Taking Lives

by Michael Pye

  “Do you want to keep the house? Or to sell it?”

  I said, “How would I bloody know?” and then, “I’m sorry.”

  “You have time,” Maria said.

  I thought how clean, how distant she seemed: a sharp, bony spectator. I wondered if my father had fancied her. He’d been a spectator, too, in London; they’d have had that in common.

  “There are no complications, are there?”

  “If you keep the land that goes with the house, we might have to file with the Ministry of Agriculture since you’re a foreigner.”

  “But my father was a foreigner.”

  “Born here. There shouldn’t be a problem. It’s just some olive trees, a few hectares, and some grapes.”

  “Of course.”

  She said, “I expect you know the land.”

  “I’ve never been here before.”

  “Oh,” Maria said. She was a little shocked; she was used to families being together and knowing all one another’s business.

  I had a sense of being overheard. I didn’t want to be in the house anymore. But Maria was conducting a meeting, and her manners held us in place.

  “He was a remarkable man,” she said, politely.

  “I suppose so.”

  In a few minutes, carefully but not obviously, she placed me as married, no children—well, no living children. I worked in a museum, had been at Oxford; senhor doutor, for sure.

  “Will you go home now?”

  “No,” I said. I surprised myself.

  “If you want to sell the house, we can start that without you. If you don’t mind who buys it—”

  “I’ve got nothing to be sentimental about.” I was talking very loudly, so he could hear me.

  “If you don’t, lock it up and go away. Come back when it’s kinder weather.”

  I really hadn’t noticed until then, but it was a relief to blame heat for my sense of tiredness and the way my emotions sank and welled. I was ridiculously aware of sweat staining the one good dark suit I had with me, and how improper this was in front of Maria.

  “Someone spray-painted the tomb,” I said. “I ought to report it. I ought to have it cleaned.”

  She looked blank.

  “Marked. They’ve written on it, at the back.”

  She said, “Why would they write on a tomb?”

  “1953. I suppose it’s the date of something.”

  “People have such long memories around here,” she said. She stretched with grace. “Your father always said I was a wonderful lawyer because I didn’t have memories. Just files. That’s why he came to me in the first place.”

  The grace confused me. One minute she was buttoned up in her lawyer’s role, precise as a stamped document, and the next she stretched as though she had no self-consciousness at all.

  She’d done such intimate things—written down and packed away my father’s life, seen him alone when he couldn’t use social training to mask what he felt. She must know things I never knew. I told myself that was the only reason I felt such a quick sense of closeness.

  The dinner for the festa was in someone’s garage, just like the wake should have been, at a long wood table, with the aunts busying about with goat stew, roast suckling pig, little fritters of salt cod and potato, red local wine with a soft, dirty undertow, roast peppers, cut oranges, potatoes boiled and fried and roasted. The fan at one end took out the faint back taste of diesel and turpentine. Lean back, and the wall was sharp with chisels and blades, loud with a many-colored root ball of electric wiring.

  I sat near the head of the table, still in my one jacket in the heat, while everyone else was down to shirts.

  I drank. The wine went down light and almost sweet, too young to have lost the taste of grapes. The men came up to me, leaned across to me, grinned their bare grins at me, and told me a few things about my father. Much more than telling, they were asking—about his life abroad, his wife, his times.

  I wondered which of them had marked his grave, and whether that was all they meant to do. But my wondering drowned in the wine.

  The men told me their things: how the heat had affected the grapes, given the sudden wrong rain in June; about the emigrant who’d come back to find his palace under interdict, took a shotgun, and blew the head off the woman who did planning for the local council; about who was sick, who was well, which families went off hotfoot to Brazil and should have waited a year longer for the sake of seeing the new train, the new road, the new water pumps; about how Erminio’s pines burned just in time for him to plant eucalyptus with the new subsidy, and he’d got the insurance, too; about how his lawyer, that Maria, was looking good these days.

  They tugged me under the wine, into a small place with its huge assumptions, and the more I drank, the more I thought I understood and the more I laughed. Once, I lost track altogether and began laughing without a reason, and a moment later everyone joined me.

  So I mentioned my father: just those words, “o meu pai.”

  “He didn’t come here much.”

  “But my father—”

  There was a little well of silence in the party, but it soon filled with talk and noise.

  The tables never emptied. After fish and goat and pig there was cake with bilious roses and pale icing, and all this was strewn about the trestles with paper plates, glasses from the bar, big white bottles of red wine, jumbles of beers, and a small archaeological find of pig bones. There was a bit of singing, shouted down at first. I thought, head now insecure, there would have to be dancing. I was close to crying wine, but I’ve always been a controlled drunk; except for the few times I tried to kill someone.

  I’d dance, this wholly separate “I” that belonged only in this village on this night, with—Graça, perhaps, or Manuela, or Adelina, maybe a widow straight and keen in her sixties or a young woman with sweet, rounded breasts and belly and cheeks or an aunt as stringy as boiled goat. I’d dance like a Londoner, like a Portuguese, like a scholar, like a husband—whatever I was, I could dance it.

  The wine was my alibi for not entirely knowing where I was.

  There was also Anna in London, which seemed an impossibly distant place. I couldn’t even tell how we had come apart. I knew her warmth, her refusal of regrets, the way she used to turn in bed in her sleep as though she ached for touch, and yet the way she could play the brisk, rhetorical teacher on demand. I used to love those contradictions, feel tangled with them.

  We almost lost each other once before. She was to be a musician, at nineteen, going to Siena for months at the Chigana Academy: to perfect the viola, to learn to conduct. She went with such huge ambition. I saw her vanish through the gates of the academy into a shaded courtyard, and I went back to Britain, unsure of where we stood. She called me months later from a hospital in London; she’d turned a leg on slippery steps, and bone and tendon had pulled apart. She asked if she could be pregnant, because the doctors had asked. I didn’t think so, and I was right.

  Then, apart from a few parties, we went off to different universities and different lives. We met again, by the kind of luck that suggests someone was trying, in the study rooms of the Museum. She was now an art history student; she was not quite good enough for performing, she said, and she always acted on judgment, practical and ruthless. I was in my first six months acclimatizing to the manners and dust of the place. We lucked into passion, in all the hidden corners of the Museum, in the unchecked stacks, in the storerooms; the place was a great, gray continuum in which we were the only brilliant colors.

  Anna will be having dinner with someone I don’t like, an old friend, while I am away; so I thought.

  I felt hot, too, and clammy all at once. I took off my jacket, walked outside, and remembered too late I was close to the mountains, in the foothills of the Serra Estrela: the kingdom of rocks between the Portuguese forest and the Spanish desert.

  The wet shirt stuck to me, and showed off the skin. I shivered and I started to dance, cold and wet and moving just so the blood wo
uld keep turning in my head. I skipped to one side, to the other. I beckoned to Maria to join me, but she didn’t like to dance; or she was simply fastidious and not at all sure of me. I beckoned to the aunts.

  I remembered my father cold in the ground—except the body was above ground, and couldn’t be cold in the heat, and was marked out with that arbitrary number: 1953. I was sad as a bear.

  One of the older men, emperor’s face on a laborer’s body, must have felt pity for me: a party without goers. He sat on the metal bench outside the garage and talked up to me.

  “You mustn’t mind what they say about your father,” he said.

  “But they don’t say anything.”

  “It has nothing to do with you. Nothing. You weren’t even born.”

  “In 1953?”

  “They shouldn’t have touched the grave.”

  “I want to know—”

  He stood, the body that seemed so strong oddly uncertain on its joints. “No, no,” he said. “You don’t have to know things. We’re glad to know you.”

  The other men, a moment later, erupted out of the garage onto the road and joined me; and they brought the women with them.

  An old man had bagpipes, red cloth with yellow trimming, and he’d started to blow and pump. There was a big drum not keeping time. There was a confusion of moves and beats, and in between them the undertaker and his wife, both round and solid like bars of fat, dancing a quick, light, startling dance.

  Someone broke away with much whispering and went off to fetch something that couldn’t quite be mentioned; or so it seemed. I was in a circle now, throwing myself around, glad that the blood and muscles were moving again, that the wine was working out of me. Maria was moving around with a man, and they weren’t smiling.

  Shutters opened, windows opened on the sounds.

  And then from down the street there was the sound of shots, mortars, rocket fire; and nobody seemed to care. I had police nerves, city expectations; I thought there were guns heading to the party and I froze for a moment in the middle of the dancers. Then I looked up to the sky and realized someone had found the mortars for the next village festa and was setting them off in a patch of cabbages behind the road, one by three by one, so the raw music went to the beat of a drunk drummer and a sky with the tracer tracks and blasts of war.

  I was beating back death and shame with noise.

  The bagpiper started marching in place. The drummer came up behind him. The mortars announced a procession, so they’d have a procession: but not, this time, the procession of the dead. They turned off the main street, older people following, younger people starting to think about tomorrow, and they pitched up a hill through a tunnel of mimosas and pines.

  I tried to dance, to march, to get my balance back. Maria came up behind me and said quietly, “It’s a long walk.”

  I said, with soft, drunk sincerity, “Are you coming?”

  Maria shrugged.

  But nothing was going to stop the procession, even though now it was just the piper playing, and the drummer wavering from side to side on the track. The procession was about the habit of walking, the power to walk. The muscles kept going when the breath was short, and the breath allowed for farts and rallies from the bagpipes.

  I went with them.

  The track twisted around. There were olive trees, it seemed from the silhouettes. On a corner, two women were lighting the candles in a little shrine, faces lit gold from underneath. There were fireflies, brilliant intervals rubbed lightly on the darkness.

  At the top of the rise, the road fell back to the next village. I expected the sound of dogs, nervy hunting dogs yelping together, and maybe shutters closing, lights going off; but nothing moved.

  The music died. In the silence, I started to shiver.

  Christopher Hart left a message on the answering machine of Maria de Sousa de Conceição Mattoso. He left eight other messages that day with other lawyers picked out of the Yellow Pages, all saying that he needed advice on renting a house in the area, any area.

  Maria was the one who answered.

  She climbed to her couple of rooms up some narrow green stairs, next door to an engineer and a shoe repairer. She heard Hart’s voice: young but otherwise difficult to place, probably English.

  She kept the shutters closed while she called him back. So she first spoke to him in an office from some film noir, pools of light, shadows of blinds cutting up the wall.

  This Mr. Hart was in a hotel thirty miles away, and wanted to do the usual business: rents and leases. It had been usual for only twenty years or so, since the first foreigners came here, slipped south from the port-wine valleys or north from Lisbon and the misty pretensions of Sintra—a lost Dutch poet, an English diplomat, a truck driver with a passion for racing pigeons. They were so few and so unexpected that nobody opposed them; they were simply new neighbors.

  Twenty years ago, of course, you could assume a lawyer here was a man with a belly who condescended to the world. But Maria de Sousa de Conceição Mattoso never had a belly.

  She liked to think of the foreigners as her friends. She cared for them. Most of them came to her sooner or later, unless they were so sly they wouldn’t trust a local foreign lawyer on local foreign business, seeing Abroad as some kind of Masonic conspiracy; and they brought their world to her—in bits and stories, like presents. In turn, when they needed it, she explained things.

  These things might surprise you: She never kept office hours. She had no secretary, no receptionist, not even her degree on the wall. She went where she was asked, and when she was not asked, she spent time as she wanted. She did all this on ground that never slipped under her, ground she knew best: the town where she grew up.

  I want you to know Maria.

  She met Hart in the bar under the office. She liked the bar because she could drink coffee and watch the town square; but you mustn’t make the wrong picture out of those words. The square is really a gap with a garden, a concrete fountain, and a line of pollarded lindens, in among the fire station, the town hall, some shops, the insurance office, a bank, the agricultural adviser’s office, and a car park. It’s clean and shaded, but not picturesque at all.

  Hart drove something shiny and he parked it where the firemen park. She didn’t know the marque of the car, but it was so clean the firemen didn’t like to complain.

  He was tall, absurdly tall in the low bar; he had limbs high above eye level, a purposeful smile that everyone saw from below at an unkind angle. He was blond, well made, but somehow like one of those security people you see around heads of state on television: no personality, just purpose.

  “You’re not at all what I expected from a provincial lawyer,” he said, which may have seemed charming at his height.

  She offered him coffee; he wanted water.

  “This is a lovely part of the world,” Mr. Hart said.

  She said, “You know it well?”

  “I came here by chance,” he said. “But I’d like to stay. I was thinking about three months.”

  He sounded like a conversation class, people in rows who each ask how the others are, and each tell the others blankly that they’re quite fine. She was glad when he talked about needing two bedrooms, good roads, good water pressure, something “private but not remote”; business fitted his language best. She thought he was arrogant, too, not wasting anything personal on her.

  She asked if he was alone, and he looked as though he knew why she asked, which he didn’t. She asked what he did for a living, and he said he was a professor who wrote books; it seemed inquisitorial to insist on knowing his subject, his tastes, where he taught, where he came from. He seemed very young to be a professor.

  He had only one answer, anyway: to promise he’d pay all the rent in advance. “I have a lot to do,” he said.

  I lay in the bedroom at my aunt’s house, with a dim bulb in an amber shade and a wardrobe painted with blue, red, and yellow flowers and garlands and a Virgin Mary tucked almost out of sight by the do
or. I couldn’t sleep for the wine.

  I just had to find the bastard.

  I told myself all this was about my duty to the Museum. I’ve been around the Museum twenty years, so my interests and doings are part of the records and fabric of the place. I almost believed my own story, except that I knew perfectly well this was all about buying more time in Portugal.

  I could at least call universities. I never knew there were so many in Portugal: new, private, scientific, scattered all over Lisbon and half the country.

  I bought phone cards at the bar and called bureaucrats to a background of game shows, once a barful of midday wasters all roaring at what the Portuguese consider the ultimate joke: flamenco.

  These calls were diligent, not hopeful. Nobody recognized Hart’s name. Of course, if he had come to Portugal to write, to be on his own, he would not necessarily need a university; but I thought he might visit some library. If he did, nobody knew about it. I thought he might need to go somewhere he and his place in a hierarchy were recognized.

  I called the Museu de Arte Antiga, the Gulbenkian Foundation, the National Library—anywhere a man might go to check a reference dutifully, or to be addressed without irony as Professor Hart. I worried for a moment that curators might think I was warning them against Hart in some way by making such a strange call; simply to get through to any responsible voice I had to say I was from the Museum.

  But then I thought: The man’s guilty. I had the certainties of a cop.

  I could do nothing else on the phone. I couldn’t talk to the police, for obvious reasons. I couldn’t simply access some register of tourists that would tell me where the man had stayed or was staying. The Dutch police file had all these facts, but at the time, I couldn’t know that; and besides, the file was in another country and on the other side of walls.

  I did deduce one thing, though. There were big cities with universities, and I didn’t think Hart would go there: not Oporto, not Lisbon. He was not trying to draw attention to himself. He had not even left a forwarding address. Besides, his British university couldn’t suggest anywhere he had connections, since New Historicist views of the Dutch Golden Age are not big business in Portugal; he had no contact to visit.