I left the key in the office. They’ll blame it all on the pain. That a failure can also die – the idea is foreign to you.
Will my death satisfy you?
Gregorius was freezing and turned on the heating. Amadeu came within a hair’s-breadth of seeing it, but I decided to keep it to myself, he heard Adriana say. The heating didn’t help. He turned on the television and sat watching a soap opera he didn’t understand a word of; it could have been in Chinese. In the bathroom, he found a sleeping pill. By the time it started to take effect, it was growing light outside.
34
There were two Maria João Flores who lived in Campo de Ourique. The next day, after language school, Gregorius went there. The first doorbell he rang was answered by a young woman with two children hanging on her skirt. In the other house, he was told that Senhora Flores had gone away two days earlier.
He picked up the Persian grammar book from the hotel and went out to the Liceu. Migratory birds swooshed over the abandoned building. He had hoped the hot African wind would come back, but the mild March air remained, with a whiff of wintry sharpness.
In the grammar book was a note from Natalie Rubin: I made it up to here! The letters were difficult, she had said when he called her to say that the book had arrived. For days, she had done nothing else; her parents were amazed at her diligence. When was he planning his trip to Iran? Wouldn’t that be a little dangerous these days?
The year before, Gregorius had read in the newspaper an ironic commentary about a man who had started learning Chinese at the age of ninety. The author had made fun of the man. You have no idea – with this sentence, Gregorius had begun his draft of a letter to the editor. ‘Why do you waste time on such things?’ Doxiades had said when he saw his anger devouring him. He hadn’t sent the letter. But the Greek’s casual manner had bothered him.
A few days ago, in Bern, when he had tested himself on how many Persian letters he still remembered, only a few had come back to him. But now, with the book before him, it went more quickly. I am still there, in that distant place in time, I never left it, but live expanded in the past, or out of it, Prado had noted. The thousand changes that time has accelerated – they are, measured by this timeless present of feeling, fleeting and unreal as a dream.
The cone of light in Senhor Cortês’s office moved. Gregorius thought of the irrevocably silent face of his dead father. He would like to have turned to him back then with his fear of the Persian sandstorm. But he hadn’t been that kind of a father.
He made the long journey to Belém on foot and arranged it so that he passed by the house where the judge had lived with his silence, his pain, and the fear of his son’s judgement. The cedars stood out in the black night sky. Gregorius thought of the scar under the velvet ribbon on Adriana’s neck. Behind the lighted windows, Mélodie went from room to room. She knew whether these were the red cedars. And what they had to do with the fact that a court could have accused Amadeu of bodily injury.
It was now the third evening he had spent in Silveira’s house. Vivo aqui. Gregorius went out of the house, through the dark garden, and on to the street. He strolled through the neighbourhood and looked through windows at people, cooking, eating, watching television. When he returned, he looked at the pale yellow façade and the illuminated porch with its columns. An elegant house in a wealthy neighbourhood. I live here now. In the parlour, he sat down in a chair. What could that mean? He could no longer touch the Bubenbergplatz. Would he eventually be able to touch the ground of Lisbon? What kind of touch would it be? And how would he place his feet on this ground?
To live for the moment: it sounds so right and so beautiful, Prado had remarked in one of his brief notes, but the more I want to, the less I understand what it means.
In all his life, Gregorius had never been bored. There were few things he found as incomprehensible as somebody who didn’t know what to do with their time. Even now he wasn’t bored. What he felt in the silent, much-too-big house was something else: time stood still, or no, it didn’t stand still, but it didn’t pull him along with it, didn’t approach any future, flowed past him indifferently, without touching him.
He went into the boy’s room and looked at the titles of the Simenon novels. L’homme qui regardait passer les trains. It was the novel whose stills had hung in the window of the Bubenberg Cinema, black-and-white pictures featuring Jeanne Moreau. It had been three weeks ago yesterday, Monday, when he had passed by there. The film must have been made in the sixties. Forty years ago. How long was that?
Gregorius hesitated to open Prado’s book. Reading the letters had changed something. The father’s letter even more than the son’s. Finally, he started leafing through it. There weren’t many pages left that he hadn’t yet read. How would it be after the last sentence? He had always feared the last sentence and from the middle of a book, had always been tormented by the thought that there would inevitably be one. But this time his fear was much greater than usual. When he finished the last sentence it would be as if the invisible thread that had bound him to the Spanish bookshop on Hirschengraben would be broken. He would delay turning the last page and read as slowly as he could, but it wasn’t entirely in your hands. The last look into the dictionary, more exhaustive than necessary. The last word. The last full stop. Only then would he would arrive in Lisbon. In Lisbon, Portugal.
TEMPO ENIGMÁTICO. ENIGMATIC TIME. It took me a year to find out how long a month is. It was in October last year, on the last day of the month. What happens every year happened and what nevertheless throws me off every year, as if I had never before experienced it: the new faded morning light announced winter. No more burning light, no painful dazzle, no sweltering air you want to flee from to the shadows. A mild, conciliatory light that visibly contained the impending shortness of the days. Not that I would meet the new light as an enemy, as one who rejects and fights it in comical helplessness. It saves strength when the world loses the sharp corners of summer and shows us more blurred outlines that demand less resolve.
No, it wasn’t the pale, milky veil of the new light that made me flinch. It was the fact that the broken, weakened light once again indicated the irrevocable end of a period in nature and a temporal segment in my life. What had I done since the end of March, since the day when the cup on the table had become hot in the sun again so that I winced when I picked it up? Had it been a lot of time that had flowed since then, or a little? Seven months – how long was that?
I usually avoid the kitchen, that’s Ana’s domain and there is something about her vigorous juggling of the pans that I don’t like. But that day, I needed somebody to whom I could express my silent fear, even if I couldn’t put a name to it.
‘How long is a month?’ I asked out of the blue.
Ana, who was about to light the gas, blew out the match.
‘You mean?’
Her forehead was wrinkled like someone confronting an insoluble puzzle.
‘What I say: how long is a month?’
Looking down, she rubbed her hands in embarrassment.
‘Well, sometimes they’re thirty days, sometimes …’
‘I know that,’ I said gruffly. ‘But the question is: how long is that?’
Ana reached for the spoon to give her hands something to do.
‘Once, I took care of my daughter for almost a month,’ she said hesitantly and with the caution of a psychiatrist afraid his words could cause a collapse in his patient that could never be restored. ‘Up and down the steps many times a day with the soup that mustn’t be spilled – that was long.’
‘And how was it afterwards, looking back?’
Now Ana risked a smile of relief that her answer apparently hadn’t been wrong. ‘Still long. But somehow it kept getting shorter, I don’t know.’
‘The time with all the soup – do you miss it now?’
Ana moved the spoon back and forth, then she took a handkerchief out of her apron and blew her nose. ‘Naturally I wanted to take care of the child
, she really wasn’t so sulky at the time. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t like to have to do it again, I was constantly scared because we didn’t know what it was or whether it was dangerous.’
‘I mean something else: whether you regret that that moment is past; that time has run out; that you can’t do anything more with it.’
‘Well, yes, it’s past,’ said Ana, and now she no longer looked like a pensive doctor, but like an intimidated schoolgirl.
‘It’s all right,’ I said and turned to the door. As I went out, I heard her strike a new match. Why was I always so short, so curt, so ungrateful for the words of others when it was something really important to me? Why the need to defend what’s important rabidly against the others, when they really didn’t want to take it away from me?
The next morning, the first day of November, I went at dawn to the arch at the end of Rua Augusta, the most beautiful street in the world. The sea in the wan morning light was like a smooth surface of flat silver. To experience with special alertness how long a month is – that was the idea that had driven me out of bed. In the café, I was the first one. When there were only a few sips left in the cup, I slowed down the usual pace of drinking. I was uncertain what I should do when the cup was empty. It would be very long, this first day, if I simply sat still. And what I wanted to know wasn’t how long a month is for those who are completely inactive. But what was it I did want to know?
Sometimes I am so slow. Only today, when the light of early November breaks again do I notice that the question I asked Ana – about the irrevocability, the transience, the regret, the sadness – wasn’t really the question that had preoccupied me. The question I had wanted to ask was completely different: What does it depend on when we have experienced a month as a fulfilled time, our time, instead of a time that has passed as by, which we only suffered, that ran through our fingers, so that it seems to us like a lost, past time, and we’re not sad because it’s past, but because we couldn’t do anything with it? So, the question was not how long is a month, but rather: What can you do for yourself with the time of a month? When is it that I have the impression that this month was all mine?
So it is wrong when I say it took me a year to find out how long a month is. It was different: it took me a year to find out what I wanted to know when I posed the misleading question about the length of a month.
Early the next afternoon, when he left the language school, Gregorius ran into Mariana Eça. When he turned the corner and saw her coming towards him, he knew all at once why he had been afraid to call her: he wanted to tell her about the attacks of dizziness but he didn’t want to hear what she thought might be causing them.
While they were having coffee she told him about João. ‘I waited all Sunday morning for him,’ he had said of Gregorius. ‘I don’t know why, but I can talk to him about things that are weighing on me. Not that they would go away, but for a few hours, it gets easier.’ Gregorius told her about Adriana and the clock, about Jorge and the chess club, and about Silveira’s house. He was about to mention the trip to Bern, but then he decided that he wanted to keep it to himself.
When he had finished, she asked him about the new glasses and then she narrowed her eyes observantly. ‘You’re sleeping too little,’ she said. He thought of the morning when she had examined him and he hadn’t ever wanted to get up from the chair in front of her desk. Of the thorough eye examination. Of the boat trip together to Cacilhas and the red-gold Assam tea he had later drunk in her house.
‘Recently I’ve been feeling dizzy sometimes,’ he said. And after a pause: ‘I’m scared.’
An hour later, he left her office. She had tested his eyes again and taken his blood pressure; he had to do knee bends and balancing exercises and she asked him to describe the dizziness very precisely. Then she had written down the address of a neurologist for him.
‘It doesn’t seem serious to me,’ she had said, ‘and it’s not surprising when you think of how much has changed in your life in a short time. But the usual things have to be examined.’
He pictured the empty square on the wall of Prado’s office where the map of the brain had hung. She saw the panic in him.
‘A tumour would present completely different symptoms,’ she said and stroked his arm.
It wasn’t far to Mélodie’s house.
‘I knew you’d come again,’ she said when she opened the door to him. ‘After your visit, Amadeu was very real to me for a few days.’
Gregorius gave her the letters of father and son to read.
‘That’s unfair,’ she said when she had read the last words of her father’s letter. ‘Very unfair. As if Amadeu had driven him to take his life. His doctor was a shrewd man. He only prescribed small quantities of sleeping pills at a time. But Papá could wait. He had infinite patience. He had the patience of a stone. Mamã saw it coming. She always saw everything coming. She didn’t do anything to prevent it. “Now his back doesn’t hurt him any more,” she said when we stood at the open coffin. I loved her for these words. “And he doesn’t have to torment himself any more,” I said. “Yes,” she said, “that, too.”’
Gregorius told her about his visits to Adriana. She hadn’t been to the blue house after Amadeu’s death, said Mélodie, but she wasn’t surprised that Adriana had turned it into a museum and a shrine where time stood still.
‘She admired him even as a little girl. He was the big brother who could do everything. Who dared to stand up to Papá! A year after he had gone to college in Coimbra, she moved to the girls’ school across from the Liceu. The same school that Maria João had attended. There, Amadeu was a legend and she enjoyed being his sister. Nevertheless, things would have taken a different, more normal turn if not for the drama when he saved her life.’
It had happened when Adriana was nineteen. Amadeu, who was soon to take the official exams, was at home and sat at his books day and night. He left his room only for meals. It was at one such family meal that Adriana choked.
‘We all had food on our plates and didn’t notice anything at first. Suddenly, a strange noise, a horrible gasp came from Adriana, she clasped her neck and stamped her feet. Amadeu was sitting next to me, deep in thought about the coming exam. We were used to him sitting there like a ghost and blindly shovelling in the food. I nudged him with my elbow and pointed to Adriana. He looked up, confused. Adriana’s face had turned purple, she wasn’t able to breathe and she was looking helplessly at Amadeu. His face wore the look of furious concentration he always had on the rare occasions when he didn’t understand something immediately.
‘Now he jumped up, the chair toppled back, and with a few steps he was next to Adriana, had grabbed her under the arms and stood her up, turned her with her back to him; then he clutched her shoulders, took a deep breath and jerked her torso back violently. A choked gasp came from Adriana. Nothing else. Amadeu jerked twice more in the same way, but the piece of meat stuck in her windpipe still wasn’t dislodged.
‘What happened next was etched on the minds of all of us for ever, second by second, movement by movement. Amadeu sat Adriana back on her chair and ordered me to come and help. He bent her head back.
‘“Hold on,” he said in a strained voice. “Tight.”
‘Then he took the sharp meat knife from his place and wiped it on the napkin. We held our breath.
‘“No!” shouted Mamã. “No!”
‘I don’t think he even heard her. He straddled Adriana’s lap and looked her in the eye.
‘“I have to do this,” he said, and even now I’m amazed at how calm his voice was. “Otherwise, you’ll die. Take your hands away. Trust me.”
‘Adriana took her hands from her neck. He groped with his index finger for the gap between thyroid cartilage and annular cartilage. Then he put the tip of the knife in the middle of the gap. A deep breath, a brief shutting of the eyes, then he stabbed.
‘I was concentrating on holding Adriana’s head tight as in a vice. I didn’t see the blood spray out, saw it only after
wards on his shirt. Adriana’s body convulsed. That Amadeu had found clear the windpipe was from Adriana’s whistling as she sucked in air through the new opening. I opened my eyes and saw with horror that Amadeu was turning the blade of the knife in the wound; it looked like an act of special brutality. I realized only later that he had to keep the air passage open. Now, Amadeu took a ballpoint pen out of his shirt pocket, stuck it between his teeth, unscrewed the top with his free hand, ripped out the cartridge and put the bottom part in the wound as a cannula. Slowly, he pulled out the blade and held the pen tight. Adriana’s breathing was jerky and rasping, but she was alive and the colour of the choking slowly subsided from her face.
‘“Ambulance!” Amadeu ordered.
‘Papá shook off his paralysis and went to the phone. We carried Adriana with the pen sticking out of her neck to the sofa. Amadeu stroked her hair.
‘“It wouldn’t have worked otherwise,” he said.
‘The doctor, who appeared a few minutes later, put his hand on Amadeu’s shoulder. “That was close,” he said. “What presence of mind. What courage. At your age.”
‘When the ambulance had left with Adriana, Amadeu sat down at his place at the table in his bloodstained shirt. Nobody said a word. I think that was the worst thing for him: that nobody said anything. With his few words, the doctor had confirmed that Amadeu had done the right thing and had saved Adriana’s life. Nevertheless, the silence that filled the dining room was one of horrified amazement at his cold-bloodedness. “The silence made me look like a butcher,” he said years later, the only time we talked about it.
‘He never got over the fact that we left him so completely alone at this moment and it changed his relationship with the family for ever. After that he came home less often and then only as a polite guest.