because I don’t want to look at the runners around me. I know that in their homes there are people who speak other languages and who are waiting for them in the same way that in my home they wait for me. They have names and they have childhoods. Without turning to face them directly, I see their dull figures on the fringes of my gaze. In this mixture of smudges of colour, I can tell they aren’t looking at anyone either. Just as we’re running here in the Stockholm streets, we’re running within ourselves, too. At the finishing line, the distance and the weight of this inner marathon will be as important as the kilometres of these streets and the heat of this sun. As I raise a foot to take a step, the other foot grips the ground. If the world were to stop at the moment when I have one foot raised, moving forwards, and the other foot set on the ground, roots could grow out of this fixed foot that holds me. These roots could penetrate the gaps of earth between the stones of the street. But I don’t let the world stop. After a step, another, another
second time. When she arrived, she gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and said nothing to me. She gave me her hand. We walked in silence the whole way from the hospital to her house. It was a night in mid-December. There was cold, and there was the cold wind that cut through us and awoke the sparkle in the puddles of water. The night was black. My hand wrapped itself around the fingers of her hand, and at certain moments squeezed them. I didn’t find her silence strange, as I carried many words with me. I had words, whole sentences, sliding through me. I turned my face to kiss her and she moved away. I smiled because I thought she was just playing. I turned my face again to kiss her and again she moved away. She kept her eyes down. I held her hands and waited. The night existed. There were no people on the streets. There were no motorcars or carts. There were frozen stars in the sky. She began to lift her face, slowly — her wavy hair, her forehead, her eyes fixing on me from the depth of the night, and her whole face. Her lips — it was then that her lips said, ‘We’re going to have a child.’ And her hands, parting from mine. And she opened the door and went into the house. And she closed the door. Suddenly it was no longer the same night. The world was clearer, and at the same time more imprecise. I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned — the blind, dirty face of my brother.
~ ~ ~
We got married on our own.
Two Saturdays earlier, we walked downtown together. We didn’t hold hands, but our smiles were only for each other. We went into a warehouse of displays with models dressed in the latest fashion. She didn’t take long to point to a roll of fabric — end of season, a leftover bit. While we exchanged smiles, while we believed more, the metres were measured out on the counter.
That was the material, not too sober, not too extravagant, that the seamstress marked with chalk, cut, sewed, and through this skill made a dress that was just as my wife had imagined it. This was the dress she premiered on the Monday morning when we got married.
Everything was taken care of, we had the papers, but we went into the civil registry without realising we were doing it. I was the one who went up to the counter, and when a man walked past carrying a pile of papers to his chest I said good morning to him. He didn’t reply. He remained indifferent, angry at the world and at all the archives. We followed him with our gaze for a few minutes that passed on the hands of the clock hanging from the wall. At some moment of his own choosing, the gentleman from the registry walked towards me, combed his moustache, stopped on the other side of the counter and — bored — as though asking a question, said
‘Now then, if you please. .’
I held out the papers to him, and explained that we’d come to get married.
He took the papers, put on his glasses and took his time reading the form that the other gentleman at that same counter had given me more than a month earlier. Without saying anything, he raised his face slightly and looked at us over the top of his glasses. He opened and closed, opened and closed the other documents. Without saying anything, he raised the board that allowed us through to the other side of the counter. We followed him between empty desks, piles of papers, cupboards full of files, until we reached a white room. He sat at a table, coughed twice, and opened a book that covered the whole surface of the table. We sat in two thick wooden chairs.
Never turning to look at us, the gentleman from the registry read a few lines quickly, not pronouncing the words completely — mixing up words — a buzzing of words. In the brief gaps where he paused, I said yes when I’d heard my name, and soon afterwards she said yes. The man from the registry breathed in deeply and blew out during the time it took me to get the wedding ring out of my pocket and put it on her finger. We were looking at one another, and smiling, as he finished up his lines. He turned the book towards us:
‘Sign here.’
I signed and she signed. It wasn’t until that moment that the gentleman from the registry noticed we didn’t have witnesses.
‘You don’t have witnesses?’
Without waiting for an answer, he got up and crossed the room in short, quick steps. He returned with a thick book with the letter B on the spine. He opened it at a page and chose two witnesses for me, a man and a woman. He opened it at another page and chose two witnesses for her, a man and a woman. He copied the names on to the page of the other book: Bartolomeu, Belarmina, Baltazar, Belmira. With different scripts, he signed under each one.
We left, light-spirited.
That day I didn’t go to work. The next morning, when my uncle arrived at the workshop, he said nothing to me.
The beginning of night-fall. July. The sounds of the town where Marta went to live. Carts passing on the beaten earth road. Men and women, greeting one another. The old olive trees bending under the fresh air. The iron gate to Marta’s yard. Clothes hanging out on a line. Pigeons making their final circuits in the sky. My wife going into Marta’s house through the kitchen door. The beginning of night-fall. Dogs barking in the yard.
‘Look, it’s Gran,’ says Hermes in the sewing room. And he freezes — his mouth stays open for a moment while he waits for confirmation from his sister. His eyes remain alight. Without saying a word, but as though breaking the silences, his sister looks at him — she smiles — as if to say yes.
Hermes starts running through all the open doors to get to the kitchen. Elisa, who is older, and knows more, walks behind him. Elisa has time. It takes her just a moment — time for almost nothing — but when she reaches the kitchen Hermes is already in his gran’s arms.