Antonio Tabucchi - Little misunderstandings of no importance - stories

The trains from Bombay to Madras leave from Victoria Station. My guide assured me that a departure from Victoria Station was, of itself, as good as a trip through India, and this was my first reason for taking the train rather than a plane. My guide was an eccentric little book, which gave utterly incongruous advice, and I followed it to the letter. My whole trip was incongruous and so this guidebook suited me to perfection. It treated the traveller not like an avid collector of stereotype images to be visited, as in a museum, by three or four set itineraries, but like a footloose and illogical individual, disposed to taking it easy and making mistakes. By plane, it said, you’ll have a fast, comfortable trip but you’ll miss out on the India of unforgettable villages and countrysides. With long-distance trains you risk unscheduled stops and may arrive as much as a whole day late, but you’ll see the true India. If you have the luck to hit the right train it will be not only comfortable but on time as well; you’ll enjoy first-rate food and service and spend only half as much as you would on a plane. And don’t forget that on Indian trains you may make the most unexpected acquaintances.

These last points had definitely convinced me, and perhaps I was so lucky as to have hit the right train. We had crossed strikingly beautiful country, unforgettable, also, for the variety of its human components, the air-conditioning worked perfectly and the service was faultless. Dusk was falling as the train crossed an area of bare red mountains. The steward came in with tea on a lacquered tray, gave me a dampened towel, poured the tea and informed me, discreetly, that we were in the centre of the country. While I was eating he made up my berth and told me that the dining-car would be open until midnight and that, if I wanted to dine in my own compartment, I had only to ring the bell. I thanked him with a small tip and gave him back the tray. Then I smoked a cigarette, looking out of the window at the unfamiliar landscape and wondering about my strange itinerary. For an agnostic to go to Madras to visit the Theosophical Society, and to spend the better part of two days on the train to get there was an undertaking that would probably have pleased the unusual authors of my unusual guidebook. The fact was that a member of the Theosophical Society might be able to tell me something I very much wanted to know. It was a slender hope, perhaps an illusion, and I didn’t want to consume it in the short space of a plane flight; I preferred to cradle and savour it in a leisurely fashion, as we like to do with hopes that we cherish while knowing that there is little chance of their realization.

An abrupt braking of the train intruded on my thoughts and probably my torpor. I must have dozed off for a few minutes while the train was entering a station and I had no time to read the sign displaying the name of the place. I had read in the guidebook that one of the stops was at Mangalore, or perhaps Bangalore, I couldn’t remember which, but now I didn’t want to bother leafing through the book to trace the railway line. Waiting on the platform there were some apparently prosperous Indian travellers in western dress, a group of women and a flurry of porters. It must have been an important industrial city; in the distance, beyond the tracks, there were factory smokestacks, tall buildings and broad, tree-lined avenues.

The man came in while the train was just starting to move again. He greeted me hastily, matched the number on his ticket with that of the berth and, after he had found that they tallied, apologized for his intrusion. He was a portly, bulging European, wearing a dark-blue suit, quite inappropriate to the climate, and a fine hat. His luggage consisted of a black leather overnight bag. He sat down, pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket and, with a smile on his face, proceeded to clean his glasses. He had an affable, almost apologetic air. “Are you going to Madras too?” he asked, and added, without waiting for an answer, “This train is highly reliable. We’ll be there at seven o’clock in the morning.”

He spoke good English, with a German accent, but he didn’t look like a German. Dutch, I thought to myself, for no particular reason, or Swiss. He looked like a businessman, around sixty years of age, perhaps a bit older. “Madras is the capital of Dravidian India,” he went on. “If you’ve never been there you’ll see extraordinary things.” He spoke in the detached, casual manner of someone well-acquainted with the country, and I prepared myself for a string of platitudes. I thought it a good idea to tell him that we could still go to the dining-car, where the probable banality of his conversation would be interrupted by the silent manipulations of knife and fork demanded by good table manners.

As we walked through the corridor I introduced myself, apologizing for not having done so before. “Oh, introductions have become useless formalities,” he said with his affable air. And, slightly inclining his head, he added: “My name’s Peter.”

On the subject of dinner he revealed himself to be an expert. He advised me against the vegetable chops which, out of sheer curiosity, I was considering, “because the vegetables have to be very varied and carefully worked over,” he said, “and that’s not likely to be the case aboard a train.” Timidly I proposed some other dishes, purely random selections, all of which he disapproved. Finally I agreed to take the lamb tandoori, which he had chosen for himself, “because the lamb is a noble, sacrificial animal, and Indians have a feeling for the ritual quality of food.”

We talked at length about Dravidian civilization, that is, he talked, and I confined myself to a few typically ignorant questions and an occasional feeble objection. He described, with a wealth of details, the cliff reliefs of Kancheepuram, and the architecture of the Shore Temple; he spoke of unknown, archaic cults extraneous to Hindu pantheism, of the significance of colours and castes and funeral rites. Hesitantly I brought up my own lore: the legend of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas at Madras, the French presence at Pondicherry, the European penetration of the coasts of Tamil, the unsuccessful attempt of the Portuguese to found another Goa in the same area and their wars with the local potentates. He rounded out my notions and corrected my inexactness in regard to indigenous dynasties, spelling out names, places, dates and events. He spoke with competence and assurance; his vast erudition seemed to mark him as an expert, perhaps a university professor or, in any case, a serious scholar. I put the question to him, frankly and with a certain ingenuousness, sure that he would make an affirmative answer. He smiled, with a certain false modesty, and shook his head. “I’m only an amateur,” he said. “I’ve a passion that fate has spurred me to cultivate.”

There was a note of distress in his voice, I thought, expressive of regret or sorrow. His eyes glistened, and his smooth face seemed paler under the lights of the dining-car. His hands were delicate and his gestures weary. His whole bearing had something incomplete and indefinable about it, a sort of hidden sickliness or shame.

We returned to our compartment and went on talking, but his liveliness had subsided and our conversation was punctuated by long silences. While we were getting ready for bed I asked him, for no specific reason, why he was travelling by train instead of by plane. I thought that, at his age, it would have been easier and more comfortable to take a plane rather than undergo so long a journey. I expected that his answer would be a confession of fear of air travel, shared by people who have not been accustomed to it from an early age.