Like a Fading Shadow

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  * * *

  Imagination does not know how to predict anything. The woman’s name was Maria, perhaps it still is. I have written first, middle, and last name and deleted them. When writing about real people it’s easy to forget that they are vulnerable. Nor is she a stereotype: she stood out in that fog of faces and voices and smoke of the Texas Bar, precisely because she did not look like a prostitute. There’s a photo of her in Life magazine, taken just a few weeks later. She’s much younger than I had imagined. Her hair is short and dark, sixties-style. She wears no makeup, no tight dress, just a high-neck blouse, a sophisticated cut that highlights her slim figure. The blouse is rolled up above her wrists. Her hands are long, her nails oval. She is wearing a bracelet and a long pendant, perhaps a crucifix or religious medal. She is looking into the camera. Her smile is young, intelligent, pleasant. She seems to enjoy being photographed, but is also a bit nervous. When that issue of the magazine got to Lisbon at the end of June, newsstand vendors and waiters in Cais do Sodré would recognize her on the streets and tell her she looked like a movie star. She will keep a copy of the magazine well-hidden for many years.

  Back then, she had just started sex work. She had to support her parents and her brothers; the parents are old, the brothers are lazy and sick. She pretends to work at a store; that is why she gets to the Texas Bar so early. She prefers that time of day, it’s usually quiet, without the crowds and fights that come later. The men who come around in the morning are usually younger and educated, though often weird. She never stays at the bar or with a client past five in the afternoon. She must get back to her house in time, as if she had a regular workday. If no one in her family or her neighborhood finds out, if no one could even imagine what she does for a living, then sleeping with men for money will feel less shameful, a stain she can wash away before leaving the room with her money, before walking back onto the streets of Lisbon like a regular woman, her head slightly bowed, her steps quick and short on the mosaic tiles. The strangest things in life happen without much notice.

  Almost forty years later, with her eyes the color of sour milk, her gaze fixed on a picture of Saint Anthony hanging on a wall that she can’t see, Maria recalls the day she became a prostitute. It was a Sunday night. She had left the cinema and was walking home alone. She was feeling melancholic, thinking about the film, when she walked in front of a parked taxi. The taxi driver saw her coming. He was leaning on the car having a smoke. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw someone in the backseat, a lit cigarette, a bulky figure, male and dark. She had not ceased to be perplexed by the importance of tobacco in all those transactions. The driver observed her face, the outline of her lips, her chin and cheekbones, her eyes, the crooked heels, the wool coat, the simple skirt. He asked her something random just to make her stop. Did she live in the area? Was she coming from the movies?

  He offered her a cigarette. It’s American, he said. She shook her head. Inside the car, staring from behind the window as in a funeral urn, the fleshy face examined her. The driver moved closer to her and with a soft, affable voice, somehow disconnected from his beady eyes and facial expression, said that if she was interested in earning five hundred escudos, all she had to do was get in the taxi with the gentleman who was waiting for him, an acquaintance, someone he trusted. He would take them somewhere private and clean, not too far from there. The leather seat creaked as she got in the car. The ceiling light illuminated the man’s hands but not his face. A thick band adorned his ring finger.

  * * *

  Time did not dilute the memories. As she descended into blindness, the near past blurred but those images of her youth only became more vivid. It was like being in the protective darkness of a movie theater while her past played on the screen in full color, the glossy ads of Life magazine, her photograph, smiling and calm, standing by the entrance of the Texas Bar. She kept a copy of that issue in her dresser, under an old pair of bedsheets that had belonged to her mother. But her daughter was getting older and Maria feared she would find the magazine and recognize her mother in the photo.

  The imagination does not know how to simulate the unexpected, the abrupt, the changes that take place over a long period of time. In May 1968, Maria was twenty-five. In 2006, she is a blind woman who walks heavy and slow. A white frost covers her eyes. A journalist from Lisbon has found her. For the first time in many years, someone asks her about him. It brings her alarm, but also delight. She lives with her husband in a slum on the outskirts of the city. Her neighbors are mostly immigrants. The sidewalks are covered in trash and there’s graffiti all over the peeling walls and metal shutters of defunct businesses. Young African men hang out on the street corners. Every now and then, a drug dealer’s SUV roars by at full speed blasting hip-hop. Her apartment is on the third or fourth floor of a building with no elevator. Her house is clean and modest, with crochet decorations on the curtains and the furniture, framed images of Saint Anthony holding baby Jesus and the three pastors worshiping Our Lady of Fatima, the photograph of her dead daughter in a silver frame atop the television, family photos she cannot see but knows exactly where each one is and feels around them as she dusts the wall.

  The broad, wrinkled face does not bear a trace of resemblance with the young woman who appeared in Life magazine. Her open eyes move in short, nervous spasms toward the voice that asks her questions, pausing at the light that comes through the window. Sometimes it takes her a while to answer, but not for lack of memory. Other sounds distract her, the animals: canaries on the balcony and in the kitchen, two dogs, one of them growling at her guest, two medium-size tortoises. The woman moves slowly through the narrow paths between the furniture, careful not to trip over the tortoises who are constantly walking around, making a peculiar sound with their nails on the linoleum. Music plays on the street, a reverberating bass, motorcycles. The woman speaks in a monotone, her voice as expressionless as her face, the sound barely rising above the chirping of the birds. One of the tortoises is stuck in the corner behind the television. It wants to move forward but its saurian, scaly snout keeps bumping against the wall.

  * * *

  She remembers the time when she frequented the Texas Bar and supported her family by sleeping with strangers. Her remorse has been tempered by the passage of time and a growing sense of unreality. That young woman was her but also someone else entirely. The day she took the magazine out of the drawer and went outside to throw it in the garbage, she was already starting to lose her vision. She had difficulty distinguishing faces in photographs and reading the small letters in English. She could barely see the pendant she wore that day to pose for the foreign photographer, but she remembered it well, along with the bracelet she wore on her left wrist, a gift from a client, gold; the man was a jeweler.

  She could not remember what had happened to the swimsuit the American from the Texas Bar had gifted her. They were waiting for a taxi. He was so pale, somewhat less attractive in the broad daylight, thin lips, pointy nose, cleft chin. A green swimsuit, yes sir, she says with a smile and her eyes closed. It was made with a synthetic fabric that fit her body very well and dried quickly. She remembers touching it. They had walked into the store together after she saw it in the display window. She liked the way she looked next to the tall American, American or Canadian, she could not tell, with his dark sunglasses and his hands in his pockets. He had left his coat and luggage at the Texas Bar, saying he would pick them up later.

  She remembered it vividly. She had walked toward him along the bar, still unsure in her high heels, glass and cigarette in hand like the actresses she had seen in movies. Once face-to-face, she saw his light blue eyes and the graying hair on the sides. He looked distinguished. He would whisper softly into her ear, burying his face in her hair, speaking words that sounded all the more exciting and mysterious because they were in a different language, an acoustic inebriation of promises. Now and then, he would say something in Spanish, pronouncing his words very carefully. She smiled and nodded even when she did not
understand, throwing her head back, a trace of lipstick on her cigarette as she removed it from her mouth, her hand on his elbow, knees touching, both seated on the tall bar stools, their reflection behind the bottles. She liked glancing at the mirror and seeing herself with a man so different from the regulars, so serious and shy, barely touching her; in fact, barely even looking her in the eye.

  He said, or so she understood, that he had arrived that morning on a cruise ship. He did not mention where he came from, how long he would stay, or the purpose of his visit. He could be a businessman with lots of money. A blue-eyed man who speaks English and wears a suit and alligator shoes must surely be rich. There was also a certain ease in the way he handled money or offered to light a woman’s cigarette, a reserved yet firm gesture. The lighter did not look expensive. The bar was filling up, the crowd was getting louder, but they remained in their own little world, very close to each other though barely touching. There were awkward silences when he would stare at the floor or at the bottom of his glass or simply close his eyes. Then he would begin to ask or propose something she could not understand: transactions of few, simple words in English or Spanish, aided by gestures, complicated by currency conversions, exhaustion, impatience, his voice growing darker in her ear.

  * * *

  Moments later he was walking clumsily next to her, a bit behind, not used to keeping up with the pace of another person, which was even more difficult on the uneven pavement and narrow sidewalks, the winding alleys and steep stairways. He saw her stop in front of a display window. Mannequins with frozen smiles stared from the other side. They stood in front of cardboard palm trees and under a paper sun that hung from a piece of string. He was the one who offered to buy the swimsuit, she emphasized, just as she had thirty-eight years earlier. Like it? he asked. She nodded. Now she repeated the words to show she had not forgotten them, like, yes, beach.

  The salesman turned friendly after seeing her in the company of the foreigner, a man well-dressed and serious. He did not remove his sunglasses after he entered and had to lower his head a bit to get in through the door. He was tall in her memory. He took out a handful of bills from one of his pockets and left it on the counter for the salesman to figure out the change. That’s also how he paid for the taxi and the room and the three hundred escudos he promised for her services. He watched with indifference as the money left his hands, money that did not quite feel real, and vanished, the way he had watched so many things happen in his life.

  She fell silent for a moment, backlit against the light that poured in through the window, while the tortoises walked under the chairs, the table, and the narrow space under the sofa. She said she never felt anything with other men who paid her, but she had enjoyed being with him. She repeated the words she heard in her soap operas: that she had given herself to him, that they had made love. She folded her hands on her lap and turned toward her guest, who had long ago stopped asking questions. In a low voice and with unexpected cheekiness, she said: “He was a hunk of a man.”

  She watched him sleep after collapsing from exhaustion with a hoarse moan. His feet protruded from the bed. It was a small room, rather sordid, one she had used several times. The ceiling had water stains. The mattress was thin and the springs were loud. The dresser mirror reflected their bodies.

  He passed out the second their bodies separated. There he lay next to her, his mouth open, breathing through his nose and making strange sounds, going into quick spasms, mumbling who knows what, a stranger with an improbable name for someone who only spoke English, Ramon, an American or Canadian with a small scar on his forehead and the chin of a Hollywood actor.

  But she had to go. She had to get home soon after five. She washed her body in the small bathroom. Through the window she could see the clear sky, the sea of roofs, a few cats.

  He was awake by the time she came out. He asked her if she had children. She still remembered the word he used: Bambino? But she did not speak to anyone about her daughter. The girl died young, she does not explain how but points to the photo atop the television, the girl’s face smiling with the anachronism of the dead.

  In the taxi back to the Texas Bar, she kept glancing at her watch. If it took much longer, she would be late. She waited in the car while he collected his luggage. Seeing him come out with bags and coat under his arm, so pale, his sunglasses still on, she had an intuition of how odd he was, of everything she did not know and would never find out about him. She later remembered it was she who recommended the Hotel Portugal.

  He kept looking out the rear window and occasionally looked at himself in the rearview mirror. Sometimes he stopped to look at her, sitting very straight beside him, her knees together, the bag with the swimsuit on her lap, in her mind becoming the woman she was for her neighbors and her parents. She would ask the taxi driver to drop her off a few blocks from her house so she could approach as if coming from the tram.

  He said that he would like to see her in the swimsuit, that they should go to the beach early the next day, beach. The taxi stopped at the corner of João das Regras Street. She pointed at the sign, HOTEL PORTUGAL. Before saying goodbye they agreed on the next day: nine, hotel door, swimsuit, beach.

  At exactly that time, she showed up at the hotel, unsure about her appearance, fearing she would make the receptionist suspicious. The receptionist looked at the register and with a tone of pity and mockery said that Mr. Ramon had left the hotel just an hour earlier; in fact, he had left Lisbon as well. Apparently, he had received an urgent telegram and had booked a plane ticket by phone.

  * * *

  In the course of several days and nights, he was also seen in other bars. Witnesses remembered him being alone most of the time, sitting in a corner, drinking his beer slowly to prolong his stay. The neon names of the bars glow in a distant time like in the night fog of Lisbon, exotic names flashing intermittently like a secret code: Arizona Bar, Niagara Bar, California Bar, Europa Bar, Bolero Bar, Tagide Nightclub, Maxime’s.

  At Maxime’s, he met Gloria. He spent at least a night with her. She was blond, slender, and had short, curly hair. Perhaps she was the one who walked into the lobby of the Hotel Portugal with him and was not allowed to continue to the room. He offered her a dress and a pair of stockings and she thought it was a gift, a present from her foreign customer who was so formal and shy. But it wasn’t a gift. He was trying to pay her in kind. She remembered he had a nervous habit of pinching the tip of his right ear and was always looking for American and British newspapers. When asked how they communicated given the language barrier, she laughed and said they spoke the international language of love.

  Who knows what lies in the memories of others, how many successive pasts they hide. They spoke softly in the room of the boardinghouse where she took him after they were turned away from the Hotel Portugal. Neither one understood the other and he told her what he had done. It was a relief to be able to say aloud why he had been on the run for over a month, to hear himself reveal his true identity and his crime without consequences. He was not inventing anything. To speak the truth and remain invisible and unpunished. To speak words that correspond to actual events, real names, real places, the hunting rifle he leaned on the windowsill of that disgusting bathroom, the focused scope, the tip of the index finger curling around the trigger as the man in the blue suit rested his hands on the railing of the balcony.

  The image from the binoculars acquired an absolute precision in the lens of the scope. He could see the man’s mouth moving, the broad black lips, the slanted eyes. He stared at the freshly shaved skin, the neatly trimmed mustache, the blue silk of his suit, the expensive cuffs, the great pretender, the holy preacher and lustful ape, laughing silently in the lens, right in the crosshairs.

  He said it all in his usual mumble while the naked woman followed the instructions he delivered with his hands and the few Spanish words he remembered from his days in Mexico, arching her spine, her blond hair tousled over his groin, the dyed mane that covered half her face whe
n she finally looked up, a sweaty lock on her forehead, wiping her lips with the back of her hand while he continued talking and talking in that squalid room where no one could find him, at the end of a narrow street and an even narrower stairway. The open window let in the voices of drunks on the street, the smells of the port, the sirens of the boats moving through the fog.

  A red lightbulb hung from the ceiling. The bed and the two bodies were reflected in the closet mirror, a piece from a bourgeois room thirty years earlier. She smoked and looked at him talk, observing the thin, colorless lips pronouncing words she did not understand, the shifty eyes that did not look at hers, the protruding ears, the hair that remained perfectly combed. Several weeks later, when foreign agents and plainclothes policemen started asking her questions, she learned to wait for the moment when they would pull out his photo and make a flirtatious yet shy gesture before nodding nervously, flattered, feeling pity and perhaps a retrospective disgust for the man who was now in a London prison cell, paler than ever, awaiting deportation and, in all likelihood, the electric chair.

  9

  I left the Santa Apolónia station and started walking, not really knowing where I was going. I was in no hurry to get in a taxi and arrive at the hotel. It was eight in the morning, the sky was clear, and the air was warm and slightly humid. The light was so soft you could almost touch it, a welcoming caress. I was coming from winter and the hard, icy light of Granada and Madrid. My eyes have never seen light like the one that washes over Lisbon; its colors have an attenuated quality: the blue of the sky and the red of the roof tiles, the blues and greens and yellows and ochers of walls punished by the maritime weather; the brightness of the azulejo tiles; the red, open flowers on the tops of tropical trees with trunks like the backs of elephants.