José Saramago - Skylight

When he had left, Lídia went back into the bedroom. She was just starting to tidy up when she heard the sharp click of heels crossing the floor above her. The sound came and went, disappeared, then returned. While she listened, Lídia stood perfectly still, fists clenched, head slightly raised. Then came two louder thumps (the shoes being taken off) and silence.

Carmen added yet another letter to a long correspondence that consisted largely of complaints and lamentations. In her faraway hometown of Vigo, her parents would be left terrified and tearful when they read the ever-growing catalog of woes sent by their daughter, who continued to live in bondage to that foreigner.

Condemned in her everyday life to speak a foreign tongue, she could only fully express herself in her letters. She told her parents everything that had happened since her previous letter, lingering over her son’s illness and describing the terrible scene in the kitchen — although she took pains to show herself in a more dignified light. For, once she had calmed down, she had to admit that her behavior had been most un dignified. Kneeling in the presence of her husband was, she felt, the worst of ignominies. As for her son, well, he was still only a child and would doubtless forget, but her husband would not, and that was what pained her most.

After some hesitation, she also wrote to her cousin Manolo. In doing so, she felt a vague sense of betrayal and had to acknowledge that writing to him was hardly appropriate. She had received no correspondence from him apart from a brief note each year on her birthday and at Christmas and Easter. However, she knew all about his life. Her parents kept her up to date on happenings in the family clan, and her cousin Manolo, along with his brush factory, always provided plenty to write about. Business had boomed, but he was, alas, still a bachelor, which meant that, when he died, there would be so many heirs to his wealth that each of them would inherit very little. Unless, of course, he were to favor one of those heirs over all the others. He was free to dispose of his goods and chattels as he wished, and so anything could happen. These concerns were set out at great length in the letters she received from Vigo. Manolo was still young, only six years older than Carmen, but he needed to be reminded of Henriquinho’s existence. Carmen had never given much importance to these suggestions, nor was there any easy way to make him more aware of her son. Manolo barely knew him. The only time he had seen him was when Henriquinho was a baby, on a trip Manolo had made to Lisbon with Carmen’s parents. Carmen knew (from her mother) that Manolo had declared his dislike of Emílio. At the time, being only recently married, she had ignored this comment, but now she could see that Manolo had been right. The Portuguese say, “From Spain expect only cold winds and cold wives,” but some similar saying could equally be applied to Portugal regarding husbands, except that, although she knew all there was to know about the evils that proliferated this side of the Spanish — Portuguese frontier, she lacked the necessary poetic imagination to come up with a nice alliterative pairing for “husbands.”

Once she had written the letters, she felt relieved. Replies to them would not be long in coming, bringing with them consolation and sympathy, which was all Carmen wanted. Manolo’s sadness regarding her situation would make up for this minor act of disloyalty toward her husband. She could imagine her cousin in his office at the factory, which she could still vaguely remember. A pile of letters, orders and invoices stood on the desk, and her letter was on the very top of the pile. Manolo would open it, then read and reread it intently. Then he would put it down on the desk before him and, once he had sat for a few moments, with the look of someone recalling pleasant past events, he would push all the other documents to one side, take a clean sheet of paper (with the name of the factory at the top in block capitals) and begin to write.

As she pondered this scene, homesickness and nostalgia began to gnaw away at Carmen’s heart. Nostalgia for everything she had left behind: her town, her parents’ house, the factory gates, the soft Galician way of speaking that the Portuguese could never imitate. Remembering all these things, she began to cry. True, she had long been troubled by such feelings, but they vanished as quickly as they came, crushed beneath the ever-growing weight of time. Everything was disappearing, she could barely dredge up the faded images from her past, but now she could see it all there before her, as clear as day. That’s why she was crying. She was crying for all that she had lost and would never see again. In Vigo, she would be among her own people, a friend among friends. No one would snigger behind her back at the way she spoke, no one would call her galega —or Galician — in the scornful way they did here; she would be a galega in the land of the galegos, where galego was not a synonym for “errand boy” or “coalman.”

“¡Ah, desgraciada, desgraciada!”

Her son was staring at her in amazement. With instinctive obstinacy, he had resisted all his mother’s attempts to win him back, just as he had resisted the beatings and the witchcraft. Every beating and every prayer had driven him closer to his father. His father was calm and serene, while his mother was excessive in everything she did, whether in love or in hate. Now, though, she was crying, and Henrique, like all children, could not bear to see another person cry, much less his mother. He went over to her and consoled her as best he could, wordlessly. He kissed her, pressed his face to her face wet with tears, and soon they were both crying. Then Carmen told him long stories about Galicia, speaking, without realizing it, in Galician rather than in Portuguese.

“I don’t understand, Mama!”

She realized then what she was doing and translated the stories into that other hateful language, Portuguese, and the stories, once stripped of their native tongue, lost all their beauty and savor. Then she showed him photographs of Grandpa Filipe and Grandma Mercedes, and another in which cousin Manolo appeared, along with other relatives. Henrique had seen all these pictures before, but his mother insisted on making him look at them again. Showing him a picture of part of her parents’ garden, she said:

“I often used to play here with cousin Manolo…”

The memory of Manolo had become an obsession. Her thoughts always led her to him along hidden paths, and Carmen felt quite troubled when she realized that she had been thinking about him for a long time now. After all these years, it was mere folly. She was old, though she was only thirty-three. And she was married. She had a home, a husband, a son. No one in her situation had the right to harbor such thoughts.

She put the photos away and immersed herself in housework, but however hard she tried to drown out those thoughts, they refused to go away: memories of her hometown, her parents and, only belatedly, of Manolo, as if his face and voice, grown too remote, took a long while to arrive.

At night, lying in bed beside her husband, she was unable to sleep. Her longing for her past life had become suddenly urgent, as if demanding immediate action from her. Immersed in these distant memories, she grew calmer. Her fiery temperament softened, a sweet serenity filled her heart. Emílio was bewildered by this transformation, but made no comment. He suspected that it was simply a change of tactic intended to recapture her son’s love, and when he noticed that Henrique now divided his favors equally between him and his mother, he assumed he must be right. It was almost as if Henrique were trying to bring them back together. Ingenuously and possibly unwittingly, he did his best to interest both of them in his needs and interests. The results were not encouraging. His father and mother, so ready to speak to him when he addressed them individually, pretended not to notice when he tried to include them both in the conversation. Henrique could not understand this. He had not been fond of his father before, but had discovered that he was capable of loving him unreservedly; for a while, he had felt afraid of his mother, but seeing her crying had made him realize that he had, in fact, never stopped loving her. He loved them both and yet he could see them growing ever more distant one from the other. Why did they not speak? Why did they look at each other sometimes as if they didn’t know each other or knew each other all too well? Why those silent evenings in which his childish voice seemed to wander, lost, as if in a vast, dark forest that muffled all sounds and from which all the birds had vanished? Yes, all the lovebirds had flown far away, and without the life that only love can engender, the forest had turned to stone.