If I Close My Eyes Now (21 page)

The names and dates that followed constituted a long list beginning in 1811, and were full of archaic Christian names and titles that had vanished with the Brazilian empire. He searched them until he came to Diógenes Marques Torres. Before his name was the title of senator, in capital letters; underneath, the dates 1882–1955. No other name was added after his. Above it, beyond a blank space, he saw two names written close to one another: Vicente Luiz Marques Torres – 1947, and André Luiz Marques Torres – 1947–1949. Contrary to his expectations, there was no woman’s name since the 1940s.

He walked round the crypt, without knowing what he was looking for. The niches of the two little boys Vicente and André had the same phrase written on the front lid:
Forever in the thoughts of his parents, Adriano and Isabel
. So the twins were the sons of the mayor Marques Torres. One of them stillborn, the other dead at the age of two. The family name was to die with them.

Beneath the twins’ niche was an open rectangle. He bent down and peered inside. Another niche. It was empty, apart from a few fragments of marble and cement.

He straightened up, leaning his left hand on the lid of the bigger sepulchre. He felt a stabbing pain in his lower back. A sign that his rheumatism would soon return. He stretched. Raised his hands above his head. Sometimes this trick worked: his spine cracked, and the pain went away.
But not this time. He sighed. He was beginning to feel weary.

The sun had shifted and now threw a yellow stripe on the far wall. Indistinct at that distance, the lengthy names now looked like gleaming, harmonious metallic lists, with one dead person following another, then another, and another … All at once he noticed a gap in this regular list. A bigger space between the name of the senator and that of his grandson Vicente.

He went closer. The surface of the marble had been scratched, but faint shapes were still visible. They could be letters. A name might have been scratched out. And dates. He went right up to the wall. The vague shapes looked like the numbers 1, 9 and 5. Nineteen hundred and … ? The fourth number was hard to make out. It looked like a 7, or a 2. He remembered that 1952 was the year Aparecida was married.

He took the wire from his pocket, and started to dig at the marble above the numbers. Letters gradually emerged. First a C … then an L … then an E … and an A. Cléa? Who could Cléa be?

He saw the mistake he had made.

He began to scrape more firmly with the wire in the centre of the letter C, where it was almost completely obliterated, and soon also made out the original shape of the third letter, Z. So the nuns had been right: this was the past that the surviving members of the Marques Torres family wanted to remove all traces of from their tomb, their history, their lives. Elza. Aparecida’s mother.

THEY WALKED UP
the street without a word, bathed in the golden evening sunlight that threw their long shadows on to the paving stones of the road. They didn’t know what to say to each other. One of the boys was disconsolately pushing a twisted bike, imagining all the ruses he would have to come up with to prevent his brother and father seeing it before he had straightened it out even a little. The other boy walked beside him in sympathy, holding his own bike by the handlebars, experiencing the unknown, possibly liberating and yet uncomfortable feeling of being seen in public as filthy as a beggar. They both noticed the crowd outside the police station at the same time.

They pushed their way through the adults whispering outside the main entrance. At the top of the steps an elegantly dressed man was talking to the police chief. He was standing erect, without moving either his long arms or his hands, which held a sheaf of papers. It looked as if he were delegating tasks to a subordinate. His jutting jaw and pointed chin
dominated his long, straw-coloured face. He was wearing a pair of round, gold-rimmed glasses.

Eduardo noted how white his starched shirt collar was, the way it was closed by the perfect knot of a plain dark tie, the elegance of his charcoal-grey pinstripe suit. He had seen material like that among his mother’s fabrics. It was cashmere. He remembered how his hand slid easily along the soft, fine cloth. The opposite of the police chief’s rough cotton suit. Boss’s clothes versus those of an employee.

A nudge from Paulo jerked him out of these thoughts.

‘Can you hear what they’re saying?’

‘No. He’s talking in a low voice, and they’re a long way off.’

‘Who’s talking low?’

‘The factory owner. Over there, with the police chief.’

‘No, Eduardo! I mean what these people’ – he indicated the crowd around them – ‘are saying.’

‘Who?’

‘Everyone. About what the dentist did.’

‘What did he do?’

Before Paulo could reply, the voices around them went suddenly quiet. Everyone was gazing in the same direction: at the coffin emerging from the police station door, carried by several policemen. Geraldo Bastos and the police chief had to move out of the way to let them down the steps.

‘He killed himself!’ shouted Eduardo, from the entrance to the courtyard.

‘He hanged himself!’ added Paulo, starting to run over towards Ubiratan, who was seated under the only light the nuns had left on. He was shuffling through bits of paper of different sizes strewn over a small table, next to the notebook he always carried with him. Picking up one of the pieces of paper, he stuffed it in his pocket, without looking up at the approaching boys.

‘He hanged himself with his tie!’

‘He tied it round a bar in his cell window!’

‘And jumped!’

‘Just now!’ As usual, Paulo was the one who arrived first. ‘It only happened a few minutes ago!’

Ubiratan put down two small sheets of paper, placing two narrower strips on top of each of them. All the pieces had dates, names and notes written on them.

‘The coffin was …’ Eduardo came to a halt next to the table, trying to get his breath back, ‘was being carried out of the police station just as we—’

Ubiratan interrupted him.

‘Have you seen
Snow White
? Have either of you seen it?’

‘… arrived on our bikes.’

‘
Snow White
,’ Ubiratan repeated.

‘The people were saying that he had hanged himself, but Eduardo didn’t realize—’

‘I didn’t realize they were talking about the dentist hanging himself, because—’

‘Eduardo didn’t hear a thing.’

‘I was surprised to see the factory owner there. That was why—’

‘It was then they came out with the coffin. Eduardo wasn’t looking!’

‘I was!’

Ubiratan was growing impatient.

‘
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
! Have you seen it?’

‘It was then that they took the coffin out.’

‘From the police station.’

‘Sealed.’

‘Yes, it was sealed. Nobody seed him.’

‘Nobody
saw
him, Paulo.’

‘Have you seen it or not?’

‘We didn’t see, Ubiratan! Nobody could see! It was sealed! Paulo told you, I told you: it was sealed!’

‘
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
!
Snow-White-and-the Se-ven Dwar-ves
,’ the old man repeated slowly. ‘Have you seen it or not?’

‘Seen what?’

‘The Walt Disney film,’ said Ubiratan, pronouncing the ‘W’ like a ‘V’. ‘The cartoon. In colour. Well, have you seen it?’

Paulo spread his arms, palms upward, perplexed.

‘Ubiratan, we’re trying to tell you that the dentist—’

‘Yes or no?’ he insisted, shaking his pen in their faces.

‘Ubiratan!’ Eduardo tried to make him see sense. ‘Ubiratan, the dentist killed himself!’

No reaction.

‘We saw the coffin being taken out of the jail!’ Paulo almost shouted.

‘He hanged himself, Ubiratan! He hanged himself with a tie from a bar in his cell window!’

The old man waved his hands, to get them to speak more quietly. Then, without giving them time to respond, he added:

‘It was made the year Aparecida was born.’

Paulo shook his head. Shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

‘What?’

‘
Snow White
. It was made in 1937. Do you think Aparecida saw it?’

‘Ubiratan—’ Eduardo tried again.

‘The same year as
Guernica
!’

‘Ubiratan, listen—’

‘Do you know what
Guernica
was? What it signified? The carnage? The bombardment? The killing of children, old people, women? Do you know about all that? The rise of Fascism? Do you know about the Spanish Civil War? Picasso?’

Paulo felt like shouting, kicking, stamping his feet and covering his ears all at the same time. Instead, he thrust his hands into the pockets of his filthy trousers in disgust.

‘Did you hear what Eduardo and me told you?’

Ubiratan bent over the bits of paper, picked one up, and shook it at the two boys.

‘
Guernica
. Picasso. Picasso –
Guernica
. The same year: 1937. Could Aparecida have heard of Picasso?’

‘Ah!’ said Eduardo, suddenly remembering. ‘And as well as the suicide, there was the lake.’

‘Someone has burned everywhere around the lake!’

‘Everything!’

‘In the spot where we found her.’

‘Her
body
.’

‘And they said we could be expelled, and they’ve put a new barbed wire fence round the lake.’

‘Expelled from school: the headmaster threatened us with expulsion,’ Eduardo explained. ‘And there’s a fence round the lake now. They must have put it up overnight. With a sign saying
No Entry
.’

‘And her grandmother died last night.’

‘Aparecida’s grandmother. Dona Madalena died.’

‘After we’d been there.’

‘She died yesterday.’

‘And when we were coming back a car ran us down.’

‘Today. On our way back from the lake. Not long ago.’

‘My bike is all squashed.’

‘Buckled.’

‘When he see it, my father—’

‘When he
sees
it.’

‘It was in 1937 that the New State was founded in Brazil. The same year. Do you know what the New State was?’

Eduardo wouldn’t give up: ‘The dentist, Ubiratan.’

‘Do you or don’t you?’

‘He killed himself in jail.’

‘Paulo: do you know about it?’

Paulo sighed dispiritedly.

‘More or less. The New State was Getúlio Vargas. But we’re trying to tell you that the dentist—’

‘Is that all you know? Is that trivial simplification all they teach you at school?’

‘Of course not,’ said Eduardo defiantly. ‘It was Getúlio Vargas’s government after he shut down Congress and banned
political parties. It was the period when the labour laws were created, when women got the vote, and everything else. It ended after the Second World War.’

‘That year 1937 was the first time I was tortured. Vargas’s police tore out all my fingernails. One by one. In the year Aparecida was born.’

‘He committed suicide,’ Paulo murmured, and Eduardo was unsure whether he was referring to the dentist or the creator of the New State.

‘It was the year when Guimarães Rosa wrote
Sagarana
. Have you read Guimarães Rosa? Is he part of your school curriculum? Or are they still stuffing the minds of our young people with that nonsense by José de Alencar?’

‘Never. Guimarães Rosa never.’

‘Were you a Communist?’ asked Paulo. ‘Wasn’t it the Communists that got beaten up by the police?’

‘I don’t have any more books. I got rid of them all when I moved here. If not, I would have lent you
Sagarana
. And
Memórias do cárcere.
Have either of you read that? Do they teach Graciliano Ramos in your school? It’s a devastating account of the consequences of the 1937 coup. Of power in the hands of a caudillo. And yes, Paulo, I was.’

He fell silent, and went back to the papers scattered over the table. The boys were expecting him to make some comment about all the events they had described. After waiting for some time in vain, Eduardo took up the topic again:

‘Did you hear what we told you?’

‘I’m not deaf. Not yet.’

‘So why didn’t you respond to anything we—’ Paulo began, only to be interrupted once more.

‘You two were born in 1950, weren’t you?’

‘1949,’ Eduardo corrected him.

‘I was born on 11 January 1949. I’m older than Eduardo.’

‘Only by a month! My birthday is 28 February.’

‘I’m forty-eight days older than you!’

‘You were little more than a year old when Vargas came back into power. Elected by direct voting. Just think: a dictator who had tortured, killed and persecuted, democratically elected! Aparecida was thirteen at the time. A year older than her mother, Elza, when she became pregnant with her. The year when Mao Tse-tung founded the People’s Republic of China. Or…’

He began a frantic search among his papers, until he found what he was looking for. He read it and, waving the scrawled-on piece of paper, turned back to the two boys.

‘I was wrong. Mao founded the People’s Republic of China in October 1949. Only twelve years ago.’

Paulo grabbed the scrap of paper. On it was written: ‘Mao – 49 – PRC’. He picked up another one: ‘
Casablanca
– 39 – Ingrid B’. He glanced at some others: ‘Adhemar de Barros – 50 – GV’; ‘GV – Aug 54 – Lacerada’; ‘Franco – 37 –
Guernica
’; ‘Eisenhower – 52 – USA’; ‘Ary Barroso – 1939 – “Aquarela do Brasil”’. To him, it all seemed mysterious, impenetrable.