The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro

Two

FIRMINO WAS HELD UP AT THE traffic light at Largo do Rato. It was an interminable red light, he knew, and the impatient taxi behind him was practically nudging his back bumper. Firmino knew that one must be very patient about the works undertaken by a Council that promised people a clean and tidy city, and was straining every nerve to make it the venue of the International Exhibition. This would be a world event, declared the posters erected at all the neuralgic points in the traffic, one of those events which would raise Lisbon to the status of a City of the Future. For the moment Firmino knew only what his immediate future was to be, and knew no other. It was to wait for at least five minutes at the light, until the excavator shifted out of the way, and even if the light turned green there was no means of moving, you still had to wait. He therefore resigned himself, lit one of the Multifilter cigarettes sent him by a Swiss friend, tuned the radio in to the program “Our Listeners Ask Us,” just to find out what was going on, and glanced up at the electronic clock at the top of the building opposite. It said two o’clock in the afternoon and gave a temperature reading of one hundred and four degrees. Well after all, it was August.

Firmino was on his way back from a week’s holiday with his girlfriend in a little village in Alentejo, and bracing days they had been, even if they had found the tides pretty fierce. However, as always before, Alentejo had not let him down. They had found farmhouse accommodation right on the coast, the owners were German, only nine rooms, and then there were the pinewoods, the beach to themselves, love-play in the open air and local cooking. He took a look at himself in the rear-view mirror: he had a fine tan, he was feeling in good shape, he didn’t give a damn about the International Exhibition and was keen to get back to his job on the newspaper. Nor was it only keenness, it was sheer necessity. For his holiday he had spent his previous month’s wages down to the last penny.

The light went green, the bulldozer pulled aside and Firmino moved on. He turned off the square at Rua Alexandre Herculano and then took the Avenida da Liberdade. At the Saldanha he found himself in a bottleneck. There had been an accident in the midstream of traffic and all the cars were edging to squeeze into the side lanes. Firmino selected the lane reserved for buses, hoping there were no traffic police in the immediate vicinity. He had recently done some sums with Catarina and realized that fines accounted for ten per cent of his meager monthly salary. But maybe at two in the afternoon in that heat there wouldn’t be any traffic cops along the avenue. If there were it was just too bad. When he drove past the National Library he could not help slowing up a little to give it a nostalgic glance. He thought of the afternoons spent in the reading room studying the novels of Elio Vittorini and his vague project of writing a critical essay to be called “The Influence of Vittorini on the Post-War Portuguese Novel.” And with that nostalgia came the smell of salt cod frying in the Library’s self-service canteen where he had lunched for weeks on end. Ah, salt cod and Vittorini! But the project had so far remained merely a project. Who knows, maybe he would take it up again when he had a little time to spare.

He arrived at the Lumiar and skirted the buildings of the Holiday Inn. A horrible monster. Middle-class Americans disembarked there looking for picturesque Old Lisbon and found themselves on the contrary plumb in the middle of a neighborhood ravaged by new buildings plus the flyover to the airport and the outer beltway. Finding a parking space was always a problem. He pulled in facing a block of flats with an electronic gate, doing his best not to obstruct the entrance. His car stuck out a good half-meter, but to hell with it. If they towed it away his fine-quota would go up by at least two per cent, which meant that he would be unable to buy the last volume of the Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana, an essential tool for the study of Vittorini. Oh well!

A few meters away loomed the newspaper building, a hideous, vulgar cement edifice built in the 1970s and completely devoid of feature. Most floors were occupied by work-a-day people with jobs in the center, who used their apartments only as dormitories. To give a touch of color to the dismal balconies some of the tenants had installed a sun-umbrella and plastic garden chairs. On the topmost balcony, quite in contrast with such bourgeois embellishments, was an eye-catching placard announcing in vermilion lettering: O ACONTECIMENTO: “What every citizen needs to know.”

This was his paper, and he made his way there in buoyant spirits. He was aware that he had to face the bosomy and paralyzed telephonist who from her wheelchair directed all the sections of the newspaper, that before reaching his cubbyhole he had to get past the desk of Dr. Silva, head of the editorial staff, who used his mothers surname, Huppert, because a French name was more stylish, and that even when he had gained his own desk he would feel the usual intolerable claustrophobia he always felt, because the cubicle with fake walls in which they had confined him had no window. Firmino knew all this, yet he pressed on with buoyant heart.

The paralytic lady had fallen asleep in her wheelchair. Before her abundant breast was a small, empty tinfoil container with greasy edges. It had been her lunch, delivered by the fast-food at the corner. Firmino walked past her with some relief and entered the elevator. It didn’t have any doors, like a freight elevator. Beneath the buttons was a metal plaque engraved with the words “Use of this elevator is forbidden to unaccompanied minors.” Beside this, in felt pen, someone had scrawled: Fuck you. By way of compensation the architect who had dreamt up this peerless building had sought to cheer the occupants of the elevator with music piped through a miniature loudspeaker. It was always the same tune: “Strangers in the Night.” At the third floor the elevator came to a halt. There entered an elderly lady with a dyed perm which suffused a horrendous perfume.

“Going down?” asked the lady without so much as a nod.

“Going up,” replied Firmino.

“I’m going down,” said the lady curtly. And she pressed the down button.

Firmino resigned himself and down he went, the lady walked off without so much as a good-day and he went up. When he reached the fourth floor he stood for one disconcerted moment on the landing. What to do? he wondered. What if he had gone to the airport and got on a flight to Paris? Paris, the great magazines, the special correspondents, all those trips the world over. Like a complete cosmopolitan journalist. Notions like this sometimes came to him, the urge to change his life once and for all, a radical choice, a sudden impulse. But the problem was that he didn’t have a bean and air tickets run into money. So does Paris. Firmino pushed open the door and went in.

The office premises were what is called open-plan. But originally, of course, they had not been designed as such. They had been converted by knocking down the dividing walls of the apartment, easy enough to demolish since they were made of hollow bricks. This had all been thought up by the firm previously occupying the premises, exporting tinned tuna-fish, and having inherited them in that condition the Editor had made the best of a bad job.

There was no one sitting at the two desks facing the entrance. The first was usually occupied by a mature spinster who acted as secretary, the other by a journalist who worked at the only computer the paper possessed. The third desk was that of Senhor Silva, or rather Huppert, as he signed his articles for the paper.

“Good afternoon, Senhor Silva,” said Firmino amiably.

Senhor Silva eyed him with some severity.

“The Editor is furious,” he said between his teeth.

“Why is that?” asked Firmino.

“Because he didn’t know how to contact you.”

“But I was at the sea,” explained Firmino.

“You can’t go to the sea in times like these,” said Senhor Silva acidly. He then pronounced his pet phrase: mala tempora currunt.

“That’s all very well,” returned Firmino, “but I was only supposed to be back tomorrow.”

Senhor Silva made no answer, but motioned towards the frosted-glass door of the Editor’s little office.

Firmino knocked and breezed straight in. The Editor was on the telephone and gestured to him to wait. Firmino closed the door and remained standing. It was stiflingly hot in that little room and the air conditioner was turned off. Yet the Editor was dressed in an impeccable grey jacket and wearing a tie. Also a white shirt. He hung up and raked Firmino from stem to stern.

“Where were you holing out?” he demanded irritably.

“Alentejo,” answered Firmino.

“What were you doing in Alentejo?” demanded the Editor more irritably still.

“I am on holiday,” pointed out Firmino, “and my holiday doesn’t end until tomorrow, I’ve called in at the paper simply to know if there’s anything new, and whether I can make myself useful.”

“You’re not useful,” snapped the Editor, “you’re indispensable, and you’re leaving on the six o’clock train.”

It occurred to Firmino that it might be better to sit down. He did so, and lit a cigarette.

“Where to?” he asked imperturbably.

“To Oporto of course,” replied the Editor in a neutral voice.

“Why of course?” asked Firmino, attempting to adopt the same neutral tone.

“Because there’s been a bit of dirty work up there,” said the Editor, “the sort of thing that’s going to cause rivers of ink to flow.”

“Can’t our man in Oporto cope with it?” asked Firmino.

“No he can’t, this is big stuff,” stated the Editor.

“Then send Senhor Silva,” replied Firmino calmly, “he likes traveling, and moreover he’ll be able to sign the thing with his French name.”

“He runs Editorial,” said the Editor, “his job is to edit the rubbish sent in by the various correspondents. The special correspondent is you.”

“But I’ve only just finished with the woman stabbed by her husband in Coimbra,” protested Firmino, “and that was only ten days ago, just before my holiday. I spent a whole afternoon in the morgue in Coimbra listening to the police surgeon’s evidence.”

“Too bad,” snapped the Editor, “our special correspondent is you and nobody else. Apart from that, it’s already arranged, I’ve booked you into a pension in Oporto for a week, and that’s just to start with, because this case is going to drag on.”

Firmino took a little time off to marshal his thoughts. He would have dearly liked to say that he had no love for the city of Oporto, that in Oporto they ate almost nothing but tripe à la mode d’Oporto and that tripe made him sick, that Oporto was cursed by sweltering damp heat, that the pension he had been booked in to was doubtless a frightful dump with a bathroom on the landing and that he would die of sheer melancholy. But instead of all this he said:

“Sir, I have to finish my study of the Post-War Portuguese novel, it’s a very important thing for me, and anyway I have already signed a contract with the publisher.”

“It’s a nasty business,” cut in the Editor, “a mystery that has to be solved, the public has its tongue hanging out, it’s the talk of the day.”

The Editor lit a cigarette, lowered his voice as if confessing a secret, and murmured: “They have discovered a headless corpse in the vicinity of Matosinhos, it is still unidentified, it was found by a gypsy, Manolo by name, who gave a muddled account of it to the police, and no one has managed to get another word out of him. He lives in an encampment on the outskirts of Oporto, and it’s up to you to search him out and interview him. It’ll be the scoop of the week.”

The Editor now appeared to be less flustered, as if for him the case had already been solved. He opened a drawer and took out some papers.

“Here’s the address of the pension,” he added, “it’s not a luxury hotel, but Dona Rosa is a perfect gem, I’ve known her for thirty years. And here is your check for board, lodging and expenses for one week. If something extra crops up, put it on the bill. And don’t forget, the train leaves at six.”