Little Misunderstandings of No Importance by Antonio Tabucchi

Author:Antonio Tabucchi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2244-0
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 1987-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

BITTERNESS AND CLOUDS

“People do you good turns and you repay them with bitterness. Why?” He was reading the final tercet of the poem by Drummond de Andrade which he was in the process of analyzing, when that sentence, spoken one afternoon many years before, came back to mind. His first good suit, jacket and trousers, in brown gaberdine with a narrow yellow stripe, perfectly horrendous as he realized later, when he had learned how to dress, but at the time he thought it was close to perfect, or at least important looking—too good for the office but indispensable for a graduation. He had looked at his reflection in the window. It was a men’s clothing shop on the Viale Libia, handling moderately priced but well-cut garments, and the minute he had put this suit on he felt at ease in it; perhaps it made him look a bit arrogant, but that didn’t hurt. It’s no good showing yourself to other people as submissive, that’s the end. Bitterness. Call it, rather, the well-spring of his being, a way to avoid being eaten alive in this world of wolves. But he didn’t answer Cecilia’s question, there was no answer to give. She wouldn’t have understood and the wolves had already eaten her up, wolves in the sense of life—you had only to look at her. At thirty years of age she was an old woman. Hair parted in the middle, some white strands already, a depressing air of resignation and her eternal fatigue. What fault was it of his if a few years before he had been in love with her and now he wasn’t? Perhaps it had been not so much love as a common purpose, their marriage had been based on a common purpose and certainly he hadn’t reduced her to her present condition. And this was the reason for his embitterment, the condition into which she had fallen, an uncared-for face and a tired body. Which was an unconscious way of displaying the sacrifices she had made on his behalf; a lament, a reproach, a mediocre remonstrance which, in reality, perversely masked her deep frustration. But how was he to blame for the defeat of a woman doomed to defeat? He had done his best to back her up. The immediate post-war years had been hard for both of them. There they were, in the uglier outlying area of the big city, with their parents dead and no one to turn to, wanting to set up house together if for no other reason than to have company. What were they to do? Jobs in the post office seemed the solution, but although these provided food and a roof over their heads, the atmosphere was squalid. A wood-burning stove and mud puddles in front of the door in the winter, humidity and mosquitoes in the summer, and all the year around the dull faces of their fellow employees, the widow who wasn’t really a widow, the assistant supervisor who talked of nothing but soccer but never bought a ticket to a match.

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