Daria Read online

  I see the smiles of the passengers through the poem that I write. They, the smiles, the people, do not seem real; or if they are real, they do not enter my core. Instead they leave me stranded at an airport eternally, like a child with no parents and no country. The poem that I write is about my father’s death. He was eighty-seven years, two months, and five days old. I cannot name the hours. He was that old when he decided to no longer resist the promise that death brings. His legs could no longer move, so thin were they. I still spoke to him when he barely emitted sounds; his mind had been slowed by blood clots formed in the heart, which then travelled to the brain, that house of memory, of memories, like the doctor told me on the phone. I showed him the book that I wrote in our language, Habitando na metáfora do tempo (Dwelling in the Metaphor of Time), and I told him that I wrote it for us. I wrote it to remember love stories that we never told one another in open words because our household, commanded by Mother, saw loving language as weakness. In our house, love and tenderness were transmitted through harsh Portuguese words that only the insiders could understand. But love does indeed come in many forms. I told him that this book was written for us, to house the stories that we knew we felt. I told him love that could be heard in the silence of our meetings, or in his facial expressions when he looked at me, or in that phrase he said to me when my sister and I had a ferocious fight: “We forget everything. Everything passes, washed away by the weight of time and the weakness of our solitude.” The fight had erupted because I’d threatened to call the social services on her. She was in one of those dark moods of her illness and was beating up her six-year-old daughter, Ana, with a long wood stick. After my father spoke, my sister replied, “I don’t know if this will ever pass. This will never pass. This is serious, very serious, to threaten to take my child away from me. She has no shame, no respect for blood ties. She is a dishonourable cunt walking freely through the world.” And then she and I did not speak for an entire year. It was just like what had happened between mother and me when I was twenty years old. She spent an entire day calling me names because I was wearing a skirt above the knee, because I went to a party and came back in a car with a boy she did not know. It was only because I was beautiful, and men, young and old, kept wanting to smell my scent up close, even though I always said no. I too, had a dream, a dream that was different from my mother’s. I did not want to be tied down, not yet, not with them, not there. I wanted to go away and find another world, other men, another type of life that I could call my own, where I could be free, where I could be clean, cleansed, and walk under a dancing abode without bad names pulling me to the dirt. But she kept calling me names, bad names, names that would spoil this diary. I do not wish to repeat them, for my intention is to talk about love: love and my father, and the other love too, the one that never came to be.

  I am at the hospital trying to speak to him, my dying father, trying to love him, read him my love, a love that feels guilty for going away and leaving him anchored in his old ways on top of that mountain. It is a love that promises more than it gives, always leaving one feeling that the thing, the reason why we are here, has not yet been found; it is delayed and then delayed again, like a vengeful ad infinitum, a fatalistic logic of some illogical religion where God with the capital “G” is the commander-in-chief. Love, that thing that could be, is in truth the only fundamental reason for life. He, my dying father, looks at me. He is sitting in the chair where the nurses had put him, with his eyes open and shiny as if his soul had all travelled there. It is as if his eyes are announcing the approaching moment of truth, one that we will all face; no one can take your turn, nothing can buy you out—not the tie, not the millions, not the mansion, not the servants all at your service. I ask him questions to revive his mind a little and to get some assurance that he is still there in some way: “What was the name of your mother? How many brothers do you have? Who lent you money to buy the lands from your American uncle? Who found your wallet at the annual cow fair of São Pedro do Sul? How many cows did you have when you were the most affluent farmer of Almores?” I ask him these and other simple questions, and he mumbles some answers. His lips have been almost paralyzed by the last stroke, when another clot travelled from his heart and installed itself in a vein somewhere in his brain, not wanting to move—a tired old mule the owner can no longer command. I feed him through his mouth, spoon by spoon, giving him an unsavoury pulpy mass. It is the same food we give babies before their teeth grow and they learn how to grasp the flavours of life with certainty and greediness. He eats, little by little, even though he mumbles sounds of protest because his throat has been affected and swallowing has become very painful. It is an act that he does not remember how to perform. They had put him on a tube a few days ago, but I insist that his throat can learn again how to swallow food. I poetically protest that a man cannot live when he is being given food like this, as if he were a chicken in a factory being fed tasteless mashed stuff instead of running free in the fields looking for soul food. The nurse smiles and asks me if I am his only daughter. I say, “No, there are four of us.” She says that the reason why she asks is because he responds very well to me. I smile, happy that I am seen as special by a nurse who does not know the dynamics of our large family.

  A man lies beside my father, a man much younger than my father who was caught like that in the spring of his life, and who, like my two brothers, went to the colonial wars in Africa, as revealed by the tattooed blue numbers on his uncovered arm. His wife asks me if I am my father’s granddaughter. I smile, happy about the confusion, and think that it must be the gentle Canadian sun that keeps me fresh and young-looking. Men also still call me Menina when I am in this country, though the other day one said, “Should I call you Menina or Senhora?” Likely he was wise in matters related to age and women, or perhaps he had travelled abroad and knew that women in other countries can fool your eye with cosmetic enhancements. The lady says that I look very young so my father must have had me when he was already a very mature man. “Oh, I am not that young,” I say, telling her my age, adding that it must be the long Canadian winters sheltering my skin from the rays of the sun and the ease of life in that country. I don’t tell her I have bad habits and deep irrational insecurities about becoming old and not being able to find a beautiful man while I still can. I don’t tell her that I spend thousands of dollars to tame my body into order and smooth my wrinkles so that I don’t become deformed prematurely by the natural and unkind processes of life like my mother, who carries her large arthritic and varicose vein–ridden body around like a dinosaur. I add that the Portuguese sun and the harshness of life in this country are too brutal and that the light in Canada is less blinding to our eyes, keeping us looking younger. Sometimes, however, that gentler light can cause deep-seated depression and make people take their own lives by jumping in front of fast-running trains, their bodies suddenly ceasing to be. I added this last part as if to tell her that there isn’t much difference between Portugal and Canada, for everywhere people die. And pain is pain.

  I am at the airport again. This time it’s Gatwick, in England. It’s Christmastime, and I left Toronto to be with my mother who is a widow for the first time at Christmas. I sit at the café called Costa—not Costa Rica, just Costa. I hear people mumbling words and beautiful dreams in different languages. Some are English, many are continental Europeans, and some come from India and faraway African countries. The plane that I took from Toronto, an Air Canada flight, has a service director who reminded me of you even though he was white. I kept looking at his name tag—“Barry White”—and I thought of you working this very shift. I thought about how polite you might have been with people and how perhaps you would have felt embarrassed if we had run into one another under these circumstances. Or maybe you would have come up with the jokes that you use all the time to hide yourself, or your pain, or something else that I never had time to figure out—assuming that I could ever do that, figure you out, that is, even if I had all the time
with you in this world. I thought about how hard you work and have worked all your life, how you must have been so exhausted sometimes, flying by night and going to school by day to earn another degree, to learn how to take care of the bodies and bones of tired people. I imagine your hands, long and slender and black, touching those bodies, healing them to the core; and then I imagine them touching me, all over my starved being, which has not been close to another body in a very long time, a very long time, avoiding as it was the pains that always come after the beautiful unparalleled illusion that falling in love is. But your hands never did touch my starved being. We never got close enough for that. At least not in reality. If you had read the poems that I wrote about us, the imaginary us, you might have laughed; or perhaps, I kept thinking, you would not have disappeared before we could really know one another; or you would come back so that we could really start—at exactly the right point. If you had read the poems that I wrote about us, the imaginary us, perhaps you would not have left me hanging like a bride that never was, a bride only deluded by the hunger she had been experiencing for a long time, one hundred years of solitude, which had forced her to go and search for love in the magnetic cybernetic pulsing waves where your photo and your words were stunning, absolutely stunning. I kept thinking these things, these thoughts. But perhaps I have been alone for so long I no longer can distinguish curiosity from pure awe. My friends tell me I can’t go fully into these things, I can’t fall for a man I met only a couple of times and with whom I had not much more than a dozen conversations. My friends keep telling me that, that I must stay cool while using this electronic harmony dating thing where lonely people search for soulmates. I must be careful because sometimes people play games, games that they themselves do not understand or even know they are playing. Meanwhile, we are all so alone, so alone, and we keep waiting and waiting, waiting for the beautiful idea to manifest itself—like a Mandela of sorts, imprisoned in a lonely cell, on the island, nurturing that which is in fact fundamental for life to be called life. And I keep sitting at airports, solitary, alone, imagining how beautiful things could happen, how truly beautiful love must be possible, has to be possible in this world of so many human disencounters.

  But he stopped calling, not even a word, and I am left hanging, trying to reconstruct a story that never fully was, trying to see if its denouement could have been fully realized, clarified, explained, or if destiny made it happen this way on purpose for me to learn, for him to learn. Perhaps you were not just into me, like I wanted you to be, like I needed you to be, like you thought you would be. Perhaps it is as simple as that, and so I must continue my search, the journey that I have barely just started, for I have been hiding in the cave for ten long years, hiding from the disenchanted beings, the bad characters, who have spat on my body. I have been hiding like a scared virgin who is afraid of the roughness of true lovemaking. It is cold now, and I must go. My flight to Porto is here. Soon I will see my newly widowed mother with her big swollen body and the veins on her legs on the verge of bursting. I will touch her, and in that very act perhaps I will feel the love of my own blood. Perhaps I will be reminded that I was not born to give birth to boys and girls and repeat that cycle of blood and plasma wounds.

  I am returning now, going back already. The time was so short. Duty calls me again, and I leave my mother behind, like I did my father just two days before he died. I left him at that hospital bed, alone and naked, and I ran away to earn a living. Now I sit here again, eternally waiting, as we do for our whole lives. The city is London and the airport is Heathrow. The murmurs in the air bring me the scent of many people. I hear the familiar voice of Brazil, recognizing the lazy syllables of Adriana Calcanhoto—sounds that go on forever as if language were trying to really grasp meaning and avoid silence. And then comes Spain, or its old empire, in a voice that I cannot name. Is it jazz? The world is no longer like before. We are everywhere at the same time and yet feel as lonely as ever, searching for a unity of time and space that never seems to come. And so we keep going and going, like wounded animals, forever yearning.

  ANOTHER TRANSCRIPTION. Today during your shift at the hospital, you had to hear another long speech from the mouth, mind, and soul of someone who wants to escape the walls of the hospital. You hear him and think, my good God, this man needs help, please deliver him from the sorrows that inhabit his nights and days, open the heavy wooden door like you did for Isabel, and let him live. Let him be among birds in the garden with sun and pathways of deliverance. Let him be part of the dance of snowflakes that the stunning Canadian winters bring, the dance that makes the world feel equal and transforms all of us into little brothers and sisters. You have to transcribe his speech word for word so that the doctors can see clearly what he needs and confirm, one more time, the diagnosis. Once again, they refuse to grant him the freedom dance that he craves and has been craving for the last twenty-five years since he got here. All this because of a misunderstanding between him and the society where he lives, a misunderstanding that robbed him of his life, his right to stretch his limbs outside under the oxygen that the sky gives to all of us equally like a father that loves all his children, whether they are in Africa or Europe or Asia. Though lately we have heard that humans have created holes in the atmosphere that are depriving some people in Russia and Africa of the pure air they need to go on. Instead these people are inhaling poison that kills their lungs. You have to transcribe word for word, gasp for gasp, trying to catch profoundly mystical metaphors, where dyslexia of mind and body join, entangled in all the truths of the world, creating aphasia, beautiful in meaning, the true language, which only the super-mind, unhabituated to simple logical words, could comprehend—a mind of an advanced future or a sublime past that we have lost somewhere, somehow. No one seems to know who is to blame. We accuse one another and go outside to protest against Wall Street and Bay Street, like guilty mobs pretending to be innocent; but deep down, we all know. We are guilty for the state of things. We know that in order to re-invent life and give bread to the children of Somalia, we have to kill ourselves and start from scratch. We have to sell our cars, our boats, and become acquainted with the nothingness of life. Perhaps in that moment of bareness and lucidity, we can find another way of life that will be the true communism that father Marx dreamed of.

  But you have to transcribe him (Mackenzie) accurately and according to the limited capacities of a supposedly normal being. You need to be accurate so that your mind does not become his and vice versa. You also don’t want to confuse the doctors, as this could be grounds for a lawsuit against you and the hospital. Not to mention you could be the cause of his misdiagnosis and spend the rest of your life feeling guilty because you kept this man in prison for longer than necessary, preventing him from tasting the sun and feeling the wet sand under his feet on a day when it is just good to walk outside. You attune your mind, your body, and your deeper self, preparing your being to understand his plea. Then you send his message to the doctors, who have the power to deliver him or to keep him. You wish you could lie and fabricate his story so that it would make more sense, and then they—the powerful doctors who are well versed in DSM compendiums and have read articles by other doctors from all over the world—could send him outside. He could sleep one more time under the stars of a summer night, or merely kiss his mother. She is now eighty-nine and has not seen him in ages—except that time when he was brought to visit her, but he was all in shackles. Looking at him then, she could not really see him as her son, a free boy of four dancing happily, like only children do, by the shores of Lake Ontario. She remembered that it had been a spring day—when greenery and transparency and light merge to create the incredible, the incendiary—and she had looked at him and thought, He is fucking beautiful, fucking beautiful, and if I were to die today, if I were to close my eyes for eternity, I would not be mad at God, for my purpose on this earth would have been achieved.

  I am Martin Luther King from 3-5, here at the hospital on Slight Stre
et, I have been here for twenty-five years, I have this doctor who is really a bad lot, hanging around with demons on the wall who dress in white, red, and green, all of them making faces and saying that I deserve to stay here, they abuse her and then she abuses me but there is no master that lets me be abused, I call corporate lawyers and they all say there is no mantra to keep me here at Slight Street, I have a case, strong lawsuit against the hospital, I have billions, millions of dollars assured by your incompetence, the judge says there is no case, there is no reason in this unreason of yours, how you keep calling the board on me, I was paying my bills and then the police stopped me and asked me my name, I did not want to give the name, the name is mine, I don’t have a name but the name that you give me, on nights like this I dream of marked forests and unmarked graves and I am swinging between them, caught only by the force of gravity and the grace of Snow White, my mother holding the line of my vision before the demon came and took me away to the other side of the river, where there is no lack of pain and I see men in knives trying to drink your blood, I see them often on the walls of this hospital too, them again trying to make me a prisoner like they did then, I see them faded in others and green like the leprechauns, the police say I must take off my jacket, I don’t have any money, I pay my bills, I turn around and I do what I’m supposed to do, I turn around and do things right, I am competent, I turn around and turn off the light, I put my blanket up to my face to keep the cold off and I say goodnight before I go, I have a case, there is no case you have against me, the lawyers have stated it very clearly, you have imprisoned me without charges, I have millions of billions to be made, I’ll sue the hospital, I have billions of millions to be made, it is a sure case, absolutely supported by the condition of the patient, I cannot see the sun or the birds, my eyes are like closed stars that have stopped believing and emitting light, my feet have sores that signal the lack of vitamin D and my tongue is nauseated with the food that you serve me, your nurses treat me like an imbecile who does not know what the word “good” means, I know things, I am smart, I do things right like I am told to do, I don’t deserve to be here, my mother is dying and I have not seen her or been with her, my mamma is dying and I am dying, God please open the doors and let me fly above the city buildings and become acquainted with the true beautiful angels like I used to do when I was a boy running around with blond curly hair, the sun, I was the sun, and mamma coming after me like a being out of this world, mamma coming after me and loving me like that, and now the leprechauns on the wall don’t leave me alone and my doctor is in on it with them, I turn around and I want things fixed, I’ll sue the hospital, I have an absolute solid case, strong as the iron shackles that you have put around my wrists or the injections you give me that make my tongue lazy and I can’t say a word, the language that I have in my head becomes frozen in the space above me and then the demons grab it and they speak for me as if it was me but it is not me it is them trying to be me, I am me, Martin, Martin Luther King from 3-5, Unit 3-5, please call me so that we can discuss, call me at 545-555-2211, hello Madam, my name is Émile Rousseau, a French citizen of Greek origins, a doctor in philosophy, ontology, and epistemology, hello Madam, I call you to tell you what I am, have been, and still want to be, I have been an agile soccer player in the arenas of Barcelona where now the bullfighters no longer are allowed to continue and with reason for the animals are part of us and killing like that was an absolute crime, absolute, absolute crime, I turn around and want to sue the hospital, can you turn around Madam and call me please, I am in 3-5 here on Slight Street, I have an absolute solid case, the corporate lawyers from Bay Street tell me, absolute one billion million dollars to be made for wrongful convictions for twenty-five years, I turn around and I want to sue, I have been a soccer player, better than Cristiano Ronaldo, showing the prowess and agility of the best of this world and beyond playing with the ball like I own it, a toy that I toy with fooling my adversaries, I used to make millions and billions before you put me here all because of a misunderstanding between you and me, I have been Miss Canada and then Miss World and then I soared above and became Miss Universe to escape the dirty hands of old pig men who could not keep it in their pants and wanted to dirty my long beautiful body that God gave me to give only to those I chose to give it to, I became Miss Universe travelling through the ancestral lights and then coming back to this hole the police and the board and you have brought me to, I turn around and I have been a Buddhist, I turn around and I have been a Christian, I turn around and I have been a Rastafarian, I turn around and I have been Astrild the Goddess of Love, I have been the prophet Mohammed and have had the pleasure of having ten beautiful wives all for myself with their legs open widely at my disposal and I delighted entering the realm of God that can be found only in the dark moist insides of a woman, I have been the Virgin Mary and have had to explain to the world, and not without discord, why and how it is possible for a woman to give birth and at the same time maintain her virginity in body and mind, I turn around and I was going for a drink with twenty bucks in my pocket and the police start harassing me and asking me for my name, I don’t have no name, I have a name that I can’t give you, I tell you this but you and I do not speak the same language, I came from a long line of people who have wisdoms beyond your grasp, who run with the long snake of time close to the ground so that their seeing is all-encompassing and does not suffer from the fallacy of logics, I turn around and I see all of you and the ones who came before me and I turn around and I can read how you think of me, how you can’t see the entirety of my being because you have been in the factory where division of labour is all you understand, I have a painting called The Division of Labour that I must show you to see if you understand, and I turn around and I am Astrild, I turn around and I am Buto the snake goddess, and I am Buddha and Mohammed and the Virgin Mary, I possess the power to navigate inter, intra and transcendentally, I am Émile Rousseau, a French citizen of Greek origins, I am Émile, a doctor in philosophy, ontology, and epistemology, I turn around and want to leave Slight Street, I have an absolute solid case, absolute solid case, the lawyers have confirmed, millions of billions, billions of millions, I turn around and I want you Madam to call me back, I am in Unit 3-5 here at Slight Street, thank you Madam, 545-555-2211, thank you Madam.