“What about the young lady?”
“She was most upset. I suspect we won’t be seeing her for a few days.”
In effect three days went by and the young lady didn’t put in an appearance. At dusk on the third day Sr Souza came back. I saw him climbing the garden steps. I looked at him hard. He was tall, stout, and weary, with a salt-and-pepper beard, and large, bulging, olive-colored eyes that were bloodshot and watery. As he started up the steps, he took his hat off and exposed a substantial, pallid baldpate. He struggled up the steps. A metabolism in decline. His manner of dress particularly struck me. He wore a jacket and pants that were too short all round — charitable goods. He wasn’t wearing a waistcoat. A big white shirt fell over his paunch, but it was off-white, a white that had aged. He wore a celluloid collar and tattered tie. His leather sandals were a faded yellow. He walked as if he was afraid of putting his feet on the ground, as if he had grains of sand under the soles of his feet. It is a well-known fact that gamblers have sensitive feet; even so, that man’s way of walking was strangely unnerving. When he reached the boarding house landing he put on a battered bowler that he tilted over one ear, leaving a sliver of baldpate exposed. The moment he disappeared, my thoughts drifted back to his face: the texture of his face was that of a rotting peach, mushy with dark blotches. A film of weariness gave his features a sardonic veneer.
He climbed up to his daughter’s private rooms on the second floor. He wasn’t there for very long: the time necessary to see that the door was locked. We soon saw him come down head bare, his bowler in his left hand and a handkerchief of a nondescript color in the other that he was using to wipe his face. He forced a smile as he walked through the door flashing green, yellowing teeth and with a furrow between his forehead and nose that was the legacy of twenty years unctuously sacrificed to roulette and happenstance. He attempted a cynical smile but it came out as the scowl of a man who is miserably poor.
He confronted the concierge on the ground floor.
“It must very sad being a concierge …” said Sr Souza, winking at him like a fool.
“Being a concierge must be very sad, but finding oneself in the situation of the father of the owner of this establishment must be even more so.”
The concierge yanked him by the arm to the road. When they reached it, Sr Souza looked wanly at the house he’d just left and walked off in the direction of Estoril, despondently, walking in that manner I found so distressing — as if he was frightened to put his feet on the ground …
The opening of the casino in Estoril attracted a good number of individuals living on the fringes of society. Sr Souza was one of them. He’d not lived in Lisbon for many years. His situation had marooned him in various provincial dives. Nevertheless, roulette retains an implacable, fascinating appeal for people driven by a passion for gambling.
The management of the enterprise took the necessary natural steps against this undesirable invasion. Entry to the gaming rooms was denied to most of these people. Sr Souza was one of the first to be denied entry. That annoyed him, of course, and he made every effort imaginable to get the ban revoked. But it never came to anything. You bumped into him idling in the vicinity of the casino looking downcast in defeat.
Sr Souza’s visits to the boarding house led to predictable, unpleasant outcomes. His daughter became more invisible by the day and whenever she did appear she seemed anxious despite her only too obvious efforts to hide the fact. The management of the household suffered and a hint of disorder entered its daily routines. Sr Pacheco was possibly the individual who showed most interest in developments. He even meddled. One of the first things he tried to do was to contact Sr Souza in the hope — I imagined — of finding some solution or other. You wouldn’t have expected Sr Pacheco to react differently, given his deep admiration for the daughter of that human shipwreck.
It wasn’t easy for him. One evening I bumped into them sitting at a table at the back of a small café in the fishermen’s district in Estoril. Pacheco beckoned to me and I went over. Sr Souza shook my hand without getting up from his chair. I gathered that the relationship between the two men had gone beyond polite niceties and they had embarked on a real heart-to-heart. It even seemed that Souza was in some way grateful to Pacheco and felt a degree of respect for him.
“Sr Pacheco, sir,” Souza said after I’d sat down at their table, “you ask me the strangest of questions. This gentleman will understand straightaway … Yes, of course, I too have often asked myself the same question. Why are there men and women who are so incredibly obsessed by a passion for gambling? Come to think of it, though, it’s rather a childish question. Gambling is obsessive precisely because it is a passion. What sense does it make to speak rationally about movements that are instinctive? None at all, in my opinion. In any case, I’d like to attempt to explain, even if only tentatively, this obsession for gambling. From the outside, looking at things on the surface, it seems that the root of this passion for gambling must be a desire to win money … There is, of course, something in that. Money never does any harm … However, that would only be the right explanation if gamblers acted as bankers and the bank was open. In that case, it would be an excellent business prospect. If they hadn’t banned me from entering this casino, I could have immediately shown that was the case. You’d have seen it straightaway … But the fact is that at a baccarat table, in any game with a bank, the gambler is face-to-face with the banker, and consequently, his prospects are practically non-existent … That’s where the problem starts.”
An empty cup of coffee and breadcrumbs lay in front of Sr Souza. Pacheco begged him to order something else. Souza reacted blankly. He was too preoccupied by his confession.
“I was saying,” he went on, “that the problem begins when we have the spectacle of a man who knows only too well that he is going to lose and yet there is no way he can extricate himself from the very mechanisms that will bring his ruin. This is the psychological mystery — if you’ll allow me to put it that way — behind the gambler, the enigma a gambler poses as a human type. Many have attempted to find an explanation. It has been said, for example, that the cause of the obsession, of the fascination the passion provokes, is located in vanity, in an uncontrollable desire for fame. I’ve heard it said that if gamblers wore masks over their faces and went completely incognito to lay their bets, they’d prefer to spend their time doing other things. The suggestion is that a gambler at a gaming table performs and thus satisfies a natural human tendency to be vain and frivolous. Such tendencies satisfy the human metabolism, prompt feelings of pleasure. In a gaming room, a gambler has an audience before which he affirms his own existence. ‘I also exist!’ he seems to say when he lays a bet, when he wins or loses. Now, I’m not implying that this kind of person doesn’t exist, but I think they are slightly out of fashion. This is the gambler one finds in romantic novels, the happy-go-lucky rake, the appealing, headstrong fool and love object of naïve young women. Bah! Real life is more complex. Please let’s be serious …”
When he reached this point in his monologue, Sr Souza ordered a coffee and seemed to loosen up. Then he continued: “Years ago, when I still lived in the provinces, I had terrible toothache one day. A confirmed gambler came over and said I looked very depressed. He asked me what I was taking for my toothache. I mentioned some sedative or other … He burst out laughing and said: ‘Why don’t you try something that’s infallible?’
“ ‘I beg your pardon, is there really something infallible?’
“ ‘Yes, sir: gambling. Have a go. Try it. Play … I assure you that you won’t feel any pain as long as you sit at that table. It is the only solution I know that’s infallible.’