The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico (7 page)

He started to laugh too, but stopped himself because
he wasn't sure whether it was best for him to join in her outburst of hilarity or not. ‘Explain,' he asked, when she had calmed down.

‘Nothing,' the girl said, between intermittent giggles. ‘It just occurred to me that you're rather better suited to the vulgar than the Middle Latin, that's all.'

He shook his head in fake pity, but you could see deep down he was flattered. ‘In any event we can begin the lesson now; so listen carefully.' He held up a thumb and said: ‘Point number one: you have to study the minor authors, it's the minor authors will make your career, all the greats have already been studied.' He raised another finger. ‘Point number two: make the bibliography as long as you possibly can, taking care to disagree with scholars who are dead.' He raised yet another finger. ‘Point number three: no fanciful methodologies, I know they're in fashion now, but they'll sink without a trace, stay with the straightforward and traditional.' She was listening carefully, concentrating hard. Perhaps the sketch of a timid objection was forming on her face, because he felt the need to offer an example. ‘Think of that French
specialist who came to talk about Racine and all Phaedra's complexes,' he said. ‘A normal person, would you say?'

‘What? Phaedra?' asked the girl, as though thinking of something else.

‘The French specialist,' he said patiently.

The girl didn't answer.

‘Quite,' he said. ‘These days critics are in the habit of unloading their own neuroses onto literary texts. I had the courage to say as much and you saw how outraged everybody was.' He opened the menu and set about a careful choice of dessert. ‘Psychoanalysis was the invention of a madman,' he concluded. ‘Everybody knows that, but you try saying it out loud.'

The girl looked absent-mindedly at the sea. She had a resigned expression and was almost pretty. ‘So what next?' she asked, still speaking as though her mind were elsewhere.

‘I'll tell you that later,' said the man. ‘Right now I want to say something else. You know what's positive about us, our winning card? Do you? It's that we're normal people, that's what.' He finally settled on a dessert and waved to
the waiter. ‘And now I'll tell you what's next,' he went on. ‘What's next is, you apply for the place right now.'

‘But we'll have your philologist friend against us,' she objected.

‘Oh, him!' exclaimed the man. ‘He'll keep quiet, he will, or rather, he'll be on our side, you'll see.' He left a pause that was full of mystery.

‘When he walks down the corridor with his pipe and hair blowing about, you'd think he was God and Father himself,' she said. ‘He can't bear me, he doesn't even say hello.'

‘He'll learn to say hello, sweetie.'

‘I told you not to call me sweetie, it brings me out in a rash.'

‘In any event he'll learn to say hello,' he interrupted. He smiled with a sly look and poured himself some wine. He was doing it on purpose to increase the mystery and wanted it to be obvious he was doing it on purpose. ‘I know all sorts of little things about him,' he finally said, letting a glimmer of light into the darkness.

‘Tell me about them.'

‘Oh, little things,' he muttered with affected casualness, ‘certain escapades, old friendships with people in this country when it was not exactly a paragon of democracy. If I was a novelist I could write a story about it.'

‘Oh, come on,' she said, ‘I don't believe it. He's always in the front row when it comes to petitions and meetings, he's left-wing.'

The man seemed to think over the adjective she'd used. ‘Left-handed, rather,' he concluded.

The girl laughed, shaking her head, which made her ponytail bob from side to side. ‘In any event, we'll need support from someone from another university,' she said. ‘We can't keep everything in the family.'

‘I've thought of that too.'

‘You think of everything, do you?'

‘In all modesty . . .'

‘Who?'

‘No names.'

He smiled affably, took the girl's hand and assumed a
paternal manner. ‘Listen carefully, you have to analyse people's motives, and that's just what I do. Everybody runs a mile from him, have you ever asked yourself why?'

The girl shook her head and he made a vague, mysterious gesture. ‘There must be a reason,' he said.

‘I've got a reason of my own,' she said. ‘I'm pregnant.'

‘Don't be stupid,' said the man with a cutting smile.

‘Don't be stupid yourself,' the girl answered sharply.

The man had frozen with a slice of pineapple just an inch from his mouth; his face betrayed the surprise of someone who has recognised the truth.

‘Since when?'

‘Two months.'

‘Why wait till now to tell me?'

‘Because I didn't feel like it before,' she said firmly. She made a broad gesture which included the sea, the sky and the waiter who was arriving with the coffee. ‘If it's a girl I'm going to call her Felicity,' she said with conviction.

The man slipped the pineapple into his mouth and swallowed in haste. ‘A bit too passé and sentimental for my taste.'

‘Okay, so Allegra, Joy, Serena, Hope, Letitia, Hilary, as you will. I don't care what you say, I think names have an influence on a person's character. Hear yourself called Hilary all the time and you begin to feel a bit hilarious, you laugh. I want a cheerful child.'

The man didn't answer. He turned to the waiter hovering patiently at a distance and made as if to write on his hand. The waiter understood and went into the restaurant to prepare the bill. There was a curtain of metal beads over the door which tinkled every time someone went in. The girl stood up and took hold of the man's hand, pulling him up.

‘Come on, come and look at the sea, don't play the crotchety old fogy, this is the best day of your life.'

The man got up a little unwillingly, letting himself be pulled. The girl put her arm round his waist, pushing him on. ‘It's you who looks pregnant,' she said. ‘About six months, if you ask me.' She let out a ringing laugh and hopped like a little bird. They leaned on the wooden parapet. There were some agave plants in the small unkept piece of ground in front of the terrace and lots of wild
flowers. The man took a cigarette from his pocket and slipped it between his lips. ‘Oh God,' she said, ‘not that unbearable stink again, it'll be the first thing I'll cut out of our life.'

‘You just try,' he said with a sly look.

She held him tight against her, stroking his cheek with her head. ‘This restaurant is delightful.'

The man patted his stomach. His expression was one of satisfaction and self-assurance. ‘You have to know how to take life,' he answered.

‘Listen, my good man, your father has cancer of the pharynx, I can't leave the conference to operate on him tomorrow, I've invited half of Italy, do you understand? And then, with what he's got, a week isn't going to make much difference.'

‘Actually our doctor says the operation should be done immediately, because it's a type of cancer that spreads extremely quickly.'

‘Oh really, immediately indeed? And what am I supposed to say to the people coming to the conference, that I have to operate tomorrow and the conference is being postponed? Listen, your father will do what everybody else does, wait until the conference is finished.'

‘You listen to me, Professor Piragine, I don't give a damn about your conference, I want my father to be operated on immediately, and any others too, if they're urgent.'

‘I have no intention of discussing the schedule of my operating theatre with you. This is the University of Pisa and I am not just a doctor, I have well-defined teaching duties as well. I'm not going to put up with you telling me what I have to do. I can't operate on your father until next week; if that's not good enough, have the patient discharged and find another hospital. It goes without saying that the responsibility will be yours. Goodbye.'

The voice of the hostess invited the passengers to buckle their safety belts and extinguish their cigarettes, the stopover would last about forty minutes for refuelling and cleaning. And as through the window one began to see the lights of Bombay and a little later the blue lights of the runway, just then – it must have been due to the slight bump as the plane touched down, sometimes these things do spark off associations of ideas – I found myself
on your scooter. You were driving with your arms out wide, because in those days the scooters used to have wide handlebars, and I was watching your scarf blowing in the wind. The fringe was tickling me and I wanted to scratch my nose but I was afraid of falling. It was 1956, I'm sure of that, because you bought the scooter as a celebration the same day I turned thirteen. I tapped two fingers on your shoulder, to ask you to slow down, and you turned, smiling, and as you turned the scarf slipped from your neck, very slowly, as if every movement of objects in space had been put into slow motion, and I saw that beneath your scarf you had a horrible wound slicing across your throat from one side to the other, so wide and open I could see the muscle tissue, the blood vessels, the carotid artery, the pharynx, but you didn't know you had the wound and you smiled unaware, and in fact you didn't have it, it was me seeing it there, it's strange how one sometimes finds oneself superimposing one memory over another, that was what I was doing. I was remembering how you were in 1956 and then adding the last image you were to leave me, almost thirty years later.

I appreciate one shouldn't write to the dead, but you know perfectly well that sometimes writing to the dead is an excuse, it's an elementary Freudian truth, because it's the quickest way of writing to oneself, and so forgive me, I am writing to myself, even though perhaps I am writing to the memory of you I keep inside me, the mark you left inside me, and hence in a certain sense I really am writing to you – but no, perhaps this too is an excuse, the truth is I am writing to no one but myself: even my memory of you, that mark you left inside me, is exclusively my business, you are nowhere and in nothing, there's just me, sitting here in this jumbo heading for Hong Kong and imagining I'm riding on a scooter, I thought I was on a scooter, I knew perfectly well I was flying on a plane that was taking me to Hong Kong from where I'll then take a boat to Macao, except that I was riding on a scooter, it was my thirteenth birthday, you were driving with your scarf around your neck and I was going to Macao by scooter. And without turning round, the fringe of your scarf in the wind tickling me, you shouted: To Macao? What on earth are you going to Macao for? And I said:
I'm going to look for some documents in the archives there, there's a municipal archive, and then the archive of an old school too, I'm going to look for some papers, some letters maybe, I'm not sure, basically some manuscripts of a symbolist poet, a strange man who lived in Macao for thirty-five years, he was an opium addict, he died in 1926, a Portuguese, called Camilo Pessanha, the family was originally from Genoa, his ancestor, a certain Pezagno, was in the service of the Portuguese king in 1300. He was a poet, he wrote only one little book of poems,
Clepsydra
, listen to this line: ‘The wild roses have bloomed by mistake.' And you asked me: ‘You think that makes any sense?'

For the solitary traveller, admittedly rare but perhaps not implausible, who cannot resign himself to the lukewarm, standardised forms of hospitalised death which the modern statae guarantees and who, what's more, is terrorised at the thought of the hurried and impersonal treatment to which his unique body will be subjected during the obsequies, Lisbon still offers an admirable range of options for a noble suicide, together with the most decorous, solemn, zealous, polite and above all cheap organisations for dealing with what a successful suicide inevitably leaves behind it: the corpse.

Choosing a place suitable for a voluntary exit, and deciding on the manner of that exit, has become an
almost hopeless undertaking these days, so much so that even the most eager are resigning themselves to natural forms of death, aided perhaps by the idea, now widespread in people's consciousness, that the atomic destruction of the planet, the Total Suicide, is just a question of time, and hence what's the point of taking so much trouble? This last idea is very much open to question, and if nothing else misleading in its cunning syllogism: first because it creates a connivance with Death and hence a sort of resignation to the so-called ‘Inevitable' (a feeling necessarily alien to the exquisitely private act of suicide which can in no way be subjected to collectivist notions without its very essence being perverted); and second, even in the event of the Great Explosion, why on earth should this be considered a suicide, rather than a homicide inspired by destructive impulses towards others and the self carried out on a large scale and similar to those which inspired the wretched Nazis? And coercive in nature too, and hence in contrast with the inalienable nature of the act of suicide, which consists, as we know, in freedom of choice.

Furthermore, it has to be said that while waiting for the Total Suicide, people are still dying, a fact I consider worthy of reflection. And dying not just in the traditional and ancient fashions, but also and to a great extent as a result of factors connected with those same diabolical traps which foreshadow the Total Suicide. Such little inventions, for the solemn reason, amongst many others, that the cathode tubes of our houses must be on and that we must thus supply them with energy, are daily distributing their doses of poison which, being indiscriminate, are, if we wish to cavil, democratic; in short, while insinuating the idea of the inevitable Total Suicide, these things are all the time carrying out a systematic, constant and, I would even say, progressive form of homicide. Thus the potential suicide who does not kill himself because he might just as well wait for the Total Suicide, does not reflect, poor sucker, that in the meantime he is absorbing radioactive strontium, cesium and other delights of that ilk, and that while postponing his departure he is quite possibly already nursing in liver, lungs or spleen, one of the innumerable forms of
cancer that the above-mentioned elements so prodigally produce.