A dying mother tells her children she’s been to the Moon; then they find a locked trunk
by Bondo Wyszpolski
(Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from a novel that’s set in Brazil in 2002. Several writers and artists are drinking coffee at a café in São Paulo, regaling one another with stories. The conversation has already started, so let’s lean in and listen…)
“What I want to relate is what was occurring in a room just across the corridor, in which a middle-aged woman with early-onslaught dementia lay dying. She was leaving behind a flurry of children in their early or middle twenties, six kids who adored her, with two or three of them by her bedside at all times. As her health decelerated she began fabricating stories for her attentive but now incredulous offspring, tales of faraway countries visited, of meeting Lyndon B. Johnson and other heads of state. She also insisted that she had been to the Moon, literally, or at least close enough to reach out and touch it.
“Selenophile,” by Drica Lobo, a Brazilian painter who knows the Moon and all her secrets “Her kids humored her. Sure, Mom; which moon, one of those circling Mars or Jupiter? No, no, she’d say in exasperation, shaking her head from side to side, that Moon, and she’d point to the ceiling. The kids would look up and see only a fluorescent globe, the base littered with dead bugs.
“This continued for days, a week, and then one afternoon the woman rolled onto her side, mumbled something that sounded like ‘ad astra,’ and died. None of her children knew a word of Latin, let alone two, and so her final utterance went unremarked until Fermento, one of the three sons, recalled it months later and a friend then told him what it meant.
“After what was billed as ‘big mama’s funeral,’ so at least we know which of Gabo’s tales they were reading at the time, the children gathered at their mother’s tiny apartment and, as children do, squabbled and fought over her meager belongings. There were six of them, which compounded the problem, and in addition to Fermento and his brothers Celso and Mateus, there were the daughters Josefa, Helena, and Ingrid. At the bottom of the deceased woman’s wardrobe was a sealed foot locker that Celso, who’d been schooled in the fine art of breaking-and-entering, was able to pop open with Ingrid’s hairpin. Inside, under layers of yellowed tissue paper, was a neatly folded spacesuit. There’s no other way to put it, and I won’t string you along by calling it a costume. It was, in every way possible, an authentic flight suit, but how it had come into the possession of the deceased was a complete riddle, not to mention that it had the family name, Oliveira, stitched over the pocket. Mateus ran his hands across it and shook his head. Anyone know where this came from? The others shook their heads as well.
“Mateus telephoned each of his five siblings and they walked, rode the tram, or bicycled over to his flat. But before passing the letter around he told them with a perfectly straight face that, yes, Mom had been on the Moon. Not only that, he continued, one of her three sons and three daughters had been conceived there. The others were stunned and looked closely at each other to see which of them might be an extraterrestrial. But then Mateus laughed loudly and told them he was joking. Really! Sex on the Moon! Okay, wise guy, his sisters groaned, feigning anger; let’s see what he wrote. The letter was then handed from one to the other, and Helena said, Well, that’s that. No moonwalk for Senhora Clarice Oliveira. The only mystery we’re left with is where on earth she found that uniform. Who sells things like that around here? It must have been for some party she went to years ago. As for Polynesia, well, that’s way off the mark. What, Mom on Bora Bora? I still think Ipanema. The others nodded, and Josefa and Celso stood up to grab their coats. Anything else, before we get going?
