Taking Lives

by Michael Pye

It was the church that my father had told me about. I stood breathless.

  The tourists fussed on. I thought I heard horses wheeling nervously, held in place by figures in gray armor, metal grazing the ground, hooves and weapons. I thought I smelled horses, too: sweat and dung.

  But I didn’t just think this. I did hear and I did smell. I was not surrounded by ghosts, but by story, a story heard by a boy when he’s half afraid of sleep, when his father domesticates terror by telling him things he already knows by heart.

  “The entrance must be through the church,” Anna said, turning the Michelin pages.

  Cloisters of blue tile and shining orange trees. A circle of a church enclosed in a gilded lantern. Below the church, a box of plain stone and light, bare and odd.

  “Umberto Eco counted the steps,” Anna said brightly. “For Foucault’s Pendulum. He seemed to think the number mattered.”

  On the outer walls, stone flourished around windows, cut into sea stuff, coral and cables and astrolabes, then artichokes, then angels in armor, held up by an old bearded man and reaching up to a heaven of square crosses and battlements—built later, Anna told me from the guide, like the Renaissance cloisters and the aqueduct that stepped into the convent like a parade, and the buff and white hospital wings, all added to this core of my father’s particular meaning.

  “I think places like this are like Tarot cards,” Anna said. “They were just playing cards to start with, then people forgot how to play and now they think the Tarot is mysterious. They’ll tell fortunes by bus tickets next century.”

  Now I know the backsides of monuments very well, the bits that fail to fit; the Museum was full of them, a mad storehouse of things with the order and sense of the public galleries as a facade. I wanted to know what was private here.

  “You want to see the rest?” I said to Anna.

  She said, “Of course. It’s extraordinary.”

  “I mean the rest that the public can’t see,” I said. “I have my Museum credentials. It’s worth a try.”

  The women at the door made phone calls, and asked us to wait. We sat on the rails by the Charola, the great round and domed church, looking in on still gray light and the scaffolding that reached to the roof with broad stairs and wide decks and a sense of permanence.

  The tourists paid and passed, a straggle speaking low out of awe at the oldness, the gold of the stone, the oddness of the place.

  After twenty minutes or so, a man in his twenties rushed out of a stone doorway, said, “Mr. Costa, Mr. Costa” as though he was embarrassed not to have been there to greet the distinguished visitor, and introduced himself as “Manoel. Your guide.”

  I stood up and stretched.

  “We can begin,” Manoel said, “in the Charola.”

  We crossed the ropes, stood inside the dome of the church. Manoel pointed out the single great pipe left from a stolen organ, the walls where once there had been paintings on wood, taken off for the glory and convenience of Lisbon clerks. He showed the spiky, gilded wood, the statues, the almost Byzantine line of the faint paintings on the wall. But my eye kept drifting upward to where the decks of the scaffolding hid the top of the dome.

  Manoel noticed. “This way,” he said.

  We climbed on the kind of settled wood that sits inside church towers and holds bells. This structure, grand and solid, was supposed to be temporary, but it filled the view and redefined both light and space inside the dome. We reached a deck that ran all around the Charola, wall to wall, which was roofed in turn by yet another deck. We were climbing through attics of old air, light that was pale gold from the reflection of the timbers. The stairs cut into one another, branched off, sometimes divided into ceremonial pairs.

  Finally, we came out inside the top of the dome. The scaffolding reduced it to a kind of circular, whitewashed corridor, suspended just under the sunlight of the top clerestory windows. There were tables set with brushes, pots, plaster knives.

  “Nobody has seen this,” Manoel said, knowing just what I would like to hear.

  I expected the crack of beams under the weight of someone working, but all I heard was my breathing, Anna’s breathing, a few ragged pigeons flapping at the windows, the slightest sound of the scaffold easing and settling in its frame of old stone. Manoel stood waiting.

  Anna said, “But I don’t know anything about all this.”

  We followed Manoel around the corner where the whitewash had been carved away from the wall.

  I saw a devil on a pillar: only an attendant devil, but standing on a dog’s hind feet with the nipples of a sow and the knowing face of a scavenger. We turned, Anna and I together. We saw Christ being beaten, the image so huge that we were caught up against open, staring eyes. We turned again, to a wall where a palace was faintly outlined and a knot of short, violent soldiers, and a virtuous face whose body had been ruined under the whitewash. It seemed strange the devil had done so well all these centuries.

  “The Passion of Christ,” Manoel said. “The pictures must continue around the dome.”

  “But who’d have seen them?” I said.

  “They didn’t have to be seen,” Manoel said. “They were for the glory of God.”

  “They’re extraordinary,” Anna said. There was some greediness in her voice: a discovery, unknown frescoes, unpublished, more evidence perhaps of Italianate influence on Portuguese art, or, better yet, some independent sort of genius, a new Giotto, maybe two. She loved to be free of the classroom kind of questions, her students’ passion for issues, not pictures, and facts that could be looked up in encyclopedias.

  “This is from the time of the Order of Christ,” Manoel said.

  “Oh. Oh, of course,” I said.

  I imagined: some secret worshipper up so dizzyingly high with paints and ladders, putting these images onto new plaster. For I was used to frescoes that, being painted fast, held decorative masses stenciled on the wall, quick and sunlit effects, a bit of individuality added later. These had something quite different: an insistent, personal sense of pain.

  I imagined the painter daring himself to work so high above the ground, to see the eyes of Christ in agony and the temporary triumph of a warthog devil with a thousand tits. All this would stay private for centuries because, after all the risk, his work was just vague lines and masses from the church below. So the painter worked—for what? For money, probably. For want of any other assignment. For God alone.

  Anna said, “Are any of the restorers around?”

  Manoel shrugged. “Sometimes there’s money, sometimes there isn’t,” he said. “It has taken a very long time.”

  Anna was up against the wall, fingers tracing just above the thick whitewash.

  I thought of my father’s decent, practical Catholicism, nothing to extremes, nothing in particular. Then I saw the devil with the nipples, the scourge in the hands of a short, dark soldier, the graphic bigness of the dark eyes of Christ, their stare only magnified where the paint had cracked and chipped in settling.

  The corridor of light between dome and platform turned claustrophobic.

  “They have worked here many years,” Manoel said.

  But there was nobody working. The quiet was eerie. The only presence was this row of half-uncovered versions of the faith that animated the place. And I was an outsider to that faith, only confused and horrified by the devil, the whipping, the eyes.

  “We should go down,” Manoel said. “We have many other things to see.”

  I was ready, more than ready, but Anna said, “Could I look for just a minute more?” She smiled her English smile: radiance on a time switch, its purpose unconcealed.

  I slipped on the first few steps going down. I was grateful to be out of the corridor of light, into the attics that followed one after another and down the last, wide staircase to the ground. I felt literally grounded: back where paintings can be classified and stored, explained and safely presented, where taxonomy takes over from impact as pity takes over from pain. I wasn’t thinking clearly,
you understand.

  I was still on the staircase when I saw Hart beside the ticket desk.

  He looked up, sharp and expectant like a dog. Anna was several minutes with the paintings, and Manoel went to help on the stairs with his elaborate chivalry, but when they reached the ropes, Hart was still there.

  I’d come for something very private, something I could barely share with Anna, and there was this thief, this sociopath, this middling thing, a suspect professor. At that moment, the tables turned. I could have killed him.

  Hart knew that at once, noted it down. He hid the same feeling for a living—as you might say—and so he recognized it in others. Reciprocated, too. Then he went back to business: watching to see if the life of John Costa was worth stealing, if anyone would ask questions.

  Manoel said, “If your friend would like to join us—”

  Hart said, “That’s very kind.”

  Anna smiled.

  “We go next into the Templars’ castle,” Manoel said. “Please follow me.”

  “I don’t want to spoil your visit,” Hart said.

  Anna said, “Of course not.”

  Manoel collected keys from the entrance desk, a heavy iron bunch, and unlocked a side door at the end of the last cloister. There was nothing on the other side except a narrow stone ledge that ran unguarded along the wall. The stone was shiny. We edged along, careful of broken blocks and the occasional jagged gap.

  “This,” Manoel was saying, “was the palace of Henry the Navigator. Are you all right, Senhora?”

  The palace was ruins, marked out by archaeologists’ tapes and flags. We picked and shuffled along the ledge.

  Hart could have slipped and I might have been delighted to be rid of him. Whatever I was still supposed to do—guard or arrest him—it would be over.

  Every time I hesitated a moment, looked out through the empty windows in the old palace wall to the woods, he’d catch up and brush against me, significantly.

  Anna went forward very cautiously.

  We came to a second locked door. Manoel rattled his chain of keys, selected one and got it wrong, then pushed a great bar of metal into the lock, and the door opened. We were in the tower of the castle itself.

  Anna was disappointed, I could tell. This was just stones and defenses, a job lot of heritage. You had to read the books to find the battles and what they meant, and she preferred to find things by trusting her eyes. So she noticed that Hart watched me and I watched him. It was odd how alert we all were, with Manoel chattering.

  Manoel, politely, pointed out the chapel: a room now suspended in a wall, the stairs long ago crumbled away. “The stores were there,” he said, showing rows of practical cells. “And the wells,” he said, pointing to a circular gap in the sweet grass that had colonized the castle.

  Hart and I stood each side of the gap in the grass, and looked down. There was a pause of dark air, no walls to be seen, and then a pool of water. I thought the pool had shores rather than edges.

  “One of the guides went down there once,” Manoel said brightly.

  We peered into the dark. All Hart would make out was a cave with black water, but just for a moment I saw the castle as it was in my father’s stories: a place where heroes mount a strange, heroic defense of mysteries.

  “What did he see?” I asked.

  Manoel said, “He was on a rope, so he didn’t walk around down there.”

  “Yes?”

  “He said there seemed to be two doorways, either side of the pool. With stone across them.”

  Hart coughed.

  “He said the stones looked almost like human figures. Like knights on guard.”

  I saw them breathe in my mind’s eye.

  Anna said, “We should get back.”

  Hart thought he’d found a fault line at last, between the odd sense of obsession in me and the practicality of Anna. He didn’t have to be right. He only had to know that other people might have guessed the same thing, that it might not be surprising if John Costa went suddenly away on some quest of his own.

  “Well,” Manoel said, startled by all the sudden feeling in his audience, “there could be passageways.”

  Hart said, “It’s almost lunchtime,” and stuffed a banknote into Manoel’s hand.

  In the safe cloister beyond the ruins, Manoel was explaining to Anna this theory a friend of his had thought out, about water, air, fire, earth, spirit, and where their signs might lie, about the inner meanings of the coral and the artichokes. Anna listened very kindly.

  Outside the Charola, in light that made us tie up our eyes, Anna took a picture: pines, tiles, architecture, and two men putting on the required smiles.

  Afterward she turned to me, cold and angry for a second. “What are you doing here?” she said.

  Arturo sat on the steps of his house, cutting green beans.

  “Women’s work,” he said.

  “Everything all right?” I asked.

  “More or less, mais ou menos. Everything all right with you?”

  “My wife’s here.”

  “She’s Catholic?”

  It was not a possible question for me, so I said nothing, and Arturo took my silence for a “yes.” “Then she can get the key to the chapel from Zulmira if she wants it. Zulmira always has it.”

  “Thank you,” I said. Then I realized I’d stepped back involuntarily while we were talking. “I’ll tell her.”

  I did, and Anna said, “Don’t men go to the chapel?”

  “I think praying is women’s work,” I said.

  “What’s men’s work, then?”

  “Going away to France to make money so women don’t starve,” I said. “Being alone there and waiting.”

  “That old man did that?”

  “He didn’t even tell his wife. She got a postcard a week after he got to Bordeaux.”

  “And she was left alone.”

  “Alone with the children. You always think life can be made fair, don’t you? Balanced somehow. Well, it can’t always. He suffered, she suffered, the children suffered. But they ate.”

  “That makes it all right?”

  I walked away.

  “That makes it all right?” she said again.

  I still didn’t turn.

  “What makes you think I don’t know about pain. You think I just fake it, is that it?”

  “No,” I said. “No, of course I don’t. But that’s you and this is Arturo in a village called Formentina. There aren’t always the same rules and the same manners for everyone everywhere.”

  “I know that,” she said, following me. “Are you sorry I came?”

  “I was going to take you out to dinner. A good dinner. Somewhere you’d like.”

  “So I go away with good memories?”

  “It’s a start.”

  She put her arms around my waist.

  When we were driving up the mountain for a breeze, she said suddenly, “The Museum are being very understanding.”

  I said, “I suppose they are.”

  She noticed how I accelerated at once.

  Maria changed the rules for Hart. He never did local things, met settled people who saw inconsistencies; he was a traveler. He would never have asked Maria to the festa, but she asked him.

  Even then, he only thought she might be lonely. He didn’t reckon loneliness, except as a failure of planning that meant he should move on. He liked moving on. It saved him from a whole garden of tempting fallacies, like the notion that nothing is true until it is shared. And now he was set in someone else’s identity, and alarmingly close to thinking the only way to save his self was to share the special souvenir edition of his past doings with someone else.

  Also, he would have liked someone to fight with. He got nostalgic for raised voices and clear diction.

  Anna, at the kitchen table, cut an onion. The knife slid off its wet shine, not like the soft, docile onions out of a supermarket at home. She set chickens on a tin dish, sparse and bony birds you could imagine on the run, unl
ike the plump, settled pillows she was used to buying. The tomatoes, too, were woody and green; they had a dusty redness close to their hearts.

  She turned on the stove. The bottled gas seethed for a minute and settled to a low burn, and then went out. She propped the door open and tried again. This time, she burned her fingers on the metal of the door, but the stove stayed lit.

  The phone rang, my cell phone. It was bothersome and persistent like all phones, but it was faint and she couldn’t quite place where I had left it. Her hands were greasy from handling the chicken skin. She washed them, half hoping the phone would simply stop, but it didn’t. She found it in the pocket of my jacket.

  “My name’s Mello. Perhaps your husband will call me.”

  “Yes. Of course. I remember. Your number—”

  There was no pad and pencil, of course. There was a paperback with a heavy, laminated cover and she scratched the number into the shine with her fingernail.

  She opened the door and stood out in the still air. Over where she thought the sea must lie, very distant, the sky had turned to a band of sepia. The afternoon heat even felt like a fire. She couldn’t think why she had decided to cook on a day like this, in a place like this.

  She went walking, slipping from one patch of shade to another, going slowly up the steps. The blackberries were almost ripe, she saw. There were bushes of spiky rosemary up against a drystone wall. She felt breathless in the dry heat. She knew she’d feel a hard ball of pain behind her eyes very soon.

  She picked rosemary. The stems wouldn’t break at first; they were too woody and resinous. She took tiny sprigs from around the curious dead-colored flowers, sprigs that could almost be fir or pine. She crushed them between her fingers and then she buried her face in her hands and the smell of sharp, medicinal oil, a concentrate of the rosemary she knew from cooler places.

  A car droned down the curves of the mountain.

  She realized suddenly that she had left the stove burning. She sprinted the steps and almost fell into the kitchen, tested the air with her hand as she walked in. She forced the rosemary sprigs into the cavities of the chickens, stuffed the tray into the hot oven and smelled her hands again: fat and medicine. The smell was in her mouth, too.