The Keyboards

When asked to select four Portuguese-language writers for The Missing Slate, my first thought was to choose only female writers, because so few women get translated. Elena Ferrante is a rare example. I’ve been translating for about thirty years now and, in that time, have translated thirty-one male writers and just seven women writers: five novelists and two poets. It was hard choosing just four writers, but my task was made easier by the enthusiasms of my three fellow translators: Annie McDermott, Zoë Perry and Victor Meadowcroft, who will explain their choices themselves.

I would also like to mention a few other female writers, whom we could also easily have chosen: Lídia Jorge (‘The Migrant Painter of Birds’, in my translation, was published in 2001 by Harvill, and a short story of hers – The Bird Hypothesis – can be found on the Asymptote website), Dulce Maria Cardoso (‘The Return’, tr. Ángel Gurria-Quintana, Maclehose Press, 2016), and two other fine authors who have never been translated into English: Maria Judite de Carvalho and Maria Velho da Costa.

~ Margaret Jull Costa

Artwork by Adam Kluger. Image courtesy of the artist.

As a child, she had prayed for Mozart.

In those days, Uncle Octávio used to sit in the armchair by the window, listening to symphonies and concertos while he tugged at the hairs sprouting from his ears and picked at his teeth with a toothpick. If anyone attempted to come in, he would swear loudly and hit the table hard as if hoping the noise would frighten off the intruder, who had, by then, beaten a hasty retreat and disappeared off into the depths of the corridor.

Uncle Octávio would scuttle over to the door, reach, futilely, for the place where the key should have been, but wasn’t, and then, instead, lean a chair against the door and place two hefty tomes on the seat for good measure.

Having done this, he would bustle back into the room, harumphing and mopping his brow with his handkerchief or else blowing his nose, and, only then, would he carefully lift the arm of the record-player and place it roughly where it had been before he was interrupted. He would sit down again, sigh and raise his eyes to heaven, like one of those pictures of martyrs in the prayer book, then settle back against the cushions on the chair and appear gradually to fall asleep, his hands folded on his paunch.

‘Beethoven,’ he would say at last, opening his eyes and raising one index finger, when, finally, the music stopped. And he would look at her with a smug, mocking smile, as pleased with himself as if he had won a battle.

She, in fact, hadn’t heard much of the music at all. She had sat there studying the tassels on the curtains, which swayed violently whenever he thumped the table and continued to do so for a long time afterwards. ‘Fools,’ said the cellos. ‘Can’t a man have a moment’s peace in his own house without some imbecile coming along and spoiling everything?’ (‘Without some imbecile coming along and spoiling everything,’ repeated the first violin in a louder, shriller tone.) ‘Go to hell, go to hell,’ rumbled the doublebasses ominously.

It had doubtless been Uncle Inácio who opened the door, she thought. It seemed unlikely that Aunt Isaura or Arménia would have been so imprudent as to burst in just at that moment. Although, of course, they wouldn’t necessarily have been able to hear the music, they were, after all, half-deaf, which was a considerable aid to their good relations. Arménia couldn’t hear Aunt Isaura muttering sourly as she tied her scarf tightly around her head, ‘Silly stupid woman, meddling old busybody’, and Aunt Isaura never heard Arménia letting slip through her toothless, rotten gums, ‘God, that woman gets stupider by the day. I’ve had just about all I can stand of her.’

So it was probable that neither of them had left the kitchen, but had only rushed anxiously to the door when they heard the commotion, sighing, as they always did: ‘Oh, dear God, not again!’, while Uncle Inácio fled, stumbling on the stair carpet, and swiftly disappeared behind his bedroom door. Then they would hear the key turning in the lock.

It was true that there were injustices in the world, and perhaps you couldn’t expect all, or indeed any, to be put right. You probably just had to grit your teeth and live each day as it came, as if injustice were not unjust.

Uncle Inácio never lost or forgot the key to his own room; he always carried it in his jacket or trouser pocket, or else around his neck on a length of string. He would hide it away if he was particularly tense or if his heart spoke to him of some danger. One day, she had surprised him diligently scooping the soil from a plant pot with his bare hands in order to bury the key. He had started, alarmed, when he heard someone approaching, then, when he saw it was her, had merely winked at her and placed one finger on his lips, cautioning silence. His mouth was smeared with earth, and his straw hat, which had slipped off his head and down his back, hung suspended by a thread-thin piece of elastic.

‘Beethoven is at the very top of the ladder,’ Uncle Octávio used to say, laughing loudly and putting the record back on the shelf. ‘Mozart’s stuck at the bottom, so far down you can’t even see him. He hasn’t even reached the first rung, poor fellow,’ he would add, laughing again and punching the air with his fists as if he were beating someone up.

She did not respond and swallowed both her answer and her anger. She would look defiantly up at him, but not say a word. At night, though, she prayed for Mozart, for justice to be done and for the world finally to recognise him, Mozart, who – so people said – had not even reached the first rung, and was despised, pointed at and mocked by everyone. Because at the time, she assumed that Uncle Octávio, who seemed to know so much about music, was expressing a universal opinion.

It was true that there were injustices in the world, and perhaps you couldn’t expect all, or indeed any, to be put right. You probably just had to grit your teeth and live each day as it came, as if injustice were not unjust. Maybe there was no alternative.

‘I promised my father I would never have him put away,’ sobbed Aunt Isaura, falling heavily onto the sofa as if on the point of collapse.

Uncle Octávio wasn’t listening, nor did he wish to hear any more about the matter. It had all been said before, but they always came back to square one.

‘It’s either him or me,’ he would thunder, purple with rage, striding up and down the room, appearing suddenly to grow in size and fill the whole space, like a bloated frog.

‘I promised my father on his deathbed,’ Aunt Isaura would declare, burying herself more deeply in the cushions, weeping and covering her face with her hands.

On other occasions, it was Aunt Isaura who looked like a bloated frog. She would jump up from the sofa and advance angrily across the room: ‘I cannot break that promise,’ she would cry. ‘Either he stays or I go,’ she would say, echoing, on a higher note, Uncle Octávio’s furious words.

It was unjust that they should spend their lives quarrelling, it was unjust that Uncle Inácio had gone mad, that the world maligned Mozart, but that was how things were.

It was true that Mozart’s music seemed simple, sometimes almost insignificant, but anyone who knew how to listen could understand what lay beneath the surface, which merely covered it like a piece of transparent glass. You might, for example, come across an apparently banal chord, followed by two notes, the first very short, the second just an interval of a fourth away from the first. And then everything would continue with the same simplicity, as if it couldn’t be any other way — it was as if anyone, yes, even you, could have invented that phrase, but then it suddenly sent you off in a different direction: something was being proclaimed in those simple notes that apparently any child could play. And that was it; Mozart despised no one and even learned from the birds. Yes, it was true. Mozart had learned a lot from the birds. In fact, she could never hear birdsong without thinking that.

His music might seem easy — the bare score, a few clean notes, sometimes so close together that they looked almost like scales — but it wasn’t easy and only someone who understood nothing could doubt that this apparent simplicity was the most difficult thing of all — the fingers all equally flexible, very close to the keys, unable to obey at first, until finally they broke free and you could hear the music.

Listening was a secret. She heard a lot of things, some of them impossible. For example, she only had to look at the score to hear the music written there. This had happened to her for the first time with Mozart, but then she realised that she could hear any music, just by reading the score. As if someone were playing the music inside her. And not just one instrument, the violin, for example, or the piano; she was sure that she would be able to hear a whole orchestra too.

But this was a secret she would never tell anyone, least of all Uncle Octávio, who used to kick the door when he thought she was getting out of time and who would shout and stamp his feet: ‘No, no, no, no, no!’

Sometimes, she would leave the house immediately afterwards and walk down the street, playing the music in her head so as not to be interrupted. She would walk past the houses and listen and listen, and no one kicked the door or shouted. The trees waved their branches, cars and people passed, but they didn’t interrupt her. Only when it was raining and she had to take shelter beneath a balcony or in a doorway did she stop and mentally close the piano lid.

Then she would hear the rain. Hearing meant giving full attention to things. Everything stopped, stood still. And then sound happened: the rain, the wind, the sea. The wind in the leaves, along the sandy path, on rooftops, in the rain. Now she was listening to the rain, the fleeting watery shapes. (Music — not the music of the rain, but music itself — was it like liquid or air? Liquid, she decided. Yes, liquid, she thought.)

But hearing was not a separate activity from seeing, feeling or understanding. Nor could you hear one isolated thing without being aware of the context, even though it was your perception of the context that made each thing stand out with extraordinary clarity. And then it was never enough to hear it just once, you always wanted to hear it a thousand times over.

The many voices of things. The voices of Bach playing with one another, crossing, converging, diverging. Pure play, like the sea and the waves. That is how the world was made.

She liked to wander through the neighbourhood, listening to whatever there was to hear — car horns, engines, voices, the mechanical clamour and hammer of a workshop, the clang of metal, doors slamming, people’s footsteps on the pavement, and, occasionally, a piece of articulated music in the midst of all the other sounds: the shrill cry launched onto the air by some market trader, the trill of a bird, the knife-grinder’s whistle, the accordion played by a blind man on a corner.

But all the rest — car horns, voices, sirens, machines — could also be a kind of music. Even silence was part of listening — the silence between one thing and another, a breath or a pause, before something else happened.

They used her as an intermediary on the most difficult days. They were afraid of his winking and his mocking grin — which always boded ill — afraid of his malice.

Listening and hearing meant allowing the world to enter you. When she listened, she was left entirely without defences. The sound followed its own course and she ceased to exist separately and became part of what was happening. And that, she thought sometimes, was dangerous, almost mortally so, because music, in a way, broke her into pieces, forced her out of herself and drew her into an undifferentiated, non-human state, over which the music finally triumphed. It was an imperfect victory, though, because the music always had to begin again, to happen again, so that chaos did not prevail. For as long as it lasted (although it could never last for ever), music was a way of conquering chaos and forcing it to fit a shape. Perhaps that was what listening meant, engaging in the struggle between form and chaos.

Sometimes, during the night, Uncle Inácio would shout out. She would cover her ears with her hands, but she couldn’t stop listening. At other times, she would grow rigid with concentration, trying to decipher the words, but to no avail, all she heard were screams.

Then there were the fits, when he would writhe around on the floor, frothing at the mouth, his eyes rolled back, and they had to put a folded handkerchief in his mouth so that he wouldn’t bite his tongue. Then he would calm down and fall asleep, sometimes peeing himself while he slept, and there were times when he slept all day. Something took him over. And she felt she could understand the dangers of that unchained, untamed energy, like a river bursting its banks.

Perhaps he had gone mad because he couldn’t communicate. No one talked to him, apart from her. He didn’t appear to understand, and yet he nodded and sighed. One of his main concerns was with keys. He threw away all the keys in the house, including the one for the front door, because he was afraid they might stop him leaving. That’s why he sometimes ran away, disappearing for several days, which he spent wandering the streets, until, when he wanted to be found and brought home, he came to rest by the river, on the same bench. For there always did come a moment when he wanted to be found and brought home: when hunger grew pressing, when his begging in the street failed to yield enough money, or when the nights grew too cold. Then he would go and sit on that bench and wait. As soon as someone arrived (usually her, Júlia), he would simply get up and follow, as docile as a child. She thought it best to leave him free like that: he wouldn’t go far, nor did he seem to be at any risk of getting lost; he rarely strayed beyond certain streets, and there was no point in looking for him elsewhere, given that the bench by the river was the only place where he could ever be found. The man who sold newspapers in the kiosk opposite would always let them know when he arrived.

But Uncle Octávio didn’t agree: the sight of Uncle Inácio begging in the streets, vacant-eyed and wearing a threadbare jacket, seemed to him a violation of his privacy. That’s why he preferred to hide him away in the depths of the house.

It was usually when Inácio was locked up, though, that he had his rages, not that these were predictable: you could never know for sure when he would shift from one extreme to the other and his child-like smile become a threat.

They used her as an intermediary on the most difficult days. They were afraid of his winking and his mocking grin — which always boded ill — afraid of his malice. He had already burned holes in Arménia’s new outfit with a lit cigarette, crushed Uncle Octávio’s silver cigarette case, thrown some pieces of fish out of the open window, and used secateurs to cut up the velvet table cloth.

‘Take Uncle Inácio his supper, will you,’ they would say nervously, handing her the tray.

She would knock on his bedroom door and make some comment or other just so that he could hear and identify her voice. He would eventually come and open the door, then immediately sit down on the floor, ignoring her and the tray completely, and continue whatever he had been doing before: putting marbles in a box or cutting out shapes from a newspaper with blunt scissors, and he wouldn’t look up until she had left the room. Yet once she was on the other side of the door he would spring to his feet and turn the key in the lock. She would hear him give a sigh of satisfaction, then noisily gobble down his food.

Sometimes, when she was in the living room, playing the piano, Uncle Inácio would push open the door and come in. And then she wished he simply didn’t exist, that he would disappear or die, go far away and never come back. However, instead of disappearing or dying, he would squat down and keep time by beating on the furniture with a wooden spoon or with a metal spoon on a glass. At best, she managed to persuade him to beat on the glass with the wooden spoon, but that wasn’t loud enough for him and, a moment later, he would grab the metal spoon again and once more keep time with it on the glass. Or else he would stamp his feet and clap his hands or snap his fingers like castanets.

On other days, though, he would come into the room, clumsily trying not to make any noise, sit down cross-legged on the floor and remain as still as he could. Then he was her listener, and she didn’t yearn for him to go away. Could he make out the different voices in Bach? she wondered. Could he hear them, he who never listened to anyone?

Sometimes, when she had finished playing, he would take her hands, turn them palm uppermost, and measure the length of her fingers, comparing them with his, then tap her nails lightly with the spoon and smile.

One day, he himself sat down at the piano, pressed hard on the keys and grimaced at the sound he made. He tried again, over and over, then covered his ears, shaking his head, and returned to his place on the floor, eyes averted, apparently deeply offended. Then, suddenly, he sprang to his feet and strode towards her with such furious intent that she thought he was going to hit her. However, he pulled up short at the last moment and left the room, slamming the door.

The small music room also served as a study and a reception room, on the rare occasions when they received visitors: the smell of wax from the highly polished floor, the photo album covered by her aunt with a floral fabric, the repoussé leather lid of the desk, and above the piano, the pokerwork tray made by her aunt many years ago, before she became Uncle Octávio’s wife, and was still his fiancée.

That tray, showing a peacock with its tail spread, had been the largest and most difficult project Aunt Isaura had ever undertaken and she could still remember every detail of its making: the smell of burning that she had to put up with day after painful day, the sharp point of the cauterizer, which she had to keep red-hot by constantly pressing a rubber bulb with her left hand, while her right hand was poised over the meticulous design, tracing detail after detail, afraid she might burn her fingers, screwing up her eyes against the searing heat and light. And all for the love of Uncle Octávio. She’d also had to put up with the smell of petrol that fuelled the old thermal cauterizer that had once belonged to Dr Lucas.

Sometimes, when she had finished playing, he would take her hands, turn them palm uppermost, and measure the length of her fingers, comparing them with his, then tap her nails lightly with the spoon and smile.

When she was young, in that same room in what was then her parents’ house, Aunt Isaura had occasionally played ‘Prima Carezza’, ‘La Vie en Rose’ and the tango ‘Camiñito’. That was when she was first getting to know Uncle Octávio, who could play czardas and tangos on the violin. This had made them feel that they were fated to be together, just as had happened with a couple they knew, who, on the night they met, had won a complete coffee service in a raffle. She had won the cups and he the coffee pot and sugar bowl. It had to be fate, for who could deny that they completed each other? It was the same when Aunt Isaura and Uncle Octávio played the tango ‘Camiñito’ together. In the days when they seemed to accompany each other.

They played rarely now, well, almost never. But it still did occasionally happen: her aunt, sitting very erect on the piano stool, would pin back her hair and adjust her spectacles to disguise her nervousness, then her uncle, keeping time with toe of his shoe, would give a curt nod as the signal to commence and then come in triumphantly six beats later. He would turn head and shoulders so as to be able to see her and now and then raise his eyebrows; her aunt would blush, feeling ever more anxious, getting the same chords wrong over and over, repeating and stopping and sometimes giving up altogether. Uncle Octávio would get angry then and stamp his foot, while Aunt Isaura, breathing hard, would be almost reduced to tears. Then he would forget all about her and finish the tune alone: he always improvised at the end anyway, furiously scraping the bow in all directions, as if he were trying to polish the strings of the violin. He perhaps imagined that he was a virtuoso, to judge by the smug way in which he bowed low, holding the violin in one hand and the bow in the other, while her aunt applauded, smiling now and recovered from her fright, sitting once again in her armchair, relieved that they had reached the end and she could go back to her knitting, liberated from the anxiety of accompanying him, now that she was old and fat and could dispense with the painful duties of courtship.

By then, Aunt Isaura was already beginning to lose her hair, and patches of shiny scalp were visible here and there. She sat in her armchair, sighing and counting stitches. She used to keep dropping them until she bought some circular needles and then the stitches ran round and round inside that ring over which, every so often, her head would droop and she would fall asleep.

It was on one such occasion, years before, when her aunt and uncle were playing together, that it had all begun, for Júlia, that is: after sitting through their laboured musical display, she had knelt down on the piano stool — because if she sat, she couldn’t reach the keyboard — and picked out the tune of ‘Camiñito’. Her aunt and uncle stared at her as if they had seen a ghost.

This frightened her so much that she scrambled down from the stool and climbed onto the sofa, stuffing her hands into the pockets of her dress, eager to forget about the whole incident.

They, however, were not at all eager to forget. They made her play again and again, and made soft, approving noises or sat in absolute silence, listening and looking first at each other and then at her. Afterwards, her uncle took off his glasses and put them on again, and her aunt blushed and wiped her damp, perspiring face. Only then did the incident end.

The next day, though, it all started again, with her uncle teaching her the notes: they were written on the stave and corresponded with the notes on the piano. And you moved your fingers by crossing the thumb under your middle finger which was curved over it in an arc. Two or more notes together made a chord, the fingers were numbered from one to five and there were sequences of notes called scales.

‘Now you do it,’ her uncle would say, and she would repeat what he had played.

More time passed, and they would have doubtless continued in this way had other incidents not intervened.

The first was called Ireninha. She was younger than Júlia and she came to live almost opposite, in a house with a garden and a name-plate made of tiles that said Casal das Flores – House of Flowers. She was learning piano with Madame Ortega, the best-known teacher in the city, whose lessons, so people said, cost a fortune. Ireninha wore frilly dresses with a big bow at the waist, and she often seemed to have difficulty breathing; she moved very slowly and had a plump, startled air about her.

Whenever they had visitors, the family would say: ‘Come on, Ireninha, play!’

And Ireninha would play. As soon as she finished one piece, they would almost always demand another. She would sigh and play another piece.

In the middle of a game, in the garden, her mother could be heard calling from the window: ‘Ireninha, it’s time!’

Ireninha would stand leaning against the wall, twisting the hem of her dress between her fingers, pretending not to have heard. She would sulk sometimes, turn very red, scuff her feet, and her jaw and mouth would tremble. But she always obeyed in the end. She would leave the rest of us and go into the house. Shortly afterwards, we would hear the notes of the piano.

‘That girl will go far,’ said the neighbours, nodding sagely.

Even worse, though, was the recital. In Ireninha’s house, for weeks beforehand, they lived in a state of permanent expectation. Madame Ortega’s pupils were going to play. Ireninha was going to play. In public.

The world seemed suddenly transformed by the revelation that there was such a thing as the public. The maid Joana arranged Ireninha’s hair differently, her mother excitedly taught her how to curtsey: ‘You take hold of your skirt with both hands, one on either side – like this.’ And, as she did so, she had to cross her feet, which would be shod in white socks and patent leather shoes.

Her father paced from one side of the room to the other, his hands behind his back. ‘The hall will be packed,’ he said.

For example, she never played the whole of any tune that Uncle Octávio had just shown her, even though she had memorised it instantly.

‘Packed,’ repeated her mother in a tremulous voice.

All Ireninha would remember of the recital later on was how tired she felt and how, on the tram coming home, she had fallen asleep on Joana’s lap. She didn’t fluff any notes or trip over her feet when she curtseyed. She was safe, Júlia had thought, when she finished playing. Sitting beside her aunt and uncle in the first row, she gave a sigh of relief. This time, Ireninha was safe.

She had not expected the terrible noise of people applauding, as if the hall was under bombardment. Ireninha hadn’t either and fled, while the audience laughed and fidgeted in their seats. When she finally returned, dragged back on stage by stout Madame Ortega, the hands continued clapping, beating and beating in her ears, and the sound they made was so aggressive that Ireninha let go of Madame Ortega’s hand and burst into tears, before fleeing once more, this time for good, behind the curtain.

‘It’s death for an artist if no one applauds,’ Uncle Octávio said the following day. ‘Pity the poor pianist if people don’t clap.’

Why, she thought to herself, although not daring to contradict him. Didn’t Ireninha have the right to exist on her own, without depending on other people’s reactions?

She felt a sudden horror of becoming like Ireninha, of being forced to practise scales, play for visitors, curtsey on stage beneath a barrage of applause like machine-gun fire.

She said nothing, but from then on, she grew more cautious. For example, she never played the whole of any tune that Uncle Octávio had just shown her, even though she had memorised it instantly. This, she had heard,was how Ireninha had been discovered, because of her great facility for memorising tunes. Not that it was difficult, because musical phrases didn’t happen by chance, they were interconnected. All you had to do was to seek what you had found already, place the notes in the right order, and, if you were unsure, try and reconstitute what was missing before looking back at the score, as if music were a piece of cloth that had been accidentally torn, a tear that could always be mended. Learning something by heart was not what people imagined. But she kept this idea to herself just as she did with her other discoveries. For instance, she would never tell anyone that she could hear the music simply by reading the score. It seemed to her dangerous to talk too much, she was afraid her thoughts might turn against her once they were spoken. On the other hand, she was full of questions, for example: Where did scales come from? No one had invented them, they were simply there, and always had been. But what did ‘always’ mean? And where was ‘there’, that place where people said the scales had always been?

And where did rhythm come from? From the body perhaps, from the heart beating. But the moment came when it left the body and became a separate thing, there was a moment when the music took on its own existence, and that idea made her dizzy. She wouldn’t share it with anyone else, though, all too aware that what had happened to Ireninha could happen to her.

Teolinda Gersão is a novelist and short story writer based in Lisbon. She has won many prizes, most recently the 2016 Prémio Virgílio Ferreira. I have translated her novel The Word Tree and many of her short stories, a genre at which I think she particularly excels. She has a wonderfully oblique way of looking at things and an extraordinarily wide range of subjects, ranging from the fantastic – a woman who turns into a fox – to the ordinary – a grandmother and her grandson battling against the wind on a beach. This translation is an extract from a novella, ‘The Keyboards’, about a gifted young pianist living in a highly dysfunctional family consisting of two uncles and an aunt. One of the uncles is mentally ill, another is a bully and husband to the long-suffering aunt. The story provides a keen insight into a young girl’s mind, yearning for independence and recognition and to escape from the burdens imposed on her by the adult world. The writing is, as always with Teolinda, seductively lucid.

Margaret Jull Costa has translated works by novelists such as Eça de Queiroz, José Saramago, Javier Marías and Teolinda Gersão, as well as poets such as Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and Ana Luísa Amaral. She has won many prizes, most recently the 2015 Marsh Award for Children’s Fiction in Translation for Bernardo Atxaga’s ‘The Adventures of Shola’. In 2013 she was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2014 was awarded an OBE for services to literature. In 2015 she was given an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Leeds.