Electrico W

DAY ONE: ANTONIO

Just as we reached Rossio Square along the Avenida da Liberdade, it stopped raining, and the Mercedes dropped us at the terrace of a bistro. The chairs were soaked, the table too; we carelessly put our two suitcases down in puddles. As the waiter took our orders, he glanced at our luggage in dismay, or simply indifference.

Antonio and I had never worked together but we had come across each other several times. His photos had illustrated my investigation into the garimpeiros, destitute gold miners in the Orinoco Basin; I’d written a piece to go with his reportage on the tribes of Botswana’s Okavango Delta. When he decided to go back to Lisbon for this particular series of articles, it was his idea to suggest me to his editors. He thought I was still living in Paris, and when he learned that I was now the newspaper’s Portuguese correspondent, he said these words (so odd that they were relayed to me): “I knew his fate would bring him to Lisbon at some point.”

I had only been here a few months. I had wanted to leave Paris, to avoid the risk of bumping into Irene in the corridors of the editorial department, to recover from my absurd love for this girl with her outdated name, this girl who didn’t want me. My father’s death in late June, his suicide — why not use the word — had made up my mind. My brother and I had sold the apartment on the rue Lecourbe, and with my share of the proceeds I had decided to buy a one-bedroom apartment in either the Castelo quarter or Santa Justa, where my mother was born and where I had spent a few holidays as a child. In the meantime, I had rented a studio in São Paulo, right next to the goods port. It was a huge room which afforded few comforts but it was whitewashed and sunny, at the top of a three-story building. It was the views more than anything that had attracted me. From one window you could look out over the roofs, from the other you could see the Tagus. The bed was new and comfortable, and there was a phone line connected. There was a small open-plan kitchen and a shower, but the toilet was in the hallway. “For substantial things …,” the landlady had explained, then, gesturing toward the sink, she chuckled, “but for anything else, okay?” In her view, a refrigerator and two hotplates justified the label studio. The compressor on the fridge made more noise than a factory press, and I soon had to settle for unplugging it at night.

I had hung my only picture on the wall, and that was just a dog-eared, yellowed copy of a late-nineteenth-century map of the Okavango Delta. I had set up my desk in a corner, which was blocked on one side. I put my fax on it and this cube-shaped computer with its small black-and-white screen, whose successors I could never have imagined. Sitting there, I could look through the window to my right and see the docks. On nights when I couldn’t sleep, in other words almost every night, I found their rumblings comforting. I left one window open and listened to the thunder of heavy diesel engines and fuel pumps, and the workers’ cries and laughter. Sometimes I got up before dawn and wandered through the steely sadness of static and traveling cranes. Living in the entrails of a port felt nostalgic and reassuring, like those English paintings of industrial landscapes, all in grays and blues. And Lisbon, a capital open to the seas, seemed to blend exoticism with civilization.

I had set myself two tasks for the imminent autumn: to finish the novel about Pescheux d’Herbinville for which I had only written a few pages and chosen a title (The Clearing), then to translate Jaime Montestrela’s Contos aquosos, the collection of bizarre short stories that he subtitled Atlas inutilis. Montestrela was far from well known, but at a secondhand bookstall in the Alfama neighborhood I had stumbled across a copy of his Contos and was instantly drawn to the whiff of dark humor they gave off. It was a thick volume, but these ironic and fantastical short stories were barely a few lines long, with a darkness reminiscent of Max Aub or Roland Topor. Out of almost a thousand, I had already translated about a hundred. Here is the first one I chanced on, the day I happened to open the book. It is a pretty good illustration of Montestrela’s mindset:

Centuries before our era, Mongols of the Ouchis tribe worshipped an adolescent named Ohisha who, when he reached puberty, stopped aging. Fascinated by this phenomenon, they soon made him their leader. The young man did, however, die at the age of seventy-three. The legend of Ohisha ended with these words: “Lying on his shroud he was still identical to himself. For all those years, only his body had aged terribly.”

I hadn’t got very far with this work when Antonio Flores called. He asked me to move in with him for a fortnight to follow the Pinheiro trial, and I was happy to bring an end to my isolation. I didn’t give up the room, I had adopted my own routine there. Antonio booked a hotel on the rua Primeiro de Dezembro in the center of town. It was quite expensive, but the paper was picking up the bill.

The Pallazo Meiras, which dated back to the early 1900s, was both tired-looking and luxurious. This palace must once have had some appeal, but renovations had reduced it to one of those international havens where you never feel at home, and don’t even want to unpack your bags. As I walked through the door I felt I had stepped into a strange ship washed up in the middle of the city, a steamer in pink marble and gray stone. The staff went about their business languidly and managed to communicate their boredom to guests. The main entrance was draped with black-and-white-striped fabric and opened onto a small paved courtyard. In this funereal setting, despite his red livery, the footman looked like an undertaker waiting for a coffin to carry.

Antonio had booked two suites on the third floor. They were exact mirror images of each other, and the two lounges were connected by heavy double doors. Once we had opened these, the central room made more sense, with our bedrooms to either side. Antonio immediately dumped his equipment on a large carved oak desk, and I put my files on its twin. The brownish leather of two armchairs sat uncomfortably with the straw yellow of two more-rustic-looking chairs; the balconies looked out over Restauradores Square, and the noise was tolerable if we didn’t open the windows.

It was ten years since Antonio had been in Lisbon. He had recently bought a tiny one-bedroom apartment in the old Belleville quarter of Paris, and I knew he had also lived in Rio, as well as spending a few months in London’s Soho. He had made a name for himself in the small world of war photographers.

In the taxi on the way back from the airport, I asked why the long absence, and he just said, “A thing. A thing with a woman.” We didn’t exchange another word, and I regretted being so inquisitive. But that first evening, in a tasca in the port where we were having a last glass of bagaço, he started talking, in snippets, as if one memory led to another. From the emotion in his voice and the muddled way he confided in me, I suspected he had never opened up to anyone and could only do so at last because I was a foreigner. I let him talk.

ANTONIO FLORES IS ELEVEN, he lives in the old Bairro Alto quarter. Known as just Tonio, he is hurtling down the long flight of cement steps on the Travessa do Carmo. It is early May, the morning light is more blinding than golden. His schoolbag lurches in every direction on his back, buffeted from one shoulder to the other like a panicking rider on a runaway horse.

Every schoolday, Tonio races the Eléctrico W, which stops outside his house at 8:18 in the morning. Tonio had trouble getting up today, the 8:18 has already left and he’s waiting for the 8:24. He will be late for school, for sure.

The Eléctrico W is the yellow-and-white funicular tram which carries its cargo of housewives and office workers every morning — except for Sundays and public holidays. True, it’s ancient, but whatever the weather it trundles unfailingly from the old Bairro Alto quarter to the exhaust fumes and traffic jams of Baixa.

Several feet ahead of Tonio, the W rolls down the hill on its steel rails, making terrible metallic screeching sounds. The pantographs splutter with bright sparks against the azure sky, the traction cable at the back rises up from the rusted channel cut into the cement. Tonio runs behind it, keeping an eye on every sway of the cable, imagining it is the trailing black tail of a tired old dragon. In the rear of the carriage, a kid with a lollipop presses his grubby face against the steamed-up window and stares at Tonio, his empty eyes crushed by boredom.

Tonio runs. He knows every paving slab on the Travessa do Carmo, every stone, every porch: right on the corner the step is a bit high, you really have to stretch your leg to avoid tripping; here, to turn as sharply as possible, you can spin on the No Parking sign; there, on that street corner, it’s better to slow up, last week he knocked down a smartly dressed old man coming out of a tasca. Of course, he could run just behind the W, on the concrete slope, but he’s already fallen once, catching his shoe in the rim of the rail, and it hurt too much. It left him with a scar as white and shiny as a trail of salt, and the pharmacist, Mr. Pereira, claimed he would have a mark there “till the day he died.” The thought of his own death — he was only six at the time — terrified him and he started crying. His mother kissed him to comfort him, and turned angrily on the pharmacist: “Mr. Pereira, really! What sort of thing is that to say to a child?”

With all this reminiscing, the W has got a little way ahead, and Tonio runs like a boy possessed.

“Go on, Tonio, go on, faster, you’ve got to turn back time …,” laughs the fishmonger, and he lobs a hail of crushed ice at the boy, its smell strong with seaweed and saltwater. Tonio ducks to avoid it and carries on with his race. Just ahead, the tram turns to the left and disappears around the corner. Tonio slows abruptly, skids in the dust and gravel, and comes to a stop, breathless.

This is because, after the corner, the steps come to an end, and with them the Travessa do Carmo’s narrow sidewalk. The W forks off and continues on its way alone in the clear cool shade of a narrow corridor between buildings. Deadened by the shuttered facades, the noise drops, becomes muffled. At the end, fifty paces farther, the dark mouth of a tunnel gapes, and when the tram enters it, the neon lights in the cabin and the round red taillight come on. In the underground darkness, sparks fly from the catenaries, lighting up the curve of the vaulted ceiling like the thousand fires of hell in the illustrated Bible his aunt gave him.

The glowing sparks fade in the distance, the sound of the Eléctrico W is swallowed by the hubbub of the city, and Tonio hears someone behind him say, “Hey, you really run fast …”

She is seven years old, maybe eight, big black eyes, a straight nose. She has long dark hair, neatly smoothed. Tonio can’t speak, he is still out of breath, his hair clinging to his sweating face.

She smiles.

“Well, my name’s Duck, it is.”

“What? What’s your name?”

“Duck, like I said. Everyone calls me that. You can too, if you like, you can call me Duck. And what’s your name?”

Tonio stays silent for a moment, rubbing his aching legs.

“Antonio … Well, Tonio. Do you live round here?”

She points to one of the buildings that look down over the W’s route. Its white facade is dazzling in the sunlight, and Tonio screws up his eyes.

“Over there. You can’t see it from here.”

She lowers her arm and watches him with a pout. Tonio is intrigued, but he’s also growing impatient.

“I have to go to school. I’m late. Aren’t you?”

“Yes, yes, of course I’m late. Well then? Go on, keep running, go to school, if it’s that important.”

With a flick of her wrist she swishes her black hair over her shoulder. Tonio doesn’t know this yet but it’s a woman’s gesture.

“Do you run after the Eléctrico like that every day? I’ve never seen you.”

“Usually it’s the eighteen minutes past.”

“Really?”

She sits down on a large granite bollard, playing with the dust with the tip of her sandal.

“And will you be late again tomorrow?” she asks.

“No, I’ll be on time tomorrow.”

“So we won’t see each other again. That’s your bad luck. Well, hi from Duck.”

She stands up and runs off, and Tonio watches her until she turns the corner at the top of the street and disappears.

The next day Tonio left late again. The little girl was there, on the bollard. She had already let one W go by, and had left her mother wondering why she had got up so early.

FOR HIS FIFTEENTH birthday, Tonio is given a camera, a Russian Zenit E which is cheap and temperamental, nothing is automatic and it weighs as much as an iron. His family insists he take his first picture. He refuses. It will be of Duck.

A LITTLE LATER, one January morning, it snows in Lisbon. Tonio is waiting for Duck at the huge viewpoint on the rua Santa Catarina which overlooks the docks and the port. Duck is late, and Tonio is hopping from one foot to the other, wearing an old fur-lined jacket given to him by his father, it makes him look like a soldier. Duck is now thirteen, she is almost as tall as he is, although he’s nearly sixteen, and her youthful face already radiates a more unsettling beauty. Tonio still calls her Duck, has never stopped calling her that. He is cold, really cold, he stamps his feet on the frozen ground. In the distance, on the icy, muddy waters of the Tagus, the ferry heading for Barreiro passes the one arriving from Seixal and salutes it with a blast of its horn.

Antonio waits. Duck has been late before, but this morning he feels a new twinge of anxiety, an inexplicable but mild apprehension. It is market day and he lets his eye roam over the crowd of passersby. He thinks he spots her a hundred times, in a flyaway lock of hair, the pattern on a dress, a stranger’s gait. Every time he gets that fleeting quiver, that constriction deep inside him, and each time the disappointment. The waiting feels easier because of this endlessly impatient searching.

All at once, woolen fingers warm with life come and cover his face, startling him.

“Don’t turn around,” she says. “Close your eyes.”

He obeys with a smile. The woolen fingers slip away. He can guess, Duck is in front of him, her breath is chocolaty, blowing warmly over his chin.

“Make sure your eyes are closed, don’t cheat.”

The fingers slide over his temples, into his hair, gently drawing him closer. Tonio’s lips feel the touch of other lips, that open slightly. He stops breathing and opens his eyes, just as Duck closes hers, he has never seen them from so close, those long eyelashes resting on the soft pink of her cheeks. She pushes him away, just a little, then presses herself to him again.

“You looked,” she whispers in his ear.

She pulls away, takes him by the hand and drags him toward the railing of the viewpoint. Snowflakes twirl around them, catching in their hair as it flies in the wind, it is a north wind, blowing a little harder now. On the Tagus, the ferry from Barreiro goes into reverse, its propellers churning the dirty water into shining creamy whirlpools. Tonio looks lost, helpless, he wishes he could talk but can’t manage a single word. Duck comes over to him and puts her arms around him. Then she takes off her gloves and slips her hands into his.

“Warm me up, Tonio, I’m cold.”

Duck’s fingers touch his, squeeze them. Something’s different. Tonio’s eyes cloud over, he turns to look at her, but she puts a finger over his mouth and he knows he mustn’t speak.

All she says is, “Tonio … I’m a woman, today.”

He doesn’t understand.

“I’m a woman,” she repeats.

She spoke the words softly, and Tonio senses that she wants to lead him into another world, a world too big for him, and mysterious too, a world deeper than the sea, and he wants to follow her there, in spite of everything. Then he wants to speak, to let out all the words welling up inside him, but she kisses him again, he holds her to him: it is their first true kiss.

THE NIGHT SHE was fifteen, Duck met up with Tonio. It was one of those luminous stifling August nights scattered with shooting stars you could almost hear whistling through the sky. Tonio and Duck took cover in the W’s tunnel because the next day was Sunday and the tram doesn’t run on Sundays. They lay down on the air mattress Tonio had blown up and spread with a big thick bedcover that smelled of bleach and lavender. A family of bats lived in the roof but Tonio made sure they wouldn’t do them any harm.

“You’ll still have to protect me, Tonio.”

She presses herself to him. She has put a drop of perfume on the back of her neck, and Tonio breathes in its musk and dark fruits.

They stay like that for a long time, not daring to talk, and it is in that position that they fall asleep. In the morning, when the dawning day sends long shadows into the tunnel, they make love, with trusting awkwardness. Everything is new, their bodies so alive they don’t exist.

AT THIS POINT Antonio’s voice cracked and he sat in silence. For a moment I hoped he had invented the story. I was jealous, felt as miserable as a vagrant who has wandered by mistake into the summer garden of an Eastern prince and, in his filthy tattered state, has to drift among its marble fountains, its orange trees and date palms. Antonio finished his brandy and we headed back to the hotel, walking slowly. He was shivering in the warm night air. I gathered he wasn’t lying.

Duck was pregnant. “I’ll kill him,” her father bellowed, “do you hear me? I’ll kill him.” She wanted to run away, join Tonio, but her father caught up with her in the street and beat her to the ground, in front of the neighbors, with hideous words, and every time he struck her she picked herself up and cried, “I’m not ashamed, I’m not ashamed, you can’t make me feel ashamed.”

That same evening Duck was confined to the house, then sent far away, hidden with an elderly cousin in Braga by all accounts, and Antonio had to leave Lisbon. I couldn’t understand this sudden fury. Was it all that catastrophic? Of course, Antonio told me. Abortion and pregnancy outside marriage were unthinkable. This was the 1970s, the calamitous closing phase of the Estado novo, the years of Salazar’s dictatorship, and of a rural Portugal that has now been forgotten but was fervently behind Salazar, Roman Catholic and illiterate. Sister Maria Lucia of the Immaculate Heart was reverentially interviewed on television as she blew out her sixty candles at her Carmelite convent, because she had once been Lucia Dos Santos, one of the three child seers of Fatima to whom the Blessed Virgin appeared six times in 1917. Yes, those were the days of the three F’s: Fatima, fado, and football.

Antonio left for Paris, where an uncle took him in. First he sold newspapers, then he learned to draw and perfected his photographic skills.

“I’ll always wait for you,” Duck had promised, and from his Paris exile Antonio wrote dozens of letters that he sent to a mutual friend. A few weeks later Duck’s father and his wife moved house, it was even said they moved out of Lisbon. Neither Antonio nor anyone else ever had news of Duck again. I asked no more questions.

We were still walking, the street had turned into a staircase and Antonio fell silent again, his eyes lowered. With his thumb he stroked a very narrow ring, a ring so simple that — I am quite sure of it now — it can only have been made of copper, perhaps even a curtain ring. I knew that, at that same moment and wherever she was, on Duck’s left hand there was an identical wedding ring with the same red glint.

WE PARTED WITHOUT a word in the hotel corridor. I opened my door as he was putting his key into his lock, I gave him a last friendly wave, and took a few steps into my room.

For a split second, in the half light, I thought I recognized my reflection in a huge mirror to my left. But something was not right. This double seemed to have a life of his own, and I realized that, each through our own doors, Antonio and I had walked into the single lounge we had created between our two bedrooms. We took the same steps, made the same moves.

Antonio turned on a lamp, on autopilot, without noticing me there, and I caught the absent look his eye. I recognized the gaze of a man quite alone, drifting, far from his wife and child, a look of pure distress, of someone lost. I knew I had trespassed into his pain, and felt still more naked than he was, and also appallingly unhelpful, hungry for his sincerity, devoid of affection, rapacious as a chronicler of his suffering.

He noticed me, pulled himself together and gave a joyless smile before retiring to his bedroom and closing the door behind him.

THAT NIGHT, as I often did, I thought back to the life my father had resolved to leave behind, a grim gray life. I may have been wrong — it’s true that other people’s happiness is mind-numbingly boring — but I felt he had gone through life without the tiniest spark of incident. He was twenty just before the Second World War, but he was not a Resistance fighter, nor even a collaborator. He had absolutely no secret double life, or longing for adventure, absolutely no fifteen minutes of fame. Now that he was definitively dead, I took the step of resenting him for this, of wishing some of his glow could have cast light on my own life.

But it was memories of Irene that stopped me getting to sleep.

The first time I saw her was at the newspaper’s archives. She was standing there smoking, leaning out of the window. Most women conceal their bodies with clothes, Irene used them to draw attention to her nakedness under them. Her black dress revealed her slender shoulders and showed off her back. The fine material hugged her buttocks and hips, and her lovely breasts seemed to be making a bid for independence. Her mouth was half open, her lips full, almost maddening, gleaming pale pink. A hint of abandon in her movements and of color in her cheeks suggested someone had just made love to her, a languid look in her eye that she wanted it to be done again and again. She asked me what article I was looking for, I had already forgotten. At first I thought I just wanted her, violently; I soon realized that I loved her, hopelessly.

At that time of the evening, Irene was most likely drinking her tea as usual at the Saint-Elme, the bar on the rue des Abbesses where she “entertained.” It was her “salon,” she claimed. She used to make herself comfortable on the banquette at the far end of the room, always with two books, one essay, one novel, and that notebook I’ve hardly ever seen her write anything in at all. Her brown curls were carelessly held up with pins, and she was always careful to let a few locks escape, in an artful arrangement. With the black shawl that she wore in the evenings, whatever the time of year, she looked like a fortune-teller.

I had seen her at the Saint-Elme several times, rarely with the same men. When she introduced me to them — if she even did introduce me — it made her laugh that she sometimes barely knew their names. But these passing characters, who had probably noticed she was free and had only just approached her, enjoyed an intimacy I was never granted. I would stick around, at first just for a moment, and then for too long, in the hope she would make up her mind to get up from the table and come with me, but I was always the one to give up the fight, leaving her to enjoy her new catch. I always regretted giving in to my urge to see her, and trying to plead for so much as a smile from her, and I pictured her leaving with those men, giving herself to them, like a bitch in heat, yes, that was the expression that came to mind, with images to match. One evening she sat there with a tall, slightly balding man in glasses, “Stanislas, no, sorry, Ladislas,” who was giving her a boring lecture about “natural foods,” and I went home humiliated, crazed with impotent rage, and stubbed my cigarette out in the palm of my hand so that this pain would wipe out the other — in vain. The following day, when, with a note of anxiety in my voice, I tried to find out where and how the evening with Ladislas had ended, she was incensed by my questions. In the end, because I persisted clumsily and failed to disguise my own torment, she snapped in exasperation: “What do you want? To know if I slept with Lad, is that it? By what right, for God’s sake? Yes, if you must know, all night, he fucked me and fucked me again, do you want details?” Her coarseness hit the target, mortifying me, and even the cruel intimacy of that “Lad” was calculated to hurt me. But I shrugged, looked away, and fled, only to come back and apologize later.

So, as with every incidence of insomnia, I translated a few more Contos aquosos. My lifeline. Jaime Montestrela wrote them over a period of three or four years at a rate of one a day. It was his “daily exercise,” as he said in his “logbook.” He often copied out the day’s story and mailed it to someone, making a note of the addressee. Of the five I translated that night, I remembered the shortest, dedicated to a “Jacques B., in Paris”:

On the island of Tahiroha, on Good Friday, cannibals who have converted to Christianity eat only sailors.

I had found very little information about Montestrela, even at the Biblioteca Nacional. He was born in Lisbon in 1925, and belonged to that generation of Portuguese writers from the time of the dictatorship, an era that included Augusto Abaleira and Eugénio de Andrade, whom he may have known. After studying medicine, he embarked on a career as a psychiatrist at the Miguel Bombarda hospital in Lisbon, until 1950, when, under the name Jaime Caxias, he published a collection of activist poetry: Prisão (Prison). His pseudonym was not taken at random because Caxias was the place where political prisoners were tortured under Salazar’s dictatorship. Montestrela was soon unmasked, arrested by La Pide, the political police, and brutally interrogated for a week before being released. He planned his escape. He took exile in Brazil in 1951 and settled in Rio de Janeiro, where he found a job at the Capo d’Oro hospital. It was here that he wrote Nihil obstat, his only novel, a searing work heavily inspired by Lawrence Sterne, and Cidade de lama (City of mud), a “bizarre and masterful essay about solitude and exile,” as André Malraux would go on to write. It was also in Rio that he met another exile, the writer and critic Jorge de Sena, to whom he in fact dedicated Cidade de lama. In 1956 when the military regime took power in Brazil, the two friends set off in search of democracies once more. Jorge de Sena left for the United States and the University of Santa Barbara, and Jaime for France and Paris. In his small Belleville apartment, he wrote Contos aquosos, shortly before he died in 1975 of a ruptured aneurism after lunching with several writers, including Raymond Queneau. It is actually that detail, found in his brief obituary in O Século, that encouraged me to take an interest in him. I quickly checked that none of his work had been translated into French, and felt that these Watery Tales might make a good starting point.

I also tried to write a few lines of The Clearing, my novel that I kept putting off till later. I wanted to create the portrait of a man, Pescheux d’Herbinville, whose name would not have gone down in history had he not, on May 30, 1832, mortally wounded one of the greatest mathematical geniuses, Évariste Galois, who was then only twenty. Galois would die of peritonitis at Cochin hospital the following day. The night before the duel, with a sense of urgency, he jotted a sort of scientific will on a few loose sheets of paper, “publicly exhorting the mathmeticians Jacobi or Gauss to give their opinion, not on the accuracy, but the importance of the theorems” he had found. And important they were: they would rank among the fundamental works on algebra and the theory of numbers. Ever since the day I had heard this legendary anecdote, it had fascinated me. At the age of twenty, on the eve of certain death, what things with a decisive impact on humanity could I have scrawled on a scrap of paper?

My pitiful hero, Pescheux d’Herbinville, was a sort of dandy whom some of Galois’s biographers accused of working as a spy for Charles II’s police. But there was nothing to prove this. It seems he and Évariste had been friends, but had fallen in love with the same woman, one Stéphanie-Félicie Poterin du Motel. So little is known about their story that there is plenty of scope for invention. I had made Pescheux an obscure petty noble rather taken with republicanism, a stupid, complacent man, which he no doubt was. Alongside his humdrum pointless existence, I wanted to depict the studious and tumultuous life of an Évariste driven by a passion for mathematics, the epitome of intelligence and youth. So the fictionalized biography of Pescheux was merely a pretext for a novel about mediocrity and a reflection on jealousy. It was an ambitious project, and I probably put too much store by it to get on with it properly. I took my inspiration for the opening passage from Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma, hoping I would immediately be unmasked: “On May 30, 1832, the republican Pescheux d’Herbinville arrived at the clearing accompanied by a friend who had just loaded one of the two dueling pistols and informed him that, because his adversary, Évariste, had no witness with him, it would be Évariste who picked the firearm.”

I had struggled to reach the fortieth page of my large black notebook; it measured eight inches by twelve, had the words Registre Le Dauphin, France, on the cover, and comprised two hundred pages marked out in quarter-inch squares. Yes — call it fetishism, superstition, or idiocy — I used the same notebooks as the legendary writer Romain Gary but didn’t succeed in stringing together more than a few words.