Electrico W (24 page)

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.

A
NTONIO’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 didn’t intend to—”

“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.

O
ne of my tacit rules in a novel is that every door opened as the fiction unfolds should be closed at the very end. It is a sort of courtesy to the reader, for whom nothing should remain in the shade. Alas, this rule is very poorly matched with the realities of life, where nothing is so limpid, and nothing hermetically closed. But as I said this was a novel, I’ll agree to comply with the rule, by rearranging the chapters which, until now, were in an arbitary order.

I’ve come across Antonio every now and then when I’ve gone to the newspaper. We have a relationship like co-workers, nothing more, but it has improved. He hasn’t seen Irene again, she left the archive department for a job as an iconographer for a magazine, and the last time we talked about her he struggled to remember her name.
Vitor is growing up and looks like him. He still has a picture of him in his wallet. We never mention those nine days spent together, but, at his request, I gave him the charcoal portrait I did of Duck.

I’ve seen Irene three or four times on my annual trips to Paris. The last time we met, a sort of erotic game was instigated. I touched her breasts, they weren’t as firm as they must have been a few years earlier. Two paltry victories.

Aurora left Lisbon for Berlin. I heard that she was awarded a European grant for the Arts and Culture, and she moved there. Antonio saw her face on a poster for a concert at the Salle Gaveau: the Wang-Oliveira duo. As for Karamazov, he fell under the spell of another young woman, a redhead who treated him badly.

Pinheiro died in prison in 1990 while serving a thirteen-year sentence for the murder of the grocer’s wife. None of the other killings could be ascribed to him, and, as the saying goes, he took his secrets to the grave. Fate has not yet brought me in contact with Dr. Vieira, whose card I kept for a long time.

I ordered more furniture from Custódia as soon as I moved into a bigger apartment in the Castelo district. He never gave me a favorable price, quite the opposite. But he wasn’t going to get rid of me that easily. I like to think that I’m the only person stopping him from closing his business. One time when he was telling me about his grandchildren, I asked whether he’d made them any wooden toys.

I’ve seen Manuela again, several times, always for lunch, never in the evening. The man she lives with, a very tall man with a beautiful, calm, regular-featured face, always says something to remind me how much he dislikes me.

My brother Paul got married. He has two boys I find unappealing and have no affection for, and he got divorced after five years. I didn’t feel sorry for him, I thought his wife was a stupid, horse-faced woman. We don’t see each other much.

Cátia Moniz—it doesn’t make much sense to call her Duck now—has another daughter. I heard that from Custódia. But I lied earlier when I implied I hadn’t seen her again. I didn’t have new business cards made—I had more than one hundred and eighty left from my old address—but I saw her at the botanical gardens with her family. Vitor was pushing the baby’s stroller and his little sister was pulling a toy behind her, a painted wooden duck with metal wheels. A duck. I smiled. I knew Custódia had made it, and I hoped he’d used off-cuts from my orders.

And then there’s me: I translated the one thousand and seventy-three
Contos aquosos
but haven’t found a publisher. The only one who showed any interest couldn’t find anyone responsible for Jaime Montestrela’s estate to sign the contract, and was worried there might be a court case after publication. Unless that was an excuse. As for the novel about Pescheux d’Herbinville, I never finished it, of course. I copied out my notes, but as the years went by, I
lost interest in the project. I don’t feel I need to apologize for that. I didn’t make you any promises, as far as I know.