A Small Death in Lisbon

'Nothing,' I said quickly.

'What about you?' asked Carlos.

'Me?' she said, and somehow stopped a blush from creeping along her jawline. 'Nothing too.'

'It was important at the time,' I said.

'And what was all that noise up in the attic last night?' she turned on me.

Carlos frowned. The cat loped in.

'I fell over in the dark,' I said. 'Where did you say you were going… later?'

'I've been invited to lunch by Sofia's parents.'

'Sofia?'

'The banker's daughter. The guy who gave you all that money for your beard.'

'You see a lot of them… the Rodrigues?'

'Sofia's in my class. She's…' Olivia hesitated, looked across at Carlos, whose eyes hadn't left her face. 'She's adopted. The past year we've been getting on. You know how it is.'

Carlos seemed to.

'I'll be in Lisbon this afternoon,' I said.

'I'll be going home,' said Carlos.

'If you're going to the station,' said Olivia, with a grab in her voice, forgetting that 'later' hadn't quite arrived. 'You could walk me up there.'

Olivia kissed me on the cheek and rubbed the lipstick in, something she liked doing, something she saw as grown-up.

'Don't forget to shave,' she said, rubbing her fingers together.

They left. I shaved and went down to the cafe and drank a bica widi Antonio Borrego. I felt relaxed after Olivia's performance. If a sixteen-year-old can manipulate two grown men then I might as well deliver myself into the hands of Luisa Madrugada and let her make a monkey or a man out of me.

I drove into Lisbon wrestling with my octopodial conscience. Should I really be taking a possible witness out to lunch when I didn't know her level of importance to the case? It was an ugly argument. That word possible became very important, and for once I let the impetuous personal beat the responsible professional into the ground.

I spent twenty minutes in Rua Actor Taborda sitting in my car waiting for the time to get less embarrassingly early. I was watching the entrance to a porno cinema, faintly interested in the type of people who would have the strength for sessoes continuas on a Sunday lunchtime. Apparently no one.

I rang the bell at 1.00 P.M. and to my slight disappointment Luisa came down to meet me. I didn't know what my subconscious had been hoping, but my stomach was telling me it wasn't to miss lunch. I wanted her to grab my arm, as Olivia would, and march down the street, which finally made me rein in on hope and instigate some equanimity. We went to a cervejaria on Avenida Almirante Reis, one in a chain well-known for their seafood. I wanted to stand at the bar because I liked to eat seafood in an informal way, but the bar area felt cheap and sleazy even with the magnified tanks of puzzled crayfish and lobster.

The waiter sat us in the window of the restaurant. There were two other couples and the rest of the cavernous interior was empty. We ordered a plate of large prawns and a couple of dressed crab and two beers.

'I have to admit you surprised me,' she said.

'By calling you up? I surprised myself, too.'

'Well, yes, that… but I meant you surprised me by being a policeman.'

'I don't look like one?'

'The ones you see are taken over by their jackboots and sunglasses. The ones you don't, people like you in the Policia Judiciaria, I don't know. I imagined them to be stern, hard men… weary too.'

'I was weary.'

'Weary of life… weary of the worst aspects of life. You were tired.'

The beers arrived. I offered her a cigarette and she sneered at the Ultralights and took out a pack of full-strength Marlboro. She lit the cigarettes with a petrol Zippo, which she buffed on the tablecloth as she looked into the tree-lined street outside. She rested her chin on the heel of her hand and smoked and thought about something that made her eyes greener.

'I've always thought,' she said, 'that if you want to be sad, Lisbon is the place to do it.'

'And you're sad?'

'I meant melancholy.'

'That's better, but…'

'I'm sad too, sitting up there in front of my computer on the first beautiful Sunday afternoon of summer.'

But you're not… any more.'

'You're right,' she said and shook her head to get rid of it. Her strange and large earrings bounced off her cheeks.

'The earrings?' I asked.

I have a friend who makes jewellery out of restaurant detritus. These were made out of the gold netting from a wine bottle.'

'I saw the spoons yesterday.'

'The spoons,' she said, her mind still elsewhere… on the beach with somebody else maybe. She went back to the window.

'You know why Lisbon's a sad place,' I said. 'It's never recovered from its history. Something terrible happened here which marked the place for ever. All those shaded, narrow alleyways, the dark gardens, the cypresses around the cemeteries, the steep cobbled streets, the black and white calcada in the squares, the views out over the red roofs to the slow river and the ocean… they've never shrugged off the fact that almost the entire population of the city was wiped out in an earthquake that happened nearly 250 years ago.'

Silence. Her chin pivoted on the heel of her hand. She blinked at me twice. What had I done?

'Poetic police,' she said.

'The Igreja do Carmo. Can you think of anywhere else in the world where they've left the skeleton of a cathedral in the heart of the city as a monument to all those that died?'

'No,' she said after a moment's thought.

'Hiroshima,' I said. 'That was the scale of it. Do you think Hiroshima will ever be a happy place?'

'Pensive police,' she said, and this time not joking.

'I can do pitiless police as well,' I said, thinking Hiroshima was not date talk.

'All right.'

I gave her my dead-eyed look reserved for lying mother-murderers. She shuddered.

'How many other police have you got in there?'

'Pleasant police,' I said, giving her my born-again-Christian smile.

'I don't believe pleasant police.'

I slumped in my chair, head on chest.

'And that?'

'The police that everybody wants to see… posthumous police.'

'You've got a diseased brain.'

'It helps with the job.'

The waiter put the prawns and crab down. We ordered two more beers. We ate the prawns. I liked her. She sucked the heads out, ladylike or not, she didn't give a damn.

'You don't look like a schoolteacher,' I said.

'Because I'm not. I'm the worst teacher I know. I love kids but I have no patience. I'm too aggressive. Two more weeks and I'm out.'

'Into what?'

She sized me up for a second to see if I was worth telling what she had to say, whether she wanted to go that far yet.

'I've been resisting it for some time, but now I'm going to do it. I'm going to run one of my father's businesses.'

She sucked hard on a prawn head, smacked her lips, wiped them and drank three-fifths of her beer down in three gulps.

'Just one of them?' I asked, and she stopped wiping her hands to check me for irony.

'I'm ambitious,' she said, tossing her napkin to one side.

The waiter lowered two more beers in front of us.

'For what?'

'For a life in which most, if not all, the decisions are my own.'

'Is this a recent development?'

She smiled and looked down at the shattered prawn shells on her plate.

'Was that perceptive police?'

I finished my first beer and started on the second.

'Have you been in business before?'

'I worked for my father for four years after university. We had a fight. We're the same type. I left and went to do a doctorate.'

'On what?'

'Was that deaf police? I told you yesterday, remember?'

'I was concentrating on other things.'

'I know,' she said, and suddenly quantum mechanics came back into my life. I was aware of every photon between us.

'Your turn to be perceptive,' I said.

'The Economics of Salazar,' she said, slowly. 'The Portuguese Economy from 1928-1968.'

'We don't have to discuss it now, do we?'