So Many People, Mariana by Marie Judite Carvalho

Author:Marie Judite Carvalho
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Two Lines Press

THE SHADOW OF THE TREE

However long and hard he thought about it, he could never have pinpointed the exact day on which the wind deposited inside him that tiny grain of pollen. Nor had he noticed—he was convinced of this, although again he couldn’t be absolutely sure—when, precisely, germination began. Something, though, had slowly and gradually put down invisible but energetic, roots, which had grown and, with each passing day, taken an ever firmer hold. Meanwhile, he still couldn’t see the plant, or perhaps he simply wasn’t looking. Only when there was nothing else around him, and it stood silhouetted against the sky as tall as a tree, plunging everything into darkness (or, who knows, perhaps protecting everything with the guarantee of its shadow), only then did old Alves Firmino face it full on. And he felt neither surprise nor fear, only a certain bitterness. The bitterness of one who is allowed to take shelter somewhere, but does so because he has no alternative, since, outside, there is only either scalding sun or freezing cold.

None of this was his fault. At sixty-five, Alves Firmino was a robust old man, his skin coarsened by fair weather and foul, especially the latter, because, for some people, the winter always lasts longer than the summer. He dreaded the bad weather but was able to withstand it nonetheless. His wife, however, had been an invalid for six years and would now never be able to leave her bed. This was the most important thing. Indeed, it went from being important to disastrous on the day he had his first heart attack, which left him poised between life and death.

“Be careful, my friend; these are treacherous illnesses,” the doctor told him when he declared him out of danger. And he had clapped him on the back with that phoney air of human sympathy, a kind of superficial vertical closeness that always keeps a safe distance, a useful way of disguising the gulf between your two situations. “Don’t tire yourself; that’s the best treatment. And come and see me again in a month.”

Don’t tire yourself. Firmino felt like laughing or possibly crying, a desire to turn his back on life and carry on regardless. But he couldn’t carry on regardless. He had to keep looking back at his bedridden wife endlessly making the crocheted lace that the seamstress who lived upstairs bought from her by the yard; gazing at him with those sad, meek eyes of hers, so terribly fearful and sometimes downright terrified. She had been like that for six years now. With her right leg bent, her left leg straight, and her upper body supported by two pillows. She was small and frail and as wrinkled as a dry, frightened leaf, her eyes fixed on the clock if he was even a quarter of an hour late arriving home from the shop where he worked as an accounts clerk in the afternoons. When he came through the door feeling tired (lately, he did get

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