With a flick of her wrist she swishes her black hair over her shoulder. Tonio doesn’t know this yet but it’s a woman’s gesture.
“Do you run after the Eléctrico like that every day? I’ve never seen you.”
“Usually it’s the eighteen minutes past.”
“Really?”
She sits down on a large granite bollard, playing with the dust with the tip of her sandal.
“And will you be late again tomorrow?” she asks.
“No, I’ll be on time tomorrow.”
“So we won’t see each other again. That’s your bad luck. Well, hi from Duck.”
She stands up and runs off, and Tonio watches her until she turns the corner at the top of the street and disappears.
The next day Tonio left late again. The little girl was there, on the bollard. She had already let one W go by, and had left her mother wondering why she had got up so early.
FOR HIS FIFTEENTH birthday, Tonio is given a camera, a Russian Zenit E which is cheap and temperamental, nothing is automatic and it weighs as much as an iron. His family insists he take his first picture. He refuses. It will be of Duck.
A LITTLE LATER, one January morning, it snows in Lisbon. Tonio is waiting for Duck at the huge viewpoint on the rua Santa Catarina which overlooks the docks and the port. Duck is late, and Tonio is hopping from one foot to the other, wearing an old fur-lined jacket given to him by his father, it makes him look like a soldier. Duck is now thirteen, she is almost as tall as he is, although he’s nearly sixteen, and her youthful face already radiates a more unsettling beauty. Tonio still calls her Duck, has never stopped calling her that. He is cold, really cold, he stamps his feet on the frozen ground. In the distance, on the icy, muddy waters of the Tagus, the ferry heading for Barreiro passes the one arriving from Seixal and salutes it with a blast of its horn.
Antonio waits. Duck has been late before, but this morning he feels a new twinge of anxiety, an inexplicable but mild apprehension. It is market day and he lets his eye roam over the crowd of passersby. He thinks he spots her a hundred times, in a flyaway lock of hair, the pattern on a dress, a stranger’s gait. Every time he gets that fleeting quiver, that constriction deep inside him, and each time the disappointment. The waiting feels easier because of this endlessly impatient searching.
All at once, woolen fingers warm with life come and cover his face, startling him.
“Don’t turn around,” she says. “Close your eyes.”
He obeys with a smile. The woolen fingers slip away. He can guess, Duck is in front of him, her breath is chocolaty, blowing warmly over his chin.
“Make sure your eyes are closed, don’t cheat.”
The fingers slide over his temples, into his hair, gently drawing him closer. Tonio’s lips feel the touch of other lips, that open slightly. He stops breathing and opens his eyes, just as Duck closes hers, he has never seen them from so close, those long eyelashes resting on the soft pink of her cheeks. She pushes him away, just a little, then presses herself to him again.
“You looked,” she whispers in his ear.
She pulls away, takes him by the hand and drags him toward the railing of the viewpoint. Snowflakes twirl around them, catching in their hair as it flies in the wind, it is a north wind, blowing a little harder now. On the Tagus, the ferry from Barreiro goes into reverse, its propellers churning the dirty water into shining creamy whirlpools. Tonio looks lost, helpless, he wishes he could talk but can’t manage a single word. Duck comes over to him and puts her arms around him. Then she takes off her gloves and slips her hands into his.
“Warm me up, Tonio, I’m cold.”
Duck’s fingers touch his, squeeze them. Something’s different. Tonio’s eyes cloud over, he turns to look at her, but she puts a finger over his mouth and he knows he mustn’t speak.
All she says is, “Tonio … I’m a woman, today.”
He doesn’t understand.
“I’m a woman,” she repeats.
She spoke the words softly, and Tonio senses that she wants to lead him into another world, a world too big for him, and mysterious too, a world deeper than the sea, and he wants to follow her there, in spite of everything. Then he wants to speak, to let out all the words welling up inside him, but she kisses him again, he holds her to him: it is their first true kiss.
THE NIGHT SHE was fifteen, Duck met up with Tonio. It was one of those luminous stifling August nights scattered with shooting stars you could almost hear whistling through the sky. Tonio and Duck took cover in the W’s tunnel because the next day was Sunday and the tram doesn’t run on Sundays. They lay down on the air mattress Tonio had blown up and spread with a big thick bedcover that smelled of bleach and lavender. A family of bats lived in the roof but Tonio made sure they wouldn’t do them any harm.
“You’ll still have to protect me, Tonio.”
She presses herself to him. She has put a drop of perfume on the back of her neck, and Tonio breathes in its musk and dark fruits.
They stay like that for a long time, not daring to talk, and it is in that position that they fall asleep. In the morning, when the dawning day sends long shadows into the tunnel, they make love, with trusting awkwardness. Everything is new, their bodies so alive they don’t exist.
AT THIS POINT Antonio’s voice cracked and he sat in silence. For a moment I hoped he had invented the story. I was jealous, felt as miserable as a vagrant who has wandered by mistake into the summer garden of an Eastern prince and, in his filthy tattered state, has to drift among its marble fountains, its orange trees and date palms. Antonio finished his brandy and we headed back to the hotel, walking slowly. He was shivering in the warm night air. I gathered he wasn’t lying.
Duck was pregnant. “I’ll kill him,” her father bellowed, “do you hear me? I’ll kill him.” She wanted to run away, join Tonio, but her father caught up with her in the street and beat her to the ground, in front of the neighbors, with hideous words, and every time he struck her she picked herself up and cried, “I’m not ashamed, I’m not ashamed, you can’t make me feel ashamed.”
That same evening Duck was confined to the house, then sent far away, hidden with an elderly cousin in Braga by all accounts, and Antonio had to leave Lisbon. I couldn’t understand this sudden fury. Was it all that catastrophic? Of course, Antonio told me. Abortion and pregnancy outside marriage were unthinkable. This was the 1970s, the calamitous closing phase of the Estado novo, the years of Salazar’s dictatorship, and of a rural Portugal that has now been forgotten but was fervently behind Salazar, Roman Catholic and illiterate. Sister Maria Lucia of the Immaculate Heart was reverentially interviewed on television as she blew out her sixty candles at her Carmelite convent, because she had once been Lucia Dos Santos, one of the three child seers of Fatima to whom the Blessed Virgin appeared six times in 1917. Yes, those were the days of the three F’s: Fatima, fado, and football.
Antonio left for Paris, where an uncle took him in. First he sold newspapers, then he learned to draw and perfected his photographic skills.
“I’ll always wait for you,” Duck had promised, and from his Paris exile Antonio wrote dozens of letters that he sent to a mutual friend. A few weeks later Duck’s father and his wife moved house, it was even said they moved out of Lisbon. Neither Antonio nor anyone else ever had news of Duck again. I asked no more questions.
We were still walking, the street had turned into a staircase and Antonio fell silent again, his eyes lowered. With his thumb he stroked a very narrow ring, a ring so simple that—I am quite sure of it now—it can only have been made of copper, perhaps even a curtain ring. I knew that, at that same moment and wherever she was, on Duck’s left hand there was an identical wedding ring with the same red glint.
WE PARTED WITHOUT a word in the hotel corridor. I opened my door as he was putting his key into his lock, I gave him a last friendly wave, and took a few steps into my room.
For a split second, in the half light, I thought I recognized my reflection in a h
uge mirror to my left. But something was not right. This double seemed to have a life of his own, and I realized that, each through our own doors, Antonio and I had walked into the single lounge we had created between our two bedrooms. We took the same steps, made the same moves.
Antonio turned on a lamp, on autopilot, without noticing me there, and I caught the absent look his eye. I recognized the gaze of a man quite alone, drifting, far from his wife and child, a look of pure distress, of someone lost. I knew I had trespassed into his pain, and felt still more naked than he was, and also appallingly unhelpful, hungry for his sincerity, devoid of affection, rapacious as a chronicler of his suffering.
He noticed me, pulled himself together and gave a joyless smile before retiring to his bedroom and closing the door behind him.
THAT NIGHT, as I often did, I thought back to the life my father had resolved to leave behind, a grim gray life. I may have been wrong—it’s true that other people’s happiness is mind-numbingly boring—but I felt he had gone through life without the tiniest spark of incident. He was twenty just before the Second World War, but he was not a Resistance fighter, nor even a collaborator. He had absolutely no secret double life, or longing for adventure, absolutely no fifteen minutes of fame. Now that he was definitively dead, I took the step of resenting him for this, of wishing some of his glow could have cast light on my own life.
But it was memories of Irene that stopped me getting to sleep.
The first time I saw her was at the newspaper’s archives. She was standing there smoking, leaning out of the window. Most women conceal their bodies with clothes, Irene used them to draw attention to her nakedness under them. Her black dress revealed her slender shoulders and showed off her back. The fine material hugged her buttocks and hips, and her lovely breasts seemed to be making a bid for independence. Her mouth was half open, her lips full, almost maddening, gleaming pale pink. A hint of abandon in her movements and of color in her cheeks suggested someone had just made love to her, a languid look in her eye that she wanted it to be done again and again. She asked me what article I was looking for, I had already forgotten. At first I thought I just wanted her, violently; I soon realized that I loved her, hopelessly.
At that time of the evening, Irene was most likely drinking her tea as usual at the Saint-Elme, the bar on the rue des Abbesses where she “entertained.” It was her “salon,” she claimed. She used to make herself comfortable on the banquette at the far end of the room, always with two books, one essay, one novel, and that notebook I’ve hardly ever seen her write anything in at all. Her brown curls were carelessly held up with pins, and she was always careful to let a few locks escape, in an artful arrangement. With the black shawl that she wore in the evenings, whatever the time of year, she looked like a fortune-teller.
I had seen her at the Saint-Elme several times, rarely with the same men. When she introduced me to them—if she even did introduce me—it made her laugh that she sometimes barely knew their names. But these passing characters, who had probably noticed she was free and had only just approached her, enjoyed an intimacy I was never granted. I would stick around, at first just for a moment, and then for too long, in the hope she would make up her mind to get up from the table and come with me, but I was always the one to give up the fight, leaving her to enjoy her new catch. I always regretted giving in to my urge to see her, and trying to plead for so much as a smile from her, and I pictured her leaving with those men, giving herself to them, like a bitch in heat, yes, that was the expression that came to mind, with images to match. One evening she sat there with a tall, slightly balding man in glasses, “Stanislas, no, sorry, Ladislas,” who was giving her a boring lecture about “natural foods,” and I went home humiliated, crazed with impotent rage, and stubbed my cigarette out in the palm of my hand so that this pain would wipe out the other—in vain. The following day, when, with a note of anxiety in my voice, I tried to find out where and how the evening with Ladislas had ended, she was incensed by my questions. In the end, because I persisted clumsily and failed to disguise my own torment, she snapped in exasperation: “What do you want? To know if I slept with Lad, is that it? By what right, for God’s sake? Yes, if you must know, all night, he fucked me and fucked me again, do you want details?” Her coarseness hit the target, mortifying me, and even the cruel intimacy of that “Lad” was calculated to hurt me. But I shrugged, looked away, and fled, only to come back and apologize later.
So, as with every incidence of insomnia, I translated a few more Contos aquosos. My lifeline. Jaime Montestrela wrote them over a period of three or four years at a rate of one a day. It was his “daily exercise,” as he said in his “logbook.” He often copied out the day’s story and mailed it to someone, making a note of the addressee. Of the five I translated that night, I remembered the shortest, dedicated to a “Jacques B., in Paris”:
On the island of Tahiroha, on Good Friday, cannibals who have converted to Christianity eat only sailors.
I had found very little information about Montestrela, even at the Biblioteca Nacional. He was born in Lisbon in 1925, and belonged to that generation of Portuguese writers from the time of the dictatorship, an era that included Augusto Abaleira and Eugénio de Andrade, whom he may have known. After studying medicine, he embarked on a career as a psychiatrist at the Miguel Bombarda hospital in Lisbon, until 1950, when, under the name Jaime Caxias, he published a collection of activist poetry: Prisão (Prison). His pseudonym was not taken at random because Caxias was the place where political prisoners were tortured under Salazar’s dictatorship. Montestrela was soon unmasked, arrested by La Pide, the political police, and brutally interrogated for a week before being released. He planned his escape. He took exile in Brazil in 1951 and settled in Rio de Janeiro, where he found a job at the Capo d’Oro hospital. It was here that he wrote Nihil obstat, his only novel, a searing work heavily inspired by Lawrence Sterne, and Cidade de lama (City of mud), a “bizarre and masterful essay about solitude and exile,” as André Malraux would go on to write. It was also in Rio that he met another exile, the writer and critic Jorge de Sena, to whom he in fact dedicated Cidade de lama. In 1956 when the military regime took power in Brazil, the two friends set off in search of democracies once more. Jorge de Sena left for the United States and the University of Santa Barbara, and Jaime for France and Paris. In his small Belleville apartment, he wrote Contos aquosos, shortly before he died in 1975 of a ruptured aneurism after lunching with several writers, including Raymond Queneau. It is actually that detail, found in his brief obituary in O Século, that encouraged me to take an interest in him. I quickly checked that none of his work had been translated into French, and felt that these Watery Tales might make a good starting point.
I also tried to write a few lines of The Clearing, my novel that I kept putting off till later. I wanted to create the portrait of a man, Pescheux d’Herbinville, whose name would not have gone down in history had he not, on May 30, 1832, mortally wounded one of the greatest mathematical geniuses, Évariste Galois, who was then only twenty. Galois would die of peritonitis at Cochin hospital the following day. The night before the duel, with a sense of urgency, he jotted a sort of scientific will on a few loose sheets of paper, “publicly exhorting the mathmeticians Jacobi or Gauss to give their opinion, not on the accuracy, but the importance of the theorems” he had found. And important they were: they would rank among the fundamental works on algebra and the theory of numbers. Ever since the day I had heard this legendary anecdote, it had fascinated me. At the age of twenty, on the eve of certain death, what things with a decisive impact on humanity could I have scrawled on a scrap of paper?
My pitiful hero, Pescheux d’Herbinville, was a sort of dandy whom some of Galois’s biographers accused of working as a spy for Charles II’s police. But there was nothing to prove this. It seems he and Évariste had been friends, but had fallen in love with the same woman, one Stéphanie-Félicie Poterin du Motel. So little is known about their story that there is plenty of sc
ope for invention. I had made Pescheux an obscure petty noble rather taken with republicanism, a stupid, complacent man, which he no doubt was. Alongside his humdrum pointless existence, I wanted to depict the studious and tumultuous life of an Évariste driven by a passion for mathematics, the epitome of intelligence and youth. So the fictionalized biography of Pescheux was merely a pretext for a novel about mediocrity and a reflection on jealousy. It was an ambitious project, and I probably put too much store by it to get on with it properly. I took my inspiration for the opening passage from Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma, hoping I would immediately be unmasked: “On May 30, 1832, the republican Pescheux d’Herbinville arrived at the clearing accompanied by a friend who had just loaded one of the two dueling pistols and informed him that, because his adversary, Évariste, had no witness with him, it would be Évariste who picked the firearm.”
I had struggled to reach the fortieth page of my large black notebook; it measured eight inches by twelve, had the words Registre Le Dauphin, France, on the cover, and comprised two hundred pages marked out in quarter-inch squares. Yes—call it fetishism, superstition, or idiocy—I used the same notebooks as the legendary writer Romain Gary but didn’t succeed in stringing together more than a few words.
DAY TWO
IRENE
The page stayed blank on that particular night. I went out and walked down to the river, to the black glint of the water, and I strolled along the banks, not really thinking about anything. I waited till dawn, till the first ferry drew in, the bars along the port opened, and water could be heard heating in percolators, before making up my mind to return to the hotel. I went back to bed, snoozed until ten in the morning, and let the racket on the street wake me. I found Antonio in the lobby, reading the Jornal de Notícias with no sign of impatience. He had his cameras around his neck, he must already have taken a few pictures. He was the one who suggested having lunch in the old port.
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