Night Train to Lisbon

by Pascal Mercier

  ‘He never wept in public, and not at the grave either. It was February the third, an unusually mild day, but he kept rubbing his hands, his hands were easily cold, and then, when the coffin was lowered into the ground, he buried his hands in his pockets and watched it, with a look I had never seen in him before, the look of someone who is burying everything he has, absolutely everything. Quite different from at the grave of Papá and Mamã, where he stood like someone who had prepared himself for this parting a long time and knew that it also meant a step forward in his own life.

  ‘Everyone felt that he wanted to be alone at the grave and so we left. When I looked back, he was standing next to Fátima’s father, who had also remained, an old friend of Papá’s. Amadeu had met Fátima at his house and had come home in a trance. Amadeu embraced the big man, who wiped his eyes with his sleeve and then went away with ostentatiously bold steps. My brother stood head down, eyes shut, and hands folded alone at the open grave, for at least a quarter of an hour. I could swear he was praying, I really hope so.’

  I love people who pray. I need the sight of them. I need it to withstand the superficial and the thoughtless. Gregorius pictured the student Prado as he had spoken about his love of cathedrals in the auditorium of the Liceu. O sacerdote ateu, he heard João Eça say.

  Gregorius had expected Adriana to give him her hand at parting, for the first time. But instead, the old woman, whose strands of grey hair now fell on her face, slowly came towards him until she stood right in front of him and he could smell the peculiar blend of perfume and medicine on her. He felt like withdrawing, but the way she now shut her eyes and ran her hands over his face had something imperious about it. Like a blind person, she ran along his features with cold, trembling fingers that sought only the slightest touch. Touching the glasses, she faltered. Prado had worn glasses with round lenses in gold frames. He, Gregorius, was the foreigner, who had set time in motion again and had sealed the death of her brother. And he was also this very brother, who had come back to life in the telling. The brother – at that moment, Gregorius was sure of it – who had something to do with the scar under the velvet ribbon and with the red cedars.

  Adriana stood embarrassed before him, her arms at her sides, looking down. Gregorius grasped her shoulders with both hands. ‘I’ll come back,’ he said.

  27

  He hadn’t been in bed half an hour when the hotel porter informed him that he had a visitor. He couldn’t believe his eyes: it was Adriana, leaning on a cane, who stood in the middle of the hotel lobby, wrapped in a long black coat, the crocheted kerchief around her head. She had the touching yet bombastic look of a woman who had left her house for the first time in years and found herself in a world she no longer knew so that she didn’t even trust herself to sit down in it.

  Now she unbuttoned the coat and took out two envelopes.

  ‘I … I’d like you to read that,’ she said stiffly and uncertainly, as if speaking in the world outside was more difficult, or very different, from inside. ‘One letter I found when we cleared out the house after Mamã’s death. Amadeu came within a hair’s-breadth of seeing it, but I decided to keep it to myself when I found it in the secret compartment of Papá’s desk. The other I found in Amadeu’s desk after his death, buried under a pile of other papers.’ She looked at Gregorius shyly, dropped her eyes, looked at him again. ‘I … I wouldn’t like to remain the only one who knows about the letters. Rita, yes, Rita wouldn’t understand them. And I don’t have anybody else.’

  Gregorius shifted the envelopes from one hand to the other. He searched for words and didn’t find them. ‘How did you get here?’ he asked at last.

  Outside in the taxi, Clotilde was waiting. When Adriana sank into the cushions of the back seat, it was as if this excursion into the real world had consumed all her strength. ‘Adeus,’ she had said to him before she got in. When she had given him her hand, he had felt the bones and the veins on the back of it yield under the pressure. He was amazed to feel how strong and decisive her handshake was, almost like that of someone who lived in the outside world from morning to night and shook dozens of hands every day.

  This surprisingly strong, almost routine handshake reverberated in Gregorius as he watched the taxi drive off. In his mind, he turned Adriana back into the forty-year-old woman described by old Coutinho when he had mentioned the arrogant way she treated the patients. If there hadn’t been the shock of the abortion and if she had lived her own life afterwards, instead of her brother’s life, what a different person she would be today!

  Back in his room, he first opened the thicker envelope. It was a letter from Amadeu to his father, the judge. A letter that had never been sent. That it had been constantly revised over the years could be inferred from the many corrections showing how the handwriting had changed and the inks of different vintages.

  Dear Father, was the original form of address, which later became Honoured feared Father. Even later Amadeu had added Beloved Papá, and the last version had opened with Secretly beloved Papá.

  When your chauffeur took me to the railway station today and I sat on the seat where you sit every morning, I knew I would have to capture in words all the contradictory feelings that threaten to tear me to pieces so as not to be their victim. I believe that by expressing a thing its power is retained and its terror diminished, writes Pessoa. At the end of this letter I will know if he is right. However, I will have to wait a long time for this knowledge; for I already feel that it will be a long and rocky road to achieve the clarity I seek in writing this. And when I think of something that Pessoa failed to mention, I’m afraid: the possibility that a thing can be lost through expressing it. What happens then to all the power and the terror?

  I wish you a successful term, you say every time I go back to Coimbra. Never – at this parting or any other – have you used words that would have expressed the wish that the new term might give me satisfaction or pleasure. In the car, when I ran my hand over the upholstery, I thought: Does he even know the word prazer? Was he ever young? At some point he must have met Mamã. Some time.

  But even though it was the same as always, this time it was also different, Papá. In a year, hopefully you’ll come home, you said when I was already outside. The sentence choked me and I felt I was stumbling. It was a sentence that came from the tormented man with the crooked back and not from the mouth of the judge. Sitting in the car, I tried to hear it as an expression of a pure and simple affection but the tone didn’t convince me, for I knew that most of all he wanted his son, the doctor, to be near him and to help him in the fight against pain. ‘Does he ever mention me?’ I asked Enrique at the wheel and he seemed to be preoccupied with the traffic. His answer was slow in coming. ‘I believe he’s very proud of you,’ he said finally.

  Gregorius knew that Portuguese children, even in the fifties, still addressed their parents formally, but used the indirect form with o pai, a mãe. He had learned that from Cecília, who had first called him você, but interrupted him after a while and suggested that they should say tu, the other was so stiff; after all, it was the abbreviated form of Vossa Mercê, or Your Grace. In the letter the young Prado had decided to alternate between the two extremes, regarding the familiar tu and the formal você. Or had it not been a decision, but rather the natural, unthinking expression of his wavering feelings?

  One sheet of the letter ended with the question to the chauffeur. Prado hadn’t numbered the pages. The continuation was abrupt and written in different ink. Was that Prado’s own order, or had Adriana determined the sequence?

  You are a judge, Father – a person who judges, condemns, and punishes. ‘I no longer know how it happened,’ Uncle Ernesto once said to me; ‘it seems to me that it was fixed at his birth.’ Yes, I thought at the time; exactly.

  I realize that you didn’t behave like a judge at home; you didn’t make judgements more often than other fathers, on the contrary, very seldom. And yet, Father, I often found your silent presence judgemental.


  You are – I imagine – a fair judge, filled with and determined by benevolence, not a judge whose harsh, unsparing judgements come from resentment at the deprivations and failures of his own life, or from the denied guilt of his secret failures. You were as lenient as the law allowed you to be. Nevertheless, I have always suffered from the fact that you are one who sits in judgement over others. ‘Are judges people who send others to prison?’ I asked you after my first day at school, where I had to reveal my father’s profession. That’s what the others were talking about at break. What they said didn’t sound scornful or accusing; rather it was curiosity and the desire for sensation, much the same as their curiosity about another student’s father who worked in the slaughterhouse. From then on, I would make every possible detour to avoid having to pass the prison.

  I was twelve when I slipped past the guard into the courtroom to see you sitting in your robes on the judge’s bench. At that time, you were a regular judge and not yet on the Supreme Court. What I felt was pride but at the same time I was terrified. You were sentencing a habitual thief to prison, without probation because of recidivism. The woman was middle-aged, careworn and ugly, not a face that could charm. Nevertheless, everything in me recoiled when she was led away and disappeared into the bowels of the court, which I imagined as dark, cold and damp.

  I thought the defence didn’t make a good case. He delivered his sentences listlessly, you learned nothing about the woman’s reasons for committing the crime. She couldn’t explain herself, I wouldn’t be surprised if she was illiterate. Later, I lay awake in the dark and defended her and it was not so much a defence against the state attorney as a defence against you. I talked myself hoarse until the stream of words ran dry. In the end, I stood before you paralysed by a lack of words. When I woke up, I realized that ultimately I had defended myself against a charge you had never made. You never accused me, your idolised son, of anything serious, not once, and sometimes I think what I did, I did for this reason: to pre-empt a possible accusation that I seemed to recognize, without knowing anything about it. Isn’t that ultimately the reason why I became a doctor? To do what is humanly possible to cure the devilish affliction of vertebral arthritis? To be protected from the reproach of not sympathizing enough with your silent suffering? A reproach meant to drive away Adriana and Rita.

  But back to the court. Never will I forget the incredulousness and horror that gripped me when I saw the prosecution and the defence turn to each other after the verdict and laugh together. I would have thought such a thing was impossible and, to this day, I can’t grasp it. I’ll say this for you: when you left the chamber, with the books under your arm, your face was serious, regret could be read in it. How much I wished it was really genuine, this regret that a heavy cell door would now close behind the thief and that enormous, unbearably loud keys would turn in the lock!

  I could never forget her, that thief. Many years later, I observed another thief in a department store, a young woman of bewitching beauty, a wizard at making glittering things disappear into her coat pockets. Confused by the joy I felt as I watched her on her reckless raid of the store, I followed her. Only very gradually did it occur to me that, in my imagination, the woman was avenging that other thief you had sent to prison. When I saw a man approaching her with a purposeful step, I went up to her and whispered: ‘Cuidado!’ Her presence of mind left me speechless. ‘Vem, armor,’ she said and hung on to me, her head on my shoulder. In the street, she looked at me and now anxiety could be read in her eyes, in amazing contrast to her nonchalant, cold-blooded actions.

  ‘Why?’ The wind blew her hair into her face and hid her expression for a moment. I stroked it off her forehead.

  ‘It’s a long story,’ I said. ‘But to cut it short: I love thieves. Assuming I know their names.’

  She pursed her lips and considered for a moment. ‘Diamantina Esmeralda Ermelinda.’

  She smiled, pressed a kiss on my lips and disappeared round the corner. Afterwards I sat at the table opposite you with a feeling of triumph. At this moment, all the thieves in the world mocked all the law books in the world.

  Your law books: for as long as I can remember, the uniform black leather volumes have filled me with awe. Those weren’t like other books, they possessed a special status and a unique dignity. They were so grand that it surprised me to find Portuguese words in them – even though they were heavy, baroque, and squiggly words, invented, it seemed to me, by denizens of a different planet. Their foreignness and remoteness were underlined even more by the sharp smell of dust that penetrated from the shelf and made me think vaguely that it had to be part of the nature of these books that no one ever took them down and they kept their sublime content entirely to themselves.

  Much later, when I began to grasp what the arbitrariness of a dictatorship meant, I sometimes pictured those unused law books from my childhood, and then I blamed you, rather childishly, for not taking them out to fling them in the face of Salazar’s thugs.

  You never ordered me not to take the books off the shelf. No, it wasn’t you who stopped me, it was the heavy, majestic volumes themselves that forbade me with draconian rigour to do so, or even to shift them very slightly. How often when I was a little boy did I creep into your study and, with heart pounding, struggle against the wish to pick up a volume and glance at the sacred contents! I was ten when I finally did so, with trembling fingers and after looking over my shoulder to avoid being caught. I wanted to track down the mystery of your profession and understand who you were in the outside world. It was a powerful disappointment to see that the brittle, formal language contained between the covers held absolutely nothing revelatory, nothing that could make one feel the hoped-for frisson of fear.

  Back then, when the court rose after the trial of the thief, our eyes met. In any case, that’s how it seemed to me. I had hoped – and it lasted for weeks, this hope – that you would bring up the matter yourself. Finally, the hope turned to disappointment, which gradually metamorphosed into something closer to protest and rage: did you think I was too young for it, too limited? But that didn’t agree with the fact that otherwise you demanded everything from me and and took it for granted. Was it painful for you that your son had seen you in your judge’s robes? But I never had the feeling that you were embarrassed by your profession. In the end, were you scared of my doubts? You knew that I would have them, even if I was still half-child; you knew me well enough for that; at least I hope so. So, was it cowardice – a kind of weakness I never otherwise connected with you?

  And I? Why didn’t I bring it up myself? The answer is simple and clear: to take you to task – that was something one simply could not do. It would have brought down the whole edifice of the family. And it wasn’t only something one couldn’t do; it was something one couldn’t even think. Instead of thinking and doing it, I combined the two images in my imagination: the familiar, private father, master of silence, and the man in the robes, who measures his words in the courtroom and speaks in a sonorous voice, overflowing with eloquence. And whenever I imagined this, I flinched, for no consoling contradiction emerged. It was hard, Father, that everything fitted together in this way and when I could no longer bear your presence in me like a monolithic figure, I indulged a thought that I generally avoided because it seemed to defile the sacredness of intimacy: that now and then you must have embraced Mamã.

  Why did you become a judge, Papá, and not a defence attorney? Why did you come down on the side of the prosecution? There must be judges, you would probably say, and naturally I know that it would be difficult to argue with this. But why did my father, of all people, have to be one of them?

  So far, it was a letter to a father who was still alive, a letter the student Prado had written in Coimbra; you could imagine he had started it immediately after the return he mentioned. On the next sheet, the ink and the handwriting changed. The pen-stroke was now more self-confident, more relaxed, and as if it were refined by the professional routine of medical notes. And the
verb forms indicated when sentences had been added after the judge’s death.

  Gregorius calculated: there were ten years between the time Prado finished college and the time of his father’s death. Had the silent conversation between father and son come to a halt for so long? When feelings ran deep ten years could pass in a second; nobody knew that better than Prado.

  Did the son have to wait until the father’s death before he could continue writing the letter? When he had finished at medical school, Prado had returned to Lisbon where he worked in the neurological clinic. Gregorius had learned that from Mélodie.

  ‘I was nine then and glad he was back; today I would say it was a mistake,’ she had said. ‘But he was homesick for Lisbon, he was always homesick. As soon as he went away, he wanted to come back. As well as this homesickness he had a crazy love of trains. He was full of contradicitons, my big, beaming brother. There was the traveller in him, the man with wanderlust, who was fascinated by the Trans-Siberian Railway – Vladivostok was a holy name to him – and there was the other side of him, the homesick one. It’s like thirst, he’d say, when it attacks me, homesickness; it’s like an unbearable thirst. Maybe I have to know all the train routes so I can come home at any time. I couldn’t bear to go to Siberia – just imagine: the pounding of the wheels over many days and nights; it would take me farther away from Lisbon, ever farther.’

  It was already getting light when Gregorius laid the dictionary aside and rubbed his burning eyes. He closed the curtain and lay down under the covers in his clothes. I am losing myself: that had been the thought that had made him go to Bubenbergplatz, which he found he could no longer touch. When had that been?