Tristano Dies

  … The cicadas have stopped … it must be dark out, maybe you’re tired of writing. But isn’t this why you came? I’m tired of talking, too, but this is why I sent for you; if Frau comes in and disturbs us, tell her we’ll go on for a little yet, just ten more minutes, because I’m not so sure tomorrow I’ll have the strength to go on. And it’s important, you know this better than me, you reconstructed this in your book, you even won a prize, am I right? If I send you away now you might have trouble sleeping tonight, might sleep worse than me, worrying I might lose hold of the thread, and that you’ll be screwed, right? – that you’ll have traveled all this way to listen to me in the stink of carbolic acid, of gangrene, and right at the best part, I’ll lose the thread … don’t worry, I haven’t lost it, because that sagging door is swinging open, and the house is dark, and Tristano can’t see a thing. Out, he thinks, out, you monsters. And there’s one, finally. But he looks familiar – it’s Stefano, who was always so friendly, the school janitor down in the village, who’d made it clear he could be trusted. And now he’s dressed in black, a tassel on his fez – the pig. Stefano looks around, cautious, checking no one’s there to see him, he signals toward the house, out comes a German, then two, three, four … Fire, Tristano tells himself, it’s just four assholes. He presses down on the trigger, impatient, but, no, hold back – any more inside, he’s fucked. And now the others are advancing toward him through the meadow, coming closer, if they see him he’s a dead man – what now – it’s a poker hand, this waiting, throw down your cards, Tristano, fire. And then he hears a woman’s voice, singing, a lovely voice singing a slow melody, strange, strange words, an old lullaby, old like that voice is old – but how can a woman be singing up here in the woods, the dawn after a slaughter? And is that voice even real? Tristano listens, and he remembers what the church fathers wrote, that it’s an internal voice, that it can’t come from outside of him, and he alone hears it, and these are the voices of the angels, the church fathers said, and the only ones who hear them are those that can hear them or want to hear what they long to hear; it’s an old woman’s voice, an enchanting voice singing … I had a pony all dappled gray, that counted clip-clops to the moon, I had a dark-haired boy who went away, oh love and I are out of tune … and he knows it’s a cradle song, and then the meadow, the mountains, the woods, everything begins to sway, as though an unseen hand, a woman’s hand, is rocking a cradle, and there’s only that voice singing, I had a pony without a tail, I tied that pony on a rope, and on that rope it used to pull, like a man in love and full of hope … and everything is swaying in front of him, and now all the Germans are finally out in the open, gathered together, caught, enraptured by this woman’s voice that’s rocking the whole countryside to sleep, it’s beddy-bye, now beddy-bye, you’re nonna’s little baby … so sings the siren’s voice, casting its spell over the Germans, who are almost asleep, lost to oblivion, frozen, side by side, like a family photo, a monument to the dead. Tristano fires his first volley, a second, a third, he’s firing and singing along with that voice that’s saved him, it’s beddy-bye, now beddy-bye, you’re nonna’s little baby, oh … the woods echo with machine-gun fire, clusters of echoes bouncing off the hillsides, from mountain to valley, then fading into the distance, like rolling thunder. Now Tristano is the new commander of the partisan brigade, the mantle of the old commander killed by the Germans has passed to him, though he doesn’t know it yet, he doesn’t know anything, Tristano, as he stands there, in the open, out past the rock he hid behind, stands there, lit by the rising sun, which seems fitting, how heroes appear in the movies. Go on, Tristano, approach your fallen prey, set your foot on a German’s chest and raise your machine gun high in triumph, that’s how we want to remember you, these are your memories, we’re writing your life. And now you can go, writer, it must be late, enough for today, you’ve heard what you wanted to hear.

  Life isn’t arranged in alphabetical order like all of you believe. It seems … a little here, a little there, sprinkled as you will, granules, the problem’s gathering them up later, a pile of sand, and which granule supports the next? Sometimes what’s on top, what seems supported by everything else, is really holding everything in place, because that sand pile doesn’t obey the laws of physics, take away a granule you didn’t think held up anything else, and the whole pile collapses, sliding, spreading out, and all you’re left to do is trace in the sand with your finger, making squiggle marks, comings and goings, paths leading nowhere, and you go on and on this way, tracing back and forth, but where did that damn grain of sand get to that held everything in place … and then one day your finger stops all on its own, and can’t go on with its squiggling, and there’s a strange outline in the sand, a drawing that’s meaningless, absurd, and you have the sneaking suspicion the meaning of this whole business was just in the squiggling.

  … Correction: that dream I told you, the one on the beach, that wasn’t Rosamunda after all, it was Daphne … now that I think about it, Tristano went into that wooden bathing hut with his Daphne, I promise this is true, I can prove it, I didn’t think of it before, the watermelon … In that hut, there’s a watermelon split in half, a beautiful red watermelon sitting on the wooden shelf where they kept their bathing suits, I see it like it’s now, along the road to the beach there was this little man with a little fruit stand selling peaches, melons, and karpùzhi, the word’s come back to me now, and Daphne adored karpùzhi, karpùzhi meant Greece to her, there’s even watermelon ice cream in Greece, you know, I remember one summer in Crete – the first time I went with her – and an enormous, white beach, and the watermelon the man kept buried in crushed ice on his little rolling fruit stand, along the road to the beach … and certain afternoons, on that beach … in the bathing hut, making love with his Daphne, after chasing each other into the water, and licking all the salt off each other … and then they’d eat a slice of watermelon … it couldn’t have been Rosamunda, Marilyn didn’t like watermelon, Americans don’t like watermelon, maybe because they’re all water and no vitamins.

  I heard what Frau whispered to you … sir, don’t write down what he tells you under morphine. Don’t you listen to her: you write everything down, everything, morphine or no morphine, gather everything you possibly can, the pieces blown to smithereens, down to the last granule, my delirium is also me …

  … Are you familiar with a poem about a mother dressed in black crying over the body of her son killed in the square? Frau read it to me this morning. Frau has the gift of prophecy, she’s ahead of me, she’s always reading me a poem that refers to something I want to tell you, today she came into my bedroom and read this one, and it’s not Sunday, this I’m sure of, and I started thinking that the story I’m telling you, that maybe you think makes no sense, is like a musical score where every now and then an instrument will start talking on its own, in its own voice, and there’s a baton directing all that music, only you can’t see the conductor, but you know who’s holding that baton? – I think it’s Frau.

  … You have no idea how quickly an August can end, hurling itself against early September, like a car ramming a tree, crumpling, deflated like an accordion out of breath. Such arrogance, those days of summer, during the Feast of the Assumption or when the sky’s lit up with fireworks on the night of San Lorenzo and the senses seem so full and life, a cavern from the vaults of heaven, but then four rain drops, the coriander’s gone to seed, and in a single day that bloated, bombastic month is swallowed up … Life’s that way, too, like August, you start to realize there’s a lapse between what’s said and done, when you really weren’t expecting this, the elastic’s worn out, can’t be stretched, and the raven shows up in the corner to croak its nevermore … The house, empty as a dried gourd, and he emptier still, and the dead seasons, and the current day dead as a doornail, everything was conspiring for a completely ataraxic state, the stillness of the horizon, only a few lisped words, directed at nothing, unheard. And that thick fog … How do you feel? Doctor Ziegler asked hi
m. Shooshoo, Tristano answered, I feel shooshoo, as to the rest, I’d be fine if I weren’t feeling so shooshoo. Doctor Ziegler didn’t understand; he asked Tristano to please explain, bitte, Herr Tristano, bitte. Shooshoo’s like rain-soaked cabbage, Doctor, have you ever seen cabbage with its limp outer leaves in the mud? They’re shooshoo … And then he added, it’s like I’ve seen a tranglumanglo, you understand? Doctor Ziegler began to suspect this was some sort of language of the unconscious, but reluctantly, as he wasn’t of that school … but what on earth did these words mean? Tristano hesitated, secretive. Well, they come to me at night – no – they think of me – really – I’m thought up, they’re the ones that think of me, they nip at me – no – it’s more like they sting me, tiny slivers of something, tiny letters, exploding into a thousand pieces, and they arrive like they’re washing in on the evening tide … Doctor Ziegler had his hands behind his back, his chin on his chest. So, they’re dreams? he asked. No answer. Half-dreams, then? Yes, that’s it, Doctor, almost – no, not really – more like memories, floating in their own sea foam, I’m on the edge of sleep, a few reach me, sting me, others, all I have to do is dangle my arm alongside the bed to fish some up. Doctor Ziegler kept pacing back and forth as though he wanted to dig a rut in the floor, he didn’t care that Tristano was slouched in his chair on the porch, it was as if he’d found him in his sleepless bed. Try fishing one up now, he said, just let yourself go, let your arm hang over the edge, close your eyes, pretend I’m not here … Silence. Doctor Ziegler froze, held his breath. All you could hear was the countryside’s breathing, the ground, the smell of stubble in the valley, the buzzing blue flies, a bee, a barking dog, but far far away, another world. I caught a can of gambusinen, but it’s open, the key’s turning up the rusty lid, Tristano mumbled as if in a trance, nichts, absolut nichts, gambusinen kaputt. Doctor Ziegler was worrying his hands behind his back. Gambusinen? – was bedeutet gambusinen, go on, Herr Tristano, concentrate. Oh … oh … oh … Tristano was searching for something, or perhaps those concentric rings of sound rising in his throat meant he was already lost to a world of dreams? Ziegler waited patiently, silently. I should talk about old schnabelewopskian customs, Tristano mumbled, ancient anthropology, Doctor, practically geology, and he was in full flight now over a truly incomprehensible land not to be found on any maps, probably tied to the archipelago of his imagination, and over there was Utopia Island. Schnabelewops was a principality, a swatch of land high in the mountains, with a view of the sea, and that sea was the Greek sea, where Venus was virgin-born, it was understood, a country of impervious peaks but also soft slopes and meadows and olive and chestnut trees and crisscrossed by countless streams, their water as clean, as crystal-clear as the water where Orlando christened his sword Durlindana or Dionigi di Gaula bathed his feet after his long, long march, as the mad hidalgo tells it. And during the local wheat festivals or on the many scorching-hot days, the people would joyfully splash about in these streams, to the shrieks of young ladies. And there were so many streams, the Schnabelewopskians hadn’t even tried counting them for their maps. What was the point? Each village had a stream running beside it or even dividing it in two, so that there were great cultural divides going back a thousand years between those villagers on the right bank or the left, and a Nordic folklorist, who’d wandered everywhere collecting ancient songs, had recorded some ancient treasures where the maid who’d left to marry sang with longing for the land of her fathers that she’d abandoned when she wed and crossed over the stream to live in the house facing her own that was in a whole other country; and wading in, she soaked her stockings … With this last effort, Tristano grew quiet, eyes closed, his hand gone fishing, dangling off the lounge chair. Not asleep though … Doctor Ziegler was afraid to interrupt his oneiric space, which was sacred to every patient and crucial to every therapist. The countryside was slowly breathing in and out. It was midday. Doctor Ziegler should have been in his office in town, but of course he’d cancelled all his appointments: this patient was too interesting. Tristano started to speak again, but perhaps he was truly sailing in his oneiric space now, talking about gambusinen, aquatic creatures presumably from his childhood, no doubt part of a fantastic zoology known only to the disturbed or to poets who’d never written any poetry, creatures which, if you listened to his semi-garbled words, seemed to fall somewhere between crustaceans and proper fish, meaning, with gills and fins. Antidiluvian creatures, Doctor Ziegler thought, from the earliest of times, when everything was just coming into being, when taxonomy wasn’t yet possible, and you couldn’t distinguish flower from fruit, fish from fowl, insect from mammal … You see, Doctor, sir, I’m not sure I can explain: a tiny creature like a freshwater crawfish, pink-colored, but with no keratin shell, so, soft like a dormouse, with a tiny round head that’s sprouting four miniature tentacles, maybe a centimeter and a half, two centimeters long, nothing more, and extremely tender, it feeds off something like the moss that grows in the cleanest streams in the principality, the gambusinen gorge on it, an exquisite green, like nothing else, and it lingers in their meat, like a truffle cutting the slight bitterness of porcini mushrooms … Doctor Ziegler listened and was silent. The cicadas were raging, and heat settled over the pergola. It was August … It was an August like this one, writer, and Tristano didn’t need any morphine to step outside himself, he was out of his mind all on his own. I wanted to tell you about this later, but it’s come to me now and so I told you now, be patient, I’m sure it won’t make sense in your book, let it go … Listen, it must be nearly evening and Frau’s coming to give me my morphine, but I don’t want it tonight. I’m hungry, tell her I’m hungry, that I want a cup of broth, a cup of chicken broth, there was a time I’d ask for gambusinen, but now they’re extinct, all that’s left of them are empty tins with the key turning up the rusty lid … Tell Frau that since there aren’t any gambusinen, I’ll make do with a cup of chicken broth – you’ll see – she’ll know.

  Ferruccio said you writers always see yourselves in light of the future, as posthumous, and I thought about what you set in motion by telling my story in the first person, as if you were Tristano … you’d already consigned me to the future, like a tombstone, and you saw your own reflection there, because that tombstone reflected your own image back to you, like you thought you’d be for posterity … But I’m changing that image right under your nose, no, it’s more topsy-turvy, face down feet up, like a carnival mirror … I feel sorry for you, but I’m not sure what you were expecting when you came here to see me, I’m not here to confirm anything, just the opposite … never trust mirrors, right then and there they seem to show your image, but they really distort it, or even worse, they absorb your image, drink up everything, suck you in as well … Mirrors are porous, writer, and you didn’t even know.

  He didn’t answer, Marios, staring off at nothing, his finger stirring the coffee grinds at the bottom of his glass, he looked like a failed fortuneteller searching for an answer that couldn’t be found, and he just kept quiet … The same small Plaka square, one cold sunny day, the impassive Acropolis above … Marios, it’s me, I’m back, please, look at me. And then Marios spoke, his voice neutral, like a doctor handing out a diagnosis or a judge a sentence … the mountains are the same, and the stones, and the trees, but everything’s finished, there’s no one left, they’re all dead, I’m dead, too; Field Marshal Papagos, that black-hearted leader, gave Greece a new Duce and a new king, identical to the ones that came before, the British lent a hand, the Americans, too, General Skolby, the great strategist, expert at mass shootings … the British and their younger cousins have two democracies, the good kind, for internal use, and then the damaged kind, left to molder in the storehouses of time, the export kind, suitable for poor people, so poor they’ll swallow anything … and now you’re back, Tristano, I see that you’re back, and you’re asking about your comrades, about Daphne … your comrades are dead, Daphne’s far away, I don’t know where, giving her concerts, it’s not as though Greece n
eeds her music, the marshals want patriotic music for the people in their new Greece … I see that you’re back, you’re back like you promised, but maybe you didn’t notice ten years have gone by, you left in forty-three – when the beast in my country is dead I’ll be back, you said – I think the beast has been dead in your country for quite some time, but here he’s alive and well, like I told you, if you’re feeling nostalgic for the Peloponnese Mountains, go up there for a stroll, go and clear your lungs … Tristano, go back where you came from, to your own country, if you came for us, you’re awfully late, if it was for Daphne, come back next year, or maybe in a couple of years … Writer, if you’d known about this, you’d have told the story like you know how: the hero who arranges a time to return and then shows up ten years too late warrants a few pages, a parody of Ulysses, a joke of a Ulysses who got on the wrong tram, the one for Pancuervo instead of Ithaca … I don’t know how your protagonist would have answered Marios if you’d written what I told you, what excuse would your Tristano have come up with? Sorry if I’m jumping to conclusions here, I’m only guessing … I can see a solemn Tristano, with wounded pride … I received the War Cross, he says in a grave voice, I’m a hero, Marios, you have to understand how many obligations fill a hero’s days, the staged appearances, diplomatic missions, ambassadorships for peace and brotherhood, ceremonies, conferences … and a man like Marios, who’d fought for freedom, even though it turned out badly, would understand and embrace him. But Tristano gave another excuse entirely … I didn’t come before because of one small detail, he said with conviction, one damned detail. Just like that, a ridiculous excuse, it smacks of comedy, someone getting on the wrong tram … and if you write Tristano’s life, this is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me … But listen, writer, if you want to write this according to your own ideas, how you might have if you’d known about this earlier, then feel free. Your choice – and who’d object?