Phantom Tense

I arrived in Viana do Alentejo on a Tuesday in September, which I note because the town still had Tuesdays then, they still had September, and they would keep both for the duration of what happened, the calendar being a record of what has already been named rather than a projection of what has not yet occurred, a distinction I did not think to make until much later, when making it no longer mattered.

The grant proposal described the project as a documentation of dialectal variation in the Alentejo interior, which was true in the way that calling an autopsy a medical procedure is true. The linguistics department at Coimbra had received reports — secondhand, thirdhand, passed along the way a strange odor is reported, not by the person who smelled it but by someone who heard someone mention it — that speakers in certain Alentejo villages were exhibiting unusual patterns of tense usage. Specifically, an apparent reduction in future-tense morphology. The department chair, Professor Nogueira, mentioned this to me at a faculty dinner with the careful indifference of someone placing a bet he does not want to be seen placing. You might find it interesting, he said, given your work on creole tense systems. I said I might. Neither of us used the word anomaly, though it was the word we both meant.

Viana do Alentejo is a town of perhaps three thousand, depending on the season and how one counts the families who maintain houses there but live in Évora or Lisbon for most of the year. The old town sits on a low hill, the castle walls still partially intact, the church of São Luís visible from the highway as a white interruption against the brown. Below the walls the town spreads into the typical Alentejo pattern: whitewashed houses with colored trim, streets too narrow for the cars that use them, a largo with cork oaks providing the only shade that matters between May and October. The river Odivelas runs south of the town, though in September it was reduced to a series of connected pools where dogs stood belly-deep in the afternoons, and the smell of the water — warm, vegetal, not unpleasant — reached the largo when the wind was right.

I rented a room from Dona Beatriz Fonseca, who kept a pensão above the old pharmacy on the Rua Serpa Pinto. The room had a narrow bed, a desk by the window, and a crucifix that I turned to face the wall, then turned back, then turned again, unable to decide whether the gesture of removal was more presumptuous than the gesture of display. Dona Beatriz was in her seventies, small, with hands that never stopped moving — smoothing tablecloths, adjusting curtains, tearing bread into smaller and smaller pieces as she spoke. She talked constantly, a quality I initially attributed to loneliness and later recognized as something else entirely: a need to stay in the only tense still available to her.

On the first morning she brought me coffee and said, I make this coffee every morning at seven, the beans are from the Sical factory in Porto, my husband liked the Delta brand but I find it bitter, and I tell him so every time he brings it home though of course he has been dead for eleven years so what I mean is I told him, she said, I told him, and she repeated the correction with the deliberateness of a person stepping around a hole in the floor that she has stepped around so many times the movement has become part of walking.

I recorded this. I had brought a Tascam field recorder, a leather notebook of the kind that anthropologists carry to signal that they are anthropologists, and a laptop with Praat software for spectral analysis. I expected to need the software. I did not expect to need the notebook more.

The first systematic account of the phenomenon — I am going to call it that, the phenomenon, because every clinical term I consider is either too precise for something I do not fully understand or too dramatic for something that happened this quietly — the first account I could reconstruct was Dona Glória Vaz, who worked at the municipal library in the Praça da República.

Dona Glória was sixty-three and had worked at the library for twenty-nine years, which in a town that size meant she had read or at least catalogued everything, and her memory for books was the kind of memory that functions as a secondary library, so that people sometimes called her instead of visiting the stacks, asking Do you have anything by so-and-so, and she would say the title, the shelf number, and whether the binding was still good.

The first report I found came from Padre Simão, the parish priest, who told me that six months before my arrival — so March, roughly — Dona Glória had come to confession and said, Father, I cannot pray the Creed. He had asked why, naturally, and she had said, I reach the part about the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, and the words are there, I can read them on the page, but when I speak them they mean nothing, they are sounds only, I can say the life of the world to come the way I can say a word in a language I do not speak, making the shape with my mouth but carrying nothing across. Padre Simão had told her that faith was not a feeling but a discipline, that doubt was the soil in which belief grew stronger, the usual pastoral consolations, and she had thanked him and left.

A week later she returned. She said, Father, it is not only the Creed, I cannot plan the Wednesday reading group, I know that Wednesday follows Tuesday but I cannot — and here, Padre Simão told me, she had paused for a long time, her mouth working as if around a stone — I cannot make Wednesday real before it is Wednesday, do you understand, I can remember last Wednesday and I know I am in this Wednesday but I cannot go to the next one, it is not there, I reach for it and there is nothing.

Padre Simão told me this in the sacristy of the Igreja de São Luís, sitting on a wooden bench that had been worn smooth by the weight of men in vestments. He was a careful man, deliberate in his speech, and he recounted Dona Glória’s words without interpretation, which I appreciated, because by the time I spoke with him I had already heard three other accounts of Dona Glória’s condition, each layered with the teller’s own theory: that she had suffered a stroke, that she was experiencing early dementia, that she had always been a little odd and this was the oddness finally settling into a shape.

What interested me was that none of these accounts used the word future. They said she could not plan, could not anticipate, could not imagine what came next, could not promise. They described the loss functionally — the things she could no longer do — without identifying the grammatical faculty that connected them. This is significant because it suggests that the loss, even in its earliest stage, was already affecting the observers, not the content of their speech but the framework they used to categorize experience. To name the loss as a loss of future tense requires the future tense: requires being able to say she has lost something that she used to have and that she needs, and need is itself a future-oriented word, it points toward a state that does not yet exist.

I wrote this in my notebook. I underlined it twice. I did not yet understand that I was underlining a warning.

The school was where the phenomenon became visible as a social fact rather than an individual curiosity.

The Escola Básica de Viana sat at the bottom of the hill, a low concrete building with a yard of packed red earth where the children played under a canopy of corrugated plastic that turned the light amber. I visited in my second week, with permission from the headmaster, Senhor Tavares, who was a lean, nervous man with the look of someone who has been explaining the same problem to people who do not understand it for so long that the explanation has become a kind of penance. He took me to the third-year classroom, where the teacher, Professora Ana Luísa, was conducting a Portuguese language lesson.

She had written on the board:

Ontem eu fui ao mercado. (Yesterday I went to the market.) Hoje eu vou ao mercado. (Today I am going to the market.) Amanhã eu _________ ao mercado. (Tomorrow I _________ to the market.)

The children — eight- and nine-year-olds, twelve of them, though two desks were empty — stared at the blank. Professora Ana Luísa waited. She was young, perhaps thirty, and she wore her patience in a way that suggested it was recently acquired. Come now, she said, yesterday we went, today we go, tomorrow we — and she gestured toward the board with the expectant sweep of a conductor bringing in the strings. One child said vou, which is the present tense. Another said fui, the past. A third said nothing. Professora Ana Luísa wrote irei in the blank — the simple future of ir — and then looked at it. She looked at it for a long time. Then she erased it and wrote it again, and I understood, watching her hand, that the problem was not the children. The children had never had the future tense in the first place, not because they had lost it but because they were learning language from adults who no longer used it, and a tense that is never modeled is a tense that is never acquired, so the children were not victims of the phenomenon so much as evidence that the phenomenon had become the medium in which language was transmitted, the water in which these particular fish were swimming, and the fish did not know the water was unusual because they had never swum in any other.

I recorded thirty minutes of the lesson. That evening, in my room above the pharmacy, I played it back through Praat and marked every verb. In thirty minutes of classroom speech — teacher and students combined — there were one hundred and forty-seven verb tokens. One hundred and twelve were present tense. Thirty-one were past. Four were subjunctive or conditional, tenses that hover near the future without committing to it. Zero were simple future. Zero were future periphrastic.

I checked the recording three times. The number did not change.

I played the recording for Professora Ana Luísa after the lesson. She listened with the distracted attention of a person being shown a photograph of their own house — yes, that is where I live, what of it? I pointed out the absence. She said, I teach what the children need, and I said, But the future tense, the curriculum requires it, and she said, The curriculum says what the curriculum says, and I teach what the children need, and the circularity of this was not evasion, I do not think, but was the shape her thinking had taken, a closed loop from which the forward-pointing arrow had been removed, and she was not lying or resistant but was genuinely unable to see the gap in the way that a person who has been deaf from birth does not experience silence, because silence requires the concept of sound as its absent referent.

I went to the Café Central that afternoon and sat at the counter with a galão and my notebook. The café was run by Senhor Vasco, a man of perhaps fifty whose principal talent was the preparation of coffee and whose secondary talent was the maintenance of a running commentary on every person who entered the establishment, their habits, their ailments, their marriages, their debts. He spoke entirely in present and past tense, which meant his commentary, normally a form of prediction — she is going to leave him, he is going to drink himself into the hospital, they are never going to fix that roof — had become instead a form of inventory: she is with him, he drinks, the roof leaks. I sat there for two hours and recorded the café’s ambient speech: conversations between old men over dominoes, Senhor Vasco’s observations, a woman on the telephone speaking to someone in Lisbon, two teenagers sharing a screen of something that made them laugh. Not one future-tense verb. Two hundred and eleven verb tokens, not one.

What struck me was not the absence but how unremarkable the absence was. The café functioned. The dominoes were played. The coffee was drunk. The conversations flowed with what seemed, if you were not counting verbs, like perfectly normal human interaction. People discussed the weather (it is hot, it was hotter yesterday), the football (Benfica played well, the goalkeeper is injured), their children (she studies in Évora, he works at the quarry). It was only when you listened for the threads that should have connected these present facts to future states — the weather is going to break, Benfica will lose the title, my daughter is going to graduate — that you noticed the conversations were strangely bounded, each statement complete in itself, each observation a small closed room with no hallway leading to the next.

I should describe the bakery because the bakery is where I first understood the phenomenon not as a linguistic curiosity but as a form of social erosion, quiet, structural, and, once you noticed it, everywhere.

The Padaria Estrela had been run by the Mendes family for three generations. The current baker was Tomás Mendes, a large man with forearms like bread loaves — an observation so obvious he must have heard it a thousand times, and the fact that he still smiled when someone made it suggested either extraordinary patience or a kind of deafness to language that I initially attributed to temperament and later recognized as something more specific. Tomás baked every morning beginning at four, which meant he mixed the dough the night before, which meant he planned — or had once planned — a full cycle ahead: tonight’s mixing for tomorrow’s baking for tomorrow morning’s sales. The entire operation was an exercise in future tense made physical. Flour and water and yeast combined in the present with the expectation that they would become something else in the future. Bread is, in a sense, a promissory note. You commit ingredients today against hunger that has not yet arrived.

When I visited the padaria in my third week, Tomás was still baking, but something had changed in the rhythm. He mixed each morning’s dough that same morning, beginning at two instead of four, because he could no longer hold the next day’s bread in his mind as something he was working toward. He could only hold this bread, these loaves, the ones that were in front of him. The result was that the bread was different — denser, less risen, because the dough had not had sufficient time to proof. Customers noticed. Dona Beatriz told me the bread had become heavy, it sits in the stomach like a stone, she said, but nobody blamed Tomás because nobody could articulate what he had stopped doing. They could not say he no longer plans ahead because the sentence, to be meaningful, required a framework they no longer possessed. They said the bread is not the way the bread is, a tautology that expressed the problem without diagnosing it, the way a person with a fever says I feel wrong without saying the word temperature.

I asked Tomás about his process. He said, I make bread, I have always made bread, my father made bread, and before him his father, and I make it now, every morning I make it, and the conversation circled without advancing, each sentence returning to the present or the past, and I realized as I stood in the warm flour-dusted air of the padaria that I was not hearing a man describe his work but hearing a man whose language had become a room with no doors on one side, a room he could move around in freely as long as he moved only toward what had already happened or what was happening now, and that the wall where the door had been was not visible to him, not because it was hidden but because the ability to see the wall required the very faculty the wall’s presence indicated was gone.

I bought a loaf. It was dense, as Dona Beatriz had said, but the crust was good, and I ate it with cheese and olives on the bench in the largo, watching the cork oaks drop their shadows across the flagstones.

The municipal council met every second Thursday, and I attended the meeting of the twenty-fifth of September with Senhor Tavares, who seemed grateful for the company of someone who still found the situation remarkable, since to everyone else in the room it was simply the situation, which is to say it was no longer a situation at all but the ground on which they stood.

The council chamber was on the first floor of the Câmara Municipal, a high-ceilinged room with portraits of former mayors arranged chronologically along one wall, their expressions becoming incrementally less severe as they approached the present, as if governance had mellowed with the decades or as if the photographers had learned to say something amusing. The current mayor, Vereador Duarte Esteves, was a compact man with a grey moustache. He opened the meeting by reading the minutes from the previous session, which contained several action items, and it was in the reading of these action items that the phenomenon became, to me, unmistakable.

The minutes said: Vereador Esteves proposed that the council review the water quality report. Vereadora Gomes seconded. This was the past. This was intact. Then the minutes said: The council agreed to discuss the matter at the next session. And here Vereador Esteves paused, not dramatically, not in a way that signaled awareness of a rupture, but in the way a person pauses when they encounter a word in a text that they cannot pronounce, a brief hesitation, a gathering of breath, and then he read the sentence as written, the council agreed to discuss the matter at the next session, but the words came out flat, recited rather than spoken, and when he set the minutes down he said, We are here now to discuss the water quality report, which was accurate but which skipped the connective tissue — we agreed to do this, therefore we are doing it — and replaced it with bare presence: we are here, it is now, this is happening.

The discussion that followed was, by any measure, incoherent, not because the participants were unintelligent but because municipal governance is an almost purely future-oriented activity. Budgets are plans. Zoning is planning. Remove the future tense and a council meeting becomes a group of people sitting in a room describing what is currently the case, a ritual that persists after the function has drained out of it.

Vereador Esteves said, The water report indicates elevated levels of nitrates in the southern wells, and then stopped, as though the sentence were complete. Vereadora Gomes said, The school needs repair to the roof, and this too arrived as a declarative fact rather than a prelude to action. Nobody said what should be done. Nobody said we must or we ought to or the plan is. A woman in the back row, whom I later identified as the town pharmacist, stood and said, My daughter is pregnant and I do not know what to tell her, and the room went very quiet, and I understood that the pharmacist was not making a complaint about prenatal care but was articulating something more fundamental — the body literally producing a future, and no grammar left to hold it.

The meeting ended without adjournment because adjournment implies a future resumption.

I spoke with Dona Glória on the fourth of October, in the library, among books.

She was smaller than I had expected, though I did not know what I had expected, and she moved through the stacks with the unhurried precision of someone who has memorized a space the way a musician memorizes a score, not by conscious recall but by a deeper kind of knowing that lives in the hands and the feet. She knew I was studying the town, Senhor Tavares had told her, and she did not object, which I interpreted as indifference until she said, You want to understand what happened to me, and I said yes, and she said, I am happy to talk about it because talking about it is something I can do now, I can tell you what happened, I can tell you what is happening, what I cannot do is tell you what any of it leads to, or what you are going to find, or what you should do with what I tell you, and if you ask me those questions I am not being evasive when I do not answer, I simply do not have the — and here she paused, and I watched her face, and what I saw was not confusion or distress but something more like the expression of a person reaching for a glass on a shelf that has been moved, the hand going to the right place and finding air — I do not have the shape for it, she said finally, the shape in the mouth, the shape in the mind, and I do not know which one I lost first.

I asked her when it began.

She said, That is a good question because it assumes a beginning, and beginning is already a word that leans forward, a beginning is the start of something that is going to continue, but I can tell you when I first noticed, or rather when I first failed to notice and someone else noticed for me. It was February, she said, a Tuesday, I remember because the mobile library comes on Tuesdays and I was preparing the returns, and Padre Simão came in for the parish newsletter and I said Father I placed the newsletters by the door this morning and he said no you said you were going to place them by the door, meaning I had told him my plan but not executed it, and I realized that I could not remember making the plan, not the plan itself but the act of projection that a plan requires, the reaching ahead into a moment that has not arrived and placing yourself there and arranging things, and I thought perhaps I was simply tired, she said, because tiredness narrows your sense of time, when you are very tired the future compresses until there is only the next step, the next breath, and I thought if I sleep well tonight it would come back, and then I noticed that the thought if I sleep well tonight it would come back was itself a future projection, and it was the last one I had.

She told me this without sadness. I want to be precise about that. She told me this the way a patient describes a surgery — with a kind of clinical distance that is not coldness but is the particular composure of someone who has passed through a crisis and arrived on the other side, not healed but stable. She had the library around her. She had the books, which were full of futures she could read but not inhabit. She had the memory of having had a future, which is different from having one, but is not nothing.

I said, Does it frighten you?

She said, Fear requires a thing that might happen, and I cannot get to might, I can tell you I was afraid before, I can tell you that fear existed, but I cannot — and the sentence stopped, not trailed off but stopped, the way a road stops at a cliff, and she looked at me with an expression I have thought about many times since, an expression that was not asking for help because asking for help requires believing that help is possible, which requires believing that the future can be different from the present, and she could not believe that, not because she was hopeless but because hope was not available to her in the way that a color is not available to a person who has never seen it.

By November my notebooks were filling in a way that worried me.

Not the content — the content was valuable. What worried me was the handwriting. My entries from September were written in my usual hand — small, precise, forward-leaning, with dates and times and cross-references in the margins. By late October the entries were longer but less organized. I was writing in the present tense almost exclusively, and my present-tense usage was not stylistic but compulsive. I would try to write a sentence like Tomorrow I will interview Senhor Mendes about the bakery’s supply chain, and the sentence would not come. Not that I could not form the words. The words formed. But they felt hollow, like writing a sentence in a language I had studied but never spoken. I could produce the morphology — irei, farei, direi — but the morphology had become detached from the cognition it was supposed to encode, and I could write future tense but I could not mean it.

I called Professor Nogueira. The reception was poor — Viana do Alentejo sits in a slight depression and mobile service was unreliable — and the call dropped twice, and when I finally reached him I said, I think the phenomenon is affecting me, and he said, What do you mean, and I said, I can’t use the future tense, and he said, You just did, you said I think the phenomenon is affecting me, which implies an ongoing process with a trajectory, and I said, No, that is the present progressive, it describes what is happening now, I am saying what is the case, I am not projecting, and there was a silence on the line, and then he said, When do you plan to return to Coimbra, and I felt the question land like a word in a foreign language, the shape recognizable but the meaning absent. I said, I am here now, the work is here, and he said, Elena, listen to me, you need to leave that town, and I said, I know, and I did not know whether I meant I know the way a person means it when they agree with a factual statement, or I know the way a person means it when they are acknowledging advice they are not going to follow.

I did not leave.

December. The river was higher now, the rains had come, and the town took on a different quality in the wet, the whitewashed walls darker, the streets reflecting the sky, the cork oaks dripping steadily in a way that gave the largo the sound of a dozen clocks all running at slightly different speeds.

The phenomenon was, by this point, total. I say total with the caveat that totality in this context is asymptotic — there were still moments, residual grammatical structures, conditional phrases that grazed the future without landing on it — but functionally, the town had arrived at a state in which the future did not exist as a linguistic or cognitive category. People woke, ate, worked, spoke, loved, sat in the largo, walked the streets, bought bread from Tomás, attended Mass when Padre Simão rang the bells, drank coffee at the Café Central, watched the river, watched the sky, watched each other, and did all of this in a continuous present that was neither serene nor frantic but simply ongoing, the way a river is ongoing, not because it intends to continue but because continuing is what it does.

The secondary effects accumulated. Insurance lapsed because renewal is a future-oriented act and nobody renewed. The pharmacy stopped ordering ahead, so medications ran out unpredictably, and Dona Beatriz began cutting her blood pressure tablets in half, the knife and the pill and the cutting repeated each morning without reference to the bottle’s diminishing contents. The post office accepted letters but outgoing mail piled up because posting a letter requires the expectation that it is going to arrive somewhere, and the expectation was what had broken down.

The marriages interested me most. The vows are future tense: I will love, I will honor, I will cherish. Remove the future tense and what remains is not nothing but something different — a fact rather than a project. I am married. I am with this person. The marriages did not dissolve, because dissolution is itself a future-oriented act, a decision that things are going to be different, and instead they simply continued, two people in a house, each day the same commitment re-encountered as though for the first time.

I spoke with Dona Conceição Ferreira, who was thirty-seven and married to Joaquim, a mechanic, and who was expecting her second child, due in January. I asked her how she felt about the birth. She looked at me with the same expression I had seen on Dona Glória’s face, that expression of reaching for something that is not there, and she said, The baby moves, and I feel it, and it is real, and I know — but know is wrong, she said, I do not know, I experience it, the movement, the weight, the baby is here, the baby is in me, and that is what is true, and I cannot — she stopped. She placed her hand on her belly. She said, I do not have a word for what comes after this.

I stopped calling Nogueira in December. Not a decision, exactly. What happened was that I stopped, the way one stops a habit — one day you do it, the next day you do not, and the day after that the not-doing has become the thing you do. My recordings continued, but the work had shifted in character. I was no longer studying the phenomenon from outside. I was documenting it from within.

My sentences shortened. I became aware of this the way one becomes aware of a limp — not when it starts but when someone else notices, and in this case the someone else was myself, reading back my notes from October and comparing them with my notes from December and seeing the difference, the October notes full of subordinate clauses and temporal projections, if this then that, when I return I will compile, the analysis should reveal, and the December notes pared down to declarations: The bread is dense. The schoolchildren cannot conjugate ir in the future. Dona Glória shelves books. The river is high. I am here.

I am here. That sentence frightened me, not because it was inaccurate but because it was complete. I am here. Nothing leaned out of it. Nothing opened beyond it. It sat on the page like a stone.

In January, Dona Conceição had her baby. A girl. The midwife, Dona Fernanda, delivered her in the bedroom of the Ferreira house, because the hospital in Évora was forty minutes away and forty minutes is a projection, a bet on time’s continued cooperation, and Dona Conceição could not make that bet. The baby was healthy. Joaquim held her, and Dona Conceição held her, and when I visited the next day Dona Conceição said, Her name is Inês, and I said, That is a beautiful name, and she said, Yes, and neither of us said what Inês would become, or what kind of person she would grow into, or what the world held for her, because those sentences were not available, and the baby lay in her mother’s arms in a present that was total and unbroken and, from the outside, indistinguishable from peace.

I envied it. I want to record that honestly. Standing in the Ferreira house, smelling the particular sweetness of a newborn and the iron undertone of recent birth, hearing Joaquim in the kitchen making coffee with the slow movements of a man who has been awake for twenty hours and is simply moving through the actions of coffee-making as they present themselves to his hands — standing there, I envied the completeness of it. The baby was here. The mother was here. The father was making coffee. The light through the shutters was the light of January, thin and white.

I also knew that what I was envying was a loss. I knew it the way a person losing their hearing can sometimes catch a high note if the room is very silent — a residual capacity, thin, fraying. What I had spent my career studying as a grammatical feature was not a feature of language at all but was language’s attempt to encode something prelinguistic, the basic mammalian orientation toward what-comes-next that allows a squirrel to bury a nut and a bird to build a nest and a woman to hold her newborn and think, without words, forward.

After this, my notebook entries are short.

February.

The almond trees blossomed. The town was beautiful. I walked the streets and recorded sounds: the bells, the dogs, a radio playing fado through an open window, children in the schoolyard playing a game whose rules were invented moment to moment because the concept of a rule, which is an instruction for how to behave in a future situation, was not fully available to them, and so the game was a continuous improvisation, each action prompting the next without reference to a structure, and the children were happy, they were laughing, and the game was good, and I stood outside the fence and listened and did not record this in my notebook because my notebook was in my room and going to get it required forming the intention to go, which required projecting myself into the near future, and I could not, quite, manage it.

Tomás was still baking. The flour supply had become erratic — the distributor still came, because his route was a habit, but Tomás could not place orders, and so the flour arrived in quantities that bore no relation to need, and Tomás baked with what he had, some days large loaves and some days only small rolls, and the town adapted without complaint because complaint requires the belief that things should be different, and should is a word that faces forward. Padre Simão still said Mass, though the liturgy had contracted, the prayers that projected forward — deliver us from evil, lead us not into temptation, thy kingdom come — spoken now as sounds, recited from memory the way a parrot recites.

Dona Beatriz gave me tomatoes from her garden, small ones, misshapen, the kind that taste of what tomatoes are supposed to taste of, and one afternoon I sat at my desk holding one, not eating it, just holding it, feeling its weight and its warmth — it had been sitting in the sun on the windowsill — and its skin, tight and slightly furred. It was a tomato. It weighed what it weighed. It was warm. Its skin was red, shading to green at the stem. I could smell it, that green sharp smell of tomato vine. It did not refer to anything beyond itself.

Nogueira sent a colleague. His name was Dr. Teixeira, a younger man, a sociolinguist from Porto who arrived in March with equipment I recognized — the same Tascam, the same Praat software, the same leather notebook — and a manner I also recognized, the careful professional neutrality of a researcher entering a field site, the anthropologist’s studied openness that is really a form of armor.

He found me in the largo. I was sitting on the bench where I always sat, near the cork oaks, and I had not shaved in some time, or washed my hair with the regularity I once maintained, not because I had decided to let myself go but because without the demand of tomorrow the activities had lost their propulsive force.

Teixeira sat beside me. He said, Dr. Matos, Professor Nogueira is concerned about you, and I said, I know, meaning I was aware of the fact of his concern, the present reality of it, its existence as a thing in the world, and he said, He thinks you should come back to Coimbra, and I heard the should, the future-leaning should, and it sounded foreign, not wrong but distant, like a bell rung in another valley.

He asked me about my research. I showed him my notebooks. He read them with the expression of a person watching a time-lapse of a building collapsing — the early entries structured, referenced, analytical, the later entries fragmentary, present-tense, unmoored. He said, Can you hear the difference between these, and I said, Yes, and he said, And what do you think happened, and I said, I documented it, meaning the documentation was the answer, the record itself was the evidence, and what had happened was what the record showed: a gradual contraction of temporal range, a narrowing of the linguistic and cognitive horizon until the only time that remained was now.

He recorded me. I let him. I even found it funny, in a way — the researcher researched, the documenter documented, the observer observed. I told him, You should be careful, and this was the last piece of future-oriented language I can verify producing, you should be careful, and he said, I know, but he did not know, he could not know, because knowing required having been where I had been, and he had only just arrived.

He stayed for a week. He recorded Dona Glória, Tomás, Professora Ana Luísa, Padre Simão. He attended what passed for a council meeting. He visited the school. He ate the dense bread and drank the strong coffee and walked the streets in the February rain, and on his last day he came to see me and he said, Elena, I am going to write a paper about this, and his use of going to was the most beautiful thing I had heard in months, not because of what it meant but because of what it assumed — an entire cascade of not-yet that unfurled from those two words, going to, like a road seen from a height, and I wanted to tell him to hold onto that, to grip it with both hands, but the sentence required too many futures, and instead I said, Good.

He left on a Thursday. I watched his car descend the hill, turn onto the highway toward Évora, and become small and then invisible, and after it was gone I sat on the bench and I listened to the river and I held my notebook on my lap and I did not write because there was nothing to write toward, only the river and the bench and the thin spring light and the knowledge, fading, that there had once been a grammar for what came next.

I am still in Viana do Alentejo.

It is, as I write this, a day. Not a day in a sequence leading somewhere, just a day. The almond trees are in the state they are in. The river is at the level it is at. Dona Beatriz brings me coffee at the time she brings me coffee, and the coffee is the temperature it is, and I drink it.

Dona Conceição’s daughter Inês is the size she is. She has teeth now. She is learning to walk, which is to say she walks, she falls, she walks, and I do not know if she is learning because learning implies a future competence toward which the present attempts are directed, and I can no longer determine whether that implication is real or whether walking is just something that happens, the body doing what bodies do, each step complete in itself, each fall complete, each recovery not a step toward mastery but simply the next thing.

Teixeira’s paper was published. Nogueira told me this in a letter — he sends letters now, not calls, I think because letters arrive in the present, they are objects you hold, words on paper, a thing that is rather than a voice that is happening — and the paper describes what he found, the grammatical data, the verb counts, the community profile, and it describes me, not by name but as the initial researcher whose prolonged immersion resulted in linguistic assimilation to the community’s tense patterns, a description that is accurate and that misses everything.

The phenomenon has not spread, or it has, but slowly, the way a dialect spreads, by contact and proximity, and I think — I think, present tense, the act of thinking happening now in this sentence and nowhere else — I think that Teixeira carried something back to Porto, not the full loss but a trace, a slight hollowness in the future tense that he may or may not have noticed, and that Nogueira, reading the paper, may have felt something too, a faint unsteadiness, like a floor that gives slightly underfoot, not enough to alarm but enough to make you shift your weight.

I know the bench. I know the cork oaks. I know the sound of Dona Beatriz’s footsteps on the stairs at seven, the particular creak of the third stair, the clink of the cup on the saucer.

The bread is dense. The river is at the level it is at. Inês has teeth now.