Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

'I've always thought,' she said, 'that if you want to be sad, Lisbon is the place to do it.'

'And you're sad?'

'I meant melancholy.'

'That's better, but…'

'I'm sad too, sitting up there in front of my computer on the first beautiful Sunday afternoon of summer.'

But you're not… any more.'

'You're right,' she said and shook her head to get rid of it. Her strange and large earrings bounced off her cheeks.

'The earrings?' I asked.

I have a friend who makes jewellery out of restaurant detritus. These were made out of the gold netting from a wine bottle.'

'I saw the spoons yesterday.'

'The spoons,' she said, her mind still elsewhere… on the beach with somebody else maybe. She went back to the window.

'You know why Lisbon's a sad place,' I said. 'It's never recovered from its history. Something terrible happened here which marked the place for ever. All those shaded, narrow alleyways, the dark gardens, the cypresses around the cemeteries, the steep cobbled streets, the black and white calçada in the squares, the views out over the red roofs to the slow river and the ocean… they've never shrugged off the fact that almost the entire population of the city was wiped out in an earthquake that happened nearly 250 years ago.'

Silence. Her chin pivoted on the heel of her hand. She blinked at me twice. What had I done?

'Poetic police,' she said.

'The Igreja do Carmo. Can you think of anywhere else in the world where they've left the skeleton of a cathedral in the heart of the city as a monument to all those that died?'

'No,' she said after a moment's thought.

'Hiroshima,' I said. 'That was the scale of it. Do you think Hiroshima will ever be a happy place?'

'Pensive police,' she said, and this time not joking.

'I can do pitiless police as well,' I said, thinking Hiroshima was not date talk.

'All right.'

I gave her my dead-eyed look reserved for lying mother-murderers. She shuddered.

'How many other police have you got in there?'

'Pleasant police,' I said, giving her my born-again-Christian smile.

'I don't believe pleasant police.'

I slumped in my chair, head on chest.

'And that?'

'The police that everybody wants to see… posthumous police.'

'You've got a diseased brain.'

'It helps with the job.'

The waiter put the prawns and crab down. We ordered two more beers. We ate the prawns. I liked her. She sucked the heads out, ladylike or not, she didn't give a damn.

'You don't look like a schoolteacher,' I said.

'Because I'm not. I'm the worst teacher I know. I love kids but I have no patience. I'm too aggressive. Two more weeks and I'm out.'

'Into what?'

She sized me up for a second to see if I was worth telling what she had to say, whether she wanted to go that far yet.

'I've been resisting it for some time, but now I'm going to do it. I'm going to run one of my father's businesses.'

She sucked hard on a prawn head, smacked her lips, wiped them and drank three-fifths of her beer down in three gulps.

'Just one of them?' I asked, and she stopped wiping her hands to check me for irony.

'I'm ambitious,' she said, tossing her napkin to one side.

The waiter lowered two more beers in front of us.

'For what?'

'For a life in which most, if not all, the decisions are my own.'

'Is this a recent development?'

She smiled and looked down at the shattered prawn shells on her plate.

'Was that perceptive police?'

I finished my first beer and started on the second.

'Have you been in business before?'

'I worked for my father for four years after university. We had a fight. We're the same type. I left and went to do a doctorate.'

'On what?'

'Was that deaf police? I told you yesterday, remember?'

'I was concentrating on other things.'

'I know,' she said, and suddenly quantum mechanics came back into my life. I was aware of every photon between us.

'Your turn to be perceptive,' I said.

'The Economics of Salazar,' she said, slowly. 'The Portuguese Economy from 1928-1968.'

'We don't have to discuss it now, do we?'

'Not unless you can do it on your own.'

'Which of your father's businesses are you going to run?'

'He owns a publishing company.'

'What does it publish?'

'Too many male writers. Not enough fiction. No genre fiction, like crime or romance. No children's books. I want to change all that. I want to get people who don't read to read. Get them hooked, grow them.'

'The Portuguese take literature like their food-seriously.'

'You're a policeman and you've never read a crime novel?'

'I'm worried it's going to be as boring as the real thing, and if it isn't it won't ring true.'

'You're missing the point. A thirteen-year-old will never read Jose Saramago but give him a crime novel and by the time he's seventeen he will.'

'And then what'll happen to our great footballing nation?'

'They'll be well-read footballers,' she said and laughed a deep, dirty laugh that probably came from smoking Marlboro but what the hell, it made my chest boom, my spine prickle. We ate the crabs, drank more beer and talked about books, films, actors, celebrities, drugs, fame, success and I ordered a lobster split and grilled and Luisa said she'd pay for a vinho verde Soalheiro Alvarinho 96 which had more spunk to it than any vinho verde I've ever tasted. So we ordered a second bottle and drank that down in flashing gulps and two and a half hours after we'd arrived we fell out of the air conditioning and into the hot empty street with no traffic, no people and the trees still in the siesta silence.

We walked arm in arm. At the door of her apartment building she grabbed hold of my wrist and half-pulled me up the stairs. She only let go to get her keys out and then we were in the dark corridor, kissing, and she kicked the door shut with a bang so loud, glasses tinkled in the kitchen cupboards.

She led me through the living room, walking out of her sandals into her bedroom where she turned and yanked the shirt out of my trousers and ran her hands up my chest. She shrugged and the straps fell off her shoulders and the dress to the floor. She tore my jeans down my thighs. I wrestled out of my shirt. She gripped me through my undershorts and looked up with eyes that dared me. She pulled the shorts out and over and stripped down her own panties. I pulled her to me and she jumped and wrapped her legs around my waist, crooked an arm around my neck. She lowered herself slowly, her pubic hair scratching my belly, impossibly hot, heat beyond human tolerance, until we connected and she held herself there until we were both trembling, shuddering. She straightened her arms and leaned back smiling at me, smiling at my agony and, as we fell on to the bed, I felt like the surfer who feels the big wave hump underneath him, tons of ocean drawn up, the surge, the roll, the terrific speed and monumental collapse.

The traffic woke us. The Lisboans coming home at dusk. Wordlessly, we crawled into each other and made love again. The mirror looked darkly on. A red light passed across the scrap of velvet sky visible from the open window, followed by the sound of thumping helicopter blades. The room smelled of sex-sweat, perfume and something sweet like berry juice smeared on skin. Life felt suddenly rich, the city ripe, the room wine-dark and full of easy, complex possibilities.

I don't know how I got myself out of her apartment. There was a brief leaden moment and I was in the car, heading out of the city through the darkening Monsanto park, with her body smell still on me and something unfurling in my chest like the sails of a flotilla setting out.

The earth felt solid under my feet in Paço de Arcos. As I let myself into the house I had that feeling of money in the bank and a fridge full of food, neither of which was true.