Daria Page 7

  On days when the rain would fall in passionate and violent aggression, something else would happen, something else even more astounding. The little boys and the little girls with less than eight years on their bodies and souls would enter a state that was impossible to put up with. They became noisy little rascals, and there was no way that their dance could be tamed. The heavy slaps of their fathers and the light caresses of their mothers ceased to have any effect. It was as if the children were possessed by a life that was vaster and fuller, vaster and fuller than the life that commanded the other inhabitants of Almores. They were little devils, these boys and girls. They were constantly fighting and with such intensity that after a while it was not possible to discern whether we were listening to the music coming from the mountain, to the heavy rain against the glass of the windows and the zinc covers of the houses, to the sounds emitted by the little girls and boys who had not yet arrived at the octave year of their life, or to everything densely intertwined in one single whirl. After this singular fighting among the children, another thing would happen. The girls and boys would start singing, but their singing did not seem to come from their own mouths, but rather from the entire extension of their bodies. Pore after pore seemed to emit sounds similar to those that came from the pianist planted on top of the mountain, up there on the highest peak, closest to the sky and the blue indigo. It was as if the little boys and girls had themselves become flutes and trumpets, drums and violins, whistles and light bird songs, powerful machines endowed with vast musical experience. It was as if they knew how to create the world’s eternal chant, a song composed of the most varied instruments to create the perfect, the complete.

  At this point, the fathers and mothers of the little ones could no longer understand why they had been upset at their children; they no longer knew why they had wanted to tame them with heavy slaps and light caresses. They became indifferent, as if they could not feel or think. They were only aware of the sound that was coming out of their little boys, their little girls, that dilated and feathery current of impossible music. They were now dispossessed of any individual will, becoming mere spectators of the music that had been engendered as if by a miracle of a God until then unknown—a God who was only now bringing to them, through a chance of sorts, that which they had never consciously thought could exist, that which they never thought they would need. Ti Mangueiro da Poça would remain motionless, with his eyes open, listening and feeling this scene, this music—as if he were dead, unable to transmit any sign of life. And then, when the silence returned, he would pronounce the following judgment: “Only the mountain pianist can teach us how to listen to the true music of life. Only the mountain pianist can bring us the instruments that we were missing. Only he, that man between the yes and the no, the full citizen of the here and the there.”

  When the sun was shining and not a speck of fog, light rain, or even thunderous, violent rain could interrupt the passage of the pianist’s sound, everything attained a magnetic and glistening look. At times like this, the inhabitants of Almores would position themselves at the window or at the door, and they would carefully examine the sun’s rays from the very moment they started to appear behind the mountain’s peak until their very last goodbye. They would remain there, immersed in the immutability of time, capturing the light the star was bringing to them, in the multiple tonalities that the passing of the day allows. In that deep and motionless meditation, they were able to see, with the vivid clarity that only musical experts have, the trans-incendiary illumination created by the mountain musician. This illumination was brought down to the people in each of the reflecting light particles from the sun, as if the sun, the musician, and the musician’s music were all the same substance, the same illuminating unity. As the people watched, this unity entered their beings in full gradual waves, reminding them, through its slow and peaceful message, of the Reason—the Reason being that everything and everyone was part of the same light, the same sun, the same piano, the same mountain, the same pianist. And after this there was yet another junction—a confluence of waters, of land, of rivers, of people, of animals, of plants—that left in their consciousness the only possible conscience: the awareness that one exists without existing, that one exists in oneself but outside of oneself too. Or, as Ti Mangueiro da Poça would say, in his observations always injected with profound lucidity, “The consciousness that the unconscious is the conscience of the pulsating earth, the knowledge that one exists in a ring of fire, a ring of light, a ring of the moon. Like a dancing unicorn travelling between cavernous spaces that hold the universe together.”

  But the preferred banquet would take place when the snow arrived—immaculate and white, almost virginal in its sensual hugging state—to visit Almores and the surrounding regions. On such occasions, people would get up from the nocturnal silence that had enveloped them during their sleep and, when laying eyes on that circling expansion that was all around them, they would become stunned, bewildered for hours on end, oblivious to the thread weaving them, stitching them together. They would enter a lukewarm, dizzying trance as they looked at the white nothingness that displayed itself in front of them in all directions like a quilt, a wide bed ready for the magnificent nuptial night of the prince and princess. They felt as though they were in a dream, a dream they had never, never, been able to glimpse, not even in their most beautiful and relaxed sleeps—those where they were clean, gliding, silvery swordfish, without a single trace of heavy scales slowing down their flight. Only long after, when the sun was coming down directly onto the snow, blinding those who could still see, would they awaken from the orgasmic reverie they had entered. They would awaken, and suddenly they would realize they were not the same people who had gone to bed eternities before, right after the crepuscular dusk. They vaguely remembered who they had been, but they had only a faint memory of themselves. It was an alienated remembrance, similar to the one we have of those people we met long ago—in another country, speakers of another language—and with whom we spent only a day or two in those vague distracted conversations that we are forced to have with strangers who, for one reason or another, come our way. After they awakened from this state, which had been induced by the appearance of the snow, they started to hear, as they had never been able to hear before, the music of the mountain pianist.

  They would hear it, the music, in silvery medals whirled in rings of white gold, that brand that leaves traces discreetly, as if loving slowly, the way only true grownups know how to do. They would also hear the sound of the streams and fountains gushing in tamed slowness underneath the white snow, a snow that was sure of itself, so sure in fact that it did not need to change the aquatic state of the many things that were meant to remain in their original malleable substance—eternal birds gliding between spaces to kill the thirst of many. It knew the aquatic must remain aquatic so that we would not die of thirst and are able to see the various bodies that compose our primordial soup. The villagers heard, with unprecedented distinctiveness, the twittering of the birds as if they had only now remembered, after a prolonged muteness, how to sing. The villagers had suddenly become perplexed lovers of the Lord and the Virgin Mary, who was now spreading her body in a wide and perfect mantle in order to cover the green, the dry, and the arid, all those distinct states that the land we walk upon can sometimes attain. They could hear the sound of their own breathing—low, almost imperceptible, almost mute—announcing to them the life that was running in their being. They would grope their own breasts, their most intimate parts—the hollows under the arms, the spaces between the toes and the fingers—to make sure that they did in fact exist and that they were made of compact, dense matter. Their bodies sometimes asked for more than the villagers could give, distracted as they were by their daily poverty, which required the constant baking of bread and beans, the earning of a living for survival. They could hear the children of all ages playing in the soft, fleecy snow, losing themselves in the humid freshness that emanated from it in magn
ificent luminosity. To them, the snow was a magnetic, smiling lady who came from all corners of the world, bringing love and caresses to all and erasing all the inequalities that had been there before and which had often caused fights between the son of Dom Mouro and the son of Lavrador. They would hear everything like never before. They felt more alive, more conscious. They felt fuller, poorer, and richer.

  On those occasions, those days of pure and complete being, Ti Mangueiro da Poça would enter a state of the highest elation, becoming a venerable professor, ready to retire. He would kneel down, prostrated on the fresh, cool, and soft snow that gave off a light salt smell, as if it had come from the seaside, and he would proclaim in a high voice, so that he could awaken those who by chance were still dormant: “Oh Lord, pianist of the mountain, man with hair longer than the darkness of time, God of the gods, music of the music, today is the day we have always been waiting for. After today, everything will be more. After today, time will become time, an uninterrupted time of the soul. Time of everything. Time of yes and no. Time of here and there. Oh Lord, pianist of the mountain, musician of the darkness of time. Transgressor of intemperate battles.”

  DON’T BRING FLOWERS TO MY GRAVE; give them to me while I am alive. Father, I have brought a flower to your grave because I did not know how to offer it to you while you were alive. And for that, I humbly ask your forgiveness. Don’t bring flowers to my grave; give them to me while I am alive. Isabel, I have brought a flower to your grave because I did not know how to offer it to you while you were alive. And for that, I humbly ask your forgiveness.

  POEMS AND OTHER LOVE WORDS. It is over. He has passed, my father. He is buried underground in the cemetery of Almores beside Isabel. He is also beside António Ayres de Gouveia, a famed figure who lived in the eighteenth century and had been the Bishop of Betsaida, the Archbishop of Calcedónia, and later, the Minister of Foreign Affairs during the stern regime of Marquês do Pombal—the powerful minister of the monarchy, who was practically running the country. The Marquês do Pombal had an iron fist like Salazar, only perhaps much more illuminated by the Age of Reason; he was able to resurrect Lisbon after that disgraceful earthquake of 1755, and he was ruthless enough to get rid of Jesuits and nobility who did not serve his needs well. It is over. He has passed, my father. He is buried underground in the cemetery of Almores, beside Isabel and António Ayres de Gouveia. His Highness, the Excelentissímo António Ayres de Gouveia, also a son of that region of Beira Alta, had been brought from the beautiful capital of Lisbon—Lisboa, sempre menina e moça, Lisbon, forever a girl, forever a young woman—because one must go home when all is said and done, done and said. One must go home. And at the end of everything, we all go to the same place; we are all stuffed in a narrow fleecy cabinet and put under the earth. Ministers, bishops, archbishops, peasants. Ashes and pollen. The beautiful nothingness. We are returned to the all that we are part of only to start again by feeding the worms and the small herbs that insist on having their turn, sprouting to the surface to be loved by the sun. Ashes and pollen. We all return to the same place; it doesn’t matter whether you are the son of a minister or the oldest boy of a young widow—a boy who had to become a man at the age of ten, who had to grow up suddenly even though his mind and body were still playing the games of a mountain boy, up there in the Serra do Caramulo.

  I am going back to Toronto. I am at the Frankfurt airport waiting for my connecting flight, thinking, feeling that my life is always running from me, running with me. I try to catch a glimpse of it between the narrow spaces of my fingers, a complicated task that leaves me feeling inadequate, vacant, wanting more, waiting for more, all the time. My heart does not yet know how to feel. It feels many things. I feel my father’s body before it died at the hospital in Viseu, that body lying on the hospital bed wrapped in a white sheet, that mass in diapers, suffocated by the heat and the bronchopneumonia bacteria that had entered his lungs, preventing him from breathing, from breathing and living. Bacteria caught in the hospital, the doctor and nurses say, because he’d stayed there too long. Too long. But how could we have cared for him at home? How could mother, who is a stubborn mule, have cared for a man who was nearly ninety and could not move, when she herself pulls her body—a swollen living corpse— around like an ancient and overly tired matriarch? How could we have cared for a man who was being fed by a tube and could no longer swallow anything? We told that to the hospital staff. We told them we could not bring him home like that because we could not manage the tube and would end up choking him. We told them that, but they insisted that the matter was simple. “Very simple,” they said and proceeded to show us how to manage the tube, how to insert it in the narrow dark hole that is father’s throat, the one going to the stomach and not the one going to his lungs. I felt the tube descend into myself, and I mourned the taste of cherries and avocados, my favourite foods. I mourned his own taste, his love for pork sausages and codfish. I had dreams where both he and I were choking because the food went to the wrong hole. We had tried to pull the tube out several times because it was so uncomfortable and foreign to our being, but it would never come out. I woke up in the middle of the night gasping for air. I had panic attacks at Walmart when I was prowling the shelves to find the diet pills that would finally make my appetite disappear and my body become smaller, like my father’s—less dependent on the flavours of this world, so that when my time came, I could be ready for the final beautiful event, when we are released from our narrow boundaries and enter the beautiful nil—the magnificent Yes.

  Nurse Marta told me on the phone that we did not care, that I did not care, that he called my name all the time, “Daria, where is my Daria, my Daria is in Canada, bring her over here, she knows how to speak to me, how to tell me stories of America, America, where my uncle Casimiro went long, long time ago never to return, Daria, where is my Daria, bring her over here, she is the only one I can speak to, the only one that hears me, my wife is a mule, a mule with two legs who always insults me, telling me that I am dumb, I am slow, that I can’t even go to the bank, I don’t even buy a piece of bread to bring home when I go to a cow fair, she tells me I am not even a man, for a man takes charge, my wife is a mule, a mule with two legs, who spent her life making my days unbearable and the only way I could get up in the morning was because I had my cows, my cows know me by name, know me by voice, they moo and moo when they hear me, they moo and moo and stare at me when I caress their head, they stare at me with those large open eyes, so full of stories, so full of being, so full of love, Daria, Daria, where is my Daria, bring her over here, a man spends his life listening to a mule of a wife who does not even know how to cook for a man, how to feed a man, a man that spends his days unearthing the earth to find good soil to plant potatoes and corn and beans so that we can all eat and she doesn’t even see that, always saying I am a good for nothing, a good for nothing, Daria, Daria, where is my Daria, bring her over here, I go to the cow fairs to look at the beautiful animals, the most beautiful animals, I go to cow fairs and my cows, God is witness, and all the Mayors of the town, all of them know, ‘There are no cows in the region like those of Adelino Mendes from Almores, no cows like that, look at those feet and nails, and that splendid back, that clean polished skin, and he speaks to them, when he speaks to them it is as if we are seeing God and the Virgin Mary, God and the Virgin Mary in the most beautiful act of lovemaking, a cow and a man speaking like that, one is the other and the other is the one,’ that’s what they say, the mayors of the town, Daria my Daria, where is my Daria, bring her over here, and then that wife of mine, a mule with two legs goes through my pockets every time I return from these fairs, these fairs that are the only moment I have to encounter God, she goes through my pockets and counts the escudos that I have left and the ones that I spent and goes on a rant for days and days, I am a good-for-nothing, I never bring a piece of bread for the children, I was only good to make them, giving her a belly every sixteen months, a good-for-nothing who can’t even buy a piece of bre
ad, but she does not say that I give her all the money I make on the cows, the money I get from the cow prizes and the little calves that I sell every season, I give her all the money and then she counts the escudos that I spend when I go to the cow fairs and eat a dish of dobrada or bacalhau at Senhor Sampaio’s tavern, which she can’t even cook at home, she boils some food and expects us to be grateful and eat it as if we were pigs, the pigs who live under our kitchen, which we kill every fall to get some sustenance throughout the year, she counts the escudos and goes into my pockets to search and search, a wife who is a mule with two legs, Daria, Daria, where is my Daria, Nurse Marta bring her here, Nurse Marta, my Daria, my Daria, bring her over here…”

  It is over, he has passed, my father. And I was not there. I had left for Canada two days before. I should have stayed like my initial intuition was telling me. My intuition used to be sure of itself when I was much younger, very sure of itself, but then I let too many voices enter my mind, my body, my soul. Those of my mother, those of Vasco da Gama and his acquaintances and many others. And now it is too late. It’s finished. I missed his last moments. I am at the airport in Frankfurt returning to my life on the other side of the world. When my sister left me a voicemail message announcing that he had passed, that my father had passed, I called the hospital right away. I wanted to know how he had died. Was he alone, did he say something, did he recover from the unconsciousness that he had slipped into after the seizure, did he call my name, did he open his eyes, was there a last breath audible to the one standing by? I asked all these questions, and many others, in one single, long sentence to the nurse who answered the phone. It was not Marta. It was another one, the nicer one, the one who had asked if I was his only daughter because he responded so well to me. Her name was Ana. Ana Magda. And she had a soft voice and very sad eyes like someone who had witnessed a lot, someone who had been at the hospital too long working the geriatric care ward, inhaling all the sighs, all the screams, all the disillusions of old dying people. She said my father died peacefully, that he just gave that last breath, almost imperceptible, like an angel ready for departure, that he went to the other side meekly accepting the destiny that awaits all of us. He died peacefully, and there was nothing else that we could do, nothing else that we could do, nothing else to be done. God delivered him from sufferance. It was a grande esmola—it was a great act of charity—and he was now in a much better place, a much better place. You hear Ana Magda’s voice on the other side. A gentle, peaceful voice. With your heart choked and the tears almost at the surface of your entire being, you think, Ana Magda is nice, very nice. She knows what I need to hear, what I need to hear to move on and not carry the guilt of my father’s death on my shoulders. She is nice. A woman who has seen a lot. She knows love. She knows suffering. She knows human beings. She knows guilt. Ana Magda. What a beautiful name: short, soft, and simple. A sister of the other one, whom Jesus helped when she needed so much.