Electrico W

DAY SIX: MANUELA

I waited a long time in the breakfast room, leisurely perusing the Diário de Notícias newspaper, then rereading it. They didn’t come down, I went through to the lobby and sat in an armchair, resting my head against the leather and closing my eyes.

My father was walking up a stone spiral staircase, he was in pajamas, with mules on his feet, I was following him, holding a candle, wearing a tuxedo and worried about getting it dirty in that dark dusty-smelling stairway. The stairs went on forever, I avoided getting too close to the walls as if hands might leap out of them and clutch at me. My father went up without a sound, without even breathing, I was afraid he might turn around to look at me with his cadaverous stare, blank, accusing, and empty. A hand gripped my shoulder, I jumped in terror. And woke up.

Antonio shook me, smirked in amusement, went to pour himself a coffee, then thought again and poured a second cup which he brought over to me.

“Sleep well, Vincent? You don’t look like you did.”

“A neighbor kept snoring. Irene?”

“She’s still in bed. Big sleeper. We’ll call her later. Come on, we’re going to deal with Pinheiro.”

I folded up the Diário and followed Antonio.

THE PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL was a large tall 1950s building with plain architecture, covered in unhealthy ochre-colored stucco that was coming away in large flakes. Ricardo Pinheiro was locked in a padded cell in the security department. A pointless precaution given that, since his arrest, he had tried nothing against himself or his guards.

Dr. Vieira was a short bald man in his sixties, on the chubby side, jovial-looking, with an extinguished cigar wedged permanently in the corner of this mouth. Gray overalls would have turned him into the archetypal hardware dealer, but the white equivalent failed to make him look like a psychiatrist. Scarlet tie, pink-and-turquoise Jacquard sweater: Vieira had plenty of taste. Bad taste but a lot of it, as someone once said. He was talkative too, and I think that, after greeting him, I didn’t need to ask a single question. He was proud of his patient, as the director of a zoo would be of a recently acquired rare specimen.

“So, are you here to ask me about our national celebrity? Watch out, don’t forget I’m seeing you in my capacity as an expert witness, not in my capacity as practitioner, right? And for the record — and I insist on this ‘for the record’—I’m a psychiatrist. I don’t want any trouble. I won’t breach confidentiality. We’re agreed on that.”

I nodded.

“Perfect. Pinheiro may not be our first serial killer, but he’s the strangest of all. Obviously, because soldiers and doctors don’t fit in with statistics, killing is kind of our job, isn’t it?”

Vieira pushed his glasses up his nose, loosened his collar, and led us into his office, which was cluttered with files. He sat in his chair, I took the other one, and Antonio got out his camera.

“He’s almost a pleasant man, this Pinheiro. Smiley, not disturbing in the least. If he wasn’t in pajamas and slippers you’d think he was a visitor or, actually, some cleaner guy, a doctor even. Important, those slippers. They’re real proof that …”

Vieira twirled his index finger around his temple. He laughed and tucked his cigar in the breast pocket of his overalls, with the glistening chewed end uppermost.

“Here,” he said, “a piece of advice. Don’t ever put slippers on, they’d never let you out of this place. Okay, I’ll show you what there is to see.”

Vieira opened a file. Pinheiro looked different in the photographs, he seemed younger, maybe forty, and thinner too. Perhaps due to hospital food, and the year of enforced rest. He never looked at the lens, but always high above it, as if an angel were hovering in the room.

“There’s a paranoid aspect to Pinheiro, and this is indicated by, for example, his inability to criticize himself, his sensitivity, even his distrustfulness. But there’s no pride or authoritarianism. And at the same time, he presents a schizoid pathology: his solitary, introverted side, which is almost certainly coupled with a vivid imagination — that bronze undergarment was quite something, after all!”

“A coat of mail.”

“If you like. Would you like to see it? The police kept the thing itself, but look what I have here.”

He riffled through the folder and spread a number of photos on his desk.

The coat of mail had clearly been made using traditional craftsmanship. It would have covered his entire torso from the small of his back to his neckline, and was so heavy it must even have injured him. I obviously pulled an expressive face because Vieira clarified: “Seventeen and a half pounds. And no tools to make a thing like that were found at his house. In fact, did you know that on his wrists and ankles he wore plain bronze hoops, no ornamentation or engraving? Even sewn into the felt rim of his hat, guess what we found? A wide band of very thin bronze.”

He shook his head.

“I warned all the staff. Paranoid schizophrenics are unpredictable creatures. You know, a guy like that could eat your eyeballs! We didn’t get a thing out of him, he didn’t want to talk about anything. The only conversation I managed to have with him was about astronomy.”

“Astronomy?” Antonio asked as he put away his camera and films.

“Jupiter’s moons, it was his favorite subject. Pinheiro says that on a dark night with a clear sky, fewer than one person in a thousand can see them with the naked eye. Which might as well be no one. Before the astronomical telescope was invented, anyone who could didn’t dare talk about it.”

“Was his eyesight really that good?” Antonio asked in amazement. “In the pictures though, he’s wearing little glasses, look.”

“No, I think it was actually his favorite metaphor. He told me several times, ‘Be right about something one day in front of everyone, you’ll be taken for a fool for a day.’ ”

Antonio closed the zipper on his bag, his noisy way of showing he wanted to get out of the hospital as quickly as possible. Vieira noticed this impatience, closed his file, and politely claimed he needed to leave for his consulting hours. He shook our hands and was already walking away, but turned around and handed me his card.

“If you’re alone in Lisbon … It’s only a small place, we might bump into each other by chance, but should we always leave everything up to chance? Do you have a card?”

I told him what I had told Custódia: “I’ve only just moved.”

IRENE ASKED US not to wait for her, and we had risotto for lunch on a restaurant terrace, in the shade of a large ficus in a square along Dom Pedro Avenue.

When we were having coffee, an Irene in a red dress appeared around the corner of the street, facing me, suddenly looking heavier than I remembered, almost plump. She waggled a copy of Le Monde in her hand, ran over to us, and, without a word, nestled on Antonio’s lap, taking his hand and putting it on her bare thigh. Then she gave me a fish-eyed stare, drained of any expression. I looked at my watch, miming someone in a hurry, and stood up. Irene rested her head on Antonio’s shoulder.

“What? I just get here and you’re leaving? Your Lena again … This is obsession or I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“Exactly, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I smiled at my own retort, because I’m so often several beats behind. To leave things on that victorious note, I said goodbye to Antonio and left immediately.

I walked along Dom Pedro Avenue, a small street leading down to the port, and stopped to look at the window display of a curiosity shop, intrigued by a Dogon statue, or it could have been Tellem. It was likely to be fake but had an interesting patina. I went straight in.

The only valuable object I had in Paris was an Inuit mask hanging on the wall in the living room. It was large, made of driftwood with feathers stuck into it. It most probably represents a seal or even a seal-man with its red teeth and dilated nostrils. It would have been a ceremonial mask worn by a shaman to ask the spirits to ensure that the caribou, which headed south in winter, would return the following summer. Its first buyer was the Reverend Samuel Wallis. He drew it in his diary for 1897, which can still be consulted in the library at the University of Victoria (British Columbia). Next to the sketch, Samuel Wallis has written the date — February 17—and that he bought the mask for a dollar from a trapper who was asking five. The mask had been found at about Christmastime, to the north of the Kuskokwim River, in an Inuit cemetery, next to a man’s corpse that the foxes had unearthed and half eaten. Wallis wrote that the trapper had put the body back in its grave under a pile of stones and secured the mask to his sled with the beaver pelts, then urged his dogs on through the dusk of unbroken night over the frozen waters of the Kuskokwim, to sell his furs in Mamterillermiut. The name means “the people of the smokehouse,” because they smoke fish there. It was just a village with about a hundred inhabitants, at the mouth of the river, a few dozen miles from the Bering Sea: mostly Inuits, but a few white men too, gold diggers, traders, missionaries from the Moravian church, including the Reverend Samuel Wallis. A few years later Mamterillermiut would move to the western bank and be renamed Bethel; in 1905 a branch of the U.S. Post Office would open there.

When I looked at that Inuit mask I often thought of the Reverend Samuel Wallis, of the application with which he drew it in his diary. Outside, it had been dark for five months, blizzards whipped up icy snow, he could hear it beating against the walls and windows of the mission. He had seen plenty of other masks, fish masks, masks depicting beluga whale hunts, fox or bird masks. He must have stopped wondering about these sculpted wooden faces by this stage. It was now the masks that questioned him. They certainly wouldn’t have toppled his faith, but he saw too many of them not to be disturbed. The Reverend Samuel Wallis probably couldn’t quite explain these unsettling feelings. So many different peoples had shaped pieces of wood. Perhaps the question the Reverend Samuel Wallis asked himself was “Why am I so far from home and yet so close to myself?”

I wandered around the store. A tall fair-haired man was cleaning a fragment of stained glass in a frame. I asked him how much the Dogon statue was. It was far too cheap to be authentic, and therefore far too expensive for a fake. I dawdled a little longer, chatting to the salesman, an American who had recently moved to Lisbon, when, reflected in a mirror, I could see the sidewalk on the other side of the street, and Irene. If it hadn’t been for the too red dress, the brief dazzle of it in the sunlight, I wouldn’t have noticed her.

I freeze where I am, just to be sure. It’s definitely her, hiding behind a truck. Irene’s following me.

I leave the store and head toward Rossio, checking reflections in shopwindows for my tracker on my heels. It doesn’t occur to me to shake her off. As I pass the Café Brasileira, I decide to sit at a table on the terrace and pretend to be surprised when I see her. But at one of the tables is a young woman with brown hair cropped very short, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt; she looks up and gives me a hint of a smile. She brings her coffee to her mouth, the movement ethereal, fine as an italic letter. I catch a glimpse of a tattoo on the inside of her wrist, a tiny turquoise dolphin, small enough to be hidden by a 100-escudo coin, not unlike the dolphin etched onto my black notebooks. That is when, with no plan or idea in mind, I do something that amazes me.

I go over to her. Her lips are thin but they form an O of surprise when I sit in the wicker chair opposite her.

“Excuse me, please let me sit down, I won’t stay long.”

She’s startled, she tenses imperceptibly, looks at me irritably and shrugs. She reaches for her packet of cigarettes and I can tell she’s going to get up and leave.

“Please,” I say quickly, “I beg you, don’t get up. Don’t be frightened.”

“I’m not frightened.”

She hesitates for a moment, my eyes are beseeching, I’ve no idea what I look like right now.

“Promise me you’ll listen to me just for a minute. Please.”

She takes a cigarette and lights it. Her reaction was only hinted at, Irene can’t have grasped it. She might think the woman’s impatient gesture was because I’m late. The young woman looks at me, hesitant, amazed, no — better — intrigued. She has fine, charmingly irregular features, her nose perhaps not quite straight. I detect a note of amusement in her expression. Anyway, I can’t be that disturbing, dressed in the “sensible student” clothes I’ve never stopped wearing.

“I’ll explain. I don’t know where to start. I’m Vincent, Vincent Balmer. I’m French.”

“That’s obvious, you have a French accent.”

She shrugs, tilts her head to one side prettily.

Her eyebrows go up and form a tiny crease across her forehead. She pushes her brown hair off her face without a word. Eventually she smiles and shakes her head, pouting impatiently.

“I–I work here,” I stammer. “In Lisbon. The woman watching us at the moment is … is a girlfriend. An ex-girlfriend. She left me. She thinks — well, actually, I’m making her think — I have a girlfriend here. A partner, if you like. But I don’t know anyone in Lisbon, I mean, I don’t have a friend … a woman. And right now she’s following me because I said I was going to meet my girlfriend. I’m sorry, I do realize this is all quite muddled …”

She eyes me in silence, rather sternly.

“Yes, you do seem muddled.” Her voice has a slightly cracked, hoarse quality, but a singing lilt. “Is she still there, this woman?”

“I don’t know. She must be behind me, pretending to look in shopwindows.”

She stretches her neck to look over my shoulder.

“No, don’t look,” I almost shout.

“Listen, there are dozens of women looking in shopwindows. How do you expect me to believe your story? Do you often hit on girls with a fabrication like that?”

My expression is so pitiful that a crease of amusement hovers over her lips.

“Okay, let’s go with it. And why did you tell her you had someone?”

“Because she left me. To show her I was over it, I’d forgotten her, because I loved someone else. I don’t know, to keep up appearances in front of her. Or maybe to see if she was jealous.”

She stares at me intently.

“You are sure she was following you, aren’t you?”

“Absolutely, I swear it.”

“And what does this woman look like?”

“I don’t know. She’s short with curly brown hair.”

She can’t help smiling, there are lots of short women with curly brown hair. I have a flash of inspiration: “She’s wearing a dress, a really very red dress, with flouncy bits. And a necklace of orange, blue, and black beads. I gave her that necklace. And … I think she’s still holding a French newspaper.”

She picks up her coffee cup, takes a small sip, then puts the cup back down. Without looking up, she says: “There’s someone who exactly matches your description behind you, she’s admiring some glass jugs in a window. One point to you.”

“You see, I’m not lying.”

“Mmm …” She stares at me sardonically, a touch of pink on her eyelids heightens the green of her eyes. It’s quite ordinary makeup, but she hasn’t overdone it.

“Or she’s your accomplice,” she says. “That’s it. You arrange these setups together. You do it for her, she does it for you.” I must be looking desperate because she adds: “Okay, okay, I believe you.”

She lowers her sunglasses and stops talking. I can’t make out her eyes now and guess she’s secretly watching Irene.

“She’s very young, your girlfriend …”

“Twenty-two, twenty-three, I think.”

“Like I said.”

I blush, this stranger is in a good position to spell out the truth to me.

“So then, I’m meant to be your mistress, am I? Am I meant to have a name?”

“I told her about a Lena … Lena Palmer.”

“She sounds like a heroine from a TV series.”

“It’s — it’s meant to be your husband’s surname. You’re … you’re going through a divorce.”

“What about you? What’s your name? I know you’ve already told me, but I was angry and I don’t remember it.”

“Balmer.”

“Balmer … And I’m Palmer, is that right?” she asks. “That’s completely ridiculous. And what’s your first name, you fool. Do you really think I’d call the man of my life by his surname?”

“Vincent.”

“Vin-cent Bal-mer …” she lets the syllables hang in the air, to let their perfume take hold of her. “And I’m Manuela. Manuela Freire. Your story’s totally absurd. Which is why I believe it. It’s like Catholic faith … Credo quia absurdum, right?”

She stops talking, slips her sunglasses onto the top of her head, and looks at me for a long time. It’s then that I realize I dared approach her and embark on this because her face looked familiar, you could even say like a friend. If she were seventeen with slightly longer hair, she could be the twin sister of the very young actress in Thirty Years Without Seeing the Sea. That first feature by an unknown filmmaker enjoyed far too little success, but the actress took it to heart. What was her name? Clémence Guatteri? Constance Guettari? It doesn’t matter.

The story is easily summarized: a teenage girl, probably running away from home, sets off from an anonymous suburb, hitchhiking her way to meet her boyfriend in northern Germany, in Lübeck, where he works as an apprentice chef in a French restaurant. Filmed in parallel is the story of a Polish hitchhiker in his thirties armed with a tourist visa — secured God knows how — who arrives on the outskirts of Paris, on the last leg of his journey to the Mediterranean which he’s dreamed about his whole life. They meet at a gas station. She’s been caught stealing biscuits by the manager, who’s about to call the police, so the man steps in and pays for them for her. He instantly falls in love with this very young girl and when she tells him she’s going to meet up with her boyfriend in Lübeck, he says he’s heading home to Gdańsk. Lübeck isn’t far out of his way, and he suggests they travel together. During those few days traveling he protects her with great tact, aware of how lost and yet determined she is, how full of confidence but ready to snap like a thread stretched too tight. And yet she is so luminous and expects so much of life that she is the one to show him the world. She talks and he just listens, fascinated, never admitting his profound distress. He feels his love for her is forbidden, scandalous, and he suffers at the thought — or the impression — that he’s too old to deserve her. She’s drawn to him, but too inexperienced to interpret her confusing feelings. When they arrive in Lübeck and, in front of him, she calls her boyfriend to announce jubilantly that she’s there, the Pole realizes the boy wasn’t expecting her, doesn’t want her anymore. She hangs up and bursts into tears, he comforts her and she’s ready to give herself to him, in despair, in a desperate craving for tenderness too, but he loves her too much to want her at that price. He offers her a train ticket back to Paris. She accepts, they exchange an awkward kiss on the station platform, and she steps onto the train, distraught. He doesn’t have enough money left to see the Mediterranean, and hitches a ride home. He actually lived in Lublin, much farther south than Gda?sk.

Thirty Years Without Seeing the Sea is a succession of sensitive, allusive tableaux. The filmmaker must have been fresh out of film school: the framing, camera movements, and even the film’s rhythm betray its influences, from Tarkovsky to Nicolas Roeg, but in the arts there is no sentiment more stupid than a fear of being influenced. The film ends with a very long tracking shot: the girl standing in the train corridor, her cheek resting against the window, her eyes dry and red, watching the rain. Then the camera gradually pans, and the shot is no longer lost in a drowning landscape but begins, as the girl herself does, to see a new landscape appear. The sky is clearing, the sun’s going to come out.

I remember sitting alone in the darkened room, seeing how intense and dazzling that girl was, suddenly filled with the conviction that I had never truly lived, and I couldn’t help my tears flowing.

Manuela Freire has the same fine features and radiates the same charm. Yes, ten or fifteen years later, that runaway teenager, now grown calmer, serene even, could easily cut her dark hair and look like her sister.

I make an automatic nervous gesture, bringing my fingers up to my mouth. Manuela raps her index finger sharply on the back of my hand.

“You could at least stop biting your nails, it’s disgusting. Do you know, your friend’s completely fascinated by a hideous cherry-red butter dish? What’s her name, by the way?”

“Irene.”

“She’s not bad. Well, if you like that type. That girl’s the sort to fuel a few fires. I’m guessing she showed you a thing or two, didn’t she?”

She takes a sip of her coffee, watches me cheerfully.

“Ah, she’s moving a bit. O-kay. She’s moved a whole yard. Now she’s completely focused on a soup tureen. Does this Irene of yours like soup?”

“E — excuse me?”

“Soup. S-o-u-p. Broth, consommé, bouillon?”

“I–I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? Now, that’s a bad sign. You have to know everything a woman likes and dislikes, if you want to keep her. How old are you?” she adds, frowning.

I hesitate for a moment. “Thirty … thirty-nine.”

“Really?”

She knits her brow like an angry schoolteacher and I stammer awkwardly, “Yes, yes, I promise you, it’s true, I’ll be forty in June, next year.”

She laughs properly for the first time. She has pretty little teeth in perfect ivory.

“It’s okay, I believe you, I believe you. In fact, I’m even going to pay you a compliment, it’ll relax you: you look younger than that. I’m thirty-three.”

She reaches for her sunglasses on top of her head and brings them down to the bridge of her nose. Not seeing her eyes makes me uncomfortable, I feel more and more at her mercy.

“And, just out of curiosity, why did you choose me?”

“Well …”

“There wasn’t much choice, is that it?”

I’m fumbling for words, but she’s not waiting for an answer: “Aha, your wannabe Sherlock Holmes has now moved to the other side of the store, and because it’s on a street corner, she’s watching us through the windows.”

She catches the waiter by the sleeve, with all the familiarity of a regular, and orders a coffee.

“Would you like one too? You’re paying for the coffees. It’s just we’ve been here awhile. I’m back at work at four o’clock. And I have some shopping to do …”

“I’m — I’m so sorry. Do you work nearby?”

“Yes, right there,” she says, pointing to a large stone building which looks like a stock exchange.

“At the theater.”

I think I understand now: “So, you’re an actor?”

She laughs. “Yes, yes, an excellent actor. I play the part of the chief accountant every day. They all believe in me.”

She tenses her biceps, Hercules-style.

“Hey, I can’t see your girl anymore. She must have given up. Or maybe she’s taken up another position without my noticing. So, shall we go and do my shopping, then? After we’ve had coffee. Tell me about yourself.”

THE QUARTER OF an hour it takes to drink a coffee is enough to sum up a life — mine, anyway.

If we don’t drown ourselves in details, it gives us a not unhappy childhood in Lyon between a fairly absent father, a manager in a bank branch, and a Portuguese mother who taught primary school; not very turbulent teenage years in Paris; history studies culminating in a master’s degree; and a small gift for writing which earns me first some freelance work for newspapers, then a job with a daily, in the arts department and later the society section. As for love, a few relationships that never lasted, meeting Irene, her rejection which made me crazy about her. Lastly, my father’s suicide, just two months ago.

I didn’t hide anything, embellish or blacken anything either, nor did I try to submerge less glorious episodes in misplaced humor. I also related the one notable event: that lost M16 bullet in Nicaragua. A couple of inches farther to the right and writing my obituary for the paper wouldn’t have been an easy job. I found it soothing to share these confidences sincerely. I also mentioned the novel about Pescheux d’Herbinville that I kept going back to, and my translation of Jaime Montestrela’s Contos aquosos.

“The what? By who?” Manuela asked.

I took out the book; she slipped her sunglasses back onto her head opened the book in the middle, and didn’t land on the best of the tales.

In the town of Chiannesi (Umbria, Italy), on Shrove Tuesday, it was customary for every inhabitant to swap minds with another, women played at being men, children being parents. This swap included animals, and mice could be seen toying cruelly with cats. The municipality brought a definitive end to this custom in 1819, when the swap between cows and flies led to a crisis.

She handed the book back, not very convinced.

“Are you really translating it?”

“Bit by bit. I like unfashionable authors, the ones who failed to produce a major famous work by which they’ll be remembered.”

Manuela smiled. She got it. Yes, I feel a sort of kinship with people who fail. Their wanderings forgive my weaknesses, and I don’t hate the fact that posterity is so unfair toward them. The wrong done them absolves me from my own inability to create, from my laziness and fickleness.

“What about your novel, what’s it about?”

“About the mathematician Évariste Galois and his murderer.”

“Is it a detective story?”

“No, Galois really did exist, he died in a stupid sort of duel between two friends, in May 1832. It’s thought his adversary was called Pescheux d’Herbinville, but there’s another name out there too. In his last letter, written the night before the duel, Galois wrote something wonderful, more about the Republic than mathematics: ‘Remember me, because fate has not given me enough life for my country to know my name.’ And it’s true, his work was found twenty years later. Even so, I’m not getting anywhere with it.”

“Finish it by 2032. Then at least you could make the most of the bicentenary.” She pulled a face, screwing up her eyes. “You’ll notice I’m giving you my most gorgeous smile. She’s still there, your Irene. I can see her again, on the far side of the shop, through the glass. I hope I’m pretty enough to compete with her. I’m not too old for you, am I? I am over thirty, you know!”

“You’re — you’re very …”

“I’m teasing you, and you’re going to say something silly.”

Manuela’s blue dolphin was leaping over the sun. It intrigued me. She saw me looking at her wrist and this made her smile.

“Ah, the dolphin?”

“Yes. It’s very pretty.”

“It’s a kid’s thing. I had it done when I was sixteen, the day after someone very close to me was buried … Slit wrists. I was in a terrible state. I had it put right where the razor would go, so that, if I ever had the same idea, the dolphin would stop me. Dolphins save men. Why not women?”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It was a long time ago. I don’t think I ever really contemplated suicide. I just had my grief inscribed on my skin. An aesthetic act, in a way, almost shameless. Come on, let’s go and do the shopping, and you’re paying for the coffees.”

She stood up, took my arm, and dragged me off.

“It’s not unpleasant having someone at your mercy.”

WE WENT INTO one of the large stores on the rua do Carmo, and Manuela led me straight to the lingerie department on the second floor. In the still prudish Portugal of the 1980s, the range was hardly exuberant, but alluring underwear has never been my specialty. It was an era of women’s liberation, and these emblems of sexual subjection were not part of the seductive palette favored by women I knew.

Manuela couldn’t have cared less. She was enjoying asking my opinion about bras and slips. She liked ochre and cream best, ignoring the blacks and purples that dominated that world. Holding a white silk corset with gray-beige lace edging, she leaned toward my ear.

“I’m going to abandon you, you’ll know why in a minute,” she said, and was just disappearing into a fitting room when Irene appeared.

“You? here? Are you playing the dirty old man in the femme fatale department?”

“I’m with someone. Anyway, you’re here yourself.”

“I saw you … I was over there, in another department.”

She waved vaguely to a place behind her where nothing was going on. A glance toward the fitting rooms betrayed her.

“I didn’t know you liked this sort of thing,” she grimaced, picking up a red leather bustier. “So, would it turn you on if I wore something like this? With garters too?”

I was saved by Manuela’s tousled, smiling face peeping between the curtains.

“Vincent? Come and tell me if it suits me. Miss, this size is really very generous, would you have the next size down, a size four?”

She talked quickly and Irene didn’t speak Portuguese, but she did understand the mistake.

“I … Tell her I don’t work here,” replied Irene, not so much annoyed as disconcerted.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Mademoiselle,” Manuela said in pretty presentable French. “Well, Vincent, are you coming or not?”

I moved closer. She opened the curtain and pulled me by the collar, almost lovingly.

“You speak French?” I breathed.

“No. I have a smattering.” Then she went on more loudly so she would be heard, “So, do you like it on me? Tell me the truth. I don’t look too much like a hooker?”

I tried to stare at the wall but the corset molded her too wonderfully for my gaze not to linger on the unsettling shadow between her rounded breasts, her buttocks, her very long, slim legs. I stammered some sort of reply and she whispered, “How did you like the bit about the size four? Brilliant, wasn’t it? Okay, you’ve fed your eyes long enough, you great pervert.”

“It’s feasted. Feasted your eyes.”

“Go on, scram. The show’s over.”

I stepped backward and returned to where Irene was. She said nothing for a moment, then couldn’t hold out any longer.

“Is she your Lena, then?”

I could tell from her voice, it was artificial, had too much of a singsong to it: Irene was jealous. Not a lover’s jealousy, which would have been colored with pain, just the disappointment of a woman who loathed no longer being the center of attention. I pretended not to notice.

“Yes, it’s her. I realize you’re seeing her in … the circumstances are …”

Manuela popped out of the fitting room. She had put on her jeans over the corset. And managed not to look ridiculous. She came straight over to us and gave us a twirl like a ballerina.

“It’s a bit expensive. But everything’s too expensive when you don’t need it. I’m keeping it on. I’ll start a fashion.”

Then, finally deigning to look at Irene, she asked, “Do you know each other? Come on, Vincent, aren’t you going to introduce your friend? I’m Manuela …,” she said, not waiting for my reply.

I must have paled, or perhaps Irene showed some sign of surprise, because, with no hint of embarrassment, Manuela added seamlessly, “But people also call me Lena.”

“Irene. But people also call me Irene.”

It was said provocatively, but Manuela laughed and held out her hand; Irene, caught out, had to shake it. Manuela then went off to pay, and Irene watched her, as a fox might watch a hen.

“Have you told her about me? About you and me?”

“No.” And, with as much detachment as I could muster, I added, “Why would I?”

Manuela came back over to us, smiling happily, and took my arm.

“Let’s go back to the Brasileira. Do you know that’s where Vincent held my hand for the first time, oh, how long ago was that now?”

“Two months,” I said quickly.

“Two months? I can’t believe it, it sometimes feels like two hours …”

We sat at the same table. Manuela took her role remarkably seriously and had fun terrifying me by talking the whole time. She certainly had a smattering of French. When Irene proved too inquisitive, she dropped her head on my shoulder, unaffected and complicit, and let me do the lying for her. Then she steered my stories toward the truth. Divorced? It came through “just two days ago, phew!” The banker ex-husband was called Palmer, almost the same as my name? “Let’s change the subject, I’m Miss Freire again now, and things are a lot better like that.” Restoring paintings? She was bored of it now, too many issues with ignorant, tyrannical customers, and then there were museum conservators who were “so temperamental, I mean so temperamental. One time, this is the latest time it happened, it was at the Louvre — with a Titian.” And her own painting wasn’t going very well. Nonfigurative work that doesn’t see itself as conceptual is “over-over-over. I should be doing conceptual figurative stuff. But I’m still painting theater sets. Especially white walls. I love white walls.” As for the accountancy job at the theater, her new financial situation meant she “couldn’t turn it down. Accountancy’s how I met my husband. Ah! Didn’t we say we weren’t going to talk about him anymore?” In fifteen minutes Manuela Freire had succeeded in superseding Lena Palmer.

“How about you, Irene, what brings you to Lisbon?”

But there was a cold gust of wind and Manuela looked at her watch.

“I’m sorry,” she said, standing up. “I have to go. The curse of the wage earner. See you soon, Irene, it’s been a pleasure. Vincent, will you come with me for a minute?”

I obliged, not sure what to do. But Manuela Freire knew. She positioned herself so that Irene wouldn’t be able to see her behind me, then pressed my cheeks between her hands, crushing my face so that it probably looked ridiculous and flabby. Then she came right up close till her nose brushed against mine, and whispered:

“Bet this looks like a real lovers’ kiss, don’t you? I want a detailed report tomorrow with my free cup of coffee.”

She turned on her heel and headed toward the theater. A cool raindrop fell on my hand. I went back to sit next to Irene. The sidewalk in front of us was suddenly covered with little patches of darker gray. They were born as round as coins and, wherever there was a slope, they lengthened into teardrops. All at once there was a flash of lightning, immediately followed by thunder, the stiff breeze made the whole town clink and clatter, and the heavy air took on a cooler color. A clear pattering sound came from the ground, everything darkened suddenly, and the rain started pelting down. It quickly invaded the street, dense and luminous, a shivering translucent jelly reflecting the silver of the sky. It could have been monsoon rain, both violent and gentle, cleansing the earth. But no one in Lisbon displayed the defeated nonchalance of the tropics. Everyone wanted to avoid the deluge, taking refuge under shop awnings and bringing in washing that was hanging on balconies.

Manuela was walking across the square in the shower, not rushing, already soaked, her dark hair clinging to her forehead. She tried to avoid puddles, but water streamed everywhere in wide rippling flows. So she bent down swiftly and, in a spectacularly graceful move, took off her pumps. Then she started to run barefoot toward the theater. I must have smiled inadvertently because Irene shrugged irritably.

The storm didn’t last. When Irene wanted to go back to the hotel, I didn’t offer to go with her. She left alone, turning around twice, as if wanting to test my indifference. But it wasn’t faked, and I was all the more surprised for that.

“GALILEO DISCOVERED THE four largest of Jupiter’s many moons thanks to his telescope: Ganymede (which is larger than Mercury), Callisto, Io, and Europa. Anyone who claimed to have seen them by night prior to this was deemed mad.”

That was how I started my first article about Pinheiro, and faxed it straight from the hotel. Four pages of it. I had indicated that I would write at least three articles: “Jupiter’s Moons,” “The Man in Bronze,” and “The Silent One,” covering every aspect of the investigation and Pinheiro’s personality. Then I had promised myself that, if need be, I could come back to the trial.

The editor called straightaway: “What the hell’s all this junk about Jupiter’s moons? The press hasn’t talked about any of this. A correspondent’s job isn’t to go investigating but to read, conflate, and suggest. Read, conflate, and suggest. And that’s it. Still, we’ll publish the article the day after tomorrow all the same. The others at a rate of one every three days. It’s good. Carry on like that. Say well done to Flores for the pictures.”

And he hung up.

It was dark, the air warm, and Irene decided we should eat outside on a terrace and, most importantly, we “had to have lobster” because the way they cooked it here was “adorable.” Antonio suggested a restaurant in the pedestrian area near the rua São José, where crustaceans in window tanks frolicked gleefully although the most elementary understanding of caution would have required discretion.

We had placed our order and were drinking vinho verde while we waited when I noticed a young woman watching us. She was wearing black jeans and an AC-DC T-shirt, her spiky hair was set with gel like the punks in London’s Soho, and her eyes were ringed with heavy eyeliner. Because of the getup it took me several more seconds to realize she was Aurora. Even though I had proof of this from the man by her side, Alyosha Karamazov, the tall, brooding young man who clearly followed her wherever she went, standing there stiffly in his perennial gray three-piece suit. Aurora waved to me, but when Irene kissed Antonio she couldn’t contain a pained smile, and she moved away quickly, almost running, trailing her attentive escort in her wake.

A quarter of an hour passed and our lobsters arrived. Another Aurora appeared at the end of the street, wearing a long, black silk dress and blue ballet shoes, her hair smooth and still damp from her shower. Alyosha, let’s call him that, was still escorting her, taking large strides while she almost ran. Aurora was holding a violin case in her hand. When she reached us, she noticed a wooden crate abandoned outside the metal shutters of a greengrocer’s, and dragged it over to the restaurant terrace. The wood rasping on the road surface attracted the attention of the whole street. Irene was first to turn toward the sound with a grimace, then Antonio. I saw him freeze, petrified.

Aurora turned the crate over. It must once have contained oranges, it had the word “Jaffa” on it. She tested how firm it was with her foot and leaped onto it in one swift movement, standing with her feet along the edge. She waited for an amazed silence to descend, then laid her violin on her shoulder and wedged a cotton cloth on the chin rest.

“Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst’s Caprice for Violin on Schubert’s ‘Erlkönig’ …”

The chin rest was set very high, and Aurora hardly had to lower her head to secure the instrument, which looked like an alto next to Aurora’s tiny form in that black dress. She touched the strings twice with her bow, made a small adjustment to one peg to tune the E, and launched into the music with childlike energy, her bow fluid and active. The first staccato sequence implied this caprice would be an incredibly complex, virtuoso piece. Aurora mastered it perfectly. She didn’t look at Antonio, she had closed her eyes, concentrating, with a vertical crease down her forehead. On her temples I spotted an area of powder that the water had not quite cleaned away.

It took a matter of seconds for the violin to eclipse all conversation. A woman being heavy-handed with her fork was treated to an eye-popping stare by her companion, and put down her cutlery. The waiter stopped taking orders and leaned against the window. He stared at Aurora, open-mouthed. The very thrum of the street came to a stop. Antonio couldn’t take his eyes off Aurora. Irene silently plowed on with her half lobster.

Balancing on the wooden crate, Aurora drew a pure yet fragile sound from her instrument, like a soprano at the peak of an aria, but there was not a moment’s fear that she might fail. She allowed herself no leeway, even frowning and going back over a difficult passage where she alone could possibly have known she had gone wrong. I realized that Aurora could not cheat, that it wouldn’t have occurred to her. This deep-seated insistence on truthfulness was her trademark, her nobility, and her strength. It’s a cliché, I know, but the only image that came to me was of a princess on an orange box.

I sneaked a glance at Irene. I loathed wanting her so much, hated the violent appetite that urged me to look over at her Medusa eyes, the indolent back of her neck, her bare legs, her ass — no other word seemed more apt. For my desire was now tempered with contempt, a scheme to have her and humiliate her. If Irene had let me touch her that day, I wouldn’t so much have made love to her as taken her, avidly and vengefully, with no tenderness or feeling. Perhaps she detected this brutality in me, perhaps the evidence that I wanted her so badly drove her still further from me. I had even imagined every detail of this carnal scene and written the whole sequence in my notebook, so that I could realize it in a dream on paper and get it out of my system, but the words were so crude and violent they only increased my frustration and torment. I haven’t copied out any of that ignominious sequence in which I abased myself even more than her.

Aurora stopped playing abruptly, and everyone clapped for a long time. But she did not step off the crate. With her violin in one hand and her bow in the other, she waved and said simply,

“A poem by Fernando Pessoa. ‘Autopsychography.’

O poeta é um fingidor.

Finge tão completamente

Que chega a finger que é dor

Ador que deveras sente.

E os que lêem o que escreve,

Na dor lida sentem bem,

Não as duas que ele teve,

Mas só a que eles não têm.

E assim nas calhas de roda

Gira, a entreter a razão,

Esse comboio de corda

Que se charma coração.

The poet is a faker

Who’s so good at his act

He even fakes the pain

Of pain he feels in fact.

And those who read his words

Will feel in what he wrote

Neither of the pains he has

But just the one they don’t.

And so around its track

This thing called the heart winds,

A little clockwork train

To entertain our minds.”

There was some clapping, Aurora played a short legato and I thought she would step down and bow, but she carried on: “I recited that poem by Pessoa, it’s … one of his most famous poems, but we can never tire of hearing it because it is about lying and illusion and sincerity. I’m … now going to read you a text by … Jaime Montestrela … a major Portuguese poet who lived in Brazil during the dictatorship … an extract from one of his books … I Meet You.”

Her voice didn’t waver. She did not look Antonio in the eye once. If she looked at me it was only fleetingly, but the name Montestrela aroused Irene’s curiosity, and she whispered in my ear, “Is Montestrela that well known, then?”

Aurora plucked the strings of the violin to set a rhythm to her words.

“You have to read I Meet You as if it were an improvisation, the author … Jaime Montestrela … even indicates places where … where you have to stammer just like that so that listeners don’t know whether they’re already listening to I Meet You … It’s a text about a man or rather a young woman who thinks she’s met a man but all he did was spend some time with her and she’s hurt by this because … one morning after he’s slept at her house after they’ve made love no no no not made love those words don’t belong here at all says Jaime Montestrela we have to be accurate and describe this openly because the young woman leads him over to her bed she gently takes his clothes off then undresses herself and there she is naked offered she gets on top of him she guides him and now yes we can say the words they make love it’s still half dark but look the walls of the room are already being colored pink the sun is coming up over the city and the man wakes and looks at her she’s sleeping naked on the white sheet she’s so young her body’s so firm so taut almost a child’s body and something about her frightens him really frightens him it must because he gets out of bed that’s right he doesn’t stroke her doesn’t kiss her doesn’t even breathe in the smell of her hair no he gets up and dresses he has trouble tying his shoelaces and ridiculously he buttons his shirt too quickly and does it wrong and then he leaves he doesn’t leave a note on the table he’s never known what to say anyway he doesn’t even drink a glass of water in the kitchen no he opens the door as quietly as he can and there he is outside like a thief he closes the door without a sound he goes down the stairs on tiptoe and runs away that’s right he runs away the young woman knows this because no she was not sleeping no she stayed there motionless with her eyes closed and she heard his breathing his irritated groan about his uncooperative laces and when he was gone she walked over to the window and now she can see him running along the street and she understands yes yes yes he could have put down roots in her life like a lily on a pond who knows whether a water lily has roots or just floats on the water like Ophelia’s corpse … but there it is, that man would never have been able to melt into her no no he lets everything slip through his fingers like sand and with each betrayal his world becomes as tiny as he is … but here at this point Montestrela uses the young woman’s words he switches imperceptibly from she to I it’s a pivotal moment …”

The crate wobbled slightly but, light-footed, Aurora immediately steadied herself … Young Karamazov couldn’t take his eyes off her. He loved her of course. A guardian angel. Who was he? A childhood friend, an older brother, or younger, a faithful admirer? His inscrutable face expressed neither suffering nor resentment, barely even anxiety. He knew how tight a thread Aurora was balancing on, and yet was in no doubt it would hold fast.

“A pivotal switch from she to I yes but it is done very naturally because Montestrela is a fine workman when it comes to style a little too lyrical perhaps but you should be listening really it is the young woman talking she says what took you away from me you my prince of one luminous night you my Bohemian who wants none of eternity was it my overardent words intended to console you the inconsolable do you know that I wanted to run red through your veins like all the gold on earth do you know that I wanted to make pebbles burst into flower to reassure you to make you love me at last but I will not say anything no I will not say anything because I can feel my tears rising it’s true I am made like that all it takes is a piece of music or a poem and there they are spilling out of me it’s absolutely grotesque all this uncontrollable irrational emotion there was that poem that I read and reread twenty times I wanted to empty it of all my tears I wanted to rob it of all meaning but its intensity would not falter and yet it wasn’t even the most beautiful of poems no it was just a needle wounding my flesh so I thought never mind I shall love these tears they’re as much my strength as my weakness You are alive they cry You you whose life has only just started but but but shall I ever Lord God who does not exist shall I ever exhaust my reservoir of tears shall I stop being moved by anything but myself like old people who have not lived enough Lord so I started drawing up a list of all the things that can bring tears to my eyes until I realized it would be endless but that does not matter Montestrela still launches into this list and makes a note of everything and who cares if some of it is clichéd he includes the fine dirty gray rain that falls in autumn and the little girl playing hopscotch the woman looking for traces of her youth in the mirror he includes the little boy so proud to be on his father’s shoulders and the woman weeping with rage at the gates of the factory and the dead sparrow drying out on the ground and the blue toy giraffe forgotten under the wardrobe and more and more let’s stop talking about Montestrela and I Meet You and the young woman no no I am now going to play the first movement of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto because it made me cry a lot.”

Aurora took up her violin again and launched straight into the piece. She played to perfection once again, showing just as much bravura and technique. And yet there was something about her movements that surprised me, they were expansive and supple, and I eventually realized that, unusually, she was resting the violin on her right collar bone, so that the strings were back to front. Aurora must have been transposing every move of the bow as, with her left hand very high in the air, she attacked the high notes with more resolve than ever. She finished the first movement and bravos rang out. She bowed twice, then stepped down from her Jaffa crate, put away her violin, and waved rather insistently at Karamazov. He hesitated, reluctant, but had to walk around the tables with his hat, which must never have housed a single coin in its felt existence. It was a good harvest, a lot of bills.

Irene wanted to give some money too. She rummaged through her bag, but the two young people slipped away without bringing the hat to our table. Fiddling automatically under the effect of his nerves, Antonio had strewn the tablecloth with dozens of tiny balls of bread. He didn’t say a single word for the whole rest of the meal.