Alentejo Blue Read online

  When she got out of the car she checked her reflection in the wing mirror. She carried a basket of eggs.

  There was a cold rinse in his chest that might have been mistaken for fear.

  ‘Chrissie,’ he said, ‘I need to bury myself for a while.’

  She set down the basket. ‘They’ve started laying in that old Citroën.’

  He took her hand. ‘Do you see what I’m saying?’

  ‘For some reason,’ she said, ‘we’re getting a lot of double-yolkers.’

  She made it easy really. He was grateful. You’ve got your work, Harry, she told him. Need your peace and quiet. And I’ve got my husband. He kissed her on the nose. I’ll still see you, he told her. We’ll have coffee. I don’t drink coffee, she said. Tea then, he said, or a beer.

  Later he met Dieter at the café and attempted a discreet celebration. ‘A bottle of red – the best you have.’

  Vasco wiped their table and tucked his filthy rag into his belt. ‘You would like something special? Expensive, yes?’

  ‘OK,’ said Stanton.

  ‘OK,’ wheezed Vasco. ‘I charge you more.’

  Dieter’s subject was Portuguese bureaucracy, an old favourite. ‘All these obstacles they put in your way. They do not really want you to work.’

  Stanton nodded. The work on his own house would never be completed.

  ‘In Germany they will be fired. The officials are there to help you and if they do not they will be fired. Pure and simple.’

  ‘Pure and simple,’ said Stanton. ‘Why don’t you go back to Germany? Seems everything would be easier.’

  Dieter sat up and clutched the arms of his chair. ‘Germany?’ he said. ‘If I never see that country again so long as I may live, so much the better for me. Germany? No. Never.’

  Vasco came with a bottle of the usual. ‘Very expensive, this. Very good wine for celebrating. Wait, I bring a glass and make a toast with you . . . So, what do we toast?’

  ‘Long life,’ said Dieter, sounding pained.

  ‘Life and liberty,’ said Stanton, raising a glass.

  They stayed late and Vasco was waiting to close. When Stanton went to pay he was reading glossy brochures at the counter.

  ‘Going on holiday?’

  ‘Listen,’ said Vasco. ‘Treasures of the ages await at Hotel Luxor’s Giza Galleria. Located on the main level of the East Tower, enchanting fountains, beautifully sculpted statues and elegant stone walkways greet visitors when shopping Luxor-style at Giza Galleria.’ He passed a fat hand over his mouth. ‘Only in America, yes?’

  Stanton conceded this to be so.

  ‘But maybe also in the future in the Alentejo. Nothing is impossible.’

  ‘True,’ said Stanton, taking the easiest course.

  ‘You have heard of Marco Afonso Rodrigues?’

  ‘Remind me.’

  ‘A very big name in the tourist industry,’ said Vasco. ‘Luxury resorts in Thailand and Singapore. So I have been told. I believe he also has interests in London, Tokyo and Macau.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Stanton, attempting to stem the flow.

  ‘Do you know who he is?’

  ‘Do now.’

  ‘He is Eduardo’s cousin,’ Vasco said, inflating a little if that were possible. ‘And he is coming home to Mamarrosa. Imagine that.’

  ‘Well, I’ll try,’ said Stanton, more irritably than he’d meant. ‘He’s been away a long time?’ he added, as a counter-measure.

  ‘Twenty years or more,’ said Vasco proudly. ‘Of course if he wants to do business here he will need a partner. Local knowledge – you cannot make a business without that.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Stanton, taking out his wallet, ‘when are you going to America?’

  Vasco closed the brochure. ‘Oh, I cannot travel. The asthma. It is not possible.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Stanton. ‘Then why–?’

  ‘Why?’ squeaked Vasco. ‘Why? It is a good joke. The writer asks why I should read.’

  Ruby looked like a waxwork in the headlights. She stood still when he pulled over and she did not move when he opened the door. ‘Give you a ride home,’ he called. ‘Come on, get in.’ She got in without a word. She had the sunglasses in her hand. ‘Good night?’ he asked. She leaned her head against the window. Finally she said, ‘I’m really, really tired.’

  A little way along the track that led down into the valley she said, ‘Let me out now. If Dad hears he’ll come looking.’

  Stanton stopped the car and cut the engine.

  Playing it back later – in bed, entombed by the noise of cicadas – he could not recall who made the first move. She smelled of freshly dug earth and her skin was all goosebumps and when she came she bit his ear until he cried out and pinched her hard to make her let him go.

  He spent two nights at his desk and on the third day slept in his chair and woke with his head lolled back, a demon pain laced at the neck and one hand on the keyboard.

  He heard Chrissie’s car and the soft click of her sandals on the steps. He heard the sigh of the door handle and the resistance of the lock. Ruby came the next day and knocked on the door and then the window and then circled to the back and stood outside the bedroom. He crouched in the bathroom next to the stack of tiles that would never be laid and noticed for the first time the mesh of fine lines through the clear glaze. He watched her go from the sitting-room window and when she got to the cypress trees she looked back and raised one finger in the air.

  It was the second week of October and Dieter came to say goodbye. His Dutch woman had already left. ‘Maybe one day I will go to India too. This country –’ He paused and flicked back his hair in that strange feminine gesture. ‘This country is getting on my nerves.’

  ‘Well,’ said Stanton. He felt the redundancy of anything he might say. ‘I wish you luck with everything.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Dieter.

  For a moment Stanton thought he was going to be enveloped into that concave chest. ‘Hope the work situation there is more satisfactory.’

  ‘To speak the absolute truth,’ said Dieter, ‘in the Algarve everything will be the same. But you know when it is time to go and for me it is time.’

  ‘Whenever you’re in the area,’ said Stanton, hoping that would wrap things up.

  The rain came and turned the world to mud. Stanton took his boots off at the door but still the mud insinuated itself into the house. If it carried on this way he would be forced to clean the place. The oranges began to drop but they could not, Stanton discovered, be eaten. The peach trees in the little orchard turned out rotten. They sagged beneath the weight of water and split and rested their branches on the ground. At dawn – sometimes he was rising, sometimes going to bed – the eucalyptus drifted ghost-like in the mist. A fox visited every evening and Stanton began to put out his scraps.

  The shepherd moved on without goodbyes. Stanton walked in the woods and saw hunters once with ancient guns and another time thought he saw a boy but when he came to the place there was no one. His mother wrote:

  I am sorry to tell you that your father has given up the allotment. I said to him, but you love gardening! And do you know what he said? No I don’t, Joan. And I don’t like it either.

  What are we to make of that? I expect you’ve got quite a lot of experience out there now yourself. I expect you’re a dab hand now with trees and plants and growing things.

  Four more weeks and he had a complete draft. He drove half an hour, the windscreen wipers sticking and dislodging and sticking again, to the nearest town where he knew he could buy Glenfiddich and returned with two bottles.

  He poured a generous measure. A fire, he thought, would be nice. The wood caught on the third attempt but it was still damp and the smoke hurt his eyes and made him cough.

  He was sick of these four walls. In the last month he’d spoken barely a dozen words.

  He thought about Jay. It would be good to see the boy again.

  Chrissie. Lovely Chrissie. She wouldn’t be angry
. Chrissie could hardly complain. They’d said they’d have a beer.

  Ruby. Well, Ruby. Ruby would be all right. She’d made the first move, remember. Been around a bit.

  How many visitors did they get over there anyway? Let’s have a fucking drink, mate. Yes, let’s have a fucking drink.

  The whisky bottle bounced off the passenger seat as he swung a sharp left on the descent into the valley. He sang an old tune pulling up by the chicken shed. You can blow out the candle but you can’t put out the fire. As he opened the door he noticed the calf, much bigger now, bandy legs and bloated stomach, standing by the house with the rain running from his nose and tail and his hooves in plastic bags. The wind howled through the bamboo and sent a curtain of water off the roof. Chrissie answered the door and backed away from him and he went in and found that all the Pottses were there and that none was ready with a greeting.

  ‘What kind of man are you?’ China had spoken quietly. Chrissie stood behind Ruby and stroked her hair. Stanton, needing salvation, tried to smile at Jay but the boy would not look at him. ‘What kind of man are you?’ That was all. Chrissie did not speak and Ruby did not speak and Jay did not speak and Stanton had no answer. He waited for China to call him every name under the sun but China did not oblige. China was on his feet and there was hope at first of a fight but this too was clutching at straws. Long after all hope had gone Stanton stood there and waited for something to happen and nothing happened at all.

  On the drive back he swerved to avoid a tractor he had not seen coming. The pickup skidded into the verge and two wheels sank without hesitation into the mud. It was not far to walk home. He drank a good measure before removing his clothes and he found that if he just maintained a constant sipping, very evenly spaced, taking very small sips, he could keep all thoughts from his head. The whisky was warming. If he observed very closely, very carefully, the way it travelled out from the solar plexus along all the major arteries and branched off along each individual vein, he could feel it as a kind of calm radiating out from the core of his being.

  He woke in his chair, naked and half frozen, and when he went to boil water he could not feel his toes and his fingers were too stiff to strike a match. His head hurt. His back was broken; if not broken then something worse. When he bent to get his socks on he nearly cried. He set off to walk up to the telephone box and on the way he thought about how beautiful the place was and how much he would miss it. The rain had stopped in the night and the sun played in the treetops, scattering diamonds here and there and emeralds. It teased purples and scarlets from the ploughed-up field and burnished the far-off hills a fine shade of nostalgia. He breathed deeply and it was good to smell the eucalyptus and the pine and he thought of the air making him clean inside. As he came up to the road he saw an old man in black felt fedora and waistcoat leading a cow along the opposite track, heading for the village at such a slow pace, as if they had all the time in the world, as if arriving were nothing and the journey everything. He raised a hand and the old man raised a hand and they passed each other and Stanton went on his way.

  3

  IT IS LATE AND IT IS HOT AND THE GROINSWEAT MAKES bold with his thighs as he wipes for the last time the counter and turns over in his mind, now and now again, his grandmother’s phrase: we live our lives. What a way she had of complaining! There. Pretending she would never grumble and turning her whole life into a complaint.

  Vasco shakes the cloth over the sink, wipes the cash register and stuffs the cloth in the drawer with the travel brochures. What a tedious thing to say. More interesting to say we don’t live our lives, the ones we meant to have. He hitches his trousers. When he got too fat for belts he began to live in fear of his backside becoming exposed. He has braces but no faith in them. More interesting to speak of life as a spectator sport: we don’t live our lives; we wait and watch and judge.

  His legs ache. He would give anything – this café, the apartment above, his savings, his Yankees baseball cap purchased at the actual Home of Champions – for someone to come and rub his legs. Damn that Joelly, shirking off again this morning. He should go over and bang on his door. Joelly, I want you to massage my calves until the muscles are soft enough for a baby to chew. What do you mean, poorly? In my opinion a man, or even a boy like you, is fit for three things only: work, hospital or the grave. A bit poorly? That is wonderful. That is superb. Absolutely prime.

  His breath is becoming laboured. Vasco switches off the lights and stands in the blue-purple glow of the Insectocutor listening to it hum, like a man in a state of perpetual indecision. This is what Vasco is going to do: light a candle, take the last cake from the chill-cabinet (an almond tart), sit down and enjoy it and then go up to bed.

  Cake, fork, spoon and candle are before him on the table. Vasco sees that he has forgotten to cover the display stand, a procedure imported from the United States of America where he learned his trade. It is supposed to be a security measure. He looks at the dark and ragged outline made by the sunglasses, postcards, teddies and toy whistles. They are safe enough. But they have been in that rack, most of them, for a long time and he will not neglect to cover them for the night. A child spinning the stand: this is what stock-turn means in the Alentejo.

  What about that Eduardo! Vasco has never liked him. You can’t trust a man who mumbles. Speak up if you have nothing to hide.

  Vasco picks up the fork and holds it above the cake. Sugar glistens in the candlelight, beautiful as young love and as cheap.

  Three days ago Eduardo said, ‘My own prize bull. Give me one of those empadas. I’ll risk it.’ And hasn’t been in since. Vasco hopes he never comes back again. He can do without customers like that.

  He looks closely at the cake, the small landslide of pastry at one edge, the pearly nuts studding the surface, the dense brown syrupy sponge, the sugar flashing its heart out. He puts down his fork. Oh, that Eduardo, a friend for twenty years and if he never crosses Vasco’s mind again it will be too soon.

  ‘Will I eat this cake or not?’ Vasco says it out loud. He picks up the spoon. The table shakes. These damn plastic tables; all day Vasco puts up with their trembling. These damn plastic chairs. He never dares sit in one until after he closes. When he stands up again the chair will be stuck to his backside and he will take hold of the armrests and prise it off and pretend that it could happen to anyone.

  He will not eat the cake. The very idea fills him with disgust. He is not hungry at all. Well, perhaps just a little. If he eats the cake he will feel remorse. But there will be pleasure too. Nobody is going to come and rub his legs. Tomorrow the delivery from Lindoso will be here. Why leave one cake from the old stock in the cabinet? He strokes this thought like a dozing cat until it purrs right back at him.

  Yes, silly not to eat it.

  Although, why should he force down this stale cake? Is he a dustbin? A man without refinement? I’ll risk it. Eduardo! What a toad that man is. Everyone knows that Vasco’s food is always fresh.

  Vasco picks at the pastry and rubs it between thumb and finger. All this reasoning is useless. Either he is going to eat the cake or not. Reason has nothing to do with it. For every argument there is a counter-argument. If it were not so, the world would be a happy place.

  If he eats the cake he will go to bed with a full stomach and sleep soundly. Or the sugar might keep him awake. What are a few extra calories to a man of his size? On the other hand, only a slim man should be eating sticky puddings late at night. You see, there is never just the one way to look at things. Some people are blessed with partial vision. They are the ones who achieve greatness. The rest of us – Vasco turns his head and sees himself in the plate-glass window, floating with a candle in a black sea – the rest of us muddle through.

  Vasco stares at the fat man with his neck spilling over the white chef’s coat and it seems that he is drifting, that the blackness will drown him. ‘What do I know?’ he says, out loud, quickly. His voice is too high and too thin. He needs his inhaler but his legs ache and he
does not want to climb the stairs. He looks away from the window and sets his hands on the table.

  His grandmother was less than five feet tall and she knew practically nothing. She had only four teeth. In her entire life she never went further than Santa Clara. She could eat a whole raw onion. She could cut the head off a chicken and hold it down so she never lost a drop of the precious blood she used to cook it in. She could cure any woman (or goat or cow) of mastitis with her poultice and wouldn’t share the secret ingredients with anyone. Her achievements were not large but she was proud of them. She liked to pretend that whatever she knew, she knew with certainty.

  When Uncle Humberto packed his spare pair of trousers (with cuttings from his favourite vine wrapped inside) and set off for a new life in Mozambique, of metal mines and miscegenation, she said, ‘He has answered a call.’

  When her youngest son, Henrique, answered another call two years later, this time to fight the savages in Angola and save them from themselves and international communism, she said, ‘It is the Lord’s will.’

  When they learned he would not be coming home again, while Vasco’s mother sank to her knees and wept, his grandmother said, ‘What is meant to be, must be,’ and went out to feed the pig. But when Vasco broke her teapot she beat him with the big wooden spoon. Vasco sobbed. ‘I couldn’t help it. It slipped.’ She cracked the spoon down on his head. ‘Help it! Why was it in your hand in the first place? No, my boy, didn’t the Lord, through His Grace, give us free will? When Eve tasted the apple she did not say “But I could not help it.” Put your arms down. Do you think I would beat you on the face?’

  What a joke. Vasco digs his fingernail into the warm pool of wax gathering on the table. With teapots you are free to choose, in matters of life and death you are not.

  He holds his finger, with its cracked wax globe, up before his face. In the morning, when he wakes, his legs will feel like that: stiff, bloodless remains.

  He never was able to believe. All those mornings spent on his knees, smelling the polish and the dust, pushing his head against the pew in front as if he could force his way into the Light. ‘Oh, Lord,’ he prayed, ‘make me believe.’ Father Quintão’s eyes watered when the young girls took communion. Vasco saw him in the sacristy with Laura Meireles, her skirts up round her waist. He prayed again, ‘Oh, Lord, please try harder.’