William Boyd - The Destiny of Nathalie X

“Mrs. Campendonc, this is not really a suitable establishment for a lady.”

“I wanted to see you.” I touched his hand, but he jerked it away, as if my fingers burned him.

“It’s impossible. I’m expecting some friends.”

“Are you well? You look tired. I miss you.”

His gaze flickered around the café. “How is the Kamptulicon going? Pimentel is a good man.”

“Come to my house. This weekend.”

“Mrs. Campendonc …” His tone was despairing.

“Call me Lily.”

He steepled his fingers. “I’m a busy man. I live with my mother and three sisters. They expect me home in the evening.”

“Take a holiday. Say you’re going to … to Spain for a few days.”

“I only take one holiday a year.”

“Christmas.”

“They go to my aunt in Coimbra. I stay behind to look after the house.”

A young man approached the table. He wore a ludicrous yellow overcoat that reached down to his ankles. He was astonished to see me sitting there. Boscán looked even more ill as he introduced us. I have forgotten his name.

I said goodbye and went toward the door. Boscán caught up with me.

“At Christmas,” he said quietly. “I’ll see you at Christmas.”

A postcard. A sepia view of the Palace of Queen Maria Pia, Cintra:

I will be one kilometer west of the main beach at Paço de Arcos. I have rented a room in the Casa de Bizoma. Please arrive at dawn on 25 December and depart at sunset.

I am your friend,

Gaspar Barbosa

The bark of the cork tree is removed every eight to ten years, the quality of the cork improving with each successive stripping. Once the section of cork is removed from the tree the outer surface is scraped and cleaned. The sections — wide curved planks — are flattened by heating them over a fire and submitting them to pressure on a flat surface. In the heating operation the surface is charred, and thereby the pores are closed up. It is this process that the industry terms the “nerve” of cork. This is cork at its most valuable. A cork possesses “nerve” when its significant properties — lightness, impermeability, elasticity — are sealed in the material forever.

Consul Schenk’s Report

In the serene, urinous light of dawn the beach at Paço de Arcos looked slate gray. The seaside cafés were closed up and summoned up impressions of dejection and decrepitude as only out-of-season holiday resorts can. To add to this melancholy scene a fine cold rain blew off the Atlantic. I stood beneath my umbrella on the coast road and looked about me. To the left I could just make out the tower of Belém. To the right the hills of Cintra were shrouded in a heavy opaque mist. I turned and walked up the road toward the Casa de Bizoma. As I drew near I could see Boscán sitting on a balcony on the second floor. All other windows on this side of the hotel were firmly shuttered.

A young girl, of about sixteen years, let me in and led me up to his room.

Boscán was wearing a monocle. On a table behind him were two bottles of brandy. We kissed, we broke apart.

“Lise,” he said. “I want to call you Lise.”

Even then, even that day, I said no. “That’s the whole point,” I reminded him. “I’m me — Lily — whoever you are.”

He inclined his body forward in a mock bow. “Gaspar Barbosa … Would you like something to drink?”

I drank some brandy and then allowed Barbosa to undress me, which he did with pedantic diligence and great delicacy. When I was naked he knelt before me and pressed his lips against my groin, burying his nose in my pubic hair. He hugged me, still kneeling, his arms strong around the backs of my thighs, his head turned sideways in my lap. When he began to cry softly, I raised him up and led him over to the narrow bed. He undressed and we climbed in, huddling up together, our legs interlocking. I reached down to touch him.

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“We’ll wait.”

“Don’t forget you have to go at sunset. Remember.”

“I won’t.”

We made love later, but it was not very satisfactory. He seemed listless and tired — nothing like Balthazar Cabral and Melchior Vasconcelles.

At noon, the hotel restaurant was closed, so we ate a simple lunch he had brought himself: some bread, some olives, some tart sheep’s-milk cheese, some oranges and almonds. By then he was on to the second bottle of brandy. After lunch I smoked a cigarette. I offered him one — I had noticed he had not smoked all day — which he accepted but which he extinguished after a couple of puffs.

“I have developed a mysterious distaste for tobacco,” he said, pouring himself some more brandy.

In the afternoon we tried to make love again but failed.

“It’s my fault,” he said. “I’m not well.”

I asked him why I had had to arrive at dawn and why I had to leave at sunset. He told me it was because of a poem he had written, called “The Roses of the Gardens of the God Adonis.”

“You wrote? Boscán?”

“No, no. Boscán has only written one book of poems, years ago. These are mine, Gaspar Barbosa’s.”

“What’s it about?” The light was going; it was time for me to leave.

“Oh …” He thought. “Living and dying.”

He quoted me the line that explained the truncated nature of my third Christmas with Agostinho Boscán. He sat at the table before the window, wearing a dirty white shirt and the trousers of his blue serge suit, and poured himself a tumblerful of brandy.

“It goes like this — roughly. I’m translating: ‘Let us make our lives last one day,’ ” he said. “ ‘So there is night before and night after the little that we last.’ ”

The uses to which corkwood may be put are unlimited. And yet when we speak of uses it is only those that have developed by reason of the corkwood’s own peculiarity and not the great number it has been adapted to, for perhaps its utility will have no end and, in my estimation, its particular qualities are little appreciated. At any rate it is the most wonderful bark of its kind, its service has been a long one and its benefits, even as a stopper, have been many. A wonderful material truly, and of interest so full that it seems I have failed to do it justice in my humble endeavor to describe the Quercus suber of Linnaeus — cork.

Consul Schenk’s Report

Boscán, during, I think, that last Christmas: “You see, because I am nothing, I can imagine anything … If I were something, I would be unable to imagine.”

It was in early December 1936 that I received my last communication from Agostinho Boscán. I was waiting to hear from him, as I had received an offer for the company from the Armstrong Cork Company and was contemplating a sale and, possibly, a return to England.

I was in my office one morning when Pimentel knocked on the door and said there was a Senhora Boscán to see me. For an absurd, exquisite moment I thought this might prove to be Agostinho’s most singular disguise, but remembered he had three sisters and a mother still living. I knew before she was shown in that she came with news of Boscán’s death.

Senhora Boscán was small and tubby with a meek pale face. She wore black and fiddled constantly with the handle of her umbrella as she spoke. Her brother had requested specifically that I be informed of his death when it arrived. He had passed away two nights ago.

“What did he die of?”

“Cirrhosis of the liver … He was … My brother had become an increasingly heavy drinker. He was very unhappy.”

“Was there anything else for me, that he said? Any message?”