Like a Fading Shadow

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  He was in Oaxaca and a mall in Cleveland the same day. Before going to Isla Mujeres, he had stayed at Hotel Isabella in Mexico City. He had dyed his hair blond and carried an automatic pistol. He was in Merida, Yucatán, and left from there for New Orleans. In New York City, at the Oasis Bar on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Twenty-Third Street, he was wearing a blue blazer and jeans. A waiter asked him what he did for a living; he said he was a sailor.

  Early one morning, he was walking out of a bank in Geneva with a leather briefcase under his arm. An informant for the Australian police recognized him at a bar by the port in Sydney. He was at airports in Seoul and Hong Kong; also in a park in Taipei, sitting in the shade, feeding the ducks. He looked tan and was wearing sunglasses. In the Sheraton Hotel in Washington, someone spotted him in the audience of a conference on tropical diseases. He did not talk to anyone and seemed distracted. Everyone was dressed rather formally, and he was wearing a beige or white shirt open at the neck and somewhat dirty. He was wearing no socks.

  * * *

  He would buy the usual newspapers and magazines at the kiosk in Rossio Square and rush back to the hotel, ignoring everything around him—the mosaic sidewalks, the white houses, the rose-colored walls and gardens leading up the hill to San Jorge Castle. He could no longer afford to sit on the terrace of the Pastelaria Suiça. He walked through a shaded side street connecting Rossio and Figueira Squares, no longer staring at the bronze king on horseback, or the street vendors, or the beggars, or the groups of black people enjoying the sun, or the small restaurants that had once surprised him with those exotic smells. He no longer stopped to look inside the window of the locksmith shop across from the Hotel Portugal. He would go straight to the hotel and ask for his keys without looking at the receptionist.

  Once in this room, he would lock the door and lie in bed with his shoes on. He rarely took them off even though his feet were always in pain. They had not stopped hurting since the prison escape, when he had to walk six days and six nights. He examined every page of the newspapers while eating cream pastries, potato chips, roasted peanuts. Sometimes the most valuable information is in some easy-to-miss corner.

  He also went through the Portuguese newspaper, but looking for the movie listings and information on arrivals and departures from the port. On a few occasions he went to the movie theater just to feel the darkness and listen to the voices in English. He watched Planet of the Apes, and also a movie about some white mercenaries in Africa called Dark of the Sun. He liked to pronounce the names of ships, destinations, ports. Mozambique, India, Beira, Sofala, Angola, Luanda, Patria, Infante Dom Henrique, Veracruz. Later he would look for them in the white letters painted on the sides of the ships at the port. He would suddenly catch his name in an article and feel a knot in the pit of his stomach that would unravel into curiosity and then vanity. It amused him to see stories in these serious papers so full of errors, fantasies really, plots straight out of spy novels. A group of experts in chemical and subliminal manipulations had programmed and trained him to carry out the assassination and leave a false trail of clues. An organization called the International Revolutionary Council, which counted King as a member, had planned his murder to unleash a revolution among black people.

  He read the newspapers for hours at a time. Door locked, curtains drawn, the sounds of Lisbon in the background, the periodic rumbling of the underground train. Every now and then he would look up and see his reflection in the mirror, a stranger, his only confidant and interlocutor in the world, just as Charlton Heston on a future planet Earth, surrounded by apes who were in control, at least for now. He read that the person who fired the shot that afternoon was actually a woman dressed as a man; or that it was him but in a state of trance induced by FBI psychologists; or under orders by the Chinese secret service with the objective of creating social chaos in the United States and accelerating the international triumph of communism; or he had done it for a bounty of fifty thousand dollars. Some papers had him outmaneuvering the FBI and being now well beyond their reach; others had him dead, killed so the truth about who the murderer really was would never come out.

  * * *

  Sometimes, in moments of extreme isolation, fatigue, and insomnia, he feared being dead, a ghost, and not knowing about it. How different could it be, death versus this eternal wait in Lisbon. He had been living as Eric Starvo Galt for a full year when, suddenly, in Toronto, that identity had ceased to exist. For several days, he used two different names and was registered in two different boardinghouses; one belonged to a Polish woman, the other to a woman from China. Neither one spoke or understood English. One knew him as Paul Edward Bridgman, for the other one he was Ramon George Sneyd. He could be the decomposing body found in the trunk of a Chevrolet Malibu parked in the Atlanta airport—facedown, pants pulled to the knees, pockets inside out, shot in the head. Or maybe he was the body mentioned in the anonymous letter, the one buried in the ruins of Cuicuilco, next to a 1,400-year-old pyramid.

  Any unidentified cadaver could be his. They found his body close to a mine in Pennsylvania with three bullet holes in the chest. At some point they felt certain they had found him in an Acapulco beach, buried under the sand, beaten and beheaded. The crabs had already eaten his eyes and the tips of his fingers so it was impossible to confirm his identity. A plastic bag with sand soaked in blood and other fluids was sent to the FBI.

  He was the mystery protagonist, the straw man, the scapegoat, the gun for hire, a single thread in a web that extended all the way to the assassination in Dallas of John F. Kennedy, a sophisticated killing machine, according to a man with a high-pitched voice on the television. There is an organization that trains assassins and brainwashes them to kill public figures, said this supposed crime expert. It was all like the machinations of Dr. Julius No in his underground lair at Crab Key; or the SPECTRE network led by Ernst Stavro Blofeld from his impregnable fortress in the Swiss Alps.

  * * *

  He read until his head began to spin, the printed words becoming blurrier and blurrier as the room got darker. He never bothered to turn the lamp on, reading with whatever little light still came from the window, leaning uncomfortably against the headboard, his neck awkwardly propped up on a folded pillow. The pages would fall to the floor as he began to doze off. Suddenly, he was in his prison cell in Missouri, the sounds of the people in the nearby square were echoes from other cells, and the bell from the tram was the sound of a door locking. Other times, he was in the Rebel Motel on the outskirts of Memphis on the night of April 3. Wind from a tornado tossed the trees. Thunder rattled the windowpanes. Hail descended like a rain of gunshots. The room was always the same but it was never clear which motel or city. The alarm of not knowing where he was jolted him out of sleep like a ringing phone. He was lying on that dirty bed in Memphis in the heat of the afternoon. He had fallen asleep just when it was most important that he be watching the second floor of the Lorraine Motel and preparing the rifle.

  Sometimes he dreamed that he was in room 5B and had sat down on the bed or sofa for a moment and ended up falling asleep. He tried to wake up but it was impossible. Meanwhile, in the motel across the parking lot, the man was finally walking out onto the balcony and leaning on the rail. He was in an undershirt. He would stay for a few moments, then turn around and go back into his room, disappearing through the turquoise doors of room 306. In the dream, he knew what would happen in just a few minutes. It would be a brief moment but just enough time if he managed to wake up and act quickly.

  The opportunity appears again. The man, his skin black and shining with aftershave or perfume, walks out a second time. Now he is fully dressed in a dark blue suit, white shirt, and gold cuff links reflecting the red-tinted sun of 6:00 p.m. The man’s shadow fans out across the door. He must wake up right away, get up quickly, wrap the rifle in the blanket, run to the bathroom without being seen, lock the door, rest the barrel on the windowsill, adjust the scope, ignore the drunkard who will come banging on the bathroom door,
wipe the sweat of his hands on his pant leg, focus, get his balance right. But most importantly, he must wake up once and for all and confirm where he is, what room, what hotel, what city, what day, what month, what year, what hour, facing what window or balcony, in Memphis, in Birmingham, in Puerto Vallarta, in Atlanta, in Acapulco, in Los Angeles, in Selma, in Montreal, in Toronto.

  * * *

  His eyes finally opened and he jumped out of bed. The room was pitch-black. A long, screeching sound was for a second the gate of a cell before it was the metal shutters of the hardware store across João das Regras Street. It was closing time. He was in Lisbon. He began to notice the other sounds—the tram, the street vendors, the clinking sounds from a restaurant, a distant television, a news bulletin, the faint moaning of a woman in a nearby room.

  Without turning the light on, he walked to the bathroom and washed his face. The newspapers rustled under his feet. He stared at the dark and blurry reflection in the mirror and combed his hair back. He stared intently while tightening the knot of his tie, which he hadn’t undone in a long time. The face he saw was the one from the old police photos, the one that belonged to the names that were now printed in the newspapers and the WANTED signs, the names that flashed on the television screen on Sunday nights during the FBI program, where he continued to be number one on the list of the Ten Most Wanted.

  He looked into his eyes for a full minute without blinking. To change a man’s face is to change his destiny. He contracted the muscles in the corners of his mouth until he achieved the exact same smile he had in the Canadian passport. He put his glasses on and there he was, once again: Ramon George Sneyd. It was nighttime when he left the hotel. The revolver was in his jacket pocket. He caught glimpses of himself in the moving windows of the tram, a gaze stripped of substance like his own reflection, like his shadow, invisible and unpunished, lured away by the neon signs that were already lurking around the corner, the dark and narrow streets of Cais do Sodré.

  13

  Seen and unseen. I had just arrived in Lisbon and it was already time to leave. The trip was over in the blink of an eye. You wake up in a moving train and see a light of daybreak unlike any other. You close your eyes for an instant, and before you know it, it’s three days later, and you’re sitting at the Santa Apolónia station at nighttime. The immediate past has the temporal elasticity and amplitude that are usually confined to dreams; fantastic journeys unfold in a moment of somnolence, entire stages of one’s life vividly invoked a minute before waking.

  The Lusitania Express was ready to depart. The row of windows illuminated the platform. As soon as the train began to move, Lisbon would be nothing but a memory: scribbled words in a notebook; receipts and matchboxes from restaurants; a roll of film; a worn map of the city covered with pencil markings, routes, annotations, circled destinations; a small Portuguese dictionary; an anthology of poems by Fernando Pessoa, which I had purchased the first morning along with the dictionary and the map, with a page folded at the beginning of “Opiário de Álvaro de Campos,” where I had found a verse that somehow would have to make it into my novel, Um Oriente ao Oriente do Oriente, the music of a litany or spell, like John Coltrane’s invocation A love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme.

  The sadness of leaving so soon and seeing the cliffs and walls of all my obligations rise again before me was tempered with the knowledge that I had used my time wisely, that all the visual cues I needed for the novel were now impressed in the zones between my memory and imagination: the faces of two lovers who see each other for a split second across moving trains; the hospital with rose-colored walls in the wooded hillside at sunset, just as the lights are starting to turn on; the wall of that abandoned garden and the name on the azulejo tiles, QUINTA DOS LOBOS; the young woman behind the one-way glass who takes her clothes off to the rhythm of slow music, rotating inside a prism of pink lights and mirrors. Her skin is pearl white against the red satin of the bed, and her eyes, provocative and contemptuous, refuse to look into the circular mirrors that surround her with the gaze of those who watch from the anonymity of the private rooms as coins clink into the metal slots next to the toilet paper.

  * * *

  I was leaving like a spy who has accomplished his mission, the photos on the reel of my camera containing valuable, secret evidence. The night before I had been in the Hot Clube de Portugal in Alegria Square, a dark and empty square, one of the places I had circled on my map. In that same square, perhaps still there in 1987, was the neon sign of Maxime’s Club, where Ramon George Sneyd met several times with Gloria Sousa, a prostitute with platinum blond hair and a loud laugh, who had probably accompanied him the short distance between Alegria Square and João das Regras Street.

  I had arrived at number four, a closed metal door on a street lined with deserted buildings, chipped walls, and broken windows, barely illuminated by the weak lights that hung from one end of the square to the other. I thought I was probably mistaken. There was no indication that this was a club or had ever been one. The wind swung the streetlights above, enlarging and disturbing shadows. It reminded me of being a child and feeling my father’s strong grip around my hand as we walked back home at night, our footsteps resounding on the cobblestone streets.

  With a determination that back then was out of character for me, I dared to knock on the door. Perhaps there was actually an illuminated sign above the door, which I have forgotten, and its absence adds a certain fictitious satisfaction to the memory. I had come to the Hot Clube to hear some jazz, have a drink, and, most important, see the space where the musicians in my novel would perhaps play. I knocked on the door again and this time it opened as if I had accidentally used the right password.

  A young black woman with a mane of curls, an Ethiopian princess in a turtleneck, said the club would open in an hour. I could have fallen in love with her instantly. I don’t remember much about the interior of the club or the concert that night. But memory is cunning, it completes its sleepless marvelous task in secret, breaking the substance of lived experience into fertile soil for fiction; here, it offers me images of jazz clubs that only came much later, low brick vaults with posters on the walls, narrow stairways and basements in New York, the neutral facade of the Village Vanguard.

  In the end, my imaginary musicians played in a club that was partially of my own making. The entrance belonged to the facade of an old movie theater with Art Nouveau tiles. I saw the place on my way from Rossio Square to Sapateiros Street. It had a splendid name, Animatógrafo do Rossio, and had endured, like so many other things in Lisbon, in a state of decay that was a testament to time but did not signal its end, a postponement—half mercy, half neglect—which resulted in the anachronism that attracted me so much, as it stood in contrast to the barbaric impulse in Spanish cities to demolish the old and build the new. I did not go past the entrance. I imagined its interior like those of the theaters in my hometown, with gilded moldings, red curtains, and narrow corridors—old-fashioned luxury that began as artificial but acted as a cocoon for our cinematic daydreams—worn red velvet, squeaky chairs, hollow columns. In a place like that, my jazz apprentice would accompany his master at the piano. The master was a trumpeter, somewhere between Clifford Brown and Chet Baker, and his skin color would never be revealed in the book, just as the word jazz would never appear, and certain details about the female protagonist would be missing. She would take a long time to appear but then she would disappear right away; she would arrive without warning, like an apparition, and the moment she started to become more tangible she would vanish, like a ghost, because she was not a real woman but a projection of desire, fed by films and novels and, above all, by the male difficulty of seeing women as they are, to look at them as individuals and not from a place of cowardice or rapture, adolescent fascination and paralysis.

  * * *

  But that’s what I was. I was about to turn thirty-one and I was still an overgrown adolescent, a spy trapped in my public identity as a bu
reaucrat, a married man, and married by the church, father of two children; undercover, but was I infiltrating the underworld or City Hall … docile to each obligation, weighed down by the thick net of family ties that I had managed to escape for three days in Lisbon, but where I was now returning on that train in the middle of the night. Like an adolescent, I fed a melodramatic self-pity and inhabited the real world with resentment, feeling like a stranger but also superior and barely paying attention to what surrounded me. I did not want to see the effect of my attitude on those closest to me, those in my home and in my life; the life that felt like a sentence, a routine as uninspiring of emotional and intellectual stimulus as administrative work.

  I do not doubt there were moments of happiness that I took for granted and never thanked, moments I failed to notice and have forgotten, or would be ashamed of remembering now, so many years later. Lodged in those blank spaces is remorse as intense as the memory of the pain I caused. Remorse has an extraordinary resistance to the passage of time. It feeds on memory and when there is none, it latches on to amnesia like an organism capable of adapting even to the most extreme conditions.

  A January, twenty-seven years later, finds me thinking about how my then wife must have felt when I was in Lisbon. She was still recovering from the birth of our second child. It had been the days of Christmas vacation, which we usually spent in Úbeda with her family and mine, the familial skein in which she felt so warmly protected but that for me was suffocating; parents and grandparents and uncles and cousins, everything multiplied by two, endless trips and visits, and us, arm in arm, pushing the stroller with the baby, the other child holding on to her hand or mine, or holding on to both of us at the same time, asserting his place between us now that his brother was here, perhaps intuitively trying to keep us together, because he sensed, with that primal instinct kids have, the inverse magnetism of the two adults, the seed of everything he would see and hear in just a few years, too young to understand but old enough to experience the pain, to smell the toxic air of dispute and bitterness.