by William Boyd
‘This suite must be very expensive,’ I said.
‘Oh yes. But I can afford it. I have a car outside too. And a driver. We could go for a drive.’
‘If you like.’
‘It’s an American car. A Cadillac.’
‘Wonderful.’
That night when we made love in the fetid bedroom he asked me to keep my jewels on.
‘It’s your day today.’
‘Thank you. Merry Christmas.’
‘And the same to you . . . What do you want me to do?’
‘Take all your clothes off.’
I made Vasconcelles remain naked for the entire day. It was at first amusing and then intriguing to watch his mood slowly change. Initially he was excited, sexually, and regularly aroused. But then, little by little, he became self-conscious and awkward. At one stage in the day I watched him filling the stove with coal, one-handed, the other cupped reflexively around his genitals, like adolescent boys I had once seen jumping into the sea off a breakwater at Cidadella. Later still he grew irritable and restless, pacing up and down, not content to sit and talk out the hours as we had done the day before.
In mid-afternoon I put on a coat and went out for a drive, leaving him behind in the suite. The big Cadillac was there, as he had said, and a driver. I had him drive me down to Estoril and back. I was gone for almost three hours.
When I returned Vasconcelles was asleep, lying on top of the bed in the hot bedroom. He was deeply asleep, his mouth open, his arms and legs spread. His chest rose and fell slowly and I saw how very thin he was, his skin stretched tight over his ribs. When I looked closely I could see the shiver and bump of his palpitating heart.
Before dinner he asked me if he could put on his clothes. When I refused his request it seemed to make him angry. I reminded him of our gifts and their rules. But to compensate him I wore a tight sequinned gown, placed his flashy rings on my fingers and roped imitation pearls round my neck. My wrists ticked and clattered with preposterous rhinestone bangles. So we sat and ate: me, Lily Campendonc, splendid in my luminous jewels and, across the table, J. Melchior Vasconcelles, surly and morose, picking at his Christmas dinner, a crisp linen napkin spread modestly across his thighs.
The various applications of cork that we are now going to consider are worthy of description as each application has its raison d’être in one or more of the physical or chemical properties of this marvellous material. Cork possesses three key properties that are unique in a natural substance. They are: impermeability, elasticity and lightness.
Consul Schenk’s Report
I missed Boscán after this second Christmas with him, much more – strangely – than I had after the first. I was very busy in the factory that year – 1934 – as we were installing machinery to manufacture Kamptulicon, a soft, unresounding cork carpet made from cork powder and indiarubber and much favoured by hospitals and the reading-rooms of libraries. My new manager – a dour, reasonably efficient fellow called Pimentel – saw capably to most of the problems that arose but refused to accept any responsibility for all but the most minor decisions. As a result I was required to be present whenever anything of significance had to be decided, as if I functioned as a symbol of delegatory power, a kind of managerial chaperone.
I thought of Boscán often, and many nights I wanted to be with him. On those occasions, as I lay in bed dreaming of Christmasses past and, I hoped, Christmasses to come, I thought I would do anything he asked of me – or so I told myself.
One evening at the end of April I was leaving a shop on the rua Conceição, where I had been buying a christening present for my sister’s second child, when I saw Boscán entering a café, the Trinidade. I walked slowly past the door and looked inside. It was cramped and gloomy and there were no women clients. In my glimpse I saw Boscán leaning eagerly across a table, around which sat half a dozen men, showing them a photograph, which they at first peered at, frowning, and then broke into wide smiles. I walked on, agitated, this moment frozen in my mind’s eye. It was the first time I had seen Boscán, and Boscán’s life, separate from myself. I felt unsettled and oddly envious. Who were these men? Friends or colleagues? I wanted suddenly and absurdly to share in that moment of the offered photograph, to frown and then grin conspiratorially like the others.
I waited outside the Trinidade sitting in the back seat of my motor car with the windows open and the blinds down. I made Julião, my old chauffeur, take off his peaked cap. Boscán eventually emerged at about 7.45 and walked briskly to the tramway centre at the Rocio. He climbed aboard a no.2 which we duly followed until he stepped down from it near São Vicente. He set off down the steep alleyways into the Mouraria. Julião and I left the car and followed him discreetly down a series of boqueirão – dim and noisome streets that led down to the Tagus. Occasionally there would be a sharp bend and we would catch a glimpse of the wide sprawling river shining below in the moonlight, and beyond, the scatter of lights from Almada on the southern bank.
Boscán entered the door of a small decrepit house. The steps up to the threshold were worn and concave, the tiles above the porch were cracked and slipping. A blurry yellow light shone from behind drab lace curtains. Julião stopped a passer-by and asked who lived there. Senhor Boscán, he was told, with his mother and three sisters.
‘Mrs Campendonc!’
‘Mr Boscán.’ I sat down opposite him. When the surprise and shock began to leave his face I saw that he looked pale and tired. His fingers touched his bow tie, his lips, his ear lobes. He was smoking a small cigar, chocolate brown, and wearing his old blue suit.
‘Mrs Campendonc, this is not really a suitable establishment for a lady.’
‘I wanted to see you.’ I touched his hand, but he jerked it away as if my fingers burned him.
‘It’s impossible. I’m expecting some friends.’
‘Are you well? You look tired. I miss you.’
His gaze flicked around the café. ‘How is the Kamptulicon going? Pimentel is a good man.’
‘Come to my house. This weekend.’
‘Mrs Campendonc . . .’ His tone was despairing.
‘Call me Lily.’
He steepled his fingers. ‘I’m a busy man. I live with my mother and three sisters. They expect me home in the evening.’
‘Take a holiday. Say you’re going to . . . to Spain for a few days.’
‘I only take one holiday a year.’
‘Christmas.’
‘They go to my aunt in Coimbra. I stay behind to look after the house.’
A young man approached the table. He wore a ludicrous yellow overcoat that reached down to his ankles. He was astonished to see me sitting there. Boscán looked even iller as he introduced us. I have forgotten his name.
I said goodbye and went towards the door. Boscán caught up with me.
‘At Christmas,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll see you at Christmas.’
A postcard. A sepia view of the Palace of Queen Maria Pia, Cintra:
‘I will be one kilometre west of the main beach at Paco d’Arcos. I have rented a room in the Casa de Bizoma. Please arrive at dawn on 25th December and depart at sunset.
I am your friend,
Gaspar Barbosa
The bark of the cork tree is removed every 8–10 years, the quality of the cork improving with each successive stripping. Once the section of cork is removed from the tree the outer surface is scraped and cleaned. The sections – wide curved planks – are flattened by heating them over a fire and submitting them to pressure on a flat surface. In the heating operation the surface is charred, and thereby the pores are closed up. It is this process that the industry terms the ‘nerve’ of cork. This is cork at its most valuable. A cork possesses ‘nerve’ when its significant properties – lightness, impermeability, elasticity – are sealed in the material for ever.
Consul Schenk’s Report
In the serene, urinous light of dawn the beach at Paco d’Arcos looked slate grey. The seaside cafés were closed up and
conveyed sensations of dejection and decrepitude as only out-of-season holiday resorts can. To add to this melancholy scene a fine cold rain blew off the Atlantic. I stood beneath my umbrella on the coast road and looked about me. To the left I could just make out the tower of Belem. To the right the hills of Cintra were shrouded in a heavy opaque mist. I turned and walked up the road toward the Casa de Bizoma. As I drew near I could see Boscán sitting on a balcony on the second floor. All other windows on this side of the hotel were firmly shuttered.
A young girl, of about sixteen years, let me in and led me up to his room.
Boscán was wearing a monocle. On a table behind him were two bottles of brandy. We kissed, we broke apart.
‘Lise,’ he said. ‘I want to call you Lise.’
Even then, even that day, I said no. ‘That’s the whole point,’ I reminded him. ‘I’m me – Lily – whoever you are.’
He inclined his body forward in a mock bow. ‘Gaspar Barbosa . . . Would you like something to drink?’
I drank some brandy and then allowed Barbosa to undress me, which he did with pedantic diligence and great delicacy. When I was naked he knelt before me and pressed his lips against my groin, burying his nose in my pubic hair. He hugged me, still kneeling, his arms strong around the backs of my thighs, his head turned sideways in my lap. When he began to cry softly I raised him up and led him over to the narrow bed. He undressed and we climbed in, huddling up together, our legs interlocking. I reached down to touch him.
‘I don’t know what’s wrong,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’
‘We’ll wait.’
‘Don’t forget you have to go at sunset, remember.’
‘I won’t.’
We made love later but it was not very satisfactory. He seemed listless and tired – nothing like Balthazar Cabral and Melchior Vasconcelles.
At noon – the hotel restaurant was closed – we ate a simple lunch he had brought himself: some bread, some olives, some tart sheep’s-milk cheese, some oranges and almonds. By then he was on to the second bottle of brandy. After lunch I smoked a cigarette. I offered him one – I had noticed he had not smoked all day – which he accepted but which he extinguished after a couple of puffs.
‘I have developed a mysterious distaste for tobacco,’ he said, pouring himself some more brandy.
In the afternoon we tried to make love again but failed.
‘It’s my fault,’ he said. ‘I’m not well.’
I asked him why I had had to arrive at dawn and why I had to leave at sunset. He told me it was because of a poem he had written, called ‘The Roses of the Gardens of the God Adonis’.
‘You wrote? Boscán?’
‘No, no. Boscán has only written one book of poems. Years ago. These are mine, Gaspar Barbosa’s.’
‘What’s it about?’ The light was going; it was time for me to leave.
‘Oh . . .’ He thought. ‘Living and dying.’
He quoted me the line which explained the truncated nature of my third Christmas with Agostinho Boscán. He sat at the table before the window, wearing a dirty white shirt and the trousers of his blue serge suit, and poured himself a tumblerful of brandy.
‘It goes like this – roughly. I’m translating: “Let us make our lives last one day,” ’ he said. ‘ “So there is night before and night after the little that we last.” ’
The uses to which corkwood may be put are unlimited. And yet when we speak of uses it is only those that have developed by reason of the corkwood’s own peculiarity and not the great number it has been adapted to, for perhaps its utility will have no end and, in my estimation, its particular qualities are but little appreciated. At any rate it is the most wonderful bark of its kind, its service has been a long one and its benefits, even as a stopper, have been many. A wonderful material truly, and of interest, so full that it seems I have failed to do it justice in my humble endeavour to describe the Quercus Suber of Linnaeus – Cork.
Consul Schenk’s Report
Boscán, during, I think, that last Christmas: ‘You see, because I am nothing, I can imagine anything. . . If I were something, I would be unable to imagine.’
* * *
It was early December 1935 that I received my last communication from Agostinho Boscán. I was waiting to hear from him as I had received an offer for the company from the Armstrong Cork Co. and was contemplating a sale and, possibly, a return to England.
I was in my office one morning when Pimentel knocked on the door and said there was a Senhora Boscán to see me. For an absurd, exquisite moment I thought this might prove to be Agostinho’s most singular disguise, but remembered he had three sisters and a mother still living. I knew before she was shown in that she came with news of Boscán’s death.
Senhora Boscán was small and tubby with a meek pale face. She wore black and fiddled constantly with the handle of her umbrella as she spoke. Her brother had requested specifically that I be informed of his death when it arrived. He had passed away two nights ago.
‘What did he die of?’
‘Cirrhosis of the liver . . . He was . . . My brother had become an increasingly heavy drinker. He was very unhappy.’
‘Was there anything else for me, that he said? Any message?’
Senhora Boscán cleared her throat and blinked. ‘There is no message.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘That is what he asked me to say: “There is no message.” ’
‘Ah.’ I managed to disguise my smile by offering Senhora Boscán a cup of coffee. She accepted.
‘We will all miss him,’ she said. ‘Such a good quiet man.’
From an obituary of Agostinho da Silva Boscán:
. . . Boscán was born in 1888, in Durban, South Africa, where his father was Portuguese consul. He was the youngest of four children, the three elder being sisters. It was in South Africa that he received a British education and where he learned to speak English. Boscán’s father died when he was seventeen and the family returned to Lisbon, where Boscán was to reside for the rest of his life. He worked primarily as a commercial translator and office manager for various industrial concerns, but mainly in the cork business. In 1916 he published a small collection of poems, Insensivel, written in English. The one Portuguese critic who noticed them, and who wrote a short review, described them as ‘a sad waste’. Boscán was active for a while in Lisbon literary circles and would occasionally publish poems, translations and articles in the magazine Sombra. The death of his closest friend, Xavier Quevedo, who committed suicide in Paris in 1924, provoked a marked and sudden change in his personality which became increasingly melancholic and irrational from then on. He never married. His life can only be described as uneventful.
A Note on the Author
WILLIAM BOYD is the author of nine novels, many of which have won prizes. A Good Man in Africa won the Whitbread Literary Award for Best First Novel; An Ice-Cream War won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Brazzaville Beach won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; The Blue Afternoon was the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction; and most recently Restless won the 2006 Costa Novel Award. In addition, some thirteen of his screenplays have been filmed and in 1998 he both wrote and directed the feature film The Trench.
By the Same Author
A Good Man in Africa
On the Yankee Station
An Ice-Cream War
Stars and Bars
School Ties
The New Confessions
Brazzaville Beach
The Blue Afternoon
The Destiny of Nathalie ‘X’
Armadillo
Nat Tate: an American Artist
Any Human Heart
Fascination
Bamboo
Restless
Copyright © 1981, 1982, 1995 by William Boyd
Selection copyright and introduction © 2008 by William Boyd
First published in Great Britain in 1998 by Bloomsbury Publi
shing Plc,
50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
eISBN 978-1-4088-2256-2
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