Bem leve
Muse: Ynez Castillo (OC)
Track: Bem leve (Lightly)
Artist: Marisa Monte
Album: Verde, Anil, Amarelo, Cor de Rosa e Carvão
In my dreams the past few nights, I have been a hummingbird, searching the hillsides and molten plains of Tlalocan, seeking someone in the shadows I couldn’t name. As I stood at the funeral today, Wes and Aidan’s, it occurred to me that I had been looking for them.
That search is doomed to failure. Not only is Tlalocan not their destination, they would remain hidden from me even if they were there. It is completely futile to try to find anyone you have loved once they reach the land of the dead. Wherever they are, once they’ve passed completely out of the world, the nature of love itself means that they are gone forever. We, the living, hold on for as long as we can. The dead leave us, once and for all, no looking back.
That doesn’t mean I haven’t spent years hunting. I can’t not try, but it’s a futile impulse, a reflex that recalls every time I reached out to someone I knew while they were alive. The heart never forgets that urge to connect, to touch, to love. Ghosts are, at best, a minor aberration, like the hem of a skirt caught in the doorway, some lady stuck in the revolving door because she won’t set her Christmas shopping down and let go. Most of the time, it doesn’t take much to send the fragments on their way. Love fails at the edge of the greatest abyss.
The first funeral I ever went to was my mother’s. I was four years old. What I remember about it most are the black patent leather shoes I was wearing. I sat in a chair next to my father and watched the way the light moved across their slick surfaces when I moved my feet. A little bit this way, a little bit that, the shine slid like something alive. I’d move my feet a fraction, then move them back, trying to freeze that shimmer in place. It never quite worked the way I hoped, not then, not now.
Once the light has moved on, it has moved on. Every sunset is unique.
There were other funerals when I was growing up. How could there not be? My family is large and the city we live in can be violent. So many of the old traditions were dying out by the time I was old enough to observe them, but Lupe made sure I knew what they were. She clung to them longer than just about anyone I can think of, but that’s just her way. It’s funny the way funerals keep the family together almost like weddings do, funny and reassuring and horrifying all at once.
Now that I think of it, there was a purple corona of ribbon on the front door after my mother died. I thought it was so pretty. The morning of the funeral, I pulled it down so I could wear it on my head, like a little princesa.
It didn’t go over well.
Years passed and I began to learn the ways of the dead. Balanced against that, I missed my cousin Pedro’s funeral after he died in prison, murdered by another prisoner for something trivial. His death was my fault, and I didn’t know about it until months later. They always said he’d come to a bad end, and even his own mother never held me responsible, but I know the truth of the matter. If I had thought about him when I should have, he might be alive today. As it is, that laughing naughty boy exists nowhere now, except as translucent memory.
If my life were some clumsy novel, that all would have been a blatant foreshadowing of what happened to Carlos.
I wasn’t at my husband’s funeral. I was unconscious, drugged, dead to the world in a way that I could only wish afterwards had been entirely true. I spent a long time afterwards trying to make up for that and knowing that I failed. It’s almost two years since I summoned him back for one fragile week that never should have been. His ghost haunted me, quite literally, for nearly a year afterwards.
The night before my wedding - the second wedding, the church one - I dreamt that I was meeting my mother for coffee and beignets, of all things. We were on the patio of a little coffee shop somewhere, right on the edge of an empty plaza. While we sat there waiting for someone to come take our order, all I could do was fold and re-fold my napkin, back and forth, right over left, time and time again. It was made of gorgeous fine white linen, monogrammed with initials that weren’t mine. Nobody ever stopped to help us and just when I was going to get up to look for a waiter, I woke up.
I only want to know that I’m forgiven. I want to know, and I never will.
That’s the thing with the dead. After the fact, the living can never be sure that they don’t hate us for all the ways we disappointed them, all the ways we failed to say “I love you.” Regret and grief are twins. When the coffin closes, once it meets its final home, what else is left?
Today, I watched other people grieve. Tonight, I’ll remember them in my prayers. In the morning, I’ll be up to carry on my life and so will they. At least once during the day, we’ll all think of those coffins and what - and who - their contents used to be.
ooc: This is from the evening of the funeral for Aidan and Wes. Absolutely not for muse knowledge.
Bem leve (Lightly) (Mediafire link)
Marisa Monte/Arnaldo Antunes
Bem leve leve
releve
quem pouse a pele
em cima de
madeira
beira beira
quem dera mera mera
cadeira
mas breve breve
revele
vele vele
quem pese
dos pés a caveira
Dali da beira uma palavra cai no chão
caixão
dessa maneira
Uma palavra de madeira em cada mão
Imbuía
Cerejeira
Jacarandá, Peroba, Pinho, Jatobá
Cabreúva
Garapera
Uma palavra de madeira cai no chão
caixão
dessa maneira.
Lightly, lift it
Lightly
Whoever places his skin
Upon
The board
On the edge, on the edge
Were it just
A chair
But soon, soon
Revealed
Mourn, mourn
Who weighs
From feet to skull
There from the edge a word falls to the ground
A coffin
By that name
A word of wood in each hand
Imbuia
Cherry tree
Mahogany, Peroba, Pine, Jatoba
Cabreuva
Garapera
A wooden word falls to the ground
A coffin
Just like that.
ooc: Download it. It’s gorgeous. This is one of the songs that made me fall in love with the Portuguese language.