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TERESA |
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A novel by Deonísio da Silva
Translation by John Lyons |
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“There beneath the gentle reaches of the Southern Cross, in a hut thatched with straw I was born, in the shade of a beautiful coconut palm, the first ardours of love were mine.” I was singing these lines on the open road. My father walked a little ahead of me and from time to time urged me on: “Come on, son! We can’t be late, not on your first day!” He eyed me slightly apprehensively. My mother had told him that I thought and said things which didn’t sit with my tender years. “What the boy says, you know it doesn’t sit with his age, but how do you know what he is thinking?”
My father was like that: always attentive to the conversation of others, especially his wife’s, meticulous in his observations, passionate about detail. He would forgive everything in his daughters, but with me he was strict. “Why are you crying?” “Because it hurts. Mother slapped me. My sister is also crying and sir says nothing to her.” “You’re a man. Men don’t cry.” Then I’d stop crying and really relished being compared to the man that he was. Because, if being a man was to be like him, then of course it was good to be a man.
For the present, however, I was just a boy and my father observed me in that season in life to which we had journeyed together. He, stifling within himself the boy he once was projected on the son. Me, doing all I could so that the boy would at once yield and from him emerge the man my father wanted me to be. He thought I was odd because deep down he needed to believe my mother’s tales. To one of my uncles he commented that I was turning out to be a very strange boy. Talking to his brother, then, he would echo his wife, hopeful perhaps that the brother rather than himself would contradict her. “Well,” uncle João would say calmly, “you have to remember that we said and did lots of foolish things when we were boys.” These comments, however, I only came to know in another season when, my father dead, an aunt spoke to me of things shrouded in many secrets, among which the fact that I was my uncle’s son and not my father’s. They were two men that my mother loved dearly. And on the day of those revelations my aunt took the opportunity for a few reflections: “Love is complicated. For women it’s more complicated than for men. Do you know the life of Saint Teresa?” “The Little Flower, do you mean?” “No, I mean what I said: Saint Teresa.”
Aunt Vina was like that: to me she was full of surprises and that’s why I enjoyed talking to her. And as the finest pleasures came to me from her mouth, in words and in everything which later transpired between us, I loved listening to that aunt. When she was preparing a delicious dish, she would say sweetly: “To make this polenta, you need first to boil the water, add the corn flour gradually to the boiling water and then continue to stir slowly, like this. But everything must be done with your heart free of any hurry and feelings which are not of pleasure. Polenta is tastier when served with cheese and a mixed green salad with fried diced bacon.”
And while she stirred the polenta spoon in that liquid which would shortly turn pasty with the mixture of the corn flour, she would sway her fleshy body and tell me the lives of saints. “Saint Teresa, aunt? So not the Little Flower?” No, she’s the Child Jesus one. The other one fell in love when he was grown up. One was French. The other was Spanish. One was of the Child Jesus, who she was devoted to. She was very rich. She handled things directly with the son of man. And when she was received by the pope, who had never before received a woman, the pope asked her: what do you want, my child? And the saint replied: everything, Holy Father. The other, didn’t. She never had any close dealings with any authority whatsoever. Rather, she suffered a great deal at the hands of men who didn’t understand her. In fact, no man understands a woman. Some try. None understands them. And the Teresa I’m telling you about came to be known by the name of the city in which she was born, by the love she had for two men.” I wanted to know everything from my aunt. And I didn’t need to say anything then as on so many other occasions. She could see in my eyes, in the way I stood, in the statue into which I had transformed as she spoke. “Saint Teresa wanted to live differently from everybody else, but above all she didn’t want to repeat the lives of her mother and aunts. Since in anyone’s life, love is the most important thing, even though few perceive this portentous truth of our existence, she entered a convent to set herself apart from the world and searched for the love which not everyone desires. She found it in Saint John of the Cross and Jesus Crucified. My God, every woman has her cross to bear. All those who bear one spend their life complaining about everything. She bore three and was very happy!” “Three, aunt? But weren’t they two?” “You are still very young and don’t know how to count. Three, yes, sir. Did you forget the one she was already carrying when she met John and Jesus, her two great loves?”
For a moment she ceased stirring the polenta spoon and the dough soon began to bubble up, drawing an inner heat to the surface, like a volcano that was about to open pathways for the lava streams, hot molten rocks, a sea of fire. But, unlike the polenta, perhaps my aunt needed to live suppressed, hiding her past which everyone condemned. That was why, on her dark skin tiny drops of perspiration appeared and the top of her dress clung to her body, forming damp patches around her breasts which, from time to time, letting go of the spoon, she adjusted with her large hands. “It was a priest who taught me about this saint, but I can’t say where, when, nor why. And mind you don’t go telling your mother any of the things I’m telling you.” The warning was unnecessary. The two of us were full of secrets and we enjoyed savouring the sweet pleasure of one knowing so much about the other, while nobody knew that this knowledge existed between us. For we lived at a time and in a place where it seemed that everything had to be announced, the neighbours being the first to know, naturally. “Teresa liked roses. Even her statue has a fine scent. A woman can be careless about almost everything. Never her fragrance, use a perfume which suits her. For the Good Lord may have forgotten to point up some of the senses in many men, such as hearing, for example – have you noticed yet how few men pay attention to what a woman is saying? -, but he gave them all a sense of smell and they are forever sticking their noses where they don’t belong. Are you enjoying the smell of the polenta? It fills the air with a such a fine, warm fragrance!” And my aunt would breathe in the atmosphere pausing then in other remarks: “You washed yourself again with eucalyptus soap. I’m going to buy another soap for you!”
After these explanations, I went back to my chair and sat staring at the rear of my dearest aunt. Her dress swayed back and forth, close fitted at the waist, her hair flowing over her shoulders and down her sides, her calves well delineated, parts of the body attractive in few women. The calf of the leg! Such a nice name! And when she turned around to me, holding that spoon in one hand and the other folded on her waist, I felt that some great good fortune could occur at any moment if I was close to that aunt of mine, so different from my mother.
Ah, my mother! How difficult it was to understand her in those days. She had given life to me, milk, my first words, some of my first steps and many false steps, but she seemed to be fighting her son every day. We lived a domestic war in which she believed she defeated me every day. In those days I thought so too. Today I know she was training me to lose, to be weak, to be brought to my knees, to say yes. Were it not for the kind, but firm resistance of my father, I might have turned into a sissy, no will of my own, a spineless milksop.
That war, like all wars, left a world in ruins and from it emerged, much later, a boy with a story to tell. But the person who gave me the way out of this mess was my aunt Vina, thanks not to the words she said to me and which usually moved me, but to the manner in which she looked at things in a completely original way, which I saw only in her, and mainly to surprising gestures, such as while she worked singing beautiful songs, all of them about love, although sex, which was beginning to be an obsession with me, did not feature in her amorous songs. Later Fernando Pessoa showed me the deep reasons for those gestures: “Love is what is essential. / Sex is merely an accident. / It may be the same / Or different. / Man is not an animal: / He is intelligent flesh, / Though sometimes sick.”
My father almost never saw his children during the entire week. He saw them only at the weekends. Who looked after us was mummy. And when he got home, at night, she would give a short report, highlighting the problems we had caused her in the course of the day. “Did the kids get up to much mischief today?” The poor woman rattled off a rosary of complaints. “I can’t stand those kids anymore. They just give me a headache”
The good thing about telling a story is that you can dispense with documents, which in general say nothing about the real pains and the deepest joys. There is no trace of my mother in my principal document, the one which bears witness to my first appearance in the world, the one which says that a citizen born of a man and a woman is so and so’s child. In that so and so my mother’s surname does not appear. And were it to appear, it would not be hers nor her mother’s, but her father’s. The birth certificate in Brazil displays, in most cases, a terrible contempt to the one who gave us life. Her name does not appear in our name. And, yet, it was my mother who was with me, not my father. And even if the documents were modified, where would my aunt Vina fit in?
Now, however, it was my father who was with me. He was going to take me to school for the first time. Our dialogue could be in words, but also in silence, an exchange of glances. Mummy too exchanged glances with me. But almost always to tell me off. Not daddy. Sometimes he would stretch out a long look on one of us and would remain absorbed for a long time, thinking of things full of all the mysteries of the world, to judge by the length of time he took. While I softly sang the verses, now, for example, he was walking on ahead, without seeming to pay attention to what I was singing.
Suddenly, however, he would ask me: “Where did you learn such a pretty song, my boy?” “From my mother who is always singing.” “Your mother? She sings that?” “She does. Mother is always singing when sir is not at home.” “She was always very fond of singing. When we were courting, before reaching her house I could already hear, in the distance, your mother’s singing. She was always a very happy girl.”
I began to see the school in the distance. In front of it there was a large grass area. Two crossbars, then a tonsure through the middle of the field, there you could play football. Behind, many eucalyptus trees rose up. Between the school and the church there was just a narrow street. In front of the church, another grass area. In the street to the side, the chemist’s. Opposite the chemist’s, an enormous fig tree. There, on one of the boughs, a man was hanged every year, in holy week, but only after a severe beating. Next to the fig tree, the cafe, frequented a great deal by everyone. The men went there to play snooker, teenage girls to have soft drinks and to flirt, like the boys. We children went there to have an ice cream. The other women, like our mother, aunt Vina and our grandmother, merely passed by when they were going to the butcher’s or to the grocery store.
I caught the smell of the eucalyptus trees.
I arrived at school knowing how to read and write some things. My father had taught me with bottle labels and posters in the street. What a fine perfume the teachers had. Dona Renata, a beautiful person, was who embraced me for the first time to teach me. Ay what a delicious fragrance that teacher had!
One day she was teaching the numbers and I made a mistake, on purpose, number five, so that she would embrace me again. Dona Renata, who exhaled like a garden at dusk, came to my desk at the start of that day, embraced me and drew a very pretty five in my exercise book.
Ah, I fell in love with my teacher with her so provocative perfume. If my intellectual life till today has served any purpose, this is down to the delicious fragrance of that trainee teacher who taught us with so much love. Perhaps she also felt a secret pleasure in embracing us. She would brush her breasts against us boys with a certain heedlessness. The girls she embraced in a more cautious way.
All the older mistresses suffered from loneliness. They were people half stranded by life. They put on weight very quickly after marrying. Soon they were all wearing glasses, their hair in a bun, their skin flabby. Extremely domineering, they were also cantankerous and complained about almost everyone, especially the pupils. They appeared to have an aversion to the profession they practised. Such violent teachers, they slapped, pulled and boxed ears, and even scratched one or another pupil with their scaly nails.
I arrived at that school frightened to death. The teachers’ reputation spread throughout the known world which, for us, ran from the gorge in the hills to the river’s edge. But to my pleasant surprise, I belonged to the intake who started with the trained teachers who had just arrived in the city with the highest reputations: they were pretty, well-dressed, they spoke well and chatted with the men. Not even the most foolhardy had the impudence to try anything on with those young ladies. They greeted everyone with the greatest of courtesy.
Dona Renata passed in front of Barduino’s barber shop and greeted the barber their from the pavement with her honeyed voice, which rose from lips covered in lipstick, another novelty which she and her colleagues brought with them, besides fitted skirts, high-heeled shoes and lace blouses. “Good day, Mr Barduino. Much hair today?” Mr Barduino was bald, but he knew that the teacher was not referring to his hair, but to the hair of others...that he would be cutting.
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