Alentejo Blue (29 page)

Vasco put down a drink. ‘What has that pinball done to you?’

‘Not now,’ said Stanton, ‘not now.’ Instinct, not reason, he said to himself, narrowing his eyes. Go, go, go. The ball flew and kept on flying. Whatever, whatever, whatever. That’s what made it work.

To Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love, All pray in their distress, to Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love, All pray in their distress . . . The words chased round and round his head, creating the chasm he desired.

Two months to finish a second draft. Once he got started it was going to roll.

Now he’d lost the knack. He fired another ball. The lever was sticky in his hand. Everything in this whole place stuck to you. Made you feel like Vasco’s cloth had rubbed over every bit of your skin. The rain had started up again too, after a few days’ truce. It got so that you never felt entirely dry. Even the bed felt damp.

Stanton swallowed his drink. He thought he would play just one more game. It was another reason not to leave. He wasn’t leaving until he beat this bloody thing.

He smiled because he was only joking and loaded up the coins.

Marco came in, his head shining wet. Stanton raised his hand and Marco acknowledged him in some way though Stanton couldn’t tell what that was. It was like he had spoken without even opening his mouth.

I must be drunk, thought Stanton. Don’t let me drink any more.

‘I’ll buy you a drink,’ said Stanton, sitting down. ‘Vasco, two beers for us.’

‘I don’t drink,’ said Marco. ‘I’ll have a glass of milk.’

Stanton met Marco’s gaze and decided he would not be the first to look away. The people who made a virtue of looking at you frankly were the ones with something to hide. There was a shaving nick on Marco’s head, a tiny scab that would fall off soon. His eyes, which turned up at the sides, were placid brown but full of misplaced confidence, as if they could not possibly be deceived.

‘When did you give up?’ said Stanton, smelling the sanctified air of a reformed alcoholic. It explained a lot of things.

‘I never started,’ said Marco, smiling.

Stanton looked down at his beer. ‘Everyone’s talking about you. As if you didn’t know.’

‘They’ll stop soon enough.’

Marco had that stupid cape on. Didn’t he ever take it off? ‘Where did you get that cape from? What’s the story with that?’

‘On my travels,’ said Marco, in his damnably calm way.

‘Where did you get to, Marco? I hear Macau’s where you made it big.’

‘I’m no bigger than the next man,’ said Marco. He took a sip of his milk.

Stanton bounced his leg under the table and spilt a bit of his beer. The one man here he might actually be able to talk to, but he was on some spiritual, holier-than-thou, reformed-substance-abuser fucking high. ‘What’s the big secret?’ said Stanton, shredding a napkin. He resented the way Marco sat so still. It was a performance, that’s what it was. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘you know and I know that the only reason they talk about you is because you don’t speak. If you want them to stop, all you’ve got to do is talk.’

‘It doesn’t bother me.’

Stanton wanted to snap his fingers in front of Marco’s face. Make him blink for once. ‘You really think it’s some big deal.’

The birdwatcher and his
fiancée
(saying the word to himself made Stanton’s lip curl) more or less fell through the door, flicking water out of their eyes.

‘Brought the weather with us,’ said the birdwatcher. Stanton recalled he was companionably dumb.

‘Take a pew,’ said Stanton, ‘have a drink. Allow me to introduce you to Mamarrosa’s most famous inmate. Stephanie and, er . . . ?’

‘Huw,’ said the dumbbell, ‘and Sophie.’ She had something sharp stuck up her arse.

‘I want you to meet Marco. Marco was just telling me about his time with the French Foreign Legion.’

Marco and Huw laughed politely. Sophie condescended to smile.

Stanton wasn’t interested anyway. ‘Vasco! Three brandies and a glass of milk, at your leisure,
se faz favor
.’

He stared at a trail of red mud from the doorway and he thought, that is why I can’t go. It’s the earth, that’s what it is. The garden this morning was magnificently morbid, seen through a glaze of rain. Suffer and the land suffers with you. Those are the ties that bind.

The others were locked in conversation. You take it in turns to say something, thought Stanton, and you learn nothing at all.

Vasco was watching Marco from behind the counter. He thought Marco would make him rich. He didn’t dare approach him directly though. Out of respect for his wealth.

‘I had this feeling,’ the fiancée was saying, ‘when we were in the Chapel of Bones. Like there was this part of me opening up, and I did and I didn’t want that, and it’s been opening and closing ever since.’

‘That’s good,’ said Marco, in a tone he must have learned at the drying-out clinic, ‘just to recognize it.’

She thinks he’s a guru, thought Stanton. Setting her on the redemptive path. However blind you made a character, they were never blind enough.

He laughed inwardly and turned away. The Pottses, all four of them, were at a table by the cigarette machine. Now that was new. That they could come quietly into the room. The Pottses behaving themselves, being a family, mum and dad, two kids.

They sat at the table like they were having a seance, messages from the dead more likely than messages between those four. All of them wearing clean clothes and best faces. It was touching, it really was. What a reformation. Though reformations never last.

Not so long ago there had been rumours. Wild ones, even for this place.

But China had a job now with a builder in São Martinho. Chrissie was helping out at the Casa do Povo, voluntary work fit for a nun. The boy, Jay, was going to school every day and Stanton was pleased, really pleased. Ruby – he’d heard nothing of Ruby and that meant something, of course.

Happy families, thought Stanton. Why shouldn’t they play too? Play it well or badly, it was always only a game.

He looked at the back of Jay’s head and something welled inside. For a moment he thought he would cry.

He looked, instead, at China, the one who had claimed he was rising above, or diving below. But here he was, buying into it. Morality, someone said, is the herd instinct operating in the masses. Nietzsche, wasn’t it? Fucking right.

Chrissie looked over and caught him staring. He took refuge in his glass. It was only a social convention, for him to look away. If he’d felt guilty once he didn’t any longer. They ignored him but that was their problem. In fact it made it easier for him.

Conscience is but a word cowards use to keep the strong in awe.

Someone said that.

Someone or other.

Someone with a brain.

If you looked at a bald head long enough you wanted to touch it. That was a fact of life. If you needed some added charisma, which Marco obviously did, you could do worse than shave your pate.

‘I feel like I’m finally beginning to understand,’ the fiancée was burbling, ‘the need in life to make space for things that, you know, might come from . . .’

She was cute, actually. He wouldn’t mind. Any port in a storm. But she was dreaming and she thought she was just waking up.

‘The search itself,’ Marco was saying, ‘is what prevents us from finding our true being.’

One thing he was glad about now, he’d left his illusions behind. Disillusioned, was it called? Oh, well, it fitted nicely on the page and that was all that mattered to him. He looked at the girl and at Vasco and the
tableau vivant
of the Pottses. Dreaming, they were all dreaming. Marco was dreaming too.

Marco said, ‘In order to attain Awareness the mind simply has to make way.’

Stanton knew what Marco was. Some old hippie, fresh from an ashram where they chanted and indulged in free love. He got up to leave and, steadying himself with a hand on the table, whispered in Sophie’s ear. ‘Don’t listen to him, for God’s sake. If you end up like him you won’t have a single thought to call your own.’

The Mamarrosa
festa
late in November was second only to the 25 April celebrations but its provenance was unclear. It fell on one of the few days which, as far as anyone knew, was not a saint’s day. It was named simply for itself.
Festa da Mamarrosa.
In the afternoon there was a procession, with a line of little girls carrying cakes baked in the shape of houses and decorated with miniature Portuguese flags. Bruno said it was to give thanks that the village escaped unharmed in the Great Earthquake of 1755, but nobody listened to him. Others said it had begun as a birthday celebration of Manuel II, The Unfortunate, but most said it went further, much further, back. A few reckoned it marked the deposing of the Duchess of Mantua in 1640 and the restoration of Portuguese rule. They were listened to with respect but as that anniversary was on 1 December it made the position hard to defend. Vasco’s theory had something to do with Henry the Navigator and also Vasco da Gama but hardly a single villager was equal to the task of listening to what the theory was.

In the evening there was a party with music and dancing held at the Casa do Povo. People had been known to leave their sickbed and, on at least one occasion, deathbed to attend. Last year the Junta da Freguesia excelled itself by hiring a fire-eater and also an a cappella group, As Camponesas de Castro Verde, though some said it was hardly necessary to bring talent in from so far when so much of it lived beneath their collective nose. Some minor complaints notwithstanding, it was generally agreed to be the best
festa
ever, something that was agreed every year.

After the procession and as the day darkened, men prepared with tetchy heroism to shave for the second time and even Teresa’s mother, Cristina, switched off the television set.

The Casa do Povo was a building without pretension except for the pair of sickly magnolias by the entrance and a – to use the term somewhat loosely – copy of Gonçalves’ masterpiece, Panéis de São Vicente, which hogged the back wall of the main hall, framed in an explosion of gold. The room had been decorated for the event with bunting sewn by the primary-school children and the crochet work of older hands. A stage erected from pieces of scaffolding stood beneath the Duke of Bragança and his supplicants, supporting two loudspeakers, a mike and a stool.

At the far end, arraigned at a trestle table, João and his friends began with beer.

Manuel, wiping his moustache, said, ‘I drink to Rui.’

‘Rui,’ they said as one, and drank.

‘I drink to Carlos,’ said Manuel, ‘a true friend for forty years.’

‘Carlos,’ the old men said and raised bottles to their colourless lips.

‘I drink to José,’ declared Manuel, warming to his theme.

‘Drink all you like,’ said José, poking him in the chest, ‘but don’t go blaming me.’

‘João,’ said Manuel, ‘do you remember when they put this building up?’

João chewed his tongue for a while. ‘No, I don’t remember.’

‘Phut! That’s right. You got lost for all that time.’ Manuel pulled a tobacco pouch from his pocket and inserted a wad of brown leaf into his mouth. ‘You want? No, OK, so chew your tongue. Someone came from Lindoso, gave a big speech like he was Salazar himself.’

Carlos said, ‘Manuel, who will you drink to next?’

Manuel banged the table. ‘Yes, yes, it was all to be so brilliant. The Casa do Povo would look after us all. And when I was out of work, what help did I get? None.’

Joâo looked across at the painting, at the knight and the beggar and the priest. Everything keeps changing but still it remains the same.

‘It was a long time ago. Why complain?’ said José. ‘You do well enough from it now. I hear you’ve been coming to play cards, with the English woman.’

‘We never talk about anything,’ grumbled Manuel. ‘If what is gone is gone, then what is there left to say?’

João rubbed his bad knee. He looked down at his hand and wondered when the knuckles had grown so big.

‘Cards on top of the table, footsie down below.’ José poked Manuel again.

Manuel grabbed José’s finger. ‘I’ll break it,’ he said, ‘next time.’

Carlos raised his arms heavenwards, as far as his arthritis allowed. ‘Soft in the head, the two of you. Any more and I’ll throw you out.’

‘Like to see you try,’ said Manuel, twisting his moustache.

‘Pansy like you,’ said José, poking Carlos, ‘wouldn’t get very far.’

‘I drink to Rui,’ said João.

‘Rui,’ they said, and drank.

Quite a few couples were dancing in the area that had been kept clear next to the stage. Teresa stood by the wall, pointing her toes and pursing her lips. Nelson wasn’t half as good as he thought he was and who liked the accordion anyway? Girls in ribboned dresses and boys with newly shorn heads buzzed like flies around the dance floor, chasing or being chased. The women who weren’t dancing grouped around the tables, setting out plates and glasses and forks. They wore sleeveless tops and gold necklaces, arms and cheeks still pink from the shower. The men stood and fingered their collars and joined in sudden bursts of laughter sealed with a clearing of throats. Nelson’s son, Fernando, sat on the edge of the stage. Pedro and Francisco took turns offering their bums to be kicked. Such a child, Francisco, playing with the kids. Thank God he wasn’t going to be a father. That was a pack of lies. Clara said Ruby got rid of the baby. She said a lot of other stuff as well but Teresa wasn’t listening to any more of her lies.