Alentejo Blue (3 page)

João was getting cramp. He needed to stand up. He pushed Rui’s hip gently to roll him off. The bone was sharp beneath his hand. He slid his palm up beneath the vest and felt the stomach, the ribs, the looseness of the skin like a newborn calf. The scent of eucalyptus anointed the day as the heat rose up from the ground. Somewhere a dog began to moan. The cork trees kept their counsel. It was two hundred years old, the tree that Rui had chosen. Eighty-four years was barely a beginning.

João went over to the large stone and picked up the hat. The felt was warm between his fingers. He sat down on the stone and put the hat on his head. Where were the tears? Why didn’t they come?

He looked down at some old goat droppings and thought about the posters all over the village.
PCP
they said in large red letters. A hammer and sickle sat proud in the top corner.
Valeu a Pena Lutar!

The struggle was worthwhile! Fifty years ago men died for the right to say so. Even those who remained alive died a little. What did the young ones think? What did they think when they looked at Rui, his squashed nose, his whiskery ears, the humble bend in his back? Of course they never looked; and the struggle belonged to them now and it was not of a kind that João could understand. João lifted his eyes. ‘What do you think?’ he asked Rui. ‘Shall we say this, as our last rites, that it was all worthwhile?’

They had one night together, when Rui brought his broken nose and his bruised limbs and heart and his green eyes that had lost their eyelashes back from Porto and knocked at one of the three doors on the long, low house. The others moved out of their way and João held Rui afterwards, their feet pushed up against the rusting iron bedframe, knowing they could be heard, that his sister and brother-in-law would listen in the dark and hold their breath, and think that the weeping was for the torture that had been when it was only for the torture that was about to begin.

Rui would not be alone with him after that. Within six months he had married. Dona Rosa Maria was the local mortician’s daughter. She had an overbite and a way of holding her hands behind her back that made it look as if she was hiding something, a pancreas perhaps, or a kidney. Two months later they moved away. That night a man followed João out of the bar and they went together into the woods.

A cuckoo called out, fell silent and began again. A bird, thought João, never has to think about what to do next. This reflection struck him now with tremendous force, as if it had never before entered his head. A bird always knows how he feels. If he is hungry he will look for food. If he is frightened he will fly away. If he needs a mate he will find one. He is either hungry or not hungry. He is either frightened or not frightened. He knows when to be quiet, and he knows when to sing.

João went to lie down with Rui. He closed his eyes and put his hand along Rui’s shoulder and stroked at his collar bone; he put his fingertips on the rope around his neck; he followed the bruise spreading like an ink stain up to his ear, which was cool and soft as a puffball; if he pressed down hard it would explode in a gentle cloud. Rui’s papery scalp showed through his thin white hair, spotted brown with age and red, perhaps, with death. João inched his head closer to Rui. He wanted to smell him. All he could smell was the life of the forest floor. So many lies, he said to Rui. Every day and every day, the lies.

For a long while he lay there against the body. Let me feel something, he pleaded, as bitterness welled like blood in a deep white wound. When desire is gone, he thought, this is all that remains.

Before Rui moved to Mamarrosa, João saw him only once again. He was in São Teotonio visiting his youngest brother. He walked through the little town looking for something and saw a woman scrubbing clothes in the
tanque
outside the Casa do Povo. Dona Rosa Maria straightened up and slipped her hands behind her back.

She led him the two miles to the house, balancing a large basket on her head and speaking barely a word. There were rows of tomatoes and beans outside the house and, as well, a row of children who tugged at her dress as she passed.

Rui sat at a table fashioned from rough planks. He stood up when he saw João then sank back down and said, ‘You’ve come.’

He was a lorry driver’s mate and his work took him away from home for days at a time. ‘When I am at home,’ he said, ‘I sleep.’ He looked at the children who had gathered round, the youngest still unsteady on his feet, as if wondering where they had sprung from.

They drank rough red wine while Dona Rosa filled a large iron with hot charcoal and worked on the end of the table.

‘My woman,’ said Rui, pressing at his nose, ‘works as a maid at the doctor’s house. This is her day off but she is ironing their clothes.’

They finished the wine and Rui roared at Dona Rosa to walk back to the town to buy more. He leaned forward and clamped his hands on his knees. His eyelashes had grown back white. ‘I’m still part of it,’ he said. ‘Those bastards.’

‘You are careful, I hope,’ said João.

‘Yes, of course.’ He shook his head. ‘A change is coming. This is what I know. A change is coming, my friend, and then it will no longer be our turn to be careful.’

They drank more and spoke less and João spent the night on a rag rug in front of the hearth with a dog curled up on his feet and the sound of five small breathing bodies in the room.

In the morning Rui went out before it was light and Dona Rosa kicked João’s shoulder to wake him. It was raining and Dona Rosa pulled a shawl over her head and locked the little ones inside to keep them dry while she went to cook for the doctor and his wife and their children.

João looked up at the tittering leaves. I am old and I am calm, he thought. It is not wisdom. It is not experience. It is the passing of desire. Change had come, was still coming. To think that change was once something to be struggled for!

The cork oaks that had stood two hundred years, how much longer would they stand? João had not seen it with his own eyes but he had heard that there were plastic corks for wine bottles now. No, nothing was safe from change.

The big estates broke up, as Rui said they would, after the revolution he always knew would come. But the workers’ collectives were mostly gone too. The landowners, born to win, bought the land back dirt cheap. And now they were selling it on. There was talk of a six-hundred-bed hotel down at the coast, a golf course, a park with water slides. Some said Japanese owners. Some said Marco Afonso Rodrigues was coming back and it was he who would build this hotel.

Rui used to say, we should drive them out of their
quintas.
The Germans, the Dutch and the British were taking care of that.

When Rui and Dona Rosa came to live in Mamarrosa, all their children, the three that had lived, had gone to work abroad.

‘They are good children,’ said Rui. ‘Real workers.’

João was shocked at the thinness of his hair, the slope of his shoulders.

‘They never forget us,’ Rui would say, meaning they sent money back.

And at other times, ‘They have forgotten us,’ meaning they did not often come home.

They met every Thursday for the game and in between in the street and in the bread shop. ‘Oh,’ complained Rui once when the bread was baked too hard, ‘things are not the same any more.’

João cradled Rui’s head in his lap. Rui was never afraid of death. That he had proved long ago. There was only one thing that scared him; one thing he would never say. João smiled now because he finally understood that in death Rui had spoken. He looked up at the branch, the lovely, moss-skinned branch that Rui had chosen on this tree in this place and no other, where he had, in silence, told the truth at last.

João looked into Rui’s face. One eyelid was nearly all the way down, as far as it would stretch across the eyeball which seemed almost to burst from the socket. The eyebrows were long and white and curling. There was a purple bruise across his nose. Rui’s mouth had fixed open to make his final admission. The tongue, his tongue, was turning black.

2

THE POTTS GIRL WALKED INTO THE CAFÉ PRECEDED BY
her reputation so that everyone was obliged to stare. Even Stanton, who had not been in Mamarrosa a month, looked her over once more than was strictly necessary. Vasco, stuffed behind the grand Formica counter, served her with pineapple Sumol and unsmiling vigilance. The girl sat on the edge of the pool table swinging her legs and examining her navel stud. Her hair fell forward revealing an ugly brown hearing aid and Stanton averted his eyes.

Conversation spluttered and died on the lips like a lie discovered and was just as suddenly resurrected. The old men stood at the bar caressing their Macieiras and coughing up memories. In their black felt fedoras and black waistcoats, red handkerchiefs tied at the neck, they appeared to Stanton like postcards from the past, as picturesque as the crooked streets, the whitewashed houses, the doors and windows framed gaily in blue and yellow.

A young mother scolded and slapped and kissed her child, the love exhaled as palpable as the smoke from her cigarette.

‘Always they are hitting,’ said Dieter.

Stanton looked away out of the open door at the sun riding high over the far ridged hills. It couldn’t be long before noon. Even eleven thirty was respectable for beer. He waited for Vasco, cleaning ashtrays with a damp rag, to look his way but Vasco kept watch over the Potts girl. Stanton went up to the counter and nodded to the old men. ‘
O Escritor
,’ they said, as if for the first time. It was a fine joke.

‘Yes, sir?’ Vasco addressed Stanton warmly as a fellow man-of-the-world. He wiped the counter with commendable vigour, particularly for a man of his girth. Vasco was always wiping. It was a habit acquired from his legendary stint as a barman in Provincetown, Cape Cod, the United States of America. He had made his own innovation though in using the same unwashed rag for all purposes, shifting ash and dirt from surface to surface.

Stanton ordered two Sagres and was grateful to the Potts girl and her soft white belly for Vasco’s preoccupation.

‘I was thinking,’ said Dieter, stroking an eyebrow, ‘if you make the final payment in cash you can forget about the EVA, the tax. Save a lot of money.’ He shrugged. ‘If you like I will come with you now to the bank.’

‘But the
fossa
,’ Stanton said. ‘It leaks. The work’s not finished.’

Dieter worried tobacco into a paper skin. His fingers were callused and nicotine-stained. ‘This is a – what do you say? – bad understanding.’ He had a tall man’s slouch even when seated, and his chest, though broad, appeared concave. His hair, dark full curls, was cut into layers falling almost to his shoulders and brushed to a sickening sheen. Without glancing across the room, Stanton thought of the Potts girl’s mousy strings. ‘The septic tank is an open system,’ Dieter went on. ‘That is what we call this. Solid waste is kept inside. The water passes outside through a filter. No, it is a bad understanding.’

‘Misunderstanding,’ said Stanton. ‘But it isn’t. I didn’t choose to have that system because it was more expensive. I didn’t have enough money for that.’

Dieter produced a smile. ‘Lucky man,’ said the German. ‘You pay for closed but you get open. For you this is very lucky.’

‘The damn thing leaks,’ said Stanton. He knocked a fly away. ‘And there are no tiles on the bathroom floor.’

The builder shook his head. The curls bounced indecently. ‘The work is good. You don’t want to pay but the work is good.’ He lit his cigarette and sucked hard. He shook his head and sulked.

My new friend, said Stanton to himself. He thought with bitterness of the friends he had left behind though he had not been sad to part. Dieter touched his arm. ‘Look,’ he said, indicating the men at the counter. ‘Brandy before noon. Impossible in this country to get anything done. In Germany – the workers, they work. Here . . .’ He flicked his hair back in an odd feminine gesture, using the back of his hand. ‘You see the problems. You suffer, my friend, and I suffer also.’

‘So you’ll get it fixed?’ said Stanton. ‘And the tiles. You know none of the internal doors are on?’

‘Bastards,’ said Dieter. ‘Another drink?’

Stanton looked at his watch. ‘Why not?’ The day was ruined anyway. He would go back, tussle briefly with the computer, develop a fever, prescribe an afternoon of research, spend a listless couple of hours with his books, go for a walk to clear his head and return in time for sundowners. Each stage would develop inevitably into the next, all with equal futility. ‘If you don’t have any work to do,’ he said, not caring to hide his tone.

‘Too much,’ Dieter complained. He picked up the beer glasses and Stanton saw that the calluses were beginning to soften, white rings around the yellow. There was a commotion at the back of the room. Stanton turned and saw the Potts girl move across the café, something insolent in her walk. Behind the counter Vasco waved his short arms.

‘
Ladra!
’ Vasco screamed. Thief. He lifted a hatch and squeezed out, the operation hampered by his considerable size.

The girl turned at the door, donned a monstrous pair of sunglasses, flicked a V-sign and disappeared. Vasco stood panting. He had to have his trousers specially made but they did not seem large enough now that his belly heaved and shook with exertion and emotion. His customers – those who had risen – retook their seats clicking their tongues. Vasco trembled his way to the revolving rack over by the cigarette machine. He passed a hand over the postcards, comics, chewing gum, toy guns and sunglasses, perhaps to divine what else was missing, perhaps to comfort his remaining stock. It was some time before he grew calm enough to serve beer.

‘But they do not go directly to the police,’ moaned Dieter. ‘In Germany it would be –
ja, ja
.’ He broke off as if even he had heard it too many times. ‘But do you know about that family? They live one, two kilometres from your house. English neighbours.’