This is the second of a series of pieces written earlier in the pandemic by Portuguese writer Gabriela Ruivo Trindade. They appear here in my translation. Both original and translation can be found together on the author's blog.
4 April 2020
The sun is still up there. The trees, the birds. Everything in its own place. We still look to the sky for signs. And we avoid the depths of the soul, knowing them to be bottomless. Where can we bury the fear, if we cannot even carry it in our hands? We live day-to-day. We keep working, washing our faces in the morning. Voices reach us that we would rather ignore. From far off. We need to concentrate on the noise. Silence brings mournful thoughts. Convoys of military vehicles carrying bodies. How will we ever be the same after this? And now, here? Nothing has changed around us, clouds remain hovering above. It rains. We feel cold. We are still breathing. We transplant a life inside four walls, as if that were possible. We tell the children that everything’s fine. That everything will be fine. We tell ourselves the same. We return to childhood, to the land of the absurd, where we can all be kings and princesses. We believe naively what we repeat over and over, whispering, like a prayer. Wordless. A sort of white noise that accompanies us, a monologue that enters our dreams and stains our nightmares with omens. We don’t want to think about death. How do you think about death? Your own death? That of those you love? And yet, there is no thought that does not approach it, halt by it, end up in it. Death is omnipresent. People dying alone at home. In hospitals, alone. Surrounded by machines and medical workers who don’t have time to be, only to function, like machines. And so many of them succumbing. Failing, like machines. Perishing like humans, already in the place of the sick, leaving their own place vacant for another support machine. An emotional human-machine, programmed to fight until the last for everyone’s life. A selfless machine with a heart the size of this pandemic. Bigger than this pandemic, than the whole universe. So many humans that save us with the strength and determination of machines, and we thank them for being flesh and bone and failing, because we wouldn’t have it any other way. If death could not embrace us, that would mean we were already dead, long dead, without having noticed it. No one wants to think about death, but we can’t stop doing it. Without really thinking, because you don’t think about death. You hear talk. Jimmy couldn’t bear it and threw himself under a train. The number of suicides has shot up but that can’t be a news story, because despair is also contagious. Just like fear. There are houses where loneliness has dug an impassable moat. Others where daily violence abounds with the virulence of the plague. Not all houses can be shelters. In some, death comes quicker. Those blessed souls for whom their house is a nest have no idea. From there they do not witness the war. The trenches were dug outside the safety zone and in the hospitals. From their windows, the world seems normal. The sun is still up there. And it will remain there long after everything else has stopped seeming normal.
Translated from the Portuguese by Andrew McDougall
Gabriela Ruivo Trindade (Lisbon, 1970) graduated in psychology and has lived in London since 2004. She was the winner of the Prémio LeYa in 2013 for her first novel, Uma Outra Voz, which was also awarded with the Prémio PEN Clube Português Primeira Obra (ex-aequo) in 2015 and published in Brazil in 2018 (LeYa – Casa da Palavra). Her other works include the children’s book A Vaca Leitora (D. Quixote, 2016). Between 2016 and 2020 she contributed to a number of poetry and short story anthologies, and her first poetry collection, Aves Migratórias, was published in 2019 (On y va). She manages Miúda Children’s Books in Portuguese, an online bookshop specialising in children’s literature written in Portuguese.