I Had Not Been Touched in Two Years Until My Neighbour in Lisbon Peeled Me a Chestnut

Your boiler is screaming again, Rui said through the door. I was standing in a towel with conditioner sliding down my neck, in a fourth-floor flat in Alfama that had just gone up to 1,150 euros a month.

I had lived in Lisbon all forty-one years of my life. The rent was the first thing that had ever made me think about leaving.

I opened the door a hand’s width. He was holding a screwdriver in one hand and a paper cone of hot chestnuts in the other, the paper already going see-through with grease. He had lived across the landing for six weeks. We had said bom dia on the stairs maybe twenty times, and I knew his black work boots, always laced slightly wrong.

Give me two minutes, I said, and shut the door in his face.

I dressed faster than I have ever dressed. Jeans, a grey jumper with a hole at the cuff, hair still wet and wrapped in a clip. My phone buzzed on the bed with a voice note from my sister Sofia, which I did not play. It was a Thursday, a little after nine, and I had a Dutch contract open on the laptop that had to be translated by morning. I had been on the same clause for an hour.

When I let him in, he went straight to the cupboard in the hall like he had been there before. He was forty-four, and worked at the Carris depot in Santo Amaro fixing the old yellow trams, the ones tourists queue forty minutes to ride. I knew this because the woman downstairs had told me, along with his shoe size and the fact that his marriage was complicated.

I stood in the kitchen doorway and watched his back. His shirt had a little oil on the shoulder. The screaming stopped after four minutes.

The pressure valve, he said, wiping his hands on a cloth from his pocket. Your landlord will tell you it needs a new boiler. It does not. It needs somebody to care.

How much do I owe you?

Eat a chestnut.

We sat at my small table, which had a wobble I fixed every week with a folded beer mat. The chestnuts were too hot. He peeled one with his thumbnail and put it in front of me without looking up, and then another, and I realised I was being fed. I could not remember the last time that had happened.

Outside it started to rain, the sudden kind that makes the cobbles shine and sends the tourists running for the doorways of the bars on Rua de São Miguel. Somebody below was playing fado on a speaker, badly. A tram bell rang twice down the hill.

Why are you still awake at this hour? he asked.

Dutch contract.

Is it good?

It is a clause about who pays if a warehouse floods.

He laughed, low, through his nose, and I felt it somewhere below my stomach.

I do not know how to explain what happened next, because nothing happened. We talked about the price of rent in Graça, and about his mother’s stubbornness, and about my ex-husband who had moved to Faro with a woman who taught pilates.

We opened two Super Bock bottles and did not drink much of them. He told me he had not slept properly in a year. I told him I had not been touched in two.

I said it flatly, the way you read out a bill. The room went quiet and I wanted to eat my own words.

Marta, he said. Just that. My name, in his mouth, with the r soft at the back the way old Lisbon men say it.

Do not feel sorry for me.

I am not. He turned his bottle a quarter turn on the table. I am sitting here thinking about your neck.

My heart did something stupid. I put my hand flat on the table next to his, not on it, just next to it, close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off his skin. He looked at my hand. He looked at me.

Posso? he said.

Yes, I said, much too fast.

His palm was rough, with oil worked into the creases of his knuckles that no soap would ever get out. He kissed me slowly, like a man who had decided there was no hurry, and tasted of beer and smoke and chestnut. I pulled him up out of the chair by his shirt. My back met the edge of the counter and a clip fell out of my hair, and I heard myself make a sound I had forgotten I owned.

He stopped and smiled against my mouth. There it is.

Shut up, I said, and kissed him again.

We never made it properly to the bedroom. We made it in pieces: the hallway wall, the doorframe, my jumper over his head and the hole in the cuff catching on his ear. He undressed me like he was unwrapping something he intended to keep. His mouth found the place below my ear, then my collarbone, then lower, and my hands, which had been useless for two years, remembered exactly what they were for.

The bed creaked. The rain came harder. When I pulled him down over me, he said my name again, rough this time, and I stopped thinking about rent, and Dutch warehouses, and my sister’s unplayed voice note, and everything else that had been standing on my chest since the divorce.

Afterward we lay there with the shutters half closed and the streetlight cutting orange lines across the ceiling. His hand was on my hip. My hair was a disaster. Somewhere in Alfama a dog barked at a scooter.

I have not felt like that since I was young, I said, which was a stupid, true thing to say.

Neither have I.

I turned my head. He was staring at the ceiling, and his jaw had changed.

On the floor beside the bed, his phone lit up inside the pocket of his jeans. It buzzed against the tiles, stopped, buzzed again. I could see the glow through the denim. Three times. Four.

Rui.

It is Ana, he said quietly. He did not reach for it. She comes down from Porto on Sunday. For the papers.

The papers to end it?

The papers to end it. He took a long breath. Or she said she wants to talk first. She said she wants to see whether I have changed my mind.

Have you?

He did not answer straight away. A tram bell rang down the hill, the last one of the night, and I counted the seconds until it faded. His thumb moved once across my hip, slowly, like he did not know he was doing it.

Do you want me to go? he asked.

I looked at the phone glowing on the floor, and at the man in my bed with oil in his knuckles, and I did not say a word.

Some doors you open for the boiler and some you open for the rest of your life, and from the inside they sound exactly the same.