Antonio Tabucchi - Tristano Dies - A Life

Who knows how much they’ll wind up hating you for telling my story … especially in this country where you happen to live … and in this century you’re moving into. You know, if there’s someone everyday judases — who betray just to betray — absolutely hate, it’s the real Judas, who betrayed out of loyalty … but don’t you pay any attention, you’ve had the privilege of hearing Tristano’s voice, his living voice, as they say, and no one’s going to hear it anymore, because it’ll be dead. And now, Tristano’s truly tired, he’s out of breath, listen, he must want to sleep, but not just a quick nap from an injection, a long sleep, the kind of sleep that compensates for all the effort of living … It’s time now for his eyelids to lower, for a darkness to spread inside that’s darker than the darkness of drawn shutters … You never tell me what day it is, or maybe I just keep forgetting, but it’s still August, the dog days are coming to a close, I’m sensing something in the air of September, I don’t know what, something of September, but I got there first, I screwed him over … You know what Tristano’s seeing behind his eyelids? An August night from years ago, so many years ago, he’s a boy sitting on his grandfather’s knee, and they’re out in the barnyard, and his grandfather knows so much about the sky and has promised to explain the sky to him that evening, his grandfather’s a gruff man, he went all the way down to Sicily to shoot at the Bourbons and now he has a red shirt tucked away in a bureau smelling of camphor, everyone’s very formal with him, except the boy, and his grandfather laughs with him a good deal, now he’s taken hold of the boy’s hand and is pointing it toward the starry sky, and he tells him to close one eye like he’s aiming a musket, a bit more on high, he says, a bit more to sea — can you find it? — that’s Orion, the north’s behind us, what your nonno calls on high, understand, Ninototo? Behind Tristano’s eyelids, the grandfather has an odd voice, he and the boy he’s speaking to are one and the same person — so strange. But is it any stranger than the sky, with all those stars up there forever?… The things of this world are so old that by being old they’re rejuvenated, as if they were tired of being old. We’ll start in the west, his grandfather says — no — we’ll start in the south, what your nonno calls to sea when he’s talking to the cowherds. We’ll start in the south because that’s where you find Equuleus, the Little Horse, here, let me show you, follow my finger, at night I heard nonna sing you the lullaby of the dappled pony to make you fall asleep, I had a pony all dappled gray that counted clip-clops to the moon … there they are, those stars up there, they’re called that for the story: the pony Mercury gave his friend as a gift, but the Greeks called him Hermes not Mercury, the Greeks discovered the stars first, because they came first, but the stars were there before anyone, now that direction, that’s East, everything started there, in the East, everything comes from there, from that magnificent, ancient East where men understood things in the abstract, it’s all been downhill from there, Ninototo, we haven’t discovered a thing though we think we’re so clever, but I’m getting off-track, let’s get back to it, steady now, there, by the Little Horse, that’s the Swan and that’s the Swan’s brightest star, Albireo, you can see what color it is through my telescope, it’s orange, and nearby is Deneb, that’s what the Arabs called it, which means tail … no, no — I’m wrong — Deneb’s the brightest, it has a companion, a strange companion you can only see once every five years, a boy named Phaethon was transformed into that constellation, he was like Amilcare driving his ox cart, only Phaethon drove a sun cart, but he wasn’t paying attention and he wound up in a ditch and the gods turned his cart into those stars you see. Now we’ll shift some and you follow my finger, there’s Capricorn, and Aquarius, they’re faint stars, like graveyard candles, I can’t see them, not without my telescope, but your eyes are good … how do I know these things by heart? Well, it’s the same sky every summer, Ninototo, always the same sky, and I’ve studied it every summer of my life …

These days everyone’s so informal, you must have noticed, I find it brusque, overly familiar. I don’t like it — it shows disrespect … I think when two people hold each other in high regard they should be more formal, it’s more civilized, more respectful. And it creates the proper distance to make the other person understand that even if we know each other well, know each other intimately — our respective secrets — that we pretend we don’t, that we don’t know certain things, and we do this to make the other feel more comfortable, like when someone’s confessed something important to you that he wouldn’t tell anyone else and so you act a bit distracted, oh, not really, of course, you actually listened very carefully, but … well, it’s like you already stopped thinking about it, you locked it away inside a secret compartment in your heart … Now that the time has come for us to say goodbye, now that it’s time for me to take my leave, I want to be more formal with you. I’m sure you understand, it’s not an insignificant detail … also because of what you’ll write about me. Sound okay?

I think there’s still a big fly in here, please, get it out, sir, I don’t want that fly landing on my mouth after I’ve closed it. When you write this story, sir, when you turn it into a book, put your name on the cover, I don’t want my own there, I don’t want to be the one doing the telling, I want to be told … You wrote once that Tristano knew about fear, and I agreed. But real fear is something else again, that was a trifling kind of fear, a privileged, random fear, it could go badly, but it was also something you could get out from under … Real fear is when the hour’s fixed and you know it’s inevitable … that’s a strange fear, unusual, something you experience once in a lifetime, never more, it’s like vertigo, like throwing a window open onto nothing, and it’s there that thought truly drowns, is obliterated. This, this is real fear … In a little while, when you no longer hear me breathing, throw the window wide, let in the light, the sounds of the living world. They belong to you, sir; silence belongs to me. And then leave right after, close the door and leave the corpse behind, it won’t be me, I’ve already given Frau directions for disposing of it quickly … There’s a religious love of death that’s close to necrophilia, practically loving the corpse more than the living … A beautiful death … what nonsense, death’s never beautiful, death is filthy — always, filthy — the denial of life … They say death’s a mystery, but having existed at all is the greater mystery, this might seem banal, but it’s really so mysterious … Take you and me, for instance, you know, finding ourselves here, in the same room, at this precise moment, it’s very mysterious, or at least it’s rather odd, wouldn’t you say?… I thank you, sir … I’d like to give you another gift, you see that photograph on the dresser? no, not the one on the other dresser, the dresser with the mirror, next to the glass bell, where the pendulum keeps moving the hands, because the hands keep going even after we stop, we may be the ones who invented clocks, but they obey a different master … I mean the one in the ebony frame, the one of the man from behind, walking down the shore … see those houses in the distance?… that’s the town where my mother lived, my father’s heading off to marry her, that’s why he’s dressed so elegantly though he’s walking along the beach, after the ceremony he’ll bring my mother here, to this house where I was born and that will soon be sold, after Frau dies … It’s a beautiful photo, take it as a gift, use it in your book, it isn’t Tristano, but it is a little, since it’s his father … He has his back to us, as if he’s saying goodbye, what I’ve been doing all these days with you, sir, and what I’m doing now for the last time … Check the clock, what time is it? That might sound foolish, but I want to know, it’s the last thing I want to know … After all, like they say, tomorrow is another day.