The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro

Eleven

IT WAS A QUARTER PAST MIDDAY. Better so, thought Firmino, who did not wish to seem anxiously over-punctual. He was walking down Rua das Flores. It was a fine street, both elegant and smacking of the common people. The note of the common people was supplied by the windowboxes blooming with geraniums, which may have been why it was called “The Street of Flowers,” and the elegance by the smart jewelers’ shops, their windows glittering with gems. Firmino had forgotten to bring along his guidebook, which annoyed him not a little. But never mind, he’d read up on it later.

The main door was a massive thing made of studded oak, but it had certainly seen better days. Maybe it dated from the eighteenth century. It was opened wide to allow cars in, for there was parking space at the end of the courtyard. Firmino scanned the brass plates for the name of the lawyer Mello There was a concierge. She sat in a glass box and was knitting. She was a concierge such as may be found in Oporto, or still perhaps even in Paris, but only in a few parts of town. She was fat, with a ballooning bosom, she had a suspicious look, she was neatly dressed after her fashion and wore slippers with pompons.

“I’m looking for Attorney Mello Sequeira,” said Firmino.

“Are you the journalist?” asked the concierge.

Firmino said yes.

“The Attorney is expecting you, ground floor. There are four doors, knock at whichever you like, they’re all his,” said the concierge.

Firmino set off down the corridors of the old palace and knocked at the first door he came to. There was no light in the corridor, the door opened with a click, Firmino entered and closed it behind him. He found himself in a vast apartment with vaulted ceilings, though in semi-darkness. The walls were lined with books, but even the floor was cluttered with books, great tottering piles of them, along with bundles of newspapers and documents of all sorts. Firmino tried to get his eyes used to the semi-darkness. On the other side of the room, ensconced in a sofa, was a man. He was a fat man, indeed obese, of such corpulence that he filled half the sofa. At first glance he looked about sixty, perhaps a bit more. He was bald, clean-shaven, with sagging jowls and fleshy lips. His head was thrown back and he was staring at the ceiling. He really did look like Charles Laughton.

“How d’you do?” said Firmino, “I am the journalist from Lisbon.”

The fat man made a vague gesture towards an armchair and Firmino sat down. On the sofa at the man’s side was the latest edition of Acontecimento.

“Are you the author of this piece of prose?” he asked in a neutral voice.

“Yes,” replied Firmino with some embarrassment, “but it’s not exactly my style, I have to adapt to the style of my newspaper.”

“And may I ask what is your style?” enquired the obese man in the same neutral tone.

“I try to have a style of my own,” said Firmino with mounting embarrassment, “but as you know one’s style is also formed by reading the books of others.”

“What others, for example, if I may make so bold?” asked the obese man.

Firmino didn’t know what to say. Then he replied: “Lukács for example, Geörgy Lukács.”

The fat man gave a gentle cough. He at last removed his gaze from the ceiling and looked at Firmino.

“Interesting,” he said, “why? does Lukács have a style?”

“Well,” said Firmino, “I think so, at least in his own way.”

“And what way that be?” asked the fat man in the same neutral tone.

“Dialectical materialism,” returned Firmino hastily, “let’s say criticism.”

The bloated figure gave another little cough, and Firmino got the feeling that those little coughs were really a kind of stifled laughter.

“Is this because, in your opinion, dialectical materialism is in itself a style?” asked the obese man, still impassive.

Firmino found himself almost at a loss. But he also felt faintly riled. This obese lawyer, unknown to him, was grilling him as if he were sitting for a university exam. Really, it was a bit much!

“What I meant,” he explained, “was that Lukács’s methodology is useful for the studies I am involved in, that is to say a paper I want to write.”

“Have you readHistory and Class Consciousness?” enquired the obese lawyer.

“Of course,” replied Firmino, “it’s a fundamental text.”

“It dates from 1923,” commented the lawyer, “have you any notion of what was going on in Europe around that time?”

“More or less,” said Firmino briefly.

“The Vienna Circle,” murmured the obese man, “Carnap, the fundamentals of formal logic, the impossibility of non-contradiction within a system, trifles of that sort. As for Lukác’s style, seeing that you are concerned with style, the less said the better, don’t you think? Personally I think it the style of a Hungarian peasant best acquainted with horses in the Puszta.”

Firmino had the urge to say that he was not there to talk about style, but he let it go.

“I need it for the study of Portuguese neo-Realism,” he specified.

“Oh,” yawned the obese man, “Portuguese neo-Realism, eh? Really worth studying its style, I must say.”

“Not the earlier neo-Realism,” Firmino went on to explain, “not the 1940s, what interests me is the second period, the 1950s, after the belated Surrealist period, I call it neo-Realism for reasons of convention, but it certainly is a different thing.”

“That strikes me as more interesting,” murmured the obese man, “certainly more interesting to me, but as a basis for research I would scarcely choose Lukács.”

The obese man gave him a stare and proffered a wooden box. He asked if he wanted a cigar and Firmino declined. The obese man lit an enormous one. It looked like a Havana and was certainly very aromatic. He kept silent and started smoking calmly. With a lost air Firmino looked around him at that enormous room crammed with books, books everywhere, on the walls, on the chairs, on the floor, along with bundles of documents and newspapers.

“Don’t you feel you are in a scene from Kafka?” said the obese man as if he had read his thoughts, “you surely must have read Kafka, or have seen the film The Trial with Orson Welles. Not that I’m Orson Welles, even if this den of mine is loaded with old papers, even if I am obese and smoking a fat cigar, do not muddle up your film stars, here in Oporto they call me Loton.”

“So I have been told,” replied Firmino.

“Let us get down to practical matters,” said the lawyer, “so tell me exactly what you want from me.”

“I thought that Dona Rosa had already told you everything,” complained Firmino.

“Partly so,” murmured the obese man.

“Well then,” said Firmino, “the case is the one you have read about in my paper, even if it isn’t written in a style that you like, and my paper wishes to make you a proposition: Damasceno Monteiro’s family haven’t got the money to pay a lawyer, so my paper has stepped in, we need a lawyer and we thought of you.”

“I’m not sure,” grumbled the obese man, “the fact is I’m busy over Angela, you must have heard of the case, it’s in all the local press.”

Firmino looked at him perplexed and confessed: “No, frankly no.”

“The prostitute who was raped and tortured and practically killed,” said the obese man, “the case is in the Oporto papers, I represent her. It’s a pity that you of the Press follow the papers so little. Angela is a prostitute in Oporto, she was contacted for an evening of ‘fun’ in the provinces, she was taken by her pimp to a villa near Guimarães where a wealthy young man had her bound hand and foot by two thugs and used physical violence on her person, because this was a fancy he wanted to get off his chest but didn’t know who to try it out on, so he tried it out on Angela, after all she was only a prostitute.”

“Horrible,” said Firmino, “and you are representing her?”

“Certainly I am,” confirmed the lawyer, “and do you know why?”

“No,” replied Firmino, “but I’d say to see justice done.”

“Call it that if you want,” murmured the obese man, “after all it’s a definition of sorts. You only have to know that this sadist is the young son of a petty provincial landowner who has got rich thanks to the last few governments, the worst kind of bourgeoisie to surface in Portugal in the last twenty years: money, ignorance, and a lot of arrogance. Dreadful people who have to be reckoned with. My own family has for centuries exploited women like Angela and in some sense violated them, maybe not as this young man did, but let us say in a more elegant manner. We might even hypothesize, if you wish, that what I am doing is a kind of tardy penitence for history, a paradoxical inversion of class consciousness, not as according to the primary mechanisms of your friend Lukács, let us say on a different level, but these, however, are matters entirely my own concern, that I would prefer not to go in to with you.”

“As the civil party in these proceedings,” persisted Firmino staunchly, “we would like to retain you as our lawyer, if we manage to reach an agreement about your fees.”

The old man emitted a couple of those little coughs that sounded like chuckles. He tapped his cigar-ash into an ashtray. He seemed amused. He made a vague sweeping gesture to indicate the room.

“This building is mine,” he said, “it belonged to my family, and the next street belongs to me, belonged to my family. I have no descendants, so as long as the money lasts I can amuse myself.”

“And does this case amuse you?” asked Firmino.

“That’s not exactly what I wanted to say,” replied the lawyer calmly, “but I would like you to be more precise about the facts in your possession.”

“I have a witness,” said Firmino, “I met him this morning in the public gardens.”

“Is your informant prepared to give evidence before an examining magistrate?” asked the lawyer.

“I think he would if you asked him,” replied Firmino.

“Come to the point,” said the lawyer.

“It seems that Damasceno Monteiro was killed at the barracks of the Guardia Nacional,” said Firmino point-blank.

“The Guardia Nacional, eh?” murmured the lawyer. He took a puff at his cigar and chuckled: “but in that case it’s a Grundnorm.”

Firmino gave him a bewildered look and the lawyer read his bewilderment.

“I can’t expect you to know what a Grundnorm is,” continued the lawyer, “I realize that we men of law sometimes speak in code.”

“Then explain it to me,” retorted Firmino, “I only studied literature.”

“Have you heard of Hans Kelsen?” asked the lawyer in such a low voice that he might have been talking to himself.

“Hans Kelsen,” repeated Firmino, rummaging through his scanty knowledge of jurisprudence, “I think I have heard his name, he’s a philosopher of law I think, but you can tell me more about him.”

The lawyer heaved such a deep sigh that it seemed to Firmino that he could hear its echo.

“Berkeley, California, 1952,” he whispered. “You may not be able to imagine what California meant at that time to a young man hailing from the aristocracy of a provincial place such as Oporto and an oppressive country like Portugal, but I can tell you in a word that it meant freedom. Not the stereotyped sort of freedom you see represented in a lot of American movies of the time, even in America in those days there was fierce censorship, but genuine freedom, inward, absolute. Just imagine, I had a fiancee and we even used to play squash, an English game then completely unknown to the rest of Europe. I lived in a wooden house overlooking the ocean, south of Berkeley, it belonged to my distant American cousins, relatives on my mother’s side. But you will be wondering why I went to Berkeley. Because my family was wealthy, there’s no doubt about that, but first and foremost because I wanted to study the reasons which have induced mankind to draw up codes of law. Not the codes of law such as were studied by my contemporaries who have since become famous lawyers, but the underlying, and in a sense abstract, reasons. Do you follow me? And if you don’t follow me, don’t worry.”

The obese man paused for another puff at his cigar. Firmino became aware of a heavy fog hovering in the huge room.

“Well then,” he resumed, “I set my sights on that particular man on the basis of what I had learnt as a student here in Oporto. Hans Kelsen, born in Prague in 1881, a middle-European Jew, in the 1920s he had written a treatise called Hauptprobleme der Staatsrechtslehre, which I had read as a student, because I am a German speaker, you know, all my governesses were German, it’s practically my mother tongue. So I enrolled in his course at Berkeley. He was a gaunt man, bald and gauche, and at first sight no one would have taken him for a great philosopher of jurisprudence, they would have put him down as a civil servant. He had fled first from Vienna and then from Cologne because of the Nazis. He had taught in Switzerland and then he went to the United States. I followed him to the United States. The next year he transferred again to the University of Geneva, and I followed him to Geneva. His theories about the Grundnorm had become my obsession.”

The lawyer fell silent, stubbed out his cigar and drew a deep breath as if he were short of oxygen.

“Grundnorm,” he repeated, “do you grasp the concept?”

“Basic norm,” said Firmino, trying to make use of the little German he knew.

“To be sure, basic principle is what it means literally,” specified the obese man, “except that for Kelsen it is situated at the apex of the pyramid, it’s a basic norm in reverse, it’s at the pinnacle of his theory of justice, what he described as the Stufenbau Theorie, the theory of pyramidal construction.”

The lawyer paused. He sighed again, but this time plaintively. “It is a normative proposition,” he continued, “it stands on the pinnacle of what is called Law, but it’s the fruit of this scholar’s imagination, a pure hypothesis.”

Firmino did not manage to discern whether his expression was pedagogical, meditative, or simply melancholy.

“If I may so put it,” said the lawyer, “it’s a metaphysical hypothesis, purely metaphysical. And if you want, this is a truly Kafkaesque thing, it’s the norm that ensnares us all and which, though it may seem incongruous, might account for the arrogance of a little squire who thinks he has the right to whip a prostitute. The ways of the Grundnorm are infinite.”

“The witness I spoke to this morning,” said Firmino to charge the subject, “is certain that Damasceno was murdered by the Guardia Nacionale.”

The lawyer gave a tired smile and glanced at his watch.

“Oh,” said he, “now the Guardia Nacionale is a military institution, it’s the very incarnation of the Grundnorm, this business is beginning to interest me, also because you have no idea how many people have recently been killed or tortured in our charming police stations.”

“I think I have as good an idea as you do,” Firmino pointed out, “the last four cases have been covered by my paper.”

“Of course,” murmured the lawyer, “and all the culprits acquitted, all of them comfortably back in service, this business is really beginning to interest me, but what would you say to a bite of lunch? It’s half-past one and I feel a little peckish, there’s a restaurant almost next door which I heartily recommend. Incidentally, do you like tripe?”

“Moderately,” replied Firmino with misgiving.