Farinha had no wife. He was, thought João, a better man for that. Presumably he had a mother or some semblance of a family in Luanda, but that was a million miles away. He was unencumbered by any of these thoughts, the tender, lustful, or sinister.
“You probably don’t realize how many of your countrymen we hold captive in Conakry. The Portuguese send spies, commandos, sometimes warplanes to see if they can free them. It hasn’t worked yet. But we have their attention down there. Here, we don’t need attention. For all I know, you are presumed dead. We have heard nothing from your army or your governor about you. And we have channels, through Dakar and Senghor.”
He fell quiet, seemingly tired out by the conversation. His eyes drifted to a few papers scattered on the desk.
“Get out,” Farinha said quietly, waving a hand as if he was shooing a fly. “Don’t you have something more important to attend to?”
João shuffled out, with nothing to show for his efforts but mortification. The medic, Augusto, was no more sympathetic. Unlike João, he was a real soldier. He wanted João to be free, but free on Portuguese terms. It was his duty to escape, he told João. Augusto was not well enough, not yet. But João was being used to aid the enemy. If he did not have the fortitude to withhold his services, he could at least try to get out of there. João listened as Augusto chastised him, thinking it was all nonsense. He promised he would try if the chance presented itself.
“Make it present itself,” Augusto growled.
The explosions knocked João from his bed, concussive, pounding blasts that felt like they were shaking his brain. There were orders being barked, screams of fear and of pain, the twisting of metal. A fighter’s body stood upright and bleeding, impaled on a crossbeam that had torn from the Quonset hut’s frame. His head was half blown off. João lay on the ground, covering himself as best he could but looking at the body. He was fascinated by it, by the head wound, which looked like a cross section from medical school, only wrought with a meat-ax. He wondered if he would be better off outside.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
He heard the shout through the smoke. Portuguese, not Kriolu. Augusto was cursing him again.
“Get the fuck out of here, Gonçalves. This is your chance. Go.”
It took a moment for João to understand the medic was serious. It was chaos in the predawn gloom. The guerrillas who had not found shelter were dead or wounded. The planes had dropped their bombs in one run but were returning to strafe.
“I’ll die if I go out there,” João shouted back.
“What makes you think you won’t die in here?”
A long moment passed. The whiz of bullets, clatter of AK-47s, pop pop of handguns, screams of pain, shouts of orders and anger, all of it resolved into a background roar. The dashing Colonel Almeida Brito and his Esquadrão 121 had attacked the base with merciless efficiency, a last gasp from Bissau like an aerial Battle of the Bulge—inflict as much damage as possible before inevitable defeat. João imagined himself elsewhere, in the bed of his boyhood, at his clinic in the Algarve, cradled in Elizabeth’s thighs.
“Go!” Augusto bellowed.
So João ran. He ran out of guilt and shame, disappointment and loneliness, a sense of responsibility, a fear of abandonment. He didn’t even know if she’d be there. She could have abandoned him months ago, rejoined her parents in England. In his four-odd months of captivity, that’s what he had figured, that this marriage of his had long since dissolved.
The grounds of the base were glowing from fires that burned dully. There was not much to ignite but some grass and a few primitive wooden structures. The Quonset huts erected by the Cubans looked like an industrialist’s rendition of Guernica, a mass of twisted metal. João had plenty of light to escape, but he was fairly certain he could remain unseen in the chaos.
After only a few hundred yards, he was clear of the base. There were no gates, no perimeter fences. He probably could have managed this escape months ago. Once clear of the battlefield noise, he stopped and sat beneath a banyan tree to catch his breath. He had no idea where he was or where to go. Guiné was only a few miles to the south, he was sure. But his white skin would be more of a liability in the Portuguese war zone than it would in Senegal. He might be taken for a Frenchman here, maybe even a tourist who had wandered a little far afield from the beaches at Cap Skirring. He would at least not be a threat. He had penicillin and aspirin in his pockets, as always. He could trade it for food perhaps, find his way to the capital of the Casamance, Ziguinchor, and from there, get word to Bissau.
He was far too close to the ruined base for comfort, so he started walking away from it, hoping for the best. Within minutes, he stumbled into a group of market women who eyed him warily but said nothing. He fell into line behind them, on a road better than any he had seen in Guiné beyond the capital. On their heads, they balanced tubs of vegetables bound for a market that had to be large. Kolda, João reasoned.
As it turned out, the market at Kolda was close, maybe another kilometer. It was open and bustling. Portuguese aircraft had bombed the countryside just hours before, but the Senegalese appeared to pay no mind. That might as well have been happening in a different country, on a different continent. João ducked into a bakery to trade some medicine for bread. It was a small, one-roomed cement building with a colorful, hand-painted sign outside showing a brightly festooned woman holding a bouquet of baguettes. They looked like an arrangement of phalluses splayed out before her smiling face. João’s French was good. Most of Lisbon’s educated spoke French. He figured he could hold his own inside the store. Only his now-faded and beaten fatigues made him nervous.
But before he began to barter, something caught his eye. A man was speaking rapid-fire Fulani, buying dozens of loaves of bread. João stared in disbelief. Even from behind, he recognized him, something about the way he seemed to be laughing as he talked, his shoulders pulsing up and down joyfully. He was shelling out money with great disregard. It was obviously not his.
“Luis?” João asked tentatively.
The man spun around, then broke into a blinding smile. João had a full, bushy beard now. He had tried to keep his hair combed, but it hung down to his shoulders. Luis recognized him immediately. He took the few steps that separated them in the tiny shop and threw his arms around him. The bread man of Contuboel—there must be a God.
Chapter Twelve
It was past one a.m., and the windshield wipers swatted feebly at the mist that was enveloping me in panic. I was in the dreary southern outskirts of London, driving Hans’s oversized blue “ambulance” van. The road signs loomed up in the fog like pop-up targets on a shooting range. Hans’s wheelchair was locked in over my left shoulder. They didn’t design this thing to have him ride shotgun. I could sense his anxiety growing, even if I couldn’t see him.
“I’ve got this, Hans. Really, go to sleep.”
“I can’t sleep in my bed. How do you think I’m going to sleep with your driving?”
His words sounded slurred and breathy, like a whisper. They matched the soft rain that enshrouded the streetlights. It was spitting, as the British said. Like Eskimos with all their words for snow, the British had lots of words for rain: spitting, pissing, soft. Odd, I thought of his tone; Hans had been breathy before, but he usually grumbled with gusto. Still, I couldn’t argue with the sentiment.
March was proving to be no better than February, when the damp of England seeps through the lousy insulation and soaks you to the bone. Only in May can you finally warm up. For Hans, though, winter was lifting; March was within smelling distance of summer and Tuscany—what he lived for.
James and Wills had scored two tickets to La Traviata at the Royal Opera House. James took ill, and Wills decided to give the tickets to Hans. Without a third, the poor man had no choice but to spend the evening with me solo, throw those pearls before the swine. I liked to think of myself as a sophisticate—literature, symphony, art, films—but opera was beyond me. I found it dreadfully b
oring.
Elizabeth, nervous about the excursion, had seen to it that we had given ourselves plenty of time. I began hoisting Hans out of his bed at four o’clock, rolling him onto one shoulder, pushing the canvas under his body, rolling over the other shoulder, harnessing him in, hooking up the winch, and lifting him from the bed.
“Watch out, David, watch the catheter,” he shouted as I lunged to stop the winch. I had forgotten to unhook the urine bag, a potentially lethal mistake, or at least a messy one. Even with no nerves, he could sense the tug on his cock. Don’t ask me how.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I said, flustered at making such a basic mistake after so long.
“David, really, are you up to this?” Elizabeth asked. She had been leaning against the doorway, watching the process. Now she was standing bolt upright.
“Yes, yes, I’m sorry. I’m, I’m looking forward to it.”
“You’re a really bad liar.”
In truth, my mind wasn’t on my work. I was worried about my parents and their increasingly insistent letters begging me home, feeling conflicting obligations toward them, Maggie, and the Bromwells. It was spring now. I had made it through the Brighton winter, which was an accomplishment. Maybe it was time to go.
I bundled Hans into his coyote-fur straitjacket, carefully tucked the coyote throw on his lap, gave his thinning, dull hair another comb-over, and began wheeling him backward from the room, through the front door and onto the stoop. Elizabeth offered a steadying hand but not much strength as I tilted her brother back down the ramp that covered half the front steps. It was one of the more unfortunate design flaws of the house, but houses were not built for quadriplegics in the nineteenth century. It brought the two of them into closer contact than I had seen for some time. They didn’t exchange a word.
We were on our way far too early, just past four thirty, going against the traffic, north into London. Even driving at the dawdling speed Hans demanded, I made it to the opera house in less than two hours. A colony of homeless men, women, and children greeted us at the car park. Thatcherism was at its most dangerous stage of breaking the welfare state, tough love with no economic growth to absorb the casualties. The Iron Lady was staying the course, regardless. Her voters were perfectly happy with the state of affairs, their taxes dropping, dirt-cheap shares of formerly state-run enterprises like British Airways falling into their laps. Amid the human detritus of the age, Hans seemed only mildly more pathetic than the rest of humanity.
I drove past their vacant stares. No one stuck out a cup or asked for money in any way. As I unlatched the wheelchair, lowered the ramp, and backed Hans down, no one jeered at his furs. They just watched me wheel the corpse to the elevators, perfectly civil.
“C’mon Hans, I’ll buy you a beer,” I said as the doors opened on the broad, brightly lit foyer of the opera house. “Are you hungry?”
“Not for anything here.” Hans sniffed.
There weren’t many people milling around this early, but there was beer to be had. I ordered Hans a half pint of bitter. I took the full deal. This was a mistake. If I was to help Hans sip his beer, I had to put mine down. With no place to sit and no tables in the hall, that meant putting a full pint on the closely cropped carpet.
“American,” I imagined all the Londoners thinking to themselves as I picked my beer off the floor for a sip.
I made small talk with Hans for what seemed like an eternity. “How long have you been going to the opera?” “Tell me something about La Traviata.” “Not a bad drive in.” “Do you like Verdi? I’ve always liked The Four Seasons.”
“That’s Vivaldi,” he said wearily. “David, are we on a date? Why all these questions? You’re exhausting me.”
“Sorry,” I mumbled, as an elegantly dressed woman entered the picture.
I assumed Hans knew her. He looked up and smiled, seemingly in recognition as she gave him an effusive “Well heellllooo.”
“Hello to you,” Hans said cheerfully. He sounded like someone wracking his brain for the name of someone he clearly once knew but couldn’t place.
She wore a long, sequined black dress, accordion pleats swishing at her ankles, with a little patent-leather bag whose gold chain draped across her shoulder. Her face was pleasant enough, if wrinkled and fiftyish.
“Going to the opera?” she asked-stated.
“Obviously,” Hans said.
This is where I expected Hans to ask, “Oh, where is so-and-so?” or, “Your husband couldn’t make it?”—some hint of recognizing her personal status. Instead, he stared up at her blankly.
“So what happened to you?” she blurted out, running her eyes over his body and then shooting him an expectant, quizzical gaze, as if she was saying, “Now this ought to be good.”
I snapped out of my disinterested observation. This woman, I realized, was a total stranger.
“Broke my neck, my dear, snapped it right at the base of my skull. How do you like that?”
“Really,” she replied enthusiastically. “How did it happen, darling?”
Hans glanced at me beseechingly. I had never seen such a look of need from him, not levitating dangerously in his winch, not even when the hippie was hell-bent on stripping him of his coyote skins.
“Hans, I think I see Wills over there, at the end of the foyer,” I said, quickly swinging him around and sending my beer spilling onto the woman’s strappy feet.
She danced away from the cold fizz, cursing the Yank as Hans was saying, “Ah yes, I think I see him as well.” We made our getaway cleanly, leaving our guest angrily shaking a foot as she made her way back to the bar for a handful of cocktail napkins.
“My God, that was ghastly,” Hans said with relief.
He looked up at me. He didn’t quite have the dexterity to swivel his head around enough to meet my eyes, but he tried. I was touched.
“I don’t see how you put up with stuff like that, Hans.”
“David, I put up with a lot worse than that. In the house, two pretty young things wipe my arse every morning and insert a tube into my pecker. And I know their names. That’s humiliation.”
I smiled.
“Tell me about Cristina.”
“Why? Are we on a date?”
He smiled.
“No, David. How is she? She’s becoming a woman. I’m not blind. What kind of woman will she be?”
“An exceedingly attractive one, I should think.” I thought that would do the trick, but Hans looked at me expectantly.
“I don’t know, Hans. She’s very self-assured. She has a thousand times the confidence I had when I was her age. I can’t imagine anything really holding her back if she puts her mind to something.”
Then I paused. “Except maybe Elizabeth, you know?”
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t think Cristina would abandon her mother. They’re such a team.”
Hans sat silently for a time.
“That’s good, I hope. Maybe it’s not. David, the furniture won’t hold out forever. Nor will I. I want you to help Cristina, use some of that American ambition you’ve got. I know it’s still there, under that layer of English dust. I want you to help put her mind to something.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. I’m sure you do, though. With her studies, with her—how would you say it—with her direction. Take an interest in her, and not the interest I know you’ve taken. A different interest. Will you do that?”
“Yes, Hans. I’ll do that.”
He looked at me skeptically. And it was true that the thought of taking Cristina seriously scared me as much as asking her on a date would. I feared her rejection.
“I don’t ask for much, David,” he said with a sly, tired smile.
There were no wheelchair slots in the opera house, no ramps down the gently graded stairs or any other manner of assistance. I propped Hans up on the back wheels and made the trip as gentle as I could to our row, five back from the orchestra pit. I unhooked his urine bag, tucked it und
er the coyote throw on his lap, and then lifted Hans up, imploring an usher to lend a hand moving the rubber penis mat to his seat six in from the aisle. Hans sunk down uncomfortably in the folding chair. I tugged him unartfully into the best sitting position I could manage and settled in for a very long evening. I could smell the piss.
Midway through the second act I stopped fighting it and allowed my eyes to drift shut. I have no idea how long I slept. When I reopened my eyes, Hans’s body had keeled dangerously over. He slumped down in his chair, his upper body leaning into me, his head lolling sickly to the right as the music soared on stage. Adrenaline rushed through me in a panic as I lunged to push him back up. I had failed him, shamed him, amplified his helplessness in an auditorium full of people he would want to impress.
His eyes met mine. There was no anger there at all, only rapture. Violetta—desolate, inconsolable, in love—was trying to renounce Alfredo. “Amami, Alfredo.” It meant nothing to me—and everything to Hans.
As I felt my way south toward Brighton, I had the sensation of blindness. The street signs and roundabouts seemed to crash upon me through the misty rain. I was incapable of anticipating the next obstacle. In between those moments of panic, the image of Hans’s inert body lolling in its seat kept flashing before me. I felt sympathy, but mainly I felt incompetent. There wasn’t much required of me in this job, but I sucked at it anyway.
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