Taking Lives

by Michael Pye

She felt uneasy. Hart was far away, but she’d seen him here, and his presence or absence had started to matter to her. She was ready to make a story out of anything she found.

  Under the mimosa were burned sheets of paper. That’s not unexpected; people dump rubbish out here because it’s easier than finding a legal way to leave it, cars sometimes, tires and metal angles often, drums and plastic and cans and the five-liter wine bottles, papers that nobody misses much.

  This leaf of paper was thicker than usual, though, thick as a photograph. Its surface was badly blistered. She picked it up and turned it over.

  She couldn’t read it, of course. But she was sure for a moment she was looking into eyes.

  M y house was under siege: buses lining the road, blocking the tight corners, letting off a muddle of old people in good clothes who all tried to stand in the shade. I watched from my window like a village spinster.

  The old herd seemed to remember a purpose suddenly, and they moved off up the hill. I thought the path would break them, but they went steadily forward and upward, hauling their bodies ahead: hundreds of steps, irregular and sharp-edged so you had to come at them with your mind alert and work your calf muscles to go up.

  It was too hot to dress, too hot to move. I stood at the window in shorts, trying to make sense of the old people moving with such grace and purpose. They were going to a cross that bore a Christ with the wounds painted in.

  They had found their own speeds now, women in black linen, men in clean shirts. The path zigzagged on the slope, so they seemed to fill my whole field of vision, to take a quiet landscape and fill it up with effort. Some women went on their knees. Some went on bare, bloody feet. A few stalled like flies caught on paper, and some looked back to call to the others, but mostly they went forward in a serious, concentrated quiet.

  My father was never part of this, I think. But I can’t be entirely sure. He came from here, and he knew about these things; they could be buried deeper than a son can ever find.

  I thought I heard someone at the door. I went to open it, and there were five peaches piled on the doorstep.

  Hart watched the pilgrims from his steps. He was thinking he’d chosen a place that was all too particular and special.

  He told me:

  Before, he’d always chosen places that were nice, neat generalizations, the kind people choose when they run away to spend their money, with mansions, often pink, and gardens with palm trees and pools, people endlessly tan, just enough booze and drugs to ease you through days in the shade and the water. There might be boats like floating houses, too, and servants attuned to whims of iron. These, usually, were his places of choice. People didn’t talk about salvation, much less crawl on their knees about it. It would have been bad manners.

  He’d chosen average people, too, with credit. Christopher was turning out different, not all what he had seemed: which was a fixed quantity, anonymous, professorial, predictable, who had half a sabbatical year left that anyone could steal. This other Hart interested people: museums, even police.

  Well, he was interesting enough now. His life had been stolen. He was fairy-tale stuff: alive and dead at the same time.

  He tasted the sweat on his forearms. He went to the shower and let the brown water stain him. The past few days, the world had dried up so much that water now came unfiltered, because filters could impede the slow flow.

  He didn’t want anymore to see the bent, dark figures who were coming back down the scorched hillside, as though they’d found something at the top.

  Maria de Sousa de Conceição Mattoso stood in the doorway. She didn’t announce herself; she was just there, a silhouette against strong sun.

  “I was passing,” she said.

  Hart brought her in.

  “Everything O.K.?” she said. “Tudo bem?”

  “I guess,” Hart said.

  “I thought I’d call by. I was on my way to—”

  “Yeah.” His mind was too busy to let any real reaction through.

  “You can get down to the dam this way,” she said. “There’s a beautiful lake.” She seemed bird-boned and slightly at an angle to the room. “It’s very beautiful there,” she said.

  He said he was sure.

  She sat on a wooden chair. He expected her to cross her bare legs, skirt riding up to where the chair cut her narrow thighs. But she sat as though she were in a classroom.

  He said, “Would you like some tea?”

  They both laughed. He thought how English he was being. She didn’t think at all.

  He didn’t have time for this. She had all the time in the world. He had to make up a performance, and she was just curious, waiting for anything he might say that would tell her more about him.

  “I’ll make some tea,” he said.

  She sat quietly in her chair, eyes bright. She watched him take water from the tap for the kettle.

  “There’s the spring above here,” she said. “It’s better, I think. You get water up where nobody lives. No pollution.” Then she thought she might be too insistent and she said, “Not even the snakes.”

  He stopped what he was doing.

  “The snakes. People say they get in the water and poison it. With their skin, I suppose.”

  “You believe that?”

  Maria said, “I don’t believe anything very seriously.”

  He set the kettle on the stove.

  “I mean,” Maria said, “sometimes it’s good to believe in snakes in the water and usually it isn’t. It’s like ghosts.”

  “You believe in ghosts?” But he wasn’t really looking for an answer, Maria could tell. He was looking to fill up the space in the room with talk.

  “Do you?” he said.

  He sat down again, this time back in his chair with legs splayed. She liked the fact that he was strong but still a little awkward, like a young stork.

  She smiled. “People have time to believe all sorts of things around here,” she said. “We don’t have anything else to do except make up stories.”

  It was an invitation, of course. He knew that. He just wasn’t sure, this minute, how to respond—as Arkenhout, as Hart, as himself. His breath was a little deeper now, his pulse a little up.

  She stood up and went to the window. On the way, she had to brush past him, her brown arm against his.

  “You ought to keep the shutters closed,” she said. “You need to keep the hot air out in summer. Once it’s in, you never get the house cool again.”

  He said, “I guess.”

  He watched her bend to pull the shutters into place and bolt them, her small bottom angled up. She moved as a flirt might move, but entirely without self-consciousness. She neither smiled nor stopped herself smiling.

  The room was very dark.

  “You could put the light on,” she said.

  He didn’t move.

  “I’m afraid I’ll bump into the furniture,” she said.

  “You won’t.”

  “It’s after the sunlight,” she said. “I can’t see anything.”

  He didn’t move from his chair. She picked her way across the room as though she was trying to avoid him.

  He didn’t know the rules. She didn’t know there were any rules.

  “People like having you here,” she said. “They like having a senhor doutor down the road, a man with degrees.” She must be sitting down now, making polite, even deferential conversation.

  “You don’t find it dull here?” she said.

  He wondered what harm it could do to tell a single story: pick out a Bahamas night and dress it up with moon and night flowers and drums, tell her about some tourist moment in Vienna, maybe. It would be just a postcard, nothing personal.

  He started to think the whole rousing moment was over. It wasn’t.

  He felt her fingers start in the hollows of his neck and trace across the muscles of the shoulder, then down his arm.

  “I can read you,” she said.

  She covered him with her body, lightly, holding
back at just less than arm’s length; then she let her arms fold and she lay pressed against him. He could make out her eyes in the dark, a shine of faint gray. All the rest was touch.

  She was fragile bones sticking him, a child or a runner. She was a wing more than a hand. She was hands asking questions. Then he felt the full warmth of her, and her wonderful persistence, as though she were going under his skin to find him. He found himself arching and moaning and turning as though he were doing a whore’s tricks under her weight. She pulled his head back by the hair.

  He stood up and took her into the bedroom, wrapped around him. She fitted his strength exactly. She kept her lips together on his neck, the breath playing and prickling there.

  She pulled off her dress briskly. His clothes seemed cumbersome by comparison. She lay carefully on the bed, expectant but patient in the half-light, hardly moving. He thought maybe she’d run out of play, that all she wanted was the waiting and the darkness and the possibilities. He’d have understood that. He felt the same way about killing.

  But he was wrong. He went to bury his face in her, and taste the salt in her sex, but she pulled him alongside her. He couldn’t tell if she wanted him, or the peace she might find when she’d left him and gone away again, but she wanted to fuck immediately and furiously.

  He fell on her, caught her on the mattress with his whole weight. She came back up against him with much more strength than he’d guessed. She found him and took him in. There was a second of child-like surprise: that they were joined at all. Then there was nothing but bellies smacking and sucking against each other, the roar of their breath in their throats, the mutual heat.

  Afterward, he watched her breathe, her small, round stomach shifting above coarse black hair and her sex.

  “You always lived here?” he said.

  “Always.”

  “You never wanted to go, I don’t know, to Fortaleza, or San Salvador? Or Rio?”

  She opened her eyes and smiled.

  “Fortaleza,” he began, “is—”

  He knew enough to panic at what was happening to him.

  She still had to go to the spring for water, a hundred cold liters in plastic bottles pitching about in the back of her car. The only way back was through Formentina again.

  I happened to be sitting on the steps of my house. So she stopped, of course. We said a few empty things, and she drove on, but she was still printed on my retina, like the sun when you stare too long.

  Her own thoughts, though, were all domestic. She tried to imagine what it would be like when getting water for the house, going to the hypermarket; all these jobs were no longer services or duties or favors done for others, just her own necessities. Life on her own would lack a lot of moral gilding.

  She had rehearsed what to say at home, what the others would say and carefully avoid saying, but in the end it slipped out while talking over coffee: that she was going to leave the house.

  Her mother said, “You don’t have to.”

  “It’s time I did.”

  “You mustn’t go on my account,” Amandio said.

  “It’s not because of anyone. I just think I ought to have my own house.”

  “You’ll have to run it,” my mother said. “And you’ll be alone.”

  “I suppose I will.”

  “It’s not good for people to be alone,” she said, as though she’d only just found the antidote and was not sure it could last. “You need your family. You’ll have to have someone to do the cleaning and cooking.”

  Amandio said, “You ought to go out more.” He’d managed a variation on his smile: something avuncular but not disinterested.

  “I do,” Maria said. “I always do.”

  And that was that: a life turned upside down in a minute. It wasn’t just a change of address. People live in their families here, in the net of who was born to whom; that’s their acquaintance, their gossip, their expectation of dancing, drinking, and eating. You don’t often break the net, unless you marry or leave for the big city. Maria was not leaving.

  Her mother took away the coffee cups and said, “Some of us have work to do.” She bustled down to the shop, set herself in a back room behind tiles, pipes, brushes, screws, tools. Amandio went down to the shop, too, but he didn’t stay; he had business somewhere else. Maria’s mother surrounded herself with invoices, tax papers, receipts, with catalogs of pavement and lawn mowers, classified lists of bidets, specifications, with anything that made immediate sense to her. She glared, flirted, barracked with the customers who caught her eye.

  She was furious. Maria was falling out of the ways that things are done, and that could not end well.

  The police called on me the next morning, the same Captain Mello who heard my complaint about my father’s grave.

  He was courtly, almost. He told me Formentina was lovely, that he was glad to breathe the air of the serra. He said he was sorry to trouble me—my Museum connections apparently put me among the senhores doutores, the ones who expect such apologies—but he wondered if I could just confirm the identity of Christopher Hart. Yes, the professor who had taken the house up the hill. I must know him, surely, from London.

  I said, carefully, “I know his work. I wouldn’t say I know him personally.”

  “Ah,” said Mello. “But you asked for him when you came here. You found him. You did find him, didn’t you?”

  I said, “I don’t understand. There’s no doubt, you know. That’s Christopher Hart. Seventeenth-century specialist, Dutch interests. A man trying to get noticed in the shadow of Simon Schama. He’s working on—” but I couldn’t say precisely what, even in this odd atmosphere of casual conspiracy and plainclothes confession. “On genre painting.”

  “Yes,” Mello said.

  “Is there some kind of problem?”

  “Not at all,” Mello said. “A routine inquiry.”

  “The Museum has its own interest in Professor Hart,” I said. “I don’t suppose you could give me any idea—”

  “I won’t take up any more of your time,” Mello said. But he didn’t move for a moment; he studied me. “I knew your father,” he said.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “I thought you came here for your father,” Mello said. He sounded disappointed in me. “I think the grave has been cleaned,” he said. “But you probably know that.”

  “I haven’t been to the grave.”

  Again, he seemed disappointed.

  “I was glad your father came back,” he said.

  “I had mixed feelings. You can imagine.”

  “He had to come back sometime. He couldn’t stay away forever.”

  “That’s what we’re all supposed to think, is it? That we have to come back to the native soil?”

  He shook his head.

  He said, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be taking up your time. You must have many things to do.”

  He walked to his car very straight-backed and thoughtful.

  Within minutes, Hart came bounding down the steps, as though he’d counted to one hundred, two hundred, five hundred after seeing Mello drive away.

  “You want to go for lunch?” he said.

  I said, “The police were asking about you. Whether I knew you were Christopher Hart.”

  He didn’t pause. “Really?” he said. “What did you tell them?”

  “I told them who you are.”

  “Pity,” he said. “I fancied being the man of a thousand faces. Someone like that. Not just some English professor.”

  “I’ll call him back,” I said.

  He said, “Don’t bother.” He said it with surprising force.

  Hart was in another pool, swimming steadily up and down in perfect, chlorinated solipsism. The pool glinted, the universal shiny blue of pools, between roses and herbaceous stuff.

  Around it stood the English, gins aloft, assumptions polished, murmuring that the police had asked the oddest questions about this Mr. Hart.

  “Did they ask you, dear?” someone as
ked me.

  “No,” her husband said to me, firmly. “They wouldn’t. They never do ask the friends.”

  There was a self-consciously well-kept man in his sixties, overworked muscles kept assembled by skin like carpet, whose younger wife was watching Hart’s back as he slid away and back again, away and back again. They had West Midlands accents.

  “Love it here,” the man said to me. “Delightful. Really delightful. Delightful. You’ll fit right in.”

  His wife was smiling at Hart’s back.

  “He’s a professor of art history,” I told his wife, helpfully.

  “I’ll have to ask him about Portuguese art,” the wife said.

  Her husband said, “What fucking art do these people have?”

  Hart swam on, hearing nothing but the water and the occasional bubble of chat. He knew he was being watched, of course.

  He pulled himself up from the water at the deep end.

  “You swim very well,” said the Midlands wife.

  He wanted something more literal, more crude than that. He wanted her to take a proper risk. So he went back under the water, feeling clean and distanced, and waded out at the far end.

  The wife looked suddenly red.

  And Hart came back, dry and dressed: the odd man out. He had an audience of all the expatriates, not just one hot-faced wife. The police put an odd stardom on him.

  It was safe to be Christopher Hart for a while. Christopher Hart was identified by everyone’s attention, by the senhor doutor from the Museum, who had no reason to lie. No officious, persistent cops in Holland need ask questions. They could feel pity for Mrs. Arkenhout, still strung out on her loss of ten years ago, still mourning in a mad way.

  And if Hart was definitely Hart, that meant he had not lied to his mother at all. He took a perverse satisfaction in that.

  But he had to use the time. This improvisation, like the last one, was more trouble than it was worth. The next move had to be secure and certain.

  He didn’t smell enough money, certainly not enough credit, around the pool. The expatriates had the price of a house sold in Britain less the cost of living for the months or years they had been in Portugal.

  The Portuguese had an ominously settled look. They seemed to account for one another.