Antonio Tabucchi - Letter from Casablanca

Inevitably Bishop went to change the record. The sickly sweet tones of Cole Porter’s songs swept over us. Bishop was crazy about him. She thought that Cole Porter suited Fitzgerald. Or else she put on Nat King Cole singing Quizás, quizás, quizás . Anyway, I liked King Cole’s song, too. I felt it concerned me. It caused in me a slight melancholy. Siempre que te pregunto, que cómo dóndey quándo . … I tried to go on. All of you looked past me at the sea and the lights of the coast. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alps that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows …. But something hindered me. My voice was uncertain, I heard it. Why did it pain me to go on? Was it perhaps the evening? Was it the lights of the coast? Was it Nat King Cole? I stared at the twilight, y asi passando el dia, y yo, desesperado … You could at least have made a gesture of agreement. But no, you looked at me as calmly as the others, as if you didn’t know that all that concerned me. I go well through the night, right, Martine? I told you with my eyes, for a few nocturnal moments, and then you go to sleep and sleep, sleep, sleep. The wind blows the awnings. There are lights down there on the coast … But the day, what is your Perri during the day? He’s the character in a little game, the figurine in a story.

Enough. I had no wish to recite anymore, the others also had no wish to stay to listen to me. The game was open. That beginning was enough for openers. Now Bishop was aware of Rosemary Hoyt involved in dancing a slow, very sentimental dance. I agree that she wasn’t eighteen years old any longer and in the water she wasn’t capable of Rosemary’s “sharp little crawl,” but what did that matter? It was all too mixed up. Rosemary danced with Tom Barban, who should have danced with you, but this would have happened tomorrow evening, maybe. For that evening the roles were assigned, and Mr. Deluxe was perfectly suited to the part of the adventurous, dissatisfied ex-aviator, not bad at all, moreover, maybe a little too distinguished for a legionnaire, too well-nourished. As for the other two, you didn’t need much imagination to place them. They were so irrelevant and therefore so interchangeable, the handsome Brady and his blonde. And as for you, yes, you were a splendid Nicole. You did her perfectly. You looked like Lauren Bacall, your Tom Barban said. I heard him whisper it to you. What a pain. And his clumsy attempts to hide with the edge of his jacket his erection visible under his linen pants? Intolerable. But he was Tom Barban, the legionnaire. Legionnaires are very virile, you know, dancing with a lady who looks like Lauren Bacall.

But I, who was I? I wasn’t Dick, even if I had his role — in real life, I mean. And I wasn’t Abe North either, no, in spite of my old novel. I would never have known how to write another, even if everyone pretended to think the contrary, much less would I have written the story of our painful history. I knew only the beginnings of other people’s novels from memory. I belonged to an analogous story. I was a character transmigrated from another novel, its stylization in a smaller dimension, without grandeur and without tragedy. At least my model had his own grandeur as a gangster. But my part did not foresee madness, without even a dream for which to sacrifice life, without even a lost Daisy — or worse, my Daisy was you, but you, however, were Nicole. I was a game in our game: I was your dear little Gatsby.

The night advanced with little steps. You’d have liked this sentence in my story, too, right? I’ll satisfy you: the night advanced with little steps. In fact, the tender night advanced with little steps. Now the phonograph played Charlie Parker’s “Easy to Love.” I had bought that record. Under the sobbing horn of poor Bird there was an almost happy chatter from Stan Freeman’s piano, almost smothered chuckles, a little phrasing of happiness. I would have preferred Jelly Morton, but for Rosemary he was a bore. It was impossible to dance to Jelly Morton. Well, what to do at that hour of the tender night advancing with little steps? St. Raphaël or l’Hôtel du Cap? St. Raphaël was better. What do you do at the Cap once you’ve had the Negronis? You croak from boredom. And the handsome Brady (but what was the handsome Brady’s name in real life?) agreed to any program whatsoever as long as he could make sheep’s eyes at you. His stupid little blonde would have followed him anywhere. “ C’est cocasse ,” she chirped, “ c’est cocasse .” It was all cocasse , funny. Even Deluxe’s old Benz was cocasse , with its beige mudguards and its inner dividing windows. It had belonged to a retired Parisian taxi driver. He boasted about having bought it so cheaply. “I’m heartbroken only because he wanted to keep the taximeter. Sometimes there are people who get fond of such stupid things! …” And he laughed with all those very white teeth. He had too many teeth: deluxe teeth. Oh, was that a cheap shot?

But who was Mr. Deluxe, a refined musicologist? Come on, with that name! I think that he, too, was a little cocasse , like his Benz. “I loved your novel very much for its musicality,” he told me. What a fool. “But in your next novel — because you are writing another one, aren’t you? — in your next novel have the courage to express your love of music. Don’t be afraid of quotations, cram it with names, titles, they quickly create magical fiction. Put in the names of Coltrane and Alban Berg. I know you love Coltrane and Alban Berg, and I find myself in agreement.” He spoke of loving Alban Berg. He would have liked “to have more time to discuss it,” but then he didn’t go further than Gershwin. But how could he understand death, with that beautiful smile of his? You couldn’t understand death either, it was out of your reach for the moment. You could understand the dead, but death and the cadaver are two different things. Death is the curve in the road: to die is only not to be seen . Do you remember these lines? I said them one evening, but I deceived you. They weren’t by Fitzgerald, even though everyone believed they were. It was a false quotation, and inside myself I enjoyed the deception. We were on the coast, I think near Villefranche. I quoted the phrase and said: Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise . Deluxe braked almost at once. He murmured something like “Sublime, sublime,” some such nonsense, and wanted us to go down to the beach. We had to take off our shoes and walk as far as the shore line holding hands, a man and a woman, a chain. It was urgent to do something lustral , they were his words, it was an homage to being, to being there, to the fact of being on the straight and narrow path of life. In short, to hell with the curves, this was the concept.

Your mother, yes, she understood death. I understood at once when I met her that she was a woman who understood death. And she also understood the same thing about me. She understood that there was a little of this in my stupid novel, and that’s why she did everything to make it become a book. She prevented me from arriving in Mentone. She freed me from the condition of “poor young aspiring writer, son of immigrants, returning to his native land with a manuscript in his pocket.” Did you think that my love for Fitzgerald was so vast as to have driven me on a pilgrimage through his itinerary? That my descriptions of his hotel in Baltimore were the result of a maniacal passion? It really isn’t so. Let’s say that I’m a reporter. I spent my early childhood in that hotel. I prefer to pass over the particulars. My father was a waiter there for twenty-nine years. He had known Fitzgerald, he had some books with his dedication, he often talked to me about him, and also about Zelda, who had liked him very much. She was fond of him because my father prepared very comprehensive drinks for her. She even put him in Save Me the Waltz under another name. Then the hotel in the course of the years had fallen into decadence, the clientele had deteriorated. They had given my father and me a room in the rear wing. After Mama’s death he wouldn’t have known to whom to entrust me. At least I was safe there, or at least so he presumed. He spent his last years serving supper to old fur-wrapped whores, to distinguished morphine addicts, to argumentative pederasts…. Here he is, my Fitzgerald. Your mother understood many things about me. And so did I about her. Would you like to know exactly what our relationship was? It’s not something you can say in a few lines. I loved her very much, I think that’s enough.