A Small Death in Lisbon

Chapter XXV

23rd August 1961, Casa ao Fim do Mundo, Azoia, 40 km west of Lisbon Felsen looked down into the courtyard from the verandah on the roof of his house. It was full of people he didn't know, friends and business contacts of Abrantes. Some of them were standing, some sat at tables, some picked over the decimated buffet with the bald disappointment of vultures late at the kill.

The day was hot with hardly a breath of wind, which happened about once a year on this weather-blasted point of Cabo da Roca. The sea was in a flat calm, slow and viscous under the sun. Felsen smoked and sipped champagne from a shallow glass. The party was to celebrate his permanent return from Africa. He'd gone back there in the middle of June 1955 and spent almost the entire six years out there. But it was over now. Angola had exploded into war and business had collapsed.

Felsen looked across to the walled garden on the south side of the house. One of his current girlfriends, Patricia, the only one he'd invited, was standing next to Joaquim Abrantes in a group consisting of Pedro, Abrantes' eldest son, Pica, Abrantes' wife, and the Monteiros, Pica's parents. Abrantes had one hand in the small of Patricia's back and the other resting on his wife's waist. He was leaning forward listening to Pedro who, as usual, was charming everyone with one of his long, amusing stories which Felsen had probably heard before but never managed to grasp the humour.

He had no desire to be down there with them. He was used to Pedro's brilliance and, like good brandy, he didn't need too much of it. He looked around for Manuel, the second son, the one with his eyes. He found him there, in the walled garden, but four metres back from the group, standing on his own under the shade of a bougainvillea, perhaps hiding, merging into the shadows, ignored by all, invisible to them, waiting for something to happen of particular interest to him. Felsen had seen him in that position before at another party he'd thrown. Some of Pedro's friends had been standing near the bougainvillea, one a girl with blonde hair. Manuel's hand had stretched out from the shade, touched her on the head and half-frightened her to death.

Where Pedro was the tall, confident, light-haired, brown-eyed, football-playing eldest son, leader in his economics class at Lisbon University, the nineteen-year-old Manuel was shorter, fatter, and already losing his dark hair in a strange way that had left a straggling fuzz across his brown scalp. His jaw had merged into his neck, his breasts pouched in his shirt, and his trousers were inexorably drawn up the crack of his arse, however big he bought them. He had a magnificent moustache though. Compensating for what he was losing on top, it was thick, luxuriant, shining, as if all the energy in his head was drawn to it. And there were the eyes-long-lashed, blue with the faintest green in them from his mother. His best feature.

Manuel was a morose boy. He'd suffered from his mother's absence more than his brother had. School was torture. The reports on his academic ability were poor. He couldn't kick a football without sending a clod of turf after it, and the memory of his attempt at roller hockey still brought tears to people's eyes. He didn't even have the distinction of being very unpopular. He was just mildly so-not reviled, just overlooked.

If there was harsh treatment coming from his father's hand, and there was plenty of it at school report time, it found its way to the back of his head or his backside and never to Pedro's. This didn't make him hate his brother. He liked him too much, as everybody else did, and his brother always stood up for him. He didn't hate his father either, but he became watchful and sly to avoid confrontation. It was women that he found difficult. He had no way of talking to them, couldn't find anything inside himself that might interest them and, as a result, they didn't like him. He wanted to learn about them and underwear drawers seemed as good a place as any to start.

These investigations developed, in Manuel, an adolescent passion for spying on people. He found it thrilling to observe without being seen, to soak up information that people would never know he knew. It empowered him against their unconcern and it taught him things about people, and about sex.

His sex education started with the next-door neighbour's maid and his father's chauffeur. He'd let himself in to the neighbour's house and was wandering about, rifling through drawers, poking about in cupboards, when he heard them come in. He hid in the laundry room, and waited for them to leave but they followed him in there. He wasn't sure what he was watching at first as the man and woman tussled gently, making strange scoffing noises. He was only twelve at the time. But as soon as he saw the girl's skirts go up, her bare legs and a coppery bush at their apex, his own excitement told him that this was a thrill in a totally different category to Pica's underwear drawer.

He was shocked by the chauffeur's behaviour, the man dropping his trousers as if he was going to do caca in front of the girl, who he'd picked up and placed on the table. It was repellent. But when he saw the man's equipment, the state of it, the size of it, where he put it, the way he rammed it up against the girl's shiny bush, her strange, fearful gratitude, the increased savagery of the chauffeur's thrusts, and the confusion followed by the man's semen spraying everywhere-he realized he was on to something extraordinary. The state of his own pants told him so. His mind told him something different-part thrilled, part disgusted, with a strange overhanging calamity that this was what would be expected of him.

Part of the mystery was clarified two days later (the laundry room was now one of his permanent hideouts) when his father burst in with the same maid. Manuel realized that only lower-class people sprayed their semen everywhere, whereas proper people, more politely he thought, and less messy, left it all in the girl's bush.

It was a number of years later, and a succession of maids later, that he fully understood the situation and even then it took a visit to a prostitute around his eighteenth birthday to completely demystify the procedure. It was she who, with a well-positioned knee, demonstrated that the withdrawal technique was a cross-class practice in a Catholic society.

Felsen moved to get a better view of what was fascinating Manuel. Was it Pica's bottom? If so, it was a healthy sign as his own eyes had frequently drifted over that region. She'd kept her figure. She hadn't had any children. Abrantes had offered to take her up to see the Senhora dos Santos in the Beira and been met with a pitying silence. Instead he'd taken her to London several times and spent large amounts of money in Harley Street but she'd never even been pregnant, let alone miscarried. This was why her parents were excessively polite whenever they came to Abrantes' house or his parties. It made for dull conversation.

Felsen drifted back to Manuel who, in that instant, straightened as if he'd seen what he'd come for. His father's hand had slipped off Patricia's back and was now definitely cupping a buttock while, with the other hand, he was playing with the suspender clip beneath the material of Pica's dress. The old dog, thought Felsen, as Pica turned and saw the white of Manuel's shirt beneath the bougainvillea. She shrugged her husband's hand off her bottom. Abrantes' other hand shot off Patricia's buttock quick as a lizard.

The afternoon progressed. People left as the food ran out. Abrantes joined Felsen on the veranda with two brandy glasses and a bottle of aguardente he'd brought down from the Beira. They sat on raffia-seated chairs with a wrought-iron table between them and drank and smoked cigarettes while Abrantes softly slapped the painted wooden rail.

'That's the Portuguese for you,' said Felsen, watching people leave, 'they can't do anything without food.'

Abrantes wasn't listening. He flicked ash over the rail not caring where it went.

'It's been a bad year,' he said, slipping into the role of very successful, but naturally pessimistic businessman.

'We got out of Africa without losing our shirts,' said Felsen.

'No, no, I'm not talking about business. Business was all right. It's what you say… it's the colonies. That African trouble is not going to go away.'

'Salazar will follow the British. They've given independence to Ghana and Nigeria. Kenya will follow. So will Salazar. In a couple of years we'll be back in Africa making money with new independent governments.'

'Ah,' said Abrantes, leaning forward, knees spread, ankles crossed, glad, for once, to be able to correct the German, 'if you think that, then you don't understand Salazar. You're forgetting what happened when the Australians landed on East Timor during the war. Salazar will never give up the colonies. They are Empire. They are Portugal. They are part of his Estado Novo.'

'Come on, Joaquim… the man's seventy-two years old now.'

'If you don't think he's got the stomach for it, you're wrong. It's a weakness of his. Everybody knows it. Why do you think he's having all this trouble at home?'

'Moniz trying to get him to resign?' Felsen sneered and threw his hand up in the air as if he was chucking salt over his shoulder.

'And don't forget General Machedo. He's still out there.'

'In Brazil, a few thousand kilometres away.'

'There's a man with popular support,' said Abrantes, ignoring Felsen. 'There's a man who would do anything to get into power… and if he couldn't get the top military on his side he'd even talk to those people.'

'Those people?' asked Felsen.

Abrantes wound his hand round and round, slapping the rail each time to show there was more and more, the two businessmen acting at each other as if they were performing some brand of formal theatre.

'These people are drawing attention to themselves. They took that cruise liner, the Santa Maria. They hijacked that TAP aircraft. They…'

'Who are they? Who are those people or these people… which people?'

'The communists,' said Abrantes, his eyes widening in what Felsen assumed was mock fear, but was, in fact, astonishment. 'These are people to be feared. You, of all people, should know that. Look what they've done to Berlin.'

'The wall? That won't last.'

'It's a wall,' said Abrantes. 'You don't build a wall unless you expect it to last. Believe me. And they're gathering strength here too. I know.'

'How?'

'I have friends,' said Abrantes, '…in PIDE.'

And PIDE talk like that about Salazar?'

'You don't understand, my friend. You've spent a lot of time out of the country. I am here in Lisbon all the time. The PIDE,' he said, stretching out an evangelical hand, 'the PIDE aren't just the police, they're a state within the New State. They see how things really are. They understand the dangers. They see the African wars. They see trouble at home. They see dissent. They see communism. All these things are a threat to the stability of the… Do you know what communists do to banks?'

Felsen said nothing. He knew Abrantes as a lot of animals-the shrewd business partner, the ruthless practitioner of brutal labour relations, the cost-cutter, the deal-maker-but never, not to his knowledge, the political animal.

'They nationalize them,' said Abrantes, throwing his hand out as if there was a bible in it.

Felsen ran his hand over his grey fuzz. Abrantes was irritated by his apparent lack of concern.

'That means we own nothing, ' he reiterated the horror.

'I know what nationalization is,' said Felsen. 'I know what communism is. I'm scared of it. I don't need any convincing. But what are you proposing? That we sell up and get out? I'm not going to Brazil.'

'Manuel is joining PIDE,' said Abrantes and Felsen bit back his instinct to shout with laughter- that was a solution?

'What about his university education?' he asked, automatically.

'He didn't get the grades,' said Abrantes, tapping his temple with his cigar end. 'I look at Pedro, I look at Manuel… I can't believe they have the same parents. But don't misunderstand me… I think Manuel will do very well in PIDE. I've made the introductions. They like him. The boy has a structure to his life now. And he doesn't like communists either. They won't have to teach him anything about that. You'll see. We will benefit. If there are communists working in our factories he'll root them out and run them up to Caxias prison. And they know what to do with communists in the Caxias prison.'

Felsen murmured, tired now, the man's fanaticism giving the aguardente a rough edge that it didn't have before. Abrantes sat back, plugged the cigar into his mouth, and straightened his tie over his belly.

Manuel's fuzzy head slipped back into the darkness of the enclosed terrace behind the veranda.

Abrantes left at dinnertime with his family and Patricia, who claimed she wasn't feeling well, but it was because Felsen was powerfully drunk. Drunk to the point where it took several tentative stabs to get a cigarette between his lips.

He managed to put 'Jailhouse Rock' on the record player and somehow got himself up on to the veranda where he took extravagant nosefuls of the still slack sea air and looked out into the black night.

'When the music finished, and he was left with static and the rhythmical click of the needle, he blundered downstairs and drank water until he was gasping.

A short aeon slipped by and he found himself miraculously in his bedroom, wrenching the windows open, tearing his shirt-tails out of his waistband and treading his dropped trousers into the floor. He felt: hot and had a great need to be naked under cool sheets, unconscious.

He ripped the bedclothes off, jerked himself straight, and took two startled steps back.

In the middle of the bed was a huge lizard. A live lizard. It bobbed its head, braced itself against the white sheet. Felsen careered out of the room, grabbed tools and came back with a rolling pin and a hammer. His first strike was wildly off the mark and bounced the lizard on to the floor. They fought for ten minutes, wrecking the bedroom, until Felsen managed to stun the animal with the rolling pin, hurled in frustration. He beat the lizard with the hammer and only stopped when an incident on a hot, dusty road in the Beira leaked into his mind. He picked the lizard up by the tail. It was surprisingly heavy. He threw it into the courtyard.

In the morning he was woken up by his heart thumping into his chest wall. He was still drunk. He knew it because his head didn't hurt and he wasn't disturbed by the sight of blood across both pillows and the sheets. Weak grey light, and an open sea chill came through the windows. There was cloud in the room. It was ten o'clock in the morning. The house was buried in dense fog.

Felsen had an encrusted gash on his forehead. He cleaned it in the bathroom and showered some sense into his body. He went out to the car wearing a suit under a wool coat. He skirted the lizard, backing towards the garage, amazed at it, a huge thing, half a metre with its tail. He went back and rolled it with his foot. Not an indigenous beast, he thought.

He opened the garage and looked straight down at his feet as if instructed. At the back of the car on the floor below the bumper a pair of crossed rusty horseshoes had been arranged. He dropped to his haunches. Other horseshoes had been placed behind each rear wheel. He gathered them up and hurled them over the wall with exaggerated force. One bounced back at him and he gave it special treatment.

He was panting as he reversed out. When he went back to shut the garage he saw two other horseshoes which had been under the front wheels. He ran at them and launched them into the scrub outside with crazed strength. He drove down to Estoril with a pounding just beginning behind his eyes.

Less than a kilometre from the house he emerged into brilliant sunshine. He arrived in Estoril in sweat and took a coffee in the main square which seemed to damage the part of his brain controlling his breathing. His heart raced as if pumping ether instead of thick, strong blood. He left his coat in the car and walked up to Abrantes' house with his suit jacket over his shoulder. He arrived with his eyebrows full of sweat and dark African states on the front and back of his shirt. The maid nearly shut him out. She sat him in the living room with a glass of water but Felsen was too agitated to sit and paced the room like a caged panther.

Joaquim Abrantes rolled in full of energy and purpose until he saw Felsen in his patched shirt, his head gashed and wearing his hangover on the outside.

'What happened?'

He told him.

'A lizard?' said Abrantes.

'I wouldn't mind knowing who put it there.'

Manuel was called, and the accusation of a practical joke levelled. It stunned the boy who was standing like a soldier at ease. He denied it vehemently and was dismissed.

'I wonder about that boy,' said Abrantes. 'He's always snooping around people's houses.'

Felsen told him about the horseshoes. Abrantes stood stock still, hunched, and Felsen caught a glimpse of the peasant from the Beira-superstitious, pagan, nose turned up to the smell of things not right.

'This is bad,' he said. 'This is very bad. Perhaps you've upset your neighbours.'

'I don't have any neighbours.'

'People from the village, maybe.'

'I don't know anybody from the village apart from the maid and she's happy to take my money.'

'You know what you have to do?'

'I'm hoping you're going to tell me. These are your people.'

'You must go to the Senhora dos Santos.'

'In the Beira?'

'No, no. A local one. Ask in the village. They'll know. This magic is not from the Beira.'

'Magic?'

Abrantes nodded gravely.

Felsen drove back up to Azoia which was still in fog, a stationary, closed, muffled world and freezing after the August sunshine in Estoril. He went to the bar which contained four people, three in black and a barman. Nobody spoke. He asked his question, and a boy, Chico, was called.

Chico led the way into the narrow lanes of the village, the fog so thick that Felsen, in his state, would stop occasionally and rear back as if from a solid wall. The boy took him to a low house on the edge of the village. The moisture had collected on his black hair like morning dew.

A woman came to the door in a blue floral overall wiping her bloody hands on a rag-fresh from killing lunch or maybe an entrail inspection. She was round-faced with very small eyes which only opened to the tiniest slits. She looked at the boy who was her height but: it was Felsen who spoke.

'I have a problem, I'd like you to come and see my house,' he said.

She shooed the boy away. Felsen gave him a coin. They went through to the yard at the back of her house where there was a large domed dovecote the size of a church's cupola. She reached in and the doves flapped and cooed. One came out on her hand, white with brown traces on its wings. She held it to her bosom and stroked it down. Felsen felt strangely calm.

They drove to the house in fog so thick that Felsen stuck his head out of the window to see if it would improve his vision.

The Senhora dos Santos inspected the dead lizard already seething with ants.

'You found it in your bed, you said.'

Felsen nodded, scepticism crouched on his shoulder.

'It would have been better if you hadn't killed it.'

'Why?'

'Let's look in the house.'

As soon as she entered the hallway her breathing became laboured as if she was having a respiratory attack. She walked through the house, struggling with every step, her face reddening and, despite the oceanic cold, sweating. Felsen found himself close to laughing at the absurdity of the spectacle. He walked behind her, unmoved, as if on some vague barracks inspection.

The Senhora dos Santos looked at the bed, which was still bloodstained from his head injury, as if there was a thrice-stabbed body on it. She staggered from the room, down the stairs, and out into the courtyard pursued by Felsen, keen as a ghoulish schoolboy.

Her breathing recovered, her face went back to its natural colour. The dove was not so fortunate. It fell dead and already stiff from her hands. They looked at it, she sad, Felsen affronted by the woman's quackery. He was in no doubt she'd killed it herself.

'What do you make of it?' he asked.

The face that looked up at him was not encouraging. Her eyes were now fully open from the slits they had been before. They were black, all pupil, no iris.

'This is not our magic,' she said.

'But what does it all mean?' he asked. 'The lizard? The horseshoes?'

'You killed the lizard… in your own bed. It means you will destroy yourself.'

'Kill myself?'

'No, no. You will bring yourself down.'

He snorted.

'And the horseshoes?'

'They will stop you from going anywhere. They will…'

'I've just been somewhere. You and I have just been in the car.'

'Not the car, Senhor Felsen,' she said, and he wondered for a moment how she knew his name.

'What then?'

'Your life.'

'What is this… this…' he said, his hand revolving over and over looking for the word.

'This is Macumba.'

'Macumba?'

'Brazilian black magic.'