During the ten years he had lived abroad, he had spent much of his enthusiasm and lost many of his few remaining hopes, and he was returning to Portugal now feeling tired and sad—or more than that, utterly disconsolate. When he crossed the border, he was surprised to discover that he experienced none of the joy he had always felt or thought he felt when, as now, he came home to spend the holidays with his family. Instead, this was a very different sensation, almost physical, almost painful in its immediacy—that of a sick person entering a hospital where everything is white and silent and spotlessly clean, ready to treat the patient.
Duarte allowed himself to be treated. Perhaps, after all, it was better like that. He surrendered to his old life—which, astonishingly enough, was exactly the same even after all that time—and did his best to forget his other, more recent life, which was beginning to seem as faint and hazy as if he had merely dreamed it. He did everything he could to adapt, even if this involved a degree of resignation, of “what will be will be,” like someone laying back on a couch. The pretty, rather serious maid would bring him his breakfast every morning. His mother, always fresh and good-humored and smelling of soap, would appear promptly at half past nine to plant a kiss on his forehead. He would smile at his mother, but not at the maid. This was all part of toeing the line. The atmosphere in the house began to take effect, enfolding him as it had before, so that it felt as if he had never left. A house in which everything and everyone were as they should be and in their proper places. This was precisely what, fifteen or even twenty years earlier, had first aroused in him the desire to run far away, but in his current state of disillusionment he found it rather comforting, almost sweet. His father continued to set off every Saturday to spend the weekend with a widowed sister who had a house in the country. On Sundays, Luísa came to tea, without her mother now, for her mother had died that winter from a heart attack. A habit of many years. How many? He had always avoided habits or had perhaps become used to not having them, he wasn’t sure. Now, though, it was as if he had succumbed without a struggle. On the first Sunday, he stayed at home looking at Luísa, whom he found almost interesting, almost pretty, listening to her silences, which were suddenly full of memories. How old would she be, he wondered. Thirty-two, thirty-three? Yes, she must be about thirty-three. Why had she never married? She wasn’t ugly, no, not at all… She was rich, which simplified even complicated situations, let alone a simple one such as hers… There must be a reason. But what? A case of unrequited love? Did people still speak of such things? Perhaps it was nothing of the sort; perhaps she was just one of those cold women who has no interest in men, who has no interest in anything, one of those women who simply lives. During his yearly two-week visits to Lisbon, Duarte had barely seen her because he was always in too much of a hurry, with too many things to do, and with his male friends dragging him here, there, and everywhere from morning to night. Only now did he notice how different she was from the seventeen- or eighteen-year-old girl he had known—all makeup and meaningful glances, filling every house she entered with gusts of perfume—and with whom he’d had a brief, inconsequential fling. The woman before him now was nothing like the Luísa that Duarte had known then. There was something very serene about her long face, her tranquil features, her large brown eyes that had the steady glow of a candle flame on a windless night.
His mother asked him the next day:
“Have you never noticed that Luísa is in love with you?”
“What!”
“Sure. Everyone knows; everyone has always known. You’re the only one who never noticed. She’s felt like that ever since she was a child, a girl. I never said anything to you because I knew you didn’t want to get married, but now…”
Duarte looked at her in alarm. What did she mean by that? Was she planning to marry him off to Luísa? Although, when he thought about it, this was not so very surprising. It was just like his mother to come out with the most unexpected ideas, already complete and beautifully constructed by her overly fertile imagination.
“I really don’t want to marry,” he said coolly, to put an end to any possible and more-than-probable hopes she might have.
“Well, you should. This student life you lead isn’t right for a man your age. I mean, having no home, living in hotels… Luísa’s a really good girl, almost as if she belonged to a different age. She loves you… She’s honest too. As very few women are, believe me.”
Duarte, however, didn’t want to hear any more. He left the house feeling most disgruntled and wanting to run away, as he had before. This was an old habit of his, getting angry whenever his mother spoke to him about this or that woman’s honesty. There were many things hidden away inside him that he judged to be private, and it always upset him when he found them so clearly and concisely expressed by his mother, and realized that he had learned them from her and felt just as she felt, although perhaps less crudely. Hence her lifelong preoccupation with honesty, which had always led her to demand that none of her female friends or her maids “had a past.” When his mother’s opinions irritated him, Duarte would laugh at them. He would sometimes annoy her by saying that he would prefer a woman with a past to one who proclaimed her honesty from the rooftops. He liked to say a lot of things that he didn’t actually believe, because he was and always would be the product of his upbringing. But he didn’t realize this. Only the day before, he had said to Luísa that Portuguese women used marriage as a negotiating tool. She had smiled her usual cool, vague smile and said:
“Maybe, yes… There’s a lot of truth in that.”
His mother had clutched her head and cried:
“Pay no attention to him, Luísa! Honestly, the things he comes out with!”
For the rest of that week, Duarte avoided his friends and stayed at home thinking about Luísa. He recalled episodes from his youth he thought he’d forgotten and in which she had played a role. And he realized that he felt for her a vast tenderness he had never before felt for anyone. On Sunday, he waited for her, but she never came. Duarte then began thinking seriously about the possibility of marrying her. He didn’t feel a great love for her, but, rather, a strong, sincere desire to rest in the light of those calm, soothing eyes. Along with that idea came that of staying, of not going away again, of abandoning forever suitcases, trains, hotel rooms. Of having his own home, with two armchairs by the fireside. Was he getting old, he wondered. Perhaps, it was possible. He only knew that he suddenly needed that woman. His mother, in the middle of a conversation, told him where Luísa worked and what time she left the office. Duarte duly turned up to meet her.
“I didn’t know you had a job.”
“Yes, I took this one almost six years ago. I needed something to help kill time. Do you know what that means, to kill time? Maybe you don’t, you lucky man…”
“Since I came back, I do have some idea. Anyway, if you want to kill a little more time, we could go and have a drink somewhere.”
“Good idea. I’m thirsty. The department doesn’t exactly overwork its employees, but it hasn’t yet reached such a degree of perfection that they offer us tea and cakes before we go home. So inconsiderate!”
When he sat down opposite her at a café in the Baixa, for a moment he simply looked at her in silence. Luísa said in her slightly drawling voice.
“I’m sorry if I’m not dressed elegantly enough. If I’d known I would be meeting you, I’d have worn my feathered hat.”
“In my honor?”
“In honor of you inviting me to have tea with you. Before, you’ve always spoken to me as if you could barely remember who I was.”
Duarte excused himself on the grounds that he’d been very busy.
“Well, long live idleness, then! I’ve always been in favor of idleness. That’s actually one of the reasons that keeps me coming into the office. Haven’t you ever noticed that the people who don’t do much work are almost always terribly nice?”
She laughed, then slowly bit into her piece of cake before asking:
“Are you staying or going back to Paris?”
“I’m not sure yet. It all depends on whether or not I get the thing I want!”
“Ah!”
That ah was almost a full stop, but Duarte knew that this didn’t mean she necessarily wanted it to be taken as a full stop. He remembered that it had always been difficult talking to Luísa because every now and then, she would drift off, lose track of whatever the other person was saying, which, only shortly before, she had appeared to find interesting. Her eyes suddenly seemed to be looking at nothing at all.
This was when Duarte asked her:
“Luísa, would you like to marry me?”
Her gaze once again focused on him.
“I would,” she said, “but would you really want to marry me?”
Duarte began speaking. About his past life, but mainly about his future. He hoped to make a success of his career after those long years abroad. There were, of course, plenty of engineers, but not all had his experience. And if he didn’t succeed, never mind. He could still live.
Luísa was apparently listening attentively, although she couldn’t understand the meaning of the words he uttered with such enthusiasm.
“Do you remember why we stopped going out together when we were seventeen?” she asked when he fell silent.
Duarte was expecting her to say something quite different, so the question left him rather nonplussed.
“For that very reason, because we were only seventeen.”
“I was. You were twenty-three.”
“It comes to the same thing.”
“No, it’s very different. You were twenty-three and seemed much older. You’d already been abroad and experienced a lot for a young man of your age. Whereas I had just left school and, unlikely though it might seem, knew nothing about life. No, don’t laugh. Of course I knew, in theory at least, how babies are born and even how babies are made. I’d also heard a few scabrous stories from my schoolfriends, but that isn’t knowing about life. My ideas about life were very general and completely phoney.”
Her voice had lost that slight drawl and was now serene and very calm.
“You didn’t want to marry, and now I think you were quite right. You would have jeopardized your career. Anyway, you liked me well enough and were perhaps amused by me in my ‘fresh-from-the-oven’ phase. I still have photos from then. I used to wear ridiculous amounts of makeup and would look at men as if I were Joan Crawford, because, at a dance once, someone told me I had eyes like hers. And I believed it too! The things we believe when we’re seventeen! I think all girls go through a similar phase. Mine was just a little late. Usually it happens when you’re fifteen.”
Duarte was looking at her, uncomprehending. Luísa broke off to take a sip of tea, then went on:
“How were you to know that I was full of hopes when I was always adopting movie-star poses and changing my hairstyle every two weeks? You suggested, half-jokingly, that we go to Sintra to stay at the house your parents owned there. The house would, of course, be empty. Then a few days later, you asked me again and got really angry when I said No. I clearly remember you saying I was a ‘prude,’ and that really hurt me. You said that, fortunately, girls in other countries weren’t like me, that I was being ridiculous, still clinging to that stupid virginity complex. I still didn’t want to go whatever you said, and that’s why we broke up.”
“And that’s why I came to see you today, Luísa. I’ve always wanted…”
She ignored him and continued:
“Later on, I often regretted not having gone to Sintra with you that day. Life has taught me that, in the end, doing such things is both of great importance and of no importance at all. I don’t think this was what you were expecting me to say, but it’s true. I waited for you for years, Duarte. I don’t know how long now, but a long time. I would spend months thinking about the two weeks you would come to spend with your parents. Perhaps this time he’ll notice me, I would tell myself. But you never did. You came and you left, as if you had walked straight through me without even seeing me. Once, we passed each other on the stairs in your house, and you didn’t even recognize me. True, I was looking very different, because I’d been ill. I went to hold out my hand, but you merely nodded to me very formally. I wept buckets that day and spent the night thinking that I’d ruined my life because of you. I was about to turn thirty just two months after that. Thirty is a very sad, disheartening age for women who haven’t married… I had stayed single because I was waiting for you and had forgotten I had a right to a husband and children and a normal life. That night, I decided to think about myself and follow a different path and find someone else. Perhaps, for women, love is more flexible and more passive than it is for men. They do the choosing, and we almost always come to like whoever chooses us. I think I really loved Francisco…”
He broke in:
“You think?”
“Yes. The years pass and we become less certain about things. That was four years ago now…I can’t be sure what I thought or felt. He was married, but separated from his wife. He wanted to divorce her and marry me, and I’m sure he would have. Alas, he died in an accident. We were only together for a year. I was terribly upset and even considered suicide.”
She shrugged.
“But here I am drinking tea with you.”
There was a silence. Duarte asked:
“And then?”
“Then there was someone else. He was much younger than me. A complicated man with a gift for making life absurdly difficult. That relationship simply ran out of steam really, without either of us making any real decision to end it. I heard later that he married and went to Africa. And that’s all. That’s what I wanted to tell you. Why are you looking at me like that, Duarte?”
“Listen, I…”
He came to a halt in the middle of the sentence.
Luísa smiled. It was faint, joyless smile that didn’t even reach her eyes. Then, still smiling and looking at him, she got to her feet and picked up her handbag.
“I knew this would happen. It’s odd, Duarte: I’ve spent my life knowing what people were going to say before they said it. And I knew that sooner or later this would happen. It’s strange, isn’t it? Thanks for the tea. I’m so glad I didn’t wear my feathered hat. It wouldn’t have been worth it…”
“Listen, Luísa…”
But listen to what? Say what? She left with her head held high, almost running past the other tables and vanishing into the crowded street.
Duarte left for Paris that same week.