Pereira Maintains

THREE

Pereira maintains that the city seemed entirely in the hands of the police that evening. He ran into them everywhere. He took a taxi as far as Terreiro do Paço and there under the colonnade were truckloads of police armed with carbines. Perhaps they were controlling the strategic points of the city in fear of demonstrations or unruly crowds. He would have liked to walk the rest of the way, the cardiologist had told him he ought to take exercise, but he quailed at the thought of passing right under the noses of those sinister militiamen, so he caught the tram which ran the length of Rua dos Fanqueiros and stopped in Praça da Figuera. Here he alighted and found more police, he maintains. This time he was forced to walk past squads of them, and it made him feel pretty uncomfortable. On his way by he heard an officer say to his men: Just remember lads, there could be a Bolshie round every corner, so keep your eyes peeled.

Pereira looked this way and that, as if the advice had been directed at him, but saw no reason to keep his eyes peeled. Avenida da Liberdade was perfectly tranquil, the ice-cream kiosk was open and there were people at the tables enjoying the cool. He strolled peacefully along the central pavement and at this point, he maintains, he first heard the music. The gentle, melancholy guitar music of Coimbra, and it seemed to him odd, that conjunction of music and armed militiamen. It seemed to be coming from Praça da Alegria, and so it proved to be, because the nearer he got the louder grew the music.

In Praça da Alegria there was no sense of being in a besieged city, Pereira maintains, because he saw no police at all, only a night watchman who appeared to be drunk, dozing on a bench. The whole place was decorated with paper festoons and coloured light bulbs, green and yellow, hanging on wires strung from window to window. There were a number of tables out in the open and several couples dancing. Then he noticed a banner stretched between two trees, and written on it in enormous letters: LONG LIVE FRANCISCO FRANCO. And beneath this, in smaller letters: LONG LIVE OUR PORTUGUESE TROOPS IN SPAIN.

Pereira maintains that only then did he realize this was a Salazarist festival, and that was why it had no need to be picketed by troops. And only then did he notice that a lot of people were wearing the green shirt and the scarf knotted round their necks. He hung back in terror, and several different things flashed into his mind at once. It occurred to him that perhaps Monteiro Rossi was one of them, he thought of the Alentejan carter who had shed his blood all over his melons, he tried to imagine what Father António would have said had he seen him there. He thought of all this and flopped down on the bench where the night watchman was dozing, and let himself drift along with his thoughts. Or rather, he let himself drift with the music, because the music, in spite of all, was a pleasure to him. The players were two little old men, one on the viola and the other on the guitar, and they played the heartrending old melodies of the Coimbra of his youth, when he was a student and thought of life as a long radiant future. In those days he too used to play the viola at student parties, he had a trim figure and was athletic and had the girls falling in love with him. Any number of beautiful girls had been mad about him. But he had fallen for a frail, pallid little thing who wrote poetry and had frequent headaches. Then his thoughts turned to other things in his life, but these Pereira has no wish to mention, because he maintains they belong to him and him alone and have nothing to do with that evening and that festival where he had fetched up all unsuspecting. And then, Pereira maintains, at a certain point he saw a tall slim young man in a light-coloured shirt get up from a table and station himself between the two musicians. And for some reason his heart stood still, maybe because in that young man he seemed to recognize himself, he seemed to rediscover himself as he was in his Coimbra days, because the young man was in some way like him, not in feature but in the way he moved, and something about the hair too, the way a lock flopped onto his forehead. And the young man started singing an Italian song, O sole mio, of which Pereira did not understand the words, but it was a song full of passion and vitality, limpid and beautiful, and the only words he understood were ‘O sole mio’ and nothing more, and all the while the young man was singing the sea-breeze was rising again from the Atlantic and the evening was cool, and everything seemed to him lovely, his past life of which he declines to speak, and Lisbon, and the vault of the sky above the coloured lights, and he felt a great nostalgia, did Pereira, but he declines to say for what. However, Pereira realized that the young man singing was the person he had spoken to on the telephone that afternoon, so when the song was over he got up from the bench, because his curiosity was stronger than his misgivings, and made his way to the table and said to the young man: Mr Monteiro Rossi, I presume. Monteiro Rossi tried to rise to his feet, bumped against the table, and the tankard of beer in front of him toppled over, sousing his pristine white trousers from top to bottom. I do apologize, mumbled Pereira. No, it was my clumsiness, said the young man, it often happens to me, you must be Dr Pereira of the Lisboa, please take a seat. And he held out his hand.

Pereira maintains that he sat down at the table feeling ill at ease. He thought to himself that this was not the place for him at all, that it was absurd to meet a stranger at this nationalist festival, that Father António would not have approved of his conduct, and that he wished he were already on his way home to talk to his wife’s picture and ask its forgiveness. These thoughts nerved him to put a direct question, simply to start the ball rolling, and without much weighing his words he said to Monteiro Rossi: This is a Salazarist Youth festival, are you a member of the Salazarist Youth?

Monteiro Rossi brushed back his lock of hair and replied: I am a graduate in philosophy, my interests are philosophy and literature, but what has your question got to do with the Lisboa? It has this to do with it, replied Pereira, that we are a free and independent newspaper and don’t wish to meddle in politics.

Meanwhile the two old musicians had struck up again, and from their melancholy strings they elicited a song in praise of Franco, but at that point Pereira, despite his uneasiness, realized he had let himself in for it and it was his business to take the initiative. And strangely enough he felt up to doing so, felt he had the situation in hand, simply because he was Dr Pereira of the Lisboa and the young man facing him was hanging on his lips. So he said: I read your article on death and found it very interesting. Yes, I did write a thesis on death, replied Monteiro Rossi, but let me say at once that it’s not all my own work,the passage they printed in the magazine was copied, I must confess, partly from Feuerbach and partly from a French spiritualist, and not even my own professor tumbled to it, teachers are more ignorant than people realize, you know. Pereira maintains that he thought twice about putting the question he’d been preparing all evening, but eventually he made up his mind, not without first ordering something to drink from the young green-shirted waiter in attendance. Forgive me, he said to Monteiro Rossi, but I never touch alcohol, only lemonade, so I’ll have a lemonade. And while sipping his lemonade he asked in a low voice, as if someone might overhear and reprove him for it: But are you, please forgive me but, well, what I want to ask is, are you interested in death?

Monteiro Rossi gave a broad grin, and this, Pereira maintains, disconcerted him. What an idea, Dr Pereira, exclaimed Monteiro Rossi heartily, what I’m interested in is life. Then, more quietly: Listen, Dr Pereira, I’ve had quite enough of death, two years ago my mother died, she was Portuguese and a teacher and she died suddenly from an aneurism in the brain, that’s a complicated way of saying a burst blood vessel, in short she died of a stroke, and last year my father died, he was Italian, a naval engineer at the Lisbon dockyard, and he left me a little something but I’ve already run through that, I have a grandmother still alive in Italy but I haven’t seen her since I was twelve and I don’t fancy going to Italy, the situation there seems even worse than ours, and I’m fed up with death, Dr Pereira, you must excuse me for being frank with you but in any case why this question?

Pereira took a sip of his lemonade, wiped his lips with the back of his hand and said: Simply because in a newspaper one has to have memorial articles on dead writers or an obituary every time an important writer dies, and an obituary can’t be written at the drop of a hat, one has to have it ready beforehand, and I’m looking for someone to write advance obituaries on the great writers of our times, imagine if Mauriac were to die tomorrow how do you think I’d manage?

Monteiro Rossi ordered another beer, Pereira maintains. Since he’d arrived the young man had drunk at least three and at that point, in Pereira’s opinion, he ought to be already rather tight, or at least slightly tipsy. Monteiro Rossi swept back his lock of hair and said: Dr Pereira, I am a good linguist and I know the work of modern writers; what I love is life, but if you want me to write about death and you pay me for it, as they’ve paid me this evening to sing a Neapolitan song, then I can do it, for the day after tomorrow I’ll write you a funeral oration for García Lorca, what d’you think of Lorca? after all he created the avant-garde in Spain just as here in Portugal Pessoa created our modernist movement, and what’s more he was an all-round artist, he was a poet, a musician and a painter too.

Pereira said Lorca didn’t seem to him the ideal choice, he maintains, but he could certainly give it a try, as long as he dealt with Lorca tactfully and with due caution, referring exclusively to his personality as an artist and without touching on other aspects which in view of the current situation might pose problems. And then, without batting an eyelid, Monteiro Rossi said: Look here, excuse my mentioning it, I’ll do you this article on Lorca but d’you think you could give me something in advance? I’ll have to buy some new trousers, these are terribly stained, and tomorrow I’m going out with a girl I knew at university who’s on her way here now, she’s a good chum of mine and I’m very fond of her, I’d like to take her to the cinema.