Antonio Tabucchi - Little misunderstandings of no importance - stories

When the owner of the repair shop died, I took over. For some time I had been a silent partner. Monsieur Gelin had given me a free hand and I had made a pile of money, partly thanks to Albert, who found the vintage cars. Sales were my affair; I created a mid-city headquarters for public relations because we couldn’t receive prospective buyers at the shop. It was a microscopic but handsome set-up on the fashionable Avenue Foch: a waiting room and a panelled office with two leather-upholstered chairs and a brass plate on the door: Pegasus. De-luxe Vintage Cars. I received customers twice a week — Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning — as advertised. Most of the time I was bored to death because there was seldom more than one buyer a month. But seven or eight sales a year yielded all the money I wanted. Albert managed to find old wrecks that cost him a song and he had made connections with a repair shop in Marseilles which sold us museum pieces for a pittance. All we had to do was fix them up, but that was quite a job. I enjoyed it, and I took on a bright, nimble-fingered young assistant, the son of one of Albert’s cousins, called Jacob who, like him, came from Lorraine. For three or four years we restored a bit of everything: Delages, Aston Martins, a Hispano-Suiza, an Isotta Fraschini, and even a 1922 Fiat Mefistofele, the most beautiful racing car in the world. That one wasn’t a car, really; it was a torpedo, a copy of the 1908 original, and in 1924 it set a world speed record. The customers were usually Americans, rolling in money, mad about Europe, with an abominable accent and a craving for vintage cars. They pictured themselves as so many Fitzger-alds, geniuses and wastrels, drunk on champagne, Montmar-tre, and Sous le ciel de Paris. Those, too, were the days. People had been scared by bombs and the slaughter in the trenches and they wanted to celebrate and feel themselves alive: let’s laugh and have fun; life’s a gift to be enjoyed; we don’t want to be like the foolish virgins. There was an Egyptian, one of our best customers, a jovial, fat fellow; he wanted a car every three months, one for every season, he said, laughing like a child. He drank like a sponge and wrecked the cars, one after another. Eventually he came to a bad end; the French police arrested him, I never knew why; for political reasons, they said, but your guess is as good as mine. Albert wanted me to get married. “Get yourself a wife, Carabas,” he used to say. “You’re over thirty and you need the right kind of woman. What’s a man to do, in the house, after he’s spent the day fixing a hood? Time slips by, without our noticing, and you’ll be an old man before you know it.” Albert was a bit of a philosopher, like every good mechanic. You may not believe it, Monsieur, but the study of automobiles is very instructive: life’s a gearbox, a wheel here, a pump there and then the transmission, which links it all up and turns power into movement, yes, just the way it is in life. Some day I’d like to understand the workings of the transmission that ties the components of my life together. It’s the same idea; just open up the hood and study the humming motor, then tie up all the minutes, people, and events and say: here’s the engine block (that stage of my life); here’s Albert (the starter); here am I (the pistons with their valves) and here’s the spark plug that sets off the spark and gives the word to go. The spark was Miriam, of course, as you probably realize, but what was the transmission? Not the obvious one, as I told Albert, which was a Bugatti Royale, but the real, hidden one, which ties all the components together and causes a car to move just the way this one moved, with its rhythm, pulse, acceleration, speed and final slow-down.

“There’s no resisting a Bugatti Royale,” I said to Albert. “I’m going.” He looked up from wiping the bar and I thought I saw a shadow of melancholy cross his eyes. “It’ll give you problems,” he said, “you know that better than I do, but I understand. It’s your race. You’ve always been stuck between the starting line and the track and now you’re in a position to run. You’re too young and the fascination of risk is too strong.”

But first I must go back, because that isn’t where our conversation ended, I mean the conversation between Miriam and myself, when I told her I was the Marquis of Carabas but I had no mind to leave my estate. “Don’t joke, please,” she said. “I’m not joking,” I replied. Then she repeated: “Don’t joke, please.” And picking up her glass, distractedly, as if what she was about to say were the most natural thing in the world, “They want to kill me,” she added. She said it with the voice of a woman who has seen, drunk, and loved too much and so was beyond lying. I stared at her, like a fool, not knowing what to answer and then I objected, ignobly, “What’s in it for me?” She emptied her glass, hurriedly, with the melancholy smile of disillusionment. “Very little,” she said; “you’re quite right, practically nothing.” She left some change on the table and wearily pushed back her hair. “Excuse me,” she said, and went away. Besides her glass she had left a matchbox with Miriam written on it, and a telephone number. I didn’t call; better pass it up, I said to myself. But the following Saturday, I met the Count. I was in my office on the Avenue Foch, summer was at hand and through the window I could see the new green leaves on the trees. I was reading a book by an Italian dandy who drove to Peking at the turn of the century — I don’t remember his name — when the Count came in. Of course, I didn’t know at first who he was. He was a stout man, no longer young, with a short reddish beard, wearing a navy-blue blazer, light-coloured trousers, and old-fashioned sunglasses and carrying a newspaper and a cane, a rich banker or lawyer type of fellow. He introduced himself and sat down, crossing his legs awkwardly because of his weight. “I believe my wife contacted you about a job proposal,” he said deliberately, “and I’d like to clarify the terms.” His tone of voice was flat and bored, as if the matter did not concern him and he wanted to get rid of it with a cheque. “We have an old car,” he went on, “a 1927 Bugatti Royale, and my wife has got it into her head to take it to Biarritz, to take part in a rally at San Sebastian.” As I had foreseen, he pulled out a chequebook and signed a cheque for an amount more than the price of the car. His expression was more and more bored; as for me, I was sparked up, but I tried to keep cool. There are plenty of drivers around, I nearly said. If you put an ad in the paper there’ll be a flock of applicants; as for me, right now, I’m sorry, but I’m very busy. Instead, he got in first: “I want you to turn down my wife’s offer.” And he held out the cheque. It stayed in his hand, because I was staring at him stupidly, taken by surprise. At the same time I had a feeling that there was something fishy about the whole story; it was too vague and contradictory. I don’t know why, perhaps just instinctively, I said: “I don’t know your wife or anything about a job proposal. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” It was his turn to be taken aback, I was sure of it, but he didn’t flinch. He tore up the cheque and threw it into the wastepaper basket. “If that’s so,” he said, “please excuse the interruption. My secretary must have made a mistake; goodbye.” As soon as he’d left, I called the number Miriam had left me. The Hotel de Paris answered: “The Count and Countess have gone out. Do you want to leave a message?” “Yes, it’s a personal message for the Countess; tell her that the Marquis de Carabas called, that’s all.”

It was a genuine Bugatti Royale, a coupe de ville. I don’t know if that means anything to you, Monsieur; it’s quite understandable if it doesn’t. Albert and I went to fetch it, in a little garage on the Quai d’Anjou, behind a wooden door opening onto a courtyard as musky as an English house, with the Seine running below. Albert couldn’t believe his eyes. “It’s impossible,” he said, “impossible,” caressing the long, tapering fenders; I don’t know whether you get the idea, but the Bugatti has something of a woman’s body about it, a woman lying on her back with her legs out in front of her. It was a superb specimen, the body in excellent condition, the damask velvet upholstery in fairly good shape aside from a few moth holes and a single tear. The main problem — at least at first sight — lay in the wheels and the exhaust pipes. The engine seemed unaffected by its long idleness and in need only of being roused from its slumber. We roused it successfully and drove it to the shop. The elephant on the hood was missing, and this was an unpleasant surprise, because you can’t take a Bugatti Royale to a rally without its elephant. Perhaps you didn’t know, but at the top of the radiator the Royale had a silver elephant sculpted by Ettore Bugatti’s brother, Rembrandt. It wasn’t just a trademark like the Rolls Royce’s Spirit of Ecstasy or the Packard swan, it was a symbol, undecipherable, like all symbols; an elephant standing on his hind legs, with his trunk upraised and trumpeting, in a gesture of attack or mating. Is it too glib to say that these two go together? Perhaps so. But just imagine this: a Bugatti Royale on its haunches, climbing a slight incline, with fenders flared, ready to gather speed and intoxication, with power throbbing behind a fabulous radiator grille and, atop it, an elephant with upraised trunk.