Night Train to Lisbon
Amadeu started shaking and suddenly the silence was shattered. He put his hands to his face and even now I can still hear the dry sobs that racked his body. And again, we left him alone. I stroked his arm, but that was much too little. I was only the eight-year-old sister, he needed something quite different.
‘That it didn’t come was the last straw. All of a sudden, he leapt up, raced to his room, ran back down with a medical textbook and banged the book on the table with all his might; the cutlery rattled on the plates, the glasses clinked. “Here,” he shouted, “it says so here. The intervention is called a tracheotomy. Why are you all gawking at me like that? You sat there like dummies! If not for me, we would have had to carry her out in a coffin!”
‘They operated on Adriana and she stayed in hospital for two weeks. Amadeu went to see her every day, always alone, he didn’t want to go with us. Adriana was filled with an overwhelming gratitude which was almost religious. She lay white on the pillows with her neck bandaged and kept going over the dramatic scene. When I was alone with her, she talked of nothing else.
‘“Shortly before he cut into me, the cedars in the window were red, blood red,” she said. “Then I blacked out.”’
She left hospital, said Mélodie, with the conviction that she had to devote her life to the brother who had saved hers. That gave Amadeu the creeps and he tried everything to talk her out of the idea. For a while, it seemed to work; she met a Frenchman who fell in love with her and the dramatic episode seemed to recede in importance. But this love collapsed the moment Adriana got pregnant. And again Amadeu intervened. He cut short his trip to England with Fátima because of it. Adriana had trained to be a nurse and three years later, when Amadeu opened the blue office, it was clear that she would work as his assistant. Fátima refused to let her live in the house. There were dramatic scenes when she was told to go. After Fátima’s death, it took less than a week for Adriana to move back in. Amadeu was completely thrown by the loss of his wife and incapable of resistance. Adriana had won.
35
‘Sometimes I’ve thought Amadeu’s spirit consisted mainly of words,’ Mélodie had said at the end of the conversation. ‘That his soul was made up of them, in a way I had never experienced with anybody else.’
Gregorius had shown her the note on aneurysms. She hadn’t known anything about that either, but she now remembered something significant.
‘He flinched when anybody used words that had to do with going, flowing, passing, I remember mainly correr and passar. He was generally somebody who reacted to words as fiercely as if they were much more important than things. If you wanted to understand my brother, that was the most important thing you had to know. He talked of the dictatorship of the wrong words and the freedom of the right ones, of the invisible dungeon of kitsch language and the light of poetry. He was a person possessed by language, bewitched by it; a wrong word hurt him more than a knife wound. And he always reacted fiercely to words dealing with ephemerality and transience. After one of his visits when he revealed this new jumpiness, my husband and I puzzled about it half the night. “Not these words, please not these words,” he had said. We didn’t dare ask why. My brother, he could be like a volcano.’
Gregorius sat down in a chair in Silveira’s living room and began reading the text by Prado that Mélodie had given him just before he left.
‘He was in a panic that it could fall into the wrong hands,’ she had said. “Maybe I should have destroyed it,” he said. But then he gave it to me for safekeeping. He asked me not to open the envelope until after his death. The scales fell from my eyes.’
Prado had written the text in the winter following his mother’s death and given it to Mélodie shortly before Fátima’s death in the spring. There were three notes on separate sheets of paper and written in different inks. Even though they added up to a farewell letter to his mother, there was no address. Instead, the text had a tittle like many of the notes in the book.
DESPEDIDA FALHADA À MAMÃ. FAILED FAREWELL FROM MAMA. My farewell from you has to fail, Mamã. You aren’t here any more, and a real farewell would have to be an encounter. I have waited too long and naturally, that’s no accident. What distinguishes an honest farewell from a cowardly one? An honest farewell from you – that would have been the attempt to come to some understanding with you about how it was with us, you and me. For that is the meaning of a farewell in the full, important sense of the word: that the two people, before they part, come to an understanding of how they have seen and experienced each other. What succeeded between them and what failed. That takes fearlessness: you have to be able to endure the pain of dissonance. It is also about acknowledging what was impossible. Parting is also something you do with yourself: to stand by yourself under the look of the other. The cowardice of a farewell re-sides in the transfiguration: in the attempt to bathe what was in a golden light and deny the dark. What you forfeit in that is nothing less than the acknowledgment of your self in those features produced by darkness.
You played a trick on me, Mamã, and I now write down what I should have told you a long time ago: it was a perfidious trick that burdened my life like nothing else. That is, you let me know – in no uncertain terms – that you expected from me, your son – your son – nothing less than that he be the best. Never mind what, just that whatever I did had to surpass the achievements of all others and not only surpass somehow, but tower high above them. The perfidy: you never said that to me. Your expectation was never explicit, which would have allowed me to take a position on it, to think about it and argue with my feelings about it. And yet I knew it, for that exists: a knowledge you drip into a defenceless child, drop by drop, day by day, without him noticing in the slightest this silently growing knowledge. The inconspicuous knowledge spreads in him like a pernicious poison, seeps into the tissue of body and soul and determines the colours and shades of his life. From this knowledge working unknown, whose power lay in its secrecy, an invisible, undiscoverable web emerged in me of inflexible, merciless expectations of myself, woven by the horrible spiders of an ambition born of fear. How often, how desperately and comically did I later lash out to free myself – only to be caught even more! It was impossible to defend myself against your presence in me: your trick was too perfect, too faultless, a masterpiece of overwhelming, breathtaking perfection.
Part of its perfection was that you not only left your suffocating expectations unspoken, but hid them under words and gestures that expressed the opposite. I’m not saying it was a conscious, cunning, insidious plan. No. You believed your own deceptive words and were a victim of the mask whose intelligence went far beyond yours. Since then, I’ve known how people can be entwined deeply with one another and present to one another without having the slightest idea of it.
And there’s something else about the intricate way you created me according to your will – like a wanton sculptress of an alien soul: the names you gave me. Amadeu Inácio. Most people don’t think anything of it, now and then somebody says something about the melody. But I know better, for I have the sound of your voice in my ear, a sound full of conceited devotion. I was to be a genius. I was to possess godlike grace. And at the same time – the same time! – I was to embody the murderous rigidity of the holy Ignacio and his abilities to perform as a priestly general.
It’s a nasty term, but it fits the case to a T: my life was determined by a maternal poisoning.
Was there in him, too, a secret, life-determining, parental presence, perhaps disguised as its opposite? Gregorius asked himself as he walked through the quiet streets of Belém. He pictured the slim book in which his mother had written down what she earned from cleaning. The shabby glasses with the cheap frames and the eternally dirty lenses over which she looked at him wearily. If I could see the sea just once, but we simply can’t afford that. There had been something in her, something beautiful, even radiant, that he hadn’t thought about for a long time: her dignity when she met on the street the people whose homes she cleaned.
Her look was on the same level as those who paid her for crawling around on her knees, without a trace of obsequiousness. As a small boy he had wondered about this, only to feel proud later on when he had observed it again. If only there hadn’t been the sentimental novels of Ludwig Ganghofer she had picked up in the rare hours of reading. Now you’re also cursed with books. She hadn’t been a reader. It hurt, but she hadn’t been a reader.
What bank will give me a loan, Gregorius heard his father saying, and for such a thing? He could still see his big hand with the short fingernails, counting out the thirteen francs thirty for the Persian grammar, coin after coin, into his son’s hand. Are you sure you want to go there? he had said. It’s so far away, so far away from what we’re used to. Even the letters, they’re so different, not like letters at all. We won’t know anything about you. When Gregorius had given him back the money, his father had stroked his hair with the big hand, a hand much too seldom capable of affection.
The father of Eva, Unbelievable, old man von Muralt, had also been a judge. He had looked in briefly at the school party, a giant of a man. How would it have been, thought Gregorius, if he had grown up as the son of a strict, pain-ridden judge and an ambitious mother who lived her life through the life of the idolized son? Would he still have been known as Mundus, The Papyrus?
When Gregorius came into the heated house from the cold night air, he had another of his dizzy spells. He sat down in a chair and waited for it to pass. Not surprising when you think of how much has changed in your life in a short time, Mariana Eça had said. A tumour would present quite different symptoms. He banished the doctor’s voice from his head and went on reading.
My first big disappointment with you was that you didn’t want to hear about my doubts concerning Papá’s profession. I asked myself: Did you – as a neglected wife in backward Portugal – believe yourself incapable of thinking about it? Because law and justice were things that concerned only men? Or was it worse: that you simply didn’t question or have doubts about Papá’s work? That the fate of the people in Tarrafal just didn’t interest you?
Why didn’t you force Papá to talk to us about it? Were you glad about the power you gained from that? You were a virtuoso of the passive when it came to your children. And you were also a virtuoso as a diplomatic intermediary between Papá and us. You took a certain pride in the role. Was that your revenge for the limitations of your marriage? Compensation for the lack of social recognition and the burden of Father’s pain?
Why did you give in whenever I protested? Why didn’t you hold out against me and so teach me to face up to conflict? So that I could learn by observation rather than from a textbook, with a grim thoroughness that often led me to lose my sense of proportion?
Why did you burden me with my perferential treatment? Why did you and Papá expect so little from Adriana and Mélodie? Why didn’t you sense the humiliation in your lack of confidence in them?
But it would be unjust, Mamã, if that were all I said to you in farewell. In the six years since Papá’s death, I have discovered new feelings for you and I am glad of that. Your desolation by his grave moved me deeply and I was glad there were religious customs to shore up your spirit. I was really happy when the first signs of liberation became visible in you, much faster than expected. It was as if you had awoken to your own life for the first time. In the first year, you often came to the blue house and Fátima was afraid you would cling to me, to us. But no: now, when the scaffolding of your old life had collapsed, you seemed to discover what had been denied you by marrying much too early: your own life beyond your role in the family. You started asking about books, and leafed through them like a curious schoolgirl. Once when you didn’t notice me, I saw you standing in bookshop, an open book in your hand. At this moment, I loved you, Mamã, and was tempted to go to you. But that would have been exactly the wrong thing: it would have pulled you back into the old life.
36
Gregorius paced back and forth in Senhor Cortês’s room, calling everything by its familiar German name. Then he walked through the cold dark corridors of the Liceu and did the same with everything he saw there. He spoke aloud and furiously, the guttural words resounding through the building. An amazed observer would have judged that someone thoroughly demented had run amok in the abandoned building.
It had begun that morning in the language school. Suddenly, he could no longer remember the simplest things in Portuguese, things he knew from the first lesson on the first record of the language course, things he had learned before he left Bern. Cecilia, who appeared late because of a migraine, started on an ironic comment, stopped, frowned and made a calming gesture.
‘Sossega,’ she said, ‘calm down. That happens to everybody who studies a foreign language. Suddenly it deserts you. This will pass. Tomorrow you’ll be back up to standard.
Then his memory went on strike with Persian, a language he had always been able to count on remembering. In sheer panic, he had recited verses from Horace and Sappho to himself, had called up rare Homeric words and leafed frantically through Solomon’s Song of Songs. To his relief everything came to mind as usual: there was no abyss of sudden memory loss. And yet he felt as if he had survived an earthquake. Dizziness. Dizziness and loss of memory. It would pass.
He had stood quietly at the window in the Rector’s office. Today there was no cone of light wandering through the room. It was raining. All of a sudden, he had become furious. It was a violent, hot fury, mixed with despair that the anger had no recognizable cause. Only very slowly did he realize that he was experiencing a revolt, a resistance against all the linguistic foreignness he had inflicted on himself. At first it seemed to apply only to Portuguese, and maybe the French and English he occasionally had to speak here. Then, gradually and reluctantly, he admitted to himself that the surge of rage also extended to the ancient languages he had lived with for more than forty years.
He was alarmed at the depth of his rebellion. The ground swayed. He had to do something, hold on to something; he closed his eyes, imagined he was standing on Bubenbergplatz and called the things he saw by their familiar German names. He talked to the things and to himself in slow, clear sentences of dialect. The earthquake subsided, he felt solid ground beneath his feet again. But the fear had an echo; he faced it with the fury of someone who has been exposed to a great danger, and so it happened that he strode through the corridors of the empty building like a lunatic, as if the essential thing was to defeat the spirits lurking in the dark corridors with familiar German words.
Two hours later, when he sat in the living room of Silveira’s house, the whole thing seemed to him like a nightmare, like something he may only have dreamed. Reading Latin and Greek was the same as always, and when he opened the Portuguese grammar, everything came back to him and he made good progress with the conjunctive. Only the dream images still reminded him that something had temporarily stopped.
When he nodded off in the chair for a moment, he dreamed he was the only student in an enormous classroom and defended himself with sentences in dialect against questions aimed at him from the front row by somebody in a foreign language. He woke up with his shirt damp, had a shower, and then made his way to Adriana’s house.
Clotilde had reported that Adriana had changed since time and the present had returned to the blue house with the ticking clock in the living room. Gregorius had run into her on the tram on his way back from the Liceu.
‘Sometimes,’ the maid had said and repeated the words patiently when he didn’t understand, ‘she stands looking at the clock as if she wants it to stop again, but then she turns away. Her walk has become faster and firmer. She gets up earlier. It is as if she would no longer … yes, as if she would no longer only endure the day.’
She ate more and once she had asked Clotilde to take a walk with her.
When the door of the blue house opened, Gregorius experienced a surprise. Adriana wasn’t wearing black. Only the black ribbon over the scar on her neck had remained. Skir
t and jacket were a light grey with thin blue stripes and she had put on a shiny white blouse. The trace of a smile showed that she enjoyed the amazement on Gregorius’s face.
He gave her back the letters to father and son.
‘Isn’t it insane?’ she said. ‘This silent communication. Éducation sentimentale, Amadeu used to say, would have to initiate us in the art of revealing our feelings and the experience that feelings become richer through words. How little that helped him with Papá!’ She looked at the floor. ‘And how little with me!’
He would like to read the notes on the scraps of paper on Amadeu’s desk, said Gregorius. When they entered the attic room, another surprise awaited Gregorius: the office chair was no longer diagonal to the desk. After thirty years, Adriana had managed to rescue it from the past and straighten it so that it was no longer as if her brother was about to stand up from it. When he looked at her, she stood looking down, her hands in her jacket pockets, a devoted old woman who was at the same time like a schoolgirl who has solved a difficult task and waits bashfully for praise. Gregorius put his hand on her shoulder for a moment.
He noticed that the blue china cup on the copper tray had been washed, the ashtray was empty. Only the sweets were still in the sugar bowl. Adriana had screwed the top on the ancient fountain pen and now she turned on the desk lamp with the emerald green shade. She pushed the desk chair back and, with a final hesitation, beckoned to Gregorius to sit down.
The gigantic book still lay on the reading desk, open in the middle, and the stack of papers was still there, too. After a questioning glance at Adriana, he picked up the book to be able to see the author and title. João De Lousada De Ledesma, O Mar Tenebroso, the dark, dreadful sea. It contained big, calligraphic fonts, engravings of coasts, Indian ink drawings of seafarers. Gregorius looked questioningly at Adriana.