The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro Read online

  A few meters away loomed the newspaper building, a hideous, vulgar cement edifice built in the 1970s and completely devoid of feature. Most floors were occupied by work-a-day people with jobs in the center, who used their apartments only as dormitories. To give a touch of color to the dismal balconies some of the tenants had installed a sun-umbrella and plastic garden chairs. On the topmost balcony, quite in contrast with such bourgeois embellishments, was an eye-catching placard announcing in vermilion lettering: O ACONTECIMENTO: “What every citizen needs to know.”

  This was his paper, and he made his way there in buoyant spirits. He was aware that he had to face the bosomy and paralyzed telephonist who from her wheelchair directed all the sections of the newspaper, that before reaching his cubbyhole he had to get past the desk of Dr. Silva, head of the editorial staff, who used his mothers surname, Huppert, because a French name was more stylish, and that even when he had gained his own desk he would feel the usual intolerable claustrophobia he always felt, because the cubicle with fake walls in which they had confined him had no window. Firmino knew all this, yet he pressed on with buoyant heart.

  The paralytic lady had fallen asleep in her wheelchair. Before her abundant breast was a small, empty tinfoil container with greasy edges. It had been her lunch, delivered by the fast-food at the corner. Firmino walked past her with some relief and entered the elevator. It didn’t have any doors, like a freight elevator. Beneath the buttons was a metal plaque engraved with the words “Use of this elevator is forbidden to unaccompanied minors.” Beside this, in felt pen, someone had scrawled: Fuck you. By way of compensation the architect who had dreamt up this peerless building had sought to cheer the occupants of the elevator with music piped through a miniature loudspeaker. It was always the same tune: “Strangers in the Night.” At the third floor the elevator came to a halt. There entered an elderly lady with a dyed perm which suffused a horrendous perfume.

  “Going down?” asked the lady without so much as a nod.

  “Going up,” replied Firmino.

  “I’m going down,” said the lady curtly. And she pressed the down button.

  Firmino resigned himself and down he went, the lady walked off without so much as a good-day and he went up. When he reached the fourth floor he stood for one disconcerted moment on the landing. What to do? he wondered. What if he had gone to the airport and got on a flight to Paris? Paris, the great magazines, the special correspondents, all those trips the world over. Like a complete cosmopolitan journalist. Notions like this sometimes came to him, the urge to change his life once and for all, a radical choice, a sudden impulse. But the problem was that he didn’t have a bean and air tickets run into money. So does Paris. Firmino pushed open the door and went in.

  The office premises were what is called open-plan. But originally, of course, they had not been designed as such. They had been converted by knocking down the dividing walls of the apartment, easy enough to demolish since they were made of hollow bricks. This had all been thought up by the firm previously occupying the premises, exporting tinned tuna-fish, and having inherited them in that condition the Editor had made the best of a bad job.

  There was no one sitting at the two desks facing the entrance. The first was usually occupied by a mature spinster who acted as secretary, the other by a journalist who worked at the only computer the paper possessed. The third desk was that of Senhor Silva, or rather Huppert, as he signed his articles for the paper.

  “Good afternoon, Senhor Silva,” said Firmino amiably.

  Senhor Silva eyed him with some severity.

  “The Editor is furious,” he said between his teeth.

  “Why is that?” asked Firmino.

  “Because he didn’t know how to contact you.”

  “But I was at the sea,” explained Firmino.

  “You can’t go to the sea in times like these,” said Senhor Silva acidly. He then pronounced his pet phrase: mala tempora currunt.

  “That’s all very well,” returned Firmino, “but I was only supposed to be back tomorrow.”

  Senhor Silva made no answer, but motioned towards the frosted-glass door of the Editor’s little office.

  Firmino knocked and breezed straight in. The Editor was on the telephone and gestured to him to wait. Firmino closed the door and remained standing. It was stiflingly hot in that little room and the air conditioner was turned off. Yet the Editor was dressed in an impeccable grey jacket and wearing a tie. Also a white shirt. He hung up and raked Firmino from stem to stern.

  “Where were you holing out?” he demanded irritably.

  “Alentejo,” answered Firmino.

  “What were you doing in Alentejo?” demanded the Editor more irritably still.

  “I am on holiday,” pointed out Firmino, “and my holiday doesn’t end until tomorrow, I’ve called in at the paper simply to know if there’s anything new, and whether I can make myself useful.”

  “You’re not useful,” snapped the Editor, “you’re indispensable, and you’re leaving on the six o’clock train.”

  It occurred to Firmino that it might be better to sit down. He did so, and lit a cigarette.

  “Where to?” he asked imperturbably.

  “To Oporto of course,” replied the Editor in a neutral voice.

  “Why of course?” asked Firmino, attempting to adopt the same neutral tone.

  “Because there’s been a bit of dirty work up there,” said the Editor, “the sort of thing that’s going to cause rivers of ink to flow.”

  “Can’t our man in Oporto cope with it?” asked Firmino.

  “No he can’t, this is big stuff,” stated the Editor.

  “Then send Senhor Silva,” replied Firmino calmly, “he likes traveling, and moreover he’ll be able to sign the thing with his French name.”

  “He runs Editorial,” said the Editor, “his job is to edit the rubbish sent in by the various correspondents. The special correspondent is you.”

  “But I’ve only just finished with the woman stabbed by her husband in Coimbra,” protested Firmino, “and that was only ten days ago, just before my holiday. I spent a whole afternoon in the morgue in Coimbra listening to the police surgeon’s evidence.”

  “Too bad,” snapped the Editor, “our special correspondent is you and nobody else. Apart from that, it’s already arranged, I’ve booked you into a pension in Oporto for a week, and that’s just to start with, because this case is going to drag on.”

  Firmino took a little time off to marshal his thoughts. He would have dearly liked to say that he had no love for the city of Oporto, that in Oporto they ate almost nothing but tripe à la mode d’Oporto and that tripe made him sick, that Oporto was cursed by sweltering damp heat, that the pension he had been booked in to was doubtless a frightful dump with a bathroom on the landing and that he would die of sheer melancholy. But instead of all this he said:

  “Sir, I have to finish my study of the Post-War Portuguese novel, it’s a very important thing for me, and anyway I have already signed a contract with the publisher.”

  “It’s a nasty business,” cut in the Editor, “a mystery that has to be solved, the public has its tongue hanging out, it’s the talk of the day.”

  The Editor lit a cigarette, lowered his voice as if confessing a secret, and murmured: “They have discovered a headless corpse in the vicinity of Matosinhos, it is still unidentified, it was found by a gypsy, Manolo by name, who gave a muddled account of it to the police, and no one has managed to get another word out of him. He lives in an encampment on the outskirts of Oporto, and it’s up to you to search him out and interview him. It’ll be the scoop of the week.”

  The Editor now appeared to be less flustered, as if for him the case had already been solved. He opened a drawer and took out some papers.

  “Here’s the address of the pension,” he added, “it’s not a luxury hotel, but Dona Rosa is a perfect gem, I’ve known her for thirty years. And here is your check for board, lodging and expenses for one week. If s
omething extra crops up, put it on the bill. And don’t forget, the train leaves at six.”

  Three

  WHO KNOWS WHY HE HAD always disliked Oporto? Firmino thought about this. His taxi was crossing the Praça da Batalha, a fine square, austere in the English manner. Oporto did in fact have an English air to it, with its grey stone Victorian façades and people walking in such orderly fashion along the streets. Could it be, wondered Firmino, that I don’t feel at ease with the English? Possibly, but it wasn’t the main reason. The one time he’d been in London he had felt perfectly at home. Obviously Oporto wasn’t London, it was merely an imitation of London, but maybe even this wasn’t the reason, decided Firmino. And he thought back to his childhood, and his uncles and aunts in Oporto where his parents unfailingly took him every Christmas holiday. Grim, those Christmases. They flooded back into Firmino’s mind as if they had happened the day before. He saw Aunt Pitù and Uncle Nuno, herself tall and lean and always dressed in black, with a cameo pinned on her breast, and he plump, jovial, and a specialist at telling jokes that made nobody laugh. And the house! A turn-of-the-century little villa in the middle-class part of town, depressing furniture and sofas bestrewn with lace doilies, paper flowers and old oval photographs on the walls, the whole genealogy of the family Aunt Pitù was so proud of. And Christmas dinner. A nightmare. Starting with the inevitable cabbage soup served in the Cantonese porcelain bowls that were Aunt Pitù‘s pride and joy, and the tenderness with which his mother encouraged him to eat up even though he was gagging over it. And then the torture of being woken up at eleven o’clock at night to attend Low Mass, the ritual of being forced into his best suit, and setting forth into the chill December mists of Oporto. The wintry mists of Oporto. Firmino thought it over and came to the conclusion that his dislike of that city was a hangover from his childhood, maybe Freud was right. He pondered over Freud’s theories. Not that he knew them all that well, rather that they didn’t inspire enough faith in him. Lukács, on the other hand, with his precise X-ray of literature as an expression of class, he was a different matter, and besides he was useful to his studies of the post-war Portuguese novel. Yes, Lukács was more use to him than Freud, but it could be that that old Viennese doctor was right about certain things, who knows?

  “But where is this blessèd boarding-house?” he asked the cabbie.

  He felt he had the right to do so. They had been on the road for at least half an hour, at first in the broad thoroughfares of the center and now in the impossibly narrow alleyways of a district unknown to Firmino.

  “It takes the time it takes,” came the surly mutter of the cabbie.

  Taximen and policemen, thought Firmino, were the two types he hated most. And yet in his job most of his dealings were with policemen and taximen. He was a journalist on a periodical specializing in scandals and murder victims, divorces, disemboweled women and beheaded corpses, and that was his life. He thought how wonderful it would be to write his book on Vittorini and the post-war Portuguese novel, he was sure it would be an event in the academic world, and might even lead eventually to a research grant.

  The taxi stopped plumb in the middle of a narrow street, before a building that showed every year of its age, and the driver unexpectedly turned towards Firmino and bade him a hearty farewell.

  “Afraid you wouldn’t get here, eh? young gentleman,” he said kindly, “but here in Oporto we don’t cheat anyone, we don’t go round and round the mulberry bush to rook the customers of their money, we’re not in Lisbon here, you know.”

  Firmino alighted, got out his bag and paid. Above the main door a sign read “Pension Rosa—First Floor.” The entrance hall was set up as a ladies’ hair salon. There was no elevator. Firmino climbed a staircase embellished with a red banister, or one which had once been red, which saddened him and at the same time made him feel at home. Only too well did he know the sort of boarding-house his Editor habitually sent him to: dreary suppers at seven in the evening, bedrooms with a washbasin in the corner, and worst of all the old harridans who owned them.

  But this time it was nothing of the sort, at least as far as the owner was concerned. Dona Rosa, a lady of about sixty, her hair arranged in a blue permanent wave, was not wearing a flower-patterned housecoat like the proprietresses of all the other pensions he had known, but a stylish grey coat and skirt and a jovial smile. Dona Rosa bade him welcome and carefully explained the timetable of the establishment. Dinner was at eight, and that evening it would consist of tripe à la mode d’Oporto. If he wished to fend for himself for supper, in the square to the right as he left the house there was a long-established café, the Café Àncora, one of the oldest in Oporto, practically an institution, where the food was good and reasonably priced, but before that perhaps he had better have a shower, wouldn’t he like to see his room? it was the second on the right down the corridor, she would appreciate a couple of words with him but they could have them after dinner, she was a night owl anyway.

  When Firmino entered his room his good first impressions of the Pension Rosa were confirmed. A spacious window giving on to the garden behind the house, a high ceiling, solid country furniture, a double bed. A bathroom with flower-patterned tiles and a bathtub. There was even a hair-dryer. Firmino undressed without hurry and had a lukewarm shower. All in all, here in Oporto there wasn’t that sticky heat he had been afraid of, or at least his room was nice and cool. He put on a short-sleeved shirt, threw a light jacket over his arm just in case, and went out. The street outside was still showing signs of life. The shops were already shuttered up, but folks were at their windows enjoying the evening air and chatting with their neighbors across the way. He dawdled a bit to listen in to this prattle, which he found rather touching. He caught a few phrases here and there, especially those of a sturdily-built young lady leaning far out over the sill. She was carrying on about the Porto football team which had won a match in Germany the day before. She seemed particularly enthusiastic about the center forward, whose name was unknown to Firmino.

  He spotted the café as soon as he entered the square. He could scarcely have missed it. It was a nineteenth-century building with an elaborately stuccoed façade and a heavy timber-framed doorway. The sign depicted a rubicund little man sitting astride a barrel of wine. And in Firmino went.

  The main room of the café was immense, with its old wooden tables, its enormous inlaid counter and a host of revolving brass fans hanging from the ceiling. The tables right down the end were reserved for the restaurant, but there were no clients. Firmino took a seat and prepared for a lavish dinner by studying the menu carefully. He made up his mind, and already felt his mouth watering when the waiter arrived. A slender youngster with a little brown beard and a crew-cut.

  “The kitchen is closed, sir,” said the waiter, “only cold dishes are available.”

  Firmino glanced at his watch. It was half-past eleven, he had no idea it had got so late. However, in Lisbon you could dine at your leisure at this hour.

  “In Lisbon one can still have dinner at this time of night,” he said, just for something to say.

  “Lisbon is Lisbon and Oporto is Oporto,” replied the waiter philosophically, “but I think you will find that our cold dishes will not disappoint you, and if I may make a suggestion, the cook has prepared a shrimp salad with home-made mayonnaise that would make the dead arise.”

  Firmino said yes to it and the waiter soon returned with the platter of shrimp salad. He served him a generous helping, and said in the meanwhile:

  “Porto won yesterday's match in Germany, the German players are tough, but our boys beat them on speed.”

  Clearly he was in the mood for a chat, and Firmino fell in with this.

  “Porto’s a fine team,” he replied, “but it doesn’t have the tradition that Benfica has.”

  “You’re from Lisbon, then?” asked the waiter promptly.

  “The center of Lisbon,” Firmino assured him.

  “I thought so from your accent,” said the waiter. “And wh
at brings you here to Oporto?”

  “I’m looking for a gypsy,” answered Firmino without a thought.

  “A gypsy?” asked the waiter.

  “Yes, a gypsy,” repeated Firmino.

  “I’m on the side of the gypsies,” said the waiter as if feeling out his ground. “What about you?”

  “I don’t know much about them,” replied Firmino, “in fact very little indeed.”

  “It may be because I come from Barcelos,” said the waiter. “You know, when I was a child in Barcelos they held the grandest fair in the whole of the Minho, but now it’s not what it used to be, I went back last year and found it really sad and depressing, but in those days it was a sight to see, but I don’t want to bore you, perhaps I’m bothering you?”

  “Not at all,” said Firmino, “in fact sit down and keep me company, can I offer you a glass of wine?”

  The waiter sat down and accepted the glass of wine.

  “I was telling you about the fair at Barcelos,” the waiter went on, “when I was a child it was magnificent, especially on account of the livestock in the market, those pure-bred Minhota oxen with the long, long horns, do you remember them? but in any case they’re a thing of the past, but also the horses, the fillies, the foals, the mares, my father was a horse-dealer and used to do business with the gypsies during the summer months, they had splendid horses, the gypsies did, and were persons worthy of honor and esteem, I remember a banquet they gave my father after concluding some transaction, it was at a big table out in the main square of Barcelos and my father took me along with him.”