Daria Read online

  When people die at the hospital, the body is left there for four hours before it is taken down to the morgue, which is located in the basement. They want to make sure that the body is indeed dead. They did that with my father, my older brother told me. They waited four hours to see if the body would, by some miracle, come back to moving life. They did not want to kill him before his time, before God had given permission for him to leave this earth. I hear ghastly stories about the old days, when science had not yet arrived to the people of the mountains. I hear that many people, who had entered unconsciousness due to some illness, were often buried alive because those poor peasants did not possess a stethoscope to detect the pounding of the human heart. They used only their own hearts and ears to sense any sign of life in the bodies of their loved ones. I hear stories of how the son of old Maria Matos was buried alive. His mother discovered this when she went to visit his grave one day after he had been placed underground. She went to the cemetery to visit her son at his new dwellings, and she saw, in disbelief and choking pain, how the earth that had been covering him was all scattered throughout the cemetery, dressing all the other graves and hiding the beautiful marble stones and the flowers that had previously adorned the graves of the rich dead people. It was a strange, uncanny scene that made the cemetery a site of momentary equality, just like when it snows in Almores and all becomes one, all becomes the same. Ashes and pollen. All of them. All of it. Padre Lévito was livid when he saw how the cemetery of his parish had suddenly become a place like any other with no beautiful roses or stones covering the dead bodies, and he summoned his staff to immediately come and clean up the mess, that disgraceful sacrilege that had taken place during the night. Maria Matos was beside herself when she got to the cemetery and came upon this scene. She had carried, in beauty and love, a fresh bundle of red carnations to place on the grave of her beloved son. Later on, these flowers became the symbol of the beautiful revolution, when soldiers and army generals said no to the dictators and started shooting flowers instead of bullets through the barrels of their guns. The revolutionaries made Lisbon a city of love instead of blood. Finally Luanda, Lourenço Marques, and other capitals of the African colonies were going to whirl in the exhilarating feeling that liberation—that magnificent gazelle that dances stunning somersaults in the savannah, as if she were both a bird and an animal—allows for. There was finally hope that those who had been imprisoned, killed, viciously persecuted, and tortured by the PIDE,1 Africans and Portuguese, would see their beautiful idea triumph, the same idea that Mandela had nourished, with the patience and hope of a mystic, for twenty-seven years at Robben Island.

  When Maria Matos first got to the cemetery with those lovely and nice-smelling flowers and saw what had happened, the flowers flew from her arms, leaving behind their inebriating perfume, and she started crying as if it were the end of the world. “Where is my Manuel? Where is my beloved son? What have we done to you, my son? What have we done to you, my son? Oh God, forgive us all, us all, sinners who bury the living, arrogantly killing those whom only you have the right to call to you at the right time. Oh, my beloved son, what have we done? God have mercy on us.” It was Sunday morning when all this happened, and so when the people came for the Sunday mass, they were horrified by the sight and even more horrified by the cries and screams of Maria Matos. She was frantically scratching the earth that was left on top of her son’s coffin to see if she could still rescue him and find his heartbeat. But it was too late; it was too late. When she finally got to him and managed to open the tightly sealed coffin, her son appeared livid, with his eyes open and his fingers securely attached to the ceiling of the coffin and separated from his hands, a sure sign that he had spent horrific hours trying to unlock the coffin with all his force. The force had been so great that most of the earth covering him had been scattered throughout the cemetery. When she saw him like this, she lifted his body and carried him around the cemetery, in a trance, or a dance of sorts, of sorrows, invoking all the prayers that she knew and others that she invented on the spot, those that come out only when we are faced with suffering of the highest degree. She was a little old woman carrying the body of a young, tall, and sturdy son like that in an enduring romaria, a suffering pilgrimage. The force that she summoned from her entire self must have been colossal. She then took him to the church, where people were already gathered for the Sunday mass, so that everyone could see what had been done to her son. Most of all, she wanted to show Padre Lévito what he was responsible for, because she felt that as a man of God, and as the man who had pronounced the last rites for her son, he ought to be accountable for the killing. The priest was not there yet, and so Maria went to the altar and, still carrying her son in her arms, spoke to all the saints who were there: St. Mathew Our Lady of Snows, Our Lady of Sorrows, St. Anthony, and St. Peter. Then she spoke in more detail, and with more supplication and resentment, to the Virgin Mary and her son Jesus Christ, who was there, elevated at the centre, as always, in his painful and heavy cross, eternally bleeding. To the saints, she asked, “How could you not see what took place in the night? How could you not see what was going on out there in that cemetery? How could you close yourselves inside these doors and be unmindful of my son’s struggles? How could you?” And when she spoke to the Virgin Mary and to her son, her words were even less kind, more accusatory, as if she were spitting venom from her tongue: “How could you, Virgin Mary, stand there all dressed up in blue and white and only care about the suffering of your own son? Are you not a mother to us all? Do you not feel, in the entrails of your being, the suffering and agony of the one you gave birth to and the suffering and agony of all the sons of God? Are you not made of flesh and blood and bone? Do you not see how those others of flesh and blood and bone suffer, how they scream day and night, trying to escape the dark hole where they have been put before their time? What about your son? Is he not a brother to mine, the son of God, the Son of all sons? Does he not feel that prickling of the cross on his skin? Does he not know the cutting knives of the Roman soldiers on his flesh? Are you all dead? Do you even have eyes for this world that you claim you created and keep an eye on?” And on and on she went. She did not address God directly because, for her, those figures on the altar were all parts, dimensions of God. This priest and the scriptures said that “The shepherd is your Father, and you are in the Father. There is no division between Him and us. Sons and daughters of the same current. Apples of the same tree. Rivers of the same sea. The Trinity becomes the infinity of all there is in this universe.” Receiving no answer from any of the divine figures on that altar, she resorted to washing her son, from head to toe, using all the holy water that she could find on the sturdy granite stone plates attached to the walls of the church, hoping that some miracle would eventually occur. She baptized him again, this time on his death, with God’s waters calling him back to life. She undressed him and washed his body cell by cell, node by node, trying to get rid of all the signs of death that were quite evident all over, and putting her ears and mouth everywhere to see if she could find something, something that gave her hope.

  The parishioners, who were there waiting for the mass, watched all this with open motionless eyes and did not move except to allow her to pass with the body, whenever she was going from place to place inside the church in her frantic attempt to revive her son. They were all frozen in that moment of suffering that Maria was exposing before them. It was as if her suffering had taken on another dimension, swelling up gigantically to include all their own sufferings accumulated throughout their lives—and they had suffered, they had suffered and suffered, they had suffered a lot. When the Padre arrived in his white-and-purple dress, the body of the dead Manuel was resting on the marble steps of the altar, naked, uncovered, and bearing witness to what had happened to him. His mother was crouching over him, still doing anything that she could think of to make something happen, for we must never give up in the face of disgrace; we must always see if we can find some grace in the
disgrace in which we are immersed. We must never give up. The Padre immediately gave orders for the body to be dressed and taken to the cemetery again. He also ordered the parishioners to clean up the cemetery and the church, which had been ravaged by Maria’s doings, so that the proper order and peace could be restored. The parishioners obeyed the priest, and they all took action to return things to their proper places. When all was clean and Manuel’s body was buried again, this time surely dead, the Sunday mass took place. The same sermons were read, the same advice was pronounced, and when the people left to go home and have their Sunday meals, that event at the church, the image of Maria Matos carrying her son around, was nothing but a faint memory. For the parishioners, it was something akin to their own suffering, which they had learned to push down to that place where it lives while also letting them live. Before sitting down at the table to eat their lunch and enjoy a little bit of roasted rabbit meat and potatoes, their special meal reserved only for Sundays, they went to the closed trunk kept at the back of the house and took out some bay and olive tree leaves—and also a touch of rosemary from the bouquet blessed last Palm Sunday—and then threw all of it in the fire. While they ate, they could inhale the scent from the burning blessed plants and feel purified and ready for the battles of the coming weeks. Maria Matos, like Piedade, the mother of my darling friend Isabel, stopped going to church after that. She also stopped sponsoring masses for her dead relatives, claiming the priests and their company were all a bunch of imposters who had killed her son before his time. She claimed the Virgin Mary had just stood there, composed, in her clean nice dress of blue and white, while Manuel was trying to breathe. As if she were not a mother and did not have blood and bile running through her.

  My father, being younger than Manuel and having died at the hospital, did not suffer the same fate. He was interred only when it was certain he was fully dead, fully cold, fully inert. I felt it was so when I kissed him at the little chapel of Almores, where his body was on display as per the local custom. I had just arrived from Canada, and they had been waiting for me to perform the funeral. It was July and very hot, and the body could not wait much longer: it needed to go to the ground quickly. I was tired from travelling—tired from crying or sometimes holding in the tears so that the kind flight attendants and the passengers would not ask questions that would only bring about a greater river of emotion, an entire sea of tears. I entered the village with sunglasses on, the car sliding smoothly through the streets, passing by a line of onlookers who were all there for the funeral—all there waiting for me so that the rituals could proceed. I could sense them looking, and I knew what they must be murmuring to one another, common gossipy things: “She came all the way from Canada in America for her father’s funeral. She came all the way from there, and she left just a few days ago. It must be costing her an arm and a leg, all these trips. But America is rich, America is rich.” I got out of the car and I entered the chapel, and there he was: my father, dead, cold, dressed up in a suit. He looked like a man of stature, even though in his life he had been a peasant and dressed as one. I think he would object to that style of clothing, for he was a simple, content man who liked coarse pants of burel in the winter and cotton in the summer. For him, nothing more than that was necessary to walk the earth and enjoy the moments of time that life gives us, that we often let slip by, distracted as we are with the less fundamental. But it did not matter, for he had no say now. My older siblings had chosen the clothes my father would wear for his final voyage; they had suffered deprivations most of their lives and had a deep need to dress well so that others would not put them in a certain category of peasant mountaineers: rude, dirty, classless, and destitute. It was necessary to keep face. They also had, still have, an incessant need to clean—to clean over and over again that which has already been cleaned. It is as if they are trying to invent a farmhouse that is by nature immaculate, forgetting that life on the farm is always dirty. It is dirty but beautiful—immaculate at the core, that is. But I know that when the snow covers Toronto or Almores and everything becomes dazzling luminosity, there is no need to clean. At times like these, everyone rests; gazing, unblinking, out of the window; immersed in a transcendental awe; not daring to go outside and step on the justice that is covering the ground. Because we all yearn; we all yearn … and sometimes there is a god that listens to us.

  It was necessary to keep face and hide the truly beautiful inside. My grandmother once told me of the shameful story of Albertina de Azulis, a woman who died at the age of ninety-seven. When it was time to dress her up for the final voyage, they could not, for the grace of God, find a piece of clothing to put on her dead body. She had burned all the clothes she owned before she died—the mound of ashes and the empty trunks in her backyard giving witness to that act—and all she had left were five simple white cotton sheets, the kafan for the female, carefully folded on top of the chair beside her bed. On top of the kafan, she had left a Quran in ancient Arabic with a note on the cover that read There is no god but Allah. And inside the Quran there was a beautiful poem written in Tamazight, the Berber North African language. The poem was encircled in two great horns and when read out loud sounded more like a song. In the sounds of that song we could detect the cadences of a vigorous warning, that we must never forget the womb that gave us life, the breast that gave us milk: “Your body came from the earth, and the earth came from Ammon. Summoning his helpers, through the sharpened edge of his great horns that hugged everything, he created the stars and the trees. And then, flowing through him, came the cows and the beautiful horses, those animals that run wild, becoming dancing butterflies in the serene endless deserts of this land, where your mind and mine become numb, only to ascend to the dazzling vacuum.” When Albertina was found by the friendly neighbours who visited her frequently to check on her—since she was a single woman who always lived alone and never married—she was naked in her bed, her wrinkled old body fully exposed. Because goods were scarce in Almores and no one had any clothes to spare, they had no choice but to bury her wrapped in the white sheets she had left beside her bed. She in fact was not a true Christian or a true Catholic, but rather one of those covert Muslims, a conversa, a mourisca. Her family went back to the sixteenth century when the Inquisition got rid of the infidels of the faith in ways more horrid than it is possible to describe with the scribbles we have at our disposal when trying to name the unnamable. She had been hiding her faith, just like the Jews of Belmonte who had been able to keep their secret since the twelfth century. That was why she wanted to be buried like that, in simple white sheets, as per the Muslim custom. However, given the poem found inside the Quran, which referred to another god, it is very difficult to know Albertina de Azulis’s real religious affiliation. She was, it appears, a secret inside a secret inside another secret. She was her own ad infinitum: the circle with no end.

  Those who found Albertina de Azulis in her home like this did not say anything until after her burial. They really loved her, and they did not want the priest to refuse to perform her last rites. They thought these rites would in fact absolve her from worshipping the wrong God or god all her life, save her soul, and open the door to the right heaven. One of her best friends later said that Albertina had confided to her that she came from a long line of strong women and that she had remained single all her life because she wanted to enjoy the company of as many men as possible. According to her friend, Albertina had said that no religion had the right to put a chastity belt around her crotch. She was following in the footsteps of her ancestor, a fiercely independent Muslim woman from the sixteenth century who pretended to have converted to Catholicism during the Inquisition so that she could stay in Almores. She did not go back to Tangiers with the rest of her family, who refused to convert and had to flee to avoid being burned at the stake. She stayed because she wanted to escape the very unfair Muslim custom of polygamy, which allows one man to have several women but does not allow one woman to have many men. But she still wanted to
be a Muslim and not a Catholic. She wanted to be a Muslim on her own terms, so she found a way to work with what she had. Albertina de Azulis was merely honouring the name of her ancestor, the matriarch of her family. She was merely following the call for liberation of body and soul, a call that is singing deep down inside all of us, as she used to say.