Requiem: A Hallucination

Requiem: A Hallucination [Requiem: uma alucinação] (New Directions, 2002)
by Antonio Tabucchi [translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa]
Italy, 1991

A lovely, truly lovely morsel for Spanish and Portuguese Lit Months 2018 readers courtesy of "the most Portuguese" of all Italian writers.  During the course of a hot Sunday afternoon and evening in Lisbon, an Antonio Tabucchi-like narrator whiles away the time waiting to meet up with a Fernando Pessoa-like poet sometime around the stroke of midnight.  As in a dream, the narrator crosses paths with both the living and the dead--family members, old friends, total strangers, perhaps people he only knows through books--looking for answers that have long avoided him or perplexed him in "reality."  "I didn't choose to appear in this room, it was your will that called me here, because it was you who wanted me in your dream, and now I only have time to say goodbye, goodbye my son, the maid is just about to knock on the door, I have to leave" the sleeping narrator is told in one moment (52).  "I've never been here before, and the person who's coming here belongs only in my memory" the narrator later tells the manager of a private club about the guest he expects to arrive and join him (82).  "There's nothing wrong with that, he said, you'll feel perfectly at home here, this club is nothing but a memory, now."  Extraordinarily soulful, endearingly playful from time to time, not at all disquieting in its evocations of evanescence.

Antonio Tabucchi (1943-2012)

The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro

The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro [La Testa perduta di Damasceno Monteiro] (New Directions, 1999)
by Antonio Tabucchi [translated from the Italian by J.C. Patrick]
Italy, 1997

"I will start with a question which I address chiefly to myself," said Don Fernando.  "What does it mean to be against death?"

(The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro, 164)

Two novels into my relationship with the sadly recently departed Antonio Tabucchi, I think that one of the main things I appreciate about the Italian Lusophile is his light touch with some very heavy themes.  Much like its 1994 predecessor Pereira Declares, The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro cloaks a handful of depressing realities--in this case, a violent crime in Oporto which sports a spider's web of connections to the international drug trade, political torture, and the abuse of power in a modern police state--in the garb of a prose style that's easygoing and almost affable in its sensibilities.  The result is a deceptively simple crime story of sorts in which the gruesome crime that literally costs 28-year old errand boy Damasceno Monteiro his head is only the starting point for a melancholic reflection on a gruesome crime of an altogether different nature and scale: societal apathy to the victimization of the powerless by the powerful be it by bloodshed or by economic means.  Without Tabucchi's light touch, this could have ended up as some seriously heavyhanded reading.  With it, however, one only senses a concerned humanist's attempt to persuade his readers of the interconnectedness of all things literary and political as a call to action.  On this note, I should mention that one of the other keys to my enjoyment of this novel was its oddly affecting portrayal of the amicizia between the apolitical but Elio Vittorini and György Lukács-loving Lisbon crime reporter Firmino and the gluttonous social justice attorney Don Fernando--an activist who comes from old money in Oporto but not only defends the "unfortunates" with his words and his actions but actually identifies with them "because to understand the miseries of life you have to put your hands in the shit, if you will excuse the expression, and above all be aware of it.  And kindly don't force me to be rhetorical, because this form of rhetoric is cheap" (94).

Antonio Tabucchi (1943-2012)

The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro was read for Antonio Tabucchi Week sponsored by Caroline of Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat.  Thanks to Caroline for coming up with such a fine idea for the week.

Pereira Declares

Pereira Declares [Sostiene Pereira] (New Directions, 1996)
by Antonio Tabucchi [translated from the Italian by Patrick Creagh]
Italy, 1994

Pereira Declares begins with, ends with, and in reality even bludgeons you with its recurring use of the two words "Pereira declares," a stylistic tic presumably designed to emphasize the fact that Pereira's testimony isn't written by him but is mediated by another whose friend or foe status remains unclear.  Thankfully, the "Pereira declares" word truncheon is about the only thing I didn't appreciate about Tabucchi's otherwise graceful novella.  Pereira, I should point out, is a middle-aged ex-crime reporter turned culture page editor of a Catholic nightly trying to cloak himself in literature to protect himself from the political realities of 1938 Lisbon.  This is of course much more easily said than done, the proof of which is that the die is cast for a clash between the newspaperman's wish to remain apolitical and the encroaching fascism of Salazar era Portugal once Pereira enlists the aid of an idealistic young assistant to help prepare future obituaries for still living writers.  Having wasted two precious sentences on plot, I hope you'll forgive me if I return to more pressing matters.  To begin with, I really enjoyed Tabucchi's sweet, gentle humor here--like the way the widower Pereira's relationship with his dead wife's photo, which he speaks to and packs in his suitcase when traveling but "face upwards, because his wife had all her life had such a need for air and he felt sure her picture also needed plenty of room to breathe" (63), says so much about the character's loneliness without mocking his devotion to his spouse's memory.  I was also won over by the emotional pull and lyricism of moments like this one, where Pereira ecstatically reacts to dancing a waltz with the beautiful twenty-something Marta: "And during the dance he looked up at the sky above the coloured lights of the Praça da Alegria, and he felt infinitely small and at one with the universe.  In some nondescript square somewhere in the universe, he thought, there's a fat elderly man dancing with a young girl and meanwhile the stars are circling, the universe is in motion, and maybe someone is watching us from an everlasting observatory" (16-17).  Finally, in a work in which obituaries and optimism are constantly at one another's throats, it was refreshing to witness an example of the reader/writer struggling to remain true to himself/herself in trying circumstances: "He read over what he had written and found it nauseating, yes, nauseating was the word, Pereira declares.  So he chucked that page away and wrote: 'Fernando Pessoa died three years ago.  Very few people, almost no one, even knew he existed.  He lived in Portugal as a foreigner and a misfit, perhaps because he was everywhere a misfit.  He lived alone, in cheap boarding-houses and rented rooms.  He is remembered by his friends, his comrades, those who love poetry'" (21).  (New Directions)

Antonio Tabucchi