Night Train to Lisbon

by Pascal Mercier

  Then Aurora had taken off his apron, turned on the kitchen radio, taken hold of his hand and shoulder, and waltzed him around the kitchen. Gregorius, who had fled from dancing school back in his youth after one and a half lessons, now spun like a bear, stumbling over the trousers that were too long, gripped by vertigo. I’m going to fall, he thought. He tried to hold on to Aurora who didn’t seem to notice his giddiness and whistled to the music. His knees buckled, and it was only Silveira’s strong grip that prevented the fall.

  Gregorius couldn’t understand what Silveira said to Aurora, but from his tone he was clearly telling her off. He helped Gregorius sit down and brought him a glass of water.

  Half an hour later, they left. He had never seen anything like that, said Silveira in the back of the car. Gregorius had stood this whole stiff company on its head. Well, Aurora always had this reputation … But the others … They had made him promise to bring Gregorius along to the next family party!

  They let the chauffeur drive himself home, then Silveira sat down behind the wheel of the car and they went to the Liceu. ‘It seems right to go there now, somehow, doesn’t it?’ Silveira had suddenly said on the way back.

  In the light of the camping lamp, Silveira looked at the pictures of Isfahan. He nodded. He glanced at Gregorius and nodded again. On a chair lay the blanket as Maria João had folded it. Silveira sat down. He asked Gregorius questions no one here had asked, not even Maria João. How had he come to study ancient languages? Why wasn’t he teaching at the university? He still remembered everything Gregorius had told him about Florence, but hadn’t there been any other women afterwards?

  And then Gregorius told him about Prado. It was the first time he had talked about him with someone who hadn’t known him. Silveira was amazed at everything Gregorius had discovered about him and listened without once interrupting, while he warmed his hands on the camp stove. Could he see the book of the red cedars? he asked at the end.

  He looked at the portrait for a long time. He read the introduction about the thousand unexpressed experiences. And then he re-read it. Then he began leafing through the book. He laughed and read aloud: Petty book-keeping about generosity: there is that, too. He turned some more pages, stopped, leafed back and read aloud:

  AREIAS MOVEDIÇAS. QUICKSAND. When we have understood that no matter how hard we try it’s a matter of pure luck whether we succeed or not; when we have understood that in all our actions and experiences we are as quicksand before ourselves and for ourselves: what then happens to all the intimate respected feelings like pride, remorse and shame?

  Now Silveira stood up and paced back and forth, Prado’s text before his eyes. Feverishly. He read aloud: To understand yourself: is that a discovery or a creation? He turned a few more pages and read aloud again: Is anyone really interested in me, and not only in his interest in me? He had come upon a longer piece of text, sat down on the edge of Senhor Cortês’s desk and lit a cigarette.

  PALAVRAS TRAIÇOEIRAS. TREACHEROUS WORDS. When we talk about ourselves, about others, or simply about things, we want – it could be said – to reveal ourselves through our words: we want to show what we think and feel. We let others have a glimpse into our soul. (We give them a piece of our mind, as they say in English. An Englishman said that to me when we stood at a ship’s railing. That’s the only good thing I brought from that absurd country. Maybe also the memory of the Irishman with the red football in All Souls.) In this understanding of the case, we’re the sovereign director, the self-appointed dramaturge as far as exposing our self is concerned. But maybe this is utterly false? A self-deception? For not only do we reveal ourselves with our words, we also betray ourselves. We give away a lot more than we had intended to reveal, and sometimes it’s the exact opposite. And others can interpret our words as symptoms of something we ourselves may not even be aware of. As symptoms of the sickness of being us. It can be amusing when we regard others like this; it can make us more tolerant, but also put ammunition in our hands. And if we think that others are doing the same thing with us, the moment we start speaking words can stick in our throat and fear can silence us for ever.

  On the way back from the Liceu, they stopped at a building with a lot of steel and glass.

  ‘That’s my office,’ said Silveira. ‘I’d like to make a photocopy of Prado’s book.’

  He turned off the engine and opened the door. A look at Gregorius’s face made him stop.

  ‘I see. Yes. This book and a photocopying machine – they don’t go together.’ He ran his hand round the steering wheel. ‘And besides, you want to keep the text all to yourself. Not only the book. The text.’

  Later, when Gregorius lay awake, he kept thinking of these sentences. Why hadn’t there been anybody before in his life who had understood him so quickly and easily? Before they went to bed, Silveira had embraced him for a moment. He was someone he could tell about his dizziness. The dizziness and the fear of the neurologist.

  41

  When João Eça stood in the doorway of his room in the home on Sunday, Gregorius saw from his face that something had happened. Eça hesitated before asking him in. It was a cold March day, yet the window was wide open. Eça straightened his trousers before he sat down. He struggled with himself as he set up the chess pieces with shaking hands. The struggle, Gregorius later thought, was about both his feelings and the question of whether he should talk about them.

  Eça moved the pawns. ‘I wet the bed last night,’ he said in a rough voice. ‘And I didn’t notice it.’ He kept his eyes lowered to the board.

  Gregorius knew that he mustn’t remain silent for too long. He told João that he had reeled dizzily around a strange kitchen last night and had almost landed up in the arms of a hysterical woman; unintentionally, he added.

  That was entirely different. Eça was irritated.

  Because it didn’t concern the lower body? asked Gregorius. In both cases, it was about losing normal control of the body.

  Eça looked at him. The incident had obviously upset him.

  Gregorius made tea and poured him a half-cup. Eça saw the look that fell on his shaking hands.

  ‘A dignidade,’ he said.

  ‘Dignity,’ said Gregorius. ‘I have no idea what that really is. But I don’t think it’s something that gets lost just because the body fails.’

  Eça botched the opening move.

  ‘When they led me away to be tortured, I went in my underpants and they laughed at it. It was a horrible humiliation; but I didn’t feel I was losing my dignity. But what is it then?’

  Did he believe he would lose his dignity if he had talked? asked Gregorius.

  ‘I didn’t say a word, not a single word. I locked away all the possible words inside me. Yes, that’s it: I locked them away and bolted the door irrevocably. So it was impossible for me to talk, it was no longer negotiable. That had a remarkable effect: I stopped regarding the torture as an activity that others had to endure, and saw it instead as a form of behaviour. I sat there like a mere body, a heap of flesh in a hailstorm of pain. The torturers didn’t know it, but I degraded them, degraded what was happening to a meaningless piece of theatre. That helped to reduce the torture to an agony.’

  And if they had loosened his tongue with a drug?

  He had often asked himself that, said Eça, and he had dreamed about it. He had come to the conclusion that they could have destroyed him with that, but they could never take away his dignity. To lose your dignity, you had to forfeit yourself.

  ‘And then you get worked up about a wet bed?’ said Gregorius and shut the window. ‘It’s cold and the room doesn’t smell, not at all.’

  Eça ran a hand over his eyes. ‘I don’t want all those tubes and pumps. I just want to live a few weeks longer.’

  That there are things a person wouldn’t do or allow at any price: maybe that’s what dignity was about, said Gregorius. It didn’t need to be moral boundaries, he added. You could forfeit your dignity in other ways. A teacher who played the crow
ing cock in the variety show against his will. Ass-kissing for the sake of a career. Unbounded opportunism. Duplicity and avoiding conflict to save a marriage. Such things.

  ‘A beggar?’ asked Eça. ‘Can a person be a beggar with dignity?’

  ‘Maybe, if there’s an inevitability in his story, something unavoidable, something he can’t do anything about. And if he stands by it. Stands by himself,’ said Gregorius.

  To stand by yourself – that was also part of dignity. That way, a person could get through a public flogging with dignity. Galileo. Luther. Even somebody who resisted the temptation to deny his guilt. Something politicians couldn’t do. Honesty, the courage for honesty. With others and yourself.

  Gregorius stopped. You knew what you thought only when you expressed it.

  ‘There’s a disgust,’ said Eça, ‘a very special disgust you feel when someone constantly deceives himself. Maybe it’s the lack of dignity that disgusts me even today. At school I sat next to someone who kept wiping his sticky hands on his trousers, and I can still picture him doing it: as if it wasn’t true that he wiped them. He wanted to be my friend but it just wasn’t possible. And not because of the trousers. That’s how he was in general.’

  There was a question of dignity in forgiveness, too, he added. Amadeu had spoken of that sometimes. He had been particularly concerned with the difference between a forgiveness that leaves the other person his dignity and one that takes it away from him. It must not be a forgiveness that demands subordination, he said. Thus, not as in the Bible, where you must regard yourself as a servant of God and Jesus. A servant! That’s what it says!

  ‘He could get white-hot with rage,’ said Eça. ‘And often afterwards he also spoke of the lack of dignity in the New Testament relationship with death. To die in dignity means recognizing the fact of dying. And all immortality kitsch must be resisted. On Ascension Day, his office was always open and he worked even harder than usual.’

  On the ferry back to Lisbon Gregorius reflected on Prado’s words. When we have understood that in all our actions and experiences we are as quicksand … What did that imply for dignity?

  42

  On Monday morning, Gregorius sat in the train to Coimbra, the city where Prado had lived with the tormenting question of whether studying medicine had perhaps been a great mistake because he was mainly following his father’s wish and going against his own will. One day, he had gone into the oldest department store in the city and stolen goods he didn’t need. He who could afford to give his friend Jorge a complete pharmacy. Gregorius thought of his letter to his father and the beautiful thief, Diamantina Esmeralda Ermelinda, to whom Prado’s imagination had assigned the role of avenging the thief sentenced by his father.

  Before he left, he had called Maria João and asked her about the street in Coimbra where Prado had lived. He had given an evasive answer to her worried question about his dizziness. This morning, he hadn’t felt dizzy. But something was different. It was as if he had to overcome a paper-thin air cushion of the softest resistance in order to touch things. He could have experienced the layer of air to be pierced as a protective cover if not for the flickering fear that the world was incessantly slipping past him. On the railway platform in Lisbon, he had walked briskly back and forth to reassure himself. It had helped and when he took a seat in the empty train compartment, he felt calmer.

  Prado must have made this trip countless times. On the telephone, Maria João had spoken of his passion for railways. João Eça had also mentioned it when explaining how Amadeu’s knowledge of such things, his crazy patriotism for the railway, had saved the lives of people in the Resistance. The working of the points had particularly fascinated him João had reported. Maria João had emphasized something else: train travel as a riverbed of imagination, a movement where fantasy liquefied and passed you images from closed chambers of the soul. The conversation with her this morning had lasted longer than planned; the particular, precious trust that had emerged when he had read to her from the Bible yesterday was still there. Gregorius again heard O’Kelly’s sighing words: Maria, my God, yes, Maria. Exactly twenty-four hours had passed since she had opened the door to him, and it was already perfectly clear to him why Prado had written the thoughts he considered most dangerous in her kitchen and nowhere else. What was it? Her fearlessness? The impression that this was a woman who, in the course of her life, had found an internal demarcation and independence that Prado could only dream of?

  They had talked on the phone as if they were still sitting in the Liceu, he at Senhor Cortês’s desk, she in the chair with the blanket over her legs.

  ‘Concerning travel, he was remarkably split,’ she had said. ‘He wanted to travel, ever farther, he wanted to lose himself in the space opened up to him by fantasy. But, as soon as he was away from Lisbon, he became homesick, a horrible homesickness that it was painful to witness. “Look, Lisbon is indeed beautiful, but …” people said to him.

  ‘They didn’t understand that it wasn’t really about Lisbon, but about him, Amadeu. That is, his homesickness wasn’t the yearning for the familiar and beloved. It was something much deeper, something that concerned his core: the wish to take refuge behind the solid, reliable defences that protected him from the malicious undercurrents of his soul. He knew from experience that these defensive walls were strongest when he was in Lisbon, in his parents’ house, in the Liceu, but above all in the blue office. Blue is the colour of my security, he said.

  ‘That it was about self-protection explains why his homesickness always smacked of panic and catastrophe. When it came over him, he broke off a trip from one moment to the next and fled home – often to Fátima’s great disappointment.’

  Maria João had hesitated before adding, ‘It’s good that she didn’t understand what his homesickness was about. Otherwise, she would have had to acknowledge that she hadn’t managed to rid him of his fear of himself.’

  Gregorius opened Prado’s book and read for the nth time a note that seemed to be the key to all the others.

  ESTOU A VIVER EM MIM PRÓPRIO COMO NUM COMBOIO A ANDAR. I LIVE IN MYSELF AS IN A MOVING TRAIN. I didn’t board voluntarily, didn’t have the choice and don’t know the name of the destination. One day in the distant past I woke up in my compartment and felt rolling. It was exciting, I listened to the pounding of the wheels, held my head in the wind and savoured the speed of the things passing by me. I wished the train would never interrupt its journey. By no means did I want it to stop somewhere for ever.

  It was in Coimbra, on a hard bench in the lecture hall, that I became aware: I can’t get off. I can’t change the tracks or the direction. I don’t determine the pace. I don’t see the locomotive and can’t see who’s driving it and whether the engineer makes a reliable impression. I don’t know if he reads the signals correctly and notices if a switch is worked wrong. I can’t change the compartment. In the corridor, I see people passing by and think: Maybe it looks completely different in their compartment than in mine. But I can’t go there and see, a conductor I never saw and never will see has bolted and sealed the compartment door. I open the window, lean far out and see that everybody else is doing the same thing. The train makes a soft curve. The last cars are still in the tunnel and the first are going on. Maybe the train is travelling in a circle, over and over, without anybody noticing it, not even the engineer? I have no idea how long the train is. I see all the others craning their neck to see and understand something. I call a greeting, but the wind blows away my words.

  The lighting in the compartment changes and I can’t determine it. Sun and clouds, twilight and again twilight, rain, snow, storm. The light on the ceiling is dim, grows lighter, a glistening glow, it begins flickering, goes out, comes back, it’s a miserable light, a chandelier, a dazzling coloured neon light, all in one. The heating doesn’t work right. It might heat when it’s hot and break down when it’s cold. If I move the switch, it clicks and clacks, but doesn’t change anything. Strangely, my coat doesn’t always warm m
e evenly either. Outside, things seem to take their usual, reasonable course. Maybe in the other compartments, too? In mine, it’s different from what I expected, completely different. Was the designer drunk? A madman? A diabolical charlatan?

  Train schedules are available in the compartment. I want to see where we’ll stop. The pages are empty. At the railway stations where we stop, place signs are missing. The people outside glance curiously at the train. The windowpanes are murky from frequent fierce storms. I think: they distort the image of what is inside. Suddenly I’m overcome by the need to put things right. The window’s stuck. I shout myself hoarse. The others bang indignantly on the wall. Beyond the station comes a tunnel. It takes my breath away. Leaving the tunnel, I ask myself if we really did stop.

  What can you do on the trip? Tidy up the compartment. Fasten things so they don’t rattle. But then I dream that the wind billows up and smashes the window-panes. Everything I have carefully straightened up flies away. I dream a lot on the endless journey, dreams of missed trains and wrong information in the schedules, of stations that vanish when you arrive, of level-crossing attendants and stationmasters in red caps suddenly standing in the emptiness. Sometimes I fall asleep out of sheer weariness. Falling asleep is dangerous, only seldom do I awake refreshed and am glad about the changes. What usually happens is that I’m bothered by what I find on awakening, both inside and out.

  Sometimes I’m startled and think the train can go off the rails any time. Indeed I usually frighten myself with the thought. But in rare, incandescent moments, it flashes through me like a blessed lightning bolt.

  I wake up and the landscape of the others draws past. Sometimes at breakneck speed so that I hardly keep up with their moods and their exuberant nonsense; then again with tormenting slowness when they keep saying and doing the same thing. I’m glad about the window-pane between them and me. So I see their wishes and plans but they can’t open fire on me unhindered. I’m glad when the train picks up speed and they disappear. The wishes of others: What do we do with them when they strike us?