Verb Tenses and NDES (Near-death experiences)

 

I looked down from above and there was no strangeness at all. The light took me all over my soul, kissing me, loving me in an embrace without arms, in a kiss without a mouth, in a love without a face and the more I felt loved, the less I wanted to look at my body down there, in that high bed, where my legs of a girl of almost thirteen years old did not even touch the floor. All the furniture was old and heavy, marble-topped, all the accessories, lamps and busts on earthenware tripods equally secular and heavy, carrying the memory of the family in each prop. It was my room. The four-door wardrobe, huge and ghastly, but it was this proportionately larger piece of furniture that saved me from it. The "he" that had brought me to this experience of light, of god, of me in another dimension. My body lay cold, every second colder and more pathetic on that huge bed. I remember the broom in one of my arms and the body laid out deep in the middle of that double bed where I slept and protected myself from this diabolical man who had already violated the diaries I was writing. Everyone at home knew that I spent my time between reading and writing and it was in those children's diaries, with a key that I kept on my chest, inside my children's bras, so that no one dared to read what I thought and wrote about my life and that of my siblings. The hell we lived in that house eleven in Vivendas S. José, on Rua 5 de Outubro, in Ermesinde. I don't feel the need to revisit the memories to be precise in the details, because these memories have never left me, for the most varied reasons. I ate badly, in fact, I hated eating so many times a day and those meals that the adults seemed to like very much and as there was no longer my father, to "force" me to feed, so many times, hidden from the adults, I got rid of them, sometimes for the dogs, chickens and ducks, in our backyard, sometimes by the kitchen counter and sometimes even by the toilet of the bathroom.  Lack of proper nutrition and heart disease.

The devil, that's what I keep calling that ghastly man who lived with my mother and who tried to replace my father, a crass mistake of him, he had dared to blow up my diaries, since he had never found their keys. And he dared to read them and I stopped writing in the diaries. I started to write on loose sheets that, After writing, I crumpled them up and threw them on top of this tall and huge piece of furniture that they called wardrobes and that was no longer visible, visual at the same time, no matter how hard he looked, I would only find the empty place because the leaves all fell behind the furniture, such was my concern that he would never find them. The rats that had entered through the window of the pantry, had entered the room and prevented me from sleeping and frightened me, terrified me, ate the sheets of paper that I threw behind this piece of furniture. I had complained to my mother about the dread of sleeping because of the noise that the so-called cujo made during the night, so Lourdes had been in charge of helping me to find out where the animals were and she was thin like me and a little older than me. I believe that only six more years and it had been extremely difficult for us to drag that dead weight but faced with the terror of having seen a mouse in front of me and that the maid managed to catch, I lay down on that huge bed, between terror, exhaustion and giving up and let myself die. My health had always left something to be desired. I had rheumatism and I was ugly thin, slender to the point that I was often told that if I went to Guimarães, where there was a knife factory, They would stay there with me to make cables out of my arms and legs. I liked to eat bread, cereals and fruit. Sweets and all the crap, but food and soup don't. So, in addition to eating very poorly, escaping easily without adult supervision, I also spent my nights awake, placing items of clothing on top of the lamp that I carefully placed on the floor and read into the night, Until I got to the end of it and I knew that if my mother got up during the night and saw the light on, through the door opening, she would turn off the light and scold me, because I had classes the next day and needed to rest. My mother was a nurse in a psychiatric hospital and the devil she slept with worked in the STCP, I believe he was the head of the drivers' office and did the drivers' duty shifts. 

I know that he was terrible for me and my siblings, not only because he tried to replace my father, who in itself was serious enough for us, but because he tried to abuse me after he read my diary the first time, trying to force me to kiss him on the mouth and me, for being aggressive,  because I defended myself and fled into the street, always trying not to tell anyone. And even though I told myself that I forgave him, I sincerely suspect that I never did. 

At the age of twelve, I started smoking. I wanted to be an adult quickly. Tobacco made us feel like adults. Be amazed. I wasn't the only one. We had a housekeeper living with us who changed her face several times, such was our thirst as a mother and father. We committed the most diverse stumbles and savagery with them, so that they would give up being with us, believing that, in this way, the mother would return home, to support us, to hold us, to accompany us, to feed, in short, to be a mother. From Alice, to Edite, through Rita, Luzia and Lourdes, the latter from Armamar, there were many to whom we showed our bad temper, me and my brothers. And as the oldest, I was also the most responsible, so I felt, in the obligation to take care of them, Ruizinho and Antero. When that demon read what I wrote about my neighbor, Raúl, the childhood sweetheart whose greatest virtue was to make me blush just for existing and look at him, who stole a kiss on the lips when I was eleven, that I stole five escudos from the maid to buy cigarettes at the station kiosk, cigarettes in a red and white package, bringing only 12 cigarettes without a filter and that I died, almost fainted when me, Dores, Virinha and other schoolmates smoked on the hill. Such was the aggressiveness of this tobacco. And that I had written several times that the maid, after learning that I smoked and she wanting to go and date the firefighter Neca for the Volunteer Firefighters of Ermesinde, without my mother finding out, would give me two escudos, again five escudos so that I could wash the dishes and hang the clothes, in short, it was a fair exchange,  for me, because at the time I wanted to smoke and I only had that way to do it. On the sly. Away from home. Or when there were no adults around. Thus, my health was not recommended and I avoided dentists, doctors in general, I never reported my pain and, when the pain, whether it was of the head, belly, teeth or any other nature, took on greatness, I went to the pharmacy in the bathroom and did what I saw adults do, using antibiotics such as amoxicillin,  analgesics and others. I did this so systematically that I ended up ruining several of the teeth that would make me healthier today. 

There, on that ceiling, I felt like a balloon, astonished and happy, surprised and not even knowing what was happening to me. It was only a few minutes. I can't pinpoint the time, but I remember it as something fantastic and at the same time, terrifying, and I didn't tell noone about that experience for a long time, afraid that they would take me for crazy and imprison me in the asylum where my mother worked and then there would be no one who could save my brothers from the madness of this devil. I understood at the time that I had to hide this experience. I felt exhausted, miserable, and sick. I never reported it. I wrote, rather than confessed it. My younger brother suffered from heart disease, as did me, as did my father who passed away at the age of thirty, but Ruizinho had the most serious heart disease of all at the time, a mitral and aortic stenosis (I remember reading the results of his autopsy, which left when he was only eleven years old).

So, my younger brother was not only my brother, he was also my son (they say that we are mothers when we give birth to children, but no, I had not given birth to him but I was a mother as much as I could because his fragility and my impotence hurt me, So, I believe that we are mothers when we have pain), because our mother dedicated her concern to the immense mental patients of the hospital where she worked and believed that the inmate she had at home would replace her, not only in clothes and meals, Perhaps also in the mother's love that she never had, because at the age of ten, she was already an orphan of both father and mother. So, I tried to replace her in that part as well, kissing him, washing him, watching him dress, doing his homework, scolding him. There was an envelope that weighed on my conscience and helped me grow up and be more unhappy. It was a white envelope that was always sealed (the seal was burgundy), and it could only be opened when Ruizinho, due to another blood loss or any other health problem, had to go to the hospital in S. João, because our cardiologist, Dr. João Vasconcelos, was not always available to come home to treat us. Even today I can take the weight of that damn envelope that contained Ruizinho's necessary documentation, money for the ambulance and for the medicines if it was the case that I had to buy them at the Mag pharmacy. Everyone was afraid to receive my brother, everyone was afraid to take care of my brother, such was the cardiac vulnerability he had. A boy's body and a hundred-year-old man's heart, so the cardiologist said. He was forbidden to be a child, strictly forbidden to play soccer, run, ride a bike, go to the beach, any task left him exhausted and tired. He was born with his days numbered and I told them better than anyone. Of a sweetness that burst from the inside, always with her little arms around me and, when it was a feast or a holy day, in our mother's free time, around her mother's neck, like an angel, with light hair and full of curls, pendulous curls that framed his face, his round eyes,  Brown and sweet like only him and he understood everything, he accepted everything, today I believe he already possessed, also the wisdom of a hundred-year-old man. Ruizinho left when I was sixteen years old, on the tenth of September in the year one thousand nine hundred and eighty-five, having been born a year before our father left, the date of which is impossible for me to forget either. On the tenth of April, one thousand nine hundred and seventy-five, before the commemorations of the end of Salazar's dictatorship, the day on which we planted trees at the Costa primary school and I dedicated mine to him. I don't know if the tree is still alive. 

The death of my loved ones touched and silenced me for many years, a time in which I kept the pain to myself, like wounds that I hid, like cracks that would not close even with alcohol or mercury. Today I know that I feared that if I talked about such weaknesses, I could be risking losing Antero or my mother. Very difficult times of which I am neither ashamed nor proud, but which I still feel today, like the sealing envelope, the weight of it.  I understand that no pain replaces the joy of being happy, nor the other way around. 

When I asked myself why my extended family was never there to lessen our pain, I excused them, I made up a thousand excuses, but the truth, the truth is that they lived their own lives, they suffered their own pain, and only those who are in the convent know what goes on inside. When I had my first son, my Rui Francisco, believe me, I tried to bring my father Francisco and my brother Rui back to life again, both at once, the joy of bringing a two in one burst in my chest that, well done the math in my head, were three in one body,  The father, the brother and the son. I think about it and tremble and I'm glad I forgive myself for the childish thoughts and pains I took away in childbirth. At that time, before his birth took place, I feared the worst. Feeling sick and exhausted again and succumbing via an experience similar to that of my twelve-year-olds, leaving without even seeing my boy's face. That was not the case. 

I write today to relieve the pains I carry from such an early age, the longing that suffocates me for my ancestors, at the same time so that, through the catharsis of writing, I can lift the spine I have and forgive myself for not having been able to make me and mine happier. 

I am going through the most difficult period of my existence, where I surrendered to the sacrifice of partial isolation, avoiding living together and doing only what was necessary to survive until the trial for domestic violence which, I understand today, will be the watershed between the woman who suffered and the woman who leaves all her wounds, without looking back. You can live on memories, but you can also die with them, stuck in the glottis and I still don't feel like dying. And the God in me assures me that I will be able to remember all this without the pain and weight of others' expectations of me. That I deserve to fly. The page will turn for me, I don't want the past inside me anymore. 

In front of me, there, just around the corner I will have the future that awaits me and at this moment, I put the appropriate captions and photos of my dear Rui, brother, son, angel and friend and I save ten minutes from the end of the day for another coffee and another long night of reading, the pleasure within the now,  Because I deserve pleasure without pain.