John Berger - Here Is Where We Meet

What their two faces had in common was an unusual looseness about the mouth, indicating not weakness but a desire to kiss rather than to bite. They also had similar foreheads, foreheads not of imposing intelligence but of an immense, inspiring calm. Today, a century after his death, Dr Martins is referred to in Lisboa as Doctor of the Heavens and of the Earth. And my Uncle Edgar still demonstrates to me the power of reticent love.

The wind was smacking wet, and the gulls were flying very low over the roofs. It was a day when everyone turned their backs to the sea, if they had no one out on it.

Women, crouched under dark umbrellas in the middle of the roundabout, were selling candles. Three sizes of candles, priced accordingly, though no price was marked. The largest were thirty centimetres tall, their wax the colour of parchment. Nearer the statue of the doctor, lit candles were burning on two metal tables. The table-tops, encrusted with old melted wax, had spikes for impaling the new candles on, and a tall metal sheet behind to cut the wind. I watched the flames. They flickered, they guttered, they were blown sideways as if coming from a toy dragon’s mouth; yet not one of them had succumbed to the rain or the gale-force wind. A man with a black hat and the face of a gypsy stood close by, surveying them with a protective air. Perhaps, when the wind veered, he shifted the tables or the metal sheets to protect the flames, and perhaps he asked for a little money from the candle-makers for this bad-weather job. Or was he simply standing there like me, fascinated by the tenacity of the flames?

Slowly the idea came to me to buy and light some candles myself. I knew who they would be for. I was thinking of three friends who at that moment, for different reasons, were at sea.

I bought the tallest candles, which would burn longest, and I walked over to one of the tables. I impaled them, one after the other, on the three nearest spikes. Only afterwards did it occur to me that I should first have lit one from a burning candle, then I could have lit my other two with it once they were impaled. Now it would be difficult in the wind to light them with a match, and anyway I didn’t have any matches.

As I realised my mistake, a small woman from behind offered me a lit candle. I took it, without looking round, not doubting for a moment who it was! Then I stood there, mesmerised by the three new, flickering flames.

When I did at last turn round, I was amazed to discover that the small woman behind with an umbrella was not my mother.

I’m so sorry, sorry, I blurted out, I thought you were my mother! I spoke in French, which is the language I fall into when I’m confused.

I think I’m almost young enough to be your daughter, she replied lightly, speaking a French with a Portuguese accent. I gave her back her candle, which was still burning, and I bowed.

Once they are alight, she said, whatever good they may do, they do it without us.

Of course, I whispered, of course.

I saw you were at a bit of a loss, she said.

You speak French very well.

I worked in Paris. Cleaning. Last year I was fifty-five and I said to myself, it’s time to come back to Lisboa for good. And my husband came too.

Can I offer you a coffee out of the rain?

No, I’ll place my candle and I must get along home.

She had blue eyes in a face that was strong yet unprotected.

It’s for my husband, mine.

He’s ill?

No, he’s not ill. He had an accident. Fell off the roof he was working on.

Is he badly hurt?

She stared at my chest as if it were the distant Sea of Straw. I knew then that he was dead.

You should have brought an umbrella like me! she said. Then she added: Our candles will go on burning, doing whatever they can, without us.

I stepped off the roundabout, made my way with some difficulty through the traffic and found a café. I went inside, took off my anorak, dried my face on a towel in the toilet and ordered a hot grog. The café was full of people and many of them were particularly well-dressed. I listened, as I sipped the hot liquor, and I heard German and English being spoken. The clientele, I concluded, were probably from the nearby embassies.

So, this morning you went to see Dr Martins. There was a good man! Some of us still go to consult him.

I hear her say this, yet I can’t see her. I am sitting alone.

How do they go to consult him, your friends?

His surgery hours are when he’s asleep.

Dr Martins died a century ago.

The dead are allowed to sleep too, aren’t they?

What do they complain of, your friends who consult him?

Many suffer from hopefulness. Amongst us hopefulness is almost as common as depression among the living.

You see hopefulness as an illness?

One of its terminal symptoms is a desire to intervene again in life, and for us that is fatal.

Is there a cure?

Dr Martins prescribes a spell with the martyrs!

It seems he loved women, I tell her.

I’ll tell you a story, she says. One day a rich patient asked him to visit her in her large house. He examined her and then asked the maid to fetch him a glass of water from, specifically, the pantry tap. He knew the pantry was far away. During the maid’s absence he performed the cure. When the maid returned with the glass of water, he drank it. Doctor, when will your next visit be? asked the woman from her sickbed. He pondered, winked swiftly at his patient, and said: When I’m thirsty, Señora. Upon which Dr Martins left.

She laughs. A crystalline laugh, as if everyone in the café is clinking glasses. Nobody else gives any sign of hearing it.

I see him played by Groucho Marx, she says.

In the Davies Picture Palace the two of us had seen A Night at the Opera and Duck Soup. Her laughter in the cinema had been muffled as if she didn’t want to draw attention to our presence, which bordered on the illicit. Illicit since neither of us mentioned our visits to the Picture Palace to anybody else, and illicit, in a more direct sense, because she contrived and often succeeded in getting us in without paying. A question of narrow uncarpeted stairs and safety exits.

All my books have been about you, I suddenly say.

Nonsense! Maybe you wrote them so I should be there, keeping you company. And I was. Yet they were about everything in the world but me! I’ve had to wait until now, until you are an old man in Lisboa, for you to be writing this very short story about me.

Books are also about language and language for me is inseparable from your voice.

You’re trying to be clever. Don’t. Just think of me. Then you’ll learn endurance. Something which can only be learnt from a woman, never from a man.

Scott in the Antarctic?

Think of Scott’s wife. Her name was Kathleen. ’I regret,’ Kathleen said, ’I regret nothing but his suffering.’

Why did you never read any of my books?

I liked books which took me to another life. That’s why I read the books I did. Many. Each one was about real life, but not about what was happening to me when I found my bookmark and went on reading. When I read, I lost all sense of time. Women always wonder about other lives, most men are too ambitious to understand this. Other lives, other lives which you have lived before, or which you could have lived. And your books, I hoped, were about another life which I only wanted to imagine, not live, imagine by myself on my own, without any words. So it was better I didn’t read them. I could see them through the glass door of the bookcase. That was enough for me.

I risk to write nonsense these days.

You put something down and you don’t immediately know what it is. It has always been like that, she says. All you have to know is whether you’re lying or whether you’re trying to tell the truth, you can’t afford to make a mistake about that distinction any longer.