Taking Lives (23 page)

Then they took pine sticks and needles on a pitchfork and lit them, and perfumed smoke rolled up in the shed. They put the fire all over and around the pig, so it lay in a pool of flame and smoke and ash, the snout and mouth fallen apart in a loose smile. Each fork of burning pine was carefully tamped down. The white soot danced in the air.

They took heather and brushed the pig’s skin.

‘Makes it tastier,’ someone said in my ear. ‘The fire, I mean.’

I nodded.

The animal was still entire, like a stuffed thing or a carved pig, its skin blistered with a little gold and a little black. The smell now was sweet and resinous, except for the burnt hair that caught in the nose.

The men laid the pig out on a scrubbed bench and carried it into the light. They took brushes and they worked the body clean. It had a cooked colour now, not ordinary pink and white.

The slaughterer took a kitchen knife, washed it, whetted it. He cut into the cheeks of the pig’s head, pulled the flesh away and broke the mouth open. Blood rushed away: vermilion blood, shockingly dark, over long rows of small teeth and a loose tongue. The effigy of a pig was suddenly a real carcass again.

Someone pushed a glass of spirit in my hand. It burnt my stomach and settled it. So I didn’t turn away. I respected the practice, the method of these men, although one was rubbing the pig’s buttocks and grinning. Everyone laughed, shifted, like a party that has just become a party with the first broken glass and the first drunk laugh.

The laughs disturbed me.

The slaughterer cut out the anus of the pig, a neat and new round hole, and tied up the intestine. He cut a circle in the middle of the belly. No blood ran.

Then the knife went through the pig’s two back legs to make holes for a double hook. The men picked up the carcass and roped it to a beam in the shed, so it hung head down and just above the ground. The pig’s face, now the tongue was gone, the gristle of the nose carved out along with the jaw, was a drunk grin of blood.

The laughing man ducked in with his own little knife. He ran a finger down the two rows of nipples on the young sow’s belly. He sawed one off, rolled it between his lips, then chewed it and spat it out. He burst into kid’s laughter.

Now I wanted to look away. Someone pushed another glass of spirits on me and I drank it.

The slaughterer began to cut between the pig’s back legs, a careful, delicate line through the white of the fat, down and down. I went forward to see more clearly and more closely. He left his knife stuck in the flesh of a back thigh for a moment.

He took an axe to the breastbone. As the axe broke through, there was a fall and rush of blood that splattered into the red plastic bowls and coloured them black. I stood back.

He opened the caul of the belly, and the intestines began to fall, plump, white and shining. When they broke and stank, he tied them. He put his hands into the cavity and worked the guts out with the sucking sounds of a vacuum breaking.

The shed was impossibly hot. My mind was roaring with the spirits. I couldn’t tell what I thought any more: if somehow I had a window into some past, if the prospect of blood excited me, if only the methodical ways of the butcher kept me from being entirely revolted, if I wanted to work the carcass myself or if I wanted to forget I had ever watched a knife carefully go into a belly.

I wanted to say something urban: that if you eat meat, you’d better be prepared for how you get it. But I had nobody to bother with a cliche like that. I was alone with the magical transformation I had seen, that everyone else thought was ordinary and banal: from a live, screaming pig to an effigy, from a mess of organs to something now cleaned and trimmed that belonged in a freezer, or a butcher’s shop. Life turned into a menu in a half-hour.

They pulled out the flat shining liver, and the kidneys lying in their vast caul of fat. They took a saw and cut down the back of the pig to divide it.

I saw Christopher Hart watching from the doorway.

A killer watched a killing. He was startled, he told me afterwards. He’d got used to a green place, quiet, nice swimming pools, an available woman who liked stories, and here was a caricature of his own regular modus operandi. He was practical, too, when he killed. He loved change, not the killing that made it possible. He knew about the smells inside a body, the ones that were prickling my nostrils. The blowtorch and the pine needles were a new idea.

He caught the sense of party: wine, fire, blood. He had never felt such a perfect stranger. The scales in the car said this was a simple economic transaction, but it was more than that: a victory over want, and even a little dangerous.

The carcass was cut almost in half. The butcher had one last job: to take his knife first, then an axe, and sever the clotted head from the neat sides of pork above it. He swung the axe and someone held the head.

There was a procession then: the limp sides of pig thrown over shoulders, the liver hanging from a slim white rope of organs, the head, the tub of intestines. The blood had gone already.

I was hot drunk, with an unreliable look. Hart watched me. In a minute or two, the women brought the blood back from the fire: clotted like the skin on paint, to be chewed with spikes of raw garlic and a dress of olive oil, along with salt cod and boiled eggs and broa.

I ate. I snatched at the blood and the cod. I suppose I never looked more vulnerable.

‘You don’t want to drive,’ Hart was saying. So naturally I wanted to drive more than anything, wanted to drive to the sea and the mountains all at once, and fast.

Hart said, ‘You’d better get some coffee.’

‘Fuck coffee,’ I said.

He said, ‘Give me the car keys.’

So I took the keys and settled in the driver’s seat, ready to race away. It was so easy for him.

I started the car and slipped down the hill. By luck, I only grazed the low wall between road and valley. I pulled back and took the next bend too wide, trying to run away from the rocks. The trees stumbled about in my line of vision.

I knew this was wrong. The light had gone tricky and fussy, clouds over trees, not enough to define the sides of a road that lacked white lines. I was aware I needed to swing to left, to right, to run the bends accurately; I had driven this road often enough to know its character, if not its details.

I knew all at once I couldn’t make it.

There were headlights up close on my tail, blinding me. I couldn’t stop suddenly. I couldn’t see a place to stop. I couldn’t go on with the valley falling away to one side, straight down over ribs of rock and old tree roots. I could hardly hold the road but I was being pushed to go faster.

The lights were on top of me now, lights that made my head ache like blaring music. I thought I felt a slight impact, a nudge forward.

An ordinary macho would have wanted to overtake me, leave me behind. This driver stayed on my tail.

As drunks do, I had a sudden moment when I understood exactly what was happening. I saw a slip road signposted up ahead, and I cut off up its steep ruts.

The engine stalled.

The car with the ominous lights went by.

I put on the handbrake and my head fell on the wheel. The sound of the horn woke me up.

I was still stupid, you understand. I let the car run backwards to the road. I stopped there for a moment before, very slowly, another car crept round the bend with its lights full on.

The sun came out, low and brilliant.

Hart said, ‘Are you all right?’

‘What the hell are you doing following me?’

‘You’re drunk. I didn’t want you to kill yourself.’

‘You nearly killed me on the road. I couldn’t see.’

Hart didn’t answer for a bit.

‘I said, you nearly killed me.’

He said, ‘I’ll drive you back. Leave the car.’

It’s a wonder how reason hides reality. I truly believed, after that, that somehow he had saved my life.

That was when Anna arrived. She paid off the taxi, had a coffee, found out which house I was using; the barman spoke rough French. She’d asked if she could buy some of the bay leaves hanging in the bar, leaves gone brass brown in the dry air, and he’d given her some. She used them to beat the air into a breeze.

We used to share moments like this. She baked in the shade, smiling when people went past, let her eyes fill up with all the shades of green that ran up and down the mountain. There were so many cicadas rustling the air it seemed they made a wind of sound, a machine of some kind coughing like an old man in a bar comer.

I know Anna. The moment it was too late to cancel her ticket, she’d started to relax. She couldn’t waste the money, after all. She missed me, I know, missed touch, the possibility of regulating her life by someone else’s presence. It wasn’t romance; it was how things were.

But she couldn’t really see Formentina, and she knew it, and regretted it. Her colleagues said they dreamed of a life like this - green, not wasteful, not taken up with spending. Then they jumped in their Fords and went to spend plastic at a mall. They wanted healthy bodies, which they bought by the hour in a gym. They acquired peasant homes, but clean, sealed, lifeless peasant houses. They liked their world refurbished.

She, Anna, was just like them. She grinned at the fact.

She watched a woman washing at the public trough, a block of dark green soap rubbed on white linen, the linen scrubbed and rinsed and rinsed again; and a man pulling a cart of greenery and brownery from the roadside, grasses and bracken and vetch. She wanted to talk to someone but she realized she was, in the most literal sense, none of their business: a woman in neat white cotton, a bit too smart, inexplicably fallen from the sky on their chapel steps and seeming to want nothing at all.

Sooner or later, even if it was only for an afternoon with too much wine, she knew I was going to think about living here.

But she felt comfortable in the shade, immobilized by comfort. She wasn’t even watching the road when I drove up in some neat shiny Opel, followed by a straw-doll man, lanky blond, in a VW Golf.

She saw me go back to confront the blond, and she says we seemed to be fighting, but the words didn’t carry.

She got up, dusted down her skirt, held the bay leaves before her.

‘I’m early,’ she said. ‘I could come a day early, so I thought I would.’

I walked to her. It was the sun, I think, that kept my movements sensible and slow.

‘Anna,’ I said.

She put her arms round me, and I put my arms around her a moment later. I tried not to breathe out whisky.

‘I missed you. I thought I’d come early.’

‘I’m glad you did.’

‘I couldn’t call. You said your phone didn’t work up here.’

I hadn’t the slightest idea what to say or what to do about her, she could see that. She’d have to teach me all over again.

‘I like the train,’ Anna said. ‘I got a very slow train. It stopped at every station and several farms. Then I got a taxi up here. Everybody seems to know Formentina.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I was glad. I mean, it might have been some tiny village nobody knew about -‘

Hart ran up the steps to his neat white house and slammed the door hard. I know now the only thing that kept me alive through that day was the arrival of Anna, ‘that woman in a long, cotton skirt’, as Hart said, ‘with her long English face’.

Anna stirred a bit on the bed. I was up, and we’d slept only a half-hour.

‘I have to collect someone from the hospital,’ I said.

‘Who? I don’t understand.’

‘Someone from the village.’

I got out before she could ask questions, left her on thin cotton sheets in a room that never stopped being warm, even with the shutters and windows closed tight.

I drove very cautiously, but once or twice I misjudged a bend.

The hospital corridors smelled of ether and pine and plain, denatured food. I found Zulmira and Isabel sitting like guards on either side of a door.

‘He had the operation?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ Isabel said. ‘They won’t exactly tell us how it was.’

‘But he’s OK?’

‘We think so.’

Zulmira said, ‘There’ll be nobody to light the chapel.’

‘We’re going home,’ Isabel said.

‘But he’ll wake up alone in there.’

‘There’ll be nurses. There are two other men in there.’

‘He’ll be alone. I always sleep here.’

‘You’ll feel better if you go home and sleep.’

‘I suppose your husband wants you back.’

‘I expect he wants his supper, yes,’ Isabel said.

‘He could drive us home.’

‘He has to go straight home from work.’

‘We shouldn’t have to ask Senhor Joao. Jorge ought to drive us. I’ve stayed here before.’

I knew my father’s country well enough to know that conversations like this never happened in public. The one time I dropped wine glasses on a stone floor, and cursed and bellowed, I heard shutters closing on the houses all around me to spare me embarrassment. Either I now counted as a kind of local, or Zulmira was far too tired for shame.

‘I’ll try to find a doctor,’ I said.

I worked my way down the corridor. It was as tough as swimming in weeds. There were nurses, equipment, relations, a family party standing about in shock and not noticing other people trying to get by, two old men opening a five-litre white bottle of red wine and being told to put it away, a couple of doctors whose suits and coats seemed to stand away from their bodies like armour. I tackled them, got referred on, found a nurse who knew the records and told me it was a straightforward biopsy, the main danger the anaesthetic, and he was well through that.

‘It was a bit late, though,’ she said. ‘He can’t go home until tomorrow.’

‘Should his family stay?’

‘He’s fine. He’s not a young man, but he’s a strong man. Take them home and bring them back tomorrow when he can recognize them and they can take him home.’ She thought for a moment, and said, ‘If you could get his wife to see the doctor -‘ She smiled at me. ‘They think it’s only the men who die. Country people.’

I didn’t understand.

I cajoled Zulmira to her feet. I talked a nurse into opening the door so Zulmira could see Arturo’s chest rising and falling reliably in the middle bed.