Night Train to Lisbon
Yes. What he had been looking for, without being aware of it, was a word that appeared in Homer only one single time. It was as if something hidden in the wings of memory wanted to test whether his ability to remember was still as good as ever. His breath speeded up. The word didn’t come. It didn’t come.
The guide moved through the room with a group of chattering people. Gregorius pushed past them as far back as he could. He heard the door to the library close and the key turn in the lock.
His heart still pounding, he ran to the shelf and took out The Odyssey. The old, stiff leather cut his palms with its sharp edges. He leafed through the volume frantically and blew the dust into the room. The word wasn’t where he had expected to find it. It wasn’t there.
He tried to breathe calmly. As if a layer of cloud went through him, he felt a dizziness that came and went. Methodically, he went through the whole epic in his mind. No other passage was possible. But the result of the exercise was that now the supposed certainty at the start of his search began to crumble. The floor began to sway and this time it wasn’t dizziness. Had he deceived himself in the worst way, and it was The Iliad? He took the book off the shelf and leafed through it mindlessly. The movements of his hand were empty and mechanical, the goal forgotten; from one moment to the next, Gregorius felt the cushion of air surrounding him, he tried to stamp his feet, flailed his arms, the book fell from his hand, his knees gave way, and he slid to the floor in a feeble motion.
When he came to, he struggled to find his glasses that lay an arm’s length away. He looked at his watch. No more than a quarter of an hour could have passed. Sitting up, he leaned his back against the wall. Minutes went by when he only breathed, glad that he hadn’t hurt himself and that his glasses had remained intact.
And then, quite suddenly, panic flared up in him. Was this forgetting the beginning of something? A first, tiny island of forgetting? Would it grow and would others join it? We are gravel-covered slopes of forgetting, Prado had written somewhere. What if an avalanche of gravel now overcame him and ripped away all the precious words? He grabbed his head with his hands and pressed it as if he could thus prevent more words from disappearing. He examined object after object in his field of vision and gave every item its name, first in dialect, then in High German, French and English and finally in Portuguese. None was lacking and slowly he calmed down.
When the door was unlocked for the next group of visitors, he waited in the corner, mingled with the people for a moment and then disappeared. A dark blue sky arched over Coimbra. At a café, he drank a camomile tea in small sips. His stomach relaxed and he felt he could eat something.
The students lay on the grass in the warm March sunshine. A man and a woman, entangled in each other, suddenly burst into loud laughter, threw away their cigarettes, got up with fluid, supple movements and started dancing, as lightly and loosely as if there were no gravity. Gregorius felt the undertow of memory and let himself go. And suddenly it was there, the scene he hadn’t thought about in decades.
No errors, but a bit clumsy, the Latin professor had said when Gregorius translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the lecture hall. A December afternoon, snowflakes, electric light. Girls grinning. A little more dancing! the man in the bow tie and the red scarf had called. Gregorius had felt the whole weight of his body on the bench. The bench had creaked when he moved. The remaining time, when the others’ turn came, he had sat there numb. The numbness had lasted until the end of the class when he went through the arbour decorated for Christmas.
After the holidays, he hadn’t gone to this class any more. He had avoided the man with the red scarf and evaded the other professors as well. From then on, he had studied only at home.
Now he paid and went through the Mondego, called O Rio dos Poetas, back to the hotel. Do you find me boring? How? But Mundus, you can’t ask me such questions! Why did all these things hurt so much, even now? Why hadn’t he managed in twenty, thirty years to shake them off?
When Gregorius woke up in the hotel two hours later, the sun was just going down. Natalie Rubin had walked with clacking high heels over the marble of the corridors in the University of Bern. Standing at the front of an empty lecture hall, he had given a lecture about words that appeared in Greek literature only once. He wanted to write down the words, but the board was so slippery that the chalk slid off and when he tried to say the words, he had forgotten them. Estefânia Espinhosa had also flitted through his fitful sleep, a figure with shining eyes and an olive complexion, silent at first, then giving a lecture under a gigantic, gold-covered dome about subjects that didn’t exist. Doxiades had interrupted her. Come home, he had said, we’ll examine you on Bubenbergplatz.
Gregorius sat on the edge of the bed. The Homeric word didn’t come now either. And the uncertainty about the passage in which it appeared began to torment him again. There was no point picking up The Iliad. It was in The Odyssey. It was there. He knew it. But where?
The next train to Lisbon, they had found out downstairs at the reception desk, wasn’t until the next morning. He reached for the big book about the dark sea and read more of what El Edrisi, the Muslim geographer, had written: Nobody knows – we are told – what is in this sea, nor can it be explored, for there are many obstacles that confront the sailor: the profound darkness, the high waves, the frequent storms, the countless monsters that inhabit it, and the strong winds. He would have liked to make photocopies of Estefânia Espinhosa’s two articles about Finisterre, but had been unable to ask the library staff because he lacked the vocabulary.
He sat still for a while. You would be wise to have some tests, Doxiades had said. And he also heard the voice of Maria João: You shouldn’t take it lightly.
He took a shower, packed and asked the baffled woman at the reception desk to call a taxi. The car rental agency at the railway station was still open. They would also have to charge for today, said the man. Gregorius nodded, signed for two more days and went to the parking lot.
He had learned to drive as a student, with the money he earned from teaching. That had been thirty-four years ago. Since then, he hadn’t driven; the yellowed licence with the youthful photo and the stipulation, in bold print, about wearing glasses and not driving at night, had lain unused in the folder of his travel documents. The man at the car rental agency had frowned as he looked back and forth between the photo and the real face, but he hadn’t said anything.
Behind the wheel of the big car, Gregorius waited until his breathing had calmed down. Slowly, he tried all the knobs and switches. With cold hands he started the engine, put it in reverse, released the clutch and stalled the engine. Frightened by the violent jolt, he shut his eyes and waited again until his breath was calm. At the second attempt, the car lollopped along, and Gregorius backed out of the parking space. He took the curves to the exit ramp at snail’s pace. At a traffic signal on the edge of the city, the car stalled, then it settled down.
He did the highway to Viana do Castelo in two hours. He sat calmly behind the wheel and stayed in the right lane. He began to enjoy the trip. He managed to push the issue of the Homeric word so far into the background that it could almost be called forgetting. Becoming cocky, he pressed the accelerator and held the steering wheel with outstretched arms.
A car with blinding headlights came towards him in the opposite lane. Everything began to spin, Gregorius eased up on the throttle, slid on to the hard shoulder at the right, pulled up on the grass and came to a stop centimetres from the guardrail. Dashing cones of light flowed away above him. At the next rest stop, he got out and carefully inhaled the cool night air. You should come home. Talk to the doctors in your mother tongue.
An hour later, beyond Valença do Minho, he reached the border. Two members of the Guardia Civil with machine guns waved him through. From Tui, he took the highway through Vigo, Pontevedra and further north to Santiago. Shortly before midnight, he stopped and studied the map as he ate in a diner. There was no other solution: if he didn’t want to make an
enormous detour through the Cape of Santa Eugenia, he had to go through Padrón on the mountain road to Noia; the rest was straightforward: keep along the coast to Finisterre. He had never driven on mountain roads and his mind pictured the Swiss passes where the driver of the post van constantly had to swing the steering wheel back and forth.
The people around him spoke Galician. He didn’t understand a word. He was tired. He had forgotten the word. He, Mundus, had forgotten a word in Homer. Under the table, he pressed his feet on the floor to dissipate the cushion of air. He was afraid. Fear and foreign language don’t go well together.
It was easier than he had thought. In sharp, blind curves, he slowed down to a crawl, but at night, because of the headlights, you had more warning of oncoming cars than in the day. The traffic thinned out; it was after two o’clock in the morning. When he realized that he couldn’t simply stop on the narrow mountain road if the dizziness came on, he panicked. But then, when a sign indicated that Noia was close, he grew bold and cut corners. A little hard. But Mundus, you can’t ask me such things! Why hadn’t Florence simply lied! You boring? Why, absolutely not!
Was it really that you simply shook off offences? We are expanded far into the past, Prado had noted. That comes from our feelings, especially the deep ones, those that determine who we are and what it is like to be us. For these feelings are not related to time; they don’t know it and they don’t acknowledge it.
From Noia to Finisterre, it was a hundred and fifty kilometres on good roads. You didn’t see the sea, but you imagined it. It was coming up to four o’clock. Now and then Gregorius stopped. It wasn’t dizziness, he decided every time, it was simply that his brain seemed to be swimming in his skull with fatigue. After four dark petrol stations, he finally found one that was open. How far was Finisterre? he asked the sleepy garage attendant. ‘Pues, el fin del mundo! ’ he laughed.
When Gregorius entered Finisterre, dawn was beginning to break through a cloud-covered sky. The first customer, he drank a cup of coffee in a bar. Wide awake and very solid, he stood on the stone floor. The word would come to him when he least expected it, that’s how memory was, he knew that. He was enjoying this crazy trip and being here now, and took the cigarette the innkeeper offered him. After the second drag, he felt slightly dizzy. ‘Vértigo,’ he said to the innkeeper. ‘I’m an expert in dizziness. There are a whole lot of kinds and I know them all.’ The innkeeper didn’t understand and wiped the counter vigorously.
Gregorius drove the few kilometres to the Cape with the window open. The salty sea air was wonderful and he drove very slowly like someone savouring anticipation. The road ended in a harbour with fishing boats. The fishermen had recently returned and were standing smoking together. All of a sudden – he no longer knew how it had happened – he was standing with the fishermen and smoking their cigarettes.
Were they content with their life? Mundus, a Bernese philologist of ancient languages, had asked the Galician fishermen at the end of the world about their outlook on life. Gregorius enjoyed it; he enjoyed it enormously. Joy at the absurdity of his questions blended with fatigue, euphoria and an unfamiliar feeling of liberation.
The fishermen didn’t understand his questions and Gregorius had to repeat them twice in his broken Spanish. ‘Contento? ’ one of them finally shouted. ‘We don’t know anything else!’ They laughed and kept on laughing until the laughter became more like a roar, Gregorius joining in so passionately that his eyes began to water.
He put his hand on the shoulder of one of the men and turned him to face the sea.
‘Siempre derecho, más y más – nada! ’ he shouted into a gust of wind.
‘America!’ shouted the man. ‘America!’
From the inside pocket of his jacket, he took out the photo of a girl in blue jeans, boots, and a cowboy hat.
‘Mi hija! ’ My daughter! He gestured towards the sea.
The others ripped the picture out of his hand.
‘Qué guapa es!’ How pretty she is, they all shouted together.
Gregorius laughed and gesticulated and laughed. The others tapped him on the shoulders, right and left and right. They were rough blows and Gregorius staggered. The fishermen were spinning around, the sea was spinning around, the roar of the wind became a roar in the ear, it swelled on and on, to disappear quite suddenly in a silence that swallowed everything.
When he came to, he was lying on the seat of a boat with frightened faces looking down on him. He sat up. His head hurt. He refused the bottle of liquor they offered him. The dizziness had passed, he said, and added: ‘El fin del mundo! ’ They laughed with relief. He shook off calloused, gigantic hands, clambered out of the boat, and sat down behind the steering wheel of the car. He was glad the engine started immediately. The fishermen, their hands in the pockets of their oilskins, watched him go.
In the town, he took a room in a boarding house and slept until early afternoon. It had cleared up in the meantime and become warmer. Nevertheless, he was freezing when he drove to the Cape at dusk. He sat down on a rock and watched the light in the west grow weaker until it finally died out completely. O mar tenebroso. The black waves crashed, the light foam washed over the beach with a menacing rustle. The word from Homer didn’t come. It didn’t come.
Was this word there at all? Was it ultimately not his memory but his mind that had failed him? How could a person almost lose his mind because a word, a single word, that occurred one single time, had escaped him? He might torment himself in the lecture hall taking an examination. But facing the raging sea? Shouldn’t the black water merging seamlessly into the night sky simply wash away such cares as completely meaningless, absurd, of concern only to someone who had lost all sense of proportion?
He was homesick. He shut his eyes. He imagined walking from Bundesterrasse to the Kirchenfeldbrücke. Through the arcades of Spitalgasse, Marktgasse and Kramgasse, he went down to the Bärengraben. In the cathedral, he heard the Christmas Oratorio. He got off the train in Bern and entered his flat. He took the Portuguese language course off the record player and put it in the broom cupboard. Then he lay down on the bed, glad to know that nothing had changed in his absence.
It was quite unlikely that Prado and Estefânia Espinhosa had come here, he thought, returning to the present. More than unlikely. Nothing suggested it, nothing in the least.
Freezing cold and with his jacket damp, Gregorius went to the car. In the dark, the car looked enormous. Like a monster that nobody could drive back to Coimbra intact, least of all him.
Later, he tried to get something to eat from a café opposite the boarding house, but it was just about to close. At the reception desk, he asked for a few sheets of paper, then he sat down at the tiny table in his room and translated what El Edrisi, the Muslim geographer, had written into Latin, Greek and Hebrew. He had hoped that writing Greek letters would bring back the lost word. But nothing happened; the space of memory remained silent and empty.
No, it wasn’t that the rippling expanse of the sea made retaining and forgetting of words and phrases meaningless. It wasn’t so at all. A single word among words, a single phrase among phrases: they were untouchable, absolutely untouchable by the mass of blind, wordless water, and that would remain so even if the whole universe became a world of countless deluges, dripping nonstop from the skies. If there was only one word in the universe, one single word, then it wouldn’t be a word, but if it were one, it would be mightier and more illuminating than all floods beyond all horizons.
Slowly Gregorius calmed down. Before he went to sleep, he looked out of the window at the parked car. Tomorrow morning, it would take him back to Coimbra.
Exhausted and fearful after an uneasy sleep, he took the journey in short shifts. During the breaks, he was regularly haunted by dream images of the night. He had been in Isfahan and it had been by the sea. The city with its minarets and domes of shining dark blue and glittering gold, had risen against a bright horizon and therefore he was frightened when he looked at the sea and
saw it raging black and roaring before the desert city. A hot, dry wind drove damp, heavy air into his face. For the first time, he had dreamed of Prado. The goldsmith of words was only present in the broad arena of the dream, wordless and elegant, and with his ear to Adriana’s enormous tape recorder. Gregorius searched for the sound of his voice.
In Viana do Castelo, shortly before reaching the highway to Porto and Coimbra, Gregorius felt that the lost word from The Odyssey was on the tip of his tongue. Behind the wheel, he shut his eyes instinctively and tried with all his might to keep himself from sinking back into forgetting. A cacophony of horns startled him. At the last second, he was able to turn the wheel sharply, pull the car back from the oncoming lane where it had drifted, and prevent a head-on collision. At the next rest stop, he sat quietly in the car until the painful throbbing of the blood in his brain subsided. Then he drove behind a slow truck to Porto. The woman at the car rental agency was not exactly pleased that he wanted to return the car here and not in Coimbra. But seeing the tension in his face, she finally agreed.
When the train to Coimbra and Lisbon pulled out of the station, Gregorius leaned his head back, exhausted. He thought of the farewells in store for him in Lisbon. That’s the meaning of a farewell in the full, important sense of the word: that two people, before they part from each other, reach an understanding of how they have seen and experienced each other, Prado had written in his letter to the mother. Saying goodbye is something that only you can do, but it means subjecting yourself to the scrutiny of the other. The train got under way. The fear of the accident he had missed by a hair’s-breadth began to fade. Until he reached Lisbon, he didn’t want to think of anything at all.
Just as he had managed to empty his mind, helped by the monotonous beat of the wheels, the lost word was suddenly there: , an iron shovel for cleaning the floor of the hall. And now he also knew where to find it: in The Odyssey, at the end of the twenty-second book.