Oporto, Rua Do Senhor Da Boa Morte

By: Georgia Diakou

                                                               To Genia

It all begins with the light falling on the wood. The headboard is made of wood and forms a perfect rectangle. Perfect because it’s as if her head were defining the right angles. It brings me relief for now. I feel my limbs softening, like when I sink into water.

My limbs are trembling. The crust of the world is constantly vibrating. There are no certainties about tomorrow. My legs have lost the muscle strength they once had. The planes outside the window may be carrying weapons. Nuclear power plants operate to defend a few billion. Immigrants are persecuted for criminal offenses. The criminal offense is crossing the sea. Walking is a recommended method for raising the heart rate to acceptable limits. Limits, frameworks, borders. Words that drive me crazy. Behind the vowels, the surveillance of movements. Methods that reveal everything.

A little further on, the ocean begins. The Atlantic Ocean. She says, “First comes the river, then the ocean.” “From where to where?” I say. “Show me.” And her finger traces a path that vision cannot perceive.

The world of knowledge is a construct of pride. “I know, I, I, I know, know, know.” And at the end of the conversation, the disappointment of delusion. I saw the man attaching a dried frog to his fishing rod.

“In the river or the ocean?” she asks me, and I don’t know how to answer. But I can say, “You’re beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. You’ve got a bit of bread stuck in your teeth.”

When we’ve walked ten kilometers, I start to grumble. “Sorry,” I say, “I’m hungry,” I say, and a little dog comes to kiss us. We stand on the rock and watch the wave crash into another wave and grow bigger.

“Can you keep my dog?” a freckled lady asks us before diving into the ocean. The water is seven degrees. The dog stays with us; we hold the dog, who is trembling because she’s left with two strangers while his owner battles the waves. She cries a little. She cries and then kisses us. “Look what she’s doing!” you say to me. The necklace says “Bwana.”

Expensive cars pass us by. A former carpenter who’s now homeless passes us by, too. “He’s speaking in a video made by some influencers who go to the most dangerous places in the world, find poor people, ask them this and that, and the camera records it—and maybe, I hope, they pay them.”

“Over the last fourteen months, I often imagine the camera’s movement; I often imagine you.” Phrases I jot down but don’t say aloud. Whatever you say aloud becomes eternal. In conditions of exhaustion, we can imagine things up to the point of revelation. The world dissolves and three, two, one—nothing. Nothing, a superlative negative, so negative that nothing is built within it.

The layout of this city is circular. On the hill, next to the river, across from the river, and beneath the two bridges. On the bus, three elderly Catholic women are returning from the vigil for Saint Stephen. One is so frail she could be a saint. What is her secret pleasure?

The garden is dark. “Dark gardens also serve as rites of passage into adulthood.” “How do you know?” she asks me. “I don’t know. I suppose,” I reply. When we reach the center, some people have lit a fire and are singing. The grass is wet. The grass grows on the curb. An insignificant girl might bump her head.

“Rents are too expensive.” We couldn’t live together here. The two of us, poor, with a few touches of luxury like coffee with milk at the makeshift café, like half an hour of breathless kissing, like improvisations of ancient tragedy in the shower, like nose-biting and other tales of crazy homoeroticism. What I like most is making her laugh. Then little streams form, connecting her eyes to her nose and folding her feelings inward.

I don’t know how to fold clothes or tie my shoelaces properly. The method is like a rabbit’s ears: one, two, and the second is tied to the first. I have a hard time letting go of my hands. The clinging to my mother’s body. The attachment of lesbians. Ten thousand ways to carry you on my back when the final destruction begins.

“We’ll go up,” I tell you. “Where?” you reply. There, and I point to the bell tower of the Duomo. I’ll carry you over the stones, up the hills, on the trucks through the gutted houses and their ghosts so we can reach the bell.

With us, people from East Timor and Guinea-Bissau will take their revenge on the city of their colonizers by surviving, they, we, and other random beings who passed through here for a moment and thought that perhaps they shouldn’t leave, at least not now, at least not yet, at least not until they’ve counted the movements of the chickens, the ducks and peacocks in the park, where dogs aren’t allowed.