Night Train to Lisbon - Pascal Mercier
🎙️ Radio Narration: Night Train to Lisbon
"Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us—what happens with the rest?"
Tonight, we board the Night Train to Lisbon—not simply a train across countries, but a journey through memory, identity, and the unspoken depths of a human life.
The author behind this literary voyage is Pascal Mercier, the pen name of Peter Bieri, a Swiss writer and philosopher born in Bern in 1944. Before turning to fiction, Bieri made his name as a professor of philosophy, writing on the nature of mind, freedom, and human consciousness. When he turned to literature, he brought with him this philosophical lens—layering his stories with reflections that linger long after the last page.
Published in 2004, Night Train to Lisbon became an international sensation, translated into over a dozen languages, and praised for its quiet intensity. Critics have called it “a philosophical feast” and “a hymn to curiosity and the unexamined life.” It is a book that doesn’t merely tell a story—it invites you to pause, to think, to wonder about the roads not taken.
The story follows Raimund Gregorius, a reserved Latin teacher in Switzerland. One ordinary day, he stumbles upon a book of Portuguese writings by the mysterious Amadeu de Prado. Struck by its depth and beauty, Gregorius does something extraordinary: he walks away from his classes, his routines, his entire familiar life—and boards the night train to Lisbon.
As he uncovers Prado’s story, Gregorius is drawn into a tapestry of love, resistance, and philosophical searching. Along the way, he begins to question the shape of his own existence: “Is it possible,” Prado once wrote, “to be a stranger to oneself?”
The novel unfolds on two levels: the outer journey through Lisbon, its streets steeped in history, and the inner journey of the self—into memory, choice, and the countless lives we never live.
Readers often speak of the book’s atmosphere: the way it slows you down, the way it whispers instead of shouts, the way it opens quiet doors in the mind. For anyone who has ever wondered about paths left unexplored, or the secret lives of others, Night Train to Lisbon offers a haunting, meditative ride.
So tonight, as the train winds its way toward Portugal, it carries with it not just passengers—but questions, memories, and the unspoken dreams of a life still unfolding.
First Reading (Part 2)
The Day That Ended Everything – Reading Script (3 Minutes)
Gregorius began like countless other days. // At quarter to eight, he came from Bundesterrasse and stepped onto the Kirchenfeldbrücke, leading from the heart of the city to the Gymnasium. // He did that every day of the school term, always at quarter to eight. (Pause)
Once, when the bridge was blocked, he made a mistake in Greek class. // That had never happened before, nor did it ever happen again. // For days, the whole school talked of nothing but this mistake. // The longer the debate lasted, the more it was thought that he had been misheard. // At last, even the students who had been there were convinced: Mundus, as everyone called him, could not make a mistake in Greek, Latin, or Hebrew. (Pause 1 sec)
Gregorius looked ahead at the pointed towers of the Historical Museum, up to the Gurten, down to the Aare with its glacier-green water. // A gusty wind drove low-lying clouds, turned his umbrella inside out, whipped the rain in his face. (Pause—let the weather set the mood)
Then he noticed a woman standing in the middle of the bridge. // She leaned her elbows on the railing, reading—in the pouring rain—what looked like a letter. // She must have held the sheet with both hands. // As Gregorius came closer, she crumpled the paper, kneaded it into a ball, and threw it into space with a violent movement. (Pause 1 sec—dramatic tension)
Instinctively, Gregorius walked faster. // Only a few steps away, he saw rage in her pale, rain-wet face. // Not a rage expressed in words, but a grim, inward rage smouldering for a long time.
Now the woman leaned on the railing, outstretched arms, slipped her heels out of her shoes—now she jumps. (Pause 1 sec—heightened tension)
Gregorius abandoned the umbrella to a gust of wind, threw his briefcase full of notebooks to the ground, and uttered a string of curses unfamiliar to him. // The briefcase opened, notebooks slid on the wet pavement.
The woman turned. // For a few moments, she watched unmoving as the notebooks darkened with water. // Then she pulled a felt-tipped pen from her coat pocket, took two steps, leaned down to Gregorius, and wrote a line of numbers on his forehead.
“Forgive me,” she said in French, breathless, with a foreign accent.
“But I mustn’t forget this phone number, and I don’t have any paper with me.”
Now she looked at her hands as if seeing them for the first time.
“Naturally, I could have …” // And now, looking back and forth between Gregorius’s forehead and her hand, she wrote the numbers on the back of her hand.
“I … I didn’t want to keep it, I wanted to forget everything, but when I saw the letter fall … I had to hold on to it.”
✅ Reading Tips:
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Bolded words/phrases = emotional peaks, pauses for dramatic effect.
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Weather and movement: emphasize gusty wind, rain, and umbrella for tension.
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Woman’s actions: slow pacing for suspense, sudden speed for her jump.
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Dialogue: French, breathless—pause after commas to let the emotion resonate.
Gregorius in Lisbon – Reading Script (3 Minutes)
He had drunk tea in Mariana’s house, a red-gold steamy Assam, and told her about Adriana. // He wanted her to say something about it, but she merely listened in silence.
But when he mentioned the used coffee cup and the full ashtray that had apparently been there for three decades, she narrowed her eyes like somebody who suddenly thinks he’s picked up an important clue.
“Be careful,” she said to him as they parted. “With Adriana, I mean. And let me know how it goes with João.”
And now, with Schubert’s sonatas in his bag, he took the ferry to Cacilhas to visit a man who had gone through the hell of torture without losing his composure.
Once again, Gregorius covered his face with his hands. // If somebody had prophesied a week ago, when he had sat in his Bern flat correcting Latin notebooks, that seven days later, in a new suit and with new glasses, he would be sitting on a boat in Lisbon, hoping to learn something from a tortured victim of the Salazar regime about a Portuguese doctor and poet dead for more than thirty years – he would have considered him crazy.
Was he still Mundus, the myopic bookworm, who had taken fright because a few snowflakes had fallen in Bern?
The boat docked, and Gregorius slowly climbed up to the retirement home. // How would they understand each other? Did João Eça speak anything but Portuguese?
It was Sunday afternoon. People were visiting, carrying bunches of flowers. // At the home, the old people sat wrapped in blankets on the narrow balconies, because the sun kept disappearing behind clouds.
Gregorius got João’s room number at the gate. Before he knocked, he inhaled and exhaled slowly a few times; it was the second time that day he had stood at a door with a pounding heart, not knowing what was in store.
His knock wasn’t answered, not even the second time. // He had already turned to go when he heard the door open with a slight squeak.
He had expected to see a man in shabby clothing, who often sat in his bathrobe at the chess board.
But the man who appeared in the doorway, noiseless as a ghost, was quite different.
✅ Reading Notes:
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Bolded words/phrases = emotional emphasis, suspense, and internal reflection.
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Pauses after long sentences or clauses allow listeners to absorb tension.
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Slow down during the ferry, retirement home, and suspenseful knock sections.
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Use volume variation: softer for introspection, stronger for fear, surprise, or awe.
Loneliness and Reflection – Reading Script (3 Minutes)
“He often complained in his last year that he didn’t understand what it really meant, the loneliness we all feared so much. // What is it that we call loneliness? he said.
It can’t simply be the absence of others. You can be alone and not lonely, and you can be among people and yet be lonely. // So what is it?
It always concerned him that we could be lonely in the middle of the hustle and bustle. All right, he said, it isn’t only when others are there, when they occupy the space next to us. // Even when they praise us or give us advice in a friendly, clever, sensitive way: even then, we can be lonely.
So loneliness is not something simply connected with the presence of others or with what they do. Then what? What on earth is it?
He didn’t talk to me about Fátima and his feelings for her. “Intimacy is our last sanctuary,” he used to say. Only once, that I can remember, did he get carried away. // “I lie next to her, I hear her breathe, I feel her warmth – and am horribly lonely,” he said. What is it? WHAT?”
Solidão por proscrição. Loneliness through ostracism, Prado had written. // When others withdraw affection, respect, and recognition from us, why can’t we simply say: “I don’t need all that, I am self-sufficient?”
Isn’t it a horrible form of bondage that we can’t acknowledge that? Doesn’t it make us slaves of others? What feeling can we summon to protect ourselves?
Gregorius bent over the desk and read the faded words on the notes on the wall.
Extortion through trust. // “Patients confided the most intimate things to him, and also the most dangerous,” said Adriana. “Politically dangerous, I mean. And then they expected him to reciprocate. He hated that. He hated it from the bottom of his heart. I don’t want anybody to expect anything of me,” he said and stamped his foot.
The dangerous virtue of patience. // “Paciência: in the last years of his life he developed a real allergy to this word. His face darkened abruptly whenever anybody mentioned patience. Nothing more than a blessed way of missing out on yourself, he said, annoyed. Fear of the fountains that can shoot up inside us. I understood that properly only when I learned of the aneurysm.”
The last note was longer than the others: If the force of the soul is more powerful than we are: why then attach praise and blame? Why not simply say: ‘was lucky,’ ‘had bad luck’? // And it is more powerful than we are, this surge; it always is.
✅ Reading Notes:
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Bolded words = emotional weight, internal conflict, key ideas.
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Pauses after questions or profound observations let the audience reflect.
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Slow down for lines about loneliness and intimacy, slightly faster for the explanatory notes.
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Emphasize internal tension, like stamped foot, fear, and fountains inside us, to convey physical and emotional intensity.
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