At first he thought it was a scarecrow. Coming outside in the tired morning
light to relieve his bladder, blessing as always the old Judas tree, João
turned his head and saw the dark shape in the woods. It took some time to zip
his trousers. His fingers were like enemy agents. They pretended to be his
instruments but secretly worked against him.
João walked out beneath the moss-skinned branches thinking only this:
Eighty-four years upon the earth is an eternity.
He touched Rui’s boots. They almost reached the ground. “My friend,” he said,
“let me help you.” He waited for the courage to look up and see his face. When
it came, he whispered in his lacerated old man’s voice. “Querido,” he
said. “Ruizinho.”
Standing on the log that Rui had kicked away, João took his penknife and began
to cut the rope. He put his free arm across Rui’s chest and up beneath his
armpit, felt the weight begin to shift as the fibers sprang apart beneath the
blade.
The almond blossom was early this year. The tomatoes too would come early and
turn a quick, deceiving red. They would not taste of anything. João took Rui’s
crooked hand in his own and thought: These are the things that I know. It was
time to put the broad beans in. The soil that had grown the corn needed to
rest. The olives this year would be hard and small.
He sat in the long grass with his back against the log and Rui resting against
him. He moved Rui’s head so it lay more comfortably on his shoulder. He wrapped
his arms around Rui’s body. For the second time he held him.
They were seventeen and hungry when they first met, in the back of a cattle
wagon heading east to the wheat fields. Rui pulled him up without a word, but
later he said, “There’s work enough for all. That’s what I hear.” João nodded,
and when the hills had subsided and the great plains stretched out like a
golden promise, he leaned across and said, “Anyone who wants work can find it.”
They moved their arses on the wooden slats and pretended they weren’t sore and
looked out farther than they had ever seen before, white villages stamped like
foam on the blue, the land breaking against the sky.
On the third day they put down at the edge of a small town and the children who
ran up to meet the wagon were bitten hard, no different from João’s brothers
and sisters. João looked at Rui but Rui set his mouth and swung his legs over
the side the same as the other men. The older ones got called and went to cut
cork or plow the fields while João and Rui stood up tall with their hands in
their pockets. João was so hungry he felt it in his legs and his hands and his
scalp. They walked through the hovels, the women lining the doorways, the dogs
nosing the gutters, and came to the center. “We’ll stick together,” said Rui.
He had green eyes and a fine nose and white skin, as though he had never been
out in the sun.
“If someone wants us, he’ll have to take us both,” said João, as if he were
master of his destiny.
They scrounged half a loaf at the café by scrubbing the floor and humping the
rubbish to the tip, and slept on the cobbled street with their mouths open.
When he woke, the first thing João saw was Rui’s face. He thought the pain in
his stomach was pure hunger.
Side by side they scavenged and slept. They milled about with the other men
waiting for work and learned a lot: how to eke out a few words to last a
conversation, how to lean against a wall, how to spit, and how to fill up on
indifference.
At the top of the square was a two-story building with bars on the bottom
window. João had never seen a prison before. The prisoners sat in the window
and talked to friends or received food from relatives. One day a dozen or more
people had gathered. João and Rui had nothing else to do.
“He talks about sacrifice. Who is making these sacrifices, my friends? Ask
yourselves.”
No one looked at the prisoner. They were just hanging around waiting, though
there was nothing to wait for.
The prisoner clutched the bars and pressed his face to them. His nose escaped.
“Salazar,” he said, “is not making sacrifices.”
There was a general stirring, as if fear had blown in on the dry wind.
“Listen to me,” said the prisoner. His face was thin and pinched, as though he
had spent too long trying to squeeze it out of the narrow opening. “In the
whole of the Alentejo, four families own three quarters of the land. It was
like this too in other countries, like Russia. But now the Russian land belongs
to the Russian people.”
Each man averted his face from every other. It was not safe to read another’s
thoughts.
João glanced at Rui. Rui did not know what the others knew, or was too reckless
to care. He looked directly at the prisoner.
“The people make the wealth, but the wealth does not belong to the people.”
Men withdrew their hands from their pockets as if emptying their savings before
leaving town. The prisoner slid his fingers between the bars. “It is forbidden
for us to go barefoot. Salazar forbids it.” The man laughed, and the laugh was
as free as the body was caged. “Look, this is how we must bind our feet. As
long as our feet are in slippers and rags, our bellies must be full.”
An old man with a bent back, obliged to gaze at feet the long day through,
grunted a loud assent. A younger man, blinking back tears of fury, said, “It is
true.”
The prisoner tipped back into the dark cell as though wrenched by some unknown
force, perhaps by the darkness itself. Each free man discovered he had
something to do elsewhere.
“Rui,” said João, “we better go.”
Rui stood with his hands on his hips and tossed his head like a bullfighter.
“It’s finished,” said João. He grabbed Rui’s elbow and dragged him away.
Later a man came to the square and beckoned João. “You want to work?”
“Anything,” said João. “Please.”
“Come,” said the man and turned around.
“My friend,” said João, looking over at Rui, who whistled and kicked his heels
against the wall.
The man kept walking.
“Wait,” called João. “I’m coming.”
He looked up and saw Rui’s hat on a large stone, bathed in a circle of milky
light. He imagined Rui sitting there, taking off his hat for the last time.
João’s spine was stiff and there was an ache in his chest. He shifted in the
damp grass and looked across and saw how oddly Rui’s legs were lying. His
trousers were hemmed with mud. One boot faced down and the other faced up. For
us, thought João, there can be no ease.
He had been there as usual on Thursday, outside the Junta de Freguesia for the
game. Everyone was there: José, Manuel, Nelson, Carlos, Abel, and the rest.
Only Mario did not come, because Mario had broken his hip. “That Manuel,” said
Rui, “is a cheating bastard.” “That Rui,” said Manuel, “is a stupid donkey.”
Everything went on the way it had for the past eighteen years, since Rui turned
up in Mamarrosa, though Rui and João had been the young ones then. “Carlos,”
said Abel, “you bowl like a woman.” “Shut up,” said Carlos. “What do you know
about women?”
Malhadinha was the best way for men to talk. You rolled the balls out
onto the green and rolled the words out after them. You didn’t have to face
each other.
Afterward they locked the balls in the Junta and went to the café to drink.
“My granddaughter wants to go to Lisbon,” said José.
“My son left London and went to Glasgow,” said Rui.
“My daughter,” said Carlos, “says she will throw me out if I cough once more in
the night. But she always says that.”
When it was time to go to bed, João walked with Nelson, and Rui walked with
Manuel. Sometimes João walked with Manuel. Sometimes he walked with José or
Antonio or Mario. But in all those years he had never walked alone with Rui.
João thought he did not want to be the one to return Rui’s hat to his wife. He
thought and thought about what to do. A bird flew down and landed on the hat’s
ridge. It was gold with a black head and black feet. João had never seen a bird
like that before, and he knew it was a sign that he should keep the hat. Then
he remembered about Rui’s wife. Dona Rosa Maria had died not last year but the
year before that. The day they buried her was a scorcher. July the fourth:
memorial day of Isabella of Portugal, patron saint of difficult marriages and
the falsely accused.
* * *
When they met for the second time, they were men.
João passed the greenshirt parade in the Praça Souza Prado and climbed the
steps up to the Rua Fortunato Simões Dos Santos, heading for his favorite bar.
At the top of the steps, he turned and watched as a boy marched out of the
ranks and raised his right arm in the infamous salute. João went into the bar
and saw Rui. His skin had darkened and his nose was no longer fine (it looked
as though it had been broken), but João knew it was Rui because he brought back
the pain in João’s stomach.
He was talking, drawing people in from the corners of the room. “All I am
saying is that a man who owns ten thousand hectares or more and dines on six
courses twice a day is living a life of excess. Doesn’t the Public Man himself
tell us we must restrain our desires?” Rui wore a checked shirt, a frayed
jacket, and his hair dangerously long: It came to within an inch of his collar.
“Nobody can contradict Salazar.”
“But you speak like a … a …” The man sitting opposite Rui dropped his
voice. “A Communist.”
“‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’ That’s
what they say.” Rui waved his hand. “Whoever heard such nonsense? Why
should a man work according to his ability? Why should a man receive according
to his needs? Imagine what would happen if people took this nonsense into their
heads! Álvaro Cunhal” – he let the name of the Communist Party leader hang for
a while – “must rot in his cell forever.”
João knew what Rui was doing. He could see by the way the others shifted and
glanced around that they knew too.
“We are with the other side,” said Rui. He looked up and saw João, and
something passed across his face. “Blackshirts and greenshirts stick together.”
“Excuse me,” said a little vole of a man sitting by the window, “but do you
accuse Salazar of fascism?”
“Accuse?” said Rui. “I certainly accuse him of nothing. In 1945, when he
decreed all flags to fly at half mast as a sign of respect for our dear
departed Hitler, I saluted him. We supported the Germans, so of course it was a
sad day for us all.”
“But no,” cried the little man with his lips aquiver, “we weren’t with anybody.”
“Oh,” said Rui, stroking his nose, “I forget. But nevertheless, I am sad when I
am told to be sad.”
It was 1951, the third year João passed in Lindoso with his sister, her
husband, their four children, and the husband’s brother, mother, and aunt in a
long low house with three doors and one window. In the season he cut cork, and
when the season was over, he did whatever he could. Over the years he had been
a grape picker, an olive picker, a goatherd; a tanner of hides in Olhão, a
laborer on the roads in Ourique, and a gutter of fish in Portimão.
He tried to warn Rui. “There are spies,” he said. “Informers. That little man
with the shrunken head, how does he make his living? Nobody knows.”
Rui shrugged. He felt his nose, pinching down from the bridge to the tip. He
could never get used to his nose. “The PIDE pays him, I am sure. These secret
police are not so secret.”
“Please,” said João. “Be careful.”
Rui cast his line again into the dark waters of the Mira. “Nobody speaks more
highly of Salazar than me.”
He had been in France after the War, with all the other illegals, working the
construction sites. He learned to read and write. “Liberté, egalité,
ڰٱԾé,” he said. “In France,” he said, “a man has rights. He has
dignity. He has respect.”
“He has freedom,” said João. He sat down on the riverbank.
Rui sat next to him. In the cafés and bars, you could not talk freely. Out here
there was privacy.
João could hear Rui breathing. He could hear his heart beating, or perhaps that
was his own heart, banging in its cage. He looked in Rui’s face, and for a long
moment they held each other’s gaze. Rui looked away, as he always did.
“For the love of God,” said João.
“Tell me about Portimão,” said Rui.
In the months since they found each other in the Rua Fortunato Simões Dos
Santos, João had told it many times. Rui wanted to know everything about the
sardine-processing factory. The worker who read out articles from
Avante! – who had snitched on him? What, exactly, did he look like?
Was João sure he did not come from Aljustrel, because he sounded like a Comrade
that Rui had met there. He wanted to know as well: Did the men respond? Were
they interested in joining the Party? Did they see that the means of production
should be owned by the people? Did they understand about surplus value?
João did not like to think about the factory. Rui kept making him describe the
workers’ barracks. The smell there was, if anything, worse than in the main
building. The floor was a permanent slime: the result of loose tiles, faulty
drains, blocked souls.
“There’s nothing more to tell,” said João. What would happen if he put his hand
on Rui’s cheek? Just to think about it made him tremble.
“The barracks,” said Rui, “did it bring men closer, living together like that?”
“No,” said João harshly. He thought about the men he had known there who came
to his bunk at night, who had wives waiting at home, children to be fed.
“All right,” said Rui. “Let’s be quiet, then. We are not afraid of silence.”
They looked down at the Mira, the never-ending pilgrimage of water, moving
blindly, relentlessly on. A rowboat went by. Rui touched his hat.
João turned his head to Rui. Rui would not look at him. João kept waiting, out
of spite. If he put his hand between Rui’s legs, if he led him up a dark alley
and turned around, if he took him into the woods and dropped to his knees and
kept his eyes down – these things Rui would accept. João wasn’t having it. His
desire was so strong it felt like hate.
“Salazar,” said Rui, who was, after all, afraid of silence, “has not told a
single truth from the day he was born. If he tells you that the sun will rise
in the east, you know it will rise in the west. But we keep pretending to
believe his lies. That’s the problem with our people. If you pretend for long
enough, you forget you were only pretending in the first place. The illusion
becomes a kind of reality.” He looked underneath his jacket where he had thrown
it down and found the tin of bait and then began to wind in his line. “It’s
like me. I didn’t start coming to the river to fish, but now I think I’m a
fisherman.”
“Why did you come, then?” said João, wanting to hear it.
“I’ll tell you something,” said Rui, finally letting his eyes meet João’s. It
was safe now that he was standing. “Salazar has told so many lies that his
tongue has begun to rot. Really, it is what I heard. That’s why he likes to
hide away. Yes, my friend, it is true. This is true: Salazar’s tongue is black.”
Not long after, they took him far away, to Porto. Within a day or two it was
known over the town that the address of the PIDE headquarters in Porto was 329
Rua do Heroismo. It was said that the back door connected with a cemetery.
João’s nephew, who was in the Portuguese Youth, drilling every Wednesday and
Saturday afternoon with a wooden gun, said, “Will they nail his wee-wee to the
wall?”
“Get out,” said João. “Is that what they teach you? Get out.”
Everybody knew the stories. They beat a pregnant woman on the belly. They
burned a man’s hands and threw him out of the top-floor window. They made
prisoners do “the statue,” standing by a wall for ten days at a time with only
their fingertips touching it. Everybody knew the stories. The children seemed
to know them first.
João was getting a cramp. He needed to stand up. He pushed Rui’s hip gently to
roll him off. The bone was sharp beneath his hand. He slid his palm up beneath
the undershirt and felt the stomach, the ribs, the looseness of the skin like a
newborn calf’s. The scent of eucalyptus anointed the day as the heat rose up
from the ground. Somewhere a dog began to moan. The cork trees kept their
counsel. It was two hundred years old, the tree that Rui had chosen.
Eighty-four years was barely a beginning.
João went over to the large stone and picked up the hat. The felt was warm
between his fingers. He sat down on the stone and put the hat on his head.
Where were the tears? Why didn’t they come?
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Alentejo Blue
by Monica Ali
Copyright © 2006 by Monica Ali.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Scribner
Copyright © 2006
Monica Ali
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-7432-9303-7
