Antonio Tabucchi - Letter from Casablanca

But perhaps we can continue our conversation on another occasion, Wilfred Cotton said without a pause. The third act is about to begin.

For six months, until the end of 1934, every Thursday I went to the theatre with Wilfred Cotton. He was, from time to time, an awkward Hamlet, clumsy and cowardly, but also a kind Laertes; a mad Othello, but also a wicked Iago; a Brutus tormented and bitter, but also a presumptuous, scornful Anthony; and still many other characters in the pretense of joy and pain, of victories and defeat, on the shabby platform of the hut. Our evening conversations, at supper as in the foyer, were always polite without ever being friendly, cordial without ever being confidential, affable without ever being intimate. We talked very much about the theatre, and then about the climate, and the food, and the music. We thought highly of each other without ever admitting it, united by a complicity that expression would have irreparably compromised.

The night before my departure, as an added attraction — it was a Saturday evening — Wilfred Colton invited me for a good-bye supper. That evening, in honor of the happiness that shone in my face notwithstanding my careful control, he put on A Midsummer Night’s Dream , because he said that that comedy, written to celebrate a noble marriage, was also well suited to celebrate my divorce from a part of the terrestrial globe which perhaps I had not particularly loved.

We said good-bye at the theatre. I told him not to come to the truck with me, I preferred that we leave each other in that strange place which had been the scene of our curious relationship. I never saw him again.

In October of 1939, in my study in Lourenço Marques, a dispatch passed across my desk. It was a request from the British Consulate in Mozambique for the recovery of the body of a subject of His British Majesty, deceased in Portuguese territory. The subject was named Wilfred Cotton, sixty-two years of age, born in London, died in the district of Kaniemba. Only then, when the tacit understanding that I had stipulated at another time had no more reason to be, human curiosity got the better of me and I rushed to the British Consulate.

I was received by the consul, a good friend of mine. He seemed surprised when I revealed to him my old acquaintanceship with Wilfred Cotton, and even appeared slightly amazed that I did not know he had been a great Shakespearean actor, much loved by the English public, who had disappeared from the civilized world years before without anyone ever succeeding in tracing him. With confidentiality that was not usual with him, the consul also wanted to reveal to me the reasons that had induced Sir Wilfred Cotton to go off to die in that remote corner of the world. I believe that to report them would add little to this story. The reasons were generous, noble, perhaps pathetic. They would have suited not at all badly a play by Shakespeare.

When Maria do Carmo Meneses de Sequeira died, I was gazing at The Young Ladies in Waiting by Velásquez in the Prado Museum. It was a July noon and I did not know that she was dying. I remained looking at the picture until quarter past twelve, then I left slowly, trying to carry away in my memory the expression of the figure in the background. I remember that I thought of Maria do Carmo’s words: “The key to the picture is in the figure in the background — it’s a backwards game.” I crossed the garden and took the bus as far as the Puerta del Sol, had dinner in the hotel — a well-chilled gazpacho and fruit — and went to lie down in the dimness of my room in order to escape the midday heat.

The telephone woke me around five, or perhaps it didn’t wake me. I found myself in a strange drowsiness. Outside hummed the city traffic and inside hummed the air conditioner, which in my consciousness, however, was the motor of a little blue tugboat that crossed the mouth of the Tagus at twilight while Maria do Carmo and I watched it. “There’s a call from Lisbon,” the voice of the telephone operator told me. Then I heard the little electric discharge of the switch and a masculine voice, indifferent and low. He asked my name and then said, “I am Nuno Meneses de Sequeira. Maria do Carmo died at noon. The funeral will be tomorrow at five. It was her express wish that I call you.” The telephone made a click and I said, “Hello, hello.” “They hung up, sir,” said the operator. “The connection is broken.”

I took the Lusitania Express at midnight. I carried with me only a small suitcase with the bare necessities, and asked the concierge to hold my room for two days. The station was almost deserted at that hour. I had not reserved a couchette, and the conductor assigned me a compartment at the end of the train where there was one other passenger, a corpulent man who snored. I prepared myself with resignation for a night of insomnia, but contrary to my expectation I slept soundly until the outskirts of Talavera de la Reina. Then I lay motionless, awake, looking out the dark window at the dark desert of the Estremadura. I had many hours to think about Maria do Carmo.

“ Saudade ,” said Maria do Carmo, “yearning. It isn’t a word, it’s a category of the spirit. Only the Portuguese are able to feel it, because they have this word in order to say that they have it. A great poet said this.” And then she began to talk about Fernando Pessoa. I called for her at her home in Rua das Chagas about six o’clock in the afternoon. She was waiting for me behind a window. When she saw me enter Largo Camñes, she opened the heavy front door and we went down toward the harbor, wandering through Rua dos Fanqueiros and Rua dos Douradores. “Let’s take a Fernandian itinerary,” she said. “These were the favorite places of Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper — semi-heteronomous by definition — for the city of Lisbon. It was here that he practiced his metaphysics, in this barber shop.”

At that hour the Baixa, the lower part of the city, was crowded with hurrying, shouting people. The offices of the navigation companies and the commercial businesses were closing their doors. At the tram stops there were long lines. You could hear the propagandizing cry of the shoeshine boys and the newspaper sellers. In the confusion we slipped into Rua da Prata, crossed Rua da Conceição, and went down toward the Terreiro do Paço, white and sad, where the first ferries crowded with commuters were sailing for the opposite bank of the Tagus. “This is really an Álvaro de Campos zone,” said Maria do Carmo. “In a few streets we’ve passed from one heteronomous to the other.’’

At that hour the light of Lisbon was white toward the mouth of the river and pink on the hills, the eighteenth-century buildings looked like an oleograph, and the Tagus was furrowed by a myriad of boats. We went on toward the first quays, those quays where Álvaro de Campos went to wait for no one, as Maria do Carmo said, and she recited some verse from the Ode Marittima , the passage in which the shape of the little steamer is outlined on the horizon and Campos feels a flywheel begin to revolve in his breast.

Dusk was falling on the city, the first lights were lit, the Tagus glistened with iridescent reflections. In Maria do Carmo’s eyes there was a great sadness. “Maybe you’re too young to understand — at your age I wouldn’t have understood, I wouldn’t have imagined that life was like a game that I used to play when I was a little girl in Buenos Aires. Pessoa is a genius because he understood the reversal of real and imagined things. His poetry is a juego del revés , a backwards game.”

The train stopped. From the window the lights of the border town could be seen. My traveling companion had the surprised, uneasy look of one who has suddenly been awakened by the light. The policeman carefully turned the pages of my passport. “You come to our country often,” he said. “What do you find so interesting here?” “Baroque poetry,” I answered: “What did you say?” he murmured. “A lady,” I said. “A lady with a strange name — Violante do Céu.” “Is she beautiful?’’ he inquired archly. “Maybe,’’ I said. “She’s been dead for three centuries and she always lived in a convent. She was a nun.” He shook his head and smoothed his mustache with a mischievous air, stamped my visa, and handed me my passport. “You Italians always love to joke,” he said. “Do you like Totò?” “Very much,” I said, “and do you?” “I’ve seen all his films,” he said. “I like Alberto Sordi better.”