Taking Lives

by Michael Pye

One old man, with a face so smooth it could have been pumiced, asked if I was “o historiador,” the historian. So that was what father said I was: a scholar, or maybe a teller of old, audited tales. He said there was a feast in three nights’ time and that I must come. I would be staying with my father, naturally.

  I wondered about the “naturally.” It was odd to be known but not to be wanted.

  Miguel came back on his bicycle, a very quiet ten-year-old, and said Senhor Costa was coming. I went to the door of the bar and looked both ways, but all along the tight street of houses I could see nobody coming.

  A bus passed, filling the whole street. Nobody breathed for a moment.

  “Uma bica,” I said. I did remember the word for a good, small coffee.

  I thought people passed and commented on the fact that I was waiting in a bar for my father instead of going to his house. But of course they would comment on any stranger.

  A half-hour passed. I had nothing to read, and nothing to think.

  Another ten minutes. Miguel was whistling briskly. A tractor went by with a trailer behind it, and an old skull of a man, legs splayed, working the tractor with a grimly concentrated look. I thought of Grandpa on a slow-mo Harley. I thought of death on a slow rig.

  Another five. By now, the end-of-day drinkers had come into the bar for a copo—a glass of wine—or a beer. They gave me space, and they huddled companionably. I began to be infuriated with my father, to wonder why nobody would simply show me his house, why he was taking so long. He didn’t want to seem sick, I knew. He never did.

  I asked Miguel if he could tell my father one more time that I was waiting. Or perhaps he could show me how to find the house.

  “I’ll go,” Miguel said.

  He came back very quickly this time, and he would not speak to me. Instead, he stood reporting to the barman. I picked out words in clusters: “now, now, now” and “white, white.”

  I went over to Miguel and I said, “Tell me. Tell me this time.”

  “Your father,” the barman said. “You’d better go. He’s not well.”

  “He’s alone?”

  “I should think so.”

  This time, the barman gave me directions: two kilometers along the Fátima road, down a track to Casal Novo, a house with a huge stone chimney and a garden. I couldn’t miss the garden, because it was full of things.

  Miguel said he would come and guide me.

  “There,” he said.

  I wish I could have missed it: a beige bunker on a flat base, like a huge box in the maize fields. A staircase jutted up to the first floor; it had its own pineapple finials. The huge chimney split the house with large, dull stones lined in white mortar. The roof ended in eyebrow tiles and a pair of terra-cotta doves, swooping as boastfully as eagles. As for the garden, it was certainly full of things: a fountain of more madly piled pineapples, assorted lions all from the same mold with dark sleep lines, a mannequin pis off to the side, like a rough page from a plasterworks catalog, with a few bright roses for decoration.

  I stared. I remembered plain white walls in Stockwell.

  “He’s here,” Miguel said, and jumped out of the car.

  My father must have heard the car, because he came to the front door and opened it.

  I shouted, “Dad.”

  I could see he was holding himself upright, arms tight against the door frame. He was being a good soldier. But he couldn’t smile.

  “Dad, I’m coming up.”

  He seemed to watch me running up the steps, but with no expression in his eyes. Then he couldn’t hold himself anymore. He fell softly. His bones went in every direction under his skin. His face was a greenish white I’d only ever read about before.

  I took him up in my arms. I don’t think I ever did that before, but I knew he would be very light under his dark suit. I held him and asked Miguel where the nearest phone was.

  An old woman in black, working among the maize, saw me on the steps and she began a high, almost animal cry, an endless shriek.

  I asked him all the questions you’re supposed to ask after a heart attack: about pains in the arm, pains in the chest. He shook his head.

  I carried him to the car. There was nothing much to him. I strapped him into the backseat. Miguel said it was twelve kilometers to the hospital. My father said, “Eleven.”

  The old woman cried on, a signal to the whole valley.

  At the little hospital in the next town, my father was laid out on a gurney and taken away. I tried to follow, but a male nurse stopped me.

  “I have to look after him,” I said.

  “He’s dead. Didn’t you know?”

  A policeman came up to me. He wasn’t in uniform, but he wore his authority fitted tight.

  I remember how I strained for a moment to be entirely practical. If my father was dead, there was a funeral to arrange, and I didn’t know how to do it here. There must be a hospital office that could help me handle such things. Then I would need death certificates, dozens of them, probably. There would be people to notify. But who would I notify? I had already told my mother that my father had gone away. I could tell Anna, at least, if only I could find a phone.

  I folded on the ground, the power to stand gone, then the power to speak. I had time, in the middle of airless, drowned breathing, to think how ashamed my father might have been to see me like this.

  Miguel was still there. He put his hand on my head as though I were a dog, a gesture of odd comfort.

  I thought of how my father made me separate from this country he never let me know, how we lost each other years before he told me the house in Stockwell was sold.

  I was an orphan of long standing. So I told myself: I should know what to do.

  Three

  I spent a half-hour with the priest, who extolled the virtues of heaven like a salesman of swamp lots, and then an effortful hour with four aunts I had never known before—who were worn out with rigorous wailing, and now wanted to welcome me, make sure I was one of the kind that comes back to Portugal and fits again, but found I wasn’t, that I was even unsure of the language. I could see it shocked them when I said my father’s name, making José sound like Spanish, with a breathy H at the front instead of a solid J. Still, they launched into arias of births, heart murmurs, burnt houses, new marriages, and I could barely pick out enough nouns to understand the subject. The names were all strange.

  At nine, the undertaker came; at least, I thought he was the undertaker. He was a sly man, paws up to his face. He led me through the village to the garage of a furniture store on the outskirts.

  My father lay in a coffin on a trestle. “Usually,” the undertaker was saying, “he would be in his own house, but there was nobody in the house and we thought, in the circumstances, it would be better—”

  He levered up the tinfoil he’d put over the face. The face was a shock, the jaw bound in place with a cloth around the skull, and netting over that. Now that there was no more will to hold the face together, I’d never seen my father seem so at ease.

  The undertaker gave me a blanket.

  I knelt by the coffin, between cold concrete walls, with the faint smells of oil and onions and something like formaldehyde. But the body was not embalmed. It had been cracked into shape, tied there, and the nets were to keep off the flies.

  I tried to say “good-bye,” tried to say the word out loud. I couldn’t; this still body was such a plain reminder that my father was not there to hear me. For a moment, I had a sense of how loudly emptiness can roar at you: like everything you hear with fingers in your ears.

  I stood up, found the undertaker waiting just to the side of the door.

  “You don’t want to stay?” he said. It was obviously an issue, a duty he was not prepared to explain.

  I said, “No.” I tried to give him back the blanket.

  “Usually,” he said, “there would be others to join you. I have some wine if you want to wait.”

  I knew then I had no choice. I covered my shoulders
with the blanket, and I sat waiting by the open garage door, with my father trussed and netted on a trestle just beyond. A few people passed busily.

  I wondered why nobody wanted to remember my father in the place where he always thought he belonged.

  I watched the flies turning in the white light of the streetlamp, bright like fireflies. After a while, the undertaker put his portable TV on the windowsill across the alleyway, flickers of blue light in the dusk, so I could watch some dance show while I waited.

  There are a number of hotel forms in the police file. Hart tried Lisbon first, but evidently he did not fit; perhaps nobody noticed him. He spent two days in the hills around Sintra; plenty of exiles there, growing sour in pretty gardens, but he didn’t settle. He went south to the Algarve, and I can understand why he found no comfortable, sociable place along the concrete facade of the beach.

  To judge from the gap between the hotel forms, he quit the coast and drove north in a day. He came to medieval streets in the center of the country, a university town on a hill, and put himself in some shiny old-new hotel with imitation pools in a dummy atrium and an old manor house at the front. Coimbra, he obviously decided, would be a credible destination for a runaway academic.

  If he tried to find an apartment, and I suppose he did, he’d have been out of luck. Apartments to rent hardly exist, except for the long term. He had an alibi for six months, but nowhere to put it.

  I called his university again, of course. They still had no forwarding address in Portugal. They thought Professor Hart must be traveling, a word that seemed like sin in the mouth of the secretary. I called Holland, too. They were waiting to hear from him. You could tell they would happily wait a long time.

  Anna sent me all her love, like a parcel.

  For the funeral, they brought out a long Renault hearse, broad bearers in a line in the seats behind the driver, coffin clear through the glass sides, with a blue-and-gilt blanket to hide the safety belts that held it in place.

  Nobody had come to the wake. Everyone came to the funeral. The church’s banner went first, then the men in gowns of white and blue over their working clothes, then the crucifix, the priest, and the hearse—slowly down the main street, serious but not quite silent. Behind all this, a string of infuriated modern cars were held up on their business, waiting for the road to clear. There seemed to be triumph in the eyes of the old, bony aunts as they walked their memento mori into the faces of the city types behind.

  The coffin came off the hearse, and I took my place to help carry it: a sudden, wrenching weight.

  A single electric candelabra burned in the chancel of the church. I remembered what a church should be: dark and Victorian, gilded, with bright glass and the smell of incense and wax. But here the reredos went up in rough steps of gold and sky blue, there was a Madonna strung with pearls, three severed heads under her feet, and a saint flying red ribbons as long as himself, with a trident: odd, unofficial gods.

  The priest rumbled his words through a microphone. The congregation took up the words, answering before the priest could finish; they couldn’t wait. There was no theater or teaching, just a dialog they knew as intimately as any talk in the fields or the bar.

  Because I was thinking of doing things properly and not making mistakes, it was not until I turned around and took up the burden of my father’s coffin again that I was entirely overwhelmed. A whole community, this village, villages beyond, had come down here at five on a working day for a mannerly farewell to my father, and to save his soul, if they could.

  We walked the church steps, down a tight lane toward the skull and crossed bones over the cemetery gate.

  I felt the coffin handle slipping in my hand. I wouldn’t be less strong than the other bearers, the one who broke this sense of community. I held on. I wondered how a man who had become so slight and bony could weigh so much.

  The sky was full of wet light and soft, gray cloud, and along the way I noticed things that took my mind briefly from the rip in my shoulder. Here, hollyhocks massed like spires on the edge of a maize field; here, a practical concrete clinic among houses held up by tree trunks and plaster; here, hay already scythed down and full of prickly flies and grains; and, if I held my head up for a moment, the light playing along the top of the mountains beyond.

  There was a moment for the bearers to rest, and then the lane turned uphill. Rain seemed imminent. Then we were through the graveyard wall, into a square of sand and neat marble tablets, memorial photographs, family plots, tiny metal lanterns on each to make the streets of the dead seem decently suburban.

  There was one shiny white marble house at the end: an emigrant’s last resting place, windows slightly curtained, and the family name above the door.

  I hadn’t thought to ask, and nobody had thought to tell me; I’d expected an ordinary, dug grave like my mother’s, ropes to lower the coffin, the finality of earth falling on the coffin lid. But the name on the bright pink house, with shelves for many dead, was Costa.

  My mother lies in a hollow of gray marble and green grass in a South London churchyard. So, for the moment, José Costa would lie alone, second shelf of four, having made an investment in his son dying in the right place, his son’s sons if ever there were any.

  The priest spoke again. The coffin lid was raised so people could finally say good-bye, but I did not go forward. Flowers from gardens lay around, gladioli in scalding reds, fountains of montbretia.

  The doors of the vault closed as delicately as those in a house of glass, and were fixed shut with a padlock. I wondered who had a key, if I should ask for one.

  The crowd spread out about the business of tending their own family memories. Nobody rushed away, but everyone else had things do to, fields to tend, houses to clean, time to waste before dinner.

  I knew I was expected in this small marble house. I was expected to want to be boxed and filed alongside my father, in his very particular notion of a resting place. It was a neat bit of postmortem pressure: to be a good son and lie here, to think until I died whether I should.

  I rather wished my father had chosen the permanence of rotting underground rather than this state of waiting for doors to open on something better.

  I wondered why my father had to start from scratch in his own town, why there was no family vault for him to join. I wondered at the polite duty of the funeral, the lack of strong tears.

  I had picked up flowers from the ground, violent pink and black-red roses bound together with grass. Now they hung in my hands and I didn’t know where to put them. I realized the caretakers were looking down this suburban street of the dead, politely impatient.

  I needed something to dry my eyes, to blow my nose, the kind of thing a father has. I remembered: playing penguins, draped in Dad’s huge tweed jacket; waiting for Dad to free a bee that was trapped in my hair; talking big on a night walk before some exam, and seeing a shooting star. For all the impossibility of my father’s change of worlds and country, for all the ways my father made me grow away, it was not bearable for my father to be gone.

  This show of feeling was improper for an Englishman, even more shocking for a Portuguese. It was impractical, too, burning my eyes. I tried to go casually to the other side of the marble tomb, where I would be less obvious, until I could get back my breath.

  I saw, across the marble, already a little etched into the delicate surface of the stone, scrawls and lines of spray-gun black, broad tarry strokes on the fine pink marble. They made a date or a number: 1953.

  You can’t feel shock on top of shock. It fails to register. I went back to my car, started the engine, and edged through the quiet streets. It was as though the whole town had done enough feeling for the day, and closed itself down.

  I was shivering when I came to the main road. I ought to complain and protest, but I wondered why nobody had warned me. Perhaps nobody had noticed. It was as though the pink tomb, with its bubble-gum veining, was a boast; and the curt black lines were an order to shut up.

&nbs
p; Perhaps nobody minded.

  I had to see a lawyer, settle an estate of whose size and ramifications I had absolutely no idea. I wondered why my father had chosen a lawyer in some small town called Vila Nova de Formentina, forty miles away: Maria de Sousa de Conceição Mattoso.

  I unlocked the door to my father’s house.

  I expected to be overwhelmed. I always had an acute sense of smell. My father didn’t smoke in London, or keep a dog, so that house had a minimal smell: crowns of bay leaves rusting in the kitchen, and the erstaz pine of the rasping stuff my mother used to clean. I didn’t smell either of those in this secret house. There was cedar oil for polish, though, and dust in the old air.

  I expected photographs, a kind of potted life, but there were none. There were no souvenirs; those had mostly belonged to my mother, and been too much trouble to ship. There was one picture on the wall, but I had never seen it before: a bank of tiles that showed a brown caravel on a blue-and-white sea.

  I wondered if I could second-guess my father, find the coffee beans and the grinder in predictable places, the cups, the sugar, and the drinking water (my father never trusted London water for serious coffee). Somehow I still didn’t doubt that there must be some continuity from London to this house, from father to son.

  There was no coffee, no drinking water. I pulled open cupboards one by one, tugged at drawers, put on the light in the larder and looked around on the wooden shelves. I was furious: the bastard dying and not leaving even a fucking cup of coffee.

  Maria Mattoso said, “Mr. Costa?”

  She had come through the hall silently, but not in order to take me by surprise. Maria was all business. You could take her for some thin city girl.

  I thought I should apologize. Instead, I offered tea.

  Maria said, “A glass of water, please.”

  She sipped a very little and put the glass neatly down. There was no extravagance in her, I thought at the time. I noticed a silk of hairs on her arms, dark against dark. I also wondered why I was noticing this so much.

  She was a lawyer, after all. She was there to talk about money in savings accounts of one kind and another, earning rates of interest that seemed wild; and the house, of course, and some land with grapes, and the contents of the house. Everything went to John Michael Snell Costa with the provision that I give a tenth of the estate to some orphanage two towns away.