Letter from Casablanca

by Antonio Tabucchi

  CONTENTS

  LETTER FROM CASABLANCA

  SATURDAY AFTERNOONS

  HEAVENLY BLISS

  DOLORES IBARRURI SHEDS BITTER TEARS

  THE LITTLE GATSBY

  VOICES

  THEATRE

  THE BACKWARDS GAME

  LETTER FROM CASABLANCA

  Lena,

  I don’t know why I begin this letter talking to you about a palm tree when you haven’t heard anything about me for eighteen years. Perhaps because there are many palm trees here. I see them from my hospital window waving their long arms in the torrid wind along the blazing avenues that disappear in whiteness. In front of our house, when we were children, there was a palm tree. Maybe you don’t remember it because it was pulled down, if my memory does not fail me, the year the event took place—in 1953, therefore, I think in summer. I was ten years old.

  We had a happy childhood, Lena. You can’t remember it, and no one could talk to you about it. The aunt with whom you grew up can’t know about it. Yes, of course, she can tell you something about Papa and Mama, but she can’t describe for you a childhood that she didn’t know and which you don’t remember. She lived too far away, up there in the north. Her husband was a bank clerk. They considered themselves superior to the family of a signalman, a level-crossing keeper. They never came to our house.

  The palm tree was pulled down following a decree by the Minister of Transport which maintained that it impeded the view of the trains and could provoke an acccident. Who knows what accident that palm tree, grown so high, could provoke, with a tuft of branches that brushed our second-floor window? From the signalman’s house, what might be slightly annoying was its trunk, a trunk thinner than a light pole, and it certainly could not impede the view of the trains. Anyway, we had to pull it down, nothing could be done about it, the land wasn’t ours. One night at supper Mama, who from time to time had grand ideas, proposed to write a letter personally to the Minister of Transport, signed by all the family, a kind of petition. It went like this:

  Dear Mr. Minister: In reference to the circular number such-and-such, protocol such-and-such, concerning the palm tree situated on the small piece of land in from of the signal house number such-and-such for the Roma-Torino line, the family of the signalman informs Your Excellency that the above-mentioned palm tree does not constitute any obstacle to the view of the trains in passage. We beg you, therefore, to leave the above-mentioned palm tree standing, it being the only tree on the land apart from a roadside pergola of vines over the door and it being much loved by the children of the signalman, especially being company for the baby who, being by nature delicate, is often confined to bed, and at least can see a palm tree through the windowpane rather than only air, which makes it sad, and to bear witness to the love that the children of the signalman have for the above-mentioned tree, sufficeth it to say that they have christened it and do not call it palm tree, but call it Josephine, owing this name to the fact that we, having taken them once to the cinema in the city to see The Talking Dead with Totò, in the film they saw the famous French Negro singer of the above-mentioned name who danced with a most beautiful headgear made of palm leaves, and since, when there is wind, the palm tree moves as if it is dancing, our children call it their Josephine.

  This letter is one of the few things that remain to me of Mama. It is the rough copy of the petition we sent. Mama wrote it in her handwriting in my composition notebook and so, by fortuitous chance, when I was sent to Argentina, I took it along without knowing it, without imagining the treasure that that page would become for me later.

  Another thing that remains to me of Mama is an image, but you can hardly see her. It’s a photograph that Signor Quintilio took under the pergola of our house around the stone table. It must be summer. Seated at the table there are Papa and Signor Quintilio’s daughter, a thin girl with long braids and a flowered dress. I am playing with a wooden gun, and I am pretending to shoot at a target. On the table there are some glasses and a bottle of wine. Mama is coming out of the house with a soup tureen. She has just entered the photograph that Signor Quintilio has just clicked. She came in by chance and was moving. For this reason she is a little out of focus and in profile, and it is difficult even to recognize her, so much so that I prefer to think of her as I remember her. Because I remember it well, that year. I am speaking of the year in which the palm tree was pulled down. I was ten years old, it was surely summer, and the event happened in October. A person possesses perfectly the memory of when he was ten years old, and I will never be able to forget what happened that October. But Signor Quintilio—do you remember him? He was the bailiff at a farm about two kilometers from the signal house, where in May we used to go to pick cherries. He was a happy, nervous little man who always told jokes. Papa made fun of him, because under fascism he had been Vice-federal, or something of the kind, and he was ashamed. He would shake his head, say that it was water under the bridge, and then Papa would begin to laugh and give him a slap on the back. And his wife—do you remember her? Signora Elvira, that big, sad woman. She suffered terribly from the heat. When she came to dinner with us she brought a fan. She sweated and panted, then she sat outside under the pergola, asleep on the stone bench with her head leaning on the wall. Nothing woke her, not even the passing of the freight trains.

  It was splendid when they came Saturday after supper. Sometimes Signorina Palestro came too, an old maid who lived alone in a kind of dependent villa on the farm, surrounded by a battalion of cats. She had a mania for teaching me French because as a girl she had been tutor to the children of a count. She always said, “Pardon,” and “C’est dommage,” and her favorite exclamation, used in all situations to underline an important fact or simply if her glasses fell, was “Eh, lá, lá!” Those evenings Mama sat down at the little piano. How she held herself at that piano was a testimony to her upbringing, to her well-to-do girlhood, to her chancellor father, to summers spent in the Tuscan Apennines. What stories she told us about her vacations! And then she had graduated in domestic science.

  If you knew, during my first years in Argentina, how much I wished I had lived those vacations! I wanted them so much and I imagined them so vividly that sometimes a strange witchcraft came over me, and I remembered vacations spent at Gavinana and at San Marcello. We were there, Lena, you and I, as children. Only you, instead of being you, were Mama as a little girl, and I was your brother and I loved you very much. I remembered when we went to a stream below Gavinana to catch tadpoles. You—that is, Mama—had a net and a funny big hat with a brim like those of the Sisters of St. Vincent. You ran straight ahead, chattering, “Run! Run! The tadpoles are waiting! What fun!” and it seemed to me to be the funniest rhyme, and I laughed like crazy. Bursts of laughter prevented me from following you. Then you disappeared into the chestnut wood near the stream and shouted, “Catch me! Catch me!” At that point I did my very best and caught up with you. I took you by the shoulders, you gave a little cry, and we fell down. The ground was sloping and we began to roll over, and then I embraced you and whispered to you, “Mama, Mama, hug me tight, Mama,” and you hugged me tight. While we rolled over, you had become Mama as I knew her. I smelled your perfume, I kissed your hair, everything intermingled—grass, hair, sky—and at that moment of ecstasy the baritone voice of Uncle Alfredo said to me, “Now then, niño, are the platinados ready?” They were not ready, no. I found myself in the wide-open jaws of an old Mercedes with a box of tacks in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. The floor was studded with blue spots of oil mixed with water. “Whatever is this boy dreaming of!” Uncle Alfredo said good-naturedly, and gave me an affectionate slap.

  It was 1958 and we were in Rosario. Uncle Alfredo, after many years in Argentina,
spoke a strange mixture of Italian and Spanish. His garage was called “The Motorized Italian,” and he repaired everything, but mainly tractors, old Ford carcasses. As an emblem, next to Shell’s shell, he had a leaning tower of neon which, however, was only half-lit because the gas in the tubes was used up, and nobody had ever had the patience to replace it. Uncle Alfredo was a corpulent man, full-blooded, patient, a gourmet, with a nose furrowed by many tiny blue veins, and a constitutional tendency to hypertension—everything exactly opposite of Papa. You would never have said that they were brothers.

  Ah, but I was telling you about those evenings after supper at our house, when visitors came and Mama sat down at the piano. Signorina Palestro went into ecstasies over waltzes by Strauss, but I liked it much belter when Mama sang. It was so difficult to make her sing. She acted coy, she blushed. “I don’t have a voice anymore,” she said smiling, but then she gave in at the insistence of Signora Elvira. She, too, preferred ballads and songs more than waltzes. And finally Mama surrendered. Then there was a great silence. Mama began with some amusing little songs in order to enliven the atmosphere—something like Rosamunda or Eulalia Torricelli. Signora Elvira laughed delightedly, somewhat breathlessly, emitting the cluckings of a brooding hen and lifting her enormous chest, while she cooled herself with her fan. Then Mama executed an interlude at the piano without singing. Signorina Palestro requested something more challenging. Mama raised her eyes to the ceiling as if searching for inspiration or ransacking her memory. Her hands caressed the keyboard. It was a dead hour for trains, there would not be disturbing noises. From the window wide open to the marsh came the sound of crickets. A moth battered its wings against the net, trying in vain to enter. Mama sang Luna rossa, All’alba se ne parte il marinaro, or a ballad by Beniamino Gigli, Oh begli occhi di fata. How lovely it was to hear her sing! Signorina Palestro’s eyes were shining, Signora Elvira even stopped fanning herself, everyone was watching Mama. She wore a rather filmy blue dress. You were sleeping in your room, unaware. You haven’t had these moments to remember in your life. I was happy. Everyone applauded. Papa overflowed with pride. He circled around with the bottle of vermouth and refilled the guests’ glasses, saying, “Please, please, we’re not in a Turk’s house.”

  Uncle Alfredo always used this curious expression, too. It was funny to hear him say it in the middle of his Spanish sentences. I remember we were at the table. He liked tripe alia parmigiana very much and thought that the Argentinians were stupid because they appreciated only the steaks from their cattle. Helping himself abundantly from the big steaming soup tureen, he told me, “Go and eat, niño, we’re not in a Turk’s house.” It was a phrase from their childhood, Uncle Alfredo’s and Papa’s. It went back to who knows what ancient time. I understood the concept: it meant that this was a house in which there was abundance, and in which the owner was generous. Who knows why the contrary was attributed to the Turks? Perhaps it was an expression that dated from the Saracen invasions. And Uncle Alfredo really was generous with me. He brought me up as if I were his son. Moreover, he had no children of his own. He was generous and patient, just like a father, and probably with me plenty of patience was necessary. I was an absent-minded, sad boy. I caused a lot of trouble as a result of my temperament. The only time I saw him lose his patience it was terrible, but it was not my fault. We were having dinner. I had precipitated a disaster with a tractor. I had had to execute a difficult maneuver to get it into the garage. Maybe I was inattentive. And then at that moment Modugno was singing Volare on the radio, and Uncle Alfredo had put it on at full volume because he loved it. I had scraped against the side of a Chrysler going in and had done a lot of damage.

  Aunt Olga was not bad. She was a talkative, grumbling Venetian who had remained stubbornly attached to her dialect. When she spoke, you understood almost nothing. She mixed Venetian with Spanish—a disaster. She and my uncle had met in Argentina. When they decided to marry, they were already elderly. In fact, you couldn’t say they had married for love. Let’s say it had been convenient for both of them—for her, because she gave up working in the meat-canning plant, and for Uncle Alfredo, because he needed a woman to keep his house in order. However, they were fond of each other, or at least there was liking, and Aunt Olga respected him and spoiled him. Who knows why she came out with that sentence that day? Maybe she was tired or out of sorts. She lost her patience. I am sure it was not really the case. Uncle Alfredo had already reprimanded me earlier, and I was mortified enough. I kept my eyes on my plate. Aunt Olga, point-blank, but not in order to hurt my feelings, poor thing, almost as if she were confirming something, said, “He’s the son of a madman—only a madman could do that to his wife.” And then I saw Uncle Alfredo get up, calmly, his face grown white, and give her a terrible backhanded slap. The blow was so violent that Aunt Olga fell from her chair, and in her fall she grabbed the tablecloth, pulling it with all the dishes after her. Uncle Alfredo left slowly and went down to the garage to work. Aunt Olga got up as if nothing had happened, began to pick up the dishes, swept the floor, put on a new tablecloth because the other one was a mess, set the table, and appeared at the stairwell. “Alfredo,” she shouted, “dinner’s ready!”

  When I left for Mar del Plata I was sixteen years old. Sewed inside my vest I wore a roll of pesos, and in my pocket a business card from the Pensione Albano—“hot and cold running water”—and a letter to the proprietor, an Italian friend of Uncle Alfredo’s, a friend of his youth. They had arrived in Argentina on the same ship and had always kept in touch. I was going to attend a boarding school run by Salesian Italians who had a conservatory, or something of the kind. My aunt and uncle had encouraged me. By this time I had finished the lower schools. I was not cut out to be a garage mechanic, this was immediately evident, and then Aunt Olga hoped that the city would change me. One evening I had heard her say, “Sometimes his eyes scare me, they’re so frightened. Who knows what he saw, poor boy? Who knows what he remembers?” I’m sure I was a little worrying in my way of doing things, I admit. I never talked, I blushed, I stammered, I often cried. Aunt Olga complained that the popular songs, with all those stupid words, ruined me. Uncle. Alfredo tried to arouse my interest by explaining camshafts and clutches to me, and in the evening he tried to persuade me to go with him to the Caffè Florida, where there were many Italians who played cards. But I preferred to stay next to the radio to listen to the music program. I adored the old tangos of Carlos Gardel, the melancholy sambas of Wilson Baptista, the popular songs of Doris Day, but I liked all music. And perhaps it was better for me to study music, if that was my inclination, but far away from the prairie, in a civilized place.

  Mar del Plata was a bizarre and fascinating city, deserted in the cold season and crowded in the vacation months, with huge white hotels, twentieth-century style, that in the off season emitted sadness. In that period it was a city of exotic seamen and of old people who had chosen to spend their last years of life there and who tried to keep each other company by taking turns at making appointments for tea on the terraces of the hotels or at the coffee-concerts, where shabby little orchestras caterwauled popular songs and tangos.

  I stayed two years at the Salesian conservatory. With Father Matteo, an old man, half-blind, with deathly pale hands, I studied Bach, Monteverdi, and Palestrina at the organ. The classes of general culture were held by Father Simone for the scientific part and Father Anselmo for the classical part, in which I was particularly gifted. I studied Latin willingly, but I preferred history, the lives of the saints, and the lives of illustrious men. Among those particularly dear to me were Leonardo da Vinci and Ludovico Antonio Muratori, who had gotten his education by eavesdropping under the window of a school, until one day the teacher had discovered him and told him, “Come into the classroom, poor boy!”

  In the evening I returned to the Pensione Albano. Work awaited me because the monthly allowance that Uncle Alfredo sent me was not enough. I slipped on a jacket that Señora Pepa made me wash twice a week and station
ed myself in the dining room, a room painted pale blue with around thirty tables and pictures of Italy on the walls. Our clients were pensioners, business agents, an occasional Italian immigrant to Buenos Aires who could permit himself the luxury of spending fifteen days at Mar del Plata. Signor Albano ran the kitchen. He knew how to make pansoti with walnuts and trenette al pesto: he was Ligurian, from Camogli. He was a follower of Peron. He said that he had lifted up a nation of lice. And then Eva was enchanting.

  When I found steady work at the “Bichinho” I wrote Uncle Alfredo not to send me my allowance anymore. It wasn’t that I was earning enough salary to fritter it away, but, well, it was enough for me, and it didn’t seem fair that Uncle Alfredo was fixing tractors in order to send me a few pesos every month. “O Bichinho” was a restaurant-nightclub run by a plump, cheerful Brazilian, Senhor Joño Paiva, where you could have supper at midnight and listen to native music. It was a place with pretensions of respectability and considered itself to be different from the other shady night clubs, even if whoever went there to look for company found it easily, but with discretion and with the complicity of the waiters, because the prostitution was not so exposed. Everything had a respectable appearance—forty tables with candles. At two tables in the rear of the room, near the coatroom, there were two young women sitting in front of a plate that was always empty, sipping an aperitif as if waiting for their order to arrive. And if a gentleman entered, the waiter guided him skillfully and asked him discreetly, “Do you prefer to dine alone or would you like the companionship of a lady?” I was an expert at these games because my job was at the rear of the room, while Ramón attended to the tables near the platform for the show. To make those propositions you needed tact, good manners. It was necessary to understand the client in order not to offend him. And who knows why by intuition I immediately understood the client? In short, I had a flair for it, and at the end of the month my tips were greater than my salary. Besides, Anita and Pilar were two generous girls.