She’d been offering her blessings since the age of twelve, and now she was nearly eighty-five. Seven, eight, nine, ten generations she had vouchsafed in this way, with her words and gestures. Constipation, shingles, the Evil Eye, lumbago, sore muscles, other maladies: she mended them all.
As for her dreams? They were not dreams, but prophesies. She never erred. In one, she’d learned she would live until the age of seventy-five. She’d prepared accordingly, but for the first time in her life, a dream had failed her.
On her seventy-sixth birthday, very much alive, she decided that God must’ve committed some error. For reasons unknown, He’d skipped past her name on the Divine Guestbook. She made up her mind to enjoy the celestial oversight, to take things underground. So she quit working miracles, that God might not take notice.
Mameto
They say that the walls groan in that place. But that’s just a lot of tongue-wagging, a sort of elaborate shorthand meaning: a place where a bunch of butch-broads hang out. Take Mameto, for a start, who didn’t hide from anything or anybody, but who then again didn’t walk around with a big scarlet “L” on her forehead, either.
These were the old days, the old ways of doing things: a woman never put a name to the thing. A child called his mother’s friend “auntie,” or even “momma.” The women slept together, in the queen-sized bed, the door firmly shut. Nobody talked about it.
Mameto had been single for quite a while. During this time, nobody was permitted to penetrate that desolate authority. If somebody managed to cross the silent river of her inner life, they found a path of slippery stones and broken shells on the far shore, a path upon which it was impossible to walk. They’d find, in other words, a sad and passionate woman, quite different from that even-keeled mãe they so admired. They’d find a woman consumed by desire for love but lacking the courage to do anything about it.
So it had gone, that is, until the day her daughter introduced Mameto to the Huntress: a smiling, attentive young woman who warmed Mameto’s heart with a sort of energetic delicacy and who, simultaneously, disconcerted the velha senhora with her eyes.
Mameto was consumed by her doubts, and by fear. The woman she loved was her daughter’s beloved. She resisted the facts of the situation the best she could, but the Huntress’s arrow had found its mark, and now a great abyss of passion had opened up under her feet. How quickly she fell in! The daughter discovered everything, estranged herself from her mother, and foreswore the girlfriend altogether. Calling the girl an adventuress, she threatened to reveal everything. These threats, of course, made no difference.
In short order, a new marriage formed in the neighborhood, to general outcry. Mameto, enchanted, smiled through her days. She crooned to herself, rehearsing the steps of a ballroom dance.
But as the poem says, Life’s happiest days bloomed like Calendula. Heavy as a pumpkin on the vine, the warm sun shone in a faultless sky. In the voice of a mischievous girl, Oxum laughs. The orixás, in their jubilation, tear down the old world. In its place, they build a new one, a world without the strain of the heavy load of existence.
Only Exu, sitting wisely and shrewdly up in the tree of life, knew better: the work was just beginning.
Maria Isabel
I couldn’t take it anymore, all that back-and-forth. I wanted to go, they wanted me to stay. My heart disobeyed me, so I stayed until (thank God) it quit beating.
Maria Isabel, sweet girl, has come to say goodbye. I see her as I see her sisters, as a little girl. I still remember the day her mother, Dona Nina, died. Maria Isabel had hardly finished closing the woman’s eyes before Mérdia’s father was pestering her. Was it true, he wanted to know, she’d studied overseas?
He had no compassion, that fork-tongued busybody.
Mérdia’s sisters were decent people, not like her in the least. There was Marçulena, Mirizante, Mortuária, and Múrcia. And don’t go thinking some notary clerk got the names wrong, either—the juremeiro was the only one to blame for that little prank.
Mérdia used to lend schoolbooks to Maria Isabel—they were good friends, in fact, right up until Maria Isabel passed the entrance exam for the most prestigious university in the state. Mérdia, who was a shop girl, liked to claim she hadn’t studied for the university exams because she hadn’t felt like it, that passing the entrance exam wasn’t any great shakes and that this, basically, was why Maria Isabel had been able to do it. Maria Isabel, who was no fool, understood all this to be ordinary white-girl jealousy, pure and simple.
But I think on the whole my mourners are having a nice enough time at my service. Here, in this corner of the world, we die early. It’s not so often you find yourself at the funeral of somebody dead of natural causes, and at a ripe old age. Dona Ciça spent all of 2016 in a hospital, waiting on her chemotherapy.
My grandkids are all alive, thank God. My kids, too. But while it’s true that none of them died before me, it’s also true that I’ve been to plenty of their friends’ funerals.
Dita, who went to grade school with Maria Isabel, is watching her from the other side of the room. I think she must be worried Maria Isabel won’t recognize her. She’s fifty-two, but then she doesn’t look as old as I do—I mean, I’m dead.
Suffering like that will do a number on you.
Dita buried both her sons. Marlon, nineteen, and Denzel, twelve. The man who killed Marlon had heard Denzel was looking to buy a piece, and he figured better to kill the brother, too, and the sooner the better.
But Maria Isabel? She looks incredible. Like she took a bath in Formalin. She’s fifty this year, but you wouldn’t think her a day over thirty-five, she gets better with age.
A good life has that effect on a body.
Me, I’m still waiting on that incinerator. I’d rather turn to ash than watch a bunch of little microbes chip away at my body.
The people here say that mine was the right time to go. Here, in this neighborhood, death comes soon for us all.
