Antonio Tabucchi - The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro

The lawyer paused as if to draw breath. And draw it he did, like a drowning man, and the sound he made was like a pair of old bellows.

“It’s all the fault of these puros ,” said he, “I have to smoke these Spanish puros because you can’t get Havanas any more, they’ve become a memory, but perhaps that island itself has become a mere memory.” Then he continued: “We are straying from the point, though in fact it is only I who am straying from the point, please forgive me, I have too many things buzzing about in my head today.”

The hand on which his chin was resting was all the while fingering his flabby cheek.

“And then I slept badly, I have too many sleepless nights, and sleepless nights bring ghosts with them and make time recoil. Do you know what it means when time recoils?”

He looked questioningly at Firmino, and Firmino once again felt nettled and embarrassed. He didn’t at all like the way Don Fernando treated him, and perhaps others, as if he were looking for an accomplice, as if expecting a confirmation of his doubts, but in an almost threatening manner.

“I don’t know what you mean, sir,” he said, “you talk in such an ambiguous way, I don’t understand what you mean by time recoiling.”

“I realize,” murmured the lawyer, “that you are not the right person to talk to on the subject of time. Of course, you are young, and for you time is a ribbon stretching out before you, you are like a driver on an unknown road, whose only interest is in what will happen after the next bend. But that was not what I meant to say, I was referring to a theoretical concept, hell and dammit, who knows why theories have such a hold on me, perhaps because I practice law, and that too is one enormous theory, a shaky edifice surmounted by an infinitely great dome, like the celestial vault which we may observe while comfortably seated in a planetarium. You know, I once happened to come across a treatise on the theory of physics, one of those elucubrations thought up by mathematicians cloistered in comfortable cells in universities, and it spoke of a time, and one phrase really struck me and made me think, a phrase which said that at a certain time, in the universe, time came into existence. This scientist perfidiously added that this concept cannot be grasped by our mental faculties.”

He looked at Firmino with his small inquisitorial eyes. He shifted his position. He now thrust his hands into his pockets, in the attitude of a street urchin taunting someone.

“I do not wish to appear presumptuous,” he said with a provocative air, “but such an abstract concept needed a translation into human terms, do you understand me?”

“I’m doing my best,” responded Firmino.

“Dreams,” resumed the lawyer, “the translation of theoretical physics into human terms is possible only in dreams. Because in fact the translation of this concept can occur only here, right inside here.”

And he tapped his temple with a forefinger.

“Here in our little heads,” he went on, “but only when they are sleeping, in that uncontrollable space which according to Dr. Freud is the free state of Unconscious. It is true that that formidable sleuth could not make a connection between dream and the theorem of theoretical physics, but it would be interesting if someone did it some day. Do you mind my smoking?”

He tottered to the little table and lit one of his cigars. He took a puff without inhaling and blew some smoke rings.

“I sometimes dream about my grandmother,” he said pensively, “all too often I dream about her. She was very important to my childhood, you know, I was practically brought up by her, even though I was really in the hands of governesses. And sometimes I dream of her as a child. Because, to be sure, even my grandmother was once a child. That terrible old woman, as fat as I am now, with her hair all done up in a bun and a velvet ribbon round her neck, and her black silk dresses, her way of staring at me without a word when she made me have tea with her in her apartments, well, that fearsome woman who was my waking nightmare has now entered my dreams, and she has entered them as a child, what a strange thing to happen, because I could never have imagined that the old harridan had once been a child, but a child she is in my dream, in a little blue dress as light as a cloud, with bare feet, and curls tumbling on to her shoulders: and they are blond curls. I am on the other side of a stream and she is trying to reach me by setting her rosy little feet on stones in the running water. I know that she is my grandmother, but at the same time she is a little girl, just as I am a little boy. I don’t know if I have explained myself. Have I?”

“I wouldn’t know,” replied Firmino cautiously.

“I haven’t,” continued the lawyer, “because dreams can’t be explained, they don’t take place within the sphere of the expressible, as Dr. Freud would have us believe, all I wanted to say was that time can begin in this way, in our dreams, but I didn’t manage to say it.”

He stubbed out his cigar and heaved one of those enormous sighs that sounded like a pair of bellows.

“I am tired,” he said, “I need to take my mind off things, I do have more concrete matters to speak to you about, but for the moment we have to go out.”

“I walked here,” Firmino pointed out, “as you know I have no means of transport.”

“Well I won’t walk for sure,” said Don Fernando, “with all this flab on me it exhausts me to walk, perhaps we can get Manuel to drive us, if he’s not too busy there in his cellar, he’s the one who acts as my chauffeur on rare occasions, he looks after my father’s car, it’s a Chevy from the 1940s but in perfect order, the engine runs as smooth as oil, we could ask him if he’ll take us for a ride.”

Firmino realized that the lawyer was waiting for his approval, so he nodded hastily. Don Fernando picked up the telephone and called Senhor Manuel.

“IT ISN’T EASY TO ESCAPE from Oporto,” said the lawyer, “but maybe the real problem is that it isn’t easy to escape from ourselves, if you will excuse the triteness.”

The car was humming along the coast road, Senhor Manuel was driving very carefully, darkness had fallen and on their left the lights of the city were already distant. They passed an enormous slate-roofed building, the lawyer waved a vague hand towards it.

“That’s the old headquarters of the Electricity Company,” he said, “what a grim building, eh? now it’s a sort of depository for all the memories of the city, but when I was a child and they took me to the farm electric light had not yet arrived in the countryside, people made do with oil-lamps.”

“There at the Horse Farm?” asked Manuel over his shoulder.

“Yes, at the Horse Farm,” replied the lawyer.

He wound down the window and let in a bit of air.

“The Horse Farm is my early childhood,” he said in a low voice, “the first years of my life were spent there, my German governess took me into the city for Sunday tea with my grandmother, the woman who was a substitute mother to me lived at the farm, her name was Mena.”

The car crossed a bridge and turned right onto a road with little traffic. At the turning the headlights showed a couple of signposts: Areinho, Massarelos. Places Firmino had never heard of.

“When I was a child it was a flourishing farm,” said the lawyer, “and they called it the Horse Farm because there were horses for the most part, but also mules and pigs. No cows, because the farm managers kept the cows on the farms up north, near Amarante. Down here it was mostly horses.”

He sighed. But this time the sigh was hushed and muted, almost imperceptible.

“My wet-nurse was called Mena,” he continued in a whisper. “That was a diminutive, but I always called her Mena, Mamma Mena, a Junoesque woman with breasts that could have suckled ten babies, and there I sought comfort, the bosom of Mamma Mena.”