The Man from Lisbon, page 11
“You never change,” she said.
“Ah, I do so hope you are mistaken there, my little one. I’ve changed my ways—now we must reform your husband.”
“Nonsense,” Alves interrupted. “As the Americans say, I was framed!”
“Me, too,” José said, nodding enthusiastically. “The world awaits us both, Alves.” Then, watching Arnaldo quietly waiting with Alves’ bag, he amended, “All three of us.”
José was leading the way down to the busy square, Arnaldo struggling with Alves’ valise and the extra satchel of reading material. It was early evening. The sky was pink, and in the gentle shadows Lisbon looked like a city made of candy. The breeze was cool and Alves stood for a moment on the sidewalk looking around him.
“Come on, Alves,” José called from the other side of the shiny black Nash sedan. “We’ll be late. Hurry up! You must ride in my new car!” He jumped in behind the wheel, knocking his beige fedora askew. The hat matched his gloves with the tiny pearl buttons. José Bandeira had always been a snappy dresser. The sight of the car and the expensive clothing reminded Alves of the money he’d sent José in Mozambique. It seemed half a lifetime ago. Perhaps there was a chance of getting it back. …
“Late for what?” he asked Arnaldo.
“José has suggested a small party. To celebrate your return—in Cascais. A few friends.” He helped Maria into the car and stood aside to make room for Alves. “To welcome you home.”
Whatever the cares lurking in their minds, they all receded during the ride through the gathering darkness along the Tagus. Huge commercial ships loomed over a variety of luxury liners that made their way south from England, along the coasts of France and Spain to the great Portuguese harbor. Yachts, smaller still, moved jauntily among them, pennants waving. The Tower of Belem, from which Da Gama had sailed for India around the Cape of Good Hope in 1497, rose familiarly out of the dusk. The smell of the sea lay lightly on the breezes. Maria took Alves’ hand as they sped onward.
Later she spoke into his ear: “The beach, do you recognize it?”
“Of course. Once I nearly killed myself there, trying to get a silly girl’s boat into the water. …”
“And the girl, what of her?”
“Nice enough girl, I suppose. Wound up marrying her and carting her off to Africa.” He patted her stomach. “And now she has my children! With great regularity. …”
She squeezed his arm, eyes glistening in the dark.
“We’re here!” José braked the car abruptly to a halt in front of the restaurant overlooking the beach. The outdoor platform built over sand was strung with brightly colored lanterns, and perhaps twenty couples were standing by the railing calling and waving to Alves.
Alves felt tears well up as he bobbed his head, acknowledging the words of welcome as they climbed the steps and moved slowly among their friends. A small American-French-type jazz combo played in a corner under a striped canopy: a swarthy guitarist, a violinist with a patch over one eye, a black clarinet player, going through all the hits of the day.
“All Alone.”
“Limehouse Blues.”
“Somebody Loves Me.”
“What’ll I Do.”
The evening fused together into one continuous blur of music and dancing and broiled shrimps and cold wine from Germany, pretty women in daring dresses and potent perfume, dark men in white shirts and silk ties, faces smiling and congratulating him on his return, as if he had just pulled off a business coup of one kind or another. What mattered, it seemed, was that a previously successful entrepreneur had undergone a dramatic reversal and come through it with flags flying. It was the best construction thus far put on the events of the last few months, at least in Alves’ opinion, and caught up in the relief of his restored freedom and the spirit of the moment, he danced and drank and perspired freely and told jokes that everyone seemed to find enormously amusing. The lanterns glowed yellow and red and blue, and balloons attached to the lantern poles were untied and floated romantically out over the beach toward the ocean. He watched them go, remembered the day he’d seen Maria and fallen in love.
Later still the musicians melted away, conversation dropped to hushed whispers, and a red spotlight came on, bathing the tiny bandstand in a rich, shadowy glow. “Fado,” someone said, and from nowhere the singer appeared with her two accompanists. Without a word they seated themselves in front of her, one with the guitarra, the other with the viola da Franca. The guitarra, in the hands of a scowling young man with black hair to his shoulders and a cigarette stuck to his lower lip, produced the silvery, minor tune which, in all its variations, was so familiar in Lisbon. The viola da Franca propelled the music forward by means of a low throbbing. By now it was so quiet that only the sound of the surf could be heard, and the fadista stepped forward, breaking her pose, embarking on the mournful song. Her eyes were almost closed, her wild dark mane, held in check by a band of ribbon, was thrown back, her sinewy body swaying sensually to the demands of the two guitars. Like all fadista, her voice was rough, primitive and her manner earthy and unsophisticated. It was impossible to guess her background or where José might have found her. Given his nature, Alves assumed that he was most probably sleeping with her and doubtless living to some extent off her earnings, which could have accounted for the exceptionally melancholy quality of her song. Her golden earrings and a golden necklace flashed in the red glow like a gypsy’s jewelry around a campfire.
The fado exercised a magical hold on the gathering. It appealed even to Alves, who saw himself as the most businesslike of men. Somewhere in the wild moans of sadness and tragedy, in the cries of self-pity at the turns of capricious Fate, in the sounds of the erotic whorishness that lay in the song’s heart, he found the hint of an answer, even a philosophic answer. … Life, the singer seemed to say, was a mournful business, only a means of putting off the end.
As Alves listened it was as if he were alone. He recalled all the meanings of the songs as the singer wound her way deeper and deeper, and he felt that he knew, from his own experience, of what she sang. The irony, the despair, the discouragement, the caprices … If he had never known true ecstasy, perhaps it wasn’t within him to feel it. Surely it was not Maria’s fault. Love he had known. Ecstasy was for poets. Was ecstasy forever beyond the son of an impoverished undertaker? Was he simply too common a man?
Eventually the fado was done, the party over. He said a few words of thanks to his friends, who could see by the tears on his cheeks that he was moved and grateful. The effect of the wine was wearing off and the night air was restoring his equilibrium. His assumption about José and the fadista proved absolutely correct: the girl curled up in the front seat of the Nash for the drive back to Lisbon. Maria and Arnaldo, both quite happily drunk, collapsed beside Alves in the back.
At the flat Maria had rented a few weeks before his return he asked José to wait. He carried Maria up the stairs and quickly undressed her, placed her carefully beneath the coverlet. The children were with her parents. He locked the door and went back to the waiting car. Arnaldo was sleeping soundly. José was kissing the singer. Alves climbed into the front seat. The girl slowly straightened up, then tilted heavily against him. José stepped on the gas, and the Nash slid away into the quiet moonlit streets.
“Where are we going?” Alves finally asked. He felt wide awake and everyone else was sleepy.
“I’m spending the night at the girl’s place,” José said. “Arnaldo will either sleep it off in the car or manage to get to her couch. How do you like my little fadista?”
“She is very good. Admirable.”
“Very beautiful, too. Kiss her if you like. You’ve been in prison, after all, and Maria is pregnant. It’s the very least I can offer.”
“No, really.”
“You may kiss me,” the girl said. Her voice was higher and clearer than her singing. She smelled of wine, rather tantalizingly.
“If you don’t,” José said, “she’ll be insulted.”
“He’s right,” the girl said. She lifted her face to him. “I’ll stay with you all night, too.”
Alves was suddenly very uncomfortable.
“Perfectly all right, old man,” José allowed, his diction slightly slurred. “A welcome-home present.”
Alves kissed her quickly, felt her tongue dart into his mouth. She held him close, pulled his hand against a rising nipple.
“Really, I’m very sorry,” he said. “But not tonight.” The girl flung herself away, back toward José. “Another time perhaps. … All I want to do is go for a long walk. I’ve been in a cell for so long.”
“Of course, old man,” José said. “We understand. Very civilized habit, walking. No doubt about it.” He stopped at a corner where several darkish streets converged.
Alves got out of the car.
“José, I can’t possibly thank you enough for all you’ve done for me. You’ve made me see that all is not lost.”
The wolf’s grin came and went. “Now, have a nice walk,” José said. “And I’ll make certain we see each other soon. We may be useful to each other. …”
When the car was out of sight he put his hands in his pockets and began walking.
A few minutes later, the night closing around him, he found himself looking up at the long gray facades of the Bank of Portugal and the Ultramarino Bank, iron-grilled, characterless, the two great repositories of money. How fitting, he thought, surveying the two buildings in the cold moonlight: the money itself was without character, gained its meaning and nature from the uses to which it was put. Where better for it to be kept than in these anonymous, remote, faceless structures? His footsteps echoed on the pavement. He stopped to read a political broadside pasted to one of the bank buildings, lit a cigarette from a wooden match scraped on the gray surface, went along to stand at the black iron grill across one of the entry ways. He peered into the darkness. He was alone in the street.
He walked on finally, his thoughts lingering with the banks until he realized that he was approaching the ancient Alfama district where as a child he’d been cautioned never to go alone. His grandmother had called it the Mouraria, had warned him that the Jews and the Moors would catch him, cut him to pieces, boil him for soup.
Slowly he began to climb the narrow streets, where by spreading his arms he could almost touch the walls on either side of him. He smelled the food with its hints of Eastern spices, the pungency of the animals who lived cheek by jowl with their owners; he saw and heard and felt the clothing fluttering from ropes overhead where it had been hung to dry. Above him the ancient crumbling buildings, dwellings of the poor, seemed to lean toward one another, blotting out the starry night. A drunk moaned when Alves trod on his foot. Remembering his grandmother, he leaped back, stifled a cry, saw in his imagination the blade glittering as it came, saw the whisper of his own death. He hurried on up the steep cobbled path.
Old Portugal, he thought, still with us, primitive and uninformed, superstitious. The blood of an admiral, yes, certainly, but also the blood of his grandmother, who had been a child when people could still recall at first hand the French Revolution. The tumbrils rolling, the streets of Paris slippery with fresh blood … And his grandmother, who never dreamed of reading or writing, had lived in a home where a carved wooden box had contained the mano refinada, the “hand of glory,” which was in fact the pickled right hand of a corpse whose identity was lost in the mists of time but probably dated from Napoleon’s conquest of Europe. She had believed in witches who took the forms of black sparrows and flew away after sucking the lifeblood from young children. And Alves remembered her hiding the hair of the family dog behind the door to keep him from wandering away on his regular nocturnal excursions.
The street doubled back on itself, always inching higher past the narrow, shadowed doorways where cats and dogs growled in their sleep. Somewhere back in the recesses of the district a woman sang, her voice breaking with some emotional anguish that Alves couldn’t even imagine. The voice followed him as he climbed, reminding him ever more of the past. Now, on this peculiarly magical night, he felt curiously in touch with the past and with his heritage. Portuguese had once navigated the world, greatness their destiny, and now he felt a tapping on his shoulder as if the past were reaching for his attention. …
Romantic nonsense, obviously. But still, almost unbidden, here he was, drawn into the oldest section of Lisbon, upward toward the ruins of the great castle of San Jorge, which had brooded over the city from the time when the Celts and the Phoenicians and the Greek Odysseus had built their temples and forts on the mighty hill that commanded the harbor of the River Tagus. Somehow Alves had forgotten all this as he’d fought to survive, to make his own life more fruitful than his father’s. From now on, he thought as his breath grew short and his legs began to ache, from now on pettiness, small success, a little money to invest—all that was dead, gone, forgotten.
If he truly were a new man in a new age there was nothing to keep him from challenging it as Henry the Navigator or the great Da Gama had challenged the oceans beyond the horizon. He stopped to rest at the gate leading into the grounds of the castle. The way beyond was narrow and steeper yet. Vines and flowers clutched at his face as he entered where the quietness was nearly palpable. He heard the splashing of a fountain, the high wind in the trees, the cooing and clucking of the exotic birds invisible in the night.
He walked past the massive cold cast-iron cannons trained out over the city’s tiled rooftops toward the harbor, smelling the limes and the flowers, toward the castle walls rising darkly against the night sky. Up the shallow stairways, across the stone bridges, pushing past the oaken doors two feet thick, hinges creaking with the rust of the ages, past the constantly dripping water, the flat shallow ponds, into the courtyard itself where the Moors had replaced the Romans and had been in turn replaced by the Christian Alfonso Henriques, who had led his knights up the treacherous paths in 1147 with Portugal in the hands of the Christian Lord and His servants. …
A peacock flared like an explosion in the yellow moonlight, an insomniac cockatoo strutted past, a Chinese Mandarin duck floated motionless on the water, sleeping. He lit a cigarette, sat on a stone step hollowed out and smoothed two thousand years ago by sentries watching the campfires of the enemy on the plains across the wide, dark Tagus. Across the open square of grass and dust a well with its rope and bucket took on a momentarily ominous shape. He blew smoke rings, sighed. The mouras encantadas, the enchanted Moorish princesses who were indescribably beautiful and treacherous and who possessed the serpent’s tail where their legs ought to have been—the mouras encantadas waited at the bottoms of wells to devour the hapless boy or girl who carelessly leaned too far. … My God, it was all so long ago, boyhood and the werewolves and the stories of Henry the Navigator and his father toiling in the undertaker’s trade. So long ago …
He climbed higher still, up the dangerously narrow steps to the crenelated battlements from where, between the stone pillars, he could see the endless, countless rust-colored tile rooftops of his city with Rossio Square huge and empty and quiet. He leaned forward; as he did so he felt the amulet his grandmother had given him rub against his chest, between him and the stone parapet. Ah, superstition and magic! She had been dying and had pressed it into his small hand, explaining that it should go to him, that it had belonged to his grandfather, who had given it to her on his deathbed. It was a link, a bit of the continuity between the generations—in this case, a pedra de raio, the amulet of the thunderbolt. She explained the story, slowly and painstakingly since her breath was very short. The thunderbolt, she said, is the great stone shaft that plummets to the earth at the moment we see the flash of lightning and drives itself seven meters deep into the earth. With each passing year it pushes back upward until in the seventh year it reappears, at which time those with great good luck find it and take it with them, thus protecting their homes and themselves from any future thunderbolts—or strokes of calamitous bad fortune, whatever may be likened to a thunderbolt of fate. He held it in his hand, a tiny prehistoric arrowhead that his grandfather must have come upon sometime in the distant past, since he would have been one hundred years old by then, having been born in the early years of the nineteenth century. A hole had been driven through the broad end of the device and a thin leather thong passed through it, making a necklace, which is how Alves had worn it ever since receiving it. His grandmother had gone to her grave secure in the belief that young Alves had been provided for. He looked at it again, its antiquity and primal grace, the smoothness achieved by the passing centuries. He sighed. Ah, it was a good thing she had not lived to see him flattened by the thunderbolt that landed him in the Oporto jail … but that sorry event would hardly have shaken her belief in the pedra de raio. No, she would have an excuse. After all, you could hardly maintain a belief in magic if your faith reeled every time it didn’t work. …
Thunderbolts. You never outlive the past, he thought. Never.
When he looked again at the city he was surprised to see that it had grown more distinct, that the sky was going gray, that the ships on the Tagus had lost their shapelessness. But he was not tired. On the contrary he had never felt more hopeful, more alive and eager.
Staring intensely at the city, he spoke, perhaps to his grandmother, perhaps to himself, palms spread on the stone parapet as if he were addressing the city, the past, the present from the mightiest of balconies.
“I … am … Alves … Reis. …” He took a deep breath and the hint of a smile quivered on his lips. “And I have … a thunderbolt of my own. …”
Then he began the long walk home.
PART TWO
PERIL POINT
ALVES BEGAN HIS PREPARATIONS the evening of the day after the welcome-home party. He had wandered wearily, happily back from the Castle of San Jorge with the sun at his back, watching and listening as the streets came alive and the sounds of the fishermen floated up from the docks on the morning’s first breezes. He napped the day away while Maria took the children to market and then to play in the park. Hyperactive, he romped on the floor with the two oldest boys while Maria bathed the youngest, then took the sweet-smelling, freshly powdered bundle in his arms and crooned a medley of the previous night’s favorites, concluding with an up-tempo rendition of “Does the Spearmint Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?” Which he understood was very big in America.
