She stops, breathes, puts Íris down on the ground. She straightens herself up, breathes, keeps walking. At a given moment the stretched-out strings turn concrete, the knots at the end of the stakes turn concrete. My wife’s face is serene. She doesn’t think about stopping, but she feels Íris’s tugs and, looking at her, she remembers. Together they reach the toy stall.
Íris, holding her grandmother’s hand, falls back as she looks at the plastic case she’s holding in her other hand — hairpins, a mirror and a hairbrush for dolls. Which is why she pays no attention to the way they are going, and is only surprised when they reach the workshop, when my wife is already putting the key into the lock of the big workshop door.
The nieces of the woman from the boarding house come back from the cemetery alongside my wife. They had nothing to say, but they asked questions just so they could be saying something. My wife wasn’t afraid of silence, she needed it, and she didn’t answer them. Sometimes she’d change the expression on her face, as though these slight changes had some meaning, but she didn’t answer them. When they were saying their goodbyes, friendly, they told her that late that afternoon they would be going to the boarding house to deal with some matters relating to the sharing-out and they’d expect her there.
My wife kept on going, without any sleep. She spent the afternoon dealing with our children, with Marta’s help. When she managed to sit down, she stopped to enjoy the rays of light that passed through the windows and came to rest diagonally on the floor.
After the streets, she reached the pavement outside the boarding house, the wall with the ivy leaves that she’d climbed so many times to meet me. We were young on the nights of that summer. That evening my wife was still young, but she knew she had lost something for ever. In her thoughts, her godmother’s face, dead, lying in the chapel, mingled with all the years when that same face, alive, another face, would smile at her, would become angry with her, would explain everything to her. And she’d say:
‘Daughter.’
She’d end her requests with that word. Often, in the middle of a sigh, within some phrase, she would say just that word:
‘Daughter.’
My wife remembered a great deal — everything. Too many winters, Christmases, too much time when it was just the two of them, together and alone. One of the nieces of the woman from the boarding house opened the door and wrapped her in a voice that feigned familiarity. The walls were strong — they were eternal, one might say. My wife went into the house, that house she never thought she would enter again. In every corner she saw herself, little, enchanted by some mystery, or sad. In every corner, in the empty space of the open doors, in the corridor, she saw the face of her godmother — smiling, angry, explaining everything to her, just straightforward.
In the living room the other niece took some steps towards my wife to speak to her as though they had lost the same thing.
‘Leave it,’ she said.
The nieces’ husbands, rather bored, remained seated in their armchairs.
On the table there were tea services wrapped in newspaper, open boxes of cutlery, rows of goblets, piles of folded doilies, copper ashtrays, orphaned figures in porcelain.
Then, after a moment that the nieces deemed sufficient, they sat my wife down in an armchair and said to her:
‘We’ve called you here because we want you to accept something.’
And they looked at her, expecting gratitude. And the fake enthusiasm of their own expressions prevented them from noticing that my wife’s face remained immobile. Trying to preserve the surprise, they moved almost in silence, clumsily. With their bodies they were blocking the thing they wanted to give her. They looked back at her over their shoulders. One of them walked backwards towards her. When she turned, she held out to her the thing they wanted to give her. And looked at her, expectant.
It was a teaspoon that my wife, as a girl, had bought to give to her godmother. It was a delicate, simple spoon. At the end of the handle she had engraved a single small word: mother.
Simão never wanted to know. My wife always worried. He never wanted to know. He was still small when my wife and I said to him:
‘Your sisters are going to be someone, and you’ll be nobody. Your sisters are going to be ashamed of you. Two sisters who’re going to be someone with a brother who will be nobody.’
He turned his back on us. And went up to his room. My wife and I would be left there, saying nothing. At other times he would be harsh. He’d shout:
‘Leave me alone!’
And turn his back on us. And go up to his room. I’d say:
‘There’s something wrong with that boy.’
At other times I’d follow him up the stairs and go into his room. He’d open his left eye wide and almost lifted the lid off the right. I’d squeeze his arms and shake him as I said:
‘Is that any way to talk to your father?!’
Íris is nearly three, and she knows it’s different going into the workshop now, just as it was different last Sunday, as it was different in those days when she would arrive at the workshop with her grandmother, with her mother, to visit Uncle Francisco. Today the workshop is empty — the little birds, the little birds in the roof beams — and her grandmother hearing every step she takes on the earth floor of the entrance, she’s thinking about something, but there’s only the empty workshop — the objects alone there, the solitude of the tools, of the pieces of wood, of the pianos.
My wife knows it’s different going into the workshop now. On Sunday there was something in her that was soothed by the voices of our daughters, of our grandchildren. At times it was like those afternoons when I was still alive, when she would gather all our children together and together they would all come into the workshop. Now, everyone knows, it’s different.
My wife stops at the threshold of the carpentry shop. Íris lets go of her hand. My wife doesn’t have the strength to hold on to her. Íris moves away slowly. Stumbling twice on loose stones, she reaches the entrance to the piano cemetery. My wife’s tired voice:
‘Don’t touch anything.’
After a moment when she’s listening to her grandmother, Íris’s smile and her eyes — light or shadows on the surface of the sea — and the curls that roll down on to her shoulders and her little body disappear into the piano cemetery. For years my wife has known about the blind passion that children feel for the piano cemetery. Before now it has been Marta, Maria. It has been Simão, Francisco. My wife knows that no harm has ever come to them. Which is why she doesn’t worry, and returns to her thoughts. She returns to her body, ruffled, untidy under her clothes, as though her clothes have stopped being quite right for her, as though her arms are no longer the same length and are longer or shorter than the sleeves, as though her torso has turned around itself and its shape will no longer fit the shape of the blouse. My wife returns to herself, and takes a step into the carpentry shop.
I don’t know what she’s looking for. Perhaps she needs some empty time.
Íris hits the keys of an upright piano with both hands — a confused noise; the noise of her hands hitting the keys mingles with the noise of the detached or crooked mechanisms against the old wood, and mingles with a shy note, forced against its will to be heard. And again. Again. And she’s had enough. The walls of the piano cemetery are cool. The light comes in through the dirty little window and is lost. Íris is so small. Her sandals accompany the movement that her body makes as it turns around itself. She finds the lid of the same legless piano where she sat on Sunday. In the dust surface there are still traces of that passing. She sits. She looks at me, and says: