Taking Lives (15 page)

‘I’ll make more coffee,’ her mother said, and she left Amandio and Maria sitting across the narrow plastic table-top.

‘You’ll be glad to get me out of the house,’ Amandio said. Then he said, ‘Won’t you?’, insisting on an answer. But she didn’t answer. She buttered a piece of warm bread, and she said to her mother, ‘I’d like to have people to supper. Next week.’

Her mother looked at Amandio first; Maria noticed. But she didn’t look long. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I love to cook for your friends.’

Amandio and Maria could not stay in the same house much longer.

Her mother was a widow, and widows are entitled to a life. Maria meant that. But Amandio was a part-time salesman, and he’d been ingratiating so long that he was all oil; his features, nose, eyes and mouth, seemed to perch on the edge of oiled hair, oiled skin. He sold bathroom fittings, kitchen taps, that kind of thing, and he’d once waited until her mother’s shop was closing to make a formal, knees-bent declaration of how he felt for her. It was like a bad local movie; he should have posed and sung fado. Instead, she laughed so much she took him to bed, and he’d persisted ever since. Maria often wondered if she was his only widow, because he didn’t seem to mind her laughing at all.

‘We’re going to the sea, then,’ Amandio said.

‘I’ll leave supper,’ her mother said. She always seemed defensive about Amandio, as though she knew he wasn’t a serious proposition. ‘Carlos Alberto has the shop.’ She gulped a bit of coffee. ‘It was Carlos Alberto’s day in the shop, anyway.’

Maria went to the office. An older couple called in, worrying about wills. Someone called about a neighbour who’d left steel beams across a right of way. There was an escritura in its long, slow progress, and she wrote a letter, tapped it out on an old Olympia typewriter, explaining there was no need to worry, that the house was already theirs, and the paperwork would come in the slow rhythm of paper.

Then she found Hart his house. This wasn’t so easy. There are houses all around where people don’t live, but some of them belong to emigrants off working in France or Germany, and they mean to come back. Meanwhile, these houses are their refuge and their new dreams; they don’t rent them out. There are old houses, too, wrecks with slipping roofs and walls bellying, but nobody could live there; the foreigners see ‘possibilities’, and then take years to change the gold river stone into something square, white, small and decent, to put in bidets on the ground floor where the pigs, chickens and wine barrels used to be. Then they want to be here in summer. In summer, if a house is habitable, it’s not available: someone is dreaming there.

But there was a French writer, a grey, square man, who’d just gone home abruptly because of some oversight - forgetting to pay tax on his American income for thirty years, something like that. He’d lived in a rented place in Formentina, which is a famous mountain village, in a long, low house painted white, peaceful except on days of pilgrimage to the chapel of Our Lady of the Snows. But there was no need to mention that; Hart was much too young, foreign and modern to know anything about pilgrims. He probably thought the roadside walkers, feet bound up and staffs in their hands, were only ramblers.

Besides, it was a lucky day when Maria took Hart up to Formentina. The high serra was clear and the smell of pine had been softened with dew overnight, and the village was full of new flowers - daisies, big, blue shaggy agapanthus.

‘There aren’t any streets,’ Hart said.

‘Not as such. It’s too steep. Just paths.’

‘Where do I park the car?’

She told him he’d have to leave it by the main road, but he knew that already.

‘Why don’t people live here any more? Portuguese, I mean?’

‘People live here,’ she said. ‘But a lot of them left in the fifties. They went to Brazil, mostly.’

‘What happened?’

‘They couldn’t make a living out of charcoal any more. It was too rough in the winters, and too far out of town.’ No point in telling him her own theory: that people around here live for saudade, the rush of nostalgia and longing, and you first have to leave a place to feel saudade.

‘Is there piped water?’

She wanted him to see Formentina as she saw it. She always loved walking there as a child: dozy bees in plumes of white heather, slate roofs coloured like starling feathers, white houses, yellow borders round their windows, then the dark, dry stone houses that fit into the fold of the mountain, some of them deserted, some of them spoiled. She slipped between them on steps that sometimes opened on unused lots, sometimes on sheds. One track had a fierce, clean stream. She showed the place like postcards: moments when everything is sharply lit and bright.

But when she stood still and looked for herself, the cute bright image came to odd life. Goats came out of a cellar. A woman entered her garden with dung in a basket on her head. A man tugged an endless rubber pipe around for irrigation. A man wove willow twigs like gold strings. Two young men fussed over an ancient car that was parked at the edge of the road.

Already, she was afraid this would not be enough to hold Hart, that she didn’t know how to keep his attention.

She felt like a civic booster, mentioning the daily bus that swept down to the town where she lived. She catalogued her town: a library, four pharmacies, three banks, a gymnasium for power-lifting and another that metamorphosed into a billiard hall, a market twice a week, a hypermarket that had opened with feathery widgeon stuffed in the freezer and now sold frozen pizza, a cordon of new pink apartment buildings and cinema on Fridays.

She meant that Formentina had none of these things, so he’d need to come down to Vila Nova.

He loped ahead, overshot the house and turned back, looking almost angry. She thought how vigorous he seemed, too much motor for his spinning, ineffectual manner.

But once he’d walked into the house, as she had expected, the deal was done. The rooms seemed to hang on the hill. You sat by the windows and the woods rushed away from you, down to the vague white and tile of the town of Vila Nova. You couldn’t believe that you could sit, drink, sleep here, with neighbours, but also with the mountain and forest circling you. At least, that is how she saw the place, after small-town streets.

‘Storage space,’ Hart said. ‘I need storage space. I suppose I could find a carpenter?’

‘How long are you taking the place?’

‘Three months. Maybe longer.’

‘Tell me what you want to do, and I’ll ask.’

He was fidgeting around drawers and tables and cupboards and wardrobes, as though he had a whole life coming by steamer that would need careful laying out. But he couldn’t have been more than thirty. You shouldn’t need to carry your whole life at his age.

‘I’ll take it,’ he said.

She could have told him things. She knew about the old routes over the mountains to Spain, the mule trains that once stuttered up them and the places they took refuge, where the Lisbon court cut snow to keep in caves against the hot weather. She had an exact sense of what a garden should look like in summer: poles of bright green beans, tree cabbage on its high gnarled stems, sweet, shiny onions lying on the ground. But she realized she hadn’t the least idea what Hart saw here, why he wanted to be here, what all this meant to him.

I know what Christopher Hart did next. Maria told me, because she was the one who saw him.

She drove out of town on the old road south, past the tile factory that’s undercutting a whole hill to get clay, past dry fields of maize, through pine forest where the bracken was already rustling brown like paper. She was looking for a breeze, but the sky had gone dusty, just waiting to split apart in a storm.

There was a blue haze in the pines. It could have been heat, or smoke. She stopped the car on a wide turn in the road and looked down into the valley. She’d seen these fields so often she didn’t look properly at them: a rough grid of beans, maize, potatoes, coriander and garlic and onions, scraps of earth slotted one into another.

She saw something shifting in the woods. If she’d been a hunter, she’d have cocked the gun. But this animal moved about with a shameless noise, flickering and rising. It was a big animal, broad enough to bother the trees: fire walking.

A bush burst out in neon orange, then the red and orange licked their way to the edge of the road and the tall, dry grass stems went off like sparklers. The brambles ran like fuses into a hedge. The air shook so you could hear it, like a ship when the engines start turning.

She was three turns of the road above the fire. She could see it was only starting. She ought to tell the nearest village, to call for the volunteer firemen.

But she’d never been this close to fire before. It was a spectacle, a firework show, lights seen through the trees of a park. It was so usual, it couldn’t hurt her. Besides, the sound of flames held her still. The sound surrounded her even if it was only on one side; it seemed to prophesy where the fire would jump next.

A very tall man, blond, was walking into the fire. Nobody’s tall around here; it’s Celtic territory. Nobody’s blond, except the tourists. So even from that distance, she knew the man was Christopher Hart. He was trying to beat back the flames with his jacket, as though he never meant the fire to catch on this scale.

She drove away quickly. She called the bombeiros voluntarios, the firemen, of course. They assembled, but the rain hammered down and the flames weren’t hot or strong enough to persist.

There was almost no more rain that summer.

I tried library registers while the librarians were not looking. I asked concierges in great concrete faculty towers if they knew a Professor Hart. I called my aunts to tell them I would be staying a few days in Coimbra. I called the Museum to ask my secretary to check, yet again, whether Hart had left a new forwarding address in Portugal. If he had gone purposefully to ground, then to me that seemed like a confession of crime.

The aunts said Maria had called. I called her back, and got the answering machine. I left the number of my small hotel.

She rang at six. I dashed along the slippy polish of the halls, past a convention of dusted aspidistras, and took the call at reception.

‘I didn’t know you were in Coimbra,’ she said. ‘That makes things easy. Come to lunch tomorrow, in Vila Nova de Formentina. I’ve got some papers for you to sign. You must meet some people.’

I didn’t yet know her habit of assuming everybody should know everybody if they were foreign.

We went to lunch at a place with chairs of lace ironwork with unforgiving seats, and small round tables. We ate a dish of salt cod, roasted, with oil and parsley and onion and chickpeas. Three people joined us.

There was an emigrant newly returned from Holland, a man in his late twenties, a computer maven; a painter who lived alone in a hill village; and an academic, a gangling man with hair white yellow, in his late twenties. He came late and he did not have time to eat, he said.

‘Christopher Hart,’ he said.

In the room in my hotel there was a single small mirror. I presented myself: John Costa, Museum functionary.

Hart was hardly going to run from the Museum. It would be an admission of guilt. He’d rather act as though he thought I was some kind of intellectual social worker, come to check on his intellectual pregnancy, hand out more kinds of welfare, make sure he was condemned to being properly all right.

I presented myself to the mirror: avenging angel.

More like Keystone Cop, I thought. I can be threatening, but it takes passion. I can’t loom at a door and fill it up with muscle and make a man shrink away. I certainly can’t force a cold thief to give up the goods just because I say so.

So I presented myself to the mirror in a darker guise: John Costa, dealer.

You have to understand about dealers and keepers. Dealers are a special kind of gentry. They have special buffed pink skin that shines. They have double-breasted suits and their yellow ties are knotted in great blossoms of silk. Their shoes are perfect, polished brogues. They are the ones who get taxis when all humanity is trudging in the sleet, the ones who never turn corners but only cut them.

They constantly call the Museum.

I’m an honest man, but they still take me to lunch, somewhere far from the Museum, in silkiest Kensington, and propose that I could just forget an inconvenient fact or accept that a certain provenance is not entirely impossible or help separate art from (say) Italy in one of the traditional ways. They do this quite subtly, in the sense that you could not prosecute their talk, not even after the second bottle of wine, but they do it directly. They want the Museum’s authority when their own seems in doubt.

John Costa, dealer: with a proposal that Hart might consider, a suggestion that there are works he knows about that the Museum can’t acknowledge, works that might fetch a wonderful price.

The skin’s wrong: too dark, not Anglo-Saxon pig pink. I had no truly expensive suit in my wardrobe; I had nothing black for my own father’s funeral. But I can look creditworthy in a crisp, white shirt, suggest by understatement the presence of unlimited money just out of reach. I could bluff, surely.

I would have hired Maria Mattoso to negotiate the next meeting with Hart, like some lease or contract; but there was no need. She wanted a season ticket for whatever game the foreigners were about to play.

I wanted the meeting, so naturally I drove the long miles to Vila Nova de Formentina. All Hart had to do was drift down from Formentina to Vila Nova.

Since we had no particular agenda, just a kind of social duty, we met on the terrace of plastic chairs of the bar just above the market.

I arrived first, perfectly shaved, shaved as a penance. Hart turned up in pressed jeans and a flannel shirt, the neat young academic as lumberjack.

I told Hart that I’d called just because I was in the region. I talked about my father’s funeral, and he offered careful sympathy. Then I asked what had brought him down to Portugal, underlining the question just a little.

He joked: about a whole year of blonds and common sense and herring, and not being able to stand it any more.