The Company of Strangers

by Robert Wilson

  I have lost three more teeth to the man in the street with the pliers. He told me that he is also a cobbler and I have given him my shoes to repair. He is taking care of me from head to foot.

  I think of you and wish you all success.

  João Ribeiro.

  She smelt the letter, hoping to find some whiff of the sea, grilled horse mackerel or a freshly poured bica – smiling at herself as she fell for the Portuguese saudades, the longings – but all she caught was João’s melancholy – despair tempered by humanity – which had penetrated the paper from the sweat of his hand.

  Her pen hovered over the application forms, still undecided about one thing, still confused by the implications of João’s letter. The telephone rang. She answered it in the chill hall and missed the man’s name but heard that he was from the Portuguese consulate and would like to come and see her. She asked him what it was about but he declined to tell her. Only in person, Senhora Almeida. She agreed and hung up, only realizing then that he hadn’t had to ask for her address.

  He was there in less than an hour introducing himself from in front of his sticking-out ears as Senhor Martims. He was no more than five foot high and wore a black belted raincoat like a schoolboy’s. They sat over coffee. He stroked his moustache downwards over his top lip obsessively, as if this was part of diplomacy, that he should never be seen speaking. They settled and his features became still and grave so that Anne immediately felt panic-struck and wanted to run from the room. He removed a letter from his pocket and held it on his knees which were pressed together. Anne saw her own name in Luís’s handwriting. Senhor Martims looked down, gathered himself. His English came out quickly and barely made it through the gap between his teeth.

  ‘It is my sad duty to have to inform you, Senhora Anne Almeida, that your son Captain Julião Almeida was killed in action four days ago in Guiné.’

  There was a long silence. Senhor Martims’ words did not penetrate her through the normal channels. She didn’t hear them. They were hard words which hit Anne in the face, like torn-up cobblestones in a riot. They bruised their way in. They were not comprehensible as language. She understood them only as pain. Senhor Martims couldn’t bear this silence in which he could only imagine the destructive power of his fast factual words. He started again and added more.

  ‘Your son was leading a patrol in the forest and they were ambushed by guerrillas.’

  Senhor Martims repeated it for her and she nodded at the words which headed off at different angles into the room.

  ‘The guerrillas ambushed the patrol and your son, who was leading, was shot in the neck and chest. The fighting continued for an hour and his men were unable to come to his aid. By the time they had fought the guerrillas away your son had died from loss of blood. I am truly very sorry, Senhora Almeida.’

  There was colour in these words, not just black and white information, and sound, too. They flung images into her head. The green forest, hooting and screeching. The first dull shots – cracks of poisonous sound. The red of blood on his neck and chest, darkening the green of his uniform. Julião lying in the long grass, the bullets zipping above him and the sky beyond the dark canopy, white, bleached to a harsh, glaring white, but growing dimmer as his life leaked into the pulsating ground, the heart beating under Africa.

  ‘I am very sorry,’ Senhor Martims was saying again, almost chanting. ‘I have no way of softening this blow. This is the very worst thing to happen to a mother. I…I…’

  Anne thought she should be crying, that she should be wailing her heart out, but these words had taken her to a much darker place. Crying was too small for this. You cried when you hit your finger with a hammer, not when the abyss has opened up inside you. She dug her elbows into her ribs to hold herself in. More words were coming her way from the small man but she was stopping herself from being split in two. The concentration for this was so hard and pure that the new battery of words came to her incomplete.

  ‘…he felt responsible…fellow officers…nothing stupid…service revolver which I’m afraid he turned on himself…depressed…very proud…this terrible tragedy…two outstanding servants of their country. He left this letter addressed to you, Senhora Almeida.’

  She didn’t take the letter. She couldn’t move her arms from her sides. Senhor Martims, at a loss, placed the letter on the arm of the chair.

  ‘Do you have family here?’ he asked, looking into her eyes as if she was shut in a box and he was peering through a slit.

  ‘My mother died at the end of August,’ she said. ‘I have no family here.’

  ‘You have no family?’ said Senhor Martims, aghast. ‘No friends?’

  ‘Maybe…in Lisbon…still.’

  ‘Friends of your mother?’ he asked. ‘You shouldn’t be alone after such news.’

  The only name that came to her was Jim Wallis and she said it. Senhor Martims found the number and spoke to Wallis in a murmur. Senhor Martims stayed with her, pacing the room, looking at the unopened letter on the arm of the chair, waiting for Wallis to arrive.

  In her head she saw herself with her face out of the train window. These were the events that were rushing towards her, but blinded by the wind, they were just a blur, a sense of impending incident. Looking back she’d seen the silver rails but only through the incoherence of her own streaming hair. Now she was seeing a pattern, a terrible tragic pattern – her mother’s story, her father’s death, Julius Voss perishing at Stalingrad, his father’s suicide, Karl’s capture and execution, their son’s death, the suicide of the surrogate father. ‘Lies beget lies,’ her mother had said, you have to tell another to keep the first one going. But tragedy is the same. It follows bloodlines. The one thing she’d never expected to be was tragic – some jittery middle-aged woman, living alone in a large cold house, never going out because she could anticipate the next lightning strike. And here she was, a tragic figure. Pitied by Senhor Martims because she was a mother who’d lost everything and had no family. It made her angry and she tore open Luís’s letter to see what he had to say for himself.

  Dear Anne,

  It is late and I’ve been drinking. The drink is not doing what it is supposed to do. I’m sweating and words, which were never my strength, float past me, but the pain, which should be dull by now, is still there, diamond hard, piercing, not one edge of it blunted.

  The night and the noise of the insects are crowding me. My friends, fellow officers, have gone to bed. They see that I have taken it well. But I have not.

  You and I left each other on bad terms because you thought that these wars were wrong. I saw it before – that first time in Angola – and I see it clearly now, but it is too late and I have lost everything – my son, and because you can never forgive me, you as well. The two of you were all that mattered to me and without you the future has no value.

  I was never a man to do this sort of thing. I always savoured life. Perhaps if I wait I could persuade myself out of it and live the unendurable existence. But now, with the heat pressing against the walls, the vagueness of the world beyond the mosquito netting, the great distance between us and the colossal absence – I have no strength for it, no courage. Forgive me this, if not the other.

  Your husband. Luís

  She folded the letter up in its envelope and stuffed it down the side of the chair. Senhor Martims had stopped pacing and was now thinking about the English as a race. The words pity and admiration came to him. Why can’t they explode? Why can’t they squeeze out a tear? If she’d been Portuguese she’d have…she’d have fainted or fallen to her knees, wailing, but this…this bottled silence, this strapped-down stoicism. How do they do it? Sang froid, that was it, cold blood. The English were emotional reptiles. And as soon as he’d thought it he felt guilty. This was not the time for such thoughts. This woman…the suffering…it was unimaginable. Her mother as well.

  But Senhor Martims was wrong. He didn’t know it, but he was walking at the foot of a volcano. Plates had moved inside Anne, chasms h
ad opened up and this boiling rage of molten rock was seething to the surface. Her hands, which were clasping her knees, trembled against her body’s geology.

  ‘Thank you, Senhor Martims, for coming to see me,’ she said, her voice quaking. ‘Thank you for your sympathy. I’ll be all right now. You can go back to the consulate.’

  ‘No, no, I insist on staying until Mr Wallis arrives.’

  ‘I would like some moments to myself beforehand, that’s all. If you would be so kind as to…’

  She engineered him out of the door. He went to his car and waited. Anne didn’t go back into the sitting room but found the darkness of the dining room a comfort. She fell towards the table, retching with something too big to vomit out and barked her shins on a chair. The sharp physical pain was blinding and she stumbled over the chair, crashing with it to the floor. She lashed out at it with savage kicks, ripped the heel off her shoe.

  ‘You fucking…you fucking…you little fucker,’ she spat from between gritted teeth and, amazed at finding the available vocabulary, hauled herself to her feet.

  She grabbed the back of the chair and dashed it against the wall. The back and rear legs split away from the seat and she brought this down with all her strength on another chair and broke off the two legs. She smashed the back into the wall and saw it splinter into matchwood. She took the front legs and seat and reduced that, too. She stood back, panting. The china quivered in the dresser. She threw open the doors, took out a plate and hurled it against the wall, another plate and another, the destructive satisfaction of it thrilling up her ribs. She swung each one harder and, as she got tired, she dredged up a screech of agony to launch the next plate with increasing venom. Just as her arm began to hang limp from her shoulder and her chest felt too full of organs, jostling for room, she found herself engulfed by a damp raincoat and Wallis whispering into her ear. More incomprehensible words.

  She was taken up to a bedroom, her mother’s room, and put into bed. A doctor was called, who came and sedated her. He left valium for later. She lay like a figurine in a cotton wool-filled box. The outside did not penetrate and inside was curiously muted, no thought or feeling could reach its pin-sharp conclusion.

  She floated for what seemed like days and came into daylight with a strange woman in the room. She had to claw her way back into reality, a physical effort. The woman explained herself. Jim Wallis’s wife. Anne tried to edge back towards what had happened but found herself removed from it. There was a padded bulwark between this new point and her past. She knew what had happened, the steel-fastened lock of muscles around her shoulder reminded her of that. She even saw the drift of shattered china up the wall but she could not recapture any of the intensity of the moment. She felt curiously bereft. The thought of her dead son and husband elicited sadness, which produced bleak, but quiet, weeping but there was no madness. She missed that madness. It had been right for the moment. Now she felt split, completely disconnected, not just from the incident but from the whole of her old life. The memories of it were as intact as they had been in the weeks while her mother lay dying, only now it wasn’t even biography but more like history. It frightened her, this change of perception, until she realized that it was a modus vivendi, a truce after a mortifying exchange of artillery.

  Wallis came by in the evening to relieve his wife. They talked on the landing outside the room. The day’s report. Calm. Wallis sat on the bed, took Anne’s hand. The front door slammed below.

  ‘I’m back,’ she said.

  ‘It looks like it.’

  ‘How long have I been…out?’

  ‘Three days. Doctor’s orders. He thought it best, in view of your mother as well.’

  ‘Am I still on drugs?’

  ‘Less than before, which is why you’re back with us but probably a little fuzzy.’

  ‘Yes, a little…fuzzy.’

  She dressed as if she was watching herself do it and they ate something downstairs, the cutlery loud on the plates. Her surroundings, although sharp and recognizable, appeared unusual, as if oddly lit. Wallis asked her what she was going to do with herself, but carefully as if she might be considering…what did they call it? Something stupid. The strangest thing was that the thought hadn’t occurred to her – to kill herself. She assumed that she’d instinctively locked on to that stubbornness that her mother had possessed as well.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘My life seemed to picking up some kind of momentum before this, I should try and recapture that, I suppose.’

  ‘I could get you a job if you want.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘The Company, of course,’ he said. ‘They still haven’t filled Audrey’s position to Dickie’s satisfaction. Every time someone new starts in the job Dickie just shakes his head and says, “Irreplaceable”, and that’s it.’

  ‘Thanks, but Richard Rose and I, you know…I think I’m going to do this research project at Cambridge.’

  ‘Any time you need help, Anne, we’re here.’

  Then something did come back to her and in focus. The reason why she’d hesitated to fill in her university application forms.

  ‘There is something you could do for me now,’ she said. ‘You could get me my name back, my identity. I wouldn’t mind being Andrea Aspinall again.’

  Chapter 31

  1968–70, Cambridge and London.

  Her last act as Anne Ashworth was to go to Lisbon for the burial of Julião and Luís. Because of the African heat the bodies had already been cremated in Guiné but there was to be a Mass in the Basílica da Estrela and a burial service at the family mausoleum in Estremoz.

  Anne stayed in the York House in Rua das Janelas Verdes in Lapa. The evening before the funeral she walked the familiar streets past the British Embassy on Rua de São Domingos, turned right into Rua de Buenos Aires, left into Rua dos Navegantes and down the railed slope of Rua de João de Deus. She hadn’t been back in this neighbourhood for twenty-four years and, when she first saw the swaying jacarandas below the white dome of the basilica, she’d expected the memories to rush at her like excited children, but they held back, sidled off.

  She stood in front of the old apartment building, its façade still the same with the green and blue tiles, black diamonds, the plaque, commemorating the death of the poet João de Deus, was still above the door.

  She joined the Almeida family group on the steps in front of the basilica and, even though they’d never liked her, the foreigner, they took her in, accepted her in their mutual grief. They walked into the basilica together, Anne on Luís’s mother’s arm, and it confirmed to her what she knew about the Portuguese – they understood tragedy, it was their territory and they were united with anybody who was in it with them. They sat all night through the vigil – keeping watch over the urns.

  Mass was held in the morning. Few people other than family came. The friends of Luís and Julião were all in Africa, fighting the wars. The Almeidas took the urns to Estremoz where they were laid in the family mausoleum, alongside other coffins, bunked on top of each other like soldiers in the barracks. The wrought-iron door was closed on the dead and their photographs placed in frames on the outside: Luís, as he’d always been in front of the camera, solemn, almost as if he was attending his own funeral, and Julião, still ready for life, his smile unbroken.

  She stayed a night with the Almeidas and headed back to Lisbon on the train the next day. In the evening she went to see João Ribeiro, the last loose end to be tied before she flew out the next morning. João was living in a different room, but still in the heart of the Bairro Alto. He greeted her, kissing her hard on both cheeks and holding her tight to his thin body. She pulled away and he was weeping, pushing his handkerchief up under his specs until he realized it was easier to take them off.

  ‘So, this is what has happened to me. This is what you do to an old man. How can you leave for such a short time and still make me so happy to see you? And sad. I am sorry for all your losses. More than anyone should have to bear in
a lifetime, let alone a month. Life can be a brutal beast at times, Anne.’

  ‘You should know, João,’ she said, looking around the spartan room, his worn circumstances.

  ‘This…’ he said, sweeping his arm around, ‘this is nothing to what you have had to endure.’

  ‘You lost your wife, your job, the work that you loved.’

  ‘My wife was always sick. It was a blessed release for her. The university? Under this régime it can’t teach anybody anything. How can you learn with the newspapers printing their daily lies. And my work? I have work. This room is better than the last one, isn’t it?’

  ‘What work?’

  ‘I teach arithmetic to children and their mothers how to read and write. I am a true communist, a better one now that I live among the people. They feed me, clothe me, look after me. But you…you must tell me what you are going to do after these terrible events.’

  ‘There’s only one thing I can do,’ she said. ‘I seem to have reached some sort of finality and yet I’m still here. I have to continue. I have to start again.’

  She told him about Louis Greig and the research project and they talked mathematics until a woman brought a tray of plates and grilled sardines and they sat down to dinner.

  ‘It’s not a bad life for an old man,’ said João. ‘My meals cooked, my washing done, my room cleaned and fado in the evenings. Perhaps this is how we should all live. I find it harmonious.’

  The woman came back, cleared the table and left coffee and brandy.

  ‘They know you are important to me,’ said João, ‘so they’re making a fuss. They wanted to cook you something special but I told them sardines was what you liked, that you were one of us…as indeed is Louis Greig, for all his wealth.’

  ‘One of us?’

  ‘A mathematician and a communist.’

  ‘I’m surprised. He told me he worked at RAND after Princeton.’