Morte às Vassouras em breve irá atravessar a ponte...
Agradeço desde já a todos que sempre estiveram ao meu lado, direta e indiretamente!
Tradução Dr Margaret Anne Clarke
Death to the Brushes
INTRODUCTION
I entered the room softly, almost on tip-toe. I had been invited into the family home to lend a hand with the furniture, the dishes, the breakfast, the lunch, the dinner, and, above all, the old folk of the house. Assuming my usual mask of shyness, I approached them with the strategy I had decided on beforehand, blurting out refined language, along with a torrent of thank you so much, if you please, excuse me.
And when I made my presence felt, I felt alert eyes focused on me, curious, yet cold and alien. At that moment of rejoicing, I caught snatches of approving comments, something along the lines of how sweet, so polite, it must be because she reads a lot, don’t you think?
I felt confused by the antique dressers, the tables laid for lunch, ritual, ritual…
Life is a ritual, sweetheart …
Crouched on the floor, I picked up the breadcrumbs which had fallen from the table while my employers lunched or ate dinner in my presence and waited in the corner until they had finished. I stood in the room, mute, giving an impression of an old and forgotten statue.
Two old people, lost in the present day, but still preserving their old-world stiffness of decades ago. Incapable of looking me in the eye and asking even: do you have a mother?
Oh! No. The past recreates itself; my hands which now serve others, were full themselves once …
“Can you read and write, girl?”
She still takes care to use lipstick, and with age comes benevolence. The all-powerful doctor has taken care of her failing sight, and beyond that, her deafness to great events. Today at lunch the old folk are surrounded by guests, but alone, very alone with their china and porcelain. They imagine steel safes filled with cash, chained to the vicissitudes of their ephemeral existence, and climbing day after day, in a primitivism at once laconic and playful.
“You know, dear, she’s so intelligent! At last, a civilised person in this house”.
But she only answers the phone when I’m not there
Agradeço desde já a todos que sempre estiveram ao meu lado, direta e indiretamente!
Tradução Dr Margaret Anne Clarke
Death to the Brushes
INTRODUCTION
I entered the room softly, almost on tip-toe. I had been invited into the family home to lend a hand with the furniture, the dishes, the breakfast, the lunch, the dinner, and, above all, the old folk of the house. Assuming my usual mask of shyness, I approached them with the strategy I had decided on beforehand, blurting out refined language, along with a torrent of thank you so much, if you please, excuse me.
And when I made my presence felt, I felt alert eyes focused on me, curious, yet cold and alien. At that moment of rejoicing, I caught snatches of approving comments, something along the lines of how sweet, so polite, it must be because she reads a lot, don’t you think?
I felt confused by the antique dressers, the tables laid for lunch, ritual, ritual…
Life is a ritual, sweetheart …
Crouched on the floor, I picked up the breadcrumbs which had fallen from the table while my employers lunched or ate dinner in my presence and waited in the corner until they had finished. I stood in the room, mute, giving an impression of an old and forgotten statue.
Two old people, lost in the present day, but still preserving their old-world stiffness of decades ago. Incapable of looking me in the eye and asking even: do you have a mother?
Oh! No. The past recreates itself; my hands which now serve others, were full themselves once …
“Can you read and write, girl?”
She still takes care to use lipstick, and with age comes benevolence. The all-powerful doctor has taken care of her failing sight, and beyond that, her deafness to great events. Today at lunch the old folk are surrounded by guests, but alone, very alone with their china and porcelain. They imagine steel safes filled with cash, chained to the vicissitudes of their ephemeral existence, and climbing day after day, in a primitivism at once laconic and playful.
“You know, dear, she’s so intelligent! At last, a civilised person in this house”.
But she only answers the phone when I’m not there
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