Barnacle Love (10 page)

“Candida, have you no respect? Control yourself. Our mother is dead.”

“Oh Manuel, I just couldn’t …”

She tried to compose herself as she sat hugging her knees beside the lifeless body, occasionally touching their mother’s cooling forehead with her big toe—just to make sure.

“After all these years—” She caught hold of herself. “All she said was, ‘I’m dying. My stomach … all gone …
torn out of me … gone.’” She pointed to the balloon on the chamber pot, rolled onto her side, and laughed into the plank floor.

The hem of the old woman’s nightdress cut across her upper thighs, her scrawny legs tangled and melded like a slippery tail. Antonio dragged a blanket off the bed, pulled it over his grandmother’s legs, careful not to cover her face. Manuel took a step toward his sister but was held back by his wife.

“Leave her be. She has her reasons,” Georgina said.

That morning, no one would return to the warmth of their beds. The women were left to prepare the body for a short wake and then burial. It was going to be another hot day, there were things to be done.

“She was a remarkable woman, my mother.”

Manuel sat in the kitchen with his cousins. He had roused them from their sleep, called on them to gather at his mother’s home even though the sun had not risen yet.

“You’ve been away too long, Manuel,” Augusto said. “Time has healed, or it’s made you forget.”

“I haven’t forgotten. But there were crops to sow, animals to tend, an ocean floor to harvest. I remember her storming into class that day—‘Senhora Oliveira,’ she said, ‘school is getting in the way of filling their bellies,’ and we left.”

The men began to smile, their memories stoked by this simple recollection.

“Remember, Manuel, leaving before the sun rose to plunge into the frigid waters to catch octopus, eel, and
red snapper? Sometimes you would waste the day lying in the sun, rolling in the warm black sand. Remember?”

“I remember,” Manuel said. “She would lock the door if we came home with nothing.” Manuel knew that the door was always open for him; it was only Jose who was denied his warm bed. “My brother Jose and I would huddle together in the barn until the morning, when we would return to the sea once again to dive for food.”

They kept on drinking. Georgina was now in the kitchen plucking some chickens by the sink, and every so often flailing at the cigarette smoke that hung in the room. Over the course of the morning their words had begun to slow down, get longer. Manuel spoke of his sister Albina, who made sure the sheets and clothing were laundered and mended; they were poor but his mother refused to have her children dirty. He moved to Jose, who tended the six cows, two pigs, and dozen or so hens. Then there was Mariano, the shifty-eyed one, as he was known by the neighbors, who seeded the land and harvested the crops. And as if on cue, Candida walked in as Manuel recalled how his little sister was supposed to be the gatherer of fruit and berries but dreamed of becoming a movie star and making it big.

Candida began rattling the pots louder and then slammed a cast iron frying pan on top of the stove. They all turned toward her but it wasn’t enough to stop Manuel. He was now drunk and his words became tempered with bitterness.

“She was so proud of her well-oiled machine. But it was all based on fear!” He shouted these words down the hallway.

Terezinha stood there, bathing in the silence that followed her father’s outburst. He saw his daughter take hold of a dead chicken that lay on the kitchen counter. She clasped the headless animal by its feet. Terezinha bit her lips as she swung the chicken and tried to spell her name on the kitchen floor with droplets of blood.

Manuel then looked at Antonio, still in his pajamas; he sat cross-legged in the corner winding his wrist with the thin ribbon that had once held on to his balloon. So gentle, so empty of the spirit Manuel had wanted the boy to possess.

Manuel stood outside his mother’s bedroom looking through the half-opened door. It wasn’t his place. They washed her pale body by candlelight. Smoke and the smell of beeswax filled the room and wafted into the hall where he stood. Manuel could see Georgina through the haze, passing a cloth along his mother’s neck, pulling the dead woman’s frail arm out to the side as she washed the white skin on the inside of her wrist, elbow. Candida, resolved to her final duty, gathered the burial dress in her fists, like a sock just before it’s pulled over one’s foot. She placed the opening over her mother’s head, struggled and fought to pull it down her already stiffening body. Candida then reached for a neatly folded parcel of tissue paper. She carefully unpacked a tortoiseshell comb with scalloped edges, a gift from Manuel that had never been worn. She looked at Manuel before plunging it into the side of her mother’s hair. Georgina covered the woman’s head with the traditional burial wimple as Terezinha,
who had been standing by the shutters, came over and smiled at her father as she helped to fluff her grandmother’s dress. Georgina caught him looking and raised her hand to ward him off, to leave the women to their job. He stood fixed. They garnished her with branches of pine and cedar, tucking them under her, framing her. His mother’s knobby fingers were forced together across her stomach and her beaded rosary woven between her stiffening hands.

Manuel felt Antonio lean against his leg.

“The cedar helps cover up the smell of death,” he told his son. He raised him up, kissed him on the neck and lost himself in his son’s familiar sweet smell, away from the putrification that wafted from the contained room.

As the moon sank into the ocean, the day began to fill with villagers lining up outside to pay their respect. Some wanted to see it for themselves—
could she really be dead?
Others just wanted to touch her—
a saint
, some said.

Manuel wasn’t sure of their names. The women were shrouded in veils and the men wore no hats, their hair parted and wet. People knelt by the dead woman’s bed and whispered prayers. Some were brave enough to bend over and kiss her pallid forehead or adjust her clothing, a collar or sleeve. Some even cried, interrupting the steady hum of communal vespers.

There is comfort in death
, Manuel thought,
the freedom to behave in a way that could not have been possible if someone were alive.

They would then make their way around the room, offering the family their prayers and whispered things. Manuel saw how the women would cup Antonio’s face in
their rough hands and prick his cheek with their lips. Terezinha held on to Thumbelina, repeatedly tugging at the string in hopes of reviving the doll’s head. Some of the women tried to kiss her cheek but most just tapped her head in recognition.

Manuel could hear Padre Alberto begin to recite the rosary outside his mother’s window. He could hear the shuffling crowd that had gathered and repeated the words of the priest in unison. The final mourners trickled out of their front doors to gather quietly on the dirt road in front of the house, to wait for the family, to pray and offer her a final mass, to process and bury her. It had to be done within the day—the town still wasn’t large enough to make a funeral home a viable business—and so the town had no choice but to adhere to tradition. Anyway, it was best for the departed to enter the Kingdom of Heaven the old-fashioned way—right away.

Candida pulled back the sheets to reveal her mother fully dressed in black like an ominous cloud.

Georgina held on to the woman’s thin ankles, and Candida—only after much urging—tucked her arms under her mother’s shoulders. On the count of three they lifted her stiff body and awkwardly dropped her into the pine coffin. Manuel caught his children’s awe as their grandmother floated straight and hard as a tabletop. Georgina arranged the dead woman neatly and properly in the box lined with raw linen, then took it upon herself to lower the lid.

Terezinha held on to her mother’s gloved hand as she drew aside the lace curtains, flung the shutters open to lean out the window. She signaled for the priest to
begin the funeral march that would take them to
Nossa Senhor do Rosário
for the last time. They were just about to begin when Manuel motioned the pallbearers to stay where they were, to give them all a few moments alone as a family.

“Come here, Candida,” Manuel said. Georgina closed the shutters.

Manuel pried open the lid and slipped something inside the coffin. Candida reluctantly moved close to the lip of the box. Manuel felt his children nudge their way between them and grasp onto the ridge of the casket. Georgina moved beside her sister-in-law.

“A cold fish. She was no mother to me,” Candida heaved.

“She took so much from you, Candida. She took from me too, but no more,” Georgina said.

Georgina reached for the photograph of her husband and her son that Manuel had placed inside, tucked somewhere in the ripples of fabric, and slipped it into her purse.

Candida reached inside her purse and pulled out a silver cylinder. She twisted it, then lowered her hand to her mother’s white face. She smeared the woman’s mouth with bright red lipstick, went beyond her lips and up toward her cheeks like a child who chose not to color inside the lines. She trembled as she hummed a song that Manuel faintly recalled. She took a step back, cocked her head as if to admire her work. She looked to her brother, who moved away from them until his back pressed against the cold wall. He understood as much as he could but was beginning to feel uncomfortable. Candida then rammed
the tube between the dead woman’s hands, where it lay next to the jet-bead rosary and silver crucifix.

She took one last look, smiled, and gently lowered the lid.

Everyone waited outside. The box was lifted onto the men’s shoulders. They carried her with heads down, up the uneven road, kicking at the wild dogs with their now dusty shoes if they dared come near to sniff. As the procession wound its way up and passed
Nossa Senhora do Rosário
, Manuel noticed the sudden rustle of curtains, the occasional sign of the cross and the obligatory cries and sniffles from the men and women behind him. Terezinha walked in front of Manuel, holding on to her aunt’s hand. Manuel drew his wife close to him. Antonio’s arms were secured around his mother’s neck. Manuel saw him pull his mother’s veil over his head too. He whispered, “
Mãe
, how is she going to breathe? Why didn’t they put some holes in the coffin?

“Fish need air to breathe too,” Antonio said with conviction.

MANUEL USED HIS FOREARMS
to part the stalks of corn. His blood coursed through him. He forged ahead, swiping at the brittle stems, nursing the anger that had pressed on him ever since he had arrived back home and Silvia had said no.

Two weeks ago, with an eagerness that overcame jet lag and saw him abandon his luggage on the front stoop of his crumbling childhood home, he had dashed through the fields to meet with her. She had agreed to go to Canada in her letters, but it wasn’t until he arrived, after some long anticipated and disappointing love-making, that she told him she didn’t want to leave. Not prepared for her excuses, he had stormed through the cornfields, allowing the husks to thrash against his face. She was his intended, but his dream was his alone now. Her futile calls for him to return—“
Manuel! Volta,
Manuel!
”—receded as he broke through onto the dirt road.

A week passed. Silvia asked for a second meeting. He came into the clearing once again.

Silvia’s eyes rested in the dark hollows of her face. She looked smaller now.

“I’ll go! Is that what you want … I’ll leave with you as your wife.” She had crawled to him and tugged on his trousers with her chin up, pleading.

He grabbed her shoulders. “I don’t want to begin my new life with a lie!”

She swiped the snot across her cheek. “But I’ve changed my mind. I’ll make a life with you there if that’s what you want.” She reached for his hand and pulled him down as she arched her back. His knees buckled and she placed his hand between the warmth of her legs. She grasped his back to lower him even further.

He withdrew his hand and caressed her face. He whispered, “I thought it was what you wanted also,” as he stood up to leave.

“Your mother said you would stay; that all I had to do was ask you to start a life with me here and that we would all be together. She said she knew you, she knew what you wanted and that everything would be okay.” Silvia looked around now as if expecting someone or something to appear from within the thick crop of corn and save her. “She said it would all be okay.”

He stormed up to Senhora Theresa’s small house on Rua Nova. He walked straight up to the window, and with not even an inkling of restraint, he asked her for her daughter Georgina’s hand.

Those who lived in the village of Lomba da Maia would often assemble in its cobbled square to hear Amalia’s fados drifting out of Senhora Genevieve’s gramophone and through her open window. Although she herself was deaf, the songs of lament served as a backdrop for the town square as the men smoked, balancing hand-rolled cigarettes on their cracked lips as they slammed their cards down, knuckles red on bistro tables. Their wives and women sat like aged schoolgirls, repeating their family histories, shared events borne from a past as if newly found. It was in that square, as a boy of six visiting for the first time, that Antonio heard the story of the blessed union between his mother and father.

Antonio sat in his shorts and navy blazer at the bottom of the steps that led up to the whitewashed church. His father, Manuel, who sat playing cards at the other end of the square, had insisted his wife and children be dressed to perfection. Terezinha sported a bowl cut that reminded Antonio of Casey from Mr. Dressup. She wore a simple dress and bobby socks. They both wore patent-leather shoes in the dusty heat of summer. Antonio sat with his legs opened in a V, playing with his marbles while his sister skipped around him and along the fancy loops and bordered patterns of inlaid black cobblestone.

“I can see your birdie, I can see your birdie, I can see …” Terezinha chimed, and pointed and snickered.