Herve Le Tellier - Electrico W

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.

ANTONIO’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.

One 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.

I haven’t had any luck with women, or haven’t known how to seize it if I did. Let’s say the ones I liked didn’t like me enough, and the ones I could have attracted were too ready to be attracted by pretty much anyone. Still, I’d have liked to have a child. Children. I’m sixty-five now and I’m not Picasso. The question stopped arising. There was never a Lena Balmer.