He would not do anything else if they gave him up for dead and stopped looking for him. He would not care if they thought he was that corpse in the Atlanta airport or the one in that beach in Mexico who could not be identified because the crabs had eaten its fingertips. He would stop but first he needed money, he needed to rob a bank or jewelry shop and get just enough money—say twenty or thirty thousand dollars—to live the rest of his life in complete anonymity somewhere far away. That would be more than enough because he was used to getting by with very little. From the moment he started making money, he had learned to keep track of every expense, and he never spent more than what he could afford. He had a strict budget for basic necessities and small treats here and there; his rooms were always in cheap boardinghouses and he only bought simple food. The rest were small expenses: radio batteries, the occasional book or pornographic magazine from a secondhand shop, a newspaper or two every day, a few beers to drink at night in his room, and women, of course, mostly prostitutes, but always the least expensive, as he had told a cellmate once, the ones who were ready to do business even if there was a language barrier, after all, only a few words are necessary, words that are similar in any language, universal gestures, the universal language of love, like the blond woman at Maxime’s had said while laughing. She was different from the other one, the first one, the one he had met at the Texas Bar and gifted a bathing suit. He had promised her that they would go to the beach together, but he ended up deciding against it. He liked her but he could not afford to take any risks, and it was always safer to meet a person only once, man or woman, it did not matter, you could not give anyone the opportunity to form a memory of you, to become so familiar with your face that they will recognize it right away if they see it in a newspaper or on the TV.
He asked her to come to the hotel at nine in the morning, the day after his arrival in Lisbon, May 9. Sometime before that, however, after returning from breakfast, he asked the receptionist to tell the lady he had to leave town in a hurry for an urgent business matter. He sat close to the balcony, behind the curtains, and waited for her to appear. A few minutes before nine, he saw her walking from the direction of the square with the king statue. It was a bright morning. She was wearing a light summer dress, a cardigan and a shoulder bag, flat shoes. No makeup.
She glanced at the balconies of the hotel but did not see him. He remained still on the chair, dressed in the dark suit and black tie, with his eyes fixed on the street below, until he saw her again, this time from behind, walking away slowly. He would continue going to the Texas Bar for the remainder of his time in Lisbon, but he would never see her again.
* * *
He would stay in Lisbon, if only he had a way of getting money. Lisbon was better than Puerto Vallarta. It was safer. Puerto Vallarta was too close to the United States, and although it was quite secluded, it was also very small and an American did not go unnoticed. Also, American tourists came to Puerto Vallarta often and they would recognize him; they would surely hear about him in the bars and in the brothels. Lisbon was better. All one had to do to disappear was go up one of those narrow stairways to nowhere, or get a room in one of the big, gloomy buildings that lined the side streets, or get a room in one of those boardinghouses tucked in the small, quiet squares, like the one he had seen by the Texas Bar as he got in the taxi with her, feeling more fatigued than aroused, nodding off as they sped through those narrow and winding streets, harsh sunlight followed by shade, women yelling in the background, clothes hanging on lines from the balconies above, yellow trolleys appearing and disappearing around the corners.
The taxi came to a stop in a small square under the imposing shadow of a tree. He paid the driver while she waited outside. She was standing by the entrance to a house. He could hear her speak in her incomprehensible language, aided by gestures and a few English words here and there, room, cheap, clean, bath, money.
The stairway was illuminated by a skylight. He followed her up the steps. They were painted blue like the railing. He watched her hand slide on the wooden surface. No nail polish. He was trying to keep up with her, but the steps were steep and he was running out of breath. He was also starting to feel anxious, impatient to get what he wanted, always the same, the woman on her knees, her head moving faster and faster between his hands.
* * *
He could stay in a room like that, with an open window overlooking the tiled roofs and a big tree filled with birds whose song would drown out the noise of the city, making it feel so remote, a bay or a lake of silence at the end of the world. It would be like reaching the end of a tunnel that stretches all the way back to the prison cell, after a long journey that required crawling through sewers, squeezing through the narrowest passages, digging into the ground with one’s bare hands, like a mole.
* * *
He would not do anything else if he was safe, if he wasn’t running out of money so quickly. He would be content just to watch others, without fear, without being seen. Every day he felt more and more confident in his ability to dissolve in the fog of the crowds and never stand out. He would be able to watch others with curiosity instead of envy or contempt, passing along all the places where people remained bound by their schedules, their obligations, their kids, their women, the tasks they would have to repeat until the day they died.
He would stay in the room of the boardinghouse and enjoy the view from the window, or lie in bed reading novels, scanning newspaper articles, searching for possible clues about the hunt, or, even better, he would sit at a cafe, a table in the back and facing the entrance or maybe close to the back door, or perhaps on the terrace of the Pastelaria Suiça, under the shade of the awning, sipping a coffee all morning, enjoying the breeze and the sound of the water fountain.
There were still some evenings and nights when he managed to relax in the bars of Cais do Sodré. He would choose a quiet corner and drink one beer very slowly. Sitting by himself, he felt like a diver at the bottom of the sea, watching all the reds and blues that propagated through the mirrors and liquefied in the cigarette smoke; a diver who is protected behind the glass of his helmet, and is free to watch all the animals and aquatic plants, plants that are actually animals and fish that swim with their mouths open, silently, leaving a trail of air bubbles.
He watched faces and lipsticked mouths floating in the smoke, in the aquatic darkness of the bar, the glow of lit cigarettes, the hum of laughter and words in foreign languages. He watched others get drunk with alcohol and lust, men and women, courting each other like exotic animals. The rumor was out that he was stingy with money, so women left him alone.
As far back as he could remember, he had observed the world and the lives of others like a three-dimensional film that plays around him but of which he has no part, like the full-color ads in magazines that he liked so much, the ones with happy, fictional lives, unashamedly laden with promises, because behind the cars, alcohol, menthol cigarettes, air conditioners, color TVs with remote control, tanning lotions, there was something else all these people seemed to believe in: unabashed happiness, adventure, the immediate gratification of desire, sexual fantasies.
* * *
It all fascinated him. On the full-page spreads of Life magazine everything was bright: a shiny sports car, photographed from an angle that accentuated the shape of its nose, like a shark, and a background of palm trees under a blue sky, a helicopter, and a name in bold letters, Pontiac Firebird; a spray to stop feet from sweating; a businessman or insurance salesman who smiles with all the confidence of someone who will never let you down, Always with you when you need us; a young, attractive couple drinking J&B whiskey; a happy family around a breakfast table raising their big glasses of orange juice; a double page featuring the new Chrysler models, including not only cars but also rockets, tanks, trailers, excavators, school buses; an overabundance that multiplies the pages of the magazine, almost overflowing from them; tall glasses of blond, foamy beer, with beads of condensation on the glass; a Volvo with a metallic shine; an air conditioner from Frigidaire offering a cold breeze in the middle of a hot summer for all the happy people who gather around it; Redwood aftershave, which is all man to make a woman feel all woman; the twenty-six flavors of Crest toothpaste; tobacco and alcohol, the distinguishing qualities of masculinity; the smoke from Marlboro cigarettes, which expands the lungs and invigorates the rugged cowboys in the pictures; a frosty Four Roses whiskey sour in a tall glass is the new summer cooler. It cools you off from the inside out; a man in a blue blazer stepping down off a plane with a bag of golf clubs, welcomed by a stewardess who offers him a flask with Old Crow whiskey; cars have names that allude to fire and thunder: there’s the Pontiac Firebird and, a few pages later, the Ford Thunderbird.
He read with the door locked. Room number 2. Lying in bed without taking his shoes off, dropping the magazines and newspapers on the floor as he dozed off. As soon as he entered the room he secured the latch. He remained alert to every noise that came from outside. Even when relatively safe in a hideout, it was important to remain vigilant, like a mouse or a cockroach, he thought. He had read that mice and cockroaches were extremely sensitive to danger; their hearing and sense of smell, the antennas of the cockroach, the sensors in their legs and stomachs capable of perceiving every floor vibration, the creaking of the bed when you got up—they were alert and ready to disappear before the bathroom light came on.
He perceived the world in an indirect manner, with a degree of distortion that was consistent, but he did not know how to calculate, as if he were still in prison and any piece of valuable information came in fragments, transmitted through unreliable channels, word of mouth, two or three steps removed from the source, in incomplete newspapers that were so old they barely had any value. In prison, the exterior world filtered in like the murmur of voices and metallic echoes that came from other cells. Prison was similar to a military camp; in both, the exterior world felt erased and muted, and you got used to living as if it did not really exist. But you also lived every hour of the day obsessed with the idea of returning to an outside world, which felt increasingly distant and unreliable as you adapted to isolation and mental confinement, and also because people on the outside, even those closest to you, would slowly become estranged, even if they still sent letters and packages, and visited on occasion when it was obvious how uncomfortable they felt, how impatient they were to get away from the contagious smells and sounds of prison.
* * *
He could not trust anything. There was no way to confirm what was true. The government declared top secret the discovery of an alien spacecraft that had crashed in New Mexico. Much of what the newspapers publish is propaganda and lies. President Roosevelt allowed the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor so he could push the United States into war with Hitler. The black preachers decrying racial segregation in the South were, in fact, secret Soviet agents, and the FBI did nothing about it because they were infested with communist double agents.
As a boy, he would find newspapers on the street and get absorbed reading them. If his father caught him, he would knock the paper out of his hand and ridicule him. Newspapers are only good for wiping your ass. The news is lies to deceive idiots. The people who write the newspapers are in someone’s pocket, they are thieves, just like doctors, lawyers, Catholic priests, and the Jews.
Sitting alone in his cell, or on a bench at the library, or in one of the motel rooms where he lived after escaping, he imagined there had to be a method, a code he could use to understand all those things, to distinguish truth from lies, like those machines that could decipher enemy messages, a sure way to get reliable information, and perhaps intercept messages between the powerful, the people who own the world, the Jews, the ones who control everything from a distance, the communists.
As a young man, during one of his first long stints in prison, he had followed with great interest the efforts of Senator Joe McCarthy, the only politician with the courage to tell the truth and point his finger at the traitors. While other prisoners played cards or demanded that he change the station so they could listen to stupid dance songs, he pressed his ear to the old radio so he could hear the impassioned voice of Senator McCarthy speaking live, calling out his enemies, who were much more powerful. He had only seen a blurry photo of the senator in the newspaper, but he imagined him as a heroic prosecutor from a movie who unmasks the real culprits, the ones no one had suspected. It was inevitable that they would target him, spreading lies, repaying his sacrifice with ingratitude and revenge. And the majority of the people, brainwashed, now applauding his fall like they had applauded his rise not long before, cheering on the streets, spitting on the corpse and legacy of a man they had admired and feared.
* * *
At night, the outside world filtered into his dark cell through the small transistor radio he had purchased in the commissary. He pressed his ear against the plastic casing so he could hear the faint voices of the newscasters, the ads, the songs of Johnny Cash, which he loved. You could hear police sirens in the background of live news reports, also gunshots, the cries of angry people in the streets, the sermons of the preachers. Among them, that firm and solemn voice, the name that was becoming more and more familiar, the biggest liar of them all, the black man with the slanted eyes, the one who elevated his voice with each biblical reference, electrifying the dark-skinned multitudes who followed his orders, commanding them, like barbarian armies, to take over the cities of the South. He was the false prophet with the tailored suits and the gold cuff links, the one who launched the assault on the schools and the buses and the lunch counters, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the covert communist who quoted the Bible from memory, the licentious preacher who slept with white women who had no dignity.
* * *
The small radio was the most valuable thing he took with him the day he escaped. He kept making sure it was in his pocket as he crouched inside the bread cart. The radio would help him stay awake during the long nights of walking that followed. Later on, in the motel rooms, it was the sound of the radio that lulled him to sleep. The headlines and quotes he read in the newspaper were easier to understand if he attributed voices to them, if he read them out loud, pronouncing the difficult words slowly, extemporaneous, neurophysiology, realpolitik, extrasensory, telepathic.
All those nights, driving through the deserts in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, it was the human voices from the small radio that kept him company. His eyes never strayed from the tunnel of light created by the Mustang’s headlights on the highway, but his hand moved automatically to the radio dial as soon as a station began to fade. He listened to women who called the midnight shows to announce they were going to commit suicide or to demand that a real man show up to their lonely rooms. He listened to preachers go on and on about the impending Apocalypse or the coming of Jesus Christ in an alien spaceship. He listened to live reports about black people rioting and he could hear the cries, the explosions, the breaking glass, the police sirens.
He continued listening to his radio even after he bought the portable TV in Los Angeles. The TV lost its image or sound constantly and you had to keep moving the antenna. He would leave it on and stare at the screen while listening to the voices on the radio. That face seemed to always be there when he turned on the TV at night, just like in the magazines and newspapers. The prophet, the Moses of his people, the Nobel laureate, the shameless communist who was now blatant about his decision to betray his country, taking the same side as the yellow hordes of North Vietnam, the Vietcong; the champion of the poor who traveled in first class and stayed in luxury hotels, the one who bit the hand that had fed him, now announcing another march in Washington, hundreds of thousands or millions of black people invading the capital, descending like a plague.
* * *
It was much easier to study the man’s face on the TV screen. The camera acted like a set of binoculars. Before that, he had been just a photo in a newspaper, the name in the big headlines, the menacing and unctuous voice on the radio. He placed the TV on a shelf in his room in the St. Francis Hotel in Los Angeles, and when the static finally cleared it was that face again, the dark skin shining with sweat under the camera lights or the midday sun. The headline announced that he was giving a speech in Los Angeles at the moment, so close, he could have driven there in less than ten minutes. On the back of the TV, with the tip of a nail clipper, he carved the words: Martin Luther Coon.
* * *
He turned on the car radio as he was leaving Memphis on April 4. The sun was setting, and as he crossed into Mississippi the sounds of police sirens began to die down. He was listening to the news when it suddenly hit him: the little transistor radio was in the bag he had left behind with the rifle. It was like losing a talisman. Losing it was making him as anxious as the fact that he had left his fingerprints. He drove straight to Atlanta that night, taking only secondary roads and stopping once for gas. He struggled to stay awake but could still hear the voices from the radio; confused, anguished, vengeful voices describing a person who was yet to be identified but was clearly him—a man in his forties wearing a dark suit. And yet, somehow, it felt as if they were talking about someone else, someone far away who had nothing to do with him. An exalting and dangerous mirage of impunity. Standing between him and the man hunted by the police and the FBI was a blank and infinite space like the expanding time that separated him from the moment of that single shot, the face in the crosshairs, the pain in the eardrums, the recoiling of the rifle. In the confusion of voices, at least there was one that would never speak again. He was half-asleep at the wheel when a voice on the radio said something that put him on alert, though he never quite felt in danger, because with every minute that passed, the farther away he was from Memphis and the more remote it all seemed. The voice had said that the murder suspect had fled toward Mississippi in a white Mustang with Alabama plates.
* * *
But the opacity of the external world would not dissipate, not even now, under the clear light of Lisbon, so far away from Memphis, so close to his final escape. The murky consistency of all those words and images—the glass wall that separated him from others—remained. Invisible metal bars, walls of air that confined him; he felt them press against his chest, like a sharp headache, which could be the sign of a brain tumor. No matter how hard he tried, there was no crack in that wall, no escape. He counted the coins and old bills on the bedside table and tried to calculate how many more days he could afford to stay. He leaned on the railing of an elevated park, watching as a ship left the dock. To the west, he could see the red arches of the bridge surrounded by fog. In the full-page ads of Life magazine, men with golden tans sail to the islands in the Caribbean or the South Seas, invigorated by the smoke of their long cigarettes and their Canadian Club whiskey or Bacardi rum, served in tall glasses with ice. The English and American newspapers that he bought at the kiosk by Rossio Square came several days late. He had purchased a portable radio in Toronto, but it was of no use here because all the stations were in Portuguese. Sometimes he listened and could discern his name, not understanding what else they were saying about him, the name that was now linked to the other one forever, the Big Nigger, he liked to repeat, the unexpected martyr, the hero, the victim, the saint who was worthy of an exorbitant reward of a hundred thousand dollars for whoever could lead them to his murderer.
He could have disappeared forever with much less than a hundred thousand dollars, erased from the face of the earth, secluded in the room in that small square with the big tree, at the end of the stairway with the blue railing. But he was locked in another room, in the Hotel Portugal, a room he would not be able to afford in a few days’ time. He was locked there, waiting in silence with his magazines and newspapers, listening to every sound that came from outside the room. He heard steps in the hotel corridor around midnight. They stopped by his door, then continued after a few moments. He heard voices coming from the adjacent rooms, muffled laughter, the hoarse groan of a man having an orgasm, faint music from a balcony across the street, the clinking of silverware and a family talking over dinner. And two or three nights, around the same time in the wee hours of the morning, he heard a woman moaning, almost howling, on the other side of the wall, so close, he could also hear the rhythmic sound of the headboard hitting against the wall.
Everything in his life happened behind a wall, visible or invisible; everything was always at a distance, like looking inside the other cars as he passed them in the Mustang, or staring at the reflection of the couples in the Texas Bar or Maxime’s or the Niagara Bar or the California Bar or the Arizona, now that he had no money to pay for company, or even a second beer, so he sat in a corner for hours sipping the one slowly, avoiding eye contact so no woman would approach him. He stole furtive glances at them, and felt like he was watching from the other side of one of those special mirrors he once imagined he would use to shoot pornographic films, in another life that wasn’t past or future, a life that never came to exist. Perhaps that is how he would think of those days in Lisbon many years later: days that had never existed, days when he did nothing and was almost nobody, Ramon George Sneyd, or not even, Sneya.