Antonio Tabucchi - The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico

Why did he have the courage when I didn’t, I wondered. What is this quality? Poetry, unawareness, awareness, or what? And then I saw this patient vehicle which has been transporting us for thousands of years. In a tray of food on the sideboard was an orange, our teacher used to say to us: Look, children, this is the world, that’s how it’s made, like an orange. The image floated up suddenly from the well of memory, and I looked on the surface of that orange for the long roads of Castile, and for a small car driving fast, thinking it could get into life through the little cork curtain of a page of Hemingway, and instead all I saw was orange peel, it had disappeared entirely from the fruit’s surface. The poet read his fine poem with a fine, polished voice, I was on the point of tears, but not because of what he was saying (or rather, only partly because of that); no, it was me, it was because I couldn’t find the road of that afternoon on the orange, the afternoon I saw Orson Welles, the afternoon I would have liked to talk to you about. So then I went up to my room to look at the enlargements I’d brought with me from the dark room. I’d broken down the painting piece by piece, dividing it into a fine grid, and I’d photographed every little square of the grid; it will be a long, exacting job requiring patience, interminable evenings with lens and lamp. Blown up by the enlargement process the surface of the frame is an epidermis full of wrinkles and scars, it almost makes you feel sorry for it, you see it was once a living organism, and now here it is in front of me like a corpse and I anatomise it to give it a sense it has lost with the passage of time, and which perhaps is not the original sense, the same way I try to give meaning to that afternoon on the road to Madrid, and I know the sense I’m giving it is different, because it had its real sense only then, in that moment, when I didn’t know what sense it had, and now when I give it a sense made up of youth, prints of Spain and novels of Hemingway, it’s just the interpretation of the person I am now: after its fashion, a fake.

This story, whose first-person narrator must of course be taken to be a fictional character, owes much to the observations of two art historians apropos of two panels of Paolo Uccello’s triptych, The Battle of San Romano , one of which is in the National Gallery, the other in the Louvre. Of the first, which shows Niccolò da Tolentino leading the Florentines, P. Francastel (Peinture et société , Lyon, 1951) notes, upon analysing the spatial perspective, that Paolo Uccello simultaneously uses different perspectives, amongst them one elusive perspective close up and one ‘compartmentalised’ perspective in the background. The panel in the Louvre, which shows the part played by Micheletto da Cotignola, attracted the attention of A. Parronchi (Studi su la dolce prospettiva , Milan, 1964), again in response to problems of perspective. Parronchi examines the pictorial use of the silver leaves of the breastplates, and concludes that it is these which give the impression of reflections and of a multiplication of images. Basically the panel in the Louvre would seem to offer a way of playing with perspective already posited in Vitelione’s Perspectiva; a method by which ‘it is possible to arrange the mirror in such a way that the viewer sees in the air, outside the mirror, the image of something that is not within his field of vision.’ In this way Paolo Uccello’s panel would appear to offer a representation not of real beings, but of ghosts.

The only other thing I need to say is that the author of this letter is writing to a female character.

I have a non-existent novel whose story I would like to tell. The novel was called Letters to Captain Nemo , a title later altered to No One Behind the Door. I wrote it in 1977, I think, in two weeks of rough seclusion and rapture in a little village near Siena. I’m not sure what inspired me: partly memories, which in my mind are almost always mixed up with fantasy and as a result not very reliable; partly the urgency of fiction itself, which always carries a certain weight; and partly loneliness, which is often the writer’s company. Without thinking much about it, I turned the story into a novel (a long short story) and sent it to a publisher, who found it perhaps rather too allusive, and a little elusive, and then from the point of view of a publisher, not very accessible or decipherable. I think he was right. To be quite frank, I don’t know what its value in literary terms may or may not have been. I left it to settle for a while in a drawer, since I feel that obscurity and forgetfulness improve a story. Maybe I really did forget it. I came across it again a few years later, and finding it made a strange impression on me. It rose quite suddenly from the darkness of a dresser, from beneath the stacks of paper, like a submarine rising from obscure depths. I saw an obvious metaphor in this, a message almost (the novel was partly about a submarine); and as though in justification, or expiation (it is strange how novels can bring on guilt complexes), I felt the need to add a concluding note, the only thing that now remains of the whole and which still bears the title: Beyond the End. This would have been the winter of 1979, I think. I made a few small changes to the novel, then entrusted it to a publisher of a variety I thought might be more suitable for a difficult book like this. My choice turned out to be right, agreement was quickly reached and I promised delivery for the following autumn. Except that during the summer holidays I took the typescript with me in my suitcase. It had been alone for a long time and I felt it needed company. I read it again towards the end of August. I was by the Atlantic in an old house inhabited by wind and ghosts. These were not my ghosts, but real ghosts: pitiful presences which it took only the smallest amount of sensitivity or receptiveness to become aware of. And then I was particularly sensitive at the time because I knew the history of the house well and likewise the people who had lived there: by one of life’s inexplicable coincidences my own life and theirs had become mixed up together. Meanwhile September came around bringing those violent sea storms that usher in the equinox; sometimes the house would be blacked out, the trees in the big garden waved their restless branches, and all night long the corridors echoed with the groans of ageing woodwork. Occasionally friends would come to dinner, the headlamps of their cars carving white swathes in the darkness. In front of the house was a cliff with a fearful drop straight into the seething waves. I was alone, I knew that for certain, and in the loneliness of existence the restless presences of the ghosts tried to make contact. But real conversations are impossible, you have to make do with bizarre, untranslatable codes, stratagems invented ad hoc. I could think of nothing better than to rely on a flashing light. There was a lighthouse on the other side of the bay. It sent out two beams and had four different time gaps. Using combinations of these variables I invented a mental language that was very approximate but good enough for basic conversation. Some nights I would suffer from insomnia. The old house had a big terrace and I would spend the night talking to the lighthouse, using it, that is, to transmit my messages, or to receive messages, depending on the situation, the whole exchange being orchestrated by myself, of course. But some things are easier than one imagines; for example, all you have to do is think: Tonight I’m transmitting; or: Tonight I’m receiving. And you’re set.

I received many stories during those nights. I confess to transmitting very little. Most of the time I spent listening. Those presences were eager to talk and I sat and listened to their stories, trying to decipher communications which were often subject to interference, obscure and full of gaps. They were unhappy stories for the most part, that much I sensed quite clearly. Thus, amidst those silent dialogues, the autumn equinox came round. That day the sea was whipped up into a storm. I heard it thundering away from dawn on. In the afternoon an enormous force convulsed its bowels. Come evening, thick clouds had descended on the horizon and communication with my ghosts was lost. I went to the cliffs around two in the morning, having waited for the beam of the lighthouse in vain. The ocean was howling quite unbearably, as if full of voices and laments. I took my novel with me and consigned it to the wind page by page. I don’t know if it was a tribute, a homage, a sacrifice or a penance.