32
Gregorius stood in the living room of Silveira’s house and looked at a row of photographs, snapshots of a big party. Most of the men wore frock coats, the ladies long evening gowns whose trains brushed the shining parquet floor. José António da Silveira was also to be seen, many years younger, with a woman, a voluptuous blonde who reminded Gregorius of Anita Ekberg in the Trévi Fountain. The children, maybe seven or eight, chased each other under the endless buffet table. Behind one table was the family coat of arms, a silver bear with a red sash. In another picture, they all sat and listened to a young woman playing the grand piano, an alabaster beauty with a distant resemblance to the nameless Portuguese woman on the Kirchenfeldbrücke.
After arriving in the villa, Gregorius had sat on the bed for a long time and waited for the shock of parting from João Eça to subside. The raw sound from his throat, a dry sob, a cry for help, a memory of torture, all of those things – he would never erase from his memory, He wished he could pour so much hot tea into himself that it would wash away Eça’s pain.
Then, slowly, the details of the story about Estefânia Espinhosa came back into his mind. Salamanca. She had become a lecturer in Salamanca. The railway station sign with the dark medieval name emerged before him. Then the sign disappeared and he thought of the scene Father Bartolomeu had described: how O’Kelly and the woman, without looking at each other, had walked towards each other and had then stood at Prado’s grave. That they avoided each other’s eyes created a greater closeness between them than any exchange of looks could have done.
Finally, Gregorius had unpacked his suitcase and put his books on a shelf. It was very quiet in the house. Julieta, the maid, had gone home, leaving a note for him on the kitchen table about where to find the food. Gregorius had never been in a house as grand as this and everything seemed forbidden, even the sound of his footsteps. Switch by switch, he had turned on the lights. The dining room, where they had eaten together. The bathroom. He had even cast a brief glance into Silveira’s study, only to close the door again straight away.
And now he stood in the living room where he and Silveira had drunk coffee and said the word nobreza; he liked it, and he kept repeating it. And aristocracy; he now became aware that he had always liked it, too; it was a word things flowed into, or vice versa. De l’Arronge – Florence’s maiden name – had never made him think of aristocracy, and she didn’t set much store by it either. Lucien von Graffenried: that was something else, old Bern aristocracy; it made him think of a noble sandstone structure, at the corner of Gerechtigkeitsgasse, and that there had been a von Graffenried who had played some vague role in Beirut.
And naturally, of Eva von Muralt, Unbelievable. It had only been an end-of-term party, not comparable to the one in Silveira’s photos and yet he had sweated with excitement in the high rooms. ‘Unbelievable!’ Eva had said when a boy asked her if an aristocratic title could be bought. ‘Unbelievable!’ she had also shouted when Gregorius wanted to wash the dishes at the end.
Silveira’s record collection made little impression. As if the period in his life when music had played a role was long gone. Gregorius found Berlioz, Les Nuits d’Été, La Belle Voyageuse and La Mort d’Ophélie, the music Prado had loved because it reminded him of Fátima. Estefânia was his chance to finally leave the courthouse, go out into the wider world.
Maria João. He had to find Maria João. If anybody knew what had happened to Prado on the way back from Spain and why he became ill on his return, it would be her.
He spent an uneasy night, listening to every unfamiliar sound. The scattered dream images teemed with aristocratic women, limousines and chauffeurs. And they hunted Estefânia. They hunted her, and he didn’t see even a single image of the hunt. He woke up with his heart racing, had to fight dizziness, and sat down at the kitchen table at about five o’clock with the other letter Adriana had brought him.
My esteemed, dear son,
Over the years, I have started so many letters to you and thrown them away, so that I don’t know what number this one is. Why is it so difficult?
Can you imagine what it is like to have a son blessed with so many talents? A son powerful with words who gives his father the feeling that all he has left is silence if he is not to sound like a bungler? As a law student, I enjoyed the reputation of being deft with words. And I was introduced to the Reis family, mother’s family, as an eloquent attorney. My speeches against Sidónio Pais, the gallant fraud in uniform, and for Teófilo Braga, the man with the umbrella in the tram, made an impression. So why did I fall silent?
You were four when you came to me with your first book to read me two sentences: Lisbon is our capital. It is a beautiful city. It was Sunday afternoon, after a downpour, muggy, heavy air streamed in through the window, steeped with the smell of wet flowers. You had knocked on the door, stuck your head in and asked: ‘Do you have a minute?’ Just like the grown-up son of an aristocratic household who approaches the head of the family respectfully and requests an audience. I liked your precocious manners, but at the same time I was alarmed. What had we done wrong that you didn’t come crashing in like other children? Your mother hadn’t told me anything about the book and I was flabbergasted when you read me the sentences without the slightest hesitation and with the clear voice of a lecturer. And your voice was not only clear but also full of love for words, so that the two simple sentences sounded like poetry. (I know it is childish, but sometimes I thought that this was the origin of your homesickness, the legendary homesickness you savoured, without it being any the less real for that; indeed you had never even been out of Lisbon, and couldn’t possibly know what homesickness is; you have to experience it before you can feel it, but who knows, you are capable of everything, even the inconceivable.)
A radiant intelligence filled the room and I still recall that I thought: How little the naïveté of the sentences suits him! Later, when I was alone again, pride gave way to another thought: from now on, his mind will be like a dazzling spotlight that mercilessly illuminates all my weaknesses. I believe that was the beginning of my fear of you. For yes, I was afraid of you.
How hard it is for a father to confront his children, and how hard to endure the thought that one is registered in their souls with all one’s weaknesses, blindness, errors and cowardice! I had these thoughts when I worried that the Morbus Bechterev might be hereditary, but you were spared, thank God. Later, I thought more of the soul, our inside, that is as receptive to impressions as a wax tablet and records everything with seismographic precision. I stood before the mirror and thought: How will this stern face be judged by you?
But what can you do to alter your face? Only a little, for I don’t mean the simple physiognomy. But not much. We aren’t the sculptors of our facial features or the stage managers of our seriousness, our laughing and weeping.
After you read me the first two sentences came hundreds, thousands, millions of words. Sometimes, it seemed as if the books you held were as much a part of you as the hands that held them. Once when you were reading outside on the steps, a ball from a children’s game landed near you. Your hands left the book and threw the ball back. How strange the movement of the hand was!
I loved you as a reader, I loved you very much. Even if your compulsion for words seemed strange to me.
Even stranger was your fervour as you carried the candles to the altar. Unlike your mother, I didn’t believe for a moment that you could become a priest. You have the soul of a rebel and rebels don’t become priests. So where would your ardour finally lead you, what outlet would it seek? That it possessed an explosive force, this ardour, that was palpable. I was afraid of the explosions it could produce.
I felt this fear when I saw you in court. I had to condemn the thief and send her to prison, the law demanded it. Why did you look at me as if I were a torturer? Your look paralysed me, I couldn’t talk about it. Do you have a better idea of what we should do with thieves? Do you?
As I watched you grow up, I was a
mazed at the breadth of your mind, I heard you cursing God. I didn’t like your friend Jorge, anarchists frighten me, but I was glad you had a friend, a boy like you. It could have been so different: your mother dreamed of you pale and quiet behind the walls of an institution. She was deeply horrified by the text of your graduation address. ‘A blasphemous son, what did I do to deserve it?’ she said.
And I read the text. And was proud! And jealous! Jealous of the independent thought and of the morality that spoke through every one of your lines. They were like a shining horizon I would also have liked to have reached, but never could; the leaden gravity of my upbringing was too great for that. How could I have explained my proud jealousy to you? Without making myself feel small, even smaller and more dejected than I already was?
It was crazy, thought Gregorius: the two men, father and son, had lived on opposite hills of the city like opposing actors in an ancient drama, linked by an archaic fear of each other and an affection they couldn’t find words for, and had written letters to each other that they didn’t trust themselves to send. Confined in a mutual silence neither understood, and blind to the fact that one led to the other.
‘Madam sometimes sat here, too,’ said Julieta, when she came in the late morning and found him at the kitchen table. ‘But she didn’t read any books, only magazines.’
She observed him. Hadn’t he slept well? Or was there something wrong with the bed?
He was fine, said Gregorius, he hadn’t felt so good in a long time.
She was glad there was someone else in the house now, she said, Senhor da Silveira had become so quiet and closed in. ‘I hate hotels,’ he had said recently when she had helped him pack. ‘Why do I go on? Can you tell me that, Julieta?’
33
He was the strangest student she had ever had, Cecília said.
‘You know more literary words than most people in the tram, but when you curse, go shopping, or try to book a trip, you have no idea what to say. Not to mention flirting. Or do you know what you’d like to say to me?’
Shivering, she pulled the green shawl around her shoulders.
‘And the man has the slowest quick-wittedness I’ve ever encountered. Slow and yet quick-witted – wouldn’t have thought that possible. But with you …’
Under her withering look, Gregorius took out the grammar book and pointed to a mistake.
‘Yes,’ she said and the green scarf billowed in front of her lips, ‘but sometimes the informal way is the right way. That was certainly so even with the Greeks.’
On the way to Silveira’s house, Gregorius drank coffee in a bar across the street from O’Kelly’s pharmacy. Now and then he saw the smoking pharmacist through the display window. He was smitten with her, he heard João Eça say. She liked him, but he wasn’t her passion. It made him edgy and sick with jealousy … Amadeu entered the room. He saw her and was spellbound. Gregorius took out Prado’s book and leafed through it until he found the following passage:
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 the tram to Belém, he felt suddenly that his sense of the city had changed. So far, it had been exclusively the place of his investigations, and the time that had flowed through it had taken its shape from the plan to keep finding out more about Prado. Now, when he looked out of the tram window, the time when the car crept along creaking and groaning was all his own; it was simply the time when Raimund Gregorius was living his new life. He saw himself standing again in the Bern tram depot and asking about the old cars. Three weeks ago, he had had the feeling of travelling here through the Bern of his childhood. Now he was travelling through Lisbon and only Lisbon. He felt as if something had been rearranged deep inside himself.
In Silveira’s house, he called Frau Loosli and dictated his new address to her. Then he called the hotel and found out that the Persian grammar had arrived. The balcony on which he was sitting was bathed in warm spring sunshine. He listened to the people passing in the street and was amazed at how much he understood. From somewhere came the smell of food. He was reminded of the tiny balcony of his childhood, where the repulsive cooking smells had hovered. Later, when he lay under the blanket in Silveira’s son’s room, he had fallen asleep after a few moments and found himself in a contest of quick-wittedness in which the slowest won. He stood with Eva von Muralt, Unbelievable, at the sink and washed the dishes after the school party. Finally, he sat in Kägi’s office and spent hours calling distant countries where nobody picked up the phone.
In Silveira’s house, too, time began to be his own. For the first time since he had arrived in Lisbon, he turned on the television and saw the evening news. He moved very close to the set so that there was as little distance as possible between him and the words. He was surprised by how much had happened and how different Portuguese priorities were. On the other hand, it was also amazing that the familiar here was the same as at home. He thought: I’m living here. Vivo aqui. He couldn’t follow the film that came next, so he put on the record of Berlioz’s music that Prado had listened to for days after Fátima’s death. It echoed through the whole house. After a while, he sat down at the kitchen table and finished reading the letter the judge had written to the son he feared.
Sometimes, my son, increasingly often, you seem to me like a self-righteous judge who reproaches me for still wearing the robes. For seeming to shut my eyes to the cruelty of the regime. Then I feel your look on me as a scorching light. And would like to pray to God to fill you with more understanding and take the executioner’s gleam out of your eyes. Why didn’t You grant him more imagination about me? – I’d like to shout at Him and it would be a shout full of resentment.
For you see: great, even excessive, as your imagination can be, you have no idea what pain and a twisted back make of a person. Well, nobody seems to have an idea of that except the victims. Nobody. You gave me a splendid explanation of what Vladimir Bechterev discovered. And I wouldn’t want to miss a single one of these conversations, they are precious hours when I feel secure with you. But then it’s past, and I return to the hell of being stooped and enduring. And the one thing that you never seem to consider is that you can’t expect as much from those who are slaves to humiliating curvature and incessant pain as from those who can forget their bodies. You can’t expect the same thing from them! And that they depend on not having to tell people about their suffering, for that would be a new humiliation!
The truth – yes, the truth – is quite simple: I don’t know how I should have endured my life if Enrique didn’t pick me up every morning at ten to six. Sundays – you have no idea what a torture they are. Sometimes I don’t sleep on Saturday night because I anticipate how it will be. That even on Saturdays at a quarter past six, I enter the empty building: they joke about it. Sometimes I think that more cruelty is produced by thoughtlessness than by any other human weakness. I keep asking for a key for Sundays. They refuse. Sometimes I wish they had my pain for one day, one single day, so they’d understand.
When I enter the office, the pain subsides a little; it’s as if the room becomes like a prop inside my body. Until shortly before eight, it’s quiet in the building. I usually study the files for the day. I have to be sure there are no surprises, a man like me is scared of that. Sometimes I also read poetry and my breathing calms down; it’s as if I were looking at the sea and sometimes that helps to relieve the pain. Now do you understand?
But Tarrafal, you will say. Yes, Tarrafal, I know. Should I give up the key because of that? I’ve tried it out, more than once. I took it off the key ring and put it on the desk. Then I left the building and walked through the streets as if I had really done it. I breathed into my back as the doctor recommended, the breathing grew louder and louder. I walked through the city gasping, sweating with fear that some day the imagined scenario might become real. In a shirt damp with sweat, I later sat at the ju
dge’s bench. Now do you understand?
It isn’t only to you that I have written countless letters that I later destroyed. I’ve also kept writing to the minister. And one of the letters I put in the house mail. I caught the postman on the street before he delivered it to the minister. He was annoyed to have to rummage through his bag and he looked at me with the contemptuous curiosity many people show for an error. I threw the letter where the others went: into the river. So that the treacherous ink would be washed away. Now do you understand?
Maria João Flores, your loyal classmate, understood. One day, when I could no longer bear how you looked at me, I arranged to meet her.
‘He would like to respect you,’ she said and put her hand on mine; ‘revere and love you as one loves a paragon. “I don’t want to see him as a sick man who is forgiven everything,” he said. “It would then be as if I no longer had a father.’ He assigns a very definite role to others and is merciless when they don’t fit it. A refined kind of egoism.’
She looked at me and gave me a smile that came from the experience of a well-lived life.
‘Why don’t you try showing your anger?’
Gregorius picked up the last sheet. The few sentences were written with a different-coloured ink and the judge had dated it June 8, 1954, a day before his death.
The struggle is at an end. What, my son, can I say to you in farewell?
You became a doctor for my sake. What would have happened if you had not grown up in the shadow of my suffering? I am in your debt. You are not responsible that the pain remained and my resistance has now broken.