Daria Page 12
She imagined the two young lovers dressed as guerrilla fighters and running around in the dense forests trying to deliver messages or food to their comrades or even fighting with AK-47s. She saw them on impromptu open-air podiums singing and screaming poetry and manifestos with the ferocity that the yearning for justice can bring about. She saw them surrounded by a vast acclaiming public that chanted O povo unido nunca mais será vencido. She saw their rugged, tired, and scared faces at the end of a very long day—one of those days that go on and on forever, making you feel that the idea is taking too long to manifest itself and that perhaps it will never shine through, that it will never come. She imagined the nightmares they must have had together and then alone in separate cells in Tarrafal, that dungeon of slow death, far away from their native land. She imagined them trapped, surrounded by another ocean—the cold, strange, and endless Atlantic Ocean, which had once carried the caravels. They had set sea a long time ago, only to bring blood to the waters, only to discover what had already been discovered. She felt jealous, and she almost regretted not having met him earlier, not being older, not being born in Mozambique at the right time. She regretted only having images and sounds and stories in her head, things that came from far away, because she was too young to have lived through them directly; things that did not have a secure ground in her being and almost appeared as fainted romantic murmurs of a distant past, a time when people really took action and suffered injustices, a time when everything was more important and made your heart pound more vigorously. She recalled her mother’s constant stories about her brother Alberto. She recalled seeing photos of him in a green-and-brown military uniform with tall black boots, a boy-man with a moustache. She recalled the deep vivid crimson paintings of the carnation on the walls of her primary school—side by side with the foice e o martelo, the hammer and the sickle—and she heard the sounds of the mailman who came mounted on a horse to deliver news to the people of the mountains. He had been blowing a horn and singing, O povo unido nunca mais será vencido—the happy gay song that was going from mouth to mouth everywhere, like a beautiful symphony that made you fly and see colours from above. She recalled the radio announcer speaking from Lourenço Marques or Luanda or Bissau, lands that seemed to be part of her country but where all kinds of commotions were taking place. She recalled hearing names like Humberto Delgado and António de Spínola, Marcelo Caetano and António de Oliveira Salazar, Samora Machel and Agostinho Neto and Amílcar Cabral, names of important personalities but whose significance she, as a five-year-old girl, could not really grasp. She remembered the full moon up high in the clean dark azure sky of Almores, a magnificent ball that she could reach with her hands, and then remembered it being shown on TV. She saw the Americans and the Russians, people who were doing things to one another and trying to land on other grounds above the sky. She saw them as dancing butterflies, moving, moving in slow motion, trying to achieve meditation of body and spirit, as if they were truly flying like she did sometimes in some of her best dreams.
She remembered her brother-in-law with a long beard and long hair cursing the fascists. She remembered her oldest sister marrying him on that sad, rainy, November day. They had just moved to the new cement house, a house that had two bedrooms, a living room, and a bathroom with only a toilet in it and no running water. She saw the old granite house, with the very dirty wood floors and the walls that had been blackened from the smoke because there was no chimney. Her mother still cooked in that house so many years later. It had only a kitchen and another room with two beds. She remembered sleeping there, sharing one end of the bed with her brother Marcos, who was barely older than her, while other people slept on the other end; she remembered feeling their feet close to her face. She remembered the smell of urine on the floor and how everyone either peed in a pot or went outside and did it by the cowshed just beside the house. She remembered the smell and the noise of the two pigs that lived under the kitchen. She remembered how her older siblings would scare her by pretending they were going to put her inside the pig’s body hanging from the ceiling in the kitchen, after it had been killed with that long sharp knife that made it cry for what seemed hours on end. She remembered hiding in bed to keep that scream away or sometimes even running far away so that it would not reach her. She remembered moving to the new house and then having nightmares in which she was falling down from the roof in slow motion. She remembered the deep fear she felt of reaching the floor and having her body smashed by the impact. Sometimes these nightmares were mixed with her fear of wetting the bed, and if she managed to reach the floor intact, she then would pee right there on the street and she would feel a great sense of relief. She remembered all this through a mixture of internal images made up of real memory and of the distance of the memories, a distance that adds and takes away. And she also remembered it through the black-and-white photo that she stole from her sister’s wedding album and that she brought to Canada with her. This is the only photo she had of herself when she was very young because at the time no one took photos up there in the mountains of Caramulo. They had enough misery to stare at every day from sunset to sunrise; they did not need to stare at it when they went home at night because they knew nights were meant for resting and dreaming. Or perhaps it was all tied to the bare and simple fact that they did not possess the means. In this photo, she and little Marcos are wearing lilac and yellow sweaters, respectively, sweaters their oldest sister—the one getting married, who is also their godmother—bought for the special occasion. The sweaters are full of waves and intricacies that Daria had never seen before, and they made her feel so happy, happy, happy. In the photo, she is a little girl with thin twisted legs, open eyes, and hair cut abruptly at the front, as if she herself had taken a pair of scissors to do the job, perhaps trying to play a game or become an adult. In this whirling of memories flowing through her, Daria felt like a little girl again, a little girl who cannot grasp that past of real suffering, of real struggle, of real importance. And in this moment of remembrance of her faint past, she wished she had been a warrior with him, Francisco, down there in that land full of light by the Indian Ocean. But then she thought she was being silly, that she was being childish, for she had him now, he had her, they had each other, and everything would be all right. She went from corner to corner of the house, deciphering and feeling the nest of this man she already loved so much.
She was in a daze of white and blue, of black and white, her body and mind pulsing with expectation about the great night ahead of her. She had imagined it since she was a little girl, often spending nights awake visualizing it, savouring it in anticipation. She and Isabel had had many conversations about this magnificent night, and they would often play silly childish games about a man and wife in preparation for the big event—which would come one day, they were certain, when they became older and truly beautiful. She saw roses and roses, gardens of endless colours covering her life, a life that was just starting and that would be, she felt sure of it, beautiful, full, bountiful. Francisco had changed from his suit into something very light, a white cotton shirt and loose khaki pants; he had no shoes, just bare feet. She stared at the soles of his feet as he walked as if fascinated by their whiteness, and then, as he was preparing a drink for himself and juice for her, she also stared at his white palms. She went to him, took his hands, and put his palms against hers to see how similar they were. She then moved to his soles, bending down on her knees and lifting his feet one by one to inspect them. She stared at that whiteness in silence, as if trying to understand the type of cells he was made of. He told her that widely known tale of how God was in a hurry when he made Black people and so He forgot to paint their soles and their palms black like the rest of their bodies. She laughed and said she had heard a version of that story, but that her version was much nicer, for it claimed that God gave Black people white palms and soles so that the white people could see themselves in them and thus consider them their brothers and sisters. He smiled and said, “My da
rling Daria, that is a truly beautiful version, which I confess, I have never heard before. It is indeed beautiful, and perhaps the prophecy that lives there is close to manifesting itself. Daria, you are the bearer of very good news.” It was late June, and she had just turned twenty-four. She was wearing that dress she had worn when she went to the Lusitanian Social Service Centre to look for a job. She felt pretty, loved, protected, and wanted. He told her how she was the most beautiful woman he had ever met and how she possessed that courage of a warrior, a courage that he admired immensely in women, a courage that pushed her to leave Portugal by herself at the age of twenty to come and meet the world. He told her he understood how difficult it was for her—a girl of her age and station, who had been raised in a sheltered way by overly protective Catholic parents—to come just like that to the other side of the world. Listening to him, she felt loved; she felt special. She felt unique. She felt protected. She told him how she had had a hard time, how sometimes she felt misunderstood, especially among the Portuguese living in Toronto. She told him how the family of one of her Portuguese friends did not want their daughter to be friends with her because they thought that a proper young woman, a woman properly raised by proper parents, would never leave her country alone at the age of twenty to cross the Atlantic and go to a strange faraway land where all kinds of dangers and evils existed. She told him how that had upset her, how that had hurt her feelings, for she was indeed a proper young woman who just wanted to see the world and go after her dreams. There was nothing wrong with that, she said. Francisco mentioned that many of the Portuguese people living in Toronto came here many, many years ago and that they still carry that very old way of thinking. He told Daria she shouldn’t take them seriously. He told her that he knew her, that he knew how pure she was, how deep, how beautiful. He told her he loved her very, very much. He said he had never, ever met a woman like her before, and he had met many, many women: Russians, Mozambicans, white and Black, South Africans, Portuguese, Italians, and Canadians, and the many Canadians that there are in Canadians. She felt loved; she felt special. She felt unique. She felt protected. Perfect the way she was. She utterly and completely believed in love.
He came behind her as she was studying one of those tribal masks that she had never seen before with intense curiosity. She was trying to discern how it was made, who made it, what ritual it was used for, if it had a particular significance and was used on special events. As if he had read her mind, he told her that that mask represented the God Ogun, a very fierce God, the most powerful God of the Yoruba pantheon. He told her the Yoruba were a people in Nigeria, the richest nation in Africa, where oil gushes out of the earth with the force of thick milk coming out of the engorged breasts of a nursing woman. As he said that, she felt shivers running though her. Sensing her shivers, he placed his long elegant hands around her full breasts, feeling them tenderly but firmly. He kept his hands there long enough to feel their readiness and their size, and then he slowly turned Daria towards him. She felt good but also very embarrassed. Her face was red like a carnation flower, as if there were a revolution going on inside her that she could no longer control, did not want to control. He told her she was stunning and that her body had the curves of a goddess, and that he was the luckiest man alive because she was kind enough to offer him that very body. She blushed some more and felt happier than ever before. He unbuttoned her dress slowly at the front so that he could reach her breasts. He stared at them for a while—they were still hidden by the white and lilac lacy brassiere she was wearing—as if wanting to prolong the moment of expectation, the moment before the ultimate revelation. She started to tremble and said that, as he well knew, she had never gone all the way with a man and was therefore scared. He calmed her down by saying he knew that very well and he would be as gentle as possible. He told her that the first time is always a little painful, just a little. “But then my darling,” he continued, “it’s all roses, all roses…” He then proceeded to take off her brassiere so that he could see those splendid breasts for the first time, all exposed before him. First he smelled the brassiere, holding it against his nose and mouth with his eyes semi-closed, telling Daria that it smelled like cherries, cherries in full season, ready and juicy. Then he looked directly at her breasts and gasped. He seemed momentarily dizzy, but then he regained his composure and told her they are just perfect, just ripe, ready to be taken. He told her he had never seen nipples like hers, so erect, so brownish, and so pinkish, and surrounded by such splendid wide aureoles. They were like roses inside roses, Russian dolls inside Russian dolls, abracadabra mysteries of the most sacred kind. As he said that, he put his lips on her nipples, first one and then the other, initially moving them slowly and tenderly and then becoming more impatient and aggressive, like Daria imagined babies would get when they were really hungry for the mother’s milk and have been waiting too long for her to show up. At that point, she too became impatient. Suddenly, her body was no longer hers to command. He helped her undress, and she helped him take off his cotton clothes. He took off her last piece of clothing, her underwear, which she had chosen carefully that morning to match her brassiere, and he held it in his hands for a moment before bringing it to his nose, to his lips, like he did with the brassiere. Then he murmured something in Makonde which Daria could not understand.
They were both naked, standing up in front of one another in middle of the living room, in front of dozens of statuettes of naked white and Black women, and surrounded by just as many tribal masks and photos of Otu and Quintana. They moved around the entire house, as if to fully claim it as their own, entangled in one another, feeling their bodies with their hands, from head to toe, not missing a centimetre of each other’s flesh. She felt his strong member in her hands without shame, and without her mother’s words entering her mind. He then rivered every inch of her flesh with his tongue and his lips, leaving his saliva all over her, and Daria screamed and screamed, thinking that it was not possible to live like this one more minute. She thought she was going to die, she thought the neighbours were going to hear her and she would not be able to face anyone the next day because everyone will know what she had done, the shameless devilish games she had been involved in. She thought all this in a momentary flash, but then Francisco’s games became more intense, more urgent, his tongue concentrating persistently, patiently, and vigorously in the very middle of her being, which she had been keeping so tightly closed, so tightly guarded. He went up and down in motions circular, horizontal, and perpendicular—first slowly, then more aggressively—and she really thought that this was the end, the end of her life, the end of time. She screamed some more, like she had never, never screamed before. They took turns until he could no longer wait and then he entered her slowly. She opened herself fully to receive him, happy that he was finally fully hers and that she was fully his. He thrust and thrust until he was all there, until the net she had been guarding at seven keys gave in and the blood erupted, staining his expensive brown sheets, the sheets of a well-paid diplomat. She felt pain and made a contorted grimace; he tried to console her by saying, “Oh querida, oh my baby. This will pass. This will get better.”
They slept well, feeling the night through a single uninterrupted sleep, sheltered by the love and passion, and the commitment of their promises to one another, promises sealed with the blood and waters shed during that first intense night of lovemaking. They woke up happy, consoled, rested. It was Saturday and no one had to go to work. He walked around the house naked with an easygoing demeanour that embarrassed Daria. Suddenly she felt ashamed of how she’d behaved last night. Again, her mother’s words came to her: “She has given it away to a stranger and she was not even married to him. He was a strange Black man from Africa, where my beloved son Alberto died, where they killed him, those animals. Oh God, Daria, you are the disgrace and the shame of this family!” She thought this, but then she said to herself that she no longer lived with her mother, that her mother was far away on the other side of
the Atlantic. Her mother was an old peasant woman who never left that village on top of the mountains, so she could not understand the world and all its beauty. She could not understand the love between a man and woman. She could not understand. Francisco asked her what she was thinking about and why she had put his shirt on, which on her looked like a long dress. Why did she feel that she had to cover her body? A body like that, he continued, which was so beautiful, full of caves, concave, the sacred abode that had made him the happiest man alive last night. She smiled and said nothing, only blushed. He noticed her shyness and went to her, giving her a kiss on the forehead. She liked that. She had always liked a kiss on the forehead given by a man. It made her feel that the man was not only after the rest of her body, that he saw her as a full human being, a being with a soul, a mind, and emotions—an endless circle that was connected to the entire universe. She also liked to be kissed on the back, slowly, while sitting between his legs, with her back to him. He sensed that, and so he placed her just like that, between his legs at the edge of the bed, and kissed her over and over again on her back. He kissed her gently, very gently, murmuring tender words like a father to a child, or a man to a woman, a woman whom he thinks he really loves and really, really wants. After this tender sensual ritual, he got aroused and tried to reach for the rest of her body again, but she said she was hurting, she was sore and needed to take a shower. Resigned, he said, “Sim querida, I understand.”