Read Here Is Where We Meet for Free Online

there a cure?
    Dr Martins prescribes a spell with the martyrs!
    It seems he loved women, I tell her.
    I’ll tell you a story, she says. One day a rich patient asked him to visit her in her large house. He examined her and then asked the maid to fetch him a glass of water from, specifically, the pantry tap. He knew the pantry was far away. During the maid’s absence he performed the cure. When the maid returned with the glass of water, he drank it. Doctor, when will your next visit be? asked the woman from her sickbed. He pondered, winked swiftly at his patient, and said: When I’m thirsty, Señora. Upon which Dr Martins left.
    She laughs. A crystalline laugh, as if everyone in the café is clinking glasses. Nobody else gives any sign of hearing it.
    I see him played by Groucho Marx, she says.
    In the Davies Picture Palace the two of us had seen A Night at the Opera and Duck Soup. Her laughter in the cinema had been muffled as if she didn’t want to draw attention to our presence, which bordered on the illicit. Illicit since neither of us mentioned our visits to the Picture Palace to anybody else, and illicit, in a more direct sense, because she contrived and often succeeded in getting us in without paying. A question of narrow uncarpeted stairs and safety exits.
    All my books have been about you, I suddenly say.
    Nonsense! Maybe you wrote them so I should be there, keeping you company. And I was. Yet they were about everything in the world but me! I’ve had to wait until now, until you are an old man in Lisboa, for you to be writing this very short story about me.
    Books are also about language and language for me is inseparable from your voice.
    You’re trying to be clever. Don’t. Just think of me. Then you’ll learn endurance. Something which can only be learnt from a woman, never from a man.
    Scott in the Antarctic?
    Think of Scott’s wife. Her name was Kathleen. ’I regret,’ Kathleen said, ’I regret nothing but his suffering.’
    Why did you never read any of my books?
    I liked books which took me to another life. That’s why I read the books I did. Many. Each one was about real life, but not about what was happening to me when I found my bookmark and went on reading. When I read, I lost all sense of time. Women always wonder about other lives, most men are too ambitious to understand this. Other lives, other lives which you have lived before, or which you could have lived. And your books, I hoped, were about another life which I only wanted to imagine, not live, imagine by myself on my own, without any words. So it was better I didn’t read them. I could see them through the glass door of the bookcase. That was enough for me.
    I risk to write nonsense these days.
    You put something down and you don’t immediately know what it is. It has always been like that, she says. All you have to know is whether you’re lying or whether you’re trying to tell the truth, you can’t afford to make a mistake about that distinction any longer.
    I was thirteen when she had to have all her teeth pulled. She had been brought back home in a taxi. I stood at the door of the bedroom. She lay on her back, chin protruding, cheeks hollow through the new lack of teeth. I knew I had to choose between two things, the only two things I could do at that instant. I could scream or I could go and lie beside her. So I lay beside her. She was too artful to show her pleasure immediately. We both had to wait. After several minutes she pulled an arm out from under the bedclothes and held my wrist in her cold hand. She kept her eyes shut. Most people, she said, can’t stand the truth. It’s too bad but there it is, most people can’t stand it. You, John, I think you can bear the truth, we’ll see. Time will tell. I didn’t reply. I stayed there on the bed.
    Most of the time I’m lost, I tell her in the café with the embassy employees.
    That’s why you see clearly.
    Very little.
    Better than me!
    She laughs again. A cascading laugh