These days everyone’s so informal, you must have noticed, I find it brusque, overly familiar. I don’t like it — it shows disrespect … I think when two people hold each other in high regard they should be more formal, it’s more civilized, more respectful. And it creates the proper distance to make the other person understand that even if we know each other well, know each other intimately — our respective secrets — that we pretend we don’t, that we don’t know certain things, and we do this to make the other feel more comfortable, like when someone’s confessed something important to you that he wouldn’t tell anyone else and so you act a bit distracted, oh, not really, of course, you actually listened very carefully, but … well, it’s like you already stopped thinking about it, you locked it away inside a secret compartment in your heart … Now that the time has come for us to say goodbye, now that it’s time for me to take my leave, I want to be more formal with you. I’m sure you understand, it’s not an insignificant detail … also because of what you’ll write about me. Sound okay?
I think there’s still a big fly in here, please, get it out, sir, I don’t want that fly landing on my mouth after I’ve closed it. When you write this story, sir, when you turn it into a book, put your name on the cover, I don’t want my own there, I don’t want to be the one doing the telling, I want to be told … You wrote once that Tristano knew about fear, and I agreed. But real fear is something else again, that was a trifling kind of fear, a privileged, random fear, it could go badly, but it was also something you could get out from under … Real fear is when the hour’s fixed and you know it’s inevitable … that’s a strange fear, unusual, something you experience once in a lifetime, never more, it’s like vertigo, like throwing a window open onto nothing, and it’s there that thought truly drowns, is obliterated. This, this is real fear … In a little while, when you no longer hear me breathing, throw the window wide, let in the light, the sounds of the living world. They belong to you, sir; silence belongs to me. And then leave right after, close the door and leave the corpse behind, it won’t be me, I’ve already given Frau directions for disposing of it quickly … There’s a religious love of death that’s close to necrophilia, practically loving the corpse more than the living … A beautiful death … what nonsense, death’s never beautiful, death is filthy — always, filthy — the denial of life … They say death’s a mystery, but having existed at all is the greater mystery, this might seem banal, but it’s really so mysterious … Take you and me, for instance, you know, finding ourselves here, in the same room, at this precise moment, it’s very mysterious, or at least it’s rather odd, wouldn’t you say?… I thank you, sir … I’d like to give you another gift, you see that photograph on the dresser? no, not the one on the other dresser, the dresser with the mirror, next to the glass bell, where the pendulum keeps moving the hands, because the hands keep going even after we stop, we may be the ones who invented clocks, but they obey a different master … I mean the one in the ebony frame, the one of the man from behind, walking down the shore … see those houses in the distance?… that’s the town where my mother lived, my father’s heading off to marry her, that’s why he’s dressed so elegantly though he’s walking along the beach, after the ceremony he’ll bring my mother here, to this house where I was born and that will soon be sold, after Frau dies … It’s a beautiful photo, take it as a gift, use it in your book, it isn’t Tristano, but it is a little, since it’s his father … He has his back to us, as if he’s saying goodbye, what I’ve been doing all these days with you, sir, and what I’m doing now for the last time … Check the clock, what time is it? That might sound foolish, but I want to know, it’s the last thing I want to know … After all, like they say, tomorrow is another day.
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
This book has been with me a long while. Besides writing it at home, I composed it, in notebooks and in my thoughts, at the homes that dear friends put at my disposal. I thank these friends. It’s superfluous to name them here: they know.
Thank you to Valentina Parlato who, with great precision and intelligence, typed out my handwritten notebooks and the parts I knew by memory that made up this book before it was a book.
A.T.
Translator’s note
For the most part, English words that appear in italics were in English in the original novel.
There are a few poems that the narrator quotes which were translated into Italian; I have, at times, included others’ English translations of these:
this page: Heinrich Heine, “Die Lorelie,” trans. A.S. Kline
this page: C.P. Cavafy, “Long Ago,” trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard
this page: C.P. Cavafy, “Voices,” trans. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard
Translator’s Acknowledgments
The translation of this novel was supported through residencies at the Banff International Centre for the Arts in Canada and the Casa delle traduzioni in Rome. Research for the translation was greatly aided through funding from the University of North Dakota and through a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant from the PEN America Center. I wish to thank Dr. Louise Rozier for her careful reading and insights about this novel and Dr. Charles Klopp for answering my many questions. I also wish to thank Jill Schoolman, publisher of Archipelago Books, for her devotion to Tabucchi, to literature in translation, and to translators. I dedicate this translation to the memory of my mother, Nancy Harris.