How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays

How It Begins, and How It Ends

There is a drama in my life. I pursued my advanced studies as a guest of the University College of Turin, where I had won a scholarship. Of those years I have retained the happiest of memories and a lasting dislike of tuna fish. It so happened that the college refectory remained open exactly one hour and a half for each meal. Those who arrived within the first half hour were served the specialty of the day; latecomers were given tuna. Except for the summer holidays and Sundays, then, over those four years I ate 1,920 meals featuring tuna fish. But that is not the drama I refer to.

My drama springs from the fact that, while we students had no money, we still hungered for movies, music, and plays. So we would arrive at the theater ten minutes early and approach the gentleman—what was he called?—the leader of the claque, shaking his hand and slipping a hundred lire into his palm. Then he would admit us. We were a paying claque.

It also happened that the doors of the college were locked inexorably at midnight. After that hour, those who were outside remained out, because there were no residential obligations, and if a student wished, he could be absent even for a month. Practically speaking, this meant that at ten minutes to midnight we had to leave the theater and scurry to our destination. But at ten minutes to midnight the play had not yet ended. And so it was that, over a four-year period, I saw the theatrical masterpieces of every time and place, except for their last ten minutes.

Thus I have lived a lifetime without knowing if Oedipus faced up to the horrible revelation, or what became of the six characters in search of an author, whether Oswald Alving was cured thanks to penicillin, if Hamlet finally discovered that to be was better than not to be. I still don't know who the real Signora Ponza was, if Ruggero Ruggeri/Socrates drank the hemlock, if Othello punched up Iago before setting off on a second honeymoon, if the imaginary invalid's health improved, if everyone threw rice after Romeo and Juliet, and who was Bunbury. I thought I was the only human being afflicted by this ignorance until, casually reliving old memories with my friend Paolo Fabbri, I discovered that for years he has suffered from the same anguish in reverse. During his student years he worked in a theater, organized and run by students; his job was to stand at the door and take tickets. As many ticket-holders arrived late, he was never able to slip into a seat before the beginning of the second act. He saw Lear, blind and raving, wandering around with the corpse of Cordelia in his arms; but he had no idea what had brought the two of them to that ghastly pass. He heard Blanche Dubois profess her faith in strangers, but he racked his brain trying to figure out why such a sweet lady was being carted off to the bin. He never understood why Hamlet was so down on his uncle, who seemed a perfectly nice man. He saw Othello perform his dread act, but had no notion why such a docile little wife was being placed beneath a pillow and not on top of one.

Well, to make a long story short, Paolo and I exchanged confidences. And we discovered that a splendid old age lies before us. Seated on the front steps of a country house or on a bench in the park, for years we will tell each other stories: he, endings; I, beginnings, amid cries of amazement at every discovery of prelude or catharsis.

"You don't mean it! What did he say?"

"He said: 'Mother, I want the sun!' "

"Ah, then he was done for."

"Yes, but what was wrong with him?"

I whisper the answer in his ear.

"My God, what a family! Now I understand...."

"But tell me about Oedipus!"

"There isn't a lot to tell. His Mom commits suicide and he blinds himself."

"The poor kid. All the same ... they tried to tell him in every possible way."

"True, I just can't figure it. Why didn't he understand?"

"Put yourself in his place. The plague begins. He's a king, happily married...."

"So when he married his Mom, he didn't—"

"Of course not! That's the whole point."

"It's like a Freud case history. If they told you, you wouldn't believe it."

Will we be happier afterwards? Or will we have lost the freshness of those who are privileged to experience art as real life, where we enter after the trumps have been played, and we leave without knowing who's going to win or lose the game?

1988