You will almost certainly have dined in the Macau restaurant that bears the name of the man pictured here: sooner or later, everybody comes to Fernando's. In the mid-1980s it was a cafe called Ricardo's at the end of Coloane's Hac Sa beach. Then Fernando Gomes arrived.
He had travelled from one Portuguese outpost (the Azores), intended to go to another (Angola) and was diverted from his journey to a third (Timor). Macau was supposed to be a brief staging-post, but he literally stamped his name on a corner of it and stayed. He's the sort of individual about whom people like to speculate in a colourful - and, indeed, slanderous - fashion. I knew nothing factual (that is to say, repeatable) about him but, intrigued by years of stories, rang him up a couple of weeks ago and we met in his deserted restaurant on a cool day of slicing rain. What with the ceiling fans, the mid-morning twilight and the monsoon hiss, the setting felt dated and strangely intimate - a place where you could sit huddled over the past.
When I say intimate, of course, I mean it in the professional sense because within five minutes Gomes told me he doesn't think much of Western women ('They want to discuss equalisation, I always have disagreement with them'), prefers to 'fool around with the Chinese girls' and has a low tolerance of journalists. I suppose he thought he'd save us both the embarrassment of my flinging myself at his chunky body but once it became apparent that that wasn't going to happen, he settled down and talked, memorably, for several hours. And let me tell you, he was harder on himself than I could ever be. Amid all the blithe lad-chat of car crashes (31 to date) and jail (a brief Spanish interlude - 'very funny') and shrugged-off money problems (he is currently repaying a bank guarantee of five million patacas - about HK$4.5m - he signed on behalf of friends who then skipped to Portugal), there is complexity and some unfathomable rage - a raw scar on his finger, caused by a recent phone-smashing incident, being a minor physical manifestation.
I felt he wanted to paint the darkest picture of himself he could. He has an 18-year-old son - his only legal child, as he put it - about whom he was inclined to be painfully dismissive. ('I have no feelings about family, for me humans are the same everywhere.') When I commented on the way he presented himself, he replied, 'I look at myself from the outside. I'm always at knifepoint with myself.' But what if the knife becomes too sharp? 'No problem,' said Gomes (which is one of his stock phrases, he draws it out, lovingly - nooooo prrrroblem). 'It was no problem at 18. It's no problem at 47.'
He was 18 when he 'disappeared', as he puts it, from his home. This was quite a feat given that the Azores are nine windswept blips in the middle of the Atlantic and he had no passport (hence, later, the Spanish inquisition). When you next go to Fernando's, look up at the photographs which hang above the entrance: those are the Azores, and they're the only visual reminders Gomes has because he's never been back nor has he seen his parents, now in their 80s, since that day. He recently refused to identify himself to them on the telephone. 'Very nice, eh?' he murmured, with a sidelong look. 'People change. Sometimes memories are better than reality. The last picture of me is better than me now.' What about regrets when they die? 'They will die anyway.' I said that regret was a hard emotion for the living to deal with. He hesitated, then began to talk about Malaysia. I thought he was fobbing me off; his Malaysian restaurant venture in the mid-1990s was such a disaster that his namecard now bears a stamp across the Melaka address with the words: 'CANCELLED. Don't want to waste my time, and money.' After a while, however, it became clear that he was telling a story about a Hungarian woman he had once briefly employed there. Her family, to whom she was close, was leaving Malaysia and Gomes told her to go with them. 'She said she'd like to stay. I said, 'Go to Hungary on holiday - but come back.'' Gomes stopped. Then said, 'She was in a train crash. She died. That was my fault. I think about it many times. She did not want to go.'
The rain sizzled insistently outside. I asked him if he'd cried when he heard. 'No! For what? To excuse myself?' Perhaps as a relief, I said, and Gomes replied, scornfully, 'Too easy. Women cry to excuse themselves. You ask me these things, somehow, sometimes, she shows me still ... I don't know.' He did not finish the sentence.