All my thoughts were her face repeated.
At lunchtime I’d leave my uncle sitting at a table to eat and I’d go out into the streets. It was the start of summer, and I walked on, over the top of the light. The people who came into the workshop would say:
‘I saw you, yesterday, out in the street, I tried to call you, I waved to you, but you didn’t see me.’
I didn’t see anything. When I got to the corner before the boarding house I would stop with my body obscured by the wall, I would lean my head out and wait. Sometimes she would come to the door — her profile. At other times she would come out — her body drawn on the pavement. On more than one occasion — her voice greeting someone — her voice saying a phrase — her voice brought by a breeze — her voice floating — her voice fragile.
In the piano cemetery, all afternoon for a week, I wrote and tore up, and wrote again, and tore up again, and wrote again the letter where I said a part of what I felt about her. Hours could pass in the time I spent choosing a word. When I wrote it, moments would pass before I tore up the piece of paper where I’d written it. I knew by heart all the words I’d decided to write, and all the alternatives to each of them. That was what I was thinking about when at the end of the afternoon, at the start of the night, I leaned on the taberna counter, not allowing anyone to talk to me.
It was perhaps the hottest day of the whole summer. The sun burned in the streets. I made my way over the sun. In my pocket I had the piece of paper. On the paper I had the words I had managed to assemble, written in my hand, written with a carpenter’s pencil. The paper, like a piece of sun folded in my pocket, also burned me. I had finished writing it three days earlier. The two previous days I’d waited for her at the corner before the boarding house. The previous day, she had appeared at the door for a moment, and then immediately went back inside. That day I waited for her at the corner before the boarding house. When I already believed I was going to be returning to the workshop without being able to see her, she came out of the door and walked away, down the pavement. I stopped thinking. I crossed the road and, taking steps much larger than hers, I walked, looking only at her back getting ever closer, ever closer, till it was just two steps away, till it was just my arm’s length away, till it was beside me. As I passed her I put the piece of paper in the soft, soft and fresh palm of her hand. She shuddered and I felt her fingers closing at the tips of my fingers. I pulled my hand away as though I had never touched her and looked her in the eye. I didn’t stop walking. She looked at me, softened, closed the piece of paper in her hand and didn’t stop walking.
When Maria arrived my wife had already hung out the clothes, had already switched off the wireless and already had a pan on the stove, wreathed in steam. My wife wasn’t startled as she heard the key entering the lock and turning, but she was set in a thought and as she abandoned it she began to move about more quickly, only stopping when Maria came into the kitchen.
Without asking, but understanding the house’s deserted calm, knowing, Maria came in angry with my wife.
‘It’s always the same. How many times have I told you that if she goes down in the morning she doesn’t want to sleep at night?’
My wife didn’t reply. She waited. Maria continued to be angry. She said two or three things that all meant the same. Her voice was all the more severe for existing alone amid the silence of her movements. The other sounds — the whistle of the flame on the stove, the water boiling — were like shadows that surrounded the words she spoke. The moment ended when Maria pulled back a chair and sat down. My wife, feeling herself a girl and a mother and a grandmother, took a breath, approached her and told her what had happened.
Maria listened to her, her eyes wide, resisting in those moments when she almost couldn’t resist interrupting her. And as soon as she stopped being able just to listen, she leaped up and went along the corridor. Her mother followed her, trying to keep up with her speed. And suddenly there they were, both standing in the door to the living room. A brief moment had passed since our daughter had heard the whole explanation, since she had understood every word, but there, looking into the living room, she seemed not to understand the cupboard fallen on the carpet.
Ignoring her mother — her gaze frozen — she took slow steps towards the cupboard. Following her gaze, her mother followed her. The gloom of the living room was fresh like the silence, like a journey to a time past. Rays of light, straight, symmetrical, came through the gaps in the blinds and stretched into the living room air. Mother and daughter walked towards the rays of light, drawn by the rays of light. Although neither knew what the other was thinking, it was as though they thought the same thing because they bent down at the same time on either side of the cupboard, and slowly, lifting the weight of their own bodies, began to lift it up. Their movements crossed and interrupted and freed the rays of light. Their movements sketched themselves in the straight and parallel distance of the rays of light.
The touch of my hands had no weight and no texture, the people who spoke to me were always very far away, all colours were pale in my eyes, the glasses of wine I drank tasted of nothing and intoxicated some other person, my body walking along the pavement was so light that it didn’t belong to me, because I only thought of her. I could only think thoughts that imagined her. I only existed deep down inside myself thinking of her. A tiny movement inside me — believing for a moment that she might never want to see me again, believing for a moment that she might have laughed at the letter I gave her — any movement inside me was felt with my whole life; but the touch of my own hands was inexact. In the world, I was not I. I was a reflection that someone vaguely remembered. I was a reflection that someone was dreaming without believing.
The last days of May were dull sun — on the streets of Benfica, lost from myself at lunchtime; in the piano cemetery, my gaze locked on the little window that tried to illuminate the impossible and was giving up, resigned. Each moment felt like the tiring repetition of identical successive moments from previous days. In the morning, arriving at the workshop, I would think it was again morning and I was again arriving at the workshop. I recognised the temperature and the sounds and the smells of the day being born. I knew every detail before it happened — the people who arrived at the workshop, my uncle telling stories attached to stories attached to stories — currents of words snaked in the air of the shop. I watched each gesture unfold without interest. And at lunchtime I felt myself suffocating. I walked the streets towards the boarding house — I again walked the streets again towards the boarding house. Every day, at the corner before the boarding house, with my body hidden by the wall, I stuck my head out and waited again, again, again. She didn’t appear, and I always made the same plans — to jump over the walls of the neighbouring yards; to look through the windows and see her through the curtains; to knock at the door, wish that she should be the one to open it or ask some question of the woman I took to be her mother, some question I didn’t yet know but which was reasonable and allowed me to see her. I believed that if I saw her I would instantly know what she was thinking. But the time came when I had to return to the workshop, and I never, not on any of those successive days, I never dared to get any closer than the edge of the corner where I waited. Returning to the workshop, without any news, floating without any strength over the pavements, I always thought I was again returning to the workshop, without news again, floating again without any strength over the pavements.