The choicest of all crabs, she says. Here they call them naralheira felpuda. Felpuda means ’hairy’.
She straightens her back and looks into my eyes with an expression I’ve not seen before.
I’ve learnt a lot since my death. You should use me while you are here. You can look things up in a dead person like in a dictionary.
Her expression is one of happy impertinence, for she is sure now that she is beyond reach.
We walk down one of the aisles of the pagoda, past flounders, tunny fish, John Dories, mackerel, sardines, anchovies, sabre fish.
The sabre, she says, looking up at the distant roof, her little short nose in the air, the sabre only comes up from his depths to the surface at night when there’s a full moon!
All the fishmongers are women. Women with strong shoulders, hefty forearms, wearing rubber boots, handling the ice as if it was hot metal, and their tied scarves and slightly mocking eyes are very feminine. They treat the fish they’re selling as they might treat distant, mildly irritating, members of the family. Irritating because not as alert as they once were!
My mother picks up a grey shrimp to smell it. The vendor, who is gutting a fish, smiles at her.
Get half a pint, Mother says. Ask Andreas here, her name’s Andreas, she has a husband in Cuba and a daughter who is an air hostess.
Andreas holds up the fish she is gutting and points very gently with the tip of her knife at what looks like a soft roe nestling near the top of the fish’s emptied stomach cavity. Shiny, whitish-pink, curvy — like a foxglove just before it opens.
It’s a whiting, Mother says.
The tip of the knife moves carefully down the stomach cavity and now touches an orange-coloured granular sack, the same orange and the same size as a dried apricot. Hard female roe.
Hermaphrodite! Andreas announces smiling, and then repeats: Hermaphrodite! as if she does not want us to get over our surprise. Hermaphrodite!
I pay for the shrimps and we proceed down the aisle, each of us eating them and throwing the heads and tails on the floor.
We walk down another aisle and we pass a slab on which there are a dozen of the reddest fish I’ve seen. Scarlet with a fire in their red such as no flower has, not even a tropical one.
Atlantic redfish, Mother murmurs. They too have strange mating habits. First of all, they’re not mature until they are ten years old, which is very late. Next, the males fast for two months. Then they have intercourse, like animals do, with the sperm entering the female. She keeps it there for four months until all her eggs are ready, thirty, fifty or a hundred thousand. Then she lets the sperm fertilise them. After a while the eggs hatch into larvae inside her. And nine months after intercourse she lays the larvae deep in the Atlantic.
I’ve always put life before writing, I say.
Don’t boast.
It’s true.
Then pass over it in silence.
Supposing now I don’t understand what I note down.
Others may.
We stop before a bank of salmon.
Salmon was Father’s favourite dish, wasn’t it?
Yes, she says, but since his death he prefers swordfish. The espadarte! The espadarte with its upper beak, which is like a blade, and long, long — a third of his whole length — and with the blade he slashes out left and right to kill the fishes he is hunting, each with a single blow. It was a swordfish — wasn’t it? — that the old man of the sea wrestled with in Hemingway’s story. The book made me think of your father and of life in the trenches during the Great War. What’s the connection? you will ask. I can’t explain everything. The story made me think of your father and the war. I can’t explain why.
A connection of courage?
She nods.
I never saw a man who wept as often as your father and I never knew a man who was half as brave.
She nods her head again. I take her arm.
The strangest thing of all, John, is that the flesh of the espardarte — which must never be confused with the silver sabre fish — the flesh of this huge fish, when it is marinaded and cooked, is the most tender, the most delicate, and the whitest in the world. It dissolves in the mouth — you don’t bite — it tastes like a soufflé. Each time, after I’ve cooked it, I place it on his plate like a kiss.
He comes to eat it here?
Of course not. He’ll eat it, wherever he is, when he happens to think of me. Just as I think of him when I’m preparing it.
Do we have to find an espadarte, I ask, or can we just think of one like we’re doing now?
What are you saying? I told you, it has to be marinated in lemon juice and olive oil! So we have to find lemons and a green pepper and a yellow pepper and a red one. You cut up the peppers and put them in the pan first so they give off their liquid, then you pop in the fish. A slice, weighing about 300 grams, not too thin, a thick slice taken from a juicy lateral cut from across the swordfish’s belly. Takes very little time to cook — it must never be overcooked — best to put a lid on the pan. Some serve it with capers, I don’t. I’ll get the fish, you go and find the lemon and peppers.
She didn’t turn up again for several days. I took the ferry to Calilhas on the other side of the Tagus. Looking back across the water at Lisboa, each large building was recognisable, each district, as marked on the street map, could easily be distinguished and given its name, the hills behind seemed to have pushed the city nearer to the sea, to the sea’s very edge, and strangest of all was the impression I had from this distance that Lisboa had removed all its clothes and was naked! I didn’t know whether this was due to shadows from the clouds, or to a refraction of sunlight coming off the Sea of Straw, or whether it was because I had entered the zone where, throughout centuries, sailors and fishermen had found again, or looked back at for the last time, the Lisboa they loved.
The next day the weather was gusty with squalls of Atlantic rain. I was crossing the Campo dos Mártires da Pátria with an anorak pulled over my head. The rain came in fits and starts and when it came, it was drenching. The martyrs of the fatherland, after whom the square is named, were executed here by hanging in 1817. The gallows stood where the roundabout now is. All twelve of them were Freemasons. The execution was ordered by Marshal Beresford, for at that time, after Wellington’s Peninsular War, the English were governing the country. The twelve men were accused of being republicans and conspirators. As they were being blindfolded they prayed for the city.
And this square, with its roundabout and trams and unending traffic, is still strangely full of prayers. You edge your way between prayers, as between cattle in a livestock market. The martyrs’ prayers. The prayers of those who are obliged to visit the city morgue, beside the Institute of Forensic Medicine to the north of the square, and the prayers of all those who come here to have the blessing of the man whose statue has been placed in the middle of the roundabout: Dr José Thomas de Souza Martins.
Around this statue stand stone tablets which look a little like headstones for graves. Some lean against the plinth of the statue, others against one another. In fact they are not tombstones: written on them are prayers of thanks to the doctor who once cured a cirrhosis, or a bronchitis, some haemorrhoids, a case of impotence, a child’s asthma, a woman’s stress, a colitis. . Some of the cures were performed during his lifetime, some after his death.
Old women are selling photos of him in the square. Framed and unframed. Dr Martins looked somewhat like my Uncle Edgar — who was my father’s elder brother, a man of learning who never stopped learning, a man of ideals who never despaired, a man whom everyone, including my mother, treated as a failure, a man with a wart on the middle finger of his right hand where he held his pen writing hundreds of pages of a book that nobody ever read or published.