Like a Fading Shadow

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  He read with the door locked. Room number 2. Lying in bed without taking his shoes off, dropping the magazines and newspapers on the floor as he dozed off. As soon as he entered the room he secured the latch. He remained alert to every noise that came from outside. Even when relatively safe in a hideout, it was important to remain vigilant, like a mouse or a cockroach, he thought. He had read that mice and cockroaches were extremely sensitive to danger; their hearing and sense of smell, the antennas of the cockroach, the sensors in their legs and stomachs capable of perceiving every floor vibration, the creaking of the bed when you got up—they were alert and ready to disappear before the bathroom light came on.

  He perceived the world in an indirect manner, with a degree of distortion that was consistent, but he did not know how to calculate, as if he were still in prison and any piece of valuable information came in fragments, transmitted through unreliable channels, word of mouth, two or three steps removed from the source, in incomplete newspapers that were so old they barely had any value. In prison, the exterior world filtered in like the murmur of voices and metallic echoes that came from other cells. Prison was similar to a military camp; in both, the exterior world felt erased and muted, and you got used to living as if it did not really exist. But you also lived every hour of the day obsessed with the idea of returning to an outside world, which felt increasingly distant and unreliable as you adapted to isolation and mental confinement, and also because people on the outside, even those closest to you, would slowly become estranged, even if they still sent letters and packages, and visited on occasion when it was obvious how uncomfortable they felt, how impatient they were to get away from the contagious smells and sounds of prison.

  * * *

  He could not trust anything. There was no way to confirm what was true. The government declared top secret the discovery of an alien spacecraft that had crashed in New Mexico. Much of what the newspapers publish is propaganda and lies. President Roosevelt allowed the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor so he could push the United States into war with Hitler. The black preachers decrying racial segregation in the South were, in fact, secret Soviet agents, and the FBI did nothing about it because they were infested with communist double agents.

  As a boy, he would find newspapers on the street and get absorbed reading them. If his father caught him, he would knock the paper out of his hand and ridicule him. Newspapers are only good for wiping your ass. The news is lies to deceive idiots. The people who write the newspapers are in someone’s pocket, they are thieves, just like doctors, lawyers, Catholic priests, and the Jews.

  Sitting alone in his cell, or on a bench at the library, or in one of the motel rooms where he lived after escaping, he imagined there had to be a method, a code he could use to understand all those things, to distinguish truth from lies, like those machines that could decipher enemy messages, a sure way to get reliable information, and perhaps intercept messages between the powerful, the people who own the world, the Jews, the ones who control everything from a distance, the communists.

  As a young man, during one of his first long stints in prison, he had followed with great interest the efforts of Senator Joe McCarthy, the only politician with the courage to tell the truth and point his finger at the traitors. While other prisoners played cards or demanded that he change the station so they could listen to stupid dance songs, he pressed his ear to the old radio so he could hear the impassioned voice of Senator McCarthy speaking live, calling out his enemies, who were much more powerful. He had only seen a blurry photo of the senator in the newspaper, but he imagined him as a heroic prosecutor from a movie who unmasks the real culprits, the ones no one had suspected. It was inevitable that they would target him, spreading lies, repaying his sacrifice with ingratitude and revenge. And the majority of the people, brainwashed, now applauding his fall like they had applauded his rise not long before, cheering on the streets, spitting on the corpse and legacy of a man they had admired and feared.

  * * *

  At night, the outside world filtered into his dark cell through the small transistor radio he had purchased in the commissary. He pressed his ear against the plastic casing so he could hear the faint voices of the newscasters, the ads, the songs of Johnny Cash, which he loved. You could hear police sirens in the background of live news reports, also gunshots, the cries of angry people in the streets, the sermons of the preachers. Among them, that firm and solemn voice, the name that was becoming more and more familiar, the biggest liar of them all, the black man with the slanted eyes, the one who elevated his voice with each biblical reference, electrifying the dark-skinned multitudes who followed his orders, commanding them, like barbarian armies, to take over the cities of the South. He was the false prophet with the tailored suits and the gold cuff links, the one who launched the assault on the schools and the buses and the lunch counters, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the covert communist who quoted the Bible from memory, the licentious preacher who slept with white women who had no dignity.

  * * *

  The small radio was the most valuable thing he took with him the day he escaped. He kept making sure it was in his pocket as he crouched inside the bread cart. The radio would help him stay awake during the long nights of walking that followed. Later on, in the motel rooms, it was the sound of the radio that lulled him to sleep. The headlines and quotes he read in the newspaper were easier to understand if he attributed voices to them, if he read them out loud, pronouncing the difficult words slowly, extemporaneous, neurophysiology, realpolitik, extrasensory, telepathic.

  All those nights, driving through the deserts in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, it was the human voices from the small radio that kept him company. His eyes never strayed from the tunnel of light created by the Mustang’s headlights on the highway, but his hand moved automatically to the radio dial as soon as a station began to fade. He listened to women who called the midnight shows to announce they were going to commit suicide or to demand that a real man show up to their lonely rooms. He listened to preachers go on and on about the impending Apocalypse or the coming of Jesus Christ in an alien spaceship. He listened to live reports about black people rioting and he could hear the cries, the explosions, the breaking glass, the police sirens.

  He continued listening to his radio even after he bought the portable TV in Los Angeles. The TV lost its image or sound constantly and you had to keep moving the antenna. He would leave it on and stare at the screen while listening to the voices on the radio. That face seemed to always be there when he turned on the TV at night, just like in the magazines and newspapers. The prophet, the Moses of his people, the Nobel laureate, the shameless communist who was now blatant about his decision to betray his country, taking the same side as the yellow hordes of North Vietnam, the Vietcong; the champion of the poor who traveled in first class and stayed in luxury hotels, the one who bit the hand that had fed him, now announcing another march in Washington, hundreds of thousands or millions of black people invading the capital, descending like a plague.

  * * *

  It was much easier to study the man’s face on the TV screen. The camera acted like a set of binoculars. Before that, he had been just a photo in a newspaper, the name in the big headlines, the menacing and unctuous voice on the radio. He placed the TV on a shelf in his room in the St. Francis Hotel in Los Angeles, and when the static finally cleared it was that face again, the dark skin shining with sweat under the camera lights or the midday sun. The headline announced that he was giving a speech in Los Angeles at the moment, so close, he could have driven there in less than ten minutes. On the back of the TV, with the tip of a nail clipper, he carved the words: Martin Luther Coon.

  * * *

  He turned on the car radio as he was leaving Memphis on April 4. The sun was setting, and as he crossed into Mississippi the sounds of police sirens began to die down. He was listening to the news when it suddenly hit him: the little transistor radio was in the bag he had left behind with the rifle. It was like losin
g a talisman. Losing it was making him as anxious as the fact that he had left his fingerprints. He drove straight to Atlanta that night, taking only secondary roads and stopping once for gas. He struggled to stay awake but could still hear the voices from the radio; confused, anguished, vengeful voices describing a person who was yet to be identified but was clearly him—a man in his forties wearing a dark suit. And yet, somehow, it felt as if they were talking about someone else, someone far away who had nothing to do with him. An exalting and dangerous mirage of impunity. Standing between him and the man hunted by the police and the FBI was a blank and infinite space like the expanding time that separated him from the moment of that single shot, the face in the crosshairs, the pain in the eardrums, the recoiling of the rifle. In the confusion of voices, at least there was one that would never speak again. He was half-asleep at the wheel when a voice on the radio said something that put him on alert, though he never quite felt in danger, because with every minute that passed, the farther away he was from Memphis and the more remote it all seemed. The voice had said that the murder suspect had fled toward Mississippi in a white Mustang with Alabama plates.

  * * *

  But the opacity of the external world would not dissipate, not even now, under the clear light of Lisbon, so far away from Memphis, so close to his final escape. The murky consistency of all those words and images—the glass wall that separated him from others—remained. Invisible metal bars, walls of air that confined him; he felt them press against his chest, like a sharp headache, which could be the sign of a brain tumor. No matter how hard he tried, there was no crack in that wall, no escape. He counted the coins and old bills on the bedside table and tried to calculate how many more days he could afford to stay. He leaned on the railing of an elevated park, watching as a ship left the dock. To the west, he could see the red arches of the bridge surrounded by fog. In the full-page ads of Life magazine, men with golden tans sail to the islands in the Caribbean or the South Seas, invigorated by the smoke of their long cigarettes and their Canadian Club whiskey or Bacardi rum, served in tall glasses with ice. The English and American newspapers that he bought at the kiosk by Rossio Square came several days late. He had purchased a portable radio in Toronto, but it was of no use here because all the stations were in Portuguese. Sometimes he listened and could discern his name, not understanding what else they were saying about him, the name that was now linked to the other one forever, the Big Nigger, he liked to repeat, the unexpected martyr, the hero, the victim, the saint who was worthy of an exorbitant reward of a hundred thousand dollars for whoever could lead them to his murderer.

  He could have disappeared forever with much less than a hundred thousand dollars, erased from the face of the earth, secluded in the room in that small square with the big tree, at the end of the stairway with the blue railing. But he was locked in another room, in the Hotel Portugal, a room he would not be able to afford in a few days’ time. He was locked there, waiting in silence with his magazines and newspapers, listening to every sound that came from outside the room. He heard steps in the hotel corridor around midnight. They stopped by his door, then continued after a few moments. He heard voices coming from the adjacent rooms, muffled laughter, the hoarse groan of a man having an orgasm, faint music from a balcony across the street, the clinking of silverware and a family talking over dinner. And two or three nights, around the same time in the wee hours of the morning, he heard a woman moaning, almost howling, on the other side of the wall, so close, he could also hear the rhythmic sound of the headboard hitting against the wall.

  Everything in his life happened behind a wall, visible or invisible; everything was always at a distance, like looking inside the other cars as he passed them in the Mustang, or staring at the reflection of the couples in the Texas Bar or Maxime’s or the Niagara Bar or the California Bar or the Arizona, now that he had no money to pay for company, or even a second beer, so he sat in a corner for hours sipping the one slowly, avoiding eye contact so no woman would approach him. He stole furtive glances at them, and felt like he was watching from the other side of one of those special mirrors he once imagined he would use to shoot pornographic films, in another life that wasn’t past or future, a life that never came to exist. Perhaps that is how he would think of those days in Lisbon many years later: days that had never existed, days when he did nothing and was almost nobody, Ramon George Sneyd, or not even, Sneya.

  17

  I leave the apartment early on a Sunday morning. I haven’t slept well. I fell asleep after 1:00 a.m. and woke up from a nightmare within the hour. At 3:00 a.m. I was reading Mário Cesariny and Fernando Pessoa in Portuguese with the help of a dictionary. In Pessoa, I underlined Tudo começo é involuntário.

  At 4:00 a.m. I was standing by the window observing a man in a large and somber studio in the old building across the street. I could not see his face. He was deep in concentration, in silence, typing on a computer, which emitted the only light in the room. I would have liked to be able to see what he was typing.

  At 5:00 a.m. I was the one in front of a computer screen with the window to my back. I was reading an FBI memo that was largely a translation of a report in Portuguese signed on June 24, 1968, by Chief Inspector José Manuel da Cunha Passos. The report had the official letterhead and seal of PIDE, the state police under the Salazar dictatorship, and it provided a full account of their investigation into the activities of the suspect, Ramon George Sneyd, during the time he spent in Lisbon between May 8 and 17. The report lists the nightclubs he frequented and it includes transcripts of interviews with people he came in contact with, as well as the fruitless investigation into the main bank offices of the city, in order to ascertain whether the suspect had carried out any financial transactions there.

  In the FBI’s Internet archives, there are old photocopies and scanned pages, copies of copies of copies. Sometimes the type is quite blurry and entire names or sentences or pages are redacted. The light from the laptop illuminates my hands and the notebook where I take notes.

  The chief inspector’s report is hard to read. It looks like a worn carbon copy. My eyes begin to hurt. On May 15, the suspect was in the offices of South African Airlines inquiring about flights to Cape Town and Salisbury, the capital of Rhodesia. On the morning of May 16, he visited the Canadian embassy, located at 198 Liberty Avenue, and then he proceeded to Foto Lusitania close by, where he ordered six passport photos. By this time the light in the studio across the street has long turned off, and that entire building is in the dark. In a column, with capital letters, Chief Inspector Cunha Passos has typed the names of all the seedy establishments where they confirmed the suspect’s presence: Texas Bar, Arizona Bar, Niagara Bar, California Bar, Europa Bar, Atlantico Bar, Bolero Bar, Maxime’s Night Club, Garbo Bar & Night Club, Fontoria Night Club, Tagide Night Club, Nina’s Night Club.

  At 6:00 a.m. a blue light has begun to rise over the rooftops and the cables of the tram. A few minutes later, the first trolley appears; it is lit and empty like a ghost ship. Chief Inspector Cunha Passos is pleased to report that his men are investigating all the crimes committed in Lisbon between May 8 and 16 to confirm whether the suspect participated in any of them. My eyes burn from staring at the computer screen. At 7:00 a.m. I take a break and stare at the gray-blue light that enters the room, the blue on the rooftops is much lighter now, and the clouds over Magdalena Church have a pink hue. Through the American embassy in Lisbon, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent a personal thank-you letter to the chief inspector, Mr. José Manuel da Cunha Passos.

  * * *

  I force myself to go out, mostly so I can stop looking at the screen. The sleepless night produced in me a strange feeling of lightness, a distance from myself that has been heightened by the novelty of being in Lisbon. The small bars and cafes that were open until midnight are now closed.

  I go down Fanqueiros Street, turn on Arsenal, and reach Commerce Square. Today, it is almost deserted. No multitudes descending from the ferries to start
the workday. I preferred the urban and nomadic feel of Mário Cesariny’s poetry, much more worldly than Pessoa’s, inhabited by real human presences and not just projections of himself. Em todas as ruas te encontro, says Cesariny, em todas as ruas te perco.

  I see a small solitary figure against the backdrop of the river. Even at this early hour, there is usually someone sketching, reading, writing, or just staring at the horizon from the edge of Cais das Colunas. Perhaps it is someone staring at a cell phone, oblivious to this breathtaking view—the red bridge, this blue horizon, the river meeting the salty ocean breezes.

  I approach the marble flight of steps. The tide is low, exposing a white beach, rocks, and algae. Seagulls and storks peck in between the rocks and pull small crabs. I reach the last step and my shoes sink into the wet sand. Little crabs flee sideways in all directions. Small air bubbles tell the storks where their prey is hiding.

  I see a large tire with a rusty rim. It is covered in seaweed and rocky clusters of mussels. Fish larvae shine in the small pockets of water. Old wood planks and blue tiles come and go with the tide. I step around the translucent body of a dead jellyfish. What an inexplicable anatomy, like an alien castaway.

  On these steps and this beach is the frontier, the realm of a primordial life that makes the leap from the ocean to the ground, slithering on the sand, rocking back and forth with the soft waves at the mercy of the tide and the movements of the passing ships. Primordial life and human garbage, a trail of trash that marks the high contours of the tide on the sand: cigarette butts, plastic bags, lighters, condoms, clothespins, bottle caps, a mustard packet from McDonald’s, a credit card. On the wet sand, the birds have imprinted their cuneiform steps. I tread carefully around them. My long shadow follows. I pick up a few smooth fragments of blue tile and feel the rounded edges with my fingers. I put them in my pocket. There is nothing that is not memorable one way or another.