Chapter 15

CI concludes its serialisation of The Illness and the Cure

(START AT THE BEGINNING, CHAPTER 1)

Then six months passed and they heard nothing from Isabella. Paulo rang the Catholic Relief people in the Port but they had moved. He sent telegrams, he wrote letters begging her to come, but there was no reply. He feared she had died alone at the wrong end of the world.

It was a Monday morning, and he kissed little Luzo goodbye and was cuddling Simone, now seven months pregnant. He had decided to raise hell at the Australian Consul, to at least put an end to his miserable uncertainty. There came a knock at the door and they all turned. He looked at Simone and swallowed.

‘Open it,’ she said.

He walked over, bamboo matting squeaking underfoot, pulled it open, and sharp blue morning light cut through the room. There was a silence.

**

Her Kriolu tongue is sweet as sugar cane, I press it between my lips.

When it was summer again Paulo returned. Eyes bruised by sadness, he stood on the Port’s small railway platform in the old familiar suffocation of heat, kit bag at his feet, watched his train pull out. The smells of fish and cement dust and burning eucalyptus filled the air. Cicadas chirruped. He waited until the train disappeared up the line then wiped his brow and stared at his hand. The passengers gradually dispersed and he was left standing on the platform in the sun, smells seeping in through his skin.

A ginger cat wandered into the sun and stretched, took his size out of the corner of its eye. It hesitated a moment then strolled over and rubbed its face against his boot. Paulo looked up the platform and the only person in sight was Dalgleish, grown ever more short sighted over the years. He nodded at Paulo but didn’t recognise him, dressed as he was in his army fatigues and the hair cut still scratching his neck. The scar was hidden under his hat. He shouldered his kit and left the station, walked past the taxi rank and on down Station Street with its debris of leaves. In the Fisherman’s Arms talk still turned sometimes to Cathal Brett’s war record, his stint as an army supply clerk, his pilfering of supplies and his car accident under the influence that cost him an arm. He’d quit public life. He left town and politics, and they never heard of Cathal Brett again in the Port. They listened now as Inspector Bradley wove a tale about his days on the armed robbery squad in Sydney.

Paulo walked home past the roar of all that. He glanced into the pub and the shops but kept going. Knots of people stood around. Kids talking and flicking rocks. Farmers and out of towners driving up Station Street. Peaceniks and hippies hanging around in shaggy groups. He hadn’t noticed them before Viet-Nam. A girl in a long skirt, heavy leather boots and greasy hair shouted something to him from across the road, and he waved before the word ‘fascist’ sank in. He looked at her and her group of friends and kept walking. Below, the sun rippled the water on the bay. A line of smokegrey clouds, outlined in silver, tiptoed around the horizon. He turned into Furness Street and climbed the hill home. His shirt clung wet to his back.

Isabella was waiting at the window. She had been alone for nearly a year, since Arabella, her pregnancy showing, had left and gone to England. His mother had grown paler and smaller in his absence. Her prayer book was tattered and stained.

‘Aaiee!’ she moaned, raising her hands to her head and bending over double. ‘My boy, my boy.’

She embraced him in the doorway. He looked down on her hair, greyer than when he left.

‘You need to eat,’ she said.

‘I need to lie down. I can’t talk.’

‘I’ll make you food.’

He poked around the house while Isabella heated his meal. She’d been waiting all day, all week. She asked him about his time away, about Viet-Nam, but he could not lock it down to words over the dinner table.

‘How’s Luzo?’ he asked.

Isabella was quiet and they sat eating, avoiding each other’s eyes.

‘He’s gone to Melbourne,’ she said at last. ‘He left not long after you went away.’

‘I know, you told me. If I’d had his address I would have gone and seen him in Melbourne. How is he?’

‘I had your cousin here for a time. Arabella, from Portugal. There was trouble with that redheaded politician. She left. She was a beautiful singer. Beautiful voice. Nearly as good as her mother’s.’

‘I don’t know my cousin, mãe. How’s Luzo?’

Isabella rose from the table and went into the kitchen. He sat for a moment, looking around the room, the little Portuguese roosters she kept on the ledge, the photos of he and Luzo as little boys, the photo of his father with a long-dead mate, both dressed in work clothes, cement on their boots, working on a dam to divert the Snowy River. The certificate his father won for the Swiss poetry competition hung next to it. He wondered what his mother was doing, and he pulled his chair back, rose and walked to the wall to look at the certificate.

Prix Premier, Vevey, Suisse, it said. A yellowed, dog-eared scrap of paper hung out from the bottom corner of the frame, and he took it between his thumb and forefinger and pulled. A piece of paper, tightly folded, came out. It had been tucked into the paper lining at the back of the frame.

He unfolded it. The writing looked Chinese, with thick black brush strokes. It was attractive but he didn’t know which way to hold it. As he stared he saw a pencilled translation between the columns of characters. He looked up and could not see his mother, and he walked over to the window to better see it.

With its anchor up the boat has sailed away, he read.

If you go now, when shall you come again?

Ride the blue waves on the ocean –

Go in peace and come back soon.

When in the night I hear a boating song,

My heart will bleed to have to wait so long.

He refolded the paper and put it in his pocket. He felt uneasy and walked into the kitchen to find his mother. She stood by the sink, her face in her hands.

‘What’s the matter mae? Is Luzo – ?’

‘I don’t know! I don’t know. He never writes or calls. The company he keeps … I can’t speak to him any more.’

‘When did you last speak to him?’

‘Two months ago.’

Paulo touched the paper in his pocket. ‘I’ll go and get him tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I’ll bring him home.’

He climbed the stairs to his room. It looked much as he’d left it. He dropped his bag and sat on the edge of the bed, glanced around, unlaced the boots, kicked them off. He opened his bag and pulled out the picture of his father with the lobsters on the deck of the Alma de Nazaré, and placed it on the table. The frame was bent on the edge and the glass had long since broken, but it had survived the steam and heat of Indochina. He noticed a music book there and picked it up. A pearl, phosphorescent like plankton in the gloom, rolled out. He held it in his hand and lay back on the bed.

He was too tired to make anything of the noises whispering around the house. He drifted into sleep. His dreams roared with burning metal.

**

The following day he took the train back to Melbourne and then a tram over the river to Hawthorn. By evening he stood at the door of his brother’s rented house. Music blasted inside. The garden was a mess of dry weeds. His stomach rumbled. He was uncomfortable in civilian clothes, felt naked. He knocked hard on the door and voices rose inside. Nothing happened so he knocked again.

A girl of about seventeen came to the door. She was pretty in an aloof way and reminded Paulo of some of the nurses in Vietnam, sweet but businesslike.

‘Yeah?’ she said, affecting an air of cool distance, but recognition flashed across her face.

‘I’m here to see Luzo.’

She stared at him. He noticed her eyes had a glassy sheen over them and she was having trouble keeping them open.

‘You’d be his brother from Vietnam.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Man. Man oh fuckin’ man. The brother’s here! You kill any babies?’

‘I want to see Luzo.’

‘I don’t know if he wants to see you. Light?’ she called into the house.

‘Luz Light Bulb? Nah, I’m sorry, he doesn’t want anything to do with baby killers. Me either.’

She pushed the door to but he’d jammed his foot there. He brushed past her.

‘Come on man!’ she yelled. ‘Don’t push me around!’

‘Luzo?’

The hallway was gloomy and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust. On the wall in front of him was a poster, a cartoon of a man standing amid the rubble of a bombed city, a broken television clutched in one hand. He held the lead in another, confusion on his face as he looked for a power socket. A poster next to the cartoon showed an Indian guru in a street, a look of heavenly pleasure on his face. Another, a photograph of George Harrison. The house smelled of dope, incense, bad food.

‘Luzo?’

‘You fucking cunt!’ the girl screamed at him. ‘You can’t fucking push your way into my house you fucking cunt! Fucking imperialist cunt!’

‘Be quiet,’ he told her.

‘You fucking fascist pig!’

‘Shut up.’

She stepped up close to him and screamed in his face. ‘Fucking cunt! Fucking cunt! Rapist! Fucking baby-killer!’

‘You’re exhausting me,’ he said. He shoved her and with a strangled noise she stood back and fell silent.

‘What’s going on?’ A young man stepped out of a room and for a moment, as Paulo turned, he hoped it was Luzo. But this was a fat, fair-haired boy, his hair tied in a bun and a sparse beard peppering his chin. Music blared on the stereo in another room, all squealing guitar riffs and unintelligible words, and Paulo shouted to turn it off. Somebody lifted the needle and the record scratched into silence.

‘What’s going on, man?’ the boy said. ‘You want to talk about this. Before you start hitting. Man.’

‘I don’t want to talk to you. I’ve come to get my brother.’

‘Get the brother. Cool. Light. Cool. That’d be. Yeah, but …’

‘Where is he? Here?’

‘Yeah, but I don’t know if he wants. To see you. That’s unbeautiful what you’ve done. To Sharon here.’ He indicated the girl who was now sobbing, holding her face. ‘How can you be. So heartless. Where’s your soul, my man?’

‘I left it overseas. Where’s my brother?’

The boy backed away and Paulo stepped toward him.

‘Sick, man. He’s sick.’

The boy pointed to a door and Paulo walked to it, pushed it open. Inside it was darker. He stood in the doorway and saw two little boys in their pyjamas, their faces scrubbed and glowing, giggling in their beds. They were as alike as two mexilhões in their shells.

‘Knock three times if you love me,’ the nearer one called. The second one tapped the wall three times with his knuckles, and they squealed with laughter.

‘Knock three times if you love me,’ the second one said. The first one tapped the wall above his bed four times.

‘What’s that mean?’

‘I really love you!’

They squealed again and Paulo blinked and they were gone. The room smelled of shit. He walked to the window and rattled the blind till it sprang. The window was dirty and shrouded in cobwebs, but it shed enough light. He’d seen his share of the dead, and by the look of him, Luzo had been dead since the night before.

*

God’s mill may grind slowly but it grinds finely. In London Arabella signed a deal with Island Records and recorded an album that the Portuguese government immediately banned. Everyone in Portugal wanted their own copy. Eu Vim de Longe, a song of the return of the exiles, was a hit with everyone who had suffered for so long.

With a group of musicians from Portugal and Chile and Brazil Arabella toured Europe. Salazar was rotting in hospital and the new dictator Caetano packed his bags. When the fall of the ditadura was imminent, she flew in to Lisbon.

An ecstatic crowd greeted her at the airport, cheering and waving copies of her album. E depois do adeus was broadcast just before midnight on 24 April, the signal for the popular army’s units to take up their positions. Down town, PIDE men locked themselves in their headquarters on Avenjda 24 de Julho, frantically shredding files. When an angry crowd gathered to take the building, they fired on the people, killing six. They were the only deaths of Portugal’s April, 1974 Carnation Revolution. Carnation, from the Latin caro, flesh. To symbolise the union of the people with the popular army, the flesh of the murdered and disappeared.

Enraged, the crowd stormed the building and lynchings were only averted when troops arrived and led the torturers out at gunpoint.

The old city centre was at the heart of the movement in Lisbon, and streets filled with soldiers and armoured vehicles, people in their hundreds of thousands. All classes and convictions. They brought water, wine, bread, fruit for the soldiers. The press referred to an explosion of joy, to a new language of brotherhood. The placards of perhaps one million people, their songs, slogans, embraces, smiles, flowers, hands raised in the universal V, and their tears, announced the end of the dictators. The colonies were freed amid promises of socialist brotherhood.

There is a photograph from those days of a young woman, her face partially obscured by burning dark hair, pushing a carnation down the barrel of a soldier’s rifle. Perhaps her face is scarred, perhaps the photograph is just damaged by the passage of years. Tanks stand in the background, the street is filled with thousands of faces, people celebrating and singing, fists held high. The woman holds the hand of a little boy, who in turn is holding the hand of a small girl, his twin. The boy has flaming red hair and a solemn demeanour. His sister has dark hair and is looking up at the camera with extraordinary, sea-green eyes.

*

In the Port few knew what happened to Arabella. After Morrow was arrested her singing ceased, and not long after that – a few weeks, a month or two – she was gone. The old lady still sat by the window, but her house was empty, one son in Vietnam, another gone to the city. A few saw Paulo return, but his stay was short. After Luzo was buried he returned for his things, slashed to his soul.

‘I couldn’t look after him,’ he sobbed. ‘I couldn’t look after him.’

His grief was bottomless. Isabella was distraught and sank into a state. He arranged for the local Catholic Relief organisation to look after her and he left Australia, inescapably drawn back to Asia. He hit the overland trail to Europe, smoked drugs in Kashmir, retreated with the yogis, fasted till his ribs seemed to poke out of his shirt. He joined a mystic cult that worshipped the power of sexual love. Still he was lost.

After he left that cult, or the next, or the one after that, he met a blue-eyed French Mauritian girl named Simone at Madras railway station. She had been robbed of her camera and he offered to help her, to guide her to the police station and take her through the formalities of Indian bureaucracy. They fell, as travellers often do, into an easy camaraderie.

After the hassles were over and the police told her there was nothing they could do, she told him she was headed to Goa, and asked him to come. He had nothing else to do and he was drawn to her, so he agreed.

They travelled together in the train, shared their food, talked a little about who they were. It was a year now and Paulo could still not talk of Luzo. As day drew on to night the coast disappeared under a veil of rain, and on they talked. He liked the way she turned her head when she listened to him, or brushed the hair out of her eyes, and he liked her eyes. Some time before dawn, Simone told him a story.

‘This is from my home, but I don’t know if it’s true,’ she said. ‘Once, back jn the 1930s, a very wealthy man, Monsieur Pennac, a sugar planter from Lyons, with a thousand hectares outside Port Louis, told his friend he wanted to give something away.

‘When we have a lot, we should give some of it to the needy. I have plenty of money, houses, property. My plantation is going well. I have hundreds of workers. I have cut good deals with my buyers. I have holidayed in Europe. I can donate something to the poor. Why not?

‘It’s not usual, his friend told him. We come out to this miserable spec in the middle of this godforsaken ocean as poor men, work hard, save our money, and then get the hell out. Go back to Lyons, even to Paris, and we can live like kings. You squander it by giving it away to the poor and you’ll be stuck here for ever.

‘Nevertheless, Monsieur Pennac was determined to give something away, and he settled on his house.

‘You’re giving away your house? his friend asked him.

‘And why not? I have others.

‘How will you do it? Just wait, mon vieux. Have you thought this through? If you do that, you’ll have a riot on your hands. You’ll have every labourer on the island clamouring outside your door. You’ll have a revolution. They’ll be cutting each other to pieces.

‘Perhaps you’re right.

‘The men thought for a moment, then Monsieur Pennac’s friend spoke.

‘Place an advertisement in the paper saying you will give your house away to any person who is satisfied with what he has. That way you can run a contest, and it is only fair that you choose the man who qualifies.

‘So he ran the advertisement in the local newspaper and everyone saw it. Those on the plantations who could not read heard about it, the Chinese in the cities, the French planters and the English planters, the descendants of the slaves, the fishermen. For many days, nobody came forward to claim the house, and Monsieur Pennac’s friend was relieved.

‘Then finally, a man came to Monsieur Pennac. He was a young man, a trader from Port Louis, moderately successful.

‘Monsieur Pennac, he said, you have decided to give away your house – I would like you to give it to me.

‘You have no house of your own? Monsieur Pennac asked.

‘I have a house, but it is small. And it is very old.

‘Monsieur Pennac asked him, have you read the notice in the newspaper?

‘The man said he had, and Monsieur Pennac asked him what it said.

‘This house will be given to anyone who is satisfied with what he has.

‘You are not satisfied with what you have?

‘The man could not answer Monsieur Pennac’s question. Monsieur Pennac would not give the house if he said he was not satisfied. So the man said; I am satisfied with what I have!

‘You are satisfied with the house you have?

‘Yes.

‘Then why do you come asking for my house?

‘Because I want your house.

‘And what would you do with it?

‘I would live in it.

‘Why?

‘Because it is better than my house.

‘Why do you want something more if you are satisfied with what you have?

‘The man could not answer and he left. Monsieur Pennac waited another week but no one came. He told his friend he could not give his house to anyone as there was no one who was not satisfied with what he had.’

By the time Simone finished the story a sharp light sliced through blotchy, blue-black clouds. The rain eased and morning was on them, the sudden dream of light in the tropics. They saw the breakers in the distance beyond a line of palms. Then the light pouring into their eyes turned green, and they passed through a sugar plantation.

Rain fell again, criss-crossed with sunshine. A sprinkling of watery light flickered across their faces. Paulo squeezed his eyes together and watched the wall of green slipping by. Alternate shadows and hard blocks of light swept his face and for an instant he was back there, trapped in fear, a chopper high above him spinning out of its orbit, pieces of hot metal fizzing through the canopy. Rotor blades flipped through his brain.

‘What was the story about?’ he asked her, squeezing the image from his mind.

‘It’s just a story,’ she smiled, and she leaned across and kissed him. They saw the municipal steeple, stained by light, pigeons fluttering around it, and an indigo stretch of water to a horizon framed by purple clouds as the train pulled in to Old Goa.

The cobbled roads were full of people in headbands and broad-brimmed hats, turquoise amulets, sandals, embroidered shirts, girls with flowers in their hair, leather fringes hanging from every elbow. The town smelled of vanilla and tamarind, bananas, magnificent ruin, and Paulo was delighted to hear Portuguese spoken openly, as if no one were ashamed of speaking it.

He let his hair grow and told anyone he met he was evading the draft too. His scar was covered by hair and the wound was a fading memory. On the beach they swam naked and made love with waves slapping at their legs. He wrote often to his mother to tell her about his life. They struggled when their money ran out. He sold a few sketches to tourists but it was hardly enough to make ends meet, and Simone took a job as a waitress. A few years passed. They struck on the idea of opening their own restaurant, and managed to rent an empty shop under the shadow of the Church of St Francis of Assisi. It took them weeks of hard work to get it ready, borrowing money here, scrounging second-hand equipment there. Paulo put a blackboard out the front with the menu chalked on it, as well as a daily saying, such as: ‘Why so hard?’ the kitchen coal once said to the diamond. ‘After all, are we not close kin?’

They opened one Saturday and when their first customer entered, an American with a ponytail, they could have kissed him. Slowly their clientele grew, mainly with the hippies and travellers but then with the locals. Finally any Saturday they would be booked out, and they employed three staff.

Then six months passed and they heard nothing from Isabella. Paulo rang the Catholic Relief people in the Port but they had moved. He sent telegrams, he wrote letters begging her to come, but there was no reply. He feared she had died alone at the wrong end of the world.

It was a Monday morning, and he kissed little Luzo goodbye and was cuddling Simone, now seven months pregnant. He had decided to raise hell at the Australian Consul, to at least put an end to his miserable uncertainty. There came a knock at the door and they all turned. He looked at Simone and swallowed.

‘Open it,’ she said.

He walked over, bamboo matting squeaking underfoot, pulled it open, and sharp blue morning light cut through the room. There was a silence.

‘Grandma!’ Luzo cried.

She stood mopping her brow, a suitcase at her feet. She was tiny, had shrunk since he had last seen her, and was outlined in the frame of the door. Deep lines crisscrossed her face.

‘Ai, but this Goa is hot,’ Isabella said and smiled. ‘I thought you might need help with your restaurant.’

*

Gil’s curses were not as powerful as Isabella’s, but later he liked to take credit for the fall of the ditadura. He’d cursed them enough. His sleeping improved after Oracelha moved in with him, and the pair crossed the border into Spain and were married without ceremony in a sandstone church. His hair, grown in unruly tufts and worn away in others by worry, grew back, thinner and grey now at the temples. He gave up cigars and put on a little weight, which suited him. He ate much better, thrived on Oracelha’s cooking.

Perhaps the wound over Estrela’s death began to heal. Oracelha began travelling abroad with him again. A light rose around him, the light from someone who is content and feels good about what he does, who has his place in the world. He dressed carefully and it shone from the immaculate white shirts he wore, from his brand new Panama hat, from his eyes. The disquiet had slipped from his body, the shadow lifted, he laughed more. He had climbed from the bottom of a chasm.

Then his brother drowned in Australia and everything changed for the worse. He pulled out of his involvement with the government. Took himself off committees, resigned from boards, ceased travelling and lecturing on Portugal’s African possessions. He withdrew from the world, would often sit, motionless at the window, muttering curses at Caetano and the government, dreaming of his wedding with Estrela all those years ago, dreaming of Estrela. He would relive the hysteria of her death, wallow in his melancholy. He stopped writing to Isabella for a time, but because he felt a strong sense of family responsibility he forced himself to pen her the occasional letter. So they kept in touch. When his daughter was in trouble he did not hesitate to send her to her Aunt in Australia.

He felt his life wasn’t worth living and he thought constantly about putting an end to his pain. He kept his father’s pistol close by always. Some time, Oracelha gave birth to twins, baby girls with blue-black hair, the high cheekbones of Amazon Indians and the green eyes of the Guterres-Bragas. Gilberto was overwhelmed by his creation. The birth was as peaceful as any can be, and Oracelha settled herself with herbs from Arabella’s garden as well as those she had planted from the banks of the Paraná. They called the girls Amalia Arabella and Estrela Jacinta. But Gil returned to his misery, went back to sitting before the window, watching the street below where the tanks and trucks of the ditadura rolled past, where the students chanted and sometimes, clouds of teargas wafted past on the breeze off the Douro. He hardly noticed the success his two sons made of their lives, was lifted only briefly when Arabella returned, went to none of her concerts.

One day Oracelha, unhappy with his state and finding a rare moment when the maid has taken the twins out, looks through a cupboard for her sacrificial knife. Despite years of Catholic instruction and regular attendance at Mass, she has determined to kill a rooster in the courtyard in supplication to the gods of the Ofaie-Xavante, the people with lips of honey, entreating them to make whole once more the man she loves. Her hand falls upon an old disc by the Mindelo Verde All Stars, the cover battered and torn, stained by wine and years. She has not heard this music for a lifetime, it seems to her, and she pulls the disc out of its sleeve and holds it to the light as if a precious metal. She sees grooves running around it and she takes a soft cloth and lovingly polishes them, blowing dust off, removing a stubborn fleck of grit with her fingernail. She places the record on the turntable and in a moment the crackly, unmistakable tones of the band pour into the room, filling it with light.

Then comes Estrela’s lush voice, crystalline, from a shimmering day long past. It fills the house. Oracelha finds herself swaying to the music, stepping, her eyes shut, her skin prickling. Her chest swells and a thickness rises in her throat. The door bursts open behind her and she turns, and Gil is there, tears rolling down his face, his shoulders racked by sobs. He tilts his head back and closes his eyes in his agony.

She takes him tenderly in her arms, like a baby, as all women take all men, and she says soft words of love to him and rocks him. She kisses his tears. They dance, leaning in to the music, hesitant at first as they have never before danced together, then more confidently, pressing into each other’s bodies, touching each other’s skin as if for the first time, smelling each other’s scent, the two alone in that big house by the river, full of memories, distant chorus of police whistles and students’ chants and foghorns of the ships taking those leaving Portugal forever, all, all drowned by a sadglorious song from a far distant island.