Message from the Shadows Read online

  The young man looked at him goggle-eyed. “Why do I have to choose?” he stammered.

  “What do you mean, why?”

  “I mean why, what for?”

  “What for?! What do you mean, what for?”

  “To do what?”

  The broker slapped a hand to his forehead and said, “Oh dear God!” Then he asked, “Is this the first time?”

  “Yes,” the young man murmured.

  “But how old are you, my boy?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “And you’ve never done it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, look, it doesn’t matter, they’ll teach you themselves, you’ll see, it’s the easiest thing in the world.”

  He shook the little bell that was on the table and sounds and giggles could be heard in the corridor. “We’re coming, we’re coming, have a little patience,” a woman’s voice called out.

  3

  The fair was closing down. The ground was littered with trash and the stands were clearing out. A child passed by with a paper trumpet that unrolled as he blew it. Waiting near the post house were carriages and carts full of wares ready to leave for Bologna or Reggio. A peddler stood at the door of the post house. He was a skinny drifter, with a small concertina and a parrot in a little cage. He wore a cheap wool jacket and carried a case slung over his shoulder.

  “This is Regolo,” the broker said, introducing him to the young man. “He’s going to Reggio and even farther. He makes the rounds of all the fairs. He’ll keep you company.”

  The young man and the peddler shook hands.

  “I leave him in your hands,” the broker whispered to the peddler, “look after him for a while. He reminds me of my son. He’s an artist, his name is Dino.”

  The wagon driver cracked the whip and the draft horse slowly started shuffling forward. The two men sat on the cart, with their backs to the driver and their legs dangling.

  “Bye-bye,” the cattleman called, “have a good trip.”

  Just then the young man leaped down and ran toward him. “I forgot to give you this,” he said hurriedly, “it’s a sketch of the woman I met last night. I’m giving it to you as a souvenir.” And he went chasing after the cart that was already turning onto Via Emilia.

  The broker unfolded the sheet of paper. It was a crumpled scrap of wrapping paper. On it was written: Prostitute…Who beckoned you to life? Where do you come from? From the rank Tyrrhenian ports, from the singing fairs of Tuscany or was your mother rolled over in burning sands under siroccos? Immensity impressed stupor on your feral Sphynx-like face. The teeming breath of life tragically shakes your black mane as if you were a lioness. And you watch the sacrilegious blond angel who does not love you and you do not love and who suffers for you and wearily kisses you.

  4

  Regolo sold arruffi of all colors, which were skeins of thread for mending; along with serialized novels in monthly installments and “fortune planets.” The “planets” were yellow, pink, and green slips of paper that bore the lunar phases and the fortune, which the parrot Anacletus, the fisherman of Destiny, chose at random and handed to the buyer with his beak. Anacletus was very old and had a bad leg. Regolo treated him with a Chinese ointment bought at the Sottoripa arcade, in Genoa, where the Chinese sometimes set up a market to sell odds and ends as well as remedies for arthritis, aging virility, and sores. But Anacletus was willful and protested the medications, squawking furiously. Then he fell asleep on his perch, with his head tucked under his wing, and every now and then he shuddered in his sleep and puffed up his feathers, as if he were dreaming.

  Maybe even parrots dream of indigo, Dino thought. The wagon moved along slowly, jolting and swaying, the sound of its rimmed wheels monotonous. The countryside was beguiling and boundless, always the same, with rows of fruit trees and cultivated fields. Dino thought of indigo, and the music of indigo replaced the rhythmic creaking of the wheels. And when he woke up, Regolo was shaking him by the shoulder, because they had arrived in Reggio Emilia.

  They continued down to Porta Santa Croce. It was a clear afternoon. The wagon driver barked “giddy-up!” and cracked the whip, and the horse plodded on slowly. Regolo had to pick up some items from a dealer behind the public baths; so they agreed to meet at Caffe Vittorio in Piazza Cavour, and Dino roamed around the city by himself, because he wanted to see the house where Ariosto was born. He brought along Anacletus, sitting on his perch – the bird was a hindrance to Regolo, whereas he kept Dino company. He felt happy to be walking through the streets of that unfamiliar city accompanied by a parrot. And so, as he strolled along, he began to match his steps in time to a little tune he made up on the spot, which went: “I go walking through the streets mysterious dark and narrow: behind the windowpanes I see Gemmas and Rosas looking out…”

  5

  When Regolo arrived at Caffe Vittorio, Dino had just completed what he was working on. Arranged on the table were three stacks of fortune planets, sorted by color.

  “I want to tell you something,” Dino said. “If I stay with you a few days, I want to make my contribution to the business. So I’ve put the finishing touches on the planets: for each planet I have created a verse.”

  Regolo sat down and Dino explained to him that his contribution consisted of embellishing each sheet with an artistic phrase, because that’s how art should come to people, carried in the beak of a parrot who randomly selects among destiny’s slips of paper. And that was the strange function of art: to touch people by chance, because everything is random in the world, and art reminds us of that. And for that reason it both saddens and comforts us. It doesn’t explain anything, just as the wind does not explain: it blows in and stirs the leaves, then it sweeps through the trees and sails away.

  “Read me a few verses,” Regolo asked.

  Dino chose a pink planet and read: “And I kept on wandering without love, leaving my heart from door to door.” Then he picked up a yellow planet and read: “Gold, golden dusty butterfly, why have the flowers of the thistle bloomed?” Finally he selected a green planet and read: “You brought me a little bit of seaweed in your hair, and a smell of wind.” And he explained: “These words are dedicated to a woman whom I will someday find in a port, but she doesn’t yet know that we will meet.”

  “And how do you know that you will meet?” Regolo asked.

  “Because I’m sometimes a little clairvoyant. Well, that’s not really how it is.”

  “So how then?”

  “I imagine something so vividly that afterwards it actually happens.”

  “So then, read another verse,” Regolo said.

  “What color do you want?”

  “Yellow.”

  “It’s the color of organ music. Violet, on the other hand, evokes the music of an oboe, sometimes of a clarinet.”

  “I’d like to hear a yellow one.”

  Dino picked a yellow planet and read: “Because a face appears, there is like an unknown weight on the flowing water, the chirring cicada.”

  6

  They went from house to house, selling skeins and handing out planets. They crossed the Crostolo valley and took the road to Mucciatella and Pecorile.

  At night they slept in farmers’ barns and talked about many things, especially the celestial vault, because Regolo could identify all the stars and knew their names.

  Regolo had a sweetheart in Casola who put them up for five days. Her name was Alba. She was an unmarried woman with an ailing, elderly father, and Regolo was a husband to her once a year.

  During those days, Dino worked in the stable to repay Alba’s hospitality. It was a paltry stable with a pig and two goats.

  On the sixth day they left and followed the bed of the Campola River to reach Canossa.

  There were scattered farmhouses around, but they skipped them to go see the ruins of the castle. From that elevation the
view was magnificent, with the broad Po Valley spread out below them.

  Down there, on that plain, ran Via Emilia, stretched out like a ribbon of promises, headed north toward Milan; after that came Europe, modern metropolises alive with electricity and factories where life throbbed like a fever. Dino, too, had a fever; it was once again pounding in his temples, as it had the day he’d boarded the train at the station in Bologna, driven by a restlessness to travel. The sky was yellow, with violet smudges. Dino heard the music of an oboe and told that to Regolo. The music was that distant road calling to him from afar. He set Anacletus’ perch down on the ground and gripped Regolo in a hearty embrace. He left him sitting on a castle stone and ran hurriedly toward the plain, toward the road.

  The road, and its alluring siren’s call. He thought: “Harsh prelude of a muted symphony, quivering violin with electrified strings, trolley running in a line across an iron sky of curved wires…” And he said to himself, “Go Dino, walk faster, run far, life is restricted and too boundless is the soul.”

  Translated by Anne Milano Appel

  The Trains That Go to Madras

  The trains from Bombay to Madras leave from Victoria Station. My guide assured me that a departure from Victoria Station was, of itself, as good as a trip through India, and this was my first reason for taking the train rather than flying. My guide was an eccentric little book, which gave utterly incongruous advice, and I followed it to the letter. My whole trip was incongruous and so this guidebook suited me to perfection. It treated the traveler not like an avid collector of stereotype images to be visited, as in a museum, by three or four set itineraries, but like a footloose and illogical individual, disposed to taking it easy and making mistakes. By plane, it said, you’ll have a fast, comfortable trip but you’ll miss out on the India of unforgettable villages and landscapes. With long-distance trains you risk unscheduled stops and may arrive as much as a whole day late, but you’ll see the true India. If you have the luck to hit the right train it will be not only comfortable but on time as well; you’ll enjoy first-rate food and service and spend only half as much for a first-class ticket as you would on a plane. And don’t forget that on Indian trains you may make the most unexpected acquaintances.

  These last points had definitely convinced me, and perhaps I’d been lucky to have hit the right train. We had crossed strikingly beautiful country, unforgettable, also, for the humanity I saw, the air-conditioning worked perfectly and the service was faultless. Dusk was falling as the train crossed an area of bare red mountains. The steward came in with tea on a lacquered tray, gave me a dampened towel, poured the tea and informed me, discreetly, that we were in the middle of India. While I was eating he made up my berth and told me that the dining car would be open until midnight and that, if I wanted to dine in my own compartment, I had only to ring the bell. I thanked him with a small tip and gave him back the tray. Then I smoked a cigarette, looking out of the window at the unfamiliar landscape and wondering about my strange itinerary. For an agnostic to go to Madras to visit the Theosophical Society, and to spend the better part of two days on the train to get there was an undertaking that would probably have pleased the odd authors of my odd guidebook. The fact was that a member of the Theosophical Society might be able to tell me something I very much wanted to know. It was a slender hope, perhaps an illusion, and I didn’t want to consume it in the short space of a plane flight; I preferred to cradle and savor it in a leisurely fashion, as we like to do with hopes that we cherish while knowing that there is little chance of their realization.

  An abrupt braking of the train intruded on my thoughts and probably my torpor. I must have dozed off for a few minutes while the train was entering a station and I had no time to read the sign displaying the name of the place. I had read in the guidebook that one of the stops was at Mangalore, or perhaps Bangalore, I couldn’t remember which, but now I didn’t want to bother leafing through the book to trace the railway line. Waiting on the platform there were some apparently prosperous Indian travelers in western dress, a group of women and a flurry of porters. It must have been an important industrial city; in the distance, beyond the rail lines, there were factory smokestacks, tall buildings and broad, tree-lined avenues.

  The man came in while the train was just starting to move again. He greeted me hastily, matched the number on his ticket with that of the berth and, after he had found that they tallied, apologized for his intrusion. He was a portly, bulging European, wearing a dark-blue suit, quite inappropriate to the climate, and a fine hat. His luggage consisted only of a black leather overnight bag. He sat down, pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket and, with a smile on his face, proceeded to clean his glasses. He had an affable, but reserved air, seemed almost apologetic. “Are you going to Madras too?” he asked, and added, without waiting for an answer, “This train is highly reliable. We’ll be there at seven o’clock in the morning.”

  He spoke good English, with a German accent, but he didn’t look German. Dutch, I thought to myself, for no particular reason, or Swiss. He looked like a businessman, around sixty years of age, perhaps a bit older. “Madras is the capital of Dravidian India,” he went on. “If you’ve never been there you’ll see extraordinary things.” He spoke in the detached, casual manner of someone well-acquainted with the country, and I prepared myself for a string of platitudes. I thought it a good idea to tell him that we could still go to the dining car, where the probable banality of his conversation would be interrupted by the silent manipulations of knife and fork demanded by good table manners.

  As we walked through the corridor I introduced myself, apologizing for not having done so before. “Oh, introductions have become useless formalities,” he said with his affable air. And, slightly inclining his head, he added: “My name’s Peter.”

  On the subject of dinner he revealed himself to be an expert. He advised me against the vegetable cutlets which, out of sheer curiosity, I was considering, “because the vegetables have to be very varied and carefully worked over,” he said, “and that’s not likely to be the case aboard a train.” Timidly I proposed some other dishes, purely random selections, all of which he disapproved. Finally I agreed to take the lamb tandoori, which he had chosen for himself, “because the lamb is a noble, sacrificial animal, and Indians have a feeling for the ritual quality of food.”

  We talked at length about Dravidian civilization, that is, he talked, and I confined myself to a few typically ignorant questions and an occasional feeble objection. He described, with a wealth of details, the cliff reliefs of Kancheepuram, and the architecture of the Shore Temple; he spoke of unknown, archaic cults extraneous to Hindu pantheism, of the significance of colors and castes and funeral rites. Hesitantly I brought up my own lore: the legend of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas at Madras, the French presence at Pondicherry, the European penetration of the coasts of Tamil, the unsuccessful attempt of the Portuguese to found another Goa in the same area and their wars with the local potentates. He rounded out my notions and corrected my inexactness in regard to indigenous dynasties, spelling out names, places, dates, and events. He spoke with competence and assurance; his vast erudition seemed to mark him as an expert, perhaps a university professor or, in any case, a serious scholar. I put the question to him, frankly and with a certain ingenuousness, sure that he would answer in the affirmative. He smiled, with a certain false modesty, and shook his head. “I’m only an amateur,” he said. “I have a passion that fate has spurred me to cultivate.”

  There was a note of distress in his voice, I thought, expressive of regret or sorrow. His eyes glistened, and his smooth face seemed paler under the lights of the dining car. His hands were delicate and his gestures weary. His whole bearing had something incomplete and indefinable about it, a sort of hidden sickliness or shame.

  We returned to our compartment and went on talking, but now he was more subdued, and our conversation was punctuated by long silences. While we were getting
ready for bed I asked him, for no specific reason, why he was traveling by train and not flying. I thought that, at his age, it would have been easier and more comfortable to take a plane rather than undergo so long a journey. I expected that his answer would be a confession of fear of air travel, shared by people who have not been accustomed to it from an early age.

  He looked at me with perplexity, as if such a thing had never occurred to him. Then, suddenly, his face lit up and he said: “By plane you have a fast and comfortable trip, but you miss out on the real India. With long-distance trains you risk arriving as much as a day late, but if you hit the right one you’ll be just as comfortable and arrive on time. And on a train there’s always the pleasure of a conversation that you’d never have in the air.”

  Unable to hold myself back, I murmured, “India, A Travel Survival Kit.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I was thinking of a book.” And I added, boldly, “You’ve never been to Madras.”

  He looked at me ingenuously. “You can know a place without ever having been there.” He took off his jacket and shoes, put his overnight bag under the pillow, pulled the curtain of his berth, and said goodnight.

  I would have liked to tell him that he, too, had taken the train because he cherished a slender hope and preferred to cradle and savor it rather than consume it in the short space of a plane flight. I was sure of it. But, of course, I said nothing. I turned off the overhead light, leaving the blue night-lamp lit, pulled my curtain and said only goodnight.

  * * *

  —

  We were awakened by someone’s turning on the ceiling light and speaking in a loud voice. Just outside our window there was a wooden structure, lit by a dim lamp and bearing an incomprehensible sign. The train conductor was accompanied by a dark-skinned policeman with a suspicious air. “We’re in Tamil Nadu,” said the conductor, smiling, “this is a mere formality.” The policeman held out his hand: “Your papers, please.”