Night Train to Lisbon

by Pascal Mercier

  It is an error, a nonsensical act of violence, when we concentrate on the here and now with the conviction of thus grasping the essential. What matters is to move surely and calmly, with the appropriate humour and the appropriate melancholy, into the temporally and spatially expanded internal landscape that we are. Why do we feel sorry for people who can’t travel? Because, unable to expand externally, they are not able to expand internally either, they can’t multiply and so they are deprived of the possibility of undertaking expansive excursions in themselves and discovering who and what else they could have become.

  When it grew light, Gregorius went down to the railway station and took the first train to Moutier in the Jura. There were actually people travelling to Moutier. Real people. Moutier wasn’t only the city where he had lost playing chess against the man with the square face, receding forehead and crew cut, because he couldn’t bear how long he took over every move. Moutier was a real city with a city hall, supermarkets and teashops. For two hours, Gregorius searched in vain for the place where the tournament was played. You couldn’t search for something you knew so little about. The waiter in the café was surprised at his confused, incoherent questions and afterwards Gregorius saw him whispering about him to his colleague.

  In the early afternoon, he was back in Bern and took the tram to the university. It was the vacation. He sat down in an empty lecture hall and thought of the young Prado in the lecture halls at Coimbra. According to Father Bartolomeu, he could be merciless in the face of vanity. Merciless. The knife opened in his pocket. And he carried a few pieces of chalk about with him in case he was summoned to the board to be made a fool of. It was many years ago that Gregorius had sat here listening to a lecture on Euripides. He had been stunned at the high-flown gibberish being tossed about. ‘Why don’t you read the text again?’ he had wanted to shout to the young lecturer. ‘Read! Just read! ’ As the man kept introducing more and more French notions that seemed invented to suit the colour of his politics he had left the lecture hall amid the surprised looks of the other students. Too bad, he thought now, that he hadn’t challenged the lecturer back then.

  Outside the university, he paused after a few steps and held his breath. At that moment Natalie Rubin was coming out of the Haupt bookshop. In the bag she was carrying, he thought, was the Persian grammar and as she was now walking towards the post office she must be going to send it to him in Lisbon.

  Perhaps that in itself would not have been enough, Gregorius thought later. Perhaps he would have remained in Bern nevertheless and stood in Bubenbergplatz until he could feel in touch with it again. But then, in the early dusk of the dull day, the light went on it all pharmacies. Cortar a luz, he heard O’Kelly say and, as the words wouldn’t go away, Gregorius went to his bank and transferred a large sum to his current account. ‘Well, at last you are using some more of your money!’ said the woman who managed his savings.

  He told Frau Loosli, his neighbour, that he had some more travelling to do. Could she take in his mail again and forward it to him if he called and told her where? The woman would like to have known more, but didn’t trust herself to ask. ‘Everything’s fine,’ said Gregorius, and held out his hand.

  He called the hotel in Lisbon and asked them to reserve the same room for him as before for an indefinite time. It was as well that he had called, the receptionist said, since a package had come for him and the old woman had delivered another note. There had also been phone calls asking for him; they had written down the numbers. And they had found a chess set in the cupboard. Was it his?

  In the evening, Gregorius went to have dinner at the Bellevue, the safest place not to run into anybody. The waiter was gracious as with an old acquaintance. Afterwards, Gregorius walked on to the Kirchenfeldbrücke, which was open again. He went to the place where the Portuguese woman had read the letter. When he looked down, he became dizzy. Back at home, he read the book about the Portuguese plague until late into the night. He turned the pages feeling like someone who knew Portuguese.

  The next morning, he took the train to Zurich. The plane to Lisbon left shortly before eleven. When it landed in the early afternoon, the sun appeared out of a cloudless sky. The taxi drove with the windows open. The hotel porter, who carried his suitcase and the package containing Natalie Rubin’s books to his room, recognized him and wouldn’t stop talking. Gregorius didn’t understand a word.

  25

  ‘Quer tomar alguma coisa?’ Will you come and have a drink with me? said the note Clotilde had brought on Tuesday. And this time the signature was simpler and more familiar: Adriana.

  Gregorius looked at the three phone messages. Natalie Rubin had called on Monday evening and had been confused when they told her he had left. Then maybe she hadn’t posted off the Persian grammar he had seen her with yesterday?

  He called her. A misunderstanding, he said, he had only made a small trip and was now back in the hotel. She told him about her unsuccessful search for literature on the Resistência.

  ‘If I were in Lisbon – I bet I’d find something,’ she said.

  Gregorius said nothing.

  He had sent her much too much money, she said into the silence. And she was mailing his copy of the Persian grammar today.

  Gregorius was silent.

  ‘You don’t object if I study it, too?’ she asked and suddenly there was a note of trepidation in her voice that really didn’t suit the courtly maiden, much less than the laughter she had drawn him into again.

  No, no, he said and strove for a cheerful tone; why should I?

  ‘Até logo,’ she said.

  ‘Até logo,’ he said too.

  Tuesday night Doxiades and now the girl: why was he suddenly such an illiterate about closeness and distance? Or had he always been, without noticing it? And why had he never had a friend like Jorge O’Kelly had been to Prado? A friend with whom he could have talked about things like loyalty and love, and about death?

  Mariana Eça had called without leaving a message. José António de Silveira, on the other hand, had left him a message inviting him for dinner if he should ever come back to Lisbon.

  Gregorius opened the package of books. The Portuguese grammar was so similar to a Latin book that he had to laugh, and he read it until it grew dark. Then he opened the history of Portugal and discovered that Prado’s lifespan had coincided almost exactly with the length of the Estado Novo. He read about Portuguese fascism and the secret police, PIDE, which Rui Luís Mendes, the Butcher of Lisbon, had belonged to. Tarrafal, he learned, had been the worst camp for political prisoners. It had been on the Cape Verde islands of Santiago and its name had become a symbol for ruthless political persecution. But what interested Gregorius the most was what he read about the Mocidade Portuguesa, a paramilitary organization modelled on the Italian and German pattern. All young people, from grammar school to university, had to join it. That started in 1936, at the time of the Spanish Civil War, when Amadeu de Prado was sixteen. Had he too worn the compulsory green shirt? Raised his arm, as they did in Germany? Gregorius looked at the portrait: inconceivable. But how had he avoided joining it? Had his father used his influence? The judge, who, despite the atrocities of Tarrafal, had his chauffeur pick him up at ten to six in the morning in order to be the first one in the courthouse?

  Late that night, Gregorius stood in the Praça do Rossio. Would he ever be able to touch the square as he had once touched Bubenbergplatz?

  Before he went back to the hotel, he went to the Rua dos Sapateiros. In O’Kelly’s pharmacy, a light was burning, and on the counter he saw the antiquated phone he had rung on Monday night from Kägi’s office.

  26

  On Friday morning, Gregorius called Júlio Simões, the secondhand bookseller, and again asked for the address of the language school, which he had thrown away before the flight to Zurich. The school secretary was amazed when he said he couldn’t wait until Monday and wanted to start lessons right away, if possible.

  The woman who was delegated to g
ive him individual instruction was dressed all in green, and even her eyeshadow matched. She sat down behind a desk in the well-heated room and shivered as she pulled the scarf around her shoulders. Her name was Cecília, she said in a light, melodious voice that didn’t fit the sullen, sleepy face. Please would he tell her who he was and why he wanted to learn the language. In Portuguese, naturally, she added with an expression that seemed to express profound boredom.

  It wasn’t until three hours later, when Gregorius left the school, dizzy with exhaustion, that he realized, what had happened to him during that time: he had treated the sullen woman’s impudent challenge like a surprise opening on the chess board. Why do you never fight in life when you do it so well in chess! Florence had said more than once. Because I find fighting in life absurd, he had answered; you’ve got enough to fight with yourself. And now he had himself actually provoked a fight with the green lady. Had she felt with unbelievable clairvoyance that she had to accept him as he was at this point in his life? Sometimes it had seemed to him to be so, especially when, behind the sullen façade, a triumphant smile had appeared, which told him she enjoyed his progress. ‘Não, não,’ she had protested when he took out the grammar book, ‘tem que aprender falando’. You have to learn by speaking.

  In the hotel, Gregorius lay down on the bed. Cecília had forbidden him the grammar book. Him, Mundus. She had even taken it away from him. Her lips moved incessantly and so did his lips and he had no idea where the words came from; mais doce, mais suave, she said constantly, and when she pulled the filmy green scarf over her lips, so that it blew when she spoke, he waited for the moment when he could see her lips again.

  When he woke up, it was beginning to get dark, and by the time he rang Adriana’s doorbell, it was night. Clotilde led him into the parlour.

  ‘Where were you?’ Adriana asked as soon as he entered the room.

  ‘I’ve come to return your brother’s note,’ said Gregorius and handed her the envelope with the sheets.

  Her features hardened, her hands remained in her lap.

  ‘What did you expect?’ asked Gregorius and it seemed like a bold move on the board whose consequences he couldn’t foresee. ‘That a man like him wouldn’t think about what was right? After an emotional shock like that? After an accusation that put everything he stood for in question? That he would simply go on with business as usual? You can’t be serious!’

  He was alarmed by the ferocity of his last words. He was prepared for her to throw him out.

  Adriana’s features smoothed out and an almost happy amazement spread over her face. She held out her hands to him and Gregorius gave her the envelope. For a while, she stroked it with the back of her hand, as she had done with the furniture on his first visit to Amadeu’s room.

  ‘Ever since then, he’s been going to see the man he met a long time ago in England, on the trip with Fátima. He told me about him when he … came back early, because of me. João is his name, João something. He often visits him. Doesn’t come home at night so I have to send the patients away. Lies upstairs on the floor and studies train routes. He’s always been crazy about trains, but not like that. It’s not good for him, you can see that. His cheeks are hollow, he has lost weight, he’s unshaven. It will be the death of him, I feel it.’

  In the end, her voice had become fretful again, an audible refusal to acknowledge the past as something that was irrevocably past. But before, when he had snapped at her, there was something in her face that could be interpreted as the willingness and even the yearning wish to shake off the tyranny of memory and be freed from the dungeon of the past. And so he risked it.

  ‘He hasn’t studied train routes for a long time, Adriana. He hasn’t visited João for a long time. He hasn’t been practising for a long time. Amadeu is dead, Adriana. And you know that. He died of an aneurysm. Thirty-one years ago, half a human lifetime. In the morning. On Rua Augusta. They called you.’ Gregorius pointed to the grandfather clock. ‘At six twenty-three. That’s how it was, wasn’t it?’

  Dizziness gripped Gregorius, and he held tight to the back of the chair. He wouldn’t have the strength to resist another outburst from the old woman, such as he had experienced in the consulting room a week before. As soon as the dizziness had passed, he would leave the house and never come back. Why, for God’s sake, had he thought it was his duty to free this woman, with whom he really had nothing to do, from the frozen past and bring her back to real life? Why had he seen himself as destined to break open the seals of her mind? What had given him this ludicrous idea?

  They fell silent. The dizziness subsided and Gregorius opened his eyes. Adriana sat slumped on the sofa, had raised her hands to her face and was weeping; the gaunt body twitched, the hands with the dark veins shook. Gregorius sat down next to her and put his arm around her shoulders. Once more, the tears burst out of her, and now she clung to him. Then slowly, the sobs grew weaker and the calm of exhaustion set in.

  When she sat up and reached for her handkerchief, Gregorius stood up and went to the clock. As if in slow motion, he opened the glass in front of the clock face and set the hands to the present time. He didn’t dare turn round; one wrong move, one wrong look could make everything collapse. With a soft snap, the glass closed in front of the face. Gregorius opened the pendulum case and set it in motion. The ticking was louder than he had expected. In the first seconds, there seemed to be nothing in the parlour but this ticking. A new time had begun.

  Adriana looked at the clock and it was the look of a disbelieving child. The hand with the handkerchief had stopped short as if frozen in time. And then something happened that seemed to Gregorius like a seismic shift: Adriana’s eyes flickered, smouldered, went blank, refocused and all of a sudden took on the certainty and brightness of a look thoroughly attuned to the present. Their eyes met and Gregorius put into his all the confidence he possessed so that he could hold hers when they began to flicker again.

  Clotilde appeared with the tea and stood motionless in the doorway, her eyes directed at the ticking clock. Graças a Deus! she said softly. She looked at Adriana and when she put the tea on the table, her eyes glittered.

  What kind of music did Amadeu listen to? Gregorius asked after a while. At first Adriana didn’t seem to understand the question. Her attention apparently had to travel a long way before she could return to the present. The clock ticked and, with every beat, seemed to announce the message that everything had changed. Then, all of a sudden, Adriana stood up without a word and put on a record of Hector Berlioz. Les Nuits d’Été, La Belle Voyageuse, La Captive, La Mort d’Ophélie.

  ‘He could listen to it for hours,’ she said. ‘What am I saying? – for days.’ She sat down on the sofa again.

  Gregorius was sure she wanted to add something. She pressed the cover of the record so hard that her knuckles grew white. She swallowed. Fine drops formed in the corner of her mouth. She ran her tongue over her lips. Now she leaned back against the sofa, like someone yielding to fatigue. The black velvet ribbon slipped out of place and showed a small part of a scar.

  ‘It was Fátima’s favourite music,’ she said.

  When the music had died away and the ticking of the clock again broke the silence, Adriana sat erect and straightened the velvet ribbon. Her voice possessed the amazed calm and relieved confidence of someone who has just overcome an insur mountable internal hurdle.

  ‘Cardiac arrest. At thirty-five. He couldn’t believe it. My brother, who adapted to everything new with tremendous, almost inhuman speed and whose presence of mind grew by leaps and bounds when challenged, so that he seemed to be really alive only when the avalanche of an unexpected event threatened to submerge him – this man who could never get enough of reality, he couldn’t believe, didn’t want to admit that the stillness in her face was not the calm of repose. He refused a postmortem, the idea of the knife was unbearable to him, he kept postponing the funeral, shouted at people who reminded him of realities. He lost track of things, ordered a requiem mass,
cancelled it, forgot that he had done so and blasted the priest when nothing happened. I should have known it, Adriana, he said, she had heart arrhythmia, I didn’t take it seriously. I’m a doctor and didn’t take it seriously. In every other patient I would have taken it seriously but in her I attributed it to nerves. There was an argument with the other women in the nursing home; she wasn’t a trained kindergarten teacher, they said, but only a spoiled daughter from a good family and the wife of a rich doctor, who didn’t know how else to kill time. Her pride was wounded, for she had a natural way with children, they ate out of her hand. The others were just jealous. She thought she had succeeded in diverting attention from her childlessness so well and that’s why her pride was hurt. Unable to fight back, she suffered in silence and then her heart started to beat unevenly. Sometimes it also looked like tachycardia. I should have taken it seriously, Adriana, why didn’t I send her to a specialist? I knew one I studied with in Coimbra, he was a leading authority; all I had to do was call him. Why didn’t I, my God, why didn’t I? I didn’t ausculate her even once, just imagine, not even once.

  ‘So, one year after Mamã’s death, we were again at a requiem mass. Fátima would have wanted it, he said, and besides you have to give death a form, at any rate, religion says that, I don’t know. Suddenly his thoughts were unsettled; não sei, não sei, he said constantly. At the mass for Mamã, he had sat in a dark corner so that it wouldn’t be noticed that he wasn’t taking part in the liturgy. Rita didn’t understand it. They’re only gestures, a framework, she said, you were an altar boy, and it was all right in Papá’s case. Now, with Fátima, he was so off balance that one moment he participated and the next he sat still, as if frozen, instead of praying, and the worst thing was: he made mistakes in the Latin text. Him! Mistakes!