The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico

by Antonio Tabucchi

  I am, believe me, your

  XAVIER JANATA MONROY

  Vecchiano, 18 April 1985

  Dear Mr Janata Monroy,

  Your letter touched me deeply. It demands a reply, a reply I fear will be considerably inferior to the one your letter postulates. First of all, may I thank you for allowing me to use part of your name for a character in my book; and furthermore for not taking offence at the novelistic portrayal of the theosopher of Madras for which you provided the inspiration. Writers are not to be trusted even when claiming to practise the most rigorous realism: as far as I am concerned, therefore, you should treat me with the maximum distrust.

  You confer on my little book, and hence on the vision of the world which emerges from it, a religious profundity and a philosophical complexity which unfortunately I do not believe I possess. But, as the poet we both know says, ‘Everything is worth the trouble if the spirit be not mean.’ So that even my little book is worth the trouble, not so much for itself, but for what a broad spirit may read into it.

  Still, books, as you know, are almost always bigger than ourselves. To speak of the person who wrote that book, I am obliged, in spite of myself, to descend to the anecdotal (I wouldn’t dare to say biographical), which in my case is banal and low caste. The evening we made each other’s acquaintance in the Theosophical Society, I had just survived a curious adventure. Many things had happened to me in Madras: I had had the good fortune to meet a number of people and to meditate on various strange stories. But what happened to me had to do with me alone. Thanks to the complicity of a temple guard, I had managed to get inside the compound of the temple of Shiva the Destroyer, which, as you know, is strictly forbidden to non-Hindus, my precise intention being to photograph the altars. Since you appreciate the meaning I attribute to photography, you will realise that this amounted to a double sacrilege, perhaps even a challenge, since Shiva the Destroyer is indentified with Death and with Time, is the Bhoirava, the Terror, and manifests himself in sixty-four forms, which the temple of Madras illustrates and which I wanted to photograph for myself. It was two in the afternoon, when the temple shuts its gates for siesta, so that the place was entirely deserted with the exception of a few lepers who sleep there and who paid not the slightest attention. I know this will arouse a profound sense of disapproval on your part, but I do not want to lie. The heat was oppressive, the big monsoon had only just finished and the compound was full of stagnant puddles. Swarms of flies and insects wandered about in the air, and the stench of excrement from the cows was unbearable. Opposite the altars to Shiva the traitor, beyond the troughs for the ablutions, is a small wall for votive offerings. I climbed upon it and began to take my photos. At that moment a piece of the wall I was standing on, being old and sodden with rain, collapsed. Of course I am giving you a ‘pragmatic’ explanation of what happened, since considered from another point of view the affair could have another explanation. In any event, when the wall crumbled I fell, skinning my right leg. A few hours later, when I’d got back to my hotel, the scratches had developed into an incredible swelling. It was only the following morning, though, that I decided to go to the doctor, partly because I hadn’t had myself vaccinated at all before coming to India and I was afraid I might have got infected by tetanus – certainly my leg showed every sign that that was what it was. To my considerable amazement, the doctor refused to give me an anti-tetanus shot. He said it was superfluous since, as he said, tetanus runs its course much faster in India than in Europe, and ‘if it were tetanus you would already be dead.’ It was just ‘a simple infection,’ he said, and all I needed was some streptomycin. He seemed quite surprised that I hadn’t been infected by tetanus, but evidently, he concluded, one occasionally came across Europeans who had a natural resistance.

  I’m sure you will find my story ridiculous, but it’s the story I have to tell. As far as your gnostic interpretation of my Nocturne, or rather of its conclusion, is concerned, allow me to insist in all sincerity that I am not familiar with the Mandala and that my knowledge of Hindu philosophy is vague and very approximate, consisting as it does in the summary found in a tourist guide and in a pocket paperback I picked up at the airport called L’Induisme (part of the ‘Que sais-je?’ series). As regards the question of the mirror, I started doing some hurried research only after getting your letter. For help I went to the books of a serious scholar, Professor Grazia Machianò, and am finding it hard work to grasp the basics of a philosophy of which I am woefully ignorant.

  Finally I must say my own feeling is that on the most immediate level my Nocturne reflects a spiritual state which is far less profound than you so generously suppose. Private problems, of which I will spare you the tedious details, and then of course the business of finding myself in a continent so remote from my own world, had provoked an extremely strong sense of alienation towards everything: so much so that I no longer knew why I was there, what the point of my journey was, what sense there was in what I was doing or in what I myself might be. It was out of this alienation, perhaps, that my book sprang. In short, a misunderstanding. Evidently misunderstandings suit me. In confirmation of which allow me to send you this most recent book of mine, published a few days ago. You know Italian very well and may wish to take a look at it.

  I am, believe me, your

  ANTONIO TABUCCHI

  Madras, 13 June 1985

  Dear Mr Tabucchi,

  My thanks for your letter and gift. I have just finished Little Misunderstandings of No Importance and your other book of short stories, Reverse Side, which you were generous enough to enclose. You did well, since the two complement each other and this made reading them more pleasant.

  I am perfectly well aware that my letter caused you some embarrassment, just as I am also aware that you, for reasons of your own, wish to elude the gnostic interpretations that I have of your books and which you, as I said, deny. As I mentioned in my first letter, Europeans visiting India can usually be divided into two categories: those who believe they have discovered transcendence and those who profess the most radical secularism. I fear that despite your search for a third way, you do fall into these categories.

  Forgive me my insistence. Even the philosophical position (may I so define it?) which you call ‘Misunderstanding’ corresponds, albeit dressed up in Western culture (the Baroque), to the ancient Hindu precept that the misunderstanding (the error of life) is equivalent to an initiatory journey around the illusion of the real, that is, around human life on earth. Everything is identical, as we say; and it seems to me that you affirm the same thing, even if you do so from a position of scepticism (are you by any chance considered a pessimist?). But I would like to abandon my culture for a moment and draw on yours instead. Perhaps you will remember Epimenides’ paradox which goes more or less like this: ‘The phrase that follows this is false: the phrase that precedes this is true.’ As you will have noticed, the two halves of the saying are mirrors of each other. Dusting off this paradox, an American mathematician, Richard Hoffstadter, author of a paper on Gödel’s theorem, has recently called into question the whole Aristotelian-Cartesian logical dichotomy on which your culture is based and according to which every statement must be either true or false. This statement in fact can be simultaneously both true and false; and this because it refers to itself in the negative: it is a snake biting its own tail, or, to quote Hoffstadter’s definition, ‘a strange loop.’

  Life too is a strange loop. We are back to Hinduism again. Do you at least agree on this much, Mr Tabucchi?

  I am, believe me, your

  XAVIER JANATA MONROY

  Vecchiano, 10 July 1985

  Dear Mr Janata Monroy,

  As usual your letter has obliged me to make a rapid and I fear superficial attempt to assimilate some culture. I only managed to track down something about the American mathematician you mention in one Italian periodical, a column written from the USA by journalist Sandro Stille. The article was very interesting and I have promised myself to look in
to the matter more deeply. I do not, however, know much about mathematical logic, nor perhaps about any kind of logic; indeed I believe I am the most illogical person I know, and hence I don’t imagine I will make much progress in studies of this variety. Perhaps, as you say, life really is ‘a strange loop.’ It seems fair that each of us should understand this expression in the cultural context that best suits him.

  But allow me to give you a piece of advice. Don’t believe too readily in what writers say: they lie (tell lies) almost all the time. A novelist who writes in Spanish and who perhaps you are familiar with, Mario Vargas Llosa, has said that writing a story is a performance not unlike a strip-tease. Just as the girl undresses under an immodest spotlight revealing her secret charms, so the writer lays bare his intimate life to the public through his stories. Of course there are differences. What the writer reveals are not, like the uninhibited girl, his secret charms, but rather the spectres that haunt him, the ugliest parts of himself: his regrets, his guilt and his resentments. Another difference is that while in her performance the girl starts off dressed and ends up naked, in the case of the story the trajectory is inverted: the writer starts off naked and ends up dressed. Perhaps we writers are simply afraid. By all means consider us cowards and leave us to our private guilt, our private ghosts. The rest is clouds.

  Yours

  ANTONIO TABUCCHI

  The Battle of San Romano

  I would have liked to talk to you about the sky over Castile. The blue and the swift billowing clouds driven by the upland wind, and the monastery of Santa Maria de Huerta, on the road to Madrid, where I arrived one late spring afternoon to find Orson Welles shooting Falstaff, and it seemed to me the most natural thing in the world to come across that big bearded man with a cigar in his mouth, wearing a waistcoat and sitting on a stool in the Cistercian cloister. To tell you: Look, that’s what I was like then, all those years ago, I liked Spain, Hills Like White Elephants, it was like pushing aside the cork curtain of a small rather dirty tavern and walking straight into a book by Hemingway, that was the door to life, it smacked of literature, like a page from The Sun Also Rises. It was a feast day, a holiday, I wasn’t the person I am now, I still had the innocent lightness of someone who is waiting for things to happen; I could still take risks, write those stories, like Dinner with Federico, describing the limbo of adolescence, lazy afternoons, cicadas: small beer then, but it would take some courage now.

  I was listening to a poet reading his poetry; ‘my Southern Cross, my Hesperus,’ and he was full of tenderness for a woman made of poetry, who in the end was himself. I sensed that he really did love this woman, because he loved her in the most authentic way possible, he loved himself in her, that is the real secret and in its own way a form of innocence, and I said to myself: Too late.

  Nice place, the hotel, with blackened mirrors and ornamental picture frames, neoclassical columns made of wood, a discreet carefully selected audience of the kind one finds late evenings in luxury hotels, and me there listening with my heart beating, full of remorse and shame.

  Why did he have the courage when I didn’t, I wondered. What is this quality? Poetry, unawareness, awareness, or what? And then I saw this patient vehicle which has been transporting us for thousands of years. In a tray of food on the sideboard was an orange, our teacher used to say to us: Look, children, this is the world, that’s how it’s made, like an orange. The image floated up suddenly from the well of memory, and I looked on the surface of that orange for the long roads of Castile, and for a small car driving fast, thinking it could get into life through the little cork curtain of a page of Hemingway, and instead all I saw was orange peel, it had disappeared entirely from the fruit’s surface. The poet read his fine poem with a fine, polished voice, I was on the point of tears, but not because of what he was saying (or rather, only partly because of that); no, it was me, it was because I couldn’t find the road of that afternoon on the orange, the afternoon I saw Orson Welles, the afternoon I would have liked to talk to you about. So then I went up to my room to look at the enlargements I’d brought with me from the dark room. I’d broken down the painting piece by piece, dividing it into a fine grid, and I’d photographed every little square of the grid; it will be a long, exacting job requiring patience, interminable evenings with lens and lamp. Blown up by the enlargement process the surface of the frame is an epidermis full of wrinkles and scars, it almost makes you feel sorry for it, you see it was once a living organism, and now here it is in front of me like a corpse and I anatomise it to give it a sense it has lost with the passage of time, and which perhaps is not the original sense, the same way I try to give meaning to that afternoon on the road to Madrid, and I know the sense I’m giving it is different, because it had its real sense only then, in that moment, when I didn’t know what sense it had, and now when I give it a sense made up of youth, prints of Spain and novels of Hemingway, it’s just the interpretation of the person I am now: after its fashion, a fake.

  This story, whose first-person narrator must of course be taken to be a fictional character, owes much to the observations of two art historians apropos of two panels of Paolo Uccello’s triptych, The Battle of San Romano, one of which is in the National Gallery, the other in the Louvre. Of the first, which shows Niccolò da Tolentino leading the Florentines, P. Francastel (Peinture et société, Lyon, 1951) notes, upon analysing the spatial perspective, that Paolo Uccello simultaneously uses different perspectives, amongst them one elusive perspective close up and one ‘compartmentalised’ perspective in the background. The panel in the Louvre, which shows the part played by Micheletto da Cotignola, attracted the attention of A. Parronchi (Studi su la dolce prospettiva, Milan, 1964), again in response to problems of perspective. Parronchi examines the pictorial use of the silver leaves of the breastplates, and concludes that it is these which give the impression of reflections and of a multiplication of images. Basically the panel in the Louvre would seem to offer a way of playing with perspective already posited in Vitelione’s Perspectiva; a method by which ‘it is possible to arrange the mirror in such a way that the viewer sees in the air, outside the mirror, the image of something that is not within his field of vision.’ In this way Paolo Uccello’s panel would appear to offer a representation not of real beings, but of ghosts.

  The only other thing I need to say is that the author of this letter is writing to a female character.

  Story of a Non-Existent Story

  I have a non-existent novel whose story I would like to tell. The novel was called Letters to Captain Nemo, a title later altered to No One Behind the Door. I wrote it in 1977, I think, in two weeks of rough seclusion and rapture in a little village near Siena. I’m not sure what inspired me: partly memories, which in my mind are almost always mixed up with fantasy and as a result not very reliable; partly the urgency of fiction itself, which always carries a certain weight; and partly loneliness, which is often the writer’s company. Without thinking much about it, I turned the story into a novel (a long short story) and sent it to a publisher, who found it perhaps rather too allusive, and a little elusive, and then from the point of view of a publisher, not very accessible or decipherable. I think he was right. To be quite frank, I don’t know what its value in literary terms may or may not have been. I left it to settle for a while in a drawer, since I feel that obscurity and forgetfulness improve a story. Maybe I really did forget it. I came across it again a few years later, and finding it made a strange impression on me. It rose quite suddenly from the darkness of a dresser, from beneath the stacks of paper, like a submarine rising from obscure depths. I saw an obvious metaphor in this, a message almost (the novel was partly about a submarine); and as though in justification, or expiation (it is strange how novels can bring on guilt complexes), I felt the need to add a concluding note, the only thing that now remains of the whole and which still bears the title: Beyond the End. This would have been the winter of 1979, I think. I made a few small changes to the novel, then entrusted it to a publi
sher of a variety I thought might be more suitable for a difficult book like this. My choice turned out to be right, agreement was quickly reached and I promised delivery for the following autumn. Except that during the summer holidays I took the typescript with me in my suitcase. It had been alone for a long time and I felt it needed company. I read it again towards the end of August. I was by the Atlantic in an old house inhabited by wind and ghosts. These were not my ghosts, but real ghosts: pitiful presences which it took only the smallest amount of sensitivity or receptiveness to become aware of. And then I was particularly sensitive at the time because I knew the history of the house well and likewise the people who had lived there: by one of life’s inexplicable coincidences my own life and theirs had become mixed up together. Meanwhile September came around bringing those violent sea storms that usher in the equinox; sometimes the house would be blacked out, the trees in the big garden waved their restless branches, and all night long the corridors echoed with the groans of ageing woodwork. Occasionally friends would come to dinner, the headlamps of their cars carving white swathes in the darkness. In front of the house was a cliff with a fearful drop straight into the seething waves. I was alone, I knew that for certain, and in the loneliness of existence the restless presences of the ghosts tried to make contact. But real conversations are impossible, you have to make do with bizarre, untranslatable codes, stratagems invented ad hoc. I could think of nothing better than to rely on a flashing light. There was a lighthouse on the other side of the bay. It sent out two beams and had four different time gaps. Using combinations of these variables I invented a mental language that was very approximate but good enough for basic conversation. Some nights I would suffer from insomnia. The old house had a big terrace and I would spend the night talking to the lighthouse, using it, that is, to transmit my messages, or to receive messages, depending on the situation, the whole exchange being orchestrated by myself, of course. But some things are easier than one imagines; for example, all you have to do is think: Tonight I’m transmitting; or: Tonight I’m receiving. And you’re set.