Azulejos: Part 3

In part 3/3, Olinda discovers something that changes everything.

She saw them hugging, these two men, in her living room. Olinda laughed at what her mother would think of the spectacle. She’d likely have chased them out, Rosaries swinging, throwing a bible at them, cleansing the apartment with holy water procured from the church that she used to keep bottled in the curio that once stood at the far end of the dining nook.

Her father — the government had called him a traitor after all — would probably have applauded at the audacity of it all.

Olinda, however, just felt bad.

But the ghosts that haunted her, that haunted this place, needed to be purged. She couldn’t shake her mother’s insistence on religious upbringing, and the notion of some Purgatory where sins were cleansed before gaining access to Paradise.

Perhaps rather than believing it, Olinda was using it all as an easy out, a justification to do the unthinkable once these men left.

Her heavy thuds announced her arrival, her catlike agility long gone. They detached from each other and one wiped his eyes while they turned to look at her, the one with the pale skin and hair, the one who probably had no Portuguese blood. 

“Well, thanks so much for allowing us to visit this place. Seriously, it’s a real keeper,” the chattier one said. His dark features seemed to lighten a little with the bad news, as if drained of his vigor.

“Yeah, if you ever change your mind, or whatever, please, feel free to let us know,” the one who liked the Port too much said, handing her a small card with names and numbers on it.

Olinda was touched.

But it was time. She already forgot what she did with the match she was holding earlier, and there were only two left.

“Thank you, boys. Now please enjoy the rest of your time in Lisbon,” she said.

“Thank you,” the desperate one said.

“Wait, I left my phone on the counter with the Port,” the pale one said.

“Take the whole bottle if you want,” she said. “I won’t need it.”

The first one, Isaac, looked at her funnily, eyebrows raised.

“Don’t really take it,” he said, chasing after Robbie. Olinda smiled.

But then she heard a commotion, a crash, and the expletives began streaming.

“What the actual fuck did you do that for?” Robbie said.

“I didn’t mean to, I just —” Isaac said.

Olinda shuffled down the little corridor to the kitchen where they were cleaning up bits of glass from the ground. It hardly bothered her, all things considered.

“Just leave it, dears,” she said.

“I was trying to put them in the sink for you —” Isaac said.

“And he bumped into me and —” Robbie said. He was patting the wallpaper against the wall where he had rubbed up against it, pulling it away, the glue tired after years and years of keeping it all in place.

Olinda looked closer and brought her hands to her mouth.

She forgot all about them.

The pristine corner of a green painted a​​zulejo was poking through the torn wallpaper. She remembered the blue tiles on the facade outside, stolen over time, or crumbled and trampled underfoot. But inside, she had totally forgotten how her father had tiled so many spaces here as well. Olinda reached for the paper and tugged on it, hard. Weakened by age as she was, a newfound determination gave her strength as the paper tore loose. Robbie helped her as she uncovered a set of tiles at waist level.

“Well that’s a surprise,” he said.

“I can’t believe they are still here,” she said. Olinda paused a moment, the smells and sounds and flavors of past years rushed through her mind. Her muscle memory took over and she traced the wall to a light switch and began tearing at the paper there.

She found it.

There was the one tile that, if you looked hard enough, was affixed upside down, only slightly different from the others, and not far from the switch. They did it on purpose when her father was attaching the tiles. He said he’d always be in this house with her this way, and that a little piece of both of them would always be there, together, forever.

Somewhere, another tile was misplaced, his sister joining in on the fun while their mother was out of the house, unable to supervise. Or criticize.

“Peel it off. All of it,” she said. She felt her heart racing and her face beaming with excitement as the two men carefully removed the dirty, worn paper, stained with cooking grease and laced with the smells of hundreds of meals and salted cod dishes prepared over the decades.

By the time they were done and the dust began to settle, they had revealed entire walls of the kitchen covered in bright green tiles, the azulejos, vibrant as they day her father put them up, with more tiles in all colors decorating other select spots of the house. They sparkled like whitecaps on the ocean under a summer sun. It was the house she remembered, that maybe she forgot, but that she had always been a part of, and vice versa. It all rushed back to her. 

The moments of happiness.

The crumbs of evening cake scattered on the floor.

Her sister’s laugh as her father tickled her.

The way he smelled like sawdust and olive oil soap.

The hope in his eyes.

The singing in the streets when the dictatorship ended.

Her mother moving to a convent when Olinda and her sister flew to America.

The creamy pastel de nata she bought once a year, on the day he died, from that bakery in California that never tasted as good as the ones from the pasteleria down the street from this house.

She traced the pattern on the tiles, shades of seafoam, olive, and emerald greens mingling and dancing together playfully.

Her family wasn’t as dead as she thought.

An hour later, exhausted by the efforts, Olinda was sitting in the creaky chair again, the box of matches on the little table next to her, a now empty bottle of Port next to it. The two men pulled in two stools from the kitchen and sat facing her. Little bits of dust still swam through the streaks of late day sun.

She motioned to the gasoline can on the floor.

“Can you take that outside, please? It stinks to the high heavens,” she said. Robbie obeyed the orders and disappeared with it.

“And you,” she said, looking at Isaac, “don’t you dare let that one do anything too modern in here, do you hear me? No fuzzy lamps or sculptures of penises, OK?”

He leaned in, as if making sure he heard her correctly, an empty glass of Port in his hand, and nearly fell off his seat.

“So, wait. Really?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. Smiling. “Now what were you saying earlier about a fair price? Because you need some money left over to retile the facade of this place. Those azulejos aren’t cheap.”