Ferruccio said if you start looking in the most hidden crevices of society, anywhere you look, you’ll find madness. But all those brave enough to look were mad themselves … Sorry to cut off Tristano’s dream … I didn’t get to finish it myself, there came a point when the dream was interrupted by some guy riding along on a donkey, I think, and then I was really asleep, the drugs must have worn off, and so did the hallucination, Frau told me there hadn’t been a storm, she’s always one for giving out bad news, she’s spent her life giving out bad news, she comes in and says, young sir, the evening storm they predicted last night didn’t come, so it’s hotter than it was before, but your room’s cooler than anywhere else in the house, so you should be content, the nurse is taking two days off, her son has the chickenpox, I was the one who stayed with you last night, and you slept like an angel, not one peep out of you, it’s time for your morphine, but I’m not going to give it to you, it’s poisoning you, I’m not saying you’re not hurting, but your life’s been better than mine, and I never complain, you ever hear me complain? Do you?
Writer, you know who Tristano was fighting for? Go on … of course you do, you’re just not thinking … one day Tristano realized, just like that, a flash of insight, one of those things … what’s that called in literature?… you know, when reality’s fixed like concrete, and then, as if by an act of god, there’s suddenly a crack, and you can peer into that crack, and you understand … it’s like a tiny miracle, am I making myself clear? Well … never mind … Tristano understood who it was he’d struggled for — who it was he’d fought and killed and risked being killed for … and what all the pain and suffering and ideals were for. It was for pippopippi. That’s what I call it because that’s what Tristano called that thing over there, pippopippi, and it’s not just the gadget, I mean the box, the physical object, the empirical evidence, the visible thing. The pippopippi that Tristano understood was some sort of god, some entirely new, unknown god, whose religion was an absence of religion and so devoid of any substance … and this very lack of substance was the source of its extraordinary power, superior to any ity or ism, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islamism, Shintoism, Taoism, it could participate in all of these and be no one, revealing, then, a nature that was both protein and absolute, not pure spirit, visible and illusory at once, the projection of itself and all things, dreams and desires, everything and nothing, composed of electrons, of energy, but not of molecules … Curiously, Tristano understood this without watching pippopippi, because when you watch it, it isn’t it; it’s only its hypostasis … Tristano understood the essence of pippopippi one summer night, while standing on the terrace off this room, it was an extremely clear night and he was staring up at the starry sky and thinking about Doctor Ziegler’s theories, and while he was looking for the Big Dipper or Orion, he caught sight of a star that was moving, that wasn’t a star, because it was moving and too sparkly, so it had to be artificial, and he thought he caught the beep beep of this new star out in sidereal space and it seemed to him that he was catching something in code, and he was hearing … don’t think, people, don’t think, remember not to think, thinking’s hard, it’s useless, you started thinking to make a tool from flint and then came the earthenware pot and the shovel and the chamber pot and Zyklon B and the atomic bomb, yep, good job thinking, you must be tired of thinking, just think of me and I’ll think of you, so you’ll have done your thinking, I’m pippopippi and I’ll protect you from thought itself … Tristano looked down over the plain dotted with lights from the houses, then farther, to the light from the city, the smear of yellow reflected in the night sky, and the voice of that artificial star seemed to draw all those lights together, and all those lights together let out a distant roar, like the ground churning from an earthquake, a rumbling, a grumbling all together, a Biblical sound, like something from the Book of Revelations, and this is what they rumbled: pippopippi, we’re thinking your thoughts, thank you, pippopippi … Ah, it was a bad dream, and he started having nightmares, now pippopippi’s voice began to visit him even during REM, what Doctor Ziegler called deep sleep, and its voice was flute-like or falsetto, a confessor’s whisper through the confessional grate: don’t think, remember not to think, let me think for you, Tristano, you fought for freedom and freedom’s come: it’s being liberated from thinking, no longer thinking … real freedom’s when you’re thought.
Do you know the poem that goes, long shadows over the sea, your smile, my love, and your caresses soon grow resigned, like shadows at night … and then it continues with the horizon, the waves, and all the other clichés? You know that one? Don’t tell me you know it … it doesn’t exist, no one ever wrote it, and it sounds so ordinary, let’s just put it to rest.
… but he wouldn’t cry, he mustn’t cry, he didn’t like crying. And laughing? It’s nothing to laugh at, the ridens philosopher said, laughing while he spoke … That unfree man was breathless pain that brought on choking rage, and what else could he do but scream madly into the void, cry and cluck in the vineyard, when the midday is silent heat, grinding teeth, and wails of grief, killing even the shrilling of the cicada?… Listen, listen, how did the Abderites diagnose him … you never heard of them? That’s what he called them, those doctors putting on their highfalutin doctor airs … a diagnosis with the stamp of the local health department, complete with case history and description, listen now, this was their diagnosis … man gaunt in appearance, long beard, eyes at times cloudy as though affected by choleric humors that render the cornea yellow, swearing under breath not infrequent, normally won’t respond to even the most basic questions, as though he is elsewhere, so remains silent during medical session, and still quiet, gets up to leave without turning around, and if he does turn around, makes a bizarre gesture more mocking than any form of salutation, refuses medication that has restored the smile to millions and that the state would supply free of charge, even if he is well-to-do, in the first attempt at psychological examination, patient stated they might as well, quote, stop breaking his balls about his childhood because it was happy, you’d never find one happier, he remembers an anticlerical grandfather who was passionate about astronomy, he remembers his initiation at age fifteen with an unidentified female, one of their farmworkers, a grown woman, and it was marvelous, he says the problem’s not up in the mountains but down by the sea, he’s insisted on a prescription for laudanum, that we of course didn’t prescribe, and he responded to our justified medical refusal with guffaws … This, the diagnosis of the Abderites, rendered scientific, my dear Damagetus, with a certifying stamp … today I think you’re my Damagetus, that’s what I’ll call you today, and you must have read the pages concerning this madness, because that’s where Tristano found himself, just like Damagetus writes, he was stuck between laughter and fury, the two extremes that life has to offer us at times, stuck, you might say, between a rock and a hard place, and no fissure between these two extremes, which is where virtus would lie, but Tristano had no virtus, couldn’t find any. He considered the treatment for imbalanced humors in the ancient world, tears or laughter, but neither would do, because his pain was mute, continuous, inarticulate, gnawing at his chest, searching for a voice, for words, like a creature howling deep inside a tunnel … He wasn’t inside a tunnel, the tunnel was him, he’d become a tunnel … And one day in the vineyard he saw a toad … and that toad became a dog … or did I mention this already?… patience, now, you can always rewrite it … a yellow toad that became a yellow dog with its head poking up from the ground where it had been buried, its mouth wide open … you could see down its throat, it was suffocating, the toad went glog glog, and then its voice turned into a dog’s voice, and now it showed its broken, decaying teeth, boo boo boo, it said, I’m you and you’re me, am I making myself clear?… This creature, it was being extremely clear, and Tristano suddenly understood that this was his brother … no … his mirror. And the world began to spin. He was pissing, facing the vineyard, pissing on his shoes, feeling drunk, the way you do when you suddenly understand something and start feeling dizzy, sand on sand, what he’d believed, what he’d given for freedom, a freedom buried up to the neck in sand, thank you, Tristano, you’ve really been a good little watch dog, now bark if you can, and if you can’t, then nip at the wind … Tristano looked that toad in the eye and everything was written there, and he understood now, but it was too late, the bombs had gone off, the dead were dead, the murderers were on holiday and the republican brass band was playing in the piazzas, because it was June second, and the sacred flag was snapping in the wind, and officials stood at attention by the flag, like Tristano stood at attention by the vineyard while pissing on his shoes … He saluted the toad, at your command, Signor Toad, and the toad half-dog half-toad let out a sharp cry like sirens probably cry, on that first sultry day on the plains, a voice from the mountains, a cool voice blowing down from snowy peaks, a faint song, spilling over layers of time, but sharp still, a voice calling, the olive falls, no leaves fall, your beauty won’t ever, you’re like the sea of waves, go beddy-bye, go beddy-bye, you traitor. Tristano wheeled around, staggering, sought out the shadow of his room, threw himself onto the bed, covered his ears, and tried to sleep. Which as you can imagine, writer, wasn’t possible.