“No thanks, no more beer. The woman I was in love with, you’ll never guess … it was Irene.”
Just saying her name was painful.
“Irene?”
Antonio looked genuinely amazed. I had guessed right, Irene hadn’t said a thing.
“Yes … Oh, it wasn’t very serious. Anyway, there’s nothing between us now.”
“I don’t understand …”
“We had dinner together, quite often, we even went away together, but she was always distant. Seriously distant in fact.”
I laughed. A bright, cheerful laugh, truly.
“I don’t think she knew what she wanted. And I must have been really, really heavy. An analyst would have said I was developing a fixation. I should probably have gone out and got myself a goldfish or a cat.”
I burst out laughing stupidly, and thought to myself that Irene most likely cared more for her cat than for me. What was his name again? More of a dog’s name, I think. Pluto, Plato?
“Is she the reason you left Paris?”
“No. This trip was planned a long time ago … Three or four months.”
Antonio looked concerned, far more than I would have suspected. I panicked slightly. My confession was meant to protect me, and I suddenly realized that my desire for Irene might rekindle his own feelings for her. Worse, it could fan the flames of those feelings, give them a whole new meaning.
“And do you still think about her?”
There was a pressing, almost anxious note in his voice. I needed to reassure him, take a step back, stop being a threat.
“No. Sometimes, a bit. But it doesn’t hurt, I’m just amazed to have misread things so badly. And anyway, there’s Lena …”
I looked at my watch, a quasi-instinctive gesture, discreet but almost impatient, to make Antonio assume I was supposed to be meeting Lena. I said a bit more about this woman, the amber of her eyes, such a rare color, the smell of her. I think I was plausible.
Antonio let me talk, and when I ran out of empty sentences, a sad-looking smile flitted across his face.
“You and Irene … I didn’t know, I would never have imagined …”
He gave a small private laugh, little more than a breath, and it hurt me.
Why would you never have imagined, Antonio? Was there something absurd, ridiculous about her and me? Yes, of course, you’re right. What with her being so young next to my forty years, my thinning hair, my deepening wrinkles, my body which wants to pass itself off as smooth and firm but isn’t very convincing anymore. What was it Irene once said? Oh yes, it was a young man’s body that hadn’t aged well. It was a cruel turn of phrase, and a pointless one too, because surely she knew no one ever ages well.
“Do you know why I’m laughing?” he asked. “I wanted to ask you to help me. To help me write to her.”
“Write to her? About what?”
“I don’t know, to say I love her, or I don’t love her yet … to tell her … about how confused my feelings are. I write so badly, I’m so awkward. I don’t want to hurt her. You’d have been better at finding the words than me. I honestly thought you didn’t know her. Well, not like that. I read a short story you once wrote for the paper. For you it would have been …”
I put down my glass, afraid Antonio would notice my hand shaking. And I finished his sentence: “… just an exercise in style … a little Cyrano de Bergerac moment. Minus the nose, I might say.”
“Yes, if you like … Let’s drop the subject.”
I had the seeds of an idea which made me smile. A bitter smile, but in the darkness Antonio could have read it as friendly.
“No, it’s okay, Antonio, I understand. It doesn’t bother me, not at all …” My eyes didn’t betray a thing, I’m sure they didn’t betray a thing. “Let’s write this letter.”
I laughed and asked for another Sagres. Antonio would be reassured seeing me pouring it carefully into the glass, eyeing the froth in eager anticipation, then bringing it to my lips. I performed this little beer-lover routine, nicely underplaying it. A man so focused on slaking his thirst is not one who’s suffering. And in spite of myself, I appreciated that beer, it was nice and cool, with a tangible, noticeable bitterness. I felt freer, more alive.
“Does Irene know I’m in Lisbon?” I asked. “That I’m working with you?”
“I’ve no idea. I don’t think so.”
“You need to tell her. She’ll find out sooner or later. And then …” I tried to find the words as I stroked the rough stone of the balcony.
“Also, tell her you know about her and me. That I mentioned it. You see, let’s be honest, we parted in difficult circumstances. I was quite … nasty—a bit of an asshole to be frank. That’s ancient history, but I don’t want her thinking I would try to keep you two apart, out of jealousy or revenge. Do you see what I mean?”
“Yes … of course.”
I drank some more beer, tried to think of other lines of argument.
“She cares about you, that’s obvious. And when you care about someone, you worry about everything …”
Antonio nodded in silence. I moved my last pawn into position: “No more hesitating … I think we should even admit to her about Lena and me.”
I was very pleased with myself for finding that “we,” making us accomplices. I mustn’t abuse that complicity, whatever happened. Men struggle with the notion of “we,” or rather when they have a “we” it often ends badly, in dubious conniving. I finished my beer and put the glass down resolutely: “I’m sure she’ll find it reassuring knowing I’m in love with someone else …”
I looked at my watch again, automatically. It was one o’clock in the morning. I got ready to leave even though it was far from plausible to be meeting anyone so late.
Antonio smiled. “Is this Lena of yours a night owl?”
“She sometimes paints right through the night, using artificial light. If the light’s on in her window, I’ll know.”
He opened the fridge and took out another bottle.
“I’m going to stay here for a bit, Vincent, it’ll give me a chance to think … so, how about tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow? What tomorrow?”
“The letter … can we write it tomorrow?”
He took the top off the bottle, some froth spilled over his fingers, obscenely.
“Yes, that’s right,” I replied, “we’ll write it tomorrow.”
I LEFT THE HOTEL and tried to find a taxi. At exactly the same time, Antonio was calling Irene, she was talking to him tenderly. I walked a few paces, if that, my head spinning. I leaned against the wall and slid down onto my heels, my legs buckling beneath me. I stayed there for many minutes before going home to my studio. I put an album on the deck, Sting’s The Dream of the Blue Turtles, which I had bought the day I broke up with Irene, and I lay down on the bed to listen to “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free” on a loop.
It was that night I made my decision. I would put up one last fight, with all the fire and skill typical of serial losers, of people who have gone from one defeat to the next so often that winning no longer means anything to them. The hopeless philosophy of the old, the ugly, and the poor.
I was going to search for Duck, and was going to find her. At some point predetermined by me, Antonio would meet her and I would find a way of rebuilding their lost happiness, I would rewrite fate, I would be their fate. I wanted Irene to come, to be there, in Lisbon so that she could see her ruin; and the city that had brought Tonio and Duck together would be my most faithful ally.
That would be my complete revenge, that wound to her pride, the pain she would feel. I knew I no longer wanted Irene, I would be able to reject her, to say with a smile but without hatred that she meant nothing to me now, and never would again.
But almost immediately, despite my own plans, I also hoped that in that confusion of passions, that muddle of emotions, she would finally conceive some feeling for me. Something unclear at first, but that might one day be like love.
What did Montestrela say about love? “When you’re making it, don’t think about the fact that at that very moment, someone, somewhere, is dying.”
DAY THREE
AURORA
When I returned to the hotel Antonio was still asleep. His jacket was lying on one of the armchairs. I stood there in the silence for a moment. I pulled his wallet from the pocket and took out the photo of Duck. Just a loan, for no more than a few hours, time enough to make a copy.
There was another picture, this one in black and white. Antonio was in it, looking very young, in a group of other young men. It was almost like a class photo. I didn’t want to spend too long studying it. I took it as well. For no reason.
Then I went to bed and fell straight into a deep sleep. Antonio told me later that I snored, and I grimaced my apology. I hate those periods of complete abandon, a languor in which I can picture my flaccid, noisy hideousness, my face on the pillow like a dead jellyfish, my mouth half open, my breath fetid, times when—yet again—I wish I were someone else.
THAT MORNING THE press announced that the Pinheiro trial would begin any day, and I bought every newspaper. Leader writers had reopened their files, reused the photographs of bloodied corpses, recapped the circumstances of each murder. Soon the victims’ families would be put through it all again.
When Pinheiro was arrested, I had written two or three columns about the man they were calling the Mad Killer of Lisbon. They had chosen a photograph of him as a young man with a laughing face and a sailor’s uniform, accompanied by an enticing caption.
When he turned fifty, he changed into a small, thin man with brown hair, a smooth face, and sad, nearly gray eyes. A man with no history, virtually invisible. At the time of his arrest, he had been working as an administrator in the port’s customs offices for more than ten years. An honest, scrupulous employee, well viewed by his superiors, liked by his co-workers, a bachelor not known to have any relationships, no enemies, nor friends in fact. If he ate out in the evening, it was always alone, and when he had lunch in the customs canteen, he took a book from his leather case and never joined in conversations.
Antonio had called the hospital where Pinheiro was incarcerated, and had had little trouble securing an interview with the psychiatric expert. We were to meet him in three days.
IT WAS STILL early when we went down to the port and along to berth 24, drawn by a sound of tortured steel. In berth 13, I noted in my notebook, an old cargo boat with a Russian flag was baring its prow with a fresh three-foot scar in it. A workman balancing on a hanging footbridge was cutting away the dented sheet metal with a circular saw. Sprays of red sparks swirled around him, accompanied by a strong smell of burning and an almost unbearably strident noise. Under his heavy welding mask and thick leather overalls, the man handled the machine powerfully and with such ease that he seemed extraordinarily strong.
Antonio started taking pictures at machine gun speed with his Leica, then thrust the camera at me rather violently.
The telephoto lens shielded the view from the sky’s brilliance, making the scene both more immediate and more terrifying. Against a background of rust and sickening metal, the workman had pride of place among waterfalls of fire, the blacksmith god of lava and volcanoes. I released the shutter, heard its crisp click and the soft whirr of the motor.
I turned slowly and Antonio appeared in the black rectangle. Small red numerals lined up in the viewfinder, right in the middle of his chest. He was standing in profile, his features distorted by the bluish shade of the filthy cargo boat that filled the picture beside him. Coils of rope lay behind him, like sleeping black pythons. Farther away, a giant crane stood out in the sunlight, truncated sharply by the corner of the shot. I took the picture, not sure whether the light levels were good enough.
Antonio came over to me slowly, pointing toward me. His cheek was colored by the electric glow of the sparks, and the wail of the saw drowned out everything. There was something strange or even aggressive about the gesture he was making, and I saw it as a threat, a trap. What did Antonio want from me that I was so afraid of losing, that I hadn’t already lost? I took a step back, penetrated by the chill that precedes a ghostly apparition, panicked by my incomprehensible terror.
Time stretched out and slowed down as it had in childhood nightmares where I was pursued by monsters, where my hopeless stumbling flight got me nowhere, where the vampires and dinosaurs always inevitably caught up with me. Antonio was coming closer, he was smiling, an enemy’s smile. All at once his giant hand hid his face from me. Then his palm covered the lens and everything went red and black.
I staggered. Antonio looked at me, concerned.
“Are you all right, Vincent? You look pale …”
“I need to sit down a minute, I must be overtired. I—I’m not sleeping much at the moment.”
Antonio laughed, winked, gave me a little pat on the shoulder. The friendly physical contact made me shudder.
“I’m feeling better. Let’s go back.”
“No, no, let’s wait for a bit. There, look, how about going over there?”
He was pointing to a large barge with sky-blue sides, a cable’s length from the quay but connected to it by a long narrow footbridge. A bistro terrace had been set up on its deck, with wobbling garden tables, Fanta parasols in faded colors, and, stranded in the middle, a sort of prefabricated yellow workman’s hut. On the quay, an oval sign with rounded blue letters announced STROMBOLI’S, ITALIAN SPECIALTIES.
We were just boarding the barge when a good-natured, bald imp in a white apron sprang from the hut.
“We’re closed, the restaurant’s closed!” The little man ran over to us and stood puffing at the end of the footbridge. “It’s José, he didn’t take the sign down, so you obviously have no way of knowing, but we’re closed—I can’t let you—”
“Be kind,” said Antonio, “my friend’s feeling faint.”
“Faint? Oh …” The fellow moved aside, as if I were contagious. “Well, you are white as a sheet. You must be having an attack of hippopotitis … Don’t move a muscle, okay? I’ll be back …”
While Antonio stifled his explosive laughter, the man pushed a white plastic chair toward me, dusting it carefully: “Sit yourself there, sir … There you are … I’ll bring you something to drink. A glass of water, or no, better than that, a Coke, it’s stuffed full of sugar, it’ll clear your head and do you good.”
Before I had a chance to refuse he was running for his hideout. The blood pounding in my temples was already calmer. I heard the sound of a car door and looked over to the quay.
A woman was sitting at the wheel of a little red Fiat, beside a large container. She took one last energetic drag on her cigarette and threw the stub out the window. The sun must have been in her eyes, she looked away, turned the key in the ignition, and drove off. I had seen her face for only a second. From that distance she looked like Duck. If that’s who it was, she hadn’t seen Antonio, and because he was sitting facing the sun, he couldn’t have seen her. I stood up, the car was already driving away. Antonio also turned, too late. The Fiat had disappeared behind a warehouse.
“What is it, Vincent? You’re still very pale.”
“I—I thought I recognized someone …”
“Your Lena Palmer? You see her everywhere … not a good sign. You’ve got it bad.”
I shook my head.
“No, it’s nothing. I must have been wrong …”
Our enthusiastic imp was back already with a bottle and a kindly smile. He uncapped it and handed it to me.
“Here, drink that,” he said and winked as he added, “it’s the real thing, you know, I make it myself.”
He stood up and found two more chairs for Antonio and himself. Then he suddenly looked worried.
“Hey, are you sure you don’t want to call a doctor?”
“No thanks, I’m feeling better already.”
“All right. Well, that’s a relief, because I do have a phone here, but it’s out of order.”
He watched me for a moment, suspiciously, while I drank the sparkling too sugary drink and he ran his hand over his sweating head.
“If you want my opinion, it’s because of the heat. You don’t really notice, but it’s very hot already, isn’t it?”
Antonio nodded in silence. “Are you Italian?” he asked, pointing at the sign.
“No, I’m from Porto, like my father. But my mother, now she’s from Milezza in Sicily. That’s why I called the restaurant Stromboli’s. And I have an Italian name too. Leopoldo. Well, Leo. But I thought Stromboli’s sounded better than Leo’s. Don’t you think?”
There was a warm westerly breeze heavy with salt blowing off the sea.
“There’s always a bit of wind in this part of the port. It even carried off one of my parasols once.”
I don’t know whether I owed it to Leopoldo’s remedy, but I was feeling better. I took a step toward the footbridge, reached for my wallet.
“You must be joking!” the little man said indignantly, shaking our hands. “But you have to come and eat here, you will, won’t you? I’ll make penne all’arrabiata for you. It’s the house specialty, lots of chili, lots of garlic, lots of olive oil. And two or three pieces of penne, well, you have to. So, do you promise?”
We promised and left the barge. I would have liked to follow the route taken by the Fiat, perhaps it wasn’t that far away, but Antonio insisted on heading toward the streets he had known as a child.
We climbed up a narrow street toward Bairro Alto.
“You see there, Vincent, where there’s an electrical store, there used to be a hardware store, maybe it’s the old owner’s son who’s now selling Walkmans. He always used to hang things outside, dish racks and plastic bowls in sky blue, bright yellow, every color. When he opened in the morning he hung bunches of them from the awning, like Chinese lanterns. The candy was kept inside in glass jars, with lids to stop thieving fingers. He had hard candy, caramel, red and green barley sugar …”
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