The Woman of Porto Pim Read online

  Antonio Tabucchi

  The Woman

  of Porto Pim

  Translated from the Italian

  by Tim Parks

  archipelago books

  Copyright © Antonio Tabucchi, 2013 English language translation © Tim Parks, 1991

  First Archipelago Books Edition, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  First published as Donna di Porto Pim by Sellerio editore in 1983.

  Archipelago Books

  232 3rd Street #A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tabucchi, Antonio, 1943–2012.

  [Donna di Porto Pim. English]

  The woman of Porto Pim / Antonio Tabucchi ; translated from the Italian

  by Tim Parks. – 1st Archipelago Books ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN 978-1-935744-75-7

  1. Whales – Fiction. 2. Whaling – Fiction.

  3. Short stories, Italian – Translations into English. I. Parks, Tim. II. Title.

  PQ4880.A24D6613 2012

  853'.914—dc22 2012025599

  Cover art: Henri Michaux

  The publication of The Woman of Porto Pim was made possible with support from Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Hesperides. A Dream in Letter Form

  I Shipwrecks, Flotsam, Crossings, Distances

  Small Blue Whales Strolling about the Azores. Fragment of a Story

  Other Fragments

  Antero de Quental. A Life

  II Of Whales and Whalemen

  High Seas

  The Woman of Porto Pim. A Story

  Postscript. A Whale’s View of Man

  Appendix

  A Map, a Note, a Few Books

  Prologue

  I am very fond of honest travel books and have always read plenty of them. They have the virtue of bringing an elsewhere, at once theoretical and plausible, to our inescapable, unyielding here. Yet an elementary sense of loyalty obliges me to put any reader who imagines that this little book contains a travel diary on his or her guard. The travel diary requires either a flair for on-the-spot writing or a memory untainted by the imagination that memory itself generates – qualities which, out of a paradoxical sense of realism, I have given up any hope of acquiring. Having reached an age at which it seems more dignified to cultivate illusions than foolish aspirations, I have resigned myself to the destiny of writing after my own fashion.

  Having said this, it would nevertheless be dishonest to pass these pages off as pure fiction: the friendly, I might almost say pocket-size muse that dictated them could not even remotely be compared with the majestic muse of Raymond Roussel, who managed to write his Impressions d’Afrique without ever stepping off his yacht. I did step off and put my feet on the ground, so that as well as being the product of my readiness to tell untruths, this little book partly has its origins in the time I spent in the Azores. Basically, its subject matter is the whale, an animal which more than any other would seem to be a metaphor; and shipwrecks, which insofar as they are understood as failures and inconclusive adventures, would likewise appear to be metaphorical. My respect for the imaginations which conjured up Jonah and Captain Ahab has luckily saved me from any attempt to sneak myself, via literature, in amongst the ghosts and myths that inhabit our imaginations. If I talk about whales and shipwrecks, it is merely because in the Azores such phenomena can boast an unequivocal reality. There are however two stories in this small volume which it would not be entirely inappropriate to define as fiction. The first, in its basic outline, is the life of Antero de Quental, that great and unhappy poet who measured the depths of the universe and the human spirit within the brief compass of the sonnet. I owe to Octavio Paz’s suggestion that poets have no biography and that their work is their biography, the idea of writing this story as if its subject were a fictional character. And then lives lost by the wayside, like Antero’s, perhaps hold up better than others to being told along the lines of the hypothetical. The story which closes the book, on the other hand, I owe to the confidences of a man whom I may be supposed to have met in a tavern in Porto Pim. I won’t rule out my having altered it with the kind of additions and motives typical of one who believes that he can draw out the sense of a life just by telling its story. Perhaps it will be considered an extenuating circumstance if I confess that alcoholic beverages were consumed in abundance in this tavern and that I felt it would have been impolite of me not to participate in the locally recognised custom.

  The fragment of a story entitled “Small Blue Whales Strolling about the Azores” can be thought of as guided fiction, in the sense that it was prompted by a snatch of conversation overheard by chance. I don’t even know myself what had happened before and what afterwards. I presume it is about a kind of shipwreck, which is why I put it in the chapter where it is.

  The piece entitled “A Dream in Letter Form” I owe partly to reading Plato and partly to the rolling motion of a slow bus from Horta to Almoxarife. It may be that in the transition from dream to text the content has suffered some distortions, but each of us has the right to treat his dreams as he thinks fit. On the other hand the pages entitled “High Seas” aspire to no more than a factual account, the only merit they can claim being their trustworthiness. Similarly many other pages, and I feel it would be superfluous to say which, are mere transcripts of the real or of what others have written before me. Finally, the piece entitled “A Whale’s View of Man,” in addition to my old vice of looking at things from another’s point of view, unashamedly takes its inspiration from a poem by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who, before myself, and better than myself, chose to see mankind through the sorrowful eyes of a slow animal. And it is to Drummond that this piece is humbly dedicated, partly in memory of an afternoon in Plinio Doyle’s house in Ipanema when he told me about his childhood and about Halley’s comet.

  Vecchiano, 23 September 1982

  The Woman

  of Porto Pim

  Hesperides

  A Dream in Letter Form

  Having sailed for many days and many nights, I realized that the West has no end, but moves along with us, we can follow it as long as we like without ever reaching it. Such is the unknown sea beyond the Pillars, endless and always the same, and it is from that sea, like the thin backbone of an extinct colossus, that these small island crests rise up, knots of rock lost in the blue.

  Seen from the sea, the first island you come to is a green expanse amidst which fruit gleams like gems, though sometimes what you may be seeing are strange birds with purple plumage. The coastline is impervious, black rock-faces inhabited by marauding sea birds which wail as twilight falls, flapping restlessly with an air of sinister torment. Rains are heavy and the sun pitiless: and because of this climate together with the island’s rich black soil, the trees are extremely tall, the woods luxuriant and flowers abound, great blue and pink flowers, fleshy as fruit, such as I have never seen anywhere else. The other islands are rockier, though always rich in flowers and fruit, and the inhabitants get much of their food from the woods, and then the rest from the sea, since the water is warm and teeming with fish.

  The men have light complexions and astonished eyes, as if the wonder at a sight once seen but now forgotten still played across their faces. They are silent and solitary but not sad and they will frequently laugh over nothing, like children. The women are handsome and proud, with prominent cheekbones and high foreheads. They walk
with waterjugs on their heads, and descending the steep flights of steps that lead to the water their bodies don’t sway at all, so that they look like statues on which some god has bestowed the gift of movement. These people have no king, they know nothing of class or caste. There are no warriors because they have no need to wage war, having no neighbors. They do have priests, though of a special kind which I will tell you about later on. And anybody can become one, even the humblest peasant or beggar. Their Pantheon is not made up of gods like ours who preside over the sky, the earth, the sea, the underworld, the woods, the harvest, war and peace and the affairs of mankind. Instead they are gods of the spirit, of sentiments and passions. The principal deities are nine in number, like the islands in the archipelago, and each has his temple on a different island.

  The god of Regret and Nostalgia is a child with an old man’s face. His temple stands on the remotest of the islands in a valley protected by impenetrable mountains, near a lake, in a desolate, wild stretch of country. The valley is forever covered by a light mist, like a veil; there are tall beech trees which whisper in the breeze; a place of intense melancholy. To reach the temple you have to follow a path cut into the rock like the bed of a dried stream. And as you walk you come across strange skeletons of enormous unknown animals, fish perhaps, or maybe birds; and seashells, and stones the pink of mother-of-pearl. I called it a temple, but I ought to have said a shack: for the god of Regret and Nostalgia could hardly live in a palace or luxurious villa; instead he has but a hovel, poor as wept tears, something that stands amidst the things of this world with that same sense of shame as some secret sorrow lurking in our hearts. For this god is not only the god of Regret and Nostalgia; his deity extends to an area of the mind that includes remorse, and the sorrow for that which once was and which no longer causes sorrow but only the memory of sorrow, and the sorrow for that which never was but should have been, which is the most consuming sorrow of all. Men go to visit him dressed in wretched sackcloth, women cover themselves with dark cloaks; and they all stand in silence and sometimes you hear weeping, in the night, as the moon casts its silver light over the valley and over the pilgrims stretched out on the grass nursing their lifetime’s regrets.

  The god of Hatred is a little yellow dog with an emaciated look, and his temple stands on a tiny cone-shaped island: it takes many days and nights of travelling to get there and only real hatred, the hatred that swells the heart unbearably, spawned on envy and jealousy, could prompt the unhappy sufferer to undertake such an arduous voyage. Then there are the gods of Madness and of Pity, the god of Generosity and the god of Selfishness: but I never went to visit these gods and have heard only vague and fanciful stories in their regard.

  As for their most important god, who would seem to be father of all the other gods and likewise of the earth and sky, the accounts I heard of him varied greatly, and I wasn’t able to see his temple nor to approach his island. Not because foreigners aren’t allowed there, but because even the citizens of this republic can go there only after attaining a spiritual state, which is but rarely achieved – and once there they do not come back. On this god’s island stands a temple for which the inhabitants of the archipelago have a name I could perhaps translate as “The Marvelous Dwellings.” It consists of a city which is entirely suppositional – in the sense that the buildings themselves don’t exist; only their plans have been traced out on the ground. This city has the shape of a circular chessboard and stretches away for miles and miles: and every day, using simple pieces of chalk, the pilgrims move the buildings where they choose, as if they were chess pieces; so that the city is mobile and mutable and its physiognomy is constantly changing. From the centre of the chessboard rises a tower on the top of which rests an enormous golden sphere which vaguely recalls the fruit so abundant in the gardens of these islands. And this sphere is the god. I haven’t been able to find out who exactly this god might be: the definitions offered me to date have been imprecise and tentative, not easily comprehensible to the foreigner perhaps. I presume that he has something to do with the idea of completeness, of plentitude, of perfection: a highly abstract idea, not easily comprehensible to the human intellect. Which is why I did think this might be the god of Happiness: but the happiness of those who have understood the sense of life so fully that death no longer has any importance for them; and that is why the chosen few who go to honor the god never return. The task of watching over this god has been given to an idiot with a doltish face and garbled speech who is perhaps in touch with divinity in mysterious ways unknown to reason. When I expressed my desire to pay this god homage, people smiled at me and with an air of profound affection, which perhaps contained a hint of compassion, kissed me on both cheeks.

  But I did pay homage along with others to the god of Love, whose temple stands on an island with white curving beaches on the bright sand washed by the sea. And the image of this god isn’t an idol, nor anything visible, but a sound, the pure sound of sea water drawn into the temple through a channel carved from the rock and then breaking in a secret pool: and because of the shape of the walls and the size of the building, the sound from the pool reproduces itself in an endless echo, ravishing whoever hears it and inducing a sort of intoxication, or daze. And those who worship this god expose themselves to many and strange effects, since his is the principle which commands life, though it is a bizarre and capricious principle; and while it may be true that he is the soul and harmony of the elements, he can also produce illusions, ravings, visions. And on this island I witnessed spectacles that disturbed me in their innocent truth: so much so that I began to doubt whether they weren’t rather the ghosts of my own feelings leaving my body to take shape and apparent reality in the air as a result of my exposing myself to the bewitching sound of the god. It was with such thoughts in my mind that I set out along a path that leads to the highest point of the island, whence you can see the sea on every side. At which I became aware that the island was deserted, that there was no temple on the beach and that the figures and faces of love I had seen like tableaux vivants and which included numerous gradations of the spirit, such as friendship, tenderness, gratitude, pride and vanity, all these aspects of love I thought I had seen in human form, were just mirages prompted by I don’t know what enchantment. And thus I arrived right at the top of the promontory and as, observing the endless sea, I was already abandoning myself to the dejection that comes with disillusion, a blue cloud descended on me and carried me off in a dream: and I dreamed that I was writing you this letter, and that I was not the Greek who set sail to find the West and never came back, but was only dreaming of him.

  I

  Shipwrecks, Flotsam, Crossings, Distances

  Small Blue Whales Strolling

  about the Azores

  Fragment of a Story

  She owes me everything, said the man heatedly, everything: her money, her success. I did it for her, I shaped her with my own hands, that’s what. And as he spoke he looked at his hands, clenching and unclenching his fingers in a strange gesture, as if trying to grasp a shadow.

  The small ferry began to change direction and a gust of wind ruffled the woman’s hair. Don’t talk like that, Marcel, please, she muttered, looking at her shoes. Keep your voice down, people are watching us. She was blonde and wore big sunglasses with delicately tinted lenses. The man’s head jerked a little to one side, a sign of annoyance. Who cares, they don’t understand, he answered. He tossed the stub of his cigarette into the sea and touched the tip of his nose as if to squash an insect. Lady Macbeth, he said with irony, the great tragic actress. You know the name of the place I found her in? It was called ‘La Baguette’, and as it happens she wasn’t playing Lady Macbeth, you know what she was doing? The woman took off her glasses and wiped them nervously on her T-shirt. Please, Marcel, she said. She was showing off her arse to a bunch of dirty old men, that’s what our great tragic actress was doing. Once again he squashed the invisible insect on the tip of his nose. And I still have photographs, he said.<
br />
  The sailor going round checking tickets stopped in front of them and the woman rummaged in her bag. Ask him how much longer it’ll be, said the man. I feel ill, this old bathtub is turning my stomach. The woman did her best to formulate the question in that strange language, and the sailor answered with a smile. About an hour and a half, she translated. The boat stops for two hours and then goes back. She put her glasses on again and adjusted her headscarf. Things aren’t always what they seem, she said. What things? he asked. She smiled vaguely. Things, she said. And then went on: I was thinking of Albertine. The man grimaced, apparently impatient. You know what our great tragedian was called when she was at the Baguette? She was called Carole, Carole Don-Don. Nice, eh? He turned towards the sea, a wounded expression on his face, then came out with a small shout: Took! He pointed southwards. The woman turned and looked with him. On the horizon you could see the green cone of the island rising in sharp outline from the water. We’re getting near, the man said, pleased now, I don’t think it’ll take an hour and a half. Then he narrowed his eyes and leaned on the railings. There are rocks too, he added. He moved his arm to the left and pointed to two deep-blue outcrops, like two hats laid on the water. What nasty rocks, he said, they look like cushions. I can’t see them, said the woman. There, said Marcel, a little bit more to the left, right in line with my finger, see? He slipped his right arm around the woman’s shoulder, keeping his hand pointing in front. Right in the direction of my finger, he repeated.

  The ticket collector had sat down on a bench near the railing. He had finished making his rounds and was watching their movements. Maybe he guessed what they were saying, because he went over to them, smiling, and spoke to the woman with an amused expression. She listened attentively, then exclaimed: Noooo!, and she brought a hand to her mouth with a mischievous, childish look, as though suppressing a laugh. What’s he say? the man asked, with the slightly stolid expression of someone who can’t follow a conversation. The woman gave the ticket collector a look of complicity. Her eyes were laughing and she was very attractive. He says they’re not rocks, she said, deliberately holding back what she had learnt. The man looked at her, questioning and perhaps a little annoyed. They’re small blue whales strolling about the Azores, she exclaimed, those are the exact words he used. And she at last let out the laugh she’d been holding back, a small, quick, ringing laugh. Suddenly her expression changed and she pushed back the hair the wind had blown across her face. You know at the airport I mistook someone else for you? she said, candidly revealing her association of ideas. He didn’t even have the same build as you and he was wearing an extraordinary shirt you’d never put on, not even for Carnival, isn’t it odd? The man made a gesture with his hand, butting in: I stayed behind in the hotel, you know, the deadline’s getting closer and the script still needs going over. But the woman wouldn’t let him interrupt. It must be because I’ve been thinking about you so much, she went on, and about these islands, the sun. She was speaking in what was almost a whisper now, as if to herself. I’ve done nothing all this time but think of you. It never stopped raining. I imagined you sitting on a beach. It’s been too long, I think. The man took her hand. For me too, he said, but I haven’t been to the beach much, the main thing I’ve been looking at is my typewriter. And then it rains here too, oh yes, you wouldn’t believe the rain, how heavy it is. The woman smiled. I haven’t even asked you if you managed to do it, and to think, if ideas were worth anything, I’d have written ten plays with trying to imagine yours: tell me what it’s like, I’m dying to know. Oh, let’s say it’s a reworking of Ibsen in a light vein, he said, without disguising a certain enthusiasm – light, but a little bitter too, the way my stuff is, and seen from her point of view. How do you mean? asked the woman. Oh, the man said with conviction, you know the way things are going these days, I thought it would be wise to present it from her point of view, if I want people to take notice, even if that’s not why I wrote it, of course. The story’s banal in the end, a relationship breaking up, but all stories are banal, what matters is the point of view, and I rescue the woman, she is the real protagonist, he is selfish and mediocre, he doesn’t even realize what he’s losing, do you get me?