“If you want, I can try to read it.”
“Open it quickly. I escaped from bed. My granma’s sleeping.”
We tore open the envelope and the letter resembled the other one, but the handwriting was more difficult and it was impossible to understand anything. It started with Deer Komrad Frend Dona Nhéte, and after that you could hardly make out anything.
“Look at this. He wrote the word ‘explosion.’”
“Are you sure?”
“Don’t you see it then? It’s written ‘explozhun,’ which must be ‘explosion’ in Russian.”
“But my granma doesn’t understand Russian.”
“You ain’t gettin’ it; it must be a tattletale letter. He must be telling on us about the dynamite.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“If you want, we’ll burn the letter right now. I brought matches.”
“Sure. You burn it. I’m going back to the room.”
“What? And are you coming back?”
“I can only do it late in the afternoon. We’re waiting for Rafael KnockKnock’s visit.”
“Okay.”
Granma Nineteen was sleeping when I returned to the room, and it must have been a deep sleep because she was snoring rather loudly.
I didn’t find Granma Catarina in the room, nor was she in the bathroom, and Madalena Kamussekele hadn’t seen her either. An almost oppressive sadness swamped my chest, and that’s not just blather; it was right in the chest that I got a strange feeling. I went to bed but was unable to fall asleep.
I got up again and went to Granma Catarina’s room. Everything was tidied up, the black shawl folded on the bed next to the pillow, on the bedside table were photos of all of the grandchildren and a thread, black also, was attached to a freshly polished silver crucifix. The mirror, too, was cleaner than on other days, and the window was closed and locked. There was no smell of any sort to indicate that someone had been there a short time before. It seemed like a lie, or a disappearance in the movies.
“Granma Catarina?” The words issued from my lips very gently, but there was no reply.
Never again was there a reply. Never again did Granma Catarina appear. She didn’t say goodbye to me, nor did she warn me that she couldn’t speak with me any longer, not even in secret without my telling anyone. It must be because Granma Catarina really didn’t like farewells. She always used to say: “You see, in the old days people were people who arrived. We didn’t know how to take our farewell.”
I sat down on the bed. I don’t like farewells at all, either, Granma Catarina, I thought, and in the big mirror, I saw myself seated there. I started to dredge up memories of moments or conversations with Granma Catarina in order to see whether at some point she would come into the room — but there was nothing.
“Do you know things about the future, Granma Catarina?” I asked her one day when she sat down next to me at the breakfast table.
“The future is full of difficult things that happen in a different way each time. I prefer to divine the past.”
She didn’t like to speak to a lot of people in those last years and not even Granma Nineteen liked it very much when the children said they had been with Granma Catarina at either breakfast time, or at any other.
“But why? Granma Catarina always talks with us. Why can’t we tell anyone about it? Why?”
“Because you can’t.”
It was a response children heard often. “You can’t go play because”; or, if it was a little later, and darker out, “because I say so.” Going to the beach when the sea was rough, skipping class when you didn’t feel like going to school in the morning, didn’t want to get a vaccination, didn’t want to go to the dentist, playing in the dusty square when the water truck was damping down the earth, standing beneath the rain with mouth and arms open when it rained hard, wearing red blouses if it was thundering, having fun with crazy Sea Foam, asking Dona Libânia why she wasn’t married, asking Senhor Tuarles why his other daughters didn’t wear glasses so that they could see the soap operas properly, eating green mangoes with salt, staying in bed until noon, it was all not allowed “because you can’t.” But there must be a reason for these things and the elders could at least do us the favour of telling us instead of keeping this secret to themselves.
“Hey, ¿hay alguien aquí?”
I heard the voice of the Comrade Doctor Rafael KnockKnock come up the stairs to find me seated in Granma Catarina’s dark, empty room, without Granma Catarina there to talk to me. To tell the truth, it’s not your voice that I wanted to hear, I thought, and I went downstairs.
“¿Cómo estás, compañero? I’m here to see your abuela. How is she?”
“She’s sleeping like a log.”
“Like a log?”
“That’s when a person is sleeping so that it’s really hard to wake them up.”
“Can you call your abuela?”
“It’s still early, Doctor. She likes to sleep for a bit at this time and I can’t disturb the dreams she must be dreaming.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Could you wait a moment?”
“Yes. Why not?”
We went out onto the veranda. At that hour there was already a shadow close to the wall.
“Look, you know all this is going to desaparecer, no?”
“The Mausoleum? Yeah, it looks like it’s going.”
“No, no. Bishop’s Beach — the houses, todo. I’ve seen los planes. The fallout will be very beautiful.”
“Falling out, falling over…”
“¿Cómo?”
“Of course, compañero… Of course.”
“What are you saying?”
“I wanted to ask you one more question.”
“Go ahead.”
“Can somebody do something a little bit bad so that they can do something good later?”
“Bueno… I think so, sí.”
“And if the person were a child, could they still do it?”
“Listen, compañero.” Doctor Rafael laid his hand on my shoulder. I thought he was going to start making his “KnockKnock” jokes, but that wasn’t it. “There are things that one has to do that others will never understand. This happens. They are secretos that only your heart can understand.”
“‘Secretos’ are secrets?”
“Yes.”
“I like the word ‘secrets.’ It’s like something mysterious that lots of things fit inside.”
“Me gusta your way of thinking. Maybe you will become a poeta.”
“I don’t want to, thanks. I heard that poets end up going crazy.”
“No, it’s not true. Los poetas are mad, but it is another type of madness. Do not worry…Do you think it is time to wake up your abuela?”
“Yes, I’m going to call her. Sorry, I even forgot to ask if you want something to drink, comrade?”
“Sí. What do you have?”
“A good glass of water, not chilled because we don’t have electricity.”
“That would be good, gracias.”
While Madalena brought him the tepid water, I went to wake up Granma Nineteen.
“Granma, Comrade KnockKnock is here.”
“He’s here already? I have to brush my hair. Tell him I’ll be down in a minute.”
While Granma was distracted in the living room, with the doctor examining her lesion, I went outside to see if anything was happening in the square.
The Comrade Gas Jockey, Foam and Comrade Dimitry were arguing with each other with worried faces around the gas pump.