meet some people on the terrace of the Bar Diagonal, and there, John William Wilkinson (Wilki to his friends), mishearing and thinking that I was staying in an apartment in Kassel directly above a Chinese restaurant (from where I could look out over a forest), said to me—he said to all of us there—that what I was about to live through reminded him of the Irish poet John Millington Synge.
“Explain yourself!” we all said immediately.
This demanding repartee was characteristic of our
tertulia
. We endeavored with admirable tenacity on these Sunday mornings—naturally we knew it was in vain, but we made the effort anyway—to leave nothing unexplained.
The great Synge, Wilki told us more or less—but I’m sure he made it up, and, on top of that, now I’m twisting his words—was a guy, or, to phrase it better, a poet of notable talent, who traveled at the end of the nineteenth century to the Aran Isles, located at the mouth of Galway Bay on the west coast of Ireland. On one of these islands, Inishmaan, he stayed in a rough cottage with a beautiful view that can still be visited today. He also spent time on the second floor of a big house on Inishmaan that no longer exists. There, a discreet hole in the bedroom floor allowed him to listen to conversations and arguments, all of which were in Gaelic. For five summers, he spied on these neighbors’ chats without understanding anything because he didn’t know a word of that language, but he was convinced he understood everything perfectly. He was so sure that he understood anything spoken in Gaelic that he ended up producing (out of everything he heard and compiled over the summers) his famous anthropology book
The Aran Islands
. This book, which Synge finished in 1901 and published in 1907, describes the thought and customs of that remote Irish island lost in the middle of the Atlantic (that strange paradise, until then barely desecrated by any outsider). The text reflected, among other things, the belief that beneath the surface of the islanders’ Catholicism it was possible to detect a “substratum” of the ancient pagan beliefs of their ancestors.
More intrigued than usual, I listened to the wonderful Wilki, for I still hadn’t figured out what link he could be making between an Irish poet on an Atlantic island and me, who was only going to a sort of Chinese cubicle in Germany (though in any case I fully trusted that he might have found one).
Synge’s experiences over five summers on Inishmaan, Wilki went on telling us, formed the basis of many of the plays he wrote about rural farming and fishing communities in Ireland. In fact, his works helped create the unmistakable rural style of Dublin’s famous Abbey Theater for the following four decades. And everything indicated (Wilki concluded) many parallels between Synge’s vagabonds and Samuel Beckett’s tramps. In fact, part of Beckett’s inspiration—although maybe the author of
Molloy
never came to know it—proceeded from the imagination that overpowered Synge when he “listened” to the conversations of his downstairs neighbors on Inishmaan in such a singular and inventive way.
I don’t understand, I said. But a very short while later, helped by Wilki himself, I began to see more clearly when he said that he knew what I had to do in case I found myself staying by chance above the Chinese restaurant and there was a discreet hole in the floor of my room.
Very simply, Wilki answered his own question, you must never lose sight of what you hear in German or Chinese down below in the Dschingis Khan, for it could come in very handy in creating an anthropological theory on the ideas and customs of that place.
“Explain yourself! Explain yourself more!”
The other
tertulianos
, animated now by the whisky, repeated the initial demand, as if wanting to help me. And they asked him not to overburden me with so many responsibilities as well. That encouraged me to intervene, telling Wilki I did not believe