by Sergio Pitol
I left there at dawn to go see the walls, awash in sienna red. I ate breakfast and walked to the museum, ready to experience ecstasy before the Byzantine splendor of the great Duccio. But it was still a holiday and no museums were open. I could have stayed in Siena a couple of days, but I could not resist the temptation of going to Rome, of introducing myself to Canova, to tell Araceli and María Zambrano and their friends about my family experience in Bonizzo, and to find out how they had spent the holidays, and to make plans for the following days. I thought I would return very soon. So I decided to walk only a bit through the city’s center, to enjoy its splendor and a while later take the bus that would leave me in Rome.
Thirty years had to pass, however, for me to again see the walls of that exceptional city.
I returned to deliver a talk on my most recent novels at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Siena during the course of an afternoon devoted to Hispano-American culture. The event would begin at five or six in the afternoon; I would speak, then there would be a music program organized by the students, perhaps a discussion, and it would conclude with a dinner at a home not far from Siena.
I had arrived in Florence, where I called Melis to coordinate our trip to Siena, the day before the event. She would come by, she said, to pick me up at my hotel the next day at seven in the morning. Later, I called Antonio Tabucchi’s number in Florence. I was told that he was at his home in Vecchiano, a town near Pisa, and they gave me his telephone number. I tracked him down shortly thereafter; I told him that I was in Florence and that the next day I was leaving with Professor Melis for Siena, where that evening I was to meet with the students. He replied that he already knew, but regrettably was not going to be able to attend. He had to get some papers in order and then take care of some tax-related matters, which had him very anxious. He had no idea when he might be able to leave his appointment, but he suggested I go to Vecchiano from Siena and stay a few days at his home. He assured me that I would like the region and that there were sites of interest in Pisa. I explained to him that I would be delighted to accept his invitation, but my schedule was very tight. I would be leaving Siena the morning following the event; I was to be present when the award was presented to Augusto Monterroso in Rome and then return to Barcelona, where I had already committed to meet Jorge and Lali Herralde. In short, we would have to see each other another time.
I had admired Tabucchi since Anagrama had published The Woman of Porto Pim and Indian Nocturne. I awaited the arrival of each of his books after their release in Italy, and I arranged for their immediate delivery. I had written about them. I would have liked immensely to talk to him about one of his novels, The Edge of the Horizon, which reminded me of Conrad at his best, as elusive and multivalent as The Secret Sharer. The Edge of the Horizon possesses that absolutely intimate quality nourished by the everyday fantastic found in the best of Tabucchi’s stories. The reader is witness, and in a certain way accomplice, to a secret battle that takes place nonstop between allusion and elusion. The more precise the details, the more mysterious the story becomes.
I spent the rest of the day at the Uffizi. The long stroll itself through the visual splendor of the Renaissance made the trip worthwhile. Everything there is magnificent. I lingered in the hall of the Sienese three hundred, as if I were anticipating what I would see the next day. Two of the works on exhibit, the Madonna in Maestà, by Duccio di Buoninsegna, and Simone Martini’s The Annunciation with St. Margaret and St. Ansanus left me so amazed that when I thought of Siena the referent was not my conference but rather the previous visit I made to the Museum of Art. After the Uffizi Gallery, I walked through the city for a few hours; when I arrived at the hotel, I fell into bed like a ton of bricks.
I left Florence for Siena at 7:00 A.M., accompanied by Antonio Melis. The first news that met me was so awful that I rejected it out of hand, as if I had not yet awakened and were trapped in a nightmare. It was the 27th of May, 1993. Antonio turned on his car radio, where we heard the confirmation. A huge explosion had occurred the night before at the Uffizi, which resulted in seven deaths, several injuries, and the destruction of part of the building. We made the drive from Florence to Siena in a state of shock. Melis tried to clarify for me somewhat Italy’s labyrinthine political and social reality: the collapse of the Christian Democracy, whose monopoly on power had lasted more than a half century, corruption, the judicial proceedings against politicians, the ties to the mafia, drug trafficking; in short, everything that had rocked Italy for a couple of years. The catastrophe that had taken place that day could be one of the consequences of that fall into disgrace. It was perhaps an effort to destabilize Italy, to strike at its most sensitive sites, to deter the police investigations into the nexuses between political and criminal power, or, if not, to live with its consequences. I arrived in Siena very distraught. The idea of having been in those precincts for several hours, shortly before the explosion, at perhaps the same time as the criminals as they studied the last details, added to my unease. If it were a nightmare, I would feel as if I were being watched, investigated, surrounded, I would end up feeling guilty, yes, I would doubt myself, rack my brain trying to prove my innocence without being convinced myself. Someone would swear that I had been seen in the car disguised as a taxi or an ambulance that introduced the dynamite into the museum. We all know how nightmares are. When we arrived in Siena we learned that only a few paintings had been affected, and none destroyed. The deaths and injuries were the result of the dynamite having been placed in a section where part of the museum’s custodial staff lived.
Antonio Melis drove me to the university and introduced me to Lia Ogno, who then took me to the hotel where I would be staying, which was not very far. I had most of the day free. I walked with Lia through the city’s medieval center, through wonderful alleys, through plazas whose preservation seemed miraculous. We said goodbye in the main Piazza del Campo. I picked up my pace and looked for the museum. I needed to embrace it. The gate to the entrance was draped by an enormous black fabric. All museums and art centers in Italy were closing their doors for two days in mourning and protest for the attack against culture carried out in Florence.
Once again, I had been forbidden the opportunity to experience the masterpieces of Sienese painting. Two of the attractions that had made my trip to Siena appealing had vanished. I would not see Duccio de Buoninsegna’s The Kiss of Judas, nor would I meet in person Antonio Tabucchi. Talking to him, learning his points of view, hearing his interpretation of some of his texts had become so essential to me, as compulsive as it had been for the American editor, a matter of pride and dishonor, of life and death, to have in his hands the letters that the celebrated Jeffrey Aspern had written to Juliana Bordereau in the novel by Henry James.
But in the end I did see Tabucchi. I shudder as I relive the episode. Recalling my behavior still causes me stress. Since this book in a certain way is a collection of reparations and regrets, an attempt to allay anxieties and cauterize wounds, I’ll take the liberty of sketching in a few lines the circumstances of the encounter.
That afternoon I held my talk with the students and teachers. I spoke before a warm audience about my career as a writer, my ties to Italy, my recognizable influences, some philias and many phobias, viable and impossible projects. During the course of my talk, I saw Tabucchi enter through the door in the back. I recognized him immediately; I had seen pictures of him in his Anagrama editions and in the press; so I could not have been mistaken; he entered with wife María José, a very beautiful woman, with a splendidly intense expression. At the end of the talk, we introduced ourselves. Previously our relationship had been mediated by correspondence and numerous phone calls. The invisible presence of Jorge Herralde, our friend and mutual editor in Barcelona, served as a point of reference. The musical performance was about to begin. Speaking before the audience had left me extremely thirsty and rather fatigued. I asked if there was anywhere I could get a coffee; I needed at least two cups immediately. He said w
e could go somewhere, that there was a pleasant café near the university. I do not know if it was the excitement of the day, or the fear of not being able to hear him due to the deafness I mentioned earlier and responding foolishly to questions, but the fact is as soon as we sat down, after commenting briefly on the morning’s terrible news, I began to talk about his latest book, a short, smart, and delightful text about the imaginary dreams of characters to which he was devoted. It was the book of a curious, sharp, and refined intellectual, and, at the same time, one not locked away in an ivory tower—an author in solidarity with life. The twenty characters who were dreaming represented very diverse signs that the author, by bringing them together, was reconciling: Apuleyo, Rabelais, Goya, Leopardi, Stevenson, Rimbaud, Chekov, Pessoa, Mayakovsky, García Lorca, and Freund, among others. The book’s title was Dreams of Dreams; it had been released very recently in a beautiful edition by Sellerio. I began almost immediately to talk nonstop, without allowing him to contribute; I began to list authors whose dreams would be worth imagining; Henry James, for example, must have some very complex ones, locked in a labyrinthine and elliptical syntax that trying to follow would have driven even the most competent psychoanalyst insane. It would have been an arduous task not only to decipher one of his dreams but also to understand his language, not become lost in the many folds of the single, never-ending and surely dark sentence in which he described them. And Borges’s dreams! Lezama Lima’s, Góngora’s, and I don’t know how many others! I spoke nonstop until we realized that time had flown by and we needed to return to the university so we could at least be present at the end of the musical performance. We returned. The concert ended, and the preparations began that would lead us to the house in the country where we were invited to have dinner. The Tabucchis invited me to ride with them in their car. Naturally, I sat in the front seat, which meant that my good ear faced the window and the deaf one toward Tabucchi and, partially, María José, who was sitting in the backseat.
They asked me the usual questions that well-mannered people ask: how my trip had been, where I was coming from, how did I feel in Italy, those necessary preliminary questions that tend to relax the interlocutor, create a climate of trust and, at the same time, the necessary conditions for what will become the body of the conversation. I answered that I had flown from Mexico to London, from there to Rome, and then traveled to Florence by train, where I met Antonio Melis with whom I drove to Siena.
I should have stopped there. Or perhaps I could have described my shock that morning upon learning about the destruction of a place where I had been a few hours before the catastrophe, a place that should be considered invulnerable for having endured five centuries of wars, invasions, floods, and sackings, from which it had always emerged intact. That would have been the correct thing to do, would it not? But the events did not transpire that way. After relating my itinerary, as I have already said, I began to talk about my experience in the taxi that drove me from my London hotel to the airport. I said that the driver struck up a conversation, perhaps out of politeness, to keep me entertained during the long ride, which made me rather uncomfortable in the first place because of the effort required to hear and make myself heard in those vehicles of such excessive dimensions, and because as a rule English cabbies speak with accents very difficult to understand, each one more exotic than Cockney, in which one loses words and entire sentences. The driver was a man of more or less my age, portly, and with a face similar to the one in those classical illustrations by which we’ve come to know Mr. Pickwick. He began to talk about his experiences as a tourist. He recalled with disconcerting precision, like an English incarnation of Borges’s Funes, the names of all the hotels in which he had stayed, the restaurants where he had eaten, the dishes he had ingested, as well as their condiments, the brands of cigarettes, soaps, and toilet paper, and the price in local currency of each of these products, which he immediately translated into pounds sterling. He had been to Mexico on one occasion and recalled everything I had never noticed. He did not show the slightest artistic or historical curiosity for the countries he had visited, nor excitement for the landscape; no human interest in the inhabitants of those places nor curiosity about their problems. Everywhere he went he amused himself by finding the English products that were on the market and finding out their price, comparing it to the price in London and in the process determining the profits made by the merchants. To be honest, I was fed up; I answered in monosyllabic words; I wanted to read the morning paper, but cutting him off in mid-sentence would be very awkward. So I reconciled myself passively to not encouraging the conversation. He told me that he walked as much as he could, both while traveling and in London. He thought that society had begun to break down because people had become unaccustomed to walking. I do not know if in response to one of his questions or motu proprio I told him that I took a walk twice a day; that I walked my dog an hour in the morning and another hour at night. He asked me the name and breed of my dog. His name is Sacho, and he’s a wonderful bearded collie. You should have heard the fuss! He told me the story of his dog, also a bearded collie, with which he had lived for fifteen years. When she died, several years earlier, he suffered an extreme depression. He stopped working; a time arrived when he did not leave the house, he thought the end was near. A few Sundays he mustered the strength to go to Mass, it turns out he was Catholic. On one occasion, shortly before the end of mass, he heard a voice that said to him: “She’s fine where she is and is taking care of you from there.” His depression disappeared; he was able to return to a normal life and to work. His emotion seemed authentic, even after so many years. I adored him. I could have traveled to the ends of the earth to hear the everyday details of his relationship with his dog. Just then we were arriving at the house in the country. “It has an air of Chekov,” was Tabucchi’s comment.
We dined outdoors, on a terrace; I ended up sitting in the middle of a small group of professors and beside María José and Antonio Tabucchi. I do not know how I came up with the topic, what provoked it, whether the Devil made me do it, but suddenly I heard myself telling the story about the escape and death of Carranza—yes, the departure of Don Venustiano from Mexico City and his tragic final hours!—the arrival of the president and his entourage to Buenavista station, the commotion, the chaos that reigned, the hundreds of coaches, one containing the national treasury; another the official archives, the first desertions, and then, during the trip, the different attacks of which the presidential train was a target, the lack of water and coal for the engines, the telegram from the governor of Veracruz refusing to recognize him as head of State, the impossibility of going on and of turning back, his flight on horseback to the village of Tlaxcalantongo, the final bullet that cut short his life.
Where was all of this going? To talk for two hours in great detail about the flight and death of a Mexican president from the revolutionary period whom no one knew, on the terrace of a country house near Siena! Suddenly, I realized that the only person in the group speaking was me; by then we were having coffee, and the guests were beginning to say goodbye.
I would have liked for Tabucchi to clarify moments from The Edge of the Horizon, to talk about one of the stories that I liked most, “Saturday Afternoon,” to know more about his interest in Portugal, in Pessoa, to talk, if he wanted, about what he was writing. I emerged from what seemed like a trance and was horrified, more embarrassed than I had ever felt. I apologized as best as I could and added that I was usually rather quiet, which is true, that the parrot I had become was a side to my personality that I did not even know. And María José, with a smile for which I shall forever be thankful, told me that she thought my story about the old president was both tragic and beautiful. Tabucchi presented a small book to me before I left; the text of a lecture he had given not long before in Tenerife. When I got back to the hotel, I read it in one sitting, and once again I was impressed by the quality of his intelligence. I felt even more embarrassed.
In short, it was one of
those nights when one would rather be shot.
Xalapa, April 1996
WRITING
THE NARRATOR
Thinking about the foreboding moments of a work of fiction inevitably takes me back to that famous interview in which William Faulkner confessed that the inspiration for one of his novels came from seeing the “drawers” of a little girl who was attempting to climb a tree. Day after day, he would see those panties and that tree at the most unexpected times. He would pour himself a whiskey, and the intimate garment would appear among the ice cubes; he would try to read a newspaper, and the little girl’s thighs would appear floating on the printed page; he would see a puckered and wizened neighbor woman walk down the street, and could not help but superimpose the small buttocks of the girl who was climbing the tree on the behind of that dismal advertisement against lust. That initial image would begin at some moment to branch out. It occurs to me that one day the writer must have imagined a little boy beneath that tree who struggled between shame, humiliation, and the animal need to stare at the naked legs and intimate garment of the little girl who was his sister. There, in a nutshell, is the essence of one of the most extraordinary novels of our century, which recounts Quentin Compson’s erotic attraction for his sister Caddy and its tragic development. Its title: The Sound and the Fury.