1993 - The Blue Afternoon (37 page)

I was beginning to grow a little worried. If ever there was an example of clutching at straws…But Carriscant persisted, extracting a promise from them that they would ask anyone who bought the sweets to provide their name and address. They would try, they said, obviously affected by the earnestness of Carriscant’s demand, but they warned that not everyone would be prepared to divulge that information.

We found a small café nearby, the Cafe Adamastor, and stopped there for refreshment. It was little more than a smoke-darkened room with a long zinc-topped bar running the length of the rear wall with a shelf above ranged with small dumpy barrels, with spigots attached, labelled Moscatel, Clarete, Ginebra. Fixed to the ceiling was a small fan mounted vertically on the end of a hanging pole so that it resembled a propeller shaft on an outboard motor. This revolved slowly round and round, ensuring that the cigarette smoke reached every corner of the room.

We sat at a round marble-topped table. I ordered a vinho verde, Carriscant a brandy. I sipped eagerly at my cold wine, it tasted fresh and young, like crushed grass. I took out my cigarettes.

“I don’t think you should do that, Kay.”

“Do what?”

“Smoke.”

“Everyone else is, why not me, for heaven’s sake?”

“None of the women are…I have a feeling it’s not the done thing.”

“Well, I shall blaze a trail,” I said, defiantly setting fire to my Picayune. Carriscant’s instincts were correct, however:

I became the object of fascinated stares and whispered conversations for a minute or two.

“We’ve made a real start,” Carriscant said, with genuine enthusiasm, “a real start. I’ll look into that shop daily. I’ll find out others in the city. We should begin to build up a list of names.”

I felt indescribably weary at the prospect of seeking out every crystallised violets lover in Lisbon.

“Dr Carriscant, you really can’t—”

“How many times have I told you, Kay? I wish you’d call me Father.”

“It’s hard for me, you know that.”

“I don’t see why. At least
Salvador
, then. We’re friends, Kay, good chums, you and I. I don’t want to feel that I’m here on sufferance. I’ll have another brandy, I think. What about you?”

W
e found two more sweetshops which stocked crystallised violets, one a tobacconist on the Praca do Commercio, the other in Biarro Alto. Unable to make our complicated requests understood we resolved to return later with Joao.

I prevailed upon Carriscant to attempt another method of finding Delphine. I suggested we obtain an enlargement of the photograph and place an advertisement in a newspaper, asking anyone who recognised Delphine to contact us at the Commercio. We could even offer a reward, I suggested. He thought this was a fine idea, so we ended our day with a visit to the photographer’s studio where we had had our photographs taken for our identity cards and where the enlargement was duly made.

When we returned to the hotel there was a note from the US legation, from Senhor Liceu, beautifully written in exquisite copperplate. A colleague in the office thought that the woman who had been with the guests of honour on the day of the inaugural Aishlie cup was not French but Portuguese. He had spoken to her and recalled her name as Senhora Lopes do Livio. “A melodious appellation,” Liceu had added, “which is why it stayed in his head.” This fact was confirmed when they found the official visitors’ book for the day. But there was no address by the signature.

“Portuguese?” Carriscant said. “There must be some mistake.”

According to Joao there were three Lopes do Livios in the Lisbon telephone directory. One was a beautician’s, one was at an address in the Alfama—“I don’t think a lady of distinction would live there,” Joao averred—the third was in a respectable part of town near the jardim botanico. We decided to investigate in the morning.

We sauntered out arm in arm for a digestive after our meal that evening, heading for the Cafe Martinho, situated between the station and the National Theatre on the Rossio. We walked through the dimly lit streets into the enormous square, still loud with trams and taxis, the shouts of lottery-ticket vendors and the calls of shoeshine boys, with groups of people strolling about the fountains and the monument, the café windows under their faded awnings glowing orange, and, beyond the classic bulk of the theatre, rose the city on one of its higher hills, a loose heap of spangling lights in the luminous dark. For the first time I experienced the authentic thrill of travel, that strangeness of displacement, as we strolled, anonymous foreigners in this hospitable, scruffy city, amongst its idling denizens, their laughter and their chatter falling on our uncomprehending ears. I was in Europe, I remembered, albeit on its very western edge, and I should draw some sustenance from this trip I was paying for—and, my God, did I need it—and stop behaving like the tolerant chaperone of a testy and eccentric old man. But the testy and eccentric old man, I could see, was enjoying himself too as he strode briskly across the square, proud in his new suit, towards the blurry warmth of the Martinho, from whose open doors a smell of roasting coffee wafted.

The Martinho was a grandly capacious place. A large room with solid pillars, encrusted cornices and tall gilt mirrors. It was filled with neat ranks of simple wooden tables with marble tops, laid out with a schoolroom precision in immaculate rows. Drooping lights with frosted glass shades sprouted like wilting tulips from the central pillars sending out a diffuse yellow light. All the waiters were stout middle-aged men with long white aprons and generous moustaches. The place was crowded, full of men who did not remove their hats and who sat, most oddly I thought, with one hand resting on their walking sticks and canes as they drank and chatted, as if at any moment they were about to spring to their feet and stride off into the night.

We found a table for two at one side of the room, beneath a baroquely carved mirror whose sides were formed by two golden caryatids, bare breasted pubescent beauties emerging from a tangle of lianas and tropical fruits. We ordered coffee, with a brandy for Carriscant, and sat back to survey the scene.

“This is the life,” Carriscant said, upending his brandy into his coffee cup. He looked at me slyly: “You won’t find anything like this in Los Angeles.”

“Which is why one travels,” I said a little frostily, irritated by his patronising manner. “How boring it would be if every new place merely reproduced your home town. Someone from Lisbon doesn’t go to Los Angeles looking for a Cafe Martinho.”

“He’d be pleased to find one, however,” Carriscant said in a self-satisfied way.

A silence fell as I decided not to prolong this discussion.

“How did you know,” I said abruptly, irritated with him for souring the excitement and pleasure I had experienced crossing the Rossio, “that I lived in Los Angeles? How did you know Mother had gone to live there?”

My tone took him aback and he looked startled. “Udo told me,” he said. “Annaliese used to write to him once a month until he died.” He paused, remembering. “The bishop annulled our marriage very promptly. Then Udo told me she had married an American called Fischer, a coir importer, from Los Angeles. When I got there it wasn’t hard to track him down. Or you.”

“What about Hugh Paget?”

“I know nothing about any Hugh Paget.”

I felt the weight of my dissatisfactions descend on me, a sensation of living a personal history concocted of half truths and opportune fictions. Now other uncertainties and key ambiguities of Carriscant’s story rose up to nag at me, making me fretful and ill at ease. In many ways Carriscant had been as honest and as unsparing as anyone I could imagine. He seemed to have held nothing back, providing me with details and intimacies I would never have asked for myself. But in the end it was his story and he was free to emphasise and ignore what he wished, to select and choose, shape and redirect…

I sipped my coffee, looking at him over the rim of the cup as his quick eyes scanned the busy room. He turned to meet my gaze and smiled it me, raising his cup in salute. He was in a good mood.

“Thanks for everything, Kay, I think tomorrow we—”

“Who killed Ward and Braun?”

The question blurted from me, unplanned, spontaneous, as my mind sifted through the tale he’d told me. Carriscant didn’t flinch: he thought about it, tugged at an earlobe, and set his cup down in its saucer without a rattle. He shrugged.

“Your guess is as good as mine…Who do you think? I told you everything I know.”

“So you say. But that can’t be true. There must be things you forgot, or didn’t think were relevant.”

“Of course.” To my vague surprise I seemed to sense a pleasure in him now, as he settled back in his chair, a kind of mischievous delight at the line my questioning was taking. “Look, I told you the story you asked me to tell—about me and Delphine—why we were making this trip. But who knows?” He paused, a tolerant smile on his lips. “You may find the answer to other questions. Everything’s there if you know where to find it.”

This intrigued me. “What? You mean like clues?”

“Yes and no. It applies to both of us. I’m sure that in telling you what happened there are connections I haven’t spotted. Got to be. Maybe we can force them out. Two heads are better than one, and all that.”

This seemed to me to be an oblique challenge. I wished I had my notes with me, but, as I began to reflect, certain hints, certain omissions began to reveal themselves.

“Think, Kay, think hard. What’ve I forgotten? Now you know the whole story and can look back, what seems significant?”

I thought for a while before I came across something. A completely innocuous remark early on, the sort of casual parenthesis that at the time seems quite unremarkable.

I looked at him closely. “You said at one stage that you had seen Sieverance before. Before you met him that day in the Ayuntamiento.”

He frowned and looked up at the ceiling. “No I didn’t. I said I wondered if we had met before. He reminded me of someone.”

“Who?”

“It’s a long story. It happened a good while before I met Delphine. I don’t know if it has any bearing on all this.”

“Why don’t I be the judge of that?”

“All right.” He looked at me shrewdly, and then signalled to the waiter to renew our coffees. I ordered a glass of port for myself. When in Rome…

“You remember when I visited my mother in San Teodoro…I hadn’t seen her for some time, not since my last visit, which had been, I think, in February 1902. I went to her because I was worried about what was happening in the southern provinces, in South Luzon. The war was still going on. After Balangiga the fighting—”

“What’s Balangiga?”

“It’s a place. Forty-eight American soldiers were massacred there, on the island of Samar, by insurrectos. General Smith issued an order that all Filipinos capable of carrying arms who did not surrender were to be shot.” Carriscant gave a tired smile. “General Smith worked on the assumption that any male over the age of ten was capable of carrying arms.” He spread his hands. “It all got out of control. People assumed once Aguinaldo had been captured the war was virtually over. Not at all. The early months of 1902 were a bad time, the worst in some ways. Not for us in Manila, of course, but in South Luzon—in Cavite, Batangas, Tabayas—there was a lot of fighting. There was a fine insurrecto general there, Esteban Elpidio—”

“Pantaleon’s uncle.”

“Yes. There was a punitive expedition sent out, led by a young general, Franklin Bell. People were concentrated in military zones, all food outside these zones was destroyed. Whenever an American soldier was killed a Filipino prisoner was chosen by lot and executed. When they finally caught Elpidio in April the war was effectively over, but in February there were still many problems…”

So Carriscant told me about the trip he made south to visit his mother. He had gone in his carriage with supplies of food, driven by Constancio. The journey down to Los Banos on Laguna de Bay was quiet. When they turned inland to San Teodoro they entered one of the areas under military control where the curfew was enforced. They reached the village before nightfall and Carriscant was safely in his mother’s house by the time the curfew fell at 8.

The next morning however none of the household servants arrived and his mother, alarmed, asked him to return to the village to investigate. She was particularly concerned because her major-domo, Flaviano, was infallible. And if he had been ill his son, Ortega, would have come to the house with the news.

San Teodoro was completely deserted when Carriscant arrived there with Constancio. Cooking fires had been lit for breakfast and two or three market stalls had been set out beneath the old acacia tree in the square, but apart from hens and nosing pie dogs, there was no sign of the inhabitants.

Then they found an old lady hiding behind the wooden church. She told them that the Americanos had come at first light and had herded together everyone in the village—men, women and children—and had taken them up the track towards the river, the road to Santa Rosa.

Carriscant left Constancio with her and set off up the track. He knew that it crossed a small creek that flowed into the Laguna. He had been walking for ten minutes when he heard the first shot. Then two more. Then there was a pause of a few seconds before there was another shot. He left the track and circled through the undergrowth towards the direction of the noise. On the way he counted another five reports. Nine in all.

He came to a break in the trees, at the edge of the clearing where the track crossed the wooden bridge over the small river. Here, huddled together, were thirteen men and young boys guarded by several dozen American soldiers, big men, bearded, in their stained blue shirts and their dented wide-brimmed hats. Some way off, on the bridge were three other American soldiers. Below the bridge the river widened into a dammed pool and around this were gathered the female members of the village, a few very old men, and the children below the age of ten. In the pool nine bodies floated at the lip of the dam.

From his vantage point in the trees above the clearing Carriscant watched as one by one the men and boys were led out on to the bridge. The officer levelled his pistol at the prisoner’s head and called in a clear voice “Remember Balangiga!” and shot him. The body was then heaved over the parapet by the other two men and was carried gently down the stream to join the others bobbing at the edge of the dam, budged together by the sluggish current, like soft logs.