Hence it might be said that the deathly vision of the ocean, the sudden absence of life and nature on the sea that day, carved out a deep channel, without life or a way out, in my insides. Add to this the realization that Tongoy was also aware of the deathly panorama and mysteriously asked me, “Will there not be another death in paradise?” And add on top of this the sense of unease caused by the island of Pico as the ferry approached. There was barely a soul in sight when we disembarked in Madalena’s ghostly harbor. The town was deserted and a vast silence hung over it, broken only by the gusts of wind and by the birds. I felt uneasy and anxious; it was as if I had traveled to Comala, the town in Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, that town where everyone is dead.
Sad and solitary Madalena. To escape my anxiety, I asked Tongoy what we were doing there. “Visiting Antonio Caiado,” Rosa interposed. You’d think she’d have said, “I came to Pico because I was told a mysterious writer lived here.” We watched the four passengers traveling with us disembark from the ferry, they got off the boat with their bags and baskets, in grave silence. In a few seconds they disappeared like ghosts down the streets of Madalena, and that was the last we saw of them. “One visits Pico for the experience,” Tongoy remarked. We went for a wander in the town, but didn’t find or see anybody and, on returning to the pier, we found an old taxi driver in a run-down car, parked opposite the small town hall. He was clearly waiting for us, no doubt he had been warned from Fayal of the arrival of three tourists. “Where is everybody?” we asked him. “It’s Carnival, a holiday,” he answered. We hired him for a tour of the island, to drive down the road connecting Madalena and Lajes, the only road in Pico. Rosa asked about Caiado and the taxi driver, after a few moments’ hesitation, told us that he lived in a house on a small hill on the road to Lajes, but was never there; it was said on the island that he really lived in New York. “We won’t lose anything if we look to see if he’s there,” said Tongoy and, although I protested that it was a waste of time — perhaps because I felt jealous of the mysterious writer — it was decided, two against one, to visit Caiado. I didn’t forgive Tongoy his vote, I recall that I stared at him in anger and thought that he looked awful, more frightful than ever. But I later realized — while we were driving down the gloomy Lajes road — that by his presence Tongoy gave me a strange sense of security. Perhaps the kind of serenity he passed on to me was one of the reasons I had instinctively sought his friendship back on the terrace in Valparaiso. Tongoy possessed a monster’s warmth. “Very quickly,” writes Michaux, “it became obvious (from my teenage years) that I had been born to live among monsters.”
The only road on the island of Pico is — as I already described it in Montano’s Malady without adding a single drop of fiction — a narrow road that runs along the breakwater, with many curves and deep potholes, over and against a rebellious and very blue Atlantic Ocean. The road, which was once covered in vineyards and luxurious villas crosses a stony and melancholic landscape with occasional, isolated houses on small hills swept by the wind. In one of these houses on the hills, the taxi driver had fallen in love, and he told us about it. In another of these houses lived Caiado. When we parked a few yards from the mysterious writer’s house, because of the strong wind buffeting even the taxi, Tongoy refused to get out. “You go,” said Tongoy, “but I can tell you now that there’s no one in that house.” No doubt he was absolutely right. The house on the hill battered by the wind seemed firmly closed. In an act almost of courage, defying the strong wind in that region, Rosa and I abandoned the taxi and climbed the short slope, in constant danger of losing our balance, until we reached the front door.
I knocked at the door and it was like knocking at the door of lost time. We knocked three times, and the only answer we got was the fierce noise of the wind raging at the two pitiful trees that stood on top of the hill. On returning to the taxi, I thought that lost time doesn’t really exist, but what does exist — I told myself — is an empty, doomed house.
That night, back in Fayal, we went to Café Sport and drank gin with the old whalers and people from the yachts, all that bizarre set who cross the Atlantic in winter and turn up at Café Sport and chat to the whalers in a fascinating exchange of adventures. With the aid of alcohol, I began to imagine that a character by the name of Teixeira lived in that empty, doomed house on Pico’s small hill and taught laughter therapy, a copy of “the new man,” the man to come, that inhuman man who is about to arrive in the world, if he hasn’t already. I imagined him living in the house on the hill, facing the sea, his house secretly connected, by underground galleries, with a world of moles and enemies of the literary inhabiting the inside of the volcano.
Rosa saw me engrossed in thought and suddenly asked me if anything was the matter. “No,” I said, “I was thinking about Caiado and how it’s a shame not to have seen him. Do you think he exists?” Rosa looked at me and downed her gin. “Maybe he’s dead,” she replied. I then recalled that death, another death, might also inhabit that famous paradise. And I proposed a toast to all the dead of Pico, to all those Pico souls who, according to the locals, take refuge in the farthest reaches of the wells and courtyards and whose voice is the song of crickets. Various sailors from the yachts anchored in Fayal and one or two of the old whalers joined the toast, all of them drunk and suddenly singing at the top of their voices a song of the Swiss Guard I had never heard before, the words of which fascinated me and which I jotted down on a Café Sport napkin:
Notre vie est un voyage
Dans l’hiver et dans la Nuit,
Nous chercherons notre passage
Dans le ciel où rien ne luit.
We then piled out on to the street, gin-soaked with the waning moon, rough sea, persistent moan of the wind. A bird went by. I followed it. Life is an inner journey, like Michaux’s travels. Life is a winter’s journey and goes from life to death. It is an entirely imaginary journey, as Louis-Ferdinand Céline said. This is where it derives its strength. Now I am in Barcelona, thinking that my problem is not suffering from Montano’s malady. This far into the winter’s journey, my problem is rather how to disappear—“What will we do to disappear?” as Blanchot said — how to manage to be a twin brother of MUSIL, Robert (Klagenfurt, 1880–Geneva, 1942), who dissolved in the fabric of his own unending work. Not long ago I remarked that it was not desirable for this diary to go on forever or to be mortal and have a single outcome. Now I see that what is really desirable may be to disappear inside it.
PAVESE, CESARE (Santo Stefano Belbo, 1908–Turin, 1950). Late into the night I was reading This Business of Living, Pavese’s private journal, I read to its well-known end (“Suicides are timid murderers […]. All this is sickening. Not words. An act. I won’t write any more.”). On closing the book, I told myself that literature cannot teach us practical methods, results to obtain, but only life’s coordinates. The rest is a lesson that should not be drawn from literature; it is life that should teach it. The private journal, literature in short, did not help Pavese to live very much, which was what most interested him. Could the diary have helped him in any way?
I closed the book and went to bed. I told myself that Pavese’s diary belonged to a period in world culture that tended to integrate existential experience with historical ethics. A period to which Pavese’s suicide seems to set a chronological boundary. I also told myself that, whereas Pavese’s diary was tragically anchored in life, that of Gide or Gombrowicz — closer to my sensibility — was anchored in literature, which is an autonomous world, an independent reality; it has no contact with reality because it is a reality in itself, a personal opinion of mine that no doubt Pavese would not agree with.