Daria Read online

  My father died on July 2. He was born on April 27, which made him a Taurus, a man of the earth who liked earthly pleasures. For a long time, all my boyfriends were Taurus. Some said it was my father in them that attracted me to them—that girls will always do that, go for the father-like figure. I told them they had been reading too much Freud who is a patriarch of first order and thinks that my clitoris is envious of the other clitorises. He, my father, died just after I’d published my first book in Portugal, a book dedicated to him and to Isabel: “To father Adelino, who lives dwelling between memory and the memory of non-memory, and to Isabel, who simply dwells in the movement that is proper of true memory.” I don’t know if this makes sense translated into English or if it even makes sense in Portuguese, but it makes sense to me and it helps me see them, my father and Isabel, as parts of me—entities that are not really gone but rather keep living somewhere in my chest or my forehead or my little toe. I could not read the dedication at the funeral. It was my brother-in-law—the one who is a Portuguese high school teacher who went to the seminary and then gave up on the idea of finding God through those means—who read this dedication while I was crying and crying. I was looking both at my father’s coffin sinking down in the earth and at my friend Isabel’s marble tombstone that stood at its side—making them eternal neighbours, friends in the afterlife. Isabel had died five years earlier, and I did not go to her funeral even though she and I were best friends, even though she and I had spent our childhood playing in the mountains of Caramulo while keeping the goats. Playing and inventing beauty—we would make it fresh, from scratch, with wild daffodils, wild carnations, and those little blue flowers that grow in humid hidden spaces, so discreet and profoundly gorgeous.

  Isabel died very young. I had a dream about her the night before she died, which I captured in a poem that I wrote somewhere. I had a dream of her in white, with the priest, Padre Lévito, chasing after her. They were in a church that was full of people all working with the priest, and everyone was trying to grab this noiva em branco para Deus, this bride dressed in white for God. But she eluded them. I saw her escape through the church’s wide and heavy wooden door that only a goddess could move. I saw her escape and walk into the serene plains of hay and then slowly ascend to the mountains where we played as children—like a child angel in white, flying in beauty, happily leaving this world. In this dream, I felt for a second or two as if I too were dying; I felt that affliction and that inability to breathe when they were all chasing Isabel and trying to grab her. And then I also felt the release when the large church door opened and the wide plain field revealed itself to her. It was as if she and I, Isabel and I, were both dying, dying and then really living. It was like a circle of love. When I went to Portugal last year I shared this dream with Isabel’s sister, Lucinda, and she told me that the day before Isabel died, her mother went to visit her at the hospital. She had already sensed the end of her daughter’s body, and the breaking of her dark, thick, lush hair. She asked her in a careful voice, hiding her own mourning, “My darling daughter, how are you feeling today? What did you dream about last night?” When Isabel spoke, her voice was prolonged and tonal, exhibiting that singing, swaying, and lamenting quality that only those who are near the end can display, and that can be revealed only through the open, endless vowels of the Portuguese language that make time immemorial. She said, “Oh mãe, I dreamed I was in this place, this place where there were lots and lots of people, muita, muita gente, lots and lots of people, all around me, all around me, and I wanted to be free.” When I heard that I said, “I was there with her. It was the last time I saw her.” And then I remembered, like I do now, that the last time I actually saw her was in August, three months before she died. I had helped her put her thick black hair in a ponytail because she was already feeling weak and could not lift her arms up high. At the time she had no clear diagnosis and was at home. It turned out that she had been misdiagnosed pretty much the entire time. It was only a week before she died that they said she had Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. They attempted chemotherapy then, but it was to no avail for her insides were all damaged and she could no longer say yes. I told the family that they ought to sue the hospital and her family doctor. Isabel had been complaining to her doctor for years and years, only to hear that she was not well in the head and was imagining the whole thing. The doctor believed that she could not know her own body because she was a single woman of thirty-six, who was still a virgin who had not yet encountered a man. The truth is that she had encountered many men, but not a real man or a real doctor. As if a woman does not know, cannot know, when her body is hurting and telling her that there is something going on, something going on…

  When she could not endure the pain any longer, she finally went to a specialist who told her to go to the hospital immediately. She did go immediately, but they screwed up too and did not diagnose her properly. And so she’d died just like that at the end of her thirty-sixth year, na flor da idade, at the flower of the age, as my mother says. Her mother, Piedade, a fervent Catholic before her daughter’s untimely death—she used to sponsor twenty-four masses a year for her dead mother, ever since she’d died twenty-five years earlier, and pay ten euros to Padre Lévito for each one—has never stepped into a church since. She rages and rages against God. When I go there, I cannot go see her or even run into her. I was her daughter’s best friend and we were the same age, and when she sees me—which happened once—she breaks into an endless lamenting scream that goes on for weeks on end, causing the entire village to become immersed into an abysmal melancholia that only fades when Piedade is taken to the hospital to be medicated into a state of non-cognizance, forgetting everything and everyone. When Lucinda is around—which is not always because she married a French man and lives in Marseille—and the mother is not at home, I visit Isabel’s room to see all the photos she has there, photos of us when we were young and beautiful and believed in fairy tales, when we often stayed up all night dreaming up the perfect man. The mother, like many do in these circumstances, refuses to touch her room; she is still hanging on to the idea that Isabel is alive in the dead cells that she left spread on the floor among all the other dirt that time collects. My mother, who tends to be less emotional and more pragmatic, says that Piedade is crazy and needs to stop the crying and the hysteria. She says she needs to go on with her life, for she is not the only mother in the world to lose a child. Many more have had the same fate and they don’t just keep blaming God for it—they get up and go do things even if they have that constant black cloud weighing down their chest. When I hear my mother say this, I think that she is a woman of action and resolute expedience, for it is indeed true that many mothers have lost their children and, some would argue, in much more dire circumstances—like those women in Somalia who carry their children on their arms for hours and hours under the scorching sun of the horn of Africa, only to bring them to the overcrowded camps in Kenya and find out it is too late, for the limbs and the eyes of their children have stopped living among us. They have slowly slipped into the other side, where surely the body won’t hurt so much and some sort of god must live, one that gives bread, equally, to the orphans of the universe.

  THE SIGNS. Vasco da Gama is the executive director of the Lusitanian Social Service Centre. In his CV he says he has a soft spot for the underdogs and that’s why he is running the centre, to help disadvantaged Lusitanians or other speakers of the Lusitanian language. Rumour has it, however, that he took this job only because he could not pass the bar exam in Canada even with a law degree from England, a country that also follows common law. And it would make sense to believe this rumour because, despite the fact that he openly proclaims his love for and interest in the underdog, he only employs women at the centre and often refers to the Portuguese community as a bunch of ignoramuses who cannot even read and write properly, if in fact they know how to read and write at all. When she thinks about him using the word “underdog,” she laughs because when she firs
t heard it, it came to her as an insult—like he was comparing people to dogs, or even suggesting that people were less than dogs. Even though she had always been very fond of those loving animals, her intuition, that fine intelligence that tells you to see things in its own way, was slowly but keenly informing her that he, this man, may not be what he seemed to be after all. But she dismissed her intuition, thinking that a man of his stature, his education, and his age ought to be wise and kind. She told herself that she was likely being irrational, and that she ought to follow that straight Anglo-Saxon logic now that she was in Canada. Other signs would come later that would tell her that that first intuition, that little voice stirring somewhere down there, was in fact very well founded. Also, at the time, her knowledge of the English language, though strong, was still insufficient for catching certain subtleties that only a savvy and experienced speaker could grasp. For instance, she sometimes would make the mistake of taking words and phrases literally, thinking that the parts that composed a word or a sentence created a specific, matter-of-fact meaning. Take for example, the saying “chicken soup for the soul,” which she first heard on The Oprah Winfrey Show. She took it to literally mean that if one eats chicken soup, one cures spiritual wounds. And she actually put this into practice. On a particular day, when she was feeling profoundly desperate in body and soul, she ate nothing but chicken soup. When that did not appease her pains, she bathed herself in it, the result being that she smelled like chicken for an entire week. It was as if her cells had been transmuted into those of this now-dead bird, making people on the street move away from her and causing her to feel worse than she had at the beginning of the uncanny attempted remedy.

  She had a similar experience when she went to Subway, the sandwich store, and asked for TTC tokens. She was convinced that if the place is called Subway and if it sells things, it ought to sell tokens that allow you to ride the subway and all the other affiliated transit systems. But she was wrong. She went inside and said timidly, trying to speak in an accent-less voice, as newcomers often do, “Can I have five tokens pleaaase?” The store clerk, a chubby well-dispositioned fellow who looked South Asian—though she was likely wrong about this because, as she later came to realize, people in this new country may look like they are from one very particular place when they are in fact from another—had a good laugh at her. This incident was very much like the case of the word “underdog,” which she also naïvely translated to mean a dog being superior to a person. Though this interpretation made some sense, the matter was much more complicated than that; there is always more than meets the eye. Only experience in the language, the city, and its people would teach her that things are not always what they seem. Only experience and time would teach her. And then there was that incident that took place when she was working at a restaurant on College Street. Most of the patrons were of Italian and Portuguese descent, and several were also drug dealers. When she asked one customer what he would like for lunch, he said to her, “I would like you.” She replied quickly and without any hesitation, “I am not on sale.” He looked at her and smiled that Southern European smile, revealing white teeth. She noticed that he had dark, long eyelashes and a complexion to die for, and she trembled with both expectation and embarrassment. She wished she could hide herself under the ground, just like when she was in Portugal and had to pass by construction sites and men would say dirty things to her, commenting on how she had curves that could make a man dizzy and cause a dangerous road accident, how her behind was as divine as wine, and how they wished they had a good enough truck to carry such a precious asset. Then she realized, her pride a little wounded, that she should have said, “I am not for sale.” Still, she thought that what she had said made complete sense. When she went back to his table to give him his change back, she directly placed the change on his hand because she thought it was more polite to do so. As she did that, he took the opportunity to tickle her palm with his savvy moving fingers. She felt her body shiver, and even though it felt like he had been inappropriate, it did not bother her because her body was touched. This incident then resulted in an intense short-lived love affair, the first she had ever had. Every time she listened to his voice, she felt she was going to die, and die happy. Despite the intensity of her emotions and the screams of her body for his complete, deep touch, she refused to go all the way with him, for she still believed in fairy tales and wanted to give it to someone who fully understood, appreciated, and knew what it meant. Not to mention she had taken to heart her mother’s constant credo, repeated often as she was growing up and still quite present in her mind, even though she was now far away from the source: “I do not want any whores in my house. You keep your legs tightly shut, and if they come to you, you kick them right in between the legs with all the force that you have.” And then it turned out that he was a drug dealer, and she decided that she could no longer go on with this connection. He tried to convince her that he did not sell drugs to little kids, but she didn’t think this was a sufficiently convincing argument because even if he only sold to adults, those adults could very well sell to children, and his innocence would end there. He still argued the matter from another angle by saying she did not know how hard the life of a man in this country could be, especially a son of immigrants. His parents had failed to achieve the American-Canadian dream themselves and had deposited all their frustrations on the shoulders of their eldest son, wanting him to become a doctor or a lawyer because nothing else is good enough. Everyone knows that doctors and lawyers are the ones who command the world and earn the proper respect. He claimed she did not know how it feels to work in construction at the height of the Canadian winter until your hands get raw and start bleeding. She did not know how hard the life of a man could be, and she acted like a princess who thought she was better than everyone else, a princess who had had it easy all her life. She would say, “Well at least you grew up in this country. There were jobs anywhere you turned if you really wanted to work, and you could have gone to university. You still can. I grew up in the old country and had to almost beg to get a summer job here and there, where I would have to work fifteen-hour days, seven days a week. I have done this every summer since I was twelve years old. Not to mention that I had to stay away from the sloppy hands of my bosses and their sons who thought I was part of the deal. And then I also went to France for a few summers to clean old ladies’ behinds and take care of all their needs, like many Portuguese women do. In fact, if it weren’t for these hardworking Portuguese women, many more people would have died during that fateful summer of last year in Paris when there was a ferocious heat wave. Thousands of French elderly people perished because their family members didn’t feel they had to take care of their own old blood and vehemently defended the philosophy of individualism—claiming we are born alone and will die alone. Instead of caring for their elderly parents, they were enjoying the coolness of their maison à la campagne or the refreshing beaches of Greece and Portugal, the poorer Southern European counterparts, and paying very little for their pleasures. In fact, some say this is reason enough to keep Europe together, that that is what keeps the European Union going, while others say precisely the opposite. They say the EU will not work in the long run, for you have countries with very different cultural habits and economic advancement put together, countries who cannot possibly see eye to eye. At this point he would become impatient with her and would start saying that she was mixing everything up, mixing apples and roses, that she had been reading too many books on philosophy and economics and was not making much sense.

  Daria did indeed think that “underdog” was a rude word for a man to use in his CV, especially a man like Vasco da Gama. It seemed like a crude, insensitive word. Later on he would tell her that she was too repressed, like a Catholic virgin, and that that is why she became damaged by every little thing. She had left the nanny work some time ago, and she lived in fear of getting caught by the immigration officials. She had been working here and there, in cafés and restaur
ants, and she felt like she was not going anywhere. She was still attached to blue-collar jobs, as if being a maid for all services was her only destiny. She was waiting and waiting for her open work permit, which was delayed—the immigration officials kept telling her—because they were overworked and had a great backlog. And so she was waiting. But she wanted the American dream, this American dream, to manifest itself, and so she took things into her own hands again. She was impatient and had the young blood of a girl in her twenties running through her veins, up and down, incessantly reminding her that time does not wait, that we have to grasp it firmly in our hands.

  IN THE INTERVALS OF A LIFETIME. You came to me at a time when I was dying to love, dying to taste the solace that can come when two souls meet completely and the world stops for a beautiful eternity. I was dying for that unparalleled illusion that one ought not to deprive oneself from, even if one has been hurt before by the many bad characters that walk on the surface of this world. You came to me at a time when my entire being craved intimacy, that closeness that makes you forget the borders of your own body and the loneliness of your soul. It makes you feel as if the sea that you are is suddenly visible and you have found the eternal swim, where your limbs and all your pores taste the love of god through the salt that tempers the universe, making it the hospitable house that we all need to find true meaning in our lives.

  I sit alone at the Frankfurt airport, always in transit as if constantly trying to find my way home, the node of my eternal soul. I see them kissing, and I imagine what I am missing with you. I sink into melancholia, deep down, into a space of non-belief. I am a well that cries endlessly, a rainy day that does not stop watering the earth. I see the couple playing lovingly with the blond little girl full of curls. The father teases her and teaches her words in a language that I cannot understand even though I attune my ear to its sounds. I write a poem while waiting for the connecting flight to Toronto, the place that I have made my home even though the coldness of the climate sometimes reaches the marrow of my bones. The cold forces me to go to eHarmony to find harmonious words that soothe all my limbs and make me believe again—believe that the dream is still there to catch and that the stunning man will come to me easily, called through magnetic cybernetic pulsing waves that do not deceive and mystically know how love is to be found.