My father. Dead too early, and too far away. Dead and exhausted on the same day I was born. Time. As I returned the cutting to her, my aunt examined me. After a pause, she showed me other cuttings. Before the day I was born — they described races my father won. A deserving winner. Going through a spell of really good form. An example to those who were starting out in this event. As my aunt folded the cuttings at the creases, as she arranged them, she began to talk about my father. Her face wanted to break into a smile that never came, and that remained balanced in a limbo of almost existing and not existing. In her voice my father was a human being, and living again, he was a man, he was a young lad. He might perhaps have passed me in the street, I could have noticed him, could have looked at him and imagined his strengths and weaknesses. And then, silence. The light came through the damp-stained curtains. My aunt’s nails scratched the bottom of the drawer. She was holding up a photograph. She looked at it a moment, smiling at it as though smiling at a person, and held it out. I took the photograph in the palm of my hand — its weight. And I don’t know how old I was at the moment I saw my father’s face for the first time.
Time. I held the image of his face looking at me, and believed with sudden impressions which stuck into my skin like needles that he could see me. My dead father was younger than I was, and he was looking at me. Sudden impressions, skin, needles; I didn’t know if it was me looking and seeing my father in a dead time or whether it was my father, alive, looking and, for the first time, seeing me.
My aunt insisted I keep the photograph. I refused and wanted to give it back to her. She kept insisting. It was as though the photograph were burning my fingers. I tried to give it back, following her hand. She evaded it with brisk gestures. Slowly I placed the photograph inside the drawer. On top of letters, pieces of paper, my father was still looking at me.
With the tips of her fingers my aunt chose one of the envelopes and took out another photograph. Seeing it, her face saddened. She remembered the story that was too sad to tell. She held the photograph out to me and said it was her late sister, my other aunt.
I handed the photograph back to her. She took it and placed it in the drawer without looking at it again. Her silence was real.
When I began saying my goodbyes, my aunt asked me to stay a little longer. I continued to say my goodbyes. Then, amid the words, she said: ‘This bed.’ And they were eternal words. My cousin Elisa said nothing, but she lifted her face. I left my aunt, the centre of that room, and went out, thinking I would never see her again. At the door I said goodbye to my cousin with a gaze deep into her frightened eyes, and I thought I would never see her again. I never saw them again.
I walked to the station. The whole of the walk, and later, too, through all the streets that took me home, I remembered my father — the shape of his face, what he was thinking — and I remembered my aunt — lying there, waiting for nothing — and I remembered my cousin taking care of her mother — afraid, alone, waiting for nothing.
I went into the house and found women from the neighbourhood walking back and forth. My wife was about to give birth. I moved chairs out of my way, shoved widows aside and went into the room. My wife stopped writhing on the bed. Her face drenched in sweat, as though reflecting a fire, she turned to me and smiled at me just exactly as I was smiling at her.
On Saturdays the nights take longer to fall. Marta’s husband comes into the house. It is early at night. He sits at his place at the table, rests his head in his hands and Marta’s movements get faster. My wife greets him, her voice faint. Maria doesn’t move.
With all the speed she’s capable of, her legs alternating very quickly and her body hovering slowly, Marta does the calculations of the number of plates and begins to lay the table. Maria, seated, is her own shape in stone, and thinks that her husband will choose dinnertime to phone her, to ask her to come back, to tell her he misses her. My wife is leaning over the stove. I know her face. Marta’s husband is sitting at the table and he is too far away, all he has left here is his body and his silence. Wanting to call the children to dinner, Marta shouts into the hallway.
My wife moves away from the stove, holding a pan which she puts down in the middle of the table. Slowly Marta’s husband fills his plate and begins to eat. There is a calendar on the wall, there is a fruit bowl with wizened peaches, there is a lit lamp hanging from the ceiling. Marta begins to get impatient as no child has yet appeared. My wife fills Maria’s plate and asks her, wordlessly, to eat. Marta goes to call the children from the sewing room.
She opens the door and the four of them are sitting on the rug. Íris is talking to her sister:
‘Now you’ve grown up and you’re a lady.’
Marta, her cheeks red, starts to say something and only Elisa looks at her. She says to clear up the toys and go and have dinner. Turning to Hermes, she says:
‘Get a move on! Your father’s already eating.’
As though still muttering, Marta returns to the kitchen. My wife puts the bread on the table. There is the silence of small sounds, there is age, there is light. Marta notices that the children aren’t coming and asks my wife to go and fetch them.
My wife goes into the sewing room. She rounds up the grandchildren and starts pulling them up under their arms. Íris objects with her knotted eyebrows. My wife continues to hurry them. They go down the corridor. Elisa is in front. Behind her, Íris allows herself to be pushed along by my wife. They go into the kitchen. Marta’s husband has already eaten, and he has already gone out. Maria hasn’t yet brought her hands up to touch her cutlery.
It was almost the end of summer, and Marta was just a few months old. My wife was breastfeeding her. Marta closed her eyes, and she was innocent. I was on the other side of the kitchen, watching them. It was almost the end of summer, I was alive, I was so utterly alive, but my heart was apart from me, breastfeeding and innocent, on the other side of the kitchen.
Maria has said a couple of things. Having given up on waiting for her husband’s call, her arms stopped weighing her down and, at last, she was able to breathe. Inside her, she repeated the certainty she had that her husband will call tomorrow. Or it might be that her husband will choose the moment when she arrives at the workshop, that he wants to say sorry in person, wants to look her in the eye to show her he’s sincere. Maria has convinced herself of these certainties and, lighter now, freed from the need to wait, she has said a couple of things.
Marta approaches and answers her. My wife looks up. It’s time. The three of them walk to the sewing room. They don’t have time to think, but there is serenity in their faces. It’s not the same serenity in each one’s expression, but in all of them it’s genuine — the same truth in different illusions. When Elisa, Ana, Íris and Hermes see them, they already know bedtime has arrived. The end of Saturday is a warm feeling that the children know how to accept.
Elisa is the first to get up off the carpet. Without saying anything, any shouting, Ana, Íris and Hermes get up immediately after her. They follow my wife out. On the bedroom floor, between the beds, my wife will arrange folded blankets and sheets for Hermes to sleep. Ana and Íris will sleep together in his bed.