Teolinda Gersão – Four Children, Two Dogs and Some Birds

Running a household while working is a difficult job. It goes without saying that if the duties of parenthood are not equally shared amongst the parents, then the mother, who invariably takes on the lion's share of burden, particularly if she works, will be tired, stressed, unhappy and unsatisfied. A full time job was supposed to equalise men and women; instead, it too often adds to the woman's burden while decreasing the man's, for his household now has a greater safety net and cushion thanks to his wife's income. In Teolinda Gersão's Four Children, Two Dogs and Some Birds (trans. Margaret Jull Costa) the narrator has reached the end of her tether. She works too hard and too long to come home and contemplate the household tasks as well:

The amount of work I had to do at the office was absolutely crazy; I worked late every night, and even when I got home I'd sometimes still be writing letters, sending emails, making phone-calls, but always with a terrible nagging sense that I was never getting on top of the really important stuff. By the time I got home, our daily would have gone, leaving the housework only half-done, and supper time and bath time were utter hell, not to mention the children's homework...And then I still had to feed the dogs, take them for a walk and clean out the bird cage.

Her husband Carlos doesn't help as much as he should but she's too tired to raise the issue. She feels she marginalised herself out of existence, giving everything she can to others and nothing to herself, and even when she gives and gives and gives, her employer isn't perfectly satisfied and her children are neglected. And the animals aren't being cared for, either. She can't win, she has to lose, and every day she falls further behind.

Enter the newspaper advertisement.

She puts an ad in the paper for live-in help. A loving help, asks her concierge, puzzled as to why she would want to hire such a creature. No, live-in help, she reassures him. Someone to assist her with the tasks of the day. The girl she finds is nice, pleasant, and good at her job, and she's comfortable with the animals, too. The children like her, and the house seems suddenly cleaner. But then something strange occurs: the narrator just can't stop sleeping. She comes home, she sleeps. She wakes up for work in the morning, she falls back asleep. Even at work, she feels like she is sleeping, wandering through the day in a daze. At least at home the house is clean, but now she's out of the loop, failing to participate in her own home, an outsider still, for the time being, remaining inside but being pushed out.

I was so very tired that things seemed to happen only vaguely and in the distance. I remember, for example, hearing the girl singing and the children laughing. I remember thinking that the house was finally clean and tidy. Hearing my children doing their homework in the kitchen and one of them asking: what's seven times four? And the girl answering: twenty-eight, and my son repeating: twenty-eight, and me thinking that that was also her age: twenty-eight.

It gets to the point where the narrator lies down on the lounge and doesn't get up. She's dead, or maybe that's what people think – it isn't clear. She is aware of what is happening around her, but her arm has gone limp and lifeless. And then, in the kitchen, her little boy is doing something foolish:

Through the open door I saw my youngest son climb onto a chair in the kitchen; he's going to fall, I thought, but made no move to help him; I saw him perched on the chair, saw him reach out his hands over the sink, turn on the tap, press the palm of his hand to the spout, saw the water spurt out on all sides in a fine spray soaking his face and clothes, not that he seemed bothered, because he laughed and stood on tiptoe in order to get still closer to the tap. Then the chair toppled noisily over and the child fell.

The problem of gender politics aside, for the vast majority of civilised culture, the female parent has provided the majority of the care for the home and the children. More recently this balance has shifted, but only to provide a third participant alongside father and mother, and that is – neglect. The father is absent for a full working week and now so is the mother. The children and the home receive less overall care, and things begin to suffer. We all know what a woman gains from working, but what has she lost?

For Teolinda Gersão, at least in this short story, the argument is that she loses her sense of self and identity. The narrator becomes at first a sleepy zombie and then a virtual block of wood, completely disengaged from her occupation and her home, unwilling to raise the energy to do anything about it because there's the live-in help right there ready to step in. If the father never stepped in to clean the dishes because the mother always would, why then should the mother step in when there's hired help at hand? She wouldn't, and doesn't, and with that, something important is lost.

It's telling that Carlos is the only named character in the story, and even then the use of his name as opposed to “him” or “he” is irregular, unfixed. By the end of the story, the live-in help has supplanted the narrator completely, but she doesn't care. Watching them kiss, and leave the house, stirs no emotion or response. It's just what has happened, and now let's go back to sleep.

Four Children, Two Dogs and Some Birds is a conservative story which serves to highlight the perils of neglecting gender stereotypes. The narrator, when working and cleaning, is at her best and most vibrant – it's when she is released from the burden of housework and attains the freedom of a man that she becomes sloth-like and, for all intents and purposes, non-existent. It's difficult without having read any other works by Teolinda Gersão to comment on whether this conservatism is an inherent part of her oeuvre, or whether it is something explored for the purposes of the story. At any rate, it's an interesting and affective take on the supposed sacrosanctity of the idea that the modern woman can have it all and that the future is absolutely and completely bright once a full-time job has been attained. And perhaps it is, for some – but it isn't for our narrator.

Four Children, Two Dogs and Some Birds by Teolinda Gersão is a short story from Center for the Art of Translation publication, Two Lines - Volume XV: Strange Harbors

See Also

Other stories from the Center for the Art of Translation publication, Two Lines - Volume XV: Strange Harbors include:
---Rey Rosa, Rodrigo - Poco-loco
---Schiff, Agur - There's Lots to See
---Suceavă, Bogdan - Our Years of Beauty

Index of short stories under review