‘Are you still talking to the people from the book?’
‘I am.’
Silence.
‘Are you tired?’
‘Not yet.’
‘You really could be by now. Don’t you ever rest, Grandad?’
‘I can’t. I have to tell this story to the end.’
Silence. Íris puts the plastic hairbrush down on the piano lid, puts down the hairpins and mirror. She has her back to me as she leans down to rummage around in a pile of keys. In her hands each key seems too big. She has her back to me. She says:
‘When I’m big I can read the book, too, can’t I?’
I smile.
‘Yes, of course.’
Silence. She turns her face towards me.
‘Grandad, tomorrow I’m going to be big, aren’t I?’
‘Yes, Íris, tomorrow you’re going to be big.’
We smile together.
‘When I’m big I might even know how to play the piano, right?’
‘Yes, but you’ll have to learn at school.’
‘That’s all right. Teacher will teach me and then I’ll play a piano for my mother.’
‘Do you think your mother will like it?’
‘She will. She’ll even get so happy that she’ll ask me to play another song. One of those songs. . A love song.’
She turns her face towards me. She covers her mouth, waiting for my reaction.
‘But don’t be sad, Grandad. Then I’ll play a song for you, too. Except that I’ll play a grandad song.’
‘What’s that like, a grandad song?’
‘It’s a song with words from the little girls who are the granddaughters and the mothers singing them.’
‘So will your mother sing, then?’
‘No, it’s the music that has the words. When I play a piano you can hear the words that are inside the piano.’
She moves towards an upright piano, and away. She takes little steps, marked in the dust, her gaze fixed as though she were filling up with ideas. She freezes in the middle of a step. Slowly she puts the sole of her sandal down on the floor. She smiles. She says:
‘I went with Granny to the market.’
‘I know.’
She sits back down on the piano lid.
‘Granny bought me a brush for me to brush my hair.’
‘Yes, I know.’
She puts the brush and the hairpins in the folds of her skirt, on her lap. She holds up the mirror in front of her face, and in the little reflected circle she sees skin, lips, an eye.
‘Then you also know what happened.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘And what are you going to do? Will you hate all gypsies? That would be easy enough to do. Whenever there’s a conversation that relates even vaguely to gypsies, with markets, with fairs, you’ll take advantage of the moment to spread your poison. And underneath everything you say, hidden away, buried away, there will be that feeling you have. That’s something you’re good at. You know how to hate. You know how to impose your opinions and not let anyone contradict you. You know how to bring conversations to an end. If, of course, you weren’t dead, if you could still have conversations.
‘But we’re having one, aren’t we?’
‘We are?’
‘Again you’re talking as though you weren’t a little girl who’s not yet even three.’
She continues looking at herself in the little mirror that she’s holding in front of her face. She has the hairbrush in her other hand, and she starts brushing. Slowly.
‘What is it you’re afraid of, anyway? Are you afraid that I’m going to talk about Uncle Simão? It’s nobody’s fault that you can’t forget the image of a little boy, your son, up against a wall, blind in one eye, terrified, knowing he can’t run away, and you walking towards him, closing your fists, burning inside. Are you afraid that I’m going to talk about Uncle Francisco? It’s three days till he runs in the marathon at the Olympic Games, on his own, always on his own, thinking that you never valued all the things he did just to please you. And, just the same, trying everything he can to win. Even knowing that if you weren’t dead, if he got home and showed you the medal for first place, you’d turn your face away, uninterested.’
‘I always did the best I could.’
She drops the mirror on her lap. She gives up on the brushing, her wrist limp. She looks right at me.
‘Maybe the people reading the book will believe you, but you can’t believe yourself. You know. You can still see Granny’s face when you threw her to the floor, after squeezing her arm or striking her in the face with your hand. You can still remember all the times they looked at you with disappointment, with pity. You’re afraid that they’ll take away from you something that was never yours, but which for a moment you believe belongs to you just because you’re you. You’ve disappointed yourself, you feel pity for yourself, and for a moment you believe that other people should be the ones to pay for everything you did wrong and for everything you couldn’t do.’
She looks at me. Silence. She gets up, still looking at me. Her footsteps on the dust. She skirts around pianos, parts, piles of keys, makes her way down passageways and leaves the piano cemetery. Her child’s steps knowing and not knowing. She meets her grandmother standing at the carpentry bench where I used to work and where Francisco works. Íris approaches and gives her her hand. My wife feels Íris’s little hand between her fingers, holding them.
Even without any pianos to repair, there were mornings and afternoons when I’d go into the piano cemetery to be alone. There were mornings when, summer or winter, the same light always came through the window, the same shade of dirty brown. The previous night I might have spent hours at the taberna, I might have argued with my wife. Slowly threads of the previous night would pass through my head — mists of alcohol dissolving, words or images of my wife that rose up suddenly. There were afternoons when I’d change my mind, when for a few moments I’d give up, but when, suddenly, straight afterwards, I’d believe with all my strength that I could change everything. And I’d look at the pianos, and I’d think.
I’d look at the dead pianos, I’d remember how there were parts that could be brought back to life inside other pianos, and believe that all life could be reconstructed in just this way. I was not yet ill, my sons were growing up and turning into the lads that I had been myself not long ago. Time passed. And I was sure that a part of me, like the parts of the dead pianos, would continue to function inside them. Then I remembered my father — his face in the photograph, the box of medals, his stories told in my aunt’s voice or my uncle’s voice — and I was sure that a part of him was still alive in me, revived each day in my gestures, in my words and in my thoughts. A part of my father revived when I saw myself in the mirror, when I existed and when my hands continued to build all the things that he — secretly, so close and so far away — had started. Then I thought there was a part of my father that would remain in me and which I would hand on to my children so that it should remain in them until one day they begin to hand it on to my grandchildren. The same would happen with what was only mine, with what was only my children’s and what was only my grandchildren’s. We repeated ourselves, and moved away, and we moved closer together. We were perpetual in one another.
One of those afternoons when I was sitting in the piano cemetery, alone, thinking, I heard the footsteps of the postman on the earth floor of the entrance hall. I came out, as though busy, quite normal, and received the letters in my hand — bills and an envelope with the name of my cousin: Elisa. The postman was talking about the weather, complaining about the cars. I looked at him, I replied only with yeses, I said: