Herve Le Tellier - Electrico W

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Herve Le Tellier - Electrico W» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Год выпуска: 2013, ISBN: 2013, Издательство: Other Press, Жанр: Современная проза, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

Electrico W: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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By the celebrated Oulipo writer, this brilliant and witty novel set in Lisbon explores love, relationships, and the strange balance between literature and life.
Journalist, writer, and translator Vincent Balmer moves to Lisbon to escape from a failing affair. During his first assignment there, he teams up with Antonio — a photographer who has just returned to the city after a ten-year absence — to report for a French newspaper on an infamous serial killer’s trial.
While walking around the city together to take notes and photos for the article, they visit the places of Antonio’s childhood, swap stories from their pasts, and confide in each other. But the more they learn about each other, the more their lives become inextricably intertwined.
With a structure that parallels Homer’s
recounts their nine days together and the adventures that proliferate to form a constellation of successive ephemeral connections and relationships.

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I was finishing the last of my coffee when Irene appeared around the street corner, side by side with Antonio. She was wearing a floaty dress in bright scarlet that I hadn’t seen before, and suede pumps. Before even making out her features, I instantly recognized her provocative saunter, which turned plenty of heads, the way she moved her whole body, that promise of the pleasures it had to offer, a painful reminder of how much she enjoyed seducing people and, even more, refusing her favors. I have never understood exactly what it was about her that made her so desirable and beautiful in my eyes. Is “beautiful” the word?

They came up to me and Irene let go of his arm to take off her sunglasses and feign astonishment. I could tell she was forcing her laughter, wriggling exaggeratedly, aping herself. Her expression felt as false as a magazine cover girl’s as she gazes at her own reflection in the lens.

She sat facing me with a smile on her lips, and her first words were “Well, where is she then, this Lena, this Lena I’ve heard so much about?”

Her tone was mocking, spiteful, but the sound of her voice still had an effect on me.

“Are you hiding her from us? Are you afraid someone’ll steal her, or I’ll tell her things you don’t want her to hear?”

The blood drained from my face and I felt like slapping her, or just saying nothing, getting up and leaving. But I managed to look amused.

“You could say hello before launching your attack, my sweet.”

“I’m not your sweet, my love. And I never was.”

I was about to reply but, infuriated, Antonio blurted, “Have you finished your little private war, the pair of you?” Then he turned to me and added more soothingly, “Has Lena left already?”

“Just this minute. You must have walked right past her.”

“She was that fat blond thing,” Irene chuckled, “the one whose jeans were cutting her up the ass.” She laughed out loud.

“Irene,” Antonio sighed, “what’s gotten into you?”

“Nothing, nothing at all. I’ll stop. There. Shall we make peace? My sweet …”

She held out her hand to me with the forced smile of a poisonous child. I took it and, before she could snatch it back, kissed it, quickly and chastely, in the crook of her palm. It was a gesture of revenge, a form of assault, subjecting her to the touch of my lips; and yet, despite being driven by vengeance, I couldn’t help savoring the sweet warmth of that hand, its ripe perfume. Irene was so surprised that she surrendered her hand to me, as if it no longer belonged to her, and I even thought for a moment that I could keep it, that open hand, for an eternity. I let it go, stirred and embarrassed in equal measure, and to disguise my emotion I managed to laugh and say, “There, peace is sealed.”

Irene stood in silence, disconcerted. Antonio seemed indifferent, he hadn’t noticed anything. He ordered three coffees, and the waiter leaned toward me, looking very worried: “Can I clear away the other cups now, sir?”

Electrico W - изображение 24

WE SPENT THE afternoon wandering aimlessly around Alfama, then headed down toward Rossio. Irene was seeing Lisbon for the first time, and made naive pronouncements about cities and docks and sailors.

From time to time she took Antonio’s hand and sometimes, at the Santana viewpoint for example, she even huddled in his arms. But Antonio kept her at a distance. He probably did it for propriety’s sake, out of tact toward me. Perhaps also because of Aurora and my presence, which forbade him the cowardly hypocrisy common to men. But also, perhaps, because the way Irene smothered him with her wheedling affection made him uncomfortable, as if he could tell that her primary aim, and I believed this to be the case, was to wound me.

I talked about Pinheiro, and Antonio and I agreed to go to the hospital the following day. I left them at about four-thirty, claiming I was meeting a friend.

“A friend, really?” Irene asked sarcastically.

I didn’t reply, making do with a smile.

“I’ll leave you, then. Tomorrow at the hotel at about ten?”

“Won’t you have supper with us this evening? Aren’t you staying at the hotel?”

“No. I can’t. Sorry. See you tomorrow.”

I shook Antonio’s hand and gave Irene a little bow.

“Madame …”

“No more hand kissing, then?”

I shook my head and, to get away as quickly as possible, stopped a taxi that was heading the other way.

“Where are you going?” asked the driver. I hadn’t thought about that. I was about to give the address for my studio when I remembered old Custódia.

“Pragal.”

“Whereabouts in Pragal?”

“I don’t know. Does Estabelecimento Custódia mean anything to you?”

“No.” He looked at me apologetically. “Would the rail station in Pragal be okay?”

“Yes. That would be great.”

The taxi set off and passed Antonio and Irene. They were holding hands. She freed hers to give me a little wave, and I thought I detected a note of sincerity in it.

Electrico W - изображение 25

IT WASN’T EASY finding Custódia’s premises. It was just a long, narrow, dark shop on the corner of a tiny street. On the dirty shopfront window were the words

EST CU TOD A. MARCE AR A

in discolored letters. The last R was about to abandon its post too, and I smiled as I remembered the notice there used to be above the wooden seats on the Paris Métro, one whose words had filled a few fruitful hours in my teens:

THESE SEATS ARE RESERVED

FOR DISABLED EX-SERVICEMEN

Armed with a good scraper, I had devised a simple literary technique, striving to extract some meaning from that sentence. I found I could turn it into an abstruse culinary recommendation:

HE EATS SE ED

FOR ABLE SERVICE

or a sensational headline:

HE S E E S RED

FOR D SE X VICE

Although my uncontested favorite was the darkly Magrittian:

H ATS ARE SERVED

OR BLED

This game was interrupted by an on-the-spot sixty-franc fine for vandalism, when I had only just embarked on the onomatopoeic poetry of:

THE SEA RE RE R E

I didn’t know where to go next with this poem, but had calculated that there were about seven hundred different solutions. Fewer than the number of Métro cars, no doubt, and some of them impossibly obscure. But what sort of Iliad could anyone get with EST CUSTÓDIA. MARCENARIA?

The cabinetmaker’s metal shutter wasn’t lowered but the door was locked. I knocked on the glass several times, then, when no one came, decided to take a walk around.

As I passed the local tasca I spotted old Custódia. He was sitting at the end of the room with a glass of red wine, his blue work overalls gray with wood dust. He sat drinking in silence. His paper was open to the financial pages, but he wasn’t reading. I went in, stood at the bar and ordered a coffee.

Custódia looked older, more stooped, more tired than at the cemetery, well into his sixties perhaps. His hands were worn and rough but still strong, I pictured Duck’s pretty face being struck by them. Four old boys were having a noisy game of cards, using matches to keep score, and staking cigarette butts as bets. Custódia wasn’t paying any attention to them. Sitting there bringing his glass to his lips, his eyes were expressionless.

When I asked the waiter if he knew where the cabinetmaker was, he called across the room: “Hey, Ruiz, I’ve found you a customer.”

The cardplayers paused for a moment to stare at me, and the old man turned to look. I took a step toward him, but he made up his mind to stand.

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