Abstract Painting
Translated by John Elliott
On a certain day in January, in his forty-fifth year, one Saturday afternoon, sitting cross-legged in his study, Alberto Inácio noticed, for the very first time, the painting that hung in front of him. It was called "Dog that Doesn't Bark" and displayed influences from most of the painters and movements of the last century and a half. This painting had been with Alberto since his first marriage, following him around on the walls of the various houses that he had lived in. It was an "abstract".
His first marriage had all taken place in three rooms. The painting had hung on the living-room wall, a present from friends, and had witnessed a great deal of silent dining between spouses; it had escaped the vase hurled cinematographically by his wife when she discovered that Alberto had begun a second liaison, in another apartment, a little further west, in the same town. There, because of a lack of space and the distractedness of the owner, "Dog that Doesn't Bark" was hung in the damp balcony closed in with aluminium windows, overlooking the backs of other buildings. Later, in his second marriage, to a recent biology graduate who gave up everything to devote herself to a pair of twins born to her by chance, the painting had been frequently seen, but rarely commented on, in the entrance hall, crowning a preliminary arrangement of push-button-phone/vase with cloth tulips/photograph of the bride and groom on their wedding-day, set on a varnished table with bow legs like those of a cowboy who, wide-brimmed hat and whip in hand, found himself forced to trudge across the fields in search of his steed. Here too, every day around seven in the evening, Alberto Inácio's keys would be left, those of the car, the car alarm, the house, the country house that had been a neglected inheritance of his wife, all held on a stainless steel ring, and culminating in a prickly red rubber ball with multiple and very thin tentacles. This was a ball that Alberto's wife was incapable of touching, always picking up the keys very carefully between two fingers.
With this marriage ending for reasons that were never made clear, of all the arguments that were generated between them both, the discussion as to the fate of the painting was undoubtedly the most pacific. Alberto took it with him to another apartment, in some ways much better than the previous one, for it had a lot of sun and a spare room, where the twins would stay every fortnight, being used as an office the rest of the time.
Alberto Inácio's third wife was, so far, the easiest of all to live with. Érnia had a cheerful and extrovert disposition, talked loudly, woke up singing, found everything he said funny. She liked sex, was always ready to try out new things, drank in moderation, smoked, travelled. On top of it all, she had her own fortune, spent her time working flexible hours at a sofa shop that belonged to the family and didn't need any children. Whenever the twins came to spend the weekend, she would watch them from a safe distance, her face set in a large silent smile.
This woman's happiness soon began to annoy Alberto. Érnia couldn't distinguish the weekend from the other days. She was always merry and laughing. He used every pretext he could find to put her down, frequently in public, alluding to her supposedly Brazilian blood, and she answered everything pleasantly and sympathetically, giving her husband the increasingly absolute notion that whatever he said was all the same to her. Alberto began to shut himself away in his study on those Saturdays when the twins didn't come and would bury himself in his computer, pretending he was busy, whenever he heard her footsteps in the corridor. But Érnia would come in, undraw the curtains and open the window to let the smoke out, show him some pity for the excessive workload placed on him by the company and stroke his hair, and he had to repress a movement of repulsion. Shortly afterwards, Érnia would shoot off to meet her friends and, like a kid, Alberto would run to the living-room to watch the NBA basketball on television.
In the last few months, he had sought, in every way he could, to destroy this woman's impregnable happiness. He was irritated by the way she pronounced her R's, which derived from the fact that she was still a little German, by her generous-sized, flat-soled shoes, which easily slid away to the side, and by the way she used to place her hand on his jacket collar, stroking him. There were some comparisons here that were very unflattering for Érnia. But nothing seemed to touch her.
That afternoon, shut away in his study and looking at the wall, Alberto had noticed the painting for the first time. He had had a shock of recognition and then a moment's panic that had seemed to displace all the objects. There was a sudden distortion of space, like an instantaneous earthquake, and then a tearing, an invisible ray - and the computer, the standard lamp, the ashtray, the silver clock perched on the desk-top, the pile of eternally blank pages, all of them had changed: they were his own things, but entirely alien.
The company psychologist, a plump woman in her fifties, looked at him over her half-moon spectacles, with the typical calmness of psychologists, whilst Alberto Inácio described this and other experiences. Her voluminous grey hair, held in place by a variety of grips, pins and small black velvet ribbons, sought to escape as far as it could from her head; then it fell, its forces exhausted by such a great struggle, in uneven tresses, spreading over her absent neck and triple chin - and sneaked mischievously under the collar of her mustard-coloured silk blouse. In the first hour, faced with her silence, he began by identifying the symptoms that tormented him: permanent irritability, insomnia, vexation, frustration, meals consisting of emptying fridges in the middle of the night, the desire to throw his wife out of the window, a desire that was extended to all his previous wives, all women, not even excluding the psychologist, who, when she crossed her swollen little feet in her comfortable heeled shoes, caused him to hear the rustling of the stockings that corseted her short legs. After this introductory phase and faced with Dr. Anália's impavid silence, Alberto spoke of his sexual fantasies (the chapter on group rape). He was convinced that this was what she wanted to hear.
'No,' she said, finally, 'talk about whatever you want. About what's troubling you.'
They stopped talking and looked at each other - he hadn't yet reached the phase of dorsal decubitus - and Alberto was looking for something to say, but the psychologist told him that their time was up and asked if wanted to come back another day.
'Why?' he asked. 'Do you think I'm crazy?'
'Do you think that I think you're crazy?' she asked.
She had shut him up.
Alberto had had his reasons for feeling reluctant about psychotherapy. In fact, what would they ever be able to tell him about himself from couch to couch that he hadn't always known? During those two months that he had resisted, his wife and workmates had first tried to cheer him up, then to persuade him that he should find someone to talk to, and, finally, they wanted to dissuade him from taking, of his own volition, some pills that, according both to the literature and those who had tried them, were little short of paradise on earth. Alberto had then agreed to seek out this doctor Anália, simultaneously hoping and fearing that she would give him a prescription for these pills. Anália Pinto had been very clear, however: she wouldn't give him any pills. She would give him conversation.
At the second session, Alberto spoke of his childhood (a happy one, although his father had been strict and his elder brother a perfect delinquent who bullied him and stole everything from him). At the third session, it was childhood sex, first experiences. At the fourth, without knowing why, he began to talk about his mother. She was a good woman, inconspicuous, devoted to her family. A normal woman, like so many other housewives, who absent-mindedly kept the eggs in her pockets and then forgot to mix them into the pastry dough. And she cursed herself because of this, with a filthy egg in each hand, displayed like mental sores at the lunch table, to the embarrassment of her family.
Alberto and the psychologist had come to an arrangement that suited them both. She listened and he talked. Not about what he wanted to, although she insisted that he should feel at ease, lying on the black leather couch and looking at a crack in the ceiling that suggested nothing in particular to him, precisely because he hadn't the least idea what he wanted to talk about, but talking about what he thought would be appropriate for this kind of situation.
Alberto Inácio soon grew accustomed to his Tuesdays with Anália. It was an obligation just like any other. Having exhausted the rich vein of his childhood experiences (the first time he cut his head open, his first jab, his first dream about killer bees, his first separation from his mother, his first gropes with his brother and his school friends, the first time he saw his father totally naked), he began to talk about his conception of the world and was already up to cruising speed. The psychologist didn't want to know about results. She half closed her eyes, let things ride, and Alberto suspected that she had fallen asleep, because of the deep, rhythmical breathing that he could hear behind him.
'All this endless talk about protecting the environment,' he would say, 'it's obvious it won't result in anything. All that the big American companies are bothered about is feathering their own nest. Now they're concerned about the tigers in Malaysia or saving the giant turtles, but in twenty years' time, there won't be enough water for everyone. Only for those who can pay. Do you know how much a litre-and-a-half of water will cost according to the latest calculations that I read on a website? It'll cost twenty something contos, depending on the exchange rate of the dollar at the time. The dollar rules everywhere. We're nothing at all here. Those guys are telling us what to do, whatever they want gets done. They don't even ask. Anyway, who would they ask? The pathetic governments who are just lining their pockets? Do you think they care if the quality of life is going to get worse, or if people are getting further and further into debt? The banks are in charge and are being run with the money laundered from drugs.'
Drugs were a problem. And then, later, on the question of "people":
'People are stupid and narrow-minded. I've never seen a country where people are so stupid and narrow-minded. The other day, I overtook somebody perfectly legally and then this guy came after me hooting all the time. He followed me home, he really couldn't have had anything better to do. And then, when they ought to be fighting for their rights, for what's really important, they cower away. They're like worms, always afraid of losing their jobs or getting beaten by their wives.'
About "women":
'I don't understand women. The better I get to know them, the less I understand them. They talk a lot, with lots of details, they won't shut up, they're complete chatterboxes. It's very tiring. Lena, my second wife, was the opposite. She was depressing, always had a long face. First, it was because she was pregnant, then it was the twins that wouldn't let her sleep, if she slept too long it was because she had a headache, if she slept too little she'd walk around the house screaming. And she never knew anything. I'd ask her what she thought about this or that and she'd say "I don't know". Always. She used to say "I don't know" to everything. The one I've got now, who's called Érnia, my present wife, she knows everything, she's got opinions about everything, she's always happy, it's unbearable.'
About his "friends":
'My friends are all really great blokes. I don't have many friends, but they're all good ones. Paiva's a bit more of a pain, he's a neurotic guy who always thinks the worst, one of those people who are always imagining what might go wrong and almost never go out, it's hard work trying to fix up a meeting with him. But he's my oldest friend, we met at secondary school and now we sometimes go out for a snack and a few drinks, but I don't have much patience for putting up with him.'
About "love" :
'Love is complicated. It's complicated. First, we get involved with people, and then they let us down... It's difficult. I've always been disillusioned. Love is very... fleeting. It doesn't last forever, I think. However long it lasts, we have to defend ourselves all the time, if not they'll wipe the floor with us. This is a jungle, it's dog eat dog.'
About "love and sex":
'They're not exactly the same thing.'
About "Spring":
'I don't like it, my favourite season is Summer. Spring makes me feel anxious, I don't know if this is normal.'
These intimate confessions were followed by periods of silence during which Alberto Inácio would look at the crack in the ceiling, which was already beginning to irritate him, and wonder if the psychologist was asleep or awake.
'I once met a psychologist at a birthday party...' he said, at last.
'I think you're labouring under a certain misapprehension, Mr. Duarte. I'm not a psychologist, I'm a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst.'
This was the only time that Alberto Inácio ever saw her angry. That mistake caused him a certain discomfort, he couldn't see the difference between one thing and the others, but he felt distressed that he had offended her, even without wanting to. He asked his workmates what the difference was between a psychologist, a psychotherapist, a psychoanalyst and a psychiatrist, and this gave rise to a certain confusion, to which Manuel António Pinto brought an immediate end, because, besides being large and fat, he had a gruff voice and whatever he said he said with authority.
'Today I'm going to eat a steak!' he would say at one o'clock in the afternoon. And nobody dared answer him.
There was a time during the therapy when they spoke about taxes and the most efficient way of dodging them. This was followed by information about the decrepit social security system, stock market investments, the merits of the PC versus Mackintosh, the Microsoft monopoly, the high cost of living, land prices, home loans, and all this came up because Alberto disdained to discuss the television programmes, even though he was not ashamed to admit that he was addicted to the eight o'clock news.
'I like to keep myself abreast of things.'
With this comment, Alberto Inácio was running short of topics and opinions about the great universal debates. The day came when not a single phrase came to him and he allowed himself to spend a long while, tense and riddled with guilt, staring at the ceiling.
'Wouldn't you like to tell me a little bit about yourself?' asked the psychologist.
'Me?' asked the patient.
They were at a turning point. What more could Alberto Inácio say about himself? Hadn't he confessed that he liked watching the eight o'clock news? That he had his eye on a very cheap bit of land out towards Malveira da Serra? That he wasn't afraid of death? That what most attracted him about women (was this normal?) was their collar-bones? That he had no dreams or that he didn't remember them, what was the difference?
'But I'm better now,' he said, 'I think it's done me good to come here and talk to you.'
Doctor Anália waited patiently for another five minutes and declared their session to be over. Alberto felt cured. He now slept seven hours straight, the normal pattern of a normal adult, once a week he plunged hygienically into his wife, every morning he drank a cup of coffee, knotted his tie and took his place in the traffic queue listening to a bunch of comedians on the car radio. Once he even rang the programme and took part in a competition. He had his better days, others which were worse. Like everybody. When he arrived at work, he exchanged a few words with his workmates who were discussing the exotic questions asked on a television programme in which a lot of money could be won. Manuel António Pinto would come in, listen briefly and say:
- It wasn't easy. Normal people don't know what "billeting" means.
The others would lower their heads and, deep inside, knew that they should immediately sit in front of their computers and begin working, sending invoices, summoning clients, copying programmes, inserting files, sending and receiving messages, deleting compromising or out-of-date material.
Whenever there was a silence, they would all raise their heads in unison, wondering. Then a mobile phone would ring, someone would sneeze or an orange Vauxhall would come past, in first gear, climbing with difficulty up the steep street, and inside there would be an elderly gentleman lost behind some huge glasses, neatly dressed in a soft hat and overcoat, driving very close to the wheel, as if pushing the old banger forward with the mere power of his mind and the fear of getting stuck halfway.
Every Tuesday, at the time when his appointment had been, Alberto Inácio felt a certain melancholy. But what should he do? The panic had passed, he was sleeping well, fulfilling all his duties, even the marital ones, working efficiently. There was no reason to go back. Once, he ventured along the corridors that led to the psychologist's office, passed by the door, lingered around listening... A murmuring sound came from within, like a long moan, the voice of a man close to tears... He couldn't resist it, ran to the bathroom to fetch a stool, nervous and fumbling, lined it up, climbed on top and started peeping through the fanlight.
Doctor Anália was asleep with her mouth open, with one leg pointing in each direction, her comfortably heeled shoes loose on her swollen little feet and the clipboard for her notes lying abandoned on her lap, towards which there also hung, in successive folds, a belly that, now freed of the constrictions that are always forced upon us by life in society, showed itself to be truly monumental. Lying on the black leather couch, Álvaro Almeida was whimpering. He had more than enough reasons for this and they were all widely known. Alberto, forgetting the perilous and compromising situation in which he found himself, looked from one character in the picture to the other and felt nothing but jealousy. A raw jealousy, as sharp as a dagger. That couch was his, the fucking psychologist was his. Did Álvaro Almeida have any reason to be crying? Now Alberto Inácio was crying, and with good reason. Nobody saw him. He was able to calmly step down from his stool and drag himself off to the bathroom, where he tore off two small squares of toilet paper to blow his nose.
For the first time, Érnia displayed some impatience when he completely forgot to get up. In fact, Alberto woke later and later each day, until he reached the point where he only got up around eight o'clock in the evening. First he gave reasons for this:
'It's raining today.'
The next day:
'In this heat?'
Then:
'I don't feel well.'
He shrugged his shoulders if Érnia called him to attention. She did what was recommended by Maria de São Tomé, her guru and companion in moments of fun. She bought some indecent red underwear and presented herself in that outfit before an emaciated Alberto Inácio, bearded and smelly, who cast a look of disgust at her and said:
'Don't make me laugh, because it hurts my chest.'
She took it well, accepting this as a witty statement and went to take off her uniform. Érnia had no experience of depressions. She had a bullet-proof nervous constitution, and couldn't be taken too seriously.
'You'll find this strange,' he began, returning to the therapy, but the other day I passed by your door, went to fetch a stool and peeped through the fanlight. Álvaro was here, that man whose wife is very ill and who is shorter than I am, and you were asleep.
Silence fell.
'And do you feel betrayed?' she asked, after a few minutes.
'Yes,' he said.
It was the first of many "yes's" that Alberto would say to his doctor. He didn't insist so much now on taxes and natural catastrophes, but continued to want to speak, although he didn't know about what exactly. Anália again suggested to him that he should talk about whatever he felt like, freely, without any restrictions, and Alberto decided to begin with his workmates, because this was the topic closest to hand. And so off he went, willingly, until the psychologist asked him in a pause:
'Why do you always say that?'
'What?'
'With all the people you've mentioned so far, you've said that you're taller than them.'
'I am.'
Silence, once again. Finally, Alberto said:
'I think I'm convinced that I'm a dwarf. I know, rationally I know, that I'm five foot seven, but deep inside I'm convinced that I'm a dwarf. The first five years of my life, I practically didn't grow at all. My mother used to worry and always said, "look at João, he's grown so tall!", "look at António, my, he's grown!", but there was an implied criticism in what she said. Everybody around me grew, except me. She didn't say anything directly, but I knew that she was scared that I'd turn into a dwarf. She was always measuring me with her eyes. Every time she looked at me, I felt that she was trying to measure me, to see if I'd grown. At the age of five, I was the size of a two or three-year-old. After this, I went to school and suddenly grew, overnight, about eight inches. I could see that my mother thought that it was an illusion, that either I'd never grow again or I'd shrink during the night. But no, I carried on growing normally, always feeling a bit bad because I was growing. But I couldn't do anything to stop it.
'Do you see?' said the psychologist. 'We're making great progress.'
Alberto felt a lump in his throat and some warmth in the pit of his stomach. It was a long time since somebody whose opinion he valued had said: "well done, Alberto!" He happily repeated his dwarf story another three or four times, until Anália suggested that they move on. But, never in his life having thought about what he had just told her, he couldn't feel anything but amazement, looking into the immense abyss of uncharted territory that opened up before him.
'I'd never thought about this before,' he said.
'It's perfectly normal,' replied the psychologist.
Alberto Inácio soon picked up her habit and began most of his sentences like this:
'It's certainly perfectly normal...'
In this way, it is easy to understand the indescribable happiness that he felt when he succeeded in remembering a dream for the first time. He brought it in his psychic lap, with great care, anticipating Anália's appetite and their shared greedy savouring of a frugal content: in this dream, Alberto burned his fingertips. That was it. All the rest had sunk back into his unconscious and had left a fleeting memory, a smell, a colour, shadows. But, like everything else, remembering a dream was a question of practice and the next week the story that Alberto brought with him to tell her had already gained substance and consistency. But there were still some soft parts, and a similar number of doubts:
'I was walking along by the river, I don't know who with... And it wasn't exactly a river. I don't know how to explain it.
The therapist ended up saying:
'Why don't you try to draw what you can't say?'
And Alberto Inácio began painting. The difficult thing was understanding why he had chosen such a tiny format, brush number two and pure colours squeezed straight from the tube, if we accept as a premise the fact that he had already become aware of the dwarf story. His paintings were gouaches on small sheets of nine by twelve paper, awkward and uninteresting. But, taking his mission to heart, Alberto went on forcing himself to learn the laws of perspective and the rules of colour combination, assimilating precept after precept from popular books, imitating the masters, great and small, depending on his need and the work itself.
Érnia grew calmer. She saw Alberto Inácio buried in the sofa, with his board on his knees, in front of a yoghurt pot full of water, bent over his drawing. She had given up trying to interest him in outside things, she knew that sitting was a step up from lying down. And she began to live above all outside the house.
With Anália, Alberto discussed the mixture of colours and the best way to obtain a bright ochre that didn't remind him - and here he hesitated over the expression, in order not to upset the psychologist's sensitivities - in short, that didn't look to him like a horse's do-do's. She sought to explore this more or less direct association that he made without noticing between all the tones of brown and horse droppings, and in next to no time, they were talking about Alberto's father, who now appeared to his son in a way that was very different from the one in which he had previously been dismissed in one of the first therapy sessions. Where there had been an austere, firm patriarch, isolated and indifferent to affections, there now appeared a timid, listless man, concerned with his family's survival and subject to the terrifying fits of rage of his boss, a terrible man, verging on the criminal, who would be locked up at the end of his life. Alberto's father had even altered physically: his iron chest and straight back gave way to an almost Chaplinesque figure, with long feet and a funny way of walking.
One Saturday afternoon, when Alberto had organised and filed away the drawings that the small twins had produced the week before and was preparing to start painting, Érnia came into the study leading Manuel António Pinto by the hand.
'I want you to meet someone... This is Manel...' she said, and it was the first time that Alberto had seen her ill at ease.
'Hello, Manel,' Alberto said, with such a sense of unreality that he forgot about his hand with the brush in it, hanging in mid air on its way to the water.
'We've already met,' said his workmate.
Manuel António Pinto's enormous height and considerable bulk walked across Alberto's office and stationed themselves in front of the abstract painting. Érnia and her husband waited for the outcome.
'Did you paint this?' asked the colossus. And, without needing an answer, 'I like it. I really do.'
On a certain day in January, in his forty-fifth year, one Saturday afternoon, sitting cross-legged in his study, Alberto Inácio noticed, for the very first time, the painting that hung in front of him. It was called "Dog that Doesn't Bark" and displayed influences from most of the painters and movements of the last century and a half. This painting had been with Alberto since his first marriage, following him around on the walls of the various houses that he had lived in. It was an "abstract".
His first marriage had all taken place in three rooms. The painting had hung on the living-room wall, a present from friends, and had witnessed a great deal of silent dining between spouses; it had escaped the vase hurled cinematographically by his wife when she discovered that Alberto had begun a second liaison, in another apartment, a little further west, in the same town. There, because of a lack of space and the distractedness of the owner, "Dog that Doesn't Bark" was hung in the damp balcony closed in with aluminium windows, overlooking the backs of other buildings. Later, in his second marriage, to a recent biology graduate who gave up everything to devote herself to a pair of twins born to her by chance, the painting had been frequently seen, but rarely commented on, in the entrance hall, crowning a preliminary arrangement of push-button-phone/vase with cloth tulips/photograph of the bride and groom on their wedding-day, set on a varnished table with bow legs like those of a cowboy who, wide-brimmed hat and whip in hand, found himself forced to trudge across the fields in search of his steed. Here too, every day around seven in the evening, Alberto Inácio's keys would be left, those of the car, the car alarm, the house, the country house that had been a neglected inheritance of his wife, all held on a stainless steel ring, and culminating in a prickly red rubber ball with multiple and very thin tentacles. This was a ball that Alberto's wife was incapable of touching, always picking up the keys very carefully between two fingers.
With this marriage ending for reasons that were never made clear, of all the arguments that were generated between them both, the discussion as to the fate of the painting was undoubtedly the most pacific. Alberto took it with him to another apartment, in some ways much better than the previous one, for it had a lot of sun and a spare room, where the twins would stay every fortnight, being used as an office the rest of the time.
Alberto Inácio's third wife was, so far, the easiest of all to live with. Érnia had a cheerful and extrovert disposition, talked loudly, woke up singing, found everything he said funny. She liked sex, was always ready to try out new things, drank in moderation, smoked, travelled. On top of it all, she had her own fortune, spent her time working flexible hours at a sofa shop that belonged to the family and didn't need any children. Whenever the twins came to spend the weekend, she would watch them from a safe distance, her face set in a large silent smile.
This woman's happiness soon began to annoy Alberto. Érnia couldn't distinguish the weekend from the other days. She was always merry and laughing. He used every pretext he could find to put her down, frequently in public, alluding to her supposedly Brazilian blood, and she answered everything pleasantly and sympathetically, giving her husband the increasingly absolute notion that whatever he said was all the same to her. Alberto began to shut himself away in his study on those Saturdays when the twins didn't come and would bury himself in his computer, pretending he was busy, whenever he heard her footsteps in the corridor. But Érnia would come in, undraw the curtains and open the window to let the smoke out, show him some pity for the excessive workload placed on him by the company and stroke his hair, and he had to repress a movement of repulsion. Shortly afterwards, Érnia would shoot off to meet her friends and, like a kid, Alberto would run to the living-room to watch the NBA basketball on television.
In the last few months, he had sought, in every way he could, to destroy this woman's impregnable happiness. He was irritated by the way she pronounced her R's, which derived from the fact that she was still a little German, by her generous-sized, flat-soled shoes, which easily slid away to the side, and by the way she used to place her hand on his jacket collar, stroking him. There were some comparisons here that were very unflattering for Érnia. But nothing seemed to touch her.
That afternoon, shut away in his study and looking at the wall, Alberto had noticed the painting for the first time. He had had a shock of recognition and then a moment's panic that had seemed to displace all the objects. There was a sudden distortion of space, like an instantaneous earthquake, and then a tearing, an invisible ray - and the computer, the standard lamp, the ashtray, the silver clock perched on the desk-top, the pile of eternally blank pages, all of them had changed: they were his own things, but entirely alien.
The company psychologist, a plump woman in her fifties, looked at him over her half-moon spectacles, with the typical calmness of psychologists, whilst Alberto Inácio described this and other experiences. Her voluminous grey hair, held in place by a variety of grips, pins and small black velvet ribbons, sought to escape as far as it could from her head; then it fell, its forces exhausted by such a great struggle, in uneven tresses, spreading over her absent neck and triple chin - and sneaked mischievously under the collar of her mustard-coloured silk blouse. In the first hour, faced with her silence, he began by identifying the symptoms that tormented him: permanent irritability, insomnia, vexation, frustration, meals consisting of emptying fridges in the middle of the night, the desire to throw his wife out of the window, a desire that was extended to all his previous wives, all women, not even excluding the psychologist, who, when she crossed her swollen little feet in her comfortable heeled shoes, caused him to hear the rustling of the stockings that corseted her short legs. After this introductory phase and faced with Dr. Anália's impavid silence, Alberto spoke of his sexual fantasies (the chapter on group rape). He was convinced that this was what she wanted to hear.
'No,' she said, finally, 'talk about whatever you want. About what's troubling you.'
They stopped talking and looked at each other - he hadn't yet reached the phase of dorsal decubitus - and Alberto was looking for something to say, but the psychologist told him that their time was up and asked if wanted to come back another day.
'Why?' he asked. 'Do you think I'm crazy?'
'Do you think that I think you're crazy?' she asked.
She had shut him up.
Alberto had had his reasons for feeling reluctant about psychotherapy. In fact, what would they ever be able to tell him about himself from couch to couch that he hadn't always known? During those two months that he had resisted, his wife and workmates had first tried to cheer him up, then to persuade him that he should find someone to talk to, and, finally, they wanted to dissuade him from taking, of his own volition, some pills that, according both to the literature and those who had tried them, were little short of paradise on earth. Alberto had then agreed to seek out this doctor Anália, simultaneously hoping and fearing that she would give him a prescription for these pills. Anália Pinto had been very clear, however: she wouldn't give him any pills. She would give him conversation.
At the second session, Alberto spoke of his childhood (a happy one, although his father had been strict and his elder brother a perfect delinquent who bullied him and stole everything from him). At the third session, it was childhood sex, first experiences. At the fourth, without knowing why, he began to talk about his mother. She was a good woman, inconspicuous, devoted to her family. A normal woman, like so many other housewives, who absent-mindedly kept the eggs in her pockets and then forgot to mix them into the pastry dough. And she cursed herself because of this, with a filthy egg in each hand, displayed like mental sores at the lunch table, to the embarrassment of her family.
Alberto and the psychologist had come to an arrangement that suited them both. She listened and he talked. Not about what he wanted to, although she insisted that he should feel at ease, lying on the black leather couch and looking at a crack in the ceiling that suggested nothing in particular to him, precisely because he hadn't the least idea what he wanted to talk about, but talking about what he thought would be appropriate for this kind of situation.
Alberto Inácio soon grew accustomed to his Tuesdays with Anália. It was an obligation just like any other. Having exhausted the rich vein of his childhood experiences (the first time he cut his head open, his first jab, his first dream about killer bees, his first separation from his mother, his first gropes with his brother and his school friends, the first time he saw his father totally naked), he began to talk about his conception of the world and was already up to cruising speed. The psychologist didn't want to know about results. She half closed her eyes, let things ride, and Alberto suspected that she had fallen asleep, because of the deep, rhythmical breathing that he could hear behind him.
'All this endless talk about protecting the environment,' he would say, 'it's obvious it won't result in anything. All that the big American companies are bothered about is feathering their own nest. Now they're concerned about the tigers in Malaysia or saving the giant turtles, but in twenty years' time, there won't be enough water for everyone. Only for those who can pay. Do you know how much a litre-and-a-half of water will cost according to the latest calculations that I read on a website? It'll cost twenty something contos, depending on the exchange rate of the dollar at the time. The dollar rules everywhere. We're nothing at all here. Those guys are telling us what to do, whatever they want gets done. They don't even ask. Anyway, who would they ask? The pathetic governments who are just lining their pockets? Do you think they care if the quality of life is going to get worse, or if people are getting further and further into debt? The banks are in charge and are being run with the money laundered from drugs.'
Drugs were a problem. And then, later, on the question of "people":
'People are stupid and narrow-minded. I've never seen a country where people are so stupid and narrow-minded. The other day, I overtook somebody perfectly legally and then this guy came after me hooting all the time. He followed me home, he really couldn't have had anything better to do. And then, when they ought to be fighting for their rights, for what's really important, they cower away. They're like worms, always afraid of losing their jobs or getting beaten by their wives.'
About "women":
'I don't understand women. The better I get to know them, the less I understand them. They talk a lot, with lots of details, they won't shut up, they're complete chatterboxes. It's very tiring. Lena, my second wife, was the opposite. She was depressing, always had a long face. First, it was because she was pregnant, then it was the twins that wouldn't let her sleep, if she slept too long it was because she had a headache, if she slept too little she'd walk around the house screaming. And she never knew anything. I'd ask her what she thought about this or that and she'd say "I don't know". Always. She used to say "I don't know" to everything. The one I've got now, who's called Érnia, my present wife, she knows everything, she's got opinions about everything, she's always happy, it's unbearable.'
About his "friends":
'My friends are all really great blokes. I don't have many friends, but they're all good ones. Paiva's a bit more of a pain, he's a neurotic guy who always thinks the worst, one of those people who are always imagining what might go wrong and almost never go out, it's hard work trying to fix up a meeting with him. But he's my oldest friend, we met at secondary school and now we sometimes go out for a snack and a few drinks, but I don't have much patience for putting up with him.'
About "love" :
'Love is complicated. It's complicated. First, we get involved with people, and then they let us down... It's difficult. I've always been disillusioned. Love is very... fleeting. It doesn't last forever, I think. However long it lasts, we have to defend ourselves all the time, if not they'll wipe the floor with us. This is a jungle, it's dog eat dog.'
About "love and sex":
'They're not exactly the same thing.'
About "Spring":
'I don't like it, my favourite season is Summer. Spring makes me feel anxious, I don't know if this is normal.'
These intimate confessions were followed by periods of silence during which Alberto Inácio would look at the crack in the ceiling, which was already beginning to irritate him, and wonder if the psychologist was asleep or awake.
'I once met a psychologist at a birthday party...' he said, at last.
'I think you're labouring under a certain misapprehension, Mr. Duarte. I'm not a psychologist, I'm a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst.'
This was the only time that Alberto Inácio ever saw her angry. That mistake caused him a certain discomfort, he couldn't see the difference between one thing and the others, but he felt distressed that he had offended her, even without wanting to. He asked his workmates what the difference was between a psychologist, a psychotherapist, a psychoanalyst and a psychiatrist, and this gave rise to a certain confusion, to which Manuel António Pinto brought an immediate end, because, besides being large and fat, he had a gruff voice and whatever he said he said with authority.
'Today I'm going to eat a steak!' he would say at one o'clock in the afternoon. And nobody dared answer him.
There was a time during the therapy when they spoke about taxes and the most efficient way of dodging them. This was followed by information about the decrepit social security system, stock market investments, the merits of the PC versus Mackintosh, the Microsoft monopoly, the high cost of living, land prices, home loans, and all this came up because Alberto disdained to discuss the television programmes, even though he was not ashamed to admit that he was addicted to the eight o'clock news.
'I like to keep myself abreast of things.'
With this comment, Alberto Inácio was running short of topics and opinions about the great universal debates. The day came when not a single phrase came to him and he allowed himself to spend a long while, tense and riddled with guilt, staring at the ceiling.
'Wouldn't you like to tell me a little bit about yourself?' asked the psychologist.
'Me?' asked the patient.
They were at a turning point. What more could Alberto Inácio say about himself? Hadn't he confessed that he liked watching the eight o'clock news? That he had his eye on a very cheap bit of land out towards Malveira da Serra? That he wasn't afraid of death? That what most attracted him about women (was this normal?) was their collar-bones? That he had no dreams or that he didn't remember them, what was the difference?
'But I'm better now,' he said, 'I think it's done me good to come here and talk to you.'
Doctor Anália waited patiently for another five minutes and declared their session to be over. Alberto felt cured. He now slept seven hours straight, the normal pattern of a normal adult, once a week he plunged hygienically into his wife, every morning he drank a cup of coffee, knotted his tie and took his place in the traffic queue listening to a bunch of comedians on the car radio. Once he even rang the programme and took part in a competition. He had his better days, others which were worse. Like everybody. When he arrived at work, he exchanged a few words with his workmates who were discussing the exotic questions asked on a television programme in which a lot of money could be won. Manuel António Pinto would come in, listen briefly and say:
- It wasn't easy. Normal people don't know what "billeting" means.
The others would lower their heads and, deep inside, knew that they should immediately sit in front of their computers and begin working, sending invoices, summoning clients, copying programmes, inserting files, sending and receiving messages, deleting compromising or out-of-date material.
Whenever there was a silence, they would all raise their heads in unison, wondering. Then a mobile phone would ring, someone would sneeze or an orange Vauxhall would come past, in first gear, climbing with difficulty up the steep street, and inside there would be an elderly gentleman lost behind some huge glasses, neatly dressed in a soft hat and overcoat, driving very close to the wheel, as if pushing the old banger forward with the mere power of his mind and the fear of getting stuck halfway.
Every Tuesday, at the time when his appointment had been, Alberto Inácio felt a certain melancholy. But what should he do? The panic had passed, he was sleeping well, fulfilling all his duties, even the marital ones, working efficiently. There was no reason to go back. Once, he ventured along the corridors that led to the psychologist's office, passed by the door, lingered around listening... A murmuring sound came from within, like a long moan, the voice of a man close to tears... He couldn't resist it, ran to the bathroom to fetch a stool, nervous and fumbling, lined it up, climbed on top and started peeping through the fanlight.
Doctor Anália was asleep with her mouth open, with one leg pointing in each direction, her comfortably heeled shoes loose on her swollen little feet and the clipboard for her notes lying abandoned on her lap, towards which there also hung, in successive folds, a belly that, now freed of the constrictions that are always forced upon us by life in society, showed itself to be truly monumental. Lying on the black leather couch, Álvaro Almeida was whimpering. He had more than enough reasons for this and they were all widely known. Alberto, forgetting the perilous and compromising situation in which he found himself, looked from one character in the picture to the other and felt nothing but jealousy. A raw jealousy, as sharp as a dagger. That couch was his, the fucking psychologist was his. Did Álvaro Almeida have any reason to be crying? Now Alberto Inácio was crying, and with good reason. Nobody saw him. He was able to calmly step down from his stool and drag himself off to the bathroom, where he tore off two small squares of toilet paper to blow his nose.
For the first time, Érnia displayed some impatience when he completely forgot to get up. In fact, Alberto woke later and later each day, until he reached the point where he only got up around eight o'clock in the evening. First he gave reasons for this:
'It's raining today.'
The next day:
'In this heat?'
Then:
'I don't feel well.'
He shrugged his shoulders if Érnia called him to attention. She did what was recommended by Maria de São Tomé, her guru and companion in moments of fun. She bought some indecent red underwear and presented herself in that outfit before an emaciated Alberto Inácio, bearded and smelly, who cast a look of disgust at her and said:
'Don't make me laugh, because it hurts my chest.'
She took it well, accepting this as a witty statement and went to take off her uniform. Érnia had no experience of depressions. She had a bullet-proof nervous constitution, and couldn't be taken too seriously.
'You'll find this strange,' he began, returning to the therapy, but the other day I passed by your door, went to fetch a stool and peeped through the fanlight. Álvaro was here, that man whose wife is very ill and who is shorter than I am, and you were asleep.
Silence fell.
'And do you feel betrayed?' she asked, after a few minutes.
'Yes,' he said.
It was the first of many "yes's" that Alberto would say to his doctor. He didn't insist so much now on taxes and natural catastrophes, but continued to want to speak, although he didn't know about what exactly. Anália again suggested to him that he should talk about whatever he felt like, freely, without any restrictions, and Alberto decided to begin with his workmates, because this was the topic closest to hand. And so off he went, willingly, until the psychologist asked him in a pause:
'Why do you always say that?'
'What?'
'With all the people you've mentioned so far, you've said that you're taller than them.'
'I am.'
Silence, once again. Finally, Alberto said:
'I think I'm convinced that I'm a dwarf. I know, rationally I know, that I'm five foot seven, but deep inside I'm convinced that I'm a dwarf. The first five years of my life, I practically didn't grow at all. My mother used to worry and always said, "look at João, he's grown so tall!", "look at António, my, he's grown!", but there was an implied criticism in what she said. Everybody around me grew, except me. She didn't say anything directly, but I knew that she was scared that I'd turn into a dwarf. She was always measuring me with her eyes. Every time she looked at me, I felt that she was trying to measure me, to see if I'd grown. At the age of five, I was the size of a two or three-year-old. After this, I went to school and suddenly grew, overnight, about eight inches. I could see that my mother thought that it was an illusion, that either I'd never grow again or I'd shrink during the night. But no, I carried on growing normally, always feeling a bit bad because I was growing. But I couldn't do anything to stop it.
'Do you see?' said the psychologist. 'We're making great progress.'
Alberto felt a lump in his throat and some warmth in the pit of his stomach. It was a long time since somebody whose opinion he valued had said: "well done, Alberto!" He happily repeated his dwarf story another three or four times, until Anália suggested that they move on. But, never in his life having thought about what he had just told her, he couldn't feel anything but amazement, looking into the immense abyss of uncharted territory that opened up before him.
'I'd never thought about this before,' he said.
'It's perfectly normal,' replied the psychologist.
Alberto Inácio soon picked up her habit and began most of his sentences like this:
'It's certainly perfectly normal...'
In this way, it is easy to understand the indescribable happiness that he felt when he succeeded in remembering a dream for the first time. He brought it in his psychic lap, with great care, anticipating Anália's appetite and their shared greedy savouring of a frugal content: in this dream, Alberto burned his fingertips. That was it. All the rest had sunk back into his unconscious and had left a fleeting memory, a smell, a colour, shadows. But, like everything else, remembering a dream was a question of practice and the next week the story that Alberto brought with him to tell her had already gained substance and consistency. But there were still some soft parts, and a similar number of doubts:
'I was walking along by the river, I don't know who with... And it wasn't exactly a river. I don't know how to explain it.
The therapist ended up saying:
'Why don't you try to draw what you can't say?'
And Alberto Inácio began painting. The difficult thing was understanding why he had chosen such a tiny format, brush number two and pure colours squeezed straight from the tube, if we accept as a premise the fact that he had already become aware of the dwarf story. His paintings were gouaches on small sheets of nine by twelve paper, awkward and uninteresting. But, taking his mission to heart, Alberto went on forcing himself to learn the laws of perspective and the rules of colour combination, assimilating precept after precept from popular books, imitating the masters, great and small, depending on his need and the work itself.
Érnia grew calmer. She saw Alberto Inácio buried in the sofa, with his board on his knees, in front of a yoghurt pot full of water, bent over his drawing. She had given up trying to interest him in outside things, she knew that sitting was a step up from lying down. And she began to live above all outside the house.
With Anália, Alberto discussed the mixture of colours and the best way to obtain a bright ochre that didn't remind him - and here he hesitated over the expression, in order not to upset the psychologist's sensitivities - in short, that didn't look to him like a horse's do-do's. She sought to explore this more or less direct association that he made without noticing between all the tones of brown and horse droppings, and in next to no time, they were talking about Alberto's father, who now appeared to his son in a way that was very different from the one in which he had previously been dismissed in one of the first therapy sessions. Where there had been an austere, firm patriarch, isolated and indifferent to affections, there now appeared a timid, listless man, concerned with his family's survival and subject to the terrifying fits of rage of his boss, a terrible man, verging on the criminal, who would be locked up at the end of his life. Alberto's father had even altered physically: his iron chest and straight back gave way to an almost Chaplinesque figure, with long feet and a funny way of walking.
One Saturday afternoon, when Alberto had organised and filed away the drawings that the small twins had produced the week before and was preparing to start painting, Érnia came into the study leading Manuel António Pinto by the hand.
'I want you to meet someone... This is Manel...' she said, and it was the first time that Alberto had seen her ill at ease.
'Hello, Manel,' Alberto said, with such a sense of unreality that he forgot about his hand with the brush in it, hanging in mid air on its way to the water.
'We've already met,' said his workmate.
Manuel António Pinto's enormous height and considerable bulk walked across Alberto's office and stationed themselves in front of the abstract painting. Érnia and her husband waited for the outcome.
'Did you paint this?' asked the colossus. And, without needing an answer, 'I like it. I really do.'
