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"I know."
"I don't even know how to console him. Or even which, as his loving sister, to hope for--that she'll come back into his life, or leave him forever."
Olhado shrugged. All the brittleness was back.
"Do you really not care?" asked Valentine. "Or have you decided not to care?"
"Maybe I decided long ago, and now I really don't."
Part of being a good interviewer, too, is knowing when to be silent. Valentine waited.
But Olhado was also good at waiting. Valentine almost gave up and said something. She even toyed with the idea of confessing failure and leaving.
Then he spoke. "When they replaced my eyes, they also took out the tear ducts. Natural tears would interfere with the industrial lubricants they put in my eyes."
"Industrial?"
"My little joke," said Olhado. "I seem to be very dispassionate all the time, because my eyes never well up with tears. And people can't read my expressions. It's funny, you know. The actual eyeball doesn't have any ability to change shape and show an expression. It just sits there. Yes, your eyes dart around--they either keep steady eye contact or look down or up--but my eyes do that, too. They still move with perfect symmetry. They still point in the direction I'm looking. But people can't stand to look at them. So they look away. They don't read the expressions on my face. And therefore they think there are no expressions. My eyes still sting and redden and swell a little at times when I would have cried, if I still had tears."
"In other words," said Valentine, "you do care."
"I always cared," he said. "Sometimes I thought I was the only one who understood, even though half the time I didn't know what it was that I was understanding. I withdrew and watched, and because I didn't have any personal ego on the line in the family quarrels, I could see more clearly than any of them. I saw the lines of power--Mother's absolute dominance even though Marcao beat her when he was angry or drunk. Miro, thinking it was Marcao he was rebelling against, when always it was Mother. Grego's meanness--his way of handling fear. Quara, absolutely contrary by nature, doing whatever she thought the people who mattered to her didn't want her to do. Ela, the noble martyr--what in the world would she be, if she couldn't suffer? Holy, righteous Quim, finding God as his father, on the premise that the best father is the invisible kind who never raises his voice."
"You saw all this as a child?"
"I'm good at seeing things. We passive, unbelonging observers always see better. Don't you think?"
Valentine laughed. "Yes, we do. The same role, then, you think? You and I, both historians?"
"Till your brother came. From the moment he walked in the door, it was obvious that he saw and understood everything, just the way I saw it. It was exhilarating. Because of course I had never actually believed my own conclusions about my family. I never trusted my own judgments. Obviously no one saw things the way I did, so I must be wrong. I even thought that I saw things so peculiarly because of my eyes. That if I had real eyes I would have seen things Miro's way. Or Mother's."
"So Andrew confirmed your judgments."
"More than that. He acted on them. He did something about them."
"Oh?"
"He was here as a speaker for the dead. But from the moment he walked in the door, he took--he took--"
"Over?"
"Took responsibility. For change. He saw all the sicknesses I saw, but he started healing them as best he could. I saw how he was with Grego, firm but kind. With Quara, responding to what she really wanted instead of what she claimed to want. With Quim, respecting the distance he wanted to keep. With Miro, with Ela, with Mother, with everybody."
"With you?"
"Making me part of his life. Connecting with me. Watching me jack into my eye and still talking to me like a person. Do you know what that meant to me?"
"I can guess."
"Not the part about me. I was a hungry little kid, I'll admit; the first kind person could have conned me, I'm sure. It's what he did about us all. It's how he treated us all differently, and yet remained himself. You've got to think about the men in my life. Marcao, who we thought was our father--I had no idea who he was. All I ever saw was the liquor in him when he was drunk, and the thirst when he was sober. Thirst for alcohol but also a thirst for respect that he could never get. And then he dropped over dead. Things got better at once. Still not good, but better. I thought, the best father is the one who isn't there. Only that wasn't true, either, was it? Because my real father, Libo, the great scientist, the martyr, the hero of research, the love of my mother's life--he had sired all these delightful children on my mother, he could see the family in torment, and yet he did nothing."
"Your mother didn't let him, Andrew said."
"That's right--and one must always do things Mother's way, mustn't one?"
"Novinha is a very imposing woman."
"She thinks she's the only one in the world ever to suffer," said Olhado. "I say that without rancor. I have simply observed that she is so full of pain, she's incapable of taking anyone else's pain seriously."
