I want to speak to the owner, I said. The owner doesn’t come until after eight, he answered haughtily. I sat down at a table and ordered supper. She came in towards nine, there were other regulars around, she saw me and nodded vaguely, then sat in a corner with an old man with a white moustache. It was only then that I realised how beautiful she was, a beauty that made my temples burn. This was what had brought me there, but until then I hadn’t really understood. And now, in the space of a moment, it all fell into place inside me so clearly it almost made me dizzy. I spent the evening staring at her, my temples resting on my fists, and when she went out I followed her at a distance. She walked with a light step, without turning; she didn’t seem to be worried about being followed. She went under the gate in the big wall of Porto Pim and began to go down to the bay. On the other side of the bay, where the promontory ends, isolated among the rocks, between a cane thicket and a palm tree, there’s a stone house. Maybe you’ve already noticed it. It’s abandoned now and the windows are in poor shape, there’s something sinister about it; some day the roof will fall in, if it hasn’t already. She lived there, but in those days it was a white house with blue panels over the doors and windows. She went in and closed the door and the light went out. I sat on a rock and waited; halfway through the night a window lit up, she looked out and I looked at her. The nights are quiet in Porto Pim, you only need to whisper in the dark to be heard far away. Let me in, I begged her. She closed the shutter and turned off the light. The moon was coming up in a veil of red, a summer moon. I felt a great longing, the water lapped around me, everything was so intense and so unattainable, and I remembered when I was a child, how at night I used to call the eels from the rocks: then an idea came to me, I couldn’t resist, and I began to sing that song. I sang it very softly, like a lament, or a supplication, with a hand held to my ear to guide my voice. A few moments later the door opened and I went into the dark of the house and found myself in her arms. I’m called Yeborath, was all she said.
Do you know what betrayal is? Betrayal, real betrayal, is when you feel so ashamed you wish you were somebody else. I wished I’d been somebody else when I went to say goodbye to my father and his eyes followed me about as I wrapped my harpoon in oilskin and hung it on a nail in the kitchen, then slung the viola he’d given me for my twentieth birthday over my shoulder. I’ve decided to change jobs, I told him quickly, I’m going to sing in a bar in Porto Pim, I’ll come and see you Saturdays. But I didn’t go that Saturday, nor the Saturday after, and lying to myself I’d say I’d go and see him the next Saturday. So autumn came and the winter went, and I sang. I did other little jobs too, because sometimes customers would drink too much and to keep them on their feet or chase them off you needed a strong arm, which Denis didn’t have. And then I listened to what the customers said while they pretended to be on holiday; it’s easy to pick up people’s secrets when you sing in a bar, and, as you see, it’s easy to tell them too. She would wait for me in her house in Porto Pim and I didn’t have to knock any more now. I asked her: Who are you? Where are you from? Why don’t we leave these absurd people pretending to play cards? I want to be with you for ever. She laughed and left me to guess the reasons why she was living the way she was, and she said: Wait just a little longer and we’ll leave together, you have to trust me, I can’t tell you any more. Then she’d stand naked at the window, looking at the moon, and say: Sing me your eel song, but softly. And while I sang she’d ask me to make love to her, and I’d take her standing up, leaning against the windowsill, while she looked out into the night, as though waiting for something.
It happened on August 10. It was São Lourenço and the sky was full of shooting stars, I counted thirteen of them walking home. I found the door locked and I knocked. Then I knocked again louder, because there was a light on. She opened and stood in the doorway, but I pushed her aside. I’m going tomorrow, she said, the person I was waiting for has come back. She smiled, as if to thank me, and I don’t know why but I thought she was thinking of my song. At the back of the room a figure moved. He was an old man and he was getting dressed. What’s he want? he asked her in the language I now understood. He’s drunk, she said; he was a whaler once but he gave up his harpoon for the viola, while you were away he worked as my servant. Send him away, said the man, without looking at me.
There was a pale light over Porto Pim. I went around the bay as if in one of those dreams where you suddenly find yourself at the other end of the landscape. I didn’t think of anything, because I didn’t want to think. My father’s house was dark, since he went to bed early. But he wouldn’t sleep, he’d lie still in the dark the way old people often do, as if that were a kind of sleep. I went in without lighting the lamp, but he heard me. You’re back, he murmured. I went to the far wall and took my harpoon off the hook. I found my way in the moonlight. You can’t go after whales at this time of night, he said from his bunk. It’s an eel, I said. I don’t know if he understood what I meant, but he didn’t object, or get up. I think he lifted a hand to wave me goodbye, but maybe it was my imagination or the play of shadows in the half dark. I never saw him again. He died long before I’d done my time. I’ve never seen my brother again either. Last year I got a photo of him, a fat man with white hair surrounded by a group of strangers who must be his sons and daughters-in-law, sitting on the veranda of a wooden house, and the colours are too bright, like in a postcard. He said if I wanted to go and live with him, there was work there for everybody and life was easy. That almost made me laugh. What could it mean, an easy life, when your life is already over?
And if you stay a bit longer and my voice doesn’t give out, I’ll sing you the song that decided the destiny of this life of mine. I haven’t sung it for thirty years and maybe my voice isn’t up to it. I don’t know why I’m offering, I’ll dedicate it to that woman with the long neck, and to the power a face has to surface again in another’s, maybe that’s what’s touched a chord. And to you, young Italian, coming here every evening, I can see you’re hungry for true stories to turn them into paper, so I’ll make you a present of this story you’ve heard. You can even write down the name of the man who told it to you, but not the name they know me by in this bar, which is a name for tourists passing through. Write that this is the true story of Lucas Eduino who killed the woman he’d thought was his, with a harpoon, in Porto Pim.
Oh, there was just one thing she hadn’t lied to me about; I found out at the trial. She really was called Yeborath. If that’s important at all.
Postscript
A Whale’s View of Man
Always so feverish, and with those long limbs waving about. Not rounded at all, so they don’t have the majesty of complete, rounded shapes sufficient unto themselves, but little moving heads where all their strange life seems to be concentrated. They arrive sliding across the sea, but not swimming, as if they were birds almost, and they bring death with frailty and graceful ferocity. They’re silent for long periods, but then shout at each other with unexpected fury, a tangle of sounds that hardly vary and don’t have the perfection of our basic cries: the call, the love cry, the death lament. And how pitiful their lovemaking must be: and bristly, brusque almost, immediate, without a soft covering of fat, made easy by their threadlike shape which excludes the heroic difficulties of union and the magnificent and tender efforts to achieve it.
They don’t like water, they’re afraid of it, and it’s hard to understand why they bother with it. Like us they travel in herds, but they don’t bring their females, one imagines they must be elsewhere, but always invisible. Sometimes they sing, but only for themselves, and their song isn’t a call to others, but a sort of longing lament. They soon get tired and when evening falls they lie down on the little islands that take them about and perhaps fall asleep or watch the moon. They slide silently by and you realize they are sad.
Appendix
A Map, a Note, a Few Books
A Map
A Note
The Azores archipelago is sit
uated in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, about halfway between Europe and America, between latitudes 36°55' and 39°44'N and longitudes 25° to 31°W. It is composed of nine islands: Santa Maria, São Miguel, Terceira, Graciosa, São Jorge, Pico, Faial, Flores and Corvo. The archipelago stretches across a distance of around 600 km from NW to SE. The name Azores is the result of an error on the part of the first Portuguese sailors; they mistook for sparrow-hawks (in Portuguese, açores) what in fact were numerous kites which populate the islands.
Portuguese colonization began in 1432 and went on for the whole of the fifteenth century, though at the same time the Azores also became the home of a large number of Flemish colonists, this as a result of marriages which linked the Portuguese throne with Flanders. The Flemish colonists left a considerable mark, not just on the physical features of the inhabitants, but also on the islands’ popular music and folklore in general. The soil is volcanic in origin. The rocky coasts are often made up of sheets of extremely hard lava, while in flatter areas there are stretches of pulverized pumice stone. The physical characteristics of the landscape show very clear signs of volcanic and seismic activity. As well as a whole series of minor volcanic phenomena (smokeholes, geysers, warm springs and mud swamps, etc.), there is an abundance of volcanic lakes which have taken over ancient craters, and the landscape is often broken by deep crevices scored out by the burning lava. The hinterland and the mountains have a savage and often gloomy beauty. The highest peak is Pico, which is 2,345 metres high and located on the island of the same name. Innumerable volcanic eruptions have been recorded: the most terrifying earthquakes took place in 1522, 1538, 1591, 1630, 1755, 1810, 1862, 1884, 1957. The effects of the 1978 earthquake, which hit the island of Terceira in particular, are clearly visible to any traveler stopping over in Angra. In the course of this incessant volcanic activity, the landscape of the Azores has been subjected to considerable change and countless little islands have surfaced and then disappeared. The most curious anecdote in this regard was told by an English sea captain, Tillard. In 1810, on board his warship, the Sabrina, Tillard witnessed the birth of a little island on which he had two men land with an English flag, claiming possession of the territory for the English crown and baptizing it Sabrina. But the day after, before lifting anchor, Captain Tillard was to find to his disappointment that the island of Sabrina had disappeared and the sea was as flat and calm as ever.
The climate of the Azores is mild, with abundant but brief rainfalls and very hot summers. Nature is luxuriant and there are countless species of plants. Typically Mediterranean flora, in which cedars, vines, orange trees and pines dominate, flourishes alongside tropical vegetation which includes pineapple trees, banana trees, passion fruit and a huge variety of flowers. Birds and butterflies abound, but there are no reptiles. Whale hunting, using the traditional methods described in this book, is now practiced only in Pico and Faial. In our century, the emigration of large numbers of people, for mainly economic reasons, has considerably depleted the archipelago’s population. Corvo, Flores and Santa Maria are almost uninhabited.
A Few Books
ALBERT I, PRINCE OF MONACO, La Carrière d’un navigateur, Monaco, 1905 (with no publisher’s name).
RAÚL BRAHDÃO, AS Ilhas desconhecidas, Bertrand, Rio-Paris, 1926.
JOSEPH AND HENRY BULLAR, A Winter in the Azores and a Summer at the Furnas, John van Voorst, London, 1841.
“DIÁRIO DE MISS NYE,” in Insulana, vol. XXIX–XXX, Ponta Delgada, 1973–74.
J. MOUSINHO FIGUEIREDO, Introdução ao estudo da indústria baleeira insular, Astória, Lisbon, 1945.
GASPAR FRUTUOSO, Saudades da Terra, 6 vols., Lisbon, 1569–91 (a modern edition with updated orthography; Ponta Delgada, 1963–64).
JULES MICHELET, La Mer, Hachette, Paris, 1861.
ANTERO DE QUENTAL, Sonetos, Coimbra, 1861 (and countless later editions).
CAPTAIN JOSHUA SLOCUM, Sailing Alone Around the world, Rupert Hart-Davis, London, 1940 (first edition 1900).
BERNARD VENABLES, Baleia! The Whalers of the Azores, The Bodley Head, London-Sydney-Toronto, 1968.
archipelago books
is a not-for-profit literary press devoted to
promoting cross-cultural exchange through innovative
classic and contemporary international literature
www.archipelagobooks.org
Antonio Tabucchi, The Woman of Porto Pim
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends