There you had it, he thought. There. That was it. That moment held the gigantic difference between a Pauline and a Margarita. A mint infusion and an iceless vodka. He felt his bowels weaken with shocking desire.
He returned to the bar to fetch another drink for her and ordered the same for himself. The tepid alcohol seemed all the more powerful for the absence of chill. His nasal passages burned, he wrinkled his tear-flooded eyes. Made from potatoes, hard to believe. Or is it potato peelings? His teeth felt loose. He stood beside her. Someone had taken his stool.
Margarita sipped her drink with more decorum this time. “I hate that fockin’ job,” she said.
He raised her knuckles to his lips and dabbed at them.
“God, I’ve missed you,” he said, then took a deep breath. “Margarita,” he said softly, “tenho muito atração para tu.” He hoped to God he had it right, with the correct slushing and nasal sounds. He found Portuguese farcically difficult to pronounce, no matter how many hours he spent listening to his tapes.
She frowned. Too fast you fool, you bloody fool.
“What?” Her lips half formed a word. “I, I don’t—”
More slowly, more carefully: “Tenho muito atração — muito, muito — para tu.”
He slipped his hand around her thin back, fingers snagging momentarily on the buckle of her bra and drew her to him. He kissed her, there in the hot pub, boldly, with noticeable teeth clash, but no recoil from Margarita.
He moved his head back, his palm still resting on her body, warm above her hip.
She touched her lips with the palp of her thumb, scrutinizing him, not hostile, he was glad to see, not even surprised. She drank some more of her flat gray drink, still looking at him over the rim of her glass.
“Sempre para tu, Margarita, sempre.” Huskily, this. Sincere.
“Weseley. What are you saying? Sempre, I know. But the rest …”
“I … I am speaking Portuguese.”
“For why?”
“Because, I — Because I want to speak your language to you. I love your language, you must understand. I love it. I hear it in my head in your music.”
“Well …” She shrugged and reached for her cigarettes. “Then you must not speak Portuguese at me, Weseley. I am Italian.”
Marta shucked off her brassiere and had hooked down her panties with her thumbs within seconds, Liceu Lobo thought, of his entering her room in the bordello. He caught a glimpse of her plump fanny from the light cast by the bathroom cubicle. She was hot tonight, on fire, he thought, as he hauled off his T-shirt and allowed his shorts to fall to the floor. As he reached the bedside he felt her hands reaching for his engorged member. He was a pretty boy and even the oldest hooker liked a pretty boy with a precocious and impatient tool. He felt Marta’s hands all over his pepino, as if she were assessing it for some strumpet’s inventory. Maldito seja! Liceu Lobo thought, violently clenching his sphincter muscles as Marta settled him between her generous and welcoming thighs, he should definitely have jerked off before coming here tonight. Marta always had that effect on him. Deus! He hurled himself into the fray.
It had not gone well. No. He had to face up to that, acknowledge it, squarely. As lovemaking went it was indubitably B minus. B double-minus, possibly. And it was his fault. But could he put it down to the fact that he had been in bed with an Italian girl and not a Portuguese one? Or perhaps it had something to do with the half dozen vodkas and water he had consumed as he kept pace with Margarita?…
But the mood had changed, subtly, when he had learned the truth, a kind of keening sadness, a thin draft of melancholy seemed to enter the boisterous pub, depressing him. An unmistakable sense of being let down by Margarita’s nationality. She was meant to be Portuguese, that was the whole point, anything else was wrong.
He turned over in his bed and stared at the faint silhouette of Margarita’s profile as she slept beside him. Did it matter? he urged himself. This was the first non-British girl he had kissed, let alone made love to, so why had he been unable to shake off that sense of distraction? It was a sullenness of spirit that had possessed him, as if he were a spoiled child who had been promised and then denied a present. It was hardly Margarita’s fault, after all, but an irrational side of him still blamed her for not being Portuguese, for unconsciously raising his hopes by not warning him from their first encounter that she didn’t fit his national bill. Somehow she had to share the responsibility.
He turned away and dozed, and half dreamed of Liceu Lobo in a white suit. On a mountaintop with Leonor or Branca or Caterina or Joana. A balcony with two cane chairs. Mangos big as rugby balls. Liceu, blond hair flying, putting down his guitar, offering his hand, saying, “My deal is my smile.” Joana’s slim mulatto body. The sound of distant water falling.
He half sat, blinking stupidly.
“Joana?”
The naked figure in his doorway froze.
“Joana?”
The figure moved.
“Vaffanculo,” Margarita said, weariness making her voice harsh. She switched on the light and began to get dressed, still talking, but more to herself than to him. Wesley’s meager Portuguese was no help here, but he could tell her words were unkind. He hadn’t fully awakened from his dream. How could he explain that to her? She was dressed in a moment and did not shut the door as she left.
After she had gone, Wesley pulled on his dressing gown and walked slowly down the stairs. He sat for a while in his unlit sitting room, swigging directly from the rum bottle, resting it on his knee between mouthfuls, coughing and breathing deeply, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Eventually he rose to his feet and slid Elis Regina into his CD player. The strange and almost insupportable plangency of the woman’s voice filled the shadowy space around him. Nem uma lágrima. “Not one tear,” Wesley said to himself. Out loud. His voice sounded peculiar to him, a stranger’s. Poor tragic Elis, Elis Regina, who died in 1982, aged thirty-seven, tragically, of an unwise cocktail of drugs and alcohol. “Drink ’n’ drugs,” the CD’s sleeve notes had said. Tragic. A tragic loss to Brazilian music. Fucking tragic. He would call Pauline in the morning, that’s what he would do. In the meantime he had his chorinho to console him. He would make it up with Pauline, she deserved a treat, some sort of treat, definitely, a weekend somewhere. Definitely. Not one tear, Elis Regina sang for him. He would be all right. There was always Brazil. Not one tear.
The Dream Lover
NONE OF THESE girls is French, right?”
“No. But they’re European.”
“Not the same thing, man. French is crucial.”
“Of course …” I don’t know what he is talking about but it seems politic to agree.
“You know any French girls?”
“Of course,” I say again. This is almost a lie, but it doesn’t matter at this stage.
“But well? I mean well enough to ask out?”
“I don’t see why not.” Now this time we are well into mendacity, but I am unconcerned. I feel good, adult, quite confident today. This lie can germinate and grow for a while.
I am standing in a pale parallelogram of March sunshine, leaning against a wall, talking to my American friend, Preston. The wall belongs to the Centre Universitaire Mediterranéen, a large stuccoed villa on the front at Nice. In front of us is a small cobbled courtyard bounded by a balustrade. Beyond is the Promenade des Anglais, its four lanes busy with Nice’s traffic. Over the burnished roofs of the cars I can see the Mediterranean. The Baie des Anges looks gray and grim in this season: old, tired water — ashy, cindery.