Night Train to Lisbon

by Pascal Mercier

  ‘A mishap,’ he said tersely to the reassembled class. ‘I stumbled and they slipped out, in the rain. Nevertheless, the corrections should still be legible; otherwise, you will have to interpret them as best you can.’

  An audible sigh of relief went through the room. Now and then, he still caught a curious look or heard the occasional whisper. Otherwise, everything was as before. He wrote the most frequent errors on the board, then he left the students to work on their own.

  Could what happened to him in the next quarter of an hour be called a decision? Later, Gregorius was to keep asking himself this question and he could never be sure of the answer. But if it wasn’t decision – what was it?

  It began when he suddenly looked at the students bending over their notebooks as if he were seeing them for the first time.

  Lucien von Graffenried, who had secretly moved a piece in the annual chess tournament in the school auditorium where Gregorius had played simultaneous matches against a dozen students. Gregorius had noticed it immediately, and after the moves on the other boards, he looked at him calmly. ‘That’s beneath you,’ he said as Lucien’s face flamed red. And then made sure that the game ended in a draw.

  Sarah Winter, who had stood outside the door of his flat at two in the morning because she didn’t know what to do about her unwanted pregnancy. He had made her tea and listened, nothing more. ‘I’m so glad I followed your advice,’ she said a week later. ‘It would have been much too early to have a baby.’

  Beatrice Lüscher with the regular, precise handwriting who had grown old frighteningly fast under the burden of her always perfect achievements. René Zingg, always at the lowest end of the scale.

  And naturally, Natalie Rubin. A girl who was grudging with her favours, a bit like a courtly maiden of the past, reserved, idolized and feared for her sharp tongue. Last week, after the bell rang for the break, she had stood up, stretched like someone at ease in her own body, and taken a colourful sweet out of her shirt pocket. On the way to the door, she had unwrapped it and, as she passed Gregorius, had put it to her mouth. It had just touched her lips when she broke off the movement, turned to him, held the sweet out and asked: ‘Want it?’ Amused at his astonishment, she had laughed her strange light laugh and made sure her hand touched his.

  Gregorius went through each one. At first he seemed to be only drawing up an interim balance sheet of his feelings for them. Then, as he reached the middle of the rows of benches, he found himself thinking: How much life they still have before them; how open their future still is; how much can still happen to them; how much they can still experience!

  Português. He heard the melody and saw the woman’s face as, with closed eyes, it had emerged from the towel, white as alabaster. One last time, he slid his eyes over the heads of the students. Then he stood up slowly, went to the door, took the still damp coat off the hook and, without saying a word, walked out of the room.

  His briefcase, together with the textbooks that had accompanied him for a lifetime, remained behind on the desk. At the top of the stairs, he paused as he remembered how he had taken them to be rebound every couple of years, always to the same shop, where they had laughed at the worn, dog-eared, pages that felt almost like blotting paper. As long as the briefcase lay on the desk, the students would assume that he was coming back. But that wasn’t why he had left the books behind or why he now resisted the temptation to go back for them. If he left now, he also had to take his leave of those books. He felt that very strongly, even if at this moment, on the way out, he had no idea what it really signified.

  In the entrance hall, his look fell on the little puddle that had formed when the woman in the dripping coat had waited for him to come out of the cloakroom. It was the trace of a visitor from another, faraway world, and Gregorius regarded it with a devotion usually reserved for archaeological finds. Only when he heard the janitor’s shuffling step did he tear himself away and hurry out of the building.

  Without turning round, he walked to the corner, where he could look back at the Gymnasium unseen. With a sudden force he wouldn’t have expected of himself, he felt how much he loved this building and everything it stood for and how much he would miss it. He checked the numbers again: forty-two years ago, as a fifteen-year-old student, Gregorius had entered it for the first time, wavering between anticipation and apprehension. Four years later, he had left the school with his diploma in hand, only to come back again four years later as a substitute for the Greek teacher who had been in an accident, the teacher who had once opened the ancient world to him. The student substitute turned into a permanent substitute, who was thirty-three by the time he finally took his university exams.

  He had done that only because Florence, his wife, had urged him to. He had never thought of a doctorate; if anyone asked him about it, he had only laughed. Such things didn’t matter. What did matter was something quite simple: to know the ancient texts down to the last detail, to recognize every grammatical and stylistic detail and to know the history of every one of those expressions. In other words: to be good. That wasn’t modesty – his demands on himself were utterly immodest. Nor was it eccentricity or a warped kind of vanity. It had been, he sometimes thought later, a silent rage aimed at a pompous world, an unbending defiance against the world of show-offs who had made his father suffer all his life because he had been only a museum attendant. Others, who knew much less than he – ridiculously less, to tell the truth – had gained degrees and lucrative positions: they seemed to belong to another, unbearably superficial world with standards he despised. In the Gymnasium, no one would ever have come up with the idea of dismissing him and replacing him with somebody with a degree. The Rector, himself a philologist of ancient languages, knew how good Gregorius was – much better than he himself – and he knew that the students would have risen in revolt if their teacher had been replaced. When he finally did take the examination, it seemed absurdly simple to Gregorius, and he handed in his paper in half the time. He had always held it against Florence a bit that she had made him abandon his defiance.

  Gregorius turned around and walked slowly towards Kirchenfeldbrücke. When the bridge came into view, he had the amazing feeling, both upsetting and liberating, that, at the age of fifty-seven, he was about to take his life into his own hands for the first time.

  2

  At the spot where the woman had read the letter in the pouring rain, he stood still and looked down. It was only now that he realized how deep the drop was. Had she really wanted to jump? Or had that only been an unreasonable fear on his part, going back to Florence’s brother who had also jumped off a bridge? Except that Portuguese was her mother tongue, he didn’t know the slightest thing about the woman. Not even her name. Naturally, it was absurd to expect to see the scrunched-up letter from up here. Nevertheless he stared down, his eyes aching with the effort. Was that dark dot his umbrella? He felt in his jacket to make sure that the notebook with the number written on his forehead by the nameless Portuguese woman was still there. Then he walked to the end of the bridge, uncertain where to go next. He was in the course of running away from his previous life. Could somebody who intended to do that simply go home?

  His eye fell on Hotel Bellevue, the oldest, most distinguished hotel in the city. Thousands of times he had passed by without ever going in. Now he realized that, in some vague way, it had been important to him to know that it was there; he would have been upset to learn that the building had been torn down or had stopped being a hotel, even though it had never entered his mind that he, Mundus, had any reason to go there. Timorously, he now approached the entrance. A Bentley stopped, the chauffeur got out and went inside. When Gregorius followed him, he had the feeling of doing something absolutely revolutionary, indeed forbidden.

  The lobby with the coloured glass dome was empty and the carpet absorbed all sound. Gregorius was glad the rain had stopped and his coat was nearly dry. Treading lightly in his heavy, clumsy shoes he went on into the dining room. Only two of the table
s were occupied. Light notes of a Mozart diver-timento created the impression that one was far away from everything loud, ugly and oppressive. Gregorius took off his coat and sat down at a table near the window. No, he said to the waiter in the light beige jacket, he wasn’t a guest at the hotel. He felt under scrutiny: the rough turtleneck sweater under the worn-out jacket with the leather patches on the elbows; the baggy corduroy trousers; the sparse fringe of hair around the powerful bald head; the grey beard with the white specks that always made him look a bit unkempt. When the waiter had gone off with his order, Gregorius nervously checked whether he had enough money on him. Then he leaned his elbows on the starched tablecloth and looked over towards the bridge.

  It was absurd to hope that the woman would appear there once again. She must have gone back over the bridge and then vanished into an alleyway in the Old City. He pictured her sitting at the back of the classroom absently gazing out of the window. He saw her wringing her white hands. And again he saw her alabaster face surface from the towel, exhausted and vulnerable. Português. Hesitantly, he took out the notebook and looked at the phone number. The waiter brought his breakfast with coffee in a silver pot. Gregorius let the coffee grow cold. Once he stood up and went to the telephone. Halfway there, he turned round and went back to the table. Then he paid for the untouched breakfast and left the hotel.

  It was years since he had been in the Spanish bookshop on Hirschengraben. Once, every now and then, he had bought a book for Florence that she had needed for her dissertation on San Juan de la Cruz. On the bus, he had sometimes leafed through it, but at home he had never touched her books. Spanish – that was her territory. It was like Latin and yet completely different from Latin, and that bothered him. It went against the grain with him that words in which Latin was so evident came out of contemporary mouths – on the streets, in supermarkets, in cafés; that they were used to order Coke, to haggle and to curse. He found the idea hard to bear and brushed it quickly aside whenever it came to him. Naturally, the Romans had also haggled and cursed. But that was different. He loved the Latin sentences because they bore the calm of everything past. Because they didn’t make you say something. Because they were speech beyond talk. And because they were beautiful in their immutability. Dead languages – people who talked about them like that had no idea, really no idea, and Gregorius could be harsh and unbending in his contempt for them. When Florence spoke Spanish on the phone, he had to close the door. That offended her and he couldn’t explain why.

  The bookshop smelt wonderfully of old leather and dust. The owner, an ageing man with a legendary knowledge of Romance languages, was busy in the back room. The front room was empty except for a young woman, a student apparently. She sat at a table in a corner reading a slim book with a yellowed binding. Gregorius would have preferred to be alone. The sense that he was standing here only because the melody of a Portuguese word wouldn’t leave his mind, and maybe also because he hadn’t known where else to go, that feeling would have been easier to bear without witnesses. Now and then, as he walked along the rows of books, he occasionally tilted his glasses to read a title on a high shelf: but as soon as he had read it, it had been forgotten. As so often, he was alone with his thoughts, and his mind was closed to the outside world.

  When the door opened, he turned round quickly. He saw, to his disappointment, that it was the postman and realized that, contrary to his intention and against all reason, he was still waiting for the Portuguese woman. Now the student closed the book and got up. But instead of putting it on the table with the others, she stood still, let her eyes slide again over the yellowed binding, stroked it with her hand; only a few seconds later did she put the book down on the table, as softly and carefully as if it might crumble to dust with a nudge. Then, for a moment, she stood at the table and it looked as if she might reconsider and buy the book. But she went out, her hands deep in her coat pockets and her head down. Gregorius picked up the book and read: AMADEU INÁCIO DE ALMEIDA PRADO, UM OURIVES DAS PALAVRAS, LISBOA 1975.

  The bookseller came in, glanced at the book and pronounced the title aloud. Gregorius heard only a flow of sibilants; the half-swallowed, hardly audible vowels seemed to be only a pretext to keep repeating the hissing sh at the end.

  ‘Do you speak Portuguese?’

  Gregorius shook his head.

  ‘A Goldsmith of Words. Isn’t that a lovely title?’

  ‘Quiet and elegant. Like dull silver. Would you say it again in Portuguese?’

  The bookseller repeated the words. Aside from the words themselves, you could hear how he enjoyed their velvety sound. Gregorius opened the book and leafed through it until he reached the first page of text. He handed it to the man, who looked at him with surprise and pleasure and started reading aloud. As he listened, Gregorius closed his eyes. After a few sentences, the man paused.

  ‘Shall I translate?’

  Gregorius nodded. And then he heard sentences that stunned him, for they sounded as if they had been written for him alone, and not only for him, but for him on this morning that had changed everything.

  Of the thousand experiences we have, we find language for one at most and even this one merely by chance and without the care which it deserves. Among all these unexpressed experiences are those that are hidden and which have given our life. Its shape, its colour and its melody. If we then, as archaeologists of the soul, turn to examine these treasures, we will discover how confusing they are. The object of our examination refuses to stand still, the words glance off the experience we are left with a lot of contradictions. For a long time, I thought this was a defect, something that had to be overcome. Now I think differently: that it is the recognition of the confusion that is the key to understanding these intimate yet enigmatic experiences. That sounds strange, even bizarre, I know. But ever since I have seen the issue in this light, I have the feeling of being really awake and alive for the first time.

  ‘That’s the introduction,’ said the bookseller and started leafing through it. ‘And now he seems to begin, passage after passage, to dig for all the buried experiences. To be the archaeologist of himself. Some passages are several pages long and others are quite short. Here, for example, is a fragment that consists of only one sentence.’ He translated:

  Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us – what happens to the rest?

  ‘I’d like to have the book,’ said Gregorius.

  The bookseller closed it and ran his hand over the binding as affectionately as the student had.

  ‘I found it last year in the junk box of a second-hand bookshop in Lisbon. And now I remember: I bought it because I liked the introduction. Somehow I lost sight of it.’ He looked at Gregorius, who felt awkwardly for his briefcase. ‘I give it to you as a gift.’

  ‘That’s …’ Gregorius began hoarsely and cleared his throat.

  ‘It cost pretty much nothing,’ said the bookseller and handed him the book. ‘Now I remember you: San Juan de la Cruz. Right?’

  ‘That was my wife,’ said Gregorius.

  ‘Then you’re the classical philologist of Kirchenfeld, she talked about you. And later I heard somebody else talk about you. It sounded as if you were a walking encyclopaedia.’ He laughed. ‘Definitely a popular encyclopaedia.’

  Gregorius put the book in his coat pocket and held out his hand. ‘Thank you very much.’

  The bookseller accompanied him to the door. ‘I hope I haven’t …’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Gregorius and touched his arm.

  On Bubenbergplatz, he stood and looked around him. Here he had spent his whole life, here he knew his way around, here he was at home. For someone as nearsighted as he was, that was important. For someone like him, the city he lived in was like a shell, a cosy cave, a safe haven. Everything else meant danger. Only someone who had such thick glasses could understand that. Florence hadn’t understood it. And, maybe for the same reason, she hadn’t understood that he didn’t like flying. He didn’t like getting on an ae
roplane and arriving a few hours later in a completely different world, with no time to take in individual images along the way. It bothered him. It’s not right, he had said to Florence. What do you mean – not right? she had asked, irritated. He couldn’t explain it and so she had often flown by herself or with others, usually to South America.

  Gregorius stood at the display window of Bubenberg Cinema. The late show was a black-and-white film of a novel by Georges Simenon: L’homme qui regardait passer les trains. He liked the title and looked for a long time at the stills. In the late seventies, when everybody bought colour televisions, he had tried in vain for days to get another black-and-white set. Finally he had brought one home from the dump. Even after he got married, he had stubbornly held on to it, keeping it in his study; when he was by himself, he ignored the colour set in the living room and turned on the old rattle-trap that flickered, the images rolling occasionally. Mundus, you’re impossible, Florence had said one day when she found him before the ugly, misshapen box. When she had started addressing him as the others did, and even at home he was treated like a factotum of the city of Bern – that had been the beginning of the end. When the colour television had vanished from the flat with his divorced wife, he had breathed a sigh of relief. Only years later, when the black-and-white picture was unwatchable, did he buy a new colour set.

  The stills in the display window were big and crystal clear. One showed the pale alabaster face of Jeanne Moreau, stroking damp strands of hair off her forehead. Gregorius tore himself away and went into a nearby café to examine more closely the book by the Portuguese aristocrat who had tried to express himself and his mute experiences in words.