Alentejo Blue (15 page)

‘No, no,’ said Teresa, guiding her inside.

Senhora Carmona stood by the counter. She was about the same size as the children in the top class of the elementary school but much less substantial. Pointing to her stomach she said, ‘I need something for this. Be a good girl, Teresa, give me something.’

Teresa looked at Senhora Carmona’s loose black stockings and thought, yes, you need to eat more. ‘You have indigestion?’ she said.

The old woman adjusted her headscarf and muttered something that Teresa did not catch.

Years ago, when her husband was one of those who had gone abroad to work, Senhora Carmona did not do as the other wives and wear widow’s black.

‘The pharmacy, Senhora Carmona. They will have everything you need.’

Senhora Carmona spoke louder, as if to answer, but the words were meant for someone else. ‘
Sorrowful Mother, pray for us. Sighing Mother, pray for us. Forsaken Mother . . .
’

A note of scandal would creep into Teresa’s mother’s voice when she described how Senhora Carmona wore flowered skirts and lacy blouses while her man was as good as dead, toiling across the border. She was a racy woman, some said worse.

Teresa regarded what remained of the scandal: Senhora Carmona’s childish black plimsolls, the tremor in her arms, the cataract clouding her left eye, the crabbing way her mouth bit around the words of the prayer, and wondered if she remembered those times, if she dreamed of them still.

It was a hundred years ago, anyway. Senhor Carmona was dead, really dead, before Teresa was even born.

‘
Desolate Mother, pray for us. Mother most sad, pray for us
.’ Senhora Carmona had her hands in her apron pocket, turning the prayer beads.

Teresa would have to go to the pharmacy herself. She didn’t mind. She didn’t want Senhora Carmona wandering around and forgetting where she was going. ‘Wait here,’ she said, taking her bag down from the peg. But as she moved towards the door the old woman’s good eye met hers and she thought she saw something there, a flash of coquetry, an edge of steel, a hint of the woman that was.

As she waited to pay, Teresa became aware that Doutor Medeires, moving around in his dispensary, was keeping tabs on her between the shelves of bottles and tubes. Probably he had noticed something. She turned her face to the ground and bit her lip. Bending her knees slightly she pushed down on her heels and straightened up. It was a wonder she didn’t rise off the floor and float up to the ceiling. There was a huge hot bubble inside her and no way of letting it out. She glanced up at the pharmacist and there he was, peeping at her over the top of the cold-sore creams and aspirins.

Someone in the queue laughed and Teresa laughed too, though she had not heard the joke, and turned round briefly to spread a little furtive radiance.

The
doutor
would say, ‘What has happened to you, Teresa?’ and she would reply, ‘Oh, nothing special. Why do you ask?’

She thought of Senhora Carmona, reciting the Litany of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows, and then adapted the words to her own. They became lodged in her brain. The phrase repeated itself over and over, why do you ask, why do you ask, so that by the time she had paid and reached the cardboard cut-out of the woman with cellulite-free thighs by the gleaming plate-glass window she knew she had to let it out or die, and when she felt a hand on her shoulder she turned and opened her mouth with the words pressed up against her teeth.

‘For your
mãe
,’ said the pharmacist, handing her a small paper bag. ‘It will save her calling back again.’ He nodded and patted the pockets of his white coat as though he had nothing else to say.

Teresa stood on the pavement and looked along the road. People in Mamarrosa, they did not have eyes to see. Sometimes she could scream, she really could. A lorry loaded with half-sleeves of cork bark, stacked like roof tiles, came slow and ponderous down the road, dogged by a truck of rattling Calor gas bottles. In London, of course, it would be different.

A man, one of the
estrangeiros
, came towards her, ducking to clear the orange trees. The black and tan dog was with him. Would everyone in London be so tall? The man wore a filthy vest and he had not shaved. Teresa stepped back to let him pass and for a moment was covered in confusion.

She focused on Vasco, who had dipped out of his café across the road and bobbed about picking up the plastic chairs strewn around by the wind. Next door, at the mobile phone shop, a sign flashed on and off: Vodafone. At the other side was Armenio’s house, a grand two storeys high, tiled all over in green and white and glittering so much it was hard to look at. When she came back she would not think it grand at all. But maybe she would love it, love all this, more. She spread her arm weakly to encompass the three more modest houses that stood alongside, the sheep in the garden, the small square with its brassy marigolds and tender amaryllis, the village trailing off, the houses spreading further and further apart, the lapsing into fields and woods, the hills rising up to seal away the world.

By the time she turned into the side street that climbed to the centre of the village, Teresa had forgotten the
estrangeiro.
She bounced on the balls of her feet and felt the swish of her ponytail and relished the flack-flack of her sandals on the road. The doors to these houses opened directly on to the street and one flew open now. Clara folded her arms across her chest and said, ‘Well, it’s you!’ as if Teresa were the last person she was expecting to see. Teresa could hear Clara’s baby brother bawling his head off and knew Clara had been at the window, looking for any excuse to step outside. She had prepared her face, anyway, one eye narrowed and a cheek pulled back to show how strange it was, almost comical, that she should find herself in a place like this.

‘Got to dash,’ said Teresa, waving the bag with Mãe’s prescription.

‘Me too,’ called Clara. ‘Actually, I’m meeting someone.’

At the corner Teresa risked a glance over her shoulder and was rewarded by the sight of Clara gazing after her, wondering, quite clearly wondering, what on earth was going on.

Senhora Carmona had disappeared and Teresa’s aunt, Telma Ervanaria, was behind the cold counter, slicing
chouriço
.

‘Teresa,’ she cried, ‘it’s darker than the Day of Judgement back here. Get some lights on.’

Teresa hurried round saying, ‘Let me do it, please, you’re not supposed to be on this side.’ But her aunt flapped her hand and shooed her away.

‘Listen,’ said Telma Ervanaria, when she had weighed and packed her cold cuts, ‘I’m not saying Mamarrosa is bad, but for a girl like you, a bright girl like you . . . phut!’ Holding her stout hips she made a sound that indicated that this kind of girl could simply go up in smoke.

Teresa slid a foot in and out of her sandal. Telma Ervanaria was the one who had written her reference for the au pair agency. She was crazy to have trusted her. Teresa wanted to run home right away and confess everything to Mãe.

‘I was in Paris for fifteen years,’ said Telma Ervanaria. ‘Unless you saw for yourself you wouldn’t believe what it was like.’

It’s not on the moon, thought Teresa sourly. When she had been to London she would not speak of it that way. She made a mental note to always speak of it casually.

Telma Ervanaria examined her hands. ‘It’s not for everyone of course.’

Teresa heard the paper crease and tick in her back pocket. She was suddenly stricken with the thought that Telma Ervanaria would hear it too and demand to see what she was hiding.

Au pairs, the letter said, encounter a lot of new situations. Some might even experience culture shock.

‘In France, I might have told you, the men don’t sit in the cafés day and night. They work and then they go home to the family. Day and night, night and day,’ said Telma Ervanaria, whose husband had not worked since they returned from Paris. She touched her hair, which she kept short and forced with hot irons to curl around her square, pugnacious face.

You are considered, the letter went on, to be a member of the family. This is a great opportunity to make new friends.

It was a miracle that her aunt had kept her word and had not told Mãe about the application.

‘Ah, Telma Ervanaria,’ sighed Telma Ervanaria. ‘Don’t waste your breath. People do as they will. That Antonio, I don’t know what you see in him.’

Behind the counter Teresa made fists. She dug her nails into her palms. She wanted to defend Antonio, who was sweet as can be, but she wanted also to say that
he
was not the measure of
her
, she who was going to London. Her aunt had forgotten about the au pair agency, or thought Teresa would never make the grade, and either way, honestly, it was typical of people round here.

‘Antonio,’ said Teresa. She shrugged. She did not know what to say.

Telma Ervanaria patted her on the arm and sighed again. ‘Teresa Maria,’ she said, ‘we are two of a kind.’

At lunchtime Teresa locked the shop and went to drop off the tablets. She left the Vespa running to show she didn’t have time to talk but Senhora Carmona grabbed the bag and slammed the door and there was no chance even to ask for the money. Teresa sounded the horn, three quick quacks, to say goodbye. She felt like making some noise.

Outside the church she saw Father Braga, walking along with his face turned down. Father Braga would keep the secret, but only if she confessed it as sin.

Driving to Senhor João’s place, the scooter drilling lightly over the unmade roads, she summoned a vision of London, turning the tracks into esplanades, the cork oaks into marble pillars, the mossy well into a fountain that leaped and dazzled, and revelled in its own unnecessary life.

Senhor João stood outside his one-room house with his hands at his waist, elbows held out, as if the music had just stopped.

‘Good afternoon. I’ve brought your shopping,’ called Teresa. Senhor João had hurt his leg and could not walk all the way into the village.

João nodded and touched his hat. His face was as hard and brown as a nut but gentle too, tentative, as if apologizing for being so old.

Teresa walked up the path worn by João’s feet and set the shopping on the backless grey bench. ‘Milk, bread, matches, three tins of sardine paste, strong glue and two beers. You need something for tomorrow?’

‘No, no,’ said João. ‘There’s nothing.’ He covered one hand with the other and pushed his tongue into his cheek, which made him look toothless.

‘What’s that?’ said Teresa. ‘Let me see.’

João shook his head but stopped hiding the cut on his hand. It was a bad one, a deep gouge between thumb and first finger, with a mean raggedy edge. Teresa saw now the dark smear on his threadbare jumper and the spatters that led down to the earthy rings on his trousers where he had been kneeling in the dirt.

‘Aiee,’ said Teresa. ‘You need a doctor.’ She wondered about taking João on the back of the Vespa, his tough tender face on her shoulder, but couldn’t imagine what she would do if he fell off. ‘Do you want me to call someone?’

‘Eh, eh,’ wheezed João, ‘doctor.’ He wiped a tear from the corner of his eye.

It rankled with Teresa that for a second she misunderstood and thought he was upset. Then she realized that laughter, for Senhor João, was so rare that the moment was a sad one after all, and the cleverness of this insight cheered her up.

‘Let me see to that,’ she urged. Then, somewhat more uncertainly, ‘Do you have a bandage?’

João shuffled into the house. Teresa watched as the withered door swung on its hinges. Had it always been too small for the frame? She thought, you couldn’t lie down twice along the length of the house. It was mildly shocking, as if she had already been away and returned with a new pair of eyes. She went round to the side of the house, where there was a decomposing saddle and a water butt skinned with flies, and measured it in a couple of strides.

‘Senhora,’ said João. ‘Look, I found one.’ He held up a grimy strip of cloth.

Teresa didn’t even want to touch it. She was ashamed and could not look at him. Instead, she looked across the plot, at the leashed tomato plants, the orderly potato patch, the rough-hewn poles and rope of the boundary, the hens scratching a living in the shade of the persimmon tree, the firewood collected and stored beneath a patchwork quilt of plastic bags, everything so neat and poor she could not stand it.

‘Better, actually, to let the air at it,’ she said. And then, because it was important not to leave straight away and ride off under a cloud of accusation, ‘How did you do it?’

‘Come,’ said João. He motioned with his good hand and there was a twinkle in his eye, as though she were a child about to be surprised.

She followed him round the back and saw the pig tangled in rope and brambles beneath the massive spreading skirts of an old cork oak. The pig lifted its black face and grunted encouragingly.

‘Eh, eh,’ João grunted back. ‘There she is, my beauty. Don’t worry, I’ll have another go. Get you free, won’t we? No, no, we won’t leave you like that.’ His voice was old and splintery and crooning with love.

He probably spends more time with the pig, thought Teresa, than he does with anyone else.

‘I am much obliged to you,’ João was saying. He fished some coins from his pocket and Teresa took them though she suddenly wished not to.

‘I’ll do it,’ she said abruptly. ‘Give me something to cut with.’

‘She’s such a nice pig, yes, nice pig,’ said João. His sentences rarely ended cleanly but seemed to dissolve into a private, murmured call and response. There was a penknife already in his hand and Teresa felt set up.

When she had finished cutting the brambles and the rope she had scratches down her arms and hands and a thorn in her heel from sliding off her sandals. She was sweating and she feared the pig would run off now she wasn’t tied to anything. João had disappeared and out of pique she did not call him. Let the pig run, she thought, it’s not my fault.