Veranda
By Lucia Leao
I dreaded the perfume of body powder and of the prospective of the sunset that I felt every Sunday at my grandfather’s house. The veranda where he used to sit with his radio to listen to the soccer matches faced the mountains of Rio. At the sunset, the lights of the modest houses around us could be seen in the distance, coming up slowly from behind the trees and behind the day that was leaving us. Back then, there was not what we now call slums, but the presence that breathed in the mountains told a story made of samba and blackness, of rivers and music, of life and death.
The black-and-white tile that formed hexagonal patterns on the floor had cracks that seemed to grow every week. On my grandfather’s neck the white blotches of powder made me uncomfortable. Was he a baby or an elderly man?
There was a sense of accomplishment in the almost evenings when I saw him there. The week that was behind had been another challenge that we had all faced together. And together we stayed, in the family.
When I was a child growing up very close to my grandparents, Sundays were the days when the structure of the family was more visible. My grandfather was the successful businessman whose house was the center of energy for all of us. He was a tall man, with Italian ancestors, and a sweet tooth. He had a big forehead and a big smile. There were special desserts for him, who would take a nap after lunch and wait patiently for the soccer game to be broadcast through his portable radio.
He didn’t wear glasses, and I could see his eyes fixed in some indefinite point as he sat on his chair with his ear glued to the small round speaker, on the radio. Sometimes he would look at the floor for so long, I would think he was sleeping with his eyes opened. But he was only listening. The swinging motion of the hammocks where I sat in the big and long veranda made his profile tremble, as if the face were a sound and the waves could be disturbed by my movements that tried to change his routine.
Maybe it was the repetition that bothered me, and the way he distanced himself from the rest of us. He seemed to become a statue with an empty brain and an empty mouth on those Sunday evenings. He would not talk with anybody until the game was over. It was not that I wanted his attention, it was something else that I wanted, maybe to alter his profile. I was about six and I loved his loud, easy laughter, and his height. He seemed to be above everybody else in the house.
There was an agony of things coming to an end on Sundays, especially when the night came. We would go back to our house, my sisters, my parents and I. It would be hard for us to leave my grandparents again, as it was clearly difficult for my mother to separate from her parents. There was a tragic feeling in the air, as if life were too short for families to live apart. We lived one hour away from them.
My father would in a few years replace my grandfather, since he was the one that my mother had chosen to fulfill this role in her life. This would come much later and we needed first to experience the power that grandparents can have if life allows them to.
The diabetes changed my grandfather’s life completely the day he woke up blind. I was eight years old. He was 55. He would live almost 30 years in the dark, relying on sounds and on the recognition of shapes to move around.
Later, after retiring, he would rely on the radio for having contact with the world, and more and more as he got older. There was no surgery that could give him back his vision. And he never showed any kind of despair.
For us it was painful and embarrassing to have him around, as time went by. He wore big sunglasses to hide the eyes with no expression, and he had to be attended to as a child does. We helped him around every time he came to visit or when we went to his house. But the embarrassment was related to the way he showed a happiness that didn’t seem to be consistent with his condition. He behaved like a child or somebody too naïve most of the time, as if not aware of the seriousness of his disease and of his condition. There was something bewildering about his behavior, as if he had made up a faith in life or as if I was the one, for instance, who needed to make up one for myself.
I had teary eyes every time he touched my face, my hair, and smiled, trying to figure out how I looked, since I was growing and he couldn’t see me. He did it to all of us, to my two sisters and my brother. And I wanted to run away. His lack of desperation puzzled me.
But before his blindness, on the evenings on the veranda, I felt a restless need to do something, as if old age and the passage of time were already too close to me. I felt a need that I now recognize as the need to know what to do with the melancholic waves coming from everywhere around us at the end of those Sundays. Life seemed to inspire a longing for something else that was maybe far away.
Some say the presence of slaves can do that to a people, reminding them unconsciously of the need to get free, of the sadness of being bound to a world to which they don’t belong, of separation and loss. The end of the day would bring the certainty that there are chains that need to be broken, but haven’t been broken yet. Isn’t love some kind of imprisonment? Isn’t family love the biggest captivity of all?
The idea of a prison that stays inside the culture after slavery is finished is a symbolic one, and it brings the longing for an undefined freedom. My family had, as most people in my country, a past full of sad chants that the slaves had brought from afar. We had inherited maids who were part of that past, black, mulatto, poor, and in a subordinate position. Some of us heard the sadness in their history, in their chants. Others heard the mysticism, the poetry, and a different musical rhythm, but we were all surrounded by them one way or another.
So, maybe it was a life bigger than mine that influenced my vision of my grandfather and shaped the question his existence seemed to draw in mine. Maybe it was the net of family blood and genes and stories weaved throughout the generations. But I will never forget the sound of the soccer games, the screams of “Goooooooooooooooool” coming from the radio, muffled sounds distorted by my grandfather’s ear against the speaker. I will never forget the purple sky, the open veranda, the voices coming from inside the house, the dining room lights being lit, the smell of food for our last meal together that day. The agony of things about to end or that have already ended.
The last time I saw him in Rio, I had taken my three-month old son there especially for my grandfather to hold. Soon after that he died, and I couldn’t go to his funeral. I was away, already living abroad.
This is one of more than 100 stories by 37 writers in this anthology. To read the others, purchase the book at:
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