by William Boyd
“I only take one holiday a year.”
“Christmas.”
“They go to my aunt in Coimbra. I stay behind to look after the house.”
A young man approached the table. He wore a ludicrous yellow overcoat that reached down to his ankles. He was astonished to see me sitting there. Boscán looked even more ill as he introduced us. I have forgotten his name.
I said goodbye and went toward the door. Boscán caught up with me.
“At Christmas,” he said quietly. “I’ll see you at Christmas.”
A postcard. A sepia view of the Palace of Queen Maria Pia, Cintra:
I will be one kilometer west of the main beach at Paço de Arcos. I have rented a room in the Casa de Bizoma. Please arrive at dawn on 25 December and depart at sunset.
I am your friend,
Gaspar Barbosa
The bark of the cork tree is removed every eight to ten years, the quality of the cork improving with each successive stripping. Once the section of cork is removed from the tree the outer surface is scraped and cleaned. The sections—wide curved planks—are flattened by heating them over a fire and submitting them to pressure on a flat surface. In the heating operation the surface is charred, and thereby the pores are closed up. It is this process that the industry terms the “nerve” of cork. This is cork at its most valuable. A cork possesses “nerve” when its significant properties—lightness, impermeability, elasticity—are sealed in the material forever.
Consul Schenk’s Report
In the serene, urinous light of dawn the beach at Paço de Arcos looked slate gray. The seaside cafés were closed up and summoned up impressions of dejection and decrepitude as only out-of-season holiday resorts can. To add to this melancholy scene a fine cold rain blew off the Atlantic. I stood beneath my umbrella on the coast road and looked about me. To the left I could just make out the tower of Belém. To the right the hills of Cintra were shrouded in a heavy opaque mist. I turned and walked up the road toward the Casa de Bizoma. As I drew near I could see Boscán sitting on a balcony on the second floor. All other windows on this side of the hotel were firmly shuttered.
A young girl, of about sixteen years, let me in and led me up to his room.
Boscán was wearing a monocle. On a table behind him were two bottles of brandy. We kissed, we broke apart.
“Lise,” he said. “I want to call you Lise.”
Even then, even that day, I said no. “That’s the whole point,” I reminded him. “I’m me—Lily—whoever you are.”
He inclined his body forward in a mock bow. “Gaspar Barbosa … Would you like something to drink?”
I drank some brandy and then allowed Barbosa to undress me, which he did with pedantic diligence and great delicacy. When I was naked he knelt before me and pressed his lips against my groin, burying his nose in my pubic hair. He hugged me, still kneeling, his arms strong around the backs of my thighs, his head turned sideways in my lap. When he began to cry softly, I raised him up and led him over to the narrow bed. He undressed and we climbed in, huddling up together, our legs interlocking. I reached down to touch him.
“I don’t know what’s wrong,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“We’ll wait.”
“Don’t forget you have to go at sunset. Remember.”
“I won’t.”
We made love later, but it was not very satisfactory. He seemed listless and tired—nothing like Balthazar Cabral and Melchior Vasconcelles.
At noon, the hotel restaurant was closed, so we ate a simple lunch he had brought himself: some bread, some olives, some tart sheep’s-milk cheese, some oranges and almonds. By then he was on to the second bottle of brandy. After lunch I smoked a cigarette. I offered him one—I had noticed he had not smoked all day—which he accepted but which he extinguished after a couple of puffs.
“I have developed a mysterious distaste for tobacco,” he said, pouring himself some more brandy.
In the afternoon we tried to make love again but failed.
“It’s my fault,” he said. “I’m not well.”
I asked him why I had had to arrive at dawn and why I had to leave at sunset. He told me it was because of a poem he had written, called “The Roses of the Gardens of the God Adonis.”
“You wrote? Boscán?”
“No, no. Boscán has only written one book of poems, years ago. These are mine, Gaspar Barbosa’s.”
“What’s it about?” The light was going; it was time for me to leave.
“Oh …” He thought. “Living and dying.”
He quoted me the line that explained the truncated nature of my third Christmas with Agostinho Boscán. He sat at the table before the window, wearing a dirty white shirt and the trousers of his blue serge suit, and poured himself a tumblerful of brandy.
“It goes like this—roughly. I’m translating: ‘Let us make our lives last one day,’ ” he said. “ ‘So there is night before and night after the little that we last.’ ”
The uses to which corkwood may be put are unlimited. And yet when we speak of uses it is only those that have developed by reason of the corkwood’s own peculiarity and not the great number it has been adapted to, for perhaps its utility will have no end and, in my estimation, its particular qualities are little appreciated. At any rate it is the most wonderful bark of its kind, its service has been a long one and its benefits, even as a stopper, have been many. A wonderful material truly, and of interest so full that it seems I have failed to do it justice in my humble endeavor to describe the Quercus suber of Linnaeus—cork.
Consul Schenk’s Report
Boscán, during, I think, that last Christmas: “You see, because I am nothing, I can imagine anything … If I were something, I would be unable to imagine.”
It was in early December 1936 that I received my last communication from Agostinho Boscán. I was waiting to hear from him, as I had received an offer for the company from the Armstrong Cork Company and was contemplating a sale and, possibly, a return to England.
I was in my office one morning when Pimentel knocked on the door and said there was a Senhora Boscán to see me. For an absurd, exquisite moment I thought this might prove to be Agostinho’s most singular disguise, but remembered he had three sisters and a mother still living. I knew before she was shown in that she came with news of Boscán’s death.
Senhora Boscán was small and tubby with a meek pale face. She wore black and fiddled constantly with the handle of her umbrella as she spoke. Her brother had requested specifically that I be informed of his death when it arrived. He had passed away two nights ago.
“What did he die of?”
“Cirrhosis of the liver … He was … My brother had become an increasingly heavy drinker. He was very unhappy.”
“Was there anything else for me, that he said? Any message?”
Senhora Boscán cleared her throat and blinked. “There is no message.”
“I’m sorry?”
“That is what he asked me to say: ‘There is no message.’ ”
“Ah.” I managed to disguise my smile by offering Senhora Boscán a cup of coffee. She accepted.
“We will all miss him,” she said. “Such a good quiet man.”
From an obituary of Agostinho da Silva Boscán:
… Boscán was born in 1888 in Durban, South Africa, where his father was Portuguese consul. He was the youngest of four children, the three elder being sisters. It was in South Africa that he received a British education and where he learned to speak English. Boscán’s father died when he was seventeen, and the family returned to Lisbon, where Boscán was to reside for the rest of his life. He worked primarily as a commercial translator and office manager for various industrial concerns, but mainly in the cork business. In 1916 he published a small collection of poems, Insensivel, written in English. The one Portuguese critic who noticed them, and who wrote a short review, described them as “a sad waste.” Boscán was active for a while in Lisbon literary circles and would occasionall
y publish poems, translations and articles in the magazine Sombra. The death of his closest friend, Xavier Quevedo, who committed suicide in Paris in 1924, provoked a marked and sudden change in his personality, which became increasingly melancholic and irrational from then on. He never married. His life can only be described as uneventful.
Loose Continuity
IAM STANDING on the corner of Westwood and Wilshire, just down from the Mobil gas station, waiting. There is a coolish breeze just managing to blow from somewhere, and I am glad of it. Nine o’clock in the morning and it’s going to be another hot one, for sure. For the third or fourth time I needlessly go over and inspect the concrete foundation, noting again that the power lines have been properly installed and that the extra bolts I have requested are duly there. Where is everybody? I look at my watch, light another cigarette and begin to grow vaguely worried: have I picked the wrong day? Has my accent confused Mr. Koenig (he is always asking me to repeat myself)?…
A bright curtain—blues and ochres—boils and billows from an apartment window across the street. It sets a forgotten corner of my mind working—who had drapes like that, once? Who owned a skirt that was similar, or perhaps a tie?
A claxon honks down Wilshire and I look up to see Spencer driving the crane, pulling slowly across two lanes of traffic and coming to a halt at the curb.
He swings down from the cab and takes off his cap. His hair is getting longer, losing that army crop.
“Sorry I’m late, Miss Velk, the depot was, you know, crazy, impossible.”
“Doesn’t matter, it’s not here anyway.”
“Yeah, right.” Spencer moves over and crouches down at the concrete plinth, checking the power-line connection, touching and jiggling the bolts and their brackets. He goes around the back of the crane and sets out the wooden MEN AT WORK signs, then reaches into his pocket and hands me a crumpled sheet of flimsy.
“The permit,” he explains. “We got till noon.”
“Even on a Sunday?”
“Even on a Sunday. Even in Los Angeles.” He shrugs. “Even in 1945. Don’t worry, Miss Velk. We got plenty of time.”
I turn away, a little exasperated. “As long as it gets here,” I say with futile determination, as if I had the power to threaten. The drape streams out of the window suddenly, like a banner, and catches the sun. Then I remember: like the wall hanging Utta had done. The one that Tobias bought.
Spencer asks me if he should go phone the factory but I say give them an extra half hour. I am remembering another Sunday morning, sunny like this one but not as hot, and half the world away, and I can see myself walking up Grillparzerstrasse, taking the shortcut from the station, my suitcase heavy in my hand, and hoping, wondering, now that I have managed to catch the dawn train from Sorau, if Tobias will be able to find some time to see me alone that afternoon …
Gudrun Velk walked slowly up Grillparzerstrasse, enjoying the sun, her body canted over to counterbalance the weight of her suitcase. She was wearing …(What was I wearing?) She was wearing baggy cotton trousers with the elasticated cuffs at the ankles, a sky blue blouse and an embroidered felt jacket with a motif of jousters and strutting chargers. Her fair hair was down and she wore no makeup; she was thinking about Tobias, and whether they might see each other that day, and whether they might make love. Thinking about Utta, if she would be up by now. Thinking about the two thick skeins of still-damp blue wool in her suitcase, wool that she had dyed herself late the night before at the mill in Sorau and that she felt sure would finish her rug perfectly and, most importantly, in a manner that would please Paul.
Paul came to the weaving workshop often. Small, with dull olive skin and large eyes below a high forehead, eyes seemingly brimming with unshed tears. He quietly moved from loom to loom and the weavers would slip out of their seats to let him have an unobstructed view. Gudrun had started her big knotted rug, and he stood in front of it for some minutes, silently contemplating the first squares and circles. She waited; sometimes he looked, said nothing and moved on. Now, though, he said: “I like the shapes but the yellow is wrong, it needs more lemon, especially set beside that peach color.” He shrugged, adding, “In my opinion.” That was when she started to go to his classes on color theory and unpicked the work she had done and began again. She told him: “I’m weaving my rug based on your chromatic principles.” He was pleased, she thought. He said politely that in that case he would follow its progress with particular interest.
He was not happy at the Institute, she knew; since Meyer had taken over the mood had changed, was turning against Paul and the other painters. Meyer was against them, she had been told, he felt they smacked of Weimar, the bad old days. Tobias was the same: “Bogus-advertising-theatricalism,” he would state. “We should’ve left all that behind.” What the painters did was “decorative,” need one say more? So Paul was gratified to find someone who responded to his theories instead of mocking them, and in any case the mood in the weaving workshops was different, what with all the young women. There was a joke in the Institute that the women revered him, called him “the dear Lord.” He did enjoy the time he spent there, he told Gudrun later, of all the workshops it was the weavers he would miss most, he said, if the day came for him to leave—all the girls, all the bright young women.
Spencer leans against the pole that holds the power lines. The sleeve of his check shirt falls back to reveal more of his burned arm. It looks pink and new and oddly, finely ridged, like bark or like the skin you get on hot milk as it cools. He taps a rhythm on the creosoted pole with his thumb and the two remaining fingers on his left hand. I know the burn goes the length of his arm and then some more, but the hand has taken the full brunt. He turns and sees me staring.
“How’s the arm?” I say.
“I’ve got another graft next week. We’re getting there, slow but sure.”
“What about this heat? Does it make it worse?”
“It doesn’t help, but … I’d rather be here than Okinawa,” he says. “Damn right.”
“Of course,” I say, “of course.”
“Yeah.” He exhales and seems on the point of saying something—he is talking more about the war, these days, about his injury—when his eye is caught. He straightens.
“Uh-oh,” he says. “Looks like Mr. Koenig is here.”
Utta Benrath had dark orange hair, strongly hennaed, which, with her green eyes, made her look foreign to Gudrun, but excitingly so. As if she were a half-breed of some impossible sort—Irish and Malay, Swedish and Peruvian. She was small and wiry and used her hands expressively when she spoke, fists unclenching slowly like a flower opening, or thrusting, palming movements, her fingers always flexing. Her voice was deep and she had a throaty, man’s chuckle, like a hint of wicked fun. Gudrun met her when she had answered the advertisement Utta had placed on the notice board in the students’ canteen: “Room to rent, share facilities and expenses.”
When Gudrun began her affair with Tobias she realized she had to move out of the hostel she was staying in. The room in Utta’s apartment was cheap and not just because the apartment was small and had no bathroom: it was inconvenient as well. Utta, it turned out, lived a brisk forty-five-minute walk from the Institute. The apartment was on the top floor of a tenement building on Grenz Weg, out in Jonitz, with a distant view of a turgid loop of the Mulde from the kitchen window. The place was clean and simply furnished. On the walls hung brightly colored designs for stained-glass windows that Utta had drawn in Weimar. Here in Dessau she was an assistant in the mural-painting workshop. She was older than Gudrun, in her early thirties, Gudrun guessed, but her unusual coloring made her age seem almost an irrelevance: she looked so unlike anyone Gudrun had seen before that age seemed to have little or nothing to do with the impression she made.
There were two bedrooms in the apartment on Grenz Weg, a small kitchen with a stove and a surprisingly generous hall where Utta and Gudrun would eat their meals around a square scrubbed pine table. They washed in the kitchen, sta
nding on a towel in front of the sink. They carried their chamber pots down four flights of stairs and emptied them in the night-soil cistern at the rear of the small yard behind the apartment building. Gudrun developed a strong affection for their four rooms: her bedroom was the first of her own outside of her parents’ house. It was the first proper home of her adult life. Most evenings, she and Utta prepared their meal—sausage, nine times out of ten, with potatoes or turnips—and then, if they were not going out, they would sit on the bed in Utta’s room and listen to music on her phonograph. Utta would read or write—she was studying architecture by correspondence course—and they would talk. Utta’s concentration, Gudrun soon noticed, her need for further credentials, her ambitions, were motivated by a pessimistic obsession about her position at the Institute, to which the conversation inevitably returned. She told Gudrun she was convinced that the mural-painting workshop was to be closed and she would have to leave. She adduced evidence, clues, hints that she was sure proved that this was Meyer’s intention. Look what had happened to stained glass, she said, to the wood- and stone-carving workshops. The struggle it had been to transfer had almost finished her off. That’s why she wanted to be an architect: everything had to be practical these days, manufactured. Productivity was the new God. But it took so long, and if they closed the mural-painting workshop … Nothing Gudrun said could reassure her. All Utta’s energies were devoted to finding a way to stay on.
“I’ve heard that Marianne Brandt hates Meyer,” she reported one night, with excitement, almost glee. “No, I mean really hates him. She detests him. She’s going to resign, I know it.”
“Maybe Meyer will go first,” Gudrun said. “He’s so unpopular. It can’t be nice for him.”
Utta laughed. And laughed again. “Sweet Gudrun,” she said, and reached out and patted her foot. “Never change.”
“But why should it affect you?” Gudrun asked. “Marianne runs the metal workshop.”