The ticking of fate

Peter stopped in front of the church and stared at the façade that had hosted solemn farewell rites for centuries. The ancient stones, polished by the incessant march of lives that came and went, seemed to conspire against the stability of his steps, murmuring eternal longing. Filled with the fresh breath of the mountains, the breeze carried with it echoes of laments and prayers, sounds that guided him along the route he had taken from there, so many times, in a funeral procession. The destination was the sacred ground where the memories of his loved ones were intertwined with the deep roots of his ancestral homeland.

Between the walls of the village cemetery, where the tombstones stood like sentinels of ancient reminiscences and time seemed to fold in on itself, rested his ancestors, whose lives had been abruptly cut short. There, he felt the weight of an invisible inheritance, a legacy of premature farewells that resonated through the generations.

The epigraphs were simple, almost spartan in their simplicity, just birth and death dates to mark the beginning and the end. Nothing in them denoted the stories of abrupt endings that had plagued the men of the Valente family. There was no evidence of the pestilence that had stifled the breathing of great-grandfather Joseph James, who was struck down by a fever that devastated those lands, leaving behind a trail of mourning and silence. There was no trace of the fall that had taken the life of grandfather Anthony James, swallowed up by the bowels of a well while he was tending the goats and pruning the olive trees on Uncle Alfred's land. Nor was there any evidence of the metallic bang that had taken the life of his father, Joaquim Luiz, when his recklessness at the wheel of the first car he had seen in the vicinity had thrown him without warning beyond the veil of existence. 

Although the memories of those lives had been consumed by the relentless vortex of time, a shadow still hung over them: the fateful figure of 49 years old, a number that had sealed the fate of each of them, preventing them from witnessing the dawn of their fiftieth birthday. And there was Peter James Sullivan, bearing the same name and only a breath away from crossing the threshold that none of his predecessors had crossed. He believed that he wouldn't reach the age that seemed to be the final destination of his lineage. He looked at the tombstones one last time and simply said "see you soon".

He had walked through life with restrained steps, as if every less thoughtful gesture could foreshadow the end, he believed was destined for him. He had rejected Antoinette, a love as old and familiar as the cobblestones on his way home and had opted for the monotony of a job at the parish council, where the hours dragged by in a slow waltz with papers and stamps. The dreams of youth, which had once loomed large and boundless on the horizon of hope, were dissipating in the haze of fear, such was the conviction that to aspire to more would be to defy fate. He had avoided excess, not out of virtue, but out of fear and superstition. In his meticulously banal condition, he had aspired to an invisibility that would spare him from the watchful eye of death, moving with the silent hope that, by being discreet, perhaps fate would forget him.

Crushed by the weight of the acute certainty that he would not escape the dark fate that pursued the men in his family, Peter had decided that he would leave on his own terms. When he turned 49, he staged his final act on the stage of his mind. He had rejected the idea of drowning or using a weapon; water was an element in which he moved with dexterity, and weapons were foreign and treacherous to him. He had also ruled out methods with unpredictable variables, such as drugs, lethal gases or electrocution, as each carried a margin of error that he could not tolerate. Height would never be an option, as the church tower was the summit of his small village, and he would not allow himself to sully such a sacred place. An intentional collision with a car had also been promptly ruled out, as he had never been able to erase from his memory the distorted contours of his father's body after the accident. The sight of his own body bleeding to death was intolerable to him; a single red line was enough to make him wince. So it was on the beams that supported the roof of his childhood home that he made his final choice, tying his fate to the place where he was born.

He had immersed himself in formulas and concepts, engaging in a grim monologue with the laws of physics, asking himself what tension, strength and endurance he needed to succeed. He had practiced the noose to exhaustion, a spiral of turns that wrapped around the main rope, promising an inevitable final tightening with a simple pull of the free end. She had chosen the modest wooden bench, a silent witness to the tears of her mother who, in front of the fireplace, had mourned her father's absence, as if the winter of his departure had lasted through all the seasons, until the day her illness claimed her. On the morning of that last day of her 49 years, she left everything in its proper place.

On the way back from the cemetery, Peter allowed himself to absorb every detail around him, already immersed in the serenity that the proximity of the end gave him. However, despite the meticulous calculations he had made, the precision with which he had rehearsed the knots and chosen the place where the rope would be suspended, something unexpected had happened. When he entered the house, he saw Antoinette, settled on the thick, faded fabric sofa, under the flickering light of the fire she had lit herself. Her presence, an inadvertent beacon in the haze of his carefully plotted schemes, had cast a new light on the darkness of his designs.

Without uttering a word, Antoinette tapped the sofa three times with her calloused hand, a gesture that invited Peter to sit next to her. After the pilgrimage to the cemetery, he was disconnected from the time. Even though the sound of the church bell cut through the quiet of the night, the exact time eluded him. The shadows devoured the world outside and he surrendered to the comforting warmth of the fire and the presence of a love he had known since early childhood but had let slip through the fingers of time and irrationality. Their hands intertwined in a mute pact of hope, and they watched the suspended rope that swung gently, mocking the meticulous plans he had drawn up. It mocked his convictions, standing like a monument to the ephemerality of his purposes in the face of life's vast unpredictability.

When dawn broke, Antoinette remained at her lookout post. Her hand clutched the cold hand of Peter, who had been overcome by a heart shattered by the torment of the atrocious wait that had marked the tempo of his days. She realized she was leaving when the warmth of his hand was extinguished in hers. With trembling fingers, she recorded the time, a last act of testimony to Peter's small victory over a legacy of tragic events. She thought he would have liked to know that he had crossed the fifty-year threshold by three hours and fifty minutes, a milestone that none of his predecessors had reached. 

This is the story of my father, who died that morning convinced that he had removed the curse that haunted the Valente family, thinking he was the last link in a chain of misfortune. However, I emerged into life nine months later, under the same roof that witnessed my inadvertent conception. On my 61st birthday, I'm standing in front of his tombstone with the inscription "Here lies Peter Luís Valente, who at the age of 50 crossed the shadow of destiny". 

We'll never know if my father's heart would have succumbed that night if he hadn't lived under the constant shadow of death, but I believe that by finally surrendering to love, he redeemed the Valentes from their ancient curse and that act of liberation was his most valuable legacy.