Night Train to Lisbon Read online

  The dog barked and then some children, who must have been her grandchildren, burst in. Mélodie gave Gregorius her hand. She knew he had wanted to learn much more, about cedros vermelhos for instance, and about the death of the judge. Her look proved that she was aware of it. It also proved that she wouldn’t be willing to say any more today, even if the children hadn’t arrived.

  Gregorius sat down on a bench at the Castelo and thought about the letter Amadeu had sent from Oxford to his little sister. He had to find Father Bartolomeu, the gentle teacher. Prado had had an ear for the various kinds of silence, an ear granted only to insomniacs. And he had said of the evening’s lecturer that she was made of parchment. Only now was Gregorius aware that he winced at that comment and, for the first time, had recoiled internally from the godless priest with the murderous judgement. Mundus, the Papyrus. Parchment and papyrus.

  Gregorius went down the hill towards the hotel. In a shop he bought a chess set. For the rest of the day, until late at night, he tried to win against Alekhine by not accepting the sacrifice of the two rooks, unlike Bogolyubov. He missed Doxiades and put on his old pair of glasses.

  17

  They aren’t texts, Gregorius. What people say aren’t texts. They simply talk. It had been a long time since Doxiades had said that to him. What people said was often so unconnected and contradictory, he had complained to him, that it passed straight from their minds. The Greek found it touching. If, like him, you had been a taxi driver in Greece, and in Thessaloniki to boot, then you knew – and knew it as certainly as few other things – that you couldn’t tie people down to what they said. Often, they talked only for the sake of talking. And not only in the taxi. To be able to take them at their word was something only a philologist could do, particularly a philologist of ancient languages, dealing all day with immutable words.

  If you couldn’t take people at their word, what else should be done with their words? Gregorius had asked. Doxiades had laughed: ‘Use them as a chance to talk yourself! So that it keeps going on, talking.’ And now the Irishman in Prado’s letter to his little sister had said something that sounded quite similar and he hadn’t said it about fares in Greek taxis, but about professors at All Souls’ College in Oxford. He had said it to a man who was so disgusted by worn-out words that he wanted to be able to re-order the Portuguese language.

  Outside it was pouring with rain, and had been for two days now. It was as if a magic curtain shielded Gregorius from the outside world. He wasn’t in Bern and he was in Bern; he was in Lisbon and he wasn’t in Lisbon. He played chess all day long and forgot positions and moves, something that had never happened to him before. Sometimes he caught himself holding a piece in his hand and not knowing where it came from. Downstairs, at meals, the waiter had to keep asking him what he wanted, and once he ordered dessert before soup.

  On the second day, he had called his neighbour in Bern and asked her to empty the postbox; the key was under the doormat. Should she forward the mail? Yes, he said, and then he called back and said no. Leafing through the notebook, he came upon the phone number the Portuguese woman had written on his forehead. Português. He picked up the phone and dialled. When it rang, he hung up.

  The Koiné, the Greek of the New Testament, bored him, it was too simple; but looking at the other, the Portuguese section in Coutinho’s edition, had a certain appeal. He called various bookshops and asked for Aeschylus and Horace, or even Herodotus and Tacitus. They barely understood him and when he was finally successful, he couldn’t pick up the books because it was raining so hard.

  In the business directory, he looked for language schools where he could learn Portuguese. He called Mariana Eça and wanted to tell her about his visit to João, but she was in a hurry and not paying attention. Silveira was in Biarritz. Time stood still and his world stood still because his will faltered as it had never done before.

  Sometimes he stood gazing vacantly out of the hotel window, reviewing in his mind what the others – Coutinho, Adriana, João Eça, Mélodie – had said about Prado. It was a bit as if the outlines of a landscape emerged out of the fog, still veiled, but recognizable, as in a Chinese pen-and-ink drawing. Only once in these days did he leaf through Prado’s notes and then he got stuck on this passage:

  AS SOMBRAS DA ALMA. THE SHADOWS OF THE SOUL. The stories others tell about you and the stories you tell about yourself: which come closer to the truth? Is it so clear that they are your own? Is one an authority on oneself? But that really isn’t the question that concerns me. The real question is: in such stories, is there really a difference between true and false? In stories about the outside, surely. But when we set out to understand someone on the inside? Is that a trip that ever comes to an end? Is the soul a place of facts? Or are the alleged facts only the deceptive shadows of our stories?

  On Thursday morning, under a clear blue sky, Gregorius went to the newspaper offices and asked Agostinha, the trainee, to find out if there had been a Liceu in the thirties where you could learn ancient languages and where some of the teachers were priests. She searched eagerly and when she found it, she showed him the place on the city map. She also found the office of the appropriate church, called and enquired about a Father Bartolomeu, who had taught in the Liceu, it must have been about 1935. That could only have been Father Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão, she was told. He was way over ninety by now and seldom received visitors; what was it about? Amadeu Inácio de Almeida Prado? They would ask the priest and call back. The call came a few minutes later. The priest was willing to talk to someone who was interested in Prado after all this time. He looked forward to the visit in the late afternoon.

  Gregorius went in search of the former Liceu, where the student Prado had quarrelled with Father Bartolomeu about Augustine’s intransigent ban on lying without the priest ever losing his gentleness. It was to the east of the city and was surrounded by high, old trees. The building with its pale yellow walls could almost have been taken for a former grand hotel of the nineteenth century, were it not for the absence of balconies and the narrow bell tower. The building was thoroughly dilapidated. The plaster was peeling, the windowpanes were blind or smashed, tiles were missing from the roof, the gutters were rusted and one corner was broken off.

  Gregorius sat down on the entrance steps, which had been mossy even on Prado’s nostalgic visits. That must have been in the late sixties. Here he had sat and asked himself how it would have been if, thirty years before, at this fork in the road, he had taken the other turning. If he had resisted his father’s touching but imperious wish and not gone to medical school.

  Gregorius took out his notes and leafed through them …

  the dreamlike, bombastic wish to stand once again at that point in my life and be able to take a completely different direction than the one that has made me who I am now … To sit once more on the warm moss and hold the cap – it’s the absurd wish to go back behind myself in time and take myself – the one marked by events – along on this journey.

  Over there was the decomposing fence around the schoolyard where the boy at the bottom of the class had flung his cap in the pond with the waterlilies after finals, more than sixty-seven years ago. The pond had long since dried up; only a hollow, carpeted with ivy, remained.

  The building behind the trees must have been the girls’ school, from where Maria João had appeared, the girl with tanned knees and the fragrance of soap in her light dress, the girl who had become the great untouched love in Amadeu’s life, the woman who, in Mélodie’s estimation, was the only one who knew who he had really been; a woman of such significance that Adriana had hated her, even though he may not have given her a single kiss.

  Gregorius closed his eyes. He imagined himself back in Kirchenfield, at the corner of the building from where he had looked back, unseen, at the Gymnasium after he had run away in the middle of class. Once more he had the feeling that had hit him with unexpected force ten days before and had showed him how much he loved this building and all that it
stood for, and how much he would miss it. It was the same feeling and yet it was different because it was no longer one and the same. It hurt him to feel that it was no longer what it had once been. He stood up, let his eyes roam over the peeling, fading yellow of the façade, and now all of a sudden it didn’t hurt any more. The pain gave way to a hovering feeling of curiosity and he pushed open the door, which was now ajar and whose rusty hinges screeched as in a horror movie.

  An odour of damp and mould struck him as he entered. After a few steps, he almost slipped, for the uneven stone floor was covered with a film of damp dust and rotten moss. Slowly, his hand on the banister, he went up the worn stairs. The panels of the swing door that opened to the upper floor were stuck together with so many spiders’ webs that there was a dull sound of ripping when he pushed them open. He started, as frightened bats fluttered through the hall. Then there was a silence he had never before experienced: in it, you could hear the years.

  The door to the Rector’s office was easy to recognize; it was trimmed with fine wood-carvings. This door was also stuck and gave way only after several shoves. He entered a room where there seemed to be only one thing: an enormous black desk on curved and carved legs. Everything else – the empty dusty bookshelves, the bare tea table on the bare rotting floorboards, the Spartan chair – appeared insignificant beside it. Gregorius wiped off the seat of the chair and sat down behind the desk. The Rector at that time was named Senhor Cortês, the man with the measured pace and the strict expression.

  Gregorius had stirred up dust; the fine particles danced in a cone of sunlight that had entered the room. The deep silence made him feel like an interloper and for a long moment he forgot to breathe. Then curiosity triumphed and he pulled open the drawers of the desk, one after another. A piece of rope, a mouldy shaving from a sharpened pencil, a crinkled stamp from 1969, cellar smells. And then, in the bottom drawer, a Hebrew Bible, thick and heavy, bound in grey linen, faded, worn, with blisters of dampness on the cover; Biblia Hebraica in gold letters that had taken on black shadows.

  Gregorius hesitated. The Liceu, as Agostinha had found out, had not been a religious school. The Marquês de Pombal had driven the Jesuits out of Portugal in the mid-eighteenth century, and something similar had happened again in the early twentieth century. In the late 1940s, orders like the Maristas had founded a few Colégios, but that had been after Prado finished school. Until then, there had only been public Liceus, which occasionally employed priests as teachers of ancient languages. So why this Bible? And why in a drawer of the Rector’s desk? A simple mistake, a meaningless accident? An invisible silent protest against those who had closed the schools? A subversive forgetting, directed against the dictatorship and unnoticed by its stooges?

  Gregorius read. Carefully he turned the crinkly pages of thick paper that felt dank and mouldy. The cone of sunlight shifted. He buttoned up his coat, pulled up the collar and shoved his hands in the sleeves. After a while, he stuck one of the cigarettes he had bought on Monday between his lips. Now and then he had to cough. Outside, beyond the half-open door, something swished by that must have been a rat.

  He read in the Book of Job and he read with a pounding heart. Eliphaz of Teman, Bildad of Shuah and Zofar of Na’ama. Isfahan. What would the name of the family have been where he would have taught? In the Francke bookshop in those days, there had been a book of photographs of Isfahan, of the mosques, the squares, the mountains all around veiled by sandstorms. He couldn’t afford to buy it and had therefore gone to Francke every day to leaf through it. After his dream of white-hot sand that would blind him had forced him to withdraw his job application, he hadn’t gone back to Francke for months. When he finally did go back, the book was no longer there.

  The Hebrew letters had blurred before Gregorius’s eyes. He rubbed his wet face, cleaned the glasses and read on. Something of Isfahan, the city of blinding, had remained in his life: from the start he had read the Bible as poetry, linguistic music played faintly from the dark blue and gold of the mosques. I have the feeling that you don’t take the text seriously, Ruth Gautschi had said and David Lehmann had nodded. Had that really been only last month?

  Can there be anything more serious than poetic seriousness? he had asked the two of them. Ruth had looked down. She liked him. Not like Florence back then, in the front row; she would never have wanted to take off his glasses. But she liked him and now she was torn between this affection and the disappointment, perhaps even the horror, that he desecrated God’s word by reading it as a long poem and hearing it as a series of oriental sonatas.

  The sun had disappeared from Senhor Cortês’s room and Gregorius was freezing. He had been living in the past for hours, and had failed to notice the desolation of the room. Now he stood up and walked stiffly out to the corridor and up the stairs to the classrooms.

  The rooms were full of dust and silence. If they were distinct from each other, it was in the degree of dilapidation. In one there was an enormous damp patch on the ceiling; in another, the washbasin hung crookedly because a rusted screw had broken; in a third a shattered glass lampshade lay on the floor, the bare bulb still hanging from the ceiling. Gregorius worked the light switch: nothing, neither here nor in the other rooms. A deflated football lay in a corner, the jagged remains of the smashed windowpanes flashed in the afternoon sun. And yet he never knew how to play ball, Mélodie had said about her brother who had skipped two grades in this building because at the age of four he had already begun reading through the library.

  The classrooms were off long corridors like a barracks. Gregorius inspected them one after another. Once he tripped over a dead rat, then stood still, trembling, and wiped his hands, which had nothing to do with it, on his coat. From one of the classrooms you could look over at the girls’ school, but half the building was concealed by the trunk of a gigantic pine tree. Amadeu de Prado would have chosen a seat near the bank of windows. So he could see Maria João at her desk no matter where she was sitting. Gregorius sat down in the seat with the best view and strained to see. Yes, he could have seen her in her bright dress that smelt of soap. They had exchanged looks and when she took an exam, Amadeu had wished he could guide her hand. Had he used opera glasses? In the aristocratic house of a Supreme Court judge, there must have been some. Alexandre Horácio wouldn’t have used them if he ever sat in a box at the opera. But perhaps his wife, Maria Piedade Reis de Prado, had in the six years she had lived after his death? Had his death been a liberation for her? Or had it made time stand still and frozen her feelings, as with Adriana?

  Back on the ground floor, Gregorius opened a pair of lofty doors and found himself in the school dining hall. In one wall there was a hatch and behind it the former kitchen, where only rusty pipes still remained, sticking out of the tiled walls. The long dining table had been left. Was there an auditorium?

  He found it on the other side of the building. Tightly fixed benches, a stained-glass window missing two panes, in front a raised lectern with a small lamp. A separate bench, probably for the school staff. The silence of a church hung over the auditorium, a silence that wouldn’t be ended with arbitrary words. A silence that made sculptures of words, monuments of praise, warning or scathing judgements.

  Gregorius went back to the Rector’s office. Undecided, he held the Hebrew Bible in his hand. He already had it under his arm and was on his way to the exit when he turned back. He lined the damp drawer where it had lain with his sweater and put the book inside. Then he made his way to Belém, at the other side of the city, where Father Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão lived in a church home.

  18

  ‘Augustine and the lies – that was only one of a thousand things we fought about,’ said Father Bartolomeu. ‘We fought a lot without ever getting into a fight. For, you see, he was a hothead, a rebel, and a boy with a quicksilver intelligence. He was a gifted speaker, who swept through the Liceu like a whirlwind for six years, and became a legend.’

  The priest was holding Prado’s book and now
ran the back of his hand over the portrait. It could have been a smoothing action or it could have been a caress. Gregorius pictured Adriana, stroking Amadeus’s desk with the back of her hand.

  ‘He’s older here,’ said the priest. ‘But it’s him. That’s how he was, exactly.’

  He rested the book on the blanket that covered his legs.

  ‘Back then, as his teacher, I was in my mid-twenties and it was an unbelievable challenge for me to have to stand up to him. He split the faculty into those who damned him to hell and those who loved him. Yes, that’s the right word: some of us were in love with him – with his boldness, his overflowing generosity and tough determination, his brazen contempt for the world, his fearlessness, and his fanatical enthusiasm. He was full of audacity, an adventurer you could easily imagine exploring the seas, singing, preaching, and firmly resolved to protect the inhabitants of distant continents against every degrading infringement of occupation, with the sword if need be. He was willing to challenge everyone, even the devil, even God. No, it wasn’t megalomania, as his opponents said, it was only flourishing life and a volcanic outburst of awakening forces, a shower of sparks of flashing inspiration. No doubt he was full of arrogance, this boy. But it was so boisterous, so great, this arrogance, that you overcame your resistance and viewed him in amazement like a natural wonder with its own laws. Those who loved him saw him as a rough diamond, an unpolished gem. Those who rejected him were offended by his lack of respect, which could wound. They saw him as an aristocratic prig, favoured by fate, showered not only with money but also with talent, beauty and charm, as well as the irresistible melancholy that made women love him. It seemed unfair that he was so much better endowed than others. This made him a magnet for envy and resentment. Yet even those who felt resentment were secretly full of admiration. He was a boy who could touch heaven.’