Antonio Tabucchi - The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico

I’m sure you will find my story ridiculous, but it’s the story I have to tell. As far as your gnostic interpretation of my Nocturne , or rather of its conclusion, is concerned, allow me to insist in all sincerity that I am not familiar with the Mandala and that my knowledge of Hindu philosophy is vague and very approximate, consisting as it does in the summary found in a tourist guide and in a pocket paperback I picked up at the airport called L’Induisme (part of the ‘Que sais-je?’ series). As regards the question of the mirror, I started doing some hurried research only after getting your letter. For help I went to the books of a serious scholar, Professor Grazia Machianò, and am finding it hard work to grasp the basics of a philosophy of which I am woefully ignorant.

Finally I must say my own feeling is that on the most immediate level my Nocturne reflects a spiritual state which is far less profound than you so generously suppose. Private problems, of which I will spare you the tedious details, and then of course the business of finding myself in a continent so remote from my own world, had provoked an extremely strong sense of alienation towards everything: so much so that I no longer knew why I was there, what the point of my journey was, what sense there was in what I was doing or in what I myself might be. It was out of this alienation, perhaps, that my book sprang. In short, a misunderstanding. Evidently misunderstandings suit me. In confirmation of which allow me to send you this most recent book of mine, published a few days ago. You know Italian very well and may wish to take a look at it.

I am, believe me, your

ANTONIO TABUCCHI

Madras, 13 June 1985

Dear Mr Tabucchi,

My thanks for your letter and gift. I have just finished Little Misunderstandings of No Importance and your other book of short stories, Reverse Side , which you were generous enough to enclose. You did well, since the two complement each other and this made reading them more pleasant.

I am perfectly well aware that my letter caused you some embarrassment, just as I am also aware that you, for reasons of your own, wish to elude the gnostic interpretations that I have of your books and which you, as I said, deny. As I mentioned in my first letter, Europeans visiting India can usually be divided into two categories: those who believe they have discovered transcendence and those who profess the most radical secularism. I fear that despite your search for a third way, you do fall into these categories.

Forgive me my insistence. Even the philosophical position (may I so define it?) which you call ‘Misunderstanding’ corresponds, albeit dressed up in Western culture (the Baroque), to the ancient Hindu precept that the misunderstanding (the error of life) is equivalent to an initiatory journey around the illusion of the real, that is, around human life on earth. Everything is identical, as we say; and it seems to me that you affirm the same thing, even if you do so from a position of scepticism (are you by any chance considered a pessimist?). But I would like to abandon my culture for a moment and draw on yours instead. Perhaps you will remember Epimenides’ paradox which goes more or less like this: ‘The phrase that follows this is false: the phrase that precedes this is true.’ As you will have noticed, the two halves of the saying are mirrors of each other. Dusting off this paradox, an American mathematician, Richard Hoffstadter, author of a paper on Gödel’s theorem, has recently called into question the whole Aristotelian-Cartesian logical dichotomy on which your culture is based and according to which every statement must be either true or false. This statement in fact can be simultaneously both true and false; and this because it refers to itself in the negative: it is a snake biting its own tail, or, to quote Hoffstadter’s definition, ‘a strange loop.’

Life too is a strange loop. We are back to Hinduism again. Do you at least agree on this much, Mr Tabucchi?

I am, believe me, your

XAVIER JANATA MONROY

Vecchiano, 10 July 1985

Dear Mr Janata Monroy,

As usual your letter has obliged me to make a rapid and I fear superficial attempt to assimilate some culture. I only managed to track down something about the American mathematician you mention in one Italian periodical, a column written from the USA by journalist Sandro Stille. The article was very interesting and I have promised myself to look into the matter more deeply. I do not, however, know much about mathematical logic, nor perhaps about any kind of logic; indeed I believe I am the most illogical person I know, and hence I don’t imagine I will make much progress in studies of this variety. Perhaps, as you say, life really is ‘a strange loop.’ It seems fair that each of us should understand this expression in the cultural context that best suits him.

But allow me to give you a piece of advice. Don’t believe too readily in what writers say: they lie (tell lies) almost all the time. A novelist who writes in Spanish and who perhaps you are familiar with, Mario Vargas Llosa, has said that writing a story is a performance not unlike a strip-tease. Just as the girl undresses under an immodest spotlight revealing her secret charms, so the writer lays bare his intimate life to the public through his stories. Of course there are differences. What the writer reveals are not, like the uninhibited girl, his secret charms, but rather the spectres that haunt him, the ugliest parts of himself: his regrets, his guilt and his resentments. Another difference is that while in her performance the girl starts off dressed and ends up naked, in the case of the story the trajectory is inverted: the writer starts off naked and ends up dressed. Perhaps we writers are simply afraid. By all means consider us cowards and leave us to our private guilt, our private ghosts. The rest is clouds.

Yours

ANTONIO TABUCCHI

I would have liked to talk to you about the sky over Castile. The blue and the swift billowing clouds driven by the upland wind, and the monastery of Santa Maria de Huerta, on the road to Madrid, where I arrived one late spring afternoon to find Orson Welles shooting Falstaff , and it seemed to me the most natural thing in the world to come across that big bearded man with a cigar in his mouth, wearing a waistcoat and sitting on a stool in the Cistercian cloister. To tell you: Look, that’s what I was like then, all those years ago, I liked Spain, Hills Like White Elephants , it was like pushing aside the cork curtain of a small rather dirty tavern and walking straight into a book by Hemingway, that was the door to life, it smacked of literature, like a page from The Sun Also Rises. It was a feast day, a holiday, I wasn’t the person I am now, I still had the innocent lightness of someone who is waiting for things to happen; I could still take risks, write those stories, like Dinner with Federico , describing the limbo of adolescence, lazy afternoons, cicadas: small beer then, but it would take some courage now.

I was listening to a poet reading his poetry; ‘my Southern Cross, my Hesperus,’ and he was full of tenderness for a woman made of poetry, who in the end was himself. I sensed that he really did love this woman, because he loved her in the most authentic way possible, he loved himself in her, that is the real secret and in its own way a form of innocence, and I said to myself: Too late.

Nice place, the hotel, with blackened mirrors and ornamental picture frames, neoclassical columns made of wood, a discreet carefully selected audience of the kind one finds late evenings in luxury hotels, and me there listening with my heart beating, full of remorse and shame.