Antonio Tabucchi - The Woman of Porto Pim

The whale is dead and lies motionless on the water. The coagulated blood forms a bank that looks like coral. I hadn’t realized the day was almost over, and dusk surprises me. The whole crew are busy organizing the towing. Working quickly, they punch a hole in the tail fin and thread through a rope with a stick to lock it. We are more than eighteen miles out to sea, Carlos Eugénio tells me; it will take all night to get back, the sperm whale weighs around thirty tons and the launch will have to go very slowly. In a strange marine rope party led by the launch and with the whale bringing up the rear, we head towards the island of Pico and the factory of São Roque. In the middle is the sloop with the whalemen, and Carlos Eugénio suggests I join them so as to be able to get a little rest: under enormous strain, the launch’s engine is making an infernal racket and sleep would be impossible. The two boats draw alongside each other and Carlos Eugénio leaves the launch with me, handing over the helm to the young sailor and two oarsmen who take our place. The whalemen set up a makeshift bed for me near the tiller; night has fallen and two oil lanterns have been lit on the sloop. The fishermen are exhausted, their faces strained and serious, tinted yellow in the light from the lanterns. They hoist the sail so as not to be a dead weight increasing the strain on the launch, then lie any-old-how across the planks and fall into a deep sleep. Chá Preto sleeps on his back, paunch up, and snores loudly. Carlos Eugénio offers me a cigarette and talks to me about his two children, who have emigrated to America and whom he hasn’t seen for six years. They came back just once, he tells me, maybe they’ll come again next summer. They’d like me to go to them, but I want to die here, at home. He smokes slowly and watches the sky, the stars. What about you, though, why did you want to come with us today, he asks me, out of simple curiosity? I hesitate, thinking how to answer: I’d like to tell him the truth, but am held back by the fear that this might offend. I let a hand dangle in the water. If I stretched out my arm I could almost touch the enormous fin of the animal we’re towing. Perhaps you’re both a dying breed, I finally say softly, you people and the whales, I think that’s why I came. Probably he’s already asleep, he doesn’t answer; though the coal of his cigarette still burns between his fingers. The sail slaps sombrely; motionless in sleep, the bodies of the whalemen are small dark heaps and the sloop slides over the water like a ghost.

I sing every evening, because that’s what I’m paid to do, but the songs you heard were pesinhos and sapateiras for the tourists and for those Americans over there laughing at the back. They’ll get up and stagger off soon. My real songs are chamaritas, just four of them, because I don’t have a big repertoire and then I’m getting on, and I smoke a lot, my voice is hoarse. I have to wear this balandrau, the traditional old Azores costume, because Americans like things to be picturesque, then they go back to Texas and say how they went to a tavern on a godforsaken island where there was an old man dressed in an ancient cloak singing his people’s folksongs. They want the viola de arame, which has this proud, melancholy sound, and I sing them sugary modinhas, with the same rhyme all the time, but it doesn’t matter because they don’t understand, and then as you can see, they’re drinking gin and tonics. But what about you, though, what are you after, coming here every evening? You’re curious and you’re looking for something different, because this is the second time you’ve offered me a drink, you order cheiro wine as if you were one of us, you’re a foreigner and you pretend to speak like us, but you don’t drink much and then you don’t say anything either, you wait for me to speak. You said you were a writer, and that maybe your job was something like mine. All books are stupid, there’s never much truth in them, still I’ve read a lot over the last thirty years, I haven’t had much else to do, Italian books too, all in translation of course. The one I liked most was called Canaviais no vento, by someone called Deledda, do you know it? And then you’re young and you have an eye for the women, I saw the way you were looking at that beautiful woman with the long neck, you’ve been watching her all evening, I don’t know if she’s your girlfriend, she was looking at you too, and maybe you’ll find it strange but all this has reawakened something in me, it must be because I’ve had too much to drink. I’ve always done things to excess in life, a road that leads to perdition, but if you’re born like that you can’t do anything about it.

In front of our house there was an atafona, that’s what they’re called on this island, a sort of wheel for drawing up water that turned round and round, they don’t exist any more, I’m talking about years and years ago, before you were even born. If I think of it now, I can still hear it creaking, it’s one of the childhood sounds that have stuck in my memory, my mother would send me with a pitcher to get some water and to make it less tiring I used to sing a lullaby as I pushed and sometimes I really would fall asleep. Beyond the water wheel there was a low whitewashed wall and then a sheer drop down to the sea. There were three of us children and I was the youngest. My father was a slow man, he used to weigh his words and gestures and his eyes were so clear they looked like water. His boat was called Madrugada, which was also my mother’s maiden name. My father was a whaleman, like his father before him, but in the seasons when there were no whales, he used to fish for mo ray eels, and we went with him, and our mother too. People don’t do it now, but when I was a child there was a ritual that was part of going fishing. You catch mo rays in the evening, with a waxing moon, and to call them there was a song which had no words: it was a song, a tune, that started low and languid, then turned shrill. I never heard a song so sorrowful, it sounded like it was coming from the bottom of the sea, or from lost souls in the night, a song as old as our islands. Nobody knows it any more, it’s been lost, and maybe it’s better that way, since there was a curse in it, or a destiny, like a spell. My father went out with the boat, it was dark, he moved the oars softly, dipping them in vertically so as not to make any noise, and the rest of us, my brothers and my mother, would sit on the rocks and start to sing. Sometimes the others would keep quiet, they wanted me to call the eels, because they said my voice was more melodious than anybody else’s and the mo rays couldn’t resist it. I don’t believe my voice was any better than theirs: they wanted me to sing on my own because I was the youngest and people used to say that the eels liked clear voices. Perhaps it was just superstition and there was nothing in it, but that hardly matters.

Then we grew up and my mother died. My father became more taciturn and sometimes, at night, he would sit on the wall by the cliffs and look at the sea. By now we only went out after whales; we three boys were big and strong and Father gave us the harpoons and the lances, since he was getting too old. Then one day my brothers left. The second oldest went to America, he only told us the day he left, I went to the harbour to see him off, my father didn’t come. The other went to be a truck driver on the mainland, he was always laughing and he’d always loved the sound of engines; when the army man came to tell us about the accident I was at home alone and I told my father over supper.

We two still went out whaling. It was more difficult now, we had to take on casual labour for the day, because you can’t go out with less than five, then my father would have liked me to get married, because a home without a woman isn’t a real home. But I was twenty-five and I liked playing at love; every Sunday I’d go down to the harbour and get a new girlfriend. It was wartime in Europe and there were lots of people passing through the Azores. Every day a ship would moor here or on another island, and in Porto Pim you could hear all kinds of languages.