The Landlady's Radio

The radio in Dona Amélia's kitchen was never switched off. I learned this in my first week in the room above it, coming home from the night desk at a quarter past four and hearing through the floorboards a man reading the tide times for the whole coast, in a voice so level it sounded like someone reading out the names of the dead.

She was eighty-three and a widow, and for thirty years she had let the room above her kitchen to students and night workers. The contract was one page long and handwritten. It said that the rent was due on the first, that guests were not to stay after midnight, and that the tenant was not to touch the radio. I thought the last line was a joke. When I asked, she looked at me as if I had asked whether I was allowed to touch her teeth.

So I did not touch it. It was not difficult. The radio lived on a shelf above the sink, a brown set with a cloth front and a dial that glowed orange even in daylight, and it played day and night at a volume just high enough to be heard in every room of the house and just low enough that you could not always make out the words. In the mornings there was news. In the afternoons there were request programmes, and old songs with a lot of violins. At night there was talk, and then the tides, and then, at about three, a long stretch of music with no presenter at all, as if the station had gone home and left the records playing.

I worked nights, so I slept in the day, and for the first month I slept badly. Then I stopped hearing it. Then, in my third month, the radio went quiet for twenty minutes on a Sunday afternoon during a power cut, and I woke up at once, sitting straight up in bed with my heart going, as if someone had shouted my name.

Dona Amélia was in the kitchen when I came down. She was sitting at the table with her hands flat on the oilcloth and she did not look round. When the power came back and the radio warmed up and the violins came through again, she let out a breath that I think she had been holding for the whole twenty minutes. Then she got up and made coffee for both of us without asking whether I wanted any.

She did not explain and I did not ask. But after that she began to talk to me in the mornings when I came in from the hotel, and over the winter I learned the story in pieces, the way you learn most stories in a house like that.

Her husband had been a pilot on the river, one of the men who took the big ships in over the bar. He left the house at every hour of the day and night, depending on the tides, and he told her that if she wanted to know where he was, she should listen to the radio. When the tide times were read, she would know whether he was going out or coming in. When the weather warnings came, she would know whether to worry. The radio was how she kept him in the house while he was on the water.

He died in his bed, of something ordinary, in the spring of the year before I came. The radio had been on for forty-one years by then. She saw no reason to turn it off.

In February her nephew came from Lisbon. He was a pleasant man in a good coat who called her tia and brought her a box of pastries and spent most of the weekend on the telephone in the hall. On the Sunday he went through the house with a notebook, and on the Monday, when I came in from work, the kitchen was silent.

I thought she had died. I actually thought that. I stood in the hallway with my key still in my hand and I could not make my legs take me to the kitchen door, because the silence was so complete that it could only mean one thing.

She was sitting at the table. Her nephew was standing by the sink holding the plug of the radio in his hand. He was explaining, very kindly, about the electricity bill, and about fire, and about how an old set like that should not be left on all night, and about how he only wanted to help her get the house ready, because it was a big house for one person and there had been an offer. She was nodding. Her hands were flat on the oilcloth.

I do not know what made me do it. I was a tenant. I had a handwritten contract that said I was not to touch the radio. I walked across the kitchen and took the plug out of his hand, quite gently, and pushed it back into the wall. The dial lit up orange. There was a hiss, and then the violins.

Nobody said anything for a long time. Then the nephew laughed, a little, and said something about me being very attached to the house. Dona Amélia got up and made coffee for three people. He left the next morning. The offer on the house was accepted in the summer, when her hip got worse and she agreed to go to her sister's in Braga, and I had six weeks to find somewhere else.

On my last day I carried my boxes down the stairs past the kitchen door. The house was mostly empty by then. The nephew had arranged for the furniture to be sold, and the kitchen had only the table and one chair and the shelf above the sink, where the radio still sat, still on, playing to nobody.

I asked the man from the removal company whether it was going with her. He checked his list and said no, it was down as rubbish.

I have my own place now, a room with a kitchen of its own, three streets up from the river. On the shelf above the sink there is a brown radio with a cloth front and a dial that glows orange even in daylight. I do not turn it off. I am not entirely sure who I am keeping it on for. But at three in the morning, when the station goes quiet and the records play on their own, I sometimes stand in the kitchen and listen for the tide times, as if someone I am waiting for is out on the water.