Antonio Tabucchi - Tristano Dies - A Life

In the distance, you could make out fires on the mountains, maybe shepherds. Night was falling, a feeble purple tingeing the strip of land blue, and a word came to him that he hadn’t thought of in years, bluing, that blue liquid housekeepers added to the wash … and now the road ran straight toward the mountain, a cluster of lights on the slope, a village, perhaps, no, not Thebes, Ghiannis said, though Thebes is just a village now, but we’ve already passed it and you didn’t notice, it’s just some little town, but now we’ll be rounding a lot of curves, we’re climbing toward Parnassus, which is only a hill in literature but is really a massive mountain, maybe we’ll stop and eat in Arachova … And then Ghiannis started talking about the Crimean War, who knows why, and Tristano recalled his elementary-school teacher who’d loved him, and his schoolbook primer, and on that Parnassus of defunct muses, faceless faces appeared in the night, General La Marmora and his bersaglieri , and most of all, a voice singing, I had a pony all dappled gray … But the moon was an icy disc, the road empty; a stray dog by the side of the road seemed to be waiting for someone, straining its neck, head tilted upward, perhaps the creature was howling … And with that image there came another voice, one of those voices that had settled inside him, or maybe it was always the same voice, just different tones, and it was singing a dirge like a lullaby … Antheos, he said, if you know that poem “Voices,” then recite it for me in the Greek, would you? My name’s not Antheos, Ghiannis said, it’s Ghiannis. Do it anyway, Tristano said, you sound just like a friend I had in Plaka many years ago, but I called him Marios, at times we hear them talking in our dreams, at times in thought they echo through the brain … They started up the mountain, the olive grove of Delphi stretched out below, they stopped beside the omphalòs … he looked up. The sky hung low, a blanket of dripping fog, Tristano stroked the curving surface of the stone and then started up toward the temple of Apollo. A little man in raggedy clothes was sitting under the columns of Athena’s Sanctuary, trying to keep out of the rain, he had a buzuki on his lap and when he saw Tristano, he started plucking the strings. Tristano gave him a coin and the man began to sing softly, something old, maybe, but he barely even knew the chorus, tram to teleutaio , then a dedah dedah … a sad folk song … He asked the man to sing it more clearly, but he didn’t understand … Essùrossa ki arghìsame, ma osso ke na fteo, perpàta na prolàvume, to tram to teleutaio … I got drunk, we were late, a mistake, but let’s grab the last tram, dedah dedah, ring the bell tonight, dedah dedah … it’s the last tram … He asked Ghiannis to wait for him, and he started up toward the temple of Apollo, careful to keep his footing on the wet paving stones. He laid his hand on a lopped-off column and made a sign, he’d read somewhere that this was how you called the oracle. He squatted in the rain and lit a cigarette … Not even the shadow of a Pythia — of course not — they hadn’t existed for centuries. You idiot, he told himself, you came all this way, you just needed to really concentrate, a nice cozy headache and the Pythia would have come calling … The rain was falling harder, he got to his feet and made his way down slowly in the dark. Far off, on the horizon, he could see the lights on the coast, Galaxidi … a line of trembling lights, yellow, only one was white, strange, that one white light in a line of yellow, Tristano concentrated on that light and it started coming closer, rushing toward him, plowing into him like a meteor, and then he was in a cold, deserted square, a Nazi officer lying at his feet, he stood there, staring in amazement at his rifle, and a girl was pushing open a large front door, gesturing for him to come inside … But is this the riddle I came to solve, he murmured, this past is already clear to me … I know, the cypress answered, this isn’t the past you came for … you came to hear your real past told in my voice, because you don’t have the courage for it yourself, so you’re leaving it to me, predictor of the future, to predict what’s already been and won’t ever change … so listen … one day, many years ago, you’ll find yourself in the woods, in the mountains, on a pale, cold dawn, and you’ll be hiding behind a rock and clutching a submachine gun, waiting for your enemies to leave a ruined farmhouse … you’ll be impatient, trembling because you’re cold and frightened, because what you need to do is critical, the fate of all your comrades, of the ideals you’re fighting for, they’re in your hands … and finally those enemies will leave the farmhouse, and you’ll fire your precise blasts, and kill them all … now that mountain clearing is dead silent, and you get to your feet, triumphant, you’re the new squad commander, a hero, you’ve killed them all and even avenged the old commander’s slaughter … but then, something unexpected — your temples are pounding, you’re freezing cold — a woman has stepped outside the farmhouse, her hair tousled as though she’s been asleep, her eyes wide, astonished, terrified … she sees you, she’s standing in the clearing, surrounded by dead soldiers, she looks like a statue, and she’s screaming at you, traitor! — spy — traitor!.. You’d like to go meet her, tell her he was only an old commander and that it was for one person and one person only that you killed them all … but you don’t say a word, as if your thoughts freeze in the air and can’t find a voice … how’s it possible?… she was supposed to be on a mission tonight in the valley, but … she was here … now you point your gun at her, she’s in your sights, one round and you’ll be vindicated and the one witness to what really happened will disappear, and you will be a perfect hero … But you won’t fire, the Pythia knows this, and so do you … Pilgrim, did you know she spent her nights at that farmhouse? Is that why you became a spy? Or was it because you really wanted to slaughter a German platoon? Or was it because that commander fighting a common enemy believed in a different future than you, and so that made him your enemy as well?… Your life holds three possibilities, pilgrim, but the Pythia can’t know what they are: she can predict what’s going to happen, but not the will behind it, because Oracles might know what happens outside a man, but they can’t read his thoughts.

… But instead, the world’s composed of acts, actions … concrete things that then are gone, because, writer, an action takes place, it occurs … and occurs only in that one precise moment, then disappears, is no longer there; it was. For an action to remain, it needs words, which continue to make it be, they bear witness. Verba volant isn’t true. Verba manent . All that remains of what we are and what we were are the words we’ve said, the words you’re writing down now, writer, and not what I did in that given place and that given time. Words remain … my words … and above all, yours … words that bear witness. The word is not at the beginning, writer; it’s at the end. But who bears witness for the witness? Here’s the point: no one bears witness for the witness … Happy, unhappy, that’s not the problem, you know, what I’m consoled by, writer, is that in the great summation of things, in your odious summation filled with figures, I don’t figure in, I’m not a single unit among the others, I haven’t been counted into the total, okay, you wanted me to be even and I was odd, I screwed up your calculations … That’s my poem for Monday, or Tuesday … I’ve forgotten Sunday’s — I didn’t like it — so take this as my gift to you instead.

… But in spite of what I was saying earlier, I have an advantage over you, my friend: I am voice; yours is only writing, mine is voice … writing’s deaf … these sounds you’re hearing in the air will die on the page, writing fixes them, kills them, like a fossil crystallized in quartz … writing is a fossilized voice, no longer living, its spirit, once waves vibrating in space, has disappeared … in a little while my voice will be gone, and your writing will remain … sure, you can record my voice, but it will be dead, it will always be the same words, unchanging, with no volition, into infinity, not a voice, a facsimile of a voice … while what I’m saying to you, even if I have to force myself with my cracked vocal cords that croak and wheeze, the words I say are alive, because they’re my breath, until … a voice is breath, writer, listen now, do you hear it, how the cicada’s cry shatters the oppressive silence? And the suffocating breathing of the August countryside … do you hear it?… the countryside is breathing like you and me, like everything around us breathes, this globe turning in space, we as we turn on it, and the space we turn in, and the universe that space turns in, and the universes the universe turns in … but stop thinking about the rotation of the earth, think about my head, I’ve got a splitting headache, right now, as I reach the end, headaches are diehard, harder than we are, see if you can find me something on the dresser, any kind of pill … and god, too, if there is one, god breathes … imagine the lungs he must have … cosmic, I’d say, with monstrous alveoli opening and closing like jaws, measureless breath, but he is breathing … today is the last day for me, or the second to last, I can’t be any more precise, but trust me when I say my breathing’s at an end, I can hear it, and so’s my voice, this voice that’s told you a life as best it could, sorry, I’d like to have done a better job, but you probably understand … you don’t tell a life, like I already said, you live a life, and while you’re living it, it’s already lost, has slipped away … so what you’ve heard is a resurrected time, but it’s not the time of that living breath, that breath can’t be repeated, all you can do is tell it, like a gramophone … Besides, look, I haven’t told you anything new, I’ve told you an ancient story, History’s told this story a thousand times over, poor thing, just like us, we men, History doesn’t have many choices, someone had to say it … so someone, always meaning well, has to sacrifice himself … our story started with Judas, and look at our contempt for him, we should reflect more on the sacrifice he made, it’s not that easy making a choice, even if you mean well, it was the ultimate choice, the choice of choices, he deserves some rehabilitation, since I’m asking you to rehabilitate a few folks today … there’s a colleague of yours from Argentina who’s confronted this riddle like few others, I’ve read him over and over … just incredible … but he makes a theorem of it, maybe he knew little about life and more about its apparatus, what we call paradigms … But when you dig under paradigms you often find shit, and that’s hard to solve, there’s no solution to shit … You talk about a hero and maybe you find shit … so what do you do — build a statue? Why not? — printed words have the same function, in the end, they’re a future memory, like a statue, memory and oblivion at the same time, because someday the first will be swallowed by the second … but if it were only oblivion it would already be quite a lot, because before that there’d be memory, which they say refers to reality, but I’m afraid that words are only under the delusion of grabbing hold of reality … in my view they only describe the apparatus of reality, so we’re back to the paradigm … but underneath, is life … teeming life, like when you lift a stone and find an ant nest, ants fleeing in every direction … we call this an ant nest, and everyone understands what we mean by this, but an ant nest is composed of ants, and all the ants have fled. So what do you have left? A hole. Dig, though, go ahead and dig.