Night Train to Lisbon

by Pascal Mercier

  He had left the light on in the pharmacy, said Gregorius in parting.

  O’Kelly laughed. ‘That’s on purpose. The light is always burning. Always. The pure extravagance. My vengeance for the poverty I grew up in. We could only afford to light a single room so you went to bed when it was dark. The few centavos of pocket money I got, I spent on batteries for a torch to read by at night. Books I stole. Books mustn’t cost anything, that’s what I thought then and still do. They kept turning the electricity off in our house because of unpaid bills. Cortar a luz, I will never forget the threat. Those are simple things you never get over. How something smelt; how your skin burned after a smack; how it was when the sudden dark flooded the house; how harsh Father’s cursing sounded. At first, the police sometimes checked on the pharmacy because of the light. Now everybody knows it never gets switched off and they leave me alone.’

  23

  Natalie Rubin had called three times. Gregorius called back. The dictionary and the Portuguese grammar had been no problem at all, she said. ‘You’ll love this grammer book! Like a law book and heaps of lists with exceptions, the man is nuts about exceptions. Like you, sorry.’

  The history of Portugal had been harder; there were several and she had decided on the most condensed. All these books were now on the way to him. The Persian grammar he had mentioned was still in print and Haupt could get it by the middle of next week. The history of the Portuguese Resistance, on the other hand – that was a real challenge. The library had been closed when she got there but she would return on Monday. At Haupt, they had advised her to enquire in the department of Romance literature and she knew who to ask for.

  Gregorius was frightened by her enthusiasm, even though he had seen it coming. She would prefer to come to Lisbon and help him with his research, he heard her say.

  Gregorius woke up in the middle of the night and wasn’t sure she had really said this, or whether he had dreamed it. Cool, Kägi and Lucien von Graffenried had said all the time he was playing chess against Pedro, the man from Jura, who pushed his pieces over the board with his forehead and banged his head furiously on the table when Gregorius outfoxed him. To play against Natalie had been strange and weird, for she played without pieces and without light. ‘I know Portuguese and could assist you!’ she said. He tried to answer her in Portuguese and felt as if he were taking an exam when the words didn’t come. Minha Senhora, he kept repeating, Minha Senhora, and then he didn’t know how to continue.

  He called Doxiades. No, he hadn’t woken him up, said the Greek, he was having trouble sleeping again. And not only with sleep.

  Gregorius had never heard such an admission from him, and he was scared. What was the problem? he asked.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ said the Greek. ‘I’m just tired. I’m making mistakes in my practice. I’d like to stop working.’

  Stop? Doxiades stop? Then what?

  ‘Go to Lisbon, for example,’ he laughed.

  Gregorius told him about Pedro, his receding forehead and the epileptic look. Doxiades remembered the man from Jura.

  ‘After that, you played miserably for a while,’ he said. ‘For you.’

  It was already light when Gregorius fell asleep again. When he woke up two hours later, a cloudless sky arched over Lisbon and people were walking around without coats. He decided to take the ferry over to Cacilhas to visit João Eça.

  ‘I thought you’d come today,’ João said and from his thin lips, the sparse words sounded enthusiastic.

  They drank tea and played chess. Eça’s hand trembled when he moved, and there was a clack when he put the piece down. At every one of his moves, Gregorius was horrified by the burn scars on the backs of his hands.

  ‘It’s not the pain and the wounds that are the worst,’ said Eça. ‘The worst is the humiliation. The humiliation when you feel you’re going to shit your pants. When I got out, I burned with a need for revenge. White hot. Waited in hiding until the torturers came off duty, in plain coats and with briefcases, like people leaving an office. I followed them home. To get even. What saved me was the disgust at touching them. Shooting was much too good for them. Mariana thought I had undergone a process of moral maturation. Not a bit. I always rejected becoming mature, as she called it. Didn’t like maturity. Considered this so-called maturity opportunism or pure fatigue.’

  Gregorius lost. After a few moves, he felt that he didn’t want to win against this man. The art was not letting him sense that, and he decided on daredevil manoeuvres that a player like Eça would see through.

  ‘Next time, don’t let me win,’ said Eça when the signal for food came. ‘Otherwise I’ll get mad.’

  They ate the insipid boiled lunch provided by the home. Yes, that’s how it always was, said Eça, and when he saw Gregorius’s face, he laughed a real laugh for the first time. Gregorius learned something about João’s brother, Mariana’s father, who had married into a wealthy family, and about the doctor’s failed marriage.

  This time he hadn’t asked at all about Amadeu, said Eça.

  ‘I’m here for your sake, not his,’ said Gregorius.

  ‘Even if you haven’t come for his sake,’ said Eça as evening fell, ‘I have something I’d like to show you. He gave it to me after I had asked him one day what he was writing. I’ve read it so often I know it almost by heart.’ And he translated the two sheets for Gregorius.

  O BÁLSAMO DA DESILUSÃO. THE BALM OF DISAPPOINTMENT. Disappointment is considered bad. A thoughtless prejudice. How, if not through disappointment, should we discover what we have expected and hoped for? And where, if not in this discovery, should self-knowledge lie? So, how could one gain clarity about oneself without disappointment?

  We shouldn’t suffer disappointment sighing at something our lives would be better without. We should seek it, track it down, collect it. Why am I disappointed that the adored actors of my youth all now show signs of age and decay? What does disappointment teach me about how little success is worth? Many need a whole life to admit the disappointment about their parents to themselves. What did we really expect from them? People who have to live their life under the merciless rule of pain are often disappointed at how others behave, even those who endure with them and feed them the medicine. It’s too little, what they do and say, and also too little, what they feel. ‘What do you expect?’ I ask. They can’t say it and are dismayed that, for years, they have carried around an expectation that could be disappointed and they don’t know details of it.

  One who would really like to know himself would have to be a restless, fanatical collector of disappointments, and seeking disappointing experiences must be like an addiction, the all-determining addiction of his life, for it would stand so clearly before his eyes that disappointment is not a hot, destroying poison, but rather a cool, calming balm that opens our eyes to the real contours of ourselves.

  And it should not only be disappointments concerning others or circumstances. When you have discovered disappointment as the guide to yourself, you will be eager to learn how much you are disappointed about yourself: about lack of courage and inadequate honesty, or about the horribly narrow borders drawn by your own feelings, acts, and sayings. What was it we expected and hoped from ourselves? That we were boundless, or quite different than we are?

  One could have the hope that he would become more real by reducing expectations, shrink to a hard, reliable core and thus be immune to the pain of disappointment. But how would it be to lead a life that banished every long, bold expectation, a life where there were only banal expectations like ‘The bus is coming’?

  ‘I never knew anybody who could get so thoroughly lost in his daydreams as Amadeu,’ said Eça. ‘And who hated so much to be disappointed. What he writes here – he writes it against himself. As he also often lived against himself. Jorge would deny that. Have you met Jorge? Jorge O’Kelly, the pharmacist, in whose shop the light burns day and night? He knew Amadeu much longer than I did, much longer. And yet…

  ‘Jorge and I … w
ell yes. Once we played together. The only time. A draw. But when it came to plans of operation and cunning strategies, we were an unbeatable team, like twins who understood each other instinctively.

  ‘Amadeu was jealous of this understanding; he felt he couldn’t keep up with our deviousness and unscrupulousness. Your phalanx, he called our alliance, which was sometimes an alliance of silence, even against him. And then you felt: he would like to have broken through it, this phalanx. Then he made assumptions. Sometimes he hit the nail on the head. And sometimes he was completely off-target. Especially when it was about something that … yes, that concerned himself.’

  Gregorius held his breath. Would he now learn something about Estefânia Espinhosa? He could ask neither Eça nor O’Kelly about her; that was out of the question. Had Prado been wrong in the end? Had he taken the woman to safety from a danger that didn’t exist? Or did Eça’s hesitation concern a completely different memory?

  ‘I’ve always hated Sundays here,’ said Eça in parting. ‘Cake without taste, whipped cream without taste, gifts without taste, phrases without taste. The hell of convention. But now … the afternoons with you … I could get used to that.’

  He took his hand out of his jacket pocket and held it out to Gregorius. It was the hand with the missing fingernails. Gregorius felt its solid pressure all the way back on the ferry.

  PART III

  THE ATTEMPT

  24

  On Monday morning, Gregorius flew to Zurich. He had woken at dawn and had thought: I am losing myself. It wasn’t that he had woken up and then had the thought, but the other way round: first the thought had been there and then the waking. So this special, transparent awareness, which was different from the awareness that had filled him on the trip to Paris as something new, had, in a certain sense, been nothing but that thought. He wasn’t sure he knew what he thought with it and in it, but, with all its vagueness, the thought had possessed an imperious distinctness. Panic seized him and he had begun to pack with trembling hands, jumbling books and clothes together. When the suitcase was fastened, he forced himself to calm down and stood at the window for a while.

  It would be a radiant day. In Adriana’s parlour, the sun would illuminate the parquet floor. In the morning light, Prado’s writing desk would look even more deserted than usual. On the wall above the desk hung notes with faded, barely legible words, discernible from a distance only by a few points where the pen had pressed harder on paper. He would like to have known what the doctor’s words were supposed to have reminded him of.

  Tomorrow or the day after, perhaps even today, Clotilde would come to the hotel with a new invitation from Adriana. João Eça was counting on him to come for chess on Sunday afternoon. O’Kelly and Mélodie would be amazed that they never heard anything from him again, from the man who had emerged out of nowhere and had asked about Amadeu as if his salvation depended on understanding who he had been. Father Bartolomeu would find it strange that he returned the copy of Prado’s valedictory address in the post. Nor would Mariana Eça understand why he had disappeared off the face of the earth. And Silveira. And Coutinho.

  When he settled his bill the woman at the reception desk said that she hoped nothing bad had made him leave so suddenly. He didn’t understand a single word of the taxi driver’s Portuguese. When he paid him at the airport, he found in his coat pocket the piece of paper on which Júlio Simões, the second-hand book dealer, had written down the address of a language school. He looked at it for a moment and then threw it into the wastepaper basket at the door of the departure lounge. The flight at ten was half empty, they told him at the counter, and gave him a window seat.

  At the departure gate, he heard only Portuguese spoken. Once he also heard the word português. Now it was a word that scared him but he couldn’t have said why. He wanted to sleep in his own bed on Länggasse; he wanted to walk on Bundesterrasse and over the Kirchenfeldbrücke; he wanted to talk about the ablativus absolutus and The Iliad; he wanted to stand on Bubenbergplatz, where he knew his way around. He wanted to go home.

  At the approach to Kloten, he was woken by one of the stewardesses asking a question in Portuguese. It was a long question but he understood it without an effort and answered in Portuguese. He looked down on the lake of Zurich. Large parts of the landscape lay under dirty snow. Rain pelted on the wings of the aircraft.

  But it wasn’t Zurich where he wanted to be; it was Bern. He was glad he had Prado’s book with him. When the plane landed and everyone else put away their books and newspapers, he took it out and began to read.

  JUVENTUDE IMORTAL. IMMORTAL YOUTH. In youth we live as if we were immortal. Knowledge of mortality capers around us like a brittle paper ribbon that barely touches our skin. When in life does that change? When does the ribbon start twining around us tighter, until it ends by strangling us? How do we recognize its soft, but unrelenting pressure that makes us know it will never again subside? How do we recognize it in others? And how in ourselves?

  Gregorius wished the flight were a bus so that you could simply sit there until the final stop, go on reading and then return. He was the last one out of the plane.

  At the ticket counter of the main railway station in Zurich he hesitated so long that the woman twisted her bracelet impatiently.

  ‘Second class,’ he said at last.

  As the train left the station and reached its full speed, it occurred to him that Natalie Rubin would be searching in the libraries today for a book on the Portuguese Resistance and that the other books were on their way to him in Lisbon. In the mid-week, long after he was living on Länggasse again, she would go to the Haupt bookshop only a few houses away from his flat and then take the Persian grammar to the post office. What could he say to her if he should run into her? What could he say to the others? Kägi and his colleagues? The students? Doxiades would be the easiest, and yet: what would be the right words, the words that said it? When Bern cathedral came into view, he had the feeling he would be entering a forbidden city in a few minutes’ time.

  It was icy cold in the flat. Gregorius pulled up the Venetian blind in the kitchen that he had pulled down two weeks ago in order to hide. The record of the language course was still on the record player, the cover on the table. The telephone receiver was turned around on the cradle and reminded him of the night conversation with Doxiades. Why do traces of the past make me sad even when they’re traces of something cheerful? Prado had asked himself in one of his laconic notes.

  Gregorius unpacked the suitcase and put the books on the table. O GRANDE TERRAMOTO. A MORTE NEGRA. He turned on the heat in all the rooms, put on the washing machine, and then started reading about the Portuguese plague in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It wasn’t difficult Portuguese and he progressed well with it. After a while, he lit the last cigarette from the packet he had bought in the café near Mélodie’s house. In the fifteen years that he had lived here, this was the first time that cigarette smoke hung in the air. Now and then, when a passage in the book came to an end, he thought of his first visit to João Eça and it was as if he could feel in his throat the burning tea he had poured into himself to make it easier for Eça’s trembling hands.

  As he went to the cupboard to get a thicker sweater, he recalled the sweater in which he had wrapped the Hebrew Bible at the abandoned Liceu. It had been good to sit at Senhor Cortês’s desk and read the Book of Job, while the cone of sunlight wandered through the room. Gregorius thought of Eliphaz of Teman, Bildad of Shuah, and Zophar of Na’ama. He pictured the railway station sign at Salamanca and remembered how, in preparation for Isfahan, he had written the first Persian letters on the blackboard in his room not far from here. He took a sheet of paper and tried to recall them now. A few lines and loops came, a dot for the vocalization. Then he ripped it up.

  He was startled when the doorbell rang. It was Frau Loosli, his neighbour. She had seen from the change in the doormat that he was back, she said, and gave him the post and the mailbox key. Had he had a good
trip? And was there always a school holiday this early in the year?

  The only thing in the mail that interested Gregorius was a letter from Kägi. Contrary to habit, he didn’t use the letter opener, but ripped the letter open quickly.

  Dear Gregorius,

  I didn’t want to leave the letter you wrote me unanswered: It touched me too much. And I assume that, wherever your travels take you, you will have the mail forwarded.

  The first thing I’d like to tell you is this: our Gymnasium feels remarkably empty without you. How empty may be shown by the fact that today in the staffroom Virginie Ledoyen said quite suddenly: ‘I sometimes hated him for his blunt, uncouth manner; and it really wouldn’t have hurt if he had sometimes dressed a little better. Always this worn-out, baggy stuff. But I must say, I must say: somehow I miss him. Étonnant.’ And what our esteemed French colleague says is nothing compared to what we hear from the students. And, I might add, from quite a few female students. When I take your classes now, I feel your absence as a big, dark shadow. And what will happen now with the chess tournament?

  Marcus Aurelius, indeed! If I may confide this to you, more and more my wife and I have had the feeling of losing our two children recently. It’s not a loss through sickness or accident, it’s worse: they reject our whole way of life and aren’t at all afraid of saying so. There are moments when my wife looks as if she’s going to pieces. So your reminder of the wise emperor was right on target. And let me add something you hopefully won’t regard as importunate: whenever I see the envelope with your letter, I feel a twinge of envy. Simply to get up and go: what courage! ‘He just got up and went,’ the students keep saying. ‘Just got up and went.’