Here Is Where We Meet (6 page)

Do you know the city well? the public relations lady asked me. She was looking worried, as if she had too many exam papers to correct, although clearly she wasn’t a teacher. It occurred to me that I should have offered her some Toicino do Céu. She would have eaten them absentmindedly while working on her computer.

No, I replied, I love the city but I don’t know it well. That’s why I need your help.

As you are probably aware, the Águas Livres supplied water to the city until a very few years ago. Now it doesn’t but we keep it running as – how do you say? – as a kind of homage? You could go up on Monday morning with Fernando. He’s the maintenance inspector for the water channels. 8:30 a.m., here in this office, Monday!

Could it be Tuesday?

Yes, but I thought you said it was urgent.

Tuesday would be better.

Then come Tuesday.

Fernando turned out to be a man in his mid-sixties, on the point of retirement. He had worked all his life for the Empresa Portuguesa das Águas Livres. He kept his eyes screwed up, he held himself very upright for his age, and he had the air of a man used to being alone and away from the crowds – like a shepherd or a steeplejack. He led me very quickly through the imposing temple-like building of the reservoir, which can hold 5,000 cubic metres of water. It was clear he did not like the temple – it had been built for too many people and too many speeches had been made there.

His private passion was for the water on its long, solitary, unnatural, improbable journey from its sources. A journey underground, over ground, and through the sky. Up there in its ducts the water had to be kept cool and well mixed, tranquil, and transparent, with the correct amount of light so that it did not become turgid. As soon as we were on the steps climbing up from the reservoir to the aqueduct, he slowed down.

The aqueduct at its top is only about five metres wide and consists of an apparently endless stone tunnel, on either side of which there is an open, very straight path, with a parapet to prevent people falling off. Fernando considered the water in the aqueduct as something alive, that had to be protected, fed, cleaned out, looked after – almost like an animal in a zoo. Perhaps an otter. Once a week he walked the fourteen kilometres to its sources in the Cavenque, checking everything. I think he had the impression that, like an otter, the water recognised him when he approached. He was dreading his retirement.

By this time we had walked some distance along the path and were high above the Alcântara valley. With a gesture over the parapet he indicated how he hated the idea of being stuck down there with the crowds, the cows, the chatter. And what made it worse was that he was still fit! He asked me my age. I told him. So you understand! he said. Você entende! I understood.

Now he wanted to show me his tunnel. He explained how the two semi-circular ducts for channelling the water were carved by hand out of basalt stone, piece by piece, and how the blocks were fitted together with mortice and tenon joints, and the cracks between the blocks filled with a putty made of quicklime, powdered limestone, and virgin olive oil, and how this putty, once set, was tougher than the basalt stone. Fernando had been trained as a stonemason.

I could not accompany him because of my rendezvous. Nor did I want him to be there when I met my mother. The other times the presence of others hadn’t worried me. Perhaps it was something to do with the location, with being off the ground. Or perhaps because it was the only time my mother had fixed the meeting in advance.

I told him I wanted to draw the view and to draw I needed to be quiet. He nodded, and unlocked a door that led into the tunnel, saying he would leave it open, so that when I was finished I could come and find him.

As he stepped out of the sunlight into the vaulted obscurity, his face relaxed and his eyes opened. The tunnel inside was narrow. I could easily have touched both walls with my outstretched arms. The semi-circular channels on either side were about two hand-spans in diameter. They were less than half-f, yet the flow of the water was even and persistent. After many kilometres, the water had become convinced of the gradient.

Down the centre, above the ducts, ran a flagged walkway, straight as a die, as far as the eye could see. It too was narrow. Two people would have had considerable difficulty in passing on it without one of them stepping off. Fernando switched on his lamp and set out.

A little later, while I was leaning against the parapet opposite the door he had left open, I thought I heard him talking. He was speaking in brief sentences as if making or giving notes. Yet there was nobody with him.

I started walking fast down the outside path, enticed on by the aqueduct’s straightness. All Vieira da Silva’s paintings are, in some way, about Lisboa and its skies and the paths through its skies. When I reached the far side of the valley I turned back and counted the arches until I found the sixteenth, which was not far from Fernando’s open door.

Way below were a couple of unfinished streets and some houses which were being lived in, though still being built. A poor suburb rather than a favela. I could see a car with no wheels, a balcony the size of a kitchen chair, a child’s swing with only one rope attached to a tree, red tiles with concrete blocks on them to prevent them being blown away by the Atlantic winds, a window without a frame with a double mattress hanging out of it, a dog on a chain, barking in the sun.

Do you see? she suddenly said. Everything is broken, slightly broken, like the rejects from the factory they sell cheap, at half price. Not really damaged, only rejects. Everything – the hills, the Sea of Straw, the child’s swing down there, the car, the castle, everything is a reject, and has been so since the beginning.

She was sitting on a portable stool a few metres along the path from me. It was a stool with three legs that folded, which was very light; she used to carry it with her so she could sit down in public places. She was wearing a cloche hat.

Everything begins sour, she said, then goes sweet and is afterwards bitter.

Did Father enjoy his swordfish? I asked.

I’m talking about life, not about details.

In spite of her words she was smiling, even her shoulders were smiling. I remember her smiling like that in a bathing costume on a beach around 1935, because whilst she was wearing the bathing costume she considered herself spared from work.

There was a mistake at the beginning, she continued. Everything began with a death.

I don’t understand.

One day, when you’re in my situation, you will. The Creation began with a death.

Two white butterflies were circling above her hat. Perhaps they had come with her, for there is little on the aqueduct at that height to attract butterflies.

Surely, I asked, the beginning might be thought of as a birth?

That’s the common error, and you fell into the trap as I thought you would!

So, everything began with a death, you say!

Exactly. And the births followed. The births happened – that’s why there’s birth – precisely because they offered a chance of repairing some of what was damaged from the beginning, after the death. That’s why we are here, John. To repair.

Yet you are not really here, are you?

How stupid can you get! We – us – we are all here. Just like you and the living are here. You and us, we are here to repair a little of what was broken. This is why we occurred.

Occurred?

Came to be.

You talk as if nobody can choose anything!

Choose whatever you like. What you can’t do is to hope for everything.

She was still beaming.

Of course.

Hope is a great magnifier – which is why it doesn’t see far ahead.

Why are you smiling?

Let’s hope only for what has some chance of being achieved! Let a few things be repaired. A few is a lot. One thing repaired changes a thousand others.

So?

The dog down there is on too short a chain. Change it, lengthen it. Then he’ll be able to reach the shade, and he’ll lie down and he’ll stop barking. And the silence will remind the mother she wanted a canary in a cage in the kitchen. And when the canary sings, she’ll do more ironing. And the father’s shoulders in a freshly ironed shirt will ache less when he goes to work. And so when he comes home he’ll sometimes joke, like he used to, with his teenage daughter. And the daughter will change her mind and decide, just this once, to bring her lover home one evening. And on another evening, the father will propose to the young man that they go fishing together . . . Who in the wide world knows? Just lengthen the chain.

The dog was still barking.

There are certain things which, to be repaired, require nothing short of a revolution, I suggest.

So you say, John.

It’s not a question of my saying, it’s a question of circumstances.

I prefer to believe it’s your saying.

Why?

It’s less evasive. Circumstances! Anything can hide behind that word. I believe in repairs, as I was telling you, and one other thing.

What would that be?

The inevitability of desire. Desire cannot be stopped.

At this point she got up from her portable stool and leant against the parapet.

Desire is unstoppable. The other day I heard one of us explaining why. But I knew it before. Think of a bottomless pit, think of a nothing. An absolute nothing. In it there’s already an appeal – are you following me? A Nothing is an appeal for Something. It can’t be otherwise. Yet the appeal is all there is; there’s only a naked crying-out appeal. A yearning. And so we come to the eternal conundrum of making something out of nothing.

She took a step towards me. She was whispering, with her bathing-costume smile, and her brown eyes fixed on some point in the distance.

The something which is made can give no support to anything else, it is only a desire. It possesses nothing, nothing is given to it, there is no place for it! Yet it exists! It exists. He was a shoemaker, I believe, the man who said all this.

Sounds to me like Jacob Boehme.

Stop dropping names!

She laughed her impertinent seventeen-year-old laugh.

Stop dropping names! she repeated and giggled. From here you could kill somebody dropping a name!

We gazed down at the red tiles and the double mattress in the window. The dog had stopped barking. And, when she stopped laughing, I held her cold hand.

Just write down what you find, she said.

I’ll never know what I’ve found.

No, you’ll never know.

It takes courage to write, I said.

The courage will come. Write down what you find, and do us the courtesy of noticing us.

You are no longer here!

Hence, the courtesy, John!

After saying this, she got to her feet, handed me the folding stool and proceeded to the door that Fernando had left unlocked. There she tugged it open and stepped – as if she had done the same thing every morning of her life – over the water duct, up on to the narrow flagged walkway.

Inside the air was cooler – as if we were underground instead of being in the sky. The light too was different. Outside, the daylight had been sparkling and transparent; having penetrated the tunnel, it changed and became golden. Every fifty metres the vaulted roof opened out into a small tower, which was built like a stone lantern so that daylight could enter. And from each lantern, as one after another they receded into the distance, the daylight fell like a golden curtain, the curtains getting forever smaller. Sound was also different. In the quiet we heard the lapping – as discrete as a cat’s tongue when drinking – of water flowing down the two basalt-stone channels on its way to the Mãe d’Agua.

I’m not sure how long we stood there facing each other – perhaps for the fifteen years since her death.

After the death of mothers, time often doubles or accelerates its speed.

Eventually she turned round, bit her lower lip, and began to walk. As she did so, she repeated without looking back: The courtesy, John!

She approached the cascade of light from the first stone lantern. Either side of her, the water reflected sparks that bobbed up and down like floating candles. When she entered the gold, it hid her like a curtain, and I did not see her again until she re-emerged from the light on the far side. She had become small because of the distance. She seemed to be walking with increasing ease; the further away she got, the more sprightly she became. She disappeared into the next golden curtain and when she reappeared I could scarcely distinguish her.

I bent down and I let my hand trail in the water which was flowing after her.

2

Genève

There’s a photo of Jorge Luis Borges, probably taken in the early 1980s, a year or two before he left Buenos Aires to come to die in Genève, a city he claimed as one of his ’native lands’. You can see in the photo how he’s almost blind and you sense how blindness is a prison – something he often referred to in his poetry. At the same time, his face in this photo is one inhabited by many other lives. It is a face full of company; many other men and women with their appetites speak through his almost sightless eyes. A face of countless desires. It’s a portrait which might be lent to the poets across the centuries and millennia, indexed as ’Anonymous’.