The Silence

Every morning they found solace in an age old routine.  She got up first, used the bathroom and went into the kitchen to make herself a bowl of cereal and brew a pot of coffee. The regrets she carried on her back had the weight of a century each morning as she walked down the hall, through the family room and into the kitchen of the rented house.  Her husband of thirty seven years stayed in bed.  He never got out of bed before she had left the bedroom and bathroom. In fact he hardly stirred as she performed her morning ablutions.  They had long since given up on the niceties of morning greetings and inquiries as to how the other had spent the night.  Whatever fondness and respect they had shared decades ago was never nurtured by either, and over time withered and were forgotten, like so many memories.  Now the silence between them was like another person in the house, it filled a void, had a personality and in those moments when it happened to be absent, it was missed.

The couple had married while in High School.  She got pregnant and he got a job as a mechanic in a rundown shop run by an alcoholic. They had never been properly in love when they got married, they were simply together because they were embarrassed about being alone,  but that was not something they had ever discussed. They had a baby boy, who they named Bobby,  now thirty seven years old Bobby is the father of two children and goes by the more formal version of his name.   Only his parents still call him Bobby and no one ever corrects them. 

Bobby would have been an only child if after a few years his brother The Silence had not joined the family.   The Silence started small, one might even say premature.   It was conceived when the alcoholic boss gave the husband a small raise and the husband requested that the 30 additional dollars a month be paid in cash so he could have some money in his pocket without the wife nagging him about groceries and gas.  The Silence grew stronger and at a much faster rate than its older brother.  In fact, Bobby had been just six years old when The Silence had a huge growth spurt and lodged itself permanently in the house.  The spurt was nourished by some fishing trip and a ‘stay with mother.’ The Silence had never been sure about who had gone where and when, it was too small to remember.  But every year it still celebrates the date as its birthday.

Over the years the silence became an integral part of the family.  It lived mostly in the spaces between the husband and the wife.   In the car The Silence sat on the hand break between the front seats and commented loudly on the driver’s skill, speed, route and on the fact that a mechanic shouldn’t be driving this broken down piece of shit.   During meals it would sit on top of the table between the husband and wife and comment on the monotonous and repetitive cooking.   In bed it slept between the husband and the wife and yelled threats like “if you fart under the covers again I’m going to kill you” and spat rhetorical questions like “did you even brush your teeth today?”  All in the most absolute, sacrosanct silence.  For years now the husband and the wife had given up expressing all those things that The Silence screamed so loudly every day.

The Silence had been happy throughout Bobby’s childhood.   It attended little league games, visited the library and had ice-cream at the mall once a week.  Its days were joyful, but for as long as it could remember The Silence hated Sundays.   From an early age it remembered going to something called church where the husband and the wife spent  an hour in silence listening to a preacher, which wasn’t bad, but then to The Silence’s complete despair they socialized with people, smiled and made conversation as if The Silence had never exist.   It was awful.  But The Silence knew that the torturous charade never lasted and that all would return to normal on the car ride home.  

After Bobby grew up the husband and the wife stopped attending the church theater and The Silence experienced some of the happiest years of its life.
When its elder brother went to college, The Silence had the run of the house.  It went everywhere.   And there were moments of great happiness as it had never experienced before.   When a mobile phone would ring and the husband would look at the caller id and let the wife’s call go to voicemail, it felt wonderful.  When the wife’s girlfriends inquired after the husband and she exhaled contempt out of her nose in reply.   That was all wonderful too.   Even on Sundays.

When Bobby decided to get married, The Silence experienced a rough patch in its life.  But it always recovered each morning when the husband and wife so diligently adhered to their routine.   And a few years later came the time when Sundays once again became dreaded.

On Sundays Bobby, his wife and the grandchildren came to visit after church.   On those dreadful days the house was filled with the laughter of small children and stories of the week.  A great living light filled the house on Sundays and The Silence became dim in its brightness.  Oh what horrible days Sundays.   On Sundays The Silence clung to the memory of the morning routine the husband and the wife follow each day.  That memory gave it the strength to endure in the light.  

And so The Silence continued for many years.   Until one morning the husband packed a suitcase and walked out of the front door.   But the wife never motioned to stop him and she never asked him to stay, so The Silence never worried.  But it should have.  For a few months after the husband left The Silence was lonely, almost forgotten.  One day the wife walked into the kitchen and made French toast instead of cereal and then something horrible happened.   She hummed a little ditty while she flipped the toast!!   The Silence immediately got a headache and retired to a corner of the living room, next to the phone. 

A few hours later divorce papers arrived by courier.  But since the wife signed them without reading a single word, The Silence remained hopeful, but its head was throbbing now.

Life is always absurd, you just have to look

Today I walked over a historic monument into a 700 year old institution and paid to contribute to the deaths of thousands.

You don’t believe me, do you? Oh ye of little faith. It’s true! Everyday life is a surrealist experience if you stop to examine it. 

This morning I left my apartment, turned right and walked down to the street. A block later I descended one of four pedestrian staircases of this overpass:
  

 
Built in 1926, it is apparently an engineering feat that required the removal of a hill.  I happen to be very fond of this overpass, but I frequently question sanity of the multitude of tourists who come to Porto Alegre and stand on this overpass to take pictures of themselves just standing there.   I watch them and think that they probably get excited about warm milk…  It is a historic monument in the city of Porto Alegre, which is not saying much about historic monuments in Porto Alegre.  And so this morning I walked down one of its staircases.

I walked three blocks and turned left and into an institution that dates back to 1305.  On January 15, 1305 Dinis I, the 6th king of Portugal, instituted a system of ‘cartórios’ , or registry offices.
 These are outdated, useless institutions that have remained mostly unchanged for 700 years. All of the work is paper based and labor intensive.  I'm not exaggerating when I say that computers are only used as bona fide typewriters to generate more documents. The main function of cartórios in Brazil is to perpetuate the quagmire of bureaucracy  that stagnates that country and deprives of oxygen any hint of progress. And so I walked into the belly of this paper pushing dinosaur and had my signature notarized on a piece of paper.

The piece of paper was a sworn translation I did the day before. Only the few, the proud, the stoopid are allowed to do sworn translations in Brazil – you have to take a test that is only offered once every 30 years and receive official credentials.  In fact, these sorts of sworn translations only exist in Brazil and are only required by Jurassic governmental institutions.  And there I was in the belly of the dinosaur notarizing my signature on the fossilized remains of what was once a promising economy. The paper allowed a South American equivalent of Phillip Morris to import 15 kg of tobacco from well fed Fiji farmers, who exploit malnourished Fiji peasants, to produce cigarettes that will destroy the health of thousands of smokers, who are fully cognizant of the risks!  And this morning there was I, wallowing in the quagmire of Jurassic bureaucracy, paying for a service that will perpetuate this absurdity for future generations and inadvertently, or advertently as the case may be, contributing to the death of thousands of smokers. 

Everyday life is always absurd, you just have to look.