I WOULD SAY I WAS STUDYING at Andrea’s and, after buying chocolate on Rua do Brasil, took the route to the shipwright’s factory where Miguel worked. The factory was in an area of the Largo de Camilo Pessanha which was now dangerous, but the only people I saw after school were the old women selling black-market kerosene on the street. His office was up a narrow concrete staircase. Although he had not finished school, he loved to read and there were many books scattered about this small room, along with maps of the world and a few sepia photographs of the Azores which he would seek out in his spare time at the old bookshop in the Rua de Duarte Lopes…His parents, peasants from the Azores, who had dreamed of a better life, were so proud of the son who was now a foreman in the factory which sustained them. But this pride was also the source of Miguel’s resentment…His hero was Amílcar Cabral and he had aspirations to study agronomy. He boasted that he wanted to change lives by taking new farming practices to the poor in Africa, in India. The way he talked of these places, it seemed they were distant – rather than an extension of the very earth on which we stood – but I did not say so for fear of treading on his dreams. Some days, I’d find him cheerful when I arrived; on others, pensive – because something had gone wrong at the factory and the boss had had stern words with him about the workers whom Miguel regarded as his comrades…Or perhaps he was morose because he had had an argument that morning with his father – they were both communists and atheists and very much alike, but quarrelled all the time. Yet when his mood lifted, he would say something affectionate, about how his father would monitor the Journal de Angola for progress of Salazar’s illness, or how much they both liked to eat kitetas though the smell of shellfish drove his mother wild – she prepared them out of devotion to them both. Some days he would be so overworked that I would arrive to find him asleep on the old sofa. I would hesitate to wake him…His face, which I had not thought so at first, grew more handsome the more I looked at it; each time I saw it, it was like coming upon a sight in nature that, existing beneath one’s ordinary awareness, suddenly reveals all sorts of unspoken truths, an epiphany…Awake, this face was full of sadness, a saudade – a lostness, a feeling of not having a place in the world. He was very young when his parents had, full of hope and expectation, left Portugal and come to Angola, yet now they did not know how to return to a life they had forgotten, to farms that had been abandoned or long since lain fallow…I would press him to tell me what it was like on the island. Red of the poppies in April, he would say, and the sight of the volcano breathing in the distance but as for the rest, he could barely remember…I enjoyed kissing each part of him separately. And because of all his preparatory kisses I got impatient for him to do something momentous, but he would draw back at this moment and say it was better we waited. Waited for what, I wondered? He played the guitar like a troubadour from Coimbra and also sang English popular songs; Paul McCartney was a favourite although I contended that it was Lennon who was the real genius. He would open the window and let in the wind off the Atlantic and both this and his voice were a balm. His touch was so tender. Later when I lay on my own small bed at home, I would replay the feeling of his touch in the darkness and this was a vicariousness too. I wondered did he know how to touch me so well because he had touched other women in the same way? I wondered how many girls he had already had, but dared not ask. He knew I was a virgin. Despite his exhortations that we wait, the first time happened unexpectedly and without ceremony. I did not know what I should say. I confessed that it hurt, and cried. He held me, got up and smoked a joint and then played his guitar a little. Then somehow we managed to make love again and I thought, so this is what it is, a sort of closeness but also a being apart: now together, now alone, and also this, being a man, being a woman, forever divided…To improve his English, Miguel was reading Heart of Darkness, and he would try out certain phrases on me: ‘I flew like mad to get ready, and before forty-eight hours I was crossing the Channel to show myself to my employers, and sign the contract…’ Did I know Conrad was writing in a second language and that his real name was Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski? Or that the poet Arthur Rimbaud was a mercenary who had come to Africa and got into the illegal arms trade? I did not know, I told him, for we were still studying Camões at school…Then he shook his head and said how young I was, although the gap was not that great; of course he said it to rile me. Once I opened my Camões and read aloud: ‘Love is a fire that burns unseen, a wound that aches yet isn’t felt…a longing for nothing but to long, a loneliness in the midst of people, a never feeling pleased when pleased, a passion that gains when lost in thought…’, and he snapped it shut and threw the book on the floor. I loved kissing him and could have done only this but soon became emboldened directing his mouth from my mouth to my breasts and then between my legs. Sometimes he would extinguish himself on me and we would simply lie there, spent. I would have to be careful not to fall asleep but often enough this happened, so he’d drop me home on his scooter. My arms sheathed in the warm fleece of his leather jacket, I’d glimpse the smattering of stars amidst the smog…My mother was often already in bed when I got home, reading old National Geographics. She would get up to ask me if I had eaten. As if by habit, she passed me and reached into the pantry for an Alka-Seltzer. Andrea might call. I said nothing of Miguel, although it was as though he was standing there, an invisible presence between us; and I felt my silence, more than any words, to have been the ultimate betrayal. Conversation inevitably turned to our history papers which were due imminently. Our teacher, a young man from Mozambique who was openly a communist, had said history was written from the perspective of the victors, but there were many other, hidden sides…If we looked closely enough, could we not see? Andrea suggested we study at her house together, but the one time I went there, I was unable to concentrate. There was the window, overlooking the manicured garden; the Mercedes, polished and shiny below; the Steinway piano in one corner of the room; the privilege which now made me so uneasy. Andrea was taking copious notes on her chosen topic – the Lisbon Earthquake – and all I could imagine was trembling as Miguel’s hands made contact with my body. The topic I had chosen to write on was an alternative biography of Vasco da Gama and, not knowing where to begin, I had made a column of the navigational feats of da Gama’s life culminating in the discovery of the trade route to India; in another column I made an inventory of all the spoils that had resulted from da Gama’s first and second voyages – cinnamon, cloves, peppercorns, gold, and, of course, slaves. Then, in another column all the acts of terror and brutality which da Gama meted out to the Muslim pilgrims and traders whom he met with in the Arabian Sea and upon arrival on the coast to the Hindus of Calicut – massacring and burning people alive, cutting off their lips, ears, noses and hands. How ironic, I noted, that this man, who as a small child had wandered among the fisher-folk of Sines, should become Viceroy of India and die in Cochin, another small fishing village, from the bite of an infected mosquito…I was just reading this line aloud to Andrea when Paulo came to the door. I knew that he had had a bitter political argument with Miguel, who had called him a colonial sympathiser and a spoilt petit bourgeois, and now I felt suddenly riven, although I could not have said to what ideology, or whose, I owed my allegiance…One afternoon when I arrived at the factory, Miguel was in a particularly melancholy mood. Amílcar Cabral had been assassinated and the MPLA broadcasts from Brazzaville told of the PIDE’s involvement. I asked about the factory, which had run into problems. He said he did not want to talk about it. The factory was to close, he said; the owner had decided to cut his losses and relocate to Lisbon. Now how would he support his parents? By becoming a soldier? He would rather be a mercenary. The family may have to go to Brazil, for there was no farm now to return to in the Azores… He then spoke of karma and fate and said perhaps there were such forces in the world. He said not to get too attached, that nothing could go on forever…I thought I loved him but suddenly realised that this kind of love was a feeling that could pass, perhaps not without pain; that around it there were many lesser and greater worlds, none of them necessarily coincident with the other…I had thought my happiness depended on Miguel, but suddenly saw, with epiphanic clarity, that this was not so. Noise from the street rose up and entered the room: a man shouting ‘Elizabeta’, then the engine of a scooter. I looked up through the open window and caught sight of the shadows of a couple dancing the umbigada with each other, she swaying her hips and encircling him, he clapping to keep the tempo. We lay down and made love. I was suddenly exhausted and soon fell asleep. I dreamt outlandish things, of ships passing through the Arabian Sea, ships heavily laden with stolen and seized treasure, capsizing and spilling their stores of spices and silks and gold. I dreamt of the Lisbon Earthquake, the water bursting the banks of the Tagus and Andrea’s Steinway falling through broken flooded floors. When I woke, I told Miguel. He said that I had a vivid imagination and should become a writer. I said that I preferred to live in the world, rather than in words on a page. I preferred to be intimate with things, whereas it seemed a writer had always to be apart, sequestered, even hidden from it, to observe the world so closely. He seemed hurt. How easy it was, I thought, to be close to someone and yet feel out of joint with them and the world…Each time I saw him after that, he was more restless. He kept a set of keys to important parts of the factory on a thick steel chain and often took up these keys from wherever they were, on his desk or hanging from a hook behind the door, and jangled them. One day I arrived and he closed up and we went for a walk around the streets of the Largo do Poeta Bocage: Rua de Antero de Quental, Rua de Almeida Garret and Rua de Fernando Pessoa. At a street stall, we stopped and ate kifula. It was then he told me that he was going to Lisbon. He had not told his parents. Eventually Salazar would fall, and he wanted to be there for that; at the first opportunity he would take the entrance exams to enter the University of Lisbon…In the meantime, he would find work on his aunt’s farm in the Alentejo. Perhaps I would follow him there? I nodded but in reality could not see myself in Lisbon or the Alentejo or even in the misty Azores. I could not picture myself leaving and starting my sentences on a maudlin note, with a heavy-hearted intonation and the phrase, ‘during my time in Africa’. I wanted to cry; I wanted to be stoic and indifferent. A gulf opened up between us, Miguel on one side and me on the other, and it felt vast and deep and unfathomable. We walked back in silence and, when we approached the factory, he asked me if I could come the following day. I did not know if these words made him or me more vulnerable; yet when I saw him with his defences down I was admittedly not moved to comfort him but to beat a hasty retreat. Outside I walked quickly past the women selling kerosene. Some workers were carting packages of cement mix and squatters’ children were playing with the split bags that had been abandoned on the jetties. I went to the beach. I liked watching the boys playing football there but they had not come because of the recent police raids. I sat on the rough-hewn stones of the esplanade, devouring a chocolate bar square by square. I stared at the sea. The tide was coming in; a barge was moving along laboriously, its foghorn droning. A child ran with a kite, its elongated shadow flickering on the sand, but hardly did it lift and mount the air before it fell and the string had to be rewound. Insects swarmed around the huge globes of the streetlamps. Two figures, one a man wearing a white suit and a bow tie, the other a woman wearing stilettos, passed me on the esplanade. With each step she wavered like she was high and about to fall. I still had Miguel’s jacket on; he had given it to me weeks before and now I took it off, folded it up and left it behind on the old stone parapet. Andrea called when I got home. She had finished her assignment and spoke of her new crush, our history teacher…I was world-weary, my view of love jaundiced, but I maintained my discretion and kept the secret of my own injured pride. I just listened, tears streaming down my face, murmuring some words I’d heard but did not believe, not to get too attached, and nothing goes on forever…