Waiting on line I perspired. Some of those in front, along the winding ess curve of bodies, left while others passed through the entrance. My turn, the person in the booth remained invisible behind the grill and mesh netting. Through a small window slot near the bottom I asked the dark female voice the price of entrance. “The ability to quickly enter another world with an open mind,” she began her list.“Unafraid to tour a life racked by the methods of Time’s skill in tearing memory asunder.The removal of the thinned partition still and stoic in its attempts to divide the imagination from a reality conjured and filled in by imagination.An acceptance watching the wall’s sudden sway, then collapse.”I slid the fare into the slot taking the returned ticket to the uniformed guard by the entrance gate. Half bowing he waved me in, white toothed and smiling.Once, I had been to Tabucchi Land Theme Park. Given time off from the work of life it fell on the holiday of Pereira Maintains. Then, I stepped into a phantasm of the unknown appearing as the every day. Amongst the myriad din of voices unwinding their typical pauses and spacings, magicians immediately staged themselves on both sides. Using swift movements of their torsos, flash of shoulders and hands whipping into dazzled contortions their phantasm through the use of well placed specifics rendering it believable, partook of the world of the commonplace without a hitch. How it is done, made to look easy, comfortable.Further on I came upon a row on either side of large rusted black metal barrels. Peering down into one I moved on to the next and then the next. Each was filled three quarters of the way to the top with quotation marks. The she and he saids, were on the other side in identical barrels but scribbled on the outside in rose chalk warned, “Use only to clarify and further rhythm.” Moving on into a corridor, doors to be opened and closed lined the plastered walls leading to staircases winding up and downward.Each door opened onto a room. Steadfast and plainly set. Shrugging it off I went to leave the first room I entered. The door was locked, the phantasm quietly setting into place. Looking around everything appeared similar. It wasn’t what I saw but a feeling. A feeling the wall began its crumble and dream sifted in. A door painted the same white as the splitting walls opened and a man appeared with two drinks. We sat at a table I hadn’t noticed and talked. When finished he directed me to another door. There stood…yes, may father as a young man filled with questions to grill me. When finished he directed me to another where I found my old friend who had died. Mine or…his. Tabucchi himself, his narrator, or was it me. Confused I no longer recognized the difference. A life was being walked through. Retaken in its ending. Room after room handed off through the past. Some rooms occupied by those of my present situation which quickly worsened as the corridor split off again. What kind of theme park was this? What was Tabucchi thinking, doing? My thoughts spiraled. There were no signs lit. Choosing either direction might well spin my disorientation into mayhem in this maze. It seemed too far to turn back. Knocking on doors there was no answer. On impulse I chose the path on the left. It grew dimmer. I could turn around and retrace my steps then take the turn to the right. But if I just listened a faint sound simmered through the dark. Barely heard but gradually louder as I stepped on. Then shards of light, widening. But to where? To an opening, the din reshuffled into voices of tears, sobs, mutterings convoluted. Holding my breath and stepping to the flutter of my heart I snaked out into the light. All eyes turned toward me. The sudden silence. I had returned to the entrance where my journey began. I followed the path, patrons on both sides of me, the bitter-sweet smiles, handkerchiefs dabbing at moist eyes, pats on the back encouraging me on. The exit gate opened for me. I looked back. There he sat. The Poet with legs crossed a hand held briefly up hesitated then waved. I felt my own eyes grow moist and waved back. Passing through the exit gate I heard it click shut behind me. I was alone.
“My past is everything I failed to be.” The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa Memory is made of hope and oblivion resembling a shimmering reflection of vanished beings in the hollow mirror of silence and time, which provides walking paths to shorten the distance between previous but vividly delineated selves and the faint creature one is now.Let’s invent a universe where to walk slowly on the horizon separating the sky and sea and wire a versed bridge to bring the past forward to the future of current infinity. “I am dreaming but what I dream seems to me to be real, and I have to meet certain people who exist only in my memory.” (p. 17) It is from the ambiguous state flowing between consciousness and unconsciousness, between the experience of reality and the perception of dreams that truth is forged and enlightenment is consummated.A writer’s story within a writer’s biography shaping a mirage of a day spent in a deserted and scorching Lisbon on a last Sunday of any given July. Unprecedented Tabucchi’s diary as token of the most fervent homage to his beloved Lisbon?Or a feverish yet fecund hallucination of a middle aged writer product of a transcendental journey?Either journal or uncanny experience, Tabucchi has a mission to accomplish in Lisbon. An illustrious and befogged Portuguese poet, who makes his apparition only at midnight, waits for him. Blurred and abrupt change of scenarios, from a cemetery to the house of a long deceased friend, stopping by a traditional restaurant that magically gets the silhouette of a cool room of a brothel where the writer takes a nap within his dream, where billiard rooms and demolished lighthouses blend without awkwardness. The shadowy meetings, all random and crucial, are naturally presented one after another in miraculous fashion, albeit without tricks or traps.Everything is possible in this no man’s land of chimera where Tabucchi writes the unfinished chapters of his life. From an eternal date with the lost love of his life to a tremendously rousing encounter with his young father that will defy fate, passing through “Café A Brasileira” to meet Fernando Pessoa and his multiple unfocused existences, who answer in multilayered echoes “In order to travel it is enough to be” at Tabucchi’s unuttered question.Memories and phantoms merge in a twelve hours half momentous journey, half delusional trance, in which a lifetime is relentlessly compressed and dilated and past and present commingle to reciprocally give meaning to each other. Dead meet the living in the motionless crevice filled with the absence of time paying homage to the soul of Lisbon, the quintessential city where poets and mementoes smile from the other shore of the river of life. “Did you fall into the river?, he asked. Worse than that, I said, I seem to have the river inside me.” (p. 21) Let’s descend to the oldest river in the world where every fractal billow acts as a mirror creating fragmented works of art in the form of self portraits in which one discovers hidden gospel truths when looking at the reflection of another’s consciousness. This is the power of words, of art … of literature.
What do You think about Requiem: A Hallucination (2002)?
After reading only a few sentences, I knew this would be a book I would hold dear for a long time to come. Even though I only stumbled on it last year, I have reread it more than once. It is difficult to describe, given that the title does a good job already. Reader: prepared to be swept away on a hot, humid, sweaty but dreamy day in Lisbon, accompanying the narrator through moments tender, quixotic, and mysterious. It is a gentle whirlwind, where perhaps not everything is explained, but the trip is so beautiful, so exquisite, so cinematic, that the book's mysteries feel sacred.
—Lauren G
A ridiculously charming novella that is is difficult to describe in a way that gives it justice. The story follows one day (or perhaps one dream) of an Italian walking around Lisbon interacting with both figures from his past and people he meets. It works at many levels: as mediatation on life; a flanneurs travel guide to Lisbon; a collection of rustic Portuguese cooking; a homage to Pessoa; but above all it works as an expression of love by a foreigner of a country he gets to know in a way that only a foreigner can.
—James
Lance Cleland (Workshop Director): Antonio Tabucchi opens his “hallucination” with the following Carlos Drummond de Andrade quote—“I have no desire to be friends with Handel. I’ve never heard the dawn chorus of the archangels. I’m happy with the noises that drift up from the street, which bear no message and are lost, just as we are lost.” This is perfect table setting, for we spend the next 100 or so pages meandering through a not quite real Lisbon, walking beside an unnamed narrator who is trying to keep an appointment with the ghost of Fernando Pessoa, the city’s literary saint. Along the journey, we hear countless voices from the street, diverse in their origins, but all confessing some manor of love for the world of yesterday or the one being born tomorrow. The Portuguese, who invented an entire musical genre devoted to melancholy, have a word, Saudade, which has no direct translation in English but can best be described as what remains after love’s departure. Circumstances have no doubt influenced my reading of Requiem—I was fortunate enough to encounter the novel while traveling in Lisbon recently—but I can’t help but think Tabucchi intended the book to be read while sitting on a park bench, in a city you might never visit again, allowing his own view of its inhabitants to blend with your own, creating a hallucination both fleeting and lingering. For this is a novel meant to travel with.
—TinHouseBooks
