Antonio Tabucchi - Indian Nocturne

I followed him and we went into the largest room I have ever seen. It was as big as a hangar, almost, and along the walls and down three central rows were the beds, or rather mattresses. A few dim lamps hung from the ceiling, and I stopped a moment, because the smell was very strong. Crouching near the door were two men dressed in the barest rags who moved off as we came in.

‘They are untouchables,’ said the doctor. ‘They look after the patients’ bodily needs, no one else will do the job. India’s like that.’

In the first bed was an old man. He was completely naked and very thin. He looked dead, but kept his eyes wide open and looked at us without any trace of expression. He had an enormous penis curled up on his abdomen. The doctor went to him and touched his forehead. I thought he slipped a pill into his mouth, but I couldn’t be sure because I was standing at the foot of the mattress. ‘He’s a sādhu ,’ said the doctor. ‘His genital organs are consecrated to God; once he was worshipped by infertile women, but he has never procreated in his life.’

Then he moved on and I followed him. He stopped at every bed, while I hung back a short distance away looking at the patient’s face. With some patients he stayed a while longer, murmuring a few words, distributing drugs. With others he stopped only a moment to touch their foreheads. The walls were stained red from the spittings of chewed betel and the heat was suffocating. Or perhaps it was the overpoweringly strong smell that gave this sensation of suffocation. In any case, the fans on the ceiling weren’t working. Then the doctor turned back and I followed him in silence.

‘He’s not here,’ I said. ‘He’s not one of these.’

He pushed aside the curtain to the hall again with the same politeness as before, letting me lead the way.

‘The heat is unbearable,’ I said, ‘and the fans aren’t working. It’s incredible.’

‘The voltage is very low at night in Bombay,’ he answered.

‘And yet you have a nuclear reactor at Trobay, I saw the cooling tower from the front.’

He smiled very weakly. ‘Almost all the energy goes to the factories, then to the luxury hotels and the Marine Drive area; here we have to make do.’ He set off along the corridor taking the opposite direction to the one we’d come from. ‘India’s like that,’ he finished.

‘Did you study here?’ I asked.

He stopped to look at me and I had the impression that a flicker of nostalgia lit his eyes. ‘I studied in London,’ he said, ‘and then I did my specialisation in Zürich.’ He brought out his straw cigarette case and took a cigarette. ‘An absurd specialisation for India. I’m a cardiologist, but no one here has heart problems; only you people in Europe die of heart attacks.’

‘What do people die of here?’ I asked.

‘Of everything that has nothing to do with the heart. Syphilis, tuberculosis, leprosy, typhoid, septicaemia, cholera, meningitis, pellagra, diphtheria and other things. But I enjoyed studying the heart, I enjoyed finding out about that muscle that controls our lives, like this.’ He made a gesture, opening and closing his fist. ‘Perhaps I thought I would discover something inside it.’

The corridor opened on to a small covered courtyard in front of a low brick building.

‘Do you believe in God?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m an atheist. Being an atheist is the worst possible curse, in India.’

We crossed the courtyard and stopped in front of the other building.

‘The terminal cases are in here,’ he said, ‘there’s just a chance your friend is one of them.’

‘What are they suffering from?’ I asked.

‘Everything you can possibly imagine,’ he said, ‘but perhaps it would be better if you went now.’

‘I think so too,’ I said.

‘I’ll show you out,’ he said.

‘No, don’t bother, please, perhaps I can get out through that door in the entrance gate. I think we’re by the road here.’

‘My name’s Ganesh,’ he said, ‘after the merry God with the elephant’s face.’

I told him my name too before setting off. The gate was only a moment away beyond a hedge of jasmin. It was open. When I turned to look back at him he spoke again. ‘If I find him, should I say something?’

‘No thanks,’ I said, ‘don’t say anything.’

He raised his hairpiece as if it were a hat and made a slight bow. I went out into the street. It was getting light and the people on the pavements were waking up. Some were rolling up the mats they slept on at night. The street was full of crows hopping around the cow dung. Near the steps at the entrance was a beat-up old taxi, the driver asleep with his face against the side window.

‘The Taj Mahal,’ I said, getting in.

The only inhabitants of Bombay who take no notice of the ‘right of admission’ regulations in force at the Taj Mahal are the crows. They drop slowly onto the terrace of the Inter-Continental, laze on the Mogul windows of the older building, perch amid the branches of the mango trees in the garden, and hop on the perfect carpet of lawn that surrounds the swimming pool. They would go and drink from the pool itself or peck at the orange peel in your martini, were it not for a very efficient servant in livery who chases them off with a cricket bat, as though in some absurd match orchestrated by a whimsical film director. You have to be careful of the crows, they have very dirty beaks. The Bombay town council has had to arrange for the enormous reservoirs that feed the city’s aqueduct to be covered over, because more than once the crows, who themselves arrange for the re-introduction into the ‘life cycle’ of the corpses the Parsees lay out on the Towers of Silence (there are quite a number of towers in the Malabar Hill area), have dropped the odd mouthful into the water supply. But even with these measures the town council certainly hasn’t resolved the hygiene problem, because then there are the problems of the rats, the insects, the seepage from the sewers. It’s as well not to drink the water in Bombay. But you can drink it at the Taj Mahal which has its own purifiers and is proud of its water. Because the Taj is not a hotel: with its eight hundred rooms it is a city within a city.

When I arrived in this city I was received by a doorman dressed as an Indian prince with red sash and turban, who led me as far as the lobby, all done out in brass, where there were other employees likewise disguised as maharajas. Probably they imagined that I too was disguised, though in reverse — that I was a tycoon dressed up as a nobody — and they busily set about finding me a room in the noble wing of the building, the part that has the antique furniture and the view of the Gateway of India. For a moment I was tempted to tell them that I wasn’t there for aesthetic purposes, but just to sleep in consciousless comfort, and that they could put me anywhere they liked, in a room with shamefully modern furniture, even the skyscraper of the Inter-Continental was okay by me. But then I thought it would be cruel to disappoint them like this. The Peacock Suite, however, I refused. It was too much for one person on his own; but it wasn’t a question of price, I explained, to maintain the kind of style I had opted for.

The room was impressive, my case had come along ahead of me by some mysterious route and stood on a wicker stool, the bath was already full of water and foam. I sank into it and then wrapped myself in a linen towel. The windows opened onto the Arabian Sea. The sun was almost up now, and a pinkish light tinged the beach; beneath the Taj Mahal the life of India had begun to swarm once again. The heavy curtains of green velvet ran sweetly and softly as a theatre curtain; I drew them across the scene and the room was reduced to half-light and silence. The lazy, comforting hum of the big fan lulled me and I just managed to reflect that this too was a superfluous luxury, since the room temperature was perfect, when suddenly I found myself at an old chapel on a Mediterranean hillside. The chapel was white and it was hot. We were hungry and Xavier, laughing, was pulling out some sandwiches and cool wine from a basket. Isabel was laughing too, while Magda stretched out on a blanket on the grass. Far below us was the blue of the sea and a solitary donkey dawdled in the shade of the chapel. But it wasn’t a dream, it was a real memory; I was looking into the dark of the room and seeing that distant scene which seemed like a dream because I’d slept for a long time; my watch told me it was four in the afternoon. I stayed in bed quite a while, thinking of those times, going back over landscapes, faces, lives. I remembered the trips in the car along the pinewoods by the sea, the nicknames we gave each other, Xavier’s guitar and Magda’s shrill voice announcing in mock-serious tones, like a fairground showman: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please, we have among us The Italian Nightingale!’ And I would play along with her and launch into old Neapolitan songs, mimicking the out-dated warbling of singers in the old days, while everybody laughed and applauded. Amongst ourselves, and I was resigned to it, I was ‘Roux’, short for Rouxinol, Portuguese for nightingale. But the way they said it it seemed an attractive, even exotic name, so there was no reason to take offence. And then I went back over the following summers. Magda crying — I thought, why? Was it right perhaps? And Isabel, and her illusions. And when those memories took on an unbearable clarity, sharp as if beamed on the wall by a projector, I got up and left the room.