Like a Fading Shadow
Page 34
I barely read the newspaper. I don’t bother to open magazines or packages with books. I have deleted myself without difficulty, and to great relief, from social networks. I’m exercising my right to an ancient form of solitude, disconnected from everything; dedicating my time to one thing, and doing so because that’s what I desire, for pleasure, for the satisfaction of the process in and of itself; free, for now, from all the anxiety that is sure to come, the uncertainty of the result, the fear of hostile reviews, the emptiness or silence that will overcome me when the book is published and I wait to hear from the first unknown readers.
The Internet is the gateway to a vast archive where every day I discover new information that feeds my writing. Admirers from all over the world write to Ray asking for his autograph. A firefighter said he did not remember the shot but he did remember the rattling of the windows. Ray wrote over four hundred letters during his time in prison and they have been preserved in the archives of Boston University. The store clerk who sold him the binoculars around 4:15 p.m. on April 4 was surprised to see him in a suit and with a loose tie. At the Canadian embassy in Lisbon, the person who helped him fill out the passport application said he held the pen and the forms as if he could not write or read.
When he was about to pay for something, he took money directly from his pockets, instead of a wallet. Several female witnesses noted with displeasure the excessive amounts of hair pomade he wore. After the shot, King’s face looked as if it had been torn from front to back. At the jail in Memphis, he sang in the shower when he was in a good mood. The gush of blood from the wound reached the door of the room. Among the things that Ray left behind in the boardinghouse in Atlanta were maps of the southeastern United States, Texas, Oklahoma, Mexico, Louisiana, Los Angeles, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Birmingham.
Some people thought he looked like an insurance agent, a door-to-door salesman, a preacher. In King’s pockets, at the time of his death, there were two ten-dollar bills, a five, three ones, forty-five cents in change, a silver pen, various business cards, and an appointment book for the year 1968 with black covers.
The novel has developed on its own with the unlimited richness of reality and the blank spaces I haven’t been tempted to fill, spaces in the shadows that cannot be illuminated, mostly because it has been too long, most of the witnesses have died, and memory is quite fragile.
The novel is what I write and also the room where I work. The novel is the fine-point pen that ran out of ink one day when I wrote for five or six hours without stopping and filled an entire notebook. The novel is made with everything I know and everything I don’t know, and with the sensation of groping my way through this story but never finding a precise narrative outline. In 1977 James Earl Ray escaped from prison and remained on the run for fifty hours, chased by hundreds of armed officers, dogs, helicopters with searchlights, through a forest in the mountains of Tennessee. They found him hiding in a ditch, cold and starved, crouching under a layer of branches in an area infested with snakes.
The novel writes itself while I type away at the computer and also when I sit quietly and pensively with both hands on the edge of the table. It writes itself now as I travel in Tram 28 to meet with you at a pub you found on the corner of a sloping street, near the Bica Elevator and the viewpoint of Santa Catarina. After dinner, we’re going to Cais do Sodré to see the lights of the bars and peek inside those doorways and stairways where he would have disappeared with women in tight skirts and high heels echoing on the stone steps.
Where does a story begin, where does it end? Don Quixote learns that Ginés de Pasamonte, one of the criminals he released with great folly, is writing his own autobiography. Don Quixote asks him if he has finished it, and Ginés responds: “How can it be finished, when my life is not yet finished?” We have been apart all afternoon and I’m dying to see you. Perhaps from the sidewalk, I will catch a glimpse of your face before you notice. To love the face is to love the soul.
Tram 28 rises and falls like a sailboat on the rolling waves of Lisbon’s hills. Alone, in her room at the Lorraine Motel, her eyes wide open in the dark, stunned by the unreality of pain, hearing the sounds of police sirens and fire trucks in the distance, Memphis in flames, Georgia Davis notices a sound above her ceiling, a rubbing, a scraping. She comes out of her room and stands in the empty parking lot under the red, blue, and yellow glow of the motel sign. On the second floor, in front of room 306, custodians work quietly, scrubbing with sponges and rags the wall, the door, the floor to erase the traces of blood.
Readings and Acknowledgments
I first read about James Earl Ray’s days in Lisbon many years ago, in Hellhound on His Trail, a book by Hampton Sides about the assassination of Martin Luther King. Though published in 1998, Killing the Dream, by Gerald Posner, is still, in my opinion, the most comprehensive and best-written account of Ray’s life, his crime, and his escape. The book also examines, in great detail, the conspiracy theories that remain in circulation to this day, many of them encouraged by Ray himself. The Making of an Assassin, by George McMillan, and He Slew the Dreamer, by William Bradford Huie, have the advantage of the authors’ chronological proximity to the events and personal knowledge of some of the protagonists.
America in the King Years, 1954–1968, a three-volume account by Taylor Branch, is my favorite study of Martin Luther King’s life and the civil rights movement, because of its ambition, rigor, and narrative clarity. In Spain, this admirable political movement inspires great sympathy, but there is little knowledge, because, as far as I know, almost none of the fundamental historical books have been translated into Spanish. Several high-quality documentaries are available on YouTube and were very useful as I was writing. Perhaps the most complete account is offered by the twelve-episode series Eyes on the Prize.
In 1989, Ralph David Abernathy’s autobiography And the Walls Came Tumbling Down revealed that Martin Luther King met with a lover at the Lorraine Motel on the nights of April 3 and 4 in 1968. Six years after its publication, Georgia Davis, a member of the Kentucky Senate, wrote in her memoirs, I Shared the Dream, about her affair with King and confirmed she was the woman who met King at the Lorraine.
Besides countless interviews in newspapers and on television, many of them paid, James Earl Ray also wrote two autobiographies, Tennessee Waltz, in 1987, and Who Killed Martin Luther King?, in 1992. He never stopped recounting the story of “Raoul,” with several variations. No one has found credible evidence that this character existed. Ray died in prison in 1998. He was waiting for a liver transplant.
Numerous primary sources on King’s assassination and the manhunt for Ray are available on the Internet. The website for the Mary Ferrell Foundation, www.maryferrell.org, includes the FBI’s files on the case and documents from the congressional commission, which investigated the assassination again in 1978. The Shelby County archive, property of the City of Memphis (www.register.shelby.tn.us), includes the initial investigations by the local police, interrogations of suspect witnesses, and a register of every day and every hour Ray was detained there. For a defender of the practical virtues of democracy, it was a great joy to confirm that thanks to one of its most valuable ones, transparency, I had access to materials that were essential for the writing of this novel.
In Lisbon, Pilar Soler helped me gather valuable information about the names and comings and goings of cargo ships, movie posters, news articles, and the nightclubs Ray frequented. And thanks to Pilar I met Vladimiro Nunes, the journalist who in 2007 interviewed Maria I.S., the sex worker who met Ray in the Texas Bar. I must thank Pilar and Vladimiro for some of the crucial details in this novel.
Elvira Lindo traveled with me to Lisbon and Memphis, documenting everything with photographs, offering helpful observations, and encouraging me through this entire process. Her feedback on the first draft of the book helped me discover elements that were missing at that stage. Miguel, Antonio, Elena, and Arturo were, as always, keen and generous readers. For evident reason
s, their opinions about this book were very important to me.
This novel is dedicated to the four of them and Elvira.
Madrid, September 2014
Also by Antonio Muñoz Molina
In the Night of Time
A Manuscript of Ashes
In Her Absence
Sepharad
Prince of Shadows
Winter in Lisbon
A Note About the Author
Antonio Muñoz Molina is the author of more than a dozen novels, including In the Night of Time, Sepharad, and A Manuscript of Ashes. He is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including Spain’s National Narrative Prize, the Planeta Prize, and the Príncipe de Asturias Prize. He lives in Madrid and New York City. You can sign up for email updates here.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Readings and Acknowledgments
Also by Antonio Muñoz Molina
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2014 by Antonio Muñoz Molina
Copyright © 2014 by Editorial Planeta, S.A.
Translation copyright © 2017 by Camilo A. Ramirez
All rights reserved
Originally published in Spanish in 2014 by Seix Barral, Spain, as Como la sombra que se va
English translation published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2017
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Muñoz Molina, Antonio author. | Ramirez, Camilo A., 1985– translator.
Title: Like a fading shadow: a novel / Antonio Muñoz Molina; translated by Camilo A. Ramirez.
Other titles: Como la sombra que se va. English
Description: New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016050908 | ISBN 9780374126902 (hardback) | ISBN 9780374714161 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929–1968—Assassination—Fiction. | Ray, James Earl, 1928–1998—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Historical.
Classification: LCC PQ6663.U4795 C6613 2017 | DDC 863/.64—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016050908
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.