Chronicle of the Murdered House. Lúcio Cardoso
In writing this letter, I only wish I could tell you all the sympathetic things he has to say about my situation. Perhaps only then would you understand that this world, whose opinion you seem to value so highly, is not on your side, but on mine. Yes, I am the person being wronged and persecuted, despite all Demétrio’s efforts to portray me as a flibbertigibbet, a femme fatale who would lead any man to his ruin. And strangely enough, the rumors you so fear are not about me, as you might expect, but about the Meneses family. The Meneses of Vila Velha, that ancient trunk whose roots reach down into the very origins of Minas Gerais. I can’t help but feel a certain pleasure when I say this and imagine Demétrio, tremulous with resentment, and Ana, disdainfully sticking her nose in the air whenever she passes me, meanwhile peering at me through every window and shutter she comes across. As I say, this world does not accuse me, it judges you as severely as the Colonel does.
I stopped writing for a moment to wipe away the tears filling my eyes. It’s hard to write and harder still to write when what rises to one’s lips are words of love that the heart silences beneath the weight of bitter grievances. No, Valdo, my situation could not be more wretched, and you could not possibly blame me were some misfortune to occur. I don’t sleep, I’m feverish; I pace back and forth, remembering how things once were, wondering what force it was that drove me to turn my back on everything that made up my life. It wasn’t me, you can be quite sure of that, I didn’t want it to end like this, it was someone else, prompted by secret powers bent on destroying me. I’m not accusing anyone, because I can’t say for certain that it was this person or that, and I can’t even pinpoint the motive, because I can’t say it was for this reason or that, but the truth is that I always felt a distinct lack of love and watched as the atmosphere I had always imagined to be warm and affectionate slowly turned to ice. When I wake in the night and sit up in bed, listening to the dogs barking in the darkness, behind the railings and gardens that surround more fortunate people—and when I imagine, although I don’t know why, that some horrible fate awaits me, and that death is tearing off the pages from the calendar of my allotted time . . . ah, Valdo, is there no pity in your heart? Are you Meneses not made of flesh and blood? Can you never forgive me, never forget an outrage I never actually committed? And can you not sympathize with my situation now, can you not see how you tore my heart in two? The worst thing is the active part played in all this by your brother. The day will come when you will understand what he did to me, the influence he had on my behavior. Until then, until that day, banished and forgotten, I must endure the painful insults heaped on me. (And yet I will say this: you should have seen the way he used to follow me with his eyes down the hallway, pretending, of course, that he wasn’t, but devouring my every gesture and opening any doors behind which I tried to take refuge—you should have felt the greedy touch of his hands, on the few occasions when he dared to touch me, revealing the sick desires that lay behind the Meneses mask—you should have heard the cry he let out—the only time—one afternoon when I was crossing the verandah aglow with sunlight. I was just about to open the door when I heard that strange yelp—Nina!—and it was as if the black, stagnant water of his lust had spouted forth from the very depths of his being . . . I hadn’t even seen him, but I could sense his presence behind me, the galloping beat of his heart. I swear I didn’t even turn around, but all that night, I could feel his eyes fixed on me, as if they could penetrate walls—the eyes of a lunatic, a starving man not brave enough to touch the food set before him. My hand fails, the pen falls from my grasp: how can I possibly describe the devil you have living in your house? But nothing I can say will convince you, Valdo, because you’ll think it’s just another of my extravagant claims.) And yet someone, even if that someone is me, needs to warn you against your own credulity. What kills us is nearly always the unrecognized cruelty of those around us. If only I could make you recall certain facts . . . certain long-past situations . . . the early days . . . life in the Pavilion. That day, Valdo, when you stood on the steps strewn with dead leaves and embraced me, saying: “Nothing will ever part us, Nina!” But we did part, and with each day that passes, we find ourselves further away from each other. At that moment, though, it appeared to be true, the air was filled with the scent of jasmine, and the whole burgeoning world around us seemed to approve and to promise that our love would remain alive. But what evil spell was cast on us, how was it that everything changed so quickly? What happened to me, what happened to our love? Are there no certainties in life, do we engender only forgetting and distance? Do words mean nothing at all, can they not be used to seal an oath? What are we, we who pass through life like so much foam, who leave no trace once we are gone, only a handful of ashes and shadows? I ask myself these questions, my heart in my mouth: does anything endure, does anything remain untouched by the rage of time, are there feelings that never die and are never betrayed?
But we have been here before. I can feel you retreating into sullen silence and staring off into the distance. Distance is the image of our weariness. There, where not a hint of me, not a shadow of my gestures, not an echo of my words will ever enter, there will you take refuge in your certainty and dig my grave with gnarled, heartless fingers. I am definitively dead for you, a vast, formless tombstone stands permanently between us. And that is what most wounds and consumes me. Imagining you far off, giving not so much as a pitying backward glance at what we were. Imagining your silence, the way you have completely forgotten what you swore and promised, and feeling that I was nothing but a name spoken long ago in a vast and now vanished garden. A name like a petal that falls. Ah, Valdo, Valdo!
On one such day, grown tired of thinking and suffering, I went to a pharmacist’s to buy a sleeping draught. I came back and sorted out all my things—boxes, ribbons, hats, the silly little bits and bobs I always have with me and that I find so helpful—putting everything in order so that, after my death, it could all be given to a friend of mine, a nurse. Then I scribbled a note to the Colonel, asking him to forgive me for not being the daughter he wanted me to be—and asking him to forget me, because things weren’t well with me. Lastly . . .
Anyway, you can imagine the letter. Then I filled a glass of water, emptied the whole contents of the tube into it and waited until I had courage enough to drink it. No, I’m lying, Valdo, that wasn’t the letter I wrote with the glass there before me. I wanted to write something that would be a summation of my life, my testament. I wanted the cries in that letter to echo through the vast spaces of your house and make the guilty parties tremble in their hiding places. I listed Demétrio’s crimes, stating that I would never forgive him, in this world or the next. I laid out all the reasons he would come up with once he learned I was no longer in this world. The adulteries and the sins he imagined I would be committing on the other side. It gave me such pleasure writing that letter, imagining my body lying there with a candle at each corner, to be gawked at by the curious. The dead have a language of their own and send a message that is, at once, a warning and a condemnation of our lives. I don’t know how much I wrote, but there were pages and pages of the stuff—and I don’t know what I wrote after that, what tears and pleas and curses I flung down on the paper. I know only that it was all very confused, that you would never have had the patience or the desire to decipher it. I can’t remember either how long I spent writing the letter, I do remember that it was already dark by the time I finished, and the pen had fallen from my hand when the door opened and I heard Colonel Gonçalves saying almost in my ear: “What were you thinking? Are you mad? Have you lost your reason?” I turned around; the floor was covered in sheets of paper. Gripped by a single thought, I made a grab for the glass, but the Colonel snatched it up and poured the contents down the sink. “Have you forgotten that you have a duty to your friends?” he went on. He helped me to my feet: “We must be patient with life.” He tilted my chin and shook his head reprovingly at the sight of my tear-filled eyes: “You need to get out more and have a little fun.” He gathered up the sheets of paper from the floor and tore them into pieces, then took me to a casino. I followed him like an automaton, blinded by the lights, feeling ill and weak. And yet I won thirty thousand cruzeiros. I have never known such luck. “You see!” exclaimed the Colonel “Fate is on our side.” I ended up almost forgetting my woes. We dined at a restaurant by the sea, the moonlight glinting on the water, we drank champagne, we danced. It was almost dawn by the time we came home: the sun was rising and lighting up the harbor. It was then that I decided to do as the Colonel advised, to forget and let my heart rest easy.
Don’t go thinking, though, that money was the cause of this transformation.