"The more we want to escape from the life we have, the more it sticks to us."
Dulce Maria Cardoso, “My Feelings”
“Why do I surrender to death, why does life kill me?” These are the questions Violeta asks herself, the main character of the novel “My (co)sensations”, written by the Portuguese writer Dulce Maria Cardoso, which was recently published by Buybook, as part of the Creative Europe project “100 years of European literature in 10 books”, and translated by Tamina Šop. The novel opens with a scene in which the main character lies in the wreckage of her car, hanging by her seat belt because she drove off the road while intoxicated during a stormy night. The car is overturned in a wasteland, a bag hanging in the bushes, packages of wax, gifts for customers, a ledger - scattered in the mud, with rain and threads of fireflies fluttering - and Violeta looks at a drop of water falling from a broken window and returns to the day before the accident and revises her life as a whole.
And what does her life look like? She sold her parents' house before the accident, which made her daughter Dora resentful and threaten to move out, and her family's plunge into darkness reveals shocking details from the lives of her parents, their maid, her half-brother and daughter.
"THE NAME OF A FLOWER THAT IS ALSO THE NAME OF A COLOR"
Violeta is described as an overweight Portuguese woman in her late thirties who sells waxing products, shares her sexual urges with truck drivers, and these aspects of her identity are constantly highlighted in her sentences. When she was a girl, in the darkness of a movie theater, she would let other boys touch her. After that, they would go after other, prettier and thinner girls, and Violeta would be left alone. She is not particularly shaken by her relationship with the men with whom she has been having sexual relations since her teens; Violeta describes herself as an overweight, promiscuous “figure,” almost a nymphomaniac. Sometimes self-mocking, sometimes pitiful, but most of the time just indifferent.
At the beginning of the novel, Violeta recalls having sex on the floor of a public toilet with a thin, drunk truck driver. She knows about love from other people's stories, she feels her body only under the weight of someone else's sweaty body, in an act devoid of emotion, on the cold floor, staring at a damp stain on the ceiling and a neon light that blinks unevenly. "I do what I have to do, even if I feel ashamed afterwards, what I feel does not become shame, only a certain discomfort, a lump."
Dora, Violeta's daughter, works at the supermarket cash register, finds in her grandparents the role models of parental love that she never had, and despises her mother because she decided to sell the family house after their deaths. Dora's father, Angelo, is a bad comedian, an animator, and a clown at children's parties whose jokes and antics make no one laugh.
"My (Sympathies)" is a novel that offers us a harsh insight into Portuguese society and the neuralgic sides of the revolution through the lives of Violeta's parents. In a flash of memories, we learn how her father Baltazar, after the Carnation Revolution and his connection to the dictatorship of Antonio Salazar, lost his mind and devoted himself to collecting sick birds, breaking their wings. We learn about his and his wife's past, and several other extremely moving situations that undoubtedly influenced Violeta's life even after their deaths.
This is a story about a woman who is destined to fail by birth: growing up in an atmosphere of dictatorship and with parents whose restrictions are sometimes understandable, but never necessary. Violeta welcomes every part of her life in promiscuity, alcohol and hatred towards her parents, which she materialized in the house she grew up in, and which she desperately wants to sell. She cannot build any functional relationship in her life because during her growing up she saw everything in the opposite way and embraced the negative -isms that accompanied her until her accident. This certainly does not amnesty Violeta from the guilt she caused herself. She runs away from the past, and only in the moments when blood comes out of her mouth does she become aware that there is no escaping the past:
"The past will grab onto anything to trap us, there is no worse torment than memory, it doesn't leave me alone even until I can no longer feel my body, hanging on a safety belt. (...) no one can correct the past, period."
STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Using the stream of consciousness technique, Cardoso shapes a series of memories and emotions of the heroine, which are lined up in a sequence of associations. Being able to maintain the coherence of the monologue on over three hundred pages really represents a skill for which the author must be praised. "My (with) feelings" is thus a novel without a concrete and classically conceived plot, as is most often the case with (post)modern novels that use stream of consciousness as their technique. Violeta is both a character and an (unreliable) narrator who tells us about her attitudes towards her parents, daughter, and finally her own actions. However, for the lack of structure, this is a novel that works quite well as a whole; Violeta introduces new characters into the story, (un)discovers their relationships and builds a special kind of tension with each new detail she presents.
With this story, Cardoso tries to sound the silence in which Violeta lived, because "there is nothing that silence cannot kill" and take us through the vast caravanserai of her tragedies. In a way, the novel is also a contribution to the image of what we assume to be the experienced images before death - the previous life that flashes before the eyes. We read "My (with) feelings" struggling for breath, the sentences line up just like the thoughts, the associations are separated only by commas that contribute to textual accessibility. The flow of Violeta's consciousness, which is one big sentence about pain, is interrupted by repeated lines ("no one can correct the past, period", "when they put us in one life, we don't know how to have another", "there is nothing that silence cannot kill", etc.), short sentences that are often spoken by someone else - father, mother, daughter, Yangelo. These interruptions are often in the service of Violeta's repeated questioning of the same thoughts and events. Thus, the novel re-emphasizes the father's adultery, social difficulties, and the consequences of dinner with Ângela and Dora, the day before the accident.
The stream-of-consciousness technique is most suitable for temporal narrative maneuvers, but it is equally slippery terrain in the field of time. Violeta’s story is not always clearly determined in time, which we would say is expected and appropriate given that it is a novel in fragments and that the narrator’s state is closer to delusional given the position from which she speaks, but temporal jumps are sometimes frustrating even for this novelistic technique. For example, in the same series of associations she recalls the previous day’s meal with Ângela and Dora, imagines other people’s conversations about her accident, and even cites imagined dialogues of people in the bank where she is waiting to sign the sale of the family house. Although she asks herself: “Where did I get all this from now, why am I suddenly so sure that everything was like this,” this is not an entirely convincing excuse for such statements at the level of a story that strives for a whole in accordance with its possibilities.
CYNICISM AND SARCASM
Violeta's voice meanders between self-pity and unfinished cynicism and sarcasm, if I may call it that. When we manage to cope with her thoughts and when we learn all the important things related to her life, is there a point in the book when we wonder where she is going to take us next? There is a certain moment of saturation in reading and the style itself gradually ceases to be enough to hold our attention. True, at the very end there is some kind of resolution, conditionally speaking, of Violeta's internal emotional conflict, but the question of her ambivalent character remains. Incompleteness, although often fitting with this literary technique and this constructed character, is not always justified in the novel "My (s)entiments".
Coming to the end, Violeta reminds us that this is after all just her story, which came from a trauma that was deeply and cancerously imprinted on all members of her family, on all generations to come.
"And mine, as well as the truth of my mother, my father, they are all different from each other, every story can be told in many ways, if this story was told by, say, Đangelo's mother, it would be a story about how she loved my father and because of that she ruined her own life, the truth of Đangelo's mother is even dramatically interesting, the only problem is that this type of story has long gone out of fashion."
Despite occasional distractions and saturation in reading, it is encouraging that Cardoso successfully overcomes the pitfalls of the literary technique she chose for her novel and offers an interesting framework to a story devoid of (strict) structure. With "My (with) Feelings" (the first publication of this novel was in 2005, for which she received the European Prize for Literature in 2009) and her later books, which have been translated and awarded multiple times, the writer has certainly shown why she is one of the most important contemporary Portuguese writers.