So Many People Mariana - Tanta Gente Mariana - Maria Judite de Carvalho

I’ve not long got back and I only vaguely remember going there. The only thing I remember clearly was the old man who was almost run over, at the hands of the taxi driver who brought me back  -  wide white hands with short fingers almost without finger nails, spread out on the steering wheel like stars that the sea might have forgotten on the sands. Two bloodless hands. And yet the owner of these hands was fully alive. He cursed the old man who had stepped in front of his wheels.

“Get some glasses, stupid git!”

The old man looked as if he were not quite there. There was a dull absent look in his eyes. It was as if he were really a long way from the street where his body was walking, and where he had now stopped to receive, without hearing them, the insults of the driver, and the laughter of the people who had stopped just to make fun of him.

“Hey, look, he’s lost the plot! Have you had a drop too many, or what?”

So alone, that poor man, so alone!

Is it true that I went to the doctors? Have I really been out? Yes, it all really happened. I’ve still got my bag by my side, and on my knees is the hat that I bought six years ago. Only today I noticed that it has two small holes and a ridiculous feather on the right side. It neither suits me, nor I it. How could it be otherwise?

Suddenly the world is a heap of strange things that I am seeing for the first time. Everything exists with an unexpected vividness; the peach tree in the garden which is almost ready to flower, the old disembowelled armchair where I usually sit, the rose embroidered bedspread that once belonged to Dona Gloria’s mother. Tremulous images that come to draw themselves into the sea of my tears.

There are so many things that we do not think about because we lack time, such as hope, for instance. Who is going to waste five or ten minutes thinking about hope when they can make use of those minutes more profitably by reading a romance or talking on the phone with a friend, or going to the cinema, or sorting out what needs to be sorted out at work? Thinking about hope? What a stupid idiotic thing to do! It makes you want to laugh! Hope  -  there’s always some hope  -  hope like sand in the hem of your garments and in the folds of your soul. Years go by, lives go by, then comes the last day and the last hour and the last minute and yet still hope turns up unexpectedly at the dread moment we were awaiting embittering further what was already bitter. Hope just makes things even more bitter.

The specialist asked me if I had family. I told him no. He seemed slightly disappointed, as if my familial situation were the most important detail of all that was going on with me, the first stone on my road to recovery. He looked at me with the reports in his hand.

“Really? Nobody?” he insisted, as if he wanted to awaken my good will. I shook my head and smiled with serious eyes into the mirror with a beige picture frame hanging behind his ruddy neck. The feather in my hat was moving from left to right. I don’t know why, but I was very embarrassed on account of that feather.

He said, “Well?”

He had just finished reading the reports again. All that theatre, for what? Maybe he didn’t know where to start. He didn’t seem to know what he was doing. All that practice for nothing! Why all the delay? Maybe to busy himself with me for a few more minutes? It was possible. I had handed over five hundred escudos on arrival -  and it had been some effort to get together the five hundred escudos  -  to the pretty receptionist with the technicolour face, immaculate in her appearance and with a standard smile that lit up one moment and then was suddenly extinguished like a flame that had somehow been blown out. It was extinguished because it was no longer necessary.

“The doctor has not yet arrived. Please be so good as to take a seat…..”

Maybe it wasn’t so bad as the other doctor had made it out to be. With his silences, with his encouraging half-words, with his smile that was too frank and self-satisfied, sounding as false as Judas. Who knows? Maybe…… There was still hope.

Her red and white smile, her large eyes edged with cheap mascara.

“Senhora Dona Mariana Toledo.”

There he was now in front of me, the great Cardenio Santos, studying once more the strange symbols, the mysterious numbers meant only for the initiated, the secret code of death.

I decided to look at his face closely, as if this were the most important thing of all, even more important than the words that he was about to throw like a veil over the truth.

A moon shaped pink face, two small penetrating eyes sunk in soft flesh. Nothing else, except the face of a good doctor, of one of those rare genial types who never in their lives have made a mistake in their diagnosis. Never. He knows it all, naturally.

He said, “Your case isn’t desperate, far from it…………..What is required is………

But all I required was to know. I managed to drag out of myself another smile and I handed him the specimen that I had brought with me from home.

“Good,” I said to him, “I have everything arranged for a journey. All I need to do is to buy a ticket and I didn’t want to buy it without coming here first.”

I could see he was perplexed. Without even looking at me he saw the tatty coat, the feather in the hat, the shabby underwear, the air of abandon.

“I don’t think it’s wise,” he said, in spite of everything.

“I’m a courageous woman, Doctor. How long do I have left? Without going into care, of course. I am not contagious. I want to die in my house, that is, the house where I am living.”

The shot had hit its target, because he was off guard. He still hesitated, naturally. He laughed and I felt great admiration for him because his laugh appeared authentic.

“You’re a lady who doesn’t beat about the bush. Then assume that you are going to die.”

“Then I am begging you, Doctor, to tell me the truth. It is very, very important to me. You can’t imagine how important it is. I’m not going on any voyage at all. Please, look at me! Do I look like someone who goes on voyages? When you are alone like I am, without anyone, you can’t afford the luxury of being deceived. I need to be prepared.”

He began to mutter, “Well……..”

Then he told me a truth laden with pompous, difficult words which were all very technical. When I deciphered them I found myself face to face with death.

Yet hope survived in spite of everything, screaming at me that it wasn’t possible. Maybe he was mistaken, who knows? Everyone makes mistakes, even professors in the Faculty of Medicine. What an idea! How could he have possibly got wrong those numbers that were written right there, perfectly clearly. And as for the laboratory, mine wasn’t the first such case they had seen. I remembered reading in the newspaper sometime in the past about a mix-up.

But it is true what the doctor said and it is true what is written there. And hope, not wanting to give up, grabs hold of any straw, however weak, however unreasonable.

But today is the 23^rd January, and three or four months from now I can expect to die.

I feel alone, more alone than ever, even though I have always been alone.

Always.