The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico

by Antonio Tabucchi

  Meanwhile dawn had passed, it was daytime, the sun was already hot, and afraid that the heat might bother their strange skins, Fra Giovanni sheltered one side of the cage with twigs; then, after asking if they needed anything else and telling them if they did to please be sure to call him with their rustling noise, he went off to dig up the onions he needed to make the soup for lunch.

  That night the dragonfly came to visit him. Fra Giovanni was asleep, he saw the creature sitting on the stool of his cell and had the impression of waking with a start, whereas in fact he was already awake. There was a full moon, and bright moonlight projected the square of the window onto the brick floor. Fra Giovanni caught an intense odour of basil, so strong it gave him a sort of heady feeling. He sat on his bed and said: ‘Is it you that smells of basil?’ The creature laid one of her incredibly long fingers on her mouth as if to silence him and then came to him and embraced him. At which Fra Giovanni, confused by the night, by the smell of basil and by that pale face with the long hair, said: ‘Nerina, it’s you, I’m dreaming.’ The creature smiled, and before leaving said with a rustle of wings: ‘Tomorrow you must paint us, that’s why we came.’

  Fra Giovanni woke at dawn, as he always did, and straight after first prayers went out to the cage where the bird creatures were and chose the first model. A few days before, assisted by some of his brother monks, he had painted, in the twenty-third cell in the monastery, the crucifixion of Christ. He had asked his helpers to paint the background verdaccio, a mixture of ochre, black and vermilion, since he wanted this to be the colour of Mary’s desperation as she points, petrified, at her crucified son. But now that he had this little round creature here, tail elusive as a flame, he thought that to lighten the virgin’s grief and have her understand how her son’s suffering was God’s will, he would paint some divine beings who, as instruments of the heavenly plan, consented to bang the nails into Christ’s hands and feet. He thus took the creature into the cell, set him down on a stool, on his stomach so that he looked as though he were in flight, and painted him like that at the corners of the cross, placing a hammer in his right hand to drive in the nails: and the monks who had frescoed the cell with him looked on in astonishment as with incredible rapidity his brush conjured up this strange creature from the shadows of the crucifixion, and with one voice they said: ‘Oh!’

  So the week passed with Fra Giovanni painting so much he even forgot to eat. He added another figure to an already completed fresco, the one in cell thirty-four, where he had already painted Christ praying in the Garden. The painting looked finished, as if there were no more space to fill; but he found a little corner above the trees to the right and there he painted the dragonfly with Nerina’s face and the translucent golden wings. And in her hand he placed a chalice, so that she could offer it to Christ.

  Then, last of all, he painted the bird creature who had arrived first. He chose the wall in the corridor on the first floor, because he wanted a wide wall that could be seen from a good distance. First he painted a portico, with Corinthian columns and capitals, and then a glimpse of garden ending in a palisade. Finally he arranged the creature in a genuflecting pose, leaning him against a bench to prevent him from falling over; he had him cross his hands on his breast in a gesture of reverence and said to him: ‘I’ll cover you with a pink tunic, because your body is too ugly. I’ll draw the Virgin tomorrow. You hang on this afternoon and then you can all go. I’m doing an Annunciation.’

  By evening he had finished. Night was falling and he felt a little tired, and melancholy too, that melancholy that comes when something is finished and there is nothing left to do and the moment has passed. He went to the cage and found it empty. Just four or five feathers had got caught in the net and were twitching in the fresh wind coming down from the Fiesole hills. Fra Giovanni thought he could smell an intense odour of basil, but there was no basil in the garden. There were the onions that had been waiting to be picked for a week now and perhaps were already going off, soon they wouldn’t be good enough for making soup anymore. So he set to pick them before they went rotten.

  Past Composed: Three Letters

  I

  Letter from Dom Sebastião de Avis,* King of Portugal,

  to Francisco Goya, painter

  In this shadow world I inhabit, where the future is already present, I have heard tell that your hands are unrivalled in the depiction of carnage and caprice. Your home is Aragon, a land dear to me for its solitude, for the geometry of its roads, for the quiet green of its courtyards hidden behind bellied gratings.

  There are dark chapels with sorrowful portraits, relics, braids of hair in glass cases, phials of real tears and real blood; and small arenas where lithe men stalk the captive beast with the agile steps of dancers. Your land embodies some quintessential virtue of our peninsula in its lines, its faith, its fury. From these I shall choose some images for the symbol which, as heraldic emblem of a unique nation, you shall inscribe in the borders of the painting I hereby commission from you.

  So then: On the right you shall paint the Sacred Heart of Our Lord. It will be dripping and bound in thorns, as in the images sold by pedlars and blind men in the squares outside our churches. But it must faithfully reproduce man’s real anatomy, since to suffer on the cross Our Lord became a man, and His heart burst like a human heart and was pierced like any muscle of flesh. You shall paint it like that, muscular, throbbing, swollen with blood and pain, showing the lacework of the veins, the severed arteries, and the intricate latticework of the surrounding membrane open like a curtain and folded back like the peel of a fruit. It would be well to thrust the spear that transfixed it into the heart, the blade being shaped like a hook so as to tear open the wound from which His blood pours freely down.

  On the opposite side of the painting, halfway up, and therefore level with the horizon, you shall paint a small bull. Paint him lying on his haunches, his front legs stretched out before him, like a pet dog; and his horns must be diabolical and his countenance evil. In the physiognomy of this monster you shall demonstrate that flair for the fantastical wherein you excel. Thus a sneer shall twist the animal’s muzzle, but the eyes must be innocent, almost childlike. The weather shall be misty; the hour, dusk. The merciful, soft shadow of evening will already be falling, veiling the scene. The ground will be littered with corpses, thousands of corpses, thick as flies. You shall depict them as only you know how, incongruous and innocent as the dead always are. And beside the corpses, and in their arms, you shall paint the viols and guitars they took with them to their deaths.

  In the middle of the painting, high up, amidst clouds and sky, you shall paint a ship. Not a ship drawn from life, but something from a dream, an apparition, a chimera. For this must be all the ships that took my people across foreign seas to distant coasts or down to the bottomless depths of the ocean, and again all the dreams my people dreamt looking out from the cliffs where my country runs to meet the sea, the monsters they conjured up in their imaginations, and the fables, the fish, the dazzling birds, the mourning and the mirages. And at the same time it shall also be my own dreams, the dreams I inherited from ancestors and my own silent folly. The figurehead of this ship shall have a human form and you must paint its features so that they seem alive and distantly recall my own. A smile may hover over them, but it must be faint, or vaguely mysterious: the incurable, subtle nostalgia of one who knows that all is vanity and that the winds which swell the sails of dreams are nothing but air, air, air.

  II

  Letter from Mademoiselle Lenormand,* fortune-teller,

  to Dolores Ibarruri, revolutionary

  My cards portray ladies in sumptuous brocades, coffers, castles, and graceful dancing skeletons, not at all macabre and well suited to predict triumph and death to delicate princes and hot-tempered emperors. I do not know why they are asking me to read the story of your life, which has not yet begun and which, given the many years that separate it from this present time, I discern only through broad, perhaps deceptive, re
nts in the veil. Perhaps it is because, despite your humble birth, something in your destiny does partake of the nature of monarchs and lords: that profound sadness, like a fatal disease, of those who have the power to decide the fate of others, to dispose of men and women and to move, albeit for a noble end, poor human lives across the chessboard of destiny.

  You will be born in the heart of Spain, in a village whose name is unclear to me, veiled in black gritty dust. Your father will plunge into the dark every morning at dawn, reappearing in the dead of night, heavy with filth and fatigue, to sleep like a rock in a bed near your own. Encased in the shell of her black dress, your mother will be silent and pious, terrified of what the future may bring. They will call you Dolores, out of Christian reverence, not realising that it foreshadows the nature of your life.

  Your childhood will be utterly empty, I can see that clearly. You will not even wish for a doll, since never having seen one you will be unable to imagine such a thing, but simply cherish a vague longing for some kind of human shape onto which to transfer your childhood terrors. Your mother, poor ignorant woman, doesn’t know how to stitch together a doll, doesn’t realise that children need games, only that what they most need is food.

  You will grow up with the righteous anger of the poor when they refuse to become resigned. You will speak to those the powerful think of as dirt and you will teach them not to become like your mother. You will kindle hope in them, and they will follow you. For how could the poor live without hope?

  You will suffer the threats of judges, the beatings of the police, the coarseness of prison guards, the contempt of servants. But you will be beautiful, impetuous, fearless, blazing with scorn. They will call you ‘La Pasionaria,’ because of the fire that burns in your heart.

  Then I see war. You will organise your people: on your side you will have the lowly and those who believe that men can be redeemed, and that will be your banner. You will even fight ideals similar to your own, because you consider them less perfect. And meanwhile the real enemy will defeat you. You will experience flight, exile, one hiding place after another. You will live on silence and scraps of bread, and at sunset the long straight roads will point to the horizons of lands as alien to you as those you are fleeing. Haylofts and stables, ditches, unknown comrades, people’s compassion – these will be your shelter.

  You are dark-haired and dark-eyed, a woman of the South, accustomed to blond, sun-drenched landscapes dotted here and there with the white of Don Quixote’s windmills. You will find refuge in the great plains of the East, where the deep winter cold cracks both earth and hearts. Your voice has a resonant Latin cadence with syllables ringing like the clapping of hands: you speak a language made for guitars, for festivals in orange groves, for challenges in the arena where brave, stupid men grapple with the beast. The tongue of the steppes will sound barbaric, but you will have to use it and forget your own. They will give you a medal; every year, in early May, you will sit on a platform beside taciturn men, likewise wearing medals, to watch soldiers in dress uniform file by below, while the wind spreads the red of the flags and the thundering notes of martial anthems played by machines. You will be a veteran with a flat – reward in bricks and mortar for your heroism.

  War again. Some are destined to witness death and destruction: you are one of them. In a city that will come to be called Stalingrad, death will snatch away the son you bore, the one real solace of your existence. My God, how quickly the years fly by in my cards, in your regrets! Only yesterday he was a child, and now he’s a soldier already, and dead. You will be the heroic mother of a hero; your breast will bear another medal. The war is over now. Moscow. I see stealthy footsteps crossing the snow; a pure white blanket tries in vain to blur my cards; I sense the funereal gloom that pervades the city. At the carriage stops everyone stares at the ground to avoid meeting their neighbours’ eyes.

  And you too will be cautious, coming home of an evening, for this is a time of suspicion. At night you will wake with a start, soaked in sweat, unsure even of your own loyalty, since the worst heresy is to believe oneself in possession of the truth, and pride has brought down many. You will search your conscience long and hard. And where have your old comrades gone meanwhile? Vanished, all of them. You will toss and turn in your bed, the sheets will be thorns. Outside it is bitterly cold; how can the pillow burn so fiercely?

  ‘All traitors?’

  ‘Every one.’

  ‘Even Francisco who laughed like a child and sang the romancero?’

  ‘Even Francisco.’

  ‘Even El Campesino who wept with you over your dead?’

  Yes, even El Campesino – he’s cleaning Moscow’s toilets now. And your short sleep will already be over. You are sitting on your bed, eyes fixed on the opposite wall, staring into the shadows (you always leave a night-light on – you can’t bear the darkness). But what else can you do? South America is too far away, and besides, they won’t let La Pasionaria leave the friendly confines of Russia.

  So you decide you had better cling to your ideals, make of them an even stronger faith, stronger and stronger and stronger still. And then after all, time is passing. Slowly, very slowly, but all things do pass. Men pass away, and suffering, and disasters. You too will almost be ready to pass away, and that will be a source of subtle, secret comfort. The meagre bun of your hair will turn white with age and grief. Your face will be dry, ascetic, with two deep hollows. Then your king will die too. You will take your place beside the coffin in the middle of the square, you will stay there day and night, always wholly yourself, silent, inflexible, your eyes always open, while a huge crowd files mutely by the embalmed corpse. Priestly, statuesque, carved in flint – ‘That is La Pasionaria,’ people will think when they see you, and here and there a father will point you out to his son. While all the time, to stop yourself giving way to the panic and longing which have carved out tunnels in your soul, the hands in your lap will be twisting and twisting your handkerchief, until you tie it into a knot (how strange, why are you stroking that little round wad?). And in your mind you see a room that time has borne away, a bare iron bed and a tiny Dolores, frightened and sick, with feverish eyes, calling plaintively, ‘Mamaita, el jugete. Mamaita, por favor, el jugete.’ And your mother gets up from her chair and makes you something like a doll, knotting together the corners of her brown handkerchief.

  Many more years await you, but they will all be the same. Dolores Ibarruri, when you look in your mirror what you will see will be the image of La Pasionaria, it will never change.

  Then one day, perhaps, you will read my letter. Or you won’t read it, but this will not have the slightest importance, because you will be old, and everything will already have been. Because if life could go back and be different from what has been, it would annihilate time and the succession of cause and effect that is life itself, and that would be absurd. And my cards, Dolores, cannot change what, since it has to be, has already been.

  III

  Letter from Calypso, a nymph, to Odysseus, King of Ithaca

  Purple and swollen like secret flesh are the petals of Ogygia’s flowers; brief showers, soft and warm, feed the bright green of her woods; no winter troubles the waters of her streams.

  Barely the blink of an eye has passed since your departure, which seems so remote to you, and your voice calling farewell to me from the sea still wounds my divine hearing in this insuperable now. Every day I watch the sun’s chariot race across the sky and I follow its course towards your west; I look at my white, unchanging hands; I trace a mark in the sand with a twig, as if adding a number to some futile reckoning, and then I erase it. And I have traced and erased many thousands of marks: the gesture is the same, the sand is the same, I am the same. And everything else.

  But you live in change. Your hands have become bony, with protruding knuckles; the firm blue veins that ran across them have come to resemble the knotty rigging of your ship, and if a child plays with them, the blue ropes slither away under the skin and the child
laughs and measures the smallness of his own small hand against your palm. Then you lift him down from your knees and set him on the ground, because a memory of long ago has caught up with you and a shadow crosses your face. But he runs around you, shouting happily, and at once you pick him up again and sit him on the table in front of you. Something deep, something that can’t be put into words takes place, and intuitively you grasp the substance of time in the transmission of the flesh.

  But what is the substance of time, and how can it come into being, if everything is fixed, unchanging, one? At night I gaze at the spaces between the stars, I see the boundless void, and what overwhelms you humans and sweeps you away is only one fixed moment here, without beginning or end.

  Oh, Odysseus, to be able to escape this eternal green! To be able to follow the leaves as they yellow and fall, to live the moment with them! To discover myself mortal!

  I envy your old age and I long for it; that is the form my love for you takes. And I dream of another Calypso, old and grey and feeble, and I dream of feeling my strength dwindling, of sensing every day that I am a little closer to the Great Circle where everything returns and revolves, of scattering the atoms that make up this woman’s body I call Calypso. And yet here I remain, staring at the sea as it ebbs and flows, feeling no more than its reflection, suffering this weariness of being that devours me and will never be appeased – and the empty terror of eternity.