Electrico W (8 page)

Time stretched out and slowed down as it had in childhood nightmares where I was pursued by monsters, where my hopeless stumbling flight got me nowhere, where the vampires and dinosaurs always inevitably caught up with me. Antonio was coming closer, he was smiling, an enemy’s smile. All at once his giant hand hid his face from
me. Then his palm covered the lens and everything went red and black.

I staggered. Antonio looked at me, concerned.

“Are you all right, Vincent? You look pale …”

“I need to sit down a minute, I must be overtired. I—I’m not sleeping much at the moment.”

Antonio laughed, winked, gave me a little pat on the shoulder. The friendly physical contact made me shudder.

“I’m feeling better. Let’s go back.”

“No, no, let’s wait for a bit. There, look, how about going over there?”

He was pointing to a large barge with sky-blue sides, a cable’s length from the quay but connected to it by a long narrow footbridge. A bistro terrace had been set up on its deck, with wobbling garden tables, Fanta parasols in faded colors, and, stranded in the middle, a sort of prefabricated yellow workman’s hut. On the quay, an oval sign with rounded blue letters announced
STROMBOLI’S, ITALIAN SPECIALTIES
.

We were just boarding the barge when a good-natured, bald imp in a white apron sprang from the hut.

“We’re closed, the restaurant’s closed!” The little man ran over to us and stood puffing at the end of the footbridge. “It’s José, he didn’t take the sign down, so you obviously have no way of knowing, but we’re closed—I can’t let you—”

“Be kind,” said Antonio, “my friend’s feeling faint.”

“Faint? Oh …” The fellow moved aside, as if I were contagious. “Well, you
are
white as a sheet. You must be having an attack of hippopotitis … Don’t move a muscle, okay? I’ll be back …”

While Antonio stifled his explosive laughter, the man pushed a white plastic chair toward me, dusting it carefully: “Sit yourself there, sir … There you are … I’ll bring you something to drink. A glass of water, or no, better than that, a Coke, it’s stuffed full of sugar, it’ll clear your head and do you good.”

Before I had a chance to refuse he was running for his hideout. The blood pounding in my temples was already calmer. I heard the sound of a car door and looked over to the quay.

A woman was sitting at the wheel of a little red Fiat, beside a large container. She took one last energetic drag on her cigarette and threw the stub out the window. The sun must have been in her eyes, she looked away, turned the key in the ignition, and drove off. I had seen her face for only a second. From that distance she looked like Duck. If that’s who it was, she hadn’t seen Antonio, and because he was sitting facing the sun, he couldn’t have seen her. I stood up, the car was already driving away. Antonio also turned, too late. The Fiat had disappeared behind a warehouse.

“What is it, Vincent? You’re still very pale.”

“I—I thought I recognized someone …”

“Your Lena Palmer? You see her everywhere … not a good sign. You’ve got it bad.”

I shook my head.

“No, it’s nothing. I must have been wrong …”

Our enthusiastic imp was back already with a bottle and a kindly smile. He uncapped it and handed it to me.

“Here, drink that,” he said and winked as he added, “it’s the real thing, you know, I make it myself.”

He stood up and found two more chairs for Antonio and himself. Then he suddenly looked worried.

“Hey, are you sure you don’t want to call a doctor?”

“No thanks, I’m feeling better already.”

“All right. Well, that’s a relief, because I do have a phone here, but it’s out of order.”

He watched me for a moment, suspiciously, while I drank the sparkling too sugary drink and he ran his hand over his sweating head.

“If you want my opinion, it’s because of the heat. You don’t really notice, but it’s very hot already, isn’t it?”

Antonio nodded in silence. “Are you Italian?” he asked, pointing at the sign.

“No, I’m from Porto, like my father. But my mother, now
she’
s from Milezza in Sicily. That’s why I called the restaurant Stromboli’s. And I have an Italian name too. Leopoldo. Well, Leo. But I thought Stromboli’s sounded better than Leo’s. Don’t you think?”

There was a warm westerly breeze heavy with salt blowing off the sea.

“There’s
always
a bit of wind in this part of the port. It even carried off one of my parasols once.”

I don’t know whether I owed it to Leopoldo’s remedy, but I was feeling better. I took a step toward the footbridge, reached for my wallet.

“You must be joking!” the little man said indignantly, shaking our hands. “But you have to come and eat here, you will, won’t you? I’ll make
penne all’arrabiata
for you. It’s the house specialty, lots of chili, lots of garlic, lots of olive oil. And two or three pieces of penne, well, you have to. So, do you promise?”

We promised and left the barge. I would have liked to follow the route taken by the Fiat, perhaps it wasn’t that far away, but Antonio insisted on heading toward the streets he had known as a child.

We climbed up a narrow street toward Bairro Alto.

“You see there, Vincent, where there’s an electrical store, there used to be a hardware store, maybe it’s the old owner’s son who’s now selling Walkmans. He always used to hang things outside, dish racks and plastic bowls in sky blue, bright yellow, every color. When he opened in the morning he hung bunches of them from the awning, like Chinese lanterns. The candy was kept inside in glass jars, with lids to stop thieving fingers. He had hard candy, caramel, red and green barley sugar …”

“Did you come here with Duck?”

“I don’t remember. When I was with her I didn’t feel much like eating candy.”

“Where did she live?”

He tilted his chin toward one of the ten-story buildings at the top of the street. It was built in the sixties and had about a hundred peeling balconies, all laden with parched potted plants, broken old toys, bicycles, and laundry dryers.

“Do you remember which apartment it was?”

“No, just that it was on the other side of the building. On the seventh or eighth floor, I can’t remember. From her bedroom you could see the April 25 Bridge and the statue of Christ the King.”

Antonio looked away and we slowed imperceptibly.

We walked toward Eduardo VII Park, toward the clammy heat of Estufa Fria. Antonio couldn’t wait to rediscover the smell of the tropical hothouses, and he bought two tickets.

A slatted wooden canopy softened the sun’s rays. We wandered among the ferns and umbrella trees, and followed the meanders of an artificial river that snaked through the gardens. Antonio stopped from time to time to take a photograph.

A tousled-haired kid in sandals ran up to Antonio. He was holding a long cluster of milk-white flowers.

“Here,” he said, handing him the flowers with his arm held high. It was an insistent, determined gesture, not
the sort of childish command that could be shrugged off. Antonio knelt, accepted the present, and put it in his buttonhole.

“Like that?” he asked.

“Yes, that’s great like that.”

The boy backed away slightly to look at Antonio and said solemnly, “They’ll bring you good luck. What are you going to give me in exchange?”

Antonio reached up and took his wallet from his jacket. I blenched: I hadn’t yet had time to put back the two photos after having them copied. All Antonio offered was a stamp, a French one.

“Here, it’s a French stamp. Is that okay?”

“That’s robbery …,” the kid retorted sulkily. He rubbed his head to show he was thinking, and added, “But it’ll do. Just this once.”

And he put the stamp in his pocket.

An elderly man appeared behind the child, slightly out of breath. He was holding his hat in his hand and automatically raised it above his head to greet us.

“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! Please forgive him, he does whatever he pleases. Marco, did you pick that off a tree? You mustn’t take flowers off the trees. Oh, I can’t cope with him, he won’t stay still for a moment.”

The child had already gone on ahead, escaping his minder.

“Marco, wait for me. Do forgive him, really, please.”

The old man trotted off in pursuit of the boy, and Antonio put the viewfinder to his eye, snapping the pair of them before they disappeared behind the foliage.

We crossed a bridge sculpted out of cement, then another. Passing by waterfalls and lagoons, the path took us to an indoor pond covered in water hyacinths. In the middle of this small lake stood a gray-and-pink marble building, it was imposing, monumental even, and overrun with creepers. It must have been the hothouse curator’s home or a reception area for summer shows. We were alone on the edge of the water, and I felt uncomfortable. We shouldn’t have been there, we had gone into an area out of bounds to visitors.

On the paved terrace in front of the building, sitting between the paws of a marble lion, a girl was twisting and turning a bamboo stick in the water. At first I thought she couldn’t have been more than sixteen. She was wearing a short dress with a red-and-blue pattern, her legs were slender but toned and tanned, and her black hair was held in a multicolored ribbon. Beside her on the flat tiles lay a sketchbook covered with pictures in charcoal and pastels. An old case for a child’s violin lay open, full of oil pastels. She didn’t appear to notice us and, for a moment, perhaps because she looked so unaware and peaceful, the place seemed to belong to her for all eternity.

She was describing shapes in the emerald water, ephemeral figures, no two the same, manipulating the bamboo
precisely, unhesitatingly. It was as if she was forming letters, writing words long forgotten by the waters but carried to us silently on the shimmering wavelets.

Antonio was mesmerized. He set off along a paved path that ran through the water lilies and other water plants, crossing the lake that lay between us and the terrace. Something about the way he moved made me think he knew her, but he asked, “What’s your name?”

Antonio’s presumptuous familiarity, his intrusion, wasn’t paternal, it didn’t have the authority of an adult addressing an adolescent. It had more to do with an instant instinctive intimacy, the first words from a besotted prince to a shepherdess, or rather a fascinated shepherd to a princess.

“Aurora,” she replied, not looking up or even stopping her twirling of the bamboo in the lagoon.

All at once she threw the stick in the water and stared at Antonio and then at me, as I too crossed toward the terrace, clumsily, trying not to slip on the mossy paving stones. She jumped to her feet and when she looked me in the eye I realized she reminded me of Irene, because of her black, almond-shaped eyes, olive skin, and other indefinable qualities.

“Are you two lost? You realize this is my house, here, my island?”

Antonio smiled. “Your island?”

“Yes. It may not actually be completely an island but it is mine. I come here whenever I like, even when it’s closed. I
have the keys to the little door at the end. That’s where my father keeps his machines. I always do my studying here. Textile drawings, but not printed patterns. I mean I do designs for woven fabrics. Do you know what I mean? Look.”

She opened her sketchbook at random. Every inch of paper was covered with sketches of geometric designs. One area looked like the cubist weave of cotton, another like pencil-drawn stitches in wool.

She stood on tiptoe and smelled the flowers on Antonio’s lapel.

“That’s pretty.
Clivia minata
. And where was it stolen?”

“Some kid just gave it to me,” Antonio apologized, embarrassed. “It’s a good luck charm …”

“Really? A good luck charm? Do you believe in good luck, then?”

She pirouetted on the spot.

“At night I sometimes light the little blue suns,” she said, pointing to ultraviolet lights on the roof arches.

“At night?” Antonio asked, smiling and running his hand through his red hair in a rather contrived, affected way.

The girl crouched, closed her sketchbook, and started clearing the pastels scattered over the paving stones into the violin case.

“Don’t you believe me? Are you laughing at me?”

“No, I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

She looked down, arranging her oil pastels in order like the colors of the rainbow. Antonio knelt beside her, picked
up a few crayons, and handed them to her. Without looking up, she took them and said, “And do you two have names? You, what’s your name?”

“Antonio, Antonio Flores. And my friend is Vincent. Vincent Balmer.”

I introduced myself with a bow.

“Vincent Balmer? Are you English, then?” Aurora asked, but not waiting for a reply, she turned to Antonio: “And what about Flores? Is that really your name? Is that why you’ve come to see your cousins the flowers? That’s Jewish, isn’t it? They say all flower and tree names are Jewish. My name’s Jewish too, it’s Oliveira. And my middle name’s Judith. But I was baptized. Gods are so complicated.”

Of all the pastels she chose cyan and ran it along her forearm, tracing a streak of azure, like war paint.

“I’ll draw a bird for you Antonio, okay?”

She snatched Antonio’s wrist like a bird of prey launching itself at a mouse. In one fluid movement she drew a beak and a neck on his palm, created the line of a wing on his thumb, then another on his little finger, and, on his index finger, a long tail like a magpie’s, pointing upward. She put down the blue crayon, picked up a sunny yellow one, and, with a roll of her fingers, created the eye in the middle of his palm where his heart line and luck line crossed. She let go of Antonio’s hand and put away the pastels.

“Bird-hand, by Aurora Oliveira,” she laughed. “A good luck charm, and this one’s real. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, you know.”

Antonio moved his hand and the bird came fleetingly to life, spreading its wings, ready to fly. Antonio opened and closed his hand slowly, fascinated, unable to say a thing, and Aurora watched him closely, smiling. In the golden light, Antonio’s hair looked almost brown, and for the second time I thought him handsome, even more so. Then he turned to Aurora, and his whole voice had changed, husky but gentle too: “How old are you, Aurora?”