‘And what are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘I mean, it’s not my place …’
‘Hard to say,’ said Gregorius. ‘Really hard. You know what daydreaming is. It’s a little like that. But also quite different. More serious. And crazier. When life is short, rules no longer apply. And then it looks as if you have cracked and are fit for the loony bin. But basically it’s the other way around: the ones who belong there are those who don’t want to admit that time is short. You understand?’
‘Two years ago, I had a heart attack,’ said Filipe. ‘I found it strange to go back to work afterwards. Now it comes back to me, I had completely forgotten it.’
‘Yes,’ said Gregorius.
When Filipe had gone, the sky clouded over; it became cool and dark. Gregorius put on the heater, turned on the light and made coffee. The cigarettes. He took them out of his pocket. What brand of cigarettes had he smoked the first time in his life? Silveira had asked him. Then he had left the room and returned with a packet of this very brand. Here. It was my wife’s brand. Been lying for years in the drawer of the night table. On her side of the bed. Couldn’t throw them away. The tobacco must be dry as dust. Gregorius tore open the packet and lit one. By now he could inhale without coughing. The smoke was sharp and tasted like burned wood. A wave of dizziness washed over him and his heart seemed to skip a beat.
He read the passage in Jeremiah that Prado had written about and leafed back in Isaiah. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Prado had taken seriously the idea that God was a person who could think, feel, and had a will. Then he had heard himself saying: I won’t have anything to do with such an arrogant character. Did God have a character? Gregorius thought of Ruth Gautschi and David Lehmann and of his own words about poetic seriousness, the greatest seriousness of all. Bern was far away.
Your remoteness, Father. Mamã as the interpreter, who had to translate your reticence to us. Why didn’t you learn to talk about yourself and your feelings? I want to tell you why: it was too comfortable for you, it was so wonderfully comfortable for you to hide behind the Mediterranean role of the aristocratic head of the family. And there was also the role of the sufferer in whom taciturnity is a virtue, that is, the virtue of not complaining about the pain. And so, your illness was an excuse for not wanting to learn to express yourself. You were arrogant: others were left to guess how much you were suffering.
Didn’t you see what you forfeited in terms of autonomy, which we only have if we know how to express ourselves?
Did you never think, Papá, how much of a burden it was for us that you didn’t talk about your pain and humiliation? That your mute, heroic endurance, which was not without vanity, could be more oppressive for us than if you had sometimes cursed and shed tears of self-pity? For that meant that we children, and mainly I, the son, imprisoned by your imposed bravery, we had no right to complain. Every such right, even before one of us claimed it – was negated, destroyed by your courage and your bravely endured suffering.
You refused to take painkillers, you didn’t want to lose your lucidity, you were dogmatic about that. Once, when you believed you were unobserved, I watched you through a crack in the door. You took one tablet and after a brief struggle, you also put another one in your mouth. After a while, when I looked in again, you were leaning back in the chair, your head on the cushion, your glasses in your lap, your mouth slack. Naturally it was unthinkable, but how I would have liked to go in and give you a hug!
Not once did I see you weep. You stood there with a rigid face when we buried Carlos, the beloved dog – even beloved by you. You weren’t a soulless person, far from it. But why did you act all your life as if the soul was something to be ashamed of, something unseemly, a place of weakness that must be kept hidden, at almost any cost?
Through you, we all learned from childhood on are that there is nothing in our minds that wasn’t first in the body. And then – what a paradox! – you withheld from us every sign of affection so that we really couldn’t believe that you had ever come close enough to Mamã to conceive us. It wasn’t him, Mélodie once said, it was the Amazon. Only once did I feel that you recognized what a woman is: when Fátima came into the room. Nothing changed in you and everything changed. For the first time I grasped what a magnetic field was.
Here the letter ended. Gregorius put the sheets back in the envelope. As he did so, he noticed a pencilled note on the back of the last page. What did I know of your fantasies? Why do we know so little about the fantasies of our parents? What do we know of somebody if we know nothing of the images passed to him by his imagination? Gregorius put the envelope away and looked at his watch. He was due to play chess with João Eça that afternoon, and it was time to set out for the ferry.
31
Eça chose white, but didn’t start. Gregorius had made tea and poured both of them half a cup. He smoked one of the cigarettes Silveira’s wife had left behind in the bedroom. João Eça also smoked. He smoked and drank and said nothing. Twilight descended over the city. They would soon be called for supper.
‘No,’ said Eça when Gregorius went to the light switch. ‘But lock the door.’
It grew dark fast. The glow of Eça’s cigarette expanded and contracted. When he started speaking, it was as if he had put a mute on his voice, as on an instrument, a mute that made the words not only softer and darker, but also rougher.
‘The girl. Estefânia Espinhosa. I don’t know what you know about her. But I’m sure you have heard of her. You’ve wanted to ask me about her for a long time. I feel that. You haven’t dared. I’ve been thinking about it since last Sunday. It’s better if I tell you my story. It is, I think, only a part of the truth. If there is a truth here. But this part you should know. Whatever the others will say.’
Gregorius refilled the teacup. Eça’s hands shook as he drank.
‘She worked in the post office. The post office was important for the Resistance. Post office and railway. She was young when O’Kelly met her. Twenty-three or twenty-four. That was in the spring of 1970. She had this unbelievable memory. Forgot nothing, neither what she had seen nor what she had heard. Addresses, phone numbers, faces. We used to joke that she knew the phone directory by heart. “How come you can’t, too?” she said in retaliation. “I don’t understand how one can be so forgetful.” Her mother had run away or had died young, I don’t remember, and her father was arrested and dragged off one morning, a railway worker they suspected of sabotage.
‘She became Jorge’s lover. He was smitten with her; we were worried about it because such things are always dangerous. She liked him, but he wasn’t her passion. That gnawed at him, made him edgy and sick with jealousy. “Don’t worry,” he said when I looked at him pensively. “You’re not the only one who’s not a beginner.”’
‘The school for illiterate people was her idea. Brilliant. Salazar had started a campaign against illiteracy, learning to read as a patriotic duty. We hired a room, stocked it with old benches and a desk. Enormous blackboard. The girl got hold of whatever educational materials there were, pictures illustrating letters, things like that. Such a class was open to anybody, people of all ages. That was the deception: nobody needed to justify his presence to the outside world, and moreover, with stool pigeons, you could rely on discretion; it’s a stigma not to know how to read. Estefânia sent out the invitations, made sure they weren’t opened, even though all they said was: Shall we see each other on Friday? Kisses, Noëlia, the imaginary name as a password.
‘We met. Discussed plans.
If somebody from, the PIDE showed up, or anyone else who hadn’t been invited, she would simply pick up a piece of chalk. That was also part of the deception: we could meet openly, we didn’t need to hide. We could do whatever we wanted with the pigs. Resistance isn’t anything to laugh at. But sometimes we laughed.
&nbs
p; ‘Estefânia’s memory became increasingly important. We didn’t have to write anything down, didn’t have to leave a paper trail. The whole network was in her head. Sometimes I thought: what if she had an accident? But she was so young and so beautiful, full of life, you pushed such thoughts aside. We landed one blow after another.
‘One evening, in the autumn of 1971, Amadeu entered the room. He saw her and was spellbound. When the meeting broke up, he went across to speak to her. Jorge waited in the doorway. She hardly looked at Amadeu, lowered her eyes immediately. I saw it coming.
‘Nothing happened. Jorge and Estefânia stayed together. Amadeu stopped coming to meetings. Later, I found out that she used to go to his office. She was crazy about him. Amadeu turned her away. He was loyal to O’Kelly. Loyal to the point of self-denial. Through the winter, a semblance of calm prevailed. Sometimes Jorge was seen with Amadeu. Something had changed between them, something intangible. When they walked beside each other, it was as if they were no longer walking in step as before. As if the solidarity had become an effort. And something had also changed between O’Kelly and the girl. He managed to control himself, but now and then irritability flared, he blamed her for mistakes but was proved wrong by her memory and left the group. Even so, things might have come to a head, but it would have been harmless, compared to what actually happened.
‘In late February, one of Mendes’s minions burst into the meeting. An intelligent, dangerous man – we all knew him – he had opened the door silently and slipped into the room. Estefânia was unbelievable. As soon as she saw him, she broke off a sentence about a dangerous operation, picked up the chalk and the pointer and pretended to be giving us a lesson. Badajoz – that was the man’s name, like the Spanish city – sat down, I can still hear the bench squeak in the breathless silence. Estefânia took off her jacket although it was cool in the room. To be safe, she always dressed seductively at our meetings. With bare arms and the see-through blouse, she was … you could lose your mind on the spot. O’Kelly hated it. Badajoz crossed his legs.
‘With a provocative spin of her body, Estefânia ended the would-be lesson. “Until next time,” she said. Everyone stood up, you could feel the collective self-control. Estefânia’s music professor, sitting next to me, also got up to leave. Badajoz went over to him.
‘I knew it. I knew that disaster had struck.
‘“An illiterate professor,” said Badajoz and his face twisted into a nasty grin. “Something new. Congratulations on the educational experience.”
‘The professor turned pale and ran his tongue over his dry lips. But he held up well under the circumstances.
‘“I’ve recently met someone who has never learned to read. I knew about Senhora Espinhosa’s course, she is one of my students, and I wanted to sample it myself before recomending it to the person in question,” he said.
‘“Ah,” said Badajoz. “What’s his name?”
‘I was glad the others had disappeared. I didn’t have my knife on me. I cursed myself.
‘“João Pinto,” said the professor.
‘“How original,” grinned Badajoz. “And the address?”
‘The address the professor gave didn’t exist. They arrested him and kept him in custody. It wasn’t safe for Estefânia to go home any more. I forbade her to stay at O’Kelly’s place too. “Be reasonable,” I said to him. “That’s much too dangerous. If she’s busted, you’ll be busted with her.” I arranged for her to stay with an old aunt of mine.
‘Amadeu asked me to come to the office. He had spoken with Jorge. He was out of his mind with anxiety. Thoroughly beside himself. In this quiet, subdued way that was peculiar to him.
‘“He wants to kill her,” he said flatly. “He didn’t say it in as many words, but it’s clear: he wants to kill Estefânia. To wipe out her memory before they catch her. Just imagine: Jorge, my old friend Jorge, my best friend, my only real friend. He’s gone crazy, he wants to sacrifice his lover. It’s about many lives, he kept saying. One life against many, that’s his calculation. Help me, you must help me, it mustn’t be allowed to happen.”
‘If I hadn’t always known it – I realized during this conversation that Amadeu loved her. Naturally, I couldn’t know how it had been with Fátima. I had seen them together only that one time in Brighton, and yet I was sure: this was something completely different, something much wilder, like a volcano about to erupt. Amadeu was a walking paradox: self-confident and fearless, but also someone who constantly felt under scrutiny. That was why he had come to us; he wanted to defend himself against the accusation about Mendes. Estefânia, I think, was his chance to finally leave the courthouse, go out into the wider world and live his life according to his own wishes, according to his passions, and to hell with the rest.
‘He was aware of this, I’m sure, he knew himself relatively well, better than most, but there was this barrier, the iron barrier of loyalty to Jorge. Amadeu, was the most loyal person alive, loyalty was his religion. But sometimes loyalty had to be sacrificed for freedom and maybe happiness. He had steeled himself to suppress the desire he felt for the girl. He wanted to keep on being able to look Jorge in the eye; he didn’t want a forty-year-old friendship to break up because of a daydream, however painful.
‘And now, Jorge wanted to take away from him the girl who had never belonged to him. Wanted to test his sense of loyalty beyond acceptable limits.
‘I talked with O’Kelly. He denied saying anything of the sort or even implying it. Some red spots had appeared on his unshaved face and it was hard to say if they were connected more with Estefânia or with Amadeu.
‘He was lying. I knew it and he knew that I knew. He had started drinking. He felt that Estefânia was slipping away from him, with or without Amadeu, and he couldn’t bear it.
‘“We could take her out of the country,” I said.
‘“They’ll catch her,” he said. “The professor is strong, but not strong enough. They’ll crack him, then they’ll find out that she carries everything in her memory, and they’ll hunt her down. They’ll use all the means at their disposal to find her. Imagine, the whole Lisbon network could be at risk. They won’t rest until they have her, and they’re an army.”’
The nurse had knocked on the door to call them for dinner. Eça had ignored her and gone on talking. It was dark in the room by now and Eça’s voice sounded to Gregorius as if it came from another world.
‘What I say now may shock you: I understood O’Kelly. I understood both him and his arguments, for those were two different things. If they gave her an injection and cracked her memory, all of us would be implicated, some two hundred people, and it would be many times that if they dragged every individual over the coals. It was inconceivable. You only needed to imagine some of the consequences and you thought: She has to go.
‘In this sense, I understood O’Kelly. I still believe it would have been a justifiable murder. Whoever disagreed simply didn’t get it. A lack of imagination, I’d say. The wish for clean hands as the highest principle I find repulsive.
‘I think that, in this matter, Amadeu couldn’t think clearly. He pictured her shining eyes, the unusual, almost Asian features the contagious, thrilling laugh, the swaying walk, and he simply didn’t want all that to be snuffed out. He could not want it and I am glad he couldn’t, for anything else would have made him a monster, a monster of self-denial.
‘O’Kelly, on the other hand – I suspect that he also saw her death as a redemption, redemption from the torment of knowing that passion drew her to Amadeu. And in that, too, I understood him, but in a completely different sense, that is, without approval. I understood him because I recognized myself in his feelings. A long time ago I had also lost a woman to somebody else and she had also brought music into my life, not Bach as with O’Kelly, but Schubert. I knew what it meant to dream of such a redemption and I knew how easily you can find a pretext for such a plan.
‘And precisely because of that, I threw a monkey wrench into O’Kelly’s
plan. I got the girl out of hiding and took her to the blue house. Adriana hated me for it, but then she already hated me. To her, I was the man who had hijacked her brother into the Resistance.
‘I spoke with people who knew their way around the mountains on the border and gave Amadeu the necessary instructions. He stayed away for a week. When he came back, he was ill. I never saw Estefânia again.
‘They caught me shortly after, but that had nothing to do with her. They said she was at Amadeu’s funeral. Much later, I heard that she was working in Salamanca, as a lecturer in history.
‘I haven’t spoken a word to O’Kelly for ten years. Today it’s all right again, but we don’t seek each other out. He knows what I thought back then, which doesn’t make it any easier.’
As Eça took a fierce drag on his cigarette, the burning ash ate along the paper that shimmered bright in the dark room. He coughed.
‘Every time Amadeu visited me in the slammer, I was tempted to ask him about O’Kelly, about their friendship. I didn’t dare. Amadeu never threatened anybody, that was part of his credo. But, without knowing it, he could be a threat. There was always the danger that he might go to pieces in front of the others. Naturally, I couldn’t ask Jorge either. Maybe today, after more than thirty years, I don’t know. Can a friendship survive such a thing?
‘When I came out, I searched for the professor. Nobody had heard from him since the day of the arrest. Those pigs. Tarrafal. Have you ever heard of Tarrafal? I had counted on being sent there. Salazar was senile and the PIDE did just what it wanted. I think it was only by chance that I wasn’t. In that case, I had planned to ram my head against the wall of the cell until my skull broke.’
They fell silent. Gregorius was lost for words.
Finally, Eça stood up and turned on the light. He rubbed his eyes and made the opening move he always made. They played until the fourth move, then Eça pushed the board aside. The two men stood up. Eça took his hands out of the sweater pockets. They approached each other and embraced. Eça’s body shook. A raw sound of animal strength and helplessness came out of his throat. Then he grew limp and held on tight to Gregorius. Gregorius stroked his head. When he quietly unlocked the door, Eça was standing at the window and looking out into the night.