The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico by Antonio Tabucchi

Author:Antonio Tabucchi [Tabucchi, Antonio]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781935744573
Publisher: Steerforth Press

The Battle of San Romano

I would have liked to talk to you about the sky over Castile. The blue and the swift billowing clouds driven by the upland wind, and the monastery of Santa Maria de Huerta, on the road to Madrid, where I arrived one late spring afternoon to find Orson Welles shooting Falstaff, and it seemed to me the most natural thing in the world to come across that big bearded man with a cigar in his mouth, wearing a waistcoat and sitting on a stool in the Cistercian cloister. To tell you: Look, that’s what I was like then, all those years ago, I liked Spain, Hills Like White Elephants, it was like pushing aside the cork curtain of a small rather dirty tavern and walking straight into a book by Hemingway, that was the door to life, it smacked of literature, like a page from The Sun Also Rises. It was a feast day, a holiday, I wasn’t the person I am now, I still had the innocent lightness of someone who is waiting for things to happen; I could still take risks, write those stories, like Dinner with Federico, describing the limbo of adolescence, lazy afternoons, cicadas: small beer then, but it would take some courage now.

I was listening to a poet reading his poetry; ‘my Southern Cross, my Hesperus,’ and he was full of tenderness for a woman made of poetry, who in the end was himself. I sensed that he really did love this woman, because he loved her in the most authentic way possible, he loved himself in her, that is the real secret and in its own way a form of innocence, and I said to myself: Too late.

Nice place, the hotel, with blackened mirrors and ornamental picture frames, neoclassical columns made of wood, a discreet carefully selected audience of the kind one finds late evenings in luxury hotels, and me there listening with my heart beating, full of remorse and shame.

Why did he have the courage when I didn’t, I wondered. What is this quality? Poetry, unawareness, awareness, or what? And then I saw this patient vehicle which has been transporting us for thousands of years. In a tray of food on the sideboard was an orange, our teacher used to say to us: Look, children, this is the world, that’s how it’s made, like an orange. The image floated up suddenly from the well of memory, and I looked on the surface of that orange for the long roads of Castile, and for a small car driving fast, thinking it could get into life through the little cork curtain of a page of Hemingway, and instead all I saw was orange peel, it had disappeared entirely from the fruit’s surface. The poet read his fine poem with a fine, polished voice, I was on the point of tears, but not because of what he was saying (or rather, only partly because of that); no, it was me, it was

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