The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico

by Antonio Tabucchi

  * Dom Sebastião de Avis (1554–78) was the last Portuguese king of the house of Avis. He came to the throne while still a child, was raised in the atmosphere of mysticism, and came to believe he had been chosen by God to accomplish great deeds. Nursing his dream to subject all Barbary to his rule and extend his kingdom as far as the revered Palestine, he put together a huge army, made up mostly of adventurers and beggars, and set off on a crusade that was to spell disaster for Portugal. In August 1578, exhausted by the heat and a forced march across the desert, the Portuguese army was destroyed by the light cavalry of the Moors near Alcácer-Quibir. Sebastião had left no direct descendants; with his death, Portugal was subjected to foreign domination for the first and only time in history. Annexed to the crown of Spain by Philip II, it regained its independence in 1640 after a national rebellion.

  * Mademoiselle Lenormand was Napoleon’s fortune-teller and one of the most celebrated French clairvoyants of her time.

  The Passion of Dom Pedro

  A man, a woman, passion and unreasoned revenge are the characters of this story. The white pebbled banks of the River Mondego where it flows beneath Coimbra provide the setting. Time, which as a concept is essential to the tale, is of little importance in chronological terms: for the record, however, I will say that we are halfway through the fourteenth century.

  The opening scenario smacks of the banal. Marriages of convenience dictated by diplomacy and the need to establish alliances were banal in those times. Likewise banal was the young prince Dom Pedro sitting in his palace awaiting the arrival of his betrothed, a noblewoman from nearby Spain. And in banal fashion, as custom and tradition would have it, the nuptial delegation arrived: the future bride, her guards, her maids of honour. I would even venture to say that it was banal that the young prince should fall in love with one of the maids in waiting, the tender Inês de Castro, who in the manner of the time contemporary chroniclers and poets described as being slender of neck and rosy of cheek. Banal because, if it was common for a monarch to marry not a woman but a reason of state, it was equally common for him to satisfy his desires as a man with a woman to whom he was attracted for motives other than those of political convenience.

  But the young Dom Pedro was a stubborn and determined monogamist; that is the first element in our story which is not banal. Fired by an exclusive and indivisible love for the tender Inês, Dom Pedro infringed the subtle canons of concealment and the prudent heedings of diplomacy. The marriage had been imposed on him for strictly dynastic reasons, and from a strictly dynastic point of view he did abide by it: but having produced the heir his father wanted of him, he moved together with Inês into a castle on the Mondego, and without marrying made her his real spouse: which is the second element in our story which is not banal. At this point the cold violence of reason enters the scene in the shape of a pitiless executioner. The old king was a wise and prudent man and in loving his son loved not so much the son himself as the king his son would become. He gathered together his councillors of the realm and they suggested a remedy they felt would settle the problem once and for all: the elimination of this obstacle to the good of the state. While the prince was away, Dona Inês was put to death by the sword, as a chronicler tells us, in her house in Coimbra.

  Years went by. The legitimate queen had died some time ago. Then one day the old father died too and Dom Pedro was king. Now his vendetta could begin. At first it was a cruel and foul vendetta, but one which nevertheless still partook of human logic. With prodigious patience and the meticulousness of a solicitor’s clerk, he had his police trace all of his father’s old councillors. Some, already old and retired, were living quiet lives away from the public eye; others were difficult to find: plausible fears had prompted them to leave Portugal and offer their services to other monarchs. Dom Pedro waited for them one by one in the courtyard of his palace. He was haunted by insomnia. Some nights he would get up and break the unbearable silence of his rooms by having the servants light all the torches and by calling the trumpeters and ordering them to play. The chronicler of the period who recorded these events is prodigal with his details: he describes the bare, austere courtyard, the echoing of horses’ hooves on stone, the rattle of chains, the shouts of the guards announcing the capture of another wanted man. He describes too how Dom Pedro waited patiently, standing motionless at a window from which he could look down on the courtyard and the road whence his victims must come. He was a tall man, very thin, with an ascetic face and long pointed beard, like a physician or a priest, and he always wore the same cloak over the same jerkin. Our meticulous chronicler even gives us the words, or rather supplications, the prisoners addressed to their torturer, and to which he never replied: for the king would do nothing more than supply details of a technical nature indicating what he felt would be the most fitting way to put an end to a victim’s life. Dom Pedro was not without reserves of irony: for a prisoner called Coelho, which in Portuguese means ‘rabbit,’ he chose death over a gridiron. But in every case, and sometimes while they were still alive, he would have the victim’s chest ripped open and the heart removed and brought to him on a copper tray. He would take the still warm organ in his hands and toss it to a pack of greedy dogs waiting below on the terrace.

  But his bloody vendetta, which horrified our good chronicler, did not prove an effective placebo for Dom Pedro. His resentment at having been crushed by events now irremediable was not to be satisfied by the cardiac muscle of a few courtiers: in the stony loneliness of his palace he meditated a more subtle revenge which concerned not the pragmatic or human planes, but that of time itself and of the concatenation of events which make up our lives – events which in this case were already past. He decided to retrieve the irretrievable.

  It was a hot Coimbra summer, and lavender and broom were flourishing along the pebbly banks of the river. The washerwomen beat their laundry in the lazy trickle that snaked between the stones; and they sang. Dom Pedro realised that everything – his subjects, that river, the flowers, the songs, his very being there as a king – would have been the same even if everything had been different and nothing had happened; and that the tremendous plausibility of existence, inexorable as reality always is, was more solid than his ferocity, could not be wiped out by any vendetta of his. What exactly did the king think as he looked out of his window across the white plains of Portugal? What kind of sorrow was it that haunted him? The nostalgia for what has been may be heart-rending; but nostalgia for what we would have liked to happen, for what might have been and never was, must be intolerable. Probably it was this nostalgia that was crushing Dom Pedro. Every night, in his incurable insomnia, he would look up at the stars: and perhaps it was the interstellar distances, those spaces immeasurable in terms of human time which gave him the idea. Perhaps that subtle irony which he nursed in his heart along with the nostalgia for what hadn’t been also played its part. In any event he thought up a brilliant plan.

  As we have seen, Dom Pedro was a man of few words and strong character: the following morning a terse notice announced a great feast for the people throughout the kingdom, the coronation of a queen and a solemn nuptial procession in the midst of an exultant crowd all the way from Coimbra to Alcobaça. Dona Inês was exhumed from her tomb. The chronicler does not tell us whether she was already a bare skeleton or in what state of decomposition otherwise. She was dressed in white, crowned and placed on an open royal coach to the right of the king. The couple were pulled by a pair of white horses with big coloured plumes. Silver harness bells on the horses’ heads jingled brightly at every step. The crowd, as ordered, followed on either side of the nuptial procession, marrying the reverence of subjects with their repugnance. I am inclined to believe that Dom Pedro, careless of appearances, from which anyway he was protected by the powers of a considerable imagination, was convinced he was riding, not with the corpse of his old lover, but with the real Inês before her death. One could maintain that he was essentially mad, but that would be an evident simplification.
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br />   It is eighty kilometers from Coimbra to Alcobaça. Dom Pedro came back alone and incognito from his imaginary honeymoon. Awaiting Donna Inês in the abbey at Alcobaça was a stone tomb the king had had sculpted by a famous artist. Opposite Inês’s sarcophagus, on the lid of which she was shown in all her youthful beauty, and arranged pied à pied, so that come the day of judgement their residents would find themselves face-to-face, was a similar sarcophagus bearing the image of the king.

  Dom Pedro was to wait many years before taking his place in the tomb he had prepared for himself. He passed this time fulfilling his kingly duties: he minted gold and silver coins, brought peace to his kingdom, chose a woman to brighten up his rooms; he was an exemplary father, a discreet and courteous friend, a fair administrator of justice. He even experienced happiness and gave parties. But these would seem to be irrelevant details. In all likelihood those years had a different rhythm for him than the rhythm of other men. They were all the same, and perhaps passed in a flash, as if they had already been.

  Message from the Shadows

  In these latitudes night falls suddenly, hard upon a fleeting dusk that lasts but an instant, then the dark. I must live only in that brief space of time, the rest of the day I don’t exist. Or rather, I am here, but it’s as if I weren’t, because I’m elsewhere, in every place on earth, on the waters, in the wind that swells the sails of ships, in the travellers who cross the plain, in the city squares with their merchants and their voices and the anonymous flow of the crowd. It’s difficult to say what my shadow world is made of and what it means. It’s like a dream you know you are dreaming, that’s where its truth lies: in its being real beyond the real. Its structure is that of the iris, or rather of fleeting gradations, already gone while still there, like time in our lives. I have been granted the chance to go back over it, that time no longer mine which once was ours; it runs swiftly inside my eyes; so fast that I make out places and landscapes where we lived together, moments we shared, even our conversations of long ago, do you remember? We would talk about parks in Madrid, about a fisherman’s house where we would have liked to live, about windmills and the rocky cliffs falling sheer into the sea one winter night when we ate bread soup, and of the chapel with the fishermen’s votive offerings: madonnas with the faces of local women and castaways like puppets who save themselves from the waves by holding on to a beam of sunlight pouring down from the heavens. But all this flickers by inside my eyes and although I can decipher it and do so with minute exactness, it’s so fast in its inexorable passage that it becomes just a colour: the mauve of morning in the highlands, the saffron of the fields, the indigo of a September night with the moon hung on the tree in the clearing outside the old house, the strong smell of the earth and your left breast that I loved more than the right, and life was there, calmed and measured out by the cricket who lived nearby, and that was the best night of all nights, liquid as the pulp of an apricot.

  In the time of this infinitesimal infinite, which is the space between my now and our then, I wave you goodbye and I whistle ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Guaglione.’ I’ve laid my pullover on the seat next to mine, the way I used to when we went to the cinema and I waited for you to come back with the peanuts.

  ‘The phrase that follows this is false:

  the phrase that precedes this is true’

  Madras, 12 January 1985

  Dear Mr Tabucchi,

  Three years have gone by since we met at the Theosophical Society in Madras. I will admit that the place was hardly the most propitious in which to strike up an acquaintance. We barely had time for a brief conversation, you told me you were looking for someone and writing a little diary about India. You seemed to be very curious about onomastics; I remember you liking my name and asking my permission to use it, albeit disguised, in the book you were writing. I suspect that what interested you was not so much myself as two other things: my distant Portuguese origins and the fact that I knew the works of Fernando Pessoa. Perhaps our conversation was somewhat eccentric: in fact its departure point was two adverbs used frequently in the West (practically and actually), from which we attempted to arrive at the mental states which preside over such adverbs. All of which led us, with a certain logic, to talk about pragmatism and transcendence, shifting the conversation, perhaps inevitably, to the plane of our respective religious beliefs. I remember your professing yourself to be, it seemed to me with a little embarrassment, an agnostic, and when I asked you to imagine how you might one day be reincarnated, you answered that if ever this were to happen you would doubtless return as a lame chicken. At first I thought you were Irish, perhaps because the Irish, more than the English, have their own special way of approaching the question of religion. I must say in all honesty that you made me suspicious. Usually Europeans who come to India can be divided into two groups: those who believe they have discovered transcendence and those who profess the most radical secularism. My impression was that you were mocking both attitudes, and in the end I didn’t like that. We parted with a certain coldness. When you left I was sure your book, if you ever wrote it, would be one of those intolerable Western accounts which mix up folklore and misery in an incomprehensible India.

  I admit I was wrong. Reading your Indian Nocturne prompted a number of considerations which led me to write you this letter. First of all I would like to say that if the theosopher in Chapter Six is in part a portrayal of myself, then it is a clever and even amusing portrait, albeit characterised by a severity I don’t believe I deserve, but which I find plausible in the way you see me. But these are not, of course, the considerations that prompted me to write to you. Instead I would like to begin with a Hindu phrase which translated into your language goes more or less like this: The man who thinks he knows his (or his own?) life, in fact knows his (or his own?) death.

  I have no doubt that Indian Nocturne is about appearances, and hence about death. The whole book is about death, especially the parts where it talks about photography, about the image, about the impossibility of finding what has been lost: time, people, one’s own image, history (as understood by Western culture at least since Hegel, one of the most doltish philosophers, I think, that your culture has produced). But these parts of the book are also an initiation, of which some chapters form secret and mysterious steps. Every initiation is mysterious, there’s no need to invoke Hindu philosophy here because Western religions believe in this mystery too (the Gospel). Faith is mysterious and in its own way a form of initiation. But I’m sure the most aware of Western artists do sense this mystery as we do. And in this regard, permit me to quote a statement by the composer Emmanuel Nunes, whom I had occasion to hear recently in Europe: ‘Sur cette route infinie, qui les unit, furent bâties deux cités: la Musique et la Poésie. La première est née, en partie, de cet élan voyageur qui attire le Son vers le Verbe, de ce désir vital de sortir de soi-même, de la fascination de l’Autre, de l’aventure qui consiste à vouloir prendre possession d’un sens qui n’est pas le sien. La seconde jaillit de cette montée ou descente du Verbe vers sa propre origine, de ce besoin non moins vital de revisiter le lieu d’effroi où l’on passe du non-être à l’être.’

  But I would like to turn to the end of your book, the last chapter. During my most recent trip to Europe, after buying your book, I looked up a few newspapers for the simple curiosity of seeing what the literary critics thought about the end. I could not, of course, be exhaustive, but the few reviews I was able to read confirmed what I thought. It was evident that Western criticism could not interpret your book in anything but a Western manner. And that means through the tradition of the ‘double,’ Otto Rank, Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, psychoanalysis, the literary ‘game’ and other such cultural categories characteristic of the West. It could hardly be otherwise. But I suspect that you wanted to say something different; and I also suspect that that evening in Madras when you confessed to knowing nothing about Hindu philosophy, you were – why, I don’t know – lying (telling lies). As it is, I think you are fami
liar with Oriental gnosticism and with those Western thinkers who have followed the path of gnosticism. You are familiar with the Mandala, I’m sure, and have simply transferred it into your culture. In India the preferred symbol of wholeness is usually the Mandala (from the Latin mundus, in Sanskrit ‘globe,’ or ‘ring’), and then the zero sign, and the mirror. The zero, which the West discovered in the fourth century after Christ, served in India as a symbol of Brahma and of Nirvana, matrix of everything and of nothing, light and dark; it was also an equivalent of the ‘as if’ of duality as described in the Upanishads. But let us take what for Westerners is a more comprehensible symbol: the mirror. Let us pick up a mirror and look at it. It gives us an identical reflection of ourselves, but inverting left and right. What is on the right is transposed to the left and vice versa with the result that the person looking at us is ourselves, but not the same self that another sees. In giving us our image inverted on the back-front axis, the mirror produces an effect that may even conceal a sort of sorcery: it looks at us from outside, but it is as if it were prying inside us; the sight of ourselves does not leave us indifferent, it intrigues and disturbs us as that of no other: the Taoist philosophers call it the gaze returned.

  Allow me a logical leap which you perhaps will understand. We are looking at the gnosis of the Upanishads and the dialogues between Misargatta Maharaj and his disciples. Knowing the Self means discovering in ourselves that which is already ours, and discovering furthermore that there is no real difference between being in me and the universal wholeness. Buddhist gnosis goes a step further, beyond return: it nullifies the Self as well. Behind the last mask, the Self turns out to be absent.

  I am reaching the conclusion of what, I appreciate, is an overly long letter, and probably an impertinence that our relationship hardly justifies. You will forgive me a last intrusion into your privacy, justified in part by the confession you made me that evening in Madras vis-à-vis your likely reincarnation, a confession I haven’t the audacity to consider a mere whim. Even Hindu thinking, despite believing that the way of Karma is already written, maintains the secret hope that harmony of thought and mind may open paths different from those already assigned. I sincerely wish you a different incarnation from the one you foresaw. At least I hope it may be so.