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  DARIA

  Copyright © 2021 Irene Marques

  Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Collective Agency (Access Copyright).

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.

  This is a magical realism historical novel where fact and fiction intermingle.

  Cover design: Val Fullard

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Daria : a novel / Irene Marques.

  Names: Marques, Irene, 1969- author.

  Series: Inanna poetry & fiction series.

  Description: Series statement: Inanna poetry & fiction series

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210182105 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210182164 | ISBN 9781771338417 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771338431 (PDF) | ISBN 9781771338424 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8626.A683 D37 2021 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  Printed and Bound in Canada.

  Published in Canada by

  Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

  210 Founders College, York University

  4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3

  Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax (416) 736-5765

  Email: [email protected] Website: www.inanna.ca

  DARIA

  A NOVEL

  Irene Marques

  INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.

  TORONTO, CANADA

  To Mother and Father: A and A.

  To Isabel.

  “Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.”

  —Clarice Lispector

  “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”

  —Roland Barthes

  “If you have ever peeled an onion, then you know that the first thin, papery layer reveals another thin, papery layer, and that layer reveals another, and another, and before you know it you have hundreds of layers all over the kitchen table and thousands of tears in your eyes…”

  —Lemony Snicket

  I write myself in the intervals of a lifetime to see if I find my true name.

  DARIA. Your name is Daria. Daria Mendes. Mendes with an s, not a z, like the lady at the bank counter pronounced, and then wrote on your receipt, the other day, when you were sending money to your old mother who still lives on the other side of the world. You came to this side of the world when you were young and bountiful in body and mind—beautiful too, men kept telling you when you passed them on the street, whistling with wide shiny eyes, as if looking for something different from what they had ever seen, something that would remind them of the many good things there are in this universe, just waiting to be taken, eaten and loved, danced with. You left alone. You left the village on top of the mountains—that place where the stars were so close that you thought the sky was only a fingertip away and the god with a small g was kind, not mean like the one Padre Lévito always talked about in church when you went on Sundays. You didn’t always go because the church was far away and you needed to walk ten kilometres to get there. And also because your mother, even though a fervent Catholic in many ways, did not really teach you to be a diligent worshipper. She prayed to Saint Gregory only in the middle of the night when angry thunderstorms were brought down on us by the God with a capital G who was treating us like peasants, peasants who had not yet suffered enough for their sins. You left the village on top of the mountains. You left and took things in your own hands. Things that you knew were there to be taken, to be tried by those brave enough to evade the rigid destinies of old stubborn Catholicism, that sturdy current imprinted even in the smallest stones of the country you left and seasoned with nearly fifty years of Salazar’s fascism. Salazar’s parents, truth be told, were landless peasants who lived in a village just next door to yours, but they found a way to give their son an education by sending him to the seminary and then to the University of Coimbra. He then became an acclaimed professor of economics and, shortly after, the iron fist of the country.

  Despite all that he did and did not do, your father still says that what we need now is another Salazar to make things work, to take us out of the shameful debt and sinful spending that makes us look like incompetent lazy bastards who cannot govern their own households. What we need is another Salazar, not Socrates who has disgraced our house such that we are now called the PIGS of Europe. He says this despite the fact that his oldest son, Alberto, was killed fighting in Angola during the colonial wars that lasted thirteen years. Alberto was blown away in the dark, deep Mayombe and no one ever saw a piece of him again. Your mother mourns him frequently, with prolonged sighs and teary, motionless, cow-like eyes trying to spot particles of him in the air, love remnants that might have flown upward, back to its source; he was her first child, born when she was only seventeen, and he was a boy with fair, fair skin and curly black hair. The taxi drivers picking you up at the airport, when you return for a visit, tell you similar stories. They are eager to inform you about the news of the country, sensing that you come from another world, governed by other laws where good money is to be made. “What we need, Menina,” they say with their finger in the air, “what we need is another Salazar to straighten things up, to put these people in their place and teach them some proper old values. Ah, good were the days then, when we worked from sunrise to sunset to get to the belly of the earth and lift the minerals out of there, or just to find enough good soil to plant some corn and potatoes without the intrusion of the stubborn stones, our domesticated cows pushing the plough to turn the earth, guided by the sharpened metallic ending of a long stick piercing their back—because all beings need discipline. Even though we had to divide one sardine among three of us, and we felt tired to the core at day’s end, we were proud citizens and owed nothing to no one.” You listen and you smile, and think that nothing much has changed. But things have changed, as they always do, and perhaps you are only wishing that they did not change, that they had remained the same as when you left because that’s how you remember them or think you remember them. That’s how your country plays itself in your mind and body, making you feel like you do indeed have a sturdy, stable house to walk upon, even if you abandoned that house more than twenty years ago and it is no longer stable, no longer the same—as you find out when you enter it more deeply, noting the deep and mysterious shadows that inhabit the old corridors or the new colours that the walls have or the water now running in the sink. In the old days you had to carry water by the bucket or the crock from the ancient fountain, on your hands and head, balancing an intricate act, as if you were a dextrous African woman who could do many things at the same time because she knows the many needs people have and the choices are scarce. Yet it does not seem to matter much, for you find ways to make it stay the same, like a stubborn child who refuses to see her own children grow or her mother die and get old—only so that you can access the beautiful.

  THE DREAM OF LAVENDER. She woke up in the middle of the night possessed by the astounding beauty that she had seen in the dream she was in. In this dream, she was dancing, or sometimes walking, in the middle of the most beautiful field of lavender somewhere in Avignon. S
he felt herself in a forest of open fields, moving through the ups and downs, bouncy and serene, where only lavender had been allowed to flourish and find mineral food from the belly of Mother Earth. She had never been in Avignon, but she had seen the images in postcards countless times, and so she felt that land, or the colour through which it tells itself, was somehow imprinted in her soul, remembered by the eye of the white eagle, which never forgets. She always knew that lilac, that colour that comes out perfectly only in the flowers of lavender, spoke to her from some transcendental place that she could not quite understand or grasp with the logic of her mind. But today, this morning, after having been inside the peaceful and floating sensation that those plants and their sight and scent had gifted her, she felt extraordinary, like never before. Extraordinary. It was as if the world—this world that often imposed so much on her shoulders and her lower back, making her cry and contort her body in sheer pain—had suddenly revealed itself as the perfect place in which to attain sanctity and find mercy. A mercy. Like the title of a novel by Toni Morrison that she adored, a book where finding a cure is all that matters. It was as if her body, habituated to the loads she carried, an overweight and overflowing sac pressed down by the many sad stories of the world, had suddenly discovered that flying is not only possible but that it is required. She had suddenly realized that, in fact, the ability to fly may just come when you least expect it: in the middle of your dreams at night, when darkness takes over your soul only to allow for a new dawn, that moment when flight and light will be possible and the twin sisters living in the little girls of your eyes twinkle in newly found redemption.

  First, she remained seated in her bed, symmetrically positioned, so that her body would feel and remember the sensations of the dream fully and deeply. She then rolled out of bed carefully—like a gazelle in slow motion, ready to canvass the fields and graze in fresh grass—and walked out the door. The night was still high, and the darkness that enveloped her felt like a bath of wisdom or a blanket of carefully stitched pieces of fine wool, protecting her from the bad elements and the witch stories she had heard so much in her infancy. These were tales told by old ladies who knew only how to scare the soul. They knew how to suffer in this world; they had mastered it. Yes, because this world was only a passage through the painful tunnel, after which heaven would appear to you, clearly, very clearly, like an open field, finally ready to give you some happiness and much deserved rest. She walked slowly but with certainty; she was eager to feel every element under her naked feet. Seen from afar, she appeared like a nude virgin, an incandescent being, who descended to the streets of that place only to allow its inhabitants to feel and know what bliss is, how bliss is. Seen from afar, she brought tears to your eyes. She made you want more, want a lot, and deeply feel the loss that your life was. It was as if she, that woman of the night, a sudden nymph roaming the streets, was an incumbida entrusted with delivering a message to a dying generation, a generation who had forgotten how to be happy in this world and how to experience god right here under this starry sky. As she moved through the streets, the god with a small g suddenly became big, like a gigantic transparent ball of water where you and all the rest bathed in a muddy hug, finally clean of all the crimes of the world. She was finally ready to be the forever bride of all there is, all there will ever be, floating in a nothingness that kept her in the greatest company. She danced like this through the streets of the town, corner after corner, line after line, meticulously, until she found the tunnel that took her into the field of that marvelous lilac. In that field, which she entered fully in body and soul, she roamed freely and aimlessly, time after time, because she knew—and deeply felt in her bones, as if the line of her life went way beyond her—that wisdom comes to you only after you have been lost in the maze that scares you to death and makes you bleed and bleed, lost in the logics of the non-logic, where there still lives a certain sparkle of beingness. She knew that the perfect is caught only in that moment of unawareness. Unlike what the scientists at the Hospital of the Soul say and keep telling those who have disease in their being, those who are hurting to the core and speaking in tongues; they scare the masses who then run away from them on the bus and on the streetcars, pretending that they are not a related species at all. Pretending that they themselves do not speak in tongues sometimes, or wish to speak in tongues to be released from the iron bar that holds them down, preventing them from finding meaning outside the ordered webs of their everyday lives. They pretend. Pretenders they are.

  Daria roamed and roamed in the lilac sheet until her body was nothing but a mound of lilac and she became indistinguishable from the landscape. She felt pure then. She felt pure and young and clean. And in that state of being she woke up. Blessed like never before and ready to be anything—the secretary or the professor or the nanny—because labels did not frazzle her, did not weaken her, did not bring her to the lower point, at least for the time being. She felt she could be anything under the sun, and in fact she wanted to be anything under the sun. She wanted to feel the entire universe upon her with the wisdoms of different people entrenched in her cells, making her immensely erudite. She wanted to be a shoemaker living in the Middle Ages producing a stunning shoe, from beginning to end, with her hands; she wanted to feel that sense of completion and wholeness that only creation, holy, holistic, without division of labour, can produce. She wanted to be a seller and maker of coal like her mother had been, pulling deep, sturdy roots out of the earth and smelling its fresh moisture; or a nun enclosed in a remote thirteenth-century monastery praying avidly to Christ with eyes shut and bosom pulsating, praying rosary after rosary until she found bliss and orgasmic divinity; or Nelson Mandela wanting and waiting for the idea to realize itself; or Wangari Muta Maathai at the moment when her ashes were spread by the trunk of a young tree and it all suddenly made sense. Ad infinitum. She wanted to be all stories and all people and beings and things—without any commas to intrude.

  THE UNKNOWN UNDERDOG. Daria, you think you are the unknown underdog. You think you have personally been a victim of maltreatment, misunderstanding, harassment, and discrimination on several occasions. You think your people, your community, are not represented sufficiently in positions of power in Canadian society because they are not visible minorities. Even the current mayor of Toronto, you say, António Palavreiro, whom you have nicknamed a merchant of words, a man of Portuguese descent who has made it to the top but seems to have poor knowledge of Portuguese geography and has mixed up the Atlantic with the Mediterranean by saying, during his election campaign, that he grew up in Pombal, surrounded by beautiful mountains and the Mediterranean sea—maybe he wanted the non-Portuguese voters to think of Portugal as Greece or Italy or Spain for those are much more often advertised on TV and other mediums, and have likely more deeply entered the consciousness of Canadians and therefore are more likely to be associated with the quintessential Southern European culture—even he, you’ve noted, and I do know that to be true because I heard him myself, even he has stated on national television that the Portuguese are the underdogs nobody pays attention to. “We are poor and the sons and daughters of the poor. We have the highest high school drop-out rate, higher even than Black people according to some recent census. Our people clean and build the city of Toronto and parts of the rest of the country. Our older people, men and women, were born and raised in the throes of Salazar’s regime and escaped here—and God knows how! Maybe by swimming through the vast and perilous Atlantic, like many others crossed the frigid and wolf-infested Pyrenees by foot to go to France and Germany. Our old people don’t know how to read and write—like my own mother, in fact—and many are abused by their children who have brought them here only to get their pension cheques and make them care for their own children. As the mayor of this great city, and a proud Luso-Canadian—another term for Portuguese-Canadian, for those who may not know—I intend to address this long-overdue wrong by creating specific affirmative action, municipal laws that will correct the problem
.”

  You’ve also added that he, the mayor, won because of the ethnic Portuguese vote and not because he is in fact smart or even well-educated or particularly thoughtful. Although he only has a BA in General Arts, he indiscreetly acts as if he is the only educated person in the Portuguese community. Here you also add that you don’t like the term “ethnic” because it implies that only some Canadians are ethnic, while others—namely, the so-called founding European fathers of the nation—are not. As everyone knows, we are all ethnic! We all belong to a certain group. Of course, that is changing too because, here in Canada, the so-called mother nation of a truly successful multiculturalism, groups have mixed so much that we no longer know how many people there are in us. The whole thing has, in fact, become quite complicated and difficult to label neatly. It’s a muddy, muddy affair. And here you also noted, and I quote you directly: “I am not saying that this is a bad thing.” You have further indicated that your dislike for the mayor of Toronto goes back to the time you both spent in a Portuguese literature class at the Northern University in Toronto years ago, the one taught by Professor Marcus Whiteshilgel, a German-Canadian who was very passionate about all things Portuguese, including, rumour had it, women of Portuguese descent. Whiteshilgel led a very insightful class, in fact, one of the best you’ve had so far. He used to joke and say that whenever he went to Portugal to a conference, his colleagues in the field attacked him, pointlessly claiming he could not teach Portuguese literature properly since he was not only a Saxon but a Canadian-Saxon and therefore quite far from possessing the necessary authenticity and aptitude. You developed a particular distaste for Palavreiro when you were discussing a novel by Lídia Jorge, O dia dos Prodígios, and another one by José Saramago, O ensaio sobre a cegueira, because during the break he asked you what part of Lisbon you were from, and you stated sarcastically, “Oh, I am not from Lisbon, I am from a little place in the middle of nowhere, just like Vilamaninhos or Azinhaga.” You are firmly convinced that the only reason he said that is because he could not fathom that someone who spoke Portuguese like you and knew how to argue like you could in fact be from a place other than Lisbon, which you claim has always been the privileged centre of the country and perceived as the only cultivated place in the nation. I have tried to point out that perhaps he has changed since then—it’s been quite a long time now since this encounter you had with him in the classroom, and your assessment may be outdated because he was just a young boy then and people do change. But when I point this out, you insist that your intuition is seldom wrong, that we are all basically born with the general inclination to be good or bad, and that some things, once expressed, cannot be retracted and do indeed show the core of the person’s being. You insist that this man does not, cannot fool you. You add that you don’t like Palavreiro because you tend to dislike politicians and see them as either unethical sophists or very good networkers. And you also don’t like him because of other specific reasons that are yet to be disclosed. Maybe that will come with time, with more trust between us.