by Helena Carla Gonçalo Ferreira
I. Of the waters
Before there was a house there was water, and before the water there was the good dark,
which is not the dark of fears but the dark of seeds, and in that dark am I, who am not yet I,
who am a wanting-to-be folded upon itself like the foetus of a foetus, a tiny fern, a snail of
flesh, listening.
I hear you, mother. I hear you from inside and from outside, for you are my house and my
outskirts, my room and my street, and when you talk to the neighbour on the third floor left
I hear your voice twice, once coming through the bones, deep and oceanic, and once coming
through the air, already worn, already social. I prefer the one of the bones. I shall always
prefer what comes from within.
You do not yet know my name. You carry it in your mouth like someone testing plums at
the market, Leonor no, Constança perhaps, Maria of what, and in here I laugh with my gills
that are gills no longer, because I know things you do not know, mother, that time in here
does not run in a line, it runs in a wheel, and I see backward and forward like someone
standing in the middle of a threshing floor with the wind coming from every side.
I see, for instance, that I shall love women.
I do not tell you this for scandal, nor to fulfil a programme. I tell you the way one tells the
colour of the eyes before they open: it is here already, curled up in me as I in you, a truth tiny
and complete, fingernail, lunula, destiny. I shall love women as you loved — no, wait, that I
cannot tell you yet. There is an order to revelations, even between us, even in this
conversation no one hears, held between a woman and her water.
II. Of the Mother, Speaking Inward
I talk to you, little creature. I don’t say it out loud, for your father would laugh and my mother
would cross herself, but I talk to you at all hours, in the bathroom, on the bus, in the queue
at the chemist’s, when I hang out the washing and the wind pushes my belly as if to say go
ahead, madam, you carry precious cargo.
They tell me: it’s a girl. They saw you on a screen, salt and pepper of light, a shoal of a single
fish, and the doctor pointed with her ballpoint, there, do you see?, and I saw nothing and
saw everything, saw you all future, in a school smock, with a satchel, in a wedding dress —
and right here I stumbled, notice, right here my imagination came out mass-produced, a
Sunday leaflet, and something in me, I don’t know whether you, whether I, said softly: slowly.
Do not order her life the way one orders the layette.
Because how am I to know who you are. I know you kick when I eat pomegranates and grow
quiet with Chico Buarque, that much I know, you have inherited my bossa nova and my fruit,
but the rest, daughter, the rest is yours, it comes with you, sealed, a letter only you shall open,
and I, at most, shall hold the paper-knife for you.
Still, I confess: sometimes I dream of you grown, and in the dream you always arrive
accompanied, and I never quite see whose hand it is you bring in yours. And I wake with a
question caught crosswise, and it is not fear, it is something else, it is like hearing a key in the
door and not yet knowing who enters, but knowing that they enter, and that the house is
theirs.
III. Of the Daughter, Answering
The hand is a woman’s, mother. Now I can tell you, for you asked even without asking, and
in here questions reach me naked, without the clothing of conveniences.
Don’t make that face, I can feel it from here, I feel when your heart changes step, that heart
which is my wall-clock, my village bell. It didn’t change much, the step. It gave a small
shudder, of tidy surprise, and returned to its measure. Thank you for that. There are hearts
that derail over less.
Let me explain it to you the way one explains what needs no explaining, that is, the way one
tells a tale:
Once upon a time there was a girl who loved a woman first, because all girls do. Everyone’s
first beloved is a woman, mother, it is you, it is all of you, the mothers, the ones inside. I
loved you before I had a finished heart, I loved you with the tube that was to become a heart,
and when the heart was made, it beat already in a love known, rehearsed, yours. What I bring
is not deviation, it is fidelity. I shall love women because the first language I learned was this
body, and no one forgets their mother tongue; some pretend, translate themselves, spend
their whole lives in translation. Not I. I am staying in the original.
They will call it names, I know. I can see the names from here, some hurled, some whispered,
and I see the school corridors and the cousin who asks questions at dinner and grandmother’s
silence, which is worse than the questions. I also see, and keep this for the bad days, I see a
kitchen full of sun, many years from now, and two women arguing over whether the soup
takes coriander, and one of them is me, and it is a happy argument, mother, there are happy
arguments; you shall go there and taste the soup and say it wants salt, just so you can be right
about something.
IV. Of the Mother, Sewing
I went to the seamstress today to unpick a dress of mine to make you another. It is an old
custom, a mother’s clothes make a daughter’s clothes, the cloth remembers. And while the
scissors went opening their way along the seams I thought that raising a child is perhaps this,
unstitching myself with care so that out of me you may come, without tearing, along the right
lines, and with little waste.
And I thought more, my mouth full of pins: that my mother wanted me one shape and I
came out another, and her mother had wanted her another and she had come out another
still, and so on backwards to the beginning of women, all of us come out crooked from the
pattern, thank God, for if any one of us had come out true the sewing would be over, the
story would be over, and we would all be identical to the fashion-plate, and the fashion-plate,
when you look at it properly, whoever drew it never dressed a single woman.
So I tell you, and I tell it to myself, who am a slow learner: if you come crooked to my pattern,
blessed be you. The pattern tears. You do not.
I also bought, I don’t know why, I bought thread in every colour. The box is sitting on the
machine, it looks like a Sunday. It was the nearest I knew how to come to telling you yes
without yet knowing to what.
V. Of the Daughter, Almost
The hour is coming, I feel it. The house is tightening, the waters are settling their accounts,
and I, who spent nine months knowing everything, am beginning to forget. That is the rule:
one is born to forget and lives to relearn. In a little while I shall not remember this
conversation, nor will you ever have known of it, and the truth I now tell you whole I shall
tell you in pieces, over twenty years, in a hallway, one day, mother, there is something I have
to tell you, and you will pretend to be surprised to make my courage easier, and neither of us
will know it is an old rehearsal, a play already premiered here, in this theatre of water where
we were, so briefly, one.
Let me then take my leave of what I know:
I know you shall love me badly on some days and well on almost all of them, which is the
possible proportion.
I know the first girl I love will cost you, not for being a girl but for being first, for mothers
always find the debut of loves hard, whatever the costume.
I know you shall defend me at the Christmas table with a sentence you have not yet invented
and that will come out perfect, straight, yours, and that grandmother’s silence will dissolve
slowly, like sugar in warm water, and one day she will ask after my partner calling her by her
name, and you will go and cry in the bathroom out of sheer astonishment, for one also cries
when things go well, one cries a great deal, it is among the best of cryings.
I know the soup takes coriander.
And I know, one last thing, mother, for the waters are going now, the wheel is turning now,
I know that this that I am I do not bring you against you, nor in spite of you; I bring it to
you for your sake, in your honour, in honour of the first language: woman was the word in
which I learned to say love. I shall never unlearn it. Not even after forgetting.
VI. Of the Delivery Room
She was born at the end of the afternoon, like the big news.
They laid her at the breast, still on the wrong side of the world, and the mother looked at her
and saw that she knew nothing about her, absolutely nothing, and that this nothing was vast
and good, like a house waiting to be furnished.
“Welcome,” she said to her, softly, in the voice of the bones.
And the little girl, who had already forgotten everything, everything but the essential, sought
her heart with her ear and found it at once, on the first try, without hesitating, like one
returning, like one recognising, like one who was to spend her whole life, and did, knowing
by heart where the hearts of women beat.
Helena Carla Gonçalo Ferreira has developed a significant artistic dimension in literary creation and has been distinguished with several literary awards, including the Japão. Ir e Voltar Literary Award in the short story category for her short story “O Labirinto dos Jarrões Azuis” [“The Labyrinth of the Blue Vases”], the 2024 Theatrical Text Contest prize from the University Theater of Porto for her text “A Espécie que Sobrou” [“The Species That Remained”], and she is the winner of the 2025 edition of DramaTEns — Teatroensaio’s Annual Playwriting Competition with her play “Por Onde Voam os Pássaros” [“Where Birds Fly”].