Night Train to Lisbon

by Pascal Mercier

  Another hour had passed when Gregorius decided to cause confusion by sacrificing a pawn without attaining the slightest advantage of position.

  Pedro pushed his lips in and out several times, then raised his head and looked at Gregorius. Gregorius wished he were wearing the old glasses, which were like a bulwark against such looks. Pedro blinked, rubbed his temples, ran his short, pudgy fingers over his hair stubble. Then he let the pawn alone. ‘Novato,’ he murmured, ‘diz Novato.’ Now Gregorius knew: it meant beginner.

  That Pedro hadn’t taken the pawn because he considered the sacrifice a trap had manoeuvred Gregorius into a position from which he could attack. Move after move, he advanced his army and cut off all possibility of defence for Pedro. The Portuguese man started snuffling noisily every few minutes, Gregorius didn’t know if it was deliberation or slovenliness. Jorge grinned when he saw how the disgusting noise annoyed Gregorius; the others seemed quite used to Pedro’s habit. Whenever Gregorius thwarted one of Pedro’s plans, even before it became visible, his look became harder and his eyes were now like glowing slate. Gregorius leaned back and glanced calmly at the game: even if it lasted for hours, nothing more could happen.

  Looking ostensibly at the window where a streetlamp swung softly on a loose cable, he began to observe O’Kelly’s face. In Father Bartolomeu’s tale, the man had only been a figure of light at first, a figure of light without brilliance, an incorruptible, fearless boy, who called things by name and was anything but a show-off. But then, at the end, there had been the tale of Prado’s night visit to the priest. She. She has become the danger. She wouldn’t resist. She would talk. The others think so. Jorge too? I don’t want to talk about that.

  O’Kelly took a drag at the cigarette before he went across the board with the bishop and captured his opponent’s rook. The fingers were yellow with nicotine and black under the nails. His big, fleshy nose with the open pores disgusted Gregorius; it looked to him like an outgrowth of ruthlessness and fitted the man’s spiteful grin. But anything that was distasteful about his face was cancelled out by the weary and kind look in the brown eyes.

  Estefânia. Gregorius’s memory was jolted and he felt hot. The name had appeared in Prado’s text this afternoon, but he hadn’t made the connection … the Goldberg Variations … Estefânia – she can, she played all alone for me, and ever since, I carried in me the wish to be able to do it too. Could that have been this Estefânia? The woman Prado had to save from O’Kelly? The woman who had broken up the friendship between them – that damned sacred friendship?

  Gregorius began calculating feverishly. Yes, it could be. Then, however, it was the cruellest thing you could imagine: that someone was willing to sacrifice to the resistance movement the woman who had reinforced with Bach’s notes the wonderful, bewitching Steinway illusions Jorge had harboured even at the Liceu.

  What had happened all those years ago in the cemetery between the two, after the priest had left. Had Estefânia Espinhosa gone back to Spain? She would have been younger than O’Kelly, so much younger that Prado could have fallen in love with her back then, ten years after Fátima’s death. If that were so, then the drama between Prado and O’Kelly had been not only a conflict of morality, but also a drama of love.

  What did Adriana know about this drama? Could she have even allowed it into her thoughts? Or did she have to seal her mind against it, as against so many other things? Did the untouched, shiny Steinway still stand in O’Kelly’s flat?

  Gregorius had made the last moves with the routine, perfunctory concentration he had played in simultaneous tournaments against the students in Kirchenfeld. Now he saw Pedro grinning insidiously and after a careful look at the board, he was jolted. The advantage was gone and the Portuguese man had set in motion a dangerous attack.

  Gregorius shut his eyes. Leaden weariness washed over him. Why didn’t he just get up and go? How did he happen to be sitting in Lisbon in a smoke-filled room with an unbearably low ceiling and playing chess with a man who didn’t matter to him in the least and with whom he couldn’t exchange a word?

  He sacrificed the last bishop and thus opened the endgame. He couldn’t win any more, but it could come to a draw. Pedro went to the WC. Gregorius looked around. The room had emptied and the few people who remained had approached his table. Pedro came back, sat down and snuffled. Jorge’s opponent had gone but he himself had sat down at the next table so that he could follow the endgame. Gregorius heard his rattling breath. If he didn’t want to lose, he had to forget the man.

  Alekhine had once won an endgame, even though he was three pieces down. Incredulous, Gregorius, as a student, had played over the endgame. And for months afterwards he had played every endgame he came across. Ever since, he could see at a glance what had to be done. He saw it now, too.

  Pedro deliberated for half an hour and then, nevertheless, walked into the trap. He saw it as soon as he had moved. He could no longer win. He pushed his lips back and forth, back and forth. He stared at Gregorius with his stony look. ‘Novato,’ he said, ‘Novato.’ Then he stood up quickly and went out.

  ‘Donde és?’ asked one of those standing around. Where do you come from?

  ‘De Berna, na Suiça,’ said Gregorius and added: ‘Gente lenta.’ Slow people.

  They laughed and offered him a beer. They hoped he would come back.

  On the street, O’Kelly came up to him.

  ‘Why are you following me?’ he asked in English.

  When he saw the amazement in Gregorius’s face, he laughed harshly.

  ‘There were times when my life depended on noticing when somebody was following me.’

  Gregorius hesitated. What would happen if the man was suddenly confronted with Prado’s portrait? Thirty years after he had parted from him at the grave? Slowly, he took the book out of his coat pocket, opened it and showed O’Kelly the picture. Jorge blinked, took the book out of Gregorius’s hand, went under a street lamp and held the picture close to his eyes. Gregorius was never to forget the scene: O’Kelly observing the picture of his lost friend in the light of the swaying street lamp, unbelieving, frightened, a face that was distraught.

  ‘Come with me,’ said Jorge in a hoarse voice that sounded imperious only to hide the tremor in it. ‘I live near by.’

  His step as he walked ahead was stiffer than before and more uncertain; he was now an old man.

  His flat was like a cave, a smoky cave with walls plastered with photographs of pianists. Rubinstein, Richter, Horowitz, Dinu Lipati, Murray Perahia. A gigantic portrait of Maria João Pires, João Eça’s favourite pianist.

  O’Kelly went through the living room and turned on an endless series of lamps, one spotlight after another highlighting the gallery of photographs. A single corner of the room remained unlit. There was the grand piano, in whose black surface was reflected the gleam of the many lamps. I wish I could make the piano ring … My life will end without playing the Variations. For decades this grand piano had stood there, a dark fata morgana of polished elegance, a monument to the unfulfilled dream of a rounded life. Gregorius thought of the untouchable things in Prado’s consulting room, for there didn’t seem to be a particle of dust on O’Kelly’s grand piano either.

  Life is not what we live; it is what we imagine we are living, said a note in Prado’s book.

  O’Kelly sat in the chair he seemed always to sit in. He looked at Amadeu’s picture. His look, interrupted only by an occasional blink, was like someone who had seen a ghost. The black silence of the grand piano filled the room. The howls of the motorcycles outside bounced off the silence. Human beings can’t bear silence, said one of Prado’s brief notes, it would mean that they would bear themselves.

  Where did he get the book? Jorge asked now, and Gregorius told him. Cedros vermelhos, Jorge read aloud.

  ‘Sounds like Adriana, like her kind of melodrama. He didn’t like this side of her, but he did everything to keep Adriana from noticing. “She’s my sister, and she helps me live my life,” he said
.’

  Did Gregorius know what the red cedars were supposed to mean? Mélodie, said Gregorius; he had had the impression she knew. How did he know Mélodie and why did all this interest him? asked O’Kelly. Gregorius thought he heard the echo of a sharpness that had once been in the voice, at a time when you had to be continually on your guard.

  ‘I’d like to know what it was like to be him,’ Gregorius said.

  Jorge looked at him in amazement, then dropped his eyes to the portrait.

  ‘Can you do that? Know what it is like to be another person? Without being the other person?’

  At least you could find out what it was like when you imagined being the other person, said Gregorius.

  Jorge laughed. It must have sounded like that when he had laughed about the barking dog at the graduation ceremony at the Liceu.

  ‘And that’s why you ran away? Absolutely crazy. I like it. A imaginação, o nosso último santuário. Imagination is our last sanctuary, Amadeu used to say.’

  Uttering Prado’s name, a change came over O’Kelly. He hasn’t spoken it for decades, thought Gregorius. Jorge’s fingers trembled when he lit a cigarette. He coughed, then opened Prado’s book where Gregorius had stuck the receipt from the café between the pages that afternoon. His gaunt ribcage rose and fell, his breath rattled softly. Gregorius would have preferred to leave him alone.

  ‘And I’m still alive,’ Jorge said and put the book aside. ‘And the fear, the dimly understood fear of back then, is still there. And the grand piano is still standing there, too. Today it’s no longer a memorial, it’s simply it, the grand piano, without a message, a silent companion. The conversation Amadeu writes about was in late 1970. Even then, yes, I would have sworn that we could never lose each other, he and I. We were like brothers. More than brothers.

  ‘I remember the first time I saw him. It was the beginning of the school year and he arrived a day late. I forget why. He was late for the first lesson, too. His frock coat marked him out as a boy from a wealthy home, for you can’t buy such things off the peg. He was the only one without a schoolbag, as if he wanted to say: I carry everything in my head. There was no trace of arrogance or haughtiness as he sat down in the empty place. He simply knew there was nothing he couldn’t learn easily. As he stood up, said his name, and sat down again, he would have been at home on the stage, not that he wanted or needed one; it was charm, pure grace that flowed from his movements. Father Bartolomeu stopped short when he first saw him and for a moment he was lost for words.’

  He had read his graduation address, said Gregorius, when O’Kelly sank into silence. Jorge stood up, went into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of red wine. He poured two glasses and drank his like someone who needs it.

  ‘We worked on it night after night. Meantime he lost his nerve. Then rage helped. “God punishes the Egyptians with plagues because Pharaoh is obstinate,” he shouted, “but it was God Himself who made him like that! And He made him like that so He could demonstrate His own power! What a vain, complacent God! What a show-off!” I loved him when he was full of rage like this and offered God his high, beautiful forehead.

  ‘He wanted to call the lecture: “Reverence and Loathing of the Dying Word of God.” That was bombastic, I said, bombastic metaphysics, and in the end he left it untitled. He tended towards bombast. He didn’t want to admit it, but he knew it. Therefore he fought against kitsch, at every opportunity. He could be unfair in his judgements, horribly unfair.

  ‘The only person spared his anathema was Fátima. She could do no wrong. He waited on her hand and foot the whole eight years they were married. He needed someone he could wait on hand and foot, he was like that. It didn’t make her happy. She and I, we didn’t talk about it. She didn’t like me especially, maybe because she was jealous of the intimacy between him and me. But once, I bumped into her in a café. She was reading the Situations Vacant adverts in the newspaper and had circled a few. She folded up the paper when she saw me but I had already seen it. “I wish he thought more of me,” she said in that conversation. But the only woman he really thought more of was Maria João. Maria, my God, yes, Maria.’

  O’Kelly opened a new bottle of wine. His words began to blur around the edges.

  ‘What was Maria João’s last name?’ asked Gregorius.

  “Ávila. Like Saint Teresa. That’s why, in school, they called her a santa, the saint. She was furious when she heard it. She married a man with a throughly normal, inconspicious name, but I forget what it is.’

  O’Kelly drank and was silent.

  ‘I really thought we could never lose each other,’ he suddenly said into the silence. ‘I thought it was impossible. Once I read somewhere the sentence Friendships have their time and end. Not with us, I thought then, not with us.’

  O’Kelly was drinking faster now and his mouth no longer obeyed him. He stood up laboriously and went out of the room on uncertain legs. A while later, he came back with a sheet of paper.

  ‘Here. We once wrote this together. In Coimbra when the whole world seemed to belong to us.’

  It was a list titled: LEALDADE POR. Prado and O’Kelly had noted all the reasons for loyalty:

  Guilt towards the other; common steps of development; shared suffering; shared joy; solidarity of mortals; common intentions; common struggle against the outside; common strengths, weaknesses; common need for closeness; common taste; common hatred; shared secrets; shared fantasies, dreams; shared enthusiasm; shared humour; shared heroes; common decisions made; common successes, failures, victories, defeats; shared disappointments; common errors.

  ‘You forgot to include love on the list,’ said Gregorius. O’Kelly’s body tensed and for a while, behind the smoke, he was wide awake again.

  ‘He didn’t believe in it. Avoided even the word as too sentimental. There were only three things that were important, he used to say: desire, pleasure, and security. All were transitory. The most ephemeral was desire, then came pleasure, and finally, security, the feeling of being safe with someone. The impositions of life, all the things we had to put up with, were just too numerous and powerful for our feelings to weather them intact. That’s why loyalty was important. It was not a feeling but an act of will, a commitment, a partisanship of the soul, that turned the accident of encounters and comradeship into a necessity. A breath of eternity, he said, only a breath, but all the same.

  ‘He was wrong. We were both wrong.

  ‘Later, when we were back in Lisbon, he was often preoccupied with the question of whether there was something like loyalty towards oneself. The duty not to run away from yourself. Neither in thought nor in deed. The willingness to stand up for yourself even if you don’t like yourself. He would have liked to reinvent himself and make sure that truth emerged from the process. I can only bear myself when I’m working, he said.’

  O’Kelly was silent; the tension in his body slackened, his eyes grew dull, his breath slowed as if he was falling asleep. It was impossible to leave just yet.

  Gregorius stood up and looked at the bookshelves. A whole row of books about anarchism, Russian, Andalusian, Catalonian. A lot of books with justiça in the title. Dostoevsky and more Dostoevsky. Eça de Queirós, O Crime Do Padre Amaro, the book he had bought on his first visit to Júlio Simões’s secondhand bookshop. Sigmund Freud. Biographies of pianists. Chess books. And finally, in an alcove, a narrow shelf with his books from the Liceu, some almost seventy years old. Gregorius took out the Latin and Greek grammars and leafed through the inkstained pages. The dictionaries, the workbooks. Cicero, Livy, Xenophon, Sophocles. The Bible, battered and full of notes.

  O’Kelly woke up, but when he started talking, it was as if the dream he had just experienced was continuing.

  ‘He bought me the pharmacy. A whole pharmacy in the best location. Just like that. We used to meet in a café and talk about everything under the sun. Not a word about the pharmacy. He was a virtuoso of mystery, a goddamned, lovable virtuoso of mystery, I haven’t known anybody who mas
tered the art of mystery like he did. It was his form of vanity – even if he refused to admit it. On the way home one evening, he suddenly stops. “You see this pharmacy?” he asks. “Naturally I see it,” I said, “so what?” “It belongs to you,” he says and holds a bunch of keys before my nose. “You always wanted your own pharmacy, now you’ve got it.” And he also paid for all the equipment. And you know what? It didn’t even embarrass me. I was overwhelmed, and at first, I rubbed my eyes every morning. Sometimes I called him and said: “Just imagine, I’m standing in my own pharmacy.” Then he laughed, a relaxed, happy laugh that became rarer from one year to the next.

  ‘Because he came from a wealthy family, he had a troubled relationship with money. He could throw money out of the window in an expansive gesture, unlike the judge, his father, who didn’t allow himself anything. When he saw a beggar in the street, it was always the same. “Why do I give him only a few coins?” he would say. “Why not a bundle of notes? Why not everything? And why this beggar and not all the others too? It’s quite by chance that we passed him and not another beggar. And anyway, how can you buy an ice cream when someone a few steps away is having to bear this humiliation? That simply doesn’t add up! It shouldn’t be allowed.” Once he was so furious about this illogicality – this damn, sticky muddle, as he called it – that he ran back and threw a generous banknote into the beggar’s hat.’

  O’Kelly’s face, which had been relaxed in memory as with someone relieved of pain, darkened again and grew old.

  ‘When we lost each other, at first I wanted to sell the pharmacy and give him back the money. But then I realized it would have been like cancelling everything that had been, the long happy time of our friendship. Like retrospectively poisoning our past closeness and the earlier trust. So I kept the pharmacy. And a few days after this decision, something amazing happened: it was suddenly much more my own pharmacy than before. I didn’t understand it. I still don’t understand it to this day.’