This is why my wife, even if she doesn’t remember, knows, recognises this time of day, without having to look at the clock on the kitchen wall, without having to pay any attention to the sharp whistles that interrupt the piano notes on the wireless. It’s why weeks, months, seasons exist. It’s why my wife knows this time of day by seeing it and feeling it and breathing it every day — an infinite succession of Mondays.
Perhaps. My wife doesn’t know if Maria will be the first to arrive, holding Ana’s hand, the voices of our grandchildren meeting and shouting, with her work problems and talk, with the life and moods of the six, seven women who work around her, chained to their sewing machines; or whether Maria’s husband will arrive, dispirited, the silence of the house almost unchanged, Íris walking barefoot along the hall runner and meeting him without surprise.
My wife knows. Leaning on the kitchen sink, she dries her arms with a cloth and thinks. Yesterday they arrived from the workshop. Yesterday: Maria, defeated, coming up the stairs — her feet heavy on the steps — her body hoisted up by her arm on the banister. Yesterday: our granddaughters, vaguely understanding everything. Yesterday: my wife there, but far away. Her body there, her presence if requested, but the words that populated her, the images she shared with no one, very far away.
And when they opened the door, Maria’s husband was a ghost amid the shadows of the house. He didn’t greet anyone, didn’t speak, didn’t say sorry to Maria. My wife put down the suitcase she had brought and went into the kitchen. Ana and Íris went to play in the living room. Maria walked the corridors and the rooms as though it were a necessary thing to do, as though she were doing something other than trying to give her husband a chance to talk to her.
At the dinner table he seemed sad. He didn’t look at anyone. His face was a memory of other days. Then between one moment and the next Maria said something to him. She spoke naturally, as though nothing had happened, as though she no longer remembered, as though she’d forgiven him, as though it didn’t matter. Her husband replied with a syllable. She spoke again — a question about his answer. He replied with two syllables, a pause and then another syllable. She spoke again — another question. He replied calmly. And so the evening went on. The children laughed when they found some detail funny. Maria was the same daughter and wife and mother as on other nights. As though nothing had happened. They were already all asleep when my wife, alone, set up the iron couch in the dining room, stretched out the sheets, put the pillowcase on to the pillow, lay down on to a groaning of springs and, after some time that she doesn’t remember, fell asleep.
Íris is in the living room. Leaning on the sink, my wife wipes her hands on a cloth and she knows this time of day through her own skin. The surface of the windowpanes. The surface of the tabletop. My wife hears the sound of the key going into the lock. Piano notes come out of the wireless. Who is there, far away, playing them?
‘Grandad is loveliest of the world,’ said Elisa, sitting on a piece of wood on the carpentry shop floor. It must have been summer, because the sun had been very hot and the cooler time of day was slowly beginning. I stopped what I was doing to look at her with a smile. Elisa was three, four years old. My Marta still lived in the house near the workshop and she was out on the patio doing something with a straw hat on her head. It was Saturday.
‘Grandad is loveliest of the world,’ said Elisa, when I was not yet sick and I didn’t know that my time was seeping away. Elisa was three, four years old and she’d wanted to come and be with me. I was making a door frame or a window frame or something when I saw her come in, so very little, her body still unsteady from climbing the stairs. For a moment her body was sketched by the sunlight. She sat down on a piece of wood on the carpentry shop floor.
‘Grandad is loveliest of the world.’ I took her in my arms and went to the patio door. Marta was still living in the house near the workshop. She had a straw hat on her head and she was sitting with Francisco on the bottom step. They were eating oranges and talking. In front of them, wagging its tail, was a dog. I went down the stairs, and as I approached them Elisa was playing with my ear. I put her down on the ground and she began to run around on the pine shavings. I stayed a bit to make the most of the cool. I peeled an orange. We talked about something that was more or less important at that moment. But that was a long time ago. The sky was loveliest of the world.
I’d just arrived back from the workshop. The gentle voices of my children were gliding. As I dried myself with the towel that was hanging in the washroom, Francisco ran around my legs. It was the last moment of lightness. Someone knocked unhurriedly at the door. From that moment the light began to transform into the shadow that was the colour of the sky and the streets, the shadow which would turn black and come in through the night. I had already arrived back from the workshop. I opened the door.
The wrinkled, distressed face of a woman looking at me from down there, who hadn’t yet come up to the front step. She looked away. She looked at me again. She asked if this was where my wife lived. She said my wife’s name. She said the name, solid but light, white, a single white shape; the unpronounceable name which exists, but which is impossible, because it is a name whose meaning is from a time before there were words, the first name, like a spot in the universe that’s still empty, waiting to be filled up with life, illusions, possibilities.
Francisco, small, shy, leaned silently on the half-open door, watching the woman with his huge child’s eyes. My wife walked alone to the door and for a frozen moment she was frightened, her lips had no words, the palms of her hands on her skirt. She told the woman to come in. Marta, Maria and Simão fell silent when she entered. Francisco ran into my arms.
The two of them sat at the table. Dimly lit. The woman chose the words and the moment to say them. She chose the voice to say them with — serious, firm. They weren’t merely words. My wife’s godmother, who’d had a boarding house, glasses, who opened the door to me that first time I saw my wife, who closed the doors and the windows when my wife told her she was going to have a child, who’d brought her up since she was small, had died.
That night, there was nothing for us to do but sit at the kitchen table, after putting our children to bed, me listening, my wife telling all the stories she remembered about her godmother, about how she was sometimes tender, how she always laughed at the same jokes, how she invented enemies from among the women who lived next door, how she treated the plants in their pots, how austere she was and innocent. I know what my wife was thinking that night before she went to sleep.
In the morning, dressed in black, she went into the morgue accompanied by the gentleman from the undertaker’s. At the end of the morning she opened the door to the chapel while the priest and the gentleman from the undertaker’s talked next to the coffin. She sat in a chair, her hands between her knees, and spent the whole afternoon looking at the same spot, and she was there the whole evening, the whole night. At the same time, at home, I was trying to tell Francisco not to make so much noise and filling Maria’s plate, and Simão’s, and using a gruff voice to tell them to eat it all up, and playing with them, and stopping playing with them, and saying to them: