José Peixoto - The Piano Cemetery

Marta spent most of her days in bed. Maria would sit by her and read her romance novels, and they would talk in low voices. Sometimes Marta would come into the kitchen in her dressing-gown and sit by the fire. It was the last months of autumn, then it was the months of winter. Elisa was born at the start of spring.

Marta’s belly was round and even. Marta would carefully tie the belt of her dressing-gown over it. Francisco would rest his hand on its shape to feel Elisa’s kicks.

‘She’s moving.’

Maria was not yet quite sure that she was pregnant when she came to tell us. She was. Her eyes were at the bottom of a well, small, and there was a childish tenderness on their surface. It was as though the baby’s eyes existed within them. Nobody knew then that Ana’s eyes would be exactly the same, as though they were the same eyes.

Some afternoons Simão would go and visit her. Nobody told me, but I was sure of it. He brought her old peanuts that he took out of his pocket. He held out the palms of his dirty hands to her, with peanuts.

Her husband treated her with care. Francisco would go by her house after work. They would talk, and at those times they were the same age. After going to the market, my wife would stop by her house to take her gifts of kale, vegetables, greens.

‘Make a soup. Do you want me to make it? It’s no trouble.’

Marta had already started to get fat. It could be seen, week after week, as she came in through the front door a little heavier. Elisa ran through the house and kissed her aunt’s belly. There was true peace between the sisters, there were healed wounds, there was a good silence and eyes that looked on the past without resentment.

Maria’s belly. She wore a blue flannel dress to wait for her husband. She rested her hands on her belly, as though she were carrying it. She smoothed out the dress, and with this gesture emphasised the belly. Her cheeks were flushed, her face affectionately expectant.

When Marta became pregnant for the second time I was already sick, my wife had already lost all possible consolation; Francisco was trying to look after the workshop and ran aimlessly through the streets of Lisbon in the late afternoons; Simão had disappeared even more from all the places where he’d never been, where he had really never been; Maria fretted and wept for no concrete reason, which she couldn’t qualify with any words she knew; Marta was fat, she was of a delicate nature; Marta’s husband had his own thoughts, he had women he looked at and touched, whom he called by names that Marta could only imagine being whispered, perhaps affectionate or perhaps feigning affection, which, at the moment when they existed, in that mirror, were still the same as true affection.

When Maria became pregnant for the second time, everyone wanted to be hopeful.

Now it’s Saturday. Maria woke up alone, and light. She’s in the kitchen, and she’s thinking that tomorrow Francisco is going to run in the Olympic Games. Maria confuses tenderness with pity. She feels tenderly towards her brother, but believes she feels some pity. She can’t stop remembering when he was little. She always remembers him laughing or smiling. And she feels tenderness, calling it pity inside her thoughts. And she remembers Simão. The image of her brother, blind in one eye, is veiled by a curtain of pity, real pity, the pity of not having seen him for so long, of never hearing any word of him. She throws out some questions, inside herself — where might he be? Is he well? Who’s taking care of him? And the cries of the girls in the living room catch her attention. Her attention is a floating boat, rudderless, ruled by the wind and the currents.

In the living room Maria’s daughters are playing, and they don’t worry because they are children and they can’t conceive of anything destroying what they know and expect from every gesture or unknown moment passing: Ana and Íris. My wife is sitting next to them on the sofa. It has been many days, or months, since she has been like this, without any chores, simple and blank. She too is unworried. She is a child in a different way.

The doorbell. Always the same agitation, feverish anxiety, even when they know who it is. And now they don’t know who it is. Maria thinks it might be her husband. My wife thinks it might be the gypsy. Always the same agitation — the doorbell. My wife doesn’t think about this, but if she did, she could have remembered that it was like when she still used to drink coffee and afterwards had to sit down until the feeling of unease went away. Neither Maria nor my wife try to avoid what they know is inevitable. They are afraid, they are people, but they always confront it, and thus weaken it, destroy it. This is why Maria and my wife come into the corridor at the same time. It’s Maria who arrives first as she is closest. A single, firm movement of her arm opens the door.

Marta, Elisa to one side of her, Hermes to the other. Marta — huge — is holding a little suitcase and two plastic bags. All this weight pulls her body down towards the floor and turns her into a gigantic mountain of flesh, in a nearly new fabric dress. And her face — eyes smiling or sad, cheeks reddened by two powder stains, the hairdo that she arranges with water when she leaves the house to get the train. Elisa, a well-behaved little girl, doesn’t understand and doesn’t ask, she trusts. Hermes wants to play.

Maria and my wife go into the kitchen with Marta, just listening. Her voice. It is outside them, and at the same time it exists within them, too. It is as though they have within their thoughts a kitchen just like the one they’re in, with the same gentle lightness, the same serenity, and Marta’s voice using the same words to speak of the lack of surprise, vaporous and breathable, that she is speaking of here. My wife and Maria had been expecting to hear those words in that voice for a long time. They couldn’t have predicted that she would leave home. They don’t remember imagining her talking with such peaceful acceptance, neither sad nor disappointed. Marta tells them her story wearily, using phrases she constructed on her train journey as she watched the landscape. After each word she can see that they know just which word she is going to say next, and she gets wearier. Then she tells them about the decision she has taken. Finally she says:

‘I’m never going back.’

And both my wife and Maria can see that, sooner or later, she will go back home. They don’t know how long it will take her to go back, but they know she will.

In the living room neither Ana nor Íris ask Elisa or Hermes any questions. They’re glad at their arrival and immediately begin playing.

And Saturday passes with a sunny calm, like a day for bicycling without going anywhere, a day for taking a walk, for going round the lake in the park just because it’s a route without any problems, just like any other. My wife and my daughters do simple chores, understanding one another. When they pass, their voices are young and they have the resigned wisdom of a lack of urgency. There is plenty of time, and harmony. The hours float by. All the hours float by, and they are identical. The children play and laugh, as though my daughters or my wife could laugh too whenever they felt like it. It is Saturday, and on this day the world has uncomplicated itself.

After putting the children to bed, after a little longer sitting at the kitchen table, after talking about Francisco and agreeing about everything, after remembering many things and laughing more, my wife and my daughters go to bed, and before they fall asleep they think that they could live like this for ever.

Marta hadn’t yet been born, my wife was pregnant, we were sitting very close together — sometimes she would sit on my lap — and wondering which of us would die first. It was an anxiety that afflicted us. There were other insoluble conversations which like this one would return every once in a while. A lot of time might go by without us having it, months, years, but when we returned to it we always remembered that it was not the first time we’d talked about it. It was an anxiety that existed underground, and that never completely disappeared. We were too alert to the truth to ignore it. We couldn’t pretend it didn’t exist. All our children had already been born, we might be lying in bed, naked, we might have just finished making love, and one of us would remember to wonder which of us would die first. And then we also thought about our children. It would be very hard for us to leave them, we weren’t sure they could manage themselves on their own, we were afraid they would be incapable, that they’d need us and we wouldn’t be there. Marta, Maria, Francisco and even Simão, even Simão. And we thought about what it would be like to die and leave the other, to be left alone. And how long would we be apart? Months? Years? How many years’ life would be left to the one who survived the other? I was already very sick, without enough peaceful time to say anything. It was one afternoon. My wife brought me food that I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t eat anything. I was at home, in the pyjamas my wife had bought me to wear in hospital. For months I’d spent all my time in pyjamas, thin, my hair frail. And I wanted to sit up in bed, I wanted to hold her hand and press her to my breast. It was one of the last things I said in total consciousness. I was capable of a great deal of hurt. I said to her: