Antonio Tabucchi - Tristano Dies - A Life

… and I saw my entire life reduced to that insect, a minuscule, complicated instrument for flight and hibernation, the buzzing rage and fragile beating of wing casings and filthy feet, I tossed it all into the gutter, bits of rubber, smell of burning cork, that’s all that ties me to this world … You know what I’m referring to, it’s that piece Frau tortured me with, it didn’t just come to me, it’s because Tristano started getting letters, one after another, a steady stream. But I don’t feel like talking about that now, I don’t feel like saying anything — but stay here anyway — please — stay here anyway and I’ll have other things to tell you … you have to be patient. Be patient.

… Could you explain a bit more, said Doctor Ziegler, about what you mean when you say you feel as if everything has stopped? Tristano was sprawled in the wicker chair, one arm dangling, the other covering his eyes from the noonday sun: it’s like this afternoon, he said, everything has stopped, don’t you feel it?… a stillness has settled over everything, wiped out space and time, like with some medieval paintings when you see a saint in rapture, under his own mystical spell, an eternal moment … any sound at all now and the glass bell covering the countryside will crack; a rooster might crow, a dog might bark, and the spell will be broken … okay, what I mean is I have these moments when I feel like it feels this afternoon … everything has stopped … and I feel like I’m stopped in the middle of time that’s stopped, as if I’ve been momentarily transported to another world. Even Doctor Ziegler had stopped pacing back and forth on the porch, he’d stopped beside Tristano, hands behind his back, deep in thought. Go on, Herr Tristano, go on … Or maybe I’m feeling other things, Tristano continued, like I’m dreaming though I’m awake, and forgotten memories from long ago start coming back … memories I didn’t even know about … they well up so fast and flash before me like a movie projected on a wall, and it’s my eyes doing the projecting. And what do you feel? Doctor Ziegler whispered, can you tell me? Tristano was quiet. Ziegler waited patiently. If you feel like sighing, the doctor whispered, then sigh … don’t breathe in, sigh, sighing is what our bodies invented for expelling that diffuse, insidious anxiety from the pneuma that the British call spleen … yawning serves the same function, though less extreme, for common boredom, but yours is a different kind of boredom … it’s a weariness of being … so sigh, Herr Tristano. Tristano breathed deeply, and he let out a long, weak sigh, as though releasing evil humors composed of air. Go on, Doctor Ziegler said. What I was referring to, Tristano said, was a very intense sense of nostalgia … too intense … devastating … but it’s not nostalgia exactly, more of a yearning, something frightening, more abstract, because nostalgia implies the object you have nostalgia for, and the truth is I don’t feel nostalgia for the images flashing before my eyes like a film; often, they’re memories that don’t matter, banalities buried in my memory because they’re banal, and so they carry no nostalgia … no, the nostalgia I’m feeling is outside, unrelated to those images, I’m not sure I can explain: it feels like they’re not the cause of this nostalgia but that this nostalgia is a condition, and without it I couldn’t see them … so this isn’t really nostalgia, it’s a vague restlessness that’s also become a fear of sorts, but mixed with the absurd, and inside this sense of the absurd there’s a terror that’s destroying me, as though my body’s convulsing and about to blow apart, you must have seen in the movies how they’ll bring down old city-buildings so another can go up, they collapse in on themselves, crumple, implode … that’s how I feel … my body’s imploding, and I feel terribly cold, my hands and feet are freezing and that’s when I get a splitting migraine: ferocious, unbearable. Doctor Ziegler was sitting on the low wall by the pots of lavender, he’d plucked a flowering sprig and was brushing it over his face, breathing in the smell now and then. Angor mortis , the doctor murmured, that’s what they called it in the ancient world … you’ve described the most complicated symptoms of the migraine aura, Herr Tristano, cluster headaches, probably, and they never just come on their own, when these empresses come calling, they’re preceded by an ambassadorship of the most distinctive creatures, a madhouse of heralds, trumpeters, courtiers, female dancers, shouting street vendors, fire eaters, tightrope walkers … if I were to take a census of all the different kinds of auras preceding headaches, I’d be here until evening, and I’d have to insist, Herr Tristano, that you invite me to stay for dinner … I think tonight we’re having rabbit with rosemary, Tristano answered, it’s a dish that Agostino’s wife prepares that’s just sublime, and maybe Frau will make a chocolate cake. Doctor Ziegler removed the white coat he always wore, even when he saw his patient at home, and he hung it on a hook on the pergola. Chocolate’s not recommended for headaches, he said, but I love it and you can avoid it, rabbit on the other hand will be fine for us both, since it’s white meat.

You came here to gather up a life. But you know what you’re gathering? Words. No — more like air, my friend — words are sounds composed of air. Air. You’re gathering air.

The rabbit with rosemary was really quite good, Doctor Ziegler said, but this chocolate cake … we have cakes like this where I come from, but this one is something else again, maybe it’s the ground almonds … you can certainly have a little, Herr Tristano, nothing’s going to happen if you do. Tristano could tell what Doctor Ziegler really wanted to ask, and so he brought it up, to avoid any awkwardness: I did invite Frau to eat with us, he said, but she refused, said she was tired … the truth is, she isn’t tired, but I don’t want you to think she’s avoiding you, either, Doctor — quite the contrary — she respects you a great deal: the truth is, I’ve put myself in your hands because she advised it, I mean it … the real reason is she’s afraid we’ll start speaking in German, which would only be natural, it’s your language after all, and I don’t mind speaking it, either … you see, Doctor, Frau … I understand her, she came here when she was just a little girl, and it’s not that she’s lost her German, but she’s had to use Italian her whole life … I don’t know what it is that keeps her from speaking German with a German, it’s as if she has to get over some kind of hurdle, as if she’s ashamed … she only speaks German with me, but imagine this, if someone annoying drops by, someone unexpected, then Frau will speak to him in German, and you should hear how good her German is then, and she’ll pretend she doesn’t know any Italian. Herr Tristano, Doctor Ziegler said, I’ll allow one more bite of cake, I’m sure you’ll sleep better tonight, you’ll have no unwelcome visitors … but I promised you a list of the symptoms leading up to the arrival of the empress, as I call her, it’s an endless list, so I’ll try to be succinct … but first, this strange term, aura … it comes from an ancient physician, Pelope, who was Galen’s teacher … he was the first to note the physical phenomenon generally signaling the onset of the seizure, a sensation that starts in the hand or foot and seems to rise toward the head. One of his patients described it as feeling like cold vapor, and since the general belief during that period was that blood vessels contained air, he thought the problem had to be vapor in the limbs that was then carried back in the veins and he called it pneumatickè aura, an immaterial vapor … Herr Tristano, when you say a star fell on your head one August night, you were really telling me the truth with that metaphor of yours … that star didn’t just fall on your head, it entered inside your head, I’m sure of it … you started seeing brilliant intermittent lights with your eyes closed, zigzagging electricity, flashing lights that no doubt looked like continuously transforming mosaics, like a kaleidoscope, am I right? Tristano, silent, gave an imperceptible nod. It’s the most common aura, Ziegler continued, light effects like fireworks going off inside your eyes, and even things, objects, seem to have glowing outlines, or they’re bright, anyway, am I right? as though they’re encircled by an electric wire and you can see the electricity running through them … but the aura symptoms, before the empress arrives and while she’s visiting, are endless … sensory hallucinations of various kinds, emotional disturbance with extreme yet indefinable emotions, impossible to describe, to communicate to others … something like ecstasy, that some even find pleasurable … who knows, perhaps many mystics suffer from terrible headaches … plus visual disorders, perceiving objects and figures as distorted, or the magnifying of an image, from what I can tell … the person in front of you looks like he’s shrinking, or growing, growing all of a sudden, in front of you, like you see in certain documentaries on plant growth, you must have seen them, a camera lens is trained on a flower bud for a week, and you watch the flower blooming in a few seconds because the image has been sped up … Lewis Carroll suffered from terrible migraines and described these optical distortions extremely well with his Alice … for that matter, he was also a mathematician, and he understood logic, he knew how to talk about his symptoms logically, even if we find his logic fantastic … and then there are hallucinations of sound … noises, hissing, buzzing, muttering that can be dim or crystal-clear, it all depends, it might be the rumbling of thunder or the roar of a fountain … but it might also be voices, many voices … the most common case histories include familiar voices, those voices that are or were a part of our life, or that we’ve listened to so much they’re stored up in our warehouse of memories … but they can also be completely unknown voices, artificial voices that our brain invents, generates. Doctor Ziegler paused. These cases are rare, complicated, Herr Tristano, I don’t want you to worry, usually they occur in migraines associated with epilepsy, but they can also occur in non-epileptic subjects, very acute forms that cause convulsive seizures … however, there is some scientific debate on the matter, and in fact, some maintain that it’s not convulsions that bring on the headache but the other way around … by now, Tristano was on his third piece of cake. I don’t think chocolate has much to do with it, either, he said … but the symptoms I described this afternoon, memories that just come rushing out of nowhere, experiences that rush by like a movie, what can you tell me about these, Doctor Ziegler? They might belong to the category of déjà vu, the doctor answered, I’m inclined to think they belong to the category of déjà vu, in a more complex clinical context, of course, but I’d say they belong to that family of temporal confusion … there have been theories advanced concerning both the physiological and the psychological bases of this phenomenon that we’ve all experienced, if only momentarily, the feeling that we’re reliving something for the second time … there seems to be a delay between our perception of something and the transmission of that perception to the brain — it’s a millionth of a second delay, of course — but our brain thinks that years have passed, the brain’s already lived through this thing — am I making myself clear? But why this should occur is still a mystery … An important physiologist defined déjà vu as a distortion of the cataloguing of time in the nervous system … such a beautiful definition. Freud, on the other hand, explored déjà vu in his studies of Unheimlich , what’s referred to as the uncanny, because the experience of the uncanny does indeed often accompany déjà vu, though it’s hard to say if it follows or precedes the incident … to Freud, déjà vu is the return of the repressed experience, which feels unwarranted, like a betrayal, and so provokes this sensation … And what theory do you support? Tristano asked. Doctor Ziegler helped himself to more cake, but to be polite, left the last bite for Tristano. Cool country air spilled in through the wide-open windows. Doctor Ziegler was preparing to leave. Since I first met you, he said, and you started this type of hybrid analysis with me, I’ve grown ever more convinced that the two theories aren’t mutually exclusive — actually in patients like you they can be the perfect marriage … good night, Herr Tristano, try to get some rest.