Indian Nocturne

by Antonio Tabucchi

She said nothing and just drank the fruit-juice the waiter had served her. ‘And then it’s not true we don’t know each other,’ I went on, ‘we got to know each other this morning.’

  ‘We haven’t even introduced ourselves,’ she objected.

  ‘It’s an omission that’s easily enough remedied,’ I said. ‘I’m called Roux.’

  ‘And I’m called Christine,’ she said. And then added: ‘It’s not an Italian name, is it?’

  ‘What difference does it make?’

  ‘Actually, none,’ she admitted. And then sighed: ‘Your technique is truly irresistible.’

  I confessed that I had no intention of trying any technique or of chatting her up at all, that I had started off with the idea of a lively dinner with a friendly conversation between equals. Something like that anyway. She looked at me with a mock-imploring look, and still with the same playful tone protested: ‘Oh no, do chat me up, please, sweet talk me, do, say nice things to me, I’m terribly in need of that sort of thing.’ I asked her where she’d come from. She looked at the sea and said: ‘From Calcutta. I made a brief stop-over in Pondicherry for a stupid feature on my compatriots who are still living there, but I worked for a month in Calcutta.’

  ‘What were you doing in Calcutta?’

  ‘Photographing wretchedness,’ Christine replied.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Misery,’ she said, ‘degradation, horror, call it what you like.’

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘It’s my job,’ she said. ‘They pay me for it.’ She made a gesture that perhaps was meant to indicate resignation to her life’s profession, and then she asked me: ‘Have you ever been to Calcutta?’

  I shook my head. ‘Don’t go,’ said Christine, ‘don’t ever make that mistake.’

  ‘I imagined that a person like yourself would think that one ought to see as much as possible in life.’

  ‘No,’ she said with conviction, ‘one ought to see as little as possible.’

  The waiter signed to us that our table was ready and led us to the terrace. It was a good corner table as I had asked, near the shrubs round the edge, away from the light. I asked Christine if I could sit on her left, so as to be able to see the other tables. The waiter was attentive and most discreet, as waiters are in hotels like the Oberoi. Did we want Indian cuisine or a barbecue? He didn’t want to influence us, of course, but the Calangute fishermen had brought baskets of lobsters today, they were all there at the bottom of the terrace ready to be cooked, where you could see the cook in his white hat and the shimmer of glowing coals in the open air. Taking advantage of his suggestion, I ran an eye along the terrace, the tables, the diners. The light was fairly uncertain, there were candles on every table, but the people were distinguishable, with a little concentration.

  ‘I’ve told you what I do,’ said Christine, ‘so what do you do? If you feel like telling me.’

  ‘Well, let’s suppose I’m writing a book, for example.’

  ‘What kind of book?’

  ‘A book.’

  ‘A novel?’ asked Christine with a sly look.

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘So you’re a novelist,’ she said with a certain logic.

  ‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘it’s just an experiment, my job is something else, I look for dead mice.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘I was joking,’ I said. ‘I scour through old archives, I hunt for old chronicles, things time has swallowed up. It’s my job, I call it dead mice.’

  Christine looked at me with tolerance, and perhaps with a touch of disappointment. The waiter came promptly and brought us some dishes full of sauces. He asked us if we’d like wine and we said yes. The lobster arrived steaming, just the shell singed, the meat spread with melted butter. The sauces were very heavily spiced, it only took a drop to set your mouth on fire. But then the flames died out at once and the palate filled with exquisite, unusual aromas: I recognised juniper, but the other spices I didn’t know. We carefully spread the sauces on our lobster and raised our glasses. Christine confessed that she already felt a bit drunk, perhaps I did too, but I wasn’t aware of it.

  ‘Tell me about your novel, come on,’ she said. ‘I’m intrigued, don’t keep me in suspense.’

  ‘But it’s not a novel,’ I protested, ‘it’s a bit here and a bit there, there’s not even a real story, just fragments of a story. And then I’m not writing it, I said let’s suppose that I’m writing it.’

  Clearly we were both terribly hungry. The lobster shell was already empty and the waiter appeared promptly. We ordered some other things, whatever he wanted to bring. Light things, we specified, and he nodded knowingly.

  ‘A few years ago I published a book of photographs,’ said Christine. ‘It was a single sequence on a roll, impeccably printed, just the way I like, with the perforations along the edges of the roll showing, no captions, just photos. It opened with a photograph that I feel is the most successful of my career, I’ll send you a copy sometime if you give me your address. It was a blow-up of a detail; the photo showed a young negro, just his head and shoulders, a sports singlet with a sales slogan, an athletic body, an expression of great effort on his face, his arms raised as if in victory; obviously he’s breasting the tape, in the hundred metres for example.’ She looked at me with a slightly mysterious air, waiting for me to speak.

  ‘And so?’ I asked. ‘Where’s the mystery?’

  ‘The second photograph,’ she said. ‘That was the whole photograph. On the left there’s a policeman dressed like a Martian, a plexiglass helmet over his face, high boots, a rifle tucked into his shoulder, his eyes fierce under his fierce visor. He’s shooting at the negro. And the negro is running away with his arms up, but he is already dead: a second after I clicked the shutter he was already dead.’ She didn’t say anything else and went on eating.

  ‘Tell me the rest,’ I said, ‘you may as well finish the story now.’

  ‘My book was called South Africa and it had just one caption under the first photograph that I’ve described, the blow-up. The caption said: Méfiez-vous des morceaux choisis.’ She grimaced a moment and went on: ‘No selections, please. Tell me what your book is about, I want to know the concept behind it.’

  I tried to think. How could my book turn out? It’s difficult to explain the concept behind a book. Christine was watching me, implacable, she was a stubborn girl. ‘For example, in the book I would be someone who has lost his way in India,’ I said quickly, ‘that’s the concept.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Christine, ‘that’s not enough, you can’t get off so lightly, there must be more to it than that.’

  ‘The central idea is that in this book I am someone who has lost his way in India,’ I repeated. ‘Let’s put it like that. There is someone else who is looking for me, but I have no intention of letting him find me. I saw him arrive and I have followed him day by day, we could say. I know his likes and his dislikes, his enthusiasms and his hesitations, his generosity and his fears. I keep him more or less under control. He, on the contrary, knows almost nothing about me. He has a few vague clues: a letter, a few witnesses, confused or reticent, a note that doesn’t say much at all: signs, fragments which he laboriously tries to piece together.’

  ‘But who are you?’ asked Christine. ‘In the book I mean.’

  ‘That’s never revealed,’ I answered. ‘I am someone who doesn’t want to be found, so it’s not part of the game to say who.’

  ‘And the person looking for you who you seem to know so well,’ Christine asked again, ‘does he know you?’

  ‘Once he knew me, let’s suppose that we were great friends, once. But this was a long time ago, outside the frame of the book.’

  ‘And why is he looking for you with such determination?’

  ‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘It’s hard to tell, I don’t even know that and I’m writing the book. Perhaps he’s looking for a past, an answer to something. Perhaps he would like to grasp something that escape
d him in the past. In a way he is looking for himself. I mean, it’s as if he were looking for himself, looking for me: that often happens in books, it’s literature.’ I paused, as if I had reached a crucial point and said confidentially: ‘Actually, as it turns out, there are also two women.’

  ‘Ah, finally,’ Christine exclaimed, ‘now it’s getting more interesting.’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ I went on, ‘since they too are outside the frame, they don’t belong to the story.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Christine, ‘is everything outside the frame in this book? Why don’t you tell me what’s inside the frame?’

  ‘I told you, there is someone looking for someone else, there is someone looking for me, the book is his looking for me.’

  ‘So then tell me the story a bit better!’

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘it begins like this: he arrives in Bombay, he has the address of a third-rate hotel where I once stayed and he sets off on his search. And there he meets a girl who knew me in the past and she tells him that I’ve fallen ill, that I went to hospital, and then that I had contacts with some people in the south of India. So he goes off to look for me in hospital, which turns out to be a false trail, and then he leaves Bombay and begins a journey, still with the excuse that he is looking for me, whereas the truth is that he is travelling on his own account for his own reasons; the book is mainly that: his travelling. He has a whole series of encounters, naturally, because when one travels one meets people. He arrives in Madras, goes around the city, the temples in the vicinity, and in a scholarly society he finds a few equivocal clues as to my whereabouts. And in the end he arrives in Goa, where, however, he had to go anyway for reasons of his own.’

  Christine was following me with attention now, sucking a mint stick and watching me. ‘In Goa,’ she said, ‘Goa of all places, interesting. And what happens there?’

  ‘In Goa there are a lot of other encounters,’ I continued, ‘he wanders about here and there, and then one evening he arrives in a certain town and there he understands everything.’

  ‘Which is what?’

  ‘Oh, well,’ I said, ‘that he wasn’t finding me partly for the very simple reason that I had assumed another name. And he manages to find out what it is. In the end it wasn’t impossible to find out because it was a name that had to do with himself, in the past. Except that I had altered the name, camouflaged it. I don’t know how he got to it, but the fact is that he did, maybe it was luck.’

  ‘And what is this name?’

  ‘Nightingale,’ I said.

  ‘Nice name,’ said Christine. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, then obviously he manages to find out where I am, pretending he has some important business with me: someone tells him that I am in a luxury hotel on the coast, a place like this.’

  ‘All righty,’ said Christine, ‘now you’d better tell the story really well: we’re on set.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, ‘you’ve got it: I’ll take this as the set. Let’s suppose that it’s an evening like this evening, warm and spicy, a first-class hotel, by the sea, a big terrace with tables and candles, soft music, waiters who move about attentively, discreetly, the best food, naturally, with an international cuisine. I am sitting at a table with a beautiful woman, a girl like yourself, with a foreign look to her; we are at a table on the opposite side to the one we’re sitting at now, the girl facing the sea, while I on the other hand am looking toward the other tables. We are talking amicably, the woman laughs from time to time, you can see from her shoulders, exactly like yourself. At a certain point . . .’ I stopped talking and looked across the terrace, my eye running over the people eating at the other tables. Christine had snapped her mint stick, she was holding it in a corner of her mouth as if it were a cigarette, following intently. ‘At a certain point?’ she asked. ‘What happens at a certain point?’

  ‘At a certain point I see him. He’s at a table toward the back on the other side of the terrace. He’s sitting the same way I’m sitting, we are face to face. He’s with a woman, too, but she has her back to me and I can’t see who she is. Perhaps I know her, or I think I know her, she reminds me of somebody, of two people even, she could be either of them. But from a distance like this, with the light from the candles, it’s difficult to say for sure, and then the terrace is very big, just like this one. He probably tells the woman not to turn round, he looks at me for a long time, without moving, he has a satisfied expression, he’s almost smiling. Perhaps he too thinks he recognises the woman I’m with, she reminds him of someone, two people even, she could be either of them.’

  ‘In short, the man who was looking for you has managed to find you,’ said Christine.

  ‘Not exactly,’ I said, ‘it’s not quite like that. He has been looking at me for a long time, and now that he has found me he no longer has any desire to find me. I’m sorry to split hairs but that’s how it is. And I have no desire to be found either. We both think exactly the same thing; we look at each other, but nothing more.’

  ‘And then?’ asked Christine, ‘what happens next?’

  ‘One of the two finishes drinking his coffee, folds his napkin, adjusts his tie, let’s suppose he has a tie, gestures to the waiter to come, pays his bill, gets up, politely draws back the chair of the lady who’s with him and who gets up together with him, and goes. That’s it, the book is finished.’

  Christine looked at me doubtfully. ‘It seems rather a lame ending to me,’ she says, putting down her cup.

  ‘Right, it does to me too,’ I said, likewise putting down my cup, ‘but I can’t think of any other solution.’

  ‘End of story, end of meal,’ said Christine. ‘Both at the same time.’

  We lit cigarettes and I made a sign to the waiter. ‘Listen, Christine,’ I said, ‘you’ll have to excuse me but I’ve changed my mind, I’d like to buy you dinner, I think I have enough money.’

  ‘No way,’ she protested, ‘the agreement was explicit, a friendly dinner and we both pay our own.’

  ‘Please,’ I insisted, ‘take it as an apology for having bored you so much.’

  ‘But I’ve enjoyed myself immensely,’ retorted Christine, ‘I insist on going halves.’

  The waiter came up to me and whispered something she couldn’t hear, then padded off in his discreet way. ‘It’s no good arguing,’ I said, ‘the dinner is gratis, a customer at the hotel who wishes to remain anonymous has paid for you.’ She looked at me in amazement. ‘Must be an admirer of yours,’ I said, ‘somebody more gallant than myself.’

  ‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ said Christine. Then, pretending to take offence: ‘It’s not fair,’ she said, ‘you’d already arranged everything with the waiter.’

  The verandas that led to the rooms had a roof of polished wood, forming a kind of cloister that looked out on the dark of the vegetation at the back of the hotel. We must have been amongst the first to retire, almost all the other guests had stayed on, in deckchairs, listening to music on the terrace. We walked side by side, in silence. At the end of the veranda a big moth whirred for a moment.

  ‘There’s something not quite right in your book,’ said Christine. ‘I don’t know what exactly, but for me it’s not quite right.’

  ‘I feel the same way,’ I answered.

  ‘Listen,’ said Christine, ‘you always agree with my criticisms, I can’t stand it.’

  ‘But I really do agree,’ I told her, ‘honestly. It must be a bit like that photograph of yours, the blow-up falsifies the context: you have to see things from a distance. Méfiez-vous des morceaux choisis.’

  ‘How long are you staying?’ she asked me.

  ‘I’m leaving tomorrow.’

  ‘So soon?’

  ‘My dead mice are waiting for me,’ I said. ‘To each his own work.’ I tried to imitate that gesture of resignation she had made when talking about her work. ‘They pay me for it, like you.’

  She smiled and fitted the key in the door.

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  Antonio Tabucchi, Indian Nocturne