While his wife, Cecilia, a neuroscience researcher, is still in New York, a man moves to Lisbon as a scout, with their little dog, Luria, to prepare the apartment that the couple bought a few years earlier.
Climate disruption, forest fires, the specter of Trumpism in the United States? This explains their move. “I settled in this city to wait out the end of the world. The conditions there are unrivaled,” explains Bruno, a Spaniard who we imagine to be in his fifties and the narrator of Your steps on the stairson the 16the novel by Antonio Muñoz Molina (Full moon, A winter in Lisbon, Sephardic),
Lisbon seems to him to be the ideal place for their “quiet wait and retreat from the collapse of the world”. A silent street, a balcony overlooking the Tagus and the hills on the other bank, a panoramic view of the large statue of Christ with open arms, the cargo ships going up the river and the planes preparing to land — with their deafening noise which revives in the narrator the memory of the September 11 attacks.
Confined to his apartment, the man makes rare forays outside their neighborhood, reading Montaigne or travel stories in the Arctic. With a bottle of white wine in the refrigerator, he, too in the cool of their apartment, has been waiting for his wife for days, weeks or months, stirring up memories of their meeting and their life together. “I have no one but Cecilia and I need no one else. »
He was recently dismissed, he tells us, with the same harshness with which he himself had shown the door to other workers, expressing surprise at having devoted the greater part of his life to exhausting activities which in fact “always seemed detestable” to him.
“I was a secret rebel, a fierce and superfluous anarchist, a very ineffective underling, because efficiency is also an illusion, a corporate banality,” he says, finally returning to this sort of idleness happy childhood, after a whole life in exile.
In any case, this is the story he tells himself — and that he tells us in the same breath. But should we believe it? In this bubble of suspended time, the man fuels a monologue that nothing, or almost nothing, will contradict.
Just like Luria, the dog, who herself waits for him in an “impatient and perfect immobility” when he ventures out of the apartment, he is on the lookout for the door of the building which opens. opens and closes, footsteps echoing on the stairs. And while the author ofA solitary walker in the crowd (Seuil, 2020, Foreign Medici Prize) shows us his antihero, reclusive and protected from the outside world as in a submarine, the character’s expectation also becomes a little bit ours.
Little by little, this still and contemplative novel, an intense stroll crossed by mad love and solitude, will delicately take on the appearance of an interior thriller.
A mechanism that will make a few squeaks emit, until a predictable final tear that it will be possible to interpret, yes, as a small end of the world.