Night Train to Lisbon

by Pascal Mercier

  ‘You’re a man who doesn’t sleep well,’ she said.

  The examination lasted more than an hour. The instruments looked different from those of Doxiades, and Senhora Eça studied the background of his eyes with the detail of somebody becoming familiar with a brand-new landscape. But what impressed Gregorius the most was that she repeated the test for visual acuity three times. In between were pauses when she made him walk around and started a conversation about his profession.

  ‘How well one sees depends on so many things,’ she said smiling when she noted his amazement.

  At last, there was a diopter number that was clearly different from the usual one and the value for the two eyes was further apart than usual. Senhora Eça saw his confusion.

  ‘Let’s just try it out,’ she said and touched his arm.

  Gregorius wavered between resistance and trust. Trust won. The doctor gave him the business card of an optician and then she called the shop. Her Portuguese voice brought back the magic he had felt when the enigmatic woman on the Kirchenfeldbrücke had pronounced the word português. Suddenly being in this city made sense, a sense that couldn’t be explained; on the contrary, it was part of this sense that it musn’t be violated by trying to capture it in words.

  ‘Two days,’ said the doctor after she hung up. ‘With the best will in the world, says César, the glasses can’t be ready any sooner.’

  Now, Gregorius took the little volume by Amadeu de Prado out of his jacket pocket, showed her the strange name of the publisher and told of the futile search in the phone book. Yes, she said, distracted, it sounds like a private publisher.

  ‘And the red cedars – it wouldn’t surprise me if they were a metaphor for something.’

  Gregorius had thought the same: a metaphor or a code for something secret – bloody or beautiful – hidden under the colourful, wilted foliage of a life story.

  The doctor went into another room and came back with an address book. She opened it and ran her finger along a page.

  ‘Here. Júlio Simões,’ she said, ‘a friend of my late husband, a second-hand book dealer who always seemed to us to know more about books than anyone else alive, it was really weird.’

  She wrote down the address and explained to Gregorius where it was.

  ‘Give him my best. And call in with the new glasses. I’d like to know if I’ve done it right.’

  When Gregorius turned around on the staircase, she was still standing in the doorway, with one hand on the lintel. If Silveira had called her, she might also know that he had run away. He would gladly have told her about it and as he went down the stairs, his steps were hesitant, as if he was reluctant to leave.

  The sky was coated with a fine white veil that softened the gleam of the sunlight. The optician’s shop was near the ferry across the Tagus. César Santarém’s surly face lit up when Gregorius told him who had sent him. He looked at the prescription, weighed the glasses Gregorius gave him in his hand and then said in broken French that they could be made of lighter material and put in a lighter frame.

  That was the second time in a short period that someone had cast doubt on the judgement of Constantine Doxiades, and it seemed to Gregorius that his former life was being taken out of his hands, a life spent, as long as he could remember, with heavy glasses on his nose. Uncertainly, he tried on frame after frame and finally let himself be tempted by Santarém’s assistant, who knew only Portuguese and talked like a waterfall, to choose a narrow reddish frame that seemed much too stylish and chic for his broad, square face. On the way to the Bairro Alto, where Júlio Simões’s second-hand bookshop was, he kept telling himself that the new glasses could be spare glasses and didn’t need to be worn, and when he finally stood before the bookshop, he had recovered his internal balance.

  Senhor Simões was a wiry man with a sharp nose and dark eyes emanating a mercurial intelligence. Mariana Eça had called and told him the issue. Half the city of Lisbon, thought Gregorius, seemed to be concerned with calling on his behalf and directing him on; he couldn’t remember ever experiencing such a thing before.

  Cedros Vermelhos – there was no such publisher, said Simões, in the thirty years that he had been in the book business, of that he was sure. Um Ourives das Palavras – no, he had never heard of that title either. He leafed through the book, read a sentence here and there, and it seemed to Gregorius that he was waiting for his memory to bring something to light. Finally, he looked once more at the year of publication. Nineteen seventy-five – he had still been in college in Porto and wouldn’t have heard of a book that appeared as a private publication, especially not if it had been printed in Lisbon.

  ‘If there is anybody who would know,’ he said and filled his pipe, ‘it’s old Coutinho, who had the shop here before me. He’s close to ninety and is nuts, but his memory for books is phenomenal, a genuine miracle. I can’t call him because he can barely hear, but I’ll write you a few lines to give him.’

  Simões went to his desk in the corner, wrote something on a notepad, and put it in an envelope.

  ‘You have to be patient with him,’ he said when he gave Gregorius the envelope. ‘He’s had a lot of bad luck in his life and is a bitter old man. But he can also be very nice when you take the right tone with him. The problem is that you never know in advance what the right tone is.’

  Gregorius stayed in the second-hand bookshop a long time. Getting to know a city through the books in it – he had always done that. His first trip abroad as a student had been to London. On the way back to Calais, he had realized that, except for the Youth Hostel, the British Museum and the many bookshops around it, he had seen practically nothing of the city. But the same books could also be anywhere else! said the others and shook their heads at all the things he had missed. Yes, but in fact they weren’t anywhere else, he had replied.

  And now he stood before the ceiling-high shelves filled with Portuguese books that he couldn’t read and reflected on how quickly he had established contact with the city. When he had left the hotel that morning, he had thought he had to find Amadeu de Prado as fast as possible to give a meaning to his stay here. But then there had been Mariana Eça’s dark eyes, reddish hair and black velvet jacket and now there were all these books with names of previous owners that reminded him of Anneli Weiss’s handwriting in his Latin book.

  O Grande Terramoto. Except that it took place in 1755 and had devastated Lisbon, he knew nothing about the great earthquake that had shaken faith in God for so many people. He took the book off the shelf. The next book, standing crooked, was titled A Morte Negra and about the plague of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. With both books under his arm, Gregorius went to the literature section on the other side of the room. Luis Vaz de Camões; Francisco de Sá de Miranda; Fernão Mendes Pinto; Camilo Castelo Branco. An entire universe he had never heard of, not even from Florence. José Maria Eça de Queirós, O Crime do Padre Amaro. Hesitantly, as if it was something forbidden, he took the volume off the shelf and added it to the two others. And then, all of a sudden, he stood before it: Fernando Pessoa, O Livro do Desassossego. It really was unbelievable, but he had gone to Lisbon without thinking that he was going to the city of the assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares, who worked on Rua dos Douradores and whose thoughts Pessoa had written down – thoughts that were lonelier than all thoughts in the world, before or after him.

  Was it so unbelievable? The fields are greener in description than in their greenness. This sentence by Pessoa had led to the shrillest episode between him and Florence in all their years together.

  She had been sitting in the living room with colleagues, to the accompaniment of laughter and clinking glasses. Gregorius had gone in there reluctantly because he needed a book. As he entered, somebody was reading a sentence aloud. Isn’t that a brilliant sentence? one of Florence’s colleagues had called out, shaking his artist’s mane and putting his hand on Florence’s bare arm. Only very few will understand this sentence, Gregorius had said. All at once, the room f
illed with an embarrassed silence. And you’re one of these chosen ones? Florence asked in a cutting tone. With exaggerated slowness, Gregorius had taken the book off the shelf and had left the room without a word. It was some minutes before he heard voices and laughter again.

  Afterwards, when he had seen The Book of Disquiet somewhere, he had quickly passed it by. They had never spoken of the episode again. It was part of everything that hadn’t been worked through when they split up.

  Now, Gregorius took the book off the shelf.

  ‘Do you know what this unbelievable book seems like to me?’ asked Senhor Simões, tapping the price into the cash register. ‘It’s as if Marcel Proust had written the essays of Michel de Montaigne.’

  Gregorius was exhausted when, with his heavy bags, he approached the memorial to Camões on Rua Garrett. But he didn’t want to go back to the hotel. He had come to this city and he wanted to experience more of this feeling of belonging so that he could be sure he wouldn’t call the airport again tonight to book a return flight. He drank a coffee and then boarded the tram that would take him to the Cemitério dos Prazeres, near the home of Vítor Coutinho, the crazy old man who might know something about Amadeu de Prado.

  9

  In the hundred-year-old Lisbon tram, Gregorius travelled back to the Bern of his childhood. The car that took him, bumping, shaking and ringing through Bairro Alto, looked just like the one he had ridden through the streets of Bern for hours when he was still too young to have to pay the fare. The same lacquered wooden slat benches, the same bell-pulls next to the strap handles hanging down from the ceiling, the same metal lever the driver operated to brake and accelerate and whose workings Gregorius understood as little today as he had back then. At some time, when he was already wearing a sixth-form cap, the old trams were replaced with new once. The other students scrambled to ride in the new trams because they were quieter and smoother, and not a few were late to class because they had waited for one of them. Gregorius hadn’t trusted himself to say it, but it bothered him that the world changed. He mustered all his courage, went to the tram depot and asked a workman what had happened to the old cars. They would be sold to Yugoslavia, said the man. He must have seen the boy’s unhappiness, for he went into the office and came back with a model of the old car. Gregorius guarded it as a precious, irreplaceable find from a prehistoric time. He pictured it as the Lisbon tram rattled and screeched to a stop in the final loop.

  It had never crossed Gregorius’s mind that the old Portuguese aristocrat might be dead. Only now did the thought come to him as he stood at the cemetery gates. Slowly and apprehensively, he wandered through the lanes of the necropolis lined with simple little mausoleums.

  It might have been half an hour later when he came upon a tall sepulchre of white weather-spotted marble. Two tablets with ornate corners and edges had been hewn in the stone. AQUI JAZ ALEXANDRE HORÁCIO DE ALMEIDA PRADO QUE NASCEU EM 28 DE MAIO DE 1890 E FALECEU EM 9 DE JUNHO DE 1954, was written on the top tablet, and AQUI JAZ MARIA PIEDADE REIS DE PRADO QUE NASCEU EM 12 DE JANEIRO DE 1899 E FALECEU EM 24 DE OUTUBRO DE 1960. On the bottom tablet, which was clearly lighter and less mossy, Gregorius read: AQUI JAZ FÁTIMA AMÉLIA CLEMÊNCIA GALHARDO DE PRADO QUE NASCEU EM 1 DE JANEIRO DE 1926 E FALECEU EM 3 DE FEVEREIRO DE 1961, and under that, with less patina on the letters, AQUI JAZ AMADEU INÁCIO DE ALMEIDA PRADO QUE NASCEU EM 20 DE DEZEMBRO DE 1920 E FALECEU EM 20 DE JUNHO DE 1973.

  Gregorius stared at the last date. The book in his pocket had appeared in 1975. If this Amadeu de Prado was the doctor who had attended the strict Liceu of Senhor Cortês and had later, while sitting on its mossy steps, asked himself how it would have been to become somebody else – then he wouldn’t have published his writings himself. Somebody else had done it, probably a private publisher. A friend, a brother, a sister. If this person was still alive after twenty-nine years, that was who he had to find.

  But the name on the tomb could also be a coincidence. Gregorius wanted it to be, he wanted it with all his might. He knew how disappointed he would be and how dejected he would become if he couldn’t meet the melancholy man who had wanted to re-order the Portuguese language because it was so hackneyed in its old form.

  Nevertheless, he took out his notebook and wrote down all the names along with the dates of births and deaths. This Amadeu de Prado had been fifty-three when he died. He had lost his father at the age of thirty-four. Had that been the father whose smile had mostly failed? The mother had died when he was forty. Fátima Galhardo – that could have been Amadeu’s wife, a woman who had been only thirty-five and had died when he was forty-one.

  Once more Gregorius let his eyes slide over the tomb and only now did he notice an inscription on the pedestal, half covered with wild ivy: QUANDO A DITADURA É UM FACTO A REVOLUÇÃO É UM DEVER. When dictatorship is a fact, revolution is a duty. Had the death of this Prado been a political death? The Revolution of the Carnations in Portugal, the end of the dictatorship, had taken place in the spring of 1974. So this Prado hadn’t lived through it. The inscription sounded as if he had died as a resistance fighter. Gregorius took out the book and looked at the picture. It could be him, he thought, it would suit the face and the restrained rage behind everything he wrote. A poet and a language mystic who had taken up arms and fought against Salazar.

  At the cemetery gate, he tried to ask the man in uniform how you could find out who a grave belonged to. But his few Portuguese words weren’t adequate. He took out the notepaper on which Júlio Simões had written the address of his predecessor, and set out.

  The house Vítor Coutinho lived in looked as if it could tumble down at any moment. Set back from the street, it was hidden behind other houses and its lower floor was overgrown with ivy. There was no bell and Gregorius stood helpless in the courtyard for a while. Just as he was about to leave a voice barked from one of the upper windows:

  ‘O que é que quer? ’ What do you want?

  The head at the window was framed with white locks that merged seamlessly into a white beard, and on the nose was a pair of glasses with broad, dark frames.

  ‘Pergunta sobre livro,’ Gregorius called out as loud as he could and held up Prado’s notes.

  ‘O quê?’ the man asked and Gregorius repeated his words.

  The head disappeared and the door buzzed. Gregorius entered a corridor with overflowing bookshelves up to the ceiling and a worn-out Oriental rug on the red stone floor. It smelt of stale food, dust and pipe tobacco. On the creaky steps, the white-haired man appeared, a pipe between dark teeth. A coarse checked shirt of washed-out indefinable colour drooped over his baggy corduroy trousers; on his feet were open sandals.

  ‘Quem é?’ he asked with the exaggerated loudness of the hard of hearing. The light brown, amberish-coloured eyes under the gigantic eyebrows had the look of someone whose rest had been disturbed.

  Gregorius handed him the envelope with the message from Simões. He was Swiss, he explained in Portuguese, and added in French: a philologist of ancient languages and searching for the author of this book. When Coutinho didn’t react, he started on a loud repetition.

  He wasn’t deaf. The old man interrupted him in French, and now a cunning grin appeared on the lined, weatherbeaten face. Deafness – that was useful shield against all the twaddle you were subjected to.

  His French had an eccentric accent, but the words came, albeit slowly, in a confident order. He scanned Simões’s lines, then pointed to a room at the end of the corridor, to which he led the way. On the kitchen table, next to a half-eaten tin of sardines and a half-full glass of red wine, lay an open book. Gregorius went to the chair at the other end of the table and sat down. Then the old man came to him and did something surprising: He took off Gregorius’s glasses and put them on himself. He blinked, looked here and there, while swinging his own glasses in his hand.

  ‘So, we’ve got that in common,’ he said at last and returned the glasses to Gregorius.

  The solidarity of those who go through the world wi
th thick glasses. All of a sudden, all the annoyance and defensiveness had disappeared from Coutinho’s face, and he reached for Prado’s book.

  Without a word, he looked at the portrait of the doctor for a few minutes. He stood up now and then, absent as a sleepwalker, and once poured Gregorius a glass of wine. A cat slipped in and sidled around his legs. He didn’t notice it, took off his glasses, and grasped the bridge of his nose with thumb and index finger, a gesture that reminded Gregorius of Doxiades. In the next room, a grandfather clock was ticking. Now he emptied his pipe, took another from the shelf and filled it. More minutes passed until he began to speak, softly and in the timbre of distant memory.

  ‘It would be wrong if I said I knew him. You can’t even speak of an encounter. But I did see him, twice, in the doorway of his treatment room, in a white coat, his brows raised, waiting for the next patient. I was there with my sister, whom he was treating. Jaundice. High blood pressure. She swore by him. Was, I think, a little bit in love with him. No wonder, a fine figure of a man, with a personality that hypnotized people. He was the son of the famous Judge Prado, who took his own life, many said, because he could no longer bear the pains of his hunched back. Others conjectured that he couldn’t forgive himself for staying in office under the dictatorship.

  ‘Amadeu de Prado was a much loved, even esteemed doctor. Until he saved the life of Rui Luís Mendes, a member of the secret police, the one called The Butcher. That was in the mid-sixties, shortly after I turned fifty. After that, people avoided him. That broke his heart. From then on, he worked for the Resistance, but nobody knew it; as if he wanted to atone for rescuing Mendes. It came out only after his death. He died, as I remember, quite surprisingly of a cerebral haemorrhage, one year before the revolution. Lived at the end with Adriana, his sister, who idolized him.