Like a Fading Shadow

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  * * *

  It was like that now, at the temple. He was speaking instead of writing, but the words flowed with the same urgency. He was at a pulpit in front of two thousand people instead of in a cell, but the fever was identical, the inner flood, the trance. The words swelled up as powerfully as the air that filled his lungs at every breath. He felt the blood rush through his body, his hands clutching the edges of the lectern as he leaned in.

  He held up the Bible and there was no need to open it because he knew its every word, and the right passages came to his lips as he needed them. He held the book like a tool, a percussion instrument to strike against his palm, a hammer that sounded like thunder.

  He no longer thought about the proximity of his friends or tried to see beyond the blinding lights and the TV cameras. He spoke into a darkness or an abyss of silence populated by a few voices. He challenged them and said things he had never said aloud before, only acknowledged to himself. He was alone at the top of the stage and far from the stands of the huge auditorium but he still perceived the unanimous response of the crowd as if he were singing the call of a work song. At thirty-nine years he felt as old as Moses and saw everything before him with a strange clarity that must only come after death.

  There was angst pressing out against his chest, the sadness of a farewell but also a unique joy. The fever that unleashed his words was its own fuel and intensified.

  Like a musician in a state of trance, he kept going deeper inside himself, while commanding with even greater control the attention and fervor of the crowd. All the darkness that had been germinating within him was suddenly bursting from his chest in a torrent of words. Fear became courage, despair became defiance, frustration became serenity. He defied whoever wanted to kill him or slander him. No man scared him; no lie, no humiliation, no extortion. He opened his eyes wide as if he were seeing events that did not yet exist, things that would only happen after he died.

  He finished abruptly and could only stand with his hands clutching the lectern. Abernathy hugged him and led him to a chair. He was drenched in sweat as if they had just pulled him half-conscious from a river.

  * * *

  How strange that a night and almost a full day later, that lightness of being, that calm without guilt, was still with him. It remained like the warmth of the afternoon in Memphis, that suspended moment when the sky is an ember of light before dusk. The wind was picking up. Perhaps it was better to go back and get a coat.

  Abernathy was still in the bathroom, although he had promised not to take long, just a moment to put on a bit of cologne. The driver of the Cadillac had turned on the engine. She would be in her room, downstairs, with the door half-open, attentive to the sounds outside, perhaps applying lipstick in the mirror, waiting to distinguish his voice among the many, so she could leave right at that moment and get in the other car. It was now too late to smoke that cigarette after all.

  Next to the Cadillac he recognized one of the musicians who would play that night, the trumpeter. He had made him promise to play “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” God can take it all or give it all, more than you can dare ask, more than the poor imagination can desire. Leaning on the balcony, he counted all the gifts he had received on that trip, in just a few hours, the trip to Memphis that he had undertaken with such reluctance, with a taste of ashes in his mouth, so deep into that darkness of the soul that he never thought he would come out.

  It was not that he had regained hope, but rather, he did not need to feel it, just as at this moment he did not feel fear, physical exhaustion, or even the passage of time. At dawn, in her room, as he was saying goodbye, he had said: “What little time we have.” But he had said it without complaint, with gratitude that such little time could encompass so many gifts, secret lights in other people’s rooms and in motels, minutes that were rescued from the whirlwind of obligations, the mandatory fate that he no longer saw any point in resisting, just as you can’t rebel against chance, or the times you had to live, or the color of your skin.

  * * *

  But it was time to go. The more precious the time, the faster it runs. Below, his friends were getting in the cars and asking him to hurry. He caught a whiff of Abernathy’s cologne and as his hands left the railing a shot he would not hear pierced through his jaw and his neck and his spine and lifted him up and threw him against the door of room 306 and then onto the concrete floor, where he remained with his eyes wide open and an expression of awe and wonder, a knee bent and a foot with a black shoe and a black sock sticking through the bars of the balcony, shaking.

  26

  I stop writing around 9:00 p.m. and take a shower before leaving. The room turns dark as I try to reconstruct a single minute forty-six years ago and imagine what took place in someone else’s mind. But in the facade of the house right across the street, faint rays of the sun still shine on the balcony. It’s an old stone building with chipped blue and white azulejo tiles. Sometimes I see in the interior a man in a T-shirt walking slowly from one end of the room to the other, as if looking for something. The balcony is filled with lush geraniums that perfume the sidewalk below.

  The street is a cul-de-sac, resembling an old neighborhood courtyard. At the entrance, an Art Nouveau sign in blue and white tiles reads: VILA BERTA. Colorful pennant garlands that are starting to fade hang across the street, over the rooftops, along the cornices, and from balcony to balcony.

  We can hear the voices of neighbors who lean out the windows to have conversations with those on the sidewalk. We hear the children play and cry, and the sound of brooms sweeping and mops splashing water on the floors. In the mornings, very early, the most clear sound is the whistling of the swallows.

  When it’s late, at three or four in the morning, and the intoxication of what I imagine and write no longer lets me sleep, I lean out the window and stare at the quiet shadows of the street.

  Sometimes, through the open windows, the breeze carries the smell of stews or grilled sardines and people’s conversations. Grass grows between the cobblestones. The only house on the block that stands out with a bit of opulence has one of those Lisbon rooftops that rise with the subtle curves of Chinese or Japanese architecture, a garden surrounded by grand trees, and bougainvilleas spilling over the wall.

  * * *

  I’m off for a walk but the satisfaction of having worked part of the morning and all afternoon does not clear my head. The shower, the wet hair in the warm afternoon, the cool breeze are not enough to take my mind from everything that has been occupying it for so long.

  I have left the house but not the book where I have lived for so many months. We have returned to Lisbon so I can continue following his final episodes. I enjoy the anticipation of our meeting and a dinner in a different part of the city, but part of me remains hypnotized in front of the computer screen, the basements, the aisles of virtual files, reports, testimonies, confessions, newspaper clippings, forensic photographs, sketches of the bullet trajectory.

  I have spent the entire afternoon exploring a few minutes in the afternoon of April 4, 1968. I step out of South Main and Mulberry Streets, the Lorraine Motel, Bessie Brewer’s boardinghouse, and onto Vila Berta and Graça Street. A few steps take me from a distant dusk in April 1968 to this sunset today.

  That afternoon someone heard the blast of a firecracker or the exhaust of a car. Someone else was certain it was a shot. But a car mechanic who was having a drink at Jim’s Grill after work said the bar and the pinball machine were so loud he did not hear anything. In the music store next door, the owner had been playing music, and the two customers who had been looking through jazz records did not remember any alarming sound, just the police sirens wailing outside.

  At the Lorraine Motel, in one of the ground-level rooms, Reverend A. D. King, the younger brother of Martin Luther King, Jr., slept so soundly from a hangover the shot did not wake him up. Georgia Davis, who hadn’t seen King since he left her room before dawn, was applying her lipstick in the mirror. Ralph Abernathy was
putting on cologne.

  In Largo da Graça, most of the small shops have closed, but the bakeries and fruit stores are still open and the cafes are buzzing with people having dinner. I like this square, the stone, the trees, the benches where there are always people chatting or watching. The sound of the Lisbon tram reminds me of the trolleys in Memphis. But the ones in Memphis travel in straight lines, and are oftentimes empty, almost spectral, like the sidewalks where no one walks, the boarded-up buildings, and the stores with RENT signs in the windows.

  * * *

  Tram 28 turns the corner at the bottom of Graça Street. Seen from the front, it looks taller, narrower, almost weightless on the rails. It’s still light out but its headlight is already on. Especially at night and dawn, the single headlight of the trams gives them an underwater quality.

  At the jail in Memphis, Ray complained about the blinding light that stayed on day and night. But according to the police officers who kept watch, he slept most of the time, had an excellent appetite, and even joked with them. The guards brought him a sleeping mask so the lights would not bother him as much when he tried to sleep. He laughed as he put it on and asked them if he looked like Zorro.

  I have seen photos of the prison wing that was reserved exclusively for him. It looks more like a hospital than a prison, with white surfaces and linoleum floors, and aseptic bars like a psychiatric ward. The first day, when they brought him from the airport in a caravan of armored cars, after removing the handcuffs, the waist chain, the leg shackles, and the bulletproof vest, they served him a big breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausages, white bread, and coffee. He ate to his heart’s content and then slept deeply for six hours. For lunch, he had grilled meat, peas, roasted potatoes, beet salad, pudding, and iced tea. In the mornings wake-up time was at 6:30 a.m. for breakfast, but sometimes he wasn’t hungry and kept sleeping until nine or ten, or had breakfast, read the paper for a bit, and went back to bed. On the website for the archives of the Memphis police, every minute of his life in pretrial custody is accounted for. He ends up escaping the electric chair by pleading guilty and accepting a sentence of ninety-nine years; then he recants his confession, pleads innocent, and demands a retrial that he will never get.

  He wrote, of course, but only in stretches of half an hour or forty minutes. He read an entire paper in the morning and one in the afternoon. He asked for the weekly editions of Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report. He would walk for hours around the prison wing, walking fast, stopping only at the end of the corridor and turning around immediately, the way prisoners walk in the recreational yard. He took two aspirins every six hours for his headaches.

  Sometimes he watched television and became furious when the news media painted him in a negative light, or when they talked about his miserable origins and his disastrous family. According to the logbook, he spent a lot of time reading, though the record does not state the titles. He would get tired of reading and start doing push-ups. He challenged the guards to push-up contests and always won. He told them stories about his time as a fugitive and the absurd calamities of his criminal career: the time he robbed a Chinese restaurant—for nothing, the loot was shit—and his military ID fell from his pocket as he ran out; the time he stole a car after a robbery but forgot to lock the door and almost fell out flying around a curve. He watched baseball on TV. The boarded-up windows and the permanent ceiling lights made him lose his sense of time but not his ability to sleep. Sometimes he slept for eight or ten hours at a time. He also took naps. Some nights he twisted and turned in bed, mumbling in his sleep.

  * * *

  Tram 28 brakes with the squeaking of metal and the gnashing of wood. I get in and scan my transport pass like any other passenger. You begin to know a city when you can walk quickly and use public transit without trouble. At this time of day, it’s easy to get a seat. Staring out the window of a Lisbon tram is one of the great pleasures in life. The tram moves through the city in a very physical way, like walking, instead of the smooth speed of a car or a bus.

  Every time I see a tram I imagine Ray sitting inside—though there’s no evidence he ever took one—foreign and silent, blinking a lot or hiding his eyes behind sunglasses. From Figueira Square, just outside the Hotel Portugal, he could have taken the tram to the bars on Cais do Sodré.

  I’m living in two worlds and two times, in the same city. I like the way that Tram 28 reaches the end of Largo da Graça and suddenly slopes down Voz do Operário Street in a straight line toward the Tagus River, where the golden sun is setting.

  My gaze could be his. I’m watching the passengers in the tram climbing uphill toward us, and a pale man in sunglasses stares back at me. It could be him, it could have been him. I pretend, even with you and often without success, that I live in reality and in the present.

  * * *

  The tram continues its improbable journey through narrow winding streets, the wheels creak on the rails, and you can almost touch the walls of the houses. People get on the sidewalks and press their backs against the wall, so the tram can pass. A woman looks at me from behind the window of a small appliances shop. Above us the cables of the tram form a grid against the sky. It stops abruptly halfway up a slope and seems about to roll back. But it resumes with a jolt, a mechanical obstinacy, and continues its ascent with no apparent effort, passing within millimeters of dumpsters and parked cars, navigating around them with the prowess of a sea creature.

  I’m lost in my thoughts and at the same time I perceive and take pleasure in everything around me. A baroque angel in the dusty window of an antiques shop. The profile of a foreign tourist standing next to the window on the other side, holding a guide to Lisbon. An enormous palace with all the drama of an impending collapse, with the stem of a tree growing through a crack in a balcony. A square opens up like a great outlook with bar terraces and an enormous statue of white stone that I now recognize as Saint Vincent.

  The gradual knowledge organizes sights that had previously been unforeseen occurrences, situating them with certainty in a mental map of the city that with each visit becomes more dense and complete. I’m writing a novel at the same time that I’m discovering a city. In this square, which now has a name and an exact position in our daily routes, we arrived unexpectedly, the way one arrives somewhere in a dream, that night in December, during our walk with Paula and Arturo.

  That night, the only voices, the only steps, were ours, and the only presence was the statue. But today, the square is buzzing with people eating outside, groups of tourists, street musicians and vendors, kids doing acrobatics to the sounds of hip-hop blasting from a boom box. I was listening to John Coltrane play “Alabama,” with Elvin Jones on the drums, and I didn’t know the terrible and hopeful resonance that this name could have for an African-American man in the early 1960s, or the fact that Coltrane had tried to re-create in that intense and mystical melody the cadence of the sermons of Martin Luther King.

  * * *

  Se escrevo o que sinto é porque assim diminuo a febre de sentir, says Fernando Pessoa. If I write what I feel, it’s to reduce the fever of feeling. Feverish images and words proliferate like coral through the depths of insomnia. I feel I won’t be able to sleep well until I know everything, until I have reviewed every detail and thread of the story. There isn’t a blank space behind what could have been the final period of that fateful shot. And a shot does not exhaust and does not even summarize what happened in that instant, at six in the afternoon, six and one minute.

  In the firehouse, just in front of the Lorraine Motel, the windows are covered with newspapers, as if painters were working on the place. But the newspaper sheets have small holes and behind, police officers and FBI agents keep watch, take photos of everyone who goes in and out of the hotel, and write down every license plate. One of the police officers hears the shot as he is watching King through his binoculars. At first, he does not believe what he has just seen and does not alert the others. But he looks at King again, now on the floor, as if he had missed a
frame in the sequence; the knee is bent, a foot protruding from the balcony.

  There isn’t a fragment of information that under the magnifying lens of my insomnia does not become memorable. In the Lorraine Motel, at six and one minute, a maid is walking on the second floor and passing room 304. She was so busy she did not notice Dr. King standing by the railing two doors down. She only saw him as he fell back at the moment of the explosion, and she dropped everything.

  At Bessie Brewer’s boardinghouse, the deaf-mute from room 6B and the drunk from 4B (who had tried to open the bathroom door just minutes earlier) were watching television in her room and she did not understand why his face suddenly turned toward the window.

  * * *

  The novel simplifies life. It simplifies it and it tames it. It begets its own fever, especially when you intuit its end. I don’t want to watch films, or listen to music that isn’t spirituals, songs from the civil rights movement, and jazz from that time. I don’t want to write articles, or give lectures, or plan trips, or see exhibits. All I need is a wooden desk and a laptop. If the laptop crashes or its battery dies, I would continue in a notebook. I don’t read anything that doesn’t have to do with what I’m writing.

  The novel subjects life to its own limits and at the same time opens it up to an exploration of depths that are within and without you and that only you were meant to discover. You’re writing even when you don’t write. Narrative imagination does not feed on what is invented; it feeds on the past. Every minor or trivial event that one experiences or discovers in the course of an investigation can be valuable or even decisive for the novel, occupying a minimal but precise place within it, like an uneven cobblestone in a sidewalk in Lisbon.