Electrico W

DAY SEVEN: PAUL

I dreamed of Irene and Manuela that night. A muddled hallucination in which Irene was taking a poodle called Extra for a walk through Lisbon. It started to snow and she opened an umbrella with an ornate handle shaped liked a toucan’s beak. At this point Manuela appeared. She was wearing one of those Cretan dresses from the Minoan civilization, revealing firm breasts with imperious, erect nipples. She walked toward Irene, who was wearing the dog’s collar around her neck but was meowing. A volcano then erupted in the middle of the Tagus (the reds and ochres of the image in my dream mimicked Turner’s Vesuvius in Eruption). Gray ash covered the city, and I woke — in a sweat, confused by this unfathomable dream — to the sound of the telephone.

It was my brother Paul. The loan our father had taken out for the apartment on the rue Lecourbe had another eight years to run, and the bank’s insurance company was refusing to cover for a suicide, since “the suicide of the insured party constitutes grounds for exclusion in the case of real estate.” The company was asking us to reimburse the outstanding capital due “within twelve months” or to “take personal responsibility for continued monthly payments.” The letterhead was familiar: it was from the bank to which our father had devoted his entire career. The management had sent a wreath for the funeral.

Paul had taken advice: in order to avoid the repayments, we needed a doctor’s certificate stating that our father no longer “had all his mental faculties,” and was not “conscious of the consequences of his act.” But our father’s doctor was refusing to testify to this. In his view Dad was in full possession of his senses and was not of a depressive disposition. Paul had gotten angry. So you could buy a rope from the do-it-yourself store in Courtenay, tie it to a beam, climb onto a Formica stool that you brought through from the kitchen, and slip your head into a running knot, all with a perfectly balanced mind. “Not all suicides are pathological,” the doctor had kept saying. “Look at Romain Gary.” The example had not struck Paul as persuasive.

To try to understand, Paul and I had read books on the subject. They stated that hangings are the work of the melancholic, that the act itself often takes place in the morning after a sleepless night spent mulling over morbid thoughts or pondering the recent loss of a loved one. But Mom had died more than eight years earlier. It could also involve the sudden redundancy of retirement. This was sometimes an explanation, but he had retired two years ago already. He had also met Laurence, a divorcée tackling her fifties with energy and fun, whom he had introduced to us and saw more and more regularly. In the church she had stared at the coffin and kept saying, “Why, but why?” and her eyes were sad and caring, but dry.

It was a religious funeral. An initiative of Uncle Simon’s, he took care of everything. Dad was not a believer, perhaps even something of a blasphemer, but his brother believed in the cathartic value of rituals, in ceremonies, and tradition. In his sermon, the priest talked about “great sorrow” and said we must “not despair of eternal salvation for a man who has died by his own hand. By means known only to Himself, God would grant him repentance. Let us pray for Jacques, who took his own life. Praise the Lord.” No one repeated the words “Praise the lord,” as they are supposed to, but after waiting for a moment, the priest carried on as if nothing untoward had happened.

Thinking of those empty pronouncements reminded me of one of Montestrela’s tales that I had just translated:

The people of the Adjiji archipelago are convinced that God, whom they call Niaka, is very evil and that the Devil, whom they call Puku, is good. They follow the moral codes decreed by Puku’s prophets, exhorting them to renounce Niaka. When all is said and done, this does not change much.

At one point during the service Uncle Simon leaned over to us and tilted his chin toward the back of the nave. A rather chubby woman with permed blond hair and a veil was hanging back, standing beside a pillar, clutching an embroidered handkerchief. We didn’t know her: could this be “Solange”? Dad had once admitted to Simon that he had a mistress, a client from his bank branch, a “very beautiful woman” (those were his words) who was also married. Their relationship began in the safety deposit room, under neon lights, surrounded by locked drawers, a setting that made their liaison all the more unimaginable. According to Simon, she and Dad were still seeing each other even when our mother had to go into the hospital. They had broken off all contact after her death, as if, with Mom dead, it was now impossible for Dad to be unfaithful to her. It must have been Solange: she left very quickly, without saying hello to anyone.

The police inquiry had retraced what Dad did on his last day. He must have caught the 10:15 train to Courtenay and the bus to Montcardon, sitting at the back, as he always did, then walked to his little house on the rue du Mail. There he set up his incident in the barn, a cinder-block building attached to a windowless wall. But beforehand he had had lunch in the local restaurant. The owner hadn’t noticed anything unusual. Dad had the dish of the day, mushroom lasagna, drank a glass of Côtes du Rhône, and had a decaf coffee. It was this decaf that most surprised the inspector. Our father’s doctor had warned him to avoid caffeine, but what difference would it make on a day like that? Perhaps he wasn’t yet thinking about dying. Or had simply developed a taste for decaf.

Dad left no letter, nothing that explained anything. Paul and I searched through the house. Nothing. I resented him for that, I still do. I’d have been happier if he had left with a declaration of paternal love, the only one he would ever have made to us. A sort of absolution for having failed to see or notice anything. A few tender sentences we could have clung to while the coffin was being lowered into the ground. I spent many nights dreaming of that letter. It would have to start with the words “My sons, my dear sons …,” and I didn’t really give a damn about the rest. But Dad had always been the silent type, and it was a bit late now for him to change.

He must have lain down in his first-floor bedroom, the bedspread was still crumpled. He had taken out a few yellowed books — or perhaps they just hadn’t been put away. I had never known him to read those books, but I couldn’t see what to make of them. Still, I did note down the titles, as if they held some impenetrable secret: Mallarmé’s Verse and Prose, the Teubner edition of the Odyssey, Jules Verne’s Voyage to the Center of the Earth, and an old 1898 edition of Leon Bloy’s The Ungrateful Beggar. Its epigraph was a quote from Barbey d’Aurevilly: “The most beautiful names borne by men were the names given by their enemies.”

Dad had forgotten to close the iron gate, as well as the door to the barn. Unless he had actually left them open deliberately so that someone would notice, would think there had been a burglary. That was what happened. A neighbor found his body the same day, shortly before nightfall. The pathologist had set the time of death at about four in the afternoon.

No, the insurance would not pay, and Lecourbe would bring in a lot less than anticipated. Paul also suggested dropping the price of Montcardon, to close the deal swiftly, and to give it to an estate agent’s office in Paris. I agreed: of course, the agents in Courtenay weren’t going around telling prospective buyers that the previous owner had hanged himself in the barn, but the facts always came out in the end, and the sale had already fallen through three times.

Paul said a few more words about what an idiot our father’s doctor was and the elegance of the bank’s last gesture, and we hung up.

Paul wanted to sort everything out as quickly as possible. It was his way of running away, of hurrying through grief. Back when our mother died, he had set up house in Milan for no apparent reason. He found work in an architect’s office, pitching up for a few days every Christmas with a big panettone and some Asti Spumante. His exile lasted three years, then he came back to France. Once the inheritance had been carved up, I knew he would go away again, and that we would gradually become what we had always been to each other, although we never admitted it: strangers. I thought he would get back in touch with me when his children were born, when he had them. I hadn’t imagined for one moment that I myself might be a father.

I felt like calling Paul back, telling him what a family could be like, or just two brothers. Telling him about the affection I felt for him, for my younger brother who had been too many years younger for me for a long time, whom I got to know so little and so badly, also telling him how hard it would be for me to lose the scraps I had left of my childhood. I didn’t do it. I thought of writing to him. I didn’t do that either.

I HAD A shower and went down to the cafe to read the Diário. It devoted most of page 3 to a long article about Pinheiro’s bronze coat of mail. This style of armor was a perfect copy of the lorica hamata that Roman legionaries took from the Celts and wore for six centuries. It was made of linked rings: each ring was connected to four others and sealed with a rivet known as a barleycorn, and this was illustrated with a detailed diagram. The rings were flattened and had a diameter of just a few millimeters, so the coat of mail comprised several hundred thousand of them. A peculiar detail: some of the rings had been soldered to wires connected to 4.5-volt batteries, as in toning belts athletes used for their abdominal muscles. The setup was absurd, though, given that bronze is a very good conductor so the power would inevitably be dissipated in short circuits.

The Diário’s journalist had had an identical one made by a locksmith, who was kept busy for a whole week with the task. The alloy used was not commercially available, and he had had to order it from a foundry because no bronze sculpture had so much copper and so little pewter in it: there was also some arsenic which made the alloy harder, making the article more clean-cut. As he reproduced the original, the craftsman became convinced that Pinheiro’s coat of mail had been one of a limited edition of “at least half a dozen.”

For nearly three hours the journalist had worn the hat, bronze bangles, and chain mail, right next to his skin as Pinheiro had, although legionaries never actually wore it naked like this but over a linen shirt. Once the wires were connected to batteries, the experiment had become painful, far less because of the electrical current than because his body hair kept getting caught in the rings.

I covered all of this in my article, bolstering it with a few details on the capture of Rome by the Gauls under Brennus, to whom minor history owes the story of the geese at the Capitol — and to whom Roman military history owes this form of chain mail.

My brother Paul was given a Vercingetorix the Gaul outfit for his sixth birthday. A winged helmet as on cigarette packets, a brown cape in rough fabric, a wide sword, a round shield, and a plastic coat of mail. It was a family celebration, in the countryside at Montcardon. I was thirteen and bored, rereading old Tarzan and Bob Morane stories in our bedroom. My brother spent the day running all over the place in his Gallic chieftain’s costume; toward nightfall he wanted to go and play in the woods. My mother asked me to take him and play with him. I dug my heels in and she reprimanded me with a frown: “Vincent — it’s your brother’s birthday.”

I sighed and went out with Paul.

We simply had to follow a dirt track alongside the house. It was impracticable by bicycle because it was too rutted up by tractor tires. First we had to walk past two cornfields, then a vineyard, and you reached the woods after half a mile. You went into the woods on a path edged with ivy and brambles, cutting through an embankment. It was just a few dozen hectares of straggly, poorly maintained forest, but in springtime there were hundreds of daffodils under the trees, and even lily of the valley. My brother liked going for walks there, bringing home moss, collecting gleaming blue beetles in jars where they scuttled under damp tree bark. Down below us, in the light of the setting sun, was the watercourse, the Vougre, where people swam in summer, although it was barely deeper than a brook. Nearby were the dark waters of a pond, known as the Tramen Pond, where people went boating. My brother could lie in the grass on the banks for hours watching the balletic moves of yellow-bellied newts, but never daring to catch them. In the middle of the forest there was also a dead tree with black, clawlike branches, the Devil Tree. It terrified Paul and that was my fault: I was the one who called it that, and I had told my little brother terrible stories, full of witches and monsters. When the tree appeared around a bend on a walk, Paul would run and hide behind me, scared. I protected him from the demon with incantations and curses. Paul’s disillusion when he grew up was in direct proportion to the admiration he had once felt.

I’ll never forget that afternoon. Paul is running ahead of me, pushing aside brambles with his shield. From time to time he strays from the path, pursuing one of the pond’s big green dragonflies with his sword. Then he comes back, laughing, victorious. I’ve brought a comic book with me and don’t pay much attention to him. At some point I can’t hear him anymore. I call him. He doesn’t answer. I shout his name again several times and, succumbing to genuine fear, start running toward the pond. He isn’t there. I run to the river, climb back up the bank yelling Paul, Paul, with all my strength, all the way to a backwater of the Vougre even though he can’t have had time to get there. I go back to the Tramen, I search through the reeds, wading out into the water, I daren’t think the unimaginable, of finding a little blond-haired Gallic chieftain floating in the water, drowned in his chain mail, still wearing his helmet. I even go to the Devil Tree. Maybe Paul’s overcome his fear, maybe he’s waiting for me there, sitting on a low branch? But no. It’s getting dark. I can see less and less clearly. I stand with my back against a tree and start to cry. I’m paralyzed with guilt, and I’m also frightened of my mother’s fury, but I must go home and ask for help. I run along the path in sodden shoes. Again and again I trip in the deep ruts gouged out by farm machinery, grazing my knees and elbows and hands.

I barge through the door to the house and see Paul in the kitchen. He got hungry, wanted a jelly sandwich, looked for me for a while in the woods and, when he didn’t find me, came home on his own. My mother sees me in the doorway, dripping and filthy. She comes toward me, beside herself with rage and, unable to articulate a sentence, she slaps me to dispel her own anxiety. I don’t try to avoid the blow, one of the very few in my life. The pain in my cheek frees me from my own tension, tears well up immediately and I go to our room and throw myself on my bed. I sob uncontrollably. I know that that could have been the day when my life turned upside down, when I would have been burdened forever with the atrocity of Paul’s memory. I imagine the nightmare of a life without Paul, a shameful life that would have to be lived in the shadow of his death, and yet, somewhere in that total darkness, in that abyss of misery, there is a vertiginous sort of appeal, as if I knew that only a glow as dark as that could give meaning to my own life, as if you had to be infinitely guilty to be truly saved.

I put down the Diário with its pictures of chain mail and drove away the images it had evoked. I went over to the hotel. Antonio had left a note for me with the porter.

“It’s early. I called your place, but you weren’t there. I’m going to the Estufa Fria. I need to talk to Aurora, to explain. Then I’m going to take some pictures around Belém, I’ll be gone all day. Let’s meet up this evening, if you can. Irene’s still asleep. Tell her I’ll be back at about five. You’ll think of an explanation, I know you’ll be discreet. Thanks. A.”

I didn’t have to wait for Irene, she was having her breakfast. I found an explanation, and was also discreet.

I said I was meeting someone. No, I couldn’t have lunch with her, or meet for coffee in the afternoon, and I probably wouldn’t be around this evening either. But tomorrow, it’s a promise. I stood up, pleased with my indifference. She looked at me as if she thought I was going to hurt her and she couldn’t give a damn.

IT WAS ALSO the first day of the Pinheiro trial. I could have waited for the reports in the Portuguese press, but I had an official pass after all, and I was curious to see how he behaved in court.

The courtroom was packed, the press box heaving. Pinheiro seemed half asleep in the dock, utterly silent, his eyes blank. That morning they were giving an inventory of the murders. He had confessed to the police for all those that involved the Luger, but his lawyer made much of reminding the jury that, for three of these, he had a cast-iron alibi. The same weapon must, therefore, have been used by several assassins. That would be the position taken by the defense: Pinheiro, who had accepted the blame for all the murders, could in fact be innocent of them all, and why not also the last one, if the culprit had dropped the firearm in his pocket. Then he would simply have been the accomplice responsible for disposing of the gun, in a strange complex mechanism.

They then showed some images provided by the pathologist. They were poorly framed, workaday shots, showing blood-stained bodies frozen in death, captured on film out of respect for protocol, without humanity. This obscenity created an awkward tension among people in the public gallery, but Pinheiro didn’t look at them.

I was just leaving the courtroom, feeling slightly nauseous, when Pinheiro stood up and started shouting: “Why are you degrading Heaven and Earth? Why are you pointlessly humiliating the children of men? Why charge the twinkling stars with your futile laws? Why, when we are born free, do you make us slaves of an inanimate heaven?”

Then he sat back down, dazed by so many words. His lawyer, disconcerted, leaned toward him and seemed to give copious advice. Pinheiro’s head dropped forward as if he had fallen asleep. As I was leaving, the policeman next to me muttered, “What an idiot.”

The cop looked stupid too. Which detracted nothing from the accuracy of his comment.

AT ONE O’CLOCK I was at the Brasileira. I had lunch there, spinning out each course, hoping Manuela would come by. I liked the newfound fever that was gradually driving out my longing for Irene. But at three o’clock she still wasn’t there.

I went home to my studio and worked on a few more Contos aquosos, whose title I had decided to translate as Liquid Tales because Aqueous Tales sounded too much like “queer tales.” And “liquid” had the advantage of evoking the absurd, playful way Montestrela liquidated great philosophical themes:

On the planet FH76, the bodies of living beings are not fused to their spirits. This means that the spirit can sometimes die long before the body. The latter carries on eating, running, conversing, or even copulating to the death. Bodily activity can continue for several years without anyone noticing a thing.

Finding an editor for Liquid Tales would have been sensible, but I was beginning to feel, like Gertrude Stein, “If it can be done, why do it?” I was afraid that, as soon as an agreement was reached, I would be far less motivated. I was translating the four hundred and third tale when there was a knock at my door.

It was Custódia. He had climbed the three floors slowly but was flushed and out of breath.

“I was just checking you’re here,” he said, raising his hat. “And, anyway, the shelves are too heavy for me to bring them up on my own. Where are they to go?”

I asked him in and showed him the wall. The drawing of Duck was there, framed, beneath the window. But he didn’t look at it. He just tapped the wall with a finger and listened to its resonance.

“We could hang it off the ground here, if you like. It’s a weight-bearing wall and it would hold up well. It would look better and keep the floor space clear. I made it with brackets and I’ve brought my drill.”

I nodded and we went downstairs. I was behind Custódia; he was losing his hair and his bald patch revealed the first liver spots. He was probably not yet sixty but was as worn as his gray cardigan. A nasty man, a brute even, was what his neighbor Pita had said. I just felt sorry for him.

We unloaded the frame from the truck, it was incredibly heavy. Custódia handed me some gloves.

“Oh yes, it’s definitely not balsa wood. We’ll take the shelves up separately.”

We took a rest on each landing and when we reached my studio, I went in first and saw the portrait of Duck. I was suddenly terribly ashamed of stooping so low, being so abject. I flipped the picture to face the wall, to hide his daughter’s face from Custódia. I didn’t want to produce such pointless pain. It didn’t matter anymore.

We put the frame against the wall, went down for the shelves, and came straight back up without exchanging a word. Custódia marked out the screw holes with a pencil. Then he moved the frame a few inches to one side to get to a socket, drilled deep into the wall, and inserted the pegs. I held the shelf unit and he secured it with a few turns of the screwdriver. The result wasn’t at all bad. Custódia had added a frieze and some moldings, filled the joints with wood glue, and waxed the unit. Moments later we had put the shelves in.

“Your books?” Custódia asked. “Shall we put them in to see what it looks like?”

“I–I don’t have any. In a trunk, somewhere else. I’ll bring them over.”

Custódia pulled on the cord of his drill and that was when he caught the portrait. It fell onto the tiled floor and the glass broke. Custódia swore and apologized.

“I’ll mend it,” he said, “don’t you worry about it.”

Before I had a chance to react he was assessing the damage, turning the frame over in his hand. He looked at the portrait for a long time, then leaned it back against the wall.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s just glass, really.”

“I mean forgive me for looking at the picture for so long. She looks so like my daughter.”

Custódia nodded, it was impossible to know what he was thinking, and all at once I was afraid Duck might be dead. It was this fear rather than deceitfulness that made me ask, “Your daughter?”

“Yes.”

“How — how old is she?” I persisted, hoping for reassurance.

“Twenty-seven. Is it someone you know, the woman in the picture, or did you buy it just like that?”

“She’s … a friend. I drew it.” And to prove the point I showed him the charcoal still lying on my desk. Custódia put away his tools. I felt fate had decided for me, and I didn’t have the right to let the opportunity go.

“And … do you have grandchildren?”

“Two. A boy and a little girl.”

Custódia stood up with a sigh and dusted himself off.

“How old are they?”

“The boy’s eleven and the girl’s six, I think. I’m not sure. I hardly ever see them. It’s not easy, nowadays, a father-daughter relationship.”

“Tell me. She doesn’t have a red Fiat, does she? I saw a woman who looked liked this picture in a red Fiat.”

“I wouldn’t know. Honestly, we don’t see each other much. Not much at all. That’s the way it is.”

He picked up his gloves and tools and opened the door. He threw a last long glance at the portrait of Duck.

“It’s incredible,” he said. “It really is her, believe me. Actually, she works quite near here. Printers on the corner of the rua da Barroca.”

He shook my hand, his was callused, rough, he could easily have broken my fingers, but the handshake was civil. I closed the door and gathered up the broken glass. Custódia’s truck set off noisily.

Printers, on the corner of the rua da Barroca, who’d have thought it?

I remembered a story that I knew to be true, the one about a Jew who survived the Nazi camps where he lost his entire family, who emigrated to the United States and settled in Brooklyn, gradually rebuilding his shattered life. Then one day he scratched a car in the parking lot of the supermarket he went to every week. The driver was his own wife, who he thought had died. She’d been living five blocks from him for twenty years.

On the corner of the rua da Barroca. It was so simple.

I SET OFF in search of the printers and found it in a matter of minutes. It was called LisboPrint, Soares & Filhos. The metal shutter was closed. The company offered faxing and photocopying services, and the window display showed business cards, wedding invitations, and small bespoke pieces such as posters and leaflets. I ate not far from there, not as impatient to get to the next day as I would have thought.

Then I went back to my studio and opened my black notebook for The Clearing and turned on my Mac to copy out the latest sentences. It wasn’t any good. I wanted to rewrite the whole text, to put it into first-person narrative, like a private journal, to turn it into Pescheux’s inner monologue, a rambling discourse, occasionally tinged with a lyricism that I wanted to ruffle up. I tried out the effect on the first few pages: “Met Galois at Palais-Royal. He was kissing Stéphanie and didn’t see me. My whole being was instantly reduced to images. The traitress’s smile betrayed the feverishness of their every move, hidden moisture, flesh and sweat, it pierced through me till I felt nauseous, till I flinched, I pulled myself together, ran toward them, drunk with rage …”

That wasn’t very good either. I gave up.

It was late already. The radio was talking about a terrible earthquake in Mexico City, 8.2 on the Richter scale. The city was in ruins, emergency services were converging. I listened for a while, and put my few books, including Contos aquosos, onto Custódia’s shelves. Then I turned out the light but didn’t draw the curtains. I couldn’t get to sleep. Someone rang my doorbell: Antonio. I turned on a lamp but the light was too harsh for him, so we stayed there in shadow with just the glow from the street. The facade of the building opposite went from green to red, red to green, with the traffic lights at the crossroads.

Antonio asked for a drink. I put two glasses on the table and an almost empty bottle of ouzo. I opened the fridge to get a jug of chilled water, and closed it quickly so its wan light didn’t compromise the mood of trust. Tonio’s forehead was gleaming with clammy, anxious sweat. I wished he would wipe it, because I couldn’t take my eyes off that almost phosphorescent strip of skin reflecting colors on the street like a wet sidewalk. Orange, then red, back to green.

He didn’t say anything for a long time. I could see he was shaking but his eyes were obscured by shadows. He was breathing hard, or perhaps that was merely the rarefied, obsessive awareness of sound produced by the dark.

“Do you want to sleep?” he asked.

“It doesn’t matter.”

I was ashamed for not trying to disguise how tired I was. Red, green, a motorbike setting off and fading away. He sighed.

“Row with Irene. Violent. Nasty. In the letter I called her ‘sweet.’ Anyway … she’s leaving tomorrow.”

“Did you see Aurora?”

He whispered her name as if calling to her softly.

“I went to the hothouse, to her ‘island,’ as she calls it. She was there with a fair-haired man with very fine, almost feminine features, he was holding her hand, they were kissing. As soon as she saw me she came over, smiling. She didn’t seem to feel caught out. I wanted to explain things but she stopped me short by kissing my cheek. She introduced me to her friend, with a simple ‘Timoteo, my friend.’ And to him she said, ‘Antonio.’ She didn’t say anything resentful, behaved quite naturally, was sweet. It was as if an eternity had passed. I belonged to her past. I left pretty much right away. I looked back one last time, Aurora and her Timoteo gave me a friendly wave goodbye. And I knew I’d lost her.”

He put his glass on the table, near the Macintosh.

“Do you think she really loved me?”

I repressed a smile at this adolescent question. But what sort of answer could I give, as I know nothing about love, and never understand women better than on the day they leave me. He leaned with his back to the wall, against the nearly empty bookshelves. We stayed like that for a long time, not speaking.

I recognized the color of that silence. Years ago I spent three weeks in Inuit country, in Iqaluit and then Kugaaruk, far above the Arctic Circle. That was where I got the Reverend Samuel Wallis’s mask. Rather than staying in the Pelly Bay Inn, a hotel made of prefabricated units, I rented a room in a private home. My host was called Niam Amgoalik. In Inupiak, Niam means “sweetness” or “my darling” but, although he was welcoming enough, this man was not the image Europeans have of sweetness. One evening when Niam and I were in the living room — I was reading a copy of Nunatsiak News several months old and he was repairing the handlebar of his Skidoo — there was a knock at the door and a man came straight in without waiting for an answer. Niam didn’t say a word, just gave a friendly nod. The visitor took a Coke from his bag, opened it and sat slowly in an armchair. Niam carried on mending his handlebars while his friend sipped his Coke. It wasn’t completely silent: Niam breathed loudly as he tinkered with the brake lever, his friend burped from time to time, and I turned the pages of the newspaper. Outside there was the noise of a snowstorm, the smack of a badly secured shutter.

I eventually got used to this muteness and forgot my initial embarrassment. But while Niam and his friend were sharing the simple fact of being together, I was withdrawing into myself to the point of indifference. And when, after half an hour, or perhaps a little more, the friend waved goodbye to Niam and left, I felt incomplete, like a deaf person who has watched musicians play but heard nothing of the tune. I never knew Niam’s friend’s name.

A motorbike backfiring on the street broke the spell. Antonio knocked back the rest of his ouzo.

“Thanks, Vincent. I’ll go back to the hotel.”

But he didn’t move. The wall turned from red to green. I went over to the window and opened it wide, a breeze carrying the smell of the sea swept through the room.

“I think I have a couple beers, if you like.”

“Okay.”

I opened the fridge, and as I took the bottles out the cold neon light briefly illuminated the portrait of Duck. It was too late to hide it from Antonio.

“What the hell’s that, Vincent? It’s — it can’t be.”

He took out his wallet, searching through it feverishly.

“Yes, it’s Duck,” I preempted him. “I — drew it from memory. I thought she was beautiful. Her face is so … pure.”

Antonio found the photo and compared it to the portrait, speechless.

“I know I should have told you,” I went on, “but I never thought you’d end up seeing it.”

“But, Vincent, I don’t understand. You don’t know her, and this portrait … it’s not just a drawing.”

“I could give it to you, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a, what would you call it? Just an amateur sketch. I wanted to get back into working with charcoal. Since meeting Aurora.”

“You’re messing with me, Vincent … I think this is … sick. Kind of love by proxy.”

“What are you talking about? What love? Forgive the comparison, but Leonardo da Vinci wasn’t in love with Mona Lisa. It’s just a picture.”

I must have hit the right note because Antonio grimaced, then smiled properly.

“Okay. I’ll give you that. I should apologize. Let’s open these bottles.”

I prized the lids off and Antonio took one of the beers and walked over to the window. He looked at the portrait, more relaxed, appeased.

“It’s good, for something done from memory. It would have been even more faithful if you’d had the photo. You’ve aged her a bit, but she must actually look like that now.”

I didn’t mention the printers on the rua da Barroca but asked, “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“No.”

It was a cold no. I showed Antonio the map of the Okavango Delta.

“Do you remember Okavango in Botswana, Antonio? You took the pictures, I wrote the piece. You hired a small plane, flew over the delta and the Moremi Reserve … They were magnificent pictures.”

“That was a long time ago. I don’t know why you brought that up. Sorry, I’m tired, I’m going back.”

Antonio finished his beer, nodded, and left.

But no one forgets the Okavango. It’s an African river, a really long river, much more powerful than the Tagus or the Rhône and over half a mile wide at the Popa Falls. Its source is in Angola, it flows through Namibia before reaching Botswana. That’s where it meets the Kalahari Desert, where it coils into meanders, creating a rich tropical forest and producing a vast, swampy, saltwater delta that is home to tens of thousands of flamingoes. In the dry season, there are a myriad of islands formed around giant termite mounds and dense shrubs. Tourist leaflets describe luxuriant marshes, a miracle performed by water, an earthly paradise. All rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full, says Ecclesiastes. That’s not true: the Kalahari is vast and all the water of the Okavango gradually evaporates, or seeps into mud and sand.

The Okavango never reaches the sea. Its destiny as a river is never fulfilled. Of course other watercourses have the same fate: the Awash in the Afar region of Ethiopia simply irrigates that country’s great lakes, the Bear River ends its days in the brine of the Great Salt Lake. But no river is as powerful as the Okavango, none as indomitable. Its defeat in the face of the scorching Kalahari Desert is a catastrophe, its slow absorption like the end of the world. I’ve always liked old geographical maps, which is why I had bought the one I hung on the wall. That old map of the Okavango Basin was a metaphor for unfinished business, for adversity, for an unreachable goal.

I listened to Antonio walking along the deserted street. He suddenly started running and I heard the sound of his racing footsteps for a long time. Then the hubbub from farther down in the city smothered everything. I knew why Antonio was running. Sometimes the sound of our own footsteps becomes unbearable. It describes our impotence, our density, our weight. Walking means being resigned to that. So we refuse to be, and we run, it doesn’t matter where, because we’re running away from ourselves.