Night Train to Lisbon Page 13

  Died as the result of a long illness. Gregorius felt himself growing hot with rage.

  ‘That’s nothing,’ said Agostinha, ‘that’s nothing compared with some of the distortions I’ve seen. The silent lying.’

  On the way out, Gregorius asked her about the street mentioned in the obituary. He was glad that she was apparently needed now in the editorial office.

  ‘That you make the history of this family so much … so much your own … is …’ she said after they had shaken hands.

  ‘Strange, you think? Yes, it is strange. Very strange. For me, too.’

  16

  It wasn’t a palace, but a house for wealthy people who could spread out as much as they liked, one room more or less didn’t matter; there would be two or even three bathrooms. Here the hunched judge had lived, he had walked through this house on a cane with a silver knob, struggling grimly against the continual pain, accompanied by the conviction that you shouldn’t take yourself so seriously. Did he have his study in the square tower, whose arched windows were separated from one another with small pillars? There were so many balconies set at different angles, with finely carved wrought-iron bars, that Gregorius imagined each of the five family members must have had one if not two to himself. He thought of the narrow, badly soundproofed rooms in which his own family had lived, the museum guard and the cleaning woman with their nearsighted son, who sat in his room at a simple wooden table and chanted complicated Greek verb forms against the drone of the neighbours’ radio. The tiny balcony, too narrow for a parasol, had been white-hot in the summer and he had hardly ever ventured on to it, repelled by the kitchen odours that wafted around it. The judge’s house, on the other hand, was like a paradise of vastness, shadow and silence. Everywhere, high, spreading conifers with knotty trunks and interwoven branches that came together in small, shadowy roofs that sometimes looked like pagodas.

  Cedars. Gregorius started. Cedars. Cedros vermelhos. Were they really cedars? The cedars soaked in red for Adriana? The trees whose imaginary colour took on such meaning that they came to mind when she sought a name for the invented publisher? Gregorius stopped some passers-by and asked if they were cedars. Their amazement at the question of a bizarre foreigner was evident from the shrugs and raised eyebrows. Yes, said a young woman at last, they were cedars, especially big and beautiful ones. Now he imagined himself living in the house looking out at the lush dark greenery around it. What could have happened? What could have changed the green into red? Blood?

  Behind the tower window appeared a female figure in bright clothes, her hair up; light, almost hovering, she walked here and there, busy without haste. Now she took a burning cigarette from somewhere, and smoke rose to the high ceiling. She evaded a sunbeam that fell into the room through the cedars and apparently blinded her, then she suddenly vanished. A girl who didn’t seem to touch the ground, João Eça had called Mélodie, whose real name must have been Rita. His little sister. Could there have been such a big difference in age that today she could still move as nimbly and smoothly as the woman in the tower?

  Gregorius walked on and entered a coffee shop in the next street. Along with the coffee, he bought a packet of cigarettes, the same brand he had smoked at Eça’s yesterday. As he puffed he pictured the students in Kirchenfeld standing in front of the bakery a few streets away, smoking and drinking coffee out of paper cups. When had Kägi introduced the ban on smoking in the staffroom? Now he tried to inhale but a scorching cough took his breath away. He put the new glasses on the counter, coughed and rubbed the tears from his eyes. The woman behind the counter, a chain-smoking matron, grinned. ‘É melhor não começar,’ Better not start, she said, and Gregorius was proud that he understood her, even if the understanding came with hesitation. He didn’t know what to do with the cigarette and finally put it out in the glass of water next to the coffee cup. The woman cleared away the glass with a lenient shake of her head. He was a bloody beginner, what could you do?

  Slowly he returned to the gate of the cedar house, once again uncertain whether to ring the doorbell. Just then the front door opened and the woman from the tower room came out with an impatient German shepherd dog on a leash. Now she was wearing blue jeans and running shoes; only the light blouse seemed the same. She walked the few steps to the gate on tiptoe, pulled by the dog. A girl who didn’t seem to touch the ground. Despite all the grey in the ash-blonde hair, she still looked like a girl even now.

  ‘Bom dia,’ she said, raising her eyebrows inquiringly and looked at him with clear eyes.

  ‘I …’ Gregorius began uncertainly in French, feeling the unpleasant aftertaste of the cigarette, ‘a long time ago, a judge lived here, a famous judge, and I’d like …’

  ‘That was my father,’ said the woman and blew a loose strand of hair off her face. She had a light voice that suited the watery grey of her eyes and she spoke French without an accent. Rita was good as a name, but Mélodie was simply perfect. ‘Why are you interested in him?’ she asked.

  ‘Because he was the father of this man,’ and now Gregorius showed her Prado’s book.

  The dog tugged at the leash.

  ‘Pan, sit,’ said Mélodie. ‘Pan.’

  The dog sat down. She shoved the loop of the leash in the crook of her arm and opened the book. ‘Cedros ver …’ she read, and from one syllable to the next, her voice grew softer until, finally, it died out completely. She leafed through the book and looked at her brother’s portrait. Her light face, covered with tiny freckles, had become darker and swallowing seemed difficult for her. She looked at the picture, intently, like a statute beyond space and time, and once she ran the tip of her tongue over her dry lips. Now she leafed through some more pages, read two sentences, went back to the picture, then to the title page.

  ‘Nineteen seventy-five,’ she said. ‘He had already been dead two years. I didn’t know anything about the book. Where did you get it?’

  As Gregorius told her, she ran her hand softly over the grey binding and the movement reminded him of the student in the Spanish bookshop in Bern. She didn’t seem to be listening any more and he broke off.

  ‘Adriana,’ she said now. ‘Adriana. And not a single word. É próprio dela,’ That’s typical of her. At first, there was only amazement in the words; then he detected bitterness and the melodious name no longer suited her. She gazed into the distance, past the citadel, over the valley of the Baixa, to the hill of Bairro Alto. As if she wanted to strike the sister up there in the blue house with her angry look.

  They stood mutely facing each other. Pan panted. Gregorius felt like an interloper, a voyeur.

  ‘Come, let’s have some coffee,’ she said, and it sounded as if she leapt light-footed over her resentment. ‘I want to look at the book. Pan, you’re out of luck,’ and with these words, she dragged the dog back into the house.

  It was a house that breathed life, a house with toys on the steps, that smelled of coffee, cigarette smoke and perfume, with Portuguese newspapers and French magazines lying around, with open CD cases and a cat licking the butter on the breakfast table. Mélodie shooed the cat away and poured them coffee. The blood that had just now flooded her face had subsided and only a few red spots hinted at her recent excitement. She reached for her glasses and began to read pieces of what her brother had written. Now and then, she bit her lips. Once, without taking her eyes off the book, she took off her jacket and blindly fished a cigarette out of the packet in its pocket. Gregorius noticed that she was breathing heavily.

  ‘That part about Maria João and changing schools – that must have been before I was born. We were sixteen years apart in age. But Papá – he was like it says here, just like that. He was forty-six when I was born. I was an accident, conceived in the Amazon, on one of the few trips Mamá could tempt him to go on. I can’t even imagine Papá on the Amazon. When I was fourteen, we celebrated his sixtieth birthday; it seems to me that I only knew him as an old man, a stooped, strict old man.’

  Mélodie paused, lit anot
her cigarette, and looked straight ahead. Gregorius hoped she would talk about the judge’s death. But her thoughts were moving in another direction for now her face lit up.

  ‘Maria João. So he knew her even as a kid. I didn’t know that. An orange. Apparently he loved her even then. Never stopped. The great, untouched love of his life. It wouldn’t surprise me if he never even kissed her. But nobody, no woman, measured up to her. She got married, had children. None of it mattered. When he had problems, real cares, he went to her. In a certain sense, she, only she, knew who he was. He knew how to create intimacy with shared secrets, he was a master at that art, a virtuoso. And we knew: if there was anybody who knew all his secrets, it was Maria João. Fátima suffered from it, and Adriana hated her.’

  Was she still alive? asked Gregorius. Recently she had lived outside in the Campo de Ourique, near the cemetery, said Mélodie, but it had been many years since she had encountered her there at his grave, a friendly yet cool meeting.

  ‘She, a peasant girl, always kept her distance from us, the nobles. That Amadeu was also one of us – she acted as if she didn’t know that. Or as if it was something accidental, external, that had nothing to do with him.’

  What was her last name? Mélodie didn’t know. ‘She was simply Maria João to us.’

  They went out of the tower room and into the main part of the house, where there was a loom.

  ‘I’ve done a thousand things,’ she said, laughing at Gregorius’s curious look. ‘I was always the flighty one, the unpredictable one, so Papá didn’t know what to do with me.’

  For a moment, the light voice darkened like a fleeting cloud blotting out the sun, then the moment passed and she pointed to the photographs on the wall showing her in a variety of surroundings.

  ‘As a waitress in a bar; playing hooky, as a garage attendant; and here, you have to look at this: my orchestra.’

  It was a street orchestra with eight girls, all playing violins and all wearing Mao caps, the peaks turned to the side.

  ‘Do you recognize me? I’ve turned my peak to the left, all the others to the right. That means I was the leader. We made money, pretty good money. We played at weddings and parties; we were a hot item.’

  Abruptly she turned away, went to the window and looked out.

  ‘Papá didn’t like it, my drifting. Shortly before his death – I was on the road with the moças de balão, the balloon girls, as we were called – I suddenly saw Papá’s official car at the kerb. In the driving seat was Felipe, the chauffeur who picked him up every morning at ten to six and took him to the courthouse; he was always the first one there. Papá sat in the back as always and now he looked at us. Tears shot into my eyes and I made one mistake after another in playing. The car door opened and Papá clambered out, laboriously, his face twisted with pain. He stopped the traffic with his cane – even now he radiated the authority of a judge – and came over to us. For a while he stood among the spectators at the back, then he made his way to the open violin cases in which we collected the money. Without looking at me, he tossed in a handful of coins. The tears ran down my face and they had to finish the rest of the piece without me. As the car drove off, Papá waved with his gouty hand and I waved back, but then I sat down on the steps of a house and cried my eyes out. I don’t know if it was more out of joy that he had come or out of sadness that he had not come before.

  Gregorius let his gaze wander over the photos. Mélodie had been a girl who sat on everyone’s lap and made everyone laugh and when she wept, it was over as quickly as a short downpour on a sunny day. She played truant from school, but got away with it because she charmed the teachers with her bewitching impudence. She went on to tell me how she had learned French overnight, as it were, and called herself after a French actress named Élodie. The others turned it into Mélodie, a word invented for her because her presence was as beautiful and fleeting as a melody. Everybody fell in love but nobody could hold on to her.

  ‘I loved Amadeu, or let’s say I would have liked to love him, but it was hard, the way you love a monument. And he was a monument, even when I was little. Everybody looked up to him, even Papá, but most of all Adriana, who took him away from me with her jealousy. He was nice to me, the way you’re nice to your kid sister. But I would have liked to be taken seriously by him, not just patted like a doll. Not until I was twenty-five and about to get married did I get a letter from him, a letter from England.’

  She opened a desk and took out a fat envelope. The yellowed stationery was covered to the margins with calligraphic letters in dark black ink. Mélodie cast her eye down it and then began to translate what Amadeu had written to her from Oxford, a few months after his wife’s death.

  Dear Mélodie,

  It was a mistake to make this trip. I thought it would help me if once again I saw the things Fátima and I had seen together. But it hurts me and I’m coming back earlier than planned. I miss you and so I’m sending you what I wrote last night. Perhaps in this way, I can come closer to you with my thoughts.

  OXFORD: JUST TALKING. Why does the nocturnal silence among the cloistered buildings seem so lifeless to me, so queasy and desolate, so completely vapid and without charm? So completely different from the Rua Augusta, which flashes with life even at three or four in the morning when no human souls are out and about? How can it be, where the bright unearthly shining stone encloses buildings with sacred names, cells of scholarship, exquisite libraries, rooms of dusty velvet silence, where perfectly shaped sentences are spoken, weighed pensively, refuted, and defended? How can that be?

  ‘Come on,’ said the red-haired Irishman to me as I stood before the poster announcing a lecture titled ‘Lying to Liars’, ‘let’s listen to this; might be fun.’ I thought of Father Bartolomeu, who had defended Augustine: to repay lies with lies would be the same as repaying robbery with robbery, sacrilege with sacrilege, adultery with adultery. And that in view of what happened then in Spain and in Germany! We had quarrelled as so often and he didn’t lose his gentleness. He never lost it, this gentleness, not one single time, and when I sat down in the lecture hall next to the Irishman, all of a sudden I missed him terribly and felt homesick.

  It was unbelievable. The lecturer, a pointy nosed, pointy prissy spinster, sketched in a creaky voice a casuistic of lying that couldn’t have been more nitpicking or farther from reality. A woman who must never have lived in the web of lies of a dictatorship where lying well can be a question of life or death. Can God create a stone He couldn’t lift? If not, then He isn’t almighty; if yes, then He isn’t either, for now there is a stone He cannot lift. That was the kind of scholasticism that poured forth into the room from a woman made of parchment, with an artificial bird’s-nest of grey hair on her head.

  But that wasn’t what was really unbelievable. What was really incomprehensible was the discussion, as it was called. Cast into and enclosed in the grey lead frame of polite empty British phrases, the people spoke perfectly past one another. Constantly they said they understood each other, answered each other. But it wasn’t so. No one, not a single one of the discussants, showed the slightest indication of a change of mind in view of the reasons presented. And suddenly, with a fear I felt even in my body, I realized: that’s how it always is. Saying something to another: how can we expect it to affect anything? The current of thoughts, images and feelings that flows through us on every side, has such force, this torrential current, that it would be a miracle if it didn’t simply sweep away and consign to oblivion all words anyone else says to us, if they didn’t by accident, sheer accident, suit our own words. Is it different with me? I thought. Did I really listen to anybody else? Let him into me with his words so that my internal current would be diverted?

  ‘How did you like it?’ asked the Irishman as we walked along Broad Street. I didn’t say everything, I said only that I had found it eerie how everybody had been talking only to themselves. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘well.’ And after a while: ‘It’s just talking, you know; just talking. Peopl
e like to talk. Basically, that’s it. Talking.’ ‘No meeting of minds?’ I asked. ‘What?’ he shouted and howled with laughter. ‘What!’ And then he shot the ball he had been carrying the whole time on to the pavement. I would like to have been the Irishman, an Irishman who dared to appear in All Souls College for the evening lecture with a bright red football. What wouldn’t I have given to be Irishman!

  I think I know now why the nocturnal silence in this illustrious place is such a bad silence. The words, all of them destined to oblivion, have died out. That wouldn’t matter, they die out in the Baixa too. But there, no one pretends that it’s more than talk, people talk and enjoy talking, as they enjoy licking ice cream, so the tongue can take a break from words. While here, everyone always acts as if it were different. As if it were enormously important, what they said. But they, too, have to sleep in their self-importance, and then a silence remains that smells rotten because cadavers of pomposity are lying around everywhere and stinking without words.

  ‘He hated them, the pompous asses, os presunçosos, whom he also called os enchouriçados, the windbags,’ said Mélodie and put the letter back in the envelope. ‘He hated them everywhere: in politics, medicine, journalism. And he was merciless in his condemnation. I liked his condemnation because it was incorruptible, relentless, even against himself. I didn’t like it when it became murderous, destructive. Then I got out of the way of my monumental brother.’

  Next to Mélodie’s head, a photo hung on the wall that showed them dancing together, she and Amadeu. His movement wasn’t really stiff, thought Gregorius; and yet you could see that he was a stranger to it. Later, when he thought about it, he came up with the right word: dancing was somehow inappropriate for Amadeu.

  ‘The Irishman with the red ball in the sacred college,’ said Mélodie into the silence. ‘It moved me very much at that time, this passage in the letter. It seemed to me that it expressed a longing he never spoke of otherwise: to be able to be a boy who played with a ball just once. He learned to read at the age of four and from then on he read everything he could; he was bored to death at the Liceu where he skipped a grade twice. At twenty, he really knew everything and sometimes asked himself what else there was to learn. And yet he never knew how to play ball.’