Like a Fading Shadow

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  A convoy of armored vehicles and police cars took him from the airport to the courthouse in Memphis through a street where they had blocked all traffic. He could not see anything out the window or the cell where he ended up. Soon he began losing his sense of time. He started writing on yellow notepads from the first day, with the marks of the handcuffs still fresh on his wrist. He told the guard who stood next to his cell in London that he would become rich writing and selling his story to Hollywood.

  In a cell that was specially built for him, he wrote for hours under incandescent ceiling lights, leaning on the metal table, his face very close to the paper and his left arm covering what he was writing from the eyes of the security cameras. He missed his portable typewriter, the clinking sound of the keys on the balcony of the hotel room in Puerto Vallarta, the cool night, the ocean breeze, the smell of beach fires and grilled fish.

  His handwriting was slanted and spaced. He wrote fluidly, with misspellings, never crossing anything out, filling sheet after sheet, without margins, front and back. He wrote with sweat dripping from his face, despite the fans, which were always on, huge and roaring like airplane propellers. There was a big clock on one of the walls but this did not help, he had no way of knowing whether the hands were marking an hour in the morning or the afternoon. The incandescent lights on the ceiling created a perpetual artificial day.

  He was allowed to have maps, pencils, pens, and ink refills with different colors. He also had an appointment diary from the previous year and one of the current, in which he could fill the day boxes with everything he remembered, all the places he had been, the names of the cities, giving that period of time—the fourteen months since his escape from prison—the clarity of an order it otherwise lacked.

  He drew diagrams to remember the layout of a bar or a bedroom or the bathroom at the end of the hallway in one of the boardinghouses where he had stayed. He tried to hypnotize himself to block the voices of the guards who played cards or watched sports, yelling as if they were in a bar. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but the light was so bright it filtered through his eyelids, pressing to the back of his skull. He would wake up with nosebleeds, and sometimes drops of blood fell from his nose onto the sheet where he was writing. They gave him permission to keep a roll of toilet paper next to him. He swallowed blood and felt nauseous. There was not a single angle in the cell that was not visible to the security cameras, including the toilet in the corner. One of the police officers watched him with the unblinking objectivity of a camera lens. At first, they collected his urine and feces and took them to a lab. Latex gloves, masks, plastic containers with hermetic seals. His food and water were tested for poison before he ate or drank. They unrolled the toilet paper entirely and rolled it up again before giving it to him. They examined the pencils, the notebooks, the eraser, the pencil sharpener. One of them brought a small screwdriver and removed the small blade from the sharpener.

  * * *

  He liked to feel the pen on the paper, the pressure of the tip on the soft thickness of his notebook. He wrote, remembering places with graphic precision and aiding himself with maps and the diagrams he had drawn; the layout of the room where he had stayed only one night, the orientation of the boardinghouse in Memphis in relation to the Lorraine Motel, the location of the balcony with the glass door slid open and the white curtain flapping in the wind. He wrote, letting himself be carried away by the free association of ideas and images, and had to adjust the chronology of events afterward. He intentionally left some gaps, blank spaces in his narrative, and omitted certain names. Those were secrets he would take to the grave. There were scenes that he described over and over again in successive drafts, hoping to stay as close as possible to the facts or at least attain a bare minimum of internal cohesion. There were others that changed from paragraph to paragraph. He reread what he had written and, upon noticing the contradictions, would tear the sheets violently and rip them into tiny pieces.

  * * *

  The act of writing allowed him to see himself from outside, often facing his own back. He saw himself like a character in a film or one of the novels he had read and reread while on the run. His writing began to slide into fiction. He organized meticulous sequences that could be corroborated and began to introduce in them fictitious events or figures. The new characters were constructed from different people he’d met, combined into an arbitrary portrait of part memory, part fabrication, part things he had read in books.

  Perhaps he had started profiling the figure he would call Raoul long before he was taken to the windowless cell in Memphis. He would continue writing and talking about this character for many years, until the end of his life, like someone who keeps revising the drafts of a story that never ends and never seems to click into a final form. Raoul appears and disappears. Sometimes his name is Raoul. Sometimes he is Roual. He has a Hispanic accent and his hair is dark and wavy. Other times his hair is black but also a bit reddish, as if Raoul came from a mixed background, Hispanic and Irish perhaps, French-Canadian. It is also possible that Raoul dyed his hair. The hair color and the name could both be false. But what does it matter if his hair was dyed and if Raoul was not his real name? His real name was not Eric Starvo Galt and yet that was the only name he gave Raoul. Years later, in another memory, Raoul’s hair is blond or light brown, the color of sand.

  Beyond those changing details, the descriptions remain extraordinarily vague. Raoul is neither tall nor short, neither thin nor fat. He once said he recognized him in a photograph: a big man with thick black hair and fleshy features. It turns out to be a photo taken by three passersby in Dallas, November 1963, close to the place where President Kennedy was assassinated. Raoul always wore dark suits and shirts, but never ties. We don’t know his eye color. He was close to Raoul many times and they talked and traveled together in the car for many hours and met in bars and cafeterias and hotel rooms, but he never provides any information that can help identify this person. He is a featureless face, a backlit silhouette sitting at the bar of the Neptune Tavern in Montreal, one summer day in 1967.

  * * *

  He sits alone at a secluded table. He’s already going by the name Eric Starvo Galt. He’s wearing a new suit, his first one ever, and his hands feel soft after a manicure. He has robbed a supermarket or a brothel and is trying to get a passport or identification that allows him to stay on the move. After a few years, he will have perfected the story and will be able to narrate it in the style of a detective novel. Raoul is observing him from a distance and after a few minutes comes to his table and sits across from him. He waves to the waiter and orders a drink.

  Raoul seems to wrap himself in mystery, he writes and speaks in a long-winded manner, probing, exploring. His words drifted like a cold fog, he writes, many years later, from another cell, old and sick, still combing his hair in a seventies style, stiff with pomade. He writes that he suspected Raoul of being a junkie, because he was always wearing long shirts and jackets, as if trying to hide his arms.

  Raoul’s innuendos seem to amount to some kind of proposal, offering something in return, something he needs more than anything else, money to find a good place to hide, a passport. He has an old car. Raoul suggests that he drive to the nearby city of Windsor and wait for him on a certain street close to the bus station. Raoul asks questions but does not answer any. He parks his car in the specified location. A few minutes later, Raoul appears on the sidewalk carrying a gift-wrapped package in his hand. He lowers the window and Raoul gives him the package and asks him to put it under the seat.

  He must now drive across the border and meet Raoul on the other side on American soil. He notices a taxi in the rearview mirror, and sees Raoul in the backseat of the car. He prefers not to know what’s inside the package. The taxi does not follow him past the border. He waits at the cafeteria by the railway station, just as Raoul asked him to.

  He sits in the back, close to the kitchen and the emergency exit, but with a clear view of the entrance. The package is
on his lap under the table. He gets distracted for a few seconds and when he looks up Raoul is standing in front of him. Raoul has a gift for sudden entrances and exits. He sits across from him and demands the package. He covers it with a light coat he had under his arm, takes out his wallet and counts one thousand dollars in fifties and twenties. The bills look and smell new. Raoul tells him to drive to Birmingham, Alabama, and wait for instructions there. He doesn’t tell him how long he’ll have to wait. He just assures him that after that job, he will receive twelve thousand dollars and a passport, and he will be able to go “anywhere in the world.”

  * * *

  He is like a secret agent on a mission so important not even he can know about it. He travels by train from Detroit to Birmingham. He arrives early in the morning and rents a room in an inn close to the station. Later he remembers the name of the hotel and marks its location on the map of Birmingham. He has also marked the boardinghouse where he will later rent a room and the post office where a few days after arriving he went to ask if there was a letter for Eric S. Galt.

  The letter came many weeks later. The name on the envelope is typed and there is no return address. Inside, there’s a sheet of paper with a date, a time, and the name of a cafe, Starlight, which was located across the street from the post office. He showed up a bit earlier to check out the place, to note possible exits, and to see if he could catch Raoul arriving; he wants to know if he will come in a car, in a taxi, or by foot. Night is falling and the street is mostly empty of people and traffic. The red neon sign of the cafeteria illuminates the sidewalk.

  He takes a table in the back, by the bathroom, and orders a coffee. The waitress is in a bad mood. She seems tired, ready for her shift to be over. He describes the coffee, sugar, and the open newspaper on his table. He hears the toilet flush and out comes Raoul.

  Raoul takes the newspaper and the coffee and tells him to follow him to one of the booths. This time he counts three thousand dollars. It is always in twenties and fifties, and Raoul counts with the speed of a bank teller, glancing once to the side to make sure the waitress is not watching them. Along with the money, he gives him a new set of instructions. These are quite enigmatic. He’s to buy a used car in good shape, and pay no more than two thousand dollars for it. He also needs to get a Super 8 camera and some basic equipment according to the specifications typed on the sheet of paper. Raoul writes a phone number on one of the napkins with the name of the cafeteria. He tells him it’s in New Orleans and asks him to destroy the napkin as soon as he has committed it to memory. He will receive new instructions by mail in a few weeks, but if there’s an emergency, he should call that number. He implies that the next step will probably be a trip to New Orleans. He leaves the cafeteria abruptly, without saying goodbye or shaking his hand, and with a rolled-up newspaper under his arm. In October, he gets a letter with an appointment date and time at a motel in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.

  * * *

  After a few years, in the monotonous eternity of the prison, the details of this story only get more precise. They are purified and sharpened, like the prose he uses to tell them, so different from the confused legalese he churns out obsessively, claiming his innocence, suggesting conspiracies where he is always the victim, the scapegoat, a cog in a machine controlled by the government and intelligence agencies.

  He was only following instructions and waiting, he writes. He presented his driver’s license with the name Eric S. Galt at the window of the post office and smiled briefly and thanked the clerk, who kept telling him there was nothing for him. When the new instructions finally came, at the beginning of October, he loaded the typewriter and the camera in the Mustang and drove almost without rest to New Orleans, where he had to call a number to find out the place and time for his next meeting with Raoul. He dialed the number from a phone booth and there was no answer. It was unwise to call twice from the same phone booth. The third or fourth time, someone picked up. Raoul had had to leave earlier than planned. He would meet him in Nuevo Laredo. The voice said the name of a motel and the address and hung up.

  At the border post they told him how to get to the motel. He had just put his head down, exhausted after four days of driving, when someone knocked on the door. It was Raoul. Once again, it was obvious that he had been spying on him. Raoul started talking as if they had already been chatting for hours. He did not explain anything and did not ask about the drive or his life during the months of waiting. Raoul never loses his shadow-like elusiveness. A taxi was waiting outside the motel. Raoul got in and ordered the driver to follow the Mustang. They crossed the border back into Texas. Once they were past customs, Raoul got out of the taxi and climbed into the Mustang.

  They drove to an isolated house at the end of a dusty shantytown. There was another car parked in front of the house. The driver had a Native American profile and remained still as Raoul opened the trunk of his car and took out a spare tire, which he then switched with the one in the trunk of the Mustang. They drove back to the border. Raoul got out and walked the pedestrian bridge. He obeyed and drove through customs. He stopped the Mustang and saw Raoul approaching in the rearview mirror, a hat over his face and long sleeves despite the heat. Raoul got in and asked him to drive to the motel. They arrived and to his surprise the car from the house was parked there and the same driver awaited inside.

  Raoul switched the spare tires again. The next morning, he came to his room and handed him two thousand dollars. The bills were new and smelled of ink. Their texture was slippery. He asked Raoul when he would get the promised passport and Raoul stared back at him as if he had not understood the question. Another man came into the room silently. It was the Native American driver. He knew right away that the man had a gun on him, but he also had his in his back pocket and could have reached for it in the blink of an eye if necessary. Raoul told him to be patient; that perhaps it was better if he stayed in Mexico for some time and checked in with him every now and then by calling the New Orleans number.

  * * *

  The story then takes a new direction, still blurry; the idle days in Mexico feel like preparation for something, a point of no return. How naive of him to imagine that he could stay in Puerto Vallarta forever, spending his days in the cool shade of a hut by the ocean, watching the whales spout their geysers in the distance. By the middle of November, he was driving north in the Mustang with the Alabama plates. The yellow paint had turned almost white from the sun. He rented a room in a hotel for retirees in the squalid periphery of Hollywood Boulevard.

  After a few weeks he began to run out of money: he had to pay the hotel, the bartender school, the dance classes, the locksmith correspondence course. He calls the number Raoul wrote on the napkin from the Starlight Cafe. Someone who is not Raoul, perhaps the Native American driver, answers and tells him to be patient, to continue checking at the post office every two or three days, where the next set of instructions will arrive. Beneath the visible life where he appears to be just some impostor, meekly dedicated to memorizing cocktail recipes and rumba steps, is the waiting, the calls, the typed letters with no signature that order him to travel to different cities for secret appointments.

  That point of no return begins to close in as he drives to New Orleans in December, under the pretext of going to pick up the daughters of an acquaintance who is a dancer at a strip club, in the company of a lunatic who smokes dope and invokes Mother Earth and sees UFOs in the desert skies. In a deep and dark pub, the Bunny Lounge, on the corner of Canal Street and Charles Avenue, Raoul waits for him, sitting in the back, drinking a beer. He probably imagined these scenes like in a movie or a James Bond novel where the brand of everything the characters carry or use is detailed.

  This time Raoul has a clearer and more tempting proposal: if he helps him in a gun-smuggling operation with Mexico, he will receive twelve thousand dollars and the passport he desires so much. When he asks him if he still needs the film equipment, Raoul just shrugs his shoulders. He gives him money, not much for now, five
hundred dollars. In early April, perhaps sooner, he will receive a message to return to New Orleans to the same bar and the same table. Raoul’s beer has lost its foam and he has yet to take a sip. The waiter has not come to bother them even once.

  * * *

  He is not a conspirator, much less a murderer. If he is a spy, he doesn’t know what he is spying on or on whose orders. The narrative that is perfected throughout the years is one where he is basically a sleepwalker following orders, a fugitive who was on the run though no one was looking for him; it’s as if he had been hypnotized from far away, an innocent who little by little gets closer to a trap that others have created specially for him, while distracting himself with occupations and interests that lead nowhere: he never makes the pornographic films, he never finishes the locksmith course, and he quits the dance school; he receives his bartender diploma, but he does not look for a job, and when he is offered one he turns it down, saying that he has been hired to work on a cargo ship on the Mississippi.

  Halfway through March, he interrupts his life in Los Angeles. He does not go to the last appointment with the plastic surgeon who operated on his nose. The signal has arrived, the call. He shows his driver’s license at the post office and the clerk does not even look up to confirm the resemblance. It now feels as if that has always been his name. He’s able to say it naturally, without a second of hesitation, and he can sign it just as well. He has put the letter in his jacket pocket and only opens it after exiting the building and putting on his sunglasses.