MY COUNTRYMAN AND HIS SAD AND BEAUTIFUL LYRICISM

 

Joaquim Vasconcelos' mother (Teixeira de Pascoaes) was my great-grandfather's sister. Carlota Guedes. Joaquim's father was Mr. Vasconcelos. The lives of some of my ancestors go into a spiral of smoke and fog and I feel some sadness that history is not told, revealed, integrated. There are always pieces of the puzzle missing from me, so my sadness is anchored in a level to which I have no direct access. I wonder why the sad or less happy pieces are hidden, if by integrating the whole, everything dissolves and reintegrates, rearranges itself and reaches its whole place? We will never be whole without the past, we will never be whole without the hope of the future. And what does an orange matter on the tree of life? It matters, learn that it matters, a single orange, even when it does not grow, even when its sap is interrupted, matters, because it gave tears to the tree, because at a certain moment it created expectations, added wrinkles, hung dreams, fed strings of atoms, of molecules that are part of the whole. So it is and so it always will be.  Our life begins even before it is dreamed, a breath, a speck in the eye, a moan on the stairs, the legs and arms embracing another body, the ass frozen in the humidity of the stone, a curtain that opens and two eyes that petrify, a mouth that screams a tall and that erupts, ending up freezing a moment of joy,  a womb that hangs in agony, fear and sadness, an eruption of darkness, in a village, in a sadly birthed society, in a time full of goo and appearances, and he flees into the urban hustle and bustle, that torso, his naked gaze, his compressed buttocks, the womb that generates without knowing it, without even feeling it, and suddenly a belly that is swelling and generating a being that, even interrupted, was generated, in the cold heat of the village stairs, even in the beards of the holy family, even before God,  and the letters that are written without a sender, the handwriting that is recognized as irregular, the cold chilling his face, her eyes staring at the space, that space in which she had it in her hands, within her reach and now, this nothingness, a nothingness made of not seeing it, nor feeling it, nor knowing how well to be in health, that pain in the chest that is socially unspeakable, a weak lungs of moisture, of fragility that is not hers, but his,  through him, this he, where he can be found, That more than loved being who does not know that his life is prolonged at the dawn that also happens in the city, where he goes, where he surrenders to the opium of the clocks that do not stop the tick tick, tick tick in his navel, tick tick, behold, a girl or a Rodrigo will come from there and it will be a Rodrigo,  but let no one dare to guess what God will bring from that urgent moment, at the back of the church in S. Gonçalo, there where the Trinities are secular and make the river foam and grow in the sap of women and say, they bring good time in childbirth, but her time only God and her mother will see it, from the tear of that fraction of a second of sperm, from the curtain in the window, in the cutouts of the window panes, in the secular dragging of the alleys that he hurriedly walked,  That she fled in a stampede, from the furtive tears that filled the embroidered handkerchiefs, only God and perhaps, her mother can ignore that when the burlap approaches from the fire, there is nothing but God to extinguish it. And what fires have been repeated next to the holy family, how beautiful and brief and earthly and inseminated with lasciviousness or sadness, with an abandonment of hopes that were born long before those children became people, were born in the countenances that carry and postpone life and cling to the night to perpetuate themselves.  Such is life, even in the intervals of the night, this is how it is in the villages, in the dark human places, traveled, now empty, where we cling, where we hide secrets in the stones, in the trees, in the branches, in the brambles, in the decades, in the stolen years to the schisms that remain with us, even if the mother does not want it, even if the father does not return,  Though the maid does not utter the word of speech, though the people whisper in the nave of the church, Even if the bad tongue runs through each one of the ghastly brains of ignorance and bad reputation, only God in the intervals, in the wisdom, in the phalluses, in the bed, in the chambray sheets, in the now abandoned house, in the cut-out windows, in the smoky stained glass windows of time, in the silence of the stones that are silent, in the silence, in the silence that screams, that wants the floor that wants to be completed in composition,  who wants to speak what has been kept, how the hearts without clothing have been mutilated because of the multitudes and their mouths of curses of impure blood, of the blood that as soon as it is born becomes blood like everything else, full of viscosities and secrets and throats shut with fears, and syringes of tetanus and lungs washed in the tuberculosis of,  from the secular and concrete sacristies from which I flee, taking refuge in libraries, to build the truth of those times, where silence was the required majesty, to please all and to displease themselves, the hearts of poets still have a bayonet and a scale of dissonant chords. The secrets are musicians who fill the roles of the books and keep themselves between F-flats and C-sharps. My heroes, my ancestors, my dear ones, it is time to haunt the clotheslines, the backyards of the broken, the silent winds, the woes in bell jars, circumvallate in the sacristies, in the charters, in the immoral patriarchies. Shshshshshsh, the wind whispers the truth of these days, even if they want to silence it! Shhhhsh it's time to erect tombs and tear apart the pain and shame, it's time to take off the clothes consumed by woodworm and expose it to the wind and sun, it's time to dismantle the delay, to let the story of your jackals blush with glory. In the rivers, in the springs, in the seas and in the mountains you find him, lost in the midst of unknown pains and in the woes of love that could not be lived for social reasons. An orange is a daughter even if it rots, it is part of the history of life. An orange, a poem, a love on the stairs- Both have endured to this day and you donkeys hide it, the pearl of your lives in the sad and honorless history of others. The wind wanted to wash away the fragility of the branches of the orange tree and, unintentionally, only God in the cause to know, took the baby orange, lost, the promise of this life that could not be portrayed. Shhsh, all the orange trees cry and ignore the infamous mouth. It is the time to weep, Pascoaes, to wash the baskets, that the harvest is not yet over. I am still here, waiting for you, on the stairs, back here, next to the holy family, which remains with me. In a brief time of a few decades that will turn into centuries. Here I am waiting for you, in this stairwell, with the orange in my belly, with your heart in my hands. And I am Pascoaes, like the others, Vasconcelos, although without nourished and beautiful ties. I am Guedes, even in the intervals of centuries. And even the centuries are short. Pay attention to the brevity of life.