ARTUR VIRGILIO ALVES REIS. His earliest boyhood memory was as much a recurring dream as it was the recollection of actual events. Yet he supposed, as the years went by and his life took its final shape, that he remembered it pretty much as it had happened. It came often, haunted him like the phrase of an old tune; perhaps because the occasion itself had marked his first venture into the tightly wound complexity of human existence, into the area of refined, obstinate truth where Alves realized for the first time that everyone was not alike.

The year was 1904 and he was eight years old. A Sunday morning in the spring: it seemed to Alves that it was probably Easter. But every Sunday had been a dress-up, go-for-a-walk day. The family, turned out in its only finery, went to the church that morning—the glorious, magical Church of Sao Rocque with its priceless gold altars and tons of brilliant lapis lazuli—and then for a long walk in the feathery weightlessness of the sunshine, through the fragrant streets of Lisbon, a promenade far from the dark, narrow street where his father’s mortuary catered to the people who had to scrimp enough together to launch a loved one into the great beyond.

There was Alves’ faintly mustachioed mother with her short legs thumping out the pace; his short, stringy father; the older son who was afflicted with a squint; and young Alves with the innocent eyes he would never outgrow. His father had once possessed a similar innocence and a small inheritance, both of which he lost in a slightly shady deal involving inferior cork. With what was left he’d set himself up in the funeral parlor, scraped by with two worn black suits and a shiny pair of black shoes. He lived under a terrible strain that Alves understood only much later, long after his father had died. Having once enjoyed a degree of status, however slight, the elder Reis had been forced to accept his own diminution, a particularly galling fate for a Portuguese invested with the customary measure of national and personal pride. Years later he still saw his father cursing impatiently at his fate. By then Alves knew what had really been the trouble: there simply hadn’t been enough money. Money, money, money.

There was an air of excitement that Sunday, almost palpable, and a fresh, ceremonial flower bloomed in his father’s buttonhole. His mother’s flowered shawl fluttered transparently in the breeze. His brother peered anxiously through his thick, magnifying spectacles: his eyes floated like dark olives on either side of his broad nose.

Block after block went by, past blue tiled courtyard walls, skipping beneath a glassy pale-blue sky, until finally his father pulled up abruptly, uttered a brief exclamation, and gestured down what seemed to be only another pleasant avenue, tree-lined, coolly shaded, unremarkable. He pointed excitedly at the name of the street discreetly lettered on the pink courtyard wall of a large three-story house. Young Alves was at a loss.

“This avenue,” his father declaimed, “with all its grand houses and fine trees—” he swept his hand in a broad arc, building the suspense—“Avenue Francisco da Silva Reis, is named in honor of a great man, my sons … a man who was an admiral of the Portuguese fleet!” He fixed the boys with a slightly mad gaze as if a candle were flickering in the depths of his dark, onyx eyes. Alves instinctively reached for his mother’s warm hand.

His father embarked on another of his frequent disquisitions on the role of the sea and sailors in the life of the Portuguese. The sea, he pointed out, was the highway used to establish the most magnificent empire in the history of the world, the most far-flung, the most powerful … He summoned up the names of the greatest of all navigators, men like Henry the Navigator and Bartolemeu Diaz, Vasco da Gama and the mighty Magellan, who had sailed off from the mouth of the Tagus River to circumnavigate the globe! He may have glossed the surface of history a trifle, but the fact was that little glossing was needed: the two boys listened, swept on by their father’s eloquence. He told them of how the Portuguese crown had rejected Christopher Columbus’ requests because they had no need of yet another great seaman, sent him packing back to Queen Isabella … otherwise, Portugal would have sponsored the voyage to discover North America.

“And, my sons, Admiral Francisco da Silva Reis was your great-uncle! Yes, your great-uncle! The blood of da Silva Reis flows in your veins! You must never forget that—never.” He leaned down and placed his arms around their shoulders. “You are not the sons of an undertaker, my boys—you are the great-nephews of the great Admiral da Silva Reis … after whom a great avenue of Lisbon is named.” It was a very long time before Alves Reis, a grown man, realized what a price his father must have paid as he spoke. Humility, he knew by then, came hard to a Portuguese.

The blood of da Silva Reis flows in my veins … It was a peculiar idea for little Alves to cope with, an abstraction that made precious little sense. What did it mean?

He pondered the possible implications of his father’s claim as he and his brother skipped ahead of their parents on the walk home to the Sao Tiago district. They trampled the jacaranda leaves on the paving stones and the purple stains spread, leaving a trail. And Admiral da Silva Reis, grand as he may well have been, faded from their minds as they ran, faded as they crumpled the leaves of the orange and tangerine trees in their tiny fists, inhaling the released essence, pungent, intense, concentrated. The scents clung to Alves, like his memory of the day, as the years multiplied.

Although the sky was still vividly blue when they turned toward home, the street itself was engulfed in deep shadow, the structures on either side seeming to tilt forward, as if trying to lean against one another for support above the slippery smooth cobblestones. Alves smelled his grandmother’s cooking before he reached the doorstep: fish stew—and, having gone without lunch, he was ravenous.

Grandmother was a short, stumplike woman with thick gray hair, shapeless dresses, a deeply lined face the color of stained oak, and she spoke a dialect he only partly understood. He did not realize then just how primitive her life had been, how much a product of the Middle Ages she was; but he knew that her grandmother had survived the earthquake of 1755 that had destroyed much of Lisbon. Through her he had glimpsed for the first time his Portuguese past, the days of the limitless empire when Portuguese seamen ruled so much of the globe. … Even as a boy of eight he had learned those lessons. And such a grandmother made the lessons take on the pulse of life. At times it seemed that, surely, she must have marched to the Tagus to watch Henry the Navigator set sail.

The shadowy, narrow house was dark. There was no electricity anywhere on the block. A skylight provided a glow and there were lanterns, candles, firelight. His grandmother was humming a tuneless peasant song, her breath whistling in spaces where there had been no teeth for half a century. He went to taste the pot of stew, answered her cursory questions about the afternoon’s stroll, stuck his tongue against the wooden spoon and drew back from the scorching brew. Climbing up on a stool to watch the old woman cook, Alves felt secure as only a child can feel in familiar surroundings, however modest.

His grandmother was stealthily sneaking up behind the family dog, a spirited, bedraggled specimen who snored peacefully beneath the scarred kitchen table. Carefully she took hold of a few strands of flank hair, wrapped it around her finger and proceeded to saw it clean through with a kitchen knife. Suddenly aware that something out of the ordinary was being done to his body, the hound awoke with some alarm, skulled himself on the underside of the tabletop, staggered dizzily toward the center of the room, upending his dinner dish, and wobbled yelping down the hallway toward the front door through which the undertaker and his wife were just now appearing. Their meeting produced several peculiar sounds as the dog in his confusion mistook them for his attacker. Several minutes were required to restore the house’s normal somber tranquillity. The dog retired to a safe distance, crawling beneath the bed shared by the two brothers, and in the meantime Alves watched his grandmother carry out the errand for which she had required the dog’s hair.

The old woman methodically wrapped the hair in a triangle of gray cloth, tied it with a piece of greasy string from the pocket of her apron and with a dozen hearty whacks of her hammer—adding immeasurably to what Alves felt was the hugely enjoyable din—nailed the packet to the plaster wall behind the back door that led to the alleyway. One of the structure’s countless cheaply framed reproductions of Sao Rocque and his dog, the saint for whom their church was named and whose devotion it so sumptuously celebrated, leaped from the wall by the door and clattered to the floor. Alves hugged his knees at the excitement.

When the racket had subsided he took his grandmother’s hand and drew her to the packet of hair nailed to the wall.

“Why is this necessary, Grandma? What does it do?”

The old woman gave a snort as if to say that there was obviously little hope for the twentieth century if young men of eight still needed to ask such questions.

“Because,” she whistled elaborately, “the dog has been staying out all night, getting into unimaginable mischief … bothering our neighbors! I thought even you, a child, knew that the dog’s hair behind the door made sure there would be no more such excursions. I thought everyone knew that—maybe your father forgot to tell you that. … You make sure you remember and when the time comes you tell your children.” She waddled back to the wood-burning iron stove.

A family of several cousins was expected for dinner that evening, and by chance they brought with them the son of a friend, a boy Alves had met before and to whom he had taken quite a shine. José dos Santos Bandeira, three years older than Alves, was a slender, olive-skinned eleven-year-old with the eyes of an old man, or at least a cynic, punctuating what showed every sign of becoming exceedingly handsome features. The Bandeira family owned land south of Lisbon and maintained residences both in the city and the country. Alves had first encountered José on a visit to these same cousins, had spent a long, grass-stained afternoon of rough-and-tumble on the lawn of the country home, during the course of which he had confided that his father was a mortician and regularly laid hands upon the bodies of the dead! The effect on José had been galvanic: nothing would do but that he visit Alves’ father’s place of business.

Now, with the chance to impress his new and much older friend both with his grandmother’s delicious stew and one of his father’s corpses, Alves was quite nearly beside himself with excitement. He took pains to show José the dog hair behind the door and the dog himself beneath the bed. José, whose family was more sophisticated and less saturated with superstition, found the packet of hair most amusing and congratulated Alves on his choice of a grandmother. Alves was enjoying his role of host.

But the evening itself was less than first-rate entertainment for the two boys. The conversation was tedious adult stuff that left José yawning and Alves desperate for diversion. If this were to be the extent of the evening, Alves imagined he’d be lucky even to see José again, let alone become his friend.

Deliverance came in the form of a young doctor knocking at the door with a rather grisly tale. An elderly gentleman a few doors away had passed on and a quick trip to the mortuary was called for, Sunday or not, since death had occurred the previous night and the doctor had not been notified until a few minutes before he appeared at Senhor Reis’ door.

“A new client,” Alves’ father announced with grim solemnity to the guests, vaguely underlining his own indispensability. “I must go when I am called. …” He slipped into his black suitcoat, tightened the knot in his tie.

At the door he turned to Alves and José, who had followed him, half afraid to ask if they might accompany him. “Do you want to come with me, boys? My assistant won’t be there, not on Sunday night—I might need some help.” Alves’ heart leaped. He forgot the fear he’d always had, forgot all the times in the past year he and Alfonso had turned down opportunities to go with their father. Tonight was different. José was there, and Alves had bragged about what he could show him.

The mortuary was a few winding streets away, a dark, narrow building, windowless and forbidding. Many of the inhabitants of the Sao Tiago held tight to their old beliefs, the beliefs of their peasant origins. They knew of the dead within and they hurried to pass.

In front was a waiting room for the family of the newly departed; beyond it, through heavy moth-eaten draperies, a chamber for viewing the prepared remains; a catafalque made of rough-hewn beams hidden by a purple velvet cloth; two back rooms with mortuary tables, containers of chemicals, the various gleaming tools of the trade.

While Senhor Reis went to the back door to meet the doctor and take possession of his cumbersome parcel, the boys waited in the front room. José peered cautiously into the viewing chamber. Alves hesitated, his enthusiasm fading fast, riding to extinction on the familiar scent of the rooms. Death had a bad smell, chemical and rotting. It summoned up childhood’s horrible images—fears that the back rooms must look like the butcher’s work tables, stained and running with blood. …

José beckoned him.

“Reis,” he whispered urgently. “You promised. There’s a box in there.” He nodded toward the curtains and beyond. “I’ll bet there’s a dead one in it.” His eyes had grown round. “You promised …”

The viewing chamber was lighted by candles that jumped and flickered in a draft. The curtains closed behind him. Ominous muffled thuds came from the rear of the building. Slowly, on tiptoe, they crept toward the coffin, Alves praying that it would be either empty or nailed shut. It was both open and occupied. Sweat broke out like a rash on Alves’ face; José exclaimed softly, his hand to his mouth. A fog of sudden fear cloaked Alves’ vision, smudged the corners, providing him with a kind of tunnel view that magnified the fear growing in his bowels and spreading through him like a fever. Bogeys from the grave, remembrances of his grandmother’s tales of bodies rising from beneath ancient scarred tombstones to snatch small boys who forgot to say their prayers … The face before them as they reached the plain wooden coffin was waxen, cheerily cosmeticized, wore a hideous false smile as if he were somehow enjoying the bad joke of his own death. …

José leaned over the corpse, unafraid, grinning in amazement. Alves clamped his eyes shut, fighting off a rising tide of nausea. His nostrils filled with the death smell. Eyes closed, he still saw the false face like a feast-day mask. Even at the age of eight he recognized what he had done, that he had impulsively gone too far, begun something without thinking it through or considering the consequences. He had done it before, leaped in without looking and sworn to himself past veils of tears that he would never do it again. He opened his eyes. José was reaching for the face.

“Stop,” Alves gurgled. “Don’t touch it.” His own whisper sounded hollow. “It leaves marks, Papa says!”

“Then you touch,” José said. “You know how to do it. Just on the tip of his nose, that won’t leave a mark.” He was still grinning, sensing Alves’ discomfort. “You told me you’d touched lots of dead ones.”

Gritting his teeth to keep the stew in his stomach where it belonged, squinting through shut eyes, Alves extended a small shaking hand and slowly touched the tip of the shiny dead nose.

José leaned forward. “He’s breathing!”

Alves screamed, stumbled backward, very nearly upsetting the pedestal bearing the candelabra, darted through the curtain, on through the waiting room, into the street, where his stomach turned itself inside out.

Alves’ friendship with José grew during the next few years. José’s greater age and experience made him the natural leader, with the younger boy grateful to be included. José’s daring, his willingness to sidestep parental commands, the useful ability to make one thing appear something else altogether at just the crucial moment—all this established his superiority.

There was, for instance, the matter of the relics. Now, that struck Alves as a markedly childish prank, even as he willingly engaged in it. However much he had felt his heart pound fit to burst on those occasions the swindle had worked, however much he had sweated out the hours of possible detection, he had always felt that while for José it was a money-making enterprise, for him it was only a lark.

The relics included bits of animal bone from the bins behind the butchery, splinters of old wooden beams the boys scouted out in Lisbon’s vacant, sandy, weed-ridden lots. In the name of earning a few extra escudos—José was fifteen, Alves twelve—the two boys met to discuss profitable means of spending the school holidays. There seemed to be vast numbers of foreigners on tour—mostly Germans, Englishmen and Italians—with pronounced interests in the various old and ornately bedecked churches, wealthy foreigners who seemed always on the lookout for bits and pieces to buy, presumably to prove they had been there. José, in the grip of the proclivities which were to give his life its unique texture, leaped on the idea of religious relics and embellished it handsomely.

Their church was Sao Rocque, humble in its exterior views, lavish beyond imagining within. The truly knowledgeable guides made sure it was on their itineraries. The church was blinding with burnished golden altars, columns and alters of lapis lazuli, railings of ebony, bronze and silver work, tons of perfectly matched agate, carloads of amethysts—on and on went the splendors of the small, dowdy church overlooking the dusty plain square well above the bustle of Rossio Square. The paintings of Sao Rocque were everywhere, the saint of the lepers, depicted with his thigh bared to show the mark of leprosy, always accompanied by the monumentally faithful dog who had brought him bread when he was starving. The mosaics that told the saint’s story were so detailed and fine that observers could never quite believe they were not oil paintings. All in all, the junior confidence men concluded, what better place could there be to prey on susceptible foreigners with money for appropriate trinkets?

Since the church was renowned for its many reliquaries—Alves had heard his father remark with some cynicism that there were enough pieces of saints’ bones in the church to reconstruct an entire saint—relics seemed a good thing to sell. The animal doctors’ waste bins were picked over for bits of bone, as were the butchers’. Alves did not find it the most enjoyable of tasks, but the spirit and ingenuity of the moment made up for the nastiness of the job. Shards of bone were then glued onto pieces of cardboard and placed in small boxes acquired by José. Smiling angelically, they waited in the square outside the church of Sao Rocque and chose their victims.

The essential dishonesty of the scheme never really arose as an obstacle in either boy’s mind. After all, it was only a matter of a few escudos. José considered the swindle an example of his own sharpness of mind as well as the accepted way in which commerce of any kind was conducted. Alves found it something of an elaborate practical joke—never to be confused with work.

Work, he knew from listening to his father, was long and hard and allowed for no short cuts. Work was what a man did: the harder he worked, the greater his chance of worldly success, money and the esteem of his fellow man. His apprenticeship at the mortuary—that was work. He frequently thanked God for his older brother Alfonso, who bore the brunt of Senhor Reis’ teaching methods. Inevitably Alves was cast in the role of observer while his father trained his first son in the various procedures of the mortuarial art. When the lecture grew overly specific, Alves would close his eyes or try mentally to block his ears—avenues of escape not open to his brother, who might actually be holding something slippery, something sticky or, worse, something both slippery and sticky. Alves put in his hours among the chemicals and the cadavers and their scent of death. It was a matter of duty. Alves understood duty, the need for honest, determined, unpleasant effort.

Education was something else entirely, something of value, an opportunity to be seized. There was, it occurred to him, no limit but laziness to this business of educating himself. He worked on his English, lost himself in Portuguese history and hammered away at mathematics. He quickly surpassed his fellow students, and it got him through many a long weekend when the mortuary was the only alternative. Senhor Reis applauded his studious son and made do with the squinting Alfonso at the shop. …

At the age of eighteen José Bandeira, impatient with the prospects of learning to manage some of his father’s land, set off to make his own fortune abroad. His destination, hinted to be Brazil, remained vague, as if his intention was to remain out of touch. Alves trudged down to the quay, weighed down with his friend’s bags, bade him farewell and the best of luck, cautioned him to write and returned glumly to his everyday routine. There was schoolwork, which included a course in rudimentary practical engineering, conscientious application to homework and apprenticeship in the mortuary.

There was no word from José for two years. Then the cable arrived; it had originated in Paris and instructed Alves to meet the overnight train at Rossio Station. It was midsummer and José was coming home.

The man who climbed down from the first-class carriage and embraced Alves was even leaner if possible, pale, well dressed, carefully barbered, with white teeth gleaming beneath a pencil-thin mustache, and smelled of a lemonish Parisian cologne. Only traces of the boy were left, in a flashing of his eye, the lilt of the voice, but they were fading fast. It made Alves feel older just being near such an obviously successful gentleman. He was glad that he’d worn his suit.

As they made their way through the hurrying crowds in the vaulting grimy darkness of the station, Alves wondered aloud where José’s family was, was he possibly surprising them? The questions, once unloosed, came in a rush, and as they passed out into the warm late-afternoon shadows of the square José laughed, held up a manicured hand.

“Stop, stop, we have plenty of time,” he chuckled, shaking his narrow, aristocratic head. “First things first, let’s stop for a drink, let me look at Lisbon for a moment …” They found a table outside the Metropole where they could deposit José’s single leather-belted bag on a chair, sit down, cross their legs, light up cigarettes like careless boulevardiers and review the past two years.

The streets were full of beautiful young women, sun splashing them, bathing the square with the translucent Portuguese brightness. Black sedans edged against the pedestrians; rich men in black suits, puffing on cigars, peered from back seats. Lisbon throbbed in the sunshine. The excitement Alves felt at seeing his friend meshed with the city’s great square, so different from the dark, quiet street where the mortuary slowly crumbled, year after year, like his father’s hopes. …

“My parents were not at the station,” José explained softly, “because I have returned home in disgrace.”

“What do you mean? You arrive in a first-class carriage from Paris—what is so disgraceful about that?”

“The disgrace,” José remarked casually, smiling, “is that I have spent the better part of the last year in a South African jail.” There was an unmistakable scintilla of pride in his tone and for Alves, as the story unfolded, an unspoken feeling of justification. He had known all along that José would have to mend his ways—or run the risk of just such problems. While he had emerged from the incident of the relics and gone straight to school and the long hours in the mortuary, José had undoubtedly gone on to sharper practices. While José wore expensive clothes and smelled of lemons, he had spent a year in jail; Alves might still be the poor son of an impoverished undertaker, dressed in a suit that smelled of embalming chemicals, but he had most certainly never seen the inside of a jail.

José’s story, however, was exciting, and Alves savored the details, was elaborately seduced by the bizarre tale, which sounded very much like the plot of a cheap novel.

Although José had set off with the idea of reaching Brazil, events and some new acquaintances brought him instead to South Africa, where, in Johannesburg, he had fallen in with some fleet-footed young rakes who made a handsome living as burglars. After the first few jobs, which went off with perfect precision, he presumed that he was ready to strike out on his own. But on his second solo enterprise he ran afoul of an unforgiving Boer who caught him in the act of rifling the dining-room silver cabinet, tore one of his own candlesticks from the youthful intruder’s grasp and skulled him with it. Upon awaking, José found the Boer astride his chest and the Johannesburg police knocking on the door.

The Johannesburg court sentenced José dos Santos Bandeira to three years at hard labor—this brought a gasp of consternation from a stunned Alves—but the wily inmate bribed a guard and escaped after only two months. Undaunted by the side trip to jail, José returned to his wicked ways, and within a few months he played an encore before the same magistrate and was this time sentenced to the remainder of his first sentence as well as four more years on his second offense. But with the help of some newly cultivated jailbird friends the wily Portuguese was once again at large. He turned to selling booze to the natives—illegally, of course. He had a run of nearly three months before he was apprehended and judged an habitual criminal, no longer the responsibility of South Africa. After lengthy negotiations, his father in Lisbon ransomed his wayward son from the Johannesburg authorities, who were fortunately as corrupt as was necessary. José’s return to Lisbon and the fortnight in Paris was paid for with what he had been able to squirrel away from his burglaries and bootlegging.

The end of this altogether remarkable recital found Alves caught between admiration for a friend who had experienced such adventures and the inbred righteousness of the moral man who lived a boring existence. José finished his second glass and leaned back, smiling his scoundrel’s smile, thumbs hooked into his vest pockets. At twenty he seemed, in Alves’ eyes, infinitely grand and sophisticated.

“I know, I know,” José said, scraping back his chair and rising, “you disapprove. And you, Alves, will never go to jail.” He was laughing.

It was dark. The night had come alive. Shy couples holding hands, rakes dressed to the hilt, handsome men and elegant women were coursing on all sides of the square, and the lanterns glowed like tiny yellow moons. Alves was bereft of ideas to keep the daring magic of José’s homecoming alive, but he was absolutely sure he did not want to trudge back to Sao Tiago and spend the weekend in the mortuary with his father and brother.

“I have an idea,” José said slyly. “Can you stay out the night?”

“I don’t know … I’m expected—”

“I know, I know. You’ve been expected all your life. Your father—he’s forgotten what it’s like to be young and in need of a good time.”

“A good time!” Alves said. “Could be he’s never had one!” He saw a glimmer of mirth in that and heard José laugh conspiratorially.

Alves hoisted the expensive suitcase. José took his arm. “I’ll treat you to dinner—we’ll go by hack out to that place on the beach in Cascais. There’s a pavilion, there’s dancing, we can talk some more, drink wine. … Come on, you’re only young once.”

Alves turned it over cautiously in his mind. After all, there was his brother to help out at the mortuary, and he hadn’t heard his father remark on any surplus of business. Yes, it was time he spent a night out. … And surely José’s homecoming was sufficient excuse. “Why not?” he said.

The evening at Cascais, melting away into the dead of night, fading into the blush of dawn, was the height of sophistication. There was the hack ride through the narrow streets full of shops, on down to the harbor where the moon reflected in the broad, flat river, then past the outskirts of the city, speeding along the riverbed with the lights fading behind them. They ate dinner at an outdoor café with candles winking in the breeze and the mighty Tagus swelling in white furls along the moonlit beach and the cold wine bringing in its wake a new giddiness. He enjoyed everything—the further stories of José’s two years at large in an entirely foreign world, the swindles and the little con games, the thrill and stealth of the burglaries, the camaraderie José had found among the criminal class … José was utterly unpenitent, obviously a born scalawag.

The wine had made them both a little unsteady; there were wobbles and the odd stagger as they ventured onto the deck where the band played and the dancers slowly swayed to American music. Then, as the moon slid softly among the clouds, the two friends marched off down the beach, singing. José clutched their third bottle of wine. Sand filled their shoes, fingers grappled with knotted ties and collar studs, and eventually they collapsed laughing, swigging at the bottle.

“And the women,” José sighed much later when they had grown quiet. “The women, Alves … Do you know anything about women? Really?” He was staring off at the wide river and the ocean beyond. “Do you?”

“No, I don’t suppose I do. …”

José sighted along his index finger at the disk of the moon. “I mean, the whole story about women? Do you think you’re ready for it?” He turned to face Alves, grinning wolfishly.

Alves lay on his back, resting his head on a pillow of sand. “I definitely think I am ready.”

“Women are simple creatures—most men make the mistake of thinking they are complex, mysterious, difficult to cope with. … Nothing could be further from the truth—slaves to their desires, their bodies! And they don’t know for sure what to do about it, you see … not and be ladies, too, that is.” José leaned close and whispered a trifle boozily: “If anything, they think about it more than we do! It—you know. They think about it constantly, and once a man realizes that, why, all he needs to do is grab it when he’s in the mood and hope she doesn’t wear him out!” He laughed, hiccupping, falling back in the sand. “There are only three kinds of women. You didn’t know that, eh? Once you master this piece of information—widely known in parts of Johannesburg as Bandeira’s first law—the battle is won, they’ll be knocking themselves out to get their panties down for you. …

“First, there are the sweet little homebodies who make good wives, love to bear you children as long as you’re willing to give them a good poking when they need it and will never give you cause for jealousy—comforting but not exactly daring. Second, there are the adventurers, the beautiful creatures every man lusts for but seldom conquers because they inspire fright and timidity … yet the fact is, the world is a highway that leads right between their legs! Yes, practically for the taking, I guarantee it. They look at a casual fuck like men—it’s fun and good for the complexion! Yes, by God, give me the adventuresses—but you’ve got to remember that the minute you pull yourself out of them they’re looking for someone else to stick it in! And, finally, there are the whores, and they are great foot soldiers in the sexual struggle. No jealousy here: you pay for what you get, one way or another, and they know what they’re doing, by and large.

“That’s it—three types only, no exceptions. Once you grasp this and act on it your prick will never be limp, except from exhaustion!” He collapsed again on the sand, staring at the moon, the wine bottle dropping from his fingers, falling on its side. “Oh, God, the world lost a great teacher when I decided on the life of a ne’er-do-well. …” He laughed, rolling over, making a pillow of his arm, staring at Alves.

What an extraordinary world José had lived in: dangerous, of course, but almost glorious. … Alves had grown increasingly aware of the terrible, inexplicable gap between the late admiral’s glory and dignity and the bleak, penurious world of the mortuary. How could the gap be bridged, what could he do to make that leap? He was nothing, an undertaker’s apprentice with a mortuary in his future. … Where had the glory and dignity gone? Was it still, somehow, within his grasp? José might be short of dignity, but he’d seen the world, had a taste of adventure and a kind of glory, and what if jail had been the price?

Alves awoke with the sun streaming over the low hills, the sky changing from gray to a pink-tinged blue, and a boot prodding him in the ribs.

“Alves, for God’s sake! Are you all right? What’s happened to you?”

It was Arnaldo Carvalho. Alves squinted blearily at the silhouette of his school friend. Arnaldo was a solemn, serious fellow with a face to match. Oh, God, Alves reflected, head throbbing, closing his eyes.

“Arnaldo—would you please stop kicking me?” Both his eyes and mouth seemed to have gotten full of sand. He spied an empty wine bottle beyond his outstretched hand. He groaned, closed his eyes again.

“Can you explain what you’re doing here? On the beach? Drunk?” Arnaldo kicked the bottle a safe distance away and worked up an expression of dark disapproval.

Alves shook his head. “Can’t talk. Mouth is all funny—”

“And this body over here, the great Bandeira?” Arnaldo said, scowling. “I come to the beach to walk by myself as the sun comes up, to read poetry aloud as I leave my footprints in the damp sand—” José belched, half awake from the sounds of Arnaldo’s outrage—“and what do I find? My friend, dead drunk like a common tramp!”

José flung back an eyelid and croaked, “Reis, make this man stop screaming. …”

Arnaldo pushed his slender volume of poetry into a trouser pocket and shepherded the two disheveled young men across the shingle of sand to the restaurant, where life was slowly stirring. A tired dog lifted its leg against the underpinning of the outdoor dance floor. A woman peered at them from the veranda. Arnaldo arranged for the use of a basin of water and the toilet facilities behind the main building. He sighed at length while Alves and José managed to revive themselves. He prevailed upon the woman’s good nature for a simple but recuperative breakfast.

Later, with the sun parching the landscape and the sand burning his bare feet, Alves strolled off by himself, leaving Arnaldo and José to get acquainted. What a pair! He grinned as he moved along the edge of the water. Looking back, he saw José come out onto the empty dance floor and slowly lower himself to a sitting position with his legs dangling in space. He was holding a wine bottle in each hand. Presently Arnaldo joined him. He sat down beside José and took a drink from one of the bottles. Alves peered hard, squinting in the sunlight. He couldn’t believe it. Arnaldo … Clearly, Bandeira the sophisticate, Bandeira the criminal was also a magician!

Alves sat down with his back against the stone wall beneath the roadway, felt the shade bathe him and rested his head on the rolled-up suit coat. He wasn’t worrying about the condition of his good suit. He wasn’t worrying about what his mother might be thinking or what his father would do without him at the mortuary. He wasn’t worrying about anything. He was thinking about José and the stories about the girls, and that was when he looked up at the wide stone steps dropping down from the road, heard the girls laughing and saw her.

A hundred years earlier, perhaps even fifty, Alves Reis, approaching eighteen, would have been most reticent about presenting himself to such a young lady as Maria Luiza Jacobetti d’Azevedo. She came down the steps surrounded by her giggling girlfriends, the ribbon in her long dark hair matching the sky. Her feet were bare beneath layered, billowing skirts, and as she ran, carrying her pale-blue parasol, her tiny feet kicked up the sand. What made him single her out for attention? The ribbon? No … Perhaps her laugh, careless and fit for sunshine and the beach, or huge eyes beneath dark brows, lashes like dainty ferns on her pale cheek, fawnlike. Yes, he decided, it had something to do with her eyes. And her nose, which wasn’t at all Portuguese but Roman. He had seen her in profile as she ran past. She had a certain quality, a style, which he knew placed her above him. He would have to stretch for this young lady. …

Heat waves shimmered in front of him, and he remembered the taste of last night’s wine. He moved away from the wall, leaning on one elbow, watching the girls at their silly games, their laughter drifting toward him like the sighing of the surf. In his mind he undressed the girl, fitting her into José’s reminiscences, wondering what her body might be like. Was she one of José’s types? Her voice reached him: she was much too good for a rake like José, in any case. He was sure of that, smiling at the thought.

He heard her laugh as she chased the beach ball, which floated like a balloon on the breeze. She laughed the way he’d heard other women sing; the mirth attracted him, he supposed, because he laughed so little himself. He watched as the girls lost interest in the ball and wandered over toward a large flat-bottomed rowboat. She was shorter than the others, shapely beneath the yards of clothing. They struggled with the rowboat, pulling ineffectually on a thick rope and budging it only a few inches along the wet, dark sand. Finally he stood up, carrying his badly rumpled suit coat over his shoulder, and walked across the shining sand.

“Excuse me,” he said, “but you seem to need some help. …”

They all chattered shyly, eyes cast down, smiling a trifle naughtily—all but the tiny one with the Roman nose and high cheekbones that gave her face a thinner quality than was common among Portuguese women.

“Yes, please,” she said, looking him directly in the eye. “You might help us get this boat to the water. It’s just too heavy for us … but for you …” She regarded his broad shoulders, thick chest, the sleeves rolled up tight on the bulging biceps. Alves was thinking she was just the right height.

“Please allow me,” he said grandly, heart squirming toward his throat. “Step, back, ladies, step back, and I’ll have it in the water in a moment.” He took a second look at the craft, which was steel-banded and rather larger than it had appeared from a distance. “Or two.” He chuckled feebly, already regretting his offer. Then he caught the girl’s eye, figured the effort might be a good investment and put his back into it. A mighty shove.

At first he thought he’d ruptured himself, straightened up very quickly, smiled desperately around the wide-eyed circle of faces. Why had he offered? Why? It was like offering to show José a cadaver and then having to do it. …

“Perhaps I’d better pull,” he said heartily. “Pushing such a … a battleship is no good. A pull—pulling is what it needs, heh, heh.”

The rope attached to the front of the boat apparently dated from the maiden voyage of Henry the Navigator. Alves did not trust the rope. Jesus in heaven … He wondered if José and Arnaldo, swilling icy wine, were watching.

A tentative tug budged the monstrous thing slightly, and the appreciative cries of the ladies unfortunately gave him confidence. He took the measure of the rope, wrapped it securely around his compact fists, smiled heartily to indicate savoir faire and great strength, gave a mighty heave and abruptly threw himself backward into the surf, where for the moment he disappeared.

While the girls bit their knuckles to hold back their laughter, the daring young man struggled to his feet, soaked, grabbing at his back, then glaring in pain and anger at the boat. Finally he made a raging, limping dash at the inanimate object—but she stepped between him and the boat, soothing him, holding him back with her small strong hand.

The flush of that first touch, his blood rising …

José and Arnaldo appeared, laughing at his disheveled state, and shoved the rowboat into the water. When they had paddled slowly away, Maria alone had chosen to remain ashore, to massage Alves Reis’ poor, wounded back.

As the long afternoon dwindled, patient and nurse sat on the crumbling wall at Cascais watching the traffic at the mouth of the Tagus come and go far out beyond the rowboats. She discovered that this bullish, impetuous young fellow had a famous admiral dangling from his family tree; he learned of her Italian ancestors, prominent among whom was the great playwright Jacobetti … and he realized the source of her non-Portuguese physical traits, those cheekbones, that Roman nose. Later when José and Arnaldo returned with the girls, they ate fresh shrimp with mayonnaise and sipped wine and enjoyed being wonderfully young, careless.

By the time her father, a clerk of some importance in a British-owned firm, arrived in his automobile to take the girls home, Alves Reis was thoroughly in love. As was Maria d’Azevedo. It was something new for each of them.

Portuguese courtships were not unlike the stock exchange—they could be counted on to reflect the slightest seismic changes in the social landscape. Alves plodded along for a year to overcome completely the coolness of his prospective parents-in-law; in their eyes, he realized, Maria was not only failing to move socially upward but was not even verging on marriage with an equal. Times were changing, yes, but this quickly? Alves was a nice boy of course, but … Maria gently but accurately conveyed the tone and content of the discreetly discouraging conversations she had with her father. However, Alves persisted from without the Azevedo home and Maria from within; he was in love and his wife-to-be was utterly determined. She loved her Alves—he had a future, she sensed it somehow against the force of her father’s arguments, was convinced of it, and she was bound to spend it with him.

More practically there was the matter of her dowry, which, though not excessive, would certainly come in handy. He had a plan, a small one but a plan nonetheless, and it required just a bit of ready cash. … And a great deal of nerve. The nerve he believed he had.

The formal meetings between the two sets of parents were grotesque, stillborn. They had nothing in common. But whatever the obstacles, the lovers persevered.

Although his father had failed, Alves was a twentieth-century man and defeat was no longer an inherited quality; Alves did not plan to fail. Hope was in his blood, along with the remnants of the old admiral’s accomplishments.

While vigorously pursuing the study of practical engineering, Alves had also continued his voracious reading of Portuguese-history, a habit stemming from his father’s obsessive interest in the glories of the distant past—and quite possibly the most meaningful legacy he could leave his son. Alves read everything, filling his mind and countless notebooks. Inevitably he saw his place in the great scheme accurately, and, unlike less determined students, he knew how he’d gotten there.

The objections of Maria’s parents finally worn down, Maria and Alves decided on the late summer of 1916 for their marriage: Alves would by then be twenty years old, Maria nineteen. Although it was a happy time for them both, Alves was discovering throughout the summer that there seemed to be no jobs in Lisbon for young men with not very impressive training in practical engineering regardless of how much everyday know-how they might possess. Day after day he prowled the streets looking for a job with a future, and as the dispiriting results piled up his frustration grew. He still refused to consider the mortuary seriously. In the first place Alfonso was only just now beginning to receive any wages at all, and, in the second, he simply could not face spending the rest of his days there—poor, without hope for advancement, life slowly dwindling away. He deserved better than that. Almost anything was better than that.

As July ran out there was no offer from his future father-in-law of a position in the English-owned firm. Sensing his concern, Maria took his hand in hers one evening as they walked near her parents’ solidly respectable, middle-class home. “Perhaps you could at least begin working with your father,” she remarked hesitantly. “You could continue looking for a better opportunity.” She gestured with a slight toss of her head, left the thought unfinished.

“Try to leave once I’d begun working for him?” He laughed bitterly. “Impossible, my dearest. Once I willingly enter that world of … of formaldehyde and tubes and gaping abdominal cavities and loved ones crying in the front room … You’d smell death on my clothing and in my hair and when I touched your breast you’d smell it on your own flesh.”

“Please, stop!” she cried, holding her hands up to her ears. “We won’t speak of it again.” She hugged his arm to her, sighing. “You’ll find something.”

But the passing weeks, filled with wedding plans and Maria’s tea parties with her girlfriends and their mothers, were markedly empty of promising employment for her husband-to-be. He did not stop looking; if he had nothing else, he was blessed—or cursed—with absolute determination. But, by August, less than a week before the wedding, he felt the cutting edge of panic: his resourcefulness was almost at an end.

What saved him at this point was an altogether less personal and therefore less trivial problem brought about two years earlier by the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, an event that served to precipitate the Great War. Two years later Portugal began to feel the waves. While Alves Reis, the twentieth-century man, was readying himself as best he could to benefit from the new spirit of equality, he was not pleased by another kind of equality offered by the war. He wanted no part of it.

In this state of turmoil Alves was driven to act. If he stayed in Lisbon he would almost surely wind up a soldier somewhere in a trench at the front, not an encouraging prospect for an ambitious young man. The week before the wedding he spent busily arranging certain drastic changes in his plans for the future. …

The plans were more in José’s line, but the fact was that José had once again set sail. Having made amends to his father, he struck a bargain regarding his future. Somehow the elder Bandeira and his first son, Antonio, who was a Portuguese diplomat posted to The Hague, prevailed on family friends at Garland, Laidlaw, and Company, a firm of shipping agents doing business with such distinguished groups as Cunard, to take the errant José on as a most junior clerk. In Brazil.

Standing before the heavy draperies in the ballroom of the Avenida Palace Hotel, watching the wedding reception swirling about him, Alves felt a trifle remote from the gaiety. It wasn’t that he was in any way disappointed; he was in fact more deeply in love than he’d believed possible. His mother stood on tiptoe to kiss him, tears glistening on her plump cheeks, and his father, who resembled his cadaverous clients more each time Alves saw him, hugged his son tightly. Maria’s father concluded the festivities tipsy, dancing with Alves’ mother, while the bridegroom whirled his new mother-in-law about the slippery dance floor in a cloud of perspiration and champagne fumes.

Flower girls, ring bearers, matrons and maids, unknown relatives, strangers wandering through … It was a wedding party slowly sputtering out. The photographer with his endless flash-powder explosions was slowing down, getting just a few final shots. Alves smiled, shook hands, kissed countless cheeks, nodded at remarks he didn’t quite hear. But his mind was elsewhere. He missed José, particularly José’s devious turn of mind. The plan he’d worked out himself, however, seemed … seemed a good one, but, God knew, he’d precious little experience of a practical nature. He was worried.

Over a glass of champagne, which he kept dribbling on his fingertips, Alves drew Arnaldo aside and spoke carefully to his best man.

“Tomorrow—you remember what you’re to do, what you must do, Arnaldo … unless, of course, a career in the military appeals to you. We meet at three o’clock. Precisely. Don’t disappoint me, Arnaldo.” He caught his friend’s eye. “You’re not drunk, are you?”

“Don’t be absurd,” Arnaldo snapped. “But why can’t this plan of yours wait for even a few days? You’ll be, ah, honeymooning—what will Maria say?”

“Look, Arnaldo, we’re staying at a hotel in Estoril. And, believe me, the sooner we make arrangements the better off we’ll be.” He grinned at the solemn, intent face. “Don’t worry about Maria. I’ll see to it that she’s sleeping in the afternoon. …”

“Braggart!” Impulsively Arnaldo clapped his arms around Alves and squeezed him tightly. “Congratulations, Alves—may your life be a happy one. Always. For both of you.” A tear squeezed out of his eye and hung on his cheek. Champagne spilled.

“For the three of us,” Alves corrected him, a hint of emotion catching in his throat. “Three friends—Maria and Alves and Arnaldo. Inseparable …” The music was filling the room, and his head, fueled by champagne, threatened to take flight. He wished José were there. That would have made it perfect, absolutely perfect. José … wherever he was.

The honeymoon, in the hotel in Estoril overlooking the beach, was a cascade of youthful, playful passion. Both husband and wife were virgins and happily curious, like two dewy-eyed puppies. Their exertions were joyous, unnerving, exhausting, gloriously happy. Maria d’Azevedo Reis was so much more than his imagination had prepared him for—from the moist softness of her body and the shy delight with which she gave herself to him, from the way she whispered in French as he slowly fed her desire, from her constant perusal of the latest novels from Paris with the thick uncut pages as she soaked in the tub, to her habit of buying things her more or less penniless husband could not possibly pay for. …

Alves was true to his word the day after the wedding. He met Arnaldo in the city. Together they visited the proper bureaucratic offices, explaining their sincere desire to serve their country in developing the Angolan potential rather than in the trenches. Always persuasive, Alves saw to it that their applications were accepted. Suppose they got to Angola—they were out of the war, but what then? To that question Alves Reis devoted the next several weeks.

The great post-nuptial event of the late summer was a party given by Maria’s parents officially celebrating her brother Manuelo’s graduation from the University of Coimbra. The young man was full of himself, of course, setting out to make his way in the world of commerce. There had been some talk of his joining the English-based firm through whose ranks his father had risen, but it wasn’t set: perhaps, Manuelo suggested, he could do better. …

Alves watched from the terrace as Manuelo soaked up the praise, surrounded by his family and college friends in their well-cut suits that were worn with the ease and arrogance of their smiles. His own suit was a boxy affair, the best he could afford, black and pitiful by comparison. He sipped from a cup of punch, watched them roaring at their collegiate jokes, which he could not understand. Several of them actually drove their own automobiles.

Yet he would gladly have pitted his intelligence and knowledge against theirs. He knew he was a quicker thinker, the way he knew his suit was inferior … the way he knew his prospects were considerably less hopeful than theirs.

“Well, son, they look a happy bunch, don’t they? In one month’s time my daughter is married and my son sets out to make his fortune—it does a man good, I tell you.” Maria’s father had overcome his objections to his son-in-law’s humble status, primarily because he had been unable to change his daughter’s mind. They got along well enough, except when the subject of Alves’ future came up. The older man couldn’t quite imagine what Alves was going to do with his life, but the fact was that if worse came to worst Maria could always come home. “Yes,” he sighed, “a diploma from Coimbra makes all the difference. …”

Alves nodded: what could he say?

“It takes such a load off a man’s mind, knowing that his son is a college man … the way ahead is smoothed out, doors will open.” He sighed contentedly, then turned to face Alves, his face clouding. “By the way, have you made any further plans? You’ve got to get some work, you know. Life is a serious business, Alves. You can’t just slide along and hope for the best.”

“I’m well aware, sir,” he said solemnly. “I have several inquiries pending. It’s only a matter of time, something will break soon. …”

“Well, I have faith in you. But it’s hard to find a good position these days. … Not many jobs. Of course, you could always work with your father. I’m not sure but what that’s your best bet. You could get used to it, you know.” He was watching his son again, bellowing out some joke or other.

“No, I have other plans,” Alves said. “You don’t need to worry. I’m going to be fine. … Maria will be well taken care of.”

“Yes, well,” he said, moving away toward the merriment, “I only wish you’d gone to the university. Then everything falls in your lap. … But there’s no use crying about that, I suppose. It’s too late now to spend all those years in Coimbra …” He squeezed Alves’ arm and went away. Manuelo was waving his diploma over his head while his chums engaged in a rhythmic chant, signifying, no doubt, the great distinction of their education.

Much later, when things had quieted down, a tipsy Manuelo approached him holding a bottle of champagne.

“A final toast,” Manuelo said, slurring his words.

“Sure,” Alves said. Manuelo poured two glasses brimful, dribbling champagne over his hand.

“To me,” Manuelo proclaimed proudly. He drank the champagne off, filled the glass again. He sauntered over to the couch and dropped full length, grinning up at Alves. He took his diploma from the coffee table and held it out to Alves. “You want to see this? My ticket to success?” He chuckled.

“Oh, Alves, don’t be such a drip,” he muttered. “You ought to get yourself one of these. … Get you out of that damned undertaker’s office. That’s no life for a newly married man.” He coughed, wiped his chin. “My sister deserves more than that. …”

“I have plans,” Alves said, his face burning.

“He has plans,” Manuelo mocked. “You damned well better have some plans. …” He laughed, sipping more champagne. “You’ve got plans and I’ve got a diploma. I’ll take my diploma, thanks.”

The only thing left to do with Manuelo was to club him to death with the champagne bottle. Alves decided against that, went and found Maria, left the comfortable house.

“Oh, I had a wonderful time,” she said. “I’m so proud of Manuelo. …”

Alves nodded. “Yes, he certainly is the college man, isn’t he?”

By early autumn the permissions to set sail for Angola came through. And the day was unforgettable for another reason as well. The piano arrived at their tiny flat—a piano, a grand piano, for God’s sake! “But why, Alves, have I learned to play a piano,” Maria had reasoned sweetly, massaging his aching temples, “if I am not allowed to have a piano? You see, don’t you, Alves?” He realized early on that, whether or not he understood what Maria had in mind, it was supremely irrelevant. In some things. He was learning with alacrity what other poor men who married above themselves had learned before him.

Maria was engaged in mastering Chopin’s etudes that fall evening. Dinner was over, and Arnaldo was staring at Alves across the remains of chicken piccata. Maria’s Italian heritage revealed itself most often in the kitchen and at the table. The cigar smoke drifted lazily out the window, port rolled on the tongue. Arnaldo mentioned his official permission to sail for Angola; it was his calling, he reflected happily, to follow Alves. He welcomed his fate. But he was not quite able to grasp what Alves was now suggesting, the next step of the mysterious plan. …

“My point,” Alves amplified formally, as was the custom among young men striving to seem older, “is that while the opportunities for advancement may be far greater in Luanda than in Lisbon, we must be realistic—”

“My point as well, exactly,” Arnaldo said, perplexed. “And what you suggest bears an unlikely relationship to reality.” He relit his cigar from the candle that was guttering in the breeze. They greatly enjoyed the formal speech, managing to seem what they were not but wanted to be.

“An individual without qualifications may be no better off in Luanda than he is in Lisbon.”

“A nobody is a nobody, wherever he may be.”

A small smile crossed Alves’ solemn, perpetually worried face. “While you and I know differently,” he went on, “the rest of the world does not yet know that I am anything but a … nobody, as you put it. As the key to our plan, we must educate them—we must help them to comprehend what we alone know to be the reality of the situation.”

“Double talk!” Arnaldo said bluntly. “The world at large decides what is real and what is not. You are on very treacherous ground, philosophically speaking, my friend—defining reality for yourself. …”

“But we are not philosophers,” Alves said, as if scoring the climactic point in debate. “We are practical men making our way in the real world. What precisely does our predicament demand from men of ability and ambition?”

“What, Alves?”

“That we be seen by others to be the successful, resourceful fellows we know ourselves to be! We are embarking on the greatest game of all, and our pile of chips would seem to be—well, low. What are we to do?” Alves had grown animated, his face working into the slightly crazy expressions Arnaldo recognized.

“Alves, the fact is, we are nobodies! Face it, for God’s sake!”

Alves shook his head, drained the last of his port, peered in mock grief into the glass. Arnaldo pressed on, toying with a shred of chicken and sauce.

“We have no credentials, man. We have no cards, no chips. Do you intend to make them up out of thin air?”

“At last,” Alves murmured, looking up and into the eyes of his friend. “You see my point. … A mere scrap of parchment.”

Maria concluded her current etude and leaped merrily to her feet. “I’ve done it,” she cried. “Aren’t you proud, dear?” She kissed the top of his head, mussing the neat part. “I’ve mastered it.” She left his spectacles askew.

The next morning Alves went to a small stationer in one of the shady, narrow streets serving the many businesses located in the Baixa, meandering away from Rossio Square. He purchased four quarto-sized sheets of parchment that he felt were suitably official-looking, a heavy leather folder, three scribe’s pens, a bottle of thick India ink and a blotter. Whistling an approximation of a certain Chopin etude, a cigarette dangling from his lips, he strolled back across the warm square with its memorial to Dom Pedro IV, who had made Portugal a parliamentary democracy in 1826, piercing the sunny morning. The crowds were already thickening, chattering, automobiles and horse-drawn carriages clattering past. It was a fine morning, he reflected, to be young, in love and about to begin making his way in the world. For once he ignored the news of the war, which reached the waiting crowds by means of strips of newsprint dripping wet ink suspended from wires above the sidewalk. The eagerness for the dispatches was good for business at the Metropole Hotel, where he stopped for a cold beer.

Halfway through his second glass of beer, Gomes, a boyhood friend who had gone to the university at Coimbra and was now a secondary-school teacher, arrived, perspiring, with a parcel of his own and a quizzical expression. Alves gestured expansively for a beer for Gomes.

“Alves, it’s good to see you!” He wiped a handkerchief across his high forehead, blinked his tiny, shining black eyes. “And I hear you are now a married man! You have my congratulation—lady killer!” He laughed a trifle enviously. “And a wife to be proud of, I’m also told. …” Envy was in his nature, like the sweating.

“You have excellent spies, Gomes. And you are on your way to a professorship. I’ve heard about your great success at Coimbra. You must be very proud, and rightly so, Gomes, rightly so.” Together, two young men of the new world, they chuckled. “Now, you have brought the document I requested?”

“Of course,” Gomes said, the puzzled expression returning, “but why, I ask myself, why do you want such a thing?” He shrugged. “It is a small favor, happily granted. … But I can’t help my curiosity.” He smiled, clutching his parcel, awaiting an answer.

“An elaborate joke, nothing more. No one you know, I’m afraid—and I’ll have it back to you tomorrow. You have my word, Gomes. But now,” he sighed, glancing at his watch in the manner of older, prosperous men of means and affairs, “I’m off for a luncheon engagement—a farewell for a friend who is on his way to naval maneuvers.” He held out his hand for Gomes’ package as he stood up. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your meeting me on such short notice … and for bringing the item with you. Time, as the philosopher says, is of the essence. Thank you, my friend.” The package was handed over at last. Alves smiled. “Enjoy your beer, Gomes. Have another.” He dropped a banknote onto the tabletop. “Really you must join my Maria and me for dinner soon. She will play Chopin for you on our grand piano!”

Gomes was suitably impressed by such largess and the grand piano. Alves nodded and strolled away, inordinately pleased by overwhelming even such a negligible fellow.

Twenty minutes later he was back at the flat, already chain smoking the day’s second pack of cigarettes, the table covered with the writing materials from the stationer’s shop. Maria was visiting her mother at the family cottage near Estoril; she would not be back until the following day. Tomorrow he would have to have the job completed. Now it was time to open Gomes’ parcel. Alves had never seen a university diploma at close hand before; he studied it closely in its details, the calligraphy, the wording, the design. A marvelous, almost magical document: a key to opportunity in this new world, the twentieth-century equivalent of just the right nineteenth-century bloodline, just the precise genealogy the old days had required. Squinting, he stared at it through the haze from his cigarette. Insurance for the future, and yet it was only a piece of paper without any worth beyond the few escudos the university had paid their stationer. Quite incredible. But he saw no reason for Manuelo to have such an advantage when he went without. …

Six hours later he slumped back in his chair, opened his fourth pack of cigarettes and closed his red-rimmed eyes. Countless sheaves of paper littered the floor, ashtrays overflowed, his eyes were shot through with crimson lightning flashes. But he had mastered the calligraphy on the University of Coimbra diploma. A steady hand, an artistic eye: considering that he had never tried it before, it wasn’t a bad job. Now he’d have to produce a final copy, no blotches, no mistakes in spelling. He picked up a sheet containing the fairly lengthy inscription he’d devised. It sounded good, weighty, official, impressive. But would it work?

This was no time to lose faith: it had seemed so simple in the sunshine of Rossio Square, and now here he stood ankle deep in it once again. But still … He sighed aloud. … There was nothing really dishonest in it. No one would be hurt. Was it his fault that there had been no money to send him to the university, where he would surely have acquired a similar piece of parchment in the normal run of things? He readied himself, picked up his pen, dipped it carefully into the bottle of India ink. …

Arnaldo stopped by the flat at midnight. Alves had fallen asleep on the couch and came to groggily. He splashed water over his face while Arnaldo poured two glasses of port. Holding a towel to his streaming head, Alves led the way to the dining table, now free of all the day’s remnants.

“Sit down, Arnaldo. I have something to show you that will convince the world of what you and I already know. …” Carefully he took the leather folder from the highboy and laid it before his friend. Tired as he was, he couldn’t hold back the slow, broad grin.

Arnaldo was silent for thirty seconds or so, then exclaimed with abrupt anxiety, “What in the name of God have you done!”

“Please.” Alves closed his eyes peacefully. “Read it aloud.”

“ ‘To Artur Virgilio Alves Reis,’ ” Arnaldo read somewhat breathlessly, “ ‘is awarded the degree of Bachelor … for his application in the following disciplines. Engineering Science, Geology, Geometry, Physics, Pure Mathematics, Mathematics, Paleography’—Alves, what the hell is paleography?”

“It doesn’t matter. I can look it up. …”

Arnaldo sighed, read on: “ ‘Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Chemistry, Experimental Physics, Applied Mechanics, Applied Physics … ’ Alves! This is insane, incredible. … What do you know about experimental physics?”

“You’re missing the point. Anyone can learn these things by reading a book or two. …”

“ ‘General Civil Engineering, Civil and Mechanical Engineering, General Engineering, Mechanical and Civil Design.’ Good lord, man … civil design? What does it mean, designing civilizations? You have gone too far!”

Alves scraped his chair back and stood up slowly, went to stand in the window bay by the piano. “But,” he said modestly, “I must say I’ve covered matters quite well, don’t you think? Read on.” He struck a listener’s pose, leaning against the piano, stroking his chin.

“ ‘Bachelor Artur Virgilio Alves Reis is hereby qualified to direct industries referent to the grade in which he has specialized.’ My, God,” Arnaldo groaned. “ ‘Granted by Oxford University, Oxford, England’ … signed by the director of the polytechnic, Henry Spooner, and the chancellor of the university, John D. Peel … Alves, do these men exist? At all? Anywhere?”

“I really don’t know, Arnaldo. How could I?” He pointed to a chair. Arnaldo sat.

“But why Oxford? Do you realize that this document certifies that you have, in effect, studied everything and can do anything?”

“My intent, I assure you. As for Oxford, who knows when one might encounter a disagreeable official, someone who might challenge these most excellent credentials if they were Portuguese?”

“It seems more than likely to me if you’re assigned to undertake a little paleography—”

“And if I had a diploma from Coimbra a verification might be easily sought. Oxford, on the other hand, is well beyond reach … and, besides, you know that all Portuguese officials are Anglophiles, anything that’s English goes unquestioned—who knows why? It is a tradition, a fact of life.”

“Alves, it can’t possibly—”

“Oh, cheer up, Arnaldo. Remember, I have studied practical engineering. I’m not an untrained dolt. …”

“Neither are you an experimental physicist, a civil designer or paleographer.” He shook his head despondently.

“It’s only a piece of paper,” Alves said, yawning. “The world wants such a piece of paper, then it shall have one. But paper is only paper. I know what I’m doing.” He crossed the room and clapped Arnaldo’s shoulder. Arnaldo nodded, dazed.

I think I know what I’m doing, Alves thought. Every man has his limits. … Had he ventured beyond his own? It was such a harmless maneuver, really … and surely foolproof. He felt himself nodding off, thinking, oddly enough, of Angola—was that where his life would truly begin?

The vessel of the Portuguese Steamship Lines was crowded. It creaked a good deal, displayed disconcerting amounts of rust in half-hidden places and smelled overwhelmingly of sweat, anxiety and greed. The sweat was inevitable in the heat and humidity; the anxiety was visible in the eyes of those escaping army service; Angola had a way of engendering greed in travelers. There had been a day-long layover at Madeira, then at St. Vincent, then on toward Africa. Maria spent much of the time in the cabin comforting Alves, who was discovering that while the blood of a Portuguese admiral flowed in his veins, he was the inheritor of a landlubber’s stomach. Arnaldo paced the deck with nervous concern, checking in several times each day for reports on his friend’s condition.

Alves eventually wobbled into view on Maria’s arm. Breathing heavily, face moist and ashen, he sagged into a deck chair, grinned faintly at Arnaldo and scanned the horizon for the first blessed sight of land. In the late evening, unable to sleep as the vessel pitched and moaned, he spent hours staring at the Oxford diploma as if it had a life of its own, magical powers, secrets it would divulge if considered in exactly the right way. Maria, trained by culture and tradition to ignore the curlicues of the male existence, paid no attention to the leather folder, never dreamed of inquiring.

The steamer finally slid through the dusk into Luanda harbor, cutting between parallel lines of high cliffs and a long sand pit with the lights of the town glowing through the fog ahead. Hugely relieved, Alves felt himself coming back to life, dined almost normally that night and took pleasure in supervising Arnaldo and Maria as they readied themselves for disembarking the next morning. After a decent sleep in the becalmed harbor waters, the threesome clambered with their steamer trunks and cases into the small craft that ferried them to shore. The cliffs were touched with shades of pastel reds and pinks in the early-morning sun, and at the pinnacle of the cliffline, overlooking the city and guarding the harbor entrance from a jagged crag, Alves picked out the three-hundred-year-old fortress of San Michel. Behind it, sprinkled like an eerie caravan, were the outlines of a church, a convent, a palace, clusters of solid, well-built, timeless buildings. Together they comprised the Upper Town. A shelf of sand separated the rock walls from the sea, creating the Lower Town, which was obviously the commercial section. Shops and houses and warehouses sprawled along the quay and receded back toward the cliffs: the town was bustling, lively. On the waterfront the little sixteenth-century fort of San Francisco welcomed seafarers, harking back to the city’s past. There was a railway station, a wireless tower rising from the jumble of low buildings like a jaunty finger pointing to the future.

Within two hours of reaching the dock Alves had recovered his energies and spirits, located the Central Hotel, where he booked a week’s accommodation, and engaged an agent to show them houses in the Upper Town. After a hearty lunch he left Maria and Arnaldo to get settled into the hotel and set off through the tattered confusion of dusty streets, through the shouts and smells and sights of the brightly colored markets that offered native goods, pipes, tobacco, snuff, vivid skeins of yarn, large quantities of dried salt fish and tureens of exceedingly messy, oily foodstuffs. But it was all a blur as he quickly marched to the Central Public Works Office. Once past the banging screen door, brushing dust from his coat, he realized that, as usual, he was in up over his chin and had no choice but to act forthrightly, depending on his natural gall, earnest face and forged diploma. The clerk behind the wooden railing looked up inquiringly. It was now or never. …

By five o’clock, however, Alves’ burden of worry was considerably lightened. Senhor Terreira, a sixtyish bureaucrat who preferred to spend the bulk of his time on expeditions inland hunting sable, took one look at Diploma Number 2148 from the Polytechnic School of Engineering at Oxford and favored the young man before him with a tug of his white mustache and a smile appointed with sparkling gold. “Heaven has intervened in Angola’s behalf, Engineer Reis!” he exclaimed in only partially mock wonderment. “Our director of building and sewerage has just returned to Lisbon, a sick man—after seventeen years of glorious service. And here you are, fully qualified to replace him! It is almost too good to be true.” Alves assured him that it was indeed true.

Senhor Terreira hooked his thumbs through his braces, leaned back in the squeaking swivel chair and began enumerating the new director’s responsibilities, going over several folders of works in progress and repairs being carried out and determining a salary that turned out to be considerably more than Alves’ father had earned in any one year in his entire life. Alves nodded sagely from time to time, made a mental note to cultivate a mustache and buy a pith helmet and drew some satisfaction from the realization that a child could have understood and conquered the challenges of the building and sewerage job. A secretary entered with forms to fill out, thick bitter coffee was served, and he was introduced to several of his perspiring and mustachioed colleagues, none of whom happened, fortunately, to be an Oxford man. A bank draft was issued against his first month’s salary, the name of a tailor was provided, his hand was shaken enthusiastically and an invitation was presented for dinner that same evening at the European Club. As Terreira saw him to the door, he remarked, “You know, Reis, I’d wager a sizable batch of escudos that you are the only graduate of Oxford in all Angola!” Behind his voluminous mustache he beamed, relieved at his good fortune in finding such a remarkable young man.

Within a week the newly pregnant Maria had found a large walled-in old house in the Upper Town, whitewashed, tree-shaded, encircling a splashing fountain; the three of them—Alves, Maria and Arnaldo—had moved in, and Alves had hired Arnaldo as his assistant. Together they got off to a good start, mopping up old projects, moving ahead with new ones. After two months of clearing his desk, Alves took a break, gathered up Maria and went off to a dinner party hosted by Terreira. Late in the evening Alves strolled onto the veranda with a sun-blackened man named Chaves, who was a director of Angola Railways.

“So you’re the man from Lisbon … Terreira speaks well of you, Reis,” Chaves growled past the stub of his cigar. “Says you’ve taken hold remarkably well. Very rare out here, Oxford men. …”

“Yes, very rare,” Alves said. “Senhor Terreira is very kind, of course. My work here has gone well. My problem is that there is not really enough to do.”

“Aha, well then, there is a matter we should discuss.” Chaves spit out a tangle of wet tobacco leaf and pointed what was left of the cigar at Alves. He was short, low-browed, with a nose that drooped like an overripe fruit. A gold chain stretched across the expanse of vest. There was a crust of permanent dirt beneath his fingernails: he bore the signs of a man who had worked his way to the top.

“The railway here is in the process of dramatic growth,” he rumbled softly. “You’ve seen the crews out blasting right-of-way, building roadbeds, laying track—they’re all convicts. There is no death penalty at home, as you know, but those who deserve it are shipped out here. We put them to work, hard work but better than a firing squad. Eventually, if they behave themselves, they’re given their freedom … but in the meantime they build the railroads and do a damned fine job of it, all things considered. …”

“And the matter we should discuss?”

“Terreira says you’re full of mechanical qualifications. Is it true?”

“Not to seem immodest, but he’s not entirely wrong.” Alves smiled ingenuously, shot his cuffs, noticed that a button was missing.

“Well, then, here is my point. While the track is being put down, we have problems with our locomotives. To give it a name—” his voice dropped to a throaty whisper—“many of them just won’t run. … There are, you see, very few farm-to-market roads—”

“And,” Alves concluded for him, grasping at once what was coming next, “the produce must therefore move to market by rail. So the locomotives must be made to run. Correct?”

Chaves nodded. “Obviously. We have few spare parts, and the ones we have are infrequently the ones we need. The problem is, would you consent to look them over? They are of Belgian manufacture, you may be able to do nothing … and, please, I realize that you are not merely a mechanic. I would normally hesitate to apply to a man of your skill and learning for such a practical diagnosis, but quite frankly we are faced with an emergency, Reis. There is only one question left—what to do?” He plunged his stubby-fingered hands into his jacket pockets, worked the cigar into the furthermost corner of his mouth.

“I understand. I sympathize,” Alves replied after a thoughtful pause. “I will look at the locomotives. Tomorrow morning.” The moon darted from behind the clouds, catching their faces in a bluish light. They smiled.

When Chaves arrived at the locomotive barns the next morning it was eight-thirty and Alves had already been there, aided by Arnaldo, for three and a half hours. The sound of hammering filled the low, cavernous building with its begrimed windows and hard-packed earth floor. Alves was working on the inside of an engine, freeing up a series of metal plates: he was figuring out how to do it as he went along, and hoped the blacks charged with keeping the trains knew less, wouldn’t detect his ignorance. Chaves peered in, shook his head, paced around the huge black piece of machinery for the half hour it took his new adviser to finish, and confronted Reis—who emerged clad in coveralls and generous helpings of thick grease—with an expression mingling shock and pleasure.

“Engineer Reis, one word. You’re new here, young and ambitious and capable, but—well, you must understand our ways.” He gestured at the filthy coveralls and shook his huge, heavy head, which protruded hornlike from his thick shoulders.

Alves was out of breath from the exertion. Arnaldo threw him a rag to wipe his hands. “I thought you wanted me to—”

“Look them over,” Chaves said reproachfully. “To diagnose the ailment, you might say. But we’ve got these boys here, these native boys, to do the fixing—the dirty work. That’s what we pay them for.”

“Well, I certainly had no intention of upsetting the routine. …” Alves swallowed hard, looking away from Chaves’ suddenly steely eyes. He recognized the key moment: apologize or assert himself. “But there are certain problems that only a trained engineer can possibly master.” He turned back, smiling, masking his hesitancy with confidence, relieved at his flanking maneuver. “These fine boys can take care of routine maintenance, I have no doubt, but for sophisticated analysis—well, Director, such matters require a graduate engineer … and the adjustments, even on so great a machine, are so fine they must be made by a trained hand.” He finished wiping his hands, methodically folded the cloth and thrust it into his side coverall pocket. “All of which undoubtedly explains why these locomotives sit idle and crops rot in the countryside. Technical matters have been either beyond what passed for real engineers here or incomprehensible to blacks, who should never have been expected to handle them. …

“I can make these trains run, Director, if you would care to make them my responsibility. I am at your service.” He was unable to resist the opportunity, push it for all it was worth.

Director Chaves blinked, swallowed and took this remarkable suggestion back to his suite at the railway office. Alves and Arnaldo reported to the Public Works Office.

Arnaldo followed his friend into his private cubicle and shut the door. “What do you think you’re doing, talking to Chaves that way? It’s his railroad … and you insulted his engineers! You know nothing about trains. … Will the great monstrous things run?” Despairing, Arnaldo hurled himself into a spindly wooden chair and began squeezing his temples.

Alves sat down and lit a cigarette. “I think they’ll run.” He reconsidered: “What am I saying? I’m probably the first person in Angola who’s looked at them and had any idea at all what was wrong. … His engineers probably spent all their time keeping clean and trying to explain to the native boys what to do. Of course they’ll run. They’re no different than engines I studied in school … just bigger. They’ll run, all right.” He blew several perfect smoke rings. “Really, it’s not difficult. …”

Arnaldo gave him a pleading look and went off to visit a sewerage repair site. Alves sat quietly at his desk, reflecting on what a land of opportunity Angola was!

Shortly before noon he was jangled out of his thoughtful reverie by Chaves himself.

“All right, Reis,” he said from deep within his thick chest, the stubby, black-haired fingers drumming on Alves’ desk, “it’s my pleasure to inform you that the locomotive is already in action. I congratulate you, sir!” Abruptly he grabbed Alves’ small hand in his own and gave it a single bone-crunching pump of approval. “I have considered your proposal—and I’m now prepared to offer you the position of Acting Chief Engineer of Angola Railways, starting at once!” The room bristled with the man’s rough dynamism.

Alves cracked his second pack of cigarettes and slowly lit one, camouflaging his amazement. He hadn’t reckoned that this gorilla in a white linen suit was such an impulsive decision maker.

“I’m very pleased, even flattered,” he said, once the room had stopped reverberating from Chaves’ cries.

“There is a problem, however. …”

“Yes?” He felt his heart pounding: the Oxford diploma hissed in his past like something wriggling and poisonous, dangling from a limb in his path.

“What about your present position here? Surely Terreira needs you.”

“A mere nothing, Director,” Alves said, trying to hide a wheeze of relief. “I can easily manage both sets of responsibilities. You have met my associate, Senhor Carvalho. He is most trustworthy, fully capable of executing my directives. Without disrupting things here at this office, I can report to the locomotive barns at five each morning, clear up any problems there, attend to the daily communiqués to the field … and spend the remainder of the day here, always at the ready in case there is a railway emergency. A most excellent arrangement.”

“You are,” Chaves growled past pursed lips, “a very confident young man.”

Alves nodded, losing himself in playing his new role. “May I make a suggestion?”

“Certainly.”

“Why not a trial period? A month, say, during which time I will see that all the locomotives capable of running are in fact running. At the end of the month we will discuss permanent appointment. Is that agreeable to Angola Railways?”

Chaves was bobbing his huge head enthusiastically; he liked this man, he liked making a deal. “And your compensation, what of that?” He had a figure in mind, approximately half of what Reis was earning in Public Works. There was no sense in passing up a bargain. Alves could see it in Chaves’ eyes.

“No compensation whatsoever for the first month—the period during which you will see if I make the trains run. That way you run no risk whatsoever. …”

“And thereafter?” Chaves gazed, perplexed and slightly off balance, into Alves’ smile.

“I suggest that a salary comparable exactly to my salary in Public Works—modest in the extreme for the possessor of an Oxford diploma, surely—would be most fitting. In other words, the railway is as important as the sewers. Am I right, Director?”

Chaves knew when he had come up against a sound thinker with a sense of his own worth. He could argue the matter of escudos per hour, of course, but he knew that Reis held the cards. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and fixed on Alves’ large brown eyes, which seemed magnified behind his round spectacles. “Right. I agree. The same salary … if the trains are running in a month.” They shook hands again. Alves doubted if his hand could withstand another bargain struck.

The trains ran. Alves decked out in his macoco, his monkey suit, became a familiar sight, moving from one locomotive to another, performing prodigies of energy. The local Europeans, who scorned him for getting dirty when he worked, called him “the monkey engineer,” but the trains ran. And quite suddenly he was making twice as much money as before, with plenty available for investments, an utterly new experience. Sentimentally, he sunk some of it into railway stock, making him his own employer, at least to a small degree. It was a very good feeling. Chaves and Terreira each claimed credit for discovering the miracle man. Arnaldo wearily shook his head, grinning, encouraging. Maria began to have dinner parties befitting her status as Senhora Miracle Man. Alves grew restless. …

He developed a new hobby that he’d never before been able to afford—photography. He bought cameras. He snapped away at Maria, Arnaldo, Chaves, Terreira. He arranged afternoons of family portraiture in Luanda’s best photographic studio. He sent copies to his friends at home; he filled photograph albums. He would stand transfixed before the photographer’s studio window gazing at the portraits of himself and Maria smiling out at the passers-by, young and successful and full of confidence in the future. He began to see qualities in himself he’d never noticed before: he saw a young man of substance. And what he saw increased his impatience. He wanted to break into a run. He wanted the future now: he was developing some plans. …

The Official Gazette in Luanda had organized a small testimonial dinner in honor of Alves Reis. Not only were the trains running; they actually made sense of the new railway timetables. It was an unheard-of phenomenon. A gathering of perhaps two dozen railroad officials and businessmen, drawn from among those most likely to benefit from the new schedule, puffed on cigars and sipped fine port that night in a private room at the Central Hotel. A storm had broken outside, the windows were open to cooling breezes, and Alves, only twenty-three but happily full of himself on this remarkable occasion, acknowledged the chairman’s introduction, rose, peered from behind his circular glasses and began to grin. He thanked his hosts, felt a tear building in the corner of his eye and went on in a spasm of emotion to speak of his feelings for his land of opportunity. It was the first official honor of his young life, and he wasn’t sure where the effect of the port left off and emotion began. He ought to have felt his nerves fraying, but as he rose he saw in his mind the puffing trains churning along the track, his own face staring confidently from the photographer’s windows, the leaders of the community dining at his table. It was all of a piece. No wonder they were all applauding the guest of honor. …

“I have sailed along Angola’s lengthy coastline,” he recalled, nervously rubbing one moist palm against the other, “and I have undertaken many arduous journeys to the interior. I have carefully studied the resources of the country.” He paused, swallowing hard, wondering what was coming out of his mouth next. “How to say it, gentlemen, how to make clear my feelings? I am …” He heard his voice crack, as if from a great distance. He seemed to be watching the scene, watching this new man emerge from the opportunity Angola had provided, but of course he wasn’t watching. He had to say something. “I am lost in wonder at the immensity of the riches in its soil and subsoil. … As though Mother Nature in her wisdom had sought a showcase for her might and caprice!” Someone chuckled at the young man’s enthusiasm, the flowery turn of phrase. A rumble of approval drifted toward him, mingling with banks of cigar smoke. The night’s breeze carried the wetness and scent of foliage and earth and ocean; he was nearly drunk on it. “Hear, hear!” a banker called from the back of the room. “Viva Angola!” came a cry. Alves sipped the ruby port, rolling it on his tongue, then swept on, carried away by the quality of the moment.

“Gold and silver, copper and tin and iron and … diamonds, they all ensure the Angola of tomorrow its place as one of the most prosperous lands not only of the African continent but of the entire globe!” He banged his fist on the table, upsetting the goblet, watching with surprise the stain spreading across the tablecloth, feeling his face go crimson beneath the perspiration. For God’s sake, what had he done now?

But drowning out the laughter were more shouts of approval, standing applause, then the presentation of a handsome brass plate bolted to a hardwood plaque with the inscription “Alves Reis … who discharges his post with great zeal and competence, thus serving the Colony and the Republic well.” Arnaldo led the final round of applause, and, once good nights were said and the group dispersed, the two old friends in their best suits and gleaming shoes strolled the cobbled, glistening streets in the storm’s aftermath.

“A satisfying evening,” Arnaldo ventured, exhaling a puff of smoke, toying with the gold paper cigar band on his ring finger. “Good humor, your fair share of honor. … A kind of pinnacle, to have achieved so much and been recognized for it—”

“And I spilled the bloody port!” Alves interrupted, but his spirits were high. He forced himself to be calm. “A good beginning, yes, but there is so much ahead of us, so much to do, so much world to do it in. …” He smiled in the sweet darkness, his ambition and imagination racing before him. Arnaldo seemed always to be satisfied, to accept the way things were as the way they should continue to be. Well, that was Arnaldo, but he was loyal, a man you could count on.

“Dare I ask what next?”

“Now that we are established, this is the time to press our advantage. We must learn what we can in this training ground.”

“Training ground? That’s not what you called it this evening. The future lies in Angola, I believe you said.” He stopped on the dark street, fixed Alves with a quizzical grin.

“Well, one says what the situation requires.” He clasped Arnaldo’s arm. “The future awaits us in Lisbon, though, I’m sure of it. The war is over in Lisbon and Europe, and the future is bright! You can hold me to that. …” He smiled tiredly, exhausted from the first attempt at speechmaking in his life. Frequently in convincing Arnaldo he was able to convince himself. And that was a damned good thing.

Maria was something else. Arnaldo was a man; you knew what to say to him, and it didn’t take a fortuneteller to gauge his response. But a woman! A mystery … outwardly so content, so simple, so easily pleased. What Alves missed in her was a sense of sharing his own life. On the one hand, he knew perfectly well that you didn’t confide your business to your wife; it was traditionally impossible … but, on the other hand, he spent many a night sitting by the fountain in the courtyard, past midnight, smoking, wanting her to know what his life meant. Really meant.

But there were the children, the entertaining, her friends, managing the small household staff …

Still, once he’d moved on into other fields—discreet moneylending, buying and selling crops, consulting other businessmen on how best to make use of the rail system—he took a tentative step toward increasing communication with Maria. He still retained close ties with both Chaves and Terreira, but increasingly his pursuits took him far afield, into the interior. He took Maria with him, leaving Arnaldo to cope with the office in Luanda.

Maria was more often than not the only white woman the natives had ever seen. She was unafraid, trusting and made friends easily. He found himself enjoying her company—almost as a friend rather than a wife, though he was unable to detect in her manner any awareness of the changing relationship.

Late in the year 1919, having been on his own for six months, he took her with him to visit a tobacco farmer whose crop he was buying. Returning, still on horseback, with the railway yet another day’s ride distant, they sat by the campfire, alone, the native boys sound asleep.

“You know,” Alves said, leaning toward her on one elbow, searching her face for reaction, “I’ve put away a great deal of money. Do you understand what I mean, Maria?” She watched the flames, hands folded in her lap. He smelled the leather of her new boots. “Far more money than your father has. …”

She looked up quickly. “You are joking? Aren’t you?” Her voice was soft, startled.

“Not at all.”

“I see.” She smiled shyly. “I don’t know what to say. I know nothing about money.”

“Ah, you know one great thing, my dearest.” He took her hand, tracing the length of her fingers. “How to spend it.”

She nodded, laughing very quietly.

At length she said, “What has this to do with me? Why are you telling me?” She seemed almost embarrassed by the subject.

“Because I love you, because our two lives make only one life, because money makes things change.” He lit a cigarette and looked at the moon. “It cannot buy the moon, I know, but it is strange and wonderful stuff nonetheless. You see, I have a knack for making it. … It’s like a game, a sport—some people are good at it, others are not. It comes easily to me. And once you begin playing, there’s no point in stopping. …”

“All right,” she said. “I’m happy that you are good at it.” She stretched, held his hand to her mouth for a kiss. Then she cupped his palm around her breast and stopped his eyes with hers. “You are good at even more important things. …” A giggle barely escaped: she was still so much a child. He stroked the round, soft breast, feeling her respond. But he pushed on; he wanted to talk now that he’d begun.

He wasn’t altogether sure she was listening, but he told her of his recent trip to Europe, the buying and selling he’d done in what was being called “war surplus” these days. War surplus—the production overruns left idle in warehouses throughout Europe when the war had finally ended. In France he’d bought an entire trainload of heavy paper sandbags that had never reached the trenches. He had shipped them to Angola, selling them with the guarantee that they were as strong as jute. Not one complaint! And that was only one of many such business dealings.

Against the background of profit-making, the death of his father had seemed only a moment’s interlude. Alves had gone through the photographs he’d saved of his father, trying to fix a happy memory in his mind, but the pictures had been barren of any lightheartedness. It was memory that brought forth the happy moment, the Easter Sunday of his boyhood, his father telling them about the admiral. … That had been an exciting day and his father had been part of it. Now his father was dead, saved further grinding down, spared any more humiliation.

“Our future is in Europe,” he said. “It is clearer every day.”

“But we’re so happy here,” she protested.

“There’s more to life, Maria … life is so much bigger than this.” He watched her leaning back against the saddle and blanket. He knew when she wanted to make love. He looked away at a night sound. “I’m going back to Lisbon in two weeks.”

“Not all of us, not to live?” Her eyes were wide, stricken.

“No, no, my darling. Business. … I’m just preparing you for the inevitable.”

“Then come to me now,” she said. “I know what is inevitable, don’t you?” She held out her arms. Shadows flickered across her face, the expression of sudden need.

In the morning he couldn’t be sure that she even remembered the conversation. Perhaps it made no difference to her, one way or the other, knowing about his life. Perhaps women thought only of their houses and their children and their sexual needs. It was a mystery. He looked at her out of the corner of his eye as she rode beside him. Not a clue. He’d better forget his idea of sharing that part of his life with her. He’d been wrong. Women were women.

While picking through a derelict warehouse in Lisbon near the docks, far below the serpentine streets of the ancient Alfama district, he came across two dozen unused tractors left behind from the day the Portuguese government had impounded all German shipping and goods. Despite some surface rust, a cursory inspection convinced Reis that they were in no way permanently damaged. After a morning of poking about in the clammy, filthy warehouse, he offered to buy the lot for one tenth of the original price. The supply chief looked on it as found money; as well, the space would be cleared at no cost to the government.

Having guaranteed to empty the warehouse in fourteen days, Alves found two well-qualified, out-of-work mechanics and hired them to refurbish the tractors. He once again climbed into his monkey suit, and the three of them went to work greasing, sanding, oiling, painting. He made a deal with an Angolan importer based in Lisbon: the price of the tractors, or comparable English-made machines, had risen considerably since the time these had first been manufactured—yet Alves generously offered them, brand new, in mint unused condition, for their original price, a 900 percent profit for himself minus the 4 percent he’d agreed to pay the mechanics. The Angolan importer assumed responsibility in the eyes of his clients, and Alves was well out of it. The deal was signed and the consignment delivered in twelve, not fourteen, days. Money, money, money …

Upon his return to Luanda he summoned Arnaldo to a meeting that took place in the handsome beamed study of the ancient walled-in house. He recounted the story of his European adventures and bestowed a substantial raise on his properly impressed associate. Together in their new, elegantly cut dinner clothes and carefully pampered mustaches, the two of them sat in the dim silence and stared at each other from the deep recesses of heavy armchairs. It was one of life’s sweet moments when all has been seen to go right in the face of substantial odds.

“Why are you grinning?” Arnaldo inquired, crossing his right leg over his left, pointing the patent-leather toe of his pump.

“What a pair we are!” Alves exclaimed. “We can do anything … I’m almost convinced of that.”

Together they wandered into the foyer and waited for Maria, who finally bustled in, still instructing the cook about preparations for the late after-theater supper.

Maria clattered down the hall after kissing the children—two by now—good night. She was a determined mother, a natural comforter who gloried in her children, the managing of her home. She was tremendously pleased with her husband’s worldly success, both the money and the esteem in which he was held by Luanda’s leaders. She found it all particularly satisfying. Socially she made the most of her opportunities. That very night a dozen of Luanda’s most prominent figures would dine in her home. And that would make quite a tantalizing subject for a letter home.

The play, Camille, was not done well even by Portuguese standards; by Angolan standards, however, it was a treat, and the young company was warmly applauded once the heroine coughed her last. The party congregated in the lobby, in the center of the swirling, festive, well-dressed crowd. While the Governor had been unable to attend, both Terreira and Chaves were on hand with their wives, the managing director of the Eastern Telegraph Company, an executive of the steamship company, the importer who had handled the tractor transaction, the editor of Luanda’s major newspaper. The women in their jewelry and long dresses glittered and quivered and chattered; the men spoke quietly among themselves and appraised the women.

The newspaper editor’s wife, only a few years older than Maria, was the most strikingly attractive woman in the group. For several months Alves had lusted in his mind after her full round breasts, which were much in view that evening, and her quick, intelligent laughter, her pale-blue eyes, her most unusual pale straw-colored hair. She was German, or perhaps Swiss, and he joined her at a small table in the courtyard for dinner.

He leaned over her slightly, peering into the recesses of her low-cut gown, and asked if he might sit with her. There was a knowing smile on her wide mouth.

“Dinner with the famous Senhor Reis, just the two of us,” she murmured. “I’m very flattered. I hope Director Chaves does not feel slighted … you were very intent together during the intermission, you and Director Chaves.”

“Business,” he said, “mere business. He was seeking my advice about an acquisition—”

“How very interesting,” she said. The thick, somewhat coarse Teutonic intonation and pronunciation intrigued him. Everything about her was so different from Maria, including her interest in the business world. “A very large purchase?”

“Extraordinarily,” he said, smelling her perfume on the cool breeze. “Several huge American locomotives, machines of the future—we must watch the progressive Americans, learn from them.”

“Americans,” she repeated tonelessly. “I suppose you are right, but still, I am a German. … I do not find the Americans very sympathetic, you see.”

“I apologize,” Alves said, reaching across the small table, stroking the soft texture of her hand. “But the fact is their locomotives are of very high quality. I told Director Chaves to buy them at once. They’ll never be cheaper.” He smiled into the cool eyes.

A stiff, straight-backed figure bowed fractionally over the table. It was a man the editor had brought along for the evening and had introduced briefly to Alves. Leaving such a slight alteration in the dinner plans to Maria, he had failed to remember the man’s name. The impression, however, had been dramatic: very close-cropped hair, neck as thick as a tree trunk, with even rolls of hard fat layered down to the back of his collar, flashing monocle, cigarette in an ivory holder—he brought to mind a photograph Alves had seen of a German actor called Von Stroheim.

The woman glanced up. “Herr Hennies,” she said, “you’ve met our host, Senhor Reis?”

“Of course,” Hennies said stiffly. “Adolf Hennies.” He made it sound like a command, bowed again. “May I join you?”

“Please do,” she said. “We were speaking of business.”

Seating himself, placing his dinner plate on the table, Hennies nodded stiffly. “I could not help but overhear you in passing—so I stopped, intruding on your tête-à-tête, I am afraid.” He smiled thinly below the monocle, which gleamed opaquely in the candlelight like a huge Cyclopean eye. “But I could not resist. You have become a famous man in Angola, Senhor Reis … famous for your unerring business sense. I hoped for a chance to talk this evening. Tomorrow, you see, I return to the Continent.” He chewed a tiny morsel of the excellent stuffed fish.

“You are too kind,” Alves said, tearing his eyes away from the woman’s pale bosom, confronting the monocle. “You are here on business, Herr Hennies?”

The German nodded. “In a way. Germany must make its way in this new postwar world. There is no time to sit licking our wounds—business is the business of the world, is it not?”

He watched the German, wondering if he was a better bet for the evening than the editor’s wife.

“You have done well here, no one can doubt it,” Hennies said. “But Africa lacks the stability of Europe. We may face inflation of the currency in Europe, but there are alternative currencies—if one doesn’t suit you, try another. Here, where you are also facing inflation, you are locked to the mother country … and business opportunities are limited. Angola is owned by Portugal, a fact that puts a finite limit on opportunity. Now—” carefully sipping his wine, speaking so quietly that the editor’s wife was forced to lean forward—“now is the time for a man of your caliber to make his move back to Europe. With the way the Angolan economy is developing, well, you must see for yourself what is happening. … You have recently been to France, I understand, and Lisbon. You have undoubtedly reached these conclusions for yourself. I hope I have not been presumptuous.”

“Not at all,” Alves assured him. “Most interesting, in fact. You are obviously a man who gives such matters considerable thought.”

“Herr Hennies is very deep, very mysterious,” the woman said, smiling at the German. “He is a good man to strike a bargain with.” Her lashes fluttered. “But watch him closely. Others have not and lived to regret it. I warn you.”

“Ah, you defame me,” Hennies said, forcing a chuckle.

Alves’ attention had swung almost completely away from the woman to concentrate on Hennies. He had never spoken at any length with a German before, and he found himself wondering how the man’s mind worked. How much of what he had always been told about Germans was true? Stiff, formal, slow-witted, brutal, intransigent? As a Portuguese he didn’t fully trust any German, nor did he pretend to understand the man’s motivation. What did the man want?

In time the editor came to spirit his wife off to another cluster of guests, leaving him alone with the German. They smoked in silence for a moment, listening to the fountain splashing nearby.

“Seriously, Senhor Reis,” Hennies said, “our charming friend has made a small joke at my expense … but let me say that I hope you recognize it as just that, a joke. If you decide to return to the Continent I should be most grateful if you would inform me.” He inclined his head on what seemed to be a ballbearing at the top of his spinal column, slipped a small white pasteboard from his pocket, smoothing his waistcoat. “Please accept my card. Men of vision and ability may often benefit one another. Just possibly I could put some good things in your way.” He stood abruptly, consulted a large gold hunter at the end of a substantial gold link chain and softly brought his heels together. “Good evening, Senhor Reis. My ship embarks at first light.”

Alves watched the German move his substantial bulk toward Maria. Alves drained his wine and lit another cigarette.

Director Chaves, as was his custom, was the final guest. Alves found him scraping the sides of the chafing dish.

“What do you know of the German, Herr Hennies?”

Chaves belched appreciatively into his fist. “Seems to me I heard he was a spy. During the war, maybe even now. You know what people say, Alves. Germans are not to be trusted. Now they say that the Germans want to take Angola away from us, that Hennies is here evaluating the situation. …” He huffed tiredly. “They say he’s passing himself off as a Swiss these days.”

“Do you think it’s true?” But hadn’t he implied he was German?

Chaves shrugged. “Why not? Most of what I hear these days turns out to be true.” He put his plate down and yawned. “Can you forgive me? Maria, my dear, I’ve stayed too long yet again.”

“Impossible, Director,” she said, taking his hairy hand. “You are always our favorite guest.” The cook had come in to clear the buffet. Arnaldo dozed on a bench in the courtyard. His snoring wafted gently on the breeze. Alves walked to the gate with Chaves.

“Hennies thinks I should return to Europe.”

“And you, Alves? What do you think?”

“He may be right.”

Chaves sighed deeply and nodded. “Sooner or later, I’ve known it was inevitable—your leaving. I can’t say I blame you, if it comes to that. But keep an eye on Hennies. I expect he’s a tricky one.” He turned in the roadway. “Don’t do anything impulsively, Alves. Think it over. But whatever you do, you must make me a promise. …”

“And that is?”

“The American locomotives. You must wait for delivery, in case there’s a problem. Promise me, Alves.”

“Of course I’ll wait.”

Chaves came forward, squeezed Alves’ shoulder. Then he strolled off into the darkness.

That night Alves sat on the bed watching Maria brush her long rich hair, one hundred, two hundred strokes, like a careful, solemn little girl. She was such an innocent, so sheltered: helpless without him. He wanted her. He always wanted her, always enjoyed the yielding softness. Maybe it was better, all things considered, that his little attempt to draw her into his public life had come to nothing. Maybe it was better this way, the old way. … Away from the everyday battles, she gave him refuge, a place to forget for a moment. Holding her, watching her tremble, tears on her cheeks as she struggled to reach her climax, he was sure that she was as she should be, complete in her womanhood, innocent of the outside world, devoted solely to the life he made for her. … He had been wrong to expect anything else, and only infrequently, when he saw another kind of woman on the street or at dinner, did he wonder what else there was, what secrets might lie within other women.

After they made love, erasing the editor’s wife from his mind, he lit a cigarette and told her that they would be returning to Lisbon soon, once the American locomotives arrived.

During the months of waiting for the new locomotives, Alves pursued his various business arrangements with increased fervor. With the decision to return home made he was intent on building up as large a supply of capital as possible. He spent most of his time traveling into the countryside, seeking new and increasingly ingenious ways to make money, and the more he saw the more committed he became in his belief that somehow Angola would play a deciding role in his life. Sooner or later …

Traveling alone, by train and horseback, stopping in friendly farmhouses and ramshackle, makeshift inns and outland campsites, he had the time to evaluate his condition, the course his life had taken since that night on the beach with José—that, he felt in his heart, had been the turning point. Late at night he would sit on the plain beneath a shadowy tree, smoke a cigarette, warm his feet by a campfire and consider the moon sliding silently across sleeping Africa. He knew what it took to succeed. He had to ignore his own doubts: doubt yourself, he thought, and the doubts of others would surely follow.

What had always been important to Alves was the country itself, Angola, all 480,000 square miles of Africa’s western coast that was fourteen times larger than Portugal itself. Three and a half million people roamed the vastness of plain and rain forest and mountainous ridge with areas larger than all of England, inhabited by only a few thousand blacks. … He loved it. He knew he would be back. …

Only a few weeks before the locomotives were scheduled to arrive from America, Alves received a surprise by post—a thick envelope, sent from Mozambique. José Bandeira!

He ripped the envelope, a grin spreading across his face. José—good old José. How often since arriving in Luanda almost six years before had he longed for word of José. …

The letter, which began in a rambling, discursive manner, laboriously thrashed its way toward the point. Alves slumped down behind his study desk and read it again from the beginning, slowly shaking his head.

José was in prison in Mozambique. At least he was honest about telling his story; he could hardly have fabricated a more depressing tale. First, a year after arriving in Mozambique, he had stolen two thousand dollars from the Garland, Laidlaw safe and gone to prison. But his father, freshly humiliated, had repaid the money and an added indemnity to the authorities, thereby securing José’s release. Then, by pulling additional strings, the elder Bandeira had imposed on friends at the Mozambique Railway to give his son “one last chance, to quote the old boy,” wrote José, who seemed in remarkably peppy spirits considering his unhappy situation. José went on:

But I was never meant to be an impoverished clerk. I cannot rid myself of the belief that I was born for bigger things—you know how I care for good clothes and not-so-good women. Temptation is my enemy … and dealing with these idiots here was too great a temptation, I’m afraid. So much money was passing through my hands that some found its way into my pocket. So, here I am in jail again! Naturally I applied to Father for help, but this time he was unforgiving—can you blame him? He compares me with Antonio, who has never given him any trouble at all and now distinguishes our family in the diplomatic world.

The letter continued chattily for another few pages. José, Alves reflected, obviously had plenty of time on his hands. Finally, on the last page, came José’s shameless request:

Word has reached me of your great successes! You are famous even in Mozambique! Now you have the opportunity to help your oldest friend. From your vast treasury a mere five thousand dollars American will ransom your chum. If you can find it in your heart to aid me at this difficult time I can only give you my frail assurances that you will never regret it.

The letter concluded with directions as to how the money might be transferred. Alves stubbed out his cigarette. José was José and the loyalty ran deep. There was also much in the letter that Alves understood, much with which he sympathized. Poor José … Whatever would become of him? Alves set off for his bank.

Alves hadn’t forgotten his origins, but he had just about had it with the mutterings of the rabble. He couldn’t see them: they were crowded, hot and dusty, beyond the riveted steel walls of the locomotive boiler inside of which he was stewing in his own fragrant juices. There was a bemused excitement in the native Angolan voices, a counterpoint of irritating jocularity from the Europeans. Patiently he tightened his concentration like palms over his ears and turned his attention back to the recalcitrant damned piece of machinery. There was, he told himself, no point in venting anger on a piece of machinery. Machinery was not constructed haphazardly to confound you; it was predictable and yielded to the man who understood certain basic principles. Basic principles—he wished he knew more about them. His mind wandered as he fussed with the bolts, levers.

As he worked sweat welled up in the transverse crevices of his broad forehead, cascaded down his nose, and when he brushed a grimy hand at the sting he left his face marked like a warrior red Indian. From time to time he changed his crouching stance, groaned and sneaked a look at the circle of glowing, pale-blue sky above him. Why, in the name of God, had he promised Chaves he’d get these damned things going?

He knew perfectly well that the Europeans outside in the shade—including the abominable Englishman Smythe-Hancock with his monocle on a string—were discussing what they’d come to call “Reis’ Mistake.” Smythe-Hancock of all the Europeans had always bothered him most of all, for a peculiar reason. The man struck Alves as the perfect idea of an Oxford man, seemed always capable of exposing the old diploma fraud. Alves knew it was all in his mind—but he couldn’t shake it.

The Angolans in their black cotton robes were judiciously pondering the absurdities of the white man’s fascination with large mechanical devices. All of them, the blacks and the whites, were doubtless tanking up on grappa, the native beer.

Well, if all came right with the last series of levers, he’d fix the smug bastards, especially the monocled pudding-faced one.

He was having a hell of a time reading the American repair manual. It was the fact that the huge locomotives were of American manufacture that so amused his fellow Europeans. The locomotives that had always been in use on the Melanje line hadn’t been good enough for Transport Engineer Alves Reis, oh no! He had to buy American—and when he got them he couldn’t make them run! Smythe-Hancock had haw-hawed his way through many an evening at the Central, verbally sniping at the Portuguese. “Reis, you’ve been foozled, lumbered, buggered! Most expensive damned pieces of railway machinery ever brought into Africa, by God, and all they’ll do is sit there. … What are they, pieces of sculpture?”

Cocktails at the Central Hotel had become something of a trial since the locomotives had arrived. There was nothing to do but fix them, make them run.

The problem with the rabble outside was that its European complement was composed of small, petty men. If Smythe-Hancock was the worst, the margin was a small one. They were still, after all these years, waiting for him to fail. How, he wondered, could they have failed to grasp the one key element in his personality? He knew the answer, of course, down in the core of his soul: it was simply that they wanted him to fail more than they wanted to know why he always succeeded. He didn’t like it, but it wasn’t something he could change. …

He turned away from the repair manual, oil-spotted and folded open to what he suspected was the correct page, and went back to the maze of rods, cogs and levers. Another hour and he’d have it mastered. He was confident of that. He’d make the damn thing work all right. And that was what they didn’t understand about Reis, that he never questioned the advisability of trying nor entertained at any length the possibility of failure.

Arnaldo’s head appeared upside down over the rim of the boiler funnel, dark and featureless against the still bright medallion of sky.

“My God, you’re going to die down there! I’m about to pass out just from waiting. … I mean it!”

“I think it’s ready.” He climbed shakily up the toeholds riveted to the boiler plate and rested his elbows on the rim, the blood draining out of his head, his sight momentarily gone. The soft breeze stroked his face, chilled his soaked jumpsuit against his skin. He breathed deeply, hearing the voices of the onlookers taking notice of his reappearance. It couldn’t be more than one hundred degrees now that he was out of the boiler. He took a deep breath and climbed down to the ground slowly, steadying himself.

A few minutes later Arnaldo began to shovel coal into the firebox. Alves manned the controls. Outside the Europeans were laughing at the two of them, sweating, struggling. The fire was roaring. …

The locomotive chugged slowly down the spur with Arnaldo gently patting Alves’ thick, broad shoulders. As they climbed down in the shade of a grove of tall trees at the end of the spur two hundred yards from the crowd, Arnaldo swore softly in admiration and the two solemnly shook hands.

“Let’s get cleaned up,” Arnaldo said, “and go get a drink. There’s something I’ve got to tell you. …”

The early-evening crowd at the Central Hotel bar was well dressed, smelled of bay rum and perspired elegantly beneath the huge, slowly revolving ceiling fans. The Central’s lounge was replete with potted palms, beaded curtains, a long polished zinc bar and a nice haze of cigarette smoke. Ice from a loudly laboring device behind the bar clinked in glasses. It was said that everybody who was anybody in Luanda met for drinks twice a day at the Central, a broad claim that could be stretched to cover explorers, big-game hunters, traders, English tourists, German spies with hard, expressionless eyes on the riches of the colony, anybody else after the fast killing.

Arnaldo claimed a table against the wall. When the whiskies with soda arrived Alves took a long sip, lit one of his daily hundred cigarettes and leaned back in the cane chair. “And what is it you have to tell me? Some wonderful bit of good news, no doubt?” He leaned forward nervously, resting his elbows on the tabletop. He heard Smythe-Hancock braying in the lobby. The sound made his stomach queasy. He was afraid of Smythe-Hancock, not without reason.

“Not … exactly, Alves,” Arnaldo said. He recognized the developing situation. He was about to play Sancho Panza to Alves’ Don, pointing out still another windmill. Alves was looking around the room, eyes flickering restlessly, as if scouting out a stratagem or an ambush. The next table was occupied by a group of scrupulously groomed young American oil engineers. They were the new breed drawn to Angola, full of non-European optimism and what was generally agreed to be tireless determination, working on the oil concessions. He caught Arnaldo’s eye and nodded toward the boisterous table.

“I think I like the Americans,” he said. “They’re not like our European friends.” He gestured minutely, barely fluttering his fingertips at the rest of the room. “The Americans look to the future, you see? Our other friends look backward. … It’s a new world, I’m convinced of that, full of new ideas, new opportunities.” He sipped at the whiskey. “So tell me the news which is not exactly wonderful.”

“Well, actually it concerns your backward-looking Europeans and your forward-looking business deals with the Americans—” He stopped his voice on the rise, questioning.

“Their contention is that the locomotives are too heavy for the bridges … that the bridges will collapse beneath them! Alves, I’ve seen their stress tables, which prove conclusively that the bridges absolutely will come crashing down. …” Arnaldo shrugged disconsolately, shook his dark, curly head.

“That can’t be.” Alves stubbed out the cigarette, shook his head. What the hell was a stress table? He couldn’t do everything. …

“Well, you can’t run the risk,” Arnaldo said with finality. “My God, I can see it now, mangled bodies, railway cars broken like toys at the bottom of the ravine …”

“Ah, you have an excess of imagination—”

“From you, what a joke!” A rueful smile crossed his dark, smooth, troubled face. “You can’t send those locomotives across those bridges,” Arnaldo repeated. “Innocent people, unsuspecting—didn’t you know the Americans made their trains heavier?”

“Arnaldo, calm yourself.” He waited, patting his friend’s arm, waiting for his own quiet to come, then engulf Arnaldo. “The problem is not with the locomotives.” He sighed, staring at the tip of another cigarette with its beard of gray ash. “The problem is with the bridges. I know nothing of bridges.” He shrugged, palms up. “Bridges … what to do, what to do …” He spoke so softly that Arnaldo lost the words.

“Do you want me to acquire these stress tables they speak of? Perhaps you could interpret them, see that these experts are wrong about these bridges?”

“But what difference would it make?” Alves was striving to conceal his anxiety. “Consider the situation, Arnaldo. The locomotives are useless if they cannot cross the bridges. Am I right? Of course I am. And we cannot accept that. They were purchased on my authorization. I have examined the railway bridges at first hand. I have touched the braces and underpinnings with these callused hands. … They seem perfectly solid to me.” He pursed his lips, the dark eyes glittering behind his round spectacles. Arnaldo was familiar with the process. Alves was convincing himself, creating confidence out of a very bad situation. Another man would have written it all off, chalked it up to experience. But not Alves.

He stared unblinking at his old friend. “We shall see … that the bridges will hold!” He was whispering, emphasizing each word like a canny welterweight punching to the body. The metamorphosis was complete: Alves believed.

“But why will they? It was Arnaldo’s last gesture. “If the mathematics say they won’t …”

“Because …” And Alves searched his friend’s eyes for the clincher, turned back within himself, and it came to him, a prideful gesture, an impulse: “Because, my friend, tomorrow Engineer Alves Reis and his wife will take the locomotive across the High Bridge. And the bridge will hold … if my life has any meaning, the bridge will hold.”

Arnaldo quietly considered his friend, who was hunched forward, hands flat on the table, waiting for his capitulation. Logic told Arnaldo that tomorrow would find Reis a dead man … but, then, logic had never bad much to do with Alves Reis. Finally, he sighed, surrendering. “Well,” he said, “I hope you’re right.” When they left, Smythe-Hancock was standing in the doorway. He nodded, smirking.

In the street outside the hotel they stood breathing deeply of the cool night air.

“Have the locomotive stoked and ready, Arnaldo. We will begin at ten o’clock. … Station Number Two—it’s nearest the High Bridge.” He shook Arnaldo’s hand. “Bring your confidence with you!”

“I know what you are,” Arnaldo said. “You are a confidence man. …”

They laughed at the small joke.

It was well past midnight when he reached his home in the Upper Town. With the sudden, new whiff of danger he saw his house as if for the first, or last, time … the sweet-smelling garden and cloistered courtyard surrounded by the customary high whitewashed walls which had long ago been intended to keep the slaves from wandering off. Euphorbia trees cast deep blue shadows in the moonlight, and a nightbird splashed mysteriously in the tiny, decorative pond. Alves stood for a moment in the stillness. When he had such a moment of peace, rare in his hectic, pushing, searching life, Alves could not quite keep from looking back at its remarkable, prospectless beginnings. What would his father have said had he stood beside his son, seen the handsome old house and known young Alves as Engineer Reis? He shook his head. He shrugged his heavy shoulders, took off his spectacles to rub his tired eyes and went inside.

Maria and their sons Virgilio and Guilhermo were sleeping. The baby Antonio was in his crib in the nursery. He bent over his sons’ small beds, kissed their cheeks, gently removed a small thumb from between moist lips. In the large bedroom with the massive, rough-hewn, canopied bedstead, Maria slept peacefully, her small dark head resting on a forearm, her tiny hand clenched in a fist. The thin sheet was molded to the soft round contours of her body. On another night he would undoubtedly have fondled her breasts, watching the large, dark-brown nipples swell in her half-sleep, watching her instincts make her body moist and receptive … and then he would have taken her, leisurely, with maximum pleasure for them both. On another night, when the morning to come was only another morning. But not tonight.

That very night, as the patrons of the bar at the Central Hotel gossiped among themselves, as Arnaldo stopped in a favorite pub for a nightcap and fell into conversation with cronies, the news of the coming morning’s drama began to spread. A good deal of the smart money in Luanda was being wagered against Alves Reis in his match with the High Bridge. It was, the smart money argued, a golden opportunity to recoup losses suffered in Engineer Reis’s match with the locomotive that afternoon.

Alves summarily rejected the possibility that he and his wife would plummet to their deaths with the huge locomotive as their coffin. Still, he slept fitfully, gently haunted by the caprices of memory, moments of his life thrown up like targets in a shooting gallery, frozen still, while he squeezed the trigger of emotion and recollection. He was not a sentimental man, nor a reflective man. But that night, as he lay listening to the rhythmic breathing of his dear Maria next to him, the flood of the past swept across him; he could not hold it back. …

He turned the gilt-framed photograph of the happy young newlyweds—Alves and Maria, he with a glazed smile, lips clenched in nervous rigor, face powdered dry in the intense heat of the photographer’s studio, hair polished ebony and parted in the middle, heavy eyebrows knitted in unconscious concern; she with glowing embers in her eyes, an eager tilt to her head as she grasped for the future, a hint of adolescence as she glanced at her husband.

He wished he weren’t in precisely the spot he found himself, but he forced himself to consider it from another angle. His eyes roved toward the photograph: he was sure as hell better off now than he had been that day in Lisbon. He had learned a great deal and accomplished at least as much, the train and the bridge aside.

The dim light of morning reached the Upper Town first, turning it slowly from shadowy midnight blue through shades of gray as the trees and buildings and walls were revealed bit by bit as if smoke were being blown away. Alves yawned, stretched, set fire to the morning’s first cigarette.

He soaked awhile in the deep tub and then began ceremoniously to complete his toilet, like a bullfighter readying himself for what could in the nature of things be his last fight. He meticulously clipped his mustache and snipped an errant hair or two from his nostrils, then waxed his mustache until it shone like onyx. Carefully he pomaded his black hair, combed it smooth to his scalp, brushed his even teeth to a new luster, talcumed his body, applied generous ladlings of bay rum to his face and neck.

Engulfed in his robe, he went to the bed and sat down beside Maria, waking her with a gentle touch.

“Maria, my darling wife, wake up. We have much to do this lovely day.” Her eyes came sleepily open; her fingers closed like an infant’s on his arm. She smiled up at him. Never, he reflected, had there been such trust. … “Today, my beloved, we ride the American locomotive across the bridge on the Melanje line.” He bent to kiss her cheek. “We have been chosen to inaugurate the service, my dearest, and I want you at my side. … And I myself will be at the controls.” He smiled, he hoped reassuringly.

“Oh, Alves!” she whispered excitedly. “I know, I will wear my new white dress—the silk shantung. And my white hat with the crimson plume! Will there be a great crowd to see us?”

He nodded. “Quite a large crowd at the bridge, I should think. Everyone will be there, never fear.” Smythe-Hancock wagering his packet, no doubt, he reflected.

As he methodically dressed in the fitted white linen suit, he heard her humming gaily to herself, making her own preparations. He was, despite his occasional lecherous impulses, deeply in love with and devoted to his wife. She had never doubted him, never weakened in her support; and for him loyalty was a virtue above all others. Now, this particularly fateful morning, he didn’t think twice about deceiving her. She played no part whatsoever in his business life, knew nothing of how he conducted his affairs.

If, he reasoned, as he buttoned up his trousers and bent to tie his shoe laces, if they were going to their deaths on the High Bridge, then it was as it should be: they would die together, still trusting, still in love. She had made her husband her life. If life was to end, so be it.

But, of course, there was no point in morbid thoughts. They were not going to die, he told himself, not today. His hands were shaking badly as he tried to knot his cravat. Quietly he cursed the locomotives. Already they had cost him the better part of a year. It had been nine months since the dinner party, since he had told Chaves to go ahead and buy the American locomotives. It had taken seven months for delivery, another month to make them ready, another month to test them—and now this damned business with the stress tables! Well, the hell with it. …

It was time for a grand gesture. Impulsively he’d committed himself to make it. He shrugged. It was José and the cadaver all over again. …

If in fact the locomotives were too heavy and therefore useless, Angola Railways was ruined. It was brutally simple. Too large an investment had been made and the responsibility would undoubtedly be laid at Engineer Reis’ doorstep. It was the sort of charge that could never be lived down. He would become “the man who bankrupted the Angola Railways.” And there would surely be an investigation into his qualifications. The fraudulent Oxford diploma would quickly be revealed for what it was; any official engineering examination would prove insurmountable. Either ride the train to glory, or ride it to the bottom of the chasm. No choice.

“Alves, look—I have a surprise for you.” Maria’s voice trembled with pride. He knew that she would follow him, insist on accompanying him, even if she knew the risk involved. He composed his face into a mask of contentment and turned. “See, our sons will share today’s honor!” On either side of Maria, in the crescents of her arms, stood their white-suited sons, miniatures of Alves, aged five and three, smiling solemnly at their father. The baby would be left behind.

“Maria,” he said softly, “we must not …”

At once he saw her excitement and happiness begin to fade. The three sets of eyes, the three solemn faces with quivering lips blurred before him; he felt tears pulsing as he tried to hold them back.

“Of course,” he said, hugging them, struggling to control himself, “of course, we will all ride the train! It will be a great adventure, a great treat!”

Feeling the warmth of their bodies against him, hearing his children’s cries of delight, smelling Maria’s perfumed sweetness and kissing her lowered eyelids, Alves bore the brunt of his decision and realized with a chill what it was to be truly alone.

At the offices of Director Chaves they met Arnaldo, whose voice was stuck in a loud, panic-stricken whisper. “Alves, reconsider, for God’s sake—”

“Please, Arnaldo, calm yourself. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that can go wrong.” He took his friend by the shoulders, fixed his eyes. “I went over the stress tables last night,” he lied, voice at the breaking point. “Why else would I be willing to take Maria and the boys with me? Would I risk their lives?”

“Yes. If you had to,” Arnaldo replied numbly. “I don’t know …”

Alves glared at him and gestured to Chaves’ anteroom, where the director was awkwardly making conversation with Maria. “Now get Chaves in here so I can tell him what’s going on—that the fears are baseless, that it is a gala occasion and should be treated as such. … And get three white horses for us and have them ready at the station. We’ll get there in Chaves’ limousine. And see that the locomotive is running with a good head of steam.” He smiled finally, beginning to be caught up in his own bravado.

The same explanation of the morning’s program left Chaves unconvinced but unable to circumvent it. He no longer knew what to believe, but then Reis had never failed him. The three adults and two children settled into the back seat of the Rolls-Royce limousine, the children bouncing on the jump seats, Maria composed and oblivious, Chaves sweating profusely, Alves monitoring his rushing heartbeats.

The word of the run across the High Bridge had spread like a brushfire during the night and early morning. Now, as the dusty black automobile rolled over the cobbled streets, beneath the green sheltering trees, he saw that the regular morning routine of the city had been interrupted; the streets were empty, the vendors were nowhere in sight, all as if a terrible plague had paid Luanda a visit.

The crimson had faded completely from the cliffs, the sun was its customary gold, the sky a brilliant blistered blue.

At the station in the Upper City he fixed a grin in place, shepherded his family to the three white horses Arnaldo had waiting. The crowd of natives seemed to be raising their arms in unison, shaking their fists, cheering loudly. They might as well have stood behind a pane of thick, soundproof glass. He was moving in an almost senseless trance, mechanically, like a man who marches quickly to face the firing squad, already dead.

“The horses, Alves,” Arnaldo said.

“Right.” He turned to Maria. “Up you go, my dear,” and he assisted her into the sidesaddle. She mounted lightly, her elegant hat with its dashing furled brim and rakish plume at just the right tilt. He tried to imprint her forever in his memory as she looked down at him from the great white stallion. “Arnaldo,” he said, turning to his friend, “would you be good enough to walk the children’s horse? We don’t want an accident.” Arnaldo nodded and took the reins as Alves lifted his sons onto the broad white back, the huge saddle that comfortably engulfed both boys. “Don’t be afraid. While he is a very large horsey, I have looked him in the eye and I know that he is very gentle.” He mounted his own white horse and they set off in single file, at a majestic pace, toward the waiting locomotive, crouching like a great steaming weapon where the rise of track met the horizon in a heat haze.

The blacks in their robes and rags grew in numbers as the procession drew closer to the locomotive. The crowd swarmed in behind the children’s horse and seemed to sweep the riders inevitably forward toward the train. Alves blinked. Each time he did so the bloody damned thing seemed to leap larger in his view, gargantuan. … What kind of bridges must they have in America? My God … He turned to Maria and smiled. She was happy, even with the dust caking her new dress; she was radiant, smiling, proud. They were approaching the large knot of onlookers gathered about the train engine, but even then there were few Europeans, just a jostling gaggle of blacks. Then it struck him: the Europeans were all at the bridge … waiting. Best seats in the house.

He was vaguely aware of the hissing and clanging of the locomotive. They dismounted at a seemly distance and waited while Director Chaves’ limousine slowly parted the crowd. Chaves beckoned to him.

“Do you have any idea what’s going on here? Any idea at all?”

“They think it’s a celebration,” Alves said. “I am in charge of the first ceremonial voyage of the American locomotive. … It’s an opportunity to get away from work, to get drunk. They don’t need a big excuse, Director.” He motioned to Chaves’ driver. “Go on, my friend, you don’t want to miss the show!”

Time was drawing lamentably short. The crowd moved away in the wake of the Rolls-Royce, following it toward the other audience, those in the dress circle at the edge of the chasm. Alves knew what they were doing, how money was being wagered and odds were constantly shifting. When the word reached the bridge that Engineer Reis was to be accompanied by his wife and children, the bookmakers would make a sudden change. Havoc. He caught himself wishing he’d gotten a thousand or so down himself.

He helped Maria into the cab of the locomotive. “Alves,” she said, “I had no idea it would be so big!”

He nodded, received the boys handed up by Arnaldo. “Thank you,” he said to Arnaldo. “Mark my word, we will drink French champagne at lunch today!” He adjusted the controls, took a long look up the slight incline to the cliff edge. He wanted to be traveling as fast as possible when he reached the bridge. There was no scientific basis involved; it was merely the quickest way to the other side. Or wherever they were going. …

The children were settled; Maria had braced herself against them, wedging all three bodies into a corner. They had adjusted their goggles to guard against the flying sparks. Alves looked at them. He felt faint.

Quickly he released the brake and felt the jarring of the three flatbed cars strung out behind him, cables smashing together, grinding. He stripped off his coat, slid his hands into the heavy fireman’s gloves and began to pitch wood from the chest into the firebox. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Arnaldo jogging along, shouting.

“I’m coming with you.” Arnaldo made a leap and managed to get his foot onto the first step and his fingers hooked around a railing.

Alves moved immediately to the top of the stairs, blocking Maria’s view. “No,” he shouted into the steam and the wind and the rattle of the wheels on the tracks so close beneath them. “Get off, I cannot allow this.”

Arnaldo clung to two rails, peered upward, his black suit dusty brown. “I must,” he cried, cords straining in his neck.

“You and I,” Alves said, his head leaning close to Arnaldo’s, “we’re finished if you insist—the risk is too great. …” The locomotive was gathering speed, the wind tearing at Arnaldo. “Off,” Alves screamed. And with a quick movement of his forearm he planted a fist in Arnaldo’s exposed stomach. Arnaldo dropped away and bounced in the dust. Without another look back, Alves turned back to the pressure gauges, which were still below the danger level. The boiler plating was so thick—that must be why it’s so godawful heavy. … He fed wood into the fire, squinting, feeling the hellish blast of the boiler on his face, feeling his face grow hot, then numb. And he began to smell his own hair singeing, his eyebrows curling and sticking to the back of his hand when he brushed sweat away.

Sparks like fireworks showered past him, blowing wildly from the huge black funnel; soot filled the air like a ghastly exhalation from the nether world; bits of burning ash seared holes in his shirt, trousers, arms. He had imagined it would be different, stately. And he hadn’t counted on what the fear would do to him, how it would galvanize and transform him into a creature who was firing himself as well as the locomotive, one who could endure pain and agony rather than a quiet waiting for the end. … The pressure gauges had slipped across into the red danger zones. He turned to see Maria. She was shielding herself and the boys. The three-year-old was crying, but she held him with his face to her breast; the older boy was staring out at the world in clear wonder. Maria, though taken aback by the sudden change in her husband’s appearance, still regarded it all as an adventure, though quite possibly one that had gotten rather out of hand. Still, it matched so well her picture of Alves: heroic, fearless, undaunted. … She smiled at him, an encouraging look. The woman is mad, he thought, devoted but mad. He saw the crowd undulating through the heat waves less than a hundred yards away; he bent to his stoking again.

Meanwhile Arnaldo regained his footing and made a dash for the engine. Legs and heart pumping in a frenzy, the dust choking him, steam burning him, he had almost no breath left. He gave a final surge, hurled himself upward at the back of the locomotive, clung for his life only inches above the coupling. All of his strength concentrated in his arms and hands, he flattened himself against the black steel and desperately raised his legs above the track flashing past below. He was going with Alves; there was no other way.

Inside the cab, Alves had slumped back, his clothing covered with burns and ashes. The throttle was full open, the firebox overloaded; the pressure gauges had gone as far as they could. He recognized the baobabs and euphorbias growing in the distance, craned his neck to see ahead. The fragile structure of the bridge jutted into view, heading off toward space, and as they reached the crowd he picked out familiar faces in the flash and blur, saw banknotes waved in the air, calabashes of grappa tilted over thirsty mouths, heard vague distant shouts. He felt his burn-tightened face crack in a smile.

The locomotive reached the bridge at top speed, in a horrific rush of sound that blended with the shining morning sun, the vast emptiness yawning below the narrow steel thread that seemed so fragile to bear such a cumbersome, hurtling monster. Smoke blackened his view when he sought the sun overhead; the wind grabbed at his hair and twisted it. The bridge gleamed like an assassin’s blade.

The moment froze forever in his mind, soundless, like one of his photographs. He was standing outside the event, which now had a life of its own. He saw it whole and it was fine. The exquisite Angolan morning, the grandeur of the two facing cliffs held together by the span of bridgework, the hollow echoing space between and below, the mixture of dense foliage and jagged rocks dropping down to a gently tumbling stream. The train reached the bridge and like a projectile began its steady journey along the line of steel, the smoke curling back like a black aviator’s scarf unfurled in the brisk breeze. From a distance there would be an absolute quiet to the scene, a peaceful progress, the machine age making itself felt in Africa.

In the middle of the bridge it became cool in the cabin. The wind coming up the canyon from the ocean freshened, touched their faces. Like the hand of God, Alves thought. At the back of the locomotive Arnaldo still clung, paralyzed by fear. Behind him the crowd was shrinking into a shapeless, mute creature, finally fading into the landscape. Now his eyes were closed, his lips moved, but he could not hear his own prayers.

As Alves listened to the creak and straining of the bridge over the wind, he began to realize that the bridge was indeed going to hold. Maria’s eyes were closed behind her goggles. Alves saw that she was praying. He leaned toward her, touched his blistered lips to her smudged forehead. He could hear the children laughing at last, pointing into space, enjoying the thrill of the ride. “Thank God,” he murmured, “thank God. I was right.”

Slowly Alves braked the locomotive. The bridge was behind them. The wheels screeched on the track, grinding, sparks rolling away like cinders, burning pebbles. They remained in the cab, in the stillness, draped like dolls over railings. He wiped his face with a silk handkerchief and the goggles were stripped away, leaving them all with masks of fresh, clean flesh.

Maria touched his cheek. “My darling, your face … oh, my dear.” She pressed her face against his chest, only half comprehending the truth of the matter.

“But it was a great honor,” he whispered, “to inaugurate this great train, was it not?”

“Yes, yes,” she said, her full lips muffled against his shirt. “A great honor.” The laughing children struggled down the steps, leaping, tumbling to the ground.

“Uncle! Uncle!” The older boy’s voice piped clearly.

Arnaldo, shirt torn, streaks of blood running across his hands and staining his cuffs, staggered into view. “Alves,” he croaked, a crooked grin stamped across his ashen face. “Alves, I came anyway … on the back of the locomotive.” He laughed and shook his head, abashed.

Alves wobbled to the ground, helped Maria down and stared at him for a long time.

Together, like children bound by a blood oath, the three embraced in the shadow of the vast American locomotive. As the tears and laughter slowly subsided, Alves kissed them both and moved off toward the bridge.

He wasn’t sure of his legs just yet, but he needed to be alone, to stand by the bridge, to see where he had been. He stood at the precipice, stared down into the void, heard the wind whistling in the steel. Blown toward him from across the vast chasm he heard, faintly, as if in a dream, the cheering of the crowd. …

Sitting disconsolately in the deep leather chair in his office, a mere six months after his triumphant return to Lisbon, Alves Reis was not prepared to announce that the European opportunities sketched by Adolf Hennies had been illusory, but he had decided it was not quite the bed of roses he had foreseen. Primarily he had developed a most sincere concern: how was he ever going to get rich? It was a warm, humid day, and he loosened his tie, flipped on the fan overhead, adjusted the louvers on the window shutters and fitted a cigarette into a black Dunhill holder. He leaned back and reflected on the state of things. …

To begin with, he’d thought he was rich. With operating capital of seventy-five thousand dollars—quite a stupendous amount of money for a young Portuguese in 1922—his return had been gaudy, a masterpiece of the nouveau riche impulse, and he’d enjoyed it enormously. He formed a corporation, A. V. Alves Reis Lda. (Limitado). For a luxurious twelve-room flat, including a music room for a new Steinway and a billiard room where he could entertain his business associates, he paid a veritable king’s ransom—one thousand escudos per month, or fifty dollars. The household staff over which Maria presided included a cook, a maid, a butler and her own private, full-time seamstress. Alves indulged in a chauffeur, who drove him through Lisbon’s narrow, winding streets in either of his two Nash automobiles, Nashes because Alves Reis Lda. had quickly purchased the Portuguese dealership. He furnished his home and his suite of offices in a baronial manner—brass-studded leather couches, hand-carved breakfronts twenty feet long, appointments of Carrara marble and onyx. All in all it was a staggeringly effective front.

But, Alves reflected, wiping sweat from his forehead with a nicotine-stained forefinger, life can be supported by either of two contradictory principles—namely, illusion and reality. He saw it now with frightening clarity and recognized that it had been with him ever since the day he created his own Oxford diploma, affixed the fictional signatures and found a gullible notary who gave it his stamp. He had based his entire Angolan adventure on that diploma—clearly an illusion. And he had emerged rich, respected and well launched. No one had been harmed. The illusion, the appearance, had created the reality because he could personally back it up. It was the way business was done: you bet on yourself—and he won, kept winning. He was good at it. It was a trick.

The problem that confronted him now was that while the illusion remained, the reality of his situation had gone straight to hell. He had looked up one day from his ledgers and with a depressing shock acknowledged to himself what he’d feared. Incredibly, he was going broke.

While it was Angola that had been the making of him, he could ironically look to the African promised land for the wellsprings of his current predicament. His unbridled faith in the future of the colony and in its presumed mineral deposits had led him to invest his cash reserves in the South Angola Mining Corporation. Not a ton of iron ore had yet issued forth, and the prospects were less hopeful by the day.

The financial pages made for grim reading. By late summer of 1923 Angola’s economy was approaching the dropping-off place, and daily he read the bad news in the pages of O Seculo. He watched with dismay verging on panic as the Ultramarino Bank of Portugal continued issuing specifically Angolan escudos at a rate that finally inflated them to the point where they were almost worthless in Angola and absolutely nonexchangeable anywhere else on earth. Currency could no longer be transferred by individuals or corporations from the colony to the mother country. Taken together, these two turns of events had delivered him to the brink of disaster.

Finally, fed up with the worry, he left the office and went walking along the harbor, watching the great ships riding at anchor. He could almost smell Africa on them. It set him longing. Maybe Maria had been right in the first place. They had always been happy in Angola. …

Director Chaves, his old benefactor from Luanda, had come to Lisbon well aware that history and time had reversed their roles. He still moved with the bullish rush, stared out from beneath the jutting gorillalike brow; he still gestured with thick-fingered, hairy fists. But his voice was that of a supplicant as he arrived unannounced and indifferently barbered at A. V. Alves Reis Lda.’s gleaming, polished, most deceptive office. The flower in his lapel was yesterday’s, brown-edged.

He hugged Alves impulsively. The faint aroma of brandy hung about him like shaving lotion. Alves, who practiced his English by reading the exploits of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, decided that Chaves had found himself in need of bottled courage. After a smiling exchange of pleasantries, remembrances from old friends in Luanda and a report that the mighty American locomotives were flourishing atop the bridges, Chaves slumped into a deep leather club chair.

“And now,” Alves said from behind his vast tycoon’s desk, gently inquisitive, “what has brought you all this way, Director?” Chaves’ face drooped glumly. “You’ve come to buy some new bridges!” Alves’ accompanying chuckle went unappreciated.

“Things are not good in Angola, Alves,” he growled characteristically, hunching forward in the chair. “It’s worse than you may have heard. … It touches us all, me and Terreira even, and that speaks for itself.” He sighed as if the reality was even now having difficulty sinking in. “And the railway …” The thought was too much for him to remain trapped in the chair. He bounded to the window and looked down at the carefully symmetrical pattern of the sidewalk tiles below. Goldsmiths lined the street, and after the openness of Luanda’s topography he felt as if he could reach out the window and across the way and steal a watch.

“I’ve read about that too, of course,” Alves said. It was true. The difficulties of his old employer, known officially as the Royal Trans-African Railway Company of Angola, known in the marketplace as Ambaca, had been recounted in tortured detail in the daily press. With the economy in shreds and tatters, Ambaca stock had fallen to a few escudos—literally pennies—per share. The shares he had bought before returning to Lisbon were symptomatic of his current predicament: they were worthless. Foreign investors who owned substantial blocks of stock and held large notes sensed either bankruptcy or a takeover opportunity or both. They were impatiently demanding money—unpaid dividends and interest on the notes.

Chaves ran through the brutal details as quickly as possible, huffing and puffing as if he were fading fast on the uphill slope. “What we need,” he concluded abruptly, spinning back from the window, hair on the wild side from anxious wanderings of his sausage-shaped fingers, “is some new blood! New investment, someone with vision and skill in putting off our creditors—someone with capital who can step in, take a firm hand, give us back the confidence we’ve lost. …” His dark eyes seemed to swell, pleading, pathetic.

“It is a difficult situation, Director,” Alves allowed sagely. He took a cigarette from an ebony box on his desk, offered them to Chaves, who was distractedly picking his large nose. “What’s your next step?” Chaves popped a match on his thumbnail and applied it with some vigor to the fragile Egyptian smoke.

“My associates and I met just before I left for Lisbon and we agreed unanimously … I have come all the way from Africa, Alves,” he said, his voice growing weighty, as if he were conferring an honor, “to find help for Ambaca. We agreed that you are the man to save Ambaca. You have the resources, the knowledge, the experience. …” He shrugged his huge shoulders.

“My God.”

“Aha, you may say ‘my God,’ but what can I say to my associates?”

“But my capital is … well, I have other investments, you understand.”

“You mean to say that it is a matter of liquidity?” Chaves threw the cigarette at a standing floor ashtray, narrowly missed.

“More or less.” Inwardly Alves cringed. Could such an opportunity be passing him by—the chance to control the Royal Trans-African Railway, the place he’d gotten his start? The poetry of it quickened his pulse. But of all times, why now? Chaves was applying for capital, precisely the ingredient Alves was searching for himself. The irony of it was indescribably painful. Only last week the Ultramarino Bank had done everything but laugh aloud at his loan application.

“You might be well advised to liquidate another investment in order to take advantage of this one. Ambaca is not all that sick a company. … To being with, there’s the hundred thousand dollars in the treasury—my God, billions of escudos the way things are going these days!”

“What hundred thousand dollars?” Alves asked. Chaves, taken by surprise, slid down in the club chair. Alves was now up and coming around the desk, a gleam in his eye. This, it occurred to him, must be the way real money men are struck by an idea.

“Why, the hundred thousand lent to Ambaca by the government here in Lisbon … to pay off the interest on all those notes, to keep the creditors from foreclosing. I thought you’d know of that.”

“How would I know about that? Believe me, there’s been nothing in the press about that.” Alves smashed out the cigarette stub and quickly fumbled another into his mouth. Be calm, he told himself, take your time. “Well, then, there is life in the firm. … That may change my opinion of it, as an opportunity for sound investment.”

“When will you know, Alves?”

“It depends, Director.” He forced himself down into a chair that matched Chaves’. He studied his manicured nails for a moment, running over his lines. “One of my guiding principles has been never to entrust my money to the possible mismanagement of others. No offense, Director, but … but if I am able to control matters, then a situation may look considerably more attractive to me. Just between the two of us, you do see my point?”

“Of course, certainly.” Chaves wriggled in discomfort, tried to work up a conspiratorial nod. “You have a plan?”

“Were I to find this opportunity sufficiently tempting, what would be required to gain control of Ambaca? So that I might feel comfortable, you understand. Remembering that I am the fellow who may be throwing the rope to the drowning man.” He squinted at Chaves. His ash fell on his very expensive suit.

“Forty thousand dollars,” Chaves said.

Alves smiled, rose, consulted his watch.

“Let me sleep on it,” he said, enigmatic. “Now I must excuse myself. I’ve called a meeting of the board of one of my interests.” He took Chaves by the elbow and propelled him to the heavy oak door. “Meet me here tomorrow at noon. I expect you to respect our confidences, Director.”

“I will speak with no one else before we meet tomorrow, in any case.”

Alves slapped Chaves’ back. Encouragingly.

That evening the illusion was in full flower though the audience of two knew too much to swallow any of it. The lamp hanging over the billiard table moved in the breeze from the open window; shadows flickered across the green baize; a pale-blond cue drew back from the circle of light, drawing tension with it. Alves miscued. The ball leaped as if victimized by a rude gesture, clattered away on the floor. “Shit!” He slammed his cue into the rack and glared through the darkness surrounding the table like a jungle night. “What do I know about billiards?”

Arnaldo sighed. “Alves, billiards should make you relax—that’s the point.”

“Why should doing some idiotic thing I know nothing about make me relax?” A match flared in the darkness. “What matters is Chaves’ suggestion. I’ve got to get my hands on that hundred thousand in the Ambaca treasury. … It’s the answer to all our current problems, the answer to my prayers.”

Arnaldo leaned over the table and executed a neat bank shot with the two remaining ivory balls. He watched the slow, steady trajectories. The clear-cut parameters of the game appealed to his conservative nature. “Where can you possibly raise the forty thousand you need to get the hundred thousand? And why in the world do you want to control a nearly bankrupt African railway? You mystify me, Alves.”

“For the last time,” he croaked, “I do not want to run the railroad! I want the bloody hundred thousand!”

“Please, Alves, the veins in your neck—”

“Well, then, don’t excite me! Listen carefully—I need to control the company to get the money.”

Alves made a strangled sound, coughed on cigarette smoke. He was finishing the day’s fifth pack. Arnaldo made another shot. Alves read his face, knew what it meant. He could always depend on Alves to think of something. …

“If—I say if—there were some way to use the hundred thousand in the Ambaca treasury to buy Ambaca itself … I need forty thousand of it to buy Ambaca.”

“That makes no sense. A riddle.”

“Sherlock Holmes tells me that if all possibilities are exhausted but one, then that one, however improbable, must be the solution.”

“Well, I don’t see it.” Arnaldo leaned on the upright cue, chin on the backs of his hands, staring at Alves.

“Slow boats, fast checks. Voilà! The forty thousand.” Alves broke off chuckling to himself.

“Not with such a large amount, Alves! What if something went wrong?” Arnaldo’s shock, mingled with a wise man’s trepidation, gleamed in the dark like a warning beacon.

“Wait,” Alves cautioned him. “Think. Arrange the perspective. Now, just when things look darkest, along comes salvation by way of Luanda. The money exists. I am being begged to take it! But there is one small obstacle, the need for forty thousand dollars … and only for a short time, when I will then as the man who controls the railroad have access to the hundred thousand, out of which I can make up the forty thousand I have used to buy the railroad! Do you follow me? Well, then, why not by the means of our special system?” He waited for the logic of it to dawn on Arnaldo. “Chaves would not have been provided in our time of need if we were not meant to use him. He has thrown us the rope!”

“But such large sums—”

“Has anything ever gone wrong before?”

“No.” Arnaldo shrugged, muttering.

“Well, then. There is no time to lose. A bold stroke now will bring it all right. And who will be hurt? Eh, tell me—no one! Listen to me, Arnaldo!” He shook Arnaldo’s sleeve. Sweat beaded on Alves’ forehead.

“I am listening.”

“We are in the materialistic world.” Alves spoke very quietly now. “We have chosen it, we are suited to it. And in our world there are neither honest men nor rogues—only victors and vanquished. I know which I choose to be. … It’s the law of the jungle.”

Eventually the faithful Arnaldo saw the light.

Alves was rather pleased with the notion of slow boats and fast checks.

Owning a Nash dealership—an American-based operation in a European country—had made it useful for A. V. Alves Reis Lda. to open a checking account at the prestigious National City Bank of New York. Knowing full well the value and protean uses of money, Alves issued checks in special circumstances “on our New York bank.” It went down well with provincial creditors who had never dealt with a New World financial firm before. More importantly it allowed him the free use of the National City Bank’s money for a week or more at a time, counting for an average eight-day sea crossing, Lisbon to New York. Write a check on a Tuesday, have the money working all week—during which time a killing might wisely be made to cover the check and provide for a generous profit—and cable the appropriate amount to New York the following Monday. And if the plans took longer than anticipated, the bounced check would not reappear in Lisbon until the sixteenth day at the earliest and more likely on, say, the twentieth day. At which time one professed astonishment to the creditor, cursed slovenly American clerical errors and confidently suggested he need only redeposit the check, assuring him the National City Bank would be written a stern letter of reprimand. Another eight days’ use of the interest-free money had been granted, a month in all to raise the money to cover the check. Eventually the check was good; it was a foolproof system. He knew that: he’d tested it repeatedly, though not on so grand a scale.

When Director Chaves turned up at the office the next day, a chipper, nattily turned-out Alves greeted him with a broad smile and the news that, having slept on it, he had decided to help his old friends out of their difficulties. The shares of Royal Trans-African Railway stock were already being purchased. Within twenty-four hours Alves Reis would have control and in another few hours would institute the move to vote himself chairman of the company. After all, he voted the majority of the shares himself. Director Chaves was so relieved he nearly collapsed.

Within a month the firm of A. V. Alves Reis Limitado was considerably revived. Unopposed in his lunge at the chairmanship, Alves covered his check and used the remaining sixty thousand dollars in the Ambaca treasury to buy outright control of the South Angola Mining Corporation. Having grown wonderfully adept at touting whatever he was interested in at a given moment, he went to work pushing the mining stock. The shares rose on cue, even in the face of the company’s continuing lack of productivity. New investments were lured to both Ambaca and the mining operation. He was diversifying. His next enterprise was the exporting of German beer to Angola. But when he returned to Lisbon from Munich there was a surprise in store for him. He was going to jail. …

Alves screamed as if bitten by a rabid dog. “You tell me I am wanted by the police! Have you completely lost your mind? What do the police want with me, Reis of Reis Limitado?”

It was the fifth of July 1924, and the sun was turning the office into an oven even with the windows thrown wide open. Arnaldo stood before him in a shirt that clung wetly to his back, in trousers that had lost their crease, reminding Alves of no one so much as his late undertaker father.

“Let me speak, Alves,” he said softly.

“Stop mumbling, then!” Alves paced across the carpet, took a limp cigarette from the ebony box and lit it, inhaling deeply. “All right, all right. I am perfectly calm. See, my hand is like a rock.” He held out his right hand. Both men stared at it. It quaked as if the catastrophe of 1755 that destroyed most of Lisbon was repeating itself in the streets outside. Arnaldo looked up from the chair Alves had pushed him into. “Stupid test,” Alves declared, jerking his hand away. “It proves nothing.” He puffed hard on the cigarette, yanked the silk handkerchief out of his breast pocket and wiped his face. “Why isn’t this fan turned on? It just sits there. …” He gestured imploringly to an unjust deity and turned the switch on the base of the heavy black oscillating fan, which hummed slowly to life. “That’s what fans are for, Arnaldo, they are for when it’s hot. Are you going to tell me what’s going on here?”

“The Ambaca deal,” Arnaldo said, his voice too high, catching in his throat. “Two of the directors, not Chaves, but two here in Portugal, have gone to the police with the charge that you embezzled the Ambaca treasury, one hundred thousand dollars American, for your personal use. … The police were here yesterday with a warrant for your arrest.” The words came hard, and Alves strained to hear them over the racket of the fan. Impatiently he jabbed at the switch, turning it off.

“I am simply appalled. … To be perfectly frank, it smacks of a vendetta. Or jealousy. Or politics.” He groaned. “A dastardly attempt to discredit me.” He marched to the window and rested his head against the pane of glass, eyes closed, sweat dripping from his face. “Ah, fuck! What do they want from me? I’ve dealt with their creditors, bought time. … The company is better off now than when Chaves came stumbling in here like a lost soul looking for salvation—and now the miserable bastards turn on me! Christ, what am I supposed to do?”

“Alves?”

“Yes, yes, yes. What else? Maria has run off with the butcher? Oh God, poor Maria, she’ll die of humiliation. …”

“They are coming back today. They’ll be taking you to … Oporto.” He gripped the arms of the club chair to steady himself.

“Oporto!” Alves shouted, livid again. “Oporto? A city where I am unknown, without friends—”

“The two directors are also directors of an Oporto bank. As far as I can tell they simply pulled some strings to have you brought to the Oporto jail. …”

“Oh my God,” Alves said mournfully, “I am in the hands of my enemies. … Is there no justice, Arnaldo, after all I have done for Portugal?”

Arnaldo blinked helplessly.

A heavy, insistent knock came at the door.

The Oporto jail was worse than he’d expected.

The cell was small, dank, oppressive. Confinement was a constant, desperate goad. At times he would vomit at the loss of freedom, the inability to move here and there at will. The jailers were an uncongenial lot who looked on him as just another swindler. It rained all the time in Oporto—far to the north of his hospitable Lisbon—and a peculiar fungus grew in the corners of the cell. The toilet was a disgrace. And since no one in the Oporto jail paid much attention to what he had to say by way of an explanation of his unhappy state, he was left with only himself to talk to. Which he did and which inevitably led to rumors that the swindler from Africa had gone mad and frothed at the mouth.

Maria, growing ever larger with her fourth pregnancy, came to visit him, and while he denounced his accusers as political enemies plotting his destruction she dissolved in tears of support and incomprehension. She didn’t know what he was talking about, but that didn’t matter. She believed him; she believed in him. When she took her leave, he frequently was raving, smashing his fists against the walls of his cell.

As time went by, however, Alves grappled with his anxieties, tamed them. There were quiet times, times when he settled back on his board cot and read the newspapers and magazines Arnaldo brought. Not since his student days had he been confronted with enough solitude to take his own measure as an adult, to lose himself in reading about the world—the great world. He read and he analyzed, page after page, indiscriminately, every word, and he began to take a broad view of what lay beyond the reach of his own fingertips. He began to educate himself all over again, this time widening the scope.

And he learned.

He learned that Lenin was dying just as Great Britain was recognizing the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, that Ramsay MacDonald was forming the first Labour government in London, that something called Teapot Dome was causing a great scandal in America, that Greece had been proclaimed a republic under someone named Venizelos, that a onetime German corporal called Hitler had been released from prison after serving only eight months of a five-year sentence, that the Italians had given a Fascist called Mussolini 65 percent of their votes, that a peculiar little Indian called Gandhi had fasted twenty-one days to protest the religious strife between the Hindus and the Moslems, that J. Edgar Hoover had been appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation in Washington, that Stalin and Zinoviev and Kamenev had allied themselves against Trotsky. … And to help with his English, he read a novel by Michael Arlen called The Green Hat, which Arnaldo told him was all the rage, and another called The Inimitable Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse, which he found quite enticing but incomprehensible. All of this brought him a certain calm, which he needed very badly, particularly following one of Maria’s visitations.

He read that the Ford automobile concern had produced its ten millionth vehicle, that a novelist named Kafka had died, that two men in Chicago were sentenced to life imprisonment for kidnapping and killing a twelve-year-old boy, that everyone in the world including his wife had gone wild over a game called mah-jongg, that there were an incredible two and one half million radios in use in the United States. … My God, it was such a big world, made even larger by his tiny cell.

It was the great world that occupied his mind between the frantic, nearly hysterical interludes when he was faced with the destruction of the life he had built in the years since they had all set sail in innocence and wonder for Angola. So long ago … And now in Oporto could it all be ending? Was this the whole story? He shook it off. Everything he’d been reading indicated that life was a matter of ups and downs, that a man was defeated only when he gave up. … The thought brought him a night’s sleep time and again. As a principle it was not to be despised, and he clung to it as he sought to touch bottom. Once he’d hit bottom he’d think of something. …

In the end, with money to raise for his defense and more money required for possible restitution payments to the Ambaca shareholders, he had no choice but to liquidate everything. He took pen and paper and wrote to Maria.

My Dear and Holy Little Wife,

Arnaldo, who just left my cell, has spent so much time here of late that he will probably come down with pneumonia, too. My cough is no better, my little flower, but do not concern yourself. I have the constitution of a water buffalo! Well, I have lost all hope of getting out of this dungeon before the trial. But don’t worry about money, my love, for soon we won’t have any! Ha, ha. Do as I tell you through our faithful Arnaldo about the sale of the house and the jewels, the cars, the furs, the billiard table, the piano—this is no time for sentimental attachments, not while your husband rots in this pit of hell. Everything here indicates that all must be handled urgently. Whatever jewels and silver no one buys bring with you on your next visit and we will decide what to do with them.

Don’t worry, my little one. I am learning that life is all ups and downs, and there is nothing to do but resign ourselves to it. … Your poor husband always helped everyone and now nobody comes to help him. What a great lesson! Life is like the African jungle, my sweet. But we must not be bitter. I am learning my lesson. Kisses for my sons. Remember to bring me some fresh bedsheets. And I shall want to know all about this mah-jongg business.

Millions of kisses

from your loving Alves

Week after week he languished in the Oporto jail, reading, talking to himself, thinking, writing notes to Maria and Arnaldo. Somehow the money derived from the sale of their effects proved sufficient. Maria and the children retreated to her parents’ home, where ranks were loyally closed behind Alves and the blame was agreed to lie with his unscrupulous enemies.

Alves read everything. He read by candlelight late into the night, ignoring the damp walls all around him, spent hours scribbling notes to himself on coarse writing paper. He had, he reasoned patiently, used all his initiative and native shrewdness to advance himself. He had begun with next to nothing, no birthright, and he had improvised, he had dared all when the occasion required, he had conquered Angola by his own sweat and determination. He had risen as far in the world of legitimate business as even the sternest taskmaster might have demanded. He had made money and lost money; he had excluded almost everything but hard work from his life; he had played as fair as any realistic businessman could—and he had landed in the Oporto jail.

Something was wrong.

He had proven that by playing his cards within the rules of the game. He simply couldn’t hold it all together. Whether it was the system itself, or the powerful jealously guarding their own preserves, or the pettiness of his enemies, the point was that he was in jail and the bankers who put him there were not.

Why?

The answer that presented itself was too simple; it drove him to seek a more complex and sophisticated explanation. Perhaps it was a question of a flaw in his own character. … Or a failure to grasp some elusive philosophical oddment. He poked at the question, worried it like the village idiot tormenting a spider with a sharp stick. But it refused to yield a more complicated answer.

The answer was simply … money.

He was in the Oporto jail because he had run out of money. It was a question of insufficient capital, the scourge of hopeful businessmen yesterday, today and inevitably tomorrow.

Money.

And what, he asked himself, was money?

Paper! Absolutely nothing but bits of paper. Oh, yes, once it had merely been the everyday symbol for gold and silver, more convenient to carry in your pocket than great lumps of precious metal. But that was ancient history.

Portugal had long ago abandoned any semblance of a gold standard. And the newspapers and magazines were full of the wildly bloated inflation of Germany, where loaves of bread cost thousands of marks. There was nothing to back up currency in Germany, and, his fitful brain working in nooks and crannies of memory, he recalled the German, or Swiss, Adolf Hennies. What was inflation doing to Hennies’ grandiose thoughts of Europe as the hope of the future?

And it wasn’t only Germany. Hungary. Italy. Everywhere, it was a matter of simply printing more money. Christ! It was only paper. And he was in jail because he didn’t have enough of it. What he was having, he realized by the flickering light of the candle stub, was a revelation. Unable to sleep, he drew up a list of questions he needed to have answered, publications he would need to consult. Arnaldo would have some digging to do.

Mystified but willing, Arnaldo took the list, rounded up the various volumes and deposited them on Alves’ bare table. “What,” he inquired, “is the point of all this?”

“Our future,” Alves answered.

Arnaldo went away shaking his head.

By prolonged study, interrupted only by Maria’s visits and brief consultations with his lawyer, Alves learned a great deal about the financial structure of his homeland. There had long ago ceased to be gold or silver to lend the currency that elusive hardness. Yet, that lack never seemed to have the slightest inhibiting effect on the printing of more banknotes. For something as serious as money, something which exercised such brutalizing power over each and every individual citizen of the state, such an attitude struck him as breathtakingly cavalier. They simply printed it when they needed it!

Digesting this remarkable nugget of information took some doing; he pushed on with his solitary researches. Next he asked himself who the devil “they” were. Much to his surprise he discovered that “they” were not the government, the state itself, as he had assumed; the state had in fact granted this enormous power to print money, to change paper into something of exceptional value and legal validity, to the Bank of Portugal, a semiprivate institution! “Such an enormous privilege,” he jotted down among his notes, “can make the state into the slave of the holders of this great power.”

Arnaldo was instructed to bring everything he could lay his hands on relevant to the Bank of Portugal—newspaper clippings, bylaws, history, annual reports.

The bank’s stock was divided unequally between private citizens, who held by far the larger proportion, and the government, which owned the piddling remainder. Ever since 1887 the bank had held the exclusive license to issue banknotes, equal in face value to the amount of twice its paid-up capital. The institution’s very substantial annual profits were systematically divided proportionately between the private stockholders and the government according to the stock owned by each faction.

By 1891 the banknotes were no longer convertible to either gold or silver. In other words, ever since 1891 Portuguese money had been worth precisely the cost of the paper and printing bills. … It was almost too much for the astounded Reis to countenance. He was the one in jail, but look at what those in positions of great power and respectability had done to the very currency he was charged with embezzling!

As the years passed and the government had found itself hard pressed, the structure relating to twice the bank’s paid-up capital was conveniently shunted aside. By 1924 the bank had authorized the issuance of more than one hundred times the paid-up capital. He rubbed his eyes and shook his head over that one. Could such things be? According to the figures before him, in the postwar period between 1918 and 1923 alone the number of escudos issued by the Bank of Portugal had undergone a sixfold increase, which logically meant that the value of the escudo had suffered a severe reduction in the face of uninflated, hard foreign currency. In 1918 the British pound sterling was equivalent to eight escudos. Six years later there were one hundred and five escudos in every pound: the escudo was worth less than a nickel!

His interest whetted beyond description, Alves plunged forward into the Bank’s by-laws, intent on discovering how an institution with such prerogatives actually functioned. With great care he constructed a chart of the bank’s many separate departments. To his amazement he discovered that there was no department that had any means of controlling the possibility of duplicate banknotes. There was no provision for checking the numbers printed on the face of banknotes. Should a second issuance of notes with certain numbers—numbers coinciding with those on notes already in circulation—be printed, there was no conceivable way the bank could know it. Used, soiled banknotes returned from the many bank branches and from private banks underwent a simple process. Whereas in England notes returned to the Bank of England were duly recorded, the numbers retired from any further use and replaced by new notes with new numbers, the Bank of Portugal—ironically, to save the printing expense involved in issuing new notes—washed and pressed the old money, sorted it out by series and number and sent it back once again to the economic battlefield.

These discoveries haunted Alves. Such a careless, slovenly way of handling important matters! Somehow, surely, there was a way to turn this process to his advantage. … Working from the official estimates of the amount of money in circulation and from the average size of individual issuances of notes, he concluded that three hundred million escudos, worth three million pounds sterling or about fifteen million dollars, could be inserted into the Portuguese economy without upsetting the official bank machinery. …

The mere thought of such a sum left him emotionally and intellectually drained. He sat down on his damp cot, forgetting for the moment the vile cell. His mind was free. What splendid undertakings, he thought as he watched the candle’s bright flame, he could initiate for Portugal and Angola with such a sum of money!

And for Alves Reis, too.

By the time he had amassed his voluminous researches and reached his somewhat scarifying conclusions, his case was finally due for trial. It was a brief affair, concluded in less than a single day. Outside the rain dripped steadily from the eaves; the magistrate seemed remarkably disinterested, as if the climate had sapped his spirit. On the major charge of embezzling the contents of the Ambaca treasury, Alves was acquitted. But in the matter of the fraud involving the check written against the National City Bank of New York without adequate covering funds, he was ordered held. With almost the last of the money raised from the sale of their personal effects, Alves managed bail and covered the bad check. His bail was returned, providing the stake he needed to begin the rebuilding of his life. He was free again, a new man with a new view of the world and the beginning of an idea.

Like a monk in a medieval cell, he had applied himself to his studies, to learning the true way, and it was a way that no man had ever quite glimpsed before. The innocent man had let his own peculiar strength—the agility of his uncluttered mind—flex its muscles.

He stood in the courtyard of the Oporto jail, feeling the warm rain sifting down. The humidity had steamed his glasses, but he saw in the distance by the courtyard gate a taxi, Maria’s face framed in the side window. He waved. He knew she would be crying.

“You’re free!” Arnaldo cried, hurling himself into Alves’ embrace. “You look good, considering. Not much color in your cheeks—we’ll fix that. … A few days walking on the beach, you’ll be as good as ever.”

Arm in arm they began walking toward the car.

“Maria, is she all right? The trip wasn’t too much for her, carrying the baby? How has she taken it all, really? We’re poor now, you know. She’s never been poor.”

“You’ll be proud of her.” Arnaldo smiled, carrying Alves’ suitcase. “She’s learning how much backbone she really has. It’s an adventure for her. You’ll see.”

The trees dripped rain. The paving stones glistened.

Alves stared at her flawless face, framed with the thick dark hair, lips parted, her huge brown eyes overflowing. He ran the rest of the way to the taxi.

“Alves, my darling …” She choked back a sob and he leaned through the window, pressing his mouth to hers.

“I love you,” he whispered against her soft, smooth cheek. Sitting beside her on the ride to the train depot, he held her to him, placed his hand gently on her swollen belly, tapped with his fingertips as if trying to establish communications with the tiny creature within—their fourth child. Maria giggled, hugged him. There was no need to speak.

With Oporto already fading behind him, the rain slackened, dried up, and the sun began to shine, revealing a countryside bedecked with rainbows. Maria dozed with a wet cloth across her forehead. Arnaldo chattered on, but Alves’ mind was working quietly, intensely as he nodded at Arnaldo’s pauses. His concern for the future was alive, possessed a dynamism of its own. His mind was full of the information gathered during the last few weeks in jail. …

But how do you start again, no matter how capable you are, when you’ve come straight from jail?

Out of touch. That was how he felt. … He had responsibilities, Maria, the children, the baby … He needed to formulate a new set of rules by which to play the game; the old rules had landed him in the Oporto jail. The point was, it was the petty crimes that were punished—the small crimes, the small men—not the important men who manipulated the large amounts of currency, who toyed with the banking rules and did business as it suited them. All along he had been thinking too small. …

“We have a surprise for you in Lisbon, Alves,” Arnaldo said. “Something you’d never guess—never.” He grinned, barely able to keep the secret. Alves nodded. Fine dust sifted into the car, streaking and caking their perspiring faces. But Alves didn’t notice.

Rossio Station was dark, echoing like a giant’s cave after the steaming run across the countryside. Alves felt a surge of hope: he was back in Lisbon. Climbing down from the carriage, reaching back up to assist Maria, he heard a familiar voice, couldn’t place it, turned slowly, her hand in his. The face of the man next to him was smiling crookedly, wolfishly, mustache sloping like a bandit’s, eyes drooping and heavy-lidded.

“José!”

He held Alves at arm’s length, sizing him up, brushing dust from the shoulders of his dark, rumpled suit. “A little pale, but …” He dropped his voice to a whisper, winked. “Jail does that to a man!”

“You,” Alves cried, “should know!”

“Please, no unhappy memories,” José replied with mock gravity. “We must both begin anew!” He threw his arms around Maria and exuberantly kissed her cheek. “My dear Maria, you must make Alves retire his African fertility doll!” Maria obligingly blushed, wagging her finger.

“You never change,” she said.

“Ah, I do so hope you are mistaken there, my little one. I’ve changed my ways—now we must reform your husband.”

“Nonsense,” Alves interrupted. “As the Americans say, I was framed!”

“Me, too,” José said, nodding enthusiastically. “The world awaits us both, Alves.” Then, watching Arnaldo quietly waiting with Alves’ bag, he amended, “All three of us.”

José was leading the way down to the busy square, Arnaldo struggling with Alves’ valise and the extra satchel of reading material. It was early evening. The sky was pink, and in the gentle shadows Lisbon looked like a city made of candy. The breeze was cool and Alves stood for a moment on the sidewalk looking around him.

“Come on, Alves,” José called from the other side of the shiny black Nash sedan. “We’ll be late. Hurry up! You must ride in my new car!” He jumped in behind the wheel, knocking his beige fedora askew. The hat matched his gloves with the tiny pearl buttons. José Bandeira had always been a snappy dresser. The sight of the car and the expensive clothing reminded Alves of the money he’d sent José in Mozambique. It seemed half a lifetime ago. Perhaps there was a chance of getting it back. …

“Late for what?” he asked Arnaldo.

“José has suggested a small party. To celebrate your return—in Cascais. A few friends.” He helped Maria into the car and stood aside to make room for Alves. “To welcome you home.”

Whatever the cares lurking in their minds, they all receded during the ride through the gathering darkness along the Tagus. Huge commercial ships loomed over a variety of luxury liners that made their way south from England, along the coasts of France and Spain to the great Portuguese harbor. Yachts, smaller still, moved jauntily among them, pennants waving. The Tower of Belem, from which Da Gama had sailed for India around the Cape of Good Hope in 1497, rose familiarly out of the dusk. The smell of the sea lay lightly on the breezes. Maria took Alves’ hand as they sped onward.

Later she spoke into his ear: “The beach, do you recognize it?”

“Of course. Once I nearly killed myself there, trying to get a silly girl’s boat into the water. …”

“And the girl, what of her?”

“Nice enough girl, I suppose. Wound up marrying her and carting her off to Africa.” He patted her stomach. “And now she has my children! With great regularity. …”

She squeezed his arm, eyes glistening in the dark.

“We’re here!” José braked the car abruptly to a halt in front of the restaurant overlooking the beach. The outdoor platform built over sand was strung with brightly colored lanterns, and perhaps twenty couples were standing by the railing calling and waving to Alves.

Alves felt tears well up as he bobbed his head, acknowledging the words of welcome as they climbed the steps and moved slowly among their friends. A small American-French-type jazz combo played in a corner under a striped canopy: a swarthy guitarist, a violinist with a patch over one eye, a black clarinet player, going through all the hits of the day.

“All Alone.”

“Limehouse Blues.”

“Somebody Loves Me.”

“What’ll I Do.”

The evening fused together into one continuous blur of music and dancing and broiled shrimps and cold wine from Germany, pretty women in daring dresses and potent perfume, dark men in white shirts and silk ties, faces smiling and congratulating him on his return, as if he had just pulled off a business coup of one kind or another. What mattered, it seemed, was that a previously successful entrepreneur had undergone a dramatic reversal and come through it with flags flying. It was the best construction thus far put on the events of the last few months, at least in Alves’ opinion, and caught up in the relief of his restored freedom and the spirit of the moment, he danced and drank and perspired freely and told jokes that everyone seemed to find enormously amusing. The lanterns glowed yellow and red and blue, and balloons attached to the lantern poles were untied and floated romantically out over the beach toward the ocean. He watched them go, remembered the day he’d seen Maria and fallen in love.

Later still the musicians melted away, conversation dropped to hushed whispers, and a red spotlight came on, bathing the tiny bandstand in a rich, shadowy glow. “Fado,” someone said, and from nowhere the singer appeared with her two accompanists. Without a word they seated themselves in front of her, one with the guitarra, the other with the viola da Franca. The guitarra, in the hands of a scowling young man with black hair to his shoulders and a cigarette stuck to his lower lip, produced the silvery, minor tune which, in all its variations, was so familiar in Lisbon. The viola da Franca propelled the music forward by means of a low throbbing. By now it was so quiet that only the sound of the surf could be heard, and the fadista stepped forward, breaking her pose, embarking on the mournful song. Her eyes were almost closed, her wild dark mane, held in check by a band of ribbon, was thrown back, her sinewy body swaying sensually to the demands of the two guitars. Like all fadista, her voice was rough, primitive and her manner earthy and unsophisticated. It was impossible to guess her background or where José might have found her. Given his nature, Alves assumed that he was most probably sleeping with her and doubtless living to some extent off her earnings, which could have accounted for the exceptionally melancholy quality of her song. Her golden earrings and a golden necklace flashed in the red glow like a gypsy’s jewelry around a campfire.

The fado exercised a magical hold on the gathering. It appealed even to Alves, who saw himself as the most businesslike of men. Somewhere in the wild moans of sadness and tragedy, in the cries of self-pity at the turns of capricious Fate, in the sounds of the erotic whorishness that lay in the song’s heart, he found the hint of an answer, even a philosophic answer. … Life, the singer seemed to say, was a mournful business, only a means of putting off the end.

As Alves listened it was as if he were alone. He recalled all the meanings of the songs as the singer wound her way deeper and deeper, and he felt that he knew, from his own experience, of what she sang. The irony, the despair, the discouragement, the caprices … If he had never known true ecstasy, perhaps it wasn’t within him to feel it. Surely it was not Maria’s fault. Love he had known. Ecstasy was for poets. Was ecstasy forever beyond the son of an impoverished undertaker? Was he simply too common a man?

Eventually the fado was done, the party over. He said a few words of thanks to his friends, who could see by the tears on his cheeks that he was moved and grateful. The effect of the wine was wearing off and the night air was restoring his equilibrium. His assumption about José and the fadista proved absolutely correct: the girl curled up in the front seat of the Nash for the drive back to Lisbon. Maria and Arnaldo, both quite happily drunk, collapsed beside Alves in the back.

At the flat Maria had rented a few weeks before his return he asked José to wait. He carried Maria up the stairs and quickly undressed her, placed her carefully beneath the coverlet. The children were with her parents. He locked the door and went back to the waiting car. Arnaldo was sleeping soundly. José was kissing the singer. Alves climbed into the front seat. The girl slowly straightened up, then tilted heavily against him. José stepped on the gas, and the Nash slid away into the quiet moonlit streets.

“Where are we going?” Alves finally asked. He felt wide awake and everyone else was sleepy.

“I’m spending the night at the girl’s place,” José said. “Arnaldo will either sleep it off in the car or manage to get to her couch. How do you like my little fadista?”

“She is very good. Admirable.”

“Very beautiful, too. Kiss her if you like. You’ve been in prison, after all, and Maria is pregnant. It’s the very least I can offer.”

“No, really.”

“You may kiss me,” the girl said. Her voice was higher and clearer than her singing. She smelled of wine, rather tantalizingly.

“If you don’t,” José said, “she’ll be insulted.”

“He’s right,” the girl said. She lifted her face to him. “I’ll stay with you all night, too.”

Alves was suddenly very uncomfortable.

“Perfectly all right, old man,” José allowed, his diction slightly slurred. “A welcome-home present.”

Alves kissed her quickly, felt her tongue dart into his mouth. She held him close, pulled his hand against a rising nipple.

“Really, I’m very sorry,” he said. “But not tonight.” The girl flung herself away, back toward José. “Another time perhaps. … All I want to do is go for a long walk. I’ve been in a cell for so long.”

“Of course, old man,” José said. “We understand. Very civilized habit, walking. No doubt about it.” He stopped at a corner where several darkish streets converged.

Alves got out of the car.

“José, I can’t possibly thank you enough for all you’ve done for me. You’ve made me see that all is not lost.”

The wolf’s grin came and went. “Now, have a nice walk,” José said. “And I’ll make certain we see each other soon. We may be useful to each other. …”

When the car was out of sight he put his hands in his pockets and began walking.

A few minutes later, the night closing around him, he found himself looking up at the long gray facades of the Bank of Portugal and the Ultramarino Bank, iron-grilled, characterless, the two great repositories of money. How fitting, he thought, surveying the two buildings in the cold moonlight: the money itself was without character, gained its meaning and nature from the uses to which it was put. Where better for it to be kept than in these anonymous, remote, faceless structures? His footsteps echoed on the pavement. He stopped to read a political broadside pasted to one of the bank buildings, lit a cigarette from a wooden match scraped on the gray surface, went along to stand at the black iron grill across one of the entry ways. He peered into the darkness. He was alone in the street.

He walked on finally, his thoughts lingering with the banks until he realized that he was approaching the ancient Alfama district where as a child he’d been cautioned never to go alone. His grandmother had called it the Mouraria, had warned him that the Jews and the Moors would catch him, cut him to pieces, boil him for soup.

Slowly he began to climb the narrow streets, where by spreading his arms he could almost touch the walls on either side of him. He smelled the food with its hints of Eastern spices, the pungency of the animals who lived cheek by jowl with their owners; he saw and heard and felt the clothing fluttering from ropes overhead where it had been hung to dry. Above him the ancient crumbling buildings, dwellings of the poor, seemed to lean toward one another, blotting out the starry night. A drunk moaned when Alves trod on his foot. Remembering his grandmother, he leaped back, stifled a cry, saw in his imagination the blade glittering as it came, saw the whisper of his own death. He hurried on up the steep cobbled path.

Old Portugal, he thought, still with us, primitive and uninformed, superstitious. The blood of an admiral, yes, certainly, but also the blood of his grandmother, who had been a child when people could still recall at first hand the French Revolution. The tumbrils rolling, the streets of Paris slippery with fresh blood … And his grandmother, who never dreamed of reading or writing, had lived in a home where a carved wooden box had contained the mano refinada, the “hand of glory,” which was in fact the pickled right hand of a corpse whose identity was lost in the mists of time but probably dated from Napoleon’s conquest of Europe. She had believed in witches who took the forms of black sparrows and flew away after sucking the lifeblood from young children. And Alves remembered her hiding the hair of the family dog behind the door to keep him from wandering away on his regular nocturnal excursions.

The street doubled back on itself, always inching higher past the narrow, shadowed doorways where cats and dogs growled in their sleep. Somewhere back in the recesses of the district a woman sang, her voice breaking with some emotional anguish that Alves couldn’t even imagine. The voice followed him as he climbed, reminding him ever more of the past. Now, on this peculiarly magical night, he felt curiously in touch with the past and with his heritage. Portuguese had once navigated the world, greatness their destiny, and now he felt a tapping on his shoulder as if the past were reaching for his attention. …

Romantic nonsense, obviously. But still, almost unbidden, here he was, drawn into the oldest section of Lisbon, upward toward the ruins of the great castle of San Jorge, which had brooded over the city from the time when the Celts and the Phoenicians and the Greek Odysseus had built their temples and forts on the mighty hill that commanded the harbor of the River Tagus. Somehow Alves had forgotten all this as he’d fought to survive, to make his own life more fruitful than his father’s. From now on, he thought as his breath grew short and his legs began to ache, from now on pettiness, small success, a little money to invest—all that was dead, gone, forgotten.

If he truly were a new man in a new age there was nothing to keep him from challenging it as Henry the Navigator or the great Da Gama had challenged the oceans beyond the horizon. He stopped to rest at the gate leading into the grounds of the castle. The way beyond was narrow and steeper yet. Vines and flowers clutched at his face as he entered where the quietness was nearly palpable. He heard the splashing of a fountain, the high wind in the trees, the cooing and clucking of the exotic birds invisible in the night.

He walked past the massive cold cast-iron cannons trained out over the city’s tiled rooftops toward the harbor, smelling the limes and the flowers, toward the castle walls rising darkly against the night sky. Up the shallow stairways, across the stone bridges, pushing past the oaken doors two feet thick, hinges creaking with the rust of the ages, past the constantly dripping water, the flat shallow ponds, into the courtyard itself where the Moors had replaced the Romans and had been in turn replaced by the Christian Alfonso Henriques, who had led his knights up the treacherous paths in 1147 with Portugal in the hands of the Christian Lord and His servants. …

A peacock flared like an explosion in the yellow moonlight, an insomniac cockatoo strutted past, a Chinese Mandarin duck floated motionless on the water, sleeping. He lit a cigarette, sat on a stone step hollowed out and smoothed two thousand years ago by sentries watching the campfires of the enemy on the plains across the wide, dark Tagus. Across the open square of grass and dust a well with its rope and bucket took on a momentarily ominous shape. He blew smoke rings, sighed. The mouras encantadas, the enchanted Moorish princesses who were indescribably beautiful and treacherous and who possessed the serpent’s tail where their legs ought to have been—the mouras encantadas waited at the bottoms of wells to devour the hapless boy or girl who carelessly leaned too far. … My God, it was all so long ago, boyhood and the werewolves and the stories of Henry the Navigator and his father toiling in the undertaker’s trade. So long ago …

He climbed higher still, up the dangerously narrow steps to the crenelated battlements from where, between the stone pillars, he could see the endless, countless rust-colored tile rooftops of his city with Rossio Square huge and empty and quiet. He leaned forward; as he did so he felt the amulet his grandmother had given him rub against his chest, between him and the stone parapet. Ah, superstition and magic! She had been dying and had pressed it into his small hand, explaining that it should go to him, that it had belonged to his grandfather, who had given it to her on his deathbed. It was a link, a bit of the continuity between the generations—in this case, a pedra de raio, the amulet of the thunderbolt. She explained the story, slowly and painstakingly since her breath was very short. The thunderbolt, she said, is the great stone shaft that plummets to the earth at the moment we see the flash of lightning and drives itself seven meters deep into the earth. With each passing year it pushes back upward until in the seventh year it reappears, at which time those with great good luck find it and take it with them, thus protecting their homes and themselves from any future thunderbolts—or strokes of calamitous bad fortune, whatever may be likened to a thunderbolt of fate. He held it in his hand, a tiny prehistoric arrowhead that his grandfather must have come upon sometime in the distant past, since he would have been one hundred years old by then, having been born in the early years of the nineteenth century. A hole had been driven through the broad end of the device and a thin leather thong passed through it, making a necklace, which is how Alves had worn it ever since receiving it. His grandmother had gone to her grave secure in the belief that young Alves had been provided for. He looked at it again, its antiquity and primal grace, the smoothness achieved by the passing centuries. He sighed. Ah, it was a good thing she had not lived to see him flattened by the thunderbolt that landed him in the Oporto jail … but that sorry event would hardly have shaken her belief in the pedra de raio. No, she would have an excuse. After all, you could hardly maintain a belief in magic if your faith reeled every time it didn’t work. …

Thunderbolts. You never outlive the past, he thought. Never.

When he looked again at the city he was surprised to see that it had grown more distinct, that the sky was going gray, that the ships on the Tagus had lost their shapelessness. But he was not tired. On the contrary he had never felt more hopeful, more alive and eager.

Staring intensely at the city, he spoke, perhaps to his grandmother, perhaps to himself, palms spread on the stone parapet as if he were addressing the city, the past, the present from the mightiest of balconies.

“I … am … Alves … Reis. …” He took a deep breath and the hint of a smile quivered on his lips. “And I have … a thunderbolt of my own. …”

Then he began the long walk home.