Antonio Tabucchi - Letter from Casablanca

For the interview, Madame received me on the terrace. She was lying on a very austere, cushionless, reed deck chair, of the yoga-meditation type and was dressed in a delicious pale blue kimono. Up until the last moment I had been undecided whether to wear my blue pleated skirt with my red pullover, the “adolescent-of-good-family-who-belongs-to-the-tennis-club” type, or my nut-brown tweed suit with the beige shin. Then I had decided on the suit, not without certain misgivings over the resolution because the season was not really ideal for a heavy tweed like mine. That year a dazzling October seemed untiringly to prolong a summer that had been magnificent, and the last tourists were still going around the lake shore in shorts, as if they wanted to absorb the sunshine.

But for heavens sake! After all, that suit had cost me almost all my salary, in spite of the fact that I’d bought it on sale at the end of the previous winter, and then I hadn’t had a chance to wear it yet. It was a Saint Laurent divided skirt, Forties-type squared shoulders with stiff padding, and wide lapels with two buttons like a man’s. A super chic item: in Vogue Deborah Kerr wore an identical one, leaning on the veranda of her ranch. But in that stupid school whoever would have appreciated a Saint Laurent like mine? My colleagues arrived in the morning dolled up in an appalling way. Only their aprons and hair curlers were missing. I might as well put on the Saint Laurent for the interview with Madame. At least someone would be able to appreciate it. At least I presumed so, and I thought I knew why. I say, a villa like Madame’s was not in keeping with those stupid creatures, the rich grocers’ wives type who had infested the hills around the lake with villas in taste that could compete with Disneyland and who swooped down on the gallery at the end of the season when the owner organized AN AUCTION WITHOUT PRECEDENT and carried away some daubs of paint that would make a horse faint in order to hang them on the walls of their small-town mansions. Furthermore, it was enough to look at the wrought-iron gate from which led two straight rows of cypresses, the arabesque towers in early twentieth-century style, each with its own lightning rod, the Italian garden, the terrace flooded with bougainvillea. And then I thought that even a simple announcement in the newspaper could be enough for a shrewd person to understand something about the class of a lady. The job offers, which I looked through avidly on Saturday, were full of rude and insinuating, or at best dull and predictable, proposals, where “the possibility of a brilliant career” masked the squalor of selling encyclopedias for deficient children door to door. An announcement like this one requiring a secretary: “Intelligence, discretion, culture. French indispensable,” didn’t happen very often.

I considered that these were four qualities which I possessed unequivocally. It’s a pity that the principal of the school, terrorized because I talked to the boys about the Nude Maja , and the owner of the gallery, who thought only of fleecing the ladies from Varese, didn’t agree. Too bad for them.

To say that Madame was charmante may seem trifling, but serves to convey the idea. If she was fifty years old, she carried her age in an excellent manner; if she was forty, she carried it with dignity. But I was inclined toward the first hypothesis. She had hair of a blonde so unnatural that one ended up by accepting it immediately, because blatant deceit is much more acceptable than pretended deceit. (At that time I had a whole theory based on the scale of deceit.) And, thank heaven, she didn’t have a permanent. On principle I had nothing against permanents, for goodness sake, but the fact is that my colleagues came to school with such painful permanents that I’d ended up detesting them.

Madame began a very lengthy conversation in French. Evidently she used French to verify my knowledge of the language, as was requested in the advertisement, but in that regard I felt myself impregnable, thanks to Charleroi, even though I was careful not to say so. However, I did nothing to disguise my strong Belgian accent, even though it wasn’t difficult for me to do so: it was only a question of tonics and gutturals.

We began with literature. Very discreetly Madame informed herself of my tastes, not without letting me know hers, in order to put me at ease, which were Montherlant of La reine morte (“so human and all-consuming,” she said) and the enchanting melancholy of Alain-Fournier. Pierre Loti, however, was not to be disregarded. He was redeemed, especially by his Rarnuntcho . She was sure that sooner or later someone would have done it, perhaps even an American critic: the Americans had an unquestionable flair for the rêpechages . To tell the truth, Loti brought back to me the memory of the stuffy smell of the classrooms in the Sacred Heart School in Charleroi, where Pécheurs d’lslande was one of the few reading books allowed, but I tried to agree. I had spent eight years erasing the school in Charleroi from my existence and it would not have been to Madame’s liking to bring those memories back to me. I could have aimed at the intellectual, risking Sartre, one of whose stories I had read (it was horrible, however) but I preferred to proceed cautiously and said Françoise Sagan who, after all, had something to do with existentialism. And then I mentioned Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro (I’d seen the film with Ava Gardner) and Louis Bromfield’s Rain . Madame asked me if I knew the tropics. I said no, “ unfortunately ,” but that sooner or later I must; I had always lacked the opportunity. And then we went on to painting.

Here I went on at great length because it was my field, and if I told some falsehoods it wasn’t entirely for “promotional” motives but only to embellish a little. I said that I’d graduated from the state institute of art two years before (which was true) but that Italy was intolerably narrow-minded. What was offered to a young artist in Italy? Substitute teaching in a middle school.

Fortunately in the summer I could cultivate my interests by working in a local art gallery (I ardently hoped, while I said it, that she had never gone there); only that at the end of the tourist season the gallery closed and the town plummeted again into a cultureless void. And so, me voilà .

I thought that the moment for more precise questions had arrived. In particular I feared that Madame would question me about my ability to type, an ability which I considered indispensable for every secretary. Mine was nonexistent. The rare times when I had to write a letter, down at the gallery, it took me all afternoon (I typed only with my right index finger) and even after much application the results were not very impressive. Instead, Madame didn’t seem in the least disposed to ask me “technical” questions. She seemed to have her mind very much occupied with painting, and it didn’t seem right to discourage her.

At first we talked about Bonnard’s yellows — I don’t remember why, probably because of the autumn light and the golden spot of chestnuts that we could see on the side of the mountain across the lake. Then I grew crafty and went for the fauves , the “big game.” Matisse was out of the question, of course. I took that for granted. But personally I felt Dufy more, the Dufy of the seascapes, the geraniums, the palm trees of Cannes. — With Dufy — I said — the happiness of the Mediterranean sings on the canvas. — On the wall next to the desk in the salon of the “Palette of the Lake,” the owner kept a calendar which had a Dufy reproduction for each month. I was a veteran of thirty consecutive afternoons from five to nine (thirty-one for July and August) for every reproduction. In the summer months the “Palette of the Lake” never closed. Let’s say, to be more precise, that Dufy even came out of my ears. But in the gallery the view varied between the Dufy reproductions and the idiotic faces of the women who admired the daubs hung on the walls, and to whom, according to the owner, I had to direct welcoming smiles into the bargain. It’s logical that I preferred Dufy. I knew him from memory.