Eliete

by Dulce Maria Cardoso

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

*Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award*

Eliete is forty (-something)
Eliete has been married to Jorge for twenty years
Eliete has an average career as an average estate agent
Eliete has a completely normal life
Eliete has reached breaking-point

Eliete is stuck in both a dead-end job, and a dead-end marriage. She's never had many grand dreams or ambitions, but now she is starting to wonder if life might have passed her by, and if it's too late to do anything about it.

So, Eliete decides to join Tinder. She sets up some fake dating profiles, and embarks on a number of liaisons with various men around suburban Lisbon. Will this ignite her marriage with the spark it so desperately needs? Unlikely. It is the summer of 2016: Jorge has become hooked on Pokémon Go!, there's football on the telly, he's got opinions on Brexit, and he remains completely oblivious to his wife's new exploits.

And then, in the middle of all of this, Eliete's grandmother is diagnosed with dementia, and moves in with them. Alarmingly, her illness seems to have resurfaced some scandalous personal memories, and her unguarded outbursts threaten to reveal explosive, long-buried family secrets. Secrets that suddenly turn Eliete's perception of herself upside-down, as her seemingly normal life collapses around her . . .

Translated from the Portuguese by Ángel Gurría-Quintana

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 288

Sample

I am what I am and Salazar can go fuck himself. A dictator rules Portugal for almost half a century, almost another half century passes since his death, and then he shows up again. Suddenly it was as if he’d been here all along, running everything, I couldn’t let that happen.

*

It was five months before the night of the big storm when the hospital called about Grandma, but I feel like that was the moment when Salazar started insinuating himself into my life.

At the hospital, Mother kept saying, My mother-in-law has always had her head screwed on, I don’t know how this happened. It was no secret to anyone that Mother didn’t like Grandma, Our saints don’t get on, she would explain when she was in a good mood, at other times she would resort to cursing her, May a lightning bolt strike the old woman, let her die far away and see if I care. But, at the hospital, Mother’s concern appeared sincere and it was surprising to see her struggling to accept that, at eighty-one years of age, Grandma could have gone off the rails like that. It can’t be, my mother-in-law can’t be perfectly well one moment and then like this the next, she pleaded with the doctor, as if displaying her disbelief might allow her to magically understand what was going on. Politely ignoring Mother, the doctor turned to me and asked, Have you noticed your grandmother behaving unusually before this episode? Episode, that was the word the doctor used to describe an event as unusual as Grandma leaving home in her nightgown and her Sunday shoes, and walking around Cascais, before falling and gashing her head open at the souvenir shop on Rua Direita, and then being all tearful when Mother and I arrived at the hospital. We found her on a hospital bed, her head wound already dressed with a white bandage. Restless and anxious, she insisted on going into Lisbon. What’s wrong with her, she has always hated the city, Mother said with alarm. Do you think she drank something by mistake? I don’t think that’s what happened, the doctor replied. He was young, with a flat voice and an expensive aftershave. Mother smelled of the cheap scented water she bought by the half-litre at the pharmacy on Rua da Polícia, enough to fill twice the bottle of Bien Être that she kept on the chest of drawers in her bedroom. I would recognise that mix of synthetic lavender and lemon given off by Mother anywhere, her shaved armpits, the folds of her tummy, her fleshy thighs. I would recognise anywhere the smell of those evenings when I fell asleep on her lap while watching television.

God knows what else she’ll do next, Mother fretted, which was unusual for her since, unlike Grandma, Mother never wanted anything to do with God. What misfortune awaits us now, she fretted, raising her eyebrows like the heroines in photo novels do at moments of concern or anxiety. If there was one thing Mother prized, it was her photo novels. She had them bound in sets of ten, with red and gold covers, and displayed them on the pine bookshelf that she had bought at the second-hand furniture store when we moved to Grandma’s house. How does someone end up like that, Mother asked, clearly as troubled as I was. She was referring to the distress that had taken over Grandma, get me out of here, get me out of here, take me to Lisbon, she begged and shouted, trying to take off her hospital gown and rip out the needle that connected her to the drip.

She tore off the gown before we could stop her, revealing herself naked, unfettered by modesty, pink nipples cresting the trembling breasts, a perfect triangle of grey hair covering her pubis, very pale skin lined with the same wrinkles she had on her hands and neck, like an ancient piece of pottery gently worked over by time, a body in which everything seemed to be proportionate and casually delicate. I had never seen Grandma naked. Except for her face and hands, her body had always been hidden beneath layers of black, black skirt, black nightdress, black stockings and shoes. When I was a girl, I imagined she was like those mannequins from the bridal shop where Mother worked, a plastic body onto which someone had attached an old head and hands. At some point I became convinced that this was exactly what Grandma wanted us to believe, such were the lengths she went to in order to conceal her body. The mournfulness, the sombreness and the severity with which she always dressed and behaved hadn’t hidden her beauty, but only now, seeing her undressed, did I realise that they had managed to conceal the alluring woman she had undoubtedly been. For Grandma, nudity was the devil’s temptation, like almost everything else in life, the devil was tireless in his trickery, and Grandma needed to be even more tireless in her vigilance. Come here, Eliete, she called out to me one afternoon, a moment that remains whole and intact in my mind. I was passing by the kitchen, on my way to the garden to cool off under the hosepipe, wearing the swimsuit Mother had bought me at the market, a swimsuit with white stars on a blue background. Come here, Eliete, you’re a young woman now, you mustn’t be going around like that. Grandma was sitting on a dark wooden stool by the balcony door shelling broad beans, her hands still untroubled by the old age that would make them fragile and hesitant, Senhor Pereira on the other side of the house, locked away in his study as usual, and Mother at work, a late afternoon train-and-bus ride away. In my hand, the orange cotton towel that I would stretch out on the concrete slab, my rocky island in the middle of the garden.

The long holiday afternoons were so slow that they melded into each other, becoming a single never-ending afternoon. In my small world, changes always led, incessantly, to new beginnings, pomegranate flowers announced the end of summer, winter light gilded the persimmons, oranges ripened and were turned into the marmalade that Grandma kept in the cupboard in jars labelled “Bitter Orange”, ants marched in single file, birds huddled in tree branches. In the morning the sun shone into Grandma’s bedroom and in the afternoon it came to rest in my room and in Mother’s, at night the moonlight shone wherever it wanted to.

Standing up, tightening every muscle in my little body, I would put the spout of the green hose pipe against my head, waiting for the cold water to leave the earth’s bowels and run riot over my body. To release me from the spell of the interminable afternoon, my body would start moving of its own accord. Feim aim gonnaliv forevar, I would hear myself singing from within my swimsuit with its white stars, my feet muddy, Feim aim gonnaliv forevar. I knew no English, life was not yet able to offer anything other than the childhood I would never escape.

I would let the cold water run over my body, the skin on my hands wrinkling and my lips turning purple, just a little more, just a little more, the cold water streaming from the earth’s bowels until I was unable to breathe. The longer I could withstand it, the greater the pleasure of lying down on the towel spread over the concrete slab, just a little more, I would say to myself, just a little more. The heat in the slab warmed my body, one pore at a time, and tamed it, made it once again submissive. I would open my eyes, notice the forming and unravelling of clouds, seeking out the animal shapes, a dolphin wrapping itself around a tiger’s head before stretching into the form of a snake, a sky not yet crisscrossed by aeroplane trails, an endless and scattered world. Come here, Eliete.

The blue ceramic bowl almost filled with little green kidneys, Grandma not even raising her eyes, her fingers intent on bursting open the bean pods that piled up on newspaper sheets, and which we would chop up and throw into the chicken coop, made up of wire fencing and a corrugated tin roof between the garage and the wall at the back of the garden. A decent girl cannot walk around the house like that, she can’t be showing the world and his wife what belongs to her future husband. Grandma seemed to have no greater ambition than to tame my flesh and my soul. You don’t want to be like the others, do you? The others, the sluts, the ones who had lost their way and were condemned to the hell of eternally grinding teeth and flames taller than mountains, the skanks, the ones I would soon be secretly envying. At that point, I no longer worried about the details of Grandma’s stories, I no longer quizzed her about how God decided who to please if I prayed for sunshine but she prayed for rain, I knew her answer by heart, it’s not you asking those questions, it’s the devil himself. Grandma then explained that the devil made us doubt that God would, in time, reveal everything that needed to be revealed, and the proof that God wouldn’t abandon us was in the stories of miracles told at Mass. Isaac, son of Abraham and Sarah, the manna from heaven as the chosen people crossed the desert, Elijah fed by ravens, the crumbling walls of Jericho, in due course God would supply all my needs. Apparently, the delay between the moment when I expressed a need and the moment it was satisfied was one of God’s ways of testing my faith.

But that afternoon neither I nor the devil asked any questions. We both knew my body had changed and that it was dragging me helplessly along with it. The change had started quietly with the two fleshy bumps growing on my skinny chest, two fleshy bumps that I tried to smother against the mattress, always sleeping face-down, two fleshy bumps that ached close to my heart and that the boys made fun of, Stop the ball with your chest, Eliete, just don’t puncture it, the boys played with their flat chests, dreaming of Maradona, Platini, Rummenigge and other names that took up all their conversations. I could have coped with the boys’ laughter if the fleshy bumps hadn’t been followed by the shame of dark hair between my legs and in my armpits, of my thighs filling out the denim trousers like legs of ham, of the smelly grown-up sweat that I covered with the deodorant Mother bought at the same pharmacy as her fake Bien Être, an aerosol that caused my armpits to itch.

Come here, Eliete. I knew nothing was the same in my body, that blood had started to seep out of me, thick and dark blood that forced me to use sanitary pads every month. Above all I was afraid of someone noticing I was using the pads, that the boys would start with their teasing. Benfica is playing in its red kit, or, Run away, there’s a red tide today! The boys guffawing through crooked teeth that had yet to find their place, their faces nicked by shaving blades that seemed to cut through more pimples than hairs. The shame of them knowing that I used pads added to my fear of the disgusting blood staining my clothes, the new and humiliating habit of having to sneak into toilets to change the pad and the various precautions I was suddenly forced to take. To never, under any circumstance, leave the pack of pads in the toilet cabinet at home so that Senhor Pereira wouldn’t have the unpleasant experience of finding it when he opened the cabinet to splash some Old Spice onto his face with loud slaps, Men don’t want to know about such things, Mother or Grandma explained. The issue of menstruation was one of the few on which they agreed, men didn’t like finding packs of sanitary pads or hearing about cramps and chocolate cravings, menstruation was a woman’s business like embroidery, cooking and housework, it was discussed quietly and led to all sorts of prohibitions. On those days one shouldn’t wash one’s hair, walk around in bare feet, enter a cemetery, do any physical exercise nor go to the beach, since one’s flower was open and blood might either rush to the head or flow non-stop. Even though they mostly agreed on the subject, Mother and Grandma disagreed on some of the details. According to Mother I could wash my hair as long as I didn’t take too long, I could exercise as long as I didn’t stand on my head, and I could go to the beach as long as I didn’t sunbathe. To Mother’s and Grandma’s orders and counter-orders was added the conflicting advice from friends and classmates, from Milena who used tampons with no fear of losing her virginity, from Clara who knew of a home remedy to stop the belly from swelling, from Paulinha, who stopped the bleeding with cold showers, and so we grew together through pride in our common destiny as future procreators. We bled proudly every month, even if we were made uncomfortable by cramps, spotty faces and sanitary pads, because as long as we bled we could fulfil the destinies, given only to us, of bringing children into the world. The worst that could happen to a woman was to be unserviceable in that department, all we had to do was look at Dona Rosalinda, who lived a couple of houses away from Grandma and was forced to raise her husband’s two little dark-skinned bastards, amid insults and thrashings. The poor woman cannot give him any children, Grandma explained, everyone knows that in such circumstances, the men will go and find them somewhere else. As everyone knew that this was how things were, Dona Rosalinda thanked God for having escaped the fate of unserviceable women, which was, as everyone knew, to be abandoned.

At the supermarket, when Senhor Pascoal stood in for his wife at the checkout counter, Mother took her time walking along the half dozen aisles as if she were visiting a museum. Men get ideas into their heads when they see certain things, Mother said to me once, enigmatically, as we killed time near the detergent shelves, the pack of sanitary pads hidden beneath the rest of our shopping. If there was no urgency, and if Senhor Pascoal’s wife was taking too long to return to the checkout counter, Mother would give up on buying the pads. We’ll get them next time, she’d say, as if some invisible superior force had made her stop. If there was some urgency, Mother would sigh as if resigned to face a volley of bullets and, discreetly, she would place the pack of pads on the checkout belt, not daring to meet eyes with Senhor Pascoal, who must have been getting into his head the ideas that men get into their heads when they see certain things.

Come here, Eliete. After that afternoon, there were no more hosepipe showers in the garden and the swimsuit was used only at the beach, where a certain lack of modesty was permitted for health reasons, because the sea was good for me, especially for the allergies that gave me breathing difficulties, and the spots that disfigured my face. The beach I liked most was Tamariz, but we always went to Rainha, Mother’s favourite. We would arrive quite early, when the morning was still cool, the sun still low, to secure a good place near the large rock in the middle of the beach, around which other well-prepared beach goers would gather, and we would remain fully dressed until the sun was out. Every time, Mother would discuss with the other families the size of the waves, the level of the tide, the accuracy of the tidal forecasts, the inaccuracy of the weather forecasts, the haze that blocked her view of the cliffs, on top of which perched shops, restaurants and houses, their air conditioning units and aluminium awnings visible from the beach. Another thing that never changed was the spot she chose to keep the packed lunch we brought in a basket, egg sandwiches wrapped in rough paper towels, fresh oranges bought at the station bar. Here, in the rock’s shade, she would always say, as if it were the first time, and I couldn’t understand why it was so easy to predict tides and Mother’s behaviour but so difficult to predict weather or visibility. When the sun emerged, the moment came for Mother to slather our shoulders, nose and cheeks with Nivea cream, taking care to always open the blue jar over the towel because of the sand. I must have looked like an ugly clown, if the state of Mother’s face was anything to go by. After the daubing of the cream, Mother would lie belly-up and sleep with her mouth open as if she were at home. She even took a dip in the sea as if she were at home, bending over at the water’s edge and using her cupped hands to gather the foam from the shallow waves to refresh her sun-burnt skin. She often asked for my help when she was bathing in the sea like this, but I avoided it when I could. I was even more embarrassed by Mother putting on that display than by me not knowing how to do the front crawl when I swam.

For years I dreamed of imitating the perfect movements of those girls who swam in the sea as naturally as if they were walking on dry land, but unlike walking, running and jumping, the mere passage of time wasn’t enough for my body to learn how to swim properly, leaving me desperate to figure out how to coordinate my breathing, my strokes, my head rotations and all my other movements like those girls who swam with the boys all the way out to the boats moored in the distance. I could do breaststroke, and badly. One day I even made it as far as the rope with the orange floats a few metres before the boats, but I was never able to repeat the deed, I would get tired, swallow seawater, get cramps. I imagine I looked like I was being weighed down, like a stiff-necked turtle with frog legs and arms swinging in sad semicircles. Before falling asleep, in that brief interval between wakefulness and a slumber in which I was no longer properly myself, I pictured myself going into the water with a somersault or a pike jump and swimming front crawl out to the boats as fast as the heroines in Bond films, other holidaymakers would give me a standing ovation and I would walk out of the sea as if I were on a catwalk, no need to break the illusion by shaking my head to get water out of my ears or by shielding my eyes from the sun to find my towel. For a brief moment, I was the best and most elegant front crawl swimmer. If I was tired at bedtime, my dreams were less ambitious. I longed to have an even golden tan, to lose my fear of diving onto the ground as I reached for a ball during racquet sports, for ten fewer centimetres of waistline and about as many more of leg length. Really, there was nothing wrong with me, it was just a question of redistributing those centimetres. On those beach days I also longed to find my role in that seaside theatre, that enormous theatre in which everyone knew what character they were playing, the tobacco-chewing lifeguard, the girl who took her time getting into the water and the other one who whispered and laughed, the pedalo rental attendant offering discounts to pretty girls, the embarrassing mother, the couple entwining hands and legs, the family playing cards or the other family eating breaded chicken and melon cubes, the boy playing with a ball or the other boy splashing the girls, the wafer biscuit seller, the people who walked at the water’s edge, the ones who exercised, the ones who made an effort to get bronzed, the ones who read, everyone played their roles convincingly, except for me.

Now that you’re a young woman, anything can happen, you don’t have to look too far to know this. The first few times Grandma gave me this warning, I had no idea what she was talking about. It was the way she insisted that you don’t have to look too far and the way she emphasised it when Mother was nearby that led me to think about Mother’s past. I didn’t want to be like Mother, I didn’t want whatever had happened to her to happen to me, but it was too late to prevent Grandma’s words from igniting something, her anything can happen foreshadowing a future of adventure that I intended to embrace with all my strength. Anything can happen resonated within me like an exquisite echo, as if I were a boy. Anything could happen to boys, they didn’t need to feel fear or shame; fear and shame were always for the girls. Even if it was the boys trying to grope them or pulling them close to kiss them with tongues, the fault was always with the girls who had failed to avoid being harassed, the fault was always with the girls who had asked for it, the fault had always been with the girls since Eve gave Adam the apple, full-stop. Anything can happen, but within that anything, I would know how to become something different to Mother, to Mother and to Grandma, I would know how to be whoever I wanted to be.

Do something, doctor, please, do something, Mother begged, she seemed to be more upset about Grandma’s distress and nudity than I was. While I tried to sort out Grandma, the man on the nearby hospital bed, a grumpy man who had driven off the road on a motor scooter, tugged once more at the doctor’s coat to ask about the football score. I’m not interested in football, the doctor replied, a firm voice, a confident man. His lucky wife, I thought, she doesn’t have to see her husband knocking back cans of beer while he watches a match, she doesn’t have to listen to his ridiculous insults when he thinks someone has played badly or his throaty laugh when he reads what his friends are saying on Facebook, sneering at rival clubs. His lucky wife, she doesn’t have to witness her husband’s absurd anger at referees, how lucky not to be married to Jorge, how lucky not to be me.

There were no windows in the A&E room or in the corridor, where patient trolleys were lined up against the walls, and the strangely white light falling on us, especially the light falling on Grandma, was making me uncomfortable, making me feel guilty for not having answered the doctor’s question. Have you noticed your grandmother behaving unusually before this episode? I couldn’t find a way to tell him that I knew almost nothing about my grandmother’s day-to-day life, I was going to come across as the monstrous granddaughter who had abandoned her, but that’s not what happened, even though I couldn’t say what had happened. I wanted to escape and couldn’t. The light falling on us, especially the light falling on the doctor, emphasised his body and the muscles rippling beneath the coat. He was a young doctor who didn’t like football, and Mother wouldn’t shut up, Do something, doctor, please, do something. Suddenly, I pictured myself naked, bent over one of the trolleys in the corridor as the doctor spanked me, asking repeatedly as he fucked me, Any unusual behaviour, have you noticed any unusual behaviour? while I pondered his use of the word “episode”. Please doctor, I could still hear Mother’s strident voice even as I imagined dragging the doctor to the Venus suite of the motel on the IC19 motorway that I sometimes passed on the way to viewings. I was a competent estate agent, diligent in securing properties, persuasive in selling them, good at establishing partnerships with the best clients and implementing strategies that delivered unbeatable results, even if I wasn’t as eloquent as Natália, or had the photogenic looks that made her placards stop passers-by in their tracks wherever she put them up. Natália who had bee. . .