And PIDE talk like that about Salazar?'
'You don't understand, my friend. You've spent a lot of time out of the country. I am here in Lisbon all the time. The PIDE,' he said, stretching out an evangelical hand, 'the PIDE aren't just the police, they're a state within the New State. They see how things really are. They understand the dangers. They see the African wars. They see trouble at home. They see dissent. They see communism. All these things are a threat to the stability of the ... Do you know what communists do to banks?'
Felsen said nothing. He knew Abrantes as a lot of animals—the shrewd business partner, the ruthless practitioner of brutal labour relations, the cost-cutter, the deal-maker—but never, not to his knowledge, the political animal.
'They nationalize them,' said Abrantes, throwing his hand out as if there was a bible in it.
Felsen ran his hand over his grey fuzz. Abrantes was irritated by his apparent lack of concern.
'That means we own nothing,' he reiterated the horror.
'I know what nationalization is,' said Felsen. 'I know what communism is. I'm scared of it. I don't need any convincing. But what are you proposing? That we sell up and get out? I'm not going to Brazil.'
'Manuel is joining PIDE,' said Abrantes and Felsen bit back his instinct to shout with laughter—that was a solution?
'What about his university education?' he asked, automatically.
'He didn't get the grades,' said Abrantes, tapping his temple with his cigar end. 'I look at Pedro, I look at Manuel ... I can't believe they have the same parents. But don't misunderstand me ... I think Manuel will do very well in PIDE. I've made the introductions. They like him. The boy has a structure to his life now. And he doesn't like communists either. They won't have to teach him anything about that. You'll see. We will benefit. If there are communists working in our factories he'll root them out and run them up to Caxias prison. And they know what to do with communists in the Caxias prison.'
Felsen murmured, tired now, the man's fanaticism giving the aguardente a rough edge that it didn't have before. Abrantes sat back, plugged the cigar into his mouth, and straightened his tie over his belly.
Manuel's fuzzy head slipped back into the darkness of the enclosed terrace behind the veranda.
Abrantes left at dinnertime with his family and Patricia, who claimed she wasn't feeling well, but it was because Felsen was powerfully drunk. Drunk to the point where it took several tentative stabs to get a cigarette between his lips.
He managed to put 'Jailhouse Rock' on the record player and somehow got himself up on to the veranda where he took extravagant nosefuls of the still slack sea air and looked out into the black night.
'When the music finished, and he was left with static and the rhythmical click of the needle, he blundered downstairs and drank water until he was gasping.
A short aeon slipped by and he found himself miraculously in his bedroom, wrenching the windows open, tearing his shirt-tails out of his waistband and treading his dropped trousers into the floor. He felt: hot and had a great need to be naked under cool sheets, unconscious.
He ripped the bedclothes off, jerked himself straight, and took two startled steps back.
In the middle of the bed was a huge lizard. A live lizard. It bobbed its head, braced itself against the white sheet. Felsen careered out of the room, grabbed tools and came back with a rolling pin and a hammer. His first strike was wildly off the mark and bounced the lizard on to the floor. They fought for ten minutes, wrecking the bedroom, until Felsen managed to stun the animal with the rolling pin, hurled in frustration. He beat the lizard with the hammer and only stopped when an incident on a hot, dusty road in the Beira leaked into his mind. He picked the lizard up by the tail. It was surprisingly heavy. He threw it into the courtyard.
In the morning he was woken up by his heart thumping into his chest wall. He was still drunk. He knew it because his head didn't hurt and he wasn't disturbed by the sight of blood across both pillows and the sheets. Weak grey light, and an open sea chill came through the windows. There was cloud in the room. It was ten o'clock in the morning. The house was buried in dense fog.
Felsen had an encrusted gash on his forehead. He cleaned it in the bathroom and showered some sense into his body. He went out to the car wearing a suit under a wool coat. He skirted the lizard, backing towards the garage, amazed at it, a huge thing, half a metre with its tail. He went back and rolled it with his foot. Not an indigenous beast, he thought.
He opened the garage and looked straight down at his feet as if instructed. At the back of the car on the floor below the bumper a pair of crossed rusty horseshoes had been arranged. He dropped to his haunches. Other horseshoes had been placed behind each rear wheel. He gathered them up and hurled them over the wall with exaggerated force. One bounced back at him and he gave it special treatment.
He was panting as he reversed out. When he went back to shut the garage he saw two other horseshoes which had been under the front wheels. He ran at them and launched them into the scrub outside with crazed strength. He drove down to Estoril with a pounding just beginning behind his eyes.
Less than a kilometre from the house he emerged into brilliant sunshine. He arrived in Estoril in sweat and took a coffee in the main square which seemed to damage the part of his brain controlling his breathing. His heart raced as if pumping ether instead of thick, strong blood. He left his coat in the car and walked up to Abrantes' house with his suit jacket over his shoulder. He arrived with his eyebrows full of sweat and dark African states on the front and back of his shirt. The maid nearly shut him out. She sat him in the living room with a glass of water but Felsen was too agitated to sit and paced the room like a caged panther.
Joaquim Abrantes rolled in full of energy and purpose until he saw Felsen in his patched shirt, his head gashed and wearing his hangover on the outside.
'What happened?'
He told him.
'A lizard?' said Abrantes.
'I wouldn't mind knowing who put it there.'
Manuel was called, and the accusation of a practical joke levelled. It stunned the boy who was standing like a soldier at ease. He denied it vehemently and was dismissed.
'I wonder about that boy,' said Abrantes. 'He's always snooping around people's houses.'
Felsen told him about the horseshoes. Abrantes stood stock still, hunched, and Felsen caught a glimpse of the peasant from the Beira—superstitious, pagan, nose turned up to the smell of things not right.
'This is bad,' he said. 'This is very bad. Perhaps you've upset your neighbours.'
'I don't have any neighbours.'
'People from the village, maybe.'
'I don't know anybody from the village apart from the maid and she's happy to take my money.'
'You know what you have to do?'
'I'm hoping you're going to tell me. These are your people.'
'You must go to the Senhora dos Santos.'
'In the Beira?'
'No, no. A local one. Ask in the village. They'll know. This magic is not from the Beira.'
'Magic?'
Abrantes nodded gravely.
Felsen drove back up to Azóia which was still in fog, a stationary, closed, muffled world and freezing after the August sunshine in Estoril. He went to the bar which contained four people, three in black and a barman. Nobody spoke. He asked his question, and a boy, Chico, was called.
Chico led the way into the narrow lanes of the village, the fog so thick that Felsen, in his state, would stop occasionally and rear back as if from a solid wall. The boy took him to a low house on the edge of the village. The moisture had collected on his black hair like morning dew.
A woman came to the door in a blue floral overall wiping her bloody hands on a rag—fresh from killing lunch or maybe an entrail inspection. She was round-faced with very small eyes which only opened to the tiniest slits. She looked at the boy who was her height but: it was Felsen who spoke.
'I have a problem, I'd like you to co
me and see my house,' he said.
She shooed the boy away. Felsen gave him a coin. They went through to the yard at the back of her house where there was a large domed dovecote the size of a church's cupola. She reached in and the doves flapped and cooed. One came out on her hand, white with brown traces on its wings. She held it to her bosom and stroked it down. Felsen felt strangely calm.
They drove to the house in fog so thick that Felsen stuck his head out of the window to see if it would improve his vision.
The Senhora dos Santos inspected the dead lizard already seething with ants.
'You found it in your bed, you said.'
Felsen nodded, scepticism crouched on his shoulder.
'It would have been better if you hadn't killed it.'
'Why?'
'Let's look in the house.'
As soon as she entered the hallway her breathing became laboured as if she was having a respiratory attack. She walked through the house, struggling with every step, her face reddening and, despite the oceanic cold, sweating. Felsen found himself close to laughing at the absurdity of the spectacle. He walked behind her, unmoved, as if on some vague barracks inspection.
The Senhora dos Santos looked at the bed, which was still bloodstained from his head injury, as if there was a thrice-stabbed body on it. She staggered from the room, down the stairs, and out into the courtyard pursued by Felsen, keen as a ghoulish schoolboy.
Her breathing recovered, her face went back to its natural colour. The dove was not so fortunate. It fell dead and already stiff from her hands. They looked at it, she sad, Felsen affronted by the woman's quackery. He was in no doubt she'd killed it herself.
'What do you make of it?' he asked.
The face that looked up at him was not encouraging. Her eyes were now fully open from the slits they had been before. They were black, all pupil, no iris.
'This is not our magic,' she said.
'But what does it all mean?' he asked. 'The lizard? The horseshoes?'
'You killed the lizard ... in your own bed. It means you will destroy yourself.'
'Kill myself?'
'No, no. You will bring yourself down.'
He snorted.
'And the horseshoes?'
'They will stop you from going anywhere. They will...'
'I've just been somewhere. You and I have just been in the car.'
'Not the car, Senhor Felsen,' she said, and he wondered for a moment how she knew his name.
'What then?'
'Your life.'
'What is this ... this...' he said, his hand revolving over and over looking for the word.
'This is Macumba.'
'Macumba?'
'Brazilian black magic.'
Chapter XXVI
Saturday, 13th June 199–, Paço de Arcos, Lisbon
During those six hard months of controlled fat intake to get myself back into shape, I'd planned to celebrate the end by cooking something exquisitely drenched in fat for Olivia and myself. Somewhere in my body there was a high whining for something like arroz de pato, duck with rice—the fat soaked into the rice, studded with chouriço, the flesh of idle chunks of duck falling apart, the skin crisp—and a deep, cutting, slatey red to wash it down. But the dish took hours to make, it was late, nearly midnight, Olivia wasn't home and there was nothing in the fridge. I tipped the whisky undrunk into the sink. I showered and changed.
I slapped around the kitchen in bare feet and thawed some turkey steaks I'd found in the freezer in warm water. I boiled up some rice, a tin of corn and opened a bottle of Esteva red.
By half-past-midnight I was sitting with a small coffee and an aguardente, smoking my penultimate cigarette. Olivia came in smelling of perfume and beer. She sat down and smoked my last cigarette for me. I complained. She hugged me around the head and kissed me loudly on the ear. I crushed her to me and resisted biting her like I used to when she was small. She squirmed away from me and asked what had happened to my hand.
'A little accident,' I said, not wanting to face that again.
'So,' she said, taking a sip of my coffee, speaking in English as we did from time to time.
'You look happy,' I said.
'I am.'
'You met somebody you liked?'
'Sort of,' she half-lied, automatic at any age. 'How was your day?'
'You heard anything?'
'The girl on the beach, Dad. Paço de Arcos hasn't been talking about anything else.'
'And Cascais?'
'Cascais, too.'
'You stopped talking about the Manic Street Preachers for two seconds.'
'Not that long.'
'Yes, well, she was dead on the beach. Hit on the head and strangled. Not nice. The only thing...'
'How old was she?'
'A bit younger than you.'
'What was "the only thing"?'
My sweet daughter, my little girl. I still saw that under the clothes, the hairstyle, the make-up and perfume. I used to disturb myself at night, because I'm a man and I know men, thinking about all those young guys who wouldn't see that, who saw ... who saw what she wanted them to see. I suppose that's it. Girls don't want to be little girls for ever ... not even for ten minutes these days.
'Maybe you knew this girl,' I said, deviating.
'Me?'
'Why not? She's the same age. Her parents live in Cascais. She goes to school in Lisbon—Liceu D. Dinis. Her name's Catarina Sousa Oliveira. Privileged kids get murdered too.'
'I don't know anyone at the Liceu D. Dinis. I don't know anyone called Catarina Sousa Oliveira. But that wasn't "the only thing". You changed your mind. I can tell. You don't...'
'I did. The thing was ... she was under sixteen and for a kid that age she was getting up to a lot of tricks.'
'Tricks?'
'It's what prostitutes do ... they turn tricks.'
'I know that ... it's just a weird word for the work.'
'I bet your mother didn't teach you that.'
'Mum and I talked about everything.'
'Turning tricks?'
'It's called "Sex Education". She didn't get any herself so she gave me some.'
'Did she use those words?'
'That's what women do, Dad. When boys are kicking footballs in the park, we're talking about ... everything.'
'Except football.'
'I bought you a present,' she said.
'What else did your mother tell you?'
'There,' she said, and laid out a razor, five blades and a can of shaving foam. I pulled her over and kissed her on the head.
What are these for?' I asked.
'Don't be difficult.'
'Go on.'
'What?'
We were talking about your mother.'
You were being nosey about our conversations ... and if Mum didn't talk to you about what she talked about with me, then she probably thought it was none of your business. Or, more likely Dad, you wouldn't have been interested.'
Try me.'
She looked up into her head, smoked a bit and polished her teeth with her tongue.
'You first,' she said.
'Me?'
'Tell me something personal that you talked about with Mum to show me ... good faith.'
'Like what?'
'Something personal,' she said, enjoying herself, 'like sex. Didn't you ever talk about sex?'
I looked into my aguardente glass for quite some time.
'She talked to me about what it was like having sex with you,' she said.
'Did she?' I said, astonished.
'She said, let me get this right: "It's a wonderful thing to have sex with a man you love. Once you've felt that tenderness, the deep intimacy of his total regard for you, the thrill of that mental connection, then there's no going back..." I think that was more or less it. She told me that after my first time when I complained that it wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.'
Olivia stopped. I was in trouble, unable to swallow, my eyeballs prickling, my stomach c
lenching. It was silent in the room. A single dog barked in the night, a long way off. My daughter put her hand on my back, rubbed me between the shoulders. I pulled back from the: precipice. She put her forehead on to my arm. I stroked her soft, black hair. More time passed. She kissed my wrist. The traffic reasserted itself in the room.
'Your first time?' I said, coming round.
Olivia sat up.
'She didn't tell you, did she? I didn't think she would.'
'Why?'
'I asked her not to. I thought you'd probably have arrested him.'
'When was this?'
'A while ago.'
'I'm not sure how long a while is in English? Sometimes it's short, sometimes it's long.'
'About eighteen months ago.'
'When exactly. I want to remember that time.'
'February last year, Carnival time.'
'You were only just fifteen.'
'That's right.'
'What happened?'
She stretched and shivered with nerves, not used to talking to me like this. Neither of us were.
'You know,' she said.
'Tell me.'
'It was at a party, he was eighteen...'
You think of these things, and then you find they've happened without you knowing. Why hadn't I seen it? Don't women get that look in their eye when they've eaten the forbidden fruit? I know boys don't—they're nerds before and afterwards they're just happy nerds.
It happened again. I thought I was relaxed, but I was coiled tighter than a metal spring. Where was all this ... this rage coming from? For the second time that night my fist came down on the table and I roared against the bastard stranger who'd deflowered my daughter. I harangued my dead wife. I railed against my reflection in the window for being so blind. I castigated Olivia who kicked back her chair and volleyed her entire love-life straight back in my face. Yelling at the top of her voice, so that ship's crews heading out into the Atlantic that night would have lined up on the rails to listen. It didn't stop until she hit me, tears streaming down her face, she thundered her fists into my chest and stormed out, the doors crashing behind her, heels cracking the stairs, a final door slam and I could see her thumping face-down on the bed.
Then quiet, apart from the blood thundering in my ears, and the tick of a woodworm eating its way up the table leg.
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