What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire?: A Novel (46 page)

and the waves lowering

one minute eleven

beating and beating on the rocks at the fort

no pipes, no faucets, no voices, the building deserted and it was just as well the building was deserted because when at one minute eleven from now

when at one minute from now, when at fifty-three seconds only the four of us in the neighborhood, only the two of us in this room waiting finally for the covered window and at the moment when the covered window loosens up, the orchestra begins, a yellow spot and a silver spot swirl over the audience showing necklaces, glasses of spumante, Dona Amélia with her tray of cigarettes, candy, and French perfume, the spotlights showing a velvet curtain as the sound grows louder, the manager signaling to Micaela, Marlene, Soraia

Soraia

Vânia, Sissi, an ankle peeking out of the curtain, a leg, a long glove, I was squeezing the lemon into the spoon, heating the spoon, coming to a stop because the girl in the copper oval

—Gabriela

—I’ve been waiting for you for more than fifteen years Gabriela

—You don’t even remember, of course not, do you Gabriela?

the statue, the vase, the fence around the stone, if I didn’t remember then I’d remember today

sixteen seconds, seen from the side they seem like sixteen seconds and yet they’re fewer, Paulo his head down, drawing on the sheet

—Don’t talk to me

convinced that I was talking to him and I wasn’t talking to him, how could I be talking to him when I was talking to the gravestone, swearing to the girl

—Nothing’s happened to you

calming the girl down

—Your parents went for a walk don’t be afraid they haven’t forgotten you

and the shadow of a cloud almost coming down on top of us, you took a look at the sky and it wasn’t round, lengthened, with gold edges, now that I know how to read the name above the dates, the date of my birth, and today’s date, and on top Gabriela

Gabriela Matos Henriques

the vase with withered flowers was just like my parents’ jar, my name

Gabriela

smiling at the girl

—It’s me

still smiling when the hand is on zero seeing my grandfather rocking on the Tagus, a hazy glow, the covered window open, thank God, and in the window a man stops playing his accordion, lays it on the sofa and takes me with him

I’m so weightless

over the trees in the cemetery which no matter how hard they tried, so ugly, so dark, couldn’t hold me back.

later

I’ll have to leave

there’s nothing left for me to do except leave

the tulip design on the chandelier that I hated at first and which I’ve got to like because of the clumsy symmetry of its petals that a worker in some unnamed factory put together with patience and bad taste, all I need before I go to sleep, kept awake by the street sounds that are deformed by darkness

the hose that’s washing down the sidewalk, a certain change in the rustle of the trees, the leaves that make the lake frown with the concentration that a forehead shows when it’s searching for memories that it knows are there but is still trying to get away from, all I need is your arm brushing against mine after a sleep where gestures are heavy, like the algae of dead women lying on the shore, asking

—Is that you?

all I need, in short, is to sense that you’re present in your absence, outside of time and your body, of which I can only see two or three fingers, is still on the pillow and not over the shape of my features but over a face that’s not mine

some other man’s, someone who’d earned the right to take my place and seems to be giving you the tenderness and peace I never brought you, the hollow silence where you lay your fears to rest, the right direction I couldn’t follow because I’d lost my way, no screwdriver to tighten life’s hinges one by one until they were secure,

solid, livable, putting weeks, months, years together in a tranquil harmony I couldn’t live in, so used to the change of a wave that lifts me up and carries me off and doesn’t set me down right away all covered by flotsam that’s just as useless

aluminum bowls, straw hats, those mutilated dolls on which an unchanging happy smile beams out and which instead of making me happy makes me sad and I envy it, it gives me an urge to destroy, with all the sick remorse of evil, that’s all I need

I said

for me to feel all alone when I’m next to you surrounded by the numbered pieces of the puzzle of an existence that are scattered across the table and that, in spite of its being easy, I refuse to put together, just so I can understand that I have to stand up again, pass through who you know I am to who I also am and whose existence you’re unaware of, the thing I hide from you, don’t confess anything, don’t talk about it, my parents, the maid from the dining room, Chelas, the old couple who thought they were raising me in an apartment in Anjos where the church seemed to be made of sparrows because every time the bells tolled it would grow thinner with a swirl of wings, me, who told you my name was António and my name is Paulo, I’m not in this building with officers and engineers and women with golden braids and German cars but in a laundry room on the Avenida Almirante Reis, just imagine, where Dona Helena ironed in winter and in summer would bring in a wicker chair, take off her shoes and rest her heels on a sack or a stool to get some rest from her arthritis, her husband would keep her company with a matchstick in his mouth

I remember the floor tiles so clearly

and strange as I may seem to you

there are times when I seem strange to myself

I loved them even though I wasn’t capable of telling them that, just as I’m not capable of telling you that I love you in spite of the fact that if you were to ask me I’d tell you yes, maybe asking myself

—Do I love you?

maybe replacing the words with a caress that would get lost on the back of your neck or your throat before going back to my cigarette, conscious of my age and an age like that carries with it bashfulness and fear, afraid of a heart rotting under a stone

or miraculously intact, who the hell knows, me, who doesn’t believe in miracles, I’m the bottle I was talking about a while back and if it reached shore a rock would break it, but me up on a girl’s bicycle whose light was drooped over the wheel when the mudguard was missing, its tiny eye turned off, the old couple looked after me with a zeal that bothered me at the time and now, if I could only get back my heart from under the stone along with the tears my mother stole from me so she could use them to weep for herself, maybe it would give me a few tender feelings, but the sounds keep alternating and taking on an October tone while afternoon is coming to its end, the sparrows cluster together to build the church, I can hear you tossing the keys onto the entrance table and in just a moment now your smile

always the first smile, your puppy-dog smile as you stand in the center of the living room waiting

in just a moment now the quick click of your heels, in just a moment now my smile too, wrapped around my tongue, half hidden in my mouth with an urge to meet yours and to curl up, run away, I’m not in this easy chair

imagine

I’m up on the bicycle between my two old people from the laundry room who are so formal with me, submissive, humble, Dona Helena holding the iron up over the board and her husband, Mr. Couceiro, reaching for the jacket he’d left on the coatrack, all cloaked in embarrassment

—Forgive me ma’am

worried about the floor that should have been mopped and the sideboard that should have been dusted, the tea that should have been ready on the lacquer tray hanging on the wall with the pride of a hunting trophy along with its little mother-of-pearl roses and its worn wicker baskets

a pincebeck can’t you see?

the mat on the tray, the copper sugar bowl missing its top

the sugar served with an unmatching spoon because the spoon for the sugar bowl

—Two spoonfuls ma’am?

the uncertain little hand

—Two spoonfuls ma’am?

had also disappeared, the poor old-timers going inside to change clothes and you didn’t understand, stealing a little peek at the door, you were counting on dining with some friends, shaking your head at the teacup with the Statue of Liberty printed on it

—Are we in some kind of play António?

Dona Helena combing her hair and gathering in the wisps that were getting away from the brush and anxiously forcing on her shoes with a shoehorn, Mr. Couceiro borrowing one of Noémia’s flowers to decorate his lapel, a puppet show, you’re right, look at the stage setting of the wallpaper, the detail on the carpet that doesn’t stick to the floor, the tray with ceramic ducklings in a descending row, two of them without any tails, puffing up a muted protest, the sugar in unbroken lumps, the tea that tastes rusty like the bottom of a tin, the leaves that stick to your gums with a sour insistence, pulling them off with a finger but what can you do with them good Lord, your friends waiting and you impatient, looking at the teacup and the old people standing there, waiting for a phrase that you’re looking for and that doesn’t come and since it wouldn’t mean anything it’s all right, but the wallpaper, the carpet, the ducklings, one half of your face is giving kind looks to Dona Helena and the other half holding back desperate frowns held in a vise of growing irritation says

—António

so I reluctantly leave the bicycle in the laundry room with no time to pump up the tires or raise the light, I run a little finger of thanks over the ceramic family, taking a moment to straighten up the smallest member, I notice that Dona Helena has her skirt tightened with a safety pin on the waistband because the doctor’s pills are consuming her or maybe it’s the anemia, her paleness and the bags under her eyes come from some creature inside her breast that has a horrible name I don’t dare think about, the sad hopes, the deceptive improvements

—I haven’t felt this well in ages

the fatigue, the hospital, the little tidbits she doesn’t eat fruit, cakes, almonds

can’t eat, magazines she doesn’t read, held for a moment, falling without her noticing it from bedcover to floor, her look which even as it follows us to the door as we leave and stops, grows dark and stays that way

an object with no place

until the nurse adjusts the pillow for it and gives it a tranquilizer or some soothing syrup, Mr. Couceiro who mistrusts nobody, no matter what, believes the surgeon and confuses pity with hope, pointing to the teapot

—Wouldn’t you like some tea ma’am?

going along with us

do you hear his asthma?

up to the old furniture by the door, the umbrellas in a stand, the bolt on the door that he doesn’t have the strength to lift

—Did you like our place ma’am?

worried that you’re not interested in me because of him, that you decide I’m just like him, crippled and old that is, that you don’t want to see me anymore, that you’re rejecting me and you are rejecting me, a thoughtful slowness, a nose sniffling out lies

—Did the little man call you Paulo, António?

the headlights that sprayed the ceiling of this room with light revealing to me for a second the corner of the wardrobe with my suitcase on top, the tulip chandelier with its awkwardly symmetrical petals that some worker

Mr. Couceiro?

and thinking about Mr. Couceiro your face

—This one?

in some anonymous factory put together over the fire with patience and poor taste and which I don’t know why

why?

you like, I’m kept awake by the sounds from the street deformed by the darkness, thinking about the conditional freedom of my life with you, in this daily postponement of a separation

without any scenes or drama

that we both know is inevitable and about which neither of us says anything

different interests as we explain to others when there’s nothing to explain, why justify ourselves when there’s nothing to explain and since there’s nothing to explain we talk about different interests, different interests João

or Eduardo or Daniel or Gonçalo

different worlds, characters so different and accentuated by routine, I’m not thinking about you, about the two or three fingers sticking out of the sheet and tracing along the pillow the contours of a face that doesn’t belong to me, João’s, Eduardo’s, Daniel’s, Gonçalo’s, imprecise memories of imprecise creatures, imprecise squeezing of hands at imprecise parties that suddenly become concrete when I run into you people in a restaurant or at the movies, the short hair that makes you younger, a dress I don’t know, pearls I don’t remember, your artificial pleasant way

no, your natural way

the lightheartedness of your casual introduction your

—You know Daniel, don’t you?

an arm that leaves your shoulder to greet me and after greeting me and after a half-dozen condescending niceties

or that my jealousy imagines are condescending

which I don’t get to hear, have no curiosity in hearing, refuse to hear, leads you away, on my shoulder again, far away from me, for a moment I can make you out between two heads, I can’t make you out anymore, I stand on tiptoes and you’ve disappeared with him

where to?

I’d rather not think about where to, I keep still, a road sign that announces anonymous villages or chapels in ruins, the ruins I am for you, a pleat in the past that’s not disguised because it’s not noticed, that one, the one I almost didn’t recognize, how awful, the one I still don’t understand today how I was capable, the one who sees you go by in a car and lowers the mirror on the sunshade to examine your makeup, the one with a wave or a request with the slow lifting of his sleeve, the fellow on the sidewalk who doesn’t notice that it’s raining until the first drop lands between his forehead and his glasses and extinguishes an eye, and then he takes off his glasses, and off fights the drop, but the drop persists

everybody knows how stubborn rain is

the fellow without glasses, looking at the small square and the confused buildings, sure they’re flower beds

—Aren’t they flower beds, drop?

a complicated fluorescent sign that’s hard to read in spite of his being able to read disconsolation and remorse, seeing me in the living room where you’d moved the furniture, the glass ashtray we never got to buy the size of the drop or of my pity for myself on the end table, the print that in my time I’d exiled to the pantry

apples, pears, brown and blue cherries on the corner of a tablecloth, a red background and at the bottom in pencil, 35/200 and a hasty signature

presiding over dinner, checkered sheets I swear, a different wristwatch on the night table beside me, a book in English, I can barely read English, the miniature of an idol from Thailand making faces at me and pitying me

—Oh Paulo

I mean

—Oh António

Dona Helena in the cemetery squeezing her rosary between her thumbs, not daring to go against the terracotta god who, she knew, never went against anyone

—António

putting my glasses back on with the remnants of a drop

you know what rain is like

wavering, insisting, the buildings on the little square are clear, the fluorescent sign, Club Something-or-Other, maybe a cellar club like the ones where my father worked and for an instant my father called by a colleague