Antonio Tabucchi - The Woman of Porto Pim

She’s slim, very streamlined, built of top-quality material. She must have been around a great deal. She arrived in this port by chance. But then journeys are a chance. She’s called Nota azzurra. Mountains of fire, wind and solitude: thus in the sixteenth century did one of the first Portuguese travellers to land here describe the Azores.

Antero was born the last of nine children into a large Azores family which possessed both pastureland and orange orchards, and so grew up amidst the austere and frugal affluence of island landowners. Among his forebears were an astronomer and a mystic, whose portraits, together with that of his grandfather, adorned the walls of a dark sitting room which smelt of camphor. His grandfather had been called André da Ponte de Quental and had suffered exile and prison for having taken part in the first liberal revolution in 1820. So much his father told him, a kind man who loved horses and had fought in the battle of Mindelo against the absolutists.

To keep him company in his early years he had some small dappled colts and the archaic lullabies of serving women who came down from the mountains of São Miguel, where the villages are built of lava and have names like Caldeiras and Pico do Ferro. He was a calm pale child, with reddish hair and eyes so clear they sometimes seemed transparent. He spent the mornings on the patio of a solid house where the women kept the keys to the cupboards and the windows had curtains made from thick lace. He ran about letting out little whoops of joy and was happy. He was particularly close to his oldest brother, whose singular and bizarre intelligence would for long periods be overshadowed by a silent madness. Together they invented a game called Heaven and Earth, with cobblestones and shells for pieces, playing on a circular checkerboard sketched in the dust.

When the child was of an age to learn, his father called the Portuguese poet Feliciano de Castilho to their house and entrusted him with the boy’s education. At the time Castilho was considered a great poet, perhaps because of his versions of Ovid and Goethe and perhaps again because of the misfortune of his blindness, which sometimes conferred on his poetry that prophetic tone beloved of the Romantics. In fact he was a peevish, crusty scholar with a preference for rhetoric and grammar. With him the young Antero learnt Latin, German and metrics. And amidst these studies he reached adolescence.

On the April night of his fifteenth birthday, Antero woke up with a start and felt that he must go down to the sea. It was a calm night with a waxing moon. The whole household was asleep in silence and went down toward the cliffs. He sat on a rock and looked at the sky, trying to imagine what could have prompted him to come here. The sea was calm and breathed as though asleep, and the night was like any other night. Just that he had a great sense of disquiet, of anxiety weighing on his chest. And at that moment he heard a dull bellow rising from the earth and the moon turned blood red and the sea swelled up like an enormous belly to crash down on the rocks. The earth shook and the trees bent under the force of a rushing wind. Antero ran home, bewildered to find the family gathered together on the patio; but the danger was over now and the women’s embarrassment at being seen in their nightclothes was already greater than the fright they had suffered. Before going back to bed, Antero took a piece of paper and, unable to control himself, wrote down some words. And as he wrote he became aware that the words were arranging themselves on the page, by themselves almost, in the form and metre of a sonnet: and he dedicated it, in Latin, to the unknown god who was inspiring him. That night he slept soundly and at dawn dreamt that a small monkey with a sad ironic little face was offering him a note. He read the note and discovered a secret no one else had been allowed to know, except the monkey.

He approached manhood. He studied astronomy and geometry, he came under the spell of Laplace’s cosmogony, of the idea of a unity of physical forces and a mathematical conception of space. In the evening he wrote descriptions of mysterious, abstract little contrivances, translating into words his ideas of the cosmic machine. By now he had resigned himself to his dreams of the small monkey with the sad ironic little face and was amazed those nights when the creature did not visit him.

When he reached university age he left for Coimbra as family tradition required and announced that the moment had come for him to give up his studies of cosmic laws and dedicate himself to the laws of man. He was now a tall, solid boy with a blond beard that gave him a majestic, almost arrogant look. In Coimbra he discovered love, read Michelet and Proudhon and, instead of studying the laws used to apply the justice of the time, got excited by the idea of a new justice based on the equality and dignity of man. He pursued this idea with the passion he had inherited from his island forebears, but likewise with the reason of the man he was, for he was convinced that justice and equality formed part of the geometry of the world. In the perfect, closed form of the sonnet, he expressed the ardor that possessed him and his eagerness for truth. He left for Paris and became a typesetter, the way someone else might have become a monk, because he wanted to experience physical tiredness and the concreteness of manual tools. After France he went to England and then North America, living in New York and Halifax, so as to get to know the new metropolises man was building and the different ways of life they engendered. By the time he went back to Portugal he had become a socialist. He founded the National Association of Workers, travelled and made converts, lived among the peasants, passed through his own islands with the fiery oratory of the demagogue; he came against the arrogance of the powerful, the flattery of the sly, the cowardliness of servants. He was animated by disdain and wrote sonnets full of sarcasm and fury. He also experienced the betrayal of certain comrades and the ambiguous alchemy of those who manage to combine the common good with their own advantage.

He realized he would have to leave it to others more able than himself to press on with the work he had begun, almost as though that work no longer belonged to him. The time had come for practical men, and he was not practical. This filled him with a sense of desolation, like a child who loses his innocence and suddenly discovers how vulgar the world is. He wasn’t even fifty yet and his face was deeply scored. The eyes had sunk into hollows and his beard was going grey. He began to suffer from insomnia and in the rare moments when he did sleep would let out low muffled cries. Sometimes he had the impression his words did not belong to him and often to his surprise he would catch himself talking out loud alone as if he were somebody else talking to himself, Antero. A Parisian doctor diagnosed hysteria and prescribed electric shock therapy. In a note, Antero wrote that he was suffering from “the infinite,” and perhaps in his case this was the more plausible explanation. Perhaps he was just tired of this transitory, imperfect form of the ideal and of passion, his yearning now taking him toward another kind of geometrical order. In his writings, the word nothing began to appear, seeming to him now the most perfect form of perfection. In his forty-ninth year he returned to his native island.

The morning of 11 September 1891 he left his house in Ponta Delgada, walked quickly down the steep shady road to Igreja Matriz and went into a small shop on the corner that sold arms. He was wearing a black suit and white shirt, his tie fixed with a tiepin made with a shell. The shopkeeper was a friendly, obese man who loved dogs and old prints. A bronze fan turned slowly in the ceiling. The owner showed his customer a beautiful seventeenth-century print he had recently bought depicting a pack of dogs chasing a stag. The old shopkeeper had been a friend of his father’s, and Antero remembered how, as a child, the two men had taken him to the Caloura fair, which boasted the best horses in São Miguel. They talked for a long time about dogs and horses, then Antero bought a small revolver with a short barrel. When he left the shop the bell tower of Matriz was striking eleven. He walked slowly along by the sea as far as the harbor office, and stood a long time on the wharf looking out at the clippers. Then he crossed the coast road and walked into the circle of gaunt plane trees around Praça da Esperança. The sun was fierce and everything was white. The praça was deserted at that time of day, because of the extreme heat. A sad-looking donkey, tied to a ring on a wall, let its head loll. As he was crossing the square, Antero caught the sound of music. He stopped and turned. In the opposite corner, under the shade of a plane tree, a tramp was playing a barrel organ. The tramp nodded and Antero walked over to him. He was a lean gypsy and he had a monkey on his shoulder. It was a small animal with a sad, ironic little face, wearing a red uniform with gold buttons. Antero recognized the monkey of his dreams and realized who it was. The animal held out its tiny black hand and Antero dropped a coin in it. In exchange the monkey pulled out one of the many slips of colored paper the gypsy kept tucked in the ribbon of his hat and offered it to him. He took it and read it. He crossed the praça, the trees, the sparkle of the sea, the gypsy playing his barrel organ. He felt a warm trickle running down his neck. He clicked the drum of the revolver and fired again. At which the gypsy disappeared along with the rest of the scene and the bells of the Matriz began to strike noon.