Here Is Where We Meet

by John Berger

  Did he know that you had children?

  I hid nothing from him.

  A face so full of pain, I said.

  There followed a long silence during which we both looked out of the window and watched the white of the buildings outstaring the blue of the sky. Then she said: Alfred taught me and I taught you and I’m telling you that what you saw in his face wasn’t only pain. Not only pain. I’m going to take a little rest now.

  She got to her feet and walked slowly towards the toilets.

  She is serving mashed potatoes. Nice and fluffy, she says, still stirring them with a fork. She wears a kerchief over her hair. She worked all day in the kitchen of the tea-house in which we lived. She suffered from the heat of the stoves, yet when she sucked her fingers because they had icing sugar or homemade custard on them, she couldn’t help smiling: the sweetness folding into her pastry pride, for she knew she was a good cook. I see her writing in her diary. She bought herself one every year, often waiting until February when they were sold cheaper. The diaries she chose invariably had a small thin pencil attached to them. The pencil slipped through a loop and lay along the golden edges of the pages. Smaller and thinner than a cigarette – she smoked then a brand of cigarettes called Du Maurier – it was often the only pencil we could find to write something down with. Sometimes I drew with it. Be sure to give it back to me. It was always carefully reinserted into its loop. And with it she makes her diary entries, noting her rare appointments, and each day systematically, the weather. Morning: rain. Afternoon: bright patches.

  The next time I saw her was on a bright morning.

  The trams in the centre of Lisboa are very different from the red double-decker ones that used to run in Croydon; they are as cramped as small fishing boats and they are a lemon yellow. Their drivers, as they negotiate the steep one-way streets like straits, and nose their way round blind jetties, give the impression of hauling in ropes and holding rudders rather than turning wheels and operating levers. Yet despite the sudden descents, the lurches, the choppiness, the passengers, mostly elderly, remain contemplative and calm – as if they were still sitting in their living rooms or visiting a neighbour. And indeed, in places, the trams, with their open windows, sway so close to these rooms that it would be easy to reach out and touch a birdcage hanging from a balcony and with a little push set it swinging.

  I had caught the number 28 going to the destination of Prazeres (Pleasures), which is the name of an old cemetery where the mausoleums have front doors with window panes through which you can look at the abodes of the departed. Many are furnished with low tables, a chair, bunks with bedspreads, rugs, photographs, statues of the Madonna, cushions. One has a pair of dancing shoes on a rug. Another has a bicycle and a fishing rod leaning against the wall facing the bunk with a small coffin on it.

  I had got on the tram at the church in the district of Gracia, which is at the opposite end of the line from the cemetery, and it was when we were passing through the next district of Bairro Alto that I saw my mother again. Like other pedestrians in the narrow street, she was flattening herself against a shop-front to let the tram, which was ringing its bell, pass by. She spotted me notwithstanding and, at the next corner, where the tram stopped and its two sets of doors unfolded noisily like wooden curtains, she climbed aboard with a triumphant air, took a ticket out of her purse and, using the usual umbrella as a stick, came to stand beside me and slip her arm through mine. A dog sitting at the feet of another old woman wagged its tail, which thumped on the floor. The wooden curtains shut. The electro-motor whined to gather enough momentum for the tram to start. She said nothing, she simply handed me a plastic bag with the logo of the Colombo Shopping Centre printed on it.

  At the next stop, when the wooden curtains opened again, she said: We’re going to the market, I take it?

  Yes, that was my idea.

  On hearing me say Yes, she laughed her seventeen-year-old laugh.

  We get off, she said, in one minute and and it’s downhill all the way to the Mercado da Ribeira.

  Seen from its interior, the Mercado da Ribeira resembles a pagoda, a pagoda constructed of carved stone, glass and metal. The engineering challenge must have been to find the best way of letting in daylight and, simultaneously, of offering shade from the punishing summer heat. The solution was to make it tall and only to let the light enter sideways.

  There are surprisingly few flies, even where the raw meats are hanging. She leads me, tripping light-footedly, umbrella scarcely touching the flagstones, past the vegetables and fruit, to the avenues of fish.

  It crosses my mind that the Mercado da Ribeira is why she chose to come to Lisboa.

  Large fish markets are strange places because when you enter one, you enter another kingdom. The stony sea urchins, the locust lobsters, the lampreys, the squids, the lings, the turbots, insist that here the measures of time and space, of longevity and pain, of light and darkness, of alertness and sleepiness, of recognition and indifference are altered. For example, fish never stop growing; the older they are, the larger they are. A sixty-year-old sandy ray measuring two metres would, most of the time, live in what would seem to us total darkness. Fish can detect hormones by their smell in the water. They also have an additional sixth sense, which is that of their lateral line, a kind of elongated eyelid, running from gills to tail, sensitive to vibrations, sounds and sudden disturbances. There are 45,000 species of shellfish, all of them constituting food for others, all of them eaters. The age, relative immutability and cyclic complexity of this other kingdom is somewhat humbling.

  They know me well here, my mother announces without a trace of humility.

  She did not believe in humility. Humility was, in her opinion, a pretence, a tactic of diversion while the person involved covertly aimed at something else. Perhaps she was right.

  Now she is bending over a basket of lady crabs. Their dark shells are like brown velvet, with a down on them so that they are as soft to touch as their nippers are sharp, and on their legs are smears of blue, as if they had sidled their way through oil.

  The choicest of all crabs, she says. Here they call them naralheira felpuda. Felpuda means ’hairy’.

  She straightens her back and looks into my eyes with an expression I’ve not seen before.

  I’ve learnt a lot since my death. You should use me while you are here. You can look things up in a dead person like in a dictionary.

  Her expression is one of happy impertinence, for she is sure now that she is beyond reach.

  We walk down one of the aisles of the pagoda, past flounders, tunny fish, John Dories, mackerel, sardines, anchovies, sabre fish.

  The sabre, she says, looking up at the distant roof, her little short nose in the air, the sabre only comes up from his depths to the surface at night when there’s a full moon!

  All the fishmongers are women. Women with strong shoulders, hefty forearms, wearing rubber boots, handling the ice as if it was hot metal, and their tied scarves and slightly mocking eyes are very feminine. They treat the fish they’re selling as they might treat distant, mildly irritating, members of the family. Irritating because not as alert as they once were!

  My mother picks up a grey shrimp to smell it. The vendor, who is gutting a fish, smiles at her.

  Get half a pint, Mother says. Ask Andreas here, her name’s Andreas, she has a husband in Cuba and a daughter who is an air hostess.

  Andreas holds up the fish she is gutting and points very gently with the tip of her knife at what looks like a soft roe nestling near the top of the fish’s emptied stomach cavity. Shiny, whitish-pink, curvy – like a foxglove just before it opens.

  It’s a whiting, Mother says.

  The tip of the knife moves carefully down the stomach cavity and now touches an orange-coloured granular sack, the same orange and the same size as a dried apricot. Hard female roe.

  Hermaphrodite! Andreas announces smiling, and then repeats: Hermaphrodite! as if she does not want us to get over our surprise. Hermap
hrodite!

  I pay for the shrimps and we proceed down the aisle, each of us eating them and throwing the heads and tails on the floor.

  We walk down another aisle and we pass a slab on which there are a dozen of the reddest fish I’ve seen. Scarlet with a fire in their red such as no flower has, not even a tropical one.

  Atlantic redfish, Mother murmurs. They too have strange mating habits. First of all, they’re not mature until they are ten years old, which is very late. Next, the males fast for two months. Then they have intercourse, like animals do, with the sperm entering the female. She keeps it there for four months until all her eggs are ready, thirty, fifty or a hundred thousand. Then she lets the sperm fertilise them. After a while the eggs hatch into larvae inside her. And nine months after intercourse she lays the larvae deep in the Atlantic.

  I’ve always put life before writing, I say.

  Don’t boast.

  It’s true.

  Then pass over it in silence.

  Supposing now I don’t understand what I note down.

  Others may.

  We stop before a bank of salmon.

  Salmon was Father’s favourite dish, wasn’t it?

  Yes, she says, but since his death he prefers swordfish. The espadarte! The espadarte with its upper beak, which is like a blade, and long, long – a third of his whole length – and with the blade he slashes out left and right to kill the fishes he is hunting, each with a single blow. It was a swordfish – wasn’t it? – that the old man of the sea wrestled with in Hemingway’s story. The book made me think of your father and of life in the trenches during the Great War. What’s the connection? you will ask. I can’t explain everything. The story made me think of your father and the war. I can’t explain why.

  A connection of courage?

  She nods.

  I never saw a man who wept as often as your father and I never knew a man who was half as brave.

  She nods her head again. I take her arm.

  The strangest thing of all, John, is that the flesh of the espardarte – which must never be confused with the silver sabre fish – the flesh of this huge fish, when it is marinaded and cooked, is the most tender, the most delicate, and the whitest in the world. It dissolves in the mouth – you don’t bite – it tastes like a soufflé. Each time, after I’ve cooked it, I place it on his plate like a kiss.

  He comes to eat it here?

  Of course not. He’ll eat it, wherever he is, when he happens to think of me. Just as I think of him when I’m preparing it.

  Do we have to find an espadarte, I ask, or can we just think of one like we’re doing now?

  What are you saying? I told you, it has to be marinated in lemon juice and olive oil! So we have to find lemons and a green pepper and a yellow pepper and a red one. You cut up the peppers and put them in the pan first so they give off their liquid, then you pop in the fish. A slice, weighing about 300 grams, not too thin, a thick slice taken from a juicy lateral cut from across the swordfish’s belly. Takes very little time to cook – it must never be overcooked – best to put a lid on the pan. Some serve it with capers, I don’t. I’ll get the fish, you go and find the lemon and peppers.

  She didn’t turn up again for several days. I took the ferry to Calilhas on the other side of the Tagus. Looking back across the water at Lisboa, each large building was recognisable, each district, as marked on the street map, could easily be distinguished and given its name, the hills behind seemed to have pushed the city nearer to the sea, to the sea’s very edge, and strangest of all was the impression I had from this distance that Lisboa had removed all its clothes and was naked! I didn’t know whether this was due to shadows from the clouds, or to a refraction of sunlight coming off the Sea of Straw, or whether it was because I had entered the zone where, throughout centuries, sailors and fishermen had found again, or looked back at for the last time, the Lisboa they loved.

  The next day the weather was gusty with squalls of Atlantic rain. I was crossing the Campo dos Mártires da Pátria with an anorak pulled over my head. The rain came in fits and starts and when it came, it was drenching. The martyrs of the fatherland, after whom the square is named, were executed here by hanging in 1817. The gallows stood where the roundabout now is. All twelve of them were Freemasons. The execution was ordered by Marshal Beresford, for at that time, after Wellington’s Peninsular War, the English were governing the country. The twelve men were accused of being republicans and conspirators. As they were being blindfolded they prayed for the city.

  And this square, with its roundabout and trams and unending traffic, is still strangely full of prayers. You edge your way between prayers, as between cattle in a livestock market. The martyrs’ prayers. The prayers of those who are obliged to visit the city morgue, beside the Institute of Forensic Medicine to the north of the square, and the prayers of all those who come here to have the blessing of the man whose statue has been placed in the middle of the roundabout: Dr José Thomas de Souza Martins.

  Around this statue stand stone tablets which look a little like headstones for graves. Some lean against the plinth of the statue, others against one another. In fact they are not tombstones: written on them are prayers of thanks to the doctor who once cured a cirrhosis, or a bronchitis, some haemorrhoids, a case of impotence, a child’s asthma, a woman’s stress, a colitis . . . Some of the cures were performed during his lifetime, some after his death.

  Old women are selling photos of him in the square. Framed and unframed. Dr Martins looked somewhat like my Uncle Edgar – who was my father’s elder brother, a man of learning who never stopped learning, a man of ideals who never despaired, a man whom everyone, including my mother, treated as a failure, a man with a wart on the middle finger of his right hand where he held his pen writing hundreds of pages of a book that nobody ever read or published.

  What their two faces had in common was an unusual looseness about the mouth, indicating not weakness but a desire to kiss rather than to bite. They also had similar foreheads, foreheads not of imposing intelligence but of an immense, inspiring calm. Today, a century after his death, Dr Martins is referred to in Lisboa as Doctor of the Heavens and of the Earth. And my Uncle Edgar still demonstrates to me the power of reticent love.

  The wind was smacking wet, and the gulls were flying very low over the roofs. It was a day when everyone turned their backs to the sea, if they had no one out on it.

  Women, crouched under dark umbrellas in the middle of the roundabout, were selling candles. Three sizes of candles, priced accordingly, though no price was marked. The largest were thirty centimetres tall, their wax the colour of parchment. Nearer the statue of the doctor, lit candles were burning on two metal tables. The table-tops, encrusted with old melted wax, had spikes for impaling the new candles on, and a tall metal sheet behind to cut the wind. I watched the flames. They flickered, they guttered, they were blown sideways as if coming from a toy dragon’s mouth; yet not one of them had succumbed to the rain or the gale-force wind. A man with a black hat and the face of a gypsy stood close by, surveying them with a protective air. Perhaps, when the wind veered, he shifted the tables or the metal sheets to protect the flames, and perhaps he asked for a little money from the candle-makers for this bad-weather job. Or was he simply standing there like me, fascinated by the tenacity of the flames?

  Slowly the idea came to me to buy and light some candles myself. I knew who they would be for. I was thinking of three friends who at that moment, for different reasons, were at sea.

  I bought the tallest candles, which would burn longest, and I walked over to one of the tables. I impaled them, one after the other, on the three nearest spikes. Only afterwards did it occur to me that I should first have lit one from a burning candle, then I could have lit my other two with it once they were impaled. Now it would be difficult in the wind to light them with a match, and anyway I didn’t have any matches.

  As I realised my mistake, a small woman from behind offered me a lit candle. I took it, with
out looking round, not doubting for a moment who it was! Then I stood there, mesmerised by the three new, flickering flames.

  When I did at last turn round, I was amazed to discover that the small woman behind with an umbrella was not my mother.

  I’m so sorry, sorry, I blurted out, I thought you were my mother! I spoke in French, which is the language I fall into when I’m confused.

  I think I’m almost young enough to be your daughter, she replied lightly, speaking a French with a Portuguese accent. I gave her back her candle, which was still burning, and I bowed.

  Once they are alight, she said, whatever good they may do, they do it without us.

  Of course, I whispered, of course.

  I saw you were at a bit of a loss, she said.

  You speak French very well.

  I worked in Paris. Cleaning. Last year I was fifty-five and I said to myself, it’s time to come back to Lisboa for good. And my husband came too.

  Can I offer you a coffee out of the rain?

  No, I’ll place my candle and I must get along home.

  She had blue eyes in a face that was strong yet unprotected.

  It’s for my husband, mine.

  He’s ill?

  No, he’s not ill. He had an accident. Fell off the roof he was working on.

  Is he badly hurt?

  She stared at my chest as if it were the distant Sea of Straw. I knew then that he was dead.

  You should have brought an umbrella like me! she said. Then she added: Our candles will go on burning, doing whatever they can, without us.

  I stepped off the roundabout, made my way with some difficulty through the traffic and found a café. I went inside, took off my anorak, dried my face on a towel in the toilet and ordered a hot grog. The café was full of people and many of them were particularly well-dressed. I listened, as I sipped the hot liquor, and I heard German and English being spoken. The clientele, I concluded, were probably from the nearby embassies.

  So, this morning you went to see Dr Martins. There was a good man! Some of us still go to consult him.