MURMÚRIOS DE LISBOA XLIV

Heathcliff - Chapter III
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Lago no Jardim Botânico

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It suddenly struck me – you’re not a Paul Auster Book. You’re Heathcliff. From Wuthering Heights. And since I couldn’t stop seeing those cynical blue eyes in my mind, I decided to take a good look at you again. I never did this, you know. Ever. But I had to. Don’t ask me why. I just had to. It’s like in those movies with strange endings where characters do crazy things because they simply must.

Maybe it’s because you’re Heathcliff and you just came out of Emily Brontë’s novel to torment my Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre soul with your dark cynical blue eyes piercing mine and your hidden rage and your incapacity to adjust anywhere. Your eyes haunted me for a whole week and although I tried to understand what they were saying, I couldn’t. I had to drown in them again. So I did.

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I had a good excuse. I was going to buy a present, order a poet’s book and look for Thomas Moore’s “Utopia”. The sales woman asked you for Utopia and you said there was none. And now I know your name. She was fat and nice and dumb. And then you came in my direction, looking straight at me, with those blue dangerous eyes, like a tiger approaching it’s pray. There was no shuddering this time, like there hadn’t been before, I realized. This time I was sure I could see lust in them. They were saying: “Well … well … well … just look who came to see me …” You knew. And you were happy. But in my eyes there was no indication of what I was feeling and I turned my back to you again. And maybe that surprised you and annoyed you.

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And so you played a game with me. You rapped my present and then you helped the other sales woman to search for the poet’s book on the internet and all the time you were being very professional about it and not even looking at me. And the fat girl likes you, and you know she does. She kept flirting with you, right in front of me. And everything was so very Heathcliffish of you, wasn’t it?

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So I studied your hands, instead. They’re smaller than I thought and you eat your fingers. You’re even thinner than I remembered – an almost kind of sick thinness - and less tall and there’s an even greater, more dangerous coldness in those eyes than I had noticed. Because maybe you’re used to this. Maybe you’re used to women losing themselves in those watery, clear, almost transparent blue cynical dark eyes of yours. Your voice is softer than I remembered too, it has a slippery quality in it, and it reminded me of a snake. And we were laughing and chatting and searching for the book, but I felt dislocated, like an intruder.

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And now you know my name. In the end you practically sent me away. You said, “well don’t worry, you can go if you’re in a hurry, we’ll take care of the order.”, and you didn’t even look at me when I left and kept on talking to the sales woman. But that made me smile. What the hell was that, Heathcliff?

And now I wonder if you were doing it on purpose because I didn’t shudder when I saw you and all you saw was this huge wall in my eyes. And I wonder if you were pretending aswell.

And you know what? This is amusing, actually. Because I still haven’t quite figured what kind of book you are. Maybe it’s a game you play. Or maybe you were sulking. And since I didn’t quite figure it yet, I guess I’ll have to go back to your bookstore.

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But there is something you don’t know about me, Heathcliff. You don’t know that I am writing about you. You don’t know I chose you as my subject. So I will keep playing this game with you. It might be a dangerous game. But I like playing with fire, especially a fire that has a good story in it.

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Can a character surprise her author? You certainly surprised me. Everything I ever wrote about Lisbon brought me to you. You’re extremely interesting, but not just for the reasons you might think.

Yet, you are The Character an author dreams with. The real thing.

And can a writer surprise her character? Maybe …