Free Requiem by Antonio Tabucchi Page B

a man thinks about is drink. But
     Francisco was a nice man, I said, I think he loved his wife. Oh, he loved her all right, said
     the Lighthousekeeper’s Wife, he never hit her, but that didn’t stop him getting
     paralytic every night.
    The taxi driver sounded his horn, wanting to know what I intended to do. I signalled to him
     to wait and said to the Lighthousekeeper’s Wife: You don’t want to show me the
     house then? Oh, all right, she said, but we’ll have to be quick, my son will be here
     soon with his family, it’s my little granddaughter’s birthday today and I have to
     finish making the supper. That’s fine by me, I said, I’ve got to get the train in
     Cascais, I have to be in Lisbon at nine o’clock. The Lighthousekeeper’s Wife
     disappeared inside the house. She came back with a bunch of keys and told me to follow her. We
     crossed the yard to the porch. This is the way in now, she said, I expect when you were here,
     you used to go in through the French windows on the terrace, but they can’t be used any
     more, the glass is all broken. We went in and I immediately recognised the smell of the house.
     It smelled a bit like the metro in Paris in winter, a mixture of mustiness, varnish and
     mahogany, a smell peculiar to that house, and my memories all came back to me. We went into
     the large sitting room and I saw the piano. It was covered with a sheet, but I still had the
     urge to sit down at it. Excuse me, I said, but there’s something I must play, I’ll
     be quick, I don’t really know how to play properly but anyway. I sat down and with one
     finger, from memory, I played the melody from a nocturne by Chopin. Other hands, in other
     times, used to play that melody. I remembered those nights, when I was upstairs in my room,
     and I would lie listening to Chopin nocturnes. They were solitary nights, the house in winter
     was swathed in mist, my friends were in Lisbon and didn’t come to visit, no one came, no
     one phoned, I was writing and wondering why I was writing, the story I was working on was a
     strange story, a story without a solution, what had made me want to write a story like that?,
     how did I come to be writing it? More than that, the story was changing my life, would change
     it, once I’d written it, my life would never be the same again. That’s what I
     would say to myself, closeted upstairs writing that strange story, a story that someone
     afterwards would imitate in real life, would transfer back to the plane of reality. I
     didn’t know that, but I imagined it, I don’t know why, but I sensed that one
     shouldn’t write stories like that, because there’s always someone who’ll try
     and imitate fiction, who’ll manage to make it come true. And that was what happened.
     That same year someone imitated my story, or rather, the story became flesh, was
     transubstantiated, and I had to live that crazy story all over again, but this time for real,
     this time the characters inhabiting the story weren’t made of paper, they were flesh and
     blood, this time the development, the sequence of events in my story unravelled day by day, I
     followed its progress on the calendar, to the point that I knew what would happen.
    Was it a good year?, the Lighthousekeeper’s Wife asked me, I mean, were you comfortable
     here in this house? It was a bewitched year, I replied, there was some kind of witchcraft
     going on. Do you believe in witches?, asked the Lighthousekeeper’s Wife, people like
     yourself don’t usually, they think it’s just popular superstition. Oh, I believe,
     I said, at least in some forms of witchcraft, you know, you should never try to influence
     things by suggestion, if you do, things end up happening that way. I went to see a clairvoyant
     when my son was in the war in Guinea Bissau, said the Lighthousekeeper’s Wife, I was
     terribly worried because I’d had a dream, I dreamed that he would never come back, so I
     talked to my husband and