Antonio Tabucchi - The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro

“We’ve had an anonymous call,” he said, “he won’t talk to us, he wants to talk directly to the special correspondent, which is you, we’ve given him the number of the pension and he’s going to ring at four o’clock, in my opinion he was calling from Oporto.”

Silva paused.

“Are you enjoying your nice tripe?” he asked perfidiously.

Firmino replied that he had just finished eating a dish that he, Silva, could not have imagined in his wildest dreams.

“Don’t leave the pension,” entreated Silva, “it could be a mythomaniac, but he didn’t give me that impression, treat him well, he may have important information for you.”

Firmino glanced at his watch and took a seat on the sofa. Dammit, he thought, now even that ass Silva took the liberty of giving him advice. He picked a magazine out of a wicker basket. It was called Vultos , and was devoted to the Portuguese and international jet-set. He settled down to read with interest an article about the claimant to the throne of Portugal, Don Duarte de Braganca, who had just become the father of a son. The claimant, wearing a mustache in the nineteenth-century manner, was sitting bolt upright in a high-backed leather chair and holding the hand of his consort, who was buried so deep in a low chair that only her shins and neck were visible, as if she had been sawn in half. Firmino concluded that the photographer was totally incompetent, but he had no time to finish the article because the telephone rang. He waited for Dona Rosa to answer it.

“It’s for you, Senhor Firmino,” said Dona Rosa amiably.

“Hullo,” said Firmino into the instrument.

“Look in the yellow pages,” murmured the voice at the other end of the wire.

“Look for what?” asked Firmino.

“For Stones of Portugal,” said the voice, “under Import-Export.”

“Who are you?” asked Firmino.

“It doesn’t matter,” answered the voice.

“Why don’t you telephone the police instead of me?” inquired Firmino.

“Because I know the police better than you do,” replied the voice. And the line went dead.

Firmino set himself to thinking. It was a young voice with a strong Northern accent. Not an educated person, that was plain from his pronunciation. And so? And so what? The North of Portugal was full of uneducated young men with strong Northern accents. He picked up the telephone directory from the little table and looked through the Yellow Pages for the section Import-Export. It said: Stones of Portugal, Vila Nova de Gaia, Avenida Heróis do Mar, 123. He looked in his guidebook but it wasn’t any help to him. There was nothing to do but ask Dona Rosa. Dona Rosa very patiently unfolded the map of Oporto once more and showed him the place. It certainly wasn’t just round the corner, it was right on the other side of town and practically not in Oporto at all. In fact Vila Nova was a town of its own, with a town hall and everything else. He was in a hurry? Well in that case the only thing was to take a taxi, because by public transport he wouldn’t get there until dinner-time, and how much a taxi would cost him she simply couldn’t say, she’d never been to Vila Nova by taxi, but of course luxuries have to be paid for.

“And now goodbye young man,” she said, she was going to have a short siesta, yes, that’s just what she needed.

AVENIDA HERÓIS DO MAR was a long street on the outskirts lined with a few stunted trees and small building sites, half-finished buildings, warehouses and brand-new little villas with gardens full of effigies of Snow White and ceramic swallows on the walls of the verandas. Number 123 was a white, single-story building with an undulating wall in the Mexican style. In its rear rose a large warehouse with a corrugated-iron roof. On the wall a brass plaque read: Stones of Portugal. Firmino pressed the electronic button and the gate clicked open. The building itself had a little portico along the front, like the other villas in the street, and on one of the columns was a sign saying “Administration.” Firmino went in. It was a little office equipped with modern furniture, but not devoid of good taste. At a glass-topped table cluttered with documents sat an elderly, bald, bespectacled gentleman tapping away at a typewriter.

“Good afternoon,” said Firmino.

The old chap stopped typing and looked up. He returned the greeting.

“The reason for your visit?” he asked.

Firmino felt caught unprepared. He had really been an idiot, he thought, because all through the long taxi-ride he had thought about Manolo, and then his fiancée whom he was already missing, and thereafter how Lukács would have reacted if instead of being confronted by a text of Balzac’s he had had to face the naked reality of things, as he himself was doing at the moment. He had thought of all this, but had neglected to think of how he should explain his presence.

“I was looking for the boss,” he mumbled.

“The boss is in Hong Kong,” said the old boy, “he’ll be away till the end of the month.”

“Who can I talk to then?” asked Firmino.

“The secretary has taken a week’s holiday,” was the answer, “so there’s just the warehouseman and me, I’m responsible for the accounting, is it a matter of urgency?”

“Yes and no,” replied Firmino, “but as I’m passing through Oporto I wanted to make a proposal to your boss.”

Then, as if to make his presence a little more convincing, he added: “I’m in the business myself, I have a small firm in Lisbon.”

“Ah,” replied the employee without the least vestige of interest.

“May I sit down for a moment?” asked Firmino.

The man waved a hand at the chair facing the desk. It was a buff-colored canvas chair with arms to it, such as film directors use. It struck Firmino again that whoever had furnished Stones of Portugal had pretty good taste.

“What is your exact line of business?” he enquired with the most charming smile at his disposal.

The old man at last raised his eyes from the papers on his desk. He lit a Gauloise from a packet on the table beside him and inhaled an avid puff.

“Curse it,” he said, “these Chinese accounts are hell on earth, they send their statements in Hong Kong dollars and I have to turn them into Portuguese escudos, and the hitch is that the Hong Kong dollar never fluctuates a red cent one way or the other whereas our currency goes up and down like a yo-yo, I don’t know whether you follow the Lisbon stock exchange.”

Firmino nodded and spread his arms as if to say: ah yes, I know it only too well.

“We began with marble,” said the old man, “seven years ago it was just the boss and me, an Alsatian dog and a tin shack.”

“Ah yes,” said Firmino to urge him to further confidences, “marble really goes, here in this country.”

“ If it goes,” returned the old man, “ if it goes. But you have to find the right market. The boss has an extraordinary flair for these things, maybe he’s had a bit of luck as well, but I can’t deny he’s got a real business sense, and that’s why he thought of Italy.”

Firmino’s face took on an expression of wonderment.

“It seems to me a pretty queer notion, exporting marble to Italy,” he said, “the Italians are up to their eyeballs in marble.”

“So you think, my dear sir,” exclaimed the old man, “and so I thought myself, but this means that we don’t have a flair for these things and don’t know the laws of the market. I’ll say one thing: do you know which is the most highly prized marble in Italy? That’s easy enough, it’s the marble from Carrara. And what does the Italian market demand? Easy again: marble from Carrara. But it so happens that Carrara is no longer able to satisfy the demands, my dear sir, I don’t know the exact reasons, let’s say because labor is too expensive, the quarrymen are anarchists and have very demanding trade unions, that the environmentalists are making life hell for the government because the Apuan Alps have been riddled with holes, things of that sort.”