Night Train to Lisbon Page 12

  ‘I met him the first time in the autumn of 1952, in England, on the train from London to Brighton. I was taking a language course for my firm; they sent me to learn foreign correspondence. It was the Sunday after the first week and I was going to Brighton because I missed the sea. I grew up by the sea, in the north, in Esposende. The compartment door opened and in came this man with shining hair that sat on his head like a helmet, with these unbelievable eyes, bold, soft and melancholy. He was making a long trip with Fátima, his new wife. Money never mattered to him, not then and not later. I learned that he was a doctor who was fascinated mainly by the brain. A diehard materialist, who had originally wanted to be a priest. A man who had an unusual attitude towards a lot of things, not absurd, but paradoxical.

  ‘I was twenty-seven, he was five years older. He was vastly superior to me in everything. In any case, that’s how I felt on that journey. He was the son of an aristocratic Lisbon family, I the son of farmers from the north. We spent the day together, strolled on the beach, ate together. At some point, we started talking about the dictatorship. Devemos resistir. We must resist, I said. I still remember the words. I remember them because they seemed crass spoken to a man who had the chiselled face of a poet and sometimes used words I had never heard of.

  ‘He lowered his eyes, looked out of the window, nodded. I had touched on a subject he was uncomfortable with. It was the wrong subject for a man on his honeymoon. I spoke of other things but he was no longer really involved and left the conversation to Fátima and me. “You’re right,” he said when we parted, “of course you’re right.” And clearly he was talking of the Resistance.

  ‘When I thought of him on the way back to London, it seemed to me that he, or a part of him, wanted to go back to Portugal with me instead of continuing his trip. He had asked me for my address and it had been more than a courtesy towards a travelling acquaintance. In fact, they soon broke off the trip and returned to Lisbon. But that had nothing to do with me. Adriana, his older sister, had had an abortion and almost died from it. He wanted to check on her as he didn’t trust the doctor. A doctor who distrusted doctors. That’s how he was. That was Amadeu.’

  Gregorius pictured Adriana’s bitter, unreconciled look. He was beginning to understand. And what about the younger sister? But that had to wait.

  ‘Thirteen years passed until I saw him again,’ Eça went on. ‘It was in the winter of 1965, the year the secret police murdered Delgado. He had learned my new address from the company and one evening, he stood at my door, pale and unshaved. The hair that had once gleamed like black gold had become dull, and his look spoke of his pain. He told me how he had saved the life of Rui Luís Mendes, a high-ranking officer in the secret police, called the Butcher of Lisbon, and how his previous patients were now avoiding him. He felt ostracized.

  ‘“I want to work for the Resistance,” he said.

  ‘“To make up for it?”

  ‘He looked down, embarrassed.

  ‘“You haven’t done anything wrong,” I said. “You’re a doctor.”

  ‘“I want to do something,” he said. “You understand: do. Tell me what I can do. You know your way around.”

  ‘“How do you know that?”

  ‘“I know it,” he said. “I’ve known it since Brighton.”

  ‘It was dangerous. For us much more than for him. Because for a resistance fighter, he didn’t have – how should I put it – the right make-up, the right character. You have to have patience, be able to wait, you have to have a head like mine, a peasant’s skull, not the soul of a sensitive dreamer. Otherwise you risk too much, slip up, endanger everything. Cold-bloodedness, he did have that, almost too much of it, he tended to be daring. But he lacked the persistence, the stubbornness, the ability to do nothing, even when the opportunity seems to favour action. He sensed that I thought that, he sensed the thoughts of others even before they had begun to think them. It was hard for him; it was, I think, the first time in his life that anyone had ever said to him: You can’t do that, you lack the ability for that. But he knew I was right, he was anything but blind about himself, and he accepted that the tasks would be small and nondescript at first.

  ‘I kept reminding him that, above all, he must resist the temptation to let his patients know he was working for us. He wanted it to atone for a supposed breach of loyalty towards Mendes’s victims. And this plan really only had meaning for him if the people who blamed him for it learned of it. If he could manage to reverse their contemptuous judgement. This wish was paramount in him, I knew that, and it was his and our greatest enemy. He flared up whenever I talked of it, acted as if I underestimated his intelligence, I, nothing but an accountant, and five years younger than he. But he knew that, on this point, I was right. “I hate it when somebody knows as much about me as you do,” he said once. And grinned.

  ‘He had overcome his yearning, his ludicrous yearning for forgiveness for something that hadn’t been wrong, and made no mistakes, or none that had any consequences.

  ‘Mendes secretly protected him, his lifesaver. In Amadeu’s office, messages were passed, envelopes with money changed hands. There was never a search, as there usually was. Amadeu was furious about that, that’s how he was, the godless priest. He wanted to be taken seriously. Being spared wounded his pride, which was rather like the pride of a martyr.

  ‘For a while, that conjured up a new danger: the danger that he might want to provoke Mendes with daredevil acts so that he would withdraw his protection. I spoke to him about it. Our friendship hung on a silk thread. This time he didn’t admit that I was right. But he became more controlled, more cautious.

  ‘Shortly after, he brilliantly carried out two delicate operations that only someone like him could have undertaken, someone who knew the railway network inside out. Amadeu did, he was crazy about trains, rails and points, knew every type of locomotive and above all he knew every railway station in Portugal, even the smallest. He knew whether it had a signal box or not, for that was one of his obsessions: that you could determine the direction of the train by twisting a lever. This simple mechanical operation fascinated him and ultimately it was his knowledge of these things, his crazy railway patriotism that saved the lives of our people. The comrades who weren’t happy that I accepted him, because they thought his refined manner could be dangerous for us, changed their minds.

  ‘Mendes must have been eternally grateful to him. In prison, I wasn’t allowed any visits, not even Mariana, and certainly not comrades who were suspected of belonging to the Resistance. With one exception: Amadeu. He was permitted to come twice a month and he could choose the day and even the hour. It violated all the rules.

  ‘And he came. He always came and stayed longer than agreed; the guards were afraid of his furious look when they mentioned the time. He brought me medicines, some to help the pain and some to help me sleep. They let him bring them in but took them away from me afterwards. I never told him that, he would have tried to tear down the walls. Tears flowed down his cheeks when he saw what they had done to me. Tears that were naturally tears of sympathy, but even more tears of impotent rage. It wouldn’t have taken much for him to become violent towards the guards; his damp face was red with rage.’

  Gregorius looked at Eça and imagined his grey, piercing eyes watching the white-hot iron that threatened to blind him approaching in a hissing glow. He felt the unbelievable strength of this man who could be defeated only by death.

  ‘Amadeu brought me the Bible, the New Testament. Portuguese and Greek. That and the Greek grammar he threw in were the only books they let through in the two years.

  ‘“You don’t believe a word of it,” I said to him when they came to take me back to the cell.

  ‘He smiled. “It’s a beautiful text,” he said. “An amazingly beautiful language. And pay attention to the metaphors.”

  ‘I was amazed. I had never really read the Bible, knew only quotations, like everybody does. I was amazed at the strange blend of the relevant and the biz
arre. Sometimes we talked about it. A religion whose centre is a scene of execution, I find disgusting, he once said. Just imagine if there had been a gallows, a guillotine or a garrotte. Just imagine how our religious symbolism would look then. I had never seen it in those terms. I was even a little frightened because the sentences had a special significance between those walls.

  ‘That’s how he was, the godless priest: he thought things through to the end. He always thought them through to the end, no matter how black the consequences were. Sometimes he could be brutal, sometimes self-lacerating. Maybe that was why, except for me and Jorge, he had no friends; you had to be able to put up with certain things. He was unhappy that Mélodie had broken off contact with him, he loved his little sister. I saw her only once; she looked light and cheerful, a girl who didn’t seem to touch the ground, I could imagine that she wouldn’t be able to handle her brother’s melancholy side; he could be like a boiling volcano before an eruption.’

  João Eça shut his eyes. Exhaustion was written on his face. It had been a trip back in time and he may not have talked so much in years. Gregorius would like to have asked much more about the little sister with the wonderful name, about Jorge and Fátima, and also whether Eça had started learning Greek then. He had listened breathlessly, forgetting his burning throat. Now it burned again and his tongue was thick. In the middle of his story, Eça had offered him a cigarette. He had the feeling he couldn’t refuse it, it would have been as if he had ripped the invisible thread spun between them. He couldn’t drink the tea from Eça’s cup and then refuse his tobacco, who knows why, and so he put the first cigarette of his life between his lips. He watched the trembling flame in Eça’s hand anxiously and then puffed timorously and sparingly so as, not to cough. He cursed his irrationality and at the same time he felt with amazement that he wouldn’t want to have missed the sensation of the hot smoke poisoning his burnt mouth.

  A shrill signal startled Gregorius.

  ‘Dinner,’ said Eça.

  Gregorius looked at his watch: five thirty. Eça saw his amazement and grinned scornfully.

  ‘Much too early. Like in the slammer. It’s not for the convenience of the inmates, it’s for the sake of the staff.’

  Might he visit him again? asked Gregorius. Eça looked over at the chess table. Then he nodded mutely. It was as if an armour of wordlessness had closed in around him. When he noticed that Gregorius wanted to give him his hand, he vigorously buried both hands in the sweater pockets and looked at the floor.

  On the crossing back to Lisbon Gregorius noticed little. He walked through the Rua Augusta, through the chessboard of the Baixa, to Rossio, deep in thought. The longest day of his life seemed to be coming to an end. Later, in bed in the hotel room, he remembered how he had leaned his forehead against the fog-damp window of the religious bookshop that morning and waited for the urgent desire to go to the airport to subside. Then he had met Adriana, drunk Mariana Eça’s red-gold tea, and with her uncle had smoked his first cigarette with a burnt mouth. Had all that really happened in one single day? He looked at the picture of Amadeu de Prado. Everything new he had learned about him today changed his features. He began to live, the godless priest.

  15

  ‘Voilà. Ça va aller? It’s not exactly comfortable, but …’ said Agostinha, the trainee at Diario de Noticias, Portugal’s traditional newspaper, somewhat embarrassed.

  Yes, said Gregorius, that would do, and sat down in the gloomy alcove with the microfilm reader. Agostinha, who had been introduced to him by an impatient editor as a student of history and French, seemed only too glad to help him. He had the impression that, upstairs, where the phone was constantly ringing and the computer screens were flickering, she was tolerated more than needed.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ she asked now. ‘I mean, it’s none of my business …’

  ‘For the death of a judge,’ said Gregorius. ‘For the suicide of a famous judge in 1954, on June 9. He may have killed himself because he had Bechterev’s disease and could no longer bear the pain, but maybe also from a sense of guilt because, during the dictatorship, he kept on administering the law and did not refuse to comply with the unjust regime. He was sixty-four when took his life. So, he didn’t have long to go before retirement. Something must have happened that made it impossible for him to wait. Something to do with his illness or something at court. That’s what I’d like to find out.’

  ‘And … and why do you want to find this out? Pardon …’ Gregorius took out Prado’s book and let her read:

  PORQUÊ, PAI? WHY, FATHER? ‘Don’t take yourself so seriously,’ you used to say when somebody complained. You sat in your chair, where nobody could sit, the cane between your thin legs, the gouty deformed hands on the silver knob, the head – as always – stretched down and forward. (My God, if only I could see you once standing tall, head up, befitting your pride! Only one single time! But the thousandfold view of the twisted back, it extinguished every other memory, and not only that, it also paralysed the imagination.) The many pains you had to endure in your life lent authority to your repeated admonition. No one dared contradict. Not only externally; internally, too, contradiction was forbidden. We children did parody your words, far away from you there was scorn and laughter, and even Mamã, when she scolded us about it, sometimes gave herself away with the trace of a smile we greedily pounced on. But the liberation was only make-believe, like the helpless blasphemy of the pious.

  Your words held. They held until that morning when I went off to school apprehensively, with wind-whipped rain in my face. Why wasn’t my apprehension about the gloomy schoolrooms and the joyless cramming to be taken seriously? Why shouldn’t I take it seriously that Maria João treated me like air, when I could think of hardly anything else? Why were your pains and the judiciousness they had bestowed on you the measure of all things? ‘Considered from the standpoint of eternity,’ you sometimes added, ‘that does lose significance.’ Full of rage and jealousy of Maria João’s new friend, I left school, trudged home and sat down across from you after dinner. ‘I want to go to another school,’ I said in a voice that sounded more solid than it felt internally. ‘This one is unbearable.’ ‘You take yourself too seriously,’ you said and rubbed the silver knob of the cane. ‘What, if not myself, should I take seriously?’ I asked. ‘And the standpoint of eternity – there is none.’

  The room filled with a silence that threatened to explode. Such a thing had never happened. It was unheard of and coming from your favourite child made it even worse. Everyone expected an outburst with your voice cracking, as usual. Nothing happened. You put both hands on the knob of the cane. An expression appeared on Mamã’s face that I had never seen. It made it clear – I later thought – why she had married you. You got up without a word, only a slight groan of pain was to be heard. You didn’t appear at supper. Ever since this family had existed, that had never happened. When I sat down to dinner the next day, you looked at me calmly and a little sadly. ‘What other school are you thinking of?’ you asked. During recess, Maria João had asked me if I wanted an orange. ‘It’s over,’ I said.

  How can you tell whether to take a feeling seriously or treat it as a carefree mood? Why, Papá, didn’t you talk to me before you did it? So that I would at least know why you did it?

  ‘I understand,’ said Agostinha, and then went on searching among the microfiches for a record of the death of Judge Prado.

  ‘Nineteen fifty-four, that was the strictest year of censorship,’ she said. ‘I know about that, I wrote my senior essay on press censorship. What the Diaro prints doesn’t have to be true. Especially if it was a political suicide.’

  The first thing they found was the obituary that appeared on June 11. The wording was extremely terse, reflecting the Portuguese attitude to suicide at the time, Faleceu, Gregorius knew the word from the cemetery. Amor, recordação, terse ritual jargon. Underneath, the names of the closest relatives: Maria Piedade Reis de Prado; Amadeu; Adriana; Rita. The address. T
he name of the church where the mass would be held. That was all. Rita, thought Gregorius – was that the Mélodie João Eça had spoken of?

  Now they looked for an article. In the first week after June 9, there was nothing. ‘No, no, go on,’ said Agostinha when Gregorius wanted to give up. The article appeared on June 20, far back in the local section:

  ‘Yesterday, the Minister of Justice announced that Alexandre Horácio de Almeida Prado, who served as an outstanding judge on the Supreme Court for many years, died last week as the result of a long illness.’

  Next to it was a picture of the judge, a surprisingly large one considering the brevity of the article. A severe face with a pince-nez on a chain, a goatee and a moustache, a high forehead, as high as his son’s, a greying but still full head of hair, white stand-up collar with folded corners, black tiepin, a very white hand supporting his chin; everything else was lost in the dark background. A cleverly taken photo, no trace of the torment of the subject’s crooked back, or of the gout in his hands, the figure emerging silent and ghostly from the darkness, white and imperious, tolerating neither objection nor contradiction. A judge who couldn’t have been anything but a judge. A man of iron rigidity and stony consistency, even towards himself, A man who would judge himself if he were lacking. A father whose smile usually failed. A man who had had something in common with António de Oliveira Salazar: not his cruelty, not his fanaticism, not his ambition and his desire for power, but the rigidity, even mercilessness towards himself. Was that why he had served him for so long, the man in black with the strained face under the derby hat? And ultimately, could he not forgive himself for promoting the cruelty, a cruelty that could be seen in the shaking hands of João Eça, hands that had once played Schubert?