A letter from Tiago Rodrigues

It was autumn

Rogério Rodrigues had gone into hospital for the last time

He knew that the grape harvest

in the distant village where he was born

in Trás-os-Montes, in north-east Portugal

was coming to an end

He also knew he wouldn’t drink the wine from this harvest

He was 418 km away from his village

here in Amadora-Sintra hospital, in a bleak suburb of Lisbon

But the problem wasn’t distance, it was time

The distance was precise

Time was uncertain

Like the grape harvest, Rogério was coming to an end

***

When my father Rogério Rodrigues was in hospital in the last weeks of his life, he asked me to bring a notebook and a pen. He told me he wanted to write a final article after a 40-year career as a journalist. Writing articles as a way of dying.

My father wanted to report on his experiences in hospital. About the people and movements he saw in the clinic and how it felt to lie there, degenerated from human to patient. He wanted to write about that place where people are treated as if they were no longer there while they still are. He already had a title and wrote it right on the first page: The dead don't eat yoghurt.  My father had hated yoghurt all his life, but now it was part of his daily diet at the hospital, and he grew to like it.

After my father died, I opened the notebook to read what he had written, but there were only some lines and spots. Scribbles, like the abstract drawings of a baby. I suppose he tried to write, but his hand was too fragile. Maybe he thought he was writing, in a dream-like state, but nothing really came out.

***

Just scribbles

Nothing more, except the title

Not a single word

Nothing resembling a letter

Scratches, scribbles, strokes

Scrambled lines

Like the marks children make before they can draw

Lines drawn by a weakened hand

A hand that imagined that it was writing, but was not

A hand that could no longer form letters

A useless hand

***

For weeks, months and years, I flicked through the pages of the notebook. The scribbles were like a picture of powerlessness. Drawings of the end. What might my father have been trying to write?

Then I decided to write a play. Maybe making theatre is my way of living. To give meaning to something thas has no meaning. A play imagining the last words my father would have written.

***

This play is an imagined report

Sometimes we show things on stage that happened

Sometimes we show things that are made up

Sometimes a thing that really happened will seem to be made up

Sometimes something made up will seem to be real

This imagined report plays out on the border

between life and death

between reality and fiction

between journalism and theatre

In this play Rogério has a different name: Longbeard

To avoid confusion

The elder son will be Shortbeard

The play starts like this

“No Yoghurt for the Dead”

A report by Longbeard

Correspondent in Amadora-Sintra hospital