Antonio Tabucchi - Tristano Dies - A Life

… You have no idea how quickly an August can end, hurling itself against early September, like a car ramming a tree, crumpling, deflated like an accordion out of breath. Such arrogance, those days of summer, during the Feast of the Assumption or when the sky’s lit up with fireworks on the night of San Lorenzo and the senses seem so full and life, a cavern from the vaults of heaven, but then four rain drops, the coriander’s gone to seed, and in a single day that bloated, bombastic month is swallowed up … Life’s that way, too, like August, you start to realize there’s a lapse between what’s said and done, when you really weren’t expecting this, the elastic’s worn out, can’t be stretched, and the raven shows up in the corner to croak its nevermore … The house, empty as a dried gourd, and he emptier still, and the dead seasons, and the current day dead as a doornail, everything was conspiring for a completely ataraxic state, the stillness of the horizon, only a few lisped words, directed at nothing, unheard. And that thick fog … How do you feel? Doctor Ziegler asked him. Shooshoo, Tristano answered, I feel shooshoo, as to the rest, I’d be fine if I weren’t feeling so shooshoo. Doctor Ziegler didn’t understand; he asked Tristano to please explain, bitte, Herr Tristano, bitte . Shooshoo’s like rain-soaked cabbage, Doctor, have you ever seen cabbage with its limp outer leaves in the mud? They’re shooshoo … And then he added, it’s like I’ve seen a tranglumanglo, you understand? Doctor Ziegler began to suspect this was some sort of language of the unconscious, but reluctantly, as he wasn’t of that school … but what on earth did these words mean? Tristano hesitated, secretive. Well, they come to me at night — no — they think of me — really — I’m thought up, they’re the ones that think of me, they nip at me — no — it’s more like they sting me, tiny slivers of something, tiny letters, exploding into a thousand pieces, and they arrive like they’re washing in on the evening tide … Doctor Ziegler had his hands behind his back, his chin on his chest. So, they’re dreams? he asked. No answer. Half-dreams, then? Yes, that’s it, Doctor, almost — no, not really — more like memories, floating in their own sea foam, I’m on the edge of sleep, a few reach me, sting me, others, all I have to do is dangle my arm alongside the bed to fish some up. Doctor Ziegler kept pacing back and forth as though he wanted to dig a rut in the floor, he didn’t care that Tristano was slouched in his chair on the porch, it was as if he’d found him in his sleepless bed. Try fishing one up now, he said, just let yourself go, let your arm hang over the edge, close your eyes, pretend I’m not here … Silence. Doctor Ziegler froze, held his breath. All you could hear was the countryside’s breathing, the ground, the smell of stubble in the valley, the buzzing blue flies, a bee, a barking dog, but far far away, another world. I caught a can of gambusinen, but it’s open, the key’s turning up the rusty lid, Tristano mumbled as if in a trance, nichts, absolut nichts, gambusinen kaputt . Doctor Ziegler was worrying his hands behind his back. Gambusinen? — was bedeutet gambusinen , go on, Herr Tristano, concentrate. Oh … oh … oh … Tristano was searching for something, or perhaps those concentric rings of sound rising in his throat meant he was already lost to a world of dreams? Ziegler waited patiently, silently. I should talk about old schnabelewopskian customs, Tristano mumbled, ancient anthropology, Doctor, practically geology, and he was in full flight now over a truly incomprehensible land not to be found on any maps, probably tied to the archipelago of his imagination, and over there was Utopia Island. Schnabelewops was a principality, a swatch of land high in the mountains, with a view of the sea, and that sea was the Greek sea, where Venus was virgin-born, it was understood, a country of impervious peaks but also soft slopes and meadows and olive and chestnut trees and crisscrossed by countless streams, their water as clean, as crystal-clear as the water where Orlando christened his sword Durlindana or Dionigi di Gaula bathed his feet after his long, long march, as the mad hidalgo tells it. And during the local wheat festivals or on the many scorching-hot days, the people would joyfully splash about in these streams, to the shrieks of young ladies. And there were so many streams, the Schnabelewopskians hadn’t even tried counting them for their maps. What was the point? Each village had a stream running beside it or even dividing it in two, so that there were great cultural divides going back a thousand years between those villagers on the right bank or the left, and a Nordic folklorist, who’d wandered everywhere collecting ancient songs, had recorded some ancient treasures where the maid who’d left to marry sang with longing for the land of her fathers that she’d abandoned when she wed and crossed over the stream to live in the house facing her own that was in a whole other country; and wading in, she soaked her stockings … With this last effort, Tristano grew quiet, eyes closed, his hand gone fishing, dangling off the lounge chair. Not asleep though … Doctor Ziegler was afraid to interrupt his oneiric space, which was sacred to every patient and crucial to every therapist. The countryside was slowly breathing in and out. It was midday. Doctor Ziegler should have been in his office in town, but of course he’d cancelled all his appointments: this patient was too interesting. Tristano started to speak again, but perhaps he was truly sailing in his oneiric space now, talking about gambusinen, aquatic creatures presumably from his childhood, no doubt part of a fantastic zoology known only to the disturbed or to poets who’d never written any poetry, creatures which, if you listened to his semi-garbled words, seemed to fall somewhere between crustaceans and proper fish, meaning, with gills and fins. Antidiluvian creatures, Doctor Ziegler thought, from the earliest of times, when everything was just coming into being, when taxonomy wasn’t yet possible, and you couldn’t distinguish flower from fruit, fish from fowl, insect from mammal … You see, Doctor, sir, I’m not sure I can explain: a tiny creature like a freshwater crawfish, pink-colored, but with no keratin shell, so, soft like a dormouse, with a tiny round head that’s sprouting four miniature tentacles, maybe a centimeter and a half, two centimeters long, nothing more, and extremely tender, it feeds off something like the moss that grows in the cleanest streams in the principality, the gambusinen gorge on it, an exquisite green, like nothing else, and it lingers in their meat, like a truffle cutting the slight bitterness of porcini mushrooms … Doctor Ziegler listened and was silent. The cicadas were raging, and heat settled over the pergola. It was August … It was an August like this one, writer, and Tristano didn’t need any morphine to step outside himself, he was out of his mind all on his own. I wanted to tell you about this later, but it’s come to me now and so I told you now, be patient, I’m sure it won’t make sense in your book, let it go … Listen, it must be nearly evening and Frau’s coming to give me my morphine, but I don’t want it tonight. I’m hungry, tell her I’m hungry, that I want a cup of broth, a cup of chicken broth, there was a time I’d ask for gambusinen, but now they’re extinct, all that’s left of them are empty tins with the key turning up the rusty lid … Tell Frau that since there aren’t any gambusinen, I’ll make do with a cup of chicken broth — you’ll see — she’ll know.

Ferruccio said you writers always see yourselves in light of the future, as posthumous, and I thought about what you set in motion by telling my story in the first person, as if you were Tristano … you’d already consigned me to the future, like a tombstone, and you saw your own reflection there, because that tombstone reflected your own image back to you, like you thought you’d be for posterity … But I’m changing that image right under your nose, no, it’s more topsy-turvy, face down feet up, like a carnival mirror … I feel sorry for you, but I’m not sure what you were expecting when you came here to see me, I’m not here to confirm anything, just the opposite … never trust mirrors, right then and there they seem to show your image, but they really distort it, or even worse, they absorb your image, drink up everything, suck you in as well … Mirrors are porous, writer, and you didn’t even know.