I watched them go: Grandpa Celestino, Auxiliadora, my parents, Aunt Márcia, two women friends of Aunt Márcia, a neighbour I’d never seen, his wife and mother-in-law, the local postman, an eight-year-old kid who used to run around in the street, former teachers, my cousin Ascênsio (who always insisted on wearing his military uniform), and his two children. Some of these people I remember clearly, but I only have a vague recollection of others; some fell in love with me, but there were others for whom I had little affection. I’ve watched people without name or past – people close by – depart for a place at the very edge of time.
Sometimes I hear the echo of Auxiliadora’s voice calling out in the late afternoon. “Come over here, come talk to me!” she’d holler from the door of her house, far from knowing that, decades later, I’d remember her clear, sky-blue voice as if not even a minute had passed since the last time we’d seen each other.
Auxiliadora spoke with the certainty and excitement of those who have confidence in others, who believe in them. She used to talk as if the whole world were hers, defiance and mischief in her eyes. I wouldn’t reply or even glance at her, sure that my lack of interest would leave her trembling with fury.
“Come over here…I have something to tell you!” she’d call to me again.
Fully expecting to drown her enthusiasm, I’d make believe I didn’t care what she was saying and would let her talk, fuss, and grow irritated while she leaned against the doorframe in her bare feet, restless underneath her rumpled dress, which came down to just above her knees.
“I give up on you,” she’d protest after a while, sensing my indifference. “I’m sick of trying. Don’t come back. Forget about me. I’m only sorry not to have listened to the people who warned me about you…”
She didn’t end that way to hurt me on purpose or to force a reaction out of me, but I wasn’t going to give her what she wanted. I’d go into the house and not set eyes on her again until the following day. Auxiliadora was slender and olive-skinned, with short hair. She was nearly always ready to boil over. Our friendship lasted until the day she left our world. We stopped speaking a thousand times and started again just as many. When I got the news of her death, my mind emptied, and I felt a constriction in my soul that has lasted to this day. Not to be able to see Auxiliadora has been a terrible blow. There were things that I could only confess to her, things that only she would understand. I’d just reached thirty years old, and she’d been twenty-eight. We hadn’t known what was ahead of us and she never understood what was coming. To me, her death was a book that would never be written.
I sometimes turn the pages in the notebook of hers that I’ve kept for years, flipping back and forth, making Auxiliadora return to me and to life through her words, notes, scribblings. You’re far away, Auxiliadora, and I’m not sure where, though your presence is as real as the sun coming into my room.
The first chapter of this book of mine is a clear and resplendent day that grows indistinct from the luminous pages of the notebook that Auxiliadora left me.
Auxiliadora is here, full of stories to tell, anxious to add to the lines she jotted down in the notebook of her memory, which really are just notes and vague impressions, ideas without themes, things she needed to put down on paper. With her, a lot is always happening.
Auxiliadora is gone and not gone, dead but alive in other people, enduring, indomitable, stalking me like a tiger hunting prey, a tiger with claws that time has not been able to dull. I detect signs of her, marks in the air, sighs with which she adorns the house as afternoon falls. I don’t know if she still goes by the name of Auxiliadora or should be called something else, but it makes no difference.
For now, I’m in bed, waiting for them to come for me. I felt a bit out of sorts and called an ambulance to take me to the emergency room. At my age, it’s not worth taking chances. Before resorting to the ambulance, I tried calling Ruth, but there was no answer. For several days now Ruth hasn’t shown up. When I go a while without seeing her, I feel like someone else, as if something essential has been lost to me, and I get the impression that everything might just come crashing down.
Ruth is a doctor friend who has gotten in the habit of visiting me pretty regularly. My feeling out of sorts might be due to her absence. I hope the ambulance doesn’t take long; I’d like to hang around for a little while longer. I want to join Auxiliadora, but I’ve some duties to take care of that would make it difficult for me to go right now.
I see the shadows of disquieted ghosts hovering around me. They plead with me to tell everything, to keep writing and avoid sentimentality, to forget Auxiliadora. She had her time and mine is nearing its end, an end that will open gates to all the time in the world.
I know they’re right. I put up no opposition to them, though I also believe that it’s not easy to cut myself off from Auxiliadora and Ruth and so many others. To be forced to distance myself from a place or a person is the worst thing that can happen to me. I feel as if I am coming apart on the inside, sentenced to living in an cruel orphanage. I get the urge to go to the window and renounce what’s been taught me. I become disoriented and despondent, and I give up, at least for a while, but then I become again the person I was. It’s happened so many times, and I’ve accumulated so much pain.
I’m reaching the start of another phase of life – its end. The time has come for me to ease up a bit. The journey has been intense, and made with great effort, almost too much, obliging me to pass on my experience and knowledge to someone else – a child, a neighbour, a friend, a stranger – who will continue the race in my place, a relay race toward eternity, to which I’ve made my contribution, no matter how miniscule. Death is a moment in the journey of which I’m a part, an instant of clarity and love, a moment when someone will follow me on the voyage, just as I followed Auxiliadora, if that was truly the case. We never know with any certainty whom we follow, or who follows us, though we can hazard a guess, of course. It’s a question of love, and the love I feel is born in the encounter between other people and myself, that identification with someone else, or that attempt to create an identification, which is the reasoning behind eternity. I would guess that living beings, and even the body itself, have the sense that we follow one another, which makes eternity possible. To always live in others is perhaps where our happiness and well-being lie. I’m not referring to any kind of reincarnation, but a continuation of being through another person. The transmission of our knowledge to someone else.
For years, I lived inside the illusion of what was told to me, of what was shown to me. Then I learned how things have their time, and I accepted death. I want to rest now. The best thing I can do is cede to someone else so that I can continue through him or her. Having children gives form to this unstoppable process. Children are the most obvious way to step onto this path to eternity. We give to them willingly, without effort, eagerly. They are part of us, are born from us, exist inside us, and, if death doesn’t take them young, go on after us. Children are the easiest way to build eternity. And so, education is important in family relations, transmitting fundamental values for achieving the eternal. The closer that a child follows the path of a parent, the clearer the transmission of knowledge will be.
Physical similarities between parents and children sustain the idea that death is not the end of anything, because someone can continue to live for you, someone with a face like yours, with eyes like yours, with a tone of voice identical to yours, with a way of walking that yours, too.
The more two people look alike, the easier and more obvious becomes the transmission of experience because, even in life, the continuity through that other person is clear to the eyes. The similarity to the other person, whether in appearance or through education, is the most obvious form of eternity.
Imagine a child on the way to school, running through the shadows of morning, jumping around the street, carrying in his hand the book-bag that his mother used when she went to school as a young girl. Years later, the book-bag is there, witness to a life that continues and renews itself, and twinned to a small hand with restless fingers is another hand that is the same, or that could be the same, that was the same, with only time separating them.
But time doesn’t count. We are what counts; we are being and action. And we are the other person, and outside time. We are here, born of the strange matter of which we’re made, contributing to the effervescence of lives that produce the gyration of universes.
If I were capable of seeing others, of understanding them, of accompanying them, I would be contributing to the eternity of a oneness and, as such, to my own eternity. As a part of everything, I cannot help but count in the process.
On the contrary, the possibility that each person, by himself, is eternal, represents the victory of selfishness over love, the victory of ignorance over knowledge, the negation of the nature of the cosmos and its evolution. Individual eternity would mean endless suffering, the nightmare of all nightmares. Life would be unbearable – and we would constantly covet death.
In consequence, eternity comes into being along a collective pathway, in which people take the place of others, in a cosmic journey lasting millions of years, during which time memory keeps dissipating and transforming.
But eternity does not end with the disappearance of memory. It’s fully understandable that after a certain time I stop being conscious of eternity (at least in any organized way), but I nonetheless continue to exist within it, even if it is only for contributing to the process during my lifespan.
Death is merely a kind of natural intelligence that works within us; it our instinct for survival at its highest efficiency.
And it is death that brings forth the restlessness of childhood, the urgency of adolescence, the impetus of youth, the fevers of adulthood, the attainment of maturity, the lucidity of old age. Death prevents me from becoming a monster and, at the same time, enables me to give meaning to other people. Above all else, it is the approach of death that allows me to understand what is incomprehensible, to accept the unacceptable, to tolerate the intolerable. Death is what awaits us constantly, though it will fall to others to experience our passing. In consequence, there are those who believe that souls – and loved ones – will meet again. But there is no such meeting, and there is no other life. There are other lives, which are those to whom, through death, we transmit our accumulated experience of existence.
It’s in death that I resolve the contradictions that I have lived, and it has given me, too, the chance to resist my enormous craving for moments of happiness. My body is part of the movement of galaxies, stars, comets, planets, and endless and boundless agglomerations of fire and dust. My body has been part, and will always be part, of all cosmic happenings. The sum of all these pathways constitutes the eternity of the universe that, in turn, integrates into another universe, and that one into yet another, and so on, creating the infinite at immense distances, the frenzy of millions of universes deriving from others and from constant gigantesque explosions, whose boundless sum explains the existence of a greater and greater eternity, to the point that we lose ourselves in the calculations of this infinity, which though infinite is comprehensible.