A Small Death in Lisbon

Chapter XXIX

16th July 1964, Pensao Isadora, Praca da Alegria, Lisbon Manuel Abrantes woke up with a jerk, staring at the threadbare central panel of the bedside carpet. His moustache was full of sweat, his head confused by alcohol gone bad in his brain. He didn't know the room until the smell of cheap perfume made it through his dense nasal hair and a light snoring at his back reminded him some more. He looked over his shoulder trying to remember a face or a name. Neither came to him. She was young and a little fat. She was lying on her back, the sheet down around her waist. Her breasts were widely spaced and had slipped down her ribs under her armpits. She had a light moustache. Her Alentejana accent came back to him.

He got up, wiped the sweat out of his moustache and was repelled by the smell of the girl still on him. He found a towel and went down the corridor to the bathroom. He showered under a trickle of tepid water standing up in a cast-iron bath. A small headache had emerged which didn't bother him, and a sore penis which did. They always tell you they're clean, but…

He dressed. His shirt was in a ghastly state. Yesterday the weather had been torrid and he'd drunk too much and that had made him sweat doubly. He'd have to go to work via the family house in Lapa and pick up a fresh shirt. A suit, too. This one was trampled to death. He looked like a broken salesman rather than an agente de i° classe in the Policia International e de Defesa do Estado (PIDE) and still not even twenty-two years old.

He clicked a coin down on the bedside table and left. He looked for his car in the Praca da Alegria, until he remembered he'd left it up in the Bairro Alto. He walked down Rua da Gloria and caught the funicular up the hill and found his car parked on Rua Dom Pedro V. He drove to Lapa. The house was silent. The rest of the family were in the Estoril villa for the summer. He shaved, showered, moved his bowels massively and changed into fresh clothes which felt cool around his chafed penis.

He straightened himself up in the mirror, pulled his shirt loose over his gut and then tucked it back in again, undecided which looked better. He had wanted to be at his best for this day's work and it had all started badly, but he hoped he'd pulled himself back on track now.

He drove out on to the Marginal and noticed for the first time on the outskirts of the city that the air was fresher and purer. After five days of brutal swelter, the sea was blue again, the sky clear and the twin steel towers of the Ponte Salazar, the new suspension bridge being built across the Tagus, were pin-sharp in the flat calm of the estuary. The workmen were already out on the massive concrete ramp, preparing to string the first cable across the river.

He stopped off in Belem to take a coffee and a pastel de nata in the Antiga Confeitaria. He ate three and smoked a cigarette. Now that his body was clean and his stomach sweetened he began to relish his work. He'd been with the PIDE for two and a half years and hadn't regretted a moment. He'd spent his first year in the PIDE headquarters in Rua Antonio Maria Cardoso in the Chiado district of Lisbon, where he'd demonstrated to his superiors a natural talent for the work. They didn't even have to tell him how to recruit informers. He knew. He found out people's weaknesses, he implied PIDE interest in their activities, and then saved them from arrest and the dreaded Caxias prison by bringing them into his network. It surprised him that his most significant weapon was charm. He'd thought he was devoid of it, but he'd learnt more than he'd thought from his elder brother, Pedro, and now that he was in a new world, where he had no history, he could use what previously he'd only observed. It was so facile. Charm was just a question of demeanour. If he smiled people liked him. The smiling made his long-lashed, blue-green eyes shine, which attracted their attention, while his moustache made him appear genial, and his thinning hair gave him an air of vulnerability so that, overall, people trusted him. He never made the mistake of despising people for this because he was so glad to be liked. He just made sure that his superiors knew that this carefully crafted exterior concealed a ruthless persistence, an unflinching severity, and an unswerving relish for following through.

Manuel asked the barman at the Antiga Confeitaria to make up a packet of six pastels de nata. He crushed out his cigarette, paid and drove to the Caxias prison.

In his first year at the PIDE headquarters he'd been particularly successful at rooting out dissent in the university. It had been easier than he'd expected. His brother was at the university. He was very popular. His friends were constantly in the house. Manuel listened. He took down names and fed them into his network. He did more recruiting. He cajoled, threatened and manipulated until by the end of 1963 he had compiled dossiers on two professors, who would never work again, and eight students whose futures were over before they'd even begun. His superiors were impressed. His father wanted him to root out all the union men and communists from his factories, and was annoyed to find that he didn't have the influence over this institution that he'd come to expect elsewhere. Manuel was moved to the interrogation centre in the Caxias prison where the Estado Novo detained their more serious, more politically active dissidents. These people needed more persuasive methods to encourage them to help PIDE uncover the network of communist cells threatening not just the stability of the government, but the country's whole way of life.

The first months in Caxias were spent honing his interrogation skills, partly through practice but initially by watching more experienced men through a recently installed two-way mirror. The new mirror excited Manuel. It brought back memories of childhood. He liked to sit close to it, almost with his nose touching, and sometimes with the prisoner's face pressed right up against it on the other side. The pleasure was exquisite, almost sexual for him, to openly observe, without being seen, a man's shattered face as he was brought to the limits of his endurance.

This was another part of the training-the breaking-down of the prisoner. The preferred method was a combination of sleep deprivation and random beatings. They had installed sound equipment which, with little supervision, could keep a prisoner awake for days. They still used the old method, the statue, where the prisoner was made to lean against a wall, his bodyweight supported by his fingertips, but it was time-consuming and required regular beatings and therefore manpower.

Manuel parked up outside the fort. He put his jacket on, picked up his briefcase and the cakes and remembered with a thrill the reason why he'd bought the girl the night before, and why he'd particularly wanted one with an Alentejana accent. He showed his pass, which the guard ignored. He walked across the inner courtyard to the interrogation centre. Waiting for him in his office was Jorge Raposo, an overweight twenty-one-year-old from Caldas da Rainha who was an agente de 2° classe. He was talking to another agente about an English pop group called the Beatles and their new single called 'Can't Buy Me Love'. Jorge was translating the tide into Portuguese but he shut up when Manuel came in and the other agent slipped out after a hurried bom dia.

'What's his problem?' asked Manuel, laying his briefcase down and the packet of cakes. Jorge shrugged and eyed the cakes. 'We haven't got to the stage where we're reporting each other for listening to pop music.'

Jorge shrugged again, lit a cigarette and turned the box of matches over and over on his desk.

'So, you like the Beatles,' said Manuel.

'Sure,' said Jorge, sitting back and blowing smoke at the ceiling.

'She loves me yeah, yeah, yeah,' said Manuel in English, to show he was groovy, too.

'She loves you…' said Jorge.

'What?'

'She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah. Not "me".'

Manuel grunted and sat at his desk and laid his hands down flat. Jorge regretted correcting him now. He thought it might have an impact on the cake situation.

'What have we got today?' asked Manuel.

Jorge stuck his cigarette back into the corner of his mouth and looked down at his papers wondering how he could remedy the situation. The name sprang off the page.

'There's always that Maria Antonia Medinas girl,' said Jorge, who saw immediately that he'd hit the right button.

'Ah, yes,' said Manuel, frowning as if he'd forgotten her, 'the girl from Reguengos.'

'The one with the blonde hair… the blue eyes…'

'And I thought they were all Arabs out there,' said Manuel. 'You know… dusky… Moorish.'

'She certainly isn't,' said Jorge, licking his lips.

'Shut up, Jorge, and have a cake,' said Manuel quickly.

Jorge opened up the packet and took two.

'God, they're good,' he said. 'We should bring some cinnamon to the office.'

'Get them to bring up the Medinas girl,' said Manuel.

Jorge reached for the internal phone.

'Do you want to talk to her or…?'

'No, no, I'll watch this time,' said Manuel.

The girl stood in the interrogation room. Jorge moved her up close to the mirror. Manuel looked into her face, haggard now from lack of sleep. The blue eyes were dark and sunken. She blinked frequently in the harsh strip-lit room. Her hair was beginning to grease up. She was scared but keeping it to herself. Manuel felt pity and admiration. She stood with her shoulders square in a tight-fitting grey top with four buttons that started between her jutting breasts and finished at her neck. She wore a grey calf-length skirt and a pair of black pumps. She was neat and still looked clean, apart from her hair.

Jorge began with the same litany of questions. He wanted to know about the copies of the communist rag Avante which had been found in her possession as she'd tried to board a ferry in Cais do Sodre. Her answers were the same. She didn't know anything. She'd picked up the packet by mistake. They weren't given to her. She didn't know about any clandestine printing operations. She didn't know any names. She didn't know any addresses of safe houses.

Jorge grilled her for two hours. She stuck rigidly to her story. When Jorge's questions flagged and she began to drift into sleep he'd slap her awake and make her stand in the crucifix position and do knee-bends until she was sobbing. After the third hour Jorge had her sent back down to the cells.

The political side of the prison was overcrowded and they'd had to put the sleep deprivation equipment in one of the cells in the long-term block for criminals. The guard took her down, strapped her on to the hard wooden bench and clamped the earphones over her head. Felsen watched through a crack in the grille of his cell door, such comings and goings were interesting to a man to whom nothing had happened for two years. And to see a woman, too.

Jorge and Manuel went out to lunch. They ate fish, drank a bottle of white wine and two bagacos each. In the afternoon they interrogated a further four prisoners. At five o'clock Jorge went home. Manuel went down to the sound room. He took the keys from the guard and let himself in to the narrow cell. Maria Antonia Medinas lay on the board, convulsing under the straps. The noise pounding through her head was faintly audible from the door. Manuel turned the machine off. Her body stilled. He leaned over her, hands clasped behind his back. The good doctor. She looked wild, confused and frightened, like a car-crash survivor staring up through a shattered windscreen. Muscles twitched. Her breasts heaved.

Manuel lifted off the earphones. She swallowed hard. He brushed the hank of hair off her forehead, which was clammy cold with sweat. He wiped his soft, dry palms together slowly and sat on the edge of the bed. He smiled without showing his teeth. The good fattier. The sick child.

'It's been hard,' he said, in the softest, most calming voice he could find. 'I know how it's been. But it's over now. You can go to sleep. A long deep sleep. Then we'll have a little talk and, you'll see, after that everything will be all right.'

He patted her cheek. Her lids dropped. Her mouth crinkled oddly and a tear crept down her cheek. He wiped it away with his thumb. Her eyes opened. He could see her gratitude.

'Don't say anything yet,' he said. 'You sleep first. We'll have time, plenty of time, later.'

Her eyes closed and her mouth slackened in her face. He replaced the silent headphones over her ears. He left her and instructed the guard that nobody was to go into the cell.

Manuel drove west to Estoril. He felt good. He felt happy. For once he wanted the company of family. They ate dinner together, his father, Pica and Pedro. There was a festive mood in the house with eve rybody finding their appetite again after the days of brutal swelter. They all agreed to go up to the cool of the mountains in the Beira for holidays in August.

Manuel slept until his alarm at 2.00 a.m. He woke up with a leap in his heart, a strangling excitement. He dressed and made a cheese sandwich with the best Queijo da Serra and drove back to the Caxias prison.

The guard was playing cards on a different floor and it took some time for Manuel to find him and get the keys. He let himself into the cell and relocked the door. He heard her rhythmical breathing. He undid the straps on the bed. The girl rolled on her side and curled up. He sat and rested his hand on her hip. He shook her shoulder. She whimpered. He kept at it, jiggling her small shoulder-bone between his thumb and forefinger. She came awake with a desperate sigh. She rolled and her eyes snapped open, straight into fear.

'Don't be scared,' he said, holding up his hands, showing no weapons, no intent.

She pushed herself up the bed and sat with her back to the wall, her knees tucked up under her chin. One of her shoes was missing. He retrieved it from the floor. He put it next to her bare foot. She slipped into it. She remembered this man. The kind one. The one to watch.

'I have something for you,' he said, and gave her the cheese sandwich wrapped in a paper napkin.

'Water,' she said, hoarsely.

He found the guard's clay pitcher full of cool water. She drank heavily, the spout of the pitcher not once touching her lips. Water spilled over her lip and dripped down her chin darkening a patch on the top of her left breast. She checked the inside of the sandwich and ate it. Then she drank again, not knowing when the kindness was going to stop.

Manuel offered her a cigarette. She didn't smoke. He lit one himself and paced the room. He gave her the last pastel de nata he'd bought that morning. She wolfed it.

She rested the back of her head against the wall. He's strange this one, she thought, but they're all the same underneath. Manuel suddenly sat down, close to her, so that she inched back her feet. He crushed out the cigarette with his foot. He looked at her throat.

'What do you do in Reguengos?' he asked.

'I'm a loom operator. I make mantas'. Blankets.

'Is the factory closed for the summer?'

'No. They gave me time off to come and see my uncle.'

She tried to take it back once it was out. She'd never spoken about the uncle before. Manuel noted it, but ignored the obvious. It would all come out in the end. She clasped her fingers together around her knees as if that would stop other things leaking out. You have to watch this one.

'There's a big fair for mantas down south somewhere, isn't there?' asked Manuel.

'Castro Verde.'

'I've never been.'

'There's not much call for mantas from Lisboans,' she said, and he felt: a little stupid.

'It's true, it's true,' he said. 'I'm from the Beira myself.'

'I know.'

'How's that?'

'The cheese in the sandwich,' she said, to show him she was sharp again.

'My father has it brought down, and all the chouricos, morcelas and presuntos. The best in Portugal, without a doubt.'

'There's nothing wrong with a good paio Alentejano. "

'The heat. The heat's not good for it. It sharpens the meat.'

'We have ways of keeping things cool.'

'Of course, the cork.'

'And the cork oak produces acorns, which feed the pigs, which makes…'

'You could be right,' he said, enjoying himself talking like this with a woman. 'We only think of the heat when we talk of the Alentejo.'

And communists, she thought.

'And the wine,' she said.

'Yes, excellent tinto, but I prefer Dao.'

'You would, coming from up there.'

'When this is all over you should let me show you…' he let the sentence drift.

She stiffened inside and looked intensely at the man's ear. He was staring across the room, smiling. He turned. Their eyes connected.

'When what's all over?' she asked.

'This resistance.'

'Whose resistance… to what?'

'Your resistance,' he said and looked down.

He ran a finger and thumb around her slim ankle and then drew them down her foot to the rim of her shoe. The touch shot panic up to her throat. She wanted to squeal. She pressed her head back into the wall, closed her eyes for a moment to gather herself. He smiled at her. When she reopened her eyes he was closer, his soft face moving closer, his full, red lips under the moustache, parted.

'Filho da puta,' she said, under her breath, but they were so close her breath mingled with his, and he reared back as if she'd slapped him.

Things happened in the man's face. The softness went. The jaw bunched. The eyes closed a fraction and walled over. His large soft hand reached over her knees and grabbed a twist of her blonde greasy hair. He yanked her head round so sharply her body was forced to follow.

She was kneeling on the edge of the bed, her neck stretched back. He pushed her face into the corner, his thick fist bunched in the back of her head. A hand reached round and wrenched the skirt out from under her knees. Her voice left her. Nothing would come up over her voice box. Her cheekbones hurt where he forced her face into the corner. She felt her skirt come up over her thighs. She lashed out with her fist behind her. He pulled her head back and thudded her face into the wall. Her skirt was around her waist. He tore at her underwear like a feral animal. It had gone green inside her head and she couldn't get things straight any more. There was only one moment when she managed the faintest cry of the smallest child in the night. Pain flashed between her legs. Her body jolted. Her forehead thumped into the wall.

It was over in less than a minute. She slid off the bed on to the floor. Her face cold against the rough concrete floor. She vomited the cheese sandwich and water. He tried to pull her up but she was a dead weight. He kicked her in the stomach, harder than he'd intended. Something like an organ seemed to break inside her. He grabbed hold of her leg and hair and pushed a knee into her belly and heaved her up on to the bed. The pain reached right up to the top of the inside of her head.

He rolled her over, strapped her down, replaced the earphones. Breathing heavily, he pinched his nose with thumb and forefinger and flicked a hank of sweat and snot on to the floor. He turned on the sound machine. Her body strained. He zipped up his fly with a short, sharp jerk. He picked up the pitcher and left the cell.

As he relocked the door the flesh at the back of his neck began to crawl. He heard his name whispered softly over and over. Manuel. Manuel. Manuel. The cell corridor was empty. He shuddered, picked up the pitcher and nearly ran back to the guard's empty chair.

He drove back to the house in Lapa needing to be quiet and alone. He drank heavily, aguardente directly from the bottle. He slept deeply and horribly until late. He was woken by the sun streaming through the undrawn curtains, the clap of the palm trees in a nearby garden, the noise of children playing. His face was hot, swollen and sweaty. His insides felt black.

He showered and soaped himself until his body squeaked, but he couldn't get shot of the blackness in his gut. He drove to Belem and had a coffee but couldn't get a pastel de nata down his constricted throat. He was an hour and a half late getting to work. Jorge Raposo was waiting for him.

'We've got a problem,' he said, and Manuel's black guts ran cave-cold.

'Do we?'

'The Medinas girl. She's dead.'

'Dead?!' he said, the blood vacating his head so that he had to sit down.

'The guard found her this morning. Blood everywhere,' he said, waving a hand distastefully around the genital area.

'Has the doctor seen her?'

'That's how we know she's dead. She miscarried. Died of internal and, by the looks of it, external bleeding.'

'Miscarried? Did we know she was pregnant?'

'No, we didn't, and by the way, the boss wants to see you.'

'Narciso?'

Jorge shrugged and looked at Manuel's hands.

'No cakes today?'

Major Virgilio Duarte Narciso eased the phone back on to its cradle and smoked the last inch of his cigarette as if each drag was lacerating his lungs. Manuel had been trying to cross his legs but he was in such a sweat that the material stuck to every inch of his lower limbs and he just couldn't get one over the other. His boss, the major, rubbed the end of his large, brown nose, as thick as the thumb of a bo:dng glove with every pore visible, as if they'd been pricked there.

'You're being transferred,' he said.

'But…'

'In this matter there is no argument. The orders have come down from the Director himself. You are to head a team responsible for bringing that charlatan General Machedo to justice. We've had an intelligence report that he is over in Spain preparing another coup attempt. You are being promoted to chefe de brigada with immediate effect and you will be briefed by the Director himself this afternoon in Lisbon. There. What do you think of that? You don't look very happy, agente Abrantes.'

Manuel still found himself staring into the cold crevasse of his own thoughts.

'I'm honoured,' he stammered. 'I thought I was too young for such a promotion.'

The major closed an eye and looked at him shrewdly.

'Caxias is no place for a man of your ability.'

'I thought you wanted to see me about the Medinas girl.'

'Who's she?'

'She died in her cell last night. Miscarried. Internal bleeding.'

The beat of silence was broken by the phone ringing. It jolted them both and the major yanked it to his ear. His secretary informed him that his son, Jaime, had been taken to hospital with a broken wrist after falling out of a tree. Major Narciso hung up, mesmerized by the space between himself and Manuel until he re-focused once more. Manuel tried and failed to swallow.

'Ah,' said Narciso, finally crushing out the cigarette, whose end was stinging his nail, 'one less communist for us to worry about.'

On February 19th 1965 Manuel Abrantes was having dinner in a small restaurant in Badajoz in Spain, no more than two kilometres from the Portuguese border. His two fellow-diners were enjoying themselves and Manuel himself was a mask of geniality. In two hours' time he and his two companions would be taking a short walk to a dark place for a meeting with a Portuguese army officer from the barracks in Estremoz, who would outline the strategy which could be the beginning of a new life for eight million Portuguese. Manuel's two dinner companions were General Machedo and his secretary, Paulo Abreu.

This meeting had taken six months to bring off, not to mention the four previous years PIDE had spent infiltrating the top echelons of General Machedo's entourage. Manuel had arrived at the best possible time. He'd brought fresh ideas to a man who'd spent the best part of a decade in exile. He'd cured the melancholia that surrounded the General and had infected him with a new optimism. Around Manuel, the General had begun to believe in a future.

The February night was cold and the heating in the restaurant inadequate. They sat in their coats and drank brandy to quell the shivers. At 11.00 p.m. a man came in and drank a coffee at their table. Fifteen minutes later they put on their hats and made the short two-hundred-metre walk to the churchyard, where the meeting was supposed to take place. There was a half-moon in a freezing clear sky and they had no trouble seeing their way. The man who'd come to their table walked a few metres ahead of them. The men didn't speak. The General's shoulders were hunched against the cold.

Inside the churchyard the man told them to wait in a narrow passage between some marble mausoleums. The General looked through the window of one and remarked on the smallness of the coffins.

'They must have been children,' said his secretary, which were his last words. A hammer struck him on the back of the head and his forehead broke the glass in the mausoleum door. The General stepped back, shocked, and found two men on his shoulders. His hands were lifted out of his pockets and held behind him. He watched in horror as his secretary was strangled in front of him. Even in his unconscious state Paulo Abreu struggled to hold on, his legs straightening and straightening until they were still and the feet slack.

The General was forced to his knees. The man who'd come to the restaurant removed a handgun from one pocket and a silencer from the other. He screwed them together and handed the piece to chefe de brigada, Manuel Abrantes, who looked down at the General whose hat had fallen off in front of him. The face, the whole body of the old man was suddenly completely exhausted. The General shook his head but his neck couldn't support it and it sank on to his chest.

'We must have been children,' he said, bitterly.

Manuel Abrantes placed the muzzle of the silencer on the back of the General's head and squeezed the trigger. There was a dull thud and the man shot forward with such force that his arms were torn from the grip of the two PIDE men.

Manuel handed the gun back to the agente. He reached down to the General and felt for a neck pulse. There was nothing.

'Where are the graves?' he asked.

The man with the gun walked down the corridor of mausoleums and turned left to a corner of the churchyard. The holes were barely a foot deep.

'What the hell is this?' said Manuel.

'The ground was too hard.'

'Bloody idiots.'