Chronicle of the Murdered House. Lúcio Cardoso
buried in them, I finally allowed my tears to flow freely—and I felt her body tremble beneath my touch, first withdrawing, then allowing itself to be caressed, as sensitive as a plant battered by a furious wind. Only then, when I had revealed my utter devastation, did peace seem to reign in her heart. She slowly stroked my hair.
“I’m so unhappy, André, so jealous. And yet you must stay and I must go . . .” and she sobbed quietly, as if not daring to make too much noise or to wipe away the tears streaming down her face. I looked up and dried her eyes with one corner of the sheet.
“Nina, I swear there’s no one else in my life. How could there be when I’ve known you?” Tentatively, and when she made no objection, I lay my head on her breast. What did I care if she was ill, or if the cracked, thirsty mouth of decomposition were about to burst from the very flesh my greedy lips had so often kissed?
Then she grasped my head firmly between her hands, and her hollow eyes fixed on mine:
“Swear again so that I can believe what you’re saying! You wouldn’t dare lie to a woman about to depart this world, would you?”
“Never,” I lied, and my voice sounded calm and decisive.
“Then swear, swear now!” she begged.
But swear what, dear God, swear that there was no other woman in my life, swear that she wasn’t at death’s door? And yet, with my face pressed to her bosom, I did swear and, if her peace of mind had depended on it, I would have sworn whatever she wanted me to and committed all kinds of perjury. When I looked up, she was gazing into my eyes, and in her eyes I saw the frightened, disoriented expression you see in the eyes of certain animals. It was as if she were staring beyond me and beyond my words into a world she could no longer understand. She let out a sigh, pushed me away, and went back to combing her hair. She must have exhausted all her strength, though, because the comb fell from her hands and she turned deathly pale, crying:
“André!”
I took her in my arms and gently repositioned her so that she was once more leaning against the pillows. She was breathing hard. Silence fell, and in that silence, all the objects one usually associates with illness—medicine bottles, rolls of cotton wool, pills, the whole accumulation of things that, for a moment, I had managed to ignore—suddenly reasserted themselves, as if tearing their way through a mist that had, until then, been omnipresent. I stood looking at her, and an unfamiliar machine, weaving who knew what dark, mortal web, began to function again inside her. I couldn’t say how long we stayed like that, until finally she came to and said:
“What happened? What’s wrong?”
I tried to calm her, saying that she was still weak and had probably talked more than she should have. She shook her head and answered in a strangely serene voice:
“No. That moment was a warning. There’s no doubt about it, André, the end is coming.”
She again took my hand in hers and lay very still. Someone, not that far away, gestured to me in the darkness. I had to leave. But I could feel time flowing through my whole being and fixing me to that spot as if I had put down roots. The doctor came over to me, touched my shoulder—he was a shy young man, who had only arrived from Rio a few days earlier—and indicated the door as if to say there was no point in my insisting. The world regained possession of my dream. Before leaving, however, I looked back one last time: Nina was sleeping, but nothing in her face bore any resemblance to that of a living person.
(That night, I walked endlessly about the garden, prowling up and down beneath the lit window of the room in which she lay. The doctor’s shadow came and went against the white backdrop of the wall. At one point, I saw my father bending over her; he looked even wearier than usual. What would he be feeling, what emotions would he be hiding in his heart, what sense of sad and entirely inappropriate pride? I even considered speaking to him, and in my mind there stirred something like an impulse to console, but my lips refused to utter a word and, when I met him on the steps, as he, like me, came down into the garden in search of solitude, I let him pass, my face a blank.)
. . . When I placed the flowers on her lap, she opened her eyes, and I saw then that she appeared already to have left this world. She could still repeat the same gestures as the living and even say similar words—but the vital force was leaving her body and she was standing on that impenetrable frontier from which the dead gaze back indifferently at the land inhabited by the living. And yet, out of some kind of survival instinct, or maybe it was mere habit, she took the violets in her hand and raised them slowly to her nose, just as she used to do in times past, except that she no longer breathed in the perfume with the same eagerness, and her face was now soft and expressionless. Her arm fell, and the violets scattered over the bed.
“I can’t,” she said.
Her voice was no longer recognizable either, it was a cold, mechanical thing, a sound uttered with great difficulty, still audible, but soft and insubstantial as cotton wool. I didn’t have the courage to say anything and simply stood by her side, asking God, with lips that lacked the flame of faith, to give me a little of her suffering. Roused perhaps by the flicker of consciousness that allows the dying briefly to distinguish some tiny detail in the surrounding heap of agglutinative shapes, she suddenly looked at me. Then, in a flash of recognition, she tried to conceal what was happening to her and turned away. And there we were, so near, so far, separated by that powerful presence. I had promised myself I would be sensible and would force the grief in my heart to keep silent, not because I cared what others might think, but purely in order to avoid creating the tense atmosphere of farewell that surrounds the dying. However, seeing her already half-immersed in night, and as far from me as if her presence were a mere memory, I felt beating in my breast a pulse of despair, of irrepressible anger. And by some bizarre coincidence—or perhaps it was simply the ineluctable nature of the hour—I sensed that both our memories were filled with images of times long gone. (Her, sitting by the pond on the day when I was so filled with desire for her and she touched my lips with her fingertips, saying: “Have you ever kissed a woman on the mouth?”—or on that other day when, sitting on a fallen tree trunk, she suddenly slapped my legs, crying: “Why, you’re almost a grown man!” And many other memories came flooding in, multiplying as if under the influence of some narcotic, forming a gigantic, colored spiral, in which her resplendent figure could be seen, like a sun visible from all angles.)
She turned to me as if she had read my mind:
“Ah, André, if only we could live again as we once lived!”
Not daring to take that thought any further, a thought too full of sinful ideas, ideas that should be repelled at that supreme moment, her hand brushed against one of the fallen violets and she picked it up as if trying to pluck a humble witness from the past, then let it fall again—and the flower dropped to the floor.
“But perhaps . . . perhaps . . .” I murmured, not even knowing what exactly I was trying to say.
At that word, a desperate flame, possibly her final plea to the fast-retreating material world, flared into life.
“Perhaps!” and her voice echoed around the room. “Ah, yes, perhaps, who knows, André?”
And she tried to sit up. Her cold, bony hand drew me toward her and, once again, with the same thirst the traveler feels as he pours out the last few drops of water from his canteen, her eyes sought mine—devouring my outer and my inner fabric, my final shape and form, my very being, in order to go beyond that sad, enclosed thing that is the very heart, the umbilical cord, of the material self, and to wander, lucid and uncertain, through my essential self, looking to see if the love that had bound us together was true—seeking, too, the final word, the farewell, the power, the suggestion and the love that had made of me the unique creature chosen by her passion. A cloud obscured my vision and I had to lean on the bed to steady myself.
“Who knows?” she said again. “Maybe this is not the end of everything. So many things happen, so many people recover.”
And drowning me in her burning breath, she added:
“Do you believe in miracles, André? Do you believe in the resurrection?”