Susana Moreira Marques - Now and at the Hour of Our Death

I went back there in the autumn, on the day of Paula and Casimiro’s grape harvest, around seven in the morning, and I parked the car next to the church with the Star of David. There was nothing but the sound of dogs barking and a few birds singing. I was alone, and yet I was never alone anymore now that there was another life growing inside me. I watched the sunrise throw the land into light, a daily, perhaps even trivial, sight, but one that just then seemed to me unique. This is what we humans are like. After watching the universe materialize as if I were the only person in the world, I fell asleep, and then woke up again, the sun high and the harvested grapes in their baskets.

But it is in August that Paula attends the procession. Her daughter, dressed for the occasion, follows her at a distance, almost as if watching over her, one hand holding on to one of the purple ribbons attached to the figure of Christ being carried solemnly along the village streets. Her husband, in his Sunday best, follows the procession from afar, smoking heavily. From the windows, beautiful bright drapes and immaculate white curtains stream down the walls. The priest’s voice echoes through the loudspeakers and the village, preaching that parents must look after their children so that later on their children might look after them. ‘God be with us. Amen.’

Paula walks barefoot over the hot and dusty August street. She has delicate feet, long and thin, and her toenails are painted. The procession continues up the last street and ends at the small chapel by the graveyard with the best view in the village: seen from here, the land seems to run on like time itself.

In the chapel there is only enough room for the Christ figure and for a couple of benches, where Paula now sits. Ana kneels down and helps her mother put on her shoes. They don’t speak. Their eyes aren’t wet with tears. Their expressions don’t change.

And it was there, by the chapel, when the procession was finished and the vows made, that the men launched the fireworks, painting the clear August sky with fleeting clouds that concealed small, contented, finite gods.

The dance, then, had actually been the night before the procession, the night before hope. The lights that bounced off the stage swept the tarmac while the younger children chased the white, red, and blue spots. The speakers, distorting the music, made even our bones quiver, and the singer changed her costume as often as if she were in a 1950s vaudeville show.

Mother and daughter danced in their identical tops without looking each other in the eyes. They twirled around one another, neither shy nor brazen. They danced as if they spent every night on a dance floor, as if each knew with absolute certainty that she would hold the other in her arms forever. As if it weren’t August and as if August, especially this August, weren’t flying by far too quickly.

Later, August had come and gone. Paula seemed thinner in the face, wearier, yet also more serene. In their house in the town, Mogadouro, where the family spends the school year, Ana did her homework in her room, decorated on one side with Hello Kittys and on the other, Luís’s side, with Spidermen. Paula, alone in the living room, the tv on in the background, did not wrinkle her nose, nor were there creases around her closed mouth. Her face, now relaxed, revealed how wounded she was.

I thought of the bullfights at the festival in Trás-os-Montes in August, of how the bulls fought, of how the more they suffered, the fiercer they were, wowing the crowd with their apparent invincibility — dying in the arena they are, at least briefly, immortal.

Whenever I try to remember Paula’s face, I see it as it was in August, with the obstinate expression of one who refuses to accept defeat. Even now, when I think of her, I always think of August and I believe I’ll think of her every August, and of her village, beating like a fragile heart.

Night is falling by the time Luís comes home from school. He scatters his notebooks on the living-room table and shows his grades to his mother, who scolds him for his poor marks. Not long after, Casimiro comes home from work. Ana, who is still doing her homework in her room, doesn’t come down. Casimiro takes a beer from the fridge. Paula sets the table and finds something to talk about, as if for her the day had been very eventful. Whenever there’s a lull in the conversation, Paula glances at the muted television and Casimiro lowers his eyes to his beer. They can hear the ticking of the wall clock painted with two skyscrapers lit up in the night.

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this summer I let everything go: I spent time with my family — with my husband and my kids — and I didn’t feel a thing, I mean, sure, sometimes I’d be in a bit of pain, so I’d take something, ’cause the pain was in my bones, and your body can feel the lack of chemo, but I just gritted my teeth, and even then… it was like there was nothing wrong with me, and now it’s hard to start the chemo again, but if that’s what I’ve gotta do… ’cause they can’t make any guarantees, even if you do get your treatment it’s still there inside you, they can’t guarantee it won’t come back, but it’s something, I guess. It’s like everyone says, if you do the chemo then even if it does come back, it won’t be as bad, but if you don’t get any treatment at all, it might come galloping back even harder

life changes completely from one day to the next, and that’s when you realize that there’s no use fighting wars, there’s no use getting annoyed — life’s too short — and it changed my way of thinking, my way of being… now I live more for my children, I pay closer attention to what people tell me, everything’s different now, I try to make the most of things, to have more fun, and, sure, I used to be more cheerful, but back then I had my whole life ahead of me… not anymore though, now I know I’m sick, I know I might have another two or three years left, or maybe just a few months, and so I’m trying to take life one day at a time, I’m trying to give the best of myself to my husband, to my children, ’cause I want to make my kids as happy as I can, for as long as I can

I don’t like sitting still, I want to be out doing things and I know I can’t, it’s so frustrating… we used to own this café in the village, it was my mom’s, but then we had to close it… I met my husband at that café… She bought it when I was eighteen years old and that’s where we met and where we started dating, we dated for a whole six years before we got married, I was twenty-four and he was twenty-six… I’d had boyfriends before, I wasn’t the sort to just watch life go by, and I dated this one boy my mom really liked… me and my husband, we dated in secret — our moms didn’t want us seeing each other so that’s why we dated for so long, although then we broke up and I got back together with the other guy for a bit, but finally I ended up with Casimiro… that other boy really liked me — he liked me so much that even when I was handing out wedding invitations, he went and he talked to my mom and he told her not to let me get married ’cause he was the one I was supposed to marry… he’s in Lisbon now, he’s a police officer, and I guess love really is blind, because he was richer, but I was in love with Casimiro, so what could I do? We were married for three years before we had children, we’d go to all these parties, I had all the fun I’d missed out on when I was single, then Ana was born and we didn’t have Luís until five years later, ’cause we had all the time in the world, we had all the time in the world ahead of us and we weren’t in a hurry to do anything at all

it was an adventure, it really was — I was sixteen, and four of us girls went away to Macau, one of them was my husband’s sister, but I didn’t know my husband back then, I’d only seen him around… they wanted to open a restaurant out there and this cousin of mine, who was a priest in Macau, he said he’d get hold of four girls from here to take over there — I didn’t even think twice about it, all I wanted was to go and my mom let me, so I went… I really liked Macau, it’s somewhere I’d go back to, it’s a seventeen-hour trip so we stopped in Frankfurt to switch planes and we couldn’t really speak the language, we didn’t know anything at all, but luckily we met this woman who was going to Macau too, to meet her husband who was a vet over there, and she helped us get there, that’s the kind of adventure it was… later that woman moved from Macau to Porto, and when I was sick I found out she was a volunteer at the oncology hospital in Porto, she pushes the tea cart… we go years without seeing each other and then that’s where we end up meeting… in Hong Kong we took a boat to Macau and the four of us shared an apartment there, but then the restaurant didn’t work out… it was so great out there, though, I can’t even describe it, I loved everything about it — that’s where I tried Chinese food for the first time, and we traveled, the priest took us traveling to China, to Thailand — in Thailand, we visited this really tall hotel that had this area where you could sit at a table and just watch, and then, after a little while, you were suddenly looking at something else, another view, it was great, really great, even though the Chinese were dirt poor, it wasn’t as bad in Macau — they ate rice with every meal there and sometimes I ate with them, but I used a knife and fork… I was sorry to leave, but I had to… I missed home, sure, but when you’re that age you barely feel it, you just want to go out all the time and that’s it. Those days, talking on the phone was a luxury, so we’d write lots of letters and send photos, I have a lot of photos from back then… I wish I’d traveled more, but who’s got the money? Nobody we knew had the money for that kind of thing