Like a Fading Shadow

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  But this time something caught his attention before he walked away from the kiosk: the familiar red rectangle with the white type of Life. May 3, 1968, this issue had taken a while to get to Lisbon. The cover had an old black-and-white photo of schoolchildren posing for a class portrait. The little faces looked serious, some had uneasy smiles. The girl in the corner had a dress, the rest were boys in old overalls. He stared at each one of them. The faces looked familiar. He stopped on the last one on the right in the second row, but he would not have known it was his except for the red arrow that pointed to it.

  He remembered the photographer who came to their class that day. He never got a copy because his parents did not pay the five cents. You can only see his hair, forehead, and the two little eyes. He paid for the magazine and placed it between the newspapers as if protecting it or hiding it. As he walked, he thought about the red arrow and could almost feel it now pointing at his head. Marked since he was a child, they would say, self-satisfied at having found this old photo. Who knows how much they had paid for it. He could imagine the dirty finger of the traitor who pulled it out of an old shoebox and pointed at the head of the small child. Now he could really feel them getting closer.

  20

  Every end has a prelude. But it takes a while to know when you’ve reached it. Endings and preludes happen in an insidious manner and later you see their traces in all those moments that seemed ordinary. I returned to Lisbon one November, almost four years after my first visit and the completion of the novel that took me there. In that time the novel had changed my life, not as much as it was about to in the next few months, but much more than I had ever imagined.

  Slowly and unexpectedly, the book had become a bestseller. It received awards and a movie was in the works. Dizzy Gillespie was composing the soundtrack and also playing the part of the ailing jazz trumpeter. The boy who was born when I was still writing was about to turn four. We’d also had a daughter who just turned one in September. I had quit my job as a public employee and we no longer lived in the government housing by the river but in a house with a garden in a quiet neighborhood with trees, still in the city but more secluded, with spacious rooms and big windows and a room I could use exclusively for writing and listening to music. Now I was writing on a computer. I still had days when I got up and could not believe that I had the entire morning to myself, instead of having to drag my body to the office. Morning was now the gift of time, a gift that can disappear in the blink of an eye if you don’t learn to administer it wisely. The children now see me every day of the week, my wife works close to Granada, and we all live together.

  * * *

  This time I took a flight to Madrid and then the 11:00 p.m. Lusitania Express to Lisbon. In the last two or three years, I’ve lived in a daze of commitments and traveling. Success came unexpectedly and probably undeservedly or at least arbitrarily, like most things, and I had not learned to be more protective of my time. What keeps me grounded, to some extent, besides my love for writing, especially the habit of writing, is life with my family, my wife and my children.

  Every trip is a hassle but sometimes also a needed break, a nice treat. You visit a city and someone comes to pick you up, they take you to a nice hotel, and then to an auditorium where people want to hear what you have to say. You were unknown not too long ago and now people come up to you after a talk and ask you to sign their copy of your book. People take your photo and interview you for the newspaper and the local radio. Younger people who like your work address you with deference and timidly present you with a book of poems or stories they have self-published.

  A few years ago that was me. The organizers take you to late dinners after these events, and the dinners last an eternity followed by a round of drinks at a bar. The dreamlike quality of every night, in every city, was fueled and heightened by alcohol. I would go for late-night strolls after my hosts had dropped me off at the hotel. I was still looking for something but I did not know what, anything but returning alone and drunk to my hotel room. Your solitude, shy in hotels, says García Lorca. Smoking in bed in the dark, unable to fall asleep, I would be overcome with remorse for all the things alcohol made me do or say. I always returned home with a Tintin book for my children.

  * * *

  I had stopped drinking a few months before that return to Lisbon. It happened on a regular weekday. I had had a few beers around noon with a group of friends. Then we went to one of our favorite restaurants, the San Remo, had some food and wine and continued talking. But then we got a bottle of whiskey, and probably one of those poisonous herb liqueurs that were so fashionable at the time. I don’t think anyone left the place feeling drunk.

  That night my wife and I were going to a housewarming dinner at our friends’ new place, a couple with small children, like us, with similar likes and literary interests. From the balcony off their dining room, I could see the Vega, the lights glimmering faintly in the distance. We drank beer, then wine with dinner, followed by whiskeys and gin and tonics as we talked and smoked cigarettes.

  It was quite late when we returned home. We were both tired but in a good mood. I felt a pleasant dizziness and did not think much of it. I figured some fresh air on the balcony before going to sleep would make it go away.

  I fell asleep quickly. Moments later, I woke up feeling like I was going to die. Somehow I made it to the bathroom. I barely closed the door before violently throwing up. The floor was revolving under my bare feet and the spasms sent me against the walls. I could not stop retching. There was vomit everywhere. I could not recognize myself in the mirror. I feared that my wife and children would wake up and see me like this. My body was drenched in sweat and I could smell the alcohol on my skin and breath. Later I found myself sitting on the toilet with my head on my knees, sweating profusely and struggling to breathe.

  Somehow I managed to clean that mess. I took a long, hot shower and put on a clean pair of pajamas. I went to the children’s room to check I had not awoken them. Then I slid back into bed next to my wife. She seemed to be asleep, though it’s possible she heard it all and was just pretending to save me the embarrassment. Before finally closing my eyes, I caught a glimpse of the alarm clock. I was surprised to realize the whole incident had been much shorter than I imagined.

  * * *

  I would not taste a drop of alcohol for many months afterward. I immediately began to lose weight. My face looked younger in the mirror. It was a marvelous thing to wake up with a clear head each morning. I also started smoking less. Suddenly, I was in a state of lightness and physical well-being that was entirely new to me. I started writing every day and listening to Bach. Billie Holiday and some of my other favorites were now associated with alcohol and I could not take them. I discovered how the mind, free of alcohol, instead of growing atrophied for lack of chemical stimulus, can generate its own euphoria, self-sustaining flashes of neural excitement. A rather sickly disciple of Borges, I had loved in excess, like he says, the sunsets, the slums and misery. Now I was learning to love the mornings, the downtown and serenity.

  It was, of course, a somewhat sad serenity, the fragile calm of convalescence. The months leading to that night of agony and shame in the bathroom had been a time of growing confusion, a delirium sustained by alcohol, lies, guilt, the simulacra of double lives that were quickly becoming more suffocating than the life I was trying to escape. That is why I was so attracted, then, to stories about spies, traitors, and impostors, novels about fugitives who fake their own death, acquire new identities, and are free at last of those who are after them. I lied like a coward when I was at home but I also lied whenever I left. I returned after every trip slightly hungover, ashamed, afraid that something was going to give me away. Always with a new Tintin book.

  * * *

  Staying calm did not take any effort. Some of the temptations that had been irresistible under the influence of alcohol now seemed trivial. Previously fascinating people now seemed boring and repetitive as I listened to them at the bar,
drinking water or a Coca-Cola. The warmth and excitement of certain friendships ended up having more to do with the shared habit of drinking than old affinities and loyalties. Years before, when I was still in university, a friend who had to stop drinking by doctor’s orders said something I would later put in the mouth of the old trumpeter in my novel: without alcohol, life loses its brilliance, everything seems black and white. But for me it was the opposite. Now colors looked more vivid. Deep inside, however, I was afraid that without alcohol I would not experience the world with the same intensity and this would affect my writing. I was certain that I had saved myself from a great danger, something dark and perhaps irreparable, and, in any case, I needed a break, less traveling, more time with my children and my wife, acceptance of who I was and what I had, a new house, a life in Granada, a new novel in the works, which seemed to promise and require a new kind of writing, one that was less mediated by literature and more faithful to my personal experience and the people who had raised me.

  Perhaps it was possible to live contently with what I had, within the limits I had created with my acts and indecisions, a calm without drama, with literature as the space where I could unleash my passions in a way that I could not do with my life. Do not lie and do not harm and do not suffer. I drank tea while I wrote, or water, or nothing. The brain produced amazing stimulants. And without alcohol the excitement of writing lasted much longer, the words flowed from my fingers and materialized on the computer monitor, acquiring a life of their own.

  * * *

  This was my frame of mind when I traveled to Lisbon a second time. I had a few hours in Madrid, before the train departed. A journalist who had interviewed me in Granada a few days before had given me her number, but I decided not to call her. We had dinner after the interview. She was younger, red-haired, attractive, with a beautiful Madrid accent, and a quick and sharp sense of humor.

  I wandered around the downtown, the streets brought bittersweet memories. Every time I passed a telephone booth, I thought about the phone number in my pocket but could not bring myself to dial. I ended up heading to the train station much earlier than necessary.

  This time I was traveling in one of the sleeper cars. One of the attendants approached me with a copy of the Lisbon novel and asked for an autograph. I could not sleep that night. I felt alone and restless, and I wanted to enjoy every minute in this comfortable little cabin, with the warm reading light over the bed, the rhythm of the train, the night scenery outside the window.

  I don’t remember my first impression upon arriving, nor the location of the hotel. I remember, almost like a flashback, the clear sensation of walking under the November sun, down Liberty Avenue, and seeing once again the cobblestone sidewalks of Lisbon, the small polished stones, white and smooth like bone.

  That is all I remember from that trip, a benevolent flood of light, the sudden memory of the city, recovered after almost four years. I don’t remember what I did or who I spent time with or who invited me. Sleep escaped me that night as well, as I found myself enveloped in that claustrophobic insomnia that is unique to hotel rooms on the last day before you have to leave.

  * * *

  I took a flight back to Madrid. I was scheduled to participate in a public homage to Adolfo Bioy Casares. I bought a bottle of scotch in the duty-free shop. With great caution, I was beginning to drink again, in moderation, one glass of wine with dinner, a beer, a pour of scotch on special occasions, sipped very slowly, rediscovering the aroma of smoke, wood, and peat without the numbness of habit.

  The feeling that I lacked solid ground, that I was floating from side to side, was accentuated when I returned to Madrid. I was not familiar with the area around the hotel and could not place it in my mental map of the city. Hotel Mindanao. It was enormous, exemplary of a vulgar modernism, one more cement block on a wide and nondescript avenue of tall buildings from the seventies, practically indistinguishable from so many others in Madrid or any other city.

  By mid-morning I was checked in; the room was very similar to the one I had just left in Lisbon. I had nothing to do until seven. I thought about calling the journalist, but I found an excuse—I told myself she would probably come to the event that night. I probably ate lunch alone at the hotel restaurant. I went to the room and called the house to say hi to the children. Then I lay in bed feeling exhausted but unable to sleep. I was nervous and somewhat daunted by the prospect of meeting Bioy. Some of his novels and stories had a decisive influence on me, much like Borges or Onetti: the lean and rigorous plots, the presence of mystery and the magical in the everyday, irony, the way of invoking sexual desire and love. I still had to prepare my remarks for the evening.

  * * *

  Also in attendance would be Enrique Vila-Matas and the poet Juan Luis Panero, a big, cordial man, with a voice and laughter to match his size, and a rotund eloquence that immediately brings to mind good conversation in a Spanish cafe. He was comfortable around Bioy. When I arrived at the event, I found Bioy polite, warm, thin, and beginning to bend under old age, which seemed to have recently arrived. He was an elegant man, not only in his dress—English wool suit, flexible leather shoes—but in his manners, the way he leaned in to listen, the way he said thank you. His hair was gray-blond; his eyes were light and framed by heavy eyebrows. Borges and Bioy were responsible for my love of detective stories and fantastic tales, which have in common the discipline of poetry. But in Bioy, there was also the love of women, the implicit vindication of a male subjectivity in awe of women and bound by respect, hopelessly seduced by the combination of intelligence and beauty, vulnerability and sensuality, the concealed, the forbidden.

  * * *

  I saw the journalist in the audience, but she wasn’t you yet, she could have easily been somebody else. She was in the back, near the exit, standing. She had either just arrived or was about to leave. It was the third time I had seen her and the first time her presence affected me and made me wish she would stay. I only knew her name and occupation. She could have left at the end of the event as people began gathering around Bioy. But she remained there, standing in the same spot, even after the room began to empty. Everything was happening with uncertainty, a constellation of improbable events. Just two days before, I was in Granada, yesterday in Lisbon, and this evening in Madrid, standing next to Bioy Casares, watching her out of the corner of my eye as people came to say things to me, to thank me, to give me books or envelopes, to ask for autographs.

  * * *

  I was finally free and I was getting ready to approach her when another woman came up to me. She was older, foreign, blond, blue-eyed. One of those round faces that even in old age preserve an air of youthfulness, a childlike form. She extended her hand and introduced herself. Her name was Dolly and she had a Buenos Aires accent. I thought the journalist would end up leaving if I could not excuse myself from this conversation.

  Dolly, Dolly Onetti, she repeated. She said she had a message from Juan. Dolly always called Onetti Juan, instead of Juan Carlos. There was no writer alive that I admired more than Juan Carlos Onetti. Dolly was wearing a big coat and a small English hat. She said Juan had read my novel and wanted to talk to me. She gave me a paper with an address and a phone number. I was supposed to call in the morning to confirm, but they would expect me around noon.

  * * *

  I continue making my way toward her as in a dream where you walk and walk but don’t seem to advance. As I got closer I saw her smile, her eyes, almond-shaped and slightly downturned, her reddish hair, her lips painted red. She said she had only waited to say hi and bye. No doubt I had to stay and have dinner with Bioy and the other writers. I asked her to come with us. The restaurant was in the same hotel. I asked her to at least stay for a beer.

  She glanced at her watch and looked around searching for something, a phone. I lost sight of her for a few moments and thought she had left. She reappeared, still shy, but a bit more calmed, putting a few coins back into her purse.

  I did not know about her
personal life and, for some reason, did not even wonder who she had to call to say she would be late. It was unclear how long she would stay. Would it be a few minutes, just a beer at the bar. Or would she stay a bit longer and drink a glass of wine with me while we waited for a table. She sat next to me because I was the only person she knew at the table, but we were still strangers to each other.