Alfred! my mother whispered in the café with the blue and white azulejos.
He was twice as large as you, I said, and his decrepitude made him look larger still. You remember what happened next? He gave you something in a packet.
It was some letters. He said he didn’t have any place to keep them now that he was on the street, and he couldn’t bring himself to destroy them, so he wanted to give them back to me.
Do they still exist?
She shook her head.
I burnt them, burnt them as soon as we got home.
Then he put out a filthy hand and ruffled my hair and he said to you: He needs taking care of.
My mother started to cry in the café with the azulejos.
When something has to go, she sobbed, I don’t hesitate.
You were still in love with him?
He had eyes that burnt through you, she murmured.
The moment I saw him I knew that wherever you had been that afternoon you’d been with him. And I told myself I would never tell anybody.
He died soon after. He was knocked down by a car that didn’t stop. They thought he was a tramp.
She put her hands up to hide her face.
It’s dangerous, she said, chewing on the words, to live just on virtue, or what Seneca called wisdom, even if it’s true virtue, it’s dangerous. It leads to addiction, like drink. I’ve seen it.
Why did he say I needed taking care of?
She lowered her hands.
He could tell by looking at you. You were ten, and you had a mouth that was always hanging open.
Did he know that you had children?
I hid nothing from him.
A face so full of pain, I said.
There followed a long silence during which we both looked out of the window and watched the white of the buildings outstaring the blue of the sky. Then she said: Alfred taught me and I taught you and I’m telling you that what you saw in his face wasn’t only pain. Not only pain. I’m going to take a little rest now.
She got to her feet and walked slowly towards the toilets.
She is serving mashed potatoes. Nice and fluffy, she says, still stirring them with a fork. She wears a kerchief over her hair. She worked all day in the kitchen of the tea-house in which we lived. She suffered from the heat of the stoves, yet when she sucked her fingers because they had icing sugar or homemade custard on them, she couldn’t help smiling: the sweetness folding into her pastry pride, for she knew she was a good cook. I see her writing in her diary. She bought herself one every year, often waiting until February when they were sold cheaper. The diaries she chose invariably had a small thin pencil attached to them. The pencil slipped through a loop and lay along the golden edges of the pages. Smaller and thinner than a cigarette — she smoked then a brand of cigarettes called Du Maurier — it was often the only pencil we could find to write something down with. Sometimes I drew with it. Be sure to give it back to me. It was always carefully reinserted into its loop. And with it she makes her diary entries, noting her rare appointments, and each day systematically, the weather. Morning: rain. Afternoon: bright patches.
The next time I saw her was on a bright morning.
The trams in the centre of Lisboa are very different from the red double-decker ones that used to run in Croydon; they are as cramped as small fishing boats and they are a lemon yellow. Their drivers, as they negotiate the steep one-way streets like straits, and nose their way round blind jetties, give the impression of hauling in ropes and holding rudders rather than turning wheels and operating levers. Yet despite the sudden descents, the lurches, the choppiness, the passengers, mostly elderly, remain contemplative and calm — as if they were still sitting in their living rooms or visiting a neighbour. And indeed, in places, the trams, with their open windows, sway so close to these rooms that it would be easy to reach out and touch a birdcage hanging from a balcony and with a little push set it swinging.
I had caught the number 28 going to the destination of Prazeres (Pleasures), which is the name of an old cemetery where the mausoleums have front doors with window panes through which you can look at the abodes of the departed. Many are furnished with low tables, a chair, bunks with bedspreads, rugs, photographs, statues of the Madonna, cushions. One has a pair of dancing shoes on a rug. Another has a bicycle and a fishing rod leaning against the wall facing the bunk with a small coffin on it.
I had got on the tram at the church in the district of Gracia, which is at the opposite end of the line from the cemetery, and it was when we were passing through the next district of Bairro Alto that I saw my mother again. Like other pedestrians in the narrow street, she was flattening herself against a shop-front to let the tram, which was ringing its bell, pass by. She spotted me notwithstanding and, at the next corner, where the tram stopped and its two sets of doors unfolded noisily like wooden curtains, she climbed aboard with a triumphant air, took a ticket out of her purse and, using the usual umbrella as a stick, came to stand beside me and slip her arm through mine. A dog sitting at the feet of another old woman wagged its tail, which thumped on the floor. The wooden curtains shut. The electro-motor whined to gather enough momentum for the tram to start. She said nothing, she simply handed me a plastic bag with the logo of the Colombo Shopping Centre printed on it.
At the next stop, when the wooden curtains opened again, she said: We’re going to the market, I take it?
Yes, that was my idea.
On hearing me say Yes, she laughed her seventeen-year-old laugh.
We get off, she said, in one minute and and it’s downhill all the way to the Mercado da Ribeira.
Seen from its interior, the Mercado da Ribeira resembles a pagoda, a pagoda constructed of carved stone, glass and metal. The engineering challenge must have been to find the best way of letting in daylight and, simultaneously, of offering shade from the punishing summer heat. The solution was to make it tall and only to let the light enter sideways.
There are surprisingly few flies, even where the raw meats are hanging. She leads me, tripping light-footedly, umbrella scarcely touching the flagstones, past the vegetables and fruit, to the avenues of fish.
It crosses my mind that the Mercado da Ribeira is why she chose to come to Lisboa.
Large fish markets are strange places because when you enter one, you enter another kingdom. The stony sea urchins, the locust lobsters, the lampreys, the squids, the lings, the turbots, insist that here the measures of time and space, of longevity and pain, of light and darkness, of alertness and sleepiness, of recognition and indifference are altered. For example, fish never stop growing; the older they are, the larger they are. A sixty-year-old sandy ray measuring two metres would, most of the time, live in what would seem to us total darkness. Fish can detect hormones by their smell in the water. They also have an additional sixth sense, which is that of their lateral line, a kind of elongated eyelid, running from gills to tail, sensitive to vibrations, sounds and sudden disturbances. There are 45,000 species of shellfish, all of them constituting food for others, all of them eaters. The age, relative immutability and cyclic complexity of this other kingdom is somewhat humbling.
They know me well here, my mother announces without a trace of humility.
She did not believe in humility. Humility was, in her opinion, a pretence, a tactic of diversion while the person involved covertly aimed at something else. Perhaps she was right.
Now she is bending over a basket of lady crabs. Their dark shells are like brown velvet, with a down on them so that they are as soft to touch as their nippers are sharp, and on their legs are smears of blue, as if they had sidled their way through oil.