Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

'I don't get that.'

'Especially when you don't reveal your own little truths… when you hide.'

'Ah, yes, I knew we'd get to that. The beard.'

'The beard,' she snorted. 'The beard didn't matter.'

'Metaphorically, I meant.'

'OK, if you like,' she said. 'But remember, that's the first time you've told me about what you thought of your father's actions.'

'Why didn't you tell me about Olivia?' I said it in a rush. 'She trusted me not to.'

'I see.'

'She said she couldn't have borne your disappointment.'

'My disappointment?'

'She remembers all those times you used to take her off as a little girl. All those hours you spent with her telling her about things and about how wonderful she was and how much she meant to you. Were you disappointed?'

I took the joint down to the roach and stubbed it out in the tin seashell ashtray. I re-experienced that crushed feeling after a girl you've fallen for lets you down lightly. 'We're strange creatures,' I said. 'Love is a complicated business.'

I stared at my own reflection in the pane above my wife.

'I met someone today,' I said.

'Who was that?'

'A teacher.'

'He or she?'

'She.'

'What about her?' she asked, with a little edge.

'I'm… I like her.'

'Like? What's like?'

'I'm attracted to her.'

Silence.

'She's the first woman I've met that I'd like to…'

'You don't have to be explicit, Ze.'

'I didn't mean to…'

'Then don't.'

'It was just that…'

'Ze?'

Her image shuddered in the windowpane, a breeze smartening off the sea rattled the loose panes, whose putty had come out long ago. The lamp buzzed on the corner of the table. I leaned back and found myself crouching, braced against the edge of the desk. Tiles on the roof shifted against each other as the breeze freshened more. The jolt, when it came, seemed to come from behind my sternum. It thumped me forward into the desk, the photograph collapsed, the pane blackened, the lamp keeled over.

I lay on the floor in the dark, my hands folded on my stomach. I was half under the desk, unable to get enough air in my lungs. A doctor might have thought it was a heart attack and it was, of sorts. After a small aeon I crawled up the chair, just made it to the door and half-fell down the stairs.

I stripped vehemently, my clothes sticking to me like a crazed lover's. I lay on the bed with my hand in her dent of the mattress. Tears leaked down the side of my face, over my ears and wet the pillow.

Felsen sat on the edge of a wooden chest with his back to the black, rain-lashed window which in daylight would have shown the grey ocean and, off to the right, the Fort of Cascais, squat, robust, taking on the waves. He was watching Pica's family leave after a Christmas Eve dinner. Pedro, Joaquim's eldest son, was in amongst the guests, kissing and shaking hands. Manuel leaned against the wall, feet crossed at the ankle, hands in pockets, watching. Confident in his watching.

The party broke up, Pica went upstairs, Pedro and Manuel disappeared into the house. Abrantes and Felsen poured themselves some pre-war Armagnac and lit a Cuban cigar apiece. Abrantes sat down in his favourite piece of furniture, a high-backed leather armchair with an arched hood. He liked to gently and absentmindedly slap the arm of this chair, and there was a dark patch where the natural grease of his palm had been kneaded in.

You don't look well,' said Abrantes. 'You're not eating properly.'

It was true Felsen hadn't had any appetite for some weeks. He felt as if there was a big moment pending, and to be ready for it he wanted to be sharp, hungry, concentrated. He looked out of the black window watching Abrantes' reflection.

'You put alcohol on an empty stomach, you'll ruin yourself,' said Abrantes, demonstrating his all-round expertise, as if his visits to Harley Street with Pica had been part of his education, and allowed him to pontificate on all things medical. Felsen puffed on his cigar, the coal at the end sending Morse code back to him.

'Smoking's bad too… unless you eat,' added Abrantes, which tempted Felsen to announce a midnight swim to see if his partner would say that that would kill him too. 'Everything's all right as long as you eat properly.'

Felsen paced the length of the window looking out across the other houses to the ocean.

'You're nervous too,' said Abrantes. 'You can't sit still any more. You're not working. You're spending too much time with too many different women. You should calm down, marry…'

'Joaquim?'

'What?' he asked, looking up from his chair, innocent, put-upon. 'I'm just trying to help. You haven't been yourself since you came back from Africa. If you had a wife I wouldn't have to worry about you… that's what wives do.'

'I don't want to get married,' said Felsen, for the first time out loud.

'But you have to, you have to have children or… or…'

'Or what?'

'It all stops. You don't want to be the end of the line.'

'It's not as if I'm the last male Hapsburg, Joaquim.'

Abrantes wasn't sure what a Hapsburg was. It shut him up. They drank. Felsen refilled and went back to the window. He saw Abrantes reflected, craning his neck to see what was worth looking at.

'Manuel is doing very well in PIDE,' said Abrantes.

'You told me.'

'They say he has a natural ability for the work.'

'A suspicious mind, maybe?'

'An enquiring mind,' said Abrantes. 'They tell me he likes to know everything… they're going to make him an agente de i° classe.'

'Is that impressive?'

'After less than six months in the job? I think so.'

'What does he do?'

'You know… he checks up on people. He talks to informers. He finds the worms in the apple.'

Felsen nodded, hardly listening. Abrantes writhed in his favourite chair unable to get comfortable.

'I meant to ask you this,' said Abrantes. 'I meant to ask you this months ago.'

'What?' said Felsen, turning away from the window, interested for the first time that night.

'Did you see the Senhora dos Santos about your problem in the summer?'

'Of course I did.'

Abrantes sat back, legs spread, relieved.

'I was worried,' he said. 'That you wouldn't take it seriously. It's a very serious business.'

'She didn't do anything,' said Felsen. 'She said it wasn't her type of magic.'

Abrantes came out of his chair as if a mechanism had thumped him in the back. He took Felsen by the elbow, squeezed it hard to impress upon him the gravity of the matter.

'Now I know,' he said, his eyes staring and wide. 'Now I know why you're behaving in this way. You must see someone. Immediately.'

Felsen eased his elbow out of the man's mechanical grip. He threw back the Armagnac remaining in his glass and left the house.

It was 10.30 P.M. He was drunk but not too drunk to drive himself back out to Cabo da Roca. He drove his Mercedes through the silent streets, black and glistening from the rain. He slowed past a couple of addresses in Cascais but each time moved on-not lacking in any physical appetite, just the talk necessary to get him to that point. He smoked the remains of the cigar and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and it occurred to him out there, in the blustery darkness on the Guincho road with the storms stacked up over the Atlantic waiting to come in, that in a fit of madness Maria might have told Abrantes thai: Manuel was not his child. Was that why she was back up in the Beira? Was that why Abrantes talked about continuing the line, and in the next breath mentioned Manuel and his success in PIDE? Abrantes had made a remark at that party in the summer too, about Manuel not having the same parents as Pedro. He shook his head at the indecisive windscreen wipers, at the rain gusting across the road, slashing and buffeting the car. His thoughts unnerved him. He began to feel uncomfortable between his shoulders and up the back of his neck, suspicious suddenly that the back seat of the car was not empty.