Sgarbe to; Letter four

Rusted gates, paths guided by unflinching pines, silences so ambiguous and a cold moon. I arrived at Limoeiro six years after my first visit, almost forgetting how much this displacement can take me in in order to gather me in.

I have lost count of the words that stopped expressing me in these years. So many years have passed since the enormous precaution that was securing myself with words. Today, I secure myself with nothing. A certain running outside of all things gives me the feeling that I keep myself alive, and with some pulse outside the body. But always in that way.

It rains a lot, all the windows run in that way, half sad, half tacky. I have no signal to guarantee the traffic of my ridiculous epiphanies. Indeed, the ridiculous, the crossing of the ridiculous has been a theme in particular. God spoke to me about it at the start of the week, taking out an insurance policy with me.

Always living hidden, loving hidden, as if my nature were not appropriate. Come now. How can nature not be appropriate, if natural, if nature. That constant, unchanging, invincible fight against the permanent condition had come to an end. That was when I realized that so many convictions had come to an end. The fight itself was an engineering for life, it was something I had clung to in order to live and that now had come apart like an old cart. One could hear the noise of the pieces piling up on one another in the irrecoverable symphony of calamity. The time had come there to die once and for all to those false expectations of transforming the world or the world inside me. I was tired once and for all, I had concluded that a plan to die in the flesh would be more useful than a plan to live in the soul — although earlier attempts at both had failed before, now, a kind of resignation about life and determination about death followed me continuously. I was willing to put an end to all of that, as indeed I did.

At 30, reality had proved frighteningly hard for me, because any unsuccessful daydream would bring terrible consequences. One had to think sickly, focused on complete destruction, without the surrounding structures being harmed. A kind of implosion. Hard to happen when you are a communication executive and correspondent for international news. Having conceived this text as an autobiographical, testimonial fantasy drastically lowered the dramatic quality of this account. Instead of recounting the flagrant anguish of these days, I did what I had been attached to doing in recent hours, counting titles and chores in order to forget the main reasons. Indeed, it is behind them that I hurled myself before all the miseries I dressed in, fed on, spent the night in. Behind the reasons is where I was greater and lesser, is where I am now. Behind a reason is where I died. My mind was disturbed when it finally lay in bed, saw itself alone again, remembered that it intended to write a little before dying. Remembered that the desire it has is to die. That death is lying in wait and God watches closely, guards, saves, will give a sign in time. Yesterday or today, it repeated, an answer is on its way.

The answer will find me prostrate. Even holding on to the arm of the Eternal, I feel the delay in rising. I missed the day when they called me a woman. When they made me feel I was something other than this here. I will hide nothing from the Eternal, that is my agreement with him, so he will keep a new deal with me. At the same time, this devastates me, silences every signal I might emit. It puts me dead. It puts me, above all, wanting to die.

Anguish returned, but transformed. Analyzed, combed, clean, with a bare face. Before, it presented itself drunk, legs crossing and suggesting unintelligibility. Now it comes alone, like a sober widow on the morning of the burial, without masks.

It was necessary to locate all of that, since the main prisons had been established. I mean, time was established, the most irreversible, most stable condition — worryingly, more worryingly stable — was established. So the norms of description applied from the inside out, from top to bottom. I could see the Portuguese teacher standing in front of me, gesturing slowly, in the effort to make me a less stupid writer when drawing the exact location of my sadness. She would surely have some compassion for me, good as she was, on discovering that I was swallowed by the mediocrity of the simplest attempts, and that I hardly risked saying that the heart of my tragedy pulsed from a stolen kiss.

I had not yet realized at what point my recovery stood, or whether any recovery was still going on. Indeed, terms like that, recovery, were the last that interested me. So many relapses — indeed, a succession so bitter, recurring and tiring that it had left me at death’s door — had taken from me any prospect that I was still living to live. It was as if I were playing just to fulfill the fixture list knowing relegation was imminent. I never liked soccer and have no idea why I made this poor analogy with a sport that does not interest me at all.

Of the day I buried Aunt Josmara I remember few details. I had kept little in the foreground, so that superficiality would be that very appropriate kind of anesthesia. It was the way to bear a Catholic funeral. Initially, I tried to avoid going, but civic obligations took me out of bed near three in the morning. My brother’s voice tore through the cold night saying with a headline euphoria “Aunt Josmara died.” How lucky I was not to share her fate, that of being without anyone who loved her at that moment. We got out of bed and made a memorial, a photo and party candles floating on the shallow, slow water of a decoration. That makeshift ritual (macumba) would have been enough. But it was necessary, not for me, but for the lives of others, that I suffer publicly. Not long passed before my father came by car to pick me up. He did not want to go with me. Then, her coffin dragged on the floor of the grave, making a heavy sound, the last of the inert body. Wood rubbing on cement, earth, sand. Then I learned what the sound of death is.