Read Online Tristano Dies by Antonio Tabucchi - Free Book Online

memories, floating in their own sea foam, I’m on the edge of sleep, a few reach me, sting me, others, all I have to do is dangle my arm alongside the bed to fish some up. Doctor Ziegler kept pacing back and forth as though he wanted to dig a rut in the floor, he didn’t care that Tristano was slouched in his chair on the porch, it was as if he’d found him in his sleepless bed. Try fishing one up now, he said, just let yourself go, let your arm hang over the edge, close your eyes, pretend I’m not here … Silence. Doctor Ziegler froze, held his breath. All you could hear was the countryside’s breathing, the ground, the smell of stubble in the valley, the buzzing blue flies, a bee, a barking dog, but far far away, another world. I caught a can of gambusinen, but it’s open, the key’s turning up the rusty lid, Tristano mumbled as if in a trance,
nichts, absolut nichts, gambusinen kaputt
. Doctor Ziegler was worrying his hands behind his back. Gambusinen? –
was bedeutet gambusinen
, go on, Herr Tristano, concentrate. Oh … oh … oh … Tristano was searching for something, or perhaps those concentric rings of sound rising in his throat meant he was already lost to a world of dreams? Ziegler waited patiently, silently. I should talk about old schnabelewopskian customs, Tristano mumbled, ancient anthropology, Doctor, practically geology, and he was in full flight now over a truly incomprehensible land not to be found on any maps, probably tied to the archipelago of his imagination, and over therewas Utopia Island. Schnabelewops was a principality, a swatch of land high in the mountains, with a view of the sea, and that sea was the Greek sea, where Venus was virgin-born, it was understood, a country of impervious peaks but also soft slopes and meadows and olive and chestnut trees and crisscrossed by countless streams, their water as clean, as crystal-clear as the water where Orlando christened his sword Durlindana or Dionigi di Gaula bathed his feet after his long, long march, as the mad hidalgo tells it. And during the local wheat festivals or on the many scorching-hot days, the people would joyfully splash about in these streams, to the shrieks of young ladies. And there were so many streams, the Schnabelewopskians hadn’t even tried counting them for their maps. What was the point? Each village had a stream running beside it or even dividing it in two, so that there were great cultural divides going back a thousand years between those villagers on the right bank or the left, and a Nordic folklorist, who’d wandered everywhere collecting ancient songs, had recorded some ancient treasures where the maid who’d left to marry sang with longing for the land of her fathers that she’d abandoned when she wed and crossed over the stream to live in the house facing her own that was in a whole other country; and wading in, she soaked her stockings … With this last effort, Tristano grew quiet, eyes closed, his hand gone fishing, dangling off the lounge chair. Not asleep though … Doctor Ziegler was afraid to interrupt his oneiric space, which was sacred to every patient and crucial to every therapist. The countryside was slowly breathing in and out. It was midday.Doctor Ziegler should have been in his office in town, but of course he’d cancelled all his appointments: this patient was too interesting. Tristano started to speak again, but perhaps he was truly sailing in his oneiric space now, talking about gambusinen, aquatic creatures presumably from his childhood, no doubt part of a fantastic zoology known only to the disturbed or to poets who’d never written any poetry, creatures which, if you listened to his semi-garbled words, seemed to fall somewhere between crustaceans and proper fish, meaning, with gills and fins. Antidiluvian creatures, Doctor Ziegler thought, from the earliest of times, when everything was just coming into being, when taxonomy wasn’t yet possible, and you couldn’t