The Blue Afternoon

by William Boyd

  Back at his house he could not even think of sleeping. He sat on a cane chair on the azotea watching the lemony dawn light slowly expose the dew-drenched trees and shrubs of his garden. At 5.45 he went through to the bedroom and woke Annaliese. She propped herself on her elbows and stared at him stupidly.

  “Are you going already?”

  “Yes.” He quelled his impatience. It all had to be handled correctly. “I want to make an early start. The roads are always bad in the rains.”

  She rolled over and hunched into her pillow, closing her eyes.

  “Oh, well, if you want to. Say hello to your mother.”

  “I will. Goodbye.”

  He closed the main door and walked down the worn stone steps to the entresuelos. He walked quietly to the front gate, there was no sign of Constancio or the other servants, the only sound the snort and shifting of the ponies in their stalls. He stepped through the double doors on to the street. Only at this time of the day was there a true coolness in the air, the day’s humidity had not had time to build. He felt a slight fresh breeze on his face and neck which made him shiver. He took a deep breath. The rest of his life was about to commence and he savoured the sweetness of the moment in the fresh coolness of the morning.

  Around the corner from the Palacio end of the street strode three men, walking not fast but purposefully all the same, the watery citron sun illuminating the brass buttons on their uniforms, making them wink and flash prettily.

  “Salvador Carriscant.”

  He turned to see Paton Bobby and two other men walking down the street from the other direction. He wondered what was happening and why Bobby referred to him by his full name. He soon had his answer.

  Bobby’s square honest face could conceal neither his embarrassment nor his intense sadness.

  “Salvador Carriscant—”

  “What’s happening, Paton? What’s going on?”

  Bobby could not hold his gaze and looked away as he spoke.

  “Why did you do it, Salvador?”

  “Do what?”

  “Kill him.”

  “Kill? Kill who, for God’s sake? Are you completely—”

  “Sieverance.”

  “Sieverance…?”

  “Shot dead while he was sleeping. Two bullets in his brain.”

  Carriscant could say nothing, now.

  Bobby turned to face him and seized his arm.

  “Paton, you can’t possibly think I—”

  “Salvador Carriscant—” His voice was shaky and he had to clear his throat. “Salvador Carriscant, I arrest you for the wilful murder of Colonel Jepson George Sieverance.”

  LISBON, 1936

  WEDNESDAY, 3RD MAY

  My first view of the city was a solitary one. Carriscant said he was feeling unwell and stayed below as the SS Herzog steamed slowly up the Tagus towards the docks. There was a fine rain falling and the sky was full of heavy mouse-grey clouds. The buildings of the city rose up from the dull sheen of the estuary stacked on their undulating hills, hunched and nondescript in the murky crepuscular light, the stepped facades and rooftops punctuated here and there by a spire or cupola, the baroque dome of a church or the squared teeth of a castellated rampart.

  We docked opposite a building that said Posta do Desin-faccao and the gangplank was lowered. I saw customs sheds and warehouses, railway lines, and along the north shore a great fritter of ships. Then the vast sweep of water and the blurry green slopes rising to the south. A placid traffic of boats—ferries and tugs, launches and fishing boats—crisscrossed the scene. In the air the periodic curse of gulls and the shouts of the stevedores. A smell of oil, of smoke and underlying that something fresh and briny, the presence of the great ocean lying beyond these encircling hills.

  Carriscant joined me on deck. He did look somewhat pasty-faced, I had to admit, and he had shaved himself badly, leaving a furze of grey bristles under his left ear.

  “I’m glad it’s raining,” he said, thoughtfully, after he had stared at the view for a while.

  “Why? It’s May and we’re in Europe.”

  “It suits my mood. Sun and blue skies would have been wrong, I’d have hated that.”

  I didn’t remonstrate. We leaned on the rail waiting to be summoned for customs, staring out at the damp creams and ochres, the pinks and pale yellows of the terraced buildings, their terracotta roofs turned mauve and brown by the rain.

  “To think she’s out there, somewhere,” he said, not looking at me.

  “I hope you’re right. We’ve come a long way.”

  “You’ve got to help me, Kay,” he said, petulantly. “I don’t need sarcasm, I need help.” He patted my hand on the rail. “Yours.”

  Carriscant, Carriscant. What should I call him, this baffling new presence in my life? My father?…Too uncertain. Or Salvador? Too intimate. The more neutral S.C.? Even after all these days of talk I find my ideas change about him several times an hour. Keep your distance, don’t become too involved, watch out for the way he draws you in. Carriscant it shall remain.

  We cleared customs quickly as we had little luggage. I had packed two suitcases, having no idea how long I would be away; Carriscant had only one. As we drove in a taxi to our hotel I found myself wondering: what if she has left Lisbon? We were following a trail that was almost ten years old, what if it led us all over Europe? The notion did not perturb me as much as I thought. The fact that I was here was a tribute to my lack of rationality and absence of commonsense; it was a little late to start demanding that logic and prudence be my watchwords now.

  Our hotel is the Francfort on the Rua do Santa Justa, middle category, ‘a good commercial house’ the guidebook says, with a restaurant, and situated some few streets away from the Rossio. We have adjoining rooms on the third floor, quite large and clean with simple functional furniture.

  At the end of the corridor is a bathroom. A young man, Joao, who spoke good English, was at reception and most helpful undertaking to secure our identity cards and providing us with the address of a photographer. He had the pale waxy skin of those who work indoors under artificial light and his good features were spoilt by a black tooth in his smile. The elevator was tiny, a small cage of elaborately twisted metal that only just managed to contain the three of us. I stood close behind Joao, his shiny black jacket inches from my eyes. There was a strong smell of camphor coming from him, and in the confined space it set Carriscant off on a sneezing fit that had the small lift rocking.

  The trial of Salvador Carriscant was surprisingly short. Accused of the murder of Sieverance and of conspiracy to murder Ward and Braun, he was acquitted of the first charge and found guilty of the second. He was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment and was incarcerated in Bilibid prison. From his cell window he could see in the distance, on a clear day, the fading roof of the nipa barn where Pantaleon Quiroga had built his flying machine.

  It had been Bobby’s idea to introduce the second charge of conspiracy to murder, convinced as he was that the deaths of all three soldiers were connected. In court, under cross-examination, Bobby’s theory emerged. He was sure that Pantaleon had been the murderer, aided and abetted by Carriscant. It was the location of the bodies at key sites of the first day of the war that had led him to the unshakeable conclusion that the motive was political, or driven by some idea of ideological or nationalist vengeance. The case against Carriscant for the murder of Sieverance was harder to establish as there seemed to be no obvious reason why he should have done the deed. The prosecution tried hard to introduce the implication that, owing to the untimely death of his co-conspirator, Quiroga, Carriscant was obliged to finish the matter off himself. The key item of evidence was the discovery in the Sieverance house of a gauze face mask from the San Jeronimo hospital of the sort used for administering anaesthesia. It was also held against him that Carriscant had no alibi for his movements between 4 and 6 a.m., from the time he was seen leaving the hospital to his awakening of Annaliese. His explanation—that he was sitting on his
azotea, thinking—was regarded as risible. One other piece of evidence counted against him: a torn-up letter was found in his secretary’s waste paper basket which, when fitted together, was found to be to Annaliese, informing her that he was leaving her to start a new life. This was adduced, not very convincingly, by the prosecution, to be a tacit admission of guilt, a sign that the cycle of murders was over and that the perpetrator was about to flee. Carriscant admitted his marriage was in difficulties and that he had written the letter in a moment of despair. Rather than flee the country, he attested that he was on his way to visit his sick old mother in Batangas. Chief of Constabulary Bobby had arrested him just as he was about to rouse his driver and tell him to make the carriage ready for the journey. The idea that, having fought vainly all night to save the life of Mrs Sieverance, he then should follow her husband home to murder him was simply incomprehensible, and unless the prosecution could establish any reason why Salvador Carriscant should have committed such a bizarre act, the defence argued, then the charge was simply not worthy of consideration and should be thrown out.

  Carriscant remembered the courtroom with the newly installed electric roof fans that kept breaking down. One minute a veritable breeze would be rustling the weighted papers on the lawyers’ desks, the next there would be a sharp crack and a smell of burning and handkerchiefs would be applied to moist brows and slick, collar-chafed necks. A pause would be called while a nervous workman mounted a step–ladder to investigate the recalcitrant machinery. Eventually after seven interruptions in one day the judge called for the fans to be switched off, the windows were thrown as wide as possible and matters continued in the usual sweltering fug.

  He remembered Bobby perjuring himself shamelessly in the witness box telling, with phenomenal recall of detail, how he had found the scalpel by the body of the murdered woman—“a scalpel identified by the defendant himself as coming from his own stores at the San Jeronimo hospital”. He remembered too the daily mutter of speculation and fascinated curiosity that would arise as he entered the courtroom each morning, carried in, he felt, on a foaming susurrus of gossip, the public benches and the gallery packed with the craning, ogling faces of Manila’s expatriate bourgeoisie. The celebrated surgeon, Dr Carriscant, turned conspirator, assassin and clandestine insurrecto…Once, on the journey back to his cell at Bilibid, the police carriage had been obliged to make a detour through the back streets of Santa Cruz where the local indios, when they realised who was held inside, cheered him heartily on his way, children running after the carriage yelling “Carriscant! Carriscant!” until the prison doors swung closed behind it.

  Carriscant’s lawyer, a young ilustrado called Felix de la Rama, was a young man of slight build and unimpressive demeanour with a long neck and prominent Adam’s apple. Luckily, his voice was unusually deep—some special reverberating capacity in that laryngeal prominence, Carriscant fantasised. His voice emerged from his mouth as a fruity, sagacious baritone giving everything he said a considered, experienced air. Every observation, however inconsequential, seemed to have been brewed in gravitas and authority. It probably made the vital difference, Carriscant reflected. Upon such trifles hang our fates.

  De la Rama doggedly hammered away at the implausibilities in the murder charge but in so doing rather neglected to expose the deficiencies in the second alleged offence. As the trial progressed all manner of speculation was introduced as to why Pantaleon Quiroga wanted to kill American enlisted men and the prosecution managed to build a semi-convincing picture of these two eminent surgeons, infected by disappointed insurrecto zeal, trying either to instil terror in the occupying colonial forces or to exact some revenge for the insurgents’ defeat. In the end reason and fantasy both emerged triumphant. The jury (eight Americans, a Chinese and three mestizos) threw out the murder charge and then, almost by default, found Carriscant guilty of the lesser crime. The judge (Judge Charles K. Weller) took the opportunity of handing down an exemplary sentence.

  De la Rama had been particularly effective when it came to diminishing the damage done by the discovery of the gauze mask. He did not deny that it might well have been brought to the Sieverance house by Carriscant himself—more than likely, in fact, as the defendant had been a regular visitor during Mrs Sieverance’s convalescence. Furthermore, it had to be taken into account that Nurse Aslinger had been living in the same abode for several weeks; the piece of gauze was a very common medical item, and no one could say with any accuracy when it might have been introduced into the household.

  Carriscant, or so he told me, sat impassively through the farcical proceedings simply counting the days off as they went by. He could not believe his luck that, in the huge fuss and scandal of his arrest and trial, Delphine Sieverance’s ‘death’ had been virtually forgotten. What had happened was this: with Jepson Sieverance dead no one thought to claim or make arrangements for the coffined body lying in the San Jeronimo morgue. It was not until four days after Carriscant’s arrest that Delphine’s friend Mrs Oliver suddenly remembered and decided that someone should arrange a funeral. This was done discreetly and with great speed as the warm and humid weather had significantly accelerated the decomposition of the body. The funeral took place the next day and the body was buried at the Paco cemetery in a small ceremony attended by a few friends and, as a mark of respect, Mrs William Taft. Sieverance’s body was embalmed and shipped home to his family where he was buried with full military honours.

  Carriscant’s explanation of this oversight was that it was due to Bobby’s obsession. He was so convinced that Pantaleon Quiroga was the murderer of Ward and Braun that the only explanation of Sieverance’s killing was that it had to have been carried out by an accomplice, and Salvador Carriscant regrettably fitted that bill. The last person seen with Sieverance had been Carriscant—talking outside the San Jeronimo. The gauze mask, the absence of an alibi and, to Bobby’s mind, recollections of the testimony of the old man who claimed to have seen Carriscant out and about on the night of the Braun murder were sufficient to make the arrest. Any other route of investigation—such as the last murder not being connected to the first two—was never followed up. The death in premature childbirth of Delphine Sieverance and the murder of her husband by rebels was seen by polite Manila society as a ghastly double tragedy, a potent illustration of the white man’s burden, and no-one sought to establish any connection that might have existed between the two. So Carriscant sat in court silent and unforthcoming, knowing exactly who was responsible for the death of Colonel Jepson Sieverance (although baffled as to the motive), and knowing too that any attempt to protest or establish his own innocence would have terrible consequences. As innuendo and circumstance, blustering argument and gimcrack reasoning slowly wound a skein of guilt about him so, as each day and week passed by, was the guilty party’s freedom more assured. And that freedom became absolute the day he was sentenced and the case was effectively closed.

  Carriscant spent eight years behind the grey walls of Bilibid prison before he was transferred to the island of Guam, to a prison camp for former unrepentant insurrectos (battles were still being waged in the hills of Mindanao as late as 1913) run by the US military. In 1919, after serving sixteen years of his sentence he was paroled and went to live in Capiz, on Panay island, where he opened a small restaurant in the main square of that pretty provincial town. He was still obliged to report to the authorities in Iloilo once a month until the full term of his sentence was up. He never returned to Manila and lived quietly and forgotten in Capiz where his restaurant, “La Esperanza”, earned him a decent living. It was only in 1935 when he bought the house of a former Portuguese manager of the sugar refinery there, and came across a stack of old illustrated magazines through which he idly leafed, that he ever thought about moving.

  I asked Carriscant how he had survived his sixteen years of incarceration. “Two things, really,” he said, “though I have to tell you conditions were not so tough, especially on Guam. It was more like a farm there, and I ended up runn
ing the camp’s kitchens.” The first was the ever-sustaining knowledge that Delphine at least was free, that she had escaped, and somewhere was leading the new life that they had both planned. “I was the only person in the world who knew she was not buried in Paco cemetery. A big secret, that, a secret worth keeping. I was consoled by it. As long as I kept the secret she was safe. It helped to know that.”

  “What was the second thing?”

  “You.”

  Love is not a feeling. It does not belong to that category of bodily experience which would include, for instance, pain. Love and pain are not the same at all. Love is put to the test—pain is not. You do not say of pain, as you do of love,

  “That was not true pain, or it would not have disappeared so quickly.”

  It was Udo Leys who told Carriscant about Annaliese’s pregnancy. Udo died in 1905 and in the years up to his death he was Carriscant’s only visitor in Bilibid. It was a month after the verdict that he broke the news that Annaliese was leaving the Philippines.

  “She’s going back to Germany,” Udo told him, morosely. “I tell her no but she says she can’t live here. The shame, the scandal. Everyone knows her as the woman married to the murderer.”

  “But I wasn’t found guilty of murder.”

  “Salvador, I have to tell you, everyone talks as if you did it.”

  “Jesus Christ…Anyway, I’m sorry about Annaliese, I knew it would be hard on her.” He thought for a while. “I’d like to see her before she goes.”

  “Ah, Salvador, she’ll never see you. Never again, she say. She’s even given up her job with the bishop. She stays indoors, she can’t face anyone.”

  “Did you give her my last letter?”

  “She tear it up, before my eyes. She won’t see you.”

  “Poor Annaliese…I should’ve thought how difficult it would be for her to stay here.”