Like a Fading Shadow

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  He soaked his underwear in the sink. He washed his shirts by hand. On the nightstand or next to the bed on the floor were his books, the old paperbacks he carried with him to the end, a poorly printed hypnosis manual by Dr. Adolf F. Louk; the psycho-cybernetics book by Dr. Maxwell Maltz; Quiller and Robert Belcourt spy novels; and a booklet from the locksmith course he had taken. In the drawer he kept pornography magazines, and also True magazine and Man’s Life.

  The margins of his newspapers often had calculations, small additions and subtractions, lists of expenses. He tore them out and ripped them into very small pieces, which would end up in the toilet or in his pockets, along with ad clippings, American coins, and other bits of paper. Caution had become a nervous habit. He tore bits from the corners of paper tablecloths, receipts, and coasters and rolled them into tiny balls.

  He checked the daily section of a Portuguese newspaper that listed every arriving and departing ship by name. He drew circles on his map of Lisbon: the Canadian embassy on Liberty Avenue; one for that of the Republic of South Africa, which was farther to the north, beyond the statue of the king; and one around the statesman with the lion and the park where he had fallen asleep one morning, under the humid shade of a tree, after a night of drinking.

  He had woken up abruptly, fearing that he had been robbed. It was a hot day and the tight shirt collar chafed his neck. He felt his pockets for the passport, the gun, and the money—the wad of twenty-dollar bills and Portuguese notes that kept getting lighter. The fact that he was quickly running out of money was as overwhelming as the feeling that he was running out of time. They both seemed to trickle through his fingers, through the empty days, the delays, the waiting, while all those people kept tirelessly looking for him, the thousands in America, in Europe, in Mexico, in Canada, police officers, detectives, federal agents, scientists in lab coats, analyzing everything from fingerprints, hair, and handwriting to the saliva he left on postage stamps. Or at least, that’s what they say in the papers. Snitches, prison guards, men in gray suits knocking on doors and showing their government IDs, waiters, the people who owned those boardinghouses and Laundromats, prostitutes, everyone remembering, or acting like they did, giving out information in the hopes that they will be the ones to get the hundred-thousand-dollar reward, or not even that, maybe just for the pleasure of ratting on him, making up details, nodding at the photos, everyone after him like a pack of dogs, everyone adding a thread to the web of persecution, perhaps knowing much more than what’s in the papers, hoping that this will make him overconfident, that he will continue using his latest alias, the one on the Canadian passport and the plane ticket to Lisbon, lists of passengers and passport applications with thousands of names, verified one by one, until they find the odd one out and notice the similarity between the photo of the fugitive and the applicant, Sneyd, Ramon George Sneyd. According to J. Edgar Hoover, there are 3,075 FBI agents assigned exclusively to finding him; so far they have spent $781,407 and the agents have covered 332,849 miles; the Department of Justice is reviewing 2,153,000 passport applications in the United States; the Canadian government has to review 200,000; 53,000 fingerprints have been checked. He never imagined all of this would happen over the death of a black man; it baffled him until the end of his life.

  * * *

  The lethargic mood among the people of this city was slowly taking a hold of him. It was like a spell, an invincible exhaustion he could not shake. He was spending entire days in bed or walking aimlessly until he lost a sense of time.

  He avoided wide streets and unshaded areas. It was instinctual by now. He walked past small jewelry shops assessing the possibility of a robbery. But he didn’t know the four or five indispensable words or where he would sell the loot. It terrified him to think he could get arrested in this country and sent to a prison where he would not understand what anyone was saying. And what could he possibly steal from the other stores? They were filled with worthless stuff. It was hard to escape through those narrow, winding streets, and where would he go, he didn’t even have a car.

  Loud, heavyset women would stop to stare at him as he walked by. The foreigner with the thick, dark suit—completely inappropriate for the heat of May—stared at his map, wiping the beads of sweat from his face with a handkerchief. He turned a corner and there it was: the great river and its mist enveloping the red pillars and cables of the bridge. He saw the tall port cranes and yacht sails beyond the redbrick terminals, massive ships anchored in the center of the river, ferries in mid-crossing, leaving behind big arcs of foam.

  The sound of the boat sirens combined with that of the trains, trams, and seagulls. He could not get used to walking on the cobblestone of those narrow streets with their crooked steps and angles. He descended toward the docks, trying his best not to trip. Fresh laundry fluttered on the clotheslines over his head. The smells of the port grew stronger with each step: tar and algae, fish, machine oil, paint and rust, coffee and cod.

  He liked to buy sailing magazines and study each photo in detail: the shiny navigation tools, the wood decks where blond women in bikinis sunbathed, their dark lenses, the tall cocktail glasses, the long menthol cigarettes. With his diploma from the International School of Bartending, it would not be difficult to get a job as a waiter or even a butler on one of those yachts—white jacket, cap, his expert hands mixing cocktails for the wives of millionaires looking for a good time. They would look at him over their sunglasses as he approached with their drinks, perfectly balancing the tray despite the swells.

  The pale face and demeanor gave him away, but he still liked to tell strangers, particularly women he met at bars, that he was in the merchant navy. Sometimes he was an officer, sometimes a bartender or cook; it all depended on his whim and the gullibility of the listener. He would spend weeks at a time on the Mississippi as the ship slowly made its way from New Orleans to Saint Louis. Sometimes it was the Gulf of Mexico, the islands of the Caribbean, the ship anchored in Havana.

  In the cool shade of the bar, drinking daiquiris and mojitos under large ceiling fans, he would correct the waiters on their mixology. A sailor on shore leave, dressed in a white linen suit. Mulatto women in short, tight dresses would approach him and give him inviting looks, just like in the rum ads. He would follow them to rooms upstairs where curtains blew in the sea breeze.

  Everything had the gloss of a double-page ad in Life magazine. He crossed the railroad tracks and walked to one of the docks where a cargo ship was being loaded. On the prow, in white letters, read the name Minerva Zoe. An officer with a buzz cut, hair so blond it was almost white, told him that the ship would be sailing for Angola in three days. The officer stared at him for a moment as if trying to remember something or simply annoyed by the presence of a man who looked so out of place on the dock. The Minerva Zoe was a merchant ship but it had room for a few travelers. The ticket cost around three hundred dollars. For a Canadian citizen, the only formality was a visa, which was easily issued by the Ministry of the Overseas. But Angola was not the best place to go on vacation, said the officer, a half smile forming on his red face. He was probably Dutch or Nordic. There was a war, even if the Portuguese newspapers rarely talked about it or covered only the victories, a cruel war, a most vicious bloody war.

  * * *

  He dreamed of seeing everything he had imagined in his countless hours in prison cells, motel rooms, staring at the ceiling or the wall, rigid, completely dressed, sometimes with the revolver under his pillow, or a sharpened shank with a duct-tape handle, always alert, listening to every sound. He imagined the shore fading in the distance, his elbows on the railing, or even better, looking out the porthole in the safety of his cabin, feeling the vibration of the engines, the incredible relief of leaving once and for all, even more final than stepping on the gas of a car or taking off in a plane.

  He would no longer be the one staring at the boats from the dock, watching the hull separate from the stone edge, watching the passengers and their waving hands get smaller and smalle
r. The cabin would be smaller than even the worst rooms he had stayed in, but it would not feel like a cell or a trap because, even when he lay in bed, he would still be moving, farther and farther away.

  The city would begin to withdraw into the horizon, its white glow fading in the mist, taking with it the red rooftops and bell towers, the hints of blue tile, the webs of clotheslines. The ship would glide under the red bridge and cross its long shadow; the sun shining on the water with an intensity that hurt his eyes. He had studied the mouth of the river on a map. Escape would only be a reality when the cliffs and the lighthouse were behind, when all that stretched before him was the open sea like he had never seen it.

  * * *

  At night, from his room in the Tropicana hotel, he could see the foamy waves washing over the sand and the glow of bonfires where fish was grilled. But that memory, from just a few months prior, no longer seemed his. It belonged to somebody else’s life in a distant time, or not even that, an invented life, a movie or a novel, a rum ad, a fabricated past that makes for a good story at a bar, improvising details on the fly, the white Ford Mustang convertible, one hand on the wheel, driving full speed, kicking up dust on the dirt road, his shirt open to the chest, sunglasses, the camera and the typewriter on the backseat, and next to him, disheveled and dark, the woman who said her name was Irma just like he said his name was Eric, neither one believing the other. They had probably found her already, faster than he had anticipated, just like they had found the shy brunette from the Texas Bar and the fake blond from Maxime’s, who had also used a made-up name, Wendy or Patty. He had just arrived in Lisbon when he learned that they had followed his tracks to Puerto Vallarta and found Irma. They had published a cropped photo of him in the newspaper and he instantly recognized it from an occasion when he posed for a photo with Irma, something he should have never allowed. He had been drinking mojitos and smoking pot on the hotel terrace. He remembered watching the still silhouettes of the oil tankers in the distance while Irma laughed and spoke in Spanish, then her friend snapped a photo. It shows Irma next to him wearing a floral dress with cleavage, her face is too dark, he looks uncomfortable, very tan, red rather, with sunglasses, his hair is slicked back and it looks black in the photo. He looks unrecognizable, which is a great relief; every photo they find and print is so different from the previous ones that it can only make their search more difficult. Meanwhile, he is perfecting his ability to leave no strong impressions on others, so they can only remember him in the most general ways.

  * * *

  Hiding in his hotel room during the day and walking through the streets of Cais do Sodré at night—he could not tell if he had managed to become truly invisible, to vanish like a fading shadow, like a gangster from a movie who can just get plastic surgery and all of a sudden look like Humphrey Bogart, or Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the supreme villain from James Bond, who can be fat, pale, and bald in one novel, and slender, tan, with white hair in another.

  He was one figure among the many reflected in the mirrors of Maxime’s or the Texas Bar; a figure appearing and disappearing outside window displays.

  He was invisible in Lisbon and at the same time it seemed he could be anywhere. He had vanished on April 5 at dawn. It was the day after the shooting. He had driven all night from Memphis to Atlanta, perhaps stopping somewhere secluded to sleep for an hour or two in the car. Someone saw the white car from a window high above. It was entering the parking lot between the two towers of the housing projects. The sky was already blue, but the streets were still in shadows. The car arrived with the headlights on. It seemed out of place in that working-class neighborhood. The engine ceased. The headlights turned off. In the dark and monotonous brick buildings, a few scattered window lights were starting to turn on. Even more odd than the Mustang is the presence of the white man inside. He gets out and takes a plastic bag from the trunk. The sound of the car door resonates in the stillness of dawn.

  He looks around but not up, not toward the window where someone watches him, someone who will remember him days later when the Mustang is still parked in the same spot, arousing the curiosity of the residents and the children who like to get close and peek inside, noticing the exotic sticker from the Mexican border. Someone will remember seeing the white man in the suit and tie at daybreak, taking his bag from the car and disappearing around a corner.

  An hour later, a similar man is seen picking up clothes from a Laundromat in Atlanta. The shopkeeper, Miss Peters, said he was serious, well-dressed, shy, very clean. She saw him leave on foot instead of in the white Mustang he usually parked outside.

  * * *

  People had seen him in the airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico, trying to buy a ticket to Jamaica or Aruba. A wiry man with auburn hair and blue eyes. He seemed nervous. His lips, thin and dry, moving in silence, showing a slight overbite. He was wearing a brown suit with a blue shirt and black shoes. One hand pulled on an earlobe, the other was tightly clasped around the handle of a dark suitcase.

  A Mexican taxi driver recalled taking him from Tapachula to Ciudad Hidalgo, all the way to the edge of a river that marked the border between Mexico and Guatemala. He said the man had a beard and a scar over his right eye, and carried a gun and a green backpack.

  On April 21, he arrived at a gas station in Pennsylvania in a blue Mustang. He asked the employees if he could sleep in the car for a few hours. He said he had to be in Chicago the next day and was trying to save time by not stopping at a motel.

  On May 5, a woman saw him praying in a church in Tucson.

  On May 8, he was at the bar of the International Inn in Tampa. Two days later he was on a cruise from Jacksonville to Key West, but also having breakfast in the Chicago airport. A woman was certain she had seen him in the lobby of the Miami International Airport Hotel. He was wearing dark pants and a shirt open at the neck. He seemed restless and tired. Eventually he fell asleep in an armchair. He left the hotel at 1:45 p.m.

  On May 9, he was in a restaurant called Lido in Curaçao. An American tourist heard the southern accent as he ordered some food. She noticed his shirt was open and very wrinkled. In her memory his hair is light brown and longer than in the photos; his face is red from the sun and he has a cleft chin.

  On May 11, he was driving a red Mercury somewhere in Arkansas. The driver who saw him said he had a pointy nose and one ear bigger than the other. Some people saw him in a village in the Sonoran Desert. They said he was living with a very young woman and a child around seven years old. But he was also on the front page of The New York Times in a photo sent anonymously to the FBI: the mayor of New York City welcomes his counterpart from Toronto, a crowd is gathered around them and there you can see the face with the aquiline nose, the sunglasses, the slicked-back hair, undoubtedly his, says the person who mailed the photo with a red circle around the face.

  People saw him in a hotel in Columbus, Ohio, wearing a hat that darkened his face. He had two bags and paid for the night in advance. He was waiting for a flight in the international terminal at the Los Angeles airport. He was the ghost of airports and Greyhound stations, diners and hotel bars.

  In the Denver airport at 10:30 p.m. one night in May, he was sitting in front of a television, absorbed in an issue of Life magazine. He tore one of the pages, folded it, and put it in his pocket. It was an article about the assassination of President Kennedy. He left the magazine behind.

  Someone also spotted him on a night bus from Houston to Mexico City, in a drugstore on the outskirts of Alliance, Ohio, in a barbershop in Stanford, Florida.

  He had been staying in a small house outside Kansas City close to an airport. A small plane had taken him to Belle Glade, Florida, and then to Cuba.

  According to an anonymous letter sent from Canada, his corpse was buried outside Mexico City. The letter included a diagram and a cross marking the location of the body.

  On May 17, he arrived at a gas station in Oklahoma City in a white Chevrolet truck with New Mexico plates. He was wearing casual clothes, light
pants, tennis shoes. He was working at a gay bar in Los Angeles. He spent a night in the Woodland Motor Court in Thomasville, Georgia. He arrived in a ’66 white Mustang and his only luggage was a small toiletry bag.

  He was in Argentina and Switzerland, in the Hotel Clark in Los Angeles, the Carolina Hotel in Columbia, South Carolina, the Holiday Inn in Tucson, where he had a bad cough, in an RV park in a wooded area in Arkansas, working as a bellboy at the Sun Castle Club in Pompano Beach, Florida, hitchhiking somewhere in Georgia. At 2:45 p.m. on April 29, he was having lunch at Glenn’s Bakery and Coffee Shop in Crescent City, California. He seemed nervous. Someone saw him in the last row of a flight from New Orleans to Frankfurt. He had grown a thick mustache and was frequently seen at a fishing supply store in Portland, Oregon. He was on a bus from Palo Alto to San Francisco.

  He was watching television while waiting at a gate in the Portland airport. He was in the last seat on a Greyhound leaving Tulsa, Oklahoma. He was whispering to the person next to him: “I killed a man. They are looking for me in forty-eight states. I can tell you everything about that nigger, King. There’s twenty of us involved in this, but we are all cops so no one suspects us.”

  In a Dallas suburb, they saw him in the white Mustang with a revolver and a machine gun. There was a panting Doberman in the backseat. He got violent when drunk and started yelling about blacks, Jews, and Catholics.

  Around 3:00 a.m., in the cafeteria of the Greyhound station in Jackson, Florida, he was wearing a black shirt and gray pants, and drinking an orange soda. He was a bartender in a hotel in Monterrey. He worked as a cook at a beach restaurant in Isla Mujeres. He was walking along a highway close to Phoenix, Arizona. He was the man drinking alone at the Aztec Bar in El Paso. He drove a ’67 Plymouth Fury convertible.