My wife appears with her hair in disarray, in her nightdress. She’s surprised to see Maria, but can’t say anything because Ana and Íris surround her, pulling her and giving her little kisses. When they stop, Maria is sitting in a chair, unable to cry, and Marta is beside her, standing, a hand resting on her shoulder. My wife approaches. Maria, her hands on her legs, her sad gaze on her hands, speaks weakly:
‘This time it’s over. This time I’m not going back.’
My wife and Marta have already heard these words many times. Through the window the morning is picking up strength. Marta tries to console her sister, caressing her shoulder. And my wife asks her questions. Maria replies with the same weak voice. In a corner, Ana and Íris, alone, have conversations all to themselves in a place where there is no one else. My wife — concern on her face — listens to Maria and keeps asking her questions: –
‘And what about the neighbours?’
And Maria keeps replying:
‘What do I want with the neighbours?. . This time it’s over. Really. This time I’m not going back.’
The china tureen that ornamented the middle of the kitchen table had been bought by Maria and her mother at the Luz market. It was afternoon, it was Sunday, and it was September. It had been years since my wife had gone to buy items for Maria’s trousseau. Every birthday, every Christmas, Maria had received gifts for her trousseau — sets of bedsheets, sets of towels. Sometimes, on late Saturday mornings, my wife would get back from the market, and from among the thin bags of lettuce, of carrots, among bags that had fish scales stuck together, she would take out saucepans, boiling-pans and aluminium jugs.
These purchases were made with the money my wife saved. She bought glasses and cutlery, salt and pepper pots, cruets for oil and vinegar, gravy boats, napkin rings.
That afternoon, Marta was already married and still living in the house close to the workshop. My wife and Maria were walking through the Luz market. It was clear as a September afternoon. They smiled, they analysed objects they wouldn’t think of buying, and they asked:
‘How much?’
They crossed the street with the shoes and clothes to look at the fashions. Maria had a shoulder bag. My wife had a napa bag on her arm. They stopped beside a merry-go-round to buy a fartura, and while they ate, with oil and sugar around their mouths, they watched the children throwing tantrums and listened to the shrill music being distorted by the loudspeakers.
They passed stalls selling chairs and wicker baskets. My wife held up a wooden spoon and asked:
‘How much?’
And they reached a stall that sold all kinds of chinaware. There were china dogs, painted as Dalmatians, sitting, with gentle eyes. It made them want to stroke the chilly ceramic heads. There was a china fountain with multicoloured lights that worked with a mechanism that meant it never stopped pouring out water. There were decorative plates for hanging on the wall, and there were plates for everyday. There were dishes. There were tureens.
Maria’s gaze was immediately attracted by that tureen. She lifted the lid to look at the inside and to hold the china ladle whose handle was sculpted with flowers. The grip of the lid was three roses with ceramic petals. The handles of the tureen were also made from roses. At various points on the tureen, and on the dish on which it sat, there were small roses and rosebuds sculpted and painted in tiny detail.
Maria looked at my mother as though she didn’t dare to ask. My mother looked at her, turned towards the stallholder and asked:
‘How much?’
And she asked if he couldn’t knock the price down, he said he couldn’t, she asked the same question again, he knocked the price down and my wife took her purse out of the bag.
The man wrapped each piece of the tureen in sheets of newspaper, saying:
‘You’ve done very well out of this.’
The lampposts were already lit, but it wasn’t yet night. Late afternoon was a sky that darkened to its own particular shade of blue. The stallholder was enjoying himself, wrapping the tureen dish in a piece of newspaper and fitting it into a plastic bag. He was enjoying himself repeating lines he’d already said a thousand times. My daughter smiled, and my wife gave clever answers, casually.
This was the tureen that Maria’s husband picked up with both hands. He held it by the dish, held it up to the height of his chest, and with all his strength threw it to the ground in a moment of absolute silence. The pieces of the tureen were spread, useless, across the kitchen floor; also spread across the floor were the buttons, pins, pencil ends, pieces of toys and all the purposeless objects that were kept inside.
I went into the piano cemetery. I walked through the dust until I came to my uncle, at the back, his chest leaning over an upright piano, looking at something that was happening over the other side. I approached. Looking at me with his enthusiastic left eye, he pointed me towards where he’d been looking. Inside a piano with no lid, no legs, sitting on the floor, a bitch was lying, with a resigned and tender expression, with four newly born puppies.
‘They were born last night,’ my uncle whispered.
Under the mechanism of the piano — the strings stretched out — there was a torn old tangled jacket covered in dog hairs. On this jacket was the body of the bitch, surrounded by her children. They were small like mice, they had their eyes closed, stuck closed, short ears, and they moved slowly without knowing where they were going. They made a constant noise, made up of many thin squeals. They opened their mouths and stuck out their tiny tongues. They opened their mouths and from time to time hung on their mother’s thick teats. When they moved away — waddling or dragging themselves on their little paws — the bitch grabbed them with her mouth and brought them back, putting them down close to her.
With a smile, my uncle stared at the bitch and her pups. When something happened, when the bitch chose one and began to lick it, my uncle smiled wider. As we walked together to the carpentry shop, we had no words to say. We had thoughts.
Leaning over my workbench, I went back to work and only later remembered. I interrupted a story my uncle was telling and that not even he was listening to. I opened the shoebox and called him over. I didn’t have to ask him any questions. Amazed, suddenly sad, he held some of the medals.
That was the morning I learned that my father died far away from my mother, exhausted, on the same day that I was born.
After hearing my uncle at last, my father and I were even more strangers. My father revived in words that had the light coming through them, and the smell of wood, and everything I didn’t know about myself.
After spending all the days making doors and windows, benches and tables, dreaming about pianos, my father would close up the big workshop doors and run through the streets of Lisbon, running and tearing the streets of Lisbon. Then he’d arrive early at the races that were held on Sunday mornings. He took trains at Santa Apolónia, and travelled alone second-class to the suburbs where, at a tranquil pace, he ran to different parts of the city. When there were marathons, my father would arrive and the other runners would look at him from a distance. There might have been fear in these looks, or disdain, but fear is what there was and that was why they feigned disdain. My father ignored them, just lived within his own light. When he ran past them people would call him by his name. Before he arrived people would comment: