Antonio Tabucchi - Little misunderstandings of no importance - stories

When he took him the second edition of his thesis, minus the hateful dedication, he felt that he was carrying out an insipid and disappointing obligation. If the Professor had been argumentative, if he had lashed out against him, as he had expected, there would have been a frank, excited discussion. The Professor was waiting for him in his study with a melancholy air; he played the part of a man betrayed and shunted aside and welcomed him with tears in his eyes and no courage to put up a fight. “I didn’t know that you were my enemy,” he said; “it’s the greatest sorrow of my old age.” It was sentimental blackmail, based on a presumed friendship, old age, and disillusionment, which reminded him of Cecilia’s oblique reproaches. And he couldn’t bear this because it was a subtle and yet unfair way to recall Madrid and Lisbon, to accuse him of that silent and bitter scorn of which he had undoubtedly been aware and with which the Professor now hoped to put pressure upon him. At this point he voiced his disdain, calmly but sarcastically, in sentences whose rhythm recalled the Ma-chado of the Coplas per la muerte di don Guido. While he whispered bare, cutting words of revenge, his mind, off on its own tack, freed by thought from thought’s harmful effects, silently recited, in a familiar rhythm: Al fin, una pulmonia mato a don Guido, y estdn las campans todo el dia doblando por el: din-dan! Murio don Guido, un senor de mozo muy jaranero, muy galdn e algo torero, de viejo, gran rezador.”… This was the death of Don Guido, a gentleman who, when young, was very haughty, very gallant and something of a bullfighter; but when old was given to prayer.” The Professor interrupted his silent recital and told him to go away, and he went, savouring the taste of victory. For it was a victory, and he knew that many other victories were to follow.

The second was Giuliana, a victory not over her but over life. He rescued her from the status of a premature old maid and restored to her a youthfulness that she tried to conceal, erasing her idea that she was ill and replacing it with the conviction that she was healthy, all too healthy, and needed only a man to give her protection and a feeling of security. The only thing about her that disturbed him was her conciliatory nature, of a transparency which seemed to him simple-minded and perhaps damaging to them both. He made her do away with violet perfume, a modest lambswool coat, loud laughter, and anything else that might make her conspicuous. He would teach her or, rather, “construct” for her the pattern of a university career, which was to be learned like a profession. This didn’t mean that she was to be his creature, that would be an oversimplified interpretation. What they had was a common purpose, an existential partnership, that was his idea of love, if only she could understand. And she understood.

Other victories came in a pleasing enough manner. Chiefly victory over a colleague who thoughtlessly or frivolously had wronged him. Such wrongs are searing because they presuppose a lack of attention to the wronged party. And he could not tolerate inattentiveness, it was a form of humiliation that made him pale, one which he had experienced all too many times, which reminded him of the days when he was a pariah, when he had had to buy wretched suits at the shop on the Viale Libia and to imagine that they were well-tailored. But searing wrongs are the richest and most productive; they swell in the mind and postulate elaborate and complex answers, not rapid and disappointing acts of liberation. No, he knew that searing wrongs nest in some secret area; they crouch there like lethargic larvae and then create ramifications, colonies, anthills with winding passageways which deserve their own painstaking, detailed topography. A topography which he had studied in painstaking detail, patiently, because there was no way of taking direct revenge except through an unsatisfactory, poisonously personal attack in some scholarly periodical. He had, then, to find an indirect approach. This called for alliances, deliciously allusive conversations, subtle understandings, elective affinities.

There is a delicate pleasure in identifying the friends of our enemies and making them the secret objectives of revenge. He worked on it for months, years. His enemy’s favourite student had just gone to a university in the north; by one of life’s little coincidences he was in the same field. To find a possible enemy for him was difficult but not impossible; he had only to study the location of various colleagues and the second one he found was a good choice. He didn’t know the man well. He’d met him at some congress or other and was on first name terms. He was a mediocre, arrogant fellow whose writings were marked by awkward syntax and vague conclusions; they extolled second-rate authors in second-rate reviews. But this was not his Achilles’ heel. The weak point of this prospective ally was his wearisome career in the shadow of a pitiless superior who had humiliated him for years as if he were a superfluous object, calling him Smerdyakov, like the servant of the Brothers Karamazov. Here was the weakness to be exploited, not heavy-handedly but with a light touch, which would not threaten blackmail but surreptitiously hint at it in a way possible between congenial spirits. After only a brief conversation the machinery was put in motion and he watched it from the sidelines with deliberately prolonged enjoyment. An enjoyment which followed a set course to the very end, like a symphony. And when it was over he started again and finished with a short, syncopated rondo, which was easier but less gratifying. His second alliance, with an ambitious and spiteful young woman colleague gave him little satisfaction. She was a frank and obvious schemer who had betrayed a friend, usurped her place with the old Professor and installed herself, almost insolently in his department. To have her on his side was actually tedious; privately he called her “the gangster’s moll”.

And the other victories, the official ones. Published books, articles, scholarly meetings. His greatest success came, once more, from the Iberian Peninsula. The dictatorships were over, there were no more limitations, and no one to prevent him from exercising his critical powers on a sixteenth-century courtier-poet, commemorated at a congress of scholars from all over Europe which took place in an aristocratic, baroque country mansion, far from the capital and surrounded by olive trees and vineyards. He had managed to be scheduled near the end, intending to deliver a dry, technical paper, an apparently neutral, rhythmical reading which actually pointed up relentlessly the stylistic wiles of the poet in question, his concealed plagiarism of his great contemporaries. But at one point there was a paper by a Dominican monk, of his own age, a professor of Classics and for years editor of a literary review which, during the superseded government had held to a vaguely liberal and anti-Fascist “cultural” line, with no definite political colouring. Now this champion of vague anti-Fascism spoke in a conciliatory manner of the compromising courtier-poet, in terms of the autonomy of the poetical text, of human weakness and the necessity of putting aside biographical details, because “poets have no biography except in their poetry”, and we must pay due respect to the solitary, mysterious inner Word which dictated the words of their poems. There was intolerable Platonism in this specious and surreptitious allusion, a fuzziness that spilled over into a metaphysical logos, an influence of Spinoza which the speaker gracefully linked with pre-Socratic philosophy but which was actually tied up with Right-wing neo-idealism. And then the monk’s humility, his conciliatory tone, his forgiveness of human weakness in the name of the poetic text, these were a form of subtle arrogance, a reversed censorship, a blackmailing expression of the remission of sins. No, no sin was to be remitted; he would not tolerate such a vision of the world or let himself be trapped by so treacherous a formula.