Antonio Tabucchi
TRANS. BY Elizabeth Harris
Story of the Man of Paper
1
What shall I, the astral emigrant, do in life? I’ve started off. You can see me. I’m dressed like a normal man. I’m carrying a normal briefcase. I’m disguised as a normal man. I walk along with the crowd. Left-right-left-right, forward, march, right leg forward, right arm going along with the right leg. Left-right-left, left leg following the right, left arm going along with the left leg. I enter the crowd. I’m looking for someone who will listen to me. Won’t you listen? Hey, everybody, I’m talking to you— won’t you listen? I’m the Witness—won’t you listen?
2
And the city, now, is like a map of my humiliations and failures:
I’m the Witness. But let me ask you, what is a witness?—ectoplasm resembling air, in air the storm is born, the sound of a voice vanishes into air and air changes to a cloud, to fog, to nothing. I’d like a witness, myself. It’s a windy day. My tie, like a flag, flutters in the wind. My tie is the flag of my country. My body is my country. The flag of my body waves in the wind of History. Ah, History, such a strange lady! She told me she’s not responsible, that none of it’s her fault, it all depends on her cousin, Clio, the one of memory. Come join us for tea, she told me, we have splendid cookies. Madame History’s house is far away, but I’m used to walking. I walked all day. Such a windy day. My tie was waving in the wind. And what sort of wind could it be? In France the mistral blows, and sometimes the north wind. In Buenos Aires we get the sea breeze mostly. But this was the wind of History. Walking, walking, not finding Madame History’s house. Did it not exist? I called Information. They sounded fairly alarmed. Why are you looking? they asked. I have to tell her about my neighbors, I explained. They were out on the terrace, enjoying the cool evening, when they heard someone knocking at the door. There were two gentlemen in uniform, and they asked: sir, do you see this, do you know what it is? Of course, my neighbor said, it’s a gun. That is correct, good for you, said the two gentlemen who’d knocked on the door, it is indeed a gun, and a gun confers authority, so we are the authorities, and you’ll come with us whether you like it or not, we really don’t give a shit, because you, sir, are not a citizen, you’re anonymous, you’re the crowd, and you’ll disappear into the crowd, like nothing, like a small cloud, into a sky full of clouds. And what will become of my body? my neighbor asked. Don’t worry about your body, they answered, think about your soul, think about your country. But my soul is my body, my country is my body, my neighbor said. The two gentlemen started laughing hysterically. Did you hear that, they said, slapping each other on the back, that’s a good one. That guy’s a riot, and they shoved him into the car. His wife never saw him again. Her last memory of him was his voice calling as that car disappeared into the night: my body!
3
Nothing’s changed. Except perhaps the manners, ceremonies, dances. The gesture of the hands shielding the head has nonetheless remained the same.
That’s the story I wanted to tell Madame History, I explained to Information. And a neutral voice over the phone said: go on, then.
4
The body writhes, jerks, and tugs, falls to the ground when shoved, pulls up its knees, bruises, swells, drools, and bleeds.
Do you understand? Strange, but Information didn’t seem to understand. As if a body was beyond comprehension. I was having a little trouble. How to explain a body? I said: a nose, do you have a nose? A head, do you have a head? Eyes, do you have eyes? And a mouth and arms and hands and feet and balls, all these things are a body, dear Information, do you understand? But the neutral voice over the phone only said: go into more detail.
5
Nothing has changed. Except for the boundaries of rivers, the shapes of forests, shores, deserts, and glaciers. The little soul roams among these landscapes, disappears, returns, draws near, moves away, evasive and a stranger to itself, now sure, now uncertain of its own existence, whereas the body is, and is, and is, and has nowhere to go.
I was almost screaming now, and the even voice over the phone said: calm down, don’t get too excited, tell us where you are, we’ll come and help you. I left the receiver dangling in that phone booth and resumed walking. I met a lot of people, you know. One day, I found a woman. She lay stretched out on a couch, she was naked, and I saw she had scars. She said: come, my friend, mate with me, misfortune will be the metronome of our intimacy. One day, I found a dog. Because even dogs exist and have a right to dogness, which is their nationality, their country. Then I found an elephant. It was a very hot day, the sun was ruthless. We set off walking toward a bright future, like Charlot, at the end of his movies. Please, the elephant told me, take me through a triumphal arch, I’ve already traced my circle and soon I’ll want to step inside. We walked a long time because it wasn’t possible to combine an arch with triumph, meaning, the arch was close, but triumph was still a good ways off. Perhaps that’s just how it goes, in life. We sat down on a park bench and were cooling our feet in the spray of a small fountain, when someone approached, disguised as a bishop but wearing a black leather Gestapo-style coat. He opened his coat to show the luger he kept below his armpit. Then he pulled out an identification card with the name: Friedrich Lefebvre. In Argentina, he said, I’d be Frederico, in France, Frédéric, but, he said, that’s my code name, I’m a mercenary soldier, I work for the church of defamation, I turn gold to shit, I know everything about you both—especially you there—I know everything about everybody: put your hands up. That scum thought he knew everything, he was a degenerate, and at night in the barracks (we learned later), he took out a leather whip and sodomized himself with the handle. But he didn’t know the language of elephants. What should I do, the elephant whispered, trunk to my ear. Whack him, I said, it’s him or us, a matter of survival. The elephant whacked him. There’s nothing better than the nice hard whack of an elephant trunk to free yourself from the scum working for the secret police.
6
You work for the whirling, scattering wind; a terrible sentence, life.
But I am a man of flesh. Heroes are made of iron. Men of iron crush men of flesh. In Argentina, they come at night. They cruise the neighborhoods in their Ford Falcons, no plates, headlights off. And men of flesh can find no shelter. Where’s the Italian ambassador? He’s not here, he’s out to dinner. Where’s the apostolic nuncio? He’s not here, he’s playing tennis with the general of the coup. Big-time fascists, the host on their tongue. And the man of flesh, crushed beneath the iron throng, becomes a man of paper. I am a man of paper. To escape the world, I’ve turned to paper, but I’ve locked the world inside this paper so I can tell its story.
7
When left uncharmed, the snake will bite. But what does the charmer stand to gain?
It’s a matter of charming the charmer. I was searching for someone to charm the charmer. I found it, a hand, a human hand, the thumb, index finger, middle finger, to support a pencil or a brush. The human hand I found charms the charmer who charms the snake.
8
Do you recognize me, air, you who knew things that once were mine?
We were dropping from planes. Night flight. First, though, just a quick injection so you’ll think you’re in the clouds. We became a telephone directory of dropped numbers. Entirely of paper. The world’s made of paper. The world ends up in a book, but someone already said that.
9
No one can write a book. Since before a book can really be, it needs the dawn, the dusk, centuries, arms, and the binding and sundering sea.
A hard wind blew, waves almost swallowing me, and I hoped those hands would catch me. Whose hands? I remembered the lesson of Princesse Bibesco, in the book on the West that the nuns had made me study. The only thing to do was be a Bateau sur l’eau: la rivière, la rivière au bord de l’eau. With these vain, childish words, my small paper boat set sail without a bottle, with no protective glass, sail on, sail on, toward what? Toward the unknown. The question had changed. It was no longer to be or not to be. The ocean didn’t give a damn about that, and neither did the West. The question was: to be or to appear? To be or to disappear? I wasn’t stylish, I was well-aware, I didn’t know how to slip on gloves from a Paris glove shop like Princesse Bibesco teaches. And I wasn’t searching for gloved hands. I was searching for bare hands, for hands of flesh that would take me for a man of flesh and tell me: stay—this is your likeness.
10
Exhausted from trying, we don’t know where to go, strangers in our own city.
But there still have to be hands, a single hand, a single eye, a single finger. Is there just one eye, one finger left on the face of the earth? We’re in the billions after all, it’s statistically possible. Hope is a matter of statistics. Faith and Charity might be, too. Ah, art! Art that’s useless yet also saves! Art that no one votes for, that has no place in parliament, you escape in the crowd, you enter the crowd, you are the crowd. We’re all the crowd. Might there be two hands, a single finger that can shape an individual from a crowd? One individual, who represents the crowd? The entire crowd, what we are, we, humanity as a whole. But humanity reduced to just one individual is silly, says the flute-like voice of Information over the phone. All right, I’ll admit it’s silly. I’ll be that for you, I’ll be the clown. A clown of the third type. Not the happy clown, not the sad clown, according to the binary pattern we’ve binarally divided the world into. A normal clown. Does that surprise you? Did it never occur to you? Well, I’m a normal clown. I need hands so I can move, walk, navigate through space, time, and memories. For this is normalcy: space, time, memory.
11
The only thing that doesn’t exist is oblivion.
And all the rest exists, all the rest can be portrayed. Life escapes, you pass through it and it escapes. Death escapes, it grabs hold of you and it escapes. Cities escape, you pass through them and they escape. And you, you escape as well, you can’t tell your story, because you escape. But the hand runs over the page, guides the nib or brush; life escaped, but its image remains. The music played, the notes disappeared. But the score remains. Right here, in front of you. Do you all see it, how it’s drawn in precise lines, legible, decipherable: waiting to be played. Play it. Each one of you will play it on your own instrument. You have a cello you keep at your side like a beloved bride? You have a flute that’s your classmate? You have a set of bagpipes you carry piggyback like a child? Play the score in your own way, play the music as you see fit. You have an ocarina? Take it from your pocket. You don’t have any instrument at all? Try whistling. You don’t know how? Try humming to yourselves, step onto the main square of this beautiful city carrying your vision of that score you saw, transform these images to a sound that’s yours alone, play it with your music, coming home, even if you’re tone-deaf—do it—for the private gifts that I won’t mention, for the music, that mysterious form of time. Day enters night. It doesn’t go away.
Antonio Tabucchi, born in Pisa in 1943, published over thirty books that have been translated into forty languages and received many awards. For his most famous works, Indian Nocturne and Pereira Maintains, he received the Prix Médicis étranger, Premio Super Campiello, Premio Scanno, and the Premio Jean Monnet for European Literature. He was made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in France and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and (twice) for the International Man Booker Prize. He died in 2012 in Lisbon.
Elizabeth Harris’s translations of contemporary Italian fiction include Mario Rigoni Stern’s Giacomo’s Seasons (Autumn Hill), Giulio Mozzi’s This Is the Garden (Open Letter), and Antonio Tabucchi’s Tristano Dies and For Isabel: A Mandala (both with Archipelago Books). Her translation awards, all for works by Tabucchi, include a PEN/Heim Fund Grant, an NEA Translation Fellowship, the Italian Prose in Translation Award, and the National Translation Award.