by Monica Ali
That Eduardo is like a bad case of the piles: the last thing you want to think about and the first thing on your mind. What did he mean, anyway? My own prize bull – what kind of insult is that? A prize bull is a fine animal and Eduardo has never come close to owning one. If you wish to insult a man, do it properly. That is Vasco’s opinion and he will not waste any more time on Eduardo.
Only a couple of weeks ago he was in here snorting and mumbling when Vasco was discussing certain matters with Bruno.
‘The United States,’ Vasco was saying, ‘is the policeman of the world. Like it or not, it makes no difference.’
‘This a free lecture?’ said Eduardo, taking a stool at the counter.
Vasco ignored him. ‘The United Nations cannot fart without permission from them.’
‘Emissions and permissions,’ said Eduardo. ‘Who has the licence here?’
Vasco should have said something then and there.
‘A beer,’ said Eduardo. ‘When you have a moment.’
The thing about Eduardo is that he eats his words. By the time you realize what he said, he is on to the next thing.
But Vasco should have spoken up and then one thing would not have led to another like this.
He breaks the wax off his finger. Some of it falls on the cake. It is not as though Eduardo is one for holding back on opinions. But it makes him uncomfortable when Vasco talks about certain matters of world affairs because Eduardo – and Vasco knows this for a fact – does not even possess a passport.
Vasco rolls his shoulders. The bones click. How would it ever be possible, he thinks now, for me to decide to eat this cake or not to eat it? As if this is an isolated act, unconnected to all other acts that have gone before. As if history does not play its part. As if one thing does not depend on another. As if there is no chain. As if everything is random.
His aunt Joana was fat. Vasco never knew her but Mãe used to talk about her all the time. She’d pinch his cheeks, his arms, his belly: ‘Just like Joana. The pigs went hungry when she was around.’ He was a fat baby. Mãe said, ‘God in Heaven, you near split me apart.’ He was a fat child. ‘See that? Fat on the back of his head.’ He was a fat teenager. ‘Don’t sit on that chair.’
Yes, Vasco, he’s the fat one, look at him eat. Have some more, Vasco. He can put it away. See, he’s finished it already. But he’ll have some more. Vasco, have some more. Eat. Go on, eat!
Probably Mãe did not love him enough. If your mother does not love you, you fill the hole with something. Mãe was always fussing round, pinching him and kissing him. She could never leave him alone. Probably she loved him too much. She made him needy. A needy person never has enough. There is always a hole to be filled.
This much is sure: one thing follows another. ‘I’ll do this,’ we say, ‘because I feel like it.’ We think we live like kings, but we are puppets on the throne. We send out proclamations and fancy we are making History and forget that it has made us.
If I eat the cake, thinks Vasco – he bows his head towards it – I’ll say it is because I am hungry. If I don’t eat it I’ll say it is because I am full. It will become the truth. If Dona Marisa had taken this cake along with her coffee this afternoon, I would not even be here. I would be in bed resting my legs instead of sitting at this table, putting off the climb with this silly business about cake.
He lifts the plate and resists the urge to throw it across the room. The tart would fit into the palm of his hand. The pastry is roughly fluted and of mouth-drying thickness. The sponge is perhaps darker than it should be. It has spent too long in the oven or sat too long on the shelf. But the sugar winks at him and makes shiny promises: give me your tongue and forget; give me your tongue and be free.
Vasco sets the plate down. He looks around the room at the plastic tables and chairs, their dull-white sheen and sullen stance. He twists to see the long dark counter crouched beneath the indigo halo of the insect annihilator. The pool table stands close to the door. He was so proud when he bought it. When anyone played a game he had to take two puffs on his inhaler. The baize is worn now, the victim of time and cigarettes and spilled drinks. A car goes by, heading out of the village, sluicing the walls pale yellow, the Moorish design on the tiles coming up and receding like a dream on waking, half lost, half held. He listens to the engine diminish. The sound grows fainter and fainter but it does not disappear. It is coming from his chest. It will not disappear unless he fetches his inhaler or quits altogether this breathing.
‘Well,’ says Vasco to himself, ‘what is life without the time to sit alone and contemplate?’ This, at least, is something that the Portuguese understand. He listens as the lantana taps furtively at the window.
In a moment he will get up and fetch a small glass of whisky.
To sit alone and think like this – every man should do it, but not every man will risk it.
He has made big decisions in his life. He is not incapable. There are people in this village whose biggest decision has been whether to paint the doorframe yellow or blue. But Vasco went to America. Not even twenty-one when he left. We live our lives, his grandmother said. But Vasco made his. Mãe gave him a cross to wear. She had the chain specially lengthened. In Provincetown, Cape Cod, all the Portuguese wore crosses but didn’t know if they were saved. Vasco left his in a kidney dish in Falmouth Hospital. A nurse ran after him down the corridor saying here, here, you lost something.
Damn Eduardo. Damn him. Everyone listening and Vasco didn’t say a word. He shifts his legs and the table quivers. He begins to knead his thigh. Next time that man comes in Vasco will say, ‘You are welcome here, of course, but in my opinion you would be happier at Joaquim’s. So much more to complain about there.’
He begins on the other thigh. He will not waste another thought on Eduardo. The way he tosses peanuts into his mouth is quite sickening. Ever since he got the position on the Junta he has been unbearable. He is certainly not as clever as he thinks he is. And now with Marco Afonso Rodrigues returning he believes he is a cut above. The worst thing, really, about him is that he never can speak straight. Oh, he’s a sly one, that Eduardo, and not worth his weight in swill.
Marco might be Eduardo’s cousin, but if he has any sense it will be Vasco whom Marco decides to approach. The one businessman in Mamarrosa who knows anything about business at all.
A whisky would go down nicely. He was sweating before and now he is chilled. Only his armpits are hot from the work on his thighs and if he were to walk in here now from the street he knows that he would smell them. He would like to let go of a fart but can’t ease it out. When it comes it will blow the chair off. There is a pinch in his neck and bubbles in his stomach. His body never ceases to amaze him. He is supposed to be in charge of it but this notion is absurd. In all that churning and creaking and bloating and leaking he has no say.
Yes, he went to America. Got the idea God-knows-how and did it. He must have been insane. The insane are not responsible for what they do. They can get away with anything. Everyone is mad, thinks Vasco. Most of us can hide it. In private, we are all insane. Those travel brochures in his drawer – why doesn’t he throw them away? Some are ten years old. He will never go back to America. He does not even want to.
Something is happening to his anus. It is fizzing. He squeezes his buttocks together. The fizzing stops. Vasco puts his elbows on the table and clasps his hands. What he hates most about being fat is the way his hands and feet have shrunk. No, what he hates most is the chafing inside his thighs and groin. It is a problem that no amount of talcum powder will solve. If he were in America right now he would hardly be fat at all. In America they had to take the side of a house right off to get a man out of his own home.
Twelve years he spent in Provincetown. He learned his trade. The first restaurant he walked into he got a job, peeling potatoes, humping bins, scraping crap off toilets, and stuck it until the place closed down. He walked into another job as barman, Manhattans and Long Island iced teas, and went on with it un
til he got laid off. He was in a pit-stop diner circling want ads when the owner shouted over ‘Quer trabalhar?’ and hired him then and there as fry cook. Eggs and bacon, eggs and sausage, eggs with more eggs. A guy at the counter, yolk on his moustache: he was opening a smart new joint down by the harbour, needed a broilerman, how about it? His suit was blue velvet with thin lapels. It looked expensive. Vasco didn’t say yes, didn’t say no, but things took their course. The next five years he charred steaks the size of Castro Verde at the Blue Boy Inn on the corner of Commercial and Carver.
What a place! Three, four, five hundred covers a night. A ship could set sail in the lobster tank. Oak tables and fine linen and mirrors in curly frames that came all the way from Paris. It was sweet hell in there, roasting his forearms over the broiler, the fat spitting up in his eyes.
And there was Lili. He received her like he received everything else in those years, with gratitude, with surprise. The waitresses wore yellow dresses with full skirts, like they were going on first dates. Lili tied a lilac sash round hers and said, ‘Jeez, look at me, Prom Queen.’ She smoked cigarettes in the kitchen and stubbed them out on mounds of carrot peel. Her grandparents were from Calabria but she was New Jersey born and bred. She called all the chefs Tarzan and the punters Captain and the maître d’ she called Mein Führer, but only behind his back.
Vasco got the idea she was watching him but it was difficult to tell with her lazy eye. She might have been looking over at the salad station, or even up at the ceiling. He was not as fat as he is now. Some of the customers made him feel slim. It was a lot to hope but certainly she kept looking, if not at him, then in the general vicinity.
‘What you doing Sunday?’ she said, shouldering a tray of T-bones.
‘Sunday?’ he said, shaking with fear.
She wiggled her hip and her shoulder to get the weight loaded right. ‘You obviously don’t know so I’ll tell you. You’re going to Herring Cove Beach to make out with a girl. She’s bringing the picnic.’ Her lazy eye had slid up nearly all the way beneath the lid, but the other one held his gaze. ‘Ask me how I know, Tarzan.’
He opened and closed his mouth.
‘I’m the girl, Tarzan.’ She smiled her tight-lipped smile. ‘I’m the girl.’
Pai courted Mãe through a window. That was how it was done. Namorar a janela. Vasco told Lili about it. ‘A brick wall,’ she said, ‘great prophylactic.’ His grandmother’s marriage was arranged, formally, when she was twelve years old but she always knew that she was meant for Pedro just as everything else in her life seemed to her foretold. Vasco’s marriage too was arranged. Lili arranged it all.
‘Let’s not beat around the bush,’ she said. ‘I think this is it for me and you.’
She was buttoning up her blouse. It was 1976. Lots of the girls were going braless but Lili wore a kind of armour plating beneath her clothes. When Vasco managed to get his hands on her breasts it was like feeling a pair of hubcaps. She smelled of cinnamon, though, and rosewater and it was all he could do to keep from fainting on top of her.
‘Lili,’ he groaned, ‘don’t say that.’
She bedded down on his stomach. ‘This is it, Tarzan. We are going to get wed.’
What he could do with, actually, is a beer to wash the cake down. That pastry will definitely be on the dry side. He raises one foot and turns his ankle. Eleven hours on his feet. Whose legs wouldn’t ache?
All this women’s liberation has gone too far. Lili had no time for it. She didn’t need it, that’s what she said. Now it’s gone too far. Only the other day he was saying to Bruno that in his opinion it has gone too far. In America now romance is dead. The feminists killed it and the men are scared. If a man opens a door for a woman he will end up in court. Sex discrimination.
‘You think it could never happen here?’ he said. ‘These crazy Americans? Let me tell you, in my opinion it is only a matter of time.’
It’s the way the world is. Even the Alentejo cannot escape. The United States of America is the Superpower and it is not just a question of guns. He said to Bruno, ‘What language do you think your grandchildren will speak?’
Bruno pushed up his cap and grunted. Bruno is not a great thinker.
‘English, my friend,’ Vasco informed him. ‘With an American accent.’
Vasco sighs a long, wheezing sigh. Oh, he says to himself, what do I know? Not as much as Bruno, even. His grandchildren and their grandchildren will speak Portuguese. Such a beautiful language will never die. His eyes begin to fill. He is so tired he feels hollow. There is nothing inside him, nothing. Why does he say all these things? Such a beautiful language. Even when he said it he didn’t believe it. Why must he talk and talk and invent all these things? America this and America that. Twenty-two years since he’s been there. He does not give a rotten acorn’s worth for that place.
What a fool I am. Vasco focuses on the flame, which is beginning to burn low. Stripped to the core, this is what I am. Yet he holds himself apart, as if there are two Vascos, one passing judgement on the other.
‘Talk to me,’ Lili would say, propped up in the hospital bed, three pillows behind her back, two more beneath her knees. ‘Tell me things. Tell me about Mamarrosa.’
She swelled up like one of those magic beans you drop in a bowl of water. Her hands, her feet, her legs, her face. She was just into her third trimester.
The hospital chair was so low he had to reach up to hold her hand. Every time he stopped speaking she said, ‘Don’t just sit there. Talk to me.’
‘Everything will be all right,’ he said. ‘I promise.’
She rolled her good eye. ‘I know that, you dope. Tell me something interesting.’
Out in the corridor, the doctor had said, ‘The only cure for pre-eclampsia is delivery. Bed rest. That’s the best we can do.’
Vasco hunted him down and held him by the shoulder. ‘Take it out,’ he said. ‘Take the baby out.’
The doctor looked at Vasco, considering, it seemed, whether to press charges. Then he laughed and clapped him on the back. ‘Can’t do that, buddy. It ain’t cooked yet. Another coupla weeks.’
‘I’m bored,’ said Lili. She wore a nightdress printed with teddy bears. She said the baby would like it. Her face was all stretched and shiny. The way her cheeks puffed out she looked like a kid with a birthday cake. ‘What’s a girl got to do to get a cigarette? Start talking fast or I’m going to roll down off this perch and bounce right out of here.’
He told her about his grandmother and how, many years ago, Senhor Pinheiro had paid to have two windows put into her house and how she, unable to get used to it, boarded them back up again. Mãe told Vasco about it, shaking her head to show how far she herself had come into the light. It was the same day she told him about Pedro Gomes getting an inside toilet. ‘What could he be thinking of? To bring it inside! A dirty thing like that.’ Mãe always stood a certain way, with her hand on her hip, to let everyone know she wasn’t falling for it, whatever it was. She spread her hair once a week to dry in the sun and said, ‘I’ll give you five escudos if you find a grey one and pull it out.’
‘Do you think she’s going to like me?’ said Lili.
‘No,’ said Vasco, mock-sad. ‘I don’t think so.’
Lili pulled her hand away.
‘I was making a joke,’ said Vasco.
‘My chest,’ said Lili. ‘It burns.’
They put her on an IV drip and listened for the baby’s heartbeat. Every time he heard the baby’s heart beating Vasco felt sick. Lili woke from a nap the next day and said, ‘What are all those little black things floating around the room?’ She had the worst headache. By evening she couldn’t feel her face.
Vasco prayed. He knelt down in a toilet cubicle and clasped his hands in front of his chin. ‘Please, God. Please.’ There was a wet patch under one knee. He tried to ignore it. ‘Help me.’ He was kneeling in urine. ‘Hail Mary, full of grace.’ The tiles were freezing. ‘The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women.’
On the door someone had written ‘Springsteen sucks’. ‘And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.’ Another pen has added ‘cock’. ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners.’ Cigarette ash on the tissue dispenser. ‘Now and at the hour of our death. Amen.’
The candle has burned itself out. Vasco looks across to the big window but there is no reflection now. He picks up the spoon and the fork and puts them on the side of the plate. It is time to go to bed.
‘Lili,’ he whispers. ‘I’m sorry.’ How rarely he remembers. He thought his love would stay pure, the silver lining. But what remains? Disappointment maybe; a little guilt.
A man can decide to do this, and not do that. But feelings, thinks Vasco, are not in his control. I want to feel happy! This is the new madness. Everyone wanting to be happy. In Vasco’s opinion they are crazy.
He breaks off a small piece of pastry and puts it in his mouth. He does not feel happy and he does not feel sad. These things he has lost. Belief he never had. It always eluded him. And what does he know? Not much. When he adds it all up it does not amount to much. All I have, thinks Vasco, is my bloody opinion.
‘God,’ he says, and bites on his fist. There is a throbbing behind his eyes. He gnaws his hand and stares at the table. Somewhere in the night a fox screeches. A mosquito whines close to his ear. The lantana brushes the window. For a long time he sits and thinks of nothing at all.
When he stirs it is because he must shift his legs. The table shakes and the fork and spoon slide off the plate.
Well, of course a man must have opinions. What is a man without opinions? He’s Bruno, that’s what.
Customers, Vasco knows, want conversation. They want jokes. They want comment. They want to be entertained. Eduardo, the old goat, will be in tomorrow, picking a fight and picking his nose. ‘Eduardo,’ Vasco will say, slapping the counter, ‘we’ve missed you. Though it’s been cooler in here, without all that hot air you blow around.’