The piano cemetery was enormous. The afternoons were as vast as linked generations. I would choose a piano, open it and stay there, looking at its suspended mechanism. Every time I could not help thinking that my life, diminished by those afternoons, was exactly like the suspended mechanism of a piano — the fragile silence of the aligned strings, the perfect geometry of its almost death, able to be resuscitated at any moment that never came, a simple moment like so many others would be enough, a moment which could arrive, but which never arrived.
And it was in a moment that my uncle came into the piano cemetery. I raised my eyes towards him. He approached me. He stopped and stood a pace away from me. In that concrete distance which separated us, in silence, it was as though I was passing on to him a part of all the hurt that I was capable of imagining. Then I lowered my face, as though I really was able to cry. I’d already stopped trying to hide what I could not hide. My uncle looked at me, with his left eye saddened, with the blind space of his right eye, ever sad, and in the concrete distance which separated us, in silence, it was as though he almost nearly hugged me and was able to speak to me with words of courage. We returned together to the carpentry shop, and as soon as we resumed our work my uncle resumed the telling of the stories I didn’t hear.
As night fell, the taberna. Then home, alone.
It was the morning when more than two weeks had passed since the moment when I’d handed her the piece of paper, the letter in which I had written the word you and that word was her, the letter in which I had written the word me and that word was me. I reached the big workshop door and my uncle wasn’t waiting for me. I didn’t pay too much notice to this absence as I believed I’d known it even before it had happened. And I spent the morning in the solitary hours of my thoughts, between the hours in the carpentry shop and the hours in the piano cemetery. It was June, and for me, there were no birds singing, there was no freedom of the people on the streets. At lunchtime I walked slowly along the pavements that each day took me to the boarding house. I stopped on the corner where I stopped every day. I waited. I waited. And when I thought that this was a moment just like any other, her body appeared at the door. She looked towards me and went back inside.
Returning to the workshop, my feet walked along the pavements, my movements avoided people who stopped in front of me or came towards me, but inside me there was a shadow that avoided even more obstacles, that walked even faster. I didn’t understand whether she had come out to see me, or whether she had gone back inside because she had seen me. From a distance there were no answers to be found in her face. And my feet walked along the pavement. And by avoiding fear, I was avoiding hope.
I crossed the entrance hall of the workshop. The high walls were the limits of the world. My steps on the earth, against the silence, were the only sign of life. I went into the shop. I crossed it. I opened the window and, arms open, holding the shutters, it was as though I was trying to grasp the whole afternoon and pull it into my chest. In the immense time that began in that early afternoon, not much time passed. I heard steps in the entrance hall and I didn’t turn to see who it was, because I believed I knew in advance what was going to happen, nothing could surprise me; I believed it was my uncle. Sensing that, strangely, the steps had stopped at the door to the shop; sensing someone’s breathing beginning to calm, sensing the silence, I turned. It was a boy, in shorts, arms folded across his waist, dirty cheeks, looking at me fearfully. Without my saying a word to him, he reached out his arm, holding a folded piece of paper. I took it from his hand, gave him a coin, and in the time it took me to lift my gaze I saw him running out. I opened the piece of paper before I was able to breathe. It just said — I like you a lot, too.
Light, light — the sun can cover every object with its brightness after all. The sun slipped across the surface of pine shavings on the patio floor, came into the carpentry shop, wrapped up my skin and came inside, too. Within me, I was infinite. June was born within me again. The sun expelled all the shadows and brought only brightness. Smiling, a child in this world, I ran round the workshop, looking for my uncle. I wanted to tell him of my happiness and I wanted to see him smile with me. I went into the piano cemetery, I looked out on the patio, I almost called out his name, but I couldn’t find him anywhere.
I stopped looking for my uncle when I anchored myself to the carpenter’s bench. Resting my gaze on a point where I could see her — she was clear, she was beautiful — I kept smiling and, like a child, so I remained. It was only after the night had passed without seeing my uncle at the taberna, after he didn’t show up for work the next day, after asking the men at the taberna if they knew anything of him and them saying no, after I had been to the house where he rented a room and asked if they knew anything of him and them saying no, it was only after spending another night without seeing him at the taberna, it was only after he didn’t show up for work again, that I understood that my uncle had disappeared.
My wife says she wants to telephone Marta. Maria doesn’t reply. Maria is still cross. If my wife just stopped to think, just to look for an answer, she would end up concluding that Maria is cross over some problem at the factory.
Maria spends her day at the factory sewing items of women’s underwear — bras, knickers. Around her are six or seven women who do the same job. They have already become used to talking above the noise of the sewing machines. The factory is a warehouse filled with women sitting at sewing machines. The factory is always lit by the same light — white lamps sticking out from the ceiling when it’s daytime, when it’s night-time, when’s it’s raining, when it’s the height of summer. Normally my wife knows the stories, the conflicts and friendships of the six or seven women who surround our daughter at the factory. Normally, at lunchtime, sitting on a kitchen chair, my wife hears Maria talk to her about these women — their ambitions, their sacrifices, their scares, their fears, their secrets.
My wife doesn’t stop to look for an answer, and so she, too, becomes angry. Being angry is being haughty, speaking with superiority. It is a statement that expects no reply, when she says:
‘I’m going to phone Marta.’
Maria, angry, doesn’t reply. My wife lifts the receiver.
On the day Marta’s husband came back from his mother’s funeral, he chose a hurt expression and announced that he no longer wanted to live at the house by the workshop. On that same day, respecting a son’s mourning, Marta started to pack things away in cardboard boxes and packing cases she asked for at the grocer’s.
Hermes hadn’t yet been born and Elisa wandered round the house, contented, dodging table lamps spread around the floor.
Marta’s husband borrowed a truck. For several days he did one trip after another between the two houses, between Benfica and the plantation land where he was born. Each time he arrived, Marta had everything organised in piles and told him what to take.
On the final trip — the house completely empty, the walls, the house suddenly bigger — the final thing to be taken was the living-room armchair. Marta’s husband asked two friends to help, who also used all their strength to get Marta up and on to the back of the truck — her husband pushed her rump, one man held her under the arms and another by the waist.
When Marta managed to install herself on the truck, when the men had recovered their breath and her husband had thanked them, Marta stood herself up, took a few embarrassed steps and sat down in the armchair. As the truck made its way along the streets, each time it stopped at the traffic lights people would stop on the pavements and look at her, pointing in her direction because they had never seen anyone like her before — squeezing her legs together, setting her elbows on the arms of the armchair, her head held up on her neck, Marta’s body spilled over in waves of flesh and skin that covered the armchair; the existence of the armchair could be inferred simply because Marta’s body was in the position of sitting on something.