“Why of course?” asked Firmino, attempting to adopt the same neutral tone.
“Because there’s been a bit of dirty work up there,” said the Editor, “the sort of thing that’s going to cause rivers of ink to flow.”
“Can’t our man in Oporto cope with it?” asked Firmino.
“No he can’t, this is big stuff,” stated the Editor.
“Then send Senhor Silva,” replied Firmino calmly, “he likes traveling, and moreover he’ll be able to sign the thing with his French name.”
“He runs Editorial,” said the Editor, “his job is to edit the rubbish sent in by the various correspondents. The special correspondent is you.”
“But I’ve only just finished with the woman stabbed by her husband in Coimbra,” protested Firmino, “and that was only ten days ago, just before my holiday. I spent a whole afternoon in the morgue in Coimbra listening to the police surgeon’s evidence.”
“Too bad,” snapped the Editor, “our special correspondent is you and nobody else. Apart from that, it’s already arranged, I’ve booked you into a pension in Oporto for a week, and that’s just to start with, because this case is going to drag on.”
Firmino took a little time off to marshal his thoughts. He would have dearly liked to say that he had no love for the city of Oporto, that in Oporto they ate almost nothing but tripe à la mode d’Oporto and that tripe made him sick, that Oporto was cursed by sweltering damp heat, that the pension he had been booked in to was doubtless a frightful dump with a bathroom on the landing and that he would die of sheer melancholy. But instead of all this he said:
“Sir, I have to finish my study of the Post-War Portuguese novel, it’s a very important thing for me, and anyway I have already signed a contract with the publisher.”
“It’s a nasty business,” cut in the Editor, “a mystery that has to be solved, the public has its tongue hanging out, it’s the talk of the day.”
The Editor lit a cigarette, lowered his voice as if confessing a secret, and murmured: “They have discovered a headless corpse in the vicinity of Matosinhos, it is still unidentified, it was found by a gypsy, Manolo by name, who gave a muddled account of it to the police, and no one has managed to get another word out of him. He lives in an encampment on the outskirts of Oporto, and it’s up to you to search him out and interview him. It’ll be the scoop of the week.”
The Editor now appeared to be less flustered, as if for him the case had already been solved. He opened a drawer and took out some papers.
“Here’s the address of the pension,” he added, “it’s not a luxury hotel, but Dona Rosa is a perfect gem, I’ve known her for thirty years. And here is your check for board, lodging and expenses for one week. If something extra crops up, put it on the bill. And don’t forget, the train leaves at six.”
Three
WHO KNOWS WHY HE HAD always disliked Oporto? Firmino thought about this. His taxi was crossing the Praça da Batalha, a fine square, austere in the English manner. Oporto did in fact have an English air to it, with its grey stone Victorian façades and people walking in such orderly fashion along the streets. Could it be, wondered Firmino, that I don’t feel at ease with the English? Possibly, but it wasn’t the main reason. The one time he’d been in London he had felt perfectly at home. Obviously Oporto wasn’t London, it was merely an imitation of London, but maybe even this wasn’t the reason, decided Firmino. And he thought back to his childhood, and his uncles and aunts in Oporto where his parents unfailingly took him every Christmas holiday. Grim, those Christmases. They flooded back into Firmino’s mind as if they had happened the day before. He saw Aunt Pitù and Uncle Nuno, herself tall and lean and always dressed in black, with a cameo pinned on her breast, and he plump, jovial, and a specialist at telling jokes that made nobody laugh. And the house! A turn-of-the-century little villa in the middle-class part of town, depressing furniture and sofas bestrewn with lace doilies, paper flowers and old oval photographs on the walls, the whole genealogy of the family Aunt Pitù was so proud of. And Christmas dinner. A nightmare. Starting with the inevitable cabbage soup served in the Cantonese porcelain bowls that were Aunt Pitù‘s pride and joy, and the tenderness with which his mother encouraged him to eat up even though he was gagging over it. And then the torture of being woken up at eleven o’clock at night to attend Low Mass, the ritual of being forced into his best suit, and setting forth into the chill December mists of Oporto. The wintry mists of Oporto. Firmino thought it over and came to the conclusion that his dislike of that city was a hangover from his childhood, maybe Freud was right. He pondered over Freud’s theories. Not that he knew them all that well, rather that they didn’t inspire enough faith in him. Lukács, on the other hand, with his precise X-ray of literature as an expression of class, he was a different matter, and besides he was useful to his studies of the post-war Portuguese novel. Yes, Lukács was more use to him than Freud, but it could be that that old Viennese doctor was right about certain things, who knows?
“But where is this blessèd boarding-house?” he asked the cabbie.
He felt he had the right to do so. They had been on the road for at least half an hour, at first in the broad thoroughfares of the center and now in the impossibly narrow alleyways of a district unknown to Firmino.
“It takes the time it takes,” came the surly mutter of the cabbie.
Taximen and policemen, thought Firmino, were the two types he hated most. And yet in his job most of his dealings were with policemen and taximen. He was a journalist on a periodical specializing in scandals and murder victims, divorces, disemboweled women and beheaded corpses, and that was his life. He thought how wonderful it would be to write his book on Vittorini and the post-war Portuguese novel, he was sure it would be an event in the academic world, and might even lead eventually to a research grant.
The taxi stopped plumb in the middle of a narrow street, before a building that showed every year of its age, and the driver unexpectedly turned towards Firmino and bade him a hearty farewell.
“Afraid you wouldn’t get here, eh? young gentleman,” he said kindly, “but here in Oporto we don’t cheat anyone, we don’t go round and round the mulberry bush to rook the customers of their money, we’re not in Lisbon here, you know.”
Firmino alighted, got out his bag and paid. Above the main door a sign read “Pension Rosa — First Floor.” The entrance hall was set up as a ladies’ hair salon. There was no elevator. Firmino climbed a staircase embellished with a red banister, or one which had once been red, which saddened him and at the same time made him feel at home. Only too well did he know the sort of boarding-house his Editor habitually sent him to: dreary suppers at seven in the evening, bedrooms with a washbasin in the corner, and worst of all the old harridans who owned them.
But this time it was nothing of the sort, at least as far as the owner was concerned. Dona Rosa, a lady of about sixty, her hair arranged in a blue permanent wave, was not wearing a flower-patterned housecoat like the proprietresses of all the other pensions he had known, but a stylish grey coat and skirt and a jovial smile. Dona Rosa bade him welcome and carefully explained the timetable of the establishment. Dinner was at eight, and that evening it would consist of tripe à la mode d’Oporto. If he wished to fend for himself for supper, in the square to the right as he left the house there was a long-established café, the Café Àncora, one of the oldest in Oporto, practically an institution, where the food was good and reasonably priced, but before that perhaps he had better have a shower, wouldn’t he like to see his room? it was the second on the right down the corridor, she would appreciate a couple of words with him but they could have them after dinner, she was a night owl anyway.