37
Solidão por proscrição, loneliness through ostracism, that was what had preoccupied Prado at the end. That we need the respect and affection of others and that that makes us dependent on them. How far he had come! Gregorius sat in Silveira’s living room and re-read the previous note about loneliness that Adriana had put into the book.
SOLIDÃO FURIOSA.FURIOUS LONELINESS. Is it so that everything we do is done out of fear of loneliness? Is that why we renounce all the things we will regret at the end of life? Is that why we so seldom say what we think? Why else do we hold on to all these broken marriages, false friendships, boring birthday parties? What would happen if we refused all that, put an end to the skulking blackmail and stood on our own? If we let our enslaved wishes and the fury at our enslavement rise high as a fountain? For the feared loneliness – what does it really consist of? Of the silence of absent reproaches? Of not needing to creep through the minefield of marital lies and friendly half-truths while holding our breath? Of the freedom not to have anybody across from us at meals? Of the fullness of time that yawns when the barrage of appointments falls silent? Aren’t those wonderful things? A heavenly situation? So why the fear of it? Is it ultimately a fear that exists only because we haven’t thought through its object? A fear we have been talked into by thoughtless parents, teachers and priests? And why are we so sure the others wouldn’t envy us if they saw how great our freedom has become? And that they didn’t seek our company as a result?
He hadn’t then known the icy wind of the ostracism he was to experience twice later: when he saved Mendes and when he took Estefânia Espinhosa out of the country. This earlier note showed him as the open-minded iconoclast who didn’t shrink from delivering a blasphemous speech to a faculty of teachers, including priests. He had written as a result of the security given him by his friendship with Jorge. This security, thought Gregorius, must have helped him endure being spat upon before the enraged mob. And then it had been withdrawn. The demands of life were simply too many and too massive for our feelings to survive them intact, he had said when he was at college in Coimbra. To Jorge, of all people.
Now his shrewd prediction had come true and he had remained in the chill of unbearable isolation, which even his sister’s care could do nothing to alleviate it. The loyalty he had considered an anchor against the tides of feelings – it too had turned out to be fragile. Never again did he go to meetings of the Resistance, Adriana had said. He only visited João Eça in prison. Permission for that was the one token of gratitude he he would accept from Mendes. His hands, Adriana, he had said when he came back, his hands. They once played Schubert.
After Jorge’s last visit Amadeu had forbidden Adriana to open the office windows to dispel the lingering smell of smoke. The patients complained about it but the windows remained closed for days. He inhaled the stale air like a memory drug. When ventilation could no longer be avoided, he sat slumped in a chair and his life force seemed to leave the room along with the smoke.
‘Come,’ Adriana had said to Gregorius. ‘I want to show you something.’
They went down to the office. In a corner of the floor was a small rug. Adriana shoved it aside with her foot. The mortar had been loosened and one of the floor tiles had been removed. Adriana went down on her knees and lifted out the tile. Underneath, a hollow had been chiselled into the floor in which there was a folded chessboard and a box. Adriana opened the box and showed Gregorius the carved chess pieces.
Gregorius couldn’t catch his breath, and opened a window to inhale the cool night air. He was overcome by dizziness and had to hold on to the windowsill.
‘I surprised him at that,’ said Adriana. She had replaced the tile and had come to stand next to Gregorius.
‘His face flushed flaming red. “I only wanted …” he began. “No reason to be embarrassed,” I said. That evening he was as vulnerable and fragile as a small child. Naturally, it looked like a grave for the chess set, for Jorge, for their friendship. But he hadn’t felt it like that at all, I discovered. It was more complicated. And somehow, also more hopeful. He hadn’t wanted to bury the set. He only wanted to push it over the borders of his world, without destroying it, and he wanted the certainty that he could take it out at any time. His world was now a world without Jorge. But Jorge was still there. He was still there. “Now, where he no longer is, it is as if I am no longer, either,” he had once said.
‘After that, for days he lacked self-confidence and his manner was almost servile to me. “So sentimental, the business with the chess set,” he finally burst out, as if I had made him speak.’
Gregorius thought of O’Kelly’s words: He tended to bombast, he didn’t want to admit it, but he knew it, and therefore he fought against kitsch at every opportunity, and he could be unjust in that, horribly unjust.
Now, in Silveira’s living room, he re-read the note about kitsch in Prado’s book:
Kitsch is the most misleading of all prisons. The bars are covered with the gold of simplistic, unreal feelings so that you mistake them for the pillars of a palace.
Adriana had given him a pile of papers, one of the piles from Prado’s desk, pressed between cardboard and tied with a red ribbon. ‘Those are things that aren’t in the book. The world mustn’t know of their existence,’ she had said.
Gregorius untied the ribbon, pushed back the cover, and started to read:
Jorge’s chess set. The way he handed it to me. Only he can do that. I don’t know anyone who can be so compelling. A compulsion I wouldn’t miss for anything in the world. Like his compelling moves on the board. What did he want to make up for? Is it even right to say: he wanted to make up for something? He didn’t say: “You misunderstood me back then about Estefânia.” He said: “I thought back then that we could talk about everything, everything that came into our heads. That’s what we had always done, don’t you remember?” When he said that, I thought for a few seconds, only a few seconds, that we could find each other again. It was a wonderful feeling. But it died out again. His gigantic nose, his tear ducts, his brown teeth. Earlier, that face had been inside me, a part of me. Now it remained outside me, stranger than the face of a stranger. There was such an ache in my chest, such an ache.
Why should it be sentimental, what I did with the chess set? Really, a simple, genuine gesture. And I did it only for myself, not for an audience. If someone does something just for himself and others happen to see him doing it, and think it sentimental, why should we care?
An hour later, when Gregorius entered the chess club, O’Kelly was involved in a complicated endgame. Pedro was also there, the man with the epileptic eyes and the snuffle, who reminded Gregorius of the lost tournament in Moutier. There was no board free.
‘Sit down here,’ said O’Kelly and pulled an empty chair up to his table.
All the way to the club, Gregorius had asked himself what he expected of it. What he wanted from O’Kelly. Clearly he couldn’t ask him what had happened back then with Estefânia Espinhosa and whether he would have been willing in all seriousness to sacrifice her. He hadn’t found the answer, but he couldn’t go back either.
Now, with the smoke of O’Kelly’s cigarette in his face, he suddenly knew that he wanted once more to experience sitting next to the man Prado had carried inside him for a lifetime, the man, as Father Bartolomeu had said, he had needed in order to be whole. The man he enjoyed losing to and to whom he had given a whole pharmacy without expecting gratitude. The man who was the first to laugh when the barking dog had broken through the painful silence after his scandalous speech at the Liceu.
‘Shall we?’ asked O’Kelly after he had won the endgame and parted from his partner.
Gregorius had never played like that against anybody. It wasn’t the game but the presence of the other person. Only his presence. And the question of what it must have felt like to be somebody whose life was filled with this man whose nicotine-stained fingers with the dirty nails moved the chess pieces with such merciless precision.
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‘What I recently told you, about Amadeu and me, I mean: forget it.’
O’Kelly looked at Gregorius with a look blending bashfulness and a furious willingness to throw everything away.
‘It was the wine. Everything was quite different.’
Gregorius nodded and hoped O’Kelly could see on his face his respect for that deep and complex friendship. Prado had asked himself if the soul was a place of facts or whether the alleged facts were only the deceptive shadows of stories we tell ourselves, about others and about ourselves.
Yes, said O’Kelly, that had been what had preoccupied Amadeu all his life. Inside a person, he said, it was much more complicated than our schematic, ridiculous explanations wanted to have us believe. Everything is much more complicated. The further one goes, the more complicated it becomes. ‘They got married because they fell in love and wanted to share their life’; ‘she stole because she needed money’; ‘he lied because he didn’t want to hurt someone’: what ridiculous stories! We are stratified creatures, full of abysses, with souls of quicksilver, with minds whose colour and shape change as in a kaleidoscope that is constantly shaken.
That sounded as if there were, after all, psychological facts, even very complicated ones, Jorge had objected.
No, no, Amadeu protested, we could improve our explanations to infinity and they’d still be false. And what is false is the assumption that there are truths to be discovered. The soul, Jorge, is a pure invention, our most brilliant invention, and its brilliance resides in the suggestion, the overwhelmingly plausible suggestion, that there is something in the soul to be discovered as in a real part of the world. The truth, Jorge, is quite different: we invented the soul to have a topic of conversation, something we can talk about when we meet one another. Just imagine if we couldn’t talk about the soul: what should we talk about with one another? It would be hell!
‘He could work himself up into a state of intoxication about that, then he really glowed, and when he saw that I was enjoying his intoxication, he said: You know, thinking is the second most beautiful thing. The most beautiful is poetry. If there were poetic thinking and thinking poetry – that would be paradise. Later when he began on his notes he wrote: I think they were an attempt to pave the way to this paradise.’
O’Kelly looked close to tears. He didn’t see that his queen was in danger. Gregorius made an insignificant move. They were the only two people in the room.
‘Once the intellectual argument became bitter and deadly serious. But it’s none of your business, it’s nobody’s business.’
He bit his lip.
‘Neither is João’s business up in Cacilhas.’
He took a drag at the cigarette and coughed.
‘“You’re fooling yourself,” he said to me. “You want it for another reason than the one you’ve fabricated for yourself.”
‘Those were his words, his damned, insulting words: the one you’ve fabricated for yourself. Can you imagine how it feels when somebody says that you’re only fabricating your reasons? Can you imagine how it feels when a friend, the friend, says that?
‘“How do you know that?” I yelled at him. “I think there is no true or false, or don’t you admit that any more?’’’
On O’Kelly’s unshaven face some red spots appeared.
‘You know, I had simply believed we could talk about everything that came into our minds. Everything. Romantic. Damned romantic, I know. But that’s how it was between us for more than forty years. Ever since the day he appeared in class in his expensive frock coat and without a satchel.
‘He was the one who had no fear of any thought. He was the one who had wanted to talk of the dying word of God in front of priests. And when I wanted to try out a bold and, I admit, horrible thought – I saw that I had overestimated him and our friendship. He looked at me as if I was a monster. Usually he could distinguish between a mere tried-out thought and one that actually set us in motion. He was the one who taught me this liberating difference. And suddenly he didn’t know anything about it any more. All the blood had drained from his face. In this one single second, I realized that the most horrible thing had happened: our lifelong affection had turned into hate. That was the moment, the dreadful moment, when we lost each other.’
Gregorius wanted O’Kelly to win the game. He wanted him to mate him with compelling moves. But Jorge had lost interest in the game and so Gregorius arranged a draw.
‘It’s simply not possible, unlimited openness,’ said Jorge, when they shook hands in the street. ‘It’s beyond us. Loneliness through the need to conceal, there’s that too.’
He exhaled smoke.
‘It’s been a long time, over thirty years. As if it were yesterday. I’m glad I have the pharmacy. I can live there in our friendship. And occasionally I succeed in thinking that we never lost each other. That he just died.’
38
For a good hour, Gregorius had been sneaking around Maria João’s house and asking himself why his heart was pounding. The great, untouched love of his life, Mélodie had called her. It wouldn’t surprise me if he never even kissed her. But nobody, no woman, measured up to her. If there was anybody who knew all his secrets, it was Maria João. In a certain sense, she, only she, knew who he was. And Jorge had said that she had been the only woman Amadeu really had thought something of. Maria, my God yes, Maria, he had said.
When she opened the door, everything became clear to Gregorius. She held a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and warmed the other hand on it. The look in the clear brown eyes was scrutinizing but not threatening. She wasn’t a beautiful woman. She wasn’t a woman you’d turn round to look at in the street. Nor had she been such a woman in her youth. But Gregorius had never met a woman who radiated such inconspicuous and yet such perfect confidence and independence. She must have been over eighty, but it wouldn’t have been surprising if she were still confidently practising her profession.
‘Depends on what you want,’ she said when Gregorius asked if he might come in. He didn’t want to stand in a doorway again and produce the portrait of Prado like a calling card. The calm, open look gave him the courage for a direct opening.
‘I’m interested in the life and notes of Amadeu de Prado,’ he said in French. ‘I have learned that you knew him. Knew him better than anybody else.’
You might think from looking at her that nothing could disturb her equilibrium. But it happened now. Not on the surface. In her dark blue wool dress, she leaned on the door frame as sure and calm as before, and the free hand kept rubbing the warm cup, only a little more slowly. Her eyelids twitched and lines of concentration appeared on her forehead as if she had suddenly been confronted with something unexpected that could have consequences. She said nothing. For a few seconds, she closed her eyes. Then she had herself under control again.
‘I don’t know if I want to go back there,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t make sense for you to stand out here in the rain.’
The French words came without hesitation, and her accent had the sleepy elegance of a Portuguese woman who also speaks fluent French.
Who was he? she wanted to know after she had given him a cup of coffee, not with the affected movements of an attentive hostess, but with the sober, plain movements of someone carrying out the practical essentials.
Gregorius told her about the Spanish bookshop in Bern and the sentences the bookseller had translated for him. Of the thousand experiences we have, we find language for one at most and even this one merely by chance and without the care it deserves. Among all these unexpressed experiences are those that are hidden and that have given our life its shape, its colour and its melody.
Maria João closed her eyes and her lips began to shake imperceptibly. She sank a little deeper into the chair. Her hands clasped a knee and let go of it as if she didn’t know what to do with them. Slowly her breath grew calmer. She opened her eyes.
‘You heard that and ran away from school,’ she said.
‘I ran away
from school and heard that,’ said Gregorius.
She smiled. She looked at me and gave me a smile that came from the experience of a well-lived life, Judge Prado had written.
‘Good. But it fits. It fits so well that you wanted to meet him. How did you get to me?’
When Gregorius had finished his story, she looked at him.
‘I don’t know anything about the book. I’d like to see it.’
She opened it, saw the picture and it was as if a double force of gravity pressed her into the chair. Behind her veined, almost transparent eyelids, the pupils raced. She made another attempt, opened her eyes and fixed them on the picture. Slowly, she ran her shrivelled hand over it and then she repeated the action. Now she leaned her hands on her knees, stood up and went out of the room without a word.
Gregorius picked up the book and studied the picture. He thought of the moment when he had sat in the café in Bubenbergplatz and had seen it for the first time. He thought of Prado’s voice from Adriana’s old tape recorder.
‘So now I’ve gone back there,’ said Maria João, sitting down in the chair again. ‘If it’s about the soul, there is little we can do. He used to say.’
Her face was more composed and he noticed that she had combed the stray strands of hair out of her face. She took the book and looked at the picture again.
‘Amadeu.’
In her mouth, the name sounded completely different than when spoken by the others. As if it couldn’t possibly belong to the same man.
‘He was so white and quiet, so terribly white and quiet. Perhaps it was because he consisted so much of language. I could hardly believe that words would never come from him again. Never again. The blood from the burst vein had washed them away, the words. All words. A bloody break in the dam of destructive force. As a nurse, I’ve seen a lot of dead people. But never did death seem so horrible to me. As something that simply shouldn’t have happened. As something absolutely unberable. Unbearable.’