Antonio Tabucchi - Indian Nocturne

‘I’ve told you what I do,’ said Christine, ‘so what do you do? If you feel like telling me.’

‘Well, let’s suppose I’m writing a book, for example.’

‘What kind of book?’

‘A book.’

‘A novel?’ asked Christine with a sly look.

‘Something like that.’

‘So you’re a novelist,’ she said with a certain logic.

‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘it’s just an experiment, my job is something else, I look for dead mice.’

‘Come again?’

‘I was joking,’ I said. ‘I scour through old archives, I hunt for old chronicles, things time has swallowed up. It’s my job, I call it dead mice.’

Christine looked at me with tolerance, and perhaps with a touch of disappointment. The waiter came promptly and brought us some dishes full of sauces. He asked us if we’d like wine and we said yes. The lobster arrived steaming, just the shell singed, the meat spread with melted butter. The sauces were very heavily spiced, it only took a drop to set your mouth on fire. But then the flames died out at once and the palate filled with exquisite, unusual aromas: I recognised juniper, but the other spices I didn’t know. We carefully spread the sauces on our lobster and raised our glasses. Christine confessed that she already felt a bit drunk, perhaps I did too, but I wasn’t aware of it.

‘Tell me about your novel, come on,’ she said. ‘I’m intrigued, don’t keep me in suspense.’

‘But it’s not a novel,’ I protested, ‘it’s a bit here and a bit there, there’s not even a real story, just fragments of a story. And then I’m not writing it, I said let’s suppose that I’m writing it.’

Clearly we were both terribly hungry. The lobster shell was already empty and the waiter appeared promptly. We ordered some other things, whatever he wanted to bring. Light things, we specified, and he nodded knowingly.

‘A few years ago I published a book of photographs,’ said Christine. ‘It was a single sequence on a roll, impeccably printed, just the way I like, with the perforations along the edges of the roll showing, no captions, just photos. It opened with a photograph that I feel is the most successful of my career, I’ll send you a copy sometime if you give me your address. It was a blow-up of a detail; the photo showed a young negro, just his head and shoulders, a sports singlet with a sales slogan, an athletic body, an expression of great effort on his face, his arms raised as if in victory; obviously he’s breasting the tape, in the hundred metres for example.’ She looked at me with a slightly mysterious air, waiting for me to speak.

‘And so?’ I asked. ‘Where’s the mystery?’

‘The second photograph,’ she said. ‘That was the whole photograph. On the left there’s a policeman dressed like a Martian, a plexiglass helmet over his face, high boots, a rifle tucked into his shoulder, his eyes fierce under his fierce visor. He’s shooting at the negro. And the negro is running away with his arms up, but he is already dead: a second after I clicked the shutter he was already dead.’ She didn’t say anything else and went on eating.

‘Tell me the rest,’ I said, ‘you may as well finish the story now.’

‘My book was called South Africa and it had just one caption under the first photograph that I’ve described, the blow-up. The caption said: Méfiez-vous des morceaux choisis .’ She grimaced a moment and went on: ‘No selections, please. Tell me what your book is about, I want to know the concept behind it.’

I tried to think. How could my book turn out? It’s difficult to explain the concept behind a book. Christine was watching me, implacable, she was a stubborn girl. ‘For example, in the book I would be someone who has lost his way in India,’ I said quickly, ‘that’s the concept.’

‘Oh no,’ said Christine, ‘that’s not enough, you can’t get off so lightly, there must be more to it than that.’

‘The central idea is that in this book I am someone who has lost his way in India,’ I repeated. ‘Let’s put it like that. There is someone else who is looking for me, but I have no intention of letting him find me. I saw him arrive and I have followed him day by day, we could say. I know his likes and his dislikes, his enthusiasms and his hesitations, his generosity and his fears. I keep him more or less under control. He, on the contrary, knows almost nothing about me. He has a few vague clues: a letter, a few witnesses, confused or reticent, a note that doesn’t say much at all: signs, fragments which he laboriously tries to piece together.’

‘But who are you?’ asked Christine. ‘In the book I mean.’

‘That’s never revealed,’ I answered. ‘I am someone who doesn’t want to be found, so it’s not part of the game to say who.’

‘And the person looking for you who you seem to know so well,’ Christine asked again, ‘does he know you?’

‘Once he knew me, let’s suppose that we were great friends, once. But this was a long time ago, outside the frame of the book.’

‘And why is he looking for you with such determination?’

‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘It’s hard to tell, I don’t even know that and I’m writing the book. Perhaps he’s looking for a past, an answer to something. Perhaps he would like to grasp something that escaped him in the past. In a way he is looking for himself. I mean, it’s as if he were looking for himself, looking for me: that often happens in books, it’s literature.’ I paused, as if I had reached a crucial point and said confidentially: ‘Actually, as it turns out, there are also two women.’

‘Ah, finally,’ Christine exclaimed, ‘now it’s getting more interesting.’

‘I’m afraid not,’ I went on, ‘since they too are outside the frame, they don’t belong to the story.’

‘Oh, come on,’ said Christine, ‘is everything outside the frame in this book? Why don’t you tell me what’s inside the frame?’

‘I told you, there is someone looking for someone else, there is someone looking for me, the book is his looking for me.’

‘So then tell me the story a bit better!’

‘All right,’ I said, ‘it begins like this: he arrives in Bombay, he has the address of a third-rate hotel where I once stayed and he sets off on his search. And there he meets a girl who knew me in the past and she tells him that I’ve fallen ill, that I went to hospital, and then that I had contacts with some people in the south of India. So he goes off to look for me in hospital, which turns out to be a false trail, and then he leaves Bombay and begins a journey, still with the excuse that he is looking for me, whereas the truth is that he is travelling on his own account for his own reasons; the book is mainly that: his travelling. He has a whole series of encounters, naturally, because when one travels one meets people. He arrives in Madras, goes around the city, the temples in the vicinity, and in a scholarly society he finds a few equivocal clues as to my whereabouts. And in the end he arrives in Goa, where, however, he had to go anyway for reasons of his own.’

Christine was following me with attention now, sucking a mint stick and watching me. ‘In Goa,’ she said, ‘Goa of all places, interesting. And what happens there?’

‘In Goa there are a lot of other encounters,’ I continued, ‘he wanders about here and there, and then one evening he arrives in a certain town and there he understands everything.’

‘Which is what?’

‘Oh, well,’ I said, ‘that he wasn’t finding me partly for the very simple reason that I had assumed another name. And he manages to find out what it is. In the end it wasn’t impossible to find out because it was a name that had to do with himself, in the past. Except that I had altered the name, camouflaged it. I don’t know how he got to it, but the fact is that he did, maybe it was luck.’