Beatriz Baptista > Recent Status Updates

evening comrades 🫡

“I will only be truly dead if nobody ever comes, if the centu-ries, then the millennia go by for so long that this planet, which I no longer believe is Earth, no longer exists. As long as the sheets of paper covered in my handwriting lie on this table, I can become a reality in someone's mind.”

“But if that person comes, they will read them and I will have a time in their mind.
They will have my thoughts in them. The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before reading, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking.”

“I think that time must have something to do with the duration of pregnancies, the growth of children, all those things that I haven't experienced. If someone spoke to me, there would be time, the beginning and end of what they said to me, the moment when I answered, their response. The briefest conversation creates time. Perhaps I have tried to create time through writing these pages.”

“The alternation of day and night is merely a physical phenomenon, time is a question of being human and, frankly, how could I consider myself a human being, I who have only known thirty-nine people and all of them women?”

“Perhaps you never have time when you are alone? You only acquire it by watching it go by in others, and since all the women have died, it only affects the scrawny plants growing between the stones […]”

“Sometimes the women pitied me, saying that at least they'd known real life, and I was very jealous of them, but they died, as I am about to die, and what does having lived mean once you are no longer alive?”

“[…] since I had no one to lie to, I discovered that you can lie to yourself, which felt. very strange. Was I missing companionship more than I thought and making myself into another, a witness, if only to deceive her?”

“I knew nothing about him, but I knew nothing about myself, except that, one day, I too would die and that, like him, I would prop myself up and remain upright, looking straight ahead until the last, and, when death triumphed over my gaze, I would be like a proud monument raised with hatred in the face of silence.”

“As long as I lived, my memory of him would live too, there would be a witness to his pride and solitude.”

“I felt a surge of grief, I, who had never known men, as I stood in front of this man who had wanted to overcome fear and despair to enter eternity upright and furious. I sighed and left.”

“Death is sometimes so discreet that it steals in noiselessly, stays for only a moment and carries off its prey, and I didn't notice the change. When I was certain it was all over, I lay there for a long time, holding her to me, as she had wanted.”

“And what does it matter if I've become mute in a world where there is no one to talk to?”

“[…] the gradual abandonment of all expectations, a defeat that had killed everything without a battle. She wondered when it had dawned on us that we were as much prisoners out in the open as we had been behind bars.”

“[…] eager to embrace another world which perhaps didn't exist, but they preterred nothingness to the futile succession of empty days.”

“I cannot mourn for what I have
not known.”

“Perhaps, somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silence.”

“Inevitably, with memory comes pain.”

OMG SE ESTE LIVRO NÃO TEM CLOSURE EU NÃO SEI O QUE FAÇO

“Something that everybody does becomes meaningless.”

“— Perhaps they'll forbid it. They forbid what they like.”
“—Then they'd be acknowledging my existence. If you do something that is forbidden, it is the action that is the target. If you do something that isn't forbidden, and they intervene, then it's not the activity that's attracting attention, it's you yourself.”

“But human beings need to speak, otherwise they lose their humanity, as I've realised these past few years.”

“[…] perhaps like the others I needed to create an illusion to enable me to cope with the misery.”

“If the only thing that differentiates us from animals is the fact that we hide to defecate, then being human rests on very little, I thought.”

“[…] perhaps that made us equal and they were trying to console themselves by depriving me of the only thing they could.”

“Did they only keep me in ignorance so they could pretend they weren't entirely powerless?”