The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico

  ANTONIO TABUCCHI

  The Flying Creatures

  of Fra Angelico

  Translated from the Italian by Tim Parks

  archipelago books

  Copyright © Antonio Tabucchi, 2013

  English language translation © Tim Parks, 1991

  First Archipelago Books Edition, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

  in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  First published as I volatili del Beato Angelico by Sellerio editore in 1987.

  Archipelago Books

  232 3rd Street #A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tabucchi, Antonio, 1943–2012.

  [Volatili del Beato Angelico. English]

  The flying creatures of Fra Angelico/by Antonio Tabucchi;

  translated from the Italian by Tim Parks.—1st Archipelago Books ed.

  p. cm.

  “First published I volatili del Beato Angelico by Sellerio editore in 1987”—T.p. verso.

  ISBN 978-1-935744-57-3

  1. Short stories, Italian—Translations into English. I. Parks, Tim. II. Title.

  PQ4880.A24V6513 2013

  853’.914—dc22 2012025598

  Distributed by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

  www.cbsd.com

  Cover art: Hieronymus Bosch, detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights

  The publication of The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico was made possible with support from Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

  Contents

  Note

  The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico

  Past Composed: Three Letters

  I Letter from Dom Sebastião de Avis, King of Portugal,

  to Francisco Goya, painter

  II Letter from Mademoiselle Lenormand, fortune-teller,

  to Dolores Ibarruri, revolutionary

  III Letter from Calypso, a nymph, to Odysseus,

  King of Ithaca

  The Passion of Dom Pedro

  Message from the Shadows

  ‘The phrase that follows this is false: the phrase

  that precedes this is true’

  The Battle of San Romano

  Story of a Non-Existent Story

  The Translation

  Happy People

  The Archives of Macao

  Last Invitation

  Note

  Hypochondria, insomnia, restlessness and yearning are the lame muses of these brief pages. I would have liked to call them Extravaganzas, not so much for their style, as because many of them seem to wander about in a strange outside that has no inside, like drifting splinters, survivors of some whole that never was. Alien to any orbit, I have the impression they navigate in familiar spaces whose geometry nevertheless remains a mystery; let’s say domestic thickets: the interstitial zones of our daily having-to-be, or bumps on the surface of existence.

  Then some of these pages, as for example “The Archives of Macao” and “Past Composed: Three Letters,” are eccentric even on their own terms, refugees from the idea that originated them. To the extent that they are fragments of novels and stories, they are no more than meagre conjectures, or spurious projections of desire. They have a larval nature: they present themselves like creatures under formalin, with the oversize eyes of organisms still in the foetal stage – questioning eyes. But questioning whom? What do they want? I don’t know if they’re really questioning anyone, nor if they want anything, but I feel it would be kinder to ask nothing of them, since I believe that asking questions is the prerogative of those beings Nature has not brought to completion: it is that which is clearly incomplete that has the right to ask questions. Still, I cannot deny that I love them, these sketchy compositions entrusted to a notebook which out of an unconscious sort of faithfulness I have carried around with me constantly these last few years. In them, in the form of quasi-stories, are the murmurings and mutterings that have accompanied and still accompany me: outbursts, moods, little ecstasies, real or presumed emotions, grudges and regrets.

  So that rather than quasi-stories, perhaps I should say that these pages are no more than background noise in written form. Had I been a little more ruthless with myself, I would have called the collection Buridan’s Ass. What stopped me from doing that, apart from a residual pride, which is often no more than a sublimated form of baseness, was the idea that although choice and completeness are not granted to the slothful wrapped up in their background noises, one is nevertheless still left with the chance of a few meagre words: so one may as well say them. A kind of awareness, this, not to be confused with noble stoicism, and not with resignation either.

  A.T.

  Some of these pieces have already been published in Italian or foreign reviews, though it would be difficult for me to supply an exact bibliography. All the same I would like to mention the original publications of two pieces which are linked to friends. Of the letters that make up “Past Composed,” published in Il cavallo di Troia, no. 4, 1983–84, the one from Dom Sebastião of Portugal to Francisco Goya was dedicated to José Sasportes, and I would like to renew that dedication. “Message from the Half Dark” appeared in the catalogue (published by the Comune di Reggio Emilia, 1986) for a show of paintings by Davide Benati entitled Terre d’ombre. The piece is inspired by his paintings.

  The Flying Creatures

  of Fra Angelico

  The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico

  The first creature arrived on a Thursday towards the end of June, at vespers, when all the monks were in the chapel for service. Privately, Fra Giovanni of Fiesole still thought of himself as Guidolino, the name he had left behind in the world when he came to the cloister. He was in the vegetable garden gathering onions, which was his job, since in abandoning the world he hadn’t wanted to abandon the vocation of his father, Pietro, who was a vegetable gardener, and in the garden at San Marco he grew tomatoes, courgettes and onions. The onions were the red kind, with big heads, very sweet after you’d soaked them for an hour, though they made you cry a fair bit when you handled them. He was putting them in his frock gathered to form an apron, when he heard a voice calling: Guidolino. He raised his eyes and saw the bird. He saw it through onion tears filling his eyes and so stood gazing at it for a few moments, for the shape was magnified and distorted by his tears as though through a bizarre lens; he blinked his eyes to dry the lashes, then looked again.

  It was a pinkish creature, soft looking, with small yellowish arms like a plucked chicken’s, bony, and two feet which again were very lean with bulbous joints and calloused toes, like a turkey’s. The face was that of an aged baby, but smooth, with two big black eyes and a hoary down instead of hair; and he watched as its arms floundered wearily, as if unable to stop itself making this repetitive movement, miming a flight that was no longer possible. It had got caught up in the branches of the pear tree, which were spiky and warty and at this time of year laden with pears, so that at every one of the creature’s movements, a few ripe pears would fall and land splat on the clods beneath. There it hung, in a very uncomfortable position, feet straddled over two branches which must be hurting its groin, torso sideways and neck twisted, since otherwise it would have been forced to look up in the air. From the creature’s shoulder blades, like incredible triangular sails, rose two enormous wings which covered the entire foliage of the tree and which moved in the breeze together with the leaves. They were made of
different coloured feathers, ochre, yellow, deep blue, and an emerald green the colour of a kingfisher, and every now and then they opened like a fan, almost touching the ground, then closed again, in a flash, disappearing behind each other.

  Fra Giovanni dried his eyes with the back of his hand and said: “Was it you called me?”

  The bird shook his head and, pointing a claw like an index finger towards him, wagged it.

  “Me?” asked Fra Giovanni, amazed.

  The bird nodded.

  “It was me calling me?” repeated Fra Giovanni.

  This time the creature closed his eyes and then opened them again, to indicate yes once again; or perhaps out of tiredness, it was hard to say: because he was tired, you could see it in his face, in the heavy dark hollows around his eyes, and Fra Giovanni noticed that his forehead was beaded with sweat, a lattice of droplets, though they weren’t dripping down; they evaporated in the evening breeze and then formed again.

  Fra Giovanni looked at him and felt sorry for him and muttered: “You’re overtired.” The creature looked back with his big moist eyes, then closed his eyelids and wriggled a few feathers in his wings: a yellow feather, a green one and two blue ones, the latter three times in rapid succession. Fra Giovanni understood and said, spelling it out as one learning a code: “You’ve made a trip, it was too long.” And then he asked: “Why do I understand what you say?” The creature opened his arms as far as his position allowed, as if to say, I haven’t the faintest idea. So that Fra Giovanni concluded: “Obviously I understand you because I understand you.” Then he said: “Now I’ll help you get down.”

  Standing against a cherry tree at the bottom of the garden was a ladder. Fra Giovanni went and picked it up, and, holding it horizontally on his shoulders with his head between two rungs, carried it over to the pear tree, where he leaned it in such a way that the top of the ladder was near the creature’s feet. Before climbing up, he slipped off his frock because the skirts cramped his movements, and draped it over a sage bush near the well. As he climbed up the rungs he looked down at his legs, which were lean and white with hardly any hairs, and it occurred to him they looked like the bird creature’s. And he smiled, since likenesses do make one smile. Then, as he climbed, he realised his private part had slipped out of the slit in his drawers and that the creature was staring at it with astonished eyes, shocked and frightened. Fra Giovanni did himself up, straightened his drawers and said: “I’m sorry, it’s something we humans have”; and for a moment he thought of Nerina, of a farmhouse near Siena many years before, a blonde girl and a straw rick. Then he said: ‘Sometimes we manage to forget it, but it takes a lot of effort and a sense of the clouds above, because the flesh is heavy and forever pulling us earthwards.’

  He grabbed the bird creature by the feet, freed him from the spikes of the pear tree, made sure that the down on his head didn’t catch on the twigs, closed his wings, and then with the creature holding on to his back, brought him down to the ground.

  The creature was droll: he couldn’t walk. When he touched the ground he tottered, then fell on one side, and there he stayed, flailing about with his feet in the air like a sick chicken. Then he leaned on one arm and straightened his wings, rustling and whirling them like windmill sails, probably in an attempt to get up again. He didn’t succeed, so Fra Giovanni gripped him under the armpits and pulled him up, and while he was holding the creature those frenetic feathers brushed back and forth across his face tickling him. Holding him almost suspended under these things that weren’t quite armpits, he got him to walk, the way one does with a baby; and while they were walking, the creature’s feathers opened and closed in a code Fra Giovanni understood, and asked him: ‘What’s this?’ And he answered: ‘This is earth, this is the earth.’ And then, walking along the path through the garden, he explained that the earth was made of earth, and clods of soil, and that plants grew in the soil, such as tomatoes, courgettes and onions, for example.

  When they reached the arches of the cloister, the creature stopped. He dug in his heels, stiffened and said he wouldn’t go any farther. Fra Giovanni put him down on the granite bench against the wall and told him to wait; and the creature stayed there, leaning up against the wall, staring dreamily at the sky.

  ‘He doesn’t want to be inside,’ explained Fra Giovanni to the father superior, ‘he’s never been inside; he says he’s afraid of being in an enclosed space, he can’t conceive of space if it’s not open, he doesn’t know what geometry is.’ And he explained that only he, Fra Giovanni, could see the creature, no one else. Well, because that’s how it was. The father superior, though only because he was a friend of Fra Giovanni’s, might be able to hear the rustling of his wings, if he paid attention. And he asked: ‘Can you hear?’ And then he added that the creature was lost, had arrived from another dimension, wandering about; there’d been three of them and they’d got lost, a small band of creatures cast adrift, they had roamed aimlessly through skies, through secret dimensions, until this one had fallen into the pear tree. And he added that they would have to shelter him for the night under something that prevented him from floating up again, since when darkness came the creature suffered from the force of ascension, something he was subject to, and if there was nothing to hold him down he would float off to wander about in the ether again like a splinter cast adrift, and they couldn’t allow that to happen, they must offer the creature hospitality in the monastery, because in his way this creature was a pilgrim.

  The father superior agreed and they tried to think what would be the best sort of shelter: something that was, yes, out in the open, but that would prevent any forced ascension. And so they took the garden netting that protected the vegetables from hedgehogs and moles; a net of hemp strings woven by the basket-weavers of Fiesole, who were very clever with wicker and yarn. They stretched the net over four poles which they set up at the bottom of the vegetable garden against the perimeter wall, so as to form a sort of open shed; and on the clods of earth, which the bird creature found so strange, they placed a layer of dry straw, and laid the creature on top of it. After rearranging his little body a few times, he found the position he wanted on his side. He sank down with intense pleasure and, surrendering to the tiredness he must have dragged after him across the skies, immediately fell asleep. Upon which the monks likewise went to bed.

  The other two creatures arrived the following morning at dawn while Fra Giovanni was going out to check the guest’s chicken run and see if he had slept well. Against the pink glow of the dawning day he saw them approaching in a low, slanting flight, as if desperately trying, and failing, to maintain height, veering in fearful zigzags, so that at first he thought they were going to crash against the perimeter wall. But they cleared it by a hair’s breadth and then, unexpectedly, regained height. One hovered in the air like a dragonfly, then landed with legs wide apart on the wall. He sat there a moment, astride the wall, as if undecided whether to fall down on this side or the other, until at last he crashed down headfirst into the rosemary bushes in the flower bed. The second creature meanwhile turned in two spiralling loops, an acrobat’s pirouette almost, like a strange ball, because he was a rolypoly sort of being without a lower part to his body, just a chubby bust ending in a greenish brushlike tail with thick, abundant plumage that must serve both as driving force and rudder. And like a ball he came down amongst the rows of lettuce, bouncing two or three times, so that what with his shape and greenish colour you would have thought he was a head of lettuce a bit bigger than the others off larking about thanks to some trick of nature.

  For a moment Fra Giovanni was undecided as to whom he should go and help first. Then he chose the big dragonfly, because he seemed more in need, miserably caught as he was head down in the rosemary bushes, one leg sticking out and flailing about as if calling for help. When he went to pull him out he really did look like a big dragonfly, or at least that was the impression he gave; or rather, a large cricket, yes, that’s what he looked like, so long and thin, and al
l gangly, with frail slender limbs you were afraid to touch in case they broke, almost translucent, pale green, like stems of unripe corn. And his chest was like a grasshopper’s too, a wedge-shaped chest, pointed, without a scrap of flesh, just skin and bones: though there was the plumage, so sheer it almost seemed fur; golden; and the long shining hairs that sprouted from his skull were golden too, almost like hair, but not quite, and given the position of his body, head down, they were hiding his face.

  Fearfully, Fra Giovanni stretched out an arm and pushed back the hair from the creature’s face: first he saw two big eyes, so pale they looked like water, gazing in amazement, then a thin, handsome face with white skin and red cheeks. A woman’s face, because the features were feminine, albeit on a strange insectlike body. ‘You look like Nerina,’ Fra Giovanni said, ‘a girl I once knew called Nerina.’ And he began to free the creature from the rosemary needles, carefully, because he was afraid of breaking the thing; and because he was afraid he might snap her wings, which looked exactly like a dragonfly’s, but large and streamlined, transparent, bluish pink and gold with a very fine latticing, like a sail. He took the creature in his arms. She was fairly light, no heavier than a bundle of straw, and walking across the garden Fra Giovanni repeated what he had said the day before to the other creature; that this was the earth and that the earth was made of earth and of clods of soil and that in the soil grew plants, such as tomatoes, courgettes and onions, for example.

  He laid the bird creature in the cage next to the guest already there, and then hurried to fetch the other little creature, the rolypoly one that had wound up in the lettuces. Though it now turned out that he wasn’t as rounded as he had seemed, his body having in the meantime as it were unrolled, to show that he had the shape of a loop, or of a figure eight, though cut in half, since he was really no more than a bust terminating in a beautiful tail, and no bigger than a baby. Fra Giovanni picked him up and, repeating his explanations about the earth and the clods, took him to the cage, and when the others saw him coming they began to wriggle with excitement; Fra Giovanni put the little ball on the straw and watched with amazement as the creatures exchanged affectionate looks, patted each other’s feet and brushed each other’s feathers, talking and even laughing with their wings at the joy of being reunited.