Empire of Love
Translated by Suzan Bozkurt
She suddenly felt sympathetic toward everything solitary and graceless in Nature. A palm tree, its chevelure grotesque, lurching to the side, battered by the wind in the middle of a meadow. A turtle trying to hatch, against all odds, in a wild life documentary. She would pick up useless articles from the floor, broken bits, chewing gum wrappers, a lined button, and she would hesitate before throwing them away. Friends would beat about the bush. Right in front of her, they would indulge in pointed demonstrations of conjugal affection, especially the husbands, who would tell their wives how much they had missed them during the day, or called them ‘darling’ where it was uncalled for. Couples felt a chill of terror when faced with the catastrophe of divorce, there embodied in the physical and moral person of Alda.
Alone in Lisbon, she had to get used to her new timetable. In restaurants she dined at half past seven in an empty room, in advance of couples, families or parties, the waiter turned nursemaid, treating her like a child who had to be sent off to bed so as not to interrupt dinner of the grownups. She watched television programms where young couples would embrace fervently in romantic soaps, looking deeply into each other’s eyes, music, the final kiss, and she would wander round the shopping centre killing time before the film, and the film would invariably show a man and a woman who fell in love and could not live without each other, and so on. Even if she chose war films she had to watch helplessly as the female recruit fell passionately in love with her colleague or fell victim to sexual harassment by the drill sergeant. Love, love, love, everywhere, love, love, love.
Given the astonishing longevity of the women in her family, who lived to be a hundred without any trouble whatsoever, clear-headed and sweet-toothed, Alda reckoned she could look forward to thousands of those early dinners, followed by romantic movies after endless trips to the shops. Contemplating an excessively dramatic sunset on the Caparica beach, featuring a fantastical cumulonimbus which looked as if it had been designed by a light engineer, she saw, looming ahead, fifty years of solitary pleasures such as visits to the cinema and theatre, trips, cruises, afternoon teas, vernissages, openings, closings, premieres, birthdays, family gatherings, all kinds of festivities. For which there would be the ritual preparation of the body, or what could be seen of her body, creamed and powdered, turning up on time well dressed and made up like a woman who takes pride in herself. A woman who does not herself go. Her husband had left her the house and taken the contents, in the interests of fair play. The new wife gave the sofas away to charities, bought design furniture, they set up house together. The cloud of misfortune hung over Alda, who did not miss her married life, nor regretted it ending, but suddenly found that she had too much time on her hands, and she herself felt relegated to a strange, grey zone on the fringe of society, obliged to walk in the shadows, muffled from head to toe in an old camel-hair overcoat, head hanging, eyes fixed to the ground, a pariah in the Empire of Love. If she dared to lift her eyes just a little, it was only to come across a poster in which two youngsters in bathing costumes were inviting her to take some marvellous holiday. The galleries, cafés, the breezy streets, all seemed to shout at her, echoing and with pointed finger, Die! Die! Go away, you freak of Nature, you middle-aged woman!
Alda had two women friends. An old school friend she met up with from time to time, who loved to dispense advice. The other, more recent friend, was intelligent and restrained, had a talent for the succinct, would listen to the end and then sum up in one sentence, normally legalistic, the most significant part of the conversation. She phoned them one after the other on Easter Sunday. Ana had caught a cold in the kitchen, as unlikely as this, admittedly, sounded. She was sure the lamb had brought the virus, in an act of revenge. She advised Alda not to let infected lamb enter her house under any circumstances. Marisa was going through a crisis and had sat down with her husband on Maundy Thursday to talk things through. On Easter Sunday they had a break for lunch, intending to carry on until they had clarified all the issues that concerned them as partners in the same sentimental venture. Marisa thought, given the severity of the crisis — which was not very severe— that maybe in August, when both had planned to take their holidays, they would finally be able to leave the negotiating table not least to stretch their legs. Alda’s parents, now in their eighties, had arranged to go skiing in the Alps in Holy Week,
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casting aside all of their obligations. Going up and down the snowy pistes in X with a group of friends in their sixties, accompanied, as it happened, by a doctor to attend to broken bones and heart attacks, the couple, both lawyers, would enjoy themselves and, at the same time, have a good workout. This felicitous arrangement in what was after all an innocent pleasure, had made them decide to pack their cases for X, as they both were dedicated bohemians. Her mother sent the entertainment schedule to Alda’s work e-mail with a message full of exclamation marks and spelling mistakes owing to a lack of time or patience. Sitting in her wicker chair, leafing indolently through her much amended book of telephone numbers, Alda smiled at the thought of her mother, who had not looked her into the eye for about thirty years. When Alda turned up at her house to fulfil her daughterly duty, her mother would place her hands on her shoulders, turn her head to receive her kiss and say, usually to a vase of yellow tulips adorning the hall table: ‘You look wonderful! And she would describe in detail her last holiday and her plans for the next one, while darting about the house, putting books back in their shelves, making tea, arranging flowers, cleaning marks off tables, tinkling here and there in her many bracelets and necklaces; then came the news of her own generation, who had died, who had been delivered from evil, news of the second generation, who had got divorced, who had remarried, news of the third generation, who was taking drugs, who had graduated, who had married for the first time, who had got divorced for the first time. From this multitude of relatives Alda knew quite a few by sight, but she hadn’t the slightest idea about the others. Who knows, perhaps her unconscious was reminding her of the myth of the sacrificial Easter lamb when she remembered Anabela. Anabela was the perfect sacrificial lamb, or so Alda wanted to remember her, persistently mistreated by destiny, almost absent-mindedly, like someone who forgets, after a while, that they are pressing the door bell. Daughter of someone or other, neglected by aunts and uncles, bullied at boarding school, betrayed even by her friends, seduced and abandoned at the age of sixteen, forced to give up her daughter for adoption, then beginning a life of aimless wandering and hard jobs, small business deals that went wrong, giving up, swindles to which, she invariably fell prey, schemes that landed her in jail, an innocent doing time for others, and all this before the age of twenty-five, at which time Alda, probably more upset by Anabela’s destiny than Anabela herself, backed off, unwilling to witness such wrongheadedness.
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Now, alone in the world and feeling an affinity with lonely palm trees and turtles, she started to rethink her relationship with Anabela. With Anabela she did not risk the humiliation of begging for attention. If she were still alive, they would make a reasonably balanced couple on Sunday outings. She looked for the last telephone number she had for her, which dated from a chance encounter in downtown Lisbon, just in passing — ‘You look great!’, “Ring me”, “Bye”’, written down in the diary above three others that had been crossed out. But the number had changed. Alda rushed to Directory Enquiries in her dizzying search, but of course they didn’t know, covering their ignorance by claiming that the number was ex-directory. With her usual attention to detail, Alda tried combining different numbers. Knowing the general rules for updating telephone numbers, the trick of turning 37 into 347 and 70 into 760, then adding an area code of 21760, she finally heard Anabela’s unmistakable voice, nasal, purring, without any emotional inflections, ab- solutely mechanical. But it was Anabela’s voice in a pre-recorded message that redirected the caller to another number, this time a mobile, of which Alda, in secretarial, mode, took note. Dialling that number she was greeted by yet another message which sent her to a new number, this time a landline, and Alda hesitated between carrying on or giving up, but it was Easter Sunday and she had nothing else to do but indulge her curiosity, so she dialled the number. Anabela picked up, breathless. It took her some time to understand who this Alda was, from whom she had not heard for the past twenty years, and with that same nasal, indolent voice, which Alda knew she used to excuse those who betrayed her, she invited her to come round, gave her the address and said she would be waiting. Having found Anabela, Alda naturally lost any desire to go out. It was drizzling, a stiff breeze was blowing; it was all too depressing. A whole after noon spent in Anabela’s sitting room listening to her litany of woes, which she knew only too well would be one of the most complete litanies imaginable, now struck her as useless torture to add to her own isolation. But she had promised she would go and so she went. Anabela had moved from a flat in Póvoa de Santo Adrião to Laranjeiras, on the tenth floor with a view over the ringroad and Alda entered without misgivings though expecting the worst, when she heard Anabela from inside: “Take a seat, I’m coming, I was having a bath.”
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The entire sitting room was salmon pink. Later on they would argue whether it was salmon or peach (at one point, to hide her embarrassment, in an unusual flash of humour, Alda would call it ‘rainbow trout’). But for now, Alda tried to hold on to her psychic balance in the middle of dressers and china cabinets, standard lamps and chandeliers, carpets and rugs, curtains and drapes, armchairs and footstools, all salmon pink and decorated with fruit and vegetable motifs. Having taken in the sitting room, to avoid the profoundly depressing impact it was having on her, Alda pressed her nail on the remote control and turned on the television. Alda did not pay proper attention to what was happening in front of her, as she was remembering those other times, many years ago, when she waited for Anabela in sitting rooms and parlours — Anabela was forever having a bath or still had to dry her hair or clean up in the kitchen or deal with some unfortunate situation or other — and trying at least not to give in to the rage that always overtook her when waiting. However, little by little, she began to realise that it was not a normal television programme. On screen the actors, men and women, were naked and intertwined in such couplings that it took her a while to grasp the workings of that extensive pornographic machine. She realised she had inadvertently switched on the video player and was watching a tape recording. After first reaching for the remote control, which she cradled in her hand, she listened out for Anabela’s steps and continued watching. One of the women was looking at the camera, noisily reaching an orgasm and a man with a blond moustache, happily showing off his beer belly, waited patiently till somebody had time for him. Finally Alda heard Anabela coming along the corridor in her mules to apologise for the delay and she quickly turned off the television. She noticed that the video recorder was switched on and the cassette still turning round and pressing all the buttons, she tried desperately to find a way to prevent her own embarrassment. She threw the remote away and stood up. Anabela came in dressed from head to toe in salmon pink, her shimmering hair showing bronze highlights, a see-through blouse over her wonder bra, breast implants, skin-tight lycra trousers, patent leather belt, and sandals with very high heels — and Alda recognized the leading actress in the film she had been watching. “You look great!” she said. Anabela thanked her and smiled at her with the sweet little face of an old girl. A botox injection to smooth out the wrinkles had paralysed the muscles
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in her forehead, she had filled it with fat from her body, enhanced her lips with the Paris-Lip procedure, had her eyelids lifted, as well as her double chin, breasts, stomach, bottom and legs. She recounted all this in a factual voice, as if she were talking about a shopping list for the home, things needed to survive. After that they had that altercation about the colour of the sitting room and Anabela suggested they go out as soon as Roberto returned from having a coffee. “This is Alda”, she said, “and this is Roberto, my manager.”
* Asking the waiter for her coffee, Alda noticed that she had not talked to anyone since seven o’clock on Friday evening, when she had said good evening by mistake to a woman going up in the lift with her; only to realise afterwards that it was the troublemaker, the one who did not pay her share of the communal maintenance fee, the one who constantly complained, the one who was noisy all night long and she regretted having extended such a warm greeting so distractedly. At two thirty on Sunday afternoon, after forty-three and a half hours of silence, Her voice came out husky and rasping. Sitting at a table facing the door, after a while she noticed a man in an overcoat staring at her, his jaw set in a hard expression, his forehead wrinkled, doggedly stirring his coffee with his spoon. Intimidated, Alda smiled at him. The man scribbled down some notes on a paper napkin, put away the pen, lit a cigarette and went out. Alda recognized from the past her own mechanical smile in response to the man’s fixed and absent stare, similar in all ways to that of her ex-husband. Strangers at two tables in a café, they were acting out the old marital scene like two old automatons from the same family. Alda was on her way to the matinée and her hour-long walk around the shopping centre where once again she would become acquainted with leather handbags and shoes artistically displayed in the shop windows. She heard a voice shouting her name, carried on the dry, dirty wind of Avandia Fonts Pereira de Milo: “Alda!” Roberto kissed both her cheeks with enormous affection. He treated her like an old and much loved aunt, who awakens only good memories of cakes and comfort. He held her between his hands and looked deeply into her eyes, smiling, enraptured. Everything she said to him was interesting and different.
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He wouldn’t let go of her. He took her to the cinema and in the tearoom he ordered scones for both of them and he praised Lisbon Town Council for maintaining parks and gardens in which one could stroll freely, accompanied by an adorable woman. Alda started to refuse each new invitation, inventing excuses to get away only to accept it shortly after, vexed and ill at ease with Roberto’s gentle insistence, gazing at her timidly like the victim of a grave injustice: “You really don’t like me, Alda …” There was a natural vanity in being seen, even by complete strangers, with a man who would carefully take her by the elbow and protect her back when she stepped on to an elevator. When his hand touched her back, Alda’s stomach turned and she would feel old; she pulled in her belly and lifted her chin so the skin on her neck would become taut. Nobody would know that he worked in “property” and managed the career of a porn film actress who he called Belinda. He could just as easily be a sport’s journalist, a television presenter, a singer from a rather passé boys’ band, a PE teacher. At midnight, standing at the door of the building where Alda had got used to living, Roberto didn’t want to leave. He insisted on seeing her room, wanted to see where she slept, because he fancied himself a psychologist, he said, and one could learn a lot about a person by observing the place they had chosen to rest. At that moment Alda felt a last qualm, and, as it was the last one, she saw it through to the end. Tired from walking and talking, even tired of herself, her life, her recent experiences, tired of speaking to an attentive and understanding listener whose empathy seemed to be limitless, Alda firmly refused him entry. She closed the door behind her, only to glimpse him smiling and saying good bye like a giant teddy bear. Peeping out of her bedroom window at the pavement in order to check whether Roberto was still standing there, Alda noticed she was panting, terrified. Replaying some of the things she had confided in him, which had given him a powerful hold over her, a bleak world opened up before her, a crude, sordid, dangerous world of unimaginable markets, networks of traffickers, arms, drugs, human organs, prostitutes who were abused then disappeared, abducted children — this abyss was staring up at her right now, staring right at her. In her nightdress in the middle of the kitchen, a glass of milk in her right hand and a sleeping pill in the left, for the first time Alda was afraid to be alone.
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Roberto persisted. He called and she put the telephone down. But when he turned up, two days later, with his American actor’s smile, a smile that showed teeth so perfect they could not possibly be a work of fallible Nature, Alda let him in, ready for anything. He’d come to explain. He seemed calm, and his initial shyness had given way to the confidence of an old friend who had certain acquired rights. He had understood why she was reluctant, he said. But she had to believe that his relationship with Bela was purely professional. He could also understand the distaste of a lady like Alda, upperclass, refined, educated, in relation to Bela’s profession. But he could assure her the business had improved its quality standards, it was a good business, fairly honest, and Bela was a splendid woman, highly respected within her profession. And finally, Alda should not think that Anabela would make any lousy old film. They read the scripts together, paying close attention, and selected her roles with care. Agreeing to certain things damaged an actress’s reputation and an actress with a damaged reputation didn’t find work. It was a question of image, as Alda would understand, and protecting Bela’s image was Roberto’s life. But he had entirely different feelings for Alda, what he called the deep friendship of two lost souls who had found each other unexpectedly, and clicked. And, saying this, he stroked her hand with his own, revealing the silver bracelet engraved with his name, peeping out vulgarly from below his cuff. Alda, as a single woman, did not think she had many rights. She knew that, in theory, she could refuse, call Roberto a swindler and a pimp and throw him out. But she thought, and turned it all over and she couldn’t for the life of her see what he might want. To avoid making a decision, she procrastinated, and her procrastination took the form of a bet with herself: if he had a gold chain necklace with a medallion of a saint round his neck, she would never see him again. But in order to find out, she would have to wait. So they ended up eating in a seafood restaurant, where Roberto was greeted by staff practically standing to attention and diners who seemed like regulars to Alda, mostly greasy, old men who looked past her, even when Roberto introduced her. ‘This is Doctor Alda, Mr Pities’. The man wiped his lips, shook her hand and lost interest. She was not merchandise. And Alda stayed, her coat covering her down from head to toe and her eyes lost in a mural that depicted the sun setting over some crayfish
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with enormous spying eyes, pretending that couldn’t hear a conversation all conducted in code, about supplies and demand and deliveries of products. More at ease with her after he had erased her doubts about Bela and the pornographic empire, over which, to quote Roberto, she reigned like a queen, the “property” manager announced the arrival of a new script with a curious plot: “It’s the story of a woman who ends up a divorcee, in her late thirties, heart-broken, because he is leaving her for a younger woman. So she goes into a convent, because she wants to find solace in God and attain some spiritual peace. There she meets a nun, sister Maria do Rosário, who seduces her…” The waiter brought the shellfish and Alda managed to interrupt the conversation and they talked about something else. But Roberto was keen to hear her opinion about the film. There was one curious detail: they had to shoot in Spain and even more interestingly the producer was allowing them to choose how they would be paid. Either in cash or with plastic surgery in a clinic in Pamplona. “Lovely”, said Alda. She felt a desperate craving for chocolate mousse, which she devoured in big spoonfuls without stopping. As she scraped out the bowl, Roberto bent forward with a serious and attentive expression in his light-coloured eyes, and she thought she could glimpse the shine of a gold chain in his half open shirt. He took his napkin and delicately wiped away a speck of mousse, which, disconcertingly, had attached itself to her left ear lobe. Looking back, Alda regretted her voracity; she thought she had revealed something indecent about herself. She woke up at half past seven in the morning crushed by a feeling of guilt that suffocated her. She ran to the window to breathe in the fumes from the road where the traffic, risen from the ashes a short time before, seemed always the same, created by God, the same cars going round and round for all eternity in the same colourless, wretched circuit. She hurriedly dressed to go out and buy the Diário de Notícias. Like those people now stuck in the traffic jam, she had a great urge to find an occupation, an honest goal. She wanted a job, starting today, right now. The free time for which she had fought some years before, when overwhelmed by duties and obligations, was now a curse, a burden. Sitting in the cake shop had taken
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on a new significance in her life: now she read the paper with a purpose, she searched, dismissed, let her finger run down the columns, deliberated, counted the possibles and struck out others. There was not much on offer, and little of any interest. With a degree in maths and a sworn hatred of teaching, Alda had neither skills nor possibilities. At fifty she found herself relegated, by education and experience, to that forbidden human zone where good is done by default. Finally, her eyes came to rest on a discreet advert, almost miserly, asking for a companion for an elderly lady. The advert did not promise a great salary and Alda did not need money. It asked for a CV and a photograph. She rushed home on a wave of enthusiasm. She looked for the best writing paper, the most flattering photo. And, sitting down in front of an old oil painting passed down from generation to generation, in which a gazelle was being devoured by a lioness, she confessed: “It’s either this, or buying a cat”.
* The photograph did not pose any problems, Alda was perfectly turned out for a niece’s wedding, in a very discreet burgundy shantung suit, her hair bound up in a chignon which had sent her rushing to the mirror countless times to catch up all the strands that were resisting the hair mesh. She had the innocent and reserved look of a married wedding guest and her expression said that despite her experience, she would not spoil the wedding feast with comments that could point to the transient and temporary nature of a ceremony that was meant to be lasting. Alda had not counted, however, on the difficulty in writing her CV. Pen in hand, she gazed out of the window at the blank wall of the opposite building for what seemed an eternity. Her cup of chicory tea had grown slimy and cold, and she was still waiting for an opening line to occur to her. Next, she slowly wrote down her name on the long-readied sheet of paper, a name that was both strange and new to her, lacking the addition of her husband’s family name. It was no longer Mascarenhas; it had been but wasn’t anymore. Now she was called Almeida again, like her father. Like Grandfather Almeida. She had been named Alda, for her godmother and her mother’s sister, Fernanda, for her father’s dead sister, taking Ramos and Mullet from her mother and Melo and Almeida from her father. But she was not Mascarenhas anymore.
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But Alda Mullet de Almeida pleased her, she thought it sounded mellow and augured well, because it had a certain resonance and left something hanging, which calmed her. In short, she would just be Alda Almeida, almost cacophonous, but with undeniable media charm. Then she wrote down her old name, curiously the same and yet different from the new one, Mascarenhas for twenty-five years but now, fortunately, bereft of its procreators. Her sisterin-law, Helena, still phoned occasionally and, depressed, told her all the gossip. Alda had a more unhindered picture of the Mascarenhas family than of her own Mullet and Almeida relatives. The Mascarenhas family lived under the yoke of a ninety-year-old aunt, who laid down the law in a big house lost in the mountains, where each member of the clan was summoned in turn, as if to thehigh court, in order to be admonished or called to account. Helena was terrified of the aunt, who used her as a spy, like the kings of old. And when the clan met in conspiratorial meetings trying to put the old lady into a home, Helena was torn between two loyalties. The thing was, the peaceful country side of yesteryear had changed, for some unfathomable and complicated social reasons, into a den of drug addicts, thieves of necessity or for pleasure, who robbed the big house once a week without fail, while the aunt nodded off over a volume by Montaigne. Helena was inclined towards the old people’s home option, with the best of intentions. She asked Alda what she thought, not really expecting an answer, and Alda remained stubbornly silent and sighed a sigh of relief that she was finally free of such a muddle. “I have not known many men,” she wrote, “and I find it strange (and I find it strange that it should puzzle me) that none of the men I have known would stroke people.” One male friend had dogs and stroked his dogs. But not women, or children — the men I have known did not make a fuss of human beings. It’s a bit ridiculous that a grown woman should say such a thing. Maybe I had bad luck. The only man who had paid me much attention was my cousin António. I was seven, I’d just arrived from Angola, I was exhausted. I let myself fall to the floor and rested my head on Monstro’s flank: He didn’t even move. António was talking and stroking my head. I remember that I didn’t want to fall asleep, I wanted to hear him talk, but all the same I soon fell asleep”. This was not a CV point, but she thought it offered an adequate description of her love life. Nothing very negative, a notion that was pointed to an
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unknown destiny, good things that had happened but were lost mostly due to the lack of opportunity or coordination. “I was born”, she continued writing, “at a time that didn’t really suit my mother”. She had told her that they had planned a great adventure, living on the Côte d’Azur with her father as if they were characters in a novel of white linen suits and cocktails on the terrace in the afternoon; her father had inherited money from his maternal grandparents and he intended to make his life into a work of art. Alda extrapolated the inconvenience of her birth to other aspects of her life. Everything had happened at the wrong time, when there was no longer any reason for it — a great disappointment in a first love which had made her timid, a course imposed by a failure in another course, which had previously been chosen by default, a lengthy engagement that was broken off, a hasty marriage that went on too long. Endless missed oppor tunities, a continuous disengagement, something outside of her skin. “Our lives are all giving and squandering”, she wrote in the CV and was left full of doubts about the plural, which struck her as ambitious and the result more of ignorance and resentment than a clear and complete vision of things. She thought herself bitter and pessimistic, but she was not bitter and pessimistic. Circumstances had not been the best. And despair was more abhorrent, in those days, than illegitimacy in her grandmother’s time. She limited herself, in the end, to facts that could easily be confirmed: born in Carcavelos, 1950, studied maths in Lisbon, married, no children, divorced from a dentist, lives in Picoas. Years ago she had tried teaching in a high school, but had fled, appalled, the first time a student was rude to her. She did translations from Spanish in order to pass the afternoons, cowboy stories, crime novels, but she grew tired of the tight deadlines and an obliga tion taken on purely to combat the boredom. All in all, the facts were scant, they didn’t amount to more than half a page, and the lines were short. She looked for things to say about her morals in a few brief words. What sort of person was she? She though she could realistically describe herself as restrained in all things, the way she dressed and walked, how she was and how she behaved, and also reasonably cultured and diligent. She thought when it came to writing that she had a stable life and some good friends and did not mind looking after elderly people. She could not find anything truly important that would give a more precise picture. At the table, which was set with blue and pink china in the dining
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room, Roberto and Anabela, were furious with her. The actress had arrived unhurriedly, scuffing her high heels, three-quarters of an hour late — although in order to be late one has to be conscious of the fact that one is late, which was never the case— and was languishing on the sofa, while Roberto, in his apron, was cooking a paella that kept needing that special something. Alda, sitting down with a glass of beer, was studying a book on the great houses of Portugal from the past. “They took my handbag with everything in it, there were the cards, my identity card, it had everything, and the money, I’ll never see it again”. “Never mind”, said Roberto, “’ll buy you a new one. You’re not going to worry about it now”. “That’s such a nuisance”, said Alda, turning a page. “‘Roberto will fix it”, said Roberto. “Don’t you think I should turn on the air conditioning?” “Are you hot?” asked Anabela. “You’re hot because you’re cooking. I’m not even hungry, why don’t you sit down with us?” “What do you think, Alda?” “I don’t care one way or the other. Do what you’d do at home”. “You don’t get on with air conditioning, is that it?” asked Anabela. “If it’s too cold I get a sore throat, but that happens to everyone”. “I don’t. Do you get a sore throat, Roberto?” “If it’s very cold, but you can turn it down”. “I don’t know about that. What are you going to set it at?” “What setting do you prefer, Alda?” “Not too high, not too low”, said Alda, distracted by a sixteenth-century manor house. “If it’s too cold, I can make it warmer”. “Seems like a reasonable solution”. “And if she gets a sore throat?” “I’ll put it on very low. Is that all right, Alda?” With the paella cooked with all the trimmings in front of them, the three friends, extremely sluggish, glanced once in a while at the screen showing selected scenes from “Succulent Intimacies”, an adaptation of the book with the same title. Roberto played the host; he opened the wine and continued to debate with Anabela the pros and cons of air conditioning, and public opinion, and what had happened to so-and-so. Anabela complained about
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the lack of choice of partners in the film they were going to shoot in Spain, and she refused to make a film with a guy who chased after her even off the set. She hated another actor who Roberto was at pains to recommend to her as pleasant and well equipped, because he had a thing about stroking her head and tousle her hair, which the actress could not stand under any circumstances. Alda followed the conversation without any curiosity, and asked herself privately what she was doing there opposite the ring road, under a leaden sky, with the constant roar of traffic speeding down the road to Alcântara. “Did you know I found a job?” asked Alda. At first they took it quite well, perhaps they thought it was some noble calling, pedagogical, or a television programme that would make her a star. When she told them she was going to be an au pair for Dona Mafalda, who lived in Estoril, they were outraged. “At some old woman’s beck and call? A woman with your class, Alda?’” Roberto was, of course, the most wounded. He stopped eating, put down his knife and fork, toyed with his bracelet. “If you need money”, he asked finally in a voice constricted by rejection, “why didn’t you come to me? Am I such a bad person that you wouldn’t consider asking for my help? Don’t you think I deserve your trust?” Taking the bull by the horns Alda responded to these three weighty questions, complaining about the futility of her free time, the loneliness and the silence of her life, the fact that she had nobody to look after, at the same time lauding the social dignity of caring for children and the elderly — and she faltered trying to justify her own entitlement to have to tasks and goals. Roberto had looked down at the body of a prawn and listened to her in consternation. With each new argument she offered, he shook his head as if he were trying to escape a nightmare. “If she wants to, let her”, concluded Anabela, “it’s an amusement just like any other. I wouldn’t be seen dead serving an old woman who is probably mad. But then I’ve always been lucky; I’ve always had people who helped me when I needed it”. “Lucky?”, asked Alda, incredulous. “Always. Ever since I met Roberto things have always been on the up, haven’t they, love?” As Roberto got up to embrace her from behind, the second button of his shirt popped open, freeing from his chest a gold chain from which there
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hung a very large and holy medallion. Staring at it, Alda wondered which divinity was watching over him. “Belinha, darling”, he murmured, kissing the actress’s neck with devotion, “our life is so perfect”.
* Her palms were sweating when she greeted the very tall and very thin lady, who was the living image of decorum and restraint. From the short silver hair, brushed cleanly back, to the flat shoes, which shouted Paris and exorbitant prices everything about Maria de Magalhães spoke of wealth, wealth from the cradle, seven generations of vast inherited wealth heaped upon vast inherited riches. Alda had felt surprised and disgusted by the answer she was given to the c.v. and the photograph. In four typewritten A4 pages Dona Mafalda’s daughter and secretary asked about everything, including the existence of physical/mental/other illnesses in her family, reasons for her divorce and her present mental state, thoroughness and frequency of habits of hygiene, special aptitude for social interaction (was she timid, reserved, silent?), topics she could discuss with ease (international politics and diplomacy, taxation, travel?), familiarity with protocol, athletic training and standard of performance and stamina, problems with sleep or digestion, and she was especially probing on questions of morality, even including the indelicate allusion to criminal convictions. Once the initial shock at finding herself treated with undeserved unfairness had passed, Alda, had ended up answering three quarters of the idiotic woman’s questionnaire, putting ‘This is a personal question’ in all the spaces where she found the question offensive. Maria subsequently sent her a restrained note of thanks then fell silent, to the indescribable relief of Alda, who returned with gusto and resolve to her routines, openings and matinées, finding an amusement and lightness in her loneliness that unexpectedly put smiles and expressions of happiness on her face. Meanwhile, Roberto gave her the silent treatment and phoned laconically to ask after Alda’s health and not much else. It was a strange daily occurrence, the phone call from Roberto, to whose way of proceeding she had become accustomed. He would first ask how she was, to which she would answer, “Fine”, he would then ask whether she had received any answer about
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‘the job’ (there was a pause before ‘job’, which meant he was putting it in quotation marks). When she said no, Roberto would lapse into silence once again, and Alda could see him shaking his head in the salmon pink sitting room, his gold chain dangling from his neck, then he would say: “Well, good night then”. And he would hang up. Sometimes Alda pre-empted him by a second, and did not hear the ‘night’, because she was busy eating her dinner or she was eager to watch a programme about koalas and their lives on top of distant trees. So Maria de Magalhães’s telephone call took her by surprise, when she invited her, in a voice without the slightest trace of superiority in its accent, to an interview in person on the following day at the house in Estoril. And now, sipping her lemonade on the terrace overlooking the sea, Alda felt herself slipping into the character of the young maths graduate so she could ignore the nature of the situation that reduced her to the status of daily help, an upper servant. Maria had explained straight away that all negotiations would be conducted not only in her mother’s absence, but against her wishes. She referred to her in a string of euphemisms which Alda was not slow to decipher, for soon after, Dona Mafalda appeared dragging a tearful girl in a maid’s uniform by the arm, pushing her forward and shouting at the daughter: “I caught this tart going through my drawers, you stupid cow. You sent her, there’s no need to ask. The drawers are empty. Four drawers are empty”. “Her ladyship hit me”, said the girl, on her knees in front of Maria, “and I want to leave”. The vexed Dona Mafalda must have been about seventy-five. The shocking pink dress left her bronzed, skeletal thighs exposed, the skin hanging in folds from the bones; the low neckline was thrust out by her wonder bra, lifting the front of her dress. She stood before her daughter haughty and silent, swaying on her silver stiletto heels and occasionally pushing back from her forehead the fringe of the ash blonde hair which reached down to her shoulders. Only from the fixed stare, the constant working of her dry mouth, the wetting of her lips with her tongue, could Alda deduce that she was completely drunk. “Alda Mullet de Almeida”, said Maria, “my mother, Mafalda Ortega Magalhães”. The old woman stepped back, while the maid escaped as best she could, and faced Alda, who had stood up to shake her hand:
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“Just what is this all about?” Looking beyond Alda to the blue of the sea, fixing her falcon’s eyes on the horizon, she spotted and stared at a sailing boat, which passed far away, swelling and happy. “Bitch…”, she said. And hastening towards the balcony, she leant over towards the horizon. Then she ran, stumbling, to the sitting room, and opening the drawer of an immense inlaid bureau, she took out a pair of binoculars and rushed back to the balcony. “What a beautiful torso! A magnificent torso! Have you seen that magnificent torso, Maria?” The daughter had leant against the old stone balustrade, aimed the binoculars, taking her time, slipping her shoe off the heel of her right foot, which slid like liquid in the silk stocking: “Well? Asked her mother. And Maria, emotionless: “You’re quite right, Mama. It’s superb”.
*
Then began the true idyll with Roberto. Freed from the hypothetical “job”, they went to the beach and spent weekends together, taking trips through hills and valleys, to bullfights and festivals and processions and pilgrimages to his favourite places and her favourite places. Roberto was wholly devoted to her but Alda, for her part, couldn’t help feeling constraint, which she hid out of politeness and a certain fear. Anabela was constantly “meditating”, as Roberto called it, which Alda thought was in keeping with the naturally inert state of the actress — the only person she knew who could make a big drama out of not thinking anything about anything. “Meditation is easy”, said Anabela. “I’ve already spent an hour thinking about nothing. Only sometimes I felt hungry, but kept it under control”. As she returned from three days in Gerês with Roberto who, it turned out, was also a great lover of nature, concerned about the extinction of species, which would be a great loss, and holding forth about the importance of biodiversity while climbing mountains, Alda rushed to open the front door when she heard the telephone ringing inside. It was Dona Mafalda asking out of the blue whether she would care to bet on some horses.
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“It’s a sure thing”, she said. “I have a very honest bookie, he’s from a very good family in Brooklyn, Italian mother, I’ve worked with him for ages. We could start with one hundred thousand dollars, going halves, fifty for each, what do you think? I don’t have the money here as yet, I haven’t had the interest payments yet, I won’t receive them until the end of the month. But you could lend me the fifty thousand, Alda, and I’ll pay you with the winnings, would that be all right?”’ And when Alda, emboldened by the ludicrousness of the proposition, told her that she didn’t bet on horses, Mafalda invited her to a bridge party that very Sunday afternoon. She stressed that the stakes would be very low and she could always pay with pre-dated cheques, if she did not have the means to cover her losses. Alda, unfortunately, had a great deal to do and would be busy until the end of the following week. The insults, which followed, were curiously all directed at Maria de Magalhães, from whose watchful eye and iron hand Mafalda could not escape. “And she threatens me with her father! Says he’ll cut off my allowance! Her father? Who knows who her father is! She’s convinced he’s my husband and maybe he is too and they think I’m senile because I say these things. But there have been so many of them, I have a full life, I’m not an ugly old woman, I’m not a chair, I’m a useless lump, I’m not dishevelled, I’m not dull, I’m not bad tempered. They keep me locked up in this mausoleum; can you imagine what this is like? When I die, all they’ll have to do is throw me out of the window, they can give me a burial at sea”. At first, Alda did not understand the expression ‘burial at sea’, as she pronounced it with a heavy Spanish accent. She made her excuses as politely as she could, she still had so much to deal with in her house, and heard Dona Mafalda hurl a string of expletives at her, direct insults and abusive remarks, which made her put the receiver down, as if, of her own volition, she had decided she needed to lie down and rest after such nonsense. And she was about to open the suitcase to unpack, when she heard Roberto tapping on the front door. Not very happy with yet another interruption, she opened the door and found herself face to face with Marisa, whose eyes were red from crying. She never tired of admiring Marisa’s ability to let the tears flow without losing her composure. They ran straight down her cheeks, opening up furrows in the moisturiser that glowed, the foundation that concealed and the powder
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that covered it all. Her tears hung in droplets on either side of her chin and Alda collected them all in a couple of tissues which soon proved insufficient. She noted, on the other hand, that she had never actually seen Anabela weep. She had seen her betrayed and abused, she had witnessed successes and failures, and Marisa’s big round eyes continued to contain all of this in that same desolate interior landscape, without even shrugging her shoulders. And Alda, watching Marisa weep and wail, already felt more in common with Anabela, taking the form of a refusal to offer advice or make general observations. Finally, Marisa, defeated, admitted that talking was only of use in minor conflicts, superficial ones, where fundamental mutual trust had not yet been shaken. “How can I believe someone who lies all the time?’” Alda made some tea, asked whether she wanted a sedative, but Marisa was calm, almost too calm, she was sad, not quite herself; one cannot lose faith in conversation without rocking the foundations of other beliefs, related or otherwise. From the way she was talking, Alda gathered that Marisa not longer believed in the fruitfulness of dialogue, but she still believed in what she said, in her explanations, in what she thought the past had been and what the present was. Fundamental doubts about herself had not yet occurred to her, and given the way that she was made, they probably never would. Alda was about to cut short her friend’s tears, when the telephone rang again and she heard the nasal voice of Dona Mafalda: “And dogs? Do you play the dogs?” She tried to convince her that she could not possibly lose in dog races, and launched into a meandering history of greyhounds, referred to cock fighting, then investments in building projects, fruit trees, agricultural subsidies, unimaginable ways of betting without risk. Alda left the receiver upturned on the sofa between her and Marisa, her friend lent forward to hear better and they remained there listening to that meaningless flood of words, exchanging looks and impatient gestures. Covering the receiver, Alda explained, as far as she could, who Dona Mafalda was, naturally omitting to mention the reason why she had called her. And Marisa concluded: “The mad always get away with it. If you were mad, you could do whatever you wanted and nobody could do anything about it”.
*
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Lying on the sand, she fought unsuccessfully to disperse the image of Roberto last night in the lodge, saying to her, mystically taking her breath into his mouth: “I am so happy with you, Alda!” At the same time, she tried to forget the letter she had received from him, a business letter on headed paper, the exact meaning of which escaped her. Nevertheless, Alda thought she understood the general significance of what had happened, even though she was sceptical as to what it all meant for her personally. Now she was merely suffering from shock and humiliation, but who knows how it might all turn out, after her lover’s insistent explanations? “We are pleased to inform you”, said the paper sent by Robimota Imports/Exports, “that a cheque to the total value of fifty million escudos has been deposited in your account. Deeply grateful for your kindness and humanitarian principles we are placing at your disposition ten per cent of the total amount, a token of our gratitude and fee for your services”. It was signed by Roberto Imperioso and Arnaldo Mota, and Alda could not help but be touched by the two signatures, so similar and clumsy that they were obviously done by the same person, someone who had not tried very hard to hide the deception. Alda climbed up on to the wall to begin the painstaking task. Since she was a girl, she had sat on that very same bench and cleaned off all the grains of sand before setting off on the difficult path for home. She took her necklace and her watch out of the bag, tied back her hair, misted her face with mineral water. Closing her eyes to envelop herself in a cloud of spray — when she closed her eyes she always stopped breathing — she noticed that the old man next to her, beside whom she had unwittingly sat down, was moaning and crying. Alda kept herself busy cleaning the sand off her feet, pretended that she was not listening, but the old man came closer determined to tell her. He was crying for Menina, the dog that had been run over and died. He took out a Polaroid photo from the inner pocket of his jacket, showing a Golden Retriever, gentle and playful, sitting on a sofa with her snout resting on the dark leather arm of the sofa, looking tenderly at the very same old man who was relaxing on the floor at her feet. Alda didn’t feel any compassion; she didn’t even know what to say. She said good bye, stood up, her endless job of brushing off the sand not quite done. She was looking for a bench with less suffering. Sitting on the stones of the quay, all manner of bathers were looking at the sea. Further along, on the stone steps, were an obese man and woman, herhead resting on his mountainous shoulder, his arm circling her mountain-
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ous shoulder, contemplating their twilight. In the car, finishing her tidying up, getting rid of the last obdurate grain of sand, she could also see a young couple playing, against the light. First the girl chased after the boy to slap his head hard, then the lad chased after her and captured her hands, giving her a kiss on the neck, which she eluded, then running after him to hit him once more and to let herself be caught. But suddenly, the nymph broke free and une xpectedly began to dance barefoot, a dark figure, slim, with long hair, and Alda noticed that the inner rhythm of the girl coincided exactly with what she heard playing on her car radio. Smiling, the key in the ignition, she was again immersed and completely carried away, floating in the inescapable torrent of love.
She suddenly felt sympathetic toward everything solitary and graceless in Nature. A palm tree, its chevelure grotesque, lurching to the side, battered by the wind in the middle of a meadow. A turtle trying to hatch, against all odds, in a wild life documentary. She would pick up useless articles from the floor, broken bits, chewing gum wrappers, a lined button, and she would hesitate before throwing them away. Friends would beat about the bush. Right in front of her, they would indulge in pointed demonstrations of conjugal affection, especially the husbands, who would tell their wives how much they had missed them during the day, or called them ‘darling’ where it was uncalled for. Couples felt a chill of terror when faced with the catastrophe of divorce, there embodied in the physical and moral person of Alda.
Alone in Lisbon, she had to get used to her new timetable. In restaurants she dined at half past seven in an empty room, in advance of couples, families or parties, the waiter turned nursemaid, treating her like a child who had to be sent off to bed so as not to interrupt dinner of the grownups. She watched television programms where young couples would embrace fervently in romantic soaps, looking deeply into each other’s eyes, music, the final kiss, and she would wander round the shopping centre killing time before the film, and the film would invariably show a man and a woman who fell in love and could not live without each other, and so on. Even if she chose war films she had to watch helplessly as the female recruit fell passionately in love with her colleague or fell victim to sexual harassment by the drill sergeant. Love, love, love, everywhere, love, love, love.
Given the astonishing longevity of the women in her family, who lived to be a hundred without any trouble whatsoever, clear-headed and sweet-toothed, Alda reckoned she could look forward to thousands of those early dinners, followed by romantic movies after endless trips to the shops. Contemplating an excessively dramatic sunset on the Caparica beach, featuring a fantastical cumulonimbus which looked as if it had been designed by a light engineer, she saw, looming ahead, fifty years of solitary pleasures such as visits to the cinema and theatre, trips, cruises, afternoon teas, vernissages, openings, closings, premieres, birthdays, family gatherings, all kinds of festivities. For which there would be the ritual preparation of the body, or what could be seen of her body, creamed and powdered, turning up on time well dressed and made up like a woman who takes pride in herself. A woman who does not herself go. Her husband had left her the house and taken the contents, in the interests of fair play. The new wife gave the sofas away to charities, bought design furniture, they set up house together. The cloud of misfortune hung over Alda, who did not miss her married life, nor regretted it ending, but suddenly found that she had too much time on her hands, and she herself felt relegated to a strange, grey zone on the fringe of society, obliged to walk in the shadows, muffled from head to toe in an old camel-hair overcoat, head hanging, eyes fixed to the ground, a pariah in the Empire of Love. If she dared to lift her eyes just a little, it was only to come across a poster in which two youngsters in bathing costumes were inviting her to take some marvellous holiday. The galleries, cafés, the breezy streets, all seemed to shout at her, echoing and with pointed finger, Die! Die! Go away, you freak of Nature, you middle-aged woman!
Alda had two women friends. An old school friend she met up with from time to time, who loved to dispense advice. The other, more recent friend, was intelligent and restrained, had a talent for the succinct, would listen to the end and then sum up in one sentence, normally legalistic, the most significant part of the conversation. She phoned them one after the other on Easter Sunday. Ana had caught a cold in the kitchen, as unlikely as this, admittedly, sounded. She was sure the lamb had brought the virus, in an act of revenge. She advised Alda not to let infected lamb enter her house under any circumstances. Marisa was going through a crisis and had sat down with her husband on Maundy Thursday to talk things through. On Easter Sunday they had a break for lunch, intending to carry on until they had clarified all the issues that concerned them as partners in the same sentimental venture. Marisa thought, given the severity of the crisis — which was not very severe— that maybe in August, when both had planned to take their holidays, they would finally be able to leave the negotiating table not least to stretch their legs. Alda’s parents, now in their eighties, had arranged to go skiing in the Alps in Holy Week,
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casting aside all of their obligations. Going up and down the snowy pistes in X with a group of friends in their sixties, accompanied, as it happened, by a doctor to attend to broken bones and heart attacks, the couple, both lawyers, would enjoy themselves and, at the same time, have a good workout. This felicitous arrangement in what was after all an innocent pleasure, had made them decide to pack their cases for X, as they both were dedicated bohemians. Her mother sent the entertainment schedule to Alda’s work e-mail with a message full of exclamation marks and spelling mistakes owing to a lack of time or patience. Sitting in her wicker chair, leafing indolently through her much amended book of telephone numbers, Alda smiled at the thought of her mother, who had not looked her into the eye for about thirty years. When Alda turned up at her house to fulfil her daughterly duty, her mother would place her hands on her shoulders, turn her head to receive her kiss and say, usually to a vase of yellow tulips adorning the hall table: ‘You look wonderful! And she would describe in detail her last holiday and her plans for the next one, while darting about the house, putting books back in their shelves, making tea, arranging flowers, cleaning marks off tables, tinkling here and there in her many bracelets and necklaces; then came the news of her own generation, who had died, who had been delivered from evil, news of the second generation, who had got divorced, who had remarried, news of the third generation, who was taking drugs, who had graduated, who had married for the first time, who had got divorced for the first time. From this multitude of relatives Alda knew quite a few by sight, but she hadn’t the slightest idea about the others. Who knows, perhaps her unconscious was reminding her of the myth of the sacrificial Easter lamb when she remembered Anabela. Anabela was the perfect sacrificial lamb, or so Alda wanted to remember her, persistently mistreated by destiny, almost absent-mindedly, like someone who forgets, after a while, that they are pressing the door bell. Daughter of someone or other, neglected by aunts and uncles, bullied at boarding school, betrayed even by her friends, seduced and abandoned at the age of sixteen, forced to give up her daughter for adoption, then beginning a life of aimless wandering and hard jobs, small business deals that went wrong, giving up, swindles to which, she invariably fell prey, schemes that landed her in jail, an innocent doing time for others, and all this before the age of twenty-five, at which time Alda, probably more upset by Anabela’s destiny than Anabela herself, backed off, unwilling to witness such wrongheadedness.
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Now, alone in the world and feeling an affinity with lonely palm trees and turtles, she started to rethink her relationship with Anabela. With Anabela she did not risk the humiliation of begging for attention. If she were still alive, they would make a reasonably balanced couple on Sunday outings. She looked for the last telephone number she had for her, which dated from a chance encounter in downtown Lisbon, just in passing — ‘You look great!’, “Ring me”, “Bye”’, written down in the diary above three others that had been crossed out. But the number had changed. Alda rushed to Directory Enquiries in her dizzying search, but of course they didn’t know, covering their ignorance by claiming that the number was ex-directory. With her usual attention to detail, Alda tried combining different numbers. Knowing the general rules for updating telephone numbers, the trick of turning 37 into 347 and 70 into 760, then adding an area code of 21760, she finally heard Anabela’s unmistakable voice, nasal, purring, without any emotional inflections, ab- solutely mechanical. But it was Anabela’s voice in a pre-recorded message that redirected the caller to another number, this time a mobile, of which Alda, in secretarial, mode, took note. Dialling that number she was greeted by yet another message which sent her to a new number, this time a landline, and Alda hesitated between carrying on or giving up, but it was Easter Sunday and she had nothing else to do but indulge her curiosity, so she dialled the number. Anabela picked up, breathless. It took her some time to understand who this Alda was, from whom she had not heard for the past twenty years, and with that same nasal, indolent voice, which Alda knew she used to excuse those who betrayed her, she invited her to come round, gave her the address and said she would be waiting. Having found Anabela, Alda naturally lost any desire to go out. It was drizzling, a stiff breeze was blowing; it was all too depressing. A whole after noon spent in Anabela’s sitting room listening to her litany of woes, which she knew only too well would be one of the most complete litanies imaginable, now struck her as useless torture to add to her own isolation. But she had promised she would go and so she went. Anabela had moved from a flat in Póvoa de Santo Adrião to Laranjeiras, on the tenth floor with a view over the ringroad and Alda entered without misgivings though expecting the worst, when she heard Anabela from inside: “Take a seat, I’m coming, I was having a bath.”
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The entire sitting room was salmon pink. Later on they would argue whether it was salmon or peach (at one point, to hide her embarrassment, in an unusual flash of humour, Alda would call it ‘rainbow trout’). But for now, Alda tried to hold on to her psychic balance in the middle of dressers and china cabinets, standard lamps and chandeliers, carpets and rugs, curtains and drapes, armchairs and footstools, all salmon pink and decorated with fruit and vegetable motifs. Having taken in the sitting room, to avoid the profoundly depressing impact it was having on her, Alda pressed her nail on the remote control and turned on the television. Alda did not pay proper attention to what was happening in front of her, as she was remembering those other times, many years ago, when she waited for Anabela in sitting rooms and parlours — Anabela was forever having a bath or still had to dry her hair or clean up in the kitchen or deal with some unfortunate situation or other — and trying at least not to give in to the rage that always overtook her when waiting. However, little by little, she began to realise that it was not a normal television programme. On screen the actors, men and women, were naked and intertwined in such couplings that it took her a while to grasp the workings of that extensive pornographic machine. She realised she had inadvertently switched on the video player and was watching a tape recording. After first reaching for the remote control, which she cradled in her hand, she listened out for Anabela’s steps and continued watching. One of the women was looking at the camera, noisily reaching an orgasm and a man with a blond moustache, happily showing off his beer belly, waited patiently till somebody had time for him. Finally Alda heard Anabela coming along the corridor in her mules to apologise for the delay and she quickly turned off the television. She noticed that the video recorder was switched on and the cassette still turning round and pressing all the buttons, she tried desperately to find a way to prevent her own embarrassment. She threw the remote away and stood up. Anabela came in dressed from head to toe in salmon pink, her shimmering hair showing bronze highlights, a see-through blouse over her wonder bra, breast implants, skin-tight lycra trousers, patent leather belt, and sandals with very high heels — and Alda recognized the leading actress in the film she had been watching. “You look great!” she said. Anabela thanked her and smiled at her with the sweet little face of an old girl. A botox injection to smooth out the wrinkles had paralysed the muscles
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in her forehead, she had filled it with fat from her body, enhanced her lips with the Paris-Lip procedure, had her eyelids lifted, as well as her double chin, breasts, stomach, bottom and legs. She recounted all this in a factual voice, as if she were talking about a shopping list for the home, things needed to survive. After that they had that altercation about the colour of the sitting room and Anabela suggested they go out as soon as Roberto returned from having a coffee. “This is Alda”, she said, “and this is Roberto, my manager.”
* Asking the waiter for her coffee, Alda noticed that she had not talked to anyone since seven o’clock on Friday evening, when she had said good evening by mistake to a woman going up in the lift with her; only to realise afterwards that it was the troublemaker, the one who did not pay her share of the communal maintenance fee, the one who constantly complained, the one who was noisy all night long and she regretted having extended such a warm greeting so distractedly. At two thirty on Sunday afternoon, after forty-three and a half hours of silence, Her voice came out husky and rasping. Sitting at a table facing the door, after a while she noticed a man in an overcoat staring at her, his jaw set in a hard expression, his forehead wrinkled, doggedly stirring his coffee with his spoon. Intimidated, Alda smiled at him. The man scribbled down some notes on a paper napkin, put away the pen, lit a cigarette and went out. Alda recognized from the past her own mechanical smile in response to the man’s fixed and absent stare, similar in all ways to that of her ex-husband. Strangers at two tables in a café, they were acting out the old marital scene like two old automatons from the same family. Alda was on her way to the matinée and her hour-long walk around the shopping centre where once again she would become acquainted with leather handbags and shoes artistically displayed in the shop windows. She heard a voice shouting her name, carried on the dry, dirty wind of Avandia Fonts Pereira de Milo: “Alda!” Roberto kissed both her cheeks with enormous affection. He treated her like an old and much loved aunt, who awakens only good memories of cakes and comfort. He held her between his hands and looked deeply into her eyes, smiling, enraptured. Everything she said to him was interesting and different.
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He wouldn’t let go of her. He took her to the cinema and in the tearoom he ordered scones for both of them and he praised Lisbon Town Council for maintaining parks and gardens in which one could stroll freely, accompanied by an adorable woman. Alda started to refuse each new invitation, inventing excuses to get away only to accept it shortly after, vexed and ill at ease with Roberto’s gentle insistence, gazing at her timidly like the victim of a grave injustice: “You really don’t like me, Alda …” There was a natural vanity in being seen, even by complete strangers, with a man who would carefully take her by the elbow and protect her back when she stepped on to an elevator. When his hand touched her back, Alda’s stomach turned and she would feel old; she pulled in her belly and lifted her chin so the skin on her neck would become taut. Nobody would know that he worked in “property” and managed the career of a porn film actress who he called Belinda. He could just as easily be a sport’s journalist, a television presenter, a singer from a rather passé boys’ band, a PE teacher. At midnight, standing at the door of the building where Alda had got used to living, Roberto didn’t want to leave. He insisted on seeing her room, wanted to see where she slept, because he fancied himself a psychologist, he said, and one could learn a lot about a person by observing the place they had chosen to rest. At that moment Alda felt a last qualm, and, as it was the last one, she saw it through to the end. Tired from walking and talking, even tired of herself, her life, her recent experiences, tired of speaking to an attentive and understanding listener whose empathy seemed to be limitless, Alda firmly refused him entry. She closed the door behind her, only to glimpse him smiling and saying good bye like a giant teddy bear. Peeping out of her bedroom window at the pavement in order to check whether Roberto was still standing there, Alda noticed she was panting, terrified. Replaying some of the things she had confided in him, which had given him a powerful hold over her, a bleak world opened up before her, a crude, sordid, dangerous world of unimaginable markets, networks of traffickers, arms, drugs, human organs, prostitutes who were abused then disappeared, abducted children — this abyss was staring up at her right now, staring right at her. In her nightdress in the middle of the kitchen, a glass of milk in her right hand and a sleeping pill in the left, for the first time Alda was afraid to be alone.
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Roberto persisted. He called and she put the telephone down. But when he turned up, two days later, with his American actor’s smile, a smile that showed teeth so perfect they could not possibly be a work of fallible Nature, Alda let him in, ready for anything. He’d come to explain. He seemed calm, and his initial shyness had given way to the confidence of an old friend who had certain acquired rights. He had understood why she was reluctant, he said. But she had to believe that his relationship with Bela was purely professional. He could also understand the distaste of a lady like Alda, upperclass, refined, educated, in relation to Bela’s profession. But he could assure her the business had improved its quality standards, it was a good business, fairly honest, and Bela was a splendid woman, highly respected within her profession. And finally, Alda should not think that Anabela would make any lousy old film. They read the scripts together, paying close attention, and selected her roles with care. Agreeing to certain things damaged an actress’s reputation and an actress with a damaged reputation didn’t find work. It was a question of image, as Alda would understand, and protecting Bela’s image was Roberto’s life. But he had entirely different feelings for Alda, what he called the deep friendship of two lost souls who had found each other unexpectedly, and clicked. And, saying this, he stroked her hand with his own, revealing the silver bracelet engraved with his name, peeping out vulgarly from below his cuff. Alda, as a single woman, did not think she had many rights. She knew that, in theory, she could refuse, call Roberto a swindler and a pimp and throw him out. But she thought, and turned it all over and she couldn’t for the life of her see what he might want. To avoid making a decision, she procrastinated, and her procrastination took the form of a bet with herself: if he had a gold chain necklace with a medallion of a saint round his neck, she would never see him again. But in order to find out, she would have to wait. So they ended up eating in a seafood restaurant, where Roberto was greeted by staff practically standing to attention and diners who seemed like regulars to Alda, mostly greasy, old men who looked past her, even when Roberto introduced her. ‘This is Doctor Alda, Mr Pities’. The man wiped his lips, shook her hand and lost interest. She was not merchandise. And Alda stayed, her coat covering her down from head to toe and her eyes lost in a mural that depicted the sun setting over some crayfish
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with enormous spying eyes, pretending that couldn’t hear a conversation all conducted in code, about supplies and demand and deliveries of products. More at ease with her after he had erased her doubts about Bela and the pornographic empire, over which, to quote Roberto, she reigned like a queen, the “property” manager announced the arrival of a new script with a curious plot: “It’s the story of a woman who ends up a divorcee, in her late thirties, heart-broken, because he is leaving her for a younger woman. So she goes into a convent, because she wants to find solace in God and attain some spiritual peace. There she meets a nun, sister Maria do Rosário, who seduces her…” The waiter brought the shellfish and Alda managed to interrupt the conversation and they talked about something else. But Roberto was keen to hear her opinion about the film. There was one curious detail: they had to shoot in Spain and even more interestingly the producer was allowing them to choose how they would be paid. Either in cash or with plastic surgery in a clinic in Pamplona. “Lovely”, said Alda. She felt a desperate craving for chocolate mousse, which she devoured in big spoonfuls without stopping. As she scraped out the bowl, Roberto bent forward with a serious and attentive expression in his light-coloured eyes, and she thought she could glimpse the shine of a gold chain in his half open shirt. He took his napkin and delicately wiped away a speck of mousse, which, disconcertingly, had attached itself to her left ear lobe. Looking back, Alda regretted her voracity; she thought she had revealed something indecent about herself. She woke up at half past seven in the morning crushed by a feeling of guilt that suffocated her. She ran to the window to breathe in the fumes from the road where the traffic, risen from the ashes a short time before, seemed always the same, created by God, the same cars going round and round for all eternity in the same colourless, wretched circuit. She hurriedly dressed to go out and buy the Diário de Notícias. Like those people now stuck in the traffic jam, she had a great urge to find an occupation, an honest goal. She wanted a job, starting today, right now. The free time for which she had fought some years before, when overwhelmed by duties and obligations, was now a curse, a burden. Sitting in the cake shop had taken
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on a new significance in her life: now she read the paper with a purpose, she searched, dismissed, let her finger run down the columns, deliberated, counted the possibles and struck out others. There was not much on offer, and little of any interest. With a degree in maths and a sworn hatred of teaching, Alda had neither skills nor possibilities. At fifty she found herself relegated, by education and experience, to that forbidden human zone where good is done by default. Finally, her eyes came to rest on a discreet advert, almost miserly, asking for a companion for an elderly lady. The advert did not promise a great salary and Alda did not need money. It asked for a CV and a photograph. She rushed home on a wave of enthusiasm. She looked for the best writing paper, the most flattering photo. And, sitting down in front of an old oil painting passed down from generation to generation, in which a gazelle was being devoured by a lioness, she confessed: “It’s either this, or buying a cat”.
* The photograph did not pose any problems, Alda was perfectly turned out for a niece’s wedding, in a very discreet burgundy shantung suit, her hair bound up in a chignon which had sent her rushing to the mirror countless times to catch up all the strands that were resisting the hair mesh. She had the innocent and reserved look of a married wedding guest and her expression said that despite her experience, she would not spoil the wedding feast with comments that could point to the transient and temporary nature of a ceremony that was meant to be lasting. Alda had not counted, however, on the difficulty in writing her CV. Pen in hand, she gazed out of the window at the blank wall of the opposite building for what seemed an eternity. Her cup of chicory tea had grown slimy and cold, and she was still waiting for an opening line to occur to her. Next, she slowly wrote down her name on the long-readied sheet of paper, a name that was both strange and new to her, lacking the addition of her husband’s family name. It was no longer Mascarenhas; it had been but wasn’t anymore. Now she was called Almeida again, like her father. Like Grandfather Almeida. She had been named Alda, for her godmother and her mother’s sister, Fernanda, for her father’s dead sister, taking Ramos and Mullet from her mother and Melo and Almeida from her father. But she was not Mascarenhas anymore.
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But Alda Mullet de Almeida pleased her, she thought it sounded mellow and augured well, because it had a certain resonance and left something hanging, which calmed her. In short, she would just be Alda Almeida, almost cacophonous, but with undeniable media charm. Then she wrote down her old name, curiously the same and yet different from the new one, Mascarenhas for twenty-five years but now, fortunately, bereft of its procreators. Her sisterin-law, Helena, still phoned occasionally and, depressed, told her all the gossip. Alda had a more unhindered picture of the Mascarenhas family than of her own Mullet and Almeida relatives. The Mascarenhas family lived under the yoke of a ninety-year-old aunt, who laid down the law in a big house lost in the mountains, where each member of the clan was summoned in turn, as if to thehigh court, in order to be admonished or called to account. Helena was terrified of the aunt, who used her as a spy, like the kings of old. And when the clan met in conspiratorial meetings trying to put the old lady into a home, Helena was torn between two loyalties. The thing was, the peaceful country side of yesteryear had changed, for some unfathomable and complicated social reasons, into a den of drug addicts, thieves of necessity or for pleasure, who robbed the big house once a week without fail, while the aunt nodded off over a volume by Montaigne. Helena was inclined towards the old people’s home option, with the best of intentions. She asked Alda what she thought, not really expecting an answer, and Alda remained stubbornly silent and sighed a sigh of relief that she was finally free of such a muddle. “I have not known many men,” she wrote, “and I find it strange (and I find it strange that it should puzzle me) that none of the men I have known would stroke people.” One male friend had dogs and stroked his dogs. But not women, or children — the men I have known did not make a fuss of human beings. It’s a bit ridiculous that a grown woman should say such a thing. Maybe I had bad luck. The only man who had paid me much attention was my cousin António. I was seven, I’d just arrived from Angola, I was exhausted. I let myself fall to the floor and rested my head on Monstro’s flank: He didn’t even move. António was talking and stroking my head. I remember that I didn’t want to fall asleep, I wanted to hear him talk, but all the same I soon fell asleep”. This was not a CV point, but she thought it offered an adequate description of her love life. Nothing very negative, a notion that was pointed to an
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unknown destiny, good things that had happened but were lost mostly due to the lack of opportunity or coordination. “I was born”, she continued writing, “at a time that didn’t really suit my mother”. She had told her that they had planned a great adventure, living on the Côte d’Azur with her father as if they were characters in a novel of white linen suits and cocktails on the terrace in the afternoon; her father had inherited money from his maternal grandparents and he intended to make his life into a work of art. Alda extrapolated the inconvenience of her birth to other aspects of her life. Everything had happened at the wrong time, when there was no longer any reason for it — a great disappointment in a first love which had made her timid, a course imposed by a failure in another course, which had previously been chosen by default, a lengthy engagement that was broken off, a hasty marriage that went on too long. Endless missed oppor tunities, a continuous disengagement, something outside of her skin. “Our lives are all giving and squandering”, she wrote in the CV and was left full of doubts about the plural, which struck her as ambitious and the result more of ignorance and resentment than a clear and complete vision of things. She thought herself bitter and pessimistic, but she was not bitter and pessimistic. Circumstances had not been the best. And despair was more abhorrent, in those days, than illegitimacy in her grandmother’s time. She limited herself, in the end, to facts that could easily be confirmed: born in Carcavelos, 1950, studied maths in Lisbon, married, no children, divorced from a dentist, lives in Picoas. Years ago she had tried teaching in a high school, but had fled, appalled, the first time a student was rude to her. She did translations from Spanish in order to pass the afternoons, cowboy stories, crime novels, but she grew tired of the tight deadlines and an obliga tion taken on purely to combat the boredom. All in all, the facts were scant, they didn’t amount to more than half a page, and the lines were short. She looked for things to say about her morals in a few brief words. What sort of person was she? She though she could realistically describe herself as restrained in all things, the way she dressed and walked, how she was and how she behaved, and also reasonably cultured and diligent. She thought when it came to writing that she had a stable life and some good friends and did not mind looking after elderly people. She could not find anything truly important that would give a more precise picture. At the table, which was set with blue and pink china in the dining
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room, Roberto and Anabela, were furious with her. The actress had arrived unhurriedly, scuffing her high heels, three-quarters of an hour late — although in order to be late one has to be conscious of the fact that one is late, which was never the case— and was languishing on the sofa, while Roberto, in his apron, was cooking a paella that kept needing that special something. Alda, sitting down with a glass of beer, was studying a book on the great houses of Portugal from the past. “They took my handbag with everything in it, there were the cards, my identity card, it had everything, and the money, I’ll never see it again”. “Never mind”, said Roberto, “’ll buy you a new one. You’re not going to worry about it now”. “That’s such a nuisance”, said Alda, turning a page. “‘Roberto will fix it”, said Roberto. “Don’t you think I should turn on the air conditioning?” “Are you hot?” asked Anabela. “You’re hot because you’re cooking. I’m not even hungry, why don’t you sit down with us?” “What do you think, Alda?” “I don’t care one way or the other. Do what you’d do at home”. “You don’t get on with air conditioning, is that it?” asked Anabela. “If it’s too cold I get a sore throat, but that happens to everyone”. “I don’t. Do you get a sore throat, Roberto?” “If it’s very cold, but you can turn it down”. “I don’t know about that. What are you going to set it at?” “What setting do you prefer, Alda?” “Not too high, not too low”, said Alda, distracted by a sixteenth-century manor house. “If it’s too cold, I can make it warmer”. “Seems like a reasonable solution”. “And if she gets a sore throat?” “I’ll put it on very low. Is that all right, Alda?” With the paella cooked with all the trimmings in front of them, the three friends, extremely sluggish, glanced once in a while at the screen showing selected scenes from “Succulent Intimacies”, an adaptation of the book with the same title. Roberto played the host; he opened the wine and continued to debate with Anabela the pros and cons of air conditioning, and public opinion, and what had happened to so-and-so. Anabela complained about
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the lack of choice of partners in the film they were going to shoot in Spain, and she refused to make a film with a guy who chased after her even off the set. She hated another actor who Roberto was at pains to recommend to her as pleasant and well equipped, because he had a thing about stroking her head and tousle her hair, which the actress could not stand under any circumstances. Alda followed the conversation without any curiosity, and asked herself privately what she was doing there opposite the ring road, under a leaden sky, with the constant roar of traffic speeding down the road to Alcântara. “Did you know I found a job?” asked Alda. At first they took it quite well, perhaps they thought it was some noble calling, pedagogical, or a television programme that would make her a star. When she told them she was going to be an au pair for Dona Mafalda, who lived in Estoril, they were outraged. “At some old woman’s beck and call? A woman with your class, Alda?’” Roberto was, of course, the most wounded. He stopped eating, put down his knife and fork, toyed with his bracelet. “If you need money”, he asked finally in a voice constricted by rejection, “why didn’t you come to me? Am I such a bad person that you wouldn’t consider asking for my help? Don’t you think I deserve your trust?” Taking the bull by the horns Alda responded to these three weighty questions, complaining about the futility of her free time, the loneliness and the silence of her life, the fact that she had nobody to look after, at the same time lauding the social dignity of caring for children and the elderly — and she faltered trying to justify her own entitlement to have to tasks and goals. Roberto had looked down at the body of a prawn and listened to her in consternation. With each new argument she offered, he shook his head as if he were trying to escape a nightmare. “If she wants to, let her”, concluded Anabela, “it’s an amusement just like any other. I wouldn’t be seen dead serving an old woman who is probably mad. But then I’ve always been lucky; I’ve always had people who helped me when I needed it”. “Lucky?”, asked Alda, incredulous. “Always. Ever since I met Roberto things have always been on the up, haven’t they, love?” As Roberto got up to embrace her from behind, the second button of his shirt popped open, freeing from his chest a gold chain from which there
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hung a very large and holy medallion. Staring at it, Alda wondered which divinity was watching over him. “Belinha, darling”, he murmured, kissing the actress’s neck with devotion, “our life is so perfect”.
* Her palms were sweating when she greeted the very tall and very thin lady, who was the living image of decorum and restraint. From the short silver hair, brushed cleanly back, to the flat shoes, which shouted Paris and exorbitant prices everything about Maria de Magalhães spoke of wealth, wealth from the cradle, seven generations of vast inherited wealth heaped upon vast inherited riches. Alda had felt surprised and disgusted by the answer she was given to the c.v. and the photograph. In four typewritten A4 pages Dona Mafalda’s daughter and secretary asked about everything, including the existence of physical/mental/other illnesses in her family, reasons for her divorce and her present mental state, thoroughness and frequency of habits of hygiene, special aptitude for social interaction (was she timid, reserved, silent?), topics she could discuss with ease (international politics and diplomacy, taxation, travel?), familiarity with protocol, athletic training and standard of performance and stamina, problems with sleep or digestion, and she was especially probing on questions of morality, even including the indelicate allusion to criminal convictions. Once the initial shock at finding herself treated with undeserved unfairness had passed, Alda, had ended up answering three quarters of the idiotic woman’s questionnaire, putting ‘This is a personal question’ in all the spaces where she found the question offensive. Maria subsequently sent her a restrained note of thanks then fell silent, to the indescribable relief of Alda, who returned with gusto and resolve to her routines, openings and matinées, finding an amusement and lightness in her loneliness that unexpectedly put smiles and expressions of happiness on her face. Meanwhile, Roberto gave her the silent treatment and phoned laconically to ask after Alda’s health and not much else. It was a strange daily occurrence, the phone call from Roberto, to whose way of proceeding she had become accustomed. He would first ask how she was, to which she would answer, “Fine”, he would then ask whether she had received any answer about
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‘the job’ (there was a pause before ‘job’, which meant he was putting it in quotation marks). When she said no, Roberto would lapse into silence once again, and Alda could see him shaking his head in the salmon pink sitting room, his gold chain dangling from his neck, then he would say: “Well, good night then”. And he would hang up. Sometimes Alda pre-empted him by a second, and did not hear the ‘night’, because she was busy eating her dinner or she was eager to watch a programme about koalas and their lives on top of distant trees. So Maria de Magalhães’s telephone call took her by surprise, when she invited her, in a voice without the slightest trace of superiority in its accent, to an interview in person on the following day at the house in Estoril. And now, sipping her lemonade on the terrace overlooking the sea, Alda felt herself slipping into the character of the young maths graduate so she could ignore the nature of the situation that reduced her to the status of daily help, an upper servant. Maria had explained straight away that all negotiations would be conducted not only in her mother’s absence, but against her wishes. She referred to her in a string of euphemisms which Alda was not slow to decipher, for soon after, Dona Mafalda appeared dragging a tearful girl in a maid’s uniform by the arm, pushing her forward and shouting at the daughter: “I caught this tart going through my drawers, you stupid cow. You sent her, there’s no need to ask. The drawers are empty. Four drawers are empty”. “Her ladyship hit me”, said the girl, on her knees in front of Maria, “and I want to leave”. The vexed Dona Mafalda must have been about seventy-five. The shocking pink dress left her bronzed, skeletal thighs exposed, the skin hanging in folds from the bones; the low neckline was thrust out by her wonder bra, lifting the front of her dress. She stood before her daughter haughty and silent, swaying on her silver stiletto heels and occasionally pushing back from her forehead the fringe of the ash blonde hair which reached down to her shoulders. Only from the fixed stare, the constant working of her dry mouth, the wetting of her lips with her tongue, could Alda deduce that she was completely drunk. “Alda Mullet de Almeida”, said Maria, “my mother, Mafalda Ortega Magalhães”. The old woman stepped back, while the maid escaped as best she could, and faced Alda, who had stood up to shake her hand:
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“Just what is this all about?” Looking beyond Alda to the blue of the sea, fixing her falcon’s eyes on the horizon, she spotted and stared at a sailing boat, which passed far away, swelling and happy. “Bitch…”, she said. And hastening towards the balcony, she leant over towards the horizon. Then she ran, stumbling, to the sitting room, and opening the drawer of an immense inlaid bureau, she took out a pair of binoculars and rushed back to the balcony. “What a beautiful torso! A magnificent torso! Have you seen that magnificent torso, Maria?” The daughter had leant against the old stone balustrade, aimed the binoculars, taking her time, slipping her shoe off the heel of her right foot, which slid like liquid in the silk stocking: “Well? Asked her mother. And Maria, emotionless: “You’re quite right, Mama. It’s superb”.
*
Then began the true idyll with Roberto. Freed from the hypothetical “job”, they went to the beach and spent weekends together, taking trips through hills and valleys, to bullfights and festivals and processions and pilgrimages to his favourite places and her favourite places. Roberto was wholly devoted to her but Alda, for her part, couldn’t help feeling constraint, which she hid out of politeness and a certain fear. Anabela was constantly “meditating”, as Roberto called it, which Alda thought was in keeping with the naturally inert state of the actress — the only person she knew who could make a big drama out of not thinking anything about anything. “Meditation is easy”, said Anabela. “I’ve already spent an hour thinking about nothing. Only sometimes I felt hungry, but kept it under control”. As she returned from three days in Gerês with Roberto who, it turned out, was also a great lover of nature, concerned about the extinction of species, which would be a great loss, and holding forth about the importance of biodiversity while climbing mountains, Alda rushed to open the front door when she heard the telephone ringing inside. It was Dona Mafalda asking out of the blue whether she would care to bet on some horses.
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“It’s a sure thing”, she said. “I have a very honest bookie, he’s from a very good family in Brooklyn, Italian mother, I’ve worked with him for ages. We could start with one hundred thousand dollars, going halves, fifty for each, what do you think? I don’t have the money here as yet, I haven’t had the interest payments yet, I won’t receive them until the end of the month. But you could lend me the fifty thousand, Alda, and I’ll pay you with the winnings, would that be all right?”’ And when Alda, emboldened by the ludicrousness of the proposition, told her that she didn’t bet on horses, Mafalda invited her to a bridge party that very Sunday afternoon. She stressed that the stakes would be very low and she could always pay with pre-dated cheques, if she did not have the means to cover her losses. Alda, unfortunately, had a great deal to do and would be busy until the end of the following week. The insults, which followed, were curiously all directed at Maria de Magalhães, from whose watchful eye and iron hand Mafalda could not escape. “And she threatens me with her father! Says he’ll cut off my allowance! Her father? Who knows who her father is! She’s convinced he’s my husband and maybe he is too and they think I’m senile because I say these things. But there have been so many of them, I have a full life, I’m not an ugly old woman, I’m not a chair, I’m a useless lump, I’m not dishevelled, I’m not dull, I’m not bad tempered. They keep me locked up in this mausoleum; can you imagine what this is like? When I die, all they’ll have to do is throw me out of the window, they can give me a burial at sea”. At first, Alda did not understand the expression ‘burial at sea’, as she pronounced it with a heavy Spanish accent. She made her excuses as politely as she could, she still had so much to deal with in her house, and heard Dona Mafalda hurl a string of expletives at her, direct insults and abusive remarks, which made her put the receiver down, as if, of her own volition, she had decided she needed to lie down and rest after such nonsense. And she was about to open the suitcase to unpack, when she heard Roberto tapping on the front door. Not very happy with yet another interruption, she opened the door and found herself face to face with Marisa, whose eyes were red from crying. She never tired of admiring Marisa’s ability to let the tears flow without losing her composure. They ran straight down her cheeks, opening up furrows in the moisturiser that glowed, the foundation that concealed and the powder
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that covered it all. Her tears hung in droplets on either side of her chin and Alda collected them all in a couple of tissues which soon proved insufficient. She noted, on the other hand, that she had never actually seen Anabela weep. She had seen her betrayed and abused, she had witnessed successes and failures, and Marisa’s big round eyes continued to contain all of this in that same desolate interior landscape, without even shrugging her shoulders. And Alda, watching Marisa weep and wail, already felt more in common with Anabela, taking the form of a refusal to offer advice or make general observations. Finally, Marisa, defeated, admitted that talking was only of use in minor conflicts, superficial ones, where fundamental mutual trust had not yet been shaken. “How can I believe someone who lies all the time?’” Alda made some tea, asked whether she wanted a sedative, but Marisa was calm, almost too calm, she was sad, not quite herself; one cannot lose faith in conversation without rocking the foundations of other beliefs, related or otherwise. From the way she was talking, Alda gathered that Marisa not longer believed in the fruitfulness of dialogue, but she still believed in what she said, in her explanations, in what she thought the past had been and what the present was. Fundamental doubts about herself had not yet occurred to her, and given the way that she was made, they probably never would. Alda was about to cut short her friend’s tears, when the telephone rang again and she heard the nasal voice of Dona Mafalda: “And dogs? Do you play the dogs?” She tried to convince her that she could not possibly lose in dog races, and launched into a meandering history of greyhounds, referred to cock fighting, then investments in building projects, fruit trees, agricultural subsidies, unimaginable ways of betting without risk. Alda left the receiver upturned on the sofa between her and Marisa, her friend lent forward to hear better and they remained there listening to that meaningless flood of words, exchanging looks and impatient gestures. Covering the receiver, Alda explained, as far as she could, who Dona Mafalda was, naturally omitting to mention the reason why she had called her. And Marisa concluded: “The mad always get away with it. If you were mad, you could do whatever you wanted and nobody could do anything about it”.
*
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Lying on the sand, she fought unsuccessfully to disperse the image of Roberto last night in the lodge, saying to her, mystically taking her breath into his mouth: “I am so happy with you, Alda!” At the same time, she tried to forget the letter she had received from him, a business letter on headed paper, the exact meaning of which escaped her. Nevertheless, Alda thought she understood the general significance of what had happened, even though she was sceptical as to what it all meant for her personally. Now she was merely suffering from shock and humiliation, but who knows how it might all turn out, after her lover’s insistent explanations? “We are pleased to inform you”, said the paper sent by Robimota Imports/Exports, “that a cheque to the total value of fifty million escudos has been deposited in your account. Deeply grateful for your kindness and humanitarian principles we are placing at your disposition ten per cent of the total amount, a token of our gratitude and fee for your services”. It was signed by Roberto Imperioso and Arnaldo Mota, and Alda could not help but be touched by the two signatures, so similar and clumsy that they were obviously done by the same person, someone who had not tried very hard to hide the deception. Alda climbed up on to the wall to begin the painstaking task. Since she was a girl, she had sat on that very same bench and cleaned off all the grains of sand before setting off on the difficult path for home. She took her necklace and her watch out of the bag, tied back her hair, misted her face with mineral water. Closing her eyes to envelop herself in a cloud of spray — when she closed her eyes she always stopped breathing — she noticed that the old man next to her, beside whom she had unwittingly sat down, was moaning and crying. Alda kept herself busy cleaning the sand off her feet, pretended that she was not listening, but the old man came closer determined to tell her. He was crying for Menina, the dog that had been run over and died. He took out a Polaroid photo from the inner pocket of his jacket, showing a Golden Retriever, gentle and playful, sitting on a sofa with her snout resting on the dark leather arm of the sofa, looking tenderly at the very same old man who was relaxing on the floor at her feet. Alda didn’t feel any compassion; she didn’t even know what to say. She said good bye, stood up, her endless job of brushing off the sand not quite done. She was looking for a bench with less suffering. Sitting on the stones of the quay, all manner of bathers were looking at the sea. Further along, on the stone steps, were an obese man and woman, herhead resting on his mountainous shoulder, his arm circling her mountain-
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ous shoulder, contemplating their twilight. In the car, finishing her tidying up, getting rid of the last obdurate grain of sand, she could also see a young couple playing, against the light. First the girl chased after the boy to slap his head hard, then the lad chased after her and captured her hands, giving her a kiss on the neck, which she eluded, then running after him to hit him once more and to let herself be caught. But suddenly, the nymph broke free and une xpectedly began to dance barefoot, a dark figure, slim, with long hair, and Alda noticed that the inner rhythm of the girl coincided exactly with what she heard playing on her car radio. Smiling, the key in the ignition, she was again immersed and completely carried away, floating in the inescapable torrent of love.