António Antunes - The Splendor of Portugal

as if I was going to die but I didn’t die my father caught me before I landed on the ground, I remember his smell, his hands, the damaged fingernail on his scarred thumb, which didn’t leave a fingerprint, it felt funny when you ran your finger over the tip of it, my mother cheering for whomever was trailing behind

“Hurry hurry”

my grandmother sullen because nobody was talking to her, reprimanding the kitchen help

“Who filled the sideboard table with whiskey bottles?”

my father would go over to the sideboard table and sneak a drink, my mother would argue with customs agents from Cotonang in the study while my father stumbled around in his bedroom, uninterested in the Bailundos, either my grandmother or Carlos would be the one who counted them at night, my father’s jarring voice resounded in the dark, singing, startling the owls, Lady would scurry around in distress, Carlos would get tripped up in his counting and have to start over, counting out loud, one two three four five six seven eight nine pointing at each one with a switch cut from a tree, speaking with the same authority my father had before he started in with the bottles, the ones sick with dysentery or malaria sat waiting on the ground wrapped in blankets and burlap sacks, the foreman taught them manners with the edge of his boot

“Hey you”

laborers who were starting to waste away after they’d barely arrived from Huambo, at first they were bigger than our blacks, more obedient, fatter, but now their ribs were sticking out, trying to stand up, then giving up

“Hey you”

and my father stopped singing for a moment to cough, whenever they turned on the generator the house would suddenly appear, the same size it was during the day but somehow different, the golden rain tree shining in the light, a house that was hidden behind another house, lying in wait, you could hear distant sounds that seemed to be right next to us, toads, frogs, a shivering fox, insects that weren’t digging burrows in the ground, they were digging into my bones, someone said my name, not Luís Filipe, not my mother, not me, not cousin Deodata

cousin Deodata

“Clarisse”

and I woke up to the morning in Estoril on the couch in the living room with the bouquet of flowers scattered about, the dress and the bracelet on the carpet, as if some woman I don’t know had taken them off and gone to lie down on my bed, there were times when I was so tired when I got home that I started to undress in the entryway, my jacket, my purse, my shoes, my contorted acrobat arms reaching around to pull the zipper at the nape of my neck, there was never a man here to help me unzip, that’s what a marriage is, having a man to whom we can turn our backs and pull back our hair and he’ll zip us up and fasten the clasp at the top and then step back and start thinking about something else

“All set”

I’d keep undressing as I came down the hall, without turning on the light, my bra on the back of a chair, my panties on the ground, my necklace in an ashtray, stubbing my toe on the flowerpot with the little rubber tree, writhing in pain, my earrings, which, who cares, I’ll spend an eternity looking for the next day, down on my hands and knees, furious with myself, someone called my name, not my mother, not Luís Filipe, not my grandmother, not Rui, not the cartoons on TV, cars that belong to Luís Fillipe’s kids swerving past people’s lawns and gardens on their way to Alcabideche, to Cascais, to Sintra, except for me and the Air Force Major who lives on the ground floor nobody else lives in this building, the Major’s wife doesn’t respond to me when I say hello, she just shuts the door in my face as if she didn’t see me, she shakes her head as she points me out to her husband with the tip of her nose, thinking I don’t notice, same goes for the woman at the butcher shop, same goes for the tobacco shop where I buy my cigarettes, all these people involved in a conspiracy of whispers, the butcher-shop lady’s stepson leaves notes in my mailbox next to bank statements and advertisements for plumbers all services performed, Wanna go to the movies with me sweetheart? on Sundays I’m startled by the rumble of his motorcycle going up and down the street, swerving around all the scaffolding and the mounds of sand, speeding off behind a billow of exhaust, disappearing the moment I pull back the curtain, if my father even dreamed of how they treat me he’d fold up his newspaper and set it aside, jump up off the couch, and invent some game to make me feel better, he’d hop across the patio on one foot with me, stopping before he got to the flowerpot, pretending to be tired so that I could win, he’d help me hunt for grasshoppers in the grass, we’d make boats out of paper and launch them in the little pond to the amusement of the fish, he’d promise me a bicycle with a headlight on it for my birthday, my mother would be arguing with my grandmother about the arrangement of stitches in one of their needlepoint magazines

“But that screws up the look of the flowerpots you can’t tell what it’s supposed to be”

just before he died he motioned for me to come to his bedside with his finger, I put my ear to his lips, a short breath, the tendons in his neck were flexed tight, his tongue tried to separate the words, line them up in a row, pronounce them in order, one syllable after another, putting together sentences like the pieces of a puzzle mixed up with lots of pieces from other puzzles, to tell me what he hadn’t had time to tell my mother or his own mother many years before, those sentences that my mother or his mother didn’t have time to tell him

snatches of songs, children’s prayers, the tributaries on the left bank of the Douro River, the names of different kinds of marbles cat’s-eye devil’s-eye oxblood and aggie, hit it chase it hit it then chase it hit it, a shallow hole still open after a marble jumped it, playing soldiers, choosing partners by walking toward each other one foot in front of the other whoever steps on the other person’s shoe has to go first, tell my daughter that as soon as I feel well, as soon as I feel better, the tributaries on the left bank of the Douro River, the hills of the Galaico-Duriense mountain range Peneda Soajo Gerês Larouco Falperra, I never knew what the Douro or the Galaico-Duriense mountain range were, me, for whom Portugal was nothing more than a pink-colored smudge on the map, full of kings and monasteries, and it wasn’t clear how all of that fit in the tiny space next to the big green blotch that was Spain, I wanted to tell my daughter that as soon as I feel better, I can’t find the rest of it in all these mixed-up sentences, who wants to see the beautiful boat today put out to sea, no that’s not it, oh mary of mine mary my tender branch of rosemary, no that’s not it either, when my grandfather fell ill he raised his head from the pillow, held up his hand to ask us to wait, all of us waiting for his final revelation, he swallowed, cleared his throat, held up his hand again, my uncle Joaquim to us

“Be quiet”

to my grandfather

“What is it Dad?”

all of us paying close attention to his final words of advice, my grandfather with his hand in the air, then setting it back down on the bed, his head collapsing onto the pillow

“I can’t”

not desperate, just very distant, hearing something that no one else could hear, maybe it was Who wants to see the beautiful boat today put out to sea, maybe it was Oh mary of mine mary my tender branch of rosemary, maybe some ballad that’s even older than those or maybe it wasn’t even a ballad at all

“I can’t”

just silence, his body all quiet and still inside, or maybe this little ditty, blood is flowing round and round then dances at the end of town, I could see him hesitate but he didn’t panic because it’s so simple, terrified of it our whole life, thinking about it our whole life, but it’s really so simple