When Maria became pregnant for the second time, everyone wanted to be hopeful.
Now it’s Saturday. Maria woke up alone, and light. She’s in the kitchen, and she’s thinking that tomorrow Francisco is going to run in the Olympic Games. Maria confuses tenderness with pity. She feels tenderly towards her brother, but believes she feels some pity. She can’t stop remembering when he was little. She always remembers him laughing or smiling. And she feels tenderness, calling it pity inside her thoughts. And she remembers Simão. The image of her brother, blind in one eye, is veiled by a curtain of pity, real pity, the pity of not having seen him for so long, of never hearing any word of him. She throws out some questions, inside herself — where might he be? Is he well? Who’s taking care of him? And the cries of the girls in the living room catch her attention. Her attention is a floating boat, rudderless, ruled by the wind and the currents.
In the living room Maria’s daughters are playing, and they don’t worry because they are children and they can’t conceive of anything destroying what they know and expect from every gesture or unknown moment passing: Ana and Íris. My wife is sitting next to them on the sofa. It has been many days, or months, since she has been like this, without any chores, simple and blank. She too is unworried. She is a child in a different way.
The doorbell. Always the same agitation, feverish anxiety, even when they know who it is. And now they don’t know who it is. Maria thinks it might be her husband. My wife thinks it might be the gypsy. Always the same agitation — the doorbell. My wife doesn’t think about this, but if she did, she could have remembered that it was like when she still used to drink coffee and afterwards had to sit down until the feeling of unease went away. Neither Maria nor my wife try to avoid what they know is inevitable. They are afraid, they are people, but they always confront it, and thus weaken it, destroy it. This is why Maria and my wife come into the corridor at the same time. It’s Maria who arrives first as she is closest. A single, firm movement of her arm opens the door.
Marta, Elisa to one side of her, Hermes to the other. Marta — huge — is holding a little suitcase and two plastic bags. All this weight pulls her body down towards the floor and turns her into a gigantic mountain of flesh, in a nearly new fabric dress. And her face — eyes smiling or sad, cheeks reddened by two powder stains, the hairdo that she arranges with water when she leaves the house to get the train. Elisa, a well-behaved little girl, doesn’t understand and doesn’t ask, she trusts. Hermes wants to play.
Maria and my wife go into the kitchen with Marta, just listening. Her voice. It is outside them, and at the same time it exists within them, too. It is as though they have within their thoughts a kitchen just like the one they’re in, with the same gentle lightness, the same serenity, and Marta’s voice using the same words to speak of the lack of surprise, vaporous and breathable, that she is speaking of here. My wife and Maria had been expecting to hear those words in that voice for a long time. They couldn’t have predicted that she would leave home. They don’t remember imagining her talking with such peaceful acceptance, neither sad nor disappointed. Marta tells them her story wearily, using phrases she constructed on her train journey as she watched the landscape. After each word she can see that they know just which word she is going to say next, and she gets wearier. Then she tells them about the decision she has taken. Finally she says:
‘I’m never going back.’
And both my wife and Maria can see that, sooner or later, she will go back home. They don’t know how long it will take her to go back, but they know she will.
In the living room neither Ana nor Íris ask Elisa or Hermes any questions. They’re glad at their arrival and immediately begin playing.
And Saturday passes with a sunny calm, like a day for bicycling without going anywhere, a day for taking a walk, for going round the lake in the park just because it’s a route without any problems, just like any other. My wife and my daughters do simple chores, understanding one another. When they pass, their voices are young and they have the resigned wisdom of a lack of urgency. There is plenty of time, and harmony. The hours float by. All the hours float by, and they are identical. The children play and laugh, as though my daughters or my wife could laugh too whenever they felt like it. It is Saturday, and on this day the world has uncomplicated itself.
After putting the children to bed, after a little longer sitting at the kitchen table, after talking about Francisco and agreeing about everything, after remembering many things and laughing more, my wife and my daughters go to bed, and before they fall asleep they think that they could live like this for ever.
Marta hadn’t yet been born, my wife was pregnant, we were sitting very close together — sometimes she would sit on my lap — and wondering which of us would die first. It was an anxiety that afflicted us. There were other insoluble conversations which like this one would return every once in a while. A lot of time might go by without us having it, months, years, but when we returned to it we always remembered that it was not the first time we’d talked about it. It was an anxiety that existed underground, and that never completely disappeared. We were too alert to the truth to ignore it. We couldn’t pretend it didn’t exist. All our children had already been born, we might be lying in bed, naked, we might have just finished making love, and one of us would remember to wonder which of us would die first. And then we also thought about our children. It would be very hard for us to leave them, we weren’t sure they could manage themselves on their own, we were afraid they would be incapable, that they’d need us and we wouldn’t be there. Marta, Maria, Francisco and even Simão, even Simão. And we thought about what it would be like to die and leave the other, to be left alone. And how long would we be apart? Months? Years? How many years’ life would be left to the one who survived the other? I was already very sick, without enough peaceful time to say anything. It was one afternoon. My wife brought me food that I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t eat anything. I was at home, in the pyjamas my wife had bought me to wear in hospital. For months I’d spent all my time in pyjamas, thin, my hair frail. And I wanted to sit up in bed, I wanted to hold her hand and press her to my breast. It was one of the last things I said in total consciousness. I was capable of a great deal of hurt. I said to her:
‘Now we know who’s going to die first.’
There were Sundays. Looking back, it’s impossible to avoid the feeling that a lot of them were wasted. Today I feel that just one more Sunday would be enough for me to be able to resolve everything. Then straight after that, I think that it would not. Then straight after that, I think that yes, it would. A single Sunday, from the morning, always bright and unconcerned, a whole day to take advantage of, to waste until the drawing-in of the night — an illusion created by a planet that turns around itself. Today is a Sunday different from every other — Francisco is running the marathon in the Olympic Games. It is this shock of happiness that wakes first Íris, then all the other children, then Maria, Marta, then my wife, who, waking, almost believes she never fell asleep. It is Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, Sunday.
Marta combs Hermes’s hair in front of the bathroom mirror. Maria gets excited walking up and down the hall runner, followed by Íris, who wants to tell her something, or who just wants to pretend for a few moments that she is big and has important chores to do. Ana and Elisa are talking in the living room. Ana’s eyes are shining with the illusion of being a big girl, correct, well-behaved, who does what is expected of her, who understands conversations. My wife is in the kitchen — piano music on the wireless — and she is thinking.