Taking Lives (26 page)

We both picked up a tourist sheet about the Templars and read it over coffee. Facts were listed: how the Templars fought, how the order was dissolved around 1400 and the Order of Christ formed at Tomar on its ruins; and how the caravels of the Portuguese discoverers, on their way to find Prester John and India and America, carried the cross of the Order of Christ around the world. But this was not the history my father had laid out on nights when he and his son were both hungry for a missing wife, a missing mother; the man’s stuff, the core of things, the strong, grey, purposeful, ominously patient knights.

‘I’d like to walk to the castle,’ I said.

I was a tourist, but I was actually nervous. The castle at Tomar was the one great picture I shared with my father. If he was lying about this, he lied about everything.

Walking seemed like a proper pilgrim’s way up the hill. The path led behind the town hall, up green tracks and along walls of soft grey stone tangled with ivy and bougainvillea.

We stopped on the way, under an olive tree.

‘My father used to dress the story up,’ I said.

‘Fathers do.’

‘I’d be warm in bed and he wanted me to be grateful, so he’d make me shiver.’

Anna said, ‘I know some ghost stories, too.’

‘He talked about this deep, deep well where the dead ride by in procession every night. There were vaults underneath, warrens and tunnels. There was the seven-branched candlestick of Solomon’s Temple, the skull of someone called Beelzebub, the Shroud from the tomb of Christ and the Holy Grail.’

I started walking again over the disorderly stones.

‘You don’t understand,’ I said.

But she wouldn’t let me block her out like that.

She said, ‘I only ever heard the crazy stories about the Templars. The ones that wash up in literary novels. All that stuff about an androgyne devil and kissing each other on the anus and the cat and the severed head. And the secrets of Solomon’s Temple. And the Masons, of course.’

‘I got a book on the Charing Cross Road once,’ I said,

‘about the Templars. It was in French. Apparently the Templars had secret Masters from other galaxies, and they explained absolutely everything.’

Anna said: ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to simplify the world like that - to understand everything all at once with just one great mistake?’

We came to the outer gate.

I was cleaning the place in my mind, taking away the long buses, true common carriers, lined against the walls, and the chatterers at the gate trying to read the opening hours out loud, and the stand selling apricots and cold water. Anna knew not to break into this odd air of reverence.

I wonder what she made of my mood. I never knew.

We went through the gate into a sunken lane of stone. The lane turned and opened suddenly on to a terrace: orange trees and blowzy pink oleander and box hedges, benches in blue and yellow tile, a view of woods. Anna was delighted. I was shocked. I couldn’t see blood and chivalry for this pretty park.

You sense madness in this, don’t you? Or at least irrational and obsessive feeling. But this was my only way, I truly thought, to know my father’s world and see the picture we shared. I needed to know this one thing.

Tourists bustled past us, camcorders cutting the place down to screen size and details. Anna pulled out the green Michelin for her own information.

Ahead I saw the true fortress: not the castle, but a round church buttressed down to the rock, its brute defensiveness only a little disguised by the new steps and terraces around it, a tower squared off for strength and with one huge, prophetic bell hanging above it.

It was the church that my father had told me about. I stood breathless.

The tourists fussed on. I thought I heard horses wheeling nervously, held in place by figures in grey armour, metal grazing the ground, hoofs and weapons. I thought I smelt horses, too: sweat and dung.

But I didn’t just think this. I did hear and I did smell. I was not surrounded by ghosts, but by story, a story heard by a boy when he’s half afraid of sleep, when his father domesticates terror by telling him things he already knows by heart.

‘The entrance must be through the church,’ Anna said, turning the Michelin pages.

Cloisters of blue tile and shining orange trees. A circle of a church enclosed in a gilded lantern. Below the church, a box of plain stone and light, bare and odd.

‘Umberto Eco counted the steps,’ Anna said, brightly. ‘For Foucault’s Pendulum. He seemed to think the number mattered.’

On the outer walls, stone flourished around windows, cut into sea stuff, coral and cables and astrolabes, then artichokes, then angels in armour, held up by an old bearded man and reaching up to a heaven of square crosses and battlements. Built later, Anna told me from the guide, like the Renaissance cloisters and the aqueduct that stepped into the convent like a parade, and the buff and white hospital wings, all added to this core of my father’s particular meaning.

‘I think places like this are like Tarot cards,’ Anna said. ‘They were just playing cards to start with, then people forgot how to play and now they think the Tarot is mysterious. They’ll tell fortunes by bus tickets next century.’

Now I know the backsides of monuments very well, the bits that fail to fit; the Museum was full of them, a mad storehouse of things with the order and sense of the public galleries as a facade. I wanted to know what was private here.

‘You want to see the rest?’ I said to Anna.

She said: ‘Of course. It’s extraordinary.’

‘I mean the rest that the public can’t see,’ I said. ‘I have my Museum credentials. It’s worth a try.’

The woman at the door made phone calls, and asked us to wait. We sat on the rails by the Charola, the great round and domed church, looking in on still grey light and the scaffolding that reached to the roof with broad stairs and wide decks and a sense of permanence.

The tourists paid and passed, a straggle speaking low out of awe at the oldness, the gold of the stone, the oddness of the place.

After twenty minutes or so, a man in his twenties rushed out of a stone doorway, said, ‘Mr Costa, Mr Costa’ as though he was embarrassed not to have been there to greet the distinguished visitor, and introduced himself as ‘Manoel. Your guide.’

I stood up and stretched.

‘We can begin,’ Manoel said, ‘in the Charola.’

We crossed the ropes, stood inside the dome of the church. Manoel pointed out the single great pipe left from a stolen organ, the walls where once there had been paintings on wood, taken off for the glory and convenience of Lisbon clerks. He showed the spiky, gilded wood, the statues, the almost Byzantine line of the faint paintings on the wall. But my eye kept drifting upwards, to where the decks of the scaffolding hid the top of the dome.

Manoel noticed. ‘This way,’ he said.

We climbed on the kind of settled wood that sits inside church towers and holds bells. This structure, grand and solid, was supposed to be temporary, but it filled the view and redefined both light and space inside the dome. We reached a deck that ran all around the Charola, wall to wall, which was roofed in turn by yet another deck. We were climbing through attics of old air, light that was pale gold from the reflection of the timbers. The stairs cut into each other, branched off, sometimes divided into ceremonial pairs.

Finally, we came out inside the top of the dome. The scaffolding reduced it to a kind of circular, whitewashed corridor, suspended just under the sunlight of the top clerestory windows. There were tables set with brushes, pots, plaster knives.

‘Nobody has seen this,’ Manoel said, knowing just what I would like to hear.

I expected the crack of beams under the weight of someone working, but all I heard was my breathing, Anna’s breathing, a few ragged pigeons flapping at the windows, the slightest sound of the scaffold easing and settling in its frame of old stone. Manoel stood waiting.

Anna said, ‘But I don’t know anything about all this.’

We followed Manoel around the corner where the whitewash had been carved away from the wall.

I saw a devil on a pillar: only an attendant devil, but standing on a dog’s hind feet with the nipples of a sow and the knowing face of a scavenger. We turned, Anna and I together. We saw Christ being beaten, the image so huge that we were caught up against open, staring eyes. We turned again, to a wall where a palace was faintly outlined and a knot of short, violent soldiers, and a virtuous face whose body had been ruined under the whitewash. It seemed strange the devil had done so well all these centuries.

‘The Passion of Christ,’ Manoel said. ‘The pictures must continue around the dome.’

‘But who’d have seen them?’ I said.

‘They didn’t have to be seen,’ Manoel said. ‘They were for the glory of God.’

‘They’re extraordinary,’ Anna said. There was some greediness in her voice: a discovery, unknown frescoes, unpublished, more evidence perhaps of Italianate influence on Portuguese art, or, better yet, some independent sort of genius, a new Giotto, maybe two. She loved to be free of the classroom kind of questions, her students’ passion for issues, not pictures, and facts that could be looked up in encyclopedias.

‘This is from the time of the Order of Christ,’ Manoel said.

‘Oh. Oh, of course,’ I said.

I imagined: some secret worshipper up so dizzyingly high with paints and ladders, putting these images on to new plaster. For I was used to frescoes that, being painted fast, held decorative masses stencilled on the wall, quick and sunlit effects, a bit of individuality added later. These had something quite different: an insistent, personal sense of pain.

I imagined the painter daring himself to work so high above the ground, to see the eyes of Christ in agony and the temporary triumph of a warthog devil with a thousand tits. All this would stay private for centuries because, after all the risk, his work was just vague lines and masses from the church below. So the painter worked - for what? For money, probably. For want of any other assignment. For God alone.

Anna said, ‘Are any of the restorers about?’

Manoel shrugged. ‘Sometimes there’s money, sometimes there isn’t,’ he said. ‘It has taken a very long time.’

Anna was up against the wall, fingers tracing just above the thick whitewash.

I thought of my father’s decent, practical Catholicism, nothing to extremes, nothing in particular. Then I saw the devil with the nipples, the scourge in the hands of a short, dark soldier, the graphic bigness of the dark eyes of Christ, their stare only magnified where the paint had cracked and chipped in settling.

The corridor of light between dome and platform turned claustrophobic.

‘They have worked here many years,’ Manoel said.

But there was nobody working. The quiet was eerie. The only presence was this row of half-uncovered versions of the faith that animated the place. And I was an outsider to that faith, only confused and horrified by the devil, the whipping, the eyes.

‘We should go down,’ Manoel said. ‘We have many other things to see.’

I was ready, more than ready, but Anna said, ‘Could I look for just a minute more?’ She smiled her English smile: radiance on a time switch, its purpose unconcealed.

I slipped on the first few steps going down. I was grateful to be out of the corridor of light, into the attics that followed one after another and down the last, wide staircase to the ground. I felt literally grounded: back where paintings can be classified and stored, explained and safely presented, where taxonomy takes over from impact as pity takes over from pain. I wasn’t thinking clearly, you understand.

I was still on the staircase when I saw Hart by the ticket desk.

He looked up, sharp and expectant like a dog. Anna was several minutes with the paintings, and Manoel went to help on the stairs with his elaborate chivalry, but when they reached the ropes, Hart was still there.

I’d come for something very private, something I could barely share with Anna, and there was this thief, this sociopath, this middling thing, a suspect professor. At that moment, the tables turned. I could have killed him.

Hart knew that at once, noted it down. He hid the same feeling for a living - as you might say - and so he recognized it in others. Reciprocated, too. Then he went back to business: watching to see if the life of John Costa was worth stealing, if anyone would ask questions.

Manoel said, ‘If your friend would like to join us -‘

Hart said: ‘That’s very kind.’

Anna smiled.

‘We go next into the Templars’ castle,’ Manoel said. ‘Please follow me.’

‘I don’t want to spoil your visit,’ Hart said.

Anna said, ‘Of course not.’

Manoel collected keys from the entrance desk, a heavy iron bunch, and unlocked a side door at the end of the last cloister. There was nothing on the other side except a narrow stone ledge that ran unguarded along the wall. The stone was shiny. We edged along, careful of broken blocks and the occasional jagged gap.

‘This,’ Manoel was saying, ‘was the palace of Henry the Navigator. Are you all right, Senhora?’

The palace was ruins, marked out by archaeologists’ tapes and flags. We picked and shuffled along the ledge.

Hart could have slipped and I might have been delighted to be rid of him. Whatever I was still supposed to do - guard or arrest him - it would be over.

Every time I hesitated a moment, looked out through the empty windows in the old palace wall to the woods, he’d catch up and brush against me, significantly.

Anna went forward very cautiously.

We came to a second locked door. Manoel rattled his chain of keys, selected one and got it wrong, then pushed a great bar of metal into the lock, and the door opened. We were in the tower of the castle itself.

Anna was disappointed, I could tell. This was just stones and defences, a job lot of heritage. You had to read the books to find the battles and what they meant, and she preferred to find things by trusting her eyes. So she noticed that Hart watched me and I watched him. It was odd how alert we all were, with Manoel chattering.

Manoel, politely, pointed out the chapel: a room now suspended in a wall, the stairs long ago crumbled away. ‘The stores were there,’ he said, showing rows of practical cells. ‘And the wells,’ he said, pointing to a circular gap in the sweet grass that had colonized the castle.