Night Train to Lisbon

by Pascal Mercier

  People said to Gregorius that he went through the world in a posture, as if he were always bent over a book and constantly reading it. Now he stood up straight and tried to imagine how it was to straighten the pain-crooked back of your own father by standing with an exaggeratedly straight back and an especially high head. In the sixth form, he had had a teacher who suffered from Bechterev’s disease. Such people shoved their heads into their necks to keep from having to look at the ground all the time. They looked the way Prado had described the janitor he met on his visit to the school: like a bird. Horrible jokes about the crooked figure made the rounds and the teacher took revenge with a malicious, punishing strictness. What must it have been like to have a father who had to spend his life in this humiliating posture, hour after hour, day after day, at the judge’s bench and at the dinner table with his children?

  Alexandre Horácio de Almeida Prado had been a judge, a famous judge, as Coutinho had said. A judge who had administered the law under Salazar – a man who had broken every law. A judge who perhaps couldn’t forgive himself and therefore sought death. When dictatorship is a fact, revolution is a duty, was inscribed on the pedestal of the Prados’ tomb. Was it there because of the son who had joined the Resistance? Or because of the father who had recognized the truth of the sentence too late?

  On the way down to the big square, Gregorius realized that knowing these things was now more urgent than the ancient texts that had once dominated his life. Why? The judge had been dead for half a century, the revolution was thirty years ago, and the son’s death was also part of that distant past. So why? What did all that have to do with him? How could it have happened that a single Portuguese word and a phone number written on his forehead had torn him out of his orderly life and involved him, far from Bern, in the life of Portuguese people who were no longer alive?

  In the bookshop on Rossio, a photo biography of António de Oliveira Salazar, the man who had played a crucial, perhaps fatal role in Prado’s life, leapt to his eyes. The dust jacket showed a man, dressed all in black, with an overbearing but not insensitive face and with a hard, even fanatical look that did however reveal intelligence. Gregorius leafed through it. Salazar, he thought, was a man who had sought power but not one who had seized it with blind brutality and dull violence, nor one who had enjoyed it like an excess of rich food at an orgiastic banquet. To gain power and hold it for so long, he had sacrificed everything in his life that had stood in the way of the absolute discipline that governed it. The price had been high, you could tell that from the stern features and the effort of the rare smile. And the repressed needs and impulses of this barren life amid the sumptuousness of government – distorted beyond recognition by the rhetoric of state – had found an outlet in merciless execution orders.

  Gregorius lay awake in the dark and thought of the great distance there had always been between him and world affairs. Not that he hadn’t been interested in political events abroad. In April 1974, when the dictatorship of Portugal came to an end, some of his generation had gone there and he had offended them by saying that he didn’t care for political tourism. Nor was he uninformed, but it always felt as if he were reading Thucydides when he read the newspaper or watched the news. Or was there a connection with the impeccable character of Switzerland? Or was it because of his fascination with words, communicating horrid, bloody and unjust things? And maybe with his nearsightedness?

  When his father, who hadn’t gone further than non-commissioned officer, spoke of the time when his company had been stationed on the Rhine, Gregorius always had the feeling of something unreal, whose significance was mainly that it could be remembered as exciting and possibly something that stood out from the banality of the rest of his life. Once, his father had blurted out: We were scared, scared to death, for it could easily have been different and then maybe you wouldn’t even exist. He hadn’t shouted, his father never did that; nevertheless, they had been furious words that Gregorius heard with shame and had never forgotten.

  Was that why he now wanted to know what it had been like to be Amadeu de Prado? To move closer to his world through this understanding?

  He turned on the light and reread the following sentences:

  NADA. NOTHING. Aneurysm. Every moment can be the last. Without the slightest premonition, in total ignorance, I will walk through an invisible wall, behind which is nothing, not even darkness. My next step can be the step through this wall. Isn’t it illogical to be afraid of it, knowing that I shall no longer experience this sudden extinction?

  Gregorius called Doxiades and asked him what an aneurysm was. ‘I know the word means a dilation. But of what?’ It was the expansion of an arterial blood vessel through innate or acquired changes in the wall, said the Greek. Yes, in the brain, too, quite often. People didn’t usually notice anything and it could be fine for a long time – decades. Then the vessel would suddenly burst and that was the end. Why did he want to know that in the middle of the night? Was anything wrong? And where was he anyway?

  Gregorius felt he had made a mistake in calling the Greek. The words that would have suited their long intimacy eluded him. Stiff and hesitant, he said something about the old tram, about an odd second-hand bookseller, and the cemetery where the dead Portuguese man lay. It made no sense and he knew it. There was a pause.

  ‘Gregorius?’ Doxiades asked at last.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘How do you say chess in Portuguese?’

  Gregorius could have hugged him for the question.

  ‘Xadrez,’ he said and the dryness in his mouth had disappeared.

  ‘Everything all right with the eyes?’

  Now the tongue stuck to the palate again. ‘Yes.’ And after another pause, Gregorius asked:

  ‘Do you have the impression that people see you as you are?’

  The Greek burst out laughing. ‘Of course not!’

  Gregorius was flabbergasted that somebody, Doxiades of all people, could laugh about that when Amadeu de Prado was deeply horrified. He picked up Prado’s book, as if to hold on to himself.

  ‘Is everything really all right?’ the Greek asked into the new silence.

  Yes, said Gregorius, everything’s fine.

  They ended the conversation in the usual way.

  Gregorius lay in the dark, distraught, and tried to figure out what had come between him and Doxiades. He was, after all, the man whose words had given him the courage to make this trip, despite the snow that had started falling in Bern. He had put himself through university by working as a taxi driver in Thessaloniki. A pretty rough bunch, the taxi drivers, he had once said. Now and then, a coarse word would escape him. As when he cursed or dragged fiercely on a cigarette. The dark stubble and the thick black hair on his arms looked wild and uncontrollable at such moments.

  So he considered it natural that others failed to see him as he was. Was it possible that this didn’t matter at all to some people? And was that a lack of sensibility? Or a desirable internal independence? It was growing light when Gregorius finally fell asleep.

  11

  It can’t be, it’s impossible. Gregorius took off the new, feather-light glasses, rubbed his eyes and put them back on. It was possible: he could see better than ever. That was especially true for the top half of the glasses, through which he looked out at the world. Things literally seemed to jump at him, as if they were crowding up to attract his look. And since he no longer felt the previous weight on his nose, which had made the old glasses a protective bulwark, they seemed importunate, even threatening, in their new clarity. The new impressions also made him a little dizzy, and he took the glasses off. A smile flitted over César Santarém’s gruff face.

  ‘And now you don’t know if the old or the new ones are better?’ he said.

  Gregorius nodded and stood before the mirror. The narrow, reddish frames and the new lenses that no longer looked like martial barriers before his eyes made him into somebody else. Somebody whose appearance was important. Somebody who wanted to l
ook elegant, chic. OK, that was an exaggeration; but still, Santarém’s assistant, who had talked him into buying the frames, gestured her appreciation in the background. Santarém saw it. ‘Tem razão,’ he said, She’s right. Gregorius felt rage rising in him. He put on the old glasses, had the new ones packed up, and quickly paid.

  Mariana Eça’s office in the Alfama quarter was half an hour’s walk from the optician’s. It took Gregorius four hours. It began with him sitting down whenever he found a bench, sitting down and changing his glasses. With the new glasses the world was bigger and for the first time, space really had three dimensions where things could extend unhindered. The Tagus was no longer a vague brownish surface, but a river, and the Castelo de São Jorge projected into the sky in three directions, like a real citadel. But the world was a strain like that. Indeed it was also lighter with the light frames on the nose; the heavy steps he was used to taking no longer suited the new lightness in his face. But the world was closer and more oppressive; it demanded more of you, but its demands weren’t clear. When they became too much for him, these obscure demands, he retreated behind the old lenses that kept everything at a distance and allowed him to doubt whether there really was an outside world beyond words and texts, a doubt that was dear to him and without which he really couldn’t imagine life at all. But he could no longer forget the new view either and in a little park, he took out Prado’s notes and tried out the new glasses.

  O verdadeiro encenador da nossa vida é o acaso – um encenador cheio de crueldade, misericórdia e encanto cativante. Gregorius couldn’t believe his eyes: he hadn’t understood any of Prado’s sentences so easily: The real director of our life is accident – a director full of cruelty, compassion and bewitching charm. He shut his eyes and gave in to the sweet illusion that the new glasses would make all the Portuguese man’s other sentences accessible to him in this way – as if they were a fabulous magical instrument that made the meaning of the words visible through their external contours. He grasped the glasses and adjusted them. He was beginning to like them.

  I’d like to know if I’ve done it right – the words of the woman with the big eyes and the black velvet jacket; words that had surprised him because they had sounded like those of an ambitious schoolgirl with little self-confidence and didn’t suit the certainty she radiated. Gregorius watched a girl on rollerblades. If the rollerblader had held his elbow at a different angle that first evening – missing his temple – he wouldn’t now be on the way to see this woman – or torn between an imperceptibly veiled and a dazzlingly clear field of vision that lent the world this unreal reality.

  In a bar, he drank a coffee. It was lunchtime; the bar was full of well-dressed men from an office building next door. Gregorius looked at his new face in the mirror, then the whole figure, as the doctor would see it later. The baggy corduroy trousers, the rough turtleneck and the old anorak contrasted with the many tailored jackets, the matching shirts and ties around him. Nor did they suit the new glasses, not at all. It angered Gregorius that the contrast bothered him; from one sip of coffee to another, he became increasingly annoyed about it. He thought of the way the waiter in the Hotel Bellevue had scrutinized him on the morning of his flight, and how it hadn’t mattered to him; on the contrary, with his shabby look, he had felt he was standing up to the hollow elegance of the surroundings. Where had this certainty gone? He put on the old glasses, paid, and left.

  Had the grand houses next to and across from Mariana Eça’s office really been there on his first visit? Gregorius put on the new glasses and looked around. Doctors, lawyers, a wine company, an African embassy. He was sweating under the thick jumper, and at the same time he felt on his face the cold wind that had swept the sky clear. Behind which window was the consulting room?

  How well one sees depends on so many things, she had said. It was a quarter to two. Could he just go up there without an appointment? He walked on a few streets and stopped outside a men’s clothing shop. You really might buy something new for a change. To the student Florence, the girl in the front row, his indifference to his outward appearance had been attractive. This attitude had soon got on her nerves as his wife. After all, you don’t live alone. And Greek isn’t enough for that. In the nineteen years he had lived alone again, he had been in a clothes shop only two or three times. He was glad that nobody had scolded him for it. Were nineteen years’ defiance enough? Hesitantly, he entered the shop.

  The two saleswomen took all conceivable pains with him, the only customer, and finally they summoned the manager. Gregorius kept looking at himself in the mirror: first in suits that made him into a banker, an opera-goer, a bon vivant, a professor, an accountant; then in jackets, from the double-breasted blazer to the sports jacket suitable for a ride in the castle grounds; finally in leather. He didn’t understand a single one of the enthusiastic Portuguese sentences bombarding him and kept shaking his head. Finally, he left the shop in a grey corduroy suit. He looked at himself uncertainly in a display window a few buildings away. Did the fine scarlet polo neck he had also let himself be pressured into, match the red of the new spectacle frames?

  Quite suddenly, Gregorius lost his nerve. With fast, furious steps, he walked to the public toilet on the other side of the street and put his old things back on. When he passed an alleyway with a mountain of junk at the entrance, he put down the bag with the new clothes. Then he walked slowly in the direction of the doctor’s apartment.

  As soon as he entered the building, he heard the door open upstairs and then he saw her coming down in a flowing coat. Now he wished he had kept the new clothes.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said and asked how the new glasses were.

  As he was telling her, she came close to him, grasped the new glasses and tested whether they were sitting right. He smelled her perfume, a strand of her hair stroked his face, and for a fleeting moment, her movement merged with that of Florence the first time she had taken off his glasses. When he spoke of the unreal reality things had assumed all of a sudden, she smiled and then looked at her watch.

  ‘I have to catch the ferry to pay a visit.’ Something in his face must have made her wonder, for she paused as she was leaving. ‘Have you ever been on the Tagus? Would you like to come along?’

  Later, Gregorius no longer remembered the drive down to the ferry. Only that, with a single liquid motion, she had pulled into a parking place that seemed much too small. Then they were sitting on the upper deck of the ferry and Mariana Eça was telling him about the uncle she wanted to visit, her father’s brother.

  João Eça lived in a nursing home up in Cacilhas, barely spoke a word and replayed famous chess games all day long. He had been an accountant in a big firm, a modest, unprepossessing, inconspicuous man. It had never occurred to anybody that he was working for the Resistance. The disguise was perfect. He was forty-seven when Salazar’s thugs caught up with him. As a communist, he was sentenced to life in prison for high treason. Two years later, Mariana, his favourite niece, went to collect him from the prison.

  ‘That was in the summer of 1974, a few weeks after the revolution. I was twenty-one and was studying in Coimbra,’ she said now, her face averted.

  Gregorius heard her swallow, and now her voice became raw, in an effort not to break.

  ‘I never got over how much he had changed. He was only forty-nine, but torture had made him into a sick old man. He had had a full, deep voice; now he spoke in a hoarse soft voice, and his hands that had played Schubert, mainly Schubert, were disfigured and constantly shaking.’ She took a breath and sat up very straight. ‘Only the incredibly direct, fearless look in his grey eyes – it was still there. It took years before he could tell me about his time in prison: they had held a white-hot iron before his eyes to make him talk. They kept coming closer, and he had expected to sink into a wave of darkness at any minute. But his eyes didn’t flinch from the iron and when they had finished with him he could still see his torturers’ faces. This unbelievable courage gave them pause. “Since t
hen, nothing can scare me any more,” he said, “literally nothing.” And I am sure he didn’t reveal anything.’

  The ferry had docked.

  ‘Over there,’ she said, and now her voice recovered its usual firmness; ‘that’s the home.’

  She pointed to a ferry that described a big arc, so the city could be seen from another perspective. Then she stood still for a moment, her hesitation revealing the awareness of an intimacy between them, which had happened surprisingly fast and couldn’t be allowed to continue, and perhaps also her doubts as to whether it had been right to expose so much of João and herself. When she finally went off towards the care home, Gregorius looked after her for a long time and imagined her standing at the prison gates at the age of twenty-one.

  He went back to Lisbon and then made the whole trip over the Tagus again. João Eça had been in the Resistance, Amadeu de Prado had worked for the Resistance. Resistência: the doctor had naturally used the Portuguese word – as if, for this matter, this sacred matter, there could be no other. In her mouth, the word, softly urgent, had an intoxicating sonority, it was a word with a mythical gleam and a mystical aura. An accountant and a doctor, five years apart. Both had risked everything, both had worked under perfect cover, both had been masters of silence. Had they known each other?

  When he was back on land, Gregorius bought a city map with an enlarged inset of Bairro Alto. Sitting in a café he worked out the route he would follow in search of the blue house where Adriana de Prado, old and without a telephone, might still be living. By the time he left the café, darkness was falling. He caught a tram to the Alfama quarter. After a while, he found the alleyway with the pile of rubbish. The bag with his new clothes in was still there. He picked it up, hailed a cab and was driven to the hotel.