Crossing memories

 

The portrait loses its colour. It's not my eyes wearing you out, nor my longing for you that takes away your light, it's my hands and my mouth, because I kiss your face and caress you all over with my fingers, contouring the edges of the dream you've become. A photograph. In front of us, a sea of letter decals, some amplifiers, long rulers and, behind you, an old and large image of summer fruits, the painting that has always been in that kitchen. At that time, your hair was shorter than usual, but your close curls were still well-made circles between my fingers, when I had your back to me and put my lips on your head, and with my hands I searched your neck or massaged your scalp, as if confirming that I was still all on the side of joy,  All whole, all me. A dark blue sports shirt, it always suited you in blue, with two unbuttoned buttons, where you could see your white skin. Your hand still hangs towards me, raised, and a smile dedicated to the conversation that was kept between humour and intimacy. It was on a late afternoon in August, when we achieved the impossible, to retain the freshness of the walls under the cover of the unbearable heat that remained on the street, into the night. Rui had already left us almost five years ago, but the tenderness of his image continued in that house, perfuming it from childhood. Curious that I make this connection of feelings and characters with Rui, not because in that room that is the kitchen, where I took your photo, there were photos of him, but because, somehow, I associate the decals and the appliances built by you with another, much less happy, but equally hot, afternoon in September, when he left. What intersperses these moments are no more or less than five years, the activity, but the same as on the tenth of September in the fateful year of nineteen eighty-five. Which were alarms that I traced. That afternoon, you were not there. You were in Porto, working. The three of us were, except you and Antero, who are, after all, the characters in this portrait taken by me. I remember that, while I was doing it, I was listening to the album Scissors Cut, If they ever drop the bomb, "you said, I'll find you in the flames" of eighty-one on the turntable, and I would let his voice guide me into the afternoon with his heart in New York and a rose in the street, mine was with you,  in thought, and the thirty-three-rpm record rolled to the end.My mother was off duty and now I understand that she used to take her days off when that ghastly man still lived at home, and when he was working, she crocheted on the big sofa and Ruizinho, I can see him in the side memory of my eyes, leaned against her and asked her questions about our father and kissed her on the cheeks and neck. My mother scolded him gently, telling him that he had to do his summer homework, that the holidays would soon be over and that he would have to show the teacher that he had applied himself, so that forgetting the contents would not lead the teacher to go back in time. I won't go back to school, mummy, but oh Cristina, why did dad give you this medal and not me too? I looked at him and answered him again: because when daddy died, you were only one year old, you were such a baby, he didn't have time to give you the same!  And as i turned my eyes to the device, i kept thinking about the pain of absence, of having a father figure and of whom, even though he had, he didn't even remember her. And that this absence was so sad, that I was left with his pain and mine, the two of them mixed there, in that room, in my thoughts. 

At that time, I remember, I had the curtains wide open, so that the afternoon sun focused, objectively, on the black appliances, where, with all the precision I could, and following your instructions to the letter, I traced the operations of the appliance, on, off, electrical input and output, as well as the mark of the application on the front,  a brand that you had created for those in particular, to which you were dedicated at the time. I don't remember that mark. I look in my memory, but I lack the information. The detail. And Antero was still at Chaplin, serving francesinhas and washing glasses. In the first moment, we, me and you, were still dating, Rui Alberto was still with us, pretty much alive, in the second moment, he had already left and we had another Rui, Rui Francisco. As a baby, about a year old, my mother had insisted a lot with us that we live with her, she had already separated from the ghastly man and had married and was going through a divorce process from another one a little less ghastly than the previous one. And it was very difficult for us to leave our home, but we went back there, because she didn't want to be alone and we felt her sadness, the loneliness that she feared so much all her life. Today I wonder if it was sadness I felt for her or if I felt the obligation to take care of her. Our Rui was already walking, when we agreed to live with her, and he was already saying something, saying father, mother, grandmother, uncle, car, ball, motorcycle, he still didn't say backhoe, but in the following months yes, he had already arrived there and was already sitting in the kitchen, improvising drums and percussion. That's when we had to take him to a real drum set, in the bands, on the tuning fork and then buy him one, so that he could sit down and dedicate most of his day to the instrument. And then, the Jazz school. And then, double pedal, then the brooms, the "demos" in the coliseum, the snare drums and toms, the bass drum, the tuned and stretched skins, and the auditorium of the Jazz school, which was the home of Barreiros, Brendan, Nelson Cedrez, Paco, António Sala, Veludo, Júlio Magalhães, the International Music Day,  Big Show Sic and João Baião, the monkey Adriano and the beautiful dancers with whom he chose to have lunch, exchanging us for them, and then his fever, rising to forty and him playing everywhere, on television, at the bands' concerts, doing the sound check and all the confusion of circus phenomena that, thankfully, did not settle in. The fever of the drums was taken away from him by shock when he was already nine years old. So, doing the simple maths, this Rui of ours lived mounted on a battery for eight years. Because he started playing at the age of one and a half. With a pacifier in his mouth. With the cloth nappy and the nipple of the cloth nappy to reconcile sleep, falling asleep with breaks in his mouth and notes in his ears, at the time of concerts, with the drumsticks and with the excavators, and the music always inside and outside, inside him that he expressed by humming breaks, imitating Manu Catché, Peter Gabriel,  Genesis, with the red scarf around her neck imitating Lino and the Albatross repertoire, the cap like Pedro Abrunhosa's and that hippy vest, and improvising, and listening to all kinds of symphonic rock that we heard. Many days were thirteen years old. The battery left it shortly after we parted ways. The band's drums were his. He stopped wanting to play. He was revolted and, instead of playing, he preferred to play video games, listen to darker and more aggressive music. Then, he started to make all kinds of allergies to spaces where he wasn't with his mother, where I was without his father. At that time, after you had gone out, every night I insisted on reading him stories to fall asleep. He resisted sleep. And then, still angry, when he heard a no from me, for whatever reason, or when he asked to take him to you, I said that I couldn't take it, it couldn't be me, because I didn't want to see you accompanied and I said that I had to call you so that you could come and pick him up at home. Then I started working shifts and he started throwing more tantrums than usual and I remember that, even before we moved to Porto again, he told me: Mom, make me my backpack because I want to go live with my father forever. I made him the backpack with two changes, but I took many pieces from the closets and he said: that's enough, mum, if I need more, dad will come and get it. And then I would take him, first to the clay pots, then to Rua da Alegria, and he would go on Friday, but on Saturday he wanted to come home, sick, ill-disposed, defeated. The world, as he saw it, crashed into ninety-eight. I had no hope, neither he nor I. When you left, there was still the set of instruments in the basement, scattered around the room and he insisted on making me go downstairs, to see him play and I went, sat on the sofa, but the basement became a place of darkness for us, full of living ghosts, of which neither of us felt well, being there alone. And he left the drums, sometimes after half an hour, sometimes more and other times, after five minutes, he would sit with me on the couch, between my legs and with his small arms grabbing my neck and asking me to tell him everything again, why it happened, how it happened and after it happened,  what would happen to us, that we were no longer a family, we would never be a whole family again, without the father, and me looking at everything in that room, the photos and the postcards on the corkboard, the notes, the giant poster of the drums saying Drummers do it louder that you had bought and all the crap I saved,  As if I was going to forget all that, my disposition was indisposed to the disposal of everything, the furniture, the music devices, the cassettes, the annoying Jack Jacks on the floor, I controlled my tears and anger, other times I couldn't. And he heard me repeat over and over again that everything was going to be fine, even so, that he would continue to have you, that he would continue to laugh with you, to keep you company, that from then on he would have, not one, but two mothers, one who was his, and the other who was the borrowed mother that he had to get used to her,  that he would end up liking her, that she offered him things but that she wasn't nice to him, that she was only half-nice, that she was only half-good, half-good, but not mum, mum. I don't want her my mother. And the distance remained, the quarrels too, the outrages and insults, when I happened to come across her, I still hear them in my ears, in front of the boy, in front of you. On the street where I lived. At the entrance of our house. And then, the worn out photograph, your smile remains, even your smell and the thing becomes intense, when I try to sleep without palliatives, sleep as you sleep when you get up early and do tasks that are distributed in the day and you reach the end of it and you want to close your eyes, without needing tablets, and I rest my eyes on the photograph and my head on the pillow and when I stop looking at you and try to abandon myself to the dark is when I see you most everywhere, here, there, in Paços de Sousa, outside and inside the gaiato, in Ramirinho, there already at the exit of this ghastly street, in Porto,  in my arms, in my mouth, in my ears, your last words since the last time I laid eyes on you, every word, every inch of distance that there was between us, silence of you in the noise of so many people around, that you always have so many people around you, your look, your coldness,  and your gaze denying what your mouth said, disconnected from each other, as if the words spoken were not yours and I re-analyse each one at the millimetre ratio, every time, did he mean this instead or did he say this expecting me to say that,  but what if this and that and these ifs, and these theses and theses spill into me, like echoes of an abyss where I always fall, and it is always this and that that that prevents me from really turning off the thread of memory, turning the photograph, sometimes crying until I fall asleep, forgetting my existence to finally rest from yours and others, I no longer cry, because it is not convenient for them to listen to me or because I would not know how to control the degree of pain,  the size of the crying or the agony of the moans that begin as a request to God for rest and can always gain an apotheosis between rounding and that going out to the street, to the garden, to the moonlit night defeats me and takes me even further away from my attempts to dispense with the alprazolam pill. Damn, how can the human being be alive, be happy, exhaust himself in tasks and still find the strength to cry his dreams? Literary exercises stagnate, that is, in an attempt to exhaust what I feel, unlike memory that never stops. And the sound of the trinities in the belfry comes to me, and brings me the Ganga, the cemintendes, the Camels, the Barclays and all the sounds like eternal clues to which I return, to land soon after, with the bold, white moon full of you entering the room, three nights in a row, three whole nights, beautiful and arrogant, already lofty and now,  more and more distant, and not even distance distances you from me. Sometimes it seems to me to hear you call sweet, oh sweet!, but it is me dreaming, it is me living in an unreal world and it is in it that I become a resident in the permanent state. Madness is a place that welcomes me, that does not take me away from you. I return to the portrait, Antero's face on the back of yours, that I folded the photo in two, that I see my brother with the same regularity of the menstrual period, more and more in menopause, that he is at the distance of a call that is more or less regular, but to you, you, oh star of the sea of my sky,  you are truly unattainable! You cross my sky outside and inside. You give the coordinates and check the latitudes on my map. I give myself too many occupations not to go to you, I entertain myself with ene of scenes, things and more things as a way of postponing that moment when I know that you will return to my private universe. I wonder if you don't have my soul captive there, if you haven't made me a hostage to your chest, but honestly, I can't hear the answer. It would be the same as throwing rockets and picking up the canes, and that exercise is indeed painful! And grief grows in my chest and looms in my eyes. I believe I never told you that you made me happy, so immensely happy, like no other, nothing else, in this life. You have grown over time and have become this edifice of love and decay of hope. In this chest of memories, I feel like the knight of the sad figure, he sees mills are mills, he sees giants, they are giants, but he never sees the sweet dulcinea. I am, indeed, that knight of the sad figure in its feminine version. May Cervantes forgive me. And the cuckold pain completes another turn, my love. And not even Garfunkel's sharp scissors and beautiful sludge Dulcinea, in its masculine version. And I continue. Up in the world. Alone. Hanging on in.