by Monica Ali
‘You realize,’ he said, ‘that when we’re married we can only have sex twice a week.’
‘As often as that?’ she said.
The rain let up and the sun came through, a nauseous kind of yellow. In the distance roiling black clouds smothered the sky and the fields like a chemical explosion.
‘Look what’s waiting for us,’ said Sophie.
‘I love this kind of landscape,’ said Huw.
The plains spread out on either side. Here and there a cork oak stood grieving. The land rose and fell in modest dimensions. Now and again a gleam of machinery, glittering drops of water on an acacia, a giant eucalyptus shedding its splintery scrolls. Field upon field upon field, wheat and grass and fallow, on and on and on, and in this flat composition there was a depth, both sadness and tremulous joy.
Huw rolled the window down. ‘Lapwings,’ he said. ‘Up there.’
‘Get the map. Let’s find the main road,’ said Sophie, without looking.
Just before the turn there was a house with ochreframed doors and windows, a pigsty fashioned from branches, rough as a stork’s nest, a small stone well and a striated vegetable plot. Planted in the thin soil, an old couple leaned on their hoes and waited for the car to pass, as if this would be the day’s main event. Huw, bending into the open window, raised his hand. The old man pushed his hat up an inch. His wife bowed her back and attended to the earth.
‘In the north of Portugal it’s all smallholdings like that,’ said Huw. ‘Here it’s big landowners.’
‘Come the revolution . . .’ said Sophie.
‘It came,’ said Huw. ‘Collectivization. And it went.’
‘What?’ she cried. ‘When?’
‘Seventies. Didn’t work out. The old landowners started buying their land back on the cheap.’
‘Crafty sods. Why couldn’t the workers just get their own bit each?’
‘Because,’ said Huw. ‘I don’t know. The peasants didn’t have any money, probably, to buy a share. And, anyway, there’s nothing more conservative than a land-owning peasant, in case you didn’t know.’
‘Yes there is,’ said Sophie, ‘there’s you.’
‘Thanks. But it’s over now anyway, this life. How many men does it take to drive that tractor? How many young people have you seen? How many empty houses?’
‘And that makes you happy, I suppose, that a way of life is dying.’
‘Not at all,’ said Huw. He reached across and massaged the back of her neck. It would be raining in Evora. They’d have to stay in and make the most of the room. ‘Peasants are so picturesque.’
She put the radio on and scanned through the stations playing American soft rock until she hit on a mournful Portuguese song and turned it up. Huw stared at Sophie’s face, the small scar at the temple, the artful lift of her eyebrows. He thought about the old couple at the side of the road and how their expressions had not changed, unaltered, it seemed, through the centuries. In their sturdy boots and frayed sweaters they worked side by side and he imagined the understanding between them ran deeper than the well. He tried to swap places with them, he and Sophie forever in the field and the others passing through, but he could not. He thought about growing old with Sophie, about being old with Sophie, and that was real and he thought, yes, we are not so far apart, we are not always passing through and he felt something for the old couple, gratitude, love, that made him cough and begin to sing tunelessly along with the unknown song.
She taught English at a large comprehensive. Her friends were teachers or social workers or had jobs in local government.
‘Have they excommunicated you yet?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘They haven’t. But they want me to go into therapy.’
The way they looked at her, he could tell all the men fancied her. They bought him pints and ribbed him and said, how much then? how many millions today? but he could see that they were bitter too, that they thought how unfair it was, how typical, that the pretty one would jump ship like that.
They began sentences with ‘If you believe’. ‘If you believe in social justice . . .’ ‘If you believe in participatory democracy . . .’ ‘If you believe in civil liberties . . .’ Huw found it interesting. It was like a church. He wondered what beliefs he had and decided he didn’t have any. He knew some things were right and he knew some things were wrong. Or he didn’t care either way.
Sophie, he had learned, would always take the side of the underdog. She had a big heart, his Sophie. And she liked to argue a lot.
On the main road they were doing a hundred and ten. They came up to a village and Sophie slowed the car right down. Whitewashed houses ran alongside the road with barely a scraping of verge in between. A mother carried a small child out of one house and into another. White smoke rose from the chimney. There was a wind chime in the doorway.
A car, a big black BMW, overtook them at such speed that it left in its wake little ripples of anger, a swell of outrage.
Outside the village Sophie hunched into the steering wheel.
‘What are you doing?’ said Huw.
A humming vibration started up in the door panel. Huw wondered if the door was properly closed.
‘You’re not trying to catch him?’ he said.
Then tendons in her hands stood out. Huw couldn’t see the speed dial.
‘He was an arsehole,’ he said, ‘but, honestly, some of the drivers here . . .’
The BMW came into view.
‘Sophie,’ he said. ‘Sophie. My door. I think it’s not properly shut.’
Her hands looked totally alien. He had never seen anger in a pair of hands before.
They gained on the BMW. They were too close now, the rear bumper high in the frame. Huw held on to the door handle. ‘It’s not funny,’ he shouted. ‘Sophie.’
She swung the car out and Huw saw the yellow bus – a school bus, it had to be – coming at them. He let go of the door handle and grabbed her hand and turned the wheel so that they veered off again to the right, slicing in front of the car and then skidding left, and sliding a couple more times across the road and back before straightening up finally with him in charge of the wheel and Sophie pressing hard on the horn.
The BMW dropped far behind, though they were not going fast now.
‘So that was fun,’ said Sophie.
Huw couldn’t speak. His heart wasn’t in his mouth. It seemed to be in his throat, beating violently and blocking his airways.
‘Did you think you were going to die?’ asked Sophie.
Huw put his head back and closed his eyes. Adrenalin, he told himself, you’re not having a heart attack.
‘I did,’ said Sophie. ‘I thought I was going to die.’
Another twenty minutes and they’d be there. Huw made himself busy looking up the directions to the pousada. They’d driven into the clouds now and the rain bounced hard off the bonnet and turned the windscreen into a vertical lake, the wipers swimming through.
They passed a power station, commandingly ugly, painted on the grey canvas of the sky: high wire fences and great metal vats and spiny towers that flashed in the milky light of the storm.
‘What’s this?’ said Sophie, as they pulled past the station. ‘What are we driving through now?’ She sounded upset.
He didn’t know at first. He peered through the window at the dark rows of claw-ended posts and the long lines of wizened black stumps and had this wild thought, that this was where they grew the power stations, out of the ground, in nursery beds of coal.
‘It’s a vineyard,’ he said finally. ‘Scenic.’
‘God,’ said Sophie, ‘they look like severed arms. Charred-up severed arms.’
The wedding, he thought, was getting her down. They had taken it over. They were turning it into a charade.
It was easy, at first, to laugh about it. A church wedding. For the sake of Sophie’s parents, who had had her baptized, who had her confirmed, who sent her to Sunday School, who would weep, discreetly, at the exchangi
ng of the vows.
Sophie and Huw had to see the vicar every time they went down to Devon to visit Sophie’s parents. ‘I don’t need to tell you,’ the vicar said, ‘that marriage is a serious business.’ He seemed embarrassed. He fiddled with the biscuits on the plate. ‘I have to ask you,’ he said, as though if it were up to him he would not, ‘how you, ah, perceive – I say perceive, I mean feel – that your faith in the Lord will reflect upon your relationship in the . . . er . . . married state, as it were, as it will be.’
He had a strawberry birthmark over his right eye that, Hugh fancied, was in the shape of a cloven hoof and the tips of two of his fingers were missing.
‘He used to be a carpenter,’ Sophie said later.
‘No,’ said Huw. ‘No. And born in a manger as well?’
She punched him softly in the stomach and they collapsed on the bed, their legs in a tangle. ‘Do you mind?’ she asked. ‘Do you mind doing all this?’
He blew in her ear and said, ‘None of the silly stuff matters.’ But now, he thought, it was getting too much. Before they came away there was tension. Sniping and snapping over every little thing. Her saying what hymns shall we have and him saying ‘Away in a Manger’ and her walking out and slamming the door.
They agreed not to mention the wedding on holiday. ‘Let’s have a break from it,’ she said.
‘Let’s just take a Bible with us,’ he said, ‘in case it rains.’
It wasn’t only the church stuff. Everything else was spiralling out of control too. The guest lists and seating plans, the caterers and flowers and cake and dresses and car hire and wedding list and god-knows-what. None of it for their sakes. ‘Apparently,’ said Sophie, ‘I’ve got to have four bridesmaids and two pageboys.’
‘Why?’ said Huw. ‘Who?’
‘Marsha and Tatiana,’ said Sophie, naming her nieces, ‘and the rest are just kids in Mum and Dad’s village.’
‘Great. Why don’t we adopt them as well?’
They hadn’t mentioned the wedding. Three days now. But maybe it was making her crazy.
Over dinner tonight. That would be a good time to discuss it. Not now, not while she was driving.
‘Sophie,’ he said, ‘I think you should put the headlights on.’
‘Oh, Jesus,’ she said. ‘Stop fussing.’
‘Shall we talk about the wedding?’ he said. ‘Shall we just bloody well talk about it?’
‘Please! What are you doing? Why are you saying that? I don’t want to talk about the bloody wedding and neither do you. We’re having a break, remember, a holiday.’
‘I know. I thought . . . I thought, maybe it would be better . . .’
‘We’ll only end up arguing.’
‘And you hate that, don’t you? You really hate to argue.’
She set her mouth and didn’t answer.
‘In fact,’ he said, ‘I know you’ll do anything to avoid an argument.’
She tried to keep her cross face but he could see that she was cracking.
‘In a Christian marriage,’ he said, and rested a hand on her knee, ‘I think that is usually the wife’s burden.’
She smiled tenderly. ‘Fuckwit,’ she said.
In the altar room of the Capela dos Ossos, abutting the Igreja de São Francisco, a woman dropped to her knees and prayed, hands either side of her face, palms facing forward to the life-size, purple-robed statue of Christ, kneeling under a cross.
Underneath the window were two giant electric candlesticks and between them a wooden box of small red lights. Sophie dropped a one-euro coin in the slot.
‘What does that buy you?’ said Huw, though he could see that four of the candles had lit up. ‘A place in Heaven?’
Sophie put a finger to her lips.
The woman was still praying. Huw put his hands in his pockets. This, he thought, is where the veneer comes off. To kneel before an effigy like that.
Sophie had moved through to the next antechamber. She was buying tickets for the chapel and a guidebook in Portuguese, French and English. ‘Hey,’ she said, when he joined her at the desk, ‘if I faint will you carry me out?’
‘You?’ he said. ‘What about me?’
Yesterday’s mood had passed. When they got to the hotel they had gone up to the room and she turned on the television and watched two hours of CNN. The hotel was a converted monastery and the rooms were monks’ cells, tiny with high vaulted ceilings, dark wood furniture and elderly drawings, framed in faded and padded silk, of Senhor Jesus dos Passos on his way to the crucifixion. After dinner, in the cloisters, they took their books to the lounge and read until someone came to turn off the lights.
Nos ossos que aqui estamos pelos vossos esperamos.
At the entrance they paused while Sophie looked up the translation. She had her hair up today, showing her long neck. The teenage boys in her class . . . god, she probably had no idea what goes through the mind of a fourteen-year-old boy.
‘“We bones that are here, for yours we are waiting.”’
‘Good gag,’ said Huw. He looked through into the chapel and whistled softly. They went a few paces in. ‘It’s like drystone walling. Not what I was expecting.’
The room was about the size of the church hall where their wedding reception would be. It was divided into three aisles, marked out by rows of pillars on which the ribbed and vaulted ceiling rested. The floor was tiled, cream and red, and there were azelejos – glazed hand-painted tiles in blue and yellow and white – forming a low skirting to the walls. At the far end of the room was a golden altar and crucifix lit by two small windows and the rest of the room, cast in electric light and shadow, was made out of human remains.
Sophie had her hand over her nose and mouth. ‘I don’t want to smell it,’ she said, muffled.
Huw put his nose up to a skull, right into the eye socket. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘there’s no smell. They’ve been here five hundred years.’
She took her hand away and sniffed the air. ‘You can smell something, can’t you?’
‘Devotion?’ said Huw. ‘Fanaticism?’
‘Look how tiny these skulls are.’
‘Kids.’
‘No, they’re all monks.’
‘Why did they do it?’
Sophie walked up to a pillar and stared at the neat arrangement of tibias and vertebrae and skulls. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘you can see the cement or stone or whatever underneath. They’re just kind of set in here.’
‘But here,’ said Huw, over to the side, where the rounded tips of the bones packed tightly together, ‘it looks like they are the wall, bones instead of bricks.’
They walked to the far end of the chapel. Another couple entered – Scandinavian, thought Huw – and giggled and whispered together as if they had caught the priest with his pants down.
‘Good acoustics in here,’ said Huw, louder than he meant to.
‘What?’ said Sophie. ‘Is it giving you the creeps?’
Huw started singing. ‘The knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone. The thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone. The hip bone’s connected to the . . .’
‘That’s not how it goes.’
‘Them bones, them bones, them – thigh bones!’
‘Shush,’ said Sophie, ‘I’m reading.’ She stalked off, holding up the guidebook.
Huw looked up at the ceiling. Angels and weeping angels. A crown of thorns, a crude tree and castle. A black cross, more angels, a rope. Whoever painted this stuff wasn’t very good.
Huw moved across to a side aisle. Two butterflies heading for a candle. Mors in Luce, it said. Death in light.
There was a landscape here, of sorts, an awkward assembly of parts: a building with a round dome, a floating skull, a bird – not in flight but with wings spread, and, on a boulder, a pelican feeding its chicks. Huw examined the unidentified bird. What was that supposed to be?
Sophie used to ask him, ‘What do you like about birdwatching?’
‘Everything,’ he’d say.
&
nbsp; One time she persisted. ‘But what?’
‘The birds,’ he said. ‘I like the birds.’
She stroked the back of his neck and said, ‘Tell me.’ She meant it. He could see that she meant it, as if she thought that was a key with which she would unlock the secret part of him.
‘Seeing them, you know, just as they are.’ There wasn’t much else, anyway.
‘Go on,’ she said.
He folded his arms. ‘A boy has to preserve some mystery. It’s part of our allure.’
He had a crick in his neck. He twisted his head from side to side and went to look out of the window. There was nothing to see but a blank wall. The Scandinavian couple passed him, arm in arm, as though on a school outing. They wore white trainers and waterproof jackets, hers red, his green. Well, thought Huw, well.
He put his hand on a skull at the edge of the window. He looked quickly around the chapel. How many skulls here? Hundreds. How many bones from how many people? What a sick joke it was. The Catholic Church at its best. Doing what it did best. What a brilliant way to shock and awe.
This is what you are and you are nothing.
To the glory, not of God, surely, but of the Institution. Built from these bones. Yes, indeed.
The skull was smooth beneath his fingers. This, he thought, was a man. He took his fingers away.
Yes, indeed, the Institution.
He thought about the bank, to which he would return in five days, the vaulted atrium and marble-floored reception. Built from our bones, more or less, too. At least they didn’t ask for your soul.
Though in a way they did, they did. And who struck the best bargain? Eternal salvation or a 100k bonus. Which was the better deal?
Huw closed his eyes and pressed his little fingers against his eyeballs, noticing how loose, how thin, the skin was. He opened his eyes and scratched his ear, his nose, his scalp. Where was Sophie? There was nothing else to see.
The 100k is better, of course, because that is all there is.
Five hundred years holding up a wall. It’s a long time, he thought stupidly. He had not slept well, on that high, narrow bed with the carved wood headboard. Where was she?
