Night Train to Lisbon

by Pascal Mercier

  It had been the life he had wanted, said Gregorius, and even as the words took shape in him, he became aware of defiance in his tone. Only two days ago, when he had stepped on to the Kirchenfeldbrücke and seen the Portuguese woman reading the letter, he wouldn’t have had any reason for this defiance. He would have said exactly the same thing, but his words would have contained no trace of obstinacy.

  And why are you sitting here, then? Gregorius was afraid of the question and for a moment, the elegant Portuguese man seemed like an inquisitor.

  How long does it take to learn Greek? Silveira asked next. Gregorius breathed a sigh of relief and plunged into an answer that was much too long. Could he write down a few words for him in Hebrew, here on the napkin? asked Silveira.

  And God said, Let there be light; and there was light, wrote Gregorius and translated it for him.

  Silveira’s phone rang. He had to go, he said, when he finished his conversation, and thrust the napkin into his jacket pocket. ‘What was the word for light?’ he asked, standing up, and he repeated it to himself on his way to the door.

  The broad river outside must already have been the Tejo. Gregorius started: that meant they would soon be arriving. He returned to his compartment, which had been converted back into a regular compartment with a cushioned bench, and sat down at the window. He didn’t want the journey to end. What was he to do in Lisbon? He had a hotel. He would give the porter a tip, close the door, rest. And then?

  Hesitantly, he picked up Prado’s book and leafed through it.

  SAUDADE PARADOXAL. PARADOXICAL YEARNING. For 1,922 days I attended the Liceu where my father sent me, the strictest school in the whole country, they said. ‘You don’t need to become a scholar,’ he said, and tried a smile that, as usual, failed. By the third day. I realized that I had to count the days so as not to be crushed by them.

  As Gregorius was looking up the verb crush in the dictionary, the train pulled into the city’s Santa Apolónia railway station.

  The few sentences had captivated him. They were the first that revealed something about the external life of the Portuguese man. A student at a strict school, who counted the days, and the son of a father whose smile usually failed. Was that the origin of the restrained rage conveyed in the other sentences? Gregorius couldn’t have said why, but he wanted to know more about this rage. He had glimpsed the first brushstrokes in a portrait of somebody who lived here in this city. Somebody he wanted to know. Lisbon seemed to grow towards him in these sentences. As if it had just stopped being a thoroughly strange city.

  He took his suitcase and stepped out on to the platform. Silveira had waited for him. He took him to the taxi and gave the driver the address of the hotel. ‘You have my card,’ he said to Gregorius and waved a brief goodbye.

  7

  When Gregorius woke up, it was late afternoon and twilight was sinking over the cloud-draped city. Soon after he arrived, he had climbed under the bedspread in his clothes and had slipped into a leaden sleep, despite the feeling that he really couldn’t allow himself any sleep, for there were a thousand things to do, things he couldn’t name but no less urgent for that. On the contrary, the fact that they were nameless made it all the more imperative to tackle them at once to prevent something bad from happening, something that also couldn’t be named. Now, as he washed his face in the bathroom, he felt with relief the fear of missing something, and feeling guilty about it, fall away along with his numbness.

  During the next hour, he sat at the window and tried in vain to bring order to his thoughts. Now and then, his eye was drawn to the unpacked suitcase in the corner. When night fell, he went down to reception and had them enquire at the airport if there was still a flight to Zurich or Geneva. There were none, and when he went up in the elevator, he was amazed at how relieved he felt. Then he sat on the bed in the dark and tried to interpret the surprising relief. He dialled Doxiades’s number and let the phone ring ten times before he hung up. He opened the book by Amadeu de Prado and read on from where he had stopped at the railway station.

  Six times a day I heard the jingle of bells announcing the beginning of class and sounding as if monks were being called to their prayers. Thus it was 11,532 times that I clenched my teeth and went back into the gloomy building from the schoolyard instead of following my imagination, which sent me through the school-gate and out to the port, to a ship’s rail, where I would then lick the salt from my lips.

  Now, thirty years later, I keep coming back to this place. There isn’t the slightest practical reason for it. So why? I sit on the mossy, crumbling steps at the entrance and have no idea why my heart is in my mouth. Why am I full of envy when I see the students with brown legs and light hair going in and out as if they were at home here? What is it? Why do I envy them? Recently, when the window was open on a hot day, I listened to the various teachers and heard the stuttering answers of anxious students to questions that had made me tremble too. Sitting inside there once more – no, that was certainly not what I wanted. In the cool dark of the long corridor, I met the janitor, a man with a protruding, birdlike head, advancing towards me with a suspicious look. ‘What are you searching for here?’ he asked, when I passed him. He had an asthmatic falsetto voice that sounded as if it came from the hereafter. ‘I went to school here,’ I said and was filled with contempt for myself when I heard how hoarse my voice sounded. For a few seconds, an eerie silence reigned in the corridor. Then the man behind me shuffled off. I felt I had been caught red-handed. But why?

  On the last day of finals, we had all stood behind our benches, the school caps on our heads, as if we were lined up for morning roll call. With measured tread, Senhor Cortês went from one boy to another, announced the results with his usual strict expression and with the same look, he handed us our diplomas. Joyless and pale, my assiduous benchmate took his and held it in his folded hands like a Bible. Giggling, the boy at the bottom of the class, the girls’ suntanned favourite, let his diploma fall to the floor like a piece of litter. Then we went out into the midday heat of a July day. What could, what should, be done with all the time that lay before us, open and unshaped, feather-light in its freedom and lead-heavy in its uncertainty?

  Neither before nor since have I experienced anything that revealed so cogently and impressively as the following scene how different people are. The boy at the bottom of the class was the first to take off his cap; he spun around and threw it over the fence of the schoolyard into the pond next door where it was slowly soaked and finally disappeared under the waterlilies. Three or four other boys followed his example and one cap remained hanging on the fence. My benchmate then straightened his cap, anxious and indignant, you couldn’t tell which feeling predominated in him. What would he do tomorrow morning when there was no more reason to put on the cap? But what was most impressive was what I observed in the shadowy corner of the schoolyard. Half hidden behind a dusty bush, a boy was trying to stow his cap in his schoolbag. He didn’t simply want to stuff it in, that was plain from the hesitant movements. He tried to place it carefully this way and that; finally he made room for it by taking out a few books which he now wedged awkwardly under his arm. When he turned and looked around, you could read in his eyes the hope that nobody had observed him in his shameful act, along with a last trace of the childish thought, wiped out by experience, that you could become invisible by averting your eyes.

  I can still feel today how I twisted my own sweaty cap back and forth. I sat on the warm moss of the entrance steps and thought of my father’s imperious wish that I might become a doctor – one who might release people like him from pain. I loved him for his trust and cursed him for the crushing burden he imposed on me with his touching wish. Meanwhile, some students from the girls’ school had come over. ‘Are you glad it’s over?’ asked Maria João and sat down next to me. She examined me. ‘Or are you sad about it, after all?’

  Now I finally seem to know what keeps compelling me to return to the school: I’d like to go back to those minutes
in the schoolyard when the past had dropped from us and the future hadn’t yet begun. Time came to a halt and held its breath, as it never did again. Was it Maria João’s suntanned knees and the fragrance of soap in her light dress that I’d like to go back to? Or is it the wish – the dreamlike, nostalgic wish – to stand once again at that point in my life and be able to take a completely different direction to the one that has made me who I am now?

  There’s something strange about this wish, because the one who wishes it isn’t the one who, still untouched by the future, stands at the crossroads. Instead, it is the one marked by the future-become-past who wants to go back to the past, to revoke the irrevocable. Would he want to revoke it if he hadn’t suffered it? To sit once more on the warm moss holding his cap – it’s the absurd wish to go back in time and take oneself – the one marked by events – on this journey. And is it conceivable that the boy back then would have defied the father’s wish and not gone to medical school – as I sometimes wish today? Could he have done it and be me? At that time no perspective of experience could have made me want to take another fork at the crossroads. So what good would it do me to turn back time and, extinguishing one experience after another, to turn myself into the boy who was addicted to the fresh fragrance of Maria João’s dress and the sight of her tanned knees? The boy with the cap – he would have had to be quite different from me to take another direction, as I wish for myself today. But then, if he had, he wouldn’t have become a man who would later wish to return to the previous crossroads. Can I wish myself to be him? I wouldn’t want to be him. But this would only be because I am not him, only as the fulfilment of wishes that aren’t his. If, in fact, I were him – I couldn’t wish for what would satisfy me as him, as my own wishes might, because I wouldn’t have them at all if they had already been fulfilled.

  Yet I am certain I will soon wake up again with the wish to return to the school and give in to a yearning whose object can’t exist because you can’t even think it. Can there be anything more absurd than this: to be moved by a wish that has no conceivable object?

  It was nearly midnight before Gregorius was finally sure he understood the difficult text. So Prado was a doctor and had become one because his father, whose smile usually failed, had had this imperious wish, a wish that had originated not in dictatorial arbitrariness or paternal vanity, but had developed out of the helplessness of chronic pain. Gregorius opened the phone book. There were fourteen listings under the name of Prado, but there was no Amadeu among them, no Inácio and no Almeida. Why had he assumed that Prado lived in Lisbon? Now he looked in the business directory for the publisher Cedros Vermelhos: nothing. Would he have to search through the whole country? Did that make sense? Even the slightest sense?

  Gregorius set out to walk in the night-time city. He had been doing that since his mid-twenties when he lost the capacity to fall asleep easily. Countless times, he had walked through the empty streets of Bern after midnight, had stopped from time to time and listened like a blind man to the few footsteps coming or going. He loved to stand at the dark display windows of the bookshops and feel that, because others were sleeping, all these books belonged only to him. With slow steps, he now turned the corner out of the side street of the hotel into the broad Avenida da Liberdade and went towards the Baixa, the lower part of town where the streets were arranged like a chessboard. It was cold, and a fine fog formed a milky halo around the old-fashioned street lamps with their gold light. He found a coffee shop where he had a sandwich and coffee.

  Prado kept returning to sit on the steps of his school and imagine how it would have been to live a completely different life. Gregorius thought of the question Silveira had put to him and to which he had answered defiantly that he had lived the life he wanted. He felt that the image of the doubting doctor on the mossy steps and the question of the doubting businessman in the train had shifted something in him, something that would never have happened in the familiar streets of Bern.

  Now the only other man in the café paid and left. With sudden inexplicable haste, Gregorius also paid and followed the man. He was an old man who dragged one leg and stood still every now and then to rest. Gregorius followed him at a distance into Bairro Alto, the upper part of the city, until he disappeared behind the door of a narrow, shabby house. Now the light went on in the first floor, the curtain was pushed aside, and the man stood at the open window, a cigarette between his lips. From the protective dark of a doorway, Gregorius looked past him into the lighted flat. A sofa with cushions of worn-out needlepoint. Two unmatched armchairs. A glass cabinet with crockery and small, colourful porcelain figures. A crucifix on the wall. Not a single book. How was it to be this man?

  After the man had closed the window and pulled the curtains closed, Gregorius emerged from the doorway. He had lost his orientation and took the next street down. Never had he followed anybody like this with the thought of how it would be to live another life instead of his own. It was a brand-new kind of curiosity that had taken hold of him and it suited the new alertness he had experienced on the train journey and when he had arrived at the Gare de Lyon in Paris, yesterday or whenever it was.

  Now and then he paused and looked around him. The ancient texts, his ancient texts, they were also full of characters who lived a life, and to read and understand the texts had always also meant reading and understanding this life. So why was everything so new now when it concerned both the Portuguese aristocrat and the limping man? On the damp cobblestones of the steep streets, he put one uncertain foot before the other and breathed a sigh of relief when he recognized the Avenida da Liberdade.

  The blow caught him unprepared, for he hadn’t heard the rollerblader coming. He was a giant who hit Gregorius on the temple with his elbow as he overtook him and ripped off his glasses. Dazed and suddenly sightless, Gregorius stumbled a few steps and to his horror felt himself stepping on the glasses and crushing them underfoot. A wave of panic washed over him. Don’t forget the spare glasses, he heard Doxiades say on the phone. Minutes passed until his breathing grew calm. Then he knelt down on the street and felt for the glass splinters and the fragments of the frame. What he could feel he brushed together and knotted into his handkerchief. Slowly he groped his way back to the hotel.

  The night porter jumped up, in fright when Gregorius entered the lobby with blood dripping from his temple. In the elevator, he pressed the porter’s handkerchief to the wound and then ran along the corridor, opened his door with trembling fingers and tumbled on to the suitcase. He felt tears of relief when his hand touched the cool metal case of the spare pair of glasses. He put them on, washed off the blood, and stuck the Band-Aid the porter had given him on the scratch on his temple. It was two-thirty. At the airport nobody answered the phone. At four he fell asleep.

  8

  If Lisbon hadn’t been steeped in that bewitching light the next morning, Gregorius thought later, things might have taken a completely different turn. Maybe he would have gone to the airport and taken the next flight home. But the light dispelled any temptation to turn back. Its glow made the past very distant, almost unreal, under its luminosity, the only possibility was to move forward into the future whatever it might bring. Bern and its snowflakes were far away and it was hard for Gregorius to believe that only three days had passed since he had met the enigmatic Portuguese woman on the Kirchenfeldbrücke.

  After breakfast, he dialled José António da Silveria’s number and reached his secretary. Could she recommend an ophthalmologist who spoke German, French or English, he asked. Half an hour later, she called back, gave him greetings from Silveria and the name of a doctor his sister went to, a woman who had worked for a long time at the university clinics in Coimbra and Munich.

  Her office was in the Alfama quarter, the oldest part of the city, behind the citadel. Gregorius walked slowly through the luminious day and avoided anybody who could have bumped into him. Sometimes he stood still and rubbed his eyes behind the thick lenses. So this was Lisbon, the city he h
ad come to because, while looking at his students, he had suddenly seen his life from the other end, and because a book by a Portuguese doctor had fallen into his hands and its words sounded as if they were aimed at him.

  The rooms he entered an hour later didn’t look like a doctor’s office at all. The dark wood panelling, the original paintings, and the thick carpet gave the impression that you were in the home of a noble family, where everything had its solid form and life proceeded without a sound. It didn’t surprise Gregorius that nobody was in the waiting room. No one who lived in such rooms needed to accept patients. Senhora Eça would come in a few minutes, said the woman at the reception desk. Nothing about her indicated a medical assistant. The only thing that hinted at commercial matters was a bright monitor full of names and numbers. Gregorius thought of Doxiades’s slightly shabby office and the cocky medical assistant. Suddenly he had the feeling of committing treason and when one of the high doors opened and the doctor appeared, he was glad to be relieved of the uncomfortable thought.

  Doutora Mariana Conceição Eça was woman with big dark eyes he felt he could trust. In fluent German, with a mistake only here and there, she greeted Gregorius as a friend of Silveira, and already knew why he was here. Why should he feel any need to apologize for his panic about the broken glasses? she asked. Naturally, somebody as nearsighted as he was had to feel he had a spare pair of glasses.

  All at once, Gregorius calmed down, sank deep into the chair at her desk and wished he never had to stand up again. The woman seemed to have unlimited time for him. Gregorius had never had this feeling with any doctor, not even Doxiades; it was unreal, almost as in a dream. He had expected her to measure the spare glasses, make the usual eye tests, and then send him to the optician with a prescription. Instead, she made him tell her the history of his nearsightedness, stage by stage, concern after concern. When he finally handed her the glasses, she gave him a searching look.