Night Train to Lisbon

by Pascal Mercier

  Gregorius pointed to Prado’s book, which he had put on the table. ‘Is that all Amadeu wrote?’

  The few words worked a miracle. Adriana straightened up, threw her head back, ran both hands through her hair, and then looked at him. It was the first time a smile appeared on her features; mischievous and conspiratorial, it made her look twenty years younger.

  ‘Venha, Senhor.’ Come. All traces of her overbearing manner had vanished from her voice; the words didn’t sound like an order, not even like a demand. It was more like an announcement that she would show him something, let him in on something hidden and mysterious, and it suited the promised intimacy and complicity that she had apparently forgotten he didn’t speak Portuguese.

  She led Gregorius along a corridor and up to the second floor and from there up to the attic, gasping as she took one stair after another. At one of the two doors, she halted. It could have been merely to catch her breath but later, when Gregorius sorted out the images of his memory, he was sure it had also been a moment of hesitation, of doubt as to whether she really should show the stranger this holy of holies. At last she turned the knob, as softly as if she were visiting a sickroom, and the care with which she opened the door – only a crack at first and then pushing it open slowly – gave the impression that, as she climbed the stairs, she had gone back more than thirty years in time and was entering the room expecting to meet Amadeu in it, writing and meditating, maybe even sleeping.

  Gregorius was dimly conscious of the thought that he was dealing with a woman who was straying on to a narrow ridge that separated her present, visible life from another whose invisibility and chronological distance was much more real to her, and that it would take only a feeble shove, perhaps only a gust of wind, to make her plunge and vanish irrevocably into the past of life with her brother.

  In fact, in the big room they now entered, time had stood still. It was furnished with ascetic sparseness. At one end, facing the wall, was a desk and a chair. At the other end, a bed with a small rug beside it, like a prayer rug. In the centre was a reading chair with a standard lamp and next to it mountains of messy piles of books on the bare floorboards. Nothing else. The room was a sanctuary, a chapel to the memory of Amadeu Inácio de Almeida Prado, doctor, resistance fighter and goldsmith of words. The cool, eloquent silence of a cathedral prevailed here, the impassive rustle of a room filled with frozen time.

  Gregorius stood still in the doorway; this wasn’t a room a stranger could simply walk around in. And even if Adriana now moved among the few objects, it was different from normal movement. Not that she walked on tiptoe or that her gait was at all artificial. But her slow steps had something ethereal, thought Gregorius, something dematerialized and almost timeless and spaceless about them. That also applied to the movements she made as she went to the pieces of furniture and stroked them softly, barely touching them.

  She did that first with the desk chair, a match for the chairs in the parlour with its round seat and curved back. It stood at an angle from the desk, as if someone had risen hastily and pushed it back. Gregorius instinctively waited for Adriana to straighten it and only when she had affectionately stroked all its corners without changing anything did he understand: the crooked position of the chair was where Amadeu had left it thirty years and two months earlier, and not to be changed at any cost. That would have been as if someone were trying with Promethean arrogance to rescue the past from its inalterability or to overturn the laws of nature.

  What was true of the chair was also true of the objects on the desk, which was slightly tilted to make it easier to read and write. On it, in a precarious position, was an enormous book open in the middle; in front of it, a pile of pages, the top one, as far as Gregorius could make out with an effort, with only a few words written on it. Adriana softly stroked the wood with the back of her hand and then touched the bluish porcelain cup on the red copper tray, along with a sugar bowl full of sweets and an overflowing ashtray. Were these things also old? Thirty-year-old coffee grounds? Cigarette butts more than a quarter of a century old? The ink in the open fountain pen must have crumbled to fine dust or dried to a black lump by now. Would the light bulb in the richly decorated table lamp with the emerald green shade still burn?

  There was something else that amazed Gregorius, but it took him a while to grasp it: there was no dust on anything. He shut his eyes and now Adriana was only a spirit with visible outlines sliding through the room. Had this spirit regularly wiped off the dust, on eleven thousand days? And grown grey doing it?

  When he opened his eyes again, Adriana was standing before a towering pile of books that looked as if it could topple over at any minute. She was looking down at a thick, oversized book on the cover of which was a picture of the human brain.

  ‘O cérebro sempre o cérebro,’ she said softly and accusingly. The brain, always the brain. ‘Porquê não disseste nada? ’ Why do you say nothing?

  Now there was anger in her voice, resigned anger, eroded by time and the silence with which her dead brother had responded for decades. He had told her nothing of the aneurysm, thought Gregorius, nothing of his fear and the awareness that his life could come to an end at any time. Only from the notes had she learned of it. And through all the grief, she had been furious that he had denied her the intimacy of this knowledge.

  Now she glanced up and looked at Gregorius as if she had forgotten him. Only slowly did her mind return to the present.

  ‘Oh yes, come here,’ she said in French and, with firmer steps than before, she went back to the desk, where she pulled open two drawers. In them were thick piles of papers, pressed between cardboard covers and tied several times with red ribbons.

  ‘He started that shortly after Fátima’s death. “It’s a struggle against the internal paralysis,” he said, and a few weeks later: “Why on earth didn’t I start it before! You’re not really awake when you don’t write. And you have no idea who you are. Not to mention who you aren’t.” Nobody was allowed to read it, not even me. He removed the key and always carried it around with him. He was … he could be very distrusting.’

  She shut the drawers. ‘I’d like to be alone now,’ she said abruptly, with a trace of hostility, and as they went down the stairs, she didn’t say another word. When she had opened the front door, she stood there silent, angular and stiff. She wasn’t a woman to whom you offered your hand.

  ‘Au revoir et merci,’ said Gregorius and turned hesitantly to leave.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  The question came louder than necessary; it sounded a little like a hoarse bark that reminded him of Coutinho. She repeated the name: Gregoriusch.

  ‘Where do you live?’

  He told her the name of the hotel. Without a word of farewell, she shut the door and turned the key.

  14

  On the Tagus, the clouds were reflected. They chased the sun-glittering surfaces, slid over them, swallowed the light and let it pierce through the shadows. Gregorius took off his glasses and covered his face with his hands. The feverish change between dazzling brightness and threatening shadow pressing with unusual sharpness through the new glasses was a torment for unprotected eyes. Just now, at the hotel, after he had woken up from a light and uneasy afternoon nap, he had tried on the old glasses again. But now their dense heaviness felt disturbing, as if he had to push his face through the world with a tedious burden.

  Uncertain and even a little strange to himself, he had sat on the edge of the bed for a long time and tried to decipher and sort out the confusing experiences of the morning. In his most recent dream, haunted by a mute Adriana with a marble pallor, the colour black had prevailed, a black with the disconcerting quality of adhering to objects – all objects – no matter what their colour or how bright they were. The velvet ribbon around Adriana’s neck seemed to be choking her, for she was constantly tugging at it. Then she grasped her head with both hands and she wasn’t trying to protect the skull so much as the brain. Towers of books, one after another, c
ollapsed and for a moment of tense expectation, blended with apprehension and the guilty conscience of the voyeur, Gregorius had sat at Prado’s desk. On it lay a sea of fossils and in the middle a half-written page, whose lines paled to illegibility when he strained to read it.

  While he was busy remembering these dream images, it sometimes seemed to Gregorius that the visit to the blue house really hadn’t taken place – as if the whole thing had been only an especially vivid dream, where the difference between waking and dreaming was faked. Then he grabbed his head too and when he had recovered the sense of the reality of his visit and pictured the figure of Adriana clearly, stripped of all dreamlike elements, he mentally rehearsed the hour he had spent with her thought for thought, movement for movement, word for word. Sometimes he felt a chill when he thought of her stern, bitter look, with its irreconcilability towards distant events. An eerie feeling had crept over him when he saw her floating through Prado’s room, completely lost in the past, and close to madness. Then he wanted to put the crocheted cloth gently back around her head to grant her tormented spirit a break.

  The way to Amadeu de Prado led through this hard yet fragile woman, or rather, it led through the dark corridor of her memory. Did he want to take that on? Was he up to it? He, who was called ‘The Papyrus’ by his spiteful colleagues because he had lived more in ancient texts than in the modern world?

  It was crucial to find other people who had known Prado; not only seen him, like Coutinho, and known him as a doctor, like the limping man and the old woman of yesterday, but had really known him, as a friend, perhaps as a comrade in the Resistance. It would be hard, he thought, to learn anything from Adriana about it; she considered the dead brother her exclusive property, that much had become clear when, looking down at the medical book, she had spoken directly to him. She would deny, or use all means to keep away, anybody who attempted to question the only real picture of him – which was hers and hers alone.

  Gregorius had looked up Mariana Eça’s number and called her after hesitating a long time. Would she have any objection if he visited João, her uncle, in the home? He now knew that Prado had also been in the Resistance and perhaps João had known him. There was a silence and Gregorius was about to apologize for the suggestion when Mariana said pensively, ‘Of course I have nothing against it; on the contrary, a new face might be good for him. I’m only wondering whether he would accept it. He can be very brusque, and yesterday he was even more taciturn than usual. In any case, you must have a reason for your visit.’

  She was silent.

  ‘I think I know something that might help. I wanted to take him a new recording of Schubert’s sonatas yesterday. He wants to hear only Maria João Pires. I don’t know whether it’s the sound or the woman or a bizarre form of patriotism. But he will like this recording. I forgot to take it with me. You can call at my house and take it to him. My messenger, as it were. That should make your visit easier.’

  He had drunk tea in Mariana’s house, a red-gold steamy Assam, and told her about Adriana. He wanted her to say something about it, but she merely listened to his account in silence. But when he mentioned the used coffee cup and the full ashtray that had apparently been there for three decades, she narrowed her eyes like somebody who suddenly thinks he’s picked up an important clue.

  ‘Be careful,’ she said to him as they parted. ‘With Adriana, I mean. And let me know how it goes with João.’

  And now, with Schubert’s sonatas in his bag, he took the ferry to Cacilhas to visit a man who had gone through the hell of torture without losing his composure. Once again. Gregorius covered his face with his hands. If somebody had prophesied a week ago, when he had sat in his Bern flat correcting Latin notebooks, that seven days later, in a new suit and with new glasses, he would be sitting on a boat in Lisbon, hoping to learn something from a tortured victim of the Salazar regime about a Portuguese doctor and poet who had been dead for more than thirty years – he would have considered him crazy. Was he still Mundus, the myopic bookworm, who had taken fright because a few snowflakes had fallen in Bern?

  The boat docked and Gregorius slowly climbed up to the retirement home. How would they understand each other? Did João Eça speak anything but Portuguese? It was Sunday afternoon people who were paying visits to the home, and you could recognize them by the bunches of flowers they carried. At the home, the old people sat wrapped in blankets on the narrow balconies because the sun kept disappearing behind clouds. Gregorius got João’s room number at the gate. Before he knocked, he inhaled and exhaled slowly a few times; it was the second time that day that he had stood at a door with a pounding heart, not knowing what was in store for him.

  His knock wasn’t answered, not even the second time. He had already turned to go when he heard the door open with a slight squeak. He had expected to see a man in shabby clothing, who often didn’t get properly dressed, but sat in his bathrobe at the chess board. The man who appeared in the doorway, noiseless as a ghost, was quite different. He wore a dark blue cardigan sweater over a brilliant white shirt with a red tie, trousers with an impeccable crease and shiny black shoes. He kept his hands hidden in his sweater pockets and the bald head with the few cropped hairs over the protruding ears was turned slightly to the side, like someone who doesn’t want to deal with anything. João Eça was old and he may have been ill, as his niece had said, but the look in his grey squinting eyes seemed to pierce whatever they saw. A broken man he was not. It would be better, thought Gregorius instinctively, not to have him as an enemy.

  ‘Senhor Eça?’ said Gregorius. ‘Venho da parte de Mariana, a sua sobrinha. Trago este disco. Sonatas de Schubert.’ Those were words he had looked up on the boat and had then repeated to himself several times.

  Eça stood still in the doorway and looked at him. Gregorius had never had to endure such scrutiny and after a while, he looked away. Now Eça pulled the door wide open and beckoned him in. Gregorius entered a meticulously tidy, room furnished only with what was most necessary. For a fleeting moment, he thought of the luxurious rooms in which the ophthalmologist lived, and asked himself why she hadn’t found her uncle a better place to live. The thought vanished with Eça’s first words:

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked in English. The words came lightly, and yet they had authority, the authority of a man who had seen everything and was nobody’s fool.

  Holding the record, Gregorius told him something about himself in English and explained how he had met Mariana.

  ‘Why are you here? Not because of the record, surely.’

  Gregorius put the record on the table and took a breath. Then he pulled Prado’s book out of his pocket and showed him the portrait.

  ‘Your niece thought you might have known him.’

  After a brief glance at the picture, Eça closed his eyes. He swayed a little, then, with eyes still shut, he went to the sofa and sat down.

  ‘Amadeu,’ he said into the silence and then again: ‘Amadeu. O sacerdote ateu. The godless priest.’

  Gregorius waited. One wrong word, one wrong gesture, and Eça wouldn’t say another word. He went to the chessboard and looked at the game in progress. He had to risk it.

  ‘Hastings 1922. Alekhine beats Bogolyubov,’ he said.

  Eça opened his eyes and looked at him in amazement.

  ‘Tartakover was once asked whom he considered the greatest chess player. He said: “If chess is a battle – Lasker; if it’s a science – Capablanca; if it’s an art – Alekhine.”’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gregorius. ‘The sacrifice of both rooks reveals the imagination of an artist.’

  ‘Sounds like envy.’

  ‘It is. It simply wouldn’t occur to me.’

  On Eça’s weatherbeaten, peasant features, the trace of a smile appeared.

  ‘If it makes you feel better, not to me either.’

  Their eyes met, then each looked straight ahead. Either Eça was preparing to continue the conversation, thought Gregorius, or the meeting was at an end.


  ‘Up there in the alcove is some tea,’ said Eça. ‘I’d also like a cup.’

  At first, Gregorius was taken aback to be asked to do what the host usually did. But then he saw Eça’s hands balled into fists in his sweater pockets and he understood that he didn’t want Gregorius to see his disfigured, shaking hands, the remaining proof of his torture. And so he made tea for both of them. Gregorius waited. From the next room came the laughter of visitors. Then all was quiet again.

  The silent way Eça finally took his hand out of his pocket to take the cup was like his silent appearance at the door. He kept his eyes shut as if he thought the disfigured hand would thus be invisible to others too. The hand was covered with traces of cigarette burns, two fingernails were missing, and it shook as if with palsy. Now Eça glanced searchingly at Gregorius: was he up to the sight? Gregorius’s horror flowed over him like an attack of weakness; he held it in check, and brought his cup calmly to his mouth.

  ‘You can only fill mine halfway.’

  Eça said it softly, in a strained voice, and Gregorius was never to forget those words. He felt a burning in his eyes that indicated tears and then he did something that was to shape the relationship between him and this flayed man for ever: he took Eça’s cup and drank half of the hot tea himself.

  Tongue and throat burned. It didn’t matter. Calmly, he put the half-full cup back and turned the handle to Eça’s thumb. Now the man looked at him at length, and this look too was etched deep in his memory. It was a look that blended incredulity and gratitude, a gratitude that was only tentative, for Eça had long ago given up expecting anything from others that called for this. Shaking, he lifted the cup to his lips, waited for a favourable moment and then drank in hasty sips. There was a rhythmic clinking when he put the cup back on the saucer.

  Now he took a packet of cigarettes from his sweater pocket, put one between his lips and brought the trembling flame to the tobacco. He smoked in deep, calm drags and the shaking diminished. He held the hand with the cigarette so that the missing fingernails weren’t visible. The other hand had once more disappeared in the sweater pocket. He looked out of the window as he began to speak.