Night Train to Lisbon

by Pascal Mercier

  Despite the noise of traffic outside the window, silence filled the room.

  ‘I can see him now coming towards me, the hospital report in his hand; it was in a yellowish envelope. He had gone there because of piercing headaches and dizziness. He was afraid it could he a tumour. Angiography, radiography revealed nothing. Only an aneurysm. “You could live to be a hundred with that,” the neurologist had told him. But Amadeu was pale as a ghost. “It can burst any minute, any minute. How can I live with this time bomb in my brain?” he said.’

  ‘He took the map of the brain off the wall,’ said Gregorius.

  ‘I know, that was the first thing he did. What it meant, you can guess only if you know what unbounded admiration he had for the human brain and its enigmatic achievements. A proof of God’s existence, he said, it’s a proof of God’s existence. Only there is no God. And from now on he steered clear of every thought of the brain. Every clinical syndrome with the remotest connection to the brain, he immediately referred to the specialists.’

  Gregorius pictured the big book that lay in Prado’s room on top of the heap of books. O cérebro sempre o cérebro, he heard Adriana say. Porquê não disseste nada?

  ‘Nobody but me knew about it. Not Adriana. Not Jorge.’

  The pride was barely audible, but it was there.

  ‘Later we seldom talked about it, and never for long. There wasn’t much to say. But the threat lay like a shadow over the last seven years of his life. There were moments when he wished it would finally happen. To get rid of the fear.’

  She looked at Gregorius. ‘Come.’ She led the way into the kitchen. From the top shelf of a cupboard she took a big flat box of lacquered wood, its cover embellished with marquetry, and sat down at the kitchen table.

  ‘A few of his notes were written in my kitchen. It was another kitchen, but it was at this table. The things I write here are the most dangerous, he said. He didn’t want to talk about them. Writing doesn’t require speech, he said. He’d sit here all night and then go to the office without having had any sleep. He ruined his health. Adriana hated it. She hated everything connected with me. “Thanks,” he said when he left. “With you it’s like being in a quiet, protected port.” I always kept the notes in the kitchen. They belonged here.’

  She opened the engraved clasp of the box and took out the top three sheets. After she had read a few lines to herself, she pushed the papers towards Gregorius.

  He read. Whenever he didn’t understand something, he looked at her and she translated it.

  MEMENTO MORI. Dark monastery walls, downcast look, snow-covered cemetery. Must it be that?

  Reflecting on what you may really want. The awareness of limited, ephemeral time as a source of strength to withstand your own habits and expectations, but mostly the expectations and threats of others. So something that opens up and doesn’t lock the future. Understood like this, the memento is a danger for the powerful, the oppressors who try to keep the oppressed from finding an ear for their wishes, not even in themselves.

  ‘Why should I think about it, the end is the end, it comes when it comes, why do you tell me that, that doesn’t change in the least.’

  What is the reply?

  ‘Don’t waste your time, do something worthwhile with it.’

  But what can that mean: worthwhile? Finally to start realizing long-cherished wishes. To attack the error that there will always be time for it later. The memento as an instrument in the struggle against indolence, self-deception and fear, linked with the necessary change. Take the long-dreamed-of trip, learn this language, read those books, buy yourself this jewellery, spend a night in that famous hotel. Don’t miss out on yourself.

  Bigger things are also part of that: to give up the loathed profession, break out of a hated milieu. Do what contributes to making you more genuine, moves you closer to yourself.

  Lying on the beach or sitting in the café from morning to night: that can also be the answer to the memento, the answer of one who has only worked up to now.

  ‘Think that you have to die someday, maybe this morning.’

  ‘I think of it all the time, and so I play hooky from the office and let myself bask in the sun.’

  The apparently gloomy warning doesn’t lock us up in the snow-covered monastery garden. It opens the way out and wakes us to the present.

  With death in mind straightening out the relationship with others. Ending a hostility, excusing yourself for an injustice done, expressing an acknowledgement that pettiness kept us from doing. Stop taking trivialities seriously, the jibes of others, their pompousness, their entire bad judgement of us. The memento as a demand to feel different.

  The danger: relations are no longer genuine and alive because they lack the momentary seriousness assumed by a certain lack of distance. And: for much of what we experience, it is crucial not to be linked with thoughts of finitude, but rather with the feeling that the future will still be very long. It means nipping this experience in the bud if the awareness of impending death would seep in.

  Gregorius told her about the Irishman who had dared to appear at the evening lecture in All Souls College at Oxford with a bright red football.

  ‘Amadeu noted: What wouldn’t I have given to be the Irishman! ’

  ‘Yes, that fits,’ said Maria João, ‘that fits precisely. Above all, it fits the beginning, our first meeting, when, as I would say today, everything was already predestined. It was in my first year at the girls’ school of the Liceu. We were all in awe of the boys on the other side of the fence. Latin and Greek! One day, it was a warm morning in May, I simply went over there, I’d had enough of the stupid awe in which we held them. They played, they laughed, they played. Amadeu was the only one who didn’t. He sat on the steps his arms wrapped around his knees, and was looking at me. As if he had been waiting years for me. If he hadn’t looked like that – I wouldn’t have simply sat down next to him. But it seemed to be the most natural thing in the world.

  ‘“You’re not playing?” I said. He shook his head, short and sweet, almost a little gruffly.

  ‘“I read this book,” he said in the soft, irresistible tone of a dictator who doesn’t yet know anything of his despotism and in a certain sense would never know it. “A book about saints, Thérèse of Lisieux, Teresa of Ávila and so on. After that, everything I do seems so banal. Simply not important enough. You understand?”

  ‘I laughed. “My name’s Ávila, Maria João Ávila,” I said.

  ‘He laughed too, but it was a tormented laugh; he felt he wasn’t being taken seriously.

  ‘“Not everything can be important, and not always,” I said. “That would be awful.”

  ‘He looked at me and now his smile wasn’t tormented. The Liceu bell rang for the end of break.

  ‘“Will you come back tomorrow?” he asked. No more than five minutes had passed, and it felt as if we had known each other for years.

  ‘Naturally I went back the next day and by then he knew everything about my last name. He gave me a lecture about Vasco Ximeno and Count Raimundo de Borgonha, who had been dispatched to the town by King Alfonso VI of Castile, about Antão and João Gonçalves de Ávila, who brought the name to Portugal in the fifteenth century, and so on.

  ‘“We could go to Ávila together,” he said.

  ‘The next day, I looked out of the classroom towards the Liceu and I saw two dazzling points of light in the window. It was the sunlight on the lenses of his opera glasses. Everything moved so fast, everything always moved so fast with him.

  ‘At break, he showed me the opera glasses. “They belong to Mamã,” he said. “She likes going to the opera, but Papá …”

  ‘He wanted to make me a good student so I could become a doctor. I really didn’t want that, I said. I wanted to be a nurse.

  ‘“But you …” he began.

  ‘“A nurse,” I said. “A simple nurse.”

  ‘It took him a year to accept it. That I stuck to my guns and couldn’t be compelled by him –
that shaped our friendship. For that’s what it was: a lifelong friendship.

  ‘“You have such tanned knees, and your dress smells so good, of soap,” he said two or three weeks after our first encounter.

  ‘I had given him an orange. The others in the class were really jealous: the aristocrat and the peasant girl. Why Maria of all people? one of them asked, not knowing I was near by. They imagined things. Father Bartolomeu, Amadeu’s favourite teacher, didn’t like me. When he saw me, he turned round and went the other way.

  ‘On my birthday, I was given a new dress. I asked Mamã to shorten it a little. Amadeu didn’t comment on it.

  ‘Sometimes he came over to the girls’ side and we went for a walk at break. He told me about his home, his father’s back, his mother’s silent expectations. I learned about everything that mattered to him. I was his confidante. Yes, that’s what I was: his lifelong confidante.

  ‘He didn’t invite me to the wedding. “You’d only be bored,” he said. I stood behind a tree when they came out of the church. It was an expensive society wedding. Big, shiny cars, a gown with a long white train. Men in tailcoats and top hats.

  ‘It was the first time I set eyes on Fátima. A well-proportioned, beautiful face, white as alabaster. Long black hair, a boyish figure. Not a fashion plate, I’d say, but somehow … withdrawn. I can’t prove it, but I think he patronized her. Without noticing it. He was that sort of man. Not a domineering nature, not at all, but controlling, glorious, superior. Basically, there was no place in his life for a woman. When she died, it was a deep shock for him.’

  Maria João fell silent and looked out of the window. When she continued, it was hesitantly, as if with a bad conscience.

  ‘As I said: a deep shock. No doubt. And yet … how should I put it: not a shock that would penetrate to the deepest part of him. In the first days after her death, he often sat with me. Not to be comforted. He knew that he … that he couldn’t expect that from me. Yes, he knew that. He must have known. He simply wanted me to be there. That’s how it often was: I had to be there.’

  Maria João got up, went to the window and stood there looking out, her hands clasped behind her back. When she went on talking, it was in the soft voice of secrecy.

  ‘The third or fourth time, he finally found the courage; the inner need had become too great, he had to tell somebody. He couldn’t produce any children. He had had an operation not to become a father under any circumstances. That was long before he met Fátima.

  ‘“I don’t want little, defenceless children, who have to bear the burden of my soul,” he said. “I know how it was with me – and still is.”’

  Gregorius told Maria João what Amadeus had written to his father. Parental will and fear are branded on the souls of the children, who are helpless and ignorant of what is happening to them. It would take a lifetime to decipher the marks of the branding iron and we can never be sure we have understood it.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes. What weighed on him wasn’t the operation, he never regretted it. It was that he hadn’t told Fátima about it. She suffered from childlessness and he almost choked on his bad conscience. He was a brave man, a man of really extraordinary courage. But in this he was cowardly and he never got over this cowardice.’

  He’s a coward when it comes to Mamã, Adriana had said. The only cowardice in him. He who usually faces up to unpleasant things.

  ‘I understood it,’ said Maria João. ‘Yes, I believe I can say that I understood it. After all, I experienced how deeply he was influenced by his father and mother. And yet I was upset. Also because of Fátima. But what upset me even more was the finality, even brutality of his decision. In his mid-twenties he committed himself in this matter. For ever. It took me about a year before I could say: He wouldn’t be Amadeu if he couldn’t do such a thing.’

  Maria João picked up Prado’s book, put on a pair of glasses and started leafing through it. But her thoughts were still in the past and she took the glasses off again.

  ‘We never talked about Fátima, about what she meant to him. She and I once met in café; she came in and felt obliged to sit with me. Even before the waiter came, we both knew it was a mistake. Fortunately, it was only an espresso.

  ‘I don’t know if I understood the whole thing or if I didn’t. I’m not even sure if he understood it. And here is my cowardice: I didn’t read what he wrote about Fátima. “You may read it only after my death,” he said when he gave me the sealed envelope. “But I don’t want it to fall into Adriana’s hands.” More than once, I’ve picked up the envelope. At some point, I decided I didn’t want to open it. And so it is still here in the box.’

  Maria João put the text about the warning of death back in the box and pushed it aside.

  ‘One thing I do know: when the thing happened with Estefânia, I wasn’t a bit surprised. It happens: one doesn’t know what a person is missing until he gets it and then all of a sudden it’s quite obvious.

  ‘He changed. For the first time in forty years he seemed embarrassed with me and to want to hide something about himself from me. I learned only that there was somebody, somebody from the Resistance who was also connected with Jorge. And that Amadeu wouldn’t allow it, couldn’t allow it. But I knew him: he thought constantly of her. From his silence, it was clear that I was not to meet her. As if I could learn something about him from seeing her that he didn’t want me to know. That no one was to know. Not even himself, so to speak. I went there and waited in front of the house where the Resistance met. Only one woman came out and I realized at once: That’s her.’

  Maria João’s glance fixed on a distant point in the room.

  ‘I won’t describe her to you. I’ll only say this: I could immediately imagine what had happened to him. That the world suddenly looked quite different for him. That the previous order had been turned upside down. That all of a sudden, quite different things mattered. That’s the kind of woman she was. And she was only in her mid-twenties. She wasn’t only the ball, the red Irish ball in the Oxford college. She was much more than all red Irish balls together. He must have felt that she was the chance for him to be whole. As a man, I mean.

  ‘That’s the only way to explain why he staked everything on it: the respect of others, the friendship with Jorge, which had been sacred to him, even his life. And that he came back from Spain as if he … was destroyed. Destroyed, yes, that’s the right word. He slowed down, had trouble concentrating. There was no more of the earlier quicksilver in his veins, no more of his boldness. His life glow was extinguished. He spoke of having to learn life all over again.

  ‘“I was out at the Liceu,” he said one day. “Back then, everything was still ahead of me. So much was still possible. Everything was open.”’

  Maria João had a lump in her throat. She cleared her throat and when she went on, her voice sounded hoarse.

  ‘He said something else. “Why didn’t we ever go to Ávila together?” he said.

  ‘I thought he had forgotten it. He hadn’t. We wept. It was the only time we wept together.’

  Maria João went out of the room. When she came back, she had a scarf around her neck and a thick coat over her arm.

  ‘I’d like to go to the Liceu with you,’ she said. ‘What’s left of it.’

  Gregorius imagined her looking at the pictures of Isfahan and asking questions. He was amazed that he wasn’t embarrassed. Not with Maria João.

  39

  She, the eighty-year-old woman, drove the car with the calm and precision of a cab-driver. Gregorius looked at her hands on the steering wheel and the gearshift. They weren’t elegant hands, nor did she take the time to look after them. They were hands that had cared for sick people, emptied bedpans, applied bandages. Hands that knew what they were doing. Why hadn’t Prado made her his assistant?

  They stopped and walked through the park. She wanted first to go to the girls’ school.

  ‘I haven’t been here in thirty years. Not since his death. Back then I was here almost e
very day. I thought, the shared place, the place of our first meeting, could teach me to part from him. I didn’t know how I was to do it: part from him. How do you part from somebody who shaped your own life like nobody else?

  ‘He gave me something I didn’t know before and have never experienced since: his unbelievable ability to empathize. He was often preoccupied and he could be dreadfully self-referential. But at the same time, as far as others were concerned, he possessed an imagination so fast and precise it could make you dizzy. He seemed to tell me how I felt even before I had begun to look for the words. Wanting to understand others was a passion with him. But he wouldn’t have been Amadeu if he hadn’t also questioned the possibility of such an understanding and been so radical in his doubts that it could make one’s head spin to see him swing in the opposite direction.

  ‘It created an unbelievable, breathtaking closeness when he was like that with me. In our family we were very serious with each other, practical so to speak. And then came someone who could see inside me. It was like a revelation. And it let a hope emerge.’

  They stood in Maria João’s old classroom. The benches had been removed but the blackboard was still there. The windows were missing a pane of glass here and there. Maria João opened one and its squeaking spoke of decades. She pointed to the Liceu.

  ‘There. Over there, on the third floor, were the points of light of the opera glasses.’ She swallowed. ‘That someone, a boy from an aristocratic family, was looking for me with opera glasses: that … was really something. And as I said, it let a hope emerge. It still had a childish form, this hope, and naturally it wasn’t clear what it was about. Nevertheless, it was, in a vague form, the hope for a shared life.’

  They went down the stairs which were coated with a film of damp dust and rotting moss, as in the Liceu. Maria João was silent until they had crossed the park.