Tristano Dies by Antonio Tabucchi

Author:Antonio Tabucchi [Tabucchi, Antonio]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 978-0-914671-25-1
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2015-11-09T16:00:00+00:00

… Some nights, sometimes, he’d stare at the lights on the plains and think of the past, of those days when people were playing with the future of his country, up in the mountains … everyone against the Nazi-Fascists, that was clear, but the future was something else again. By now, I’m very much aware that as far as the future’s concerned, there are many, could be many, like the color spectrum, slight gradations of color, almost nothing, a shade of blue will bring you to indigo, then violet, but blue’s one thing and violet another, almost nothing, but try living in one shade, you’ll see how intense it can be … During that time, though, he saw the world as binary; you know, we tend to be binary by nature, and we let ourselves be convinced, we’re such idiots: black and white, hot and cold, male and female. In short: this or that. But why do we always have to think of life as this or that, did you ever ask yourself why, writer? I think you have, and that might be why I called you here. But back then, he saw the future as divided in two, because he thought history was divided in two – the idiot – he didn’t understand that we make history, that we build it with our own two hands, it’s our own invention, and we could build another, if we just wanted to, if we just convinced ourselves that history, her story, is this or that, if we only had the strength to tell her, you’re nothing, madam history, don’t be so arrogant, you’re just my hypothesis, and if you don’t mind, madam, I’m going to invent you now as I see fit. But to say this, you have to be old and useless, practically a corpse like me, before you understand that she was an illusion, a ghost, and you can’t make her anymore, she’s already been made. History’s like love, a kind of music, and you’re the musician, and while you play her, you’re extremely capable, an interpreter who blows full blast on his toy trumpet or scrapes his bow ecstatically across the strings … magnificent, a perfect execution, applause. But you don’t know the score. And you only understand this later, much later, after the music’s already disappeared … So for him, there were only two possible futures. The first he knew all too well because he knew the country that had invented it, though you couldn’t say this in Italy, a future composed of ashen days, steered by a political system that considered people not as individuals but as cogs in a superior machine, small teeth in small, insignificant wheels grinding for the great wheel, for a classless society where we’d all be equal, with equal thoughts, equal efforts, equal joys, equal destinies. You want a little happiness, what you’ve got coming to you, comrade? – do you have a party membership card? – a ration card for

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.