Authors: Antonio Tabucchi
It’s been pouring down rain … No, I’m not referring to the weather – it’s scorching-hot out, just like yesterday – it’s one of Frau’s things, the things she reads, that says there’s been driving rain all day, while this morning everything was so blue, and then it goes on, I know perfectly well how elegant a gray rain can be, and how oppressive the sun is, how vulgar, and I also know it’s out of style now to be affected by changes in the light, but who said I want to be in style? These days, everyone’s so sharp, don’t you agree, writer?… no one’s affected by changes in the light … that’s just old-fashioned …
… But the topic was clouds … I was saying, how could there suddenly be a cloud going by, where did it come from, and how dare it, anyway? Someone like you wouldn’t know, a writer who reads the weather by casting out nines, even if he’s also produced a little humidity himself, if only through breathing, at times all you need is one little breath, the atmosphere’s so sensitive, one puff and you’ve made your extremely modest contribution to forming a cloud, which then supplies the shadow, and suddenly the whole countryside goes dark, this morning was so radiant, really promising, but the weather’s turned, who could have predicted, not a writer like you, I know your story … metaphors … your two main characters betray each other, but then they finally see the error of their ways and their betrayal cements their love even more, the music grows louder, they kiss each other passionately, the sun setting in the background, the lights go up,
the end
appears on the screen, the audience is moved, someone’s crying, and now it’s dinnertime, Sunday’s over, everybody home. Your Tristano deserves that sort of movie, uplifting … Too bad it’s not that way. Do you know what the true nature of betrayal is? – to betray, and so it also betrays the betrayer, it has no limits, like the shadow over the countryside, you begin by betraying a love, or a small love, I mean some little nothing, a cat, say, and then you wind up arriving at yourself, but you didn’t know you’d get there, otherwise you wouldn’t have made that first move, and it turns out it was exactly this move, this little bit of nonsense that seemed so unimportant, that’s become a catastrophe, an absolute torrent, a flood that
carries you off, you’re struggling, struggling, can’t keep afloat … Understand? Sure you do, you were in this country during those times, just like Tristano, and you’re not one of those people who acted as if nothing had happened, one of those who, if he wasn’t sleeping or looking at the highest peaks of art, then laurels, laurels, lift up your hearts … You understood as much as I did, I mean, that someone broke his agreements, right? – and breaking your agreement means betrayal. That’s what Tristano thought, but you didn’t have him think this way in your novel, you’re too kind, and I know that’s why you came running to my bedside as soon as I called, my dear writer, because you wanted to find out what you’d missed … you Peeping Tom … sorry to call you that since what you really do is use your ears – be patient with me – after all, it is pretty much the same thing; do you want to know how Tristano started to think this way, and especially, how he came to question why, something you didn’t do, and why on earth would you, if the principle, the ideal, was sound? So if the principle, the ideal, was sound, that meant people had to be killed for it? Blown sky-high? Blown to bits? Is freedom so precious, then, to be worth this price?…
Nous n’osons plus chanter les roses
, they wrote. Do you still dare to sing them? Can you understand how someone like Tristano thought about going to Delphi, a ridiculous solution if there ever was one, a non-solution solution … but what’s there left to do when everything is ashes? With no lord god of his own, he wound up putting his trust in a senseless pilgrimage back to the origins … but the origins of what? you might ask. I couldn’t say … of his civilization that
he picked up a rifle for, or what he thought was his civilization –
poareto di un zuanìn
– that’s what we called him in dialect – the poor little guy – the once valiant Anselmo who went off to war with his helmet on, that helmet of freedom on his head so he wouldn’t be too badly hurt, western civilization, writer … so let’s see what you can do with this one, will it be at all like that shadow over the countryside?… on the other side of the ocean, another West, a torch in one hand, an atomic bomb in the other, and insisting she’s the real West – so now what? – where’s the sun going to set? All right, all right … Well … I’m tired … I’m so tired all of a sudden, I was feeling so peppy … it must be all this business about freedom and equality … citizen writer, I think I heard it on our free morning broadcast, the daily reports are in on the state of equality based on data from the national institute for measuring freedom: the freedom stock index is down significantly, owing to a country a little to our south that’s chock-f of poor, awful people who need a lesson on freedom, and so the entire market has shifted south … dear listeners, we’re pleased to inform you that a branch of our stock exchange has opened in a soccer stadium in this country’s capital, with a high interest rate; this is something our new economists developed, which makes use of the old system, what’s known as direct from the manufacturer to the consumer: each stock index is attached to the testicle of one of those awful customers, and every time there’s any effort to raise the local stock market, the consumer in this country gets a nice jolt of electricity that he most unequivocally feels … it’s a personalized system … for those esteemed
customers of the female persuasion, the market index acts upon the ovaries, or on the fetus, in case of pregnancy … Writer, the freedom index is widespread, reaches customers the world over, our fatherland is the world over, our law is freedom, and a solemn thought is in our hearts … Go get some rest, I’ve kept you late. Or maybe it’s not late for you, but I’m tired, anyway. Hand me the urinal first, though, set it on the nightstand where I can reach it. But don’t worry, I can stick it in there on my own, I didn’t call you here to humiliate you.
Ferruccio said the person who writes in order to comment on life always thinks the fact that he’s commenting is more important than the comment itself, though he might not realize this. And what about you? – you write about life – so what do you think?…
… sorry for yesterday, if it was yesterday. Was it yesterday or this morning? I think it was yesterday, but I can’t be sure anymore … sorry … it’s true … I wasn’t particularly soft on you, but you probably don’t expect someone in my condition to be very nice … I know when certain things are raised … I mean, that novel’s so important to you, you wrote it, even won a prize … Frau tells me you weren’t feeling too well today … a headache, she says … she’s taken a shine to you … you’re torturing him, young sir, she tells me, hours and hours of listening to you in
this hot, airless room that stinks of disinfectant … But you don’t have a headache, I’m the one with the headache, you were just smarting from … I needled you about your comment on life … patience, now … anyway, sorry, I thought of a detail: when Tristano’s waiting for the Germans to leave the farmhouse, you describe his face as resembling an American actor’s from back then, and I’ve always asked myself how you came up with this, how you could have known … it’s impossible, that was just a little game he had with Marilyn, no one else knew, Marilyn’s the only one who called him Clark – a coincidence? – it must be – you’re too young, and everyone who knew him in the mountains is dead by now … I don’t like that passage in your novel … Clark waited, absolutely still, crouched for hours behind that rock; he’d often been the prey before, but other times, like now, he’d also played the role of the hunter … It doesn’t even feel like your writing, it’s like you copied someone else, your own writing’s far more capable, it explores nuances, chiaroscuro, you’re a different sort of hunter, an ambiguity detective, you’re always wary, even of yourself, you are, and here you drop me into some kind of neorealism, as if reality’s what a person sees, do you really think life can be sealed into biography? This idea doesn’t suit you, the notion of the official record … you don’t believe in biography, especially the kind that interprets and concludes, you know these biographies are only skin-deep, you prefer lifting the flap of skin and seeing underneath, the tissues are what interest you, I’ve been mulling this over the past two days … before you go, meaning, before I go, if you want to tell me the truth, I’d like
that … The morphine I just took hasn’t done a thing for the pain, no effect whatsoever, when you leave, tell Frau she’s giving me distilled water … inject him with distilled water, you’ll see: it will act like a placebo … I can just hear that kid doctor who’s treating my death according to local healthcare regulations … do me a favor, tell her to give me some real morphine, to put some morphine in this water clock of mine … a water clock of morphine … you like that idea? I believe in chemistry, so do you … listen to me, no, listen to someone who wrote before you, who wrote better than you, that writer who understood that even feelings are combinations of chemicals, he called them elective affinities, equilibriums predisposed by nature, understand?, it’s a question of atoms, an atom of this drawn to an atom of that, valences, they combine and you either love or loathe someone, depending on … sorry, I’m losing the thread … I was saying … was it something about religion? I think I was telling you something before about religion, but maybe not, anyway, I was getting to Tristano’s not believing in faith, if I can put it like that, well, he just didn’t have the gift, like those with faith might say, and Tristano just didn’t have it, and so he was at risk and wound up the way people like him wind up, those people who don’t have anything nonexistent to believe in, and so they wind up believing in people because people exist, which is the worst thing ever, but there’s also a worst of the worst of the worst, because Tristano believed in believing in people, but in my opinion, deep down, he didn’t believe in them, and this is the worst of the worst of the worst – am I making any sense? And this is why at his
lowest moments, he clung oh so quietly to a faith in those religions that priests have who try to find a little happiness by relying on something like the morphine Frau’s so stingy with, this thing that lasts as long as it lasts, and as long as it lasts it’s okay, but it’s not paradise, because paradise should be eternal, and Tristano was only staying in a hotel by the hour, with just a chance for a few good dreams. And this is why there came a time, like I was saying before, that he decided the solution might be to make a pilgrimage to a shrine no longer in use, a ruin that was now a tourists-in-shorts destination, and he was thinking that in this place the spirit of some defunct priestess might be able to explain the past and the present and the fleeing hours, what they might mean … life, in other words, that life you’re turning into biography, if a bit piecemeal … but I’ll tell you about this trip later, I’ll remember it better tomorrow … and I’ll make it to tomorrow, don’t worry, and even to the day after that, I’ll let you know when the movie’s over, I’ll know better than you, and in the meantime, you stick to writing Tristano’s biography, what you can write, what’s possible to write … Life … a novel read one time only, long ago … a philosopher said that, I can’t remember who, must be German, only a German could say something so grim and so true … speaking of lives and novels, I think I may have left out a third type of biography, the kind that’s fictionalized, sorry to keep on about this, but the book you wrote with your character inspired by Tristano – when someone writes in first person and is writing someone else’s life as if it’s his own – deep down, this becomes something of that third type. Why did
you write me in first person? That might seem normal to you, but, listen, it really isn’t. Why did you become Tristano? Why did you put yourself in his place? – and thirty years after it all happened, when Tristano wasn’t Tristano anymore, when there was no longer a reason for it, except your personal reasons, if we can speak of these … I don’t think there’s a writer out there who can say why he writes – and what does your life have to do with Tristano’s, anyway – why did you identify with him exactly?… Why do you write, writer? Are you afraid of dying? Do you want to be someone else? Is it a longing for the womb? Do you need a father – like you’re still a child? Life’s not enough for you? And where did you get the idea to write about Tristano – up in the mountains? But you were never in those mountains, not with a submachine gun in your hands, anyway, maybe you were up there on vacation, in some nice hotel with old-world, Central European charm, because the Cecco Beppe – the Franz Joseph – railway used to lead up there, I know about hotels like that and the people who go there, entrepreneurs, politicians, the rich and powerful … maybe you were surrounded by that sort and got the idea to write about Tristano – was it because you saw the Alan Ladd film
Shane
? Was this why, during that time of war, you had your Tristano obsessing over the Soviet tribunals and the Moscow Trials, why you had him act as supreme judge, in the name of a sacrosanct principle, as a condemnation of any attempt to stifle individual consciousness, a sacred principle that anyone wanting to create a free society had
to recognize? But how could you simplify Tristano that way? Who are you, writer, to possess the pangs of conscience of someone you’ve never met? Tristano seems like one of Charlemagne’s paladins, Charlemagne, the great avenger of betrayal, relentless toward traitors. But what do you know about real betrayal?… I think you just know the edges of it, the piddling stuff, nothing, what you solve with a pardon me, a bedtime confession, a transgression. You can’t possibly know the very heart of betrayal … Call for Frau, call her in here, tell her that even she’s betraying me, betraying me for my own good or what she thinks is my own good, such a stupid betrayal … instead of morphine she’s pumping me full of distilled water, now’s the time for another injection, I can tell by the light that it must be five in the evening, six at the latest, just listen to the cicadas, this is when they sing like crazy,
a las cinco de la tarde
, they’re afraid the male won’t come back again, they’ve been calling him all day … he’s coming, he’s coming … the male cicada always comes back, even if it’s at the last moment, males keep others waiting, they’re cruel, but then he returns and he finally impregnates the female, and then for her it’s all over, she’s served her purpose, what she sang for, the fool, he’s filled her belly, she lays her eggs and croaks so another cicada will be born that will spend another summer singing, calling for the male to impregnate her … Call for Frau, let’s continue this later, the pain’s getting worse, and it’s making me crabby … can’t you see I’m in a bad mood?… and you, too, go lie down, rest at noon, pale and thoughtful, you deserve a
little nap, writer, or go out to the vineyard for a breath of fresh air, since Frau says I’m keeping you prisoner in this dark room that stinks of disinfectant.