Antonio Tabucchi - Requiem - A Hallucination

The taxi driver sounded his horn, wanting to know what I intended to do. I signalled to him to wait and said to the Lighthousekeeper’s Wife: You don’t want to show me the house then? Oh, all right, she said, but we’ll have to be quick, my son will be here soon with his family, it’s my little granddaughter’s birthday today and I have to finish making the supper. That’s fine by me, I said, I’ve got to get the train in Cascais, I have to be in Lisbon at nine o’clock. The Lighthousekeeper’s Wife disappeared inside the house. She came back with a bunch of keys and told me to follow her. We crossed the yard to the porch. This is the way in now, she said, I expect when you were here, you used to go in through the French windows on the terrace, but they can’t be used any more, the glass is all broken. We went in and I immediately recognised the smell of the house. It smelled a bit like the metro in Paris in winter, a mixture of mustiness, varnish and mahogany, a smell peculiar to that house, and my memories all came back to me. We went into the large sitting room and I saw the piano. It was covered with a sheet, but I still had the urge to sit down at it. Excuse me, I said, but there’s something I must play, I’ll be quick, I don’t really know how to play properly but anyway. I sat down and with one finger, from memory, I played the melody from a nocturne by Chopin. Other hands, in other times, used to play that melody. I remembered those nights, when I was upstairs in my room, and I would lie listening to Chopin nocturnes. They were solitary nights, the house in winter was swathed in mist, my friends were in Lisbon and didn’t come to visit, no one came, no one phoned, I was writing and wondering why I was writing, the story I was working on was a strange story, a story without a solution, what had made me want to write a story like that? how did I come to be writing it? More than that, the story was changing my life, would change it, once I’d written it, my life would never be the same again. That’s what I would say to myself, closeted upstairs writing that strange story, a story that someone afterwards would imitate in real life, would transfer back to the plane of reality. I didn’t know that, but I imagined it, I don’t know why, but I sensed that one shouldn’t write stories like that, because there’s always someone who’ll try and imitate fiction, who’ll manage to make it come true. And that was what happened. That same year someone imitated my story, or rather, the story became flesh, was transubstantiated, and I had to live that crazy story all over again, but this time for real, this time the characters inhabiting the story weren’t made of paper, they were flesh and blood, this time the development, the sequence of events in my story unravelled day by day, I followed its progress on the calendar, to the point that I knew what would happen.

Was it a good year? the Lighthousekeeper’s Wife asked me, I mean, were you comfortable here in this house? It was a bewitched year, I replied, there was some kind of witchcraft going on. Do you believe in witches? asked the Lighthousekeeper’s Wife, people like yourself don’t usually, they think it’s just popular superstition. Oh, I believe, I said, at least in some forms of witchcraft, you know, you should never try to influence things by suggestion, if you do, things end up happening that way. I went to see a clairvoyant when my son was in the war in Guinea Bissau, said the Lighthousekeeper’s Wife, I was terribly worried because I’d had a dream, I dreamed that he would never come back, so I talked to my husband and said: Look, Armando, you’ve got to give me some money because I want to go to the clairvoyant, I had a bad dream, I dreamed that Pedro would never come back and I want to know whether he will or not, anyway, I went to the woman and she laid out the cards, then she turned one card over and said: Your son will come back, but he’ll be maimed, and Pedro did come back, but he’d lost an arm. The Lighthousekeeper’s Wife opened a door and said: This is the dining room, was this where you used to have supper?

The dining room was exactly as it had been: the fireplace, the sideboard, the Indo-Portuguese furniture, the large, dark-wood table. It was indeed, I said, I used to sit here, in this chair, a woman friend used to sit to my right and, here and here, two other friends of mine. Did Vitalina serve at table? asked the Lighthousekeeper’s Wife. She did, I said, or rather, she brought the things from the kitchen and left them on a tray in the middle of the table and we served ourselves, Vitalina didn’t like to serve at table, she preferred the kitchen, apart from arroz de tamboril she made a magnificent açorda de mariscos, but her speciality was sopa alentejana . Because she was from the Alentejo, remarked the Lighthousekeeper’s Wife, that’s why she could do sopa alentejana . You know, my day today has been full of people from the Alentejo, I said, I’ve just realised that almost everyone I’ve met today has been from there. Alentejanos are very proud, remarked the Lighthousekeeper’s Wife, but I like them, I mean, they’re nothing like me, I’m from Viana do Castelo and I’m a very different type of person, but I still like them. The Lighthousekeeper’s Wife wiped the layer of dust off the sideboard with her apron. Would you like to see upstairs too? she asked. If you wouldn’t mind, I said. Be careful on the stairs, she said, they’re very slippery because the wood’s so worn, I’ll go first.

I opened the door of the room, looked up and saw the sky. It was a very blue sky, transparent, it dazzled the eyes. It was unreal, that room with the bed, the wardrobe and the bedside tables, and almost no roof over it. It’s dangerous here, said the Lighthousekeeper’s Wife, that one last bit of roof could fall any minute, we can’t stay in here. Just for a second, I said, it’s not going to fall right now. I stretched out on the bed and said: I’m sorry but I just have to lie down for a moment, as a way of saying goodbye, it’s the last time I’ll ever lie on this bed. Seeing me lying there, the Lighthousekeeper’s Wife discreetly left the room and I stared up at the sky. It was very odd, when I was younger I’d always thought of that blue as mine, as something that belonged to me, but now it seemed exaggerated, distant, like a hallucination, and I thought: It can’t be true, it just can’t be true that I’m lying here on this bed again and instead of looking up at the ceiling, as I did on so many nights, I’m looking up at a sky that once belonged to me. I got up and went to find the old woman, who was waiting for me in the corridor. One last thing, I said, there’s just one other room I’d like to see. There’s no guestroom any more, she said, when the roof fell in, everything was ruined, my husband took all the furniture out. I’d just like a look, I said. But you can’t go in, she said, my husband says even the floor is dangerous. She opened the door and I peered in. There was nothing in the room and the roof had disappeared completely. You could see the lighthouse through the window. My husband’s up there, she said, but he’s probably asleep now, there’s nothing to do at this hour, but he’s so stubborn, and instead of coming home for a sleep, he goes and sleeps in the lighthouse. Do you know what I used to do with that lighthouse in the old days? I said, I’ll tell you, I used to play a game sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d come into this room and stand at the window, the lighthouse has three intermittent lights, one white, one green and one red, and I used to play a game with the lights, I’d invented a luminous alphabet and I used to speak through the lighthouse, as it were. And who were you speaking to? asked the Lighthousekeeper’s Wife. Well, I said, I used to speak to certain invisible presences, I was writing a story at the time, I suppose you could say I was speaking to ghosts. Oh my God, exclaimed the Lighthousekeeper’s Wife, weren’t you afraid of talking to ghosts? I should never have done it, I said, it’s not a good idea to talk to ghosts, you shouldn’t do it, but sometimes you have to, I can’t explain it really, but that’s partly why I’m here today.