I dressed in the clothes he had brought and stood before him as he looked at me intently, concentrating. After a while he asked me to pin my hair up.
“Whose jacket is this?” I asked as I did so.
“Mine,” he said.
We sat down to dinner. Balthazar had cooked the food. Tough stringy lamb in an oily gravy. A plate of beans the color of pistachio. Chunks of grayish spongy bread torn from a flat crusty loaf.
On Christmas Day we went out and walked for several miles along unpaved country roads. It was a cool morning with a fresh breeze. On our way back home we were caught in a shower of rain and took shelter under an olive tree, waiting for it to pass. I sat with my back against the trunk and smoked a cigarette. Balthazar sat cross-legged on the ground and scratched designs in the earth with a twig. He wore heavy boots and coarse woolen trousers. His new beard was uneven — dense around his mouth and throat, skimpy on his cheeks. His hair was uncombed and greasy. The smell of the rain falling on the dry earth was strong — sour and ferrous, like old cellars.
That night we lay side by side in bed, hot and exhausted. I slipped my hands in the creases beneath my breasts and drew them out, my fingers moist and slick. I scratched my neck. I could smell the sweat on my body. I turned. Balthazar was sitting up, one knee raised, the sheet flung off him, his shoulders against the wooden headboard. On his side of the bed was an oil lamp set on a stool. A small brown moth fluttered crazily around it, its big shadow bumping on the ceiling. I felt a sudden huge contentment spill through me. My bladder was full and was aching slightly, but with the happiness came a profound lethargy that made the effort required to reach below the bed for the enamel chamber pot prodigious.
I reached out and touched Balthazar’s thigh.
“You can go tomorrow,” he said. “If you want.”
“No, I’ll stay on,” I said instantly, without thinking. “I’m enjoying myself. I’m glad I’m here.” I hauled myself up to sit beside him.
“I want to see you in Lisbon,” I said, taking his hand.
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“Why?”
“Because after tomorrow you will never see Balthazar Cabral again.”
From this meager description we now at least have some idea of what “corkwood” is and have some indication of the constant care necessary to ensure a successful gathering or harvest, while admitting that the narration in no wise does justice to this most interesting material. We shall now turn to examine it more closely and see what it really is, how this particular formation comes about and its peculiarities.
Consul Schenk’s Report
Boscán: “One of my problems, one of my mental problems, rather — and how can I convince you of its effect? — horrible, horrible beyond words — is my deep and abiding fear of insanity … Of course it goes without saying; such a deep fear of insanity is insanity itself.”
I saw nothing of Boscán for a full year. Having left my employ, he then, I believe, became a freelance translator, working for any firm that would give him a job and not necessarily in the cork industry. Then came Christmas 1933 and another invitation arrived, written on a thick buff card with deckle edges in a precise italic hand, in violet ink:
Senhora Campendonc, do me the honor of spending the festive season in my company. I shall be staying at the Avenida Palace hotel, rooms 35–38, from 22 to 26 December inclusive.
Your devoted admirer,
J. Melchior Vasconcelles
P.S. Bring many expensive clothes and scents. I have jewels.
Boscán’s suite in the Avenida Palace was on the fourth floor. The bellhop referred to me as Senhora Vasconcelles. Boscán greeted me in the small vestibule and made the bellhop leave my cases there.
Boscán was dressed in a pale gray suit. His face was thinner, clean-shaven and his hair was sleek, plastered down on his head with macassar. In his shiny hair I could see the stiff furrows made from the teeth of the comb.
When the bellhop had gone we kissed. I could taste the mint from his mouthwash on his lips.
Boscán opened a small leather suitcase. It was full of jewels, paste jewels, rhinestones, strings of artificial pearls, diamante brooches and marcasite baubles. This was his plan, he said: this Christmas our gift to each other would be a day. I would dedicate a day to him, and he one to me.
“Today you must do everything I tell you,” he said. “Tomorrow is yours.”
“All right,” I said. “But I won’t do everything you tell me to, I warn you.”
“Don’t worry, Lily, I will ask nothing indelicate of you.”
“Agreed. What shall I do?”
“All I want you to do is to wear these jewels.”
The suite was large: a bathroom, two bedrooms and a capacious sitting room. Boscán/Vasconcelles kept the curtains drawn, day and night. In one corner was a freestanding cast-iron stove that one fed from a wooden box full of coal. It was warm and dark in the suite; we were closed off from the noise of the city; we could have been anywhere.
We did nothing. Absolutely nothing. I wore as many of his cheap trinkets as my neck, blouse, wrists and fingers could carry. We ordered food and wine from the hotel kitchen, which was brought up at regular intervals, Vasconcelles himself collecting everything in the vestibule. I sat and read in the electric gloom, my jewels winking and flashing merrily at the slightest shift of position. Vasconcelles smoked short stubby cigars and offered me fragrant oval cigarettes. The hours crawled by. We smoked, we ate, we drank. For want of anything better to do I consumed most of a bottle of champagne and dozed off. I awoke, fuzzy and irritated, to find Vasconcelles had drawn a chair up to the sofa I was slumped on and was sitting there, elbows on knees, chin on fists, staring at me. He asked me questions about the business, what I had been doing in the last year, had I enjoyed my trip home to England, had the supply of cork from Elvas improved and so on. He was loquacious, we talked a great deal, but I could think of nothing to ask him in return. J. Melchior Vasconcelles was, after all, a complete stranger to me, and I sensed it would put his tender personality under too much strain to inquire about his circumstances and the fantastical life he led. All the same, I was very curious, knowing Boscán as I did.
“This suite must be very expensive,” I said.
“Oh yes. But I can afford it. I have a car outside too. And a driver. We could go for a drive.”
“If you like.”
“It’s an American car. A Packard.”
“Wonderful.”
That night, when we made love in the fetid bedroom he asked me to keep my jewels on.
“It’s your day today.”
“Thank you. Merry Christmas.”
“And the same to you … What do you want me to do?”
“Take all your clothes off.”
I made Vasconcelles remain naked for the entire day. It was at first amusing and then intriguing to watch his mood slowly change. Initially he was excited, sexually, and regularly aroused. But then, little by little, he became self-conscious and awkward. At one stage in the day I watched him filling the stove with coal, one-handed, the other hand cupped reflexively around his genitals, like adolescent boys I had once seen jumping into the sea off a breakwater at Cidadela. Later still, he grew irritable and restless, pacing up and down, not content to sit and talk out the hours as we had done the day before.
In midafternoon I put on a coat and went out for a drive, leaving him behind in the suite. The big Packard was there, as he had said, and a driver. I had him drive me down to Estoril and back. I was gone for almost three hours.