Night Train to Lisbon

by Pascal Mercier

  When his laughter subsided and he felt the weight of the world again, Gregorius thought of how he had laughed with João Eça about the overcooked lunch at the home.

  Silveira went into his study and came back with the napkin from the dining car on which Gregorius had written the Hebrew words: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. He asked Gregorius to read it to him once more, then he asked him to write something from the Bible in Greek.

  Gregorius couldn’t resist writing: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men.

  Silveira picked up his Bible and read these opening sentences of the Gospel of St John:

  ‘So the word is the light of men,’ he said. ‘And so things exist properly only when they are grasped in words.’

  ‘And the words have to have a rhythm,’ said Gregorius. ‘A rhythm such as the words have in St John, for example. Only then, only when they are poetry, do they really shed light on things. In the changing light of the words the same things can look quite different.’

  Silveira looked at him.

  ‘And therefore, when, faced with three hundred thousand books and one word is missing, it has to make you dizzy.’

  They laughed and laughed some more. They looked at each other and knew that they were also laughing at the earlier laughter and because you laughed best about the most important things there were.

  Would he leave him the photographs of Isfahan? Silveira asked later. They hung them in his study. Silveira sat down behind his desk, lit a cigarette and looked at the pictures.

  ‘I wish my ex-wife and my children could see that,’ he said.

  Before they went to bed, they stood silently in the hall for a while.

  ‘That’s also past now,’ said Silveira. ‘Your stay here, I mean. Here in my house.’

  Gregorius couldn’t fall asleep. He imagined how his train would start up the next morning, he felt the first, soft jolts. He cursed the dizziness and the fact that Doxiades was right.

  He turned on a light and read what Prado had noted about intimacy:

  INTIMIDADE IMPERIOSA. IMPERIOUS INTIMACY.In intimacy, we are clasped into one another, and the invisible bonds are liberating shackles. This clasping is imperious: it demands exclusivity. To share is to betray. But we want to love and touch not only one single person. What to do? Control the various intimacies? Strict bookkeeping of subjects, words, gestures? Mutual knowledge and secrets? It would be a silent trickling poison.

  It was already growing light when he slipped into a restless sleep and dreamed of the end of the world. It was a melodious dream without musical instruments or notes, a dream of sun, wind and words. The fishermen with their rough hands shouted coarse things to one another; the salty wind blew away the words, and the word that had escaped him, too. Now he was in the water and he swam deeper with all his might and felt the desire and warmth in his muscles when they braced against the cold. He had to leave the banana boat because he was in a hurry; he assured the fishermen it had nothing to do with them, but they defended themselves and regarded him as a stranger when he went ashore with his sailor’s kitbag, accompanied by sun, wind, and words.

  PART IV

  THE RETURN

  49

  Silveira had long ago disappeared from sight, but Gregorius still kept waving. ‘Is there a company that produces porcelain in Bern?’ he had asked on the platform. Gregorius had taken a picture from the compartment window: Silveira, shielding his cigarette against the wind so he could light it.

  The last houses of Lisbon. Yesterday in the Bairro Alto, he had gone once more to the religious bookshop where he had leaned his forehead on the foggy damp windowpane before ringing the doorbell of the blue house for the first time. Back then, he had had to struggle against the temptation to go to the airport and take the next plane to Zurich. Now he had to resist the temptation to get out at the next station.

  If a memory was extinguished with every metre travelled, and if, in addition, the world reverted to what it had been, so that, when he arrived in Bern, everything would be as before: would the time of his stay also be destroyed?

  Gregorius took out the envelope Adriana had given him. It destroys everything. Everything. What he was about to read, Prado had written after the trip to Spain. After the girl. He thought of what she had said about his return from Spain: he had got out of the taxi unshaven and hollow-cheeked, had gulped down everything as if he hadn’t eaten for a week, taken a sleeping pill and slept for a day and a night.

  As the train arrived in Vilar, where it would cross the border, Gregorius translated the text Prado had written in tiny letters.

  ZINZAS DA FUTILIDADE. ASHES OF FUTILITY. It has been an eternity since Jorge called me in the middle of the night because he was assailed by the fear of death. No, not an eternity. It was in a different time, a completely different time. And it was hardly three years, three perfectly normal, boring calendar years. Estefânia. He spoke then of Estefânia. The Goldberg Variations. She had played them for him, and he wanted to play them himself on his Steinway. Estefânia Espinhosa. What an enchanting, bewitching name! I thought that night. I wanted never to see the woman; no woman could live up to this name, it had to be a disappointment. How could I know that it was the other way around: the name couldn’t live up to her.

  The fear that life remained incomplete, a torso; the awareness of no longer being able to become the one we aimed to be. That’s how we had finally interpreted the fear of death. But how, I asked, can the missing wholeness and coherence of life be feared when it’s not experienced at all as soon as it has become an irrevocable fact? Jorge seemed to understand it. What did he say?

  Why don’t I leaf through, why don’t I watch? Why don’t I want to know what I thought and wrote back then? Whence this indifference? Is it indifference? Or is the loss greater, deeper?

  To want to know how one thought before and how it became what one thinks now: that too, if it existed, was also part of the wholeness of a life. So had I lost what makes death fearsome? The belief in a coherence of life worth struggling for and which we try to wrest from death?

  Loyalty, I tell Jorge, loyalty. That’s how we invent our coherence. Estefânia. Why couldn’t the surf of accident wash her up someplace else? Why to us of all places? Why did she have to put us to a test we weren’t up to? Which neither of us passed, each in his own way?

  ‘You’re too hungry for me. It’s wonderful with you. But you’re too hungry for me. I can’t want this trip. You see, it would be your trip, yours alone. It couldn’t be ours.’ And she was right: you mustn’t make others into the building blocks of your own life, into water bearers in the race for your own bliss.

  Finis terrae. Never have I been so awake as there. And so sober. Since then, I know: my race is at an end. A race I didn’t know I was running, always. A race without rivals, without purpose, without reward. Wholeness? Espejismo, say the Spaniards, I read the word in the newspapers on those days, it’s the only one I still know. Mirage. Fata morgana.

  Our life, those are fleeting formations of quicksand, formed by one gust of wind, destroyed by the next. Images of futility that blow away even before they have properly formed.

  He was no longer himself, Adriana had said. And she wanted nothing to do with her strange, estranged brother. Far away. Very far away.

  When was anybody himself? When he was unchanged? As he saw himself? Or as he was when the passion of thoughts and feelings buried all lies, masks, and self-deceptions? Usually it was others who complained that somebody was no longer himself. Perhaps this is what it really meant: he’s no longer as we would like him to be? So was the whole thing ultimately no more than a kind of rallying cry against a menacing disruption of the usual, masquerading as concern and worry about the alleged welfare of the other?

  On the way to Salamanca,
Gregorius fell asleep. And then something happened that he hadn’t ever experienced: he woke feeling dizzy. Nervous irritation flooded through him, threatening to draw him into the depths, so that he clutched the armrest of the seat. Shutting his eyes made it worse. Then he buried his face in his hands and it was over.

  . Everything’s fine.

  Why hadn’t he flown? Tomorrow morning, in eighteen hours, he would in Geneva, and three hours later at home. At noon he would be with Doxiades, who would arrange all the rest.

  The train slowed down. SALAMANCA. Then a second sign: SALAMANCA. Estefânia Espinhosa.

  Gregorius stood up, heaved the suitcase down from the rack, and held on to it until the dizziness had passed. On the platform, he walked firmly as if to crush the cushion of air surrounding him.

  50

  Later, when he thought back on his first evening in Salamanca, he seemed to have struggled for hours against the dizziness, reeling through cathedrals, chapels and cloisters, blind to their beauty, but overwhelmed by their dark force. He looked at altars, domes, and choir stalls that immediately overlapped in his memory, wound up twice at mass and finally came to rest in an organ concert. I would not like to live in a world without cathedrals. I need their beauty and grandeur. I need them against the vulgarity of the world. I want to let myself be wrapped in the austere coolness of the church. I need their imperious silence. I need it against the witless bellowing of the barracks yard and the witty chatter of the yes-men. I want to hear the rustling of the organ, this deluge of ethereal notes. I need it against the shrill farce of marches.

  That had been written by the seventeen-year-old Prado. A boy who glowed. A boy who went soon after with Jorge to Coimbra, where the whole world seemed to belong to them and where he reprimanded the professors in the lecture hall. A boy who had not yet experienced the tide of accident, of blowing quicksand and the ashes of futility.

  Years later, he had written these lines to Father Bartolomeu: There are things that are too big for us humans: pain, loneliness and death, but also beauty, sublimity and happiness. For them we created religion. What happens when we lose it? Those things are still too big for us. What is left for us is the poetry of the individual life. Is it strong enough to bear us?

  From his hotel room, Gregorius could see the old and the new cathedrals. When the hour struck, he went to the window and looked out at the floodlit facades. San Juan de la Cruz had lived here. Florence had travelled here several times when she was writing about him. He had never felt like making the trip so she had gone with other students. He hadn’t liked the way she and the others. had gushed over the mystical verse of the great poet.

  Over poetry, you didn’t gush. You read it. You read it with the tongue. You lived it. You felt how it moved you, changed you. How it contributed to shaping your own life, giving it colour and melody. You didn’t talk about it and you certainly didn’t make it the cannon fodder of an academic career.

  In Coimbra, he had asked himself if he hadn’t missed a possible life in the university. The answer was no. He felt once again how he had when he had sat in La Coupole in Paris and had put down Florence’s chattering colleagues with his Bernese tongue and knowledge. No.

  Later he dreamed that Aurora was whirling him around to organ music in Silveira’s kitchen. The kitchen expanded and he swam down only to be caught in a vortex where he lost consciousness. Then he woke up.

  He was the first at breakfast. Afterwards he went to the university and asked for the history department. Estefânia Espinhosa’s lecture was in an hour’s time: Isabel la Católica.

  In the inner courtyard of the university, students huddled under the cloisters. Gregorius didn’t understand a word of their rapid Spanish and went to the lecture hall early. It was a panelled room of bare, monastic elegance, with a raised lectern at the front. The room filled up. It was a big room, but soon every seat was taken and students sat on the floor of the aisles.

  I hated this person, the long black hair, the swaying walk, the short skirt. Adriana had seen her as a girl in her mid-twenties. The woman who came in now was in her late fifties. He pictured her shining eyes, the unusual, almost Asian features the contagious, thrilling laugh, the swaying walk, and he simply didn’t want all that to be snuffed out. He could not want it, João Eça. had said of Prado.

  Nobody could want that, thought Gregorius. Not even today. And especially not when he heard her speak. She had a dark, smoky alto voice and spoke the harsh Spanish words with a remnant of Portuguese softness. Right at the beginning, she had turned off the microphone. It was a voice that would fill a cathedral. And her manner made you hope the lecture might never end.

  Gregorius understood hardly anything of what she said. He listened to her as to a musical instrument, sometimes with his eyes shut, sometimes concentrating on her gestures: her hand stroking the grey-streaked hair off her forehead, the other hand holding the silver pen and drawing a line in the air to emphasize things, the elbows leaning on the lectern, her two arms outstretched as if to embrace the lectern when she introduced something new. A girl who had once worked in the post office; a girl with a phenomenal memory retaining all the secrets of the Resistance; the woman who objected when O’Kelly held her around the waist in the street; the woman behind the steering wheel of the car outside the blue house who had travelled for her life to the end of the world; the woman who hadn’t let Prado take her on his trip, a disappointment and a setback that had provoked in him the most painful awareness of his life, the consciousness that the race for his bliss had finally been lost, the feeling that his life, begun so glowingly, had been extinguished and fallen into ashes.

  The shoving of the students as they stood up to leave startled Gregorius. Estefânia Espinhosa packed her papers in her briefcase and came down the steps from the podium. A number of students approached her. Gregorius went outside and waited.

  He had placed himself where he could see her from afar. Should he address her? She approached accompanied by a woman, possibly an assistant. Gregorius’s heart pounded as she passed him. He followed the two upstairs and along a corridor. The assistant went off and Estefânia Espinhosa disappeared through a door. As Gregorius passed the door he saw her name. The name couldn’t live up to her.

  Slowly he returned, gripping the banister. At the foot of the stairs he paused for a moment. Then he ran back upstairs. He waited to catch his breath, then he knocked on the door.

  She had her coat on and was about to leave. She looked at him questioningly.

  ‘I … can I speak French with you?’ asked Gregorius.

  She nodded.

  He introduced himself falteringly and then, as so often of late, he took out Prado’s book.

  Her light brown eyes narrowed. She stared at the book without reaching for it. The seconds passed.

  ‘I … why … Come in.’

  She went to the phone and told someone in Portuguese that she couldn’t come now. Then she took off her coat. She asked Gregorius to sit down and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Is there anything about me in there?’ she asked, exhaling smoke.

  Gregorius shook his head.

  ‘How do you know about me?’

  Gregorius explained. He told her about Adriana and João Eça; of the book about the dark sea that Prado had read at the end. About the second-hand bookseller’s investigations. About the blurb on her books. O’Kelly he didn’t mention. Nor did he say anything about the handwritten note with the small letters.

  Now she wanted to see the book. She read, lighting another cigarette. Then she looked at the portrait.

  ‘That’s how he looked earlier. I’ve never seen a picture from this period.’

  He hadn’t planned to break his journey here, Gregorius said. But then he couldn’t resist it. The picture of Prado, it was so … so incomplete without meeting her. But naturally he knew that it was unreasonable to simply burst in here.

  She went to the window. The phone rang. She let it ring.

  ‘I don’t know if
I want to,’ she said. ‘To talk about those days, I mean. At any rate not here. Can I take the book home with me? I’d like to read it and think about it. Come to my house this evening. Then I’ll tell you how I feel about it.’

  She gave him her card.

  Gregorius bought a guidebook and spent the afternoon visiting monasteries, one after another. He wasn’t one for sightseeing. If people gathered around something, he tended to keep his distance; that equated with his habit of reading bestsellers only years later. So, it wasn’t the tourist instinct that drove him now. It wasn’t until late afternoon that he began to understand: the preoccupation with Prado had changed his feelings about churches and monasteries. Can there be anything more serious than poetic seriousness? he had objected to Ruth Gautschi and David Lehmann. That linked him with Prado. Maybe was this the strongest link. But the man who had changed from a glowing altar boy to a godless priest had gone a step further, a step that Gregorius tried to understand as he walked through the cloisters. Had he managed to extend the poetic depth of the biblical words to the buildings that these words had created? Was that it?

  A few days before his death, Mélodie had seen him coming out of a church. I want to read the mighty words of the Bible. I need the unreal force of their poetry. I love praying people. I need the sight of them. I need them against the malicious poison of the superficial and the thoughtless. Those had been the feelings of his youth. With what feelings had the man entered the church, the man who was waiting for the time bomb in his brain to explode? The man for whom, having journeyed to the end of the world, everything had become ashes?

  While the taxi that took Gregorius to Estefânia Espinhosa’s address waited at the traffic lights he saw a poster with domes and minarets in the window of a travel agent’s. How would it have been if, in the blue Orient with its golden domes, he had heard the Muezzin every morning? If Persian poetry had been the soundtrack of his life?