an edited version of this story was published in the Lincolnshire Echo on 29.12.2011 and can seen using the following link:
Piri-piri sauce
Eyes turned and lips unseamed when Paulo first walked into the covered market carrying what looked like a large suitcase and a fishing stool. He unclipped and opened the trestle table and unfolded the little canvas chair. He set them at the edge of fish stalls slithery with sardines, bream, horse-mackerel and eel, by stalls piled high with the season’s oranges and lemons. Noses peered from behind mountains of bright green cabbage and golden squash, craned over bunches of red radishes the size of golf balls.
Some ridiculed him directly as he unpacked his bags of books and began to lay them in neat rows upon the table. Others stood in small groups, muttering, heads nodding in his direction. Unperturbed, Paulo continued to arrange his wares.
“What good, Paulo,” said Antoni, the adjacent fishmonger, as Paulo sat quietly waiting for his first customers, “what good, selling dry paper that no-one can eat, however much piripiri sauce you serve it with? Get yourself an honest trade; why, Hugo is due to retire soon – you could sell clams, make yourself a fortune…”
Paulo shrugged, gave a good natured smile.
“Your wares are gone in a day,” he replied. “Mine might last a hundred years.”
“But all your customers will have died of boredom before then,” persisted Antoni, moving off to attend to a customer, “whereas mine…mine will have good food in their bellies and fire in their loins.”
“Take those three,” he said, returning from serving a woman who wandered off to join two elderly women waiting for her. He wiped his hands on his apron, nodding in their direction. Paulo gazed at them in their print dresses and overalls, thick stockings and solid shoes. Raised a cynical eyebrow.
“Fire? Even those three, Antoni?”
Antoni’s eyes sparkled mischievously.
“Behind closed doors, who knows what delights a woman such as them has to offer?”
He leaned forward conspiratorially, eyeing another stall-holder beside crates of clementines – a middle-aged woman bundled in a woollen coat and scarf, over-wrapped with a grey plastic apron. And whispered something into his ear which made Paulo’s eyes widen with surprise.
“I can catch fish,” Antoni winked, “but you, Paulo, with your intellect, you could catch a fine woman with those books of yours…”
*
A year passed. The other stall holders had long since grown accustomed to Paulo and his unusual wares. Some of them had even joined his customers in browsing through the novels, the cookery books, texts on bull-fighting or chess and the ones on far-off places. They leafed through them with their fishy hands, searching for something different from their television screens with which to amuse themselves in the evening. And somehow or other Paulo managed to make a modest living. That is, until the Bad Times hit.
Then, instead of stopping by, customers passed his stall with their carrier bags of clams and sardines. “Sorry, Paulo,” they would call out, “I can barely afford to eat these days, let alone read…”
So it was that Paulo sat perched on his chair hour after hour, a grim expression on his face, his knees drawn up beneath his chest, watching the flow of people pass before him like a fisherman upon the beach with no sign of a catch, his line swaying idly with the tide.
“There’s still money in clams,” Antoni advised him. “Why not buy yourself a little boat? People can’t get enough of the things…”
But there came a point when even Antoni began to complain. The restaurateurs were not buying enough; they said that the purses of visitors were dry as old figs; even the locals were buying less, eking out salt cod in stews…
Reluctantly, after the third day when he had not taken a single cent, Paulo snapped together his trestle table for the last time, bound the frayed canvas chair to it and was sorting his stock into a box that he might store and a pile that he would deliver to the recycling bin on his way home, when a woman in her mid-forties appeared before him, bright as a mackerel in water. Her skin was dark and her hair, jet-black, curled to her shoulders. She wore a bright red silken jacket over a smart black trouser suit. She smiled, her teeth sparkling white against the rim of cherry lipstick that glossed her lips.
“Are you building a funeral pyre, my friend?” she asked, eyeing the pile of discarded books.
“Might as well be -” he grunted, “they’re good for nothing else, I can tell you.”
She bent down to retrieve a small pamphlet of poems by a lesser known poet.
“How can you think of burning this?” she said, flicking through the pages. “Imagine the work that has gone into it – the passion, the sensitivity, the…sheer doggedness…”
Paolo was in no mood for a lecture.
“You try selling them then,” he snarled.
She looked him directly in the eye.
“Very well,” she said.
Senhora Armideri arranged for Paulo to leave the market stall with her for two weeks. No money would pass hands, she said, but he was to stay away. When he came back, he could decide whether to continue to run the stall or not, and if it was the latter decision, she personally would help him to dispose of the stock.
Paulo eyed her suspiciously.
“What’s in it for you?”
“I’ve been looking for a challenge,” was her reply.
“Fool!” he muttered as he scuttled away, not caring if it was the last he saw of his books or his trestle table.
Two weeks passed, during which time Paulo was not even tempted to spy on the strange Senhora or his books. He was sick of the whole thing. He drank rather too much, and wandered up into the hills, wallowing in his regret to follow his heart rather than take Antoni’s advice and buy himself a small fishing boat while he still had had the funds to do so. Now he had nothing. He searched in the cupboards for something to eat and found only a bottle of Piripiri sauce.
“Antoni was right. Even I can’t eat books,” he said to himself.
Paulo arrived at the Market Hall at around eleven a.m. Saturday morning. There was a crowd mushrooming from the entrance and he had trouble squeezing past to see what all the fuss was about. “The usual, no doubt,” he muttered to himself. “A heart attack. Someone fainted and blue at the lips like a slab of haddock.”
Then he realised that the source of the crowd was the area where he had had his stall. Above the heads he could see, tied between the pillars, rows of lemon yellow and orange balloons and large blue ones, mackerel-shaped, flying high as if they were filled with helium.
Children and adults were coming away carrying paper bags and balloons, and as he squeezed closer, he could see Senhora Armideri standing behind the trestle table, taking books from the customers, slipping them into a paper bag and handing them back with a balloon on a long string.
“Free book with every balloon,” she was shouting. “Free book with every special balloon!”
And in the old bait tin that he used for cash, he could see a pile of coins.
Senhora Armideri greeted him with that big white smile. And leaning across his counter, Antoni waved and winked.
“Nearly finished,” Senhora Armideri said, gesturing towards the almost empty trestle table, and showed him from her jacket pocket a wallet thick with notes.
Another few minutes and the crowd began to disperse. Senhora Armideri gathered her things together and handed over the money to Paulo.
“A lesson in marketing,” she said proudly.
“ How can I repay you?” said Paulo, overwhelmed. Such choices to be made now! A chance to try again…or something different? But choices, nevertheless. He was filled with gratitude.
“Friendship is enough,” she said, tossing one last title back on to the empty trestle table. “I thought I would end up eating this book with Piripiri sauce, it was so dry - boredom drove me through it but then, at last, it gave me a great idea. So, you see, we have each learned a lesson…”
“I tell you, Paulo,” Antoni called, “clams have had their day. Books and balloons are the thing!”
Paolo gazed at the title of the book he’d known vaguely he’d had in stock: “Techniques in Marketing,” he read. And smiled.
THE END