He tempts her with Portugal in spring –

I can’t, she says, not having stayed before

in a hotel with anyone but her husband.

He laughs, kisses her, points out that

there are four hundred bedrooms, so who

will know or care? This being a question,

for which she has no answer, they go,

oblivious to the Carnation Revolution,

bewildered to find their hotel empty,

its terraces deserted, salt pool unruffled,

to dine alone in a chandeliered ballroom

where a trio of defeated women play

selections from long-dead musicals. This

soup’s good, he says; she stabs her plate,

an ill-conceived stew of pork, beans and

shellfish. It can’t get any worse, she thinks

but all week the sun’s too hot, the beach

too far; they trail from one sad bar or café

to the next, weary of fado, the endless

bacalhau, the sickly egg yolk docinhos

whipped up, she imagines, by sour-faced

nuns. We should never go back, he says

on the last night. I should never have come,

she thinks, sticky with guilt and sugar

which she tries to rinse away in vinho

verde. And later, it will not be this meal,

his sleeping face and priapic body or his

unfaithful mouth she will remember,

but how, slipping in through shutters,

the sunlight stained everything.