Did anyone admire or envy them; could anyone look at them without smirking? Was there anyone who would have given anything to be like them? You must be joking! People laughed when they saw them. I did too. I know I was very young then, and, at that age, we do tend to make fun of everything, even the most serious things, even those most deserving of our respect. As I well know.
They, and this is the absolute truth—and not at all to their credit—had no notion of how ridiculous they were. None at all. They would walk down the street hand in hand, laughing and whispering to each other like lovers out for a Sunday morning stroll, and the way they dressed…especially her. I can still remember a particular black woolen dress that she wore with various scarlet accessories—she was very into accessories. She looked, how can I put it, diabolical, although she was far from being diabolical. Imagine a woman no longer in the first flush of youth; somewhat on the buxom side; with an ample, motherly bosom; and wearing hat, shoes, gloves, and handbag, all of them a bright blood red… She also tended to combine colors that no one would ever dream of putting together: orange and purple, for example; canary yellow and peacock blue. And she never wore makeup, apart from a light dusting of face powder, and then there were the thick, almost brown, lisle stockings she wore. All these things—the garish colors, the pouter-pigeon breast, the thick stockings, and the face powder—were strangely at odds with each other. They simply didn’t go somehow.
As for him, he made rather less of an impact, although he, too, was far from ordinary looking. He was short and skinny. A poor excuse for a man, as people say, with a large, snub nose, very round nostrils, thick glasses, and a tie. Ties were his one great extravagance. And although he was noted for wearing very light-colored suits in winter and summer, with over-long jackets and bell-bottom pants, it was his ties that marked him out. He had them in every color and every fabric, from wool to taffeta, all of them adorned with polka dots.
We lived in the same building: they on the third floor and we on the second. I remember my mother coming home one day, looking rather flustered and saying, “I just met our upstairs neighbor. Goodness, she looked as if she was wearing a blanket. I mean it. Broad vertical stripes from top to bottom and in green and yellow! You’d think her husband would say something.” My father replied placidly, “Of course he won’t. You and me and, yes, a lot of other people, we’re the malicious ones. We, in short, suffer from a disease of the mind. They are the healthy ones, God bless them.”
I doubt if God did bestow many blessings on them, but that’s beside the point. This is all about a recent discovery I made, because the fact is, I hadn’t really thought about them once we moved.
I think all streets have their unwitting clowns, just as they have their villains, their heroes, and their idiots. They were the clowns of our street. We talked about them and we smiled; we couldn’t help but smile. Did they know that they kept the whole street amused? That’s one mystery I never fathomed. Now, though, I’m convinced that even had they known, they wouldn’t have cared. The truth is that they were the truly wealthy ones, because they didn’t need anyone else. And yet there we were—the real imbeciles—laughing at them!
I went to their apartment only once. Our phone wasn’t working, and someone who, at the time, needed to speak to me urgently had called their number instead. She came to fetch me because her husband wasn’t home at that hour. I was just about to say thank you and leave, when she asked me to stay a while. “We sometimes talk about you. We’ve watched you grow up and become a young woman… People can become fond of other people even if they don’t know them, don’t you agree? Perhaps especially those they don’t know.” She talked about when I was a child and about a lovely white lace dress I used to wear. Whenever we met on the stairs, she would pat me on the head, and I would run away, I was so shy! Silva—that was her husband’s name—always liked me too. He would sometimes say, “If only we’d had a little girl like her…” But God chose otherwise.
They had an extraordinary living room, full of figurines and faded, moth-eaten dolls, vases of flowers, leather pouffes, bead-embroidered cushions, doilies, and, on the flock wallpaper, family photos all with dedications written in the righthand corner. This was her sister—you’ve probably seen her visiting sometimes—that was her sister-in-law, and that was her cousin Rui: He was in the merchant navy, and was the one who had given them that ship in a bottle. Because one of the many objects was a bottle with a ship inside it. However, she spoke of these people indifferently, with little enthusiasm, rather as if she were a bored museum guard explaining an exhibit. She only waxed enthusiastic when she spoke about her husband. “We’re very happy together. Even now, when he’s away, I feel a strange unease, as if I were lacking something. Then, when he comes home and closes the door, everything is right again, in its proper place, peace restored! It’s so consoling, the sound of the door closing behind him when he gets home… The two of us snug in our apartment. That’s all we want, nothing more. But you’re still too young to understand.”
I told her that I did understand, which wasn’t true. Yes, if she were young or pretty, I could understand that, but given the way she looked and dressed… Then she asked me—not that she wanted to pry—about the boy who had just phoned me. Did he really like me? And did I like him? Because this was what mattered, and it was very easy to deceive yourself… If both parties were equally deceived, that was fine, but if only one of them was… “People are born with wings, and suddenly someone clips them. They become like chickens, poor things, with only the remnants of wings that won’t let them fly. If anyone clipped my wings, I might do something completely crazy… Yes, I think I would.”
She remained thoughtful for a while, and I took advantage of that pause to make my escape. From then on, we always exchanged a few words whenever we met on the stairs, but I was convinced she wasn’t quite right in the head.
No, no one envied them, no one would give up everything just to be like them. And yet—at the time—they were possibly the most enviable creatures in the street, so much so that they could become fond of people they didn’t even know or need. Me, for example.
I was only seventeen, though, and all I brought back from that visit was the troubling idea that she had wings. Wings…
Then my father died, we changed both our apartment and our lives, and the world turned on its axis many times.
On one of those turns, I found myself teaching at a school in the Estrela district of Lisbon. I would get off the tram and walk part of the way, taking a shortcut down my old street. I enjoyed doing this, but often it troubled me to see, standing at the same door or window or coming out of the same shop, the very same people I had left behind there ten years before. It was as if I alone had moved through time and that, for those other people, time was something static. One day, purely out of curiosity and to see if I was right, I went into the tobacconist’s on the corner and saw the same owner chatting to the same man, as they doubtless had on some day in my youth, about a football match that probably wasn’t the same one, but was almost certainly not very different. It was as if the people there hadn’t grown older or as if time had forgotten them.
Meanwhile, I had lived, yes, really lived! I had blossomed, and the wind had carried off my dead leaves. But spring always returned. For how much longer though? I preferred not to ask myself that question. I simply let life happen.
A crowd of people were gathered outside my old house. I stopped and asked what was going on. “A murder,” I was told. “On the third floor.” I wanted to run away, to be far from there, but somehow or other, for reasons I don’t understand, I found myself right at the front of that agitated group of people, who were all pushing and shoving in order to see nothing at all. A policeman was preventing anyone from going in. I considered saying, “I used to live here ten years ago. Can’t I go in?” but quickly realized that this was pure madness and that policemen are not noted for their sense of humor. Nor, for that matter, am I. At least not then. The truth is that I wanted to run away, to get as far from there as possible, but it was as if my will and my actions had suddenly become separated, breaking their ancient bond. I wanted to do one thing and found myself doing exactly the opposite. I wanted to distance myself, but there I was, elbowing my way through the crowd and, like everyone else, trying to get a place at the front, where, with bruised shoulders and wide eyes, I waited for who knows what.
“Who’d have thought it, eh? Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to be in her shoes!” came the shrill voice of a woman dressed all in black who was standing beside me. Even without turning around, without even moving my eyes—which the incident had somehow rendered immobile—I saw a tall, thin creature with a sallow, bird-like profile. I could have asked, “So what happened?” but it was too late now. I had been there for so long, motionless and vacant… What would the others think? Besides, there was no point asking questions. I had already been given the answer: “A murder. On the third floor.”
“Why did she do it?” I asked fearfully. The others looked at me in alarm. “Did you know them then?” “Just a minute,” said someone, “didn’t you used to live here, in this very building, on the second floor?” Yes, I said, and asked again, “What happened?”
They shrugged and exchanged glances. No one knew for sure. They had their ideas, but they didn’t actually know… Meanwhile, a blonde woman, who lived on the top floor (I could still remember her) declared roundly that, lately, the couple hadn’t been getting along; there were fights and screams and tears. She leaned closer and said softly, “He wanted to leave her.”
Leave her? Was that possible? But why? Who for?
There it was. Who for? The blonde woman gave an arch, knowing smile. “Well, she was getting on a bit, wasn’t she? Fifty, although she looked even older, and she had no fashion sense, poor woman. No, what am I saying, poor man, since he’s the one who’s dead. But she had no fashion sense at all. Men age more slowly, don’t they? Some other woman must have turned his head. And she killed him.”
“How? How?” I asked eagerly. The woman said coldly, “With a kitchen knife.”
I broke away from that magnetic circle then and walked on up the street. I didn’t go to school that day. I couldn’t. I returned to my cold apartment, where nothing was waiting for me. An empty apartment, with no kitsch objects, no kitsch feelings. And I thought about her—a lot.
“Perhaps she did do something crazy…” What will the men appointed to judge her think? An ugly old woman committing a crime of passion and who will perhaps turn up at the trial dressed in green and yellow… How grotesque, and, above all, ridiculous. But as I think I said earlier, the two of them never did have any sense of how ridiculous they were.