope, clinging to the slenderest reed, however frail, however insubstantial.
Today is the 20th of January, and in three or four months’ time, I will begin to wait for death.
I feel very alone, more than ever, even though I always have been.
Always.
One night when I was fifteen, I woke up crying. I don’t know now what path led me to those tears; it’s all so long ago now, lost somewhere along the white ribbon of the past. I remember only that my father heard me and came into my room. He sat down gently on the edge of my bed and began stroking my hair, wanting to know what was wrong.
“I’m all alone, Pa; that’s what’s wrong. I was crying because I was so alone and it seemed to me… How silly, eh? I mean I’m not alone now, am I? You’re here.”
I tried to cover my embarrassment with laughter, regretting having been so frank, but he refused to collaborate, and that refusal saved him from the anger I might have felt for him the following morning. He didn’t laugh, and when he spoke, his voice was very gentle, almost sad.
“So you’ve felt that too,” he said softly. “Yes, you’ve felt that too. Some people live for seventy or eighty years, sometimes more, and never notice. And yet you, at fifteen… We’re all of us alone, Mariana. Alone, but with lots of people around us. So many people, Mariana! And not one of them can help us. They can’t, and wouldn’t want to if they could. Not a hope.”
“But what about you, Pa?”
“Me? The people who fill your world are different from those who fill mine. Well, some of them will be the same, and yet if they ever met, they wouldn’t even recognize one another. How can we help each other? No one can, sweetheart, no one can.”
No one can.
Not even my father, who, poor thing, died just a few months later; not even António, or after him, Luís Gonzaga. My life is like a tree on which all the leaves have gradually withered and died, followed, one after the other, by all the branches. Not a single one is left. And now it’s about to topple over for lack of sap.
The maid, Augusta, spends her days uttering huge, heartfelt sighs. Then she says, Sometimes, I think I’d be better off dead! And yet she’s a plump, healthy woman, always cheerful and smiling, with a real penchant for policemen, which she does nothing to hide. The words that accompany those sighs are completely meaningless. Unlike me, she doesn’t have nightmares about lying in the dark under the heavy earth. She couldn’t, and even if she could, she’d find it childish to think about such things, to imagine the worms devouring her body. She didn’t see, as I did, the mound of earth on my father’s grave. The earth from the graves being dug on either side. My father who, only months before, was stroking my hair with his warm hand. No one can, sweetheart, no one can.
I didn’t believe him because I was just a little girl, still hoping for great things from life. So many that I can no longer remember what they were. I felt alone, but I knew that I wouldn’t always be. I was sure of that. When, a few years later, I left school and met António, I thought my father had been quite wrong. Well, I don’t know that I even thought about my father. I had time only to think about António and about me. Time was slipping through my fingers, and I wanted to grab hold of it.
We had a few difficult years. My in-laws didn’t approve of our marriage and did their best to ignore us, which was easy enough because they lived in the provinces.
Now that any egotistical thoughts I might have had, any resentments and enmities large and small, are about to die with me, I’d like to think they were right, or at least feel able to understand their attitude. Who knows: Perhaps I wouldn’t have been pleased if Fernandinho had married a mere typist with no money and no family, who wasn’t even pretty or attractive or brilliant. Who knows what we would be capable of doing or thinking if this or that had happened in this or that way? If my son had grown to be a man, for example. If I had been rich like António’s parents. Money changes people in the most extraordinary way. Those who were secretly, modestly evil become ostentatiously so when they grow rich. They can be as aggressive or indifferent as they like, and all will be forgiven.
For six years, we lived in an attic apartment on Rua das Pretas. António was teaching math in a girls’ school in Largo do Andaluz and giving private lessons in the evening. I worked as a typist and did the occasional translation job. Our joint income, plus the few investments left me by my prudent father, was just enough for us to pay the rent and keep from starving.
Sometimes, in the evening, we would walk down the Avenue to the Baixa, as far as the river. On sunny days, there were always children standing by the harbor wall staring in astonishment at the ships, or happily chasing the pigeons. Filled with sudden sadness, I would say to António:
“Perhaps things will be better next year; then we could have a baby, don’t you think? I would love that.”
He would say, yes, perhaps things would get better; then he would clasp me to him. We’d have a baby, then we’d go to Paris. Agreed? Sometimes he would get angry at the thought of all the land his family owned around Gouveia, the properties in Viséu, the gold bars that his parents kept under lock and key in some bank vault.
“If it’s a boy, we’ll name him Fernando, after my father,” I said to him once.
He laughed purely for the sake of laughing.
“All right, my love, if that’s what you want.”
His eyes were bright with tears.
Life is a strange thing. When António’s mother died suddenly, we both went up to Gouveia for the funeral. His father was utterly distraught, terrified by a death he had never thought possible. He embraced his son, weeping, and asked our forgiveness. He, too, felt suddenly alone, and this seemed to him so dreadful that he immediately began to ingratiate himself with those he had previously despised (he was a simple soul really and was merely in need of human company). He would begin by ingratiating himself, and then, of course, would ask for something in return—just to be sure he wasn’t being duped, the wily old peasant! A little money for us to spend in Paris, which was António’s dream. Then a nicely furnished house, where he would expect to have his own room. When he said this, he would turn to me with a triumphant look in his eye, because he assumed this must be my dream come true. I would smile and say nothing. I would smile and think of little Fernando.
I feel so sluggish, and somehow sick of myself too, as if I am a much-chewed piece of bread that ends up tasting sour, tasting of me, of my own juices. In sheer disgust, I spat myself out onto the bed, and here I have stayed, limp and insipid. It’s a state of mind somewhere between calm and despair, with a slight admixture of anxiety. Sometimes I feel afraid of this solitude, which is far greater, far vaster than any I’ve known before. Whichever way I turn, I bump into myself, but I’ve seen quite enough of me and realize that I have nothing more to say to myself. Nothing.
From time to time, I feel afraid, but the room protects me. When I closed the door just now, I thought it made a different noise, one that didn’t just hang in the air as it usually did, but stood there in the silence like a full stop. Time stopped too. The hands on the clock continue to move, but the hours are all the same. The hours set aside for eating and sleeping, for talking to other people, for working—but that’s all in the distant past—and those hours that were mine alone have ceased to exist. Now that they are all mine, I don’t even notice them. There is only day and night, but morning is no longer the beginning that smoothes the rough edges off things. Everything has stopped. Even the cars that pass in the street and the voices from outside, because they no longer touch me. Even the rain beating on the window, because that noise has become silence.
I’m in my room. It’s no longer dark in here and no longer smells like an unwashed body that can’t even sweat now because it’s run out of juice, or like decaying paper and ants, which is how many old women smell and how this house smelled when I first moved in. It was a smell that kept me company, that wrapped about me even in the street, that entered my nostrils and my mouth, and that probably hasn’t left me for the last few years, although I no longer notice it. The room has gradually stopped being horrible. I had to look around me very carefully just now in order, once again, to notice the low ceiling with its large areas of flaking plaster, like constantly watching eyes weighing on my shoulders, the ugly old furniture, the florid wallpaper, of which Dona Glória is perhaps overly proud.
She pops in sometimes wielding all the diminutives she has on hand. Why don’t I go for a little walk? Would I like her to bring me a little something from the shops? No? It’s such a lovely day, a little bit of sun would do me good…
Go out? And what if I met someone I knew? I can hear them now, as if they are here in front of me. “Oh, my dear, you’re so thin and pale. You should see a doctor. Why don’t you go to Dr. So-and-so? He’s wonderful, you know.” Followed by a litany of all the people saved by Dr. So-and-so. Or else, “I hardly recognized you, you know. Look, seek help while there’s still time. Remember What’s-her-name? Well, she started to look unwell too, lost all her energy, and when she did go to a doctor, it was too late. Nothing to be done. Poor thing, she’s in the cemetery now.” In the Lumiar cemetery, or Alto de São João, or Prazeres.
Even if they didn’t know, even if I didn’t tell them I was going to die, they would still feel sorry for me. People love to feel sorry for themselves and even more so for others. “You’re ill, my dear: I can see it in your face. How much weight have you lost? Oh, that’s terrible.” And they would be sure to wear that look, at once resentful and indifferent, that the truly unhappy or anxious (which is to say, nearly all human beings), even the best, even so-called good people, are incapable of concealing. “These things happen, you just have to be patient. Take me, for example…”
I’ve had it up to here with examples, I’ve had it up to here with other people.
The worst things are the nights. Long. Endless. Full of ghosts. Some old albeit recent, almost without faces or voices, others young and yet ancient, airy bodies that had not yet begun to decompose, a process that chose not to start just yet even though time is flying. António, Luís Gonzaga, and Estrela of course. She more than any of them. Thoughts of them come into my head unbidden, even when I try really hard not to let them in. They come, despite everything, and stay there. I see them as they were before and also as I imagine them now. They’re all so immensely happy since they batted me out of their lives like some annoying insect. Did they? No, they didn’t. It’s not their fault my life has ended up like this. It just hurts me that they have managed to be happy at my expense. It was me and my silence that gave them their good fortune. One word would have been enough, a scream or a tear, but I couldn’t squeeze out either. Now it’s too late, because I’m going to die. It would be too late even if death wasn’t already on its way.
Fortunately, in Portugal you can purchase sleep without a prescription. One, two, or three tubes of sleep. If I were in Paris… L’ordonnance s’il vous plaît… Interdit, Madame…à cause des suicides, Madame…à cause des suicides, Madame… À CAUSE DES SUICIDES, MADAME…
That voice comes from so far away! It’s so clear. And real. Six or was it eight years ago? I think the pharmacy was called Heudebert. Or was it Saint-Michel? It was on the left side of the boulevard on the way down to the Seine. Je vous l’ai déjà dit, Madame. C’est impossible. Je regrette.
I wandered the streets. An icy cold drizzle began to fall, and I went into Café Biard because it occurred to me that I hadn’t eaten since the previous evening, and this fact seemed suddenly very important. Afterward, I went down into the metro, but I can’t remember which station it was. I don’t know where I resurfaced either, but I spent a long time down below, one hour or two. It was late evening, and there were loads of people. They carried me along: it was comfortable like that; they chose where I should go. It smelled good, that bustling night spent going nowhere in particular. Dubo… Dubon… Dubonnet… The night was coming to an end. Barbès or Place Clichy? Mangez les pâtes Lustrucu… Les enfants aiment Banania… Marignan… Les Amants de Venise… Being propelled down two corridors then out again into the night. Vous ne sortez pas? Alors permettez…permettez…permettez… A girl next to me was reading Confidences. It’s odd how clearly I remember her face. As if she were a close friend. Omo lave plus blanc… Jean Marais about to kiss a motionless profile with long blonde hair. Messieurs, rasez-vous avec la lame…
A few days later, I went to sort out our passports for our return to Lisbon. António insisted on coming with me.
Just hours before, it had been night: a cold February night with lights spilling on to the greasy asphalt of the boulevard and neon signs forming luminous puddles outside the cinema and the cafés. In the air, a light mist like the city’s breath. We went into the Royal. Costa, a friend of ours from Lisbon, was already there; he had a scholarship at the Centre des Recherches Scientifiques. With him were a group of Brazilian friends and a Portuguese woman I didn’t know. Her name was Estrela Vale, and she was a sculptor. I barely noticed her at first. Then, when I saw the unusually insistent way António was looking at her, I began to observe her more closely. She was short and skinny and wore her dark hair combed very sleekly over her small, round head and a dash of cyclamen-pink lipstick on her thin, tight lips. She was wearing a very low-cut top and had a mole at the base of her overly long, white neck. She talked a lot, but very slowly, as if she had to sculpt each word, meticulously, carefully.
It all began not with a presence or a look or even a conversation, but with a few words that came out of nowhere and that were, perhaps for that very reason, inevitable, yes; it’s odd how I instantly felt so sure about that. Ordinary words, as innocent as so many others that are spoken only to dissolve in time and be forgotten. Those words, though, remained engraved on my memory. Everyone was talking. What a great poet Apollinaire is. Have you read Alcools? You know Julinha Reis, don’t you? Well, Julinha Reis… They suddenly plunged into a conversation “for Brazilians only,” in which they were trying to ascertain whether a particular person was actually married. Estrela raised her glass of white port to her lips, and António gazed at her, forgetting his own glass of beer. At one point, he said in a voice I didn’t recognize:
“That mole is really pretty. It looks like a flower being blown by the wind.”
I was so shocked. It was so unlike him to say such a thing. He always called a spade a spade. Had it really been António who had spoken, who had said those words?
She placed her hand on her neck to hold on to the flower those words had created and began to laugh, for no reason, as if filled by one of those all-consuming joys that sometimes rise up in people and that, when they go—as unexpectedly as they came—leave behind them a memory of a whole week spent with a mouth like sawdust and dark circles under eyes closed to any light. But I have no idea what Estrela thought or felt… António continued to look at her as if oblivious to everything and everyone. She laughed; she laughed a lot. I can still hear that laugh, secret, subterranean, coming lightly to the boil, but without ever spilling over.
Why do I remember that night so clearly? The voices of the others kept elbowing each other aside, scrambling and trampling over each other in their desire to reach a vantage point, where they could claim that they were right. All I could hear was Estrela’s muted laughter.
At around one o’clock, the fat Brazilian with the flat face—what was his name now?—already maudlin with whiskey and full of an irrepressible, nauseating nostalgia for the family he had left behind in Curitiba, started talking about his wife (or as he called her “his other half”) and their two “precious” children, all the while staring doggedly—as if the two subjects were related—at Simone’s vast decolletage, which barely covered her nipples. António was talking to Estrela, but so softly that I couldn’t hear what he was saying. The others, distracted and utterly indifferent to anyone other than themselves, continued the topic of the moment, laboriously washing down with alcohol the few, tired words they could still muster at that late hour.
We returned home crammed into either the swarthy Brazilian’s Renault or Simone’s Vedette, with Simone, as usual, advancing and retreating and turning back on herself in the old, deserted city, sometimes getting lost in the narrow backstreets or in the broad boulevards, which she couldn’t tell apart even in broad daylight, because, in her view, they were all equally gloomy and ugly. Simone didn’t like Paris. She agreed when people talked about its many good qualities. Far be it from her to say otherwise. The night life was amazing, yes, but don’t talk to her about how elegant the Parisians were (the women in Rio were far better dressed) or about French cuisine and about how beautiful Paris was. Beautiful! She was fed up to the back teeth with bifteck and frites and the all-pervading filth. Her dark eyes danced in the small, rectangular rearview mirror, eyes so dark they seemed to have no iris. Her slender hands with their scarlet nails tapped impatiently on the steering wheel, because she had once again gone the wrong way.
“Rio is something else entirely,” she said suddenly in a dreamy voice. “That huge sea, eh, Etelvino? Do you remember? That vast, never-ending ocean.”
In the back seat, to my left, Etelvino Cruz’s teeth were a white gash in the darkness.
“Why did you come here, then?” he asked in a slurred voice. “Why don’t you catch the first plane back? Or did you come here just to criticize everything? That’s sick.”
They were talking, and, suddenly, I was alone, so alone that, just as I had years before, I felt like crying. Except now I had no one to stroke my hair. António was beside me, yes, but I knew he was really with Estrela in the car belonging to the fat Brazilian, whom I now remember was named Garibaldi.
Simone started singing. She had a low, husky voice, and the songs she sang were almost always sad. They spoke of godless, hungover eyes, eyes that are like nocturnal harbors where ships run aground, like deep lakes where men disappear forever. Her voice droned never-endingly on.
Costa, who was sitting next to her, asked her to sing something cheerier. It was too depressing, he thought. Simone shook her dark, glossy Indian hair. Impossible, she said. Drink made her sad, and there was nothing to be done about it. She felt really low. So much so that, one night, she’d even considered suicide and had taken six Gardenal tablets. She didn’t know anyone else who felt like that. Jandira, the fair-haired girl, who was sitting near the door, her arms around Costa, confessed that it was only after the fourth whiskey that she began to enjoy life, and she suggested that we finish the night in a bar in Montparnasse that was ouvert la nuit. Simone stopped the car to tell the others about this new plan, and, a few moments later, we were all sitting around another table. António sat down next to Estrela and resumed their whispered conversation. Simone, eyelids drooping, seemed to believe that the only solution to life was death.
It’s odd how I remember every detail of that night. At one point, Jandira started singing a samba, and António got up to dance with Estrela. Their faces were very close, and their two bodies seemed to form one body. They weren’t talking. Simone suddenly cried out as if inspired:
“I’d give anything for some feijoada.”
Etelvino said:
“Well, there’s a restaurant somewhere that serves feijoada.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Salustiano told me where it was, but I wasn’t paying attention. It would be hard to find now, because he’s gone off traveling.”
António and Estrela returned to the table. Etelvino was rhythmically shaking a box of matches.
“Garçon, une demie.”
That was me. António said:
“You’ve drunk too much already. You know you can’t hold your liquor.”
I drank the beer down, then another and another. Everything became quite different then. The other people were suddenly much nicer, and I even felt an impulse to embrace them all. I began to feel so fond of Estrela that I almost wanted to cry. It was more or less then that I spotted the white hair, so coarse that I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. Estrela started looking at me equally hard, doubtless because my drunken state put her at her ease. Then she transferred her gaze to António. How could that man have married this woman? It was easy to guess her thoughts in that piercing look and the puzzled crease that appeared between her plucked eyebrows. I then leaned over the table and pointed at her head:
“Let me pull that hair out for you; you might make a mistake and pull out the wrong one, one you might need later on. After all, you don’t have much hair as it is.”
My words emerged with difficulty, slightly garbled. But they emerged all the same. There was a tense silence, interrupted by Jandira’s nervous giggle. Then António helped me to my feet, helped me on with my jacket, wrapped my scarf around my neck, and told the others not to worry about us. There were taxis nearby, the waiter said.
At the door, we passed the Bible man who had just come in. Rappellez-vous de la vie éternelle… I laughed at him as if he were some very witty comedian and even turned to wave goodbye to Estrela, for whom I clearly remember feeling genuine friendship.
I think that as soon as my head cleared of alcohol—that is, the next morning—I considered killing myself, which is not the same as saying that I really intended to. Far from it. There are very few suicides, and it’s the ones who never talk about it who, sooner or later, actually do kill themselves. The others, those who spend their lives talking about it, are just using death as a form of blackmail. I’m going to kill myself because I’ve just found out that you’re the lover of this man or this woman. If you leave me, I’ll kill myself. Usually, this works because human credulity (especially male credulity when personal vanity is involved) knows no limits.
I only considered suicide as a way of increasing my suffering. A kind of chess game I was playing with an absent partner—António: a game he knew nothing about. And even when I went into that pharmacy on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, it wasn’t because I wanted to kill myself, but because I wanted to sleep and thought this would be impossible without a sedative.
Much later, I did mean it. There was a day when I did want to die. The day when Estrela came back to Portugal, just to take away from me all that was left—the memory of the child I never had.
Even today, I’m amazed that I was so sure about what was going to happen between António and Estrela. Something—I knew it, knew it at once—was going to be spoiled, and no one would lift a finger to stop it happening. Not Estrela and not him or me. I was certain, but that certainty was still full of doubts. I told myself, more emphatically with each passing day, that perhaps I was wrong and it had been nothing but a mild flirtation, already relegated to the past. Inside, though, that certainty had already put down roots I couldn’t see. My doubts were hard workers, but even when I put them into words, I still didn’t really believe in them. That’s why the surprise I felt was only relative—mixed with a kind of bitter satisfaction that made me say to that other part of me, You see, didn’t I tell you? I was right, wasn’t I?—when, one afternoon, António told me, without looking at me and while he was rummaging around in a desk drawer for something he never found:
“Guess who arrived yesterday: Estrela Vale. I just met her downtown. She’s come back for good.”
“I just don’t understand why he told you that,” my oldest friend, Lúcia, said to me much later on (she had always been my friend and always would be, or so I thought). Lúcia knew António only superficially. For her, he was just a man; for me, he was António. That was the difference. He was in love with Estrela, as I had seen at once that night in Paris. He wanted her entirely to himself and, as I realized later, wanted to be entirely hers. António was like that. Never, even when he was single, had he gone with a woman he didn’t like or stayed with one he no longer liked. He just couldn’t do it.
At the time, we were living in the first-floor apartment in Avenida de Berna, which, during our absence, António’s father had had furnished in exquisitely bad taste, all very ornate. He had not yet visited, and his room at the far end of a vast corridor was still empty, but on the wall there was already a big, blown-up, full-length picture of his late wife.
I invited Estrela to supper, and that very night all my carefully constructed doubts dissolved before the evidence. António was incapable of hiding his feelings, and maybe he didn’t want to. She settled her narrow, invertebrate body into an armchair, her head always very erect, her lips half-open even when she was listening. She brought with her all kinds of stories, the sort of gossip that usually irritated António, yet that now, on the contrary, he appeared to find positively delicious. Did we know that Costa was now engaged to Jandira? He was going back to Brazil, of course. Her father was very rich, some sort of factory owner. She had never thought Costa would allow himself to be seduced by money…
“But Jandira…”
“Oh, Jandira! A complete ninny, une tête de linotte. But then, between you and me, Costa isn’t exactly a genius either…”
António laughed. He was a friend of Costa’s, yet he laughed at Estrela’s words. So that was Costa out of the way; what else did she have to tell us? What about Simone? What had happened to Simone?
She had taken Gardenal again one night when she got drunk and was now spending a lot of time with the doctor who had treated her, Jean-Claude. As for Garibaldi…
António drank in her every word.
Estrela visited us on other nights too. I needed to see them together. I needed their presence. I would watch them, and, oddly enough, I felt very calm.
Lúcia, who visited me almost every day, said straight out:
“Mariana, your husband is deceiving you.”
“Deceiving me. What a horrible expression. António never intended to deceive me. The only reason he hasn’t told me everything is because I’ve been avoiding having that unpleasant conversation.”
“And are you determined to continue avoiding it?”
“I suppose I am. I’m waiting for António to say something.”
“You’re in for a long wait.”
“I certainly hope so, but I’m almost sure he’ll say something soon.”
Lúcia gave a puzzled frown.
“And you still keep inviting that great…” (She stopped on the edge of the next ugly word, just as in life she had always stopped on the edge of anything she found embarrassing.) “You still keep inviting her so that she can throw herself at YOUR HUSBAND, IN YOUR HOUSE?”
Lúcia always spoke in capitals when she was angry. She had an over-developed, almost medieval sense of ownership. Perhaps because she had a ruined great-uncle, who was a count. I tried several times to show how exaggerated her views were, but Lúcia either couldn’t or didn’t want to understand. I think she probably couldn’t. When she was still a child, she had been given a set of infallible opinions by her mother, which she will doubtless pass on to her own children in their entirety, enriched still further by her husband’s views.
I wonder what Lúcia is like now. Even then, it was clear she’d do well for herself. As far as she was concerned, my husband was a man who belonged to me, body and soul, and my house was a kind of impregnable fortress from which I could hurl down rocks or boiling oil on any attackers. Poor Lúcia didn’t realize that the possessive is, in most cases, purely ornamental.
We went to spend a weekend in Gouveia because António’s father was feeling unwell. In the end, it was nothing serious, and he was already up and about when we got there, working away as always, and worried because there were so few flowers on the olive trees. It was a lovely day, so we went for a walk. For some reason, perhaps to avoid having to talk, or to fill the hours in some way or another, António decided to take some photographs. I remember I was leaning against a tree with my arms by my side. There was a click, and I shuddered.
“That’s it. It’s all over,” I said, letting my arms hang loose by my side.
“What’s over?” he asked in a faint, hesitant voice.
“I don’t know, but something is. I was looking at you just now and feeling very good about things. Despite everything. Then you took that photo, and somehow you and I changed position. And there’s no real need for us to change…”
“What do you mean? Of course there is. We can’t possibly stay like this for the rest of our lives.”
I said:
“No, we can’t.”
António came over to me.
“Listen, Mariana. I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time…to explain. But it’s so difficult, Mariana. I would never have believed it could be so difficult. I look at you and I can’t… Perhaps it’s better like this; yes, it definitely is.”
“I know what you’re about to tell me.”
I said this without so much as a tremor in my voice. I spoke a little abruptly perhaps or a little too loudly, but I couldn’t have said it any differently. António was silent for a moment, then he said:
“I thought you probably knew, that it was almost impossible for you not to know.”
“It was only natural, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
It was so difficult; he would never have believed how difficult. And I had to help him; otherwise, in my own relationship with myself, already so tense at times, there would be a kind of schism.
“Look, António, I’ll go along with whatever you want to do.”
I feel quite calm today, which is why I am once again writing to myself. Who else would waste their time listening to me, given that my life is now empty of everyone? Of António, Luís, Lúcia—who had always been my friend… Always… How deluded I was! The stage is bare even of those pals who enter and then leave having spoken their few lines but who are, after all, so necessary.
Around me there is only the death that gets closer by the day, that and the silence of the house, the silence of the noises in the house, the cracked monotone voice of the landlady chatting to the neighbors who come each evening to talk about other neighbors and about embroidery and about the maids (they’re the enemy within, Dona Glória!), the cars passing in the street, the women crying their wares—vegetables or fish. Sometimes there’s only silence, and sometimes there are noises I don’t want to hear, because they are no longer my noises and long ago ceased to belong to me. They belong to others, to those who are alive. I close the window, put a pillow over my head so as not to hear them, so as to be alone. And also so that I can feel the tears welling up and feel sorry for myself. Then it’s as if I have finally reached the top of the mountain and am feeling perfectly calm, ready for the descent. There are other days, though, when I go out onto the balcony to watch the passers-by. I already know the barber who spends his days standing outside his shop, the Barbearia Chique, enjoying the cool or the sun, depending on whether it’s hot or cold; the old lady with the cat who always smiles when she sees me; the pretty girl who lives in the next building and who sometimes leaves in a car driven by a bald gentleman, an older man, apparently very respectable; the children who play on the sidewalk when they come back from school. It’s when I see them and hear their fresh, green voices that I close the window and step back into my life, which is mine alone and is spent in my room.
For years—how many exactly?—I tried to flee from solitude, the mere thought of which terrified me. I would believe in people, then just let them slip from my open hands. Luís Gonzaga said I expected too much from God’s creatures, forgetting that they were just that, God’s creatures. Perhaps he was right. Then there were days, months even, black and empty, with no beginning and no end, days I had to get through somehow, leafing through other people’s lives in detective novels with happy endings, in which the villain was always punished and virtue richly rewarded, watching stupid films, smoking one pleasureless cigarette after another, or wandering the streets. Alone. But that’s all in the past…
Now I’m here and can’t even bear to read a book. I know I’m going to die, and that certainty is enough; it’s rather soothing actually. In the face of death, everything disappears. But sometimes everything comes back too, depending on what color the day is. The gray days pass, flaccid and glum and tear-stained. I spend the black days trying to unpick for myself the whole of my failed existence. I sometimes wonder if that existence would have been different, better, and if not longer at least more profitable, if I had behaved differently, taken different paths. But no. I wasn’t the one who made the decisions. I wasn’t the one who let it all slip away, but I see now that I did exactly that. I was forced to act and, at the same time, to do nothing. I would sometimes be walking down a wide street, the sidewalk ahead of me clear, and suddenly, unexpectedly, I would find a wall blocking my path. It would be too late to retreat, and then I had to find a way of getting out of there or else give in and stay where I was. I wasn’t the one who built that wall, nor was I the one who was causing time to speed up. It was all there, ready for my arrival, waiting for me.
My life in this room has lasted for five years, and now it’s the only possible life for me. Now that I know what awaits me, there’s something deathly about it, or at least something provisional, nebulous. It isn’t yet death, but it’s not entirely life either. I suppose it never was. I wouldn’t be capable of living a real life, because I’ve lost the habit. Besides, life always was far too difficult for me. I never got used to it, which is strange, because other people find it simple and natural, the simplest, most natural thing there is. I always made such a fuss about it and didn’t behave as I should, as other people did so easily, even the coarsest, most vulgar people. I spoke loudly when the most elementary rules told me to speak softly; I said nothing when I really should have said something; I didn’t know how to be. Yes, that’s it. I didn’t know how to be. I always chose the wrong moments to speak and not to speak. I got everything the wrong way around; I got so muddled that, in the end, I didn’t even know where I was. People like Estrela, or even Lúcia, know how to choose their moment, know the value of what is appropriate—that is, they know how to live. I always chose badly. Even the moment for Fernandinho to arrive, had he been born, was wrong. Estrela herself said to someone that, in her view, it could not have happened at a worse moment. Even Estrela.
My son died inside me. One afternoon, I was crossing Restauradores when I spotted Estrela. She was wearing a close-fitting, tailored yellow suit, and, from a distance, her head seemed to me even smaller and blacker. Without thinking, I stopped to look at her. That was when the car drove past and struck my legs. I fell to the ground unconscious. I think I cried out first.
That’s how it came about that my son wasn’t born and why I could never have any more children. Looking at Estrela. She probably didn’t even see me. She didn’t stop, because she never was the sort to stop in the street just because someone cried out; she may not even have heard. Her crime was to have passed close by me, for the second time in our two lives. Sometimes, though, all it takes for another person to die is a look, a word, for someone to laugh or walk on by.
Later, many months later, I found out that, at the time of the accident, Estrela was abroad with António. For me, though, that is purely secondary. I could never free myself from the idea that Estrela was that woman. Her or her deceitful shadow, what difference does it make? She was the person I saw even if her actual body was, at that moment, in Paris or in London. It was because of her that Fernandinho never arrived.
I don’t want to leave anything behind me. I spent this afternoon tearing up papers. Among them, I found that photo of me, arms by my side, leaning against a tree. Why had I kept it? I don’t know; I can’t remember. I put it on top of the chest of drawers. I enjoy looking at it.
So many papers, so many pieces of paper filled with my scribblings! Diaries, letters that never reached their addressee because, when I thought about it, it didn’t seem worth sending them… Papers written in a tiny hand that I no longer recognize. Firmer, neater, rounder. My writing now is as shriveled and flaccid as my face and my hands, as my slack-breasted body, my lonely faded flesh.
The wastepaper basket is full of my life. Torn bits of paper, fragments, phrases that someone once said to me and that I can’t even recall having heard, words I once said to someone and have forgotten. It’s all jumbled up in my memory. Postcards from Luís Gonzaga bearing Italian stamps and views of cathedrals. Words from a stranger addressed to someone I no longer am. The weather’s been lovely… Rome is just amazing…sending you my very best wishes. I can’t even laugh about it.
It’s perhaps because of those postcards that I dreamed about Luís last night. His real or imagined presence was—and still is—very pleasant company. For a long time, I would often find myself thinking of him when I woke up. He would appear to me as he was when I first met him or when we said goodbye to each other forever. Forever, despite the postcards that he continues to send me every few months. It was a time when I would wake in the night and gradually become aware of the dim, still strange and vaguely aromatic light of my bedroom, my mouth still tasting of sleep. I didn’t want to wake up, because then I would begin to become conscious of myself again. I would close my eyes, wanting to return to the nothingness I had just left behind. In the back of my mind were images I could not see. I wanted to know who I had dreamed of, but couldn’t make them out. Sometimes, though, from the deepest depths of my night I would manage to haul to the surface the occasional, almost drowned figure, vague and dull. Were other people’s dreams so colorless? I once asked Luís this question, and he said his dreams were like that too. But then Luís accepted everything, never made fun of anything or found anything strange or ridiculous. He always thought deeply about any idea and tried to understand everything, even things too trivial to merit his attention. And in that respect and others too—his voice, his way of smiling—he reminded me intensely of my father.
He and Lúcia were distantly related, and I first met him at her house. He belonged to a wealthy, very devout family from Minho. He was the youngest and most fragile of their sons and had been destined for the priesthood when he was still only a child. He had dutifully gone to the seminary, but, when he had finished his studies there and before taking orders, he was gripped by doubts. Did he really have a religious vocation? That was when he came to Lisbon to study classical philosophy. And yet the first time I met him at Lúcia’s house, he said quite spontaneously that it was very likely that he would still become a priest.
Now, writing his name and recalling his face, I feel less alone. As I do when one of his postcards arrives. They don’t really say much, but the handwriting is his, and it’s so lovely to know that someone actually thought about me, however briefly.
I wonder for how much longer Luís Gonzaga will continue to send those postcards. In the last one, sent six months ago, he told me that after five years spent in universities and on retreats, he was coming back to Portugal, where he was looking forward to being given a small parish in his own province. This was followed by a banal sentence, in which he hoped that I, too, had found my direction.
My direction… Perhaps I have found it. Could there be a better one for me, however hard I looked for it?
Perhaps he will continue to write to me even when I’m dead, who knows? But no, there will be so many things to prevent him from doing that. His reputation, for example. What would people say and think if they found out—as they surely would—that he was writing to a woman? And you have to protect your reputation, as Lúcia knew. Who cares about friendship when your reputation is at stake? Friendship… As far as Luís is concerned, it may simply be a matter of rooting out a memory that is now nothing more than pity. Yes, perhaps he will continue to send me those postcards out of pity. No, what an idea! What about his reputation? And don’t forget egotism. We only give others the gift of remembering them if they thank us for it. And I think I’ve only written to him a couple of times. We are, after all, only God’s creatures. Once, twice, ten or perhaps twelve times in exceptional cases… But then boredom sets in and forgetting, along with those words we cling to so as to feel we’re in the right. She doesn’t answer because she’s not interested in my news. Perhaps my letters bore her. Or: She may have moved again. Or even: Perhaps she’s remarried. That is the absolution we give ourselves.
How will I remember Luís Gonzaga? We’re incapable of remembering a person or a landscape, except perhaps on the very first day we saw him or her or it. How can I possibly summon him up as he was then, when I’m now thirty-six, an old woman of thirty-six? An old woman with a lined face and white hair who ceased—how long ago now?—to be a woman? I’m sure that Lúcia’s mother still goes to the hairdresser’s every two weeks, has her nails manicured, and even plucks her eyebrows and still applies her anti-wrinkle cream each night. What a joke! Lúcia’s mother doing all that and me…
How shall I remember Luís Gonzaga? I was twenty-eight at the time. I was going through a divorce; I was unhappy, but I was still only twenty-eight. And I still loved António; there’s no doubt about that! Oh, I suffered, yes, but I can’t remember how much. It’s odd: The years pass, and we remember ancient details with almost photographic clarity, we hear a few words along with the voice that said them, but what we actually felt at a specific moment gets left behind in the past, dies with the moment itself. It’s because I was in pain and unhappy that I clung to Luís Gonzaga with something verging on despair. His eyes had the kind of serenity I needed. His calm voice and the way he had of looking at me calmly, almost absentmindedly, brought a feeling of well-being I had never known before and never again found in anyone else. That serenity was perfectly in keeping with the slight flicker of anxiety that sometimes appeared in his eyes and that he did little to suppress. He never again spoke to me, or to anyone else, about the possibility of becoming a priest, but the idea never left him; I knew this from his silences, the sentences begun and never finished, whenever the conversation, however remotely, touched on the church or the seminary, or even the Catholic religion itself. I also knew this from the fact, which will be incomprehensible to some, that he never tried to convert me.
We often went out together. I had an almost physical need to walk, to see people, to go places, to keep my eyes fixed on things outside myself, far from myself. I had finally found a job as a typist in a shipping company, but after work, and whenever he was free, I would meet up with Luís Gonzaga and we would visit exhibitions, go to cinema matinees, and, on Sundays, for lack of anything better, we would even go to the zoo to look at the animals. On bad days, I would talk to him about António, about Estrela, and about myself. He would laugh and remind me that I was still only twenty-eight and had many more years ahead of me.
“Just you wait, I’ll officiate at your wedding one of these days,” he said once.
He had his bad times too. He would seem preoccupied and silent. Once, he told me that the seminary had damaged him. Other people had made his decisions for him, and now he didn’t know how to set himself free.
“I can see the marks,” I said. “Anyone could. Just think, out of five siblings you were the one chosen by the family to be a priest. Don’t you think it would be a tremendous coincidence if you also happened to have a religious vocation? Unless you think you’re in a state of grace and are thus committing the sin of pride.”
He smiled:
“We all commit the sin of pride sixty times an hour, sometimes more. You saw my marks and know you’re right. And I know I’m right in knowing that I don’t yet know. Ah, yes, pride…”
Estrela and António were married one June morning. A church wedding, of course. As Luís Gonzaga always mentioned, mine had merely been a registry office affair. Alice Mendes, an old colleague of Maria Amália’s with whom I’d always stayed in touch, phoned me to give me the news. Purely by chance, of course. The matter came up in conversation by a simple association of ideas. Or so she said. “And speaking of fools…” Perhaps it was true. Among other snippets of news—Alice always had plenty of news and couldn’t distinguish good from bad—she mentioned a former rather unpleasant classmate of ours, whom she had bumped into a few days before in Versailles. “And speaking of fools, do you know who got married today? Your husband, António.”
I would have preferred to find this out the next day or a week or month later. Alice could not resist though. Poor thing, you couldn’t really blame her; she’d been the same at school. She wasn’t a bad person, merely a victim—as we all are—of the quality of our chromosomes. It’s a real curse being such a blabbermouth. You’re not in control of yourself; you never know what you should or shouldn’t say. And you can cause other people real pain.
That afternoon, I went in search of Luís. I couldn’t be alone with Estrela and António, and they wouldn’t go away. I even phoned Lúcia, but she had gone to the cinema with her mother. I had visited Luís Gonzaga’s room on other occasions to borrow a book or to take him one I’d promised to lend him. It was a small, modest, self-contained room in Rua do Conde do Redondo. A bachelor room, tidy and anonymous, and that gave the impression of being uninhabited. There was a cross above the head of the narrow wrought-iron bed. By the time I left, it was dark. He had told me earlier, looking me in the eye, that he couldn’t marry me.
“I know.”
“Because it’s almost certain, almost inevitable that I’ll go on to become a priest.”
“That’s OK.”
Before I left, just as I was about to open the door, I asked, and I still don’t know why:
“Will you go to confession first thing tomorrow, Luís?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Good question.”
We met frequently after that, then, one night, he phoned me. He needed to speak to me urgently. The following morning, I found him looking tired and sunken-eyed, like someone who has spent a sleepless night. He had finally come to a decision. It was all arranged. He would be leaving in a couple of days.
I put my hand on my belly, where my son was not yet stirring, then held the same hand out to him. I spoke (I don’t know now what I said), but I remember that my face and my words were those of a very bad ham actress.
“So, this is goodbye, then,” I said at last. “We won’t see each other again.”
“We can always see each other again, Mariana. After all, we were friends before, weren’t we?”
“Aren’t we friends anymore?”
“That isn’t what I meant, but, yes, we can be friends as we used to be. If you ever need anything…”
“I’ll ask. But why these empty words, Luís? Goodbye means goodbye, nothing more.”
The world had not fallen in on me as it had that other time, when António gazed into Estrela’s eyes. Now it was more as if a screw had come loose or a small beam had broken, but both things could be mended. And I didn’t feel alone either, because I had my son with me, a son all to myself.
I went over to Luís and thought very coolly that, under the circumstances, a tear or two would make him happy, but I had none to give him. At first, I had felt sad, despondent, but now I was beginning to feel strangely liberated, which was rather troubling at the time. Luís seemed to be waiting for some response from me. I found myself silently thinking things like “abandoned and with a child on the way” and “what a terrible situation to be left in” and even “how am I going to pay for the birth?” And these words suddenly made me feel like laughing.
“You’re hurt, Mariana,” said Luís. “Go on, cry if you want to.”
The vanity of men! Why would I cry when I had my son with me? Just because he was leaving. Ah, the vanity of men, the incredible, ridiculous vanity of men…
I was at Lúcia’s house. She hadn’t yet come home, and her mother was telling me about her daughter’s new boyfriend, whom she liked enormously. Her eyes were shining, and, in her enthusiasm, she had put her knitting down on her plump knees. She was a woman of a certain age (Lúcia had been a late child), but she took great care of herself. Her now somewhat ill-defined mouth resembled a withered flower, her lipstick leaching into the concentric lines surrounding it.
“He’s an excellent young man,” she said firmly. “Excellent.”
For Dona Corina, a nice young man had no age or physical or intellectual qualities, let alone moral ones. He had, and this was very important, a salary worth more than three contos. The description I had just heard told me all I needed to know about Lúcia’s new boyfriend, whom I had not even met: namely, that he must be earning well over five contos.
“How old is he?” I asked merely to ask something. “The same age as Lúcia?”
Dona Corina took off her glasses.
“No, he’s forty-five, but you’d never think it. You must meet him. You’d think he was thirty at the most. And he’s just mad about Lúcia, you’ve no idea. He wants to rent an apartment and get married this year…”
“What does he do?”
“Oh, I thought you knew. He’s an engineer, and highly respected. He works for Tabor. He has a good salary too, very good.”
I managed to suppress the “How much?” that was on the tip of my tongue. Not out of curiosity, no one could accuse me of that, but simply to discover what qualities were necessary to merit the description of “excellent.” But what was the point? Dona Corina resumed her knitting, and I turned on the radio. I felt at home in Lúcia’s house, my “always friend,” as much as I did in my own house, which I no longer had. And infinitely more than in the boarding house I was living in at the time. I didn’t like the music they were playing, and so I twizzled the knob. Lúcia was late. I began to think it odd that she hadn’t yet introduced me to that boyfriend to whom she was soon to be married. It probably just hadn’t happened. What other reason could there be?
Without even stopping her knitting, Dona Corina returned to the subject preoccupying her.
“He’s from very good stock, you know. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Vale de Pomar family. You haven’t?”
She frowned in disbelief, as if I had just confessed to not knowing that the British royal family existed. Then she abandoned her knitting to go into the kitchen to see what the maid was up to.
“Oh, it’s nothing, just the usual. You’ll excuse me, won’t you, Mariana, but if you don’t keep an eye on these maids…”
I was left alone to wait for Lúcia. I thought to myself, “What am I doing here when I have nothing to say to her?” I stayed out of sheer inertia. The armchair was very comfortable and the flower painting opposite so pleasant to look at. My already heavy body was filled with a great languor.
Lúcia arrived at around seven o’clock. She was in high spirits and looked prettier than usual; she asked rather indifferently if I would be staying for supper, then, without waiting for a reply, asked what I’d been up to recently. For nearly half an hour, we spoke of matters of no interest to either of us. In the end, I laughed. She always did keep her cards close to her chest, I said. I hoped she’d at least invite me to the wedding.
She gave a rather embarrassed laugh. Oh, so her mother had told me, had she? The blabbermouth! Not that she had been keeping it a secret, what an idea, but nothing had yet been decided. Her mother always oversimplified things. After all, a person can’t get married just like that…
“But you’ve never even mentioned him to me!”
Really? No, she must have.
I got up. I had to go, I said. No, I wouldn’t stay for supper. They were expecting me back at the boarding house. I went over to the window to see if it was raining. When I turned round, I saw Lúcia’s eyes fixed on me, on one particular part of my body. The keen, interrogative eye of someone who wanted to be absolutely sure about something.
I hoped with all my heart that I was wrong, and, while I waited and hoped, I didn’t return to Lúcia’s house. She knew where I lived, didn’t she?
I heard nothing from her for months.
One day, my boss called me in. He was usually a very autocratic type and rather unpleasant, but this time, I felt sorry for him. He looked at me, not knowing how to begin. He cleared his throat. He riffled through some papers. He was very pale.
“Someone told Senhor Bruno (the owner of the company) that you’ve, well, that you’re…”
“Going to have a baby. As you can see, that’s perfectly true. It’s so obvious that the ‘someone’ who told Senhor Bruno could have saved him or herself the bother. Senhor Bruno just had to look at me.”
“Senhor Bruno has charged me with asking you to leave the company quietly, and nothing more will be said.” Those were his words, which he repeated twice: “nothing more will be said.” “And that’s all, Dona Mariana. I’m really sorry. You can collect your wages at the cashier’s office. Believe me, I really am very sorry.”
His hands were trembling. Not that he was a nice man. On the contrary, he was coarse, unfair, and bossy. He was simply experiencing his one moment of kindness. I didn’t say this to him, because I knew he wouldn’t understand.
I had to survive on the meager interest from my father’s investments until Fernandinho was born and then try and find another job. I started saving up so that I could pay for my stay in the maternity ward.
One morning, I read about her wedding in the society column. Her uncle, the bankrupt count, had given her away, and her bridesmaid had been a friend of the family, whose forebears had been in trade, but who had inherited substantial wealth. The bridegroom’s best men had been João Frederico de Castro and Nunes Vale de Pomar, long names that meant nothing to me. I couldn’t be angry with Lúcia, poor thing. How could she possibly present me to her new family?
“This is my friend, Mariana, who, as you see, is about to have a child.”
“And your husband?” someone would ask.
“I don’t have a husband, Senhora.”
“So who is the child’s father?”
And Lúcia, in very worldly fashion, would say:
“No one knows. Do you, Mariana? I mean, you might know, mightn’t you? It does happen…”
I had exactly these conversations several times a day, but I couldn’t be angry with Lúcia. The time it must have taken her, her fiancé, and her mother to arrive at a solution! The hypotheses set aside and the shortlist of possible strategies drawn up before making a final decision. Should they put the situation to me frankly? They wouldn’t have the courage. Introduce me anyway? “Are you mad, Lúcia? And what about my family and the Vale de Pomar family?” Silence was the best option. They forced me to understand that I was simply not a friend they could introduce to anyone. “What do you think, Mama?” And Dona Corina would state very firmly, “I think a lady should know how to preserve her reputation.” I can hear her now. She would have taken off her glasses and put her eternal knitting down on her lap. The hours they must have wasted on my account. Poor, poor Lúcia!
That was yesterday. Today, it’s poor me. I’m going to take some sleeping pills.
The landlady woke in a bad mood. She’s spent all morning scolding the maid, who responds with the silence of her great sighs. Today’s topic is that the girl got up late. Despite the general disorder and lack of cleanliness, which surprised me at first, Dona Glória considers herself to be a good housewife. Lúcia’s mother also used to say sometimes, “I’m a very good housewife myself, and the man who marries my daughter can think himself lucky. She can do everything. That’s very important in a woman. Men like to have a tidy house: the clothes put away and meals on the table at the proper time. I’ve always been a real slave to housework.”
What would my mother have been like? She died when I was only three, and my father would always cry when he talked about her. I longed to know what the mother I’d never really known was like, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask him. Sometimes, I would spend hours looking at the photo on my father’s bedside table. I would gaze at it so hard that it seemed to me that her eyelids moved and her mouth opened in a smile.
No, she hadn’t been like these other women; she couldn’t have been. She cooked the meals, did the washing (they didn’t have a maid), but I’m sure she wasn’t a “good housewife.”
I loathe good housewives. If they’re poor, they wear themselves out working; if they’re well-off or rich, they employ one or more other women to wear themselves out working instead. Either way, they are the slaves of that work or of keeping an eye on the other slaves at their beck and call. Life goes on outside—husbands and children can get on with their lives, can plunge into it—and the housewives have to stay home scrubbing and cleaning and polishing the brass. Or watch others: Look, you’ve missed a bit of dust there. That tap isn’t shiny enough. Things can’t go on this way. Life, meanwhile, has passed them by and they haven’t noticed, haven’t noticed a thing. They’ve been left alone, and they haven’t even noticed. The husband has died without ever being there; the sons have fled in order to marry the housewives hidden inside other pretty, jolly, passionate girls. And life goes on. Look, things can’t go on like this. And the sons of those sons dream of running away and meeting other passionate girls…
Then I saw Estrela on Restauradores. Well, Estrela or someone who looked like her; it doesn’t matter. And Fernandinho died forever and ever. He and all the brothers and sisters he might have had. The nurse told me he was a boy. As if I didn’t know! The nurse had seen him, but I knew far more about him than she did. I was sure he would have fair hair, large, slightly almond-shaped eyes, António’s pale hands… António’s?
“It’s such a shame. He was a lovely baby.”
The nurse was sharing professionally in my grief. I said only:
“Yes, he was.”
And I closed my eyes tight to keep the tears in.
The nurse came over to me and stroked my hair. I screamed at her to leave. I screamed so loudly that the women in the other beds fell silent, and, for a long time, all you could hear in the ward were my sobs and the frightened cries of newborn babies.
I moved from the boarding house where I was living to a private house that suited me better, Dona Glória’s house. She knows nothing, either about my life or my death. Nothing, except that I’m divorced. On several occasions, at mealtimes, she’s tried to draw me out by talking about herself. She tells me about her husband who died of septicemia (that was in the days before penicillin, Dona Mariana); about the younger sister who, at seventeen, ran away with an ensign and was, alas, very unhappy. I’ve even seen the photograph of her sister, Ermelinda, a plump girl with vacant eyes. Ermelinda is dead now, God rest her, Dona Glória always says very reverently, and you can tell that she’s dead from the faded photo where there is neither gaze nor smile.
“What the poor creature went through, Dona Mariana! The heartbreak, the money problems, that man’s disgraceful behavior…everything. And she was so pretty, too, as you can see from the photo.”
“Yes, she had lovely eyes,” I say, just to please her.
“Lovely.”
You can never go wrong with eyes. Everyone is convinced that they, and all their family, have lovely eyes. They run in the family! Even I had—yes, “had” is the word—lovely eyes. Like your mother, my father would say dreamily. Just like your mother’s eyes.
Dona Glória sometimes sighs gently.
“But that’s life, and we all have our cross to bear. As you yourself know all too well.”
There’s the hook. I smile and nod. Don’t I know it, say that smile and nod. But I offer her only an empty phrase:
“Who doesn’t, Dona Glória?”
“Oh, not everyone does, Dona Mariana, not everyone. You know, sometimes I think…”
But I never find out what Dona Glória thinks. She sits there, gazing off into the distance. When she speaks again, she’s already onto another subject.
“Now, tell me what you’d like for supper. You’re so thin and have no appetite at all. Isn’t there anything you really fancy? Really? I was thinking of making some fish pasties with tomato risotto…”
That woman, Dona Glória, has photos of her husband and her sister. I don’t have any of my father or of António. I was in such a hurry to leave the house in Avenida de Berna that I left all my things there. I know now why I’ve always kept the photo António took in Gouveia, the one of me leaning against the tree. Because it’s the only one I have of him. He’s there in my wide eyes.
I went back to work, this time as secretary to a semi-famous writer, who, every day, produced several pages (he, poor man, thought he was giving them to posterity) that were then typed up by me in single spacing. That job lasted as long as it took me to transfer onto new paper all the vicissitudes of a very wealthy family living on an estate close to Viseu. And then I again found myself unemployed, with very little money and with nothing close by to which I could cling. But I felt almost contented.
Sometimes I go to bed and spend hours staring up at the ceiling or at the wall on the lefthand side of the bed. The floral wallpaper has a background that must once have been white, but is now yellow with age, and it’s full of spots of mold where I can make out smiling or sometimes very troubling faces. Strange, almost diabolical, silently snickering profiles, which grow more perfect the longer I spend looking at them, unblinking, as if my gaze were unwittingly completing the design, bringing life and relief to the outline. At other times, the faces are horrible, looming out of the peeling ceiling plaster or formed by the shadows cast by the furniture when I turn on the light. Sometimes, one of those profiles gradually mutates into Estrela laughing her quiet laugh. I close my eyes, but she’s still there inside me. I take a couple of pills, but sometimes it’s only with the fourth pill that her face and her laugh dissolve into a deep, heavy sleep.
One day, I was reading the classifieds in the paper, and I found one that interested me. An English couple with two children needed a Portuguese companion to go abroad with them. I thought my English would be good enough, and so I replied. They arranged to meet me in a hotel in the Baixa. The wife was a tall, thin woman, not in the first flush of youth, with very pink, freckled skin. Her husband was a fat, imposing man, with a short brush of almost white hair. The boys gravely shook my hand. They were both fair-haired and rather lackluster, with a deep, precocious gaze that was older than their years.
The proposed conditions suited me perfectly. The Harpers wanted their children to learn Portuguese. They were going to spend a few months in London, possibly a year, and only then settle in Oporto, where Mr. Harper had business interests. On the way back, they intended to spend a few days in Paris. Oh, I knew Paris, did I? Then I would doubtless be pleased to make a return visit. After all, anyone who has ever been there always dreams of going back, wasn’t that so? Mrs. Harper smiled. Should I tell her that it was in Paris that…? No, why tell anything to a woman who was a matter of complete indifference to me? She continued to talk. If, at any point or for any reason, I should feel ill or even bored or simply miss my family (as was only natural!), they would consider themselves free of any further obligation toward me—which did not mean, she added, that they would be shocked by any decision of that kind. It was also agreed that I would enjoy relative freedom. The husband said almost nothing, merely underlining with smiles and nods what his wife was saying. The house and the children were clearly her domain, while he dealt with the business side of things. When I got up to leave, having first given my prolix author and two or three other people as possible references, the two boys accompanied me to the door of the hotel.
At last, a job I would really enjoy and one that I had never even considered. I had often thought I would like to be a nurse or a primary school teacher, but I didn’t have the necessary qualifications for either profession. My experiences working for the shipping company and for the novelist had been real nightmares. I really couldn’t face the idea of spending weeks, months, years, the rest of my life, sitting at a desk in front of a typewriter, writing boring letters or typing up horribly tedious, vapid novels. Getting older and fatter (because I think boredom does make you fat), always mired in the same problems, other people’s problems. When the writer had finished his “novel of manners,” he offered to recommend me to some under-secretary or other who often featured in the newspapers at the time.
“I’m sure he’ll find something for you. He’s a great friend of mine and will be glad to do me a favor. He’s an excellent fellow, as admirable in public life as he is in private. Why do you laugh?”
My old habit of laughing at things that others didn’t find funny. Men could have a public life, but women? Or only women of the street. Perhaps there was a connection. I stopped laughing, and he continued to praise his friend and admirer.
“I’ll give you a letter of recommendation.”
I turned down his offer, even though all I had in my purse was a twenty escudo note. I had asked to be paid the rest as an advance during the month I had worked for him.
Now I would have a job that interested me. I once again placed my hope in life. Not too much, just a little. Consciously, I mean. Perhaps a change of air, a job I enjoyed, and spending time with children would bring more cheerful thoughts, would sweep away those obsessive ideas that kept me from sleeping. It was with something verging on enthusiasm that I sorted out my passport and the necessary visas. So great was my desire to return to a normal life that I even phoned a few vague acquaintances, including Alice Mendes, to say goodbye. I think I needed to convince myself that things would get better and that the best way to be sure of that was to hear it in my own voice.
Then, just two days before we were due to leave, Mr. Harper called me in a terrible state, stumbling over his words. His wife had just been taken into the hospital for an urgent operation. The doctors had clearly thought it was a serious matter, and he feared the worst. And of course, for the moment, he had dismissed all thoughts of traveling. Even if everything went well, Mrs. Harper would be left very weak, and he had just phoned one of her sisters, who lived in London, to come and take care of the children. He was expecting her on the first plane the following day. Naturally, he insisted I tell him of any expenses incurred.
Mrs. Harper recovered, I found out later. In fact, I telephoned the hotel one day to ask. Mrs. Harper was convalescing, I was told. She hadn’t left Lisbon, and I was still chained to my old room, an eternal prisoner of its walls.
“It’s just as well, Dona Mariana,” said the landlady. “I was dreading having to get used to a new face… That would have been very hard. I even prayed to St. Teresa for you not to leave.”
The Englishwoman survived, and Dona Glória was content. It was all for the best, thanks to St. Teresa.
I began to feel more and more tired. Tired of living and incapable of seeking out my own death. Tired of existing and tired of the ghosts that continued to come at all hours of the day or night to saunter past me. Tired of everything, both near and far. I became so thin and looked so ill that the landlady insisted I go to the doctor.
“Has it never occurred to you that it might be tuberculosis, Dona Mariana? And that’s very serious, a contagious disease. I’m not saying that because I’m afraid I might catch it, I’ve never been afraid of illnesses, but Augusta’s still a young girl…”
I went to the doctor. He examined me carefully, then sent me off to have various blood tests. It was probably nothing, but just in case… I asked him if what he suspected I had was contagious.
“No, what an idea!”
And he laughed. I couldn’t see what was so funny. Neither could he.
One evening, I went to the cinema. I’ve no idea why. How long had it been since I last went to see a movie? I walked past the Tivoli. There weren’t many people going in, and I felt something calling to me. Why not? That was life after all. I used to love going to the cinema, and later on, I just enjoyed being there when the lights went down and having a dream appear right before my eyes. I used to enjoy it; perhaps I still would. Yes, now I remember: that’s why I went in, just to find out if I was still capable of enjoying something.
It was early, and the place was almost empty. Behind me, two women, sorry, two ladies, were talking. They both had the kind of voice you’d expect to hear coming from a buxom contralto bursting out of her dress, the kind of voice that, for some reason, certain well-heeled ladies always have.
“You were quite right; she’s really nice. And so unaffected!”
“Yes, she is, isn’t she?”
“Absolutely. I was just utterly charmed. As a couple, they seem very close too, which is quite a rarity these days. But not embarrassingly so. And they’re quite well-off too. With a big house and all. How long have they been married?”
“Four years, I think. They met in Paris, he got divorced, because, fortunately, his first marriage was just a registry office affair. It was a real coup de foudre…”
“Hm, unusual, but then Estrela always struck me as remarkable, not as a sculptor, let it be said. I mean that ‘Seated Bather’ she has in the living room, really…but as a person. Attractive, pretty, a complete woman.”
“And she’s nice too, really decent. She won’t have a word said against António’s first wife, because there was a lot of talk about how the silly woman, just a few months after her divorce, could be seen swanning around town with a belly on her…well, you can imagine what people were saying…”
“I didn’t know that. I assume she must have had a lover while she was married. Who was she?”
“No one you’d know. There was a lot of gossip because she was the ex-wife of Estrela’s husband, but Estrela has always defended her. She agreed, of course, that the woman couldn’t have chosen a worse moment to make a mistake like that, but that, in view of the circumstances… Anyway, she’s a lovely person. A good wife, a good mother… When her two-year-old had tonsillitis, she couldn’t have been more…”
“Oh, I didn’t know they had children…”
“Yes, two, and the oldest one, Fernando…”
The lights had dimmed. I got up and struggled to the end of the row, stepping on the toes of various loudly complaining people. The usher said something I didn’t understand; what it was I don’t know, but I remember hearing his voice. I only breathed freely again once I was out in the street and had started walking down the avenue with no idea where I was going. At one point, I realized I was standing by the river. At the same time, I noticed people looking at me, and some were laughing. Two boys stopped right in front of me, then ran away. I raised my hands to my face, and when I removed them, they were wet with tears.
That day, I really did consider killing myself. I was still considering it the following morning when Dona Glória and the maid went out to do the shopping. I was alone in the house; I couldn’t let the chance slip by. I closed the window and the kitchen door. Then I turned on the gas and waited. And I did all this without thinking, without wanting to think. Just as the air began to grow thick, someone rang the doorbell. I turned off the gas, slowly opened the kitchen door, then went to the front door. It was the mailman with a postcard from Luís Gonzaga.
Then life went on, if you can call it life.
“Why don’t you go out for a while? Go to another doctor, Dona Mariana. Everyone says Cardênio Santos is wonderful. My sister, God rest her… We all have our cross to bear… But there are people… How about some rabbit stew, Dona Mariana? How about a little rabbit stew?”
“I love rabbit stew, Dona Glória. I adore it.”
In the end, I did go to Dr. Cardénio, one of those people who never ever makes a misdiagnosis. I only went because I wanted to know for sure. Now I do know, and I’m waiting. I’m not having any more tests, nor do I intend to see the doctor again. Why bother if, in a month or two months, I’m going to die? I know I can’t expect any more from life, and that’s why I just want to feel calm. I want… Yes, that is my goal, my only goal. I can’t choose another one; there aren’t any. For the first time, someone is coming to find me, seeking me out. Why, then, shouldn’t I be happy, me, the chosen one?
But I can’t. I feel at once violated and a virgin. There are so many things in me, and yet I’m completely empty. Empty because all hope is gone. Hope, but not the desire to live. Even though I’m stuck in this room with its sour smell that I can’t smell anymore, even though António is far from me and Fernandinho is kissing a mother who is not me, even so, I still want to live. As best I can. And life is ticking away with each day that passes, without me having lived it.
I can’t get out of bed now; I don’t have the strength. Dona Glória came today and sat across from me in the old armchair and talked for half an hour. I don’t know what she said because her words somehow didn’t enter my brain.
“Don’t you agree, Dona Mariana? Don’t you think that would be better?”
I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I nodded. She looked very pleased.
“It’s the best solution, Dona Mariana, believe me. You’ll lack for nothing there. And don’t worry, I’ve already spoken to Dona Manuela, who’s a nurse at the Hospital de Santa Marta. She’s a kind woman, a real gem, no disrespect to yourself, of course. She immediately agreed to ask them to help.”
Why say No? She was, after all, in her own house, in her castle. Lúcia had been right about that. How could I say No? Without opening my eyes, I simply said:
“Won’t St. Teresa be upset with you, Dona Glória? You asked her to make me stay, remember.”
“But it’s for your own good, Dona Mariana, for your own good.”
“Oh, well, in that case…”
I go to the hospital today. I thought I would be able to die here in this room, but it seems not. I put my photo in my bag; perhaps they’ll let me look at it, I don’t know. Dona Glória dressed me as if I were already dead. She put my hat on my head, the hat with the feather, put my jacket over my shoulders, gave me a pair of her stockings because I didn’t have any that didn’t have holes in them. Now we’re both waiting for the taxi that Augusta has gone downstairs to call. Dona Glória is coming with me. It’s as if we were both going to my funeral.