Skylight Page 9

  Abel went into his room and made himself comfortable. He pulled on some old trousers, replaced his shoes with slippers and took off his jacket. He opened the suitcase where he kept his books, chose one, which he placed on the bed, and prepared to get down to work. No one else would call it work, but that’s how Abel thought of it. He had before him the second volume of a French translation of The Brothers Karamazov, which he was rereading in order to clarify his thoughts after having read it for the first time. Before sitting down, he looked in vain for his cigarettes. He had smoked them all and forgotten to buy more. He left the room, quite prepared to get wet again rather than be left with nothing to smoke. As he passed the dining room door, he heard Silvestre ask:

  “Going out again, Senhor Abel?”

  Abel smiled and said:

  “Yes, I’ve run out of cigarettes, so I’m just going down to the local bar to see if they have any.”

  “I’ve got some here. I don’t know if it’s to your taste, though, it’s shag tobacco.”

  “Oh, that’s fine by me. I’ll smoke anything.”

  “Help yourself!” said Silvestre, offering him the tobacco pouch and the packet of cigarette papers.

  In doing so, he revealed the checkerboard he had kept hidden until then. Abel glanced at Silvestre and caught a look of anguished embarrassment in his eyes. Beneath Silvestre’s critical gaze, he quickly rolled himself a cigarette and lit it. Out of pride now, Silvestre was trying to conceal the checkerboard with his body. Abel noticed that the glass fruit bowl, which usually stood in the center of the table, had been pushed to one side and that opposite Silvestre stood an empty chair. The chair, he realized, was intended for him. He murmured:

  “Do you know, I fancy a game of checkers. What about you, Senhor Silvestre?”

  Silvestre felt a slight tingling in the tip of his nose, a sure sign of excitement. Without quite knowing why, he felt that he and Abel had, at that moment, become very good friends. He said:

  “I was just about to say the same thing.”

  Abel went back to his room, put away his book and returned to the dining room.

  Silvestre had already set out the pieces, placed the ashtray where Abel could reach it and had moved the table slightly so that the ceiling light wouldn’t cast any shadows on the board.

  They started playing. Silvestre was radiant. Abel, although less demonstrative, reflected Silvestre’s contentment and continued to observe him intently.

  Mariana finished her work and went to bed. The two men stayed on. At around midnight, after a particularly disastrous game for Abel, he declared:

  “That’s enough for tonight! You play much better than I do, I’ve learned that much!”

  Silvestre looked slightly disappointed, but no more than that. They had been playing for quite a while and it would, he agreed, be best to stop. Abel picked up the tobacco, rolled another cigarette and, looking around the room, asked:

  “Have you lived here long, Senhor Silvestre?”

  “A good twenty years. I’m the oldest tenant.”

  “And you obviously know the other tenants.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Decent people?”

  “Some good, some bad. Well, it’s the same the world over, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Abel began absent-mindedly piling up the checkers, alternating white and black pieces. Then he knocked the pile over and asked:

  “And the man next door, I assume, isn’t one of the better ones.”

  “Oh, he’s all right, just rather silent, and I don’t usually like silent men, but he’s not a bad sort. She’s a real viper, though, and Spanish to boot.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  Silvestre regretted the sneering way in which he had said the word “Spanish”:

  “I didn’t mean it like that, but you know what they say: ‘From Spain expect only cold winds and cold wives.’”

  “Ah, so you don’t think they get on, then?”

  “I know they don’t. You hardly hear a peep out of him, but she’s got a voice on her like a foghorn—I mean, she talks really loudly.”

  Abel smiled at Silvestre’s embarrassment and at his careful choice of vocabulary.

  “What about the others?”

  “Well, I don’t understand the couple who live on the first floor left at all. He works for the local newspaper and is a real bastard. I’m sorry, but he is. She, poor thing, has looked as if she was at death’s door for as long as I’ve known her. She gets thinner by the day.”

  “Is she ill?”

  “She’s diabetic, at least that’s what she told Mariana. But unless I’m very much mistaken, I reckon she’s got TB. Their daughter died of meningitis, and after that, the mother aged about thirty years. As far as I can see, they’re a very unhappy pair. She certainly is . . . And as for him, like I said, he’s a real brute of a man. I mend his shoes because I have a living to make, but if I had my way . . .”

  “And next door to them?”

  Silvestre smiled mischievously: he thought that his lodger’s interest in the other neighbors was really an excuse to find out more about their upstairs neighbor, and so he was quite put out when he heard Abel add:

  “Well, I know about her, of course. What about the top floor?”

  This, Silvestre thought, was taking curiosity too far, and yet, although Abel kept asking questions, he didn’t really seem that interested.

  “On the top floor right lives a man I really can’t abide. You could turn him upside down and shake him and you wouldn’t get a penny out of him, but anyone looking at him would take him for a . . . for a capitalist.”

  “You don’t seem to like capitalists,” said Abel, smiling.

  Distrust suddenly made Silvestre take a mental step back. He said very slowly:

  “I don’t like or dislike them really. It was just a manner of speaking.”

  Abel appeared not to hear.

  “And the rest of the family?”

  “The wife’s a fool, it’s always ‘my Anselmo this’ and ‘my Anselmo that’ . . . And the daughter, well, it’s as clear as day that she’s going to give her parents a fair few headaches later on. Especially since they absolutely dote on her.”

  “How old is she?”

  “She must be about twenty now. We know her as Claudinha. And let’s hope I’m wrong.”

  “And on the other side?”

  “On the other side live four very respectable ladies. I think they had money once, but have fallen on hard times. They’re educated folk. They don’t stand on the landing gossiping, and that’s quite something here. They keep themselves to themselves.”

  Abel was now amusing himself arranging the pieces into a square. When Silvestre fell silent, Abel looked up expectantly, but Silvestre didn’t feel like saying anything more. It seemed to him there was some other motive behind his lodger’s questions and, although he had said nothing compromising, he regretted having talked so much. He remembered his initial suspicions and cursed his own gullibility. Abel’s remark about him not liking capitalists bristled with potential booby traps.

  The silence between them made Silvestre feel uncomfortable, which bothered him, especially since Abel seemed perfectly at ease. He had lined up the pieces along the length of the table now, like steppingstones in a river. This childish game irritated Silvestre. When the silence became unbearable, Abel gathered the pieces together with exasperating care and then, out of the blue, asked:

  “Why didn’t you follow up my references, Senhor Silvestre?”

  The question dovetailed so well with Silvestre’s own thoughts that he sat stunned for a few seconds, not knowing what to say. The only way he could think of to gain time was to take two glasses and a bottle from a cupboard and say:

  “Do you like cherry brandy?”

  “I do.”

  “With a cherry or without?”

  “With.”

  He filled their glasses while he was pondering what to say, b
ut became so absorbed in getting the cherries out of the jar that, by the time he’d done so, he still hadn’t come up with an answer. Abel sniffed his drink and said innocently:

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “Ah, yes, your question!” Silvestre’s discomfort was obvious. “I didn’t follow them up because . . . because at the time I didn’t think it was necessary.”

  He said this in such a way that any attentive listener would understand that he now had his doubts. Abel understood.

  “And do you still think that?”

  Feeling cornered, Silvestre tried to go on the attack:

  “You’re a bit of a mind reader, aren’t you, Senhor Abel?”

  “No, I’m simply in the habit of listening to what people say and how they say it. It’s not hard. Anyway, do you or do you not distrust me?”

  “Why would I distrust you?”

  “That’s what I’m hoping to find out. I gave you the chance to check up on me, and you chose not to . . .” He took a sip of his drink, smacked his lips and, with his smiling eyes fixed on Silvestre, asked: “Or would you prefer me to tell you?”

  Silvestre, his curiosity aroused, could not help leaning slightly forward in interested anticipation. Abel added:

  “Although, of course, who’s to say I’m not pulling the wool over your eyes?”

  Silvestre suddenly understood how a mouse must feel when caught between the paws of a cat. He had a strong desire to put the young man firmly in his place, but that desire quickly melted away and he didn’t know what to say. Abel, however, as if he hadn’t really expected an answer to either of his questions, went on:

  “I like you, Senhor Silvestre. I like your home and your wife and I feel very comfortable here. I may not stay long, but when I leave, I will take some very good memories with me. I noticed from the very first day that you, whom I already, if I may, consider to be my friend . . . Am I right to do that?”

  Silvestre, busy biting into his cherry, nodded.

  “Thank you,” said Abel. “I noticed a certain initial distrust, mainly in the way you looked at me. Whatever the reason for that distrust, I feel it’s only fair that I should tell you about myself. It’s true that, alongside that distrust, there was a touching warmth. I can still see that combination of warmth and distrust in your face . . .”

  Silvestre’s expression shifted from warmth to unalloyed distrust and back again, and Abel watched this putting on and taking off of masks with an amused smile.

  “And there they both are. When I’ve finished telling you my tale, I hope to see only warmth. So let’s get straight on with the story. May I take a little more of your tobacco?”

  Silvestre had now eaten his cherry, but did not feel it necessary to respond. He was slightly put out by the young man’s lack of ceremony and was afraid that, had he responded, he might have done so somewhat brusquely.

  “It’s rather a long story,” said Abel, having lit his cigarette, “but I’ll try and keep it short. It’s getting late and I don’t want to exhaust your patience. I’m twenty-eight now and have still not done my military service. I have no fixed profession, and you’ll soon see why. I’m single and unattached and know the dangers and advantages of freedom and solitude and am equally at home with both. I’ve been living like this for twelve years, since I was sixteen. My memories of childhood are of no interest here, partly because I’m not yet old enough to enjoy recounting them, but also because they would do nothing to contribute to either your distrust or your warmth. I was a good student at junior and senior school. I was well liked by both classmates and teachers, which is quite rare. There was, I can assure you, nothing calculated about this; I neither flattered my teachers nor kowtowed to my classmates. Anyway, I reached the age of sixteen, at which point I . . . Ah, but I haven’t yet told you that I was an only child and lived with my parents. You’re free to imagine what you like now: that they both died in some disaster or that they separated because they could no longer bear to live with each other. You choose. It comes down to the same thing anyway: I was left alone. If you choose the second option, you’ll say that I could have continued living with one of them. Imagine, then, that I didn’t want to live with either of them. Perhaps because I didn’t love them. Perhaps because I loved them both equally and couldn’t choose between them. Think what you like, because, as I say, it comes to the same thing: I was left alone. At sixteen—can you remember being sixteen?—life is a wonderful thing, at least for some people. I can see from your face that, for you, life at that age wasn’t wonderful at all. It was for me, unfortunately, and I say ‘unfortunately’ because it didn’t help me at all. I left school and looked for work. Some relatives in the country asked me to go and live with them. I refused. I had taken a bite out of the fruit of freedom and solitude and wasn’t prepared to let them take it away from me. I didn’t know at the time how very bitter that fruit can be sometimes. Am I boring you?”

  Silvestre folded his strong arms and said:

  “You know very well you’re not.”

  Abel smiled.

  “You’re right. Onward. For a sixteen-year-old boy who wants to set up on his own, but who knows nothing—and what I knew was as good as nothing—finding work isn’t easy, even if you’re not that choosy. And I wasn’t choosy. I just grabbed the first thing that came my way, which was an ad for an assistant in a cake shop. There were a lot of applicants, I found out later, but the owner chose me. I was lucky. Perhaps my clean suit and my good manners helped. I tested this theory out later on, when I tried to find another job. I turned up looking like a scruffy, badly brought-up kid, and as people say nowadays, enough said. They hardly looked at me. Anyway, my wages at the cake shop just about kept me from starving, and I had accumulated enough reserves from sixteen years of being well fed to survive. When those reserves were exhausted, the only thing I could do was fill up on my boss’s cakes. I can’t so much as look at a cake now without wanting to throw up. Could I have another cherry brandy?”

  Silvestre filled his glass. Abel took a sip and went on:

  “If I keep going into so much detail, we’ll be here all night. It’s past one o’clock already, and I’m only on my first job. I’ve had loads, which is what I meant when I said that I have no fixed profession. At the moment, I’m clerk of works on a building site over in Areeiro. Tomorrow, I don’t know what I’ll be. Unemployed possibly. It wouldn’t be the first time. I don’t know if you’ve ever been without work, without money or a place to live. I have. Once, it coincided with a medical inspection to see if I was fit enough to do my military service. I was in such a debilitated state that they rejected me outright. I was one of those men the nation did not want. I didn’t care, to be honest, although a couple of years of guaranteed bed and board does have its attractions. I managed to get a job shortly afterward, though. You’ll laugh when I tell you what it was. I was employed as a salesman, selling a marvelous tea that could cure all ills. Funny, don’t you think? You certainly would’ve found it funny if you’d heard me talking about it. I have never lied so much in my life, and I hadn’t realized how many people are prepared to believe lies. I traveled all over the country, selling my miraculous tea to whoever would believe me. I never felt guilty about it. The tea didn’t do any harm, I can assure you, and my words gave such hope to those who bought it that I reckon they might still owe me money, because hope is beyond price . . .”

  Silvestre nodded in agreement.

  “You agree, don’t you? Well, there you have it, there hardly seems any point in telling you much more about my life. I’ve been cold and starving. I’ve known excess and privation. I’ve eaten like a wolf who can’t be sure he’ll catch anything tomorrow and I’ve fasted as if determined to starve myself to death. And here I am. I’ve lived in every part of this city. I’ve slept in dormitories where you can count the fleas and the bedbugs in their millions. I’ve even set up ‘home’ with certain good ladies of whom there are hundreds in Lisbon. Apart from the cakes I stole from my
first employer, I’ve only ever stolen once, and that was in the Jardim da Estrela. I was hungry, and as someone who knows what hunger is, I can safely say that I had never been that hungry before. A pretty little girl came over to me. No, it’s not what you’re thinking. She was only about four years old at most. And if I describe her as pretty, that’s perhaps to make up for having robbed her. She was carrying a slice of bread and butter, almost uneaten. Her parents or her nursemaid must have been around somewhere, but I didn’t even think about that. She didn’t scream or cry, and a few moments later I was standing behind the church eating my bread and butter . . .”

  There was a glimmer of tears in Silvestre’s eyes.

  “And I’ve always paid my rent, so you don’t need to worry about that.”

  Silvestre shrugged. He wanted Abel to go on talking, because he liked listening to him and, more than that, he still didn’t know how to answer his question. There was something he wanted to ask, but he feared it might be too soon to do so. Abel preempted him:

  “This is only the second time I’ve told anyone this story. The first time was to a woman. I thought she would understand, but women never understand anything. I was wrong to tell her. She wanted to settle down and thought she could hold on to me. She was wrong about that. I don’t even know why I’ve told my story to you now. Perhaps because I like your face, perhaps because I haven’t spoken about it for some years and needed to get it off my chest. Or perhaps for some other reason. I don’t know . . .”

  “You told me so that I would stop distrusting you,” said Silvestre.

  “No, it wasn’t that. Plenty of people have distrusted me, but never heard my story. It was possibly the lateness of the hour, the game of checkers, the book I would be reading if I hadn’t joined you in here. Who can say? Whatever the reason, you now know all about my life.”

  Silvestre scratched his unruly head of hair with both hands. Then he filled his glass and drank it down all at once. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and asked:

  “Why do you live like this? And forgive me if I’m being indiscreet . . .”