Estefânia Espinhosa wore blue jeans and a dark blue sailor’s sweater. Despite the strands of grey, she looked as if she were in her mid-forties. She had made sandwiches and poured Gregorius a cup of tea. She needed time, she said.
Seeing Gregorius’s eyes slide over the bookshelves, she said he could take a closer look. He picked up the thick history books. How little he knew of the Iberian Peninsula and its history, he said. Then he told her of the books about the earthquake of Lisbon and the Black Death.
She made him tell her about the philology of ancient languages and kept asking questions. She wanted to know, he thought, what kind of person she would be telling about the trip with Prado. Or was she just playing for time?
Latin, she said at last. In a certain sense, Latin had been the beginning. ‘There was this boy, this student, who helped out in the post office. A timid boy who was in love with me and thought I didn’t notice it. He was studying Latin. Finis terrae, he said one day, when he picked up a letter to Finisterre. And then he recited a long Latin poem that also talked about the end of the world. I liked the way he recited Latin poetry while still sorting letters. He sensed that I liked it and kept on doing it all morning.
‘I started learning Latin secretly. I didn’t want him to know or he would have misunderstood. It was so improbable that somebody like me, a girl from the post office with a rotten education, would learn Latin. So improbable! I don’t know what appealed to me more: the language or this improbability.
‘I made rapid progress, I have a good memory. I began getting interested in Roman history. Read everything I could lay my hands on, and later, books about Portuguese, Spanish, Italian history. My mother had died when I was a child. I lived with my father who was on the railways. He had never read books. At first he was upset that I did. Later he was proud, a touching pride. I was twenty-three when the PIDE arrested him and sent him to Tarrafal for sabotage. But I can’t talk about that, not even today.
‘I met Jorge O’Kelly a few months later at a Resistance meeting. Papá’s arrest had been spoken about in the post office, and to my amazement, it turned out that a lot of my colleagues belonged to the Resistance. As for political things, I woke up to them with a jolt because of Papá’s arrest. Jorge was an important man in the group. He and João Eça. He fell head over heels in love with me. It flattered me. He tried to make me a star. I had this idea of starting a school for illiterates where everybody could meet unsuspected.
‘And there it happened. One evening Amadeu entered the room. After that everything was different. A new light fell on everything. It was the same for him, I felt that from the start.
‘I wanted it so much. I couldn’t sleep any more. I went to his office, kept going, despite his sister’s hateful looks. He wanted to take me in his arms. Inside him was an avalanche that could let go at any moment. But he rejected me. Jorge, he kept saying. What about Jorge? I began to hate Jorge.
‘Once I rang Amadeu’s doorbell at midnight. We walked a few streets, then he pulled me under an archway. The avalanche broke. ‘That mustn’t happen again,’ he said afterwards and forbade me to come back.
‘It was a long, tormenting winter. Amadeu didn’t come to meetings any more. Jorge was sick with jealousy.
‘It would be an exaggeration to say that I saw it coming. Yes, that would be an exaggeration. I was, however, aware that they were relying more and more on my memory. “What if something happens to me?” I said.’
Estefânia went out of the room. When she came back, she looked different. As if to pull herself together, she had washed her face and her hair was now tied in a ponytail. She stood at the window and smoked a whole cigarette with hasty drags. Then she went on.
‘It all went wrong at the end of February. The door opened much too slowly. Silently. He was wearing boots. No uniform, but boots. His boots, that was the first thing I saw when the door opened. Then the intelligent, cunning face. We knew it was Badajoz, one of Mendes’s people. As so often before, we started talking about the ç. Later, for a long time, I couldn’t see a ç without being forced to think of Badajoz. The bench creaked when he sat down. João Eça slipped me a warning look. Now everything depends on you, the look seemed to say.
‘As always, I was wearing my see-through blouse, my working clothes, so to speak. Jorge hated it. Now I took off the jacket. I hoped Badajoz would save us. But Badajoz just crossed his legs. It was disgusting. I brought the lesson to an end.
‘When Badajoz approached Adrião, my piano teacher, I knew it was over. I didn’t hear what they said, but Adrião turned pale and Badajoz grinned deviously.
‘Adrião didn’t come back from the interrogation. I don’t know what they did to him, I never saw him again.
‘João insisted that I live with his aunt from then on. Safety, he said, it was about keeping me safe. By the first night, I realized that was so, but it wasn’t only me, it was mainly my memory. What it might reveal if they caught me. I met Jorge only once in those days. We didn’t touch, not even our hands. It was eerie. I didn’t understand why. I didn’t understand until Amadeu told me why I had to leave the country.’
Estefânia came back from the window and sat down. She looked at Gregorius.
‘What Amadeu said about Jorge – it was so monstrous, so inconceivably cruel that at first I simply laughed. Amadeu made up a bed for me in the consulting room before we left the next day.
‘“I simply don’t believe it,” I said. “Kill me.” I looked at him. “We’re talking about Jorge, your friend.”
‘“Exactly,” he said flatly.
‘What precisely did he say? I wanted to know, but he didn’t want to repeat the words.
‘Afterwards, as I lay alone in the office, I went over everything I had experienced with Jorge. Was he capable of thinking such a thing? Seriously thinking it? I was tired and confused. I thought of his jealousy. I thought of the times when he had seemed brutal and inconsiderate, even if not to me. I didn’t know what to make of him any more.
‘At Amadeu’s funeral, we stood together at the grave, he and I. The others had left.
‘“You didn’t really believe it, did you?” he asked after a while. “He misunderstood me. It was a misunderstanding, just a misunderstanding.”
‘“It’s not important now,” I said.
‘We parted without touching. I’ve not heard anything more of him. Is he still alive?’
After Gregorius’s answer, there was silence for a while. Then she stood up and took from the shelf her copy of O Mar Tenebroso, the big book that had lain on Prado’s desk.
‘And at the end he was reading that?’ she asked.
She sat down, with the book on her lap.
‘It was simply too much, much too much for a twenty-five-year-old girl like me. Badajoz, being spirited off to João’s aunt, the night spent in Amadeu’s office, the dreadful thoughts of Jorge, the journey with the man who had robbed me of my sleep. I was a complete mess.
‘The first hours, we drove without saying anything. I was glad I could still handle the steering wheel and gears. We were to go north, to Galicia, over the border, João had said.
‘“And then we’ll drive to Finisterre,” I said and told him the story of the Latin student in the post office.
‘He asked me to stop and he embraced me. After that, he kept questioning me. Was he searching for me, or was he searching for life? He wanted more of it, and he always wanted it faster and greedier. Not that he was coarse or violent. On the contrary, I hadn’t known such tenderness. But he almost swamped me with it; he had such a ravenous hunger for life, its warmth, its lust. And he was just as hungry for my mind as for my body. He wanted, in a few hours, to know my whole life, my memories, thoughts, fantasies, dreams. Everything. After the first joyous amazement, he began to scare me. His quick mind tore down all my defences.
‘In the years after that, I fled as soon as anyone began to understand me. But not now. One thing, however, has remained: I don’t want anybody to understand me
completely. I want to go through life incognito. The blindness of others is my safety and my freedom.
‘Even though now it sounds as if Amadeu was passionately interested in me, it wasn’t so. It was just an encounter. He drew in everything that he experienced, he couldn’t get enough of life. To put it another way, I wasn’t really somebody for him, but rather some aspect of life he craved as if he had previously been cheated of it. It was as if he wanted to live a full life before death claimed him.’
Gregorius told her of the aneurysm and the map of the brain.
‘My God,’ she said softly.
They had sat on the beach in Finisterre. Beyond, a ship had passed.
‘“Let’s sail away,” he said, “perhaps to Brazil. Belém, Manaús. The Amazon. Where it’s hot and damp. I’d like to write about it, about colours, smells, sticky plants, the rain forest, animals. I’ve only ever written about the soul.”’
This man who could never get enough of reality, Adriana had said of him.
‘It wasn’t adolescent romanticism, or the dreams of an ageing man. It was genuine, it was real. But on the other hand, it had nothing to do with me. He wanted to take me on a trip that would have been his alone, his voyage to the inner depths of his soul.
‘“You’re too demanding for me,” I said. “I can’t do it, I can’t.”
‘Back then, when he had pulled me into the doorway, I would have followed him to the end of the world. But then I didn’t know of his instatiable hunger. This hunger for life was also horrible. A devouring, destructive force. Terrifying. Dreadful.
‘My words must have wounded him dreadfully. Quite dreadfully. He no longer wanted to take a double room, paid for two singles. Later, when we met, he had changed his clothes. He looked composed and stood there stiffly, very correct. My words had lost him his dignity. The stiffness, the correctness were a hapless attempt to show that he had won it back. I didn’t see it like that at all. There was nothing undignified in his passion, or in his lust. Lust in and of itself isn’t undignified.
‘I didn’t close my eyes, even though I was tired out.
‘He would stay a few days, he said abruptly the next morning. Nothing could have expressed his complete withdrawal better than this abruptness.
‘In parting, we simply shook hands. He went back to the hotel, without even turning round. Before driving off, I waited in vain for a sign from the window.
‘After an unbearable half-hour behind the wheel, I drove back to the hotel. I knocked. He stood calmly in the doorway, without hostility, almost without emotion. He had shut me out of his soul for ever. I have no idea when he returned to Lisbon.’
‘A week later,’ said Gregorius.
Estefânia gave him back the book.
‘I read it all afternoon. First I was horrified. Not about him. About me. That I had no idea who he was. How aware he was of himself. And how sincere. Mercilessly sincere. Hence his verbal force. I was upset to have said to such a man: “You’re too demanding for me.” But then I slowly realized: it was right to say that. It would have been right even if I had seen his writings.
It was close to midnight. Gregorius didn’t want to leave Bern, the railway, the dizziness – everything was far away. He asked how a girl from the post office who learned Latin had become a professor. Her reply was curt, almost cold. That could happen: that someone receptive to the distant past would be reticent about what came later and about the present. There was a time for intimacy.
They stood in the doorway. Then he made up his mind. He proffered the envelope with Prado’s last note.
‘I think these most likely belong to you,’ he said.
51
Gregorius stood by the window of an estate agent. In three hours’ time, his train would leave for Irún and Paris. His bag was at the station in a locker. He stood motionless on the pavement, studying the prices and thinking of his savings. To learn Spanish, the language he had previously left to Florence. To live in the city of her holy hero. Attend Estefânia Espinhosa’s lectures. Study the history of the many monasteries. Translate Prado’s notes. Discuss his writings with Estefânia, one by one.
The agent set up three inspections within the next two hours. Gregorius stood in empty, echoing apartments taking in the view, the traffic noise, imagining the daily walk downstairs. He made offers on two apartments. Then he rode back and forth through the city in a taxi. ‘Continue!’ he kept saying to the driver. ‘Siempre derecho, más y más!’
Back at the railway station, he made a mistake about his locker number and had to run to catch the train.
In the compartment, he nodded off and woke up only when the train stopped in Valladolid. A young woman came into the compartment. Gregorius heaved her suitcase on to the luggage rack. ‘Muito obrigada,’ she said, sat down next to the door and began reading a French book. There was a light, rustling sound when she crossed her legs.
Gregorius looked at the sealed envelope Maria João hadn’t wanted to open. To be read only after my death, Prado had said. And I don’t want it to fall into Adriana’s hands. Gregorius broke the seal, took out the sheets, and began to read.
PORQUÊ TU, ENTRE TODAS? WHY YOU, OF ALL WOMEN? A question that forms sometimes in everyone. Why does it seem dangerous to allow it, even if it happens only in silence? What is so frightening about the idea of contingency that is expressed in it and is not the same idea as those of randomness and interchangeability? Why can one not acknowledge this contingency and joke about it? Why do we think it would trivialize, really cancel affection, if we acknowledge it as something obvious?
I saw you pass through the living room, past heads and champagne glasses. ‘That is Fátima, my daughter,’ said your father. ‘I could imagine you passing through my rooms,’ I said to you in the garden. ‘Can you still imagine me in passing through your rooms?’ you asked in England. And on the ship: ‘Do you also think in passing we were destined for each other?’
No one is destined for another. Not only because there is no Providence and no one else who could arrange it. No: because there is simply no inevitability between people beyond accidental needs and the powerful force of habit. I had spent five years in a clinic, five years, when no one had passed through my rooms. I stood here absolutely by chance, you stood there absolutely by chance, between us the champagne glasses. That’s how it was. No different.
It is good that you won’t read that. Why did you think you had to ally with Mamã against my Godlessness? An advocate of contingency loves no less. Nor is he less loyal. Rather more.
The reading woman had taken off her glasses and was cleaning them. Her face didn’t look like the face of the Portuguese woman on the Kirchenfeldbrücke. But they did have one thing in common: the unequal distance between the eyebrows and the bridge of the nose, with one eyebrow stopping before the other.
Gregorius said he would like to ask her something. Whether the Portuguese word glória, apart from fame, could also mean bliss in the religious sense.
She thought, then she nodded.
And whether a non-believer could make use of it when he wanted to refer to a bliss that was other than religious.
She laughed. ‘Que c’est drôle! Mais … oui. Oui.’
The train left Burgos. Gregorius read on.
UM MOZART DO FUTURO ABERTO. A MOZART OF THE OPEN FUTURE. You came down the steps. Like thousands of times before, I watched as more and more of you became visible, while the head remained hidden to the last behind the banister opposite. I had always completed what was still concealed in thoughts. And always the same. It was certain, who was coming down.
On this morning, it was different all of a sudden. Children playing had thrown the ball against the colored window the day before and smashed the pane. The light on the stairs was different than usual – instead of the gold, veiled light, reminiscent of the illumination in a church, unbroken daylight flowed in. It was as if this new light made a breach in my usual expectations, as if something ripped open that demanded new thoughts
from me. I was suddenly curious about how your face would look. The sudden curiosity made me happy and yet also made me flinch. It was years since the time of wooing curiosity had come to an end and the door had shut on our shared life. Why, Fátima, did a window have to shatter for me to be able to meet you again with an open look.
I also tried it with you, Adriana. But our familiarity had become leaden.
Just why is the open look so hard? We are sluggish creatures who need familiarity. Curiosity as a rare luxury on home ground. To be certain and be able to play with the openness, in every moment, it would be an art. You had to be a Mozart. A Mozart of the open future.
San Sebastián. Gregorius looked at the timetable. Soon he would have to change trains in Irún for Paris. The woman crossed her legs and went on reading. He picked up the last note from the sealed envelope.
MINHA QUERIDA ARTISTA NA AUTO-ILUSÃO. MY BELOVED VIRTUOSO OF SELF-DELUSION. We are in the dark about so many of our wishes and thoughts, and others sometimes know more about them than we do. Who ever believed anything different?
No one. No one who lives and breathes with another. We know each other down to the smallest twitches of body and words. We know and often don’t want to know what we know. Especially when the gap between what we see and what the other believes becomes unbearably wide. It takes divine courage and divine strength to live with oneself in perfect truth. So much we know, even of ourselves. No reason for self-justification.
And if she is a true virtuoso of self-deception, always a step ahead of me? Would I have had to confront you and say: No, you’re fooling yourself, you’re not like that? I owed you that. If I owed you.
How does one know what he owes the other in this sense?
Irún. Isto ainda não é Irún. This is not yet Irún. These were the first Portuguese words he had said to anyone. Five weeks before, and also on a train. Gregorius lifted down the woman’s suitcase.
Shortly after he had taken a seat in the Paris train, the woman passed by his compartment. She had almost disappeared, then she paused, saw him, hesitated a moment and came in. He put her suitcase up on the rack.