by Michael Pye
Mello shook his head.
He said, “It’s a very un-Christian act. Unforgiving.”
His concern seemed gentle, unlike a policeman, and intense. He said my name again. “John Costa. Such a pity.”
I said, “Should I make a report—”
“No, no. That won’t be necessary.”
“But you don’t even know where the grave is.”
“We have the report. We’re doing everything we can.”
I thought this must be the standard bromide for a distressed son, but he was watching me as though he expected to find something out.
“I didn’t understand the figures,” I said. “1953.”
He said, “Vandals. They don’t understand what they write half the time.”
“But you have an idea, don’t you?”
I was brushed off and out of the barracks in minutes, an exercise of authority I hardly noticed until I was in the car park.
And then I was alone in my father’s country, perfectly ignorant, with everything to discover.
It was one of those rare days when you snatch back a little of a child’s most ordinary privileges—to wonder, to chase after wonders, to put together a landscape, a history, a place as you want out of stories, dreams, misunderstandings, and what you see. There are no experts, revisionists, conference papers, no catalogues raisonnés and guidebooks and politics to cut in between you and sensation. Everything is sharp, and not yet spoiled with words.
I thought Mello could have told me my father’s story. Then I put the thought aside, and I gloried in the high colors and the brilliant light.
I made an expedition. I followed the Mondego River down past castles, green rice paddy, down to the sea. Then I went north a little, where the coast is rocks and alcoves, but it wasn’t a day for that kind of craggy wildness. The sea just persisted at the foot of cliffs.
South, then. There was a fishing village with rooms to let that opened onto a vast crescent of a bay, white sand filled in with more white sand, cabanas in striped canvas rows along a city of board-walks. The place smelled of coconut oil and iodine. There was a circus tent closed up and waiting for the evening, and a few fishing boats with high, bright prows and sterns pulled up by the sea of car-park tarmac.
Everyone edged out on the hard, hot sand. Beyond that, the sea stopped them: gray, busy with kelp, alarming small children with its cold and its spitting and sucking.
A father was taking his son to the edge of the water, showing him the whole ocean. The boy stared, and wouldn’t move.
We don’t have children, Anna and I. We never had the clean mercy of a scientific explanation, not until it was too late; we thought it was a pain we had to share and tend. We came to confuse it with love, I think now.
I couldn’t see the ocean anymore, just the concrete blocks, pink and white like a matchbox town, that ringed the wide sands and the sea.
I saw Hart, glimpsed him really, in a serious working port, with freighters riding rusty and high. He must have taken a wrong turn. He glared at me, and accelerated out of town over the long, high river bridge which is an estuary wide.
I followed, of course. He had to think I was on his trail, always. He had to be unnerved.
Below the road were salt pans, all as regular as Dutch fields, squared off and neat; but instead of a uniform green, they were sometimes full of dark water, sometimes almost white with salt, with a red tinge and a black vein in the white. There were buildings scattered, too: huts, stores, refuges.
For a man who’s angry, this landscape is a melodrama. Someone running away could scrabble down to the salt water, fade from one dike to another, hole up in a brick hut with nothing to drink or eat for miles. Death by condiments. He would drown, sucked down by the salt. He would be blinded by the whiteness of the salt and stumble into machines or deep water or the path of a car.
After the bridge, Hart turned off down cobbled roads, then a main road, then a kind of wrecked avenue with sea pines and yucca and the occasional sandwich shop, the sort of road that always leads to some superannuated seaside town.
I saw just a man running. I didn’t imagine how he was reinventing me in his mind.
At the end of the avenue, he lucked into surfer heaven: a long, narrow beach that ran away forever, slammed by waves, sea curling back as translucent as glass but with fine white lines of spray. The buildings stopped. Gulls massed. There were only occasional stark black figures in wet-suits. Once he was on the beach itself, he could see only sand and the ocean, and people playing in the ocean, and a black dog on its hind legs trying to wrestle back the waves.
He spat on the sand three times to pardon himself.
The farther he walked down that beach, into a distance of spray and light, the more he fancied staying there. He threw himself into that sea, worked his way out until he could feel the muscle of the water under him, and rode it back to shore. And when he was scattered back on the sand, there was still nothing beyond the glinting screen of the ocean, and the long procession of white sands. No distractions. No problems.
I wanted to be his problem.
He had no choices, either; I know that now. On that mile of spare sand, he was still the boy from an orderly childhood, rectangles of green dirt, straight-sided canals, greenhouses flickering at night like ghost industries. He had only the Arkenhouts for parents, and if ever he stopped moving on, he would fall back into the scrubbed regularity of their world and it would scour and sweep and shine him to death.
I watched him on the beach. I found the right road by luck, away from all those families on the big beach, and the girls in brash shorts working the truckers on the main road; but then, there aren’t many destinations on this coast. I saw his car parked among surfers’ vans; and then there was only one direction he could walk, on the edge of the sea.
I liked his agitation. But he didn’t see me as a guard on his life, or a Nemesis; and he wasn’t ready to crack. He saw me as the kind with a job, an office, a wife to tug me back to London. I’d leave him, soon. Besides, he had all the venom of an adolescent’s fine feeling: he was better than anyone settled. Settling was compromise. He didn’t compromise.
He waded out again into the water. I saw him flail at the waves, not swimming but fighting the ocean; and then he was washed back to the sands very suddenly on the fierce run of a riptide. He sat down on the sands.
He saw me waving from a distance. He knew nobody else, so he knew it must be me, even though I was far too distant and indistinct to be identified.
He stared out to sea. Civil servants came and dropped hints to him about stolen property, and then would not leave him alone. Christopher Hart might as well have had lovers.
And there was such a choice, a whole tribe he could have culled: solo barflies, solitary walkers, the disengaged, people abroad for reasons they’d forgotten; men out trying to think up a new life; the ones too absentminded to keep friends, or too vicious, the dumb but creditworthy, the wanderers who might someday stop long enough to decide what they were pursuing—a people of lost boys who catch too many planes. But he hadn’t stolen one of these shiftless, rootless lives. He’d stolen Hart, and Hart was of interest to others.
He could always steal another life. He would get it right this time. There must be some expatriate whose sudden exit would surprise nobody.
He wondered again about me.
John Costa had a wife in London, a life, a job, certainly a mortgage: obligations and maybe loves.
But that meant John Costa was sure to have a passport and credit and all the vital things. John Costa was a museum keeper who dropped hints about stolen property, who might have reason to disappear. The longer I stayed, he reasoned, the less likely I would simply go back to the office. I was up to something.
Apparently, he did think I might have dreams and fancies. But he thought they were just cinema, finished without consequences when the lights went up. He didn’t know much about movies, either.
It was the first time he thought abo
ut killing me. He promised me later he dismissed the thought almost at once.
By the time he caught up to me, suggested lunch, asked advice on which among the unfamiliar fish he should eat, bought me a glass of white port like some tourist with a sweet tooth, he was almost adhesive.
“I ought to be flattered,” he said. “You following me. I thought I was just an anonymous professor.”
“I just happened this way. I’m hardly invading your privacy—”
He said, “You’re here, though. You wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.”
I shrugged and poured vinho verde.
“If you weren’t here,” he said, as though he was thinking matters out, “nobody would know me.”
“Maybe not.”
I didn’t want to have some sophomore talk about identity, or be eyewitness to some premature midlife crisis.
“But if you’re here—” he said.
“You know I can’t leave until we have things sorted out. The Liber Principis.”
“Really?” he said.
“You know that.”
“I can count on that?” he said. I thought he was being ironic.
We took the fast road home, a two-car convoy under a turning sky that was no longer blue and bright, but sepia, smudged with black. There was a smell of baked air. Where light ought to flicker through the trees there was only smoke, until the road pulled us on, out of the woods and onto the flat, wet rice paddy. Then the smoke stood behind us like a wall.
Hart stopped abruptly at a roadside castle: battlements, underpinnings, a church built inside the walls.
I overshot for a moment, then quit the road fast, alarming the posse of small cars running behind me.
The castle was stuck with a crown of bright blond stone, newly fixed, and everything below had been hollowed into the hill: caves, sooty cooking places, old holes for latrines, stones rounded by a hundred years of romantics who wanted a seat with a view, enclosed by an outer wall that had mostly become a high grass dyke. I wandered. A goat stared at me. I trailed around the entire outer wall and climbed to the stone enclosure at the top of the hill.
I didn’t look for Hart. I assumed he would want to find me.
I crossed into the inner keep, down onto a floor of set stone rubble. I could see nobody, hear nothing moving except the cars streaming past on the road below. The stillness bothered me.
I ran the steel steps and gantries up to the battlements. The view was red earth and the dusty greens of summer trees, and villages like clusters of white boxes. But I wasn’t looking properly. I was listening, and looking out of the corner of my eye for Hart.
The man had nowhere to hide. He had no reason to hide. There weren’t even pools of shadow to hide him under a high, overhead sun. His absence hung in the air.
I stood against the cross-shaped arrow slit in a corner of the battlement, looking down and around the circle of the keep. I thought I heard a door close. But a ruin has no doors that close with that tight, quick sound.
The afternoon heat came down like hammers on my mind. I told myself that was the problem.
I walked the battlements, checking where I could see down into the keep or on to the hill around the castle. I came down quickly to the main tower, and the way out.
Hart’s car was still there.
I couldn’t imagine what he might be doing. I assumed he’d turned off to see the castle as a distraction, that he was playing the tourist for a moment.
I went back to the undercrofts of the ruin, the hollows and caves of the place. I went gratefully out of the sun. Papers blew about. A fine, small breeze worked the olive leaves on the hill.
I found a hollow behind the main cooking cave, and walked into it: just curious, I told myself, about the place. A dog flustered out, nervous and yelping. I turned back toward the sun.
Hart was standing in the entrance of the cave. He had a knife in his right hand, something solid in the left.
I said, “I thought I’d lost you.”
I couldn’t see the expression on his face.
He took the knife and began turning an orange in his hand so he could pare away the peel in a neat spiral.
“We’ll have to sort this out,” I said.
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m only interested in the Liber Principis. If we can just sort out—”
“I guess it interests everyone.” He didn’t know what he was saying, so he was perfectly deadpan.
I said, “We’d better go.”
He dropped the orange peel to the ground, where it glinted like oil in the sun.
“We can talk later,” I said.
As I went past him, I thought I felt something like a shiver across my hand.
Hart said, “I’m sorry.”
He smiled. I never saw a smile like that before.
In the car, I watched a fine line of blood open on the back of my hand. I wiped it away. I thought at first it must have been some accident I’d failed to notice, but my hand smelled of orange.
On the way back he drove kindly, so we moved in the lockstep of a convoy: safe, protected.
But he hated the idea of “protection.” He told me later he much preferred the idea of being pursued; it was less alarming than the awful, regulating persistence of goodwill.
He took a wrong turn. But it might not have been a wrong turn, so I followed. He ran several bends ahead of me, then felt obliged to slow for a while.
Two kids were hitchhiking at the roadside: stringy, blond, undressed, too young and foreign-looking and gigglingly innocent to be truckers’ tarts. He stopped.
The two blonds scrambled up to the car and smiled energetically, as though they didn’t know enough to calculate their appeal. He laughed back.
The kids wanted the next town but one. They packed in beside Hart. I could almost smell the oil and the baked blond skin on the girl and the boy; I was interested, too.
Hart showed off driving, of course.
But then he stopped the car suddenly and pitched both kids out onto the roadside. They looked startled at the failure of skin and charm. They stood while he drove off, and the girl gave him the finger.
Then he was the one, again, who suggested a drink. He came bounding down the steps before I could wash my face and change my shirt. A little above my house he slowed for a moment, settled his collar, arched his back, and then walked on as though he was distracted by all kinds of professorial thoughts. I watched the change.
He said, “Maria left me a note. The police have been asking where I am.”
“Did she say why?” I knew the Museum would have made no official complaint; we are discreet about sin in general, and the sin of theft implies the sin of inattention to security.
“Someone trying to find me, I suppose.” He shrugged. “It’s a good job I’ve got you to vouch for me,” he said brightly. “You’re official. You matter.”
“And you have the reputation,” I said. “We just have titles in the Museum. We just wear the titles for a while, nothing personal.”
He said, “But your being here, it makes things easier.”
Later he said, “The mountains close in on you after a while. You’ll see.”
“I like the mountains.”
He was restless like a boy in his chair. He stood up, went to the window, paced a little, said his apologies, and went out to walk down the crease of the valley.
He broke a stick from a dead bush and thrashed at brambles and tall grasses. A dust of yellow powder hung in the air. But on the way back, he remembered to turn to my house and he waved and grinned like a good holiday neighbor.
Four
Maria was reading a book about fire that summer. Someone must have left it in one of the houses for rent: a book full of diagrams and graphs, pictures of spiked plants from burned places. Some days, it filled whole afternoons.
The wind was coming hot from Spain each day, and in the afternoons Vila Nova was closed. Open a shutter, and the whole house would sink under the he
avy rush of the heat; you could bruise yourself on it. Even the smell of the town was cooked: pine and eucalyptus in the lumberyards, market trash, a thin fume of glue from the carpet factory, hot roses in dry gardens.
The foreigners were all pinned down by the heat, as you’d expect— too hot even to fret or feud and call a lawyer. So Maria could read about grass trees and orchids that flower only after fire, how animals don’t panic in fire, that they double back through the firewall to the safety of ground that has already burned. She read about hawks that fly into the smoke plumes to catch the escaping grasshoppers, and beetles that dance into fire itself, scramble down branches where the sap is still boiling and the wood is red hot. Even English beetles do this.
Fire was on everybody’s mind that summer. Only Hart and I were too foreign to be worried.
Maria was curious enough to go back to the site of the fire where she saw Hart dancing. She told herself she wanted to check the book, to see if ants came out to steal the hard poppylike seedheads of the eucalypt, if bushes broke into flower on scorched stems, and small, round mice came stirring up the ash. Maybe there’d be a grass tree or an orchid; she could dream.
The brambles were just spiked tangles of black string. There was a small new clearing, some uphill scars on old trees. She was glad the fire had been beaten back. Mountain people live the same way with snow and its sudden, deadly shifts, floodplain people with rivers; they’re nervous, and they like a little triumph.
She walked into the wood, reading the fire: how it moved, where it started. It had spread out from a single point, as a fan does, and it had stayed small enough for the point to be obvious.
It was Thursday, hunters’ day. Guns popped in the quiet, popped again and again. After lunch and wine, there’s a lot more ammunition used, a lot less blood spilled; anything moving is a target when you can’t quite see through the trees. Men start shooting eagles and wondering why the dogs can’t find them. They fill a cat with shot in the hope it might still turn out to be a rabbit.
She was in a clearing under the black knots of a burned mimosa. All the fire’s tracks led back here.