‘This set upon us at dawn on the twenty-sixth day. From our rock we saw the approaching wind as it battered distant waters; closer by, sluggish leaden waves swelled ever larger. Soon the gusts arrived, whistling in our ears, bending the withered rosemary bushes. The sea churned below us and the first white-capped surge advanced. “Farewell, Sasà. You won’t forget.” The billow broke upon the rock; the Siren dove into the iridescent spray. I never saw her come down; she seemed to dissolve into the foam.’

The senator left the next morning; I went to the station to see him off. He was surly and cutting as usual, but, when the train began to move, his fingers reached through the window to graze my head.

The next day at dawn a telephone call came into the newspaper from Genoa: During the night Senator La Ciura had fallen into the sea from the deck of the Rex as it sailed toward Napoli; though lifeboats had been deployed immediately, the body was not found.

A week later came the reading of his will: To Bettina went the bank account and furniture; the library was donated to the University of Catania; in a recently added codicil I was named legatee of both the Greek crater with the Siren figures and the large photograph of the Acropolis kore.

I had the two objects sent to my house in Palermo. Then came the war and while I was stuck in Marmarica with a pint of water a day, the ‘Liberators’ destroyed my house. When I returned I found the photograph had been cut into strips and used by the looters for torches. The crater had been smashed to bits; the largest piece showed the feet of Odysseus tied to the mast of his ship. I still have it today. The books had been stored underground by the university, but, for lack of money for shelves, there they slowly rot.

‘The Siren’

Written in the winter 1956–1957 and published posthumously (with the title ‘Lighea’) in Racconti (Feltrinelli, 1961).

Antonio Tabucchi

1943–2012

Writing, for Tabucchi, was often an act of crossing borders, of switching from one set of coordinates to the next. Implicit to his creative journey was an enduring and transformative dedication to another language, its literature and its people. In his case, the language was Portuguese, first encountered in the work of the writer Fernando Pessoa, famous for creating separate literary identities known as heteronyms. In translating and introducing Pessoa’s work to Italy, Tabucchi fabricated a unique postmodern identity for himself. He travelled to Portugal, met and married a Portuguese woman, and founded, with his wife, a magazine dedicated to Portuguese literature. In Italy he taught Portuguese for decades, in Bologna, Genoa and Siena, and then became the director of the Institute for Italian Culture in Lisbon in the late 1980s. He wrote long novels and short ones, his style also crossing the borders of conventional narrative technique over the course of his creative career. He composed his novel, Requiem, directly in Portuguese, a book he did not himself translate into Italian. An outspoken public intellectual, Tabucchi collaborated with Italy’s major newspapers until his articles, fiercely critical of the Berlusconi government, marginalized him to the realm of overtly leftist publications. He wrote four books of short stories. This selection appears at the end of his final collection, Il tempo invecchia in fretta (Time Ages in a Hurry): nine cyclical, deeply elegiac tales in which time, place and memory form a thematic triad. Each is set in a series of different international cities. The book was published three years before the author’s death in Portugal. By then Tabucchi had been made a Portuguese national, and so his ashes rest in a tomb dedicated to Portuguese writers in Lisbon’s Prazeres Cemetery. His funeral was conducted in Italian, French and Portuguese.