Seen and unseen. I had just arrived in Lisbon and it was already time to leave. The trip was over in the blink of an eye. You wake up in a moving train and see a light of daybreak unlike any other. You close your eyes for an instant, and before you know it, it’s three days later, and you’re sitting at the Santa Apolónia station at nighttime. The immediate past has the temporal elasticity and amplitude that are usually confined to dreams; fantastic journeys unfold in a moment of somnolence, entire stages of one’s life vividly invoked a minute before waking.
The Lusitania Express was ready to depart. The row of windows illuminated the platform. As soon as the train began to move, Lisbon would be nothing but a memory: scribbled words in a notebook; receipts and matchboxes from restaurants; a roll of film; a worn map of the city covered with pencil markings, routes, annotations, circled destinations; a small Portuguese dictionary; an anthology of poems by Fernando Pessoa, which I had purchased the first morning along with the dictionary and the map, with a page folded at the beginning of “Opiário de Álvaro de Campos,” where I had found a verse that somehow would have to make it into my novel, Um Oriente ao Oriente do Oriente, the music of a litany or spell, like John Coltrane’s invocation A love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme, a love supreme.
The sadness of leaving so soon and seeing the cliffs and walls of all my obligations rise again before me was tempered with the knowledge that I had used my time wisely, that all the visual cues I needed for the novel were now impressed in the zones between my memory and imagination: the faces of two lovers who see each other for a split second across moving trains; the hospital with rose-colored walls in the wooded hillside at sunset, just as the lights are starting to turn on; the wall of that abandoned garden and the name on the azulejo tiles, QUINTA DOS LOBOS; the young woman behind the one-way glass who takes her clothes off to the rhythm of slow music, rotating inside a prism of pink lights and mirrors. Her skin is pearl white against the red satin of the bed, and her eyes, provocative and contemptuous, refuse to look into the circular mirrors that surround her with the gaze of those who watch from the anonymity of the private rooms as coins clink into the metal slots next to the toilet paper.
* * *
I was leaving like a spy who has accomplished his mission, the photos on the reel of my camera containing valuable, secret evidence. The night before I had been in the Hot Clube de Portugal in Alegria Square, a dark and empty square, one of the places I had circled on my map. In that same square, perhaps still there in 1987, was the neon sign of Maxime’s Club, where Ramon George Sneyd met several times with Gloria Sousa, a prostitute with platinum blond hair and a loud laugh, who had probably accompanied him the short distance between Alegria Square and João das Regras Street.
I had arrived at number four, a closed metal door on a street lined with deserted buildings, chipped walls, and broken windows, barely illuminated by the weak lights that hung from one end of the square to the other. I thought I was probably mistaken. There was no indication that this was a club or had ever been one. The wind swung the streetlights above, enlarging and disturbing shadows. It reminded me of being a child and feeling my father’s strong grip around my hand as we walked back home at night, our footsteps resounding on the cobblestone streets.
With a determination that back then was out of character for me, I dared to knock on the door. Perhaps there was actually an illuminated sign above the door, which I have forgotten, and its absence adds a certain fictitious satisfaction to the memory. I had come to the Hot Clube to hear some jazz, have a drink, and, most important, see the space where the musicians in my novel would perhaps play. I knocked on the door again and this time it opened as if I had accidentally used the right password.
A young black woman with a mane of curls, an Ethiopian princess in a turtleneck, said the club would open in an hour. I could have fallen in love with her instantly. I don’t remember much about the interior of the club or the concert that night. But memory is cunning, it completes its sleepless marvelous task in secret, breaking the substance of lived experience into fertile soil for fiction; here, it offers me images of jazz clubs that only came much later, low brick vaults with posters on the walls, narrow stairways and basements in New York, the neutral facade of the Village Vanguard.
In the end, my imaginary musicians played in a club that was partially of my own making. The entrance belonged to the facade of an old movie theater with Art Nouveau tiles. I saw the place on my way from Rossio Square to Sapateiros Street. It had a splendid name, Animatógrafo do Rossio, and had endured, like so many other things in Lisbon, in a state of decay that was a testament to time but did not signal its end, a postponement—half mercy, half neglect—which resulted in the anachronism that attracted me so much, as it stood in contrast to the barbaric impulse in Spanish cities to demolish the old and build the new. I did not go past the entrance. I imagined its interior like those of the theaters in my hometown, with gilded moldings, red curtains, and narrow corridors—old-fashioned luxury that began as artificial but acted as a cocoon for our cinematic daydreams—worn red velvet, squeaky chairs, hollow columns. In a place like that, my jazz apprentice would accompany his master at the piano. The master was a trumpeter, somewhere between Clifford Brown and Chet Baker, and his skin color would never be revealed in the book, just as the word jazz would never appear, and certain details about the female protagonist would be missing. She would take a long time to appear but then she would disappear right away; she would arrive without warning, like an apparition, and the moment she started to become more tangible she would vanish, like a ghost, because she was not a real woman but a projection of desire, fed by films and novels and, above all, by the male difficulty of seeing women as they are, to look at them as individuals and not from a place of cowardice or rapture, adolescent fascination and paralysis.
* * *
But that’s what I was. I was about to turn thirty-one and I was still an overgrown adolescent, a spy trapped in my public identity as a bureaucrat, a married man, and married by the church, father of two children; undercover, but was I infiltrating the underworld or City Hall … docile to each obligation, weighed down by the thick net of family ties that I had managed to escape for three days in Lisbon, but where I was now returning on that train in the middle of the night. Like an adolescent, I fed a melodramatic self-pity and inhabited the real world with resentment, feeling like a stranger but also superior and barely paying attention to what surrounded me. I did not want to see the effect of my attitude on those closest to me, those in my home and in my life; the life that felt like a sentence, a routine as uninspiring of emotional and intellectual stimulus as administrative work.
I do not doubt there were moments of happiness that I took for granted and never thanked, moments I failed to notice and have forgotten, or would be ashamed of remembering now, so many years later. Lodged in those blank spaces is remorse as intense as the memory of the pain I caused. Remorse has an extraordinary resistance to the passage of time. It feeds on memory and when there is none, it latches on to amnesia like an organism capable of adapting even to the most extreme conditions.
A January, twenty-seven years later, finds me thinking about how my then wife must have felt when I was in Lisbon. She was still recovering from the birth of our second child. It had been the days of Christmas vacation, which we usually spent in Úbeda with her family and mine, the familial skein in which she felt so warmly protected but that for me was suffocating; parents and grandparents and uncles and cousins, everything multiplied by two, endless trips and visits, and us, arm in arm, pushing the stroller with the baby, the other child holding on to her hand or mine, or holding on to both of us at the same time, asserting his place between us now that his brother was here, perhaps intuitively trying to keep us together, because he sensed, with that primal instinct kids have, the inverse magnetism of the two adults, the seed of everything he would see and hear in just a few years, too young to understand but old enough to experience the pain, to smell the toxic air of dispute and bitterness.
I wonder what she was thinking during those three days in which I called no more than once or twice to ask about the baby. I wonder what she imagined I was doing. She had every reason not to believe what I said. I had lied to her several times, and she always saw right through it. An adolescent about to turn thirty-one, still seeking refuge in literature and music from his mediocre life.
* * *
A group of Spaniards drank and laughed loudly in the train cafeteria. The volume of life was being dialed up again. I had gotten used to the Portuguese manner, the polite and muffled tone of the voices. I had lived those three days in a frontier state of mind, a no-man’s-land between imagination and the real world, with a clearly set beginning and end.
Now I had to go back and sit before the typewriter, create words out of lived experience, resume the thread of the novel. There was nothing beyond the final period of a sentence. The blank page did not signal a particular direction. The train advanced in the darkness and I could feel the proximity of the task ahead, the moment of truth when I sat to write again; a stack of blank paper on one side, the current manuscript on the other, and in the middle, the typewriter and the keyboard, so familiar to my touch. This time I would also have detailed notes to guide me and the photographs I would get developed as soon as I got back.
The train was fairly empty and I was the only person in my compartment. I sat quietly next to the window, waiting for sleep as I watched the passing bursts of shadows, the reflection of the moon on the river, the scattered lights of small villages in the distance. When I woke, the sun was rising over the barren plains near Madrid. I remembered the entire trip as if I had dreamed it. In Atocha I took another train and by noon I was already with my family. I have not preserved a single image from that reunion.
It was January 5 and the Three Kings Day Parade would take place in the afternoon. My wife and I had agreed to take our elder son to see it. On my way there, I bumped into an old childhood friend whom I hadn’t seen in years. He hugged me and we decided to go for a beer. It was still a while before the parade. At the bar we came across more old friends. The beer soothed the anxiety of being late, but I still felt remorseful, and also angry at my obligations. I allowed myself to feel like the victim of oppressive circumstances beyond my control, trapped by responsibilities that my friends, who were less cowardly or less complacent, did not have to endure. Just the day before in Lisbon, I had been living the imaginary life of a novelist, almost like a character in a book; now, in the city of my adolescence, as I became more intoxicated with beer and hashish and the effusive displays of friendship that drunkenness encourages, I was once again acting like a seventeen-year-old, indulging myself in sentimentality and nostalgia.
We kept hopping from bar to bar and it was getting late. The parade and the fireworks had ended long ago. By this point, leaving my wife and my son waiting was not nearly as bad as the fact that I hadn’t even called to tell them I was okay, to make up some excuse, to justify my tardiness, to say I had changed my plans. I thought the harm was done and so it did not matter if I went with my friends to yet another bar and had another drink. The feeling of guilt was a preview of the hangover to come. We laughed, shared stories, and compared memories from our days at the institute. It was three or four in the morning and we were drunk and fumbling through the streets. Didn’t I have the right to go out for a night with my best friends, the people I had known since I was a little kid playing on the streets? I feel so ashamed now. I imagined that after the parade my wife had probably taken the kids to sleep at her parents’ house. At five in the morning, I did the same and went to the old house where I grew up. I struggled to open the door and somehow made it to my old room. I lay on my bed feeling nauseous as the whole room spun in the darkness. For a moment I was back in the train returning from Lisbon, but with no trace of the dignity I had experienced there. I was wrecked and full of anger.