Electrico W Read online

  ALSO BY HERVÉ LE TELLIER

  Enough About Love

  The Intervention of a Good Man

  The Sextine Chapel

  A Thousand Pearls (for a Thousand Pennies)

  WITH OULIPO

  Oulipo Compendium

  Winter Journeys

  Copyright © 2011 by JC Lattès

  Originally published in French in 2011

  by Jean-Claude Lattès, Paris, France

  Translation copyright © 2012 Adriana Hunter

  Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any in formation storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Le Tellier, Hervé, 1957-

  [Eléctrico W. English]

  Eléctrico W / by Hervé Le Tellier; translated by Adriana Hunter.

  p. cm.

  “Originally published in French in 2011 by Jean-Claude Lattès, Paris, France.”

  eISBN: 978-1-59051-534-1

  1. Journalists—Fiction. 2. Translators—Fiction. 3. French— Portugal—Lisbon—Fiction. 4. Photographers—Portugal— Lisbon—Fiction. 5. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. I. Hunter, Adriana. II. Title.

  PQ2672.E11455E4413 2012

  843′.914—dc23

  2012026349

  Publisher’s Note:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue of Sorts

  Day One: Antonio

  Day Two: Irene

  Day Three: Aurora

  Day Four: Pinheiro

  Day Five: Custódia

  Day Six: Manuela

  Day Seven: Paul

  Day Eight: Duck

  Day Nine: Vincent

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  If I can stop one heart from breaking

  I shall not live in vain

  If I can ease one life the aching

  Or cool one pain

  Or help one fainting robin

  Unto his nest again

  I shall not live in vain.

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  When I tried taking off the mask,

  It stuck to my face.

  When I pulled it off and looked in the mirror,

  I’d grown older.

  —FERNANDO PESSOA

  PROLOGUE OF SORTS

  We were heading toward Rossio in a taxi the color of olives, green and black, an ancient Mercedes 220, one of those rounded sedans from the sixties. It was still summer but a gray Atlantic rain was falling and the sky was pewter-colored. Lisbon did not look itself, but the setting may not matter very much. Water streamed over the car window, Antonio gazed out at the city, not concentrating on anything for long. I thought he seemed transparent, absent and present all at the same time—a watermark in the weft of a sheet of paper.

  As the taxi slowed to turn into the square by Eduardo VII Park, Antonio took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and struck a match. He inhaled, sucking in his cheeks, and wound down the window to blow out a scroll of smoke snatched away as we sped along. I mention these insignificant details, not much more than snapshots, because they struck me so emphatically, as did the suffocating smell of sulfur and tobacco.

  It felt as if time had taken a step to one side, a divergence as fine as a crack in the glaze on porcelain. Something unfamiliar had insinuated itself inside me. I can think of no other way of putting it: I no longer saw a thirty-year-old man in flesh and blood sitting beside me on that seat with its cracked leather, but a character, a character from a book.

  That same evening I made the decision to write it. I didn’t let my ignorance of the plot or framework hold me back. I had no Ariadne’s thread, I just took my big black notebook from my bag and wrote these few sentences, in the past tense, exactly as they appear here, I have left them unchanged.

  People will suspect some sort of imposture, a feeble writer’s strategy. They would be wrong: there was actually nothing extraordinary, fascinating, or, in a nutshell, bookworthy about Antonio Flores. Physically he was ordinary, although his brown, almost curly hair tended toward auburn. His dark eyes were mischievous without being playful, and cutting down his forehead between his thick eyebrows he had two vertical lines that gave him an alert expression. His legs looked too short to me, and he seemed more elegant sitting than standing. If he had to walk quickly, a childhood injury made him limp. And yet he had indisputable charm, his own particular way of occupying space, what people call magnetism.

  There was nothing predictable or expected about Antonio Flores. Never, in the nine days I spent with him, was I so much as a comma ahead of the sentences that his presence provoked. Never, right up until the collapse, did I guess where Antonio was taking me. He himself knew nothing about this extraordinary phenomenon. His every move conformed to some invisible scheme, and certain silences dictated the beginning of a new paragraph.

  So here begins the book. I have revised it—very little, to be honest—as I typed it up. I altered some turns of phrase because they no longer conveyed the exact feeling of the moment in which they were conceived. It was 1985, nearly twenty-seven years ago. At the time I didn’t feel like showing it to publishers. I did give it a title, though, and this morning, with the sun taking its time coming up, it is still called Eléctrico W, the name of a tramline in Lisbon. But that has been a provisional title for so long.

  This paragraph is added in because, according to the computer, the manuscript comprised 53,278 words. I wanted it to be a prime number. Out of some superstition. So I added an adjective here, an adverb there, I don’t even remember where. And this is where the notebook starts again.

  DAY ONE

  ANTONIO

  Just as we reached Rossio Square along the Avenida da Liberdade, it stopped raining, and the Mercedes dropped us at the terrace of a bistro. The chairs were soaked, the table too; we carelessly put our two suitcases down in puddles. As the waiter took our orders, he glanced at our luggage in dismay, or simply indifference.

  Antonio and I had never worked together but we had come across each other several times. His photos had illustrated my investigation into the garimpeiros, destitute gold miners in the Orinoco Basin; I’d written a piece to go with his reportage on the tribes of Botswana’s Okavango Delta. When he decided to go back to Lisbon for this particular series of articles, it was his idea to suggest me to his editors. He thought I was still living in Paris, and when he learned that I was now the newspaper’s Portuguese correspondent, he said these words (so odd that they were relayed to me): “I knew his fate would bring him to Lisbon at some point.”

  I had only been here a few months. I had wanted to leave Paris, to avoid the risk of bumping into Irene in the corridors of the editorial department, to recover from my absurd love for this girl with her outdated name, this girl who didn’t want me. My father’s death in late June, his suicide—why not use the word—had made up my mind. My brother and I had sold the apartment on the rue Lecourbe, and with my share of the proceeds I had dec
ided to buy a one-bedroom apartment in either the Castelo quarter or Santa Justa, where my mother was born and where I had spent a few holidays as a child. In the meantime, I had rented a studio in São Paulo, right next to the goods port. It was a huge room which afforded few comforts but it was whitewashed and sunny, at the top of a three-story building. It was the views more than anything that had attracted me. From one window you could look out over the roofs, from the other you could see the Tagus. The bed was new and comfortable, and there was a phone line connected. There was a small open-plan kitchen and a shower, but the toilet was in the hallway. “For substantial things …,” the landlady had explained, then, gesturing toward the sink, she chuckled, “but for anything else, okay?” In her view, a refrigerator and two hotplates justified the label studio. The compressor on the fridge made more noise than a factory press, and I soon had to settle for unplugging it at night.

  I had hung my only picture on the wall, and that was just a dog-eared, yellowed copy of a late-nineteenth-century map of the Okavango Delta. I had set up my desk in a corner, which was blocked on one side. I put my fax on it and this cube-shaped computer with its small black-and-white screen, whose successors I could never have imagined. Sitting there, I could look through the window to my right and see the docks. On nights when I couldn’t sleep, in other words almost every night, I found their rumblings comforting. I left one window open and listened to the thunder of heavy diesel engines and fuel pumps, and the workers’ cries and laughter. Sometimes I got up before dawn and wandered through the steely sadness of static and traveling cranes. Living in the entrails of a port felt nostalgic and reassuring, like those English paintings of industrial landscapes, all in grays and blues. And Lisbon, a capital open to the seas, seemed to blend exoticism with civilization.

  I had set myself two tasks for the imminent autumn: to finish the novel about Pescheux d’Herbinville for which I had only written a few pages and chosen a title (The Clearing), then to translate Jaime Montestrela’s Contos aquosos, the collection of bizarre short stories that he subtitled Atlas inutilis. Montestrela was far from well known, but at a secondhand bookstall in the Alfama neighborhood I had stumbled across a copy of his Contos and was instantly drawn to the whiff of dark humor they gave off. It was a thick volume, but these ironic and fantastical short stories were barely a few lines long, with a darkness reminiscent of Max Aub or Roland Topor. Out of almost a thousand, I had already translated about a hundred. Here is the first one I chanced on, the day I happened to open the book. It is a pretty good illustration of Montestrela’s mindset:

  Centuries before our era, Mongols of the Ouchis tribe worshipped an adolescent named Ohisha who, when he reached puberty, stopped aging. Fascinated by this phenomenon, they soon made him their leader. The young man did, however, die at the age of seventy-three. The legend of Ohisha ended with these words: “Lying on his shroud he was still identical to himself. For all those years, only his body had aged terribly.”

  I hadn’t got very far with this work when Antonio Flores called. He asked me to move in with him for a fortnight to follow the Pinheiro trial, and I was happy to bring an end to my isolation. I didn’t give up the room, I had adopted my own routine there. Antonio booked a hotel on the rua Primeiro de Dezembro in the center of town. It was quite expensive, but the paper was picking up the bill.

  The Pallazo Meiras, which dated back to the early 1900s, was both tired-looking and luxurious. This palace must once have had some appeal, but renovations had reduced it to one of those international havens where you never feel at home, and don’t even want to unpack your bags. As I walked through the door I felt I had stepped into a strange ship washed up in the middle of the city, a steamer in pink marble and gray stone. The staff went about their business languidly and managed to communicate their boredom to guests. The main entrance was draped with black-and-white-striped fabric and opened onto a small paved courtyard. In this funereal setting, despite his red livery, the footman looked like an undertaker waiting for a coffin to carry.

  Antonio had booked two suites on the third floor. They were exact mirror images of each other, and the two lounges were connected by heavy double doors. Once we had opened these, the central room made more sense, with our bedrooms to either side. Antonio immediately dumped his equipment on a large carved oak desk, and I put my files on its twin. The brownish leather of two armchairs sat uncomfortably with the straw yellow of two more-rustic-looking chairs; the balconies looked out over Restauradores Square, and the noise was tolerable if we didn’t open the windows.

  It was ten years since Antonio had been in Lisbon. He had recently bought a tiny one-bedroom apartment in the old Belleville quarter of Paris, and I knew he had also lived in Rio, as well as spending a few months in London’s Soho. He had made a name for himself in the small world of war photographers.

  In the taxi on the way back from the airport, I asked why the long absence, and he just said, “A thing. A thing with a woman.” We didn’t exchange another word, and I regretted being so inquisitive. But that first evening, in a tasca in the port where we were having a last glass of bagaço, he started talking, in snippets, as if one memory led to another. From the emotion in his voice and the muddled way he confided in me, I suspected he had never opened up to anyone and could only do so at last because I was a foreigner. I let him talk.

  ANTONIO FLORES IS ELEVEN, he lives in the old Bairro Alto quarter. Known as just Tonio, he is hurtling down the long flight of cement steps on the Travessa do Carmo. It is early May, the morning light is more blinding than golden. His schoolbag lurches in every direction on his back, buffeted from one shoulder to the other like a panicking rider on a runaway horse.

  Every schoolday, Tonio races the Eléctrico W, which stops outside his house at 8:18 in the morning. Tonio had trouble getting up today, the 8:18 has already left and he’s waiting for the 8:24. He will be late for school, for sure.

  The Eléctrico W is the yellow-and-white funicular tram which carries its cargo of housewives and office workers every morning—except for Sundays and public holidays. True, it’s ancient, but whatever the weather it trundles unfailingly from the old Bairro Alto quarter to the exhaust fumes and traffic jams of Baixa.

  Several feet ahead of Tonio, the W rolls down the hill on its steel rails, making terrible metallic screeching sounds. The pantographs splutter with bright sparks against the azure sky, the traction cable at the back rises up from the rusted channel cut into the cement. Tonio runs behind it, keeping an eye on every sway of the cable, imagining it is the trailing black tail of a tired old dragon. In the rear of the carriage, a kid with a lollipop presses his grubby face against the steamed-up window and stares at Tonio, his empty eyes crushed by boredom.

  Tonio runs. He knows every paving slab on the Travessa do Carmo, every stone, every porch: right on the corner the step is a bit high, you really have to stretch your leg to avoid tripping; here, to turn as sharply as possible, you can spin on the No Parking sign; there, on that street corner, it’s better to slow up, last week he knocked down a smartly dressed old man coming out of a tasca. Of course, he could run just behind the W, on the concrete slope, but he’s already fallen once, catching his shoe in the rim of the rail, and it hurt too much. It left him with a scar as white and shiny as a trail of salt, and the pharmacist, Mr. Pereira, claimed he would have a mark there “till the day he died.” The thought of his own death—he was only six at the time—terrified him and he started crying. His mother kissed him to comfort him, and turned angrily on the pharmacist: “Mr. Pereira, really! What sort of thing is that to say to a child?”

  With all this reminiscing, the W has got a little way ahead, and Tonio runs like a boy possessed.

  “Go on, Tonio, go on, faster, you’ve got to turn back time …,” laughs the fishmonger, and he lobs a hail of crushed ice at the boy, its smell strong with seaweed and saltwater. Tonio ducks to avoid it and carries on with his race. Just ahead, the tram turns to the left and disappears around the corner.
Tonio slows abruptly, skids in the dust and gravel, and comes to a stop, breathless.

  This is because, after the corner, the steps come to an end, and with them the Travessa do Carmo’s narrow sidewalk. The W forks off and continues on its way alone in the clear cool shade of a narrow corridor between buildings. Deadened by the shuttered facades, the noise drops, becomes muffled. At the end, fifty paces farther, the dark mouth of a tunnel gapes, and when the tram enters it, the neon lights in the cabin and the round red taillight come on. In the underground darkness, sparks fly from the catenaries, lighting up the curve of the vaulted ceiling like the thousand fires of hell in the illustrated Bible his aunt gave him.

  The glowing sparks fade in the distance, the sound of the Eléctrico W is swallowed by the hubbub of the city, and Tonio hears someone behind him say, “Hey, you really run fast …”

  She is seven years old, maybe eight, big black eyes, a straight nose. She has long dark hair, neatly smoothed. Tonio can’t speak, he is still out of breath, his hair clinging to his sweating face.

  She smiles.

  “Well, my name’s Duck, it is.”

  “What? What’s your name?”

  “Duck, like I said. Everyone calls me that. You can too, if you like, you can call me Duck. And what’s your name?”

  Tonio stays silent for a moment, rubbing his aching legs.

  “Antonio … Well, Tonio. Do you live round here?”

  She points to one of the buildings that look down over the W’s route. Its white facade is dazzling in the sunlight, and Tonio screws up his eyes.

  “Over there. You can’t see it from here.”

  She lowers her arm and watches him with a pout. Tonio is intrigued, but he’s also growing impatient.

  “I have to go to school. I’m late. Aren’t you?”

  “Yes, yes, of course I’m late. Well then? Go on, keep running, go to school, if it’s that important.”