Daria Read online

Page 3


  YOUR FATHER DIED. My father died. He was eighty-seven years, two months, and five days old. You can’t tell the number of hours because he died on the other side where time is five hours ahead, which often makes you feel that you can never catch it and are always in between something. Something that is not the present, not the past, not the future but some other time, a time where all is confused into an entanglement of possibilities. You can see this confluence clearly in your mind, but when your hands extend themselves to grasp it, they quickly realize how difficult it is to find a palpable body, stumbling upon a bare nothingness that leaves you disconsolate and uncertain, submerged in a vacuum of sorts. Sometimes you get up early with the intention of calling your mother and speaking to her when she gets up in the early morning because you want to hear her voice, a voice that goes through the day displaying different cadences of happiness, different possibilities of being. You get up early with this intention and quickly dial the phone, and then when you first hear her you get confused because you are thinking that it is the morning and that her voice should sound a certain way. At first you think that the distance between the two of you and the time away from her have made it impossible for you to recognize her. You feel that you have lost her, that you have lost that connection that comes only with presence, and you get sad, very sad. But then you suddenly remember that the time is ahead there and you become calmer, thinking you still have that connection, that you can still detect the different tones of her voice, and that this was nothing but momentary confusion. And with that insight you recompose yourself to seem cheerful to your mother on the other end of the line. She always speaks very loudly on the phone because she truly believes that if one is far away from the other, some extra work on the vocal cords is necessary if communication is to take place. You recompose yourself and promise yourself that next time you call her you will get up at three o’clock, which will be exactly seven o’clock there. Then you will be able to capture that seven-o’clock voice, her precise state of mind and feeling at that time of the day. And indeed you do precisely that, but still you fail to feel like you remember feeling when you were there and would see her in the morning speaking in a low voice, slowly awakening to life, a life that had been very hard on her. You fail to feel like that, and then you say it’s likely because you yourself are speaking to her in the middle of the night, and are not, cannot, be in the same morning mood, in the same state of awareness that she is. You are desynchronized, and really there is nothing to do about that except imagine how things were and how they might now be.

  My father died two days after I came back to Canada. I could have stayed longer—should have stayed longer like my initial intuition was telling me—but then I discarded the idea as if afraid of trusting the non-logical too much. I was striving to be a woman of reason, perhaps influenced by the Canadian Anglo-Saxon ethic and aesthetic. I discarded it and left him there at the hospital after the second stroke when he could no longer speak and only his eyes could murmur through that shining, merciful, and pleading intensity they emitted. I silenced that initial intuition. I thought that maybe he was a man for life, as my mother had said, a man that would still have days and days to live. She had said that after she went to see him at the hospital, two days before he died. She had not been to visit him in a while. She came home and announced to all of us, “We have a man for life there. His cheeks are rosy, and he has that overall colour that gives off health.” And my mother’s words always carried weight in the house. She was the boss of the castle, the one wearing the pants. But my father died two days after, and then my mother said in a suffocating lament, “Oh Lord, that is not possible, for I just saw him and he looked so handsome and healthy. Oh Lord.” She said that, and then she did not say a word for the rest of the day, my older sister told me. She went into the back of the house to look in the old trunk and take out all her black clothes because she had now become a widow for life. She was a woman who had had ten children and only one man in her life and would not conceive of ever having another one. She would not want to be called a woman of the world like her mother had been. My grandmother had been a single mother with two little girls to raise alone. It was the 1920s, when things were tough and to give away that thing that you keep tightly hidden between your legs was the ultimate sin; it made you a condenada for life. Condemned for life. Later on we told mother that father had waited for her visit at the hospital—he had maintained his body alive in this world because he had been waiting for her visit—and that after she came and he had had the chance to say goodbye to the mother of his ten children, he was ready to go. She smiled and said maybe that was true and so it was a good thing that she had not gone to visit him earlier because had she done so, he would have died earlier.

  My father died two days after I came back to Canada. I could have stayed longer, should have stayed longer, but duty was calling me. And my mother, always afraid that I don’t have enough money and thinking that Canada is very far away from Portugal, said to me before I left, “If he dies soon you should not come back because it is very expensive and you were just here so there is no point. Don’t be stupid.” I thought to myself, this woman is very crude, very crude, always thinking about money, always putting money above love. She also still doesn’t seem to trust me, doesn’t seem to think I have now grown up and can live without her constant advice. She thinks I don’t know how to manage my finances. I screamed at her and said, “Listen to yourself! All you care about is money. Can’t you see how your husband, my father, is worth much more than that? Can’t you see that? If he dies, you call me; someone call me. Do you hear me? Do you hear me? I will never speak to you again if you bury my father without telling me.” And they did call me two days after I returned to Canada. My sister left me a message on my voicemail announcing it in a low voice. My father was tall and thin and good-looking. He never went to the dentist or brushed his teeth despite the fact that I tried to explain to him, on several occasions, the benefits of having healthy clean teeth and would bring him toothbrushes and toothpaste quite often. He would always say that he drinks clean, pure Lusitanian water from the central fountain—a fountain that has been there since even before the Celts came to the Iberian Peninsula—and that’s all he needs to cleanse his mouth and to live a long and healthy life. He loved to eat cod and pork sausages, and when my mother offered him sardines he would say that she did not know how to treat a man, that she thought that a man can eat like a woman and still be able to plough the earth and cut the hay from sunrise to sunset. He would say that she was lucky to have married him because if she had married other men in the village, like Mateus or Magnífico, she would have truly learned how to behave like a proper woman. My father loved the land and his cows to infinity. He would go to cow fairs frequently, and his cows would always be given the first prizes. This gave him great happiness, the greatest happiness, and earned him an equal amount of envy from the other villagers.

  My father was a peasant—not a landless peasant though, like Salazar and Saramago’s parents—and being a peasant was all he had ever wanted to be. I grew up hearing his and my mother’s stories about the trials they had endured to be able to buy all the land they had from their siblings or other family members. But they did it. They did it with lots of sacrifice. People would always trust them, often lending them money for the purpose, which they always paid back. They would often both list the several pieces of land they owned, naming each one by its specific name—just like my father did with the cows and my mother with the goats—and explaining exactly how they’d come to buy or inherit it, to whom it had belonged, the communal water that it had, and the days that that water was theirs. Sometimes they told stories of the many fights and altercations, verbal or physical, they’d had with other villagers because of this communal water. When I visit, I am eager to hear these stories again—now told only by my mother. She tends to be the better storyteller, many say, though I think my father had his own special ways of transmitting poetry and emoti
on, often using fewer words but injecting them with the wisdom of the old ways. This land that they owned, lost up there in the mountains, is now divided among their nine living children, making me an owner too. It is not worth much. It’s mostly subsistence farming and was always so, but for them, for my parents, this land was all they had and it meant the world. It made them proud. It gave them corn and beans and wine and all they needed to feed themselves and their children. And it was theirs, earned through a lot of work at a time when having land was a mark of being rich and powerful and important—and mostly, self-sufficient. It meant something to be a peasant with land, a componês of means. Some means at least, for the land was harsh and difficult to penetrate, full of rocks. It was a collection of tiny little pieces lost in the slopes of hills, mountains, and narrow valleys, and it did not easily open its womb to the wishes of the villagers. But through the will of love and need, they managed to pull from there bread for their abundant offspring—boys and girls created in the long wintry night after the rosary prayers. Today most of this land is abandoned and most of the youngsters have run away. If they stay, they buy their food mostly at the supermarkets. Only the elderly people, who are slowly disappearing and who represent a different way of life, still cultivate a piece of land or two, or as much as they can—to maintain their reason for living, to keep their dignity alive. My eighty-two-year-old mother, stubborn as a mule, still has a goat and still makes cheese to sell to the judges in town, even though she now needs a permit, which she refuses to get. She has been arrested by the police for doing what she has always done to feed her children. One day, as she was walking in town with her tabuleira on her head as usual, an officer asked her to show him her ID. She said spitefully, “I do not have it,” and when asked where she was from, she stated, “I am from the earth and the sky.” She was taken to the police station for her insolence. A few months later, when she went to see the judge to pay the fine, she told the judge, “Madame Justice, this is not the last time I will be selling cheese on the street. I have been doing this for over forty years, and you yourself have bought cheese from me on many occasions.” The judge said, “I know, I know, Dona Alzira. I know, and I must admit that I really like your cheese, but things have changed, and now you must be careful.”

  My father was a proud peasant who loved his land. He loved getting up early, in the midst of that fresh air of the morning, to go feed his animals. The cows would moo when they heard his voice. They would moo very gently like sisters who knew their brother well or daughters who were happy to hear their father’s song. My father had a third-grade education only, which was significant for a man of his age. My grandmother, his mother, became a widow at the age of twenty-seven and was left with five boys to feed and educate. Her husband died of pneumonia; in those days there was no cure, and the few hospitals in the region were far away from the mountains. My father knew the letters of the alphabet, he could read and write, and he could sign his name. He knew the letters, the numbers, and some history, which he would occasionally recite when we were sitting by the fireplace. It may very well have been these recitations that made me want to study and read, read a lot. He also knew a lot of proverbs. When I was enthusiastically telling him something that I had read about, he would say, “Books suffer what people put in them.” When I told him the earth is the one revolving around the sun and not the other way around, like he believed, he shook his head and said, “Nah that can’t be. Books suffer what people put in them. Tomorrow I want you to spend your day looking at the movement of the sun from dawn to dusk. I want you to do that so that you can stop talking and reading nonsense.”