by William Boyd
‘You and Brazil,’ his mother admonished. ‘It’s not as if we’ve got any Brazilians in the family.’
‘Not as if you’ve even been there,’ Pauline said, a distinct hostility in her voice. ‘Never even set foot.’
Wesley silently hummed the melody from a Joáo Gilberto samba to himself. Gilberto had taken the traditional form and distilled it through a cool jazz filter. It was Joáo who had stripped away the excess of percussion in Brazilian music and brought bossa nova to the –
‘Yeah, what is it with you and Brazil, Wes?’ Dermot asked, a thin line of beer suds on his top lip. ‘What gives?’
WHUCHINNNNNNG! WHACHANNNNGGG!! Liceu Lobo put down his guitar and before selecting the mandolin he tied his dreadlocks back behind his head in a slack bun. Gibson Piacava played a dull roll on the zabumba and Liceu Lobo began slowly to strum the musical phrase that seemed to be dominating ‘The Waves on the Shore’ at this stage in its extemporized composition. Joel Carlos Brandt automatically started to echo the mandolin phrases on his guitar and Bola da Rocha plaintively picked up the melody on his saxophone.
Behind the glass of the recording studio Albertina swayed her hips to and fro to the sinuous rhythm that was slowly building. Pure chorinho, she thought, sensuous yet melancholic, only Liceu is capable of this, of all the great choroes in Brazil, he was the greatest. At that moment he looked round and caught her eye and he smiled at her as he played. She kissed the tip of her forefinger and pressed it against the warm glass of the window that separated them. Once Liceu and his fellow musicians started a session like this it could last for days, weeks even. She would wait patiently for him, though, wait until he was finished and take him home to their wide bed.
Wesley stepped out into the back garden and flipped open his mobile phone.
‘Café Caravelle, may I help you, please?’
‘Ah. Could I speak to, ah, Margarita?’
‘MARGARITA! Telefono.’
In the chilly dusk of a back garden in Hounslow Wesley Bright listened to the gabble of foreign voices, the erratic percussion of silverware and china, and felt he was calling some distant land, far overseas. A warmth located itself in his body, a spreading coin of heat, deep in his bowels.
‘Hello?’ That slight guttural catch on the ‘h’ . . .
‘Margarita, it’s Wesley.’
‘Ghello?’
‘Wesley. It’s me – Wesley?’
‘Please?’
‘WESLEY!’ He caught himself from shouting louder, and repeated his name in a throat-tearing whisper several times, glancing round at the yellow windows of Dermot’s house. He saw someone peering at him, a silhouette.
‘Ah, Weseley,’ Margarita said. ‘Yes?’
’I’ll pick you up at ten, outside the café.’
Pauline stood at the kitchen door frowning out into the thickening dusk of the garden. Wesley advanced into the rectangle of light the open door had thrown on the grass.
‘What’re you up to, Wesley?’
Wesley slid his thin phone into his hip pocket.
‘Needed a breath of fresh air,’ he said. ‘I’m feeling a bit off, to tell the truth. Those vol-au-vents tasted dodgy to me.’
Pauline was upset, she had been expecting a meal out after the christening, but she was also concerned for him and his health. ‘I thought you looked a bit sort of pallid,’ she said when he dropped her at her flat. She made him wait while she went inside and re-emerged with two sachets of mint infusion, ‘to help settle your stomach’, she said. She took them whenever she felt bilious, she told him, and they worked wonders.
As he drove off he smelt strongly the pungent impress of her perfume, or powder or make-up, on his cheek where she had kissed him and he felt a squirm of guilt at his duplicity – if something so easily accomplished merited the description – and a small pelt of shame covered him for a minute or two as he headed east towards the Café Caravelle and the waiting Margarita.
Her hair was down. Her hair was down and he was both rapt and astonished at the change it wrought in her. And to see her out of black, too, he thought, it was almost too much. He carried their drinks through the jostling noisy pub to the back where she sat, on a high stool, elbow resting on a narrow shelf designed to take glasses. She was drinking double vodka and water, no ice and no slice, a fact he found exciting and vaguely troubling. He had smelt her drink as the barmaid had served up his rum and Coke and it had seemed redolent of heavy industry, some strange fuel or new lubricant, something one would pour into a machine rather than down one’s throat. It seemed, also, definitely not a drink of the warm south either, not at all apt for his taciturn Latin beauty, more suited to the bleak cravings of a sheet-metal worker in Smolensk. Still, it was gratifying to observe how she put it away, shudderless, in three pragmatic draughts. Then she spoke briefly, brutally, of how much she hated her job. It was a familiar theme, one Wesley recognized from his two previous social encounters with Margarita – the first a snatched coffee in a hamburger franchise before her evening shift began, and then a more leisurely autumnal Sunday lunch at a brash pub on the river at Richmond.
On that last occasion she had seemed out of sorts, cowed perhaps by the strapping conviviality of the tall noisy lads and their feisty, jolly girls. But tonight she had returned to the same tiresome plaint – the mendacious and rebarbative qualities of the Caravelle’s manager, Joáo – so Wesley had to concede it was clearly something of an obsession.
They had kissed briefly and not very satisfactorily after their Sunday pub tryst and Wesley felt this allowed him now to take her free hand (her other held her cigarette) and squeeze it. She stopped talking and, he thought, half smiled at him.
‘Weseley,’ she said, and stubbed out her cigarette. Then she grinned. ‘Tonight, I thin’ I wan’ to be drunk . . .’
There you had it, he thought. There. That was it. That moment held the gigantic difference between a Pauline and a Margarita. A mint infusion and an iceless vodka. He felt his bowels weaken with shocking desire.
He returned to the bar to fetch another drink for her and ordered the same for himself. The tepid alcohol seemed all the more powerful for the absence of chill. His nasal passages burned, he wrinkled his tear-flooded eyes. Made from potatoes, hard to believe. Or is it potato peelings? His teeth felt loose. He stood beside her. Someone had taken his stool.
Margarita sipped her drink with more decorum this time. ‘I hate that fackin’ job,’ she said.
He raised her knuckles to his lips and dabbed at them.
‘God, I’ve missed you,’ he said, then took a deep breath. ‘Margarita,’ he said softly, ‘tenho muito atração para tu.’ He hoped to God he had it right, with the correct slushing and nasal sounds. He found Portuguese farcically difficult to pronounce, no matter the hours he spent listening to his tapes.
She frowned. Too fast you fool, you bloody fool.
‘What?’ Her lips half formed a word. ‘I, I don’t –’
More slowly, more carefully: ‘Tenho muito atração– muito, muito– para tu.’
He slipped his hand round her thin back, fingers snagging momentarily on the buckle of her bra, and drew her to him. He kissed her, there in the hot pub, boldly, with noticeable teeth clash, but no recoil from Margarita.
He moved his head back, his palm still resting on her body, warm above her hip.
She touched her lips with the palp of her thumb, scrutinizing him, not hostile, he was glad to see, not even surprised. She drank some more of her grey flat drink, still looking at him over the rim of her glass.
‘Sempre para tu, Marçarita, sempre.’ Huskily, this. Sincere.
‘Weseley. What you saying? Sempre, I know. But the rest. . .’
‘I . . . I am speaking Portuguese.’
‘For why?’
‘Because, I. . . Because I want to speak your language to you. I love your language, you must understand. I love it. I hear it in my head, in your music.’
‘Well. . .’ She shrugged and rea
ched for her cigarettes. ‘Then you must not speak Portuguese at me, Weseley. I am Italian.’
Marta shucked off her brassière and had hooked down her panties with her thumbs within seconds, Liceu Lobo thought, of his entering her room in the bordello. He caught a glimpse of her plump fanny from the light cast by the bathroom cubicle. She was hot tonight, on fire, he thought, as he hauled off his T-shirt and allowed his shorts to fall to the floor. As he reached the bedside he felt her hands reaching for his engorged member. He was a pretty boy and even the oldest hooker liked a pretty boy with a precocious and impatient tool. He felt Marta’s hands all over his pepino as if she were assessing it for some strumpet’s inventory. Maldito seja! Liceu Lobo thought, violently clenching his sphincter muscles as Marta settled him between her generous and welcoming thighs, he should definitely have jerked off before coming here tonight. Marta always had that effect on him. Deus! He hurled himself into the fray.
It had not gone well. No. He had to face up to that, acknowledge it squarely. As love-making went it was indubitably B minus. B double-minus, possibly. And it was his fault. But could he put it down to the fact that he had been in bed with an Italian girl and not a Portuguese one? Or perhaps it had something to do with the half-dozen vodkas and water he had consumed as he kept pace with Margarita? . . .
But the mood had changed, subtly, when he had learned the truth, a kind of keening sadness, a thin draught of melancholy seemed to enter the boisterous pub, depressing him. An unmistakable sense of being let down by Margarita’s nationality. She was meant to be Portuguese, that was the whole point, anything else was wrong.
He turned over in his bed and stared at the faint silhouette of Margarita’s profile as she slept beside him. Did it matter? he urged himself. This was the first non-British girl he had kissed, let alone made love to, so why had he been unable to shake off that sense of distraction? It was a sullenness of spirit that had possessed him, as if he were a spoilt child who had been promised and then denied a present. It was hardly Margarita’s fault, after all, but an irrational side of him still blamed her for not being Portuguese, for unconsciously raising his hopes by not warning him from their first encounter that she didn’t fit his national bill. Somehow she had to share the responsibility.
He turned away and dozed, and half dreamed of Liceu Lobo in a white suit. On a mountain top with Leonor or Branca or Caterina or Joana. A balcony with two cane chairs. Mangoes big as rugby balls. Liceu, blond hair flying, putting down his sunglasses, offering his hand, saying, ‘My deal is my smile.’ Joana’s slim mulatto body. The sound of distant water falling.
He half sat, blinking stupidly.
‘Joana?’
The naked figure in his doorway froze.
‘Joana?’
The figure moved.
‘Vaffanculo,’ Margarita said, weariness making her voice harsh. She switched on the light and began to get dressed, still talking, but more to herself than to him. Wesley’s meagre Portuguese was no help here, but he could tell her words were unkind. He hadn’t fully awakened from his dream. How could he explain that to her? She was dressed in a moment and did not shut the door as she left.
After she had gone, Wesley pulled on his dressing-gown and walked slowly down the stairs. He sat for a while in his unlit sitting-room swigging directly from the rum bottle, resting it on his knee between mouthfuls, coughing and breathing deeply, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Eventually he rose to his feet and slid Elis Regina into his CD player. The strange and almost insupportable plangency of the woman’s voice filled the shadowy space around him. ‘Nem Uma Lagrima’.‘Not one tear,’ Wesley said to himself. Out loud. His voice sounded peculiar to him, a stranger’s. Poor tragic Elis, Elis Regina, who died in 1982, aged thirty-seven, tragically, of an unwise cocktail of drugs and alcohol. ‘Drink ‘n’ drugs’ the CD’s sleeve notes had said. Tragic. A tragic loss to Brazilian music. Fucking tragic. He would call Pauline in the morning, that’s what he would do. In the meantime he had his chorinho to console him. He would make it up with Pauline, she deserved a treat, some sort of treat, definitely, a weekend somewhere. Definitely. Not one tear, Elis Regina sang for him. He would be all right. There was always Brazil. Not one tear.
The Dream Lover
‘None of these girls is French, right?’
‘No. But they’re European.’
‘Not the same thing, man. French is crucial.’
‘Of course . . .’ I don’t know what he is talking about but it seems politic to agree.
‘You know any French girls?’
‘Of course,’ I say again. This is almost a lie, but it doesn’t matter at this stage.
‘But well?’ I mean well enough to ask out?’
‘I don’t see why not.’ Now this time we are into mendacity, but I am unconcerned. I feel good, adult, quite confident today. This lie can germinate and grow for a while.
I am standing in a pale parallelogram of March sunshine, leaning against a wall, talking to my American friend, Preston. The wall belongs to the Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen, a large stuccoed villa on the front at Nice. In front of us is a small cobbled courtyard bounded by a balustrade. Beyond is the Promenade des Anglais, its four lanes busy with Nice’s traffic. Over the burnished roofs of the cars I can see the Mediterranean. The Baie des Anges looks grey and grim in this season: old, tired water – ashy, cindery.
‘We got to do something . . .’ Preston says, a hint of petulant desperation in his voice. I like the ‘we’. Preston scratches his short hard hair noisily. ‘What with the new apartment, and all.’
‘You moved out of the hotel?’
‘Yeah. Want to come by tonight?’ He shifts his big frame as if troubled by a fugitive itch, and pats his pockets – breast, hip, thigh – looking for his cigarettes. ‘We got a bar on the roof.’
I am intrigued, but I explain that the invitation has to be turned down as it is a Monday, and every Monday night I have a dinner appointment with a French family – friends of friends of my mother.
Preston shrugs, then finds and sets fire to a cigarette. He smokes an American brand called ‘Picayune’ which is made in New Orleans. When he came to France he brought two thousand with him. He has never smoked anything else since he was fourteen, he insists.
We watch our fellow students saunter into the building. They are nearly all strangers to me, these bright boys and girls, as I have only been in Nice a few weeks, and, so far, Preston is the only friend I have made. Slightly envious of their easy conviviality, I watch the others chatter and mingle – Germans, Scandinavians, Italians, Tunisians, Nigerians . . . We are all foreigners, trying hard to learn French and win our diplomas . . . Except for Preston, who makes no effort at all and seems quite content to remain monoglot.
A young guy with long hair rides his motorbike into the courtyard. He is wearing no shirt. He is English and, apart from me, the only other English person in the place. He revs his motorbike unnecessarily a few times before parking it and switching it off. He takes a T-shirt out of a saddle-bag and nonchalantly pulls it on. I think how I too would like to own a motorbike and do exactly what he has done . . . His name is Tim. One day, I imagine, we might be friends. We’ll see.
Monsieur Cambrai welcomes me with his usual exhausting, impossible geniality. He shakes my hand fervently and shouts to his wife over his shoulder.
‘Ne bouge pas. C’est l’habitué!’
That’s what he calls me – l’habitué. L’habitué de lundi, to give the appellation in full, so called because I am invited to dinner every Monday night without fail. He almost never uses my proper name and sometimes I find this perpetual alias a little wearing, a little stressful. ‘Salut, l’habitué’, ‘Bien mangé, l’habitué? ‘Encore du vin, l’habitué? and so on. But I like him and the entire Cambrai family; in fact I like them so much that it makes me feel weak, insufficient, cowed.
Monsieur and Madame are small people, fit, sophisticated and nimble, with neat spry figures. Both of t
hem are dentists, it so happens, who teach at the big medical school here in Nice. A significant portion of my affection for them owes to the fact that they have three daughters – Delphine, Stéphanie and Annique – all older than me and all possessed of – to my fogged and blurry eyes – an incandescent, almost supernatural beauty. Stéphanie and Annique still live with their parents, Delphine has a flat somewhere in the city, but she often dines at home. These are the French girls that I claimed to know, though ‘know’ is far too inadequate a word to sum up the complexity of my feelings for them. I come to their house on Monday nights as a supplicant and votary, both frightened and in awe of them. I sit in their luminous presence, quiet and eager, for two hours or so, unmanned by my astonishing good fortune.
I am humbled further when I consider the family’s disarming, disinterested kindness. When I arrived in Nice they were the only contacts I had in the city and, on my mother’s urging, I duly wrote to them citing our tenuous connection via my mother’s friend. To my surprise I was promptly invited to dinner and then invited back every Monday night. What shamed me was that I knew I myself could never be so hospitable so quickly, not even to a close friend, and what was more I knew no one else who would be, either. So I cross the Cambrai threshold each Monday with a rich cocktail of emotions gurgling inside me: shame, guilt, gratitude, admiration and – it goes without saying – lust.
Preston’s new address is on the Promenade des Anglais itself – the ‘Résidence Les Anges’. I stand outside the building, looking up, impressed. I have passed it many times before, a distressing and vulgar edifice on this celebrated boulevard, an unadorned rectangle of coppery, smoked glass with stacked ranks of gilded aluminium balconies.
I press a buzzer in a slim, free-standing concrete post and speak into a crackling wire grille. When I mention the name ‘Mr Fairfield’ glass doors part softly and I am admitted to a bare granite lobby where a taciturn man in a tight suit shows me to the lift.