The Two Hotel Francforts

by David Leavitt

  “Speaking of Eiffel,” Iris said, “did you hear what happened when Hitler marched on Paris? He wanted to ride the elevator to the top of the Eiffel Tower, but the operators cut the electrical cords.”

  “Good for them,” I said.

  “And he only stayed one night. I suppose Paris was too rich for his taste.”

  We stepped into the foremost of the cars. It was paneled in polished oak and had been manufactured, a brass plaque informed us, by R. Waygood & Co., Engineers of London. “Further evidence of the enduring bond between England and Portugal,” Edward said, pirouetting to escape the tangle of Daisy’s leash. “The oldest unbroken alliance in Europe—which is probably the only reason they’re letting the British through to Lisbon instead of sending them off into résidence forcée.”

  “And the Americans?” Julia said.

  “America’s neutral, so no harm, no foul.”

  “Speaking of England”—speaking of, I had discovered, was one of Iris’s favorite locutions, since it allowed her to change subject at will—“did you hear that the Duke of Kent is in town? He’s to be the guest of honor at the inauguration of Salazar’s Exposition, where there will also be delegations from France and Germany.”

  “Leave it to Salazar to get those three eating out of the same trough,” Edward said.

  “Something else we haven’t been to,” I said. “The Exposition.”

  “The Exposition of the Portuguese World,” Edward said, adopting his tour-guide voice, “celebrating the nation’s double centenary—Portugal having been founded in 1140 and attained liberation from Spain in 1640.”

  “I’ve heard it’s splendid,” Julia said. “They say an entire Angolan village has been shipped over for the occasion.”

  “Isn’t that horrible?” Iris said. “Those poor people, on display behind ropes. Like animals at a zoo.” She glanced at Daisy, who had gone to sleep on the elevator floor. “Anyway, as I was saying, it’s because the Duke of Kent’s in town that the Duke of Windsor isn’t. He and the Duchess have to cool their heels in Madrid until George leaves. They’re furious about it, but there’s nothing they can do, since it would be a breach of protocol for the brothers to be in the same country.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I eavesdrop. It’s part of our method. I pick up the gossip, out of which I forge a plot. Then Eddie collects the facts so we can be sure it’s accurate.”

  “What was it Oscar Wilde said?” Edward said. “‘Anyone can write accurately.’”

  “‘Anyone can play accurately.’ He was talking about the piano.”

  “What my wife is saying is that she’s the brains of the operation, while I do the drudge work. Make sure she’s got her facts straight, which she usually hasn’t. Correct her spelling, which is usually egregious.”

  “So you’re writing a novel set in Lisbon?” Julia said. “How interesting. I wonder if we’ll end up being characters in it.”

  “Don’t put ideas in her head,” Edward said.

  “The premise—still very rough—is a suicide in a Lisbon hotel,” Iris said. “An apparent suicide. I got the idea because that was how we got our room. You see, we’d been shown the door at a dozen other places, and so when we tried the Francfort, it was a shot in the dark. And then, to our astonishment, the manager told us that just that morning a room had become available, its previous occupant—these were his exact words—‘having had to leave suddenly in the night.’ Now I ask you, how likely is it that anyone, at this moment in time, would leave a Lisbon hotel suddenly in the night?”

  “She spent a whole day scouring the room for evidence,” Edward said. “Cracks in the ceiling in case he’d hung himself. Blood on the tiles.”

  “Did you find any?” Julia asked.

  “Alas, no,” Iris said. “But what do facts matter?”

  “How are you going to get your detective to Lisbon?” I asked.

  “He’s Jewish. He’ll come to Lisbon for the same reason we did.”

  “You’re Jewish?”

  “I’m not. Eddie is.”

  “Julia knows that,” Edward said. “In fact, we’ve just been talking about it. Our grandmothers come from the same part of Bavaria. We think we might be cousins.”

  Julia frowned. Now I understood why she had been so stiff when Edward had his arm around her.

  All through this conversation, the elevator’s conductor—an old man in an ill-fitting uniform—had been standing on the curb, smoking. Now he stubbed out his cigarette and got into the car with us. We were the only passengers. Nonetheless he waited until nine o’clock precisely—church bells confirmed the hour—to close the gate and switch on the motor. The elevator creaked, purred, and began its ascent.

  There is a feeling that you get, or at least that I get, when an elevator lifts off: a queasiness, almost a weightlessness, as if the ground has dropped away under your feet; a feeling, now that I think about it, not unlike that of passing through a revolving door. If the women hadn’t been there, I would have put my hand on Edward’s shoulder. But the women were there, and so I had only the woodwork to steady myself against as, outside the glass, the roof of our own Hotel Francfort sank below the dusk sky and a pair of ladies’ underpants, unloosed from a clothesline, billowed before drifting down toward the street.

  Then we were at the top. We got out. To our left, a narrow spiral staircase rose.

  “View finest at sunset,” Edward said. “Let’s go.”

  He picked Daisy up and headed up the stairs. Iris and Julia followed. I took up the rear so I could catch Julia if she got dizzy.

  The first thought I had when we got to the roof was that the railings were entirely too low to keep someone from falling.

  The second was that I had never in my life seen such a view.

  “Isn’t it extraordinary?” Edward said, coming to stand next to me. “Three hundred and sixty degrees. Look, there are the castle ramparts. You couldn’t see them when you didn’t have your glasses, Pete. And the river—it might be wider than the Mississippi. And there’s the Rossio. It’s only from up here that you really get the nautical effect—how the waves seem to roll.”

  “Please, Eddie,” Iris said, “you’re making me queasy.” She had her hand on her stomach.

  “My poor wife suffers from vertigo and seasickness,” Edward said.

  “It’s true,” Iris said. “That’s why, of all the methods of committing suicide, jumping is the hardest for me to imagine. The courage it must take—”

  “It was how Jean’s father killed himself,” Julia said.

  “Who?” Iris said.

  “Jean. Our decorator. His father jumped out the window of their apartment on Avenue Mozart. This was in 1915. He was German, you see, and though he’d lived in France for years, he’d never bothered to change his citizenship. And so when the war came, he was declared an enemy alien, though he had two sons fighting on the front. Fighting for France. And then within a month of each other the sons were killed. So he jumped out the window.” She said all of this matter-of-factly.

  “You never told me this,” I said.

  “I only thought of it now because of what you just said”—she looked at Iris—“that you wondered how anyone could muster the courage. Well, he did.”

  As if she was suddenly cold, Julia rubbed her bare arms.

  “I’m sure it says a lot about a person, the way he’d choose to kill himself,” Edward said. “If it was up to me, I’d put a pistol in my mouth. Spectacular yet painless. How about you, Pete?”

  “Me? I wouldn’t. I’ve never even thought about it.”

  “Oh, come on. You must have. Everyone has.”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s true,” Julia said. “He is hopelessly committed to life.” Her tone was almost bitter.

  I turned toward the river. Even though it had been years since I left the Midwest, coasts still humbled and appalled me. The first time I saw the Atlantic, I was twenty. I wanted to run screaming. I’m tol
d people from the Northeast feel the same thing when they step off a train in Kansas or Nebraska for the first time. The endlessness of the plains, the vastness of the sky—it’s a kind of horror to them.

  Then something strange happened. Pigeons began circling the Elevator. Without warning, one of them dove at Edward’s head. He ducked, and Daisy suddenly leaped up, barking and lunging. “Whoa, steady girl,” Edward said, scooping her up into his arms. Yet she didn’t stop barking. She didn’t stop lunging.

  “What on earth has got into her?” Iris said.

  “It’s these pigeons,” Edward said. “I told you, they’re infernal.”

  “But it’s not like her. She’s a terrier. She’s always been oblivious to birds.”

  “Hadn’t we better go down?” I said. “It’s getting dark.”

  “Isn’t it amazing,” Julia said, “how in the summer the sun takes forever to start setting, but then when it does, it sets so fast?”

  It was true. In minutes the sky had gone from yellow to blue to purple, like a bruise. “Pete’s right,” Edward said. “If we don’t go soon, we’ll have to lick the steps, like Daisy.”

  For some reason we descended in reverse order—me first, then the women, then Edward taking up the rear. From the platform, an ironwork bridge thrust out into the shadows. We crossed it, Iris clutching my arm, defiantly not looking at the pedestrians making their way along Rua do Carmo, 150 feet below.

  “I remember someone telling me once that when you fling yourself off a roof, you should make sure to dive, not jump,” she said. “That way your head hits the ground first and you die instantly.” She laughed. “My, what a grim turn the conversation has taken! We were all so lighthearted earlier.”

  “I know,” Edward said. “You’d think the world was ending or something.”

  Chapter 7

  With a self-assurance that was beginning to seem predictable, Edward led us through a warren of cobbled streets so narrow that the old women leaning out of their windows could almost kiss. How he had discovered Farta Brutos in the first place was what I wanted to know. It had no sign. Nor did the streets at the corner of which it was situated appear to have names. Each sloped upward at such a precipitous angle that the restaurant itself was sunk a few feet below the sidewalk. The door was so low that I had to bend down to get through it. In a sort of antechamber, a raucous group of young men was eating at a circular table. “That’s something else that you don’t see in Paris anymore,” Iris said to me. “Young men.”

  Soon the owner—elderly and pot-bellied, with suspiciously luxuriant black hair—stepped over to greet us. Seeing Edward, he cried out with joy. They shook all four hands. They embraced. They kissed each other on the cheek.

  “Look at him,” Iris said, nudging me in the ribs. “You’d think he was a regular. Yet we’ve only ever been here once. And it’s like this everywhere we go.”

  The owner ushered us down a few more steps into the dining room proper. It was only slightly bigger than the antechamber. It had five tables, all but one occupied by Portuguese men, smoking and shouting. “Lucky I reserved,” Edward said, taking a seat at the one empty table. I tried to pull out a chair for Julia, but there wasn’t space. She had to slide in sideways. The chairs themselves were low and narrow, with rigid backs. Through the windows you could see the shoes of the people passing by outside.

  “What do you think?” Edward said. “Definitely not the sort of place you’d run into the Duke of Kent.”

  “Probably he doesn’t have the stomach for it,” Iris said as a waiter deposited carafes of wine and water, a basket of rolls, and a ramekin containing what appeared to be fish paste onto the table.

  “Is there a menu in English?” Julia said.

  “Oh, you don’t bother with a menu here,” Edward said. “You leave it to Armando to choose for you.”

  “Lovely.”

  Edward poured the wine, which was amber in color and rather pale. “Vinho verde. A specialty of the north, made from unripe grapes. And now I’d like to propose a toast. To us. The four seasons.”

  “Four seasons?”

  “Yes, since all of them are represented here tonight. Mr. Winters, with his summery wife, Julia. Then me—Freleng is almost frühling, isn’t it? And the autumn-blooming Iris.”

  “But irises bloom in spring.”

  “Not all of them do,” Julia said. “A few bloom in autumn.”

  “Do they?” Iris said. “I didn’t know. As Eddie will tell you, I’m an idiot when it comes to gardening.”

  We toasted, and for a moment Iris’s small, wet, very blue eyes met mine. There was in them a vulnerability at odds with her sardonic tone. Or was the sardonic tone merely defensive, a child’s fists beating against intolerable knowledge?

  Soon Armando returned, bearing a tureen of thick, brownish-red soup, which he ladled out for us. To Daisy he gave a bowl of water and a kidney. Tasting the soup, I could not help but wonder if a kidney had also been involved in its preparation—that or some pig’s blood, for it had a distinctly metallic flavor. Offal holds no fear for me. I dug in with gusto. So did Edward. Julia, on the other hand, took one sniff and cringed, while Iris—such was her enthusiasm for the vinho verde that she appeared hardly to notice the soup, which in any case was soon cleared away, to be replaced by a steaming casserole of duck and rice atop which slivers of chorizo sausage lay curled.

  “This is the specialty of the house,” Edward said. “It’s prepared like an Italian risotto, then put in the oven so the rice gets crisp.”

  He dolloped some onto my plate. How different this was from French food! “In French cooking,” I said to Edward, “either you get the purity of a particular ingredient—for instance, mâche in a salad—or you get a flavor that defies you to identify any of the ingredients. Here you get both.”

  “Exactly. The rank pungency of the duck meat, the acridity of the chorizo, the … How would you characterize the rice?”

  “Rice doesn’t have a taste so much as a texture. It’s something for the palate to resist.”

  “Listen to them,” Iris said to Julia. “Why can’t men talk sensibly? It’s only food.”

  “And then the collective flavor of each forkful,” Edward said, “which almost brings tears to the eyes, because there’s something so, well, nostalgic about it, yet it’s entirely new … I mean, you can tell that, for someone, this is the food of childhood. Nor does it matter that it’s not your own childhood. The past—some collective notion of the past—comes alive in your mouth.”

  “Been reading Proust lately, have you?” Iris said.

  “I think I could live here,” Edward said, “if I could learn the language. The language—that would be the challenge.”

  “It sounds like Russian to me,” Julia said.

  “Of course, it’s easier to read than to speak,” I said. “When I look at the newspapers, I recognize maybe half the words.”

  “Speaking of Portuguese,” Iris said, “do you know what the locals have taken to calling our own Suiça? Bompernasse.”

  “Bom what?”

  “Bompernasse. It’s a pun. Montparnasse combined with bom perna, which is Portuguese for ‘nice legs.’”

  “Because of all the barelegged Frenchwomen who sit outside in the afternoon, smoking,” Edward said, “which is something no self-respecting Portuguese woman would do. In fact it would be a scandal for a Portuguese woman even to go into a café.”

  “Such a backward country in some ways,” Julia said.

  “But Julia, I thought you wanted to wait out the war here,” I said.

  “That doesn’t mean I consider it the ideal place to live,” Julia said. “I mean, it’s not Paris.”

  “Is Paris your favorite place on earth?” Iris said.

  “Of course. Isn’t it yours?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say anywhere was my favorite place. Now, Eddie—he really can feel at home anywhere. Close your eyes, spin the globe, send him wherever your finger lands, and I guarantee you, within
a month he’ll be mayor.”

  “But isn’t feeling at home anywhere really the same as feeling at home nowhere?”

  “No, in fact it isn’t,” Edward said, “though that’s a common misperception. In fact, the person who feels at home nowhere is in an entirely different category from the person who feels at home everywhere. Iris is that person.”

  “It’s true,” Iris said. “I don’t even understand what people mean when they say they feel ‘at home.’”

  “Well, isn’t it—I don’t know—a sense of belonging?”

  “So I’m told. But ‘belonging,’ ‘home’—they’re just words to me. And don’t bother trying to explain them—it would be like trying to convey the notion of sight to a blind man.”

  “But surely you must have a feeling for the place you grew up.”

  “You assume that I grew up in a place. I didn’t. I was born in Malaysia. My mother died in childbirth, my father when I was four. I hardly remember him—or the amah who nursed me. I was five when I was sent back to England, and though I had some relations there, they didn’t have much interest in me, so from then on it was just school after school … until I met Eddie.”

  “Little Orphan Iris,” Edward said.

  “I think it’s probably why I have a dog,” Iris said. “A dog is a constant. You can rely on a dog in a way you can’t rely on a place. Of course, when we left Pyla we could have left Daisy behind. Our friends told us we were mad, that getting to New York would be difficult enough without having to worry about an old dog. Well, I put my foot down. I’d have stayed in Pyla myself, brazened out the occupation, rather than abandon Daisy to some French peasant who for all I knew would shoot her the moment we were out of sight.” She was teary-eyed again. “And then in Irun, at the Spanish customs, the officer insisted that Daisy was commercial merchandise and we had to pay duty on her. I said, ‘She’s fifteen years old. How much do you think you could get for her?’ But I had the feeling he’d take his chances rather than lose the argument, so we paid the duty.”