Taking Lives (22 page)

‘Sure.’

‘Someone could plant grapes there again.’

That day three policemen, no sign of Mello, parked on the road and ran up to Hart’s house and opened it up like you open a tin can: without violence, but everyone can see what has happened.

‘Papers,’ one of them said.

Hart said, ‘What do you need?’

He fished in the pockets of the Cerutti jacket, the one that was still a bit too smart for the valley, and he pulled out a passport.

The senior of the three cops took it, opened windows and put on a desk light, and peered at page after page. He seemed to care about the views of Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State, about the date and place of issue and the date of expiry, about the American visa with the barely readable photograph of Hart copied on to it. He ran his fingernail over the visa, checked the figures at the bottom against the birth date on page four. Then he checked the emergencies section on page ninety-four which Hart, like everyone else, had left blank. Only then did he put the passport to one side.

‘Do you have any i.d.?’ he said.

Hart said, ‘You must be joking.’

He knew that was wrong. He’d cleared Customs often enough in different countries to understand that you stand respectfully while they examine your papers because the papers don’t interest them; they want your submission, or they want you to show nerves.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Yes, of course.’

The university i.d. had a photograph. So did the back of his bank cheque card. The Indians had done a wonderful job on both of them.

But he hadn’t asked them to change the gym card; He’d meant to dispose of it, he should have left it in Hart’s house, no reason for him to carry a card for a London gym all the way to Portugal. But Hart had carried it to Holland, of course.

The senior policeman was playing out cards now, dealing them into lines with a casino precision.

He’d see the gym card. It would be incongruous. It would be enough.

It was too late to take the card back. He’d volunteered it.

The computer repair card. The library card. The Greenpeace credit card, biodegradable.

‘Where were you on the nights of 26 and 27 June?’ the senior cop asked. He held the gym card in his hand. The photograph was just a Polaroid snap, colours fast settling towards beige and magenta; it was inconclusive, surely. The cop gave it the same grave attention he had given to every other scrap of Hart’s official, carded being.

‘I don’t know,’ Hart said. ‘I could look in my diary -‘

The cop threw the gym card down.

‘Let me know,’ he said. ‘Or Captain Mello. At the police station. People in Holland want to know.’

He shuffled the cards again and stood up, flanked by his juniors, with his perfectly inexpressive policeman’s face.

‘fust those dates,’ the cop said. ‘I need an answer by the end of the day.’

When they had gone, Hart fell to the floor and started to do press-ups, for the sake of something he could control.

He was seriously alarmed, not by the check which could have been any routine check on foreigners, but by the demand that he go down to the police station to fill in the last detail. They could have waited while he found his diary. He could have told them at once.

They couldn’t possibly know what had happened on 27 June, because it was nothing that left traces. He had to check the date himself. It was the night he went drinking in a warm, brown bar, sat about and hunted; the night he met Hart for the first time.

Maria let herself into the house. He was lying on the bed, fitfully asleep and still fully dressed.

She snapped on the light, abrupt as a policeman would be.

‘Old,’ she said. ‘You sleeping?’

She looked at him with a directness he did not expect. It wasn’t politely usual, or conventional. It had something in common with the directness of the older peasant women who have never learned any other way of seeing the world.

‘I’m sleeping,’ he said. He lay still.

‘Imagine if the cops came back,’ she said. ‘If we only had ten minutes -‘

She turned off the light.

I drove Arturo to the hospital in the morning, slowly like some black car in a solemn procession.

The old man must have seen the mist in the trees most mornings of his life, seen it shift out of shape and drift through the headlights with the tar steaming below, but now he chose to stare at it; and Zulmira sat upright in the back seat. The two of them were sharp as scared animals.

Their daughter Isabel tried to take Zulmira’s right hand. She couldn’t break Zulmira’s grip on herself.

The hospital had the manageable look of a picture in a prospectus: oleanders, parking spaces, towers of glass. But inside, it was frantic like a market, women in black, bags and bundles, a whole civilian population turned out to mourn its men in the wars: men cut up by machines, men whose hearts exploded or whose brains stopped because of the drink, men broken, men who wore out when they could least afford it. Every grating and corner was full of people waiting; the hard glass and tile of the walls had gone soft with cloth and eyes and hands.

Arturo wasn’t quite expected, was about to be shunted aside to wait in line for an office that could tell him which line he should wait in next. There were processions of the sick between this office and the next.

I couldn’t bear the sight of his resignation, his patience. I barged up to the admitting desk and used my proper bourgeois manner and the oddness of my accent to get attention. After a few minutes, a nurse came for Arturo and led him away, cardboard case in one hand, down a long dark corridor that sometimes shone with the light from a far window.

Zulmira went after him at once. But a squadron of doctors bustled by, and she stopped out of deference. She sat down in the corridor and began to check the food she’d brought in another bag.

‘He won’t need that,’ Isabel said.

‘They don’t feed you in places like this.’

‘They won’t let him have it.’

‘I brought the right thing, didn’t I?’ She appealed to me as if it was my business, a jam jar of bean stew in one hand.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He won’t be able to eat much before the operation, and afterwards maybe he won’t feel like it.’

‘He’ll want this. To build him up.’

Isabel said, ‘You don’t have to stay. We’ll stay.’

Zulmira looked at me directly. Her right hand had relaxed a little, and in it was a crucifix: a metal Christ on a wooden cross. The crucifix had bitten her hand hard.

She went entirely blank for a moment, face like paper, eyes dead; and then she came back to us, still focused only on Arturo.

‘He’ll want the food,’ she said.

‘You know he can’t have it,’ Isabel said. ‘We’ll bring him food when he’s getting better.’

‘I made it for him,’ Zulmira said, stubbornly, but she had no more energy. She’d watched over Arturo all night in this hospital before, watched him shaved and white, on his back on a trolley like something being moved in a barn, his face tired even though he was coming out of chemical sleep. She thought everyone has a measured portion of luck, and she wasn’t sure if he would be there this time when he woke up. Isabel said, ‘There’s nothing we can do now.’ ‘I can wait,’ Zulmira said, fiercely. ‘I can.’ I left them. I told myself I was only cluttering a place that was already confused, that I was somehow intruding. But so was everybody else in that corridor, bumping in and out of one another’s lives, sometimes edging accidentally up on a death. I did think to check the ward number before I left, and the name of the admitting doctor.

I drove down into the town, bought an English-language newspaper, and ordered a coffee under the shades of a street cafe.

I kept clinging to ideas, even quotations, to save me from what I saw in Isabel and Arturo: their fear and their certainties, both. I remembered, as a kid, being corrupted for months by a line in Graham Greene - it must be in The Human Factor - where someone says something truly wicked: that pity is the only truly adult emotion. So I thought being adult meant detachment, the right to appropriate someone else’s pain with your pity, to feel morally involved without feeling anything stronger. I know much better now.

Someone passed me with those odd turtle gestures of neck and head that mean he wants you to know he thinks he’s recognized you, but isn’t sure he is entitled to talk. The someone passed again: Captain Mello. I put down the paper. Mello stood there, smiling.

‘Could I buy you a coffee?’ he said.

I could say only ‘Yes.’

He commanded a chair, summoned the waiter with small, authoritative gestures.

‘They’ve done the best they can with the grave,’ he said. ‘The marble drinks paint, unfortunately.’

‘I’m very grateful. I just don’t know why it was marked in the first place.’

Mello said, ‘Some people have it in their hearts to forgive. Some don’t.’

‘You knew my father,’ I said.

‘Before he left, of course.’

‘He never spoke much about those years.’

‘They’re gone,’ Mello said. ‘For better or worse.’

I said: ‘For worse?’

‘You look around you,’ Mello said, and he raked a quite ordinary shopping street of Benettons and Body Shops. ‘You know things aren’t all better.’

I saw a girl in a token skirt, with dazzlingly bare legs, two men playing drums and saxophone, windows full of pastel clothes, an old-fashioned barber, a bookshop full of academic titles and a couple of other cafes spilling out into the street.

‘We have a drug problem, of course. You can’t park your car without some toxicodependant “helping” you find a safe place, and stoving in your windscreen if you don’t pay him. You can’t walk all the streets any more.’

I saw tourists trying to make their green guides fit the sights.

‘And prices,’ Mello said. ‘People say they were happier when you could get three sardines for ten escudos. Nowadays, money frightens them. They were happy in their place.’

‘My father wasn’t.’

‘There were always exceptions. And people who worked abroad, of course, were exceptions.’

‘People worked abroad because they were hungry here.’

‘Is that what your father told you?’ Mello sipped his coffee. ‘I didn’t think so.’

I wasn’t sure I wanted this man’s version of my father. But he at least knew some of the story, and there was nobody else who would admit as much.

‘We knew you were here,’ Mello said. ‘I meant to visit you before.’

I looked at my watch. ‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘But I had arranged to see somebody in the hospital and I mustn’t miss visiting hours.’

Mello said, ‘It took courage for your father to come back.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

For an odd moment, the sun behind him, he could almost have been a priest: someone with the power to release and forgive, not a cop’s power to seize and avenge.

‘I’ll let you go,’ he said.

Far down the street, past windows full of fake lace, and other windows full of ancient tin toys and dust, and a seed shop with a window full of grass seed in packets, I kept hearing Mello’s words: ‘courage to come back …’

Now the unspoken thought, the one that put gold round my father’s name, was always that he had left a dictatorship to come to London. It seemed a heroic, not just an economic thing to do, a matter of principle to get away from all the police spies and the regulated life. I didn’t want a policeman’s view of that, not even if he implied there was enough of the old fascist hierarchy left to make my father a hero just for being back where he belonged.

Besides, I thought Mello was asking, ‘Are you brave enough to come back?’

I went to the bank, made my usual polite apology about not speaking Portuguese well, then asked to cash a Eurocheque for 35,000 escudos.

In the next queue stood a bulky, formidable woman, felt-hatted, green-suited, obviously the chairwoman of something purposeful. She punched me quite suddenly in the ribs.

‘You speak Portuguese perfectly well,’ she said.

I could think of nothing to say except ‘Thank you.’

The day turned cooler at last. A stranger’s car was parked by the chapel, back open and scales visible inside on a bed of sacking.

The fields were deserted. Women criss-crossed in the village and the men clustered in the shade.

I sensed something on the air. The ox, usually silent, bellowed once.

Four square-built men came out in a scrum, women following with wide red plastic bowls, with plates, wine, eggs and bread.

I supposed the foreigners were meant to stay away, whatever this was. Hart would be up in his clean white house engaged in his own business; no reason he should even come down. I found out later that I was a rather different matter. Arturo had wanted to include me, but the other men weren’t sure how a man in such nice city shoes, city-shined, would react. And without Arturo, there was nobody who felt obliged or entitled to invite me.

I didn’t go inside the house. The dogs ran about as though they had errands.

A woman I didn’t know called across to me: ‘Senhor. Senhor Joao.’ She didn’t think it quite proper that she should invite me, but she wanted to include me, since I’d done my duty by Zulmira and Arturo and Isabel, like a neighbour.

The scrum went into a barn at the roadside, stone walls with an iron roof that roasted the evening air. I followed. The women and some of the older men stepped around the pine cones and needles and heather and wood on the floor, keeping out of the way.

The pig was very young, very fat. The scrum threw themselves on the pig, one to clamp each thrashing leg and hold the animal down, a fifth to take a strong knife and cut the throat. It was very sudden, undignified but not brutal. Blood crazed the pig’s white skin, like a pretty martyr on a tile.

The animal seized up still and rigid.

I’d never seen this before. I wondered if it was simply a routine for these men, something they knew exactly.

There was one who cut and slaughtered, while the others helped. He said he wasn’t an expert; I asked. He said he knew a bit about doing this.

They laid the pig on the floor and took a blowtorch to the skin, over the sides and under the round buttocks, scraping the dirt from the trotters like a lady filing nails for the night, shaving the skin with trowels, cutting the ears and burning out the bristles. The fire was pale blue and I smelt gas, burnt bristle, the wet ochre shit the pig dumped in its last moment. Someone thought to stuff its arse with paper and a cork.