So Many People, Mariana - Tanta Gente Mariana - Maria Judite de Carvalho - Part 11

Then I came across Estrela at Restauradores. Whether it was Estrela herself or someone who looked like her is all the same. And Fernandinho died forever more   -  he and all the other brothers and sisters he might have had. He was a little boy, the nurse told me. As if I didn’t know already! The nurse saw him but I know a lot more things about him than she did. I was sure that he would have fair hair, slightly oblique eyes, António’s slight hands……..António’s?

“He was a beautiful baby, it’s such a shame” In her professional manner the nurse shared in my sorrow, “It’s such a shame.”

I shut my eyes with all my might, to stop the flow of tears. The nurse came up to me now and ran her fingers through my hair. I shouted at her to go away. I shouted so loud that everyone else shut up and for a long time all that could be heard in the ward were my sobs and the frightened crying of new born babies.

I moved from the boarding house to a private dwelling, Dona Gloria’s house, which was more to my taste. She knows nothing about my life, nor about my death, nothing at all, not even that I am divorced. A number of times, particularly at meal times, she has tried to draw out of me a few confidences by telling her own. She speaks to me about her husband, who died of septicaemia (unfortunately Dona Mariana, there was no penicillin back then), about her youngest sister, who, at the age of seventeen ran off with a lieutenant and who was, poor thing, very unhappy. She has even shown me a photograph of her sister, Ermelinda, a chubby girl with a vacant stare. Ermelinda is dead now, God rest her soul, as Dona Gloria always says reverently, though to me she already looks dead in the photograph, with her unsmiling empty expression.

“What the poor thing went through, Dona Mariana! Such misfortune  -  poverty, neglect from her husband, everything. She was so pretty, as you can see in the picture, no?”

“She had beautiful eyes,” I say to keep her happy.”

“Beautiful,”

“You can always tell what a person’s like by looking in their eyes. And she had such beautiful eyes. It’s in the family. I had them too, beautiful eyes. ‘Just like your mother,’ my father used to say, ‘just like your mother.”

Then Dona Gloria would sigh softly, “Such is life. We all have our cross to bear. As you know so well, Dona Mariana……….”

Then she leaves off. I smile, I nod. Yes, I know say my smile and my nod. But I can only offer up an empty phrase, “Yes, we all have our cross to bear, Dona Gloria.”

“Yes, really, some people’s lives, yes, some people…..Dona Mariana…Sometimes I think……..”

But I don’t find out what Dona Gloria is thinking because she has already moved on to another subject, “Tell me what you want for dinner, dear. You’re so thin these days. There’s nothing I can tempt you with. Really? I had thought of making breaded cod with a tomato rice….”

I tell her yes, that would be lovely. And Dona Gloria is happy.

Dona Gloria has pictures of her husband and her sister. I don’t even have a photograph of my father, or one of António. I left all my things in our flat in the Avenida de Berne, such a hurry I was in to get out. But I still have the photograph that António took of me in Gouveia, with my back against the tree. It’s the only reminder that I have of him. But he is always present whenever my eyes are open.