Antonio Tabucchi - Little misunderstandings of no importance - stories

That summer he made a trip to Spain and Portugal. The Professor, through the “Friends of Spain”, got him a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There were no strings attached; it was an invitation, a reward for his interest in Spanish culture. Spaniards were proud of their culture and flattered if scholars from foreign universities wanted to consult their libraries. The only obligation which he incurred was the delivery of the proofs of an article written by the Professor for a review in Madrid to which he was a contributor. It was a no-account review, but that wasn’t his affair. Barcelona overwhelmed him. An immense, sunlit city with tree-lined boulevards, splendid late nineteenth-century buildings and cordial and affable people — the city which had suffered the worst damage during the civil war. After ten days he felt that he belonged there. His heart, his very nature were akin to those of the people who thronged, in the evening, to the lower part of the city, the harbour, the cafes, the wine shops, and the sordid taverns in the alleyways. It irked him to have to stay in the luxury hotel where he was put up by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. While he took his dinner in the brightly lighted dining room, in the company of well-dressed travellers eating shellfish, he longed to be among the simple, noisy folk in the taverns which he had glimpsed during his afternoon walks, drinking in, with an almost physical pleasure, the liquid Catalan speech, so different from the dry sonority of the Castilian. All of this reinforced his anti-Franco feelings. His heart was unequivocally with the victims of the war; he remembered, suddenly, all that they had endured and was deeply moved by it. He decided, on the spot, to learn Catalan, as a tribute to Catalonia. Meanwhile he thought of another tribute, the book by Orwell, which he had read on the train and thrown into a rubbish bin at the frontier railway station, because it was the tribute of an English snob, of the same class as the travellers eating shellfish at his hotel, people who knew nothing of the soul of the common people of Spain. He felt more and more bitterness towards certain false progressives of his acquaintance and boundless affection for the crystal-clear figure of Dolores Ibarruri. She was the earthy embodiment of the Spanish people, she was generosity and self-sacrifice in person. La Pasionaria! He really should have gone to Moscow, to shake her hand and embrace her, instead of to this wretched dictator-ridden country where he was to deliver the Professor’s rhetorical pages to a pro-Franco review. Meanwhile the train was taking him to Madrid. The journey was monotonous and the headquarters of the review disappointing, a colourless office in a building near the Prado, where a distracted employee thanked him in a perfunctory manner. Now Madrid was all his, even if he didn’t take to it. He hated the aristocratic monumentality of the public buildings, the elegance of the fashionable section, the vastness of the Prado, the paradoxical, shapeless Goyas, all in the detestable styles of baroque monstrosity and romantic fantasy. He couldn’t resist the temptation of taking a train across the Castilian plain, on a pilgrimage to Soria, a stripped, sober town to which he was drawn by a poem. The room in Dona Isabel Cuevas’ boarding house was intact: a table, a chair, a bed, a washstand. He wandered with emotion through the unpretentious town, encircled by the lunar desert of Castile. In an antiquarian bookshop, he found, after considerable insistence, a photograph of Machado with a dedication in his own writing dated 22 January 1939, when the poet, hounded by Franco’s police, was fleeing towards the frontier and death. The bookseller was a circumspect, suspicious fellow, fearful, perhaps, of a trap, and so, although his Castilian was first-rate, he spoke in Italian. His reassuring words obviously came from the heart; he held out the money and got what he wanted. Back in his Madrid hotel, a letter from the Professor awaited him, and it was in the terms of an obligation, an order laid upon him. He was to proceed to Lisbon on another errand; a first-class railway ticket was enclosed. Well, he was glad enough to go. The Professor wanted to place another of his stale articles in a Portuguese review, and he would take it there and make the necessary arrangements. Why not? It was almost a satisfaction, a sort of subtle revenge. The melancholy, honest face of Machado smiled at him from the bottom of his suitcase, he covered it with the Professor’s pages and his personal belongings, took the train and, at the border, told the customs officer that he had nothing to declare. The slight risk that he was running was his revenge and his talisman.

In Lisbon they were polite and attentive, unlike the Spaniards. The review was located in a handsome building on the Placa dos Restauradores, the Palacio Foz, with an English-style facade, a slate roof, and heavily carpeted rooms. They sang the praises of the Professor and he went along with them, adding a more graceful and subtle appreciation of his own, whose slyness certainly escaped the pompous editor, an unconscious symbol of idiocy. Certainly, he said, with maximum hypocrisy, he too was a friend of Portugal, a small country but a great one. For the time being he couldn’t contribute to the review; besides, his name meant nothing, he was only an assistant to the Professor and, moreover, he took no interest in politics, tie might, eventually, be able to make some translations, under a fictitious name; his Portuguese wasn’t all that good, but he could count on the help of a Portuguese reader in an Italian university, whom they doubtless knew. And they, in their turn, could count on his good will. The Professor was old, had many commitments and couldn’t make frequent trips to Portugal. He, on the other hand, was happy to travel.

And so it went. The texts he was given to translate were stupid and easy, but the pay was good. Their very stupidity bore out his inner instincts, kindling the secret fire of his resentment. As for the photograph of Machado, he hung it over his table, between the bed and the window giving onto the hospital courtyard. But he wouldn’t be staying much longer in this squalid rented room, he knew; a competitive examination for a better post was in the offing. He would come out first and then hang the photograph in a place worthy of it. Meanwhile, half consciously, he was coming to resemble his idol. He let his hair grow — bushy and unpom-maded — over his forehead, giving it the shape of Machado’s. The cut of his mouth was similar also; the thin lips were like a cynical slash, which dissembled the injustices to which he had been subjected. He was reading the reflections attributed to the fictitious Juan de Mairena and was fascinated by Machado’s capacity to wear masks, by the subtle ability to assume various roles, which he too enjoyed. “My philosophy is fundamentally sad, but I’m not a sad man, and I don’t believe I sadden anyone else. In other words, the fact that I don’t put my own philosophy into practice saves me from its evil spell, or, rather, my faith in the human race is stronger than my intellectual analysis of it; there lies the fountain of youth in which my heart is continually bathing.” The fact that I don’t put my own philosophy into practice saves me from its evil spell — this notion gave him a feeling of infinite lightness, a sort of remission of his pains, of innocence. It was in such a state of innocence that he lived through the examination days unaware of the difficulties involved. The examination was not on Machado; obviously, it covered purely technical, theoretical matters of metrics. And yet this very abstract poetical grammar, so proudly uncontaminated, seemed to him a metaphor of his existence, of pure thought, free of thought’s harmful effects. He passed the examination with flying colours, just as he had expected. And, at this point, it was easy, too easy to give him any satisfaction, to cast off the old Professor.