Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

He had no desire to be down there with them. He was used to Pedro's brilliance and, like good brandy, he didn't need too much of it. He looked around for Manuel, the second son, the one with his eyes. He found him there, in the walled garden, but four metres back from the group, standing on his own under the shade of a bougainvillea, perhaps hiding, merging into the shadows, ignored by all, invisible to them, waiting for something to happen of particular interest to him. Felsen had seen him in that position before at another party he'd thrown. Some of Pedro's friends had been standing near the bougainvillea, one a girl with blonde hair. Manuel's hand had stretched out from the shade, touched her on the head and half-frightened her to death.

Where Pedro was the tall, confident, light-haired, brown-eyed, football-playing eldest son, leader in his economics class at Lisbon University, the nineteen-year-old Manuel was shorter, fatter, and already losing his dark hair in a strange way that had left a straggling fuzz across his brown scalp. His jaw had merged into his neck, his breasts pouched in his shirt, and his trousers were inexorably drawn up the crack of his arse, however big he bought them. He had a magnificent moustache though. Compensating for what he was losing on top, it was thick, luxuriant, shining, as if all the energy in his head was drawn to it. And there were the eyes-long-lashed, blue with the faintest green in them from his mother. His best feature.

Manuel was a morose boy. He'd suffered from his mother's absence more than his brother had. School was torture. The reports on his academic ability were poor. He couldn't kick a football without sending a clod of turf after it, and the memory of his attempt at roller hockey still brought tears to people's eyes. He didn't even have the distinction of being very unpopular. He was just mildly so-not reviled, just overlooked.

If there was harsh treatment coming from his father's hand, and there was plenty of it at school report time, it found its way to the back of his head or his backside and never to Pedro's. This didn't make him hate his brother. He liked him too much, as everybody else did, and his brother always stood up for him. He didn't hate his father either, but he became watchful and sly to avoid confrontation. It was women that he found difficult. He had no way of talking to them, couldn't find anything inside himself that might interest them and, as a result, they didn't like him. He wanted to learn about them and underwear drawers seemed as good a place as any to start.

These investigations developed, in Manuel, an adolescent passion for spying on people. He found it thrilling to observe without being seen, to soak up information that people would never know he knew. It empowered him against their unconcern and it taught him things about people, and about sex.

His sex education started with the next-door neighbour's maid and his father's chauffeur. He'd let himself in to the neighbour's house and was wandering about, rifling through drawers, poking about in cupboards, when he heard them come in. He hid in the laundry room, and waited for them to leave but they followed him in there. He wasn't sure what he was watching at first as the man and woman tussled gently, making strange scoffing noises. He was only twelve at the time. But as soon as he saw the girl's skirts go up, her bare legs and a coppery bush at their apex, his own excitement told him that this was a thrill in a totally different category to Pica's underwear drawer.

He was shocked by the chauffeur's behaviour, the man dropping his trousers as if he was going to do caca in front of the girl, who he'd picked up and placed on the table. It was repellent. But when he saw the man's equipment, the state of it, the size of it, where he put it, the way he rammed it up against the girl's shiny bush, her strange, fearful gratitude, the increased savagery of the chauffeur's thrusts, and the confusion followed by the man's semen spraying everywhere-he realized he was on to something extraordinary. The state of his own pants told him so. His mind told him something different-part thrilled, part disgusted, with a strange overhanging calamity that this was what would be expected of him.

Part of the mystery was clarified two days later (the laundry room was now one of his permanent hideouts) when his father burst in with the same maid. Manuel realized that only lower-class people sprayed their semen everywhere, whereas proper people, more politely he thought, and less messy, left it all in the girl's bush.

It was a number of years later, and a succession of maids later, that he fully understood the situation and even then it took a visit to a prostitute around his eighteenth birthday to completely demystify the procedure. It was she who, with a well-positioned knee, demonstrated that the withdrawal technique was a cross-class practice in a Catholic society.

Felsen moved to get a better view of what was fascinating Manuel. Was it Pica's bottom? If so, it was a healthy sign as his own eyes had frequently drifted over that region. She'd kept her figure. She hadn't had any children. Abrantes had offered to take her up to see the Senhora dos Santos in the Beira and been met with a pitying silence. Instead he'd taken her to London several times and spent large amounts of money in Harley Street but she'd never even been pregnant, let alone miscarried. This was why her parents were excessively polite whenever they came to Abrantes' house or his parties. It made for dull conversation.

Felsen drifted back to Manuel who, in that instant, straightened as if he'd seen what he'd come for. His father's hand had slipped off Patricia's back and was now definitely cupping a buttock while, with the other hand, he was playing with the suspender clip beneath the material of Pica's dress. The old dog, thought Felsen, as Pica turned and saw the white of Manuel's shirt beneath the bougainvillea. She shrugged her husband's hand off her bottom. Abrantes' other hand shot off Patricia's buttock quick as a lizard.

The afternoon progressed. People left as the food ran out. Abrantes joined Felsen on the veranda with two brandy glasses and a bottle of aguardente he'd brought down from the Beira. They sat on raffia-seated chairs with a wrought-iron table between them and drank and smoked cigarettes while Abrantes softly slapped the painted wooden rail.

'That's the Portuguese for you,' said Felsen, watching people leave, 'they can't do anything without food.'

Abrantes wasn't listening. He flicked ash over the rail not caring where it went.

'It's been a bad year,' he said, slipping into the role of very successful, but naturally pessimistic businessman.

'We got out of Africa without losing our shirts,' said Felsen.

'No, no, I'm not talking about business. Business was all right. It's what you say… it's the colonies. That African trouble is not going to go away.'

'Salazar will follow the British. They've given independence to Ghana and Nigeria. Kenya will follow. So will Salazar. In a couple of years we'll be back in Africa making money with new independent governments.'

'Ah,' said Abrantes, leaning forward, knees spread, ankles crossed, glad, for once, to be able to correct the German, 'if you think that, then you don't understand Salazar. You're forgetting what happened when the Australians landed on East Timor during the war. Salazar will never give up the colonies. They are Empire. They are Portugal. They are part of his Estado Novo.'

'Come on, Joaquim… the man's seventy-two years old now.'

'If you don't think he's got the stomach for it, you're wrong. It's a weakness of his. Everybody knows it. Why do you think he's having all this trouble at home?'

'Moniz trying to get him to resign?' Felsen sneered and threw his hand up in the air as if he was chucking salt over his shoulder.