Antonio Tabucchi - The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico

‘I have no intention of discussing the schedule of my operating theatre with you. This is the University of Pisa and I am not just a doctor, I have well-defined teaching duties as well. I’m not going to put up with you telling me what I have to do. I can’t operate on your father until next week; if that’s not good enough, have the patient discharged and find another hospital. It goes without saying that the responsibility will be yours. Goodbye.’

The voice of the hostess invited the passengers to buckle their safety belts and extinguish their cigarettes, the stopover would last about forty minutes for refuelling and cleaning. And as through the window one began to see the lights of Bombay and a little later the blue lights of the runway, just then — it must have been due to the slight bump as the plane touched down, sometimes these things do spark off associations of ideas — I found myself on your scooter. You were driving with your arms out wide, because in those days the scooters used to have wide handlebars, and I was watching your scarf blowing in the wind. The fringe was tickling me and I wanted to scratch my nose but I was afraid of falling. It was 1956, I’m sure of that, because you bought the scooter as a celebration the same day I turned thirteen. I tapped two fingers on your shoulder, to ask you to slow down, and you turned, smiling, and as you turned the scarf slipped from your neck, very slowly, as if every movement of objects in space had been put into slow motion, and I saw that beneath your scarf you had a horrible wound slicing across your throat from one side to the other, so wide and open I could see the muscle tissue, the blood vessels, the carotid artery, the pharynx, but you didn’t know you had the wound and you smiled unaware, and in fact you didn’t have it, it was me seeing it there, it’s strange how one sometimes finds oneself superimposing one memory over another, that was what I was doing. I was remembering how you were in 1956 and then adding the last image you were to leave me, almost thirty years later.

I appreciate one shouldn’t write to the dead, but you know perfectly well that sometimes writing to the dead is an excuse, it’s an elementary Freudian truth, because it’s the quickest way of writing to oneself, and so forgive me, I am writing to myself, even though perhaps I am writing to the memory of you I keep inside me, the mark you left inside me, and hence in a certain sense I really am writing to you — but no, perhaps this too is an excuse, the truth is I am writing to no one but myself: even my memory of you, that mark you left inside me, is exclusively my business, you are nowhere and in nothing, there’s just me, sitting here in this jumbo heading for Hong Kong and imagining I’m riding on a scooter, I thought I was on a scooter, I knew perfectly well I was flying on a plane that was taking me to Hong Kong from where I’ll then take a boat to Macao, except that I was riding on a scooter, it was my thirteenth birthday, you were driving with your scarf around your neck and I was going to Macao by scooter. And without turning round, the fringe of your scarf in the wind tickling me, you shouted: To Macao? What on earth are you going to Macao for? And I said: I’m going to look for some documents in the archives there, there’s a municipal archive, and then the archive of an old school too, I’m going to look for some papers, some letters maybe, I’m not sure, basically some manuscripts of a symbolist poet, a strange man who lived in Macao for thirty-five years, he was an opium addict, he died in 1926, a Portuguese, called Camilo Pessanha, the family was originally from Genoa, his ancestor, a certain Pezagno, was in the service of the Portuguese king in 1300. He was a poet, he wrote only one little book of poems, Clepsydra , listen to this line: ‘The wild roses have bloomed by mistake.’ And you asked me: ‘You think that makes any sense?’

For the solitary traveller, admittedly rare but perhaps not implausible, who cannot resign himself to the lukewarm, standardised forms of hospitalised death which the modern statae guarantees and who, what’s more, is terrorised at the thought of the hurried and impersonal treatment to which his unique body will be subjected during the obsequies, Lisbon still offers an admirable range of options for a noble suicide, together with the most decorous, solemn, zealous, polite and above all cheap organisations for dealing with what a successful suicide inevitably leaves behind it: the corpse.

Choosing a place suitable for a voluntary exit, and deciding on the manner of that exit, has become an almost hopeless undertaking these days, so much so that even the most eager are resigning themselves to natural forms of death, aided perhaps by the idea, now widespread in people’s consciousness, that the atomic destruction of the planet, the Total Suicide, is just a question of time, and hence what’s the point of taking so much trouble? This last idea is very much open to question, and if nothing else misleading in its cunning syllogism: first because it creates a connivance with Death and hence a sort of resignation to the so-called ‘Inevitable’ (a feeling necessarily alien to the exquisitely private act of suicide which can in no way be subjected to collectivist notions without its very essence being perverted); and second, even in the event of the Great Explosion, why on earth should this be considered a suicide, rather than a homicide inspired by destructive impulses towards others and the self carried out on a large scale and similar to those which inspired the wretched Nazis? And coercive in nature too, and hence in contrast with the inalienable nature of the act of suicide, which consists, as we know, in freedom of choice.

Furthermore, it has to be said that while waiting for the Total Suicide, people are still dying, a fact I consider worthy of reflection. And dying not just in the traditional and ancient fashions, but also and to a great extent as a result of factors connected with those same diabolical traps which foreshadow the Total Suicide. Such little inventions, for the solemn reason, amongst many others, that the cathode tubes of our houses must be on and that we must thus supply them with energy, are daily distributing their doses of poison which, being indiscriminate, are, if we wish to cavil, democratic; in short, while insinuating the idea of the inevitable Total Suicide, these things are all the time carrying out a systematic, constant and, I would even say, progressive form of homicide. Thus the potential suicide who does not kill himself because he might just as well wait for the Total Suicide, does not reflect, poor sucker, that in the meantime he is absorbing radioactive strontium, cesium and other delights of that ilk, and that while postponing his departure he is quite possibly already nursing in liver, lungs or spleen, one of the innumerable forms of cancer that the above-mentioned elements so prodigally produce.

In indicating a place where one might still kill oneself with dignity, in complete liberty and in ways esteemed by our ancestors and now apparently lost, one does not pretend to offer a public service (though it could be that), but to promote reflection, from a purely theoretical point of view, on a liberty: a hypothetical initiative practised upon ourselves which might be carried out without sinking to the more disheartening and vulgar stratagems to which the would-be suicide inevitably seems to be constrained in those countries defined as industrially advanced. (Obviously I am not referring to countries where problems of political, mental or physical survival exist and where suicide presents itself as a form of desperation and thus outside the realm of the kind of suicide here discussed, which is based on freedom of choice.)