from The Tree of Words

[ A Árvore das Palavras . Lisbon : Dom Quixote, 1997, pp. 240]

by Teolinda Gersão

The way to get to the back yard was through a narrow door from the kitchen. The kitchen was dark, but you could still see the aluminium pots and bulging casseroles, the enamel mugs and bowls, the old white stove with its cast-iron burners, the large marble table where there were always some forgotten dishes. But you passed over these things without really looking at them, you ran straight to the yard, as if pulled there by the light, you reeled as you went out the door, because for a few seconds you were blind, your first steps guided by merely the heat and the smells – the smell of earth, of grass, of overly ripe fruit – that came to you in the warm wind, like a living animal's breath.

The things in the yard danced: the broad leaves of a banana tree, the leaves and flowers of the hibiscus, the still young branches of the jacaranda, blades of wild grass that sprang up like weeds and against which, at a certain point, we stopped fighting.

It was lying down, on top of the grass, that you could see just how thin were the jacaranda leaves that swept the sky and how the sun was a golden-blue eye that glared, blinding all other eyes so that only it could see. The sun above the yard and the house was the only eye that wasn't blind.

But, as I said, you didn't need eyes to see, for you could see even with eyes closed, through your eyelids flooded by light – the chicken wire of the hen coop at the back of the yard, the stone wall, the roof of the house, the windows, the dark door, always open, the balcony up above, where at sundown Laureano would sit and drink beer. You didn't need eyes to see, because you knew it all and it was all yours, and it was hardly even necessary to wait or wish, for things happened on their own, they found you. It was enough, for instance, to lift your head at day's end to see Laureano sitting on the balcony.

Then night would fall, like a dark beer poured across the sky. Or like the lowering of an eyelid. Because the twilight was quick, in fact there was no twilight, nor any transition between anything: there was darkness, or light.

Down below – while Laureano sat on the balcony – the back yard grew like something uncontrollable. A plant would sprout from a grain of sorghum tossed at random or left for the birds. A clandestine bean stalk would shoot up next to the daisies. Brambles and nettles and nameless grasses would sprout in the middle of the laburnum and the bauhinia. Any seed brought by the wind would burst forth into green leaves, showered by the summer rains. And Amélia, frowning, would say: “The garden has become a jungle.” And she'd slam the window shut.

But it wasn't a garden, it was a wild yard, which you either loved or hated, with no in-between, because you couldn't compete with it. It was there and surrounded us, and you were part of it or you weren't. Amélia wasn't. Or she chose not to be. That's why she kept trying to domesticate it. “I want this swept,” she'd say to Lóia. No fruit skin could be left lying, no pit dropped on the ground. “That's for out in the shanty towns, not here,” she'd say when she wanted to find fault with something.

And that's what divided the house into two: the White House and the Black House. The White House was Amélia's, the Black House was Lóia's. The yard was around the Black House. I belonged to the Black House and the yard.

“You've got to be on guard,” said Amélia. “Everything looks fine on the surface, but the city is rotten and full of contagious diseases. It was built on swamps.”

When someone got sick, she always blamed it on ancient fevers that periodically returned and left people weak and with rings around their eyes, as if sapped by malevolent spirits. The swamp, or the memory of the swamp, which she had never known, since it hadn't existed for almost a hundred years, seemed to still beleaguer her, in nightmarish visions. As if the putrid water of the swamplands were close by. And she herself went around with the sanitation guard and the local black official who came once in a blue moon, wearing yellow armbands, to poke ­through the yard, spraying the corners and the walls with a foul-smelling chemical that was supposed to exterminate or repel the mosquitoes.

In the Black House no one was afraid of mosquitoes or, for that matter, of anything else. The things in the Black House sang and danced. The hens would leave the hen coop and walk over the laundry that had fallen from the clothesline, merrily defecating all over it. Lóia shooed them away shouting, but she'd break out laughing with her knees on the ground, scrubbing the laundry once more with a bar of soap and rinsing it with a full watering-can. She seemed to have fun doing things, for she always laughed and never really shut up the chickens, which would again defecate on the laundry, which she would again rinse clean – the water came out like rain from the spout of the can that she balanced in her hand. And as she walked from the tap to the laundry, she would revive the flowers.

And so the flowers never died for long. All it took for them to reopen was Lóia passing by a few times, tipping the spout of the can with its water transformed into rain. (…)

Laureano also belongs to the Black House. He's not afraid of mosquitoes, and he himself planted the castor bean at the back of the yard. The cat Simba, which he one day brought home in his coat pocket, sleeps next to him on the rug at siesta time, on the days when he comes home for lunch, which is most days. Laureano doesn't usually sleep during siesta, he just dozes, sitting on the reclining chair with very wide arms, which we call the aviator's chair.

But the best time is nighttime, before I go to sleep, when he plays the music box that has a dancing cat on top. It's a strange animal, dressed in a satin doublet and a frilly shirt with a lace jabot and holding an arch of flowers over its head while it dances, in blue high-heeled shoes. Everything about it intrigues and fascinates me, because it's so unusual. You could never imagine, as you can about Simba, that it's a cousin to the wildcat and still knows a lot about the woods.

Laureano turns the crank and the cat twirls around to the sound of the music – light, tinny notes that vaguely recall the sound of the marimba. Questions come to mind – why does the cat dress like that and wear those odd shoes? – but I refrain from talking so that I can keep listening, and I'll have fallen asleep before it stops dancing.

(…)

Everything in the yard danced: the leaves, the earth, the dapples of sunlight, the branches, the trees, the shadows. They all danced, and nothing had limits, not even your body, which grew in all directions and was huge like the world. Your body was a tree and your body was the wind. It touched the sky just by lifting its head a little, it swayed in the wind dancing, life in those days was danced, and the placing of one step in front of the other was enough to turn your body into a party: everything was in it and was it, from the shrill calls of the birds to the African summer's hot breath and the vast night dotted with stars. But infinity wasn't mind-boggling or even surprising, it was a simple idea – merely the certainty that you could grow up to the sky.

Perhaps because we knew all its secrets, the world, though vast, was familiar. We knew it in its smallest details, down to the snail's sinuous shell and the sound of rain on the leaves. The dapples of sunlight on the wall and the shrill song of the cicadas. The taste of earth on the tongue and the sweet taste of ants.

The house and yard also had no limits, and everything fit in them. When lost in thought you could hear the wild animals' stealthy steps, and when sleeping you could feel their breath on your face. And when you slept deeply, your arms and feet would blend with their wild bodies and suddenly know how to jump from one branch to another, even when it was necessary to jump across the rapids and waterfalls of dreams.

Then you'd pant, breathing into the sheets with your mouth half open and turning your head in the pillow, but you'd keep running in the jungle, quietly advancing with your thick paws, sniffing the warm night air. Attentive to the slightest sound among the leaves. You'd travel far distances in the forest and in the night. Finally you'd drink some long-sought water. You'd lower your head until it touched the surface and be off again, a quick-footed antelope.

Or you'd dive into the water, to quench your thirst faster, and then you'd have the muddy, contented body of a submerged pachyderm.

You'd run at liberty all night and could change your skin at any moment. You could be the swift body of a weasel, with its teeth sinking into the juicy fruits of the mampsincha . Or sniff the wind with the irate snout of a hyena.

You could be anything, and in the morning you returned. You opened your eyes, but even with your eyes opened nothing was different. You'd jump out of bed with the cloven hoofs of a zebra and brush your pointy rabbit's or hare's teeth in front of the mirror. Lóia would put the milk and fruit on the table, and you'd devour everything like a famished animal. You'd go out the door wagging your tail.

The day didn't interrupt your dreams. You could sleep with your eyes opened, and life was fun and easy, like playing and like dreaming. You could spread your arms and shout “I'm alive”, but there was no need for such an exalted, exaggerated gesture – things were so close and simple that you were hardly aware of them. You went out the kitchen door, for instance, without noticing that you were crossing a threshold. There were no separations between spaces, nor intervals separating the days. Because your body linked the earth to the sky.

Lóia was in the yard, and everything in it circled around her. That's how I remember it: she perfectly still, at a fixed point, and everything spinning around her.

The water shoots out of the tap into the tank where she tosses towels and sheets, and drains out slowly when she pulls the plug, frothy with soap. As she wrings out the laundry, soaking her feet with what looks like milk rising up to her ankles, she holds onto Ló in one arm, repositioning the capulana * that holds the little girl against her chest. Lóia always has a child in tow, either against her chest or on her back.

I know that's how it was when one day she appeared, holding on to Orquídea. She stepped up to the front door a bit wary. “Is this where they need a wet nurse?” Without letting go of Orquídea.

“Come in, come in,” says impatient Amélia, so impatient that her milk has completely dried up, her tongue is dry, and she's all sharp-edged thinness and haste. She shuts the door immediately. “Come in, quick. I've been waiting for you since yesterday, and this creature won't stop crying. Didn't you get my message from Fana?”

But Lóia isn't in a hurry, because Orquídea also isn't in a hurry, she sucks and gasps a lot, with the sounds of a small, satiated animal. Amélia trembles with disgust in the kitchen. She'll have to disinfect her breast with alcohol, or Gita will contract all those contagious diseases. But Lóia refuses to put any disinfectant on her nipples, and Gita contracts the worst disease of all: she becomes black like Lóia and Orquídea.

Lóia, sitting in the kitchen or in the yard, gives one breast to each girl. And so I acquire the same smell as Orquídea, along with a dense and supple flesh, full but without any fat, and covered by a skin soft as silk. Lóia hardly ever separates herself from us, even when we're sleeping. She holds one or the other of us (usually the one who's not sleeping) next to her body, secure in her capulana , as she cooks, scrubs the floor, sweeps the house, washes the laundry, lights the fire, cleans the fish, irons the clothes, and dusts the bibelots with the blue and yellow feather duster.

Laureano smiles, sitting on the balcony. He knows I'm not going to die – I, who up until then was pale as wax and had arms as thin as Amélia's sewing thread.

Lóia also smiles. A slow smile that hovers on her thick lips, with her white teeth separately peeking out from her gums.

The curtain drawn shut, the shadowy warmth of the bedroom, clothes thrown onto the chair, the murmuring voice of Lóia at siesta time: “Hush now”. The door slowly closing, Simba's tail in the air, pulled away from the door-jamb at the last moment, without haste.

I looked at Orquídea in the dim light as if looking into a mirror. My same size, just like me in every detail. And above us Lóia would say “Hush now”, while tucking in the sheet and closing the door.

All day long I was her sister. “Orquíiiiideaaaa,” I shout while hugging her under the jacaranda. She lets me hug her until she's breathless, then grabs fistfuls of earth that she hurls into the air. We fight and, closing our eyes, we shake the dirt from our heads.

And finally I go up to Lóia: “I want hair like Orquídea's. Combed in little braids around my head.”

Lóia takes her hands from the basin with clothes and bursts out laughing. “Hold on, hold on.”

She divides my hair into tiny tufts with the thickness of woollen thread, attaches a pierced seed or glass bead onto the ends, and braids them with her fingers as if she were doing needlework. “Hold on, hold on,” she keeps repeating, while I fidget impatiently, my head lying on her apron.

The result is astonishing: I end up looking exactly like Orquídea. I shake my head, quivering with laughter: the tiny braids shake but keep sticking out, like the antennae of insects, not two but ten of them, all around my head. I hug my image that follows me everywhere: Orquídea.

But Amélia doesn't like what she sees. “Get rid of those braids right now,” she orders while opening the door to her sewing room.

Happiness, each morning, like a bird tapping on the window. And the sun was a giant sunflower, lighting up the day.

“Discover my paths,” said the snail's shell, and with the tip of my finger I followed the dark line that left from one point and became a wide circle that, just as it was about to end, transformed into another and then another, and none of them ever ended or closed.

“Come with me,” said the ant as it disappeared into the earth.

“Sing louder,” said the cicada.

“Enter inside me,” said the tree.

“I'll take you with me,” said the wind.

Water dripped from the tap and made a little puddle in the flower bed, and the water falling from above woke up the accumulated water below, with the drops dancing like ballerinas.

“Sun-sun-sun-sun,” said the dripping water.

And the puddle of water repeated the song:

“Sun-sun-sun-sun” – two that were higher pitched, one right after the other, between two that were slower, hesitant.

We'd stay for a long long time under the tree, leaning against the trunk, and, as I said, you could turn into a tree. Or into a bird, though to fly was more difficult. But to be things was easy. Because you suddenly held in your hand the root of everything that was alive. Your first ear would open up and begin to hear the wind. And after a long time your second ear would open up and begin to hear the rain. And there were many other ears, which listened to the blood and the voice of things.

Back then you knew everything and could order around the world:

“Wake up, yeast. Time to rise and shine.”

“Stop moving, wind. Cross your legs and sit on the roof.” Or, “Cross your feet and rest for the night under the porch.”

“Sit down, death, on the edge of the bed, and don't carry away that dying person in your sack so soon, give him a snatch of time yet, a snatch just the size of a palm leaf.”

And as fast as opening and closing your eyes, the night came, and the morning returned.

“You can't trust the blacks,” says Amélia. “Because they hate us and wish us evil. They cast spells on us and can bring us sickness or death. Your friend, yes, your very own friend, can bring you death.”

“She doesn't like me,” says Lóia about Amélia. “She's got a hard heart.”

But about Laureano she says: “A big heart.” And she smiles with all her gleaming teeth, turning her head towards him.

Amélia lives in the sewing room, hunched over a machine with P f a f f written on the back in large, separated letters. From the hallway you can hear its irritating, monotonous hum, interrupted now and then by the snapping of thread, and more rarely by the sharp, metallic sound of the scissors falling.

Amélia usually breaks the thread with her fingers, or she sticks it between two teeth and pulls it with a swift tug, before putting it back into her mouth so as to thread the needle.

She doesn't use the scissors to cut the thread, which in a way makes sense, given the fineness of the thread and the size of the scissors, which always struck me as exaggerated. It always astonishes me to see how deftly her small, nervous hands handle that instrument that seems to me as large as pruning sheers.

But Amélia isn't intimidated when she has to cut the cloth: she draws a line with chalk and ruler down the whole length, and the scissors cut over the line in no time – tearing, in fact, more than cutting the cloth.

Above the likewise enormous table where she cuts, there's a lamp with a white enamel shade hanging from the ceiling, balanced by a weight shaped like a grenade. When the daylight starts dwindling, Amélia turns on the lamp by means of a porcelain switch next to the bulb and swiftly raises or lowers it to the desired height, with her arm reaching over her head. All of this without taking her eyes off her work, mind focused, lips pursed, and a wrinkle running straight down the middle of her forehead to between her eyebrows.

She sighs, finally, bent over the table. Here and there she pokes in pins that she pulls out of a round pin cushion held on her shoulder. Sometimes she secures the pinheads in her mouth, the sharp points appearing between her teeth, as if prolonging them.

“I wish you wouldn't do that,” pleaded Laureano. “It would be certain death if you swallowed one of them. What if you were to suddenly cough or sneeze?”

But she paid no attention and continued sticking the pins in her mouth, speaking through her teeth with those who came to try on clothes.

“Yes, yes,” said the client, who was often Elejana Miranda. “A little tighter there. And there. And there. And there.”

She twirled around in front of the mirror, half afraid, half contented, then took a step or two to make the dress swing.

Amélia, kneeling on the rug, measured the front and the back.

A little higher in the hem?

Elejana hesitated. No, she finally decided. But the front seemed a little higher to her than the back.

Amélia, kneeling on the rug, denied it. She'd measured and it was all equal. She showed her the tape measure. She went to get a contraption that squirted, with precision, chalk dust all around, and thus determined the height between the floor and the hem.

The client sighed again, unconvinced. “Let it down in the front anyway,” she finally decided, with no ifs and buts.

“As you like,” said Amélia, undoing the basting with a single tug.

But after Elejana had left, it was her own rage that snapped:

“What I should have cut is your stomach, fat old bitch,” she muttered between her teeth while seizing the scissors. “It's all that fat that makes your skirt lopsided.”

Laureano whistles in the bathroom, crooning “O Laurindinha, come to the window”, which I change to Laurentina:

“O Laurentina, come to the window.” We sing in unison, and he glides the sharpened razor across his foam-covered face.

On Sundays he lets me dissolve the shaving soap in a metal cup and spread it on hi face with a short-handled brush that I can't dunk into the cup without wetting my hands. But now he has to go to work and shaves in a hurry, his fingers nimbly securing the razor that opens up like a V. The blade descends in regular movements, leaving clean and clear skin in its trail, which he rinses with water and dries in the towel – all so rapidly that I suspect a few traces of foam have remained on his face.

But there's no time to fix that. All I can do is pour into my hand and spread onto your face the liquid from a green bottle that has a very strong fragrance, and it leaves on my hands, and on the scarf where I wipe them, the same intense smell that will last all day. And then you say “See you later”, and leave, almost running, slipping on your coat as you go down the steps.

I wake up in the middle of siesta feeling thirsty. “I'll go get some water,” I think, “in the refrigerator.” I get up without any noise, stepping over Orquídea.

I hear Amélia leave the kitchen and go back into the sewing room. The humming of her machine starts up again. Amélia never sleeps during siesta and she chides Lóia when she catches her sitting in the back yard dozing.

I don't want Amélia to hear me, so I tiptoe past her door and down the hallway to the kitchen, where she left the tap loosely shut. Drops of water fall into the sink, one after another, without let-up. Nervous and full of hatred.

I don't want to hear them and I go to shut the tap. But the sink is high, I have to drag over a stool and climb up. At that height everything is shaky and uncertain, I can't reach the tap, and when I lean forward a bit more, I fall flat on the floor.

Amélia pushes the door open, stumbles on the stool, and picks me up shouting:

“Stupid girl, stupid girl.”

Her hand comes down on me and lifts up, comes down and lifts up, as if it won't ever stop. For a moment I don't feel anything but emptiness and me falling down a pit, the walls whirling, and the stool falls over again with a bang:

“Stupid girl who won't sit still.”

Later on I'll feel pain and fear, but for a long moment there's nothing but emptiness and Amélia's unceasing shouts.

And then she sits on the floor and starts crying.

That's what always happened in the end. Amélia would sit on the floor and start crying.

“She doesn't like me,” she'd repeat, all choked up. “My daughter, my own daughter.”

*Cloth that native Mozambicans wrap around their bodies as clothing.

Translated by Richard Zenith