“To lunch, of course,” Pessoa answered.
“But that’s what the sandwiches were for!”
The poet looked up from buttoning his coat, his eyebrows raised in disapproval. “For a Portuguese man, a sandwich is not a lunch,” he said with dignity, and walked down the theatre aisle after his countrymen.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MABEL: It’s true that he has gone astray.
THE AFTERNOON WAS somewhat truncated, since our pirates did not reappear until 3:00 and we had to be out of the Maria Vitoria at 6:00. In addition, they’d had a somewhat liquid luncheon – and moreover, had brought the alcoholic portion of the meal back with them, since at least four of them paused every so often to swallow from small bottles.
By five their boisterous shouts were rattling the lights, and Fflytte hastily cancelled the scheduled swordfight rehearsal. While I went through the cast with a box of sticking plasters, he threw up his hands and stormed out. La Rocha watched him go, looking amused, and one of the younger pirates took half a dozen steps in the director’s wake, mocking Fflytte’s pace. Which I had to admit was rather funny, the gait of an outraged child.
I glanced at Hale, who stood motionless, his eyes drilling into La Rocha. When the door banged shut behind Fflytte, the pirate king turned, still smiling, and saw the Englishman. The two locked gazes for a long minute before La Rocha’s fell, and he spoke a word that caused the hubbub to die.
“Be here at nine in the morning,” Hale said through clenched teeth. Pessoa automatically translated, causing a couple of the men to protest. La Rocha cut their complaints off with a sharp twitch of the hand.
Hale picked up his hat. As he went past my seat, midway down the aisle, he paused. “Have a word with Mr Pessoa,” he told me. “See that his friend understands that Fflytte Films is making a moving picture, not providing entertainment for amateur actors. We can find others willing to show up and work.”
“Why me?” I protested.
“Would you rather have the job of convincing Randolph that he shouldn’t pack up and go home?”
“Er, no.”
However, Pessoa had himself not stinted at lunch-time, and was distracted by the antics of the pirates, who had spilled over into the ropes and gangways above the stage and were trying to inflict concussions on their mates with the dangling sandbags.
“Mr Pessoa,” I began, making my voice sharp as a schoolmaster. He snapped to attention, as any public schoolboy would. “I need you to come to the hotel tonight at eight o’clock. I need you to be sober. And I need you to clear these men out before they damage something that Fflytte Films has to pay for.”
I watched them go, a few minutes later, herded by Samuel, following La Rocha. Pessoa made to stay, but I sent him off, too, hoping he had a long walk home to get rid of the wine in his veins. Then I hunted down a broom and did what I could to corral the spilt sand, happily turning the cleaning over to the man who came to open the theatre at six. He stared at the dangling ropes. They looked as if a herd of monkeys had got at them.
I made a mental note to learn the Portuguese for
* * *
I was waiting in the hotel lobby at eight that evening, my official Assistant’s Notebook in my lap. I was still waiting at 8:15. At 8:30, I gave up and went into the restaurant. At 8:40, Pessoa came in, although it took me a moment to recognise him.
He wore a monocle in place of the black owl spectacles. His hair was parted on the side and his maroon- coloured bow tie was dashing rather than snug, but beyond the details, it was his overall air that was so very different. Coming to the table, he gave a little click of the heels and a brief inclination of the head, the humorous gesture of a friend, not an employee, before dropping into the chair across from me. There he sat sprawled, an expansive set to his shoulders, with not the slightest sign of his normal prim attitude.
I leant forward to study the man’s features: Yes, there was the fleck in the right iris, the mild disturbance in the hair over his left brow, the nick from that morning’s razor. I sat back, breathing a sigh of relief: For a moment, I feared I’d strayed into the cliches of an unlikely detective story. As if William S. Gilbert were collaborating with Edgar A. Poe.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I need truth, and some aspirin.
Friday, 14 November, 11:30 p.m.
Avenida-Palace, Lisbon
Dear Holmes,
I have spent any number of odd evenings (generally in your company, come to think of it) but I’ve just had one of the oddest. Even after having it explained to me, I’m not at all certain I understand it.
This afternoon, our hired pirates turned up drunk from their lunch, and it was given to me to explain to the translator that it simply wouldn’t do. Since he, too, had of drink taken, I commanded him to dinner. When he showed up, I would initially have sworn that he and I had become characters in “The Case of the Substitute Twin.”
Now, it is true that I occasionally feel myself going translucent and fictional (again, often in your company.) However, the stories I occupy are not generally so lowbrow as to depend on the mechanism of twins. This being a new experience for me – what next, I could only wonder: white slavery? opium dens? – I pursued the anomaly with interest. What had caused our translator’s transformation from a quiet, unhealthy-looking, marginally shabby and humorously self-deprecating melancholic into an intense, ardent, witty gentleman-about-town? He wore the exact clothes he had earlier, but with panache rather than apology.
And although I’m not at all certain I grasp the details, it would appear that I have spent the evening within a poetical conceit.
I believe I mentioned previously that our translator, Mr Pessoa, is a poet – and according to him, not simply any poet, but the poet who will define his country to the world. It matters not that he is well into his fourth decade and few have heard of him. No: In his mind, Portugal is due to become the world’s leader in the modern era – in artistic and literary matters, if not political and economic – and Fernando Pessoa is due to take his place at its head. A Fifth Empire, less the apocalypse, ushered in by this narrow country on the edge of Europe – just as soon as he obtains government funding for his journal. And finds a publisher for his poetry. And finishes his detective story, and finds acceptance for his Arts Council, and … And he did not show any indication of being under the influence of drugs.
Holmes, I am awash in a sea of megalomaniacs.
In any event, I settled to dinner with this fellow who was both familiar and unknown: hair parting different, monocle in place of spectacles, wide gestures instead of controlled, a flamboyant vocabulary, a shift in accent. He even looked taller.
After some minutes of increasingly disorientating conversation, I had to ask. It turned out the man across from me was both Mr Pessoa, and another.
Modern poetry, in Pessoa’s eyes, is required to be outrageous and exaggerated. The modern poet, he believes, must do more than sit and write verse: He must become his poem, he must transform himself into a living stage. Only through lies is the truth known; only through pretence does one achieve revelation. The dramatis personae of Pessoa’s life are the embodiment of theatre, a solemn game, a celebration of the counterfeit. He calls
