Authors: Antonio Tabucchi
… Another letter, hard to define the color, maybe colorless. My darling Clark, that’s what I’ll call you from now on, since no one knows your name here, you’ve given out two or three, but only the commander knows your real name, I’m going to call you Clark because with that wisp of hair on your forehead and that little ironic smile, you resemble an actor from my country that I really like, but I like you even more, and I like it when you wrap your strong arms around me at night, but tonight we can’t, my darling Clark, I know you’re going down to the valley with the squad they’ve given you, I’m going down with the Gesso squad, you’re headed to the eastern versant, I’m headed to the western versant, the commander finally ordered me into action, and this is why they had me parachute into these mountains, he’ll stay here by himself, but he’s got nothing to worry about, the Savoy soldiers make good guards, and tomorrow night
I’ll be back with you in your shelter, I promise, I think after this military action you’ll have to obey me and stop calling me Rosamunda, I don’t like it when you call me that, my name’s Marilyn, and you, Clark, what’s your name, won’t you tell me?… Another: bitter-green. Tristano, you’re awful, what you’re suggesting’s obscene, it was a paradoxical affair, not tied to my real life, my heart was always so full of this frustrated love for you, there was very little room for a man in my life, and that paradoxical situation was, paradoxically, the only one that worked for me … I wasn’t the one who betrayed you in the mountains, you wanted to believe that – and you know why, too – you know you needed to think that someone else was doing the betraying … Another: a rich color. Dear comrade, I’m not writing to you as commander, I’m writing to you as a comrade, if it’s all right to call you that even if you might not entirely sympathize with the deeper meaning of the word. I really appreciate your position and how honest you’ve been with me about your political views, I don’t want you to think that I consider you a bourgeois intellectual as you’ve accused me, and I also don’t want you to think of me as a diehard proletarian-lover, which is how you put it, and which didn’t offend me in the least, you should know this, because I value your ideas just as I hope you value mine, you’re brave and I respect you as a man and as a combatant, when all this is over, we’ll sit down and calmly discuss our ideas; for now, let’s just stick to firing at the enemy, and not at each other … Another: yellow. Tristano, I’m beginning to understand that no one wants to take responsibility for anything in your country, as
if everything that happened, what we came to rid you of, was no one’s fault, and this allowed some to flirt with communist countries, as if any kind of totalitarianism was good, no matter what, me, I’m staying in Spain for now, I don’t have the heart to go back to Cincinnati,
Spain’s different
, really, and the ghost of old Ernest surrounds me here, is my amulet … but why did you decide to stay behind at that small train depot in the middle of nowhere, why didn’t you come with me, was it because you were afraid to understand? Another: black, in black vestments. Tristano, I entrusted him to you, and you didn’t know how to protect him, and you’re not capable of cutting off her head, the head of Medusa who hypnotized him, you’re the same coward you were back then.
… Because he had a mirror, Perseus managed to cut off the head of Medusa, who turned people to stone with her stare, and when he held up his trophy by the snake hair, he was able to free Andromeda from the sea monster, and then he married her … The principal star in the Perseus constellation is Algenib, or Mirfak … Arabic names … the Arabs were such great navigators, always sailing the seas and studying the stars … In Arabic, Algenib means keep to the right, and this is the brightest star, easily seen with the naked eye … thousands of times brighter than the sun, but the most well-known star is Algol, which means the demon’s head, apparently sailors found this star the most useful, who knows why … the Perseids are shooting
stars that originate in the Perseus constellation, astronomers say they’re the remains of lasting comets, comets that have lasted god knows how long, you can see them around the tenth of August, maybe if you take a peek out the window, you’ll get to see them, I always did, it was like an appointment, every August tenth, but it must be long past August tenth by now, lying here, I’ve lost track.
I landed on this island late in the day. From the ferry, I watched the harbor approaching, and the small white town perched around the Venetian-style castle, and I thought, maybe he’s here. And I wandered narrow lanes that led to the tower, carrying my suitcase that every day grew lighter, and up every step I’d repeat to myself, maybe he’s here. In the small square below the castle, a terrace overlooking the harbor, there’s a cheap restaurant with old iron tables along a low wall, two flower beds with two olive trees, and bright red geraniums in rectangular pots. Old men sit on the wall and talk quietly, children run around a marble bust of a mustached captain, a hero in the Balkan Wars of the twenties. I sat down at a small table, set my suitcase on the ground, smoothed my skirt, and ordered a typical island dish, rabbit and onions, that smelled of cinnamon. The first tourists show up in early June. Night was falling, a clear night, the cobalt sky going bright purple, then darker, to indigo. Out on the water, the lights glimmered from the villages of Paros, which seemed only a few short steps away. Yesterday I
met a doctor on Paros. He’s from the South, I believe from our Crete, though I didn’t ask. He’s short and stocky, with a veined nose. I was watching the horizon and he asked if I was watching the horizon. I’m watching the horizon, I answered. The only line that breaks the horizon, he said, is a rainbow. An optical trick, pure illusion. And we talked about illusions, and though I didn’t want to, I spoke of you, I brought up your name without even trying, and he told me he met you once because he’d sutured your veins after you slit your wrists. I didn’t know, and I was moved, and I thought I’d find a bit of you in him, because he’d known your blood. So I went back with him to his hotel, the Thalassa, on the boardwalk, it was dingy, full of the sort of middle-class foreigners who spend their vacations in Greece and detest the Greeks. But he wasn’t like them, he was kind, shy when he undressed, and his member was small, slightly twisted, like those terracotta satyr statues in the Athens museum. And it wasn’t so much that he wanted a woman as a few comforting words, because he was unhappy, and I pretended to comfort him, for pity’s sake. I looked for you, my love, for every speck of you dispersed in the universe. I gathered what I could, from the ground, the air, the sea, the glances and gestures of others. I even looked for you in the kouroi on a far-off mountain of one of these islands, because you told me once that you sat on a kouros’s lap. It wasn’t easy getting up there. The bus left me in Sypouros, if that’s what this unknown village is even called, since it’s not on any map, and then I had to do the last three kilometers on foot, I trudged up the winding dirt road, which
further on, led to a valley of cypresses and olive trees. There was an old shepherd by the road, and I said the only word to him that mattered: kouros. And his eyes shone with a light of complicity as though he understood, as though he knew who I was and who I was looking for, that I was looking for you, and without a word, he pointed to a path, and I gathered up his guiding gesture and that brief light shining in his eyes, and I put them in my pocket, look, they’re right here, I could lay them out on this little patio table where I’m dining, they’re two more chips of the crumbled fresco I’m desperately gathering, trying to put you back together, along with the smell of that man I spent the night with and the rainbow on the horizon and this pale blue sea that makes me feel so anxious. And above them all is the barred window I discovered on Santorini, the one with a grapevine climbing the bars, which looks out over the vast sea and a small public square. The sea was endless kilometers, and the small square a few meters across, and I recalled some poems about the sea and about squares, a sea of shimmering tiles that I saw from a cemetery with you, and a small square and the people living there who’d seen your face, and I looked for you in the shimmering of that sea because you’d seen it, and in the eyes of the shopkeeper, the pharmacist, the little old man who sold iced coffee in that small square, because they’d seen you. And I put these things in my pocket, too, in this pocket that’s myself and my eyes. A priest stepped onto the church square. He was sweating in his black robes and reciting a Byzantine liturgy and the kyrie was colored by you. On the horizon, a boat leaves a trail of
white foam over the blue. Is that you as well? Perhaps. I might put it in my pocket. But in the meantime a foreigner, an early tourist – early for the season, but practically old herself – is on a payphone by the sea that’s open to the wind and anyone passing by, and she’s saying,
Here the weather is wonderful. I will remain very well
. And these are your words, I recognize them even in another language, though of course we know this is just a tourist’s attempt at translating something you’ve already said into English. Spring has passed for us, my dearest friend, my dearest love. And autumn’s come, with its yellowing leaves. No – it’s the dead of winter in this untimely summer cooled by a breeze on this terrace overlooking Naxos Port. Windows, that’s what we need, a wise old man in a distant country once told me, the vastness of reality is incomprehensible, and to understand it, we must lock a rectangle around it, geometry is opposed to chaos, that’s why men invented windows that are geometrical, and every structure assumes right angles. And is our life subject to right angles as well? You know, those difficult routes, composed of segments that we all must get through just to reach our death. Perhaps, but if a woman like me sits thinking on an open terrace by the Aegean Sea on a night like this, she understands that everything we think and live and have lived and imagine and long for, that all of this can’t be governed by geometry. And that windows are only a timid geometric form for men afraid of the circular gaze, where everything beyond the window frame might enter, senseless and irreparable, like Thales gazing at the stars. Everything I collected of you, crumbs, dust, fragments,
traces, guesses, intonations left behind in others’ voices, grains of sand, a conch, your past that I imagined, our supposed future, what I wanted from you, what you promised me, my childhood dreams, the love I felt for my father as a child, some silly poems from my youth, a poppy along a dusty road – that went into my pocket, too, you understand? The corolla of a poppy, like the poppies I’d collect in May, when I drove up into the hills in my Volkswagen, while you stayed home, consumed with your projects, the complicated recipes your mother left you, scribbled in French in a little black book, and I’d gather poppies for you, and you didn’t understand. I don’t know if you planted your seed in me, or if it was the other way around. Each of us is alone, with no transmission of future flesh, and most of all I have no one to gather up my anguish. All of them, I’ve wandered all these islands, all of them, searching for you. And this is the last, just as I’m the last. After me, no more. And who besides me would look for you? I won’t betray you, cut the thread. Not even knowing where your body lies. You surrendered to your Minos, whom you thought you’d tricked, but who swallowed you instead. And so I read epigraphs in every cemetery I can find, searching for your beloved name, where I might cry for you at least. Two times you betrayed me, the second, when you hid your body. And now here I sit at this table on a terrace, staring out to sea, eating rabbit seasoned with cinnamon. A lazy old Greek is singing an ancient song for coins. There are cats, children, two British tourists my age talking about Virginia Woolf, and a lighthouse in the distance that they don’t even see. I made you leave the
labyrinth that you forced me into, but for me there’s no exit, not even one that’s final. Because my life is over, and everything is slipping past, with no chance for a connection that will lead me back to myself or to the cosmos. I’m here, the breeze caresses my hair, and I’m groping in the dark, because I’ve lost my thread, Theseus, the one I gave you …
You like it? I thought about it all night, rewrote it in my head, word for word, but I’m sure you’ll improve it once you write it down; make it poignant, if you can … I’m not much good at heartbreak, but that’s exactly what this calls for, because this is a letter that truly came out of nowhere … Who wrote that letter to Tristano, and from what depths did it emerge, like a relentless sea-bass pushing up in time from the bottom of the ocean until one day it breaks the surface of the water? Was she still living, that woman searching for his grave? – and why – to dig her own beside it? Daphne was no longer there, but her voice remained, so her search for him remained as well. Can we survive ourselves? Who can say … Eyes wide-open in the dog days of August, with words from a letter but no letter in his hand, the air thick with viscous remorse, like ammoniac gas leaking from a punctured pipe, Tristano stood there, frozen in the blinding midday sun, naked as the day he was born, as he’d fled from the house, fled from voices invoking spirits that were invoking him … his hanging, flaccid member, a useless compass needle, indicating a non-cardinal point that he knew to be the
ground, and more than the ground, the bottom, and more than the bottom, the pit, and eternity … and the slight kiss of light on his body turned to shadow, blinding shadow that swallowed all … He raised his arms, groping, and he felt he inhabited nothing, was made of nothing, too. Was he already dead? Who could say, who could say … No one can say, writer, I’m the only one who knows, and maybe I don’t know, either, because you don’t just die on the outside, you die on the inside even more.
I’ll be honest, before you came I thought I’d tell you everything about Mavri Elià, no one’s ever mentioned her, and luckily, you ignored her in your book as well … I told myself that I’d make things right again. How foolish, as if things could be made right in this life … but I don’t feel like it anymore, Mavri Elià is Tristano’s and his alone, why should I give her to you, you don’t deserve her … at most, I’ll give you a few of the essential details, limit myself to the so-called facts. But what do facts mean?… the facts … let’s say this … the facts … when she disappeared, for instance … when she passed away, like someone might say who uses expressions like, it is my obligation to, and, my condolences. So stupid, people don’t die, it is my obligation to be precise, they’re only under a spell … a writer you must be familiar with said we’re under the spell of those who love us – I mean those who really really love us – and we wind up floating off the ground, like balloons, though no one sees, the only ones who see are those who love us, those who really really love us,
and they rise up on tiptoe, give a little hop, just a bounce, and grab hold of our legs, which at this point have turned to air, and they pull us down, keep hold of us, otherwise we’d start flying again, rising again, but they link their arm in ours, holding us down, down with them, as if nothing had occurred, as we do with certain pretenses in our life, a matter of social convention, so we won’t look bad in front of the shopkeeper or the tobacco-store owner who’s known you forever and might say, but look at that strange guy arm-in-arm with his wife who’s floating right off the ground … and that’s what happened to him, to Tristano, it was Sunday, and even if it wasn’t, make it Sunday, because I’ve decided that everything important to Tristano happened on a Sunday, and if you write it this way in your book, what you write will become true, because when things are written down they become true … and it was August, because I’ve decided all the important things in Tristano’s life happened on a Sunday in August, and if you write it this way, then it will become true as well, you’ll see … he wandered around empty Plaka and thought about how sad she looked at times, and about some sad evenings at Malafrasca, Daphne, pensive, staring out the open windows toward the plains, the gas lamps, and her saying in her Crete accent, Tristano, if there’s one thing I want, it’s not to be buried out there when I die, in that cemetery covered by fog, take me home and have me cremated, and scatter my ashes in my sea, around my Aegean islands, but nothing dramatic, please, something simple, just wander here and there, go from one island to the next, borrow a little fishing boat, take it a little ways out from
shore, not too far, at Sifnos, Naxos, Paros, and throw a pinch here, a pinch there, and also, please lie naked in the bottom of the boat, like when we made those trips because you got it into your head to fish for gambusinen, but you never did fish for them, and we’d wind up making love, the boat rocking crazily and you shouting, shipwrecked once more!… Tristano stopped at the men’s shop in Plaka, she was lying in the Byzantine chapel nearby, it was so hot … and he thought the shopkeeper might find a way to get her back because he’d known her since she was a girl, but the shopkeeper didn’t remember her, then Tristano went to the snack kiosk and asked the little man if he remembered a woman who bought candies there as a girl, her name’s Daphne, Phine, her friends always called her Phine, she’s lying in a coffin in the chapel close by, on the square, if you remember her, could you give her back to me? I’ve heard about these magic spells, and I’m trying … But the little man at the kiosk didn’t remember Daphne, sorry, he said, but Greece is filled with Daphnes … and then Tristano turned to the legless woman selling violets, and the legless woman selling violets remembered her at once, of course, of course, she said, that girl with eyes like two black olives, it was a long time ago, but I remember her very well, look, she hasn’t just vanished into thin air, she’s right there beside you, up by that orange tree, just grab her legs and pull her down … Spells are strange, writer, because just like that, Tristano swung round and there was Mavri Elià floating by an orange tree, and he told her, how silly, I’m old and must be going blind, you were right there behind me and I didn’t even
notice, thank god for the lady selling violets who made me see you were only under a spell … Thank you, ma’am, he said to the legless woman selling violets, and he pulled Daphne down from the tree and they started strolling around Plaka, but it wasn’t as he thought, it was a winter day, and Daphne was saying, come inside the door, they’re shooting – it’s dangerous – and you’ve killed a German officer.