yuriy tarnawsky

The car moved solemnly down the street in which now there was no traffic, like a stately procession. The great river on the left (the Tejo or Tagus) was still as if paved with concrete. Roses stopped blooming in gardens behind iron fences like people holding their breath in excitement. Chinamen in Chinese laundries interrupted their work and stood at the door to see the yellow streetcar go by. Fadistas in the fado places stopped singing and stood among the customers crowding on the sidewalk, some of them with drinks in their hands, curious expressions on their faces. As those about to die a violent death supposedly see flashing through their minds moments before their end, Rodrigo Vanas saw the important scenes from his life displayed for his benefit in vivid tableaus in vacant lots between buildings and vegetable or flower gardens -- he as an infant in a long white shirt trimmed with lace half-buried in his mother's bosom, sucking avidly on her full breast; aged six months, sitting on the sofa in the living room, smiling a toothless smile and shaking a pink and white rattle; walking for the first time to school with a proud, solemn face and a brand new school bag on his back; a teenager, stealing his first kiss from a shy girl taller than he although of the same age, in the dusk under the chestnut tree in the empty school yard; his first day on the job in the accountant's office he worked at until two days ago, perched on a tall stool, hunched over a huge book crawling with numbers as if with ants; clumsily making love for the first time on the sofa at the home of the girl he almost married, on a Sunday afternoon while everyone else was away; he and his wife like two separate life-size photos pasted on cardboard, standing awkwardly at the top of the stairs in front of the door of the church after the wedding ceremony; he clumsily cradling his firstborn son, brick-red and screaming, minutes after his birth, his wife in the nearby bed looking proudly up at him; a few more scenes like that ending with the family huddled together by the dining room table with him announcing the news of the yellow streetcar two days ago. The car moved past the great suspension bridge, like a giant effortlessly stepping over the river in one stride, the Mosteiro dos Jeronimos (the Monastery of the Jeronimites) like a fancy garment of stone lace, the spectral-white Torre do Belem (the Tower of Bethlehem), the old prison the cells of which flooded with the rising tide so that the inmates in them didn't last more than six months.

The car was empty at times, with only a solitary fly or two crawling on the dusty window panes, and perhaps a skinny dog curled up under a bench, at other times full of people packed like sardines on the wooden benches and standing around them. The scenes alternated as if in irregularly flashing slowed-down strobe light. As long as he could distinguish them, Rodrigo Vanas looked out the rear window watching his family saying good-by to him, but when they merged into a dot, he turned the other way and faced the Atlantic.

The car climbed the last, steep hill, moving unsteadily from side to side like a drunk uncertain to make it to the top, reached the crest, huge as the setting sun trembled for a second or two, and plunged obligingly into the emptiness before it.

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