Night Train to Lisbon

by Pascal Mercier

  ‘She must have been the one who had the book printed, I even have an idea who published it, but the firm closed down a long time ago. A few years later, the book popped up in my second-hand bookshop. I put it in some corner, didn’t read it, had an aversion to it, don’t really know why. Maybe because I didn’t like Adriana, even though I hardly knew her. She worked as his assistant and both times I was there her overbearing way with patients got on my nerves. Probably unfair of me, but that’s how I’ve always felt.’

  Coutinho leafed through the book. ‘Good sentences, it seems. And a good title. I didn’t know he was a writer. Where did you get it? And why have you come looking for him?’

  The story Gregorius told him sounded different from the one he had told José Antonio da Silveira on the night train. Mainly because he also mentioned the enigmatic Portuguese woman on the Kirchenfeldbrücke and the phone number written on his forehead.

  ‘Do you still have the number?’ asked the old man, who liked the story so much that he opened another bottle of wine.

  For a moment, Gregorius was tempted to take out the notebook. But he felt this was going too far; after the episode with the glasses, he wouldn’t put it past the old man to call the number. Simões had said he was nuts. That couldn’t mean that Coutinho was confused; there was no question of that. What he seemed to have lost in his solitary life with the cat was any sense of distance and proximity.

  No, said Gregorius now; he no longer had the number. Too bad, said the old man. He didn’t believe a word of it, and suddenly they sat across from each other like total strangers.

  There was no Adriana de Almeida Prado in the phone book, said Gregorius after an embarrassed pause.

  That didn’t mean anything, growled Coutinho. If she was still alive, Adriana had to be close to eighty, and old people sometimes got unlisted numbers; he had done that recently. And if she had died, her name would also have been on the tombstone. The address where the doctor had lived and worked, no, he no longer knew that after forty years. Somewhere in Bairro Alto. It wouldn’t be too hard for him to find the house, for it was a house with a lot of blue tiles on the façade and there weren’t many blue houses in Lisbon. O consultório azul, the blue practice, it was called.

  When Gregorius left the old man an hour later, they had drawn close again. Gruff distance and surprising complicity alternated irregularly in Coutinho’s behaviour, without any obvious reason for the abrupt changes. Stunned, Gregorius followed him through the house that was more like a library. The old man was uncommonly well-read and possessed a huge number of first editions.

  He was well-versed in Portuguese names, too. The Prados, Gregorius learned, were a very old family that went back to João Nunes do Prado, a grandson of Afonso III, king of Portugal. Eça? Went back to Pedro I and Inês de Castro and was one of the most distinguished names in all of Portugal.

  ‘My name is indeed even older and also linked with the royal house,’ said Coutinho, and his pride was evident despite the irony.

  The old man envied Gregorius his knowledge of ancient languages and on the way to the door, he suddenly pulled a Greek–Portuguese edition of the New Testament off the shelf.

  ‘No idea why I give this to you,’ he said, ‘but that’s how it is.’

  As Gregorius went through the courtyard, he knew he would never forget that sentence. Or the old man’s hand on his back softly pushing him out.

  The tram rattled through the early dusk. He would never find the blue house at night, thought Gregorius. The day had lasted an eternity, and now, exhausted, he leaned his head against the misted panes of the tram. Was it possible that he had been in this city only two days? And that only four days, not even a hundred hours, had passed since he had left his Latin books on the desk? At Rossio, the most famous square in Lisbon, he got out and trudged to the hotel with the heavy bag from Simões’s second-hand bookshop, made even heavier by Coutinho’s gift.

  10

  Why had Kägi talked to him in a language that sounded like Portuguese, but wasn’t? And why had he complained about Marcus Aurelius without saying a single word about him?

  Gregorius sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. In his dream the janitor had been there, in the corridor of the Gymnasium, hosing down the place where he had stood with the Portuguese woman when she dried her hair. Before or after, you couldn’t tell, Gregorius had gone with her into Kägi’s office to introduce her to him. He must not have opened a door to it; suddenly they had simply been standing before his gigantic desk, a little like petitioners who had forgotten their petition; but then the Rector suddenly wasn’t there any more, the desk and even the wall behind it had disappeared, and they had had a clear view of the Alps.

  Now Gregorius noted that the door to the minibar was ajar. At some time during the night, he had woken up from hunger and had eaten the peanuts and the chocolate. Before that, the overflowing postbox of his Bern flat had tormented him, all the bills and junk mail, and all of a sudden, his library was in flames before it became Coutinho’s library, where there were nothing but charred Bibles, an endless row of them.

  At breakfast, Gregorius took second helpings of everything and then sat there to the annoyance of the waiter, who was preparing the dining room for lunch. He had no idea how to proceed. Just now he had listened to a German couple making their tourist plans for the day. Lisbon didn’t interest him for sightseeing, as a tourist setting. Lisbon was the city where he had run away from his life. The only thing he could imagine doing was taking the ferry across the Tagus to see the city from a different perspective. But he really didn’t want to do that either. What did he want?

  In his room, he assembled the books he had collected: the two about the earthquake and the Black Death, the novel by Eça de Queirós, The Book of Disquiet, the New Testament, the language books. Then he packed his bag tentatively and put it by the door.

  No, that wasn’t it either. Not only because of the glasses he had to pick up the next day. To land in Zurich now and get off the train in Bern just wasn’t possible; it wasn’t possible any more.

  What else? Was this what came from thoughts of time running out and death: that all of a sudden you no longer knew what you wanted? That you didn’t know your own mind? That you lost the obvious familiarity with your own wishes? And in this way became strange and a problem to yourself?

  Why didn’t he set off in search of the blue house where Adriana de Prado might still be living, thirty-one years after her brother’s death? Why was he hesitating? Why was there suddenly a barrier?

  Gregorius did what he had always done when he was unsure: he opened a book. His mother, a country girl from the flatlands around Bern, had seldom picked up a book, at most a sentimental novel by Ludwig Ganghofer and then it took her weeks to read. His father had discovered reading as an antidote to boredom in the empty halls of the museum, and after he had acquired the taste, he read everything that came to hand. Now you’re escaping into books, too, said his mother when her son also discovered reading. It had hurt Gregorius that she saw it like that and that she didn’t understand when he spoke of the magic and luminosity of good writing.

  There were the people who read and there were the others. Whether you were a reader or a non-reader – it was soon apparent. There was no greater distinction between people. People were amazed when he asserted this and many shook their heads at such crankiness. But that’s how it was. Gregorius knew it. He knew it.

  He sent the chambermaid away and in the next few hours he sank into an attempt to understand a note by Amadeu de Prado, whose title had leapt to his eye as he leafed through the book.

  O INTERIOR DO EXTERIOR DO INTERIOR. THE INSIDE OF THE OUTSIDE OF THE INSIDE. Some time ago – it was a dazzling morning in June, the morning brightness flooded unmoving through the streets – I was standing in the Rua Garrett at a shop window where the blinding light made me look at my reflection instead of at the merchandise. It was annoying to stand in my own way – particularly since t
he whole thing was like an allegory of the way I usually stood by me – and I was about to make my way inside through the shadowy funnels of my hands, when behind my reflection – it reminded me of a threatening storm shadow that changed the world – the figure of a tall man emerged. He stood still, took a packet of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, and stuck one between his lips. As he inhaled the first drag, his look strayed and finally fixed on me. We humans: what do we know of one another? I thought, and acted – to keep from meeting his reflected look – as if I could easily see the display in the window. The stranger saw a gaunt man with greying hair, a narrow, stern face and dark eyes behind round lenses in gold frames. I cast a searching glance at my reflection. As always, I stood with my square shoulders straighter than straight, my head higher than my size really allowed, and leaning back a trace and it was undoubtedly correct what they said, even those who liked me: I looked like an arrogant misanthrope who looked down on everything human, a misanthrope with a mocking comment ready for everything and everyone. That was the impression the smoking man must have had.

  How wrong he was! For sometimes I think: I exaggerate standing and walking that way in protest against my father’s irrevocably crooked body, his torment, to be bowed down by Bechterev’s disease, to have to aim your eyes at the ground like a tortured slave who didn’t trust himself to meet his master with a raised head and a direct look. It is perhaps as if, by stretching myself, I could straighten my proud father’s back or, with a backward, magical law of effect make sure his life would be less bowed and enslaved to pain than it really was – as if through my attempt in the present, I could strip the tormented past of its reality and replace it with a better, freer one.

  And that wasn’t the only delusion my appearance must have produced in the stranger behind me. After an endless night which had brought neither sleep nor consolation, far be it from me to look down on another. The day before, I had informed a patient in the presence of his wife that he didn’t have long to live. You have to, I had persuaded myself before I called the two of them into the consulting room, they have to plan for themselves and the five children – and anyway: part of human dignity consists of the strength to look your fate, even a hard one, in the eye. It had been early evening; through the open balcony door a light warm wind brought the sounds and smells of a dying summer day, and if this soft wave of brightness could have been enjoyed in freedom and oblivion, it could have been a moment of happiness. If only a sharp, ruthless wind had whipped the rain against the windowpane! I had thought, as the man and woman across from me sat on the very edge of their chairs, hesitant yet full of scared impatience, eager to hear the verdict that would release them from the fear of an impending death, so they could go downstairs and mix with the strolling passers-by, a sea of time before them.

  I took off my glasses and pinched the bridge of my nose between thumb and forefinger before I spoke. The two must have recognized the gesture as a harbinger of an awful truth, for when I looked up they had grasped each other’s hands, which looked as if they hadn’t done so for decades. That choked me so that the anxious wait seemed even longer. I spoke down to these hands, so hard was it to confront the nameless horror in their eyes. The hands clenched each other, the blood leached from them, and it was this image of a bloodless, white knot of fingers that robbed me of sleep and that I tried to drive away when I went out for the walk that had led me to the reflecting shop window. (And I had tried to drive away something else in the lighted streets: the memory of my rage at my clumsy words announcing the bitter message that had later been turned against Adriana only because she, who takes care of me better than a mother, had forgotten to buy my favourite bread. If only the white-gold light of the morning would extinguish this injustice that wasn’t untypical for me!)

  The man with the cigarette, now leaning on a lamp post, let his look wander back and forth between me and what was happening in the street. What he saw of me could have revealed nothing about my self-doubting fragility that didn’t accord much with my proud, even arrogant posture. I put myself into his look, reproduced it in me, and from that perspective absorbed my reflection. The way I looked and appeared – I thought – I had never been that way for a single minute in my life. Not at school, not at university, not in my practice. Is it the same with others: that they don’t recognize themselves from the outside? That the reflection seems like a stage set full of crass distortion? That, with fear, they note a gap between the perception others have of them and the way they experience themselves? That the familiarity of inside and the familiarity of outside can be so far apart that they can hardly be considered familiarity with the same thing?

  The distance from others, where this awareness moves us, becomes even greater when we realize that our outside form doesn’t appear to others as to our own eyes. Human beings are not viewed like houses, trees and stars. They are seen with the expectation of being able to encounter them in a specific way and thus making them a part of our own Imagination trims them to suit our own wishes and hopes, but also to confirm our own fears and prejudices. We don’t even get safely and impartially to the outside contours of another person. On the way, the eye is diverted and blurred by all the wishes and fantasies that make us the special, unmistakable human beings we are. Even the outside world of an inside world is still a piece of our inside world, not to mention the thoughts we have about the inside world of strangers and that are so uncertain and unstable that they say more about ourselves than about others. How does the man with the cigarette view an exaggeratedly upright man with a gaunt face, full lips and gold-framed glasses on the sharp, straight nose that seems to me to be too long and too dominant? How does this figure fit into the framework of the pleasure and displeasure and into the remaining architecture of his soul? What does his look exaggerate and stress in my appearance, and what does it leave out as if it didn’t even exist? It will inevitably be a caricature that the smoking stranger forms of my reflection, and his notion of my notional world will pile up caricature on caricature. And so we are doubly strangers, for between us there is not only the deceptive outside world, but also the delusion that exists of it in every inside world.

  Is it an evil, this strangeness and distance? Would a painter have to portray us with outstretched arms, desperate in the vain attempt to reach the other? Or should a picture show us in a pose expressing relief that there is this double barrier that is also a protective wall? Should we be grateful for the protection that guards us from the strangeness of one another? And for the freedom it makes possible? How would it be if we confronted each other unprotected by the double refraction represented by the interpreted body? If, because nothing stood between us, we tumbled into each other?

  As he read Prado’s self-description, Gregorius kept looking at the portrait at the front of the book. In his mind, he turned the doctor’s helmet of combed hair grey and put gold-framed glasses with round lenses on him. Haughtiness, even misanthropy, others had seen in him. Yet, as Coutinho said, he had been a beloved, even esteemed doctor. Until he had saved the life of a member of the secret police. After that, he was despised by the same people who had loved him. It had broken his heart and he had tried to make up for it by working for the Resistance.

  How could a doctor need to atone for something every doctor did – had to do – the opposite of a transgression? Something, thought Gregorius, couldn’t be right in Coutinho’s account. Things must have been more complicated, more involved. Gregorius leafed through the book. Nós homens, que sabemos uns dos outros? We humans: what do we know of one another? For a while, Gregorius kept leafing through it. Maybe there was a note about this dramatic and regrettable turn in Prado’s life?

  When he found nothing, he left the hotel at twilight and made his way to Rua Garrett, where Prado had seen his reflection in the display window and where Júlio Simões’s second-hand bookshop was.

  There was no sunlight today to make the display window into a mirror. But after a while, Gregorius found a brightly lit clothin
g store with an enormous mirror where he could look at himself through the windowpane. He tried to do what Prado had done: to put himself into a stranger’s look, to reproduce it in himself and absorb his reflection from this look. To encounter himself as a stranger might see him.

  That was how his students and colleagues had seen him. That was what their Mundus looked like. Florence had also seen him like that, first as an infatuated student in the front row, later as a wife, to whom he had become an increasingly ponderous and boring husband, who used his learning more often to destroy the magic, the high spirits and the chic of her world of literary celebrities.

  They all had the same image before them and yet, as Prado said, each had seen something different in the others because every piece of a human being’s outside world seen was also a piece of an inside world. The Portuguese man had been sure that in not one single minute of his life had he been as he appeared to others; he hadn’t recognized himself in his outside – familiar as it was – and was deeply frightened at this strangeness.

  Now a boy hurrying past bumped into Gregorius, who recoiled. Fear at being shoved coincided with the upsetting thought that he had no certainty equal to the doctor’s. Where had Prado acquired his certainty that he was completely different from the way others saw him? He talked about it as of a bright light inside that had always illuminated him, a light that had meant both great familiarity with himself and great strangeness in the view of others. Gregorius shut his eyes and imagined himself back in the dining car on the trip to Paris. The new kind of wakefulness he had experienced there, when he realized that his trip was actually taking place – was it somehow connected with the amazing awareness the Portuguese man had possessed about himself, an awareness whose price had been loneliness? Or were these two completely different things?