The Foreigner from Here

Peregrina unpacked her bag three times in the first week, and all three times she left one jumper unput-away, folded on top of the chest of drawers, the way one leaves a foot out of the bed because of the heat. She did not notice what she was doing. Only much later, when she had learned to look at herself from the outside, did she understand that the jumper not put away was the bag half-packed, and that the bag half-packed was her, and that she had carried it with her from one country to the other the way one carries an illness without knowing one has it.

She had reached her parents' village on a June evening, on the bus from the big town, the last one, the half-past-five. She had come at the window, her forehead almost against the glass, waiting to feel a thing she had rehearsed feeling all her life: the arrival home. The serra opened to the right, long, with the light coming down its back, and below, the river, more heard than seen, and the first houses with their clay-coloured tiles, and the square with the fountain in the middle, and Peregrina waited for the feeling the way one waits for a visitor who has been announced. The feeling did not come. Something else came, more like the entering of a house one has lived in and which has since changed its people: everything in its place, and nothing one's own.

She came down the steps of the bus with her bag in her hand, and the bus drove off, and she was left in the square, alone, with the bag at her feet, at the end of the afternoon, and no one waiting. And it was that, more than anything, that told her something was out of true. Because as a child, in the summers, arriving at the village had been grandmother Aurora at the door, and people, and a feast, and the this one is mine; and now she arrived at the same village and the square was empty, and she set her bag down and there was no one to run to. She had told her aunt she was coming, but had not said the exact hour, on purpose, without quite knowing why, and now she understood: she had not wanted them to come and meet her, had not wanted the scene of arrival, because an arrival with people waiting belongs to one who is coming home, and she, deep down, was not sure she was coming home, was afraid of arriving and the home not recognising her, and it was better to reach the empty square alone than to risk a welcome that would taste of too little. She picked up the bag and went up the path to the family house alone, with the light coming down on the serra, a woman of thirty-eight arriving in her parents' land the way one arrives in a strange land: on foot, alone, with everything she had in one bag.

Aunt Remédios killed the hen.

It was the family's way of saying it was a feast. When a house in Véspera kills the hen in the middle of the week, it is saying a thing that does not fit in words, and aunt Remédios, who was sister to the dead father and the only one who still kept the key of the mother-house, killed it the very day after the arrival, and laid the long table, and called the children, and there was lunch. Peregrina came into the kitchen full of people and was embraced from every side, the niece who came back, Firmino's girl, God rest him, and for a while, in the warmth of those arms, with the smell of the frying and the noise of all the voices talking over one another, she believed she had done right. That she had come home.

It lasted the length of one word.

She was at the table, among the cousins, telling something, a small thing, about the journey, and she said a word the way they say it over there, one of those words that came out of her mixed without her noticing, half in one tongue and half in the other, the way they come to the children of emigration. Aurélio, the cousin nearest her own age, stopped halfway through pouring the wine. He looked at Glória, his sister, across the table. And the two of them laughed. It was not laughter of malice. It was worse than that: it was the laughter of someone who hears something funny, light, weightless, the laughter one has with children who still say their words wrong.

"Oh, cousin," said Aurélio, good-humoured, finishing the filling of the glasses. "You do talk in a way. You've brought the accent stuck to you, there's no help for it."

"I'm from here," said Peregrina, and heard her own voice come out firmer than she meant.

"You are, you are," said Glória, conciliatory, her mouth smiling and her eyes already elsewhere. "You're uncle Firmino's daughter, that's plain to see. But you grew up over there, poor thing, that leaves its mark."

Poor thing. The word stayed in her plate the rest of the lunch, beside the hen the aunt had killed out of love. Poor thing. And Peregrina, who had come to the village precisely to flee from that, from the poor thing, from the one from away, felt, in the middle of the family lunch that received her with open arms, the thing that had followed her always and which she had thought she had left on the other side of the border: she felt herself a foreigner. There. At the table of her own.

Because over there, in the country where she was born, Peregrina had been the Portuguese one her whole life. However well she spoke the tongue of over there, with no accent at all, however much the school was the school of over there and the friends the friends of over there, there was always something that set her apart, and that something had small names: the name hard to say at the register, the different food the mother put in her lunchbox, the smell of home on her clothes, which was not the smell of the schoolmates' houses, the Sundays spent on the telephone with a family that lived in a map no one at school knew how to open. And when they quarrelled with her, in the playground, at the end of it all there always came the sentence that put her in her place: go back to your own country. The child Peregrina would go home wondering which was her own country, because of that one, where she was born, they told her she was not; and the other one, this one, the one in Portugal, she barely knew, only from the holidays; and she was left with neither, a girl without ground, the one from here treated as the one from there.

She had thought, her whole life, that the problem was being over there. That it would be enough to go back, to set her feet on her father's land, in the village he had left, to belong at last, to have a land, to stop being the one from away and become, once and for all, the one from here. It was with that hope, more than with anything else, more than with the death of her father or the emptiness her life over there had become, that Peregrina had sold what she had, packed her bags, and come down on the half-past-five bus. She was going home. She was going to belong.

And at the first lunch, the first glass of wine, the first poor thing, she understood she had got the wrong map.

In the afternoon, when the lunch broke up and the cousins had gone, aunt Remédios stayed washing the dishes and refusing help, woman, you've come off a journey, rest. Peregrina stayed in the kitchen all the same, drying, because drying the dishes beside someone is a way of not being alone, and the aunt, with her back turned, her hands in the water, spoke to her of the father.

"Your father, now, he was from here to the marrow," said aunt Remédios. "However many years he spent away, he'd get here and be Firmino again straight off, the one from the house up top, he'd put on his boots and go off to the fields as if he'd never left. Your mother's the one who never came back, poor soul. She was afraid, I think. There's people that are afraid of seeing the land changed." She scrubbed a plate hard. "Do you take more after your mother or your father, girl? I can't tell yet."

And Peregrina did not know how to answer, because the aunt's question was the question of her life put in other words: which of them she took after, which side she was of, of the one who comes back whole or of the one who never comes back at all. She only said, I don't know, aunt, maybe after neither of them, and aunt Remédios laughed, thinking it was a joke, and it was not.

Peregrina went out into the square. She sat on the rim of the fountain, in the lowering sun, and stayed listening to the water. The fountain of Véspera ran as it has always run, with that sure sound, in no hurry, and around it the village passed by at the end of the day, a woman with a pitcher, a man coming from the fields who wet his face, two children throwing water at each other and earning a scolding. Peregrina watched them and saw what she had never had: people who belonged to a place without having to think about it, people who were in a land the way one is in one's own skin, with no bag half-packed.

A neighbour she did not know passed by her, an elderly woman with a bunch of greens, and stopped, with the good curiosity of villages.

"Are you from the land, miss? I don't remember you."

"I'm Firmino's daughter," said Peregrina. "And Dores's. The ones who emigrated."

"Ah," said the woman.

And in that ah was everything. There was the you're of emigration, you're from away, you're not quite from here. The woman said a few more kind things, that God rest Firmino, that he was good people, and went on her way with the greens, and Peregrina stayed on the rim of the fountain with the ah dripping inside her, slowly, like the water on the stone. She had come back to the land to flee the you're from away, and she heard the same you're from away in the land where she had thought she would be, at last, from within. There, she was the Portuguese one. Here, she was the one of emigration. There, this was what she lacked. Here, she was already beginning to miss the over there, the friends of over there, the streets of over there, the way of living of over there, which after all were also hers and which now, from this side, hurt her like a lack.

She went back to the family house with the light fleeing. It was a good house, solid, of stone, with the things of the family inside it, the grandparents' furniture, the photographs on the walls, the aunt's crockery, and Peregrina went through the rooms turning on the lights and understood, in the turning of them on, that there was nothing there that was hers. Not an object, not a chair, not a smell she recognised as her own. It was the house of others, lent to the one who came back, and she would sleep in it the way one sleeps in a rented room, with the bag at the foot of the bed.

On one of the walls of the corridor was a photograph that made her stop. It was the father as a boy, there, in that house, with the serra behind, leaning against an ox cart, in a cap, laughing, with the face of someone who is at home without having to think about it. He was perhaps fourteen. Peregrina stood a long time before that photograph, in the weak light of the corridor, and a thing hurt her that she did not know how to name. The father had been from there. The father had belonged to that ground, that serra, that ox cart, in a way she would never belong anywhere. He had it in his eyes, in the photograph, the belonging, and it was a thing one inherits or does not inherit, and which had not reached her, because between her and that ground an ocean had come, and a whole life on the other side of it. And she thought it strange to have come to live in the house where the father had been a boy of fourteen who belonged, she who at fourteen, one summer, had learned exactly the opposite, that she was from nowhere. The same age, the same house, and two fates the other way round: the father leaving here wholly of here, she arriving here wholly of away.

That was the first night. She sat on the bed, in the house that was meant to be hers, and at the foot of the bed was the bag, the lid still raised, and on top of the chest of drawers the jumper not put away, and Peregrina looked at the two things without yet understanding that she was looking at herself. Outside, a dog barked and fell quiet. The river, down below, that never fell entirely quiet. And Peregrina asked, for the first time, sitting on that bed, the question that would run through all the rest, and she asked it low, almost without noticing, the way one notices a door that had always been there and never been opened:

"If I'm not from there, and I'm not from here, where am I from?"

She did not sleep well, that first night. The house made noises she did not know, the timber cracked as it cooled, the wind came in through some chink and moved a door away down the passage, and outside, instead of the rumour of the city her body had been used to for thirty-eight years, the traffic, the voices, the life that never stops in cities, there was an enormous silence, peopled only with things of the serra, a dog far off, an owl, the river. And Peregrina's body, lying in that bed, would not settle, because the body did not know where it was, it waited for the noises of home and did not find them, and a body that does not recognise the noises around it does not fall asleep, it stays on sentry, waiting for a danger that does not come but that might come, which is what the body does in a strange land. And Peregrina understood, lying in the dark listening to the house crack, that she did not even have sleep there, that even sleeping, the most natural thing in the world, was foreign to her in that land; and she had, in the middle of the night, the absurd and deep longing to be in the bed of over there, with the noises of over there, in the city that was not her land but that the body knew, and she understood, with a tightening, that to long for the bed of over there on her first night in her parents' land was the rawest proof that she belonged to neither of the two: neither did that one receive her, nor did the one she had come from belong to her, and she was there, lying between the two, sleepless, listening to a house that did not know her.

The house did not answer. The houses of others do not answer. And the bag stayed there, with the lid raised, the whole night, in case she changed her mind, because that was what the bag did, that was its service: not to let Peregrina settle entirely anywhere, so that, on the day the land hurt her again, she could pick it up and leave, quickly, before it hurt in earnest. She did not unpack the bag that night. She did not unpack it the next. And the jumper stayed on top of the chest of drawers, folded, waiting, like a foot out of the bed, for far longer than Peregrina, at that time, would ever have had the courage to confess.