Antonio Tabucchi
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| textos retirados de obra editada em 2001 |
I was between Kancheepuram and Mahabalipuram, in the south of India, where magnificent temples rise. I was travelling in a car driven by an Indian driver, for in India you can't rent cars without drivers, it would be too dangerous. We stopped at a cottage restaurant which was mentioned in the guide book I brought with me, and which, by now, I trusted blindly: "India, A Travel Survival Kit". The cottage was not at all disappointing. It had an ample bamboo terrace, cheered up by large brass air conditioners, where one could have a light breakfast. It was a little past five in the afternoon and the driver and I ordered two teas which were served with biscuits and slices of papaya. I tried to get the driver to tell me about Mahabalipuram, its religious traditions, but he was pretty reticent. Maybe he was simply being discreet, as the Indians are. Probably your guide can give you better information than me, he told me.
I felt far away from everything. This everything being my cultural reference points: the West, my language, European fashions, the company of someone you could really talk to. I decided to continue on my journey again, I wanted to get to Mahabalipuram soon, where there was a hotel waiting that a Goan priest had booked for me, and to discharge that silent and slightly arrogant driver. Anyway, I had promised the hotel in the area I had come from, that the driver would bring the car back that evening. It was appallingly hot.
We got back into the car, a battered vehicle from the sixties. I couldn't tell whether it was American or Japanese. Anyway, what difference did it make? The suspension had already gone and every pothole in the road hit my kidneys. The windows didn't work properly, they only went half way down, and the fake leather seat coverings made my back sweat terribly. I closed my eyes and resigned myself. The road was lined with mango trees, the driver would drive with concentration or smoke one of those little perfumed Indian cigars, made with only one tobacco leaf, that are called "Ganesh". The driver began to smoke, I opened my eyes and looked through the windscreen. We were at a closed level crossing. One can see all sorts of things at level crossings in India. And in fact the travellers standing at the barrier were a mixed bunch. There was a motorised rick-shaw, apparently empty, painted yellow and with an enormous indecipherable sign, probably Hindi, probably in some language of the south. Oh well: the unknown. There was a man standing by his bicycle; his face was tinted with white lead and he had a gauze over his mouth. I was able to understand somewhat what that man was about, he was a believer in the Jainist religion, the white lead was a symbol of humility and the gauze on the mouth prevented him from swallowing an insect, that could be the form of a person who is crossing another plane of existence. There was also an elephant with its forehead painted with violet signs, maybe a sacred elephant, ridden by it's driver. And also there was a man sitting on a scooter. He had two coloured bands around his forehead, a white shirt that came down to his knees, and behind, on his luggage-rack, placed cross-wise, a long and thin covering wrapped with white bands of material that looked like an enormous "baguette".
I asked the driver if he knew what it could be. He sucked on his little cigar and replied peacefully: it's a dead body. I didn't have the courage to ask him again. The sun was now implacable, I was sweating, I felt ill at ease, I wanted to be somewhere else, but I was here waiting at this absurd level crossing, with a motorcyclist carrying a dead body as though it were a postage parcel. I summoned up my strength and asked him again: a dead body, why a dead body? Well, the driver answered phlegmatically, he's probably taking it for burning at a temple in Mahabalipuram, there are pyres at the temples of Mahabalipuram, and the waters of the lakes are holy, and can receive the ashes.
I looked at the motorcyclist through the window. He felt he was being watched and in his turn he looked at me. I smiled at him, he continued to look at me without making a sign. Good morning, I said to him, are you going to Mahabalipuram? The man didn't reply. I would have liked to have asked him something less banal, to have had a brief conversation with him as one does with travellers on the same route, to wish him all the best, maybe, or my condolences. But it was impossible to say any of this to him, simply impossible. And so I said the only thing that came to mind, superfluous information, just silly, and for him, useless. I'm Italian, I told him. He looked at me and his face broadened into a big smile, one of those large very white smiles that Indians from the south have. He gave his scooter a friendly pat, pointed his finger at it and shouted: Vespa! And at that moment the train went past, the level crossing barrier went up, my driver drove on, and we left behind the man with his troublesome load. I looked at him from my seat at the back of the car and saw that he was giving me a sign of greeting. And I gave him the thumbs up too, my arm leaning out of the window.
Antonio Tabucchi, born in Pisa in 1943, is full professor of Portuguese Literature at the University of Siena. Among his fiction publications, that have been translated into many languages and appreciated all over the world, we may mention Piazza d'Italia (1975), Il gioco del rovescio (1981), Piccoli equivoci senza importanza (1985), Il filo dell'orizzonte (1986), Requiem(1992) and the recent best-seller Sostiene Pereira, on which the movie of the same name with Marcello Mastroianni was based. Among the literary awards won by Tabucchi are "Médicis Etranger", "Viareggio", "Campiello" and the European Award "Jean Monnet". Tabucchi has also translated the work of Fernando Pessoa into Italian.
The forbidden Vespa-fruit
Umberto Eco
As I take up my pen to respond to the invitation to write something about what undoubtedly was, and has continued to be, a social phenomenon of post-war Italy, I hesitate, because I realise that this is a phenomenon which passed me by at a certain distance. I went zig-zagging through the joyful parade ofVespas on my antique bike like an outsider, albeit not wholly indifferent. Now that I am called upon to bear witness to this phenomenon, I realise that the truth is not so much that the Vespa didn't concern me, but that I removed its presence from my mind because, for me, it was like a forbidden fruit.
To put it in what is by now a dated terminology, it was a question of both economic structure and ideology. I belonged to a family which was undoubtedly not rich, but not poor, either. An office-worker's family, whose pride lay in the fact that the children had everything they needed, in the way of food, clothes, education, and a month's holiday in the countryside every year, renting a couple of rooms from distant relations who were farmers.
This comfortable situation was only possible thanks to thrifty administration, a horror for waste, and a calm indifference to the superfluous. Perhaps I should remind my readers of the economic conditions of Italian families immediately before and after the Second World War, when every middle-class family dreamt, as a famous Italian song says, of having "one thousand liras a month".
I remember that one day, shortly before the war, my father came home, had dinner with us in silence, as if something were troubling him, and then, almost secretively, as he was washing his hands in the bathroom with the door ajar, shyly called my mother and said to her, "By the way, 'the Lawyer' has given me a present of one thousand liras". 'The Lawyer' was the owner of the firm my father worked for (in Piemonte, not only Agnelli, but anybody with a degree in law - which at the time meant practically every graduate - was a lawyer). I don't know whether my father's monthly salary had already reached one thousand liras, but the sum was undoubtedly (as we used to say) an unexpected "windfall", an extraordinarily generous gift una tantum, which was a token of esteem and satisfaction (and was therefore primarily a source of moral gratification); and, as we shall see, rather than offering a remedy for a situation of poverty, the wealth brought by this gift of one thousand liras opened the way to the dizzy heights of "something extra" for my family.
My mother answered excitedly, "Oh, then we can buy a radio!".
Thus the radio entered into my home: it was a large Telefunken with an alarming kind of design, a mixture of the towers of Mongo (the planet of Ming where Flash Gordon had landed) and the flimsy brownish skyscrapers of Blade Runner. The dernier cri of a technology that was considered to be beyond all possible improvement, with a mobile, flickering eye for the tuning. I would spend hours, not only listening to the national programmes, but building up a Hertzian geography of my own, tracking down exotic gurgles on the green, red and yellow illuminated panel, which proffered the names of mysterious stations that could only be picked up on the short-wave bands: Riga, Tallin, Hilversum.
But I haven't been invited to write about the radio. You can imagine, though, that in that post-war period, as we were gradually getting used to the delights of white bread again (it didn't happen immediately; it took a few years), the appearance of the Vespa was like an event in a world that existed near mine, but didn't concern me directly, on the same level as Dakotas, or jeeps, or a Hammond organ. The thought would never have crossed my mind that I could ask my father for a scooter, as I continued to pedal around on my pre-war bike, with its tyres all patched up as a result of dozens of tiring repair jobs. My request would have aroused such amazement that it never occurred to me that I could make it. Consequently, I didn't even feel the need for this unthinkable possession.
And yet the Vespas were there, racing past me, all around me, ridden by boys of my age, or a little older. And this is the point where ideology comes in.
I was a member of a Catholic youth group, which made a distinction between those who lived for an ideal and those who took life as a diversion. On the one side, us, who sacrificed our Sundays in serious meetings, organising sports teams, or theatrical groups, and on the other side, the others, who on Sundays went dancing or - a symbol of the ritual consumption of wealth (highly envied, I must confess) - skiing. And every day, at a certain time, the others (who included many boys I went to school with, and even some close friends of mine) entered into another world. In that other world, They had their Vespas. For me, the Vespa went together with the boogie woogie and the snow-capped Alpine peaks.
They would jump on it at the gates of the school, where we had been united by the same fears and the same schoolboy tricks up to a few minutes before. In the evening, they would arrive on their Vespas in the square where we whiled away hours chattering on the benches, opposite a fountain that was usually not working, and some of them would tell stories they had heard about brothels, or revues with Wanda Osiris - and those who had heard these stories acquired a kind of morbid fascination in the eyes of the rest.
Thus the Vespa came to be linked in my eyes with transgression, sin, and even temptation - not the temptation to possess the object, but the subtle seduction of faraway places where the Vespa was the only means of transport. And it entered into my imagination not as an object of desire, but as a symbol of an unfulfilled desire.
I fell in love, as sometimes happens at that age. I used to write poems about my languidly Platonic love stories in secret, because it seemed impossible to declare my passion openly to the unattainable She, the lovely flower beside which I felt like an importunate worm. At the end of lessons, I think the boys used to leave school first. And so I used to go along the road with my friends in the opposite direction to my house, and then say goodbye to them after five minutes, and turn back with the busy air of one who is going home for lunch, knowing that on the way I would meet Her, in the gay company of her girl-friends (another sign of the times: the two sexes used to go home without dividing up into couples).
I would meet the group of girls, and look at my Beloved, and my day was made; I was in seventh heaven!
But sometimes the girl was not together with the group, and as I hurried on, fearing that some jealous divinity had stolen her from me, something terrible happened, something much less sacral, or - if sacral - infernal. She was still there, in front of the school steps, as if waiting for someone. And up drove (on a Vespa) a boy that I couldn't compete with, because he was already an undergraduate, tall, fair-haired, disdainful (and he nonchalantly told his friends that a plaster that he wore on his neck for a few days was to cover up a syphiloma).
He helped her on to the Vespa, and each time, the perverse pillion-rider - so much the more desirable - escaped from my clutches forever.
But worse followed; it was the period when the scandalously short, almost knee-length skirts of the war years (due, I believe, more to a lack of material than to a desire to seduce) and the bell-bottomed knee-length ones that graced the fiancées of Rip Kirby in the first American comics that returned to the newspaper kiosks, were being substituted by long, flowing skirts that came half-way down the calf. Probably the younger generations of today, who have been deprived of any erotic shock by the sporting nonchalance of the mini-skirt and hot pants, cannot imagine what perverse grace, what airy elegance a long skirt gave to a girl, as she clung to her driver on the back seat of a Vespa that swept away, and then disappeared.
It was like the fluttering of an oriflamme, a coy floating in the wind that held innumerable suggestions of ostentatious reticence (if the oxymoron gets the idea across), a hymn of glory to femininity through the interposed symbol; theVespa sailed regally away leaving in its wake a singing foam, and the sporting of mystical dolphins. And then nothing was left.
This is what the Vespa was for me. A magical instrument, which I never really desired, because it was beyond every possible desire, and at the same time, it frustrated my desire - or rather, it made it sublime, allowing it to live in an incorruptible world - and perhaps it was just as well: nothing is lovelier in my memory than the suffering of those vain passions.
Umberto Eco was born in Alessandria on January 1, 1932. After graduating in Philosophy (Turin, 1954), he was appointed university professor of Aesthetics (1961), and since 1975 has been full professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna, where he is the President of the degree course in Communication Sciences. He is director of the magazine "VS-Quaderni di Studi Semiotici". He has taught in many foreign universities (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Collège de France, École Normale Superieure) and is a Honorary Fellow of Kellog College, Oxford. He has also received 19 degrees "honoris causa". Among his major scientific and literary works are: Il problema estetico in San Tommaso, 1956;Opera aperta, (1962); La ricerca della lingua perfetta, (1993); Sei passeggiate nei boschi narrativi, (1994); Il nome della rosa, (1980); Il pendolo di Foucault, (1988); L'isola del giorno prima, (1992). His works have been translated in thirty-two languages. He is contributor to several Italian and foreign newspapers and magazines, and is presently editor of a weekly column for the magazine "L'Espresso".
