Manual of Painting and Calligraphy (31 page)

For some minutes we did not speak. “Thanks for telling me these things. You were under no obligation.” “I was under no obligation, but I wanted you to know. So there’s nothing to thank me for.” “What type of work do you do?” I could feel her stretch out on the seat, even smile. “Oh, nothing special. I’m not important. I make contact with comrades in a number of villages, with various organizations—a job no one notices, but necessary just the same. Things blow hot and cold and I’ve had my troubles. But, believe me, as I look at these fields right now, I’m convinced I’m doing the right thing. Don’t ask me to explain.” “You don’t have to explain anything. I’ve also read Marx.” She laughed. “Don’t tell me you’re another one who claims to have read the whole of
Das Kapital
.” “Not quite all of it.” We both laughed. She rested her arm on the back of my seat and I repeated the gesture she had made in Sintra. Holding the wheel with my left hand, I squeezed hers with my right hand. But a narrow bend in the road appeared and the steering wheel required my roaming hand. “Were you imprisoned because of these activities?” “No. For something much more obvious. But they couldn’t prove anything.” “If I’m asking questions you’d rather not answer, tell me.” “Don’t worry. You simply won’t get an answer. I might even call the police.” We were laughing again like a couple of adolescents. This miraculous sphere traveling with me inside.

“Your job isn’t easy.” “No, at times it can be tough, but someone has to do it. The workers have an even harder time and they don’t complain; they just go on struggling. In 1962, when workers were campaigning for an eight-hour day, I was twenty-seven years old and had just separated from my husband. At that time I wasn’t even a Party member, but I was no less committed. My father is a veteran militant. I know he was extremely active in those days, mainly in the region south of the river: Almeirim, Lamarosa, Coruche, as far as Couço. Have you ever been to Couço? Anyone reading the newspapers at that time must have thought it was on some other planet. But that planet was right here. Let me try to explain: the workers didn’t go around pleading for eight hours, they didn’t go begging the government to release them from labor that lasted from dawn to dusk. There are Party documents to prove it. In Alcácer do Sol, for example—a story I read and will never forget—this is what happened: the workers decided to ignore their foreman’s orders and began work at eight o’clock. At ten-thirty, the normal time for lunch, the siren went, but they played deaf and went on working. At noon they downed tools and went off to have their lunch. By five o’clock they had been working for eight hours. Work came to a halt and everyone went home. Sounds simple, wouldn’t you say? But you have no idea how much effort went into making workers aware of their rights, organizing meetings and debates. One has to be involved to appreciate the problems. And I could quote other stories: such as that of the landowner at Montemor-o-Novo. When some men asked him for work, he told them, ‘If you’ve already eaten the food you earned in eight hours, then you can feed on straw!’ Whereupon the workers went onto his land and stole a lamb, leaving behind a note which read: ‘So long as there’s meat, why should we feed on straw?’ The authorities retaliated with arrests, torture, shootings. People were killed. Anyone who was there knows what it was like. I’ve only heard or read about these things.” “Has the situation improved?” I asked. “We go on. It’s rather like a river. It carries more or less water but goes on flowing. We’re much the same, we go on.” She looked very serious, her eyes fixed on the road. To the right the river shone. “Besides,” she said, “this regime can’t last much longer. The coup at Caldas won’t be the last. And we haven’t been idle. Our work goes on. Fascism is on the way out.”

We were approaching the city. I said, “You must trust me, telling me these things.” “Yes. I trust you. And I like you. I like you a lot.” A hundred and ten kilometers from Sintra I finally stopped the car. I pulled in to the side of the road and parked under a tree, listening to the leaves crackling beneath the wheels, and then silence. I turned to M. She was looking at me. She repeated, “Yes, I like you.” I pulled her toward me but did not open her blouse or pull up her skirt. We simply kissed until the world was full of constellations. And I told her, “I like you.” And then with one voice we said, “My love.”

“M
Y LOVE.”
To repeat these two words on ten pages, to go on writing them uninterruptedly without any clarification, slowly to begin with, letter by letter, carefully tracing out the humps of the handwritten m, the loops of the y and the l, the startled cry over that o, the deep riverbed excavated by the v and the slack knot of the e. And then to transform this slow operation into a single quivering thread, a sign on the seismograph as limbs shudder and collide, the page a white sea, luminous towel or extended linen sheet. “My love,” and I repeated the words, throwing my door wide open to receive you as you walked in. Your eyes opened wide as you came toward me, as if you were trying to get a better look at me, and you put your bag on the floor. And before I could kiss you, I heard you say quite calmly, “I’ve come to spend the night with you.” You arrived neither too early nor too late. You came at precisely the right moment onto that precise and precious platform of time where I could wait for you. Surrounded by mediocre pictures, by things painted and watching, we removed our clothes. Your body so fresh. Both of us eager but taking our time. And once naked, we looked at each other without shame, because paradise is to be naked and to know. Slowly (it could only be slowly, very slowly) we drew closer and closer until we suddenly found ourselves in a tight embrace and trembling. Our bodies were pressed against each other, my sex against your belly, your arms around my neck, our mouths, tongues and teeth, breathing and drawing nourishment, speaking without uttering a word, an interminable moan like some vibration, unformed letters, an interval. We knelt, climbed the first step, and then slowly, as if supported by air, you fell onto your back with me on top of you, both of us naked, and then we rolled over, naked, you now on top of me, your breasts elastic, your hips covering me, your thighs spreading like wings. We became as one and as one we rolled over once more, with me back on top of you, your hair glistening, my hands now spread on the floor as if I were supporting the world on my shoulders, or the heavens, and in the space between us tense looks, then blurred, the noise of blood ebbing and flowing in our veins and arteries, beating in our temples, surging beneath our skin as our bodies came together. We are the sun. The walls go around, the books and pictures, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, tiny Pluto, the earth. And now here is the sea, not the great wide ocean, but the wave from the depths trapped between two coral reefs, rising up and up until it explodes in frothing spume. The quiet murmuring of waters spilling over mosses. The wave retreats into the mysterious recesses of submarine caves, and you whisper, “My love.” Around the sun, the planets resume their slow and solemn journey, and here from afar we now see them at a standstill, once more there are pictures and books, and instead of that deep sky there are walls. Night has returned. I lift you naked from the floor. Resting on my shoulder, you tread the same ground as me. Look, these are our feet, a mysterious inheritance, soles which leave imprints as they claim the little space we occupy in the world. We are standing in the doorway. Can you feel the invisible veil which has to be penetrated, the hymen of houses, torn and renewed? Inside there is a room. I cannot promise you the clear sky and drifting clouds of Magritte. We are as wet as if we had just come out of the sea and were entering a tiny cavern where you can feel the darkness on your face. The faintest of light. Just enough to see each other. I lay you on the bed and you open your arms and hover over the white sheet. I bend over you. It is your body that is breathing, the mountain ledge and source. Your eyes are open, forever open, wells of glistening honey. And your hair is shining, a golden harvest. I whisper “My love” and your hands travel down from the nape of my neck to the small of my back. There is a fiery torch inside my body. Once again your thighs spread like wings. And you sigh. I know you, I recognize where I am: my mouth opens on your shoulder, my outstretched arms accompany yours until our fingers clasp with a superhuman strength. Like two hearts our bellies throb. You call out, my love. The entire heavens are calling out above us, everything seems to be dying. We have already unclasped our hands, they have lost and found each other on the nape of our neck, in our hair, and locked in embrace we now await approaching death. You are trembling. I am trembling. We shake from head to foot and cling to each other on the brink of the fall. It is inevitable. The sea has just swept in, rolls us onto this white shore or sheet and explodes over us. We call out, close to suffocation. And I whisper, “My love.” You lie sleeping naked beneath the first light of dawn. I see your bosom outlined against the light of that intangible veil covering the door. I slowly rest my hand on your belly. And sigh peacefully.

I
ALREADY KNOW
what I shall do with the canvas on the easel. It is still too early for the portrait of M., but my time has come. The canvas has matured (in the atmosphere and light of the studio), the mirror has matured if such a thing is possible (tarnished with time), I have matured (this lined face, this canvas, this other mirror). I look at myself in the polished surface, the tubes of paint unopened, the brushes dried out after weeks of gathering dust. I gaze at myself in the mirror, not distracted nor in haste, but attentive, appraising, measuring the depth of the cut I am about to make. A brush, gentlemen (I am not addressing anyone in particular, it is a somewhat rhetorical form of address I have adopted before in these pages), a brush resembles an engraver’s scalpel. It is not a scalpel but something like a scalpel. It can be used, for example, to prize off and gently scrape away the skin of the couple from Lapa in order to find out what is underneath. It has helped me to graft skin onto skin, as I have explained at length elsewhere, and I can claim to have carried out this operation during the last twenty years of my life as an artist (there is no other way to define it) some eighty times. As a skilled practitioner of this other type of plastic surgery, I compare more than favorably with the specialists. There are never any seams, scars or marks showing after I have carried out this surgery. I fear that once they unhook me from the wall they will not find it easy to replace me. The Eduardo Maltas of this world are a dying breed of painters and I might well be the last in the line. I am working on designs for packaging, I slip the art supplement into publicity campaigns and tactfully ask the copywriter, who is very jealous of his work, whether he would mind moving his phrase to the right to give one of my lines some breathing space. And so I find myself in the interval. It is time to put this entire face onto canvas, and what those eyes in the mirror see around them, all those lines and planes which in one way or another always converge to the pupils of the eyes, which are the vanishing point. Besides, there is another reason. This narrative is about to end. It has lasted the time that was necessary to finish one man and start another. It was important that the face which still exists should be recorded and that the first traces of the one about to emerge should be sketched out. Jotting these things down provided a challenge. I am now facing up to another challenge, but on my own territory. Would that I might succeed in putting onto this canvas what has been written on these pages. Painting must at least achieve this much. I ask no more, for I am asking a lot. (Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, Luca Signorelli, Paolo Uccello, Bosch, Pieter Brueghel, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Matthias Grünewald, Van Eyck, Goya, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Giotto, Picasso, Van Gogh and so many others put everything into their painting.) Would that I (H.) might be able to put something, however modest, into mine. I cannot say how long it will take me to paint this self-portrait. I have learned at last not to rush things. Writing has taught me this first lesson. Will the portrait also reveal the face of this apprentice? But let us not anticipate. What concerns us here is the soil today and not tomorrow’s wheat. Tomorrow this mirror will be broken, today is its time and mine.