Alentejo Blue (16 page)

The pig stayed where she was, then tossed her head and stuck her snout in Teresa’s crotch.

‘Sorrowful Mother,’ shouted Teresa. She threw down the pieces of rope, tried to dust off her jeans and limped back towards the house.

On the bench, laid out on a handkerchief, were the loaf of bread, a tin of sardine paste, two tomatoes, and two butter knives. Two tin plates were waiting too.

João came round from the other side carrying cups of water.

‘It’s ready,’ he said. ‘Let’s eat.’

João chewed his bread and paste with a faraway expression, as though engaging with issues both private and profound.

Teresa clattered her knife three times on her plate. Why did he force her, then, to stay? And what could he possibly have to think about anyway?

She bit her tomato, lifted the tin cup and – remembering the flies on the water butt – put it down again. ‘Don’t you want to check the pig? What if she wanders off?’

João seemed to ruminate on this but did not speak.

Teresa gave up. She poked at the puncture mark on her heel to provoke the peculiar satisfaction of a small, anticipated pain.

If only João had a wife, someone to darn his jumper and place a vase of flowers in the window. But his wife must have died long ago. There would be a photograph in a frame above the bed, an unsmiling moustached face which received his prayers at bedtime, impartially, perhaps indifferently, no matter how hard João prayed.

The mobile phone, clipped on to her waistband, shivered and bleeped. Teresa read Antonio’s text message then slipped the phone into her bag as if to hide something indecent. João had no electricity. When the sun went down he would go to bed. Teresa imagined herself on an aeroplane, a mile high in the sky; she thought of herself in London, coming out of a restaurant or nightclub; she saw herself on an escalator, travelling through a department store that reached nearly as high as the plane. It was so sad. It almost made her cry, as though it was João she was leaving behind.

She stared openly at the deep lines on his face, the dirt that would never come out from under his fingernails, the untrimmed hair in his crumbling nose, the piteous absence of disguise, and sighed because she did not always want to notice everything.

João cut more bread with the penknife, resting the loaf on his knee and whittling it like a piece of wood. Teresa received a slice and touched her chest and closed and opened her eyes as though she had taken the sacrament.

Friday night. Are you excited?
Antonio’s message finally took hold. Until the letter arrived this morning all she could think of was Friday night. They would meet at the house at Corte Brique and, after two years of romance and negotiation, give themselves freely, each to the other.

Teresa felt the warm breeze nibbling like an impatient lover at her ear. She flicked aside a strand of loose hair and set her plate down on the ground.

‘I remember,’ said João, making her jump, ‘the first time I saw my father kill a pig. I loved that pig, eh, eh, loved her, but I stuck my hands in her belly, pulled out her guts. He said, “A man now, you are,” like that’s all there was to it, just pulling out the guts, see, with these hands.’ He held his hands up and gave a short laugh and wiped them on his trousers.

‘Oh,’ said Teresa, who had been riding a wave of sexual longing and resented the way it now mingled with revulsion. She turned her head to take in the view over the red earth of the track, the archaeological stillness of the olive grove beyond, the interlocking slices of wooded hills, the single high-ridged blue escarpment, the cloudless cobalt sky.

When she left for London it would be as a woman. Already the experience – though it had not happened yet – was emanating from her, oozing from every pore. She crossed her legs, folded her arms across her chest and tucked her hands into her armpits. Antonio, sweet Antonio. How cruel it would be to leave him then. Perhaps it would be kinder not to sleep with him.

‘Eh, eh,’ said João.

She turned her head but all she could think of was Antonio. She was surrounded by his presence and even the movement of her head felt strange, as though drifting through the sea of his being.

If she didn’t sleep with him, oh how miserable he would be, they would both be. No, they had waited long enough and afterwards, when they curled together, bathed in candlelight and sweat and love, she would whisper to him that while she was gone she would not blame him if he did not wait for her to come home. It would be her gift to him. To make him free like that. And his love, his sweet, uncomplicated love, would grow stronger. It would be so beautiful it almost seemed a shame that nobody else would see.

But with her next breath she feared that they would fight, that the leave-taking would be anguished and hostile. She cast him as ungenerous, provincial, small, pinching up his mouth and blowing smoke rings as he did when he didn’t want to talk, and she responded with her own bitter silence.

‘Isn’t it so?’ said João, his voice crackling like a log on the fire.

She beamed at him suddenly as if they understood each other perfectly.

‘Really and truly,’ she said.

It was obvious to her now that João did not need her pity. She almost envied his simple life. The headaches he had never known. The certainty of each day like the last. The protection of not wanting more.

João stood up and she followed him round the back. The pig had wandered some distance off, rooting beneath the trees. She heard them or sensed them and looked over her shoulder and twitched her tail and came towards the house at a trot.

‘My beauty, my beauty,’ murmured João, ‘she knows that it’s better at home.’

Francisco, as usual, had to be called three times for dinner.

‘I don’t understand a word of his books,’ said Mãe, her usual boast. She doled out the soup and when she was seated pressed her knuckles into her eyes as if even the thought of study was a strain.

‘Books, Francisco,’ said Teresa. ‘Hear that? Books.’ Teresa, finally, had gone into his room and grabbed the comic from his hands.

‘I’m not deaf,’ said Francisco, smiling and feigning good humour and toleration so that Teresa wanted to pull the curls right out of his head.

‘That’s strange,’ she said. ‘You didn’t hear Mãe calling.’

Francisco tilted his face and frowned. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I must have been concentrating.’

‘That’s funny, because when I came in all you were doing . . .’

‘Teresa Maria, kindly use your mouth for eating.’

Teresa tasted the
açorda.
Mãe always used too much salt. How many times a week did they have this, bread and garlic soup at dinner? She pushed the bowl aside.

‘Dieting,’ observed Francisco gravely. He poured her soup into his bowl. If he only knew how greedy he looked.

When Pai died, five years ago now, it was assumed without question that Teresa would give up school.

Across the polished dark-wood table in which the white bowls were faintly reflected, she watched Francisco eat. His hair curled gently, his green eyes were complacent and his nose, most unfairly, was small and straight. He smiled at her, a strand of coriander caught between his teeth. Teresa smiled back, attempting to feel a devilish contentment at her secret triumph, but realizing she was really too nervous to eat.

She fingered the crocheted placemat and sought out her father. His photograph, in a black lacquered frame, stood on top of the television. Surrounded by the skittish clouds of the photographer’s backdrop, his face was sombre and withholding, as though disapproving of what he saw – the heavy furniture, the needlepoint cushions, the preponderance of brass and malfunctioning lamps, the rag rugs draping the doorways.

‘Working tonight?’ said Francisco.

‘What’s it to you?’ cried Teresa, insulted once again by his lack of care, his easy manner, the way he had never once said thank you.

‘Are we going to sit chatting?’ said Mãe, as if that was the kind of thing she would not stand for. ‘There’s dishes to be cleared.’ She stacked and removed the crockery and brought in the salt cod and a plate of green beans and another of rice, moving with determined but poindess efficiency.

‘So,’ said Francisco slyly, when Mãe was in the kitchen, ‘lover boy this evening, then? The worm finds the hole tonight?’

Teresa gasped and blinked. Then she saw that he didn’t know anything. God, how she hated him. She was damned if she was going to stay here and slave her guts out for him to go to university. Let him leave school tomorrow. She said, ‘What about your girlfriend? This Ruby. This nice English girl. Why don’t you bring her home and let Mãe meet her?’ She slapped her hands to her cheeks. ‘Oh, I forgot. She’s not just your girlfriend, is she? She doesn’t have time to meet
all
the mothers.’

Her brother grinned, as if this was just a bit of fun. ‘Ruby,’ he said, closing his eyes and groping something in mid-air, ‘she’s got a great . . . attitude.’

Teresa turned to her father, as though every point she had ever silently made had now been proved. She tried to think what he would say about her decision (that was what she was calling it now, leaving nothing to chance) to go to London.

She stared at the heavy brow, the tuck of his chin that warded off bullshit, the long, hooked nose that she had inherited. He’d say, of course, that she should go. That she must go. She remembered riding on his shoulders, the roughness of his jacket on her bare legs, the smell of wood chippings and diesel, the two of them patrolling the builders’ yard and her father telling the customers, this one up here, she’s the boss, this one.

‘Are you eating or not?’ said Mãe. ‘Because I have to get on.’

‘Not hungry,’ said Teresa, miserable now with the certainty that Pai would tell her that she should stay, that she should get over herself, that he hadn’t brought her up to abandon her own flesh and blood.

Francisco slipped out of the house and Teresa washed the plates, looking out at the twilight-thickened sky, and listening to the prattle of birdsong from the lemon trees and the swirling lament of the Brazilian soap opera that her mother was watching.

She went into the living room, drying her hands on her jeans. Mãe didn’t look round. Nothing short of an earthquake would shift her now. She had her sewing in her lap but would not touch it all evening. It was her excuse, her cover story, her way of saying that she was not an idle woman. Her mouth pursed and flattened against her teeth as though she were forming opinions, but she never talked about her soap operas; they were too trivial to speak of or too serious. On the screen, a woman in a low-cut dress pushed her fists into her chest and said, rip my heart out, why don’t you, and feed it to the dogs, while a man standing behind her ran his fingertips up and down her arms.

Teresa moved closer to Mãe’s chair. She saw the way her mother’s hips spread across the cushion and quickly felt the girth of her own. She looked down at the soft curve of her cheek, the thick black flick of her eyelashes. Something she had not noticed before – her mother was young. Younger, possibly, than the woman on the screen who had vertical lines running into her cleavage.

It was terrible that her mother was so young. There were, perhaps, forty years more of this, of endless busyness and torpor, of inadmissible defeat.

Teresa gripped the back of her mother’s chair and squeezed it. Having dispensed what comfort she could, she went to her room to change.

The photograph of the children that came with the letter of invitation and the photocopied ‘Things to Know’ sheet was tucked underneath her mattress. She pulled it out and, still kneeling, read the message on the back again.
Daniel and Katy say hi! We are looking forward to playing with you
. Daniel, who was six years old, had written his name in red felt tip and Katy, who was three, had joined the dots to make her name as well.

The children, photographed in a garden, wore Indian headdresses and face paints and stared into the camera with unlimited expectation. ‘Ah, the little angels,’ Teresa said, stroking the glossy print. She quickly turned the photo over again as though they might see through her. It didn’t matter. She would grow to love them quickly enough.

Teresa got up and looked round her room, trying to decide what she would take with her to London. She wished she could take everything: her mirror with the painted cherries and bows, her collection of miniature teddy bears, the beach-ball globe, the white melamine dressing table with scalloped edge and matching stool that she had paid for herself, the Rosanna doll on its special chair.

Pai gave her the doll for her twelfth birthday. She had a porcelain head, real human hair, porcelain feet and hands, a cloth body and a brown velvet dress with white lace petticoats and lace-trimmed bloomers. She came with a little wicker chair and a leaflet with pictures of all the other dolls (Betty, Josephine, Lilly, Tatiana) you could collect. For three years Mãe kept her locked away because she was too precious to play with. After Pai died, Mãe gave her back to Teresa, who was too old then for dolls but tended and rearranged her every day thinking that Pai would be pleased.