La línea del horizonte

Por Antonio Tabucchi

Una ciudad marítima que se parece a Génova, un turbio crimen, un cadáver anónimo, un hombre que emprende una investigación personal para desvelar su identidad. Pero el procedimiento de Spino, el detective de la historia, no sigue una lógica de causa-efecto.En lugar de las apariencias visibles, él busca los significados que estas apariencias contienen, y su búsqueda corre sobre el filo ambiguo que separa el espectáculo del espectador. Así, su investigación «enloquece» y de pesquisa sobre una muerte se desliza al ámbito de las razones secretas que guían una existencia, transformándose en una especie de caída libre, vertiginosa y obligada al mismo tiempo: una indagación sin pausa, tendida hacia un objetivo que, igual que el horizonte, parece desplazarse junto con quien lo sigue. Una inolvidable novela-enigma que, bajo la apariencia de la detective story, oculta un interrogante sobre el sentido de las cosas.

• Idioma: Español
• Editorial: Editorial Anagrama
• Fecha de lanzamiento: 1 ene 1988
• ISBN: 9788433945624

Antonio Tabucchi

(Vecchiano, 1943 - Lisboa, 2012) se ha impuesto como el mejor escritor italiano de su generación y goza de un amplio prestigio internacional: un escritor «situado a la cabeza de la literatura europea» (Miguel García-Posada), que ejerce «una fascinación sin par», en palabras de José Cardoso Pires. Ha sido galardonado con los premios más prestigiosos, entre ellos el Pen Club, el Campiello y el Viareggio-Rèpaci en Italia; el Prix Médicis Étranger, el Prix Européen de la Littérature o el Prix Méditerranée en Francia. También ha sido nombrado Officier des Arts et des Lettres en Francia y Comendador da Ordem do Infante Dom Enrique en Portugal.

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Nota al margen

Créditos

El haber sido pertenece en cierto modo a un «tercer género», tan radicalmente heterogéneo del ser como del no ser.

VLADIMIR JANKELEVITCH

1

Para abrir los cajones hay que apretar y girar el asa a presión. Entonces se suelta el muelle, el mecanismo salta con un suave clic metálico, se ponen automáticamente en marcha los cojinetes, los cajones están ligeramente inclinados y corren por sí solos sobre unos pequeños rieles. Primero aparecen los pies, luego el vientre, luego el tronco, y finalmente la cabeza del cadáver. A veces, en el caso de los cadáveres a los que no se les ha practicado la autopsia, hay que ayudar al mecanismo tirando con las manos, porque algunos tienen el vientre hinchado que choca con el cajón superior y obstaculiza el movimiento. Aquellos a los que se les ha practicado la autopsia, por el contrario, están flacos, como secos, con aquella especie de cremallera a lo largo del vientre y el interior relleno de serrín. Parecen grandes muñecos, enormes monigotes de una representación ya concluida que han sido arrojados a un depósito de antiguallas. A su manera esto es un almacén de la vida. Los detritus del escenario, antes de su definitiva desaparición, realizan aquí una última parada en espera de una clasificación oportuna, porque no se pueden ignorar las causas de su fallecimiento. Por esa razón permanecen aquí, y él los asiste y los vigila. Administra la antecámara de la definitiva desaparición de su imagen visible, registra su entrada y su salida, los clasifica, los numera, a veces los fotografía, rellena la ficha que les permite desaparecer del mundo de lo sensible, les proporciona el último billete. Él es su compañero último y algo más, como un tutor a posteriori, impasible y objetivo.

Por otra parte, ¿es tan grande la distancia que separa a los vivos de los muertos?, piensa a veces. No sabe contestarse. La convivencia, llamémosla así, ayuda en cualquier caso a reducirla. Tienen que llevar una cartulina pegada al pulgar del pie en la cual se anota un número de matrícula, pero él está convencido de que en su remoto estar presentes ellos detestan ser clasificados con un número como si fueran objetos. Por este motivo, para sus adentros los llama con apodos chistosos, a veces completamente gratuitos, y a veces suscitados por un vago parecido o por una circunstancia en común con el personaje de una vieja película: Mae West, Profesor Unrat, Marcelino Pan y Vino. Marcelino, por ejemplo, es igual que Pablito Calvo: cara redonda, rodillas salientes, flequillo negro y brillante. Trece años, caído de un andamio, trabajo clandestino. El padre en paradero desconocido, la madre vive en Cerdeña y no puede venir, se lo envían mañana.

Del primitivo hospital solo el servicio de urgencias y el depósito de cadáveres han permanecido en esta parte vieja de la ciudad, llamada también centro histórico, que desde hace tiempo está en fase de estudio y saneamiento. Pero los años pasan, las administraciones municipales se suceden, los intereses cambian y la parte por sanear enferma cada vez más. Y además la ciudad presiona amenazante desde otras zonas, atrae a otros lugares la atención de los expertos, en donde se acumula la población «productiva», donde han nacido dormitorios inmensos. Allí están los edificios que exigen la intervención de los departamentos técnicos: a veces la colina se desmorona como si se sacudiese de encima aquellas feas costras, y entonces se disparan las medidas urgentes, los presupuestos excepcionales; y también están las calles por hacer, las tuberías por enlazar, las escuelas, las guarderías, los consultorios. Aquí, en cambio, se trata de una agonía difusa, una lepra lenta que ha invadido paredes y casas cuya ruina es solapada e imparable, como una condena. Habitan en ella ancianos y prostitutas, vendedores ambulantes, pescaderas, jóvenes parados, drogueros con tiendas oscuras y antiguas, húmedas, que huelen a especias y a bacalao, en cuyas puertas se leen con dificultad rótulos desteñidos que dicen: «Vinos-Ultramarios-Tabacos.» Los barrenderos pasan raramente, también ellos desdeñan los detritus de esta humanidad menor. De noche en las callejuelas relucen jeringuillas, bolsas de plástico, la masa indescifrable de alguna rata muerta en una esquina, donde un anuncio fosforescente del Pest-Control advierte que no se deben tocar los trozos de comida de color cardenillo esparcidos por el suelo.

Varias veces Sara ha insistido en irle a recoger las noches en que su turno acaba a las diez, pero él siempre se ha opuesto. No tanto por la gente; de noche la calleja está habitada por tres tranquilas prostitutas que tienen atentos protectores en las ventanas de los primeros pisos. Teme más que nada la manada de ratas que de noche se pasean agresivas, es imposible hacerse una idea de lo grandes que son, seguro que Sara se aterrorizaría, ella no puede ni imaginárselas. Es cierto que en esta ciudad abundan las ratas, pero en esta zona la cría es excepcional. Spino tiene una teoría, pero nunca se la ha contado a nadie, y mucho menos a Sara. Cree que es la presencia del depósito de cadáveres lo que las excita.

2

La noche del sábado suelen ir a la Linterna Mágica. Es un cineclub situado en lo alto del Vico dei Carbonari, en un pequeño patio que parece un rincón de pueblo, recuerda a casas de labranza, parcelas de terreno, otros tiempos. Desde arriba se ve el puerto,

Comentarios para La línea del horizonte

[thorold_1 · Calificación: 4 de 5 estrellas]

Spino, a failed medical student, is working as a mortuary attendant in a small port on the Gulf of Genoa. He's somehow slipped into middle-age without ever quite making his mind up whether to go back to college and try again, or indeed deciding where his long-standing but undefined relationship with Sara is going. One night, the body of a young man killed in a shoot-out between police and gangsters is brought in to the mortuary. The police have little idea who he is, beyond a false ID in the name of "Carlo Nobodi", and don't seem to be making much effort to find out, but Spino somehow becomes interested and starts to investigate on his own account. He follows up a few clues which don't lead anywhere very concrete. They do however put him indirectly in touch with people who seem to know something, who summon him to a chain of increasingly scary but inconclusive appointments - a low-life patisserie, a shop selling under-the-counter hair-tonics, a cemetery at closing time, the docks late at night. The solution to the mystery posed by the plot of the book remains elusive, but through his investigation, Spino seems to be coming closer to making sense of the mystery of who he is himself.Very atmospheric, wistful, allusive, dark - not at all the conventional crime story Tabucchi pretends to be writing, more a philosophical investigation than a forensic one. And rather beautiful.

[antao-3 · Calificación: 4 de 5 estrellas]

Of course it's the old "can you teach talent" argument, isn't it? That's the meaty question, the puzzler of substantial length and girth that needs to be grabbed firmly with both hands. What produces worse writing? People striking off alone, with nobody to tell them to stop and their critics being self-selected (because you see a lot of that online in fandom communities) or people going to study creative writing and, much like Larkin claims parents do, getting fucked up by their teachers' preferences? Books aren't quite the same as music, there's less chances for an obviously wrong note that doesn't fit; even a single poorly. Chosen word in a 50,000 word novel is often far less jarring in the grand scheme of things than a G# when you expect a G in a 10-minute concerto. As they say, even Homer nods. Of course if you open a book and it begins "It was the best of times, it was the best of times", then there's a problem. And "bad" is just a really broad term. A book might be beautifully written but completely morally repellant, and I'd call that bad; it might have a thrilling plot but contain nothing but dull clichés and poor imagery and I'd call it bad. I'd even call a book bad if it was great for three quarters of its length and then had an awful ending. All these different “badnesses” are forgivable by different people to different degrees; I'd be more kind to a book which just had a bit of a flat ending to a book that thoroughly endorsed objectivism as a moral philosophy as its sole Daseinszweck. I'd be more forgiving of something that used cliché and well-worn archetypes with brio and enthusiasm and a little inventiveness than something that tries so hard to not be formulaic it feels like a schoolchild told they can't use "got, nice or went".When is a literary novel worth reading like this one by Tabucchi? It depends on how you define "culture." Literary novels were certainly an emblem of high (educated) culture as opposed to low (mass) culture--much like classical music. How did one truly get educated 50/150 years ago--you read seriously, including literary novels. There was no PC/Web on which to waste time. Right after I graduated from college, I spent the better part of a decade reading literary novels--best thing I ever did. My daughters are voracious readers--but of course it is all serialized apocalyptic teen fiction. For a while I have been telling them that they will soon be reading classic novels--and that she will grow to appreciate them and the genre. But as I write this words I realize that maybe they won't. The Millennial generation will be well-educated and able to do difficult work--but they probably won't read novels. They’re not wired like that.Any reason to think that writing itself will be around in the future? Once upon a time, not that long ago, people lived without it. In a future of virtual reality and brain to brain interfaces who says it will still be needed? We've gone from oral storytelling, in which small groups made their own imaginative creations from the ever varying iterations of various storytellers - to writing in which one storyteller addresses the imaginations of millions - to cinema in which one storyteller eliminates the need for anyone to imagine anything. Maybe the next step is one story, one storyteller, one humanity, and no ability to imagine anything individually. And one sensory feed to rule them all...What I'd love to see is the return of the SHORT novel of great beauty and clarity like “The Edge of the Horizon” so masterfully does.The contemporary writer is so passionless. So stale. Such meandering, somewhat antiseptic prose causes you NOT TO REALLY CARE. I always think it's a terrible crime when a novel loses the opportunity to get to the heart of the matter, the rape and pillage of all that is considered art and it's harekari at the feet of the Consumer.Since I learnt to read, I have always spent a lot of my spare time reading. I plough through books at a rate of knots. I used to be buying books all the time. Now I read on the Kindle just as much. I hate it when a smack addict who often uses words that send readers willing to read him scurrying for a dictionary. That’s what loses readers. The idea that "Complexity" and "Literaryness" (and their adjuncts "Depth" and "Meaning") are things that writers consciously write into their books - they sit down and say "I'm going to write a Literary Novel", as if Literature is something you add to a work rather than a post-fact label ascribed to works that stand out from the crowd. Now that sounds like cowardly equivocation of my own - "literature's, like, totally relative, man" - but I think there's something to it. Throughout history a frankly tiny proportion of the massive corpus of books ever written endures and gains the label "literature" and, as many defenders of popular culture will tell you at great length, some of them were written as "popular books!" (It's always Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen, I find - and they'd all apparently have written comics/TV shows/whatever you're trying to sell).So if "literature" is best applied as a label post-fact to the best writing an era can offer, perhaps what's really stultifying - and killing - culture is the efforts to capture that zing, that unknown quality that means you remember “The Merchant of Venice” over “The Jew of Malta”, and turn it into something you can mass-produce, teach in schools and writers can use as their selling-point. Narrative in written form has been mined until the seams have been gleaned clean in places. To create new voices like Tabucchi’s, to tell the seven basic plots in new and interesting ways has become more difficult as there are so many out there doing it. Yet what has already been written is alive and out there, waiting for new readers to discover. I’ll add that this novel doesn’t reach 100 pages…No small feat, considering the punch it gives. Tabucchi’s language is a wonderfully rich one. Should we impoverish it by stripping it of perfectly good words and phrases simply because they are uncommon? Why is a phrase construction that you and I know a better choice than one that we don't know but Tabucchi does? With Tabucchi I need not fear the usual House Syndrome:1) Patient has strange condition.2) House treats patient, assumes that they're cured.3) Patient gets worse. Patient is on the verge of death.4) House has epiphany. Cures patient.It's hard enough these days to find time to get through books that aren't of the order of “The Edge of the Horizon”. Not that I worry too much about that, though - I think the best reading years of my life were in my twenties, when during the five years of my Engineering degree I was free to read novels and poetry all day in cafes and parks, and to go out drinking at night and do other unmentionable things. You can't do it forever, though, and there's a lot of stuff that I suspect I just couldn't be bothered with now, stuff that I read almost religiously and with enormous excitement when I was in my early to mid-20s - Kafka, Hemingway, Kerouac, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Malcolm Lowry, and so on. I'll never be mad for all that stuff the way I was back then. Living is easy when you're young, so you challenge yourself with art. When you get older, living itself becomes the main art you have to cultivate, and high falutin books don't hold the same fascination.I can still tear into a Antonio Tabucchi like this one, though, no problem there. It’s not perfect, but it’s still better than most of the crap being published nowadays. Maybe Tabucchi has taken modernism and post-modernism as far as it can go (e.g., I can’t stand most of what’s being labelled and published as post-modernism in this day and age). Maybe it is impossible to trump a novel where everything is a chain of imaginings: a senile mind imagining an uneducated comatose mind imagining a lunatic mind. If so, it is a good thing that the final modernistic novel is not difficult at all, nerdishly very entertaining: I was disturbing other passengers by laughing sometimes while I was reading it. I know. I’m weird. And the way you write freely, without caring about trying not to sound pretentious, is very likable, in fact, charming. But modernism is not the only way of telling a story. Other movements will appear. Art, generally, is light and spectacular at the present. But this is just a phase. It will pass after the dominance of old men has been broken. The plutocracy will not always be forcing the young to waste all their time on useless work. Nor does it matter if appreciation of novels is confined to a cult. The Portuguese-speaking population with practical access to Portuguese-language novels is already greater than it was in 1950 by at least one order of magnitude. There will always be people who will appreciate the simplicity of pure text, without the complication of sound and visuals. It cannot happen in the near future. But there will be a renaissance of all the arts starting shortly before, or during, or shortly after the collapse of the plutocracy. I reckon.The Edge of the Horizon is us.NB: This time I re-read the book in English to see whether it'd would hold up. It did. One word: Marvellous.

[msarki_3 · Calificación: 4 de 5 estrellas]

Truly a mysterious book beautifully written. Tabucchi certainly kept me engaged throughout. I know no more today than when I started, but at least I felt a connection to the character Spino who wasn't afraid of the darkness. I believe this book was about looking into the unknown, not being afraid to, and in so doing still continuing to maintain a life of virtue. It is possible a second read would be beneficial for better understanding. But for some reason it doesn't feel like that kind of book for me.

[jon1lambert · Calificación: 4 de 5 estrellas]

I enjoyed reading this. I stumbled across a Tabucchi exhibition in the Bibliotheque nationale de France and bought this in the BnF bookshop - super bookshop. It is about a person who works in a hospital morgue who tries to find out more about a corpse. In so doing he goes from clue to clue and place to place and finds out a lot about himself.