Hermes had just been born.
The words were:
‘He’s been born, Marta’s boy.’
Hermes had just been born.
In the hospital Marta was resting. And nobody knew how to be happy, but happiness was so strong, and it grew inside them. It was as though they had a spring of water in their breasts and happiness was that water. There was a miracle that turned tears into tears. They had their hands resting on their breasts. They had their eyelids closing very slowly over their eyes to feel the gentle rain of this happiness that covered them, flooded them.
An hour passed. The telephone rang again.
I had just died.
~ ~ ~
The morning light doesn’t feel the clean windowpanes as it passes through them, coming to rest on the notes of the piano that emerge from the wireless and float in the kitchen air. The morning light, resting on the notes of the piano, pauses, speckled, in the reflections of the white wall tiles, on the corners of the formica-topped tables, on the drops of water that hang from the rims of the pans, washed and upturned over the draining board.
My wife goes past. She doesn’t notice the invisible, luminous agitation of the piano notes that her passing leaves behind. Lightly, she goes by with her sleeves rolled up to her elbows. Without noticing, she bears the morning’s lightness in her face. She goes into the corridor. Her skin shines under the shadows. Her muffled steps along the hall runner cannot be made out in the silence. She approaches the open living-room door and smiles, sees Íris’s little body, sitting on the rug, surrounded by toys and broken pieces of plastic toys — dolls’ legs.
My wife stays a moment like this. Íris is nearly three, and she doesn’t feel the gaze covering and protecting her. During this moment my wife is ageless. She has no sense of the size of Maria’s house, measured out by the creaking sounds of pieces of furniture in the distance: the wardrobe full of outmoded clothes in Maria and her husband’s room, at the far end of the corridor; the iron couch that my wife sets up every night before going to sleep and then disassembles when she wakes up, in the dining room halfway down the corridor; the refrigerator straining under the notes emerging from the wireless at the other end of the corridor.
Íris was born when there was nothing left of me but memories and photographs. Íris still doesn’t understand all the conversations, and pays no attention to photographs of people she doesn’t know. Her eyes are blue like a holiday-postcard sea; her hair is long and ends in ringlets that curl over her shoulders and her back. She is a lovely wild child. Some days she picks up speed; running on her little legs, she throws herself with abandon on to the sofa and laughs. Now she is peaceful, playing with her dolls. And like every morning, she woke up when her mother went to get her sister up for school. At the kitchen table, Ana, half-asleep, didn’t reply to the questions Íris insisted on asking. Maria walked to and fro looking for little things — handkerchiefs, keys — and putting them in her bag. My wife was hurrying Ana, who wasn’t finishing her food. In July there’s no school any more, but Maria still takes her because there is a teacher who for a small amount of money continues to look after the children, to teach them sums and give them homework. Like every morning, my wife picked Íris up in her arms and went with her to the window to watch Ana, in her striped smock, heading away, down the road, running to keep up with her mother, then falling behind, and running again, and falling behind, running and disappearing with her mother at the bend in the pavement.
Now Íris is peaceful, playing with her dolls:
‘You don’t want your din-dins? Why don’t you want your din-dins?’ she asks the doll, bringing a little spoon to the rubber mouth. Then she combs her hair. Then she lays her down to sleep. She watches her sleep for a moment, then wakes her up. She changes her clothes and tries to feed her again.
My wife returns to the kitchen. In the cups hanging on hooks inside the cupboard, in the fruit bowl, in the washed cutlery, in the broom handle, in the cloths hanging by the side of the sink, in the box of matches spotted with fat, in the kettle resting on the unlit stove, her eyes recognise the peace of the morning. She opens the window and, after choosing a few pegs and an item of clothing from a full tub, she leans over the ledge to hang it out. And she repeats these movements. And each time she bends down to take hold of a pair of Maria’s husband’s trousers, or one of Maria’s blouses, or one of her granddaughters’ vests, she is submerged by a piece of piano music which fills the kitchen with the strength of a breeze. And each time she leans over the ledge and pulls on the line to fix a peg, she thinks about how Lisbon and the world are vast. Her torso, thrust through the third-floor window of a building in Benfica, has some sense of what it might feel like to fly. It is at that moment that she thinks of our son Francisco, who left early yesterday morning for the marathon, for the Olympic Games, as if he was heading off into a dream. This thought was always there under the others, like the glow of an ember that occasionally wakes into a flame. And, first, the pride — our son, our boy — the weight of all those tender memories — and that name printed in the newspapers, important. That name. We gave him my name, so that it should become his. That name which used to be mine now belongs to him entirely. That name and all those who utter it: Francisco Lázaro. And later, later, the pride.
As though she could speak silently to Francisco, she lowers her gaze to the streets, to the pavement with its missing stones — irregular earth figures in the shapes of the stones that are missing — then she raises her eyes. On the other side of the road, two buildings separated by plots where pieces of bricks, necks of broken bottles and rusty pram-wheels grow. A little further off, gardens of spring greens, surrounded by barriers made of rusty tins. Further still, the road where motorcars pass, in both directions, day and night. And after this road, the whole of Lisbon. And after Lisbon, the world and our son, our boy. And above all, in everything, the morning.
She lowers herself to the kitchen floor to pick up a blouse of Ana’s — round, embroidered collars — and two pegs. The piano music continues, continuous, to come out of the wireless. She begins to lean over the ledge and, suddenly, a din is heard from the living room, a collapse, the explosion of some weight smashing to the ground — glass, wood, iron. Within that same moment, Íris’s sudden cries. My wife drops Ana’s blouse, not staying to watch it drift down on to the pavement because she is running towards the living room. My wife knows well the differences between Íris’s different cries — when she’s making a fuss, when she’s just startled or when she really is upset — this is why she runs as fast as she can. Beneath Íris’s piercing cries, the quick heartbeats of my wife coming to her. Her body goes down the corridor with the same movements as when she goes walking, but much faster, because that is the way she runs.
It was our house. My wife would sit on the yard steps, she’d spend pleasant early August evenings, and she’d stay there concentrating on her knitting. She would make woollen booties or little jackets for our son. There was a month to go before he was born and already she was imagining the size of his arms and the size of his little feet. Sometimes she would stretch the half-knitted pieces out in the palms of her hands, and at those moments it was as though she could see the arms or feet of our as yet unborn child.
I would hold the end of the hose, the water thick and fresh, hitting the feet of the trees and the plants. There was that fresh smell of earth drinking in water. There was a breeze that serenaded the skin on our faces.