Like a Fading Shadow

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  The weapon was useless if you did not know how to say anything in Portuguese. Hands up, this is robbery, don’t move, give me all the money. He didn’t know how to say any of it. He imagined pressing the gun into the forehead of one of those old jewelers in the tiny shops. Panic would flash in their eyes. But the spaces were so small he wouldn’t even be able to fully extend his arm. He would fill his pockets with jewelry and then what? Where would he go without a car in this city of narrow streets and dead ends? And who would he sell the stuff to?

  He felt for his wallet, now filled with coins and a few crumpled bills. Time and money were trickling through his fingers like sand and there was nothing he could do about it. He could not think of another exit, not even a daydream.

  He walked along the water feeling the sun and tasting the humidity. Cargo ships with exotic names painted on the prow, white passenger liners, sailboats with burnished wood and gilded rails. The time of staring at them and imagining grand escapes had passed. So much time under the spell of a life at sea, always stuck in a port city, anchored to the firm ground, watching those special others, that race of blond men with golden skin, strong arms, and expert hands, climbing the rope ladders, raising the sails, and gliding away.

  Time had run out. He walked back to the shade, away from the blistering sun and the still, oily water, the blue haze that exaggerated the distances and blurred the outlines of the bridge, that red gate to the Atlantic Ocean and all those places he had seen in the atlas in school and at the prison library, the islands, the southern coasts of Africa and America, the routes by way of Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope, the coasts of Biafra and Angola, the mouth of the Congo River, the vastness of South Africa, where a man could disappear without a trace and become an explorer of deserts and jungles, perhaps a foreman in a diamond mine, or a hunter of elephants, rhinos, and lions, or a mercenary with a green beret and a camouflage uniform.

  The rifle weighed around eight pounds and could have taken down a charging rhino two hundred meters away. He said his name was Harvey Lowmeyer when he bought it. He liked that name and he liked the fact that he only used it on that occasion. The shop owner and his assistant did not ask for identification, though they had observed him from head to toe with suspicion and ridicule. Both were heavyset and red, like oxen, and chewed on something as they spoke. They were expert hunters and assumed the pale man with the soft hands and the suit and tie did not know what he was doing. When the FBI agents interrogated them, they said they did not believe for a second the story that he was going hunting with his brother in Canada.

  They said it was obvious he did not know how to handle a rifle. They described him as out of shape, thin but with a belly, which he kept touching nervously. He did not try to negotiate the price. He paid in cash and turned his attention to the instruction manual. The glasses kept sliding down his nose as he read. His eyes were bloodshot. A few hours later, he called the store and asked if he could exchange the rifle for a larger model. He said his brother or brother-in-law had told him that they were going to a region in Canada where the deer were huge. The shop owner and his assistant had a good laugh after hanging up the phone. He was back the following morning to exchange the rifle. This time they installed a scope and sold him soft-point bullets, which expand on impact and tear through tissue and bones more effectively.

  * * *

  He did not remember the sound of the shot. He remembered the rearward motion of the rifle, the sharp pain in his shoulder, the ringing in his ears after the explosion, the sudden silence that surrounded him as he escaped. It was like being inside a bubble that sound could not pierce.

  Now, as he replayed every second on this hot Lisbon morning, he felt a similar silence creep in. He instinctively turned away from the main axis of the square and looked for one of the shaded, narrow streets to exit. Sapateiros Street. He walked at a quick, steady pace, not really knowing where he was going. Lisbon was a city of dead ends. After a few days, the routes he had traced in the pocket map had begun to resemble the outline of a prison. Potential escape routes, like narrow passages or stairways, led to basements or walls or reinforced doors. The arch at the end of the street could suddenly drop a metal grating as he approached. If he got inside the strange public elevator that went up to the church, he would basically be stepping into a cell.

  But the most impenetrable wall was the river itself. There was no sound, only the feeling of blood pulsing in his temples and a sharp pain rushing through his head. These could be the symptoms of a brain tumor. He had read about it in a medical encyclopedia. He took a few loose aspirins from his pockets and swallowed them.

  When he returned to the hotel room, he would have to go through every pocket and count the money he had left. American dollars, Canadian dollars, grimy Portuguese bills, coins from four different countries buried in every crevice of his pockets; lint, sand, water on his fingers; the imminence of destitution, like the vertigo of a stumble in a dream; scribbled calculations on the margins of newspapers, on the back of the weekly invoice from the Hotel Portugal, which he had to pay as soon as he returned before the receptionist reminded him again. He had to limit himself to just one beer when he went to the bar. When he got his change he put every single cent back in his pocket, avoiding eye contact with the server. In the last few days he had not returned to the Texas Bar. He was avoiding the blond woman with the loud laugh. This primitive city had no hot dog stands, or cheap places to get a burger, or strip clubs, or pawnshops where he could easily sell stolen merchandise, or boats that could take him around the world, or offices that were recruiting mercenaries. There was nothing. He had no way to stay and no way to leave. This place was on the ass of the world, a dead-end alley that reeked of garbage and urine, with lines of wet laundry hanging overhead, and poor, dark people who ate disgusting food and only knew how to mumble or yell in their incomprehensible tongue.

  None of the addresses listed in the phone book of the hotel, which were almost impossible to find on the map, had been useful. There were no places left to visit. No place where others would not be looking at him with suspicion. He had traced the route between the hotel and the South African embassy and gotten lost for hours in some neighborhood trying to find it. Luís Bívar Avenue, number ten. It looked like the waiting room at a medical office. Posters with city skylines at night or desert landscapes with elephants. Blond children with school uniforms and big smiles playing in a park. One of the receptionists asked him what he was there for and then said he would be right back. He was very thirsty and could not stop gulping. Perhaps the man had recognized his face and went to call the police.

  But the man returned with a folder and took out the forms. He would have to fill out every one and also provide his birth certificate, proof of vaccination, school diploma, and reference letters. They would take everything into consideration and get back to him with an answer in a few months. He cleared his throat and asked vaguely about the possibility of getting political asylum. He hadn’t stopped pinching his right earlobe.

  The receptionist did not catch what he was saying, or perhaps he just smiled and acted like he did not understand. He said he wasn’t sure if there was a Rhodesian delegation in Lisbon, obviously there was no embassy, but perhaps there was an informal representative.

  He went outside, a narrow square with trees and a corner cafe or grocery store. He wasn’t sure where he was even after looking at the map. He bought a packet of biscuits and a Coca-Cola. He was surviving on cookies, salty chips, canned food, and powdered soups he mixed with water from his room and warmed with a submersible heating element. Later on, they would find crumbs of food in every pocket and oil rings on his maps.

  He ate the biscuits and took a long gulp of Coca-Cola, sitting on a bench, with the coat folded next to him and the map of the city opened on top. In every place he had visited in the course of a year, he had left a trail of road and city maps with annotations, itineraries, dates, and circled addresses. On the map of Lisbon he had circled the Oversea
s Ministry, the Canadian and South African embassies, and Belém Tower Avenue. The authorities would also find, among his possessions, a brochure with flight schedules from South African Airlines in which he had highlighted all the flights to Salisbury, the capital of Rhodesia.

  He stiffened when he sensed someone approach. The employee from the South African embassy sat next to him and, without making eye contact, handed him a folded piece of paper and left. The note read: Delegation of Biafra, Avda Torre de Belém 16.

  * * *

  This was not uncommon in spy novels. Strange characters like this man from the embassy were usually the ones who relayed secret messages. They would ask the secret agent to meet them in some unsuspecting place so they could deliver instructions for the mission, maps, passwords, and keys to secret places. The man squeezed his hand for a second as he handed him the piece of paper. The hand was softer and warmer than his. He watched him walk away out of the corner of his eye. The smell of his cologne stayed behind. What if this was all a trap. He looked for the address on his map and saw that it was quite far. He would have to return to Commerce Square and take one of the trolleys. He walked while eating the biscuits. His stomach was full but he still felt hungry. He felt light-headed as he continued chewing on the mouthful of sugary flour.

  The trolley ran along the port, passing warehouses, cranes, and boats, then slowly made its way through the fog and up the red bridge. Why did it all have to be so slow. Every stop took an eternity as elderly people got in and out. No one seemed to care. The smell of the water and the cries of the seagulls reminded him of Saint Louis. He imagined a city by a river or an ocean where he would live anonymously and safely, where no one would be able to find him, a city where the air was similar to here but thicker, the air of a bay in Africa, a tropical island, or perhaps somewhere in the Amazon rain forest or the South Sea.

  He had shown the conductor the address and now the man was gesturing that his stop was next. He got out on a corner and stood for a while staring at the map. It was the same odd silhouette that kept appearing throughout Lisbon between the eighth and the seventeenth of May, a presence or a ghost, as improbable in this city as it was in any of the others where people had allegedly seen him.

  He was now on the outskirts of Lisbon on a quiet street with low houses and gardens. Belém Tower Avenue. He stared at the number on the building. Number sixteen. There was no flag, no official plaque, nothing. It was a one-story building surrounded by a white wall and overgrown plants with violet flowers. He could hear a dog barking inside and a lawn mower. The Biafran regime was not internationally recognized. Being pariahs among the countries of the world, perhaps they would be willing to offer political asylum to a fugitive. They were at war and paid mercenaries in diamonds and oil. They needed excellent shooters, men who could take down rhinos and elephants without trouble and handle machine guns in crowds.

  He folded the map and put it inside his pocket. He cleared his throat, straightened his back, and checked the gun in his jacket pocket. According to the book on psycho-cybernetics, you had to visualize the way you wanted others to see you. You had to sculpt it, outline it, fully embody it into your physical presence. The most important thing was to show no sign of hesitation. He rang the bell and waited, stiff, his head held so high he could feel the shirt collar on his nape. The lawn mower was close and he caught a faint whiff of gasoline. The dog was still barking.

  He rang the bell again. This time the iron gate opened automatically. He took a few steps and then heard it close behind him. If necessary, he could get out by climbing the vines. A straight path led to the house through the garden. The dog barked furiously somewhere he could not see.

  A black woman in a white uniform opened the door while taking a drag of her cigarette. It felt as if they had been waiting for him. A black man with muscular arms sat behind a metal table in the vestibule. He was wearing a safari jacket. There was nothing on the table except a phone, and a flag was pinned to the wall behind. It bothered him that it had to be a black man who was sitting at that table. He stared at the solid gold watch, the gold bracelet, and the green stone on his finger. He started to say something and immediately hated the tone of his own voice. He mentioned travel plans, business interests, charitable projects. The man waved him to go down the hall behind him. “All the way to the end, the last office.”

  The linoleum floor reminded him of the boardinghouse in Memphis, a distant past, so far away. He remembered the hot air and the smell of fermented urine in the bathroom as he got ready to fire the shot. There was always the possibility of another world behind a closed door that would open at the lightest push. “Come in, please,” said a deep voice with a British accent.

  The office was smaller than he had imagined and looked more like a storage room. It had no windows and all the furniture was mismatched. There was a bookcase with law books. A black man sat behind a desk and a white man stood next to him. They were both large and their bulk made the room feel even smaller. The white man was smoking a pipe and wore a light suit and thick glasses. White smoke rose slowly from his mouth. The black man was in military uniform but the attire seemed too elaborate to be real. He had combat boots, a beret attached to the shoulder of his camouflage jacket, military badges and pins, and a pair of gold-rimmed Ray-Bans.

  The white man pulled up a chair for their visitor, who proceeded to sit on the very edge of the seat. The black man began to talk. The British accent was his. He spoke for a while about a variety of topics. His white colleague stood next to him, opening his mouth only to let the long threads of smoke rise through his yellow teeth.

  Different gestures accompanied every sentence that came out of the man’s mouth, as if hinting at hidden meanings. He spoke about the tragic state of the world; the collapse of morality; wars and unrest everywhere; riots and looting in black neighborhoods in the United States; the rebellious students in Paris, mama’s boys hanging red flags all over the Sorbonne.

  In moments of crisis, it was essential that the real men came together in armed struggle to save society. And you should expect nothing in return for your sacrifice, for sometimes they will even stab you in the back. In that perfect pronunciation, he said the name Oswald Spengler: “a few soldiers always end up saving Civilization.” He mentioned with reverence the French legionnaires who fought at Dien Bien Phu, and the paratroopers who lost their lives in vain in Algeria.

  There was a moment of silence. A small fan hummed from one of the shelves. The visitor cleared his throat, said his name was Ramon George Sneyd, and placed a passport on the desk. The white man leaned over to see the nationality. They left it unopened. The black man remarked on his accent, saying that it did not sound very Canadian. They listened to what he had to say, exchanging glances every now and then.

  He could tell they were not buying his story, just like the two shopkeepers who had sold him the rifle in Birmingham. The glasses, the pale face, the soft hands. Someone knocked on the door. A chill ran up his spine. It would take him no time to pull out his gun and then they would look at him differently.

  The man who came in was also white—as white as these Portuguese people could get, anyway—and went up to the one with the pipe and said something in his ear. He could not tell what language it was but knew it was not Portuguese. The room felt hotter and his shirt was soaked in sweat. The black man waved goodbye with his sunglasses as the other one left, then leaned on the desk and stared at him intently, almost with pity, while rubbing his hands together.

  He suddenly realized that the language they had spoken was French. He remembered it from his days in Montreal. One word had jumped out: journaliste. So these two thought he was a journalist trying to pass for a mercenary or political refugee, a journalist who was perhaps also a spy.

  The black man got up abruptly and puffed his chest. He was bigger and more muscular than he seemed while sitting. There were dark patches of sweat in the armpits of his shirt. He thought about how the smell of someone’s sweat was enough to iden
tify their race.

  The black man walked around the desk and extended a handshake. His grip was strong, almost painful, and the expression on his face was a combination of pity and a warning. In his aristocratic British accent he told him softly to leave and never show his face there again.

  The white man with the pipe took a few steps forward as if to get a better look at his face. He felt the stare behind the thick lenses fixing on the tip of his nose and chin, perhaps identifying the signs of plastic surgery.

  * * *

  He struggled to assign specific dates to his most recent memories; they lacked a clear sequence. The night he had arrived in Lisbon, the young brunette at the Texas Bar, the office with the balcony facing the river and all the maps of the colonies on the wall, the blond woman from Maxime’s, who laughed so loud and faked her moaning, the military man with the Ray-Bans, the South African embassy, the freshly painted black prow of a ship soon headed to Angola. The newspapers he bought at the kiosk by Commerce Square were the only way he had of confirming the date and day of the week. But that wasn’t always the case; sometimes the newspapers would not arrive for days to this godforsaken city where time seemed to belong to a different world, a much slower and lethargic world, like that of the prison. Everything was slow here, the trolleys, the way people walked, the government offices where employees looked at a file for an eternity while taking long drags from their cigarettes.

  He was now the fastest person on the sidewalk of the narrow street, passing others, almost pushing people out of his way, as if he were late for something. But there was nothing and no one waiting for him, he just forged ahead with his head low like in those circular walks at the prison yard, with the coat under his arm and an invisible abyss or blank space in front of him, in the white stone of the sidewalks, with their drawings of arches or waves, his secret time pulsating faster and faster, every minute and every hour fading away as he advanced, vanishing into thin air just like the money that would soon run out and leave him with nowhere to go, no next stop on the map, no destination in a travel brochure that could make for his next hideout. Beads of sweat were running down his forehead as he arrived at the kiosk with the newspaper stand. He quickly surveyed the front pages of the newspapers and confirmed that his name and photo were not in them. But he would have to read each paper carefully, slowly, from beginning to end, to make sure he didn’t miss a story with his picture. He was alarmed to realize that the man at the kiosk now recognized him as a regular and greeted him, even though he had never made eye contact or said anything, he simply pointed to the papers he wanted—The Times of London, The Daily Telegraph, the International Herald Tribune, the Financial Times—and placed some money on the counter. Sometimes he extended his hand with the coins and waited for the man to count the amount. The kiosk attendant would later recall that he looked nervous, as if he were late and had to get somewhere fast with all those newspapers, which he could start reading compulsively the moment he stepped away. It took less than ten minutes to get back to the hotel from there. Just a quick walk through the square, down a street, and through the lobby and he would be in his room with the newspapers laid out on the bed.