He exchanged the return flight to Toronto for a ticket to Lisbon and got fourteen dollars back. Later he said he had called the Portuguese embassy from the airport and they had assured him that once in Lisbon he would be able to apply for a visa to Angola or South Africa. A lone man facing away, suitcase between his legs, hair buzzed at the nape, protruding lopsided ears, a pile of newspapers on the seat next to him, a novel in his hands. Every now and then, his head would begin to nod, lowering slowly before a quick shake fended off sleep.
He went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face, took out the toiletry bag and shaved. Cold water and aftershave made him feel more alert. He put the glasses back on, his mask. There he was, a Canadian professor traveling in Europe, now on his way to Lisbon to represent the pharmaceutical company he worked for. Or maybe he was going as an officer or chef for a merchant ship set to travel to the Portuguese colonies in Africa. In the corner of a dark bar, he ordered a burger and a beer and was shocked by the prices after calculating the amount in dollars. He realized in a panic that he could run out of money before he ran out of time. He was the only one sitting alone. A radio was on but he could barely hear the news report over the laughter and conversations of other drinkers, their red faces glowing in the half-light. A split second of silence and he thought he heard his former name, pronounced with an accent that made it almost unrecognizable. A silent TV showed the mug shot, the face that was no longer his, scared, belonging to a past life, eight years ago. A headline ran across the photo: ON THE RUN OR DEAD? Cut to a street scene: bearded men, an angry crowd, flags and fists waving in the air. Then an ad: young people in swimsuits drinking orange sodas under palm trees.
Perhaps they would assume he was dead and stop the search; find a disfigured corpse and say it was his; save themselves the embarrassment of failing to catch him. He would become invisible, forgotten. A bearded stranger on a beach like Puerto Vallarta, living in a cabana with a view of the ocean, flanked by the jungle, trees rustling under the rain, birds singing.
* * *
But now he was in the Lisbon airport, birth certificate in the same envelope in the same coat pocket. He had not been as nervous during this flight, but it was still a relief to step down the stairway and touch solid ground. The night air brushed his face softly, an entirely new sensation that did not rise to the level of consciousness. The airport was small, dark, and mostly empty at that hour. Steps echoed through the corridors. If you see yourself as a fugitive, destined to be caught, sent to prison, perhaps the electric chair, you will act like one and draw suspicion. With autosuggestion you can mold yourself like clay and become another person, said the Reverend Xavier von Koss in his manual about hypnosis.
A faint smile formed on his face as he stepped to the window with his passport. If you say your chosen name with spontaneity, no one will doubt you. You must say it with conviction, like someone who has never changed his name and fabricated a new identity. He repeated the name in his head, trying to erase the previous ones, preempting the possibility that one might slip out. He repeated the name aloud, with different intonations, trying to get used to it. Ramon George Sneyd. He had read it in the birthdays column of a newspaper from 1932, sitting at a table in the Toronto public library, pencil in hand, muttering names line by line. He repeated the name in front of the mirror, paying attention to the way his lips moved, trying to fuse the sound and the image together. People who have never had to change their name don’t know how hard it is to choose a new one. A name you’ve used your entire life becomes as yours as your face or hands. Adopting a new one is like getting used to those ridiculous names in novels that no one could possibly have. The ones in the James Bond novels are the best. Two thugs from New York: Sluggsy and Horror. “Sluggsy” Morant, Sol “Horror” Horowitz. When he finds a convincing name he commits it to memory, writes it down immediately if possible.
The last name Starvo could be in a James Bond novel, Stavro. The best names can be found in cemeteries and the death and birth notices of small-town newspapers. A good name is like the one of a city you forget the moment you drive past it at night, briefly lit by the car lights, then disappearing forever in the dark. A name picked at random in the phone book or a newspaper ad, after hours of lying in the hotel bed, the door locked, reading name after name in the columns, underlining the best ones. Names from the movie credits, when the lights are back on but you want to stay in your seat, in one of those cinemas that are open around the clock, hideouts for homeless people and alcoholics, people sleeping next to you with their mouths open, snoring, reeking. John Willard is a good name. Harvey Lowmeyer. John Larry Raynes. Paul Edward Bridgman. Galt, Eric S. Galt, Eric Starvo Galt.
* * *
He hides in the human waste of the slums but he is not one of them. At eight o’clock, he steps out of the roach-infested boardinghouse looking spotless. He wears his nice suit and tie, walks in his alligator shoes past the drunks sleeping on the sidewalk. He always did his best to be clean. When he had to sleep in his car, he used the bathrooms in gas stations to wash up. On a few occasions, he drove for three days, only stopping to buy food, use the bathroom, and nap one or two hours in the backseat. He missed the name Eric S. Galt as much as he missed his white ’66 Mustang, which gave him almost fifteen thousand miles. The yellowed paint, the galloping horse badge in the grille, the silver spoke wheels, the red interior. He stepped on the accelerator and the Mustang surged like a colt.
In the bathroom of the hotel room, he left his only pair of underwear soaking overnight, then washed it and dried it in the morning. As you exit through the lobby, a receptionist might call the name you used to register. If you’re not alert, you’ll keep walking. Don’t call yourself Smith, Brown, or Jones; you will draw a blank stare.
It’s necessary to take a name that is unusual but not too eccentric. Mental discipline is necessary to truly embody a new name. You must also choose a simple signature. We only use 10 percent of our brains, says the Reverend von Koss in his book. He always scored above average on the IQ tests they gave him in prison. Not much, but enough. The elementary school teacher treated him like an idiot, but later, in his first year of secondary, a history teacher noticed his love of maps and newspapers and gave him a world atlas.
Once you choose a name you must repeat it over and over, like a rosary. And you must practice your signature often. The margins of a newspaper are good for notes but they must be ripped and destroyed once you’re done. His mother sold the atlas and bought a jug of wine. You must stand still in front of a mirror, clean shaven, and repeat the name with different intonations, practicing different situations. Most important, you must be able to spell it without hesitation. In prison, his cellmate used to call him the Thinker, sarcastically, though not without some admiration, because he was always reading. Dictionaries, novels, magazines, books about yoga, hypnosis, photography, even gymnastics. Autohypnosis is the secret to success. Galt, gee ei el tee. Sneyd, ess en ee wai dee. And, if necessary, you must switch seamlessly from one name to another, from passport to passport, different lives, different dates of birth, different nationalities, different jobs, different parents. When asked about his parents, he said they were long dead.
He told the officer at the Lisbon airport that he was an executive with an international car rental company. The officer had a wrinkled shirt, stubble, and very dark eyes. António Rocha Fama was his name. It’s a good name though it sounds made-up. He would focus his mental energy and send him hypnotic waves to distract him from the misspelling in the name, the one letter conspiring against his new life. The first rule in hypnosis training is to not blink. A single blink is enough to break the trance. A black woman with weary features was cleaning the floor, pushing a bucket with soapy water. How strange to see black people in Portugal. He thought Portugal would be like Mexico, with indigenous-looking people but not blacks. There were black people carrying bags and cleaning the airport bathrooms in London. He had seen a black man drinking at a bar next to two white pe
ople. The officer noticed the misspelling in the name, but he was tired and sleepy, his face was weary like that of the cleaning woman, who kept on pushing her bucket, leaning on the mop, a red rag on her head. It’s like they never left Africa. He pulled out the envelope with the birth certificate, trying to expedite the process, a bit upset, a Canadian citizen with nothing to hide, an executive on a business trip. The officer ran a hand through his curly hair and returned the passport, placing it on the counter like a poker card. “Get this fixed at your embassy before your next flight,” said the man, his eyes red from sleep deprivation.
* * *
Behind the taxi window, Lisbon looked as empty as the airport. The car tires bounced over the cobblestone. He saw villas, gardens, chipped walls illuminated by the taxi’s headlights, buildings with balconies, scattered windows with a single light shining behind a curtain. Tunnels of light opened through the tree-lined road, revealing stairways to palaces, ruins with cranes and excavators, sheets of metal covering construction sites.
Arriving at a city when everything is closed and there is no one on the streets is like arriving in secret, protected by the night. He loved those moments in novels when the secret agent arrives at the foreign city where his mission is to take place.
In The Ninth Directive, one of the novels he had when they caught him, Secret Agent Quiller travels to Bangkok on the trail of an assassin who is planning an attack against a member of the royal family on a diplomatic visit to Thailand. Quiller is a loner and a cynic, but his superiors know there is no one better than him to navigate Bangkok’s underworld. He saw his eyes reflected in the rearview mirror and awkwardly met an inquisitive look from the driver.
According to psycho-cybernetics, the human mind is a preprogrammed computer. Anything you do has to be projected in the imagination like on a screen where all details are within view. We can program ourselves for success just as we often do for failure.
The taxi stopped by a red light and he imagined himself planting his gun on the back of the head of the driver, who kept on talking in his incomprehensible language. He imagined the whole scene but dismissed it quickly. Where would he go after the robbery in this unfamiliar city? And what could this peasant driver possibly have? His knit cap, this old car. He had assured him in broken English that he would take him to a good, inexpensive hotel in a central yet quiet part of town. Typical taxi driver, the man looked like a thief, and even more so when he smiled with his big mouth to announce they had arrived.
* * *
It was a short street and it had two clear exits. A reporter for Life magazine wrote a few weeks later that it smelled of charcoal and rotisserie chicken. The only light at that hour, apart from the lampposts, came from the lobby of the hotel. Hotel Portugal, João das Regras Street, number four. He hesitated for a moment before going through the revolving door. It was obvious the building had seen better times, and that it was in a poor area, but maybe they would try to play him, a tourist easily tricked into giving away all his money. He went through the door, feeling somewhat light-headed, and fearing for a moment that he would get trapped with his suitcase. The lobby smelled like musty carpet and dust, and the low light made it look like some kind of aquarium. He pulled back automatically when the bellhop tried to take his suitcase. He had not seen him approach. No matter how alert you are, someone can always surprise you. With a lot of training it was possible to develop telepathic powers to anticipate an attack seconds before it happens. In secret government laboratories they were researching techniques to become invisible. Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy while hypnotized by a special CIA team. The pale hand tightened around the handle of the suitcase, the skin tensing over the knuckles. Perhaps he reached for the gun, though it would have been hard to retrieve it fast enough from the back pocket with a coat on. He needed a holster. Before leaving for an evening of equal parts sex and danger, James Bond looked at himself in the mirror and made sure his gun was fully concealed under his fitted blazer. The coat Ramon George Sneyd wore had a tag from a Toronto shop. No one there remembered selling it to him. The best suits are made in London by the tailors on Savile Row. His had been purchased the previous summer in Montreal at a store called Andy’s Men’s Shop. It was the first suit he had ever owned. The receptionist at the Hotel Portugal watched him approach with tired eyes and a smile. His uniform, like the entire hotel, was from a different era. It was two in the morning. Lisbon at night was a city inhabited by just a few insomniacs.
* * *
Some things can be known; others never. The receptionist’s name was Gentil Soares. He was a young man back then and could still be alive. At least he was in 2006, when a Portuguese journalist named Vladimiro Nunes interviewed him. Soares said the man stared at the floor as he spoke, and it was hard to understand his English because he spoke softly and barely opened his mouth. He said the man would sometimes spend the entire day in his room; other days he would leave very early and not come back until the wee hours.
The night he arrived he was wearing the glasses from the passport photo; after that he wore none or just sunglasses. He was very pale and had a look of combined exhaustion and alertness, anxiety and somnolence. When the receptionist asked him how many days he planned to stay in Lisbon, he said he had been hired as the chief engineer on a ship and didn’t know when they would be departing. On his way to the elevator, he picked up a British newspaper someone had left open on a table. He did not tip the bellhop who carried his suitcase.
Room number 2 was on the first floor. He went out to the balcony, and although the street was quite narrow the smell of the ocean could still reach him, albeit combined with sewage. He could hear a conversation rising up from the street corner below. Whispers, a laugh. Standing by a doorway, a woman leaned toward a man who had offered to light her cigarette. In the still silence of 2:30 a.m., he heard a ship’s foghorn. He collapsed in bed without taking his shoes off. He could not remember how many days he had been wearing them. It would be hard to remove them with his feet so swollen. But at least he had no sores and would not bleed when he finally took them off. He fell into a deep sleep, then jolted out convinced he had slept an entire night and day. It was dark again and something irreparable had happened. He was crouching in a cell, or hiding in a sewage pipe, gasping for air, when the vibrations of an underground train swaying the lamp chain awoke him. The clock confirmed he had only been asleep for one hour. He did not know transatlantic air travel disrupts the sleep cycle. He would not sleep well any of the ten nights he spent in Lisbon. He felt the ground move as the trains ran through the tunnels. He remembered the sounds of the eternal freight train that ran through his sleepless nights in prison.
5
I had never written in such a state, it was like a lucid somnambulism. No longer weighed down by the lived experiences that originally inspired it, the story took on a life of its own, separate from my will, the real and the imagined forming spontaneous configurations like in a dream.
To erase Granada, I wrote Madrid, I wrote San Sebastián, I wrote Lisbon. Those names radiated successive images and visual resonances. I was writing the names of characters and places and each carried the seed of its own story and the threads, seen and unseen, that connected them to each other. Only one name was missing and it did not matter. The name of the narrator. Not having a name was like not having a face. An observer who exists solely in the act of bearing witness. It was inspired by Scott Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway, but I did not know then that Nick Carraway took after Joseph Conrad’s Marlow.
The one who tells the story has no place in it. He is a camera, an invisible man. That camera lens is the detective Philip Marlowe’s point of view in the film with Robert Montgomery. It is the reader or moviegoer who forgets himself on the written page or in the darkness of the theater. One goes into a movie theater to cease to exist. It is because of that, not the size or quality of the image, that something crucial is lost when a film is experienced on a television set, in the domestic light of one’s home, in
the calcareous shell of one’s identity. If there are other people in the theater, your shadow becomes one with all the others, it dissolves in a collective stare. And if you have the luxury to be alone, the screen, the characters, the music—they are all yours, like a book. I either earned my education, or entirely missed out on it, in the two movie theaters of Granada. The Principe and Alhambra cinemas, very close to each other, one in the Campo del Principe square, the other on Molinos Street. I submerged myself in them like a diver in depths that are just a few meters from the shore but already a world stranger than the moon. That’s how I’ve always sought to experience the things and places that I like, the cities I visit, the languages I want to learn, forgetting without effort all that is familiar, my life, my city, my country, my name.
* * *
Perhaps it is the same capacity for evasion that characterizes children’s games, a withdrawal from the world but not from perception, reality temporarily suspended while the mind explores other possibilities, sometimes more promising, sometimes threatening. But I had not realized that my self-withdrawal, at the time, had a growing edge of exasperation, because I was no longer a child or an adolescent, and yet I was trying to hide in a similar way but with greater determination, since I carried a heavier weight of responsibility; the trap I had gotten myself into was tighter, because I could not see myself or what surrounded me, narcotized by fantasies, used to seeking refuge in daydreams like an opium addict who can no longer tolerate the jarring light of the open sky.
Like a Fading Shadow Page 6
