Indian Nocturne by Antonio Tabucchi Page A

than that.’
    ‘The central idea is that in this book I am someone who has lost his way in India,’ I repeated. ‘Let’s put it like that. There is someone else who is looking for me, but
I have no intention of letting him find me. I saw him arrive and I have followed him day by day, we could say. I know his likes and his dislikes, his enthusiasms and his hesitations, his generosity
and his fears. I keep him more or less under control. He, on the contrary, knows almost nothing about me. He has a few vague clues: a letter, a few witnesses, confused or reticent, a note that
doesn’t say much at all: signs, fragments which he laboriously tries to piece together.’
    ‘But who are you?’ asked Christine. ‘In the book I mean.’
    ‘That’s never revealed,’ I answered. ‘I am someone who doesn’t want to be found, so it’s not part of the game to say who.’
    ‘And the person looking for you who you seem to know so well,’ Christine asked again, ‘does he know you?’
    ‘Once he knew me, let’s suppose that we were great friends, once. But this was a long time ago, outside the frame of the book.’
    ‘And why is he looking for you with such determination?’
    ‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘It’s hard to tell, I don’t even know that and I’m writing the book. Perhaps he’s looking for a past, an answer to something.
Perhaps he would like to grasp something that escaped him in the past. In a way he is looking for himself. I mean, it’s as if he were looking for himself, looking for me: that often happens
in books, it’s literature.’ I paused, as if I had reached a crucial point and said confidentially: ‘Actually, as it turns out, there are also two women.’
    ‘Ah, finally,’ Christine exclaimed, ‘now it’s getting more interesting.’
    ‘I’m afraid not,’ I went on, ‘since they too are outside the frame, they don’t belong to the story.’
    ‘Oh, come on,’ said Christine, ‘is everything outside the frame in this book? Why don’t you tell me what’s inside the frame?’
    ‘I told you, there is someone looking for someone else, there is someone looking for me, the book is his looking for me.’
    ‘So then tell me the story a bit better!’
    ‘All right,’ I said, ‘it begins like this: he arrives in Bombay, he has the address of a third-rate hotel where I once stayed and he sets off on his search. And there he meets
a girl who knew me in the past and she tells him that I’ve fallen ill, that I went to hospital, and then that I had contacts with some people in the south of India. So he goes off to look for
me in hospital, which turns out to be a false trail, and then he leaves Bombay and begins a journey, still with the excuse that he is looking for me, whereas the truth is that he is travelling on
his own account for his own reasons; the book is mainly that: his travelling. He has a whole series of encounters, naturally, because when one travels one meets people. He arrives in Madras, goes
around the city, the temples in the vicinity, and in a scholarly society he finds a few equivocal clues as to my whereabouts. And in the end he arrives in Goa, where, however, he had to go anyway
for reasons of his own.’
    Christine was following me with attention now, sucking a mint stick and watching me. ‘In Goa,’ she said, ‘Goa of all places, interesting. And what happens there?’
    ‘In Goa there are a lot of other encounters,’ I continued, ‘he wanders about here and there, and then one evening he arrives in a certain town and there he understands
everything.’
    ‘Which is what?’
    ‘Oh, well,’ I said, ‘that he wasn’t finding me partly for the very simple reason that I had assumed another name. And he manages to find out what it is. In the end it
wasn’t impossible to find out because it was a name that had to do with himself, in the past. Except that I had altered the name, camouflaged it. I don’t know how he got to it, but the
fact is that he did,