The Answering Sea

The room at the east end of the palace was called, on no map she had ever been given, anything so plain as a room. It had a name in the old inventory books — a sea, she was told, painted in 1892 by a hand no one alive could name — and the sea had spent the last hundred years going the colour of weak tea.

She had come to Sintra to put it back.

The restoration was her contract, her only reason for the month: pigments, linseed, a steady wrist, and the patience of a woman who had learned, after Lisbon, after the apartment with its two beds and one of them hers, that the world did not owe her a continuation. She was good at putting back what had gone. It was the whole of her work now. The sea was going. So she climbed the scaffolding each morning, and by ten the light through the east window had begun to argue with the surface of the painted water, and she was on her knees with a sable brush and a drop of glaze, coaxing the old green-blue back into its old shape.

It was on the fourth morning that the fog came in at precisely the hour the man from the forest had promised it would.

"You said six," she said, not looking up. The fog had a voice of its own, sliding across the glass, and where it passed, the painted sea and the real one became the same object.

"I said between six and seven," said Rui, from the doorway with a tin of coffee and a face she had stopped finding handsome because she had decided to find it irritating. "The forest keeps its own hour. You restore your sea, I keep my mountain. Neither of us is negotiating."

He was the warden of Sintra-Cascais, which is to say he owned the weather of the hill behind the palace, and the paths that went up into it, and the two thousand species the forest kept. He had appeared at her site on day two with a clipboard and a comment about her scaffolding, and had not stopped appearing since. He knew which tide-tablet the palace hung out of season. He knew the name of the mushroom that grew under the eastern wall and ate the mortar. He knew when the fog would come, and when the mist would lift, and he said these things with the flat, unbothered accuracy of a man describing his own pulse.

She had decided to find him irritating, and then to find him interesting, and then — which was the trouble, and which she would not examine before the scaffolding was down — to find that when he said the fog comes at six, the fog came at six, and the painted sea under her brush answered him, and she was left on her knees in a room full of other people's ghosts, wanting.

"Your sea," he said, that morning, setting the tin of coffee at the foot of the scaffold. Below them, through the glass, the real sea had already gone. "It's a good sea. Better than most of the rest of the palace, which is mostly furniture."

"I've put back the water. I haven't put back the sky."

"Put back the sky tomorrow. It's not going anywhere. Nothing's going anywhere today." He leaned on the doorframe with the easy weight of a man who had nowhere in particular to be. "The Penha is going to be a wall of it all day. The paths are closed. The palace is closed. You're stuck, and so am I, and the mountain is going to sit on top of everything like it owns the furniture."

He was, she admitted to no one, almost exactly right.

The day closed the way the forest closed: slowly, and all at once. By two o'clock the palace had lost its edges. The restoration stopped; there is no painting in a world without a horizon. She sat down on the scaffold with her coffee and her aching lower back, and Rui sat down on the floor below with his clipboard, and they were, for the first time in four days, simply two people in a closed room, with the glass between them and the weather doing what the weather does.

"You're afraid of it," he said. It was not a question.

"Of the fog?"

"Of being the thing that stays." He looked up at her the way he looked at a weather sign — reading. "Lisbon had you for six years. The palace has had you for four. The sea in this room had you before either of them, and you've been putting it back for a month. People don't do that with what they mean to keep. You do it with what you're leaving."

She held the coffee and let it be quiet. The fog pressed on the glass with the patience of a hand. Somewhere in the mountain, a path she had not yet walked closed for the season.

"When I was small," she said, "my grandmother had a rule. The fog means the forest is dreaming. You don't walk in a dream. You wait for it to wake." She looked at him. "I've been waiting for it to wake. For a very long time. And then one morning it simply did, and I walked in, and now I'm standing here and I don't know which of us is the dream."

Below them the glass had gone entirely white. The painted sea and the real one were the same object now, and neither of them had any intention of coming back.

She climbed down. That was the thing she would never manage to explain to anyone afterwards, in any of the versions she would try — the decision, arriving the way fog arrives: not as a decision at all, but as a weather, all at once, and already over. She climbed down, and stood on the floor of the east room with the daylight gone to milk, and looked at the man from the forest, and said, very quietly, "I'm not putting the sky back tomorrow."

He looked at her for a long time. Then he put his clipboard down, the way you put down something when your hands are finally needed, and crossed the room, and took her face in both hands — warm, rough, smelling of pine smoke and coffee and the green animal smell of the hill — and kissed her the way the mountain sits on everything: completely, and without negotiating.

She went into it the way the sea goes into the glass. There was nothing left to put back.

The rest of the afternoon was the forest waking, and them. She knew every pigment in the room by heart, and she used most of them wrong, which was the point; she used her hands, and the wall, and the two of them. She knew the names of the paths he kept, and she walked them all now, blind and bare and burning with the slow cold of the mountain air on her skin, while he followed with his lantern and his breath and his hands in her hair, and the fog rolled in from the glass and out of the world and back again, and the painted sea under them took the shape of the real one and answered. She screamed once, and again, and did not stop until there was nothing left in the room but the two of them and the weather, and the sea, and the sea, and the sea.

He was inside her, and she came around him the way the tide comes around the tide-tablet, and he went to the edge and held, and the room was full of nothing but her, and then he came in her, and the mountain, which had been sitting on everything like it owned the furniture, went through the floor of the east room, and she fell off the end of the world with her hands in his hair and her name in her throat, and did not come back up for a long, long time.

After, he lay with his face in her shoulder and his breath slow in her skin, and the fog was going out of the glass the way it comes in — slowly, and all at once. She put her hand on the back of his head, and held him, and did not think, for the first time in six years, about leaving.

In the morning the fog was gone, and the sea under the glass was itself again, green-blue and honest. She climbed the scaffolding, and looked at the east room, at the water she had put back over four days of work, and at the sky above it, which was still weak tea, and which was the part she had not been brave enough to restore.

She went back down to Rui, who was making coffee in the small kitchen with his back to her and his shirt over his head, and she stood in the doorway of the east room and watched the light come through the glass and find the water, and did not say anything, because there was nothing left to say, and everything left to do.

"I'm keeping the sky," she said.

He turned, and looked at her, and smiled the way the fog smiles when it's already decided where it's going.

"Then keep it," he said. "I'll keep the mountain. We'll see which of us lasts."

And the sea, under the glass, went on answering.