Time Ages in a Hurry

by Antonio Tabucchi

  She stood there, watching the shimmer of the straw specks raised in the dust as they glinted in the sunset, she thought she should keep thinking of not thinking of anything, she sat down and scraped at the grass stubble, searching for the ground, the sun was disappearing and the orange light already held hints of indigo, up there the horizon was circular, it was the only thing she was able to think, that the horizon was circular, it was as though the circle drawn by the horses had expanded to infinity, transmuting into the horizon.

  Drip, Drop, Drippity-Drop

  The pain that woke him ran down his left leg, from the groin to the knee, but its provenance was elsewhere, by then he knew this all too well. With his thumb he began to press from his tailbone upward, when he arrived between the third and fourth lumbar vertebrae, he felt a sort of electric current running through his body, as if right from that spot a radio station was broadcasting out from the neck to the toes. He tried rolling over in bed. At the first attempt the pain paralyzed him. He stayed on his side, actually not even on his side, on half his side, which isn’t a precise position, it’s a would-be position, a passage. He stayed suspended in this movement, if one can put it that way, as in certain Italian Baroque paintings where the saint, male or female, gracefully overexcited from fasting or from Christ, remains forever suspended within the painter’s brushstrokes, because the craziest of painters, who are also the ones of genius, are marvelous at catching the unfinished movement of their depicted character, usually crazy himself, and the pictorial miracle happens as a kind of bizarre levitation that seems to dispense with the force of gravity.

  He tried to wiggle his toes. With a little pain they moved, the big toe included, the one most at risk. He stayed like this, not daring to shift a millimeter, looking at his toes, and thought of that poor guy from Prague who one day awoke out of context, meaning that instead of lying on his back he was lying on his armor-plated shell, and watching the ceiling of his little room, which he imagined to be pale blue, who knows why, he helplessly waved his hairy little paws and wondered what to do. The thought irritated him, not so much because of the comparison but because of the reference to genre: literature, literature again. He tried out an experimental phenomenology of the situation. He got up his courage and shifted his side a centimeter. From the fourth vertebra a dart of pain shot to the base of the neck – he could almost hear the whistle – then it spun around, reached the groin, and spread along the entire leg. How to Speak with Your Own Body was a book he’d read with skepticism yet with a certain curiosity, he couldn’t deny that, a popular book though probably not very reliable in scientific terms, but why shouldn’t one talk to one’s own body? There are people who talk to walls. As a young man he’d read a novel by a writer quite popular at the time, then unjustly neglected, quite a guy, who really got down to the nitty-gritty at times and who in that book spoke to his own body, indeed a specific part of his body, which he called his “him,” and from there arose a dialogue that was anything but banal. Here though it wasn’t the same, since his “him” wasn’t involved, and so he simply said: leg, oh leg! He moved it and it responded with a lacerating pain. Dialogue was impossible. He stretched it very carefully and the pain concentrated in his spinal column. The column of infamy. He grew irritated again. He thought that if he called the doctor, who at this point he was all too familiar with, he’d tell him he was suffering from literature, an observation already made in the past. He pictured the doctor saying: my dear fellow, the problem is mainly due to the fact that you assume the wrong positions, actually you’ve assumed the wrong positions all your life, to write, because the problem unfortunately is that you write, don’t be offended, instead of leading a life more consonant with hygiene and well-being, that is, going to a pool or jogging around in shorts like other men your age, you stay all bent over writing your books for whole days at a time, and not only bent over – I’ve seen you – you’re all crooked too, like a misshapen biscuit, your spine looks like the sea when a southwest wind blows, all crooked, but it’s too late to reform it now, you could try torturing it a bit less, you don’t seem capable of reading the X-rays I brought you, so to make you really understand, tomorrow I’ll bring you the plastic articulated spine I used to study with at college, and I’ll shape it like yours, so you’ll finally see what you’ve reduced it to.

  We gave her oxygen because she was having difficulty breathing, said the doctor, but her condition is stable, don’t worry. Which meant: stay calm tonight, she’ll get through it. He entered on tiptoe. The room was dim. The patient in the next bed was asleep. She was a chubby blond woman who yesterday had spent all afternoon on her cell phone while lying in bed in her robe, waiting for the operation she needed to have as soon as possible, she said. And added: I don’t know why I decided to check myself into the hospital, today of all days, with the Easter holidays and our restaurant in Porto Venere packed, you know, dear sir (she said it like that, dear sir), ours is one of the very few Ligurian restaurants that appear in the Michelin Guide, and imagine that, I came here to have this little operation on this of all days, when diners are waiting in line to get in, could I be any stupider, just for a few gallstones, Armando, Armando (meanwhile Armando, who must have been her husband, was on the phone), please don’t make Leopoldina set the tables, she does her best but she always mixes up the glasses, puts the wine glasses in the wrong spot, I spent the whole winter teaching her but she doesn’t get it, she’s a girl from the country, bye, Armando, mi raccomando. And having gotten rid of Armando with a rhyme, she went on: you’ll understand, dear sir, demanding clients, they’re almost always from Milan, or they’re Lombards, anyway, and as you know better than I, it’s Lombardy that pulls the cart in our country, they’re rich because they work, and it’s understandable that they’re demanding, and if a Milanese says I’m paying and I demand, you can’t object, because if someone’s paying then he demands, dear sir, it stands to reason. And then she began describing in detail the specialty of the house, tagliatelle with lobster, but fortunately she was cut off by another call from Armando.

  He avoided passing too close, circled around her bed, and sat at the foot of the other one. His aunt wasn’t sleeping, she always seemed to be sleeping yet as soon as she heard a rustle she’d open her eyes. When she saw him she removed her oxygen tube. She didn’t want her body to look ravaged by illness, even flat on her back she was able to eye him up and down, she noticed the cane right away, perhaps she read the suffering on his face, even though the worst of it had passed with the painkillers. What happened to you? she asked, yesterday you were fine. It’s been since this morning, he said, I don’t know, I talked with the doctor, it seems my spine has had another crash like last year in May, I need another X-ray, I’ll do it when I can. She wagged her finger, a warning sign: in Italy the only good kind of crash is a financial one, she murmured, today the woman in the other bed spent the afternoon watching TV, she wanted a TV, she says it’s her right since she’s paying for the room, they gave her headphones so I wouldn’t be disturbed, at a certain point they interviewed that show-off from Telecom who caused a shortfall of I don’t know how many millions, he fixed himself right up with that crash. Unfortunately mine is only vertebral, he replied. The conversation was mouth to ear, so the restaurateur wouldn’t wake up and start reciting the second part of the recipe for tagliatelle with lobster. Don’t come anymore, she said, sitting in that chair day and night is destroying you, with that spine of yours, stay at home a few days. What are you saying? he said, excuse me, I stay home lazing away like the doctor would want while you’re here in this bed, at home I get depressed, at least here we chat. Don’t be silly, she said, what chatting, in a whole day I get out three words, I don’t have the breath anymore. And she smiled. It was strange, the smile on her face; on the suffering mask drawn by illness the smile restored that beautiful woman with prominent cheekbones and enormous eyes whom the disease had buried in extensive swelling, as if she’d reemerge stubbornly, that young woman who had acted as a
mother to him when he was a kid and his own wasn’t able to. And an image returned that his memory had erased, a precise scene, the same expression on the aunt’s face now, and her voice saying to the sister: don’t worry, just go to the hospital, I’ll take care of the boy like he’s my own, I’ll think only of him. And right after came the image of Enzo, surfacing from an eternity of time came Enzo, the judicious student of jurisprudence, Enzo, so proper and so polite, who after graduating was supposed to join the firm of his grandfather as an intern because he’d be marrying this aunt, and he was so earnest, Enzo, everybody used to say, and still surfacing from the well of memory here was Enzo now, waving his arms and shouting, he, who was so proper and polite, was yelling at the aunt, telling her that she was crazy: but you’re crazy – I’m taking the bar exam and you’re heading to the mountains for three months with the kid, and what about us, when are we supposed to get married! And he saw again his self from back then, a scrawny little kid, wearing glasses because he was nearsighted, he didn’t understand, and then why was his left knee always hurting, he didn’t want to go to the Dolomites, they were far away, and up in the mountains he couldn’t play bandits with his friend Franco, his aunt whirled around, her voice was icy and low, he’d never heard her use that tone before, Enzo, you don’t understand anything, you’re broke, and you’re also a bit of a fascist, I’ve heard that you and your friends criticize my father for his ideas, this kid has tuberculosis of the knee, he needs to be in the mountains, and I’m taking him to the mountains with my own money, not yours, which you don’t have, except for what my father is kind enough to give you every month, and if you ever feel like taking a real curve, now’s the moment. Go ahead and take the curve: was it possible his aunt had used this expression? And yet the words resounded in his ears: go ahead and take the curve.

  For the rest of the afternoon the woman talked about her gallstones, his aunt murmured in his ear, it’s not possible they’d put her in a ward like this for gallstones, it has to be more than gallstones, poor woman, and then she watched Big Brother, her favorite show, I pretended to sleep, so she took off her headphones and lowered the volume but I could hear too, I didn’t want to call the nurses, what do you expect, educating people is a waste of time, besides, by now these people have made their money and Big Brother has educated them, that’s why they vote for him, it’s a vicious circle, they vote for those who educated them, you’ve lost the tail end of the tagliatelle with lobster, but I wanted to humor myself, you know how much she charges her demanding diners for a lobster tagliatelle? Fifty euros, and it’s frozen lobster, I made her confess. She seemed to want to stop talking, turning her head on the pillow. But then she murmured: Ferruccio, I want to say several words I’ve never said in my life, or I haven’t said them often, only when nobody could hear me, but now I’d really like to say them out loud, and if I wake that one up over there, too bad. He nodded and winked at her. What a fool, poor woman, she said. And then added: they’re all a bunch of assholes. She closed her eyes. Perhaps she’d really fallen asleep.

  Ferruccio. He remembered that name, Ferruccio. She’d called him Ferruccio only a few rare times, when he was a child, though, then she stopped. His uncle’s name was Ferruccio, but no one called him Ferruccio, it was his given name, the kind people are given but never use, that used to happen where they lived, the newborn would be given the name of some ancestor, to honor his memory, and then they’d call the baby something else. He’d always heard his aunt’s brother called Cesare, sometimes Cesarino, maybe that was his middle name, Ferruccio Cesare, who knows, but on his gravestone there was no Cesare, just Ferruccio. His aunt was the only person who’d always called her brother by the name Ferruccio, he died in Mussolini’s war, in the pictures sent from that Greek island where he’d refused to surrender to the Germans, he was a scrawny little lieutenant with an honest face and curly hair, he was studying engineering, when his draft card arrived in ’39 the aunt had a terrible fight with him, she’d told him about it once, she didn’t want her brother to leave, but where do you want me to go, he objected, are you crazy? Go into the mountains here behind us, she said, hide in the caves, don’t go to war for these cockroaches. But in ’39 nobody was in the mountains yet, there were only wild rabbits and foxes, the aunt was always ahead of her time, and so Ferruccio left for Il Duce and for the King.

  He moved close enough to brush against her face. She wasn’t sleeping: she suddenly opened her eyes and put a finger to his lips. The aunt’s voice was a whisper, so feeble it seemed like the rustling wind. Pull up your chair and move closer to my mouth, she said, but don’t think I’m dying, I’m talking like this so the restaurateur won’t wake up, if we interrupt her dream she’ll get upset, she’s dreaming of lobster. He laughed softly. Don’t laugh, she said, I need to talk, I’d like to talk to you, and I don’t know if there’ll be another occasion. He nodded and whispered in her ear: what would you like to tell me? About your childhood, she said, when you were so small you can’t remember. It was the last thing he expected. And she sensed it, his aunt didn’t miss a thing. Don’t be surprised, she said, it’s not all that strange, you think you’re so smart but it probably never occurred to you that memories of the time when someone is very young are kept by the grown-ups near him, you can’t recall such far-off memories, you need the grown-ups from back then, if I don’t tell you about it myself maybe something of it will remain but only in a confusing, thick fog, like when you’ve dreamed something but can’t really remember what, so you don’t even try to remember since it doesn’t make sense to try remembering a dream you don’t remember, this is how the past is made, especially if it’s really past, I couldn’t possibly remember when your uncle Ferruccio and I were children, yet I remember it like it was yesterday though more than eighty years have passed, because in her last days my grandmother thought to tell me what I was like before I knew who I was, when I wasn’t aware yet of being myself, have you ever thought about this? He shook his head no, he never had, and said: so what years do you want to tell me about? When you were five and everyone at home had come to believe you were a bit retarded, as the kindergarten teacher said, but that just didn’t make sense to me, how could you be retarded if you already knew how to write your name? I’d already taught you the alphabet and you’d learned it in the blink of an eye. I write the letters on the blackboard, the teacher said, I ask him to repeat them, like everybody else, and he stays silent, there are two possibilities, either he’s a difficult boy and is refusing, or he just doesn’t understand. I suddenly grasped the problem one July day, we were at Forte, a woman with a white apron and a basket on her arm was walking along the beach, yelling: doughnuts! We were under the beach umbrella, you wanted a doughnut, and your father was about to call her over, but I said to you: Ferruccio, go and get one by yourself, then I’ll give you the money, do you remember? He said nothing, drifting back. Go on and try, she said, see if you can catch hold of the memory, you were sitting on a black-and-white rubber ring your father had made for you from the inner tube of a moped to which he’d stuck a waterproof, papier-mâché duck head he’d found in a warehouse for carnival floats, it must have been one of the first Viareggio carnivals after the disaster, you were hugging it all morning long but didn’t have the courage to take it into the water, now can you see yourself? He could see himself. Or it seemed like he did, he saw a skinny little boy hugging an inner tube with a duck head attached to it and the little boy saying to his dad: I want a doughnut. I see him, Aunt, he confirmed, I think I’m back there. And then I told you to go and get the doughnut, she murmured, you left the duck and ran toward that white apron on the beach, hurrying hurrying, afraid that apron would go by, an imposing man was standing at the water’s edge showing off how elegant he was in his white robe and he took you by the hand, not understanding, and called to us in a haughty voice, and I said to your father: the kid can’t see distances, he mistook that man for the doughnut woman, he is really nearsighted, no way he’s retarded, take him to an eye doc
tor.