Alentejo Blue (18 page)

‘Never mind,’ said Teresa. ‘Were you busy this morning?’

‘Oil leak on a Peugeot 504. Broken fan belt on a Fiesta. Senhor Mendes brought the Mercedes in for a service. I said, “Why, isn’t she running right?” The inspection was only six months ago. He said . . .’

‘Well,’ said Teresa, ‘sounds busy.’ She nodded towards the computers. ‘Shall we try it out?’

‘Can’t,’ said Antonio. ‘There’s no connection.’

‘Of course not, no.’ She looked at Antonio’s dark, accepting eyes, the slightly goofy way his hair sprang away from the parting, the length of his earlobes smudged with dirt.
This is a great opportunity to make new friends.
‘I love you,’ she whispered.

‘Me too,’ said Antonio, without urgency.

‘I mean it.’ How fierce she sounded.

‘Me too,’ he repeated and she pulled away.

Paula, wearing a tight skirt that showed the line of her knickers, came to take their order.

Teresa stood up and kissed her. ‘I’m so happy for you, Paula. It’s really wonderful.’

Paula fanned the fingers of her left hand and studied the ring. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m a lucky girl.’

Antonio was at least twice as handsome as Vicente, who had narrow shoulders and small, mean eyes.

‘Exactly,’ said Teresa, ‘you’ve done well for yourself. You couldn’t do better than Vicente.’

‘Thank you,’ said Paula, a little louder than necessary. ‘And it’s time for me, really, to
grow up
.’

‘Oh, yes, it’s just right for you. Now you know for certain what the rest of your life will be. I wish you every happiness, Paula, now and for always.’

‘Me too,’ said Antonio.

Paula licked the end of her pencil and stabbed her order pad. ‘What’s it to be?’

‘I’m starving,’ said Antonio.

‘We’ve got cheese toast, ham toast or cheese and ham toast,’ said Paula, ‘kitchen’s not on till next week.’

Teresa picked pink slivers of ham from her sandwich. The crust, toasted black, was sharp enough to cut your finger. She watched Antonio eat with his head down over the plate, the broad brown sweep of his cheeks peppered with stubble. He was nervous about tomorrow and it was making him more tongue-tied than ever. Poor Antonio. She knew him better than he knew himself.

He lifted his face and their eyes locked. Teresa burned. The knowledge of what lay ahead welded them together. Forged in this moment was an everlasting bond. Where the minds, the souls, came together, the bodies would naturally follow.

Antonio spoiled it by chewing. She sighed and looked away but forgave him. Probably he felt too naked. He didn’t understand that not a person here had eyes to see.

Clara came in, her baby brother like a storm cloud over her shoulder. ‘The Pope is sick again,’ she said, sinking down at the table. ‘I saw it on the television.’ She nodded and panted, pleased to have shared the bad news.

‘So much suffering,’ said Teresa. She stroked Hugo’s head. It was huge. No wonder he never wanted to walk. He would be toppled by that head.

‘Anyway,’ said Clara, dragging out the word, ‘do you want to come round tonight? I’m babysitting but I got this braider out of the catalogue; it’s electric and you put three strands in and press the button and it whizzes round and they’re really, like, the best braids.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe I have to work.’ Teresa stroked Hugo’s cheek. Hugo knew that Clara didn’t want to look after him. That was why he gave her such a hard time. ‘Cutie-pie,’ she said. ‘Little angel.’

Hugo bit her finger.

Teresa screamed and jumped out of her seat.

Hugo thrashed and unleashed the full works. Clara tried to rock him in her arms but it was like juggling with firecrackers. Glaring at Teresa she pinned Hugo in a fireman’s hoist and said, ‘Oh, brilliant.’

‘He bit me,’ Teresa hissed. ‘My God.’

Clara was leaving. ‘He’s two years old,’ she called back. ‘He doesn’t like to be fussed with,’ she added, as though Teresa knew nothing about children.

Antonio ordered ice-cream and Paula brought two little plastic cartons of something pink and wavy from one of the chest freezers. Teresa took a sniff. ‘Smells of fish. Probably they didn’t clean out the freezers.’

Antonio got that look, a kid in class with his hand up, bursting with the answer. ‘Prawn ice-cream,’ he said, tapping with his spoon. ‘It’s prawn ice-cream.’

Teresa laughed politely. It wasn’t his fault she was always one step ahead. ‘What about that Hugo, though? He bit me.’

Antonio shrugged. ‘Someone wants to give him a good slap.’

Teresa thought so too. ‘I would never slap a child,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘Physical punishment of a child is never acceptable,’ said Teresa, translating from the au pair information sheet.

‘Why not?’ said Antonio, clearly puzzled.

‘Stop doing that,’ she barked.

‘Doing what?’

‘
That
. Just don’t . . . oh, never mind.’

They sat in silence. A fly crawled across Antonio’s forehead and disappeared into his hair.

‘Want a beer?’ he said.

‘I’ve got to get back to work.’

‘There’s half an hour yet.’

They had a beer. Paula swayed by on her heels. She always wore heels because of her short legs. Teresa wasn’t being bitchy but it only made things worse.

‘Are you going there in the morning?’ Teresa knew he was but she wanted to talk about it.

‘Yes.’

‘And your mother won’t . . . you know, she won’t come looking for you, later on?’

‘No.’

‘You’ll get everything ready?’

Antonio, she could see, did not know what she meant by this. ‘Yes,’ he said, to please her.

She did not know what she meant either. What would he get ready? What preparations would he make?

The house at Corte Brique was owned by a couple from Lisbon. It was their holiday house. Antonio’s mother looked after it. She was going to give him the keys tomorrow because there were two drains that needed unblocking, a dripping tap and a broken toilet flush. Antonio was good with his hands.

‘What’s it like, the house? Is it nice?’

‘It’s nice,’ said Antonio decisively. ‘There’s a swimming pool.’

She knew there was a swimming pool. It was the only thing he had told her and she had imagined the rest.

‘But what would you say it’s like? How would you describe it?’

Antonio took a deep breath. ‘I’d say . . . that it’s nice. Very nice.’

‘I’ve seen her on television, the wife, the reporter. You can tell it’s not fake jewellery she’s wearing.’

‘That’s right,’ said Antonio, clearly hoping that settled things.

Teresa wet her lips. ‘I just want everything to be perfect.’

‘Me too,’ said Antonio, squeezing her knee too hard.

A butterfly, powder blue, lit briefly on the neck of her bottle, on the table top, on the back of a chair, tilting and turning like a heroine making a dizzy escape. Teresa watched it dip and flutter across the room to the bar, where it wheeled away from the line of old bent backs and shaved necks and dropped suddenly to the floor.

Listen, Teresa addressed it silently, I know how you feel.

The café had been open three hours and already it felt like it had been there for ever. Although the door and one window stood open, the air was thick as paste and compromised by fish. The walls were a valiant shade of green but on them hung last year’s calendar and a stupid painting of a bullfight. It was an internet café without the internet and nobody expected any better. People took up their places, the old ones at the bar, the younger ones at the tables, as if no other course were possible and this sense, this weary inevitability, pressed down on her and made her yawn.

She stretched and looked behind her and saw the English writer seated close to the chest freezers. His lips were red and full, the blood too close to the surface. He had a notebook open but stared into the middle distance as though he were having a vision. In a way he was handsome with his blond hair and bloody lips but he made her skin crawl. Clara said he was banging the other Englishman’s wife. Was it true? It made a kind of sense. Better that they keep to their own.

The writer looked at her then. He seemed to know she had been staring. Damn him, she thought, turning. What does he want here anyway? Suddenly she was filled with rage. She drained the last of her beer. Don’t be so stupid, she told herself. You are going to London and he has come here. What is wrong with that?

She gazed in desperation round the room, certain that if she left everything would change. Didn’t she want that? Didn’t she?

She thought about the other Englishman, who never washed his clothes. How annoying it was. It made a mockery of her going all the way there with him wandering around here like that. When she was in London she didn’t want people to look at him and think of her. It was so unfair. And really and honestly even if the wife was sleeping with the writer the least she could do was to wash her husband’s clothes.

‘I’ve got to go,’ she said and picked up her purse.

Antonio had that look again. He whispered, ‘I
am
prepared, you know, for tomorrow.’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘What do you mean?’ Maybe he meant candles. She had bought some already but that didn’t matter.

‘I’ve got some,
you know
, of those things that we’ll need.’

‘What things?’

Antonio blushed but he almost looked angry. ‘
You know, when we
 . . .’

A stomach interjected itself across her line of sight. A high-pitched voice said, ‘Internet café, yes? Internet café?’

Antonio leaned back, lit a cigarette and blew smoke rings. There he was. The trainee mechanic of a village garage.

‘Senhor Vasco,’ said Teresa, ‘I’m afraid the connection isn’t working yet.’

Vasco made some reply but at a frequency unintelligible to the human ear.

‘Ah, yes,’ she said vaguely, gazing up the undulating slope. From this angle his head appeared several sizes too small. It was tiring, almost dizzying, to keep noticing the way all these bodies failed to fit properly together.

‘Tell me,’ said Vasco, fingering his braces, ‘is my life worth something?’

‘My life won’t be,’ said Teresa, smiling, ‘if I don’t get back to the shop on time.’ She stood up.

‘Senhora Mendes explained everything to me. She said, “Now I can sleep soundly, with a price on my husband’s head.” She said, “Teresa will come to see you too. She won’t forget about you.”’

Teresa looked at Antonio but he was no help at all. There was nothing to do but surrender. ‘When would you like me to come?’

‘When I was a young man,’ said Vasco, ‘I worked abroad, in Provincetown, Cape Cod, the United States of America . . .’

Teresa took a step backwards.

‘. . .  and there was a notice that hung in the kitchens . . .’

Though she did not see his feet move, the great bulk of him drew nearer.

‘. . .  it was placed there by my manager, a very conscientious man, and it said . . .’

His face looked like the bread dough that Mãe rested on a marble slab.

‘. . .  do not put off until tomorrow that which can be done today . . .’

He rubbed his hands together, which surely signalled the end.

‘. . .  and so I propose to you that we set the appointment, without delay, for this very evening. I shall expect to see you then.’

Sometimes she felt like a social worker. Teresa set her brochures out on the cracked Formica bar and pulled up a stool. Vasco’s café was empty. He was wiping the tables with a damp rag and humming. Every time he moved past he caught a chair or a table leg and set the flimsy plastic vibrating. She watched him in the cloudy mirror. The last of the evening sun wound gold around the spirit bottles and licked up the mirror’s edge. The wooden legs of the stool were warm as sleeping kittens and she wrapped her own around them.

‘All done,’ cried Vasco, hurrying to the other side of the bar. He flicked the rag over his shoulder. One end wrapped round his neck but he did not notice or mind. ‘This business,’ he said, ‘is a constant war on germs. Now, I am all ears –’ he located the relevant items – ‘you see, all ears.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Well. What I’m here to talk about, of course . . .’

‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ said Vasco, ‘that so-called internet café will never last. Even when – even
if
– they get their little gimmick working, that will not save their skins.’

‘Very true,’ said Teresa. If she could get started straight away there was a chance if not to make a sale then at least to get out of here before dark. ‘Could I ask you first to take a look at this?’ She turned a brochure towards him and tapped it smartly with her pen.

Vasco picked up the brochure without a glance. ‘Always read the small print,’ he advised. ‘When you go into business without knowing the small print you are in deep, deep trouble. Let me say just this . . .’

This meant he was going to talk for a long time. She cast about for a way to head him off.

‘. . .  if Eduardo had come to me openly and honestly and said, “My son, Armenio, wants to open up a café, what advice do you have for him?” If he had come and spoken to me this way I would have revealed to him the small print. This business is about details. I learned that many years ago. It was a long apprenticeship, many years in the United States of America, and I was trained by some of the best. Some people think there is nothing to it, just put out the tables and chairs and people will flock and throng, but I didn’t achieve this –’ he waved the brochure at the empty seats – ‘all this, without paying attention to detail.’ Vasco pulled the grey cloth from round his neck and assaulted the Formica.

‘If you turn to page four,’ said Teresa, ‘the main points are clearly laid out.’

‘Yes, yes, I know,’ said Vasco, as though he had been studying it closely. ‘Cheap beer, I have to tell you, is not enough. Tonight, they will go. Everyone is there for the cheap beer, but how long before they come back?’