It has always been like this. For some incomprehensible reason, my wife doesn’t like — has never liked — to talk about what she’s got heating up in the pans on the stove. Maria, with her thin voice, asks:
‘What’s for dinner?’
My wife replies:
‘Look, it’s food, all right?’
Maria says nothing, because she knows it has always been like this. She forgets about it. She walks over to some place she knows in her thoughts. All through the kitchen there is the smell of food being made. She remembers. She approaches the stove, lifts the lid off a pan, and without any expression looks inside.
Íris is leaning right up against Ana because she is waiting for her to finish her homework so that they can play together. Her father, passing her, trips, and shouts:
‘Leave your sister in peace.’
Maria is startled by the shout, but she says nothing. She raises her eyes, and lowers them. She walks towards the door and pulls Íris by the arm. She wants to take her to the living room. Íris is small and stabs her buckle-shoes into the floor, she objects and flails around. On the other side of the kitchen Maria’s husband raises his chin and his voice gets thicker:
‘What is it you’re doing?’
It has begun.
Maria could have told him with all sincerity that she is taking her to the living room, which was what she understood he wanted, but she is unable to because his voice has wounded her. This is why she also has to reply to him rudely, she has to hide the fact that she has been hurt and she has to hurt him, too. This is why she replies with some haughty phrase, rudely, to provoke him, to strike him.
Piano music fills the few empty corners of the kitchen. Maria’s husband, as if threatening, says:
‘Well, well, well.’
The piano music changes colour. It turns red. Maria doesn’t let it rest.
‘Well what?’
Ana gets down from her chair. The exercise book is left open on the table. She takes her sister’s hand and the two of them leave the kitchen.
Maria’s husband has blood flowing through the veins in his temples. He is alive. As if trying to restrain himself:
‘You’re not talking to your father now, you know.’
My wife can’t keep silent:
‘And what does her father have to do with anything?’
He turns his head the other way:
‘Now it’s both of you? You keep quiet! No one’s talking to you.’
My wife can’t, she demands a reply, pulls him by the arm:
‘What does her father have to do with anything?’
He frees himself:
‘Ai ai ai. .’
My wife can’t, she approaches him again:
‘Well? What does her father have to do with anything?’
He turns suddenly — fury — and pushes her. My wife knocks into the sink with her waist, falls. She’s sitting on the floor.
‘Leave me alone!’
Maria crosses the kitchen to where he is, grabs his arm and twists it behind his back. At the same speed she takes him out to the corridor. Taller, stronger, she takes him. He is like a muted, anxious child, afraid of speaking and making it worse, afraid of reacting and making it worse. Maria opens the front door and throws him out into the shadows of the staircase. She bangs the door closed, as though firing a shot.
She waits. Her breathing. Maybe he’ll knock at the door. He didn’t take his key, he didn’t take his jacket, he didn’t take his wallet. She waits. She hears the banging of the door to the street. She lowers her eyelids. Her breathing. She walks slowly towards the kitchen and finds my wife on her feet already. They don’t say anything. Maria knows that if she were to go to the window she would see her husband heading away in one direction or other. She doesn’t want to, she’s no longer interested. It’s still rage, burning. After a time she goes to the window. Perhaps she’ll still see him. She doesn’t see him. He has disappeared. The street is deserted. And that’s that.
When Marta became pregnant, we were pleased. Marta was twenty years old, she still believed in everything and she was thin. Marta’s husband was little more than a boy, he didn’t look at other women and he smiled a lot when he heard the news. My wife and I received the news that we were going to be grandparents very naturally. We had a twenty-year-old daughter, and we were going to be grandparents.
At four months, the doctor recommended rest. That was he word he used. To my wife’s satisfaction, for the remainder of the time Marta moved to our house. Her husband would arrive at night and have dinner with us, and we would have solemn conversations, and then he would go to bed with Marta. For those months Maria left her bed to sleep in Francisco’s room.
Marta spent most of her days in bed. Maria would sit by her and read her romance novels, and they would talk in low voices. Sometimes Marta would come into the kitchen in her dressing-gown and sit by the fire. It was the last months of autumn, then it was the months of winter. Elisa was born at the start of spring.
Marta’s belly was round and even. Marta would carefully tie the belt of her dressing-gown over it. Francisco would rest his hand on its shape to feel Elisa’s kicks.
‘She’s moving.’
Maria was not yet quite sure that she was pregnant when she came to tell us. She was. Her eyes were at the bottom of a well, small, and there was a childish tenderness on their surface. It was as though the baby’s eyes existed within them. Nobody knew then that Ana’s eyes would be exactly the same, as though they were the same eyes.
Some afternoons Simão would go and visit her. Nobody told me, but I was sure of it. He brought her old peanuts that he took out of his pocket. He held out the palms of his dirty hands to her, with peanuts.
Her husband treated her with care. Francisco would go by her house after work. They would talk, and at those times they were the same age. After going to the market, my wife would stop by her house to take her gifts of kale, vegetables, greens.
‘Make a soup. Do you want me to make it? It’s no trouble.’
Marta had already started to get fat. It could be seen, week after week, as she came in through the front door a little heavier. Elisa ran through the house and kissed her aunt’s belly. There was true peace between the sisters, there were healed wounds, there was a good silence and eyes that looked on the past without resentment.
Maria’s belly. She wore a blue flannel dress to wait for her husband. She rested her hands on her belly, as though she were carrying it. She smoothed out the dress, and with this gesture emphasised the belly. Her cheeks were flushed, her face affectionately expectant.
When Marta became pregnant for the second time I was already sick, my wife had already lost all possible consolation; Francisco was trying to look after the workshop and ran aimlessly through the streets of Lisbon in the late afternoons; Simão had disappeared even more from all the places where he’d never been, where he had really never been; Maria fretted and wept for no concrete reason, which she couldn’t qualify with any words she knew; Marta was fat, she was of a delicate nature; Marta’s husband had his own thoughts, he had women he looked at and touched, whom he called by names that Marta could only imagine being whispered, perhaps affectionate or perhaps feigning affection, which, at the moment when they existed, in that mirror, were still the same as true affection.