Taking Lives (25 page)

Senhora Mello brought in a fresh cheese like dimpled milk, small black olives, a cut broa, salt and pepper. She went away immediately.

‘You saw the driveway coming in,’ Mello said. ‘You saw all those blocks on either side. They don’t respect the privacy of a quinta any longer. Everything has changed.’

‘This must have been very beautiful, very peaceful before the blocks were built.’

Mello shrugged. ‘It was my father’s house, too. In the middle of the town, a farm. Such a thing could not survive for ever.’ He seemed a little resigned, a little angry: a man in his sixties perhaps, who’d clearly risen in a bureaucratic continuum, who was suspicious of the new permissions and possibilities. God help me, I thought this made him a reactionary, even a fascist, attached to the same brutal past he had gone to such trouble to show me.

I wanted to get to the point. I didn’t dare.

‘You don’t think of moving out into the country?’ I asked, politely.

‘Nobody moved into the country in my day. You didn’t buy land any more than you bought a new child. That’s changed, too.

‘The fresh cheese,’ he said, ‘is very good. It’s not dangerous like they say nowadays. The goats are all vaccinated.’

‘And my father?’ I said.

Mello put pepper and salt on the fresh cheese and took a fork to it. ‘Your father,’ he said, with the air of someone marking time before making a presentation.

‘My father loved this place. He taught me Portuguese history.’ I’d begun to sound like a defender to a jury. ‘But,’ I said, ‘he never told me about himself.’

‘And you think -?’

‘I don’t know what to think. The house was a surprise, and the grave. As though he came back here and yet he wanted to separate himself from everyone.’

Mello said, ‘The emigrantes often do. They go away, they make money, they want something that shows all that time and effort was worthwhile.’

‘He boasted too much,’ I said. I had said it out loud at last. ‘He didn’t need that grave. He was telling people something.’

Mello got up and brought an envelope from a crowded roll-top desk. He said, ‘I can just give you this.’

I took the envelope. I didn’t have a pocket for it, so it was stained with sweat by the time I got home.

Anna said: ‘Where the hell did you go?’

Hart said, ‘Where were you? You just disappeared.’

I said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it. Maybe I can get a taxi back to the house.’

‘All the taxi drivers are out dancing,’ Maria said.

‘Then someone come with me. That way you can bring the car back later. I don’t want to spoil the evening.’

Anna said, ‘I’m coming with you.’

Hart said, ‘Will you be all right?’

‘I was only away an hour,’ I said. It was flattering, almost like being loved too much, to see how an absence unnerved them both.

When we closed the house door, you could cut the quiet in Formentina. Dogs stopped fretting. Cicadas and frogs were subdued, a chatter in the quiet of the night and not their usual bright song.

We heard plates smashing in a house in the village, then something metal - a pot, perhaps - rolling on tile. The sound of the accident filled up all the quiet. It made Anna whisper for a while.

‘Why did Mello want you?’

‘I haven’t worked it out. He wanted me to read some papers.’

I made myself a drink and opened the windows to get a breeze moving. The air was dusty and I thought I smelt smoke.

Anna didn’t even suggest I read the papers to her. She went to the verandah and sat there in cool shade from the moonlight.

I would have liked a fight, something to stall the moment of discovering what Mello had to tell me. Instead, the best I could do was to fuss over finding a knife to open the envelope, not a perfect one I would blunt on paper, but a rough one. The edge I left was jagged.

I pulled out two sheets of flimsy paper, one headed with the name of the restaurant where my father had worked and signed by my father, one a carbon copy of Mello’s reply.

I was sure I wouldn’t know quite enough Portuguese to read an official letter. There’d be euphemisms, euphuisms, jargon and code. So I went to get a dictionary even before I unfolded the papers fully.

My father in a blank white room with a hook, electric power and a pillar. He was not a policeman. He was not being tortured. So what was he, and when and why was he there? He was a riddle in a box.

I couldn’t stall any more.

‘Most Excellent Senhor Mello,’ my father began, with conventional respect, the kind banks give customers on the monthly statement. Then his full name was typed out on a separate line, centred and underlined.

‘You may remember me from our days in Portugal, of which I hold such saudade …’ my father wrote.

I knew this word ‘saudade’: the consuming sense of loss, the sweetness of nostalgia and raw longing all bundled up in two syllables.

I left for London in 1953, as you know. I made my career and my life here, as best I could. Now I am an old man, and considering a return to my own country, to be myself again, to have a Portuguese house. Everything has changed, of course. I have changed. The country has changed. Everything is free and democratic now. I would be very grateful for your opinion on my plan to return - if there might be any difficulties of any kind, if it would be wise or even possible.

I held the letter up as though I could find some marks or secret ink, some special code in the way the words were organized on the page. But there was nothing exceptional. The letter meant what it seemed to mean: that my father had asked permission to come back.

He had signed the letter in his fullest, most formal way, with all the initials embroidered. There was a reference at the top as though the office typist had pecked it out, letter by letter, puzzling over the odd accents.

I opened the second letter.

Mello had written:

All Portuguese citizens are welcome to return to the country of their birth. Much time has passed since we last saw each other and the times have changed, as you say. If you have any problems at all when you return, you must contact me. I am a policeman, above all.

And Mello, when asked, had given his permission.

In a white room where a man is being tortured, who is the man who is not the torturer, not the policeman, and not the victim? My mind rambled about all that night. It seemed my father didn’t run from officialdom, as I had imagined, but then he never said that he had. Perhaps he did some accidental, or deliberate service to the state of the dictator. It was something people were likely to remember after so many years and my father, who had always seemed so assured and brave, needed to ask if he would be entirely safe if he returned. Or perhaps he was worried about the old-time attitudes that were still only a scrape beneath the surface of a democratic state.

Who is the man in the white room who is not the victim and not the torturer?

I remembered: how there had been no true mourners at his funeral, how the two houses with marble, one for life, one for death, seemed such a deliberate defiance of everyone around, how I had been moderately welcome - because I was a grieving son, because I was a returning emigrante, because it was customary - but my father was not honoured.

Anna went to bed. She didn’t bother to comfort or question me. She knew we were past all that.

I stood at the windows. The air was cold now, but still smelt faintly of heat and ashes. Up the hill, I could make out the shapes of the houses, a few fruit trees in between them, and sometimes the shape of an agapanthus blossom against the shine from the slate. People slept; you couldn’t risk nightmares and sleeplessness with a day’s work ahead. I wondered if I would ever know such powerful tiredness.

It must be like that in all small places, separated for so long from any other places, where thirty years ago you carried a pregnant woman miles on a shutter before there was a road that an ambulance could tackle. There was only one place to live, so people forgot what they needed to forget in order to protect their lives.

When my father came back to Portugal, built his big, assertive house right by the road and his flashy marble tomb for a new dynasty, he thumbed his nose at memory and its rules. He was protected, guarded and official. He didn’t have to care what neighbours knew; anything they did would disrupt their own lives more than his.

But memory, one night, broke out of its cage of manners and went to the graveyard and used a spray can to erase the shape and the boast of my father’s tomb. It was one thing to tolerate the living man, and quite another to tolerate his claim to be one of them, only better.

The marks could not hurt the dead. They were an affront to the living: perhaps, it crossed my mind, to Mello himself, who had such a taste for order, and such concern at the toxicodependants and the girls in short skirts.

In bed later, the same questions went past again and again, like a paper parade on a zoetrope. Once, I sat up cold, thinking that I was, as a matter of fact, a long way from home, mortgaged, with a marriage kept together by frantically doing other things. Once, I started walking around the house looking for comfort.

The village outside slept on relentlessly.

At four, I was wide awake. The perfume of coffee in the dark made me think about days of expeditions, rising early to get to fish in the canal, or to catch the train on holiday to some salty resort. At five, I had reread the letters a dozen times and found no explanation I wanted to hear.

At six there was pink behind the grey skin of the sky. Birds sang. Hunting dogs, hungry and pepper-fed, howled at some imaginary sound. Detail, a dead tree here, a high tree there, appeared in the black blur of the woods. A man was coughing.

Anna came to the door and complained softly.

I brought Anna coffee in bed and some peaches cut up in a bowl.

‘What do you want to do today?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

We still had a joint talent for setting things aside.

‘We could take a picnic up into the mountains.’

‘It’s too hot.’

‘There’s a breeze up there. I promise.’

We wrangled amiably. Finally, I said: ‘It’s hot everywhere.’

‘I’d like to see something, now I’m here.’

‘You mean art and churches?’

‘Yes, I do. Art and churches.’ She threw the pillow at me. ‘That’s how I make my living, art and churches.’

‘We could always go to Tomar,’ I said.

‘Yes, please,’ she said. ‘I want to share this place with you. I really do.’

I knew Tomar would engage Anna: a footnote in art history, a castle and a convent, Renaissance, Manueline with a sidelong reference in a book by Umberto Eco, paintings by Gregorio Lopes whose name she’d think she ought to know, somewhere she’d like and find interesting.

That was not why I wanted to go.

I remembered the nights my father turned Tomar into stories, rainy nights when I kicked about under the sheets while my father talked about treasure and secrets and holy knights and codes for the whole universe cut into stone.

Sometimes, all this was quite literal, a history lesson: how the Knights Templar, bound to God, built the castle at Tomar to battle the Infidel Moors - my father liked big phrases for the villains; he understood boys very well -how the Templars rode their horses to Mass and broke away to make the castle stones run with Muslim blood. We all took sides in those days.

My father sang the Templars’ poverty, their dedication to God and to war, and then his voice would go soft because he wanted me to go to sleep. But I listened relentlessly. I made the Templars into a boy’s club with huge broadswords, and mystery to set the hairs up on a boy’s neck. I told Anna all this on a road that stretched ahead like black glass.

‘You never talk about your father now,’ she said.

‘I can’t talk about everything,’ I said.

I remembered watching the Templars pass in my dreams, men as huge and grim as old stones, and their faces as worn. On nights when I had more courage, I burst with them out of their plain, strong castle on a tide of faith, which was strong enough to carry me even though I did not believe in their particular God or any other; and armed with something even more powerful, for which the closest word is ‘anger’, an old worm in the mind. I was terrified to be with them, and terrified to find it was somehow inevitable I should be there. It was what it meant to be a man.

I couldn’t tell Anna.

‘I used to imagine the castle,’ I said. ‘It had halls and corridors. Lots of staircases going round and round.’

‘Like a swashbuckler,’ said Anna. ‘Like Errol Flynn.’

‘Castles always looked right in the movies,’ I said. ‘Great towers. And there had to be torches flickering away.’ I couldn’t say that I thought of the torches as the memory of the place.

‘You press a stone on a grave and a secret corridor opens?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, the grave is the library. You have to read it for clues. Then you go after some great mystery. I never could imagine what the mystery could be, what lay in the next room. I was always on the other side of the door from it.’

‘Was it metaphysical? Or was it gold?’

‘There had to be a treasure house,’ I said. ‘The Templars kept everyone’s riches in wartime, like bankers.’

‘I know that,’ she said.

But she didn’t know that the old stone knights stood on perpetual guard in my mind, immortals even after their individual faces had worn quite away. Sometimes I seemed to be among them when the stones breathed for a moment and the chain mail shifted. I used to be glad to feel my father’s weight still on the side of the bed.

‘Straight on,’ Anna said, holding the map.

We came over a hill between a barracks and a supermarket and we saw Tomar. The town was washed white, and the castle, from below, was a line of strong gold riverine stone, with a huddled tower and a range of battlements as wide as the sky.

It wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t a story, only a fact on the skyline, something that could be cased and labelled like Museum stuff. The tall red geraniums were pretty on the white streets, I thought. The church was fine.

Anna said, ‘What is it? What’s bothering you?’