Then the compartment door opened and a young man entered. He sat down opposite Gregorius and unfolded a tabloid newspaper with bold headlines. Gregorius stood up, took his bag and went to the end of the train where there was an empty compartment. , he said to himself, .
When the train reached Coimbra, he thought of the university on the hill and of the surveyor who went over the bridge in his imagination with an old-fashioned doctor’s bag, a thin, bent man in a grey smock, who wondered how he could make the people in the castle let him in.
When Silveira came home from the office that night, Gregorius met him in the hall. Silveira hesitated and narrowed his eyes.
‘You’re going home.’
Gregorius nodded.
‘Explain!’
44
‘If you’d given me time – I’d have made a Portuguese out of you,’ said Cecília. ‘When you’re back in your raw, guttural country, think of that: doce, suave, and we leap over the vowels.’
She pulled the green scarf over her lips and it blew when she spoke. She laughed when she saw his look.
‘The thing with the scarf, you like it. Don’t you?’ And she blew into it again.
She gave him her hand. ‘Your unbelievable memory. Because of that I won’t forget you.’
Gregorius held her hand too long. He hesitated. Finally he ventured, ‘Is there any reason why …’
‘You mean, why I always wear green? Yes, there is. You’ll hear it when you come back.’
Quando voltares. When you come back. Quando, she had said, not se. On the way to Vítor Coutinho, he imagined how it would be if he turned up at the language school on Monday morning. How her face would look; how her lips would move when she told him the reason for the eternal green.
‘Que quer? ’ Coutinho’s voice roared an hour later.
The door buzzed; the old man came down the steps with his pipe between his teeth. For a moment, he had to search in his memory.
‘Ah, c’est vous,’ he said then.
Today, too, the house smelled of stale food, dust and pipe tobacco, and today, too, Coutinho wore a washed-out shirt of indefinable colour.
Prado. O consultório azul. Had Gregorius found the man?
No idea why I give this to you, but that’s how it is, the old man had said to him when he had given him the New Testament on his previous visit. Gregorius had it with him but it remained in his pocket. He didn’t even mention it; the right words wouldn’t come. Intimacy, it is fleeting and deceptive as a mirage, Prado had written.
He was in a hurry, said Gregorius, and gave the old man his hand.
‘One more thing,’ the old man shouted at him across the courtyard. ‘Will you call the number now that you’re here again? The number on your forehead?’
Gregorius made the sign of uncertainty and waved.
He went to the Baixa, the lower part of the city, and paced the chessboard of the streets. In the café across from O’Kelly’s pharmacy, he had something to eat and kept waiting for the figure of the smoking pharmacist to appear behind the glass door. Did he want to have another talk with him? Did he want to?
All morning he felt that something wasn’t right with his farewells. That something was lacking. Now he knew what it was. He went to the photo shop and bought a camera with a telephoto lens. Back in the café, he aimed it at the part of the glass door through which O’Kelly could sometimes be seen and shot a whole roll of film.
Later he went back to Coutinho’s house in the Cemitério dos Prazeres and photographed the dilapidated building overgrown with ivy. This time he aimed at the window, but the old man didn’t appear. Finally, he gave up and went to the cemetery where he took pictures of the Prado family plot. Near the cemetery, he bought more film and then took the old tram through the city to visit Mariana Eça.
Red-gold Assam with biscuits. Big dark eyes. Reddish hair. Yes, she said, it would be better if he could explain his symptoms in his mother tongue. Gregorius said nothing about fainting in the library at Coimbra. They talked about João Eça.
‘His room is a little small,’ said Gregorius.
For a moment, anger flitted over her face, then she had herself under control again.
‘I suggested other homes to him, more comfortable ones. But that’s what he wanted. It should be basic, he said. After everything that was, it has to be basic.’
Gregorius left before the teapot was empty. He wished he hadn’t said anything about Eça’s room. It was ridiculous to have done so, as if, after spending four afternoons with João, he was closer to him than she, who had known him as a little girl. As if he understood João better. It was ridiculous. Even if it was right.
When he returned to Silveira’s house that afternoon, he put on the old, heavy glasses but they no longer felt comfortable.
It was too dark to take a photograph when he arrived at Mélodie’s house. The flash worked when he took a few pictures anyway. Today she wasn’t to be seen behind the illuminated windows. A girl who didn’t seem to touch the floor. The judge had got out of the car, stopped the traffic with his cane, made his way through the audience, and without looking at his daughter in the Mao cap, had tossed a handful of coins into the open violin case. Gregorius gazed up at the cedars that had looked blood red to Adriana just before her brother had stuck the knife in her throat.
Now Gregorius saw a man at one of the windows. That decided the issue of whether or not he should ring the bell. In a bar where he had once been, he drank a coffee and smoked a cigarette, as before. Then he went over to the citadel and imprinted Lisbon at night on his memory.
At closing time O’Kelly was there to lock up the shop. A few minutes later, when he entered the street, Gregorius followed him again, but at a safe distance this time. When he saw him turn into the side street where the chess club was, Gregorius went back to take a picture of the lighted pharmacy.
45
On Saturday morning, Filipe drove Gregorius to the Liceu. They packed up the camping gear and Gregorius took the pictures of Isfahan off the walls. Then he sent the chauffeur away.
It was a warm sunny day and April was only a week away. Gregorius sat down on the moss on the front steps. I sat on the mossy steps and thought of my father’s imperious wish that I might become a doctor – one who might release people like him from pain. I loved him for his trust and cursed him for the crushing burden he imposed on me with his touching wish.
Suddenly Gregorius began to weep. He took off the glasses, buried his head between his knees and let the tears drip freely on to the moss. Em vão, In vain, had been one of Prado’s favorite phrases, Maria João had said. Gregorius said the words and repeated them, slowly, then faster, until they merged into one another and with the tears.
Later he went up to Prado’s classroom and photographed the view of the girls’ school. From the girls’ school, he got the opposite view: the window where Maria João had seen the points of light in Prado’s opera glasses.
He told Maria João about the pictures when he sat in her kitchen at noon. And then, all at once, it broke out of him; he talked of fainting in Coimbra, of forgetting the Homeric word, and of the panicky fear of a neurological examination.
Later they sat together at the kitchen table and read what Maria João’s encyclopaedia said about dizziness. It could have completely harmless causes, Maria João said, and showed him the sentences, moving her index finger along as she translated the important words.
Tumour. Gregorius pointed silently to the word. Yes, of course, said Maria João, but he had to read what it said, mainly, that in this case dizziness doesn’t appear without other, more serious signs of breakdown, which didn’t appear in him.
She was glad, she said at parting, that he had taken her along on the trip into the past. In this way, she could feel the peculiar blend of closeness and distance that was the essence of her relationship with Amadeu. Then she went to the cupboard and took out the big box with the marquetry lid. She handed him the sealed envelope with Prado’s not
es about Fátima.
‘I won’t read it, as I said,’ she said. ‘And I think it’s better off with you. Maybe, in the end, you’re the one who knows him best of all of us. I’m grateful for the way you’ve talked about him.’
Later, when Gregorius sat on the ferry across the Tagus, he pictured Maria João waving goodbye until he had disappeared from view. She was the one he had met last, and she was the one he would miss most. Would he write and tell her how the examination had turned out? she had asked him.
46
When Gregorius stood at the door, João Eça squinted and his features hardened as if he was anticipating great pain.
‘It’s Saturday,’ he said.
They sat down in the usual places. The chessboard wasn’t there; the table looked naked.
Gregorius told him about the dizziness, the fear, the fishermen at the end of the world.
‘So you won’t be coming any more,’ said Eça.
Instead of Gregorius and his worries, he spoke about himself, which, in anyone else, would have seemed strange to Gregorius. But not in this tortured, taciturn, lonely man. Eça’s words were some of the most precious he had heard.
If the dizziness turned out to be nothing and the doctors managed to treat it, he would come back, he said. To learn Portuguese properly and write the history of the Portuguese Resistance. He said it in a firm voice, but the confidence he forced into it sounded hollow, and he was sure that it sounded hollow to Eça too.
With shaking hands, Eça took the chessboard off the shelf and lined up the pieces. For a while, he sat there with his eyes closed. Then he stood up and took a book of chess games from the shelf.
‘Here. Alekhine against Capablanca. I’d like us to play it together.’
‘Art against science,’ said Gregorius.
Eça smiled. Gregorius wished he could have captured this smile on film.
Sometimes he tried to imagine how the last minutes were after you took a lethal dose, Eça said in the middle of the game. First perhaps relief that it was now finally over and you had escaped from your undignified disability. A soupçon of pride at your own bravery. A regret that you hadn’t been so brave more often. A final summing-up, a final assurance that it was right and it would be wrong to call the ambulance. Hope and composure to the last. Waiting for the cloudiness and numbness in fingertips and lips.
‘And then suddenly a tremendous panic, a convulsion, the crazy wish that it might not be the end. An internal flooding, a hot current of will to live that sweeps everything aside and makes all thoughts and decisions appear artificial, stilted, absurd. And then? What then?’
He didn’t know, said Gregorius, and then he took out Prado’s book and read aloud:
Wasn’t it obvious, simple and clear what her horror consisted of when she received news of her impending death at this moment? I held the bleary-eyed face in the morning sun and thought: They simply wanted more of the stuff of their life, however light or heavy, barren or lush this life may be. They don’t want it to end, even if they can no longer miss the lacking life after the end – and know that.
Eça took the book and read, first, this passage, then the whole conversation with Jorge about death.
‘O’Kelly,’ he said finally. ‘Smoking himself to death. “So what?” he said when anyone mentioned it. I picture his face: Kiss my ass, he used to say And then fear got to him after all. Merda.’
By the time the game was over and Alekhine had won, it was beginning to grow dark. Gregorius took Eça’s cup and drank the last sip of tea. At the door, they stood facing each other. Gregorius felt himself shaking. Eça’s hands grabbed his shoulders and now he felt his head against his cheek. Eça sobbed aloud, Gregorius could feel the movement of his Adam’s apple. With a violent shove that made Gregorius totter, Eça pushed away from him and opened the door, looking down. Before Gregorius turned the corner in the hall, he looked back. Eça stood in the middle of the hall and watched him. He had never done that before.
On the street, Gregorius went behind some bushes and waited. Eça came out on to the balcony and lit a cigarette. Gregorius shot a whole roll of film.
On the return journey he saw nothing of the Tagus, but saw and felt João Eça. From the Praça do Comércio, he walked slowly towards Bairro Alto and sat down in a café near the blue house.
47
He let one quarter-hour after another pass. Adriana. That would be the hardest goodbye.
She opened the door and immediately read his face correctly. ‘Something’s happened,’ she said.
A routine medical examination with his doctor in Bern, said Gregorius. Yes, he might well come back. He was amazed at how calmly she took it; it almost offended him a little.
She started breathing more heavily than before. Then she pulled herself together, stood up and took out a notebook. She’d like to have his phone number in Bern, she said.
Gregorius raised his eyebrows in surprise. Then she pointed to the little table in the corner where there was a telephone.
‘Since yesterday,’ she said. And she wanted to show him something else. She led the way to the attic.
The mountains of books on the bare floorboards in Amadeu’s room had disappeared. The books were now on a shelf in the corner. She watched him expectantly. He nodded, went to her and touched her arm.
Now she pulled out the drawer of Amadeu’s desk, untied the ribbon holding the cardboard cover together and took out three sheets of paper.
‘He wrote it afterwards, after the girl,’ she said. Her gaunt breasts rose and fell. ‘The writing is suddenly so small. When I saw it, I thought: he wanted to hide it from himself.’
She slid her eyes over the text. ‘It destroys everything. Everything.’
She put the sheets in an envelope and handed it to Gregorius.
‘He was no longer himself. I’d like … please take it. Far away. Very far away.’
Later Gregorius cursed himself. He asked to have a last look at the examining room where Prado had saved Mendes’s life, where the map of the brain had hung and where he had buried Jorge’s chess set.
‘He really likes to work down here,’ said Adriana, when they stood in the office. ‘With me. Together with me.’ She stroked the examination table. ‘They all love him. Love and admire him.’
She smiled a ghostly light, distant smile.
‘Many come, even when they don’t need to. They make up something. Just to see him.’
Gregorius’s thoughts raced. He went to the table with the antiquated syringes, and picked one up. Yes, this was the way syringes used to look, he said. How different they were today!
The words didn’t reach Adriana; she was tugging at the paper cloth on the examination table. A remnant of the smile he had seen before still lay on her features.
Did she know what had become of the map of the brain? he asked. Today, it had to be a rarity.
‘“Why do you need it?” I sometimes ask him. “Bodies are transparent to you.” “It’s just a map,” he says then. He loves maps. Land maps. Railway maps. In Coimbra, when he was at college, he once criticized a standard work of anatomy. The professors didn’t like him. He is impudent. Simply superior.’
Gregorius knew only one solution to her lapse into the present tense. He looked at the clock.
‘I’m late,’ he said. ‘Can I use your phone?’
He opened the door and went out, into the vestibule of the house.
Her face was distraught as she locked the office. A vertical line divided her forehead and made her look like somebody ruled by darkness and confusion.
Gregorius went to the stairs.
‘Adeus,’ said Adriana and unlocked the front door.
It was the bitter, hostile voice he remembered from the first visit. She stood straight as a candle and faced the whole world brazenly.
Gregorius went to her slowly and stood still before her. He looked her in the eye. Her look was sealed and cold. He didn’t hold out his hand. He knew she wouldn’t take it. r />
‘Adieu,’ he said. ‘All the best.’ Then he was outside.
48
Gregorius gave Silveira the photocopy of Prado’s book. He had wandered through the city for more than an hour until he found a shop that was still open where you could make copies.
‘That’s …’ said Silveira in a hoarse voice. ‘I …’
Then they talked about the dizziness. His sister, whose eyesight was failing, said Silveira, had suffered from dizziness for decades; they couldn’t find the cause, she simply got used to it.
‘I went to the neurologist with her once. And left his office with the feeling of being in the Stone Age. Our knowledge of the brain is still so primitive. A few areals, a few examples of neural activity, a few bits of brain tissue. We don’t know more. I had the feeling they don’t even know where they should search.’
They spoke of the fear that comes with uncertainty. Suddenly Gregorius felt that something was bothering him. It lasted until he realized what it was: the day before yesterday, on his return, the conversation with Silveira about the trip; today the conversation with João Eça; now Silveira again. Could two intimacies coexist? He was glad he hadn’t told Eça anything about the fainting in the library at Coimbra so that he had something he shared only with Silveira.
So what was the Homeric word he had forgotten? Silveira asked now. , said Gregorius, an iron shovel to clean the floor of the hall.
Silveira laughed and Gregorius joined in. They laughed and laughed, they roared with laughter, two men, who, for a moment, were able to rise above all fear, all sadness, all disappointment and over all their weariness of life. Who were linked in laughter in a precious way, even if the fear, the sadness and the disappointment were all their own and created their own loneliness for them.