ou can stay out late, even for the midnight show. First a snack down the river at the Port of Santa Maria, shrimp in a sweet-sour sauce and Cantonese rice. There’s a John Ford festival — wonderful — where you can catch The Horse Soldiers (a bit of a bore), Rio Grande, and A Yellow Ribbon. The alternative is a French retrospective, slow-moving intellectual films and the complexities of Marguerite Duras, no thanks. Somewhere they’re showing Casablanca, oh yes, at the Alpha Cinema, never heard of it, must be at the ends of the earth, on a street nobody’s ever heard of. What did Ingrid Bergman do when she came to Lisbon and saw “The End” flashed on the screen? The story should have a sequel, said the reviewer. I know him, a fellow my age with a black moustache and keen eyes, who also writes short stories. But perhaps you’re tired. It must be the humidity. Sometimes a heavy fog rolls in from the Atlantic, penetrates and stops up the pores of your skin and makes your legs feel like two sticks. At the Capitol there’s a reissue of the Duke Jordan record, Sultry Eva and Kiss of Spain; you remember it perfectly, from Paris, 1964. It was icy cold and you lived on sandwiches; she was still to come, in the mists of the future. Now the Personals; they’re the most interesting because humanity lays itself bare, pitifully hiding behind euphemism. It’s pitiful, yes, the veil of words. Trustworthy widow seeks a lasting friendship. Three special ads with indecipherable abbreviations. A retired man who’s perishing from loneliness. The usual matchmaking agency: why haven’t you come to us to find a kindred spirit? And then, all of a sudden your heart begins to pound furiously, tap, tap, tap; you can hear it in your throat and the people at the other tables must hear it as well. The world loses shape, everything is opaque, lights and sounds fade away, as if an immense, unnatural silence had paralyzed the universe. You look again at the little phrase, you re-read it, there’s a strange taste in your mouth; it’s not possible you think, it’s a horrible coincidence and then you take back the word “horrible” and think: it’s only a coincidence, a matter of chance, one little chance among millions, just a happening. But why is it happening to you, that’s what you ask yourself, and why in this place, at this table, in this newspaper? It’s not possible; you think, it’s a dislocated phrase, a slug that was mislaid at the printer’s, under hundreds of others, and which a careless linotypist pulled out by mistake and put into the want ads. You formulate this hypothesis and others which are even more absurd: they gave me an old paper, by mistake I bought one four years old. The newspaper vendor had it under the counter, it had been there four years and when he saw that I was a foreigner he palmed it off on me; it’s all a cheap trick, not worth losing your head about. In an embarrassed and clumsy manner you turn back to the first page to find the date, blaming the sea breeze for ruffling the pages and preventing you from folding them back neatly. Of course you’re not nervous, you’re perfectly cool and collected; keep cool now. It’s today’s paper, the paper of this day and of this year in the Gregorian calendar. Yes, today’s. Any where out of the world. You re-read the phrase a dozen times over; this isn’t a regular advertisement, it’s a paid, clandestine message in the evening paper, with no mention of a post-office box, a name, address, business, school. Only this: Any where out of the world. And you need to know nothing more, because the phrase drags after it, the way a flooded river carries flotsam in its wake, bits and pieces of words which your memory, with a frightening, icy calm, is putting into order. This life is a hospital where every patient wants to change beds. One would prefer to suffer near the stove, another thinks he can be cured beside the window. “Your orange juice, sir. Sorry, there are no more almonds. Would you care for some other kind of nut?” You make a gesture that might mean either yes or no, wanting not to be interrupted, because now you are looking at the coast, where the lights are once more visible to your eyes, and words and memories too, are lit up in your mind, to the point that you can almost see them shine; they are little lights in the night, obviously far away, and yet you could pick them up and hold them in the palm of your hand. It always seems to me that I should be better off where I am not, and this question of packing up and moving is one which I ceaselessly debate with my soul. You’ve picked up your glass and are taking little sips of juice. You seem a quiet, somewhat dreamy customer, looking, like the customers at other tables, at the river and the night. You’ve folded the newspaper and laid it carefully on the table in the exaggeratedly meticulous manner of certain old men who have borrowed a paper from the barber and have to give it back. You look at it with distracted indifference; it’s only a paper, after all, today’s paper, carrying already stale news, because the day is over and someone, somewhere, is already making up another paper with news that will shortly dispossess the news, coagulated into words, of today. But today’s sheet carries an item four years old and yet very new, disquietingly new. If you were to give in, it would greatly upset you; but you’re not going to give in, you can’t, you must stay cool. Only then do you notice the date — the twenty-second of September. A coincidence, you say to yourself again. But a coincidence with what? An impossible second coincidence, not only of words but also of dates, the same date and the same phrase. And nothing can stop it; it’s as if it had a voice of its own in your memory, like a clinging childish singsong which you thought you’d shaken off because it had been engulfed in the past, but it hadn’t really disappeared; it lay in a deep recess within you, until now its rhythm is re-awakened and its phrasing begins to drip, tic, tic, tic — it pushes against a rocky wall, it buzzes and gropes for an outlet, then bursts forth like a spring, bathing you in tepid water, which somehow makes you shiver, and finally pulls you into its eddies with a power that it’s useless to resist, violently and irresistibly whirling through subterranean tunnels as it leads you on. Tell me, dear heart, dear chilled heart, what would you say to going to live in Lisbon? It’s surely warm there and you’d revive like a lizard under the sun. The city’s at the water’s edge and they say it’s built of marble. You see it is a country after my own heart; a landscape made up of light and stone, and water to reflect them! And so you walk slowly through this marble city, between eighteenth-century buildings and arcades that witnessed the days of colonial trade, sailing ships, the bustle and the foggy dawns of anchors being weighed. Your solitary footsteps raise an echo; there’s an old beggar leaning against a pillar, beyond the arches there’s the square right on the river, licked by its muddy waters; the brightly lighted boats providing a ferry service to the opposite shore are taking off from the pier; soon the haste of the last passengers will be swallowed up by the dark, leaving only the silent night, peopled by a few distracted night-walkers — unquiet souls carrying their sleepless bodies around and talking to themselves. You talk to yourself, too, first in silence, then out loud, articulating your words very distinctly as if you were dictating them, as if the river could take them down and preserve them in some watery archive, amid the sand, pebbles, and rubbish of the sea floor. Until finally you say: guilt. A word you’ve never pronounced before, perhaps because you didn’t have the nerve, and yet a simple, unequivocal word, which echoes clearly in the darkness and seems to enter, completely, into the halo of your breath, where it is condensed for a moment in the damp air before fading away. You enter the empty square; the monument is impressive and the tall rider spurs his horse into the night. Guilt. You sit on the base of the monument and light a cigarette; the folded newspaper is in your pocket and the mere feel of it gives you a sense of subtle discomfort, like the prick of a pin or an insect on the nape of your neck. It’s not possible, nobody knows I’m here, I’m lost among the world’s million faces; it can’t be a message for me, it’s only a phrase that many people know, it’s another reader of Baudelaire who’s secretly conveying a secret to somebody else. And for a moment you follow up the strange idea of a repetition, a doubling-up, as if it were plausible that the wheel of fate should possess stereotypes and print them out haphazardly, in the lives of other people with different eyes and hands and ways of being, in different streets and rooms. Another man, then, talking to another woman in another room, a room that is like a dream. And your fantasy creates the lighted window of a room that is itself a fantasy. You can approach the misted window and peek through the old lace curtains. It’s a room with antique furniture, and wallpaper with a faded tulip design. A man and a woman are on the bed; it’s evident from the position of the bodies and the rumpled sheets that they’ve been making love. He strokes her head and says: “Let me keep on breathing the scent of your hair.” At that moment a clock strikes. “It’s late,” she says; “I must go.” But you answer: “The Chinese tell time by a cat’s eye. It’s not time yet, Isabelle, everything has yet to happen: I’ve still to involve you in the real betrayal, but it won’t be my fault, believe me, it’s the fault of things that will it so — who knows what determines their course? — and you have still to let yourself be involved in the betrayal; but it won’t be your fault either, and then, in my own way, I’ll have to bring about your death, but this, too, won’t be my fault. It will be your remorse, and meanwhile he’ll know nothing of my betrayal, only one day a notice in the newspaper, a short, secret phrase, which only we two know — Any where in the world — will be the signal, and then everything will happen.” Instead, everything had already happened, only the man in that room didn’t know it and said: “You’re right, it’s late. Go along, and I’ll go afterwards.”