Electrico W

DAY FOUR: PINHEIRO

A cool breeze was blowing and I shivered in the shade of a cypress tree. Graves seen in sunshine are never entirely melancholy.

There’s always a hint of life to distract the eye, a blade of grass glimmering, a carefree chaffinch pecking at the ground, a black beetle with heavy mandibles crawling over the gravel. And when graves have no story to tell, we don’t linger over them.

A large weathered stone. Familia Custódia. Names, dates, and at the very bottom, Maria Custódia, 1934–1964. The gilding had long since disappeared, the northern corner of its almond green surface was decorated with a brooch of lichen. There was a bouquet of withered mauve flowers, and a slightly muddy, chipped, discolored porcelain plaque. It said TO MOMMY.

Thirty years old. How old would Duck have been? What sort of lies did they tell her that day? That her mother had gone to heaven?

When my mother died I was in London. For an interview, with the chairman of a chemicals company. Mom had gone to the hospital a few days earlier, she was frightened. The doctor took me to one side, shook my hand: “I’m very concerned. Don’t go too far from Paris.” But I never guessed it would happen so quickly.

I found out she had died when I returned to my hotel very late in the evening. The message left in my mailbox said: “Urgent: contacter le manager. Votre frère a phoné. Concerner votre mère.” Their use of French, even this approximate version, was thoughtful. I reread those words several times and went to sit near reception in an armchair that was a little too low for me. I wished I could feel something, feel the tears rising, but nothing came. I closed my eyes, tried to remember her face. I couldn’t.

Under my eyelids, red and crimson hydras, almost translucent creatures, reached out their supple tentacles. I discovered the existence of these luminous shapes in my teens, and they had become familiar. They weren’t the blotches of color that stay engraved on objects, phosphenes, as I discovered, much later, they were called. They were well and truly microorganisms with lives of their own, capricious undulating specks of life.

Every evening before I went to sleep, I liked to follow their aimless trajectories across what seemed to me to be a microscopic universe, a living primordial soup, a sort of original ocean. When I moved my eyes, the hydras followed the move for a moment, then stopped as if arrested in cloying jelly, before setting off again on their slow drifting. I concluded from this quirk that they were not the product of my imagination, and invented a serious illness for myself, an unknown infection involving giant bacteria. In the end I got used to them. I later learned they were caused by excess fluid in the vitreous humor, common in the shortsighted.

The night I lost my mother, the hydras were everywhere, more mobile than ever in the shifting liquid shadows. They made it impossible for me to reconstitute her features or even find a memory of her, they were protecting me from pain.

I remember the affectedly baleful expression on the hotel manager’s face when he came over to me, walking quickly, bending forward slightly.

“Monsieur Balmer?” he asked, speaking French with almost no accent. “Terrible news, monsieur. Your mother … Your brother called this afternoon. She has passed away. Please accept my condolences and those of the hotel staff.”

I returned to Paris on the first flight the following morning and took a taxi from the airport straight to the hospital. The driver wanted to chat — about the filthy weather, the staggered rail strike, the traffic — but I said, “I’m sorry, my mother died yesterday, I don’t feel like talking.”

My words were like a thunderbolt and he stopped talking immediately. There was something comical about this metamorphosis, and it produced the beginnings of a smile on my face. The driver caught sight of it in the rearview mirror, and I immediately resumed my orphan’s mask.

When I went into the room where my mother had been laid to rest, I didn’t recognize her. Her body looked tiny, with almost no depth to it, drowning in white sheets, like a pale skinny dwarf, a stranger’s corpse. Her mouth was open, gaping, as if she were asleep, knocked out by the smell of ether. Her dentures had been taken out, and, discomfited, I looked away from the obscene sight of this toothless old woman with her dry, twisted lips.

My brother Paul was there, along with my father, and they turned to look at me. Paul stood up, put his arms around me, and hugged me with calculated intensity, he was family but not affectionate. I wanted to hug my father but he was still sitting, had made no move toward me.

“I was in London,” I managed to say. “For work … I’m sorry.”

I had spent my whole childhood saying “I’m sorry.” Every time, my father would sigh and say, “Well, don’t let it happen again.” I wished he had scolded me that morning. He could have said, “You’ll never change,” or even, as he used to, simply sighed, “You may be sorry, Vincent, but don’t let it happen again.”

Yes, that’s what he could have said. But he stayed sitting and stared right at me. His eyes were red, but I knew he hadn’t cried all night, that he had just watched over her, unblinking.

He tilted his chin toward the bed. “It’s not me you need to apologize to.”

His voice was cold, his expression detached, hard, the sort I imagine people use on traitors and cowards, and I knew then and there that he didn’t forgive me, would never forgive me.

I heard a crunch of gravel.

An old man greeted me with a polite nod of his head. His Sunday best was outdated, but his tie neatly knotted, his white shirt ironed. He must once have been a strapping fellow, a force of nature, but he looked tired now. In fact, he wasn’t all that old. But he was unshaven or had shaved half-heartedly, and the wind was mussing his gray hair.

I stepped back, embarrassed, as if caught committing a crime as I meditated beside that strangers’ grave. I moved away to one side and pretended to pay my respects to another grave, the resting place of one Maule Gorma, funny, he was born the same year as me, 1944, and died in 1979. What do you die of at thirty-five? Then I walked toward the gates, slowly. There, sheltering behind a mausoleum, I waited for him.

Ruiz Custódia, if that’s who he was, didn’t seem to have noticed anything, or even to be surprised. He took the dead flowers from the grave, dusted it off a bit, and laid a branch of mimosa on it in silence. He scrunched up the paper it had been wrapped in and thrust this into his jacket pocket.

I watched the man. He stood there motionless. His lips were moving, but his hands weren’t joined, and I thought he can’t have been praying, but talking, to his wife, really talking.

Yes, it must have been Ruiz Custódia. To make sure, I hid and called out his name. He turned around, looked for whoever had called him. But that didn’t prove anything: that woman over there also turned to look at me.

He stayed by his wife’s grave a long time, still talking under his breath. It wasn’t all that absurd, after all, at least no more so than going to a cemetery at all, no more ridiculous than laying flowers to honor a few bones.

In the early years, my father also used to go to the cemetery on a Sunday, almost once a month. He would stare at the headstone, reading our mother’s name over and over, even repeating it to himself, as if afraid of forgetting it, or of forgetting his pain: Anne Balmer.

The cemetery was miles from anywhere, lost in the northern suburbs of Paris, and I used to take him in my old Saab, when my brother asked me to do it on the pretext that he didn’t have time. I would go all the way to the graveside with my father, my eyes lowered, remorseful for my absence on my mother’s last day, but also in disgust for this old man mumbling a dead woman’s name.

We went there twenty or thirty times and then one morning, because my father’s muttering was louder than usual and people were watching us in embarrassment, I whispered, “There’s no point coming here, Dad. It just hurts you.”

He turned to me, almost spitting in my face: “But that’s exactly why I come here, to be hurt. What did you think, that it was for her? She doesn’t give a damn now, Annette doesn’t, she doesn’t give a damn, and you, you think I’ve gone crazy, don’t you, that’s it, my own son thinks I’m crazy!”

He took me by the lapels of my jacket and started shaking me, harder and harder, as if he wanted to fight. Then he let go abruptly, I could tell his legs couldn’t hold him and he collapsed on the path without even trying to clutch hold of me. There he was on the ground, crying, making little whimpering sounds like a mouse. I didn’t recognize him and felt ashamed and frightened, witnessing this old man’s madness. Shame, fear. I remember those two feelings, that had been reduced to one. I wanted to help him stand up, brush him down like a child, his pants had slick yellowish mud on them, but he pushed me away.

“Leave me alone. Leave me alone, I tell you.”

He stood up, wiped his eyes, brushed off his pants and jacket, and started limping quickly toward the gate.

I followed just behind him. He opened the gate, walked past the Saab, and crossed the street, almost tripping. I was still behind him, watching the street, afraid he might throw himself under the next car.

We walked on until we came to a bistro, a sort of small-town cafe and store, and my father went in. There was a bar, a newspaper stand, and four or five tables, all deserted. At the back, in another room overlooking a grim courtyard, was a large French billiards table with green baize. My father went up to the bar, ordered a draft lager from a man in a gray overall, and went to sit in a corner of the games room. I asked for a coffee.

“Are you together?” the man asked.

I said that he was my father … but the man shook his head as if that wasn’t an answer.

On the baize, the three balls were set out in their prescribed positions, and my father took a cue down from the wall. He drained his beer without pausing for breath and started to play, alone. I drank my coffee in silence, leaning against the wall, watching the balls gliding, my mind blank.

The black ball hit the cushion and missed the white. My father handed me the cue, took down another, and went to the bar to ask for two more beers. One for me. We played, without exchanging a word. My father kept score and ordered the beers; occasionally he sighed, especially when his shot was particularly inept. We must have played for an hour, or a little less. My ears were buzzing, from all those beers on an empty stomach. Toward midday, the cafe started to fill up with regulars, people who worked locally.

My father put down his cue.

“Come, let’s eat.”

The dish of the day was a too salty portion of salt pork with lentils. He gulped it down in no time, wiped the sauce from his plate with bread, and, when I was only halfway through my meal, put some money on the table.

“Hurry up and finish, Vincent. This place is dismal.”

We went back to the Saab. My father reached out his hand. I didn’t understand what he meant, I thought he wanted to leave, that this was a wave goodbye. My heart constricted, for a moment I thought in terror: I’ll never see him again.

But he was waggling his hand as if wanting something.

“The keys. The keys to your car. Give them here. I’m driving.”

He stayed at the wheel all the way to his house, driving too fast and not saying a word. On the corner of the street he cut the engine and climbed out, not in any rush. I was about to start the car up again when he crouched by the door, looked at me for a moment, and just said, “It’s fine like this. Don’t worry about me. See you soon.”

He smelled of beer. I watched him walk away and open his door. At the last moment he turned around, waved, and, I think, winked.

A few weeks later Paul asked him whether he wanted anyone to put flowers on the grave, and was even going to add “for All Saints’ Day,” but my father waved his hand back and forth vigorously. Over the next five years we never went back to the cemetery with him. Except to bury him, two months ago now, beside our mother.

In the distance, Custódia had put his hat back on his head and walked away.

He trudged heavily. As he passed the bin for flowers, he threw in the crumpled paper, then put his hands in his pockets and hunched over as if he were cold. When he left the cemetery he climbed into an old truck with chipping paintwork. It was still possible to make out the words ETS CUSTÓDIA — PRAGAL. 2800.

I thought that would be enough of a lead, and didn’t try to talk to him. Sure enough, in the Pragal telephone book, I found “Estabelecimento Ruiz Custódia. Cabinetmaker.”

THAT EVENING I found Antonio leaning on the bar at the hotel, drinking a whiskey. He was talking to the barman, passing the time of day. My eye came to rest on the back of his neck, and I looked at it for a long time.

So, Irene, this was all he turned out to be, this lover of yours. This short little guy, stooped even, drinking with no sense of style, his hair thinning on the back of his head, this guy who didn’t even know how to wear a jacket.

As if sensing me behind him, Antonio turned around. He smiled and I returned the smile. He seemed to be waiting for a question, a sign of complicity, but I just sat next to him. I ordered a whiskey too, and then gauged his reaction as I said, “I went for a walk. All the way to the cemetery on the other side of the bridge.”

“Took notes as usual?”

He swallowed some of his drink and I thought I detected a hint of mockery in his voice, as if I attached more importance to my notes than they deserved.

“As usual, yes …,” I smiled.

Nothing ever drives me to write, I’m not heckled by tides of words. There is so much vanity in it that I write only to feel worthy of my own respect.

And the characters always prevail in the end, the way dreams prevail over life, fantasy over love. Even your face, Irene, is disappearing behind the face of the woman who bears your name here. From one page to the next, I’m drying you out, withering you, and sooner or later you’ll be swallowed up by the Irene in this novel, who’s so much more alive than you.

“You should go and take some photos there, Antonio.”

“In the cemetery? Okay, in a couple of days. Because Irene’s coming tomorrow. You’re not forgetting, are you? And the Pinheiro trial starts too.”

I nodded.

I wonder whether the time has now come to talk about Pinheiro. It may be a digression here, but this story’s so odd, anyway. Two years ago, over a period of four months, Lisbon saw a wave of unexplained murders. Thirteen victims of all ages and from every walk of life. A retired old woman, an unemployed laborer, a family practitioner, a fishmonger, a bank employee, a schoolboy … There was a link between the murders but the police chose to hide it from the press so no one knew a serial killer was operating in the city: the killer used the same weapon every time, a.30 caliber pistol. And he fired two or three shots every time, not with relentless ferocity, just to be sure the life had been taken.

The investigation was so short of clues that it would have dragged on for a long time were it not for a tailor working late one night who, shortly after hearing two shots ringing around the courtyard of his building, saw a stranger come out of the porch. The tailor rushed outside. The man was walking slowly, not turning around. He wasn’t running away. Even so, spurred only by intuition, the tailor caught up with him and held him by the sleeve. Ricardo Pinheiro froze on the sidewalk. He didn’t seem surprised. He had “faraway eyes,” according to the witness’s statement.

He was an insignificant man. He was wearing a gray Prince of Wales checked suit, fraying along the sleeve and the collar, and a gray flannel hat with a black ribbon. Something heavy distended one of his pockets, and the tailor was frightened. He started yelling for help, still keeping a hold of Pinheiro. Pinheiro tried listlessly to free himself, less to escape than as a reflex.

The 7.65mm Parabellum Luger was in his pocket, its barrel still burning hot, and four bullets were left in the cylinder, one of them ready to be fired. He didn’t try to use it against the tailor. Meanwhile the grocer’s wife on the third floor lay in a pool of blood, the bullet had shattered her skull.

When the police arrived, Pinheiro was lying unconscious on the sidewalk. The crowd must have punched and kicked him until he collapsed, although the tailor said that he fell with the first blow.

He was taken to the hospital, where the doctors made a bizarre discovery: under his clothes, next to his skin, Ricardo Pinheiro was wearing a fine coat of bronze chain mail.

For a week Pinheiro remained in a state of unconsciousness close to coma. Then, as soon as he was questioned by the police, he admitted to all the murders, without providing any explanation. He even admitted to those committed while he had been visiting his sister near Porto. It was the police who found witnesses to exonerate him. He didn’t betray his accomplices. He didn’t explain the bronze chain mail or ask to wear it in prison, contradicting every diagnosis made by psychiatrists.

The press was expecting a great deal from the trial, perhaps too much. I thought Pinheiro would say nothing, would let a succession of experts take the stand, attending his own trial without a word, more of a Bartleby than a Jack the Ripper. Keeping a record of his silence suited me very well.