The Destiny of Nathalie X

Cork

O hornern não é um animal

É uma carne inteligente

Embora às vezes doente.

(A man is not an animal;

Is intelligent flesh,

Although sometimes ill.)

Fernando Pessoa

MY NAME is Lily Campendonc. A long time ago I used to live in Lisbon.

I lived in Lisbon between 1929 and 1935. A beautiful city, but melancholy.

Boscán, Christmas 1934: “We never love anyone. Not really. We only love our idea of another person. It is some conception of our own that we love. We love ourselves, in fact.”

“Mrs. Campendonc?”

“Yes?”

“May I be permitted to have a discreet word with you? Discreetly?”

“Of course.”

He did not want this word to take place in the office, so we left the building and walked down the rua Serpa toward the Arsenal. It was dark, we had been working late, but the night was warm.

“Here, please. I think this small café will suit.”

I agreed. We entered and sat at a small table in the rear. I asked for a coffee and he for a small glass of vinho verde. Then he decided to collect the order himself and went to the bar to do so. While he was there I noticed him drink a brandy standing at the bar, quickly, in one swift gulp.

He brought the drinks and sat down.

“Mrs. Campendonc, I’m afraid I have some bad news.” His thin taut features remained impassive. Needlessly he re-straightened his straight bow tie.

“And what would that be?” I resolved to be equally calm.

He cleared his throat, looked up at the mottled ceiling and smiled vaguely.

“I am obliged to resign,” he said. “I hereby offer you one month’s notice.”

I tried to keep the surprise off my face. I frowned. “That is bad news, Senhor Boscán.”

“I am afraid I had no choice.”

“May I ask why?”

“Of course, of course, you have every right.” He thought for a while, saying nothing, printing neat circles of condensation on the tan scrubbed wood of the table with the bottom of his wineglass.

“The reason is …” he began, “and if you will forgive me I will be entirely candid — the reason is,” and at this he looked me in the eye, “that I am very much in love with you, Mrs. Campendonc.”

The material of which this monograph treats has become of double interest because of its shrouded mystery, which has never been pierced to the extent of giving the world a complete and comprehensive story. The mysticism is not associated with its utility and general uses, as these are well known, but rather with its chemical makeup, composition and its fascinating and extraordinary character.

Consul Schenk’s Report

on the Manufacture of Cork (Leipzig, 1890)

After my husband, John Campendonc, died in 1932, I decided to stay on in Lisbon. I knew enough about the business, I told myself, and in any event could not bear the thought of returning to England and his family. In his will he left the company — the Campendonc Cork Company Ltd. — to me with instructions that it should continue as a going concern under the family name or else be sold. I made my decision and reassured those members of John’s family who tried earnestly to dissuade me that I knew exactly what I was doing, and besides, there was Senhor Boscán who would always be there to help.

I should tell you a little about John Campendonc first, I suppose, before I go on to Boscán.

John Campendonc was twelve years older than me, a small strong Englishman, very fair in coloring, with fine blond hair that was receding from his forehead. His body was well muscled with a tendency to run to fat. I was attracted to him on our first meeting. He was not handsome — his features were oddly lopsided — but there was a vigor about him that was contagious, and that characterized his every movement and preoccupation. He read vigorously, for example, leaning forward over his book or newspaper, frowning, turning and smoothing down the pages with a flick and crack and a brisk stroke of his palm. He walked everywhere at high speed and his habitual pose was to thrust his left hand in the pocket of his coat — thrust strongly down — and, with his right hand, to smooth his hair back in a series of rapid caresses. Consequently his coats were always distorted on the left, the pocket bulged and baggy, sometimes torn, the constant strain on the seams inevitably proving too great. In this manner he wore out three or four suits a year. Shortly before he died I found a tailor in the rua Garrett who would make him a suit with three identical coats. So for John’s fortieth birthday I presented him with an assortment of suits — flannel, tweed and cotton drill — consisting of three pairs of trousers and nine coats. He was very amused.

I retain a strong and moving image of him. It was about two weeks before his death and we had gone down to Cascais for a picnic and a bathe in the sea. It was late afternoon and the beach was deserted. John stripped off his clothes and ran naked into the sea, diving easily through the breakers. I could not — and still cannot — swim and so sat on the running board of our motorcar, smoked a cigarette and watched him splash about in the waves. Eventually he emerged and strode up the beach toward me, flicking water from his hands.

“Freezing,” he shouted from some ways off. “Freezing freezing freezing!”

This is how I remember him, confident, ruddy and noisy in his nakedness. The wide slab of his chest, his fair, open face, his thick legs darkened with slick wet hair, his balls clenched and shrunken with cold, his penis a tense white stub. I laughed at him and pointed at his groin. Such a tiny thing, I said, laughing. He stood there, hands on his hips, trying to look offended. Big enough for you, Lily Campendonc, he said, grinning, you wait and see.

Two weeks and two days later his heart failed him and he was dead and gone forever.

Why do I tell you so much about John Campendonc? It will help explain Boscán, I think.

The cork tree has in no wise escaped from disease and infections; on the contrary it has its full allotted share, which worries the growers more than the acquiring of a perfect texture. Unless great care is taken, all manner of ailments can corrupt and weaken fine cork and prevent this remarkable material from attaining its full potential.

Consul Schenk’s Report

Agostinho da Silva Boscán kissed me one week after he had resigned. He worked out his month’s notice scrupulously and dutifully. Every evening he came to my office to report on the day’s business and present me with letters and contracts to sign. On this particular evening, I recall, we were going over a letter of complaint to a cork grower in Elvas — hitherto reliable — whose cork planks proved to be riddled with ant borings. Boscán was standing beside my chair, his right hand flat on the leather top of the desk, his forefinger slid beneath the upper page of the letter, ready to turn it over. Slowly and steadily he translated the Portuguese into his impeccable English. It was hot and I was a little tired. I found I was not concentrating on the sonorous monotone of his voice. My gaze left the page of the letter and focused on his hand, flat on the desktop. I saw its even, pale brownness, like milky coffee, the dark glossy hairs that grew beneath the knuckles and the first joint of the fingers, the nacreous shine of his fingernails … the pithy edge of his white cuffs, beginning to fray … I could smell a faint musky perfume coming off him — farinaceous and sweet — from the lotion he put on his hair, and mingled with that his own scent, sour and salt … His suit was too heavy, his only suit, a worn shiny blue serge, made in Madrid, he told me, too hot for a summer night in Lisbon … Quietly, I inhaled and my nostrils filled with the smell of Agostinho Boscán.

“If you say you love me, Senhor Boscán,” I interrupted him, “why don’t you do something about it?”

“I am,” he said after a pause. “I’m leaving.”

He straightened. I did not turn, keeping my eyes on the letter.

“Isn’t that a bit cowardly?”

“Well,” he said. “It’s true. I would like to be a bit less … cowardly. But there is a problem. Rather a serious problem.”

Now I turned. “What’s that?”

“I think I’m going mad.”

My name is Lily Campendonc, née Jordan. I was born in Cairo in 1908. In 1914 my family moved to London. I was educated there and in Paris and Geneva. I married John Campendonc in 1929 and we moved to Lisbon, where he ran the family’s cork processing factory. He died of a coronary attack in October 1931. I had been a widow for nine months before I kissed another man, my late husband’s office manager. I was twenty-four years old when I spent my first Christmas with Agostinho da Silva Boscán.

The invitation came, typewritten on a lined sheet of cheap writing paper.

My dear Lily,

I invite you to spend Christmas with me. For three days—24, 25, 26 December — I will be residing in the village of Manjedoura. Take the train to Cintra and then a taxi from the station. My house is at the east end of the village, painted white with green shutters. It would make me very happy if you could come, even for a day. There are only two conditions. One, you must address me only as Balthazar Cabral. Two, please do not depilate yourself — anywhere.

Your good friend,

Agostinho Boscán

“Balthazar Cabral” stood naked beside the bed I was lying in. His penis hung long and thin, but slowly fattening, shifting. Uncircumcised. I watched him pour a little olive oil into the palm of his hand and grip himself gently. He pulled at his penis, smearing it with oil, watching it grow erect under his touch. Then he pulled the sheet off me and sat down. He wet his fingers with the oil again and reached to feel me.

“What’s happening?” I could barely sense his moving fingers.

“It’s an old trick,” he said. “Roman centurions discovered it in Egypt.” He grinned. “Or so they say.”

I felt oil running off my inner thighs onto the bedclothes. Boscán clambered over me and spread my legs. He was thin and wiry, his flat chest shadowed with fine hairs, his nipples were almost black. The beard he had grown made him look strangely younger.

He knelt in front of me. He closed his eyes.

“Say my name, Lily, say my name.”

I said it. Balthazar Cabral. Balthazar Cabral. Balthazar Cabral …

After the first stripping the cork tree is left in the juvenescent state to regenerate. Great care must be taken in the stripping not to injure the inner skin or epidermis at any stage in the process, for the life of the tree depends on its proper preservation. If it is injured at any point, growth there ceases and the spot remains forever afterward scarred and uncovered.

Consul Schenk’s Report

I decided not to leave the house that first day. I spent most of the time in bed, reading or sleeping. Balthazar brought me food — small cakes and coffee. In the afternoon he went out for several hours. The house we were in was square and simple and set in a tangled uncultivated garden. The ground floor consisted of a sitting room and a kitchen, and above that were three bedrooms. There was no lavatory or bathroom. We used chamber pots to relieve ourselves. We did not wash.

Balthazar returned in the early evening, bringing with him some clothes that he asked me to put on. There was a small short cerise jacket with epaulets but no lapels — it looked vaguely German or Swiss — a simple white shirt and some black cotton trousers with a drawstring at the waist. The jacket was small, even for me, tight across my shoulders, the sleeves short at my wrists. I wondered if it belonged to a boy.

I dressed in the clothes he had brought and stood before him as he looked at me intently, concentrating. After a while he asked me to pin my hair up.

“Whose jacket is this?” I asked as I did so.

“Mine,” he said.

We sat down to dinner. Balthazar had cooked the food. Tough stringy lamb in an oily gravy. A plate of beans the color of pistachio. Chunks of grayish spongy bread torn from a flat crusty loaf.

On Christmas Day we went out and walked for several miles along unpaved country roads. It was a cool morning with a fresh breeze. On our way back home we were caught in a shower of rain and took shelter under an olive tree, waiting for it to pass. I sat with my back against the trunk and smoked a cigarette. Balthazar sat cross-legged on the ground and scratched designs in the earth with a twig. He wore heavy boots and coarse woolen trousers. His new beard was uneven — dense around his mouth and throat, skimpy on his cheeks. His hair was uncombed and greasy. The smell of the rain falling on the dry earth was strong — sour and ferrous, like old cellars.

That night we lay side by side in bed, hot and exhausted. I slipped my hands in the creases beneath my breasts and drew them out, my fingers moist and slick. I scratched my neck. I could smell the sweat on my body. I turned. Balthazar was sitting up, one knee raised, the sheet flung off him, his shoulders against the wooden headboard. On his side of the bed was an oil lamp set on a stool. A small brown moth fluttered crazily around it, its big shadow bumping on the ceiling. I felt a sudden huge contentment spill through me. My bladder was full and was aching slightly, but with the happiness came a profound lethargy that made the effort required to reach below the bed for the enamel chamber pot prodigious.

I reached out and touched Balthazar’s thigh.

“You can go tomorrow,” he said. “If you want.”

“No, I’ll stay on,” I said instantly, without thinking. “I’m enjoying myself. I’m glad I’m here.” I hauled myself up to sit beside him.

“I want to see you in Lisbon,” I said, taking his hand.

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“Why?”

“Because after tomorrow you will never see Balthazar Cabral again.”

From this meager description we now at least have some idea of what “corkwood” is and have some indication of the constant care necessary to ensure a successful gathering or harvest, while admitting that the narration in no wise does justice to this most interesting material. We shall now turn to examine it more closely and see what it really is, how this particular formation comes about and its peculiarities.

Consul Schenk’s Report

Boscán: “One of my problems, one of my mental problems, rather — and how can I convince you of its effect? — horrible, horrible beyond words — is my deep and abiding fear of insanity … Of course it goes without saying; such a deep fear of insanity is insanity itself.”

I saw nothing of Boscán for a full year. Having left my employ, he then, I believe, became a freelance translator, working for any firm that would give him a job and not necessarily in the cork industry. Then came Christmas 1933 and another invitation arrived, written on a thick buff card with deckle edges in a precise italic hand, in violet ink:

Senhora Campendonc, do me the honor of spending the festive season in my company. I shall be staying at the Avenida Palace hotel, rooms 35–38, from 22 to 26 December inclusive.

Your devoted admirer,

J. Melchior Vasconcelles

P.S. Bring many expensive clothes and scents. I have jewels.

Boscán’s suite in the Avenida Palace was on the fourth floor. The bellhop referred to me as Senhora Vasconcelles. Boscán greeted me in the small vestibule and made the bellhop leave my cases there.

Boscán was dressed in a pale gray suit. His face was thinner, clean-shaven and his hair was sleek, plastered down on his head with macassar. In his shiny hair I could see the stiff furrows made from the teeth of the comb.

When the bellhop had gone we kissed. I could taste the mint from his mouthwash on his lips.

Boscán opened a small leather suitcase. It was full of jewels, paste jewels, rhinestones, strings of artificial pearls, diamante brooches and marcasite baubles. This was his plan, he said: this Christmas our gift to each other would be a day. I would dedicate a day to him, and he one to me.

“Today you must do everything I tell you,” he said. “Tomorrow is yours.”

“All right,” I said. “But I won’t do everything you tell me to, I warn you.”

“Don’t worry, Lily, I will ask nothing indelicate of you.”

“Agreed. What shall I do?”

“All I want you to do is to wear these jewels.”

The suite was large: a bathroom, two bedrooms and a capacious sitting room. Boscán/Vasconcelles kept the curtains drawn, day and night. In one corner was a freestanding cast-iron stove that one fed from a wooden box full of coal. It was warm and dark in the suite; we were closed off from the noise of the city; we could have been anywhere.

We did nothing. Absolutely nothing. I wore as many of his cheap trinkets as my neck, blouse, wrists and fingers could carry. We ordered food and wine from the hotel kitchen, which was brought up at regular intervals, Vasconcelles himself collecting everything in the vestibule. I sat and read in the electric gloom, my jewels winking and flashing merrily at the slightest shift of position. Vasconcelles smoked short stubby cigars and offered me fragrant oval cigarettes. The hours crawled by. We smoked, we ate, we drank. For want of anything better to do I consumed most of a bottle of champagne and dozed off. I awoke, fuzzy and irritated, to find Vasconcelles had drawn a chair up to the sofa I was slumped on and was sitting there, elbows on knees, chin on fists, staring at me. He asked me questions about the business, what I had been doing in the last year, had I enjoyed my trip home to England, had the supply of cork from Elvas improved and so on. He was loquacious, we talked a great deal, but I could think of nothing to ask him in return. J. Melchior Vasconcelles was, after all, a complete stranger to me, and I sensed it would put his tender personality under too much strain to inquire about his circumstances and the fantastical life he led. All the same, I was very curious, knowing Boscán as I did.

“This suite must be very expensive,” I said.

“Oh yes. But I can afford it. I have a car outside too. And a driver. We could go for a drive.”

“If you like.”

“It’s an American car. A Packard.”

“Wonderful.”

That night, when we made love in the fetid bedroom he asked me to keep my jewels on.

“It’s your day today.”

“Thank you. Merry Christmas.”

“And the same to you … What do you want me to do?”

“Take all your clothes off.”

I made Vasconcelles remain naked for the entire day. It was at first amusing and then intriguing to watch his mood slowly change. Initially he was excited, sexually, and regularly aroused. But then, little by little, he became self-conscious and awkward. At one stage in the day I watched him filling the stove with coal, one-handed, the other hand cupped reflexively around his genitals, like adolescent boys I had once seen jumping into the sea off a breakwater at Cidadela. Later still, he grew irritable and restless, pacing up and down, not content to sit and talk out the hours as we had done the day before.

In midafternoon I put on a coat and went out for a drive, leaving him behind in the suite. The big Packard was there, as he had said, and a driver. I had him drive me down to Estoril and back. I was gone for almost three hours.

When I returned Vasconcelles was asleep, lying on top of the bed in the hot bedroom. He was deeply asleep, his mouth open, his arms and legs spread. His chest rose and fell slowly and I saw how very thin he was, his skin stretched tight over his ribs. When I looked closely I could see the shiver and bump of his palpitating heart.

Before dinner he asked me if he could put on his clothes. When I refused his request it seemed to make him angry. I reminded him of our gifts and their rules. But to compensate him I wore a tight sequined gown, placed his flashy rings on my fingers and roped imitation pearls around my neck. My wrists tickled and clattered with preposterous rhinestone bangles. So we sat and ate: me, Lily Campendonc, splendid in my luminous jewels and, across the table, J. Melchior Vasconcelles, surly and morose, picking at his Christmas dinner, a crisp linen napkin spread modestly across his thighs.

The various applications of cork that we are now going to consider are worthy of description, as each application has its raison d’être in one or more of the physical or chemical properties of this marvelous material. Cork possesses three key properties that are unique in a natural substance. They are: impermeability, elasticity and lightness.

Consul Schenk’s Report

I missed Boscán after this second Christmas with him, much more — strangely — than I had after the first. I was very busy in the factory that year—1934—as we were installing machinery to manufacture Kamptulicon, a soft, unresounding cork carpet made from cork powder and india rubber and much favored by hospitals and the reading rooms of libraries. My new manager — a dour, reasonably efficient fellow called Pimentel — saw capably to most of the problems that arose but refused to accept any responsibility for all but the most minor decisions. As a result I was required to be present whenever anything of significance had to be decided, as if I functioned as a symbol of delegatory power, a kind of managerial chaperone.

I thought of Boscán often, and many nights I wanted to be with him. On those occasions, as I lay in bed dreaming of Christmases past and, I hoped, Christmases to come, I thought I would do anything he asked of me — or so I told myself.

One evening at the end of April I was leaving a shop on the rua Conceição, where I had been buying a christening present for my sister’s second child, when I saw Boscán enter a café, the Trinidade. I walked slowly past the door and looked inside. It was cramped and gloomy and there were no women clients. In my glimpse I saw Boscán leaning eagerly across a table, around which sat half a dozen men, showing them a photograph; at first they peered at it, frowning, and then they broke into wide smiles. I walked on, agitated, this moment frozen in my mind’s eye. It was the first time I had seen Boscán, and Boscán’s life, separate from myself. I felt unsettled and oddly envious. Who were these men? Friends or colleagues? I wanted suddenly and absurdly to share in that moment of the offered photograph, to frown and then grin conspiratorially like the others.

I waited outside the Trinidade sitting in the back of my motorcar with the windows open and the blinds down. I made Julião, my old chauffeur, take off his peaked cap. Boscán eventually emerged at about 7:45 and walked briskly to the tramway center at the Rocio. He climbed aboard a No. 2, which we duly followed until he stepped down from it near São Vicente. He set off down the steep alleyways into the Mouraria. Julião and I left the car and followed him discreetly down a series of boqueirão—dim and noisome streets that led down to the Tagus. Occasionally there would be a sharp bend and we would catch a glimpse of the wide sprawling river shining below in the moonlight and beyond the scatter of lights from Almada on the southern bank.

Boscán entered through the door of a small decrepit house. The steps up to the threshold were worn and concave, the tiles above the porch were cracked and slipping. A blurry yellow light shone from behind drab lace curtains. Julião stopped a passerby and asked who lived there. Senhor Boscán, he was told, with his mother and three sisters.

“Mrs. Campendonc!”

“Mr. Boscán.” I sat down opposite him. When the surprise and shock began to leave his face, I saw that he looked pale and tired. His fingers touched his bow tie, his lips, his earlobes. He was smoking a small cigar, chocolate brown, and wearing his old blue suit.

“Mrs. Campendonc, this is not really a suitable establishment for a lady.”

“I wanted to see you.” I touched his hand, but he jerked it away, as if my fingers burned him.

“It’s impossible. I’m expecting some friends.”

“Are you well? You look tired. I miss you.”

His gaze flickered around the café. “How is the Kamptulicon going? Pimentel is a good man.”

“Come to my house. This weekend.”

“Mrs. Campendonc …” His tone was despairing.

“Call me Lily.”

He steepled his fingers. “I’m a busy man. I live with my mother and three sisters. They expect me home in the evening.”

“Take a holiday. Say you’re going to … to Spain for a few days.”

“I only take one holiday a year.”

“Christmas.”

“They go to my aunt in Coimbra. I stay behind to look after the house.”

A young man approached the table. He wore a ludicrous yellow overcoat that reached down to his ankles. He was astonished to see me sitting there. Boscán looked even more ill as he introduced us. I have forgotten his name.

I said goodbye and went toward the door. Boscán caught up with me.

“At Christmas,” he said quietly. “I’ll see you at Christmas.”

A postcard. A sepia view of the Palace of Queen Maria Pia, Cintra:

I will be one kilometer west of the main beach at Paço de Arcos. I have rented a room in the Casa de Bizoma. Please arrive at dawn on 25 December and depart at sunset.

I am your friend,

Gaspar Barbosa

The bark of the cork tree is removed every eight to ten years, the quality of the cork improving with each successive stripping. Once the section of cork is removed from the tree the outer surface is scraped and cleaned. The sections — wide curved planks — are flattened by heating them over a fire and submitting them to pressure on a flat surface. In the heating operation the surface is charred, and thereby the pores are closed up. It is this process that the industry terms the “nerve” of cork. This is cork at its most valuable. A cork possesses “nerve” when its significant properties — lightness, impermeability, elasticity — are sealed in the material forever.

Consul Schenk’s Report

In the serene, urinous light of dawn the beach at Paço de Arcos looked slate gray. The seaside cafés were closed up and summoned up impressions of dejection and decrepitude as only out-of-season holiday resorts can. To add to this melancholy scene a fine cold rain blew off the Atlantic. I stood beneath my umbrella on the coast road and looked about me. To the left I could just make out the tower of Belém. To the right the hills of Cintra were shrouded in a heavy opaque mist. I turned and walked up the road toward the Casa de Bizoma. As I drew near I could see Boscán sitting on a balcony on the second floor. All other windows on this side of the hotel were firmly shuttered.

A young girl, of about sixteen years, let me in and led me up to his room.

Boscán was wearing a monocle. On a table behind him were two bottles of brandy. We kissed, we broke apart.

“Lise,” he said. “I want to call you Lise.”

Even then, even that day, I said no. “That’s the whole point,” I reminded him. “I’m me — Lily — whoever you are.”

He inclined his body forward in a mock bow. “Gaspar Barbosa … Would you like something to drink?”

I drank some brandy and then allowed Barbosa to undress me, which he did with pedantic diligence and great delicacy. When I was naked he knelt before me and pressed his lips against my groin, burying his nose in my pubic hair. He hugged me, still kneeling, his arms strong around the backs of my thighs, his head turned sideways in my lap. When he began to cry softly, I raised him up and led him over to the narrow bed. He undressed and we climbed in, huddling up together, our legs interlocking. I reached down to touch him.

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“We’ll wait.”

“Don’t forget you have to go at sunset. Remember.”

“I won’t.”

We made love later, but it was not very satisfactory. He seemed listless and tired — nothing like Balthazar Cabral and Melchior Vasconcelles.

At noon, the hotel restaurant was closed, so we ate a simple lunch he had brought himself: some bread, some olives, some tart sheep’s-milk cheese, some oranges and almonds. By then he was on to the second bottle of brandy. After lunch I smoked a cigarette. I offered him one — I had noticed he had not smoked all day — which he accepted but which he extinguished after a couple of puffs.

“I have developed a mysterious distaste for tobacco,” he said, pouring himself some more brandy.

In the afternoon we tried to make love again but failed.

“It’s my fault,” he said. “I’m not well.”

I asked him why I had had to arrive at dawn and why I had to leave at sunset. He told me it was because of a poem he had written, called “The Roses of the Gardens of the God Adonis.”

“You wrote? Boscán?”

“No, no. Boscán has only written one book of poems, years ago. These are mine, Gaspar Barbosa’s.”

“What’s it about?” The light was going; it was time for me to leave.

“Oh …” He thought. “Living and dying.”

He quoted me the line that explained the truncated nature of my third Christmas with Agostinho Boscán. He sat at the table before the window, wearing a dirty white shirt and the trousers of his blue serge suit, and poured himself a tumblerful of brandy.

“It goes like this — roughly. I’m translating: ‘Let us make our lives last one day,’ ” he said. “ ‘So there is night before and night after the little that we last.’ ”

The uses to which corkwood may be put are unlimited. And yet when we speak of uses it is only those that have developed by reason of the corkwood’s own peculiarity and not the great number it has been adapted to, for perhaps its utility will have no end and, in my estimation, its particular qualities are little appreciated. At any rate it is the most wonderful bark of its kind, its service has been a long one and its benefits, even as a stopper, have been many. A wonderful material truly, and of interest so full that it seems I have failed to do it justice in my humble endeavor to describe the Quercus suber of Linnaeus — cork.

Consul Schenk’s Report

Boscán, during, I think, that last Christmas: “You see, because I am nothing, I can imagine anything … If I were something, I would be unable to imagine.”

It was in early December 1936 that I received my last communication from Agostinho Boscán. I was waiting to hear from him, as I had received an offer for the company from the Armstrong Cork Company and was contemplating a sale and, possibly, a return to England.

I was in my office one morning when Pimentel knocked on the door and said there was a Senhora Boscán to see me. For an absurd, exquisite moment I thought this might prove to be Agostinho’s most singular disguise, but remembered he had three sisters and a mother still living. I knew before she was shown in that she came with news of Boscán’s death.

Senhora Boscán was small and tubby with a meek pale face. She wore black and fiddled constantly with the handle of her umbrella as she spoke. Her brother had requested specifically that I be informed of his death when it arrived. He had passed away two nights ago.

“What did he die of?”

“Cirrhosis of the liver … He was … My brother had become an increasingly heavy drinker. He was very unhappy.”

“Was there anything else for me, that he said? Any message?”

Senhora Boscán cleared her throat and blinked. “There is no message.”

“I’m sorry?”

“That is what he asked me to say: ‘There is no message.’ ”

“Ah.” I managed to disguise my smile by offering Senhora Boscán a cup of coffee. She accepted.

“We will all miss him,” she said. “Such a good quiet man.”

From an obituary of Agostinho da Silva Boscán:

… Boscán was born in 1888 in Durban, South Africa, where his father was Portuguese consul. He was the youngest of four children, the three elder being sisters. It was in South Africa that he received a British education and where he learned to speak English. Boscán’s father died when he was seventeen, and the family returned to Lisbon, where Boscán was to reside for the rest of his life. He worked primarily as a commercial translator and office manager for various industrial concerns, but mainly in the cork business. In 1916 he published a small collection of poems, Insensivel, written in English. The one Portuguese critic who noticed them, and who wrote a short review, described them as “a sad waste.” Boscán was active for a while in Lisbon literary circles and would occasionally publish poems, translations and articles in the magazine Sombra. The death of his closest friend, Xavier Quevedo, who committed suicide in Paris in 1924, provoked a marked and sudden change in his personality, which became increasingly melancholic and irrational from then on. He never married. His life can only be described as uneventful.