NIHIL SINE CAUSA

                       

                           Life can only be understood backwards;

                                                                       but it must be lived forwards.

SÖREN KIERKEGAARD

 

                                                                       The present is the side effect of the future.

E. B. VON IMMERHÄSSLER

 

 

If I had been having an affair with another woman my wife would have known about it. And I wasn’t. It wouldn’t have been impossible, of course, but it didn’t suit my character, and also, at the time, I didn’t have a lot of free time because of my PhD. It would have been necessary to make serious plans as to how to organize my time. I would have to have taken a firm and resolute decision.

 

Every day, before I go to bed, I decide on what clothes I will wear next day, and nothing, not even the whims of the Lisbon weather in the months of spring and autumn, can make me change my mind. If I think that it is going to rain next day I lay out a gabardine, and sometimes a hat, and even when I am surprised by a glorious day rising up between the rooftops of S. Domingos de Benfica, I leave home well wrapped up. I prepare notes on a little pad about the most important things I have to do and when to do them. I have a note in front of me now; it says: “wash hair, shopping: -- salmon/Carrefour; afternoon, write to Dad -- buy book by Damásio”.

 

I have never in my life written: “sleep with lover” or “telephone girlfriend” or “buy flowers”. So when Sonia came home with that photograph I was stunned.

 

I had gotten home after classes and was sitting in the living room, watching and not watching TV. I had spent a rather complicated afternoon in the library studying one of Heidegger’s lesser-known works, The Inter-relating of Time and Matter, and, as usual, I was getting ready to hear, one eye and one ear on the TV program, one of Sonia’s talks on the discovery of the “fantastic-real”. Sonia lectured at the New University of Lisbon on South American Literature. Borges, Cortázar and those strange writers. And she, in these conversations would lift me out of my field of concrete and realistic analysis, leading me into a world full of the absurdities of super-realistic abstraction. I was expecting another of these journeys as soon as I saw her face as she came into the house. She was very excited.

 

She sat down opposite me and took something from her briefcase. A photograph. Even today I remember what I felt at the time. Or didn’t feel. Everything around me was black. The black of the video, the CD, the sofa, the television, the coffee table. I remember thinking that nowadays they make everything in black for the living room, everything in white for the kitchen. I looked at the photograph.

 

Against a black, or dark, background, and standing in what seemed to be a bar, were two people, in an embrace and clearly in the act of kissing. One was a young girl, about twenty, wearing a tight-fitting and low-cut sweater. Against the darkness of the background, her short and bright blonde hair stood out like a precious stone on a velvet cloth. The other person was me. I looked at the photograph. And said nothing. It couldn’t be me.

 

            “I got it in my mail at the faculty”, my wife said.

 

As there was no way of convincing her that it was someone else, and restricted within my structuralist vision of reality, I didn’t even try. Sonia took this as a sign of guilt, or admission, although I failed to see the possibility of connecting the two.

 

***************

 

When we were still lovers my wife maintained a passion for an ex-boyfriend of hers. He was called Rogerio and was studying Law, or something equally practical and mundane. I remember once phoning her at the apartment she shared with a few other students.

 

            “Sonia? It’s Dave. Do you fancy a movie?”

            (Pause)

            “Sonia?”

            “I can’t... I’m going out with a friend of mine, from the Ribatejo...”

            “Can’t I come along?”

“It’s best if you don’t... he’s only in Lisbon for a few days... He’s a friend of the family...”

 

Of course I didn’t take kindly to this situation, but after the initial rage I didn’t mind it so much. Rogerio was from a family which owned one of those farms which stretched out of sight, thoroughbred horses, cork, bulls, aunts who were secretaries of state, servants at the dozen and who knows what else. Sonia even enjoyed playing with the class difference between the two of us. My father worked in the Lisbon Screw Factory.

 

But I knew that, for this Rogerio, Sonia would be just another game. For me, however, she would be my wife. It was written.

 

***************

The telephone rang on the table that separated me from Sonia. I looked at my wife, who turned her face away, smoking. It would probably be my father, or a colleague; without doubt something innocent. But instead of this, now that I had been accused of sin, I imagined a blonde girl on the other end, in a phone booth or in a hidden corner of a café, with a handkerchief covering the mouthpiece, ready to hang up if a female voice answered. The phone stopped ringing.

 

We both lean over the coffee table, and I took a cigarette from the packet on the table. The last thing I took from Sonia. Our reflection in the polished mahogany of the table seemed so much more than what we were, obeying the rules of decorum which govern cowards like us, but which matter little to others. Sonia left me that afternoon, and came back next day to collect her things. What sticks in my memory about the separation was the mess. The enormous mess of knowing what belonged to whom. I stayed on the balcony smoking. Sonia took the coffee table, her books and some other bits of furniture. She took all the ornaments that she had placed on my shelves, and I, having fought fiercely against her when she wanted to buy them, didn’t miss them.

 

I didn’t see Sonia for some time. She sent me the photograph, the house keys and, strangely, a month’s rent. And she missed the first divorce hearing.

 

I busied myself in work. I knew that the PhD was fundamental to maintaining my position as a lecturer, as there had been rumors about the idea of “finishing with philosophy” by the Ministry. Courses which did not lead to profitable production in financial terms were under threat. A position as a PhD had been my ambition ever since the first day I entered the faculty, but I admit I had had periods of doubt. My professor and head of department, a follower of Bertrand Russell and Sporting Football Club, didn’t seem to maintain an adequate distance in relation to the texts we studied. I defended my thesis on the day after Sporting won the Portuguese Championship, and I will never know if one event influenced the other.

 

I have been lecturing for a few years now, fighting against the modern tendency to worship anarchy. “Anarchy”, as I so often have to preach, “resides in the absolute elimination of forms of pressure, resulting in a life without limits in terms as to its horizons, but held back by its own unlimited restrictions.” Saying this to the average student is the same as giving a monologue in my bathroom, but once in a while, as there must be, there is a voice that stands out. And this voice belonged to Susana.

 

She liked the way I dealt with the more difficult works by Heidegger, Immerhässler and Kant, and I admired her commitment, her intellectual curiosity and her body.

 

Susana was a first year student, taking my course as an option, as Philosophy didn’t have a rigid course structure, and was a different presence in the classroom. Generally my students were male, with glasses and beards, and were convinced that a philosophy course would give them the right to a position as an intellectual in our society. They learned the texts by heart; they understood nothing. And they also didn’t understand that the intellectual belonged to a dead world. But Susana was different, and she filled me with an appetite for life that surprised everyone, even my waking self. My sleeping self had become a friend to so many dark-haired young girls in my dreams.

 

After a chance meeting, at the door of the 111 Gallery, after which we went for a drink -- coffee for her and beer for me -- in the bar at the National Library, I started seeing her for a chat now and then, with the meeting normally taking place in a café near to the faculty. While I waited for her, often on my own with the owner, he would go on about the chances of Sporting winning the Cup Winners’ Cup or the Portuguese Cup etc. It didn’t seem to matter to him that I would just nod my head and grunt occasionally. He wanted to talk about his favorite subject: Sporting’s past.

 

Susana’s arrival would save me from these terrible conferences. Susana was from Coruche, was “taking” philosophy (as she said), and then was thinking of going to Australia to “find herself”.

 

There was nothing personal between us. In fact, my paranoia about the student-teacher situation made me always stay on the other side of the table from her, so there would never be the slightest chance of us touching, even by accident. If there was anything between us it was a look. After all, I was still a married man.

 

It was a shock when I got the notification about the second divorce hearing. I knew that the procedures were in motion, and that those things that lawyers do were being done, but I had never managed to interiorize the day of the final judgment, the decree nisi. It was a Tuesday at ten a.m., which would allow me to get to my midday class if there were no delays.

 

I presented myself, with my lawyer, a young man from the Law Faculty, and I went into the Family Court Main Chamber. In principle, said my lawyer, Sergio, it would just be in and out, but I made a point of taking the photograph, and when the young female judge asked me my position I said “guilty”, waving the photograph in the air.

 

***************

 

And now I am waiting at a table in the corner of a café close to the faculty and Susana promised to be here by around eight. It’s gone nine and the owner is saying that this year, with the new squad, Sporting will be European Champion. The door opens and Susana comes in, or at least I think it’s Susana. She’s got short blonde hair and she comes over to me and for the first time sits down next to me and starts talking about friends who have just arrived in Lisbon and that’s why she’s late and do I like her hair and she’s a natural blonde and I don’t mind, do I? I’ve had too much to drink, I’ve heard too much about Sporting’s chances of winning whatever shit they play, I’ve read too much Heidegger and above all I’ve been too, too, too long on my side of the table and I’m pissed off and I’m saying that I don’t want to go anywhere and it’s unbelievable that she left me waiting here for an hour and I’ve just got divorced, and she says she’s sorry, really, really sorry, really, and I look at her and I want this girl for myself and I want another beer and another and another after and I want to show her the photograph and I want to touch her, to possess her, and she says that a friend of hers is coming, who’s a lawyer in Coruche, and he wants to meet me and then this man comes towards us and she leans towards me to kiss me on the cheek and I can’t resist or I should resist but I’m not married anymore and I don’t resist and there is the desire to kiss her on the mouth and on her soul and on her body and the moment seems to last beyond time and into the future and coming from the past and I hear the “click” of a camera and I feel a flash, and then “Hello, I’m Rogerio.”

(First published in the collection "Side Effects" Ed. Maria Augusta & António de Macedo, Simetria, Lisbon, 1997)