Antonio Tabucchi - Little misunderstandings of no importance - stories

Now you leave the cafe and walk across the square. A prostitute in a car signals to you with the headlights but you shake your head, still thinking: it’s not possible, it’s just a coincidence, a trick of fate. But something tells you it’s no such thing. A chill has penetrated your bones and its iciness is a sort of certainty; the cathedral clock rings out the same hour as a clock rang four years before, you think again that it’s a repetition of the same story; perhaps I could eat something — I’m just cold and hungry. A tram goes by, but you don’t want to get on. You prefer to go on foot up the steep street leading from the river to the castle; there are laughing foreign tourists and sightseeing buses and an Indian restaurant where you often go for a chicken balchao — the owner is a fellow from Goa who talks his head off, perhaps he drinks too much, but he makes a sauce that goes well with the rice and sometimes he serves a spiced wine. Two American couples are happily eating near the window; the table lamps have checked red-and-white shades which make for a cosy, intimate atmosphere; the floor is somewhat dirty, with paper napkins that have fallen from the tables and not been picked up. Senhor Colva is less talkative than usual, he looks tired, perhaps because the place has been too crowded. “The balchao may be a bit spicy,” he says. “I’ll bring you some cold beer.” He is unfailingly attentive without a touch of servility. Then, with the air of suddenly remembering something, he taps his forehead, as if to admit his forgetfulness and to beg pardon for it at the same time. He walks, with short steps, over to the bar and comes back smiling. “Your paper,” he says. You stare at the paper in his outstretched hand but do not reach out to take it. You feel yourself turning pale and sweating cold sweat; you touch your jacket. Your paper, neatly folded, is in the slightly bulging pocket where you had put it. You look at the paper that Senhor Colva is holding but do not reach out to take it. What he reads on your face is only surprise, not the terror that you feel like a stream of ants climbing from your ankles to your groin. “They must have brought it for you,” he says; “you’re the only one to read this particular paper.” “Ah, yes,’ you manage to answer with frightening calm, “but who brought it?” “I don’t know, sir; my son found it this morning under the door. There was a wrapping around it, of course, but the rascal tore it off in order to read about the soccer match. You know, don’t you, that Sporting Lisbon tied with Real Madrid?” You agree that this is an achievement, too bad the game wasn’t on TV. They say that Sporting deserved to win if it hadn’t been for the incident with the cross bar and, of course, the referee; in such cases the referee is all-important, although Real have a very fine pitch and fans who are perfect gentlemen… but was he sure that your name was on the wrapping of this paper? He looked around, puzzled. You’ll have to forgive the boy, today young people don’t know how to behave; in his time it was different, they got the whip. He put on a serious expression and retreated with his quick short steps to the back of the room. Just before the kitchen there was a stairway leading to his living quarters. You know perfectly well that your name wasn’t on the wrapping although you can’t be certain for the simple reason that something of this kind is without certainty or explanation, that’s the truth; and then you begin to ponder what it really means to demand an explanation of something like that which is happening. Or an explanation of all that did happen, yes, all, getting to the bottom of it — she, he, you, and the pinwheel of subterfuges, postponements, and confusions which go to make up the whole story. Then you begin to allot the moral responsibilities, and that’s the worst thing of all because it leads nowhere; as you well know, life can’t be measured in moral terms, it simply happens. But he didn’t deserve it. That’s certain. And she knew that he didn’t deserve it. Equally certain. And you knew that she knew that he didn’t deserve it, and you didn’t care. Yes, but why shouldn’t you have deserved to stay with her? You met her only later, much later, didn’t you, that’s true, too — it was after all the chips were down. But what chips? Life has no such deadlines, no croupier who raises his hand to indicate that the chips are down to stay; everything moves on and nothing stands still. Why should we remain apart after we’d found each other, as the real game seemed to have decreed: the same tastes — white houses with scrawny palm trees or scarce vegetation, agaves, tamarinds, a rock; the same passions — Chopin or minimalist music, old rumbas, Tiengo el corazon maluco; the same nostalgia — the spleen de Paris. Let’s get away from this place and this spleen and look for a city of white marble at the water’s edge; let’s look together for such a city or another like it, it doesn’t matter where, anywhere out of the world. “I can’t.” “Yes, you can, if you want to.” “Please don’t force me.” “I’ll send you a message. I’m leaving, I’ve already left, I can’t stand it any longer, join me if you choose, buy this paper, it will be the signal and tell you where to find me, leave everything, no one will know.” No one can know, you’re thinking while Senhor Colva makes an apologetic gesture from the back of the restaurant, which you wave away. You and she were the only ones to know, and Baudelaire. You played a game with him, too — certain things aren’t to be fooled around with; you musn’t needle the mystery that brought them about. But no one else knew, of this you’re certain. He didn’t know, that’s sure, and if he did know, it’s ancient history. Because at present everything’s “ancient history”: that’s why your hands shake as you pay the bill. It doesn’t make any sense. Yet there is some sense to it, you know this or rather feel it. And you want to put it to the test. You go to the telephone near the washroom, insert a coin, and dial that dead number. This too is ancient history; the telephone company hasn’t given it to anyone else, so it hangs loose, a group of figures which transmit an acoustic signal to nobody; you’ve known that all too well for four years. You dial the number slowly, you hear one, two, three rings, then the receiver clicks, but no voice answers; you feel only a presence, not even a breath, because it doesn’t breathe. At the other end of the wire there’s only a presence which is there to listen to the presence of your silence. And so you hang up and go out onto the street. You’ve no intention of going home, because you know that the telephone would ring, one, two, three times, you’d pick up the receiver and hold it to your ear and there would be nothing from the other end, only the distinct density of a presence listening in silence to the silence of your presence. You go back to the river; the boat traffic is suspended for the night and the piers are deserted. You sit on the embankment wall, the water is muddy and rippling; perhaps it’s high tide and the river can’t work its way to the sea. You know that it’s late, but not merely by the clock; the hour around you is as vast and solemn as space, a motionless unit of time which is not marked on the dial and is as light as a sigh, as quick as a glance.

“People do you good turns and you repay them with bitterness. Why?” He was reading the final tercet of the poem by Drummond de Andrade which he was in the process of analyzing, when that sentence, spoken one afternoon many years before, came back to mind. His first good suit, jacket and trousers, in brown gaberdine with a narrow yellow stripe, perfectly horrendous as he realized later, when he had learned how to dress, but at the time he thought it was close to perfect, or at least important looking — too good for the office but indispensable for a graduation. He had looked at his reflection in the window. It was a men’s clothing shop on the Viale Libia, handling moderately priced but well-cut garments, and the minute he had put this suit on he felt at ease in it; perhaps it made him look a bit arrogant, but that didn’t hurt. It’s no good showing yourself to other people as submissive, that’s the end. Bitterness. Call it, rather, the well-spring of his being, a way to avoid being eaten alive in this world of wolves. But he didn’t answer Cecilia’s question, there was no answer to give. She wouldn’t have understood and the wolves had already eaten her up, wolves in the sense of life — you had only to look at her. At thirty years of age she was an old woman. Hair parted in the middle, some white strands already, a depressing air of resignation and her eternal fatigue. What fault was it of his if a few years before he had been in love with her and now he wasn’t? Perhaps it had been not so much love as a common purpose, their marriage had been based on a common purpose and certainly he hadn’t reduced her to her present condition. And this was the reason for his embitterment, the condition into which she had fallen, an uncared-for face and a tired body. Which was an unconscious way of displaying the sacrifices she had made on his behalf; a lament, a reproach, a mediocre remonstrance which, in reality, perversely masked her deep frustration. But how was he to blame for the defeat of a woman doomed to defeat? He had done his best to back her up. The immediate post-war years had been hard for both of them. There they were, in the uglier outlying area of the big city, with their parents dead and no one to turn to, wanting to set up house together if for no other reason than to have company. What were they to do? Jobs in the post office seemed the solution, but although these provided food and a roof over their heads, the atmosphere was squalid. A wood-burning stove and mud puddles in front of the door in the winter, humidity and mosquitoes in the summer, and all the year around the dull faces of their fellow employees, the widow who wasn’t really a widow, the assistant supervisor who talked of nothing but soccer but never bought a ticket to a match. Finally he had said: “Cecilia, let’s move on to something better, let’s sign up at the university and aim at a career.” But she was always tired. And why, after all? Wasn’t he tired, too? They had the same working hours. And the amount of housework she did — making the bed and washing a few dishes — couldn’t be called tiring. If the place had been spick-and-span he might have understood her being tired. But the three disorderly rooms, with her bedroom slippers always sticking out from under the bed, didn’t seem appropriate to a young married couple; they were the preview of an old people’s home; he had never summoned up the courage to ask even his sister to drop in.