Also by Antonio Tabucchi
Indian Nocturne
It’s Getting Later All the Time
Letter from Casablanca
Little Misunderstandings of No Importance
The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro
Pereira Declares
Requiem
“Having been” belongs in some way to
a “third kind,” radically heterogeneous to both
being and non-being.—VLADIMIR JANKELEVITCH
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Author’s Note
Copyright Page
1
To open the drawers you have to turn the handle and press down. This disconnects the spring, the mechanism is set off with a slight metallic click, and the ball bearings automatically begin to slide. The drawers are stacked at a slight angle and run out of their own accord on small rails. First you see the feet, then the stomach, then the chest, then the head of the corpse. Sometimes, when an autopsy hasn’t been performed, you have to help the mechanism by pulling the drawer with your hands, since some of the corpses will have bloated stomachs which press against the drawer above and so get stuck. The corpses which have been autopsied on the other hand are dry, as though drained, with a sort of zip fastener along their stomachs and their innards stuffed with sawdust. They make you think of big dolls, oversized puppets from a show whose run has ended, tossed away in a store for old bric-a-brac. And in a way this is life’s storehouse. Before their final disappearance, the discarded products of the scene find a last home here while waiting for suitable classification, since the causes of their deaths cannot be left in doubt. That’s why they are lying here, and he looks after them and watches over them. He manages the anteroom that leads to the definitive disappearance of their visible image; he records their entry and their departure; he classifies them; he numbers them; sometimes he photographs them; he fills in the file-card that will allow them to vanish from the world of the senses; he hands out their final ticket. He is their last companion, and something more, like a posthumous guardian, impassive and objective.
Then is the distance that separates the living from the dead, he sometimes wonders, really so great? He’s unable to answer his own question. In any event cohabitation, if we can call it that, helps to reduce that distance. The corpses have to have a little card attached to their big toes with a registration number, but he’s sure that, in the remote way in which they are present, they detest being classified with a number as if they were objects. Because of this, when he thinks about them himself he gives them jokey nicknames, some entirely random, others suggested by a vague likeness to, or circumstance in common with, some character in an old film: Mae West, Professor Unrat, Marcelino Pan y Vino. Pablito Calvo, for example, is the exact double of Marcelino: round face, knobbly knees, a short shiny black fringe. Thirteen years old, Pablito was working illegally when he fell off some scaffolding. The father can’t be found, the mother lives in Sardinia and can’t come. They’ll be sending him back to her tomorrow.
Of the original hospital, only the temporary reception ward and the morgue are still here in this old part of town, otherwise referred to as the historic center. For a long time now this area has been considered a site for study and restoration. But the years go by, local governments alternate, vested interests change and the part to be restored grows more and more decrepit. And then the city encroaches menacingly from other areas, drawing the attention of the experts elsewhere, to suburbs where the “productive” population is ever more densely settled, where huge dormitories have been built. It’s the buildings in these areas that demand the time of the municipal engineers. Sometimes the hillside will slip, as if it wanted to shrug off those ugly encrustations—and urgent measures are introduced, special funds made available. Then there are roads to be built, sewers and gas pipes to be linked up, schools, nurseries, clinics. Here in the center, on the other hand, the agony is diffuse, a slow leprosy that has invaded walls and houses whose decay is stealthy and irreversible, like a pending death sentence. Here live pensioners, prostitutes, street vendors, fishmongers, unemployed young layabouts, grocers with ancient, damp, dark shops that smell of spices and dried cod, above whose doors one can barely make out faded signs announcing: “Wines—Colonial Products—Tobaccos.” The garbage men rarely come by; even they disdain the leavings of this second-class humanity. In the evening syringes glitter in the narrow streets, there are plastic bags, and sometimes the shapeless mass of a rat dead in a corner where a phosphorescent poster put up by the Pest Control Department warns you not to touch the verdigris-colored bait scattered on the ground.
Sara has frequently said she’d like to come and pick him up on those evenings his shift finishes at ten, but he has always forbidden her. Not so much for fear of the people; in the evening the narrow street is home for three quiet prostitutes who have watchful pimps at first-floor windows. No, what worries him most are the bands of rats that roam around aggressively in the evening. Sara has no idea how big they are; he’s sure she would be terrified; she can’t imagine what they’re like. True, the city abounds in rats, but this area has its own special breed. Spino has a theory, but he’s never told anyone, least of all Sara. He thinks it’s the morgue that attracts them.
2
Saturday evenings they usually go to the Magic Lantern. It’s a film club at the top of Vico dei Carbonari in a small courtyard that looks like some corner of a country village and reminds you of farmhouses, patches of countryside, times past. From up here you can see the harbor, the open sea, the tangle of tiny streets in the old Jewish ghetto, the pinkish bell tower of a church hemmed in between walls and houses, invisible from other parts of the city, unsuspected. You have to climb a brick stairway worn by long use, a long shiny iron bar serving as a handrail, twisting along a pitted wall invaded by tufts of caper plants obscuring faded graffiti. You can still read: “Long live Coppi” and “The exploiters’ law shall not pass.” Things from years gone by. On summer nights, after the film, they wind up their evening in a small café at the end of the narrow street where two blocks of granite with a chain between them mark off a little terrace complete with pergola and surrounded by a shaky wall. There are four small tables with green iron legs and marble tops where the circles of wine and coffee the stone has absorbed and made its own trace out hieroglyphics, little patterns to interpret, the archaeology of a recent past of other customers, other evenings, drinking bouts perhaps, late nights with card games and singing.
Beneath them the untidy geometry of the city falls sheer away together with the lights of villages along the bay, the world. Sara has a mint granita that they still make here using a primitive little gadget. With a grater fitted inside a small aluminum box, it scrapes the fragments of ice together compact and soft as snow. The proprietor is a fat man with bags under his eyes and a lazy walk. He wears a white apron that emphasizes his paunch, he smiles, he pronounces his always miserable weather predictions: “Tomorrow it’ll get colder, the wind is from the east” or “This haze’ll bring rain.” He prides himself on knowing the winds and weather; he was a seaman when he was younger; he worked on a steamship on the Americas ro
ute.
Even when it’s hot Sara draws in her legs and covers her shoulders with a shawl, since the night air gives her pains in her joints. She looks towards the sea, a brooding mass that might be the night itself were it not for the stationary lights of the ships waiting to come into harbor. “How nice it would be to get away,” she says, “wouldn’t it?” Sara has been saying how nice it would be to get away for ten years now, and he answers her that one day maybe, sooner or later, they ought to do it. By tacit agreement their exchanges on this subject have never gone beyond these two ritual phrases: yet all the same he knows that Sara dreams of their impossible departure. He knows because it isn’t difficult for him to get close to her dreams. There’s an ocean liner in her fantasies, with a deckchair under cover and a plaid blanket to protect her from the sea breeze, and some men in white trousers at the end of the deck are playing a game the English play. It takes twenty days to get to South America, but to which city isn’t specified: Mar del Plata, Montevideo, Salvador de Bahia, it doesn’t matter: South America is small in the space of a dream. It’s a film with Myrna Loy that Sara liked a lot: the evenings are stylish, there’s dancing on board, the deck is lit up by garlands of lights and the band plays “What a Night, What a Moon, What a Girl” or some tango from the thirties, like “Por una cabeza.” She’s wearing an evening dress with a white scarf, she lets the dashing captain flirt with her and waits for her partner to leave the infirmary and come and dance with her. Because, of course, as well as being her partner, Spino is also the ship’s doctor.
If Sara’s dream is not exactly that, then it’s certainly something very like it. The evening they saw Southern Waters she looked so wistful; she hugged his arm tight, and while she was eating her granita went back to the old chestnut of his unfinished degree. These days even the line that he is too old doesn’t deter her. Won’t she accept, he says, once and for all, that at his age you don’t feel like going back to school any more? And then the exam registration booklet, the bureaucracy, his old college friends who would be his examiners now. It would be intolerable. But it’s no good, she doesn’t give up: life is long, she says, longer maybe than one expects, and you don’t have the right to throw it away. At which he prefers to look off into the distance, doesn’t answer, falls silent to let the matter drop and to avoid it leading to another argument that’s connected to his not getting his degree. It’s a subject that distresses him: he understands well enough how she feels about it, but what can he do? Of course at their age this life as secret lovers is a somewhat inconvenient eccentricity, but it’s so difficult to break with old habits, to pass suddenly into married life. And then, the idea of becoming the father of that evasive eighteen-year-old with his absurd way of speaking and indolent, slovenly manner terrifies him. Sometimes he sees the boy walk by on his way back from school and thinks: I would be your father, your substitute father.
No, this is definitely not something he wants to talk about. But Sara doesn’t want to talk about it either; she wants him to want to. So like him she doesn’t mention it; instead she talks about films. The Magic Lantern has been holding two retrospectives dedicated to Myrna Loy and Humphrey Bogart; they even showed Strictly Confidential: there’s more than enough for them to chew over here. Did he notice the scarves Myrna Loy was wearing? Of course he did, for heaven’s sake, they’re so flashy; but Bogart’s foulards as well, always so fluffy and with those polka dots, truly unbearable . . . sometimes it seems like wafts of cologne and Brylcreem are coming off the screen. Sara laughs quietly, with that delicate way of catching her breath she has. But why don’t they have a retrospective for Virginia Mayo, too? That Bogart treated her like a dog, the bastard. She has a special soft spot for Virginia Mayo, who died in a motel room, destroyed by alcohol, because he’d dropped her. But, by the way, that ship in the harbor, doesn’t it look like a liner? It has too many lights, she thinks, to be a cargo ship. He isn’t sure, hmm, no, he wouldn’t know. Though perhaps, no, they don’t have ocean liners anymore these days, they’re all in the breakers’ yards, just a few left for cruises. People travel by plane these days, who would cross the Atlantic in a liner? She says: “Right, you’re right,” but he senses from her tone that she doesn’t agree, is merely resigned. Meanwhile the proprietor of the café moves around with a cloth in his hand, wiping the empty tables. It’s a silent message: if they would be so kind as to call it a day he could close down and get off to bed, he’s been on his feet since eight this morning and the years weigh heavier than his paunch. Then the breeze has got a bit cool; the night is oppressively silent and humid; you can feel a film of brine on the arms of the chairs; perhaps they really had better go. Sara agrees it would be better. Her eyes are bright, he never knows whether this is emotion or merely tiredness. “I’d like you to sleep with me tonight,” she tells him. Spino says he’d like to as well. But tomorrow is his day off, she’ll come to his place in the morning and they’ll be together until evening. He’ll prepare a quick snack to eat in the kitchen and they can spend the whole afternoon in bed. She whispers what a shame it is they met so late in life, when everything was already settled; she’s sure she would have been happy with him. Perhaps he’s thinking the same thing, but to cheer her up he tells her no, it’s one thing being lovers and quite another being married, the daily routine is love’s worst enemy, it grinds it down.
The proprietor of the café is already lowering his shutters and mumbles goodnight under his breath.
3
They brought him in in the middle of the night. The ambulance arrived quietly, its headlights dimmed, and Spino immediately thought: something horrific has happened. He had the impression he’d been asleep and yet he picked up the sound of the ambulance’s motor perfectly clearly, heard it turn into the narrow street too calmly, as if there were nothing more that could be done, and he sensed how death arrives slowly, how that is death’s real pace, unhurried and inexorable.
At this time of night the city is asleep, this city which never rests during the day. The noise of the traffic dies down, just every now and then the lonely roar of a truck from along the coast road. Through the empty expanses of night-time silence comes the hum of the steelworks that stands guard over the town to the west, like some ghostly sentinel with lunar lighting. The doors of the ambulance echoed wearily in the courtyard, then he heard the sliding door open and felt he was picking up that smell the night’s chill leaves in people’s clothes, not unlike the sour, slightly unpleasant smell some rooms have when they’ve been slept in. There were four policemen, their faces ashen, four boys with dark hair and the movements of sleepwalkers. They said nothing. A fifth had stayed outside and stammered something in the dark that Spino couldn’t catch. At which the four went out, moving as though they didn’t really know what they were doing. He had the impression of witnessing a graceful, funereal ballet whose choreography he couldn’t understand.
Then they came in again with a corpse on a stretcher. Everything was done in silence. They shifted the corpse from the stretcher and Spino laid it out on the stainless-steel slab. He opened the stiffened hands, tied the jaws tight with a bandage. He didn’t ask anything, because everything was only too clear, and what did the mere mechanics of the facts matter? He recorded the time of arrival in the register and pushed the bell that rang on the first floor to get the doctor on duty to come and certify death. The four boys sat down on the enameled bench and smoked. They seemed shipwrecked. Then the doctor came down and started to talk and write. He looked at the fifth boy, who was wounded and was moaning softly. Spino telephoned the New Hospital and told them to prepare the operating theater for an urgent case, then immediately arranged for the boy to be sent there. “We haven’t even got any instruments here,” he said. “We’re just a morgue now.”
The doctor went out by the back stairs and someone, one of the boys, sobbed and murmured: “Mother,” pushing his hands into his eyes, as if to erase a scene that had been etched there. At which Spino felt an oppressive tiredness, as though the tire
dness of everything around him were bearing down on his shoulders. He went outside and sensed that even the courtyard was tired, and the walls of this old hospital were tired, the windows too, and the city, and everything. He looked up and had the impression that even the stars were tired, and he wished there were some escape from this universal tiredness, some kind of postponement or forgetting.
4
He walked all morning by the harbor. He got as far as the Customs and the cargo docks. There was an ugly ship with “Liberia” written on the poop, unloading bags and boxes. A black man leaning against the guard-rail watching the unloading procedure waved to him and he waved back. Then a thick bank of low cloud rose from the sea and only moments later had reached the shore, wrapping itself round the lighthouse and the derricks, which dissolved in fog. The harbor grew dark and the iron structures shiny. He crossed the Piazza delle Vettovaglie and went to the elevator cars that go up to the hills beyond the bastion of apartment blocks framing the city. There was no one on the cars now, they fill up in the late afternoon when people come home from work. The operator is a little old man with a smoke-dark suit and a wooden hand. On his lapel he wears a disabled veteran’s ribbon. He’s extremely efficient at using his one good hand to operate the levers and that strange iron ring that looks like the controls of a tram. Alongside the windows of the cabin, which in this first stretch of the journey runs on rails like a funicular, blank walls of houses march by, interrupted by small dark openings inhabited by cats, gates leading through to courtyards where you can glimpse a little washbowl, a rusty bicycle, geraniums and basil planted in tuna cans. Then all at once the walls open up: it’s as if the car had burst through the roofs and was headed straight for the sky. For a moment you feel you’re hanging in the void, the traction cables slide silently; the harbor and the buildings fall away rapidly below; you almost have the impression that the lifting movement will never stop; the law of gravity seems an absurdity and the town a toy it’s a relief to be leaving behind you.
The Edge of the Horizon Page 1
