Chapter 44
Dinner passes in a haze. I am now too inebriated to follow the conversation, and even if I weren’t I would be in no mood for idle chatter. But it is good that I cannot think anymore, so I am spared my own thoughts.
Strange Madalena sits beside me looking vaguely distraught, and once again she and the doctor carry most of the conversation between the two of them.
Suddenly and without warning, Mother seizes my wrist. I recognize the look on her face even before she starts speaking in a threatening tone. She recites an Inferno passage about the souls in Hell stewing in a shore of boiling vermilion.
It’s Mother now. The Inferno passage is a telltale sign of Mother’s presence.
Even as a young woman, Mother was always fascinated with Dante’s Inferno and its vivid renderings of the nine rings of Hell.
When I was little, she frequently reminded me of possible punishments I could suffer for different sins.
She spoke often about the nature of divine justice, wherein the punishment mirrors the sin.
Over the years, she infused her rhetoric with teachings from the Old Testament as well.
I am caught between vague terror and a pleasing familiarity of Mother’s presence. I don’t know if she’s seeing me or not. I think maybe she is seeing me, at least somewhat. She wouldn’t talk to my father that way, would she?
Unwisely, I say: “Who do you think you’re talking to?”
I mean it as a simple question and not as an affront, but the words leave my mouth ripe for misunderstanding.
Mother lets go of my wrist and looks away, fading back to the soft expression of Strange Madalena.
Once again, Mother has flashed for a moment, briefly come to life, then disappeared inside the alien mind of the younger Madalena.
I feel myself deflate. Will this be the rest of my life?
Living with Strange Madalena? Death, the fate that seemed so horrible months ago when Mother first fell ill, now seems peaceful and preferable to the situation we find ourselves in, and the life that stands before us now.
I should have done as Mother asked: called for a priest and accepted her natural death. I would have been parted from her only temporarily, only in the four or so decades that are left of my time on earth. Doctor Amado was right—I should have learned to live with my new reality.
Mother rises from the table abruptly. There’s something robotic and strange about the way she moves, almost like she’s sleepwalking.
She goes into the kitchen.
I sit up, alert. What is Mother doing in the kitchen in the middle of dinner?
I overhear Maria das Dores speaking to her. “Do you need something, Sinhá Madalena?”
I don’t hear a response.
Alarm bells ring inside my head.
A moment later, Maria das Dores’s voice rings again, this time louder and laced with concern: “Sinhá Madalena…?”
I push back the chair and rush to the kitchen.
Strange Madalena stands with a firm grip on the glass dome that encases Mother’s fubá cake.
Mother made the fubá cake when she first got sick.
It was always my favorite. Then she fell ill, and I set it aside for us to eat later when she recovered.
But she got worse. I told Maria das Dores not to discard it, hoping that Mother would recover.
Each day I hoped that the next day she would turn a corner.
Weeks passed. As I hardly come into the kitchen, I didn’t notice how putrid the cake got.
One day Maria das Dores came into my study and asked about discarding it.
It irritated me and I snapped, saying, “Why must you bring this up again?” She hasn’t brought it up since.
Strange Madalena shoots me a hateful look as she clutches the dome. I don’t know what she’s thinking, but it can’t be good.
With whatever faculties remain of me, I try to choose my words carefully. “What are you doing?”
“This is connected to her somehow.” Strange Madalena’s voice is full of poison. She’s breathy and shaky and there’s a broken thread in it that makes my heart twist. “It is why you cannot dispose of it.”
She is hovering in the vicinity of the truth, yet she’s not there. It wasn’t the last thing she ate before she died, and we didn’t share it as a last meal, and I don’t intend to keep it forever. It’s so much more mundane than that.
But the cake could have reminded her, and it didn’t.
I fear she’ll never come to remember who she is, or who I am.
Her mind will twist and turn and reframe events forever, according to the framework of June 1877.
She understands herself now as a separate person from Mother.
Even though she doesn’t know, still she knows.
Doctor Lobo comes up behind me now, watching the spectacle.
She starts asking me pointed questions. “Is that why you’re so distraught here? You’re haunted by her? Who was down in the senzala?”
Doctor Lobo tries to placate her. “No one’s haunted, Madalena. Just come back to the table.”
“I would believe it,” she says, “if only it were Leandro saying it.”
She looks at me, as though daring me. In the silence that follows, I can feel Doctor Lobo and Maria das Dores watching me, waiting, wondering why I’m not saying anything.
But I can’t. I won’t keep lying to Mother. I won’t pretend to be my father, rattling off lie after lie without conscience, like Lobo does. I won’t add another lie to the little box of lies.
The room spins. Her asking about herself without realizing, past and future going around in circles in my head like a spinning wheel. I’m not sure what is true anymore, what is a lie. What might be a subtle hint or what might give everything away and trigger a terrible stupor.
“And you’ve decided that based on what,” Doctor Lobo says, “a moldy cake?”
She bites her lip and looks between him and me. I search for Mother in her expression, but don’t see it. There is only the anguish of the more na?ve Madalena. And she doesn’t seem at all appeased by Lobo’s cajoling words.
“Let’s just go back to dinner,” Doctor Lobo says. “Come now.”
“If I’m wrong,” she insists, “then surely it’s fine if I discard this cake right now?”
“I…” I start. “I simply forgot about the cake. It slipped my mind. I’ll take care of it later.”
Doubt creeps into her eyes. “What of…what of the renovations? Who slept in the room upstairs? Who was down in the senzala?”
The mention of the senzala makes me freeze.
“You’re just going to stand there silent?” Her voice rises. “Letting him speak on your behalf? Coward. You were full of sweet words the day we saw the circus together, when you led me to the cliff and put a child in me!”
“What?”
“I am with child!”
“It’s not mine!”
Her features contort into a hideous grimace, and in a flash she’s struck me hard across the face. My cheek starts stinging. A burning feeling climbs up from my gut and squeezes my chest. Why did she hit me? The unfairness of it burns through me.
She tosses the cake into the open flames.
I see it unfold as if in a dream: the cornmeal, partly disintegrated already, grinds to ash quickly amid the flames.
Silence falls as we all watch it burn, like revelers watching the bonfires on the eve of S?o Jo?o.
The occasional pop and crackle, the vague smoky scent.
But Mother doesn’t remember. It’s not her fault.