Commission of Tears by Antonio Lobo Antunes

Author:Antonio Lobo Antunes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing

Eleventh Chapter

Which one of us will talk now, my mother, my father, me, all three of us at the same time or not a soul because we don’t have a relative or an acquaintance who visits us and each of us is in a different place, even though we’re together, we can smell the cedars around the Jewish cemetery, where I never saw a burial, I saw a guard enter in the morning with his lunchbox, he breathes at our side, I see the guard enter but I don’t see him leave, if I am quiet every day there’ll be a new guard, approaching the gate, next to the gate a barber shop with no clients and inside it mirrors that are disinterested in the world and a flycatcher spiral, a building with a tile façade with a guy in pajamas scratching himself at the window introducing his slow fingers in between the buttons, then a wall, a curve of electric tram tracks without the trams and all of Lisbon descending in somersaults down to the Tejo, awnings and little stairs leading to the cranes down below and the seagulls that nobody pays attention to lingering in the steps of the air with short cries, the opposite bank, more reflected than authentic, faded colors and silhouettes that become confused, a villa whose name I don’t know, weightless, in the flower of the seafoam, at the same time inhabited and uninhabited like Angola, one determines that nobody and millions of people are born in the bush, which of us will speak now and we don’t speak, my mother places the starching iron on the metal stand while my father draws on the sand with a little stick listening to the complaints of the Blacks interrupting each other, they who always interrupt each other, in the outskirts of Luanda, a cargo ship, as deserted as the cemetery, starts to move, with the slow pace of someone with a hernia, toward the estuary, what are you waiting for, Mother, for old age to give you another gramophone, another dance, and her face shuts down, feature by feature, so that not even her grandfather could get in

—Come here, girl

if she had a grandfather, if what I write is the truth, my mother picks up the iron and puts it down, I thought she would answer me but she’s silent, she doesn’t wait for death because one doesn’t wait for death, it always comes alone, friendly, helpful

—Your body has gotten too heavy for you, I’ll help you

wait for what, Mother, tell me, because in spite of everything we wait, what can we do except wait, my father was leaving with the soldiers, along the railway line where the grass is highest, from time to time a truck filled with Whites lighting up trembling branches with its headlights, from time to time a sigh in the trees that were absorbed in their thoughts, on the return we fall asleep and what leaves our mouth is no

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