Little Misunderstandings of No Importance

by Antonio Tabucchi

  That danger more than ever hung over us, that everything was worse than before, that the real guilty party must be struck … it had to be done and Saturday was only forty-eight hours off. The suitcase dragged out again from under the bed, her thin hands with the bitten nails working over the white suit of that curious doll with the bow tie and the smile.… How do you like him, tell me. Doesn’t he remind you of somebody? Now we take this string, we have to make knots, a little knot here, a little knot there, and you must repeat this word after me, no, not like that, silly, but as if you meant it, otherwise it won’t work. And finally that big pin, brandished like a dagger in search of the right place to strike—the eyes, the heart, the throat … we had to decide. And what did I advise? I advised nothing, I didn’t want to advise. It was no longer a game, the way it was in other years, a game to pass the summer away.

  On Saturday evening Uncle Tullio took us to the Bathhouse. Son of Tarzan was no longer playing; there was only a film we couldn’t see because minors weren’t allowed, but we had a fine walk, all the finer because Clelia had consented to come along. Aunt Esther was radiant, you could read it on her face. We stayed late so as to hear the band. Aunt Esther ordered a fancy ice cream and Clelia and I sat among the potted palms, listening to Mamma solo per te la mia canzone vola and picking up the caps from bottles of Recoaro, which bore the same design as that on the T-shirts worn at championship soccer matches. Aunt Esther and Uncle Tullio danced on the platform bordered with potted palms and then we went home by the shore road. It was a beautiful evening and the tree-lined road was quiet and cool. Aunt Esther and Uncle Tullio walked briskly, arm in arm, and Clelia hummed as if she were happy. I felt as if we were back in the summers that had gone before, when everything was yet to happen. I wanted to hug my aunt and uncle or write to my father not to come for me, to pay no heed to my wish to see him arrive in a red car, because I was content with things the way they were. But Clelia tugged at my sleeve and said: It’ll happen tomorrow, you’ll see.

  But on the morrow nothing happened. The morning was superb and we went to the nine o’clock Mass so as to avoid the noonday heat. Aunt Esther had a headache—because of the follies of the night before, she said contritely—but her eyes were shining with joy. Flora had made a fish chowder and the house was filled with an appetizing smell. Cece was convalescing in princely style in his basket and Flora was thrilled because there was a film at the Don Bosco with her favourite actress, Yvonne Sanson. Sunday dinner was a better occasion than any in a long time, filled with laughing and chatter. Then Aunt Esther went to take her nap, saying we’d meet again at teatime. Uncle Tullio had something to do in the garage; if I wanted to go with him he’d show me how to take the distributor apart. I shot a glance at Clelia, but I couldn’t make out if there was any danger involved. I liked the idea of fooling around with the distributor, but I didn’t want to cause Clelia any worry and so I said yes, I’d be glad to serve as assistant mechanic, but not for too long, because Clelia and I were reading a very exciting book, which we wanted to finish. As I said these words I broke out into perspiration. But Uncle Tullio didn’t notice, he was pleased with the way the day was going. In the garage he put on a pair of rubber gloves so as not to dirty his hands and opened up the hood. Here’s the engine block, here’s the dynamo, here’s the fan, there are the spark plugs … give me the toolbox, it’s on the workbench over there to the right. To take apart the distributor all you do is press on the two springs, then use the screwdriver to loosen these two screws, that’s it, very good, just be careful not to pull too hard so you won’t snap the wires. It was a fine car, not brand-new like my father’s Aprilia, but nothing to turn up your nose at; it could get up to a hundred and ten kilometers an hour. I worked until four o’clock, when I went into the house, leaving Uncle Tullio with his head still buried in the engine. Flora was probably sleeping in the deck chair on the back porch; she’d be going to see the film that evening and she wouldn’t want to doze off in the middle. Cece was lying under the small sofa in the entrance hall, sticking his head out every once in a while. I tiptoed upstairs and knocked softly at Clelia’s door. Everything’s going right, she said, with an incomprehensible gesture, he suspects nothing, it seems to me, what do you think? I said it seemed to me, too, that he suspected nothing, but wouldn’t it be wise to think twice about it? Uncle Tullio was such a good fellow, and our game was turning into something … something evil; she’d have to forgive the word, but that was what I honestly thought. Clelia looked at me in silence; the house was silent and even the usual noises from the shore were lacking. I wished that someone, anyone, would give signs of life—Aunt Esther, Flora, Cece—but there wasn’t a sound and I was afraid even to breathe. Because now there was no way of turning back, everything was ready, and only an hour was left before the appointed time; the hands of the clock in the entrance hall were ticking away, inexorably. Then I said: I’ll go down. But an indeterminate time had gone by when I said it; I was sitting on the rug near the half-open window and I had dreamed—or was dreaming—my father was driving along the shore in a red car and smiling at me. He was smiling at the wind, but the smile was meant for me and I was sitting there, waiting, and at the same time I saw him and waved my hand to tell him to stop. Then Clelia touched my shoulder and said let’s go, and I followed her down the stairs as if I were somewhere else. In the dining room Flora had set the table for tea, so quietly that no one could hear; there were the teapot, the pitcher of lemonade, the toast and biscuits. Clelia sat down and I followed her example; Flora arrived promptly and said that the grown-ups would be there in a minute and we could begin. Uncle Tullio came in from the garden and Flora went upstairs to call Aunt Esther. She knocked at the door on the balcony and said: Signora, tea is ready. I was just starting to butter a piece of toast when Flora cried out. She was at the doorway of Aunt Esther’s room, holding one hand over her mouth as if to prevent herself from crying out again, but another shrill, choked moan of horror and despair broke out of her throat. Clelia got up, overturning a cup of tea, and started to run towards the stairs, but Uncle Tullio prevented her. He, too, had got up and was looking with stupor at Flora, all the time holding Clelia close to him as if to protect her. I saw that she had taken off her glasses and her eye was rolling dizzily. She looked at me in a terrible manner, with an expression of terror and nausea and also of bewilderment on her face, as if she were silently begging for my help. But how could I help her, what could I do? Write to my father? I would have done that, with all my heart, but my father wasn’t like Constantine Dragases. From where he was he couldn’t send me even a facsimile of his feet to meet my memories halfway.

  ROOMS

  A melia looked at the light veil of mist, descending in the distance, over the roof of the house, and thought: it’s late, we’ve got to hurry. The path was steep and winding, paved with wide strips of granite; in the evening dampness it was like a petrified stream. There were clumps of rosemary and sage on either side; the air was cool and intensely fragrant and the hillside was carpeted with yellow splotches. October’s here again, thought Amelia; perhaps tomorrow we’ll have our first day of rain. Amelia always talked to herself in the first person plural; it was a habit she’d had for years, and if she had stopped to reflect, she wouldn’t have been able to say when it had begun. She had lingered longer than she should at the organ and this gave her a twinge of worry. But it was irresistible, so much did she enjoy practising Pergolesi in the deserted church. Vespers were over, the little old women had drifted away, and the priest always let her be the one to finally shut the small side door, which closed with a click behind her. In the adjacent rectory the windows were already lit up; over the countryside the light had taken on the deepening blue colour of approaching night. We played much too well, Amelia said to herself, and quickened her steps.

  From the churchyard she could see nothing of her house but the roof and the top-floor windows. The vine that climbed its twisting way up to the window sills was already half bare in prep
aration for the autumn, and there was a dim light in Guido’s window from the shaded lamp on the bedside table. Beside the brass lamp, on the yellowed lace cloth, there were a Dante with a gilt binding like that of a Book of Hours, a crystal bottle marked off to indicate the dose of medicine for minor crises, an ivory box containing a mother-of-pearl rosary and a horn of red coral. As Amelia walked she reviewed these objects in her mind with the total recall born of long acquaintance with the detailed topography of a given room. A walnut cabinet occupied the far wall. In it her mother had kept the household linens and Amelia still used it for the heavy, yellowed sheets which had enveloped the sleep of preceding generations. Once upon a time the cabinet had had a key that stood out, for its large size, among the bunch hung from a nail in the wardrobe, with tags specifying, in brown ink, pantry, cupboard, clothes closet, storage room. To the right of the cabinet there was a small, marble-topped table where, when he was well enough to get up, Guido had sat to write, looking out of the window at the treetops and the slope of the hill. In a folding chessboard, in the right-hand drawer, Guido kept a diary, which, for years, Amelia had read every morning, comparing her impressions of the day before with those of her brother. She thought how bogus all writing really was—the implacable tyranny of circumscribing words, of verbs and adjectives that imprison things, hardening them into a glassy fixity, like a dragonfly caught for centuries in a rock, which keeps the appearance of a dragonfly but is one no longer. Such is writing, with its capacity to pin down the present and the recent past and distance them, by centuries, from us. But things are fuzzy-edged, thought Amelia; they are alive because they are fuzzy-edged, without borders, and do not let themselves be imprisoned by words.

  The books of a lifetime were lined up on the table. Some were bound in old leather, others in cardboard processed to look like blue marble with ash-coloured veins running through it: the New Testament, an eighteenth-century Aeneid printed in Paris by the Frères Michaud, Tasso’s Aminta, Petrarch, Shelley, the lyrical poems of Goethe, Manzoni’s Adelchi, Alfieri’s Vita. In the upper right-hand corner of the blank page before the frontispiece there was the owner’s bookplate: the sepia picture of a lighthouse throwing its beam over a night-time sea and beneath it, in italics, guido with a small g.

  In the left-hand drawer, tied together with ribbons of various colours, were all the letters that Guido had received in the course of his life. Amelia had, for years, kept them organized, cataloguing them in order of importance: Academy, University, Italian and foreign writers, magazines, appeals for aid. Some began: Dear Master and Friend, others simply: Your Excellency, in a pompous and fluttery hand. During the recent months of his illness, there were only a few letters from tried-and-true friends and a formal one from the Academy, expressing concern for his health and wishing him a speedy recovery. To this Amelia had replied with a polite short note: “My brother is not able to answer you personally for the moment. I appreciate your generous thought.”

  On the chest of drawers, with a mirror, next to the window, there were photographs, mostly of Guido and herself, with one of their mother as a child. Amelia had chosen to keep those of their father and mother together on the chest in her own room. As she walked, Amelia looked at the photographs and thought about how time goes by. Time goes by. In the first photograph Guido was twelve years old, wearing a grown-man’s jacket and short velveteen trousers, buttoned at the knee. His feet were enclosed in high-buckled boots, the right one propped up on a tree stump intended by the photographer to produce a rustic air. On the backdrop there was an incongruous balcony giving onto something like the bay of Naples, without the pine trees or Vesuvius. In the lower right-hand corner was the handwritten signature: Savinelli, Photo Studio.

  Amelia looked at the photograph beside it, where already ten years had gone by. It was in a silver frame with a winding mark around the edges from the humidity, like the line left by a wave on the shore. Guido was at Amelia’s left, offering her his right arm, on which she leaned lightly, like a bride. He was wearing a dark suit and a wide tie and his left hand was holding his hat, by the rim, against his thigh. She was wearing a white, slightly fluffy dress with a ribbon around the waist. A straw hat shaded her forehead all the way down to the barely visible eyes, but the rest of her face was flooded with light and an ingenuous, perhaps happy smile revealed a row of white teeth. It was summer and behind them the pergola, overgrown with grapevines, outlined puddles of shade in the courtyard. On the wrought-iron table there was a pitcher, which someone had filled with flowers. Brother and sister seemed like a bride and groom immediately after the ceremony. Yes, on the day when Guido received his university degree, there was a party under the pergola; Amelia remembered it perfectly. Father and mother weren’t.yet dead; father had overdone it with the food and drink and now he was sitting in the shade of the porch, his face shiny and his waistcoat unbuttoned so that his big paunch could be seen rising and falling under his shirt as he drew breath. Father, thought Amelia, overcome by nostalgia. She had no such nostalgia for her mother; she thought of her with little or no sorrow, only with a faint regret faded by memory. She was a pale, slight, silent woman, who tiptoed through the house and through life. She had died early, before Amelia knew what real sorrow was, leaving almost imperceptible traces: the memory of her rustling skirt and pale hands, of the way she brushed her long hair, which she camouflaged in a braid rolled up at the nape of her neck. Father, on the other hand, had a loud voice, his footsteps rang out through the house and he filled it with his presence. He gave her big hugs which made for a feeling of safety and for a strange warmth, which caused her to blush.

  Amelia was aware of hating this photograph. She learned to hate it years later, when hatred no longer made sense. She knew and preferred not to know the real reason. In that faraway moment captured by the lens she preferred to think that what annoyed her were insignificant details: her own infantile, almost stupid smile, the slope of Guido’s right shoulder, indicative, perhaps, of embarrassment, yes, insignificant things. And then there were two other photographs beside it, which she didn’t hate; they were part of her real life, after the choices had been made. Yes, the choices.

  What choices? Amelia asked as she walked along, pushing away the shoot of a blackberry bush which had fallen across the path. For some time now she had carried a cane; not that she was so old, she walked perfectly well without support, but she liked to go out on Sunday afternoons with the cane that had belonged to her father, a slender, elegant bamboo cane, with a silver knob in the shape of a small dog’s head. What choices?

  In the third photograph Guido had a solemn, ceremonious expression. He was wearing an academic gown and holding a rolled-up parchment in one hand while with the other he leaned on the edge of a dry fountain in the University cloisters. The last photograph had been taken at an official dinner where Guido, as guest of honour, was seated at the head of the table. It had been snapped when the dinner was nearly over and wine had dissolved the artificial solemnity of the participants’ faces, leaving them relaxed and defenceless. There were writers and artists; the scrawny little man at the end of the table was a famous musician whom she had always found as insipid as his compositions. She was at her brother’s right hand; her eyes reflected satisfaction and contentment, but her lips had narrowed in comparison with those in her eighteen-year-old image. They had lost their openness and generosity, they were tight, cautious, watchful of words, thoughts, and life.

  Time is very strange.

  “Signor Guido has had an attack,” Cesarina told her in a low voice. “The pain must have been unbearable, because he bit his hands so that he wouldn’t cry out, then he moaned like an animal. Now he’s dozed off; he couldn’t stand it any longer.”

  Cesarina was a young, married woman with a peaches-and-cream complexion and enormous breasts, a creature of milk and blood. She had brought her last-born baby with her and laid him to sleep in a straw basket on a shelf on the kitchen cabinet. He was a quiet child, who woke up only when he was h
ungry, and she nursed him, perching on a high stool. She had taken her mother’s place in the household. Her mother’s name was Fanny, and she had spent her whole life in the family’s service. Fanny was the same age as Amelia and, as children, they had played together. If Amelia had married she might now have a daughter of Cesarina’s age—this thought occasionally crossed her mind—and a couple of grandchildren.

  Now she told Cesarina thanks; she would take over. This had become a regular thing. The girl should go home; it was late and the road to the village was dark and riddled with holes. She answered the girl’s goodnight and picked up the pitcher of water. “The soup’s ready,” Cesarina added. “I made a light beef broth.” As Amelia went up the stairs she heard the sound of the garden gate opening and closing. After that there was only the faint sound of her own footsteps. A ray of dim light filtered through the crack of the door to Guido’s room; as she went by she heard his laboured, lugubrious breathing. Gingerly she opened the adjacent door of her own room and gingerly shut it, with the old wood barely creaking behind her. She took off her coat in the darkness and hung it on the three-legged coat-stand beside the door. On the chest of drawers a perpetual light burned before the photograph of her father and mother, two ancient faces against a faded background, smiling at nothingness. In the semi-darkness she reached for her dressing gown and opened the window. The air was sharp and the moon, rising over the hill, cast a halo, broken only by the trees. Amelia stretched out on the bed, still looking out into the night. This was her parents’ bed; here, many years ago, two people had conceived her. The bed stood against the wall which divided it from Guido’s bed. Just so, they had been divided by a wall for so long a time. Amelia thought of this and then, again, of time. She could almost hear it glide by, now that the countryside lay sleeping in silence; it hummed with the sound of a subterranean river. She thought of how many nights she had slept in this bed, thinking of the person asleep on the other side of the wall. And she thought of hate. Hate, too, is a fuzzy-edged, elusive thing, it refuses to be imprisoned by words, it has multiple shapes, shadings, fringes, paces, fluxes and refluxes and imperceptible shifts between light and darkness. Hate can make you wish somebody would die. For a long time, in secret, she had nursed such a wish. She couldn’t say when it had started, for hate has a strange way of taking concrete shape. Before it becomes definite and definable it has already been born within us, it silently pre-existed, hidden in some recess of the mind. And then, perhaps it wasn’t hate after all. Amelia thought of the expression: recesses of the mind. How very apt it was, for the mind has many recesses.