Time Ages in a Hurry

by Antonio Tabucchi

  The aunt’s phrasing came back to him. She’d never say a game was nice, it was really nice, and she hadn’t bought him a colorful book but a really colorful one, and we had to go for a walk because that day the sky was really blue. Meanwhile she’d moved on to another memory, murmuring in that silent room, all those devices over the bed: the tanks, the plastic tubes, and the needles inserted in her arms, then she went quiet and suddenly the silence grew heavy, the sounds of the city seemed almost from another planet, the vast grounds surrounding the hospital isolated it from everything. And in that silence he listened to her murmuring in his ear, leaning forward, curiously his back pain had ceased, and behind that feeble voice he found he was navigating in a self he’d lost, back and forth like a kite twisting on a string, and from up there, from that kite upon which he was seated, he began to discern: a tricycle, the voice of an evening radio broadcast, a Madonna everybody claimed was crying, a little girl from a “displaced” family, with bows in her braids, who as she hopped on a chalk pattern on the ground exclaimed: square one, bread and salami! and other things like that, the aunt by then was talking in the dark since even the dim overhead light had been shut off, only the pale blue lamp over the bed remained and a glowing slice of neon coming from under the door. She closed her eyes and fell silent, she seemed exhausted. He straightened up in the chair and felt a sharp pinprick of pain between his vertebrae. She’s fallen asleep, he thought, now she’s really fallen asleep. Instead she brushed his hand and beckoned for him to come closer again. Ferruccio, he heard her breath saying, do you remember how beautiful Italy used to be?

  How can the night be present? Composed only of itself, it’s absolute, every space belongs to it, its mere presence is imposing, the same presence a ghost might have that you know is there in front of you but is everywhere, even behind you, and if you seek refuge in a patch of light you become its prisoner because all around you, like the sea surrounding your little lighthouse, is the impenetrable presence of the night.

  Instinctively he dug in his pocket for his car keys. They were attached to a small black device as big as a matchbox with two buttons: one set off a dot of red light that opened and closed the car, from the other, a mini-eye with a convex lens, emerged a bright fluorescent beam. He pointed the white beam at the floor. It cut through the dark like a laser. He scribbled with the light until he found his shoes, how strange, he’d never realized that they were still those shoes. Italian shoes? the woman at the next table had asked, studying them with interest. It’d started like that, with the shoes. But of course they’re Italian shoes, madame, he mumbled to himself, handmade, finest leather, just look at the uppers, shoes are judged mainly by their uppers, here, madame, put your finger inside, don’t worry, no, it doesn’t tickle, do you like? But why do people hold on to a pair of shoes for twenty years, even Italian shoes, they wind up ruined, old shoes must be thrown out. The fact is they’re comfortable, madame, he continued mumbling, I wear them because they’re comfortable, don’t kid yourself that these worn-out shoes are the madeleine of your lovely lashes, the point is lately my feet get a bit swollen, particularly at night, bad circulation, this damn discopathy has brought on arterial stenosis in my leg, the capillaries have been affected and so, madame, my feet swell.

  Cautiously he pointed the beam of light toward the wall, like a detective searching for clues in the dark, he avoided the patient, especially her body, slowly scrolling down over the bed. He began to catalog. One: the plastic bag full of that milky stuff, with a narrow tube leading to the stomach: food. Two: next to it some sort of intravenous drip that disappeared under the sheets. Three: the oxygen boiling soundlessly in the water, now emerging from the inhaler she’d removed. Four: a little white bottle hanging upside down from a rack, with a thin tube that made a U-turn, the drops falling one after another before descending in a fixed rhythm down to the arm: morphine. With that same rhythm, all day and all night, doctors administered an artificial peace to a body that otherwise would shake from a storm of pain. He would’ve liked to avert his gaze but couldn’t, as if he were being drawn in, hypnotized by that monotonous rhythm of drops. He pushed the little button and turned off the light. And then he heard them, the drops. At first they were muffled sound, a subterranean thrum, as though coming from the floor or walls: drip, drop, drippity, drippity, drip, drop, drippity-drop. They reached into his skull, tapped against his brain, but with no echo, a snap that pops and disappears to make way at once for the next snap, seemingly similar to the previous snap, but actually with a different tone, the same way rain begins falling on a lakeshore but if you really listen you can hear there’s a variation of sound from drop to drop, because the cloud doesn’t make the drops identical, some are bigger, some smaller, you just have to listen: drip, drop, drippity-drop, according to their own musical scale, they sounded like that, and after arriving and getting muffled inside his head, began growing in intensity to the point where he heard them burst in his head as though his skull couldn’t contain them anymore, and they burst from his ears into the surrounding space, like bells gone crazy whose sonic waves grew to a spasm. And then, by sorcery, as though his body were a magnet able to attract sonic waves, he felt they were swarming toward him, but no longer in the brain, in the vertebrae, at a precise point, as though his vertebrae were the well of water where the rod discharges the lightning bolt. And it was also right at that point, he felt, that they extinguished themselves, tearing through the pall that the night imposed on the earth, lacerating its presence. The chinks in the shutters began going pale. It was dawn.

  And if we were to play the if game? The memory came with a voice at the little table next to his, as though his uncle were there, hidden behind the hedge bordering the terrace of the coffee bar. It was his uncle’s voice this time, actually his uncle was the one who’d invented that game. Why? Because the if game is good for the imagination, especially on certain rainy days. For instance we are at the beach, or in the mountains, it doesn’t matter, since the kid is sick and the sea and the mountains are both good for him, it all depends, otherwise a bad worm will gnaw at his knee, and for instance it’s September, and in September sometimes it rains, never mind, if it’s raining and he’s at home, a kid can find a lot to do, but during this forced vacation, especially in a poorly furnished rental cottage or even worse in a pensione, if it rains, boredom sets in, and with it melancholy. But fortunately there’s the if game, and so the imagination gets to work, and the best player is the one who throws out the craziest ideas, totally crazy, mamma mia that laughter, listen to this: and what if the pope were to have landed in Pisa?

  He asked for a double espresso in a large cup. The hospital grounds were coming to life: two young doctors in white uniforms were chatting, a little truck marked Hospital Supplies set off, a man in light-blue coveralls came down a side street carrying a whisk and a plastic bag, now and then he’d stop and sweep up some leaves, some butts. On his little table he spread out the paper napkin folded next to his cup and smoothed it carefully so he could write on it. On a corner of the napkin, a brand: Caffè Honduras. He circled it with his fountain pen. The paper, porous, absorbed a little ink but held up: he could try. The first sentence was obligatory: what if I were to go to Honduras? He continued numbering the sentences. Two: and what if I were to dance the Viennese waltz? Three: and what if I were to go to the moon and eat Cain’s fritters? Four: and what if Cain hadn’t made any fritters? Five: and what if I had left on the ship? Six: and what if the ship had already left? Seven: and what if at a whistle it would turn back? Eight: and what if Betta were to get married? Nine: and what if the Maltese cat were to play the piano and sing in French?

  Read as a poem it had its own personality, maybe that woman who’d asked him to write something for a poetry anthology for children would like it, but that wouldn’t be honest, it wasn’t for children, it was a poème zutique. But children like zutiques, what matters is saying silly things, so even if it’s done out of melancholy, children won’t realize. I’
ll phone him, he said to himself. There was no need for a cell phone, besides, he’d never had one: right by the coffee bar was a phone booth, and some change left on the table, tempting him. Sure, it wouldn’t be easy to explain himself, the conversation had to be set up right, like a teacher wants with an essay, because if you set up the theme correctly, you’re safe, even if you express yourself poorly. Perhaps before approaching the topic you’d need a code, something that once suggested complicity, a sort of watchword, like sentinels in the trenches would use when they changed guard. He thought: hand hand square and there passed a crazy hare. Sure that he’d get it. And then he’d say: I know very well you can’t wake up someone at this hour after not calling him for three years, but the fact is I went into hiding for a bit. Hand hand square and there passed a crazy hare. He went on: I set my mind on writing a big novel, let’s put it that way, that novel everyone’s waiting for, sooner or later, the publisher, the critics, because sure, they say, the short stories are splendid, and also those two books of meanderings, even that fake diary is a text of the first order, no doubt, but a novel, when are you going to write us a real novel? Everyone’s fixed on the novel, so I was fixed on it too, and if you’re going to write the novel everyone wants from you, which will be your masterpiece, you realize you need the right atmosphere, and the right place, and you need to search for the right place God knows where, because where you are is never the right place, and so I went into hiding to look for the right place to write my masterpiece, am I making myself clear? Hand hand square and there passed a crazy hare. Ingrid is in Göteborg, she went to see our daughter, I don’t know if you know but she got married in Göteborg, she went back to her maternal roots, besides, she’s better off there than here around someone dying, but I’ll explain that later, no, I’ll explain right now, I’m in my usual haunts, at the city hospital, no, no, I’m really fine, sure I’d like to see you, I’m coming to the point, because my call is nothing but an SOS from a radio operator who turned off his radio, but it’s not that there was a storm around me, if anything a dead calm, without even any shadow lines to cross, they had been crossed a long time ago, there was a sandbar instead on which the boat ran aground. Hand hand square and there passed a crazy hare. My aunt is dying, said en passant. Mine, not yours, we each have a mother, and our father didn’t have sisters, so it’s my aunt, though that’s not really why I’m calling, it’s that actually I wanted to read you a passage from the novel I’ve been working on these past three years of silence so you’ll have some idea of the effort I’ve put into it, I’m sure you’ll understand why I didn’t show up earlier, you ready? It goes like this: and what if I went to Honduras? And what if I danced the Viennese waltz? And what if I went to the moon and ate Cain’s fritters? And what if Cain hadn’t made his fritters? And what if I left with the ship? And what if the ship had already left? And what if at a whistle it would turn back? And what if Betta got married? And what if the Maltese cat played the piano while singing in French? It cost me more than the Serchio River cost the people of Lucca, you like it?

  He sat there, with the coins in hand, staring at the phone booth, there’s a world of difference between saying and doing, and doing was saying: listen, I’m back, I’m here at the hospital, no, I’m totally fine, well, not totally, the fact is these three years have heaped up one on top of the other as though they were all just one day, actually just one night, I know I’m not making myself clear, I’ll try to be clearer, think of plastic bottles, the ones for mineral water, the bottle makes sense as long as it’s full of water, but when you’ve drunk it you can scrunch it up and throw it out, that’s what happened to me, my time has scrunched up, and my vertebrae too, if I can put it that way, I know I’m jumping around but I can’t express myself any better, be patient. And while he was thinking of what he’d come up with, he noticed a nurse in white pushing a wheelchair coming out of the low pavilion not far from the coffee bar, its glass door opened from the inside. And on the door closing behind them was a yellow sign with three blades, like a fan. The nurse was moving forward slowly because the path from the pavilion to the coffee shop rose slightly, and in the wheelchair was a boy, or at least from a distance it seemed a boy because he had no hair, but gradually as they approached he realized it was a girl. The features of the face, even though it was a childish face, weren’t male, because the difference is already clear at ten or twelve, which seemed roughly the age of that boy, which is to say, that girl, and also the voice was already female, since at that age the vocal cords are well differentiated, and she talked with the old nurse pushing the wheelchair, although from there he couldn’t make out what they were saying, he caught only the sound of the voices. He’d stood up with the coins in his hand aimed at the phone, rather he’d almost stood, he half stood, just like the day before getting out of bed, when the same razor blade cut into his back again, slicing all the way down to below his navel. He stood very still, like that figure of Pontormo he liked so much, whose face is a landscape of pain almost as though he were bearing the cross instead of the one destined for such a task. The two female voices were still too feeble to be deciphered, but they were cheerful, this he got from the tone, they seemed to be twittering back and forth, like two little sparrows telling each other something, he shut his eyes and the twittering became a squeak and he thought instead of mice chattering together in their cage, those white mice that scientists experiment on, they were two guinea pigs for the science of so-called life, the most agonizing science of all, one of them was being subjected to it prematurely, the other, the old one, had endured the experiments and gone on. They fell silent, perhaps because the woman pushing the wheelchair was getting tired and the girl didn’t want to wear her out, but as soon as they reached the top of the path the girl began talking again, and must have been responding to something the nurse had said, from her tone of voice it was clear she was affirming something, a solemn affirmation that nobody could prove wrong. Her voice was joyful, full of life, as when life, through the voice, is willful and affirms itself. The girl repeated what she’d said just as they were passing him, and while she spoke a broad smile lit up her face: but this is the most beautiful thing in the world! But this is the most beautiful thing in the world!

  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?

  Clouds

  – You stay here in the shade all day, said the young girl, don’t you like going in the water?

  The man gave a vague nod that could have meant yes or no, but said nothing.

  – Can I use tu with you? asked the girl.

  – If I’m not mistaken, you just did, the man said, and smiled.

  – In my class we also use tu with adults, said the girl, some teachers allow it, but my parents won’t let me, they say it’s impolite, and lei, sir, what do you think?

  – I think they’re right, responded the man, but you can use tu with me, I won’t tell anybody.

  – Don’t you like going in the water? she asked. I think it’s special.

  – Special? the man repeated.

  – My teacher told us we can’t use awesome for everything, that sometimes we might say special, I was about to say awesome, for me going in the water at this beach is special.

  – Ah, said the man, I agree, it seems awesome to me too, even special.

  – Sunbathing’s awesome too, the young girl went on, in the first few days I had to use the SPF forty cream, then I went to twenty, and now I can use the golden bronzing cream, the one that makes your skin sparkle like it has little gold specks all over i
t, see? But, sir, why are you so white? You came here a week ago and you’re always under the beach umbrella, don’t you like the sun at all?

  – I think it’s awesome, said the man, I swear, to me sunbathing is awesome.

  – Are you afraid of getting sunburned, sir? asked the young girl.

  – And what do you think? answered the man.

  – I think you’re afraid of burning, sir, though if a person doesn’t start out slowly, he’ll never get tan.

  – That’s true, the man confirmed, it seems logical to me, though do you think it’s mandatory to get tan?

  The girl mulled this over.

  – Not entirely mandatory, nothing is mandatory except for mandatory things, but if someone comes to the beach, doesn’t go in the water, and doesn’t get tan, then why is he coming to the beach?

  – You know what? said the man, you’re a logical girl, you have a gift for logic, and that’s awesome, to me the world today has lost its logic, it’s a real pleasure to meet a logical girl, may I have the pleasure of making your acquaintance? What’s your name?