The Foundling's War (38 page)

He closed his eyes to summon an image of Claude in her barred room. Her treatment had swollen the clear, fine features that had
expressed the nobility of her beleaguered soul and dulled the gaze that had once been so calm and balanced. She spoke slowly, with deliberation, and several times had implored him to take her away, to rescue her from the nurse and doctor. For a time Jean had wondered if he still loved her, knowing it was a dreadful, pitiless question and blaming it on his bitter disappointment. You cannot love someone the same way when they have a breakdown – it was as if the obstacles and barriers that that person put in the way to defend themselves were the spice of love. In fact he still loved her as much as ever, but seeing her made him miserable. The ordeal of every visit took several hours to get over, before he could salvage yet again, intact, the perfect feeling that had brought them together. Alone with her in her blue room, whose barred window looked onto a kitchen garden and a road, he did not know what to say. One Sunday, as he had walked away towards the station, she had shouted from the first floor, ‘Jean, Jean, don’t leave me.’ Her bare arm had reached out between the bars, her hand extended with her fingers spread as if she was putting a curse on him. He had turned and seen her desperate white face, so white she looked nearer dead than alive. The nurse had dragged her away from the bars, closing the window on her cries …

In the late afternoon the train, after spending hours unmoving in dismal stations, stopped at Fuentés de Oñoro on the Portuguese border. The Lisbon express, having tired of waiting, had left an hour earlier. The delay, the stormy exchanges between Spanish and Portuguese railway workers, and the confusion of officials allowed Jean to get the case through without difficulty. The most hazardous part of his mission was over and he saw himself stuck in an insignificant Portuguese town, about to spend twenty-four hours in the station waiting room, when a young man in a grey suit and a black felt hat approached him. In good French he offered Jean a lift in his car to Guarda.

‘There’s an excellent inn there. You’ll get dinner and a bed for the night. It’s better than spending a day and a night in a station.’

He had a pleasing, open face. Jean accepted this stroke of luck.

‘I didn’t see you on the train,’ he said.

‘I wasn’t on it. I work at this station from time to time … I might as well tell you straight away that I belong to the PIDE. I believe you call it the Sûreté in your country. I hope I’m not alarming you?’

He smiled. He had an old Chrysler waiting outside and took the wheel with assurance. The road climbed up to Guarda. He drove cautiously, asking the sort of banal questions one usually asks a stranger.

‘Is it your first trip to Portugal?’

‘Yes.’

‘I hope you’ll like our country.’

‘There’s no reason for me not to like it.’

It did not sound from the man’s tone as if he was interrogating him, but Jean, certain that behind the banalities the young policeman was gathering information, decided to be open with him.

‘Exit visas from France are rare,’ the man said. ‘It’s a great shame. Portugal would open its doors to all those who seek asylum.’

‘Oh, there’s nothing secret about my reason for being here! I jumped at an opportunity one of my uncles offered me: he’s very well in with the Germans. I have to see his banker. If he came himself he’d arouse suspicion. I’m just coming and going straight back. It’s good to breathe free air for a change.’

Guarda was an austere, handsome town: the pearl of the Serra da Estrela. The policeman dropped him outside the hotel.

‘I’ll probably see you tomorrow,’ he said. ‘The Lisbon express leaves at six in the evening. If you’re interested I’ll show you around. I’m free tomorrow. The dinner at the inn is good. The cook is excellent. Ask her to make you a fish pie. There’s nothing better …’

Jean’s bedroom looked out on the Praça Luís de Camões. He froze for much of the night in a huge bed. The morning market woke him.
Men in thick cloth jackets with fox-fur collars strolled among the crouching vendors, black mummies of whom all he could see, apart from their headscarves knotted beneath their chins, was their angular profiles. They held out eggs, herbs, butter, or a plucked chicken. After France’s obscure misery and Spain’s rancid version of the same misery, a Portuguese market was lavishness itself. Jean was astonished that the suspicious buyers, with their ascetic faces and measured gestures, were not falling on these most rare products like wild animals.

A small maid in a lace apron and starched collar, with a sallow serious face, entered, bowed as she murmured, ‘
Com licença
,’ and placed coffee, a jug of milk and toast on the table. She indicated by gestures that a
senhor
was asking for him downstairs. She meant of course the PIDE official.

‘I hope you slept well. I forgot to tell you my name: Urbano de Mello …’

‘And mine’s Jean Arnaud.’

‘I know. I saw your passport … You might like to know that I’ve had a telephone call from Lisbon. I have to go there this afternoon. I’ll be driving, and if you like I can take you.’

Jean was no longer in any doubt that someone was particularly interested in him. The important thing remained to get to Lisbon. There was no safer way of getting there than with the young policeman.

The Chrysler laboured through the Serra da Estrela. Its valves clattered painfully.

‘Our petrol’s very bad,’ Urbano said.

He drove unhurriedly along narrow roads edged with mimosas and Judas trees in bloom, commenting on the sights.

‘It’s a shame we don’t have more time. There are churches and some beautiful palaces I’d like to show you. Have you heard of Coimbra?’

‘There’s a university there, isn’t there?’

‘Dr Salazar taught political economy there before taking over as head of the government. He’s a quite remarkable man. He has saved
the country from ruin and anarchy and this time once again he has kept us out of the conflict. Peace is an incalculable asset.’

Jean did not doubt it. While Spain, even glimpsed from a train window, seemed barely to have recovered from its exhausting civil war, Portugal radiated a prosperity and sense of easy living that the rest of Europe no longer knew and might never know again.

They stopped at a restaurant at Coimbra, near the university. Students in frayed black gowns were talking animatedly, crowded together around several tables. Urbano declared that they served the best salt cod in all of Portugal here. He went on to elaborate a multitude of different gastronomic approaches to cod and ways of serving it. Jean listened to him, amused, wondering how, after playing cat and mouse with him for twenty-four hours, he planned to keep up his surveillance in Lisbon. Whatever happened, there was no doubt that in the capital Jean had been judged sufficiently interesting to assign him a bodyguard who would not let him out of his sight.

‘Seeing these students makes me feel young again,’ Urbano said. ‘I studied law here myself once.’

Jean no longer wondered whether Urbano was more than a simple border official stamping passports. An older student than the others came into the restaurant, slumped at a table and suddenly caught sight of the man from the PIDE.

‘Urbano!’ he called. ‘What the devil are you doing here?’

The two men thumped each other vigorously on the back.

‘I see, João,’ the young policeman said, ‘that you’re still not in any hurry to finish your exams. How much more have you got to do?’

‘Why should I be in a hurry? I like life in Coimbra. If I fail a few more exams I can probably stay here till I’m at least thirty.’

Some students who had finished eating crowded round them. Urbano explained that Jean was a Frenchman passing through. They sat, keenly interested, bombarding him with questions: what was life like in Paris, in the free zone? What did the French want to happen?
Had the universities reopened? Jean responded to their thirst for information as best he could.

‘It’s a shame we have so little time,’ Urbano said. ‘We’ll have to come back. Portugal is a friend to France.’

‘France has few friends when she’s on the winning side, but she’s lucky enough to have plenty when she finds herself in the shit.’

João burst out laughing.

‘Shit! Shit! And they taught me at school that French is a refined language, the language of diplomacy! You’re right, but we all cried in 1940 when Marshal Pétain requested an armistice. But he did well. They say here that he’s distracting the Germans while General de Gaulle – his favourite pupil – is preparing, alongside the Free French, to drive them out of the country …’

The other students protested that they did not share his view. Dropping out of French, which they spoke well, they began an excited discussion that would have been interminable if Urbano had not called an end to it.

‘We need to be in Lisbon this afternoon.’

João ordered a bottle of wine that they drank standing, to France’s health.

‘I hope,’ he said, raising his glass for the last time to Urbano, ‘that they were lying to me when they told me you’d joined the PIDE.’

Not missing a beat, the young policeman raised his glass in turn.

‘They were lying to you, João. I’m a civil servant. That’s all.’

‘Then,’ João said, ‘long live the Republic and long live Coimbra!’

For the first time Jean heard France being talked about from outside the country. The perspective was very different from what could be said in Paris. Urbano was especially keen to know what Jean thought of a confused situation, to which optimists attributed a Machiavellian
intent (unfortunately non-existent). For his part, Jean was shocked that Urbano had lied about working for the PIDE. As they left Coimbra the policeman sought to justify himself.

‘I didn’t lie, I dissembled,’ he said. ‘As I’m sure you’ll appreciate, no student likes the police, and it’s not my job to shout my credentials from the rooftops. Many ways are open to me to serve my country. I chose this one. It’s not the least interesting by a long way …’

They spoke little for the rest of the journey. On the outskirts of Lisbon Urbano suggested he drive Jean to a small hotel run by a friend of his.

‘Not too expensive and very comfortable. She’ll give you a good room. The hotels are full … there are so many refugees, people waiting for a ship to America.’

Jean assured him that he was not short of money. His ‘uncle’ had given him enough for any eventuality. Anyway he preferred big hotels. You could come and go unobserved. Urbano laughed.

‘You sound as if you think I want to keep an eye on you!’

‘But you do. Admit it!’

‘Not exactly. And Lisbon’s a big city. You can disappear for
twenty-four
hours without the PIDE catching up with you.’

‘I don’t see why the PIDE should be interested in me.’

Urbano did not look embarrassed.

‘Oh, I won’t deny that you interest us. Foreign powers are exerting pressure on us to keep spies under surveillance.’

‘I’m not a spy.’

‘I’m sure you’re not. Even so, admit it, it’s hardly usual for a man of your age, living in a France occupied by Hitler’s Germany, to get hold of a visa for Portugal on the pretext of paying a banker a visit.’

‘It’s true that it’s not very likely.’

They were coming into Lisbon. It started raining heavily and the old Chrysler had to slow down, its worn tyres skidding on the wet asphalt. Urbano stopped at a large hotel and accompanied Jean to the front desk. Contrary to his prediction, there was a room available. Jean
thanked him, convinced that the policeman had taken the opportunity to point him out to the doorman. His movements would be watched. He did not care. In any case they would not be able to stop him being at his meeting with the bank the following day. He was delighted to have been so unmysterious. There was nothing so calculated to disconcert the police or, if not the police, then the foreign service for which Urbano laboured discreetly to augment his modest salary.

The next day Jean kept his appointment with the banker whose name he had been given in Paris. He was introduced to a cold, offhand individual whose expression was hidden behind sunglasses and who spoke to him at first in German.

‘No,’ Jean said, ‘I’m not German. I’m French.’

The banker fell silent, took off his sunglasses and cleaned them with a silk cloth. His eyes were bloodshot.

‘I suffer from conjunctivitis,’ he said. ‘Before the war I was treated by an ophthalmologist from Leipzig. He’s in Russia now, amputating frozen feet.’

Jean commiserated but did not smile. The banker put his sunglasses back on. He was no longer the same man with the wet, blinking gaze.

‘You understand,’ he said, ‘that we’ll have to make some checks …’

‘I realise that. When will you give me an answer?’

‘Tomorrow morning.’

Jean left with a receipt in his pocket. He set out on foot through the city. He did not feel he was being followed and he was disappointed. It would have been fun to keep on intriguing Urbano and his superiors. Perhaps they had lost interest in him. The thought mildly annoyed him. He walked around Lisbon as, when he was much younger, he had walked around Rome and London. To be a stranger in an unknown city for the first time is a marvellously heady feeling. You lose yourself in the name of discovery, and your head is filled with
a new world in which you are the savage. Jean knew nothing about Portugal. He could, like Valery Larbaud, have shut himself up in a hotel room and learnt Portuguese ferociously in a week, but he much preferred the distance that separated him from a warm, well-lit city in which the sound of people’s voices surprised him and reminded him at every moment of his difference. He admired the attractive, soft gaze and amber-coloured skin of the women, and the asceticism of the masculine faces. He wandered the streets and strolled around the museums. From the Castelo de São Jorge he surveyed the terraced city and the
mar da palha
crisscrossed by small, heavy lateen-sailed boats. He liked the
azulejos
of Estrela, the Manueline doorways and the marvellous way the Portuguese had of covering the exteriors of their houses, which they kept closed to the light, with flowers. He would certainly come back to share this jewel of peace and grace, but who with? In the last three months he had despaired of ever seeing Claude seize hold of reality again, and if she did there would still need to be peace for them to be allowed to leave and forget everything. Nelly? Even if she enlivened life and quickened it with her generous spirit, he didn’t think he could count on her company to spend hours wandering around a beautiful city. She loved poetry and the theatre because they sprang from words; over the rest she cast an indifferent gaze. Besides, what good was dreaming? He could see nothing in front of him except, if he was utterly honest, complete uncertainty. In the evening he went to Estoril. At the casino a crowd that talked in many tongues pressed around the gaming tables with an eagerness that defied the rest of Europe at war. It was a euphoria he did not share.