Procession of Shadows: The Novel of Tamoga

I.

MORTES’S STORY

It was toward the end of September, when the drowsiness of autumn was beginning to make itself felt; the hours went by more slowly and time itself seemed to stagnate like the forlorn waters of the salt marshes around Tamoga.

A traveling salesman, said or thought absentmindedly all the bored men gathered in the station with nothing better to do as dusk fell when they saw first the enormous suitcase and then the short man comically veering from side to side in his efforts to drag it along the platform. A dung beetle, someone in the group joked, trying to breathe new life into their flagging conversation. They stared at the stranger for a few moments longer, but nobody could be bothered to add another comment. They watched the train disappear into the endless rain, feeling a twinge of disappointment, a nostalgia for times past.

That man, the stranger, perhaps himself never even knew why he had chosen this town. Or perhaps it was not he who had chosen it, but chance, fate, his lucky or unlucky star, one inevitability leading to another.

We learned afterward that he had agreed to meet a woman in the town, and that she—still young, almost beautiful, with the look of someone recently widowed—was his sister-in-law. We learned from Inspector Cardona the story of his flight, their crazy love affair. We also learned (she, the sister-in-law, allowed herself to be interrogated at length by the inspector; sad but serene, proud of her love, docile and disbelieving in the end, past caring about anything or anyone) that his name was Mortes and that he was a traveling salesman, that he was soon to be fifty, had a wife and five children, and a blameless past. Everything very ordinary and inoffensive, depressing. And yet it seemed that he, Mortes—the least mysterious man in the world—had come to our town to play out an apparently absurd little farce.

For us, for our curiosity, it all began one Tuesday in September at the start of autumn, the day he arrived. From the window of his second-class compartment, Mortes would have gazed out at the rain-swept platform, the faded sign with the letters T and M almost completely worn away, so that it read A OGA. He would have been greeted by a jumble of clouds and roofs. Seeing this, he must have thought the town was gloomy enough for what he had in mind. It’s also likely that what persuaded him to get off the train at the last moment was weariness, boredom, the conviction that he had never been in this town before; the certainty that he would not be recognized, that he had never dragged his huge leather trunk through the streets of Tamoga or put on his professional smile in any of its stores or businesses. He must also have known and felt relieved that he had never leaned on any counter chatting to the inevitable old maid about ribbons and buttons with the restrained passion, the secretive air, of someone making an indecent proposal. It’s also likely he was attracted by the town’s location and the fact it was so close to the border (we came to suspect this later on, when the woman appeared), not to mention that from the start he thought he could rely on our stupidity and collective curiosity, our lack of foresight—although none of these suppositions help explain the end of this story, if it can be said to have an end. It might also simply have been that he was crazy or scared. Or possibly he got caught up in his own game, the impossible lie he wanted to believe.

As I said, he, Mortes, arrived in Tamoga at the start of autumn on a sad, rainy day. Despite the fact that he was only among us for a few hours, he is still remembered with great relish, especially because of how his story ended; many people swear not only to have seen him, but to have talked with him. He had the gift of metamorphosis, apparently, because each one of us remembers him differently—although it’s possible that all of our impressions were equally correct: happy, timid, forlorn, a joker, sneering, respectful, cynical, dull, likeable: he is all those things in our accounts of him. In the end we’re left with fascination, and the impossibility of telling his story, because in this case the words are more concrete than the facts, and a story is really only worth telling when words can’t exhaust its meaning. We’re also free to imagine and attribute multiple, contradictory, and obscure objectives to that rather short, rather skinny, rather ungainly stranger who chose Tamoga as the stage for his performance. Now Mortes is nothing more than words and a vague image already beginning to fade in our memory: a broad face with ill-defined features, dun colored, as if made out of mud. His eyes were red-rimmed and his mouth a slash; his voice a nasal drawl that sometimes turned into a deep gurgling like the sound of water running through pipes. An unremarkable man who wore (not elegantly, but not shabbily either) a crumpled brown suit and an oversized trench coat. That is how we see Mortes in our memory, and that is how Don Elío, the stationmaster, must have seen him that first afternoon.

You get used to all kinds, especially at my age and this being a frontier station, old Don Elío will have said. But there must’ve been something wrong with that one—he wasn’t quite right in the head. Look: he was on the quarter-past-seven train, which that day was almost on time. It always stops here for five minutes, that’s long enough. I rang the bell for it to depart and right across from me saw the man suddenly leap up from his seat and rush into the corridor with his trunk. He got off just as the train was pulling out. Because he was just absentminded, maybe? Well, listen: thirty seconds before, he had been staring calmly out of his compartment window. He looked at the people on the platform, at me, at the station, smoking as calmly as though he was going somewhere else, as if he wasn’t at all concerned that this station was Tamoga, though the big sign was there right in front of his nose. He heard the bell as if it was a call to Mass and then, at the very last moment, he was in a rush, jumping off the moving train with his trunk and everything. He almost killed himself. You should have seen him: standing there on the platform as if he had fallen from heaven, arms out wide like a scarecrow.

In any event, he wasn’t a statue there for too long. He headed for the main exit and walked out into the rain and blustery wind of Tamoga. The taxi drivers sitting bored in their cabs outside the station watched him cross the square without any hope of a fare. He waved the porters away too, and dragged his trunk over to the coach parked under the plane trees. He sat with the other few passengers in the ramshackle bus, staring blankly out at the rain and the square, the dripping trees, and the showy sign by the side of the main road proclaiming in red letters: WELCOME TO TAMOGA, until One-Armed Gómez, the conductor, appeared in front of him. According to Gómez, the stranger looked like he was convalescing or completely exhausted, as if he had been in a hospital or was returning from a long trip. The stranger dried his face with a handkerchief and patted his shoulders to shake off the raindrops. He asked how much a ticket was, and how far it was to town. He seemed relieved at the answers, as though he was in a hurry and the three kilometers were one less thing to worry about. He sat examining his ticket, as if the small pink piece of paper announcing Bus Service Tamoga/Station or Vice-Versa was an object of great interest. After a while, he raised his head:

Perhaps you can help me…Do you happen to know of a hotel without too many bedbugs or fleas? he asked the conductor with a smile.

I mentioned the London Hotel, Gómez said. I don’t know why, but I took a liking to him. Perhaps because he was different from the passengers I usually get. He put the coins in my left hand, and made no fuss when he saw my stump. He seemed to find it quite natural that a conductor might have an arm or a leg missing, so long as he doesn’t let anyone get away without paying. After that he said thanks, pressed his face to the window, and stared out at the marshes the whole time until we got into town.

He took a room at the London, wrote his name and all his details in the hotel register, putting up the whole time with Doña Milagros’s rude stare. As usual, she was sitting bolt upright on her wheelchair throne behind the counter, knitting. (In our sentimental way, some of us suspected that Doña Milagros opened the hotel not simply to show everyone in Tamoga how resilient and capable she was—that she was in no way an invalid and would never accept pity from anyone—but also in the secret hope that one day her husband would make a nostalgic leap back to Tamoga. He had abandoned her in the middle of their honeymoon when she had her accident; terrified at the thought of all that this implied—with no money or job, and unable to bear his wife’s temper a day longer, in a moment of lucid panic he must have glimpsed the inferno awaiting him. In those days they lived close to the Portuguese quarter, in a house belonging to one of Doña Milagros’s uncles. An