You and I need to make a pact. I thought about it all night … what I mean is, I have something to ask you, too, so thinking about it some more, I want to do a little bartering. But first let’s be clear on something, because I don’t want you to convince yourself that I was the one who asked you to come … it was you, you know that better than me, I whistled and you came running, because that’s all you were waiting for … it was just too tempting … Sorry I’m only telling you this now, agreements should be worked out early on, like gentlemen do, sealing the deal with a handshake, but I was saying, and then I got a bit lost, even if I wanted to tell you first thing, believe me … okay, here it is … what I propose is that you say something in return … I want us to make a pact here, because I know you writers, at just the right moment, you’ll see something, maybe it stands out, you think something like this has nothing to do with the rest of the story, it interrupts the flow, and so long, into the garbage it goes … I’m telling this story but you’re the one writing it down, and who’s to guarantee you’ll include something if you think it’s insignificant and doesn’t matter?… But it does matter, it matters a great deal, and that’s why we need to make a pact: I tell you what I promised to tell you, but you write this detail down, because they say when something’s written down, it holds a different value … and be sure they know that it’s not just anybody asking for this; it’s a national hero, someone with a war cross on his chest, and who knows, maybe that’ll impress the British, the British value heroism, they’ve practiced it quite lavishly, and if they hadn’t been up there when Tristano was in the mountains … you can write this down: that Tristano truly admired them at that time … less at other times … because of what they did in other places, and you don’t have to go very far, just think of Daphne’s country, where they propped up that big fascist Field Marshall Papagos, so the Greeks got themselves a new Duce and a new king, after Metaxas, it’s the British concept of democracy in other people’s houses … But now let’s get down to it … personally, I don’t know the exact words to use — that’s your job — it’ll take tact and diplomacy, otherwise what kind of writer would you be … It’s about the Parthenon marbles … that’s what Tristano wants you to ask for, the marble friezes taken by a British lord who was ambassador to Turkey when the Ottomans controlled Greece, and who had the Parthenon flayed and the marbles transported to Great Britain, like a man who finds a lady lying unconscious on a deserted street and tears off her necklace for his wife … it was that exactly … flayed, that’s the word, writer, that thief had his workers use pick axes and sledgehammers … years ago I read an account of someone who witnessed that rape, but I’ll spare you the details … You know, they didn’t just take a painting, what you’d stick on a wall, they stole a whole landscape … supporters of this theft have their various views … I know: the friezes at the British Museum are gorgeously lit … as if fluorescent lights in England were somehow brighter than the sun in Greece … or that when the lord took them they weren’t friezes on the original temple anymore, because the Ottomans had turned it into a mosque … nice reasoning, but the Ottomans only changed the contents, a small thing — what’s it take to substitute one god for another? — they didn’t change the container in the least … such sweethearts, I’d really like to see how they’d react, these fine thinkers, if the spires of their Westminster Abbey wound up in the Athens Museum … The lord in question was Elgin, Lord Elgin, write it down, so the British won’t get him confused with some other lord, with all those lords they have in England … In short, write down that Tristano wants them to give those marbles back to their rightful owner, that it’s a sublime temple, and if Athena hadn’t built it, they wouldn’t have their House of Lords, they’d still be just a bunch of sheep herders … and maybe remind them of Byron, who died for these things, who knows, maybe that’ll have an impact … And if you want, add that along with the reasonable demands of normal diplomacy, these friezes were already requested by a great poet, though no one knew him because he lived like a nobody in rented rooms, Mr. Cavafy, and that Tristano wishes to repeat this poet’s polite request, which he made a century ago, so by now, it must have reached British ears … All right, here’s my proposaclass="underline" I tell you what you want to know, and you write down Tristano’s wish, I think you’re the one who’s getting the better end of things … Is it a deal? If it’s a deal, I trust you, it’s an old-fashioned pact, between gentlemen … a verbal pact … but for us everything is verbal, everything’s composed of words, right? A gentlemen’s agreement, as the British say … If it’s a deal, take my hand, I still know how to shake someone’s hand, and this will be the first time you ever touched me.
Do you know what a headache means? I’m not talking about a migraine, or a slight headache, this is something else again, it’s a bunch of different things at once, and it’s not easy explaining something that’s a bunch of different things at once … first off it’s a small noise, that’s how it starts, a strange bell, more like a whistle or a squeal, a sonar that arrives from far away, from deep, deep down, and you can feel it, and all of a sudden you see the fierce outlines of things, as if that whistle’s there in sight, intensifying, distorting, and you feel as if a prism has replaced your eyes, because contours, edges, objects have increased and filled up space, expanded, changed shape, and through this change, they no longer mean what they used to mean, the wardrobe, for instance, is now a cube, a cube and nothing more, it no longer has the sense of a wardrobe, and now everything is rippling, space is swelling like the tide, and here comes the ache of the headache sea, like a blowing bellows that you’re sitting on, swaying, you have to sit, and the floor turns fluid, and around you is a breathing lung that seems to be the entire universe, no, it’s inside you, and you’re on top and inside at the same time; you’re a dust mote floating in the alveoli of a monstrous lung that’s breathing in and out and you press on your temples, trying to hold back the waves bursting in your head like a tempest where you drown … this, this is a headache … Tristano had his first headache one August tenth, many things have happened to him, to Tristano, in August, his life is marked by August, there are men like that, it’s Uranus, Saturn, so many things, I’ve forgotten many of them, but not this, that would be impossible, August tenth is San Lorenzo Day, the day of shooting stars, and maybe one dropped right on his head, a meteorite, but it wasn’t at night, it was noon, and he was right here in this house where he’d come back to do nothing, sitting under the pergola, and he was staring at a bunch of unripe grapes, counting them off like the years of his life, one grape one grape one grape for you, he whispered, a silly little ditty, and there were already so many grapes, and right then he grew aware of a strange whistle he’d never heard before, the bunch of grapes stopped being a bunch of grapes, the air cracked into fissures, nausea rose in his throat, and he staggered across the veranda as though he were on the quarterdeck of a ship tossing in the waves, and he reached his room, closed the shutters, threw himself onto the bed and clutched his pillow, and he was off on the first of those wretched journeys that would accompany him a long while, through miasmas, locust-filled clouds, a glaring expanse of nothing in all directions … He died the day before, you know, he blew up, with his instruments of death — his boy — that he loved more than a son … goddamn him …