After dinner we walked back to the Rossio. The streets were loud with the plaintive wail of fado singers.
“Call me a snob, but I just don’t get the appeal of the fado,” Iris said.
“They’re such sad songs,” Julia said.
“The fado is meant to be sad,” Edward said. “It is the ultimate expression of that most Portuguese of emotions, saudade, which might best be defined as the perpetual longing for a perpetually elusive … no, not satiation. Rather, that which will never be.”
“Perhaps, what will never be on the menu at Farta Brutos?” I suggested.
“Yes!” Edward said.
“If you ask me, it’s just caterwauling,” Iris said. “Daisy can’t bear it, can you?”
Daisy was busy smelling some pigeon droppings on the pavement.
“Not here, Daisy,” Edward said, tugging at her leash. “We don’t want to stop here.”
I looked at him questioningly. With his shoulder he indicated the window display we had stopped in front of. Castles, Meistersingers, elves. Friendly old Munich, hearty old Heidelberg. Gay, carefree waltzing in Vienna.
“The German Reich Railway Office,” he said.
“As recently as December, they were advertising in Vogue,” Julia said. “Sixty percent off with special travel marks.”
A young man wearing a homburg stepped up to us. “You are planning a trip, Madame?” he asked Julia.
“What?” Julia said. “Oh, no. I mean, not to Germany.”
“But you are Americans. Why not go on holiday in Germany?”
“Actually, we’re not American,” Iris said. “We’re Tasmanian.”
“Tasmanian?”
She nodded. “Have you been to Tasmania? It’s lovely. Famous for its animals, most notably the Tasmanian devil.” She pointed to Daisy. “Of course, this one’s tame—more or less. Still, I wouldn’t get too close.”
The young man tipped his hat and fled. Edward burst out laughing.
“What was that all about?” I said.
“A German informer,” Edward said. “They’re all over the city. Usually they pretend to be English, hoping to pick up some information.”
“You could tell because he had a big behind,” Iris said.
“What?” Julia covered her mouth with her hand.
“It’s my wife’s theory,” Edward said, “that informers can always be recognized by their big behinds.”
“It’s not a theory. It’s something I was told. By someone who knows.”
“But why should they have big behinds?” Julia asked.
“Maybe it’s all the sitting they do,” I said.
“Or the double life,” Edward said. “It could be the double life, the double life itself, that brings on the big behind. Pete here, for instance—he doesn’t have a big behind. And I’ll bet he’s never led a double life. Am I right, Pete?”
“About the behind or the life?”
“Let me have a look,” Iris said, stepping behind me. “My God, it’s true! There’s just this … flat plane. You’d think he had no buttocks at all.”
“Of course I have buttocks. Only these trousers—”
“But Pete, you don’t.” Almost in spite of herself, Julia burst into laughter. “I mean, you do, only there’s just … not much to them.”
“Reductio ad absurdum,” Edward said, “a man with a clear conscience.”
“Whereas you, my darling,” Iris said, “have a distinctly protuberant behind. Not fat, just … protuberant. You could bounce a dime off it,” she added to Julia.
“With all that implies,” Edward said.
By now we had passed under the bridge we had crossed earlier, the one that connected the Elevator to the Bairro Alto. Above the Rossio, a neon stopwatch told the time, the words OMEGA O MELHOR pulsing beneath it.
“For a poor country, they certainly seem to have plenty of money for electricity,” Julia said.
“It’s too much,” I said. “It gives me a headache.”
“Would you rather go back to the blackout?”
“In some ways.” The truth is, I have always preferred darkness to light, silence to noise.
Outside the Francfort Hotel, I reached to shake Edward’s hand, but he didn’t take it. “Anyone care for a nightcap?” he said.
“Count me out,” Iris said. “I’ve hardly slept since we got here, and I have a feeling that tonight I just might. Julia’s tired, too. Aren’t you, Julia?”
“Let them go,” Iris said, touching her arm. “Men need time to themselves. Especially when they’ve been cooped up with their wives for weeks and weeks.”
“Oh, all right. I am a bit tired. But you go, Pete.”
“How about it, Pete?” Edward said.
“I’m game if you are,” I said.
Once we had dropped off our wives at their respective Francforts, an unexpected shyness overtook us. We walked without speaking. On the sidewalks of Baixa, old men were playing cards by the light of gas lamps around which flies swarmed. Boys kicked soccer balls—this at an hour when any self-respecting Anglo-Saxon child would already have been in bed for hours.
Soon we passed my car, my Buick, dried sprays of Spanish mud on the fenders.
We stopped.
“That’s my car,” I said.
“Really?” Edward said. “Do you have the keys?”
I did, as a matter of fact. Out of habit, I still put them in my pocket every time I went out—not just the car keys, but the keys to our apartment in Paris, to my office, to the chambre de bonne to which Julia’s decorator had relegated our old furniture.
“Let’s take her for a spin,” Edward said. “Let’s go to Estoril.”
“But I don’t know the way.”
“It’s simple. Head to the river and turn right.”
We got in. The car’s interior smelled of naphthalene, cigarettes, some vile coffee I’d spilled somewhere in Spain. When Julia and I had first gotten to Lisbon, I’d parked the Buick and tried to forget it. For ten gruesome days, it had been all the home we had—a few nights it had been our bed—and so the mere sight of it was enough to conjure the drone of German planes, the uninflected voices of those Spanish customs officers, the jolt of poorly paved roads. But now it was Edward, not Julia, who was sitting across from me, and the pleasure I had once taken in the car revived. His rangy legs spread out before him, he opened and shut the glove compartment, pulled out the ash drawer, lowered and raised the sunshade.
I switched on the ignition and edged out into the street, barely wide enough to accommodate such a mammoth vehicle.
“Do you drive?” I asked Edward.
“Me? No. Iris does, though. And sails. And rides.” He unrolled the passenger window, out of which he thrust his long arm.
“She seems quite a capable woman, Iris,” I said.
“She is like Salazar,” Edward said. “Prime minister, foreign minister, minister of the interior, minister of finance. She is the cabinet.”
“And what does that make you?”
“A lowly peon. Obeisant. The functionary who keeps his job by making sure never to have an opinion, then shoots himself at his retirement party … Seriously, though, my wife is a marvel. Far more intelligent than I am, though of course she doesn’t believe it. It’s because her education was so piecemeal, she never got the basics—you know, how to do long division, how to punctuate a sentence properly. Latin and Greek. God! Whereas I did Latin and Greek for eons. I’m supereducated, hypereducated. Yet compared to her, I’m stupid.”
“If you’re stupid, I’m a cretin. I’m no smarter than—than this ashtray.”
“But you do something. You have a job. You sell cars.”
“And you write books.”
“Stupid books. Did Iris tell Julia how we got started on them? It was a bet. Alec Tyndall, this fellow we met in Le Touquet—his wife was reading Agatha Christie. Well, one night he and I got drunk and he bet me a hundred pounds that he could write a detective novel before I could. And I took him up on it.”
“I assume you won.”
“Yes. But I wouldn’t let him pay me. I couldn’t. By then we were getting royalty checks.”
“Royalty checks are something to be proud of.”
“No, they are not something to be proud of. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is something to be proud of. The Incompleteness Theorem is something to be proud of.”
I didn’t know what the Incompleteness Theorem was. I wondered if it had anything to do with Theosophy.
“In the world I live in, men aren’t measured by their brains,” I said. “They’re measured by what they earn.”
“Then in your world I’m nothing, because I’ve never earned a dime in my life.”
“But the novels must make money.”
“Chalk those up to Iris. Like I said, she’s the brains of the operation.” He fiddled with the door lock, pulling it up and pressing it down. “Here’s where we turn, by the way.”
I turned. We were driving alongside the river. To our left the hulls of ships loomed, their surfaces mottled in the moonlight. A breeze came up, filling the Buick with maritime smells—brine, burning rubber, fish guts—that I inhaled with relish, hoping they would eradicate the naphthalene, the cigarettes, the coffee, all the tired, residual odors of our slow exodus.
“I like this car,” Edward said. “I really do. Here’s an idea. Let’s pretend I’m a customer, a stranger. Make your pitch. Sell me a car.”
“When it comes to luxury, you won’t find anything to compare with the Limited,” I said. “She’s got a whopping 140-inch wheelbase and a fifty-six-inch front seat. That’s just a trifle less wide than a full-size Davenport—and no less comfortable, because the seats are built on a foundation of Foamtex rubber over Marshall springs and upholstered in smart Bedford cord. You could be relaxing at your favorite club.”
“My favorite club! I love that. Go on.”
“The rear armrest retracts into the seatback and has a built-in ash receptacle, while the doors are equipped with capacious side pockets, attractively shirred and ideal for holding magazines, road maps, and small parcels. Window and ventipane controls are designed for sure grip and easy operation and have richly colored plastic knobs that harmonize with the interior trim. Now let’s have a look at the dashboard. See the electric clock mounted in the glove-compartment door? Stays accurate within three seconds a year. Plus you’ve got an automatic electric cigar lighter and multiple ash receivers. Not only that, this particular model features Buick’s exclusive retractable Sunshine Turret Top—ideal for warm afternoons. But don’t think that just because the Limited is spacious, she’s slow, because she comes equipped with our 141-horsepower Dynaflash oil-cushioned, valve-in-head, straight-eight engine. You can go from ten to sixty miles per hour in eighteen seconds flat. And our exclusive BuiCoil spring rests guarantee a smooth ride even on the roughest road. Now, hold on to your seat and watch the clock.” I shifted gears, pressed my foot to the accelerator.
“Whoa,” Edward said, putting a hand on the dashboard.
We hit sixty. “How many seconds was that?”
“Fourteen. I’m sold. I’m ready to write the check.”
“You can write it, but I won’t take it.”
“Why not?”
“The same reason you wouldn’t take that fellow’s money—the one you made the bet with … No, I’m afraid I’ll just have to sell her at a loss. Well, easy come, easy go … Do you know what I heard yesterday? The last time the Excambion set sail, some Polish grandee was hawking his Rolls-Royce on the pier—as the ship was getting ready to weigh anchor. Literally as it was weighing anchor.”
“But why sell at a loss when I’ll give you market value?”
“And what do you propose to do with a car when you can’t even drive?”
“I’ll leave it here. To pick up when I come back.”
“So you think you’ll come back?”
“Why not?”
I brooded over this for a moment. “Julia seems to think that if we leave, it’s for good. She’s putting in for staying here, in Portugal.”
“It might not be the worst idea. Portugal’s neutral, after all. I know, people say it won’t last. Still, I wouldn’t underestimate Salazar. He’s shrewd. He knows how to play both sides against the middle.”
“Then why are people like the Fischbeins so desperate to get out?”
“Because they’ve got no status. No standing. And look what they’ve come out of. War. Real war. They’d like to put an ocean between themselves and that. We had it easy, comparatively speaking.”
I couldn’t disagree with this. In Paris, the war had at first seemed little more than a costume party. In anticipation of air raids, Julia had bought herself a Charles Creed alerte-plaid poncho and an haute-couture gas-mask holder in red tweed with gold studs from Lanvin. According to Vogue, an haute-couture gas-mask holder was now a necessity no sophisticated Parisienne should be without.
Things got worse in the spring. A few bombs fell. Nonetheless, the attitude of the newspapers remained phlegmatic. Then one afternoon, on my way home from work, I happened to notice smoke rising from behind the foreign ministry. I wondered if it was another bomb. It turned out that the functionaries were throwing bales of documents out the windows, onto a bonfire.
That evening, under cover of darkness, the government fled the capital—first for Tours, then Bordeaux—and the next evening, our Buick packed to the hilt, Julia and I followed suit. In the gas-mask holder, which had never held a gas mask, we put everything we didn’t want the customs agents to find.
“Look,” Edward said, pointing out the window. “It’s the Exposition!”
I looked. The Exposition was floodlit like an aerodrome. Everything about it was titanic: the pavilions, the statues, the fountains shooting sprays of water sixty feet in the air. “This is what happens when modernism comes under the spell of Fascism,” Edward said. “The avant-garde becomes the vehicle for the promotion of the very forces it should seek to subvert. A modernist vernacular is hijacked for the purposes of promulgating the values of an idyllic past, a past that never was. A sort of politically enforced nostalgia … Is that perhaps the definition of Fascism?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“And to think that this time next year it’ll all be torn down.”
“Really?”
“Of course. It’s just a stage set. Otherwise how could they have knocked it up so fast? You know, you’ve really got to hand it to Salazar. He’s got that show-must-go-on spirit. I mean, the war couldn’t have come at a worse time for him.”
“At least the hotels are full.”
“Oh, but they were supposed to be full. With tourists, not refugees.”
This was correct. Earlier I had asked Senhor Costa how many of the guests at the Francfort were in Lisbon for the Exposition. “Perhaps ten,” he had said—under his breath, as if it was shameful. “As for the rest—what passports I have seen, sir! Bulgarian, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Japanese, Soviet, Luxembourger, Nansen. All come to Lisbon, and why? To leave Lisbon.”
What was odd—what no one at first understood—was why Salazar had let so many refugees in in the first place. Edward’s opinion was that it was all thanks to the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. “Do you remember the scene at the consulate?” he asked. “The consul was signing visas all night, signing every visa that crossed his desk. When Iris and I were there, he had a rabbi helping him, an old-style rabbi, wearing a prayer shawl. The rabbi would stamp the passport, then the consul would sign it. No questions asked. Like an assembly line.”
Though I didn’t remember the rabbi, I did remember the consul: a fat man with a beard, spooning stew into his mouth with one hand and signing with the other. It was true, he wasn’t turning anyone away. It was also true that when Julia and I finally left with our visas, at around eleven at night, the consulate was still open and showed no signs of closing. By contrast, the Spanish consulate closed every afternoon on the stroke of five, no matter how long the line snaking up its stairwell.
“The point is, by signing all these visas, the consul was flagrantly violating his orders, which were not to issue a single visa without getting clearance from Lisbon. He had a conscience—for which he’ll pay dearly. And in the meantime Salazar’s stuck with a hundred thousand refugees.”
“Can’t he send them back?”
“Back where? Spain won’t have them. France won’t have them. Did I tell you about the couple Iris and I met on the International Bridge? The wife was Dutch, the husband Belgian. It turned out they’d made it through the French border patrol and crossed into Spain, only to be told by the Spaniards that there was something wrong with the wife’s visa—they couldn’t read the date or something—and she had to go back to France and get a new one. So then she walked back to the French side of the bridge, where the French guards told her that she couldn’t enter France because she didn’t have a French entry visa. So then she trooped back to the Spanish side, only to be told … Well, you get the picture. For all I know, she’s still on the bridge.”
Julia and I had also crossed the International Bridge. There were two lanes for cars—one for ordinary cars, such as ours, which moved at a crawl, and the other for vehicles with diplomatic plates, of which perhaps ten passed during the five hours we spent on that bridge. Getting through Spanish customs took another five hours, at the end of which an officer mapped out a route to the Portuguese frontier. If we diverged from this route, we were warned, we could be arrested.
Spain might have been the worst part of the trip. Julia refused to eat anything. Such was her fussiness about the sanitary facilities that she developed an acute case of constipation. For hours at a time she played solitaire—she had rigged up a sort of board that she could hold on her lap—or gazed at the photographs of our apartment in Vogue, from which she sometimes read aloud: “It was the wish of the lady of the house, an American long resident in Europe, to maintain the flat’s Parisian charm while reducing its Parisian crowdedness. Less of everything—Colette instead of Proust! Matisse instead of Ingres!—but still distinctly à la française.” She had only one copy, and it was getting dog-eared.
Now, in the Buick, I looked at Edward. I wanted to reassure myself that it was actually he, not Julia, who was in the passenger seat. Like a dog, he had his face out the window. “Look, we’re in Estoril!” he said. “There’s the Atlantic!” He pointed at a hotel, from the roof of which the name ATLÂNTICO pulsed out in neon. “And that’s the Palace!” Again, the name, PALÁCIO, was written on the roof—which led me to wonder if he’d even actually been to Estoril. It was an impression he liked to give, that anywhere he went was a place he’d been before.
We parked the car. From the steps of the casino, an English-style park rolled toward the ocean. We walked up an avenue lined with palm trees to the entrance. “Feel that breeze,” Edward said. “So much cooler than Lisbon. Doesn’t it remind you of the Riviera? You know, that slightly convalescent air, and all these hotels that look vaguely like hospitals. And then the train tracks dividing the beach from the town. Only it’s not the Mediterranean on the other side, it’s the Atlantic. That’s a big difference. I could never abide Mediterranean resorts, the water like a tepid bath. Whereas an ocean is wilder than a sea. Listen, even from here you can hear the waves.”
I listened—and heard the engines of limousines, the wail of dance music, the chattering of café-goers. Certain words are the same in every European language. Visa. Passport. Hotel.
We arrived at the casino. As at Macy’s, commissionaires with epaulets on their shoulders held open the doors. Past the gaming tables and the poker parlors and the cinema and the Wonder Bar Edward led me to a vast rotunda where Europeans in evening dress were dancing. He pulled a table out from the wall, indicated that I should sit, then, when I had, pushed the table back in so that it pinned me.
“I feel like a child being tucked into bed,” I said.
“Just call me Nanny,” he said. Overhead, an immense chandelier shivered. The orchestra was playing Noël Coward’s “World Weary,” the singer pronouncing the lyrics phonetically:
When I’m feeling weary and blue, I’m only too glad to be left alone,
dreaming of a place in the sun when day is done far from a telephone …
“Hardly ever see the sky,” Edward sang along, “buildings seem to grow so high.”
Give me somewhere peaceful and grand
Where all the land slumbers in monotone …
A waiter appeared. “Absinthe,” Edward ordered. “It’s legal here,” he added after the waiter had left.
“I know. I’ve never tried it.”
“Really? The kiss of the green fairy is bitter.” Under the table I could feel the pressure of his leg against mine. “I actually learned quite a bit about absinthe when we were writing the second of the Legrand novels. Iris’s idea was that the victim should be an absinthe hound. Since he can’t get the stuff in Paris, he has it smuggled in from Spain. Well, his wife hates him, so she decides to do away with him by putting cyanide in his absinthe. Her gambit is that the coroner will declare the cause of death to be absinthe poisoning—which he does.”
I’m world weary, world weary,
Living in a great big town …
“And is there actually such a thing as absinthe poisoning?”
“Only to the extent that there’s such a thing as alcohol poisoning. The thujone itself is relatively harmless.”
The waiter returned, bearing on his tray the elaborate implementa of absinthe. These included a carafe of water and two tiny glasses, each of which he filled a quarter of the way with the viscous green liqueur. Then he balanced a leaf-shaped perforated spoon atop each glass. Then he put a sugar cube atop each spoon. It was Edward who poured the water from the carafe through the sugar cubes—at which the absinthe clouded. “To sweeten, a little, the green fairy’s kiss.”
We toasted wordlessly. In flavor the absinthe reminded me of some strong licorice my mother used to keep by her bedside—to mask, I suppose, the bourbon on her breath.
I’m world weary, world weary,
Tired of all these jumping jacks …
Suddenly a woman stumbled out of the crowd. “Eddie, is that you?”
“Oh, God,” Edward said. “Hello, George.”
The woman leaned over for a kiss, so that her breasts hung like bladders. A diamond-studded cross dangled between them. She was in her sixties, with freckled skin and untidy gray-black hair.
“George, this is Pete.”
“Georgina Kendall, pleased to meet you,” the woman said, holding out a hand that seemed to be all swollen knuckles. “I’m here with Lucy. You remember Lucy? From the train?”
He nodded.
“Eddie and I met on the Sud Express, when it was stuck outside Salamanca,” Georgina said to me.
“In war, trains never run on time,” Edward said aphoristically.
“Tell me about it! Anyway, we got to be great friends, the four of us—Lucy and me and Eddie and Aster. How is Aster, by the way? And that charming little schnauzer.”
“Both fine. Are you staying here in Estoril?”
“Yes, we’re at the Palace, and it’s costing me a fortune—Lucy has a weakness for the tables—but I’m hoping the material I’m collecting for my book will earn us back her losses and then some. You see, I’m a writer”—this to me—“and I’m working on a memoir. Not a diary—a memoir. I mean, I’m writing it as if I’m already back home, sitting in my study, recalling all I’ve been through. It’s to be called Flight from France. Now, you may ask why I’m doing it that way, and I’ll tell you. It’s because I know the market. This time next year, I guarantee, the bookshops will be swamped with memoirs of foreigners escaping France, and I’m not about to let anyone pip me at the post.”
“But isn’t that a bit tricky?” Edward said. “You’ll have to falsify your perspective. Pretend that you’re looking back when really you’re right in the thick of things.”
“Illusion, as you know perfectly well, Eddie, is the writer’s stock in trade. Anyway, no one likes to read diaries. They’re so boring. ‘June thirtieth. Woke up, had breakfast. June thirty-first. Woke up, had breakfast.’”
“June thirty-first?”
“Well, you know what I mean.”
“But what if something totally unexpected happens? What if Portugal joins the Allies? Or Franco teams up with Hitler? It’ll ruin your ending.”
“Now you’re making fun of me.”
“No, I’m not. I’m challenging you. I’m calling your bluff.”
“Dear Eddie,” Georgina said as she turned to me, “he seems to think writers ought to behave like newspaper reporters. He doesn’t understand that for us time doesn’t exist. Consider Proust.” She smiled, showing her small, uneven teeth. “Well, I must be off. Give Aster my best. And the dog.”
As she disappeared into the crowd, I pressed my leg harder against Edward’s. Suddenly I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to make him cry uncle.
He didn’t even blink. “Now that, my boy,” he said, “is a hack. Hackus literarius. In case you’ve never seen a live specimen.”
“I’ve never even heard of her.”
“Better that you haven’t. She’s a charlatan. Just another of these rich American women who’ve been idling around in Nice since the Napoleonic Wars. Nice, or maybe Saint-Tropez.”
“Strange, this notion of writing about what’s happening as if it’s already happened.”
“Fear of the future, that’s what it is. She thinks that if she can make the present the past, the future can’t hurt her.”
“And you? Aren’t you afraid of the future?”
“What’s to be afraid of? The future doesn’t exist. It’s the past that frightens me.”
“Why?”
“Because it can’t be undone, and it can never be known.” Under the table he changed position, so that his legs were squeezing mine. “That’s the trouble, you see, these days we all spend so much time worrying about the future that the present moment slips right out of our hands. And so all we have left is retrospection and anticipation, retrospection and anticipation. In which case what’s left to recall but past anticipation? What’s left to anticipate but future retrospection?”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “It’s like my brother Harry. The last time I saw him and his wife, they spent the whole of breakfast arguing about where to have lunch.”
“Exactly.”
“And the whole of lunch arguing about where to have dinner.”
“Yes!”
“And the whole of dinner going over what they’d had for breakfast and lunch.”
“That’s it! That’s the thing to avoid.”
“But how can you avoid it when everywhere you turn, you have to make plans, learn from your mistakes, strategize?”
“Right, how can you? How the hell can you?” He leaned in closer. “Are you feeling it now?”
“What? Your leg?”
“No, I know you’re feeling that. The absinthe.”
“I’m not sure. What am I supposed to feel?”
“You’re supposed to hallucinate.”
“I might be hallucinating. I’ll need to check.”
I looked out at the crowd.
“What do you see?”
“People dancing. Oh, there are the Fischbeins. Do you see them?”
“I do. I do see them. So either we’re having the same hallucination or they’re really there.”
If the Fischbeins were there, they didn’t recognize us. Monsieur Fischbein wore a tuxedo a size too big for him, Madame Fischbein a green taffeta evening gown. Against her freckled wattle, her pearls gleamed. Her fur coat was again slung over the back of her chair.
“They are as bad as the Germans,” Monsieur Fischbein was telling some unseen auditor. “They say to us we need one paper, we bring. Then they say to us we need another paper, we tell them we cannot bring. Then they say to us they are sorry, we should try another country. But where, I ask you? Terre de Feu?”
It seemed it was always Terre de Feu.
“We will go back to Antwerp,” Madame Fischbein said. “Whatever the Germans do, it cannot be worse than this.”
With a fatalistic flourish, the old couple took to the dance floor. Around and around they waltzed, to the tune of “When I Grow Too Old to Dream,” Madame leaning her forehead against Monsieur’s bony shoulder. “Look at them,” Edward said. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may and all that. It’s the end of Europe, that’s why they’re dancing, and of course Lisbon is the end of Europe, too. The fingertip of Europe. And everything that Europe is and means is pressed into that fingertip. Too much of it. It’s a cistern full to overflowing—and each time a ship sails, the water level goes down a little. But not nearly enough. And in the meantime the floodgates remain open.”
“Hold on a minute. According to what you just said, Lisbon is a cistern—”
“Right.”
“So the refugees are water—”
“Correct.”
“But that means that when they get on the ship—the ship is carrying water as its cargo. Carrying as its cargo the very element on which it sails.”
“What, you’re saying my metaphor doesn’t hold water?”
We both burst out laughing.
“Now are you feeling it?”
“I believe I am.”
“Shall we have some more?”
“Let’s.”
He refilled our glasses. How long had I known him then? Twelve hours? Fourteen? It’s true: in war, trains never run on time. And now this one, like the Wabash Cannonball, was about to arrive at its destination—only it hadn’t yet left. Or had it left the moment he’d stepped on my glasses?
Half an hour later, he asked for the bill. “Don’t even try,” he said when I took out my wallet.
I stood, and was surprised that my legs still worked.
“Where to?”
“The beach. Not the one here in Estoril—it’s crawling with police. We’ll go down the coast, to Guincho.”
We got into the car. For a moment I entertained the possibility that I ought not to be driving in such a condition. I entertained it and dismissed it. For I felt none of the symptoms of inebriation, not giddiness nor agitation nor sleepiness. Rather, what I felt—have you ever driven on a wet road in winter? Do you know that moment when suddenly the car seems to lift right off the surface of the earth? That was what I felt.
I had no idea what time it was. There were timepieces everywhere—on my wrist, on the dashboard—yet I didn’t look at any of them. After Cascais, the road grew narrower and more windy, far too windy to accommodate such a gargantuan vehicle—and still I navigated them effortlessly, as if the laws of nature had ceased to apply, as if the car had suddenly acquired an unsuspected elasticity, allowing it to bend like an accordion. Even when a bicyclist appeared in my headlights, I didn’t flinch. I simply veered around him. In retrospect, I understand that it was all the absinthe, and that this is one of the many reasons why absinthe is dangerous. Now I wonder that we didn’t kill someone, or get killed ourselves.
Then we got to Guincho, where two or three other cars were parked on the road’s shoulder. Through a grove of umbrella pines, Edward led me out onto dunes that descended to a crescent-shaped beach. Here and there, shadowy hummocks rose where couples slept or made love under blankets. The moon was high. “Now do you see what I mean about the difference between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean?” he said, taking off his shoes. White-tipped breakers slapped the shore. He rolled up his cuffs and waded into the surf. As I followed, I tried to fit my footprints into his, so that there would be only one set.
The water stung my ankles. “It’s cold,” I said, stepping back, but Edward wasn’t listening.
“Where the land ends and the sea begins,” he said. “That’s Camões, the great Lusitanian poet. He wrote that about Cabo da Roca, at the westernmost point in all of Europe. It’s just a little ways to the north. Look.” He put his hands on my shoulders, pointing me in the direction of some murky cliffs. “Can you see it?”
“I don’t know. But I’ll tell people that I did.”
“Yes. Let’s tell people that we did.”
He did not move his hands.
“Pete—”
“What?”
“May I say something?”
“Of course.”
“I have never in my life been so happy as I am at this moment.” His voice was so solemn I nearly laughed.
“Do you think I’m mad or evil to say that?” he went on. “I mean, here we are in Portugal—Portugal, for God’s sake—and all around us, all you can see is suffering and fear, suffering and panic. And then when you consider that the people here, they’re the lucky ones, just because they managed to get this far … What right do I have to be happy? Yet I am. I’m not ashamed of it, either.”
“Maybe it’s because you’re safe.”
“Yes. There’s a sense of relief you can’t help but feel—at knowing you’ve been thrown clear of danger. And yet the panic and fear of others, the panic and suffering of others … It’s still there … And we’re feeding on it, aren’t we? We might as well admit we’re feeding on it. It should really only belong to them, this weird vitality, this sense that you can do things you wouldn’t normally let yourself do … We have no right to it, yet we’re sharing in it … And that’s not the only reason I’m happy. That’s not even the principal reason I’m happy. It’s because of you.”
“Me?”
“Isn’t that obvious?”
“But why? I’m so ordinary. And you’ve done so much in your life, gone to Harvard and Cambridge, known so many interesting people—”
He covered my mouth with his hand. “Quiet. You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know—anything.”
He was now standing so close that I wondered if he was going to kiss me. Instead he took off his jacket. With one swift motion he yanked his shirt and tie over his head.
“Let’s swim,” he said.
“Swim?”
“Come on!” Already he had his trousers and shorts off. White buttocks blazing, he ran into the water, where he got on his knees as if in prayer. A wave crested over him. It withdrew and he was gone.
“Edward!” I called.
A few seconds later, another wave hurled him back onto the sand. “That was glorious!” he said, pushing his hair back. “Come on!”
I didn’t hesitate. I pulled off my clothes as he had, without ceremony. I took off my glasses. The patch of darkness toward which I swam might have been a rock or a sea monster. All I had to navigate by was Edward’s voice. “Warmer,” he said. “Colder … Warmer …”
Suddenly we collided. The hair on his chest was slick as seaweed. I could feel the contours of his pectoral muscles. I could feel his erection.
Behind us a wave was building. I tried to draw away, but Edward wouldn’t let me go. “The thing to do is to go under it,” he said. “Hold on to me.”
Then he pulled me down until we were sitting on the sandy bottom. The wave broke over us. I felt it as the faintest trembling.
We rose again. I was laughing. He took my head in his hands, and now he did kiss me. Another wave broke, pulling us apart from each other, sending us tumbling.
“Edward!” I called, but he didn’t answer. I turned and saw a bigger wave approaching and, remembering what he had said, I dove down, cleaving myself to the ocean floor.
This time I felt the wave as a rumbling—what I imagined an earthquake would feel like.
“Pete!” I heard him calling as I broke the surface.
“I’m here!” I answered.
Separately we stumbled out of the water. The tide had carried us thirty feet or so up the shoreline. To reach our clothes we had to backtrack. “A pity we didn’t bring towels,” he said, drying his face with his shirt.
I put on my glasses. The salt water had marked them. As in a cartoon of drunkenness, I saw spots.
“Where are you going?” I asked Edward, who had picked up his pile of clothes and was moving in the direction of the dunes.
Again he didn’t answer. Maybe he hadn’t heard me. I picked up my own clothes and followed him, until we reached the perimeter of the pine trees. Tufts of beach grass burst sporadically from the sand. Edward put his clothes down and stepped toward me.
Very delicately, he took the glasses from my face, folded them, and rested them atop his pile of clothes.
“Why did you do that?” I said.
And he said, “So that you can truthfully say you never saw what was coming.”