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1
I’ve moved to this city to wait for the end of the world. The conditions couldn’t be better. The apartment is on a quiet street. From the balcony you can see the river in the distance. You can also see it from the small kitchen patio, which overlooks the back gardens and balconies along the adjoining street, the enclosed balconies with iron railings where clothes are hanging, fluttering in the breeze. At the end of the street, beyond the river, the horizon of hills on the other bank and the Cristo Rei with his open arms, as if he were about to take flight. In Siberia there are, at this very moment, temperatures above one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. In Sweden, fires fueled by unprecedented heat ravage the forests that extend above the Arctic Circle. In California, fires spanning hundreds of thousands of acres have been raging for several months in a row, and they are given their own names, like hurricanes in the Caribbean. Here, days dawn fresh and serene. Every morning there’s a damp, bright-white mist the sun breaks through slowly as it carries the strong scent of the sea upriver. Swallows skim across the sky and fly over the rooftops, like they did in the cool summer mornings of my childhood. As soon as Cecilia arrives I won’t need anything else. The end of the world has most likely already started, but it still seems far away from this place. Airplanes fly in all day, from before dawn until after midnight, coming across the sky from the south, just above the Cristo Rei, spreading his reinforced concrete arms out like a superhero about to launch himself into the air. Immense cruise ships glide up the river, looking like vertical housing developments for tourists, floating replicas of Benidorm or Miami Beach. There’s nothing better to take your mind off waiting than to look out over a balcony or a park railing and watch the ships pass by on a large, sea-wide river. Light sailboats and tankers with rusty, cliff-like hulls drift along. From a nearby street I can see the container wharf crane along the shoreline of the river. In the glare of the nocturnal floodlights, the crane moves back and forth like a robotic spider, one of those spiders grown monstrous from the effects of atomic radiation in some futuristic movie from the 1950s. From the kitchen patio, where Cecilia and I will soon start planting vegetables in raised beds filled with fertile soil, above the balconies and rooftops and the brick chimney of an old factory, I can see the top of one of the bridge towers, faded red against the soft-blue sky. The always-present background rumble comes from the traffic on the bridge: the cars and trucks and the trains on the lower deck; and there’s also the vibration of the pillars and metal plates under the weight and tremor of the traffic, and the cables quivering like harp strings in the wind. The bridge and the whole river and the hills on the other bank and the container wharfs and the Cristo Rei, I see all of it every morning from the little park where I take Luria for a walk. If I walk beside her, she sniffs through the bushes, runs behind the pigeons, digs and plunges her snout into the ground. If I sit on a bench and stare out at the river and the incoming planes, Luria sits at my side contemplating the same spectacle in a perfect wait-and-see attitude, her nose raised, her gaze fixed on a distance that her myopic eyes will only vaguely be able to make out. If I pull a book out of my bag and start reading, she seems to take over for me, and her attention intensifies.
2
Maybe I’ve settled into this new life so quickly because there are a certain number of things in common with the one we left behind. Maybe the similarities influenced us unconsciously when we chose this part of the city and this apartment. Every day I observe repetitions and echoes that I hadn’t noticed before. Most of our decisive mental operations take place in the brain without our consciousness being aware of them, Cecilia says. The Cristo Rei on the opposite riverbank was a disturbance at first, a mistake on the landscape: the first day in our Lisbon hotel, Cecilia opened the window and saw it in the distance and because she was still a little dazed from jet lag, she told me that for an absurd moment she had the mistaken impression that she was in Rio de Janeiro, where she had been a few weeks earlier for one of her conferences on the human brain. Then she had to come to Lisbon, and it was on that particular trip I was able to join her. She would attend her scientific seminars and I would wander around the city and wait for her at the hotel or in a café, relieved not to be in New York and that I wasn’t working. The hotel was quiet and tidy, like one of those friendly English hotels, not a real one but one from some movie, with clean rugs and no musty smell. We opened the curtains in the room when we arrived and we saw the river and the piers all at once. There was a library on the third floor with dark, wood-lined walls, old leather armchairs, a fireplace, a gilded copper telescope, a large picture window, a terrace facing the river. The bridge loomed in the background. The strands of lights came on early in the December dusk, in a drizzling fog. Huddled in bed as if inside a burrow, we listened to the bells, chiming in a church tower and announcing each hour. Sated afterward, appeased, hungry, we went out to search for a place to have dinner, along uninhabited, scarcely lit streets. The white-stone sidewalks were slippery with the condensation from the mist. It didn’t seem likely that we would find a restaurant in such an out-of-the-way neighborhood and at such an hour. As we climbed a flight of steps we saw a lighted corner at the end of the street; a quiet murmur of voices, cutlery, and dishes trickled out of it. It was a low structure, like an unexpected country house, painted pink, with a bougainvillea covering half the facade and the window. When we came in from the deserted street we were even more pleased to see the animated diners and waiters. It was an Italian restaurant. There were a lot of people, but they were still able to seat us. The waiters, cordial and efficient, looked Italian, but they were all Nepalese. To have stumbled across that restaurant and then savor a flavorful pasta dish and an inexpensive light-red wine, some tiramisu, an ice-cold grappa, nourished our inner joy, our gratitude toward randomness, an unforgettable trattoria in Lisbon run by people from Nepal. Then we got lost exploring the unfamiliar places that are now part of my everyday life, the normal life we are about to begin in our quiet and sheltered wait for the world to collapse. “A river like the Hudson,” Cecilia said, a little drunk, happy, unsteady in her high heels on those climbs and descents, “a bridge like the George Washington Bridge.” In a nearby church a bell tolled the hour. “The clock tower like the one on Riverside Church,” I said: and at that moment, that night I never want to forget, in every one of its secret nuances, neither of us imagined anything yet, though it is possible that we passed along this street, under this balcony I am now peering over.
3
We were in New York and now we’re going to be in Lisbon. For the time being I’m in Lisbon. I’m using my time to make all the preparations for when Cecilia arrives. There was a container in one of those giant freighters that go up the Tagus transporting all our things, so many years, our two lives, each other’s books and the books we shared, the outdated CDs we gave each other at the beginning of our relationship, the photos that were still printed and framed at that time, the heavy winter clothes we didn’t realize we would no longer need, one of Cecelia’s lined coats that reached down to her feet, with its fur-trimmed hood, and the coat that made me look like an Eskimo. I’ll have to ask Alexis, who knows everything, if there’s some organization in Lisbon where we can donate all these clothes. Reading Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s memoirs about the Antarctic has made me nostalgic for those winters. I packed Cecilia’s long coat away in a closet and remembered how her face looked in the cold, the fur cap over her eyebrows, the reddened tip of her nose, the pink luster on her cheeks. It’s been exhausting, but now I’m glad I rushed the move without waiting for her to return. It was quite a feat to move things along so quickly in a city where life seems to happen at a much slower pace.
I’ve also had, we’ve had, the good fortune that, in a moment of absolute crisis, Alexis appeared, leading his infallible team of assistants, accomplices rather, colluding in their various tasks, in their practical knowledge, all of which Alexis himself seems to master effortlessly. The poetry of a new city runs the risk of being snuffed out without a trace when one is in the process of settling in. Time was running out, and I was paralyzed by inefficiency and anxiety. I called phone numbers no one answered. When someone finally answered after I’d been waiting for half an hour listening to a musical recording that played the same songs over and over, I couldn’t understand what they were saying and I wasn’t able to explain myself in Portuguese. Someone assured me he would come to install something or deliver something and then he never showed up. I’d spend the day waiting, sitting on an unopened box with the label of an American moving company on it. Luria waited with me. Luria is even more talented than I am at waiting. Luria welcomes even the slowest or most incompetent workers with her unflagging enthusiasm for the human species. The sky was dark and low, and it rained nonstop. Day after day the garbage continued to pile up next to the overflowing dumpsters on the street. More than the inconvenience, I was weighed down by the superstition that because of those mishaps our future life in the city would be ruined, our unfinished apartment would be tainted with failure. I didn’t want to say anything to Cecilia because I was afraid that she would wait to come. But I also didn’t want her to come and find herself in the middle of such a mess, with such deplorable living and work conditions. One day Alexis showed up, to install I don’t know what, and he arrived at the exact time he had told me he would be coming, with his phone in one hand and his toolbox in the other, wearing a workman’s belt where all kinds of screwdrivers, various gadgets, and clusters of sonorous keys were hanging. I opened the door, and before he entered Alexis bowed, as if making some kind of Japanese greeting, while wiping the soles of his boots on the doormat. He said “com licença,” and glided through the gap in the doorway before I could open it all the way, agile as a scuba diver or an expert at escaping from traps or safes, a true Houdini of every kind of domestic job. He looked around, his appraisal precise and no doubt tinged with a little pity, at the sorry state of everything: the piled-up boxes, the partially unpacked furniture still inside its plastic and cardboard liners and packing tape, the dank cold of an apartment that had been uninhabited for several months, not to mention the half-painted walls, which had been abandoned by a handyman who had very politely left one afternoon and never returned, and the paint cans, rags, and pages of newspapers spread out across the floor. Alexis is from the Argentine interior, but over the years his accent has diminished substantially, and he has acquired a certain Portuguese formality. He says that since he left Argentina he has been suffering from the bad reputation, not undeserved in his opinion, of his compatriots in Buenos Aires. He comes from the tropical province of Misiones. Luria rolled onto her back next to him to show her excitement and encourage him to rub her belly. Alexis, ever so formal, lay down beside her and, after rolling around on the floor with her, got back to his feet in a simple, springlike motion. “El señor is going to see how all of this gets straightened out. You, sir, can promise Señora Cecilia that when she arrives everything will be in order, ready and waiting for her arrival just as she deserves.”