Antonio Tabucchi - Little misunderstandings of no importance - stories

And then Gianna was born, but that wasn’t his fault either; she had wanted a child. “This isn’t the moment,” he had told her. “Let’s wait, and time it better. A child’s a burden, one that will swallow up what little free time we have.” But she cried at night; the longing for motherhood consumed her like a fire and it must have been the only warmth within her because the rest was desert. Finally the silly woman struck a bargain. She’d take total care of the child and he could enrol at the university, he could even leave his job and devote his whole time to his studies. Since she’d had a promotion, her salary would be enough for them to live on and, if he didn’t object, she’d do some moonlighting at home over the weekend; a private postal service was offering just such employment. He said all right, if that was what she wanted. He wasn’t the one to stifle her maternal instinct, but it was agreed that he didn’t have to change diapers. He’d spend weekends at the university library, where a friendly guard would let him in on Sundays. If she wanted a child, he wanted a university degree; they both had their priorities. The agreement was clear and he respected it. She did, too, silently and with no audible complaint, only her usual resignation. Job, housework, take-home assignments from the office, care of the child. The little girl was just like her mother, things happen that way; nature is implacable. The same apathy, the same resigned look, the same defeat written on her face. As she grew, on the rare Sundays when he didn’t go to the library, he tried to awaken her interest in something, to rouse her from her precocious torpor. “Do you want to take a walk with Papa, to go to the zoo?” And the voice of a humble, common-sense little woman answered: “I must keep Mama company, thank you, Papa. She asked me to lend her a hand with the housework.” And so there they were, at it, bolstering up his “privilege” of being a middle-aged student, toiling over his books late at night in order to keep up with the young classmates who appeared on Monday morning rested and casual, with neatly creased trousers and pullovers in the latest style, quite the young gentlemen. Of course he felt it in his heart to hate those young gentlemen. And this surge of feeling, tinged with bitterness and resentment, rose, again, from the depths of his being. His hatred of them was mute and inexpressible and only increased by the fact that they shared the same political stance. In their case there were rich fathers, a long liberal tradition, membership in the postwar Partito d’Azione. Their inherited political background was a luxury and their own left-wing views even more of one. For him, instead, they marked an achievement, a painful journey slowed by family considerations, respect for a church-going mother and father with too many children to support to be able to indulge in politics. His way of being a left-winger was based on firsthand acquaintance with want, the refusal to accept it, and, finally, revenge. This had nothing to do with their abstract, geometrical ideology. He had said as much, one day, to the most stupid among them, who voiced disapproval of his choice, for director of his thesis, of an unpopular and downtrodden professor known to harbour nostalgia for the days of the dictatorship. He had looked his fellow-student in the face and said, “It’s all very easy for you to be on the left, my boy. You’ve no idea of the difficulties of real life.” And the other had only stared at him with amazement.

The Professor. He wasn’t a genius, no doubt of that. But more brilliant teachers had scowled when he asked their advice about a subject for his thesis. The Professor had shown immediate understanding of his situation as a middle-aged student and a father. “I hope, at least, that you’re not like those presumptuous young fellows who, instead of recalling our country’s heroic past, look only to a radiant future.” And he had answered, cautiously: “Every form of government has its good points, Professor. It’s only that today the past of which you are speaking is in total disrepute.” Their understanding, at least at the start, was based on mutual respect, and was advantageous to him. Working out his thesis didn’t take too long; the worst part was the typing. He stayed up until all hours pecking away at a typewriter which Cecilia brought home every evening from the office. The reproachful look on her tired face was underlined by the hardship of carrying an old Olivetti, as big as a tank, up four flights of stairs while Gianna memorized geometry theorems in the kitchen. The rest went smoothly enough. Top marks for the oral exam; the thesis was substantial and the Professor, when he wanted to, could count on the support of some of his colleagues. Publication, too, turned out to be fairly easy, at the hands of a printer who also ran up university lectures and did not make the usual charge on this occasion. The dedication To my Master seemed useful as well as necessary. Bitterness came afterwards, when it was a question of a post as an assistant in the department. The Professor’s talk had become less guarded and neutral. Gone were the days of mutual respect; he demanded approval and complicity.

When he left home, he did it in the most proper and painless manner, leaving a letter behind him. It was the day he got his first salary payment as an assistant. A pittance, but enough for one person to live on. He had found a room in an old building behind the hospital, very small, with a window overlooking a courtyard filled with stretchers. It was not attractive, and he spent a week whitewashing the walls and installing a table bought from a junk dealer, a chair, and a coat rack. There was already a bed; he had only to add a mattress. An outsider might have called the room a miserable affair, but he saw it as an example of sobriety. He thought often of Machado, who lived in a room like this one, with a table, a chair, a bed, and an iron washstand, in the boarding house kept by Dona Isabel Cuevas. He had read Campos de Castilla and found in it a spiritual affinity. Especially in the Retrato which opens the collection, with a sort of catalogue of events, sometimes anecdotal in character but at the same time allusive, summing up a whole life: restrained but firm ethical and ideological statements and a joking reference to his mode of dress. It was a Sunday afternoon and he sat at his work table, re-reading the Retrato for the nth time. First he underlined three lines and then transcribed them. Mi historia, algunos casos que recordar no quiero. IYa conosceis mi torpe alino indumentario. /Hay en mis venas gotas de sangre jacobina. “My story, some events that I do not want to recall. / Already you know about my shabby clothes. /There are drops of Jacobin blood in my veins.” Those lines, he thought, belonged to him personally, they could have been his own. And then he copied two more. He was looking out of the window at the hospital courtyard. It was May, and the slender trees were green. At one point, a nurse, holding a little girl by the hand, stepped out from a small iron gate bearing the word “Radiology” in a yellow triangle above it. They were advancing very slowly because the child’s legs were encased in two metal braces all the way up to the hips. The legs were scrawny, rigid and deformed, and she walked with obvious difficulty, as if imitating the pathetically grotesque waddle of a duck. She seemed no more than eight years old, with fair hair and a checked dress. The nurse sat her down on a stretcher, tapped her on one cheek, made a reassuring gesture indicating that she should be patient, and then went away. The girl sat there patiently, looking at the empty courtyard, while the nurse re-entered the hospital. At this moment a white cat came out of the opposite corner. Hard to say whether the cat or the child was the first to see the other. They exchanged stares and then the cat trotted towards her like a puppy and jumped nimbly onto the stretcher, where the little girl took him into her arms and kissed him. He lowered his eyes to the poem before him and re-read the line Mi historia, algunos casos que recordar no quiero. He saw that the printed words were quivering through his tears and, in his notebook, added three more lines to those he had already copied: Pero mi verso brota de manatial sereno IY, mas que un hombre al uso que sabe su doctrina /Soy, en el buen sentido de la palabra, bueno [But my verse flows from a source serene/ and, rather than an everyday man who knows his doctrine,/ I am, in the best sense of the word, good].