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

promised, but maybe you didn’t notice ten years have gone by, you left in forty-three – when the beast in my country is dead I’ll be back, you said – I think the beast has been dead in your country for quite some time, but here he’s alive and well, like I told you, if you’re feeling nostalgicfor the Peloponnese Mountains, go up there for a stroll, go and clear your lungs … Tristano, go back where you came from, to your own country, if you came for us, you’re awfully late, if it was for Daphne, come back next year, or maybe in a couple of years … Writer, if you’d known about this, you’d have told the story like you know how: the hero who arranges a time to return and then shows up ten years too late warrants a few pages, a parody of Ulysses, a joke of a Ulysses who got on the wrong tram, the one for Pancuervo instead of Ithaca … I don’t know how your protagonist would have answered Marios if you’d written what I told you, what excuse would your Tristano have come up with? Sorry if I’m jumping to conclusions here, I’m only guessing … I can see a solemn Tristano, with wounded pride … I received the War Cross, he says in a grave voice, I’m a hero, Marios, you have to understand how many obligations fill a hero’s days, the staged appearances, diplomatic missions, ambassadorships for peace and brotherhood, ceremonies, conferences … and a man like Marios, who’d fought for freedom, even though it turned out badly, would understand and embrace him. But Tristano gave another excuse entirely … I didn’t come before because of one small detail, he said with conviction, one damned detail. Just like that, a ridiculous excuse, it smacks of comedy, someone getting on the wrong tram … and if you write Tristano’s life, this is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me … But listen, writer, if you want to write this according to your own ideas, how you might have if you’d known about this earlier, then feel free. Your choice – and who’d object?
    God is in the details, a Jewish scholar said, a philologist, I think. But so’s the Devil. It was a summer day, blue, Tristano remembers, even the city he remembers as blue, though it was actually a rose-colored city, with pink and yellow buildings all along the moats and ancient walls by the sea. The buildings crowded along the bulwarks had sheets hanging out the windows to dry, like white flags, and they were snapping that day in the northwest wind. And Tristano, when he’d go see Taddeo, rode his red motorcycle, because he liked riding his motorcycle along the coast, the road just outside the city sloped down, winding sharply around rocky cliffs where tamarisk and prickly pear grew, and from there you could enjoy the vast panorama, the sky-blue sea, with sailboats on the horizon, and after a few curves, Taddeo’s pensione came into view. Not a real pensione, though; it was called Taddeo Zimmer, a low structure that Taddeo had put up with his own two hands, right below the cliffs, by a short, pebble beach. Eight small rooms with a kitchenette and bath, each with its own terrace divided from the others by privet shrubs in terracotta pots, to give the Germans – the Krauts, Taddeo called them – a sense of being in the Mediterranean, as he liked to say. He’d become a great friend of the krauts, and they were devoted clients, because Taddeo’s pensione was modest and his customers were mainly workers from the Ruhr Valley, and at night they’d sit with Taddeo and play cards. Taddeo had killed many Germans. He counted his kills in a filthy notebook,in German, jotting down the hour and place,
ein, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben
, and next to those he’d killed with the highest military rank, he put three small stars like in the Michelin Guide. Taddeo and Tristano first met a few years before in those mountains behind them. Taddeo was a small wild boy who lived in the woods with his family of