A Small Death in lisbon (37 page)

The afternoon progressed. People left as the food ran out. Abrantes joined Felsen on the veranda with two brandy glasses and a bottle of
aguardente
he'd brought down from the Beira. They sat on raffia-seated chairs with a wrought-iron table between them and drank and smoked cigarettes while Abrantes softly slapped the painted wooden rail.

'That's the Portuguese for you,' said Felsen, watching people leave, 'they can't do anything without food.'

Abrantes wasn't listening. He flicked ash over the rail not caring where it went.

'It's been a bad year,' he said, slipping into the role of very successful, but naturally pessimistic businessman.

'We got out of Africa without losing our shirts,' said Felsen.

'No, no, I'm not talking about business. Business was all right. It's what you say ... it's the colonies. That African trouble is not going to go away.'

'Salazar will follow the British. They've given independence to Ghana and Nigeria. Kenya will follow. So will Salazar. In a couple of years we'll be back in Africa making money with new independent governments.'

'Ah,' said Abrantes, leaning forward, knees spread, ankles crossed, glad, for once, to be able to correct the German, 'if you think that, then you don't understand Salazar. You're forgetting what happened when the Australians landed on East Timor during the war. Salazar will never give up the colonies. They are Empire. They are Portugal. They are part of his
Estado Novo.'

'Come on, Joaquim ... the man's seventy-two years old now.'

'If you don't think he's got the stomach for it, you're wrong. It's a weakness of his. Everybody knows it. Why do you think he's having all this trouble at home?'

'Moniz trying to get him to resign?' Felsen sneered and threw his hand up in the air as if he was chucking salt over his shoulder.

'And don't forget General Machedo. He's still out there.'

'In Brazil, a few thousand kilometres away.'

'There's
a man with popular support,' said Abrantes, ignoring Felsen. 'There's a man who would do anything to get into power ... and if he couldn't get the top military on his side he'd even talk to
those
people.'

'Those people?' asked Felsen.

Abrantes wound his hand round and round, slapping the rail each time to show there was more and more, the two businessmen acting at each other as if they were performing some brand of formal theatre.

'These people are drawing attention to themselves. They took that cruise liner, the
Santa Maria.
They hijacked that TAP aircraft. They...'

'Who are
they
? Who are those people or these people ... which people?'

'The
communists
,' said Abrantes, his eyes widening in what Felsen assumed was mock fear, but was, in fact, astonishment. 'These are people to be feared. You, of all people, should know that. Look what they've done to Berlin.'

'The wall? That won't last.'

'It's a wall,' said Abrantes. 'You don't build a wall unless you expect it to last. Believe me. And they're gathering strength here too. I know.'

'How?'

'I have friends,' said Abrantes, '...in PIDE.'

And PIDE talk like that about Salazar?'

'You don't understand, my friend. You've spent a lot of time out of the country. I am here in Lisbon all the time. The PIDE,' he said, stretching out an evangelical hand, 'the PIDE aren't just the police, they're a state within the New State. They see how things really are. They understand the dangers. They see the African wars. They see trouble at home. They see dissent. They see communism. All these things are a threat to the stability of the ... Do you know what communists do to banks?'

Felsen said nothing. He knew Abrantes as a lot of animals—the shrewd business partner, the ruthless practitioner of brutal labour relations, the cost-cutter, the deal-maker—but never, not to his knowledge, the political animal.

'They nationalize them,' said Abrantes, throwing his hand out as if there was a bible in it.

Felsen ran his hand over his grey fuzz. Abrantes was irritated by his apparent lack of concern.

'That means
we
own
nothing,
' he reiterated the horror.

'I know what nationalization is,' said Felsen. 'I know what communism is. I'm scared of it. I don't need any convincing. But what are you proposing? That we sell up and get out?
I'm
not going to Brazil.'

'Manuel is joining PIDE,' said Abrantes and Felsen bit back his instinct to shout with laughter—
that
was a solution?

'What about his university education?' he asked, automatically.

'He didn't get the grades,' said Abrantes, tapping his temple with his cigar end. 'I look at Pedro, I look at Manuel ... I can't believe they have the same parents. But don't misunderstand me ... I think Manuel will do very well in PIDE. I've made the introductions. They like him. The boy has a structure to his life now. And he doesn't like communists either. They won't have to teach him anything about that. You'll see. We will benefit. If there are communists working in our factories he'll root them out and run them up to Caxias prison. And they know what to do with communists in the Caxias prison.'

Felsen murmured, tired now, the man's fanaticism giving the
aguardente
a rough edge that it didn't have before. Abrantes sat back, plugged the cigar into his mouth, and straightened his tie over his belly.

Manuel's fuzzy head slipped back into the darkness of the enclosed terrace behind the veranda.

Abrantes left at dinnertime with his family and Patricia, who claimed she wasn't feeling well, but it was because Felsen was powerfully drunk. Drunk to the point where it took several tentative stabs to get a cigarette between his lips.

He managed to put 'Jailhouse Rock' on the record player and somehow got himself up on to the veranda where he took extravagant nosefuls of the still slack sea air and looked out into the black night.

'When the music finished, and he was left with static and the rhythmical click of the needle, he blundered downstairs and drank water until he was gasping.

A short aeon slipped by and he found himself miraculously in his bedroom, wrenching the windows open, tearing his shirt-tails out of his waistband and treading his dropped trousers into the floor. He felt: hot and had a great need to be naked under cool sheets, unconscious.

He ripped the bedclothes off, jerked himself straight, and took two startled steps back.

In the middle of the bed was a huge lizard. A live lizard. It bobbed its head, braced itself against the white sheet. Felsen careered out of the room, grabbed tools and came back with a rolling pin and a hammer. His first strike was wildly off the mark and bounced the lizard on to the floor. They fought for ten minutes, wrecking the bedroom, until Felsen managed to stun the animal with the rolling pin, hurled in frustration. He beat the lizard with the hammer and only stopped when an incident on a hot, dusty road in the Beira leaked into his mind. He picked the lizard up by the tail. It was surprisingly heavy. He threw it into the courtyard.

In the morning he was woken up by his heart thumping into his chest wall. He was still drunk. He knew it because his head didn't hurt and he wasn't disturbed by the sight of blood across both pillows and the sheets. Weak grey light, and an open sea chill came through the windows. There was cloud in the room. It was ten o'clock in the morning. The house was buried in dense fog.

Felsen had an encrusted gash on his forehead. He cleaned it in the bathroom and showered some sense into his body. He went out to the car wearing a suit under a wool coat. He skirted the lizard, backing towards the garage, amazed at it, a huge thing, half a metre with its tail. He went back and rolled it with his foot. Not an indigenous beast, he thought.

He opened the garage and looked straight down at his feet as if instructed. At the back of the car on the floor below the bumper a pair of crossed rusty horseshoes had been arranged. He dropped to his haunches. Other horseshoes had been placed behind each rear wheel. He gathered them up and hurled them over the wall with exaggerated force. One bounced back at him and he gave it special treatment.

He was panting as he reversed out. When he went back to shut the garage he saw two other horseshoes which had been under the front wheels. He ran at them and launched them into the scrub outside with crazed strength. He drove down to Estoril with a pounding just beginning behind his eyes.

Less than a kilometre from the house he emerged into brilliant sunshine. He arrived in Estoril in sweat and took a coffee in the main square which seemed to damage the part of his brain controlling his breathing. His heart raced as if pumping ether instead of thick, strong blood. He left his coat in the car and walked up to Abrantes' house with his suit jacket over his shoulder. He arrived with his eyebrows full of sweat and dark African states on the front and back of his shirt. The maid nearly shut him out. She sat him in the living room with a glass of water but Felsen was too agitated to sit and paced the room like a caged panther.

Joaquim Abrantes rolled in full of energy and purpose until he saw Felsen in his patched shirt, his head gashed and wearing his hangover on the outside.

'What happened?'

He told him.

'A lizard?' said Abrantes.

'I wouldn't mind knowing who put it there.'

Manuel was called, and the accusation of a practical joke levelled. It stunned the boy who was standing like a soldier at ease. He denied it vehemently and was dismissed.

'I wonder about that boy,' said Abrantes. 'He's always snooping around people's houses.'

Felsen told him about the horseshoes. Abrantes stood stock still, hunched, and Felsen caught a glimpse of the peasant from the Beira—superstitious, pagan, nose turned up to the smell of things not right.

'This is bad,' he said. 'This is very bad. Perhaps you've upset your neighbours.'

'I don't have any neighbours.'

'People from the village, maybe.'

'I don't know anybody from the village apart from the maid and she's happy to take my money.'

'You know what you have to do?'

'I'm hoping you're going to tell me. These are your people.'

'You must go to the
Senhora dos Santos.'

'In the Beira?'

'No, no. A local one. Ask in the village. They'll know. This magic is not from the Beira.'

'Magic?'

Abrantes nodded gravely.

Felsen drove back up to Azóia which was still in fog, a stationary, closed, muffled world and freezing after the August sunshine in Estoril. He went to the bar which contained four people, three in black and a barman. Nobody spoke. He asked his question, and a boy, Chico, was called.

Chico led the way into the narrow lanes of the village, the fog so thick that Felsen, in his state, would stop occasionally and rear back as if from a solid wall. The boy took him to a low house on the edge of the village. The moisture had collected on his black hair like morning dew.

A woman came to the door in a blue floral overall wiping her bloody hands on a rag—fresh from killing lunch or maybe an entrail inspection. She was round-faced with very small eyes which only opened to the tiniest slits. She looked at the boy who was her height but: it was Felsen who spoke.

'I have a problem, I'd like you to come and see my house,' he said.

She shooed the boy away. Felsen gave him a coin. They went through to the yard at the back of her house where there was a large domed dovecote the size of a church's cupola. She reached in and the doves flapped and cooed. One came out on her hand, white with brown traces on its wings. She held it to her bosom and stroked it down. Felsen felt strangely calm.

They drove to the house in fog so thick that Felsen stuck his head out of the window to see if it would improve his vision.

The
Senhora dos Santos
inspected the dead lizard already seething with ants.

'You found it in your bed, you said.'

Felsen nodded, scepticism crouched on his shoulder.

'It would have been better if you hadn't killed it.'

'Why?'

'Let's look in the house.'

As soon as she entered the hallway her breathing became laboured as if she was having a respiratory attack. She walked through the house, struggling with every step, her face reddening and, despite the oceanic cold, sweating. Felsen found himself close to laughing at the absurdity of the spectacle. He walked behind her, unmoved, as if on some vague barracks inspection.

The
Senhora dos Santos
looked at the bed, which was still bloodstained from his head injury, as if there was a thrice-stabbed body on it. She staggered from the room, down the stairs, and out into the courtyard pursued by Felsen, keen as a ghoulish schoolboy.

Her breathing recovered, her face went back to its natural colour. The dove was not so fortunate. It fell dead and already stiff from her hands. They looked at it, she sad, Felsen affronted by the woman's quackery. He was in no doubt she'd killed it herself.

'What do you make of it?' he asked.

The face that looked up at him was not encouraging. Her eyes were now fully open from the slits they had been before. They were black, all pupil, no iris.

'This is not our magic,' she said.

'But what does it all mean?' he asked. 'The lizard? The horseshoes?'

'You killed the lizard ... in your own bed. It means you will destroy yourself.'

'Kill myself?'

'No, no. You will bring yourself down.'

He snorted.

'And the horseshoes?'

'They will stop you from going anywhere. They will...'

'I've just been somewhere. You and I have just
been
in the car.'

'Not the car,
Senhor
Felsen,' she said, and he wondered for a moment how she knew his name.

'What then?'

'Your life.'

'What is this ... this...' he said, his hand revolving over and over looking for the word.

'This is
Macumba.'

'Macumba?'

'Brazilian black magic.'