Taking Lives

by Michael Pye

  I called, “Zulmira? Arturo?”

  Arturo came out of the shadow on the verandah. “Senhor João,” he said.

  “Everything all right? Tudo bem?”

  Arturo said, unconvincingly, “Tudo bem.”

  “Really?”

  He shook his head a little. “If you could drive me, me and Zulmira, into the town. I think we should go to the little hospital in Vila Nova.”

  “Zulmira’s sick now?”

  “I’ll bring her down.”

  I said, “Can I help?”

  But he had gone back into the shadow, and I was half-blind from the brilliance of the sun.

  Anna, too, wanted to help. She wanted it even more than she wanted me occupied, although she was treating me now with the elaborate kindness you show to someone in mourning.

  “There,” she said. “There they are.”

  Arturo was coming down the steps, Zulmira at his side. I knew how Arturo’s legs could sometimes fail him, but today he stared forward as though he was concentrating all his will on simply moving down. Zulmira seemed to hang on his neck. There were dark patches under her eyes, like old blood under the skin, and she stumbled, feet dragging on the stones.

  I wanted to help. Anna wanted to help. We have the same instincts in such different forms: Anna is more sure that she can intervene in lives, while I was born to be a bureaucrat and find objections. But we are both kind, always.

  Arturo didn’t acknowledge me. He kept walking with Zulmira’s arm around his neck. I was so used to her as a strong presence in the fields, chasing down a goat, cutting greens, picking at the ground with a hoe, that the slackness of her arm shocked me.

  There must have been some sense of occasion, because Hart was watching from above. He caught my eye. He shrugged. The usual afternoon stillness seemed to weigh on us all.

  Arturo and Zulmira reached the road. Arturo held Zulmira with one hand, and opened my car with the other; she couldn’t stand. He was using all the old, stored strength in his body to keep her from tipping down to the ground.

  He packed her into the backseat of the car. You never lock cars in villages where everyone watches out for everyone else.

  Anna said, “You’d better go and help.”

  I went scrambling down the hill.

  Arturo sat in the passenger seat. I clambered into the car, started the engine, and looked back to check the traffic.

  Zulmira sat with her head tilted back, her arms loose and slack. I saw that her eyes had rolled up in her head.

  I recognized the smell, at last: a spoiled version of sweat and flesh, overlaid with sweet, cheap soap. Zulmira was dead.

  Nobody expected the police reaction. The kindly, courteous Mello was abrupt; he insisted that Arturo had concealed a death, found suspicious circumstances, had him taken down to the prison in the city for the duration of the investigation even though the man could walk only when he exercised all his will. The police occupied the village, checking everything and everyone; people came in from the fields to find their identification cards. Everyone was a material witness, quarantined in the village.

  I love Anna’s outrage. She would have thrown herself between the police and the women if she could. But she had no Portuguese, and she could never quite work out the exact wrongs being done around her, so her anger stayed general and ineffectual. She hated that.

  She made her apologies to the college. I made my apologies to the deputy director, explaining I was held in Portugal for reasons beyond my control.

  “You do have an eventful life,” the deputy director said.

  I thought the world could not close down on us any more. It was Anna and I, rattling about in the box of our house, and Hart always watching. He sniffed out tears and arguments, and studied them. He tried to measure the distance between us.

  I missed talking about the bees with Arturo, or the city or the dust.

  Formentina, which seemed such a perfect backdrop for a life, was beginning to spoil, the way a drawing crumbles or glaze crazes over paint, or vandals cut up something as lovely as the Liber Principis. But there wasn’t any room for my usual bright, righteous anger at such a change. Arturo had done nothing wrong. Zulmira certainly hadn’t. Hart hadn’t changed the place; I would never have found it without him.

  Anna wanted to go. She said so once or twice. She asked why I wouldn’t go talk to my friend Captain Mello, to see when the witnesses could leave.

  I found Mello at the GNR barracks.

  “I do apologize,” Mello said. “We’ve had to take rather extraordinary measures. You understand.”

  “I just understand that my wife needs—”

  “Your Professor Hart,” Mello said. “He’s of interest to us. There’s another inquiry. But I expect you guessed that.”

  “Indeed.”

  “You don’t need to tell me why you’re interested in Hart. I have a good idea. The Dutch police talked to the Rijksmuseum people, that sort of thing.”

  His sentences worked like interrogation, so I tried very carefully to show no reaction at all.

  “Listen,” he said. “This other inquiry is extremely serious. You should know that. I can’t say much else. I’ve said too much already.” He talked stage talk out of some Victorian gaslight story, because that was the English he knew: novelist’s stuff.

  “You mean you’re holding Formentina so you can chase Hart? Isn’t that a bit excessive?”

  “It’s only a day or two. This other inquiry is extremely serious.”

  “But my wife—”

  “If we have to go over Mr. Hart’s house in any case, you could happen to be there.”

  I stared at him.

  “I’ll call you,” he said. “We can work this out to everyone’s advantage.”

  Maria Mattoso had never handled a criminal case, didn’t usually deal with the Portuguese; but Anna persuaded her, and I supported Anna, and she went down to the prison in the city. It had once been a bishop’s palace: a massive oval of wall, and all you could see from outside was a gold-and-white cupola with big glass, set about with guards. The gates could have served a palace still.

  Maria Mattoso parked, presented her identity card, and walked inside. She was alarmed by the stillness of the corridor and the sense of pressed life everywhere else.

  Arturo was produced, wearing an orange overall and his own, old shirt.

  He said, “It is very kind of you to come.”

  “How are you?”

  Arturo didn’t try to find an answer.

  “I brought you some food.” Anna had insisted.

  Arturo said, “I’m not hungry.”

  “But you will be hungry.”

  “I don’t want to have anything they can take.”

  “Who takes food from you?”

  Arturo said, “We’re in bunks, you know. Fourteen to a room. I’m in the bottom bunk and the man above isn’t clean. I can’t go out.”

  “I know it isn’t good in there.”

  “They have toilets but they don’t work.”

  “Even when you’re charged, you have rights. You might get bail.”

  “I don’t know these people,” Arturo said. “They’re young. They mutter at night. They have marks on them.”

  “You don’t belong here.”

  “But I do,” Arturo said. “I have to be here.”

  For a moment, she was unsure how to continue. She could be the lawyer, the calculating protector. She could be Maria Mattoso, who saw a man petrified by sadness.

  “This is only a technical offense,” Maria said. “There’s no question Zulmira died of natural causes. An undiagnosed heart condition.”

  “Then why am I here?”

  “I don’t know. You didn’t hurt her.”

  “I cleaned her. I did my best.”

  “Everyone knows that.”

  “She should have been the one to have the tests and see the doctors. Not me.”

  “That’s not a criminal mistake. That’s the doctors’ problem.�
��

  “Then why—?” But he did not bother to finish his question. He had had a whole lifetime of being handled by authority with willful indifference; he was not surprised. If he allowed himself to be angry, he would have to be angry with his whole life.

  “It’s going to be worse. I made it worse.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “These men in the room,” Arturo said. “I think they might be toxicodependent. They might be sick. I don’t like to sleep.”

  He got up.

  “Yesterday,” he said, “they forgot to give us food.”

  Maria stood too. “I’ll complain,” she said. “I’ll do what I can.”

  Arturo said, “It’s God’s will, I expect. I wish you could ask Zulmira. She knows about God’s will.”

  Maria watched him walk off, trying to march but on shaky, compromised legs. She watched the door swing behind him and close. She smelled a little disinfectant warring with a slurry of old sweat and shit, with windows closed on a merciless day and air used by a dozen men.

  I suppose Arturo lowered himself onto his bunk bed. He sat watching the sundry cracks in the wall for the tiny movements they seemed to make now his glasses were gone. The guards had nothing for the men on remand to do; they would be better off convicted, in larger cells. So Arturo planted a garden on the wall. With his bad eyes, he could see vines again, and beans on poles and the dense green of potato tops.

  The funeral was not like the funeral of my father. The body came from the police morgue in a cheap pine box. Arturo was brought from prison, humiliated by handcuffs, unable to do anything but stand and keep back tears. The gravedigger made a scene about his fee and the proper tip before he’d lower the box between the dry clay sides of the hole.

  The family of Arturo and Zulmira stood about, a little knot of people, until the coffin was covered.

  Anna said, “He doesn’t know she’s dead.”

  “Of course he does.”

  She shook her head. “He was sleeping with her for a couple of nights. Maria told me.”

  I said, “The women almost never die first. You just have to count the women in black.”

  “So nobody worries about the women? They take the men into hospital and they don’t even ask about the women.”

  I remembered what the nurse had said about country people when she said Zulmira should see a doctor. But even the nurse did not press the point.

  The graveyard was a box of hot white walls, bright with the shine of chippings and marble, of pale stone and polished metal. We stifled there.

  She shrugged. “I’d like to see your father’s grave,” she said.

  I put a hand on her shoulder, let it slip a little. “I know you have to go soon. I wish you didn’t have to go. I wish I could just come back.”

  “Then come back,” she said. She wasn’t interested in rhetoric anymore.

  “I have to see this through.”

  “Why?” she said. “Why do you have to see this through?”

  I couldn’t be quite sure what I meant. My leave was up in a week, but I had police orders not to leave; that was an excuse. I watched Hart’s irritating assurance, his bright-eyed chat, and I wanted to catch him out. I needed an answer to all the riddles Mello set about my father’s past.

  Anna found my father’s grave easily, the only marble hut. The doors were already dirtied with a bit of lichen.

  She said, “They put the coffin on a shelf? Like that?”

  I said nothing.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s a family home for the dead. I don’t know who else he was expecting.”

  Anna waited.

  “I still want to know,” I said, “who he was before he went to London and who he was when he left to come back here. And whether London was just an unfortunate gap in his life.”

  “He loved you very much.”

  “He wanted me to be English.”

  “He wanted to protect you.”

  “Or he wanted to hand me off, to make me someone else’s responsibility who wouldn’t come back to him. I don’t know.”

  “You can’t know.”

  “I still wonder. I’m wondering what it means to feel at home in a place you don’t know. And wondering, and wondering. And wondering why I can’t feel as he felt. Don’t fathers and sons come from the same place, usually, wherever they go, however they change?”

  Anna said, “Come somewhere we can sit. It’s very hot.” She looked once more inside the tomb. She saw four shelves set back a little from the door, and a single coffin lying to the right with a small marble label. The coffin was still immaculate; you couldn’t cheat on the shine and the brass like you can on boxes that will go down in the ground.

  “You know as much as I do now,” I said.

  “I want to see his house,” she said. “You could show me his house before someone else buys it.”

  I said, “I haven’t decided to sell it.”

  We kicked up dust on the path between church and graveyard, live, skirling dust that stuck at the top of the mouth and pricked our eyes. Hot-weather flowers, blue paper discs, stood open at the end of green sticks along the path.

  “What do you mean you haven’t decided?” I expected her to sound exasperated, but her tone was flat, like a teacher sure of her authority.

  “I can’t decide,” I said.

  “So let me see it,” Anna said.

  We said nothing on the drive.

  I parked outside my father’s house. Anna stood leaning on the car and looking at the stone lions, the paired putti, the dry fountain with the tall brown rods of grass around it, the great fake chimney of fieldstone and the wrought iron everywhere. The house was assorted dreams and aspirations cut up and pasted together in an ambitious muddle. A single, tough red rose, the blooms open and almost black, flourished by the wall.

  “I didn’t know what to expect,” she said.

  “He wanted all the things other people have, only bigger. I never knew that. I guess that’s what all the emigrantes want. You have to show it was worth all the pain of going away.” I opened the gate to the small front yard. “He couldn’t do that in South London.”

  “He liked lions.”

  “Everyone has lions. He has plaster pineapples, too.”

  “And terraces—”

  I fussed with the keys in my pocket. The London keys wouldn’t do, nor the Museum keys. The set of light keys, the color and weight of aluminum, was for the house in Formentina.

  “I don’t have the keys,” I said, and, as I turned to Anna, “I really thought I did have the keys. I didn’t mean to leave them behind.”

  Anna was already up the steps, at a window, looking in on the dark, cool space, picking out the heavy chairs, the brass lamps on tables without pictures.

  “I don’t think he brought anything from London,” I said.

  “I suppose he wanted to start again.”

  “But he didn’t bring pictures or photographs. Nothing. It’s as though his whole life in London never happened.”

  She looked down on me. She says now she saw a man loyal and habitual and out of his depth. She felt a great sadness because she would have liked to hold me, but that couldn’t work anymore.

  Women cut greens for the goats: grass, dock, lavender. Zulmira’s daughter caught the morning bus because on Thursdays she cleaned a house in Vila Nova. Some of the village men were working day shifts cutting eucalyptus to clear a whole hill of red clay that the tile factory would use. The others were out on construction jobs as usual, basted with sweat, pushing beams and stone around or taking green wood and varnishing it so carefully it was like walking on mirrors.

  I know that Arturo in his cell regretted his ordinary occupation more than anything, the cleaning of ground, tying gold willow branches for a fence, staking trees, sharpening something and using it until it needed to be sharpened again. He could run through a year of occupation in a day’s imagining, but without the satisfaction of having
moved, used his muscles, been of use; and without usefulness, he lost himself.

  I know this because it is my feeling, too. I was obliged, somehow, to pin down Hart and bring back those pictures. My job, my credibility, might depend on it, but so did my sense of self, now that so much else had fallen away: my sense of my father, my marriage, my place. There were consolations, of course: woods, the mountain, peace, spring water, maybe even the dignity of labor, the cycle of seasons, everything that was a wonder if you had a ticket out and a prison if you didn’t.

  There was another festa over the mountain, Maria announced. She made herself social director of the day.

  We assembled, like a convoy, in a triangle of park with a bandstand at its center, and the heavy shade of lindens. Hart said he wanted Coca-Cola, and went off to the little local store. I came in behind him, wanting coffee, and watched as he paid the woman for large garbage bags, a length of chicken wire, a screwdriver, a pair of small pruning shears with stout metal blades.

  Garbage bags, shears, chicken wire, a screwdriver. Such things had nothing to do with art or theft, and I forgot them.

  Maria went home that evening with her mother. They had things to talk about, she said; already she made excuses for not being with Hart. Hart said he understood, that she worked, she had a life. He was just a visitor.

  Then he offered her a present. She could collect it anytime in Formentina.

  He knew at once he’d done the wrong thing. But she did not refuse. She said, “I’ll collect it now.”

  She followed him up the hill, and sat in a chair like a judge.

  He disappeared into the bedroom. He thought he could bring out a book, perhaps, or a bottle. But he wanted to give her one of these famous images that Hart had stolen.

  He searched again. He created an odd kind of magic: by promising a page to Maria, he made sure he would have to find them.

  There was nothing in the lining of cases, in the obvious smuggler’s spots. He looked among the clothes he had brought from Hart’s house, just to clear the place.

  Jackets. Nobody would elaborately sew a valuable picture into a jacket lining; Professor Hart was not likely to have been nimble with a needle. Trousers, ditto. Socks do not ball up big enough to hide a picture.

  There was a pile of shirts, of course: neat, cotton shirts from the laundry. Five were marked in Dutch, one in English, from London. It was a perfectly respectable shirt, too: button-down, white. But it was thick, too thick.