He went along to the Café Orquídea, only a few steps down the road just past the kosher butcher, and sat down at a table inside, where at least there were electric fans. Outside it was quite impossible because of the heat. He ordered a lemonade, went to the gents to rinse his face and hands, ordered a cigar and an evening paper, and Manuel the waiter brought him the Lisboa of all things. He hadn’t seen the proofs that day, so he leafed through it as if it were any other paper. The first page announced: ‘World’s Most Luxurious Yacht Sailed Today from New York.’ Pereira stared at the headline for a long time and then looked at the photograph. It showed a group of people in straw hats and shirtsleeves opening bottles of champagne. Pereira broke out in sweat, he maintains, and his thoughts turned again to the resurrection of the body. If I rise from the dead, he thought, will I be stuck with these people in straw hats? He really imagined himself being stuck with those yacht people in some unspecified harbour in eternity. And eternity appeared to him as an insufferable place shrouded in muggy haze, with people speaking English and proposing toasts and exclaiming: Chin chin! Pereira ordered another lemonade. He wondered whether he should go home and have a cool bath or go and call on his priest friend, Don António of the church of the Mercês, who had been his confessor some years before when his wife died, and to whom he paid a monthly visit. He thought the best thing was to go and see Don António, perhaps it would do him good.
So he went. Pereira maintains that on that occasion he forgot to pay his bill. He got to his feet in a daze, his thoughts elsewhere, and simply walked out, leaving his newspaper on the table along with his hat, maybe because it was so hot he didn’t want to wear it anyway, or else because he was like that, objects didn’t mean much to him.
Pereira found Father Antonio a perfect wreck, he maintains. He had great bags under his eyes and looked as if he hadn’t slept for a week. Pereira asked him what was the matter and Father António said: What, haven’t you heard? they’ve murdered a carter on his own cart in Alentejo, and there are workers on strike, here in the city and all over the country, are you living in another world, and you working on a newspaper? look here, Pereira, for goodness’ sake go and find out what’s happening around you.
Pereira maintains that he was upset by this brief exchange and the way in which he had been sent packing. He asked himself: Am I living in another world? And he was struck by the odd notion that perhaps he was not alive at all, it was as if he were dead. Ever since his wife’s death he had been living as if he were dead. Or rather, he did nothing but think of death, of the resurrection of the body which he didn’t believe in and nonsense of that sort, and perhaps his life was merely a remnant and a pretence. And he felt done in, he maintains. He managed to drag himself to the nearest tram stop and board a tram that took him as far as Terreiro do Paço. Through the window he watched Lisbon gliding slowly by, his Lisbon: the Avenida da Liberdade with its fine buildings, then the English-style Praça do Rossio, and at Terreiro do Paço he got out and took another tram up the hill towards the Castle. He left it when it reached the Cathedral because he lived close by, in Rua da Saudade. He made heavy weather of it up the steep ramp to where he lived. There he rang the bell for the caretaker because he couldn’t be bothered to hunt for the key of the street door, and she, who was also his daily, came to open it. Dr Pereira, said she, I’ve fried you a chop for supper. Pereira thanked her and toiled up the stairs, took the key from under the doormat where he always kept it, and let himself in. In the hallway he paused in front of the bookcase, on which stood a photograph of his wife. He had taken that photo himself, in Nineteen Twenty-Seven, during a trip to Madrid, and looming in the background was the vast bulk of the Escorial. Sorry if I’m a bit late, said Pereira.
Pereira maintains that for some time past he had been in the habit of talking to this photo of his wife. He told it what he had done during the day, confided his thoughts to it, asked it for advice. It seems that I’m living in another world, said Pereira to the photograph, even Father António told me so, the problem is that all I do is think about death, it seems to me that the whole world is dead or on the point of death. And then Pereira thought about the child they hadn’t had. He had longed for one, but he couldn’t ask so much of that frail suffering woman who spent sleepless nights and long stretches in the sanatorium. And this grieved him. For if he’d had a son, a grown-up son to sit at table with and talk to, he would not have needed to talk to that picture taken on a trip so long ago he could scarcely remember it. And he said: Well, never mind, which was how he always took leave of his wife’s photograph. Then he went into the kitchen, sat down at the table and took the cover off the pan with the fried chop in it. The chop was cold, but he couldn’t be bothered to heat it up. He always ate it as it was, as the caretaker had left it for him: cold. He made quick work of it, went to the bathroom, washed under his arms, put on a clean shirt, a black tie and a dab of the Spanish scent remaining in a flask he had bought in Madrid in Nineteen Twenty-Seven. Then he put on a grey jacket and left the flat to make his way to Praça da Alegria. It was already nine o’clock, Pereira maintains.
THREE
Pereira maintains that the city seemed entirely in the hands of the police that evening. He ran into them everywhere. He took a taxi as far as Terreiro do Paço and there under the colonnade were truckloads of police armed with carbines. Perhaps they were controlling the strategic points of the city in fear of demonstrations or unruly crowds. He would have liked to walk the rest of the way, the cardiologist had told him he ought to take exercise, but he quailed at the thought of passing right under the noses of those sinister militiamen, so he caught the tram which ran the length of Rua dos Fanqueiros and stopped in Praça da Figuera. Here he alighted and found more police, he maintains. This time he was forced to walk past squads of them, and it made him feel pretty uncomfortable. On his way by he heard an officer say to his men: Just remember lads, there could be a Bolshie round every corner, so keep your eyes peeled.
Pereira looked this way and that, as if the advice had been directed at him, but saw no reason to keep his eyes peeled. Avenida da Liberdade was perfectly tranquil, the ice-cream kiosk was open and there were people at the tables enjoying the cool. He strolled peacefully along the central pavement and at this point, he maintains, he first heard the music. The gentle, melancholy guitar music of Coimbra, and it seemed to him odd, that conjunction of music and armed militiamen. It seemed to be coming from Praça da Alegria, and so it proved to be, because the nearer he got the louder grew the music.
In Praça da Alegria there was no sense of being in a besieged city, Pereira maintains, because he saw no police at all, only a night watchman who appeared to be drunk, dozing on a bench. The whole place was decorated with paper festoons and coloured light bulbs, green and yellow, hanging on wires strung from window to window. There were a number of tables out in the open and several couples dancing. Then he noticed a banner stretched between two trees, and written on it in enormous letters: LONG LIVE FRANCISCO FRANCO. And beneath this, in smaller letters: LONG LIVE OUR PORTUGUESE TROOPS IN SPAIN.
Pereira maintains that only then did he realize this was a Salazarist festival, and that was why it had no need to be picketed by troops. And only then did he notice that a lot of people were wearing the green shirt and the scarf knotted round their necks. He hung back in terror, and several different things flashed into his mind at once. It occurred to him that perhaps Monteiro Rossi was one of them, he thought of the Alentejan carter who had shed his blood all over his melons, he tried to imagine what Father António would have said had he seen him there. He thought of all this and flopped down on the bench where the night watchman was dozing, and let himself drift along with his thoughts. Or rather, he let himself drift with the music, because the music, in spite of all, was a pleasure to him. The players were two little old men, one on the viola and the other on the guitar, and they played the heartrending old melodies of the Coimbra of his youth, when he was a student and thought of life as a long radiant future. In those days he too used to play the viola at student parties, he had a trim figure and was athletic and had the girls falling in love with him. Any number of beautiful girls had been mad about him. But he had fallen for a frail, pallid little thing who wrote poetry and had frequent headaches. Then his thoughts turned to other things in his life, but these Pereira has no wish to mention, because he maintains they belong to him and him alone and have nothing to do with that evening and that festival where he had fetched up all unsuspecting. And then, Pereira maintains, at a certain point he saw a tall slim young man in a light-coloured shirt get up from a table and station himself between the two musicians. And for some reason his heart stood still, maybe because in that young man he seemed to recognize himself, he seemed to rediscover himself as he was in his Coimbra days, because the young man was in some way like him, not in feature but in the way he moved, and something about the hair too, the way a lock flopped onto his forehead. And the young man started singing an Italian song, O sole mio, of which Pereira did not understand the words, but it was a song full of passion and vitality, limpid and beautiful, and the only words he understood were ‘O sole mio’ and nothing more, and all the while the young man was singing the sea-breeze was rising again from the Atlantic and the evening was cool, and everything seemed to him lovely, his past life of which he declines to speak, and Lisbon, and the vault of the sky above the coloured lights, and he felt a great nostalgia, did Pereira, but he declines to say for what. However, Pereira realized that the young man singing was the person he had spoken to on the telephone that afternoon, so when the song was over he got up from the bench, because his curiosity was stronger than his misgivings, and made his way to the table and said to the young man: Mr Monteiro Rossi, I presume. Monteiro Rossi tried to rise to his feet, bumped against the table, and the tankard of beer in front of him toppled over, sousing his pristine white trousers from top to bottom. I do apologize, mumbled Pereira. No, it was my clumsiness, said the young man, it often happens to me, you must be Dr Pereira of the Lisboa, please take a seat. And he held out his hand.