Night Train to Lisbon Read online

  Adriana took one of the white coats off the hook and put it on. ‘He always hangs his on the left, he’s left-handed,’ she said as she did up the buttons.

  Gregorius began to fear the moment when she got stuck in the past, where she moved like a sleepwalker. But it wasn’t yet time for that. With a relaxed face, that began to glow with a zeal for work, she opened the medicine cabinet and checked the stocks.

  ‘We’re almost out of morphine,’ she murmured. ‘I’ll have to call Jorge.’

  She closed the cabinet, stroked the paper cover on the examining table, straightened the scales with her toes, checked whether the washbasin was clean, and then stood at the desk with the card file. Without touching the crooked card or even looking at it, she began talking about the patient.

  ‘Why did she go to this bungler, this back-street abortionist? Well, she doesn’t know how awful it was for me. But everybody knows that Amadeu takes good care of you in such cases. That he doesn’t give a damn about the law when a woman’s in trouble. Etelvina and another child, that’s quite impossible. Next week, says Amadeu, we have to decide whether she needs follow-up treatment in the hospital.’

  His older sister had an abortion and had almost died from it, Gregorius heard João Eça say. It was eerie to him. Here, downstairs, Adriana sank even deeper into the past than upstairs in Amadeu’s room. Upstairs was a past which she could attend only from outside. With the book, she had erected a belated memorial to it. When her brother had sat there smoking and drinking coffee at the desk, the old-fashioned fountain pen in his hand, she couldn’t reach him, and Gregorius was sure she had burned with jealousy at the solitude of his thoughts. Here, in the office, it had been different. She had heard everything he said, had discussed the patients with him and had assisted him in his work. Here he was all hers. For many years, this had been the centre of her life, the place of her most living present. Her face, which, despite the traces of age was young and beautiful at this moment, expressed her wish to be able to remain for ever in that present, not to have to leave the eternity of those happy years.

  The moment of awakening wasn’t far off. Adriana’s fingers groped uncertainly to make sure the white coat was buttoned up. The gleam of the eyes began to die out, the slack skin of the old face drooped, the bliss of time past departed the room.

  Gregorius didn’t want her to wake up and return to the cold solitude of her life, where Clotilde had to put on the tape for her. Not now; it would be too cruel. And so he risked it.

  ‘Rui Luís Mendes. Did Amadeu treat him here?’

  It was as if he had taken a syringe from the tray and injected her with a drug that raced through the dark veins. A wave of trembling went through her, the bony body shook feverishly and her breathing was heavy. For a moment Gregorius was alarmed and cursed his stupidity. But then the convulsions died down, Adriana’s body grew still, the flickering look subsided, and now she went over to the treatment table. Gregorius waited for the question of how he knew about Mendes. But Adriana was a long way back in the past.

  She put her flat hand on the paper covering the treatment table. ‘It was here. Right here. I can see him lying there as if it were only minutes ago.’

  And then she began to talk. The museum-like rooms came alive with the force and passion of her words; the heat and the disaster of that distant day when Amadeu Inácio de Almeida Prado, lover of cathedrals and merciless enemy of all cruelty, had done something, the consequences of which would never leave him, something he couldn’t cope with and couldn’t put behind him, even with the ferocious clarity of his intellect. Something that lay like a sticky shadow over the last years of his smouldering life.

  It had happened on a hot, damp August day in 1965, shortly after Prado’s forty-fifth birthday. In February, Humberto Delgado, the former candidate of the centre-left opposition in the presidential election of 1958, was murdered when he tried to return from Algerian exile across the Spanish border. The Spanish and Portuguese police were blamed for the murder, but everybody was convinced that it had been the work of the secret police, the Polícia Internacional de Defesa do Estado, PIDE, that had controlled everything ever since António de Salazar’s senility had become obvious. In Lisbon, illegally printed flyers circulated placing responsibility for the bloody act on Rui Luís Mendes, a feared officer of the secret police.

  ‘We also had one in the mailbox,’ said Adriana. ‘Amadeu stared at the photo of Mendes as if he wanted to annihilate him with his look. Then he tore the flyer to shreds and flushed them down the toilet.’

  It was early afternoon, and a silent, ominous heat lay over the city. Prado was taking his daily nap which lasted for half an hour almost to the minute. It was the only point in the whole cycle of day and night when he managed to fall asleep easily. During this time, he always had a deep and dreamless sleep, was deaf to all noise, and if anything woke him, he was disturbed and disoriented for a while. Adriana guarded this sleep like a shrine.

  Amadeu had just fallen asleep when Adriana heard shrill shouts in the street, shattering the midday silence. She dashed to the window. A man lay on the pavement in front of the house next door. The people who stood around him and blocked Adriana’s view were yelling at one another and gesticulating wildly. It seemed to Adriana that one of the women kicked the body with the tips of her shoes. Two big men finally managed to push the people back; they picked up the man and carried him to the door of Prado’s office. Only now did Adriana recognize him and her heart stopped: it was Mendes, the man on the flyer, whose photo was captioned: o carniceiro de Lisboa, the Butcher of Lisbon.

  ‘At that moment, I knew exactly what would happen. I knew it down to the last detail. It was as if the future had already happened – as if it were already contained in my fear as an existing fact, and now it would simply be a matter of expanding chronologically. It was even horribly clear to me that the next hours would change the course of Amadeu’s life and present him with the hardest test he had ever had to endure.’

  The men who carried Mendes leaned on the doorbell and it seemed to Adriana that, with the shrill sound now swelling to an unbearable pitch, the violence and brutality of the dictatorship which so far – not without a bad conscience – they had been able to stave off, now made its way into the elegant, guarded silence of her house. For two or three seconds, she considered simply doing nothing and playing dead. But she knew Amadeu would never forgive her for that. So she opened his bedroom door and went to wake him.

  ‘He didn’t say a word; he knew I wouldn’t have woken him up if it wasn’t a matter of life and death. “In the consulting room,” I simply said. Barefoot he staggered down the stairs and rushed to the washbasin where he scooped cold water on to his face. Then he went to the examining table, where Mendes lay.

  ‘For two or three seconds he stared in disbelief at the leaden, limp face with the beads of sweat on the forehead. He turned round and looked at me for confirmation. I nodded. For a moment, he raised his hands to his face, petrified. Then a jolt went through my brother. With both hands, he ripped off Mendes’s shirt, popping the buttons. He put his ear to the hairy chest, then listened to it with the stethoscope I handed him.

  ‘“Digitalis!”

  ‘He said only this one word but in his choked voice was all the hatred he fought against, a hatred like flashing steel. As I filled the syringe, he massaged Mendes’s heart. I heard the dull crack when the ribs broke.

  ‘When I handed him the syringe, our eyes met for a split second. How I loved him at that moment, my brother! With the enormous force of his inflexible iron will, he struggled against the wish to simply let the man on the examining table die, the man who almost certainly had the whole merciless oppression of the state on his conscience. How easy it would have been, how unbelievably easy! A few seconds of inaction would have been enough. Just to do nothing! Nothing!

  ‘After Amadeu had rubbed disinfectant on Mendes’s chest, he hesitated and shut his eyes. Never, neither before nor after, have I observed a pe
rson mastering himself like that. Then Amadeu opened his eyes and thrust the needle directly into Mendes’s heart. It looked like the death blow and I froze. He did it with the breathtaking certainty with which he gave every injection; you had the feeling that, in such moments, human bodies were made of glass for him. Without the slightest tremor, with enormous steadiness, he continued to inject the drug into Mendes’s heart muscle to start it up again. When he pulled out the syringe, all the violence had been wiped out of him. He put on a dressing and listened to Mendes’s heart with the stethoscope. Then he looked at me and nodded. ‘The ambulance,’ he said.

  ‘They came and carried Mendes out on a stretcher. Just before it reached the door, he came to, opened his eyes, and encountered Amadeu’s look. I was amazed to see how calmly, even dispassionately, my brother looked at him. Maybe it was also exhaustion. In any case, he leaned against the door like someone who has weathered a tough crisis and can now count on having some peace.

  ‘But the opposite happened. Amadeu knew nothing of the people who had gathered around the collapsed Mendes out in the street, and I had forgotten about them. So, it took us by surprise when we suddenly heard hysterical voices shouting: “Traidor! Traidor!” They must have seen that Mendes was still alive on the orderlies’ stretcher, and now they were venting their rage on the person who had saved his life and reprieved him from the punishment he deserved.

  ‘As before, when he had recognized Mendes, Amadeu raised his hands to his face. But now, it happened slowly, having always carried his head high, he lowered it, and nothing could have expressed better his weariness and grief at what he saw was in store for him.

  ‘But neither weariness nor grief could dull his mind. With a confident grip, he took the white coat he hadn’t had time to put on before, off the hook, and slipped it on. Only later did I grasp the significance of this: he knew, without thinking, that he had to appear to the people as a doctor and that they would recognize him best as that if he wore the customary garment.

  ‘When he appeared at the front door, the shouting ceased. For a while, he just stood there, head down, his hands in the pockets of the white coat. Everybody waited for him to say something in his defence. Amadeu raised his head and looked around. It was as if his bare feet didn’t so much touch the pavement as press into it.

  ‘“Sou médico,” he said and once again, imploring, “Sou médico.”

  ‘I recognized three or four of our patients from the neighbourhood, who looked down, embarrassed.

  ‘“É um assassino! ” someone now yelled.

  ‘“Carniceiro! ” yelled another.

  ‘I saw Amadeu’s shoulders lift and fall in heavy breaths.

  ‘“É um ser humano, uma pessoa,” He is a human being, a person, he said loud and clear, and probably only I, who knew every nuance of his voice, heard the soft tremor when he repeated, ‘Pessoa.’

  ‘Right after that, a tomato burst on his white coat. As far as I know, it was the first and only time anyone ever attacked Amadeu physically. I can’t say how much this attack had to do with what happened next – how much it contributed to the deep shock triggered in him by this scene at the door. But I suppose it wasn’t much compared with what now occurred: a woman emerged out of the crowd, stood before him, and spat in his face.

  ‘If it had only happened once, it might have been seen as an impulsive act, like a furious, uncontrollable twitch. But the woman spat several times and kept on spitting, as if she were spitting her soul out of her body and drowning Amadeu in the slime of her disgust, trickling slowly down his face.

  ‘He withstood this new attack with his eyes closed. But, just like me, he must have recognized the woman: it was Inês Salomão, the wife of a patient who had died of cancer after years of treatment and countless house calls, for which Amadeu hadn’t charged a centavo. What ingratitude! I thought at first. But then I saw in her eyes the pain and despair that fuelled the rage, and I understood: she was spitting at him because she was grateful for what he had done. He had been a hero, a guardian angel, a divine emissary, who had guided her through the darkness of the disease where she would have lost her way if she had been on her own. And it was he, he of all people, who had stood in the way of justice and allowed Mendes to live. This thought had caused such turmoil in the soul of this misshapen, rather narrow-minded woman that she could relieve herself only with an outburst, and the longer it lasted, the more it took on something mythical, a significance that went far beyond Amadeu.

  ‘As if the crowd felt that a line had been crossed, it broke up; the people went away, eyes down. Amadeu closed the door and returned to the consulting room. I washed the worst off his face with a handkerchief. Over there, at the washbasin, he held his face under the running tap. He turned it on so hard that the water sprayed out of the basin in all directions. The face he rubbed dry was pale. I believe that, at that moment, he would have given anything to be able to weep. He stood there and waited for the tears, but they wouldn’t come. Since Fátima’s death four years before, he hadn’t wept once. He took a few stiff steps towards me as if he had to learn how to walk again. Then he stood before me, in his eyes the tears that wouldn’t flow, he grabbed my shoulders with both hands and leaned his forehead against mine. We may have stood like that for three or four minutes, and they are some of the most precious minutes of my life.’

  Adriana fell silent. Once again, she lived these minutes. Her face twitched, but her tears wouldn’t come either. She went over to the washbasin, let water run into her cupped palms and splashed it over her face. Slowly, she passed the towel over her eyes, cheeks and mouth. As if the story demanded it she went back to the same place before continuing. She also put her hand again on the examining table.

  Amadeu, she said, took shower after shower. Then he sat down at the desk, took a fresh sheet of paper and unscrewed his fountain pen.

  Nothing happened. Not a single word appeared.

  ‘That was the worst thing of all,’ said Adriana, ‘to have to watch how the event had so upset him that it had robbed him of words.’

  When asked if he wanted something to eat, he nodded absently. Then he went into the bathroom and sponged the traces of tomato off the coat. He came to the dinner table in the white coat – that had never happened before – incessantly wiping the wet patches. Adriana felt that this wiping was an instinctive action, not one he performed deliberately. She was afraid that he would lose his mind before her very eyes and sit there like that for ever, a lost-looking man, always trying mentally to wipe away the filth pelted at him by people to whom he had given all his skill and all his vitality, day and night.

  Suddenly, in the middle of the meal, he ran into the bathroom and vomited in a seemingly endless series of retching convulsions. He wanted to lie down, he said flatly afterwards.

  ‘I would like to have taken him in my arms,’ said Adriana.

  ‘But it was impossible. It was as if he were burning and everyone who came near him would be scorched.’

  The next two days, it was almost as if nothing had happened. Prado was only a little more tense than usual and his kindness to the patients had something ethereal and unreal about it. Now and then he stopped in the middle of doing something and gazed straight ahead with an empty, vague look on his face, like an epileptic during a seizure. And every time he went to the door of the waiting room, there was a hesitation, as if he were afraid to find someone from the crowd who had accused him of treason.

  On the third day, he fell ill. Adriana found him trembling at the kitchen table at dawn. He seemed to have aged overnight and didn’t want to see anyone. He gratefully handed everything over to her to arrange and sank into a deep, ghostly apathy. He didn’t shave or get dressed. The only visitor he allowed was Jorge, the pharmacist. But he hardly said a word to him either, and Jorge knew him too well to press him. Adriana had told him what had happened, and he had nodded silently.

  ‘A week later, a letter arrived from Mendes. Amadeu put it on the hall table, unopened. It lay th
ere for two days. Early on the morning of the third day, he put it, still unopened, in an envelope and addressed it to the sender. He insisted on taking it to the post office himself. They didn’t open until nine, I objected. Nevertheless, he left the house with the envelope in his hand. I watched him go and then waited at the window until he came back some hours later. He walked more erectly than when he had left. In the kitchen he checked whether he could bear the taste of coffee again. He could. Then he shaved, got dressed and sat down at the desk.’

  Adriana fell silent and her face was closed. She looked forlornly at the examining table where Amadeu had stood when he pushed the life-saving needle into Mendes’s heart with a movement like a death blow. As the story came to an end, time also ended for her.

  In that moment, it seemed to Gregorius, too, as if time had been cut off right in front of his nose. He had the impression of having caught a brief glance of the hardship Adriana had lived with for more than thirty years: the hardship of having to live in a time that had long ago come to an end.

  Now she took her hand off the examining table and as she did so she also seemed to lose the link with the past, which was her only present. At first, she didn’t know what to do with her hand, then she thrust it into the pocket of the white coat. The movement made the coat stand out as something special; now it looked to Gregorius like a magical wrap which Adriana put on to escape from her silent, uneventful present and to be revived in the distant flaming past. Now that this past was extinguished, the coat looked as forlorn on her as a costume in the wardrobe room of an abandoned theatre.

  Gregorius could no longer bear the sight of her lifelessness. He would have liked to take himself off into the city, to a pub with a lot of voices, laughter and music. To the kind of place he usually avoided.

  ‘Amadeu sits down at the desk,’ he said. ‘What does he write?’

  The glow of her former life returned to Adriana’s face. But her joy of being able to speak of him again was mixed with something else, something Gregorius recognized only slowly. It was anger. Not a short-lived anger kindled by a trifle that flares up and soon goes out, but a profound, creeping anger, like a smouldering fire.