Message from the Shadows

by Antonio Tabucchi

  The path continued down toward a clinic in the middle of the grounds. They’d stopped talking, but he could hear the noise of the wheelchair rolling over the gravel. He wanted to turn around but was unable to. The most beautiful thing in the world. That’s what the girl had said, this bald girl, being hauled in a wheelchair by a nurse. She knew what the most beautiful thing in the world was. He, however, did not. How was it possible at his age, with all he’d seen and experienced, that he still didn’t know what the most beautiful thing in the world was?

  Translated by Martha Cooley and Antonio Romani

  The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico

  The first creature arrived on a Thursday toward the end of June, at vespers, when all the monks were in the chapel for service. Privately, Fra Giovanni of Fiesole still thought of himself as Guidolino, the name he had left behind in the world when he came to the cloister. He was in the vegetable garden gathering onions, which was his job, since in abandoning the world he hadn’t wanted to abandon the vocation of his father, Pietro, who was a vegetable gardener, and in the garden at San Marco he grew tomatoes, courgettes and onions. The onions were the red kind, with big heads, very sweet after you’d soaked them for an hour, though they made you cry a fair bit when you handled them. He was putting them in his frock gathered to form an apron, when he heard a voice calling: Guidolino. He raised his eyes and saw the bird. He saw it through onion tears filling his eyes and so stood gazing at it for a few moments, for the shape was magnified and distorted by his tears as though through a bizarre lens; he blinked his eyes to dry the lashes, then looked again.

  It was a pinkish creature, soft looking, with small yellowish arms like a plucked chicken’s, bony, and two feet that again were very lean with bulbous joints and calloused toes, like a turkey’s. The face was that of an aged baby, but smooth, with two big black eyes and a hoary down instead of hair; and he watched as its arms floundered wearily, as if unable to stop itself making this repetitive movement, miming a flight that was no longer possible. It had got caught up in the branches of the pear tree, which were spiky and warty and at this time of year laden with pears, so that at every one of the creature’s movements, a few ripe pears would fall and land splat on the clods beneath. There it hung, in a very uncomfortable position, feet straddled over two branches which must be hurting its groin, torso sideways and neck twisted, since otherwise it would have been forced to look up in the air. From the creature’s shoulder blades, like incredible triangular sails, rose two enormous wings which covered the entire foliage of the tree and which moved in the breeze together with the leaves. They were made of different colored feathers, ochre, yellow, deep blue, and an emerald green the color of a kingfisher, and every now and then they opened like a fan, almost touching the ground, then closed again, in a flash, disappearing behind each other.

  Fra Giovanni dried his eyes with the back of his hand and said: “Was it you called me?”

  The bird shook his head and, pointing a claw like an index finger toward him, wagged it.

  “Me?” asked Fra Giovanni, amazed.

  The bird nodded.

  “It was me calling me?” repeated Fra Giovanni.

  This time the creature closed his eyes and then opened them again, to indicate yes once again; or perhaps out of tiredness, it was hard to say: because he was tired, you could see it in his face, in the heavy dark hollows around his eyes, and Fra Giovanni noticed that his forehead was beaded with sweat, a lattice of droplets, though they weren’t dripping down; they evaporated in the evening breeze and then formed again.

  Fra Giovanni looked at him and felt sorry for him and muttered: “You’re overtired.” The creature looked back with his big moist eyes, then closed his eyelids and wriggled a few feathers in his wings: a yellow feather, a green one and two blue ones, the latter three times in rapid succession. Fra Giovanni understood and said, spelling it out as one learning a code: “You’ve made a trip, it was too long.” And then he asked: “Why do I understand what you say?” The creature opened his arms as far as his position allowed, as if to say, I haven’t the faintest idea. So that Fra Giovanni concluded: “Obviously I understand you because I understand you.” Then he said: “Now I’ll help you get down.”

  Standing against a cherry tree at the bottom of the garden was a ladder. Fra Giovanni went and picked it up, and, holding it horizontally on his shoulders with his head between two rungs, carried it over to the pear tree, where he leaned it in such a way that the top of the ladder was near the creature’s feet. Before climbing up, he slipped off his frock because the skirts cramped his movements, and draped it over a sage bush near the well. As he climbed up the rungs he looked down at his legs, which were lean and white with hardly any hairs, and it occurred to him they looked like the bird creature’s. And he smiled, since likenesses do make one smile. Then, as he climbed, he realized his private part had slipped out of the slit in his drawers and that the creature was staring at it with astonished eyes, shocked and frightened. Fra Giovanni did himself up, straightened his drawers and said: “I’m sorry, it’s something we humans have”; and for a moment he thought of Nerina, of a farmhouse near Siena many years before, a blond girl and a straw rick. Then he said: “Sometimes we manage to forget it, but it takes a lot of effort and a sense of the clouds above, because the flesh is heavy and forever pulling us earthward.”

  He grabbed the bird creature by the feet, freed him from the spikes of the pear tree, made sure that the down on his head didn’t catch on the twigs, closed his wings, and then with the creature holding on to his back, brought him down to the ground.

  The creature was droll: he couldn’t walk. When he touched the ground he tottered, then fell on one side, and there he stayed, flailing about with his feet in the air like a sick chicken. Then he leaned on one arm and straightened his wings, rustling and whirling them like windmill sails, probably in an attempt to get up again. He didn’t succeed, so Fra Giovanni gripped him under the armpits and pulled him up, and while he was holding the creature those frenetic feathers brushed back and forth across his face tickling him. Holding him almost suspended under these things that weren’t quite armpits, he got him to walk, the way one does with a baby; and while they were walking, the creature’s feathers opened and closed in a code Fra Giovanni understood, and asked him: “What’s this?” And he answered: “This is earth, this is the earth.” And then, walking along the path through the garden, he explained that the earth was made of earth, and clods of soil, and that plants grew in the soil, such as tomatoes, courgettes and onions, for example.

  When they reached the arches of the cloister, the creature stopped. He dug in his heels, stiffened and said he wouldn’t go any farther. Fra Giovanni put him down on the granite bench against the wall and told him to wait; and the creature stayed there, leaning up against the wall, staring dreamily at the sky.

  “He doesn’t want to be inside,” explained Fra Giovanni to the father superior, “he’s never been inside; he says he’s afraid of being in an enclosed space, he can’t conceive of space if it’s not open, he doesn’t know what geometry is.” And he explained that only he, Fra Giovanni, could see the creature, no one else. Well, because that’s how it was. The father superior, though only because he was a friend of Fra Giovanni’s, might be able to hear the rustling of his wings, if he paid attention. And he asked: “Can you hear?” And then he added that the creature was lost, had arrived from another dimension, wandering about; there’d been three of them and they’d got lost, a small band of creatures cast adrift, they had roamed aimlessly through skies, through secret dimensions, until this one had fallen into the pear tree. And he added that they would have to shelter him for the night under something that prevented him from floating up again, since when darkness came the creature suffered from the force of ascension, something he was subject to, and if there was nothing to hold him down he would float off to wander about in the ether again like a splinter cast adrift, and
they couldn’t allow that to happen, they must offer the creature hospitality in the monastery, because in his way this creature was a pilgrim.

  The father superior agreed and they tried to think what would be the best sort of shelter: something that was, yes, out in the open, but that would prevent any forced ascension. And so they took the garden netting that protected the vegetables from hedgehogs and moles; a net of hemp strings woven by the basket weavers of Fiesole, who were very clever with wicker and yarn. They stretched the net over four poles, which they set up at the bottom of the vegetable garden against the perimeter wall, so as to form a sort of open shed; and on the clods of earth, which the bird creature found so strange, they placed a layer of dry straw, and laid the creature on top of it. After rearranging his little body a few times, he found the position he wanted on his side. He sank down with intense pleasure and, surrendering to the tiredness he must have dragged after him across the skies, immediately fell asleep. Upon which the monks likewise went to bed.

  * * *

  —

  The other two creatures arrived the following morning at dawn while Fra Giovanni was going out to check the guest’s chicken run and see if he had slept well. Against the pink glow of the dawning day he saw them approaching in a low, slanting flight, as if desperately trying, and failing, to maintain height, veering in fearful zigzags, so that at first he thought they were going to crash against the perimeter wall. But they cleared it by a hair’s breadth and then, unexpectedly, regained height. One hovered in the air like a dragonfly, then landed with legs wide apart on the wall. He sat there a moment, astride the wall, as if undecided whether to fall down on this side or the other, until at last he crashed down headfirst into the rosemary bushes in the flower bed. The second creature meanwhile turned in two spiraling loops, an acrobat’s pirouette almost, like a strange ball, because he was a rolypoly sort of being without a lower part to his body, just a chubby bust ending in a greenish brushlike tail with thick, abundant plumage that must serve both as driving force and rudder. And like a ball he came down among the rows of lettuce, bouncing two or three times, so that what with his shape and greenish color you would have thought he was a head of lettuce a bit bigger than the others off larking about thanks to some trick of nature.

  For a moment Fra Giovanni was undecided as to whom he should go and help first. Then he chose the big dragonfly, because he seemed more in need, miserably caught as he was head down in the rosemary bushes, one leg sticking out and flailing about as if calling for help. When he went to pull him out he really did look like a big dragonfly, or at least that was the impression he gave; or rather, a large cricket, yes, that’s what he looked like, so long and thin, and all gangly, with frail slender limbs you were afraid to touch in case they broke, almost translucent, pale green, like stems of unripe corn. And his chest was like a grasshopper’s too, a wedge-shaped chest, pointed, without a scrap of flesh, just skin and bones: though there was the plumage, so sheer it almost seemed fur; golden; and the long shining hairs that sprouted from his skull were golden too, almost like hair, but not quite, and given the position of his body, head down, they were hiding his face.

  Fearfully, Fra Giovanni stretched out an arm and pushed back the hair from the creature’s face: first he saw two big eyes, so pale they looked like water, gazing in amazement, then a thin, handsome face with white skin and red cheeks. A woman’s face, because the features were feminine, albeit on a strange insectlike body. “You look like Nerina,” Fra Giovanni said, “a girl I once knew called Nerina.” And he began to free the creature from the rosemary needles, carefully, because he was afraid of breaking the thing; and because he was afraid he might snap her wings, which looked exactly like a dragonfly’s, but large and streamlined, transparent, bluish pink and gold with a very fine latticing, like a sail. He took the creature in his arms. She was fairly light, no heavier than a bundle of straw, and walking across the garden Fra Giovanni repeated what he had said the day before to the other creature; that this was the earth and that the earth was made of earth and of clods of soil and that in the soil grew plants, such as tomatoes, courgettes, and onions, for example.

  He laid the bird creature in the cage next to the guest already there, and then hurried to fetch the other little creature, the rolypoly one that had wound up in the lettuces. Though it now turned out that he wasn’t as rounded as he had seemed, his body having in the meantime as it were unrolled, to show that he had the shape of a loop, or of a figure eight, though cut in half, since he was really no more than a bust terminating in a beautiful tail, and no bigger than a baby. Fra Giovanni picked him up and, repeating his explanations about the earth and the clods, took him to the cage, and when the others saw him coming they began to wriggle with excitement; Fra Giovanni put the little ball on the straw and watched with amazement as the creatures exchanged affectionate looks, patted each other’s feet, and brushed each other’s feathers, talking and even laughing with their wings at the joy of being reunited.

  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 odor 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 color 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 odor 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.