António Antunes - The Splendor of Portugal

“They hung up”

climbing up the stairs to the second floor in my evening gown which even the bishop swore looked beautiful on me when I kissed his ring

“God forgive me for saying so but you really do look like a holy saint Dona Isilda”

pearl earrings, lipstick, powder, perfume, stretched out on the bed awaiting the Cubans, hoping the Cubans will come and put a bullet in me.

For many years if I happened to wake up before everyone else I thought that the ticktock of the clock on the wall in the living room was the heart of the house, I would lie in the dark with my eyes open for hours and hours listening to its living pulse certain that as long as the pendulum still swayed from one side to the other

systole diastole, systole diastole, systole diastole

none of us would die.

For many years if I happened to wake up before everyone else I thought that the ticktock of the clock on the wall in the living room was my own heart and I would lie in the dark with my eyes open for hours and hours listening to my own living pulse. The bed in my parents’ room squeaked when my father leaned over the nightstand groping among the bottles, my grandmother whom the doctor would come to examine with his stethoscope and prescribe medications for coughed in her room at the end of the hallway the sound was like someone shaking a bag of rocks, the threshers started up, Maria da Boa Morte walked up from the workers’ huts and came into the kitchen smoking a cigarette with the lit end inside her mouth burning her tongue and I felt responsible for all of them given that it was surely something in me, inside my chest, swinging from left to right and right to left

systole diastole, systole diastole, systole diastole

ensuring our continued existence, the house, my parents, Maria da Boa Morte, me, the others began to get up, the setters barked on the porch, the quails flew down from the top of the wall chirping at the sun, my grandmother, drinking sugar water, kept shaking her bag of rocks, the clock cleared its throat before striking six o’clock and me with my eyes open not even daring to move a finger, aware of the sparrows outside, the brightness of the cotton coming through the window, and the cotton pickers whom the foremen with whistles slung around their necks distributed across the fields, keeping the world from dying, keeping the men in black clothing from bringing the hearse and taking away my grandmother in a coffin, me swinging from left to right and from right to left

systole diastole, systole diastole, systole diastole

worried about Rui’s crying that Josélia helped to calm and Clarisse’s complaints, refusing to eat, letting my father pour himself a whiskey and then hide the bottle, my mother in her robe, wrinkled from sleep, getting upset in the doorway to my room

“Carlos”

not knowing that it was thanks to me that she was even able to get upset, that the second the clock, or I, stopped beating

systole diastole, systole diastole

the house and my family and all of Angola would disappear, I had to keep quiet, something in my chest going from left to right and from right to left, allowing the continued existence of the Baixa de Cassanje and the day itself and the river, allowing her to roll back the blinds and shake my foot underneath the blanket

“Carlos”

my mother in the morning, older and poorer and shorter and uglier than my mother at night, without her fake eyelashes, earrings, necklaces, high heels, with wrinkles that I’d never noticed that made her mouth look withered, flaps of loose skin between her neck and her shoulders, the clock pausing to gather strength

(everything gave off the impression that it would all dissolve in silence)

rang out with a regal clang and began ticking again and as long as it ticked we all remained alive, my father scrounging for bottles in the study, my mother walking over to me, a stain from grease or a fried egg on her robe, pulling the blanket off my legs

“It’s already six-thirty Carlos”

a trail of smoke wafted behind the thresher, it crept along the hillside on its crippled wheels, the dusty driver up on top

Cassiano

(he lived alone, always lived alone in a small brick shack that he stuffed with birdcages full of doves, after they took ill all that was left in the birdcages was a pile of feathers and beaks that were open but no longer sang, he opened the little door to the cage and dumped the dead doves out in the forest without a tear

Cassiano

where are those doves now?)

my mother in the morning covering her tiny yawn with the palm of her hand she put on my shirt and pants, Maria da Boa Morte carried bowls of food out to the setters who jumped excitedly all around her, my father with purple bags under his eyes

(he was the same father in the morning, the same father at night, the same untied shoes, the same general disarray)

he came slowly down the stairs for breakfast, declining milk and toast, pushing away his cup of Postum with a look of disgust, asking Damião, already in his white jacket with the golden buttons, to fix him a cordial

(he called it a cordial)

from the liquors in the sideboard table I straightened my shirt very carefully, slowly, so they wouldn’t have to bury my grandmother six feet under and the heart of the house didn’t stop beating, as I walked down the hallway, carrying the full glass that was my heart, aware of the back-and-forth nodding of the pendulum, I passed by my sick grandmother’s room from which emerged the coughs that sounded like a bag of rocks and the vapors of medicines and agony, since only the copper pendulum with two counterweights, also made of copper, behind the glass case of the clock, kept the men in black clothing from taking her away, one of the quails flew into the glass window, startling me, startling the mechanism in my chest that hiccupped and missed a beat

diastole, systole diastole

and flinched, emitting a frail little tick, I was sure that the house and everyone in it had evaporated, but no, Maria da Boa Morte was stoking the fire, Clarisse was refusing to eat more oatmeal, and my mother was cursing under her breath as she locked the cupboard door of the sideboard table and put the key in her pocket, the smell of the sunflowers and the glimmer of the sun on the river helped me to walk without stepping off the rug onto the wooden floor, the bag of rocks rattled painfully in the distance, too far away now to distress me, the clock thank God continued to tick, would always continue to tick, ultimately there was no sickness, no death, Africa, my house, my family, and I were all eternal since nothing bad would ever happen to us, my father could drink his whiskey without his liver wasting away because all the warnings from the medic in Malanje, waving around the pages of results from all the medical tests, two red Xs here, three red Xs over there, were nothing more than nonsensical drivel, the field workers were the ones who smelled like corpses and were buried in the cemetery at the monastery near the old colonist’s tomb where the hyenas howled, we were eternal, we never grew old, we played on the ground beneath the golden rain tree, and in the midst of all this Rui knocked his dessert to the tile floor, his whole body fell backward, his huge face with his mouth opening wider and wider exposing more and more of his teeth, a mass of foam spewing out of his mouth like rising dough, my mother saying to Damião and Fernando

“Hold him still for the love of God hold him still”

that stupid pendulum swinging from left to right and from right to left determined to keep fooling me with its monotony inside its potbellied case, Rui kept writhing despite the efforts of Damião and Fernando, knocking over Josélia, my father fidgeted with the tablecloth in an effort to console himself, I threw a silver candlestick, who knows what ever happened to it after I left Angola with all the chaos that’s been reported in the newspapers, against the glass case of the clock