Taking Lives

by Michael Pye

  Isabel said, “There’s nothing we can do now.”

  “I can wait,” Zulmira said fiercely. “I can.”

  I left them. I told myself I was only cluttering a place that was already confused, that I was somehow intruding. But so was everybody else in that corridor, bumping in and out of one another’s lives, sometimes edging accidentally up on a death. I did think to check the ward number before I left, and the name of the admitting doctor.

  I drove down into the town, bought an English-language newspaper, and ordered a coffee under the shades of a street cafe.

  I kept clinging to ideas, even quotations, to save me from what I saw in Isabel and Arturo: their fear and their certainties, both. I remembered, as a kid, being corrupted for months by a line in Graham Greene—it must be in The Human Factor—where someone says something truly wicked: that pity is the only truly adult emotion. So I thought being adult meant detachment, the right to appropriate someone else’s pain with your pity, to feel morally involved without feeling anything stronger. I know much better now.

  Someone passed me with those odd turtle gestures of neck and head that mean he wants you to know he thinks he’s recognized you, but isn’t sure he is entitled to talk. The someone passed again: Captain Mello.

  I put down the paper. Mello stood there, smiling.

  “Could I buy you a coffee?” he said.

  I could say only “Yes.”

  He commanded a chair, summoned the waiter with small, authoritative gestures.

  “They’ve done the best they can with the grave,” he said. “The marble drinks paint, unfortunately.”

  “I’m very grateful. I just don’t know why it was marked in the first place.”

  Mello said, “Some people have it in their hearts to forgive. Some don’t.”

  “You knew my father,” I said.

  “Before he left, of course.”

  “He never spoke much about those years.”

  “They’re gone,” Mello said. “For better or worse.”

  I said, “For worse?”

  “You look around you,” Mello said, and he raked a quite ordinary shopping street of Benettons and Body Shops. “You know things aren’t all better.”

  I saw a girl in a token skirt, with dazzlingly bare legs, two men playing drums and saxophone, windows full of pastel clothes, an old-fashioned barber, a bookshop full of academic titles, and a couple of other cafes spilling out into the street.

  “We have a drug problem, of course. You can’t park your car without some toxicodependent ‘helping’ you find a safe place, and staving in your windshield if you don’t pay him. You can’t walk all the streets anymore.”

  I saw tourists trying to make their green guides fit the sights.

  “And prices,” Mello said. “People say they were happier when you could get three sardines for ten escudos. Nowadays, money frightens them. They were happy in their place.”

  “My father wasn’t.”

  “There were always exceptions. And people who worked abroad, of course, were exceptions.”

  “People worked abroad because they were hungry here.”

  “Is that what your father told you?” Mello sipped his coffee. “I didn’t think so.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted this man’s version of my father. But he at least knew some of the story, and there was nobody else who would admit as much.

  “We knew you were here,” Mello said. “I meant to visit you before.”

  I looked at my watch. “Forgive me,” I said. “But I had arranged to see somebody in the hospital and I mustn’t miss visiting hours.”

  Mello said, “It took courage for your father to come back.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  For an odd moment, the sun behind him, he could almost have been a priest: someone with the power to release and forgive, not a cop’s power to seize and avenge.

  “I’ll let you go,” he said.

  Far down the street, past windows full of fake lace, and other windows full of ancient tin toys and dust, and a seed shop with a window full of grass seed in packets, I kept hearing Mello’s words: “courage . . . to come back . . .”

  Now the unspoken thought, the one that put gold around my father’s name, was always that he had left a dictatorship to come to London. It seemed a heroic, not just an economic thing to do, a matter of principle to get away from all the police spies and the regulated life. I didn’t want a policeman’s view of that, not even if he implied there was enough of the old fascist hierarchy left to make my father a hero just for being back where he belonged.

  Besides, I thought Mello was asking “Are you brave enough to come back?”

  I went to the bank, made my usual polite apology about not speaking Portuguese well, then asked to cash a Eurocheque for 35,000 escudos.

  In the next queue stood a bulky, formidable woman, felt-hatted, green-suited, obviously the chairwoman of something purposeful. She punched me quite suddenly in the ribs.

  “You speak Portuguese perfectly well,” she said.

  I could think of nothing to say except “Thank you.”

  The day turned cooler at last. A stranger’s car was parked by the chapel, back open and scales visible inside on a bed of sacking.

  The fields were deserted. Women crisscrossed in the village and the men clustered in the shade.

  I sensed something on the air. The ox, usually silent, bellowed once.

  Four square-built men came out in a scrum, women following with wide red plastic bowls, with plates, wine, eggs, and bread.

  I supposed the foreigners were meant to stay away, whatever this was. Hart would be up in his clean white house engaged in his own business; no reason he should even come down. I found out later that I was a rather different matter. Arturo had wanted to include me, but the other men weren’t sure how a man in such nice city shoes, city-shined, would react. And without Arturo, there was nobody who felt obliged or entitled to invite me.

  I didn’t go inside the house. The dogs ran about as though they had errands.

  A woman I didn’t know called across to me: “Senhor. Senhor João.” She didn’t think it quite proper that she should invite me, but she wanted to include me, since I’d done my duty by Zulmira and Arturo and Isabel, like a neighbor.

  The scrum went into a barn at the roadside, stone walls with an iron roof that roasted the evening air. I followed. The women and some of the older men stepped around the pine cones and needles and heather and wood on the floor, keeping out of the way.

  The pig was very young, very fat. The scrum threw themselves on the pig, one to clamp each thrashing leg and hold the animal down, a fifth to take a strong knife and cut the throat. It was very sudden, undignified but not brutal. Blood crazed the pig’s white skin, like a pretty martyr on a tile.

  The animal seized up still and rigid.

  I’d never seen this before. I wondered if it was simply a routine for these men, something they knew exactly.

  There was one who cut and slaughtered, while the others helped. He said he wasn’t an expert; I asked. He said he knew a bit about doing this.

  They laid the pig on the floor and took a blowtorch to the skin, over the sides and under the round buttocks, scraping the dirt from the trotters like a lady filing nails for the night, shaving the skin with trowels, cutting the ears and burning out the bristles. The fire was pale blue and I smelled gas, burnt bristle, the wet ocher shit the pig dumped in its last moment. Someone thought to stuff its ass with paper and a cork.

  Then they took pine sticks and needles on a pitchfork and lit them, and perfumed smoke rolled up in the shed. They put the fire all over and around the pig, so it lay in a pool of flame and smoke and ash, the snout and mouth fallen apart in a loose smile. Each fork of burning pine was carefully tamped down. The white soot danced in the air.

  They took heather and brushed the pig’s skin.

  “Makes it tastier,” someone said in my ear. “The fire, I mean.”

 
I nodded.

  The animal was still entire, like a stuffed thing or a carved pig, its skin blistered with a little gold and a little black. The smell now was sweet and resinous, except for the burnt hair that caught in the nose.

  The men laid the pig out on a scrubbed bench and carried it into the light. They took brushes and they worked the body clean. It had a cooked color now, not ordinary pink and white.

  The slaughterer took a kitchen knife, washed it, whetted it. He cut into the cheeks of the pig’s head, pulled the flesh away, and broke the mouth open. Blood rushed away: vermilion blood, shockingly dark, over long rows of small teeth and a loose tongue. The effigy of a pig was suddenly a real carcass again.

  Someone pushed a glass of spirits in my hand. It burned my stomach and settled it. So I didn’t turn away. I respected the practice, the method of these men, although one was rubbing the pig’s buttocks and grinning. Everyone laughed, shifted, like a party that has just become a party with the first broken glass and the first drunk laugh.

  The laughs disturbed me.

  The slaughterer cut out the anus of the pig, a neat and new round hole, and tied up the intestine. He cut a circle in the middle of the belly. No blood ran.

  Then the knife went through the pig’s two back legs to make holes for a double hook. The men picked up the carcass and roped it to a beam in the shed, so it hung head down and just above the ground. The pig’s face, now the tongue was gone, the gristle of the nose carved out along with the jaw, was a drunk grin of blood.

  The laughing man ducked in with his own little knife. He ran a finger down the two rows of nipples on the young sow’s belly. He sawed one off, rolled it between his lips, then chewed it and spat it out. He burst into kid’s laughter.

  Now I wanted to look away. Someone pushed another glass of spirits on me and I drank it.

  The slaughterer began to cut between the pig’s back legs, a careful, delicate line through the white of the fat, down and down. I went forward to see more clearly and more closely. He left his knife stuck in the flesh of a back thigh for a moment.

  He took an axe to the breastbone. As the axe broke through, there was a fall and rush of blood that splattered into the red plastic bowls and colored them black. I stood back.

  He opened the caul of the belly, and the intestines began to fall, plump, white, and shining. When they broke and stank, he tied them. He put his hands into the cavity and worked the guts out with the sucking sounds of a vacuum breaking.

  The shed was impossibly hot. My mind was roaring with the spirits. I couldn’t tell what I thought anymore: if somehow I had a window into some past, if the prospect of blood excited me, if only the methodical ways of the butcher kept me from being entirely revolted, if I wanted to work the carcass myself, or if I wanted to forget I had ever watched a knife carefully go into a belly.

  I wanted to say something urban: that if you eat meat, you’d better be prepared for how you get it. But I had nobody to bother with a cliché like that. I was alone with the magical transformation I had seen, that everyone else thought was ordinary and banal: from a live, screaming pig to an effigy, from a mess of organs to something now cleaned and trimmed that belonged in a freezer, or a butcher’s shop. Life turned into a menu in a half-hour.

  They pulled out the flat, shining liver, and the kidneys lying in their vast caul of fat. They took a saw and cut down the back of the pig to divide it.

  I saw Christopher Hart watching from the doorway.

  A killer watched a killing. He was startled, he told me afterward. He’d got used to a green place, quiet, nice swimming pools, an available woman who liked stories, and here was a caricature of his own regular modus operandi. He was practical, too, when he killed. He loved change, not the killing that made it possible. He knew about the smells inside a body, the ones that were prickling in my nostrils. The blowtorch and the pine needles were a new idea.

  He caught the sense of party: wine, fire, blood. He had never felt such a perfect stranger. The scales in the car said this was a simple economic transaction, but it was more than that: a victory over want, and even a little dangerous.

  The carcass was cut almost in half. The butcher had one last job: to take his knife first, then an axe, and sever the clotted head from the neat sides of pork above it. He swung the axe and someone held the head.

  There was a procession then: the limp sides of pig thrown over shoulders, the liver hanging from a slim white rope of organs, the head, the tub of intestines. The blood had gone already.

  I was hot drunk, with an unreliable look. Hart watched me. In a minute or two, the women brought the blood back from the fire: clotted like the skin on paint, to be chewed with spikes of raw garlic and a dress of olive oil, along with salt cod and boiled eggs and broa.

  I ate. I snatched at the blood and the cod. I suppose I never looked more vulnerable.

  “You don’t want to drive, ” Hart was saying. So naturally I wanted to drive more than anything, wanted to drive to the sea and the mountains all at once, and fast.

  Hart said, “You’d better get some coffee.”

  “Fuck coffee,” I said.

  He said, “Give me the car keys.”

  So I took the keys and settled in the driver’s seat, ready to race away. It was so easy for him.

  I started the car and slipped down the hill. By luck, I only grazed the low wall between road and valley. I pulled back and took the next bend too wide, trying to run away from the rocks. The trees stumbled about in my line of vision.

  I knew this was wrong. The light had gone tricky and fussy, clouds over trees, not enough to define the sides of a road that lacked white lines. I was aware I needed to swing to left, to right, to run the bends accurately; I had driven this road often enough to know its character, if not its details.

  I knew all at once I couldn’t make it.

  There were headlights up close on my tail, blinding me. I couldn’t stop suddenly. I couldn’t see a place to stop. I couldn’t go on with the valley falling away to one side, straight down over ribs of rock and old tree roots. I could hardly hold the road but I was being pushed to go faster.

  The lights were on top of me now, lights that made my head ache like blaring music. I thought I felt a slight impact, a nudge forward.

  An ordinary macho would have wanted to overtake me, leave me behind. This driver stayed on my tail.

  As drunks do, I had a sudden moment when I understood exactly what was happening. I saw a side road signposted up ahead, and I cut off up its steep ruts.

  The engine stalled.

  The car with the ominous lights went by.

  I put on the handbrake and my head fell on the wheel. The sound of the horn woke me up.

  I was still stupid, you understand. I let the car run backward to the road. I stopped there for a moment before, very slowly, another car crept around the bend with its lights full on.

  The sun came out, low and brilliant.

  Hart said, “Are you all right?”

  “What the hell are you doing following me?”

  “You’re drunk. I didn’t want you to kill yourself.”

  “You nearly killed me on the road. I couldn’t see.”

  Hart didn’t answer for a bit.

  “I said, you nearly killed me.”

  He said, “I’ll drive you back. Leave the car.”

  It’s a wonder how reason hides reality. I truly believed, after that, that somehow he had saved my life.

  That was when Anna arrived. She paid off the taxi, had a coffee, found out which house I was using; the barman spoke rough French. She’d asked if she could buy some of the bay leaves hanging in the bar, leaves gone brass-brown in the dry air, and he’d given her some. She used them to beat the air into a breeze.

  We used to share moments like this. She baked in the shade, smiling when people went past, let her eyes fill up with all the various greens that ran up and down the mountain. There were so many cicadas rustling the air it seemed they made a wind of
sound, a machine of some kind coughing like an old man in a bar corner.

  I know Anna. The moment it was too late to cancel her ticket, she’d started to relax. She couldn’t waste the money, after all. She missed me, I know, missed touch, the possibility of regulating her life by someone else’s presence. It wasn’t romance; it was how things were.

  But she couldn’t really see Formentina, and she knew it, and regretted it. Her colleagues said they dreamed of a life like this— green, not wasteful, not taken up with spending. Then they jumped in their Fords and went to spend plastic at a mall. They wanted healthy bodies, which they bought by the hour in a gym. They acquired peasant homes, but clean, sealed, lifeless peasant houses. They liked their world refurbished.

  She, Anna, was just like them. She grinned at the fact.

  She watched a woman washing at the public trough, a block of dark-green soap rubbed on white linen, the linen scrubbed and rinsed and rinsed again; and a man pulling a cart of greenery and brownery from the roadside, grasses and bracken and vetch. She wanted to talk to someone but she realized she was, in the most literal sense, none of their business: a woman in neat white cotton, a bit too smart, inexplicably fallen from the sky on their chapel steps and seeming to want nothing at all.

  Sooner or later, even if it was only for an afternoon with too much wine, she knew I was going to think about living here.

  But she felt comfortable in the shade, immobilized by comfort. She wasn’t even watching the road when I drove up in some neat, shiny Opel, followed by a straw-doll man, lanky blond, in a VW Golf.

  She saw me go back to confront the blond, and she says we seemed to be fighting, but the words didn’t carry.

  She got up, dusted down her skirt, held the bay leaves before her.

  “I’m early,” she said. “I could come a day early, so I thought I would.”

  I walked to her. It was the sun, I think, that kept my movements sensible and slow.

  “Anna,” I said.

  She put her arms around me, and I put my arms around her a moment later. I tried not to breathe out whisky.

  “I missed you. I thought I’d come early.”

  “I’m glad you did.”