Night Train to Lisbon

by Pascal Mercier

  She had taken the slow train, she explained, because she wanted to read this book. Le Silence du Monde avant les mots. Nowhere else did she read as well as she did on a train. Nowhere else was her mind so receptive. This made her quite an expert on slow trains. She was also travelling to Switzerland, to Lausanne. Yes, they would arrive in Geneva tomorrow morning. Obviously they had both chosen the slow train for the same reason.

  Gregorius pulled his coat over his face. His reason had been different. He didn’t want to reach Bern. He didn’t want Doxiades to pick up the phone and reserve a bed in the clinic. There were twenty-four stops before Geneva. Twenty-four opportunities to get off the train.

  He sank ever deeper. The fishermen laughed as he danced with Estefânia Espinhosa through Silveira’s kitchen. All these monasteries that led to all these empty apartments. Their echoing emptiness had extinguished the Homeric word.

  He woke with a start . He went to the toilet and washed his face.

  While he slept, the woman had turned off the ceiling light and turned on her reading lamp. She read and read. When Gregorius came back from the toilet, she glanced up and smiled remotely.

  Gregorius pulled his coat over his face again and imagined the reading woman. I stand here completely by chance, you stand there completely by chance, between us the champagne glasses. That’s how it was. No different.

  They could share a taxi to the Gare de Lyon, said the woman, as they pulled into Paris shortly after midnight. La Coupole. Gregorius breathed the perfume of the woman beside him. He didn’t want to go to the clinic. He didn’t want to smell clinical air. The air he had fought his way through when he had visited his dying parents in the overheated ward where the air always smelt of urine.

  At close to four in the morning, when he woke up beneath his coat, the woman had fallen asleep with the open book in her lap. He turned off the reading lamp over her head. She turned to the side and pulled her coat over her face. Dawn broke. Gregorius didn’t want it to grow light.

  The dining-car waiter passed by with the drinks trolley. The woman woke up. Gregorius handed her a cup of coffee. Silently they watched the sun rise behind a fine veil of clouds. It was strange, said the woman suddenly, that glória could stand for two completely different things: external, noisy glory and internal, silent bliss. And after a pause: ‘Bliss – what are we really talking about?’

  Gregorius carried her heavy suitcase through Geneva station. People in the Swiss train were talking loudly and laughing. Seeing his anger, the woman pointed to the title of her book and laughed. Then he laughed too. In the middle of his laughter, the loudspeaker announced Lausanne. The woman stood up, he took down her suitcase. She looked at him. ‘C’était bien, ça,’ she said. Then she left the train.

  Fribourg. Gregorius slept. He dreamt he was climbing up the mountain and looking down on Lisbon at night. He was on the ferry crossing the Tagus. He was sitting with Maria João in the kitchen. He was visiting the monasteries of Salamanca and listening to Estefânia Espinhosa’s lecture.

  Bern. Gregorius got out. He put down the suitcase and waited. When he picked it up and went on, it was as if he were wading through lead.

  52

  After leaving his luggage in the cold flat, Gregorius went out to the photo shop. Then he sat in the living room. In two hours, he could pick up the developed pictures. What should he do until then?

  The telephone receiver was still turned around on the cradle and reminded him of the night-time conversation with Doxiades five weeks ago. Back then it had snowed; now people were walking around without coats. But the light was still pale, so unlike the light on the Tagus.

  The language-course record was still on the turntable. Gregorius switched it on. He compared the voices with the voices on the old trams of Lisbon. He imagined travelling from Belém to the Alfama quarter and taking the Metro on to the Liceu.

  The doorbell rang. The doormat, Frau Loosli, always knew from the position of the doormat when he was at home, she said. She gave him a letter from the school office that had come the day before. The other mail had been forwarded to Silveira’s address. He looked pale, she said. Was everything all right?

  Gregorius read the communication from the school and forgot the details even as he read them. He arrived early at the photo shop and had to wait. He almost ran the short distance home.

  A whole roll of film for the lighted glass door of O’Kelly’s pharmacy. He had almost always been too late. The smoking pharmacist was visible in only three of them. The tangled hair. The big, fleshy nose. The eternally slipped tie. I began to hate Jorge. Ever since he had known the story of Estefânia Espinhosa, thought Gregorius, O’Kelly’s look seemed devious to him. Mean. As in the chess club when he sat at the next table and Gregorius saw how annoyed he was by the repulsive sound of Pedro’s constant sniffing.

  Gregorius looked closely at the photos. Where was the kind, weary look he had also seen on the peasant face? The look of grief for his lost friend? We were like brothers. More than brothers. I really thought we could never lose each other. Gregorius no longer found that earlier look. It’s simply not possible, unlimited openness. It’s beyond us. Loneliness through having to suppress, there’s that too. Now they were back, the other looks.

  Is the soul a place of facts? Or are the alleged facts only the deceptive shadows of our stories? Prado had asked himself. That’s also true of looks, thought Gregorius. Looks are only meaningful when they are interpreted. Only then do they exist.

  João Eça in the twilight on the balcony of the home in Cacilhas. I don’t want all these tubes and pumps. I just want to live a few weeks longer. Gregorius felt the scalding tea he had drunk from Eça’s cup.

  The pictures of Mélodie’s house had not come out because it was too dark when they were taken.

  Silveira, on the platform, trying to light his cigarette in the wind. Today he would be returning to Biarritz and would ask himself as he did so often, ‘Why do I go on?’

  Gregorius went through the pictures once more. And then again. The past began to freeze beneath his look. Memory would select, arrange, retouch, lie. The pernicious thing was that the omissions, distortions and lies were later no longer recognized. There was no point of view beyond memory.

  A normal Wednesday afternoon in the city where he had spent his life. What should he do with it?

  The words of the Muslim geographer, El Edrisi, about the end of the world. Gregorius took out the pages on which he had translated his words into Latin, Greek and Hebrew in Finisterre.

  Suddenly he knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to photograph Bern. To record where he had lived all these years. The buildings, streets, squares that had been much more than just the stage set of his life.

  In the photo shop, he bought more film and in the time that remained until twilight he walked through the streets of the Länggasse, where he had spent his childhood. Considering them from various angles and with a photographer’s eye, they were quite different, these streets. He photographed until sleep overtook him. Sometimes he woke up and didn’t know where he was. Then, when he sat on the edge of the bed, he was no longer sure whether the detached, calculating eye of the photographer was the right one to capture the world of a life.

  He continued on Thursday. He went down to the Old City where he took the lift from Universitätstrasse and cut through the railway station. That way, he could avoid Bubenbergplatz. He shot one roll of film after another. He saw the cathedral as he had never seen it. An organist was practising. For the first time since his arrival, the dizziness returned, and Gregorius held on to a pew.

  He took the most recent film to be developed. Going on to Bubenbergplatz, it was as if he was attempting something beyond his strength. At the memorial he rested for a while. The sun had disappeared, a leaden grey sky arched over the city. He had expected to find out whether he could touch the square again. He didn’t think so. It wasn’t the same as before. Nor was it as it had been on his short visit three weeks ago. Why was that? H
e was tired and turned to go.

  ‘How did you like the goldsmith’s book?’

  It was the bookseller from the Spanish bookshop. He held out his hand to Gregorius.

  ‘Did it live up to expectations?’

  Yes, said Gregorius, absolutely.

  He said it stiffly. The bookseller noted that he wasn’t in the mood to talk and quickly took his leave.

  At the Bubenberg Cinema, the programme had changed. The Simenon film starring Jeanne Moreau was no longer showing.

  As Gregorius waited impatiently for his film standing in the doorway of a shop, Kägi, the Rector, turned the corner. There are moments when my wife looks as if she’s going to pieces, he had written. Now he had heard she was in the psychiatric clinic. Kägi looked tired and seemed hardly to notice what was going on around him. For a moment, Gregorius felt the impulse to talk but the feeling soon passed.

  When he had collected the latest batch of photos, he sat down in the restaurant of the Hotel Bellevue and opened the folders. The pictures were strange and meant nothing to him. He ate his meal wondering what he had hoped to find out from them.

  On the stairs up to his flat, a violent dizziness grabbed him and he had to hold on to the banister with both hands. After that, he sat by the phone all evening and imagined what would inevitably happen when he called Doxiades.

  Shortly before falling asleep, he was always afraid of sinking into dizziness and unconsciousness and waking up without a memory. As it slowly became light over the city, he summoned his courage. When Doxiades’s receptionist appeared, he was already at his office.

  A few minutes later, the Greek arrived. Gregorius waited for him to complain about the new glasses. But Doxiades only frowned when he saw them, led the way into the examination room and then listened to everything about them and the dizziness.

  He saw no reason for panic, he said at last. But a series of tests was necessary, and Gregorius would have to remain in the clinic under observation. He picked up the phone, let his hand rest on it, and looked at Gregorius.

  Gregorius inhaled and exhaled a few times, then he nodded.

  They could admit him on Sunday evening, said the Greek after he had hung up. There was nobody better than this doctor for miles around, he added.

  Gregorius walked slowly through the city, past the many buildings and squares that had been important to him. That seemed the right way to do it. He ate where he had usually eaten, and in the early afternoon he went to the cinema where, as a student, he had seen his first film. The film bored him, but the cinema still smelt the same and he stayed to the end.

  On the way home, he ran into Natalie Rubin.

  ‘New glasses!’ she greeted him.

  Both of them felt a little awkward. Their phone conversations were now something of the past, like the echo of a dream.

  Yes, he said, he might well go back to Lisbon. The medical examination? No, no, only a minor problem with his eyes.

  Her Persian had ground to a halt, said Natalie. He nodded.

  Had they got used to the new teacher? he asked finally.

  She laughed. ‘A boring man by the grace of God!’

  Both of them turned after a few steps and waved.

  On Saturday, Gregorius spent several hours gathering up his Latin, Greek and Hebrew books. He looked at the many marginal notes and the changes his handwriting had undergone over the decades. In the end, a small pile of books lay on the table, which he packed in the holdall he was taking to the clinic. Then he called Florence and asked if he might visit her.

  When they met, she told him that she had had a stillborn child, and had been operated on for cancer a few years earlier. The disease hadn’t returned. She was working as a translator. She was far less tired and dowdy than he had recently thought when he had watched her come home.

  He told her about the monasteries in Salamanca.

  ‘Back then, you didn’t want to,’ she said.

  He nodded. They laughed. He didn’t tell her anything about the clinic, which he regretted when he went to the Kirchenfeldbrücke afterwards.

  He walked all the way around the dark Gymnasium. As he did so, he thought of the Hebrew Bible in Senhor Cortês’s desk in the Liceu, still wrapped in his sweater.

  On Sunday morning, he called João Eça. What should he do this afternoon? Eça asked him. Could Gregorius please tell him?.

  He was going in to the clinic tonight, Gregorius said.

  ‘It may be nothing,’ said Eça after a pause. ‘And if – nobody can keep you there.’

  In the afternoon, Doxiades called and asked if he felt like a game of chess. He would take him to the clinic afterwards.

  Did he still think of retiring? Gregorius asked the Greek after the first game. Yes, said Doxiades, he thought about it often. But maybe it would pass. In the next month, he was going to Thessaloniki; it was more than ten years since he had been there.

  The second game was over and it was time to leave for the clinic.

  ‘What if they find something bad?’ asked Gregorius. ‘Something that would make me lose myself?’

  The Greek looked at him. It was a calm and solid look.

  ‘I have a prescription pad,’ he said.

  Silently, they drove in the twilight to the clinic. Life is not what we live; it is what we imagine living, Prado had written.

  Doxiades gave him his hand. ‘It’s probably nothing,’ he said. ‘And the man, as I said, is the best.’

  At the entrance to the clinic, Gregorius turned around and waved. Then he went in. As the door closed behind him, it started raining.