“Where Is Here?” an excerpt from I’m Still Here by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, translated by Alison Entrekin & Daniel Hahn
We don’t remember the first images and accomplishments of our lives: milk from the breast, the bars of our crib, the mobile that turns magically of its own accord, rolling over, not being able to roll back and crying till somebody comes to help us, learning to throw our little legs to one side, rolling over and rolling back all on our own, the first movement in our lives that reveals significant bodily mastery, of which we are immensely proud, like lifting ourselves up in our cribs, on our parents’ bed, on the floor, the first time we stand up, hands on the wall, the second movement of bodily mastery of which we’re immensely proud, throwing our toys out of the crib, knowing who dada and mama are, squeezing dolls that say “You are my friend,” “I love youuuu,” “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands,” the discovery that crying brings rewards, the fascinating switch that turns the light on and off, the world of buttons just waiting to be pressed all around us, a world in which airplanes fly overhead, there are sockets, paper can be torn, and the printer spits out paper, the drawer opens and closes, opens and closes, and there are drawers absolutely everywhere, turning on the TV, calling the elevator, things to be pressed on the telephone and the computer and the remote control, our first contact with the magnificent cellphone, which plays music, and an unsupported freefall that in time becomes walking and is perfected, a movement that everybody encourages and loves and applauds.
We remember this every day, as we climb out of our cribs, go in search of phones, the remote, trying to walk, to tear paper, to open and close drawers, open and close, the button on the doll that says we’re their friend, all the motor skills that improve with time, and light switches, and what is allowed and what elicits a loud “no!” You mustn’t do that, and knowing who these people are, dada, mama, granny, auntie, and the fact that, when they carry us back to our crib and turn off the lights, we’re scared that all this is going to disappear and never come back: which is why we end up crying ourselves to sleep.
The rebirth of a past psychological fact and being able to recognize and locate it are the necessary conditions for memories.
Each of us has a Memory that is already working from the day we are born! We remember things from the moment we wake up, we remember how magnificent the world is, we feel an emptiness in our stomach, a diaper that’s heavy, wet, we remember that, if we cry, someone will miraculously appear to relieve us of our discomfort.
We are it-ty-bit-ty mini-humans and we have our memories and reference points, we play with them, calculate our actions drawing from those memories that have (already) solidified. And yet we remember none of this years later. We remember none of this, though we do remember the tricycle we were given when we were three or four, our pre-school, a birthday party where all our friends came, certain toys, nannies, houses where we lived, hallways, bedrooms, punishments, fights, schools, schoolteachers, classmates.
The first memories that stay with us for our whole lives are from when we’re three or four and, with every passing year, there will be more memories retained, five, six, seven, and these will be the first ones that are strong enough to resist erasure, which will be layered over with new experiences, which pile up, and up, and up, eight, nine, ten . . .
My son won’t remember the time when he was still just one and he insisted on showing his bellybutton to everyone who came to talk to him. He would only settle down if we showed him ours too. He won’t remember the fat bellybuttons, the hairy ones, the smooth ones, the funny ones, the feminine ones, the huge, pasty-white, crooked, flattened, soft, shy, showy, beautiful ones that he saw. He won’t remember his uncles and aunts, his parents’ friends, all sorts of men and women he didn’t know lifting up their shirts for him, pulling a funny face, smiling a smile that he would check to see if it matched their bellybutton, as he stared at that unfamiliar bellybutton, then up at its owner’s face, then back at the bellybutton. He won’t remember how he used to careen around the living room like a spinning top, falling, getting back up, spinning again; it wasn’t till days later that we learned he was performing solo capoeira in the living room, having learned it at preschool.
But he will know about his childhood fascination with that hole with the funny name that everybody has in the middle of their body, the depression in the skin where the umbilical cord used to be, our first physiological scar. He’ll know about this because we’ll tell him, because in the first photos of the first parties in his first year of preschool, the children are all gathered around the little table smiling or tearful, looking at the camera or not, and he has his shirt up and he’s pointing at the marvel that is his bellybutton. And he’ll wonder if there’s a period in which our communication with the world takes place through the bellybutton and whether our first memories enter us that way.
The rebirth of a past psychological fact and being able to recognize and locate it are the necessary conditions for memories. Or for Memory itself. Eliminate one of them, and it won’t be a memory but a recollection. You see somebody on the street, think you recognize them, you imagine you’ve seen them before but you couldn’t say when or where. In that case you have the return of a fact from the past and the recognition but no localization: There’s no memory. Henri Bergson wrote about this. A simple clinical test for detecting the lack of a functioning memory, as for example with Alzheimer’s patients, is to ask where we are and what year it is.
January 30, 2008. We came out of Liberdade station. It was sunny, but I remember the smell of imminent rain. I suspect everyone in São Paulo can smell precisely when there’s rain coming. The feeling in the air that the sky might suddenly bucket down and everything will change. They know that, if it rains, chaos will follow. And that, try as we might, it is still nature that governs people’s routines in South America’s biggest urban centre.
São Paulo is one of those rare cities that has signposts to indicate an area subject to flooding, red letters on a blue background with two large clouds releasing enormous drops, a sign that is not a part of the Brazilian Traffic Code. As if forewarning the driver coming down Rua Diana, in Perdizes, on the corner of Rua Turiassu—or Turiaçu, on some signs—that, in the event of a storm, the street opposite will become a torrential river, flowing downhill with its strong current going in the same direction as the cars, not the wrong way up a one-way street, as if it too obeys traffic signs—and that it floods every summer.
Memory is an unriddled magic trick. A trick that life plays on you.
Memory is an unriddled magic trick. A trick that life plays on you. One memory doesn’t settle over another, but beside it. A recent memory isn’t retrieved before the thousandth. They become entangled. My mother, who has Alzheimer’s, can’t remember what she had for breakfast. My mother, who has Alzheimer’s, sees my one-year-old son, who looks just like I did, and can recognize him. She doesn’t think he’s me, but she calls him sweet child, my sweet child. And she always says:
“He’s the sweetest thing.”
Sometimes she gets confused and says:
“She’s just the sweetest little thing.”
Perhaps, having had four daughters, all babies are girls to her. My mother complains when we leave and take him with us.
The old centre of São Paulo. We came out of Liberdade station. My mother, my sister Veroca, and I. We crossed Largo de Sete de Setembro. I remember the smell of impending rain and the bustle around the courthouse. Mother had already walked this way hundreds of times. But if we’d left her there alone that muggy afternoon, she’d have stopped short, unable to find her way home. She’d have lost herself in circular reasoning; a flood of images, synapses, commands and memories would have inundated her brain, making the familiar unfamiliar, resulting in a single question:
“What am I doing here?”
Or better:
“What was it I came here to do?”
And perhaps:
“Where is this?”
And because the answer wouldn’t have been forthcoming, as the storm in her brain prevented any clarity of thought, she’d have uttered the words that marked the beginning of her Alzheimer’s:
“I want to leave.”
Or:
“I want to go home.”
Sometimes smiling. Sometimes furious. Always surprising.
We entered the João Mendes Courthouse. She looked at the familiar-looking place and smiled. She was enjoying the outing. We waited in line for an elevator. Indicators above the elevator doors showed which floors they were currently on. A busy ebb and flow of lawyers, interns, defendants, witnesses, plaintiffs, police officers, prisoners, assistants, victims, and couples parting ways.
Turiaçu is a river in the state of Maranhão. The name comes from “tury” = “torch” + “assu” = “big.” Big torch, big light, big fire. A bonfire in a high place seen from afar used to help shrimp fishermen at sea. On dark nights, it showed those who were taking too long, who were further out from the coast, the point of return. It guided those who were lost. Turyassu: the big fire, the beacon that lit the way home, to the village, to their families.
Someone crashed into my car on a thoroughfare running parallel to Rua Turiaçu, one cloudless day. I was sued in that courthouse. My mother was my lawyer. Even though the other guy was guilty, he was the one asking me for money. My mother agreed to settle. The guy wanted five times the cost of his repairs. He presented false quotes. I was disappointed in her for not fighting to the end, not making justice prevail. I was innocent. He’d crashed into me and now he was saying I did it!
“Settle, son. It isn’t worth the fight . . . ”
Justice did not prevail. I paid for the guy’s repairs. We took the elevator down with that crook and his opportunistic lawyer. We rode in respectful silence and parted ways without a word. I should have throttled them both, him and his lawyer. We headed for Liberdade Station. On other occasions, when I was defeated, I heard:
“Just settle, son. It isn’t worth the fight . . . ”
I was legally separated in that courthouse, years later. My mother was supposed to have been my lawyer, as she had been my whole life, for everything: car crashes, contracts, labour squabbles, problems with the tax man. She was my proof-reader and accountant, as well as lawyer for all five of her children and a dozen cousins, friends, and even cousins’ friends and friends’ parents. She handled friends’ divorces, probate, and represented factories, businesses, and Indigenous people. She was the divorce lawyer for the celebrity Ronnie Von, who caused a furore when he showed up at the office.
Where has all that knowledge gone? It’s adrift in her memory, bobbing here and there in a sea of chemical connections.
As one of few specialists in Indigenous law, she acted for the Gilberto Gil Foundation, and was Sting’s lawyer in Brazil. He donated money to the Kayapo tribe. He would call her at home, with his unmistakable English accent:
“Eunice Paiva, porrrfa-vorrr.”
“Mom! Sting-ee’s on the phone again! Don’t talk for ages, I’m waiting for a call!”
She represented the illustrious and the unknown, and was a legal consultant to the federal government, the World Bank and the United Nations. Where has all that knowledge gone? It’s adrift in her memory, bobbing here and there in a sea of chemical connections, where the big torch on the coast can’t be seen—the big fire that guides us back to land, to our point of departure. Like David Bowie’s Major Tom, stuck floating around the earth in a most peculiar way.
Major Tom, in the dark, flying blind, at the door of his tin-can spaceship. Circling a blue planet, unable to do a thing. I wonder if there is something conformist in this outlook, the outlook of one who doesn’t believe in transformative action or that we humans, political creatures, might make history, with actions we once called revolution, or if, sometimes, planet Earth is indeed blue, it dwarfs us in our insignificance, and we really can’t do anything about it.
We exited the elevator into the Family Division of the João Mendes Courthouse, where we met our two lawyers, whom my mother had chosen back when she was still lucid, in an office on Avenida Paulista, to brief them on what to do.
We waited in the corridor.
Handcuffed prisoners stood with their backs turned, faces to the wall, always with a police escort. Sitting on the many benches, defendants, witnesses and plaintiffs were all bothered by the same heat, by the knowledge that it was going to rain, that we’d leave the building and chaos would have poured down on the city. All of them almost silent, respectfully silent, yes, sir, no, sir. Have I already said this?
The curious thing is that, inside the individual courtrooms, all hell breaks loose. But outside, in the corridors, in the foyer, in the elevators, few words are spoken. When someone does speak, it’s in whispers.
At no point did my mother ask what we were doing, nor did she ask to leave. At that stage in her disease, going out, seeing people and things, could make her happy. And perhaps she felt comfortable there. The countless times she had waited on those benches were still somewhere in her memory. She must have felt at home, which was why she didn’t complain. She still had some notion of the present, and thus, of memory. And perhaps our memory isn’t just one single entity.
Outside each courtroom there was a secretary sitting at a little desk. When they called us, I looked at my mother. It’s our turn. Let’s go? She looked at Veroca. She trusted the two of us, not just me. She trusted her oldest daughter and her only son. She didn’t trust us blindly. She never trusted anyone blindly. She was a lawyer. She double-checked every decision we made to make sure it was the right one. She knew that we were in command now. And that, if she signed a document, even with Alzheimer’s, she would check it five times. If she didn’t agree, she wouldn’t sign it. She double-checked every decision her lawyers made to ensure it was the right one. She knew what her future would be like. She knew that dementia was a case not just for medicine, but also for the legal system. She knew that there were laws that protected her and safeguarded the family’s wellbeing (and assets). She believed in the legal system. She was proud to be a part of that world. She always used to tell me:
“It’s there to defend the weakest among us.”
They called her name. Resigned, she obeyed. We walked in. The family judge was sitting at a raised bench. We sat where the clerk told us to. An enormous, badly-painted portrait of a soldier in uniform was the only picture hanging on the wall opposite the judge. To break the ice, I observed that it would have been impossible for anyone to fight in that ridiculous uniform, not to mention the heavy helmet. The judge interrupted me, saying it was his father, who had been a police officer with the Public Force, the former Military Police, an example of good character. And that that was his dress uniform. I couldn’t take it back. The judge read the case out loud, skipping paragraphs, and looked at everyone. He turned to my mother.
“I see we have a fellow legal practitioner here.”
“Yes, I’m a lawyer. Retired.”
“Do you know why you’re here, Senhora Paiva?”
“Because I’m old and I need other people to look after me,” she replied with her trademark forthrightness and logic.
We were in the Family Division of the João Mendes Courthouse because she was old. That was the great irony. A specialist in declaring friends’ parents incompetent, trusted lawyer of many, she herself was about to be declared incompetent at 2.35 pm. She was 77 years old. Not that old. She’d had old acquaintances declared incompetent in dramatic circumstances. She knew, step by step, how it was done.
The judge had certificates in front of him from two medical specialists, one a professor at the University of São Paulo, plus clinical exams, images of her brain with the characteristic white marks that indicate the disease, and letters of attorney from all five of her children requesting that she be declared incompetent. We hoped that, as was the practice, the judge would appoint a reliable legal expert to remove her civil rights. He treated the case with cool objectivity and respect; after all, my mother was a fellow practitioner of law. He didn’t speak in legalese. It was routine. How many cases like that had he presided over that very week? How many times had he read them out loud and seen the same words, terms, requests?
He turned to my mother and surprised her with the question, “What year is it?”
She shot me a desperate look. It was that expression, the new expression, acquired in the last few years, as if she were trying to remember something basic and couldn’t—the date! What day is it today! Date! Day/month/year!—humiliated by the connections in her brain, proteins that were dwindling by the day, increasingly so, they want the date! This left her with a strange blank. Where was the torch? She looked at us as if she were being dragged by the current into the emptiness of the ocean, she was going to drown, drown in forgetting. Startled, surprised that she couldn’t remember such a simple thing. Rowing back took a superhuman effort. She had to guess the direction, defend herself, and answer what year it was. She didn’t know. She didn’t know what year it was, what month it was, what day it was. Time didn’t make much sense. She couldn’t have said for sure what she had eaten for breakfast. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get the first question right. The disease was winning, one-nil.
“What’s the name of the president of Brazil?” asked the judge.
Again, the look, despair, shame, blank, I’ve drawn a blank. She suffered terribly, she always suffered when she didn’t recognize someone and the person asked, “Remember me?” It was unnerving not being able to remember if she’d showered, forgotten to take her medicine, left a pot on the stove, unable to see the fire on the hill to guide her back to the coast with a boat full of shrimp, trawling done, mission accomplished.
The president of Brazil, Mom, you know him personally. He came over to our house a couple of times, when he was still a union leader. You were there at the founding of his party. You fought beside him for the Amnesty Law, for the direct vote, to restore democracy. They even wanted you to be a substitute senator with his party. The house was a mess when he came over one night. I was playing Risk in the living room with some friends. We’d smoked pot. We were laughing loudly. You were in the bedroom. Veroca brought him in with Geraldinho. He walked in and we cracked up laughing because we were really stoned. He greeted us and chuckled too. He must have smelled it from outside. Of course, we didn’t offer him any. He came in and went to talk to you about the direction that Brazilian politics were taking. Brazil getting organized, coming out of the dictatorship. We debated whether or not we should offer the former steelworker-cum-union leader some pot. Best not. In those days, I smoked at home with my friends. In my room, on the veranda, never in front of you. After you found out that I smoked, after you found out that my friends smoked, after you found out that your friends, and friends that you made after you were widowed, all smoked, after your friends who smoked offered you some, and you didn’t refuse, out of politeness, or shyness, and took a few tokes, curious . . . and didn’t feel a thing, then at last you saw that it wasn’t the devil’s work. You relaxed the rules.
Memory isn’t the capacity to organize and file away recollections. There are no files. The layering of past on past persists to the end, memory upon memory, through memories that become jumbled, distorted, blocked, recurrent or hidden, or that are repressed or shielded by an instinct for survival. A fire on a hill would be helpful. But fires burn low with time. And now we can’t sail back home.
The judge waited for her answer. Veroca, as if talking to a child, tried again, “Mom, you know him, it’s Lu . . . ”
Nothing. Silence. She glanced at me. Nothing. It’s okay, Mom. It’s okay, it’s normal to forget, you’re old, it happens, we all forget, you don’t need to get worked up or feel guilty, we’re here to help you, we’re all going to get old, remember your mother-in-law, remember Grandma, it happened to her too, she ended up senile, your mother aged too, she became an old lady, remember the friends of friends that you had declared incompetent, it happened to them, aging is a part of life, forgetting is normal, I’ll forget things in the future too, me, Veroca, the lawyers, this judge, his dad, in that ridiculous uniform, surely he’ll be a forgetful old man by now, don’t worry, we all forget, forgetting is a part of life, it’s normal, growing old is normal, it’s a part of life, everything’s going to be all right, the law will protect you, you believe in the law, we’ll look after you, don’t worry . . .
She was trying, at all costs, to be treated not as someone sick or demented, but as a person like anyone else, who, with age, is betrayed by memory.
The judge had asked the questions because he wanted to be sure we had a case. Yes, my mother, the lawyer, was incompetent. She was suffering from some kind of dementia. It was the disease that prevented her from remembering. It could be Alzheimer’s. It could be hormonal or some other kind of dementia. These days dementias are identified and labelled, all different to one another. People grow old. People’s brains grow old. An expert appointed by the judge would conduct the final assessment. But my mother needed to be temporarily declared incompetent.
“We are assembled here today because your children are asking that you be declared legally incompetent. They elect your son, Marcelo, to be your guardian. Are you aware of this?”
“It’s because I’m old and I need them to take care of me.”
She didn’t name the thing that ailed her. She was trying, at all costs, to be treated not as someone sick or demented, but as a person like anyone else, who, with age, is betrayed by memory, grows old, becomes forgetful, becomes senile, a little old lady.
“Can she be my guardian too?” she asked, referring to Veroca.
“No, only one can.”
“But can she look after me?”
“Of course, Mom, I’ll always look after you,” said Veroca.
And she did. They had already established a partnership of love and trust. I wondered why I, and not her, my older sister, was being elected guardian. Because I’m a man. The only man of the house. I had been chosen. After everything she had done for me, over my whole life, it was time to return the favour.
She began to talk about her two daughters who lived abroad, one in Switzerland, the other in Paris, the grandchildren who lived in France. She said she wanted to pay for them to come see her every year, since she could no longer travel. She insisted that we should always keep her grandchildren close to her, that she could afford it. The judge agreed. She insisted. She said again that she had two daughters who lived abroad, one in Switzerland, the other in France, and three grandchildren in Paris, and that she needed them to come every year, that she would pay for it if they didn’t have the money, because she went to see them every year, but now she was old, she couldn’t travel, she got lost in airports, she got lost in the street looking for a taxi, she couldn’t buy tickets on the internet, she couldn’t buy anything on the internet, she couldn’t use the internet, despite the afternoons I’d spent teaching her, the mouse irritated her, she didn’t really understand the mouse, the cursor vanished and reappeared, what she really wanted was to buy tickets directly from Varig on Avenida Paulista, but the agency had closed, the company was going under, Vasp had folded too, the company she had routinely travelled with because of their special offer (collect nine boarding passes and get one trip FREE). They’d gone bankrupt. So had Transbrasil, it was all changing too quickly, the banks were becoming automated, now her newsletter from the São Paulo Lawyers Association came via email, instead of through the post on stapled newspaper, and the dratted, maledetto mouse wouldn’t obey her! Damn it!
Repeating things is routine for those with dementia. I don’t know if it’s because they’ve forgotten what they said or if it’s to reiterate what they said, since some people don’t pay attention. This repetition, in fact, is a warning: It’s when the family receives the first signs that the person’s thoughts are not on a continuous path.
The judge was surprisingly courteous and listened the second time as if it were the first: She had daughters and grandchildren abroad and would pay for them to come visit her every year. Of course, don’t worry, we’ll take care of it, he replied.
The judge gave me a serious look.
“From this date, you are legally and criminally responsible for your mother,” he announced.
He said that I was to do everything in my power to ensure her comfort and wellbeing. He determined that she could no longer be left alone. We would have to arrange for her to be cared for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. And he reminded me that I was obliged to bring her daughters and grandchildren who lived abroad to come see her.
From that moment on, my mother would never again be left on her own.
The tables turned that very instant.
On January 30, 2008, that muggy afternoon, in compliance with the law, in the Central Civil Court on Praça João Mendes, fourth floor, room 426 of the São Paulo State Court, first temporarily, and then permanently, the woman who had looked after me for 48 years would now be looked after by me. In witness whereof, I certify that the foregoing is true and accurate.
I had become my mother’s mother.
And it didn’t rain.
Excerpted from I’m Still Here by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, translated by Alison Entrekin & Daniel Hahn, published by Charco Press. Copyright (c) Marcelo Rubens Paiva 2015, 2026.
