António Antunes - The Splendor of Portugal

“Don’t eat it”

the aunties would take back the sweets wrapped in tinfoil, dirtying their hands, sucking on their brown fingertips

“Did you lose your appetite little girl?”

my mother’s eyes would grow very wide, staring down my father’s

“How insulting”

my father’s eyes would get smaller and my mother’s eyes would grow wider as she looked at me

“Why don’t you try just a little bite at first Isilda be patient”

my fingers dirty as well, my dress dirty, a drop of melted chocolate on the couch, my mother’s eyes raised to the ceiling

“How terrible”

my father’s eyes

“Didn’t I tell you this would happen?”

my aunties’ fingers, even though they’d been sucked clean, leaving fingerprints on the couch cushions, on the curtains, on the upholstery, on my father’s hand when they bid him farewell, my father’s eyes growing wider as he looked at his hand, as he wiped his hand on his pants and stained his pants, growing wider as he looked at my mother

“I’m going to kill you”

my mother’s eyes distressed, apologizing

“What could I do?”

the aunties kissing my mother, leaving dark smudges on her cheeks, trying to hold on to my father as they walked down the front steps, my father trying to escape their grasp, recoiling from them but trying to make it look like he wasn’t recoiling from them, examining his shirt, smiling at them, not a smile really, just rows of teeth, whipping my mother with his pupils

“I’m going to kill them”

we’d step on caramels, which were a pain to scrape off the bottom of our shoes, even after scraping with a knife for hours our shoes would still stick to the ground and would only come unglued from the floorboards with great difficulty, we’d lift our ankles and feel a strange pull, we’d be pulling the rug along behind us and it was as if we were dragging the whole house along with us, its foundations and everything, we’d sit down and bruise our skin on cookie shards crushed beneath the weight of our bodies, crunch crunch, my father to my mother, livid, limping, the whole study stuck to his foot and dragging along behind him, the wooden floor, the ledgers, the furniture

“Get this entire business off of me when you get the chance”

for two weeks Fernando and Damião dusted, washed, and scrubbed, moving aside armchairs, tables, armoires, searching for any wily candy that might still be lying in wait in the shadows or hanging from the chandelier like a tick, ready to drop down on us in all its villainous stickiness, my father distrustfully inspecting the seats of all the chairs, taking half an hour to go from the bedroom to the hallway as he examined the hardwood floor, taking his revenge by knocking over the photographs of the deceased, kissing the letters that arrived to announce another death in triumphant joy, my father, who never kissed anybody

“Thank God one less”

maybe he kissed the French woman or the women in Luanda who my mother thought were of the same breed as the French woman, which is to say wearing low-cut blouses and smoking with a cigarette holder, my mother swore he kissed them, handing me the collars and cuffs of his shirt so I could smell them, showing me smudges of lipstick and eyeliner

“Look at this lack of respect this shamelessness”

but he never kissed me, he’d put his hands on my head and tousle my hair with the palm of his hand

“Little Isilda”

he never kissed my mother because he slept in a different room, he’d graze his lips across her forehead

“See you in the morning”

and go up the stairs with a newspaper, we could hear his key turn in the lock, the springs in the lock engaging, the sound of the generator breaking the silence, the lightbulbs now about to explode, now tiny anemic filaments, my mother to herself

“What did I ever do to him?”

weighing herself, examining herself in the mirror, going on a diet of grilled fish, grilled beef, greens, weighing herself again, showing me the slack in the waistband of her skirt, proud

“Two kilos”

buying new clothes, changing her hairstyle, putting on more makeup, wearing higher heels, buying rings, without saying anything to anybody, with her own money from her inheritance, from the jeweler in Malanje, to the point where all the savings that had been left to her evaporated into thin air, my mother taking her place in the living room an hour before my father arrived

“How do I look?”

my father not even noticing her

“Hi”

putting his hands on my head and tousling my hair with the palm of his hand

“Little Isilda”

not registering the new clothes, the new hairstyle, the makeup, the high heels, the rings, the pathetic sad face that tried to force a smile, the creams on her face washed away with tears, my father oblivious to it all, despite the rouged eyelids, the fluttering eyelashes, the breasts that her corset strained to contain, I woke up in the middle of the night with my mother tapping on his door

“Eduardo”

with her fingertips, waiting a moment, tapping again, trying the doorknob, then pounding on the door with an open palm

“Let me in Eduardo”

using the base of a bronze lamp to knock even louder, the lightbulb shattering, the lampshade about to fall off, me barefoot on the carpet runner in the hallway holding my doll to my chest, my mother throwing herself against the door

“You don’t have the right to do this to me Eduardo”

the doll crying in anguish, not me, and so I sang to comfort her, not myself, as we walked through the house, it was for the doll’s sake not my own that I yelled down to the first floor

“Come talk to me Mom”

but nothing, just metal handles that were transformed into threatening, scowling faces, the curtain puffed up by the wind, something that looked like a dead person gesturing at me, something that looked like a leopard about to pounce, things that looked like

they didn’t look like, they were

spirits and skulls like they had in the Castle of Terrors that came to Malanje in February, you’d buy a ticket from a harmless little man who was always coughing, leaning against the doorway with a cigarette in his mouth, my father holding me by the hand, cautious, eyeing the witches near the entrance who shook their hips and rolled their eyes

“Do you think it’ll scare the little girl?”

the little man who, up close, didn’t seem very clean, and whom I admired for his unperturbed intimacy with spirits and bones, pulling his handkerchief out of his pocket, unfolding it, spitting into it, putting it back into his pocket, and cutting a corner off our tickets, doing all of this without the ash of his cigarette, which was extremely long, longer than the cigarette itself, so much as shaking

“It’s a silly little puppet show it doesn’t scare anybody”

as soon as we entered there were spiderwebs, coffins, howls, satanic laughter

I love the term satanic laughter if I could I’d say satanic laughter every five minutes

a greenish manikin pulling the lid off an urn with a frightful creaking sound

same goes for frightful, frightful frightful

my mother, lacking the courage to go in, waiting nervously outside, the little man consoling her, finished with his cigarette, a cylinder of ash that shook as he spoke, after he stopped coughing

“Don’t worry ma’am only an idiot would be scared of this”

disdainfully cutting corners from the tickets of more trembling idiots, me extremely happy to be alive, how wonderful, my father, I’m not sure how he felt, with an ambiguous smile on his face, my mother backing away from the witches and their shaking hips with a girlish, anxious look on her face, absolutely amazed and timid