In front of our house there was an atafona, that’s what they’re called on this island, a sort of wheel for drawing up water that turned round and round, they don’t exist anymore, I’m talking about years and years ago, before you were even born. If I think of it now, I can still hear it creaking, it’s one of the childhood sounds that have stuck in my memory, my mother would send me with a pitcher to get some water and to make it less tiring I used to sing a lullaby as I pushed and sometimes I really would fall asleep. Beyond the water wheel there was a low whitewashed wall and then a sheer drop down to the sea. There were three of us children and I was the youngest. My father was a slow man, he used to weigh his words and gestures and his eyes were so clear they looked like water. His boat was called Madrugada, which was also my mother’s maiden name. My father was a whaleman, like his father before him, but in the seasons when there were no whales, he used to fish for moray eels, and we went with him, and our mother too. People don’t do it now, but when I was a child there was a ritual that was part of going fishing. You catch morays in the evening, with a waxing moon, and to call them there was a song that had no words: it was a song, a tune, that started low and languid, then turned shrill. I never heard a song so sorrowful, it sounded like it was coming from the bottom of the sea, or from lost souls in the night, a song as old as our islands. Nobody knows it anymore, it’s been lost, and maybe it’s better that way, since there was a curse in it, or a destiny, like a spell. My father went out with the boat, it was dark, he moved the oars softly, dipping them in vertically so as not to make any noise, and the rest of us, my brothers and my mother, would sit on the rocks and start to sing. Sometimes the others would keep quiet, they wanted me to call the eels, because they said my voice was more melodious than anybody else’s and the morays couldn’t resist it. I don’t believe my voice was any better than theirs: they wanted me to sing on my own because I was the youngest and people used to say that the eels liked clear voices. Perhaps it was just superstition and there was nothing in it, but that hardly matters.
Then we grew up and my mother died. My father became more taciturn and sometimes, at night, he would sit on the wall by the cliffs and look at the sea. By now we only went out after whales; we three boys were big and strong and Father gave us the harpoons and the lances, since he was getting too old. Then one day my brothers left. The second oldest went to America, he only told us the day he left, I went to the harbor to see him off, my father didn’t come. The other went to be a truck driver on the mainland, he was always laughing and he’d always loved the sound of engines; when the army man came to tell us about the accident I was at home alone and I told my father over supper.
We two still went out whaling. It was more difficult now, we had to take on casual labor for the day, because you can’t go out with less than five, then my father would have liked me to get married, because a home without a woman isn’t a real home. But I was twenty-five and I liked playing at love; every Sunday I’d go down to the harbor and get a new girlfriend. It was wartime in Europe and there were lots of people passing through the Azores. Every day a ship would moor here or on another island, and in Porto Pim you could hear all kinds of languages.
I met her one Sunday in the harbor. She was wearing white, her shoulders were bare and she had a lace cap. She looked as though she’d climbed out of a painting, not from one of those ships full of people fleeing to the Americas. I looked at her a long time and she looked at me too. It’s strange how love can find a way through to you. It got to me when I noticed two small wrinkles just forming round her eyes and I thought: she isn’t that young. Maybe I thought like that because, being the boy I still was then, a mature woman seemed older to me than her real age. I only found out she wasn’t much over thirty a lot later, when knowing her age would be of no use at all. I said good morning to her and asked if I could help her in any way. She pointed to the suitcase at her feet. Take it to the Bote, she said in my own language. The Bote is no place for a lady, I said. I’m not a lady, she answered, I’m the new owner.
Next Sunday I went down to town again. In those days the Bote was a strange kind of bar, not exactly a place for fishermen, and I’d only been there once before. I knew there were two private rooms at the back where rumor had it people gambled, and that the bar itself had a low ceiling, a large ornate mirror, and tables made out of fig wood. The customers were all foreigners, they looked as though they were on holiday, while the truth was they spent all day spying on each other and pretending to come from countries they didn’t really come from, and when they weren’t spying they played cards. Faial was an incredible place in those days. Behind the bar was a Canadian called Denis, a short man with pointed sideburns who spoke Portuguese like someone from Cape Verde. I knew him because he came to the harbor on Saturdays to buy fish; you could eat at the Bote on Sunday evening. It was Denis who later taught me English.
I want to speak to the owner, I said. The owner doesn’t come until after eight, he answered haughtily. I sat down at a table and ordered supper. She came in toward nine, there were other regulars around, she saw me and nodded vaguely, then sat in a corner with an old man with a white mustache. It was only then that I realized how beautiful she was, a beauty that made my temples burn. This was what had brought me there, but until then I hadn’t really understood. And now, in the space of a moment, it all fell into place inside me so clearly it almost made me dizzy. I spent the evening staring at her, my temples resting on my fists, and when she went out I followed her at a distance. She walked with a light step, without turning; she didn’t seem to be worried about being followed. She went under the gate in the big wall of Porto Pim and began to go down to the bay. On the other side of the bay, where the promontory ends, isolated among the rocks, between a cane thicket and a palm tree, there’s a stone house. Maybe you’ve already noticed it. It’s abandoned now and the windows are in poor shape, there’s something sinister about it; some day the roof will fall in, if it hasn’t already. She lived there, but in those days it was a white house with blue panels over the doors and windows. She went in and closed the door and the light went out. I sat on a rock and waited; halfway through the night a window lit up, she looked out and I looked at her. The nights are quiet in Porto Pim, you only need to whisper in the dark to be heard far away. Let me in, I begged her. She closed the shutter and turned off the light. The moon was coming up in a veil of red, a summer moon. I felt a great longing, the water lapped around me, everything was so intense and so unattainable, and I remembered when I was a child, how at night I used to call the eels from the rocks: then an idea came to me, I couldn’t resist, and I began to sing that song. I sang it very softly, like a lament, or a supplication, with a hand held to my ear to guide my voice. A few moments later the door opened and I went into the dark of the house and found myself in her arms. I’m called Yeborath, was all she said.
Do you know what betrayal is? Betrayal, real betrayal, is when you feel so ashamed you wish you were somebody else. I wished I’d been somebody else when I went to say goodbye to my father and his eyes followed me about as I wrapped my harpoon in oilskin and hung it on a nail in the kitchen, then slung the viola he’d given me for my twentieth birthday over my shoulder. I’ve decided to change jobs, I told him quickly, I’m going to sing in a bar in Porto Pim, I’ll come and see you Saturdays. But I didn’t go that Saturday, nor the Saturday after, and lying to myself I’d say I’d go and see him the next Saturday. So autumn came and the winter went, and I sang. I did other little jobs too, because sometimes customers would drink too much and to keep them on their feet or chase them off you needed a strong arm, which Denis didn’t have. And then I listened to what the customers said while they pretended to be on holiday; it’s easy to pick up people’s secrets when you sing in a bar, and, as you see, it’s easy to tell them too. She would wait for me in her house in Porto Pim and I didn’t have to knock anymore now. I asked her: who are you? Where are you from? Why don’t we leave these absurd pe
ople pretending to play cards? I want to be with you forever. She laughed and left me to guess the reasons she was living the way she was, and she said: wait just a little longer and we’ll leave together, you have to trust me, I can’t tell you any more. Then she’d stand naked at the window, looking at the moon, and say: sing me your eel song, but softly. And while I sang she’d ask me to make love to her, and I’d take her standing up, leaning against the windowsill, while she looked out into the night, as though waiting for something.
It happened on August 10. It was São Lourenço and the sky was full of shooting stars, I counted thirteen of them walking home. I found the door locked and I knocked. Then I knocked again louder, because there was a light on. She opened and stood in the doorway, but I pushed her aside. I’m going tomorrow, she said, the person I was waiting for has come back. She smiled, as if to thank me, and I don’t know why but I thought she was thinking of my song. At the back of the room a figure moved. It was an old man and he was getting dressed. What’s he want? he asked her in the language I now understood. He’s drunk, she said; he was a whaler once but he gave up his harpoon for the viola, while you were away he worked as my servant. Send him away, said the man, without looking at me.
There was a pale light over Porto Pim. I went around the bay as if in one of those dreams where you suddenly find yourself at the other end of the landscape. I didn’t think of anything, because I didn’t want to think. My father’s house was dark, since he went to bed early. But he wouldn’t sleep, he’d lie still in the dark the way old people often do, as if that were a kind of sleep. I went in without lighting the lamp, but he heard me. You’re back, he murmured. I went to the far wall and took my harpoon off the hook. I found my way in the moonlight. You can’t go after whales at this time of night, he said from his bunk. It’s an eel, I said. I don’t know if he understood what I meant, but he didn’t object, or get up. I think he lifted a hand to wave me goodbye, but maybe it was my imagination or the play of shadows in the half dark. I never saw him again. He died long before I’d done my time. I’ve never seen my brother again either. Last year I got a photo of him, a fat man with white hair surrounded by a group of strangers who must be his sons and daughters-in-law, sitting on the veranda of a wooden house, and the colors are too bright, like in a postcard. He said if I wanted to go and live with him, there was work there for everybody and life was easy. That almost made me laugh. What could it mean, an easy life, when your life is already over?
And if you stay a bit longer and my voice doesn’t give out, I’ll sing you the song that decided the destiny of this life of mine. I haven’t sung it for thirty years and maybe my voice isn’t up to it. I don’t know why I’m offering, I’ll dedicate it to that woman with the long neck, and to the power a face has to surface again in another’s, maybe that’s what’s touched a chord. And to you, young Italian, coming here every evening, I can see you’re hungry for true stories to turn them into paper, so I’ll make you a present of this story you’ve heard. You can even write down the name of the man who told it to you, but not the name they know me by in this bar, which is a name for tourists passing through. Write that this is the true story of Lucas Eduino who killed the woman he’d thought was his, with a harpoon, in Porto Pim.
Oh, there was just one thing she hadn’t lied to me about; I found out at the trial. She really was called Yeborath. If that’s important at all.
Translated by Tim Parks
Islands
He thought he might put it this way: Dear Maria Issunta, I am well and hope the same is true of you. Here it’s already hot, it’s nearly summer, but with you, on the other hand, good weather perhaps hasn’t yet come; we’re always hearing about fog, and then there’s all that big-city and industrial waste. Anyhow I’m expecting you if you want to come for a holiday, with Giannandrea, too, of course, and God bless you. I want to thank you for his and your invitation, but I’ve decided not to come, because, you know, your mother and I lived here together for thirty-five years. When we first came we felt as if we were in a different world, as if in the North, and in fact it was, but now I’ve grown fond of the place and it’s filled with memories. Then, since your mother’s death I’ve grown accustomed to living alone and even if I miss my work I can find a lot of distractions, like looking after the garden, something I’ve always enjoyed doing, and also after the two blackbirds, which keep me company, too, and what would I do in a big city, and so I’ve decided to stay in these four rooms, where I can see the harbor and if I feel like it I can take the ferry to go and visit my old friends and have a game of briscola. It’s only a few hours by ferry, and I feel at home on board, because a man misses the place where he spent his whole life, every week for a lifetime.
He peeled the orange, dropped the peel into the water, watched it float in the boat’s foaming wake parting the blue and imagined that he had finished one page and was starting another, because he simply had to say that he was missing his work already; it was his last day of service and already he missed it. Missed what? A lifetime aboard the boat, the trip out and the trip in, I don’t know whether you remember, Maria Assunta, you were very little and your mother used to say: how is this little one ever going to become a big girl? I got up early; in winter it was still dark and I gave you a kiss before going out; it was bitterly cold and they never gave us decent coats, only old horse blankets dyed blue, those were our uniforms. All those years made for a habit, and I ask you again what would I do in a big city, what would I do in your house at five o’clock in the morning? I can’t stay in bed any later; I get up at five, as I did for forty years, it’s as if an alarm clock rings inside me. And then you’ve had schooling and school changes people even if they’re from the same family; and your husband, too – what would we have to talk about? He has ideas, which can’t be mine, from this point of view we don’t exactly get along. You’re educated, both of you; that time when I came with your mother and after dinner some friends of yours arrived, I didn’t say a word the whole evening. All I could talk about were things I know, that I learned in the course of my life, and you’d asked me not to mention my job. Then there’s something else, which may seem silly to you, I’m sure Giannandrea would laugh, but I couldn’t live with the furniture in your house. It’s all glass, and I bump into it because I don’t see it. So many years, you understand, with my own furniture and getting up at five o’clock.
But, mentally, he crumpled up this last page, just as he had written it and threw it into the sea where he imagined he could see it floating, together with the orange peel.
2
I sent for you so that you’d take off the handcuffs, the man said in a low voice.
His shirt was unbuttoned and his eyes were closed as if he were sleeping. He seemed to have a yellow complexion, but perhaps it was the curtain strung across the porthole that gave the whole cabin this color. How old was he; thirty, thirty-five? Perhaps no older than Maria Assunta; prison ages a man quickly. And then that emaciated look. He felt a sudden curiosity and thought to ask the fellow his age. He took off his hat and sat down on the opposite bunk. The man had opened his eyes and was looking at him. The eyes were blue and, who knows why, this touched him. How old are you? he asked in a formal manner. Formal, perhaps because this was the end of his service. And the man was a political prisoner, which was something special. Now the man sat up and looked at him hard out of his big blue eyes. He had a blond mustache and ruffled hair. He was young, yes, younger than he seemed. I told you to take off my handcuffs, he said, in a weary voice. I want to write a letter, and my arms hurt. The accent was from the North, but he didn’t know one northern accent from another. Piedmontese, perhaps. Are you afraid I’ll escape? he asked ironically. Look here, I won’t run away, I won’t attack you, I won’t do anything. I wouldn’t have the strength. He pressed one hand against his stomach, with a quick smile that traced two deep furrows in his cheeks. And then it’s my last trip, he added.
When the handcuff
s were off he poked about in a small canvas bag, taking out a comb, a pen and a yellow notebook. If you don’t mind I’d rather be alone to write, he said; your presence bothers me. I’d appreciate it if you’d wait outside the cabin. If you’re afraid I may do something you can stay by the door. I promise not to make trouble.
3
And then he’d surely find something to do. When you have work you’re not so alone. But real work, which would yield not only satisfaction but also money. Chinchillas, for instance. In theory he already knew all about them. A prisoner who had raised them before his arrest had told him. They’re charming little creatures; just don’t get too close. Chinchillas are tough and adaptable, they reproduce even in places where there isn’t much light. Perhaps the closet in the cellar would do, if the landlord would allow it. Or you could hide what you’re doing. The man on the second floor kept hamsters.
He leaned against the rail and loosened his shirt collar. Hardly nine o’clock and it was already hot. It was the first day of real summer heat. He fancied he smelled scorched earth and with the smell came the picture of a country road running among prickly pears, a yellow landscape under the sun, a barefoot boy walking toward a house with a lemon tree: his childhood. He took another orange from the bag he had bought the evening before and began to peel it. The price was impossibly high at this season, but he had allowed himself a treat. He threw the peel into the sea and caught a glimpse of the shining coast. Currents outlined bright strips in the water, like the wake of other ships. Quickly he calculated the time. The prison guard would be waiting at the pier and the formality of turning the prisoner over to him would take a quarter of an hour. He could reach the barracks toward noon; it wasn’t far. He fingered the inside pocket of his jacket to check that his discharge papers were there. If he were lucky enough to find the sergeant in the barracks he’d finish by one o’clock. And by half-past one he’d be sitting under the pergola of the restaurant at the far end of the harbor. He knew the place well but had never eaten there. Whenever he’d gone by, he paused to look at the menu displayed on a sign surmounted by a swordfish painted in metallic blue. He had an empty feeling in his stomach, but it couldn’t be hunger. At any rate he let his imagination play over the dishes listed on the sign. Today it will be fish soup and red mullet, he said to himself, and fried zucchini, if he chose. To top it off, a fruit cup or, better still, cherries. And coffee. Then he’d ask for a sheet of paper and an envelope and spend the afternoon writing the letter. Because you see, Maria Assunta, when a man works he is not so alone, but it must be real work, which yields not only satisfaction but also a bit of money. And so I’ve decided to raise chinchillas, they’re charming creatures as long as you don’t get too close. They’re tough and adaptable and they reproduce even in places where there isn’t much light. But in your house it would be impossible, you can see that, Maria Assunta, not because of Giannandrea, whom I respect even if we don’t have the same ideas; it’s a question of space and here I have the cellar closet. It may not be ideal, but if the man on the floor above me raises hamsters in a closet I don’t see why I can’t do the same thing.
Message from the Shadows Page 8
