Indian Nocturne Read online

  This edition published in Great Britain in 2013 by Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

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  This digital edition first published in 2013 by Canongate Books

  Notturno indiano copyright © Antonio Tabucchi, 1984

  All rights reserved

  Translation copyright © Chatto & Windus, 1988

  The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 0 85786 943 2

  eISBN 978 0 85786 944 9

  Typeset in Van Dijck by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  Those who sleep badly seem to a greater or lesser degree guilty: what do they do? They make the night present.

  Maurice Blanchot

  Author’s Note

  As well as being an insomnia, this book is also a journey. The insomnia belongs to the writer of the book, the journey to the person who did the travelling. All the same, given that I too happen to have been through the same places as the protagonist of this story, it seemed fitting to supply a brief index of the various locations. I don’t really know whether this idea was prompted by the illusion that a topographical inventory, with the force that the real possesses, might throw some light on this Nocturne in which a Shadow is sought; or whether by the irrational conjecture that some lover of unlikely itineraries might one day use it as a guide.

  A.T.

  Index of the Places in this Book

  1. The Khajuraho Hotel. Suklaji Street, no number, Bombay.

  2. Breach Candy Hospital. Bhulabai Desai Road, Bombay.

  3. The Taj Mahal Inter-Continental Hotel. Gateway of India, Bombay.

  4. Railway Retiring Rooms. Victoria Station, Central Railway, Bombay. Accommodation for the night with valid railway ticket or with an Indrail Pass.

  5. The Taj Coromandel Hotel. 5 Nungambakkam Road, Madras.

  6. The Theosophical Society. 12 Adyar Road, Adyar, Madras.

  7. Bus-stop. The Madras–Mangalore road, about 50 kilometres from Mangalore, place-name unknown.

  8. Arcebispado e Colégio de S. Boaventura. Calangute–Panaji road, Velha Goa, Goa.

  9. The Zuari Hotel. Swatantrya Path, no number, Vasco da Gama, Goa.

  10. Calangute Beach. About 20 kilometres from Panaji, Goa.

  11. The Mandovi Hotel. 28 Bandodkar Marg, Panaji, Goa.

  12. The Oberoi Hotel. Bogmalo Beach, Goa.

  INDIAN NOCTURNE

  Contents

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  I

  The taxi driver wore a hairnet and had a pointed beard and a short ponytail tied with a white ribbon. I thought he might be a Sikh, since my guidebook described them as looking exactly like that. My guidebook was called India, a Travel Survival Kit; I’d bought it in London, more out of curiosity than anything else, since the information it offered about India was fairly bizarre and at first glance superfluous. Only later was I to realise how useful it could be.

  The Sikh was driving too fast for my liking and hitting his horn ferociously. I had the impression he was deliberately going as close to the pedestrians as he could, and with an indefinable smile on his face that I didn’t like. On his right hand he wore a black glove, and I didn’t like that either. When he turned into Marine Drive he seemed to calm down and quietly took his place in one of the lines of traffic on the side nearest the sea. With his gloved hand he pointed to the palm trees along the seafront and the curve of the bay. ‘That’s Trobay,’ he said, ‘and opposite us is Elephant Island, only you can’t see it. I’m sure you’ll be wanting to go there, the ferries leave every hour from the Gateway of India.’

  I asked him why he was going down Marine Drive. I didn’t know Bombay, but I was trying to follow our route on a map on my knees. My reference points were Malabar Hill and the Chor, the Thieves’ Market. My hotel was somewhere between those two points, and there was no need to go along Marine Drive to get to it. We were driving in the opposite direction.

  ‘The hotel you mentioned is in a very poor district,’ he said affably, ‘and the goods are very poor quality. Tourists on their first trip to Bombay often end up in the wrong sort of place. I’m taking you to a hotel suitable for a gentleman like yourself.’ He spat out of the window and winked. ‘Where the goods are top quality.’ He gave me a sleazy smile of great complicity, and this I liked even less.

  ‘Stop here,’ I said, ‘at once.’

  He turned round and looked at me with a servile expression. ‘But I can’t stop here,’ he said, ‘there’s the traffic.’

  ‘Then I’ll get out anyway,’ I said, opening the door and holding it tight.

  He braked sharply and began a litany in a language that must have been Marathi. He looked furious and I don’t suppose the words he was hissing through his teeth were particularly polite, but I didn’t take any notice. I had only the one small suitcase which I had kept beside me, so there wasn’t even any need for him to get out and get me my luggage. I left him a hundred-rupee note and climbed out onto the vast pavement of Marine Drive. On the beach there was a religious festival, or fair, one or the other, with a big crowd milling in front of something I couldn’t make out. Along the seafront there were bums stretched out on the parapet, children selling knick-knacks, beggars. There was also a line of motorised rickshaws; I jumped into a sort of yellow cubicle hitched up to a moped and shouted the name of the street my hotel was on to the small driver. He stamped on the starter pedal and set off at full speed, slipping into the traffic.

  Cage District was much worse than I had imagined. I’d seen it in the photographs of a famous photographer and thought I was prepared for human misery, but photographs enclose the visible in a rectangle. The visible without a frame is always something else. And then here the visible had too strong a smell. Or rather smells, a lot of smells.

  It was dusk when we entered the district, and in the time it took to go down a street, quite suddenly, as happens in the tropics, night fell. Many of the buildings in Cage District are made of wood and matting. Prostitutes wait in shacks made of ill-fitting boards, their heads sticking out of holes. Some of those shacks were not much larger than sentry-boxes. And then there were hovels and tents of rags, little shops perhaps or other kinds of business, lit by paraffin lamps, with small clusters of people in front. But the Hotel Khajuraho had a small illuminated sign and opened almost on the corner of a street with brick buildings, and the lobby, if you could call it that, was merely ambiguous without being sordid. It was a small dark room with a high counter like the bars in English pubs; at each end of the counter were two lamps with red shades and behind it was an old woman. She wore a gaudy sari and her nails were painted blue; by the looks of her she could have been European, although on her forehead she wore one of the many marks that Indian women do wear. I showed her my passport and told her I’d booked by telegram. She nodded and began to copy from my passport making a great show of how careful she was being, then she turned the paper round for me to sign.

  ‘With bathroom or without?’ she asked, and told me the price.

  I took a room with a bathroom. I had the impression she spoke with a slight American accent, but I didn’t go into it.

  She told me the room number and handed me the key. The keyring was made of transparent plastic with a design inside of the kind you might expect in a hotel like this. ‘Do you want dinner?’ she as
ked. She looked at me suspiciously. I got the message that the place was not usually used by Westerners. Naturally she was wondering what I was doing there with hardly any luggage after having cabled from the airport.

  I said yes. Not that eating in the hotel was a particularly pleasant prospect, but I was very hungry and it didn’t seem a good idea to start wandering around the area at this hour.

  ‘The dining room closes at eight,’ she said. ‘After eight it’s room-service only.’

  I said I’d prefer to eat downstairs; she led me to a curtain on the other side of the lobby and I went through into a small vaulted room with darkly painted walls and low tables. The tables were almost all free and the light very dim. The menu promised an infinite variety of dishes, but on asking the waiter I discovered that just that particular evening they were all off. Except for number fifteen. I dined swiftly on rice and fish, drank a warm beer and went back to the lobby. The woman was still on her seat and seemed intent on arranging some coloured stones on a kind of mirror. On the small sofa in the corner, near the main door, sat two very dark young men, wearing Western style dress, with flared trousers. They acted as if they hadn’t noticed me, but I immediately sensed a certain unease. I went up to the counter and waited for her to speak first. Which she did. She said some numbers in a neutral detached voice; I didn’t get exactly what she meant and asked her to repeat. It was a price list. The only figures I understood were the first and the last; from thirteen to fifteen years old, three hundred rupees, over fifty, five rupees.

  ‘The women are in the lounge on the first floor,’ she finished.

  I took the letter from my pocket and showed her the signature. I had memorized the name, but I preferred to let her see it written so that there would be no misunderstanding. ‘Vimala Sar,’ I said. ‘I want a girl called Vimala Sar.’

  She threw a quick glance at the two young men sitting on the sofa. ‘Vimala Sar doesn’t work here any more,’ she said. ‘She’s left.’

  ‘Where did she go?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but we have prettier girls than her.’

  The situation didn’t look promising. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw the two youths shift a little, but maybe it was just an impression.

  ‘Find her for me,’ I said quickly. ‘I’ll wait in my room.’ Fortunately I had two twenty-dollar bills in my pocket. I laid them among the coloured stones and picked up my suitcase. As I was climbing the stairs I had a small inspiration dictated by fear. ‘My embassy knows I’m here,’ I said in a loud voice.

  The room looked clean. It was painted a light green colour and on the walls were prints showing what looked like the erotic sculptures of Khajuraho, but I didn’t particularly feel like checking. The bed was very low with a tattered armchair next to it and a small mountain of coloured cushions. On the bedside table were various objects whose purpose could not be misunderstood. I undressed and found some clean underwear. The bathroom was a painted cubbyhole with a poster on the door showing a blonde straddling a bottle of Coca-Cola. The poster was yellow with age and smutted by insects, the blonde wore her hair à la Marilyn Monroe, fifties style, which made her look even more incongruous. The shower had no shower head, it was simply a pipe sticking out of the wall with a jet of water that gushed out at head height. Still, washing seemed the most voluptuous thing in the world: I had an eight-hour flight behind me, plus three hours in the airport and then the ride across Bombay.

  I don’t know how long I slept. Perhaps two hours, perhaps longer. When the knocking on the door woke me I automatically went to answer, not even realising where I was at first. The girl entered with a rustle of clothes. She was small and wore a pretty sari. She was sweating and her make-up was running at the corners of her eyes. She said: ‘Good evening, sir, I am Vimala Sar.’ She stood in the middle of the room, her eyes down and arms at her sides, as if I was supposed to inspect her.

  ‘I’m a friend of Xavier’s,’ I said.

  She lifted her eyes and I saw the total amazement on her face. I had set up her letter on the bedside table. She looked at it and began to cry.

  ‘How come he ended up in this place?’ I asked. ‘What was he doing here? Where is he now?’

  She began to sob softly and I realised I’d asked too many questions.

  ‘Take it easy,’ I said.

  ‘When he found out I’d written to you he was very angry,’ she said.

  ‘And why did you write to me?’

  ‘Because I found your address in Xavier’s diary,’ she said. ‘I knew you were good friends, once.’

  ‘Why was he angry?’

  She put a hand to her mouth as if to stop herself crying. ‘He’d got to be very hard on me those last months,’ she said. ‘He was ill.’

  ‘But what was he doing?’

  ‘He was doing business,’ she said. ‘I don’t know, he didn’t tell me anything, he’d stopped being nice to me.’

  ‘What kind of business?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she repeated, ‘he didn’t tell me anything. Sometimes he wouldn’t say anything for days and days, then all of a sudden he’d get restless and flare up in a furious rage.’

  ‘When did he arrive here?’

  ‘Last year,’ she said. ‘He came from Goa. He was doing business with them, then he fell ill.’

  ‘Them who?’

  ‘The people in Goa,’ she said, ‘in Goa, I don’t know.’ She sat on the armchair near the bed; she wasn’t crying now, she seemed calmer. ‘Get something to drink,’ she said. ‘There are drinks in the cabinet. A bottle costs fifty rupees.’

  I went to the cabinet and took a small bottle full of an orange liquid, a tangerine liqueur. ‘But who were the people in Goa?’ I insisted. ‘Don’t you remember the name, anything?’

  She shook her head and began to cry again. ‘The people in Goa,’ she said, ‘in Goa, I don’t know. He was ill,’ she repeated.

  She paused and let out a long sigh. ‘Sometimes it seemed he didn’t care about anything,’ she said, ‘not even me. The only thing that interested him at all were the letters from Madras, but then the next day he would be the same as before.’

  ‘What letters?’

  ‘The letters from Madras,’ she said ingenuously, as if this were information enough.

  ‘But who from?’ I pressed her. ‘Who wrote to him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘a society, I don’t remember, he never let me read them.’

  ‘And he answered?’

  Vimala sat there thinking. ‘Yes, he used to answer, I think he did, he spent hours and hours writing.’

  ‘Please,’ I said, ‘try to make an effort. What was this society?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘it was a scholarly society I think, I don’t know, sir.’ She paused again and then said: ‘He was a good man, he meant well. It was his nature. He had a sad destiny.’

  Her hands were clasped together, her fingers long and beautiful. Then she looked at me with an expression of relief, as if something had come back to her. ‘The Theosophical Society,’ she said. And for the first time she smiled.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘tell me everything, take your time, everything you remember, everything you can tell me.’

  I poured her another glass of the liqueur. She drank and began to tell. It was a long, rambling story, full of details. She talked about their affair, about the streets of Bombay, the holiday trips to Bassein and Elephanta. And then about afternoons at the Victoria Gardens, stretched out on the grass, about swimming at Chowpatty Beach under the first rains of the monsoon. I heard how Xavier had learnt to laugh and what he laughed about; and how much he liked the sunsets over the Arabian Sea when they walked along the seafront at dusk. It was a story she had carefully purged of any ugliness or misery. It was a love story.

  ‘Xavier had written a great deal,’ she said, ‘then one day he burnt everything. Here in this hotel, he got a copper basin and burnt everything.’

  ‘Why?’ I
asked.

  ‘He was ill,’ she said. ‘It was his nature. He had a sad destiny.’

  By the time Vimala left the night must have been over. I didn’t look at my watch. I drew the curtains across the window and lay on the bed. Before falling asleep I heard a distant cry. Perhaps it was a prayer, or an invocation to the new day that was dawning.

  II

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘His name was Xavier,’ I answered.

  ‘Like the missionary?’ he asked. And then he said: ‘It’s not an English name, that’s for sure, is it?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s Portuguese. But he didn’t come as a missionary; he’s a Portuguese who lost his way in India.’

  The doctor nodded his head in agreement. He had a gleaming hairpiece that shifted like a rubber skullcap every time he moved his head. ‘A lot of people lose their way in India,’ he said, ‘it’s a country specially made for that.’

  I said: ‘Right.’ And then I looked at him and he looked at me without a trace of concern on his face, as if he were there by chance and everything else were where it was by chance, because that was how it had to be.

  ‘Do you know his surname as well?’ he asked. ‘It can be helpful sometimes.’

  ‘Janata Pinto,’ I said. ‘He had some distant connections with India, I think one of his ancestors was from Goa, or at least so he said.’

  The doctor made a gesture as if to say, that’s enough, but that wasn’t what he meant of course.

  ‘There must be some records,’ I said, ‘or I hope there are.’

  He smiled with an unhappy, guilty look. He had very white teeth with a gap in the upper set. ‘Records . . .’ he muttered. Suddenly his expression became hard and tense. He looked at me severely, almost contemptuously. ‘This hospital is in Bombay,’ he said abruptly, ‘you can forget your European notions, they are an arrogant luxury.’

  I said nothing and he too sat there silent. From his shirt pocket he pulled out a straw cigarette case and took a cigarette. Behind his table, on the wall, was a big clock. It said seven o’clock, it had stopped. I looked at it and he understood what I was thinking. ‘It stopped a long time ago,’ he said, ‘anyhow, it’s midnight.’