I saw today Second Out

 ... with Jennifer López. The cake is in the oven, after the electricity failed several times, today too, yesterday too, the day before yesterday too. This time, I made the chiffon with plain yogurt, added to all that superb orange juice. Instead of regular flour, I used oat flour. I stirred in the small teaspoon of coffee with yeast. Brown sugar. Less than the recipe calls for and I added one more egg. I was reminded of Genesis. When the film started. And from when I bought this Genesis album. And I've always preferred to listen to Genesis with Peter Gabriel on vocals. We still lived near the church of Cedofeita, on Álvares Cabral Street, in that backyard, where on clear days, we could see the sea. I took a quick shower, at the time we had a broken washing machine. I remember that I wore a gray flannel skirt that you had given me, with a tight body, girded at the hips, by a wide black elastic band. A thin black blouse and a jacket, too black and chosen by you, tight and full of quilts. 

After towel-drying my hair, I let my hair fall to my shoulders, all curly and left with it still wet. I went down the rest of the street and entered Cedofeita street, next to the police, crossed and entered the old mall, where Cardoso had his bar. The blue and white. I was just going to have a coffee, but I entered the carcass of the Cedofeita shopping mall. Where there was a record and vinyl store. The record store was in the center of the lobby and all the other stores, in the circle of the circumference and we could go around the store and see all the new albums. I saw the album Seconds out, for the first time there, it wasn't on Tubitec. And that's where I bought it. I didn't tell you anything. Only then. Someone had invited us to go to some show. If we wanted to go. I said yes, I would tell him. But then they told me it was at the Athenaeum. I lost the will. I didn't tell you. Instead, I showed you the record. We listened to the album, and I don't remember if it was in Almada street or if it was in the studio that you recorded for a cassette, so that we could listen to it in the car, when we made our trips. At that time, I know now, after reconstructing the days, with all the time I have left, that the so-and-so who frequented our house was my enemy. So everyone asked me how I put up with her, because they said she was execrably selfish. And it came into the family and maybe that's when she started secretly hatin' me. I couldn't imagine that. I didn't know it at the time. She hates me, you see, years dedicated to trying to heal all her wounds. And she here two months ago told me on the phone that she hated me, she didn't say it with all the words, because you can't expect someone who holds such a grudge, anger, envy, jealousy, fear, rejection, for more than thirty years, to have the courage and to have kept everything well guarded, and to have told me everything she thought and didn't think in just fifteen minutes,  months ago via phone call. She was never able to tell me before and managed to be concealed, so much of her life. As I was saying, at that time, when so-and-so appeared to me every day at home, to cry, to saturate me with her complaints, to drive me crazy through her pain, my mother paid me a visit and was even surprised to find her there. Since my brother, who was her main interest, did not visit me. My mother arrived with Vilma. Loaded with groceries. She had gone to the supermarket near our house, that is, in República square. They still had a lot of charging. They arrived in a state of turmoil. I remember looking at them with great surprise. My mother never knew how to apologize, or say I miss you, or she didn't want it to be like that, or anything else she remembered, to justify coming to our house. I don't even remember telling her where we lived, because I never saw her again. Our apartment was a kitchenette, open kitchen or small, she said, it was true, but for us it was enough. I remember seeing her disappointed and talking to Vilma that she didn't expect the fridge to be so full. At that time, I thought she would rather know that we needed her shopping bags, so that she could be more satisfied. What is certain is that nothing she brought was of any use to us or fit in the fridge. Nothing was ever missing. I remember asking her about my brother. She told me that he still saw him little, because he was at the Chaplin during the day and at night he went to class. And when she wasn't working, she missed her children. She felt lonely. I read it at the time, I understood it, I digested it. She didn't want to be alone. I couldn't do anything to her. My life had changed and she had her own life, the one she chose. She asked me why I had a basin on top of the machine in the bathroom, with laundry detergent, if I had a machine to wash it. I told her, between my teeth, that the machine had broken down and that we were still waiting for the washing machine repairer to go there. Because it was the drum that was ruined. I saw her smile, because she imagined me washing clothes by hand and she could always be useful to me. After all, her daughter needed her. I told her that I didn't need another machine, but that one was repaired. She wanted to give me money. I told her no. That the man there would notice, as soon as he could. I wasn't lying to her. The next day, she went back there with Vilma. Taking a hand washer, to make sure I wouldn't be scrubbing clothes by hand. I couldn't tell her no. I thanked her and told her she didn't need to bother. Coldness was what was left of our mother-daughter relationship until my adolescence. Ever since. Always.

After the attitude she took towards me, after everything she said to me, about me, about you, about us, she couldn't expect that I would continue to talk to her as I had always done, trying to please her, not after everything she did. We didn't stay there for long, we moved to Rua Eduardo Santos Silva the following year. Close to Costa Cabral. She was overjoyed. Because she could go through there. To say hello, instead of going to her home, turning on the television, going to bed, getting up again and turning off the television, for fear that the dead would rise to ask her to account for us. Poor mother, she never knew how to deal with the living, except in a superficial way. 

I don't remember if it was a year after we were living in Eduardo Santos Silva that I found out I was pregnant. I think we've been there longer. The pregnancy didn't come as a surprise to me. At that time, she started to avoid being with us. At that time, she decided to get married, even though she knew everything about him and that it didn't work in his favor. Insisted. Married. Shortly afterwards she asked us for help. She called crying. I was distressed. We decided to be present. She begged us, after our son was born, that we would go and live with her. For me, we would never have done it. But there was my internal question of the spirit of mission. And you said: why not? 

And it should have been not. Because it was only five years ago that she confessed to me, at Christmas, that she hated being a grandmother, that she hated to see me pregnant, that she couldn't stand my joy, that she never wanted to be a grandmother. And she told me with all the letters and with witnesses. And that in the second grandchild, she hated me even more. And to his grandson. Inconsistencies that she said out of her mouth. She dropped the verb. I was cornered. We were here, in my house, where she has spent years of her life. I don't know how others took what she said lightly, I don't know, because I was left with an unbearable pain growing internally, and I didn't know if it was mine or if it was hers too, and we don't talk about it anymore, and I say lightly, because I know that she loves her grandchildren. But she said it. It was a shock to me. And I've been digesting and trying to understand what makes a woman who has lost a child and a husband say these things. these absurdities. And I understand her limitations, saying I hated is like saying I didn't agree, I didn't like that you got pregnant, but I could have done it in another way, in private, I could have told me daughter, your father's family criticized me so much that I couldn't stand them saying, you see, this is the result of the mother's permissiveness, who leaves her children with a maid almost their age,  that allows so many things, that is so modern, I could have said it, I didn't say it but I understood it. And I have postponed everything, perceived everything, as if she said and wanted me to be her continuation, with her coldness, with her rationality, with her hidden prejudices, kept, as if it were a shame to say: look, girl, don't you think you should postpone the desire to be a mother? Don't you think your father's family, blah blah blah and I would have said two or three things, I would have said it was none of their business, I would have said that I came to fulfill my life and my dreams and not be a copy of it, that I was in the inks for what they thought of me, that I only cared what Grandma Bina and Grandpa Rodrigo had to say to me and they always told me, in a loving way, that they loved and cherished me,  Surely, I would have told her that I was tired of protecting her, of covering her ears, of listening to nonsense, but she did not get tired and kept repeating it again. "You're going to be very miserable. You'll never get lucky. It's going to happen to you the same as with me! And a mother's words always find a way to trap the future of her children, to suspend it, to shake it. Mothers should come with a manual. None do. And we have to guess what goes through them when they say I hated being a grandmother, I hated being a grandmother to your children, I hated you when you were pregnant, I hated you when you had your children and before you had them, and even long before, when your father left and left me with just the three of you to raise. I hated being a mother, I hated losing other children, I hated being born and losing both father and mother to death, I hated having so many siblings and none of them wanted to know about me, I hated everything, I even hated your father, when I told him I was pregnant and he told me that he deceived me, that he was one year younger than me. And I sent him away. And if he hadn't come back, you would have gone too. Otherwise. And yes, I was independent. I was prepared to do whatever it took to secure myself, but I didn't want any family, not your father's family and not my own. It made me so confusing to have such a big and united family, so many siblings getting along and mine didn't even know I existed. Then he left. Then I got maids who would do a better job than I did. Then I got used to it. I knew I had three children at home. That were waiting for me. And that teased me, in such a way they had to be with me. And I, who just wanted to be working, busy, not thinking that the dead could sleep next to me, didn't want to think about anything. I just wanted to know why death was so close to me and why I was chosen to be alone, always. Even you dated and went to live with someone. Why should you be happy? I wasn't. I didn't want you to go. So I chose the absence of feelings, the banal conversations, the career, the job, the sick, the soap operas and the political debates, the presumption of having lived without God, but having been at his mercy, letting him choose for me what I have lived. It could only have been fate. Loneliness and fear. The monologue of mothers who do not allow themselves to be authentic, real, integral. And who says mothers, says people, because mothers are people, they are women, they are daughters, nieces, cousins and aunts, and girlfriends and neighbors and friends are never just one thing or the other. That fate, I didn't tell you at the time, but it's made up of our choices. Wrong and right, thought and unthought, even when we don't choose, we are letting fate fabricate a reality that we don't want, that doesn't suit us, because we refuse to feel, as if we could have the fate of the stones! That when we are negative and pessimistic, even the air is contagious, we give birth to our sadness and even those of others, in some way. I always tried not to let myself get infected. I always smile at life, the life that is inside others and at mine. I have always found in bad times, something good, no matter how small, but that could be taken advantage of, like the storms that are the pains of mothers who do not speak and contain themselves and then erupt in lightning and rain and outbursts and insinuations, to say I can't take it anymore, I can't stand this pain or this,  I can't even stand those who catalogue all the pains! I tried and continue to try to understand what goes on inside, ruminated between the body and soul of others, and somehow, I know that I helped many in this perception, in the deconstructions and in the following phases. And when the rumbling happens, the earth trembles, flashes of light are seen, here and there, that the light infects all darkness and relief is immediate. Discharge happens that way, inside people. My maternal grandmother died like this. Because of a thunderstorm. She took refuge on a stormy day under a chestnut tree. And her organs were all burned. She survived a while longer. Yes, my maternal grandmother was strong. It withstood a discharge. The emotional discharge of mothers is also like that, it erupts in the same way, and even if those who are close to them are not to blame for the storm, they must hold the storm, be lightning rods for the mothers, they must hold the ends, to have candles and lanterns pointed at the little mothers, who continue to fear the dark, loneliness and everything that stirs inside. There should be absolution of pain for such mothers. So that they would not build quarries in their hearts. So that they would build gardens and greenhouses, or ponds and tree houses. Mothers should be given not to lose their compasses, not to be too human, too fragile, too young yet. I tried, in the intervals I was with her, to tell her that loneliness does not exist. We are never alone and in any way. That the loneliness you feel doesn't exist. Just like hatred. That it's a product created by your mind that deceives you. Solitude is fantastic because it allows us to enjoy who we are, to know ourselves internally and even others. That fear is another illusion created to be trapped and limited. That death does not exist and I have told you that many times. He doesn't believe me, he believes in Leo, he believes in the Pope and the Antichrist, but he prefers not to talk about God. She asks me to teach her how to meditate, and she makes a clean slate of everything that I have repeated to her over and over again. Who believes in all that is of the other world, and in all the negative things of this one, but in the soul tends not to believe. I close the door to my mother's thoughts, to her mother's monologues, to the distance that remains between my heart and hers. And foot by foot, I go back to the now, after having stuck the toothpick in the cake to check that it is ready, that the odor is sweet. That the thunderstorm continues. I'm not timely. I feel calm. The bar was left for tomorrow, at the end of the day. Maybe tomorrow I don't feel like going out either. I changed the menu from Sunday roast to picanha, farofa, cabbage, black beans and soon I'll see if I serve the cake, or if I keep it for a snack and serve some strawberries with a scoop of strawberry ice cream for dessert. That Eva likes ice cream better. They say it will rain, starting on Monday. I say let it rain. And may it cleanse the souls of humans. Let it wash. And to all those who are not afraid to walk under its drips. I took your picture to say goodnight to you and I remembered Phil Collins. Everything reminds me of you and you are frozen in some decree, in a must-be-before-I-die! And you are life, who wound me up, who taught me to live the passion, and music continues to be my greatest passion. And if I continue, I melt the decree and there goes the freezing vote I made. Shalom.