The faded, obsequious, courteous clerk opens the glass door, keeps it open with one foot (it’s an automatic door)—“Mind the step, Madame”—and bends slightly to allow her to pass. He is carrying a large round package, clumsily wrapped in brown paper; he has it clutched to his chest with one hairy hand. She notices that he has very long fingernails, one of which, the index finger, is stained yellow with nicotine. In exchange, Graça offers him her static, impersonal, almost invisible smile and finds herself out on the street in the rain—which hasn’t stopped since morning—wondering why she always feels obliged to thank people, to reciprocate acts of kindness and acts of rudeness with various kinds of smiles, of which she has so many! The last, most recent smile remains forgotten on her face, frozen, indissoluble in the air. However, the clerk standing next to her doesn’t even notice—and would it matter if he did?—the customer smiled at him, and that was kind of her. Not that he’s thinking any of this, because he has his back to her, his right arm raised. The taxi, however, doesn’t stop. It’s already occupied.
“It’s always difficult at this time of day: too much traffic, a real nuisance. We just have to be patient… And this rain certainly doesn’t help. What weather, eh? A whole two weeks of it we’ve had… Say what they like, Madame, but I blame those atomic bombs and the rockets they keep sending up to the moon; don’t you agree, Madame? They call it progress, but to what end? If they at least made some useful discoveries, a cure for cancer, for example… That’s just my personal opinion of course… But we’ve never had rain like this in October, not on the tenth of October. If there aren’t any taxis, we can always phone the taxi stand, because sometimes…” He’s speaking slowly in a voice that is neither too loud nor too soft. A quiet, careful, cautious voice that shifts unaltered from subject to subject, without registering the change, always the same, independent of the rest of his body, unrelated to the concave chest in which the great brown paper package appears to have embedded itself, almost penetrated.
“Ah, at last!” cries the man. And this cry is immediately followed by a faint splashing sound, and the man looks anxiously down at the package, studying it with an expression that closely resembles professional concern, then he turns to Graça: “My pleasure, Madame.” He opens the taxi door with his free hand and allows her to get in; she holds out her black-gloved hands—everything about her is black, apart from her triangular face with its round, oblique features, incredibly white next to all that blackness, almost luminous in the half-light of the car, rather like certain phosphorescent images that are visible at night.
“Take care, Madame,” he says. And to the driver: “Don’t drive too fast, please.” Then, turning to her again, feeling completely at ease now: “Thank you so much, Madame, always glad to help. Don’t forget the pebbles; they’re important.”
Graça says “Goodbye” and in the same neutral tone, announces the name of the street where she lives and the number of the house, so that she is then free to drift freely—such peace! —over the surface of things and gestures and sounds. And the car sets off, slowly, as the clerk had requested. Too slowly. She half-closes her eyes, which are green or brown depending on the day. Whenever she gets into a taxi (it has to be a taxi, not an ordinary car; a car always has someone driving it, someone who speaks, and to whom you have to listen and respond—not in a taxi though, where the driver doesn’t exist, can’t be seen, well, he doesn’t have a face, just a pair of shoulders, the nape of a neck), whenever she gets into a taxi, she has the feeling, half-pleasure, half-anxiety, that she’s setting off with no fixed destination, borne along inside some unknown animal. Or quite simply en route to a new life or even to a gentle, friendly, mysterious death, faceless and painless. At such times, she barely feels, barely sees, merely thinks how sweet and consoling it is. She almost never regrets what she has done or what she has lost. She almost never says to herself, if only I could go back…
But no one can go back, Claude would tell her. Why ruminate about things; why chew over what’s already been digested? Graça would talk, would tell him things, always returning to the same spot. Claude would shrug, quite certain he was right. “Why bother, if every night we die a kind of death? The next day is always new: We emerge once more from our mother’s womb, are once again thrown to the lions, but everything is different; we see it in a different way, in a different light. Why look back at what’s happened when it’s lost, irrecoverable, if it can’t be fixed?”
This was the voice of Claude, a voice that, despite it all, had not yet begun to decompose, rising up from that ever-present past, flapping its wings and brushing her cold forehead, but lacking the strength to go any farther, any deeper, into her heart. Claude’s hesitant, sometimes strident, always monotone voice.
Piedade has a monotone voice too, but hers is a gray voice, so there’s no comparison. Claude’s voice is the color of verdigris. Graça feels almost irritated with herself, but it’s only a very slight, almost insubstantial irritation. Not even irritation really. Perhaps a mere disagreement between the part of her that always disagrees and the other part that usually accepts everything with a wan smile or, rather, pretends to accept out of inertia, too tired to argue.
She cautiously rotates her left wrist, peers at her watch, and sees that it’s five to one. Her lunchtime (the time set by her maid Piedade) is half past twelve. This means that Piedade has been sitting for twenty-five minutes, seething and talking to herself, because when she’s angry, Piedade talks to herself and refers to Graça in the third-person plural.
Graça likes to enter the apartment without Piedade noticing and then eavesdrop on her muttered complaints: “Where on earth can they have gotten to at this hour? The lunch will be ruined, but what do they expect, it’s not my fault.” Or is it? For Graça suspects that, on those occasions, Piedade takes her cruel revenge by deliberately burning the food, so that Graça will leave it on her plate untouched, or by somehow making the food smell burned or by adding too much salt. “I cooked it for too long, but that’s hardly my fault; it was really delicious, and if you’d arrived on time, everything would have been fine.” Piedade’s soul, though, is a mystery. Who can possibly understand other people’s souls? Because she worries if Graça doesn’t eat the lunch she has deliberately ruined. She then runs into the kitchen and whips up an omelette or brings her some leftovers from the previous evening. And she gets very offended if Graça doesn’t eat; she scowls and turns her back and disappears, but the clatter of plates can be heard in the kitchen accompanied by her mutterings: “Well, if they want to starve, fine…”
This has been going on for nearly six months, ever since Graça came home and found Piedade, anonymously and discreetly, perusing the want ads in the Diário de Notícias.
To her surprise, the taxi has stopped. For a moment, she doesn’t recognize that this is her street, and the heavy wooden door with an iron grille covering the glass panel at the top is her door. The idea and the image very slowly take shape in her mind and before her eyes. When they are complete and perfectly aligned, she feels as if she has come from quite where she doesn’t know, suddenly reborn on the back seat of that taxi. The driver turns (he finally has a face, poor thing, a round, pockmarked face) and is looking at her—for how long?—alarmed at her immobility.
“This is it, isn’t it?” he asks.
She shudders, quickly says, Yes, it is, and feels obliged to explain that she had been miles away (thinking about Piedade, how ridiculous!); she opens her handbag, takes from her purse the tightly folded twenty escudo note, receives her change, and gives him a one escudo coin as a tip. The driver rather sullenly takes the coin, reaches over, and unlocks the door. Graça carefully places the parcel on the seat, gets out, then turns to pick the parcel up. This is becoming an endless chain, she thinks, but it doesn’t end there; it’s much longer. There are still a few more links—only a few?—that she knows about, those she can foresee. The others will perhaps only end that night or never. Jusqu’à ce que mort s’ensuive… What a stupid idea! She slightly raises her shoulders as she picks up the parcel, or rather she thinks she does. Then it’s the mesh elevator door sliding to the right at the same time as the light comes on, and outside, in another world, the engine of the taxi starts up again. The small metal button; the jolt as the lift sets off; the ascent skyward; the sudden, inevitable juddering halt. If only she could carry on going up and up, but no, there’s always a terminus, and this is hers. How often as a child did she dream about the fifth floor and gaze enviously at the neighbors who lived up there… But she always had to come down again, to this second floor: The rest doesn’t belong to her, and she’s never been there; it remains a complete unknown. She rings the bell (her hands too occupied for her to get the key out of her handbag); hears the slow, reluctant steps of Piedade, who silently opens the door and lets her in; then she very cautiously puts everything down on the table in the hallway, gives a weary sigh, takes off her scarf, takes off her gloves, breathes in the new smell of the apartment—what does it smell of?—and says in her quiet, implacable voice, before turning her back on Piedade:
“The rice smells burned.”
The fish is swimming around and around in its small translucent planet. “You can put some sand in the bottom along with a few colored pebbles,” said the man in the shop. As if she didn’t know that… For the moment, though, the bowl is empty, and the fish has it all to itself and is dancing about, occasionally stopping to stare at her in surprise, opening and closing its fat round lips. She really must do something about it; that complete absence of any scenery is terribly sad, almost painful. It’s cold.
“Lunch is on the table. If you want…”
To eat. But that censorious sentence is even more truncated than usual: It stops right there, overwhelmed by the force of the image, and Piedade abandons her position in the doorway, from where she usually hurls her hard, well-aimed words at Graça. She takes two steps forward and stares, unable to understand what that fishbowl is doing there. She doesn’t speak; she merely looks at Graça, at the fish, and then back at Graça.
“What’s that?” she says at last, without the slightest rise in intonation. It’s not so much a question as a demand for a response.
Graça smiles. Another of her many smiles. This is the false-trail kind of smile, which always points the wrong way and never to the easiest path, the one that will lead straight out into open countryside. This one is in subterranean communication with her eyes, which are suddenly larger and brighter. A smile that confuses Piedade.
“I’ve always liked animals. And now that I have my own apartment…”
She stops and, for a moment, ponders her own words. Her own apartment… Was the other one not hers? The other one, with its pale furniture; colored formica countertops, curtains, and armchairs, all with an abstract design; and a big poster for a Jean Lurçat exhibition on the wall? Wasn’t that hers? She asks the question three times, but doesn’t wait for an answer; she runs away, turns her back on Piedade, thinks it’s not worth the bother, no, she doesn’t even think that. She returns to the room.
“…and I’m going to get a cat too.”
She isn’t going to get a cat. This is just a simple, last-minute excuse. And of course she doesn’t know (how could she?) that Piedade cannot stand cats, can’t even look at them: All the hairs on her large body stand on end. She fears both their volatility and their stillness, but most of all she fears that fixed gaze of theirs (like the gaze of a snake, she says); a cat only has to arch its back slightly for her to feel she’s about to be attacked, mauled, possibly have her eyes scratched out, and definitely end up covered in blood. That’s all it takes for her to utter terrified screams, completely absurd in that tall, sturdy, fifty-something woman with a gruff, almost masculine voice. Graça knows nothing about this. Piedade first hints at it, then tells her straight out, giving her a kind of ultimatum:
“The day you bring one of those creatures in here, I’ll be leaving on that very same day.”
Graça accepts this statement, ponders it gravely, and reserves it for later consideration. In fact, she only heard what Piedade said very vaguely, in passing. Equally vaguely, she saw Piedade turn and go back into the kitchen, her world and her refuge. We all have one. Hers… Hers what? What was she thinking about? About the fishbowl of course. About the fishbowl and where she was going to put it. Where else, but in the living room? Isn’t that why she bought it, to put it in the living room? That’s where Leda used to keep her goldfish, on the shelf next to the record player. But the record player has gone; what could have happened to it? Did it stop working? Had her father removed it because it brought back too many painful memories? Yet the shelf is still the best place. She again picks up the fishbowl, goes into the living room, and looks around. The same furniture in the same places: She hadn’t wanted to move anything. She’s always had a horror of moving things and, if she ever does, she just can’t get used to it: The furniture becomes somehow aggressive, too real; she keeps bumping into it and always ends up restoring it to its previous location. To the comfortable absences of their former positions. Opposite her is the big glass cabinet full of leatherbound books; to the right, the velvet-upholstered divan; and opposite that, the two armchairs and the low table with the pink cut-glass ashtray on one corner. To the left, the console table on which sits the bust of her father, chin raised, eyes vacant. Beside it, the small bookshelf, empty now, where he kept his favorite books: Cronin, Maugham, Pierre Benoit. Opposite that, the large drafting table, where he always worked standing up. Sad and empty. On the wall, a single painting—why that one?—the peasant woman wrapped in a black shawl, holding a basket in her large, red hands, swollen with the cold.
She used to suffer from chilblains, horrible things. Her fingers resembled suspiciously pink sausages, almost bursting out of their skins, possibly going off. She couldn’t even bend them. Claude would clasp her always-icy hands and try to warm them with his. Even when he had just come in from the street, his hands would be warm with quick, lively blood. Then, though, she would get a terrible itching and bite her fingers to stop the itch, leaving deep, white marks on her taut skin that would then, slowly, disappear.
The worst thing was having to wash her clothes when there was no hot water, which was most of the day. The water was only really hot until half past nine in the morning. After that, it was always cold, no matter how long Graça let the water run. Only sometimes, purely by chance, would it come warm from the spring.
Washing clothes first thing in the morning was even more unpleasant. At around midday, someone would come to clean the room—je ne dérange pas ces messieurs dames—and that daily interruption of their relative privacy was intensely annoying! She couldn’t drape her handkerchiefs over the wardrobe door to dry or hang her underwear on the heater. She preferred to do this only when she was sure no one would come in. By then, though, the water was already cold. It was so irritating!
She had never before noticed how flat the painting was, how crude the drawing. She sits down in order to study it more closely and because she feels tired. Looking at it now, the woman’s hands appear to be made not of skin, but rubber; the basket has no substance to it; her face lacks all expression. A mannequin wrapped in a shawl. What was he trying to paint? Despair? Weariness? His ignorance of a weariness that nonetheless exists? Vasco always had plenty of ideas but was incapable of transferring them to his paintings. That is why he couldn’t sell them and why the art critics ignored him. He would shrug and say he didn’t give two hoots, he really didn’t… “What kind of hoots?” Clotilde-my-love had asked once. “Loud or soft?” But no one had laughed, apart, that is, from Clotilde’s husband of course.
It was Vasco who had taught her how to wash and dry handkerchiefs, a memory from his days as a penniless student. Graça hadn’t believed him—no, really, it was perfectly possible; he would show her—and in one of his bursts of childish enthusiasm, he had rushed into the bathroom, taken his white handkerchief out of his pocket, run it under the tap, carefully wrung it out, then placed it perfectly flat on the surface of the mirror. There were a few small wrinkles, some bigger than others, Great Walls of China that wouldn’t stick to the glass, but Vasco had used his large, bony hand to eradicate those so that the now-almost-transparent fabric, with its satiny edge, became as smooth as the mirror. She was so thrilled she even climbed onto a chair to get a better look.
“When will it be dry, Vasco? In an hour?”
“Yes, in an hour, sweetie.”
He had then turned around, put his hands on her waist, and lifted her bodily into the air. Graça could still remember how she had started kicking and protesting, albeit softly, so that only he would hear:
“Let me go. You’re hurting me. Let me go, you hear! Let…me…go!”
Her eyes welled up with tears, but she drew them back in with all her might.
“What’s wrong? Are you mad? What’s gotten into you?”
He finally put her down. He was standing in the middle of the bathroom, his long arms hanging by his sides; his pale eyebrows furrowed, confused; his upper lip drawn back slightly, almost scornfully, to reveal his white teeth. She could see him now, and yet that image was so ancient, so fleeting, caught on the wing. Back in her bedroom, before she could close the door, she heard him explaining what had happened, and thus the incident didn’t remain just between the two of them: Everyone knew.
“…All I did was pick her up, but anyone would think I was going to kill her. She’s a strange child!”
And then her father’s voice saying very slowly, but not so softly that she couldn’t hear, “You must remember, Vasco, she’s a motherless child.”
Graça had closed the door, not wanting to hear any more, but she did this very quietly so as not to be heard. So that they would forget all about her, so that not even the sound of the door closing would remind them of her existence. She wished she could dissolve into the air, go to sleep and wake up another person—wouldn’t that be wonderful? To wake up as Antoninha Lima, who was so happy; or Glória, who was so pretty; or Armanda. What was so special about Armanda that she should want to be her? She didn’t know—perhaps there was no particular reason—but she would have liked to wake up in Armanda’s skin or in that of any of her school friends, although not in Meneses’ skin, because Meneses stammered. Or even in the skin of a complete stranger: Yes, that would be the ideal. What a surprise to wake up with a new face, in a house she had never seen before, and with a mother… Yes, with a mother. Of course that was it; she had never known anything else. With a mother—like Armanda and Glória and Antoninha and everyone else. Why couldn’t something like that happen?
She was standing before the mirror taking a long, searching look at herself, as if waiting for something that had not yet been born, that wasn’t there, that didn’t exist. That was her face, the face she saw every day, how tedious. Was she ugly? She had no idea. That didn’t even interest her. She hadn’t yet reached the stage where that problem would be waiting for her. Without realizing it, she was starting at the end, at the top. She was looking at the mirror feeling weary of that still-incomplete face—the face of a fourteen-year-old girl!—feeling thoroughly fed up with it. A strange child. “You must remember, Vasco, she’s a motherless child.”
Those were such terrible words. They had often kept her awake at night and would end up bringing her to tears that would finally lull her to sleep. But on that day, it wasn’t the words or, by association of ideas, Leda that wounded and hurt her. She couldn’t get away from those other words, the first words. She’s a strange child. It wasn’t just her father who spoke of her as a child, he had done that. He had called her a child. The pronouns that, to Graça’s way of thinking, belonged solely to him. Him. But this was a secret, one of those big secrets that she kept hidden from herself as jealously as she did from the others, possibly more so. Vasco, he, often came into her thoughts, caught her by surprise, ambushed her, but Graça didn’t stop; she fled far away, anywhere. He, however, was still present, despite all. And deep inside her, Graça preserved a sediment of unsuspected pride: the thought that Vasco was a man and she was hopelessly in love with him, which made her interesting in her own closed eyes.
Vasco was just gorgeous. He had lovely, pale, porcelain blue eyes; a straight nose; a mouth that lifted at the corners in a smile even when he wasn’t smiling. When she looked at him, she felt the same as she had one day when, from a tram window, she saw a vast beige car belonging to the Diplomatic Corps with, at the wheel, an imposing man wearing a uniform replete with gold braid. She felt diminished, humiliated, pleasantly relegated to a much lower rung, full of pure, flawless admiration. Vasco was that beige car. Beside him, other people felt ugly and awkward.
From her room, Graça could hear them in the corridor, then in the dining room. “Sit where you usually sit, Vasco.” The voice of her stepmother. “The little one’s not here, though. I’ll go and call her.”
She just had time to lie down on the bed and press her hand to her head, which, as she only then realized, was actually aching.
“What’s the matter? Are you ill? Go on, come to supper. Your father will get annoyed, and poor Vasco thinks you’re angry with him. Come on, make an effort; don’t be a spoilsport. Clotilde and Emília are coming after supper.”
She, however, declared:
“No, I won’t, I’m ill.”
Leda’s light hand on her forehead.
“You do have a bit of a fever.”
She had a temperature of 100. The doctor came that same evening and, after examining her closely, diagnosed a kidney infection.
Illness makes everyone forget any other upsets, and Vasco, even though he must have known this was a diplomatic illness, came to say he hoped she would get better soon.
“And don’t go thinking I’m angry. We’re still friends, sweetie. Always will be.”
“I want that handkerchief.”
“What handkerchief?”
“The one you left on the mirror to dry.”
That night, she slept with the still-damp handkerchief under her pillow, and the following morning, she put it away in the little silver box where she kept all her secrets, and then locked it. It must still be there. But the key is lost.
The fishbowl looks great there; it couldn’t be better. It’s in its rightful place, thinks Graça, when she takes the time to think about it. Just as a rectangle of wall from which a painting has been removed will always belong to that painting. The wallpaper grows darker or paler (fading over time or getting scorched) and looks horribly bare and empty. There had been too much space on the wall above that shelf. Now, everything is as it should be. Serene, almost at peace.
The fishbowl draws her along secret paths to the Dupont and then, by a familiar route, to the trout at the Royal. The Brazilian man punching the waiter so hard he was hurled against the fish tank, which immediately shattered, leaving the trout free—free at last—the trout leaping around on the floor.
She had been sitting at a table with Claude but had merely glanced at that fait-divers, which was, at least, original and that on another occasion she might possibly have found amusing. On the wall beside her is a large mirror that now and then offers her fleeting images of herself, blurred, green, aquatic.
She always avoided sitting near a mirror. Mirrors, she thought, were made so that people could study themselves intently, full-face or three-quarter-face, for just a few seconds, and then cease to exist. However, she was troubled by mirrors that reflected dozens, hundreds, thousands of images of her in motion. She could see them even without looking. A hand raised slowly to a mouth, the ashtray into which the ash (hers?) was slowly falling. Expressions she didn’t recognize as hers were thrown treacherously in her face. A film to be viewed by the whole room. Her self being offered up to the world without her knowledge.
“What are you looking at?”
Claude was looking at the mirror (it was opposite him), or perhaps he wasn’t looking at anything and was simply drinking his coffee. The cup was raised into the air; his slender lips were already half-open.
“Nothing. At the mirror. Why?”
But the cup made the return journey without having reached its destination, and Claude, still holding the handle, was looking at her attentively.
“What’s wrong?” he asked at last. “You look strange. Don’t you feel well? If you like, we can leave.”
What, and go back to the hotel? To the hotel room? To the room with all the lights off? To lie down and go to sleep or to lie down and not go to sleep? No, no, not that. At least here, despite all the mirrors, there were people; there was light. Fluorescent light, strangers… It was the best she could do…
Three policemen, and the waiter pointing at the Brazilian who was calmly finishing his demi. “Il aurait pu me tuer, monsieur l’agent.” And he kept feeling the back of his neck, all bloody from the broken glass. “Il aurait pu me tuer…” The thought of that possible death, so important to him—well, it was his death! —was so all-absorbing that he couldn’t think of anything else to say. His brain was in shock. “Il aurait pu…”
“My father has died, Claude. I’ve just received a telegram.”
Anyone else would have asked “When?” and then “Why didn’t you say something? Why are you only telling me now? Why choose this moment to tell me?” And then, “What did your father die of? Who sent you the telegram?” These were, after all, the obvious questions to ask. But with Claude everything was easy, all too desolatingly straightforward, with no possibility of a detour, of a shortcut through tall vegetation that would hide her from his gaze. With him, the path was always broad and the visibility excellent. He understood everything, and he knew her so well that she sometimes found it troubling. Like now. He was looking at her, reaching out his hands to her across the table, and Graça could see on his face what he was thinking. He was of course thinking that she had only been able to speak now and to share with someone else the grief she had kept inside her for hours, hers alone. What could be more natural? There was a kind of hope in that silence. Now she had spoken and suddenly her father really had died, and she could cry.
Graça raised her hands to her face and felt her palms become wet. As she always mechanically did, she pressed them to her mouth, half-opened her lips, and touched them with her tongue.
The rice is burned as usual and over-salted too. Inedible. Piedade has outdone herself.
This is where she always stands, with her back to the door. Her father would be to the right and, opposite her, Leda. Behind her, almost leaning on the back of her chair, the maid serving at table. Right now, it is Piedade who she can neither see nor hear, but whose presence she can feel: stiff, resentful, suspicious, her eyes fixed on the pile of burned rice that remains uneaten on her plate. And Graça tries to think of something that will take her away from there, from the solitude of that day (and of many other days), that will carry her off somewhere, but she can’t because she’s waiting intensely, almost eagerly for Piedade to say what she has to say.
“Would you like some eggs? There’s ham in the fridge…”
A sigh. There it is. She feels liberated and almost grateful. “No, there’s no need,” she replies meekly. “I’m not hungry. You can serve the coffee.” And then, as if she had only just remembered something of no importance: “Ah, yes, a lady is coming to see me. Show her into the living room.”
The coffee is dreadful. Piedade is hopeless at making coffee, and Graça still hasn’t got around to buying a machine. Piedade’s coffee is either like dark, insipid water or a thick, bitter, disgusting brew. At least this time it doesn’t taste of anything, which is preferable… At the Royal…
“What I find hardest is that he hadn’t forgiven me,” she had said.
“I know.”
And suddenly she felt welling up inside her an invisible fountain that flowed through her veins and into her heart, something very familiar and very painful.
“No, you don’t know!” she cried. How could he know if she had never told him? That serene gaze and those calm hands clasping hers irritated her. She felt a sudden desire to hurt him, to ruffle the smooth surface of the waters, to throw in a pebble just to see that surface dimple and wrinkle with little waves. “It was much more complicated than you think. I was fourteen…”
She was fourteen then, and now she’s thirty-four. Could it be that the images are still intact and that she’s spent twenty years playing a game of chess with herself, moving the pieces, then taking them only to put them back, oblivious to life passing her by? Where have those twenty years of long, long days that took such an age to pass, where have they gone, and how is it possible that she already has a few gray hairs—not many, but some?
She realized all this only because the days were so long and difficult, and not only for her, but for many other people: a day, or, to be more precise, a night. She was in her apartment—the other one, the one furnished American style—that had been hers only episodically, although that particular episode had lasted a good twelve years. They’d had guests to supper, a married couple of a certain age—the husband was an engineer and worked in the factory owned by Claude’s uncle. After the meal, coffee, and liqueurs, they had set up the card table. Purely out of politeness. They knew that the engineer named Van-something-or-other loved to play poker. His wife wasn’t so keen and played badly. She was a fine, fat bourgeois woman with a high color, lots of children, and already quite a number of grandchildren, and her handbag was always full of photographs of children. “Aren’t they lovely?” she would ask. They weren’t the slightest bit lovely, but the touching way in which she asked was more a desire for confirmation than a question: a need for everyone to agree that they really were adorable, irresistible. As it turned out, that evening, Mrs. Van-something-or-other really got into the poker game, and her unexpected enthusiasm meant that they didn’t finish playing until nearly three in the morning. No one lost or won very much. They pretty much broke even. And as she was leaving, after saying her goodbyes, the woman said:
“I enjoyed it so much that I’m going to become a proper gambler, because it’s such a good way of passing the time.”
Passing the time: That was the real solution, or, rather, the real problem. Passing the time. By gambling, according to the Belgian lady’s new theory. Chewing over the past, according to Graça. Time was so long for a lot of people, even for a good bourgeois lady with lots of grandchildren. And yet how natural it sounded: “It’s such a good way of passing the time.” That was all. She had discovered the medicine and would perhaps use it from now on. But what about Graça? She was fed up with moving the pieces about on the board, fed up with the pieces and with the hands moving them and the board she was moving them on. But she couldn’t do anything else.
She gets up from the table. A clock somewhere outside strikes two. A few moments later, an eternity later, she will get up from the table again. And tomorrow. And the next day. And for years to come. Everything dies at night, Claude would say. But that wasn’t true: Life is long; it slips and slithers seamlessly past. A succession of events, an endless stream of words said and left unsaid. Especially the latter. She had been fourteen that winter, and now she’s thirty-four. Twenty years during which nothing died, nothing, not even Claude, and during which, in the mornings when she woke, everything was always as painfully the same as it was when she went to sleep. And here she is in the same place.
It was an almost miraculous age, and she hadn’t noticed. The bird had taken flight, but hadn’t yet reached the mountain top; it was hovering in the air, wings spread wide, but it lacked the strength to make it to the top. She was always being reminded by people with serious, frowning faces, that she said and did things that were inappropriate, ridiculous—hadn’t she realized that she had grown up, that she was a woman? Then they would say, sometimes almost immediately afterward, depending on the time and the day, that she was still too young to adopt certain “modern,” “independent” attitudes. Two words, so tightly wrapped in sarcasm that you couldn’t even see their original meaning, as if they had just been invented. Her father would pronounce them in a very grave tone of voice, heavy with dark foreboding.
All this happened before her illness. Then, of course, all such values were overturned. Endless, endless time, once of only secondary importance, went straight to the top of the first page, ahead even of Vasco, ahead of Leda.
The winter dragged by, sad, monotonous, and very rainy, but very cold too. The vast, dank days were followed by gray, dry days, when the sun did not shine even for a moment. After this, there had perhaps been worse winters, sadder or more beautiful (the Paris winters drawn in pen and ink, the Brussels winters heavy and white), but they had slipped past her, or she had slipped past them—at any rate she barely noticed them, her eyes and mind occupied with more important matters going on around her or inside her. The actors are always more important than the stage set, and the text is always far more important than the actors. Apart, of course, from the main character, who dominates everything, or, in this case, who dominated everything, because she was the main character. That winter, however, there had been an almost radical schism between her mind and her body, and her body had won by losing. And she had ceased to be the main character and become instead inert matter.
Sometimes, with her lips pressed together and eyes screwed so tightly shut that they hurt, she would hear Leda’s light, airy footsteps as she crossed the bedroom, putting everything in order, closing the wooden shutters, so she wouldn’t be woken by the grayish, color-of-the-wall-opposite light, and pausing by her bed to listen to her breathing. She would even touch her forehead very lightly to check that she wasn’t feverish. Then she would tiptoe out (she had a talent for silent gestures), and Graça would no longer feel the unbearable weight of her presence. She found her stepmother’s tender care offensive; she would have preferred her to mistreat or at least neglect her so that she would be free to loathe her with an easy conscience, without remorse. But, no, she wasn’t even allowed that. She would then summon up her mother’s face, an increasingly difficult task, as if that image would be enough to neutralize the existence of that other woman’s face. Alas, this was not the case. Her mother took ever longer to arrive. Her image had, over time, become extremely fluid and slippery, and a moment’s distraction on her part was all it took for the image to escape; she would catch it just as it was about to disappear, but the shadow (because eventually it was no more than a shadow) always ended up slipping down into a deep dark hole and the effort involved in retrieving it became simply too exhausting. In the end, she would give up, open hands and eyes, and let it go. She would relax completely then and be filled by a great sense of calm and great bitterness too.
How many winters had passed since then, and inside her, even today, there are moments and sounds, and smells too, bequeathed to her by that winter. She had become incredibly attentive and sensitive to so many things: To the cold, for example, which, even when she was tucked up in bed under several woolen blankets, covered her meager flesh with goosebumps; or to the rain that wept at her window for whole afternoons, for endless days and weeks. Her senses became keener inside the new, more restricted, and therefore much clearer world that had become hers. The bedroom. The fragment of street she could see from the window. The perfume her stepmother was using that winter (Vasco had brought it for her from Tangiers), an “oriental essence of lotus blossom”—that, at least, was what it said on the label in English—coarse and sickly, heavy and persistent. It wasn’t a normal, invisible, modestly airy perfume like others she had known. It was shaped like Leda. And sounded like her too. It had lasted all that winter until the day they found the bottle broken, the house left horribly steeped in Lotus Blossom, a smell that would become indissolubly linked to everything else: the cold, the rain, the doctor’s visits, Vasco’s visits, and so many other things. The voices she would hear coming from the living room on the rare evenings they had visitors. Clotilde’s rippling laughter. Clotilde, who had been her mother’s friend, but who had accepted Leda unconditionally. Vasco’s concise, audible comments. The voice of Clotilde’s husband, a vast, placid, vegetable of a man, who was in the habit of agreeing with everyone, even if their opinions were entirely contradictory, and who always called his wife Clotilde-my-love. Her father’s long, slow, categorical statements. Even Leda’s silences, for she could imagine Leda sipping a glass of Chartreuse and lighting endless Camel cigarettes, which she would stub out having smoked only half of them, or sometimes without even raising them to her lips. The people who walked down the quiet street at night and told her, just by the sound their feet made on the paving stones, if it was raining or dry. The tree opposite, the top of which she could see from her bed. What kind of tree was it? She didn’t know and never had. For her, they were all just trees and had never been anything more than that. They had no other name; nothing distinguished one from the other. She remembers how the wind would furiously flail the leaves with a kind of gentle, serene, implacable loathing, and how they would surrender slowly, softly and without a struggle, then hover for an instant in the air like small frozen hands, sometimes tapping at her window pane asking for refuge, before drifting down to the street below. Watching them detach themselves then fall became a painful game for Graça, and she would think, “If that one on the left, the big one, falls in the next five minutes, it means I’ll get better soon.” Once though, it occurred to her to think: “…it means that she’ll leave, that something will make her leave.” And the leaf had fallen.
She could also hear the noises of the house, familiar sounds that formed part of the habitual silence or an amalgam of sounds so unworthy of attention that they touched her ears too lightly even to be noticed. The maids talking in the kitchen when no one else was home. The faucet in the sink out on the veranda. The clink of glasses when the table was being laid, quite different from the sound they made when the table was being cleared. The shrill sound of the doorbell. That record—what was it called?—that Leda would play in the afternoons when her father wasn’t there, the volume turned right down so as not to bother her. An irritating pianola java, the notes endlessly circling and entangling, so that she sometimes had to cover her ears in order not to scream, but to which her stepmother listened, placidly seated in her usual chair. At first, Graça thought, What is it she likes about that music? Then she wondered, What memories does it summon up for her?
Claude was listening, uncomprehending. “Do you honestly think all this is necessary?” And he glanced at his watch. “It’s almost half past midnight; couldn’t we talk on our way back to the hotel?”
No, they couldn’t. She needed his face, his unfurrowed brow in order to talk. She needed to shape her words, to see them, to offer them to him in her hand. She didn’t want to lose them in the dark, in the streets of Paris.
It was a Thursday in February, Claude. A day like any other, like those that have been and gone and those still to come. Another day spent in the cramped bunk onboard the sailing ship, which, when things became difficult, went back to being her bedroom. Now and then she would cheat time and sleep for a couple of hours in the afternoon. She would wake at the sweet, brief, maternal hour as dusk was falling. Then night would come, and that was always pleasant. Not that she had a particular predilection for the night, but it was like a door closing on yet another day, another day that had passed, one day less. Sometimes, she would pick up her alarm clock and make the hands spin. One day, eight days, thirty days… But when she stopped, only two or three minutes had passed, five at most, and there she was in the same place still holding the clock. She did jigsaw puzzles and read a lot, but reading always tired her. She would close her eyes and, after her own fashion, reimagine the stories she had read. She would enter into them and would, of course, become the main character, even if only in her imagination. These were her best moments, when she descended to the center of the Earth with Axel and Professor Lidenbrock or fearlessly went down into King Solomon’s mines. Then that too would weary her, and she would once again find herself alone with herself, an encounter that had nothing new about it and always bored her.
Just be patient for a little while longer, Claude. She was telling him all this so that he would understand, so that he would see how lonely she had been. Why? Because she wanted to be? Because she wanted to keep Leda at a distance? Because she refused to speak to her? Yes, perhaps that was it. But none of that made her any less lonely or prevented everything, even contemptible things, from expanding and growing inside her. As for the other things, they seemed equally vast to her then.
And Vasco? Didn’t Vasco keep her company sometimes? Strangely enough, she couldn’t remember… What was Vasco doing at the time? Where was he? Ah, that’s right, he had gone to spend a month with a friend on an estate he had in the North. Vasco? No, his friend. His name was Ferreira. A very ordinary name that died as soon as it was spoken. Which is why she could remember it. Vasco would mention his friend and repeat something he had said, and there would be a silence finally broken by her father or by Leda, who would always change the subject. But going back to that winter, Claude.
Sometimes, her friend Antoninha Lima, who shared a desk at school with her, would come and visit her. At first, she would come every Friday, and she always came bearing news, things that had happened during the week, minor intrigues. However, the visits, which she had initially greeted with excitement, had begun to bore her. Everything her friend told her felt as if it had happened in another life to which she no longer had a ticket. And Antoninha’s visits grew less frequent, perhaps because she realized she was no longer greeted with that initial enthusiasm and consequently felt her own enthusiasm waning—a praiseworthy enthusiasm, like that of a budding nun doing her Christian duty by visiting the sick and those in prison. Then she stopped coming altogether. Graça had found this perfectly natural and had even smiled at her stepmother’s childish questions. “What’s become of Antoninha? Is she ill too? Would you like me to phone and ask?” She had told her No, she certainly didn’t want that, and did her best not to think about her ex-friend. She had never felt capable of doing much for other people, and so she wasn’t surprised when they did little or nothing for her. Besides, since she had never gone back to school, she had never seen her again.
She opens the door of what has always been her bedroom. The other rooms where she had lived with Claude, even their bedroom in Brussels, had been merely temporary, with no glass in the windows, with no windows, open to everyone’s gaze. This room is her fortress, and she has never known another. It’s dangerous outside: The phone’s always ringing and you have to answer it; someone comes knocking at the door and you have to speak to them; even the maid’s silent presence was still a presence, and she might, at any moment, appear at her side. For Piedade is very fond of making those sudden random appearances, just to say that there’s no bacalhau or that the cleaner who comes once a week (and whom she recommended) has a reputation as a thief. A high-class thief, to use her words. The things she comes to tell her, though, are almost never true, mere gossip she’s heard when out and about in the morning. And Piedade knows them to be false or, at the very least, suspects that they might be. If that weren’t the case, she would say nothing and would instead wait until disaster was imminent or had actually occurred, so that she could announce, “There’s no bacalhau at the shop.” Or better still, wait in total silence until Graça said, “One of my petticoats has gone missing.” Or a ring. Or money. So that she could then declare in triumphant tones, “Everyone knows the cleaner is a high-class thief.”
There needs to be a wall and a locked door between Graça and Piedade. And the only guarantee of her safety was the locked door.
None of the furniture has changed: The very grand bed her grandmother gave her before she died; the little dressing table with its tarnished mirror cracked in one corner (Vasco broke it one day when he was playing ball with her); the two chairs with their faded blue upholstery; the rug her mother embroidered with its border of birds, also in blue. Blue birds and pink anemones. Next to the door stood the desk where she did her homework, which used to be adorned by a tall bronze candlestick. So many things heard and stored away forever while she was mechanically memorizing the rivers of Asia and the conjugation of the verb to have.
The room is on one side of the corridor. On the other, almost opposite, but farther to the right, is the living room.
The coffee had gone cold. Her cigarette had burned out alone in the ashtray, but the ash had not yet crumbled into nothing. Claude was staring at the room reflected in the mirror, dark and tinged with green like a giant aquarium, and he was asking “So what happened then?” in a dull, impersonal tone, not because he was interested, but merely to be polite.
Her father had come into her room as he did every morning. He always kissed her on her left cheek—not because this was on the same side as her heart, but because it was closest to the door. “Did you have a good night?” he would ask, and then he was gone, even if his body remained there for a few more moments. She only saw him again at night, when he would come to say goodnight. “Goodnight, Maria da Graça.” It was as if he cared only about the night. However, this wasn’t the reason. Her father cultivated to perfection those polite bourgeois, or perhaps even petit-bourgeois, formulae that, according to him, shaped a person’s character. Graça thought he was quite right. Or perhaps she didn’t even think that, because it was only later, when she was living with Claude, that she began to regard her father in a slightly critical light, an ability she had suddenly and unexpectedly discovered she possessed.
Later, she couldn’t recall the date or even the month—only that it was winter—but she could recall less significant things. For example, Leda coming into her room long after her father had left. “Good morning, Graça.” She had adapted very quickly to the household rituals; you might almost say she had embraced them with the overenthusiasm of all recent converts. “How are you feeling today?” A question with a prepaid answer. Naturally, what she ought to say, with one of those prefabricated little smiles she always had on hand, was “Better, thank you,” or “Much the same, thank you for asking.” And all of it was utterly meaningless, given that everyone knew she wasn’t in pain or feverish. What continued to trouble her most were her chilblains.
She didn’t know now what answer she had given. Another of her memory lapses. She was too impractical, her father would say. And he would then launch into one of his rather didactic little speeches, sprinkled with proverbs, clichés, and quotes from Father Vieira or Dom Francisco Manuel or the wisdom of the people. He usually chose as an example (not to be followed) Uncle Rafael, his brother, who lived in Africa, but that is another story.
On that day, contrary to custom, she must have told Leda that she was feeling ill or bored, because Leda had answered “Poor thing, and who can blame you?” and sat down at the foot of the bed, looking at her. Did they say anything more? She couldn’t remember. She knew only that Leda had given a quick little smile that was more like a nervous tic, one that occurred whenever she was feeling ill at ease and that she couldn’t control. Graça had watched her fidgeting awkwardly and crossing her thin legs. Then she had looked away.
That image would also stay with her like a photograph taken at point-blank range and carefully stowed away in her personal album—just in case. This was a new pose that Leda was adopting for the first time along with the black dress, which made her look younger and more elegant and that Graça had never seen before. The camera had failed to capture her face with its very regular but unlovely features, her clear, hesitant, slightly squinting eyes, which remained forever blurred. What shape was her nose? And her eyes? Were they really blue or just faded, colorless?
Graça could no longer remember. What she could remember was that her store of weariness was fuller than usual that day, and several times she had opened and closed the book by A. J. Cronin that her father had so kindly lent her along with many words of advice: “Now don’t turn down the corners of the pages. And be sure not to stain them.” Concluding with a moral lesson: “Never forget, books are our best friends.”
Vasco had arrived in the early afternoon, having returned from the North a week before. Why had he come then, when he knew her father was never at home at that hour? He usually came into her bedroom, pushing open the door without even knocking. Not on that day though. He had walked past her and past her door and gone straight to the living room. He had already been there for a quarter of an hour. A murmur of muffled voices reached Graça’s sharp ears along with a wave, then another—or was that just her imagination?—of perfume. She had slipped out of bed then, though she was never quite sure why. And yet…on second thought…when she thought about it… Her suspicious subconscious—pricked by a little apparently unprovoked laughter that was immediately suppressed, again for no apparent reason, and by what she imagined might be a longer-than-usual handshake and a few long, lingering looks—told her she was right and set her legs in motion. She almost collapsed in the middle of the room, not having taken so much as a step for two months. She had opened the door very slowly and peered over toward the kitchen. However, all that reached her was a distant voice coming from the garden, singing some fado or other. She had advanced then, barefoot and in her flannel nightdress (decorated with little blue flowers), prepared to face whatever dangers might arise from this “raid.” When she reached the living room door, she very, very gently drew aside the curtain, and a slender ribbon of truth appeared before her nonetheless astonished eyes. A bright, vertical ribbon on which were painted two static figures, glued together in an embrace. On one of the armchairs, spliced in two by the edge of the ribbon, lay a bunch of yellow carnations (Leda’s favorite flower) wrapped in cellophane. She had then loosened her grip on the velvet curtain and slowly made the return journey from that brief incursion into the mysterious, brutal, incomprehensible world of adults.
Claude is perched on the dressing table, imprisoned in his window frame of red leather and golden thread and from which he gazes out at nothing at all. In a moment of enthusiasm, she’d had an enlargement made of a small passport photo, the only one she had, and locked him up in there forever.
“It’s one o’clock, Graça; we’d better go. I have to get up early tomorrow, and I can’t miss the first class. It’s really important to me. We have time, don’t we? All the time in the world. Tomorrow, or the day after, whenever you want, whenever you feel like it, you can tell me the rest of the story. Although, when I think about it, Graça, why tell me? It can only bring you pain. Your stepmother was having an affair with Vasco, who you were in love with… What could be more natural? That you should love him, I mean. Fourteen-year-old girls are easily dazzled by older men. And it was only natural that your stepmother should be his lover. He was a good-looking young man, with nothing to do—and women adore men with nothing to do and who, therefore, have time to spend with them (as long as they have a husband who earns the money, of course). Besides, your father was a difficult man, wasn’t he? Garçon, les deux cafés!”
“But it’s important. I wanted to tell you; I needed you to understand, to try and understand…”
“But I have understood, Graça. One day, when you were chatting with someone, you told them what you’d seen, and your father found out… Am I right?”
“Yes.”
But he wasn’t right. That would be too simple. Above all, there was the bitter or perhaps insipid sense that she had spoiled things—which were perhaps already spoiled—that her mere presence had somehow curdled the milk. The trout from the shattered fish tank had all disappeared (when did that happen?), and the floor had been carefully mopped clean. Only the tank itself and the stain on the rug bore witness to that recent epic scene. And the back of the waiter’s head of course. “Il aurait pu me tuer, monsieur l’agent.” He, however, was no longer there.
He had left. It was a warm spring night, so sweet. There was an indefinable scent in the air, but what was it? Then something like cotton wool touched her face, sending a shudder through her. The repellent touch of a cobweb. But, no, it was only the petals from the horse chestnut blossoms, which had been fluttering over the city all day, wafted along on the breeze.
The nightwatchman opened the door to them. They had gone up to their room in silence. They had lain down in silence. Then Claude turned out the light and felt for her hand, which was cold and suddenly hard and absent.
“Try not to think about it, my love. Do you promise?”
“I promise.”
Was that so difficult?
“I’m here!” she says in response to Piedade’s unnecessary question: “Are you there, Senhora?” Where else would she be?
The door slowly opens, and Piedade tiptoes over to her and almost whispers in her ear in a mysterious manner:
“That lady has just arrived. She’s in the living room.”
For a moment, Graça feels lost and reaches for something to hold onto and steady herself, but looking around she can find nothing. Everything is fragile and insubstantial. She’s filled with a desire to run far away, to put on her coat and creep down the stairs. Piedade could easily go into the living room and say, “I’m afraid my mistress has gone out. I thought she was here, but she’s gone.” She’s not prepared and has never been any good at improvising. She needs to concentrate, to summon up her courage and then think slowly and calmly, telling herself there’s nothing to worry about, that she can simply rehearse everything she’s going to say, or at least, everything she’d like to say but that, as she well knows, she won’t. Because she never has said what she wants to say, but always other different, irrelevant things that had taken shape inside her without her realizing and that are often completely inappropriate…
Piedade is looking at her in alarm—or is it scorn? (it’s hard to read Piedade’s feelings; she’s remarkably inscrutable)—and Graça is beginning to think that it can’t possibly be “that woman,” the one she’s expecting, whom she had told to come. It’s too early. She had said on the phone, “Would six o’clock be all right?” And Graça: “Yes, six will be fine.” But it’s only twenty to three.
“What she’s like, the lady in the living room?”
“Short, fat, and dark. She’s wearing glasses and has a weird-looking nose.”
Piedade never ceases to surprise her. With just five strokes of the pen, she’s drawn a portrait that is Clotilde-my-love to a T. Graça takes a deep breath, feeling vastly relieved. She gets up, smooths her very creased skirt, and goes out into the corridor. At the door of the living room, she places her hand lightly on the velvet curtain, as she had on that now-distant afternoon. And she stands there, looking.
There, she had said it. At last. Not very well, admittedly, but it had at last fluttered out of her and into someone else’s ears, and that was what mattered. She had thought about it for years, had stuffed it away in the bottom of a drawer (she didn’t know what to do with that uncomfortable, unnecessary thing); she had forgotten it—the words that is, not the image, which had been photographed and hung forever on a wall in her memory. She had come across the words—intact—a few days before. “Don’t throw anything away; you never know when it will come in handy,” her father used to say. “Don’t be like your Uncle Rafael.” He was right. About that and many other things.
She had just turned twenty-two and was visiting Clotilde. In the big room that Clotilde always referred to in English as “the living-dining room.” Clotilde was sitting across from her in that living-dining room, next to a low table with a glass top (on which lay a detective novel, a glass of water, and a small brass bell); she had one huge leg encased in plaster, and her plump mouth was hanging open.
“Are you absolutely sure, my dear?”
Her voice sounded different, no longer rising up and down like a rollercoaster, and Graça had seen and heard her swallowing hard. Yes, her mouth was positively watering. Graça had smiled. Her of-course-I’m-sure smile. Who did she take her for? Why would she say it if she wasn’t absolutely sure? Really.
Clotilde had muttered, “Yes, but something like that…although, of course, anything’s possible!”
It is, but not something so obvious, so blatant. You might feel a vague suspicion, a moment’s doubt…but don’t you think, Clotilde… Clotilde, don’t you find it strange… Or something like that. And then that bold statement of fact… I saw them. Clotilde had shifted in her chair, and her leg no longer seemed to hurt her.
Now Graça can hear again her own words, what she had said—how many years ago was it now?—in Clotilde-my-love’s living-dining room, words that come ricocheting back at her, sounding as false as Judas. She had thought about them for so long, had shaped them… It was as if she had dreamed it and believed the dream was true—it can happen to anyone—and then told someone her dream. Or as if she had given false testimony, for which she could be put on trial.
Clotilde was looking at her, speechless. “Is that really true? I mean if it were…if it were…”
“If it were?”
“It would be terribly funny!”
So she didn’t believe her. And when she heard her own words, she too found them strange, almost ridiculous. She had been practicing for such a long time, admittedly after a long interval, but lately she had been furiously studying as if on the eve of a difficult exam, just to come out with that hesitant, feeble phrase.
Perhaps, when she had gone down the stairs, even before she stepped out into the street, Clotilde had gone straight to the phone, dragging her enormous leg, and called Leda. “Do you know who was just here? I’ll give you a clue. Your lovely stepdaughter. And do you know why she came? To see me, of course, to visit the poor invalid—well, that was her excuse. But the real reason? You’ll die laughing when I tell you, but I just wanted you to be warned.” But, no, something in Clotilde’s anxious (or was it smug?) expression reassured her. Imagining Clotilde-my-love doing such a thing was most unfair, did not do her justice. She would have to tell someone, to whisper it, but not to Leda. And she would demand total secrecy. “Now don’t get me into trouble, because if anyone found out…well, it doesn’t bear thinking about…” That was more her style.
“How old were you?” she had asked at last. “Thirteen, fourteen?”
“Fourteen.”
“You were still a child. You could have been mistaken. Children often do exaggerate the facts, without even realizing it. You saw them kissing, fine. But it may have gone no further than that. You know Vasco…”
She had interrupted her at that point, quite why she didn’t know, or rather she did, yes, perhaps she did, but she preferred not to think about it. She had interrupted her.
“I’m not exaggerating. Besides, if I did get out of bed that afternoon…”
Clotilde-my-love had also tried to get up but had fallen back with a cry and a grimace of pain. “That wretched banana peel!” Then, returning to the matter in hand: “Basically, all you can be sure of is that you saw them kissing, which isn’t really much to go on. Saying that Leda was Vasco’s lover seems a leap too far. Especially since Vasco…”
Graça had then abruptly changed the subject and asked her about her fall. People really shouldn’t drop banana peels in the middle of the Chiado. It was dangerous enough as it was. It had happened at the top of Rua Garrett, hadn’t it?
Clotilde answered her questions and chatted, but she wasn’t really there. She returned only after a silence that proved hard to fill, so hard that Graça had actually stood up to leave. And there was a sly smile on Clotilde’s wrinkled lips.
“Listen, why come and tell me this now, after all these years? It’s because they hurt you, isn’t it? Because they don’t like your beloved. And you thought it would be a good trick to play on them and thought I would be your dupe. The king’s messenger, the town crier. The scandal-monger. A splendid way of having your revenge. Didn’t you know that I’m your stepmother’s friend? Oh dear, my poor little Graça, I’m afraid you came knocking at the wrong door!”
“My poor little Graça…”
Clotilde is there before her now, arms flung wide, her grizzled, tousled hair wet with rain, and somehow or other, Graça finds herself clasped in those two strong arms and pressed against that plump bosom by two equally plump hands, which then, still gripping her shoulders, push her away so as to get a good look at her.
“My poor little Graça…”
What can she say, what is there to say? She had never seen Clotilde again after the day she went to visit her, ostensibly because she had slipped and broken her leg. Was that the reason? No, of course not.
“…how you’ve changed!”
Has she? Possibly, it’s only natural that she would. But has she really changed that much? The remark is classic Clotilde.
“I only found out yesterday, completely by chance, when I was talking to someone…goodness, it’s a small world. Imagine, you and I go to the same dressmaker, Virgínia. I went to see her yesterday, and she was telling me how busy she was and so on and that she had to make some dresses for a widow who lives in Campo Grande and who has just returned from Belgium. Campo Grande, Belgium, well, my heart turned over. ‘What’s the lady’s name?’ I asked. And when she told me, well, I was all set to give you a call, but you know what I’m like; you remember, don’t you?”
Graça doesn’t remember, but she nods anyway.
“Exactly. The telephone and me have never got along. To be able to talk on the phone, you need a kind of mysticism I lack. So I said to myself, I’ll just turn up. It’ll be a surprise.”
“A very pleasant surprise. Do sit down, Clotilde.”
Clotilde-my-love takes two steps. She’s limping (the result of that fall) and has grown extraordinarily fat. She has a neglected air about her too and isn’t wearing any makeup. What with her dark, shiny skin, the little moustache above her top lip that she has given up tweezering, and her receding chin, she looks uncannily like a seal.
“How’s your husband?”
“He’s fine, as always. He’s thinner, though, whereas I, as you see, am fatter, by a good thirty pounds. Time passes.”
“It does.”
She doesn’t know what to say. What can they possibly talk about apart from Leda? She’s there now; Graça can feel her presence. She’s there between them. And they’re both thinking about her. Her two executioners. That’s why they decide to escape down other paths, even the most painful ones. Clotilde asks:
“When did your husband die?”
“Six months ago. Six months ago yesterday.”
She had never told Claude the rest of the story. He hadn’t been interested that night (he had an important class the next day), and once that ideal moment passed, Graça could never bring herself to tell him the end, even if she had wanted to. Never again.
Besides, Claude had felt it was all over and done with. Sometimes, if he saw her looking sad or if she seemed irritable, he would tell her that there was no point mulling over what was done and dusted. “What’s the point, Graça? We die each night and wake each day anew.” And that was that. Perhaps he didn’t want to ruffle the tranquil waters of his own lake. Perhaps he had simply forgotten what she had said to him as well as what she hadn’t said.
After those two years in Paris, living in modest hotel rooms and eating in self-service restaurants, they had settled in his hometown of Brussels, where his uncle found him a good job in one of his factories. There, years later, years with no history, he fell ill and died in one short week that, even now, was wrapped in a thick mist; whether that mist hung over the city or existed only inside herself, Graça never knew.
She had grieved, of course she had, but how much and why? For him, for herself? It was all too recent for her to know. Perhaps one day, later on, she would see the movie pass before her eyes. For the moment, that was impossible. She had done so much for him: She had gambled and lost so much for his sake, even her own father, and she was unable to gauge the intensity or the quality of her grief. She knew, though—although she preferred not to think about it, even though it was one of those secrets she kept to herself—that she had felt somehow liberated, troublingly herself, and this was such an ill-defined feeling that she didn’t know whether to file it away among the sweet things or the bitter things.
She had closed the apartment (the one with the pale furniture and abstract-patterned curtains). It was just another hotel really, where instead of one tiny room, they’d had several tiny rooms. She had never felt at ease there; she had never felt she owned that furniture—she found the colors hostile, and they screamed their presence and blotted out hers. It wasn’t the right backdrop for her. And she had suffered with the cold, her hands swollen with chilblains, and spent her days beside the stove. How different from Paris, where she had never felt the lack of the sun. The mist irritated her, the snow forced her to stay at home, and she didn’t like the Belgians.
“But, Graça, I’m Belgian.”
Yes, he was. How strange. But before, in Lisbon, and later, in Paris, she had never registered this.
“Six months ago yesterday.”
“Fancy that. Life’s so strange. You’ve never had much luck either, have you, poor dear?”
Who was that “either” intended for? Her or Clotilde?
Clotilde-my-love was always a rather sour person; she always enjoyed hearing about other people’s misfortunes, especially any that affected those closest to her. Was this because she was unhappy, and their bad luck served as a balm? But why was she unhappy? Her husband adored her (Clotilde-my-love), she had no money worries, and she was in good health. But who knows? Everything is possible in life, even the strangest things, the least likely… Clotilde is unhappy, and why shouldn’t she be? And so she takes her revenge with sour words wrapped in the honey of her voice: “How you’ve changed!” Or with anonymous letters full of declarations of friendship and devotion…
But perhaps Clotilde isn’t referring to herself when she says that Graça hasn’t had much luck either. She could be thinking of many other people: Leda, her father, even Emília.
Clotilde and Emilia sometimes came to tea, and when she came home from school, she would hear them talking in the living room. She would sometimes go and speak to them, presenting her pink cheek—pink either with cold or with heat—to Emília’s condescending kiss and to Clotilde’s overly affectionate one. However, she usually went straight to her room, took her schoolbooks out of her bag, and sat down to do her homework for the next day. Leda would then ask, “Is that you, Graça?” and she would say Yes, and the voices would grow lower and more muffled. Talking like that proved tiring, though, and gradually they would return to their normal volume. One of them would say, “Ssh, the child might hear.” And the voices would again grow quieter. Emília spoke slowly, dragging the words after her. She would say, for example, that she wished she could do something useful or even useless, one of the useless things people feel obliged to do, like writing bad books or painting bad paintings. “Like a message in a bottle,” Leda would say. And Emília would go on: “I’m sure most women who write or paint do so in the same way my mother would embroider tea towels, just to feel they were somehow useful, femininely useful. So that they wouldn’t feel they were redundant, that they were, in short, paying their way.” And everything she said seemed extremely important, even profound.
At other times, Leda would meet up with her friends in a café downtown, or they would go to a matinee together. When she returned, her eyes would always seem brighter and she would have lots to say; she would often open her mouth only to close it again without having said anything. Sometimes she couldn’t help herself, and she would struggle against the insurmountable wall of silence that Graça’s father usually built around him and would end up saying something entirely insignificant about someone she had met, or about someone who had married or had died. Graça’s father would look up from his work and utter the entirely meaningless “Oh, really?” of someone who hasn’t the slightest interest in what he has just heard, and then he would continue drawing mysterious lines on a sheet of white drawing paper. Leda would blush deeply, and at such moments, her shoulders would droop a little more and her eyelids would close over her eyes like blinds she had chosen to draw because there was nothing outside worth looking at. She would sometimes stand in front of the fishbowl, as if lost in thought, but what would she be thinking?
When her friends came to the apartment, she was quite different. She would become almost cheerful; she would talk and laugh. From the privacy of her room, Graça began to penetrate the lives of Clotilde and Emília, especially when the latter turned up alone. From her deep voice Graça learned a great deal about life in general and about Emília in particular. She had learned about Clotilde too. “Knowledge doesn’t take up any room,” her father used to say. And again he was right.
Among other things, she learned that Emília had just taken the plunge and begun what Clotilde referred to euphemistically (she was always very careful about the terminology she used) as a belated extramarital experience. Her lover (Clotilde didn’t use that word; she called him simply he—he, how sad, because for Graça, he was and continued to be Vasco and no one else), anyway, Emília’s lover or he was Bernardo de Melo, and he was an obscure but ambitious lawyer who would go on to make a remarkable career for himself and would appear at least once a week (having since acquired another “l”—Mello—to look classier) on the front page of the papers where he would be described as “well known,” having for a while been only “up and coming.” Emília had belonged to Bernardo’s prehistoric period. “Don’t you find it all rather indecent?” Clotilde-my-love would ask. “I don’t know, I still find it shocking. Not that I’m a puritan, well, you know I’m not, but deep down I’m just a poor bourgeois woman with liberal ideas, liberal bourgeois ideas, if you see what I mean. And doesn’t it all seem a bit late in the day to you? When you’re forty, no, forty-two…” Graça heard someone whisper her name, and everything concluded in a murmur of voices or a torrent of music.
Emília wasn’t old, although, at the time, sixteen- or seventeen-year-old Graça found it hard to believe that anyone would give her a second glance. Now, though, viewed through her distance glasses, Emília wasn’t old at all, far from it, although there was in her something that was not yet visible, but that Emília herself was beginning to feel and others were beginning to sense. A shift as invisible as time itself—one experienced by all bodies that have reached their apogee and, having lingered there for as long as possible, set off earthward, toward the earth that will one day open up and devour them. This was the case with Emília’s tall, white body: her complexion slightly duller; the skin beneath her eyes beginning, very discreetly, to sag; the first gray hairs making an appearance, only to be immediately disguised. “Such bad luck,” said Clotilde, “and just when she’s found love!” She then went on to say that Emília was doing the rounds of the beauticians, covering herself in masks from head to toe, mud masks—“Life as a mudbath, eh, Leda!”—and had even started going to exercise classes. “I mean, exercise classes, really!” And she snorted with sheer pleasure.
Sometimes, when the two of them came, Graça would hear Clotilde say tenderly, “You poor dear, you look so tired. Did you go to bed late? You look positively ancient…” Leda would break in rather too quickly, “Not at all. Emília’s in wonderful shape. The years may pass, but she always looks the same.”
According to Clotilde-my-love, no one, apart from her and Leda, knew about Emília’s “affair.” “Besides, if she didn’t have at least two people in the know, what would be the point of all these complications?” she said once. Leda risked a cautiously critical comment. She was very fond of Emília, but…
“I don’t understand such duplicity. If she loves Bernardo de Melo, why doesn’t she leave her husband?”
Clotilde laughed and mentally jigged up and down, guffawing loudly. Graça was astonished. Her stepmother had said, “If she loves Bernardo de Melo…” Had she heard right?
But Clotilde-my-love interrupted her thoughts and launched into a determined defense of her friend. A defense of sorts, of course, from which her “friend” emerged covered in scratch marks. According to her, Emília genuinely loved Bernardo—“With a passion, my dear.” (But hadn’t she just said that there would really be no point in Emília having a lover if there weren’t at least two people in the know?) First and foremost, however, she went on, first and foremost there was her son, João, a bright young fellow who was going to study engineering. Emília believed—and quite rightly too—that the family home should remain unsullied. “Have you considered how many people would suffer if Emília was actually to leave home and live with him? Let’s start with her husband, poor man; we mustn’t forget him (he’s a real saint, but, between you and me, terribly dull), who just adores her. Yes, ad-o-res her. Then there’s João, such a sensitive boy. He even writes poetry… How he would suffer if he ever found out that his mother, well, you know what I mean… And then there’s him. What would become of an ambitious young man like that with a golden future ahead of him if he had a married woman of forty-two in tow?” No, the fact is that Emília was proceeding in the best possible way and with great tact and intelligence. Although of course—and here she giggled—while this was the best possible way to proceed given the situation, the best of all things would be if there were no “situation.” However, one must be understanding and accept people as they are, with their good and bad qualities. “Because Emília has lots of good qualities, Leda.” The truth is that not all women were capable of making sacrifices and resisting the temptations that life placed in their path, but this didn’t mean they were worse than anyone else.
On the other side of the corridor, Graça was holding her breath. She wondered what the look on her stepmother’s face would be at that moment? Especially her mouth. But the monologue continued. Now Clotilde was singing the praises of her friend’s purity. Graça couldn’t now remember the reasons she gave, but she knows they were very convincing.
Graça shrugs and tells Clotilde that life is like that. She feels like using an expletive—and she hates expletives—to provide a more accurate definition of life, the only one that occurs to her just then. Clotilde, though, would react badly. She would say in shocked tones, “Oh, Graça!” And so instead she says that life is like that, a suitably vague definition that embraces everything she wants to include, from her father’s death to her own widowhood, including, inevitably, Leda. And that could embrace—and does embrace—many more things.
There is now a faint smile on those dark features. It had been there for some time, but Graça hadn’t noticed.
“Oh, my dear…”
Clotilde is looking at one particular place in the room, opposite her and a little to the left.
“…you still have the goldfish.”
Graça gives a nervous little laugh.
“It’s part of the décor. I’ve always had a goldfish.”
“No, you haven’t, Leda always had one…” says Clotilde.
“Leda? Possibly…”
They can finally look at the image that has been there since the start. Now that their ramblings about Claude and Emília are over, they can look at that image full on. Clotilde sits back in her chair; crosses her plump or, rather, sturdy legs, sturdy as tree trunks; and blows her nose. She has only just remembered that she has a horrible cold. Graça asks:
“Have you seen Leda? I haven’t heard from her since…” Not since yesterday, she thinks.
“Only very rarely. Sometimes whole months go by. I get most of my news from Emília because she lives near Leda, on the same street, and they often see each other. Besides, Leda doesn’t have much free time, and, as you know, I live in the boonies… Anyway, life does drive people apart…”
She says this so nonchalantly. Graça is afraid that, at any moment, she will hear her say, “…even the very best of friends” or “even close friends like us.” Or something of the sort. But Clotilde-my-love prudently stops before she goes too far, and says only:
“Did you know that Leda’s working now?”
No, she didn’t. Working where? Did she have any qualifications?
“Don’t you remember, she speaks excellent English. And some German.”
There were so many things she didn’t remember! There were some images that were too big (and too vivid), powerful memories whose presence had devoured and dazzled and obscured other memories, had consigned them forever to oblivion. No, of course she didn’t remember. Always assuming she had ever known.
“She was a teacher before she married, living with some very wealthy family and teaching the kids English. That’s where your father met her.”
“Ah!” She had thought (the things young girls think!) that her father had come across her in some much seedier place. Antoninha had told her about certain women and certain establishments occupied by Arletes, Carlas, and Rosas…so why not Ledas too? Only some shameless woman, coming from who knows where, would deceive a husband who happened to be Graça’s father. Even if she was deceiving him with Vasco. The idea had stuck. She had never managed to get rid of it entirely. Where did Leda come from?
“Otherwise,” (this is Clotilde speaking), “I really don’t know what would have become of her, poor thing, if she hadn’t found that job—if I hadn’t found it for her, because I was the one who got her the job—but, as I say, I don’t know what would have become of her. Your father, may he rest in peace and I hate to speak ill of the dead, but the fact is he treated her very badly indeed. He split up with her without a word of explanation and left her without a penny.”
“Was there never any explanation as to why they split up?”
“No one ever knew why, nor did she. The fact is, she suspects you, because it all coincided with you leaving home… But she has no idea what you could have told your father.”
“Me? Really?” Graça smooths her skirt and doesn’t know quite what to say. “Me?” she says again.
She tries to change the subject, to ask about someone else, Vasco for example, yes, why not? She carries inside her the faint hope that Clotilde will tell her that he’s back, that he sometimes mentions her, that he hasn’t forgotten her, or simply to know that he’s all right. However, she doesn’t have the courage. She feels a sudden desire, which she struggles to suppress, to get up, drag Clotilde over to the front door, and throw her out, possibly even push her down the stairs. She can’t stand her, she never could, but now she’s even worse. With age, Clotilde must have prospered and increased her stock of bitterness. Or perhaps she, Graça, is the one who has grown more impatient and lost what little sense of humor she had. Clotilde used to amuse her or at the very least, shock her. Now she merely irritates her. “Poor girl…”; “I was the one who got her the job…” What a load of nonsense.
“Today is clearly my day for visitors…”
Clotilde takes off her thick-lensed glasses and polishes them carefully. Her eyes suddenly shrink and become two tremulous, naked, anxious cracks. Then she puts her glasses back on and is herself again.
“I’m expecting Leda. She phoned me yesterday, saying she wants to speak to me. To clear up a number of things she has never understood. That’s what she said. So I’m just waiting to see what she wants to know.”
She watches Clotilde, expecting her to react. Will Clotilde-my-love leap out of her chair, scream, turn pale? No. She simply says very calmly and imperturbably:
“That will be an interesting encounter. I’d certainly like to be a fly on the wall for that. Anyway, I’ll be on my way and leave you two alone. Your conversation won’t do my heart any good. Did you know I have heart problems? Nor did I! They’ve only just found out… Anyway, stay in touch. We could even arrange to meet one Saturday afternoon. Leda and Emília could come too. I’m sure Emília would love to see you. She often speaks of you… You knew about that business with Bernardo de Melo…” (and she makes a horizontal movement with her hand across her plump throat.) “What am I saying? Of course you do, that was long before you left home.”
It was. Two years perhaps, or more. She remembers it vividly. One day, Bernardo de Mello (now with two ls) had appeared for the first time by himself on the front page of the newspapers. He had been appointed director-general of some organization or other, or perhaps he had been made chairman of some board, and almost at the same time, he had written the words The End on his love affair with Emília. Shortly afterward, he had married a girl from a good family, a family with a good deal of money too, which was equally important for an ambitious man like him, keen to rise to the top quickly, and he hadn’t hesitated for one moment to place his sacrifice at the feet of his new bride all in white, and that sacrifice was Emília.
For some time, Emília had talked of killing herself and had even gone so far as to take a massive overdose of some sedative or other, but, after having her stomach pumped, she survived, albeit mortally wounded. Or so it seemed.
Enlivened by the memory of her friend’s misfortune, Clotilde tells her that Bernardo is very happy, and his wife’s about to have their eighth child. Emília, though, is a changed woman—(“Poor Graça, how you’ve changed!”)—an old crock.
“Yes, a real old crock; you’d hardly recognize her.”
And from behind the thick round lenses of her glasses, Clotilde-my-love’s eyes glinted in all their shameless splendor.
She sets off down the stairs. Graça keeps the latch drawn back as she very slowly and carefully closes the door, gradually letting the latch return to its original position. Out in the corridor, she can still hear Clotilde’s slow, heavy, fearful footsteps. Ever since that fall, which had left her permanently lame (yet another reason for her to hate other people, the ones who were not lame), ever since that day, Clotilde has had to keep an even more watchful eye on the ground she treads, afraid she might fall over again. One of her feet makes a lopsided noise as she walks. Why did she choose not to go down in the elevator? Ah, now she remembers. Clotilde has never liked elevators.
Nor did Uncle Rafael. Little Graça used to laugh out loud at that inexplicable phobia of his, which seemed utterly ridiculous in such a strong, cheerful man. “But why, Uncle, why?” He would shrug and then smile that almost childlike smile, which revealed his small teeth and made his plump cheeks tremble. He was both the saving grace and the black sheep of the family, qualities (or defects, depending on your point of view) that often exist side by side. A poet, and this was something Graça would only understand later on, who had never written any poems and on whom life had played a dastardly trick (because life doesn’t like poets, or as her father would say: Because that idler never applied himself) by finding him a job in the Commissioning Department of Faria Benavente & Co. on Rua dos Fanqueiros, where, it’s true, he rarely put in an appearance. He never had any money and was always accumulating debts, and her father had never forgiven him for his complete lack of common sense. They were constantly embroiled in rather bitter arguments. If Leda or Graça spoke well of him, praised his qualities, Graça’s father would get very annoyed. “And what exactly are these qualities; can you tell me that?” Leda would open her mouth to speak, unsure how to separate out the qualities from what made her declare simply that he was “an excellent fellow.” Graça’s father would respond bluntly, “Most of the world’s imbeciles are ‘excellent fellows.’”
One day, though, Uncle Rafael, having had enough of the Commissioning Department and, doubtless, having had more than enough of those endless arguments with his brother, had decided to head off to Luanda as a tourist—on an adventure with no job lined up and waiting for him. And so off he went on that huge gray-and-white ship, en route to a new life.
Graça’s father would sometimes say mockingly, “I wonder what happened to the ‘tourist’?” Then he would turn to her and say very seriously, “Let this be an example to you, my dear. Lives like the one your uncle is leading always end badly. My brother has never worried about what will happen tomorrow, but sooner or later, he’ll turn up here full of diseases and debts. And of course, I’ll have to pay.”
Graça would say, “Yes, Papa.”
“Work and hard-earned savings are the only wealth we have. Waste not, want not.”
“Yes, Papa.”
Uncle Rafael never came back. What did arrive one day, several years later, was a letter, his only letter. Her father had torn open the envelope, read the letter very attentively, then reread it several times, his face bright red. “The impudence!” he muttered. Then, without another word, without even a show of anger, he tore the letter into tiny pieces.
Curiosity had always been a weakness of Graça’s. Besides, she was very fond of Uncle Rafael and had spotted the Angolan stamp. Thirdly, she was very good at jigsaw puzzles, having trained herself up during her illness. So she took all those little pieces of paper that her father carelessly left in the glass ashtray back to her room, and within half an hour she had found out everything, even about the mixed-race woman who had given Uncle Rafael an heir and whom he had resolved to make a legal member of the family.
The following day, her father complained for the first time about a strange pain in his chest. He went to the doctor and, over supper, explained that he had a bad heart and must avoid any stressful situations.
Graça goes back into the living room. The image of Clotilde and her voice had departed along with her, and, fortunately, nothing of her remained. Memories are sometimes more potent than any actual presence, and for a moment, Uncle Rafael is sitting there before her, legs crossed, savoring the thin cigarette he himself has just rolled. Then he leaves as well, and as she feels him going and makes not the slightest effort to stop him, Graça sits down on the rounded arm of Vasco’s armchair. Uncle Rafael is gone. She is left alone with the armchair that will, for all eternity, be Vasco’s armchair. She reaches out her right arm, and her hand remains open, in mid-air, as if it really was encircling someone’s shoulder.
Where will Vasco be now? Will he have put on weight? Will he have gone gray? What will he be like?
The night brought with it his fine, serene, perfect profile, his beautifully cut gray suit, his green suede vest. Graça threw back her head and saw his thick two-toned brown hair that curled almost down to his neck.
“How are things, sweetie. How’s school? Is Antoninha all right?”
Graça shrank back. School. Antoninha. He was talking down to her now. Why didn’t he just go ahead and ask to look at her school books?…
“I got 12 in Portuguese, 13 in French, 8 in Math…”
“Amazing!”
Vasco was holding up his hands in pretend astonishment. His large, bony hands were carefully manicured. Her father had raised his eyes from his drawing board:
“You should be ashamed of yourself. Fancy boasting about such bad marks. Go to your room and study. You’re almost fourteen and in the third year now. Don’t you realize you’re a grown-up now, a young woman? People should be aware of their responsibilities. Go on, go and study. And then straight to bed.” He had glanced at his wristwatch. “It’s nearly eleven o’clock. You’re still too young to be going to bed so late.”
She had slouched across the room, her blue pleated skirt swinging, the skirt that was beginning to be too short for her.
“Don’t I get a goodnight kiss, sweetie?”
No, she wasn’t going to give him a kiss. But what if she did? She had stopped at the door, hesitating. But the others had already forgotten all about her. Especially Vasco. He had set aside the gentle voice he adopted to speak to her, and it was now almost excessively normal.
“Do you want anything from Tangiers?”
“Are you going to Tangiers?” asked Leda, taken aback.
“Yes, tomorrow. I’m going with a friend who has a car. We’re driving through Spain. Just for a week.”
She heard the faint click of his lighter. Graça had stopped on her way out of the room and was standing still and expectant behind the curtain, surrounded by a pleasant, protective penumbra. What was she going to do in her room? Study? She was, in fact, really sleepy. It’s nearly eleven o’clock. You’re still too young to be going to bed so late. She crossed the corridor, dragging her feet.
“Are you going with Ferreira?”
“Yes.”
A silence. The sound of an eraser rubbing something out.
“You shouldn’t see so much of that Ferreira fellow.”
How odd her stepmother’s voice sounded, and what an odd thing to say. “Why shouldn’t Vasco go around with whoever he wants?” her father said. “That’s taking your maternal instincts too far…”
“My frustrated maternal instincts, you mean.”
“Well, frustrated or not, don’t exaggerate. Vasco knows perfectly well, or at least he should, who he should go around with, whether A or B. It’s none of our business. So, Vasco, you’re off to Tangiers? Good. Il faut que jeunesse se passe. Would you like Vasco to bring you something, Leda? I might have a few pesetas somewhere…”
Her stepmother said only, “No, I don’t want anything.”
“Well, I’m going to bring you a present anyway. How about a bottle of perfume?”
Graça had gone into her room, locked the door, thrown herself down on the bed, and wept.
She had arisen from her illness looking terribly thin and so weak she could barely stand. At the same time, though, she felt extraordinarily powerful. She would often find herself thinking, “One day, tomorrow or the day after, whenever I choose, that’ll be the end of Leda. An end to the good life and to little tea parties with her female friends.” This, however, was a purely abstract desire. She thought, Whenever I choose, but never properly considered the manner of her choosing. And her revenge—her sad, pathetic revenge—was limited to breaking the bottle of Lotus Blossom perfume that Vasco had brought back from his trip to Tangiers. Only much later, when she was with Claude, would she look at the problem head on. And Clotilde’s sudden reappearance would provide her only way out.
One Sunday afternoon, the telephone rang, and Leda had answered, then held the receiver out to Graça’s father.
“It’s someone asking for you.”
“Who is it?”
“He didn’t say…”
“You should have asked. You know perfectly well that I hate answering the phone when I don’t… Hello? Yes, yes, of course I remember you. How are you?”
There was a long silence. The voice on the other end talked on and on. Finally, her father was able to respond: “My dear fellow, what you’re asking me is really most unpleasant… He and I are really not that close. He’s the cousin of my first wife. Is there no other solution? Is it really necessary?’
Again there came that disembodied voice talking about Vasco. What was he saying? Leda was sitting rigid, empty, and had, it seemed, completely forgotten how to breathe.
“All right, fine. I’ll come immediately, although I don’t honestly know what I can say. It doesn’t matter, you say? Come now. All right, my friend, goodbye.”
He had disconnected the phone with his left hand, while still keeping the receiver held to his ear, as he always did when he was very annoyed.
“Vasco has been arrested. Hardly a surprise really. However, I never imagined I would have to get involved. Apparently, I must tell his family because his brother-in-law has influence in high places. I just wish I knew what precisely I’m expected to say—tell them he’s been arrested, I suppose.”
“Arrested?”
Leda had turned very pale, and Graça could see her mouth moving, grimacing, quite independent of her will. “But why?” her stepmother had asked at last, in a breathless, fearful voice. She had said this not intending to be heard and then turned away, pressing her hand to her lips.
Graça’s father had said sharply, “Please, don’t ask stupid questions. I’m up to here with it.”
Then he’d said that this could only ever happen to Vasco, that he attracted trouble like a magnet, yes, that was it, like a magnet. He then rammed his hat on his head and angrily pulled on his coat, so hastily that a coat button fell off and rolled onto the mat. Then he left, slamming all the doors: the apartment door, the elevator door, and the street door. And the echoes had lingered, as if glued one to the other, until they finally dissolved into the air.
Another door banging. This time it’s the kitchen door, and Piedade suddenly appears before Graça—“Oh, I didn’t know you were in here, Senhora, I thought you were in your bedroom”—thus catches Piedade in fraternal flagrante delicto, holding a saucer of breadcrumbs for the fish. Graça pretends not to notice and leaves the room.
“I’m still expecting that lady,” she says on her way to the door, but without turning around. “The one who just left was someone else.”
Piedade mumbles affirmatively, and Graça hears the faint sound of breadcrumbs being scattered from on high, while the fish, presumably unaware of the kindness of humans, must be descending to its deepest submarine depths.
Graça walks past the dressing-table mirror and sees, without even looking, the shadow of her profile. She loathes that unknown profile, which she has only ever been able to see with great difficulty by sitting before a mirror and holding another mirror in her hand, the profile that belongs not to her, but only to other people. Even when alone, she feels embarrassed by that momentary image, which is hers, after all, and that floats into view only to vanish at once, leaving the stage empty. “Poor Graça, how you’ve changed!” The image of that Graça, of that one or another, it really doesn’t matter. “You’ve never had much luck either, have you, poor dear.” No she hadn’t. Or had she, but simply never noticed? At first, it had all been so marvelous, just amazing. But had it really been so very amazing? Wasn’t it just that she had wanted it to be amazing, had wanted to be amazed, to embrace with the desperation of a drowning woman the first illusory hope that hove into view?
She was phoning a university friend and had gotten two of the numbers the wrong way around. Instead of a two and a five, she had dialed a five and a two. Because of this mistake her life had taken a completely different route—and not only her life, but also the lives of her father and of Leda. A voice had answered, the voice of a man who spoke very bad Portuguese.
“Hello.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I think I must have made a mistake. What number is this?”
“We spend our lives making mistakes. Don’t you?”
It was a cheerful, slightly sharp voice, with a pleasantly foreign accent. She had said, “Me? I’m not sure… It’s hard to say…”
But she hadn’t put the phone down. The voice at the other end was waiting too. It was one of those vast, dense silences that occurs when we’re waiting for nothing at all, while clasping a receiver in one hand.
“Aren’t you going to hang up?” he had asked.
“I hate hanging up. It means taking responsibility for something, and I hate doing that.”
“Yes, I know, the responsibility of cutting the fragile thread that, just for a moment, joins us together. If you hang up, it’s all over; you’ll have killed me forever. And I might have been something important. Is that what you mean?”
“More or less.”
This is how things had been born. How they had died, or, rather, withered away, was harder to say. The fact is that she couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment when she had begun to view Claude through those lenses that make everything so clear, so frighteningly real, like seeing ourselves reflected in one of those mirrors used to study imperfections of the skin. Blackheads, huge craters; the hairs above the upper lip like bushes leaning over into the abyss. With him, with Claude, there were no imaginary lenses, no blurred images, no comforting, soothing crepuscular atmospheres. Why was that? She had no idea…
And yet, the beginning had been quite different. They had met after that chance telephone conversation, and he had not arrived as other people arrive. Or was it perhaps that she had not waited for him as people usually wait… But why think about that? Her lingering impression was of him arriving, not of her waiting, of him arriving not as other men did, with a smile, a witty remark, a glance, a presence. No, that wasn’t him. He had erupted into her life, emptying out everything she had kept safely stashed in drawers, filed away all neatly labeled or, quite simply, things she had been quite unaware of and that were brought to light by the sheer force of those storm winds. She was surrounded by wreckage, the key to all secrets bobbing about on the crest of the waves (it had not bobbed for long, for she had managed to retrieve it), fragments of ideas she had inherited and dreams that were actually hers. Or were they? Here and there, she spotted bits of her father, scattered remnants of that venerable image, unwittingly shattered by the iconoclast. And she regarded it all quite serenely, because she suddenly realized that none of it was of any value. Such a relief.
Claude understood everything. Wasn’t that extraordinary? She would begin a sentence, then pause, and he would finish it for her. It was as if he knew her father and Leda. He spoke of them as if nothing about them were unknown to him. And Graça felt that this, at last, was love. Finding a person you could tell everything to. Everything? No, that would be impossible. But as much as she could tell him: The tears she had shed for the dog that had been run over; how she missed her mother; how she hated Leda…
Life could at last be different, and it lay before her like a broad green sea, upon which she could set off in any direction. Was it green? On that point, she recalled, she had hesitated. Was it green or some other color, or no color at all, and later on how would it be? Anyway, regardless of color, it was a sea. And that was what mattered.
The journey began in the streets of the city, either crowded with people or deserted, far from the people who walked past them and who weren’t even there…far, too, from the rusty old machines repeating the same thing every day of every year. “Did you sleep well?”—“Your grandmother, may she rest in peace…”—“Let that be an example to you, Graça… Work…”
With him, though, everything was new, even when the same thing was repeated, because she hadn’t yet understood it or become accustomed to it, finding it normal and commonplace and growing tired of it. A little as if the air she breathed hadn’t had time to leave her lungs. And this was how—holding her breath, her chest still full of air, and lightly, lightly hovering above everything and everyone—she visited the places Claude had already discovered in the few months he had lived in Lisbon, but that she still didn’t know because she had been born in Estrela, just up the hill from the town center. These were places he had cut out from the landscape for his own personal use in order to stick them in his album of memories and, of course, so he could show them to her. He had an unusual technique. To obtain the best shot he required five square feet of ground (that particular spot and no other: neither the one that lay to the right or the left, behind or in front), and from there he would gaze to the south or the east or even the southwest and at a particular time of day, down to the very minute and sometimes even down to the very second. And the shot came out precisely as he wanted it. In Cascais (they had gone there on purpose) there were two boats among many others. She had never known quite why they were the chosen ones and had perhaps never bothered to find out, but they were the ones. They would sit and wait, he with not a trace of anxiety on his face, only a look of expectation. The sun would be about to sink below the horizon, sometimes still aglow, at others like a punctured balloon letting out air, lighting up, or already lit, falling into the blood-red water. Then, as if he had suddenly lost all interest, he would say, “Right, shall we go?”
But what she took for imagination, enthusiasm, a love of beautiful things, turned out to be merely the passing interest of a tourist. Claude did not own a camera and had perhaps never even considered owning one. He photographed things with his eyes, then put the photo away in his album of memories and closed the book. Did he really do that, Graça wondered later on. But he did. He remembered those images in every tiny detail. All of them. He had an amazing visual memory. Like Vasco.
Vasco. Where would he and his perfect profile be now? She could have asked Clotilde, who knows everything, and who’s always up to speed on the lives of everyone, but her courage had failed her. Leda is about to arrive, but she won’t ask her either. She wouldn’t be able to; she wouldn’t want to. Leda will talk about Vasco, but about the old Vasco they had both known, whom they had both loved. Perhaps not about the other one. Graça, though, is afraid this might not be the case, and her stepmother will bring her more recent news, news she doesn’t want to receive. Anything she said about him would be bad news, regardless of whether he’s alive or dead. The vague atmosphere of childhood in which he was so at ease, and in which he was he, is infinitely preferable to any harsh, wounding, explanatory words. He would have no place in the present, which is all too real and transparent. The once-beautiful hands of the peasant woman (Vasco’s work) now look as if they were made of rubber and, just a while ago, had reminded her of the terrible chilblains she used to suffer from (but no longer does). Vasco at fifty, with white hair or almost bald. Old. Dead. Rotting. Why would she want him?
No, the Vasco she wanted was the one who would arrive and sit down in Vasco’s armchair opposite Vasco’s painting. Sometimes when he arrived early and her stepmother had not yet come home, she would go and keep him company. Those were the best moments of her life, the ones she spent sitting opposite him. Dazzled by his face, by his hands, by the words he said. She would talk then and tell him all the unimportant things as well, sometimes, as the really important things she needed to tell someone, but that she couldn’t tell her father or Leda. What she was thinking. Her mother’s death. How much she missed her. Vasco would smile and say:
“These aren’t things you need to worry about at your age, sweetie. Nor at my age either for that matter. I’m not saying don’t think about your mother, of course not, but leave old graybeards and devout old ladies to worry about death. You should be thinking about life, looking to the future, going to the cinema, learning to swim, never missing a class…”
“It’s nearly two o’clock, Papa. I mustn’t miss my class.”
Her father, grave-faced, chin lifted, was standing very stiffly by the bookshelf next to the bust of his head.
“Well, you’re going to have to miss it, not, I imagine, for the first time. You’ve been spotted by my friends at some time or other either down by the river or in a park. Even in Cascais, watching the boats… And on a weekday too, if I’m not mistaken. When you should have been in class.”
“I was watching the sunset, Papa,” said Graça with her discreet little smile.
“I’m not joking.”
“Nor am I, Papa. But I like to tell things as they are. It wasn’t the boats we were looking at, but the sunset.”
Her father gave her a heavy, meaningful stare, but Graça didn’t waver and withstood the weight of his eyes.
“Why didn’t you tell me all this earlier?”
“I suppose because I wasn’t sure.”
“And now you are?”
“Yes.”
“I see.”
Two such simple words, so laden with irony. Her father had left his place beside his own private pedestal and taken a few steps around the room, around the table where the pink cut-glass ashtray already bloomed. Then he came to an abrupt halt in front of Graça and stuck his thumbs in the armholes of his vest, ready to attack.
“What does he do?”
“He’s a student of course. In Paris. He’s in the final year of his Engineering degree.”
“Which he clearly failed.”
“No, his uncle lives here and wanted him to come and work with him for a while. Besides, it was a unique opportunity.”
More pacing up and down. Another sudden halt next to the bust, and then one important sentence was followed by other, equally grave, sentences.
“Well, you must stop seeing him. I say this, as you must realize, because I have good reason to do so. And obviously I’ve made my enquiries.”
“What, like getting references for a maid? It looks like they were pretty bad…”
“They were. Your Claude, my poor Graça—his name is Claude, isn’t it?—doesn’t have a penny to his name. He was brought up by that uncle who, while he does have a bit of money, also has three legitimate children. It’s not worth leaving your country in order to live a modest, even poor, existence abroad.”
“And what if I think it is worth it?”
“That’s your affair. At twenty-two, you’re a grown-up. Marry if you want to, but be aware that you can’t count on me for help of any kind.”
Graça then lifted her chin defiantly, or perhaps she had already; she wasn’t sure. That had been the moment, though, when the first cracks had begun to appear in her father’s image, so small as to be almost invisible—not cracks exactly, but the kind of crazing that appears on poor-quality porcelain when it’s been used for a while. Or rather, that had been the moment when Graça’s eyes were keen enough to see them.
“May I leave now, or was there something else you wanted to say?”
He was probably expecting some reaction, tears perhaps, and then he would console her, and after that, who knows: She would perhaps gradually come to understand why he was so upset. Graça, however, was standing before him, not moving, just waiting. Not a sign of tears, and she appeared to be perfectly calm. Was this really his daughter, or some stranger? Was the man looking at Graça and saying, “Yes, you can leave; I’ve nothing more to say,” was he a stranger? Was her father a stranger? His image shattered.
Only later on did Graça try to piece it together again, but it was always a difficult job, a far more complicated puzzle than that letter from Luanda. Some of the pieces she never even found and never would. They were lost in the maelstrom, borne away on the current. That image would remain forever incomplete, not to be discarded, but kept in a corner of the attic of memories.
She looks at the small wristwatch that Claude gave her as birthday present one year. It’s almost six o’clock. Leda should be arriving soon.
She had phoned the previous evening. Graça had heard her low, slow voice, which sometimes seemed on the point of disappearing altogether: “Is that you, Graça?” As naturally as that, as if they had parted the best of friends only the day before. “Is that you, Graça?” No, it couldn’t be, it couldn’t possibly be Leda. What could she have to say to her or to ask her after all those years?
“Yes,” she had replied. “Who’s speaking?”
“Don’t you recognize my voice?”
A silence. She could not, for the moment, find the right words. It was as if they had all fled far away, leaving her empty, alone, with no chance of salvation. Everything seemed to her so false, so absurd… Leda talking to her after all those years and speaking to her like that. “Is that you, Graça? Don’t you recognize my voice?” What should she do? Allow herself to take the easy way out and say, “Sorry, I don’t know who’s speaking…”? But Leda had a unique voice, and there could be no mistaking it.
“Leda!” she had exclaimed at last.
A simple, overenthusiastic exclamation, which had nothing to do with what she was actually feeling or had felt in the past. Then silence. As if the shock had left her speechless. It fell to the other person to continue the conversation, to say something that revealed why she was phoning, whether she was on the attack or came with good intentions.
“I found out this morning from Emília that you were in Lisbon. Clotilde told her. I’d like to talk to you. Are you home tomorrow?”
That could mean anything…
“Yes, I am, Leda. All afternoon. You can come whenever you like.”
“I’ll be there around six o’clock…”
“Great. I’ll be waiting.”
Waiting for love, waiting for her father to understand, waiting for Clotilde to speak, waiting for a forgiveness that would never come, waiting, unconsciously waiting to be free, waiting to return to a place where nothing awaited her, waiting for Leda… And what else?
“Is my husband’s illness terminal, doctor?”
Even before she asked the question, she knew very well that Claude would not survive. She had always known about things before they happened. She had always known that Leda would leave the family home, ever since that now-distant day when a leaf had fallen from a tree.
“We must never lose hope. Where would we be without hope?”
It was the doctor speaking, already with his mind on other matters.
“I understand, doctor.”
She was pale and disheveled and so profoundly exhausted that she could serenely face the idea of Claude’s death. All that mattered was having a bed and being able to sleep for many hours.
“You need to rest,” the doctor had said. “Why make yourself suffer like this, what good does it do your husband? Why spend every night in the waiting room if you can’t even see him?”
“I know, doctor.”
But she stayed sitting in an uncomfortable chair, leafing through dog-eared copies of Paris-Match, allowing herself to be lulled to sleep by the light of the solitary bulb in the ceiling. Sometimes her head would droop and she would awake with a start. Claude was going to die, and he was calling her; she could hear his voice clearly. She would leave the room and go to reception.
“How is the patient in room 90?”
“He’s slightly better.”
He remained slightly better until the very last moment.
“How is the patient in room 90?”
“You’re going to have to be brave…”
She had been brave. She was even filled by a strange feeling of serenity. As if after swimming for a long time against the current she found herself adrift in the calm waters of a lake, with no need to move her arms. Claude had been a nice dream that had lasted long into the morning, one of those dreams in which we are never entirely present, in which there is always some part of us absent, listening for footsteps in the corridor outside.
Now she had opened her eyes. What would Vasco be like now? And Leda? How old would she be? She must be, what, fifty or more? Would her hair have turned white, and would she have false teeth? What would her face and her mouth be like now?
In the days that followed the winter afternoon when she had surprised Vasco and Leda, she felt almost bent beneath the weight of that enormous secret, far too heavy a weight for her young shoulders. Then she had gradually grown used to the idea and contented herself with savoring words that were hers alone, and she eventually came to enjoy the pleasure she felt would be lost completely if, one day, she were to reveal those words to someone else. Later, it took some external force for her to free herself from the words she had stored away, indeed, almost forgotten. And she would choose Clotilde as a bridge. She had kept for herself the modest role of instrument of fate acting from a distance. Unfortunately, instruments of fate are never popular. They are the intermediaries of evil. The enemy chooses such intermediaries either because they are weak or else very strong. And understandably enough, both types are universally disliked.
One day, a letter arrived. Graça had seen it on the silver tray and would always remember the blueish envelope it came in and the cheap paper on which the words were scrawled in red ink. There was no return address. Her father had opened it in the evening, when he came home for supper, opening it very carefully with the brass letter-opener as he always did. Slowly, so as not to tear any of the corners. He read it once, twice, just as he had read that other letter many years before, and again he turned very pale, but this time he put it in his pocket without looking at anyone. Not even at Graça or at Leda. They ate supper just as they had on other days, and just as on those other days, his father asked Leda to please pass him the salt and told the maid, in his usual voice, to tell the cook that there wasn’t enough salt in the soup.
Then, when they were all about to leave the table, he turned to his wife and said:
“Will you excuse me? I need to have a word with Graça.”
Leda left, closing the door slowly behind her. Graça’s father was once again holding the letter, which he threw down on the table.
“Read it.”
Graça never finished reading it. There was a strange magnetic current between her eyes and that cheap piece of paper spattered with the occasional ink blot.
“You wrote this, didn’t you?”
Graça was still transfixed, unable to look up, unable to speak. Her face remained calm and unruffled and not a sound emerged from her lips.
“You wrote it. This is what it says: ‘Someone who saw them in the living room. That someone cannot be wrong.’ Someone. Who, eight years later, would write that? A maid? That would be handy, wouldn’t it? But no maid ever grew old in this household. How many have passed through here in the last eight years? No…only you could have written this, to avenge yourself for the cool reception we gave to that friend of yours. Come on, speak. Why did you write this wretched thing? An anonymous letter… How base… My own daughter! I’m right, aren’t I?”
Graça remained obstinately still, her eyes lowered, the letter gripped firmly in one hand. She heard a slap, then another and another. On her face? Possibly. It might have been her face, but she wasn’t sure. It was a strange, muffled sound. Then she nearly lost her balance and was thrown against the wall. So someone was slapping her face.
“Papa…”
“So it’s true?”
Graça nodded.
“Listen, Papa…”
He snatched the letter from her, opened the living room door and went out into the corridor. For a long while, Graça stayed where she was, not moving, not thinking. Then she picked up the phone and dialed Claude’s number.
“I have to leave here tonight,” she said.
Her father had died without ever forgiving her. And what about Leda? And Vasco? Not that he had anything to forgive her for—he might know nothing about it, that was possible; yes, he almost certainly knew nothing about it. Vasco disappeared immediately after the day of his arrest. She had never seen him again.
One day, her father left home earlier than usual. That evening he said:
“I’ve just come from the station, goodness, what a rabble… Anyway, noblesse oblige.”
Graça had felt as if her heart had suddenly shriveled up, like a small hard pebble in her chest—such a strange sensation.
“Who did you go there to see off, Papa?
“Vasco. Didn’t you know? I thought Leda would have told you.”
“So he didn’t even come to say goodbye. Where has he gone, Papa?”
But her father had responded angrily, unfeelingly: “To the devil for all I care. No, to Paris. Now, please, don’t ask me any more questions. I’m up to here with it.”
Those last words were so unlike her father. Nevertheless, she had persisted: “Will he write? Did you ask him to write?”
“He’ll write if he wants to, Graça.” This was her stepmother speaking, very gently, even more gently than usual. “You should never ask people to write to you. It’s rather like asking them for alms, do you see?”
It was a day of horrors. Graça gazed at Leda uncomprehendingly. How could she speak so calmly about Vasco’s departure, about the possibility that he would never write to them? She would never forget him. Never, never, never. She fled to her bedroom. Her face was wet with tears.
She opens the window. It gets dark early in October, on this, the tenth of October. It has rained all afternoon, but now there’s a lull, and beneath the streetlamp on the pavement opposite, a few yards from the tree—what kind is it?—there is a round, still, luminous puddle. Graça half-closes her eyes and sees the light form flickering golden darts around the lamp-turned-star.
It’s exactly twenty past six, and Leda has still not arrived. Graça peers up and down the street, but sees only a fat man in a raincoat carrying a large umbrella over his arm. Then the man disappears, and the street is once more deserted. It feels like a Sunday.
Why is Leda coming to see her? What’s she going to say, to ask? What is she expecting to hear? Will she arrive full of explanations, to tell her that there never was anything between her and Vasco apart from what Graça saw that one day? Will she come to tell her about her life as an almost-abandoned wife, about the brief illusory hope of love that Vasco had given her? Will she come in an accusatory mood, accusing her of destroying a home, of having killed her father with the shock, of having killed her? Or is she simply coming to see her, unaware that Graça was the guilty party, the real criminal? And what will Graça say to her if she mentions the letter? That she didn’t write it? What difference would that make? And what if she does speak and explain everything, what would happen then?
But nothing is going to happen. Everything will stay irremediably, irreparably the same. Because what could be spoiled has been spoiled. It died one night, never to return.
Suddenly, almost seamlessly, she opens the wardrobe, takes out her coat—the heaviest one, the camelhair one she had dyed black. She picks up her handbag, glances at the dressing-table mirror with the crack in one corner. She sees that her face is paler than usual and that her hazel eyes are almost green, as they always are when the tide is coming in, bringing with it seaweed and slime.
She’s standing at the door, holding the handle, when she sees Piedade staring at her in astonishment, bewildered.
“What about that lady? Weren’t you waiting for some lady to call?”
Graça’s response is quick, hasty, and her slippery eyes choose not to look at Piedade; they slither past her and are gone. Where?
“If the lady does come, tell her I’ve left, that…that I’ve left Lisbon and that you don’t know when I’ll be back. Tell her anything.”
“All right…”
Piedade doesn’t like obscure situations, and this one strikes her as pretty murky. She shakes her head and tut-tuts.
“All right… I suppose you know what you’re doing.”
No, Graça doesn’t know. She races down the stairs, deliberately avoiding the elevator, afraid she might meet Leda when she gets out down below.
Her stepmother could easily be downstairs, waiting to take the elevator. They’re less likely to meet on the stairs.
She stops at the front door and looks cautiously right and left, but the street is still deserted. In the distance to the right, she sees a skinny woman with white hair walking along in the rain that has just started again, but she isn’t hurrying, as if she weren’t even aware of the rain. Graça pulls her scarf over her head and turns left. Could that be Leda? She doesn’t know and prefers not to.
A large gray car speeds past, splattering her with mud. Graça feels the thick, cold substance on her legs, and, at the same time, she’s conscious of a lump in her throat ready to turn into tears. But she refuses to cry. She summons the tears back inside; she drowns them, masters them. Instead, with a handkerchief, she quickly wipes away the mud on her black silk stockings.
It’s raining harder now. A taxi with a green light slows to a halt next to her. Graça opens the door and hurls herself inside, where she huddles in a corner.
“Where do you want to go?”
But Graça doesn’t want to go anywhere; she just wants to be. Just be. Not feel hungry or thirsty or sleepy, not feel the stupid anxiety that has never left her. Not think about Leda or about her father, or about Claude or Vasco or herself.
“Carry on down the avenue,” is all she says.
If only she could always carry on down—or up—without stopping, yes, carry straight on without looking to either side, without any sides to look at. With nothing at the end of the road except the end of the road. Impossible. At some point, in five or ten minutes at most, she will have to rematerialize, to open her mouth and say “I’ll get out here” or “Drop me at the end of this street” or “Drive around the square.” She’ll have no alternative.
Meanwhile, though, she will simply carry on down the avenue, which means she can close her eyes. A sweet moment of respite.