Read Online Tristano Dies by Antonio Tabucchi - Free Book Online Page A

distinguish flower from fruit, fish from fowl, insect from mammal … You see, Doctor, sir, I’m not sure I can explain: a tiny creature like a freshwater crawfish, pink-colored, but with no keratin shell, so, soft like a dormouse, with a tiny round head that’s sprouting four miniature tentacles, maybe a centimeter and a half, two centimeters long, nothing more, and extremely tender, it feeds off something like the moss that grows in the cleanest streams in the principality, the gambusinen gorge on it, an exquisite green, like nothing else, and it lingers in their meat, like a truffle cutting the slight bitterness of porcini mushrooms … Doctor Ziegler listened and was silent. The cicadas were raging, and heat settled over the pergola. It was August … It was an August like this one, writer, and Tristano didn’t need any morphine to step outside himself, he was out of his mind all on his own. I wanted to tell you about this later, but it’s come to me now and so I told younow, be patient, I’m sure it won’t make sense in your book, let it go … Listen, it must be nearly evening and Frau’s coming to give me my morphine, but I don’t want it tonight. I’m hungry, tell her I’m hungry, that I want a cup of broth, a cup of chicken broth, there was a time I’d ask for gambusinen, but now they’re extinct, all that’s left of them are empty tins with the key turning up the rusty lid … Tell Frau that since there aren’t any gambusinen, I’ll make do with a cup of chicken broth – you’ll see – she’ll know.
    Ferruccio said you writers always see yourselves in light of the future, as posthumous, and I thought about what you set in motion by telling my story in the first person, as if you were Tristano … you’d already consigned me to the future, like a tombstone, and you saw your own reflection there, because that tombstone reflected your own image back to you, like you thought you’d be for posterity … But I’m changing that image right under your nose, no, it’s more topsy-turvy, face down feet up, like a carnival mirror … I feel sorry for you, but I’m not sure what you were expecting when you came here to see me, I’m not here to confirm anything, just the opposite … never trust mirrors, right then and there they seem to show your image, but they really distort it, or even worse, they absorb your image, drink up everything, suck you in as well … Mirrors are porous, writer, and you didn’t even know.
    He didn’t answer, Marios, staring off at nothing, his finger stirring the coffee grinds at the bottom of his glass, he looked like a failed fortuneteller searching for an answer that couldn’t be found, and he just kept quiet … The same small Plaka square, one cold sunny day, the impassive Acropolis above … Marios, it’s me, I’m back, please, look at me. And then Marios spoke, his voice neutral, like a doctor handing out a diagnosis or a judge a sentence … the mountains are the same, and the stones, and the trees, but everything’s finished, there’s no one left, they’re all dead, I’m dead, too; Field Marshal Papagos, that black-hearted leader, gave Greece a new Duce and a new king, identical to the ones that came before, the British lent a hand, the Americans, too, General Skolby, the great strategist, expert at mass shootings … the British and their younger cousins have two democracies, the good kind, for internal use, and then the damaged kind, left to molder in the storehouses of time, the export kind, suitable for poor people, so poor they’ll swallow anything … and now you’re back, Tristano, I see that you’re back, and you’re asking about your comrades, about Daphne … your comrades are dead, Daphne’s far away, I don’t know where, giving her concerts, it’s not as though Greece needs her music, the marshals want patriotic music for the people in their new Greece … I see that you’re back, you’re back like you