Electrico W

by Hervé Le Tellier

  “He’s almost a pleasant man, this Pinheiro. Smiley, not disturbing in the least. If he wasn’t in pajamas and slippers you’d think he was a visitor or, actually, some cleaner guy, a doctor even. Important, those slippers. They’re real proof that …”

  Vieira twirled his index finger around his temple. He laughed and tucked his cigar in the breast pocket of his overalls, with the glistening chewed end uppermost.

  “Here,” he said, “a piece of advice. Don’t ever put slippers on, they’d never let you out of this place. Okay, I’ll show you what there is to see.”

  Vieira opened a file. Pinheiro looked different in the photographs, he seemed younger, maybe forty, and thinner too. Perhaps due to hospital food, and the year of enforced rest. He never looked at the lens, but always high above it, as if an angel were hovering in the room.

  “There’s a paranoid aspect to Pinheiro, and this is indicated by, for example, his inability to criticize himself, his sensitivity, even his distrustfulness. But there’s no pride or authoritarianism. And at the same time, he presents a schizoid pathology: his solitary, introverted side, which is almost certainly coupled with a vivid imagination—that bronze undergarment was quite something, after all!”

  “A coat of mail.”

  “If you like. Would you like to see it? The police kept the thing itself, but look what I have here.”

  He riffled through the folder and spread a number of photos on his desk.

  The coat of mail had clearly been made using traditional craftsmanship. It would have covered his entire torso from the small of his back to his neckline, and was so heavy it must even have injured him. I obviously pulled an expressive face because Vieira clarified: “Seventeen and a half pounds. And no tools to make a thing like that were found at his house. In fact, did you know that on his wrists and ankles he wore plain bronze hoops, no ornamentation or engraving? Even sewn into the felt rim of his hat, guess what we found? A wide band of very thin bronze.”

  He shook his head.

  “I warned all the staff. Paranoid schizophrenics are unpredictable creatures. You know, a guy like that could eat your eyeballs! We didn’t get a thing out of him, he didn’t want to talk about anything. The only conversation I managed to have with him was about astronomy.”

  “Astronomy?” Antonio asked as he put away his camera and films.

  “Jupiter’s moons, it was his favorite subject. Pinheiro says that on a dark night with a clear sky, fewer than one person in a thousand can see them with the naked eye. Which might as well be no one. Before the astronomical telescope was invented, anyone who could didn’t dare talk about it.”

  “Was his eyesight really that good?” Antonio asked in amazement. “In the pictures though, he’s wearing little glasses, look.”

  “No, I think it was actually his favorite metaphor. He told me several times, ‘Be right about something one day in front of everyone, you’ll be taken for a fool for a day.’ ”

  Antonio closed the zipper on his bag, his noisy way of showing he wanted to get out of the hospital as quickly as possible. Vieira noticed this impatience, closed his file, and politely claimed he needed to leave for his consulting hours. He shook our hands and was already walking away, but turned around and handed me his card.

  “If you’re alone in Lisbon … It’s only a small place, we might bump into each other by chance, but should we always leave everything up to chance? Do you have a card?”

  I told him what I had told Custódia: “I’ve only just moved.”

  IRENE ASKED US not to wait for her, and we had risotto for lunch on a restaurant terrace, in the shade of a large ficus in a square along Dom Pedro Avenue.

  When we were having coffee, an Irene in a red dress appeared around the corner of the street, facing me, suddenly looking heavier than I remembered, almost plump. She waggled a copy of Le Monde in her hand, ran over to us, and, without a word, nestled on Antonio’s lap, taking his hand and putting it on her bare thigh. Then she gave me a fish-eyed stare, drained of any expression. I looked at my watch, miming someone in a hurry, and stood up. Irene rested her head on Antonio’s shoulder.

  “What? I just get here and you’re leaving? Your Lena again … This is obsession or I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “Exactly, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I smiled at my own retort, because I’m so often several beats behind. To leave things on that victorious note, I said goodbye to Antonio and left immediately.

  I walked along Dom Pedro Avenue, a small street leading down to the port, and stopped to look at the window display of a curiosity shop, intrigued by a Dogon statue, or it could have been Tellem. It was likely to be fake but had an interesting patina. I went straight in.

  The only valuable object I had in Paris was an Inuit mask hanging on the wall in the living room. It was large, made of driftwood with feathers stuck into it. It most probably represents a seal or even a seal-man with its red teeth and dilated nostrils. It would have been a ceremonial mask worn by a shaman to ask the spirits to ensure that the caribou, which headed south in winter, would return the following summer. Its first buyer was the Reverend Samuel Wallis. He drew it in his diary for 1897, which can still be consulted in the library at the University of Victoria (British Columbia). Next to the sketch, Samuel Wallis has written the date—February 17—and that he bought the mask for a dollar from a trapper who was asking five. The mask had been found at about Christmastime, to the north of the Kuskokwim River, in an Inuit cemetery, next to a man’s corpse that the foxes had unearthed and half eaten. Wallis wrote that the trapper had put the body back in its grave under a pile of stones and secured the mask to his sled with the beaver pelts, then urged his dogs on through the dusk of unbroken night over the frozen waters of the Kuskokwim, to sell his furs in Mamterillermiut. The name means “the people of the smokehouse,” because they smoke fish there. It was just a village with about a hundred inhabitants, at the mouth of the river, a few dozen miles from the Bering Sea: mostly Inuits, but a few white men too, gold diggers, traders, missionaries from the Moravian church, including the Reverend Samuel Wallis. A few years later Mamterillermiut would move to the western bank and be renamed Bethel; in 1905 a branch of the U.S. Post Office would open there.

  When I looked at that Inuit mask I often thought of the Reverend Samuel Wallis, of the application with which he drew it in his diary. Outside, it had been dark for five months, blizzards whipped up icy snow, he could hear it beating against the walls and windows of the mission. He had seen plenty of other masks, fish masks, masks depicting beluga whale hunts, fox or bird masks. He must have stopped wondering about these sculpted wooden faces by this stage. It was now the masks that questioned him. They certainly wouldn’t have toppled his faith, but he saw too many of them not to be disturbed. The Reverend Samuel Wallis probably couldn’t quite explain these unsettling feelings. So many different peoples had shaped pieces of wood. Perhaps the question the Reverend Samuel Wallis asked himself was “Why am I so far from home and yet so close to myself?”

  I wandered around the store. A tall fair-haired man was cleaning a fragment of stained glass in a frame. I asked him how much the Dogon statue was. It was far too cheap to be authentic, and therefore far too expensive for a fake. I dawdled a little longer, chatting to the salesman, an American who had recently moved to Lisbon, when, reflected in a mirror, I could see the sidewalk on the other side of the street, and Irene. If it hadn’t been for the too red dress, the brief dazzle of it in the sunlight, I wouldn’t have noticed her.

  I freeze where I am, just to be sure. It’s definitely her, hiding behind a truck. Irene’s following me.

  I leave the store and head toward Rossio, checking reflections in shopwindows for my tracker on my heels. It doesn’t occur to me to shake her off. As I pass the Café Brasileira, I decide to sit at a table on the terrace and pretend to be surprised when I see her. But at one of the tables is a young woman with brown hair cropped very short,
wearing jeans and a white T-shirt; she looks up and gives me a hint of a smile. She brings her coffee to her mouth, the movement ethereal, fine as an italic letter. I catch a glimpse of a tattoo on the inside of her wrist, a tiny turquoise dolphin, small enough to be hidden by a 100-escudo coin, not unlike the dolphin etched onto my black notebooks. That is when, with no plan or idea in mind, I do something that amazes me.

  I go over to her. Her lips are thin but they form an O of surprise when I sit in the wicker chair opposite her.

  “Excuse me, please let me sit down, I won’t stay long.”

  She’s startled, she tenses imperceptibly, looks at me irritably and shrugs. She reaches for her packet of cigarettes and I can tell she’s going to get up and leave.

  “Please,” I say quickly, “I beg you, don’t get up. Don’t be frightened.”

  “I’m not frightened.”

  She hesitates for a moment, my eyes are beseeching, I’ve no idea what I look like right now.

  “Promise me you’ll listen to me just for a minute. Please.”

  She takes a cigarette and lights it. Her reaction was only hinted at, Irene can’t have grasped it. She might think the woman’s impatient gesture was because I’m late. The young woman looks at me, hesitant, amazed, no—better—intrigued. She has fine, charmingly irregular features, her nose perhaps not quite straight. I detect a note of amusement in her expression. Anyway, I can’t be that disturbing, dressed in the “sensible student” clothes I’ve never stopped wearing.

  “I’ll explain. I don’t know where to start. I’m Vincent, Vincent Balmer. I’m French.”

  “That’s obvious, you have a French accent.”

  She shrugs, tilts her head to one side prettily.

  Her eyebrows go up and form a tiny crease across her forehead. She pushes her brown hair off her face without a word. Eventually she smiles and shakes her head, pouting impatiently.

  “I—I work here,” I stammer. “In Lisbon. The woman watching us at the moment is … is a girlfriend. An ex-girlfriend. She left me. She thinks—well, actually, I’m making her think—I have a girlfriend here. A partner, if you like. But I don’t know anyone in Lisbon, I mean, I don’t have a friend … a woman. And right now she’s following me because I said I was going to meet my girlfriend. I’m sorry, I do realize this is all quite muddled …”

  She eyes me in silence, rather sternly.

  “Yes, you do seem muddled.” Her voice has a slightly cracked, hoarse quality, but a singing lilt. “Is she still there, this woman?”

  “I don’t know. She must be behind me, pretending to look in shopwindows.”

  She stretches her neck to look over my shoulder.

  “No, don’t look,” I almost shout.

  “Listen, there are dozens of women looking in shopwindows. How do you expect me to believe your story? Do you often hit on girls with a fabrication like that?”

  My expression is so pitiful that a crease of amusement hovers over her lips.

  “Okay, let’s go with it. And why did you tell her you had someone?”

  “Because she left me. To show her I was over it, I’d forgotten her, because I loved someone else. I don’t know, to keep up appearances in front of her. Or maybe to see if she was jealous.”

  She stares at me intently.

  “You are sure she was following you, aren’t you?”

  “Absolutely, I swear it.”

  “And what does this woman look like?”

  “I don’t know. She’s short with curly brown hair.”

  She can’t help smiling, there are lots of short women with curly brown hair. I have a flash of inspiration: “She’s wearing a dress, a really very red dress, with flouncy bits. And a necklace of orange, blue, and black beads. I gave her that necklace. And … I think she’s still holding a French newspaper.”

  She picks up her coffee cup, takes a small sip, then puts the cup back down. Without looking up, she says: “There’s someone who exactly matches your description behind you, she’s admiring some glass jugs in a window. One point to you.”

  “You see, I’m not lying.”

  “Mmm …” She stares at me sardonically, a touch of pink on her eyelids heightens the green of her eyes. It’s quite ordinary makeup, but she hasn’t overdone it.

  “Or she’s your accomplice,” she says. “That’s it. You arrange these setups together. You do it for her, she does it for you.” I must be looking desperate because she adds: “Okay, okay, I believe you.”

  She lowers her sunglasses and stops talking. I can’t make out her eyes now and guess she’s secretly watching Irene.

  “She’s very young, your girlfriend …”

  “Twenty-two, twenty-three, I think.”

  “Like I said.”

  I blush, this stranger is in a good position to spell out the truth to me.

  “So then, I’m meant to be your mistress, am I? Am I meant to have a name?”

  “I told her about a Lena … Lena Palmer.”

  “She sounds like a heroine from a TV series.”

  “It’s—it’s meant to be your husband’s surname. You’re … you’re going through a divorce.”

  “What about you? What’s your name? I know you’ve already told me, but I was angry and I don’t remember it.”

  “Balmer.”

  “Balmer … And I’m Palmer, is that right?” she asks. “That’s completely ridiculous. And what’s your first name, you fool. Do you really think I’d call the man of my life by his surname?”

  “Vincent.”

  “Vin-cent Bal-mer …” she lets the syllables hang in the air, to let their perfume take hold of her. “And I’m Manuela. Manuela Freire. Your story’s totally absurd. Which is why I believe it. It’s like Catholic faith … Credo quia absurdum, right?”

  She stops talking, slips her sunglasses onto the top of her head, and looks at me for a long time. It’s then that I realize I dared approach her and embark on this because her face looked familiar, you could even say like a friend. If she were seventeen with slightly longer hair, she could be the twin sister of the very young actress in Thirty Years Without Seeing the Sea. That first feature by an unknown filmmaker enjoyed far too little success, but the actress took it to heart. What was her name? Clémence Guatteri? Constance Guettari? It doesn’t matter.

  The story is easily summarized: a teenage girl, probably running away from home, sets off from an anonymous suburb, hitchhiking her way to meet her boyfriend in northern Germany, in Lübeck, where he works as an apprentice chef in a French restaurant. Filmed in parallel is the story of a Polish hitchhiker in his thirties armed with a tourist visa—secured God knows how—who arrives on the outskirts of Paris, on the last leg of his journey to the Mediterranean which he’s dreamed about his whole life. They meet at a gas station. She’s been caught stealing biscuits by the manager, who’s about to call the police, so the man steps in and pays for them for her. He instantly falls in love with this very young girl and when she tells him she’s going to meet up with her boyfriend in Lübeck, he says he’s heading home to Gdańsk. Lübeck isn’t far out of his way, and he suggests they travel together. During those few days traveling he protects her with great tact, aware of how lost and yet determined she is, how full of confidence but ready to snap like a thread stretched too tight. And yet she is so luminous and expects so much of life that she is the one to show him the world. She talks and he just listens, fascinated, never admitting his profound distress. He feels his love for her is forbidden, scandalous, and he suffers at the thought—or the impression—that he’s too old to deserve her. She’s drawn to him, but too inexperienced to interpret her confusing feelings. When they arrive in Lübeck and, in front of him, she calls her boyfriend to announce jubilantly that she’s there, the Pole realizes the boy wasn’t expecting her, doesn’t want her anymore. She hangs up and bursts into tears, he comforts her and she’s ready to give herself to him, in despair, in a desperate craving for tenderness too, but he loves her too much to want h
er at that price. He offers her a train ticket back to Paris. She accepts, they exchange an awkward kiss on the station platform, and she steps onto the train, distraught. He doesn’t have enough money left to see the Mediterranean, and hitches a ride home. He actually lived in Lublin, much farther south than Gda?sk.

  Thirty Years Without Seeing the Sea is a succession of sensitive, allusive tableaux. The filmmaker must have been fresh out of film school: the framing, camera movements, and even the film’s rhythm betray its influences, from Tarkovsky to Nicolas Roeg, but in the arts there is no sentiment more stupid than a fear of being influenced. The film ends with a very long tracking shot: the girl standing in the train corridor, her cheek resting against the window, her eyes dry and red, watching the rain. Then the camera gradually pans, and the shot is no longer lost in a drowning landscape but begins, as the girl herself does, to see a new landscape appear. The sky is clearing, the sun’s going to come out.

  I remember sitting alone in the darkened room, seeing how intense and dazzling that girl was, suddenly filled with the conviction that I had never truly lived, and I couldn’t help my tears flowing.

  Manuela Freire has the same fine features and radiates the same charm. Yes, ten or fifteen years later, that runaway teenager, now grown calmer, serene even, could easily cut her dark hair and look like her sister.

  I make an automatic nervous gesture, bringing my fingers up to my mouth. Manuela raps her index finger sharply on the back of my hand.

  “You could at least stop biting your nails, it’s disgusting. Do you know, your friend’s completely fascinated by a hideous cherry-red butter dish? What’s her name, by the way?”

  “Irene.”

  “She’s not bad. Well, if you like that type. That girl’s the sort to fuel a few fires. I’m guessing she showed you a thing or two, didn’t she?”

  She takes a sip of her coffee, watches me cheerfully.