Night Train to Lisbon

  I press my forehead to the compartment window and concentrate with all my might. I would like once, one single time, to grasp what is going on outside. Really grasp it. So that it doesn’t slip away from me again immediately. It fails. Everything goes much too fast, even when the train stops between stations. The next impression wipes away the last one. Memory is overheated, I’m breathlessly busy retrospectively assembling the fleeting images of the event into an illusion of something intelligible. I always come too late, how fast the light of attention to things scurries off. Everything is always already past. I’m always left behind empty-handed. Never am I there. Not even when the inside of the compartment is reflected at night in the windowpane.

  I love tunnels. They’re the symbol of hope: some time it will be bright again. If by chance it is not night.

  Sometimes I get a visit in the compartment. I don’t know how that’s possible despite the bolted and sealed door, but it does happen. Usually the visit comes at the wrong time. They’re people from the present, often also from the past. They come and go as they like, they’re inconsiderate and bother me. I have to talk with them. It’s all temporary, not binding, doomed to oblivion; conversations on a train. A few visitors disappear without a trace. Others leave sticky and stinking traces, ventilating doesn’t help. Then I’d like to rip out all the furnishings of the compartment and replace them with new ones.

  The trip is long. Some days I wish it were endless. Those are rare, precious days. Other days I’m glad to know that there will be a last tunnel, where the train will come to a halt for ever.

  When Gregorius got off the train, it was late afternoon. He took a room in a hotel on the other side of the Mondego, where he had a view of the old city on the Alcáçova Hill. The last sunbeams bathed the majestic buildings of the university, towering over everything, in a warm, golden light. Up there, in one of the steep narrow streets, Prado and O’Kelly had lived in a República, one of the student hostels dating from the Middle Ages.

  ‘He didn’t want to live differently from the others,’ Maria João had said. ‘Even though the noise from the room next door sometimes drove him to despair; he wasn’t used to that. But the family wealth from the big estates of previous generations sometimes weighed heavily on him. There were two words that wound him up like no others: colónia and latifundiário. Then he looked like a person who’s ready to shoot.

  ‘When I visited him, his clothes were deliberately casual. Why didn’t he wear the yellow ribbon of the college like the other medical students? I asked him.

  ‘“You know I don’t like uniforms; even the cap in the Liceu was repellent to me,” he said.

  ‘When I was about to leave and we were standing in the railway station, a student came on the platform wearing the dark blue ribbon of the literature faculty.

  ‘I looked at Amadeu. “It’s not the ribbon,” I said. “It’s the fact that it’s yellow. You’d be happy to wear the blue ribbon.”

  ‘“You do know,” he said, “that I don’t like people to see through me. Come again soon. Please.”

  ‘He had a way of saying por favor – I would have gone to the ends of the earth to hear it.’

  The street where Prado had lived was easy to find. Gregorius glanced into the hostel entrance and went up a few steps. In Coimbra, when the whole world seemed to belong to us. That’s how Jorge had described that time. In this house he and Prado had written down what it was that endowed lealdade, loyalty between people. A list that didn’t include love. Desire, pleasure, security. All feelings that disintegrate sooner or later. Loyalty was the only one that lasted. An act of a will, a commitment, a partisanship of the soul. Something that changed to necessity by chance encounters and the contingency of feelings. A breath of eternity, only a breath, but all the same, Prado had said. Gregorius pictured O’Kelly’s face. He deluded himself. We both deluded ourselves, he had said with the slowness of a drunk.

  In the university, Gregorius wanted to go immediately to the Biblioteca Joanina and the Sala Grande dos Actos, the places that had kept drawing Prado back here. But that was only possible at certain times, and he had missed the opening hours today.

  The Capela de São Miguel was open and Gregorius was the only visitor. He looked at the overwhelmingly beautiful baroque organ. I want to hear the swelling of the organ, this deluge of ethereal tones. I need it to counter the shrill absurdity of marches, Prado had said in his speech. Gregorius recalled the times he had been to church. Confirmation classes, the funerals of his parents. Our Father … How dull, joyless and naïve it had sounded! And all that, he thought now, had nothing to do with the sweeping poetry of the Greek and Hebrew texts. Nothing, absolutely nothing!

  Gregorius gave a start. Without meaning to, he had banged his fist on a bench and now looked round ashamed, but he was still alone. He dropped to his knees and did what Prado had done with his father’s twisted back: he tried to imagine how the posture felt from within. You would have to rip them out, Prado had said when he had passed the confessionals with Father Bartolomeu. Such humiliation!

  When Gregorius straightened up, the chapel was spinning rapidly. He clung to the bench and waited until the dizziness had passed. Then, as students rushed past him, he walked slowly along the corridors and entered a lecture hall where a lecture on jurisprudence was in progress. Sitting in the front row, he thought first of the lecture on Euripides when he had once failed to express his opinion. Then his thoughts slid back to other lectures he had attended as a student. And finally, he imagined the student Prado standing up in this very room and posing critical questions. Staid, prizewinning professors, leading authorities in their field, felt tested by him, Father Bartolomeu had said. But Prado had sat here not as an arrogant, know-it-all student. He had lived in the purgatory of doubt, tormented by the fear that he could miss himself. It was in Coimbra, sitting on a hard bench in the lecture hall, that I became aware: I can’t get off.

  Gregorius stayed until darkness fell on the grounds of the university and kept trying to be aware of the confusing feelings that accompanied him. Why did he suddenly think that here, in the most famous university of Portugal, he might have liked to stand in a lecture hall and share his comprehensive philosophical knowledge with students? Had he perhaps missed a possible life, one he could easily have led with his abilities and knowledge? Never before, not for a single hour, had he considered it a mistake that, as a student, he had stayed away from lectures after a few terms and devoted all his time to the ceaseless reading of texts. Why now, all of a sudden, this particular nostalgia? And was it really nostalgia?

  He had ordered a meal in a small pub. But when it arrived, it revolted him and he wanted to be out in the cool night air. The paper-thin cushion of air that had enclosed him this that was a trace stronger. As on the railway platform in Lisbon he walked with exaggerated firmness and that helped now, too.

  Joao de Lousada de Ledesma, O Mar Tenebroso. The title caught his eye he walked along the shelves of books in a second-hand bookshop. The book on Prado’s desk. The last thing he read. Gregorius took it off the shelf. The big calligraphic font, the engravings of coastlines, the Indian ink drawings of seafarers. Cabo Finisterre, he heard Adriana say, up in Galicia. It was like an idée fixe. He had a haunted, feverish expression on his face when he spoke of it.

  Gregorius sat down in a corner and leafed through the book until he came on the words of the twelfth-century Muslim geographer El Edrisi: From Santiago we went to Finisterre, as the peasants call it, a word that means the end of the world. You see nothing more than sky and water, and they say that the sea is so stormy that no one could travel on it, and so you can’t know what is on the other side. They told us that some, eager to fathom it, disappeared with their ships and none ever came back.

  It took a while for the thought to take shape in Gregorius’s mind. Much later I heard that she was working in Salamanca as a lecturer in history, João Eça had said about Estefânia Espinhosa. When she was working for the Resistance, she had a j
ob in the post office. After the flight with Prado, she had stayed in Spain and had studied history. Adriana had seen no connection between Prado’s trip to Spain and his sudden fanatical interest in Finisterre. Was there a link? If he and Estefânia Espinhosa had travelled to Finisterre because she had always been interested in the medieval fear of the endless stormy sea, an interest that had led to her studies? Had something happened on this trip to the end of the world that had upset Prado and moved him to return?

  But no, it was too absurd, too preposterous. And it was just as ridiculous to assume that the woman had also written a book about the fearsome sea. He really couldn’t waste the a book about the fearsome sea. He really couldn’t waste the bookseller’s time with that.

  ‘Let’s see,’ said the bookseller. ‘The same title – that’s almost out of the question. Violates good academic practice. We’ll check it with the name.’

  Estefânia Espinhosa, said the computer, had written two books. Both dealt with the beginnings of the Renaissance.

  ‘Not so far away, eh?’ said the bookseller. ‘But we can get much more precise information. Watch,’ and he called up the history department of the University of Salamanca.

  Estefânia Espinhosa had her own website, and right at the top they came upon the list of her publications: two entries about Finisterre, one in Portuguese, the other in Spanish. The second-hand bookseller grinned.

  ‘Don’t like the machine, but sometimes …’

  He called a specialized bookshop and they had one of the two books in stock.

  The shops would soon be closing. Gregorius, with the book about the dark sea under his arm, took off. Would there be a picture of the woman on the cover? He almost ripped the book out of the saleswoman’s hand and turned it over.

  Estefânia Espinhosa, born 1948 in Lisbon, currently a professor of early modern Spanish and Italian history at the University of Salamanca. And a portrait that explained everything.

  Gregorius bought the book and on the way to the hotel he stopped every few feet to look at the picture. She wasn’t only the ball, the red Irish ball in the Oxford college. She was much more than all red Irish balls together. He must have felt that she was the chance for him to be whole. As a man, I mean, he heard Maria João say. And the words of João Eça could not have been more apt: Estefânia, I think, was his chance to leave the courthouse at last, to be free to live his life according to his own wishes, according to his own passions, and to hell with the rest.

  So she had been twenty-four when she sat behind the steering wheel in front of the blue house and drove across the border with Prado, twenty-eight years older, away from O’Kelly, away from danger, into a new life.

  On the way back to the hotel, Gregorius passed the psychiatric clinic. He thought of Prado’s nervous breakdown after the shoplifting incident. Maria João had told him that he was mainly interested in those patients who, in a world of their own, paced back and forth and talked to themselves. Afterwards he was always on the lookout for such people and was amazed by how many of them there were on the street, in the bus, on the ferry, who shouted out their rage at imaginary enemies.

  ‘He wouldn’t have been Amadeu if he hadn’t spoken to them and listened to their stories. That had never happened to them and when he made the mistake of giving them his address, they arrived at his door the next day and Adriana had to throw them out.’

  In the hotel, Gregorius read one of the few notes in Prado’s book he didn’t yet know.

  O VENENO ARDENTE DO DESGOSTO. THE WHITE-HOT POISON OF ANGER. When others make us angry at them – at their shamelessness, injustice, inconsideration – then they exercise power over us, they proliferate and gnaw at our soul, then anger is like a white-hot poison that corrodes all mild, noble and balanced feelings and robs us of sleep. Sleepless, we turn on the light and are angry at the anger that has lodged like a succubus who sucks us dry and debilitates us. We are not only furious at the damage, but also that it develops in us all by itself, for while we sit on the edge of the bed with aching temples, the distant catalyst remains untouched by the corrosive force of the anger that eats at us. On the empty internal stage bathed in the harsh light of mute rage, we perform all by ourselves a drama with shadow figures and shadow words we hurl against enemies in helpless rage we feel as icy blazing fire in our bowels. And the greater our despair that it is only a shadow play and not a real discussion with the possibility of hurting the other and producing a balance of suffering, the wilder the poisonous shadows dance and haunt us even in the darkest catacombs of our dreams. (We will turn the tables, we think grimly, and all night long forge words that will produce in the other the effect of a fire bomb so that now he will be the one with the flames of indignation raging inside while we, soothed by schadenfreude, will drink our coffee in cheerful calm.)

  What could it mean to deal appropriately with anger? We really don’t want to be soulless creatures who remain thoroughly indifferent to what they come across, creatures whose appraisals consist only of cool, anemic judgements and nothing can shake them up because nothing really bothers them. Therefore, we can’t seriously wish not to know the experience of anger and instead persist in an equanimity that wouldn’t be distinguished from tedious insensibility. Anger also teaches us something about who we are. Therefore this is what I’d like to know: what can it mean to train ourselves in anger and imagine that we take advantage of its knowledge without being addicted to its poison?

  We can be sure that we will hold on to the deathbed as part of the last balance sheet – and this part will taste bitter as cyanide – that we have wasted too much, much too much strength and time on getting angry and getting even with others in a helpless shadow theatre which only we, who suffered impotently, knew anything about. What can we do to improve this balance sheet? Why did our parents, teachers and other instructors never talk to us about it? Why didn’t they tell something of this enormous significance? Not give us in this case any compass that could have helped us avoid wasting our soul on useless, self-destructive anger?

  Gregorius lay awake for a long time. Now and then he stood up and went to look out of the window. The upper part of the city with the university and the bell tower now, after midnight, looked barren, sacred, and a little menacing. He could imagine a surveyor waiting in vain to be allowed into the mysterious district.

  His head leaning on a mountain of pillows, Gregorius reread the sentences in which Prado had revealed more about himself than in all the others: Sometimes I have the startling thought: the train could go off the rails at any moment. Indeed I usually frighten myself with this thought. But in rare moments, it flashes through me like a lightning bolt.

  He didn’t know where the image came from, but all at once, Gregorius saw this Portuguese doctor who had dreamed of poetic thinking as paradise sitting among the pillars of a cloister, that had become a silent shelter for the derailed passenger. His derailment had been created when the incandescent lava of his tortured soul had scorched and washed away every trace of enslavement and strain in him. He had disappointed all expectations and broken all taboos, and that was his happiness. In the end, he was at peace with his disabled, judgemental father, the gentle dictatorship of the ambitious mother, and the lifelong stifling gratitude of the sister.

  And with himself, too, he had finally found peace. The homesickness had passed, he no longer needed Lisbon and the blue colour of safety. Now that he had let go of the internal storm tide and had become one with it, there was no longer any need for a defensive wall. Unhampered by himself, he could travel to the other end of the world. At last, he could travel the snowy steppes of Siberia to Vladivostok without having to think at every pounding of the wheels that the train was taking him farther and farther away from his blue Lisbon.

  Now the sunlight flooded the cloister garden, the pillars grew lighter and lighter and finally turned completely pale, so that only a shining depth remained where Gregorius lost his hold.

  He woke with a start, reeled to the bathroom and wa
shed his face. Then he called Doxiades. The Greek asked him to describe all the symptoms of his dizziness. Then he was silent for a few moments. Gregorius felt a creeping fear.

  ‘It can mean anything,’ said the Greek finally in his calm doctor’s voice. ‘It’s probably harmless, nothing that can’t be brought under control quickly. But you would be wise to have some tests. The Portuguese can do them just as well as we can here. But my gut feeling is that you should come home. Talk to the doctors in your mother tongue. Fear and foreign languages don’t go well together.’

  When Gregorius finally fell asleep again, the first glimmer of dawn was visible behind the university.

  43

  There were three hundred thousand volumes, said the tourist guide, and her high heels clacked on the marble floor of the Biblioteca Joanina. Gregorius hung back and looked around. Never had he seen anything like it. Rooms panelled in gold and in tropical woods, linked by arches reminiscent of triumphal arches, topped by the coat of arms of King João V who had founded the library in the early eighteenth century. Baroque shelves with galleries of delicate pillars. A portrait of João V. A red carpet that enhanced the impression of splendour. It was like a fairy tale.

  Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey, several editions in magnificent bindings that gave them the appearance of sacred texts. Gregorius let his eyes glide on.

  After a while, he felt his gaze travelling along the shelves carelessly. His thoughts had remained with Homer. It must have been these thoughts that made his heart pound, but he couldn’t figure out what they were about. He went into a corner, took off his glasses and closed his eyes. In the next room, he could hear the guide’s shrill voice. He pressed the palms of his hands to his ears and concentrated on the muffled silence. The seconds passed by and he could feel his blood throbbing.