Goa and Portugal: Their Cultural Links,

Eds. Charles Borges & Helmut Feldmann,

New Delhi, Concept Publishing Company, New Delhi, 1997,

pp. 251-260.

 

 

         FROM PEREGRINATION TO

      PILGRIMAGE

 

       Tabucchi’s Notturno Indiano 1

 

                                                                                     THOMAS STRATER

 

In 1938 the English writer Somerset Maugham visited Goa. In his Notebook he drew a sketch of tristes tropiques in Portuguese India. Four hundred years ago Goa was intended to be the starting point for christianization of the Far East. Maugham's short description makes the failure of that enterprise evident:

 

You drive through coconut groves among which you see here and there ruins of houses. On the lagoon sail fishing boats, their lateen sails shining white in the brilliant sun. The churches are large and white, their facades decorated with honey-coloured stone pilasters. Inside they are large, bare, spacious, with pulpits in Portuguese baroque carved with the utmost elaboration and altar pieces in the same style. In one at a side altar, a priest, a native was saying mass with a dark-faced acolyte to serve him. There was no one to worship. In the Franciscan church you are shown a wooden Christ on a crucifix and the guide tells you that six months before destruction of the city it wept tears. In the cathedral they were holding a service, the organ was playing and in the organ loft there was a small choir of natives singing with a harshness in which somehow the Catholic chants acquired a mysteriously heathen Indian character. It was strangely impressive to see that these great empty churches in that deserted place and to know that day by day with not a soul to listen the priest said mass in them.2

 

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          Nearly half a century after Maugham the ltalian writer Antonio Tabucchi, born in 1943 in Pisa, writes again about Goa. The genre of this work seems at first sight like Maugharn's book to be a travel diary, yet now in a more fictional form of somewhat a novel with the title Notturno Indiano (1984). Tabucchi taught as a professor of Portuguese language and literature at the University of Genoa and was the director of the Italian (Culture) Institute in Lisbon. He also translated and edited the works of two of the 20th century classic poets, the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa and the Brazilian Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Therefore, one cannot be surprised at Tabucchi's close relationship to the lusophonic world and the incorporation in his narrative of characters like Pessoa or the socialist poet Antero de Quental,3 one of the most important figures of the so‑called "generation of 187V in Portugal, or as they called themselves "the defeated by life" (vencidos da vida). It was just a matter of time that Tabucchi would turn his interest to the great time of the Portuguese navigations, the age of the discoveries and conquests sailing around the Cape of Good Hope to India, to 'Golden Goa'. Tabucchi's book, a kind of exotic novel in the tradition of Sterne's Sentimental Journey, is an attempt to explore what the Estado da India, the ex‑colonies or 'overseas provinces' as they were euphemistically called till the formal incorporation into the Indian Union in 1961 ‑ could mean to Europe at the end of the 20th century. The quest for Christians and spices as the much quoted answer of a member of da Gama's crew, when he was asked, what had brought the Portuguese to India is substituted by a spiritual‑metaphysical. discovery of the Asian sub‑continent.

 

            To understand what Notturno Indiano is about, besides its metaliterary and aesthetic dimensions, its themes like the quest for identity, mirrors and mirages,4 and what kind of role Goa, the real and the imagination of it is playing in that little novel of about hundred pages, one has to have a look on its contents and basic structure. Tabucchi's Notturno Indiano is divided into three parts: the first consists of four, the third of five chapters, the central second part of three. The first one takes place in Mumbai; the second at Chennai and at a bus stop enroute to Mangalore and the last part in and around Goa. What is conveyed to the reader and what he gets to know during this travel through India is typical for a touristic point of view: hotel rooms, receptions and lounges, mainly high class, but also some functioning as brothels, hospitals, railway and bus [253] stations. The author points out the importance of these places by giving a precise index of them in the beginning:

 

Khajuraho hotel, Suklaji Street, Bombay; Breach Candy Hospital, Bhulabai Desai Road, Bombay; Taj Mahal Inter-Continental Hotel, Gateway of India, Bombay; Railway's retiring rooms, Victoria station, Central station, Bombay; Coromandel Hotel, 5 Nungambakkam Road, Madras; Theosophical. Society, 12 Adyar Road, Adyar, Madras; Bus stop between Madras and Mangalore, exact place unknown; Archbishopric and College of St. Bonaventura, Goa; Zuari Hotel, Swatantrya Path, without number, Vasco da Gama, Goa; Beach of Calangute, 20 km. from Panaji, Goa; Mandovi Hotel, 28 Bandodkar Marg, Panaji, Goa and Oberoi Hotel, Bogmalo beach, Goa. 5

 

Each of these places corresponds to a chapter. The reader gets acquainted with India through conversations with prostitutes, physicians, nomadic prophets, philosophers, photographers, hippies, thieves, waiters, and even the ghostly apparition of the former Portuguese Vice‑king of India, Afonso de Albuquerque (1509‑1515), enters the scene in an old library in Goa.6 In the twelve chapters or episodes the narrator describes his travel through India searching for an old friend called Xavier Janata Pinto. That friend has vanished, what remains is people, who knew him, like for instance the prostitute in the first episode or a short letter given to him at the Theosophical Society in Chennai: "Dear master and friend, my circumstances don't allow me to get on with my walks at the banks of the river Adyar. I am a night bird now and therefore I prefer to believe that it was my destiny's desire. Keep me in good remembrance, as you have got to learn me once. Yours X. The date was Calangute, Goa, 23rd of September".7 This sixth chapter together with the following one are the centre of the book and the key to an interpretation. The reader already knows that the narrator's nickname in former times was Roux, the short form for the following one are the centre of the book and the key to an interpretation. The reader already knows that the narrator’s nickname in former times was Roux, the short form for the Portuguese word rouxinol, the nightingale, a night bird like the person he is searching for.8 The day is the 23rd of September, the equinox. Day and night are equal and so are the persons' identities. Narrator and Xavier are the same. There is an allusion to that date in chapter ten, when the narrator is talking to the hippies. They want to have a party because of the equinox, but it is already December, [254] Christmas time, the Holy Night.

 

As the title indicates, Notturno Indiano is a night piece ‑ a piece of literature between dust and dawn, and so all the chapters take place at night. The persons who appear are merely shadows from another world, yet described in a clear language. Notturno Indiano in the tradition of the romantic nocturne as in paintings, music or in literature deals with the mixture of realism and imagination. Tabucchi adverts in an introductory note: "this book, beyond the fact that it comes from an insomnia is a voyage".9 The voyage or a peregrination is in fact a pilgrimage. As the traveller confesses he wants to see the place where St. Thomas, the apostle, is supposed to have suffered a martyr's death (Meliapur, later renamed São Thomé, today a district of Chennai). The Portuguese built a church in this place. "I don't know what is left. And so 1 must go to Goa, I have to look for an old library, therefore 1 carne to India‑. ‑‑‑Is it a pilgrimage?", he asked. I denied. Then I said, "may be, but not in the religious meaning of the word. lt's more a private pilgrimage, [....], I was just looking for clues‑‑‑.10  All over the text there are many other hints to be found justifying the interpretation of Notturno Indiano as the variations on the theme of pilgrimage. Also the man who the traveller is searching shows behind his name the idea of pilgrimage. His name mentioned above is Xavier Janata Pinto. One cannot use the name of Xavier in relation to India and Goa without remembering the figure of Francis Xavier (1506‑1552), the first Jesuit missionary in Asia in 1542. M. N. Pearson writes about this time:

 

In the watershed year, 1540, in order to encourage conversions all temples in Goa were destroyed. Later this was done in Bardes, in 1573, and in Salcete in 1584‑7. Their no doubt distraught brahmin guardians often were able to save the holy images and install them just outside Portuguese territory,, hence the several great temples in the Ponda area, acquired by the Portuguese only in the more tolerant eighteenth century. Other discrimination was legion: orphans were kidnapped and converted, rice Christianity flourished, Hindus were discriminated against by the government in a multitude of ways. In 1541 lands which had endowed the temples were turned over to the local priests and the orders. Most Hindu ceremonies were forbidden, including marriage and cremation. These now [255] had to be done in secret, or outside Portuguese territory. In 1623 a Portuguese complained that there were still more than 150,000 Hindus living under Portuguese protection in Goa. They should, he said, be given the choice of converting, paying a poll tax, or leaving Goa.11

 

As it is well known, the aim was to convert to Christianity. That is why Xavier travelled very widely and succeeded in converting tens of thousands of Hindus. When. Xavier arrived at Goa, he was shocked at the prevalent moral laxity and the practices of the so‑called Thomas Christians. This community numbered between 80,000 and 200,000 in the 16th century. lt was believed that their forebears had beer converted by St. Thomas himself." Because their religion was tinged by Hindu and Nestorian influences it was considered sloppy, or close to heretical. But although Xavier recommended to the king that the Inquisition should be established in Goa, it was only in 1560, eight years after Xavier's death that it was introduced. The middle Indian name Janata links the Spanish-Portuguese Christian name Xavier with the typical Portuguese surname Pinto. But in Portuguese literature, especially in the so-called literatura das viagens ultramarinas (literature of overseas travels), the name Pinto indicates only one person, Fernão Mendes Pinto. It is not by chance that Tabucchi published his Notturno Indiano in 1984, just one year after the celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the death of the author of the Peregrinação," (first published in 1614, 31 years after his death), the satiric counterpart to the heroic Os Lusiadas by Luis de Camões. Fernão Mendes Pinto had met the Jesuit missionary during one of his last voyages to Japan. Deeply impressed by the strong personality of St. Francis Xavier he decided to enter the Society of Jesus and to promote a mission to Japan in which he participated. lt is supposed that the original Peregrinação suffered various cuts, because there is no mention of Pinto's participation in the Society. Nevertheless, the last chapters (113‑114) of the Peregrinação are dedicated to the glorification and the miracles (or better what should be regarded as glory and miracles) of St. Francis Xavier, "that well adventured Father Master Francis Xavier, light of his time and ali the Orient, whose virtue and holiness made him famous all over the world". 14 Rebecca Catz defends the thesis of Pinto's book as "a satire and anti‑crusade", demasking and condemning the Christianization of [256] Asia. "By resorting to hyperbole, distortion and suppression, Mendes Pinto constructs in fact a controversial, heroic‑comical portrait of St. Francis Xavier".15 Especially in the theological disputations between St. Francis Xavier and the Japanese priests, he deconstructs the idealized portrait of the missionary. The irony lies in the difficulty for a Jesuit saint who voted for poverty to convert the Japanese people who were convinced that God only loves 1111) rich and it often seems that He really does? Poverty looked upon as a divine punishment is one of the fundamental themes of the Peregrinação. Full of irony is the episode about the Japanese Bonzos' complaint that Francis Xavier uses in his sermons ugly names (to the Japanese), when he says Deus (God) or prays in his litany to the saints: "Sancte Petre ora pro nobis, Sancte Paule…”. By order of the king Francis Xavier had to suppress the word sancte and to substitute it by beate. But what about the word Deus which in Japanese sounds similar to diusa, the word for "lie". The reader has to assume blasphemically that Xavier had to suppress the mention of God.

 

Tabucchi's Notturno Indiano is a book on religion, not at least a spiritual text. Logically there is no longer any interest in the conquest of wealth or the mission for converting people who have already created a highly developed religion like Hinduism. Now we have a new type of missionary, not one who is convinced to teach the right way in believing in the one and only Christian God. The narrator of Notturno Indiano is a character, a 'person' (pessoa in Portuguese) in the Latin sense of the word: an actor's mask. He is hiding himself behind the disguise of different names like Roux(inol), nightingale, Xavier, Janata, Pinto and even the author's name Tabucchi.16 Through his conversations with the different persons he meets on his way to Goa he learns about Indian philosophy and thinking: the love story between Vimala, the prostitute, and Xavier; the visit to the hospital and the tragicomic talk with Ganesh, a cardiologist in a land where death is always present but nobody dies of heart attack: "Do you believe in anything?', I asked. 'No', he said, "I am an atheist. Atheist is the worst cure here in India".17 The dialogue with the death bound Jain in the retiring rooms of a railway station goes even further: "It seems you are a Catholic?", my travel companion said, 'All Europeans are in a sense Catholics', I said, 'or at least Christians, it's practically the same."18 A climax is reached in the above mentioned chapter 6 at the Theosophical Society in [257] Chennai. In the impassive distinguished conversation with one of its .members one literary allusion follows the other. It begins with a quotation from Victor Hugo's Les travailleurs de la mer, goes on with authors who have written about India like Friedrich von Schlegel, Swedenborg, Hermann Hesse, Annie Besant and culminates in the evocation of Fernando Pessoa: "Pessoa believed in Gnosticism", I said. ‑‑‑He was a Rosicrucian. He has written a series of esoteric poems with the title Steps of the Cross".

 

Pessoa is one of Tabucchi's preferred authors he always returns to. Pessoa's game with his heteronyms Alvaro de Campos, Alberto Caeiro and Ricardo Reis had a strong influence on Tabucchi's theoretical background and his fictions. Also the person whose fictitious name is Xavier Janata Pinto is an alter ego, a heteronym of Tabucchi: a man whose profession is to write short stories.19 At the same time the narrator is searching for this man and hiding behind. his name. Fitting to the season, December, when Notturno Indiano is playing, the member of the Theosophical Society quotes Pessoa's poem Natal (Christmas) saying goodbye to the narrator:

 

"Blind science ploughs the vane soil

The mad faith lives in the dream of its cult

A new god is only a word

Do not believe and do not search: everything lies in

darkness."20

 

In this poetical meditation and advice of four lines lies the quintessence of Notturno Indiano, At the end of the novel the narrator has found his friend Xavier. Or better, in other words: Xavier has found the person (his own mask) he is writing about. Narrator and narrated person have changed their roles and merged into one in that highly intellectual literary puzzle. The narrator tells the story of Notturno Indiano but now from Xavier's point of view. Roux is nightingale now. He is dining with Christine (!), a photographer on the terrace of the Oberoi Hotel in Goa. For her book about South Africa she chose the French title Mefiez‑vouz de morceaux choisis (Don't trust in selected parts). One of her photos shows a young Negro with his arms raised like a sprinter in the finish. But the impression eludes. lt is the second in which he is hit by a bullet, the moment of his death. Don't trust in what you see!

 

[258]

 

That's what the reader of the novel might do as well. The German translation of Notturno Indiano for instance offers a kind of supplement which is not included in the original edition: an exchange of two letters each between the member of the Theosophical Society at Chennai and Tabucchi in Italy now after the book was published. What at the first sight seems to be a self‑interpretation by the author, an 'authentic' discussion between both a fictitious person of the novel, the reader of it and the authentic author called Tabucchi is in fact also a fiction. This narrative with Epimenides' paradox as the title "the following phrase is false. The preceding phrase is true" 21 is a part of one of Tabucchi's books. 22  Here the theosophist signs his name ‑ Xavier Janata Monroy. Is he the wanted man? There are some hints that forbid such an interpretation. Especially when he refers to their discussion about the words 'practically' and 'actually'. In Notturno Indiano it is the Jain in chapter 4 who paid attention to that linguistic phenomenon and not the theosophist. It seems as the author wants to give us the advice: Don't trust in what you read!

 

Notturno Indiano is a cat‑and‑mouse game, a do‑it‑yourself kit, a riddle. When the reader assembles all the different parts and fits them together, he gets an imaginative novel on several levels. Antonio Tabucchi is an Italian author who adopted and incorporated voluntarily a new culture in his literary work, the Lusitanian world. To come to a deeper understanding of the literary background of his fictions one has to follow Tabucchi's spiritual peregrination through the ages of Portuguese history and so he will discover India, the 'golden Goa' again.

 

NOTES AND REFERENCES

 

1.   I wish to thank Victor Coelho, Hanna Kessler, Maria do Céu Mascarenhas, Reinhard Monssen, P. P. Shirodkar, Teotónio R. de Souza and Cristina Braga Ramalho for their critical comments and translation suggestions.

 

2.    W. Somerset Maugham, A writer's notebook, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin, 194911987, pp. 268‑269.

 

3.   The original title of Tabucchi's narrative concerned with Portuguese literature are Antero de Quental: Uma vita; “L’amore di don Pedro; Gli archivi di Macau; Passato composto: Tre lettere (La donna de Porto Pim, Palermo, 1983); Sostiene Pereira (Milano, 1994); Requiem: Uma alucinação (Lisbon, 1991) was originally written in Portuguese. Un [259] baule pieno di gente: Scritti su Fernando Pessoa, Milano, 1990, is a collection of essays on Fernando Pessoa.

 

4.   Gunde Kurtz has analyzed such topies in her book, Die Literatur im Spiegel ihrer selbst: I. Calvino, A. Tabucchi ‑ Zwei Beispiele (The literature in the mirror of itself. I, Calvino, A. Tabucchi ‑ two examples), Tubingen, 1992. Nevertheless the whole cultural‑historical Indian‑Portuguese background does not play any role in her interpretation.

 

5.   Notturno Indiano, 1994, p. 11. Translations from the Italian, Portuguese and German. are the author's.

 

6.   This happens in the third part, chapter 8. The guardian of the líbrary, described as an old man (vecchietto, 73) is called Teotónio. One of the participants of the symposium (at Cologne) was Teotónio de Souza, a librarian but far from being called an old man. As he also referred to Tabucchi's Notturno Indiano in his contribution, I was interested in hiis opinion on the book. He told me that he liked it very much, and that he got the impression that Tabucchi came to a deeper understanding of India. When I asked him if he had ever met Tabucchi, he smiled and moved his head like the guardian ("... mi fece grandi sorrisi dondolando la testa. . .", 73). "1 met him, without knowing who he was", Teotónio told me. "I have the honour to appear in Tabucchi's novel. But as you can see, he has changed many things", the real Teotónio confessed with his characteristic humility. I like to reveal this fact here less for its anecdotic quality but for giving me the chance to show how Tabucchi bases his fictions on real facts and persons.

 

7.     Notturno Indiano, 1984, p. 59.

 

8.      "Between you and me I was Roux, and it was fine with me" ( the initial letters of "rouxinol" (Port. nightingale), Tabucchi 1984, p. 36.

 

9.      Notturno Indiano, 1984, p. 9.

 

10.    Ibid., pp. 40, 41.

 

11. Michael N. Pearson, The Cambridge History of India, I.I : The Portuguese In India. Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987, 117 sq.

 

12. I wish to thank P. Shirodkar for his valuable remark, that there were Thomas Christians to be found only in the more southern regions of India and not in Goa at that time.

 

13. The original Portuguese title Peregrinaçam de Fernam Mendez Pinto was translated for the first English edition as The voyages and adventures of Fernand Mendez Pinto (London, 1653). There are two implications of the Portuguese word peregrinação in English: 'peregrination', the archaic and jocular word for travel or journey, especially extensively or at leisure and second 'pilgrimage', a journey to a sacred place for religious reasons (cf. The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 9th ed. Oxford, 1995). Both words have the same origin in the Latin word for stranger peregrinus.

 

14. António José Saraiva (ed.), Peregrinação e outras obras, 1961, vol. 2, ch. 113, p. 246.

 

15. Rebecca Catz, Fernão Mendes Pinto.‑ Sátira e anti‑cruzada na [260] "Peregrinação ", Lisbon, Instituto de Cultura e Lingua Portuguesa, 1981,  pp. 94‑95.

16.    Cf. the fictitious exchange of letters between a reader of Notturno Indiano, the theophisist from Chennai called Xavier Janata Monroy and the author A. T. of La frase che segue é falsa. La frase che precede é vera, I volatili del beato Angelico, Palermo, 1986.

17.  Notturno Indiano, 1994, p. 31.

18.  Ibid., p. 41.

19.  Notturno Indiano, "cf. Scriveva dei racconti", p. 28.

20.  Fernando Pessoa, Obra poetica, Rio de Janeiro, Nova Aguilar, 1987, p.73.

21.  "La frase che segue é falsa. La frase che precede é vera". I volatili del beato Angelico, Palermo, 1986.

22.  I volatili del beato Angelico. It may be that this book and also I treni che vanno a Madras (Piccolí equivoci senza importanza, 1985) share with Notturno Indiano the same time of their creation.