Ernie told me he’d sold a large landscape of Black Canyon and a portrait of Rosie sleeping on her rug.
‘Have you got the money yet?’ I was still looking for the burnt underside of this miracle.
‘Yeah, Chris did a bank transfer the other day. And he’s planning a show of my work at his restaurant. He has art on the walls. He changes the shows every three or four months. Mine will go up in late November. He says people still spend money at Christmas in England – the economic crisis isn’t as deep there as it is here.’
I didn’t want to cry in front of him, but I also didn’t want to hang up. So I chose the middle route and said nothing.
‘You there?’
‘More or less,’ I whispered.
‘Yeah, it kind of stunned me, too,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I figure I can pay you half of what I’ve received so far and still have enough money to keep me and the garden going for a while.’
I still can’t get over Ernie’s success. I want to meet Chris and Jo – to meet two people who understand how talented my brother is. He agreed that we would go to Wivenhoe for the opening. He said he’ll drink a lot of valerian tea before the flight to steady his nerves. I’ll keep some Valium ready in case that doesn’t work.
I’ve looked up the Jardine Bistro on the Internet. It looks like a big brick house. According to Wikipedia, Wivenhoe has about ten thousand people and is on the banks of the River Colne. At the website for British National Rail, I discovered that you can get there from London’s Liverpool Street Station. The journey only takes an hour and five minutes. The flights from Lisbon to London take just two hours.
I figure we’ll stay in London for a couple of nights, then catch the train to Wivenhoe. And from there, riding high on Ernie’s success, we’ll head up to Scotland, since he and I have always wanted to see Loch Ness. Maybe Ana can find some transsexuals to interview in Glasgow or Edinburgh.
Strange that it never occurred to me that I could reach an English-speaking country so easily. Thinking about being there makes me giddy – as if I’ll be going beyond everything I could ever have hoped for me and Ernie, the moment we pass through passport control. Maybe seeing his paintings hanging up in an exhibition will mean that I can stop comparing him and me to the men we might have been. I really hope so, but I think I’ll only find out when it happens.
Over the last three nights, after Ana is asleep, I’ve sat at her desk in the living room and written to Lena about Gabriel, starting with when I was eight and he scribbled a first message on my hand, though what I told her was a lot more than just how and why he comes to me. Trying to convey feelings I don’t entirely understand made me stutter a lot inside my head and do a lot of rewriting. And made me see that it would be impossible to tell her about G without also explaining a lot about my parents and Ernie. And about why I had to finally stop lying.
Just this morning, I discovered that I like making the kids’ beds and cleaning up their rooms. To see their blankets smoothed down neatly and ready for them to climb into . . . What more could I want to accomplish? Ana understood. While watching me cleaning Nati’s windows, she told me things she’d never told me before: about bicycling to the port of Buenos Aires when she was a girl so she could watch the big ships being offloaded; and the red velvet curtains in the fancy hotel where her uncle Javier got a summer job playing piano, just a few months before he disappeared; and how her father used to show her the constellations in the night sky. I think she told me all these things because she knew I’d listen closely to what she was saying and go right on cleaning.
And this is what I realized: the sound of her voice – ambling through memories of her childhood – was the same sound as my own longing for a love that would never end.
Ernie told me he’s coming over tomorrow. He’s going to bring our baseball mitts, too. We’re going to have our first catch in thirty years, in Santa Marinha Square, and he isn’t going to take it easy on me; he’s going to throw real hard and make me run all over the place, because he said I need to strengthen my bad shoulder and leg. He told me that if he was satisfied with my effort, and didn’t start what he called my ‘usual whining!’, he was going to take me to the Gulbenkian cafeteria after lunch for a double helping of avocado mousse.
After that, Ernie is going to drive us over to Coutinho’s neighbourhood. I want to snoop around the abandoned house with the shattered skylight that’s just behind his home. I’ve already got the stepladder, crowbar and flashlights in my car. I doubt I’ll find any evidence worth collecting, but that house and my shooting are connected, and I need to see it for myself.
Almost dying of gunshot wounds changes lots of things, of course. If you have a little brother who is thirty-eight years old but who still isn’t entirely convinced that he has a right to be alive, then you do pretty much anything he asks of you, and you call him every night before bed, and you order seeds for his garden from nurseries in France and Italy, and occasionally you remind him that you used to picture what he’d look like when your mother’s belly first started growing with him, and once, when you are feeling particularly tender, you even say that months before he came into the world you knew exactly what the colour of his eyes would be, and the texture of his hair, and the way he’d tug on his ear when he was reading, and how his neck would smell when he was sleepy and lots of other things, which was how you came to understand – without being able to put it into words – that wanting something enough could make it come true.
If you have a teenaged son, then you probably ask if you can comb his hair after his shower or help him put on his favourite T-shirt for the simple pleasure of touching what time is stealing from you, and you know you are irritating him with every glance that goes on too long, and by insisting that you lead while teaching him to jitterbug, but you also realize that his annoyance is the price you must pay for never forgetting that his life and yours are not nearly as separate as you’ve been led to believe.
If you have a seven-year-old son, then you are in luck, because on those nights when you cannot sleep, and they are many, you can slip softly into his bed, and he will fold himself around you like a loose-limbed rubbery creature made of trust and slumber, and he will breathe warm against your cheek, and maybe just once, the in-and-out movement of his back against your chest will erase every border between you, and you will realize that it’s this unbearable love you feel for him that might, one day, finally make you stop fearing your own death. You also buy him a bicycle, of course, and in silver – ‘Just like yours, Dad!’ – and teach him how to ride, and take him out for adventures in the countryside by Ernie’s house, and even though there’s little danger of him having an accident there, you make him wear his helmet, because there are things worth risking and things not worth risking, and it’s important that he learn the difference.
And if you have a wife who has agreed to overlook your bad moods and rudeness, at least most of the time, then you hold her in bed tighter than you ever have, and you promise to keep going to therapy sessions every week and, during a quiet moment, maybe you even admit that you aren’t nearly done hunting for justice even if you have told everyone you are, but that your search will have to take another form if you are to remain the person you want to be, and you even risk sounding like an idiot and tell her that we are always floating across the cities and countryside inside ourselves, riding on the most subtle inner winds over rooftops and staircases and parks and canyons, in Portugal and America and Argentina and everywhere else, even when we’re certain we haven’t the strength to get out of a hospital bed.
If you think enough about having nearly died, as I do, then you have also probably figured out that you don’t understand very much about the way life works – about its additions and subtractions, about those who vanish and those who don’t – but that’s okay, at least for the moment, because whatever else happens, you will crawl into bed every night next to a person who enjoys putting her cold feet against your legs, and who lets you kiss her anywhere you want
, and just maybe she’ll give you permission one of these days to start another life inside her, and perhaps this time, if all goes according to plan (as it almost never does, of course), the baby will be a girl.
And if you are anything like me, then you sometimes pause while making love to your wife or husband, and listen to the swallows swooping outside your window, chattering endlessly about the most fragrant summer winds they have known and the biggest mosquitoes they’ve ever swallowed and all the difficulties of living in Portugal, and just about any other subject – no matter how silly-sounding – that you are willing to propose to them. And maybe, if you are in a philosophical mood, you realize that even if you had died a few weeks before, bled to death on a Lisbon street corner, those crazy-hearted birds would still be diving across Santa Marinha Square – or whatever the name of the street outside your window happens to be – and speaking to one another about the same surprises and joys and disappointments and miseries that they do all over the world.
[The End]
The Night Watchman Page 42
