‘There were nights when it wouldn’t even let me sleep.’
About how it became absolutely quiet in the last month.
‘I ended up being worried.’
I, however, thought only of my uncle’s words. I thought of my older aunt and of everything her eyes had seen. I thought of my younger aunt, dead, and of all her eyes had forgotten. I thought of my father and all I didn’t know about him. I thought of my father, my uncle, my aunts, alive and together in the same room, without knowing that one day the future would arrive.
At Easter we always had a picnic in Monsanto. At home my wife would fry cubes of pork and fill a tub with rice. She took fried potatoes. She took tomatoes and lettuce leaves to make a salad. I arranged everything on the truck, putting in a bottle of fizzy water, another of orangeade, a flagon of wine, and placed the blankets over the top.
With some patience we were all able to fit in. Marta was still thin and she went on Maria’s lap. Then came my wife, squeezed between Simão and Francisco. Then me — driving with my elbows drawn in. A few years later Simão had already started going on the bicycle he’d bought with what he’d earned as a stonemason’s assistant. He’d head off before us and we’d pass him on the road. My wife, seeing him from behind, would get anxious because she thought that Simão, being blind on one side, might more easily fall and break his neck. As we passed him our daughters, one on the other’s lap, would lean out of the window, waving their arms and shouting.
The rope we used to attach door frames, or anything we were carrying, was always in the truck. When we arrived I’d tie it to the strongest limb of a tree, always the same one, and make a swing. My wife spread the blankets on the ground. We ate pork on enamel plates painted with flowers, and we were together. There was a moment when, all at the same time, we attached some value to being together.
When we finished eating, our children would head off in various directions. Simão was always the first one up. Marta was always in charge of looking after Francisco. Maria almost always hid herself away to read romance novels. I lay on a blanket under a pine tree. I closed my eyes. Once she’d cleared away the plates, my wife would come and sit by me, craning her neck to try and see our children.
On one such afternoon, I’d already fallen asleep and woke up to a shrill whining. Maria came pushing Simão’s bicycle, and she was crying. The birds fell silent in the trees. Marta stopped pushing Francisco on the swing. My wife got up:
‘So what is it?’ asked my wife.
Maria didn’t stop crying. From closer up, we could see that her face and arm were grazed. She approached us slowly, fearful. I was sitting on the blanket and asked her, my voice firm:
‘How did you fall?’
Under my voice, she trembled.
‘Simão didn’t tell me the bicycle doesn’t have brakes. .’
I got up suddenly. I tore off a pine branch that was above me and went to look for him.
Not much light on our faces. It was earlier than my usual time to go and sit in the kitchen, but I was sitting there already, drinking coffee. My wife, between the things she was doing, held her belly with both hands, looked at me and understood. Later, out on the street, it was still the gloom of early morning. It was colder than my usual time to go out to the workshop, but I took long steps, I thought, and I noticed nothing. There were indistinct, distant people on the pavements, continuing along their way. As I reached the station, as I bought my ticket, as I waited for the train, as I went in, as I sat to watch the landscape passing in the window, I kept imagining all the things I didn’t know.
The moment arrived — solid and real — when I was standing there, in front of my aunt’s house — the address written by my uncle on a piece of paper, and written on another piece of paper kept amid old envelopes in the drawer where my mother’s documents aged, the written remains of her life. I opened the iron gate, went in, stopped at the door — a solid, real moment — and knocked three times. I waited. Birds perched on the electricity wires. I waited. I knocked three times again. The door was opened to me by a hunched-up woman with startled eyes. We remained in silence. I learned later that she was my cousin.
I told her my name, told her who I was. She moved away to let me in. We took some steps along a darkening corridor. A mirror hung on the wall, over a table. For a long time it had reflected nothing but shadows. As we approached the end of the corridor, there was a revolting smell, getting worse. It was a smell that was inside the walls, inside the floor, the roof — it was in every object because it was a smell that filled the air, turning solid. As we went into the room my cousin didn’t break the silence, but stopped to look at me. My aunt was sitting on the bed. Her body was enormous. She was leaning up against pillows. She had her sheets tangled at the foot of the bed. She smiled at me with four or five rotten, worn teeth and a paste of food that covered them. Fine networks of veins branched across her round, swollen, fleshy cheeks. Her eyes shone. Her belly was a heavy bulk, tall, overflowing its sides. Her breasts were the same bulk. Her legs, full, stretched out, weren’t the shape of legs and ended in two gigantic thighs that squeezed against one another. Her arms were two arches of flesh, thick at the shoulders, thick at the wrists, ending in a thick hand, ending in narrow fingertips.
When I made to introduce myself, my aunt’s voice, uneven, weak and strong, interrupted me:
‘I know very well who you are.’
And she reached her arms out to me. I made my way across the carpet. I leaned over, and against my instincts turned my cheeks towards her. As I was giving her two kisses her arms held me. She pressed her rough, warm cheek, her hard, dishevelled hair, against my face. The smell that filled the room, born from the creases of her skin, was a mixture of hot food — soup — and sweat. It was a body lying for years on the same sheets — a brown stain around that body. It was an enormous night shirt — metres and metres of fine fabric — covered with stains under her chin — oil, grease, sauce. When my aunt’s arms let go of me, I took two steps back and kept my expression unchanged.
Her eyes shone. I answered her questions. I told her there weren’t many weeks left until the birth of my first child. An even bigger smile spread across her face; she congratulated me and told me that it would be a girl. She told me she was quite sure it would be a girl. I talked to her, then, about the workshop and about Benfica. Her gaze was frozen on the space in front of her as though in this invisible air she could see images of what I was telling her. After a moment, she was the one who was talking to me about the workshop and about Benfica. She was a child, and she’d take her father his lunch; she’d go into the carpentry shop and sit with him in the piano cemetery. And then later she was a girl who set her elbows on the window ledge and, as people returned home from work, waited for her boyfriend. Then she was living close to the workshop, she was married and her oldest daughter was born — the woman who was there with us, who kept her eyes on the floor, perhaps because she had already heard these stories many times. Her name was Elisa.
I took advantage of a moment of silence to talk about my father. My aunt’s expression didn’t change. Time. I told her that I’d only learned a few days earlier that my father was a marathon runner. She showed no surprise, continued to listen to me, and when I finished she turned to my cousin and said to her, naturally:
‘Elisa, go and fetch me the drawer from the living-room cupboard.’
We waited together for my cousin’s footsteps, the sounds of the drawer opening in another room, time. And my aunt’s gaze fixed on me. My gaze not knowing where to stop — the pile of dirty plates on the bedside table, the bedpan on a stool, the flies changing direction in sudden angles over the bed. My cousin came into the room, holding the drawer between her wrists and her chest. She passed in front of me. It was a drawer filled with papers. She put the drawer down on top of my aunt’s belly. My aunt lifted out pieces of paper and postcards with writing on them, and took out a stack of folded papers tied with a piece of string. For a long time she pulled at the ends of the bow. She held out a yellowed newspaper cutting to me. I approached the bed, held the cutting in both hands and began to read.