Daria Read online

  You tend to take everything as a personal attack, and you think the world is out to get you. Those are very clear symptoms of paranoid ideation mixed with borderline personality. Daria, I have to be honest, so I am calling the chestnut by its name. As a therapist, I don’t believe I should dance around the subject and use all kinds of euphemisms in order not to break the shell of an already broken egg—and this is, I believe, the reason you chose me as your therapist. You dislike, as I understand, those too Anglo-Saxon Canadians who never say what they mean and never mean what they say. You keep complaining that, because of that attitude, you can never forge rightful relationships with these people and that you feel you are always operating on a non-genuine level. That very operation, you say, prevents you—and them too—from attaining your potential as a human being. You also complain that these people, these types of Canadians, always end up by infecting the rest with their bad habits of extreme kindness and political correctness. You complain they can never handle negative emotion. For instance, if your voice shows you are upset and your words match that state of being and feeling, they say you are being unruly, too aggressive, and disrespectful. They say you must control your anger in order for any communication to take place. You say that type of behaviour is just bullshit—complete dung! In fact, it is quite the opposite, you say, because, and I quote you, “How can I be a full being if I am not allowed to express what bothers me? If I’m not allowed to show it with my own body, my own voice? How can I smile and maintain a low voice if my blood is boiling and my emotions are commanding me to express them, to release them? How can I do that? My thoughts and feelings cannot lie, should not lie to my voice!” You feel you would be lying to yourself, and you fear that the party listening to you would not understand the level and intensity of the concerns and feelings you are expressing and, as a result, wouldn’t do anything about it. You have concluded that because you don’t express that raw emotion—the emotion that is to be expected when something is wrong or when someone has done wrong by you—the other party will never address the wrong or really feel and understand you. She may nicely say she is very sorry that you feel that way and that she will change her behaviour to prevent the respective situation from re-occurring, but you feel that these are just words. You feel that if you don’t express your feelings about the matter with emotion, body gestural language, and intense direct words, the other person involved in the altercation will not be faced with the uncomfortable feeling that arises from that expression, and thus will never change, will never understand. She’ll just revert back to the same old bad habits shortly after—especially if the boss is not around and if she perceives you in a certain way because of your label as a departmental secretary. She knows that we live in a society that does not have to mean what it says; it only has to appear to be sincere and to speak with calmed nerves and tamed words. You add that because of all these fake, pretend-to-be-situations, you always suffer the consequences. You say that no meaningful, true exchange between human beings can actually take place.

  You also say that the reason you invented the phrase “Communicate deeply with yourself, others, and otherness”—and placed it in the signature of your personal email account—is to teach people the value of openness and true dialectical communication. You compare it to the women you see at the Y wearing T-shirts that say To be a feminist is to believe in the equality of the sexes. And here I must note that I don’t quite see the direct connection, Daria. But maybe I can’t read between the lines, and I don’t see the interconnection between everything like you do. You firmly believe that a good open fight, like dogs barking loudly at one another, is good for the soul—and that Canadians need to do that more often so that their full being can come to the surface and their soul and body can be cleansed. You express this conviction to your students at the university all the time with the hope that you will catch them young and teach them something about real communication. You feel that even at the Hospital of the Soul, where you currently work as a part-time departmental secretary, this non-confrontational way isn’t helping anyone. You call this attitude “walking around the egg” in order not to break it; this is your own saying that, in fact, deviates from the original “walking on eggshells.” You notice that if anyone—staff member or patient—screams or shows negative emotion, they are immediately sent to a workshop on how to manage aggressive behaviour or put under physical or chemical restraints, respectively. This should be basic knowledge, you add: the idea that humans need to vent, scream, cry, and run wildly sometimes in order to then recover energy and start the fight of life again—a fight that is as hard as hell and breaks you over and over again. You keep complaining that at the hospital, people who viscerally dislike each other never confront one other about their unpleasant feelings, especially if the one viscerally disliking is subordinated to the one being viscerally disliked in the hierarchical ladder. The CEO is a woman (finally, thank God!) named Simone Montgomery whom many people dislike. But they will always smile and say nice things to her because she is the big boss, makes over a million dollars, and is a medical doctor who specializes in neuro-psychopathology. She doesn’t have a PhD, but that does not really matter because she is a medical doctor and is therefore “clinical” and automatically awarded the category of superior. You continue, saying the staff only get rid of the patients’ urine smell, which has now spread throughout the entire hospital, when the CEO comes to the site because her office is not even in the same building as the patients. Her office is in a very nice off-site corporate space that smells like roses and geraniums and has colonial furniture. While it is extravagant by most standards, it is less opulent than the dwellings of the previous CEO, which, rumour had it, had been nicknamed “The Beautiful World” by some patients who had wandered off and found it.

  VASCO DA GAMA. You were abused by Vasco da Gama. Not the famous sailor who travelled to India, though both shared the name and the Indian connection. The first was the ingenious explorer and navigational entrepreneur who sailed to India in the very late 1400s, the very first European to do so. He made his journey at a time when Portugal was the proud king of Europe and was in the middle of its Golden Age. To this day, the country is still mourning and mourning the loss of this Golden Age, a fact that explains the country’s constant obsession with fado music and saudade, that deep, deep-seated nostalgia for what is gone and is very dearly missed. This Vasco da Gama sailed to India in search of Christians-to-be and spices. There he implanted his seed. Much later, the second Vasco da Gama, a product of that old half-millenary seed, the son of a Goan father and a Portuguese mother, emigrated to Canada with his high-class Lisbon wife to become a Portuguese-Indo-Canadian or perhaps an Indo-Portuguese-Canadian—it would all depend on the day and the convenience of the moment. This Vasco, this Vasco da Gama, who no doubt is related to the famed explorer—if only because he also initiated the connection between two countries and two continents—was, for a bad and brief time, your boss. And you were abused by him, this Vasco da Gama. You were young, very young, in body and mind; you thought the world was there to be taken by you, with both hands, like an offering from a god with a small g, that kind divinity that is not greedy and believes in the equality of all beings. The world was there to be taken—like a perfectly round and perfectly clear white or brown egg with no marks on its shell. You were young, you had come to Canada not very long ago, and you were all ready for this American dream. You had heard all about it through vague stories of the beautiful Marilyn Monroe and songs of freedom by various people who, like you, felt that life ought to be lived without constraints. They spoke of shaking off the shackles attached to their toes, to their souls, to their bodies by all kinds of harsh masters, from white plantation farmers to mean priests that keep preaching about a soulless God who is jealous and sees himself at the top of the pyramid, raging down on us uncontrollably.

  You became acquainted with these American dreams, first through the black-and-white images of a man landing on the moon,
which kept being played after the fact, long after the year you were born, on that tiny television that your mother bought with money she made from selling everything that she could, everything under the sun, from rabbits, to coal, to goat cheese, to sardines. (Yes, sardines. They made us who we are today, even though then it was believed sardines were the food of the poor. But god is kind. God is kind, so he made those little fishes full of vital vitamins for the brain to grow healthy, for the mind to become visionary and brave.) You had finally encountered this American dream. Even though you did not, at the time, understand that this dream you had come to was different from the American dream that you had forged in your mind. But it did not matter. What mattered was that you were coming to America, not Europe, like many in your family and in your village had done. You yourself had spent some months there. But you did not like Europe. Europe was old and full of ideas that you were trying to evade, ideas about class and social status, about peasants and non-peasants that you were trying to escape. Perhaps you were ashamed of your own parents, or perhaps you thought, deep inside, that there ought to be a place, a world, where those things do not matter, where you look at someone in the eye to measure their worth rather than at the clothes they are wearing, where it does not matter whether they speak with an accent from Lisbon or one from Viseu. And so you came. But after a while, and because you came under a restricted work permit—like the many thousands of Filipina women that we still keep seeing on the street pushing the strollers with the blond babies—you thought that freedom and the American dream, your American dream, were taking too long to happen, to show their smiling faces and embracing colours. You thought that. You thought and thought, and you decided, one more time, to take things into your own hands, things that were there to be taken by those brave enough to evade rigid destinies. And so you left. You left the children in Richmond Hill and ventured into the streets of Toronto by yourself. The mother of the children—she herself a woman from the village where you came from, who had already reached her Canadian dream, or so it seemed at the time, and who had brought you over—was quite angry at you. She was angry that you had the audacity to leave; you had no shame, she said, biting the hand that fed you like that, just like Vasco da Gama told you later on. She threatened to call Immigration to tell them that you were breaking the contract, that you were ungrateful for the opportunities this great country had given you. She was very angry, but then she calmed down and said, “Because of the long history between our parents in the old country, because they worked very hard all their lives and helped each other like brothers and sisters of the same tribe, recognizing themselves as beings from the same suffering clan who ought to extend a hand to one another, I am going to let this pass. I am going to let this pass, but when the contract is up, don’t think I am going to do anything else for you. You’ll have to find someone else to renew it because you are no longer my responsibility. And be careful. Toronto is not that big. Don’t think about going to the street corners there because we’ll know what you are doing.” And so it was.

  You left, Daria. Alone, scared but intent on trying again, trying to grasp that dream with your hand. After a while of working here and there, in cafés and cleaning houses for the friends of the friends you managed to make, you said you needed to become more than that, and you needed to do so quickly because you were young and impatient and wanted the dream now. You had the blood of a twenty-year-old running through your veins: that red liquid that runs upwards and downwards with the velocity of thunderbolts and makes you a danger to the world, like a hotel manager once told you in Portugal when you went to him to get a job for the summer. He told that to you while staring at your chest and your legs with shining glutinous eyes that made you run away and go beg somewhere else. You wanted to break free from that kind of work, being the maid for others, because you felt that was a label that you and your entire family back home had carried for long enough. You felt the responsibility to make the dream of your entire family visible. At first, you thought it might be better to leave, to go back home or to France, where your sister, who has bipolar I disorder, was already living. She was working like a maniac day and night to prove to herself, her mother, and the world that she could be more than the label, that she could in fact amass vast wealth. And she has indeed been able to amass considerable wealth, and yet she seems to remain unsatisfied, as if she still has not found what she is looking for—just like the beautiful song by U2. The song calls for more, more please, because this life has to be better, ought to feel better. We are all after this thing; we all pursue it incessantly, like mad wild wolves who do not know where their lover is and keep howling, howling into the wind only to hear back the echo of our own loneliness. You have a dog like that, back home. His name is Pastor. He is massive like a bull, and on long winter nights he goes out into the dark and freezing cold and howls to infinity. He wakes up the entire village, and they shout at him, wanting to quiet him down, but then when that does not work, they all join him in the chorus until they fall into exhaustion and finally go back to bed, sinking into something beautiful, something otherworldly.

  Yes, at first you thought you wanted to leave, that it may be better to go back home or to France where your sister was, cleaning houses from morning to night. You wanted to leave because you were lonely and scared. You were working illegally here and there instead of doing the nanny work your permit had indicated. It had clearly stated this was the only type of work you could do for two years before you could apply for an open permit and eventually get your citizenship—just like the many Filipina women who leave their own children and husbands at home to come here and make it all happen. You thought you wanted to leave, that it might be better to leave because Immigration could find you and send you back for breaking the contract. They could find you and make you feel like a real criminal, even though your only fault was wanting to leave, to work hard, so that the dream could realize itself and the label that you and your entire family had been carrying for so long would finally break down—diluted in the clear and pristine waters of the Great Lakes.

  But you did not leave. You did not leave because you felt it would be a failure. You thought about what your mother had had to endure all her life, and you realized that your plight was nothing compared to hers. You wanted the American dream, this American dream, and Europe still smelled like mould: old and stubborn, full of class and dress codes and perfumes, impregnating itself in every one of your cells—like a man who does not know that no means no and thinks he can buy young women who must work as maids. That’s exactly what a boss of yours once told you when you were only twelve and had breasts with nipples like red strawberries just before the spring. He said that as he put his sloppy fat hands on your chest: criada para todos os serviços. Just like Fernando Pessoa, the famed poet, as told by Saramago, conveyed to Lídia through his actions, for he was still blind, he was blind and in love with the other Lydia, a mere creation of another blind man, and could not see the pulsating beauty of the being that was in front of him: those hands that do so much, those breasts that keep you warm, those words that say what really matters and do not pay attention to the superficial gibberish that those who are attached to rank tend so often to display. When you see Strauss-Khan and Berlusconi on TV, your first reaction is to say PIG in big capital letters, as though you are delivering a verdict before hearing all the evidence. Your husband calls you on that, saying you are too judgmental, that you think all men are alike. But he does not know. He does not know everything, can never know everything. Because some secrets can be told only to the passing wind—that gentle breeze that cleanses and takes away dirt, leaving you feeling light, so light that you can fly, so empty of pain that the world suddenly reveals itself with astounding beauty. And you see god.

  ENDLESS SENTENCE. In days like these, I want you to read me in endless sentences, without punctuation marks, nothing between you and me, or the wind or the high tide that rises and bathes your eyes and mine, the shores of your being
mixing with the shores of mine like nothing ever existed between us, not even the two footprints left on the sand floor, nothing, nothing but soft untraceable encounters between two beings who have been in prolonged mourning, all-encompassing loneliness, and now accept the embrace that awaits us all when we go from here to the other side of the river, where Jesus or Buddha or Isis or Gioconda are, in pure expectance and with peaceful mysterious smiles and arms in the horizon to receive us in the single and only hug that there is for all of us. In days like these, I pray you put aside your grammatical logic and let us be in the infinity of the universe, floating between nothing, between things that do not have names and never will because they are far, far away from our language and our dictionaries and exist only in the blind between-the-lines like Clarice Lispector says, the only place where existence is in fact possible and does not cut you into pieces of a and b and c, where the letters form a rainbow that has no beginning and no end, for it is a circle, wide and vacuous like my throat when I open it up universally for you to see and stare in awe at the darkness of my insides. In days like these, all you can do is pray on your knees in the unassuming position of a lotus flower in the middle of a long white desert in a land with no name, no oil, no thirst, and no refugees, just like the free Libya, finally a beautiful woman without the shackles on her perfectly naked ankles, roaming the oasis in search of the gardens of the future. In days like these, I am barely breathing and walking, I fly above all and all is mine and yours, I am a thoroughly alive woman and I communicate with you using the infinity of my soul power, I call upon you using a mixture of tongues that are not Portuguese or English but possess the incantatory capacity to transmit the dark matter that exists in all of us—that fire that speaks without a tongue and creates logos on your body and mine, marking your hands’ intricate designs as if you were an Indian bride in pure expectation of the beautiful day. In days like these, I can easily dwell in that small space between the toes of goats or in that fresh cow dung, which I so miss here in Canada. I miss that fresh herbal scent that comes from the wombs of cows when they descend from the mountains at the end of the day to rest in peace for the night in the home next to yours, barns and homes joined in the dwelling castle. I think of animals and people living together, and remember the pigs who lived under your kitchen and whose smell came to you, strong and rotten from their feces, until one day their smell and their bodies would disappear because they would be killed with that long sharp knife that your father kept hidden from his children. They would be killed so that their blood could be used to make blood sausage, and you ate them like a cannibal who eats her own, only because you loved them so much and wanted to forever incorporate them into your self; their blood was your blood, our lonely self was now enlarged with the infinite, just like some tribes in the Amazonia who eat their own—or parts of them—when they die so they don’t die. They don’t die. Yes, because love is the ultimate embrace of us all. In days like these, there are no paragraphs, no commas, no stops, only long, unstoppable, unwounded sentences that go from here to where you are, from Egypt to Lebanon and then to the North and South Poles, magic currents of meaning that do not need linguists and semantics specialists to write, to catch a beautiful language. In days like these, what your Russian student writes makes the most astounding sense, for in her obscure language, there lives the wisdoms of all the celebrated Russian writers like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and the dark existential philosophy of pure profound life that searches for the uncanny and tries to evade the fiery tongues of fake communist leaders like Stalin. In days like these, you never dance alone, for in your steps you encounter the feathers of birds and the pollen of hydrangeas and get lost in their colours, which are so many and difficult to name using only the shades of the rainbow, extraordinary brightness(es) that one cannot but gasp to see. In days like these, you extend your forehead from Australia to Madrid so that Australia becomes a city and Madrid becomes a country down there at the end of the world, where once upon a time Aborigines were considered primitive beings who knew nothing but to hunt and eat flowers. As if that were not enough, as if that were not the whole point of living communally, as if that is not the whole point, the exact point where encounter between self, other, and otherness actually manifests itself in the most sublime sense. And then everything is roses. Roses and roses—and endless sky. In days like these, I chant poems to my grandmother and my darling friend Isabel and my father too. I pray a long rosary, Hail Mary after Hail Mary, Our Father after Our Father, and the Creed too, and then after a while everything is and is not—everything makes sense, the most sense of all, and I can sleep in peace and not be assaulted by what I could have done for them but did not do. In days like these, I see Toronto as the language capital of the world, not because there are over 150 languages spoken, languages that come from all the corners of the world, but because those languages have merged into English, making it less logical, less cold, and so much more profound—profound because it has in it the wisdoms of each language, the cadences, the hidden meanings, the open syllables, the un-ending vowels that make your mouth wide and your soul so much richer. It is then that I fully understand the awkward ways of Natalia, my Russian student. It is then that Jung’s collective unconscious manifests itself in my brain, revealing the Magna Carta of the universe in one sole blow—like a big bang of sorts—when “yes” became a reality, like Clarice says. It is at that point that I know I have a soul, which is much more than a brain with cells and corpus matter. It is a revelation—the revelation of the IQ. In days like these, there are no DSM compendiums that classify and reclassify the intangible, there is no HR that writes job descriptions that destroy the beautiful shoe made by the shoemaker in the Middle Ages with immense and concentrated love, there are no men or women, or wolves or birds, for we all join in the crimson orange that is each of us and scream the great scream. In days like these, I am pure. And there are translucent light rays emitting from the corners of my being, so great are they that they cross thick compact walls, breaking the solitude that you feel at night, the solitude that makes you cry often because you feel that all there is are darkness and unbreakable barriers, which you have put up in fear of bareness and connection with your true self. In days like these, I write myself through breathless sentences with nothing between to stop me so that I can find my true name. In days like these, I extend my bareness from here to where you are. In days like these, I am pure, colourless like the dawn of immemorial times. And perhaps, if you truly join me, this long sentence can become our liberation and the commencement of a beautiful love affair.