Like a Fading Shadow

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  Any unexpected event or meeting could transport me right away to the world of my novel. A photograph of William Burroughs in the newspaper gave me the look of the old trumpeter who would play the role model and mentor: dissolute and severe, dignified, black tie and a coat, hat and glasses, the sunken face with a funereal air. One afternoon I stopped writing before the usual time because I had to go meet with an acquaintance who lived in Albaicín. I arrived, feeling ill-tempered and remorseful for abandoning my work, only to find more guests, a man and a woman. The man was tall, robust, black, very talkative. He wore a gold watch, thick rings, and had one of those French-Caribbean accents. His booming voice reverberated in the air every time he broke into laughter. The woman was blond, white, almost colorless. She had light eyes, straight hair, and sat quietly with her back erect, drinking tea from a cup with pale blue motifs like the thin veins beneath her translucent skin. She seemed undaunted.

  The man was an antiques dealer. The young woman was his secretary. As soon as I saw her, I thought of García Lorca’s line from Poet in New York: “the blond women’s chlorophyll.” When we were introduced she spoke her name softly: Laurel. On the taxi ride home, I had already decided that in my novel her name would be Daphne, like the nymph who turns into a laurel trying to escape from Apollo, and that both of them would have a secondary but decisive role in the plot.

  The first thing Adam does in Genesis is name the animals. In Don Quixote, a novel whose very thread is woven before the eyes of the reader, the nobleman Alonso Quijano invents a name for himself, his horse, and his loved one, Dulcinea del Toboso, a name he finds “musical and uncommon and significant.” Names in literature sound so natural and inevitable, it’s easy to forget someone had to come up with them. Proust’s Madame Verdurin would not be as ridiculous if her name were not Madame Verdurin. The beauty of the Duchess of Guermantes would not have the same radiance if her name were not Orianne. Captain Ahab’s name is a sign of his obsession, an attribute as defining as his prosthetic leg, carved from the tusk of a narwhal. The name contains the sound of the leg pounding the deck of the Pequod in those long nights of insomnia.

  Fiction begins with the names of the characters. Philip Marlowe, Sansón Carrasco, Isidora Rufete, Frédéric Moreau, Clawdia Chauchat, Hans Castorp, Beatriz Viterbo, Moses Herzog, Teresa Panza. The wrong name can condemn a character to implausibility. A name is not a label or a symbol, but a sound that strikes a chord in the reader’s imagination. Not knowing Lisbon, I tried to intuit its mood and feel from the syllables and vowels of the name. One never knows when interruption will lead to discovery, when a break from writing will be more productive for the work than its continuation.

  * * *

  It was at the end of a chapter, halfway through a page, when the words just stopped coming to me. The effortless flow of writing abruptly stopped, like a radio station whose frequency is suddenly lost, or the first part of Don Quixote, which ends unexpectedly as the duel between the nobleman and the Vizcaíno is about to start—their horses are ready, their swords are drawn, everyone around them is staring in silence. Cervantes says he can’t continue the story because that’s the end of the manuscript on which his account is based. Perhaps there is more truth to this joke than meets the eye: Cervantes dramatizes the creative act of writing, the emptiness of the page, the void that hangs from the last written word or the flashing cursor, the limit between what is and what is yet to be, that which is not even in the writer’s conscience and doesn’t seem to emerge from it but from the nerve endings at our fingertips, like ink flowing from a pen and transforming a sheet of paper.

  Writing is like the exploration of new frontiers, much less laborious, but similar in nature to sailing in uncharted waters or pushing through an unknown forest in search of a clearing for cultivation. Writing is a journey from the known to the unknown. It is not the drawing of a map but the exploration of a new territory with the mere guidance of the cardinal points. Previous ideas are only a point of departure. The torch that illuminates the few steps ahead of you only lights up in the act of writing. Every pause is a brief relief and another point of departure. A period at the end of a paragraph can be the sudden discovery of the end of a chapter. Interruptions in the story stimulate a primal curiosity, the urge to know more, the insatiability of the “to be continued” on the last page of the comic books we devoured as children.

  In other times, exterior pauses would also play an important role in modulating a story’s rhythm: the moment when the pen ran dry and had to be dipped in more ink; or when you got to the edge of the paper on a typewriter and had to return the carriage or insert a new piece in the platen—the black-rubber fog of type marks, traces of every word typed.

  A blank piece of paper goes in the typewriter and a finished one is added to the stacked manuscript. Progress was visible and tangible, from a few scattered pages at the beginning to the solid block of paper after a few months; each millimeter was the product of great effort, like the growth rings of a tree. And there was also the pause to light a new cigarette, and the way the smoke filled the room and thickened the air, the overflowing ashtray, the nicotine circulating through the blood and feeding and satisfying addictive reflexes in the neural connections. The thought of writing without tobacco was as absurd as typing without paper. It was the flame of the lighter that lit up the imagination, its reddish light coming alive with each puff. We believed, almost religiously, that liver cirrhosis, emphysema, and lung cancer were the side effects of the creative process, clear signs of talent.

  Tobacco smoke was the very air of jazz clubs, bars, and the writer’s studio, the translucent gauze that accentuated the glow of a woman’s features and gestures in an old film. Quitting tobacco seemed like an existential capitulation, submission to the soft tyranny of health, marriage, parenthood, and office life. Being healthy was like being right-wing. Night was more poetic than day, torment and anguish more admirable than tranquility, drunkenness more visionary than sobriety. We did not suspect that intellectual brilliance could be as much of a mirage as the effervescence of cocaine.

  * * *

  I had finished a chapter with the word Lisbon and could not bring myself to start the next one. The daunting task of writing a novel set in a city that I had never visited could no longer be sustained. At the end of the chapter the protagonist is about to board a plane to Lisbon. Until then, he had been living in a Paris hotel, spending his days in bed reading detective novels. I had a general idea of what would happen when he arrived in Lisbon, but I did not know how to imagine it with the level of visual precision that is required to tell a made-up story as if one were simply recalling it. There would be night chases; a club with a neon sign that read BURMA; a sick man, pale like a skull, resting on a hospital bed; a small painting by Cézanne with one of those mountains he painted over and over throughout the years; a fight to the death on the edge of a cliff; a passionate encounter between two lovers, a reconciliation but also a farewell; a concert where master and student play together—the old master playing almost from the beyond, and the young student about to experience, in the course of two days, the vast yet fleeting power of love and music.

  I was living vicariously through my writing. But everything was now on hold, like fragments of dreams that don’t fit together; there were missing pieces, loose threads, isolated scenes. I had finished the chapter and added the page to the stack of paper that had been growing steadily since mid-September. I don’t think I even got to put a new sheet of paper in the typewriter before realizing that if the novel was to continue I had no choice but to travel to Lisbon.

  * * *

  But that would not be easy. I had a newborn and a three-year-old. My wife was weak from labor, and to make matters worse, I was distant with her. She was depressed. It would have been difficult for her to take care of the children on her own. I also could not afford more than a day or two off from work. When I finally asked for permission at work and reserved train tickets and a cheap hotel room in Lisbon, I t
ook even longer to decide when to tell my wife.

  I took the train to Madrid in the early morning of the first day of January. I felt free but also filled with remorse, like a fugitive and a traitor. Years pass, memories fade, but regret for all the pain I’ve caused does not go away.

  I arrived in Madrid mid-morning and the streets were empty. The roads looked wider without traffic. It was a strange stillness and silence. At the corner of the Bank of Spain there was a puddle of vomit and broken bottles, lasting residues of New Year’s Eve. I didn’t know anyone in Madrid. The train to Lisbon would not depart until eleven at night. It was one of those cold, bright winter days that by mid-afternoon have already given in to night and desolation, the dark tunnel that is the end of Sunday. I ate at a cheap restaurant on Atocha Street, one of those dull taverns frequented by travelers from the provinces who dare not leave the station’s vicinity. Time seemed to stand still and the gloomy atmosphere was starting to get to me so I decided to go to a cinema. I watched The Name of the Rose. The young monk who learned everything from his mentor and years later finds himself remembering the old man made me think of the troubled pianist in my novel and his devotion for the teacher with whom he would share the stage in Lisbon. In novels and films, beneath the surface of events lie the skeletons of oral histories from time immemorial, the struggle and the search, the journey to enlightenment, wisdom, or regret.

  It was already dark by the time I came out of the cinema and the streets were quickly filling up with people. I had left my bag in the lockers at the train station and was walking leisurely through Madrid with my hands in my coat pockets. Madrid overwhelmed me. I was used to Granada, where everything was at a smaller scale.

  Back then, trains would leave from the old station, under the vaults of iron and glass. The platform was dimly lit and golden letters spread over the blue background of the Lusitania Express. It was like a scene from a novel, a promise of adventure. Lisbon was listed on the destination sign. It was all really happening: I was going to board this train, I was going to be one of the faces behind the window when the train departed at eleven o’clock that evening. The departure times, the track numbers, final destinations resounded over the noise of trains arriving and departing.

  The fact that I would be spending the night in an uncomfortable bunk did not matter. By dawn the train would be running through the green and misty fields near Lisbon. Up until that point, I had only traveled a handful of times inside Spain. Now I was traveling alone to a foreign capital.

  I only had three days, exactly three days and two nights in the hotel. I carried just the basics, a handbag, a notebook, a camera, a map of Lisbon; none of the burdens of family outings, the baby car seat, diapers, bottles, toys, pacifiers, thermometers, talcum powder, moisturizers, strollers, audiobooks, suitcases I could barely close, much less fit in the trunk, towels in case of car sickness.

  I was alone, and this solitude combined with the imminence of departure made the commonplace shine under a new, mysterious light; a drunkenness that fed on itself.

  The train rested on its track like a ship on a dock; all the windows were illuminated; an operator tapped the wheels and brakes with a hammer; crew members directed passengers; loudspeaker announcements echoed in the somber concavity of iron and glass; suspended against the vast glass wall, the clock struck closer to eleven as the minute hand gave a quick spasm; the arches of the great vault recalled the profile of a Gothic cathedral or a mosque, of aerial palaces reflected on the water. Some travelers leaned out the windows to wave goodbye, others stood by the train doors, one foot on the steps, one foot on the ground, as if not wanting to leave but also fearing the train would leave without them. It was an old express with tall cars painted military green-gray, long interior corridors, and individual compartments. In the sleeper cars, the golden signs stood out against a heraldic blue, like in the Orient Express. COMPAGNIE INTERNATIONALE DES WAGONS-LITS. Someone would be leaving Madrid on that train never to return; a beautiful woman would cross paths with me in the dimly lit corridor hours later when everybody else was asleep. The hour was finally here. The metallic doors began closing. A final announcement was made. Lisbon-bound, the Lusitania Express was about to depart.

  The first few jolts of the train produced a physical and emphatic sense of travel; like that moment when musicians begin to play and their mighty stream of sound takes you with it; like immersing oneself in the first images of a film or the unmistakable first sentences of a book; as Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect; for a long time, I went to bed early; on the burning February morning Beatriz Viterbo died, after braving an agony that never for a single moment gave way to self-pity or fear; I wish I had seen nothing more than the man’s hands; many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice; I came to Comala because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Páramo, lived there. Every beginning is a once upon a time and the beginning of Genesis, the first verse of the Iliad, the first line of Don Quixote or Lazarillo de Tormes or Moby-Dick. Call me Ishmael. Well then, Your Worship should know first of all that they call me Lázaro de Tormes. If on a winter’s night a traveler. The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith. Perhaps there is no better beginning than an impersonal statement of fact. Thus literature can claim or mimic the objectivity of the world. That is why my favorite first line is that of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education; it marks the beginning of a trip and reads like an administrative record or logbook entry: In front of the Quai St. Bernard, the Ville de Montereau, which was just about to start, was puffing great whirlwinds of smoke. It was six o’clock on the morning of the 15th of September, 1840. At eleven o’clock on the night of January 1, 1987, the Lusitania Express left Madrid Atocha Station heading toward Lisbon. On May 8, 1968, at one-thirty in the morning, a traveler in his forties, wearing a dark suit and a raincoat, arrived at the Lisbon airport on a flight from London.

  8

  There is another, partially different, version of his arrival at the Texas Bar. It’s morning, but perhaps earlier. He carries his suitcase, a raincoat, a travel bag. He has not stopped by the hotel. A young woman having a drink at the bar noticed the foreigner and his bag. He seemed lost, she said later. The bar was not too crowded yet, but it was quite lively even for that hour—Babelian, was how the old patrons and former waiters recalled it years later. Where could he have spent the rest of the night, from his arrival in Lisbon at one-thirty in the morning, carrying his bag, the city foreign and unfamiliar, the streets empty, balconies closed, ghost mannequins staring from behind the dark storefronts, the sound of water fountains doubling the silence of Rossio Square, its wet cobblestones shining like patent leather in the misty night.

  Instead of taking him to the Hotel Portugal, perhaps the taxi drove directly to Cais do Sodré because he asked where he could find women and open bars. From the darkness and silence of the taxi, he emerged into the neon lights, loud music coming through the red curtains, the gregarious clamor of drunk, horny men. So unlike the others, so alone, so out of place. How many bars did he go to before settling for the Texas, all those hours with his suitcase and travel bag, exhausted, making his way through groups of rowdy sailors, couples dancing, women with low-cut dresses calling him from street corners or balcony windows adorned with red geraniums.

  * * *

  If he did not spend the first night in the Hotel Portugal, there is no way to account for those hours. He suddenly appeared in the Texas Bar with all the prestige of his patent foreignness, protected by the shadows in the wee hours of the morning, sitting before a beer, occasionally glancing at the woman who smiled at him from the other end of the bar. He signaled the bartender for another drink. In one of the many pasts he had improvised in conversations with strangers, he had run an exclusive cocktail bar in Acapulco for several years, nestled under a
roof of palm leaves just steps from the water, waves washing over his feet and the golden sand, the sound of sea foam retreating. He did not smoke but had his lighter ready in case the woman down the bar needed a light; or maybe it was a matchbox; among his belongings they found one with the name and address of a restaurant in Toronto, the New Goravale. James Bond’s Ronson lighter was silver and smooth like a cigarette case or a pistol. He examined his face in the mirror behind the bar. He was satisfied, albeit a bit nervous. When you change a man’s face you almost invariably change his future, said Dr. Maxwell Maltz in his book. In the low light of the bar, he studied his reflection, the profile modified by cosmetic surgery, the nose less pointed, the chin less pronounced. He also glanced at the reflection of the young woman with short hair who kept looking at him. What a shame that he did not get a chance to correct his ears. He was a solitary man, he had read in a James Bond novel, a man who walked alone and kept his heart to himself.

  From her corner at the bar, the woman raised her glass in a toast. They had noticed—almost recognized—each other the moment he walked through the red curtain and stood in silence letting his eyes adjust to the low light, taking in the unexpected breadth of the Texas Bar, a concavity of high stone arches and shadows, decorated with model boats, steering wheels, fishnets, paddles, portholes, identical to the Neptune Tavern in Montreal, which now seemed as though it were in a remote time, one that ceased to exist the moment he fired that shot. In the midst of all those people, the yelling, the loud music, the conversations, they instantly recognized their mutual oddity. She was by herself, sitting very straight, still new at this, barely smoking, barely drinking; alcohol and tobacco made her nauseous, made her lose sense of time, and even more so in this place where daylight could not reach her, this place where it was always the same endless night.