Daria Read online

  For my siblings, it was necessary to keep face, to show that one has enough money and means to dress well. My mother was quite happy to go along with their thinking; she felt it was especially important to dress decently when embarking upon our final voyage to meet God. I would sometimes argue with them and say that such ideology is contrary to God’s preaching of equality, poverty, and humbleness. Don’t they know, I would ask, that Jesus told his disciples they ought to abandon everything and follow him in bare shoeless feet in search for true light and salvation? Isn’t that what Padre Lévito and the preachers he brings on special occasions say over and over again? Haven’t they learned the meaning of a true religion, the true God they preach about? But then Padre Lévito dresses in dashing suits when he is not doing his official religious duty, and even during his official religious ceremonies, his dresses are all very elaborate: robe after robe after robe of stunning golds and whites and purples. He also drives a Mercedes-Benz directly imported from Bavaria of a magnificent shade: a never-seen emerald green. This colour, he argues in his sermons about paradise, when he gets lost in long, lyrical, and passionate diatribes about the route to salvation, is the colour of the true heaven. He argues that those who are lucky enough to enter heaven, after they leave this sorrowful place that is our planet earth, will forever dwell in it. Our Padre also charges an arm and a leg for the masses he says for the souls of the departed. And my mother tells me that lately, rather than saying a single mass for each soul like in the old days, he will say a single mass for ten souls and charge each family for one single mass, making quite a fortune in one single breath. It is, as the proverb goes, as if he is killing ten rabbits with a single stroke and then having meat for quite a while. The villagers are not happy with that. They say that one single mass told for ten souls cannot possibly have the same impact on all the souls that it is trying to save and that they should get their money’s worth. But they love their dead relatives dearly and do not want them to suffer in the fires of hell for eternity or forever dance aimlessly in purgatory. Apparently one of the parishioners was bold enough to confront the priest about his new practice of mass en masse, and our Padre responded, “There is a great shortage of priests nowadays, and until we bring more priests from Africa, the continent where Christianity is growing at the highest rate, I can only do so much. I am only one person, and I am not that young anymore, and I therefore cannot repeat the same mass time after time.” When this parishioner asked why he kept accepting requests for all these masses if he couldn’t handle all of them—not to mention why he didn’t tell people that they should wait until the African priests arrived so that supply and demand were in sync—the Padre informed him he had a responsibility to his community now. He said it takes time and patience to bring the African priests up to Almores because there is a certain amount of training necessary to bring them to the practice of proper Catholicism. Then he added that the people who wanted to sponsor masses for their dead loved ones now may be dead by the time the African priests finally got here and were ready to go. This, he continued, would mean that the dead souls, who are the beneficiaries of the said masses, would not receive the benefits of the masses and could therefore be forever condemned to live in purgatory, or worse yet, in hell.

  My father’s body was prepared at the funeral home. My family did not handle his body after he died. The staff from the funeral home, efficient and polite, picked up his body directly from the morgue at the hospital, where it was kept cold and fresh. Then they washed it thoroughly and did other things that are done to dead bodies to make them appear alive and still pretty to the eye when in fact, inside, the primal worms are already hard at work attacking the human core. Ashes and pollen. My family did not handle my father’s body after he died. They passed his body onto strangers. My mother is afraid of dead bodies. She cannot go near one, and she never goes to funerals. She did not go to her mother’s funeral or to my father’s funeral. It is as if she has always been running away from something, running away from her first-born son who died in the Mayombe of Angola, his body spread in thousand pieces. He became pollen and ashes, floating above the heavy forests of that African country that was once part of the powerful Portuguese Empire—the Nova Lisboa, where people were sent to make fortunes and create havoc with the locals. Unlike my father, my maternal grandmother died at home, and her body was washed and cleaned at home. I played a big role in the process when I was only sixteen. With the help of my cousin Celeste, I made my darling grandmother ready for the final trip. I cleaned her and I washed her. I sang her songs. I dressed her up. Her body was put on display at our house. My grandmother was ninety-eight years old when she died, and I had taken care of her for quite a while even though I was just a young girl, young enough to be taken care of myself. She had lost her mind and would say all kinds of things that made no sense but that sometimes had an ironic twist. She said the most truthful things that can ever be said. Because the mad mind is free from everything, it knows the most fundamental things that ought to be known. She had been a single mother all her life and had lived through hardship after hardship at a time, during the fascist regime, when church and state worked hand in hand to keep the country and women in their place. And then she lost her mind. Shortly afterwards, she lost the movement of her legs and was bedridden for the rest of her days.

  I am still assaulted by her suffering, by her thin body on the verge of expiration. I can still see her, a matriarch of the old times giving the last sighs at the end of a life that had been so full of suffering. I used to blame my mother, and perhaps still do, for not taking care of her properly and leaving her at my mercy, a girl of sixteen who was herself vulnerable and could not know any better. I blamed my mother for not calling the doctor more often, for not seeing that my darling grandmother was suffering, for not rescuing her from her dementia, for giving her only Nestum with milk because that was all she would eat and swallow. I blamed my mother for not seeing the need to offer more care, to give my grandmother more water, more vitamins, more love. But my mother was a peasant woman with many responsibilities on her shoulders. She was trying to carry all of them with pride and resignation as one must do because one must always carry the suffering God sends down on us. It is our fate, it is our life, this life that is nothing but a passing moment before the real one comes. I used to blame her, my mother. She would leave my grandmother alone, and sometimes she would lock her inside the house so that she would not wander off. My mother was afraid that my grandmother would get lost in the middle of the night and be eaten by the wolves of the region, which at the time were still roaming the Iberian land, claiming their right to live and howl and mate. I used to think that she, my mother, was cruel. She was more interested in going from town to town, carrying baskets of cheese and fish and legumes on her head to sell to whomever could buy them, than she was in caring for her mother. She would leave my grandmother alone or under my care. And I was only a girl of sixteen, struggling with my own struggles and trying to understand why men would stare at my full body, a body of a young woman, with astonishing waves of yeses and noes. They would stare and say dirty things, and sometimes they even touched me, trying to feel the softness of my flesh. I have recurring dreams of my grandmother where she appears to me time after time as if she is not truly dead, or as if she too blames me for the lack of care. My grandmother was born at the end of the nineteenth century. In the 1920s, she had two little girls with a man who never saw how truly beautiful she was and exchanged her for a wife of better means. In the last dream I had of grandmother there seemed to be some sort of resolution. I sensed that she was close to me, down there in the basement, somewhere, in a hidden drawer perhaps. I was upstairs but I had the haunting feeling of duty calling me downstairs. I went down there, my heart pounding with the affliction of the guilty, in order to rescue my grandmother. Then, when I opened the drawer, I saw her body before me in the form of a mummy—as if she had been living in Egypt thousands of years ago, as if she were a queen of ancien
t times who knew and played with Cleopatra. I saw this body, all wrinkled and brown and elongated, just like mummies are, and then I thought she was dead, that I’d killed her. I’d allowed her to die and now she was nothing, a nothing upon another nothing upon another nothing. While these feelings invaded my consciousness, or perhaps my mother’s consciousness, a sense of guilt took over that I thought would never leave me. I thought, God, what have I done, God, what I have not done? In the dream, I felt as though I was trapped in a never-ending well, doomed for life. I had an acute awareness that I’d had this dream, or others like it, countless times in the twenty-five years since my grandmother left us. I felt I was doomed for life, that there was no escape from her, from my mother, from myself. But then I looked at the face of the mummy, and, in the midst of those brown and dark colours of nothingness, I saw her white teeth exploding into a large smile, a field of light irradiating from a centre. The smile travelled all over her body and then came to me like a beautiful electric current that gave me life and solace and closure. I felt at peace. I felt that my grandmother had accepted her life and her death, and that the ashes and pollen that she had become were sufficient for her to feel alive. I felt that perhaps part of her lived in me, through this light that she had sent me. I have not had another dream of grandmother since this one. Perhaps this case is resolved. Or perhaps my deeper self grew tired of the many pains that I had been sending down there and decided to take charge so that I can move on and have space for the other deaths, for the many other pains that will come after this one.

  I am at Frankfurt Airport, returning to my life in Canada. I write poems to deal with him, my father, and all of us involved in his life and death. All of us who could not save him, could not make his last days better, all of us who left him alone to face them. We, fallible beings in the face of the inevitable.

  Passing the Passage

  Under the tip of my tongue I grasp for words, sounds, before meaning, that will say who you are, how you lived, and how you left us to go away and swim in the other current, under the node of dark nymphs, those goddesses that sing of winds below the sphere and breathe breaths under, under your skin

  My mother sighs constantly, giving voice to those kisses she never gave him even in the moments she really wanted to forget the repression of the Catholic Church and the somber sermons of Padre Lévito

  I want to cry for you, a real cry from the right side of my soul, I want to but it does not want to come, not now, not yet, as if avoiding the time that has passed between the moment you were born and the moment you died, I want to cry but I am not willing, not yet ready to emerge from the full summers of uncontained hydrangeas, those wild crazed flowers that do not know what thirst is, bursting into miscegenated colours never before seen

  Under my tongue I compose meanings and words outside of the alphabet, things that do not yet say how I feel about your passage to the other nether, after this nether full of fulls

  Very below my consciousness, I think thoughts of guilt, I hear voices that tell me I could have saved you, or at least given you more days to live, more walks in the full vines of your many lands, or that when you died I should have been there, present, easing the moment of the last blink of your heart, or that I should at least have lifted the veil of the coffin completely to stare at your entire body and touch your cold hands directly, like I did with your face scaring away the flies that could not wait to feast upon you and your sacred nothing

  I could have or I should have because nothing is enough in the face of your timely death

  The curious book

  There is a book on the shelf that is unlike all the others

  I can tell just by the spine, which is wearing out its wings, as if the book itself contains insufficient knowledge, as if it is reaching out to its neighbours to peek at their messages in an attempt to decipher the mysteries of the world, which are many, ancient, and so profound

  The neighbours of this book, though, as if jealous of the God they know, like mean-spirited or insecure priests, the type you find in The Name of the Rose, do not voluntarily open themselves to this curious counterpart, and instead hold their pages tightly together and find a way to become closer to the rest of the books in that same shelf, those that are not eager to get at the bottomless pit that is our universe and meet all the beingness that in there dwells.

  I sit on my old sofa, which is also wretched by its own condition, and I watch this spectacle in silence, savouring the manners of the curious book and the ways in which its brothers and sisters lie down in their sleep and are satisfied with their own self-contained knowledge, like premature dead children or perhaps only cynical elders who have learned that curiosity can get you killed and in fact bring you so much unhappiness

  And it is in this reminiscing that I remember my father Adelino, recalling how happy he was, just knowing his cows and using their dung to seal off the oven where we used to bake fresh corn bread, bread that exhaled the sublime scent of the mountains where the cows had gone grazing just the day before

  I recall his shiny eyes and how he kept saying that happiness and good living can be found in the most unlikely places and fools are those who keep going in circles and circles trying to unveil what must remain closed off from the eye of reason, like primal dogs who cannot stop trying to catch their own tails, even though they are old now and have tried such useless exercises countless times before

  The days

  The days may be gone, but the light still simmers through your sturdy bones, I learn how to become mute through the orifices of your nose, and I do not expect any compensation for the minutes lost in adoration meandering through each part of your body

  I watch the movement of your barely moving hand, and I remember how it is to live fully and then suddenly be assaulted by the weight of days

  I touch your forehead and perceive, through your breathing skin, that your life and mine (in this state) are but ephemeral moments that go away in less than the blink of a butterfly’s wing

  I look around your room and concentrate on details that have passed by my eyes without any second thought but which now appear as vivid and fundamental as fresh mornings when your senses are lazily awakening and life makes the most sense: your blood flowing slowly but surely to meet the challenges of a long day

  I smell your body and the decay that is approaching, and I imagine the stunning beauty of your limbs when you were a child running unimpeded as beautiful as a morning mercy

  I put my head close to yours, and I hear the inner thoughts your dying soul is reminiscing about, and I envisage all the dreams that you have had throughout your long life, from birth to this very moment, dreams of utter beauty and victory in life, from days filled with vigorous tasks when your body felt the most alive, the most able, the most noble, to days when mornings and nights gave you moments that nothing, nothing can recreate, moments of simple merciful beauty, like the gradual darkening of the approaching dusk or the arrival of a new awakening clarity with all its promises, after the night has passed and the dreams have left their vivid notes

  Your days are all there, entangled in your wrinkled body, which I am observing with the melancholia of a daughter who is losing her father and also imagining the loss of her own body, a body still young and yet already feeling, in its universal memory, that its days too are numbered

  For we are nothing but intersecting light passing through

  Or the momentary beauty of the horse cavalcading through the open fields

  * * *

  1Polícia Internacional de Defesa de Estado/International and State Defence Police: the Portuguese police during the fascist regime of António de Oliveira Salazar, which came to be known for its secret activities and use of intimidation and violence against those opposing the regime.

  At the end you feel so much better, so much better, and you think, without words, without art, love could not be properly told, properly sh
own, and you would feel as if you were choking all the time. Father, I have brought flowers to your grave because I did not know how to offer them to you while you were alive. Forgive me, Father. Grandmother, I have brought flowers to your grave because I did not know how to offer them to you while you were alive. Forgive me, Grandmother. And you too, darling Isabel.

  THE DAY IT HAPPENED. Vasco da Gama is extremely nice to Daria. “Daria, you are a wonderful young woman,” he says. “You remind me of my daughter, Santeria. And those eyes, those dark brown and wide eyes, full of mystery. If I were a man of age, and if I were to go into a place and see you sitting there with Luísa and Milena, I would choose you. You have that thing, that thing that men look for. You are a wonderful girl—a wonderful young woman. So much like my daughter, Santeria—so much like her. You know, Daria, that what men most crave is scents—pure, raw, inebriating scents. And I smell those scents in you. You know, Daria, that my homologue, Vasco da Gama went to India because he was profoundly dissatisfied with the old scents of Europe. He went all the way there in a fleet of three ships and a little caravel, facing monsters and titanic waves at sea because he could no longer stand his stale life and the air he was breathing. What he really wanted, Daria, was to feel alive again, to taste cinnamon and pepper and ginger and cardamom and saffron. He wanted to exhale and inhale so that his lungs would became alive again. He wanted the elixir of life. Do you know the first thing he did when he got there, Daria? Do you know? He got off the ship, took off all his clothes, bathed himself in the waters of Bombay—that good, splendid bay—and then he ran to the pepper mountain like a crazed man looking for the spice. He did this even though he had been warned that the mountain was infested with vicious serpents—timeless, alert, and vengeful sentinels protecting the pepper crops—and that he needed to follow the proper rituals and be invited by the locals before entering this carefully guarded site. When he finally got to the site where the sacred creeper plant was growing, whose scent he deeply craved with all his being, he vigorously rubbed himself all over with pepper seeds and ate as many as he could. He became insane for a few days with all the fire he’d ingested from the burning seeds. He then climbed to the highest peak of the mountain, all naked and red, screaming day and night. He did all this so that he could feel alive and taste the world anew. What men most desire, Daria, is scents, scents that make them feel alive again, scents that speak to their soul and bring the world to their doorsteps, scents that inebriate them from top to bottom and make them fall on the floor crying for mercy, mercy for more….”