Message from the Shadows Read online

  He looked distractedly at my passport and quickly shut it, but lingered longer over my companion’s. While he was examining it I noticed that it came from Israel. “Mr….Shi…mail?” he asked, pronouncing the name with difficulty.

  “Schlemihl,” the Israeli corrected him. “Peter Schlemihl.”

  The policeman gave us back our passports, nodded coolly and put out the light. The train was running again through the Indian night and the blue night-lamp created a dreamlike atmosphere. For a long time we were silent, then I said: “You can’t have a name like that. There’s only one Peter Schlemihl, the shadowless man, he’s a creation of Chamisso, as you know very well. You could pass it off on an Indian policeman, of course…”

  My travel companion did not reply for a minute. Then he asked, “Do you like Thomas Mann?”

  “Not everything,” I answered.

  “What, then?”

  “The stories. Some of the short novels. Tonio Kroger, Death in Venice.”

  “I wonder if you know the preface to Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl,” he said. “An admirable piece of writing.” Again there was silence between us. I thought he might have fallen asleep. But no, he couldn’t have. He was waiting for me to speak, and I did.

  “What are you doing in Madras?”

  My travel companion did not answer at once. He coughed slightly. “I’m going to see a statue,” he murmured.

  “A long trip just to see a statue.”

  My companion did not reply. He blew his nose several times in succession. “I want to tell you a little story,” he said at last. “I want to tell you a little story.” He was speaking softly, and his voice was dulled by the curtain. Many years ago, in Germany, I ran across a man, a doctor, whose job it was to give me a physical examination. He sat behind a desk and I stood, naked, before him. Behind me there was a line of other naked men waiting to be examined. When we were taken to that place we were told that we were useful to the cause of German science. Beside the doctor there were two armed guards, and a nurse who was filling out cards. The doctor asked us very precise questions about the functioning of our male organs; the nurse made some measurements which she then wrote down. The line was moving fast because the doctor was in a hurry. When my turn was over, instead of moving on to the next room where we were to go, I lingered for a few seconds to look at a statuette on the doctor’s desk which had caught my attention. It represented an oriental deity, one I had never seen, a dancing figure with the arms and legs harmoniously diverging within a circle. In the circle there wasn’t much empty space, only a few openings waiting to be closed by the imagination of the viewer. The doctor became aware of my fascination and smiled, a tight-lipped, mocking smile. ‘This statue,’ he said, ‘represents the circle of life into which all dross must enter in order to attain that superior form of life which is beauty. I hope that in the biological cycle envisaged by the philosophy which conceived of this statue you may attain, in another life, a place higher than the one you occupy in this one.’ ”

  At this point my companion halted. In spite of the noise of the train I could hear his deep, regular breathing.

  “Please go on,” I said.

  “There’s not much more to say. The statuette was a dancing Shiva, but that I didn’t know. As you see, I haven’t yet entered the recircling circle of life, and my own interpretation of the figure is a different one. I’ve thought of it every day since; indeed, it’s the only thing I’ve thought of in all these years.”

  “How many years has it been?”

  “Forty.”

  “Is it possible to think of only one thing for forty years?”

  “Yes, I think so, if you’ve been subjected to indignity.” “And what is your interpretation of the figure?”

  “I don’t think it represents the circle of life. It’s simply the dance of life.”

  “And how is that different?”

  “Oh, it’s very different,” he murmured. “Life is a circle. One day the circle must close, and we don’t know what day that will be.” He blew his nose again and said, “Now, please excuse me. I’m tired, and if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to sleep.”

  * * *

  —

  When I woke up we were drawing near to Madras. My travel companion was already shaved and fully dressed in his impeccable dark-blue suit. He had pushed up his berth and now, looking thoroughly rested and with a smile on his face, he pointed to the breakfast tray on the table next to the window.

  “I waited for you to wake up so that we could drink our tea together,” he said. “You were so fast asleep that I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  I went into the washroom and made my morning toilet, gathered my belongings together and closed my suitcase, then sat down to breakfast. We were running through an area of clustered villages, with the first signs of the approaching city.

  “As you see, we’re right on time,” said my companion. “It’s exactly a quarter to seven.” Then, carefully folding his napkin, he added: “I wish you’d go to see that statue. It’s in the Madras museum. And I’d like to hear what you think of it.” He got up, reached for his bag, held out his other hand and pleasantly said goodbye. “I’m grateful to my guidebook for the choice of the best means of transportation,” he said. “It’s true that on Indian trains you may make the most unexpected acquaintances. Your company has given me pleasure and solace.”

  “The feeling is mutual,” I answered. “I’m the one who’s grateful to the guidebook.”

  We were entering the station, alongside a crowded platform. The train’s brakes went on and we glided to a stop. I stepped aside and he got off first, waving his hand. As he started to walk away I called out to him, and he turned.

  “I don’t know where to send my reaction to the statue,” I stated. “I don’t have your address.”

  He had the same perplexed expression I had seen on his face before. After a moment’s reflection, he said: “Leave me a message at the American Express. I’ll pick it up.”

  Then we went our separate ways, into the crowd.

  * * *

  —

  I stayed only three days in Madras. Intense, almost feverish days. Madras is an enormous agglomeration of low buildings and immense uncultivated spaces, jammed with bicycles, animals, and random buses; getting from one end of the city to another took a very long time. After I had fulfilled my obligations I had only one free day and I chose to go, not to the museum but to the cliff reliefs of Kancheepuram, some kilometers from the city. Here, too, my guidebook was a precious companion.

  On the morning of the fourth day I was at the depot for buses to Kerala and Goa. There was an hour before departure time, it was scorchingly hot and the shade of the roofed platforms afforded the only relief from the heat, off the streets. In order to while away the time I bought the English-language newspaper, a four-page sheet that looked like a parish bulletin, containing local news, summaries of popular films, notices, and advertisements of every kind. Prominently displayed on the front page there was the story of a murder committed the day before. The victim was an Argentine citizen who had been living in Madras since 1958. He was described as a discreet, retiring gentleman in his seventies, without close friends, who had a house in the residential section of Adyar. His wife had died three years before, from natural causes. They had no children.

  He had been killed with a pistol shot to the heart. The murder defied explanation, since no theft was involved: everything in the house was in order and there was no sign that anything had been broken into. The article described the house as simple and plain, possessing a few well-chosen art objects and with a small garden. It seemed that the victim was a connoisseur of Dravidian art; he had taken part in the cataloguing of the Dravidian section of the local museum. His photograph showed a bald old man with blue eyes and thin lips. The report of the episode was bland and factual. The only interesting detail
was the photograph of a statuette, alongside that of the victim. A logical juxtaposition, since he was an expert on Dravidian art, and the Dance of Shiva is the best-known work in the Madras museum, and a sort of symbol as well. But this logical juxtaposition caused me to connect one thing with another. There were twenty minutes left before the departure of my bus; I looked for a telephone and dialed the number of the American Express, where a young woman answered politely. “I’d like to leave a message for Mr. Schlemihl,” I told her. The girl asked me to wait a minute and then said, “At the moment we have no such name on record, but you can leave your message all the same, if you like, and it will be delivered to him when he comes by.”

  “Hello, hello!” the operator repeated when she did not hear any reply.

  “Just a minute, operator,” I said. “Let me think.”

  What could I say. My message had a ridiculous side. Perhaps I had understood something. But exactly what? That, for someone, the circle had closed?

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’ve changed my mind.” And I hung up.

  I don’t deny that my imagination may have been working overtime. But if I guessed correctly what shadow Peter Schlemihl had lost, and if he ever happens, by the same strange chance that brought about our meeting on the train, to read this story, I’d like to convey my greetings. And my sorrow.

  Translated by Frances Frenaye

  The phrase that follows this is false: the phrase that precedes this is true

  Madras, 12 January 1985

  Dear Mr. Tabucchi,

  Three years have gone by since we met at the Theosophical Society in Madras. I will admit that the place was hardly the most propitious in which to strike up an acquaintance. We barely had time for a brief conversation, you told me you were looking for someone and writing a little diary about India. You seemed to be very curious about onomastics; I remember you liking my name and asking my permission to use it, albeit disguised, in the book you were writing. I suspect that what interested you was not so much myself as two other things: my distant Portuguese origins and the fact that I knew the works of Fernando Pessoa. Perhaps our conversation was somewhat eccentric: in fact its departure point was two adverbs used frequently in the West (practically and actually), from which we attempted to arrive at the mental states which preside over such adverbs. All of which led us, with a certain logic, to talk about pragmatism and transcendence, shifting the conversation, perhaps inevitably, to the plane of our respective religious beliefs. I remember your professing yourself to be, it seemed to me with a little embarrassment, an agnostic, and when I asked you to imagine how you might one day be reincarnated, you answered that if ever this were to happen you would doubtless return as a lame chicken. At first I thought you were Irish, perhaps because the Irish, more than the English, have their own special way of approaching the question of religion. I must say in all honesty that you made me suspicious. Usually Europeans who come to India can be divided into two groups: those who believe they have discovered transcendence and those who profess the most radical secularism. My impression was that you were mocking both attitudes, and in the end I didn’t like that. We parted with a certain coldness. When you left I was sure your book, if you ever wrote it, would be one of those intolerable Western accounts which mix up folklore and misery in an incomprehensible India.

  I admit I was wrong. Reading your Indian Nocturne prompted a number of considerations which led me to write you this letter. First of all I would like to say that if the theosopher in Chapter Six is in part a portrayal of myself, then it is a clever and even amusing portrait, albeit characterized by a severity I don’t believe I deserve, but which I find plausible in the way you see me. But these are not, of course, the considerations that prompted me to write to you. Instead I would like to begin with a Hindu phrase which translated into your language goes more or less like this: the man who thinks he knows his (or his own?) life, in fact knows his (or his own?) death.

  I have no doubt that Indian Nocturne is about appearances, and hence about death. The whole book is about death, especially the parts where it talks about photography, about the image, about the impossibility of finding what has been lost: time, people, one’s own image, history (as understood by Western culture at least since Hegel, one of the most doltish philosophers, I think, that your culture has produced). But these parts of the book are also an initiation, of which some chapters form secret and mysterious steps. Every initiation is mysterious, there’s no need to invoke Hindu philosophy here because Western religions believe in this mystery too (the Gospel). Faith is mysterious and in its own way a form of initiation. But I’m sure the most aware of Western artists do sense this mystery as we do. And in this regard, permit me to quote a statement by the composer Emmanuel Nunes, whom I had occasion to hear recently in Europe: “Sur cette route infinie, qui les unit, furent bâties deux cités: la Musique et la Poésie. La première est née, en partie, de cet élan voyageur qui attire le Son vers le Verbe, de ce désir vital de sortir de soi-même, de la fascination de l’Autre, de l’aventure qui consiste à vouloir prendre possession d’un sens qui n’est pas le sien. La seconde jaillit de cette montée ou descente du Verbe vers sa propre origine, de ce besoin non moins vital de revisiter le lieu d’effroi où l’on passe du non-être à l’être.”

  But I would like to turn to the end of your book, the last chapter. During my most recent trip to Europe, after buying your book, I looked up a few newspapers for the simple curiosity of seeing what the literary critics thought about the end. I could not, of course, be exhaustive, but the few reviews I was able to read confirmed what I thought. It was evident that Western criticism could not interpret your book in anything but a Western manner. And that means through the tradition of the ‘double,’ Otto Rank, Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, psychoanalysis, the literary ‘game’ and other such cultural categories characteristic of the West. It could hardly be otherwise. But I suspect that you wanted to say something different; and I also suspect that that evening in Madras when you confessed to knowing nothing about Hindu philosophy, you were – why, I don’t know – lying (telling lies). As it is, I think you are familiar with Oriental gnosticism and with those Western thinkers who have followed the path of gnosticism. You are familiar with the Mandala, I’m sure, and have simply transferred it into your culture. In India the preferred symbol of wholeness is usually the Mandala (from the Latin mundus, in Sanskrit ‘globe,’ or ‘ring’), and then the zero sign, and the mirror. The zero, which the West discovered in the fourth century after Christ, served in India as a symbol of Brahma and of Nirvana, matrix of everything and of nothing, light and dark; it was also an equivalent of the ‘as if’ of duality as described in the Upanishads. But let us take what for Westerners is a more comprehensible symbol: the mirror. Let us pick up a mirror and look at it. It gives us an identical reflection of ourselves, but inverting left and right. What is on the right is transposed to the left and vice versa with the result that the person looking at us is ourselves, but not the same self that another sees. In giving us our image inverted on the back-front axis, the mirror produces an effect that may even conceal a sort of sorcery: it looks at us from outside, but it is as if it were prying inside us; the sight of ourselves does not leave us indifferent, it intrigues and disturbs us as that of no other: the Taoist philosophers call it the gaze returned.

  Allow me a logical leap which you perhaps will understand. We are looking at the gnosis of the Upanishads and the dialogues between Misargatta Maharaj and his disciples. Knowing the Self means discovering in ourselves that which is already ours, and discovering furthermore that there is no real difference between being in me and the universal wholeness. Buddhist gnosis goes a step further, beyond return: it nullifies the Self as well. Behind the last mask, the Self turns out to be absent.

  I am reaching the conclusion of what, I appreciate, is an overly long letter, and probably an impertinence that our relationship hardly justifies. You will f
orgive me a last intrusion into your privacy, justified in part by the confession you made me that evening in Madras vis-à-vis your likely reincarnation, a confession I haven’t the audacity to consider a mere whim. Even Hindu thinking, despite believing that the way of Karma is already written, maintains the secret hope that harmony of thought and mind may open paths different from those already assigned. I sincerely wish you a different incarnation from the one you foresaw. At least I hope it may be so.

  I am, believe me, your

  Xavier Janata Monroy

  Vecchiano, 18 April 1985

  Dear Mr. Janata Monroy,

  Your letter touched me deeply. It demands a reply, a reply I fear will be considerably inferior to the one your letter postulates. First of all, may I thank you for allowing me to use part of your name for a character in my book; and furthermore for not taking offense at the novelistic portrayal of the theosopher of Madras for which you provided the inspiration. Writers are not to be trusted even when claiming to practice the most rigorous realism: as far as I am concerned, therefore, you should treat me with the maximum distrust.

  You confer on my little book, and hence on the vision of the world which emerges from it, a religious profundity and a philosophical complexity which unfortunately I do not believe I possess. But, as the poet we both know says, “Everything is worth the trouble if the spirit be not mean.” So that even my little book is worth the trouble, not so much for itself, but for what a broad spirit may read into it.

  Still, books, as you know, are almost always bigger than ourselves. To speak of the person who wrote that book, I am obliged, in spite of myself, to descend to the anecdotal (I wouldn’t dare to say biographical), which in my case is banal and low caste. The evening we made each other’s acquaintance in the Theosophical Society, I had just survived a curious adventure. Many things had happened to me in Madras: I had had the good fortune to meet a number of people and to meditate on various strange stories. But what happened to me had to do with me alone. Thanks to the complicity of a temple guard, I had managed to get inside the compound of the temple of Shiva the Destroyer, which, as you know, is strictly forbidden to non-Hindus, my precise intention being to photograph the altars. Since you appreciate the meaning I attribute to photography, you will realize that this amounted to a double sacrilege, perhaps even a challenge, since Shiva the Destroyer is identified with Death and with Time, is the Bhoirava, the Terror, and manifests himself in sixty-four forms, which the temple of Madras illustrates and which I wanted to photograph for myself. It was two in the afternoon, when the temple shuts its gates for siesta, so that the place was entirely deserted with the exception of a few lepers who sleep there and who paid not the slightest attention. I know this will arouse a profound sense of disapproval on your part, but I do not want to lie. The heat was oppressive, the big monsoon had only just finished and the compound was full of stagnant puddles. Swarms of flies and insects wandered about in the air, and the stench of excrement from the cows was unbearable. Opposite the altars to Shiva the traitor, beyond the troughs for the ablutions, is a small wall for votive offerings. I climbed upon it and began to take my photos. At that moment a piece of the wall I was standing on, being old and sodden with rain, collapsed. Of course I am giving you a ‘pragmatic’ explanation of what happened, since considered from another point of view the affair could have another explanation. In any event, when the wall crumbled I fell, skinning my right leg. A few hours later, when I’d got back to my hotel, the scratches had developed into an incredible swelling. It was only the following morning, though, that I decided to go to the doctor, partly because I hadn’t had myself vaccinated at all before coming to India and I was afraid I might have got infected by tetanus – certainly my leg showed every sign that that was what it was. To my considerable amazement, the doctor refused to give me an anti-tetanus shot. He said it was superfluous since, as he said, tetanus runs its course much faster in India than in Europe, and ‘if it were tetanus you would already be dead.’ It was just ‘a simple infection,’ he said, and all I needed was some streptomycin. He seemed quite surprised that I hadn’t been infected by tetanus, but evidently, he concluded, one occasionally came across Europeans who had a natural resistance.