Like a Fading Shadow

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  * * *

  On April 3, on his way from Atlanta to Memphis, he got off the highway and followed a dirt road to a secluded spot: a meadow with a fallen white picket fence and an abandoned shed. He took out the rifle and mounted the scope. During military service he had excelled as a sharpshooter. He loaded a magazine, felt the pull pressure on the trigger, and the fit of the stock on his shoulder. In the scope everything looked as if it were within arm’s reach: a rusty can, the trunk of a tree, a bird feeder hanging from a branch. It only took a little pressure and boom. Behind the crosshairs, objects exploded into shards of glass and dust, and after every shot, a great silence fell over the field.

  * * *

  The drive from Atlanta to Memphis was seven hours. He made two more stops on the road. First he stopped at a drugstore to buy a Gillette shaving kit. The cashier would later remember him due to his suit and tie, not the most common attire in the area, and not very appropriate for the heat and humidity. A hundred kilometers later, he stopped at a barbershop and got a haircut. The sky began to turn gray as he approached Memphis. The wind was whipping the trees. Lightning bolts flashed across the dark horizon.

  * * *

  At about a quarter past seven in the evening, Eric S. Galt rented a room at the New Rebel Motel, just outside Memphis. Raging waves of rain hit the windowpanes. Thunder rumbled as if the earth’s crust were opening. The night watchman saw the white Mustang parked in front of his room, where the light was still on at five in the morning.

  * * *

  On the morning of April 4, he bought a newspaper that had a photo of Martin Luther King on the front page with a caption that mentioned the hotel where he was staying, the Lorraine, the one he always stayed at when in Memphis. A hostile editorial asserted that King was back in Memphis to encourage new riots and unrest among blacks and stoke the dangerous extremism of the sanitation workers who had gone on strike.

  At three in the afternoon, he rented a room in a boardinghouse not too far from the Lorraine Motel, in a dilapidated neighborhood on the fringes of the city with the usual scenery of pawnshops, liquor stores, and drunks. He said his name was John Edward Willard. In a place like that there was no need for identification.

  The woman in charge of the boardinghouse thought he looked as out of place as the car parked by the entrance. Someone knocked on the door of the room she used as an office. She opened without removing the chain, and there he was, a pale man with a triangular face, squinting with a forced smile, a smirk that lacked connection to his other facial features.

  She took him down a hallway to one of the vacant rooms. It had a padlock. A wire hanger stuck out of the hole where the doorknob had been. There was a gutted green sofa and a dirty lightbulb that hung from the ceiling, a boarded-up fireplace, and a misshapen mattress on a bed frame. A garland with Christmas ornaments and dusty plastic leaves hung over the mantelpiece. The woman, Bessie Brewer, who was heavyset and wore a man’s shirt, apologized for the strong smell of disinfectant: the previous resident, an old drunkard, had died in the room the previous week.

  With a smirk, he asked the woman for the bathroom. It was right next to the room. A sign taped to the door read TOILET & BATH. The toilet had no lid and there was a puddle of dirty water in the tub. Through the window, across a lot littered in trash: the rows of balconies in the Lorraine Motel, the sliding glass door of a room open, a translucent curtain billowing up like a boat’s sail. It was April 4, 1968, a Thursday.

  11

  I was looking for a hospital with long corridors, cold tiles, echoes, high ceilings with white globular lamps; a nightclub with a sign that was just one word, BURMA, leading into a labyrinth of metal stairways, slow freight elevators, musty, redbrick basements or storage rooms that smelled of tropical goods; a secluded house where a woman lived alone, and where a fugitive man, probably wounded, would come at midnight; a jazz club or a theater where an old musician, who is very ill, would play his last concert.

  I wanted a train as the setting for a chase and a cliff where two men fight and one of them falls, his silhouette becoming smaller and smaller against a backdrop of foaming waves crashing on a reef, a sea of cinematographic transparency, a dark aqua-blue sky like a day-for-night shot and a bad dream.

  I was looking for settings for my novel but, above all, a visual impulse that could lead me to the encounters between my characters and their discoveries. I was not transferring to the real Lisbon the threads of the plot I had developed in my imaginary city. The plot was taking shape as I explored, as I meandered through a quest that resembled a tireless search for one face in a sea of people; a face you love so much you don’t even know how to remember it, and it vanishes from memory the moment you cannot see it anymore; a face you could search for, day in and day out in vain; a face that is always unexpected when you finally see it, in one of those places where the possibility of imminence acts like a magnetic field: corners you can’t turn without a twinge in your stomach; stairways, doorways, hallways, streets that prove favorable because they once had a sudden presence, a shadow.

  * * *

  Lisbon was a real city and a scale model of Lisbon. The strict order of the streets in Baixa had the neatness of a model city made to scale, the lines of identical windows, the simplified shapes of the houses. Rossio Square teemed with pedestrians and business activity, and it was also an abstract square, a model with an axis of symmetry extending south in the perspective of a triumphal arch and a king on horseback, with its neoclassical theater on the north side, its column crowned with the statue of a king in the center, its calligraphic signs, its pinks and blues, which lit up at night over the rooftops. Out of breath, climbing up the Calçada do Carmo, I saw a large hospital with faded pink walls and high windows facing east. Perhaps this is where the student would find his teacher, ill and disheartened, lying on a white iron bed, in a cold room at the end of the hall, his face yellow against the whiteness of the pillow, his body barely creating volume under the blanket. The sounds of Lisbon would reach the room like a maritime murmur.

  Behind Rossio Square, the mouth of an alley led to a flashing red sign and the velvet curtain of a peep show, so thick it muffled the heavy bass beat that would throb in your temples and chest the moment you entered. Right away, that place, which I had just discovered by chance, became part of my novel. I felt the impunity of doing something exciting and shameful in a city where no one knew me. A woman behind a ticket window provided change. I was one among many strangers moving like shadows under the pink and green lights; dark, lone figures in winter coats and with lit cigarettes wandering around some kind of basement with concrete floors, black curtains on the walls, a potent smell of air freshener and humidity, low ceilings, blasting music.

  Narrow doors were numbered along a corridor, each one with a red lightbulb that turned on when someone went inside. A light would go off and a man would walk out avoiding eye contact. I opened a door and found myself in a small room that was almost pitch-black. I had never been in a place like that. I remember the faint light filtering through the small window, the roll of toilet paper on a shelf next to the machine where the coins where deposited, and the music, which was all the more deafening in such a narrow space.

  As the coins went in the slot, the glass became transparent, as if a layer of frost had dissipated. On the other side, a naked woman lay on a circular bed with pillows that was a rotating platform. She was surrounded by one-way mirrors and saw her body reflected from all sides, knowing that behind each one was a man watching, hiding.

  She was slim, attractive, flexible. She writhed and wriggled, lifting her hips or leaning on her hands and knees with slow, rhythmic movements, an expression of disciplined boredom on her face, indifferent to her effect. Eyes surrounded her but she could not see them. Rotating slowly, she could not tell which rooms were in use and which were empty. On her back, her bare feet waved in the air like fish, her toenails painted red, her heels pink.

  * * *

  Years later, in Madrid, a
new acquaintance told me a story. We were having a drink in the restaurant of a hotel. He was one of those people who must confide in someone, as if a newfound joy could only be complete if shared, if witnessed, if no longer just a secret between two lovers. It was mid-morning, in January. I still could not orient myself well in Madrid. The restaurant window faced Goya Street. No one knew that you had come to meet me here and that at that moment you were waiting for me in a room.

  It was pouring. There was a lot of traffic, a lot of people on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. The lamps were turned low and there were pockets of shadow around the bar. My interlocutor would pause sometimes to take a sip from his coffee, which was already cold. He was very thin, somewhat younger than me, prominent cheekbones, bony hands. He spoke and stared like a convert, like someone who has been enlightened. He spoke without looking at me, so possessed by the intensity of his story that he forgot everything else, the coffee, the gray morning light of winter, the fact that we barely knew each other.

  He was still in disbelief about what was happening to him. If he turned to look at me, it was only to see the effect of what he was saying, unsure that I was able to understand, approve; ready to challenge me if necessary.

  He told me he was living the great love of his life. He had never liked a woman so much, never had he experienced such sexual intimacy and surrender. But he couldn’t tell anyone how they had met. It was the secret that brought them together and also a punishment. They had to agree on a new story. The truth is that he had met her at a peep show where she danced for several hours every evening or night, depending on her shift. He was working on an article about the world of sex shops, strip clubs, XXX cinemas; the sex business was just starting to proliferate openly in Madrid. He fell in love the moment he saw her behind the glass. He filled his pockets with coins and inserted them one by one so he could continue seeing her. He was possessed by a combination of sexual arousal and tenderness that rendered him helpless, like a powerful narcotic. He pressed his face against the glass to study her every feature, her face, her body, simultaneously offered and forbidden, so close, yet beyond reach.

  He became a regular at the bar next door so he could see her leaving. He knew that he could not be going to the peep show every day or the employees would find him suspicious. The first time he saw her outside, he almost did not recognize her. He felt even more attracted to her now, seeing her dressed for winter, wearing a dark coat and a wool hat. She looked younger without makeup and the chiaroscuro lights.

  One night he found the courage to approach her. He showed her his newspaper ID and his camera. She hesitated but finally agreed to hear him out. They went to the bar where he had waited so many times, pale and anxious under the fluorescent lights, oblivious to the people around him, the noisy television, the soccer game. Neither one paid attention to their surroundings. They became lovers that very night.

  Now they had been living together for a week in a rented flat. He did not have a contract with the newspaper and they only paid him per article. She danced at the peep show and modeled for art students some mornings. This was the only way she could afford dance school. Some nights, without telling her, he returned to the peep show and sat in the room where he had seen her for the first time. Seeing her again behind the window consumed him with jealousy and desire.

  I listened to him divulge his secret while I held on to mine, anticipating the moment when I would finally be able to cross the lobby, take the elevator, and walk toward the room where you were waiting for me.

  * * *

  There was no time to lose. The rolls of film and the pages of my notebook were quickly filling up. Intoxicated by so many images and exhausted from all the walking, I could not fall asleep that first night. I still had a full day, one more night, and the last day. The moment I turned off the light, I felt even more awake. My memories from that first day in Lisbon were already contaminated by fiction. Insomnia was a silver screen in the concavity of my closed eyes. I had phoned home and could hear my son crying in the background. It was strange to feel so far away after less than two days of travel. It was even stranger to think that in three or four days I would be back in Granada.

  I had to get the most out of every hour, every minute. The next morning I ran up the steps of the Rossio station and took a train to Cascais. I was in search of a specific place, though in particular, the resonance of its name, Boca do Inferno. Juan Vida had told me that peering over that cliff felt like being on the edge of the world. There was a lighthouse, not cylindrical, but in the shape of a prism, surrounded by palms, painted white and blue. There was a restaurant called Mar do Inferno. I left the station and took off walking. The morning was bright and blue. The wind and the blinding breadth of the sea gave me vertigo before even reaching the cliff. I had stared down such a deep abyss. It was all the same, to have come here in search of something or as an escape: it was impossible to go any further. It was the overwhelming and primitive intuition of finis terrae, the final frontier between the known and the unknown. Large cargo ships moved across the horizon, blurred against the brightness of the sea, rippled by the wind. I peered anxiously over the edge and took some photos. I could feel the ocean’s mist on my face. I imagined the place at night, the roaring sea, the white waves crashing against a deep blackness, the intermittent glow of the lighthouse. It was not clear how it would happen, but I knew one of my characters would fall from that cliff at night.

  Later, I wrote notes eagerly, alone and happy, sitting by a window in Mar do Inferno, hungry after the long walk, starting to feel the effects of the vinho verde I was drinking as I waited for the food, letting myself be carried away by the soft, simultaneous intoxication of wine and imagination, by the sheer intensity of the real world, this simple and clear moment in my life, the taste of the food and the friendliness of the waiters, with my little Portuguese dictionary at the side, my notebook, my pencil, the camera, the novel that was taking on a life I had not anticipated.

  * * *

  I felt even more immersed in my imaginary world when that evening, or the next day, I left the Sintra station and started walking through a path along some house gardens, seeing in the distance the scattered city, a slope of dark pines, two strange, conical chimneys jutting out like towers or geological excrescences from the roof of a palace. I walked to the sound of gravel crunching under my feet. Memory imposes a golden sun in the late afternoon, the smell of moist and rich soil, woodsmoke in the cool air, lights turning on in the ocher and pink walls of the houses, the tall and secluded buildings, reminiscent of sanatoriums, at the end of the narrow roads on the slopes of the mountain. There were houses deep in abandoned gardens and others that suggested a serene and final retirement, a long and sumptuous convalescence as in The Magic Mountain.

  In Sintra, not in Lisbon, was the sanatorium I was looking for. I took photos of towers, outlooks, gardens, fences, the names of houses written on azulejo tiles. I jumped over a wall and ventured into a tunnel of jungle greenery in an abandoned garden and then onto a porch with a door half-open, stepping on broken glass; I did not dare to go in.

  There was a house name that I liked more than all the others: Quinta dos Lobos. I could almost hear the gate opening at night, in a cold and humid air that smelled like a forest.

  I have not been back to Sintra. I don’t know if I remember what I saw then or what I wrote in one of the final chapters of the novel. On the ride back to Lisbon, I noticed that the train cars were quite old and connected by platforms with handrails, instead of covered passageways. As the train picked up speed it was more difficult to balance on those mobile, metal plates.

  I imagined two men who are in love with the same woman and come across each other by chance in Lisbon. Their mutual hate stretches back a long time. They would no longer fight on the edge of the cliff in Cascais, but on that platform between the train cars. I did not have to will any images, they just came to me in waves, effortlessly, like the countryside that flashed past the train window. The tr
ain stopped at a station along the way. I saw the illuminated interior of the train coming in the opposite direction and the faces of its passengers, our eyes meeting in the brief and exact instant when the two trains intersected. Right at that moment, the hero of my novel would see, in the other train, like a mirage, the face of the woman he has not seen in years.

  I had to be on that train to imagine that moment of mutual recognition, that exchange of glances. No matter what I did I could not escape the dreaming of the novel. To walk around the city was to walk through that imaginary world. I got off the train in Cais do Sodré in a daze of solitude and fiction. On the sidewalk, a man leaned over to kiss a woman in a wheelchair. As I walked around at dusk, the neon signs of the bars and nightclubs began to light up, the red lights from their interiors spilling into the sidewalk, the names of port cities, Oslo, Copenhagen, Jakarta, or states or places in America, names with an exotic musicality mysteriously associated with sexual innuendos, Arizona Bar, California Bar, Niagara Bar, Texas Bar. Sometimes fiction wants to supplant reality, sometimes it settles for adding certain secondary details. In that vocabulary of glowing names of the Lisbon night, in the street corners, the low passageways and arches, the end of back alleys, it would not have been too much to add just one more name, invented or anticipated or drawn by me, blinking in the distance like an invitation, several months after having appeared as a typing error on a blank sheet of paper, burma.

  12

  He would return to the Hotel Portugal around dawn, lock himself in his room—number 2 on the first floor—draw the curtains, and sometimes not come out again until nightfall. It was always the same scene: disheveled and reeking of alcohol, the greasy hair tightly slicked back, sunglasses, no eye contact, the daily newspapers bunched under his arm.

  He would bring food in a paper bag, stuff he bought in the shops nearby: crackers, cans, condensed milk. The hotel maid, Maria Celeste, would find bits of food on the bed quilt, which often looked as if it hadn’t even been removed, as though he slept on it, fully clothed, even with his shoes still on, leaving crusted mud at the bottom of the bed. He made no phone calls and received none. The cans of food left rings on the newspapers.