This summer, I read some great texts, including the latest book by Claudio Magris. I have a special affection for this great writer, a bard of the frontier, since I read the majestic Danube, which traces an itinerary full of characters, stories, and myths in which the river is always the central figure.

Curving Time in Krems is a collection of short stories from the Triestino genius. Through five stories of characters in the twilight of their lives, he captures old age and brings out a delight aspect of it, a golden age where man is spared the derisory worries and tumult of the lives of those who still aspire to achieve great things. He paints the paths of men we meet in his scenes, which have the mythical Mitteleuropa as their backdrop. Through the figures of a former businessman who has become the janitor of a building he owns, or of a writer with fading glory, he also speaks to us of time, of its illusory curve « between the source and the end ». He evokes old age as the age of another freedom, softer and less extravagant, less dithering, and that of memories and the observation of time that seems to pass.

In this book, Magris tells us again about Trieste, his city, this city in which « times do not follow one another, but line up one next to the other, like the debris of shipwrecks that the sea leaves on the beach ». Trieste… « In any case, there the years don’t count – but when do they ever count? » says a character in Curving Time in Krems, a lecturer specialising in Kafka, who could have a vague resemblance to the Italian author himself, a specialist of the Czech, Joseph Roth, and Thomas Mann, among others.

If the years don’t count or count for so little, why sacralise life in a linear progression? Why move forward according to codes and norms that, like the years, don’t count anyway? I shared my reading of Magris’ book with my friend Mikaël Serre, a Franco-German director and playwright, with whom I wrote a play this summer, which was performed at the Monfort Théâtre. We talked about theatre as a representation of life, its jolts, and the particularity for this art to leave traces often unwritten but in the heart of men. Mikaël invited me to reflect on this theatrical time before her disappearance, but also on the meaning of the final moments of a life, of a work, and what is worthy of being included in it.

What comes after? The famous after which the facetious character behind which Claudio Magris hides tells us this: « If after – after what? -there were good hostels instead of angels blowing their trumpets among the clouds, it wouldn’t be bad. »

All of the main characters in this Magris story are men, not crazy enough and concerned with the glorious mark of time on their names. They are, to some extent, boring in their own way too. Those long bores that the theorist of time, of the great obsessions, and the immense obsessions should cherish.

These characters are not free, flamboyant, and unattached heroes sailing from sea to sea in search of the fatal flaw. They are not like this writer, precious character from Frioul, who chooses to erase himself in order to be accountable to no one, neither to God nor to men.

Mikaël tells me a story he was told a few years ago, which he still doesn’t know if it is true or not. It’s about an old Corsican or Sardinian nationalist friend -he doesn’t know anymore- who had neither TV, nor wifi, nor a computer. An authentic novel character who dreamed of experiencing disappearance or at least a life on the fringe, in order to invent a land of possibilities. What animated him, besides literature and revolution, was the Nation, a certain idea of the Republic: a Republic governed by men and women sensitive to the life of the people, to what animates them, to their access to basic social services, to education, to reading and to health care. A Republic where the leaders would think from dawn to dusk about how to create links to make a nation and spare the people, the little people from the danger of populism and its unbearable demagoguery.

It was from these musings on the last pages of Curving Time in Krems that I was rereading for the umpteenth time that the welcome agent (he told me it was his title in the airport’s organisation chart) pulled me out to ask me the country of my passport. I had a curious and ridiculous pride in answering « Senegal ». I said it very loudly so that everyone in the line could hear it. I would have shouted it even louder had it not been for the attitude of decency required in public, in foreign territory no less. I would have liked to speak to the travellers, who also cross the borders dear to Magris, of Léopold Senghor, of Douta Seck, of Jacqueline Lemoine, of Ndaté Yalla Mbodj and of all the great figures who dressed this nation with their name so that the thread of history, of this certain idea of Senegal, never gets cut.

By Hamidou ANNE / hamidou.anne@lequotidien.sn

  • Translation by Déma SANE / Serigne Saliou DIAGNE