Life Embitters (46 page)

Sr Souza uttered these last words in a state of great confusion. His lower lip was quivering, and he looked at things as if he were afraid. Pacheco was so taken aback he was at a loss for words.

With that, Sr Souza picked up his suitcase and started walking down the passage, followed by the strange couple accompanying him.

“Of course, there must be a kitchen in this flat … I reckon I have a right to this kitchen!” said Souza, suddenly spinning round towards where he imagined Pacheco must be standing. However, this gentleman hadn’t budged
from the doorway into the passage. So, as Souza couldn’t see Pacheco, he spoke to the people following in his footsteps with what seemed to be an air of resignation.

“This kitchen will be yours, you wonderful family! Sr Silva, cheer up, I beg you, lift your spirits, you child of God! Those of us who have beliefs and are God-fearing should never be afraid!”

The man addressed by the name of Silva looked completely unremarkable; in his forties, wearing blue clothes thin as an onion skin, he was dark, olive-skinned, and pockmarked by smallpox. His hair was sleek, plastered in brilliantine, and gave him a pretentious crest. He had a neatly trimmed, impudent black mustache that gleamed under his largish nose. His ears were on the big side too. He was carrying a parcel wrapped in yellow material under his arm. The man had the air of someone who might occupy a lowly place in a third- or fourth-rate den of vice. Sr Silva had said very little, but from what he
had
said, he seemed rather a pernickety lisper.

The female accompanying them, Sra Silva, according to Sr Souza, was around thirty-five, flabby and fat, with small dark eyes, soft hands and a face covered in bumps and growths. She wore slapdash makeup, looked slightly squint-eyed, and sometimes wrinkled her forehead like a cat in a fury.

“Come on in, Sra Silva, come on in,” said Sr Souza, making a bow. “This is our house, you know?”

Sra Silva responded to Sr Souza’s friendly invitation by nodding her head and making all kinds of faces. Her mouth sometimes made sounds like a goldfinch. Just as Sr Souza was grabbing the kitchen door handle, Sra Silva took off her hat, a hat like a tawdry, old-fashioned funeral wreath, and her head came into view. Thin patches of greasy, soot-black hair were sprouting from it. It looked like a thin crust molded to someone’s skull. That spectacle above the clothes worn by Sra Silva – a shapeless, threadbare black velvet
dress with a small purple rose cloth trim on the collar, sleeves, and elsewhere – was one of those experiences that takes away your zest for life when you realize that they do actually exist.

The threesome entered the kitchen.

In the meantime, Pacheco had reacted. He leapt upstairs to the second floor three steps at a time to tell Maria Souza what was happening. That lady listened, more dead than alive, though she too reacted swiftly. First she picked up the telephone and called the police. “It’s nothing important,” she said, “just an unruly servant.” Then she went down to the ground floor and knocked on the kitchen door.

Sr Souza and his friends had found the kitchen in a dusty, cobwebby state and were getting ready to clean it. In fact that kitchen wasn’t in use because when the boarding house had been set up, they built another kitchen in a separate annex linked to the house. As Sr Souza went to open the door, Sra Silva, who’d raised her skirt ever so slightly, was gingerly picking up a cloth between her fingertips. Souza and Silva had taken their jackets off and were covered in dust. An ash-colored cobweb had settled on Sr Souza’s greasy crest; at that moment he was cleaning the oven top with a yellowish newspaper. Maria knocked on the door again, impatiently. However, there was nothing untoward in the delay in opening the door. When she first knocked, Sr Souza’s head was inside the oven chimney. He’d found it difficult to twist his head out. When he had freed it up, he’d met the astonished – indeed frightened – gazes of Sr and Sra Silva. They’d not liked that knock on the door one little bit. Sr Souza looked at them and laughed. He cheered them up.

“That’s nothing to worry about!” he exclaimed.

When he opened the door, Sr Souza came face to face with his daughter. At this point something happened so quickly that it is hard to describe. The
moment he saw Maria, Sr Souza crumpled. Nobody had had the time to say anything and Souza’s face already looked like a child’s about to burst into tears. Souza’s corpulence dramatically emphasized his impending collapse.

“What are you doing here?” asked Maria in a gentle tone that was quite artificial, a gentleness that masked very visible harshness.

Sr Souza gave no response, but made a mechanical, involuntary gesture, clasping his hands as if begging for forgiveness.

Meanwhile, eyes glued to the ground, Sr Silva nervously scratched his mustache with the nail of his little finger and nodded in a way that seemed to say: “My God, if only your gambling partners could see you now! Who’d have thought it!”

Her forehead a mass of wrinkles, Sra Silva looked Maria up and down. Her normal eye glanced haughtily and provocatively. Her other eye showed itself as it really was, hardly reacted – her fish-eye.

“Who are these people?” Maria asked, looking at them.

“It’s a family … That’s obvious … They’re good people …” said Sr Souza with a manic look that was manic in color …

His expression made Maria’s lips pucker sorrowfully. She stood still for a moment and stared at the ground. Then she gave her father a look of infinite pity, her dark shadow-filled eyes revealed a hint of compassion.

Sr Souza went over to the sink where he’d left his jacket. He struggled to slip it back on. Then he turned to Sra Silva, pointed to his daughter in the doorway and said with a deeply stupid smile, “Senyora, I’d like to introduce you to my daughter Maria …”

“Ha ha!” said Sra Silva, keeping her distance, bowing grotesquely and gesticulating derisively.

Maria’s face shook with indignation. But she continued to restrain herself.

With that Sr Silva rapidly deflated and withered so visibly it was pitiful.
He had imperceptibly withdrawn to a corner, from where he was observing everything with an infinitely sad air. Souza noticed and tried to cheer him up – sarcastically.

“Silva! Brighten up, you child of God! What’s wrong? I’ve known you to be brilliant: you’ve raised the dead in my presence, you know every trick in the book, you have such a light touch. I’d never have thought you were so cowardly!” said Souza, indignant and fatherly at the same time.

“Sr Souza, I can’t stand this kind of situation!” said Silva, his mouth shaping up to start sniveling.

A long pause followed that might have been a dramatic silence, if Sr Souza, at a given moment, hadn’t begun to hum snatches of a military march.

Maria gesticulated impatiently and snapped out of her frozen stance.

“Well then, what are you intending to do?”

“Stay here!” said Sr Souza forcefully.

“No! The police are on their way …” said Maria almost choking on her words.

“What?”

“The police are coming …” his daughter repeated timidly, her hands trembling.

“No! Not the police!” shouted Sr Souza like an astonished child. “Why are the police coming? What’s my connection with the police?”

“Why do we have to argue?” asked a weary, edgy Maria.

Sr Silva put his hands over his face. Perhaps he was crying.

“And you, Sr Souza, the most excellent Sr Souza, as you like to be called, why do you place me in this kind of situation?” asked Silva, reacting suddenly, a glint in his eyes. “Who gave you the right to think we poor people don’t have feelings?”

“We poor people? Am I not poor too?” asked Sr Souza, dropping his
hands despondently by his side. “The fact is, Silva, that you don’t love me, nobody loves me … he added, limply acknowledging defeat.

After she’d greeted Maria in that derisory, rude fashion we described previously, Sra Silva now surveyed the figure of Srta Souza again, disdainfully and insultingly with the harshness a squint-eye often brings. Her bad eye seemed even more remote – completely absent. Conversely, her good one was active, an intolerable, gimlet presence.

A bell rang. Maria disappeared immediately.

Sr Souza went over to Sra Silva.

“Senyora,” he asked in a defeated, exhausted voice, “what would you do?”

“I would stay!” she retorted defiantly.

And added ironically, “But I am a woman.”

“So you would stay, would you?” drawled Sr Souza, laughing sarcastically, separating out his syllables in a mocking, mortifying manner.

Sra Silva’s whole body shook indignantly. A black line set over her furrowed forehead; she swung round, put her hat on and walked out of the kitchen after scowling contemptuously at the two men.

His wife’s attitude led Sr Silva to react. He stopped daydreaming. He walked boldly over to Sr Souza and poked his arm with a fingertip.

“What did this lady do to you to act like this?” he asked, looking at him askance. “What
did
she think she was doing? We should sort this out here and now …”

Souza looked at him as if he were gazing at a toad. He didn’t feel compelled to respond.

At that very moment Sra Silva appeared in the doorway flanked by two policemen. Tense and apoplectic under her graveyard wreath of a hat, her forehead knitted, her sinister eyes squinting, she looked like a harpy dressed in rags.

A policeman pointed to Sr Souza and they started to walk. There was complete silence, a damp squib of a finale.

The woman walked in front, and, no doubt to emphasize the dire nature of the situation, she felt obliged to be provocative and sashay grotesquely. Silva had fallen back into daydreaming, but was now openly sobbing. He walked second, his yellow parcel tucked under his arm. Sr Souza came last between the two policemen, his huge, downcast head sunk between his shoulders, his cardboard suitcase in his right hand and his hat in his left.

They walked slowly across the passage like three sleepwalkers. Pacheco opened the garden gate for them. Maria watched her father walk across the top of the stairs from the porthole on the second floor landing. When she did so, she’d have wept profusely if she hadn’t bitten on her handkerchief. Then she watched him leaving the house from her bedroom window that looked over the garden.

The moment he walked through the door to the street, Sr Souza spoke to the policeman to his right.

“You must understand … for a man like me to be in this state …” he said anxiously, with the smile of an ineffably human fool.

The policeman said nothing. He took his arm and made him speed up.

“I’m sorry,” said Sr Souza, “have a little pity. I can’t walk like you. I really can’t.”

Maria stood there, pressing her forehead against the windowpanes for a while, nervously biting her handkerchief. When the group turned the first bend in the road, she collapsed. Sobbing, crying, shaking nervously, her hair disheveled, she took a few tottering steps into her bedroom and collapsed on her bed.

So I am one of the few who can say that near Estoril I have witnessed the victory of innocence.

From Estoril to Cascais the road follows the river estuary. When you reach this town, situated above the sand bar of the Tagus, the Atlantic comes into view in its all raw splendor. The road makes a right-angled turn and heads northwards. The landscape changes completely. The ocean stays on the left, and a desolate, deserted coast, eroded by the presence of the sea, rises above the narrowest strip of sand. The coast isn’t high but is precipitous, rugged, jagged, and inhospitable. A reddish swath of earth and rocks, stained by the scorched green of gorse, runs parallel to the depression. From this elongated balcony you get a view of the white-flecked Atlantic: its subdued colors and mute wildness, impressive in its solitude, furrowed by depressions and swells that churn slowly and monstrously. The horizon fractures into a gray, leaden haze. A black steamer looms like a phantom out of the swirling mists. Though your balcony isn’t high up, it does create the sensation of an abyss. This sensation charges the air with all manner of dreams and imaginings. The lines by Maragall come inevitably to mind:

On this cliff, the four lines have an astonishing geographical, cosmic, emotional precision. They sum up Portugal.

As I was saying, the road to Cascais runs northwards; at specific moment it turns right and climbs inland. This is the Sintra road properly speaking. This famous town is located in a recess in the chain of mountains that separates the Portuguese hinterland from the Atlantic rim. Lush vegetation
springs up immediately on either side of the road. Colhares is halfway up the mountain – a “romantic village,” says George Borrow in his book. I mean
The Bible in Spain
that is so fondly remembered by all who have read it. After Colhares comes Sintra.

Borrow speaks enthusiastically about Sintra – and emphatically. “If there be any place in the world,” he writes in the first chapter of his book, “entitled to the appellation of an enchanted region, it is surely Sintra: Tivoli is a beautiful and picturesque place but it quickly fades from the mind of those who have seen the Portuguese Paradise.”

This is merely Mr Borrow’s personal opinion, and it is understandable given tendencies in matters of taste at the time. It is a comparison that has no objective basis in reality.

By Sintra he means the whole area: the city, the palace – the Pena castle – the buildings, woods, and Moorish ruins … “Nothing is more sullen and uninviting than the south-western aspect of the stony wall, which, on the side of Lisbon, seems to shield Sintra from the eye of the world, but on the other side is a mingled scene of fairy beauty, artificial elegance, savage grandeur, domes, turrets, enormous trees, flowers, and waterfalls, such as is met with nowhere else beneath the sun.”

Borrow’s description is rather superficial and stagey, but the final list has a serious tone, and is a broad brushstroke that really fits Sintra.