Authors: Antonio Tabucchi
I feel good today, really good, and I’m going to tell you the whole thing, word for word, logically, it’s the set piece, in your book, it’ll be the set piece, listen and write, write and be quiet – ready?… It’s dawn. Tristano is alone in the goddamned woods, and he’s afraid. Because even heroes are afraid, you said so yourself. Besides, Tristano doesn’t know he’s a hero yet, he’s alone, hiding behind a boulder near the commander’s shelter, he knows he’s alone because all his comrades went down to the valley that night, under orders by that same commander, to attack a barracks, there were weapons, ammunition in the village, fascists standing guard, they had to go on a sortie, so his comrades went down to the valley, and Tristano’s alone on that goddamned dawn in the goddamned woods, on a dawn that should be pink and pale blue, soft, a dawn not made for days of tragedy but for loving, for holding onto a woman in bed, for love, not crouching behind a rock and trembling with fear; it’s an icy dawn. How many of them? They’re usually so cautious, there are never just a few when they make their raids, there could be ten, twenty, a whole platoon. Tristano heard shots, heard
Maschinenpistolen
fire, screaming, and now grave silence, the sun rising on that dawn, a dangerous dawn, because for Tristano,
daylight’s the enemy, he’s alone behind that rock, and there are so many of them. After the slaughter, silence. But what are they waiting for? Why aren’t they leaving? What are they doing in there? Maybe looking for charts, maps, notes. They’d done it: in one master stroke, they’d eliminated the most dangerous commander of all, a great commander, not just any commander, that one, not some eager spur-of-the-moment partisan, no, an old soldier, in the Great War, already an officer in fifteen, with enormous responsibilities, a man who knows strategy, who’s calm, skilled, careful, strong-willed, he scares the Nazis, he’s caused many casualties, the order came down from the German High Command in Italy to eliminate him, the men under him don’t matter, he’s the one, crush the rebel head, the body goes too, just poor bastards on the run without a plan, it’s urgent to carry this out, and now they have. But someone led them there, otherwise how’d they find the shelter? Tristano knows this space, it’s also the headquarters, there are four rooms in that abandoned farmhouse, a kitchen on the main floor, where they meet, discuss their military actions, develop their plans, get their orders, and the adjoining room is where two soldiers from the Savoy Army sleep, two young soldiers, two sweet, inexperienced boys who are better off not seeing any action, who serve as sentries, the commander’s bodyguards; upstairs is a hayloft, where the peasants dry figs and chestnuts on straw mats, and then a room where the commander sleeps. The gunfire was downstairs. Tristano saw the flashes through the windows on either side of the sagging wooden door of that fairy-tale cottage at the edge of
the woods. But why aren’t they coming out? It’s cold. It’s a cold dawn. Behind that rock, Tristano is afraid. Heroes aren’t afraid, but Tristano doesn’t know he’s a hero yet, he’s just a man, alone, clutching the submachine gun of a dead German, his hands frozen, his feet frozen, he can’t seem to think straight though his mind is racing, he keeps staring at that sagging door, now and then he looks around, barely glances, and doesn’t see a thing, all he knows is it’s growing lighter, soon it will be day. He thinks: how long since I heard the shots? – ten minutes – an hour? He’d slept in the shed near the woods where the peasants kept their pigs, he decided to sleep there that night instead of in the cave down by the stream where he usually slept with his comrades. Why? He can’t say why. Why, why, why …
… because, because, because. You came here to find out the answers to Tristano’s life. But there are no answers to life, didn’t anybody tell you?… why write? Or are you one of those, the kind looking for answers, wanting to put everything in its place?… Okay, listen, one answer, one because, is that he’d met the American girl in the mountains, I already brought her up, this Marilyn that he immediately started calling Rosamunda, and sometimes just Guagliona, but not too often, when he gathered her hair at her neck, her hair that she wore in a braid during the day, and he’d say undo your braid, Mary Magdalene, undo your braid, Guagliona … You want answers to other whys, why he wound up in the mountains, and how, and when, and Daphne,
whatever became of her … You’re far too curious, writer – what do you care? Besides, listen, it made sense, what else could he do, he was a drifter by then, a deserter, he’d returned home after Badoglio sent everyone home, and he had to decide if he would hide under the straw in the barn with the Germans raking or go find his king in Brindisi or somewhere around there … He didn’t like the idea of hiding under the straw – would you? – if you were him, would you want to go join a king who’d left the Italians to rot while he went off and ate orecchiette with turnip tops?… But in a way, Tristano did the same thing by going off to fight in the Resistance in the mountains, because the turnip heads came along after … but that’s all in hindsight, if you could call it sight because I’ve had my morphine … Did you know Frau gave me two doses? She’s like that: one day stingy, the next day giving me a double-dose, she gets emotional … she’s annoying, you’ve seen that tough mug on her, but inside … you ask me, she’s always crying on the inside instead of the outside, I don’t know how she does it, if it’s just her or because she’s German, sometimes the Germans do seem like they might be people crying on the inside instead of the outside, just read some of what they’ve written … we’re different, we seem to be sobbing on the outside but inside nothing’s changed … a matter of hydraulics … you ask me, even the soul obeys the laws of hydraulics … I’m lost, where was I?… you’d like to know about Daphne, the whys and wherefores to his leaving her in Greece … patience, now, was he supposed to take her into the mountains, with everything she’d suffered in her own country?… and what do you care about Daphne anyway?
Daphne’s the one beautiful thing in this whole damned story, the rest of it’s a mess … you don’t believe me? – look around, then, if you don’t believe me, and ask yourself why – no, ask yourself what good it was, what point there was to Tristano’s heading into the mountains with a telescope on his shoulder … ah, you didn’t know that, did you, that’s not something you’d ever think of, and I’m glad I’m telling you, you writers love this sort of thing, then you can start to embellish … up in the mountains, Tristano carried a submachine gun, sure, and he became the hero you know with that submachine gun, but up till then he carried a brass telescope he was fond of, that belonged to his grandfather; as a boy, he discovered the sky with that thing, and he brought it along to see the stars from mountain tops, because the higher up you are the better you see the stars … An Englishman who wrote books like you said we are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars, and maybe Tristano wanted to see the stars because his country was truly down in the gutter … And your country? – how do you like it now?
I just remembered a little more of Frau’s poem, a very long poem, she recites it bit by bit, and it’s torture … I saw a toad leap from the ditch and carry away my truest love; this smooth, loathsome creature, soft and velvety pale, stole an old locket and brought it back again, corroded with spit, an old locket, a picture inside, her sleeping echo.
… The cicadas have stopped … it must be dark out, maybe you’re tired of writing. But isn’t this why you came? I’m tired of talking, too, but this is why I sent for you; if Frau comes in and disturbs us, tell her we’ll go on for a little yet, just ten more minutes, because I’m not so sure tomorrow I’ll have the strength to go on. And it’s important, you know this better than me, you reconstructed this in your book, you even won a prize, am I right? If I send you away now you might have trouble sleeping tonight, might sleep worse than me, worrying I might lose hold of the thread, and that you’ll be screwed, right? – that you’ll have traveled all this way to listen to me in the stink of carbolic acid, of gangrene, and right at the best part, I’ll lose the thread … don’t worry, I haven’t lost it, because that sagging door is swinging open, and the house is dark, and Tristano can’t see a thing. Out, he thinks, out, you monsters. And there’s one, finally. But he looks familiar – it’s Stefano, who was always so friendly, the school janitor down in the village, who’d made it clear he could be trusted. And now he’s dressed in black, a tassel on his fez – the pig. Stefano looks around, cautious, checking no one’s there to see him, he signals toward the house, out comes a German, then two, three, four … Fire, Tristano tells himself, it’s just four assholes. He presses down on the trigger, impatient, but, no, hold back – any more inside, he’s fucked. And now the others are advancing toward him through the meadow, coming closer, if they see him he’s a dead man – what now – it’s a poker hand, this waiting, throw down your cards, Tristano, fire. And then he hears a woman’s voice, singing, a lovely voice singing a slow
melody, strange, strange words, an old lullaby, old like that voice is old – but how can a woman be singing up here in the woods, the dawn after a slaughter? And is that voice even real? Tristano listens, and he remembers what the church fathers wrote, that it’s an internal voice, that it can’t come from outside of him, and he alone hears it, and these are the voices of the angels, the church fathers said, and the only ones who hear them are those that can hear them or want to hear what they long to hear; it’s an old woman’s voice, an enchanting voice singing … I had a pony all dappled gray, that counted clip-clops to the moon, I had a dark-haired boy who went away, oh love and I are out of tune … and he knows it’s a cradle song, and then the meadow, the mountains, the woods, everything begins to sway, as though an unseen hand, a woman’s hand, is rocking a cradle, and there’s only that voice singing, I had a pony without a tail, I tied that pony on a rope, and on that rope it used to pull, like a man in love and full of hope … and everything is swaying in front of him, and now all the Germans are finally out in the open, gathered together, caught, enraptured by this woman’s voice that’s rocking the whole countryside to sleep, it’s beddy-bye, now beddy-bye, you’re nonna’s little baby … so sings the siren’s voice, casting its spell over the Germans, who are almost asleep, lost to oblivion, frozen, side by side, like a family photo, a monument to the dead. Tristano fires his first volley, a second, a third, he’s firing and singing along with that voice that’s saved him, it’s beddy-bye, now beddy-bye, you’re nonna’s little baby, oh … the woods echo with machine-gun fire, clusters of echoes bouncing off the
hillsides, from mountain to valley, then fading into the distance, like rolling thunder. Now Tristano is the new commander of the partisan brigade, the mantle of the old commander killed by the Germans has passed to him, though he doesn’t know it yet, he doesn’t know anything, Tristano, as he stands there, in the open, out past the rock he hid behind, stands there, lit by the rising sun, which seems fitting, how heroes appear in the movies. Go on, Tristano, approach your fallen prey, set your foot on a German’s chest and raise your machine gun high in triumph, that’s how we want to remember you, these are your memories, we’re writing your life. And now you can go, writer, it must be late, enough for today, you’ve heard what you wanted to hear.
Life isn’t arranged in alphabetical order like all of you believe. It seems … a little here, a little there, sprinkled as you will, granules, the problem’s gathering them up later, a pile of sand, and which granule supports the next? Sometimes what’s on top, what seems supported by everything else, is really holding everything in place, because that sand pile doesn’t obey the laws of physics, take away a granule you didn’t think held up anything else, and the whole pile collapses, sliding, spreading out, and all you’re left to do is trace in the sand with your finger, making squiggle marks, comings and goings, paths leading nowhere, and you go on and on this way, tracing back and forth, but where did that damn grain of sand get to that held everything in place … and then one day your finger stops all on its own, and
can’t go on with its squiggling, and there’s a strange outline in the sand, a drawing that’s meaningless, absurd, and you have the sneaking suspicion the meaning of this whole business was just in the squiggling.
… Correction: that dream I told you, the one on the beach, that wasn’t Rosamunda after all, it was Daphne … now that I think about it, Tristano went into that wooden bathing hut with his Daphne, I promise this is true, I can prove it, I didn’t think of it before, the watermelon … In that hut, there’s a watermelon split in half, a beautiful red watermelon sitting on the wooden shelf where they kept their bathing suits, I see it like it’s now, along the road to the beach there was this little man with a little fruit stand selling peaches, melons, and
karpùzhi
, the word’s come back to me now, and Daphne adored
karpùzhi
,
karpùzhi
meant Greece to her, there’s even watermelon ice cream in Greece, you know, I remember one summer in Crete – the first time I went with her – and an enormous, white beach, and the watermelon the man kept buried in crushed ice on his little rolling fruit stand, along the road to the beach … and certain afternoons, on that beach … in the bathing hut, making love with his Daphne, after chasing each other into the water, and licking all the salt off each other … and then they’d eat a slice of watermelon … it couldn’t have been Rosamunda, Marilyn didn’t like watermelon, Americans don’t like watermelon, maybe because they’re all water and no vitamins.
I heard what Frau whispered to you … sir, don’t write down what he tells you under morphine. Don’t you listen to her: you write everything down, everything, morphine or no morphine, gather everything you possibly can, the pieces blown to smithereens, down to the last granule, my delirium is also me …
… Are you familiar with a poem about a mother dressed in black crying over the body of her son killed in the square? Frau read it to me this morning. Frau has the gift of prophecy, she’s ahead of me, she’s always reading me a poem that refers to something I want to tell you, today she came into my bedroom and read this one, and it’s not Sunday, this I’m sure of, and I started thinking that the story I’m telling you, that maybe you think makes no sense, is like a musical score where every now and then an instrument will start talking on its own, in its own voice, and there’s a baton directing all that music, only you can’t see the conductor, but you know who’s holding that baton? – I think it’s Frau.