António Antunes - The Splendor of Portugal

“Young lady”

not like right now as I sit down on the couch, get up, sit back down in spite of the sleeping pill, the spring-summer fashions on a dozen pages, use warm colors, tight-fitting skirts, shorts that make your sensuality explode, when my parents would leave for the governor’s palace they’d come up to our beds to give us a kiss and turn out the light

“Sweet dreams”

my mother’s perfume, which I usually only smelled when I opened the bottle, lingered for who knows how long all around us, my mother with her ears stretched by slender filaments that looked like crystals from the chandelier, my father in coattails with his hair wet but it wasn’t wet it was stiff, I’d reach my hand out toward his head, the sticky oil that smelled like almonds would linger on the palm of my hand, there was a second world inside the world we lived in that I didn’t have access to, the way they breathed, the way they came near us without really coming close to us, the way they danced on certain Sunday afternoons as if a part of their bodies were made of vapor or liquid, at first I didn’t pay attention to it and afterward I pretended not to pay attention to it, and then I started to turn to liquid as well, half of me fell into a strange state of torpor, consenting, Yes

I’m your whore aren’t I you can admit it I won’t get angry

half of me remained alert so I could spy on them, I’d hear the key in the lock, shoes falling to the floor, whispers

“The window the children are outside they’ll hear us through the window”

the shutters pulled shut, my grandmother’s crochet needles moving faster, warm colors, her noisy silence, her ruddy disapproving cheeks, I’d let Carlos and Rui water my part of the azaleas

tight-fitting skirts shorts that make your sensuality explode

and crouch next to the creeping vine below the windowsill, consenting, Yes, without noticing that I was consenting and trying to listen in on what the swather engine wouldn’t let me hear, noticing that I was liquid and that my bones were melting into a strange feeling of itchiness, not an itch, something like an anthill down around my ankles

a dozen pages of women in pink and blue head scarves

and around my wrists, Rui flooded my plants and splashed around in the mud, tried to splash Josélia and Lady

I wonder whatever happened to Lady

Carlos pushing him, taking the hose away from him

“Stupid”

Rui sitting on the ground, flailing his legs

“Grandma”

me on my tiptoes, hanging from the shutters, my grandmother not paying attention to Rui, not getting mad at Carlos, understanding what I didn’t understand, what I came to understand later on with Renato but it wasn’t exactly the same

“Clarisse”

it wasn’t so

warm colors skin-tight skirts shorts that make your sensuality explode

nor did I feel like there was a separate, hidden world of perfumes and stiff hair that somehow coexisted with the golden rain tree, there was only this one world, get away from there Clarisse, it’s a good thing that your grandfather passed away if he were still alive poor thing he’d die of sorrow seeing the miserable state of this family

shameless sluts and mulattoes,

of his, my grandmother demanded an explanation from the sky over Baixa de Cassanje, which responded

“Eduardo”

his plantation that Cotonang was buying up little by little, the farmers complained about the government in Lisbon bleeding them dry with taxes, about the customs agents refusing their shipments of crops

they’re no good

yet accepted much worse shipments from the state, shipments that weighed far less and contained far more impurities, but for which they paid double the price, the whites in Portugal who treated us like blacks, we’re their blacks, the farmers would shut their mouths when the police chief came around, the police chief, in an indulgent tone of voice

“Conspiring, good sirs?”

from time to time one or another of them was summoned to the police station, he’d spend the whole morning there, then enter the pastry shop without saying a word, a single muscle twitching in his face, and take out a box of matches to light his cigarette, the matches would fall to the floor and the ones that didn’t fall would snap in two against the striking surface

“Nothing happened”

a cripple selling lottery tickets going from table to table, the farmers taking their anger at the state out on him

“Get lost”

and the police chief was the only one who’d call him over, treat him like a friend, these bums get on your nerves sure but really they’re just a bunch of poor bastards, leave him alone, and then he’d take a twenty-to-one ticket, mollifying him

“There there”

or a whole ream of tickets that he’d hand out to the farmers and which none of them would refuse, who knows maybe you’ll win a small fortune, you haven’t thanked me for all I do for you my good sirs, he’d try to cheer up the guy with the matches by giving him a little friendly pat on the back, cheer up man here take the one with the best odds buddy, the guy with the matches looking like his face was swelling up, a violet-colored spot on his cheek, the police chief, thoughtfully, you haven’t hurt yourself there have you, asking one of the pastry-shop employees for warm water and a towel to ease the pain, putting the towel on the guy’s face himself, don’t squirm it’s for your own good, hold still, when you get home you should ask your wife to rub some ointment on your face and you’ll be fine, there are some things you shouldn’t mess around with, things that are easier to prevent than to fix later isn’t that true, the water running down his neck, the cigarette drenched and falling apart, and even without a cigarette the guy’s fingers trembling trying to strike a match, the matches still snapping in two until the box was empty, the police chief extremely kind, handing the washbasin and the towel back to the employee, drying the farmer’s mouth with his own handkerchief, some dried blood between two of his teeth, the police chief asking in a sulky, childlike tone of voice

“What do we say when somebody helps us out what do we say?”

the owner pouring a glass of rum, his arm frozen in the air, the beady eyes of the cook averted toward the pantry door decorated with azulejo tiles, a shoeshine guy bent over a shoe, pausing, the veterinarian’s niece walking the dog outside by the palm trees, dry-season dust devils whirling in the garden out front, the last match, a labored murmur stifled by the dried blood, struggling with broken incisors to form the syllables

“Thank you sir”

the police chief sat back in his chair, happy, offering some last tender words

“Good boy”

the same way he addressed Carlos from the doorway to the study with his arm around my mother’s waist after he’d taken the pellet gun away from him, and my mother silent, not submissive, merely inert

your lover out in the workers’ quarters

“Good boy”

my grandmother hurried over to her altar with a rosary wrapped around her wrist, scandalized as she spoke to her little saints, complaining that she’d been abandoned by the clay figures she worshipped with offerings of hearts of palm, doilies, and little oil lamps, a multitude of martyrs in tunics and long hair, all of them out of work after she died, and whom I sometimes run into on the Cascais rail line, begging for change with a guitar strapped across their shoulders, that same compassionate look on their faces, those same virtuous thin bodies, that same faith in Eternity, those same bare feet, stretched out on the benches of the train station, playing a fife, with Uruguayan necklaces spread out in front of them on a mat or being harassed by those atheist national guardsmen, good thing that you died Grandma if you were still alive you’d die of sorrow, God’s own intimate friends have fled from the mahogany altar in Baixa de Cassanje to beg for cigarette butts and sausage sandwiches, squatting on a street corner with no one offering them hearts of palm or doilies or little oil lamps, good thing that you died Grandma, maybe they pawned all your gifts and offerings, the little porcelain vase with a rosebud for Saint Stephanie, the little dried flowers for Nuno the Pious, the porcelain dove of the archangel Gabriel whose wings, instead of coming out of his shoulder blades, emerged from his flowing robes, hairy, this whole heavenly host of beggars forcing me to alter my route on the street and lock up my house tight, windows and doors, afraid that they wouldn’t recognize that I’m the granddaughter of my grandmother, that they’d barge into my house and demand all my stuff, my watch, my jewelry, so they could trade it for smokable heroin, which is the incense of the seraphim, and then levitate, entranced, with their eyes closed, floating through the slums, helped along by the propulsion of the syringe, gathering a flock of followers from among the Cape Verdeans at the construction sites and the drunkards who live down by the columns of the aqueduct because they’ve taken a vow of poverty, mortifying their flesh for the sake of our sins, using newspapers as blankets, pieces of broken bottles, chicken bones, trash, locked up tight in Estoril, going from the couch to the balcony and from the balcony to the couch, angry about the presents from Luís Filipe, the flowers, the check, the dress, the bracelet, angry about the paper they were wrapped in, torn to pieces on the carpet, the little porcelain made-in-Singapore dogs in the niche in the wall, staring at me since the beginning of the night with the unfathomable stubbornness of corpses, the little dogs, the furniture, the paintings, the photographs staring at me as if I was an intruder, trying to make my cry, making the lights look sadder, daring me to take the whole bottle of sleeping pills, me making an colossal effort to hold back my tears