Chronicle of the Murdered House. Lúcio Cardoso
as if I had been hurled violently against some hard, dark wall—she shook me, dredging up strength from her impatience:
“You promised you would tell no lies. Come on, speak—do miracles exist?”
“No,” I answered, and was myself startled by the calm voice in which I said this. “Miracles don’t exist. And there is no resurrection either, Nina, for anyone.”
The silence that followed was so vast that I felt as if an unexpected twilight had descended upon us. The objects sitting coolly in their places were growing dull and turning into still, metallic shapes.
When she spoke again, her voice sounded as if it were rising up from the depths of a well:
“We’ll go somewhere far away, André. I hate this town, this house. And there are other places, there are, I swear, where we can live and be happy.”
I could stand it no longer and tried to free myself from her grasp. This went beyond anything I could bear. I would have preferred distance and solitude and never to see her again, rather than this face-to-face interrogation, in which not the smallest subterfuge was allowed. She sensed my reluctance, and her eyes filled with tears.
“You want to run away from me, don’t you? You want to run away, André. It’s not the same as it once was.”
I don’t know what superhuman energy was driving her just then, but thanks to those feelings, she had managed to sit up in bed, despite the beads of sweat running down her thin face and despite her broken breathing, as if she were about to faint. Now, instead of holding me only by my hand, she was tugging at my arm, my whole body, in a last effort to force me to submit. I struggled, because I was afraid she might die in my arms. I bent lower, although still without entirely giving in to her will, and since, in this ongoing battle, she continued to tug at me, her face sometimes touched mine and I felt rising up into my nostrils the stale smell of an ailing body that has spent too long in bed. This awoke in me only a feeling of intense, desolating pity for her. Our struggle lasted perhaps a minute, and when she finally realized she was going to lose, some instinct, some wounded, outraged female essence gripped her—and she raised her hand and slapped my face. It was a rather feeble slap, but I stared at her in astonishment, with eyes that held not even the faintest glimmer of resentment.
We gazed at each other and she managed to gasp out:
“You’re running away, André, running away from me. And that slap is so that you will never forget, so that you can say one day: she slapped my face to punish me for my indifference.”
And in a quieter tone, with a smile so sad I felt my heart contract:
“And so that you will never unthinkingly betray me, André. So that you will never lie and say: yes, I sinned, but it’s not something I’m proud of.”
Only then did the tears come into my eyes, not out of grief, because, by then, I was incapable of any emotion, but because I knew then that I could not help that poor, unfortunate creature still clinging to the last glimmerings of life. And what a life that had been, what a past, what a future she was evoking, making one final effort to imprison me, when nothing could now save us on that well-trodden path. Nothing. And how wretched we were, and how I felt in my own flesh the despair of that condemned creature. When I turned back to her, she saw the tears on my face.
“I’m a fool, André, I have no right to talk to you like that. I know that you and I, that our love can never die. How could you possibly forget me when I taught you everything you know?”
She fell silent, but kept her eyes fixed on mine, as if she wanted to drag from them the truth about the situation in which we found ourselves. It was easy enough to say that we, that our love would never die—but how to believe it, if all around us everything was slowly fading? Gravely, almost solemnly, she spoke again:
“I want you to remember, André . . . in case . . . in case anything should happen. I want you to remember and for your heart never to lose sight of me. I want you, on certain nights, to remember how I touched you—never to forget the first kiss we exchanged, next to that big tree by the Pavilion. I want you never to enter a garden without remembering the garden that was once ours. I want you never to wait for anyone else without remembering how you would wait for me on that bench where we used to meet. I want you always to remember the warmth of my body and the things I said when you took me in your arms. I want . . .”
I slowly knelt down. With almost frightening strength, fueled by a kind of yearning, she forced me to lay my head on her breast, to brush her cheek and her lips with my lips. But little by little, the pressure waned and, exhausted, she let her head droop to one side, her eyes closed.
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The last night I saw her . . .
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When I learned that Timóteo, my uncle, had been asked to leave the room and that it was now empty, I went straight there in order to say my final farewell. On the threshold I saw a figure with his back turned to me and realized at once that it was my father. He turned around as soon I approached and he seemed to me to have aged considerably, although he was still very erect and had the same irritatingly smug air of the country gentleman. I don’t understand why I felt so drawn to him just then—given that we didn’t even speak when we passed in the hallway. I think I’m right in saying, though, that only then did I fully grasp that the Meneses as a family no longer existed. I had come to say goodbye to a corpse—and, for a few seconds, it was that man who held my gaze, as if I had suddenly stumbled upon a dead body. A dead stranger, whom I had never seen before and did not know, who, as far as I was concerned, had no name and no identity. I stood rooted to the spot, anxiously asking myself if that feeling of estrangement was not the result of a long, patient process of separation. But, as I say, the odd thing was that I regarded him with an indifference that was there in my flesh, my blood, my nerves—I regarded him as if he were a being from another world whom we struggle to clothe in some kind of humanity. Perhaps drawn by my gaze, he walked toward me, but the coffin lay between us—then, automatically, and almost without being able to take his eyes off me, he approached the dead woman, removed the sheet covering her face and stared down at her. With that gesture, his humanity returned to him—and I felt sure that I was face to face with a complete stranger.
As soon as he moved away, I went straight over to the coffin and stopped short: it had been made by Senhor Juca and was a very simple affair, with metal handles and a plain fabric lining. Wrapped in a sheet, the body lay there without so much as a flower to adorn it. Perhaps she herself had requested that bare, Spartan simplicity.
Unhurriedly, and as timidly as if I were disobeying some secret law, I bent over and lifted one corner of the sheet. That was the first time I had ever seen the face of a corpse, and I had the strangest feeling, as if a distant, delicate music were playing inside my mind. How could a human face change so quickly! Her gentle, perfect features had suffered a violent transformation, from her almost excessively long eyelashes, to her pale, almost too broad forehead and the exaggerated curve of her nostrils, which lent her an unexpectedly semitic appearance. Rigor mortis had placed around that face an impenetrable aura. Death was clearly no joking matter; in death, the original being, roughly shaped out of clay by God’s hands, cast off all disguises to triumphantly reveal its true essence. It was clear, too, that there was nothing more to be said between us. Any unspoken words were useless now, as were any caresses not bestowed and the flowers with which we could still adorn her. Free now, she rested there in a state of ultimate purity. Everything, apart from fury and acceptance, was pointless. No answers, as if we creatures deserved nothing but mourning and injustice; it all ended there. And everything that had existed had been only a dream, a magnificent, fleeting sensory illusion. Nothing could ever remove the heavy weight pressing on my heart, and in that ruin already touched by corruption I found it hard to recognize the person who had once been the object of my love, and no tears came into my eyes, not even tears of pity.
In the same unhurried way in which I had lifted the corner of the sheet, I bent over and kissed the woman’s