A FRIEND OF DR. REIS

She didn't look like a woman who inspired dreams. She kept her eyes down and bit her fingernails. When I sat next to her I felt her shrink away, as if the merest touch of my shirt sleeve offended. Forgive me, her companion said to her, if I speak with this nice man for ten or fifteen minutes. You can eat your summer fruit and entertain yourself by studying the family at the table over there.

How such a creature came to be dining with Dr. Ricardo Reis I could not imagine. She was, he told me, a friend, but I saw at once that she was more to him than that. Clearly she had dressed especially for the occasion. She had on a modest ankle-length chemise, but with an odd crown of delicate, probably hand-picked flowers clipped to her hair. When an explosion briefly sounded outdoors, she grabbed for his hand and he responded gently by stroking her fingers. It's nothing, he said to her, and returned without pause to our conversation. Not once did he attempt to include her or ask whether the spectacle of the other diners provided sufficient interest. Once, when I caught her looking at me from the corner of her eye, she turned abruptly away and said, the wine is good, doctor, and I wondered why she did not call him Ricardo.

It was July of 1936, and I had come to Lisbon largely, though not exclusively, to speak with Dr. Reis about an anthology of poems by "undiscovered writers" I had agreed to edit for Faber and Faber in England. His work had not previously appeared in English translation, but had been highly recommended to me by people who had read it in Portuguese. As I quickly learned, Reis was the last man to think of promoting his own work or attempting to get it around. The truth was, he seemed to me a gray, passive man, tight and unyielding, and had it not been for the young woman he had brought with him that day to the restaurant, I'd have concluded our negotiations and determined never again to make contact with him. But there was something in the woman—he had introduced her simply as Lydia—that drew me and made me want to know more about the man who had improbably found in her a suitable companion. Of course I did not know then, at that first meeting, how very improbable was their connection, their union, but something in the demeanor of the woman made me feel that she herself was astonished to be there at that table with this obscure though clearly distinguished poet.

I saw Reis again the next day at a café where he'd agreed to meet me for an hour, and of course I was disappointed that he did not have Lydia with him. Is your friend not well? I asked him at once. I had expected that she would be with you.

Why ever would you have expected that? he replied. Lydia does not often accompany me when I am out on business, and I brought her along yesterday only because it was her day off. I'm sorry that you are disappointed. If I tell her she will be confused, but I may tell her anyway, if you don't mind.

I don't mind at all, I said. She interested me very much, maybe because she said so little, but also because you said nothing about her.

There is not much to say, Reis said. Lydia is a very simple woman, and unfathomable. Only a novelist would have words to describe her, and I am, alas, only a poet.

Of course I was tempted to press Reis for some further information. I had dreamt of Lydia throughout the previous night, and though this was not unusual for me—I often dreamed of women I had met for the first time—these newest dreams were insistent and oddly charged. In one, Lydia lay curled and sleeping on a red velvet divan, barefoot and with just the trace of a sulk on her face. But Reis had made it clear that he had no wish to tell me more about his companion, and as I was scheduled to leave Lisbon by the end of the week, there was no point in pressing him further. He had agreed to let me have a dozen poems for the anthology and proposed a gifted translator who would be up to the job. When I passed him a few permissions papers to sign he did so without reading them, made his apologies, and left me at the table with no suggestion that we might ever meet again. I was fated, clearly, to learn nothing more of the woman who had briefly insinuated herself into my dreams.

Only two days later, however, Lydia phoned me at my hotel and announced, in a voice almost child-like and abstracted, that Dr. Reis had died in his sleep the night before. A heart attack, she said. She had phoned because she had no one else to turn to. Would I come at once to the doctor's apartment and help her?

But really, I said, is there no friend of the doctor you can call?

He had no friend, she said.

And your own family? I tried.

I am alone, she whispered. Will you come?

I asked for the address and promised that I would be there within the hour.

I wouldn't disturb you, she assured me, if there were someone else to ask.

Your English is very good, I complimented her, aware that it was, under the circumstances, a very odd thing to say. Dr. Reis must have been very proud of you.

He was not proud of me, she said. But now he is dead and we must get him into the ground.

I moved quickly then to shave and prepare myself for this wholly unexpected encounter. The death of Reis himself affected me not at all. I barely knew him, of course, and there was no reason why I should have been shaken by Lydia's announcement. Reis was by no means an old man, but he was not young either, and he had not struck me as especially robust. No doubt he was, like other men, attached to life, but I had seen in him no great avidity, at most a certain mild amusement. What mattered now, as Lydia had said, was that he was dead, and that she needed my help, though the firmness of her resolve and the bluntness of her speech might have alerted me to the prospect that I had formed an inadequate impression of her in our first meeting.

I took a taxi to Reis's apartment building and rang the door bell in the lobby. An elderly woman let me in and directed me to the third floor. The walls of the stairwell were freshly painted, and the stairs themselves gleamed as if they had just been polished. Of course I had no idea of what to expect once Lydia opened the door to me, and so I was not surprised when she said, I thought you might not come, and stood aside to let me in. The room was as if prepared for a formal reception. There were flowers in a vase on the dining table, and a bowl of fruit. The curtains on the tall windows were tied neatly back to let in the sunlight, and the dozen or so books on what appeared to be Reis's worktable against the wall were neatly stacked.

You can see him if you like, she said, taking my coat and hat and pointing to the open door of the bedroom. I nodded, went to the door and looked in. Reis lay in a half-sitting position against the pillows, his arms folded carefully on his chest above the blanket.

Did you arrange him this way yourself? I asked.

I thought it was better.

And has a doctor been in to see him?

Not yet, she said. I was afraid to call anyone before you arrived.

Within a few hours everything was done, a doctor called in to write out a death certificate and the body taken away to a funeral home. It was not clear as yet how the costs of burial would be handled, but we agreed that on the following day we would speak to someone at Reis's bank, where Lydia had occasionally accompanied him when he needed to withdraw money from an account. She was certain that Reis had no surviving family members and no friends, not in Lisbon, at any rate. Remember, she told me, the doctor had been away from Lisbon for many years, and returned less than a year ago. Since that time, she continued, he has led a very quiet life, like a man recovering from something painful.

By the time Reis's body was removed I was desperate for something to eat, and suggested we go out to a restaurant, but Lydia said no, there was plenty of food, and she would prefer to fix something for us in the apartment. She had phoned her employer and was not expected at work for the next two days.

What sort of work do you do? I asked her.

I am a chambermaid at a hotel in the city, she replied. That is where I met Dr. Reis, when he stayed there for some months. As a guest, of course.

Of course, I said, and stopped myself from saying anything more, though I wanted to ask how a person like Lydia should have found herself working as a chambermaid in a hotel. Perhaps they did things differently in Lisbon, and a woman in her mid-twenties with considerable charm, good looks, and an impressive mastery of at least one foreign language might well be content to clean up each day after other people.

But as I saw Lydia at work in the kitchen of Dr. Reis's apartment I put those thoughts aside and turned instead to his worktable. There were the books, of course, in several languages, and a sheaf of what looked like handwritten manuscript pages, drafts, as I saw the moment I began to leaf through them. Mostly they were short poems, twelve or fifteen lines, all, inevitably, in Portuguese, so that I had no hope of reading them.

I am looking through the manuscript pages of Dr. Reis, I called to Lydia.

Do as you like, she called back. Only please keep them neatly stacked. The doctor did not like disorder.

And did you never read any of these poems? I called, as loudly as I could.

We can talk about that later, she said, when we are seated face to face.

Though I could not read the pages, I was taken with the small, meticulous handwriting and with the neatly interpolated emendations, a fine red line crossed through the offending words, the red ink used also to write out the alternate versions in the margins. But my eye was also drawn to a small leather-bound notebook up at the top of the table. I removed the three writing pens that had rested on the cover of this slender volume, opened it and saw that it contained a variety of English words and phrases, isolated couplets, though I found, several pages in, entire short poems, Reis's own translations of his work, apparently, each signed at the bottom of the page, "Ricardo Reis." Expecting Lydia to call me in for lunch at any moment, I read rapidly through these items, and felt coming over me an unaccountable melancholy, much more intense than anything I had felt upon learning of the death of Dr. Reis. Here, I saw, was the incarnation of a terrible loneliness and hopelessness. On almost every page there were expressions of an incurable indifference. Reis was a man—you had only to read a few pages to be certain—for whom seeking was a waste of time, silence and oblivion the only certainty. His goal in life was to want nothing. Who, he asked on one page, could remember the past or imagine the future without wishing that remembering and imagining were at an end?

I had an instinct to slip this little notebook into my coat, though I quickly thought no, I can surely take some time later on to copy the pages onto some loose sheets of paper, in my own hand, and take possession of them in this way. Of course Lydia would soon be asking for further help with the apartment, and the manuscripts, and I did not know whether she would wish to remain in this place and, if possible, watch over the worldly remains left behind by the good doctor. I knew so little about her really, and for the moment I could only wonder at her apparent equanimity in the face of the loss that she had suffered on this very day.

The lunch is ready now, she called. If you like, you can wash your hands here in the sink, or use the bathroom just through the doctor's bedroom.

It was, in every way, an intensely involving two hours we spent together at Dr. Reis's dining table. I sat across from Lydia, and saw that she was even lovelier than I had thought. I was struck especially by her long, thin nose and her dark, full eyebrows. Mostly, when she spoke, she did not look up at me, but when I spoke she looked directly into my eyes in what was apparently a declaration of respect and attention. Only once in these hours did she rise from her chair, when she saw that my water glass was empty. I wondered whether she was, in different circumstances, a woman who could be made to smile, or laugh, but this was clearly not a day for jokes or playful ironies. Would a display of wit be lost on this modest young person? I didn't think so, and vowed if at all possible to find out.

Of course it occurred to me, throughout this extended luncheon conversation, to ask myself what exactly I was doing here with Lydia. I was scheduled still to leave Lisbon in a couple of days, and the city itself really held little attraction for me. The news reports had it that refugees from the nearby civil war in Spain were streaming into the city, and I'd passed a number of luridly bedecked fascist party meeting houses in my several exploratory walks through the city. Lisbon was no place for an American literary man, not in July of 1936, and Lydia herself would probably have said as much if asked about my being here. Yet she very much clung to me, I felt, insisting that I was essential to her and that somehow Dr. Reis himself would have wanted me to look after his affairs. There was nothing in the least histrionic in anything Lydia said, which made her appeal to me all the more affecting. She was not, clearly, practiced in the arts of persuasion or seduction. She reached out to me as a person addressing another person who would, presumably, just simply understand—as she did—what was required.

Had this not been summer, I would have been expected back in New York, but I could well remain in Lisbon for a while longer, and Lydia seemed to me promising in so many ways that I allowed myself to be won over to her plans. I could stay, she said, for the remainder of the month, in Dr. Reis's apartment, and avoid the expense of staying these weeks in a hotel. Lydia herself, she assured me, had a small place of her own, and would thus not be in my way at all. We would meet, she assured me, for dinner every night, when she was through with her work at the hotel, and meanwhile she would write out for me a list of things I could do without her, which included the depositing of Dr. Reis's papers at a suitable library or publishing house. Did this seem all right to me? she asked, moving inexorably from one reasonable proposition to another as if she'd had weeks to work things out, when in fact she'd awakened only that morning to find that the doctor had died, and was clearly making everything up on the spot, thinking everything through as she opened her mouth and uttered the impeccably well-formulated propositions.

The following morning I cancelled my steamship booking—indefinitely—and a day later I moved out of the hotel, taking a taxi to the apartment building and letting myself in with the set of keys Lydia had given me. It was only briefly unsettling, being in those rooms without Lydia and having the doctor's things, all of them, at my disposal. Almost at once I entered the bathroom and stood before the mirror, holding, perhaps for ten long minutes, the doctor's razor in my hand. It was an odd way, I thought, of making myself at home, but I felt calm and very much in control of what lay ahead of me. In truth I was not by nature a dreamy type or a person given to thoughts of ghostly presences. The razor, like the doctor's coffee mug, was merely a thing. So I felt. He had held these things, to be sure, used them, breathed on them, rinsed them, but they did not release the ghost of a man, or none at least that I could detect. The words I had read in the notebook were something else, but the place, the furnishings, the shoes and shirts in the closet were nothing to me. I set my suitcase against the wall in the bedroom, saw that Lydia had put fresh bedding out for me and changed the towels on the rack next to the bedroom door. On the dining table she had left a note explaining where everything was, in case I had forgotten her instructions from the day before, and reminding me that she would arrive at the apartment a little past four in the afternoon. If I needed to reach her, I could phone the hotel, though her supervisor disapproved of personal calls during working hours. If I decided to take a nap in the afternoon, she would quietly let herself in and not awaken me, unless I left instruction to the contrary on the table.

She was, it occurred to me, too good to be true. No wonder Reis had been moved. The combination of vulnerability, willowy good looks, and a sort of elementary thoughtfulness would have been fatal to him, as to any man. But why had she yielded to him? Because he was charming, gentle, needy? Clearly there was nothing sexy or dangerous about Reis, nothing obviously compelling. But then Lydia would not have found an obviously sexy man attractive, though I could not say how I had come to know that. In Reis you saw, right away, a person gray and only partially there, a person who seemed to belong to another sphere, where pleasure itself was at best a mild, ephemeral distraction from the proper business of life, which was the preparation for oblivion. Perhaps Lydia thought she could save this man and did in fact help him to die a happier man than he had ever been before. If that was so, she would know, and in time, soon, she would tell me.

Of course I had no idea what she saw in me. Was I in some way a prospect, a potential suitor? It was flattering to think that Lydia might have warmed to me in this way, though she seemed a modest, decent person who had so recently been attached to another man as to make the idea of her attraction to me a bit disturbing. Did she in fact already have plans for me, apart from what I might do to help her with the affairs of Dr. Reis? There was nothing in the least flirtatious in her manner, nothing in her expression that suggested ardor or suppressed desire. If she smoldered, she kept her feelings entirely under control, and it seemed more plausible to think that she was starved for friendship and willing to grab at the person fate had set before her. She was not, I felt, a taker, one of those who greedily devour anything set before them. If she grabbed at me because I was there, and willing, she would not presume upon my inexhaustible good will or take me for granted. She would go slowly, carefully, and would not ask herself to feel what she did not feel. If I wanted her, I would need to be worthy, though what that might mean for a person like Lydia I did not know.

In fact, as I soon acknowledged, I did want Lydia, and spent my days thinking of little else. Again and again her face rose before me, the eyes like deep pools of light, the long nose so different from the standard little noses of the manikin beauties I typically allowed into my dreams. Even the hours I spent copying out the pages of Reis's notebook were saturated with thoughts of her. Did she know, I wondered, that she had affected me in this way? Perhaps Reis had informed her, after that second brief meeting in the restaurant, that I had been disappointed when she failed to come with him, and perhaps on that basis she had some idea. But I doubted that Reis would have mentioned it and supposed that Lydia knew nothing at all of my growing infatuation.

I did continue to wonder why she had absorbed the fact of the doctor's passing so easily. Once, only a day or two after the death of Reis, I asked her bluntly how she managed to hold her emotions in check. You don't always show what you are feeling, she said, something like that. And then: Dr. Reis was not an easy man to be with. For me, it was sometimes a trial.

Did you never think of leaving him? I asked.

One time, maybe two, she said. But I thought he would be very sad.

He wasn't always a little sad?

Always, yes, she replied.

The sadness she confirmed was most real to me, of course, when I read, over and over again, the poems in the notebook. But I saw nothing like that sadness in Lydia. She returned each afternoon from her work in the hotel with a look of resolute good cheer on her face, hungry for conversation. She was, I felt, a force for life, and even tried to draw me out on the poems of Dr. Reis.

Do you like them? I asked her. Do they speak to you?

The doctor never showed me his poems, she said. He must have thought I would not like them.

But then, I asked, why didn't you ask him to show them to you?

He would not have approved, she said. He knew me as a certain kind of woman.

What kind? I asked, suddenly irritated and even offended on her behalf.

A woman who does not read poems, she said.

When I read to her from the notebook, seating her on a comfortable chair in front of the window while I stood before her a few feet away, she listened very carefully, asking me once or twice to repeat a line, gravely nodding at me to go on when she was prepared to receive another poem, and another.

He was a strange man, the doctor, she said finally.

Stranger than you knew? I asked.

I didn't know he thought so much about himself, she answered. It's strange, isn't it, to think so much about what you are, about nothing, really? That is what I hear in these poems. I look at myself, he says, and I see nothing. I want nothing and I have nothing.

You are surprised, of course, to hear your own name, Lydia, in two of the poems?

At first, when you were reading, I thought it was sweet, delicious, but then I thought, it is not me he is writing about. For him it was just a name.

When I had been with her in Lisbon for a week, Lydia told me that she was carrying Reis's baby. She had come to the apartment a little after six that day, informing me that she had been to a scheduled appointment at the clinic near the hotel. She was very healthy, she assured me, slipping off her shoes and swinging her legs onto the small sofa. She was even happy, she said, though perhaps that was a mistake. Certainly Dr. Reis thought it a mistake.

You mean in general? I asked.

Yes, in general, she replied. And in particular.

Why in particular?

In particular because he did not want me to have his baby, she said.

I looked hard at her then, saw her fingers lightly brush the fabric of her dress across her thighs and knees. If she was at all embarrassed, she didn't seem so. She said, in fact, please, would you bring me a glass of water?, and shot me a little smile when I turned to fetch one from the kitchen. I was, I suppose, astonished that Lydia had said nothing to me about the child. Of course Dr. Reis would not have been happy about it. Such a man could not have welcomed new life into the world under any circumstances. And how, he would surely have wondered, would a woman like Lydia manage, without a husband? From what I understood, he had no intention of marrying her, would probably have thought the very idea ridiculous, and Lydia herself, for her own reasons, had not thought Reis suitable. If she was, as she said, happy about the child, she had perhaps not considered very carefully what would be required of her.

After she had rested for a while, with her legs up, as the doctor at the clinic had recommended, Lydia proposed to cook something for us in the apartment. I wondered at her willingness to prepare meals at the tiny two-ring gas stove, but, as with so many things, she said that she was used to it, and dreaded the thought of going out into the drizzly night air. I sat with her in the kitchen, watching her pound the veal and slice the carrots and pour the olive oil, and I tried to say pleasant things—about my work with the poems, my meetings with Reis's publisher, and my increasing mastery of the geography of Lisbon. She smiled indulgently at all of this, probably aware that I was working hard not to return to the subject of the child she was carrying. Surely it would seem to her the natural thing to speak of something so obviously important. And yet it was not really my business, was it? I was by now Lydia's friend and helpmate, and we were, to be sure, very comfortable with one another. But we had kept things where we wanted them, hadn't we?, remembering, as was essential, that I would soon return to New York to teach my classes, while Lydia would remain here, in her own city, only now with a child to support, and Reis no more than a memory.

With the dinner before us, then, we steered for a while cautiously around and away from the matter of the child. But the strain got to me, and before I could check myself I said, the doctor, Lydia, do you think he was in love with you?

A strange question, she answered, from nowhere.

I think about it a lot, I said.

I would have guessed, she said, that by now you would understand the doctor better than that.

She was right, of course. It had been an idle thing to say, to ask, and I was, for a moment, embarrassed. I lifted my eyes then, and saw her, staring at me, and quickly lowered my eyes, not knowing what to say, and determined not again to blurt out something idiotic.

So you would like, she said, as if she'd read my mind, to ask me about the baby. Why not just say what you think?

I think it's wonderful, if it's what you want, I said, displeased with the hollowness of my words but unable to do better.

A nice sentiment, she said. That is the word, isn't it? Sentiment?

I mean, I tried again, it's not a thing to take lightly.

But who would take lightly such a thing? she asked.

To carry the child of a man like that, I began.

The doctor is no part of it, she said. The child is an accident of fate, not an expression of his will, and the child will grow in its own way.

When you tell the child about its father, I began again.

I may tell him nothing, she said. Or I may read him a poem—one of those you read to me the other night, in English—and say, this I do not like, or this is from a man who thought that knowing himself—whatever that means—was more important than loving the world.

He made you unhappy, I said.

He made me think, made me defend myself against his passivity. Because of him I am more than I was. That is what I think.

And the child, I said.

The child will be more, an answer to him. It will not be what he said, superfluous.

Who taught you to use such words? I asked.

They are not hard words. They are ordinary words known to every person. Do you think that poets alone know how to use the word superfluous?

We went on in this way for some time, moving from the dining table to the kitchen and back out to the sofa, where she asked me—I was stunned by the request—to rub the bottom of her feet, and then to read to her again from Reis's poems. I did as I was told, and felt, with each passing gesture, that I was powerless to resist her, so that her words, when she had listened again to one of the poems, seemed to me inevitably the right words with which to receive those wan, ardently passive expressions of the poet's encompassing distaste for life. More than once I wondered if she would be revolted by the look of adoration I did everything in my power to disguise. She was, I tried to remind myself, a chambermaid, and I was allowing myself to be swept away by an impression that would surely seem ridiculous once I had removed myself from Lydia's presence. She had been, to be sure, the bedmate of a distinguished poet, but he was drawn to her for the consolation she offered, and because she was beautiful and made no demands. The infatuation I was allowing myself to feel was of a different order, and no doubt more preposterous by far.

By ten o' clock, her feet in my hands, she had fallen asleep, and I was loath to disturb her. It would not be comfortable, not for me certainly, spending a night in this position, sitting up and afraid to make any sudden moves. Eventually I would have to get up, use the toilet, increase the circulation in my legs. But by then, I thought, she would have gone into a deeper sleep, and it would be too late for her to leave for her own apartment. I would have her with me all night, to study, to wonder at and compose, or recompose, stitch after stitch, shaping in my mind what she was and might be. Was it possible, I asked myself, as I listened intently to the calm rhythms of her breathing, to watch someone so intently that she would become, after a while, a blur of meaningless particulars? The pout on her lips did not seem to me then an isolated trait but a tiny measure of a soul, entire and irreducible. I was infatuated, yes, but not merely with the fine line of a nose or the delicate armature of the improbably broad shoulders. It was everything about this complicated young woman that drew me, and if Ricardo Reis had found in her mainly an emblem of his own futility and his susceptibility to a beautiful surface, well, what was that to me? It was a joy, he had written, not ever to be tempted by happiness, to be reconciled completely to an essentially vegetative existence. Well good for him, I thought. Let's hear it for the so-called peace of mind that had seemed to the poor man more than enough to satisfy his wants. Lydia was hungry, obviously, for more, and if you looked at things in the perspective of the future—the one she was already beginning to design or imagine for herself—it was probably a good thing that Reis had departed and taken with him his slavish allegiance to the void and to the elegance of inertia.

She stirred then, as if to curl her legs under her, but she seemed at once to remember that she wanted her feet to remain there, in my lap, and I felt the toes seeking lightly for my fingers, which flexed reassuringly around them, small toes, part of a surprisingly small foot, not the foot of a woman with broad shoulders and a high lucid forehead. A lovely thing, I thought, to sleep that way, unafraid, to know without needing to struggle against it that tomorrow there will be again the hotel, the routine of bedding and furniture polish and stray hairs in the tub, with afterwards the hopeful, mildly worrying but welcome thoughts of the child and all that might mean. Did I somehow have for her a part in it all? Had she sensed in me, in so short a time, someone who might make a difference in her life? I thought of how easily she had allowed herself to fall in with the purposes of Dr. Reis, and wondered whether the trust she placed in me, the feet she had deposited so casually in my hands, were not in their way an expression of some tendency in her to go with the drift of things, not to resist when it would be so much easier simply to yield. But then I looked again at the serene oval of her face and remembered that she was a twenty-six-year-old woman who had been very much on her own in Lisbon for a decade before she met Doctor Reis. If she had not been swept off her feet in all that time—no doubt there had been many suitors—she was a woman who knew how to resist, and if she did not resist me, that can only have meant that she did not wish to resist.

Of course we had not slept together, had not so much as kissed, but this seemed to me of little consequence. After all, we had known each other a very short time. And the truth was, I didn't care that she had small breasts, or that, for all I knew, she might be timid, or cool, when at last I embraced her. Nor did it matter that, in the vague fantasies I entertained, I would inevitably become responsible for the child of another man whose outlook and appetites I found distasteful. To hell with Reis, I said to myself, recalling with a kind of delight that Lydia herself had declared him irrelevant. Never before had I thought of myself as a father, but it seemed to me now that with Lydia, all things were possible. If I was racing ahead in my thoughts, childishly assuming and presuming, she would set me straight, but as I felt again the warm feet cradled there in my hands, I thought no, there is nothing foolish in this, nothing to be ashamed of.

Lydia did not awaken until five in the morning, when I felt her stretch and uncoil into a sitting position. It was impossible, she said, that she had kept me prisoner there all night, with no pillow for my head, nothing.

I liked it very much, I said. Just to look up and see you there all night.

But it's time, she announced, rising and moving abruptly for the bathroom, that I washed myself and prepared for work.

So early? I asked, but she just shuffled briskly across the wooden floor, calling back that it would be a blessing if I prepared some coffee.

You can't take off a day? I called, heading for the kitchen to do as she requested.

It is impossible, she replied. I cannot afford it.

I can make up the money, I offered.

But you cannot help me if I lose my job, she replied.

Sure I can, I said, though she did not reply to that, and I wondered whether, with the water already running in the bathroom, she had heard me. By the time she emerged, her dark hair freshly tied back in a bun, she was impatient for the coffee and eager to set off. She said no more about the strange night we had spent together or about my suggestion that she take off the day, and I was content—more or less—to wait until evening to speak with her about the important things I had been thinking.

I had planned to spend the day writing a short introductory piece on the poems of Dr. Reis, based on the small selection I had read in the notebook, but this soon seemed to me not a good idea, for these were, after all, so far as I knew, unpublished works I had read, and there were inquiries to make before embarking upon a commentary. Soon I was studying the poems again, looking for the several items in which the name Lydia appeared. There were the by now familiar references to red lips and bare arms, the sad reflection that, once picked, the fruit inevitably withers. How often in the poems did Reis announce to his Lydia that he was frightened, blind, fearful of everything—though of course he never once showed her the poems, figuring, no doubt, that she understood anyway how he hated change and preferred meagerness—that was one of his favorite words—to fullness of life. He had wanted this understanding of him and his aversions to sink deep, to punish her for any brief flush of optimism or hope she might permit herself, so that she would not demand of him what in any case he would not deliver. That's how I explained it, at any rate. Had he been, I asked her once, a good lover?, to which she had replied, what do you think?, and then, before I could answer her, what a question!, so that I never heard her say what I supposed, that Reis had been tender and inadequate, as such a man was bound to be. A man, even in his ardors, committed to a chronic discomfort and self-loathing, or at least self-doubt, which in lovemaking is certain to be an unwanted frame of mind.

When she returned to the apartment, shortly after four, I had a pot of coffee ready on the burner, and two small fruit tarts set out on the table. She threw her coat down and asked—not a word about the food and drink—if I had seen the newspaper.

It's always too depressing, I said, though I nearly bought one at the kiosk when I was out to buy a few things at the bakery.

You may not want to eat a tart when you think about what is happening, she said.

Sit down anyway, I replied, and eat, please, and then you can tell me what I'm supposed to know.

You realize, she said, sitting at last and drinking down her expresso in a long, single swallow, that on most mornings the doctor did not buy a paper when he went out, and when he did, he reported that there was never anything worth reading. Of course he didn't mind contradicting himself, and in any case, if you're afraid always to find something depressing . . .

So tell me, I interrupted her, what was so important in the news today.

It was about Franco, she said. And how much our generals love him.

I didn't know that you were so interested in politics.

I try to understand things if I can.

But I can tell, I said, from the tone of your voice, that it's not some mild interest you have. You really are a political person.

It's not political that way, she corrected me, to look at the newspaper and figure out what is happening. Of course you can read the news every morning and simply accept what you read, and that way avoid having to think for yourself. Dr. Reis once told me, when we were having an argument, that he got his information from the paper that morning, and I said to him, don't you know, doctor, that you can't believe everything you read in the paper? He seemed surprised at that, even offended. He didn't expect such words to come from me, a woman, and one who washes the floors in a hotel.

But you didn't answer me, I said. You really do think of yourself as a political person, don't you?

I could be, she said, if I had the time. And anyway, how can you be outside of politics when all around you there are fascists who make everything political? Maybe poets can pretend that the world doesn't really exist, but I can assure you that I know it exists, and that no child of mine will ever hide from reality.

You're excited, I said, finding myself unequal to the intensity of her emotion. Agitated. Maybe the coffee was the wrong thing, when you came upstairs thinking about Franco.

But I want to be agitated, she said. I don't want to be relaxed and smiling when bad things are happening. That was the way of Dr. Reis, who taught himself to be calm and not to interfere. We are servants, he would say to me, servants. If there is injustice, we must let it be, because there is nothing we can do about it. Can you rule even yourself? he would ask me. Well, then, how can you expect to control what happens out in the world? It made me, I can tell you, a little sick when he spoke that way to me, even though I told myself that he was a wounded man, who did not have the strength to struggle.

So you forgave him? I proposed.

Sometimes I forgave him, she said. But when I thought of him teaching this terrible passivity to my child I said no, this man will not have his hands on a child of mine. None of that talk of fate and the gods for my children.

The discussion seemed soon to exhaust her, and when I got up to stroke her hair, to soothe her, she said no, I'm tired now, and I want to leave.

But you haven't had your dinner yet, I said, sounding like my own mother and afraid that somehow I had irritated her, driving her to flee from me.

I don't want dinner, she said. I want to take a bath and change my clothes.

You can bathe here, I said. I won't disturb you, I promise.

Don't promise so much, she said. Her eyes were steady, focused, her mouth active, churning, as if she was about to speak. Why don't you come and meet me at the hotel tomorrow, at four, and I can show you a part of the city you don't know? I won't be tired then, after a night of sleeping in my own bed.

You can't imagine, I tried, unable to stop myself, how much I'll miss just looking at you all night.

No, I can't imagine it, she said. And I'd rather not imagine it, not right now.

When I met her the next day in the lobby of the hotel she told me we were in a hurry. Did I mind taking a taxi? It would help us to get across the city to the area of the docks, where we were soon expected.

At the docks? I exclaimed. Why at the docks?

People are expecting us, she answered, pulling me by the wrist out toward the sidewalk.

But what is it about? I cried. For the first time now in these days with Lydia I was afraid. I had never seen her this way, her face with a look almost of anger. She was wearing a red bandana around her neck, and her hair was down around her face. A light rain was falling, and it was unpleasant to feel it on your eyelashes.

I'll tell you, she said, as soon as we get a taxi. I thought this would not be so easy, but she furiously waved down a speeding cab and dragged me in behind her, gripping my arm even when we were inside and the directions to the driver had been given. He said something back to her which of course I didn't grasp, and then, as the cab moved forward, the two of them continued to talk, back and forth, as if engaged in debate, the driver occasionally looking over his shoulder to assure himself it was a woman who was giving him all this trouble. Apparently, as she explained to me, the man had refused to take us as far as Lydia had requested. Too dangerous, he had said, though of course Lydia replied that he should be ashamed of himself, afraid to drive where she, a woman carrying a child, was not afraid to go.

But what is it? I repeated, until she said, finally, that we were to participate in a demonstration of some kind, I would approve of it, there was no question I would approve.

But how can I approve if I don't know what it's about? I asked. I could feel her watching me there in the cab, fierce in her insistence upon my complicity, and I tried not to look back at her, for fear she would see in my expression an element of challenge or mistrust. She was in the grip of something that concentrated all of her energies and would accept nothing less than my full approval.

It is, she said, turning then to look directly at me, the rain lashing the windows and drumming on the roof of the cab, a bit hard to give you the whole story, when we are not ten minutes from the docks. You'll need to know only that, some weeks before you arrived in Lisbon, the fascists killed some sailors, and that we are going today to tell the fascists what we think of them.

But that's so vague, I complained, hearing how the words would sound to her. It's so . . . unhelpful, really. I mean, when you call them fascists, are you referring to the police, or to some other group? And, I mean, how exactly do you intend to tell them what you think of them?

We have ways, she said. There will be speakers, for one thing, and then the numbers of people gathered together there, where the troubles erupted, will also tell them to beware of us.

I get it, I said, pulling back from her a little, unhappy to have been hurried along on this miserable day without having been properly informed of the probable risk, feeling with each jolt of the cab that I was being conveyed to a place I had no desire to see, none at all, and that my companion had devised for me a plot in which I could only be found inadequate. So you're taking me to a place, I intoned, where officials of the government will be provoked by an angry mob, in a country where the police are fascists and trained not to be gentle about disorder. A country, you remember, that is not my country. And when I thought you had a child to protect.

As we approached the outskirts of the waterfront district we saw that the sidewalks were lined with people hurrying ahead on foot, many of them carrying crudely constructed placards, many with red bandanas tied around their necks or worn as head scarves. The rain—improbable for Lisbon in July, Lydia had said—was by now falling very heavily, and as the traffic slowed I could see that the ink on the placards had begun to run, and that many people tried to hug the sides of buildings as they pressed forward. Lydia had obviously decided not to argue with me and not to defend her decision to drag me along without so much as a brief explanation. I had given her reason to believe in my slavish, unwavering devotion, and she had determined to see how far this devotion would carry me. It was entirely possible—so I saw for the first time—that her feeling for me might have played no part whatever in any of this, that I was, to her, nothing like what she was to me. Perhaps she believed, in a way not clear to her but compelling all the same, that my willingness to rise to this present occasion would reveal to her whether she had any feeling for me, beyond simple gratitude. At any rate, I was, beyond question, anxious and irritated and working very hard to hold at bay very old feelings of self doubt, and when I heard the air outside the cab humming with the sound of chants lifting above the clatter of the rain, I was overtaken by panic and regret. In the grip of that panic I saw, looming ahead through the streaming windscreen, what looked like masses of police, some of them on horseback, and I wasn't at all surprised that the driver stopped the taxi and ordered us—I could hear it in his voice—to get out. I asked Lydia how much to give him, paid the fare, and reluctantly climbed out with her, feeling the surging bodies on the sidewalk at once carry us forward with them.

She had me now by the wrist again, gripping me with one powerful hand, our faces wet with rain, some around us now with scarves wrapped around their faces. You see, she said to me, as if she could allay my fears, I told you there would be many of us. Up ahead there were cameras balanced on the shoulders of men who had positioned themselves on the hoods or roofs of parked cars. The sidewalks beneath our feet were littered with leaflets, the sound of tramping feet oddly providing a rhythmic counterpoint to the chants that rose and fell in alternating surges of sound. Lydia did not for a moment release her hold on my wrist and did not remove her eyes from the spectacle taking shape ahead. Up high, looking up into the rain, you could see that lights had been turned on somewhere, and that people had begun to throw things from the low roofs of buildings. The crowds moving up to the docks themselves had thickened now, and we were moving forward very slowly, body to body, so that I felt, for a brief moment, somewhat more secure, held there in that press of bodies. I couldn't see any longer what lay ahead, at the docks themselves, presumably, where the broad street narrowed, and the police were massed, but I knew that we were now very close to that line of defense, and that if the crowds did not disperse, thin out toward the adjacent streets, there would soon be a confrontation. I had seen this before, I thought, in newsreel films, and read about it in novels, narratives in which a man like me had no part. I asked Lydia when the speeches would begin, and where the speakers would gather. Was there a place, I asked, to stand and organize all of these bodies, but she said only that it was perhaps too late for speeches, and noted that the chanting had stopped.

At that moment we heard gunshots, first a single shot, then another, then whole volleys of rounds, one volley after another, until everyone began to shout, and we could feel a swelling agitation in the crowd, though without movement really, for movement was at the moment impossible, and Lydia said I should not separate from her, she at least would have some idea of what was happening and what to do, though how she could know anything in that mounting chaos was obscure to me, stuck as we were with all of those bodies blocking our view and with sounds of alarm breaking over us. But then I saw that the riders on horseback, lifted high above the heads of the surging crowd, had come partially into view, separated from us by a suddenly thinning rank of marchers, who were splitting and trying to run. The riders had their pistols drawn and were deliberately bearing down on us, inexorably wading into the crowd and dispersing us, now and then firing a shot, perhaps merely to intimidate, but more probably to wound or kill. Lydia, I shouted into the noise and panic, Lydia, I want us to get out of here, but she held on to my wrist and pulled me forward with her, and I said again no, Lydia, I'll not be pulled that way, I'll not, and when she tugged at me again, so that I knew that nothing I shouted at her would cause her to let go, I used my other hand to push her away, forced her fingers from the sleeve of my coat and said, one last time, come with me, Lydia, as I heard again a volley of gunshots and was freshly swallowed inside a mass of bodies fleeing urgently away, straining to break free of the others, turning away from the docks, in flight, frightened, like me wanting only to be somewhere else, not wanting to listen to any speeches or rebel anthems, nor to hear any further gunshots or tell anyone what we felt or thought.

I didn't care then, not at once, whether Lydia had turned to follow me out of there, didn't ask myself as I felt the ranks fully open before me whether she was one of those who refuse to yield or frighten and never swerve from what their instincts tell them must be done. I would not stand my ground, that was clear, in a battle that, so far as I knew, did not really involve me, and though I felt that this would be, all of it, a sure clarification for Lydia of a deep and permanent estrangement, I believed then that a woman who cared for me would not have exposed and tested me as she had done. If I was a disappointment, she had surely guessed that, in such a setting, I would be unwilling, afraid, negligible, a pale shadow of the man she would need. When I thought, running still, blocks from the action, slowing my pace but breathing hard, thought of Lydia's face, rigid with determination, innocent of any grief that might follow from this terrible afternoon, I knew that such intensity was not an air I could breathe.

Of course I did not hear from her that night, and as I ate a meal of day-old bread and cheese in the apartment and tried not to think about how close I had come to losing my life in a futile display of—what to call it?—bravado, perhaps, or stupid courage, I imagined, of all things, what Reis would have said on such a day. He had written, after all, about doubt, how it creeps over us no matter what we think or seek. Not for beings like ourselves, he would have said, to fling ourselves into danger, when doubt and ignorance attend all we do. Of course there was no trace of doubt or misgiving in Lydia, not on this day. Would she, I wondered, ever again relish the simple comfort of a cozy niche and a warm room secure from the turmoil out in the streets, a cell or haven where she could confront the normal doubts and fears that make us real to ourselves? It occurred to me that I should worry for her safety, however much the woman I thought I wanted now seemed to me a phantom I had willfully created, but there was nothing really I could do, not then, and I vowed simply to find out what I could when morning came.

At eight o' clock I awoke, made myself a pot of coffee, bathed, and only then phoned the hotel. Is Lydia there, please? I asked.

She is on the third floor, I was told. Shall I tell her who called?

No need, I said.

But I waited for her then, all day, all night, as if she might turn up at any moment. I made do with the two apples that were all I had left from our last excursion to the market. I tried to read a chapter of the novel I had carried with me from New York, but found myself distracted, and picked up instead the notebook of Reis's poems, and read again the lines, so many lines, that had puzzled and disturbed me before, this time with a new appreciation. Lofty and forbidding, Reis would always be, to a man like me, an inhabitant of another planet. And yet oddly, at this moment, I felt that he confirmed for me my swift, improbable fall from grace, my final estrangement from Lydia. The love, I read in Reis's notebook, that loves us, oppresses us with its wanting. That's it, I almost said aloud. That says it. Or perhaps, I thought, by way of correction, perhaps it is that both Reis and I belong to a category of men who define for women like Lydia the very meaning of inadequacy, men from whom more will always be expected than they can deliver.

Of course it was not—could not have been—love, could it, that Lydia had felt for me as recently as a week before? Not possible, I told myself, though it was hard, even now, to say what I had felt for her even two days before. Maybe Reis was right—though I hated to think so—when he wrote that the gods never give us much, and that what they do give is inevitably false, not to be trusted, however much we talk ourselves into believing it. Though in truth it was not in my nature to speak of the gods, who seemed to me implacably remote and fit really only for poets and fanatics.

I woke early the next morning, packed my bags and ordered a taxi for ten o' clock. At nine I phoned the hotel again and asked for Lydia. She is on the second floor, I was told. Shall I tell her who called?

No need, I said, relieved to know at least that she was back in her routine, day after day, where she belonged. Feeling a smile spread unaccountably across my face, I hung up the phone, straightened my tie, and slipped Reis's notebook into my briefcase.