CHAPTER ONE: “The Last Day of Childhood”
Douro Valley, Portugal — Late September 1998
Dear Diary,
I am writing this eleven years later, but I remember everything as if my blood is still wet on the white tile. They tell us that time heals. They lie. Time only organizes the pain into chapters. This is the first chapter. The one before the blood.
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The first time I bled, I thought I was dying.
No one told me that was the day I started losing myself.
But I am getting ahead of myself. That is the problem with stories like mine — they always want to begin with the wound. The wound is not the beginning. The wound is the end of something. The beginning is always smaller. A shoe. A tree. A morning that seems like any other morning until you look back and realize it was the last morning of your life before you became someone else.
I want to tell you about that morning.
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I.
The morning of the last day of my childhood began with the smell of eucalyptus and woodsmoke.
I was eleven years old, though I did not know that eleven was a number that would one day feel like a country I had been exiled from. I knew only that the sun came through the kitchen window in a certain way — not the harsh white of July, not the grey gauze of December, but a September gold that made everything look like a photograph my mother kept in a drawer. The photograph was of her at eleven, standing in front of the same olive tree, and she looked happy in a way I had never seen her look in real life.
That should have told me something. That the happiness of eleven-year-old girls is a language their grown bodies forget how to speak.
I was sitting on the stone windowsill of the kitchen, my bare feet dangling over the edge, my toes brushing the rosemary bush that grew out of a crack in the wall. My avó Odete always said that rosemary grew where women had cried. By that logic, our entire quintã should have been a forest of it.
“Menina,” my avó called from the stove. “Come before your mother leaves for the factory.”
She called me menina — little girl — even though I was already taller than her. My avó was a small woman, the kind of small that comes from being born hungry in the Trás-os-Montes region during a time when food was not a guarantee. She had never learned to read, but she could look at a woman’s face and tell you exactly which sadness lived behind her eyes. She looked at me that morning and I saw something flicker across her face — a shadow, quick as a lizard — but then she smiled and pushed a bowl of caldo verde toward me.
“You are too thin,” she said. “You run too much.”
I did run too much. That was the problem. I ran through the olive grove behind the house, past the cork oak where my father had carved his name in 1974 — the year of the Carnation Revolution, the year he was seventeen and believed that Portugal would finally become a place where poor people could be free. He carved his name and the date and a word that had been worn smooth by rain: LIBERDADE. I ran past that tree every morning and touched the word with my palm as if it were a prayer.
I did not know then that freedom for a man and freedom for a woman were two different languages that shared a dictionary but not a grammar.
The olive grove was my kingdom. There were forty-seven trees, some of them over a thousand years old. My avó said the Romans had planted them. My avó said a lot of things that were probably not true, but I believed her because I wanted to live in a world where a thousand-year-old tree could still make olives every November. The trees were gnarled and twisted, their trunks like the hands of old women who had worked the land for centuries. I knew every tree by a name I had given them: the Fat One, the Leaning Lady, the One with the Hole Where a Bird Lived.
On the last morning of my childhood, I climbed the Leaning Lady.
I climbed her the way I had climbed her a thousand times before — barefoot, the bark rough against my arches, the branches low enough that I could swing my leg over without thinking. I sat in the crook of her oldest branch and looked out over the Douro Valley.
The river was a silver ribbon below. The terraced vineyards climbed the hills in green and gold stripes. The smoke from the village chimneys rose straight up because there was no wind — a rare thing in September, when the vento norte usually came down from the mountains like an angry god. I could see the whitewashed chapel of São Martinho, its bell tower missing two of its three bells because a storm had torn them down in 1987 and the parish had never found the money to replace them. I could see the road where the school bus came at seven-fifteen every morning, vomiting children onto the dirt shoulder like seeds from a squeezed fruit. I could see my cousin João’s house on the other side of the valley, the red-tiled roof that had lost half its tiles in the last winter storm, the rusted tractor in the yard that had not moved since before I was born.
João was my favorite person in the world. He was twelve, fourteen months older than me, and we had been inseparable since before we could walk. His mother — my tia Graça — said we came from the same womb and were just separated by accident. We looked alike: same brown hair, same brown eyes, same gap between our front teeth. The only difference was that João had a small scar above his left eyebrow from falling off a hay bale when he was five, and I had a small scar on my right knee from falling off the same hay bale two minutes later because I was trying to prove I could do everything he did.
That morning, I heard him before I saw him.
“Agnes!” His voice came from the bottom of the olive tree, thin and reedy because he was at that age where boys’ voices start to crack but haven’t decided what they want to become. “Come down! We have to check the fig tree before the birds eat everything!”
I looked down through the branches. João was wearing a yellow t-shirt that had once belonged to his older brother and now hung on him like a flag on a windless day. His hair was sticking up in the back the way it always did when he forgot to comb it. He was holding a basket — the wicker one with the broken handle that we had repaired with duct tape last summer.
“The birds can have the figs,” I said, not meaning it.
“You don’t mean that,” he said. He knew me. “Come down or I’ll climb up and push you.”
He could not have pushed me. I was the better climber. But I came down anyway because the morning was too beautiful to argue, and because the fig tree at the edge of the property was heavy with fruit that would be gone by tomorrow if we did not pick them today.
I dropped from the lowest branch and landed in the dry grass beside him. The earth smelled of dust and oregano and something else — something sweet and distant that might have been the last of the summer wildflowers or might have been the first hint of autumn, which in the Douro arrives not with a chill but with a change in the light. The sun shifts from yellow to gold to amber over the course of a few weeks, and the grapes on the vines begin to soften, and the women in the village start talking about the harvest as if it were a war they had to win.
“Race you,” João said, and he was already running before I could answer.
I ran after him. The grass was dry and scratchy against my shins because I was wearing shorts — the same blue shorts I had worn all summer, now stained with grass and olive juice and a splotch of red that might have been from a crushed berry or might have been from the time I scraped my knee against a rock. I did not care about stains then. I did not care about how I looked. I ran with my arms out like an airplane, the wind pulling my hair back from my face, and for that moment — for those few seconds between the olive tree and the fig tree — I was not a girl or a future woman or a body that would one day be looked at by men who had no right to look. I was just a creature in motion, a collection of running legs and laughing lungs and a heart that beat for no reason other than that it was alive.
The fig tree was enormous — older than the olive trees, my avó said, though that was almost certainly another lie. Its trunk was thick as a wine barrel, its roots breaking through the soil like veins. The branches spread so wide that they shaded a circle of ground where nothing else grew — a cool, dark cathedral of leaves where João and I had spent entire afternoons pretending to be explorers, pirates, soldiers, parents, dead people come back to life.
“I won,” João said, though he was leaning against the trunk, breathing hard, and I was only two steps behind him.
“You cheated,” I said. “You started before you said go.”
“That’s not cheating. That’s strategy.”
“Strategy is what old people call cheating when they don’t want to say sorry.”
João laughed. He had a good laugh — the kind that started in his belly and came out through his nose first, so it sounded like a snort. I had heard other people make fun of his laugh, but I never understood why. It was the most honest sound I knew.
We picked figs for an hour. The fruit was soft and heavy, purple-black with tiny cracks in the skin where the sweetness had pushed through. We ate as many as we put in the basket. The juice ran down our chins and stained our fingers purple. João tried to wipe his hands on his shirt, and I told him his mother would kill him, and he said his mother was too tired to kill anyone, and I did not understand what he meant but I laughed anyway.
While we picked, we talked about the things that eleven-year-olds talk about when they think no one is listening. We talked about whether it was possible to dig a tunnel from Portugal to Brazil. We talked about whether the ghost of Inês de Castro actually haunted the Quinta das Lágrimas in Coimbra, or if that was just a story to make tourists come. We talked about what we would do if we found a million escudos — João said he would buy a motorcycle; I said I would buy a library. We talked about our teacher, Professora Fátima, who had told us that we could be anything we wanted to be when we grew up, and I asked João if he believed her, and he said yes, he believed her, and I said I did too, but I was already lying.
I did not know I was lying. But I was.
Because even then — even at eleven, even in the fig tree’s shade with my best friend in the world — there was a small voice inside me that asked: Can you really be anything? Or are there things that only boys can be, and things that only girls can be, and no one has told you the difference yet because they want you to find out for yourself, the hard way?
I did not listen to that voice. I wrapped it in fig leaves and buried it under the roots of the tree. It would take me twenty years to dig it up again.
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II.
By noon, the basket was full, and the sun was high enough that the shade of the fig tree had shrunk to a small circle around the trunk. We walked back toward the house, our feet dusty, our hands sticky, our stomachs full of fruit that would give us both stomachaches later. I did not care. Stomachaches were temporary. The memory of that morning — the smell of the figs, the sound of João’s laugh, the way the light fell through the leaves in golden coins — that memory would become a splinter in my chest that I could never remove.
My avó was sitting on the stone bench outside the kitchen door. She was shelling peas into a bowl, her hands moving with the automatic precision of someone who had done the same motion fifty thousand times. She looked up when she saw us and shook her head.
“Fig juice everywhere,” she said. “You will attract wasps. Go wash yourselves at the tanque.”
The tanque was a stone basin fed by a spring that came out of the hill behind the house. The water was cold even in September, cold enough to make your hands ache. I washed my arms and my face while João splashed water on his hair and tried to flatten it. It did not work. His hair stood up again as soon as the water dried.
“You look like a rooster,” I said.
“You look like a fig,” he said.
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“You don’t make sense.”
This was the shape of our love — a series of meaningless insults that meant I am glad you exist.
We ate lunch at the wooden table in the kitchen. My avó made pão com chouriço and a tomato salad with onions and oregano from the garden. My mother was not there — she was at the shoe factory in Vila Nova de Gaia, where she worked ten-hour shifts gluing soles onto sneakers that would be sold in French supermarkets. My father was not there either — he was on the road, driving his truck to Spain, carrying cork and wine and olive oil to buyers who paid too little. I did not miss them because I had never known a lunch where they were both present. Absence was not an event in our house. Absence was the wallpaper.
João’s mother came to get him at two o’clock. Tia Graça was a thin woman with deep circles under her eyes and a way of standing that suggested she was always bracing for bad news. She thanked my avó for the figs, grabbed João by the shoulder, and pulled him toward the dirt path that led to their house.
“Say goodbye to your cousin,” she said.
João turned around and waved. “Tomorrow,” he said. “The olive tree. Same time.”
“Tomorrow,” I said.
I did not know that there would be no tomorrow. Not like this. Not with this body, this sky, this version of myself that did not yet know the word menstruation and had never felt shame as a physical sensation, like a hand around her throat.
I watched him walk away. His yellow t-shirt grew smaller and smaller until it disappeared behind the cork oak with the word LIBERDADE carved into its trunk.
Then I went inside to help my avó wash the dishes.
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III.
The afternoon passed slowly, the way afternoons pass in the Douro when there is nothing to do and everything to feel. I sat on the stone windowsill again, this time with a book — one of the few books in the house, a Portuguese translation of The Little Prince that my mother had bought from a used bookstore in Porto when she was nineteen. The pages were yellow and loose. Someone — not me, maybe my mother, maybe a stranger before her — had underlined a passage in faded pencil: “Foi o tempo que perdeste com a tua rosa que fez a tua rosa tão importante.”
It was the time you spent with your rose that made your rose so important.
I did not understand the passage then, not really. I thought it was about love, about friendship, about the way João and I had spent years in the olive grove and the fig tree and the hay bales. I did not understand that it was also about loss — that time spent with someone is only precious because you will eventually lose them, or yourself, or both.
At four o’clock, my avó called me to help her prepare dinner. We peeled potatoes. We chopped onions. She let me stir the caldo verde while she sang a fado under her breath — not the famous ones, the ones they play in Lisbon restaurants for tourists, but the old fados from the Trás-os-Montes, the ones that had no words, just sounds, just the vowels of mourning stretched over centuries of women waiting for men who never came home.
“Avó,” I said. “When did you become a woman?”
She stopped singing. Her hand hovered over the pot.
“What do you mean, menina?”
“I mean — when did you stop being a girl? Was there a day? A moment?”
She looked at me for a long time. Her eyes were the color of the olives after they had been cured — dark green, almost black, with flecks of something older than her years.
“There was a day,” she said. “But I will not tell you about it. You will have your own day. Everyone does.”
“What happened on your day?”
She put the spoon down. She wiped her hands on her apron. She walked to the window and looked out at the olive grove, and for a moment she was not my avó — she was a girl of eleven or twelve or thirteen, a girl I would never meet, a girl who had bled for the first time in a house with no running water and no mother to explain what was happening.
“I thought I was dying,” she said quietly. “And in a way, I was. The girl I had been died that day. I became someone else. Someone who was always tired. Someone who was always afraid.”
She turned back to me and forced a smile. It was the saddest smile I had ever seen.
“But that is enough for today. Go wash your hands. Your mother will be home soon.”
I went to the tanque and washed my hands. The water was cold. The sky was turning from gold to pink to the deep purple that comes just before the stars. I heard the church bells of São Martinho ring six o’clock — one, two, three, four, five, six — each bell a hammer striking the same note of finality.
I did not know that I had just lived the last hours of my childhood.
I did not know that tomorrow, I would wake up with blood on my thighs and a question in my throat that no one would answer.
I did not know that the girl who climbed olive trees and ran through dry grass and ate figs until her stomach hurt — that girl was already disappearing, fading like the light, and that I would spend the next twenty years trying to find her again.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
Let me start at the beginning.
The real beginning.
The blood.
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Dear Diary,
I am writing this because I need someone to know that the girl in the olive grove existed. She was real. She was not a dream. And she did not deserve to disappear the way she did.
No one prepared me. No one told me.
So I am telling you.
Tomorrow, I will tell you about the blood.
Tonight, I will dream of figs.
— Agnes
Coimbra, 2009
END OF CHAPTER ONE
