Pirate King (10 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

MABEL:
It’s true that he has gone astray.

T
HE AFTERNOON WAS
somewhat truncated, since our pirates did not reappear until 3:00 and we had to be out of the Maria Vitória at 6:00. In addition, they’d had a somewhat liquid luncheon—and moreover, had brought the alcoholic portion of the meal back with them, since at least four of them paused every so often to swallow from small bottles.

By five their boisterous shouts were rattling the lights, and Fflytte hastily cancelled the scheduled swordfight rehearsal. While I went through the cast with a box of sticking plasters, he threw up his hands and stormed out. La Rocha watched him go, looking amused, and one of the younger pirates took half a dozen steps in the director’s wake, mocking Fflytte’s pace. Which I had to admit was rather funny, the gait of an outraged child.

I glanced at Hale, who stood motionless, his eyes drilling into La Rocha. When the door banged shut behind Fflytte, the pirate king turned, still smiling, and saw the Englishman. The two locked gazes for a long minute before La Rocha’s fell, and he spoke a word that caused the hubbub to die.

“Be here at nine in the morning,” Hale said through clenched teeth. Pessoa automatically translated, causing a couple of the men to protest. La Rocha cut their complaints off with a sharp twitch of the hand.

Hale picked up his hat. As he went past my seat, midway down the aisle, he paused. “Have a word with Mr Pessoa,” he told me. “See that his friend understands that Fflytte Films is making a moving picture, not providing entertainment for amateur actors. We can find others willing to show up and work.”

“Why me?” I protested.

“Would you rather have the job of convincing Randolph that he shouldn’t pack up and go home?”

“Er, no.”

However, Pessoa had himself not stinted at lunch-time, and was distracted by the antics of the pirates, who had spilled over into the ropes and gangways above the stage and were trying to inflict concussions on their mates with the dangling sandbags.

“Mr Pessoa,” I began, making my voice sharp as a schoolmaster. He snapped to attention, as any public schoolboy would. “I need you to come to the hotel tonight at eight o’clock. I need you to be sober. And I need you to clear these men out before they damage something that Fflytte Films has to pay for.”

I watched them go, a few minutes later, herded by Samuel, following La Rocha. Pessoa made to stay, but I sent him off, too, hoping he had a long walk home to get rid of the wine in his veins. Then I hunted down a broom and did what I could to corral the spilt sand, happily turning the cleaning over to the man who came to open the theatre at six. He stared at the dangling ropes. They looked as if a herd of monkeys had got at them.

I made a mental note to learn the Portuguese for
I’m sorry
. It looked to be a phrase Hale’s assistant was going to use a lot in days to come.

I was waiting in the hotel lobby at eight that evening, my official Assistant’s Notebook in my lap. I was still waiting at 8:15. At 8:30, I gave up and went into the restaurant. At 8:40, Pessoa came in, although it took me a moment to recognise him.

He wore a monocle in place of the black owl spectacles. His hair was parted on the side and his maroon-coloured bow tie was dashing rather than snug, but beyond the details, it was his overall air that was so very different. Coming to the table, he gave a little click of the heels and a brief inclination of the head, the humorous gesture of a friend, not an employee, before dropping into the chair across from me. There he sat sprawled, an expansive set to his shoulders, with not the slightest sign of his normal prim attitude.

I leant forward to study the man’s features: Yes, there was the fleck in the right iris, the mild disturbance in the hair over his left brow, the nick from that morning’s razor. I sat back, breathing a sigh of relief: For a moment, I feared I’d strayed into the clichés of an unlikely detective story. As if William S. Gilbert were collaborating with Edgar A. Poe.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I need truth, and some aspirin.

Friday, 14 November, 11:30 p.m.
Avenida-Palace, Lisbon

Dear Holmes,

I have spent any number of odd evenings (generally in your company, come to think of it) but I’ve just had one of the oddest. Even after having it explained to me, I’m not at all certain I understand it.

This afternoon, our hired pirates turned up drunk from their lunch, and it was given to me to explain to the translator that it simply wouldn’t do. Since he, too, had of drink taken, I commanded him to dinner. When he showed up, I would initially have sworn that he and I had become characters in “The Case of the Substitute Twin.”

Now, it is true that I occasionally feel myself going translucent and fictional (again, often in your company.) However, the stories I occupy are not generally so lowbrow as to depend on the mechanism of twins. This being a new experience for me—what next, I could only wonder: white slavery? opium dens?—I pursued the anomaly with interest. What had caused our translator’s transformation from a quiet, unhealthy-looking, marginally shabby and humorously self-deprecating melancholic into an intense, ardent, witty gentleman-about-town? He wore the exact clothes he had earlier, but with panache rather than apology.

And although I’m not at all certain I grasp the details, it would appear that I have spent the evening within a poetical conceit.

I believe I mentioned previously that our translator, Mr Pessoa, is a poet—and according to him, not simply any poet, but the poet who will define his country to the world. It matters not that he is well into his fourth decade and few have heard of him. No: In his mind, Portugal is due to become the world’s leader in the modern era—in artistic and literary matters, if not political and economic—and Fernando Pessoa is due to take his place at its head. A Fifth Empire, less the apocalypse, ushered in by this narrow country on the edge of Europe—just as soon as he obtains government funding for his journal. And finds a publisher for his poetry. And finishes his detective story, and finds acceptance for his Arts Council, and … And he did not show any indication of being under the influence of drugs.

Holmes, I am awash in a sea of megalomaniacs.

In any event, I settled to dinner with this fellow who was both familiar and unknown: hair parting different, monocle in place of spectacles, wide gestures instead of controlled, a flamboyant vocabulary, a shift in accent. He even looked taller.

After some minutes of increasingly disorientating conversation, I had to ask. It turned out the man across from me was both Mr Pessoa, and another.

Modern poetry, in Pessoa’s eyes, is required to be outrageous and exaggerated. The modern poet, he believes, must do more than sit and write verse: He must become his poem, he must transform himself into a living stage. Only through lies is the truth known; only through pretence does one achieve revelation. The
dramatis personae
of Pessoa’s life are the embodiment of theatre, a solemn game, a celebration of the counterfeit. He calls them (apparently there are quite a few) his
heteronyms
.

And lest one assume that Pessoa thus makes an ideal partner for a moving picture company, he has a theatrical scorn for the theatrical. He holds in polite contempt the contrivance of stage trickery, regarding the theatre as “low” because it limits a playwright—even a great playwright such as Shakespeare, whom he otherwise admires—to the dull formality of a script. At best, theatre or film itself provides the stage on which the actor can make a new thing. “A true play is one not intended as a performance, but as its own reality.”

Which is why, although he looks down his nose at scripted stage-craft, this one picture has thrilled his imagination (someone’s imagination—Pessoa? de Campos? Ricardo Reis perhaps?) because it counteracts the formal script with a “boundless unreality” of free association. (That, and the pirates—he is completely besotted with pirates, and went on and on about freedom and masculine imagery and the sea-going heritage of Portugal, and cannon. I’m sure there was something about cannon.)

If you are a touch confused, I will pause while you fetch yourself strong drink: I found that alcohol helps considerably.

All of this came spilling out of this new and excitable version of Mr Pessoa (whose surname, I should point out, translates as “Person”) after I had made the mild remark that he looked … different.

With our soup, we drank in philosophical reflection, which settled our palates for the main course of revelation: that his changed appearance reflected this true theatre, this true-faking, this poet’s grasp of play. That Fernando Pessoa does not, in fact, exist, that he is a
vácuo-pessoa
, a vacuum-person.

Before taking up his knife and fork, this non-person f
i
shed into a pocket, then extended his card across the table linen. “Álvaro de Campos, at your service.”

Senhor Álvaro de Campos is not a translator, but a naval engineer. He is from the south of Portugal, born Jewish (although he seems not entirely certain what this entails) though raised Roman Catholic, studied in Scotland, and travelled widely before settling in Lisbon. He is a Sensationist and admirer of Walt Whitman, and his tendency to flamboyance and lusty flirtations with decadence are reflected in his writing. A thick packet of which he then handed me.

Oh, indeed: Senhor de Campos is a poet, too.

It took us until coffee to reach this dramatic revelation, having spent the interim in a monologue: the great history of Portugal; the greater future of Portugal; piracy as an allegory for the Portuguese identity; his experiments with automatic writing; Pessoa’s schooling (to which he referred in the third person) in Durban (where—he gave a disbelieving laugh—the students were woefully ignorant that Vasco da Gama, a gentleman of Portugal, had not only discovered their land, but named it); the publication of two volumes of English verse; his belief that the greatest artist is the one who writes with the most contradictions, the clearest writer is he who writes the most baffling prose.…

Or I may have got some of that wrong, because by this time I was near cross-eyed with tiredness and my only lusty flirtation was for my own quiet rooms. He had been telling me about a 900 verse ode he had written to pirates, or perhaps about pirates, some years before, when I broke in to inform Pessoa—or de Campos—that I was tired, that we both were needed at the theatre by nine o’clock, and that if he did not have a word with his friend the pirate king about keeping his retainers under control, Fflytte would fire the lot of them and take his company off to Morocco, seeking his piratical actors there.

And I left the poet with his multiple personas at the table, and shall now stagger off to bed.

Saturday, 6:30 a.m.

I finish this seven hours later, in what will no doubt be my only quiet moment of the day, before setting off for my theatre of the mad.

You might, by the way, enjoy the antics of our pirates, and especially our designated Pirate King, a man who would have the air of a brigand even were it not for his gold earring and the considerable scar down the side of his face (which must have come near to taking out an eye, if not the throat itself). La Rocha lacks only a peg-leg and parrot to complete the storybook image. He impresses Randolph Fflytte mightily, as well as the men hired as his pirate band. Which is good: If he can keep that rabble in line, this film may actually get made.

        Your,
    R.

Postscript: Again, I fear I have given the impression of having greater concern with the demands of my façade employment than with the darker matter that may be at its core. I confess, I keep hoping that word will reach me of Miss Johns’ safe reappearance at her flat. Still, lest you (and Lestrade) imagine me taking my ease here, I assure you that I am pressing forward, albeit on an indirect path. If there is wrongdoing on the set of
Pirate King
along the lines of the guns of
Small Arms
and the drugs of
The Coke Express
, it may be possible to anticipate the new crime and solve the old at one and the same time. I merely have to figure out what it may be. If, as I say, crime exists.

      —R