The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro

Sixteen

FIRMINO ENTERED THE COURTYARD of the house in Rua das Flores and passed the concierge’s cubbyhole. The woman gave him a quick glance and plunged back into her knitting. Firmino crossed the corridor and rang the bell. As before, the door clicked open.

Don Fernando was seated at a green baize table, practically perched on a chair too small to contain his bulk, with a game of patience set out before him. His cigar was alight, but burning itself slowly out in an ashtray. The room smelt of mold and stale tobacco-smoke.

“I’m playing Spite and Malice,” said Don Fernando, “but it’s not coming out, I’m not on form. Do you know how to play Spite and Malice?”

Firmino stood stock-still before him with a sheaf of newspapers under his arm, watching the old lawyer in silence.

“They call them games of patience,” said Don Firmino, “but the definition is inexact, they require instinct and logic, as well as luck of course. This is a variant of Milligan, though perhaps you don’t know Milligan either.”

“Frankly no,” replied Firmino.

“Milligan,” explained Don Fernando, “is played with several players and two packs of fifty-two cards and stacks in sequence, the opening is made with the ace or the queen, with the ace the stack goes in ascending order, and in descending order if the queen opens, but that is not the best part, the beauty of it is in the obstacles.”

The lawyer picked up the cigar, which already had an inch of ash on it, and took a voluptuous puff. “You really ought to study these so-called games of patience,” he resumed, “some of them have mechanisms resembling the intolerable logic that conditions our life, and Milligan is one of them. But do sit down, young man, please take that chair.”

Firmino sat down and placed his sheaf of newspapers on the floor.

“This Milligan is very interesting,” said the lawyer, “based as it is on the moves each player makes to set traps and restrict the choices of the next player, and so on round the table, as at international conferences at Geneva.”

Firmino stared at him, his face taking on an expression of bewilderment. He made a rapid, fruitless attempt to decipher the lawyer’s meaning.

“Conferences at Geneva?” he queried.

“The fact is that a few years ago,” said the lawyer, “I asked to be an observer at the discussions on nuclear disarmament which regularly took place at the United Nations Headquarters in Geneva. I struck up a friendship with a certain lady, the ambassadress of a country in favor of disarmament. So I came to learn that her country, at that time carrying out nuclear experiments, was also committed to worldwide abolition of atomic weapons, do you grasp the concept?”

“I grasp it,” said Firmino, “it’s a paradox.”

“Well then,” continued the lawyer, “this was a lady of considerable culture and knowledge, as you may suppose, but above all she was a passionate card-player. One day I asked her to explain to me the mechanism of those negotiations, since this eluded my sense of logic. Do you know what she answered?”

“I can’t imagine,” replied Firmino.

“That I should study Milligan,” said Don Fernando, “because the logic was the same, and that is that every player who pretends to be collaborating with another is in fact constructing a sequence of cards which will trap his opponent and limit his choices. What do you think of that?”

“Some game,” replied Firmino.

“You’ve said it,” agreed Don Fernando, “but that’s what the nuclear balance of our planet rests on — on Milligan.

He tapped the top of one of the stacks of cards.

“But I play it on my own, introducing the variant of Spite and Malice, it seems to me more appropriate.”

“Meaning what?” asked Firmino.

“That I play a game of patience in such a way as to be at the same time myself and my opponent, I think the situation requires it, being concerned with missiles to be launched and others to be avoided.”

“One missile we have got,” declared Firmino, evidently pleased with himself, “it hasn’t got a nuclear warhead but it’s better than nothing.”

Don Fernando broke up his game of patience and collected the cards one by one. “You interest me, young man,” he said.

“At ‘Puccini's Butterfly,’” said Firmino, “drugs are not only peddled but consumed on the premises. In the corridor at the back there are private rooms, complete with comfortable sofas and operatic music, I think it is mostly cocaine but there could be other stuff as well, a sniff costs two hundred dollars, and the man who runs the show is certainly Titânio Silva. Shall I shoot him down in our paper?”

The lawyer got to his feet and crossed the room unsteadily. He stopped near an Empire-style console on which stood a framed photograph which Firmino had not noticed before. He propped an elbow on the marble top of the console, assuming an attitude which to Firmino appeared theatrical and almost as if he were addressing a court of law.

“You are a good reporter, young man,” he exclaimed, “within certain limits of course, but don’t go doing a Don Quixote on me, because Sergeant Titânio Silva is a very dangerous windmill. And since we well know that our gallant Don Quixote got the worst of it when he was caught up in the sails of the windmill, and since I cannot and have no wish to be his Sancho Panza anointing his poor bruised body with balsamic oils, I will tell you one thing only, so listen carefully. Listen carefully because it’s of basic importance as a move in our game of Milligan. You will now proceed to draw up an exhaustive statement to send to a press agency, describing ‘Puccini's Butterfly’ in the minutest detail, with its little cozy dens, its operatic music, its packets of various substances and dollars accurately added up by the efficient cashier Titânio Silva, all this, I say, will be reported en bloc by the Portuguese press, all the papers possible or imaginable, that part of it which espouses the magnificent and progressive destinies of the human race and also the sector devoted to the sports cars owned by the petty manufacturers of the North, which after all just means another way of conceiving the magnificent and progressive destinies, in short, every paper in its own way will be forced to publish this story, some with savage rage, others scandalized, others again with reservations, but they will all have to write that probably, and I repeat probably, in the face of incontestable evidence, on those premises, with perfect impunity, on account of the curious forgetfulness of the Republican Guardia Nacional, which has never taken it into its head to search them, are peddled certain oneirizing powders, how’s that for a description? at the modest price of two hundred dollars a sniff, which is to say a third of the monthly wage of the average Portuguese worker. In this way we will bestow on ‘Puccini’s Butterfly,’ and obviously also on Senhor Titânio, the privilege of a search by the criminal investigation department.”

The lawyer paused as if to draw breath. And draw it he did, like a drowning man, and the sound he made was like a pair of old bellows.

“It’s all the fault of these puros,” said he, “I have to smoke these Spanish puros because you can’t get Havanas any more, they’ve become a memory, but perhaps that island itself has become a mere memory.” Then he continued: “We are straying from the point, though in fact it is only I who am straying from the point, please forgive me, I have too many things buzzing about in my head today.”

The hand on which his chin was resting was all the while fingering his flabby cheek.

“And then I slept badly, I have too many sleepless nights, and sleepless nights bring ghosts with them and make time recoil. Do you know what it means when time recoils?”

He looked questioningly at Firmino, and Firmino once again felt nettled and embarrassed. He didn’t at all like the way Don Fernando treated him, and perhaps others, as if he were looking for an accomplice, as if expecting a confirmation of his doubts, but in an almost threatening manner.

“I don’t know what you mean, sir,” he said, “you talk in such an ambiguous way, I don’t understand what you mean by time recoiling.”

“I realize,” murmured the lawyer, “that you are not the right person to talk to on the subject of time. Of course, you are young, and for you time is a ribbon stretching out before you, you are like a driver on an unknown road, whose only interest is in what will happen after the next bend. But that was not what I meant to say, I was referring to a theoretical concept, hell and dammit, who knows why theories have such a hold on me, perhaps because I practice law, and that too is one enormous theory, a shaky edifice surmounted by an infinitely great dome, like the celestial vault which we may observe while comfortably seated in a planetarium. You know, I once happened to come across a treatise on the theory of physics, one of those elucubrations thought up by mathematicians cloistered in comfortable cells in universities, and it spoke of a time, and one phrase really struck me and made me think, a phrase which said that at a certain time, in the universe, time came into existence. This scientist perfidiously added that this concept cannot be grasped by our mental faculties.”

He looked at Firmino with his small inquisitorial eyes. He shifted his position. He now thrust his hands into his pockets, in the attitude of a street urchin taunting someone.

“I do not wish to appear presumptuous,” he said with a provocative air, “but such an abstract concept needed a translation into human terms, do you understand me?”

“I’m doing my best,” responded Firmino.

“Dreams,” resumed the lawyer, “the translation of theoretical physics into human terms is possible only in dreams. Because in fact the translation of this concept can occur only here, right inside here.”

And he tapped his temple with a forefinger.

“Here in our little heads,” he went on, “but only when they are sleeping, in that uncontrollable space which according to Dr. Freud is the free state of Unconscious. It is true that that formidable sleuth could not make a connection between dream and the theorem of theoretical physics, but it would be interesting if someone did it some day. Do you mind my smoking?”

He tottered to the little table and lit one of his cigars. He took a puff without inhaling and blew some smoke rings.

“I sometimes dream about my grandmother,” he said pensively, “all too often I dream about her. She was very important to my childhood, you know, I was practically brought up by her, even though I was really in the hands of governesses. And sometimes I dream of her as a child. Because, to be sure, even my grandmother was once a child. That terrible old woman, as fat as I am now, with her hair all done up in a bun and a velvet ribbon round her neck, and her black silk dresses, her way of staring at me without a word when she made me have tea with her in her apartments, well, that fearsome woman who was my waking nightmare has now entered my dreams, and she has entered them as a child, what a strange thing to happen, because I could never have imagined that the old harridan had once been a child, but a child she is in my dream, in a little blue dress as light as a cloud, with bare feet, and curls tumbling on to her shoulders: and they are blond curls. I am on the other side of a stream and she is trying to reach me by setting her rosy little feet on stones in the running water. I know that she is my grandmother, but at the same time she is a little girl, just as I am a little boy. I don’t know if I have explained myself. Have I?”

“I wouldn’t know,” replied Firmino cautiously.

“I haven’t,” continued the lawyer, “because dreams can’t be explained, they don’t take place within the sphere of the expressible, as Dr. Freud would have us believe, all I wanted to say was that time can begin in this way, in our dreams, but I didn’t manage to say it.”

He stubbed out his cigar and heaved one of those enormous sighs that sounded like a pair of bellows.

“I am tired,” he said, “I need to take my mind off things, I do have more concrete matters to speak to you about, but for the moment we have to go out.”

“I walked here,” Firmino pointed out, “as you know I have no means of transport.”

“Well I won’t walk for sure,” said Don Fernando, “with all this flab on me it exhausts me to walk, perhaps we can get Manuel to drive us, if he’s not too busy there in his cellar, he’s the one who acts as my chauffeur on rare occasions, he looks after my father’s car, it’s a Chevy from the 1940s but in perfect order, the engine runs as smooth as oil, we could ask him if he’ll take us for a ride.”

Firmino realized that the lawyer was waiting for his approval, so he nodded hastily. Don Fernando picked up the telephone and called Senhor Manuel.

“IT ISN’T EASY TO ESCAPE from Oporto,” said the lawyer, “but maybe the real problem is that it isn’t easy to escape from ourselves, if you will excuse the triteness.”

The car was humming along the coast road, Senhor Manuel was driving very carefully, darkness had fallen and on their left the lights of the city were already distant. They passed an enormous slate-roofed building, the lawyer waved a vague hand towards it.

“That’s the old headquarters of the Electricity Company,” he said, “what a grim building, eh? now it’s a sort of depository for all the memories of the city, but when I was a child and they took me to the farm electric light had not yet arrived in the countryside, people made do with oil-lamps.”

“There at the Horse Farm?” asked Manuel over his shoulder.

“Yes, at the Horse Farm,” replied the lawyer.

He wound down the window and let in a bit of air.

“The Horse Farm is my early childhood,” he said in a low voice, “the first years of my life were spent there, my German governess took me into the city for Sunday tea with my grandmother, the woman who was a substitute mother to me lived at the farm, her name was Mena.”

The car crossed a bridge and turned right onto a road with little traffic. At the turning the headlights showed a couple of signposts: Areinho, Massarelos. Places Firmino had never heard of.

“When I was a child it was a flourishing farm,” said the lawyer, “and they called it the Horse Farm because there were horses for the most part, but also mules and pigs. No cows, because the farm managers kept the cows on the farms up north, near Amarante. Down here it was mostly horses.”

He sighed. But this time the sigh was hushed and muted, almost imperceptible.

“My wet-nurse was called Mena,” he continued in a whisper. “That was a diminutive, but I always called her Mena, Mamma Mena, a Junoesque woman with breasts that could have suckled ten babies, and there I sought comfort, the bosom of Mamma Mena.”

“Happy memories in fact,” observed Firmino.

“Mena died too young alas,” continued the lawyer, ignoring what Firmino had said, “and I have given the farm to her son, making him promise to go on keeping a few horses, and he still has three or four, even if he makes a loss on them, he only does it to comply with this whim of mine, so that I still feel myself to be in my childhood home, where I can take refuge when I feel the need for comfort and contemplation. Jorge, Mamma Mena’s son, is the only relative I have left, he’s my foster-brother, and I can come to his house any time I like. So you see, young man, you are very privileged this evening.”

“I am well aware of it,” replied Firmino.

Senhor Manuel turned down a narrow dirt road where the car left a cloud of dust in its wake. This dirt road ended at a yard on the other side of which rose a traditional old farmhouse. Under the arches an elderly man was waiting. The lawyer got out of the car and embraced him, Firmino shook his hand, the man murmured some words of welcome, and Firmino realized that this was Don Fernando’s foster-brother. They entered a rustic room with a beamed ceiling where there was a table laid for five. Firmino was invited to take a seat while Senhor Jorge led the lawyer into the kitchen. When they returned they were each carrying a glass of white wine, and the girl who followed in their wake filled all the glasses.

“This wine comes from the farm,” explained the lawyer, “my brother sells wine for export, but you won’t find this vintage on the market, it’s strictly for home consumption.”

They drank a toast and took their places at the table.

“Ask your wife to join us,” said the lawyer to Senhor Jorge.

“You know she’d be embarrassed,” replied Senhor Jorge, “she’d rather eat in the kitchen with the girl, she says it’s men’s talk.”

“Bring your wife in,” said Don Fernando firmly, “I want her to sit at table with us.”

The wife came in bearing a laden tray, gave a little bow and sat down without a word.

“Spare-ribs,” said Jorge to Don Fernando almost apologetically, “but you telephoned at the last moment, it’s the best we could get ready in time. The pork isn’t our own, but you can trust it.”

During supper no one said very much. A bit of chat about the weather, the sweltering heat, and how the traffic had become impossible, things of that sort. Then Senhor Manuel dared a teasing remark: “Ah, Jorge my friend, if only I could have a cook like yours in my restaurant…”

“My cook is my wife,” said Senhor Jorge ingenuously. The conversation ended there.

The girl who had poured out the wine came back and served coffee.

“She’s Joaquim’s granddaughter,” said Jorge turning to Don Fernando, “she spends more time at our house than at her own, do you remember Joaquim? He suffered a lot before he died.”

The lawyer nodded but said nothing. Senhor Jorge uncorked a bottle of grappa and filled everyone’s glass.

“Fernando,” he said, “Manuel and I will stay here and chat, we have a lot to say to each other about vintage cars, if you want to take your guest to see the horses by all means do so.”

Don Fernando got to his feet with his glass of grappa in his hand and Firmino followed him out of the house. It was a starry night and the sky was luminous beyond belief. From behind the hill rose the reflection of the lights of Oporto. The lawyer took a few steps into the yard with Firmino close beside him. He raised one arm and made a sweeping gesture round the yard.

“Quinces,” he said, “all round here once upon a time there used to be quince trees. The pigs used to guzzle underneath them because there were masses of windfalls. Mena used to make quince jam in an old black pot hung over the kitchen fire.”

On the other side of the yard were the dark outlines of the stables and barns. The lawyer made for them with his lumbering gait.

“Does the name of Arthur London mean anything to you?” he murmured.

Firmino gave it a moment’s thought. Answering one of this lawyer’s unpredictable questions he was always scared of making a blunder.

“Wasn’t he a big Czechoslovakian politician tortured by the Communists there?” was all he came up with.

“To make him swear to a lie,” added the lawyer, “and later he wrote a book about it, it’s called The Confession.”

“I’ve seen the film,” said Firmino.

“That’ll do,” murmured the lawyer, “his most brutal jailers were called Kohoutek and Smola, those are their very names.”

He opened the stable door and entered. There were three horses inside, one of which stamped a little as if in alarm. Above the doorway was the kind of blue light bulb you find in trains. The lawyer sat heavily down on a bale of straw. Firmino followed his example.

“I love the smell of this place,” said Don Fernando, “whenever I feel depressed I come here, I breathe in this smell and look at the horses.”

He slapped his enormous belly.

“I believe that for a man like me, with such a repulsively deformed body, simply to look at the beauty of horses is a kind of consolation, it gives us faith in nature. Incidentally, does the name of Henri Alleg mean anything to you?”

Firmino was once again caught unawares. He preferred to say nothing, and simply shook his head in the semi-darkness.

“A pity,” said the lawyer, “he was a colleague of yours, a journalist, and in a book called La Question he tells us how in 1957 he was accused by the French army in Algeria of being a Communist and pro-Algerian, and he, a European and Frenchman, was tortured in Algiers to make him reveal the names of the other pro-Algerian partisans. To recapitulate, Arthur London was tortured by the Communists, Henri Alleg was tortured because he was a Communist. Which goes to show that torture can be practiced by all parties, and this is the real problem.”

Firmino said nothing. One of the horses gave a sudden neigh, and to Firmino’s ears it was a disquieting sound.

“Alleg’s jailer was called Charbonnier,” went on the lawyer almost in a whisper, “he was a lieutenant in the paras, it was he, Charbonnier, who gave electric shocks to Alleg’s testicles. I have a mania for remembering the names of torturers, for some reason remembering the names of torturers means something to me, and do you know why? because torture is an individual responsibility, to say you’re obeying orders from above is inexcusable, too many people have used that shabby excuse to shield themselves by legal quibbles, do you follow me? They hide behind the Grundnorm.”

He heaved an enormous sigh, which a horse acknowledged by pawing the ground angrily.

“Many years ago, when I was young and full of enthusiasm, and still thought that writing served some purpose, it entered my head to write about torture. I came back from Geneva, and at that time Portugal was a dictatorship and under the thumb of the Political Police, a body of men who knew exactly how to extort confessions, if you understand me. I had a pretty good field of enquiry available right here in Portugal, the Portuguese Inquisition, and I started to delve into the archives of the Torre do Tombo. I can assure you that the refined methods of the jailers who tortured people in our country for centuries are of truly special interest, so learned they were about the muscles of the human body, as studied by the great anatomist Vesalius, to the reactions of the principal nerves which traverse our limbs, our poor little genitals, a perfect knowledge of anatomy, and all done in the name of the Grundnorm, and you can’t get more Grundnorm than that, the Absolute Norm, you follow me.”

“Meaning what?” enquired Firmino.

“Meaning God,” responded the lawyer. “Those diligent, highly refined torturers were working in the name of God, from him they had received the orders from above, the concept is practically the same: I am not responsible, I am a simple sergeant, I’ve had orders from my captain, I am not responsible, and I am only a humble captain, I’ve had orders from my general, or from the Government. Or else from God. The most unbeatable thing.”

“But all the same you wrote nothing?” asked Firmino.

“I gave up on it.”

“Forgive me for asking,” said Firmino, “but why?”

“Who knows?” answered Don Fernando, “perhaps it seemed to me fruitless to write against the Grundnorm, and in any case I’d read an essay on torture by a very bumptious German writer, and it made up my mind for me.”

“Forgive my asking,” said Firmino, “but do you read only German writers?”

“Mostly,” replied Don Fernando, “because even though I grew up in Portugal it may be that culturally speaking I am really German, that was the first language I learnt to express myself in. The author of that essay was called Alexander Mitscherlich, he was a psychoanalyst, because unfortunately even psychoanalysts have started to busy themselves with these problems, and he came up with the image of Christ Crucified, and stated that it is an image closely connected with our culture, and in some way he uses this to maintain that if in the Unconscious death itself is not a sufficient punishment, then it comes down to this: don’t let’s kid ourselves, torture is here to stay, because we cannot suppress the destructive impulses of mankind. To put it more briefly, we’d better resign ourselves because I’homme est méchant. For all his Freudian theories that’s all this fellow had to say: that mankind is wicked. I therefore made a different choice.”

“And what was that?” asked Firmino.

“To dump theory and put things into practice,” said Don Fernando, “it is humbler to go into court and defend those who undergo such treatment. I couldn’t say whether it’s more useful to write a treatise on agriculture or to break up a clod of earth with a mattock, but I decided to work with the mattock, like a peasant. I spoke of humility just now, but don’t put too much faith in that, because when it comes down to it my attitude is more one of pride.”

“Why are you telling me all this?” asked Firmino.

“Damasceno Monteiro was tortured,” said the lawyer quietly, “he has the marks of cigarette burns all over his torso.”

“How do you know that?”

“I asked for a second autopsy,” replied Don Fernando, “at the first autopsy they failed to report this small detail.”

He took a deep breath and emitted an asthmatic wheeze.

“Let’s go outside,” he said, “I need some fresh air. But in the meanwhile you must report this in your newspaper, naturally from an unknown source, but you must inform public opinion at once, and in two or three days’ time we may speak of the so-called secrecy covering the investigations now under way, but let’s go one step at a time.”

They went out into the yard. Don Fernando raised his head to look at the vault of the heavens.

“Millions of stars,” he said, “millions of nebulae, fuck, millions of nebulae, and here we are fretting about electrodes applied to people’s genitals.”