by Emily Hahn
“Your husband is a wonderful man,” he said. “Never in my life did I expect to meet such an Englishman. He is very sympathetic.”
“Oh yes,” I said, “he is. Especially in Portugal, and in Portuguese.”
My neighbor drank another glass of wine. “He cannot be really English,” he said. “He knows too much about our navy and our history; he is too sympathetic for an Englishman. I have a theory. I think that he was a sailor in the Portuguese fleet, back in the sixteenth century. He must have done something very bad. And for that he was condemned to live on earth as an Englishman. What do you think of my theory?”
A lovely girl with a blue handkerchief on her hair and golden ornaments jingling at her neck, removed our plates and brought us coffee. Our host pressed his special aguardiente on us, and cigars. A manservant brought the cigars and smiled to see me take one. All the servants smiled, and kept bringing things. They were charming. My neighbor lit his cigar with a match held by the blue-handkerchiefed girl, and took coffee from a red-handkerchiefed girl whose eyes were like a cows. He drank his liqueur and sat back in his chair, sighing.
“I am a friend of the people,” he said.
Then, surrounded by these pretty slaves, he talked about his hopes for a revolution. He sounded very kind, but impractical.
When I met him again next day he had a bad headache and couldn’t speak a word of English.
“It’s lovely, oh, it is lovely,” I said. “We’ll have to come back and live here someday.”
Letty was a warm supporter of the idea. “So long as you’re foreigners you can live the way you like,” she assured me. “I mean, the way you would in England or anywhere. Fixed like I am, it isn’t quite the same thing, but I manage all right. I get on better now; they’re used to my ways.”
“If it’s raining when we get back to England, I think I’ll sit down and cry,” I declared. “Now I know why everybody writes to the Times and says England looks too gloomy and austere. But then, it always did, didn’t it, Charles?”
“Certainly. You’d think from the letters that England used to have decent railway stations. It’s nonsense; England always did look awful when I first arrived. One gets used to it in time, that’s all. It’s one thing they can hardly blame on Labour. Well, girls …”
We left him at a library and went on for a last shopping tour. I gritted my teeth and passed up all the things the sun was urging me to buy—perfume, sheer nylons, poetry books. I bought bath soap because big cakes last longer, and towels, and face cloths, and sardines.
“What about sweaters?” said Letty. “They make real good sweaters here, I will say that. Most everything else that’s any good comes from America, of course. No, honey, don’t bother to look at those shoes; they never fit right.”
“Now really, Letty, Portuguese cork shoes are famous. I can’t afford a sweater. Come on, we’ll buy a doll for Carola.”
In the toyshop we heard two young men talking. To look at, they might have been Portuguese; they had the same straight noses and brown hair and light eyes. Actually they were Americans. I never could tell the difference, just from looking, but they were talking good Middle West. Letty heard them, too, and grabbed my arm. “Listen to that,” she said. “Americans! Shall we talk to them?”
“Oh no. They might think—”
“At our age?” she said scornfully, and of course she was right. I stood there meekly while she said, “Anything I can do to help you boys? I’m American, too, but I speak Portuguese.”
They were nice, and just as pleased to meet her as she was to meet them. After interpreting their request to the shopkeeper she went on talking to them. One of them said curiously:
“Do you mean you live here, in Lisbon? How come?”
Letty opened her eyes wide, and once again the full significance of her position seemed to strike her. “I’m married to a Portuguese general,” she said. “Isn’t it a scream?”
12. THE PORCELAIN NOSE
One whiff of mountain air at Serra da Estrella and I was violently homesick. This seems unreasonable, considering that I have spent the busier half of my life deliberately staying away from home, and Serra da Estrella is some thousands of miles from there, in northern Portugal. I was homesick, nevertheless. It was a happy feeling. The sky was just blue enough that day, not glaring but misty. The mountains were pine-green where I stood, and misty blue, gray, and lavender across the valley. I stood on the dark red road beside the train and looked. I also breathed, consciously. It was the air, not the view, that lifted my heart high up, so high that it carried me with it above all the knowledge of years and miles that separated me from home. It was the air and the smell of pine.
They say these uplifted sensations are directly connected with health; often they are more explicit and say the stomach. To be perfectly healthy and to know it is a very good feeling. I have experienced it I am seldom ill, as a matter of fact. That day, however, was something special. I could have been sick as a dog, and still the miracle would have stirred in me. That morning I swear I could have had a toothache, and yet my heart would have gone swinging up, up, up over the hills with the smell of the pines, into the misty depths of air. And I was not sick; I did not have a toothache; it was almost too blissful to bear.
Things were happening around me. I must have gone through the ceremonies of introduction quite adequately, if absently, for the Major didn’t know I had been away. I was evidently now introduced to his old friend Duarte and Duarte’s little nephew Luis. I often pretend that the Major’s secretiveness is due to a boyish desire on his part to surprise me. Actually, I know, it is merely that he hates to talk to me at all. He doesn’t dislike me particularly, but he was trained that way. In England, men don’t talk to their wives except when circumstances force it. I can imagine the Major saying, under certain conditions, “By the way, the mortgage has been foreclosed. You had better pack a few things for yourself. Sensible shoes, remember.” I can’t stretch my imagination, however, far enough to visualize him just chatting with me the way he does with foreigners like Duarte.
Even with Duarte he was rather quiet at first that day, perhaps because we were so busy getting ourselves stowed into an old-fashioned car. The bulky chauffeur bobbed his head and grinned at the Major, his old friend as well as Duarte’s. Dreamily I settled back, letting them all talk Portuguese while the chauffeur put the bags in. When Duarte spoke to me in English, answering him entailed an effort I didn’t like to make. I would have preferred to sit quiet in the car, enjoying equally its abrupt stop and the long wait at a railroad crossing, where even on this lonely highway there was time for three cars and two loaded burros to line up before the gates opened. I drifted. Everyone else was talking a language so utterly strange that I was under no necessity to live in the world at all. I wanted to go on like that, gliding by myself above the mountains and the pines, without strain, without direction, softly ambling with my thoughts through the air.
“You see we still have the old Dodge,” Duarte was saying to the Major, and his deep, rich voice softened the summons back to earth. He spoke English. Reluctantly, dutifully, I looked at him. He was a slender, delicate young man with a pointed chin, pointed nose, and light eyes slanting off to his temples in long, narrow points. He was dressed in breeches, boots, and soft-collared shirt; he had a weary charm and that air of unself-consciousness which a man bears only on his own soil, in his own country.
The boy Luis leaned against his knees, or stood up bouncing in the car, or fidgeted around, bothering the driver. He was a small, electric sort of child, with jet-black hair and enormous black eyes, arresting and expressionless as only black eyes can be. They startled and perturbed me. I would glance, smiling, at Luis, and suddenly, just in time, would find myself standing on the lashy brink of those eyes, all but falling into them. They were eyes too large and significant for a child to handle; he was unaware of this, and must have wondered sometimes what gave him such a strange power over people. What with the piny air and Luis’
s fathomless glances I began to feel a little drunk, a little hypnotized. Above the rhythmic grinding of the motor Duarte’s voice resounded, talking English to Charles.
“This car is so old, so old, so old,” he was saying, “and she is all the car I can drive, and I know her perfectly, and she is twenty-eight years old; she was old when you were last here, how long ago?”
It was a poem. It was stern, sorrowful, powerful poetry.
“Eleven years,” said the Major, talking prose. “Whose child is Luis?”
“This one is my brother’s. They spend always a few months here with us, Luis and his mother. You will remember Clara.”
“Ah yes. And you yourself, Duarte. You haven’t married?”
Duarte shook his head slowly, once.
“Are you a great lawyer now?” continued the Major teasingly, “or a famous general?”
“No, no. I am nothing.” Duarte’s long hands closed over Luis’s skinny little shoulders, restraining him from too vigorous a wriggle as the Dodge swooped around a curve. “I’m nothing but a nothing,” he intoned gravely. Then, brightening, he plunged back into Portuguese and I rose free and happy into my native element, the thoughtless, tongueless air.
The road climbed, fell, crept between sandy rocky slopes, and then burst out dramatically, taking us along the edge of deep valleys or over bare hilltops. The first ecstatic flutter of wings changed and steadied, and I flew now with strong, slow strokes through the heavily perfumed clarity of my long-lost heaven. Back across the years and the miles I flew, shaking myself naked of all experience, slim and cool, light and newborn. There was no weight where I was, no fear, no body.…
Duarte’s voice followed me into the sunlight, but its message was not for me. He was telling Luis in peremptory tones to put on his broadbrimmed straw hat, and not to frisk about bareheaded. We were now sitting in a silent, motionless car, at the roadside in a little white town. We were waiting, it seemed, for the chauffeur to come out of a shop. I knew what Duarte had said, and this angered me, for I didn’t want to understand him when he talked Portuguese. I wanted not to understand any more languages; it would have been better to forget the ones I knew already. If I hadn’t been able to speak even English, Duarte and the Major could have ignored me completely and I would have been really alone, really free, a smiling, blissful deaf mute. Now, as Luis obediently picked up his hat and snapped the elastic under his chin, I realized with irritation that I had enmeshed myself with the others: I had to follow them now in their talk. The Major was saying, “Why must he put on a hat? Surely the sun isn’t harmful?” and Duarte was replying, “He is delicate. Since birth he hasn’t been able to eat as the others do, and whether or not it was originally his liver, as we all thought, something has gone very wrong now. We are always making trouble over him; one must take great care what he eats.” Luis slipped away, going outside and to the front of the car, where he sounded the horn. “He is very delicate,” repeated Duarte.
The talk of eating and of livers had a civilizing effect: I continued without protest to receive impressions. Obediently I observed and praised a “vista.” As we lumbered past a little white house with blue scrolls on it, enclosed by a blue-scrolled white wall, I noticed that the chauffeur took off his cap until we had gone by. This, then, was a church. The plain white ones without walls, however, were capelas. Not chapels, I decided; a chapel is a part of a church or of a large rich man’s house. A capela, on the other hand, is a little white box on a Portuguese mountain into which nobody can get because the door is locked and the windows are barred, protecting the saints inside. I was sure of my own discovery of the difference between capela and chapel; I refused to look it up in the dictionary.
Stirring myself, I asked Duarte the reason for the new gashes on many of the pines’ trunks, gashes with small reddish earthenware bowls pegged into them. He said it was the resin-gathering. Resin was an important product of the district. We would soon be arrived at the house, said Duarte.
On a road of white dust, just above a village, we jolted to a final stop. Three dusty children with fair hair were playing near a gate, and a small cart went past us, the burro led by a man in a wilting black hat which had once been round and stiff. Just inside the wall and the gate a blue plaster house facade rose up and got in the way of the sky. Like most Portuguese houses it was bland and flat in front, and gave a deceptive impression of simplicity and smallness. My eye continued to follow it a long way to the sides; it grew out slowly in a series of square boxes, on and on along the hillside, wall after wall. It was impossible to guess how deep it might be behind the blank heavy door in the middle of the blue façade.
“Aren’t you going to get out?” asked the Major at last.
“Oh. Yes, of course.”
The heavy door opened and two women came out of cool darkness to greet us. There were chirrups and exclamations; in English, I noted sorrowfully: “But you haven’t changed! The war has not hurt you at all!” “You’ve painted the house, haven’t you?” “Luis! where is your hat?” “Did you have a dusty drive?”
“Oh, this is my wife,” said the Major at the end.
We shook hands. There were two young women, I noted, and an old, slow-moving lady in dark blue foulard, who spoke and looked like an English lady in an English country house. We were in a sort of Roman courtyard, though there were walls and roofs. The floor was tiled and so were the walls, and a wide set of stairs led up to another terrace. It was a hillside house; indoors and out of doors were steeply placed terraces.
The fair one of the two young women led us to our room, up more steps, and down a corridor of unpainted parquet. It was a big room, shuttered and cool and furnished, like most Portuguese rooms, with only the necessary things. Left alone with the Major, I started to brush the dust from my hair, silent, and resolved to remain so until he should speak. It is the only way to make him do it. At last he said, “They’ve fixed the place up since I was here. Running water and all that. As I remember it was much plainer, just a regular ranch house.”
“Yes?” After dashing cold water on my face I was beginning to feel less dazed. Besides, there was no pine smell in the house. It was cool and scented from the garden, but there was no pine. “It’s certainly comfortable,” I said.
“Oh, it always was comfortable.” He waited, and I waited. At last, again defeated, he said, “The old lady’s sweet.”
“Yes, she is.” I powdered my nose. I said, offhand and cunning, “Who is she?”
“Why, their mother, of course—Mrs. Carvalho.”
I made careful note of the name. As he seemed to be in an unusually communicative mood I followed up my advantage. “Where are we?” I asked.
But this was going too far; he grew impatient. “Darling, don’t be silly, you know as well as I do. I told you before we left England—”
“I know we’re in the north,” I said, “and obviously we’re in some mountains somewhere. I cheated, anyway. I heard you tell people in Lisbon that we were going to the Serra da Estrella.”
“Well then, you know.”
“I would just like to know the name of the place,” I said pleadingly. “The village.”
He underwent an inner struggle which his better self won. “Azere,” he admitted.
“Azere. Thanks.”
“I’m going downstairs,” he said, with a hunted look toward the door. “Are you ready?”
“Luis, put on your hat … Luis, don’t heat yourself too much on that bicycle … Luis, put on your hat … Miss Johnson, does Luis have his hat on?”
Luis’s mother was knitting ecru silk into socks, her fine, small fingers moving with precision. She was a strikingly pretty woman, obviously responsible for Luis’s huge liquid eyes and jetty hair. In French, she spoke with gentle disparagement of herself and her contribution to the Carvalho family. She herself was so dark, so dark, so dark! Little Luis in babyhood had been beautifully fair; with his big black eyes and his yellow curls he was a perfect Murillo angel. But now! Clara
sighed and shook her head, though her sidelong glance toward Luis on his bicycle was ineffably proud.
Sitting in a garden chair on my other hand, her sister-in-law Donna Ines spoke up stoutly in defense of her darling nephew. Donna Ines was the unmarried daughter, the one who had not become a nun, but had stayed at home to help Mother with the house. Fair and slender, as Clara was dark and slender, she talked eagerly of life in Lisbon (“But I do not go any more, except for one month in the year, I prefer the air here”), of music (“I play, I try still to play, but with a child and the maids there are always interruptions”), and above all of her health.
“I was so afraid yesterday that today I would not be well, you can’t imagine, I said as I lay in bed, ‘Just suppose I am this ill tomorrow when Major Boxer and his wife arrive! It will be too disappointing! I cannot bear it!’ But today I am better.”
I congratulated her and ourselves. “Are you often ill?” I asked.
“Oh, it is terrible when I am like that. Last time we had guests, do you remember, Clara? I could not go with them on the little sightseeing trips, it was such awfully bad luck. Sometimes as yesterday I cannot eat. And then it is so inconvenient, you can imagine, with the little boy here who must be overseen—his diet alone! There is always a good deal of worry, though I love to have him here.”
“Yes indeed,” said Mrs. Carvalho, smiling. “It is pleasant with Luis, though he is such a monkey.”
The Major looked around the garden. “He doesn’t seem much in evidence.”
