Cátia Moniz called me at about ten o’clock in the morning. The book was already done, the glue had dried, and even my cards were ready. Cátia Moniz. I really couldn’t get used to it.
I stopped off at the hotel early. Antonio’s bags were already in the lobby. He had found a seat on an afternoon flight to Mexico City. I had very little time left. I wanted him to come to the printers with me to pick up Contos aquosos. We agreed to meet for lunch near my studio and it was only as we were having coffee that I said: “By the way, I had Montestrela’s book rebound at the printers on the rua da Barroca. It’s weird: the girl who works there looks very much like Duck.”
Antonio looked at me intently, took a deep breath.
“Okay, what are you playing at, Vincent? What have you been playing at this last week?”
“Nothing. It’s the nearest place where you can have a book bound, I go there yesterday and I come across this woman—”
“Stop.”
I thought he was going to punch me.
“Vincent … the day before yesterday, a picture. Today, book-binding. That’s a lot of coincidences and a lot of chance occurrences.”
“I promise you—”
“Why would you go stirring up shit like that? Isn’t your own shit enough for you, that you have to go meddling in other people’s? Do you really think that in the last ten years I haven’t had time to track her and my son down? I’ll tell you the whole story, because you’re obviously dying to hear it, and then, then, listen to this, Vincent, you’re going to pick up your fucking book from your fucking printers and you’re going to leave her the hell in peace, and me too. Do you get it? Once and for all. Otherwise I’ll break your legs, okay?”
“But—”
“Shut up.”
WE’RE AT 42 rue Saint-Maur in Paris. It’s the summer of 1974. A young woman has just come through the gate and under the porch. On her chest, in a baby carrier, she has a one-year-old boy, maybe a little older. When the concierge, who’s cleaning the courtyard, asks who she wants to see, the woman says Flores, Antonio Flores, with a strong Portuguese accent. Second floor on the left.
Antonio knows nothing about what happened in Pragal, the birth, the hidden baby, the shame. In the chaos following Salazar’s downfall, Duck must have run away to a distant relation in Paris. How she found his address, Antonio doesn’t know either. It doesn’t matter. She was never given the letters he’d written. He’d moved so many times that not all of those she’d written to him could have reached him. Duck climbs the stairs. She climbs quickly, she’s in a hurry, she’s carrying the child in her arms. There is no name on the left-hand door, just a Rolling Stones sticker shaped liked a mouth. The doormat is a hedgehog. She shows it to her baby, saying, “Olha, Vitor, ouriço, ouriço. Look, a hedgehog.”
“Riço,” Vitor mimics.
Duck rings the bell but it’s not working. She hesitates, then knocks on the door. It isn’t Antonio who answers the door but a tall, flat-chested young woman with long blond hair, wearing a man’s white shirt and jeans. She’s pretty, she smiles kindly to the attractive girl on her doorstep and her tiny little boy. Duck starts to have her doubts. Was this really the second floor, do they count floors differently in France? She’s not sure.
“Antonio Flores?” she asks.
Antonio? No, he’s not here. This evening, yes. Come back. At about eight o’clock? Duck can’t help seeing what the place looks like. It’s a very small one-bedroom apartment, you can see the double bed from the door. She takes a step back. She feels cold. She shivers. Would she like to leave a message? No, she wouldn’t. She doesn’t want to write a single word that this girl could read. She goes back down the stairs, looks for the letterbox. Both names appear in the window: Antonio Flores—Agnès Mangin. Idiota. Idiota. She’s put the baby back in his carrier, Vitor’s so heavy already, she kisses his fine hair. Duck goes out onto the street, walks toward the blinding sun, almost running, still intoning Idiota Idiota Idiota in a hissing voice Vitor doesn’t recognize.
When Antonio comes home and Agnès tells him that a pretty dark-haired girl came by with a baby, he gets it. Agnès gets it too. She leaves him. She doesn’t leave him because he hid this woman and child from her, she leaves him because he abandoned them.
Antonio sets out to find Duck. Does he ever find her? Yes, but much later. Antonio is evasive about the dates, ambivalent. The truth would only prove his fickleness. In any event, Vitor is no longer a baby.
Duck says: If you’re no longer you, I no longer want you. Those are the words. Antonio doesn’t understand. How could he no longer be himself? She says exactly the same thing again. If you’re no longer you, I no longer want you. He says: Don’t say that, I love you. She replies that he has no concept about the words he’s using. She also says that stains have permanently soiled the whiteness that they shared for many years apart, but that these years had added up because they’d been walking in opposite directions. She talks in metaphors, Antonio just tells her again that he loves her, he doesn’t know what else to say. Oh, then he does: Vitor needs a father. You’re wrong, she says, he has one now. He asks to see his son, their son. She corrects him: my son. Then, controlling herself, not softening but conciliatory: our son. She agrees, he can see him, because Vitor has a right to know, and she doesn’t want any secrets. She also tells him she’s pregnant, that she’s happy to be having a child with the man she loves. Antonio cries, he cries over what could have been. She cries too, but in her case it’s over what couldn’t have been. They’re not the same tears.
ANTONIO’S ANGER IS still there, very much alive, but the violence has dropped.
“So. There isn’t a Duck anymore. There’s Cátia Moniz, and she needs to be left alone.”
“I don’t believe you. I don’t know how you went about it, but you didn’t go into that printers by chance. Who do you think you are to go inventing my destiny?”
I sighed. Of course. Antonio didn’t want to go back to Duck any more than Ulysses did to Penelope. What is the Odyssey but the chronicle of an adventurer who loves Circe the magician and Calypso the nymph, who is promised the hand of Nausicaa, and who, despite appearances, constantly defers his homecoming? A man whom the gods forcibly deposit on the shores of Ithaca one night, and he’s so angered by his fate that he engages in the most pointless and bloodthirsty of massacres, when merely uttering his name would have been enough to make all the suitors give way.
I didn’t go to the airport with Antonio. We shook hands, coldly, and he climbed into a taxi. I bought Le Monde from the Santa Justa kiosk. It was two days old, dated September 20, and its leading article was about the Rainbow Warrior, the Greenpeace ship sunk by the French. At the bottom of the first page, an article by Umberto Eco reported Italo Calvino’s death following a stroke on the night of September 18. Calvino was sixty-two years old. I had a naive but arresting thought: this man I had so often read would no longer write, his oeuvre was complete. There would never be another “latest book by Italo Calvino.”
I went to pick up Contos aquosos from the printers. The book was waiting for me, it was beautifully done. I wanted to congratulate Cátia Moniz, but the tall guy at the till told me I should have been there in the morning, that she never worked Saturday afternoons.
“I’ll let her know you’re pleased with it, don’t worry.”
I didn’t see her again.