The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro by Antonio Tabucchi

Author:Antonio Tabucchi
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2245-7
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 1997-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

Everything that I have known

You’ll write to me to remind

Me of, and likewise I shall do,

The whole past I’ll recount to you.

The lawyer fell silent. He had shoved away his plate and sat fumbling with his napkin.

“Hölderlin,” he went on, “it’s a poem called Wenn aus der Ferne, which means ‘If From the Distance,’ it’s one of his last. Let us say that there might be people who are waiting for letters from the past, do you think that a plausible thing to believe in?”

“Perhaps,” replied Firmino, “it might be plausible, though really I’d like to understand it a bit more.”

“Nothing to it,” murmured the lawyer, “letters from the past which give us an explanation of a time in our life which we have never understood, an explanation whatever it might be that enables us to grasp the meaning of the years gone by, a meaning that eluded us then, you are young, you are waiting for letters from the future, but just suppose that there are people waiting for letters from the past, and maybe I am one of these, and maybe I go so far as to imagine that one day I shall receive them.”

He paused, lit one of his cigars, and asked: “And do you know how I imagine they will arrive? Come on, try and think.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Firmino.

“Well,” said the lawyer, “they will arrive in a little parcel done up with a pink bow, just like that, and, scented with violets, as in the most trashy romantic novels. And on that day I shall lower my horrible old snout to the package, undo the pink bow, open the letters, and with the clarity of noonday I shall understand a story I never understood before, a story unique and fundamental, I repeat, unique and fundamental, such a thing as can happen but once in our lives, that the gods grant only once in our lives, and to which at the time we did not pay enough attention, for the simple reason that we were conceited fools.”

Another pause, longer this time. Firmino watched him in silence, taking stock of his fat old droopy cheeks, his almost repulsively fleshy lips, and the expression of one lost in memories.

“Because,” the lawyer went on in a low voice,“que faites-vous faites-vous des anciennes amours?. It’s a line from a poem by Louise Colet, and goes on like this: les chassez-vous comme des ombres vaines? Ils ont été, ces fantômes glacés, coeur contre coeur, unepart de vous même* There’s no doubt the lines were addressed to Flaubert. I should add that Louise Colet wrote very bad poems, poor dear, even if she thought of herself as a great poetess and wanted to make a hit in all the literary salons in Paris, really mediocre stuff, no doubt about it. But these few lines really get to one, it seems to me, because what in fact do we do with our past loves? Push them away in a drawer along

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