Here Is Where We Meet

I Lisboa

In the centre of a square in Lisboa there is a tree called a Lusitanian (which is to say, Portuguese) cypress. Its branches, instead of pointing up to the sky, have been trained to grow outwards, horizontally, so that they form a gigantic, impenetrable, very low umbrella with a diameter of twenty metres. One hundred people could easily shelter under it. The branches are supported by metal props, arranged in circles around the twisted massive trunk; the tree is at least two hundred years old. Beside it stands a formal notice-board with a poem to passers-by written on it.

I paused to try to decipher a few lines:

. . I am the handle of your hoe, the gate of your house, the wood of your cradle and the wood of your coffin. .

Elsewhere in the square chickens were pecking for worms on the unkempt grass. At several tables men were playing sueca, each one selecting and then placing his card on the table with an expression that combined wisdom and resignation. Winning here was a quiet pleasure.

It was hot — perhaps 28 °C — at the end of the month of May. In a week or two, Africa, which begins — in a manner of speaking — on the far bank of the Tagus, would begin to impose a distant yet tangible presence. An old woman with an umbrella was sitting very still on one of the park benches. She had the kind of stillness that draws attention to itself. Sitting there on the park bench, she was determined to be noticed. A man with a suitcase walked through the square with the air of going to a rendezvous he kept every day. Afterwards a woman carrying a little dog in her arms — both of them looking sad — passed, heading down towards the Avenida da Liberdade. The old woman on the bench persisted in her demonstrative stillness. To whom was it addressed?

Abruptly, as I was asking myself this question, she got to her feet, turned and, using her umbrella like a walking stick, came towards me.

I recognised her walk, long before I could see her face. The walk of somebody already looking forward to arriving and sitting down. It was my mother.

It happens sometimes in my dreams that I have to phone my parents’ flat, in order to tell them — or to ask them to tell somebody else — that I’m likely to be late, because I’ve missed a connection. I want to warn them that I’m not, at that moment, where I’m meant to be. The details vary from dream to dream, but the gist of what I have to tell them remains the same. What also remains the same is that I don’t have my address book with me, and, although I attempt to remember their telephone number and try out several, I never find the right one. This corresponds with the truth that in my waking life I have forgotten the telephone number of the flat in which my parents lived for twenty years and which I once knew by heart. What, however, I forget in my dreams is that they are dead. My father died twenty-five years ago and my mother ten years later.

In the square, she took my arm and by common consent we crossed the street and walked slowly towards the top of the Mãe d’Agua staircase.

There’s something, John, you shouldn’t forget — you forget too much. The thing you should know is this: the dead don’t stay where they are buried.

As she began talking, she didn’t look at me. She looked concentratedly at the ground a few metres ahead of us. She was worried about tripping.

I’m not talking about heaven. Heaven is all very well, but I happen to be talking about something different!

She paused and chewed as if one of the words had gristle on it and needed more chewing before being swallowed. Then she went on:

The dead when they’re dead can choose where they want to live on Earth, always supposing they decide to stay on the Earth.

You mean they come back to some place where they were happy when they were alive?

We were by now at the top of the stairway and with her left hand she took hold of the rail.

You think you know the answers, you always did. You should have listened more to your father.

He had answers to many things. I see that today.

We took three steps down.

Your dear father was a man full of doubts, that’s why I had to be behind him all the while.

To rub his back?

Amongst other things, yes.

Another four steps. She took her hand off the rail.

How do the dead choose where they want to stay?

She didn’t answer, instead she gathered up her skirt and sat down on the next step of the staircase.

I’ve chosen Lisboa! she said, as if repeating something very obvious.

Did you ever come here — I hesitated, for I didn’t want to make the distinction too blatant — before?

Again she ignored the question. If you want to find out something I didn’t tell you, she said, or something you’ve forgotten, this is the time and place to ask me.

You told me so little, I observed.

Anybody can tell! Tell! Tell! I did something else. She looked demonstratively into the distance, towards Africa on the other side of the Tagus. No, I was never here before. I did something else, I showed you.

Is Father here?

She shook her head.

Where is he?

I don’t know and I don’t ask him. I fancy he may be in Rome.

Because of the Holy See?

For the first time she looked at me, the little triumph of a joke in her eyes.

Not at all; because of the tablecloths!

I put my arm round her. Gently, she removed my hand from her arm, and still holding it in hers, placed both our hands on the stone step.

How long have you been in Lisboa?

Don’t you remember my warning you how it would be like this? I told you it would be like this. Beyond days or months or hundreds of years, beyond time.

Again she was peering towards Africa.

So time doesn’t count, and place does? I said this to tease her. When I was a man, I liked teasing her and she went along with it, consenting, for it reminded us both of a sadness that had passed.

When I was a child her sureness enraged me (regardless of the argument involved). It was a sureness that revealed — at least to my eyes — how, behind the bravado, she was vulnerable and hesitant, whereas I wanted her to be invincible. Consequently, I would contradict whatever it was she was being so certain about, in the hope that we might discover something else, which we could question together with a shared confidence. Yet what happened, in fact, was that my counter-attacks made her more frail than she usually was, and the two of us would be drawn, helpless, into a maelstrom of perdition and lamentation, silently crying out for an angel to come and save us. On no occasion did an angel come.

The animals at least are here to help us, she said, looking at what she took to be a cat basking in the sun ten steps down.

It’s not a cat, I said. It’s an old fur hat, a chapka.

That’s why I was a vegetarian, she said.

You loved fish! I contested.

Fish are cold-blooded.

What difference does that make? If it’s a principle, it’s a principle.

Everything in life, John, is a question of drawing a line, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it. You can’t draw it for others. You can try, of course, but it doesn’t work. People obeying rules laid down by somebody else is not the same thing as respecting life. And if you want to respect life, you have to draw a line.

So time doesn’t count and place does? I asked again.

It’s not any place, John, it’s a meeting place. There aren’t many cities left with trams, are there? Here you can hear them all the while — except for a few hours during the night.

Do you sleep badly?

There’s hardly a street in the centre of Lisboa where you can’t hear trams.

It was a number 194, wasn’t it? We took it every Wednesday from East to South Croydon and back. First we shopped in Surrey Street market, then we went to the Davies Picture Palace, with the electric organ that changed colour when the man played it. The number was 194, no?

I knew the organist, she said, and I bought celery for him in the market.

You also bought kidneys, despite being a vegetarian.

Your father enjoyed them for breakfast.

Like Leopold Bloom.

Don’t show off! There’s nobody here to notice. You always wanted to sit in the front of the tram, upstairs. Yes, it was a 194.

And climbing up the stairs you complained: Ah my legs, my poor legs!

You wanted to be up there in front because there you could drive and you wanted me to watch you drive.

I loved the corners!

The rails are the same here in Lisboa, John.

Do you remember the sparks?

In the damned rain, yes.

Driving after the cinema was best.

I never saw anyone look as hard as you did, sitting on the edge of your seat.

In the tram?

In the tram and in the cinema too.

You often cried in the cinema, I told her. You had a way of dabbing at your eyes.

The way you drove the tram pretty soon put a stop to that!

No, you really cried, most weeks.

Shall I tell you something? I don’t suppose you’ve noticed the tower of Santa Justa, just down there? It’s owned by the Lisboa Tramway Company. There’s a lift in it and the lift goes nowhere really. It takes people up, they take a look around from the platform and then it brings them down again. Owned by the tramway company. Now, a film, John, can do the same thing. It takes you up and brings you back to the same place. That’s one of the reasons why people cry in the cinema.

I’d have thought–

Don’t think! There are as many reasons for crying in the cinema as there are people who buy tickets.

She licked her lower lip, a gesture she also used after applying lipstick. On one of the roofs above the Mãe d’Agua staircase a woman was singing as she pegged out sheets on a line to dry. Her voice was plaintive and the sheets were very white.

When I first came to Lisboa, my mother said, I came down in that lift of the Santa Justa. I have never been up in it — you understand? I came down in it. Like we all do. That’s why it was built. It’s lined with wood like a first-class railway carriage. I’ve seen a hundred of us in it. It was built for us.

It only takes about forty, I said.

We weigh nothing. And do you know the first thing I saw, when I stepped out of the lift? A shop for digital cameras!

She got to her feet and started climbing back up the staircase. She had a certain difficulty in breathing, and so, to make it easier, to encourage herself, she blew out in long hisses between her lips, pursed as if for whistling. It was she who first taught me to whistle. We at last reached the top.

For the moment I am not leaving Lisboa, she said. For the moment I’m waiting.

Whereupon she turned round and made for the bench she had been sitting on, and the square became demonstrably still, so still that she eventually vanished.

During the next few days she kept herself hidden. I wandered around the city, watching, drawing, reading, talking. I wasn’t looking for her. From time to time, however, I was reminded of her — usually by something only half-seen.

Lisboa is a city which has a relationship with the visible world like no other city. It plays a game. Its squares and streets are paved with patterns of white and coloured stones, as if, instead of being roads, they were ceilings. Its walls, both indoors and outdoors, are covered with the famous azulejos tiles wherever you look. And these tiles speak of the fabulous things to be seen in the world: a monkey playing pipes, a woman picking grapes, saints praying, whales in the ocean, crusaders in their boats, basilica plants, magpies in flight, lovers embracing, a tame lion, a Moreia fish with spots like a leopard. The tiles of the city draw attention to the visible, to what can be seen.

At the same time these same decorations on walls and floors, around windows and down staircases, are saying something different, in fact the opposite. Their crackly white ceramic surfaces, their vivacious colours, the mortar joints around them, the repeated patterns, all insist upon the fact that they are covering something up, and that whatever is behind them or beneath them, will remain, thanks to them, invisible and hidden for ever!

As I walked I saw the tiles as if they were playing cards which hid more of the game than they revealed. I walked and climbed and turned between deal after deal, hand after hand, and I remembered her playing patience.

Nobody seems to agree about the number of hills on which the city is built. Some say seven, like Rome. Others dispute this. Whatever the number may be, the city centre is built on steep, precipitous, rocky ground rising and falling every few hundred metres. And for centuries its steep streets have appropriated every device imaginable to banish vertigo: steps, enclaves, landings, impasses, curtains of washing, windows at floor level, little yards, railings, shutters; everything is used to offer shelter from the sun and the winds, and to blur any distinction between indoors and outdoors.

Nothing could induce her to go closer than fifty metres to a cliff-edge.

Between the stairways and the belvederes and the washing in the Alfama district, I got myself lost several times.

Once we were trying to get out of London and had taken the wrong road. Father stopped the car and unfolded a map. We are going far, far, too far to the west, Mother said. I have a good bump for direction, a phrenologist told me so more than once. He could feel it here. She was touching the back of her head. She had very fine hair with which she was never comfortable. He said my bump for places was here.

Nobody, I retorted from the back seat, takes phrenology seriously any more. They were a bunch of crypto-fascists.

Why do you say that?

You can’t measure a person’s gifts with a pair of calipers. And anyway, where did they get their norms from? From the Greeks, of course. Narrowly European. Racist.

The one who felt my head was Chinese, she muttered.

They divided people into just two categories, I said, pure and degenerate!

They were right about me anyway! I have a good bump for places! We’ve come too far, we should have turned left miles back, where we saw that poor man without any legs. Now we may as well go on — no point in turning back, it’s too late. If we can, we should take the next on the left.

It’s too late! was one of her favourite phrases. And hearing it, I was invariably filled with fury. Some event, trivial or grave, would have prompted her to use it. Yet the phrase seemed to me to refer not to an event, but to the way time folds — something I began noticing from about the age of four — the folds ensuring that some things can be saved and others cannot. She would pronounce the three words lightly, without pathos, almost as if she was quoting a price. And my fury was partly against this calm. Maybe it was the example of her calm, combined with my fury, which later made me study History.

I thought of this while I drank a small cup of sharp coffee in an Alfama bar, the size of a caravan. I looked at the faces of the other men, all over fifty, weathered in the same way. Lisboetas often talk of a feeling, a mood, which they call saudade, usually translated as nostalgia, which is incorrect. Nostalgia implies a comfort, even an indolence such as Lisboa has never enjoyed. Vienna is the capital of nostalgia. This city is still, and has always been, buffeted by too many winds to be nostalgic.

Saudade, I decided as I drank a second coffee and watched a drunk’s hands carefully arranging the accurate story he was telling as if it were a pile of envelopes, saudade was the feeling of fury at having to hear the words too late pronounced too calmly. And Fado is its unforgettable music. Perhaps Lisboa is a special stopover for the dead, perhaps here the dead show themselves off more than in any other city. The Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi, who loves Lisboa deeply, spent a whole day with the dead here.

The following Sunday I was in the Baixa district, crossing the immense Praça do Comércio. The Baixa is the only district of the old city that is flat and low. Surrounded on three sides by the famous hills, its fourth side is the estuary of the Tagus, known as the Sea of Straw because its waters, in a certain light, have a golden sheen. From the landing stages here during the fifteenth century, Lisboa’s navigators, merchants and slave-traders set out for Africa, the Orient and, later, Brazil. Lisboa was then the richest capital of Europe, trading in everything which defied the Atlantic: gold, slaves from the Congo, silks, diamonds, spices.

Stick two cloves into each apple, she’d instruct, and then we’ll bake them in the oven with brown sugar.

When she wasn’t looking I’d stick in a third, with the conviction that this would make the apple taste finer.

If she spotted the third one, she’d take it out and put it back in the jar. They come from Madagascar, she explained. Waste not, want not!

This was another phrase of hers that was like a refrain. Yet unlike It’s Too Late, Waste Not, Want Not was a warning rather than a lament. A warning which somehow applied, I thought as I walked across it, to the Praça do Comércio. All its dimensions with their projected geometries are those of an unrealisable dream.

A fatal earthquake, the tidal waves that accompanied it, the fires that followed it, devastated a third of Lisboa and killed tens of thousands of its inhabitants during the first week of November 1755. Famine, disease and looting ensued. While the fires were still burning, and people had only the tattered clothes they stood up in, men bought and sold looted diamonds among ashes and rubble. Despite the blue sky above, despite the golden tan of the Sea of Straw, there was talk everywhere of Punishment and Retribution.

And it was the following year that the Marquês de Pombal began to dream of a new city of Reason and Symmetry. After a catastrophe that had shaken the optimism and sense of justice of philosophers the length of Europe, the rebuilt city of Lisboa was going to propose a prosperity, a security guaranteed by the flow of wealth alone! A banker’s dream of streets whose regularity, transparency, parallel lines and reliability would match those of perfectly kept accounts, and whose immense Praça do Comércio would open the city to the trade of the entire world. .

Yet in the second half of the eighteenth century Lisboa was neither Manchester nor Birmingham, and the Industrial Revolution had started elsewhere. The decline that would lead to Portugal becoming the poorest nation in Western Europe had already set in.

However many people there are in the Praça do Comércio, it always looks half-empty.

She kept little in her purse. Her movements, when handling cash, were neat and precise. She hid small sums that she had ear-marked for certain projects in different envelopes, or in the drawers of her dressing table, so she wouldn’t be tempted to spend them. Once she lost a ten-shilling note, which represented a third of a working woman’s monthly wage. It’s gone! she sobbed. It’s gone! She said this as if the note had chosen to go, as if it were an animal who had run away, ungratefully run away, for she was giving it a good home. Gone!

When she wept, she tried to turn away from me. This may have been to spare me, but it was also because her tears took her back to other times, before I had been thought of. While she was crying, I waited, like you wait for a long train to pass at a level crossing.

After a while she dabbed her eyes and said: We’ll manage. All we have to do is to make a little go a long way.

By now I was in the Rua Augusta, one of the straight streets of which the banker had dreamt. Being Sunday, the opticians and hairdressers, the travel agencies and maritime insurance offices were shut. People were on their way to have lunch with family or friends. Many were carrying little packages of sweetmeats to offer to their hosts; Sunday gifts, elaborately wrapped and tied with their ribbons knotted in bows.

On the corner of the Rua da Conceição a crowd waited on the pavement, peering towards the Madalena church. I decided to wait too. There was no traffic. Even the trams had been stopped.

I heard people cheering further down the street. Then 150 runners appeared, coming from the direction of the Madalena. They were running steadily, keeping together in a bunch, encouraging one another, with no bravura or overt competitiveness. Men and women, teenagers and seventy-year-olds, all with their heads held high, some snorting like horses when they breathed out. Their long strides beat out a slow regular rhythm on the cobbles between the tram lines.

A child, who wanted to see better, pushed me in the back and I stepped a little to one side. Certain runners clenched their fists, others let them hang loose. The women seemed to keep their hands more or less at the same level as their hips, whereas with the men the hands were often higher up, level with their chests. The child who had pushed me in the back turned out to be her. She quickly took my hand. All her life she had cold hands.

Nobody in this half-marathon, she whispered, knows whether they’ll make it to the end. And that’s part of the secret, not to try! The magic number is seventeen. What they’re all telling themselves now is: Make it to the seventeenth lap!

How many laps have they done?

Ten. This is the tenth. Seven more to go to seventeen. After the seventeenth, the last four laps — that’s when the lower stomach is in danger of cramps — the last four look after themselves! You needn’t worry about them, they’re beyond you. See that man’s face, see how his face is stretched by the effort he’s making.

It’s stretched into a kind of smile.

And the smile is acknowledging his own name!

What’s his name?

Costa. Bravo, Costa!

And her?

Madalena!

You know all their names?

Madalena’s face is stretched too. Madalena is smiling! Bravo, Madalena!

One man had Luiz written on his T-shirt. Luiz! I shouted, not to be out-done.

José and Dominique! she screamed.

Smiling every one! I said.

This is not a city, my boy, which fucks itself up. That’s why I’m here.

I glanced at her. She too was smiling and there were so many creases around her eyes that her old woman’s face looked like crumpled paper. Then she repeated: Not a city that fucks itself up, that’s something I know.

Her voice had changed. It had become the voice of a seventeen-year-old. It had the somatic assurance, the impudence, of being that age. Such impudence begins with the tongue, quite apart from what it says or doesn’t say, quite apart from being shy or brazen. The impudence of the tongue running with its tip along its own white teeth while saying nothing. Or, at a given unforeseeable moment, the impudence of its sudden proposal to enter and probe somebody else’s mouth — boy’s or girl’s.

I glanced at her. It was a century ago since she was seventeen.

We walked in the direction of the Chiado and, suddenly, on the spur of the moment, I found myself entering a baker’s to ask whether they had a dessert, a kind of custard flan with almonds called Bacon from Heaven. It’s sweet, tastes like marzipan and has nothing to do with bacon. Toicino do Céu. My mother stayed outside. Yes, they do. I bought two portions and the baker’s wife made a gift package with a ribbon, the colour of the Sea of Straw. I stepped out into the street.

It’s what I like best. How on earth did you know? she asks me in her seventeen-year-old voice. Every afternoon I have a Toicino do Céu, she added.

We found a café near the Praça de Luiz de Camões, decorated with blue and white azulejos.

The blue on these tiles, she said, is the same as Reckitt’s Blue. Every little square packet was wrapped in this blue.

I remember turning the wringer to wring the water out of the sheets for you.

After doing the wringing there was water everywhere.

There were mops.

You helped a lot before you went to school.

Before I went to school nothing ever came to an end. Can you guess what the most fabulous object in my childhood was?

You sound like somebody writing an autobiography. Don’t!

Don’t what?

You’re bound to get it wrong.

Do you want to guess what the most fabulous object in my childhood was?

Tell me.

Your barometer!

The one beside Father’s desk? We took it with us whenever we moved. And Father got out his toolbox and screwed it to the wall. I forget how many times. Many, many times. It was a wedding present.

There’s a metal plaque pinned to it which says so.

The Boy Scouts had that plaque engraved specially.

You were married on the sixth of February 1926 and I was born on the fifth of November the same year!

It doesn’t say that! How could they know? Though I knew the very second you were conceived.

I must have been conceived on your wedding night in Paris. That would make exactly nine months!

I loved Paris. Ever since the first time, I’ve loved Paris.

I know.

The pillowcases and the statue of Molière!

Why aren’t you there now, then? You could have chosen Paris.

You can’t live a honeymoon all your life, can you?

No, Maman, but perhaps all your death!

This made her laugh until she had to dab her eyes. It was a silver laugh, like a small jet of water in a decorated urn in the Alhambra.

The barometer is still working, I said.

It was a good make. It’ll last several lifetimes.

Every day you went up to look at it, and you tapped with your knuckles against the glass and you looked at it again and then you announced: It’s going up! Or, the next day: It’s coming down!

Have you ever seen a barometer that stays still?

Yes, in Africa.

We weren’t in Africa, were we?

And do you know what I believed?

She laughed again, jutting her lower lip up towards her nose.

I watched you when you polished and dusted the barometer. Then you tapped it, not once, but three, four, five, six times, and I saw the secret smile on your face and I knew that you had changed what was going to happen! The needle would shift, the prophesy would be altered. It would be closer to FAIR, leaving CHANGE further behind. On other days, if you were anxious and hadn’t received the letter you were waiting for, or didn’t like the book from the public library you were reading, you tapped hard on the glass, and the needle shifted closer to STORMY. And it was never wrong. If it pointed to STORMY, stormy it would be.

So, you believed I was in control?

I did.

I kept a good many things under control, I had to.

Never me!

I never tried with you.

No?

People try to control whatever risks to get out of control, that’s to say what has been controlled before. I left you alone from the beginning.

I felt alone.

To my great surprise, my boy, you were free.

I was scared by one thing after another. I still am.

Naturally. How could it be otherwise? You can either be fearless, or you can be free, you can’t be both.

To know how to be both is surely the aim of all philosophy, Mother.

It’s not philosophy that takes you there.

She started to nibble her favourite flan.

For a few moments love can, she added.

Were you there often?

Once or twice.

When she said this she smiled. The smile accompanying an unsaid password.

You know, don’t you? I said, that after your funeral all of us learnt, to our considerable surprise, that you’d been married and divorced long before you met Father.

Everything comes out in the wash! she said. We loved each other a lot, the first husband and I.

So what made you get divorced?

Because I wanted to have children! She pointed at me with a finger that had custard on it. I didn’t know what either of you would be like, but I wanted children.

And he didn’t?

He and I looked at the stars together. And I wasn’t in a hurry. I was only seventeen. To tell the truth, I was sixteen when I met him — 1909, the year I read Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird. I met him in the Tate Gallery where I was looking, as on every Sunday, at the Turner watercolours. He invited me to have a cup of tea — there wasn’t much coffee in those days — and he told me all about Turner’s double life as an old man. I thought he was an old man — though he was only half as old as you are today. And I remember wondering whether he had a double life too. The next Sunday he told me the story of Miriam.

You mean the Bible story?

He told me both. The Bible story and my story. And do you know something? He was the first person ever to call me Miriam! At home I’d always been Mim. I left the stables and the warehouse horses my father looked after and I was Mim. I walked across Vauxhall Bridge, and on the other side of the Thames where he greeted me, I was suddenly Miriam.

You married him when?

He’d come back from India, and I thought that if I married him, it would be a way of keeping him. I kept him for nine years; for nine years he was happy with his Miriam.

He didn’t work?

He wondered about things, he asked questions. And I learnt and I read so I could talk with him. Sometimes we talked all night. He’d wake me up and take me out into the garden, we had a big garden, and at the bottom of it was a bust of Seneca, and nobody could see us and we’d stand there like Adam and Eve watching the sun come up.

Like Adam and Eve?

Naked.

The house was where?

Croydon.

Croydon! I shouted in surprise.

Shh! Don’t shout, people will look at us; people don’t shout in this city. I still remember the words I learnt by heart sitting under that statue: ’You must want nothing, if you wish to challenge Jupiter who himself wants nothing!’

But by now you wanted children and Jupiter didn’t!

Don’t be vulgar. Alfred worshipped me. Do you understand? He made me feel very beautiful. Your father was a more manly man; Charles worshipped me from afar.

Did Father meet him?

After the divorce he left his house and became a tramp.

That must have been hard on you.

It was what he wanted.

You went on seeing him?

I see him still. Like I’m seeing you now.

He’s here in Lisboa?

If ever a man should go straight to heaven, it would be Alfred. He was a saint. Saints are not easy to live with. But saint he was. He’s not in Lisboa.

I think I saw him once.

You couldn’t have!

One day in Croydon you left me in a big store.

Kennards!

You left me in Kennards’ toy department.

You loved watching the trains. The new electric trains, not the clockwork.

You took me to the toy department and you said: Wait here, John, I won’t be gone long. I waited. The trains seemed to go slower and slower. I wasn’t worried, but it was a long while. I watched the signals change colour a thousand times. When you came back you looked very flushed, as if you’d been running. We took the lift straight down to the ground floor. Outside, behind the store, in a back street, a man stood on the pavement blocking our way, and you put your handkerchief up to your face. His clothes were held together with string. He had a straggling beard. And his expression! I couldn’t take my eyes off his face.

Alfred! my mother whispered in the café with the blue and white azulejos.

He was twice as large as you, I said, and his decrepitude made him look larger still. You remember what happened next? He gave you something in a packet.

It was some letters. He said he didn’t have any place to keep them now that he was on the street, and he couldn’t bring himself to destroy them, so he wanted to give them back to me.

Do they still exist?

She shook her head.

I burnt them, burnt them as soon as we got home.

Then he put out a filthy hand and ruffled my hair and he said to you: He needs taking care of.

My mother started to cry in the café with the azulejos.

When something has to go, she sobbed, I don’t hesitate.

You were still in love with him?

He had eyes that burnt through you, she murmured.

The moment I saw him I knew that wherever you had been that afternoon you’d been with him. And I told myself I would never tell anybody.

He died soon after. He was knocked down by a car that didn’t stop. They thought he was a tramp.

She put her hands up to hide her face.

It’s dangerous, she said, chewing on the words, to live just on virtue, or what Seneca called wisdom, even if it’s true virtue, it’s dangerous. It leads to addiction, like drink. I’ve seen it.

Why did he say I needed taking care of?

She lowered her hands.

He could tell by looking at you. You were ten, and you had a mouth that was always hanging open.

Did he know that you had children?

I hid nothing from him.

A face so full of pain, I said.

There followed a long silence during which we both looked out of the window and watched the white of the buildings outstaring the blue of the sky. Then she said: Alfred taught me and I taught you and I’m telling you that what you saw in his face wasn’t only pain. Not only pain. I’m going to take a little rest now.

She got to her feet and walked slowly towards the toilets.

She is serving mashed potatoes. Nice and fluffy, she says, still stirring them with a fork. She wears a kerchief over her hair. She worked all day in the kitchen of the tea-house in which we lived. She suffered from the heat of the stoves, yet when she sucked her fingers because they had icing sugar or homemade custard on them, she couldn’t help smiling: the sweetness folding into her pastry pride, for she knew she was a good cook. I see her writing in her diary. She bought herself one every year, often waiting until February when they were sold cheaper. The diaries she chose invariably had a small thin pencil attached to them. The pencil slipped through a loop and lay along the golden edges of the pages. Smaller and thinner than a cigarette — she smoked then a brand of cigarettes called Du Maurier — it was often the only pencil we could find to write something down with. Sometimes I drew with it. Be sure to give it back to me. It was always carefully reinserted into its loop. And with it she makes her diary entries, noting her rare appointments, and each day systematically, the weather. Morning: rain. Afternoon: bright patches.

The next time I saw her was on a bright morning.

The trams in the centre of Lisboa are very different from the red double-decker ones that used to run in Croydon; they are as cramped as small fishing boats and they are a lemon yellow. Their drivers, as they negotiate the steep one-way streets like straits, and nose their way round blind jetties, give the impression of hauling in ropes and holding rudders rather than turning wheels and operating levers. Yet despite the sudden descents, the lurches, the choppiness, the passengers, mostly elderly, remain contemplative and calm — as if they were still sitting in their living rooms or visiting a neighbour. And indeed, in places, the trams, with their open windows, sway so close to these rooms that it would be easy to reach out and touch a birdcage hanging from a balcony and with a little push set it swinging.

I had caught the number 28 going to the destination of Prazeres (Pleasures), which is the name of an old cemetery where the mausoleums have front doors with window panes through which you can look at the abodes of the departed. Many are furnished with low tables, a chair, bunks with bedspreads, rugs, photographs, statues of the Madonna, cushions. One has a pair of dancing shoes on a rug. Another has a bicycle and a fishing rod leaning against the wall facing the bunk with a small coffin on it.

I had got on the tram at the church in the district of Gracia, which is at the opposite end of the line from the cemetery, and it was when we were passing through the next district of Bairro Alto that I saw my mother again. Like other pedestrians in the narrow street, she was flattening herself against a shop-front to let the tram, which was ringing its bell, pass by. She spotted me notwithstanding and, at the next corner, where the tram stopped and its two sets of doors unfolded noisily like wooden curtains, she climbed aboard with a triumphant air, took a ticket out of her purse and, using the usual umbrella as a stick, came to stand beside me and slip her arm through mine. A dog sitting at the feet of another old woman wagged its tail, which thumped on the floor. The wooden curtains shut. The electro-motor whined to gather enough momentum for the tram to start. She said nothing, she simply handed me a plastic bag with the logo of the Colombo Shopping Centre printed on it.

At the next stop, when the wooden curtains opened again, she said: We’re going to the market, I take it?

Yes, that was my idea.

On hearing me say Yes, she laughed her seventeen-year-old laugh.

We get off, she said, in one minute and and it’s downhill all the way to the Mercado da Ribeira.

Seen from its interior, the Mercado da Ribeira resembles a pagoda, a pagoda constructed of carved stone, glass and metal. The engineering challenge must have been to find the best way of letting in daylight and, simultaneously, of offering shade from the punishing summer heat. The solution was to make it tall and only to let the light enter sideways.

There are surprisingly few flies, even where the raw meats are hanging. She leads me, tripping light-footedly, umbrella scarcely touching the flagstones, past the vegetables and fruit, to the avenues of fish.

It crosses my mind that the Mercado da Ribeira is why she chose to come to Lisboa.

Large fish markets are strange places because when you enter one, you enter another kingdom. The stony sea urchins, the locust lobsters, the lampreys, the squids, the lings, the turbots, insist that here the measures of time and space, of longevity and pain, of light and darkness, of alertness and sleepiness, of recognition and indifference are altered. For example, fish never stop growing; the older they are, the larger they are. A sixty-year-old sandy ray measuring two metres would, most of the time, live in what would seem to us total darkness. Fish can detect hormones by their smell in the water. They also have an additional sixth sense, which is that of their lateral line, a kind of elongated eyelid, running from gills to tail, sensitive to vibrations, sounds and sudden disturbances. There are 45,000 species of shellfish, all of them constituting food for others, all of them eaters. The age, relative immutability and cyclic complexity of this other kingdom is somewhat humbling.

They know me well here, my mother announces without a trace of humility.

She did not believe in humility. Humility was, in her opinion, a pretence, a tactic of diversion while the person involved covertly aimed at something else. Perhaps she was right.

Now she is bending over a basket of lady crabs. Their dark shells are like brown velvet, with a down on them so that they are as soft to touch as their nippers are sharp, and on their legs are smears of blue, as if they had sidled their way through oil.

The choicest of all crabs, she says. Here they call them naralheira felpuda. Felpuda means ’hairy’.

She straightens her back and looks into my eyes with an expression I’ve not seen before.

I’ve learnt a lot since my death. You should use me while you are here. You can look things up in a dead person like in a dictionary.

Her expression is one of happy impertinence, for she is sure now that she is beyond reach.

We walk down one of the aisles of the pagoda, past flounders, tunny fish, John Dories, mackerel, sardines, anchovies, sabre fish.

The sabre, she says, looking up at the distant roof, her little short nose in the air, the sabre only comes up from his depths to the surface at night when there’s a full moon!

All the fishmongers are women. Women with strong shoulders, hefty forearms, wearing rubber boots, handling the ice as if it was hot metal, and their tied scarves and slightly mocking eyes are very feminine. They treat the fish they’re selling as they might treat distant, mildly irritating, members of the family. Irritating because not as alert as they once were!

My mother picks up a grey shrimp to smell it. The vendor, who is gutting a fish, smiles at her.

Get half a pint, Mother says. Ask Andreas here, her name’s Andreas, she has a husband in Cuba and a daughter who is an air hostess.

Andreas holds up the fish she is gutting and points very gently with the tip of her knife at what looks like a soft roe nestling near the top of the fish’s emptied stomach cavity. Shiny, whitish-pink, curvy — like a foxglove just before it opens.

It’s a whiting, Mother says.

The tip of the knife moves carefully down the stomach cavity and now touches an orange-coloured granular sack, the same orange and the same size as a dried apricot. Hard female roe.

Hermaphrodite! Andreas announces smiling, and then repeats: Hermaphrodite! as if she does not want us to get over our surprise. Hermaphrodite!

I pay for the shrimps and we proceed down the aisle, each of us eating them and throwing the heads and tails on the floor.

We walk down another aisle and we pass a slab on which there are a dozen of the reddest fish I’ve seen. Scarlet with a fire in their red such as no flower has, not even a tropical one.

Atlantic redfish, Mother murmurs. They too have strange mating habits. First of all, they’re not mature until they are ten years old, which is very late. Next, the males fast for two months. Then they have intercourse, like animals do, with the sperm entering the female. She keeps it there for four months until all her eggs are ready, thirty, fifty or a hundred thousand. Then she lets the sperm fertilise them. After a while the eggs hatch into larvae inside her. And nine months after intercourse she lays the larvae deep in the Atlantic.

I’ve always put life before writing, I say.

Don’t boast.

It’s true.

Then pass over it in silence.

Supposing now I don’t understand what I note down.

Others may.

We stop before a bank of salmon.

Salmon was Father’s favourite dish, wasn’t it?

Yes, she says, but since his death he prefers swordfish. The espadarte! The espadarte with its upper beak, which is like a blade, and long, long — a third of his whole length — and with the blade he slashes out left and right to kill the fishes he is hunting, each with a single blow. It was a swordfish — wasn’t it? — that the old man of the sea wrestled with in Hemingway’s story. The book made me think of your father and of life in the trenches during the Great War. What’s the connection? you will ask. I can’t explain everything. The story made me think of your father and the war. I can’t explain why.

A connection of courage?

She nods.

I never saw a man who wept as often as your father and I never knew a man who was half as brave.

She nods her head again. I take her arm.

The strangest thing of all, John, is that the flesh of the espardarte — which must never be confused with the silver sabre fish — the flesh of this huge fish, when it is marinaded and cooked, is the most tender, the most delicate, and the whitest in the world. It dissolves in the mouth — you don’t bite — it tastes like a soufflé. Each time, after I’ve cooked it, I place it on his plate like a kiss.

He comes to eat it here?

Of course not. He’ll eat it, wherever he is, when he happens to think of me. Just as I think of him when I’m preparing it.

Do we have to find an espadarte, I ask, or can we just think of one like we’re doing now?

What are you saying? I told you, it has to be marinated in lemon juice and olive oil! So we have to find lemons and a green pepper and a yellow pepper and a red one. You cut up the peppers and put them in the pan first so they give off their liquid, then you pop in the fish. A slice, weighing about 300 grams, not too thin, a thick slice taken from a juicy lateral cut from across the swordfish’s belly. Takes very little time to cook — it must never be overcooked — best to put a lid on the pan. Some serve it with capers, I don’t. I’ll get the fish, you go and find the lemon and peppers.

She didn’t turn up again for several days. I took the ferry to Calilhas on the other side of the Tagus. Looking back across the water at Lisboa, each large building was recognisable, each district, as marked on the street map, could easily be distinguished and given its name, the hills behind seemed to have pushed the city nearer to the sea, to the sea’s very edge, and strangest of all was the impression I had from this distance that Lisboa had removed all its clothes and was naked! I didn’t know whether this was due to shadows from the clouds, or to a refraction of sunlight coming off the Sea of Straw, or whether it was because I had entered the zone where, throughout centuries, sailors and fishermen had found again, or looked back at for the last time, the Lisboa they loved.

The next day the weather was gusty with squalls of Atlantic rain. I was crossing the Campo dos Mártires da Pátria with an anorak pulled over my head. The rain came in fits and starts and when it came, it was drenching. The martyrs of the fatherland, after whom the square is named, were executed here by hanging in 1817. The gallows stood where the roundabout now is. All twelve of them were Freemasons. The execution was ordered by Marshal Beresford, for at that time, after Wellington’s Peninsular War, the English were governing the country. The twelve men were accused of being republicans and conspirators. As they were being blindfolded they prayed for the city.

And this square, with its roundabout and trams and unending traffic, is still strangely full of prayers. You edge your way between prayers, as between cattle in a livestock market. The martyrs’ prayers. The prayers of those who are obliged to visit the city morgue, beside the Institute of Forensic Medicine to the north of the square, and the prayers of all those who come here to have the blessing of the man whose statue has been placed in the middle of the roundabout: Dr José Thomas de Souza Martins.

Around this statue stand stone tablets which look a little like headstones for graves. Some lean against the plinth of the statue, others against one another. In fact they are not tombstones: written on them are prayers of thanks to the doctor who once cured a cirrhosis, or a bronchitis, some haemorrhoids, a case of impotence, a child’s asthma, a woman’s stress, a colitis. . Some of the cures were performed during his lifetime, some after his death.

Old women are selling photos of him in the square. Framed and unframed. Dr Martins looked somewhat like my Uncle Edgar — who was my father’s elder brother, a man of learning who never stopped learning, a man of ideals who never despaired, a man whom everyone, including my mother, treated as a failure, a man with a wart on the middle finger of his right hand where he held his pen writing hundreds of pages of a book that nobody ever read or published.

What their two faces had in common was an unusual looseness about the mouth, indicating not weakness but a desire to kiss rather than to bite. They also had similar foreheads, foreheads not of imposing intelligence but of an immense, inspiring calm. Today, a century after his death, Dr Martins is referred to in Lisboa as Doctor of the Heavens and of the Earth. And my Uncle Edgar still demonstrates to me the power of reticent love.

The wind was smacking wet, and the gulls were flying very low over the roofs. It was a day when everyone turned their backs to the sea, if they had no one out on it.

Women, crouched under dark umbrellas in the middle of the roundabout, were selling candles. Three sizes of candles, priced accordingly, though no price was marked. The largest were thirty centimetres tall, their wax the colour of parchment. Nearer the statue of the doctor, lit candles were burning on two metal tables. The table-tops, encrusted with old melted wax, had spikes for impaling the new candles on, and a tall metal sheet behind to cut the wind. I watched the flames. They flickered, they guttered, they were blown sideways as if coming from a toy dragon’s mouth; yet not one of them had succumbed to the rain or the gale-force wind. A man with a black hat and the face of a gypsy stood close by, surveying them with a protective air. Perhaps, when the wind veered, he shifted the tables or the metal sheets to protect the flames, and perhaps he asked for a little money from the candle-makers for this bad-weather job. Or was he simply standing there like me, fascinated by the tenacity of the flames?

Slowly the idea came to me to buy and light some candles myself. I knew who they would be for. I was thinking of three friends who at that moment, for different reasons, were at sea.

I bought the tallest candles, which would burn longest, and I walked over to one of the tables. I impaled them, one after the other, on the three nearest spikes. Only afterwards did it occur to me that I should first have lit one from a burning candle, then I could have lit my other two with it once they were impaled. Now it would be difficult in the wind to light them with a match, and anyway I didn’t have any matches.

As I realised my mistake, a small woman from behind offered me a lit candle. I took it, without looking round, not doubting for a moment who it was! Then I stood there, mesmerised by the three new, flickering flames.

When I did at last turn round, I was amazed to discover that the small woman behind with an umbrella was not my mother.

I’m so sorry, sorry, I blurted out, I thought you were my mother! I spoke in French, which is the language I fall into when I’m confused.

I think I’m almost young enough to be your daughter, she replied lightly, speaking a French with a Portuguese accent. I gave her back her candle, which was still burning, and I bowed.

Once they are alight, she said, whatever good they may do, they do it without us.

Of course, I whispered, of course.

I saw you were at a bit of a loss, she said.

You speak French very well.

I worked in Paris. Cleaning. Last year I was fifty-five and I said to myself, it’s time to come back to Lisboa for good. And my husband came too.

Can I offer you a coffee out of the rain?

No, I’ll place my candle and I must get along home.

She had blue eyes in a face that was strong yet unprotected.

It’s for my husband, mine.

He’s ill?

No, he’s not ill. He had an accident. Fell off the roof he was working on.

Is he badly hurt?

She stared at my chest as if it were the distant Sea of Straw. I knew then that he was dead.

You should have brought an umbrella like me! she said. Then she added: Our candles will go on burning, doing whatever they can, without us.

I stepped off the roundabout, made my way with some difficulty through the traffic and found a café. I went inside, took off my anorak, dried my face on a towel in the toilet and ordered a hot grog. The café was full of people and many of them were particularly well-dressed. I listened, as I sipped the hot liquor, and I heard German and English being spoken. The clientele, I concluded, were probably from the nearby embassies.

So, this morning you went to see Dr Martins. There was a good man! Some of us still go to consult him.

I hear her say this, yet I can’t see her. I am sitting alone.

How do they go to consult him, your friends?

His surgery hours are when he’s asleep.

Dr Martins died a century ago.

The dead are allowed to sleep too, aren’t they?

What do they complain of, your friends who consult him?

Many suffer from hopefulness. Amongst us hopefulness is almost as common as depression among the living.

You see hopefulness as an illness?

One of its terminal symptoms is a desire to intervene again in life, and for us that is fatal.

Is there a cure?

Dr Martins prescribes a spell with the martyrs!

It seems he loved women, I tell her.

I’ll tell you a story, she says. One day a rich patient asked him to visit her in her large house. He examined her and then asked the maid to fetch him a glass of water from, specifically, the pantry tap. He knew the pantry was far away. During the maid’s absence he performed the cure. When the maid returned with the glass of water, he drank it. Doctor, when will your next visit be? asked the woman from her sickbed. He pondered, winked swiftly at his patient, and said: When I’m thirsty, Señora. Upon which Dr Martins left.

She laughs. A crystalline laugh, as if everyone in the café is clinking glasses. Nobody else gives any sign of hearing it.

I see him played by Groucho Marx, she says.

In the Davies Picture Palace the two of us had seen A Night at the Opera and Duck Soup. Her laughter in the cinema had been muffled as if she didn’t want to draw attention to our presence, which bordered on the illicit. Illicit since neither of us mentioned our visits to the Picture Palace to anybody else, and illicit, in a more direct sense, because she contrived and often succeeded in getting us in without paying. A question of narrow uncarpeted stairs and safety exits.

All my books have been about you, I suddenly say.

Nonsense! Maybe you wrote them so I should be there, keeping you company. And I was. Yet they were about everything in the world but me! I’ve had to wait until now, until you are an old man in Lisboa, for you to be writing this very short story about me.

Books are also about language and language for me is inseparable from your voice.

You’re trying to be clever. Don’t. Just think of me. Then you’ll learn endurance. Something which can only be learnt from a woman, never from a man.

Scott in the Antarctic?

Think of Scott’s wife. Her name was Kathleen. ’I regret,’ Kathleen said, ’I regret nothing but his suffering.’

Why did you never read any of my books?

I liked books which took me to another life. That’s why I read the books I did. Many. Each one was about real life, but not about what was happening to me when I found my bookmark and went on reading. When I read, I lost all sense of time. Women always wonder about other lives, most men are too ambitious to understand this. Other lives, other lives which you have lived before, or which you could have lived. And your books, I hoped, were about another life which I only wanted to imagine, not live, imagine by myself on my own, without any words. So it was better I didn’t read them. I could see them through the glass door of the bookcase. That was enough for me.

I risk to write nonsense these days.

You put something down and you don’t immediately know what it is. It has always been like that, she says. All you have to know is whether you’re lying or whether you’re trying to tell the truth, you can’t afford to make a mistake about that distinction any longer.

I was thirteen when she had to have all her teeth pulled. She had been brought back home in a taxi. I stood at the door of the bedroom. She lay on her back, chin protruding, cheeks hollow through the new lack of teeth. I knew I had to choose between two things, the only two things I could do at that instant. I could scream or I could go and lie beside her. So I lay beside her. She was too artful to show her pleasure immediately. We both had to wait. After several minutes she pulled an arm out from under the bedclothes and held my wrist in her cold hand. She kept her eyes shut. Most people, she said, can’t stand the truth. It’s too bad but there it is, most people can’t stand it. You, John, I think you can bear the truth, we’ll see. Time will tell. I didn’t reply. I stayed there on the bed.

Most of the time I’m lost, I tell her in the café with the embassy employees.

That’s why you see clearly.

Very little.

Better than me!

She laughs again. A cascading laugh like the sound of a stream that has broken its banks. I hear it as an invitation to dance, to dance on the ruins, so I push back my chair, and with my arms held up like a ballroom dancing partner, I take a step towards where I think she is. The embassy employees look up, mouths open. I sit down. When the general talk resumes, I whisper:

So where do I see you next?

On the aqueduct. The Águas Livres aqueduct.

It’s very long, fourteen kilometres, I think.

Where it crosses the Alcântara valley. The arches are sixty metres high at that point. From up there you can almost see America! I’ll be waiting for you by the sixteenth arch.

The sixteenth counting which way?

What do you think? From the Mãe d’Agua. I’ll meet you there on Tuesday morning.

Not before?

We all have one day in the week that wishes us well.

Which was mine?

It was Tuesday. You will probably die on a Tuesday.

And yours?

Friday. You didn’t notice? I must say, I thought you would have noticed.

You weren’t there that often.

Far more often than you believed. I wasn’t there all the time, which is what you wanted. I wasn’t there for ever.

Maybe you did seem happier on Fridays, I say.

Not so much a question of being happy, more a question of knowing I was a bit more protected and therefore freer.

When did you discover Friday was your day?

When I was ten; I noticed that if I sang on a Friday I had perfect pitch. Invariably.

Is Friday still your day?

No. Now my day is Tuesday because I’m here for you.

She laughs yet again. An anticipatory laugh. As if she sees the two of us approaching a big joke.

Lisboa is a city of endurance, unanswerable questions and pet names. The Águas Livres aqueduct was completed in 1748. It survived, perfectly intact, the earthquake that destroyed the centre of the city seven years later. When the army engineers planned the aqueduct’s course, did they try to avoid the geological fault-lines? Otherwise its exemption remains a mystery. Later, many subsidiary aqueducts were completed and added in order to augment the water supply flowing along the Águas Livres. In reality, the water — as sceptics had warned from the beginning — was never enough for the city.

In the nineteenth century the aqueduct was known as the Passeio dos Arcos, the Road of Arches, because people from the villages in the west walking to the city to sell their produce or their labour, used it as a short cut. They no longer needed to go down into the Alcântara valley, cross the water and climb up; they could just walk one kilometre across the sky. It is said that this is why they gave pet names to the thirty-odd arches of the Alcântara, names like Lia, Adila, Carolina, Sandra, Iracena. And to the great pointed arch in the middle, which is still the highest stone arch in the world, they gave the name of Maira.

The first modern proposal to bring water to the city by an aqueduct — the Romans had tried it before — was prompted, not so much by a concern about hygiene or the population’s chronic lack of drinking water, as by the authorities’ fear of fire. Every year, in district after district of the city, fires were destroying property.

When the aqueduct was finished the Marquês and bankers arranged to have their own private aqueducts siphoning off the great one. Meanwhile the poor, with no water where they lived, remained at the mercy of the public fountains which, when there was a drought, went dry. Or else they had to buy water from the water-seller at a price they could not afford. This was what the Águas Livres, the so-called Free Water, turned out to be.

Do you always want everything? Her voice interrupts me as I think.

I remember her peeling and slicing cooked beetroots, hands holding the beet, the stubby knife, her stained fingers and the shiny purple crimson of the slices, the intensity of whose colour somehow matched the intensity of her insistence on the immediate and the day-to-day. As soon as I started enquiring about how I could get up on to the aqueduct, I understood why she had slyly made the rendezvous for the following Tuesday. It was going to take some time. All entrances were locked and one had to apply for official permission from the water company. Even supposing that one had a persuasive reason for asking for permission, there was bound to be some bureaucratic delay. I decided I would claim that I was writing a story about Lisboa.

Do you know the city well? the public relations lady asked me. She was looking worried, as if she had too many exam papers to correct, although clearly she wasn’t a teacher. It occurred to me that I should have offered her some Toicino do Céu. She would have eaten them absentmindedly while working on her computer.

No, I replied, I love the city but I don’t know it well. That’s why I need your help.

As you are probably aware, the Águas Livres supplied water to the city until a very few years ago. Now it doesn’t but we keep it running as — how do you say? — as a kind of homage? You could go up on Monday morning with Fernando. He’s the maintenance inspector for the water channels. 8:30 a.m., here in this office, Monday!

Could it be Tuesday?

Yes, but I thought you said it was urgent.

Tuesday would be better.

Then come Tuesday.

Fernando turned out to be a man in his mid-sixties, on the point of retirement. He had worked all his life for the Empresa Portuguesa das Águas Livres. He kept his eyes screwed up, he held himself very upright for his age, and he had the air of a man used to being alone and away from the crowds — like a shepherd or a steeplejack. He led me very quickly through the imposing temple-like building of the reservoir, which can hold 5,000 cubic metres of water. It was clear he did not like the temple — it had been built for too many people and too many speeches had been made there.

His private passion was for the water on its long, solitary, unnatural, improbable journey from its sources. A journey underground, over ground, and through the sky. Up there in its ducts the water had to be kept cool and well mixed, tranquil, and transparent, with the correct amount of light so that it did not become turgid. As soon as we were on the steps climbing up from the reservoir to the aqueduct, he slowed down.

The aqueduct at its top is only about five metres wide and consists of an apparently endless stone tunnel, on either side of which there is an open, very straight path, with a parapet to prevent people falling off. Fernando considered the water in the aqueduct as something alive, that had to be protected, fed, cleaned out, looked after — almost like an animal in a zoo. Perhaps an otter. Once a week he walked the fourteen kilometres to its sources in the Cavenque, checking everything. I think he had the impression that, like an otter, the water recognised him when he approached. He was dreading his retirement.

By this time we had walked some distance along the path and were high above the Alcântara valley. With a gesture over the parapet he indicated how he hated the idea of being stuck down there with the crowds, the cows, the chatter. And what made it worse was that he was still fit! He asked me my age. I told him. So you understand! he said. Você entende! I understood.

Now he wanted to show me his tunnel. He explained how the two semi-circular ducts for channelling the water were carved by hand out of basalt stone, piece by piece, and how the blocks were fitted together with mortice and tenon joints, and the cracks between the blocks filled with a putty made of quicklime, powdered limestone, and virgin olive oil, and how this putty, once set, was tougher than the basalt stone. Fernando had been trained as a stonemason.

I could not accompany him because of my rendezvous. Nor did I want him to be there when I met my mother. The other times the presence of others hadn’t worried me. Perhaps it was something to do with the location, with being off the ground. Or perhaps because it was the only time my mother had fixed the meeting in advance.

I told him I wanted to draw the view and to draw I needed to be quiet. He nodded, and unlocked a door that led into the tunnel, saying he would leave it open, so that when I was finished I could come and find him.

As he stepped out of the sunlight into the vaulted obscurity, his face relaxed and his eyes opened. The tunnel inside was narrow. I could easily have touched both walls with my outstretched arms. The semi-circular channels on either side were about two hand-spans in diameter. They were less than half-full, yet the flow of the water was even and persistent. After many kilometres, the water had become convinced of the gradient.

Down the centre, above the ducts, ran a flagged walkway, straight as a die, as far as the eye could see. It too was narrow. Two people would have had considerable difficulty in passing on it without one of them stepping off. Fernando switched on his lamp and set out.

A little later, while I was leaning against the parapet opposite the door he had left open, I thought I heard him talking. He was speaking in brief sentences as if making or giving notes. Yet there was nobody with him.

I started walking fast down the outside path, enticed on by the aqueduct’s straightness. All Vieira da Silva’s paintings are, in some way, about Lisboa and its skies and the paths through its skies. When I reached the far side of the valley I turned back and counted the arches until I found the sixteenth, which was not far from Fernando’s open door.

Way below were a couple of unfinished streets and some houses which were being lived in, though still being built. A poor suburb rather than a favela. I could see a car with no wheels, a balcony the size of a kitchen chair, a child’s swing with only one rope attached to a tree, red tiles with concrete blocks on them to prevent them being blown away by the Atlantic winds, a window without a frame with a double mattress hanging out of it, a dog on a chain, barking in the sun.

Do you see? she suddenly said. Everything is broken, slightly broken, like the rejects from the factory they sell cheap, at half price. Not really damaged, only rejects. Everything — the hills, the Sea of Straw, the child’s swing down there, the car, the castle, everything is a reject, and has been so since the beginning.

She was sitting on a portable stool a few metres along the path from me. It was a stool with three legs that folded, which was very light; she used to carry it with her so she could sit down in public places. She was wearing a cloche hat.

Everything begins sour, she said, then goes sweet and is afterwards bitter.

Did Father enjoy his swordfish? I asked.

I’m talking about life, not about details.

In spite of her words she was smiling, even her shoulders were smiling. I remember her smiling like that in a bathing costume on a beach around 1935, because whilst she was wearing the bathing costume she considered herself spared from work.

There was a mistake at the beginning, she continued. Everything began with a death.

I don’t understand.

One day, when you’re in my situation, you will. The Creation began with a death.

Two white butterflies were circling above her hat. Perhaps they had come with her, for there is little on the aqueduct at that height to attract butterflies.

Surely, I asked, the beginning might be thought of as a birth?

That’s the common error, and you fell into the trap as I thought you would!

So, everything began with a death, you say!

Exactly. And the births followed. The births happened — that’s why there’s birth — precisely because they offered a chance of repairing some of what was damaged from the beginning, after the death. That’s why we are here, John. To repair.

Yet you are not really here, are you?

How stupid can you get! We — us — we are all here. Just like you and the living are here. You and us, we are here to repair a little of what was broken. This is why we occurred.

Occurred?

Came to be.

You talk as if nobody can choose anything!

Choose whatever you like. What you can’t do is to hope for everything.

She was still beaming.

Of course.

Hope is a great magnifier — which is why it doesn’t see far ahead.

Why are you smiling?

Let’s hope only for what has some chance of being achieved! Let a few things be repaired. A few is a lot. One thing repaired changes a thousand others.

So?

The dog down there is on too short a chain. Change it, lengthen it. Then he’ll be able to reach the shade, and he’ll lie down and he’ll stop barking. And the silence will remind the mother she wanted a canary in a cage in the kitchen. And when the canary sings, she’ll do more ironing. And the father’s shoulders in a freshly ironed shirt will ache less when he goes to work. And so when he comes home he’ll sometimes joke, like he used to, with his teenage daughter. And the daughter will change her mind and decide, just this once, to bring her lover home one evening. And on another evening, the father will propose to the young man that they go fishing together. . Who in the wide world knows? Just lengthen the chain.

The dog was still barking.

There are certain things which, to be repaired, require nothing short of a revolution, I suggest.

So you say, John.

It’s not a question of my saying, it’s a question of circumstances.

I prefer to believe it’s your saying.

Why?

It’s less evasive. Circumstances! Anything can hide behind that word. I believe in repairs, as I was telling you, and one other thing.

What would that be?

The inevitability of desire. Desire cannot be stopped.

At this point she got up from her portable stool and leant against the parapet.

Desire is unstoppable. The other day I heard one of us explaining why. But I knew it before. Think of a bottomless pit, think of a nothing. An absolute nothing. In it there’s already an appeal — are you following me? A Nothing is an appeal for Something. It can’t be otherwise. Yet the appeal is all there is; there’s only a naked crying-out appeal. A yearning. And so we come to the eternal conundrum of making something out of nothing.

She took a step towards me. She was whispering, with her bathing-costume smile, and her brown eyes fixed on some point in the distance.

The something which is made can give no support to anything else, it is only a desire. It possesses nothing, nothing is given to it, there is no place for it! Yet it exists! It exists. He was a shoemaker, I believe, the man who said all this.

Sounds to me like Jacob Boehme.

Stop dropping names!

She laughed her impertinent seventeen-year-old laugh.

Stop dropping names! she repeated and giggled. From here you could kill somebody dropping a name!

We gazed down at the red tiles and the double mattress in the window. The dog had stopped barking. And, when she stopped laughing, I held her cold hand.

Just write down what you find, she said.

I’ll never know what I’ve found.

No, you’ll never know.

It takes courage to write, I said.

The courage will come. Write down what you find, and do us the courtesy of noticing us.

You are no longer here!

Hence, the courtesy, John!

After saying this, she got to her feet, handed me the folding stool and proceeded to the door that Fernando had left unlocked. There she tugged it open and stepped — as if she had done the same thing every morning of her life — over the water duct, up on to the narrow flagged walkway.

Inside the air was cooler — as if we were underground instead of being in the sky. The light too was different. Outside, the daylight had been sparkling and transparent; having penetrated the tunnel, it changed and became golden. Every fifty metres the vaulted roof opened out into a small tower, which was built like a stone lantern so that daylight could enter. And from each lantern, as one after another they receded into the distance, the daylight fell like a golden curtain, the curtains getting forever smaller. Sound was also different. In the quiet we heard the lapping — as discrete as a cat’s tongue when drinking — of water flowing down the two basalt-stone channels on its way to the Mãe d’Agua.

I’m not sure how long we stood there facing each other — perhaps for the fifteen years since her death.

After the death of mothers, time often doubles or accelerates its speed.

Eventually she turned round, bit her lower lip, and began to walk. As she did so, she repeated without looking back: The courtesy, John!

She approached the cascade of light from the first stone lantern. Either side of her, the water reflected sparks that bobbed up and down like floating candles. When she entered the gold, it hid her like a curtain, and I did not see her again until she re-emerged from the light on the far side. She had become small because of the distance. She seemed to be walking with increasing ease; the further away she got, the more sprightly she became. She disappeared into the next golden curtain and when she reappeared I could scarcely distinguish her.

I bent down and I let my hand trail in the water which was flowing after her.