Pirate King (14 page)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

FREDERIC:
How quaint the ways of Paradox!
At common sense she gaily mocks!

I
T WAS STILL
too early for dinner, but I found three of the younger girls and their mothers settled in before a substantial afternoon tea. Our interactions up to now had largely been professional rather than social, since the crew tended to sit at tables apart from the actors (a pattern of segregation for which I had been grateful). When I joined them now, the mothers exchanged looks of puzzlement verging on shock, as if the maid had helped herself to a breakfast buffet and sat down among the guests. Still, short of being ill-mannered before their girls, they couldn’t very well drive me off.

Adolescent girls are a race apart. When I was June’s age, a motor accident had injured and orphaned me: Other than my friendship with Holmes, my early ’teen years were solitary, leaving me ill equipped for light conversation about … well, whatever it is girls that age talk about.

In any event, I was the wrong age for both sets of females here. I spent several increasingly uncomfortable minutes manufacturing painful topics of conversation (clothing? memorisation of lines? the weather, for pity’s sake?) before a moment of desperation had me hauling out a remark about the pirates Fflytte had hired, and waiting for that to flounder around and die.

Except it didn’t. All three mothers smiled fondly, one of the girls giggled and turned pink, the other two spoke simultaneously.

“I’m
so
glad—”

“I never expected—”

They stopped, and leant into each other with shrieks of laughter that rattled the chandelier.

“Sorry?” I said when my ears had stopped ringing.

“I was going to say,” said Isabel, “that I’m
so
glad Mr Fflytte didn’t bring a bunch of spotty boys from England to play our pirates.”

“Yes,” Kate agreed. “Who’d have thought Portuguese boys could be so good-looking?”

“Um.” I cast a sideways look at their mothers. “You do realise they’re not exactly boys, don’t you?” Apart from Lawrence, scarcely pubescent, and Jack, who seemed about fourteen, the pirates were in their twenties and thirties, and these girls were … well, they claimed to be at least fourteen, even Fannie, although I had serious doubts about her.

“Oh, pooh,” said Isabel. “At least it’ll give us something interesting to do on the way to Morocco. I always wanted to go to Arabia!”

“Morocco isn’t in Arabia.”

“It isn’t?”

“It’s on the northwest coast of Africa.”

“Are you sure?” She seemed disappointed.

“Unless they’ve moved it.”

“Well, I s’pose Africa’s all right.”

“Jungles and tigers,” popped up Fannie.

“You won’t find too many jungles in Morocco,” I told her. “More likely desert.”

“Ooh, a desert—so there
will
be sheiks?” Isabel wanted to know. The mothers looked interested. I sighed, and gave up.

It was not raining at the moment, so I wrapped up against the chill and went for a walk before dinner. The streets were quiet, with restaurants not yet open and shops closed tight, although I thought I saw one of the taller girls—probably Annie, who seemed to be everywhere—dart into a side-street. When I reached that corner, I looked, but saw no one. In any event, I reminded myself that I was not responsible for every crew member at every moment.

My feet took me down to the waterfront where, although there was more activity than the rest of the city, the loudest sounds were still the gulls and the slap of water. I wandered east, along the road that kept the tight-knit, almost Medieval Alfama district from spilling its piled boxes out across the modern docklands like a tipped toy-box. Pristine tiles abutted flaking plaster; ornate façades grew out of un-hewn stone; a sleek modern window stood next to one installed when Columbus was venturing into the Atlantic; a stone lion’s head set into a wall dripped water into a faded tin that had once held olive oil. It was nearly dark, and I was entering an area without street-lamps, so I turned to retrace my steps, intending to follow the next lighted thoroughfare.

Then I saw a pair of men, some distance down the waterfront, coming in my direction. They were too far away to identify with any confidence, but something about their shapes made the back of my mind prickle, and I retreated into the deep shadow of a boarded-up entrance-way. In a couple of minutes, I peered out again. Sure enough: our translator and finder of pirate ships, with our pirate king.

I faded into the stinking darkness. The men went past, speaking in Portuguese.

I followed. Of course I followed.

They took the next entrance into the Alfama, not far from where we had begun our Thursday night search for La Rocha. At the time, Pessoa had known neither the saloon nor La Rocha—it takes a good actor to craft an air of assurance-atop-uncertainty, and I did not think Pessoa a good actor—but it would appear that had changed. And I was not surprised when their goal was that same grubby hole in the wall.

I was too far behind to hear any exchange of words when they entered the place, but I pulled my scarf up and my hat down, and risked a quick glance through the bottle-thick, salt-scummed window as I passed. Enough to see that in the thirty seconds after they had gone in, they had also gone out.

Which could only mean that they had gone through the bar proper and into the same back room.

A room with, as I recalled, a back door—narrow and half-concealed by heavy curtains, but there.

It took me some time to find the right door amongst the warren of tiny lopsided dwellings jostling shoulder to shoulder beneath the castle walls. None of the streets—streets! one could stretch an arm across some of them—connected at right angles. Half of them came to an end in courtyards; many were enclosed overhead; most were unlit. The houses were occupied—I could hear voices and smell cooking, but it was late (and cold) enough that the children were inside, and the adults, too, were mostly invisible behind shutters. Feeling my way in and out of various brief passages, at last my eye was caught by a narrow line of light at the far end of a tunnel-like lane.

The thin strip was the only thing I could see, and although I had a torch in my overcoat pocket, I was loath to use it. Instead, I found that if I blocked the actual light with an outstretched hand, its reflection along the stone walk and walls would permit me to creep forward. I crept forward, and heard a voice. A voice I knew.

Not that I could understand what he was saying, but Fernando Pessoa was talking. And talking. I pressed my ear to the crack, hearing nothing but his voice, going on and on. It sounded like a recitation.

So I went down on my knees to put my eye near the half-inch gap between door and stone.

The horizontal slice of room that came into view contained three chairs and a merry fire. There were men in the chairs, and although I could only see their legs, I knew who the room held. La Rocha’s scuffed and elephantine red boots were stretched out to the coals, ankles propped, his right toe pulsing slightly as if keeping the beat of private music. His lieutenant—“Samuel”—sat on the other side of the fire, his own shiny black boots flat on the floorboards; a glass of some brown liquid hung from his fingertips, the arm itself resting out of sight on the chair. The third legs belonged to Pessoa: their knees were crossed with the right toe tucked behind the left calf, an uncomfortable position suggesting intense concentration. I could just see a corner of paper, drooping from his knee. As I watched, he lifted it, rearranged it out of my sight, then laid it back down. He continued reading.

This was not some report he was conveying to La Rocha and his man, not unless he had set his report in verse (although this being Pessoa, anything was likely). His words had a rhythm that drove La Rocha’s toe, and caused Samuel’s glass to swirl gently.

Then the rhythm broke off. Pessoa said something in a more normal voice—rather, in the voice he had used the other evening when he wore the monocle, not the deferential intonations of Fernando Pessoa, translator. He seemed to be asking a question, because La Rocha’s squeak answered, then Samuel contributed something. It went on that way for a few minutes, before Pessoa cleared his throat, paused for a swallow from his glass, and set to again.

I peeled my cheek off the grubby stone and sat upright, thinking,
Good heavens, they’re holding a piratical poetry reading!

This literary salon continued for another quarter hour before Pessoa came to what was clearly, even through a closed door, some kind of conclusion. The other two men did not applaud, but they did make encouraging noises. I placed my eye back to the slit, thinking that they would pour the poet a drink and talk it over, but instead all three of them stood. I positioned my hands for instant flight in the event they decided to use the back entrance, but they did not—and to my surprise, it was not Pessoa who left, but the other two.

Instead, Pessoa made a circuit of the chairs, stood before the fire for a minute—I could only see to his bagged knees, but I pictured him rolling a cigarette. Then a spent match sailed into the coals, and Pessoa returned to his chair, and his pages.

Only this time, he read his words in English.

It was—inevitably—a poem about piracy, beginning with hard, romantic, masculine images of a man’s life at sea:

To the sea!

Salt with windblown foam

My taste for great voyages!

Thrash with whipping water the flesh of my adventure
,

Douse with the cold depths the bones of my existence
,

But then the harshness slipped sideways, into imagery even a pirate might have found unnerving:

Make shrouds out of my veins!

Hawsers out of my muscles!

Flay my skin and nail it to the keels!

Was this what he’d been reading to La Rocha and his friend? It was hard to picture those two men receiving these images with such calm attentiveness. No, I decided: The poet must have read them a less inflammatory portion, and set these verses free into the room only after they had left.

It went on in this vein for some time, the poet asking that his eyes be torn out, bones smashed, blood spilt. I listened in fascination as the pale, thin landsman dreamed into existence a tropical sun that made his taut veins seethe, Patagonian winds that tattooed his imagination. There was a bizarre fascination in overhearing the man’s inner vision, of himself and his people; my cheek went numb against the frigid stone as his maritime ode unfolded. His voice became increasingly caught up in the recitation, gaining in fervency at the erotically charged violence, the fire and the blood, until from deep within booms the savage and insatiable Song of the Great Pirate, sending a chill down the spine of his men:

Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest

Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!

The abrupt shift from bloody rapine into children’s adventure story startled a noise out of me, and I slapped a hand over my mouth. The dramatic recitation cut sharply off. I staggered upright and forced my stiff limbs to shamble down the tunnelled lane, clearing the corner only an instant before the bolt rattled and the door spilt light down the stones.

I was waiting at the front of the tavern when he left a short time later, and followed him long enough to confirm that it was the flamboyant, monocled Álvaro de Campos striding along the deserted streets, not meek, bespectacled Pessoa. I trailed behind him long enough to decide that he was headed to his home, on the city’s other set of hills, and then I turned off towards the hotel, and dinner.