Alentejo Blue Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Praise for Alentejo Blue:

  Also by Monica Ali

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Alentejo Blue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781407040882

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  ALENTEJO BLUE

  A BLACK SWAN BOOK: 9780552771160

  Originally published in Great Britain by Doubleday, a division of Transworld Publishers

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Doubleday edition published 2006

  Black Swan edition published 2007

  3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

  Copyright © Monica Ali 2006

  Cork oak decoration by Neil Gower

  Lines from Journey to Portugal by José Saramago, published by

  The Harvill Press. Reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

  Lines from ‘Ash Wednesday’ by T.S. Eliot are reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.

  The right of Monica Ali to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious,

  and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Condition of Sale

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar

  condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Typeset in 12/15pt Bembo by

  Falcon Oast Graphic Art Ltd.

  Black Swan Books are published by Transworld Publishers,

  61-63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA,

  a division of The Random House Group Ltd,

  in Australia by Random House Australia (Pty) Ltd,

  20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney, NSW 2061, Australia, in New Zealand by Random House New Zealand Ltd,

  18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  in South Africa by Random House (Pty) Ltd,

  Isle of Houghton, Corner of Boundary Road & Carse O’Gowrie, Houghton 2198, South Africa.

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire.

  Papers used by Transworld Publishers are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  About the Author

  Monica Ali is the author of one previous novel, Brick Lane, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She lives in London.

  www.booksattransworld.co.uk

  Praise for Alentejo Blue:

  ‘Ali gives us a glimpse into a world that’s truly exotic . . . brilliantly evocative’

  Daily Express

  ‘This stunningly crafted fiction will knock you off your feet’

  Oprah Magazine

  ‘[Ali] views the inhabitants of her Mamarrosa with a warm and sympathetic eye, everyone has a vivid life on the page. It is also part of Ali’s gift that she never allows the reader to come to easy conclusions. The village is no rural idyll – but neither is it bereft of pleasure or culture. The same compassionate respect for complexity governs her creation of character. As a novelist, Ali is not like her fictional novelist, Stanton, who pals around with the Potts family in order “to see the demons at work”’

  Philip Marchand, Toronto Star

  ‘Young, old, male, female, Portuguese, English, Ali’s portrayal of character is consistently convincing. The book has a wide emotional range; she does pathos, bitterness, joy, cynicism, tenderness, loss, regret. Our sympathies are constantly aroused, we are given tantalising glimpses into the inner worlds of these richly varied people’

  Evening Standard

  ‘If you’re looking for an intelligent holiday read, this has it all’

  Marie Claire

  ‘Ali sketches the horrors of the Salazar years with a light but telling touch . . . her writing is assured and all the more moving and disturbing for its restraint. Her new novel reveals the scope of her considerable talent’

  Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘[Ali’s] assured writing and gentle humour are a constant delight’

  Daily Mail

  ‘Her craftsmanship is superb and her descriptions rich with quirky, sad, funny and lovely details . . . The beauty of her writing gives her a starring role in this literary generation’

  USA Today

  ‘Compelling, atmospheric and elegantly written’

  Tatler

  ‘An excellent novel, so vivid in its descriptions of people and places . . . A must read’

  Diário de Notícias (Portugal)

  ‘With its supple prose and acute insights . . . Alentejo Blue establishes definitively that Monica Ali is a major literary talent’

  Entertainment Weekly

  ‘Ali’s latest rewards with characters who etch themselves into one’s memory’

  People

  ‘The grace of Ali’s words is dazzling’

  TimeOut New York

  ‘[Ali is] a writer with a keen eye for physical and emotional detail, and a style, mixing the tart with the lyrical which pulls you fast into her chosen world’

  The Times

  ‘Ali is an expert with gesture; even minor characters appear in attitudes that are particular and unforgettable’

  Nell Freudenberger, The Nation

  ‘The “novel in short stories” is no new trick but Ali adapts it in a distinctive way, making it her own . . . These stories are absorbing and beautiful . . . legitimately gripping and lovely prose’

  Baltimore Sun

  ‘Ali is masterful in writing about her characters’ lives’

  Los Angeles Times

  ‘Beautifully written, a tour-de-force’

  Bookpage

  ‘Ali evokes the village of Mamarrosa the way the American novelist Sherwood Anderson did the town of Winesburg, Ohio, in 1919 – with spare prose, through interior monologues built on a foundation of silence’

  Philadelphia Inquirer

  ‘A master of concision and suggestion, [Ali] says volumes about characters and situations by what she does not say. It does indeed take a village – in this case, to show the fundamental universality

  of all human predicaments’

  Booklist

  ‘Using luminous, heartfelt language, the award-winning Ali weaves a tapestry of human frailty . . . the brief, tantalizing glimpses of private heartbreak each character reveals are both touching and compelling’

  Library Journal

  ‘The voices are vivid and resonant, and there’s no question that it’s a more structurally ambitious, more nuanced, book than Brick Lane’

  Chicago Tribune

  ‘Alentejo Blue is the work of an out
rageously talented writer. Deft, funny, her understanding profound enough to be called wisdom . . . Ali gives us old and young, village-born and foreigner, each impeccably realized, with never a whisper of patronage’

  The Australian

  ‘Ali writes like a dream. Every so often you stop in mid-sentenceto admire the prose . . . In Alentejo Blue you see why Ali is still considered one of the best writers working in English today’

  Now (Canada)

  ‘A bewitching read’

  Scotland on Sunday

  ‘Ali weaves their stories together with sympathy and compassion, making this a very different, but no less worthy, successor to her formidable début’

  Red

  ‘Once again, Ali’s characters are skilfully drawn, revealing hidden passions and disappointments that bring their stories alive’

  Psychologies

  Also by Monica Ali

  Brick Lane

  and published by Black Swan

  For S.C.T.

  Alentejo

  The name of this southern province of Portugal is stressed on the third syllable – A-len-TAY-jo – and the ‘j’ is similar to the French ‘j’ in ‘jolie’.

  ‘Villages are like people, we approach them slowly, a step at a time.’

  José Saramago, Journey to Portugal

  Because I do not hope to turn again

  Because I do not hope

  Because I do not hope to turn

  T. S. Eliot, ‘Ash-Wednesday’

  Acknowledgements

  This is neither a history book nor a travel book, but only a work of fiction. Readers who want to find out more about Portugal might like to turn to two books that combine history and travel to great effect: Paul Hyland’s Backwards out of the Big World, and Oldest Ally: A Portrait of Salazar’s Portugal by Peter Fryer and Patricia McGowan Pinheiro. There is not a great deal of literature available, in English, about the Alentejo. Robert and Mary Wilson’s excellent A Short Trip in the Alentejo focuses on the marble towns of the Alto (Upper) Alentejo, an area which has its own particular character, as does the imaginary corner of the Alentejo about which I have written.

  I would like to thank Grant, Wendy, Max and Maya for introducing me to the pleasures of the Portuguese countryside, Liliana Chachian for her heroic attempts to teach me Portuguese, Nicole Aragi, Arabella Stein and Bill Scott-Kerr for all their support, and Deborah Adams for her scrupulous attention to detail. Most of all I would like to thank Simon for telling me to get on with it.

  1

  AT FIRST HE THOUGHT IT WAS A SCARECROW. COMING outside in the tired morning light to relieve his bladder, blessing as always the old Judas tree, João turned his head and saw the dark shape in the woods. It took some time to zip his trousers. His fingers were like enemy agents. They pretended to be his instruments but secretly worked against him.

  João walked out beneath the moss-skinned branches thinking only this: eighty-four years upon the earth is an eternity.

  He touched Rui’s boots. They almost reached the ground. ‘My friend,’ he said, ‘let me help you.’ He waited for the courage to look up and see his face. When it came he whispered in his lacerated old man’s voice. ‘Querido,’ he said, ‘Ruizinho.’

  Standing on the log that Rui had kicked away, João took his penknife and began to cut the rope. He put his free arm across Rui’s chest and up beneath his armpit, felt the weight begin to shift as the fibres sprang apart beneath the blade.

  The almond blossom was early this year. The tomatoes too would come early and turn a quick, deceiving red. They would not taste of anything. João took Rui’s crooked hand in his own and thought: these are the things that I know. It was time to put the broad beans in. The soil that had grown the corn needed to rest. The olives this year would be hard and small.

  He sat in the long grass with his back against the log and Rui resting against him. He moved Rui’s head so it lay more comfortably on his shoulder. He wrapped his arms around Rui’s body. For the second time he held him.

  They were seventeen and hungry when they first met, in the back of a cattle wagon heading east to the wheatfields. Rui pulled him up without a word but later he said, ‘There’s work enough for all. That’s what I hear.’ João nodded and when the hills had subsided and the great plains stretched out like a golden promise he leaned across and said, ‘Anyone who wants work can find it.’ They moved their arses on the wooden slats and pretended they weren’t sore and looked out further than they had ever seen before, white villages stamped like foam on the blue, the land breaking against the sky.

  On the third day they put down on the edge of a small town and the children who ran up to meet the wagon were bitten hard, no different from João’s brothers and sisters. João looked at Rui but Rui set his mouth and swung his legs over the side the same as the other men. The older ones got called and went to cut cork or plough the fields while João and Rui stood up tall with their hands in their pockets. João was so hungry he felt it in his legs and his hands and his scalp. They walked through the hovels, the women lining the doorways, the dogs nosing the gutters, and came to the centre. ‘We’ll stick together,’ said Rui. He had green eyes and a fine nose and white skin, as though he had never been out in the sun.

  ‘If someone wants us he’ll have to take us both,’ said João, as if he were master of his destiny.

  They scrounged half a loaf at the café by scrubbing the floor and humping the rubbish to the tip and slept on the cobbled street with their mouths open. When he woke, the first thing João saw was Rui’s face. He thought the pain in his stomach was pure hunger.

  Side by side they scavenged and slept. They milled about with the other men waiting for work and learned a lot: how to eke out a few words to last a conversation, how to lean against a wall, how to spit and how to fill up on indifference.

  At the top of the square was a two-storey building with bars on the bottom window. João had never seen a prison before. The prisoners sat in the window and talked to friends or received food from relatives. One day a dozen or more people had gathered. João and Rui had nothing else to do.

  ‘He talks about sacrifice. Who is making these sacrifices, my friends? Ask yourselves.’

  No one looked at the prisoner. They were just hanging around waiting, though there was nothing to wait for.

  The prisoner clutched the bars and pressed his face to them. His nose escaped. ‘Salazar,’ he said, ‘is not making sacrifices.’

  There was a general stirring as if fear had blown in on the dry wind.

  ‘Listen to me,’ said the prisoner. His face was thin and pinched as though he had spent too long trying to squeeze it out of the narrow opening. ‘In the whole of the Alentejo four families own three-quarters of the land. It was like this too in other countries, like Russia. But now the Russian land belongs to the Russian people.’

  Each man averted his face from every other. It was not safe to read another’s thoughts.

  João glanced at Rui. Rui did not know what the others knew, or was too reckless to care. He looked directly at the prisoner.

  ‘The people make the wealth, but the wealth does not belong to the people.’

  Men withdrew their hands from their pockets as if emptying their savings before leaving town. The prisoner slid his fingers between the bars and flapped his wrists. ‘It is forbidden for us to go barefoot. Salazar forbids it.’ The man laughed and the laugh was as free as the body was caged. ‘Look, this is how we must bind our feet. As long as our feet are in slippers and rags, our bellies must be full.’

  An old man with a bent back, obliged to gaze at feet the long day through, grunted a loud assent. A younger man, blinking back tears of fury, said, ‘It is true.’

  The prisoner tipped back into the dark cell as though wrenched by some unknown force, perhaps by the darkness itself. Each free man discovered he had something to do elsewhere.

  ‘Rui,’ said João, ‘we better go.’

  Rui stood with his hands on his hips and toss
ed his head like a bullfighter. ‘It’s finished,’ said João. He grabbed Rui’s elbow and dragged him away.

  Later a man came to the square and beckoned João. ‘You want to work?’

  ‘Anything,’ said João. ‘Please.’

  ‘Come,’ said the man and turned around.

  ‘My friend,’ said João, looking over at Rui who whistled and kicked his heels against the wall.

  The man kept walking.

  ‘Wait,’ called João. ‘I’m coming.’

  He looked up and saw Rui’s hat on a large stone, bathed in a circle of milky light. He imagined Rui sitting there, taking off his hat for the last time.

  João’s spine was stiff and there was an ache in his chest. He shifted in the damp grass and looked across and saw how oddly Rui’s legs were lying. His trousers were hemmed with mud. One boot faced down and the other faced up. For us, thought João, there can be no ease.

  He had been there as usual on Thursday, outside the Junta da Freguesia for the game. Everyone was there: José, Manuel, Nelson, Carlos, Abel and the rest. Only Mario did not come because Mario had broken his hip. ‘That Manuel,’ said Rui, ‘is a cheating bastard.’ ‘That Rui,’ said Manuel, ‘is a stupid donkey.’ Everything went on the way it had for the past eighteen years, since Rui turned up in Mamarrosa, though Rui and João had been the young ones then. ‘Carlos,’ said Abel, ‘you bowl like a woman.’ ‘Shut up,’ said Carlos, ‘what do you know about women?’

  Malhadinha was the best way for men to talk. You rolled the balls out on to the green and rolled the words out after them. You didn’t have to face each other.

  Afterwards they locked the balls in the Junta and went to the café to drink.

  ‘My granddaughter wants to go to Lisbon,’ said José.

  ‘My son left London and went to Glasgow,’ said Rui.

  ‘My daughter,’ said Carlos, ‘says she will throw me out if I cough once more in the night. But she always says that.’

  When it was time to go to bed João walked with Nelson and Rui walked with Manuel. Sometimes João walked with Manuel. Sometimes he walked with José or Antonio or Mario. But in all those years he never walked alone with Rui.