Restoration
I arrived early on my first day at Palacio Cardoso. The air was heavy with exhaust fumes. I crossed the street, shielding my eyes from the glare, and hugged the thin strip of shade provided by the buildings until I found a tiny café. I went in, leaned against the counter, and scrolled through the introductory emails on my phone.
The old man behind the counter had a shock of thick white hair and a weather-beaten face. He glanced at my phone as he set my cup down on the counter, and a flicker of distaste passed over his face. “Palacio Cardoso?” he said, shaking his head. I nodded and smiled. He returned to his coffee machine, muttering, “Estrangeiros.”
When it was nearly time, I made my way back. The palace walls were plastered with flyers and spray-painted with “Tourists Go Home.” Constant drilling signaled the outward creep of gentrification from the city center. Above a shuttered garage on the corner, a pink neon sign proclaimed “Drag Night.” Long dark streaks smeared the walls on either side, below clusters of swallows’ nests.
A group had gathered by the gate, all young, white, bohemian types. We introduced ourselves awkwardly. Nobody was local. I was relieved to be the only British person. I felt pleasantly anonymous.
When Filipe, the head of the restoration team, finally arrived, he unlocked the gate and led us up the cracked marble steps. The palace doors were grand but had the same type of door knockers you saw everywhere in the city: a brass hand cradling a globe, blackened with age. Something about them caught my eye, and I peered closer. Normally the globes were plain, but this one was caged by crisscrossing threads ribbons, a symbol of Portuguese global navigation and empire. The long, delicate fingers ended in razor-sharp nails, just like the hand I had dreamed about last night, reaching out of a coffin, before I woke with a racing heart to see a fat cockroach dart into a crack in the wall. I shuddered.
“The interior is spectacular,” Filipe said. The others trouped after him, while I rummaged about in my bag to find some latex gloves and snapped them on. Nobody else bothered, but I was determined to do everything right this time. Filipe raised his eyebrows and gave me a look that said,Typical British Health and Safety.
As I stepped over the threshold, the sweat cooled on the back of my neck. The air was dry and thin, as though we were very high up in the mountains. We stood in stunned silence in a huge entrance hall facing a sweeping staircase. No surface—not one—had been spared from an onslaught of decoration. No wood was uncarved, no wall unpainted, no ceiling unmoulded. Flowers, fruits, and leaves snaked under our feet, over the walls, and above our heads. Out of this mass of foliage peeped thousands and thousands of birds. It was more like the work of a solitary, obsessive lunatic than a mercantile family showing off their wealth.
Filipe led us around the ground floor. The cloisters were full of orange trees. The air was still and silent. No birds perched on the branches, and no insects buzzed. Somewhere upstairs, a window slammed shut.
“We won’t visit the East Wing. The developers will remodel it into a spa and swimming pools. We will work here on the corridors and bedrooms upstairs, and the entrance hall and ballroom, which will become the restaurant and bar. The developers want to preserve the original features for a sense of old-world luxury.”
We climbed the staircase. “There will be twenty-five bedrooms here and fifteen each on the upper floors,” Filipe said. He pulled open the shutters. Harsh, white sunlight flooded in. The river was hidden by a grain silo; the distorted shadows of seagulls slid over the ugly concrete structure.
I was grateful to be in a foreign country surrounded by strangers. Back in the UK, I was notorious. I’d be lucky if I ever got hired again, but in Portugal, nobody knew anything about me.
My parents had come to hospital to collect me after the accident. I could barely bring myself to look at them.
“Aren’t you supposed to have steady hands?” my dad said. “At least you didn’t train to be a surgeon, eh?” Mum shushed him and said, “Accidents happen, love; it’s not the end of the world.” But how many accidents get discussed at Prime Minister’s Question Time?
That day, we had nearly finished the restoration of Michelangelo’s Venus. I was lucky I’d been allowed to assist. We had reattached the broken hand and were just doing a final clean, when the museum director brought a group of patrons in. At the exact moment he gestured toward our work, I slipped and fell. I grabbed at the statue’s hand. It snapped clean off and exploded on the floor in a shower of dust. I sprawled on my back. Blood spurted from my hand—I must have sliced it on the Venus‘s wrist. All the parts of me that were worth something crumbled to dust: my competence, my self-respect, my reputation. Before the accident, I had been a museum professional, a craftswoman, toiling away at painstaking work. Afterward, I was a meme, starting with “you had one job.”
Filipe divided us into teams and went over our work plans, schedules, and equipment. I was on a team of three with Olivia, an American, and Andrei from Romania. With his trendy haircut and tattooed arms, he seemed far too cool to work in the heritage industry. We were working in the bedrooms, which were calmer and quieter than the ground floor, where teams of builders, plumbers, and electricians swarmed around yelling, drilling, and banging. We began with the ceilings, cleaning the dust out of the molded cornices and ceiling roses, repairing the plaster, and gilding where necessary. We lay on rickety scaffolding and started work, easing the dirt and dust out of the ceiling rose with damp cotton buds.
‘Gloves?’ said Olivia. ‘Ugh! You lose manual dexterity. Better to, like, really feel things, you know?’
From his spot beside us, Andrei laughed. ‘Girl, you need to wrap it up every time, you hear me?’
Olivia laughed. ‘You’re paranoid,’ she said.
‘He’s right,’ I said, ‘if you cut yourself, you can get infected. There are all sorts of small particles… and you never know what kind of molds and things might be growing here.’ I ran my thumb over the smooth, shiny line of skin that ran down the center of my hand. It had taken so long to heal. Sometimes I felt a low, dull ache there.
‘I’m being careful, OK?’ said Olivia. ‘All these birds give me the creeps. Why are there so many birds?’
‘The Cardoso family got rich by selling guano,’ Andrei said. ‘You know, bird shit. They scraped it up off little islands off the coast of Africa, shipped it back to Europe for fertilizer, raked in the profit.’
‘Gross!’ Olivia said. ‘Hey, I’m going on a hot date tonight. I told him I’d sneak him in here.’
‘Romantic!’ Andrei said. ‘You can show him the room where they found the dead guy.’
‘Oh my god, even more creepy!’
‘What dead guy?’ I asked, with a stab of unease.
‘They found a body in bedroom thirteen,’ Olivia said. ‘An old tramp, tucked up in one of the four-poster beds. And the crazy thing was,’ she dropped her voice to a dramatic whisper, ‘the body was totally mummified. When forensics took him, there were no bodily fluids. He was completelydried out.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Paulo told us,’ Andrei said.
‘That Spanish guy? He’s making it up,’ I said.
‘Maybe it’s true,’ Andrei said. ‘It’s really dry in here.’
On my second Monday, I dragged myself into work, exhausted. Every night I’d had strange dreams. During the days, I was sluggish and tired, but as soon as I lay down, I was wide awake. I wore earplugs to dampen the din of street parties and the air conditioner’s death-rattle wheeze and lay naked on top of the covers, drenched in sweat. Strange images squirmed beneath my skin: writhing vines, birds with tiny yellow teeth, and white hands rushing up from the floor to grab my legs, jolting my eyelids open.
“I’m tired of all these birds,” said Olivia. “Like, it’s probably taking us the same amount of time to clean them as it did to carve them in the first place. Like, all day long I clean these birds, and then at night I dream about them? How is that right?”
Olivia was annoying, but she’d read my mind. “This is the most tedious job I’ve done in my entire life,” I agreed.
“Have you ever heard,” said Andrei, “of a guy called Derrida?”
“I’m not an airhead, Andrei,” Olivia said.
“OK, well, he wrote this book called Archive Fever. He said that our obsession with collecting and preserving the past is balanced with a similar urge to set fire to it all and destroy it.”
Olivia laughed. “That is, like, so French,” she said.
On Friday, we were in the kitchen on our lunch break.
“Pass that lotion,” Olivia said, and one of the guys handed her a bottle. Her hands were dry, like the dead skin on the backs of your heels at the end of the summer. The thickened calluses on her fingertips had split into a network of fine cracks.
“That looks painful,” I said.
“Itchy,” she shrugged and passed on the bottle. Half of the crew had the same problem.
Andrei raised his mug of instant coffee at me. “Here’s to wrapping it up every time!” he said.
“Oh, piss off!” Olivia said.
From the corner of the kitchen, there was a peal of laughter. “Hey, Olivia! Isn’t this your guy?”
Olivia moved over to the group clustering over a phone.
“He went to hospital ’cause he thought his dick was turning to stone!”
“I wish,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“It’s the curse of the Cardosos,” Pedro said.
Now I rolled my eyes.
“No, it real!” he said. “They won their money from bird poop, yes? From African islands, yes?”
We nodded. Everybody was bored and eager for distraction.
“Well, who dug up the poop?”
“Slaves?”
“Of course! African slaves! The palace is cursed.”
A couple of Black guys from the construction crew came in, and we fell silent and exchanged guilty looks.
That night, we went drinking at a bar near the palace.
“Did you see the priests earlier?” asked Olivia. “What was that about?”
“They deconsecrated the chapel,” said Pedro. “Took the coffins away for put them in a cemetery. They unblessed everything. They’re gonna turn it into a Jacuzzi.”
‘No!’ said Andrei.
‘Unblessed?’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ said Pedro, knocking back his wine. ‘You want some aguardente? Wanna go see the chapel?’
After a couple of shots of the local fire water, we stumbled back to the front gate. A couple of security guards were posted at the palace, but Pedro handed them a bag of beers, and they clapped him on the arm and motioned us inside. We were the nerds of the building site. They weren’t worried about us. Using the lights on our phones, we followed Pedro through the east wing to the old chapel.
‘Pretty fucked up, huh?’ said Pedro.
Despite the hot night, the empty chapel was even colder than the rest of palace. I rummaged in my rucksack for a sweater. The white marble room was stripped of purpose, like a blind eye: not just empty, but a vacuum, waiting to be filled by something.
‘We need to light candles,’ said Pedro.
‘I don’t know,’ said Andrei. ‘It’s disrespectful.’
‘To who?’ said Pedro, gesturing around. ‘To the future Jacuzzi?’
While they argued, one of the guys passed around a bottle of cachaça, and the girls lit candles.
‘We should smudge with sage,’ one said.
‘It’s already decon… you, know, unblessed!’ Olivia slurred.
In candlelight, shadows danced over the ceiling and across our faces.
Pedro waved his arms in the air. ‘Now we will see the Curse of the Cardosos!’ he yelled.
Andrei and I exchanged glances. I shrugged. I was here now. I didn’t want my team to think I was an old prude. After more drinking and goofing about, we lay down on the ground in a circle, feet together, heads apart, and held hands.
‘Silence,’ Pedro said. ‘Close your eyes. Breathe slow.’
‘And squeeze your pelvic floor,’ a girl called.
One of the guys farted, and everybody laughed.
‘Calm your popcorns!’ Pedro said.
Finally, the whispering, rustling, and laughing stopped. We were breathing in sync. I was a little drunk and felt the floor lurching underneath me, the room swaying up and down, up and down. It creaked a little. A tramp must have peed in here because the smell of ammonia coming up from the floor got worse and worse, stinging my throat. I hadn’t noticed that until I lay down. I heard flapping and felt wingtips brush my face.
I gasped my eyes snapped open. The air was thick with choking, stinking white dust, swirling and gathering above us. We scrambled to our feet. I grabbed Andrei’s hand. We stumbled back, away from the dust storm in the center of the room, while waves heaved us up and down. I pulled my sweater up over my nose and mouth, gagging from the acrid stench.
The particles span in a vortex, gathering, taking form. A man stood before us. He took a step toward us with a clinking sound. One of his ankles was chained.
‘My hands,’ he said, ‘see how it’s eaten away at my hands!’ He held them out to us. They were so swollen they looked like ripe fruit about to burst, stiff and inhuman like a bear’s paw, horrible white growths protruding from beneath his brown skin. I screamed and buried my face against Andrei’s shoulder.
‘Enough!’ Pedro yelled. He threw a match at the creature—the ghost, whatever it was—and it burst into a fireball, which shot up to the ceiling and dissolved. All the candles went out. Fumbling for the lights on our phones, we ran from the chapel.
None of us spoke about what we had seen. It was easier to pretend it had been a drunken bad dream. Filipe tried to motivate us with targets and meetings, Andrei tried to keep up the cheerful banter, but we were quiet and subdued. The confusion of voices and the suggestive grind of Brazilian funk music from the construction crew’s radios died down. Progress got slower and slower. I felt as brittle as paper. The restoration team all had rings under their eyes and slumped into work with ashy, flaky skin. Even the builders wore gloves now and passed around tubes of lotion.
The city’s febrile atmosphere never penetrated the palace, which remained as cool as a tomb. I actually felt a wave of relief when I got to work. All I had to do was stare into the whorls of decoration—cleaning, gluing, gilding—and the hours slipped past. Leaving was a shock, thrust out cringing into the merciless afternoon. The sun stabbed down; noises shattered my skull; trams and buses roared out of nowhere with their screeching brakes and yelling tourists. I just wanted to be left in peace.
We needed more solvents and more paper towels. I tried to open the supply cupboard again, but the door wouldn’t budge. Olivia said there was another supply cupboard at the other end of corridor, so I set off to look for it. I walked for a long time, past identical door after door. The hall got quieter, the air dryer and colder. It was dark. The floor was thick with white dust, completely unmarked by footprints. I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, but how could I? The first floor was one long corridor around the four sides of the cloisters. I tried one of the door handles: if I looked out of a window I would see where I was. The door was locked.
This was hopeless. I turned back, and a vertiginous sensation swam over me. The corridor stretched away endlessly into darkness in both directions. It was silent. No shouts, no hammering, no drilling. My mouth was horribly dry, and my eyeballs, too. I was thirsty. I put a gloved hand on the wall to steady myself. I needed to get back, but I didn’t have the energy. Even the blood in my veins seemed to be moving slowly and stickily, as though I was drying out from the inside. I tried to move my hand, but it was stuck to the wall. I pulled—in a panic, I pulled harder—and staggered back as my hand came free with a ripping sound and a cloud of dust. My gloved fingertips were covered in a webbing of little white threads. I gasped and rubbed my hand against my overalls to clean them off.
I walked. I tried to move faster, but the corridor seemed to go on and on. Behind me, somebody made a dry, rattling wheeze. Something clinked against the floorboards. Clink. Clink. Clink. It was a chain. I didn’t look back. I just ran.
I stumbled slowly and clumsily, as if I was running on sand. The dry air caught in my lungs, suffocating me. I turned a corner—I was sure I hadn’t turned a corner before—but the corridor went on and on, and that dry, rasping cough was behind me, and then I turned another corner, and I was back at the head of the stairs again, gasping for breath, my eyes watering in the harsh, white light from the windows. Filipe walked past with one of the project managers, holding a large file. He nodded at me. I stumbled back to Andrei and Olivia.
“Sorry I was so long,” I said.
“What? You just left a minute ago.”
“Really?” Surely he was joking. I’d been running around for ages.
“Are you okay?” Andrei asked.
“I .. .” Words died in my throat. “I’m fine,” I mumbled. “Just thirsty.”
We were repainting a panel of blue and white tiles. Winged cherubs and lopsided birds clustered around a bride and groom.
“I’m back on the apps,” Andrei said. “I hooked up with a guy last night.”
“And?” I said.
“Not really worth the effort.”
“Huh,” Olivia grunted. She was working at a snail’s pace, her movements clumsy and effortful.
Andrei glanced at me.
“That’s depressing,” I said. “I want to think that at least one of us is having hot sex.”
“Win some, lose some,” he said. “But you can’t live through me. You should make a profile. Have some fun.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“How about you, Olivia?” I asked. “Got any more dates?”
“Nuh!” Her face contorted, and with a crunch, her chisel slipped and a corner of tile cracked off. A fine shower of gray powder burst from the wall, and the chisel sliced into her finger.
“Oh god!” Andrei jumped up and went to her.
Olivia flopped onto the floor. I grabbed a stack of paper towels, ready to staunch the blood.
‘Alright, Olivia, elevate the hand, that’s it,’ Andrei said.
Olivia slumped motionless, eyes glazed. That must have been what I looked like when I had my accident. Like a zombie. Andrei held up her hand. I peeled off the glove. Her hand was stiff and ashen. Her index finger was almost severed, attached only by a small flap of skin and some threads of white fiber. There was no blood, no meat, no liquid. A cold spasm of fear stabbed at my heart. Totally dried out, they said. The dead man was totally dried out.
I took a deep breath. Andrei and I stared at each other.
‘Don’t touch it,’ I whispered. ‘Let’s get her down to first aid.’
‘Come on, Olivia,’ Andrei said. She stared vacantly. We put our arms around her and helped her up.
It’s some kind of fungal infection, I said to myself. I wore gloves the whole time. I’ll be OK. But what if it was in the air too? There could be spores. My rib cage was tight, as though I were being squeezed by a giant hand. We half-guided, half-dragged Olivia to the elevator. Her feet flopped uselessly. Her body was stiff and heavy.
Filipe gathered the restoration team in the kitchen.
‘Everybody’s heard rumors,’ he said. His normally faultless English was accented today. He rubbed at the back of his neck with one hand.
‘Don’t pay attention. Some people went on sick leave, that’s all. Now we need to work as fast as possible and finish this job. Wear your gloves all the time. All days, check your hands for small cuts that could get infected by… any type of fungus could be in the walls. The more fast we finish, the more fast we can leave. That’s all.’
We were silent and subdued as we went back to work. The usual sense of satisfaction at a job well done had leached away. The rooms we completed were passable, sure, but not up to our previous level. It was depressing. Despite being harried by Filipe, we were slow. We were all gripped by the strange, pervasive lethargy that crept through the palace.
In the little café, the old man motioned for me to drop my euro into a plastic tub of vinegar and cautiously pushed a coffee cup toward me. I glanced up at the TV screen, which showed ambulances arriving at a hospital, and scrolling along the bottom of the bottom of screen read, ‘A Morte Branca: the mysterious illness “turning people to stone.”‘ The sound was off, and I couldn’t follow the fast-scrolling words. I looked up at the old man, who raised his bushy eyebrows and nodded toward another plastic bucket of vinegar. I lowered my cup and saucer in there with a plop and left.
When I got back from the bathroom, Filipe was standing close to Andrei. They were both looking at the gilded wallpaper.
‘Hi, Filipe,’ I said, and they sprang apart as though they had been stung.
‘Great work here,’ said Filipe, ‘thanks.’ He walked away quickly, without making eye contact with me.
‘Are you…?’ I said.
Andrei shrugged.
‘Oh Andrei,’ I said, ‘he’s married! You have to be careful.’
‘I’m not naïve,’ Andrei snapped. ‘I’m just bored. I’m not going to lose it, and like, snap off the hand of a statue or something.’
I moved away, stung. ‘You know?’ I said.
‘Everybody knows,’ he said. ‘How could we not? You’re one of the most spectacular fuck-ups the art world has ever seen.’
Tears blinded my eyes. He’d been so nice to me. What was he acting like this now?
‘Look,’ he said, more gently. ‘The locals think this place is cursed. So the workers are either fuck-ups or foreigners. And the foreigners are either kids on their first jobs or fuck-ups. We’re all running away from something. Otherwise we would be doing something worthwhile, not cleaning these weird, creepy birds so they can turn it into a fancy hotel.’
‘What are you running away from?’ I asked.
Andrei snapped on his gloves. ‘It’s not that easy to be a gay man in Romania,’ he said, his voice hardening again.
‘I didn’t realize,’ I said.
He kept his eyes fixed on the wallpaper and scraped at the old glue viciously. ‘Because you never asked about me or Olivia, or anyone else. You were too busy moping around thinking your life was over because you made a mistake.’
‘But it ruined my life!’ I said, my voice catching, tears starting.
‘Get over yourself!’ he said, then, ‘Ow!’
‘What is it?’
He held out his hand. A splinter of wooden cornicing had sheared off and embedded itself in his finger.
We stared at each other.
‘Does it hurt?’ I whispered.
He nodded.
‘That’s a good sign,’ I said. My heart hammered painfully in my chest. Olivia hadn’t felt a thing and had been almost catatonic, but who knew how long that stuff, whatever it was, had been growing inside her.
Andrei pulled the splinter out and eased off his glove. I squeezed at the tiny pinprick of blood on his finger. Andrei gasped. More blood oozed out, and around it, thin white tendrils, as fine as baby’s hair.
Our eyes met.
‘We have to get rid of it,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘The… whatever it is, it moves slowly, it hasn’t spread yet. I always wore gloves.’
Neither of us dared to say the word ‘Olivia,’ as though that would curse us.
‘Disinfectant,’ I said. ‘Vinegar.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Cut it off.’
‘What?’
‘Cut off my finger.’
‘I can’t do that!’
‘You can! You took the whole hand off Michelangelo’s Venus, didn’t you?’
‘It was just a statue!’
As I looked, I saw the tiny white fibers pulsing, moving, knitting together like microscopic hands, grasping for each other. I shuddered. It must be a hallucination. It couldn’t be real.
Andrei gripped my shoulder. “For God’s sake, cut it off! I don’t want to turn to stone!”
I nodded.
I took up the sharpest chisel I had and laid his hand on the table. “One, two .. .” Before I even got to three, I sliced down hard and fast, with all my strength, below the first knuckle. Andrei screamed. Blood spurted out. Footsteps thudded in the hall. I dropped the chisel.
“He had an accident!” I yelled. “Mind out! Let’s go, first aid!”
I’ve never been the religious type, but as Filipe and I dragged Andrei between us, I prayed, please oh please, not Andrei. Not my friend. Not Andrei.
When I arrived the next morning, somebody had painted a large skull on the palace wall, and the words “O Morte Branco” and, below that, “Gentrification Matar.” The main gates were locked. The palace was empty. I checked my phone and saw a message from the developers. “The Palacio Cardoso Project has been put on hold due to cash flow issues. You will receive your final paycheck this week.”
I phoned Andrei and Filipe, but neither of them answered. I tried to message the work chat group, but it had been deleted. Finally, I sat in the café and scrolled through my phone. The developers’ website and social media had disappeared. The palms of my hands were itchy, and I rubbed them against the rough grain of my jeans before I realized what I was doing. I held them up to check and saw the old man, staring at me, gripping a broom like a weapon. My hands looked normal. I lowered them again. Don’t scratch, I told myself. It’s psychosomatic. But I thought of the slave’s hand, with those horrible white growths, and the white threads in Andrei’s finger. Fear squeezed at me.
Long, hot days drifted by. I received money in my bank account but heard nothing from anybody. During the day, I slept fitfully. I searched the news, trying to find out about Olivia, Andrei, and the others, or anything about the palace, but drew a blank. I checked my hands again and again. I ventured out after sundown, when the temperature was more bearable, drawn back to the palace like an itch I had to scratch.
One night I saw a familiar figure smoking under the neon “Drag Night” sign.
“Andrei!” I called and ran toward him.
The man turned. It was somebody else.
Nothing remained of my trip here except the Palacio Caterina itself, which loomed against the sky, heavy and mute as a tomb, immovable, eternal. Its silence seemed to mock me. “Everything I touch becomes as wordless, as dead, as obsolete as me,” it seemed to say. Nothing can touch me.
“We’ll see about that,” I thought. If I could cut off Andrei’s finger, if I could destroy the hand of Michelangelo’s Venus, I could take on a palace full of weird painted birds.
*
My hand ached. I rubbed the smooth, shiny scar tissue. I crawled under the gate easily and went to the chapel. I took a box of matches and walked around relighting the candles we had used on the night of the séance. The room got colder as I worked. Shadows lurched across the walls like drunken puppets. I poured a bottle of vodka over the floor. The whole palace was as dry as kindling. There were storage cupboards full of cleaning solvents. It wouldn’t take much for it to burn.
The pain in my scar grew sharper. I flexed my hand. All my life I had loved old things. I loved feeling connected to all the people who’d come before me, living their unknowable lives, before phones and television and radio and electric lighting and cars and antibiotics. Old things created a thread stretching back into the darkness of history, making me part of something bigger than myself, making my life amount to something.
But what if that thread went in both directions? What if we tugged on that silken line of history, and something tugged back? What if Derrida was right? What if we weren’t meant to live like this, always looking back? What if there was a reason I had broken the hand off Michelangelo’s Venus? What if I hadn’t been born to preserve, but to destroy?
I struck a final match and looked around for the last time. I threw the match. Tongues of orange flame quickly licked up the walls. I turned and ran.
About the Author
Kate Tyte was born in England, where she spent over a decade as an archivist before relocating to Portugal to teach English. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Slightly Foxed, and her fiction in various magazines and podcasts.