Just as we were about to leave the hotel, an attendant at reception waved Antonio over and handed him a message from a telephone call received that morning. Antonio glanced at it quickly, folded it in four without a word, and thrust it violently in his pocket, as if wishing it would disappear. But, because I was watching, he explained, “It’s not from the paper. I think they’ve forgotten us already …”
He must have sensed I was still curious and felt our budding friendship deserved better than this evasive comment. He took the note back out of his pocket, read it more attentively, folded it again, and put it away. Then he smiled mischievously: “Sometimes going away’s not such a bad idea … Out of sight but not out of mind.”
“Yes, something like that. Or absence makes the flames burn brighter.”
We left the hotel, heading slowly toward the port, and Antonio put film into his Leica.
“I’m going to shoot in black and white. There’s not much light, but it’s interesting light, I might get something out of it. What the paper’s really interested in is the Pinheiro trial, but I’ve just read that it’s been postponed for three days, so we can start with Lisbon.”
I nodded agreement. We had no precise goal, I had made no appointments and didn’t feel like working yet. To use the editor’s rather worn expression, my articles needed to give a feel for the place. Antonio would provide the photos and pen-and-ink sketches. He had a talent for that sort of thing.
I wanted Antonio to make the decisions, but he was keen to talk about Paris, about the woman who had left the message for him. A spell had been broken. I didn’t feel he was talking with any enthusiasm. He described her in bland terms, with no colors coming to the surface, not really haunted by any tender images. Why did Antonio talk about her so inadequately, given he had described Duck so well? Is it all that dangerous to mention your longing and admit to emotions? Every now and then he came to a stop, angled his lens at a street corner, a misshapen facade, a gap between two buildings, and released the shutter without much conviction.
Antonio didn’t love this woman, and I thought of Irene again, and the memory of her terrifies me because it’s everywhere in me, ready to spring up as soon as I’m alone, when all it really is is regret.
She had agreed to see me more than once, had accepted my tender advances, and, even though she rejected my too urgent desire every time, I like to think she always did so gently. She asked only that I be patient. I waited for her love to blossom, as she insisted it should. My feelings grew stronger by the day, and more painful too. I had fallen in love with every detail of her face, with her girlish grin, and even her cruelty.
Perhaps it was the distance she maintained that chained me to her, in the same way that the coolness I sensed in Antonio must have been holding the woman I didn’t know who called him from Paris.
One evening, tired of my persistence, Irene told me I had got everything wrong, she made fun of me: “I’m not going anywhere, I’m not leaving you. You and me, we don’t exist. Anyway, there isn’t anything going on between us.” She was right. That was weeks ago. I realized life had played a hell of a trick on me, letting me come that close to happiness. I decided to get away from Paris.
As I write those words, I don’t see them as shameless or out of place. I only mention my own despair the better to describe Antonio’s indifference. These ideas came to me while he was talking about this woman, and because it was Antonio who inspired them they belong here.
We walked until we came to a Chinese restaurant. It had an international name, something like The Inn of a Thousand Rewards, The Peking Palace, or The Golden Lotus. I didn’t make a note of it, I was overwhelmed with sadness. We were served a sickly rich chop suey, with broccoli drowning in monosodium glutamate, and, without even asking, were given knives and forks. But the exotic décor managed to offset the lack of chopsticks. I tried to steer the conversation toward literature, toward Jaime Montestrela, but Antonio had never heard of him, or even of Eugénio de Andrade. He borrowed my copy of Contos aquosos, opened it at random to page 324, and quickly read a story I had not yet translated.
On the island of Caladonga, the inhabitants conceived of a god whose existence never came into question even though this god was, alas, very small and fragile. Hence, when they had stirred sugar into their coffee and were putting their spoons back down, they checked carefully that the god was not on that particular part of the saucer. A deicide can happen so quickly.
“And how many of these are there?” Antonio asked, weighing up the book. “A thousand?”
“One thousand and seventy-three precisely. It’s a strange number.”
Antonio smiled, almost a smirk, and put the book down. He ate his food quickly, still talking volubly about nothing in particular. In the blackened pages of my notebook there are a few phrases grasped on the wing. Some notes are almost illegible, as if I wanted to forget that I would have to read through them at some point. Even so I remember that, aided and abetted by the beer, Antonio started talking about Paris and all the women he had known. He made my head spin with his drunken aphorisms, clichés, and settings from cheap airport fiction. I did not make scrupulous notes. I only remember “things that always look like what they are,” and “true love, which comes straightaway or not at all,” and also “words that can ruin everything.”
I should have smiled at this string of pearls. I could have countered each of them with the exact opposite argument, given him examples of passions that bloomed after many years, others that flourished on quarreling. I came up with a new aphorism along the lines of “No aphorism tells the truth,” which is at least as good as the paradox of the liar stating “Yes, I’m lying.” What was that philosopher’s name again, the one who was said to have died prematurely because he couldn’t disentangle that contradiction? Philitas of Cos? Hippias of Elis?
Yes, I should have smiled. But what Antonio was saying very quickly became uncomfortable for me. His every half-dime maxim resonated like the implacable truth. True love comes straightaway or not at all. Yes. Things always look like what they are. Yes again.
I was angry. I would have preferred a more constant Antonio, a less frivolous one, one more upset to be here in this city that must have brought his past back to life. His confidences about his Parisian amorous adventures did nothing for me, they were like stains on a white sheet. I wanted him to tell me more about Duck. We were wasting time.
“Antonio?”
He looked up.
“And … that woman, Duck? Don’t you want to see her again?”
He said nothing for a long while.
“I don’t know … We were just kids. She might just remember. I can’t be sure she was really pregnant, or even, if she was, whether she had the baby. But I’m sure she has a husband now, and a life. And she could have written to me, if she really wanted to.”
“Do you think? Would it have been possible?”
He wouldn’t meet my eye, and I felt I understood.
“You’re afraid of what you might find. Your Duck could be ugly now, or stupid. Maybe she already was, but you were—what—sixteen, seventeen? Over the years we dress everything up so much.”
Antonio smiled. He took an old leather wallet with splitting seams from his jacket.
“Here.”
He handed me a very tattered photograph, its colors faded, protected by a sheet of tracing paper—a photo of a very young girl. She wasn’t just beautiful, with her great mass of dark hair swept up off the nape of her neck; there was something else, something that hurt me but that I couldn’t immediately put my finger on.
“Who took the picture? Did you?”
“Yes.”
“How old was she?”
“Fifteen. Just fifteen.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off the photo. Duck was smiling at Antonio. He had caught her by surprise as she put her hair up, her eyes had a child’s dazzling sincerity, an incredible tenderness, the simple happiness of being together. Yes, that was it, the power this
picture had was the look in Duck’s eye trumpeting the fact that Antonio was alive, was loved.
Buried in the depths of my suitcase, I too have a picture of a woman, it’s of Irene. I captured her one morning, leaning over the balcony in our hotel room in Lombardy. The image is out of focus, but in the background you can make out Lake Como, still blanketed in mist, Tremezzina Bay, the cypress trees, and the mountains and forests beyond. The balcony is red with climbing magnolias, it’s going to be a gorgeous day, it’s April.
Irene is looking at me too, she’s surprised, but where’s the tenderness? I’m not convinced by those beginnings of a smile, her eyes are cold, I’m an inconvenience to her, useless, she wishes she were alone to make the most of this tranquillity and enjoy the view. Because of that photograph and that blank, empty, Medusa-like expression, I sometimes even wonder whether, whenever a couple books a room with a view, there’s always one who watches the other while the other just wants to admire the view.
Looking at that face today, I know that a woman who could look at me like that could never have loved me. In fact, there’s so little of anything in her eyes that I don’t even think she looks attractive, and can’t even remember why I wanted her so much. That’s another reason the photo so rarely comes out of the suitcase.
Antonio has put the picture back in his wallet.
“You’re right, it’s true, I’m frightened. But not for the reasons you said. I’m frightened of coming back after all these years, of not meaning anything to her anymore, absolutely nothing. I couldn’t bear it. I’d rather not hope. Besides, I never look at that photo. I don’t even know why I still keep it on me.”
He stopped talking, letting his gaze wander over the nearby Tagus. For a moment I doubted my convictions.
The silhouette of a willow tree rearing up halfway along the bank cut across the clouds. The tree must have been dead, gradually poisoned off by rust and engine grease. Its naked branches were rigid despite the breeze blowing in from the ocean. Just one waved feebly, like a survivor on a battlefield raising his arm among the corpses in the hope of being saved. I saw the seagull flying away. It had just taken off. The branch it had left a moment earlier had sprung up and seemed to come back to life. But it was just the memory of the seagull. The bird was already wheeling through the gray sky, and the willow was reduced to stone once more.
“Let’s leave the past to the past …”
Those words came to me from various things I’d read long ago. We stayed there in silence until Antonio stood up abruptly.
“Come with me,” he said. “I’m going to show you the Good Lord’s tomb.”
We left the restaurant, went back up toward Baixa, and headed into Elevador de Santa Justa. Only a few paces into the patchy shadows on that street Antonio opened the door to the Convento do Carmo, a ruin destroyed by the great earthquake. We stood among those white arches that gaped open like the ribcage of a whale skeleton. It had the feel of a cave without a roof, overrun with weeds, a dead place under the blue sky.
“So. Here we are.”
He gestured toward the parched ground and broken stones.
“I used to play here for hours when I was a kid. Hunting lizards, destroying ants’ nests, climbing the walls right up to the vaults: from up there you can see the whole lower part of the city. Later, Duck and I came here to kiss, at the foot of this very wall, with the wind blowing in from the sea making her hair fly in my face. No one bothered us, the tourists didn’t care or didn’t dare say anything, why would anyone mind a couple of youngsters having a good kiss …”
Antonio walked to the middle of the chapel, to the place where the altar must have been two centuries earlier, until beams and blocks of stone came crashing down onto the women and children who had hoped to find protection from their God’s wrath in here.
“When I went to France I read Voltaire’s poem about the Lisbon disaster. I even learned it by heart:
When you see all these victims will you say:
God is avenged, their lives for their crimes do pay?
For what crimes, what sins can children be found needing,
That now on their mothers’ breasts lay crushed and bleeding?
“Yes, I knew it by heart. I sometimes think it was here in 1755, during the earthquake, that God died. And then four years ago …”
He stood in silence awhile, his expression vacant, then, without looking at me, he asked, “Do you know about the carvoejadores in Brazil?”
Yes, I knew about them. Carvoejadores meant people “cursed by charcoal.” Children of six or seven gleaming with sweat and black with soot, working from dawn till after dark next to huge ovens burning eucalyptus wood. I had read an article about them years earlier. Antonio sat down on a block of stone, picked up a twig, and traced a circle in the dust.
“I did a photo-reportage for a German paper that paid well. It was on a large fazenda in Rondonia. They cleared several hectares of forest every day. I didn’t have permission to be there, but I greased the guards’ palms. The owners, the fazendeiros, made those kids work fifteen- or sixteen-hour days, for a couple of bowls of sugared cinnamon rice a day. Before having a barbecue, believe me, you should check where the charcoal comes from.
“I remember one tiny little boy, they called him Bombinha. That’s the name they use for a moleque da rua, a little black street urchin. This Bombinha wasn’t as smart as those kids usually are. He must have been very shortsighted, he bashed into everything, he fell down a lot and didn’t recognize anyone unless they were close up, and even then he had to screw up his eyes. I don’t know how he’d managed to survive, or how he’d ended up there, and he himself couldn’t remember, it was as if fate had caught up with him and dropped him in that corner of hell. Fate, hell—just a pretty turn of phrase I used in the article. Recruiters used to kidnap those kids in the street, or just promise them food and somewhere to live. That was all it took.”
He stopped talking, clenching and unclenching his fist as if lost in his own anger.
“Why am I telling you all this?”
“I’m not sure … You were talking about God, about God dying.”
He gave a sad smile.
“Oh yes, the Good Lord … Bombinha got cut by a machete. On his leg. It wasn’t deep, okay. He must have just sat on it without realizing. But the wound became infected, it was suppurating, it was a hideous sight. We cleaned it and covered it with moss, he clamped his teeth together with the pain, but didn’t cry. But it kept getting worse. He got feverish, he was very sick. I started taking portraits of that kid, whole rolls of film, I don’t know why, maybe because he was the same age as our child would have been, Duck’s and mine, and while I took the pictures he would smile, he didn’t think about the pain so much. I used to talk to him: Give me a nice smile, Bombinha, I know it hurts, but smile, I would say. I brought the photos back to Europe, the newspaper wanted to negotiate a price …”
Antonio was talking more and more quickly, his voice quavering. All around us, tourists in short-sleeved shirts were taking photos of the lacework of broken Roman arches, some of them laughing loudly.
“There was an American priest who kept an eye on them, a good sort who brought them food, and sandals too, I think his name was David. A Protestant preacher who’d left Kentucky behind, about fifty, I’m not sure. He looked older than that. David his name was, yes, that’s right, David. Pretty symbolic, that name …”
He threw down the twig, picked up a little clod of earth and crushed it between his fingers. The soil fell to the ground in a fine dust, scattering ants beneath it.
“The guards didn’t dare kill him, I’m sure that was because he had an American passport but also partly because he paid them. He wrote to the American consul in Rio every week, asking for their help. Actually, he sent letters all over the place, the poor man, he begged me to tell people what I’d seen there, and particularly not to forget it. I don’t know where he lived, in some village, or a shack in the woods.
“When
Bombinha was really ill the preacher came right away. He knelt down and prayed. Of course he knew medicine would have been more useful, just some antibiotics, but he’d run out, so there he was in that hut, holding the kid’s hand, stroking his clammy hot forehead and reading him the Bible. I took a picture of that too, there was hardly any light, maximum aperture, but I had the shakes and the image was out of focus. But fuck, it was beautiful, I took some Fujicolors and some 400 ASAs, really pushing them, they looked like something by De La Tour, you know, his Nativity. They didn’t want to run it in the paper. ‘Your picture’s out of focus,’ they said, ‘you can’t see a thing.’ What did the assholes want? For me to use a flash?”
Antonio was almost shouting. Tourists were giving us sideways glances, not quite daring to stare. Some were growing impatient, hovering around us, waiting for us to leave so they could get a photo of the whole convent.
“In the end they ran it with such a fucking dumb caption …”
Antonio took out a cigarette, which he didn’t succeed in lighting because of the wind and because he couldn’t get his fingers to work the lighter.
“In the end, the kid died, and when he did David was fast asleep beside him. Exhausted. He didn’t see it happen. And I wasn’t there either. When David woke and realized it was all over, he closed the boy’s eyes and called me. I took the picture, afterward. Bombinha looks like he’s sleeping in that shot, he looks restful. Really skinny, but restful. The other kids told us that just before he went, he whispered that he wanted his mother, he was delirious, asking for watermelon. David didn’t say anything, he gave a few cruzeiros to the guards for permission to bury him himself, with all the kids there. He dug a little grave, planted a little cross, said a little prayer …”
Antonio stopped talking, his chin was wobbling, his eyes shining, and I stood there, not knowing what to do. One of the tourists gave a smile, made a gesture to ask us to move aside, to get a picture. Antonio stood up, then he just looked at the high white arches and said, “Come on … We’re off.”
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