Antonio Tabucchi - Letter from Casablanca

Our compartment was the last to be checked. The door was closed with a thud. After a few seconds someone on the platform waved a lantern and the train began to move. The lights went out again. Only the pale blue lamp remained. It was the middle of the night. I was entering Portugal as I had many other times in my life. Maria do Carmo was dead. I felt a strange sensation, as if from on high I were watching another me who, one July night, inside a compartment of a semi-dark train, was entering a foreign country in order to go to see a woman whom he knew well and who was dead. It was a sensation that I had never fell before and it made me think that it had something to do with the backwards-ness.

“The game was like this,” said Maria do Carmo. “We made a circle — four or five children — we counted off, and the child whose turn it was went into the middle. He chose anyone he wanted and tossed him a word, any word at all— mariposa , for example. And that child had to pronounce it backwards immediately, but without thinking it over, because the other one was counting — one, two, three, four, five — and at five he won. But if you were able to say asopiram in time, then you were the winner of the game, you went into the middle of the circle and tossed your word at whomever you wanted.”

Climbing toward the city, Maria do Carmo told me about her Buenos Aires childhood as a daughter of exiles. I imagined a courtyard on the outskirts of the city, populated by children, sad, impoverished holidays. “It was full of Italians,” she said. “My father had an old horn-type gramophone and he had brought some fado records with him from Portugal. It was 1939. The radio said that Franco’s forces had taken Madrid. He cried and put on the records. In his last months I remember him like this, in pajamas in his armchair, crying in silence, listening to the fados of Hilário and of Tomás Alcaide. I would escape to the courtyard and play the juego del revés .”

Night had fallen. The Terreiro do Papo was almost deserted. The bronze horseman, green from the salty air, seemed absurd. “Let’s go to Alfama for something to eat,” said Maria do Carmo. “ Arroz de cabidela , for instance. It’s a Sephardic dish. The Jews don’t tear the neck off the hen, they cut off the head, and they make the rice with the blood. I know a tavern where they make it like no other place. We’ll be there in five minutes.”

A yellow tram passed, slowly, rattling, full of tired faces. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “Why did I marry my husband? Why do I live in that absurd palace? Why am I here playing at being a countess? When he arrived in Buenos Aires he was a courteous, elegant officer, I was a poor, sad young girl. From my window all I could see was that courtyard. And he took me away from that grayness, from a house with dim lights and the radio turned on at supper time. In spite of everything, I can’t leave him. I can’t forget.”

My traveling companion asked if he could have the pleasure of inviting me for coffee. He was a jovial, ceremonious Spaniard who frequently traveled that line. In the dining car we talked amiably, exchanging detailed and formal impressions of the many places we had in common. “The Portuguese have good coffee,” he said, “but this doesn’t help them much, so it seems. They’re so melancholy. They lack charm, don’t you think so?” I told him that maybe they had substituted saudade for charm. He agreed, but preferred charm. “There’s only one life,” he said. “You have to know how to live, dear sir.” I didn’t ask how he managed this himself, and we talked of something else — sports, I think. He adored skiing, the mountains. Portugal was really unliveable from this point of view. I objected that there were mountains there, too. “Oh, the Serra da Estrela!” he exclaimed. “It’s an imitation of a mountain. In order to get to two thousand meters you have to put up an antenna.” “It’s a maritime country,” I said, “a country of people who leap into the ocean. They’ve given the world urbane, dignified madmen, anti-abolitionists, and poets ill with homesickness.” “By the way,” he asked, “what’s the name of that poet you mentioned tonight?” “Soror Violante do Ceu,” I said. “Her name is splendid in Spanish, too — Madre Violante del Cielo. She was a great Baroque poetess. She spent her life sublimating her desire for a world which she had renounced.” “Is she better than Gongora?” he asked with a certain absent-mindedness. “Different,” I said, “with less charm and more saudade , naturally.”

The arroz de cabidela had a most refined taste and a repugnant appearance. It was served on a large earthenware tray with a wooden spoon. The boiled blood and wine made a dense, brown sauce. There were marble tables between a row of barrels and a zinc counter dominated by the corpulence of Senhor Tavares. At midnight an emaciated-looking fado singer arrived, accompanied by an elderly violist and a distinguished gentleman with a guitar. She sang ancient, faint, languid fados . Senhor Tavares turned out the lights and lit the candles on the tables. The transient patrons had already gone, only the devotees remained. The place was filled with smoke. At every finale there was discreet, solemn applause. Some voices requested Amor é agua que corre, Travessa da Palma . Maria do Carmo was pale, or maybe it was the candlelight, or maybe she had drunk too much. She had a fixed stare and her pupils were huge. The candlelight danced in them. She seemed to be more beautiful than usual. She lit a cigarette abstractedly, lost in revery. “Enough, now,” she said. “Let’s go. Saudade , yes. but in small doses — it’s better not to get indigestion.”

The Alfama was semi-deserted. We stopped there on the belvedere of Santa Luzia. There was a pergola thick with bougainvillea. Leaning on the parapet we looked at the lights along the Tagus. Maria do Carmo recited Lisbon Revisited , by Alvaro de Campos, a poem in which a person is at the same window as in his childhood, but it isn’t the same person anymore and it isn’t the same window anymore, because time changes men and things. We began to go down toward my hotel. She took my hand and said to me, “Listen — who knows what we are? Who knows where we are? Who knows why we are here? Listen — we live this life as if it were a dream. Tonight, for instance, you must think you are me and that you’re squeezing yourself between your arms. I think that I’m you squeezing me between my arms.”

“Anyway, it isn’t that I love Góngora so much,” said my traveling companion. “I don’t understand him — you need the vocabulary — and then I’m not cut out for poetry. I prefer the short story — Blasco Ibañez, for instance. Do you like Blasco Ibañez?” “Moderately,” I said. “Perhaps it’s not my genre.” “Then who? Pérez Galdós, maybe?” “Yes, now we’re getting somewhere,” I said.

The waiter served us coffee on a shining tray. He had a sleepy face. “I’m making an exception for you gentlemen because the dining car isn’t open now. It comes to twenty crowns.” “In spite of everything, the Portuguese are kind,” said my traveling companion. “Why in spite of everything?” I said. “They’re kind. Let’s be fair.”

We were approaching a zone of shipyards and factories. It was not yet full day. “They choose to be on Greenwich time, but in reality, according to the sun, it’s an hour earlier. And then, have you ever seen a Portuguese bullfight? They don’t kill the bull, you know. The bullfighter dances around him for half an hour and then at the end makes a symbolic gesture with his arm — a thrust like a sword. A herd of cows comes in with cowbells, the bull troops back into the herd, and everyone goes home— olé . If this seems like a bullfight to you …” “Maybe it’s more elegant,” I said. “To kill someone it isn’t always necessary to murder him. Sometimes a gesture is enough.” “Oh, come on!” he said. “The duel between man and bull has to be mortal, otherwise it’s a ridiculous pantomime.” “But all ceremonies are stylizations,” I objected. “This one keeps only the wrappings, the gesture. It seems more noble to me, more abstract.” My traveling companion appeared to reflect. “Could be,” he said without conviction. “Oh, look, we’re at the outskirts of Lisbon. We’d better go back to the compartment and get our luggage ready.”