Electrico W

by Hervé Le Tellier

  IT MUST HAVE BEEN one o’clock in the morning, I was reading the paper to try and get to sleep. The world was full of Bombinhas. Full of photographers too, framing the vulture behind the dying little girl, because sometimes death can be photogenic. “There were hundreds of little girls like her,” some guy from Gamma told me. “If we’d had to save her, we’d have ended up doing only that.” Only: adverbial part of speech implying restriction.

  I couldn’t find it in me to feel sorry for him.

  Someone once told me a good photographer had to take a pin with him. “Do you know why? To prick the baby in its mother’s arms. Because a picture with the baby crying is always worth an extra ten dollars.”

  Who was it who told me that? Oh yes, Harry, that was one of Harry’s stories. At the time I laughed so much, it was terrible, but perhaps Harry wasn’t joking.

  Harry was eighteen in 1944. He claimed to have been the youngest soldier at Omaha Beach, the youngest to come out of it alive, at least. He lied about his age to bring his call-up forward, so much so that when he reached Meaux in northern France he was barely nineteen and already a corporal. That may be a lie. With Harry, how do you know the truth from the lies? Either way, he got through dozens of rolls of film at Arromanches and Amiens, and in the Ardennes. He developed them at night, with developing fluid in GIs’ helmets. In his New Jersey apartment he still had pictures of Patton at Malmédy, kneeling before the bodies of American prisoners machine-gunned down by the Germans. Those were the first photos he ever sold, in March 1945, to Life. The ones that made him famous.

  I knew of another one, published around the same time. A simple grenade explosion near a bridge in Frankfurt. The picture was taken from very close quarters, it’s a miracle he didn’t leave his life there. It looks like a firework, for the Fourth of July. Except for an American soldier frozen in a peculiar, aerial motion, he was obviously already dead.

  But there was one he had never wanted to have published. He always had a copy of it on him, protected with transparent adhesive film. On the back he had written: “Munich, June 6, 1945.” It was of a man of indeterminate age, wearing rags, his face appallingly thin, his eyes so sunken they could almost have been plucked out. He had no laces left in his shoes and he sat slumped amid the ruins. Before him, the dull gleam of a tiny piece of metal.

  Perhaps he was a Jew who had survived one of the Polish death camps that the Soviets had liberated in January. Oświęcim. Later people said Auschwitz. Although Harry had not actually seen a single camp. Or only glimpses from a few photos published here and there in the papers, starting in April 1945 when the British entered Bergen-Belsen. The images were unbearable and yet Bergen-Belsen wasn’t actually an extermination camp, hardly even one for the sick. Harry had cut them out, those photos, and—to keep his loathing for the Germans alive—he sometimes looked at the faces of those dazed, emaciated, spent clowns in their striped suits. That day in Munich was the first time he saw a deportee close up.

  The man had mimed bringing food up to his twisted mouth, and had reached his hand out toward Harry. Then, when Harry didn’t move, he clutched hold of him with his feeble skeletal fingers. He was filthy, covered in fleas and ringworm marks, stinking of putrefaction and piss. Harry looked away and pushed him off. To get rid of him, he rummaged through his pockets and threw him a dime. At the time, that wasn’t too bad. The man reached clumsily for the coin but didn’t manage to catch it. It rolled over the rubble. He ran to pick it up, but as he bent over he collapsed like an empty sack. Exhausted by the effort, he stayed there, gasping among the ruins. The coin gleamed a few centimeters from his hand, but he didn’t have the strength left.

  Harry had shuddered. It was not yet shame, just disgust. With himself, with the war, with that eye-popping stare fixed on the brass coin. Harry discovered he was capable of barbarity. He had crossed the invisible boundary that separates indifference from cruelty. A monster within him woke and proved stronger than the human being. It was getting dark. Harry walked away, not daring to look at the man who was still on the ground.

  And yet, although he couldn’t have said why, at the last minute he took the photo. The man, the coin, the ruins. The empty eyes.

  An hour later, in the kitchen of a house requisitioned by his regiment, one of the few houses still standing in Munich, he developed the film and immediately made a set of prints. The picture came out in crisp focus, the framing was impeccable, it was the best of the roll. It was taken from just above the man, making him look truly alone, for all eternity, destitute. Only his hands were slightly out of focus, but that was probably because they had been shaking.

  Harry put the picture down. He crouched on the ground and started shivering, and then whimpered like a wounded dog. Then he started punching the tiled floor, until blood oozed from his fingers.

  Harry spent that night scouring the city, not really sure what he would do if he managed to find the man. By dawn he had interviewed dozens of people, old women, children, but in a bomb-ravaged Munich no one paid much attention to anyone else anymore. He sometimes said it was for the best, that his shame was now the truest part of him, that it had changed him permanently for the better.

  Perhaps he was lying. Perhaps he was no better than before.

  I put the newspaper down and turned out the light. I too had been a war correspondent for a while. The draw of the big wide world, the myth surrounding journalists, those words by the poet Supervielle about a pineapple-scented sadness worth more than a happiness that had never known travel. I too wanted to see the sun from another angle. One evening in 1981 when I was on the Mosquito Coast in the Sandinistas’ Nicaragua, a .22 caliber bullet fired from a contra’s M16 embedded itself in a beam less than two feet from my temple. It made the clean, powerful sound of an ax against a tree, and that pellet of steel gleamed in the half light. I flew back to Paris shortly after that and told the paper I was quitting, I was frightened; no one criticized me for it.

  I was about to fall asleep when the telephone started ringing in Antonio’s room, ringing and ringing. At first I thought he wasn’t in there, that he had gone out in the night. But the ringing stopped and I heard his voice through the closed doors.

  It was calmer than usual, very soft, and I guessed he was talking to a woman. It must have been a call from Paris, I only caught snatches of the conversation but it was in French. Sometimes his voice was a murmur like the whisper of a freshwater spring. I knew it was the woman he had mentioned, that she was unhappy, that he wouldn’t find the words to comfort her.

  So as not to listen, I concentrated on the Contos aquosos that I always kept close at hand. My copy was in good condition even though it was old, dated 1973. The cover was dog-eared, that was all.

  Montestrela was obsessed with the passage of time, with old age, degeneration, and death. Half of the short stories tackled this theme, and not always with any distance, or even levity. Sometimes he also descended rather distressingly into pornography, even into scatological vulgarities not worthy of the lyrical poet who had once written the poignant Prisão, which Marguerite Yourcenar had praised for the “painful, almost martyred rhythm of its syllables.” Still, I did not allow myself to censure anything, including stories such as this:

  On the island of Pergos, under the reign of Toludey I, the law forbade anyone from taking anything without giving something at the same time. So the inhabitants drank only when they passed urine, and ate only when they defecated. Under these conditions, it was difficult to appreciate the aroma of the dishes during banquets, and culinary art in Pergos deteriorated until the Persian invasion in the third century B.C., an invasion that brought a salutary end to Toludeyan law.

  At one point, I heard Antonio in his room almost shouting: “Don’t cry, please, I beg you, don’t cry …” There was the sharp clunk of him hanging up and almost immediately the sound of the telephone ringing again. This time Antonio picked up right away.

  I switched on the bedside light and started scribbling the notes that hel
ped me write this passage later. After a few minutes I heard footsteps in the lounge, the sound of a window being opened, and two very quiet knocks on my door.

  I got out of bed and opened the door, Tonio was standing there holding two glasses. The lounge looked subtly alive in the half light, as if inhabited by the breeze and thrum of the city.

  “Sorry to disturb you, I saw the light under the door. Did the phone wake you?”

  I shook my head, but Tonio didn’t wait for an answer and handed me a glass of beer.

  “Here,” he said. “I opened a couple of Sagres from the minibar. Nothing like a cold beer in the middle of the night …”

  I smiled, reached my glass toward his, and he clinked them together with a shy, cautious expression that was probably appropriate for a new friendship. In the darkness his features looked unfamiliar, he looked handsomer, but older too, with more wrinkles and a more receding hairline. He could have been my brother.

  “I’m really sorry about the phone. It was that girl, in Paris, the one who wrote the little note, you know.”

  He sighed, drank some beer. A thought seemed to come to him suddenly.

  “Actually, I think you know her,” he said. “It’s Irene.”

  “Irene?”

  “Yes. Such an old-fashioned name, isn’t it?”

  “Which Irene? The girl in archives? Small, with curly dark hair? Pretty?”

  “Worse. You see, you do know her.”

  I don’t know where I found the strength not to let anything show. I walked over toward the balcony and leaned against the stone parapet, my hands came to rest flat on the limestone surface, it was cold, rough, damp. My eyes misted over for a moment. I was afraid I would betray myself, afraid to know more too, but I asked, “Why did she call you?”

  “Because she’s in love with me. Or she thinks she is, which comes down to the same thing.”

  “Are you—together?”

  “Yes, no, I don’t know. We sleep together, that’s all.”

  That’s all. Two tiny words that described their meaningless lovemaking, their nights without tomorrows. And there was I who would have been able to love her so much more, so much better. A cold anger was growing inside me, a remote loathing, nothing violent, the sort you would feel for a torturer a long way away, one whose barbarity you only learned from the terrible accounts of his victims.

  I thought of Galois’s assassin, Pescheux d’Herbinville, and his murderous rage. It was not Stéphanie’s lover he had challenged to a duel, it was the living reflection of his own powerlessness to be loved. Perhaps his jealousy had also revealed a hatred for Évariste that he had not previously admitted to himself, a hatred for this unnecessarily brilliant adolescent whose intelligence and sheer life force eclipsed everything else, a hatred further fueled by the illusion of a long-standing friendship. I recognized that feeling of being nothing. It crushed me once again, this time thanks to this man and his instant and yet inexplicable charm, this man who didn’t even have to do anything to defeat me.

  I kept a portrait of Galois on me, one of only a very few to have survived, an undated pencil drawing by an unknown artist. Galois’s lips were thin and yet sensual, his nosed turned up at the end, his eyes bright and almost childlike. In that penciled image he could as easily be thirteen as twenty, even though it’s not difficult to imagine he has the beginnings of a beard. The artist only had time to sketch his collar and the curve of his coat. Évariste must have posed for quite a while, before tiring. I often studied that face as if his incandescent gaze would somehow produce the words of my novel.

  In the distance a man hailed a taxi in the dark. The car stopped and put on its hazard lights for a moment, and I thought that Hazard Lights would be a good title for this book or another, one day. The driver opened the door for the passenger and, with a squeal of tires, made a quick U-turn on the deserted Avenida da Liberdade. I watched the two red dots of his rear lights growing smaller, then fusing together and disappearing as the taxi turned right.

  Antonio came to join me on the balcony, he looked down at the street and the square and brought his glass to his lips.

  “I don’t know what to do. Really.”

  He was waiting for a word from me, a sign of encouragement. On Restauradores Square a man and woman were kissing by the obscene yellow glow of streetlamps.

  Antonio had no idea about our relationship. Otherwise, he would never have dared discuss Irene with me. Besides, I was sure she hadn’t talked to anyone about me, sure I had never really existed as far as she was concerned.

  Antonio’s gaze roved over the city, alighting on every lurid neon sign, the red and electric blue of the Pasteleria Guzman, the red and yellow of the Splendid movie theater. He drank some more beer, the foam leaving a fold of white on his lips. For a moment I considered confessing everything to him. Telling him that because of her, every night, or almost, I left my room and walked aimlessly toward the river. Or I could throw my glass on the ground. But the least word, the least gesture would have sent me headlong into reality, and I did nothing, said nothing.

  Antonio sighed and looked at my untouched beer.

  “Aren’t you drinking, don’t you want it?”

  I shook my head. A sense of calm settled. Over Irene and him. I didn’t want answers to any questions.

  A smile hovered over his lips. Which surprised me.

  “You went out last night,” he said. “I heard you.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve got someone here, haven’t you? A woman? Your sleepless nights …”

  He was smiling, and I smiled too because I was so surprised by his question. Antonio had invented a mistress for me, a woman to fill my thoughts.

  “Yes …,” I replied, without thinking. And perhaps to tone down the lie, I added, “If you like.”

  “If I like?”

  A lie. Quickly. Describe a woman, a meeting, strike the right note, watch the pauses, no hesitation about circumstances, places, times, no tripping up over words, or just the right amount. Talk about Irene too. Say enough for him to know, before he finds out, from her. I won a few seconds with a long draft of bitter beer.

  “It’s someone I met in Italy, three years ago, during that Mafia bombing in Parma, you remember. She’s a painter … Well, she doesn’t make a living from it, her real job is restoring works of art. Paintings. From the nineteenth century. She’s Portuguese, she has a small apartment in Alfama, she spends two or three months a year there, in the summer. When I decided to come to Lisbon, I asked if I could rent it from her. She said that wouldn’t be possible because she’d be there herself. When I arrived here she was at the airport waiting for me, and that was it.”

  I smiled again. So did Antonio.

  “And what is this bellissima signora called?”

  “L—Lena. Lena Palmer.”

  I was so unprepared for the question that I forged a stupid name, one so close to my own that I could anticipate Antonio’s comment.

  “Yes, I know, it’s weird: I met a girl called Palmer in Parma and, worse, my name’s Balmer, it’s a sort of mirror image, and if I marry her she’ll have a ridiculous name. But that’s not her name, it’s her husband’s. Don’t worry, her morals are safe, she’s in the process of a divorce.”

  “Because of you …”

  Go ahead, make fun of me, Antonio … Your sarcasm proved you were buying my story. I was sure you could already picture her, my Lena Palmer, far better than I could because I was busy trying to take on board each new lie. Lena Palmer. Actually, that Palmer was quite useful, there was no danger of forgetting it and giving myself away.

  “Because of her husband, mostly because of him. A banker, or rather the financial director for a large industrial group, I never really grasped what he did. She married him, I don’t know, ten years ago when she was just twenty and he was thirty-three, it couldn’t work. Well … not because of the age difference, after all the man’s nearly the same age as me. But twenty’s too young to get married, wouldn’t
you say?”

  “Whereas now …,” he ventured with a hearty laugh, baring his teeth.

  “No, no, Antonio,” I said with a smile. “Don’t go imagining things. We haven’t seen each other since Parma, you know … She’s not sure what she wants with me, no more than I am … But you see, something happened, it was nothing really, but it makes me think this relationship could work: I didn’t know she’d be at the airport, we’d agreed to meet a couple of hours later, at the Café Brasileira. In the crowds waiting at Arrivals, there was this really beautiful woman, unique in that mass of people, and my eyes were drawn to her, instant attraction. It was only a fraction of a second later that I recognized her as Lena, when she smiled at me and waved, delighted by my astonishment.”

  Antonio shook his head with a scornful laugh: “I don’t know what you found so astonishing. You’re lucky to think the woman you love is pretty.”

  “I don’t know how to explain it, I really don’t. She didn’t even have to be pretty …”

  Even though I had created my Lena, I didn’t feel like sharing any intimate details with Antonio, who didn’t understand. I didn’t mean physical attraction, or that possessive vanity that takes hold of some men who are proud of their partner’s good looks. I wanted to pinpoint the moment just after that instant, unfounded attraction, the fraction of time when anonymous desire gives way to specific tenderness, when the attraction of a face is replaced by the sweet pleasure of memories.

  I paused for a while, pretended to drink my beer, but the glass was empty.

  “And then nearly two months ago, I fell in love with someone else, so …”

  “Do you want another Sagres?” Antonio asked.

  Don’t interrupt me, Antonio, please, because this is where the real lie begins. I’m going to tell you about Irene, about her and me. Hiding feelings is so much harder than inventing new ones. I smiled and shook my head.