I sat down, out of breath, on the landing between the third and fourth floors. I didn't switch the stairwell lights on again for the same reason I had avoided the elevator: the hour was too black to set the minds of the old and insomniac neighbours wondering. I continued to climb, opening my legs wider to sustain my weight and leaning against the wall, because the railing creaked. I'd gotten as fat as he was.
    "Come over, she's about to call it quits," he'd said on the phone, "if she hasn't already."
    The cab driver snickered as my weight plopped on the back seat, the car tilting, or so it seemed.
    "What is it, you creep? If you think there's excess baggage, I'll hail another."
    He didn't answer. Who would know I wasn't armed at five a.m., alone, with that kind of cheek? But the angry outburst kept me from crying. And afterwards it was already too late.
    He took a long time to open the door. I rang again, two short rings. I heard him pant, dragging his slippers as if he'd gotten out of bed.
    I looked at the huge, disproportioned mass in pyjamas, silhouetted in the light of the hallway. I'd forgotten that the flat was so closed, like the inside of a box lined with an ochre, cornucopia-stamped paper, dark, unkempt, the lights yellowed from dust or insufficient wattage.
    He said, "Ah, you're here." But he didn't move to let me through.
    I kissed him with some disgust. He smelled of pesticides, rotting pipes, alcohol. His eyes were smaller than I remembered, and puffy. He had even less hair, tangled in tufts. And his three-day old beard was pitted with bald craters. From the kitchen came the unbridled shaking of the washing machine in its final spin-dry cycle, which didn't even strike me as odd at that hour, about five in the morning.
    "You're also fat as a cow." His tone was heedless to me, heedless to everything. He closed the door, turned the bolt, and stuck the keys in his torn pyjama pocket. I picked them up from the ground and put them back in the lock, saying I might have to leave before.
    "Before what?" he asked in the same remote tone. But the voice was the beautiful, deep, resonant voice that had always been touted as his greatest gift after his height and his handsome eyes, before we both plumped out. Tears came to my ears, for I didn't actually cry.
    "Before what?" he asked in the same remote tone. But the voice was the beautiful, deep, resonant voice that had always been touted as his greatest gift after his height and his handsome eyes, before we both plumped out. Tears came to my ears, for I didn't actually cry.
    "How do you expect her to be? Dead."
    "What time?"
    "God knows, I lost track."
    I advanced through the darkness of the living room, lit only by the glass panes over the doors. I noticed the absence of all objects of any value, the silver, the bibelots, various pieces of furniture covered by white sheets. But she had also lived at my place, years ago, when still almost a girl, until I could no longer put up with the stealing and the lies, the swindles and the sloth, the loss of the lover I had and my girl friends, who never went to the bathroom without taking their handbags and commenting on the state of the toilet.
    "How can you stand this?"
    "Where is she supposed to go?"
    But she went. To Tires for detoxification, then back to Tires, until she began to be seen in Lisbon's red light district, skinny as a rail. And finally the hospital.
    I kept earning or losing a living far away from here, a guilt ridden manic-dependent of chocolates and diets for no one, returning rarely, with the cat container in my luggage. I'd come back for good one week before. I knew he'd gone to fetch her from the hospital. It struck me how self-absorbed he'd become, an eccentric and phlegmatic old man, he who had been our mother's darling boy, regardless of his follies, abuses and failures.
    He dragged his slippers after me, stopping at the threshold of the large bedroom that was like she'd left it, she our mother, before he'd taken her to the home run by nuns, where she'd have company and proper care, he wrote me in his disjointed handwriting.
    Above the bed's headboard with inlays, someone, I suppose my brother, had removed the crucifix with an ivory Christ and replaced it with an enlarged sepia photo of our mother, her hair secured by headbands and sporting a mink collar on her astrakhan coat, which had vanished years ago thanks to our sister.
    Our much younger sister, everyone's doll, until she grew into a fussy and crafty teenager, acting like she'd been orphaned by her father, as if we weren't all victims of his self-centred negligence.
    She lay on her back, already composed, hands crossed over her chest. But a pillow with our mother's monogram covered her face.
    "What's this for?"
    "Look."
    Her eyes were open, and her mouth, blistered with herpes, showed darkened teeth in a painful-looking rictus. I tried to shut her eyes, but she had already gone stiff and cold. There were bald patches on her scalp, and the few blond tufts that remained had been combed to the sides of her sunken but still beautiful face, an exquisitely delicate wreck. For some stupid reason I remembered something she'd said as a little girl. A sign of her premature coquettishness that went down in her history: "I still haven't found a way to wear my hair that goes with my soul."
    She was nine years old and was already in the habit of stealing from the maids' savings and from the change left over after shopping.
    I pulled down the sheet. A rag, her nightgown stained with blood and urine, needle marks on her arms and wrists, what veins still wanted to get between her skin and bone. He had tied her bare feet together with a black-bordered men's handkerchief, it was too grotesque to be comic but I laughed with a kind of hiccup. I noticed that her nails were dirty with what looked to me like dried blood. I turned around. Our brother, leaning against the doorjamb, had red scratch marks from his wrists to his hands that were now securing his crossed arms.
    We looked at each other for a short time, and a time. His withered eyes, which had been so dark and intense before becoming forever evasive, sought nothing: they did not waver or implore.
    "I'm going to wash her," I said. And I began opening drawers in search of towels, still knowing exactly where everything was! Among the towels, the sheets riddled by woodworms, the shirts trimmed with guipure and the moth-eaten nightshirts, I ran across hidden objects, including the jewel box, and began to arrange them on top of the furniture in the same order they'd always had.
    "We have to call the doctor, register the death, contact the funeral parlour."
    "In a little while," he said. "The doctor was here two days ago and didn't increase the dosage like she asked. There was no longer any point."
    "No point? And the pains?"
    He shrugged his shoulders: "I did what I did."
    With a porcelain shepherdess in hand, I suddenly remembered: "Did you bleed when she...?"
    With the back of his wounded hand, he wiped his face and his nose's dripping. Without sobbing, without expression.
    I didn't offer him my arms, nor did I seek comfort in his.
    When I went to the kitchen to fetch a plastic tub, hot water and sponges, I heard him in the room where he'd installed his amateur radio equipment.
    Willow, willow, willow, I heard. Willow, willow, willow.
    Willow? Pretentious to the end. Our mother's same old fawning litany: "Foolish, but such a good heart."
    I laughed and two warm drops entered my mouth at the corners. I blew my nose on the handkerchief that had tied her feet.
    "He's so cultured. He could be anything."
    When I returned to the bedroom, I stuck the jewel box into the bag I'd brought with the mourning clothes.

Translated from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith

 Maria

 Velho

 da Costa