Read Online Indian Nocturne by Antonio Tabucchi - Free Book Online Page B

cigarette, split it in two and gave me half. ‘What are you doing round here?’ he asked.
    ‘I’m looking for someone called Xavier, he may have passed through here from time to time.’
    Tommy shook his head. ‘But is he happy for you to be looking for him?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘So don’t look for him then.’
    I tried to give him a detailed description of Xavier. ‘When he smiles he looks sad,’ I finished.
    A girl left the group and called to us. Tommy called back to her and she came towards us. ‘My girlfriend,’ Tommy explained. She was a pale blonde girl with vacant eyes and two
childish pigtails gathered up on her head. She swayed as she walked, a little hesitant. Tommy asked her if she knew a guy who looked like this and this, repeating my description. She smiled
incongruously and didn’t answer. Then she sweetly stretched out her hands to us and whispered: ‘Hotel Mandovi.’
    ‘The party’s beginning,’ said Tommy. ‘Come along.’
    We were sitting on the edge of a very primitive boat with a crude float like a catamaran’s. ‘Maybe I’ll come over later,’ I said. ‘I’m going to lie down a
while in the boat and take a nap.’ As they were going away I couldn’t resist it and shouted after him that he had forgotten to tell me if I was a gentleman like the rest. Tommy stopped,
raised his arms and said: ‘Try and guess.’
    ‘I give up,’ I shouted, ‘it’s too difficult.’ I got out my guidebook and lit matches. I found it almost at once. They described it as a ‘popular, top range
hotel’, with a respectable restaurant. In Panaji, once Nova Goa, inland. I stretched out on the bottom of the boat and looked at the sky. The night was truly magnificent. I followed the
constellations and thought about the stars and the time when we used to study them and the afternoons spent at the planetarium. All at once I remembered how I had learnt them, classifying them by
the intensity of their light: Sirius, Canopus, Centaurus, Vega, Capella, Arcturus, Orion . . . And then I thought of the variable stars and the book of a person dear to me. And then of the dead
stars, whose light still reaches us, and of the neutron stars in the last stage of evolution, and the feeble ray they emit. In a low voice I said: pulsar. And almost as if reawakened by my whisper,
or as if I had started a tape recorder, I heard the nasal phlegmatic voice of Professor Stini saying: When the mass of a dying star is greater than double the solar mass, the matter is no longer in
a state such as to arrest the process of concentration which then proceeds ad infinitum; no radiation will ever leave that star again and it is thus transformed into a black hole.

XI
    How odd life is. The Hotel Mandovi takes its name from the river it stands beside. The Mandovi is a wide, calm river with a long estuary lined with beaches, almost like sea
beaches. On the left there is the port of Panaji, a river port for small steamers pulling barges laden with merchandise. There are two dilapidated gangways and a rusty jetty. And when I arrived,
right by the edge of the jetty, as if it were coming out of the river, the moon rose. It had a yellow halo and was full and blood-coloured. I thought, red moon, and instinctively I started
whistling an old song. The idea came like a short circuit. I thought of a name, Roux, and then immediately of those words of Xavier’s: ‘I have become a night bird’; and then
everything seemed so obvious, stupid even, and I thought: Why didn’t I think of it before?
    I went into the hotel and took a look around. The Mandovi was built in the late fifties and already has an air of being old. Perhaps it was built when the Portuguese were still in Goa. I
don’t know what it was, but the place seemed to have preserved something of the fascist taste of the period. Perhaps it was the big lobby that looked like a station waiting room, or perhaps
it was the impersonal, depressing post-office or