Night Train to Lisbon Read online

  NIGHT TRAIN TO LISBON

  PASCAL MERCIER was born in 1944 in Bern, Switzerland, and currently lives in Berlin where he is a professor of philosophy. Night Train to Lisbon is his third novel.

  ‘Rich, dense, star-spangle … Night Train to Lisbon is about ends and means, language and loneliness, betrayal and complicity, intimacy and imagination, vanity and forgiveness.’

  Harper’s

  ‘Have you ever been overwhelmed by an abrupt impulse to leave your old life behind and start a new one? Many of us feel the temptation; very few give in to it … Night Train to Lisbon is a novel of ideas that reads like a thriller: an unsentimental journey that seems to transcend time and space. Every character, every scene, is evoked with an incomparable economy and a tragic nobility redolent of the mysterious hero … Pascal Mercier now takes his rightful place among our finest European novelists.’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘I heartily recommend [this novel] … I also loved The Tin Drum and Darkness at Noon and The Outsider. If those sound like your kind of novel too, Night Train to Lisbon stands comfortably in that company.’

  Irish Independent

  ‘Mercier draws together all the great existential questions in a masterful novel.’

  De Volkskrant

  ‘A serious and beautiful book’

  Le Monde

  ‘A book of astonishing richness … A visionary writer … A deserved international hit.’

  Le Canard enchaîné

  ‘Powerful, serious, and brilliant … One of the genuine revelations of the year.’

  L’Humanité

  ‘One of the great European novels of recent years’

  Page des libraires

  ‘In this book, reading becomes experience … One reads this book almost breathlessly, almost unable to put it down … A handbook for the soul, intellect and heart. In reading it, one learns to value time with a book: a rich, fulfilling lifetime.’

  Die Welt

  ‘A book of style, narrative depth and philosophy … I read it in three nights. Then I was convinced to change my life.’

  Süddeutsche Zeitung

  ‘A sensation … The best book of the last decade … A novel of incredible clarity and beauty.’

  Bücher

  Copyright

  Originally published in 2004 in Germany by Carl Hanser Verlag.

  This edition originally published in the United States of America by Grove Atlantic Ltd.

  This updated paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2009

  by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

  Copyright © Carl Hanser Verlag Muenchen Wien 2004

  The moral right of Pascal Mercier to be identified

  as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  Translation © Barbara Harshav 2008

  The moral right of Barbara Harshav to be identified

  as the translator of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means,

  electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,

  without the prior permission of both the copyright owner

  and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

  The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it

  are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance

  to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities,

  is entirely coincidental.

  The epigraphs are taken from:

  Coplas de don Jorge Manrique by Jorge Manrique,

  translated by Henry Longfellow (Boston: Allen & Ticknor, 1833)

  The Complete Essays of Montaigne by Michel de Montaigne,

  translated by Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1948)

  The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa by Fernando Pessoa,

  translated by Richard Zenith (New York: Grove Press, 2002)

  First eBook Edition: January 2010

  Atlantic Books

  An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  www.atlantic-books.co.uk

  Contents

  Cover

  NIGHT TRAIN TO LISBON

  COPYRIGHT

  PART I: THE DEPARTURE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  PART II: THE ENCOUNTER

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  PART III: THE ATTEMPT

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  PART IV: THE RETURN

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  Nuestras vidas son los ríos

  que van a dar en la mar,

  qu’es el morir

  Our lives are rivers, gliding free

  to that unfathomed, boundless sea,

  the silent grave!

  Jorge Manrique

  Nous sommes tous de lopins et d’une contexture si

  informe et diverse, que chaque piece, chaque momant, faict son jeu.

  Et se trouve autant de difference de nous à nous mesmes,

  que de nous à autruy.

  We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in

  composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own

  game. And there is as much difference between us and

  ourselves as between us and others.

  Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Second Book, 1

  Cada um de nós é vários, é muitos, é uma prolixidade

  de si mesmos. Por isso aquele que despreza o ambiente não é o

  mesmo que dele se alegra ou padece. Na vasta colónia do nosso

  ser há gente de muitas espécies, pensando

  e sentindo diferentemente.

  Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that

  the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same

  as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast

  colony of our being there are many species of people who

  think and feel in different ways.

  Fernando Pessoa, O Livro do Desassossego

  PART I

  THE DEPARTURE

  1

  The day that ended
with everything different in the life of Raimund Gregorius began like countless other days. At quarter to eight, he came from Bundesterrasse and stepped on to the Kirchenfeldbrücke leading from the heart of the city to the Gymnasium. He did that every day of the school term, always at quarter to eight. Once when the bridge was blocked, he made a mistake in the Greek class. That had never happened before nor did it ever happen again. For days, the whole school talked of nothing but this mistake. The longer the debate lasted, the more it was thought that he had been misheard. At last, this conviction won out even among the students who had been there. It was simply inconceivable that Mundus, as everyone called him, could make a mistake in Greek, Latin or Hebrew.

  Gregorius looked ahead at the pointed towers of the Historical Museum of the city of Bern, up to the Gurten and down to the Aare with its glacier-green water. A gusty wind drove low-lying clouds over him, turned his umbrella inside out and whipped the rain in his face. It was then that he noticed the woman standing in the middle of the bridge. She had leaned her elbows on the railing and was reading – in the pouring rain – what looked like a letter. She must have been holding the sheet with both hands. As Gregorius came closer, she suddenly crumpled the paper, kneaded it into a ball and threw the ball into space with a violent movement. Instinctively, Gregorius had walked faster and was now only a few steps away from her. He saw the rage in her pale, rain-wet face. It wasn’t a rage that could be expressed in words and then blow over. It was a grim rage turned inward that must have been smouldering in her for a long time. Now the woman leaned on the railing with outstretched arms, and slipped her heels out of her shoes. Now she jumps. Gregorius abandoned the umbrella to a gust of wind that drove it over the railing, threw his briefcase full of school notebooks to the ground and uttered a string of curses that weren’t part of his usual vocabulary. The briefcase opened and the notebooks slid on to the wet pavement. The woman turned around. For a few moments, she watched unmoving as the notebooks darkened with the water. Then she pulled a felt-tipped pen from her coat pocket, took two steps, leaned down to Gregorius and wrote a line of numbers on his forehead.

  ‘Forgive me,’ she said in French, breathless and with a foreign accent. ‘But I mustn’t forget this phone number and I don’t have any paper with me.’

  Now she looked at her hands as if she were seeing them for the first time.

  ‘Naturally, I could have …’ And now, looking back and forth between Gregorius’s forehead and her hand, she wrote the numbers on the back of the hand. ‘I … I didn’t want to keep it, I wanted to forget everything, but when I saw the letter fall … I had to hold on to it.’

  The rain on his thick glasses muddied Gregorius’s sight and he groped awkwardly for the wet notebooks. The tip of the felt pen seemed to slide over his forehead again. But then he realized it was the fingers of the woman, who was trying to wipe away the numbers with a handkerchief.

  ‘It is out of line, I know …’ And now she started helping Gregorius gather up the notebooks. He touched her hand and brushed against her knee, and when the two of them reached for the last notebook, they bumped heads.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ he said when they stood facing each other. He pointed to her head. ‘Does it hurt?’

  Absently, looking down, she shook her head. The rain beat down on her hair and ran over her face.

  ‘Can I walk a few steps with you?’

  ‘Ah … yes, of course,’ Gregorius stammered.

  Silently they walked together to the end of the bridge and on towards the school. His sense of time told Gregorius that it was after eight and the first class had already begun. How far was ‘a few steps’? The woman had adjusted to his pace and plodded along beside him as if she might follow him all day. She had pulled the wide collar of her coat so high that, from the side, Gregorius could only see her forehead.

  ‘I have to go in here, into the Gymnasium,’ he said, stopping. ‘I’m a teacher.’

  ‘Can I come along?’ she asked softly.

  Gregorius hesitated and ran his sleeve over his wet glasses. ‘Well … it’s dry there,’ he said at last.

  She went up the stairs, Gregorius held the door open for her, and then they stood in the hall, which seemed especially empty and quiet now that classes had started. Her coat was dripping.

  ‘Wait here,’ said Gregorius and went to the cloakroom to get a towel.

  At the mirror, he dried his glasses and wiped his face. The numbers could still be seen on his forehead. He held a corner of the towel under the warm water and was about to start rubbing them out when he suddenly stopped. That was the moment that decided everything, he thought when he recalled the event hours later. That is, he realized that he really didn’t want to wipe away the trace of his encounter with the enigmatic woman.

  He imagined appearing before the class with a phone number on his face, he, Mundus, the most reliable and predictable person in this building and probably in the whole history of the school, having worked here for more than thirty years, impeccable in his profession, a pillar of the institution, a little dull perhaps, but respected and even feared in the university for his astounding knowledge of ancient languages. He was affectionately teased by his students who put him to the test every year by calling him in the middle of the night and asking about some remote passage in an ancient text, only to receive information that was both dry and exhaustive, including a critical commentary with other possible meanings, all of it presented without a trace of anger at the disturbance. Mundus, a man with an impossibly old-fashioned, even archaic first name that you simply had to shorten, and couldn’t shorten any other way. It was a name that perfectly suited the character of this man, for what he carried around in him as a philologist was in fact no less than a whole world, or rather several whole worlds, since along with those Latin and Greek passages, his head also held the Hebrew that had amazed several Old Testament scholars. If you want to see a true scholar, the Rector would say when he introduced him to a new class, here he is.

  And this scholar, Gregorius thought now, this dry man who seemed to some to consist only of dead words, and who was spitefully called The Papyrus by some colleagues who envied him his popularity – this scholar would shortly enter the classroom with a telephone number written on his forehead by a desperate woman apparently torn between rage and love, a woman in a red leather coat with a soft, southern voice that sounded like an endless hesitant drawl that drew you in merely by hearing it.

  When Gregorius had brought her the towel, the woman had used it to rub her long black hair, which she had then combed back so that it spread over her coat collar like a fan. The janitor entered the hall and, when he saw Gregorius, cast an amazed look at the clock over the exit and then at his watch. Gregorius nodded to him, as he always did. A student hurried past, looked back in surprise and went on his way.

  ‘I teach up there,’ Gregorius said to the woman and pointed up through a window to another part of the building. Seconds passed. He felt his heart beat. ‘Do you want to come along?’

  Later, Gregorius couldn’t believe he had really said that; but he must have done, for he recalled the screech of his rubber soles on the linoleum and the clack of the woman’s boots as they walked together to the classroom.

  ‘What’s your mother tongue?’ he had asked her.

  ‘Português,’ she had answered.

  The o she pronounced surprisingly as a u; the rising, strangely constrained lightness of the é and the soft sh at the end came together in a melody that sounded much longer than it really was, and that he could have listened to all day long.

  ‘Wait,’ he said, took his notebook out of his jacket pocket and ripped out a page: ‘For the number.’

  His hand was on the doorknob when he asked her to say Português once more. She repeated it, and for the first time he saw her smile.

  The chatter broke off abruptly when they entered the classroom. Instead, an amazed silence filled the room. Later, Gregorius remembered the moment precisely: he ha
d enjoyed this surprised silence, the look of incredulity on the faces of his students as they gazed at the bedraggled couple in the doorway. He had also enjoyed his delight at being able to feel in a way he would never have believed possible.

  ‘Perhaps there?’ said Gregorius to the woman and pointed to an empty seat at the back of the room. Then he advanced, greeted the class as usual, and sat down behind the desk. He had no idea how he could explain the woman’s presence and so he simply had them translate the text they were working on. The translations were halting, and he caught some bewildered looks among the students for he – he, Mundus, who recognized every mistake, even in his sleep – was now overlooking dozens of errors.

  He tried not to look at the woman. Yet, every time he did so, he was struck by the damp strands of hair that framed her face, the white clenched hands, the absent, lost look as she gazed out of the window. Once she took out the pen and wrote the phone number on the page from his notebook. Then she leaned back in her seat and hardly seemed to know where she was.

  It was an impossible situation and Gregorius glanced at the clock: ten more minutes until break. Then the woman got up and walked softly to the door. When she reached it, she turned round to him and put a finger to her lips. He nodded and she repeated the gesture with a smile. Then the door closed behind her with a soft click.

  From this moment on, Gregorius no longer heard anything the students said. It was as if he was completely alone and enclosed in a numbing silence. He found himself standing at the window and watching the woman in the red coat until she had disappeared from view. He felt the effort not to run after her reverberate through him. He kept seeing the finger on her lips that could mean so many things: I don’t want to disturb you, and It’s our secret, but also, Let me go now, this can’t go on.

  When the bell rang for the break, he was still standing at the window. Behind him, the students left more quietly than usual. Later he went out too, left the building through the back door and went across the street to the public library where nobody would look for him.

  For the second part of the double class, he was on time as always. By then he had rubbed the numbers off his forehead, after writing them down in his notebook, and the narrow fringe of grey hair had dried. Only the damp patches on his jacket and trousers revealed that something unusual had happened. Now he took the stack of soaked notebooks out of his briefcase.