Herve Le Tellier - Electrico W

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: