In Lisbon, Portugal, on a brilliant October Sunday morning, an American woman, a tourist, experiences a sudden rush of happiness, as clear and pure as the sunshine that warms the small flowers near her feet. She is standing in the garden of the Castelo de Sāo Jorge, and the view before her includes a great spread of the city: the river and its estuary, the shining new bridge; she can see for miles!
Her name is Arden Kinnell, and she is a journalist, a political-literary critic, sometimes writing on films; she survives somewhat precariously, although recently she has begun to enjoy a small success. Tall and thin, Arden is a little awkward, shy, and her short blonde hair is flimsy, rather childlike. Her face is odd, but striking in its oddity: such wide-spaced, staring, yellow-green eyes, such a wide, clearly sensual mouth. And now she is smiling, out of sheer pleasure at this moment.
Arden and her lover-companion—Gregor, the slightly rumpled young man at her side—arrived the night before from Paris, and they slept long and well, after only a little too much wine at their hotel. Healthy Californians, they both liked the long, rather steep walk up those winding, cobbled streets, through the picturesquely crumbling, red tile–roofed old quarter, the Alfama, up to this castle, this view of everything. Arden is especially struck by the sight of the distant, lovely bridge, which she has read was dedicated to the revolution of April, 1974, the so-called Generals’ Revolution that ended fascism in Portugal.
The air is so good, so fresh and clear! Breathing in, Arden thinks, Ah, Lisbon, how beautiful it is. She thinks, I must tell Luiz how much I like his city.
Madness: in that demented instant she has forgotten that at a recent party in San Francisco a woman told her that Luiz was dying (was “terminal,” as she put it). Here in Lisbon. Now.
And even stranger than that friendly thought of Luiz, whom she once loved wildly, desperately, entirely—dear God, friends is the last thing they were; theirs was an adversary passion, almost fatal—stranger than the friendly impulse is the fact that it persists, in Arden, generally a most disciplined woman; her mind is—usually—strong and clear, her habits of work exemplary. However, insanely, there in Lisbon, that morning, as she continues to admire and to enjoy the marvellous sweep of city roofs, the graceful bridge above the shining water, she even feels the presence of Luiz, and happily; that is the incredible part. Luiz, with whom she experienced the wildest reaches of joy, but never the daily, sunny warmth of happiness.
Can Luiz possibly just that day have died? Can this lively blue Portuguese air be giving her that message, and thus causing her to rejoice? Quickly she decides against this: Luiz is not dead, he cannot be—although a long time ago she surely wished him dead, believing as she then did that only his death could release her from the brutal pain of his absence in her life.
Or, could the woman at the San Francisco party (a woman whom she did not like at all, Arden now remembers—so small and tautly chic), could that woman have been mistaken? Some other Luiz V. was dying in Lisbon? But that was unlikely; the woman clearly meant the person that Arden knew, or had known—the rich and well-connected, good, but not very famous painter. The portraitist.
Then, possibly Luiz was ill but has recovered? A remission, or possibly a misdiagnosis in the first place? Everyone knows that doctors make such mistakes; they are often wrong.
Arden decides that Luiz indeed is well; he is well and somewhere relatively nearby, in some house or apartment that she can at least distantly see from where she is standing, near the crenellated battlements of the castle, on the sun-warmed yellow gravel. She looks back down into the Alfama, where Luiz might be.
Gregor, the young lover—only five years younger than Arden, actually—Gregor, a photographer, “knows” about Luiz. Friends before they became lovers (a change in status that more than once has struck Arden as an error), in those days Arden and Gregor exchanged life stories, finding that they shared a propensity for romantic disaster—along with their similarly precarious freelance professions (and surely there is some connection? both she and Gregor take romantic as well as economic risks?).
“Can you imagine a woman dumb enough to believe that a Portuguese Catholic would leave his wife and children just for her?” Arden asked, in the wry mode that had become a useful second nature to her. “Oh, how stupid I was!” she lamentingly laughed. And Gregor countered with his own sad love adventure; she was a model, Lisa. “Well, can you imagine a photographer who wouldn’t know not to take up with a model?” This was when Gregor, just out of art school, was trying to get a start in New York; Lisa, though younger than he, was already doing quite well. But Lisa’s enchanting liveliness, and her wit, as well as her lovely thin body, turned out to be coke-maintained. “No one then was doing anything but plain old dope and a little acid,” was Gregor’s comment. “I have to hand it to her, she was really ahead of her time. But crazy.”
Gregor too can be wry, or does he imitate Arden? She sometimes has an alarmed sense that he sounds like her, or tries to. But he is fun to talk to, still, and often funny. And he is smart, and sexy. Tall and light-haired, he is not handsome but very attractive, with his huge pale Russian eyes, his big confident body. A good photographer, in fact he is excellent.
At moments, though, Arden feels a cold enmity from Gregor, which is when she wishes that they were still “just friends.” And is he an alcoholic, really? He drinks too much, too often. And does he love her?
Oh, love, Arden thinks. How can I even use that word.
Gregor and Arden do not in fact live together, and although she sometimes tells friends that she considers this an ideal arrangement, often she actually does not. Her own house in Larkspur is small, but hardly too small for two, and it is pleasantly situated on a wooded knoll, no other houses in sight. There is a pool, and what Arden considers her recreational garden, an eccentric plot all crowded with squash and nasturtiums and various lettuces. Gregor spends much of his time there with her; he likes to swim, although gardening does not interest him—but he also keeps a small place of his own on a rather bleak street near Twin Peaks, in San Francisco, high up in the fog and winds. And his apartment itself is bleak: three small rooms, monastically clean and plain and white. There is also a darkroom, of course, where he often works late at night. No personal traces anywhere, no comfortable mess. Forbidding. Arden has only been there twice. Even when they are in the city it always seems better to drive on back to Larkspur, after the movie or concert, whatever. But Arden thinks of him there, in those rooms, on the nights that he stays in town, and her thoughts are uneasy. Not only the existence of that apartment, an alternative to her house, as well as to herself, but its character is threatening to Arden, reminding her of aspects of Gregor himself: a sensed interior coldness, an implacable emptiness. When she thinks of Gregor’s house she could be imagining an enemy.
She has never seen any food around, for instance: does he only drink there, alone, in his white, white rooms? She does not imagine that he sees other women, but certainly he could. He could go out to bars, bring women home. This though seems less likely, and therefore possibly less threatening than just drinking alone, so grimly.
At the end of Arden’s love affair with Luiz there were hints in local gossip columns that he had a “somewhat less than professional relationship” with a few of the subjects of his portraits, and the pain of this information (explaining so much! so plausible!) was a further unbearable thrust to Arden.
In any case, since Gregor knows about Luiz, including the fact of Lisbon, home of Luiz (but not the possible mortal illness; Arden has not been able or perhaps not seen fit to mention this), does Gregor think it strange that so far in Lisbon Arden has not mentioned Luiz, whom she used sometimes to talk about? Here she has not once said his name, in any context. She herself does not quite know why she has not.
Still, just now she is happy, looking down to small balconies of flowers, of vines that climb up on intricate iron grillwork. She wonders: possibly, is that where Luiz lives, that especially handsome, long-windowed apartment? with the darkgray drapery?
Arden is happy and well and suddenly very hungry. She says to Gregor, “Isn’t that a restaurant over there? Shouldn’t we try it? It looks nice, and I can’t bear to leave this view.”
“Well, sure.” Gregor’s look in Arden’s direction is slightly puzzled—as well it might be, Arden thinks. She too is puzzled, very. She loves Lisbon, though, and her blood races dizzily.
They go into the restaurant; they are quickly seated at a white-clothed table, with the glorious Lisbon view.
“Had you ever, uh, heard about this place before?” asks Gregor, once their wine has come. This is his closest—if oblique—reference to Luiz, who surely might have mentioned to Arden a favorite restaurant, with its marvellous view. But as though realizing what he has done Gregor then covers up. “Or did you read about it somewhere? a restaurant guide?”
“No, actually not. It just looked good. The doors—” The front door is of heavy glass, crossed with pitted, old-looking iron bars. “An interesting use of glass, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” says Gregor.
Their eyes regard each other suspiciously.
Remembering Luiz, Arden sees flat smooth black hair, that shines, in bedside lamplight. She watches him as he dresses, while she lies there spent and languid; she watches everything shining, his hair and his bright black eyes, their dark glitter. He comes over to kiss her good-by, for that day, and then he cannot, does not leave.
“This is an illness, this endless craving that I have for you. A mania—” Luiz more than once remarked, with an accuracy that Arden could not then admit to herself. She did not feel ill, only that all her nerves had been touched, involved.
Luiz is (or was) an excellent portraitist. His paintings were both elegant and penetrating, often less than flattering; on the other hand, on occasion, very flattering indeed. He was at his best with women (well, of course he was, Arden has thought). Once she went to an exhibit of his paintings at a Sutter Street gallery—though not, naturally, to the opening, a social event much reported in the papers.
In fact they first met at a gallery opening. From across the room Luiz found Arden (that is how he put it, “I found you there”), coming over to talk to her intently for a while (about what? later she could never remember). He called the next day; he called and called, he would not be put off.
This was in the early sixties. Arden, then much involved in the peace movement, saw his assault on her life as an incursion, an invasion. He attacked with superior weapons, and with the violence of his passion for her. And he won. “I think that you have fallen in love with my love for you,” he once (again accurately) remarked.
Out of her depth, and dismayed by everything about Luiz—the wife and family at home in Portugal, a fascist country—Arden found some small comfort in the fact that all his favorite writers seemed to be of the Left: Silone, Camus—and that his favorite movie director was Pasolini.
She pointed this out, rather shyly—the shyness of an essentially defeated person.
“My darling, I have a horror of the Right, of fascismo.” (But in much the same tone he also said, “I have a horror of fat” as he stroked her thin thigh, then cupped the sharp crest with his wise and skillful hand.)
You could simply look at his eyes, or his mouth, Arden thinks now, and know that Luiz was remarkable.
She remembers his walk. The marvellous confidence in that stride. During all the weeks of suffering so acutely from his absence in her life (classically, Luiz did not get the promised divorce, nor did he defect from the fascist government he railed against; he went back to Lisbon, to his wife, to that regime)—during all that time of suffering, it was the thought of his walk that caused Arden the most piercing pain: that singular, energetic motion of his body, its course through the world, without her.
After lunch, much more slowly than earlier they had climbed the streets, Arden and Gregor start down. The day is still glorious; at one point they stop at a small terrace where there are rounded cypresses, very small, and a lovely wall of soft blue tiles, in an intricate, fanciful design—and a large and most beautiful view of sky and majestic, glossy white clouds, above the shimmering water of the sea. From this distance the commemorative suspension bridge is a graceful sculpture; catching the sunlight, it shines.
Arden is experiencing some exceptional, acute alertness; as though layers of skin had peeled away, all her senses are opened wide. She sees, in a way that she never has before. She feels all the gorgeous day, the air, and the city spread below her.
She hardly thinks of Gregor, at her side, and this is something of a relief; too often he is a worrying preoccupation for her.
Their plan for the afternoon has been to go back to their hotel, where they have left a rental car, and to drive north to Cascais, Estoril, and Sintra. And that is what they now proceed to do, not bothering to go into the hotel, but just taking their car, a small white Ford Escort, and heading north.
As they reach the outskirts of the city, a strange area of new condominiums, old shacks, and some lovely, untouched woods—just then, more quickly than seemed possible, the billowing clouds turn black, a strong wind comes up, and in another minute a violent rainstorm has begun, rains lashing at the windshield, water sweeping across the highway.
Arden and Gregor exchange excited grins: an adventure. She thinks, Oh, good, we are getting along, after all.
“Maybe we should just go to Sintra, though,” he says, a little later. “Not too much point in looking at beach resorts?”
Yielding to wisdom, Arden still feels a certain regret. Cascais. She can hear Luiz saying the word, and “Estoril,” with the sibilant Portuguese s’s. But she can also hear him saying Sintra, and she says it over to herself, in his voice.
A little later, looking over at her, Gregor asks, “Are you okay? You look sort of funny.”
“How, funny?”
“Odd. You look odd. And your nose. It’s so, uh, pink.”
Surprising them both, and especially herself, Arden laughs.
“Noses are supposed to be pink,” she tells him.
Normally, what Arden thinks of as Gregor’s lens-like observations make her nervous; they make her feel unattractive, and unloved. But today—here in Portugal!—her strange happiness separates her like a wall, or a moat from possible slights, and she thinks, How queer that Gregor should even notice the color of my nose, in a driving rainstorm—here, north of Lisbon, near Sintra. As, in her mind, she hears the deep, familiar, never-forgotten voice of Luiz saying, “I adore your face! Do you know how I adore it? How lovely you are?” She hears Luiz, she sees him.
Then quite suddenly, as suddenly as it began, the storm is over. The sky is brilliantly blue again, and the clouds are white, as Arden thinks, No wonder Luiz is more than a little erratic—it’s the weather. And she smiles to herself.
Suppose she sent him a postcard from Lisbon? Ego absolvo te. Love, Arden. Would he laugh and think fondly of her, for a moment? Is he dying?
In Sintra they drive past a small town square, with a huge, rather forbidding municipal building, some small stores. The wet stone pavement is strewn with fallen wet yellow leaves. They start up a narrow road, past gates and driveways that lead to just-not visible mansions, small towered castles. (The sort of places that Luiz might visit, or own, for weekends, elegant parties.) As they climb up and up in the small white car, on either side of the road the woods become thicker, wilder, more densely and violently green—everything green, every shape and shade of green, all rain-wet, all urgently growing. And giant rocks, great dead trees lying beside them. Ferns, enormously sprouting. Arden is holding her breath, forgetting to breathe. It is crazy with green, she thinks, crazy growth, so old and strong, ancient, endless and wild, ferocious. Like Luiz. Like Portugal, dying.
Gregor is making some odd maneuver with the car; is he turning around, mid-road? Trying to park, among so many giant rocks, heavy trees, and brilliant, dripping leaves?
In any case he has stopped the car. On a near hill Arden can see the broken ruins of a castle, jagged black fragments of stone, and in the sky big clouds are blackening again.
Willing calm (though still having trouble with her breath), Arden says, “I think it’s going to rain again.”
Huge-eyed, pale, Gregor is staring across at her. He says, “You cut me out—all the way! You might as well be here alone!”
He is right, of course; she is doing just that, pretending he is not there. So unfair—but his staring eyes are so light, so blue. Arden says, “I’m sorry, really—” but she can feel her voice getting away from her, can feel tears.
Gregor shouts, “I don’t know why we came here! Why Portugal? What did you expect? You could have just come by yourself!”
But Arden can hardly hear him. The rain has indeed begun again; it is pelting like bullets against the glass, and wind is bending down all the trees, flattening leaves.
And suddenly in those moments Arden has understood that Luiz is dead—and that she will never again feel for anyone what she felt for him. Which, even though she does not want to—she would never choose to feel so much again—still, it seems a considerable loss.
In fact, though, at that particular time, the hour of that passionate October storm (while Arden quarrelled with Gregor), Luiz is still alive, although probably “terminal.” And she only learns of his death the following spring, and then more or less by accident: she is in Washington, D.C., for some meetings having to do with grants for small magazines and presses, and in a hasty scanning of the Post she happens to glance at a column headed “Deaths Elsewhere.”
Luiz —– —– V. (There were two intervening names that Arden has not known about.) Luiz V. had died a few days earlier in Lisbon, the cause of death not reported. Famous portraitist, known for satire, and also (this is quite as surprising to Arden as the unfamiliar names)—“one of the leading intellectuals in Lisbon to voice strong public support for the armed forces coup in April 1974 that ended half a century of right-wing dictatorship.”
Curiously—years back she would not have believed this possible, ever—that day Arden is too busy with her meetings to think about this fact: Luiz dead. No longer someone whom she might possibly see again, by accident in an airport, or somewhere. No longer someone possibly to send a postcard to.
That day she is simply too busy, too harried, really, with so many people to see, and with getting back and forth from her hotel to her meetings, through the strange, unseasonable snow that has just begun, relentlessly, to fall. She thinks of the death of Luiz, but she does not absorb it.
That quarrel with Gregor in Sintra, which prolonged itself over the stormy drive back to Lisbon, and arose, refuelled, over dinner and too much wine—that quarrel was not final between them, although Arden has sometimes thought that it should have been. They continue to see each other, Arden and Gregor, in California, but considerably less often than they used to. They do not quarrel; it is as though they were no longer sufficiently intimate to fight, as though they both knew that any altercation would indeed be final.
Arden rather thinks, or suspects, that Gregor sees other women, during some of their increasing times apart. She imagines that he is more or less actively looking for her replacement. Which, curiously, she is content to let him do.
She herself has not been looking. In fact lately Arden has been uncharacteristically wary in her dealings with men. In her work she is closely allied with a lot of men, who often become good friends, her colleagues and companions. However, recently she has rather forcibly discouraged any shifts in these connections; she has chosen to ignore or to put down any possible romantic overtones. She spends time with women friends, goes out to dinner with women, takes small trips. She is quite good at friendship, has been Arden’s conclusion, or one of them. Her judgment as to lovers seems rather poor. And come to think of it her own behavior in that area is not always very good. Certainly her strangeness, her removal in Lisbon, in Sintra, was quite enough to provoke a sensitive man, which Gregor undoubtedly is.
On that night, the night of reading the news item (Deaths Elsewhere) containing the death of Luiz—that night Arden is supposed to meet a group of friends in a Georgetown restaurant. At eight. In character, she gets there a little early, and is told that she will be seated as soon as her friends arrive; would she like to wait in the bar?
She would not, especially, but she does so anyway, going into a dark, panelled room, of surpassing anonymity, and seating herself in a shadowed corner from which new arrivals in the restaurant are visible. She orders a Scotch, and then wonders why; it is not her usual drink, she has not drunk Scotch for years.
By eight-ten she has begun to wonder if perhaps she confused the name of the restaurant. It was she who made the reservation, and her friends could have gone to some other place, with a similar French name. These friends like herself are always reliably on time, even in snow, strange weather.
The problem of what to do next seems almost intolerable, suddenly—and ridiculously: Arden has surely coped with more serious emergencies. But: should she try to get a cab, which at this crowded dinner hour, in the snow, would be difficult? And if she did where would she go?
In the meantime, at eight-twenty, she orders another drink, and she begins to think about the item in the paper. About Luiz.
Odd, she casually thinks, at first, that she should have “adored” a man—have planned to marry a man whose full name she did not know. And much more odd, she thinks, that he should have publicly favored the ’74 revolution, the end of dictatorship. Opportunism, possibly, Arden first thinks. On the other hand, is she being unfair, unnecessarily harsh? He did always describe himself as anti-fascist. And perhaps that was true?
Perhaps everything he said to her was true?
Arden has finished her second drink. It is clear that her friends will not come; they have gone somewhere else by mistake, and she must decide what to do. But still she sits there, as though transfixed, and she is transfixed, by a sudden nameless pain. Nameless, but linked to loss: loss of Luiz, even, imminently, of Gregor. Perhaps of love itself.
Understanding some of this, in a hurried, determined way Arden gets to her feet and summons the bill from her waiter. She has decided that she will go back to her hotel and order a sandwich in her room. Strange that she didn’t think of that before. Of course she will eventually get a cab, even in the steadily falling, unpredicted snow.