António Antunes - The Splendor of Portugal

(it’s true these people really get attached to the kids)

ready to come to them and calm their fears if they called, my husband loosened his tie, took off his suit coat, looked around for the ashtray among the silver-handled hairbrushes and looked for the bottle of whiskey in the drawer and after he shut the drawer he had regained some enthusiasm and there was color in his face, his irises shone as brightly as his cuff links, I swear it’s the mirror that has grown old, not me, because we’ve just now returned from the Belgians’ and I was smiling, I didn’t notice a single trace of old age on my skin, not my back either, not my gallbladder, my kidney stones weren’t bothering me, while I took off my necklace I saw my husband lie down, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his pajama top, hiding a second bottle among the countless bottles of aspirin and cough syrups in the nightstand, no potbelly, no gray hairs, no canes, no shaking hands that made him spill alcohol on his clothes shaking his head back and forth

“Get the spiders off my chest Isilda don’t let them bite me”

I’d go get a broom or a towel and pretend that I was shooing away the spiders, I’d look for them under the mattress, on the floor, my husband terrified, curling up against the wall as if he wanted to knock it down and disappear into the fields

“That one there on my foot Isilda the huge one on my foot”

his stomach swollen and his feet so emaciated my God, two gnarled pieces of cassava root, my parents promised me the world and then some if I would refuse to marry him, they sent me to live in Lobito for a year, they tried to enroll me in a school in Cabo

“You’ll go straight to Cabo and in a few months you won’t even remember this guy”

they offered me a trip to France, they told me that all the agronomists who worked for Cotonang, without exception, had mulatto lovers and mulatto children with whom they secretly lived in the neighborhood near the company headquarters, I took a bus to Malanje, puttering along gravel roads, Amadeu shared a prefabricated house with a Dutch chemist, a couple of rooms so messy and dusty that you could tell that it had been centuries since the last time a woman, even a mulatto woman, had been in there, the flower vase was just an empty Coca-Cola can, the dinner table was a piece of plywood on top of a barrel the bathroom was a pigsty, the bristles on the shaving brush and the toothbrush pointing up at the lizards on the ceiling, no sign of any children, no sign of any lovers, pictures of dancing ladies on the wall, like the ones in the cabarets in Luanda, my husband standing in front of them to block my view

“I promise these are the Dutchman’s don’t worry about them”

the Dutchman went along with this story, checking out my legs, lying to me but making sure that I knew he was lying, since he liked my legs

“Not a day goes by that Amadeu doesn’t plead with me to take those down”

a worthless little miscreant sitting on a beer crate where he could get a good look at my backside, me pulling my skirt close against my legs and telling my husband that we should head out to the street, uncomfortable around this foreigner

“It’s stuffy in here Amadeu”

they weren’t streets but filthy dirt roads covered with trash that no one bothered to pick up, mules dozing in the sunlight on the embankment, a setter with its paws outstretched, reckless in its rage, barking at a guy who was frying up thin slices of liver in a little garden the size of a handkerchief that had nothing more than a single begonia growing in it, the return bus broke down out of that idiotic stubbornness that things have when they just refuse to work, a profound and unshakable obstinacy, the next bus didn’t leave until the following morning, I had dinner in the Cotonang cafeteria, embarrassed, with dozens of engineers staring at me through the haze of wine, the cafeteria looked for the most part like my husband’s prefabricated house, the same mess, the same dust everywhere, the same Coca-Cola cans used as vases for the flowers, the same tables made out of barrels and plywood, the same dancing ladies from the cabarets bashfully covering up their nakedness with a ribbon tied in a bow around their necks, engineers who seemed to be waiting, like the café owners in Uíge who wore ten rings on each finger, for me to strip off my clothes right there and shake my ankles in a frenzied can-can, the Dutchman tried to get my husband drunk so that he could toss him aside like a rag doll and have his way with me, while a filthy cafeteria worker wearing a soiled uniform and with manners almost as bad as the men dumped disgusting potatoes onto their plates with a mason’s trowel, after one or two flashes of lightning we suddenly became aware of the roof and the thousand drops of rain pounding against the zinc rooftop, the lights dimmed, accentuating the filth and squalor, I don’t know why I then thought of home and had to fight back tears, my father and mother worried, the dancing ladies were watching me from inside their pictures

(each photograph was surrounded by a border of little sketches and words that I preferred not to read)

out of a feeling of solidarity for a fellow woman, the type of detached benevolence usually reserved for escorts on their first day on the job, and we ran from one boggy field to the next, tripping over each other, up to our shins in mud, the lightning periodically illuminating the fence posts and piglets, appearing briefly, their images as clear as ghosts before evaporating in the darkness, the guesthouse in Malanje was nothing more than an oil lamp at the top of some stairs, an old woman with a toothpick in her mouth behind the counter and no rooms available, they were all taken by farm-equipment salesmen and diamond smugglers who passed the time arguing at the top of their lungs about whether they shouldn’t give a damn about Portugal and just keep getting rich here among the Bailundos or should give a damn about Portugal because my wife’s from Chaves and my in-laws send us kilos of alheira sausage at Christmas, the Dutchman

(I swear it was his hand that was groping me as if by accident)

pulled Amadeu, who could barely stay on his feet, out into the murkiness of the rain

“Why doesn’t the little lady come sleep at our place tonight?”

if my parents had heard him my father would have shot him and my mother would have fainted, my husband closer to fainting than to shooting anyone vomited violently, holding himself up in the doorway, throwing up out of fear of the Dutchman rather than devotion to his girlfriend, I helped Amadeu, my little hands on his rib cage, holding him up, my hair wet and matted against my forehead and my dress in tatters like the clothes of a shipwreck survivor

“Breathe slowly don’t choke don’t die on me now”

my husband practically holding himself up on my back alone, tripping over himself from one dirt road to the next, blowing his vinegary breath down my neck in between apologies and grumbles, the foreigner kicked open the gate to the house, lit a kerosene lantern that turned us into mummies with its white light, our movements like the jerky gestures of marionettes, butterflies did themselves in on the hot wire mesh around the lantern making a sound like the crackling of cellophane, lizards stuck the suckers at the end of their fingers to the cork panels on the ceiling, the palm trees near the chapel snapped in the north wind, a couple of voices started to shout in German, one of the voices fired a pistol and then they both fell silent, when one of his friends showed up dead in the back of a jeep with a deep wound in his chest, my father after returning from the funeral asked no one in particular what is life worth here, can someone tell me what life is worth here, and I think he died without knowing it, among the sunflowers, with the blade from one of our hoes stuck in his kidney, the sergeant feigned outrage and interrogated some of the foremen without finding the culprits, threw a few of them into prison in Luanda so that we’d stop complaining, all of them piled into a bus and wailing out of fear, I was able to get my husband to lie down under the mosquito net after taking off his shoes and his clothes, putting up with his stammering and whining, his tears