NAIDHANA RAJATA 12TH

 

My vulnerability is immense. It didn't start when you left, Dad. And if it's been fifty years since you left, it's been 58 years since it existed. It already came from the womb. If it weren't for your permanence in those first years, yes, I wouldn't be vulnerable, I would be an expelled fetus, with open veins and fractures, I wouldn't be a human being, as I am today. It wouldn't be. Point. And all of you tell me that even this I must be thankful for, because you have made me resilient, because you have made me take constant dives to understand myself and others. I know myself and I believe I know others, because of this great understanding of myself and my whats. It hurts me all the time, Dad. That when you left, the others were still here, all those who stayed except with your early departure. Whom you have also helped to become, through pain, more resilient and more empathetic. But God willed that, one by one, they should all depart. And so it was. After you, it was Grandpa Rodrigo, he will do now, on the twenty-third of this month, on the birthday of Uncle Domingos, who also marched to heaven, with his pancreatic cancer, with his increased cough, and his sudden thinness. He was immaculate and whole inside me, because I didn't go to see him at the hospital when he called me. But it pained me to leave. He was the second father. Twice father. He protected us, it is true, he taught us, he tried to replace you in the way he knew how. And he knew so much, Dad. And not even two months later, on the tenth of September, I repeated to myself that he was the one who came to get Ruizinho. My brother, my son first, how can we not be unhappy with the loss of him? How can we remain whole, without his sweetness and embraces, his heart enlarged and so fragile? I know that everything happens for a much greater cause, but our physicality doesn't allow us to understand. And yes, I found myself being selfish and blaming God for everything and nothing. To rob me of all those I loved, just like you. God was not fair. Because in my equation of losses, he was always the great denominator of pain. Because if he had really loved us, he would have left us supported. A family wants to be together, cohesive, whole, close. And we didn't have that. We never had, did we, Dad? On the day of Rui's end, when I came back from the cemetery, still all wet, I went to the living room, Milo, the German shepherd, was sitting there. I remember sitting on the floor hugging him, I remember someone came out of the room, closing the door behind him, and I saw Grandpa Rodrigo, as soon as the door closed, with the brown plaid cap on his head, look at me and fall to the ground, like a thin card from those decks you used to play Swedish, Keims, Hearts. The grandfather showed himself to me and I understood that it had to be, that I had to come and pick him up. The mother returned to her world of combat through superficiality, rigidity, career, forced labor. 

Grandma Albina kept me company, talked about the everything and nothing that makes up the chest of family memories, but she also knew that she had a deadline and even knew when he got close enough to tell us. That we always know when that lady in black comes to visit us. But only us. That others are not warned. It's no longer a rule. I've been warned for a few years now. From Claudia, from Lourdes, from Viri, from Mrs. Fernanda. Because when we know what color death is made of, we begin to recognize it. There is no longer any way to arrive without warning, to go unnoticed. 

Father, they're all gone. The mother is often visited by the lady. And I wake up with nightmares that come true, that she's fallen again, and I wake up with a bang and she's falling in the doorway of my room. She's tired. Worn. I don't think I've learned to love in all these years. Detached, superficial, cold, absent, what connects her to the world is every day, more, the social of others. And I remember that, for as long as I can remember, wounded by your absence, I have been asking for miracles. God prove to me that you exist, work this miracle! I started believing in miracles when he came into my life, but when he left, I stopped doing it. Her mother used blackmail using your name to get you to leave it. I didn't leave him. He had to accept it, because I gave him no other alternative. I did not give in to his blackmail. But he left anyway later. Like all ships, to another port. He didn't leave like you, in that clean way, where the only accusing finger is turned to the highest, with his back always wide, no, he left because I couldn't tell him how much I loved him, because I thought he could feel it in the space that was left between us, from day to day. In the look he gave her. In my constant presence in your present. I was wrong, Dad, because words are needed as much as deeds, they need to be said out loud, instead of kept inside. I should have done it every day, I should have told him that my heart was so afraid that, by saying this, he too would be stolen from my death, by this great culprit whom I love so much, who is God in me. But it's only been a few years since I've believed that. That near-death experience was a magnificent gift given to me at the age of twelve, and I didn't know how to value it properly. I believed it was the result of my fears and losses. And what I understood from this outcome, I also know just now, which I have not analyzed well. Today I forced myself to understand. I don't know if there's your finger in the experience, but I know there's your finger in this late understanding. All late in my life. Everything, Dad. 

After fifty years of your absence, you have been gone for half a century, I too would like to be ready to go. After so much pain, I too, selfish again, would like to hug you at last. But today I know that we have fulfilled a singular path, somewhere entangled in the thread of the lives of others, fulfilling purposes unknown for the time being, understood at the end of the journey.  I know i'm still missing you, you and them, you and them all, Claudia, Viriato, Lourdes, dad, I miss them all. Everyone has added to me, everyone has prolonged the joy that I haven't known what it is for a long time. I live the small joys of everyday life, the cats, the dogs, the flowers and fruits, the smiles of the people I keep hearing tell stories, in videos and movies. I see you in my two children. Their smile and that of their companions, their small successes and joys, I also make them mine. 

Dad, my brother tries to stay "at home", but he comes from far away for an occasional visit, he falls asleep day or night, he runs away from here to the nearest café, outside, tired of his mother's silence and his own, tired of life too, worried and without greater joys that I know him. The loss you have made of us has marked us all. Maybe even your mother, who instead of finally dedicating herself to her family in your absence, took refuge even more in her life, in her work. Today I measure her affective detachment as a disease. A disturbance or inability to love and be loved. In this time of his old age, three years of conversations, I try to catch up on any hint of affections and disaffections to contextualize the study of our family and to help it.She told me a lot of things that were hard to digest, a lot of things that I didn't want to hear, but that helped me realize that, as a result of your departure, if you didn't, divorce would be the graceful way out, in his opinion. 

The mother, who has always been so absent, has become even more absent, today she would correct this blunted affection pattern for autistic. As if she never woke up from the torpor of the death of others, all her life. The pattern of her mother's affections had been established since she was ten years old and no one noticed, no one was interested, and even today, she speaks of her father's death associated with the curse of the book of St. Cyprian, the grandmother having lined her earrings with black gold and being made a duke of sticks, stiff and rigid in front of the coffin.  where those two figures in black next to the coffin read a passage from this black book on their grandfather's coffin. Even today he tells me that he doesn't remember seeing his mother hit by thunder, burned inside, but he remembers that he never went into her room anymore, that for many years of his life he couldn't even look at her photograph. Even today, when she is preparing to leave, she tries to pass unscathed between her feelings, as between the raindrops, without getting wet. And you've been telling me for a long time that she's leaving. And yes, I've been feeling death hanging around the rooms, in the hallway. Sometimes, I am filled with contradictory feelings, where the anger and pain of loss are included and I go to the corridor to confront it, to confront it, wanting to face it, but I know that no one can overcome it and that it does not even exist, so that it can be prevented. Death figuratively has a smile of derision and in the depths of his gaze, the infinity of an abyss that can only be felt by looking without turning away. And now, when I speak of death, it is not death that I see, but the light, again, that light that has broken through my pain and torn it apart in ages, separating time, maturing and distinguishing by degrees, the greater pains from the lesser pains, teaching me to look them in the face and calling them the names that have kept them here. I never knew how to recognize death as the end of the mission, the outcome, the conclusion, the end, the happy ending and it was always for me the sad incomprehensible punishment. And that's how I expel each pain, saying that I've already learned, that I no longer need to understand the whys that came, like roller hems, sewn to them, the causes. I'm for causes, but I don't want them anymore. I take away from them the power I gave them, in my ignorance so immense and so childish, so needy and so inhospitable, I was the weak target chosen to guard them. I smile at the motherly mania of holding all the pains I have seen in myself and in others. I no longer think of myself as a bottomless sack where you can store everything that hurts. I got tired of being the punching bag, the one of the profit and concerted usefulness of others. I'm a new person, me. I'm a brand new me, with beautiful expressive wrinkles that don't let me forget that I've been here. My face is the map of that past, and when I smile I give more foundation to the present and when I have a birthday, as is the case today, I give depth to my desires for the future. 

Love in the experience of life is a barren piece of land or a blooming rose bush. We choose. I decided to be garden. The mother, out in the open. Here, the soil is sadly barren. An iceberg that perhaps only Freud could see a remedy for. Maybe not even Freud. Not all of us have this ability to feel. Some of us feel for others. As an auxiliary appendage to transform and turn the soil, manure and water these dry and dusty sands that life provokes in us. Not to feel is also to have felt too much, to have felt to the point of breaking, of freezing, of sterilizing, so much heartbreak without a name and without being looked at, so much scream kept that did not find a voice or strength to be transmitted, what a pity, Dad, what a pity I feel for those who do not feel anything. It's like having wings and choosing not to fly, because of the pain it can cause to fall and break the wing. And I now recognize that bad emotions are kept and that they can ruin the good ones, cause diseases, cancers, depressions and traumas that become parts of us, like new organs, that propagate in cells that pass from generation to generation, marking the generational trees. And I recognize all of this because I suffered from it when you left. Why didn't I scream? And then, when it was grandfather and Rui, why didn't I shout, together with those who remained, to wake them up from the dull affection in which they live? And later, when he left, why didn't I cry out the love I have for him? Because I kept quiet and kept everything, as I did with Grandma Bina's coat, in an attempt to preserve its smell, the memory of its stews, its soups, Grandpa's plaid cap, all the objects that I keep from everyone, as if, at the beginning of the new world, I could recover you through that matter that will not resist the passing of memory,  that time will come to steal too. Nothing of you is left in the physical buildings, nothing, only in the photographs, and even your physical objects that have kept me company all these years have been stolen from me, such as your paper weights and the little owl medal and you, then, know who did it. And you tell me not to cling to anything else. On the contrary, let me detach myself from everyone, even from love. Your gaze follows me, the gaze of your godfather remains serene and attentive to me. And the time that is salt heals bruises such as saliva and kisses. And everything else is life. It rains in the summer and the thunder tears through the dark clouds, loaded with the affections that humans keep. And it's been years since you deceived your mother by inviting her to a picnic, taking her to your house and saying that, by mistake, the whole family had already gone without you. And you told him a story. And I am that story, Father Francisco. 

It's two in the morning. I'm going to ask for one more miracle: to see you tonight in a dream. See you, Dad. And I'll attach a song that says about you what I'd like you to say about me. Today I take the muscle relaxant. Today I smoke another cigarette and push myself into dreamlike immersion. Father, the life that is born of love is the most beautiful of miracles.