What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire?: A Novel by António Lobo Antunes

music on, applaud you, bring you the gold dress and the feather stole for the final glory, I say
    —Dance, father, dance
    until they throw me out
    —Have you gone crazy, boy?
    I imagined my father’s arm rising up before they turned off the music and the lights, thanking them with a bow, accepting orchids, champagne, chocolates, smiling from the pinnacle of his glory
    —Aren’t you proud of me?
    and the doctor
    —I’ve got no time for chitchat let me go
    but it was all right because an end to a butt friend, an end to a coin for a cup of coffee friend and the cup steaming as it wobbled on the counter, Dona Helena in the Anjos apartment with currants and a cake and the chicken she imagined I like and which I don’t like
    —Son
    in spite of my having warned her a thousand times that I won’t have her calling me that
    —Just because the idiot girl in the photograph is rotting away in the cemetery do I have to repeat year in year out that I won’t have you calling me that?
    detesting the Avenida Almirante Reis, detesting Mr. Couceiro who would change from his street jacket into the scarecrow rags he wore at home if you could call those half dozen cramped little rooms a home, with the glassware shaking every time the church bells rang, a bus outside, the dead girl’s roses quivered their petals, Dona Helena
    —Wouldn’t you like some chicken Paulo?
    and I’m certain my father’s eyes with no rest
    —Paulo?
    Paulo was interested, don’t tell me otherwise, don’t lie, the maybe eyes
    —Rui?
    Rui in Chelas at that time pawning the fake jewelry or committing suicide at Fonte da Telha and the mastiff with a bow licking his knees, the two coffins in the chapel and me laughing, me laughing, I was remembering Bico da Areia, my mother, the man with the napkin in his hand trotting in the Anjos hallway, trotting in the hospital, where’s my car with wooden wheels so I can smash it on the floor, what my father had injected in his face, in his cheeks, that is, by his cheekbones, he was breaking out in purple scabs on his forehead and he
    —Rui?
    the windows at Príncipe Real were open, the carpet taken up, the floorboard had been pried up by a knife on one corner, the empty jewel bag and the clown was blind to it
    —Rui?
    so what else could I do but laugh, Dona Helena was alarmed
    maybe because the simpleton in the picture is rotting away in the cemetery I’m going to repeat time and again that I forbid her from calling me son, and she as though she understood, but she didn’t understand, if she really understood she’d have had the good sense to leave me alone, do some crocheting in the evening if she wants, go to the dead girl’s grave if she feels like it, wait five or six hours at the clinic so they can warp her backbone even more, she could enjoy cooking her chicken but if you’ve got the least bit of sense left, leave me alone, in spite of my suggestions she tried to grab me by the shoulder
    —Paulo
    Mr. Couceiro, the hero of Timor, cane in the air, was climbing up out of the easy chair or out of the rice paddies with buffalo corpses where the Japanese were searching for him shouting
    —Helena
    still to a regiment that was his cane
    —Helena
    and just when the Anjos clock was flinging down the first clump of sparrows
    —Dance father dance
    the glass on the photograph
    my fault?
    my fault
    broken on the floor, Dona Helena
    —Jaime
    an almost blind old couple on their hands and knees on the floor putting together what was left of the frame and their daughter, Dictation: My Death, I died on the seventeenth of February nineteen sixty-eight and every Saturday for thirty-two years my parents visit me, when they first started living at Anjos they would bring me along with them to the cemetery and to an iron square laid out among other iron squares making a kind of wall with grass on the stones, I scraped the grass off with a dirt-covered piece of glass and Mr. Couceiro
    —Don’t
    I imagined he was convinced