The Tuner of Silences

  I loved you, and you alone, Marcelo. My fidelity led me into the most painful of exiles: this love removed me from all possibility of loving. Now, of all the names, all I have left is your name. I can only ask that name what I used to ask of you: to beget me. For I need so much to be born! To be born another, far from me, far from my time. I am exhausted, Marcelo. Exhausted but not empty. To be empty, one must have internal substance. And I have lost my inner being.

  Why did you never write? It’s not reading you that I miss. It’s the sound of the knife slitting the envelope that carries your letter. And once again feeling my soul caressed, as if somewhere an umbilical cord was being cut. But it was just an illusion: there is no knife, there is no letter. Nothing, or nobody, is being delivered into the world.

  Do you see how small I become when I write to you? That’s why I could never be a poet. A poet grows when faced by absence, as if absence were his altar, and he became greater than the word. That’s not the case with me, for absence submerges me, so that I no longer have access to myself.

  This is my conflict: when you’re here, I don’t exist, I’m ignored. When you’re not here, I don’t know myself, I’m ignorant. I only exist when I’m in your presence. And I am only myself in your absence. Now, I know. I’m no more than a name. A name that only comes to life when uttered by you.

  This morning I watched the bushfire in the distance. On the other side of the river, vast stretches were being consumed. It wasn’t the earth that was turning to flame: it was the air itself that was burning, the whole sky was being devoured by demons.

  Later, when the blaze had died down, a sea of dark ash remained. In the absence of wind, particles fluttered around like black dragonflies over the scorched grassland. It could have been a scene from the end of the world. But for me, it was the opposite: it was the earth being born. I felt like yelling your name:

  —Marcelo!

  My cry could have been heard far away. For here, in this place, even silence produces an echo. If there is somewhere I can be reborn, it’s here, where the briefest moment leaves me sated. I’m like the savannah: I burn to live. And I die, drowned by my own thirst.

  —What’s that word?

  At the last stop before we reached Jezoosalem, Orlando (who I’ve got to get into the habit of calling Aproximado) asked, pointing at my name on the cover of my diary:

  —What’s that word?

  —This woman—I corrected him. This is me.

  I should have said: that’s my name, written on the cover of my diary. But no. I said it was me as if my whole body and my whole life were contained in a mere five letters. That’s what I am, Marcelo: I’m a word, you write me by night, and by day you erase me. Every day is a sheet you tear off, I’m the paper that awaits your hand, I’m the letter that awaits the caress of your gaze.

  What struck me right from the start at Jezoosalem was the absence of electricity. Never before had I felt the night, been embraced by darkness, embraced inside me until I too became dark.

  Tonight, I’m sitting on the veranda, under a star-filled sky. Under the sky, no. In fact I’m among the sky. The firmament is so close, I could sow it with seeds, and I breathe slowly for fear of disturbing constellations.

  The smell of the oil lamp burning is the only thing anchoring me to the ground. All the rest are indefinable vapours, unknown odours, angels whirling around me. Nothing precedes me, for I am inaugurating the world, light, shadow. More than this: I am founding words. I’m the one who launches them, I am the creator of my own language.

  All this, Marcelo, reminds me of our nights in Lisbon. You would watch me in bed, while I rubbed beauty creams over my body. You complained there were too many: a lotion for the face, another for the neck, one for the hands, still another for around the eyes. They had been invented as if each part of me were a separate body and sustained its own particular beauty. As far as the sellers of cosmetics are concerned, it’s no longer enough that each woman has her body. Each one of us has various bodies that exist in a kind of confederation of autonomous states. That’s what you said as you sought to dissuade me.

  Haunted by the fear of ageing, I allowed our relationship to grow old. Busy making myself beautiful, I allowed my true beauty, that which dwells in a candid look, to escape. The bed sheet grew cold, the bed played safe. That’s the difference: the woman you met over there, in Africa, is beautiful only for you. I was beautiful for me alone, which is another way of saying for no one.

  This is what these black women have that we can never have: they are always their whole body. They live in every part of their body. Their whole body is woman, their time is feminine. While we white women live in a strange state of transhumance: sometimes we are soul, other times we are body. We aspire to soar on the wings of desire, only to then crash to the ground under the weight of our guilt.

  Now that I’ve got here, suddenly, I don’t want to find you anymore. For me, it was a strange sensation, I who had travelled so far in my dream of reconquering you. But on my journey to Africa, this dream faltered. Perhaps I had waited too long. During my wait, I had learned to enjoy my yearning. I remember the verses of the poet, which go like this: “I came into the world to feel yearning.” As if I could only populate my mind through absence. Following the example of those houses that can only speak to the senses when they are empty. Like this house where I now live.

  The pain of a fruit that has fallen to the ground, that’s what I feel. The portent of the seed, that’s what I await. As you can see, I am learning how to be both tree and earth, time and eternity.

  —You’re like the earth. That’s your beauty.

  That’s what you used to say. And when we kissed and I became breathless, I would ask you, between sighs: what day were you born? You would reply, your voice shaking: I’m being born now. And as you brought your hand up between my legs, I would ask you again: where were you born? And, almost voiceless, you would reply: I’m being born in you, my love. That’s what you said. You were a poet, Marcelo. I was your poetry. And when you wrote to me, what you told me was so beautiful that I would get undressed to read your letters. I could only read you when naked. For it wasn’t through my eyes that I received you, but with my whole body, line by line, pore by pore.

  When I was still in the city, Aproximado asked me who I was, and I seemed to talk for the whole night. I told him everything about us, I told him almost everything about you, Marcelo. At one stage, perhaps because I was tired, I realized how surprised I was with the story I was telling. Secrets are fascinating because they were made in order to be revealed. I revealed secrets because I can no longer bear to live without fascination.

  —You know, Miss Marta: the journey to the reserve is very dangerous.

  I didn’t answer, but the truth is that I was only interested in travel if it involved crossing infernos, passing my soul through conflagrations.

  —Tell me about this Marcelo. Your husband.

  —Husband?

  I’m used to this: women explain themselves to themselves by talking about their men. While if it were you, Marcelo, explaining me to other men, your words would transform me into a simple creature to be contained in the speech of one man alone.

  —Last year, Marcelo came on a journey to Africa.

  He came with the illusions of those who have lived in a place: on a pilgrimage to nostalgia. He stayed here for a month and when he returned, he had changed out of all recognition. Perhaps it was his re-encounter with this land that had unsettled him. It was in Mozambique that he fought as a soldier years before. He thought he had been sent to an unfamiliar land in order to kill. But he had been sent to kill a distant country. During that fatal operation, Marcelo had ended up being born as another person. Fifteen years later, it wasn’t the country he wanted to see again, but that process of birth he had gone through. I told him not to go. I had a strange foreboding about his journey. No memory can be revisited. Even more serious: there are memories that are only re-encountered in death.

&
nbsp; I’ve told you this, Marcelo, because the pain of it all is like that of an ingrown nail. I need to talk, to gnaw this nail right down to the skin. You don’t know, Marcelo, how many deaths you made me die. For you came back from Africa, but part of you never returned. Every day, early in the morning, you would leave the house and wander the streets as if there was nothing you recognized in your city.

  —Is this city no longer mine?

  That’s what you would say to me. A land is ours just as a person may belong to us: without our ever taking possession. A few days after your return, I found a photo at the bottom of your drawer. It was a picture of a black woman. She was young, pretty, her pensive eyes defying the camera. On the back of the photo, there was a note in tiny handwriting: a telephone number. The miniature writing made it look like the merest scratch. But it was an abyss I kept falling back into repeatedly, every time I emerged from it.

  My first impulse was to make a phone call. But I thought twice about it. What would I say? Then my fury prevailed, uncontained. I threw the photo back, face down, like one might do with a corpse one didn’t want to see the face of.

  —You cheat, I hope you die of AIDS, and with fleas along with it . . .

  I wanted to mistreat you, Marcelo, I wanted to throw you in jail. So you would remain shackled to my rage. I was past caring about love. I spent endless, sleepless nights, waiting. I waited for you to return so that I could talk to you, but when you arrived, you were too exhausted to listen. You’d be less tired the next day. Then, when the next day came, you phoned me from the airport to say you were leaving again for Mozambique. For the first time, I was surprised by my own tone of voice. And I told you: “Well then, sleep . . .” Just that. When what I wanted to say was: “Go and fuck your black girls once and for all.” My God, how ashamed I am of my anger and of how spiteful my emotions made me.

  I remained in Lisbon, dominated by the part of me that had gone with you. It was a sad irony that the person who kept me company the most during your absence was your lover. The photograph of the other woman stared at me from the bedside table. And we would contemplate each other, day and night, as if we had been forever joined by some invisible connection. I would sometimes whisper my decision to her:

  —I’m going to go and find him . . .

  But then your black mistress would counsel me: “Don’t go!” Let him sink in the dark mud by himself. I convinced myself of the irrevocable truth: my husband had disappeared forever, a victim of cannibalism. Marcelo had been devoured, just as had happened to others who’d left for darkest Africa. He had been swallowed up by a huge mouth, a mouth the size of a continent. He had been gobbled up by ancient mysteries. There are no longer any savages, only natives. But natives can be beautiful. Above all, native women can be beautiful. And it is from that beauty that their bygone savagery emerges. It is a savage beauty. White men, in the past oppressors who were fearful of being devoured, nowadays want to be eaten, swallowed up by black beauty.

  That’s what your mistress told me. How many times did I fall asleep with my rival’s photo in the margins of my slumber. Every time, I would mutter between my teeth: cursed woman! And I was never able to come to terms with the injustice of my fate. For years, I had paid considerable attention to makeup, diet, workouts in the gym. I had assumed that this was the way to continue to captivate you. It’s only now that I’ve come to understand that seduction lies elsewhere. Perhaps in a look. And I had long ago allowed my fervent gaze to fade.

  As I contemplated the fire sweeping across the savannah, I missed that exchange of fire, the mirror of bedazzlement in Marcelo. To bedazzle, as the word suggests, should be to blind, to take away the light. So it was a glaring light that I now sought. That hallucination that I had once felt, I knew, was as addictive as morphine. Love is a type of morphine. It could be turned into a commercial product, packaged with the name: Amorphine.

  The so-called “women’s magazines” sell recipes, secrets and techniques for how to love more and better. Little hints on how to enjoy sex. At the beginning, I was sold on this illusion. I wanted to win back Marcelo and I was open to any persuasion. Now, I don’t know: all I want to know about love is precisely not to know, to disconnect the body from the mind, and allow it uncontrolled freedom. I’m just a woman in appearance. Underneath my surface expression I’m a creature of nature, a wild beast, a lava flow.

  All this sky reminds me of Marcelo. He used to tell me, “I’m going to count stars,” and then he would touch each of my freckles. He would dot my shoulders, my back, my breast with his finger. My body was Marcelo’s sky. And I never discovered how to fly, to surrender to the languorous way he counted the stars. I never felt at ease with sex. Let’s say it was a strange territory, an unknown language. My demureness was more than just shame. I was a deaf translator, incapable of turning the desire that spoke deep within me into outward expression. I was the rotten tooth in a vampire’s mouth.

  And so I return to my bedside table, to look your black mistress in the face. This was the gaze, at the moment the photo was taken, that plunged into my man’s eyes. A luminous gaze, like the light at the entrance to a house. Maybe it was precisely that, a bedazzling look, maybe that’s what Marcelo had always desired. It wasn’t sex after all. But to feel desired, even if it were only a fleeting pretence.

  Under an African sky, I become a woman once more. Earth, life, water are my sex. No, not the sky, for the sky is masculine. I feel the sky touching me with all its fingers. I fall asleep under Marcelo’s caress. And in the distance, I can hear the words of the Brazilian singer, Chico César: “If you look at me, I gently surrender, snow in a volcano . . . .”

  I want to live in a city where people dream of rain. In a world where rain is the greatest happiness of all. And where we all rain.

  Tonight, I carried out the ritual: I stripped off all my clothes in order to read Marcelo’s old letters. My love wrote so profoundly that, as I read, I felt his arm brush against my body, and it was as if he were unbuttoning my dress and my clothes were falling to my feet.

  —You’re a poet, Marcelo.

  —Don’t say that again.

  —Why?

  —Poetry is a mortal illness.

  Marcelo would fall asleep straight away after making love. He would fold the pillow between his legs and sink into slumber. I was left alone, awake, to ruminate over time. At first, I considered Marcelo’s attitude intolerably selfish. Then, much later on, I understood. Men don’t look at the women they’ve made love to because they’re scared. They’re scared of what they may find in the depths of women’s eyes.

  EVICTION ORDER

  I no longer fear myself. Farewell.

  Adélia Prado

  Marta’s papers were burning my hands. I tidied them away so as no one could see that the intimacy inhabiting them had been violated. I returned home with a heavy heart. We fear God because he exists. But we fear the devil more because he doesn’t. What made me more afraid at that particular moment was neither God nor the devil. I was especially worried about Silvestre Vitalício’s reaction when I told him that all I had found in the Portuguese woman’s room was a bunch of love letters. There was my old man at the entrance to the camp, hands on hips, his voice laden with anxiety:

  —A report! I want a report. What did you find in the Portagee woman’s things?

  —Just papers. That’s all.

  —So what did they say?

  —Don’t you remember, Father, that I can’t read?

  —Did you bring any papers with you?

  —No. Next time . . .

  He didn’t let me finish. He ran out of the kitchen and returned, the next moment, pulling Ntunzi by his arm.

  —You two go to the Portuguese woman’s house and give her my order.

  —What order, Father?—Ntunzi asked.

  —You mean to say you don’t know?

  We were to tell her to go back to the city. We were to be curt, we were to be gruff. The Portagee was to get the message fairly and sq
uarely.

  —I want that woman out of here, far away, and I don’t want to see her back here again.

  I looked at Ntunzi who was standing there, motionless, as if he were giving in. But within him, he must have been seething with recalcitrance. Nevertheless, he said nothing, and expressed no objection. There we stood, waiting for Silvestre to start speaking again. My father’s silence kept both of us quiet and so we set off, meek and vanquished, in the direction of the haunted house. Halfway there, I asked:

  —Are you going to send the Portuguese woman away? How are you going to tell her?

  Ntunzi shook his head sluggishly. The two extremes of impossibility had met within him: he couldn’t obey, but nor could he disobey. In the end, he said:

  —You go and speak to her.

  And he turned his back. I went on towards the big house, my steps faltering, like someone in a funeral procession. I found the intruder sitting on the steps, with a bag at her feet. She greeted me affectionately and stared up at the sky as if preparing to launch herself into flight. I expected to hear her say things in the gentle tone with which she had visited me in my dream. But she remained quiet while she took something from the bag, which I later learned was a camera. She took a photo of me, glimpsing hidden corners of my soul that I never knew existed. Then she took a small gadget made of metal from a case, and put it to her ear, only to put it away again.

  —What’s that?

  She explained that it was a cellphone, and told me what it was for. But right there, in Jezoosalem, she couldn’t pick up a signal for her machine.