JOSÉ RÉGIO & THE BLACK SONG

 

Life now boils down to two stages. The one I wake up in and the other one I lie down on. Did I choose seclusion or did it choose me? They say that time moves forward and eats away at our memories. Contest. They have never been so clear about who I am. The one I've always been until now. Three years ago, everything changed. Every day that passed, it was another day in which I knew the others and got to know myself better. I continue, I continue, I force myself to blossom my whole identity, born after fifty, as a result of others, in my days. And I tell my father that it should have always been like this. Always true to me. I've always been over myself. Not anymore. Whoever it is. Irrespective of. All on the same level. First me. And much later, the others. And who are the others, if not all the ones I prioritized before me!?

Ever since I was a child, for as long as I can remember, Mars has always been there, to energize me, to change the furniture, to get my middle brother out of the electricity, to run with my younger brother to the hospital, to take care of them, to fill the grocery bags of all the poor people who knocked on my door,  to feed all the friends who burst into my house, to welcome the pain of others and, in the meantime, to forget my own. At the Bom Pastor school, where I entered before the age of four, in a boarding school, it was the nuns' drumming of the nuns, me and others like me, who were put in the dark room and who beat us with slate on the ass. Until I convinced my father that i already knew how to read, that he could entertain me at home with his books, to teach me the rest. He agreed. And it's exactly him that I miss even more. My father was a father and mother and did a good job. I was the one who couldn't identify the people, without him, who took advantage of me. 

At school, while my father was alive, I taught the teacher's daughter to read and write while boredom ate away at me, because neither she liked Portuguese very much nor I waited for the whole class to continue learning. After my father died, at school, I would sit on the playground wall trying to understand others. Because inside the classroom i was treated like the poor little fatherless. And i was really poor. Because at that time, before he died, I was already an orphan of a living mother. Then the poor orphan was complete. Among several maids who followed one another, I took care of my mother's children, postponing my games and feeling that there was something in store for me, something indefinite, something that divided the cake of life into two parts, one of suffering and another for expansion. I knew there was light inside, inside that part of the cake, but I didn't yet know that that part was inside me. Until I was twelve. At that time, I knew there was no death. And that life after we left was an extension, just like the football games that dad took me to see at Dragão. In the light, it was revealed to me, I think now because of my insistence on staying there, that I would have to go back, because there was an incomplete mission. My absent mother, who was an orphan woman, needed me to take care of her and her children. I know I didn't want that for myself, that I thought I was incapable, that I didn't want such a heavy responsibility. That i didn't want to live with the man she took as her life partner. And I tried to dodge things, full of courage when facing a thirty-six-year-old man who tried to abuse me, who used machiavellian and narcissistic ways to manipulate my mother and us. I've always pronounced my father's name. I always invoked his name when I addressed this person. I've always stood up to it. What a great girl I was, a fighter and caretaker of the family. The maid who stayed with us the longest used my naivety to be able to date. She gave me two escudos and fifty cents (which I started using to buy loose cigarettes at the station kiosk), when she wanted to date the fireman and I was, like, taking care of the house, tidying up the kitchen, trying to be a mother to my siblings. After the death of my grandfather Rodrigo, who was my guardian, and who passed away on the twenty-third of July of one thousand nine hundred and eighty-four, the pain became greater and i gained a shield that i knew how to hide, but allowed me to open my heart to my grandmother Albina who still remained six more years after him, I believe. When my grandfather left, I already knew what it was like to leave, that it was that extension that I wouldn't be able to see. The only thing I didn't know, nor was it known to me before, was that my younger brother would leave, not even two months after him. On the tenth of September, Ruizinho left, behind his grandfather and with his father already upstairs, waiting for both of them. He was eleven and I was seventeen. But it's not regular seventeen years, not just eleven. Because every day, the first and last thing I did (and I think my mother and my brother, too) was to check their room to see if my brother's heart was still being heard on the pillow. Thus, one day was as if it were many days, which could not be counted in any week, nor divided, because love could only be added. It was deafening and the cause of much anguish, but the greatest anguish would be not to hear his heart beat syncopated. Rui had the heart of a hundred-year-old human. And there were many trips to the hospital, many hemorrhages, many agonies into the night, many early mornings and many mornings when he felt tired, exhausted. That the heart doesn't hurt, they told him. It didn't hurt anyone but him and us, out of sympathy. 

They say we forget the pain and it's true. Time is the salting pan that perpetuates everything, healing the wounds. Say. But it's through understanding. Going inside to see outside. To understand the hamster wheel and all those who spin on it, according to their interests and desires. From the pain that is exhausted in longing, there must be intermediate phases for us humans. The pain of a month, a year, ten years, of the whole life that disappeared, in that body that was no longer visible. They say that life is a match and that of the two days, one has passed. And it passed, it passed me and I look back, as I do in the rearview mirror of my car and the landscape is behind me, until I stop visualizing, and at the end of the day, at the end of the stains, in the necessary balance sheet, all that remains in me is the good that I have experienced. No, I don't regret the good I've done. Yes, I regret not always putting myself first. Pushing my needs and desires to one side, where hardly, if not  for seclusion, i would see. The people will always be the people. And where are the people, really? And then I remember Pedro Barroso a lot. And all those who leave, Nuno Júdice, Mário Viegas, Vasco Granja, Natália Correia, my father, my brother Rui, Viriato, Claúdia, Lourdes, grandmother Albina and grandfather Rodrigo. I remember all those who left and before they did, they left me with the nostalgia of the immense privilege of having shared moments with me, a nostalgia that remains and is accentuated in days of balance. They abandoned me or had to leave, fulfilling the unavoidable commitments of those who do not depend on the seal of anyone in the human kingdom. They left and I know they left parts, images, moments. Definitely, one dies, when those in the photos disappear, no matter where, out of sight, and can say nothing about us, attesting that we are alive. Life is a fire that burns up, burning everything around it. And when we get to the balance sheets, we start, for those who didn't leave, to cross their names off our list of people we know. Because, effectively, we never knew them. They were never real, they always used characters to be able to live with me. As if life were a mere play, in some acts. To all of these, I dedicate only one sentence: To see each other one day, only if it has to be. They say that life is measured in inches, between the letter from the midwife to the gravedigger. I heard this at a funeral. On that day, without knowing it, I too could have died. Or maybe I should have died.  Or maybe i should have left, when the true friends left. Life only makes sense shared. I say that I am in voluntary seclusion. I don't talk to dogs and cats, as my ex-husband used to say, meaning that I talked to everyone, even strangers. I only talk to dogs and cats. And I understand myself and I understand them and I know they understand me. Life is a full cup until adolescence, half a cup after it, and if we are not attentive, the last years will be of intensive thirst. That life sucks up itself, that the torches that make us feel the half-full goblets are breaking, without address, without physical visits, what about the others? Well, the others will always be the others. I don't miss it. I don't miss the others. I wonder if I am alive and still human, because it seems to me that there is very little human left in me, and perhaps it is the same with all the disillusioned who remain, when they should have taken the opportunity to leave. Life gave me a chance at the age of twelve. Because I wanted to leave at that time. It was nothing more than a wish denied. I saw the live denial of this adventure of leaving for the planet of unconditional love. Perhaps I already suspected that time would show me that my "humanity" had a limited term. My true north node in Pisces. Five years ago, I wanted to leave. I asked for a lot. I had a new heart attack, this one more serious, but not serious enough to culminate in my desired departure. And while some ask for a few more years, a few more months, a few more weeks, a few more days, a new opportunity, fighting against disease, violence and abuse, against all the inhumanities, unemployment, hunger, discrimination, so many inhumanities, everyone wants to stay a little longer, I ask for one less day, a perfect day, the day when I don't have to see the sun rise and it doesn't even have to see me go to bed. Life should be taken in light doses or in one shot, as is the case with many. I have not been chosen to be picked up by the light, yet. I won't beg for matches again. 

And since the seal is of God, or of the supreme wisdom, I will act according to what was previously agreed. But in the position of primacy. I make myself the priority of my days, of my choices. And only in this way, will I know that I am still alive, and that only in this way, by saying no to others and yes to myself, will I honor who I am, and the paths where I have lost myself will not be repeated. As José Régio used to say, in his black song, which is mine too, and when they tell me with their eyes lass, come this way, wishing If I went there, there are ironies and fatigue in my eyes and I never go there.