Only a few days before, Paula had said to her (again) that this was no way to live, and she had agreed (again) that, no, it wasn’t, but what else could she do? Paula’s voice reached her from some miles away perfectly intact, low, rich, round, and slightly pompous, without the tiniest crack or fault in its surface. It was a voice aware of its own value or—which was also possible—of its limitations. But could one even think of limitations when speaking of Paula?
“I’m not calling at a bad time, am I?” she asked that night.
“Of course not.”
She made herself more comfortable in bed to listen, and, as always, she listened for a long time. She closed her eyes and imagined Paula curled up—so very elegantly!—on her moss-green or rather lichen-green velvet sofa, leaning slightly to her left and drawing arabesques in the air with her large, invertebrate hand. That’s how she would imagine her, meanwhile continuing to sprinkle her friend’s monologue with “uh-huh”s as well as the occasional “fancy that,” “well, what do you know,” and “who’d have thought it,” but these were merely phrases utterly devoid of meaning whose sole aim was to prove that she was still there and continuing, more or less attentively, to follow the thread—which she wasn’t always. She did sometimes have the depressing feeling that she was at a lecture where she had gone in search of self-improvement, and she would feel bored, almost angry, and her interjections would suddenly take on an almost aggressive edge, and she would feel tempted to end the call. She never did though. She invariably waited for Paula to do that.
When she was speaking on the phone to Paula, she liked to imagine her sitting on that velvet sofa because this was a useful image from which she could, if she wanted, free herself. Lately, she found people very tiring, perhaps, among other reasons, because of the bad weather, and yet she could talk to them—to their voices that is—for hours. What chiefly wore her out were people’s eyes, whether bright and lively or dull and distracted, always fixed on hers, intent on drawing her in and holding her captive for some unspecified length of time. On the phone it was different. Paula would talk, and Jô could choose whether or not to imagine the stage set and the principal actor. The shelves of books, mostly unread, lining the walls, except, here and there, for an occasional rectangle, in the largest of which a small pink Pierrot smiled a sad, sweet smile (Paula’s Picasso, her famous Picasso lit by a fluorescent light), the lichen-green sofa, the imposing armchairs, and, last of all, Paula’s own face. The voice chose its words carefully, rejecting some, considering others, hesitating before making a final choice, then enthusiastically—or at least confidently—adopting one. That word—the one she needed—sometimes mischievously eluded her, hiding away in the innermost folds of her memory, or, more prosaically, under her tongue. Paula could sometimes be very prosaic; yes, she could—she allowed herself that luxury, and would even sometimes come straight out with some word that would grate on Jô’s sensitive ears. On her lips, however, that word would sound witty, and anyone hearing it would find it simple and fresh. Natural.
Jô would sometimes help her find the elusive word—a way of passing the time like any other. “Meticulous? Perfect?” she would suggest. But, no, what Paula meant was “scrupulous.” That word and that word alone. “Francisco is very scrupulous about everything he does. At the factory, everything goes like clockwork.”
And then, suddenly, as unexpectedly as ever, even though this had long since become a habit, she would bring the conversation to an abrupt close, as she did on that night (and on other subsequent nights), with nothing to announce or prepare her listener for that ending with no epilogue.
“Right, goodbye then. And come and see us one day, make an effort, don’t be difficult. I have things I want to show you.”
“I’ll do my best!”
“It really is no way to live, Jô, I’m tired of telling you that. When will you make a decision? What are you waiting for? It’s no kind of life, Jô.”
“No, it isn’t, but there’s no alternative.”
She would put down the phone, and the usual light tinkling sound of the receiver returning to the rest would be followed by a huge, heavy, devastating silence that would invade the apartment like a wave. It always took Jô a moment to grow accustomed to not hearing Paula’s voice. A slow process. Thanks to her naturally gregarious spirit, Paula, her childhood friend and frequent enemy, brought Jô very different images from those that usually filled her day-to-day life. On some nights it was irritating; on others it had a sedative, but, almost always, diverting effect: So-and-so, that blonde who was a member of the Braganza family, albeit the bastard branch…welcomed into the fold, of course, despite a divorce, a registry office wedding, and a lot of gossip… Some other Tom, Dick, or Harry, our man in Karachi (where exactly is Karachi? In which country? What exactly is a minister plenipotentiary? Or is this all nonsense?). And some other fellow, a playboy and a winner of car races, who was best buddies with the Aga Khan. Sometimes, one of these fairy-tale people orbiting Paula—a planet with the right to satellites—would disappear, and she would never know where they went or why they had enjoyed such a brief existence. She would ask, “How’s Tom? What’s happened to Dick? And what about Harry?” Paula would then give a vague, suddenly offhand explanation, and her lips (Jô could sense it) wore the grimace of someone immersed in an atmosphere stinking of boiled cabbage. Tom (or Dick or Harry) had long ago plunged into the pool of oblivion into which she usually threw people past their sell-by date. Casually tossing them over her shoulder.
On the worst days—or nights—the ones when she found Paula’s chatter most bruising—not that this stopped her listening attentively and ending the call when Paula decided to—she would put down the phone and, with that unlocatable pain gone, would immediately return with a bump to the cul-de-sac that was her life, where she found problems aplenty, but no plans and no hopes. Paula talked to her about many things, far too many for someone in her state of mind. But how could Paula, sitting on her velvet sofa, possibly know what state of mind she was in? She did go too far sometimes, talking about her trips, her clothes, her friendships, the pearls that Francisco had given her for her birthday. “He’s such a love, Francisco. I really can’t complain, although few people can consider themselves to be completely happy. Isn’t that so, Jô?”
Every night, in the small hours, a cock would crow in the garden of the naval captain who lived in the ground-floor apartment. The fine, sturdy, white cockerel with his triumphant red crest was the master of ten Orpington hens. Jô liked to hear him as she lay in the dark, her eyes wide, because he gave her a real impression of strength, of spontaneous joie de vivre. When the cock crowed at dawn—when Jô heard him crow—she had a feeling of peace and, more than that, of invulnerability. He didn’t wake her up completely. She would open her eyes with a slight shiver, and yet many things inside her continued to sleep, only to be woken later by her luminous alarm clock, as implacable as the eye of God. The sense of invulnerability came from feeling that she was still protected by a remnant, however tenuous, of the night. These were very pleasant moments. When she woke like that, and could hear—and did hear—the cock crowing and the other cocks answering him from far off beyond the other garden walls, these sounds and the cold were just vague sensations happening only on the surface. The rest of her continued to sleep and would sleep for a few more hours until the alarm clock summoned her brutally back to life. And then she would wake little by little, methodically if you like, still groggy from the sleeping pills she almost always took before bed, unaware now of all those other disparate things inside her, lost in sleep, and feeling no particular interest in finding them. They always arrived anyway, though, and then she would once again be Jô—she had no choice—and the house and the school and Artur would all be exactly the same as always. When she stood up, she still felt, for a fleeting moment, as if she were somehow standing beside herself, and even when she was fully Jô again she would still look around as if there was too little or too much of something. And she would glance briefly at that cheap oval mirror—which she was always intending to replace, but never did because she lacked either the time or the money to do so—and see, peering out at her, lively, mischievous, shape-shifting Bosch-like faces, sometimes chinless and diabolical, sometimes square-jawed and prudent and very knowing—all of which, at that morning hour, were her. Then she proceeded with her daily ablutions in order to be able to cross the threshold of the day duly cleansed.
She spent most of that day sitting behind a small desk, teaching several classes of girls about what constituted good behavior, definitions and generalizations that would never be of the slightest use to them. They even seemed to suspect as much, perhaps out of atavism or sheer clearsightedness, and took little notice of her exhortations to study hard or her reprimands or being given terrible marks. They put up with them. Worse still, they even liked her. Put simply, why did they need to know what a Leyden jar was or Fizeau’s capacitor? They didn’t. Jô spent the rest of the day giving private lessons in the four corners of the city or else sitting at home, waiting for the ever-present possibility of a phone call or a visit, killing time and ingloriously pacing up and down, engaged in a constant battle with objects: the objects that gradually accumulated somehow or other—even the furniture itself, which was full of life, especially at night, before she went to bed, before she took the second sleeping pill she always ended up taking, because until she did, she could think of nothing else, like an obsession. The chest of drawers on the left, under the window, would sometimes creak because a tiny bit of inert matter had suddenly sprung into life. And she would always turn on the light, initially out of shock, but afterward because she couldn’t stand to be alone in the dark with that unbearable presence, the near certainty that something or someone was spying on her through an invisible crack. She would then turn out the light, feeling calmer, her eyes filled by the totally unenigmatic image of an old chest of drawers piled high with books and almost-empty perfume bottles and ashtrays full of hairpins and lipsticks, and a three-quarter photo of her when she was seventeen, wearing a sky-blue taffeta dress with a high neck and puff sleeves, which, at the time, she thought very pretty.
This was the worst time, the most difficult, because it required her to remain utterly impassive before the parade of images from past and future. During the day, she could move, escape, set off along other paths, but not at that hour. The nets she had unwittingly cast into the sea dredged up those who had drowned, some of whom were so old and worn she could barely recognize them, others dangerously new. Her grandparents; her father, poor thing; her mother as she used to be, still skinny and with brown hair (now she was blonde); Paula in pigtails (people called her little Paula even though she was rather fat); Mário…am I going senile? she thought, addressing Artur, who was waiting for her there in the darkness, stiff and inexpressive.
When she left for school in the morning, she would sometimes meet the captain who lived on the ground floor. They would happen to open their respective doors at the same time, or would meet in the hallway, with her racing down the stairs and him walking very slowly, dragging his feet, which, in the last few months, had seemed to weigh like lead. He would always stand aside to let her pass, which would have seemed perfectly natural if he hadn’t made such a point of it. He was an extremely polite man, but in a slightly old-fashioned way, always addressing her formally as “Senhora.” “How have you been, Senhora? I haven’t had the pleasure of seeing you for a while. I even wondered if you were ill.” She would thank him and say she was fine, then cast a diplomatic eye at her watch and another at the bus stop, ready for a quick escape. Sometimes, though, the captain would catch the same number five bus into town to deal with some pressing business (“pressing” was a word he used a lot), and he liked to be there early. When there were seats, a rare occurrence at that hour, he would sit beside her and insist on paying her fare. “Please, Senhora, don’t even think about it, it’s such a small thing.” Yes, such a small thing.
Not that long ago, as she left the house, she had met the captain and spoken to him about his garden and his hens. About the white cockerel too, of course. She had never before told him that she sometimes sat at her window to watch the hens pecking around on the ground or counting the eggs that his old servant collected for some dish or other.
“It’s just a hobby,” said the captain apologetically.
“Yes, and a very useful one,” she said.
“Some people,” he went on, wrinkling his bushy, grizzled eyebrows, “some people think it’s hardly an appropriate pastime for a naval officer, even an officer in the merchant navy or a reservist. But what is a naval officer-now-landlubber supposed to do? I could read perhaps, but I’ve never been a great reader. I’ve always led a very active life, you see. I was, if you like, the main protagonist in the story—in my story. I’ve never been much interested in other people’s stories, or, rather, in the stories that some people go to the trouble of inventing, because they’ve never actually lived them themselves, to be read by other people who have also never lived those stories. So, what am I supposed to do? Sail paper boats on the lake? But what lake? It’s difficult, you know… Fortunately, I’m a bachelor; otherwise I would make a most undesirable husband or father.”
“We all have our little obsessions,” she said, and hesitated, afraid that this remark might have offended him. “I know someone, a friend, who reads the Times. I wouldn’t say he reads it from first page to last; that would be impracticable. But he certainly reads it every day. He spends hours hidden behind his newspaper.”
“But that’s a very fine pastime. That way, he knows what’s going on in the world, which for most people is important, I would almost say pressing. Among the more evolved in society, that is. And the Times is a serious paper; it doesn’t tell lies or commit sins of omission. Generally speaking, that is. There are always exceptions—I won’t deny it—but, still, it’s a serious newspaper. Anyway, that’s the way it is. When I stopped being a naval officer, when they decided I was too old to command my own ship, I also ceased to take any interest in important matters, grave matters like space travel, politics, the possibility of war, and so on. At first, I found it hard, but I eventually got used to it. We can get used to anything, Senhora, even to being unnecessary. Up until then, I was passionately interested in such things and, like most people, had some pretty firm opinions. Opinions that would have saved the world. Now it all seems very remote or, more than that, infantile. If I were to start taking an interest again, I would have to change my whole culture, relearn what I had forgotten, start putting things in their proper places. But why? And what is the proper place for current events? But please forgive this bit of homespun philosophy,” he concluded with a smile.
“Sometimes I spend quite a long time watching the hens, and it’s really restful,” she said. “I think if I had a garden, I would have some hens too.”
The captain said slowly:
“We all need something to do. The sea is very tiresome when it’s too calm.”
“So are the plains when they’re too solitary.”
He looked at her curiously and smiled a little.
Sometimes, the days lay before her flat and calm, but fortunately not often. Mostly they were already planned out, full of straight lines or curves, sometimes so tangled it was hard to disentangle them, but nevertheless easier to deal with. She remembered, as a little girl, holding a ball of thread and a crochet needle, her eyes filled with tears. The needlework teacher, a dark, oily woman named Aurora, would say, “Joana, untangle that awful mess!” And she would set about undoing the knots, which only grew in number because, far from undoing them, she was creating them. She would decide then to carry on regardless, but the other girls would laugh at her because what she was making didn’t even resemble crochetwork, and she would always end the class in tears and would sometimes be punished by being made to stand on the bench. Such ignominy!
That day, however—which had promised to be very tangled, with two written tests, two private lessons, some homework to grade, and a meeting later in the day with Artur—suddenly turned into one of those solitary plains when the phone rang and she was told that all classes were canceled because the head teacher’s mother had just died. Jô was getting dressed and looking out at the gray day beyond the veiled rectangle of the window. The fact that it was a gray day was not, in itself, of great importance. What mattered was the fact that this was the first in a long, long series of gray days that would last throughout a long, long winter. Dark days with no sun, or only a damp, hesitant sun. Short days, as if shriveled up by the cold. “It’ll be a long haul,” she would think or say. It would be a long haul until the sun was once again high in the sky and the days stretched out endlessly. It’s true that the long haul would gradually grow shorter, and, at some point, the summer would arrive along with summer dresses and the pool where she sometimes went to swim; and the month at the beach, alone in some hotel or other; and the tan that neither suited nor didn’t suit her, but which she liked because, for a time, it made her another person. The circumference was very slowly being drawn, though, and was about to close. She was once more standing at the door of winter. And this time, she was thirty-eight, which certainly didn’t help.
She put on her blue woolen sweater, carefully combed her hair and pinned it up neatly at the back of her head, then paused for a moment to regard herself objectively in the closet mirror. She still didn’t look old, thanks to her slender face and prominent cheekbones. She studied her high, domed, almost medieval forehead; her pale eyes; her all-important mouth, as exactly drawn as that of a black woman. That mouth rarely smiled, but when it did, it smiled broadly, showing very regular white teeth, slightly on the large size.
When she had finished getting dressed, she wondered how she was going to spend that long day, with so much free time in which to think. Lately, she had grown to dread such days. Then it occurred to her: Why not go to the bank?
She is reverently leaning on the counter, but, so that no one will sense her troubled state of mind, she adopts a relaxed, nonchalant pose. She places her red handbag on the glass top, beneath which there is a display of reports full of numbers and a few tourist brochures (a commercial map of the city; a stylized sunflower above a blue stripe on which sits a white sail without a boat—false, distant promises of April in Portugal), and then casts her eye over the dark or bald heads, bent and intent.
Then he comes over to her, taking advantage of the walk from the door he emerged from to the counter where she is waiting for him to issue a few important orders, pausing, head bowed, before this or that clerk. He is a very sober man. He moves unhurriedly—not only now, but almost always—and he thinks slowly and speaks very deliberately. It’s as if there’s a little hydraulic elevator that, when necessary, descends from his brain to his mouth, carrying inside it words that then serenely enter the world. Thoughtful words. Sometimes, he is stopped just a few feet away from her by an aromatic gentleman (English lavender and American tobacco) who has just arrived and is doubtless a good customer and who wants to know, in his busy capitalist way, if it would still be possible to arrange a few more of those useful little bonds they talked about a few days ago. Artur replies in the same attentive way as he does to everyone, in the low, mild-mannered voice of a repentant ecclesiastic—his s’s simultaneously sibilant and soft, or perhaps “gentle” would be a better word. He doesn’t even look at her, or only afterward, once the important gentleman has taken his leave: “So I can rest easy, then, my friend. You reckon that by next week…”
“Yes, they should be here next week. If you come in on Thursday…”
He looks at her then as if he has only just seen her. What are you doing here, his eyes ask. He discreetly holds out his hand, and for a second she thinks, or rather fears, that he is going to address her as the captain does: “How have you been, Senhora?” He doesn’t though. He merely asks her quietly if anything has happened.
So many things happen, she thinks. So many. At every moment and every hour. And yet we don’t even notice.
“The head teacher’s mother has died.”
He nods, the purely external nod of a puppet on a string.
“Well, that’s life, I suppose. On the one hand…”
“Yes, on the one hand… But even so…”
“Of course, of course. Had she been ill?”
“Yes, she had. Old age, I suppose. The head teacher must be nearly sixty herself, and her mother was still teaching too. Ethics.”
“I see.”
His eyes—which once were blue but have, over time, been watered down to a murky blueish blur, thus losing their original all-important blueness—linger on his wristwatch, Swiss-made and self-winding, of which he is very proud because it neither loses nor gains, a particularly precious quality for him, for whom time is money. His large, bony right hand, with its carefully manicured nails, plays a few simple scales on the map of downtown Lisbon. Do re mi fa so la ti do. His thumb beats hard three times on the Rossio square. Do do do. Meanwhile, he turns slightly to glance over at the clerks, afraid they might be observing him, criticizing him.
“Anyway, yes, the head teacher’s mother…”
He interrupts her:
“Fine, but you presumably didn’t come here just to deliver this death notice. You must agree…”
“Yes, I did, no, no, I didn’t, of course, that isn’t the only reason I came, but…”
She couldn’t tell him that she had suddenly felt terribly alone in the middle of that empty day. He wouldn’t understand and might even smile ironically: “If you had as much work to do as me, you wouldn’t mind a day off…” Jô thinks suddenly: Is he an estimable person or isn’t he? Well, he wouldn’t hurt a fly and would certainly never spill blood. If anyone spilled blood on his behalf, though, he would simply walk away. He just isn’t capable of seeing other people’s minor problems.
She says nothing and waits, then sees him shake his head.
“You have to understand,” he says at last. “I was in the middle of a meeting with the director and left halfway through, having first asked his permission of course… I have a truly hellish day ahead of me, with tons to do. It’s lovely to see you, but you don’t seem to appreciate…”
“…the heavy responsibility I bear.”
“Exactly,” he says gravely. “Exactly. I thought it must be something serious.”
“Well, I’m sorry it wasn’t.”
She smiles. So does Artur. Purely out of politeness.
“Will you be going to the head teacher’s house?” he asks, just to make conversation.
“Certainly not!” says Jô. “I can’t bear the sight of dead bodies, absolutely not. Some people can… But don’t you find that rather morbid? They go to the cemetery laden down with flowers, but who are the flowers for, what are they for? The soul, if there was one, has departed, and the body is being devoured by worms.”
He says, “That depends on your point of view.” Then: “Since you don’t have any classes, make the most of the day, and relax. And just this once, cancel your private lessons. Listen, why don’t you call your friend Paula and arrange to meet up? She’s always asking you to go and see her, isn’t she?” He must think that word, Listen, redeems him. Spoken in a tone of voice that was simultaneously concerned, insistent, interested, and slightly anxious. Listen. “She might be at home. It would be a change. Or else go to the cinema; there’s nothing better for soothing the mind. The movies they show are always so stupid that there’s no temptation to actually think.”
“That’s your opinion.”
“It is, but since you’re of the opposite opinion, then go to the cinema precisely in order to think since, according to you, the movies they show are always so intelligent.”
“Well, some are, then again…”
He suggests something else. He is suddenly full of ideas, all of them urgent, requiring immediate action. A clerk approaches and stops about six feet away to deal with a very old lady who, in one tremulous hand, is holding a small bundle of coupons held together with a rubber band. Then Artur says loudly, well, more loudly anyway, loud enough for the clerk to hear:
“A pleasure to see you Senhora Dona Joana. And hold on to those bills of exchange; they’re solid stuff. Best wishes to your family.”
She didn’t, in fact, go to the bank that morning. To do so would involve an entirely unnecessary walk that would lead her—as it always did lately—to the bitter palace of disenchantments. It was cold in the bank, and she always left it with her collar turned up and her arms covered in goosebumps. Why insist? Besides, she had long since realized—without entirely admitting it to herself—that there was no point in insisting; it was best just to go with the flow and be borne along on the current that carries us to the place where, for some reason, we are fated to arrive. You could flail around as much as you liked, but what was the point? You just floundered around and got out of breath and arrived either a little too early or a little too late. Always at the wrong time.
The trip to the bank was just an idea, but when it vanished, Jô realized that a lot of other things vanished too, and she could see their absence, or, rather, was obliged to see it (because she really didn’t want to). They were old things, precious in their day, that she kept safely stored away inside herself because even one glance from other people could bruise or upset them. And now where were they? The dissolution had started long ago, and she knew this very well, even if she had only now allowed herself to make this discovery.
A discovery that brought her such serenity. Standing nose in the air like a tourist with all the time in the world, she could finally properly observe things that she knew only glancingly. There had been images that had touched some retina or other, or ideas or even mere tones of voice. She, however, had always carried on, had chosen to hurry on ahead, as if too distressed to stop. Now, however, she could see it all, and the sight did not make her heart beat any faster.
When had he ceased to be him? He had been lost along the way, and all that remained as a reminder for posterity was his immutable wax effigy. A speaking effigy, it was true, but then why shouldn’t wax effigies be able to speak, given that the words they spoke were also made of wax? There was something about him… She didn’t know how to explain; suddenly she didn’t know how to explain anything, not even to herself. She needed to study him closely, to set aside all subjectivity, to look at him for a few moments with a cold critical eye. The watery, once-blue eyes behind the tortoiseshell glasses; the straight nose; the large, slender, almost lipless mouth with deep lines on either side; the strong jaw; the perfect hands; the well-tailored suit. What else? Not much really, because with time he had been transformed into an effigy—of himself. Inside, like a kind of alloy, there were various secret layers, superimposed, hidden away. Jô had known about these layers, but she didn’t know if some of them still existed or if they had been suffocated by the outer shell. Now, she thought, she never would. It was too late.
Sometimes—and she knew this was madness—she fancied playing a trick and giving the mannequin a shove, for example, or painting a mustache on him or shouting right in his ear. It was irresistible. She would wait until there was no one else in the museum, no guards and no visitors—which was easy enough—and then she would go over to him. However hard she pushed, though, the mannequin wouldn’t fall: It would merely rock gently, just for a moment, like a tumbler toy, then return to its vertical position. The ink she was using, the only sort she had to hand, didn’t stay on the wax, which remained smooth and impeccable. As for shouting, that had no effect whatsoever. The mannequin knew how to turn a deaf ear when convenient.
That all-too-familiar feeling of unease, which always came out of nowhere, as it did right now, at this very moment—but why?—or a faint bitterness rising up from within, then spilling over or unfurling, and ultimately overwhelming her, a cloud suddenly dissolving (opaque air inside translucent air, nothing inside nothing). Her lips tasted salty, and she realized she was crying. After her own fashion, with no fuss. Two tears running calmly, obliquely, down her motionless cheeks, as far as her neck. She wiped them away with her hands and picked up the phone. She needed to talk to someone. With her mother perhaps. Or with Paula. But her mother had gone out, and Paula was asleep. “She got in very late last night,” she was told. “She’s resting.”
Perhaps Paula would phone later to tell her about her day. “I’m her personal diary,” Jô thought suddenly, in order to think about something else. “She can’t be bothered to set things down in writing, but she needs to make a report. So, she dials a number, mine, and dictates to me all the important events of the day.” They weren’t what you would call close friends, although they had always been friends. They talked, but nothing they said was particularly meaningful or even personal. She, in turn, told Paula about school matters, about a good movie she had seen, and occasionally, in passing, she would mention Artur. “Artur went to…” “Artur said…” “Artur and I…” Casually, but discreetly. And Paula, for her part, never asked any questions, something for which Jô was grateful. Lately, though, she had begun urging her to make a decision, telling her that “that” was no kind of a life, although without specifying what decision she should make or what kind of life “that” was. Sometimes she would describe the people she hobnobbed with, or tell her about their trips abroad, the presents her husband gave her (“He’s such a sweetheart, Francisco”), the fashion shows she attended, the charity teas she organized in December (or was it earlier?) so that the poor could enjoy a decent Christmas meal, about the latest opera at the Teatro São Carlos or the latest reception held at the Palácio de São Bento, always splendid affairs held in one of those two very fancy “saints.” Jô would pick up the phone, and the teller of tales would launch into one of her stories. Sometimes these were third-person narratives involving one of her friends or acquaintances; other times, it was some matter of great importance that had happened to her; at still other times, they took the form of a sudden, unexpected return to the past. Then Jô’s heart would always beat a little faster, out of fear or anxiety.
Sitting on her big velvet sofa, Paula always really enjoyed those oral forays into old times, which, while not exactly hard, had been far from wonderful. Jô was the only person with whom she could recall the past, their days at school, the café where they would go to for a glass of hot milk that they would drink along with the bread roll they would bring from home because that worked out cheaper. She doubtless thought how nice it was to remember these things out loud and to have someone with her, at the end of a telephone line, someone who could add the odd forgotten detail that had vanished over time… And to have that someone as audience: that was the main advantage. Paula would talk. In the first-person singular of course. These memories were hers; she was the one who used to go and drink a glass of hot milk at that café: “You know the one, Pastelaria Chique.” “You mean, Pâtisserie,” Jô would say. “Patisserie Chique!” “Oh, that’s right, Pâtisserie, Pâtisserie Chique. Of course!”
She would sometimes forget that Jô had been there too and say how delicious it had been, that bread roll—“Just marvelous, you’ve no idea.” Like the great man talking to journalists about his modest beginnings, thought Jô. John Ford or Steve Rockefeller remembering, with a touch of nostalgia, the bread roll they would gobble down while sitting at some drugstore counter. Marilyn Monroe harkening back to her years in the orphanage. But she had fought back and triumphed, right? And now she was someone. The journalists would take notes, or perhaps not. Perhaps they had eaten at the same drugstore as Ford or Rockefeller or lived in the same orphanage as Marilyn. But they had not triumphed.
“Those were great times,” Paula would say. “I miss them. Not that I’d want to go back, mind you. We get used to a certain way of life, don’t we? Going back is always difficult. And why would you, even if you could? More years to be lived and you might perhaps end up doing the same thing over and over—too boring. Besides, it wasn’t all positive. Money problems and so on. Yes, that was the main thing, money problems. But at the same time… Expectation is so delightful though, or how can I put, so fruitful. Nothing had yet happened, and anything could happen…”
Then she would suddenly, unexpectedly stop:
“I’d better go; it’s getting late. I have to be in good form tomorrow. We’re having supper with an English guy, a business colleague of Francisco’s, and his wife. All he ever talks about are horses and hunting dogs, and she’s a real snob and has absolutely nothing interesting to say. Absolutely nothing. I’ll tell you all about it.”
Artur was a mere profile, and those once-blue eyes seemed quite innocuous. On the steering wheel, his white hands, faintly luminous in the dark, so still and almost unnecessary, seemed suddenly timeless. Ten minutes ago (or was it ten hours?) he had asked if she wanted the window open. After which the dense, heavy silence had reinstalled itself between them.
She starts talking then, but without making a sound, talking silently, telling him everything that’s going on inside her. She even talks to him about something she rarely dares to think about, a taboo subject: the children she didn’t have and won’t have now. Yes, she even mentions them. She accuses him of wanting to be a free man. He, however, stares fixedly at the road ahead, and his eyes are all innocence. If the expression on his face were any different, then the scales would balance evenly, but he is all serenity and purity of soul. And Jô’s dish on the scales is dropping lower and lower, while his rises, growing lighter and lighter. Not a flicker of a frown. At her final thought, “I feel betrayed,” the two dishes stop: one low down, the other high up.
I have neither a past nor a future, and sometimes I refuse to have a present. The lives of people are so gray, so empty. An amalgam of tedious, meaningless events. What did she think at any given moment? What did she feel? She no longer knows. Time passes and passed, never stopping—it can’t—and things become covered in successive layers of dust. Old dust, venerable dust. It’s like some kind of conjuring trick, and the rabbit and the doves and the string of multicolored handkerchiefs disappear into the top hat. And the top hat is turned this way and that for the respectable audience to see, and it’s completely empty. I refuse to have a present.
“I was just thinking…” she began cautiously.
“What about?”
She stopped, because anything she said was bound to seem overly significant after that long silence, and she felt intimidated by the words she was about to say. It was difficult, though, to stop halfway.
“Go on,” said Artur encouragingly.
“Well, among other things, I was thinking that our lives, yours and mine, are stuck in a cul-de-sac. In our different ways, we are both heading for the same wall. You happily and me feeling well and truly fed up. But perhaps it’s not even the same wall. The plaster on yours will at least be in better condition than mine; that would only be fair.”
“This isn’t like you.”
“It’s just that…”
“What?”
“I would like to have had a child,” she said shyly, taking a risk. “That’s all, a child. It’s not much to ask, is it? It’s easy enough and usually happens by chance. An accident. Well, I would like to have had such an accident.”
“It wasn’t possible, Jô,” he said.
“No, it wasn’t,” she said, “but I feel, how can I put it…”
“Frustrated?” suggested Artur, ever helpful.
“No, more than that, betrayed.”
“By me?”
“No, no, you never promised me anything. I really have no right to complain. No, I feel betrayed by life, by circumstances. I sometimes wonder if this is just a total lack of humility on my part. Anyway… Anyway,” she said glancing at him, “don’t go thinking I’m about to ask for your hand in marriage.”
Artur laughed quietly.
“I know you’re not. You’re too timid to do that. And too sensible.”
“Yes, I think I am both those things, but just imagine, yes, imagine for a moment that I am asking you to marry me. This is a hypothetical question of a purely experimental nature. What would you say?”
He didn’t even pause.
“You know the answer already. We’ve talked about this so often…”
“But not for ages!”
“Yes, it was ages ago, but the problem remains the same. My daughter has not yet married. She’s seventeen. We discussed this right at the start.”
“I remember,” she said. “And I remember what I thought too: ‘He’s an honest fellow, and I like honest fellows.’ It was all very clear from the start. I really have no grounds for complaint.”
Artur nodded, and for a long time they said nothing. Then she asked:
“Have you never felt that you didn’t know yourself—have you never had the feeling that you were a stranger to yourself?”
“You’re in a funny mood today.”
“It’s the weather, I think. I always find the beginning of winter difficult. It’s like the beginning of old age, the beginning of death, the beginning of many things that imply the end of other things. I get all lucid and clearsighted. On the other hand, I find the spring exciting. Ah, the spring…”
Artur said:
“Yes, give me the spring any time.”
And she agreed:
“Of course.”
“Do you want to go back?” he said.
“Yes, I’m feeling tired.”
The Lancia made a U-turn in the middle of the road, and they set off back to Lisbon. Again in silence.
She was just coming in the front door when the phone began to ring loudly. It was her mother. At that hour, she would be in her dressing gown and phoning from Benfica, where she lived, and her face would be smeared with anti-wrinkle cream and hope, and she’d have curlers in her Venetian-gold hair.
“How are you? I’ve been calling for ages, but no one answered,” she bellowed because she was deaf.
“I went out. I just got back this minute.”
“Did you go to the cinema? What did you see?”
“What did I see?”
“Yes, what movie?”
“None. I didn’t go to the cinema.”
“Ah, I understand.”
Silence. Then her mother’s voice grew louder, as if she had lost control. “I understand!” she yelled. “I UNDERSTAND!”
“I sometimes ask myself how often I’ve heard that word in the last few years, how often you have ‘understood.’ Because you always act as if you’ve understood everything.”
Her mother said, “Things change, and people do too; that’s only normal. You, for example…”
“Me?”
“What do you intend to do?”
Jô shrugged off the question.
“I don’t know. I’m waiting for something that will come either from outside me or from inside. For the time being, there’s nothing. A vacuum. And who can have thoughts in a vacuum?”
“My poor Jô,” her mother said theatrically. And Jô could imagine her at the other end of the line, pursing her lips and shaking her head like someone who can’t believe what she’s just heard, and gesticulating with the hand on which her emerald ring glitters in the light of the lamp. “My poor Jô.”
“Don’t feel sorry for me; you know I hate that. Besides, I don’t feel unhappy exactly, just a bit lost. It’s as if everyone else is sitting in their seats and suddenly, I don’t have a seat, do you see? Obviously sometimes… But anyway, it comes and goes. I think I’ve only just realized that today… Look, I’d prefer it if you didn’t say anything more about that now. As I said, I have no real thoughts at the moment. They’re sure to come back eventually, and when they do, I’ll let you know, don’t worry.”
“May I ask one last question?” her mother said. “Why don’t you marry? He’s free and so are you.”
“You said it: he’s free. And he wants to stay free. Some business about his daughter… Anyway, how many times have you asked me that same question?”
“Good grief, Jô, you have a strange way of looking at things. And you speak so objectively about your own life…”
“I do my best. And, believe me, it goes against my nature. I’d like to complain and find someone to blame, to shift responsibility. That always makes life so much easier.”
“Perhaps,” said her mother. “Perhaps.” Then she talked about other things, among them the organized bus tour she would be going on in October, that she always went on in October. “Why don’t you come with me?” she asked. “It’s really not that expensive. Shall I send you the brochure? If you’re interested…”
Jô interrupted her. She wasn’t interested. If she were to go on holiday one day, it wouldn’t be in a group. Besides, in October she would be teaching.
“I could always go in September.”
Jô closed her eyes and went looking for her mother. She found her after a few fruitless attempts, and there she was: wearing a light-colored suit and dark glasses, smiling at the passing photographer and surrounded by white doves fluttering in St Mark’s Square. Unaware then that she had a bad heart. She would write to her often when she went traveling. Postcards with pictures of Stratford-upon-Avon or Madrid or Venice, and on which she never said very much. They were more like circulars. “Still dazzled. Italy (or France or England or Spain) is an absolute dream. You can’t imagine the fun I’ve had. Unforgettable. I often think of you. Are you very busy? See you soon, cara (or ma chérie or darling).” The prodigal mother, thought Jô with a smile, with her little organized madnesses, always within reason of course.
“If you need money, I can lend you some,” said her mother. “A change of air would do you good. Believe me, there’s nothing like a little trip somewhere to help you see things in a new light.”
Her mother thought she had a monopoly on ideas that she felt were real discoveries: the secret of being happy. This is good, she would say, or that. Believe me.
“I’ll think about it. You may be right.”
This was the best way to deal with her. Her memory was getting worse, and she would probably have forgotten their conversation by the next day.
She was sitting in one corner of the staff room, in the middle of which was a round table and a few dog-eared copies of Paris-Match, as if it was a doctor’s waiting room, and she was laboriously pondering her life while listening to the history teacher, whose name was Lucrécia, going on and on about her many ailments. She was a short, skinny woman who always wore rather long pleated skirts and off-white blouses. In winter, the skirts and blouses were made of wool, and in summer of cotton or silk.
“I’ve been to the ophthalmologist,” the teacher was saying. “He prescribed some new lenses, but to be honest, nothing has changed. I still get the most appalling headaches.”
“Terrible.”
“It is. Only someone who’s had them can know. Do you get many headaches?”
She said she didn’t, and her colleague looked at her with a mixture of superiority and envy. Envy won out, though, and she remarked, “You don’t know how lucky you are. The number of doctors I’ve seen, the money I’ve spent! I’ve even wondered if it might be some kind of allergy.”
Jô thought about Paula, who also suffered from allergies, and would sometimes phone her just to say, “I’ve got one of my allergies; it’s just dreadful, you can’t imagine. No, really, you can’t…”
“I have a friend…” she began to say.
The telephone interrupted her, though, and she stayed where she was, watching the history teacher’s arm reaching for the phone. “Hello?” she said, adding, yes, she was here. She would pass her over, one moment. She then handed Jô the phone and explained that it was for her—a man, but he hadn’t given his name. Then she got up and went over to the window where she stood, apparently absorbed in watching what was going on out in the street.
Artur. But what could have happened for him to call her at school, something he had never done in all those years…
“Is that you, Jô?” asked a voice that wasn’t Artur’s. “Don’t you recognize me? Have a think…” No need to think. She was dumbstruck, could barely breathe, suddenly unable to speak or find the words. Deathly pale. When she did speak, it was in a strained, unfamiliar voice.
“Is it you? Good heavens, where did you spring from?”
Laughing, the man said that he had arrived some time ago, visiting old haunts, and had asked various people where he could find her. They all told him, however, that she had disappeared, that they’d completely lost sight of her. He finally found out—well, there are always ways. Persistence, eh? He then said he hoped she didn’t mind him phoning her at school, but it was the only possible way to make contact with her. All he had been told was that she taught at that school. “What do you teach, Jô?”
“Physics and chemistry.”
“Well, who would have thought it?”
“I know.”
They both laughed at the same time, and all the while she was staring at the history teacher’s tense, intent, motionless back.
“I hope you won’t get into trouble because of me.”
She said that she hoped so too, but there was no reason why she should, although you never knew. Her words had suddenly returned, and she could once again think and put her thoughts into words. Mário—his name was Mário—then asked what time she got out of school, which was a difficult question to answer when the history teacher was standing so close and was clearly listening. She pretended not to have heard the question and asked if he was going to be in Lisbon for long.
“I’m not sure yet,” he said. “I thought I’d stay for six months, but I don’t honestly think I’ll last that long, and will probably leave earlier. I feel as if I didn’t belong here anymore, but I’ll definitely come back now and then. I’ve even rented a house.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes, imagine that. What time do you finish work? Can I meet you outside the school?”
The history teacher’s back and shoulders stirred beneath her cream blouse, and then Jô told Mário yes, he could, she’d be leaving at a quarter past five, and all the while she was saying this, she kept her eyes fixed on the figure standing by the window, silhouetted against the light.
“Splendid,” he said. “See you later then.”
Her putting the phone down coincided with the history teacher’s sudden return to life. She breathed, moved slightly, and when Jô saw her eyes fix on her so inquisitively, she determined not to tell her anything. “Splendid,” Mário had said, and that meaningless word had somehow given her new life, like a kind of stimulating injection. She suddenly felt cheerful, eager to live. This, she thought, is how he always used to be, and she would let herself be carried along on his enthusiasm, unable to resist, even though it sometimes filled her with fear. That enthusiasm had been useful even when nothing came of it but a bitter future. That vaguely—only vaguely—plaintive tone of voice, which didn’t wait for an answer. Lack of time perhaps, or because there was no point in waiting, since he had achieved the result he wanted.
Lucrécia walked over to the door.
“See you later,” she said. “It’s almost time for class.”
She didn’t rehearse what she would say, the right words, nor did she reject those that weren’t right—she didn’t even summon them up, preferring to forget them altogether: Don’t say this or this, and don’t even think of saying that. She felt empty of any ideas that would be of immediate interest and made her way down the stairs very cautiously, like someone afraid the ground might play a trick on her and treacherously slip from under her. She scrutinized each step, measuring it, as if she were calculating its width in relation to the weight of her body and the speed acquired as it descended from the floor above. When she reached the street, she spotted him immediately, sitting at the wheel of a pale green car.
“My reputation is going to be ruined,” she said, just to say something, as she slid into the passenger seat beside him. “I hope I wasn’t seen by too many people.”
“I doubt it. But do you really care what they might think?” he asked, smiling.
“Somewhat, even if only because my daily bread depends on it. But yes, I do care about what other people think. Everyone’s different, and that’s the way I am. So, yes, I hope no one saw me.”
“I was expecting that you would have changed more,” said Mário. “How many years has it been?”
“Haven’t I changed then? You are sweet. But then you haven’t either.”
“Haven’t what?”
“Haven’t changed much. I mean, you look different, but you’re not visibly in decline. Forty is a dangerous age, they say. For men, of course.”
“You don’t look more than thirty,” said Mário. “And you’re now…”
“Thirty-eight.”
“That’s right, thirty-eight.” There was a silence, then he said, “I’m going to show you my house, if that’s all right with you.”
“Of course.”
They drove around the Bairro Alto, finally stopping outside a large two-story house with a tiny garden surrounded by railings, behind which she could see two palm trees.
“This is it,” said Mário. “It has a lovely view, though you’d never think it, would you? You can see the river and everything. It’s the house I’ve always dreamed of having.”
He opened the car door to let her out, then opened the door that led into the garden and then the door to the house.
“These two doors always remind me of that toy we all had when we were kids. A small box inside a bigger one inside an even bigger one. Do you remember?”
“I never had a toy like that.”
He thought for a moment.
“Really? Are you sure? Perhaps I didn’t have one either; that’s quite possible, and yet I do remember that toy. I found the house by chance. I was just passing by and saw a notice pinned to the door. At first, I thought it was a demolition notice, since they seem intent on demolishing most of the city, but it turned out it was for rent. And I rented it then and there. I would have bought it if it had been for sale.”
They went into a small hallway where there was a rather ancient oil painting, an old table, and two chairs. Mário opened a glass door on the right and smiled broadly as if silently asking: How do you like it? What do you think? Tell me.
She entered a large room and turned slowly around. Where could she find words to express her astonishment, eyes wide with delight, eyebrows raised? How long should she remain silent? It was lovely, really lovely, she said at last. Just gorgeous, Mário. Such exquisite taste. That chest over there was wonderful. And where had he found that tapestry? Those rich autumn colors. And the sofa? It was Venetian, wasn’t it? She could tell at once. From the second half of the eighteenth century perhaps? She joined in the game enthusiastically, passionately.
“First half,” he said. “Do you remember there was a big auction held in Sintra last month? Well, I had just arrived and, at the time, I still didn’t have a house. I bought a few things with the intention of taking them back to Brazil with me. Then I changed my mind… They weren’t that expensive. This chest, for example: How much do you think it cost me? No, no, nothing like that. It cost me twelve contos. You can pick up some real bargains at auctions sometimes. That’s how I furnished my apartment in Rio. Of course, you need a combination of luck and judgement. You need to be a connoisseur. Otherwise, you can easily miss a real gem and get palmed off with some worthless imitation. Look at that picture, for example.”
She sat down before a large, very dark painting of flowers, positioning herself so that the glare from the window didn’t blot out the colors completely. Seen like that, almost all you could make out was a blood-red stain in the middle of a dark, glossy, cracked surface, but it was nevertheless very imposing. A museum piece. Very old, no, not just old, an antique.
“Artist unknown,” said Mário, opening the door to the liquor cabinet.
“It’s really beautiful,” said Jô, standing up to take a closer look. “Very beautiful.”
“It is, isn’t it? Now, what would you like to drink? A whiskey?”
“I never drink whiskey during the day. Only at night, and even then, the conditions have to be just right. Actually, I don’t really like the taste; I find it rather unpleasant, but don’t tell anyone.”
He gazed at her sadly.
“And there I was convinced you were a good drinking companion. Before…”
People have this obsession with connecting facts, with building bridges, or, as also happened, opening the floodgates onto rivers with no bridges or boats, rivers that create borders never to be crossed. She broke in:
“Oh, before! When we were that age, we liked pretty much anything that was forbidden. The thrill of smoking a clandestine cigarette! And as for drinking, well! We thought we were so grown up, didn’t we? Then, as time passes, everything takes on its normal proportions and becomes merely an occasional pleasure or even just plain boring.”
“Well, I love whiskey,” he said very seriously.
Jô realized that, despite all she had said, she did want a drink. However, she preferred not to; it wasn’t the moment.
The only important moments were those she spent alone. All the others were pure fiction and, only later, when she was alone, did they acquire a certain density and a relative reality. Sometimes, when she came home from school or when she said goodbye to Artur, it would occur to her to think, “Was I really me? The real me? The me who is here now, complete and always absorbed in myself?” It was only when she got home in the evening, or at night when she turned out the light, that those images acquired some substance, stereophonic sound, a more-or-less concrete meaning. Right now, in this unfamiliar setting, she was leafing through a few pages of a book she had put down many years ago, when she had barely begun reading it (she had been forced to put it down), and which she had just now opened by chance. A man named Mário, newly arrived from Brazil, was showing his house to a woman named Jô, who was exclaiming enthusiastically as she looked at various works of art. Enthusiastic exclamations and admiring words, which had so little to do with her that she even ended up glancing around her in search of someone else to attribute them to. They were, however, alone. So alone that he had opened the door with a key and not a sound was to be heard inside. Was there no maid? She thought. The situation suddenly struck her as somewhat compromising, but she reminded herself that she was, alas, no longer eighteen, but thirty-eight. Twenty years older.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked, now holding a glass of whiskey.
“I’m meditating,” she said, “but don’t ask me on what. My meditations have always been private and untransmissible.”
“Always. That’s what is so extraordinary about you. And so restful too!”
“What do you mean ‘restful,’ Mário?”
“All this. You being here and being just the same. And after twenty years have passed,”
She sighed and said:
“I suppose I am the same, but I’ve changed a lot too.” And it seemed to her that she really had changed. She had loved Mário, and then she had loved Artur, but now she was dried up inside, and any feelings of love had dried up too.
Nevertheless, she wanted to feel happy like she had before, and she tried to return to the past, insofar as that was possible of course, and in a way that would hurt no one’s feelings. To feel happy to be with Mário, alone with him, but it was difficult, not to say impossible, to return to one’s youth. And yet she would like to run her hand over his smooth, thick hair and ask him for the nth time that day if he loved her. And to hear him say Yes. Simply because this would bring back what had happened then, at that time, her time. The question and the answer and the situation had long since expired.
“…and this room is pure Queen Maria,” said Mário, concluding a sentence she hadn’t heard. “But you must drink something. A Grand Marnier? A Marie Brizzard?”
She accepted a liqueur, hoping to find the courage to speak of a certain matter, as soon as she saw the way ahead was clear. Ever since she had entered the house—or, rather, ever since she had heard his voice—she had known that she had to speak about that. Mário, however, seemed to be wallowing in the present. He talked about Rio, his house in Rio, how he had often thought about coming back to Portugal.
“So, you’re a rich man,” she said, for want of anything better to say.
He pulled the contrite face, half proud, half embarrassed, of all rich men in this world. “Not rich exactly,” he said. “Well, I have enough to live comfortably and not worry about tomorrow.”
He made a point of saying this with an impersonal and, at the same time, disinterested air—and she laughed, because this was something new in him.
“It’s funny,” she said. “My cleaning lady thinks I’m rich because I earn more than she does. You don’t consider yourself to be rich because above you rises a long ladder at the top of which sits who knows who, the Shah of Persia perhaps?” She laughed, then grew serious and turned to face him. “It’s been ages since I laughed, you know. You have no idea how happy I am, how happy I was when I found out, I don’t remember when or who from, that you were rich. You have no idea. It was, you might say, a liberation. I felt so guilty.”
“There was no reason to feel guilty.” He got to his feet, picked up a lovely ornate silver box, offered her a cigarette that she refused, then came and sat beside her on the Venetian sofa. Jô was wearing her usual placid face; her heart, though, was far from placid. “There was no reason,” he went on. “If anyone should feel guilty, I should, because I never once wrote to you. But what can you expect? I remade my life, isn’t that what people say? I tried to remake it. To be born again. It was enjoyable too. I was about to say thrilling if that word wasn’t…”
She murmured, “Quite.”
“I was a new man. I severed all links with the past: I changed scene, found new cast members, but, most important of all, I changed plays. And I was lucky of course. My uncle was just great. He pretended to know nothing about the whole affair, and neither of us ever mentioned it. I really loved him for that.”
“And did he love you?”
“He had no one else. We bonded. It’s good to bond with someone, even with an uncle you’ve never even met before.”
She said:
“Yes, that must be good.” Then she asked him for a whiskey. “But only a very small one. And even if I ask you for more, don’t give it to me.”
“Tell me about you,” he said. “I assume you didn’t marry.”
“No, but why do you assume that?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps because you haven’t mentioned it yet. Or because someone else told me.”
Tell me about you. When would he ask her if she was happy? She got it in before him.
“Are you happy?
“I think so,” he said. “Not that I’ve ever examined the matter closely; I’ve never felt the need. Perhaps because I am happy. You must be thinking…”
“What?”
“That I’ve clung too tightly to the things of this world, and if so, you’re right. But what are we to cling to in this world if not to them? Fortunately, I think I understood this early on.”
“Yes, it’s good that you did understand that so early. Tell me how it happened; what’s it like?” She had always felt a great admiration for people who understand things early on, who don’t have to wait until the end of their life or, at least, until they reach old age.
He stood up and started talking and gesticulating, as he used to do, pacing up and down and sometimes tripping on the rug.
“Well, it’s this: Comfort, good food (I have the best cook in Rio, an amazing mulatto woman), a few women friends—none of whom I’m in love with, or just enough to deceive my heart. Before, I used to speak scornfully of ‘the things of this world,’ didn’t I? Even that plan of ours was only intended to get us through to adulthood, wasn’t it? But you know, it’s important to be healthy, my dear, and that’s what being healthy is. I don’t know if you’re following me… I mean, having good things, enjoying them, and thinking how extremely lucky you are because many people don’t have them.”
“Giving thanks to God.”
“In a way.”
Jô smiled contentedly, throwing herself, as she used to do, into one of these conversations they both loved and in which nothing much was said.
“There’s your liver to consider, of course,” she said. “A nice house, or two in your case, has never done anyone any harm, but good food, Mário, and made by the best cook in Rio, isn’t that what you said? And then there’s the drinking, of course. Don’t forget about your liver. As for those lady friends, an excess of lady friends…”
“I’m a careful man. The occasional lady friend, the occasional lavish supper… In between, a chaste life, a little grilled fish, and a sip of whiskey, which never killed anyone. I’m a cautious fellow.”
She again laughed gaily. Their love had been a happy one, however surrounded it was by the barbed wire of obstacles. Had Mário been different it would have been a love full of sadness and lamentations. With him, though, this was impossible. She remembered him as a discreet young man. Quiet and solitary sometimes, but at others, really happy, almost alarmingly exuberant and communicative. Impatient too, and changeable. His need for change, though, was purely physical, in revolt against static people and static landscapes. He was first here, then there. And she was the only one who understood that he was really always in the same place.
He was a nice boy, the Mário she had known. Was he any more than that? Was he? Everyone liked him, and he liked everyone; he was, if you like, an omnivore. And Jô had often wondered if there was much merit in the love he felt for her. He liked everyone equally and equally indulgently, almost, one might say, like a professional Christian. But she thought all this later on, when he had left, after he had been forced to leave.
“Anyway, I’ve told you about me,” he said.
Now tell me about you, he must be thinking. About your life and loves, your problems. Why did you never marry? Because you didn’t want to or because the right man never appeared?
She said quickly:
“You’ve really told me very little, Mário, and only briefly. I know you have a lovely home in Rio and now another—this one—in Lisbon. That you eat and drink well, that you have a few lady friends. All that is fairly obvious. What about the rest?”
“No, it’s too soon for that. We’ll meet again I hope. What about you? You still haven’t told me about you. I was told that you were or are in a relationship.”
“Yes, but that didn’t happen right away. I needed time to think.”
“About me?”
“Not about you so much as about the fallibility of things, even the best-laid plans. They fall apart and nothing is left.”
“Nothing at all?”
She wanted to say, “Nothing, absolutely nothing,” which, two hours ago, would have been easy enough to say, but it was now much less so, and she said instead that sometimes something did remain, something imponderable or inexplicable, and she felt suddenly glad to have said it. Lighter, almost freer, but sad too, sad and happy at the same time. Mário was looking at her, unblinking, and it occurred to Jô that perhaps he was thinking something else and that there was still time to make a U-turn without a great squealing of brakes. This is what she imagined or understood, or at least suspected, and she laughed even though she didn’t really want to, because she saw that he was about to speak and feared hearing unwanted words. She laughed then, but in a disciplined manner. A little light laugh, as if to herself, but also out of politeness.
“I don’t think I should have come,” she said with an exaggerated degree of nonchalance. “I should have told you that it looked bad and so on. Or simply that I was too busy, but I wanted to see you and talk to you. A battle between me and propriety!”
“I was thinking that I ruined your life.”
Ah, so that was it. Jô lost all the combative spirit she had started to feel and all moderation too. She shrugged and held out her empty glass, which he silently refilled.
“I think we both did that, Mário. I’m talking about my life, not yours, because you’ve only gained by leaving. My life though… Well, if it hadn’t been for that idea of mine… I was more to blame; that’s the truth of the matter, and that’s what I’ve always thought. It’s true that you never did write…deep down, though, I think you did the right thing, I mean, the logical thing. We are all made to take care of ourselves; I’m more and more convinced of that. Of our own beloved bodies and minds. As for others, regardless of whether they’re the love of our life or the grocer on the corner… We’re the pits really!”
“Oh, come on!”
“Why? You would say the same or, rather, think it. Or at least feel it. We don’t feel another person’s headache; we don’t die instead of them. We are, how can I put it, impervious. Why should such things be shared? It’s impossible. You were and still are right. Having those ‘lady friends’ is a good idea. Excellent. You were born again, isn’t that what you said? You were, of course. Tell me what you felt.”
“Do you really want to know?”
“I do, yes.”
“Well, I felt a great desire to be a different person, to do a lot of things and do them well, of course, and to be able to return one day as that different person.”
“Purified.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. Something more modest. Cleansed if you like. At most, disinfected. There was nothing particularly lofty in that ambition.”
“And you did return a different person, so you must be very pleased.”
“Yes, I am.”
She stood up then and said goodbye because it was getting late and she had to meet someone. Mário asked if he could call her again at the school.
“Best not to,” she said. “It could cause problems. Call me at home. I assume you can still remember my full name.”
The dying day—the dying light—brought with it a bitterly cold wind. Mário offered to drive her home, but she declined. “I like walking, as you know.” He did know and so did not insist. Jô set off down the street as if she had no particular goal, taking irregular steps, now long and slow, now very short and almost hasty, following the edge of the sidewalk, keeping a careful eye on the paving stones, worried she might stub her toe on a raised edge, barely visible in the nocturnal light of the streetlamps. She felt rather excited, with no sense of sadness or bitterness. It was a new feeling or, rather, a rediscovered one that she had not felt for a long time and that filled her whole being, spilling over into a faint smile she didn’t even know was there.
Mário Sena: That is what her smooth, white hand used to write slowly, carefully, like someone painting a miniature. Beside it she wrote Joana Sena, but she didn’t like that and corrected it to read Joana de Sena. A lovely name. It sounded good. She liked the sound of it. Later, there had been another possibility, albeit remote, and she had written Artur Fraga on the blank piece of paper, and after that, Joana Fraga. Poor Joana Fraga. Fraga, imagine!
In the darkness of her bedroom, with her head under the covers, Jô was thinking about Joana de Sena and Joana Fraga, and about just plain Joana, about Jô, and she felt like weeping for all of them.
That night, the captain’s cockerel crowed even more loudly than usual, extinguishing all of those images at a stroke with the sheer strident force of his call. In the distance, like lost echoes, other cockerels responded, first one, then another, and another. A chair creaked and she turned on the light and took a sleeping pill.
The temptation to shout in the mannequin’s ear. The irresistible temptation to punish that diluted gaze, those sealed lips. Besides, she felt that people should speak during mealtimes, even if they had nothing to say; otherwise, there was something ignoble about their self-absorbed chewing. Even if they had nothing to say, which was not her case.
“Mário’s here.”
“Mário who?”
“Mário Sena.”
“Sena…let me think…”
“He arrived from Brazil a month or so ago.”
He understood then who she meant and let out a brief cry:
“Ah, your old boyfriend. Why didn’t you say so? I know so many people. Mário… Mário Sena… How was I to know?”
Jô said nothing, and he asked:
“Who told you?”
“He called me at school. I went to his house.”
“To Mário Sena’s house.”
“To Mário Sena’s house.”
He didn’t even look up. He was occupied, even preoccupied, with liberating a bone from the fish on the plate before him, a fish with a golden skin and a creamy sauce, adorned with a single prawn. He raised the fork to his mouth, chewed, swallowed, discreetly wiped his lips, took a sip of white wine, called the waiter over to tell him the wine was warm. Then he looked at her, but his face expressed no feeling at all, not even surprise. A weary face, no, not even that, indifferent.
“And?” he asked.
“He insisted on showing me his house,” said Jô. “He’s very proud of it. It’s his dream house and so on. He’s been buying furniture at auctions.”
“Is it a nice house?” he asked, showing a polite interest.
“Not bad. Too museum-like for my taste. Cold too. Furniture with a past, you know the kind of thing. The sort that makes you feel uncomfortable, awkward.”
Artur ate a piece of bread.
“I find that shocking,” he said.
“What?”
“The enthusiasm certain men have for décor. It has a whiff of the new bride in her new home or the homosexual in his bijou residence, if you know what I mean. Aren’t you eating your fish?”
She realized that she had forgotten about the fish on her plate, and she found this as exasperating as his impassivity. The shout hadn’t worked, she thought as she chewed laboriously. The mannequin hadn’t even wobbled, not even a tremor. A twitch of the mouth perhaps, almost imperceptible. No, that was just her imagination. Artur’s mouth didn’t twitch, and she felt embarrassed because she had failed, and he knew—she was sure of this—he knew she had failed.
“Aren’t you drinking?”
“The wine isn’t chilled.”
“I know, it’s very annoying.”
He again summoned the waiter, asked him urgently to bring another bottle. “Did you only talk about furniture?” he asked.
“No, of course not, although it was one of the main subjects of conversation. Furniture, paintings, auctions. All very concrete stuff. Mário has become very much the materialist.”
“What did you expect?”
“Nothing, I suppose, which left me with all paths open. I hadn’t seen him for twenty years, and in twenty years…well, it’s only natural that people would change. Evolution and all that.”
Artur said, “Quite.” He handed her the menu. “Do you want dessert? Peach melba? And would you mind if I just glance at the newspaper? I haven’t had a moment today…”
And the Times opened up between them.
Jô turned out the light, and the room seemed suddenly small, poor, almost squalid. From the ceiling hung a bare lightbulb, and the curtains at the window were threadbare. On that day—why did she remember that day and not some other day?—they had been feeling sad, hopeless, and full of rebellious feelings. At least she was. But perhaps she had infected him, too, because Mário was frowning and staring into space. Lying side by side and yet so separate that not even their hands were touching. Two parallel rays of sunlight, once so warm, now ice cold.
“But why wouldn’t they understand?” she asked when she could find the words. “It seems so simple. It is so simple.”
“Perhaps not for them. They’re old, remember. And they may not recall how it was for them. We’ve already forgotten what we did and said as children.”
“And they haven’t.”
“And they haven’t.”
“When will they realize that their children have their own lives to live, that their lives belong to them and no one else? That they were once the way their children are now?”
“But they don’t know that anymore, Jô. Don’t you see, they’ve forgotten.”
“Yes, you’re right.”
There was another silence, which she tried to end several times. It was, however, too dense a silence, made up of all the questions they were asking and that were churning around inside them. And every time Jô opened her mouth to speak, she wished she hadn’t because nothing she might say was worth saying.
“What are you thinking?” Mário asked at last.
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s not important.”
“It might be.”
“No, really, it’s not important.”
“They insist on seeing us as if we were children,” he said. “They make me sick. They say I can only get married when I’m older; no, more than that, when I can earn enough to keep myself without having to go hat in hand to them for money. It’s always about money. If only we could live without the stuff.”
“Apparently we can’t; it’s just not possible.”
“If there were some way…”
She still did not move, a recumbent statue, arms by its sides, blind eyes gazing up at the ceiling.
“There is a way,” she said. “But I wouldn’t advise you to take that route.”
“What’s that?”
He propped himself up on one elbow, waiting. “What?” he said again.
“Like I said, it’s not advisable. Since we have to have money, we’ll try and get some somehow, then hide away in some remote village until we’re old enough. Where no one will know us. I love the countryside. It must be lovely in the spring.”
“But how do we find the money?”
Another silence, filled with all kinds of answers. He, however, heard none of them and insisted, “Have you got an idea, then? Go on, tell me.” Then more softly, “Unless you’re thinking that I might… But I can’t do that… My father…”
“If we hid ourselves away…”
Nothing more was said. They were afraid of their own thoughts, but they felt drawn to them too, seduced, and allowed themselves to be seduced. The two of them alone and without her mother’s distrustful, accusing eyes on her whenever she came home late. “What time do you call this to be coming home? And don’t tell me you’re just back from school. I’m not a fool, you know.” Without his father shouting at him whenever he mentioned getting married. “You’re not getting married: I mean, you’re barely out of diapers and already you’re causing me problems, as if I didn’t have enough to deal with… Marry? Grow up first, and then we’ll talk again. You need to acquire a bit of common sense, no, what am I saying, a lot, if not it’s Brazil for you, and there’ll be no studying there, no, you’ll work for your Uncle Ernesto!” Without having to see or hear them. Without the clock continually shouting out the hours that separated them. Alone and sole masters of their time. They gradually grew accustomed to the idea, and now that she had shared it with Mário, she felt less bitter and less alone. His father wasn’t exactly rich, but he earned a good salary. What difference would a few contos de réis make to him?
Mário broke the silence, saying tentatively:
“It would have to be on the day he gets paid.”
“Yes,” said Jô quietly. “It’s the twenty-fifth today, isn’t it?”
“Twenty-sixth.”
“Ah.”
They left the room. Jô spent the next few days secretly packing a small suitcase with her most precious possessions and hid the case in her closet. At the bottom, she put the few bits of jewelery she owned: the ring, the gold chain and medallion, the little sapphire cross, the charm bracelet. Much later, she would often think how selfish she had been to encourage Mário to commit an act in which she herself would take no active part. She had only her own possessions in the suitcase.
Her mother never knew anything about it. She never found the suitcase hidden in the closet and never noticed that, one day, it had returned to its former place, along with the other suitcases, in the storage room. The one thing she did find strange was that Jô started coming home earlier in the evening and that the phone suddenly fell silent. None of this worried her overmuch, though, because she thought they were both too young, and, in her opinion, their relationship wasn’t going to last anyway. That’s a relief, she had probably thought. And despite Jô’s concealed and unexplained tears, she felt content. “Sometimes people cry only to laugh later on,” she would say. And she prayed to all the saints that Mário would not return.
Beaten, insulted, and alone, Mário, the inept and shamefaced thief, was at that point on his way to Brazil.
“I thought my life was over, you know, had reached its inglorious end,” he told her a few days later, in a café downtown. “I really did. Everything we had thought and felt. I’ve never been so unhappy or felt so grubby. I was a complete wreck. Oh, yes, I missed you, but even more important than that was the shame I felt just to exist, to be me, unable to escape myself. There I was on the ship, in first class (my father always cared about appearances), in the midst of all those kindly people who smiled at me and tried to strike up conversations. There was even a lady in her fifties, which seemed positively ancient to me then, who decided to be my protector. I fled, and avoided her like the plague. Then, one day, when I was feeling even more alone and abandoned than usual, I let her talk to me, and she told me then that she’d had a son whom I resembled, and that he had died in an accident. She had a photo of him in her handbag, and he did look like me, a really striking resemblance. I told her everything, imagine! And to my amazement, she smiled. ‘Believe me, it’s not that bad,’ she said. ‘The only question is whether your uncle will prove more understanding than your father. You’re truly sorry for what you did, and that’s the main thing. We’ve all done similar things in thought, word, or deed. Or worse things. You’ve never killed anyone? You’re a saint! The number of people I’ve killed… The number of times I wished I had a magic lamp!’ I remember saying to her that words were of little importance and thoughts even less so, but she didn’t agree and gave me her reasons. Good reasons too. She spoke to me again—and at length—about the people she had, as she loved to say, murdered. And she persuaded me of course. I really wanted to believe it. Then when I arrived in Rio and was welcomed with open arms, the world seemed to me a marvelous place. I was walking on roses even if I did sometimes fear their thorns. Then, over time, I decided that there really were very few thorns.”
“All this makes me think…”
“What?”
“That woman, your uncle, your father, especially him, whatever can they have thought of me? You did point your father out to me once, do you remember? He was walking up the Chiado on the righthand side, and we were walking down on the left. I would sometimes say to myself, If I ever meet him, I’ll run away. And I would pray to God that he had never recognized my face.”
“There was no reason to feel afraid, Jô; he never mentioned you,” said Mário, slightly taken aback. “As far as he was concerned, you knew nothing about it, you never did. And when I think about it now, I didn’t keep silent out of loyalty, but out of egotism. Yes, it was egotism. Basically, I felt proud—well, a residue of pride at least—about an act that was simultaneously shameful and regrettable. If I placed all the responsibility on your shoulders, my love, I would be in the sad position of a young kid blaming a cleverer one for leading him astray.”
“Cleverer, are you sure?”
He said that, no, he wasn’t sure, but that everyone would think so and that was what mattered. Then he spoke about his first few weeks in Rio and about the time, ten years later, when Uncle Ernesto had died, and, from one day to the next, he had become a man with money. With money. He still didn’t use the word “rich.” Jô listened and looked at him, and she had an odd feeling, which wasn’t a new feeling, but one that had dissolved in time and was now being restored: the feeling that she had always known Mário. Not just since the day of her seventeenth birthday, when they had met at a dance at the Clube Brasileiro, to which she had worn her sky-blue taffeta dress, but before that, in another existence, where they had both lived, even though they had no memory of it. After all those years, he was again becoming a person who was important in her life. More than that, he may never have ceased to be important, despite her falling in love with Artur with an enthusiasm bordering on affectation. And despite her loving neither one nor the other now. Mário was far away, on the far shore, beyond all that sea and mist and days and nights of traveling, so faint and futile and lost somewhere over the horizon that most of the time she wasn’t even conscious of his absent presence.
“What are you thinking about so deeply that you can’t even hear me?”
“Nothing.”
“You said that once before.”
Jô shrugged and made as if to laugh, but immediately stopped because laughter seemed inappropriate. She always used to say that she wasn’t thinking about anything, and Mário had remembered. Contented but serious, almost somber.
“It’s impossible to say. I’ve never been able to explain my thoughts. It’s as if you were to ask me to separate out the ingredients of a cake once I’d mixed them all up. My thoughts are a cake, and there comes a point when I can’t remember what I put in the pan. I was thinking about you, of course. And about me. But what? Where were we?”
“Were you thinking bad things about me?”
“As if I could! And why would I? Oh, there was a time, and I expect I’ve already told you about that. I thought a lot of things about you, but I never wished you dead, I swear. They were bitter, but placid, thoughts. Mere cogitations on the absurdity of eternal loves. Then it all passed.”
“Everything passes,” he said.
“Yes, almost everything. Except…”
The waiter came over and asked what she wanted. Tea? Cakes?
“Yes, some of those very buttery ones with chocolate on top. What are they called?”
“Do you mean londrinos?” said the waiter. “I think that’s what you want. Square ones, right?”
“Yes, square. Londrinos, that’s what I want.”
“Aren’t you worried about putting on weight?” Mário asked once the waiter had left.
“If only! Fat women have such a smug look about them, as if everything in their life was hunky-dory… Say what you like about the sin of gluttony, but I would love to be one of those women whose skirt rides up a lot when they sit down, and who spend all their time tugging it down. Do you know the sort?”
He did, and asked after Paula, who used to be so fat. That was then, said Jô. If he saw her now… She never went above 120 pounds; she refused to.
They spoke about Paula for the rest of the afternoon.
“We talked about you, Paula,” she said when Paula called her that night.
“And how is he?”
“Fine. Twenty years older, but then so am I. And so are you. I went to his house. He wanted to show me. He’s so proud of it. He says he’s going to come and stay here every now and then. His house. It was quite a shock, you know, to see him in his house. Artur says…”
Paula interrupted.
“Why a shock?” she asked.
“Because it was him, of course. He used to be so, oh, I don’t know, such a free spirit… Tables were there for him to put his feet up on them. Now the tables are covered with bibelots, antique clocks inside glass domes. Things like that. He’s so settled, so contented…”
Paula laughed out loud on the other end of the line.
“That’s not so very extraordinary.”
“No, you’re right, it isn’t. You must think I’m being a bit ridiculous.”
“Not at all. Anyway, how did he seem to you?”
Jô thought for a moment.
“I don’t know,” she said at last. “I don’t know yet. I’m a bit slow on the uptake; I always have been. It takes me a while to assimilate things, and occasionally, by the time I do, I’ve lost interest. That’s the way I am, I’m afraid. Anyway…I definitely enjoyed seeing him. Besides, after twenty years, there was something we needed to clear up, or rather, talk through. Things left unsaid leave an unpleasant sense of unfinished business. That’s why I was pleased to see him.”
Paula did not pursue the matter, perhaps because she had played no part in it.
“I’m having one of my allergic reactions,” she said. “It’s ghastly. It happened just now. I suddenly had a weird feeling, as if my face no longer belonged to me. I stood up and went over to the mirror…” A suspense movie, pure Hitchcock, thought Jô. The music rising to a crescendo, loud enough to set your ears ringing. She stood up, went over to the mirror and what did she see? “You can’t imagine what it’s like. I very nearly screamed, which would have alarmed everyone, of course. Anyway, I managed to control myself. I came that close though. It has to be seen to be believed.” The music was fading away now, until it vanished almost completely, leaving only the sound of fluttering wings. “It’s happened before, but never like this. My lips swell up a little, and I know what to do: I take an antihistamine, watch what I eat, and the swelling goes down. This time I’m not so sure. I’m in a real state… It was something I ate at that cocktail party, but what?”
What? thought Jô. What? she thought again.
Her mother’s heart condition had worsened, and she had gone to the doctor that afternoon. She called Jô as soon as Paula hung up, and her voice was quiet and fearful.
“I didn’t even dare mention going on vacation. You know there comes a moment,” she whispered as if it were a secret, “there comes a moment, and I know you won’t understand this, but there comes a time when you feel you’re beginning to decay, yes, decay, Jô. Your eyesight isn’t as good as it was, you start having problems digesting food, your hearing gets worse, your heart begins to fail, not to mention your memory. Do you remember what a good memory I had? If anyone ever needed someone’s phone number and didn’t have the phonebook on hand, or a date or a name lost in the mists of time, they would come to me.”
Jô said she thought her mother had a pretty reasonable memory, perhaps not as good as it used to be, but she would say it was still “effective,” in that it only really retained what her heart deemed to be important.
“Ah, my heart, dear… I’m warning you, at thirty, we all start to decay. We take endless medications and smear ourselves with unguents to stave off total decay, but it never stops its inevitable advance,” said her mother in her rather recondite language. “Day by day. Hour by hour. I don’t want to die!” she screamed almost hysterically.
“Who’s talking about dying?”
“I could live another five or six years, ten at the most. I know I can. I take Quinicardine at mealtimes, fill myself up with vitamins, take it slow on the stairs, eat sensibly. Then there are other worries, but we all have them, don’t we? After a time, death is inevitable, but there are so many things I haven’t done, Jô, and that I won’t do now!”
“That’s what everyone must think,” Jô said wearily. “No one has done everything they wanted to do; everyone gets lost along the way.”
“Yes, but we all worry about our own death. And this is my death, you understand.”
It was five o’clock, and both students and teachers were getting ready to leave, when the head teacher asked Jô to go and see her. Jô had just spent three hours looking out over three different groups of small gleaming faces, all pink and white in the afternoon light, afloat in an odorless atmosphere. She found the head teacher sitting as usual behind her baroque desk with its twisted columns and heavy moldings. She was a dark-haired woman in her sixties, entirely dressed in black, but with a deceptively kind expression. She smiled when Jô entered the room and indicated the chair usually reserved for the mother of the student.
“I’m sorry to delay you, but I needed to talk to you, and this is the only time when there’s any peace and quiet. In the breaks between classes, there are constant interruptions and it’s almost impossible to exchange more than a few words. I hope I’m not inconveniencing you too much.”
Firstly, she asked if she was still happy with her work. She was? Excellent. She felt it was important that all the teachers should enjoy working there. The school was like a big family, at least that’s how she had always seen it. “That’s what my mother—may she rest in peace—intended when she set up the school.”
“I certainly have no complaints,” said Jô.
“Good, and how about the girls?”
For about half an hour, they talked about the students, the good and the mediocre, those who might pass, and those who definitely wouldn’t. They also discussed a private pupil that the head teacher would like her to take on. The girl’s mother was a relative of hers.
Where was she heading with this? Jô felt that behind this conversation lay larger or at least more important issues that would soon take center stage, leaving any others to fade into the background. The head teacher was very skillfully skirting around the subject, drawing spirals that coiled, then uncoiled, circles and occasional straight lines. She tended to avoid the latter, though, perhaps considering them too easy and commonplace, something anyone could draw, the easiest of shortcuts available to anyone. Sometimes, she would linger over a particular point, then abandon it to follow long, convoluted paths only to return to the same place, where no one was now expecting her.
She rambled on about some pedagogue she had once read, about something her father used to say…then about her mother, poor thing, who had worked right until the end because she felt everything was so important. We are like stupid, imbecilic bees, she commented pensively. Then she hurriedly returned to the subject:
“The girl’s mother has no illusions, because the child is nothing…special, shall we say, rather ordinary?” Jô smiled discreetly. As did the head teacher. The kind of regretful smile one would bestow on an inconsolable daughter and an illustrious relative bemoaning such ordinariness in their family. Ordinary. The casual, very slightly, just sufficiently, disdainful way in which she said the word “ordinary.” No, nothing very special. However, she wanted to please the mother, who had asked her to find her a good tutor.
“That’s all really. I won’t keep you any longer.”
Jô stood up, feeling disappointed. Would the head teacher leave it there? She proffered her hand, and the head teacher held on to it longer than usual.
“Well, I’m very glad to know that you’re still happy working with us. I was afraid you might be thinking of leaving.”
“Why?”
“When you marry, I mean.”
“I have no intention of marrying.”
She would like to have rephrased that answer, but it was too late. It had been said and was lost, launched into the world and now in the head teacher’s possession. Someone had obviously seen her with Artur. Perhaps someone had told her about their affair.
“Ah, I thought…” began the head teacher raising her very dark eyebrows. “I was told that a few days ago, someone called and then came to pick you up in their car… If you have no intention of marrying, I assume this will not happen again; otherwise, I would have to ask you to avoid such phone calls and being picked up outside school. That would set a bad example, as I’m sure you understand. The little ones…”
“You can be quite sure that such a thing won’t happen again. It was perhaps rashness on my part, but it was a friend I hadn’t seen for twenty years and who had just returned from abroad.”
“Of course, of course. I thought it must be something like that. But we must consider the little ones…and some families are very particular.”
Jô realized that no one even suspected that Artur existed, and for a moment, this thought filled her mind. She was mechanically putting on her soft new gloves, which were the subtle, uncertain, slightly melancholy color of a dried leaf. They were hard to put on, and she had to ease them on over each finger, slowly, patiently. She concentrated on this task with great patience and attention, as if her whole life depended on how she put on those gloves. She wasn’t looking at anything else, only at her small hands with their slender fingers, now almost chestnut brown and almost smooth. No, she wasn’t looking at anything else, but she was a long way from there, a very long way.
The night was sometimes vast. And dense. So dense that the white cockerel could scarcely pierce it with his crowing. The air was no longer air, but an interval between things, empty space; it was made up of a thicker material, larger and more present and almost unbreathable. A room-sized muzzle was slowly approaching and about to cover her mouth. The furniture wasn’t creaking either, or perhaps it was, but she couldn’t hear it. On such nights, she would fling back the bedclothes and get up, regardless of the cold, and go into the living room at the other end of the apartment. There she would turn on the light; sit in her armchair; take up the first detective novel she found on the shelf; and drink one or two, sometimes three whiskies, making a face as she did so. It was alarming how light and easy and pleasant everything became, as if it took on a different tonality. She would gaze almost tenderly at the wet ring the glass left on the marble table top. And she would end up falling asleep.
So it was on that night. Except that instead of reading, she thought. And while thinking, she resolved a number of things. The alcohol was helping her to think and to resolve matters.
Artur is sitting there either beside her or in front of her, and the radio is broadcasting a concert.
“Will it last much longer?” she asks.
Artur tells her to be quiet and then, about twenty minutes later, when the mellow-voiced presenter tells the esteemed listeners that they have just heard Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in G Minor, he crosses his legs and declares that not liking music shows a deplorable lack of sensitivity, an ugly defect that was nothing to be proud of.
“But I’m not proud of it; I’m just saying what I feel.”
“You think it makes you more ‘interesting’ if you dislike something everyone else likes.”
“No, you’re quite wrong. I deeply regret not liking it. I loathe being ‘interesting.’”
“Deeply regret. Loathe. What on earth has happened to you, Jô? Why are you being so over the top?”
She shrugs.
“Maybe I am, but I can assure you that I genuinely have no wish to appear ‘interesting.’ I insist on that.”
“I’m sorry if I offended you. Far be it from me…”
She isn’t in the least offended, but, rather, filled with despair. As if this conversation were terribly important. And she is annoyed that he doesn’t finish what he was about to say, and wishes he would. She needs an argument, not an apology.
“A deplorable lack of sensitivity…fine, I agree. But it’s hardly a grave matter, is it? It doesn’t harm anyone, does it? Who is going to suffer because I don’t like music? What does it matter if I am not to be seen at concerts or sitting by the radio? On the other hand, there are people whose deplorable lack of sensitivity can cause a great deal of suffering. Isn’t that so, Artur?”
“Sorry?”
“I said, ‘Isn’t that so, Artur?’”
“What?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Artur, I don’t know, but I do know that it’s all over between us.”
He stares at her, uncomprehending. Then he asks her why. The expression on his face is almost pathetic. His mouth is slightly open, his gaze uneasy. For a moment, a very brief moment, he ceases to be a mannequin.
“Why, Jô? Is it because of Mário Sena?”
She shakes her head. That all ended a long time ago. And she hadn’t even thought about Mário for years.
He says again:
“Why then?”
Why? She doesn’t know. Perhaps because she hasn’t achieved what she wanted, because that got lost along the way. Perhaps because their life together was always too sterile, with no roots and no flowers. No fruit, she thought. Perhaps because she had grown tired, simply that.
“I’m fed up with living in the shadows,” she says. “No, ‘fed up’ isn’t really the right expression—that implies some kind of strong feeling, even if only an unspoken one. Tired is closer to the truth. Exhausted. So deep in the shadows, Artur, that no one knows anything about our relationship. Not even at the bank where you work or at the school where I teach. And yet, the head teacher has already asked about Mário.”
“And did you find that useful, Jô?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Can you explain why, Jô?”
“No, I can’t. I myself don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it. But I know it was useful. Mário is going to leave at some point, and he won’t be back for a long time.”
“He has a house here now, so perhaps he’ll be back sooner.”
“Possibly, but that really doesn’t matter.”
“I’m going,” he says. “It’s late.”
“Yes, it is,” says Jô.
She opens her eyes, then closes them and falls asleep, right there, curled up in the armchair.
Mário called and he sounded anxious and in a hurry. Or perhaps the anxiety and haste weren’t just in his voice, but in him, and found expression in his rushed words.
“I’m leaving tomorrow. Just as I was thinking of having a quiet holiday, a day or so in Paris… I have to go. I’ve just received an urgent telegram. A complication, Jô. A really serious complication.”
She asked:
“To do with business?”
“No, no, as I say, it’s a really serious problem.” He fell silent for a moment, then went on: “I think I just have to make the best of it and face it head on. It’s a problem that, it turns out, I can solve with a single word.”
“It’s always good, feeling sure that you can do something, isn’t it?” she said in a worldly-wise way.
Mário agreed, although he would have preferred not to feel under pressure to do it. “I think this is the moment,” he said. “I think this time I’ll have to get married.”
“Good heavens, you’re getting married?” And her ideas ceased being images and became small personal nebulae. “Married?”
“Given the circumstances…”
“Ah.”
He asked her to forgive him, but it was highly unlikely that he would be able to come by her apartment and say goodbye. He had various things to do, a few last-minute complications with the consulate. He hoped that on the next occasion they would have more time:
“We haven’t even been anywhere together.”
“No.”
“It’s just one of those things, but I’m planning to come back in the spring. Then it will be different.”
“In the spring?”
“In April or May. It might be my honeymoon.”
“That would be a good time to show your wife Europe.”
“Yes, the weather should be good by then.”
“And not too hot.”
“Warm enough to swim in the sea.”
“For some people, yes.”
“Or for a trip into the countryside.”
“Impossible though it might seem, I’ve never been to the countryside, or only very briefly. I was once all set to go and spend some time there. In the spring. But it came to nothing.”
“Life.”
“Yes, life. I always go to the beach in the summer, though. I’m usually the only single woman in the hotel. There’s always one, I suppose. Like the village idiot or the street drunk.”
“When I come…”
“When you and your wife come…”
“Yes, when we come.”
“You and your wife.”
“Me and her. We’ll have to make a little trip into the countryside, the three of us.”
“Yes, why not?”
“It’s agreed, then.”
“Agreed.”
There was a silence, then he said:
“Don’t think this is some kind of tragedy for me. She’s pretty, she’s eighteen, and I have to marry her. That’s the way it is. But it’s not a tragedy.”
“I know it isn’t.”
“Goodbye, Jô. I’ll write as soon as I arrive in Rio.”
“Sure,” she said, not that she believed him, but she spoke as if she did. “And I’ll write back.”
Mário hung up, and she sat there quietly, not thinking, the phone still in her hand.
That night, Paula’s voice again told her that “that” wasn’t a life. She first talked about other things and other people. And about herself of course. Such a busy life, Jô, so full of obligations. Some people never have enough time, and she was one of them. “Is that the time? Is it already the twentieth? How did that happen?” She never had enough time; it was dreadful. Francisco was different, he was amazing, he had time for everything and was never in a hurry. Her father had been the same. She went back many years and spoke about her father. She took short cuts, leaped over ditches and climbed walls. By that stage, poor man—by what stage, Jô wondered because she hadn’t been following her—by that stage, he was having problems with his heart, but she didn’t know, nor did anyone else. He must have known though. All the men on his side of the family had bad hearts, and that was what took them to their graves. Peaceful deaths. One night, her father had gone to sleep and never woken up. It was a family disease. Jô found herself thinking that Paula must find that “family disease” elegant and therefore worth milking. Something like the Habsburg jaw or the hemophilia found in Queen Victoria’s descendants.
Jô gave some random answer, and it seemed to her that Paula was a happy woman and always had been. She had been at school too, except then she was more warily, cautiously happy. Happiness, though, was in her chromosomes. As it was in Mário’s. Even if things appeared not to be going well for him, they would always turn out for the best. They were both clever at looking for happiness and finding it. The doors always stood open for them: Before they even knocked, or, at the very least, the first time they rang the bell, the doors would be flung wide. And people would receive them with open arms. They already had a place for them; they were expecting them to come. How so? “Why,” the people would laugh, “we had a sixth sense, a feeling in our bones.” Two or three such welcomes create a great sense of confidence and drive away any complexes, thought Jô. And even if other doors were opened with less enthusiasm, less quickly, the individuals in question still felt confident and invulnerable. They knocked or rang in a certain way and smiled loftily. And in they went. They pushed past other people, forged paths, obliging those others, by their mere presence, to leave their seats if necessary, so that they could sit where it best suited them.
“…and we’ll probably spend Christmas in Paris. The Royers are very insistent, and Francisco is almost convinced.”
“Really!”
“Can I bring you anything?”
“A pack of Gauloises.”
“Goodness, you’re easy to please.”
“I am, aren’t I?”
“You know, sometimes I really don’t understand you.”
“I’m an island, Paula.” Yes, a small island, with no archipelago, surrounded by an unknown ocean and a mist so thick you couldn’t see the ships, if there were any. But it would be only natural that there were. There are always ships around islands. She had visited an island like that once…
In her living room, seated on her sofa, Paula’s voice was laughing. “Well, we’re all islands; you’re not alone in that.”
“Yes, but I’m this particular island.”
Small and with pebbly, rather unlovely, east-facing beaches. The sun abandoned them halfway through the afternoon, and then it was cold, and the water, which had been pleasantly warm until then, turned icy, opaque, full of life and death and mysteries. There was only one thing to do: go higher and higher in search of a little sun. However, the western side of the island was the realm of seagulls and steep cliffs. Things to be looked at. Noises that were silence. And she always ended up going back to the tent where she was camping with friends. Tired. Fed up. Wanting to leave and not leaving.
“But it’s your life that’s an island, not you.”
“Yes, it’s my life,” Jô said. “But what am I without my life; what are any of us without our lives?”
“It’s getting late, I’m off to bed,” said Paula. “And your situation, has it changed at all?”
She closed her eyes or opened them. Tomorrow, she thought, I have classes, two private lessons, and a meeting in the evening with Artur. We’ll go and have a coffee in Cascais or to Guincho beach, if it’s not raining of course, and, at a certain point, he’ll open the Times and read out the most important bits of news, because he’s always up to speed on what’s going on in the world, which is important, even pressing—now who used to use that word? As for me, I will wait patiently, or apparently patiently, for his daughter, one day, to marry.
Then all of this seemed to her unbearable, and she decided that the next day she would have a conversation with him, perhaps that one, perhaps another, but a definitive one in any case. Her mother was right. Paula was right. Tomorrow. She would phone him on purpose, she would ask him to meet her, she might even go to the bank. Tomorrow.
She was still thinking this when she fell asleep, and she did so peacefully. The night, though, was long, one of those very solid nights, so heavy they stop you from breathing and almost suffocate you. One of those nights. She woke up, took her sleeping pills, and dreamed of the father she had barely known, about her ancient mother, about fat Paula with her hair in braids, but she didn’t dream about Mário. It wasn’t a dream; it was a patchwork quilt. In the morning, the surface of the water was slightly ruffled—a mere shudder, a shiver—by the strident sound and by its echoes. She, though, had not quite come to, and only a part of herself, a very small part, heard those echoes. The rest, the most important part, was still hidden or forgotten deep down, possibly lost, in that place where no shadow fish slithered past. Among seaweed, empty seashells, and the skeletons of ships.