Electrico W by Herve Le Tellier Page A

not been what he had meant by amusing. Our father, on the other hand, laughed.
    Speech or not, Virginie broke up with Paul a year later as the wedding drew near, apologizing and saying she wasn’t “capable of such a formal commitment,” was “terrified,”and would rather “get things in perspective.” She had actually been getting things in perspective for several weeks with one Maxime, a pharmaceuticals student like herself. Paul had never been engaged since, and Virginie, who now ran a drugstore in Asnières, had also got Maxime in perspective and married an Aurélien, whom she was probably also cheating on with some other Roman emperor’s name.
    The hothouse was gradually emptying. I had sat myself on a bench near the water lilies, to make notes. Aurora walked toward me, smiling. Behind her the tiny lights on the vaulted roof shone like newly polished upholstery tacks.
    “Are you still translating that Jaime Montestrela? I asked my father and he said the name rang a bell. He took exile in Brazil when Salazar was in power, is that right? Did he write poetry too?”
    “Yes.”
    “My father couldn’t find his old copy of
Prisão
. Apparently it’s not bad. Hard to translate.”
    I had no way of knowing. But the obituary in
O Século
ended with these two lines from
Prisão
, which was cited as his founding work:
    Num raio de sol, a poeira faz palhaçadas
    Mas que idiota pintou o azul entre as minhas barras?
    In a ray of sunshine, dust plays the fool
    But what idiot painted blue between my bars?
    I had been more interested in Montestrela’s life than his writing, as if his existence were an interrogation of my own. If a dictatorship took over, would I go into exile like him, like Zweig, rather than bowing my head completely in the face of barbarity? There was a certain honesty in not being ashamed of one’s own lack of courage, in knowing oneself well enough to opt for fleeing anticipated submission, which would be as abject as the violence of the tyrant it empowers.
    Aurora headed straight off again toward Antonio while the last guests were leaving. Antonio whispered something to her and turned to me with the shifty, embarrassed eyes of a liar: “I’m going to stay a bit longer. I’ll be back later.”
    I went home to the hotel, walking quickly, almost running. It was only when I reached Avenida da Liberdade that I slowed down. I took the photograph of Duck from my pocket and looked at her for a long time in the glow of neon lights. I tried to find a name for the feeling budding inside me, tenderness perhaps, the sort you would feel for a sister far away.
    At that very moment Antonio was betraying Duck, and I resented him for it. He was probably betraying Irene first, but I was delighted by that particular felony. His distraction gave me strength. Soon, when Irene was there, he would be indebted to me for my silence.
    I translated a few more
Contos aquosos
. I knew that, botched by my anger, they would need reworking later.
    In the morning when the waiter brought up breakfast for two—we had adopted the habit of taking it in the large lounge—Antonio was not there. I waited until midday, in vain, and, as it was Sunday, I thought of Ruiz Custódia and the cemetery in the suburbs. So I decided the time had come to try my luck.

DAY FOUR

P INHEIRO
    A cool breeze was blowing and I shivered in the shade of a cypress tree. Graves seen in sunshine are never entirely melancholy.
    There’s always a hint of life to distract the eye, a blade of grass glimmering, a carefree chaffinch pecking at the ground, a black beetle with heavy mandibles crawling over the gravel. And when graves have no story to tell, we don’t linger over them.
    A large weathered stone. Familia Custódia. Names, dates, and at the very bottom, Maria Custódia, 1934–1964. The gilding had long since disappeared, the northern corner of its almond green surface was decorated with a brooch of lichen. There was a bouquet of withered mauve flowers,