Authors: Antonio Tabucchi
I knew it was her, even when she was just a figure on the horizon, a bug, because I could make out those familiar, ample hips like an amphora vase where I’d laid my hands and my body; to the left, on the hill, were two Ionic columns, of course I knew they were really the towers from my window, but the painter who’d created this scene, who paints dreams, had transformed these towers into two Ionic columns, and little by little, getting closer, her legs also seemed like two columns, and a delicate vine climbed up to cover her pubis, and he wondered if she hadn’t become a tree, though the tree was moving, he was in his shroud, in the middle of this room that was flung wide open to the countryside, it was an idea of a room and inside this idea of a room was an olive grove that could only be the grove of Delphi, because the trunks were so gnarled and ancient, they could only be those of Delphi, the places they’d passed through in their life dancing dances with immemorial movements though not a trace remains, to the sound of a reed flute that we never hear, that guides our dancing, he hummed “Tha Xanarthis,” and she peeked out from behind an olive tree and said, of course I’m back, I had to come back, my darling Tristano, I thought you
were dead, I looked all over the islands for you, I wrote you a letter, then let the wind take it, then a firefly wandering in a field of reaped wheat told me you were here, Tristano, and so I came. It’s true, he said, Mavri, my love, the wheat’s been threshed and the sheaves are yellowing in the fields, but it’s never too late to revive the stalks. Saying this, he lifted his shroud, she was very close now and with his head bowed, he whispered, do you see? – my leg’s being devoured by gangrene, the flesh is rotten and the worm is in the fruit; it’s so bad, the worm is in the fruit. He was naked, with just a kerchief around his neck like the reapers wear in the field. Tristano, she said, I can still see your cock, so you’re not completely rotten yet, maybe there’s still a little time. Daphne, he said, how notarial our life is, I’m here in
articulo mortis
. Well, I like you all the same, she said, even if your legs are full of maggots: your trunk is healthy, and that is where your heart is beating. Then they lay down, and the countryside around them turned into a hot, wide-open plain; over the hills the orange light of the setting sun sent the shadow of the Ionic temple all the way down to Daphne’s belly. You know, Daphne, he said, I forgot about backlighting, about the candle I always kept lit in a house on the shore, and one night you walked by in the frame of the window as though you were walking on air, that’s the most important memory of my whole life, and I was about to forget it, do you remember that house we once lived in, the empty rooms, the piano on the ground floor, the sound of the surf, the smell of algae that I called the smell of aldae because the woman who came to clean for us was named Alda? She
didn’t answer, her breath came rushing in his ear, like panting, here I am, she breathed like she did at certain moments, here I am, Tristano, hold me tight, and just then the beacon light came on from down the coast, the plain was dark by then, but luckily the beacon light was on, and there was nothing to be afraid of.
… Do you know that poem where a mother dressed in black is crying over the body of her son killed in the square? Or did I already ask you? Frau read it to me the other day … you left one morning in May, it goes, and now the fountain is dry, I wish you water forever … and then it goes on to say that she unties her white hair and covers that withered flower of a face … half past midnight, the hours go by quickly, even if it isn’t half past midnight, that’s what I’m guessing, Frau turned on the lamp at nine, I’ve been here, not moving, not talking, and who would I talk to? – I’m alone in this house now … did you notice how nicely that poem works for me?… seems like it was written just for me, like the writer knew … but it’s not true that I don’t have anyone now, I can talk to you, even if all you do is listen, that’s something, that’s plenty … Thank you.
Writer, you see how I go back and forth in time, I wander, can’t tell now from then, can’t separate the two, which brings Papee to mind – but who was Papee? – did I ever meet him? Maybe he was a character in some novel I read once, a nice boy
who fought for his country’s freedom, Burundi, or somewhere like that, and the memory sweeps everything along with it, into the same water, but you have an advantage: I’m teaching you that a clock’s time doesn’t run at the same pace as a lifetime, and any time you’ll have to discuss this, you can say you learned it from an old man about to croak who went back and forth in time as he pleased, and there will be those who think this is a trick of some kind, because they don’t care if they understand, they’ll think it’s all a trick, and that memory … There are so few memories remaining to us, writer: Caesar’s commentaries, Augustine’s confessions, certain
de profundis
, like Molly’s, a
de profundis
of the womb, though a man wrote it, and mine too is a
de profundis
… you know, writer, I’d really like to have a womb, to be a woman now, a beautiful, ripe young woman, the sap circulating in my body, how beautiful … lifted by the moon like the tides, a woman who was the origin of the world, and here I am instead, my two dried-up balls being devoured by gangrene, while I lie here blowing a bunch of hot air.
… Rosamunda, Rosamunda, on such a lovely evening, I truly am believing it’s fairy dust I’m breathing, a thousand voices, thousand choices, thousand hearts are all rejoicing, such happiness is ours, such joy beneath the stars … Oh, wri-ter, all of my love is for you, oh, wri-ter, I’m thinking only of you … You know, it’s really strange: I called you and I was only thinking about myself, I really wasn’t thinking about you, and since you’ve been
here, even though you haven’t said a word, I’ve started thinking about you. For one reason: you’re writing me. And at times, you seem to
be
me a little, and so I ask myself if what I’m telling you is mine because I’m telling it, or is it yours because you’re writing it … Do things belong to those who say them or to those who write them? What do you think? Think it over – what’s it matter to me – why should I give a damn at this point?
You and I need to make a pact. I thought about it all night … what I mean is, I have something to ask you, too, so thinking about it some more, I want to do a little bartering. But first let’s be clear on something, because I don’t want you to convince yourself that I was the one who asked you to come … it was you, you know that better than me, I whistled and you came running, because that’s all you were waiting for … it was just too tempting … Sorry I’m only telling you this now, agreements should be worked out early on, like gentlemen do, sealing the deal with a handshake, but I was saying, and then I got a bit lost, even if I wanted to tell you first thing, believe me … okay, here it is … what I propose is that you say something in return … I want us to make a pact here, because I know you writers, at just the right moment, you’ll see something, maybe it stands out, you think something like this has nothing to do with the rest of the story, it interrupts the flow, and so long, into the garbage it goes … I’m telling this story but you’re the one writing it down, and who’s to guarantee you’ll include something
if you think it’s insignificant and doesn’t matter?… But it does matter, it matters a great deal, and that’s why we need to make a pact: I tell you what I promised to tell you, but you write this detail down, because they say when something’s written down, it holds a different value … and be sure they know that it’s not just anybody asking for this; it’s a national hero, someone with a war cross on his chest, and who knows, maybe that’ll impress the British, the British value heroism, they’ve practiced it quite lavishly, and if they hadn’t been up there when Tristano was in the mountains … you can write this down: that Tristano truly admired them at that time … less at other times … because of what they did in other places, and you don’t have to go very far, just think of Daphne’s country, where they propped up that big fascist Field Marshall Papagos, so the Greeks got themselves a new Duce and a new king, after Metaxas, it’s the British concept of democracy in other people’s houses … But now let’s get down to it … personally, I don’t know the exact words to use – that’s your job – it’ll take tact and diplomacy, otherwise what kind of writer would you be … It’s about the Parthenon marbles … that’s what Tristano wants you to ask for, the marble friezes taken by a British lord who was ambassador to Turkey when the Ottomans controlled Greece, and who had the Parthenon flayed and the marbles transported to Great Britain, like a man who finds a lady lying unconscious on a deserted street and tears off her necklace for his wife … it was that exactly … flayed, that’s the word, writer, that thief had his workers use pick axes and sledgehammers … years ago I read an account of someone who witnessed that
rape, but I’ll spare you the details … You know, they didn’t just take a painting, what you’d stick on a wall, they stole a whole landscape … supporters of this theft have their various views … I know: the friezes at the British Museum are gorgeously lit … as if fluorescent lights in England were somehow brighter than the sun in Greece … or that when the lord took them they weren’t friezes on the original temple anymore, because the Ottomans had turned it into a mosque … nice reasoning, but the Ottomans only changed the contents, a small thing – what’s it take to substitute one god for another? – they didn’t change the container in the least … such sweethearts, I’d really like to see how they’d react, these fine thinkers, if the spires of their Westminster Abbey wound up in the Athens Museum … The lord in question was Elgin,
Lord Elgin
, write it down, so the British won’t get him confused with some other lord, with all those lords they have in England … In short, write down that Tristano wants them to give those marbles back to their rightful owner, that it’s a sublime temple, and if Athena hadn’t built it, they wouldn’t have their House of Lords, they’d still be just a bunch of sheep herders … and maybe remind them of Byron, who died for these things, who knows, maybe that’ll have an impact … And if you want, add that along with the reasonable demands of normal diplomacy, these friezes were already requested by a great poet, though no one knew him because he lived like a nobody in rented rooms, Mr. Cavafy, and that Tristano wishes to repeat this poet’s polite request, which he made a century ago, so by now, it must have reached British ears … All right, here’s my proposal: I tell you
what you want to know, and you write down Tristano’s wish, I think you’re the one who’s getting the better end of things … Is it a deal? If it’s a deal, I trust you, it’s an old-fashioned pact, between gentlemen … a verbal pact … but for us everything is verbal, everything’s composed of words, right? A
gentlemen’s agreement
, as the British say … If it’s a deal, take my hand, I still know how to shake someone’s hand, and this will be the first time you ever touched me.
Do you know what a headache means? I’m not talking about a migraine, or a slight headache, this is something else again, it’s a bunch of different things at once, and it’s not easy explaining something that’s a bunch of different things at once … first off it’s a small noise, that’s how it starts, a strange bell, more like a whistle or a squeal, a sonar that arrives from far away, from deep, deep down, and you can feel it, and all of a sudden you see the fierce outlines of things, as if that whistle’s there in sight, intensifying, distorting, and you feel as if a prism has replaced your eyes, because contours, edges, objects have increased and filled up space, expanded, changed shape, and through this change, they no longer mean what they used to mean, the wardrobe, for instance, is now a cube, a cube and nothing more, it no longer has the sense of a wardrobe, and now everything is rippling, space is swelling like the tide, and here comes the ache of the headache sea, like a blowing bellows that
you’re sitting on, swaying, you have to sit, and the floor turns fluid, and around you is a breathing lung that seems to be the entire universe, no, it’s inside you, and you’re on top and inside at the same time; you’re a dust mote floating in the alveoli of a monstrous lung that’s breathing in and out and you press on your temples, trying to hold back the waves bursting in your head like a tempest where you drown … this, this is a headache … Tristano had his first headache one August tenth, many things have happened to him, to Tristano, in August, his life is marked by August, there are men like that, it’s Uranus, Saturn, so many things, I’ve forgotten many of them, but not this, that would be impossible, August tenth is San Lorenzo Day, the day of shooting stars, and maybe one dropped right on his head, a meteorite, but it wasn’t at night, it was noon, and he was right here in this house where he’d come back to do nothing, sitting under the pergola, and he was staring at a bunch of unripe grapes, counting them off like the years of his life, one grape one grape one grape for you, he whispered, a silly little ditty, and there were already so many grapes, and right then he grew aware of a strange whistle he’d never heard before, the bunch of grapes stopped being a bunch of grapes, the air cracked into fissures, nausea rose in his throat, and he staggered across the veranda as though he were on the quarterdeck of a ship tossing in the waves, and he reached his room, closed the shutters, threw himself onto the bed and clutched his pillow, and he was off on the first of those wretched journeys that would accompany him a long
while, through miasmas, locust-filled clouds, a glaring expanse of nothing in all directions … He died the day before, you know, he blew up, with his instruments of death – his boy – that he loved more than a son … goddamn him …
… Some nights, sometimes, he’d stare at the lights on the plains and think of the past, of those days when people were playing with the future of his country, up in the mountains … everyone against the Nazi-Fascists, that was clear, but the future was something else again. By now, I’m very much aware that as far as the future’s concerned, there are many, could be many, like the color spectrum, slight gradations of color, almost nothing, a shade of blue will bring you to indigo, then violet, but blue’s one thing and violet another, almost nothing, but try living in one shade, you’ll see how intense it can be … During that time, though, he saw the world as binary; you know, we tend to be binary by nature, and we let ourselves be convinced, we’re such idiots: black and white, hot and cold, male and female. In short: this or that. But why do we always have to think of life as this or that, did you ever ask yourself why, writer? I think you have, and that might be why I called you here. But back then, he saw the future as divided in two, because he thought history was divided in two – the idiot – he didn’t understand that we make history, that we build it with our own two hands, it’s our own invention, and we could build another, if we just wanted to, if we just convinced ourselves that history, her story, is this or that, if we
only had the strength to tell her, you’re nothing, madam history, don’t be so arrogant, you’re just my hypothesis, and if you don’t mind, madam, I’m going to invent you now as I see fit. But to say this, you have to be old and useless, practically a corpse like me, before you understand that she was an illusion, a ghost, and you can’t make her anymore, she’s already been made. History’s like love, a kind of music, and you’re the musician, and while you play her, you’re extremely capable, an interpreter who blows full blast on his toy trumpet or scrapes his bow ecstatically across the strings … magnificent, a perfect execution, applause. But you don’t know the score. And you only understand this later, much later, after the music’s already disappeared … So for him, there were only two possible futures. The first he knew all too well because he knew the country that had invented it, though you couldn’t say this in Italy, a future composed of ashen days, steered by a political system that considered people not as individuals but as cogs in a superior machine, small teeth in small, insignificant wheels grinding for the great wheel, for a classless society where we’d all be equal, with equal thoughts, equal efforts, equal joys, equal destinies. You want a little happiness, what you’ve got coming to you, comrade? – do you have a party membership card? – a ration card for collective happiness? – very good, how many in your family? – four, let’s see now … let’s see now … four, you, your female comrade and two children, good, good, comrade, good, good – and your wife’s card? – good, good – and your children’s? – good, good – everything seems in order, comrade, you have the right to four shares of happiness:
sign here and I’ll stamp your paper, you’re a good comrade, and the great comrade who accompanies us all in the pursuit of happiness loves good comrades like you and wants you to have the necessary amount of happiness, just the right amount of happiness for the just world we’re building, a just world for a just society built by just comrades just like you, dear comrade, that’s what the great comrade said in his last speech, you must have heard it, a speech directed at good comrades like you working for a just society who deserve their just share of happiness, so what more do you want, comrade? – you’ve already been stamped by the political system, everything’s in order, regulated, go back to your laborious home, tell your domestic comrades that the great comrade sends his fraternal salute, now, how ’bout you stop breaking my balls? – ah, yes, you fought in the mountains, you killed a squad of fascists all by yourself – you’re a real hero, comrade – but if I’m not mistaken, you already got your medal for that – and you also lost two fingers – they got jammed in the submachine gun – no, don’t bother showing me your hand – it’s right here on this piece of paper – this piece of paper, comrade, is more important than your hand – well, you didn’t lose your balls, dear comrade – sorry to be so familiar, but we’re both comrades here, brave comrades like you don’t lose their balls, I know, I know, there were two gladiators in the arena, one was strong, mighty, ferocious, but the other was fearless, and he had this tiny, wicked smile that made him look like an American actor, some gladiators are strong but stupid, comrade – they puff out their chest, strut around, and wind up losing their balls, because
they’re stupid, but you, comrade, you’re brave and you’re sharp – you’re especially sharp – but don’t try and be too sharp now, comrade, because we know everything about you – we know you went to live in a picture-postcard city – isn’t that a bit aesthete? – we know you have a good wife, but that she’s not enough for you; comrade, you say you love freedom and justice, but isn’t that a touch middle-class? – sorry to be blunt – but you seem a bit bourgeois; you know, libertarian ideology was revolutionary at first, but if you practice it in secret, that’s just bourgeois, and above all, we believe in the family – the family is the revolutionary center of the revolutionary society – comrade, I don’t want you to disturb the great comrade, because he’s watching over us, he only sleeps two hours a night, because he has to take care of us all; in his feverish, sleepless nights, from his window overlooking the vast piazza where he assembled the military review dedicated to veterans like you who saved the country, well, comrade, he’s watching you from that window, and he knows what you did on the dawn of that day that was crucial for our country, that you took out an entire enemy squad, he knows it better than you do, comrade, but excuse me, comrade, how many hours of sleep do you get a night? – seven hours? – seven hours is a lot, comrade, a whole night’s sleep – he sleeps one, two hours at the most – you don’t want to disturb the great comrade – comrade, seven hours of sleep is a good amount – we found out you write poetry, and this makes us happy, but watch the intimism, we know about the intimist poets, they create the past – watch out – you don’t want to drink too much past, comrade, it might
go to your head, and now, back to your busy little home where your lady comrade’s waiting for you, go in peace, comrade, and don’t pester us again …