Electrico W (14 page)

“Sure. Why not?”

“What’s the name of the restaurant?”

“I … I don’t know its name. Well, I only know how to get there.” Antonio smiled sardonically. My ridiculous answers made me a little more suspect. I gave in: “Okay. Come and join us. I’ll leave a message for you at the hotel with the address.”

Antonio nodded and put on his scruffy jacket.

“Okay, I’m off.”

At the last moment he turned in the doorway: “Don’t forget. About the restaurant.”

I WENT UP
to the old neighborhood in the heights, near the Largo Santa Luzia, and chose a table on a terrace just before midday.

I called the hotel to leave the restaurant’s name, and told my waiter emphatically that I needed to eat quickly. The plane must have landed, and I was afraid they would appear around the corner of the street at any moment.

To create the illusion of a fellow diner, I put a chair opposite me, spilled some drops of wine and sauce on the tablecloth, scattered a few breadcrumbs, and even marked the white paper place mat with the circular imprints of a second plate and a glass. A Lena could very easily have just left the table.

The successive courses came too quickly, and when the waiter cleared the table, it was barely half past twelve. I ordered two coffees.

“At the same time,” I specified.

“At the same time?” the waiter repeated. “Your coffees?”

“Yes, please.”

“It’s no trouble coming back, sir. Or the second one will go cold.”

“No, no, bring them both, it’s fine.”

He walked away but I saw him raise his eyes to the heavens. When he came back I paid the bill so that it wasn’t left lying on the table. I drank the first coffee very quickly, almost burning my mouth.

He wanted to remove the empty cup, but I insisted he not touch it.

“No, no, leave it. I have some friends coming soon.”

He looked at me, bemused, and headed back to the kitchen. On the way he stopped to have a few words with the woman at the till. He prodded his temple with
his finger, and I realized my eccentricities were being discussed.

Twenty to one. I finished the second coffee and ordered a third.

“Yes, sir. Should I leave everything on the table? All the coffee cups?”

“Please.”

“Yes, sir. No problem. No problem at all.”

I decided to look away to avoid seeing whether he stopped at the till again. I took out my newspaper and started looking through it, without managing to read it properly.

On the third page, though, a headline filled the entire width of the paper: the Pinheiro trial was about to begin. Two weeks earlier my landlady had mentioned him because he had lived only two streets away.

“You know that Pinheiro worked at the customs office at the docks,” she had said. “But he used to have lunch in my son-in-law’s restaurant every day, and he never talked to anyone. No one. He used to read the whole time. How awful!”

She had said “How awful!” again with a shudder.

I folded the newspaper, wondering what on earth I could write about Pinheiro. I was bound to find something. Murderous madness in ordinary people is always a good subject.

I was finishing the last of my coffee when Irene appeared around the street corner, side by side with Antonio. She
was wearing a floaty dress in bright scarlet that I hadn’t seen before, and suede pumps. Before even making out her features, I instantly recognized her provocative saunter, which turned plenty of heads, the way she moved her whole body, that promise of the pleasures it had to offer, a painful reminder of how much she enjoyed seducing people and, even more, refusing her favors. I have never understood exactly what it was about her that made her so desirable and beautiful in my eyes. Is “beautiful” the word?

They came up to me and Irene let go of his arm to take off her sunglasses and feign astonishment. I could tell she was forcing her laughter, wriggling exaggeratedly, aping herself. Her expression felt as false as a magazine cover girl’s as she gazes at her own reflection in the lens.

She sat facing me with a smile on her lips, and her first words were “Well, where is she then, this Lena, this Lena I’ve heard so much about?”

Her tone was mocking, spiteful, but the sound of her voice still had an effect on me.

“Are you hiding her from us? Are you afraid someone’ll steal her, or I’ll tell her things you don’t want her to hear?”

The blood drained from my face and I felt like slapping her, or just saying nothing, getting up and leaving. But I managed to look amused.

“You could say hello before launching your attack, my sweet.”

“I’m not your sweet, my love. And I never was.”

I was about to reply but, infuriated, Antonio blurted, “Have you finished your little private war, the pair of you?” Then he turned to me and added more soothingly, “Has Lena left already?”

“Just this minute. You must have walked right past her.”

“She was that fat blond thing,” Irene chuckled, “the one whose jeans were cutting her up the ass.” She laughed out loud.

“Irene,” Antonio sighed, “what’s gotten into you?”

“Nothing, nothing at all. I’ll stop. There. Shall we make peace? My sweet …”

She held out her hand to me with the forced smile of a poisonous child. I took it and, before she could snatch it back, kissed it, quickly and chastely, in the crook of her palm. It was a gesture of revenge, a form of assault, subjecting her to the touch of my lips; and yet, despite being driven by vengeance, I couldn’t help savoring the sweet warmth of that hand, its ripe perfume. Irene was so surprised that she surrendered her hand to me, as if it no longer belonged to her, and I even thought for a moment that I could keep it, that open hand, for an eternity. I let it go, stirred and embarrassed in equal measure, and to disguise my emotion I managed to laugh and say, “There, peace is sealed.”

Irene stood in silence, disconcerted. Antonio seemed indifferent, he hadn’t noticed anything. He ordered three coffees, and the waiter leaned toward me, looking very worried: “Can I clear away the other cups now, sir?”

WE SPENT THE
afternoon wandering aimlessly around Alfama, then headed down toward Rossio. Irene was seeing Lisbon for the first time, and made naive pronouncements about cities and docks and sailors.

From time to time she took Antonio’s hand and sometimes, at the Santana viewpoint for example, she even huddled in his arms. But Antonio kept her at a distance. He probably did it for propriety’s sake, out of tact toward me. Perhaps also because of Aurora and my presence, which forbade him the cowardly hypocrisy common to men. But also, perhaps, because the way Irene smothered him with her wheedling affection made him uncomfortable, as if he could tell that her primary aim, and I believed this to be the case, was to wound me.

I talked about Pinheiro, and Antonio and I agreed to go to the hospital the following day. I left them at about four-thirty, claiming I was meeting a friend.

“A friend, really?” Irene asked sarcastically.

I didn’t reply, making do with a smile.

“I’ll leave you, then. Tomorrow at the hotel at about ten?”

“Won’t you have supper with us this evening? Aren’t you staying at the hotel?”

“No. I can’t. Sorry. See you tomorrow.”

I shook Antonio’s hand and gave Irene a little bow.

“Madame …”

“No more hand kissing, then?”

I shook my head and, to get away as quickly as possible, stopped a taxi that was heading the other way.

“Where are you going?” asked the driver. I hadn’t thought about that. I was about to give the address for my studio when I remembered old Custódia.

“Pragal.”

“Whereabouts in Pragal?”

“I don’t know. Does Estabelecimento Custódia mean anything to you?”

“No.” He looked at me apologetically. “Would the rail station in Pragal be okay?”

“Yes. That would be great.”

The taxi set off and passed Antonio and Irene. They were holding hands. She freed hers to give me a little wave, and I thought I detected a note of sincerity in it.

IT WASN’T EASY
finding Custódia’s premises. It was just a long, narrow, dark shop on the corner of a tiny street. On the dirty shopfront window were the words

in discolored letters. The last R was about to abandon its post too, and I smiled as I remembered the notice there used to be above the wooden seats on the Paris Métro, one whose words had filled a few fruitful hours in my teens:

Armed with a good scraper, I had devised a simple literary technique, striving to extract some meaning from that sentence. I found I could turn it into an abstruse culinary recommendation:

or a sensational headline:

Although my uncontested favorite was the darkly Magrittian:

This game was interrupted by an on-the-spot sixty-franc fine for vandalism, when I had only just embarked on the onomatopoeic poetry of:

I didn’t know where to go next with this poem, but had calculated that there were about seven hundred different solutions. Fewer than the number of Métro cars, no doubt, and some of them impossibly obscure. But what sort of
Iliad
could anyone get with
EST CUSTÓDIA. MARCENARIA?

The cabinetmaker’s metal shutter wasn’t lowered but the door was locked. I knocked on the glass several times, then, when no one came, decided to take a walk around.

As I passed the local tasca I spotted old Custódia. He was sitting at the end of the room with a glass of red wine, his blue work overalls gray with wood dust. He sat drinking in silence. His paper was open to the financial pages, but he wasn’t reading. I went in, stood at the bar and ordered a coffee.

Custódia looked older, more stooped, more tired than at the cemetery, well into his sixties perhaps. His hands were worn and rough but still strong, I pictured Duck’s pretty face being struck by them. Four old boys were having a noisy game of cards, using matches to keep score, and staking cigarette butts as bets. Custódia wasn’t paying
any attention to them. Sitting there bringing his glass to his lips, his eyes were expressionless.

When I asked the waiter if he knew where the cabinetmaker was, he called across the room: “Hey, Ruiz, I’ve found you a customer.”

The cardplayers paused for a moment to stare at me, and the old man turned to look. I took a step toward him, but he made up his mind to stand.

“What do you want? I’m closed at this time of day.”

“Closed? At five o’clock?”

Custódia shrugged and headed for the door, in spite of everything. I fell in step behind him. Just before stepping outside, he smacked his hand on the bar to catch the waiter’s attention.

“Leave the glass. I’ll be back.”

“Shall I fill it up?”