Dying in Range II

 

Sometimes, rarely, I wake up with you in the dream. What happens with immense proficiency (ploughing the faith-force of life) and constancy is to fall asleep with the dream where you are whole and full, as you have always been. A man far beyond the north, far beyond the Douro, of a delirious sweetness and beauty. Today the dream woke me up and after getting up to see if the house was still in the same place, if the body, the one I bring, was still mine that you hugged, I lay down again in the fetal position and fell asleep with tears. I called Dad, Dad, Dad, but sleep could not dry them before he arrived.  First came sleep, that sweet elixir, almost as sweet as you were in me, that snatched me from this black cloud of still being alive in a body increasingly tired and absent from the three days. And when I woke up again, eleven twenty-two, once again, I put on carapins and went to the kitchen. I didn't even want to think about anything, what I'm going to have for breakfast or what day it was. Because the days have become intermittences that cling to the hours until they are diluted, one after the other, in oblivion. I opened the small door of Tomás's slick cabinet, where I keep his things and tea, instant coffee and I pulled a donut from there. Practical, round and with the middle hole. The doughnut is my reflection, the world with a big hole, a gap, a void that only you fill. I turned on the coffee machine, replaced the capsule and instead of the small cup, I put a clay mug. There are things that never change in me, the desire for coffee, which can be hot, warm, cold, rough, but which continues to give me a pleasure that I don't like to do without. Being able. I peeked at my mother, before sitting down at the kitchen table. She still sleeps, at night and always late, always with difficulty in reconciling his spirit with sleep. I didn't open the window for him. I came to the room to get my cell phone, which is where I read the news and sometimes the emails. The doughnut emptied into my mouth in four bites. He died. I was slurping the coffee little by little, as with books, longing to know what happened and taking time so that the pleasure did not end. Almost every day, Filipe sends me poetry, the poetry of his days, it is through poetry and lyrics that I maintain rare contacts with the outside world. I'm not talking about complaints, i'm not talking about dreams, only about the day-to-day life that is arranged in rhymes, verified between possibilities and impossibilities. Today became Sunday.  Yes, because Sunday has to have a pearl inside, it cannot be just hours that stick to us, as if by doing so, they could last longer and longer. And I only know inside the days that last when they are the ones I keep in my memory, my pearls I keep them in the days that are history, where are you, where are my dear viriato, zira, oh my zira, don't let yourself go down, eat cookies like me, suck candies and leave the cigarettes, zira, how I miss you,  And Claudia, Cristina don't be so romantic, life is pathetically aggressive, but I'm like you, when love runs out, we are left in this world, we have to fly to the other, I continue here in my astral travels, behind the nests in the trees, where Fernanda appears out of nowhere with that advice always ready and rounded by the love of being a mother,   With care of this and that, not in the land of Cadaval but in that of heaven, where the angels play with her, tearing tender smiles and telling her that her almond eyes Blue ones are no longer buried in the eyelids anymore in the worries for others, where grandmother Bina continues to want me happy, and next to her, grandfather Rodrigo says to me, you see daughter, how right I was, you see that you are beautiful inside and out, and where my brother in my father's lap continues with bunches of wheat,  framed by the eyes of honey smiling at me, God, so much light, so much, and where my father's forehead does not have a single crease, except when he smiles, laughing, so that I rejoice, in the days that I keep from aunt Carmen Flor who kept me company every day I was in the land of Soalhães, always afflicted, always solicitous,  always a mother, she who never wanted to be a mother, and to know that my dead are, in short, everything that is alive in me, more alive than ever, my precious pearls in the oyster of life. A true legion of pearls and I who thought I would never see the pearls and my string of pearls in this life is what they gave me, which are a huge string that reaches the sky in the long nights, with a fleeting moon and mysterious. Today Filipe sent me a pearl that I keep in my memory because it is so beautiful. I share it on this page so that it does not get lost in the increasingly sterile draft of my days and nights. From António Borges Coelho, in his chronicles and speeches in the red of Chinita: 

Invocation to Trás-os-Montes

(...)

The little ones can't do anything...

But who ploughed the mountain?

Who conquered the empires?

Who was the worker and the architect

That tore the mountains of the

Douro, which covered them with terraces

and opened their mountains with a mountain

Caves and the space where they are

Grab the vineyard, in a work 

reminiscent of the 

Pyramids and the Great Wall of China?

(diário de Lisboa, 1968, in the chronicles and speeches of Caminho, 2024, 

communist antifascist resistance imprisoned and one of Portugal's greatest historians. Tribute is paid to him this weekend, at the Avante party. 

And when I read this Invocation, I am moved to the core, by my soul and heart, because it makes me see what I keep of the Douro, a faithful image and because it leads me to it, in the liturgical revisitation of the Douro. It's not a delusional fantasy! God up there and the little man down here are both the same, weavers of their own fortune, with a lot of art in between, a humanitarian mainstay, and this force is not manual or vassalage, but inspiration and ingenuity, it is a faith-force that builds the unthinkable. We are really what we write, books open to exposing the soul we carry inside and, on the outside, to give birth to poetry like gods of Olympus! What a great strain of poets God has prepared for the Lusíada harvest! With this tracery of Douro vineyards, even from the rocks we build thrones. And it's these moments of beauty that I experienced after the donut, while enjoying my coffee and the damn nicotine. Then the cats and dogs, my beloved daily friends, bosom friends, friends of always, who are waiting for me for pampering and meals, multiplying smiles in me, as if fighting my heart sprawled with honey. Today is Sunday, because coffee comes to my mouth while the vineyards of the Douro intertwine within my eyes, longing for its beauty, longing for the nature to which I belong and do not reach, hostage and hostile to myself, in this hole, in this hiatus where I inhabit the body that still drags me to tasks, to the obligations of being a person,  To be my mother's daughter and mother, to be a thinking and hermit being who dedicates her days to trying to forget, to fighting love, can that be? As if he didn't know that love can't be fought, can't be faced, that this is not being coherent. And before me, still, your arms and the boulders parade, and love, my love, stays and edifies, stays and exalts, hardens and remains in my mouth, not knowing how to die. Can it be, ask the boulder to leave its internal qualities, to stop being strong and resistant, to stop being a fighting mineral, to finally leave that state and change to being spring water? Like the cliffs, like the basalt, like the vineyards of the Douro, the highest mountains, you continue to break furrows and only reap what you have sown. For you, this Sunday, I keep the pearl that you are, my mature love.