The Destiny of Nathalie X (17 page)

Nota bene
. To be remembered: the serene roseate beauty of the summer dusk as I cycled homeward, a little drunk, a rare cloud trapped in a cloud-reflecting puddle at the side of the road. To be remembered: my almost insupportable feeling of happiness.

4 a.m. I am alone on the terrace of my small house, looking east beyond my blue hydrangeas toward the mainland, waiting
for the sun to rise. I wonder how many people there are on that mainland as miserable as I am.

Golo’s note was terse. She had left me and our child. She was no longer in love with me. There was another man in her life whose identity she would not reveal at this moment. I must not look for her. She would be in touch with me in due course. This was the only way. She needed none of my money. She asked my forgiveness and understanding and hoped, for the sake of Dominic, that we could remain friends.

Odette said simply that during the day Madame had received and made numerous phone calls, had packed one suitcase and then, at about four o’clock, she heard the taxi claxoning for her in the lane. She was going to visit her family, she had told Odette, she had left a note for me and was gone.

I wasted no time. I drove at once back to the port, where of course there was no sign of the
Clymene
. En route for the Azores or God knew where. I returned to my house (not
our
house anymore) and cried a few hot tears of rage and frustration over my son’s cot (
my
son, not
our
son anymore) until I woke him and he began to bawl as well. I drank half a bottle of Pernod, then drove the car to the ferry and was transported to the mainland. I spent a fruitless hour searching for a “Venus of the Crossroads,” as Pappi used to refer to them, feeling the urge for revenge slowly ebb from me. At around midnight, in an overlit dockside bar I halfheartedly bought a large woman with bobbed hair and a tight jersey a few drinks but then lost my nerve. On the last ferry back to the island a bearded youngster played some form of Hawaiian music on a guitar.

The sky is lightening, a pale cornflower blue shading into lemon; my dead eyes watch the beautiful transformation, unmarveling.
I must think, I must clarify my thoughts. The betrayed husband is always the last to know, they say. Didier Van Breuer. Were our friends in Sydney, Australia, all laughing behind my back that winter? What had made Didier come to our house to announce his separation? What had made him break down that way over the meal? What had been said while I was out of the room? To end this stream of answerless questions I force myself to think of Encarnación, a Mexican girl I had briefly loved and to whom I had once thought of proposing. Dear, lissome Encarna, some kind of ex-athlete, a hurdler or swimmer. So different from Golo. I think of a meal we shared in New York, that little restaurant in New York, south of Greenwich Village, where she cajoled me into eating a pungent, shouting salsa from her native province that made my eyes water, obliging me to suck peppermints for days …

This is what I must retain. These are the fragments I must hoard from these last three years. The soft explosion of a pile of leaves. The querulous where-the-hell-are-you? tooting of a waiting motorist. The scent of menthol jujubes. A lone yacht on a silver bay. The immaculate dicing of a garlic clove. The dark trees of Carlyle Square. Oursins à la provençale. A slim male figure in white khakis and a navy sweater. A tin of cumin. A taxi claxoning in the lane. A pungent, shouting salsa that obliged me to suck peppermints for days.

M
Y NAME
is Lily Campendonc. A long time ago I used to live in Lisbon.

I lived in Lisbon between 1929 and 1935. A beautiful city, but melancholy.

Boscán, Christmas 1934: “We never love anyone. Not really. We only love our idea of another person. It is some conception of our own that we love. We love ourselves, in fact.”

“Mrs. Campendonc?”

“Yes?”

“May I be permitted to have a discreet word with you? Discreetly?”

“Of course.”

He did not want this word to take place in the office, so we left the building and walked down the rua Serpa toward the Arsenal. It was dark, we had been working late, but the night was warm.

“Here, please. I think this small café will suit.”

I agreed. We entered and sat at a small table in the rear. I asked for a coffee and he for a small glass of
vinho verde
. Then he decided to collect the order himself and went to the bar to do so. While he was there I noticed him drink a brandy standing at the bar, quickly, in one swift gulp.

He brought the drinks and sat down.

“Mrs. Campendonc, I’m afraid I have some bad news.” His thin taut features remained impassive. Needlessly he re-straightened his straight bow tie.

“And what would that be?” I resolved to be equally calm.

He cleared his throat, looked up at the mottled ceiling and smiled vaguely.

“I am obliged to resign,” he said. “I hereby offer you one month’s notice.”

I tried to keep the surprise off my face. I frowned. “That
is
bad news, Senhor Boscán.”

“I am afraid I had no choice.”

“May I ask why?”

“Of course, of course, you have every right.” He thought for a while, saying nothing, printing neat circles of condensation on the tan scrubbed wood of the table with the bottom of his wineglass.

“The reason is …” he began, “and if you will forgive me I will be entirely candid—the reason is,” and at this he looked me in the eye, “that I am very much in love with you, Mrs. Campendonc.”

After my husband, John Campendonc, died in 1932, I decided to stay on in Lisbon. I knew enough about the business, I told myself, and in any event could not bear the thought of returning to England and his family. In his will he left the company—the Campendonc Cork Company Ltd.—to me with instructions that it should continue as a going concern under the family name or else be sold. I made my decision and reassured those members of John’s family who tried earnestly to dissuade me that I knew exactly what I was doing, and besides, there was Senhor Boscán who would always be there to help.

I should tell you a little about John Campendonc first, I suppose, before I go on to Boscán.

John Campendonc was twelve years older than me, a small strong Englishman, very fair in coloring, with fine blond hair that was receding from his forehead. His body was well muscled with a tendency to run to fat. I was attracted to him on our first meeting. He was not handsome—his features were oddly lopsided—but there was a vigor about him that was contagious, and that characterized his every movement and preoccupation. He read vigorously, for example, leaning forward over his book or newspaper, frowning, turning and smoothing down the pages with a flick and crack and a brisk stroke of his palm. He walked everywhere at high speed and his habitual pose was to thrust his left hand in the pocket of
his coat—thrust strongly down—and, with his right hand, to smooth his hair back in a series of rapid caresses. Consequently his coats were always distorted on the left, the pocket bulged and baggy, sometimes torn, the constant strain on the seams inevitably proving too great. In this manner he wore out three or four suits a year. Shortly before he died I found a tailor in the rua Garrett who would make him a suit with three identical coats. So for John’s fortieth birthday I presented him with an assortment of suits—flannel, tweed and cotton drill—consisting of three pairs of trousers and nine coats. He was very amused.

I retain a strong and moving image of him. It was about two weeks before his death and we had gone down to Cascais for a picnic and a bathe in the sea. It was late afternoon and the beach was deserted. John stripped off his clothes and ran naked into the sea, diving easily through the breakers. I could not—and still cannot—swim and so sat on the running board of our motorcar, smoked a cigarette and watched him splash about in the waves. Eventually he emerged and strode up the beach toward me, flicking water from his hands.

“Freezing,” he shouted from some ways off. “Freezing freezing freezing!”

This is how I remember him, confident, ruddy and noisy in his nakedness. The wide slab of his chest, his fair, open face, his thick legs darkened with slick wet hair, his balls clenched and shrunken with cold, his penis a tense white stub. I laughed at him and pointed at his groin. Such a tiny thing, I said, laughing. He stood there, hands on his hips, trying to look offended. Big enough for you, Lily Campendonc, he said, grinning, you wait and see.

Two weeks and two days later his heart failed him and he was dead and gone forever.

Why do I tell you so much about John Campendonc? It will help explain Boscán, I think.

Agostinho da Silva Boscán kissed me one week after he had resigned. He worked out his month’s notice scrupulously and dutifully. Every evening he came to my office to report on the day’s business and present me with letters and contracts to sign. On this particular evening, I recall, we were going over a letter of complaint to a cork grower in Elvas—hitherto reliable—whose cork planks proved to be riddled with ant borings. Boscán was standing beside my chair, his right hand flat on the leather top of the desk, his forefinger slid beneath the upper page of the letter, ready to turn it over. Slowly and steadily he translated the Portuguese into his impeccable English. It was hot and I was a little tired. I found I was not concentrating on the sonorous monotone of his voice. My gaze left the page of the letter and focused on his hand, flat on the desktop. I saw its even, pale brownness, like milky coffee, the dark glossy hairs that grew beneath the knuckles and the first joint of the fingers, the nacreous shine of his fingernails … the pithy edge of his white cuffs, beginning to fray … I could smell a faint musky perfume coming off him—farinaceous and sweet—from the lotion he put on his hair, and mingled with that his own scent, sour and salt … His suit was too heavy, his only suit, a worn shiny blue serge, made in Madrid, he told me, too hot for a summer night in Lisbon … Quietly, I inhaled and my nostrils filled with the smell of Agostinho Boscán.

“If you say you love me, Senhor Boscán,” I interrupted him, “why don’t you do something about it?”

“I am,” he said after a pause. “I’m leaving.”

He straightened. I did not turn, keeping my eyes on the letter.

“Isn’t that a bit cowardly?”

“Well,” he said. “It’s true. I would like to be a bit less … cowardly. But there is a problem. Rather a serious problem.”

Now I turned. “What’s that?”

“I think I’m going mad.”

My name is Lily Campendonc, née Jordan. I was born in Cairo in 1908. In 1914 my family moved to London. I was educated there and in Paris and Geneva. I married John Campendonc in 1929 and we moved to Lisbon, where he ran the family’s cork processing factory. He died of a coronary attack in October 1931. I had been a widow for nine months before I kissed another man, my late husband’s office manager. I was twenty-four years old when I spent my first Christmas with Agostinho da Silva Boscán.

The invitation came, typewritten on a lined sheet of cheap writing paper.

“Balthazar Cabral” stood naked beside the bed I was lying in. His penis hung long and thin, but slowly fattening, shifting. Uncircumcised. I watched him pour a little olive oil into the palm of his hand and grip himself gently. He pulled at his penis, smearing it with oil, watching it grow erect under his touch. Then he pulled the sheet off me and sat down. He wet his fingers with the oil again and reached to feel me.

“What’s happening?” I could barely sense his moving fingers.

“It’s an old trick,” he said. “Roman centurions discovered it in Egypt.” He grinned. “Or so they say.”

I felt oil running off my inner thighs onto the bedclothes. Boscán clambered over me and spread my legs. He was thin and wiry, his flat chest shadowed with fine hairs, his nipples were almost black. The beard he had grown made him look strangely younger.

He knelt in front of me. He closed his eyes.

“Say my name, Lily, say my name.”

I said it. Balthazar Cabral. Balthazar Cabral. Balthazar Cabral …