I don’t want to leave anything behind me. I spent today
tearing up papers. Amongst them I found the photo of me and the tree. Why did I
keep it? I don’t know. I can’t remember. I put it on top of the wardrobe, so I
can look at it sometime. So much paper, so many sheets I have covered with
writing! Diaries, letters that never reached their destination because, in the
end, thinking about it, they were not worth sending……Papers embroidered by a
small handwriting, firm, regular, round, that I hardly recognise. My
handwriting has wrinkled and softened with my face and my hands, with my own
body with its sagging breasts and its faded unloved flesh.
The bin is crammed full of my life. Torn up scraps,
fragments, words that someone said to me which I no longer remember hearing,
words that I said to someone that I have now forgotten. Everything mixed up in
my memory. Postcards sent by Luís Gonzaga with Italian stamps and views of
cathedrals, words from someone unknown to someone I no longer am. ‘The weather
is very pleasant. Rome is marvellous…..’, and to finish with, ‘best wishes for
your happiness.’ I’m no longer even able to laugh.
Perhaps it was because of the postcards that I’d been
reading that once again I dreamt of Luís last night. His presence, real or
imagined, was, and still is, nice company. For a long time I used to think of
him when I woke up. He would appear to me either as when I first time I saw him
or as he was that day when we said goodbye to each other forever. Forever,
despite all the postcards he continued to write to me for many months more. It
was the time when I used to wake up at night and a strange soft light filled
the room and I would notice the room’s odd smell, and taste the sleep in my
mouth. I didn’t want to wake up because then I would remember who I was. I
would shut my eyes, wanting to return to the nothing from which I had just
come. In my head were images I could not see. I wondered who I had been
dreaming of, and I couldn’t make it out. Sometimes, however, from the deepest
depths of the night I would manage to drag to the surface one or other figure,
almost smothered, vague, ghostly. Did other people dream in black and white
too? I asked Luís about it one day and he said that was just how dreams were.
But Luís would always accept everything. He didn’t laugh about anything. He
didn’t find anything strange or preposterous. Any idea at all he slowly thought
over, looking to understand everything, even that which was either childish or
ridiculous. And in this way, and many others, such as his voice, his way of
smiling, he greatly resembled my father.
I had met him at Lúcia’s house. He was a distant relation of
hers. He belonged to a rich family from the Minho, much given to religion. He,
the youngest and most fragile son, had been destined for the priesthood since
he was a child. Hence he had been sent to a seminary, but on finishing it, and
before taking orders, he had been filled with doubts. Did he really have a
religious vocation? It was then that he had come to Lisbon to study classical
philosophy. But immediately, on that first day that I met him at Lúcia’s house,
Luís Gonzaga said quite naturally that it was quite possible that he would
become a priest.
Now that I write his name, his image comes to mind and I
feel less alone. Like when his postcards arrive. They don’t say anything but
the handwriting is his and it is nice to think that somebody remembered me for
the space of a couple of minutes.
For how long will Luís Gonzaga continue to write me
postcards? The last one I received was six months ago. He said that after he
had spent a few years in universities and retreats he would return to Portugal
where he hoped for the happiness of serving a small parish in his province.
Then he wrote an unoriginal phrase in which he wished me well and hoped that I
too might find my path.
My path? Maybe I had found it after all. Could there
possibly be a better one for me, however much I looked for it?
Maybe he will continue to write to me even when I’m gone.
Who knows? But no. There will be plenty of things to prevent him from doing so,
his good name for one. What would they think and say if they found out, and
they would find out, of course, that he was writing to a woman? And it is
necessary to keep one’s good name, as Lúcia well knows. What is friendship
worth when one’s good name is at stake? Friendship…..For Luís too, maybe it’s
no more than a passing memory that goes no further than pity. Maybe it is out of pity that he still writes
to me. No, what an idea! And his good name? His egoism? It’s not good to forget
one’s egoism. We only give to others the alms of our concern if they thank us
for it. And I believe that I have written to him only once or twice. We are no
more than creatures of God. We write once, twice, ten or twenty times in
exceptional cases……..But then we get weary and we forget, and then we cling to
those phrases that justify our disinterest. She who does not reply is she who
does not interest herself in the news that she has received. Maybe she is bored
by it, who knows? Or, is it possible that she has moved house again? Or even,
maybe she has remarried? The excuses that we make for ourselves
We can only remember a face or a landscape as it was the
first day we saw it. That’s how I see him, as the young man he was back then –
I who am an old woman of thirty-six – an old woman full of white hairs and
wrinkles who left off being a woman long
ago. I am sure that Lúcia’s mother still
visits the hairdresser’s every fortnight, still files her nails, still plucks
her eyebrows, still puts on anti-wrinkle cream at night. It makes me want to
laugh……..Lúcia’s mother doing all that, and me……..
How am I to remember Luís Gonzaga? Back then I was
twenty-eight years old. I was getting divorced, I was unhappy, but I was
twenty-eight. I still liked António, certainly.
Even today, knowing that I am going to die, I still like him.
I was suffering a lot, for sure, but I don’t remember any
longer just exactly how I was suffering. It’s strange how the years go by and
we remember details with an almost photographic clarity, we hear a phrase and
the very voice that pronounced it, but how exactly we felt at a determined
point back then in the past, dies with that moment.
It was because I was suffering, because I was unhappy, that
I clung on with all my might, almost desperately, to Luís Gonzaga. His eyes
possessed a serenity that I needed. His calm voice and his gentle gaze that
lingered on people almost absently, brought with them a sense of well-being
that I had never known before, and that I would never feel from anyone else.
And that calm was never out of step with the light anxiety that
sometimes appeared in his face, which only served to soften it further. Never
again, after that first meeting, had he spoken to me, or to anybody else of the
possibility of becoming a priest, but I knew from his silences, from the
sentences begun and then abandoned, whenever the subject turned to some
connection with the Church or the seminary he had attended, or even the
Catholic faith itself, that the idea had never left him. I knew it from the
fact that he never tried to convert me.
We went out a lot. I had an almost physical need to go out,
to see people, to go here and there, to look beyond myself as much as possible.
I had finally found a job as a typist in a shipping company, but at
going-home-time, if he were free, I would meet up with Luís Gonzaga and we
would visit exhibitions and go to the early showings at the cinema, and on a
Sunday, if there was nothing better to do we would go to the zoo to see the
animals. On the bad days I would talk to him about António and Estrela and
myself. He would laugh and tell me that I was twenty-eight and that I had many
years ahead of me.
“Maybe I’ll have to marry you, eh?” he said one day.
He had his bad days too. He seemed worried, talking little.
Once he told me that the seminary had been no good for him. Other people had
decided for him that he should go, and he hadn’t known how to set himself free.
“You can see the scars, they’re plain to see,” I told him,
“To think that out of five brothers it was you who was chosen to be the priest.
Don’t you think it’s more than a coincidence that you have a religious vocation.
Unless, of course, you consider yourself to be in a state of grace, and you sin
from pride.”
He smiled, “We all sin from pride sixty times an hour,
sometimes more. You can see my scars and you know that you are right. I know
that I’m right even though I still don’t know it. There’s so much pride!”
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