Little Misunderstandings of No Importance Read online

  In Lisbon they were polite and attentive, unlike the Spaniards. The review was located in a handsome building on the Placa dos Restauradores, the Palácio Foz, with an English-style façade, a slate roof, and heavily carpeted rooms. They sang the praises of the Professor and he went along with them, adding a more graceful and subtle appreciation of his own, whose slyness certainly escaped the pompous editor, an unconscious symbol of idiocy. Certainly, he said, with maximum hypocrisy, he too was a friend of Portugal, a small country but a great one. For the time being he couldn’t contribute to the review; besides, his name meant nothing, he was only an assistant to the Professor and, moreover, he took no interest in politics. He might, eventually, be able to make some translations, under a fictitious name; his Portuguese wasn’t all that good, but he could count on the help of a Portuguese reader in an Italian university, whom they doubtless knew. And they, in their turn, could count on his good will. The Professor was old, had many commitments and couldn’t make frequent trips to Portugal. He, on the other hand, was happy to travel.

  And so it went. The texts he was given to translate were stupid and easy, but the pay was good. Their very stupidity bore out his inner instincts, kindling the secret fire of his resentment. As for the photograph of Machado, he hung it over his table, between the bed and the window giving onto the hospital courtyard. But he wouldn’t be staying much longer in this squalid rented room, he knew; a competitive examination for a better post was in the offing. He would come out first and then hang the photograph in a place worthy of it. Meanwhile, half consciously, he was coming to resemble his idol. He let his hair grow—bushy and unpommaded—over his forehead, giving it the shape of Machado’s. The cut of his mouth was similar also; the thin lips were like a cynical slash, which dissembled the injustices to which he had been subjected. He was reading the reflections attributed to the fictitious Juan de Mairena and was fascinated by Machado’s capacity to wear masks, by the subtle ability to assume various roles, which he too enjoyed. “My philosophy is fundamentally sad, but I’m not a sad man, and I don’t believe I sadden anyone else. In other words, the fact that I don’t put my own philosophy into practice saves me from its evil spell, or, rather, my faith in the human race is stronger than my intellectual analysis of it; there lies the fountain of youth in which my heart is continually bathing.” The fact that I don’t put my own philosophy into practice saves me from its evil spell—this notion gave him a feeling of infinite lightness, a sort of remission of his pains, of innocence. It was in such a state of innocence that he lived through the examination days unaware of the difficulties involved. The examination was not on Machado; obviously, it covered purely technical, theoretical matters of metrics. And yet this very abstract poetical grammar, so proudly uncontaminated, seemed to him a metaphor of his existence, of pure thought, free of thought’s harmful effects. He passed the examination with flying colours, just as he had expected. And, at this point, it was easy, too easy to give him any satisfaction, to cast off the old Professor. When he took him the second edition of his thesis, minus the hateful dedication, he felt that he was carrying out an insipid and disappointing obligation. If the Professor had been argumentative, if he had lashed out against him, as he had expected, there would have been a frank, excited discussion. The Professor was waiting for him in his study with a melancholy air; he played the part of a man betrayed and shunted aside and welcomed him with tears in his eyes and no courage to put up a fight. “I didn’t know that you were my enemy,” he said; “it’s the greatest sorrow of my old age.” It was sentimental blackmail, based on a presumed friendship, old age, and disillusionment, which reminded him of Cecilia’s oblique reproaches. And he couldn’t bear this because it was a subtle and yet unfair way to recall Madrid and Lisbon, to accuse him of that silent and bitter scorn of which he had undoubtedly been aware and with which the Professor now hoped to put pressure upon him. At this point he voiced his disdain, calmly but sarcastically, in sentences whose rhythm recalled the Machado of the Coplas per la muerte di don Guido. While he whispered bare, cutting words of revenge, his mind, off on its own tack, freed by thought from thought’s harmful effects, silently recited, in a familiar rhythm: Al fin, una pulmonia mató a don Guido, y est á n las campans todo el día doblando por el: din-dan! Murió don Guido, un señor de mozo muy jaranero, muy galán e algo torero, de viejo, gran rezador. “… This was the death of Don Guido, a gentleman who, when young, was very haughty, very gallant and something of a bullfighter; but when old was given to prayer.” The Professor interrupted his silent recital and told him to go away, and he went, savouring the taste of victory. For it was a victory, and he knew that many other victories were to follow.

  The second was Giuliana, a victory not over her but over life. He rescued her from the status of a premature old maid and restored to her a youthfulness that she tried to conceal, erasing her idea that she was ill and replacing it with the conviction that she was healthy, all too healthy, and needed only a man to give her protection and a feeling of security. The only thing about her that disturbed him was her conciliatory nature, of a transparency which seemed to him simple-minded and perhaps damaging to them both. He made her do away with violet perfume, a modest lambswool coat, loud laughter, and anything else that might make her conspicuous. He would teach her or, rather, “construct” for her the pattern of a university career, which was to be learned like a profession. This didn’t mean that she was to be his creature, that would be an oversimplified interpretation. What they had was a common purpose, an existential partnership, that was his idea of love, if only she could understand. And she understood.

  Other victories came in a pleasing enough manner. Chiefly victory over a colleague who thoughtlessly or frivolously had wronged him. Such wrongs are searing because they presuppose a lack of attention to the wronged party. And he could not tolerate inattentiveness, it was a form of humiliation that made him pale, one which he had experienced all too many times, which reminded him of the days when he was a pariah, when he had had to buy wretched suits at the shop on the Viale Libia and to imagine that they were well-tailored. But searing wrongs are the richest and most productive; they swell in the mind and postulate elaborate and complex answers, not rapid and disappointing acts of liberation. No, he knew that searing wrongs nest in some secret area; they crouch there like lethargic larvae and then create ramifications, colonies, anthills with winding passageways which deserve their own painstaking, detailed topography. A topography which he had studied in painstaking detail, patiently, because there was no way of taking direct revenge except through an unsatisfactory, poisonously personal attack in some scholarly periodical. He had, then, to find an indirect approach. This called for alliances, deliciously allusive conversations, subtle understandings, elective affinities.

  There is a delicate pleasure in identifying the friends of our enemies and making them the secret objectives of revenge. He worked on it for months, years. His enemy’s favourite student had just gone to a university in the north; by one of life’s little coincidences he was in the same field. To find a possible enemy for him was difficult but not impossible; he had only to study the location of various colleagues and the second one he found was a good choice. He didn’t know the man well. He’d met him at some congress or other and was on first name terms. He was a mediocre, arrogant fellow whose writings were marked by awkward syntax and vague conclusions; they extolled second-rate authors in second-rate reviews. But this was not his Achilles’ heel. The weak point of this prospective ally was his wearisome career in the shadow of a pitiless superior who had humiliated him for years as if he were a superfluous object, calling him Smerdyakov, like the servant of the Brothers Karamazov. Here was the weakness to be exploited, not heavy-handedly but with a light touch, which would not threaten blackmail but surreptitiously hint at it in a way possible between congenial spirits. After only a brief conversation the machinery was put in motion and he watched it from the sidelines with deliberately prolonged enjoyment. An en
joyment which followed a set course to the very end, like a symphony. And when it was over he started again and finished with a short, syncopated rondo, which was easier but less gratifying. His second alliance, with an ambitious and spiteful young woman colleague, gave him little satisfaction. She was a frank and obvious schemer who had betrayed a friend, usurped her place with the old Professor and installed herself, almost insolently in his department. To have her on his side was actually tedious; privately he called her “the gangster’s moll”.

  And the other victories, the official ones. Published books, articles, scholarly meetings. His greatest success came, once more, from the Iberian Peninsula. The dictatorships were over, there were no more limitations, and no one to prevent him from exercising his critical powers on a sixteenth-century courtier-poet, commemorated at a congress of scholars from all over Europe which took place in an aristocratic, baroque country mansion, far from the capital and surrounded by olive trees and vineyards. He had managed to be scheduled near the end, intending to deliver a dry, technical paper, an apparently neutral, rhythmical reading which actually pointed up relentlessly the stylistic wiles of the poet in question, his concealed plagiarism of his great contemporaries. But at one point there was a paper by a Dominican monk, of his own age, a professor of Classics and for years editor of a literary review which, during the superseded government had held to a vaguely liberal and anti-Fascist “cultural” line, with no definite political colouring. Now this champion of vague anti-Fascism spoke in a conciliatory manner of the compromising courtier-poet, in terms of the autonomy of the poetical text, of human weakness and the necessity of putting aside biographical details, because “poets have no biography except in their poetry”, and we must pay due respect to the solitary, mysterious inner Word which dictated the words of their poems. There was intolerable Platonism in this specious and surreptitious allusion, a fuzziness that spilled over into a metaphysical logos, an influence of Spinoza which the speaker gracefully linked with pre-Socratic philosophy but which was actually tied up with Right-wing neo-idealism. And then the monk’s humility, his conciliatory tone, his forgiveness of human weakness in the name of the poetic text, these were a form of subtle arrogance, a reversed censorship, a blackmailing expression of the remission of sins. No, no sin was to be remitted; he would not tolerate such a vision of the world or let himself be trapped by so treacherous a formula. And so he spoke up as he thought he should under the circumstances. First he apologized for quoting himself, he simply had to do it. Meanwhile he called his hearers’ attention to examples of phonetics, scansion, and vocabulary which he had picked out in order to show the similarities between the poet’s text and those of his manneristic contemporaries. He was perfectly aware of the autonomy of a poetical text, but every text has its place in a context, and the context was here. At this point he unsheathed his long sword. The classicist had used old-fashioned, outdated language—he was not up on contemporary criticism; in short, he was poorly equipped. And so he spoke of Bachtin and the meaning of context within the text; he displayed the gems of his chosen examples against a broad cultural panorama. This allowed for no indulgence or compromise; he left no space for the no-man’s-land of literature shaped by a Platonic canon; he showed them, peremptorily and incontrovertibly, an X-ray labelled literature and life. And he won. Not immediately, of course, because he incurred an aggressive attack on the part of three young intellectuals. But the important thing was that in academic circles he won the reputation of an uncompromising scholar, with a cutting edge like that of a diamond.

  And then there were comforting and reassuring domestic victories: an apartment in the centre of the city, a rich library, a study where the photograph of Machado was finally hung in an appropriate setting, near to books that were worthy of him. He transcribed the tercet of the curious poem by Drummond de Andrade that he had chosen to analyze, and wondered what title to give to its presentation at a forthcoming congress. He attempted a translation and read it aloud in order to measure the effect it would have on his hearers.

  What are our poems made of? And where?

  What poisoned dream responds to them

  If the poet is embittered and the rest is clouds?

  He rather liked the poet, after all; he was dry and realistic, with clear vision, even if it was, perhaps, veiled by a metaphysical streak which he considered superfluous. On second thoughts there was something querulous in that late-Romantic reference to a vague empyrean where poetical concepts floated in abstract form before descending in the shape of words into such a miserable receptacle as the poet, a mortal man contaminated by sin and embitterment. But perhaps this elegantly melancholy poet was unaware; he was, in his way, a young gentleman who had written these words without understanding their meaning, in the belief that they had mysteriously arisen out of some depth of cosmic space. But for him, as he read them, they held no mystery, they were clear as crystal, he had the key, he could snatch and hold them in the palm of his hand, and play with them as if they were the wooden letters of a child’s alphabet. He smiled and wrote: Bitterness and Clouds. For a rhythmical reading of a twentieth-century poem.

  He himself was the true poet, he could feel it.

  ISLANDS

  — 1 —

  He thought he might put it this way: Dear Maria Assunta, I am well and hope the same is true of you. Here it’s already hot, it’s nearly summer, but with you, on the other hand, good weather perhaps hasn’t yet come; we’re always hearing about smog, and then there’s all that big-city and industrial waste. Anyhow I’m expecting you if you want to come for a holiday, with Giannandrea, too, of course, and God bless you. I want to thank you for his and your invitation, but I’ve decided not to come, because, you know, your mother and I lived here together for thirty-five years. When we first came we felt as if we were in the North, and in fact we were, but now I’ve grown fond of the place and it’s filled with memories. Then, since your mother’s death I’ve grown accustomed to living alone and even if I miss my work I can find a lot of distractions, like looking after the garden, something I’ve always enjoyed doing, and also after the two blackbirds, which keep me company, too, and what would I do in a big city, and so I’ve decided to stay in these four rooms, where I can see the harbour and if I feel like it I can take the ferry to go and visit my old mates and have a game of cards. It’s only a few hours by ferry, and I feel at home on board, because a man misses the place where he has worked all his life, every week for a lifetime.

  He peeled the orange, dropped the peel into the water, watched it float in the foaming wake of the boat and imagined that he had finished one page and was starting another, because he simply had to say that he was missing his work already; it was his last day of service and already he missed it. Missed what? A lifetime aboard the boat, the trip out and the trip in, I don’t know whether you remember, Maria Assunta, you were very little and your mother used to say: how is this little one ever going to become a big girl? I got up early; in winter it was still dark and I gave you a kiss before going out; it was bitterly cold and they never gave us decent coats, only old horse-blankets dyed blue, those were our uniforms. All those years made for a habit, and I ask you again what would I do in a big city, what would I do in your house at five o’clock in the morning? I can’t stay in bed any later; I get up at five, as I did for forty years, it’s as if an alarm clock rang inside me. And then you’ve had schooling and school changes people even if they’re from the same background; and the same with your husband—what would we have to talk about? He has ideas, which can’t be mine, from this point of view we don’t exactly get along. You’re educated, both of you; that time when I came with your mother and after dinner some friends of yours arrived, I didn’t say a word the whole evening. All I could talk about were things I knew, that I learned in the course of my life, and you’d asked me not to mention my job. Then there’s something else, which may seem silly to you, who knows how Giannandrea would laugh, but I couldn’t live with the furniture in
your house. It’s all glass, and I bump into it because I don’t see it. So many years, you understand, with my own furniture and getting up at five o’clock.