I leave the apartment early on a Sunday morning. I haven’t slept well. I fell asleep after 1:00 a.m. and woke up from a nightmare within the hour. At 3:00 a.m. I was reading Mário Cesariny and Fernando Pessoa in Portuguese with the help of a dictionary. In Pessoa, I underlined Tudo começo é involuntário.
At 4:00 a.m. I was standing by the window observing a man in a large and somber studio in the old building across the street. I could not see his face. He was deep in concentration, in silence, typing on a computer, which emitted the only light in the room. I would have liked to be able to see what he was typing.
At 5:00 a.m. I was the one in front of a computer screen with the window to my back. I was reading an FBI memo that was largely a translation of a report in Portuguese signed on June 24, 1968, by Chief Inspector José Manuel da Cunha Passos. The report had the official letterhead and seal of PIDE, the state police under the Salazar dictatorship, and it provided a full account of their investigation into the activities of the suspect, Ramon George Sneyd, during the time he spent in Lisbon between May 8 and 17. The report lists the nightclubs he frequented and it includes transcripts of interviews with people he came in contact with, as well as the fruitless investigation into the main bank offices of the city, in order to ascertain whether the suspect had carried out any financial transactions there.
In the FBI’s Internet archives, there are old photocopies and scanned pages, copies of copies of copies. Sometimes the type is quite blurry and entire names or sentences or pages are redacted. The light from the laptop illuminates my hands and the notebook where I take notes.
The chief inspector’s report is hard to read. It looks like a worn carbon copy. My eyes begin to hurt. On May 15, the suspect was in the offices of South African Airlines inquiring about flights to Cape Town and Salisbury, the capital of Rhodesia. On the morning of May 16, he visited the Canadian embassy, located at 198 Liberty Avenue, and then he proceeded to Foto Lusitania close by, where he ordered six passport photos. By this time the light in the studio across the street has long turned off, and that entire building is in the dark. In a column, with capital letters, Chief Inspector Cunha Passos has typed the names of all the seedy establishments where they confirmed the suspect’s presence: Texas Bar, Arizona Bar, Niagara Bar, California Bar, Europa Bar, Atlantico Bar, Bolero Bar, Maxime’s Night Club, Garbo Bar & Night Club, Fontoria Night Club, Tagide Night Club, Nina’s Night Club.
At 6:00 a.m. a blue light has begun to rise over the rooftops and the cables of the tram. A few minutes later, the first trolley appears; it is lit and empty like a ghost ship. Chief Inspector Cunha Passos is pleased to report that his men are investigating all the crimes committed in Lisbon between May 8 and 16 to confirm whether the suspect participated in any of them. My eyes burn from staring at the computer screen. At 7:00 a.m. I take a break and stare at the gray-blue light that enters the room, the blue on the rooftops is much lighter now, and the clouds over Magdalena Church have a pink hue. Through the American embassy in Lisbon, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent a personal thank-you letter to the chief inspector, Mr. José Manuel da Cunha Passos.
* * *
I force myself to go out, mostly so I can stop looking at the screen. The sleepless night produced in me a strange feeling of lightness, a distance from myself that has been heightened by the novelty of being in Lisbon. The small bars and cafes that were open until midnight are now closed.
I go down Fanqueiros Street, turn on Arsenal, and reach Commerce Square. Today, it is almost deserted. No multitudes descending from the ferries to start the workday. I preferred the urban and nomadic feel of Mário Cesariny’s poetry, much more worldly than Pessoa’s, inhabited by real human presences and not just projections of himself. Em todas as ruas te encontro, says Cesariny, em todas as ruas te perco.
I see a small solitary figure against the backdrop of the river. Even at this early hour, there is usually someone sketching, reading, writing, or just staring at the horizon from the edge of Cais das Colunas. Perhaps it is someone staring at a cell phone, oblivious to this breathtaking view—the red bridge, this blue horizon, the river meeting the salty ocean breezes.
I approach the marble flight of steps. The tide is low, exposing a white beach, rocks, and algae. Seagulls and storks peck in between the rocks and pull small crabs. I reach the last step and my shoes sink into the wet sand. Little crabs flee sideways in all directions. Small air bubbles tell the storks where their prey is hiding.
I see a large tire with a rusty rim. It is covered in seaweed and rocky clusters of mussels. Fish larvae shine in the small pockets of water. Old wood planks and blue tiles come and go with the tide. I step around the translucent body of a dead jellyfish. What an inexplicable anatomy, like an alien castaway.
On these steps and this beach is the frontier, the realm of a primordial life that makes the leap from the ocean to the ground, slithering on the sand, rocking back and forth with the soft waves at the mercy of the tide and the movements of the passing ships. Primordial life and human garbage, a trail of trash that marks the high contours of the tide on the sand: cigarette butts, plastic bags, lighters, condoms, clothespins, bottle caps, a mustard packet from McDonald’s, a credit card. On the wet sand, the birds have imprinted their cuneiform steps. I tread carefully around them. My long shadow follows. I pick up a few smooth fragments of blue tile and feel the rounded edges with my fingers. I put them in my pocket. There is nothing that is not memorable one way or another.
* * *
Someone watching the river from the center of the square will see me as a solitary figure, quite abstract, a hieroglyph of human presence, a shadow. It suddenly occurs to me that he could have been that same silhouette one early morning in May, forty-five years ago, in this unchanging scene. The great expanse of the river, the empty square, the white-stone arches, the bronze horse on the pedestal and the king with his plumed helmet. He has stopped on his way back to the hotel after a night of drinking or being with a woman. He stands on the edge of the steps, his sunglasses blocking the clarity of morning, his anxiety temporarily numbed by all the alcohol.
He liked to come here to clear his mind, and if the tide was low, like it is now, he would also descend to the beach. There he would stand motionless, his back to the city, watching the river and breathing in the smell of the water, remembering the Mississippi, spellbound by the similarity, the wide and green horizon on the other side, the bridge in the distance to his right, like in Memphis, the same violet mist, the slow ships passing him by.
* * *
Standing on this beach and breathing the air of the Atlantic soothes the mind of the insomniac but does not alleviate the intoxication, the fever. I imagine his footprints on this sand, the steps of Ramon George Sneyd. Who can ever know what really happened inside somebody else’s mind, the way a place must have seemed and felt. He secretly carries the monstrous distinction of being the most wanted criminal in the world, number one, Sunday after Sunday, on the FBI’s list of infamous celebrity. Vanity and terror. What he did just a few weeks prior probably fades in the banality of his immediate situation, the routine of the helpless wait, the fatigue of being on the run, his shock that they are going to such great lengths to find him.
On my way back to the apartment I will follow the route that would have taken him back to the Hotel Portugal. I will sit at my desk and when I turn on the laptop the same page from the FBI’s website will be staring back at me. If I fall asleep after breakfast, the thought of him will filter back into my dreams, ruining the sweetness of our bedroom with the curtains drawn and the warmth of your body still present.
* * *
Back then, before I met you, I believed the task of literature was to create perfect forms, symmetries and resonances that imbued the world with an order and significance it otherwise lacked. I loved to concoct arguments, police mysteries, surprising twists, unexpected outcomes, stories that opened emphatically and ended like a drumroll, like a stab or flash of lightning that suddenly illuminates the plot. I loved Chesterton’s detective stories. I was convinced that some of his best had actually been written by Borges. I studied Bioy Casares’s arguments the way an architect would have analyzed the blueprints for a building designed by Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe. I wanted to create endings that did justice to the mysteries they resolved.
* * *
But gradually, in another future life, I began to realize that beauty, harmony, symmetry, are properties or spontaneous consequences of natural processes that exist without the need for an organizing intelligence, just as natural selection operates without an ultimate purpose, and certainly without a Supreme Being determining its laws in advance. The symmetry of a leaf or a tree or a body is self-organizing, a virtue of the instructions encoded in its DNA. The sinuous curves of a river or the ramifications of a delta draw themselves on a plane like the veins on a hand or a wave retreating from the sand. The highest aspiration of literature is not to improve an amorphous matter of real events through fiction, but to imitate the unpremeditated, yet rigorous, order of reality, to create a scale model of its forms and processes. Emily Dickinson once wrote, “Nature is a haunted house—but Art—a house that tries to be haunted.”
* * *
Over the course of a month in Lisbon, I have come daily to the small beach next to Cais das Colunas. This trip is the first time I noticed it. Every day, the highest point of the tide is recorded by a dotted line of small objects, beads on a necklace threaded by water: tiny shells, bits of plastic in different colors, fragments of blue tile, wood chips. There are successive lines, fossil impressions of every stage of the tide, roughly parallel to one another, a dendrite geometry. The lines intertwine to form the contours of a mountain landscape reminiscent of Chinese painting; lines of uncertain appearance but the precision of ink flowing from a brush on a sheet of rice paper; they are the work of the water washing over the sand, returning small objects it once took and has been pounding, shredding, abandoning for years, for centuries.
* * *
I come to Commerce Square and the small beach first thing in the morning, at mid-afternoon, and sometimes even late at night. I follow the same path each time, as if repeating a musical motif while exploring different variations marked by the character of the light, the time of day, the smell of the air, the people, the tram. Early in the morning, there are homeless people or old hippies huddled under blankets or sleeping bags. Every few days, a quiet young man comes to the beach and works tirelessly for hours on sand sculptures: a siren, the god Neptune with a crown and trident, a whale, a giant turtle, a family of frogs sitting on a sofa with their legs crossed. The sculptor comes barefoot and with his pants rolled up. His hair is long and he wears a full beard. His skin is the color of copper. I think of him as a castaway who has gotten used to solitude and silence after years on a desert island. Eventually the tide will rise and slowly chip away at the sculptures, and the wind will soften their features almost to the point of erasure, like sphinxes in the sands of Egypt.
* * *
There are always people hanging out around the steps of Cais das Colunas, like on the edge of a stage that is the river and its maritime amplitude. There will be someone taking photos. There will be couples, some in each other’s arms, some keeping a safe distance. People sit by the lower walls or the stone benches along the parapets. Two women are having a conversation on one of the lower steps. Between them is a bottle of white wine and a bag of chips. The tide is rising and will soon force them to move back. They pour wine in plastic cups and look each other in the eyes as they talk. The river wind tousles their long gray hair.
This is a powerful place. In it, presences that stood ages apart suddenly become simultaneous. In the tower on the west side of Commerce Square, we went to see an exhibit about the tens of thousands of European refugees that came through Lisbon during the summer and fall of 1940, a great wave that rose after the fall of Paris and the German occupation of France. Lisboa en tempo de guerra, A última fronteira. Seaplanes departed to England or America from the waters of the Tagus River, while those from Casablanca and Tangier arrived. From the beach of Cais das Colunas, I see the sun shine on the windows of the exhibit hall. The silhouettes that now stand by the edge of the water could have belonged to Erich Maria Remarque or Arthur Koestler, or any of the nameless refugees who did not manage to leave Lisbon and are now lost to history. One of those figures facing away could have been me in January 1987, or Ramon George Sneyd in 1968.