like the sound of a stream that has broken its banks. I hear it as an invitation to dance, to dance on the ruins, so I push back my chair, and with my arms held up like a ballroom dancing partner, I take a step towards where I think she is. The embassy employees look up, mouths open. I sit down. When the general talk resumes, I whisper:
So where do I see you next?
On the aqueduct. The Águas Livres aqueduct.
It’s very long, fourteen kilometres, I think.
Where it crosses the Alcântara valley. The arches are sixty metres high at that point. From up there you can almost see America! I’ll be waiting for you by the sixteenth arch.
The sixteenth counting which way?
What do you think? From the Mãe d’Agua. I’ll meet you there on Tuesday morning.
Not before?
We all have one day in the week that wishes us well.
Which was mine?
It was Tuesday. You will probably die on a Tuesday.
And yours?
Friday. You didn’t notice? I must say, I thought you would have noticed.
You weren’t there that often.
Far more often than you believed. I wasn’t there all the time, which is what you wanted. I wasn’t there for ever.
Maybe you did seem happier on Fridays, I say.
Not so much a question of being happy, more a question of knowing I was a bit more protected and therefore freer.
When did you discover Friday was your day?
When I was ten; I noticed that if I sang on a Friday I had perfect pitch. Invariably.
Is Friday still your day?
No. Now my day is Tuesday because I’m here for you.
She laughs yet again. An anticipatory laugh. As if she sees the two of us approaching a big joke.
Lisboa is a city of endurance, unanswerable questions and pet names. The Águas Livres aqueduct was completed in 1748. It survived, perfectly intact, the earthquake that destroyed the centre of the city seven years later. When the army engineers planned the aqueduct’s course, did they try to avoid the geological fault-lines? Otherwise its exemption remains a mystery. Later, many subsidiary aqueducts were completed and added in order to augment the water supply flowing along the Águas Livres. In reality, the water – as sceptics had warned from the beginning – was never enough for the city.
In the nineteenth century the aqueduct was known as the Passeio dos Arcos, the Road of Arches, because people from the villages in the west walking to the city to sell their produce or their labour, used it as a short cut. They no longer needed to go down into the Alcântara valley, cross the water and climb up; they could just walk one kilometre across the sky. It is said that this is why they gave pet names to the thirty-odd arches of the Alcântara, names like Lia, Adila, Carolina, Sandra, Iracena. And to the great pointed arch in the middle, which is still the highest stone arch in the world, they gave the name of Maira.
The first modern proposal to bring water to the city by an aqueduct – the Romans had tried it before – was prompted, not so much by a concern about hygiene or the population’s chronic lack of drinking water, as by the authorities’ fear of fire. Every year, in district after district of the city, fires were destroying property.
When the aqueduct was finished the Marquês and bankers arranged to have their own private aqueducts siphoning off the great one. Meanwhile the poor, with no water where they lived, remained at the mercy of the public fountains which, when there was a drought, went dry. Or else they had to buy water from the water-seller at a price they could not afford. This was what the Águas Livres, the so-called Free Water, turned out to be.
Do you always want everything? Her voice interrupts me as I think.
I remember her peeling and slicing cooked beetroots, hands holding the beet, the stubby knife, her stained fingers and the shiny purple crimson of the slices, the intensity of whose colour somehow matched the intensity of her insistence on the immediate and the day-to-day. As soon as I started enquiring