With my bag in hand I passed the line of taxis without stopping. The sun was climbing over the buildings, stretching over the motionless blade of the river, the azulejo tiles of the facades, windows, clotheslines, the stepped terraces along the hillside. Warm smells of breakfast emanated from the cafes and bakeries. I was walking alongside rows of abandoned businesses; streets named after old trade goods, Terreiro do Trigo, Jardim do Tabaco. The feeling of remoteness was even more pronounced than in Paris or Italy, the only places outside Spain that I had been to. Everyone has clear images of Paris, Florence, Rome. No image can capture Lisbon. As I walked, I could hear bits of conversations coming from kiosks, cafes, grocery stores; the language had an acoustic equivalence to the city’s light: the volume was much lower than in Spain, a muttered tone, familiar yet indecipherable, vowels that evaporated at the end of words.
To my left was the river, the docks, the buildings of the harbor, and the high prows of the ships; to my right, at the foot of a hill that ascended toward the white bell towers of the churches and a roofline with Chinese curvatures, were small businesses, arches like tunnels leading into uphill alleys, narrow like the ones in Albaicín and with a similar smell too, humidity, sewers, garbage.
The thought that no one here knew who I was gave me a feeling of lightness, an impudent happiness that was self-sufficient and unconcerned with consequences. I had freed myself from all ties, obligations, routines, loyalties, like Jules Verne’s aeronauts ridding themselves of all the heavy and unnecessary things that kept their balloon from ascending. I was discovering a capacity I had rarely exercised in my life: the ability to radically change my circumstances and immerse myself in the unexpected; to forget entirely what I had left behind; to lose myself, like in a jungle or a submarine, in the things that really interested me, a novel, a film, a song, an emotion; to disappear entirely, without a trace, not even a thread that could guide me back, no remorse, no nostalgia, no memory.
I did not miss anyone and no memories could distract me from that present. I was not thinking about my wife, who was overwhelmed taking care of the two children. I was not thinking about the three-year-old boy nor the baby who that very same day was turning one month old. I was not thinking about my job in Granada that awaited me in just three days.
In an effort to resist all thoughts, I even stopped thinking about the book that brought me to Lisbon. I was my gaze, my ears, an objective camera, the strength of my legs, the joy of breathing that humid air and the smells of the harbor, the sounds of the seagulls and boat sirens; I was the hand that tightened around the bag handle; I was the simple, impersonal happiness of sitting at a cafe, watching strangers, hearing voices nearby, drinking a coffee with milk that soothed my stomach after the night of poor sleep on the train, eating a fresh roll, soft and warm to the touch, and learning its name, pão de Deus.
The three days ahead were a blank canvas as full of promise as the blank notebook in my pocket. The arrival by train, the cool morning, the sunlight shining on the river, the rooftops, and the streets were the clean and definitive beginning of something, the first page of a novel, the fullness of a world that has just begun.
* * *
I walked tirelessly and without a destination. I was hypnotized by the city and disoriented by the lack of sleep. The name and address of the hotel were written in my notebook, but I did not know how far it was and I had no map. I was following the river in the direction of a boat that was sailing west. The silhouette of the 25th of April Bridge could be seen in the distance. Those of us from the interior are quite affected by the sight of the sea and the beauty of bridges extending high across rivers wider than one could have imagined.
I turned a corner and found myself in the emptiest square I had ever seen. One of the sides was open to the great expanse of the Tagus River, boundless and blinding in those mornings when the sun infuses the water with a mercurial brightness, the shimmer of polished metal. I recognized the sight that the painter Juan Vida had described for me one day at the office while doing a quick sketch on a piece of paper: the triumphal arch supported by its six columns, and in the distance, in the exact center of the square, surrounded by an iron gate, a pedestal with an elephant and a horse, and high above, much higher, a bronze king on his grand horse, mid-stride toward the south, crushing the bronze snakes in his path, while the king looks west toward the mouth of the river, feathers shooting from his helmet like a geyser, and the usual seagull looking out from the top. The dimensions of the square exhibited an Austro-Hungarian excess. People were leaving the docked ferries in waves and quickly disappeared through the arcades and into the shaded corners and streets. Remembering Juan’s sketch of Commerce Square, I identified the two columns flanking the stairway that leads to the water. On top of each column there is a stone ball, and on top of each ball a seagull. The square enters the river like a ship’s prow with the entire city at its back.
The tide has subsided but the slippery algae makes it difficult to go down the grooved ramp. The wind has a moist freshness and smells of the sea. A figure, just a few meters away standing still before the water, appears to be much farther away, dwarfed by the vast oceanic backdrop, isolated, dazed, anonymous in her silhouette of a traveler on a riverbank, like a Friedrich figure, placed there by the painter or the photographer that captures her image to emphasize the vastness of the space.
Some faces are prophetic, says Balzac. There are also places that shake you as soon as you arrive with a feeling or premonition of stories about to become visible in your imagination like a flashback, invented memories that are more persuasive and vivid than real ones, fantastic lucid dreams that a rude awakening saves from oblivion.
What I was experiencing was already translating into the future pages of my interrupted novel. I began taking photos and notes. I did not want to forget anything. Standing at the center of the square, I took a photograph of Cais das Colunas that mirrored Juan’s sketch, and right in the middle there was a figure facing away, a figure that could have been me staring at the river or a character in my story. I wish I could tell a story the way a photographer can: stripped down to basics; or the way Edward Hopper can tell without telling, suppressing all kinds of plot details and leaving the core, the essence, the pure schema of oral histories, which exist and are passed on without anyone having to write them, invariable in their basic form but never told with the same words, like a jazz composition that remains the same but never sounds the same, as impersonal as words and turns of phrase can be, yet capable of conveying in each instance the most intimate things, songs that are simultaneously public, shared, secret.
I am the one remembering that January morning almost twenty-seven years ago, and I both am and am not that young man who has just arrived in Lisbon, the young man standing on the edge of Commerce Square a few steps from the soft waves that wash over the ramp and recede as if slipping on the polished stone and the green algae. I am the one who takes that photograph where a figure will appear in the distance facing away, and I am also that silhouette, which could belong to an anonymous traveler or a fictional character. In a painting or a photo, there is no need for a figure to have a name or a face that turns around or, even less, a personal history beyond the immediate and visible. There is an exact equivalence between lack of information and mystery. There is no before or after. A drawing is mostly empty space. The square and the pier and the river and the figure say without words everything that needs to be said. Poetry is going no further than a story needs to breathe and weigh with everything that is left unsaid.
* * *
My hotel was cheap and far from the center, on a dull street I have forgotten, beyond Eduardo VII Park. I remember the narrow bed with a worn blue comforter, facing a window overlooking a horizon of roofs. I did not tire of looking at that light without edges, the soft red of the tiles and the pale blue of the sky made up of glazes instead of a continuous glare.
My early arrival meant the morning kept dilating. Time in Lisbon seemed to have slower
flow, it was soothing, like the light. I left my bag on the bed, unopened, and washed my face. I looked different in the mirror, in my newcomer’s solitude, free of biographical burdens, a guest who fills out a form and shows an identification document, a photograph, a name that might as well be fictional, an address, a place and date of birth, nothing more, a signature at the bottom of a page.
I left with my camera and notebook. The receptionist gave me a map of the city. I had the entire day ahead, and the next one, and the last one, until ten at night. I would get the most out of every hour until the train departed for Madrid. It was January 2. My youngest had turned one month. Maybe he had had a bad night and had turned red crying, extending his tiny hand into the darkness, looking for his mother. He was so small, he barely filled out his pajamas. His nails were transparent and fragile like the wings of an insect. His hair was blond and soft, his forehead broad, his eyes light and astonished. It’s possible I barely thought about him.
I wasn’t thinking about anything or anyone who wasn’t in my small island of time and fiction, in my three days of refuge in Lisbon. I was going on thirty-one years old and had never breathed such complete freedom, the ability to give myself entirely to my vocation and whim, to wander alone and explore the promising and foreign city, hospitable to my purpose from the moment I stepped foot on it and allowed myself to get lost in its winding and slippery sidewalks, its cobblestone alleys and stairways; as leisurely as one rides the tram, looking out the window, sedentary yet in motion, passing and watching things pass, witnessing the city unfold like a handheld fan, ascending and descending before its eyes, sometimes on the crest and sometimes on the trough of a slow swell, sometimes so close to a wall you can almost touch it, then, suddenly, facing the great maritime expanse, like being on the top of a bridge or the edge of a waterfall.
I understood from the beginning that this was the city I needed. I came to her guided by the momentum of my novel; now I just had to keep my eyes and ears and imagination open to new discoveries. The map of Lisbon in my pocket was also the paper on which I would draw the routes of the characters, the meetings, the chases, the escapes that were becoming more tangible as I explored the city, gradually taking shape around the plot of its streets like words that become visible under a flame or images that come to life in a darkroom.
* * *
Perhaps the last time I had indulged so carelessly in daydreams was as a child playing by myself the whole morning or afternoon, imagining entire worlds in the bedrooms and the attic.
Time and money. Everything was cheaper in Lisbon. For the first time in my life I did not feel broke. I could take a taxi back to the hotel and eat in good restaurants without feeling remorse. In places like that I was almost a fictional character, a foreigner traveling by himself, studying the menu and the wine list, secretly amazed that I could afford to eat there, pretending that it was nothing new to me.
I discovered that I enjoyed eating alone and observing people. It was my private feast. For my first lunch, after a long morning walk, I ate my first seafood casserole, my first vinho verde, a half bottle served very cold, my first aguardente velha. The sweet drowsiness dissipated after I started walking again. Now the shadows were more humid, and the sun shone golden over the facades and balconies facing west.
Lisbon was the crisp light seen from the shade, the exotic next to the provincial, the faces and the colors and the smells of Africa next to the cafes and the stalls selling roasted chestnuts, their warm smell dissolving in the cool air of the evening. In Rossio Square, from the sunny sidewalk of the Pastelaria Suiça, I spotted the strange metal lattice of the Santa Justa Lift tower. Riding the elevator was like being in a futuristic device from the nineteenth century, one of Jules Verne’s flying machines, a cabin in Captain Nemo’s submarine. On the highest point of the lookout, leaning over the railing, I contemplated the Alfama hill, the square towers of San Jorge Castle rising over the woods, the dark cypresses, the high garden walls, the river in the distance, the copper brightness of the setting sun. For a moment I thought I was seeing the Alhambra from Saint Nicholas Square. The tower of Graça Convent reminded me of Santa Maria Church. The horizon of the Tagus River was smooth and hazy like the Vega. I was seeing what I had imagined when writing the first drafts of the novel, my mirage city, a Granada by the sea.
10
His mother was nineteen years old when he was born. She gave birth eight more times in the next twenty years. Sometimes she got drunk by herself, other times with her husband, who was also an alcoholic. They lived in a cabin without water or electricity. Their second daughter, Marjorie, was burned alive at six years old while playing with matches. The police stopped his mother often for public drunkenness, disorderly conduct, theft, and prostitution. She stole when she didn’t have money to buy cheap wine, and when she didn’t steal she prostituted herself. She even forced her twelve-year-old daughter into sex work so she could buy alcohol. The Department of Children and Family Services took away her small children. A social worker who came to the house opened one of the closets and a stack of empty bottles fell on her. The children were covered in lice and spent their days playing and fighting in the trash.
* * *
His father bought and sold scraps and drove an old pickup truck that was always on the verge of breaking. He got tired of the scrap metal business because it made no money and he felt that others were taking advantage of him. He sold what little he had and bought a farm, but the farm turned out to be a wasteland with a dilapidated cabin, which he soon turned into a garbage dump.
His father was constantly changing his occupation and address, dragging the growing family along. He also changed his last name several times, coming up with different variations so it was harder for creditors and law enforcement to find him. A man is in a better position when he can leave as few traces as possible. Change a letter in your last name and you are already ahead. Sometimes he went by Raynes and other times by Ryan, Roy, Rayn. None of his children had exactly the same last name. Despair would overcome him and he would spend entire days in bed. The children had to remain quiet or leave the house, even if it was winter. Hard, honest work is useless when the game is rigged by swindlers and the powerful, the leeches, the parasites that feed on the efforts of others, communists, blacks, Catholics, Jews, bankers, tax collectors, preachers. Blacks spent their days doing nothing and reproducing like animals.
The only job worth his respect was thief. The thief steals from those leeches in the banks without any help. He gambles everything on his revolver, his sawed-off shotgun, his machine gun unloading on the tables and the stacks of deceitful forms and the frosted glass windows of the banks.
A sudden burst of energy would come over him some mornings and he would wake up his eldest son and tell him he could not go to school because he needed help with the business. There was no better school than the school of life. The teachers were accomplices of the preachers and the communists and the Jews and the blacks; they were parasites, just like them, enjoying long vacations at the expense of hardworking folks for whom there were no Saturdays or Sundays, no Fourth of July holiday, no Thanksgiving. Dressed in his father’s old clothes, which were too big for him, the boy sat on the pickup truck, shivering, hungry, dozing off to the old man’s angry rants. It was a point of pride for the townspeople that no black person had ever dared to spend a night there. His father slammed on the brakes as they approached the neon sign of the pool hall, still shining even though the sun was already out. Work cannot be the only thing in a man’s life. His father would buy him a soda, or nothing at all, and leave him to spend the rest of the day sitting on a stool, forgotten, starving, watching his father play pool in a fog of smoke and drunken conversations, spellbound by the artificial light that illuminated the green baize, the trajectories and the clinking sounds of the ivory balls.
* * *
At age sixteen, in 1944, he found his first job as a tanner in a shoe factory. He stayed there for two years. During that time in his l
ife he was organized and hardworking. They said he was a stingy adolescent. In two years, earning a meager salary, he managed to save a thousand dollars. He did not smoke. He was withdrawn and very shy with women. His boss was fond of him. He went to live with his grandmother, his great-aunt, and his uncle, who described him as a good boy, clean, responsible, and trustworthy. He saved almost every penny that fell into his hands. He wanted to get somewhere, be someone. He seemed strange because he lived such a solitary life. He was only close to his boss, a German man who treated him like a son and took it upon himself to teach him the craft of tannery. Rumor had it he was a Nazi. Even during the war, he spoke of Hitler with admiration, and condemned Roosevelt for making alliances with Stalin’s hordes of communists to attack Germany. The factory supplied footwear for the army. At the end of the war, the military orders stopped and the plant had to close. He said his life would have turned out quite different had the factory remained open.
* * *
He joined the army six weeks after he was laid off. During basic training, he was noted for his marksmanship skills. He was stationed in Bremerhaven, Germany, with the military police. Bremerhaven was still a city in ruins. The black market and prostitution were as visible as the destruction brought by the war. Groups of veteran Nazis ambushed American soldiers who ventured alone at night through the dark streets, the piles of rubble where a dim light would sometimes glow from a basement, the red sign of a cabaret. In the cabarets, black soldiers mingled with whites and German women who had no qualms about taking them to bed. It was in Germany that he started drinking and getting into fights. Charged with drunkenness and insubordination, he spent three months in a military jail. In December 1948, he was discharged early from the army “for ineptness and lack of adaptability to military service.”
* * *
In 1949, he spent eight months in prison for stealing a cash register from a Chinese restaurant where he broke in through a ventilation duct. His military ID fell out as he was getting away. In 1950, he was sentenced to two years in a state prison in Illinois for assaulting a taxi driver. He put a gun to his neck, but the man jumped out of the car and took off running. He got in the front seat to drive off but the man had taken the key. Between 1955 and 1958, he served a sentence for mail fraud in the federal prison in Leavenworth. In Leavenworth, he took courses in Spanish, writing, typing, and sanitary hygiene. In 1957, citing good behavior, prison officials authorized him to finish his sentence in a penitentiary farm with a more lenient regime. He refused to be transferred because the farm did not segregate blacks and whites.
Like a Fading Shadow Page 11