Electrico W

by Hervé Le Tellier

  “Did you come here with Duck?”

  “I don’t remember. When I was with her I didn’t feel much like eating candy.”

  “Where did she live?”

  He tilted his chin toward one of the ten-story buildings at the top of the street. It was built in the sixties and had about a hundred peeling balconies, all laden with parched potted plants, broken old toys, bicycles, and laundry dryers.

  “Do you remember which apartment it was?”

  “No, just that it was on the other side of the building. On the seventh or eighth floor, I can’t remember. From her bedroom you could see the April 25 Bridge and the statue of Christ the King.”

  Antonio looked away and we slowed imperceptibly.

  We walked toward Eduardo VII Park, toward the clammy heat of Estufa Fria. Antonio couldn’t wait to rediscover the smell of the tropical hothouses, and he bought two tickets.

  A slatted wooden canopy softened the sun’s rays. We wandered among the ferns and umbrella trees, and followed the meanders of an artificial river that snaked through the gardens. Antonio stopped from time to time to take a photograph.

  A tousled-haired kid in sandals ran up to Antonio. He was holding a long cluster of milk-white flowers.

  “Here,” he said, handing him the flowers with his arm held high. It was an insistent, determined gesture, not the sort of childish command that could be shrugged off. Antonio knelt, accepted the present, and put it in his buttonhole.

  “Like that?” he asked.

  “Yes, that’s great like that.”

  The boy backed away slightly to look at Antonio and said solemnly, “They’ll bring you good luck. What are you going to give me in exchange?”

  Antonio reached up and took his wallet from his jacket. I blenched: I hadn’t yet had time to put back the two photos after having them copied. All Antonio offered was a stamp, a French one.

  “Here, it’s a French stamp. Is that okay?”

  “That’s robbery …,” the kid retorted sulkily. He rubbed his head to show he was thinking, and added, “But it’ll do. Just this once.”

  And he put the stamp in his pocket.

  An elderly man appeared behind the child, slightly out of breath. He was holding his hat in his hand and automatically raised it above his head to greet us.

  “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! Please forgive him, he does whatever he pleases. Marco, did you pick that off a tree? You mustn’t take flowers off the trees. Oh, I can’t cope with him, he won’t stay still for a moment.”

  The child had already gone on ahead, escaping his minder.

  “Marco, wait for me. Do forgive him, really, please.”

  The old man trotted off in pursuit of the boy, and Antonio put the viewfinder to his eye, snapping the pair of them before they disappeared behind the foliage.

  We crossed a bridge sculpted out of cement, then another. Passing by waterfalls and lagoons, the path took us to an indoor pond covered in water hyacinths. In the middle of this small lake stood a gray-and-pink marble building, it was imposing, monumental even, and overrun with creepers. It must have been the hothouse curator’s home or a reception area for summer shows. We were alone on the edge of the water, and I felt uncomfortable. We shouldn’t have been there, we had gone into an area out of bounds to visitors.

  On the paved terrace in front of the building, sitting between the paws of a marble lion, a girl was twisting and turning a bamboo stick in the water. At first I thought she couldn’t have been more than sixteen. She was wearing a short dress with a red-and-blue pattern, her legs were slender but toned and tanned, and her black hair was held in a multicolored ribbon. Beside her on the flat tiles lay a sketchbook covered with pictures in charcoal and pastels. An old case for a child’s violin lay open, full of oil pastels. She didn’t appear to notice us and, for a moment, perhaps because she looked so unaware and peaceful, the place seemed to belong to her for all eternity.

  She was describing shapes in the emerald water, ephemeral figures, no two the same, manipulating the bamboo precisely, unhesitatingly. It was as if she was forming letters, writing words long forgotten by the waters but carried to us silently on the shimmering wavelets.

  Antonio was mesmerized. He set off along a paved path that ran through the water lilies and other water plants, crossing the lake that lay between us and the terrace. Something about the way he moved made me think he knew her, but he asked, “What’s your name?”

  Antonio’s presumptuous familiarity, his intrusion, wasn’t paternal, it didn’t have the authority of an adult addressing an adolescent. It had more to do with an instant instinctive intimacy, the first words from a besotted prince to a shepherdess, or rather a fascinated shepherd to a princess.

  “Aurora,” she replied, not looking up or even stopping her twirling of the bamboo in the lagoon.

  All at once she threw the stick in the water and stared at Antonio and then at me, as I too crossed toward the terrace, clumsily, trying not to slip on the mossy paving stones. She jumped to her feet and when she looked me in the eye I realized she reminded me of Irene, because of her black, almond-shaped eyes, olive skin, and other indefinable qualities.

  “Are you two lost? You realize this is my house, here, my island?”

  Antonio smiled. “Your island?”

  “Yes. It may not actually be completely an island but it is mine. I come here whenever I like, even when it’s closed. I have the keys to the little door at the end. That’s where my father keeps his machines. I always do my studying here. Textile drawings, but not printed patterns. I mean I do designs for woven fabrics. Do you know what I mean? Look.”

  She opened her sketchbook at random. Every inch of paper was covered with sketches of geometric designs. One area looked like the cubist weave of cotton, another like pencil-drawn stitches in wool.

  She stood on tiptoe and smelled the flowers on Antonio’s lapel.

  “That’s pretty. Clivia minata. And where was it stolen?”

  “Some kid just gave it to me,” Antonio apologized, embarrassed. “It’s a good luck charm …”

  “Really? A good luck charm? Do you believe in good luck, then?”

  She pirouetted on the spot.

  “At night I sometimes light the little blue suns,” she said, pointing to ultraviolet lights on the roof arches.

  “At night?” Antonio asked, smiling and running his hand through his red hair in a rather contrived, affected way.

  The girl crouched, closed her sketchbook, and started clearing the pastels scattered over the paving stones into the violin case.

  “Don’t you believe me? Are you laughing at me?”

  “No, I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  She looked down, arranging her oil pastels in order like the colors of the rainbow. Antonio knelt beside her, picked up a few crayons, and handed them to her. Without looking up, she took them and said, “And do you two have names? You, what’s your name?”

  “Antonio, Antonio Flores. And my friend is Vincent. Vincent Balmer.”

  I introduced myself with a bow.

  “Vincent Balmer? Are you English, then?” Aurora asked, but not waiting for a reply, she turned to Antonio: “And what about Flores? Is that really your name? Is that why you’ve come to see your cousins the flowers? That’s Jewish, isn’t it? They say all flower and tree names are Jewish. My name’s Jewish too, it’s Oliveira. And my middle name’s Judith. But I was baptized. Gods are so complicated.”

  Of all the pastels she chose cyan and ran it along her forearm, tracing a streak of azure, like war paint.

  “I’ll draw a bird for you Antonio, okay?”

  She snatched Antonio’s wrist like a bird of prey launching itself at a mouse. In one fluid movement she drew a beak and a neck on his palm, created the line of a wing on his thumb, then another on his little finger, and, on his index finger, a long tail like a magpie’s, pointing upward. She put down the blue crayon, picked up a sunny yellow one, and, with a roll of her fingers, created the eye i
n the middle of his palm where his heart line and luck line crossed. She let go of Antonio’s hand and put away the pastels.

  “Bird-hand, by Aurora Oliveira,” she laughed. “A good luck charm, and this one’s real. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, you know.”

  Antonio moved his hand and the bird came fleetingly to life, spreading its wings, ready to fly. Antonio opened and closed his hand slowly, fascinated, unable to say a thing, and Aurora watched him closely, smiling. In the golden light, Antonio’s hair looked almost brown, and for the second time I thought him handsome, even more so. Then he turned to Aurora, and his whole voice had changed, husky but gentle too: “How old are you, Aurora?”

  “Twelve.” Antonio opened his eyes wide and she burst out laughing: “No, I’m not, I’m thirty. What about you? Don’t say a thing, don’t tell me, whatever you do, you fool … Telling your age makes you older.”

  A sudden bright light made me look up. Something was twinkling far overhead, way up in a huge rubber palm whose leaves hung over the top of the building, over the bay window. The twinkling came from a pair of round, steel-framed glasses. As it had grown, the plant had gradually engulfed the metal sidepieces, and the glasses were set right into the trunk. Two growths within the wood, two bulging green protuberances, formed a pair of froglike eyes. I instinctively pushed my own glasses back up my nose. Aurora noticed the gesture.

  “Are you admiring Monstro?” she asked. “When I was little, even littler, it used to frighten me with its strange cut-out leaves, like witches’ masks. So I put an old pair of glasses between two of its branches. Then when it grew they were imprisoned. I called it Monstro because, according to the gardeners, it’s a monstera deliciosa. And it was the name of the whale in Pinocchio, you know, the film of Pinocchio …”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off Monstro, off that pair of glasses trapped in the thick trunk where acrid white sap must have been seeping over them. That fragment of human life gave the towering plant a strange personality. Behind the filthy lenses, you could almost imagine there lurked a climbing-plant philosophy, with sententious words impounded in its chlorophyll.

  Aurora was smiling mischievously. She must have been keeping a real, far deeper secret.

  “Well,” said Antonio, “I think Monstro was one of your lovers and you were bored of him and turned him into a philodendron.”

  Aurora touched Antonio’s cheek very lightly.

  “You’re so clever, Antonio,” she said mockingly. “You guessed. I always turn my lovers into plants, do you think there would be this many here otherwise? Over there, that drooping fatsia, the one that needs water and is drying out because I won’t let anyone water it, that’s that idiot José. He was always hovering around me, constantly trying to look at my breasts, when he gave me an ice cream, when he read a book over my shoulder … One day, what a nightmare, he put his hand on my hip. Ugh, it was disgusting. And in a flash, changed him into a fatsia. Ciao, José.”

  She ran over to a burgeoning plant clinging to a wall of rock.

  “This staghorn fern here is Ruiz, he always wanted people to believe he was a real man. He rolled his pack of cigarettes in the sleeve of his T-shirt and made a lot of noise on his scooter. He’s much quieter like this, with these dangling fronds like dogs’ tongues.”

  She gave a sneer to staghorn-Ruiz, walked on a few paces, and stroked a leaf on a palm tree near the water lilies.

  “And this howea which won’t stop growing is Tadeus. He was the kindest one. He used to say, ‘Tell me, Aurora, do you think you’ll ever love me? Because, as you know, I just adore you and I want to live with you.’ He was so sweet, poor Tadeus … Then he got a bit too persistent and eventually even quite nasty. There’s no getting away from it, with boys, if they love you and you don’t love them they call you a bitch. That’s oversimplifying, isn’t it?”

  Aurora talked on and on with an almost singsong accent, and I could see Antonio was increasingly unsettled.

  “Monstro’s another story,” Aurora went on, “I don’t like shortsighted boys. They make you feel you should protect them, and when they wake up in the morning their glasses are always more important than you. One day Monstro—”

  I put my hand up to my glasses without even thinking, and she burst out laughing. She tapped her finger on the copy of Contos aquosos that was peeping out of my pocket.

  “What are you reading?”

  “They’re short stories.”

  I handed the book to her, and she took it and leafed through it, frowning, but smiling too.

  “Jaime Montestrela … What a weird name. It doesn’t mean anything to me. The stories are weird too.”

  She handed it back to me, made as if to leave the terrace along the paved path, but turned back, rummaged through her large canvas bag, and took out two invitation cards which she slipped into Antonio’s hand.

  “I almost forgot: you must come tomorrow, there’s a concert. Baroque music, Purcell, Monteverdi, you’ll see when you get here. It’s at eight o’clock sharp, on the nose, you need to wear a suit, it says so on the invitation. I’ll be wearing a full-length dress. You’ll see there are plenty of people who’ll want to get their tuxedos out, and it looks very funny in the hothouse, like a colony of penguins visiting the Amazon. Okay, see you tomorrow then?”

  She ran off, a gazelle, and vanished into her jungle. I heard the motor of Antonio’s Leica. She was already hidden but her voice echoed round the hothouse: “Come back soon, Antonio, and I’ll draw a cat for you on your other hand.”

  “NO, ANTONIO, NOT like that … Don’t say My Irene, don’t start with that possessive, it’s too worn, too overused, just say Irene, it’s truer, stronger, more sensitive. She’ll read her name and hear your voice saying it, you breathing it, and Irene’s a word that never really ends, it hangs in the air long after you’ve said it, it doesn’t need anything else.

  “Write: Irene, I’m lost, I don’t know what I want. After all, that’s always true, we never have any idea what we want from other people. When I left for Lisbon—no, you weren’t leaving, it was a separation, a wrench, so write When I set off from Paris, yes, that’s better, it’s much better to refer to the place you’re leaving than some nebulous destination. When I set off from Paris, I couldn’t know that you would become—no, actually, that I had become such an important part of your life. I don’t like thinking you’re hurt, I didn’t want either of us to be hurt.

  “This letter needs to be short, it’s better to show you don’t feel comfortable with words, so start a new paragraph, pause, let your writing catch its breath: Irene, dear sweet Irene—but did you ever call her sweet? You didn’t? Well, do it then, it’ll be like you’re daring to use words in this letter that you held back in person, words you’ve never spoken, that will be hers all brand-new and subtly different.

  “Look out the window, Antonio, let the city speak for you. Tell her it’s two in the morning, or even later, it’s raining in Lisbon, and I can see the Avenida da Liberdade from the window, it’s glistening and gloomy as a canal in Amsterdam. That’s a bit of a hollow image, Antonio, I realize, but have a look, don’t you think that tonight Lisbon looks like a cold northern city, silent in the mist, and that the deserted street’s reflecting the darkness the way a slow-moving waterway would? And you need to give this letter a bit of color, even if it is gray, particularly if it’s gray. Say I want to sleep, but I can’t, the sound of the rain, perhaps, or a feeling that I’m not getting anywhere with my work, or my life. I shot two or three rolls of film today, in the port. I don’t know what they’re going to be like, these articles I’m working on with Vincent. We have ten days left to wrap everything up, and I feel I don’t recognize this place, even though not much has changed in ten years.

  “Then say, Of course, I didn’t tell you Vincent Balmer’s in Lisbon with me. There, Antonio, that’s when she needs to find out. Make the point He lives here now. As of two months ago. Or a bit longer. A big room in the port neighborhood. Not very tid
y. Anyway, we took rooms in a hotel together. It’s more practical. Explain that He’s doing the writing. He spends his days making notes, in the big black book he takes everywhere with him, and he speaks Portuguese with a funny accent, like he’s imitating a Portuguese imitating a Frenchman imitating a Portuguese, or the other way around. Does that make you laugh, Antonio? But it’s true, isn’t it? Write it. He’s not very chatty but the two of us get on well. We can say that, Antonio, can’t we? Don’t say anything more. If you say too much, it’ll never be enough. She’ll want to have details, to work out how much you know, to try and read between the lines.

  “The hotel’s comfortable, a bit impersonal, but I think it suits our work. I know, Antonio, here you can add in this, it’s a snippet from my notes, it fits perfectly with your last sentence: The place is both tired-looking and luxurious, dating back to the early 1900s, one of those palaces where you never feel at home, and never even want to unpack your bags. Say Irene, what if you came and joined me? No, that’s a stupid, bland construction with that simpering what if like a childish game. Say Come and join me in Lisbon. And don’t look at me like that, Antonio, I’m sure it’s a good idea. You’ll be on your territory here, everything will seem clearer. Don’t worry about me, I’ll go and sleep in my studio in São Paulo. Or with Lena. I’ll leave you in peace. You can give yourself enough time to be sure. Say For a few days at least. A long weekend.

  “We need to finish this letter, make it short. No lying now, we can’t go and end it with a stock phrase, an I miss you or an I can’t stop thinking about you. Anyway, you’re not in love yet, she’d know you were lying. Girls can see through everything, they’re so clever. Just say I’d really like to show you the city where I grew up. You take good care of yourself—no, put really good care.

  “And sign it. Legibly. Not impatiently. As if you regret it.

  “Shall we tell her about Aurora, in a PS? No, come on, Antonio, I’m kidding. I’m kidding, I tell you.”

  “SHE USED TO LIVE in this building, you say?”