… But in spite of what I was saying earlier, I have an advantage over you, my friend: I am voice; yours is only writing, mine is voice … writing’s deaf … these sounds you’re hearing in the air will die on the page, writing fixes them, kills them, like a fossil crystallized in quartz … writing is a fossilized voice, no longer living, its spirit, once waves vibrating in space, has disappeared … in a little while my voice will be gone, and your writing will remain … sure, you can record my voice, but it will be dead, it will always be the same words, unchanging, with no volition, into infinity, not a voice, a facsimile of a voice … while what I’m saying to you, even if I have to force myself with my cracked vocal cords that croak and wheeze, the words I say are alive, because they’re my breath, until … a voice is breath, writer, listen now, do you hear it, how the cicada’s cry shatters the oppressive silence? And the suffocating breathing of the August countryside … do you hear it?… the countryside is breathing like you and me, like everything around us breathes, this globe turning in space, we as we turn on it, and the space we turn in, and the universe that space turns in, and the universes the universe turns in … but stop thinking about the rotation of the earth, think about my head, I’ve got a splitting headache, right now, as I reach the end, headaches are diehard, harder than we are, see if you can find me something on the dresser, any kind of pill … and god, too, if there is one, god breathes … imagine the lungs he must have … cosmic, I’d say, with monstrous alveoli opening and closing like jaws, measureless breath, but he is breathing … today is the last day for me, or the second to last, I can’t be any more precise, but trust me when I say my breathing’s at an end, I can hear it, and so’s my voice, this voice that’s told you a life as best it could, sorry, I’d like to have done a better job, but you probably understand … you don’t tell a life, like I already said, you live a life, and while you’re living it, it’s already lost, has slipped away … so what you’ve heard is a resurrected time, but it’s not the time of that living breath, that breath can’t be repeated, all you can do is tell it, like a gramophone … Besides, look, I haven’t told you anything new, I’ve told you an ancient story, History’s told this story a thousand times over, poor thing, just like us, we men, History doesn’t have many choices, someone had to say it … so someone, always meaning well, has to sacrifice himself … our story started with Judas, and look at our contempt for him, we should reflect more on the sacrifice he made, it’s not that easy making a choice, even if you mean well, it was the ultimate choice, the choice of choices, he deserves some rehabilitation, since I’m asking you to rehabilitate a few folks today … there’s a colleague of yours from Argentina who’s confronted this riddle like few others, I’ve read him over and over … just incredible … but he makes a theorem of it, maybe he knew little about life and more about its apparatus, what we call paradigms … But when you dig under paradigms you often find shit, and that’s hard to solve, there’s no solution to shit … You talk about a hero and maybe you find shit … so what do you do – build a statue? Why not? – printed words have the same function, in the end, they’re a future memory, like a statue, memory and oblivion at the same time, because someday the first will be swallowed by the second … but if it were only oblivion it would already be quite a lot, because before that there’d be memory, which they say refers to reality, but I’m afraid that words are only under the delusion of grabbing hold of reality … in my view they only describe the apparatus of reality, so we’re back to the paradigm … but underneath, is life … teeming life, like when you lift a stone and find an ant nest, ants fleeing in every direction … we call this an ant nest, and everyone understands what we mean by this, but an ant nest is composed of ants, and all the ants have fled. So what do you have left? A hole. Dig, though, go ahead and dig.
Who knows how much they’ll wind up hating you for telling my story … especially in this country where you happen to live … and in this century you’re moving into. You know, if there’s someone everyday judases – who betray just to betray – absolutely hate, it’s the real Judas, who betrayed out of loyalty … but don’t you pay any attention, you’ve had the privilege of hearing Tristano’s voice, his living voice, as they say, and no one’s going to hear it anymore, because it’ll be dead. And now, Tristano’s truly tired, he’s out of breath, listen, he must want to sleep, but not just a quick nap from an injection, a long sleep, the kind of sleep that compensates for all the effort of living … It’s time now for his eyelids to lower, for a darkness to spread inside that’s darker than the darkness of drawn shutters … You never tell me what day it is, or maybe I just keep forgetting, but it’s still August, the dog days are coming to a close, I’m sensing something in the air of September, I don’t know what, something of September, but I got there first, I screwed him over … You know what Tristano’s seeing behind his eyelids? An August night from years ago, so many years ago, he’s a boy sitting on his grandfather’s knee, and they’re out in the barnyard, and his grandfather knows so much about the sky and has promised to explain the sky to him that evening, his grandfather’s a gruff man, he went all the way down to Sicily to shoot at the Bourbons and now he has a red shirt tucked away in a bureau smelling of camphor, everyone’s very formal with him, except the boy, and his grandfather laughs with him a good deal, now he’s taken hold of the boy’s hand and is pointing it toward the starry sky, and he tells him to close one eye like he’s aiming a musket, a bit more on high, he says, a bit more to sea – can you find it? – that’s Orion, the north’s behind us, what your nonno calls on high, understand, Ninototo? Behind Tristano’s eyelids, the grandfather has an odd voice, he and the boy he’s speaking to are one and the same person – so strange. But is it any stranger than the sky, with all those stars up there forever?… The things of this world are so old that by being old they’re rejuvenated, as if they were tired of being old. We’ll start in the west, his grandfather says – no – we’ll start in the south, what your nonno calls to sea when he’s talking to the cowherds. We’ll start in the south because that’s where you find Equuleus, the Little Horse, here, let me show you, follow my finger, at night I heard nonna sing you the lullaby of the dappled pony to make you fall asleep, I had a pony all dappled gray that counted clip-clops to the moon … there they are, those stars up there, they’re called that for the story: the pony Mercury gave his friend as a gift, but the Greeks called him Hermes not Mercury, the Greeks discovered the stars first, because they came first, but the stars were there before anyone, now that direction, that’s East, everything started there, in the East, everything comes from there, from that magnificent, ancient East where men understood things in the abstract, it’s all been downhill from there, Ninototo, we haven’t discovered a thing though we think we’re so clever, but I’m getting off-track, let’s get back to it, steady now, there, by the Little Horse, that’s the Swan and that’s the Swan’s brightest star, Albireo, you can see what color it is through my telescope, it’s orange, and nearby is Deneb, that’s what the Arabs called it, which means tail … no, no – I’m wrong – Deneb’s the brightest, it has a companion, a strange companion you can only see once every five years, a boy named Phaethon was transformed into that constellation, he was like Amilcare driving his ox cart, only Phaethon drove a sun cart, but he wasn’t paying attention and he wound up in a ditch and the gods turned his cart into those stars you see. Now we’ll shift some and you follow my finger, there’s Capricorn, and Aquarius, they’re faint stars, like graveyard candles, I can’t see them, not without my telescope, but your eyes are good … how do I know these things by heart? Well, it’s the same sky every summer, Ninototo, always the same sky, and I’ve studied it every summer of my life …
These days everyone’s so informal, you must have noticed, I find it brusque, overly familiar. I don’t like it – it shows disrespect … I think when two people hold each other in high regard they should be more formal, it’s more civilized, more respectful. And it creates the prope
r distance to make the other person understand that even if we know each other well, know each other intimately – our respective secrets – that we pretend we don’t, that we don’t know certain things, and we do this to make the other feel more comfortable, like when someone’s confessed something important to you that he wouldn’t tell anyone else and so you act a bit distracted, oh, not really, of course, you actually listened very carefully, but … well, it’s like you already stopped thinking about it, you locked it away inside a secret compartment in your heart … Now that the time has come for us to say goodbye, now that it’s time for me to take my leave, I want to be more formal with you. I’m sure you understand, it’s not an insignificant detail … also because of what you’ll write about me. Sound okay?
I think there’s still a big fly in here, please, get it out, sir, I don’t want that fly landing on my mouth after I’ve closed it. When you write this story, sir, when you turn it into a book, put your name on the cover, I don’t want my own there, I don’t want to be the one doing the telling, I want to be told … You wrote once that Tristano knew about fear, and I agreed. But real fear is something else again, that was a trifling kind of fear, a privileged, random fear, it could go badly, but it was also something you could get out from under … Real fear is when the hour’s fixed and you know it’s inevitable … that’s a strange fear, unusual, something you experience once in a lifetime, never more, it’s like vertigo, like throwing a window open onto nothing, and it’s there that thought truly drowns, is obliterated. This, this is real fear … In a little while, when you no longer hear me breathing, throw the window wide, let in the light, the sounds of the living world. They belong to you, sir; silence belongs to me. And then leave right after, close the door and leave the corpse behind, it won’t be me, I’ve already given Frau directions for disposing of it quickly … There’s a religious love of death that’s close to necrophilia, practically loving the corpse more than the living … A beautiful death … what nonsense, death’s never beautiful, death is filthy – always, filthy – the denial of life … They say death’s a mystery, but having existed at all is the greater mystery, this might seem banal, but it’s really so mysterious … Take you and me, for instance, you know, finding ourselves here, in the same room, at this precise moment, it’s very mysterious, or at least it’s rather odd, wouldn’t you say?… I thank you, sir … I’d like to give you another gift, you see that photograph on the dresser?, no, not the one on the other dresser, the dresser with the mirror, next to the glass bell, where the pendulum keeps moving the hands, because the hands keep going even after we stop, we may be the ones who invented clocks, but they obey a different master … I mean the one in the ebony frame, the one of the man from behind, walking down the shore … see those houses in the distance?… that’s the town where my mother lived, my father’s heading off to marry her, that’s why he’s dressed so elegantly though he’s walking along the beach, after the ceremony he’ll bring my mother here, to this house where I was born and that will soon be sold, after Frau dies … It’s a beautiful photo, take it as a gift, use it in your book, it isn’t Tristano, but it is a little, since it’s his father … He has his back to us, as if he’s saying goodbye, what I’ve been doing all these days with you, sir, and what I’m doing now for the last time … Check the clock, what time is it? That might sound foolish, but I want to know, it’s the last thing I want to know … After all, like they say, tomorrow is another day.
This book has been with me a long while. Besides writing it at home, I composed it, in notebooks and in my thoughts, at the homes that dear friends put at my disposal. I thank these friends. It’s superfluous to name them here: they know.
Thank you to Valentina Parlato who, with great precision and intelligence, typed out my handwritten notebooks and the parts I knew by memory that made up this book before it was a book.
A.T.
Translator’s note
For the most part, English words that appear in italics were in English in the original novel.
There are a few poems that the narrator quotes which were translated into Italian; I have, at times, included others’ English translations of these:
this page: Heinrich Heine, “Die Lorelie,” trans. A.S. Kline
this page: C.P. Cavafy, “Long Ago,” trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard
this page: C.P. Cavafy, “Voices,” trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard
Translator’s Acknowledgments
The translation of this novel was supported through residencies at the Banff International Centre for the Arts in Canada and the Casa delle traduzioni in Rome. Research for the translation was greatly aided through funding from the University of North Dakota and through a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant from the PEN America Center. I wish to thank Dr. Louise Rozier for her careful reading and insights about this novel and Dr. Charles Klopp for answering my many questions. I also wish to thank Jill Schoolman, publisher of Archipelago Books, for her devotion to Tabucchi, to literature in translation, and to translators. I dedicate this translation to the memory of my mother, Nancy Harris.
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Antonio Tabucchi, Tristano Dies
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