Daria Read online

  Martin Luther King did not use any commas or any full stops in his message. He told himself through a single boundless sentence until he exhausted his breath and I could no longer manage his discourse. He told himself through a single breathless sentence. I only put commas here and there so that the doctors could more easily navigate through his person, that maze with no end and no beginning, but which is in itself everything that it is possible to be: a beautiful soul trying to experience being. The chora that we all are. The space of the universe that is constantly expanding, leaving the inhabitants of the earth enveloped only in the luminary of the Milky Way. Blinds of wondrous holes, valleys, and hills: black, white, infinite rainbows of beingness… The fear is that I may not have fully understood the incantatory profundity of his message and that, for that very reason, I have failed him and myself. I can only sleep tonight if I tell myself that his fate is not in my hands anyway but rather in the hands of the doctors, for they hold the power. I am merely the transcriptionist in the sturdy tower that is the Hospital of the Soul.

  DON’T BRING FLOWERS TO MY GRAVE. Don’t bring flowers to my grave; give them to me while I am alive. I brought flowers to your grave because I did not know how to offer them to you while you were alive. And for that, I humbly ask your forgiveness. In the hospital, the nurses and the student nurses keep surrounding you and your father. You feel there is no privacy. If only they were not there, constantly coming and going, intruding on the intimacy between you and your father, you could read him the story from your book, the book dedicated to him and Isabel. You could read him the one titled “The Mountain Musician” because that is the one you feel relays your love for him most clearly, a love that you feel you ought to show more directly now that he is approaching the hour of the scorpion, now that it is almost the end of everything. After the end there will be no more chances, no more days or hours to tell the untold. You want to tell him the story, to read him your love, but the nurses and the student nurses are there. And there is also the other man with the colonial war tattoo on his arm—the one much younger than your father, with his wife by his side—and you don’t feel you can tell the story to your father with the intrusion of those strangers. He ought to be at home, dying in the intimacy of his old house, smelling the cow dung and the pig dung like he did all his life. He ought to be with you and your mother and all the rest of them who would care, should care to be there and show him their love because blood is supposed to speak louder, to know better, to be thicker than the trunk of the old oak tree. But he can’t go home. He is very sick; he can’t feed himself. They have put the tube in him again because last night he had an episode and almost choked. Nurse Idalina says we can’t take the tube out anymore because not only can he choke without it, but he has also refused to eat anything since yesterday morning. They are obliged to preserve his life, for this is not Switzerland. With the tube, they can just send something down there and feel at ease, feel they are doing their job.

  He can’t really speak. He had a seizure last night, and he is in this comatose state. But you feel he knows you are there, you feel he knows. You touch his naked legs and his feet, and you massage them. It is hot and humid in the room; the sticky heat of the approaching July is becoming unbearable. There is no air conditioning like in Canada. He is covered only with a white hospital bed sheet, like Christ in his last hours, thin, in agony, and distanced from this world. His sides have sores because he has not been able to move enough for quite a while now. When he came home, your mother and the rest of the family members who were there did not move him enough, did not take him on wheelchair walks. They thought there was no point, or maybe they were just burdened by the duties of their own lives. He was supposed to leave the hospital and go to a long-term care facility last week when the nice Cuban-born doctor finally agreed to sign the papers, but now he can’t go because he has developed bronchopneumonia, the type usually developed in hospital settings. You blame yourself because your family was fighting for weeks. They couldn’t agree about where he should go, and because there was no agreement he stayed at the hospital. You blame the doctor who refused to sign the papers that would have allowed him to go to the long-term care facility near your village where your mother could see him regularly. You felt like that Portuguese doctor was a masculine authoritarian bastard who did not like you to argue with him. You thought of your old days there. You thought of the types of men that you had encountered there. Then you thought you were in fact lucky that you no longer lived in that country, that you did not have to constantly put up with arrogant pigs like him who keep perpetuating gender and class lines as if they were living in medieval times when kings received their powers directly from God.

  The other nurse, Marta, was extremely inappropriate with you on the phone when you called her from Canada and tried to ask questions about why your father had been sent home on a feeding tube that your mother could not manage, that no one in the family could manage. She said your family and yourself have no shame. She accused you of leaving your father there in hospital longer than necessary; she blamed you for his bronchopneumonia. She made you feel guiltier than you already felt. You told her she was stepping out of her bounds and that she was being unethical, and you promised you would launch a complaint against her for professional misconduct. You did launch a complaint against her after your father died. It took them a year to reply, and they stated—in cold, obscure, roundabout bureaucratic language that says nothing—that no one had ever complained about Nurse Marta and that therefore they could not find any fault in her conduct. You still tried to argue with the hospital director about the response to your complaint. You pointed out to him that they were following outdated deductive Socratic postulates in their investigation, for they were basically saying that “All actions of Nurse Marta have been exemplary, therefore Marta is exemplary and could not have conducted herself otherwise in the case of your father.” But it was all to no avail. Your father was dead. Isabel was also dead, and her family did not confront the hospital about any wrongdoing. They said there was no point because she was dead after all and nothing would bring her back—nothing. Yes, perhaps it would not have mattered after all; perhaps they both would have died when they did even if things had turned out differently. But you still think the hospital needs to be accountable, that the doctors need to be held accountable. You still think they’re stuck in some antiquated class system. You think they’re treating villagers however they want because they don’t see them as equals, just like the slave owners did to their slaves or the colonizers did to the colonized in Angola and Mozambique. The latter accepted their treatment for a long time—a very, very long time, in fact. You think that people need to rebel and protest and step out of their resignation. They need to stop saying, “That’s life, that’s the way things are, what can we do but accept it?” And then you remember the story that your mother tells about your grandmother. The latter had gone to see a doctor because her fingers were all twisted and she was in horrible pain. She extended her hands to the doctor so that he could see them and said to him in a supplicating voice, “Senhor Doutor, look at my hands. Look at how they are, how twisted my fingers are. Look at them, Senhor Doutor.” He looked at her and merely said, “I know, I know.” He did not explain to her that she had rheumatoid arthritis and that there was no cure for it. He said nothing to her. Your grandmother was a peasant woman living at a time when there was no health coverage, and she had spent one thousand escudos to go and see this doctor because she wanted to know how her hands could become better. She wanted to know if they could become better and would stop causing her so much pain when she was washing the clothes in the river. He said nothing, nothing. And your grandmother, who was a woman of her time and station, did not feel she could ask the doctor questions and went home just as confused as she had left, accepting life as it came to her. Isabel’s parents said nothing also, did nothing to protest the actions of the hospital. They went home and cried over their fate. This bothers you immen
sely. You think that people ought to say things, that they ought to speak back to the beast when the beast is being a beast because that’s how things change, that’s how the beast becomes less of a beast. Last year when you were in Portugal, you saw a mother on TV saying, “Every last cent that I have will be used to sue the hospital for what they did and did not do to my daughter and her unborn child. Every last cent.” And you thought, This woman is doing what others ought to be doing in circumstances like that. Her pregnant daughter had gone to the emergency four times complaining that she was in extreme pain, and every time the doctors had sent her home saying that nothing was wrong and assuring her the baby was just fine, just fine. The fifth time she was taken to the hospital, she had spent the entire night bleeding and bleeding, her blood trickling down her legs and dirtying her bedroom floor. It was too late, and both she and her unborn child died shortly afterwards.

  There is no privacy in the hospital with all the nurses and the student nurses coming and going, not to mention all the sick people and their waiting families, but deep down you know you don’t have much time left and that you must express your love to your father, that you must tell him now before it’s too late. There isn’t much time left. But you need to redeem yourself and your family and the entire hospital, for no one did enough it seems, no one did enough to take away your father’s pain and make his last days bearable. And so you need to sing him a lullaby, a lullaby of goodbye, a song of last love, for the time is now. You read him the story, the story that you think will best speak to him in this place where he already is, in this unconscious valley where his memories all dwell, intermingled in unison, in a circular nothingness that carries everything. You sing him the story so that he feels less afraid, less alone, less in his own self. You sing it in your language, in his language, that perfect Portuguese with wide endless vowels. You enter the echoing a’s of the imperfect past, and the o’s and the u’s and e’s, and then the nasal ending sounds of the n and the m, forming an extended chime, a magic current that makes time trans-temporal, creating a perfect past, a perfect present, a perfect future. You feel that all you are recounting is really there, forever lingering around, like the songs of Gilberto Gil in that voice that cries and sings and loves all at the same time. That voice that cries and sings and loves, forever living in the poetic nodes of his intricately long dreadlocks.

  The mountain musician. Sitting on top of the highest peak of the astonishing mountain range, this musician was the treat, and also the fear, for all the inhabitants of Almores and its surroundings—the fear of that which is uncertain. Wherever they were, far or close to the magnificent event, people could not ignore the music he played and the aura that it brought. It was as if the wind—or whatever exists in it that permits the sound to travel—was a lover of the entire world and wanted everyone to listen to the deep, cavernous sounds coming from this enchanted musician, this pilgrim of the mountain.

  The player was a strange man, sui generis to the extreme, without name that was known, without revealed origin, with long hair, so long that it covered the entire mountain peak and walked downwards ahead of him, dressing the mountain sides and making them appear inhabited by hairy, spirited goats in search of the sacred, fresh herbs that grow only in the highest regions of the world. He had come to this place seven years ago after that premature disgrace that was the death of the birds of Ti Feijó, which sung like no other, followed by the death of Bitalina Bocage’s seven hens, which always rose before the cocks and before the moon was eaten by the sun to announce, in pure eagerness and beauty, the beginning of the world. This is what the people of the region would recount. But Ti Mangueiro da Poça, a man who carried the impressive weight of time and knew how to see things others couldn’t, would claim, with perfect certainty, that the musician was an eternal, motionless presence. He had always been on top of that mountain of Almores, sending down beautiful and aural rain so that the inhabitants of the valley could truly discover how it is that the parties of the end of the year ought to be conducted: “Celebrating the eternity of time,” he would proclaim with incendiary voice and conviction.

  In days when there was little rain falling from the sky, or when a fog—sometimes dense, sometimes light—wandered across the mountain top, down its slopes, and into the valley where Almores was located, the music would descend in slow motion as if enmeshed in the intricate circles of a happy and erotic dance. And then it would install itself in the bodies of all the inhabitants; in all the plants, trees, stones, and animals living there; and even in the abundant waters that ran fast and heavy in that region, which was known for its unending springs. The water flowed eternally, as if telling us the sea was not that far away, or merely reflecting an act of great audacity engendered by great love—a love that would not permit thirst to afflict those mountaineers, living high up there, close to the skies and the stars at night. The music would envelop everything and everyone, cloaking all with acute persistence, and Almores would become immersed in a pure silence, that silence that comes when body and matter cease speaking so they can hear, in deeper cadences, the circling song that echoes in perfect repercussion, within time, inside of them, in that hollow and concave space that lives in everything that is life: human life or life of any other important nature.