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A professor of philosophy, Pascal Mercier was born in 1944 in Bern.

© Grove

Night Train to Lisbon is his third novel.

Night train to Lisbon
An excerpt

Pascal Mercier
translated by Barbara Harshav

posted Jan 22, 2008

Part I. The Departure

1.

The day that ended with everything different in the life of Raimund Gregorius began like countless other days. At quarter to eight, he came from Bundesterrasse and stepped onto the Kirchenfeldbrücke leading from the heart of the city to the Gymnasium. He did that every workday of the school term always at quarter to eight. Once when the bridge was blocked, he made a mistake in beginning Greek class afterward. That had never happened before nor did it ever happen again. For days, the whole school talked of nothing but this mistake. The longer the discussion lasted, the more it was thought to be a mistake in hearing. At last, this conviction won out even among the students who had been there. It was simply inconceivable that Mundus, as everyone called him, could make a mistake in Greek, Latin or Hebrew.

Gregorius looked ahead at the pointed towers of the Historical Museum of the City of Bern, up to the Gurten and down to the Aare with its glacier green water. A gusty wind drove low-lying clouds over him, turned his umbrella inside out and whipped the rain in his face. Now he noticed the woman in the middle of the bridge. She had leaned her elbows on the railing and was reading in the pouring rain what looked like a letter. She must have been holding the sheet with both hands. As Gregorius came closer, she suddenly crumpled the paper, kneaded it into a ball and threw the ball into space with a violent movement. Instinctively, Gregorius had walked faster and was now only a few steps away from her. He saw the rage in her pale, rain-wet face. It wasn’t a rage that could be dumped into words and then blow over. It was a grim rage turned inward that must have been smoldering in her for a long time. Now the woman leaned on the railing with outstretched arms, and her heels slipped out of her shoes. Now she jumps. Gregorius left the umbrella to a gust of wind that drove it over the railing, threw his briefcase full of school notebooks to the ground and uttered a string of curses that weren’t part of his usual vocabulary. The briefcase opened up and the notebooks slid onto the wet pavement. The woman turned around. For a few moments, she watched unmoving as the notebooks darkened with the water. Then she pulled a felt-tipped pen from her coat pocket, took two steps, leaned down to Gregorius and wrote a line of numbers on his forehead.

“Forgive me,” she said in French, breathless and with a foreign accent. “But I mustn’t forget this phone number and I don’t have any paper with me.”

Now she looked at her hands as if she were seeing them for the first time.

“Naturally, I could have...” And now, looking back and forth between Gregorius’s forehead and her hand, she wrote the numbers on the back of the hand. “I... I didn’t want to keep it, I wanted to forget everything, but when I saw the letter fall... I had to hold onto it.”

The rain on the thick eyeglasses muddied Gregorius’s sight, and he groped awkwardly for the wet notebooks. The tip of the felt pen seemed to slide over his forehead again. But then he realized it was now the fingers of the woman, who was trying to wipe away the numbers with a handkerchief.

“It is out of line, I know...” And now she started helping Gregorius gather up the notebooks. He touched her hand and grazed her knee, and when the two of them reached for the last notebook, they bumped heads.

“Thank you very much,” he said when they stood facing each other. He pointed to her head. “Did it hurt?”

Absently, looking down, she shook her head. The rain beat down on her hair and ran over her face.

“Can I walk a few steps with you?”

“Ah... yes, of course,” Gregorius stammered.

Silently they walked together to the end of the bridge and on toward the school. The sense of time told Gregorius that it was after eight and the first hour had already begun. How far was “a few steps”? The woman had adjusted to his pace and plodded along beside him as if she would go on like that all day. She had pulled the wide collar of her coat so high that, from the side, Gregorius saw only her forehead.

“I have to go in here, into the Gymnasium,” he said and stood still. “I’m a teacher.”

“Can I come along?” she asked softly. Gregorius hesitated and ran his sleeve over his wet glasses. “In any case, it’s dry there,” he said at last.

She went up the stairs, Gregorius held the door open for her, and then they stood in the hall, which seemed especially empty and quiet now that classes had started. Her coat was dripping.

“Wait here,” said Gregorius and went to the bathroom to get a towel.

At the mirror, he dried the glasses and wiped off his face. The numbers could still be seen on his forehead. He held a corner of the towel under the warm water and wanted to start rubbing when he stopped in the middle of the movement. That was the moment that decided everything, he thought when he recalled the event hours later. That is, all of a sudden, he realized that he really didn’t want to wipe away the trace of his encounter with the enigmatic woman.

He imagined appearing before the class afterward with a phone number on his face, he, Mundus, the most reliable and predictable person in this building and probably in the whole history of the school, working here for more than thirty years, impeccable in his profession, a pillar of the institution, a little boring perhaps, but respected and even feared in the university for his astounding knowledge of ancient languages, mocked lovingly by his students who put him to the test every year by calling him in the middle of the night and asking about the conjecture for a remote passage in an ancient text, only to get every time off the top of his head information that was both dry and exhaustive, including a critical commentary with other possible meanings, all of it presented perfectly and calmly without a soupçon of anger at the disturbance—Mundus, a man with an impossibly old-fashioned, even archaic first name you simply had to abbreviate, and couldn’t abbreviate any other way, an abbreviation that revealed the character of this man as no other word could have, for what he carried around in him as a philologist was in fact no less than a whole world, or rather several whole worlds, since along with those Latin and Greek passages, his head also held the Hebrew that had amazed several Old Testament scholars. If you want to see a true scholar, the Rector would say when he introduced him to a new class, here he is.

And this scholar, Gregorius thought now, this dry man who seemed to some to consist only of dead words, and who was spitefully called the Papyrus by colleagues who envied him his popularity—this scholar would enter the room with a telephone number painted on his forehead by a desperate woman apparently torn between rage and love, a woman in a red leather coat with a fabulously soft, southern voice, that sounded like an endless hesitant drawl that drew you in merely by hearing it.

When Gregorius had brought her the towel, the woman clamped a comb between her teeth and used the towel to rub the long black hair lying in the coat collar as in a bowl. The janitor entered the hall and, when he saw Gregorius, cast an amazed look at the clock over the exit and then at his watch. Gregorius nodded to him, as he always did. A student hurried past, turned around twice and went on.

“I teach up there,” Gregorius said to the woman and pointed up through a window to another part of the building. Seconds passed. He felt his heart beat. “Do you want to come along?”

Later, Gregorius couldn’t believe he had really said that; but he must have, for all at once they walked to the classroom next to each other; he heard the screech of his rubber soles on the linoleum and the clack of the boots when the woman put her foot down.

“What’s your mother tongue?” he had asked her just now.

“Português,” she had answered.

The o she pronounced surprisingly as a u, the rising, strangely constrained lightness of the é and the soft sh at the end came together in a melody that sounded much longer than it really was, and that he could have listened to all day long.

“Wait,” he said now, took his notebook out of his jacket and ripped out a page: “For the number.”

His hand was on the doorknob when he asked her to say the word once more. She repeated it, and for the first time he saw her smile.

The chatter broke off abruptly when they entered the classroom. A silence of one single amazement filled the room. Later, Gregorius remembered precisely: He had enjoyed this surprised silence, this speechless incredulity, that spoke from every single face, and he had also enjoyed his delight at being able to feel in a way he would never have believed possible.

What’s up now? The question spoke from every single one of the twenty looks that fell on the peculiar couple at the door, on Mundus, standing with a wet bald head and a rain-darkened coat next to a hastily combed woman with a pale face.

“Perhaps there?” said Gregorius to the woman and pointed to the empty chair in the back corner. Then he advanced, greeted them as usual, and sat down behind the desk. He had no idea how he could have explained, and so he simply had them translate the text they were working on. The translations were halting, and he caught some curious looks. There were also bewildered looks for he—he, Mundus, who recognized every error even in his sleep—was overlooking dozens of errors, half measures, and awkwardness.

He managed not to look over at the woman. Yet, every second he saw her, saw the damp strands stroking her face, the white hands clenched, the absent, lost look going out the window. Once she took out the pen and wrote the phone number on the notebook page. Then she leaned back again and hardly seemed to know where she was.

It was an impossible situation and Gregorius glanced at the clock: ten more minutes until the break. Then the woman got up and walked softly to the door. When she got there, she turned around to him and put her finger on her lips. He nodded and she repeated the gesture with a smile. Then the door fell shut with a soft click.

From this moment on, Gregorius no longer heard anything the students said. It was as if he were all alone and enclosed in a numbing silence. At some time he stood at the window and watched the red female figure until she had disappeared around the corner. He felt the effort not to run after her reverberate in him. He kept seeing the finger on her lips that could mean so many things: I don’t want to disturb, and It’s our secret, but also, Let me go now, this can’t go on.

When the bell rang for the break, he stood still at the window. Behind him, the students left more quietly than usual. Later he went out too, left the building through the back door and sat down across the street in the public library, where nobody would look for him.

For the second part of the double class, he was on time as always. He had rubbed the numbers off his forehead, written them down in the notebook after a minute of hesitation and then dried the narrow fringe of gray hair. Only the damp spots on his jacket and pants still revealed that there had been something unusual. Now he took the stack of soaked notebooks out of his briefcase.

“A mishap,” he said tersely. “I stumbled and they slipped out, in the rain. Nevertheless, the corrections should still be legible; otherwise, you have to work on your conjectures.”

That was how they knew him and an audible sigh of relief went through the room. Now and then, he still caught a curious look, and a remnant of shyness was in a few voices. Otherwise, everything was as before. He wrote the most frequent errors on the board. Then he let the students work silently on their own.

Could what happened to him in the next quarter hour be called a decision? Later, Gregorius was to keep asking the question and never was he sure. But if it wasn’t a decision—what was it?

It began when he suddenly looked at the students bending over their notebooks as if he were seeing them for the first time.

Lucien von Graffenried, who had secretly moved a piece in the annual chess tournament in the auditorium, where Gregorius had played simultaneous matches against a dozen students. After the moves on the other boards, Gregorius had stood before him again. He noticed it immediately. He looked at him calmly. Lucien’s face flamed red. “That’s beneath you,” said Gregorius and then made sure this game ended in a draw.

Sarah Winter, who had stood outside the door of his flat at two in the morning because she didn’t know what to do with her pregnancy. He had made her tea and listened, nothing else. “I’m so glad I followed your advice,” she said a week later. “It would have been much too early to have a baby.”

Beatrice Lüscher with the regular, precise handwriting who had grown old frighteningly fast under the burden of her always perfect achievements. René Zingg, always at the lowest end of the scale. And naturally, Natalie Rubin. A girl who was stingy with her favor, a bit like a courtly maiden of the past, reserved, idolized and feared for her sharp tongue. Last week, after the bell rang for the break, she had stood up, stretched like someone at ease in her own body, and taken a piece of candy out of her shirt pocket. On the way to the door, she unwrapped it and when she passed him, she put it to her mouth. It had just touched her lips when she broke off the movement, turned to him, held the bright red candy to him and asked: “Want it?” Amused at his astonishment, she had laughed her strange light laugh and made sure her hand touched his.

Gregorius went through them all. At first he seemed to be only drawing up an interim balance sheet of his feelings for them. Then, in the middle of the rows of benches, he noticed that he was thinking more frequently: How much life they still have before them; how open their future still is; how much can still happen to them; how much they can still experience!

Português. He heard the melody and saw the woman’s face as it had emerged with closed eyes behind the rubbing towel, white as alabaster. One last time, he slid his eyes over the heads of the students. Then he stood up slowly, went to the door where he took the damp coat off the hook, and disappeared, without turning around, from the room.

His briefcase with the books that had accompanied him a lifetime remained behind on the desk. At the top of the steps, he paused and thought how he had taken the books to be rebound every couple of years, always to the same shop, where they laughed at the dog-eared, worn-out pages that felt almost like blotting paper. As long as the case lay on the desk, the students would assume he was coming back. But that wasn’t why he had left the books or why he now resisted the temptation to get them. If he left now, he also had to go away from those books. He felt that very clearly, even if at this moment, on the way out, he had no idea what it really meant: to go away.

In the entrance hall, his look fell on the little puddle that had formed when the woman in the dripping coat had waited for him to come back from the bathroom. It was the trace of a visitor from another, faraway world, and Gregorius regarded it with a devotion usually reserved for archaeological finds. Only when he heard the janitor’s shuffling step did he tear himself away and hurry out of the building.

Without turning around, he walked to the corner, where he could look back unseen. With a sudden force he wouldn’t have expected of himself, he felt how much he loved this building and everything it stood for and how much he would miss it. He checked the numbers again: Forty-two years ago, as a fifteen-year-old Gymnasium student, he had entered it for the first time, wavering between anticipation and apprehension. Four years later, he had left it with his diploma in hand, only to come back again four years later as a substitute for the Greek teacher who had been in an accident, the teacher who had once opened the ancient world to him. The student substitute turned into a permanent student substitute, who was thirty-three by the time he finally took his university exams.

He had done that only because Florence, his wife, had urged him. He had never thought of a doctorate; if anyone asked him about it, he only laughed. Such things didn’t matter. What did matter was something quite simple: to know the ancient texts down to the last detail, to recognize every grammatical and stylistic detail and to know the history of every one of those expressions. In other words: to be good. That wasn’t modesty—his demands on himself were utterly immodest. Nor was it eccentricity or a warped kind of vanity. It had been, he sometimes thought later, a silent rage aimed at a pompous world, an unbending defiance against the world of show-offs who made his father suffer all his life because he had been only a museum guard. Others, who knew much less than he—ridiculously less, to tell the truth—had gotten degrees and solid positions: they seemed to belong to another, unbearably superficial world with standards he despised. In the school, no one would ever have come up with the idea of dismissing him and replacing him with somebody with a degree. The Rector, himself a philologist of ancient languages, knew how good Gregorius was—much better than he himself—and he knew that the students would have risen in revolt. When he finally did take the examination, it seemed absurdly simple to Gregorius, and he handed it in in half the time. He had always held it against Florence a bit that she had made him give up his defiance.

Gregorius turned around and walked slowly toward Kirchenfeldbrücke. When the bridge came into view, he had the amazing feeling, both upsetting and liberating, that, at the age of fifty-seven, he was about to take his life into his own hands for the first time.

2

At the spot where the woman had read the letter in the pouring rain, he stood still and looked down. For the first time, he realized how deep the drop was. Had she really wanted to jump? Or had that only been an impetuous apprehension on his part going back to Florence’s brother who had also jumped off a bridge? Except that Portuguese was her mother tongue, he didn’t know the slightest thing about the woman. Not even her name. Naturally, it was absurd to want to recognize the scrunched-up letter from up here. Nevertheless he stared down, his eyes tearing with the effort. Was that dark dot his umbrella? He felt in his jacket to make sure the notebook with the number written by the nameless Portuguese woman on his forehead was still there. Then he walked to the end of the bridge, uncertain where to turn next. He was in the course of running away from his previous life. Could somebody who intended to do that simply go home?

His eye fell on Hotel Bellevue, the oldest, most distinguished hotel in the city. Thousands of times he had passed by without ever going in. Every time he had felt it was there and now he thought that, in some vague way, it had been important to him that it was there; he would have been upset to learn that the building had been torn down or had stopped being a hotel—or even: this hotel. But it had never entered his mind that he, Mundus, had any reason to be in there. Timorously, he now approached the entrance. A Bentley stopped, the chauffeur got out and went inside. When Gregorius followed him, he had the feeling of doing something absolutely revolutionary, indeed forbidden.

The lobby with the colored glass dome was empty and the carpet swallowed all sound. Gregorius was glad the rain had stopped and his coat wasn’t dripping. With his heavy, clumsy shoes he went on into the dining room. Only two of the tables set for breakfast were occupied. Light notes of a Mozart divertimento created the impression that one was far away from everything loud, ugly and oppressive. Gregorius took off his coat and sat down at a table near the window. No, he said to the waiter in the light beige jacket, he wasn’t a guest at the hotel. He felt scrutinized: the rough turtleneck under the worn-out jacket with the leather patches on the elbows; the baggy corduroy trousers; the sparse fringe of hair around the powerful bald head; the gray beard with the white specks that always made him look a bit unkempt. When the waiter had gone off with the order, Gregorius nervously checked whether he had enough money on him. Then he leaned his elbows on the starched tablecloth and looked over at the bridge.

It was absurd to hope she’d surface there once again. She had gone back over the bridge and then vanished in an Old City alley. He pictured her sitting at the back of the classroom absently gazing out the window. He saw her wringing her white hands. And again he saw her alabaster face surface from behind the towel, exhausted and vulnerable. Português. Hesitantly, he took out the notebook and looked at the phone number. The waiter brought breakfast with silver pitchers. Gregorius let the coffee grow cold. Once he stood up and went to the telephone. Halfway there, he turned around and went back to the table. He paid for the untouched breakfast and left the hotel.

It was years since he had been in the Spanish bookstore on Hirschengraben. Once, every now and then, he had gotten a book for Florence that she had needed for her dissertation on San Juan de la Cruz. On the bus, he had sometimes leafed through it, but at home he had never touched the books. Spanish—that was her territory. It was like Latin and completely different from Latin, and that bothered him. It went against his grain that words in which Latin was so present came out of contemporary mouths—on the street, in the supermarket, in the café. That they were used to order Coke, to haggle and to curse. He found the idea hard to bear and brushed it aside quickly and violently whenever it came. Naturally, the Romans had also haggled and cursed. But that was different. He loved the Latin sentences because they bore the calm of everything past. Because they didn’t make you say something. Because they were speech beyond talk. And because they were beautiful in their immutability. Dead languages—people who talked about them like that had no idea, really no idea, and Gregorius could be harsh and unbending in his contempt for them. When Florence spoke Spanish on the phone, he shut the door. That offended her and he couldn’t explain it to her.

The bookstore smelled wonderfully of old leather and dust. The owner, an aging man with a legendary knowledge of Romance languages, was busy in the back room. The front room was empty except for a young woman, a student apparently. She sat in a corner at a table and read a thin book with a yellowed binding. Gregorius would have preferred to be alone. The sense that he was standing here only because the melody of a Portuguese word wouldn’t leave his mind, and maybe also because he hadn’t known where else to go, that feeling would have been easier to bear without witnesses. He walked along the shelves without seeing anything. Now and then, he tilted his glasses to read a title on a high shelf; but as soon as he had read it, he had already forgotten it. As so often, he was alone with his thoughts, and his mind was sealed toward the outside.

When the door opened, he turned around quickly and at his disappointment that it was the mailman, he realized that, contrary to his intention and against all reason, he was still waiting for the Portuguese woman. Now the student shut the book and got up. But instead of putting it on the table with the others, she stood still, let her eyes slide again over the yellowed binding, stroked it with her hand, and only a few seconds later did she put the book down on the table, as softly and carefully as if it might crumble to dust with a nudge. Then, for a moment, she stood at the table and it looked as if she might reconsider and buy the book. But she went out, her hands buried in her coat pockets and her head down. Gregorius picked up the book and read: AMADEU INÁCIO DE ALMEIDA PRADO, UM OURIVES DAS PALAVRAS, LISBOA 1975.

The bookdealer came in, glanced at the book and pronounced the title aloud. Gregorius heard only a flow of sibilants; the half-swallowed, hardly audible vowels seemed to be only a pretext to keep repeating the hissing sh at the end.

“Do you speak Portuguese?” Gregorius shook his head.

“A Goldsmith of Words. Isn’t that a lovely title?”

“Quiet and elegant. Like dull silver. Would you say it again in Portuguese?”

The bookdealer repeated the words. Aside from the words themselves, you could hear how he enjoyed the velvety sound. Gregorius opened the book and leafed through it until the text began. He handed it to the man who looked at him with surprise and pleasure and started reading aloud. As he listened, Gregorius shut his eyes. After a few sentences, the man paused.

“Shall I translate?”

Gregorius nodded. And then he heard sentences that stunned him, for they sounded as if they had been written for him alone, and not only for him, but for him on this morning that had changed everything.

Of the thousand experiences we have, we find language for one at most and even this one merely by chance and without the care it deserves. Buried under all the mute experiences are those unseen ones that give our life its form, its color, and its melody. Then, when we turn to these treasures, as archaeologists of the soul, we discover how confusing they are. The object of contemplation refuses to stand still, the words bounce off the experience and in the end, pure contradictions stand on the paper. For a long time, I thought it was a defect, something to be overcome. Today I think it is different: that recognition of the confusion is the ideal path to understanding these intimate yet enigmatic experiences. That sounds strange, even bizarre, I know. But ever since I have seen the issue in this light, I have the feeling of being really awake and alive for the first time.

“That’s the introduction,” said the bookdealer and started leafing through it. “And now he seems to begin, passage after passage, to dig for all the buried experiences. To be the archaeologist of himself. Some passages are several pages long and others are quite short. Here, for example, is a fragment that consists of only one sentence.” He translated:

Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us— what happens with the rest?

“I’d like to have the book,” said Gregorius. The bookdealer closed it and ran his hand over the binding as affectionately as the student.

“I found it last year in the junk box of a secondhand bookshop in Lisbon. And now I remember: I took it because I liked the introduction. Somehow I lost sight of it.” He looked at Gregorius, who awkwardly felt for his briefcase. “I give it to you as a gift.” “That’s...” Gregorius began hoarsely and cleared his throat.

“It cost pretty much nothing,” said the bookdealer and handed him the book. “Now I remember you: San Juan de la Cruz. Right?”

“That was my wife,” said Gregorius.

“Then you’re the classical philologist of Kirchenfeld, she talked about you. And later I heard somebody else talk about you. It sounded as if you were a walking encyclopedia.” He laughed. “Definitely a popular encyclopedia.”

Gregorius put the book in his coat pocket and held out his hand. “Thank you very much.”

The bookdealer accompanied him to the door. “I hope I haven’t...”

“Not at all,” said Gregorius and touched his arm.

On Bubenbergplatz, he stood still and looked all around. Here he had spent his whole life, here he knew his way around, here he was at home. For someone as nearsighted as he, that was important. For someone like him, the city he lived in was like a shell, a cozy cave, a safe structure. Everything else meant danger. Only someone who had such thick eyeglasses could understand that. Florence hadn’t understood it. And, maybe for the same reason she hadn’t understood that he didn’t like to fly. Getting on an airplane and arriving a few hours later in a completely different world with no time to take in individual images of the road—he didn’t like that and it bothered him. It’s not right, he had said to Florence. What do you mean—not right? she had asked, irritated. He couldn’t explain it and so she had often flown by herself or with others, usually to South America.

Gregorius stood at the display window of Bubenberg Cinema. The late show was a black-and-white film from a novel by Georges Simenon: L’homme qui regardait passer les trains. He liked the title and looked for a long time at the stills. In the late ’70s, when everybody bought a color television, he had tried in vain for days to get another black-and-white set. Finally he had brought one home from the dump. Even after he got married, he had held on to it stubbornly, keeping it in his study, and when he was by himself, he ignored the color set in the living room and turned on the old rattletrap that flickered, the images rolling occasionally. Mundus, you’re impossible, Florence had said one day when she found him before the ugly, misshapen crate. When she started addressing him like the others, and even at home he was treated like a factotum of the city of Bern—that had been the beginning of the end. When the color television had vanished from the flat with the divorce, he had breathed a sigh of relief. Only years later, when the black-and-white picture tube broke altogether, did he buy a new color set.

The movie stills in the display window were big and crystal clear. One showed the pale alabaster face of Jeanne Moreau, stroking damp strands of hair off her forehead. Gregorius tore himself away and went into a nearby café to examine more closely the book of the Portuguese aristocrat who had tried to articulate himself and his mute experiences in words.

Only now, as he leafed slowly one by one through the pages, with a bibliophile’s careful attention, did he discover the portrait of the author, an old photo, yellowed at the time the book was printed, where the once black surfaces had faded to dark brown, the bright face on a background of coarse-grained shadowy darkness. Gregorius polished his glasses, put them back on and, within a few minutes, was completely engrossed in the face.

The man may have been in his early thirties and radiated an intelligence, a self-confidence, and a boldness that literally dazzled Gregorius. The bright face with the high forehead was thatched with luxuriant dark hair that seemed to shine dully and was combed back like a helmet, with some strands falling next to the ears in soft waves. A narrow Roman nose gave the face great clarity, supported by strong eyebrows, set like solid beams painted with a broad brush, soon breaking off at the edges so that a concentration on the middle emerged, where the thoughts were. The full curved lips that wouldn’t have been surprising in the face of a woman, were framed by a thin mustache and a trimmed beard, and the black shadows it cast on the slim neck gave Gregorius the impression of a certain coarseness and toughness. Yet, what determined everything were the dark eyes. They were underscored by shadows, not shadows of weariness, exhaustion or illness, but shadows of seriousness and melancholy. In his dark look, gentleness was mixed with intrepidity and inflexibility. The man was a dreamer and a poet, thought Gregorius, but at the same time, someone who could resolutely direct a weapon or a scalpel, and you’d better have gotten out of his way when his eyes flamed, eyes that could keep an army of powerful giants at bay, eyes that were no stranger to vile looks. As for his clothing, only the white shirt collar with the knot of a tie could be seen, and a jacket Gregorius imagined as a frock coat.

It was almost one o’clock when Gregorius surfaced from the absorption the portrait evoked in him. Once again, the coffee had grown cold in front of him. He wished he could hear the voice of the Portuguese man and see how he moved. Nineteen seventy-five: If he was then in his early thirties, as it seemed, he was now slightly over sixty. Português. Gregorius recalled the voice of the nameless Portuguese woman and transposed it to a lower pitch in his mind, but without turning it into the voice of the bookdealer. It was to be a voice of melancholy clarity, corresponding precisely with the visage of Amadeu de Prado. He tried to make the sentences in the book resonate with this voice. But it didn’t work; he didn’t know how the individual words were pronounced.

Outside, Lucien von Graffenried passed by the café. Gregorius was surprised and relieved to feel that he didn’t flinch. He watched the boy go by and thought of the books on the desk. He had to wait until classes resumed at two o’clock. Only then could he go to the bookstore to buy a Portuguese language textbook.

3

As soon as Gregorius put on the first record at home and heard the first Portuguese sentences, the phone rang. The school. The ringing wouldn’t stop. He stood next to the phone and tried out sentences he could say. Ever since this morning I’ve been feeling that I’d like to make something different out of my life. That I don’t want to be your Mundus anymore. I have no idea what the new one will be. But I can’t put it off anymore. That is, my time is running out and there may not be much more of it left. Gregorius spoke the sentences aloud. They were right, he knew that, he had said few sentences in his life that were so precisely right as these. But they sounded empty and bombastic when they were spoken, and it was impossible to say them into the phone.

The ringing had stopped. But it would start again. They were worried and wouldn’t rest until they had found him; something could have happened to him. Sooner or later, the doorbell would ring. Now, in February, it always got dark early. He wouldn’t be able to turn on a light. In the center of the city, the center of his life, he was attempting to flee and had to hide in the flat where he had lived for fifteen years. It was bizarre, absurd, and sounded like some potboiler. Yet it was serious, more serious than most things he had ever experienced and done. But it was impossible to explain it to those who were searching for him. Gregorius imagined opening the door and inviting them in. Impossible. Utterly impossible.

Three times in a row, he listened to the first record of the course, and slowly got an idea of the difference between the written and the spoken, and of all that was swallowed in spoken Portuguese. His unerring, facile memory for word formation kicked in.

The phone kept ringing at ever shorter intervals. He had taken over an antiquated phone from the previous tenant with a permanent connection he couldn’t pull out. He had insisted that everything remain as it was. Now he took out a wool blanket to muffle the ringing.

The voices guiding the language course wanted him to repeat words and short sentences. Lips and tongue felt heavy and clumsy when he tried it. The ancient languages seemed made for his Bern mouth, and the thought that you had to hurry didn’t appear in this timeless universe. The Portuguese, on the other hand, seemed always to be in a hurry, like the French, which made him feel inferior. Florence had loved it, this breakneck elegance, and when he had heard how easily she succeeded, he had become mute.

But now everything was different all of a sudden: Gregorius wanted to imitate the impetuous pace of the man and the woman’s dancing lightness like a piccolo, and repeated the same sentences over to narrow the distance between his stolid enunciation and the twinkling voice on the record. After a while, he understood that he was experiencing a great liberation; the liberation from his self-imposed limitation, from a slowness and heaviness expressed in his name and had been expressed in the slow measured steps of his father walking ponderously from one room of the museum to another; liberation from an image of himself in which, even when he wasn’t reading, he was someone bending myopically over dusty books; an image he hadn’t drawn systematically, but that had grown slowly and imperceptibly; the image of Mundus, which bore not only his own handwriting, but also the handwriting of many others who had found it pleasant and convenient to be able to hold on to this silent museum-like figure and rest in it. It seemed to Gregorius that he was stepping out of this image like a dusty oil painting on the wall of a forgotten wing in the museum. He walked back and forth in the dim illumination of the lightless flat, ordered coffee in Portuguese, asked for a street in Lisbon, inquired about someone’s profession and name, answered questions about his own profession, and conducted a brief conversation about the weather.

And all at once, he started talking with the Portuguese woman of the morning. He asked her why she was furious with the letter writer. Você quis saltar? Did you want to jump? Excitedly, he held the new dictionary and grammar book before his eyes and looked up expressions and verb forms he lacked. Português. How different the word sounded now! Before, it possessed the magic of a jewel from a distant, inaccessible land and now it was like one of a thousand gems in a palace whose door he had just pushed open.

The doorbell rang. Gregorius tiptoed to the phonograph and turned it off. They were young voices, student voices, conferring outside. Twice more, the shrill ring cut through the dim silence where Gregorius waited stock-still. Then the footsteps receding on the stairs.

The kitchen was the only room that faced the back and had a Venetian blind. Gregorius pulled it down and turned on the light. He took out the book of the Portuguese aristocrat and the language books, sat down at the table and started translating the first text after the introduction. It was like Latin and quite different from Latin, and now it didn’t bother him in the slightest. It was a difficult text, and it took a long time. Methodically and with the stamina of a marathon runner, Gregorius selected the words and combed through the tables of verbs until he had deciphered the opaque verb forms. After a few sentences, he was gripped by a feverish excitement and he got some paper to write down the translation. It was almost nine o’clock when he was finally satisfied:

PROFUNDEZAS INCERTOS. UNCERTAIN DEPTHS. Is there a mystery under the surfaces of human action? Or are human beings utterly what their obvious acts indicate? It is extraordinary, but the answer changes in me with the light that falls on the city and the Tagus. If it is the enchanting light of a shimmering August day that produces clear, sharp-edged shadows, the thought of a hidden human depth seems bizarre and like a curious, even slightly touching fantasy, like a mirage, that arises when I look too long at the waves flashing in that light. On the other hand, if city and river are clouded over on a dreary January day by a dome of shadowless light and boring gray, I know no greater certainty than this: that all human action is only an extremely imperfect, ridiculously helpless expression of a hidden internal life of unimagined depths that presses to the surface without ever being able to reach it even remotely.

And to this amazing, upsetting unreliability of my judgment is added another experience that, since I have come to know it, steeps my life continually in a distressing uncertainty: that, in this matter, the really most important one for us human beings, I waver even when it concerns myself. For when I sit in front of my favorite café, basking in the sun, and overhear the tinkling laughter of the passing Senhoras, my whole inner world seems filled down to the deepest corner, and is known to me through and through because it exhausts itself in these pleasant feelings. Yet, if a disenchanting, sobering layer of clouds pushes in before the sun, with one fell swoop, I am sure there are hidden depths and abysses in me, where unimagined things could break out and sweep me away. Then I quickly pay and hastily seek diversion in the hope that the sun might soon break out again and restore the reassuring superficiality.

Gregorius opened the picture of Amadeu de Prado and leaned the book against the table lamp. Sentence after sentence, he read the translated text into the bold, melancholy eyes. Only once had he done something like that: when he had read Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations as a student. A plaster bust of the emperor had stood on the table, and when he worked on the text, he seemed to be doing it under the aegis of his mute presence. But between then and now there was a difference, which Gregorius felt ever more clearly as the night progressed, without being able to put it into words. He knew only one thing as two o’clock approached: With the sharpness of his perception, the Portuguese aristocrat had granted him an alertness and precision of feeling that didn’t come even from the wise emperor, whose meditations he had devoured as if they were aimed directly at him. In the meantime, Gregorius had translated another note:

PALAVRAS NUM SILÊNCIO DE OURO. WORDS IN GOLDEN SILENCE. When I read a newspaper, listen to the radio or overhear what people are saying in the café, I often feel aversion, even disgust at the same words written and spoken over and over—at the same expressions, phrases, and metaphors repeated. And the worst is, when I hear myself and have to admit that I too repeat the eternally same things. They’re so horribly frayed and threadbare, these words, worn out by being used millions of times. Do they still have any meaning? Naturally, the exchange of words functions, people act on them, they laugh and cry, they go left or right, the waiter brings the coffee or tea. But that’s not what I want to ask. The question is: Are they still an expression of thoughts? Or only effective sounds that drive people here and there because the worn grooves of babble incessantly flash?

Then I go to the beach and hold my head far into the wind, which I wish were icy, colder than we know it in these parts: May it blow all the hackneyed words, all the insipid language habits out of me so I could come back with a cleansed mind, cleansed of the slag of the same talk. But the first time I have to say something, it’s all as before. The cleansing I long for doesn’t come by itself. I have to do something, and I have to do it with words. But what? It’s not that I’d like to get out of my own language and into another. No, it has nothing to do with linguistic desertion. And I also tell myself something else: You can’t invent a new language. But is that what would I like?

Maybe it’s like this: I’d like to reset Portuguese words. The sentences that would emerge from this new setting might not be odd or eccentric, not exalted, affected or artificial. They must be archetypal sentences of the Portuguese that constitute its center so that you would have the feeling that they originated directly and undefiled from the transparent, sparkling nature of this language. The words must be as unblemished as polished marble, and they must be pure as the notes in a Bach partita, which turn everything that is not themselves into perfect silence. Sometimes, when a remnant of conciliation with the linguistic sludge is in me, I think, it could be the pleasant silence of a cozy living room or the relaxed silence between lovers. But when I am utterly overcome by rage at the sticky habits of words, then it must be no less than the clear, cool silence of the unlighted outer space, where I pull my noiseless orbits as the only one who speaks Portuguese. The waiter, the barber, the conductor—they would be puzzled if they heard the newly set words and their amazement would refer to the beauty of the sentences, a beauty that would be nothing but the gleam of their clarity. They would be—I imagine—cogent sentences, and could even be called inexorable. Incorruptible and firm they would stand there and thus be like the words of a god. At the same time, they would be without exaggeration and without pomposity, precise and so laconic that you couldn’t take away one single word, one single comma. Thus they would be like a poem, plaited by a goldsmith of words.

Hunger made Gregorius’s stomach ache and he forced himself to eat something. Later he sat with a cup of tea in the dark living room. What now? Twice more the doorbell had rung, and the last time he had heard the stifled buzz of the phone was shortly before midnight. Tomorrow they would file a missing person’s report and then the police would appear at the door sometime. He could still go back. At quarter to eight he would walk across the Kirchenfeldbrücke, enter the Gymnasium and wipe out his enigmatic absence with some story that would make him look ludicrous, but that was all, and it suited him. They would never learn anything of the enormous distance he had covered internally in less than twenty-four hours.

But that was it: he had covered it. And he didn’t want to let himself be forced by others to undo this silent journey. He took out a map of Europe and considered how you got to Lisbon by train. Train information, he learned on the phone, didn’t open until six o’clock. He started packing.

It was almost four when he sat in the chair, ready to leave. Outside, it started snowing. Suddenly all courage deserted him. It was a crackpot idea. A nameless, confused Portuguese woman. Yellowed notes of a Portuguese aristocrat. A language course for beginners. The idea of time running out. You don’t run away to Lisbon in the middle of winter because of that.

At five, Gregorius called Constantine Doxiades, his eye doctor. They had often called each other in the middle of the night to share their common suffering from insomnia. Sleepless people were bound by a wordless solidarity. Sometimes he played a blind game of speed chess with the Greek, and afterward Gregorius could sleep a little before it was time to go to school.

“Doesn’t make much sense, does it?” said Gregorius at the end of his faltering story. The Greek was silent. Gregorius was familiar with that. Now he would shut his eyes and pinch the bridge of his nose with thumb and index finger.

“Yes, indeed, it does make sense,” said the Greek now. “Indeed.”

“Will you help me if, on the way, I don’t know how to go on?”

“Just call. Day or night. Don’t forget the spare glasses.”

There it was again, the laconic certainty in his voice. A medical certainty, but also a certainty that went far beyond anything professional; the certainty of a man who took time for his thoughts so they were later expressed in valid judgments. For twenty years, Gregorius had been going to this doctor, the only one who could remove his fear of going blind. Sometimes, he compared him with his father, who, after his wife’s premature death, seemed—no matter where he was or what he did—to dwell everywhere in the dusty safety of a museum. Gregorius had learned young that it was very fragile, this safety. He had liked his father and there had been moments when the feeling was even stronger and deeper than simple liking. But he had suffered from the fact that the father was not someone you could rely on, could not hold on to, unlike the Greek, whose solid judgment you could trust. Later, he had sometimes felt guilty about this accusation. The safety and self-confidence he didn’t have weren’t something a person could control or be accused for lacking. You had to be lucky with yourself to be a self-confident person. And his father hadn’t had much luck, either with himself or with others.

Gregorius sat down at the kitchen table and drafted letters to the Rector. They were either too abrupt or too apologetic. At six, he called railroad information. From Geneva, the trip took twenty-six hours. It went through Paris and Irún in the Basque region, and from there with the night train to Lisbon, arriving at eleven in the morning. Gregorius ordered the ticket. The train to Geneva left at eight-thirty. Now he got the letter right.

Honored Rector, Dear Colleague Kägi,

You will have learned by now that I left class yesterday without an explanation and didn’t come back, and you will also know that I have remained incommunicado. I am well, nothing has happened to me. But, in the course of the day yesterday, I had an experience that has changed a great deal. It is too personal and still much too obscure for me to put it on paper now. I must simply ask you to accept my abrupt and unexplained act. You know me well enough, I think, to know that it does not happen out of imprudence, irresponsibility or indifference. I am setting off on a distant journey and when I will return and in what sense is wide open. I don’t expect you to keep the position open for me. Most of my life has been closely intertwined with this Gymnasium, and I am sure I will miss it. But now, something is driving me away from it and it could well be that this movement is final. You and I are both admirers of Marcus Aurelius, and you will remember this passage in his Meditations: “Do wrong to thyself, do wrong to thyself, my soul; but later thou wilt no longer have the opportunity of respecting and honoring thyself. For every man has but one life. But yours is nearly finished, though in it you had no regard for yourself but placed thy felicity in the souls of others... But those who do not observe the impulses of their own minds must of necessity be unhappy.”

Thank you for the trust you have always shown me and for the good cooperation. You will find—I’m sure—the right words for the students, words that will let them know how much I liked working with them. Before I left yesterday, I looked at them and thought: How much time they still have before them!

In the hope of your understanding and with best wishes for you and your work, I remain yours,

Raimund Gregorius

P.S. I left my books on the desk. Would you pick them up and make sure nothing happens to them?

Gregorius mailed the letter at the railroad station. Then at the ATM, his hands shook. He polished his glasses and made sure he had his passport, ticket and address book. He found a seat at the window. When the train left for Geneva, it was snowing big, slow flakes.

NIGHT TRAIN TO LISBON © by Carl Hanser Verlag München Wien
Translation © 2008 by Barbara Harshav.
Reprinted with permission of Grove Press, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.