The Maria Vitória theatre evicting us in the afternoons required that we get an early start in the morning. I expected that I would be the first one there, since I’d already got the clear impression that Lisbon’s clock was two or three hours canted from that of London: Here, 10:00 p.m. made for an early dinner.
To my surprise, the outer doors were unlocked and I could hear voices. I shook the rain from my coat and hat, following the sound.
Three hats occupied the centre of the second row of seats, looking like the set-up for some Vaudeville jest: The one on the left barely cleared the seat-back; that in the middle was exaggeratedly wide and battered even in outline; the one sticking up on the right bore the perfect shape of the best in British haberdashery.
Fflytte on the left, Hale on the right, and between them La Rocha. All three were intent on the man occupying the stage.
In the seat behind La Rocha, straight-backed and hatless, sat Fernando Pessoa.
I draped my outer garments on the seat at the beginning of the row and sidled along to sit next to our translator. He gave me an uncertain smile before returning his attention to the conversation in front of him which, although it was in English, gave indications that it might require his services at any moment.
“No,” Hale was saying, “we only need twelve pirates.”
“Have more,” La Rocha’s incongruous high-pitched voice urged. “I have many.”
Fflytte, his eyes on the stage, said in a distracted manner, “We only have thirteen daughters.”
La Rocha stared down at the small man. Then he turned to his lieutenant from the previous evening, whose big figure was planted on the edge of the stage. “Treze filhas! É mais homen que parece.”
Pessoa’s back went straighter and his mouth came open as he prepared to spring into action, but he paused at the pressure of my hand on his sleeve.
“There may be a slight misunderstanding,” I suggested: La Rocha’s meaning had been clear in his tone of voice, if not his words, and I did not think relations would be improved by a translation of “He’s more of a man than he looks.” I leant forward to explain. “Mr Fflytte does not have thirteen daughters. There are thirteen girls in the story.”
The pirate king craned back to look at me, then again at Fflytte. “Entendo. Thirteen girls. And they need ’usbands, yes? Then thirteen piratas.”
“Just twelve,” Fflytte insisted. “Mabel is already taken by Frederic.”
Hale spoke up. “Frederic is the apprentice pirate.”
“ ’Prentice? What is this? ’Prentice?”
“O aprendiz de pirata,” Pessoa contributed.
The black eyes swept each of us in turn, silently, before La Rocha showed me his back and returned his gaze to the stage. “Aprendiz,” I heard him mutter. “De pirata.”
The current would-be pirate on the stage resumed the monologue from his printed sheet, but I found it hard to pay him any attention, distracted as I was by the man ahead of me.
I rather wished I had come in by the other door, which would have put me on Pessoa’s right: At this angle, my view was entirely dominated by La Rocha’s terrible scar. Temple to larynx, the thing must have spanned ten inches. The heavy red-gold earring winking above it made for an eccentric contrast. Why didn’t the man grow a beard to conceal the injury? One’s own throat went taut, seeing that shiny raised track.
“No,” Fflytte said, sounding as if he had been contemplating some profundity. “The colour’s wrong.”
“Clothes can be changed,” La Rocha declared.
“Not the clothing, the skin.”
“This, too, can be changed.”
“No, he’s just too light. These are Barbary pirates. This man looks Swedish.”
It was an exaggeration, but not by much. The other men trying out for the parts of pirates were swarthy, hard-looking men with nicely photogenic moustaches or beards, but the person currently at stage centre would have looked more at home in a European counting-house than as a high-seas privateer. He wore elderly but well-polished shoes, his shoulders were stooped, and his hair was not only thinning, but a most unthreatening light brown colour. His facial hair consisted of an apologetic line above his lip.
“He’s just not … swashbuckling enough,” Fflytte said. La Rocha cocked his ear back, and Pessoa struggled for synonyms.
“Er, romântico. Exôtico? Swashbuckling.”
“Ah. Swashbuckling. He can swashbuckle.”
“I really don’t think so,” Fflytte said. “He looks like my book-keeper, Bertram, who’s the least exotic person I know.”
“Next,” Hale called.
“No!” The syllable echoed through the empty theatre like a crack in glass; the entire theatre stopped dead. The balding Swedish accountant looked near to fainting. I fought an impulse to leap for the aisle. Hale, veteran of the trenches, appeared to be wrestling the same urge.
Fflytte, on the other hand, turned to peer up at the source of the countermand, frowning in disbelief. “Mr. La Rocha, are you making this picture, or am I?”
I had thought the silence profound before; now one could have heard a hair settle on the floor. The cracked pane trembled, preparing to shatter in an explosion of deadly shards – until La Rocha looked back at the stage.
“Go,” he squeaked. The accountant fled. Fflytte sat back in his seat. The rest of us drew breath. Hale settled more slowly, but within a few minutes he, too, was wrapped up again in the casting process. Pessoa’s shoulders gave a motion that was halfway between a shrug and a shiver, as if to shake off an idea he could neither justify nor account for.
It took somewhat longer for the hair on the nape of my neck to go down. Something large and dangerous had flitted through the theatre. I did not know who or what La Rocha was, but the man’s potential for violence had snarled at us, just for a moment. That he had so easily shut it away again was perhaps the most unsettling part of alclass="underline" Having this man play the pirate king was like hiring a lion to play a tabby.
I studied his scar, and was struck by the image of the man standing before his looking-glass each morning holding a razor to his face, deftly manoeuvring its keen blade around that obstacle, touching weapon to scar …
That was why he went clean-shaven – and why he wore a loop of gold that attracted the eye: He wanted people to notice the scar. Wanted them to see it, and to consider the man who had survived that injury, and to be afraid.
* * *
Well short of mid-day, Fflytte and Hale had eliminated three men too ancient (even in this post-War era) to marry a Major-General’s young daughters, a couple of others too ugly, one with a disconcerting facial spasm, and another with a mouth that refused to shut. In the end, they settled on fourteen men, allowing for two extras. These were all friends or associates of La Rocha. None had any experience with the stage. Two were mere boys, one of them so young he carried a pet mouse in his pocket. Some were willing, others sullen, a few treated the enterprise as a huge joke, but they would all make believable pirates, and they all obeyed La Rocha. Of course, if Fflytte’s pirate king decided to quit, the picture would go up in smoke, but that was hardly my problem.