REVISITING MY DEAD

 

Father, an ancient memory

(here recited in the sweet voice of Luís Gaspar, from Estúdios Raposa)

I made you a compass and for that alone forgive me.

I stay there, hidden, under the desk where no one knows or guesses me. Maybe you, but you pretend you don't see me. I see you, imagine, still sitting in the mahogany armchair. Your thoughts were not (they are not, which I still feel the same today as they were then) revealing and clear, like the drawings torn into the wood of your armchair. 

And not even the severe line in the middle of your forehead that made you more fragile, or absent. Or both. 

If I smoothed out that grave frizz of time of yours and removed it from my forehead, you would offer me the most beautiful smile that can be offered to a daughter who did not guess that she was going to lose you. And that, with your loss, I would simultaneously lose the worry of that lost look of yours or the mahogany lines of your armchair (which left after you left because it reminded us of your presence hurting). 

Where will this armchair with art-engraved arms be? On the longest day of your eternal apathy, I remember, with incredible clarity, your cold, icy hand running down my hair wet with crying.

- How unfair, I shouted in the mouth silenced by the others.

- How unfair, repeated the seconds.

Everything remained quiet, dumbfounded, apathetically still. You inert, in the position of dead, I am dead, I know now, but it was you who were buried and this injustice of stealing from you from us is what killed me. 

Even today, dad, even today and 30 years or more, I am still dead and unburied. Could this be it, to die and remain uncovered without the vultures devouring us at the first nocturnal sign of the end?

Your cut-out profile of a cold, tinned floor lamp, where a lamp of faint light I projected your nose on the side wall. 

Four frames of charcoal sailboats mingled with the movements of life in you.

On the long day of our death, you were restless, but it must have been a kind of prognosis of yours reserved for your sought-after solitude. 

Because you exiled yourself from us, reading Tolstoy and cursing this and that in a laughing way. It already weighed on your carcass, more than the limiting pathology of a secular and old heart, the dredge of the end. The dagger had done damage long before, and you still stood tall. What stopped you from doing it again? 

And you lived on the run, like Sammy, so that you wouldn't be mistaken for a body that drags between the pity of some and the despair of others. 

And loving you has always been so much easier. To love your irreverent ideas, your non-conformism, which kept alive the eyes of those who sought you and to whom you laughed so that they would not take you seriously. It's a bad joke that you don't want to be loved, that you keep your distance in the last times before the long day. 

You were so loved that the heavens closed, disjointed, desirous of taking you away and stifling our pain. 

Our dreams, if you saw them, crashed like crumpled sheets of paper, turned into nightmares to the law of force.

Dad, you were white, wax, lime, without a drop of blood and not even Tolstoy telling you stories kept you awake. And death, that black and ultimate thing, with no competence other than that of tearing the living from the dead, did not know how to smooth the crease of your forehead, as I did. 

And on the day of your departure, I tried to do it once again, when I was allowed to approach the box that led you to the humus-free blackness of the earth. 

The space that mediated being lying inside that box (I still see it today without color, without consistency and without materiality, my defense, I already know) we had talked, you and I and the mother to burst into a cry of helplessness (you needed to be by her side to comfort her, but alive). At that time, I encouraged myself with love and caressed your frosty forehead of death and seemed to see you smile. But what did I know of those things of death and end that are hidden between life and its continuation? For me, you know that, you would go on another of your trips to Lisbon, you wouldn't go on the alpha, because you had to go to bed. I now understand the mother's cry, at the farewell of the body, you went with no return, she knew it, I didn't. 

Never again. And "never again" in the vocabulary of a happy child to date, was always replaced by "forever". The most you had from me in that goodbye was a see you later, see you later. 

And the rest of the tears that flowed through me like unstoppable hot rivers were because I imagined that they would keep you asleep in that space of the cramped and obsolete box and would send you on a trip that you would not be able to enjoy. 

And you loved so much to see people and things mingle in life with sounds and smells. 

Knowing that you are between falls and vertigo boxed as a package with no destination or with a destination to which we had no access (just like all the trips you made on behalf of the opposition party). In the name of freedom. That freedom that has left us captive, with no other choice. We only knew your protection and your love.

Even today I "see" your office, your desk with 6 drawers on each side, full-bodied and mahogany, worked, on a top where the dust was often shaken by Luzia, the ashes that spread from your Ritz, the pewter or fine brass ashtray, with 3 edges, the paperweights with the name of your eagle's great-grandfather and grandfather (which I still have). The closet where thick covers, heavy dossiers were crowded, loaded with lives that hung on your back, to your thoughts, wishing you the best and finding in you a kind of messiah. 

I remember Grandpa Rodrigo's coughs before leaving with more menthol papers and candies, the pattering of your fingers when you thought that Mr. Bastos would not know how to solve these lives for you. 

From your donkey-colored corduroy jacket when you run away, from the moss-green pullover you wore you wore a dress on the day you died to me. 

Of the cream shirt, of the bundle of papers you carried in the pocket of your creased farm pants. 

Your short mustache and your temples where the time could already be guessed. That time that I wasn't going to let your hair turn gray. 

You waited for the end of the day to leave, and it was between conversations over diapers and potatoes that I left mom and Luzia in the kitchen and went to peek into your room. From outside, the lights of street lamps came in and it was these light clippings that let me see the book half-open on your belly resting and your arm hanging to the infinity of the bed, your eyes open and your forehead creased. 

Did you call someone who didn't come or was it my impression? You died and I was left unearthed. And with each passing year, with each decade that I survive, I think that staying alive and stuck in moments of pain can be the worst death, the longest and the slowest. 

I know you're there, always doing everything possible and impossible to get me back together. Other lives will come and in others I will find you. But it was in this that you stayed as a compass. And I'm disoriented.