Letter from Casablanca (11 page)

It’s intermission, said Wilfred Cotton. Shall we go to the foyer for something to drink?

The servant was waiting for us on the veranda of the cottage, where drinks were ready. We drank a cognac standing up, leaning on the wooden railing, gazing at the night before us. The monkeys, which all through twilight had made a frightening uproar, were now sleeping quietly in the trees. From the forest there were only rustling, stifled noises, a cry of a bird. Sir Wilfred asked me if the tragedy was to my liking. Yes, I admitted. And the interpretation, what did I think of that? Did I prefer King Lear or the Fool? I confessed that I felt the interpretation of the Fool was fascinating, so aggressive and passionate, almost demented. But to tell the truth, I had been overcome by the interpretation of Lear. There was something unhealthy, vile, about him, a metaphysical weakness, a condemnation. He agreed. For this reason the recitation of the Fool had been too hysterical, hallucinatory, feverish, because a strong “comic relief” was necessary in order to underline Lear’s obscure weakness. That Lear, he said, that evening rendered homage to Sir Henry Irving. I did not know him? It was normal—when he died perhaps I had not yet come into the world. Henry Irving, 1838-1905, the greatest Shakespearean actor of all time. He had the gestures of a king and the voice of a harp. Lear was his sublime role. No one had ever
been able to equal it. His sadness was as deep as hell, and his torment was unbearable in the third scene of Act Five when he held his hands to his temples as if he wanted to protect them from an interior explosion and murmured, “She’s gone for ever. I know when one is dead, and when one lives. She’s dead as earth.”

But perhaps we can continue our conversation on another occasion, Wilfred Cotton said without a pause. The third act is about to begin.

For six months, until the end of 1934, every Thursday I went to the theatre with Wilfred Cotton. He was, from time to time, an awkward Hamlet, clumsy and cowardly, but also a kind Laertes; a mad Othello, but also a wicked Iago; a Brutus tormented and bitter, but also a presumptuous, scornful Anthony; and still many other characters in the pretense of joy and pain, of victories and defeat, on the shabby platform of the hut. Our evening conversations, at supper as in the foyer, were always polite without ever being friendly, cordial without ever being confidential, affable without ever being intimate. We talked very much about the theatre, and then about the climate, and the food, and the music. We thought highly of each other without ever admitting it, united by a complicity that expression would have irreparably compromised.

The night before my departure, as an added attraction—it was a Saturday evening—Wilfred Colton invited me for a good-bye supper. That evening, in honor of the happiness that shone in my face notwithstanding my careful control, he put on
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, because he said that that comedy, written to celebrate a noble marriage, was also well suited to celebrate my divorce from a part of the terrestrial globe which perhaps I had not particularly loved.

We said good-bye at the theatre. I told him not to come to the truck with me, I preferred that we leave each other in that
strange place which had been the scene of our curious relationship. I never saw him again.

In October of 1939, in my study in Lourenço Marques, a dispatch passed across my desk. It was a request from the British Consulate in Mozambique for the recovery of the body of a subject of His British Majesty, deceased in Portuguese territory. The subject was named Wilfred Cotton, sixty-two years of age, born in London, died in the district of Kaniemba. Only then, when the tacit understanding that I had stipulated at another time had no more reason to be, human curiosity got the better of me and I rushed to the British Consulate.

I was received by the consul, a good friend of mine. He seemed surprised when I revealed to him my old acquaintanceship with Wilfred Cotton, and even appeared slightly amazed that I did not know he had been a great Shakespearean actor, much loved by the English public, who had disappeared from the civilized world years before without anyone ever succeeding in tracing him. With confidentiality that was not usual with him, the consul also wanted to reveal to me the reasons that had induced Sir Wilfred Cotton to go off to die in that remote corner of the world. I believe that to report them would add little to this story. The reasons were generous, noble, perhaps pathetic. They would have suited not at all badly a play by Shakespeare.

W
hen Maria do Carmo Meneses de Sequeira died, I was gazing at
The Young Ladies in Waiting
by Velásquez in the Prado Museum. It was a July noon and I did not know that she was dying. I remained looking at the picture until quarter past twelve, then I left slowly, trying to carry away in my memory the expression of the figure in the background. I remember that I thought of Maria do Carmo’s words: “The key to the picture is in the figure in the background—it’s a backwards game.” I crossed the garden and took the bus as far as the Puerta del Sol, had dinner in the hotel—a well-chilled gazpacho and fruit—and went to lie down in the dimness of my room in order to escape the midday heat.

The telephone woke me around five, or perhaps it didn’t wake me. I found myself in a strange drowsiness. Outside hummed the city traffic and inside hummed the air conditioner, which in my consciousness, however, was the motor of a little blue tugboat that crossed the mouth of the Tagus at twilight while Maria do Carmo and I watched it. “There’s a call from Lisbon,” the voice of the telephone operator told me. Then I heard the little electric discharge of the switch and a masculine voice, indifferent and low. He asked my name
and then said, “I am Nuno Meneses de Sequeira. Maria do Carmo died at noon. The funeral will be tomorrow at five. It was her express wish that I call you.” The telephone made a click and I said, “Hello, hello.” “They hung up, sir,” said the operator. “The connection is broken.”

I took the Lusitania Express at midnight. I carried with me only a small suitcase with the bare necessities, and asked the concierge to hold my room for two days. The station was almost deserted at that hour. I had not reserved a couchette, and the conductor assigned me a compartment at the end of the train where there was one other passenger, a corpulent man who snored. I prepared myself with resignation for a night of insomnia, but contrary to my expectation I slept soundly until the outskirts of Talavera de la Reina. Then I lay motionless, awake, looking out the dark window at the dark desert of the Estremadura. I had many hours to think about Maria do Carmo.

“
Saudade
,” said Maria do Carmo, “yearning. It isn’t a word, it’s a category of the spirit. Only the Portuguese are able to feel it, because they have this word in order to say that they have it. A great poet said this.” And then she began to talk about Fernando Pessoa. I called for her at her home in Rua das Chagas about six o’clock in the afternoon. She was waiting for me behind a window. When she saw me enter Largo Camñes, she opened the heavy front door and we went down toward the harbor, wandering through Rua dos Fanqueiros and Rua dos Douradores. “Let’s take a Fernandian itinerary,” she said. “These were the favorite places of Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper—semi-heteronomous by definition—for the city of Lisbon. It was here that he practiced his metaphysics, in this barber shop.”

At that hour the Baixa, the lower part of the city, was crowded with hurrying, shouting people. The offices of the navigation companies and the commercial businesses were
closing their doors. At the tram stops there were long lines. You could hear the propagandizing cry of the shoeshine boys and the newspaper sellers. In the confusion we slipped into Rua da Prata, crossed Rua da Conceição, and went down toward the Terreiro do Paço, white and sad, where the first ferries crowded with commuters were sailing for the opposite bank of the Tagus. “This is really an Álvaro de Campos zone,” said Maria do Carmo. “In a few streets we’ve passed from one heteronomous to the other.’’

At that hour the light of Lisbon was white toward the mouth of the river and pink on the hills, the eighteenth-century buildings looked like an oleograph, and the Tagus was furrowed by a myriad of boats. We went on toward the first quays, those quays where Álvaro de Campos went to wait for no one, as Maria do Carmo said, and she recited some verse from the
Ode Marittima
, the passage in which the shape of the little steamer is outlined on the horizon and Campos feels a flywheel begin to revolve in his breast.

Dusk was falling on the city, the first lights were lit, the Tagus glistened with iridescent reflections. In Maria do Carmo’s eyes there was a great sadness. “Maybe you’re too young to understand—at your age I wouldn’t have understood, I wouldn’t have imagined that life was like a game that I used to play when I was a little girl in Buenos Aires. Pessoa is a genius because he understood the reversal of real and imagined things. His poetry is a
juego del revés
, a backwards game.”

The train stopped. From the window the lights of the border town could be seen. My traveling companion had the surprised, uneasy look of one who has suddenly been awakened by the light. The policeman carefully turned the pages of my passport. “You come to our country often,” he said. “What do you find so interesting here?” “Baroque poetry,” I answered: “What did you say?” he murmured. “A lady,” I
said. “A lady with a strange name—Violante do Céu.” “Is she beautiful?’’ he inquired archly. “Maybe,’’ I said. “She’s been dead for three centuries and she always lived in a convent. She was a nun.” He shook his head and smoothed his mustache with a mischievous air, stamped my visa, and handed me my passport. “You Italians always love to joke,” he said. “Do you like Totò?” “Very much,” I said, “and do you?” “I’ve seen all his films,” he said. “I like Alberto Sordi better.”

Our compartment was the last to be checked. The door was closed with a thud. After a few seconds someone on the platform waved a lantern and the train began to move. The lights went out again. Only the pale blue lamp remained. It was the middle of the night. I was entering Portugal as I had many other times in my life. Maria do Carmo was dead. I felt a strange sensation, as if from on high I were watching another me who, one July night, inside a compartment of a semi-dark train, was entering a foreign country in order to go to see a woman whom he knew well and who was dead. It was a sensation that I had never fell before and it made me think that it had something to do with the backwards-ness.

“The game was like this,” said Maria do Carmo. “We made a circle—four or five children—we counted off, and the child whose turn it was went into the middle. He chose anyone he wanted and tossed him a word, any word at all—
mariposa
, for example. And that child had to pronounce it backwards immediately, but without thinking it over, because the other one was counting—one, two, three, four, five—and at five he won. But if you were able to say
asopiram
in time, then you were the winner of the game, you went into the middle of the circle and tossed your word at whomever you wanted.”

Climbing toward the city, Maria do Carmo told me about her Buenos Aires childhood as a daughter of exiles. I imagined a courtyard on the outskirts of the city, populated by children, sad, impoverished holidays. “It was full of Italians,”
she said. “My father had an old horn-type gramophone and he had brought some
fado
records with him from Portugal. It was 1939. The radio said that Franco’s forces had taken Madrid. He cried and put on the records. In his last months I remember him like this, in pajamas in his armchair, crying in silence, listening to the
fados
of Hilário and of Tomás Alcaide. I would escape to the courtyard and play the
juego del revés
.”

Night had fallen. The Terreiro do Papo was almost deserted. The bronze horseman, green from the salty air, seemed absurd. “Let’s go to Alfama for something to eat,” said Maria do Carmo. “
Arroz de cabidela
, for instance. It’s a Sephardic dish. The Jews don’t tear the neck off the hen, they cut off the head, and they make the rice with the blood. I know a tavern where they make it like no other place. We’ll be there in five minutes.”

A yellow tram passed, slowly, rattling, full of tired faces. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “Why did I marry my husband? Why do I live in that absurd palace? Why am I here playing at being a countess? When he arrived in Buenos Aires he was a courteous, elegant officer, I was a poor, sad young girl. From my window all I could see was that courtyard. And he took me away from that grayness, from a house with dim lights and the radio turned on at supper time. In spite of everything, I can’t leave him. I can’t forget.”

My traveling companion asked if he could have the pleasure of inviting me for coffee. He was a jovial, ceremonious Spaniard who frequently traveled that line. In the dining car we talked amiably, exchanging detailed and formal impressions of the many places we had in common. “The Portuguese have good coffee,” he said, “but this doesn’t help them much, so it seems. They’re so melancholy. They lack charm, don’t you think so?” I told him that maybe they had substituted
saudade
for charm. He agreed, but preferred charm.
“There’s only one life,” he said. “You have to know how to live, dear sir.” I didn’t ask how he managed this himself, and we talked of something else—sports, I think. He adored skiing, the mountains. Portugal was really unliveable from this point of view. I objected that there were mountains there, too. “Oh, the Serra da Estrela!” he exclaimed. “It’s an imitation of a mountain. In order to get to two thousand meters you have to put up an antenna.” “It’s a maritime country,” I said, “a country of people who leap into the ocean. They’ve given the world urbane, dignified madmen, anti-abolitionists, and poets ill with homesickness.” “By the way,” he asked, “what’s the name of that poet you mentioned tonight?” “Soror Violante do Ceu,” I said. “Her name is splendid in Spanish, too—Madre Violante del Cielo. She was a great Baroque poetess. She spent her life sublimating her desire for a world which she had renounced.” “Is she better than Gongora?” he asked with a certain absent-mindedness. “Different,” I said, “with less charm and more
saudade
, naturally.”

The
arroz de cabidela
had a most refined taste and a repugnant appearance. It was served on a large earthenware tray with a wooden spoon. The boiled blood and wine made a dense, brown sauce. There were marble tables between a row of barrels and a zinc counter dominated by the corpulence of Senhor Tavares. At midnight an emaciated-looking
fado
singer arrived, accompanied by an elderly violist and a distinguished gentleman with a guitar. She sang ancient, faint, languid
fados
. Senhor Tavares turned out the lights and lit the candles on the tables. The transient patrons had already gone, only the devotees remained. The place was filled with smoke. At every finale there was discreet, solemn applause. Some voices requested
Amor é agua que corre, Travessa da Palma
. Maria do Carmo was pale, or maybe it was the candlelight, or maybe she had drunk too much. She had a fixed stare and her pupils were huge. The candlelight danced in them.
She seemed to be more beautiful than usual. She lit a cigarette abstractedly, lost in revery. “Enough, now,” she said. “Let’s go.
Saudade
, yes. but in small doses—it’s better not to get indigestion.”

The Alfama was semi-deserted. We stopped there on the belvedere of Santa Luzia. There was a pergola thick with bougainvillea. Leaning on the parapet we looked at the lights along the Tagus. Maria do Carmo recited
Lisbon Revisited
, by Alvaro de Campos, a poem in which a person is at the same window as in his childhood, but it isn’t the same person anymore and it isn’t the same window anymore, because time changes men and things. We began to go down toward my hotel. She took my hand and said to me, “Listen—who knows what we are? Who knows where we are? Who knows why we are here? Listen—we live this life as if it were a dream. Tonight, for instance, you must think you are me and that you’re squeezing yourself between your arms. I think that I’m you squeezing me between my arms.”

“Anyway, it isn’t that I love Góngora so much,” said my traveling companion. “I don’t understand him—you need the vocabulary—and then I’m not cut out for poetry. I prefer the short story—Blasco Ibañez, for instance. Do you like Blasco Ibañez?” “Moderately,” I said. “Perhaps it’s not my genre.” “Then who? Pérez Galdós, maybe?” “Yes, now we’re getting somewhere,” I said.

The waiter served us coffee on a shining tray. He had a sleepy face. “I’m making an exception for you gentlemen because the dining car isn’t open now. It comes to twenty crowns.” “In spite of everything, the Portuguese are kind,” said my traveling companion. “Why in spite of everything?” I said. “They’re kind. Let’s be fair.”

We were approaching a zone of shipyards and factories. It was not yet full day. “They choose to be on Greenwich time, but in reality, according to the sun, it’s an hour earlier. And
then, have you ever seen a Portuguese bullfight? They don’t kill the bull, you know. The bullfighter dances around him for half an hour and then at the end makes a symbolic gesture with his arm—a thrust like a sword. A herd of cows comes in with cowbells, the bull troops back into the herd, and everyone goes home—
olé
. If this seems like a bullfight to you …” “Maybe it’s more elegant,” I said. “To kill someone it isn’t always necessary to murder him. Sometimes a gesture is enough.” “Oh, come on!” he said. “The duel between man and bull has to be mortal, otherwise it’s a ridiculous pantomime.” “But all ceremonies are stylizations,” I objected. “This one keeps only the wrappings, the gesture. It seems more noble to me, more abstract.” My traveling companion appeared to reflect. “Could be,” he said without conviction. “Oh, look, we’re at the outskirts of Lisbon. We’d better go back to the compartment and get our luggage ready.”

“It’s a rather delicate thing. We didn’t have the courage to ask you about it … We’ve discussed it … It can present some inconveniences, too … I mean the most that can happen to you is that they refuse your entrance visa at the border … Listen, we don’t want to keep you in the dark about anything … At first, Jorge was the courier. He was the only one who had a passport from the UN … Do you know what time it is in Winnipeg? He teaches in a Canadian university. We still haven’t found a way to replace him.”

Nine o’clock in the evening on a bench in Piazza Navona in Rome. I looked at him. Perhaps my expression was perplexed. I didn’t know what to think. I felt vaguely embarrassed, at a disadvantage, like talking with a person you’ve known for ages and one day he reveals to you something you didn’t expect.