The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro

Twelve

“UNFORTUNATELY, MANUEL, this young man doesn’t like tripe,” said the lawyer to the owner when they reached the restaurant, “so please inform him of the other specialties of the house.”

The owner put his fists on his hips and gave Firmino such a look that he lowered his eyes for shame.

“Don Fernando,” said the owner in easy tones, “if I do not manage to meet your guest’s requirements then I will offer the meal free of charge. Is he a foreigner?”

“Almost,” replied the lawyer, “but he is beginning to get used to the ways of this city.”

“Then I might suggest our rice with red beans and fried bass,” said the owner, “or else the roulade of salt cod.”

Firmino cast his companion a bewildered glance, wishing to indicate that either dish would suit him fine.

“Let’s have both,” decided the lawyer, “then we can nibble here and there. And for me the tripe, of course.”

The restaurant, which was not so much a restaurant as a cellar lined with barrels, was at the end of an apparently nameless alleyway next to Rua das Flores. Over the doorway Firmino had spotted a sort of wooden inn sign crudely painted with the words: “The cellar for discerning palates is here.”

“So what do you think are our next steps?” asked Firmino.

“What’s the name of your witness?” asked the lawyer.

“He’s called Torres,” said Firmino, “he’s an electrician at the Faisca Garage.”

“I’ll call by and pick him up this afternoon,” said the lawyer, “and take him to the examining magistrate.”

“And what if Torres doesn’t want to testify?” objected Firmino.

“I repeat: I will take him to the examining magistrate,” replied the lawyer placidly.

He poured out two glasses of a greenish wine and raised his own glass for a toast.

“This is an Alvarinho which can’t be found on the market,” he said, “but it’s only an aperitif, after this we’ll drink red wine.”

“I’m not all that used to drinking wine,” said Firmino apologetically.

“You can always make up for lost time,” replied the lawyer.

At that moment the owner appeared with dishes of food, and addressed the lawyer as if Firmino didn’t exist.

“Here we are Don Fernando,” he declared with a satisfied air, “and if your guest doesn’t like it the lunch is on me, as I said before, however he’d do better to quit town.”

The red beans and rice, smothered in a chestnut-colored sauce, looked far from appetizing. Firmino took two fried fish and cut himself a slice of the salt cod roulade. The lawyer watched him with his small, questioning eyes.

“Eat up, young man,” he said, “you’d better keep your strength up, this is going to be a long, complicated business.”

“What should I do at this point?” asked Firmino.

“Tomorrow go to Torres,” said the lawyer, “and give him a whale of an interview, as long and detailed as possible. Then publish it in your paper.”

“And if Torres doesn’t want to?” asked Firmino.

“Certainly he’ll want to,” replied the lawyer calmly, “he has no choice, the reason is simple and Torres will grasp it at once, I don’t imagine he’s a fool.”

The lawyer took a napkin to the sauce of the tripe running down his chin, and continued in a detached tone as if explaining something absolutely elementary: “Because Torres is a finished man,” he said, “this afternoon under my supervision he is going to give his evidence before a magistrate, of that I can assure you, but you know, a statement which stays in the hands of the examining authorities is a drifting mine, it’s always a good rule not to trust it, that statement might come to the knowledge of someone who doesn’t like it, and just imagine, with all the traffic accidents that happen these days, incidentally did you know that Portugal is at the top of the list in Europe for road accidents? It appears that we Portuguese drive like madmen.”

Firmino regarded him with all the perplexity which this lawyer continued to instill in him.

“And what purpose would be served by the interview in my paper?” he enquired.

The lawyer, with great relish, devoured a strip of tripe. Although it was cut quite short he kept trying vainly to wind it up round his fork.

“My dear young man,” he sighed, “you amaze me, you have been amazing me ever since you entered my house, you write for a paper with a wide circulation and you don’t seem to know the meaning of public opinion, it’s very remiss of you, so try to follow me for a moment. If after making his statement to the examining magistrate Torres repeats every word of it to your newspaper he can be easy in his mind, because he will have the whole of public opinion on his side, and any absent-minded driver, for example, would think twice before running over someone so much in the public eye, do you get the idea?”

“I get the idea,” replied Firmino.

“And then,” continued the lawyer, “and this is something that directly concerns you as a journalist, do you know what Jouhandeau said?”

Firmino shook his head. The lawyer took a sip of wine and wiped his fleshy lips.

“He said: Since the essential object of literature is the knowledge of human nature, and since there is no place in the world where one can study it better than in courts of law, would it not be desirable, by law, for there always to be a writer among the jurymen, his presence there would be an inducement to all the others to reflect more deeply. End of quotation.”

The lawyer paused for a moment and took another sip of wine.

“Well then,” he resumed, “it’s obvious that you will never sit in the jury box of a court as Monsieur Jouhandeau wished, nor will you even be present at the preliminary enquiries, because the law does not permit it, and it is also true that strictly speaking you are not exactly a writer, but we can try to consider you as such, seeing that you write for a newspaper. Let us say that you will be a virtual juryman, and that is your role, a virtual juryman, do you grasp the concept?”

“I think so,” replied Firmino.

But he wanted to come clean, so he asked: “But who is this Jouhandeau? I’ve never heard of him.”

“Marcel Jouhandeau,” came the answer, “an irritating French theologian with a taste for provoking scandal, he was also a great eulogist of abjection, if I may so put it, and of a sort of metaphysical perversion, or rather of what he imagined to be metaphysical. You must understand that he was writing in France at the time when the Surrealists were exalting rebellion and Gide had already produced his theory of gratuitous crime. But naturally he had none of Gide’s stature, in fact he was pretty poor stuff, even if the occasional maxim about justice hit the mark.”

“We still have to settle the basic question,” said Firmino, “because my paper is naturally taking on responsibility for your fees.”

The lawyer turned his inquisitorial gaze on him.

“Meaning what?” he asked.

“Meaning that your emolument will be paid in the proper manner.”

“Meaning what?” repeated the lawyer, “what does that mean in numerical terms?”

Firmino felt slightly embarrassed.

“I couldn’t say,” he answered, “that is a question for my Editor.”

“There is a house in Rua do Ferraz,” said the lawyer inconsequentially, “in which I spent my childhood, it’s just above Rua das Flores, a small eighteenth-century palace, the marchioness my grandmother lived there.”

He heaved a nostalgic sigh.

“Where did you live as a child, in what sort of house?” he asked at length.

“On the sea at Cascais,” replied Firmino, “my father was in the coast guards and had the use of a house on the sea, my brothers and I spent almost our whole childhood there.”

“Ah yes,” exclaimed the lawyer, “the Cascais coast, that pure white light at midday that becomes tinted with pink at sunset, the blue of the ocean, the pinewoods of the Guincho…. My memories, on the other hand, are of a gloomy town house, with an unfeeling grandmother who sipped cups of tea and appeared every day with a different ribbon around her wrinkled neck, sometimes simple, other times with a narrow lace trimming. She never touched me, though occasionally she lightly brushed her cold hand against mine and told me that the only thing a child had to learn about his family was to respect his forebears. I would take a look at those whom she called my forebears. They were old oil paintings of haughty men with disdainful expressions and fleshy lips like mine, which I inherited from them.”

He took a mouthful of the salt cod and said: “I find this quite excellent, tell me, what do you think of it?”

“I like it,” replied Firmino, “but you were telling me about your childhood.”

“Very well,” continued the lawyer, “that house is now abandoned, with all its memories of the old marchioness who was a grandmother to me in her way: her portraits, her furniture, her blankets from Castelo Branco and her precious family trees. Let us say that it’s my childhood that is locked up there as in a casket. Until a few years ago I still used to go there to consult the family archives, but I don’t know if you’ve seen Rua do Ferraz, to get up the slope you’d need a cable car, and with a bulk like mine I’m not up to it, I’d have to call a cab to take me five hundred meters, so it’s seven years since I set foot in the place. Therefore I’ve decided to sell it, I’ve put it in the hands of an agency, it’s just as well that these agencies should swallow up childhoods, it’s the most antiseptic way of getting rid of them, and you cannot imagine how many middle-class upstarts, who’ve minted money over these last few years thanks to grants from the European Community, would like to lay their hands on that house. You see, it’s a place that to their way of thinking would give them the social status which they crave, a modern villa with swimming pool in the residential areas is within their reach, but an eighteenth-century mansion in old Oporto is many steps higher up the ladder, do you grasp the concept?”

“I grasp the concept,” said Firmino.

“I have therefore decided to sell it,” said the lawyer. “The keenest prospective buyer comes from the provinces. He’s a typical product of the society we live in nowadays. His father was a small-time cattle-breeder. He himself began with a small shoe business even while Salazar was in power. Actually he specialized in canvas footwear, with a couple of workmen. Then in 1974 came the revolution and he sided with the co-operatives, he even gave a practically revolutionary interview to a newspaper of that persuasion. Then, after the illusions of revolution, in came unbridled neo-liberalism, and he took sides with that, as he had to. In a word, he’s known how to look after Number One. He owns four Mercedes and a golf course in Algarve, I believe he has shares in building projects in Alentejo, and who knows if not even in the Tróia Peninsula, he knows how to handle all the political parties in the constitutional spectrum, from the Communists to the Right, and it goes without saying that his shoe factory is flourishing, exporting chiefly to the United States. What do you say then, am I right to sell?”

“The house, you mean?”

“The house, naturally,” replied the lawyer. “I might well sell it to him. A few days ago I had a visit from his wife, who I think is the only literate person in the family. I will spare you a description of that painted lady. But I raised my price, saying that I was selling the house together with its antique furniture and portraits of the old aristocracy, and I asked her: what would a family like yours do with a house like that without its antique furniture and family portraits? What do you think, young man, did I do well?”

“Very well indeed,” replied Firmino, “since you ask me for my opinion I can tell you you did just the right thing.”

“In that case,” concluded the lawyer, “you may tell your Editor that for my expenses over Damasceno Monteiro I shall be amply remunerated by two eighteenth-century paintings in my house in Rua do Ferraz, and ask him to make no further proposals concerning my fees, if he will be so good.”

Firmino made no answer but simply went on eating. He had cautiously sampled the red beans and rice and found it delicious, so he was now on his second helping. He really wanted to say something but didn’t know how to put it. Eventually he tried to formulate it.

“Well my paper you know,” he stammered, “or my paper is only what it is, I mean to say you know very well what its style is, it’s the style we have to use to capture our readership, well it’s written for the masses, it’s got guts, but it’s still written for the masses, it has to make concessions to its readership in short, so as to sell more copies, if you see what I mean.”

The lawyer was concentrating on his food and said nothing. He was completely absorbed in eating the salt cod. “I don’t know if you grasp the concept,” said Firmino, taking over the lawyer’s formula.

“I do not grasp the concept,” replied the lawyer.

“Well,” continued Firmino, “what I mean is that my paper is the paper you know it to be, while you, well, you are a leading lawyer, you have the surname you have, and in a word I wanted to say you have a reputation to keep up, if you see what I mean.”

“You continue to disappoint me, young man,” replied the lawyer, “you do everything in your power to be a lesser person than you really are, we must never be less than we really are, what was it you said about me?”

“That you have a reputation to keep up,” said Firmino.

“Listen to me,” murmured the lawyer, “I don’t think we’ve understood each other, so I’ll tell you something once and for all, but open your ears and hear. I defend the unfortunates of this world because I am like them, and that is the pure and simple truth. Of my ancient lineage I exploit only what material inheritance is still left to me, but like the unfortunates whom I defend I think I have experienced the miseries of life, have understood them and even taken them on myself, because to understand the miseries of life you have to put your hands in the shit, if you will excuse the expression, and above all be aware of it. And kindly don’t force me to be rhetorical, because this form of rhetoric is cheap.”

“But what do you believe in?” asked Firmino impulsively.

He had no idea what had made him ask such an ingenuous question at that moment, and even as he spoke it seemed to him one of those questions you ask of a schoolmate, that make you both blush. The lawyer raised his head from his plate and looked at him with those inquisitorial eyes of his.

“Are you asking me a personal question?” he inquired with explicit annoyance.

“Let’s call it a personal question,” replied Firmino bravely.

“And why do you ask this question?” insisted the lawyer.

“Because you don’t believe in anything,” Firmino burst out, “I get the impression that you don’t believe in anything.”

The lawyer smiled. Firmino felt that he was ill at ease.

“I might, for example, believe in something that to you seems insignificant,” he answered.

“Give me a convincing example,” said Firmino. He had got himself into this and wanted to keep up his role.

“For example a poem,” replied the lawyer, “just a few lines, it might seem a mere trifle, or it might also be a thing of the essence. For example:

Everything that I have known

You’ll write to me to remind

Me of, and likewise I shall do,

The whole past I’ll recount to you.

The lawyer fell silent. He had shoved away his plate and sat fumbling with his napkin.

“Hölderlin,” he went on, “it’s a poem called Wenn aus der Ferne, which means ‘If From the Distance,’ it’s one of his last. Let us say that there might be people who are waiting for letters from the past, do you think that a plausible thing to believe in?”

“Perhaps,” replied Firmino, “it might be plausible, though really I’d like to understand it a bit more.”

“Nothing to it,” murmured the lawyer, “letters from the past which give us an explanation of a time in our life which we have never understood, an explanation whatever it might be that enables us to grasp the meaning of the years gone by, a meaning that eluded us then, you are young, you are waiting for letters from the future, but just suppose that there are people waiting for letters from the past, and maybe I am one of these, and maybe I go so far as to imagine that one day I shall receive them.”

He paused, lit one of his cigars, and asked: “And do you know how I imagine they will arrive? Come on, try and think.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Firmino.

“Well,” said the lawyer, “they will arrive in a little parcel done up with a pink bow, just like that, and, scented with violets, as in the most trashy romantic novels. And on that day I shall lower my horrible old snout to the package, undo the pink bow, open the letters, and with the clarity of noonday I shall understand a story I never understood before, a story unique and fundamental, I repeat, unique and fundamental, such a thing as can happen but once in our lives, that the gods grant only once in our lives, and to which at the time we did not pay enough attention, for the simple reason that we were conceited fools.”

Another pause, longer this time. Firmino watched him in silence, taking stock of his fat old droopy cheeks, his almost repulsively fleshy lips, and the expression of one lost in memories.

“Because,” the lawyer went on in a low voice,“que faites-vous faites-vous des anciennes amours?. It’s a line from a poem by Louise Colet, and goes on like this: les chassez-vous comme des ombres vaines? Ils ont été, ces fantômes glacés, coeur contre coeur, unepart de vous même* There’s no doubt the lines were addressed to Flaubert. I should add that Louise Colet wrote very bad poems, poor dear, even if she thought of herself as a great poetess and wanted to make a hit in all the literary salons in Paris, really mediocre stuff, no doubt about it. But these few lines really get to one, it seems to me, because what in fact do we do with our past loves? Push them away in a drawer along with our socks full of holes?”

He looked at Firmino as if expecting confirmation, but Firmino said not a word.

“Do you know what I say,” continued the lawyer, “that if Flaubert didn’t understand her then he was really a fool, in which case we have to agree with that smarty-pants Sartre, but maybe Flaubert did understand, what do you think, did Flaubert understand or not?”

“Maybe he understood,” replied Firmino, “I couldn’t say offhand, maybe he did understand but I’m not in a position to swear to it.”

“I beg your pardon, young man,” said the lawyer, “but you claim to be studying literature, indeed that you intend to write a paper on literature, and you here own up to me that you can’t say anything for sure on the fundamental question, whether Flaubert did or did not understand Louise Colet’s coded message.”

“But I’m studying Portuguese literature in the 1950s,” Firmino defended himself, “and what has Flaubert to do with Portuguese literature in the 1950s?”

“Apparently nothing,” said the lawyer, “but only apparently, because in literature everything has to do with everything else. Look, young man, it’s like a spider’s web, you know what a spider’s web is like? Well think of all those complicated threads woven together by the spider, all of which lead to the center, looking at those at the outer edge you wouldn’t think it, but everything leads to the center, I’ll give you an example, how could you understand L’éducation sentimentale, a novel so terribly pessimistic and at the same time so reactionary, because according to the criteria of your friend Lukács it is terribly reactionary, if you don’t know the tasteless novelettes of that period of appalling bad taste that was the Second Empire? And along with this, making the proper connections, what if you were to be unaware of Flaubert’s state of mental depression? Because, you know, when Flaubert was shut up there in his house at Croisset, peering out at the world through a window, he was fearfully depressed, and all this, even though it seems not so to you, forms a spider’s web, a system of underground connections, of astral conjunctions, of elusive correspondences. If you want to study literature at least learn that you must study correspondences.”

Firmino gave him a look and tried to come up with an answer. Strangely enough he was seized with that same absurd sense of guilt the owner had caused him when he had told him what was on the menu.

“I try in all humility to concern myself with Portuguese literature in the 1950s,” he replied, “without getting all swollen-headed about it.”

“Right,” said the lawyer, “without getting swollen-headed you have to plumb the depths of that particular period. And to do so perhaps you ought to know the weather reports published in the Portuguese papers during those years, as you may learn from a magnificent novel by one of our own authors who succeeded in describing the censorship imposed by the political police by referring to the weather reports in the papers, do you know the book I mean?”

Firmino didn’t answer but moved his head in a noncommittal fashion.

“Well then,” said the lawyer, “I give you that as a clue to a possible line of research, so remember, even weather reports can come in handy as long as they are taken as metaphors, as clues, without falling into the sociology of literature, do I make myself clear?”

“I think so,” said Firmino.

“Sociology of literature my foot!” repeated the lawyer with an air of disgust, “We live in barbarous times.”

He made to rise to his feet and Firmino leapt to his so as to get there first.

“Put it all on my bill, Manuel,” called out the lawyer, “our guest enjoyed his lunch.”

They wended their way out, but the lawyer stopped in the doorway.

“This evening I’ll let you know something about what position Torres adopts,” he said, “I’ll send you a message at Dona Rosa’s. But it is essential for you to interview him tomorrow and for your paper to bring out another special edition, since you are running so many special editions about this severed head, have you got me?”

“I’ve got you,” replied Firmino, “you can count on me.”

They emerged into the afternoon light of Oporto. The streets were full of bustle and steamy heat, with a light mist blurring the outlines of the city. The lawyer wiped his brow with a handkerchief and made a brief gesture of farewell.

“I’ve eaten too much,” he grumbled, “I always eat too much. Incidentally, do you know how Hölderlin died?”

Firmino simply looked at him without answering. For the moment he really couldn’t recall how Hölderlin died.

“He died mad,” said the lawyer, “and that’s something to bear in mind.”

And supporting his enormous bulk he moved off with uncertain steps.

* “Would you send them away like useless shadows? These gelid ghosts were, heart pressed to heart, a part of yourself.”