Contemporânea

The continuous city. What would it be like to walk in that ownerless place where the streets, instead of being named, unfold one after another with no end in sight? I come back. And I have forgotten all the other beginnings. I stand again before who I once was, open to what follows. To stop being afraid of living. To live in order to write.

I look for houses; do you know what I’m looking for? I look for my face, after crossing the blue forest. I know only you can tell me who I look like. I know my face is a matter of the wind in your hair. I look for houses; do you know what I’m looking for? A city with no thoroughfares: a face unafraid of the future you tell me about, the one where you comb my hair at the window and lull me to sleep with stories of mine I have forgotten writing. There, we are never again motherless or fatherless forever, nor do we know the haze of fevers that pain brings with it. We will be children again, and you will play with my body, and I will play with you, like lovers promised to each other from the cradle. I still believe in the distant waters by the window, and us there, writing, remembering the grandmother who was afraid of getting a tan.

How astonishing that the strength of that photograph of you still remains in me.

Right now, the future is that view to Bugio and beyond, to Cabo Espichel. The swell at the bar, like a cavalry of white horses.

To suffer so much that we forget what suffering is, and we can only live by laughing so hard and by drinking lots of iced water.

I look for houses; do you know what I’m looking for? I look for your face against the night, our two doves in the pine across the street, to know again the place of everything, to put away the white linens, to wash the trousseau, to let the dog grow up, as we dance with one another through the night, my love—we who faced death, we who had the spider buried in our hearts and pulled it out; do know what I’m looking for? I look for a house for your breath, your neck beside mine, a thousand and one ways to make you happy, do you know?

I wanted to write you a Lilliputian dictionary, to invent an entire language for our days that would fit in the palm of your hand and only we would understand. And then I think that’s all we’ve been doing, that little doll’s dictionary, the tongue of the children we once were. Nothing is as dangerous as an adult.

You told me you dreamed the devil had already arrived; these are the devil’s times, America and Russia, convulsion everywhere, floods, inundations, a list of terrible sorrows on the road to hope, as I look for houses—do you know what I’m looking for?—the list of people to be evicted brought by the municipal official, Anizete dos Santos Rego, Euclides da Costa, Patrocínio Vaz, Vera Cacilda de Sousa, Ana Paula Maciel, a woman with her children on her back, raising a shack on the slope by the Ponte 25 de Abril; they go to Leroy Merlin to buy cement and bricks, or is it a cousin who brings them?, what are hailstorms like at night?, here on this side of the world we make light of exaggerated weather warnings, yet the simplest downpour floods, in Penajóia, the children’s bedroom—I look for a house, do you know what I’m looking for?—women on the train, their heads against the window, remind me of my grandmother Ana Helena, a list made only of things so dreadful they are beautiful, the little houses scattered along the railway, where life is gentle and sad; why is Portugal so ugly, my love?

Cacilda arrives home; she must make lunch, but there’s no food. She must sleep, but there’s no bed; to speak of Portugal as one tells a tale first sad then tragic—I look for a house, do you know what I’m looking for? A world against this world. I went from Lisbon to New York and back. What did I learn? I learned what a storm is.

Then I came back, and lost you in the streets of Lisbon; the more I remember how strange you were to me in those days, how strange the world felt, the more I think I walked hand in hand with Martin in those stormy days; all visions of hell reconciled the moment I recognised you again, the moment I knew once more who you were; and it took many days, and it had to happen very slowly, going for coffee every morning, recognising in you a boyfriend and an object of desire again, knowing again who you were, that you were my husband, even though the trees, the billboards, the car number plates, the city’s alphabet still deluded me with muffled phrases that only I heard; it took cup after cup of coffee, cigarette after cigarette, drinking the love in your eyes, for the devil to be silenced.

You took me to the Feira da Ladra in those beautiful late-summer days when for moments we were single and merely friends, and I found an image of Saint Martin de Porres, a black saint with a bowl of milk at his feet from which a dog, a cat, and a duck drink, as the monastery tales say, because Martin called all creatures to him. I put the little saint on the bedside table and prayed to him every night to bring you back, and then it was Martin who was healing me, I’m certain, making me undo the house of illness and pray for my health; it was Martin, the doctor from Lima, who took me by the hand to your arms, helping me to recognise you and recognise myself after a whole year adrift on the boat of the mad; you know, my love, this time I nearly didn’t return, that’s what they told me at the clinic; I woke into this dirty world, this filthy world, where our longing for each other is a calculation error, a foreign card in the deck, and now that everything is put right; I contemplate the house around me when you leave for work and I stay here, and I think it is Martin who guards our door—I look for houses, do you know what I’m looking for?—a little chapel for our saints, a sphere of benignity; the truth is it’s been raining so much the Castelo de Bode dam is nearly full, a downpour has fallen on last year, enough water to sink the boat of the mad; only you and I remained, afloat, and then on land, dry and resolved; this is not the book of our defeat: it is the book in which you and I turn the boat of the mad and drown it, and from there we rebuild our house on the island; this is the book of the embrace of joy after the nightmare, the book of holding Martin’s hand through the days of the Martinho depression, because when it rains that’s when life feels most distant from me, cut off by a screen of rain; so much to tell you, my love, I haven’t even told you half of what I saw and happened to me, the days when I thought the birds were robots, the days when you didn’t yet know me, the days I cried for having lost our life, and then the joy of our healing beside each other whilst the world out there, dreadful, continues.

The clouds that were Beethoven and Bach above my head, and the Cape Verdean man who struck up with me and gave me a little gold choker when he found me lost in the street; I know it was you, Martin, that tiny safety valve during those days, what made me wait for the green light to cross the road, what made me cut short conversations with strangers, not undress, not throw myself into the river; who if not you, my Martin de Porres, my love, my Albano, who if not you to take me on a mad spin through Lisbon and bring me back alive; picture this with me, to imagine that I cannot trust anyone, and to come back from all that, Martin, my grandfather, by your hand, to beg you for my health, to have my husband back, to fix my head and our hearts; Papa Martin, who saved me from the storm, how do I repay you for being my lap now? On stormy days, the world is still the world, and my heart still beats.

I remember you telling me not to look for houses, and I read in that gesture your resistance to what I pompously called the end of cycles: I believed life was something one felt changing, like the wind changing direction, and that there was nothing we could do to stop it. To change house was to trigger that change, however unrealistic or idealistic it might be. To go back, yes, but perhaps to discover that my mother’s womb was the most boring place on earth; not to return to the first nest, but to build my own with my own beak, to be face to face with all the moments I felt secure; perhaps that is what I seek above all else, security against the world’s ugliness, against the betrayal of the city and the life I lead; tell me, Albano, wouldn’t you like to feel that the walls were ours, that we could paint them or pull them down at will, a house of our own we could lose to gambling in a fit of madness, a house to knock down and drag a whole generation into decadence, ours as our arms and legs are ours, ours as our faces are ours; pompously, the end of cycles, I used to say, when all I wanted from us was that we were always beginning again, like opening and closing a book, that all evil should be left behind our backs in some old house we never returned to, on a street barred to our entry, to search forever as if, in that search, we finally found meaning.