Like a Fading Shadow

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  Bioy was attentive toward her, intuiting her discomfort and wanting to make her feel welcome. It was the amorous and melancholic courtesy of a seventy-six-year-old man toward a twenty-eight-year-old woman.

  Dinner went on and on, with that exhausting persistence of Spanish dinners and despite the obvious fatigue in Bioy, who had arrived that morning from Buenos Aires. The poet Panero dominated the conversation. The journalist observed everything and listened attentively to the writers’ long-winded anecdotes but not without a sense of irony. She had barely touched her food or drink. She told me that she liked the effect of alcohol but not its taste or smell, so she rarely drank. Every time she signaled it was time for her to go, I would ask her to stay a bit longer. She would go to the bathroom, or to the pay phone, again. If she took longer than I expected, I feared she had decided to leave and skip the long round of goodbyes. To my delight, she always returned.

  * * *

  I could not overcome the impatience and the exhaustion. I had lost count of how many days I had gone without sleep. There must be a purgatory where the punishment is a never-ending cycle of Spanish dinners that start late, go on for hours and hours, and continue past the end into rounds and rounds of goodbyes.

  We finally got up from the table after many hours. Standing by the elevator, pale and exhausted, Bioy shook everyone’s hand. Panero gave him a big hug with a few pats on the back. And then the journalist and I were left alone and there was no longer an excuse for her not to go. We walked out of the hotel. It was two or three in the morning. The avenue looked even more abstract at that late hour. There were no taxis. The avenue was a slope: in the distance, high above, there was a line of green taxi lights.

  A few minutes ago time seemed to be standing still, frozen in that never-ending dinner. Now time was running out and all we had were the few steps to the taxi line, the moment when she got in a car and was finally on her way home, to whom and where I did not know. She would then disappear from my life as abruptly as she had materialized in the auditorium, in the background, beyond the crowd, where her beauty and the wry smile stood out, just like at the restaurant table, following the conversations like a stealthy cat, examining everything without making a sound.

  She was quick and precise in her judgment, critical without cruelty, effortlessly sophisticated, and at ease in what she said and what she liked, films or songs or books, but with no use for solemnity or reverence. She moved with the wondering grace of someone who is fully in the world, like a child at a fair, possessed of the hard-earned dignity that comes with managing to live and work in a city like Madrid. She was in her own time, indifferent to the latest fashions. Her mane of red hair, her face like a silent film actress from the 1920s, bare nails, a pair of Walkman headphones, short boots, fitted trousers, Mickey Mouse socks. I was surprised by how strongly I desired her. At the last possible second, as we stood by the taxi, I took a deep breath and said, almost in a whisper: “I would like you to stay with me.”

  * * *

  I remember a soft light forming large shadows in the room and outlining the contours of your naked body. Hours went by, but it was still night outside our window and across all those roofs and balconies, that abstract city that somehow was the same Madrid of just a few hours ago. It all felt so new under that light—the city, my confusion, my gratitude at having met you. It was a night without tomorrow or yesterday, in a room beyond the reach of the world, a moment of sweetness and vulnerability, our eyes staring into the other’s, and our faces so close, so unknown, so amazing, so secret, the face that no one else will see.

  * * *

  Between dreams I saw you get up and walk naked across the darkened room. I heard the shower and then I saw you come out in silence, gather your clothes from the floor, and quickly dress. You whispered something in my ear and kissed me. Then you turned off the night lamp. I slept so deeply that night and had the most vivid dreams, the white and blue walls of Lisbon, the burning red of bougainvilleas, the morning light of Madrid.

  I woke up to your voice but when I opened my eyes you were not there. It was your voice on the radio and you had left it tuned to that station. It was one of those clear and articulate radio voices that can make you fall in love without even seeing the person behind it. The woman with this voice had spent the night with me. I did not know if I would see her again.

  * * *

  So many things were happening at once, I struggled to organize them in my mind and memory. At 11:30 a.m. I was crossing Madrid in a taxi without the slightest idea of where I was. This was still a city of fragments for me, memories and impressions from one- or two-day trips. I was en route to the address Dolly Onetti had given me. America Avenue. From there I would go to the airport and take a flight back to Granada.

  The flurry of meetings and events, the afterglow of our night together, mitigated the anxiety of meeting Onetti. I could feel my heart racing as I rode the elevator to the last floor. Behind that door at the end of the hall was the writer to whom I owed one of the key impulses of my craft.

  I took a deep breath and rang the bell. Dolly opened the door and let me in. I remember a dark room and the open backlit windows with views of Madrid. “Juan is not feeling well,” Dolly said in a low voice. “He has a bad cold and wasn’t able to get any sleep last night.”

  It was an apartment with modest furniture; aged things, worn by use; photos and posters on the walls; and shelves upon shelves with the all-too-familiar paperbacks, those unforgettable editions of The Seventh Circle and Bruguera. “Juan never stops reading detective novels. Finishes one and starts another. A few days ago, he took all the ones he had read to a used bookseller and came back with more. Since he doesn’t sleep, he finishes them right away.”

  * * *

  Onetti was in a small room that was kept bare like in a hospital. He was on his side, propped on an elbow, and with a cigarette in hand. He wore light blue pajamas and slippers. His legs were visibly thin. His ankles were purple. I could see his stomach through the half-buttoned shirt. He had large bulging eyes and a sparse beard, and wore no glasses. His face had the bloated look that is caused by alcohol. His hands were long and crooked, only capable of holding cigarettes, glasses, books, and lighters. Dolly told me that at least he was now drinking only wine, mixed with water.

  There was a glass with wine on the bedside table, along with a few books, newspapers, clippings, an ashtray, two packs of cigarettes, a bottle of wine, a glass with water, and some medicine bottles. A long and narrow window opened onto a balcony with potted plants and a view of the Madrid sky over that redbrick tower on America Avenue where the Iberia sign turned on at night.

  I regret to this day not having written right away every word and every detail from that conversation. The memory seems worn from all the times I have invoked it. Above his bed, there were a few photos pinned or taped to the wall: a female fox terrier who had died recently, la Biche, friends and grandchildren, and his daughter, with Nordic features, and a beautiful young woman with tan skin and brunette hair. She had come to visit Juan not too long ago, said Dolly with a tone of indulgence. They had talked for hours. “Juan always needs his Lolita.” We talked about Humbert Humbert and Lolita: Onetti said that the novel should have ended with the night he rapes her, everything after was an unnecessary addition. Why couldn’t Nabokov be content with a short novel, he said, with that signature expression of tragic error in his big eyes.

  He told me about his love for Faulkner, whom I had discovered thanks to him. He showed me a letter he had written to the newspaper, mocking the obsession that bishops and church clergy have with regulating or prohibiting sex, even though they have no experience of it. He recalled the joy of walking out of a bookstore with a new Faulkner novel, reading it as he walked and bumping into people.

  The long yellowed fingers extracted cigarette after cigarette and lit them with a plastic lighter. Propped on his elbow, Onetti took long puffs, letting the column of ash form slowly and fall on his shirt, which he then shoo
k without fuss. It was amazing that there were no cigarette burns on the bed or his pajamas. Dolly told me that the thought of him falling asleep with a lit cigarette kept her up at night.

  I wish I had dared to tell him about you. I had always tried to learn from him how to write about desire and love, the wonder and gratitude of reaching what had never been imagined, what one did not even know existed. I quoted from memory a passage from The Face of Disgrace while secretly thinking about you: “And I suddenly had what I had never deserved, her face, overcome with weeping, and happiness under the moonlight.” That was Onetti for me: the ecstasy of beauty or unexpected abundance, as Larsen declares in The Shipyard: “Now at last I can breathe again: I can look at you, say whatever I like. I don’t know what life still holds in store for me; but meeting you is reward enough. I can see you, look at you.”

  * * *

  He was generous about my Lisbon novel. He told me that it had been right there on his nightstand, next to the medicines, the cigarettes, and the detective novels. It was then that I saw my meeting with him in the light of that story I had finished more than three years ago and was already leaving behind. Without that novel I would have never met him, I would not have been there that morning, I would not have returned to Lisbon, I would not have met you.

  Graham Greene says that some novels are written with memories of the past and others with anticipated memories of the future. The image I had created of the young musician visiting his teacher was not that different from what I was doing now.

  Dolly said that Onetti insisted on drinking bad wines and cheap whiskeys and that this was bad for him. I asked if I could give him the bottle of scotch I had purchased at the duty-free shop in the Lisbon airport. She said yes, with a gesture of resignation without drama. “At least he will drink something good.”

  She brought two glasses and I poured the scotch. I had yet to eat any breakfast and I also wasn’t used to drinking anymore. The scotch had an immediate effect on me. He told me the three things he liked the most: “Writing, a sweet and gradual binge, making love.” Dolly recalled a story of their early years together, when she was just an adolescent, and he remained quiet and then said: “Ruben says there are only two things, regret and oblivion.”

  Sometimes he got very quiet and terribly serious, with a big eye fixed on me or the wall or just looking into space. I glanced at my watch and felt disloyal. Soon I would have to leave for the airport. He asked Dolly to give me one of his most treasured books, the first volume of Joseph Blotner’s Faulkner: A Biography. Dolly asked why he did not give me the second volume as well. “That way he will come back for the second when he is done with the first one.” But time passed and I never went back. Dolly gave me the second volume as a gift after he died. When we said goodbye, Onetti squeezed my hand and said: “It’s beautiful to feel like a friend.”

  21

  A story demands an ending. Narrative consists of an unstoppable progress toward a conclusion. You must feel that momentum, let it take you along, still and in motion, guided by an impersonal force that is bigger than you but not overwhelming, the velocity of a train or a car, its movement forward as powerful as the retreat from everything you leave behind.

  A final period is a line in time. The gesture can be decisive and yet as pointless as drawing a line in the water or sand. It is difficult to find the beginning but it’s even harder to find the end. There will be nothing beyond that. The child begrudgingly accepts that a story has come to an end, even though the anticipation of the ending was the magnet that kept his or her attention. And they lived happily ever after. But the child sees no reason why the story can’t continue. How did they live ever after? The story comes to an end but the child wants to hear it one more time. You go back to the beginning and they see it with new eyes.

  * * *

  Here’s a possible ending if we look at this story under the austere clarity of facts. On May 17, 1968, Ramon George Sneyd, a Canadian citizen, paid his bill at the Hotel Portugal and took a taxi to the airport. Only the dates and the sights of Lisbon imbue his stay with a measure of consistency, a temporal arch, a spatial continuity, the bare minimum of symmetry. He had arrived nine days prior on an overnight flight from London. He would be returning to London on a flight that departed at eleven in the morning. His luggage weighed twelve kilos at Heathrow Airport. It was now two kilos heavier.

  The immigration officer at the Lisbon airport noted that his passport did not have the entry stamp for Portugal. Thankfully, the man could speak English. Sneyd, nervous, polite, somewhat distracted, searched his pant and coat pockets for the other passport. He opened it to the page with the entry stamp and pointed to the misspelling in the name that had forced him to go to the Canadian embassy in Lisbon to get a new passport. He placed the two passports on the counter next to each other. He kept adjusting his glasses and refolding the coat under his arm. The two photos were nearly identical even though they had been taken a month apart. The same uncomfortable hint of a smile, the same subdued disposition, the same tie, the glasses. Perhaps the officer had already identified him and was just creating a distraction while the police arrived.

  The officer studied one of the passports, then the other, then his face, spelling the name. The two versions were almost identical, Sneyd, Sneya, the smallest difference but enough to trap him, to delay him.

  The tension made him aware of the weight of the revolver in his pocket, the crazy possibility of reaching for it and taking off running and shooting anyone who got in his way.

  The officer returned the old passport and stamped the other with one of those metal devices that had dates and an official seal and that were used in customs, courts, police stations, prison offices where bureaucrats gathered like parasites to push papers, them on one side and the prisoner on the other, their desks always elevated so they can look down. The officer returned the new passport and made that gesture that guards always make, the one they train for their entire lives: the extended hand that authorizes you to pass, to cross the limit, a tired gesture full of contempt, like the one the prison guard had probably made after inspecting the truck with the bread cart, while he waited and tried not to sneeze from the flour falling on his face. It had been one year and fourteen days since the escape.

  * * *

  The plane takes off from Lisbon one bright morning in May. That could be a possible ending. The relief of avoiding capture combines with vertigo as the plane begins to tilt upward. He holds on to the armrests and watches the horizon out the window slant down. Commerce Square is a white spot gradually disappearing next to the wide metallic river. This is the last time he will see Lisbon.

  When the plane stabilizes, he takes off his glasses and wipes his forehead with a handkerchief. Relief will be short-lived. In just two hours, he will have to wait in the immigration line again, show his passport, explain himself.

  A plane taking off or a departing train is an excellent sign for an ending. The story is a game that remains within the strict limits of the board where pieces move in discontinuous paths. It is a powerful focal point marking a circular contour of light against the dark. The characters enter a limbo of nonexistence and we’re not allowed to rescue them. Unlike real people, they have the power to vanish without a trace. There will be no detectives investigating the last hotel room where they stayed, searching for fingerprints, hairs, any useful piece of paper. The only thing that Ramon George Sneyd or Sneya left in his room on the first floor of the Hotel Portugal, where he had spent nine days, was a mess of newspapers and an issue of Life magazine. The receptionist, Gentil Soares, saw him leave without saying goodbye, clumsily pushing the revolving door after his suitcase got stuck. He was relieved to think he would never see him again.

  * * *

  An ending is a place to rest. It has an element of absolution. The fugitive does not have to keep running. But Ramon George Sneyd is still on the run. He is falling apart; too much indecision, too many mistakes, missteps, and dead ends. When he traveled fro
m Toronto to London and from London to Lisbon, he had felt propelled in a definite direction, the peak of his grand escape: Africa, ultimate freedom. At his most deluded, he had even imagined the glory of a hero’s welcome. In South Africa or Rhodesia they would surely embrace the man who had put an end to the great enemy of the white race. A few soldiers always end up saving civilization, the man with the British accent and the fake uniform at the Delegation of Biafra had said. But now he was retracing his steps and flying back to London with the gut feeling that he was heading straight into the lion’s mouth, the final dead end. It was like being an incompetent thief, once again, and sprinting for the corner that the cops are about to turn.

  After the end in Lisbon, Ramon George Sneyd goes back to London and rents a room in a shady neighborhood. The only end he sees in sight is misery. The money is quickly disappearing, the English coins and bills he does not understand. He believes that taxi drivers, waiters, and newspaper vendors are probably stealing from him. He speaks to no one. He can barely sleep. He buys several newspapers and locks himself in his room to read them. The sole window faces a dark brick wall covered in rain. During the day the sound of traffic and loud music does not cease. At night, he listens to the planes leaving the airport for Africa or Asia, the Far East, the Pacific.

  * * *

  He reads the books that he brought from America and a few others he has purchased at street stalls. He keeps rereading the same chapters of Psycho-Cybernetics but is not able to concentrate. He reads a worn, stapled pamphlet with the title “How to Hypnotize,” written by Dr. Adolf F. Louk of the Louk International Hypnosis Institute. He tries to breathe deeply, like the pamphlet says, closes his eyes, and follows the first steps of autohypnosis, but his mind is already elsewhere. He has pounding headaches. The migraines, the heart palpitations, the sharp pain in his stomach, or perhaps in the intestine—you can also get cancer there.