Madalena

Lazarus & Saul

Since the moment I thought of myself as a person, I knew I was half of someone. It was a strange feeling knowing that you extended beyond yourself. My other half was my twin, Lazarus. He was born first, a few minutes ahead of me. Just like Lazarus, he wanted to check it out first before I tried it.

We are alike in almost everything. We look alike, we sound alike, we love and feel the same things. When I’m sad, he too is sad, and if I cry, even if he is not with me, he will be assaulted by a need to cry, and without warning, tears spill down his face. The same thing happens to me. But being a girl I was not castigated for my moods. Lazarus was.

I remember a time when my father brought him home by the ears, all the way down the village. There were crowds of people watching, some chastising my father, and others laughing at the spectacle. He explained to those who asked that Lazarus was working at the Carpentry, softly whistling, and suddenly he stopped, and tears ran down his face.

My father yelled, “What kind of fag do I have for a son who starts crying for nothing? If that is the case, I will give him a reason to cry.”

Lazarus and I learned, early on, that if we were apart, we couldn’t cry, lest my father see it.

When Lazarus died, at least when we all thought he had died, I felt like a bird with one wing. If I took flight, I would go round and round without getting to my destiny. I was trapped in only half of me.

I would have died, I think, if not for Saul.

I had fallen in love with Manuel Barcos, a beautiful boy who loved everything beautiful. He was a musician, a painter, a thespian, a singer, a lover. We fell for each other as if there were no other alternative, as if ruled by God Himself. But Manuel was not one for fights, for suffering, for pain, and he left me and our baby when we needed him the most, because he couldn’t oppose my father.

Manuel’s unwillingness to fight for us left me bereft. He was an aesthete, a dreamer, a conjurer of fantasies, not a fighter, and when I realized that, I lost him twice. And since my child required a father figure other than Manuel, my father chose Saul as my husband, and I had no fight left in me. My biggest failure was Manuel’s surrender to his cowardice. Nothing mattered anymore, except for Lazarus, who had been the target of my father’s ire since he discovered I was pregnant with Manuel’s child.

I would have ended my life if that wouldn’t be also murdering Lazarus. I believed one couldn’t live without the other. Soon I found out how wrong I was. We are born alone and die alone.

Only when Saul, like a giant eagle, descended in my life unexpectedly and enveloped me in his protective wings, did I understand love. Since then, his quiet strength warded off all maladies.

When I became Saul’s fiancé, he said in our kitchen, in front of my parents, “from this day on Madalena is under my protection. No one will ever touch her again.” My father laughed at Saul’s audacity and to show how wrong Saul was, he threw a punch at my head. But before the punch reached its target Saul grabbed my father by the neck and squeezed. It happened so fast. I found myself thinking about a frog snatching a flying bug. There was no drama, the rest of us looked as one does when witnessing a natural disaster; we couldn’t avert our eyes, witnessing the almighty mountain fall into the sea. From Saul there was no warning, no facial distortions, no grunts of rage; just that perfect squeeze and letting go before my father passed out.

To the crumpled figure on our kitchen floor, Saul said, “Madalena is my fiancée, and we will get married, regardless of you. She is coming home with me, if you don’t understand my meaning.”

Had I known early on that one could, quite literally, face evil, my life would have been different.

What do we lose if we don’t embrace courage?

I almost lost my soul. I did lose my brother, my sweet mother’s smile, my childhood and the laughter of my siblings, and the unalienable right to peace of mind.

Saul taught me so many things, effortlessly, just with one smile, one gesture of kindness, with the unshakable belief that some injuries should never be perpetrated because they are irreversible. He understands my hurts and soothes my grievances by loving me in his way, but I know he wonders if there is a version of me that has not been damaged by malice.

“Life is irreversible,” I tell him often. “After we are here, there is no going back. We live between two bookends; the day we are born and the day we die.”

“Do you consider life an injury?” he asks, teasingly pulling my hair, sensing that he is constructing a philosophical trap.

“But of course,” I answer without a doubt. “What other thing, as soon as it happens, its natural tendency is to spiral into chaos? Furthermore, we know what perfection is, we aspire for it, but we will never attain it. We know about complete happiness, but we never lived it and never will. How are we so sure about things we never had or experienced? If death is a sure thing shouldn’t our understanding of it be different? Why do we despair as if we were born with the promise of eternal life? Is our soul eternal? But when we die, we are not crying about the soul, we are crying about that body we loved so much and is now eerily inert and ready to put under ground. Can you think of greater injury than to know that all those we love will die. Who will cry first? You or me? To live is to die later.”

Saul is not afraid of many things, but he fears my dark moods, and because he understands so well the space between life and death, he holds up the sky for me to walk under its blue, until I get to the place he is. And I think of Lazarus, my other half, and I wonder who is holding up the sky for him until he gets to where I am.