Antonio Tabucchi - Little misunderstandings of no importance - stories

On every bundle there was a date, and the writer’s signature. She pulled them all out and looked them over. It was difficult to choose. She thought of the novel, but decided against it. The novel should come last, perhaps in February. And it was too soon for the play. She paused over the other bundles. The poems would be a good choice, but perhaps the diary would be better still. She weighed it in her hand and looked at the length. Three hundred was the number on the last page. Good God! She sat down on the armchair in front of the fireplace and crumpled the first page into a ball, so as to be able to throw it into the fire without having to lean too far forward. It turned a tobacco colour before turning to ashes. Poor fool, she said, poor dear fool. She leaned back in the chair and looked up at the ceiling. The winter would be long; it had scarcely begun. She felt tears flood her eyes and let them run down her cheeks, abundant, uncontrollable.

Last night I dreamed of Miriam. She was wearing a long white dress which, from a distance, seemed like a nightgown. She was walking along the beach; the waves were dangerously high and breaking in silence; it must have been the beach at Biarritz, but it was totally deserted. I was sitting on the first of an interminable line of empty deck chairs, but perhaps it was another beach because at Biarritz I don’t remember deck chairs like those; it was just an imaginary beach. I waved to her, inviting her to sit down, but she went on walking, as if she didn’t know me, looking straight ahead and, when she passed close by, I was struck by a gust of cold air, like an aura which she carried behind her: and then, with the unsurprised amazement of a dream, I realized that she was dead.

Sometimes it’s only in a dream that we glimpse a plausible solution. Perhaps because reason is fearful; it can’t fill in the gaps and achieve completeness, which is a form of simplicity; it prefers complexity, with all its gaps, and so the will entrusts the solution to dreams. But then tomorrow, or some other day, I’ll dream that Miriam’s alive, that she’ll walk close to the sea, respond to my call and sit down on a deck chair belonging to the beach at Biarritz or to an imaginary beach. With her usual languid, sensual gesture she’ll push back her hair, look out to sea, point to a sailing boat or a cloud, and laugh. And we’ll laugh together because here we are, we’ve made it, we’ve kept our appointment.

Life’s an appointment — what I’m saying is very banal, Monsieur, I realize; the only thing is that we don’t know when, where, how, and with whom. Then we think: if I’d said this instead of that or that instead of this, if I’d got up late instead of early, today I’d be imperceptibly different from what I am, and perhaps the world would be imperceptibly different, too. Or else it would be the same and I couldn’t know it. For instance, I shouldn’t be here telling a story, proposing a riddle that has no solution or else that has always had an inevitable solution, only I don’t know about it and so, every now and then, rarely, when I’m having a drink with a friend, I say: Here’s a riddle for you, let’s see how you solve it. But then, why do you care about riddles? Do you go in for puzzles and the like, or is it just the sterile curiosity with which you observe other people’s lives?

An appointment and a journey, this too is banal, I mean as a definition of life; it’s been said any number of times, and then in the great journey there are other journeys, our insignificant trips over the crust of this planet, which is journeying also, but where to? It’s all a riddle; perhaps you find me a bit odd. But, at that time, I had come to a standstill; I was stuck in a morass of boredom, in the lethargic mood of a man who is no longer very young, but not completely an adult, who is simply waiting for life.

And instead Miriam came on the scene. “I’m the Countess of Terrail, and I have to get to Biarritz.” “And I’m the Marquis of Carabas, but I seldom leave my estate.” That’s exactly how it began, with this exchange. We were at Chez Albert, near the Porte Saint-Denis, not exactly a stamping ground for countesses. In the afternoon, after I’d closed the shop, I went to this bistrot for a drink. It’s gone now and, in its place, there’s one of those establishments that sell human flesh on film — it’s the times. Albert would have liked to be buried at Pere-Lachaise, because Proust is there, but I think he wound up in the cemetery at Ivry, another sign of the times. The old days — I don’t mean to hark back to the past — but they were different, they really were. Take today’s motor cars: the engine’s all squeezed in — you could wrap it up in a handkerchief — and there’s not even room to take the carburettor apart. Albert wasn’t exactly my partner, but he might just as well have been because he got hold of many of the cars. He’d been a racing driver before there were macadam roads, when drivers wore special goggles to keep out the dust. He was a wee slip of a man, grown melancholy from standing behind the bar, who laughed only when he’d had a glass too many. At such moments he drew off some Alsatian beer and put a pitcher of it on the bar, just like in a cowboy film, exclaiming: “Speed!” Speed had done him in, but not too much; he was lame in one leg and his left hand had lost its grip. He was the one to get hold of the car that had belonged to Agostinelli, that is, to Proust. Lord knows how he did it. Agostinelli was Proust’s chauffeur, and a good fellow; together they visited all the Gothic cathedrals of Normandy. I don’t know if there was anything between them, and it doesn’t really matter. Proust, as you know, had his particular tastes. Anyhow, to go back to what I was saying, during my first year of Literature at the university I’d written a paper that I thought I might turn into a thesis, but then I dropped out; the Sorbonne and its professors seemed pointless to me. My thesis was to be entitled What Proust Saw from a Car. Obviously the car, not Proust, was what interested me. One fine day I made up my mind and sold the piece for publication in two instalments in a third-class magazine, a feeble imitation of Harper’s Bazaar (I’m not telling you the name, so you won’t find it) and, God knows how, it fell into Albert’s hands. He took that for granted; everything fell into his hands. And then, you know how life is, like a woven fabric in which all the threads cross, and what I want one day is to see the whole pattern. That’s why, one evening, I went to Chez Albert with a copy of the magazine under my arm and ordered a drink. I was wandering about Saint-Denis because I’d been told that, in the area, there was a body shop owned by an old man who repaired vintage cars. I was a proper mechanic, because I grew up in a garage at Meudon, the town where Celine lived. Not that I knew him; he was a bad egg, they say, but a good doctor, apparently, especially to the poor. Albert saw the magazine under my arm. “There’s a piece in there about Proust’s car,” he said, “by a lunatic who signs himself the Marquis of Carabas.” “I’m the Marquis of Carabas,” I said, “but for the moment I’m what they call fallen on hard times. I’m looking for the Pegasus body shop, where I hear there’s a job.” Albert looked at me hard, as if to see whether I was joking, but I wasn’t; I was in low spirits. “Don’t take it so hard, my boy; the shop’s in that courtyard over there, and so is Agostinelli’s car, which I brought in last Sunday. I bought it at a junkyard in Suresnes, where they didn’t have the foggiest idea what it was. Now it’s only a matter of putting it back into working order.”

And that’s what we spent the summer doing. “This one’s not for sale,” said Albert. “It’s the car in which I want to run my last race, destination Pere-Lachaise, with a little band behind, playing En passant par la Lorraine.” Lorraine is where he came from, of course. I don’t know if you can visualize Proust’s car, but probably you’ve seen a photograph of it. It was a monument, with headlights like searchlights, which served, on the trip through Normandy, to light up the facades of the various cathedrals. When Proust and Agosti-nelli arrived in a town after dark, they drove through the empty streets up to the cathedral square, stopping on a slight incline so that the headlights would point upwards and illuminate the tympanum. “Agostinelli…” Proust would say, and open the volume of Ruskin, which was his bible. This is all true: he wrote it up in the Le Figaro of 1907 under the title Impressions de route en automobile. Of course, I was never quite sure that our car really had been Proust’s. In the junkyard where Albert had bought it there was no registration paper and it was impossible to trace the original owner. But, in the glove compartment, there was a pair of gloves, which Albert insisted were the real thing. If he liked the idea, what was wrong with it? Only the car wasn’t used for his funeral; but that’s another story.