The Master Beam

Perpétua was the first to light the fire in the House of the Mill and the last to put it out, and between the one and the other fitted the whole house, and the whole family, and all the old ones, and she did not notice that it was a great deal, because a column does not feel the weight of the roof, it holds it.

It was to her that they turned. The telephone rang in the kitchen at those hours when only troubles ring, and it was Belmiro, from the city, his voice already asking before it said what for: oh Perpétua, look, this month has been tight, it was the car, it was the children's school, I'll settle up with you later. It was Felismina, from the next village, who came to spend a few days at the House of the Mill to rest from her troubles and left all her troubles at the door for Perpétua to hold while she rested. It was uncle Aníbal, bedridden these two years in the back room, who was Perpétua's to tend, to change, to feed, to watch over, because Perpétua is the one who knows, Perpétua is the one with the knack, Perpétua is the one who can. And the mother-house was hers, and whoever has the mother-house has the feasts, the Christmases, the weddings, the funerals, the long table laid and cleared by one pair of hands alone, because it is at the mother-house that the family gathers, and the family gathers to be served, not to serve.

The greatest weight, in those years, was uncle Aníbal, bedridden in the back room. And uncle Aníbal was a weight no one saw, because it was borne behind closed doors, before dawn, with no witnesses. Perpétua lifted him alone to change him, and a bedridden man weighs like lead, and she no longer had the age or the back to lift him, but she lifted him, because there was no one else at six in the morning in the back room of the House of the Mill. She washed him, changed his soiled clothes, turned him on his side so as not to make sores, gave him broth from her hand, spoonful by spoonful, listened to his complaints, his moans, the muddles of an old man, and went up again in the middle of the night when he called, and did all of this without ever complaining, because complaining is for one who has someone to complain to, and she had no one. The brothers and the sister knew the uncle was in Perpétua's charge, and that was enough for them; to know him in her charge was to have no need to think of it any longer, because a weight in the charge of a column is a weight that ceases to exist for the others. And Perpétua did everything, and did it well, and did it in silence, with that competence the family took for granted as one takes for granted the beam of the roof: no one thanks it, no one asks it how it is, because a beam does not tire, it is there. One Sunday, at night, the telephone rang, and it was Belmiro, and the call was the call of always, and Perpétua, who knew it by heart, knew at once, by the tone of the first word, that a request was coming.

"So, Perpétua, how are you keeping?" said Belmiro, and did not wait for the answer, for no one waited for Perpétua's answer to that question. "Look, I rang you because… well, this month was bad. It was the car, which broke down, and the children's school, and the rent went up, and I'm left with nothing for the end of the month, and I thought, maybe Perpétua can save me, just this once, and I'll settle up with you after, I'll pay you back as soon as I can."

And Perpétua, on the other end, with the list of her own bills in her head, with the uncle calling from the room, with her back aching from the day, said what she always said.

"All right, Belmiro. How much do you need?"

And Belmiro said, and it was a great deal, and Perpétua said all right, I'll see to it, and Belmiro's voice went light all over, on the spot, oh, sister, you've saved me, you're an angel, I don't know what would become of me without you; and he hung up, light, his trouble tipped into her, and never, in the whole call, did he ask his sister how she was doing, whether she had the means to pay her own bills after paying his, whether her back ached, whether she was tired, whether she was alone. Because to Belmiro, Perpétua had no bills nor back nor tiredness nor loneliness; what Perpétua had was the knack, and money, and patience, and she was always there. And Perpétua went to the pantry tin, the flour tin that held no flour, where she kept the money in reserve, the God-spare-us money, and took out Belmiro's from it, and was left with less for herself, and did not even notice she was left with less, because she had forty years of practice in noticing only what the others lacked.

And the village, which saw from outside, said of her what is said of women who spend themselves: that one is a saint, what would that family be without Perpétua, that one bears everything. And it was a praise, and it was a sentence, because to the one who bears everything more is loaded, always more, for the strength of one is the excuse for the weakness of the others.

The brothers and the sister lived light, and it was that, more than the weight, that was beginning to hurt her without her yet admitting it. They could live light because she was the column. Belmiro complained of his little city troubles, of the bills, of the tiredness, to a sister who held all his great troubles for him and whom he never asked about hers. Felismina came to rest at the house of the one who never rested. And the youngest, Tó, he had never taken up any weight in his life, and at forty he still turned to Perpétua for everything, for money, for advice, for the unsnarling of his blunders, with the naturalness of one who turns to a mother, which was what Perpétua had been to him since the real mother died.

And the body was beginning to speak. Perpétua did not say it to anyone, for to say it was to complain, and complaining was not in the nature of a column; but for months now she had had pains in her back that would not pass, a tiredness sleep did not lift, a shortness of breath climbing the uncle's stairs. She pushed the signs away, excused them on her age, on the work, on everything but the truth, which was that old timber, after a life of bearing too much weight for too long, was beginning to creak within, slowly, in a sound no one yet heard but that she already felt.

The stairs to the uncle's room, up above, had become a measure of her tiredness. Before, she would climb them in one breath, with the broth tray in one hand; now she had to stop halfway, holding to the rail, waiting for the air to come back and the heart to slow, and only then climb the rest. And she always stopped on the same step, the seventh, and laughed at herself, with a sad irony, here I go, my step; and she told no one she stopped on the seventh step, because to tell it was to admit that the beam creaked, and the beam does not creak in front of the house. She climbed, stopped on the seventh step, got her breath back, and went on, every day, several times a day, and no one knew that Perpétua, the one who bears everything, could no longer bear a staircase without stopping; no one knew because she hid the step as she hid everything, and the house, up above, went on leaning against her without noticing that the column already stopped halfway up the stairs so as not to fall.

It was at a Christmas that the creaking was heard for the first time, though only she heard it.

She had spent three days preparing everything, alone. Three days of cooking, from five in the morning to midnight: the meats the day before, the sweets her mother used to make and that she went on making as though her mother were watching, the salt cod soaking, the house scrubbed top to bottom, the good crockery taken from the cupboard and washed, the long table set up with the trestles and the boards that were kept all the year for that. The old ones washed and dressed and seated in their places. Uncle Aníbal brought down with difficulty from the room to the parlour, in no one's arms but hers, so as not to spend Christmas alone in the back room. And all of this Perpétua did alone, over the three days, while the brothers and the sister telephoned to ask what time lunch was and whether they should bring anything, and she said no, you needn't bring anything, just come, it is all seen to; because to ask them to bring something was to admit that she was not managing, and Perpétua always managed, and it was in that always managing, in that saying it is all seen to, just come, that there was made, year after year, the lightness of the others and the weight of her. The long table filled the whole parlour, and at the table sat the entire family, laughing, eating, talking over one another, and Perpétua, on her feet, serving, went from the kitchen to the table and from the table to the kitchen, and no one got up to help her, because serving was Perpétua's, as breathing is the lungs'.

Belmiro, glass in hand, was telling a story from the city, loudly, to the whole table. Felismina ruled the conversation. The children ran beneath the table. And at a certain point, in the midst of all that, with a serving dish in her hands, Perpétua felt the world go round. A shortness of breath. A pain that gripped her chest like a hand. She had to set the dish down on the dresser and lean against the wall, right there, in the corner of the parlour, so as not to fall, and she stood leaning against the cold wall, with the room spinning before her, looking at the long table full of the family she sustained.

And no one noticed her.

That was what marked her most, afterwards, going back over the night: not the pain, the fact that no one noticed her. The family laughed and ate three steps away, and the column was leaning against the wall trying not to fall, and no one looked, because no one looks at the beam, they look at the table, at the feast, at the food she had made. Belmiro was finishing his story, and there were peals of laughter. Felismina asked for more wine, and it was Tó who got up, not to go to the kitchen, to fetch the bottle that was right there at hand. No one needed Perpétua in that instant, and it was the one instant of the night in which she needed someone, and there was no one.

Leaning against the wall, with the full table before her, Perpétua had, for the first time in her life, a thought that froze her: and what if I fall? Now, here, against this wall, what if I fall? Who holds all this?

And what froze her was not that she might fall. It was that she had no answer. Because she understood, there, leaning against the wall, that if she fell there was no other column. There was no one prepared to hold anything at all, because she, her whole life, by holding everything, had taken from the siblings the need and the practice of holding whatever it was. The House of the Mill was a house of one single column, and a house of one single column falls entire on the day the column cracks. By not letting anyone share the weight, she had not made the house strong, she had made it fragile, dependent on a single piece of old timber that was beginning, in silence, to give way.

The dizziness passed. Perpétua straightened up, breathed, took up the dish, and went back to the table, and smiled, and served, because the column does not fall in front of the house. No one knew. Belmiro, taking his plate, said only, without looking, it is all good as ever, sister, you are the one who knows; and it was the thanks of the night, said in passing, with his eyes on the food, and Perpétua served the next.

At night, the table cleared, the dishes washed, the old ones put to bed, uncle Aníbal changed, the brothers and the sister gone home light and grateful, with a kiss and a see-you-next-week, Perpétua was left alone in the mother-house. The kitchen still smelled of Christmas. She sat down, which was one of the few times in the year she sat without it being to peel or to mend, and she stayed looking at the empty house, the house she held, and let herself, for once, feel what she always pushed away. She felt alone. Alone in a deep way, the loneliness of the column, the loneliness of one who holds everyone and whom no one holds.

And she asked, without meaning to, the question that was to change her life. Not the question of the Christmas, the other one, the one that came up from underneath. Everyone leans against me, she thought, looking at the wall where she had leaned hours before. And I, against whom do I lean? Who holds Perpétua?

And she did not know how to answer, because the answer, she understood with a tightening, was no one. It was that cold wall of an empty kitchen at the end of a feast. And she went to bed with the question, and it was the first night, in many years, in which the tiredness of fifty-two years did not bring her sleep, because beneath the tiredness there was now, awake, the column asking who held her, and discovering, in the dark, that she had no one, that she held herself, and that she was running out of the strength to do it.