‘Calm down, you’ll knock your granny over,’ says Marta, mouth full of bread, talking as though she can’t understand Hermes’s enthusiasm, as though she can’t hear her mother describing the train journey, as though she can’t see the dogs who’ve come into the kitchen and, tails wagging, surround my wife.
Elisa greets her grandmother with the manners of a girl who’s grown up. My wife puts Hermes down on the floor, leaves him playing with the dogs. Elisa, calm, puts her hands on her hips and leans against the cutlery drawer.
At another time Marta would have scolded Elisa for not helping, for leaning against the cutlery drawer with her hands on her hips, but night has already fallen, it’s Friday — July — and my wife has just arrived. Marta’s body is enormous. It’s in the small smile she keeps on her face when she isn’t looking at anyone, in the almost agile movements with which she puts the dogs in the yard, in the sweet way she pronounces certain words, that it’s possible to tell how glad Marta is that her mother has arrived.
She spreads the cloth over the table. My mother makes to help but our daughter doesn’t let her, and when my wife tries to go to the plate cupboard Marta’s body blocks her way. Without anyone having to say anything, Elisa begins to arrange the cutlery beside the invisible plates.
My wife hadn’t seen Marta, or Elisa, or Hermes, for more than a month.
Soon after the day Hermes was born, the day I died, my wife went to Marta’s house, went to help her look after her son. Hermes, hugged to his mother’s breast, was a very wide-eyed baby, wrapped in flesh — skin — he was a little baby wrapped in Marta’s huge arms, his head out, eyes wide. In that time my mother had watched Hermes learn to run across the kitchen, and learn to have tantrums when faced with closed doors. Sometimes Marta lost patience. Being heavy, she couldn’t keep up with her son and she lost patience. Then my wife was a real grandmother — a mother in secret — and she felt alive.
Soon after the day Íris was born, my wife returned to Maria’s house. She only went to Marta’s house intermittently, but Hermes wouldn’t forget his grandmother. When Marta allowed Hermes to speak on the telephone, he’d ask:
‘Come over here, Granny!’
My wife, at Maria’s house, was moved. She’d put down the receiver, and felt sorry that Marta no longer lived in Benfica.
There were months that passed too quickly. There were months that were lost, like lids on ballpoint pens. On the few occasions that Marta came to Lisbon, she’d go up the stairs of her sister’s house very slowly, with her mother’s help, stopping every half-dozen steps to rest. When she finally arrived she would sit in a chair and smile broadly.
My wife would take the train to Marta’s town two or three days before these trips. She’d take advantage of the lift back. In the blue truck that Marta’s husband had bought not long after the move, she’d sit at the window. Hermes and Elisa would sit between her and their father, who drove, bad-tempered. And it was always summer, or it was always spring, or it was always a day when you knew for certain that it wouldn’t rain, because Marta would be sitting in an armchair on the back of the truck. Only once it started raining on the way. They stopped at the side of the road and took her all their jackets. Marta put Hermes’s jacket on her head, tied the sleeves under the skin that hung from her chin, and covered herself as best she could with the other jackets, but when they arrived she was sad and soaked through.
Marta’s husband promised to take her to Lisbon on Sunday. They’ll collect leftover bits of wood from the workshop to burn in the winter, they’ll go and visit Maria. Marta will take her bunches of spring greens from her yard, sprigs of parsley that she planted in a tub and sausages she bought at the grocer’s. Her sister will say she needn’t have troubled herself, and Marta, sitting in a chair, will smile broadly.
When they finish their dinner, my wife is quicker. She gets up and starts piling the dirty plates. Marta complains, but my wife is quicker. Marta’s husband’s plate is still clean, his chair is still empty and pushed up against the table. When my wife makes to take his plate away, Marta says to her:
‘Leave it, he’s probably just arriving.’
And they talk like they did when Hermes was a baby and the evenings were longer. They talk about Francisco. They talk about Francisco’s wife and the child who is going to be born. Marta is sure it’s going to be a girl. They don’t feel the time pass. When Elisa’s eyes start to close and her head drops, my wife looks at the clock on the wall and it’s already late. Hermes is still playing, but my wife gets up and holds her hand out to him.
‘Come, let’s go to sleep.’
Marta says she’ll stay up a little and wait for her husband.
‘He’s probably just arriving.’
My wife leaves with Hermes and Elisa. Marta’s thoughts remain. Her steps remain — swinging from side to side, as though reeling. All over the house — in the walls — there is silence. For a moment Marta fixes a fist on the tabletop, leans part of her weight on to that arm, and looks into the air, remembering Francisco — she smiles. Slowly night comes into the house — fields spotted with crickets, dogs barking in the distance, a moped passing occasionally. Marta’s body, solid, dressed in a blue smock, is a bulk of sheer flesh that crosses the kitchen, that lowers itself to open the cupboard door and take out a biscuit tin.
She is sitting, the tin resting at the end of her belly, on the tips of her knees. Her right arm repeats the movement that takes the biscuits from the tin and brings them to her mouth. Biscuits disappear between her lips. Sometimes she remembers and forgets her husband who has not yet arrived. She thinks of Francisco, she thinks of the child who’s going to be born, she thinks of Francisco when he was little, she thinks of Francisco filled with dreams, she thinks and imagines him in Stockholm, wondering at the world and believing. Her thoughts are surrounded in light. There is a lamp hanging from the ceiling. There is the noise of the biscuits being chewed.
There is the noise, ever slower, of the biscuits being chewed. There are Marta’s eyes, closing. Her head falls slowly back. She opens her eyes, straightens up her head, swallows the remains of the biscuit she has in her mouth, runs her tongue across her teeth and loses her energy again. Her eyes close. Her head falls slowly back.
My daughter’s body, illuminated, stretched out over the corners of the chair, is shapeless. Her torso, covered in crumbs, breathing, is a mass in which it’s impossible to make out where the breasts end and the stomach starts. She has one arm alongside her body — her hand resting on her lap, next to the biscuit tin — and her other arm is stretched out — hand open, frozen in a gesture of giving — the palm of her hand, the thick back of her hand, the thin fingers, thin fingertips. In her head tilting back, as though her neck was broken — her face — her skin, mouth open, and the face that used to be a little girl’s who came running to me, who had a little girl’s voice and who laughed because the world was so simple, so simple. The world was so simple.
Hours pass, over the illuminated body of my daughter, over the plate on the table, over the unmoving cutlery. It’s the heart of night. Far away there are dark, deserted streets, black, empty houses. My daughter’s husband opens the door and his skin carries the smell and the heat of another skin. He is a man suddenly alone. He looks towards my daughter and he is not happy. He feels sorry for her, feels sorry for himself, he feels sorry for everything he knows how to name. He closes the door carefully, turns out the light, walks carefully across the kitchen. The hours remain, stretching out, filled up by the night. Time remains — time which passes without existing.