I like the title of Louis Althusser’s memoir, L’avenir dure longtemps. The future lasts forever. The future lasts much longer than literature is usually able to convey. A final period strikes at the end like a final drumbeat, a final note by Thelonious Monk, jarring or round, perhaps doubtful, an unexpected conclusion that doesn’t culminate as much as interrupt. But time continues flowing, even though we’re not allowed to see what happens to the characters after the end.
Almost nobody has possessed Flaubert’s unique talent or wisdom to include in a novel the future it does not tell, because it comes after the anticipated ending, and it seems so superfluous to the reader that, after a while, it will be forgotten. Memory, or the lack thereof, can correct a novel retrospectively, distill it, make it even better sometimes. The reader of Madame Bovary will remember a novel that ends with Emma’s agonizing death, almost unbearable to read in all its graphic detail, which Flaubert re-creates even more intensely than an erotic scene. We forget, but the novel continues after Emma’s death, just as it began long before she appeared.
Charles Bovary goes on living, isolated in his disgrace, shame, and ruin. He keeps a tormented reverence for his dead wife, but soon begins to discover unexpected and cruel things about her, letters that confirm and detail the infamy and prolong her presence after death, infecting those who remain with an illness that lacks that infallible cure for all ills in literature, the final period.
Only after the successive deaths of Emma and Charles does the novel reveal its only innocent character, the victim of so many, the one the reader had probably forgotten or barely even noticed. She is the daughter Emma brought into this world unwanted, a burden that pestered her existence.
The girl’s story is just as long and painful as any, but she does not have the right to a novel, not even a substantive role in a novel about those closest to her. When her father dies, she ends up in the custody of relatives who mistreat her. The last thing we know about her is that she is working in a cotton mill. Now I don’t even remember whether she had a name. A novel is truly great when there are many possible novels within it: the most tragic, in this case, would be titled Mademoiselle Bovary.
But in real life, the future lasts forever and real-life stories end by disintegrating into others, dispersing, unraveling loose threads without a clear plot that intertwines with other stories and ends up traveling far from their starting point. They resemble African or Asian musical compositions in their open form, the way they’re prolonged without fatigue and significant variation for hours, days, nights, flowing like rivers, without a sequence or beginning or end.
But fiction, like European music, is an art of limits. What begins must end. “In my beginning is my end,” says T. S. Eliot. A departing plane or train provides a clear and convenient ending to any story. Arrivals and departures determine the temporal boundaries of a story, as the two columns in Commerce Square frame for the viewer the expanse of the sky and the Tagus River, the hint of ocean that begins beyond the other limit, the red silhouette of the 25th of April Bridge. The train starts, the plane lifts in the last frame or in the last lines and after that the passenger aboard is beyond our reach. The plane is en route to Lisbon but for us, the audience, it might as well float over the Atlantic forever.
How to begin the story of something whose origin is unknown to you. On May 8, 1968, at 1:30 a.m., Ramon George Sneyd arrives in Lisbon. On April 6, a man named Eric Starvo Galt, who has just arrived in Toronto, rents a room in a boardinghouse owned by a Polish woman who can barely speak English. On Saturday, March 29, a man, who said his name was Harvey Lowmeyr, bought a hunting rifle at a weapons store on the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama, on the highway to the airport. On April 4, around 3:30 p.m., someone named John Willard rented a room in a run-down boardinghouse in Memphis and paid for a week in advance. On April 5, around 9:00 a.m., Eric S. Galt picked up his laundry from a dry cleaner in Atlanta. The more precise the topographical and temporal details, the more emphatic the beginning or end of the story will seem, the more powerful the appearance without warning or the abrupt departure of the character. At 9:00 a.m. on May 17, 1968, the receptionist at the Hotel Portugal in Lisbon sees the guest from room 2 disappear through the revolving door, his shoulders more slouched than when he arrived a week earlier. At 11:00 p.m. on January 4, 1987, I left Lisbon from the Santa Apolónia station on a train called the Lusitania Express.
* * *
The future continues: a few days later, at 8:00 a.m., I was once again a civil servant in Granada. I was also a father with a three-year-old son and a one-month-old baby, who still moved in the crib with the helplessness of newborn mammals, with his red skin, his hairless little head, his eyes with swollen lids and no eyelashes, his hands and his feet so small, holding on to anything with the obstinacy of biological survival, his mother’s chest, his open mouth, his smell of baby and mother’s milk.
* * *
The ability to see far is more limited in time than in space. On December 2, 2012, in another future life that has already lasted many years and I could have never imagined in that first trip to Lisbon, I am walking in Rossio Square at night, feeling a little light-headed from the day of travel and the undulating patterns of mosaics on the sidewalks of Lisbon. We have come because my son, who was only one month old the first time I walked these streets, now lives here and is turning twenty-six today. We hadn’t noticed how much time had passed since we last visited. But now it feels like time sped up and we remember what took place ten or fifteen years ago as if it had happened yesterday.
From the moment we arrive, as we look at the colors of the city from the taxi window, the pinks and blues, the ochers and worn yellows on the facades, the sun of the early afternoon, in a December with a more merciful weather than the one we left just a few hours ago in Madrid, we’re overcome with remorse for having taken so long to return, the strangeness that this has even been possible. How can there be so much distance in such a short span of time, barely an hour-long flight.
You have drawn the curtains in the room where we will stay for two or three days. It’s a tall house on a hill, and the entire city opens up before us like a fantastic diorama. The Tagus River, the 25th of April Bridge peter out in the distance toward the southeast, and next to us, almost in front of us, a wooded hill is crowned by a white church shining under the afternoon sun, and just beyond: the walls and towers of San Jorge Castle adorned with flags flapping against the blue sky. It reminds me of the Alhambra seen from a garden in Albaicín. And the house itself reminds me of those in Albaicín. Narrow stairways, low roofs, hermetic facades that hide an interior with amazing views, shaded rooms and hallways that open without warning onto a vast world. There is a balcony with an iron railing and planted geraniums and cacti. The staircase leads to a small enclosed garden with a pomegranate tree and a lemon tree. There is space for a vegetable patch. The plants would get good light and be protected from wind or heavy rains. In the church tower, a bell strikes the hours with diaphanous sonority.
* * *
Close the shutters, draw the curtain, don’t turn on the light. From inside this room, Lisbon is just a distant murmur. I knew nothing about life or desire or the passage of time the first time I was here. I wrote by ear. Shedding their clothes while their eyes remain fixed on each other, two lovers become strangers again, as if they went back in time to the first time they found themselves alone in a room. They undress each other and everything that has accumulated since they met simply falls away. The two bodies emerge from the clothes on the floor under the light of a vulnerable innocence, a water that washes away their familiarity and fatigue, and returns them to each other young and mature and even more beautiful after all this time, uplifted by wonder and the gratitude of mutual desire, anonymous in a foreign city and in a room where they have never been.
They give themselves to each other as desperately as they did back when they fought for every chance meeting, never knowing when the next opportunity would come. Now they have lost track of how many rooms and cities they have shared together; how many hours protected by the soft light of a bedside lamp, in the mid-morning or midday or in the afternoons that slowly drift toward nighttime; rooms with windows that open into urban canyons of concrete and steel, bays, forests, low winter skies, internal courtyards, the hill of the Alhambra, a street in Madrid where evenings are illuminated by the blue sign of Bar Santander, a square with cafes and trams in Amsterdam, the perpetual and silent rain of Oslo, a backyard in New York occupied by an immense maple tree that radiates its red glow into the room every November, a dark forest with moss and trunks covered with lichen on the outskirts of Breda, the pine trees and blue still waters of Formentor Bay, the white balconies of Cádiz, a street in New York submerged in a white whirlwind of snow, the church and outlook of Graça and San Jorge Castle, which are glowing in the night by the time we open the curtains and the window shutters, having just awoken from a short sleep, naked and holding each other, in this strange room that we have made ours, secret like a refuge.
I remember a particular line in a letter that Jorge Guillén wrote to his wife: To live in many cities and love the same woman in all of them. I could not imagine that the intensity of what seems so ephemeral in film and literature could actually be preserved for so many years, and even grow deeper, with a side that is sweeter and more serene and another that has seen madness, in those instants when mutual pleasure approximates pain and loss of consciousness. We both have a face that only exists then and that no one else has seen. I watch you put on lipstick at the bathroom mirror. Your back is facing me and a soft light washes over your shoulders. You are laughing about something, and I desire you even more than the day I met you.
* * *
Every beginning is involuntary. I walked down the slopes of Mouraria; it was nighttime, the streets were barely illuminated, and there was trash in every corner. Paint was peeling off from all the walls, like some kind of epidemic. Blind balconies, boarded-up windows in huge houses where no one had lived for a long time. It brought relief and sadness to see any sign of human presence: clothes hanging on balconies, bright lights coming from open windows along with the sounds of a family dinner.
Lisbon was dirtier than I remembered. In a small square I saw a group of men, some with beards and robes, congregating around the light of what appeared to be a storefront with the metal shutters partly raised. There was a sign in Arabic painted on a wall. Perhaps the store was now a mosque. At the bottom of the hill I went down some cobbled steps and entered a narrow street with more people and lots of stores selling electronics, phones, fruits.
I saw women in saris, women covered with veils and long gowns, groups of kids playing in the street at night like I hadn’t seen in a city in a very long time. The stores were small, messy, and deep as caves. It did not feel like I was in Lisbon. I did not remember ever passing through this neighborhood. I did not have a map and did not know how to orient myself. Somehow, an alleyway led me to Figueira Square. Now I realize that I probably walked on João das Regras Street and passed the entrance to the old Hotel Portugal, which was about to close, and probably still looked the way it had in the seventies, with that slow descent into ruin that characterizes buildings in Lisbon. But I did not see the sign and did not look into the vestibule where the receptionist Gentil Soares had worked forty years ago.
At night Figueira Square is a strange inverse of Rossio Square, desolate and dark, with its statue of the king on horseback off-center, creating an impression of emptiness. Now I was beginning to recognize the city, not because I knew where I was, but because I was feeling all those familiar sensations. Lisbon in December was cold fog, like a very light gauze, and the humid brightness of the white cobblestone, smooth as bone, and the smell of charcoal and smoke rising from the stalls that sold roasted chestnuts.
Walking alone I was returning to my mental state during that first trip. I turned onto Douradores Street as soon as I saw its name on a street corner. Among the wandering ghosts of literature and cities, Bernardo Soares is as ever-present in Lisbon as Leopold Bloom is in Dublin, Max Estrella in Madrid, and James Joyce in Trieste, which is so similar to Lisbon. But Joyce, thin and alcoholic, hat pushed back, bow tie, a short mustache and thick glasses, also looks like Lisbon’s Fernando Pessoa. The two were contemporaries and walked in sister cities.
* * *
The trip, the return, my son’s birthday, the hotel room, the view from the window, the walk down through Mouraria, aroused a peculiar state of alert from deep inside of me, an expectation of something, an interior resonance to every stimulus, a willingness to let myself go that was accentuated by the lassitude of love. Images and sensations from what had secretly happened to us in that room just an hour before came to me in waves. Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory, says Joyce in “The Dead.” One of the most beautiful stories about the passage of time was written by a man of twenty-five.
I wanted to see you again and fast-forward to the time of our meeting with my son. I was thinking about how fatherhood and motherhood modify the perception of time: 1986 was not an abstract date in the past but the year that my son was born; my son, the man whom we were now visiting in Lisbon. He was born around this time, 8:00 p.m., this very day in a distant December in Granada. It was a cold night with a light, damp fog, particularly around the two rivers. We were living next to one when he was born. It feels strange to write the word living in the first-person plural when it does not include you. To live in pronouns, says Pedro Salinas.
Douradores Street ends on a road where the tram passes and now I can see that it is Conceicao Street. It’s that time of day when businesses are about to close, like in provincial cities, notions stores, stationers like the ones I frequented in my hometown, in October, after school, illuminated at dusk, welcoming you with the warmth of a human breath, one that smells of ink, paper, and wood.
I still have some time before our meeting so I go into one of the shops. There is an instinct that guides you to the things you will like the most. I find some notebooks with solid cardboard covers, good stitching, and thick paper, nice to the touch, but not too soft. As I open it, the notebook suddenly acquires the consistency of a future book, a promise of words to be written from the first to the last page.
* * *
Later I open the notebook to the first page as I wait for you at a cafe. I also bought a pencil at the stationer’s, for no other reason or purpose than to feel the comfort of this simple and perfect tool in my hand right away. I write December 2, 2012, Lisbon, out of habit, just for the desired sensation of pencil on paper.
I have chosen a table in the back where I can easily see the entrance to the cafe. You will appear any moment now. I like to see you arrive, those few seconds before you see me, when you’re lost in thought and more purely yourself because you’re alone and unaware of my proximity; to see you as if I did not exist in your life.
That’s how I saw you one of the first times. You were crossing the street on your way to the cafe where we were about to meet. I could see you more clearly because I had not imagined that I would fall in love with you. I like seeing you without the filter of habit and familiarity; the way a stranger would notice you on the street without knowing who you are. That way I can see you anew again, with my eyes truly open, behold each of your features, every angle of your face. There is a split second before the moment of recognition when you are just an unknown and beautiful woman. A second later that woman who has awakened my desire is you.
To love the face is to love the soul, says Thomas Mann. I saw you once among a group of people around a large table on a terrace in El Escorial. I was distracted and barely noticed you. I saw you again a few months later and could not remember where I had seen your face. I saw you then in Madrid, in the back of an auditorium. You were standing close to the door, as if you were about to leave. You were smiling. It was an expression of irony and patience. Every time I looked away I feared you would leave. And then, as in a dream, I was trying to make my way through the crowd so I could meet you, but I kept getting stuck in introductions and goodbyes, and all I could see in the distance was your patient smile and your red hair.
I saw that great smile welcoming me at the airport gate, in the lobbies of stations and in the hotels of Madrid. Once I was on a train on my way to see you, I was about to arrive, but I could not remember if we had agreed to meet in Atocha Station or Chamartín. It was a time before cell phones when people could lose each other, and no matter how much they walked, never find each other. I got off in Atocha and regretted it the moment I stepped out of the train. I was so worried. I went to the lobby, halfheartedly hoping that I would find you, but there were hundreds of faces.
It dawned on me that if I did not find you I would not know how to get to your house. I had only been there once and did not remember the name of the street. It was 10:00 p.m. when I stepped out onto Charles V Square and looked for a taxi that could take me to Chamartín. With some luck I would get to the station at the same time as the train, or just a few minutes later. But no taxi would stop. I kept walking from corner to corner looking for one. In my distress, it didn’t occur to me to simply go to the taxi line by the arrivals exit. I could no longer tell how long I had been waiting. I imagined the train had long ago arrived at Chamartín and you had already left. What if I got to a phone booth and called your house? But I would lose more time.
A taxi stopped and I was so flustered I almost did not get it. The drive to Chamartín Station felt like an eternity, a dream where you advance and advance but get nowhere. I went through the automatic doors and at first I did not see anyone. It was late and the station was mostly empty. But then I saw you before you noticed me. You were staring at the arrivals board. You looked younger and seemed more vulnerable than I remembered.
I have just looked up from my notebook and there you are. You’re entering the cafe and you’re looking around searching for me. You glow, your hair is tousled, your lips are painted red.
My son and his girlfriend are with you. He and I hug for a long time. He is a young man, strong, my height, with a thick beard and straight brown hair. His eyes are big and clear, like his mother’s. He appears quiet and shy, at least when he’s with me. But nobody is fully him- or herself in the presence of parents. There is a familiarity between him and his girlfriend. They’ve been together since they were fifteen. I was seventeen and his mother eighteen when we met. Young people don’t know just how young they are, how close they still are to that infancy they imagine so far away, while their parents still see it in them or wish they could. I was his age when his mother and I married. When we divorced he was five years old.
The four of us sit at a table. The cafe has iron columns and plaster moldings. The waiters look like old-timers. There’s a pleasant hum of conversation in the background and the warm smell of pastries and roasted Portuguese coffee fills the space. I am happy just to look at him and the tender feeling reminds me of those words from the Gospel, which embody fatherhood so differently from the anger and vengefulness of the Old Testament: “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.” That’s what you think the first day you pick up your kid from school and see him with the other children, confused and almost anonymous among them, just another child but also your son, your beloved, in whom you are well pleased.
Now it is they who know and talk and we are the ones who ask questions and listen, and are thankful that they speak Portuguese and can translate the menu for us and place our order. When we remember ourselves in our youth what we remember is the image we had of ourselves then. That is why, when we see a young person, they seem more childlike than we were at their age—that and perhaps also the temptation of condescension. At the same time, the young person sees the parent far removed from their youth, almost settled in old age. Each one has a hard time seeing the other the way they are, but it is even more difficult to intuit how the other sees him- or herself. And thus it is very likely that they don’t know just how similar they are.
The only thing that separates them, what the adult knows and the youth can barely imagine, is how long the future is, all the unexpected paths life can take: life is not a single one, not only because of everything that can change, but also because how we ourselves can change, becoming not just another, but various possible and successive others. Perhaps the baby I held in my arms twenty-six years ago and the young man who now sits with me at a cafe in Lisbon have as much in common as the troubled and inept father that I was then and the man I am now.
The biggest difference between parents and their children is that the parents belong to a world their children don’t know how to imagine because it is the world that existed before they were born. In 1986, my son’s mother and I had modest but stable lives: she was a tenured teacher and I was an administrative assistant; we had a family and lived in a government-subsidized apartment. Sometimes we struggled, but we always made ends meet. At twenty-six you had a three-year-old son. You were twenty-eight when we met.
At an age when we had barely traveled anywhere, my son and his girlfriend have already lived in several countries. They are fluent in several languages and move from one country to another with an ease that would have been unimaginable for us at their age. But unlike us back then, they live in the air. They do freelance projects and rent an apartment for a few months at most. After dinner, they take us to the apartment they share. We walk through the alleys and stairways of the Alfama district. It is the first proper home my son has had since he left the family house. There are maps and posters on the walls, and books everywhere. It is a frugal and provisional life, emancipated from mine, largely oblivious to it, the way it was with me and my father when I was my son’s age. I escaped for three days to Lisbon. My son lives and works in the city and studies the language. I came as a fugitive, running away from the life in which he had just arrived so I could lose myself in my fantasies and literary aspirations. He lives here peacefully with his girlfriend. Even if they wanted, they could not bring a child into this world, not without knowing how they’ll make a living or where they’re going to live a few months from now.
* * *
Walking with them we soon lose track of where we are. They take us through narrow streets we don’t recognize. From time to time we see a light coming from a diner or small pub. We walk through squares with white churches and I’m reminded of the Mudéjar-style churches in Albaicín, with their geometric forms, limestone walls, and latticed windows. You walk ahead, chatting with his girlfriend. He and I walk a few steps behind. Sometimes we don’t see you but your voice and the sound of your steps on the cobblestones guide us.
Now that I am finally with him, on his birthday, after months of not seeing each other, I’m overcome with a strange shyness that is probably familiar to him. If only I had your self-confidence, your talent for casual conversation. I would like to tell my son things about myself that I have never shared with him. I could not tell him when he was a child and now that he’s an adult I don’t know how to start. I remember a conversation I had with his older brother a few years ago, one night in Brussels. We walked and talked for hours through a city that he knew well and I did not. I told him about my life and he told me about his. The bars and restaurants were closing and the streets were slowly emptying. We ended at the bar of the hotel and continued until the waiters cleared the tables and started to turn off the lights. We were reconciled and hurt, each conscious of the place the other one had in our life, the pain that can only be caused by those we love.
But perhaps it is also good to walk and let the conversation unfold spontaneously like these streets. We can enjoy the cool night and the simple fact of having each other’s company. My son tells me about his job. He translates subtitles for documentaries and fiction films. Sometimes he gets a lot of projects and has to work twelve- or fourteen-hour days; other times he has nothing to do. There are agencies that take a long time to pay him and others that try to haggle with him. Occasionally he has to work on subtitles for gore films and ends up nauseated by so much blood, horrified by the kind of public that would feed its imagination with these sorts of things. He likes to discover independent films from unexpected countries. He particularly likes documentaries.
I ask him what he would like to get from his work, if there’s anything he feels he lacks, if he needs money. I think about the incurable discontent I felt at his age, the feeling of being trapped in a life and a city and job that I did not like, the desire to write, but also the suspicion, the fear that I was writing for nobody. With an ease that surprises me, he says he is happy. He would like to have a bit more stability but can’t complain. He works on things he likes and it’s usually enough to pay the bills. He plays guitar with a pop band and has started to write songs. They would like to stay in Lisbon, but if his girlfriend can’t find a job they’ll have to return to Granada. Perhaps he’s better equipped to enjoy a quiet life than I was at his age. He most enjoys translating documentaries about travel, the lives of musicians, the history of the twentieth century, diseases, scientific discoveries, animals, jungles, polar expeditions, underwater investigations. He lives within them for days at a time as he translates and it feels like he is traveling to all those places right from his room in Alfama, hour after hour as he sits by the laptop.
I note what he already knows, that there’s a risk in those jobs where you spend a lot of time by yourself and isolated from external reality, jobs where the only structure is whatever schedule you can create for yourself, short of the anguished discipline that comes with an impending deadline when you have left everything for the last minute. As a child he was intrigued by my work. If I was writing in a notebook, he sat across from me at the table and started writing in his school workbook. The appearance of white or green letters on the black background of the old computers made him really curious. After the electric Canon, on which I wrote the novel about Lisbon, I bought a computer. It was crude and large, a Jurassic Amstrad that was becoming obsolete when I finally learned how to use it. I left it printing a long text one day, on one of those printers that was as loud as the old telex machines. My son came into the dining room with some amazing information: “There’s an invisible father writing in your room.”
Sometime later, the invisible father became even more invisible because he stopped writing in that room and living in the house. He became a visitor who sometimes arrived without notice from other cities, in a taxi, with a travel bag, and a very heavy laptop.
We have arrived at a big square that overlooks the Tagus River. A statue of a saint on a pedestal, like a huge golem, stands out from the shadows with that lunar glow that white stone has in Lisbon.
For a time, when my children were still kids, I lived with the certainty that I was about to die. But it wasn’t death that scared me, after the first strike of terror at the doctor’s office. I was dying of sadness thinking that I would have to stop seeing you and that I would never see my kids become adults. A child barely resembles the man or woman he or she will become. I thought I was going to die and never see their adult lives and faces. A future ten or fifteen or twenty years later was a forbidden country for me, hermetic like North Korea or Outer Mongolia, where it was prohibited to travel with one of the old Spanish passports.
This moment, this night, are the future that I never thought I would see. I never want to forget the exceptional gift of being alive. The Tagus River has an oily glow in the moonless night. The silhouette of the 25th of April Bridge reminds me of the George Washington Bridge at night, extending over the dark expanse of the Hudson. In the middle of the river there’s a large cargo ship floating, with a tower several stories high, cranes, and lights that illuminate the foggy surface like an empty football field.
The flow of ordinary life weaves and unravels its arguments, its symmetries, its resonances, without anyone having to invent anything, just as the waves of the river draw themselves or the arms of a delta or the nerves of a leaf without the intervention of a hand or a higher intelligence. In a way, a novel also writes itself.
With a curiosity that is just as sharp but somewhat more reserved than when he was a child, my son asks me if I’m working on something: he remembers the notebook I had open on the table when they came into the cafe. Sometimes it’s better not to talk about it, or you might jinx it. Other times saying it to whoever is interested is a way of bringing it into existence. I tell my son that this afternoon during my walk, as I watched the shadows of people in Figueira Square and then on a long and narrow street in Baixa, I remembered something that I read in a book about the assassination of Martin Luther King, a small detail that made a strong impression on me and had suddenly given me the urge to write: the man who murdered King, James Earl Ray, had spent ten days in Lisbon while on the run.