One night when I was fifteen years old I began to cry. I
don’t know what it was that caused me to cry, it’s all so long ago, lost in the
mists of time. I only remember that my
father heard me and came up to my room. He sat down lightly on the edge of my
bed and began to stroke my hair, and he asked me what was the matter.
“I’m alone, Dad. It’s nothing else. I realized that I was
alone and it just struck me…….It’s stupid, I know, isn’t it? I’m alone now, and
you too.”
I laughed to shut myself up, regretting having been so
frank, but he wouldn’t collaborate with me, and this is what saved him from the
anger that I would have had otherwise. He didn’t laugh and his voice, when it
came, was very soft, almost sad.
“I’ve come to the same conclusion as you,” he said gently,
“I’ve come to realize it too. There are people who live seventy or eighty years
without noticing it. You at fifteen…….. we are alone Mariana. Alone with all
those people around us. So many people, Mariana! And nobody is going to do
anything for us. Nobody can. Nobody would want to even if they could. There is
no hope.”
“But you, Dad………….”
“ I……..The people who fill your world are different to those in mine……In reality it is probable
that some may be the same, but there you have it, probably they wouldn’t
recognise each other……….How can we save ourselves? None of us can, my daughter,
none of us can.
Nobody can save themselves.
Not even my poor father could save himself, poor man. He
died a few months later. Neither could Antonio save himself later on, nor Luís
Gonzaga. My life is like a tree trunk where all the leaves dry up, one by one,
and then all the branches. Not even one remains. And now the trunk is about to
fall for lack of sap.
The maid, Augusta, spends her days sighing loudly and
deeply. Then she’ll say, “I wish I were dead!” She is a plump, healthy, smiling
woman, with a taste for detective stories. When she sighs, the words that she
says are meaningless. Unlike me she doesn’t have nightmares of darkness and
lying beneath the heavy earth. She does not know, and even if she knew it, she
would think such a thing childish, that one day worms will come and devour her.
She did not see, like I did, the hill of earth upon my father’s grave, the
earth from the graves they were digging by its side. At the side of my father’s
grave…………..only a few months earlier his warm hand had caressed my hair.
“Nobody can help us, my daughter, nobody.”
I didn’t believe him because I was a girl and I expected a
lot of things from life. I expected so many things that I can’t even remember
what they were. I felt alone but I knew that I would not always be alone. Of
this, I was certain. When some years later, I left school for the free life and
I met António, I thought that in reality my dad had not known anything. Looking
back, I don’t think I even gave my father a thought. There was little enough
time to think about António and myself. Time was slipping through my fingers and
I wanted to grab hold of some of it.
We spent some difficult years together, me and António. My
in-laws had not agreed with our marriage and they ignored us, which was easy
for them to do as they lived in the provinces. Now that everything selfish,
resentful, bitter, and hating that lies within me is going to die with me, I
try to think that maybe they were right, I try to understand their attitude.
Who knows? Maybe I too would not have approved had my little Fernandinho
married a simple typist without money or relations, who was neither good looking
nor brilliant in any way.
I sometimes wonder what I would have done if things had been
different - if my son had grown to be a
man, for instance, or if I had been rich like António’s parents. Money changes
people enormously! Those who once lived quietly, secretively, modestly, turn
ostentatious when they get rich. They become aggressive and indifferent to
others - and everything they do is forgiven.
For six years we lived in an attic in the Rua das Pretas.
António taught Mathematics in a girls school in the Largo do Andaluz and at
night he gave private lessons. I typed up manuscripts and did the occasional
translation. With what we both earned and the small savings that my ever
prudent father had left me, we just about managed not to die of hunger, and to
pay off the loans on the furniture.
Sometimes in the evening we would walk down the Avenue,
through the Baixa, down to the river. On sunny days there were always children
there, looking in wonder at the boats, others happily chasing the pigeons. All
of a sudden I would be unhappy and I would say to António:
“Maybe things will get better this year. We could even have
a child, don’t you think? I’d love it……..”
He would reply that yes, that maybe things would improve
this year and he would press me close to him. We would have a child and we
would go to Paris. It was agreed. Sometimes though he would get angry, thinking
of the land in Gouveia, the buildings in Viseu, the gold bars that his parents
had locked away in a bank vault.
“When our little boy is born we will call him Fernando, no?
It was my father’s name.” I said to him one day.
He laughed in spite of himself, just a laugh, “Yes, all
right love, if that’s what you want!”
Life is a strange thing. One day António’s mother died and
we both went to Gouveia to attend the funeral. His father was very down,
overcome by a death that he had never thought possible. In tears he embraced
his son, begging forgiveness from both of us. Suddenly he was feeling alone and
loneliness seemed so horrible to him that he even begged the presence of those
he had scorned. He was a rough man who needed the company of others and he
begged and then proposed, with some sort of guarantee, of course, to make sure
he was not being fooled, the crafty old peasant. He offered us a few thousand,
which we were looking forward to spending in Paris, António’s dream. Then we
would get a nicely furnished house where the old man was hoping for a room. He
said all this looking at me triumphantly, because he thought that this must be
my dream. I smiled at him without saying a word. It was the thought of
Fernandinho that made me smile.
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