Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier
Memory had carried the priest far from the room they were in, a room that was spacious and filled with books. Although it, too, was in a nursing home, as evidenced by the medical instruments and the bell over the bed, it bore no comparison with João Eça’s miserable room up in Cacilhas. Gregorius had liked Father Bartolomeu from the start, the lanky, gaunt man with the snow-white hair and deep-set clever eyes. He had to be well over ninety, if he had taught Prado, but there was nothing senile about him, no sign that he had lost any of the alertness that had countered Amadeu’s impetuous challenges seventy years before. He had slim hands with long, finely shaped fingers, as if they had been created to turn the pages of precious old books. With these fingers, he now leafed through Prado’s book. But he didn’t read it; moving the paper was like a ritual to bring back the distant past.
‘All the things he had read when he crossed the threshold of the Liceu at the age of ten in his small, tailor-made frock coat! Many of us caught ourselves secretly calculating whether we could keep up with him. And then, after class, he sat in the library soaking up all the thick books, page after page, line after line. He had an incredible memory and as incredibly concentrated, rapt look on his face when reading. Even the loudest noise would not disturb him. “When Amadeu finishes reading a book,” said another teacher, “it has no more letters. He devours not only the meaning, but also the printers’ ink.”
‘That’s how it was: the books seemed to disappear inside him, leaving empty husks on the shelf afterwards. The landscape of his mind behind the impudent high forehead expanded with breathtaking speed; from one week to the next, new ideas took shape in it, remarkable associations and inspirations that always amazed us. Sometimes he hid in the library and went on reading all night with a torch. The first time, his mother was in a sheer panic when he didn’t come home. But more and more she got used to the fact that her boy tended to violate all the rules and she took a certain pride in it.
‘Many a teacher was afraid when Amadeu’s concentrated look fell on him. Not that it was a rejecting, provoking or belligerent look. But it gave the teacher only one chance to get it right. If you made a mistake or showed uncertainty, he didn’t look contemptuous, or even disappointed. No, he simply averted his eyes, didn’t want to make you feel bad, was polite and friendly as he left. But it was precisely this tangible desire not to wound that was destructive. I myself experienced it and other teachers confirmed it: even when they were preparing their lessons, they pictured this testing look. For some, it was the look of the examiner, taking them back to the classroom; others likened it to an athlete facing a strong opponent. I didn’t know anybody who hadn’t experienced it: that Amadeu Inácio de Almeida Prado, the precocious, alert son of the famous judge, was in the study with you when you were preparing something difficult, something that could trip you up, even as a teacher.
‘Nevertheless, despite being so demanding he wasn’t a monolithic whole. There were chinks in his armour, and sometimes you felt you didn’t know your way around him at all. When he became aware of the consequences of his arrogant excesses, he was flabbergasted and tried everything to make up for it. And there was also the other Amadeu, the good, helpful comrade. He could sit with a fellow pupil all night to help him prepare for an exam, revealing a modesty and an angelic patience that shamed everybody who had maligned him.
‘The attacks of melancholy belonged to yet another Amadeu. When they descended it was almost as if a completely different soul had temporarily settled in him. He became extremely nervous, the slightest noise made him flinch, like a whiplash. And woe to anyone who offered a consoling or encouraging comment at such moments: then he leapt on you in fury.
‘He could do so much, this richly blessed boy. There was only one thing he couldn’t do: celebrate, play, let himself go. His immense alertness and his passionate need to maintain control got in his way. No alcohol. And no cigarettes, that only came later. But enormous amounts of tea; he loved the red-gold glow of a heavy Assam and brought a silver pot from home for it, which he ultimately gave to the cook.’
But what about this girl? Maria João, Gregorius interjected.
‘Yes. And Amadeu loved her. People would smile at his chaste admiration of her to hide their envy; it was envy of a feeling that occurs really only in fairy tales. He loved her and adored her. Yes, that was it: he adored her – even if that’s not usually said of children. But so many things were different about Amadeu. And she wasn’t an especially pretty girl, no princess, far from it. Nor was she a good student, as far as I know. Nobody really understood it, at least not the other girls in the school, who would have given anything to attract the eyes of the noble prince. Maybe it was simply that she wasn’t dazzled by him, not overwhelmed like all the others. Maybe that was what he needed: somebody to be on an equal footing with him, with words, looks and movements that liberated him from himself with their naturalness and ordinariness.
‘When Maria João came over and sat down next to him on the steps, he seemed to become completely calm, freed of the burden of his alertness and quickness, the weight of his incessant presence of mind, the torment of having constantly to outdo and surpass himself. Sitting next to her, he could listen to the ringing of the bells that called pupils to class, and looking at him, you had the impression he’d like to have stayed there for ever. Then Maria put her hand on his shoulder and pulled him back from the paradise of a precious effortlessness. It was always she who touched him; never did I see his hand rest on hers. When she was about to go back to her school, she’d tie hers shiny black hair into a ponytail with a rubber band. Every time she did it he looked at her as if he were under a spell; he must have loved it very much, this movement. One day, it was no longer a rubber band, but a silver hairclasp, and you could see from his face that it was a gift from him.’
Like Mélodie, the priest couldn’t remember the girl’s married name either.
‘Now that you ask me, it seems to me that we didn’t want to know the name; as if it would have been disturbing to know it,’ he said. ‘A little bit the way you don’t ask about the family names of saints. Or Diana or Electra.’
A nurse in a nun’s habit came in.
‘Not now,’ said the priest when she reached for the bloodpressure cuff.
He said it with gentle authority, and suddenly Gregorius understood why this man had been so good for young Prado: he possessed precisely the kind of authority he had needed to test his limits, and maybe also to liberate himself from the strict, austere authority of his father.
‘But we would like a cup of tea,’ said the priest and charmed the nurse with his smile. ‘An Assam, and make it strong so the red-gold glows properly.’
The priest shut his eyes and was silent. He didn’t want to let go of the distant time when Amadeu de Prado had given Maria João a silver hairclasp. Actually, thought Gregorius, he wanted to continue talking about his favourite student, with whom he had debated Augustine and a thousand other things. With the boy who could have touched the sky. The boy whose shoulder he would like to have put his hand on, like Maria João.
‘Maria and Jorge,’ the priest went on with his eyes shut, ‘they were like his patron saints. Jorge O’Kelly. In him, the future pharmacist, Amadeu found a friend, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he had been his only real friend, aside from Maria. In many respects, O’Kelly was his complete opposite and sometimes I thought: he needs him to be whole. With his peasant skull, the tousled hair and his heavy, awkward manner, he could seem limited, and on parents’ days, I saw some of the grander parents look at him askance when he passed them. He was so inelegant in his crumpled shirt, shapeless jacket and the same black tie he always wore askew in protest against the regulations.
‘Once, in the school corridor, Amadeu and Jorge came towards us, me and my colleague, who said afterwards: “If I had to explain in a dictionary the definition of elegance and its polar opposite, I would simply depict these two boys. Any further commentary would be superfluous.”
‘Jorge knew exactly when his Irish ancestors had come to Portugal, he was proud of his Irish blood and knew English well, even if his mouth wasn’t really made for the English words. And in fact, you wouldn’t have been surprised to meet him in an Irish farmyard or a country pub, and if you imagined that, he suddenly looked like the young Samuel Beckett.
‘Even then, he was a diehard atheist, I don’t know how we knew that, but we did. Despite that, he would often quote the family motto: Turris fortis mihi Deus. He read the Russian, Andalusian, and Catalan anarchists and played with the idea of crossing the border and fighting against Franco. That he later went into the Resistance: anything else would have surprised me. All his life he was a romantic without illusions, if there is such a thing. And this romantic had two dreams: to become a pharmacist and to play a Steinway. The first dream he realized; even today he stands in a white coat behind the counter of the shop on the Rua dos Sapateiros. Everybody laughed at the second dream, Jorge most of all. For his coarse hands with the broad fingertips and the grooved nails were better suited to the school double bass, which he tried for a while, until, in an attack of despair at his lack of talent, he sawed so violently on the strings that the bow broke.’
The priest drank his tea and Gregorius noticed, disappointed, that the drinking became a slurping. Suddenly, he was an old man whose lips no longer obeyed him completely. His mood had also changed; grief and wistfulness crept into his voice as he spoke of the vacuum Prado had left behind when he finished school.
‘Naturally, we all knew that, in the autumn, when the heat subsided and a golden shadow lay on the light, we’d no longer meet him in the corridors. But nobody talked about it. In parting, he shook hands with all of us, forgot no one, thanked us with such warm, refined words – I still remember them – that for a moment I thought: like a president.’
The priest hesitated and then he said: ‘They shouldn’t have been so well-formed, those words. They should have been more halting, clumsy, groping. Something more like unhewn stone. A little less like polished marble.’
And Prado should have said a goodbye to him, Father Bartolomeu, that was different from the others, thought Gregorius. With more personal words, perhaps with an embrace. He had hurt the priest by treating him like one of the others. It still rankled, seventy years later.
‘In the first few days of the new school year, I walked through the numbed school by his absence. I had to keep saying to myself: you must no longer expect to see his helmet of hair approaching, you must no longer hope that his proud figure will come round the corner and you can watch him explaining something to somebody and moving his hands in that inimitably eloquent way. And I’m sure it was the same with others, even though we didn’t talk about it. Only once did I hear someone say: “Everything’s been so different ever since.” There was no question but that he was talking about the absence of Amadeu. That his soft baritone voice was no longer heard around the school. It wasn’t only that you didn’t see him any more, didn’t meet him any more. You saw his absence and encountered it as something tangible. His not being there was like the sharply outlined emptiness of a photo with a figure cut out, in which the missing figure is now more important, more dominant, than all the others. That’s exactly how we missed Amadeu: through his precise absence.
‘It was years before I met him again. He was studying up in Coimbra and now and then I heard something about him through a friend who assisted one of the professors of medicine with lectures and courses on dissection. Even there, Amadeu had quickly become a legend. Not as brilliant though experienced professors, with prizes for excellence, leading authorities in their field, felt tested by him. Not because he knew more than they did, not yet. But he was insatiable in his need for explanations, and there must have been dramatic scenes in the lecture halls when he proved with his merciless Cartesian perspicacity that something propounded as an explanation really wasn’t.
‘Once he mocked a particularly vain professor by comparing his explanation with that of a doctor ridiculed by Molière for identifying the soporific potency of a remedy with its virtus dormitivia. He could be merciless when he encountered vanity. Merciless. The knife opened in his pocket. It’s an unrecognized form of stupidity, he would say, you have to forget the cosmic meaninglessness of all our acts to be able to be vain and that’s a glaring form of stupidity.
‘When he was in this mood, you would not want to cross him. They soon discovered that in Coimbra. And they discovered something else: that he had a sixth sense for the planned reprisals of others. Jorge also possessed such a sense, and Amadeu managed to cultivate it independently. When he imagined that someone wanted to show him up, he sought the most remote chess move you could make and prepared himself meticulously for it. It must have been the same with the faculty in Coimbra. In the lecture hall, when he was summoned to the board and asked about arcane matters, he refused the chalk offered by the avenging professor with a malicious smile, and took his own chalk out of his pocket. “Aha,” he must have said contemptuously on such occasions, and then he filled the board with anatomical sketches and physiological or biochemical formulas. “Must I know that?” he asked when he had once miscalculated. The other’s grin couldn’t be seen, but it could be heard. You just couldn’t get to him.’
For the last half-hour, they had been sitting in the dark. Now the priest turned on the light.
‘I buried him. Adriana, his sister, wanted it. He had collapsed on Rua Augusta, which he loved especially, at six in the morning, when his incurable insomnia had driven him into the city. A woman who came out of her house with a dog called an ambulance. But he was already dead. The blood from a burst aneurysm in the brain had extinguished the radiant light of his consciousness for ever.
‘I hesitated. I didn’t know what he would have thought of Adriana’s request. Burial is a matter for others, the dead have nothing to do with it, he had once said. It had been one of his chilly sentences that made many people fear him. Was it still true?
‘Adriana, who certainly could be a dragon, a dragon who protected Amadeu, was helpless as a child in the face of the things death demands of us. And so I decided to comply with her request. I would have to find words that would do justice to his silent spirit. After decades when he had no longer looked over my shoulder when I prepared words, now he was there again. His life force was extinguished, but it seemed to me that the white, irrevocably silent countenance demanded even more from me than the face that had challenged me so often when it was vividly alive.
‘My words at the grave not only had to honour the dead man. I knew that O’Kelly would be there. In his presence, I couldn’t possibly speak words dealing with God and what Jorge would call His empty promises. The way out was for me to talk about my experiences with Amadeu and of the inextinguishable traces he had left behind in all those who knew him, even his enemies.
‘The crowd at the cemetery was unbelievable. All the people he had treated, including people he had never charged for his services. I allowed myself one single religious word: Amen. I pronounced it because Amadeu had loved the word and because Jorge knew that. The sacred word died away in the silence of the graves. Nobody moved. It started raining. The people wept, fell into each other’s arms. Nobody turned to go. The heavens opened and the people were soaked to the skin. But the
‘When I finally decided to go too, something remarkable happened, something I later dreamed of sometimes, something with the unreality of a scene in a Buñuel film. Two people, a man and a young woman of restrained beauty, came towards each other from either end of the path to the grave. The man was O’Kelly, the woman I didn’t know. I couldn’t know it, but I felt it: the two knew each other. It seemed like an intimate knowing and as if this intimacy was linked with a catastrophe, a tragedy that also involved Amadeu. Each had to cover an equal distance to the grave and they seemed to adapt the speed of their steps precisely to one another, so they arrived at the same time. Their eyes did not meet once on the way, but were directed at the ground. That they avoided looking at each other created a greater closeness between them than any exchange of looks could have done. Nor did they look at each other when they stood side by side at the grave and seemed to breathe in harmony. The dead man seemed to belong to them alone and I felt I had to leave. To this day, I don’t know what kind of secret bound the two people or what it had to do with Amadeu.’