WHEN EMPTINESS IS A CHOICE

When I finished this magnificent book, I literally, wanted to hurl it across the room. I was at Toyota Service Center in Sunnyvale, unfortunately, and I was forced to get a hold of myself.

EMPTY WARDROBES by Maria Judite de Carvalho was originally written in the Portuguese language. The English version of the book was translated by Margaret Jull Costa.and published in 2021 by Two Lines Press.

Aside from it being a masterful piece of Portuguese literature by Maria Judite de Carvalho, this week’s choice of book held another unexpected gift for me. I loved the introduction to this translation by a writer named Kate Zambreno whose work I’d never read before. Like a Santoku knife, her pen slices through the inherent patriarchy of the world.

“What you need to understand is how a woman can become a piece of furniture. The kind of woman who lives in a house like a museum, filled with artifacts of her past relevance.”

Zambreno’s writing is febrile and angry. She writes from a place of personal experience, of having been around women who lived, surrounded by the memories of men who had been entitled and knew their women would hover around and wait on them.

I’m still unable to fathom how this terrific whip-smart book never got translated all these years even though it was published in 1966.  I do have a faint idea though because the world of publishing, for the large part, at least until now, has been a man’s world.

Translated in 2021 into English by Margaret Jull Costa, the timeliness and topicality of Empty Wardrobes is both enlightening and depressing. De Carvalho shows us how the actions of two men upend the lives of three generations of women while demonstrating also how systemic patriarchy gaslights families, especially women, into acceptance and inaction. The writing by De Carvalho (and not to forget Jull Costa here) is brilliant, and, in places, I was reminded of the virtuosic, loopy prose of Garcia Marquez. The picture she draws of Dora in the antique shop is priceless for it’s clear that while all those inanimate, antiquated objects in the space are bursting with life, the overseer herself seems to be nearing extinction.

“She had spent the best part of the last ten years there, among tables large and small, some semicircular and propped against the wall, others like long-legged birds, half-asleep and slightly unsteady on their feet, others standing imperiously on sturdy legs with strong metal claws gripping the floor.”

Dora Rosario is a widow and mother to Lisa. Duarte, Dora’s late husband left her a destitute and after enduring months of grinding poverty, Dora, with the support of some friends, manages to find work running an antique shop. As she tries to climb her way out of penury, Dora ages, in body and in mind.

Her attitude, too, is antediluvian, it seems and she forgets to keep up with the way of the world. Dora dresses as “Salvation Army Dora”—that is, in drab clothing meant to mourn her husband. One night, after a decade of years of grieving, Dora’s mother-in-law Ana tells her that before he died her son had been planning to leave her for another woman. Armed now with the awareness of so many years wasted, Dora begins to be upbeat. She finds herself beginning to be aware of the reflection of herself in the mirror, aware of her body, her awakening desire and her growing sense of self.

“Was that her? Could it be? The short hair, rumpled by sleep, the eyebrows once thick and now tweezed thin, gave her an almost wild, startled look. Was that her? Could it be? In the light of the sand-colored planet she didn’t immediately recognize herself and drew back slightly.”

Even as Empty Wardrobes took a wonderful, upbeat turn, Zambreno’s angry introduction never left my mind. This story was not going to end well for Dora. I must confess, however, that Zambreno’s words never did prepare me for the ending. While reading the last few pages, all the air left my lungs. I, literally, heard my bra unhook of its own volition. I heard myself say, “No way. NO WAY. This can’t be! No chance!” Heck, it was. It did happen.

I shut the book, devastated and angry. I would have hurled it across the room had I not been at Sunnyvale’s Toyota Service Center. There were people in the spanking new lobby and I needed to keep it together. I got up and walked around aimlessly inside the lobby, trying to process it all.

You have to be civil. You cannot hurl a book across the room in this upgraded Toyota Sunnyvale lobby.

In effect, it was just the perfect ending, after all. It was inevitable. I referred, in an earlier post, to something the inimitable fiction writer Charles Baxter said to a group of us at Vermont’s Bread Loaf Workshop a decade ago. He said that the greatest of stories ended with both a surprise and an inevitability to them. I suppose just how this can be accomplished, while keeping the reader baited all along, will always remain the holy grail of every fiction writer.

When I thought back to the brilliant introduction by Zambreno, I felt I disagreed vehemently with her anger, however. Rather, I think she had chosen to be angry at the wrong people. What about how women provided the perfect breeding ground for patriarchal behavior? What about choice and agency? And what about the whole army of women who support the systemic patriarchal stance of society? Don’t women have a choice in how exactly they may respond to a situation?

Empty Wardrobes is not just a story about how a widow lived in self-abnegation upon the death of her husband. It’s a larger story about how women often disfranchised themselves and also proscribed other women from taking charge of their lives because of the baggage they themselves carried.

Empty Wardrobes asks several questions of us all. Exactly who is willing to break up the system? Who is bold enough to let friendships and family lives shatter to smithereens in order to step up, make a point and allow people to reflect and change? I’d like my readers to now go back and read a post of mine from a few weeks ago on The Aunt Who Wouldn’t Die. I believe that the cantankerous aunt, Pishima—or her vindictive ghost, at any rate—would have skewered most of the characters in Empty Wardrobes.

The Praça do Comércio is the most magnificent plaza in Lisbon, and one of the highlights of the city., Photo credit: Pavithra Mohan