Herve Le Tellier - Electrico W

On the island of Caladonga, the inhabitants conceived of a god whose existence never came into question even though this god was, alas, very small and fragile. Hence, when they had stirred sugar into their coffee and were putting their spoons back down, they checked carefully that the god was not on that particular part of the saucer. A deicide can happen so quickly.

“And how many of these are there?” Antonio asked, weighing up the book. “A thousand?”

“One thousand and seventy-three precisely. It’s a strange number.”

Antonio smiled, almost a smirk, and put the book down. He ate his food quickly, still talking volubly about nothing in particular. In the blackened pages of my notebook there are a few phrases grasped on the wing. Some notes are almost illegible, as if I wanted to forget that I would have to read through them at some point. Even so I remember that, aided and abetted by the beer, Antonio started talking about Paris and all the women he had known. He made my head spin with his drunken aphorisms, clichés, and settings from cheap airport fiction. I did not make scrupulous notes. I only remember “things that always look like what they are,” and “true love, which comes straightaway or not at all,” and also “words that can ruin everything.”

I should have smiled at this string of pearls. I could have countered each of them with the exact opposite argument, given him examples of passions that bloomed after many years, others that flourished on quarreling. I came up with a new aphorism along the lines of “No aphorism tells the truth,” which is at least as good as the paradox of the liar stating “Yes, I’m lying.” What was that philosopher’s name again, the one who was said to have died prematurely because he couldn’t disentangle that contradiction? Philitas of Cos? Hippias of Elis?

Yes, I should have smiled. But what Antonio was saying very quickly became uncomfortable for me. His every half-dime maxim resonated like the implacable truth. True love comes straightaway or not at all. Yes. Things always look like what they are. Yes again.

I was angry. I would have preferred a more constant Antonio, a less frivolous one, one more upset to be here in this city that must have brought his past back to life. His confidences about his Parisian amorous adventures did nothing for me, they were like stains on a white sheet. I wanted him to tell me more about Duck. We were wasting time.

“Antonio?”

He looked up.

“And … that woman, Duck? Don’t you want to see her again?”

He said nothing for a long while.

“I don’t know … We were just kids. She might just remember. I can’t be sure she was really pregnant, or even, if she was, whether she had the baby. But I’m sure she has a husband now, and a life. And she could have written to me, if she really wanted to.”

“Do you think? Would it have been possible?”

He wouldn’t meet my eye, and I felt I understood.

“You’re afraid of what you might find. Your Duck could be ugly now, or stupid. Maybe she already was, but you were — what — sixteen, seventeen? Over the years we dress everything up so much.”

Antonio smiled. He took an old leather wallet with splitting seams from his jacket.

“Here.”

He handed me a very tattered photograph, its colors faded, protected by a sheet of tracing paper — a photo of a very young girl. She wasn’t just beautiful, with her great mass of dark hair swept up off the nape of her neck; there was something else, something that hurt me but that I couldn’t immediately put my finger on.

“Who took the picture? Did you?”

“Yes.”

“How old was she?”

“Fifteen. Just fifteen.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off the photo. Duck was smiling at Antonio. He had caught her by surprise as she put her hair up, her eyes had a child’s dazzling sincerity, an incredible tenderness, the simple happiness of being together. Yes, that was it, the power this picture had was the look in Duck’s eye trumpeting the fact that Antonio was alive, was loved.

Buried in the depths of my suitcase, I too have a picture of a woman, it’s of Irene. I captured her one morning, leaning over the balcony in our hotel room in Lombardy. The image is out of focus, but in the background you can make out Lake Como, still blanketed in mist, Tremezzina Bay, the cypress trees, and the mountains and forests beyond. The balcony is red with climbing magnolias, it’s going to be a gorgeous day, it’s April.

Irene is looking at me too, she’s surprised, but where’s the tenderness? I’m not convinced by those beginnings of a smile, her eyes are cold, I’m an inconvenience to her, useless, she wishes she were alone to make the most of this tranquillity and enjoy the view. Because of that photograph and that blank, empty, Medusa-like expression, I sometimes even wonder whether, whenever a couple books a room with a view, there’s always one who watches the other while the other just wants to admire the view.

Looking at that face today, I know that a woman who could look at me like that could never have loved me. In fact, there’s so little of anything in her eyes that I don’t even think she looks attractive, and can’t even remember why I wanted her so much. That’s another reason the photo so rarely comes out of the suitcase.

Antonio has put the picture back in his wallet.

“You’re right, it’s true, I’m frightened. But not for the reasons you said. I’m frightened of coming back after all these years, of not meaning anything to her anymore, absolutely nothing. I couldn’t bear it. I’d rather not hope. Besides, I never look at that photo. I don’t even know why I still keep it on me.”

He stopped talking, letting his gaze wander over the nearby Tagus. For a moment I doubted my convictions.

The silhouette of a willow tree rearing up halfway along the bank cut across the clouds. The tree must have been dead, gradually poisoned off by rust and engine grease. Its naked branches were rigid despite the breeze blowing in from the ocean. Just one waved feebly, like a survivor on a battlefield raising his arm among the corpses in the hope of being saved. I saw the seagull flying away. It had just taken off. The branch it had left a moment earlier had sprung up and seemed to come back to life. But it was just the memory of the seagull. The bird was already wheeling through the gray sky, and the willow was reduced to stone once more.

“Let’s leave the past to the past …”

Those words came to me from various things I’d read long ago. We stayed there in silence until Antonio stood up abruptly.

“Come with me,” he said. “I’m going to show you the Good Lord’s tomb.”

We left the restaurant, went back up toward Baixa, and headed into Elevador de Santa Justa. Only a few paces into the patchy shadows on that street Antonio opened the door to the Convento do Carmo, a ruin destroyed by the great earthquake. We stood among those white arches that gaped open like the ribcage of a whale skeleton. It had the feel of a cave without a roof, overrun with weeds, a dead place under the blue sky.

“So. Here we are.”

He gestured toward the parched ground and broken stones.

“I used to play here for hours when I was a kid. Hunting lizards, destroying ants’ nests, climbing the walls right up to the vaults: from up there you can see the whole lower part of the city. Later, Duck and I came here to kiss, at the foot of this very wall, with the wind blowing in from the sea making her hair fly in my face. No one bothered us, the tourists didn’t care or didn’t dare say anything, why would anyone mind a couple of youngsters having a good kiss …”

Antonio walked to the middle of the chapel, to the place where the altar must have been two centuries earlier, until beams and blocks of stone came crashing down onto the women and children who had hoped to find protection from their God’s wrath in here.