Guess I’m on a mystery train

Suddenly, the city went dark.

On the train to Malpensa, one of the airports serving Milan, I think of last week’s power outage in Lisbon. I was near Santa Apolónia train station, in a theater meeting, when the lights went out. First, it was just a little theatrical blackout in our building; then it seemed like the whole continent had gone dark. I went back home by bus, quite normally, but, as we got to Liberdade Avenue, traffic was already becoming chaotic. I left the bus and walked home. I had cold pasta for lunch and then sat outside writing by hand. Meanwhile, the mobile phone network was showing signs of malfunctioning.

Sometime later, I went to Rato Square to see if I could get cell signal or maybe make a call from the phone booth near São Mamede Church, but — no, no luck. On my way back, I asked people sitting in their cars, listening to the radio, if there were any news. A man said, “They’re talking about some rare atmospheric phenomenon…”. Another one, a bit farther, told me that, in some small villages around Tomar (a historic town in Ribatejo region), there was light… Everything was vague, unprecedented, unknown. I kept walking, feeling I was wandering inside a Dino Buzzati’s story.

There’s that one called “The night”, for example. It has no real protagonists; just a diffuse fear, made of little signs, different hypothesis that go on being denied; a fear composed of many, tiny fears; a fear that accumulates and grows. It’s the night coming. The night and all it evokes.

Another story by Buzzati that I really treasure is the one about the mountains — “The mountains are forbidden”. In an unnamed city, the mountains were outlawed; the city’s inhabitants should not visit them nor speak of them. They shouldn’t even behold them. Everybody knows the mountains are there, “in all their splendor” (pardon my translation from a Portuguese translation…), but no one dares mentioning them. It’s amazing, in this story, how Buzzati manages to show us the way these canceled, repressed mountains become a cause of great social malaise, driving friends apart, creating in everyone this impression of fakeness. An existencial malaise, really: a lie-contaminated life.

It’s amazing how Buzzati, in all the stories I’ve read by him, shows us the significance of mystery. How he manages to make clear — with such an astonishing simplicity — that this dimension so ignored in our time is part of life, of being human. And that denying it equals denying ourselves.

In Venice, at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, I saw a Max Ernst’s painting that wrote, without words — just earth tones; almost-green horizons and less-than-red flowers; simple, prosaic forms put on the canvas in such a way that they became essential, mythical objects — “Buzzati”.

The painting’s title is “Garden Airplane Trap”. It shows strange, intrincated flowers and big paper planes lying over mountains. This doesn’t describe the painting at all, of course, but, then again, how do you describe a mystery? Anyway, this is what appeals to me in Ernst’s painting and Buzzati’s writing: the exactitude, the clarity with which they show us mystery without explaining it. That is, without diminishing it.

On the train to Malpensa airport, I remember the Iberian power outage and I recapitulate what I saw in this Italian trip through Milan, Padua, Verona, Venice. I don’t open my book, I simply look outside. The world is sliding on the windows and it feels like I’m reading it. Trains have this way of pushing you into stories, don’t they? On the other side of the corridor, on my left, a man looks at a tablet. He’s very still, like he’s hypnotized. But, suddenly, he leans forward and I see: the man on the train is watching a movie about a man on a train.