Illness and Cure
A friend of ours wrote a GAN (Great Australian Novel). At CI we thought it worthy of a read, so here it is, a chapter at a time.
The Illness and the Cure
By Sue G Williams
Chapter 1
I am in love with a woman
who leaves footprints
in the sand of my deams.
It seemed to Alberto that he had loved Isabella for ever. He learned to read and write so he could send her letters, and over the course of that year, he sent her many. She read them all, intrigued by his childish handwriting and the smell of fish permeating the paper. In one he likened her hair to kelp and her skin to the silver belly of a mackerel, flashing past and demanding his attention. That made her laugh, yet she was impressed by his persistence.
He had seen her for years at the curandeira market in town, selling her mother’s herbs. She set them out in small piles on sheets of newspaper weighted down with stones, with assemblages of sand, minerals and coloured rocks among them. Whenever he had a cold he visited the stall and bought mixes from her mother, who many thought was a witch. If he saw Isabella there by herself he backed away and came back when her mother returned.
One spring day Isabella went down to the waterfront and sought him among the fishermen. She followed directions to the big blue boat, the Santa Marta, by the far jetty. Crates of sardines stacked on the wharf intersected a pearl-blue sky where gulls wheeled, cawing. A breeze stirred her skirt as she stood by a pile of nets thick with old scales like dulled coins. She watched him unload a catch and caught her breath.
‘Are you sure that is Alberto Guterres-Braga?’ she asked the man who pointed him out.
‘As sure as you get drunk when you drink,’ the fisherman laughed.
She had admired Alberto for months. She had seen him lingering by the market with his dark hair and deep set eyes. He wore a stained fisherman’s cap and his hands were thick and hard, and he held himself well, content in his body. He was good looking in the way of a man who has taken control of his life and is at home with other men. There were holes at the elbows of his jersey and his cap rode at an odd angle on his head. She wished he had plucked up the courage to come and buy from her. She stood and waved his latest letter at him.
‘Alberto the fisherman!’ she called.
He looked up and left his work. Two others watched him go. When he drew near she looked at him and shrugged, holding the letter.
‘You want to spend your life writing me letters?’
He wiped his hands on an oily cloth, then ran his hand over his brow, leaving a grimy smear. He glanced at his hand.
‘Well,’ he began, ‘I … no.’ He gave a nervous smile. ‘I’m just a fisherman,’ he said. ‘I’m not wealthy. Not, at least, unless I go work for my father.’
She laughed. ‘We have a lot to talk about before we talk about that.’
‘My father runs a business. He is wealthy.’
‘Let’s walk,’ she said.
They married in Nazaré’s church the following spring, 1940. Alberto’s father José, with the cyclonic temper, broke his business commitments in Paris to come to the wedding in a carriage drawn by six white horses. He had left Nazaré five years before and vowed he would only return in the kind of style that Nazaré could never afford him. He turned heads now. He sat in the church by himself, his yellow face puckered, sipping from a hip flask and looking at no one.
Leaving the church, he slipped and fell on the steps of the coach so his driver had to get down and lift him in. Alberto’s brother Gil was best man, and he kept well away from his father.
For their honeymoon Alberto and Isabella took the bus to Oporto. They stayed with Gil, who was then courting a singer named Estrela. One night they visited a bar with Gil, drank wine and listened to a small band of mulatto musicians, the Mindelo Verde All Stars. Half way through the night Estrela appeared on the small stage.
She was very beautiful. She had clear black eyes and a kink in her burnished hair, which she tied behind her head. She wore a silk, low-cut dress, all green, and emerald earrings dangled beside her throat. She took the audience in the cup of her hand. Then she sang. By the end of the first song men in the audience were weeping. She sang about exile, famine, drought, the sea, love forever lost.
‘This is my future wife,’ Gil told Alberto and Isabella, wiping his cheeks. At the end of the night they stamped their feet and threw flowers. Gil called her over. She joined them, flashing her smile and waving to the room. She kissed him on the lips, beamed at the newlyweds. Gil glowed.
‘You enjoyed the evening,’ she said to no one in particular.
‘I loved it, blossom,’ Gil said, rubbing his hand along her thigh.
‘Very … moving,’ Alberto said, awed by her beauty and unable to resist glancing at her neckline, which revealed the cleft and the full, round shape of her honey-coloured breasts, dappled with freckles like motes from Heaven.
‘Where did you learn to sing like that?’ he asked, feeling sweat spring to his forehead and upper lip. He wiped his face.
‘It came to me naturally,’ she said to him, looking into his eyes and letting her gaze wander over his fisherman’s neck and chest as if she were summing him up too, ‘one day when I was in the bath.’ She sucked in air and laughed, flashing her white teeth, and the others laughed with her.
An image of her naked body, lithe and damp, stepping out of the bath slipped into Alberto’s mind and he looked away.
So they spent the night laughing too much at Gil’s jokes and drinking too much wine into the small hours, until Isabella, jealous and lightheaded from alcohol and smoke, dragged Alberto home.
A three-day-old telegram arrived from Paris the following day with the news that their father José had fallen ill and was in the Sacré Coeur Hospital, dying. Between them, the men decided Alberto should travel to Paris to make arrangements for their father, either to bring him home or have him buried in Paris. Alberto told Isabella she should go home to Nazaré and await him there.
She shouted in his face. ‘You’re not going to Paris without me! Not on our honeymoon! Not ever!’
They called the Embassy in Paris. The Ambassador was a dear friend of their father’s, and although they could not talk to him a man told them they should come quickly and bring their father home. Gil bought two return tickets and waved goodbye to Alberto and Isabella at Oporto Station.
Clouds hung low over Paris. They took a room in a cheap hotel in the Pigalle. Not long after that the Wehrmacht marched into town. Alberto and Isabella were out and watched a mounted regiment parade through the Arc de Triomphe and on down the Champs-Elysees.
‘What beautiful horses!’ Isabella said.
‘Quiet,’ he said. People around them were weeping.
Alberto was determined to bring his father home, and they caught the metro to the Portuguese Embassy.
‘All is chaos here,’ the woman on the front desk told them by way of warning, before they even opened their mouths. She was French but spoke Portuguese beautifully. She was badly made up in the way some French women are, had bright blonde hair and a slash of scarlet across her mouth.
‘Can I speak with his Excellency the Ambassador?’ Alberto asked. ‘Senhor Adalberto Salgueiro. It is very important.’
‘Aha! You can never do that!’ She didn’t look up from the book she was leafing through.
‘I am the son of a friend of his. A good friend. I believe he will be pleased to see us.’
She laughed, still looking at the book, revealing two lines of neglected teeth. ‘Everybody says that, Monsieur. Don’t waste my time.’
‘But – ’
‘He is too busy by far. He is out of town. He has gone to Lisbon.’
She turned her face to them but her eyes remained closed, and she opened them only when she looked away or back at her book, which Alberto found disconcerting.
‘He may have gone to Australia.’ She curled her top lip.
‘This is not what I’m told,’ Alberto said. ‘We spoke to somebody here before we left, and – ’
‘Jesus, Mary, mother of God,’ she said, throwing the book down. The people! Go home, for God’s sake! Have you no eyes? Can’t you see the Bosches have arrived! Running through my grandmother’s sitting room! Rolling about through la France like some damn roosters! Ma patrie on their accursed motor scooters!’
Her face flushed and her nostrils quivered, and Alberto suspected she would launch into the national anthem at any moment. He noticed Isabella move forward and he held his hand out to stop her.
‘Senhora, I can assure you we will take up very little of his time,’ he continued in an even tone, struggling to maintain his patience. ‘He will no doubt be pleased to hear news of his good friend. If you – ’
‘La la la!’ she yelled, waggling her tongue. It sported a milky fur. She launched into French. ‘La France is the seat of culture, n’est-ce pas! La France is being raped by these barbarians, n’est-ce pas! La France has a proud and wonderful history that predates these Bosches by a thousand years, n’est-ce pas! La France is the leader of – ’
‘Listen to me, you ignorant French bit,’ Isabella said, banging her fist on the counter. ‘I will talk to the Ambassador, Senhor Adalberto Salgueiro now.’ She banged the counter for emphasis. ‘Tell him his dear friend’s son Alberto Guterres-Braga and his new bride have come to pay their respects,’ bang ‘and are seeking information on the Ambassador’s dear friend José,’ bang ‘who as we speak lays dying in the Sacred Heart Hospital in this shitting,’ bang ‘Gallic,’ bang ‘Protestant pigsty,’ bang bang bang ‘of a town where the men are constipated and none of the women wash under their arms.’
She stared at the woman. ‘Nays par!’ she added.
The woman blinked at Isabella for a moment, her eyes open this time, then stepped back as if she’d been punched. Isabella shook.
‘Michelle?’ the woman said.
‘Não! I mean now!’ Isabella shouted.
The woman looked down and sniffed, blushed, opened her mouth and shut it again like a lizard, then turned and walked into another room.
The Ambassador, who had heard the tail end of the conversation, came in and she followed. He was a large man in shirtsleeves with sweat and worry on his face. He was unshaven. His eyes darted around them as they spoke as if he were watching a fly.
‘Can I help you?’ he said, puzzled.
‘Senhor,’ Alberto began. ‘I am the son of José Guterres-Braga of Oporto, formerly of Nazaré.’ He looked at the Ambassador and waited.
‘Yes?’
‘Your dear friend,’ Isabella said. ‘We are … my husband is … his son.’
The Ambassador wrinkled his brow. ‘I don’t know the man,’ he said, puffing.
Alberto laughed. ‘Yes, yes, you must,’ he said. ‘My father speaks of you fondly. He stays with you often. He went drinking with you earlier this year.’
‘When?’
‘Aha. January.’
‘Hmm. I am sorry, but no. No, no. I was out of the country in January.’
‘It can’t be. My father told me he stayed with you. You went drinking at the Red Windmill.’
The Ambassador frowned. ‘I’m afraid your father must be mistaken, Senhor,’ he said. ‘Or he has a good imagination. Maxim’s perhaps, but Le Moulin Rouge is not a place I have ever – or am likely ever – to frequent.’
Isabella noticed the blonde woman standing behind the Ambassador staring at her, wide-eyed. She scowled.
‘What about the Red Windmill?’ Alberto asked.
‘I am sorry,’ the Ambassador smiled.
‘My father is very sick,’ Alberto said, realising in an instant that his father had made the whole connection up. Either that, or he had met the Ambassador once and had exaggerated the importance of the meeting.
‘He runs an import and export business,’ Isabella said. ‘He is a friend of the President and he is very ill. I am very sure if you call Lisbon – ’
‘Senhora,’ the Ambassador said, I’m afraid the lines are down. In case you didn’t realise the city – the country – has been invaded. A lot of people are in trouble.’
‘He may die.’
The Ambassador sighed. He appeared insufferably sad. ‘Many people are going to die,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you.’ He left the room.
Alberto and Isabella left as well without a word. They were standing on the footpath in front of the building when someone called to them.
‘Hello!’
It was the woman from the Embassy. Alberto sighed and turned to leave. ‘I can do without this vaca.’
‘I can take you there,’ the woman said, rushing up to them.
‘You’ll take us to the hospital?’
‘Why not? I finish work in half an hour anyway. No one will know the difference. Not with all this.’
She led them down the street to a small white Renault. They climbed in and she drove them to the hospital.
‘Why help us, Senhora?’ Isabella asked as they wound through the streets.
The woman was silent for a moment. She shrugged. ‘These are strange times. You remind me so much of my sister.’
At the hospital she translated. José had recovered and been discharged several days earlier. He was probably already on his way back to Portugal. The woman drove them back to their hotel, weaving through streets crowded with German tanks and soldiers, and told them to keep their heads down. She gave them a sheaf of papers with the crest of Portugal printed on them.
‘They’re not diplomatic papers, but they might get you out of trouble. Bon chance.’
She left and they realised they hadn’t even asked her name.
The concierge, Monsieur Courtôt, greeted them and rubbed his hands as they launched into an account of what had happened. Courtôt had a fair spread of flab around his middle, full, almost feminine, fleshy lips surrounded by morose drooping moustaches, a square jaw and nervous, delicate hands. They reminded Alberto of a butterfly’s wings.
Courtôt only half listened, catching a word here or there, but they carried on regardless. He had greater worries than two Portuguese newlyweds. His wife, a fair-skinned woman with red hair and freckles, had grown perilously pale over the last few months, and had chronic dark circles under her eyes. These days she rarely left her bed. Her skin had taken on a translucent quality, and you could almost see the veins pulsing beneath the surface. Her vitalité had ebbed away, and supplies of medicine were suddenly scarce under the Bosches.
Jean-Yves, the Courtôt’s oldest son, had disappeared with an underground group, and Monsieur Courtôt wasn’t sure if they had kidnapped him or whether he had joined of his own volition. Secretly, he was worried that Jean-Yves was homosexual, and he feared he was face down in a ditch. But he dared say nothing to Madeleine. He made sympathetic sucking noises through his moustache, then waved them up to their room and drifted back into his flat to tend his wife.
Isabella and Alberto drank a small toast in their bed that evening, clinking the cheap hotel glasses together over a bottle of vinho verde from home, then made love. The bedsprings squealed under their weight.
‘That was a surprise what you said to the woman at the Embassy,’ Alberto said afterwards, lying in a disorder of spilled fluids and legs slick with sweat.
‘Sometimes you have to treat people the same way they treat you,’ Isabella murmured. ‘To get what you want. Loud and rude. It’s not pleasant but sometimes all some people appreciate is their own medicine.’
‘You reminded her of her sister.’
‘Thank Jesus for errant sisters.’
On Monday Alberto was out buying bread and erotic lingerie for Isabella. Next to a horlogerie where on Sunday they had admired a chiming wooden wall clock, they had noticed a boutique called Le Pétale Secret. They stood in front of its gaudy window, speechless, their eyes wandering over the coloured feathers, skimpy bras and pants.
‘When in Paris … ’ she whispered.
He had the packages under his arms and was walking back to the Hotel l’Europe when he rounded a corner into rue La Fayette and was confronted by a group of soldiers. They wore oversize grey helmets, and their faces were like children’s. Among them were men in black uniforms, but there was nothing childlike about them. Two of them turned towards him; one waved a pistol in his face.
They wore small metal skulls on their caps, and their eyes stared at him as if from far away. They wore red armbands with swastikas. He turned away but the one with the pistol grabbed his arm and pushed him against a wall next to three Frenchmen. Up the street a body lay shrouded in a sheet, and the grey boots and trousers of a German uniform stuck out. The SS man pressed his pistol in Alberto’s face.
‘I am Portuguese, I am here on business,’ he said to them.
‘Zuschlagen rauf!’ the man yelled. He stared at Alberto and grabbed his arm. Alberto put his own hand on the man’s, drew himself up to his considerable height, and said in Portuguese:
‘I am the Portuguese Ambassador, and Portugal, Portugal – I can even spell it if you want – is a neutral country in this grubby little war of yours. If you do not take your hands off me, I will have you deported to Portugal,’ (he said the word as clearly as possible), ‘where you will work for the rest of the war in my boat cleaning toilets. Is that clear, you little shit? Portugal wants no part in this dirty gringo war of yours. Portugal.’
The SS man stared at him. ‘Portugiesisch?’ he said at last. ‘Portugiesisch?’
‘Ja, Portugiesisch,’ Alberto said, and he reached into his jacket pocket and flashed a letter with the crest of Portugal under the soldier’s nose. Then he stepped back and walked away down the rue du Chabrol. He glanced over his shoulder and saw them push the Frenchmen into the back of a lorry. Back in the foyer of the Hotel l’Europe, he dropped his bread and brown paper packages and teetered to the floor. Monsieur Courtôt fluttered around him, gave him a glass of water, fanned his face with Le Monde, broke off a small piece of bread and waved it in front of his nose. In five minutes he had recovered enough to retrieve his packages and climb the stairs.
The lovers were trapped. They had a little news of home. José had arrived back in Oporto a few days after they left and screamed at Gil for letting them go. He wired Alberto and Isabella money and sent telegrams to the Embassy, but they went unanswered. He spoke to the President whom, he told everyone, he had met through business, and he told his business acquaintances that the President was working on the case. But, according to José, the President had sway with neither the French authorities nor the German occupation forces.
No international trains ran. No one was coming in or out of Paris, and rumours circulated. Massive troop movements at the border. Hitler himself had brought his entourage to Paris. The British thrashed at Dunkirk. The invasion of Britain was imminent. Hitler was seen dining at Maxim’s. He’d even danced a jig near the Eiffel Tower.
Bitter air drifted through the capital as throngs of young men returned in defeat. They had discarded their uniforms on the way and were now dressed in borrowed, ill-fitting, farm clothes. They stood in sour knots at street corners and stared at the blonde haired young men in uniforms of the Reich who flooded their avenues, whistled their girls. The defeated men melted before them, slunk down the laneways, saying over and over — on nous a vendu and — j’ai honte d’être français.
Alberto and Isabella passed their days at the Founti Agadir in the Arab Quarter’s rue de la Goutte d’Or. Or they walked, skirting German patrols and passing through crooked little alleyways paved with cobbles. 
They were endlessly surprised at the views, at the rubbish, the stink, and they invented their own pathways through back lanes full of old tiles, through the squares and boulevards, over the bridges and around the fountains of the city.
Through St Germain and on past Rue Bonaparte, then past the Académie Française, the Seine and the dome of the Palais Royale, where wild horses frisked over a field of tarnished copper. They stopped at the street markets to watch passersby. They explored Ile de la Cité and Ile St Louis, the Luxembourg Gardens and the Tuileries. They stared in awe, their hair plastered to their heads, as gargoyles on the ivy-decked towers of Notre Dame spewed rainwater.
Alberto and Isabella stared into windows of patisseries and boulangeries at the pastries glistening with syrup and fruit, at jellied, cured and creamed meats. The whiff of ripe cheese was everywhere. They developed a taste for croissants and café au laît. And everywhere, everywhere, they saw the allemands with their rifles, clicking away with their cameras.
They could not fill the hollowness inside them with any boulangerie or patisserie. Isabella and Alberto had never felt so alone. And yet they had never felt so complete as with the other at their side.
At the Agadir they played dominoes and taught themselves French out of a book published in 1907. They came to know Sabri behind the counter, and to enjoy the little cafe with its tables jammed together, the air stiff with smoke, old men sipping their heart starters. Then three Angolan students they met at the cafe stopped coming, and one of the waiters who knew them said their apartment was deserted and vandalised, swastikas painted on the walls. Rumours ran through the capital like mercury on a plate. Sabri knew a family of Jews who had, apparently, been arrested.
‘It don’t bother me too much,’ he told them. ‘They play their god-awful music loud into the night anyway. Allah forgive me.’
One of the regulars, a dissolute, bearded man who put in some hard drinking before lunch, said a friend of his had told him the Bosches were rounding up Gypsies.
‘About time someone had the brass!’ he shouted.
A very old man with stained clothes and a red beret was sitting in the corner scanning the papers. He opened his mouth only to order absinthe and pour it down his throat or shout politics, and he spoke up now.
‘You watch,’ he said. ‘I remember the Commune! You watch, they’ll take the communists next!’
‘You and your commune,’ Sabri said to him. ‘It’s all you ever talk about.’
‘We’ll go hungry! You watch. Fritz will come and eat everything like he did in ‘71! Sales bâtardes prussiens!’
‘And how did you get by then?’
‘Uh?’
‘What did you eat in ‘71?’
‘Eat?’
‘Yes.’
‘Rats!’ he shouted.
‘How were they?’
‘Uh?’
Sabri smiled and folded his arms.
‘How were they, mon vieux?’ he said. ‘In ‘71? The rats?’
‘Not bad,’ le vieux said, his mind wandering back to the days of the Prussian siege. ‘Like partridges, or pork even. The ones from the wine cellars were the best. Grill them, that’s what you do. Skin ‘em, gut ‘em, brush ‘em with olive oil and shallots and grill the bastards over a fire of broken wine barrels.’
He smacked his lips. ‘Roof rats! Just you watch! That’s next!’
‘Hell,’ Monsieur Courtôt told Alberto one evening over a quiet glass of red, ‘even the queers, poor bastards, the Huns are rounding them up. What have they done?’
One evening they returned to the Hotel l’Europe and a doctor was standing in the hallway, a black bag in his hands. Courtôt was weeping and the doctor placed his hand on his shoulder. He smiled briefly at Isabella and Alberto, then left. Alberto climbed the stairs, not wanting to intrude, but Isabella lingered in the open doorway and asked Courtôt what was the prognosis. A sour smell drifted out of their apartment.
‘Madeleine,’ he sobbed. ‘Ma Madeleine douce. Deux semaines, c’est tout, elle sera finie.’
He leaned into the wall and wept.
The next day Isabella scoured the markets for ingredients and back in their room cooked up an evil-smelling broth. Courtôt was put off his pastries. He was puffing through his moustaches on the landing halfway up the stairs on his way to complain when he met Isabella coming down, a jug covered with a green cloth in her hands.
‘Please to make your acquaintance,’ she began in her antiquated French. ‘You gives this Mme Courtôt,’ and she thrust the jug into his arms.
Courtôt opened his mouth to complain when Isabella pointed at him.
‘One glass, three time, every day,’ she said. ‘She drink all. Before breakfast, dinner, lunch. And when finish me bring of more.’
‘What is it?’ Courtôt asked. ‘Is it safe?’
‘Safe?’ Isabella said. ‘She die next week with her sick if no drink.’
She turned and started back up the stairs, wondering if he had understood. She turned back to face him and he was peeking under the cloth, steam rising around his face.
‘Et toi,’ she said, ‘Ne plus de pâtisseries, vous êtes trop gros et vous … mourir.’
Courtôt blushed and patted his belly.
Gil wired them and told them he was marrying Estrela in December, and would Alberto be his best man? The signs around Paris for them to attend a December wedding, though, were not good. Bombs went off. Junkers and Spitfires droned overhead. A cafe was shot up and German soldiers killed. The Germans took a terrible vengeance.
The streets and the nightclubs were jammed with boys in the uniforms of the Reich. A group of them had the temerity to whistle Isabella when she was out with Alberto, and when he paused and started to turn on them she pulled him away.
They spent their evenings reading at their hotel, toasting their good fortune at having one another, making love on the creaking bed. The lovers would be woken in the still of night by the tramp and scuff of boots outside their window, car doors slamming, voices raised in alarm. Alberto looked out and once saw dark figures pushing two people into the back of a van.
Cattle trucks departed the Gare de l’Est in the middle of the night, packed with human cargo to work the factories of the Reich, or worse. Rumours spread of open pits in the forest full of corpses. From their room at all hours Isabella and Alberto heard the trains. As time passed the couple fretted for home, believing the only thing worse than being deprived of their home would be to lose one another. The old man continued to wire them money, but a business trip north to bring them back was out of the question. The Spanish were playing tricks at the border and they were stranded.
Some nights they visited the Courtôts, played them at dominoes, practised their French and talked, quietly, about the Resistance. Mme Courtôt had recovered her health, and the couples grew fond of each other. Taking Isabella’s advice, or suffering from wartime scarcity, Courtôt had lost some of the fat around his middle and was managing the stairs better than he had in years. The Courtôts thought them foolish and impetuous, rather like themselves in their own youth, and they smiled when the bedsprings complained upstairs or they heard Alberto teasing her and her giggling. For their part, Isabella and Alberto looked on the Courtôts as elderly relations, reliable, solid, if a little turgid. One afternoon Mme Courtôt stopped Isabella on the stairs and told her she smiled too much.
‘What you mean?’ Isabella asked, smiling.
‘You smile too much,’ she repeated. ‘It’s just not, particularly … parisienne, chérie.’
That night Isabella danced for Alberto wearing the lingerie he bought her, bouncing on the bed, kicking up her legs and singing as she imagined the dancers sang at the Moulin Rouge. She had learned a bawdy French song out of a book at the Agadir and sang it for him. Isabella stripped down to her scarlet garter belt and they made love, mewing like cats. The Courtôts stifled giggles and rolled over in bed downstairs. Afterwards, the lovers lay in the delirious state between orgasm and sleep.
‘I wonder why we’re still without a baby,’ Alberto murmured. ‘Is it you? Is it me? What’s wrong with us?’
‘There’s nothing wrong,’ she replied, trailing her fingers over his stomach, ‘we just can’t grow a baby in this place.’
‘Paris, ma fleur! This is the city of lovers.’ He sighed. ‘Something must be wrong.’
‘It’s not us, it’s the world,’ she whispered. ‘We can’t bring a baby into a world of soldiers and deportations. We need to be back home, you with your fishing boat, me at my market. You were so beautiful that time I saw you and I knew it was you writing me the letters, with your black hair and your sailor’s eyes and the ocean around you. And now we’re caged in an apartment no bigger than a wine cellar. We will have our baby when we are meant to, not while the Bosches are scurrying past our door.’
They fell into a sleepy embrace.
‘You love me?’ she murmured.
‘I love you as much as it is far to Belo Horizonte,’ he said.
She laughed. ‘That’s all that matters. That we love one another. There is only love. Nothing else.’
They had almost ceased their murmuring when there came footfalls in the street again below their window. Accustomed to the sounds of troops in the streets, all the same they sat up when the footsteps were on their stairs and the knocking was on their door.
‘Zigeuner raus!’ came from the landing. ‘Schnell! Schnell! Raus!’
Shivering, Alberto crept across to the door in his nightshirt and opened it a crack, but they shoved it open from the outside and he stumbled backwards into the room. Four soldiers crowded in. One of them shouted at Isabella then reached down and grabbed her arm. Alberto rushed at the man but one of the others beat him down with the butt of his rifle.
‘Dreckig Zigeuner!’ he yelled.
They dragged the couple downstairs in their nightclothes, Alberto semi-conscious and his face bloodied, Isabella terrified and furious at once.
‘A short life and evil death to you!’ she yelled. One of them shouted ‘Zuschlagen ihrer dreckig Maul!’ and tried to clap his hand over her mouth but she struggled and pulled her face away.
‘Your souls to the devil,’ she shouted. ‘Hell roast you and your homeland. May your Fuhrer have the curse of his weapons upon him, and may he die roaring and fester in his grave.’
‘Portugal! Portugal!’ yelled Alberto, regaining consciousness briefly.
A mortified Courtôt backed into his apartment as the Germans dragged them past.
And so they crowded shoulder to shoulder on the railway platform with French Gypsies, crying children, dazed women, bewildered men, all. It was very cold. Snow fell. They shivered. Gendarmes and SS men dressed in weighty overcoats stood close by each other, shepherding their lambs into the trucks. SS men held long rods, which made no sense to Alberto until he drew closer. He saw they were whips – plaited and enormous, more like props for a wild animal show than for moving humans into a train. Dogs snarled and barked, and one of them jumped at the man in front of Alberto, snapping at his groin while its master watched, his arm straining under the animal’s strength. Alberto moved to help the man but Isabella clutched his arm. ‘No,’ she whispered, ‘you can’t help him.’
Screaming, the man tried to push the dog away, but it thrashed at him. Blood splashed across Alberto’s trousers. The SS men watched until the guard pulled the beast off. The man screamed again, holding his groin, yelling something in French at the guards, his eyes bulging and thick blue ropes of veins standing out in his neck. Another SS man stepped in and hit him on the throat with the butt of his whip and the man went down. They heard the thud as his head hit the ground. A pregnant woman screamed.
Thinking she had died and gone to hell, Isabella closed her eyes, clutched her rosary in one hand and Alberto’s arm with the other and prayed. The SS man motioned for Alberto and another to carry the wounded man into the truck with them, and they grabbed him by the armpits and dragged.
The platform was littered with a pitiful garbage; spilled suitcases, loaves of bread crushed into the dirt, a rag doll, franc notes lapping at puddles of muddy iced water, children’s shoes, blood.
‘You’ll have a merde of a holiday on the Riviera,’ one of the gendarmes said as Alberto and the other man lifted the body in.
They loaded into the cargo truck at 3.20 am sharp. The lovers held on to each other in the crush and shook as the train whistle blew. Children wailed. The carriage reeked of vomit. The pregnant woman leaned into Alberto and sobbed into his neck. Doors crashed shut.
Alberto was covered in blood. The engine rose in pitch, the whistle blew and a bell clanged. The fireman fed the furnace and lights changed on the signals ahead. The train jolted forward. It stopped. Steam whooshed. They heard voices arguing in German outside. Someone laughed. They recognised a voice, the Portuguese Ambassador’s, snapping orders at the Germans.
‘Senhor Adalberto Salgueiro!’ Alberto called above the moans of the other passengers. ‘It is us, Alberto and Isabella Guterres-Braga. And Isabella’s sister. We are here!’
‘Alberto, son of José Guterres-Braga of Sagres?’
‘It is Oporto, Senhor!’
There was a pause and a quick exchange in German.
‘Of Oporto then?’ the Ambassador cried. ‘Let’s not argue the goddamn point!’
‘Si Senhor!’
The Ambassador addressed the soldiers in German again, and a short, tense conversation followed. They heard footsteps on the platform and a dog barked.
‘Still, still Rudi!’
Soldiers fumbled with the latch and the door rumbled open. People spilled out of the truck onto the platform.
‘Não parlez pas, ‘ Isabella hissed at the woman, gripping her arm. ‘Here are Isabella and Alberto, and my deaf mute sister!’ she called into the night, past the SS men at the figure of the Ambassador standing under a platform light, his breath rising in icy clouds around his face. ‘Não parlez nada,’ she whispered again to the girl.
The three walked towards the Ambassador as guards pushed the other prisoners back into the truck.
‘Halt!’ It was the SS officer standing near the Ambassador, and he raised his arm. ‘Sie gestanden dies nur zwei waren!’
‘Zwei oder auch drei, ‘the Ambassador replied, ‘es ist immerhin. Sie haben ihrer Geld.’
They continued a tense, quiet conversation, and the SS man finally said; ‘Abwimmeln hier!’
The three of them left the cattle truck and scrambled into the Ambassador’s car. The train shunted out of the platform in a billow of steam and smoke as they drove away. Daylight was not yet tugging at the blanket of dark in the eastern sky. Salgueiro sat upright, still, his hands gripping the wheel, staring straight ahead, not speaking, hardly blinking.
‘How did you know?’ Isabella asked. No one spoke and they thought he had not heard them.
‘I received a call from your hotel,’ he said at last. ‘Courtôt. The concierge.’
They sat in silence but for the French girl weeping between them.
‘We are in your debt, Excellency,’ Alberto said.
The Ambassador shrugged.
‘Excellency, you must have some power with these Germans. How can we repay you?’
Salgueiro remained silent. The night had depleted his nerves and he sweated.
‘The shouting was for show,’ he said, ‘to prove to the ranks that everyone has orders to follow. I have no power with these Germans.’
They had left a scarfaced SS man with a bulge in his breast pocket and fantasies of spending big at Piccadilly Circus. The Ambassador sheltered them in the Embassy and later in the day their baggage arrived with a message of good will from the Courtôts.
Two men in dark clothes who spoke quietly and were sure of their movements arrived late a few nights later at the gates. The Ambassador let them in and after a rapid discussion the men left with the French woman.
A few nights later, three more men arrived, led by a young red-headed man with freckles and fleshy lips, a square jaw and delicate hands that reminded Alberto of a butterfly’s wings. He was beautiful rather than strong. His name was Jean-Yves, and Isabella thought he was an artist or a writer, perhaps a homosexual. Alberto noticed a pistol strapped under his jacket.
It took a week, but Jean led the small group under arms to the foothills of the Pyrenees, along back roads and in the trucks of traders and the carts of peasants, where they rendezvoused with a small party of Basques. Money changed hands.
The Frenchmen wished Isabella and Alberto well, kissed them on the cheeks.
‘My mother thanks you,’ Jean-Yves said to Isabella.
They bade them adieu, and the Basques led them through the mountains. They sheltered in tiny huts and ate goat meat and, reaching the dry, sacred, earth of Spain, thought they were as good as home.
On their first day in a town they visited a market to buy food. They lingered at the fishmongers, and Alberto savoured again the tang of the sea, smells he had missed during their long sojourn in Paris. It brought tears to his eyes as he remembered his boat in Nazaré, his crew, his brother in Oporto. He was standing there reminiscing with his arm around Isabella’s waist when police in tricornered hats surrounded them. Once again they were dragged away.
They didn’t know how they were caught or if they had been betrayed, but they heard shooting in the hills as they were dragged from the market. They were transferred to a camp outside Pamplona, where weeks grew into months and months stacked up years.
Food parcels reached them from an Australian church, and they came to look forward to their cans of peaches and tins of biscuits decorated with brightly coloured parrots. They invented stories about Australia, a country about which they knew nothing. And they heard nothing of home.
‘What is Australia like?’ Isabella asked Alberto one afternoon.
He was reading and he looked up sharply. Beyond her were the barbed wire fences of their compound, guard towers, and beyond them, the snowy foothills of the Pyrenees.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been there.’
‘I know that,’ she said. ‘But make it up. What sort of a place do you think it might be?’
He put his book down but kept his finger on the spot.
‘Australia is a sunny place,’ he began. ‘There are parrots in the trees.’
They sat quietly for a moment, gazing at the mountains.
‘And the people,’ she said.
‘Uh?’
The people. What are they like?’
‘I don’t know. Really, Isabella, I don’t know.’
‘Put your book down and tell me.’
He checked the page number of his book, closed it and cleared his throat.
‘Well, they’re, they’re, they like animals. I know that.’
‘Why?’
‘They have time for such things. Pets. Birds in cages.’
‘And what else are the people like?’
‘Well, they’re fair. Seeing’s they like animals, you have to think they are fair with one another. It’s not like Portugal or Spain. No dictatorships. No General Francos. No Salazars.’
‘It sounds nice. And what are the streets like? Lined with gold? I heard they had a gold rush.’
‘When?’
‘I don’t know.’
He thought for a moment and squinted at the distant peaks. He shook his head. ‘No, no, the streets aren’t lined with gold. Not gold. Not gold. That’s even too much for the South Americans. They’re, they’re lined with mother of pearl. Yes, mother of pearl. Especially around the beaches. The towns near the beaches are, the streets there are lined with mother of pearl. 
They have the most beautiful sea creatures, mexilhões, oysters and clams and things, things like that. Lagostas. You should see the lagostas. As big as a man’s thigh. You’ve never seen them that big. And their flesh is very white and sweet. It makes my mouth water thinking of their lagostas.’
‘And what would you do there?’
‘Be a fisherman, of course. That’s all I want. To be a fisherman.’
‘And what do they speak there?’
He looked at the tin of biscuits.
‘English. But there may be a Portuguese colony.’
‘And what do they look like?’
‘They speak English. I don’t know. Perhaps, perhaps like those Bosches. Tall and fair-haired. But fair-minded too. No concentration camps.’
They were quiet for a while.
‘You really want to be a fisherman again?’ she asked him.
‘More than anything.’
By war’s end the camps were emptied, and Alberto managed to send a telegram to José announcing they were on their way. They found themselves on yet another cattle truck, and arrived at the station expecting to find a welcoming committee. The platform was crowded with people, and their fellow passengers met up with friends and relatives, throwing their arms around each other, bellowing, laughing, sobbing, screaming. Isabella and Alberto stood waiting, each with a cardboard suitcase in their hand, scanning the crowd for someone they knew. The crowd drifted away and they were alone. Isabella wiped her eyes. A cat resumed its place in the sun and a station attendant appeared, began sweeping the platform with a straw broom. Alberto mopped his brow.
They left the station without a word and walked under the Portuguese sun to the big house on the banks of the Douro.
They were sweating when they arrived and the house looked abandoned. Weeds grew in the footpath out the front, the shutters were either drawn or banged in the breeze. One hung off its hinges. Alberto put his suitcase on the ground, reached under his shirt and withdrew the key he had carried with him during those years of exile. He fitted it to the door, jiggled it and turned. He pushed the door and it swung open.
A musty smell of dust, stale cooking and sweat hung in the air, undercut by something sharper, cloying, sweet. Alberto called his father. They entered and waited while their eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. They tried room after room, and when they came to the old kitchen the smell was overpowering. It was urine and old wine and the terrible smell of putrescence.
‘Stand back, Isabella,’ he told her, fearing the worst, and he pushed the door open, his hand to his mouth.
José was slumped over the table. His skin had yellowed like old paper and his mouth hung slack, revealing a black hole. He clutched his revolver in one hand. Old food lay around the table, a chorizo sausage, apples black with rot. Empty bottles littered the floor, and there was rustling in the dark corners of the room.
‘Father,’ he said, and José stirred. ‘Father.’
The old man woke and looked up at Alberto with one eye. Then he lifted his gun and Alberto took an involuntary step backwards. José turned and shot into the corner of the room. The shot reverberated in the confined space and yellow dust floated down from the ceiling, coating his hair and face. A rat squealed.
‘I’m still this country’s greatest hope!’ he yelled.
Alberto and Isabella moved in. He was suffering again with his liver, and sometimes he drank whole bottles of hard liquor – vodka or whiskey – and would pass out, his snoring rattling through the house. He prowled the hallways, shouting, urinating on the floor. The house was unkempt, smelled, and Isabella was disconsolate despite her attempts to clean it.
Gil was living a few blocks away, and relations between the old man and he were icy. Nevertheless Gil was running the family business, married and happy with Estrela. They had twin boys with a third child on the way. When the baby came – a girl – Estrela haemorrhaged. The baby had the most startling emerald eyes the family had ever seen.
Estrela held the baby as the lifeblood flowed out of her, a mysterious smile on her lips as she died.
Gil named the baby Arabella Estrelita, sank into a depression and took to the bottle. He put the children, including the baby, in the care of a wet nurse and left for Seville, where in 1941 he had honeymooned with Estrela.
Isabella and Alberto felt uncomfortable back home, as if the borders had shrunk about their ears, like a sweater that was too small and scratched their necks. José’s temper tantrums and drinking grated on Isabella, but for Alberto’s sake she bit her tongue.
Alberto went to Nazaré, found the Santa Marta had been stolen years before and no one could tell him anything about it. He returned to Oporto.
They applied to emigrate to Canada, but were deterred by the pictures they saw of snow-covered prairies. In a dingy office in town with posters of sheep, beaches and idyllic rural scenes plastered around the walls they filled out forms for Australia as well. One poster stood out from the rest. It showed a before shot, with a family of immigrants from Europe rugged up in heavy overcoats and hats, with hunger lines and melancholy expressions on their drawn faces. The after shot showed the same family, smiling and laughing on a beach, the father throwing a ball to his son and the mother and daughter preparing a feast on a rug spread on the sand.
That night as they lay after making love a sliver of pure light flashed over the head of their bed, then disappeared so quickly they weren’t sure they had seen it.
‘What was it?’ Alberto said.
Isabella remained silent. Nearly an hour later another bounced through the room, as if through the ceiling.
‘Holy Jesus!’ Alberto said, and he jumped out of bed and peered down the street, half expecting to see a German patrol preparing to march up and arrest them. He saw a tanker on the river, shrouded in darkness and rain, and the deserted street. Isabella smiled in her sleep.
They were overjoyed to be accepted to Australia, and she announced she was pregnant two days later. Delighted, they told José that he and Gil and the twins, little José and Hugo, and the baby Arabella were welcome with them in Australia any time.
‘Kalangatra!’ Alberto laughed.
‘Ouangouratra! Kalgooril!’ Isabella yelled.
‘Their names make me tingle!’ He picked her up and hugged her, spinning around. She screamed with laughter and kissed him.
‘We are displaced persons!’ she yelled.
‘Mourambidgee! Koutamounda! We will be New Australians!’
‘Whoooeeee!’
They sailed from Lisbon for Melbourne on the Queen Anne in August 1947.
