Like a Fading Shadow

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  He had walked around looking for a bank that was far enough but he had almost gone in a circle. Everything had been done so hastily. He hadn’t even taped his fingertips. He had approached the counter and discreetly pointed the gun at the bank teller under a handkerchief. The old man leaned in because he was hard of hearing and obviously hadn’t seen the gun. He pulled the handkerchief back. It seemed the old man couldn’t see well either. When he finally understood what was happening his hands began to shake and he dropped the money he had been counting. He pushed the gun through the metal bars and pressed it against the old man’s forehead. With the other hand he took the money from the counter and put it in his pocket. He demanded the money that was in the metal box. The bank teller could not stop shaking and dropped the box with all the coins and bills on the marble floor, making a loud noise.

  Every set of eyes suddenly turned toward the man in the trench coat who was now running for the exit. The alarm had yet to go off. He saw his hand reach for the door almost in slow motion, and before he knew it, he was already in the street running as fast as he could. It was like running away from the jewelry shop again. Almost an exact replay of the prior day, or was it the same day just a few hours earlier, the same gray light of early morning or the rainy afternoon, now with lightning flashes anticipating a storm. He ran holding on to the revolver in one pocket and the cash in the other. Once in the hotel room, he counted the money on the bed and tried to convert it to dollars. The immediate relief would not last past the weekend, but at least he had bought himself two or three days. Tomorrow was a repetition of yesterday just like every hotel room he found was identical to the previous one.

  * * *

  Five o’clock on Wednesday, July 5. The stormy sky was so dark it felt like nightfall. He walked close to the walls, searching for a temporary refuge from the rain, which had soaked his shoes, his hair, and the coat. A small pink sign flashed from a nondescript building. ROOMS. He rang the bell and heard it echo toward the back of the house. It was still raining and no one was coming to the door. The neon sign was the only indication that the place was inhabited. A tall blond woman finally opened the door. No one is a mere passing silhouette, an extra, an auxiliary figure in the stories of others. Her name was Anna Thomas and she had been born in Sweden. Hotel Pax was the name of the inn. She saw the man on the sidewalk under the weak light of the vestibule. He was completely drenched and holding a suitcase, a bag, and a bunch of newspapers and books under his arm.

  She invited him in, quickly, she said, out of the rain. At first the man was hesitant to come in, he seemed worried about dripping water on the carpet. She could hear the water sloshing in his shoes. They were an odd choice for this kind of weather, crocodile skin or something similar, something a tourist would wear in the Caribbean.

  He asked her if she had any aspirin. He was shivering and his eyes were glossy with fever. He had a hard time articulating words. His lips moved but the sounds barely came out.

  The next morning Anna Thomas brought his breakfast to the room, along with warm orange juice with honey and a tube of aspirin. She pressed her ear to the door but could not hear anything. She knocked softly. There was no answer, so she left the tray on the floor. She had not taken more than a few steps down the hall when the door opened. The guest picked up the tray quickly and closed the door. She noticed that he was still wearing the suit and the trench coat.

  He stayed three days in Hotel Pax. The wallpaper in his room featured blue peacocks. He would leave around 9:00 a.m. and return half an hour later with a few newspapers and magazines under his arm. He would not leave again for the rest of the day. The second morning Anna Thomas pointed at the front page of one of his papers with a big photo of Robert Kennedy. How terrible, she said, hard to believe he too had been killed. The guest nodded and kept walking. He had paid for one week in advance. The following Saturday, Anna Thomas found the room empty.

  There is a possible ending, a definite line drawn in time. The morning of June 8, Ramon George Sneyd, or Sneya, was detained at Heathrow Airport as he was boarding a plane to Brussels at 11:50 a.m. He had heard that in Brussels there was a recruitment center for mercenaries who wanted to go fight in the Congo. The police officers were friendly and they escorted him to an office to review his documents. They were almost apologetic and said it was a simple routine check. One of the officers showed a pained expression when they found the revolver in one of his back pockets.

  * * *

  A Liberty Chief .38 revolver. A Polaroid camera. A hi-fi deluxe transistor radio. A Noveline trench coat. A brown wool suit. A blue hat. A blue shirt. A jacket and a pair of sport pants. Two pairs of sunglasses. A Collins pocket dictionary. A plastic comb. A plastic wallet. A Portuguese coin. Twenty-one airmail envelopes. A roll of tape. A pamphlet titled “How to Hypnotize,” by Dr. Adolf F. Louk, director of the Louk International Hypnosis Institute. A bottle opener. A blank notebook. A matchbox from the New Gonevale restaurant in Toronto. A nail clipper. A map of Portugal. A spray can of Right Guard deodorant. A small shampoo bottle. A map of London. A birth certificate with the name Ramon George Sneyd. Two bars of soap. Sixty British pounds in five-pound notes. Hair pomade. A paperback novel titled The Ninth Directive. Shaving cream. Another paperback novel, quite worn, titled Tangier Assignment. A toothbrush. A book titled Psycho-Cybernetics. An inhaler. A hand mirror. Black shoe polish.

  * * *

  They gave him the list and asked him to read it and sign it. He searched for his glasses, first in the coat, then in the jacket, and read the document slowly, mumbling some of the words in the list under his breath. A police officer handed him a pen to sign and he thanked him profusely. He hesitated before writing “R. G. Sneyd.” One of the undercover police officers came back into the small, windowless office. He got close to him and, in a polite tone, as if suggesting a mere hypothesis, said that perhaps his name was not Ramon George Sneyd; perhaps his name was James Earl Ray. He did not respond. Leaning back in the chair, feet apart, head against the wall, he stared at the pen in his right hand, the trench coat on his lap, the mended pocket. Perhaps he thought, half in disbelief, half with an odd feeling of gratitude: I no longer have to run.

  22

  I like the title of Louis Althusser’s memoir, L’avenir dure longtemps. The future lasts forever. The future lasts much longer than literature is usually able to convey. A final period strikes at the end like a final drumbeat, a final note by Thelonious Monk, jarring or round, perhaps doubtful, an unexpected conclusion that doesn’t culminate as much as interrupt. But time continues flowing, even though we’re not allowed to see what happens to the characters after the end.

  Almost nobody has possessed Flaubert’s unique talent or wisdom to include in a novel the future it does not tell, because it comes after the anticipated ending, and it seems so superfluous to the reader that, after a while, it will be forgotten. Memory, or the lack thereof, can correct a novel retrospectively, distill it, make it even better sometimes. The reader of Madame Bovary will remember a novel that ends with Emma’s agonizing death, almost unbearable to read in all its graphic detail, which Flaubert re-creates even more intensely than an erotic scene. We forget, but the novel continues after Emma’s death, just as it began long before she appeared.

  Charles Bovary goes on living, isolated in his disgrace, shame, and ruin. He keeps a tormented reverence for his dead wife, but soon begins to discover unexpected and cruel things about her, letters that confirm and detail the infamy and prolong her presence after death, infecting those who remain with an illness that lacks that infallible cure for all ills in literature, the final period.

  Only after the successive deaths of Emma and Charles does the novel reveal its only innocent character, the victim of so many, the one the reader had probably forgotten or barely even noticed. She is the daughter Emma brought into this world unwanted, a burden that pestered her existence.

  The girl’s story is just as long and painful as any, but she does not have the right to a no
vel, not even a substantive role in a novel about those closest to her. When her father dies, she ends up in the custody of relatives who mistreat her. The last thing we know about her is that she is working in a cotton mill. Now I don’t even remember whether she had a name. A novel is truly great when there are many possible novels within it: the most tragic, in this case, would be titled Mademoiselle Bovary.

  But in real life, the future lasts forever and real-life stories end by disintegrating into others, dispersing, unraveling loose threads without a clear plot that intertwines with other stories and ends up traveling far from their starting point. They resemble African or Asian musical compositions in their open form, the way they’re prolonged without fatigue and significant variation for hours, days, nights, flowing like rivers, without a sequence or beginning or end.

  But fiction, like European music, is an art of limits. What begins must end. “In my beginning is my end,” says T. S. Eliot. A departing plane or train provides a clear and convenient ending to any story. Arrivals and departures determine the temporal boundaries of a story, as the two columns in Commerce Square frame for the viewer the expanse of the sky and the Tagus River, the hint of ocean that begins beyond the other limit, the red silhouette of the 25th of April Bridge. The train starts, the plane lifts in the last frame or in the last lines and after that the passenger aboard is beyond our reach. The plane is en route to Lisbon but for us, the audience, it might as well float over the Atlantic forever.

  How to begin the story of something whose origin is unknown to you. On May 8, 1968, at 1:30 a.m., Ramon George Sneyd arrives in Lisbon. On April 6, a man named Eric Starvo Galt, who has just arrived in Toronto, rents a room in a boardinghouse owned by a Polish woman who can barely speak English. On Saturday, March 29, a man, who said his name was Harvey Lowmeyr, bought a hunting rifle at a weapons store on the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama, on the highway to the airport. On April 4, around 3:30 p.m., someone named John Willard rented a room in a run-down boardinghouse in Memphis and paid for a week in advance. On April 5, around 9:00 a.m., Eric S. Galt picked up his laundry from a dry cleaner in Atlanta. The more precise the topographical and temporal details, the more emphatic the beginning or end of the story will seem, the more powerful the appearance without warning or the abrupt departure of the character. At 9:00 a.m. on May 17, 1968, the receptionist at the Hotel Portugal in Lisbon sees the guest from room 2 disappear through the revolving door, his shoulders more slouched than when he arrived a week earlier. At 11:00 p.m. on January 4, 1987, I left Lisbon from the Santa Apolónia station on a train called the Lusitania Express.

  * * *

  The future continues: a few days later, at 8:00 a.m., I was once again a civil servant in Granada. I was also a father with a three-year-old son and a one-month-old baby, who still moved in the crib with the helplessness of newborn mammals, with his red skin, his hairless little head, his eyes with swollen lids and no eyelashes, his hands and his feet so small, holding on to anything with the obstinacy of biological survival, his mother’s chest, his open mouth, his smell of baby and mother’s milk.

  * * *

  The ability to see far is more limited in time than in space. On December 2, 2012, in another future life that has already lasted many years and I could have never imagined in that first trip to Lisbon, I am walking in Rossio Square at night, feeling a little light-headed from the day of travel and the undulating patterns of mosaics on the sidewalks of Lisbon. We have come because my son, who was only one month old the first time I walked these streets, now lives here and is turning twenty-six today. We hadn’t noticed how much time had passed since we last visited. But now it feels like time sped up and we remember what took place ten or fifteen years ago as if it had happened yesterday.

  From the moment we arrive, as we look at the colors of the city from the taxi window, the pinks and blues, the ochers and worn yellows on the facades, the sun of the early afternoon, in a December with a more merciful weather than the one we left just a few hours ago in Madrid, we’re overcome with remorse for having taken so long to return, the strangeness that this has even been possible. How can there be so much distance in such a short span of time, barely an hour-long flight.

  You have drawn the curtains in the room where we will stay for two or three days. It’s a tall house on a hill, and the entire city opens up before us like a fantastic diorama. The Tagus River, the 25th of April Bridge peter out in the distance toward the southeast, and next to us, almost in front of us, a wooded hill is crowned by a white church shining under the afternoon sun, and just beyond: the walls and towers of San Jorge Castle adorned with flags flapping against the blue sky. It reminds me of the Alhambra seen from a garden in Albaicín. And the house itself reminds me of those in Albaicín. Narrow stairways, low roofs, hermetic facades that hide an interior with amazing views, shaded rooms and hallways that open without warning onto a vast world. There is a balcony with an iron railing and planted geraniums and cacti. The staircase leads to a small enclosed garden with a pomegranate tree and a lemon tree. There is space for a vegetable patch. The plants would get good light and be protected from wind or heavy rains. In the church tower, a bell strikes the hours with diaphanous sonority.

  * * *

  Close the shutters, draw the curtain, don’t turn on the light. From inside this room, Lisbon is just a distant murmur. I knew nothing about life or desire or the passage of time the first time I was here. I wrote by ear. Shedding their clothes while their eyes remain fixed on each other, two lovers become strangers again, as if they went back in time to the first time they found themselves alone in a room. They undress each other and everything that has accumulated since they met simply falls away. The two bodies emerge from the clothes on the floor under the light of a vulnerable innocence, a water that washes away their familiarity and fatigue, and returns them to each other young and mature and even more beautiful after all this time, uplifted by wonder and the gratitude of mutual desire, anonymous in a foreign city and in a room where they have never been.

  They give themselves to each other as desperately as they did back when they fought for every chance meeting, never knowing when the next opportunity would come. Now they have lost track of how many rooms and cities they have shared together; how many hours protected by the soft light of a bedside lamp, in the mid-morning or midday or in the afternoons that slowly drift toward nighttime; rooms with windows that open into urban canyons of concrete and steel, bays, forests, low winter skies, internal courtyards, the hill of the Alhambra, a street in Madrid where evenings are illuminated by the blue sign of Bar Santander, a square with cafes and trams in Amsterdam, the perpetual and silent rain of Oslo, a backyard in New York occupied by an immense maple tree that radiates its red glow into the room every November, a dark forest with moss and trunks covered with lichen on the outskirts of Breda, the pine trees and blue still waters of Formentor Bay, the white balconies of Cádiz, a street in New York submerged in a white whirlwind of snow, the church and outlook of Graça and San Jorge Castle, which are glowing in the night by the time we open the curtains and the window shutters, having just awoken from a short sleep, naked and holding each other, in this strange room that we have made ours, secret like a refuge.

  I remember a particular line in a letter that Jorge Guillén wrote to his wife: To live in many cities and love the same woman in all of them. I could not imagine that the intensity of what seems so ephemeral in film and literature could actually be preserved for so many years, and even grow deeper, with a side that is sweeter and more serene and another that has seen madness, in those instants when mutual pleasure approximates pain and loss of consciousness. We both have a face that only exists then and that no one else has seen. I watch you put on lipstick at the bathroom mirror. Your back is facing me and a soft light washes over your shoulders. You are laughing about something, and I desire you even more than the day I met you.

  * * *

  Every beginning is involuntary. I walked down the slopes of Mo
uraria; it was nighttime, the streets were barely illuminated, and there was trash in every corner. Paint was peeling off from all the walls, like some kind of epidemic. Blind balconies, boarded-up windows in huge houses where no one had lived for a long time. It brought relief and sadness to see any sign of human presence: clothes hanging on balconies, bright lights coming from open windows along with the sounds of a family dinner.

  Lisbon was dirtier than I remembered. In a small square I saw a group of men, some with beards and robes, congregating around the light of what appeared to be a storefront with the metal shutters partly raised. There was a sign in Arabic painted on a wall. Perhaps the store was now a mosque. At the bottom of the hill I went down some cobbled steps and entered a narrow street with more people and lots of stores selling electronics, phones, fruits.

  I saw women in saris, women covered with veils and long gowns, groups of kids playing in the street at night like I hadn’t seen in a city in a very long time. The stores were small, messy, and deep as caves. It did not feel like I was in Lisbon. I did not remember ever passing through this neighborhood. I did not have a map and did not know how to orient myself. Somehow, an alleyway led me to Figueira Square. Now I realize that I probably walked on João das Regras Street and passed the entrance to the old Hotel Portugal, which was about to close, and probably still looked the way it had in the seventies, with that slow descent into ruin that characterizes buildings in Lisbon. But I did not see the sign and did not look into the vestibule where the receptionist Gentil Soares had worked forty years ago.

  At night Figueira Square is a strange inverse of Rossio Square, desolate and dark, with its statue of the king on horseback off-center, creating an impression of emptiness. Now I was beginning to recognize the city, not because I knew where I was, but because I was feeling all those familiar sensations. Lisbon in December was cold fog, like a very light gauze, and the humid brightness of the white cobblestone, smooth as bone, and the smell of charcoal and smoke rising from the stalls that sold roasted chestnuts.