Message from the Shadows Read online

  I’m sure you will find my story ridiculous, but it’s the story I have to tell. As far as your gnostic interpretation of my Nocturne, or rather of its conclusion, is concerned, allow me to insist in all sincerity that I am not familiar with the Mandala and that my knowledge of Hindu philosophy is vague and very approximate, consisting as it does in the summary found in a tourist guide and in a pocket paperback I picked up at the airport called L’Induisme (part of the ‘Que sais-je?’ series). As regards the question of the mirror, I started doing some hurried research only after getting your letter. For help I went to the books of a serious scholar, Professor Grazia Machianò, and am finding it hard work to grasp the basics of a philosophy of which I am woefully ignorant.

  Finally I must say my own feeling is that on the most immediate level my Nocturne reflects a spiritual state which is far less profound than you so generously suppose. Private problems, of which I will spare you the tedious details, and then of course the business of finding myself in a continent so remote from my own world, had provoked an extremely strong sense of alienation toward everything: so much so that I no longer knew why I was there, what the point of my journey was, what sense there was in what I was doing or in what I myself might be. It was out of this alienation, perhaps, that my book sprang. In short, a misunderstanding. Evidently misunderstandings suit me. In confirmation of which allow me to send you this most recent book of mine, published a few days ago. You know Italian very well and may wish to take a look at it.

  I am, believe me, your

  Antonio Tabucchi

  Madras, 13 June 1985

  Dear Mr. Tabucchi,

  My thanks for your letter and gift. I have just finished Little Misunderstandings of No Importance and your other book of short stories, Reverse Side, which you were generous enough to enclose. You did well, since the two complement each other and this made reading them more pleasant.

  I am perfectly well aware that my letter caused you some embarrassment, just as I am also aware that you, for reasons of your own, wish to elude the gnostic interpretations that I have of your books and which you, as I said, deny. As I mentioned in my first letter, Europeans visiting India can usually be divided into two categories: those who believe they have discovered transcendence and those who profess the most radical secularism. I fear that despite your search for a third way, you do fall into these categories.

  Forgive me my insistence. Even the philosophical position (may I so define it?) which you call ‘Misunderstanding’ corresponds, albeit dressed up in Western culture (the Baroque), to the ancient Hindu precept that the misunderstanding (the error of life) is equivalent to an initiatory journey around the illusion of the real, that is, around human life on earth. Everything is identical, as we say; and it seems to me that you affirm the same thing, even if you do so from a position of skepticism (are you by any chance considered a pessimist?). But I would like to abandon my culture for a moment and draw on yours instead. Perhaps you will remember Epimenides’ paradox which goes more or less like this: ‘The phrase that follows this is false: the phrase that precedes this is true.’ As you will have noticed, the two halves of the saying are mirrors of each other. Dusting off this paradox, an American mathematician, Richard Hoffstadter, author of a paper on Gödel’s theorem, has recently called into question the whole Aristotelian-Cartesian logical dichotomy on which your culture is based and according to which every statement must be either true or false. This statement in fact can be simultaneously both true and false; and this because it refers to itself in the negative: it is a snake biting its own tail, or, to quote Hoffstadter’s definition, ‘a strange loop.’

  Life too is a strange loop. We are back to Hinduism again. Do you at least agree on this much, Mr. Tabucchi?

  I am, believe me, your

  Xavier Janata Monroy

  Vecchiano, 10 July 1985

  Dear Mr. Janata Monroy,

  As usual your letter has obliged me to make a rapid and I fear superficial attempt to assimilate some culture. I only managed to track down something about the American mathematician you mention in one Italian periodical, a column written from the USA by journalist Sandro Stille. The article was very interesting and I have promised myself to look into the matter more deeply. I do not, however, know much about mathematical logic, nor perhaps about any kind of logic; indeed I believe I am the most illogical person I know, and hence I don’t imagine I will make much progress in studies of this variety. Perhaps, as you say, life really is ‘a strange loop.’ It seems fair that each of us should understand this expression in the cultural context that best suits him.

  But allow me to give you a piece of advice. Don’t believe too readily in what writers say: they lie (tell lies) almost all the time. A novelist who writes in Spanish and who perhaps you are familiar with, Mario Vargas Llosa, has said that writing a story is a performance not unlike a strip-tease. Just as the girl undresses under an immodest spotlight revealing her secret charms, so the writer lays bare his intimate life to the public through his stories. Of course there are differences. What the writer reveals are not, like the uninhibited girl, his secret charms, but rather the specters that haunt him, the ugliest parts of himself: his regrets, his guilt and his resentments. Another difference is that while in her performance the girl starts off dressed and ends up naked, in the case of the story the trajectory is inverted: the writer starts off naked and ends up dressed. Perhaps we writers are simply afraid. By all means consider us cowards and leave us to our private guilt, our private ghosts. The rest is clouds.

  Yours

  Antonio Tabucchi

  Translated by Tim Parks

  Bucharest Hasn’t Changed a Bit

  Not to mention, he was doing well there – too well. Was he exaggerating? No, he wasn’t exaggerating in the least. I feel better here than at home, he said, my meals served, the bed made, sheets changed once a week, and a room all to myself, there’s even a small balcony, true the view isn’t much, a stretch of cement buildings, but from the common terrace with its little tables and wicker chairs you can enjoy a splendid panorama, the whole city, and to the right, the sea, it’s not a nursing home, he said, it’s a hotel. He almost sounded irritated, the way old people sometimes do, and his son didn’t dare contradict him. Dad, he murmured, don’t get worked up, I know you’re doing well here, I realize that. You don’t know anything, mumbled the old man, what do you know, you’re just saying that to make me happy, you had the good luck to be born in this country, when your mother and I were finally able to leave she had a belly out to here, did you ever think that if we hadn’t made it out, you might’ve become some fervent kid with a red neckerchief, one of those boy scouts lining the street when the presidential car would go by, the magnificent couple inside, blessing the crowd? Do you know what you would’ve yelled, waving your little flag? Long live the conducător who leads our people toward a radiant future. And you’d have grown up like that, forget all the languages you’ve learned here and all your culture and linguistics, forget linguistics, they’d have sewn up your lingua if you weren’t obedient to the ideals of the magnificent conducatrix couple who were conducting the people toward a radiant future.

  Perhaps he’s finished, thought the son, now he’s done venting, he’s tired, the son would’ve liked to say something rather than just repeating the obvious stuff he’d said last time, fine, Dad, don’t get worked up, you just said you’re doing well here, better than at home, I think so too, leave the past alone, don’t think about it, it happened so long ago, please, Dad. But he couldn’t find any other words: fine, Dad, don’t get worked up, you just said you’re doing well here, better than at home, I think so too, leave the past alone, don’t think about it. The old man didn’t let him finish, he was entitled to speak, that’s how it should be, now he was staring blankly, he caressed his knees as though wanting to press the creases of his pants, he was sitting on that little padded chair with a white pillow behind h
is neck, gazing at a photograph in a silver frame that he kept on the side table. It was an image of a young man and woman hugging each other, he had his right arm around her waist, she had a hand on his shoulder almost without touching it, as if she were embarrassed by having her picture taken, she had a ribbon in her fluffy hair, wore a modest dress in a style that made him think of certain movies from before the war, how strange, he’d always seen that picture on the big bureau in his parents’ bedroom, once when he was young he’d asked his mom who they were and she’d answered: no one you knew.

  You know that atrocious couple was received everywhere with every honor right up till yesterday? The old man went on with his thoughts, did you know that? He didn’t answer, just nodded slightly, it wasn’t yesterday, Dad, he dared to mumble, they killed them more than fifteen years ago, Dad. The old man didn’t hear. They kept giving her honorary degrees, the great scientist, he continued, she’d invented a magic potion, a rejuvenating gelatin that stopped time much better than the monkey’s glands of that other charlatan, the Russian, a semolina flatbread, royal jelly, and sludge from the Black Sea, and for this wonderful discovery of hers, the heads of state in the countries where you now spend your time welcomed her like a benefactress to mankind, tons of honorary degrees, in France in Italy in Germany, I can’t remember, in your Europe, anyhow, you, where are you teaching now, Rome? Don’t forget that racial laws were invented right there, in this beautiful country where we made sure you were born, some sinister types, real fascists, are making official appearances, are being received with every honor, everything upside down, and meanwhile, in the country where your mother and I were born, the fervent believers in the radiant future showed up instead, the fake scientist’s eternal-youth gelatin is what attracted them, these old people like me who resisted aging, who planted themselves in a nice hotel on the Black Sea, feasted on lavish meals but every day, first thing, took two spoonfuls of the magic royal jelly, then shamelessly went down to the private beach, progressives and nudists, to check beneath their bellies to see if the treatment was having any effect. She was a nurse, she began her scientific career by sticking bedpans under old people’s asses in places like this one, then she married the conducător of the people and became a scientist, did you tell me you’re going back to Rome tomorrow? If you get a chance, wave at that guy for me when he leans out the window, the television showed him when he traveled to the same place where they used to take me on vacation as a boy, he wore lovely loafers and a white outfit, just the right color for that place, innocence, if only he’d worn a monk’s habit, which is serious clothing in certain circumstances, and as if that weren’t enough, guess what he suddenly thought to utter in his castrato voice? To ask the Lord, his Lord of course, why He was absent, why He wasn’t there, and where He was. What on earth kind of questions were those? Gott mit uns, my son, that’s where He was, He was with them, He was there, next to the sentries guarding the barbed wire, in case any of us got the idea to escape, even if we could barely stand.

  He lit a cigarette he’d hidden under a napkin in the drawer where he kept his medicines. When you leave, open the window, he said, if the nurse realizes, she’ll make a fuss about it, she’s a softie but she sticks to the rules, here everyone’s obsessed with rules, in any case I do feel much better here than at home, besides, it wasn’t a palace, and of course you remember the social worker assigned to me by the municipality to look after me four hours a week, can you imagine, that pigheaded Ukrainian used to look at me as though I were an official document, and not a word of Romanian, and then giving people like us – I’m thinking of your mother’s family now, after all they had to go through in Ukraine – giving people like that a Ukrainian as a social worker, a pigheaded person who pretends not to understand if you talk to her in Romanian and answers in her own language. He wanted to tell him: Dad, please, don’t say absurd things, she didn’t talk to you in her language, she was talking to you in Hebrew, and she didn’t pretend not to understand Romanian, she really didn’t understand it, it’s you who never wanted to learn how to speak Hebrew correctly, you always insisted on speaking Romanian, even with me, I’m grateful for that because you gave me your language, though you can’t make a chauvinistic matter out of it, I understand your problem, when you and Mom arrived here you were more than forty years old, it wasn’t easy, but you can’t blame the social worker if she doesn’t talk to you in Romanian. Instead he preferred not to say anything since the old man had launched into his soliloquy again, going back to a seemingly finished subject, as he tended to do now. Please don’t make me repeat myself, he said, I feel like I’m in a hotel here, and if you want to remain in Rome to teach, don’t let your conscience disturb you, see this nice room? I’ve never in my life been in a hotel as nice as this, you can’t even imagine when your mother and I were able to crawl out of that sewer, you can’t imagine the place where I left my brother, after his illness, that was no nursing home, it was a lager, the lager of the great conducător of the Romanian people, I left him in a wheelchair in the hall, he tried to follow us to the exit but he didn’t move a millimeter, the wheelchairs of the conducător‘s nursing homes were nailed down, and then he began praying out loud, he called after me, reciting the Talmud to make us stop, you understand? If your mother and I left, nobody else would go see him, take care of him, but in that moment, as I was crying and trying to hide my tears, with all those witches in white uniforms staring at me, all of them spies dressed up like nurses, I mean, in that moment, hey, a brother can’t be treated like that, you, would you do that to a brother even if you don’t have one? And then I turned and said clearly, so the spies in white uniforms could hear: we both managed to avoid the Codreanu camps, but this one, the great conducător r‘s, I did all by myself, for five years, my dear brother, and since I’ve been reeducated, now I can leave, because sometimes they allow visas for reeducated people, and I’ll preserve an entirely personal memory of my reeducation.

  He grew quiet, as if he’d finished, but he hadn’t, it was only a pause, he only needed to get his wind back. You know, my son, he went on, you can go ahead and tell your memories to others, they’re eager to listen to your account and perhaps they get everything, even the smallest nuances, but that memory will still be yours and yours alone, it doesn’t become someone else’s memory just because you’ve told it to others, memories are told but not transmitted. And then, since it seemed like the right moment, he said: speaking of memory, Dad, the doctor told me you refuse to take your medicine, the nurse realized that you pretend to swallow the pills and then spit them out in the sink, why do you do that? These doctors I don’t like, murmured the old man, they don’t understand a thing, believe me, they are ignorant know-it-alls. I don’t think there’s much to understand, Dad, he replied, they’re only trying to help a person of your age, that’s all, besides, the diagnosis is encouraging, there is no serious pathology as we feared, if there were, your attitude would be understandable since it wouldn’t be an attitude but the indicator of a progressive pathology, in your case it’s an attitude, or rather a purely psychological fact, so the doctors say, that’s the reason they prescribed these pills for you, it’s a very light psychoactive drug, nothing much, just a little help. The old man looked at him with an expression that struck him as indulgent, perhaps his voice had an ironic tone. A helping hand, sure, a helping hand, those people think they can polish your memory like a mirror, this is the point, to make it function not the way it wants but the way they want, so it doesn’t obey itself anymore, its own nature, which has no geometric shape, you can’t represent memory with a nice geometric drawing, it takes the shape it wants according to the moment, to the time, to who knows what, and they, the big doctors, they want to make it trigonometrical, that’s the right word, so it’s easily measured, like dice, this is reassuring for them, a die has six sides, you turn it over and can see them all, does memory seem like a die to you? He waved as though whisking away a fly. He grew quiet. He’d stopped smoothing the cre
ases of his pants. His eyes closed, his head on the pillow of the armchair, he seemed to have fallen asleep. Many years ago, he whispered, I had a recurring dream, I started having it when I was fifteen, in the lager, and I carried it with me for half my life. A night rarely passed without that dream, to tell the truth it wasn’t even a dream, because dreams, even the most disjointed dreams, have a story, and mine was only an image, like a photo, actually, my head was snapping that photo, if I can put it that way, because I was standing there looking at the fog and at a certain point, click, my brain snapped a photo, and in front of me a landscape would be displayed, or rather, there was no landscape at all, it was a landscape made of nothing, mainly there was a gate, a beautiful white gate, thrown open onto a landscape that wasn’t there, nothing other than that image, the dream was mostly what I felt while looking at that image my brain had photographed, because dreams aren’t so much what happens as the emotion one feels while living what happens, and I wouldn’t know how to tell you about the emotion I was feeling, because emotions aren’t explainable, to be explained they have to transform into feelings, as Baruch knew, but a dream isn’t the right place for transforming emotions into feelings, I can tell you this was real torment for me, because while I longed to take off running, go through that wide-open gate, and dive into the unknown beyond, fleeing toward I don’t know where, at the same time I also felt a sense of shame, like guilt for something I didn’t do, the fear of hearing my father’s voice scolding me, but there was no voice in that dream, it was a silent dream, with the fear of hearing a voice. That dream vanished the first night we got to this country. We slept in Jaffa at the house of some friends you never met, they died soon after, your mother couldn’t fit into her clothes anymore, we had only two suitcases and there was a feeling of war in the air, for that matter it’s always felt like war in this country, we slept on the terrace, on two makeshift beds, it was hot, you could hear sirens in the distance and noise coming from the streets, which wasn’t reassuring for people used to the silence of Bucharest nights, but even so, I slept like a child that night and never had that sort of dream again.