A Different Sea

by Magris, Claudio

  A bigger wave than usual strikes the ship and its spray flashes yellow in a porthole’s light. A few months ago at Pirano and Salvore, they did not let out the sheet quickly enough while sailing back against the wind, and the waves, though much smaller than these, swamped the boat. From the beach Paula and Fulvia laughed to see them struggle. They laughed too when Nino threw Enrico in, fed up with him sitting on the water’s edge, gazing into the distance while the others were swimming. Then he was forced to swim and, in fact, did so better than the others, with greater force and style, cutting through, or diving beneath, the oncoming waves. Objects seemed to expand in the dark blue stillness which became ever calmer the deeper one dived. And the colours – of the seaweed, the rocks, and the fish that veered slowly this way and that and then disappeared among the posidonia – were flashes of light amid the underwater peace.

  Paula used to swim down and hold his hand on the seabed, her hair and dark eyelashes like underwater grasses. She had the same eyes and hair as Carlo, and there beneath the waves the resemblance between brother and sister struck him even more. She smiled, and her sweet, ironic smile was still in the unmoving watery veil between them. Then she was away, upwards, with a flick of a foot that shone white like a fish. He watched her disappear. Resurfacing was painful – on the ears too.

  Carlo often stayed inside the house by the beach, listening to Argia play the piano. Perhaps he was in love with Argia, in love perhaps with the meaning of her name: “peace”, the peace of ceasing from fretful action, from questioning. “Through activity to peace”, “through energia to argia”, Carlo had written on the portrait of Schopenhauer – the peace of being, of the sea. Perhaps, Enrico muses for a moment, he means inertia on a bigger scale, the definitive inactivity. However, that is a mistake, a thought unworthy of Carlo, who never demands to exist, as a beggar might, but like a king, simply exists, forever complete and fully alive.

  Three days spent at Pirano, gazing at the waves from the beach or out in the boat to Salvore on the point of Istria opposite the white lighthouse beyond the white rocks, lying flat and looking over the side almost at the level of the water. What is low is good. To rise up is presumptuous, the vanity of those who stand on tiptoe to attract attention. The boat heeled over slightly and sailed on unaided. Enrico’s face touched the water like a fish rippling the surface. He lay face-down. Paula lay on her back, her head thrust backwards, her dark hair, black in the wind, brushed against his face. Behind her black hair the blue sea shimmered, and beyond lay the strip of red earth and the soft, dark green of cypresses and pines. The underside of a seagull shone ivory as it plummeted and skimmed over the water. An olive tree spread its branches with the stark sexuality of nature. But the boat had already rounded the point, the white lighthouse was in view, the olive’s scent already lost on the open sea. The boat glided lightly over the water and vanished in its own reflection, adrift in the afternoon.

  In those brief, still days, Enrico had seen the threads of his destiny, had seen the coins of his life thrown up high and glitter for a moment as they turned over in the air. When Argia was not on the beach she was indoors playing the piano. Playing Beethoven for Carlo she revealed the abyss that comes between the individual and his destiny; she annulled time and with it the misery and transience of life, and she demonstrated the tragic joy to be gained by living only for the moment.

  The others, meanwhile, were outside, down at the water’s edge laughing or silent, doing nothing in particular. Nino was barbecuing fish. Fulvia bounced the beach-ball on the rocks until she tired of it and, with a kick from her tanned and slender foot, sent the ball into the water, to let the waves bring it back to the shore. Fulviargiaula, as the three girls used sometimes to sign their names on postcards, were a single entity, as were he, Carlo and Nino. Fulvia laughed as she splashed them; Argia, her face shaded by her hat, watched a seagull; Paula smiled with her dark eyes, Carlo’s eyes, as she poured coffee; a shapely leg dabbled in the water.

  They had read Ibsen together. Peer Gynt lost bits of himself along the way but still existed whole and entire in Solvejg’s heart. Perhaps Enrico too exists fully only in the hearts of Fulviargiaula, Carlo and Nino. Maybe he has fallen overboard without realizing it, and been lost at sea during the night. No matter. He exists there. They often went swimming at night, even when there was no moon. Paula slipped into the water lightly, like a leaf, and taking his hand pulled him after her. Sometimes it was Fulvia or Nino or Carlo, dry and clear, like a rush of joy.

  Enrico has never been happier than in those days when he saw Carlo happy, in that mysterious yet familiar sea, so different from the ocean that now surrounds the Columbia. This is the Mare Tenebrarum, the sea of nothingness, shapeless and bitter, where nothing ever happens. The voyages of Odysseus and of the Argonauts take place in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, but their legendary tales end at the pillars of Hercules, the edge of the world. At school, Nussbaumer had made them read Apollonius Rhodius and some scholarly dissertations on the disputed route of Jason and his companions. One such was by Carli, The Expedition of the Argonauts to Colchis in Four Volumes, published in 1745, which strove to disprove that Jason had ever passed through the Adriatic via Cherso and Lussino and the Istrian sea – places lying along the route of all odysseys of persuasion.

  But there is no place for Fulviargiaula on ships which break through the grey ocean like breakwaters of oblivion. And yet things might have been different a few years ago, according to the Columbia’s bosun, a certain Vidulich, with whom Enrico plays préférence on evenings when the vast open space and unending twilight seem too empty and motionless even for him.

  Forget Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope, says Vidulich shuffling the cards, they’re so much eyewash. Take it from one who’s been rounding them all his life – the real test, God help you, is the Quarnero. Granted, we were in smaller boats in those days, but what difference does that make? Take Captain Petrina from Lussino, or rather from Lussingrande – he used to get really cross if they said he came from Lussinpiccolo! In the Contessa Hilda he used to run rings round all those famous English clippers, aye the English ones, that lapped up the ocean like a bowl of milk.

  The sea is vi-olent and the boat is to-ossing

  And you’re not the only girl to make love to me

  he used to sing to himself on putting out to sea. On graduation, as Providence dictated, from the Nautical Academy of Lussino, he set off to burrow his way into all the seven seas like a mouse into cheese. For full forty years he rounded your Cape Horns and your Capes of Good Hope as easily as the local ferry captains steer through the shoals of Lussinpiccolo. A ripple or two on the water or the slightest change to the wind’s tune in the rigging, and our Captain Aldebrando Petrina could tell at once that a sea was getting up.

  Through the porthole Enrico can see the dark and angry water. Wave and spray seem identical, their antiphony incomprehensible. But he likes listening to Vidulich’s stories of Atlantic crossings with Petrina, like when they put in at Ascension Island and all those huge birds hauled themselves back into the forest at the ship’s approach. Or of their voyages past the Scillies, when Petrina told them to keep their eyes peeled or they’d end up on the long list of shipwrecks. Not that there was any danger between the isles of Tresco and St Mary’s, where the flowers and birds evoke the Garden of Eden, where the light-blue water breaks white on the granite sand that shines like gold dust. No, it was on the windward side, out to sea, one of the most damnable points on the globe, where his great-great-grandfather had gone down, that Petrina used to make the sign of the cross and swig a bottle to his health beyond the grave. And he never went to sea without his harmonium. Otherwise, he loudly protested, I won’t go beyond the breakwater. And if that doesn’t suit the owner or the purser, they can find themselves another stooge of a captain – there are plenty of us around.

  Enrico plays clubs. He is practised at préférence, although he likes Trieste or Treviso cards best, perhaps because the ace of the coin-
shaped danari, round, sparkling and empty was the highest card. Petrina loved playing music and singing, Vidulich remarks, as he smugly produces his ace. Yes, and popular songs too – “Oh little swallow flying across the sea, stop I want a word with you” – but Verdi and Donizetti were his favourites. He used to round Cape Horn in a pandemonium of wind and wave, towers of water on all sides, sea and sky indistinguishable. Yet he brought the ship round and never missed a beat. “Shit hard and piss strong”, he used to mutter as the ship heeled over, and then he would launch into a song in the midst of the screeching elements –

  My ardent sighs will come borne to you on breezes,

  You will hear the echo of my laments in

  the murmuring sea.

  Lord, what a character he was! He conducted that whole orchestra of confusion, with a kind word or a joke for everyone – he even threw bits of fish to the petrels swooping overhead. He was not one to take any nonsense from a couple of colliding oceans. If they thought they could mess with someone born and bred on a sea lashed by the bora and tramontana between Lussino and San Pietro in Nembi, they could think again. And when Petrina came ashore there was singing and dancing in every tavern in the southern hemisphere. He was a real live wire.

  Carlo would have enjoyed that voice in the tempest. Repeating over and over the same aria, as calm as anything in the teeth of the storm, singing for the sake of singing. That was it. Just like at Pirano and Salvore. They could have spent their whole life in Captain Petrina’s company aboard the Columbia, sailing the seven seas and never landing – “my ardent sighs will come borne to you on breezes”.

  But Captain Petrina had died in 1906. Vidulich remembers the day well. They had just traversed three oceans – the Atlantic, the Indian, and the Pacific, ambling along from Trieste to Chile. A sudden blast from the brass section and he’d dropped dead on deck. The cork popped and the bubbly gushed out – but without fuss. Sooner or later everyone has to meet his maker, Petrina included.

  Die we have to, die we must, bare our arses without a fuss.

  He was buried at Iquique in Chile, more or less on the outskirts of Lussingrande. Pity he hadn’t been able to see his own funeral; he would have liked it: all done nice and proper and everyone snivelling away. He liked a good funeral. Not least because you finished up drinking in some bar.

  Too late – that voice had been silenced, although somewhere it must exist still, as a breath scattered to the winds. Nil de nilo fit et nil in nilum abit, as Enrico had once jotted down. But he’d never cared for melodrama – too syrupy and, invariably, too loud. He likes the Lieder of Beethoven and Schubert, where everyday things become remote – a flower in a glass of water, a tree outside the house. Or if one must indulge in a spot of sentimentality, there’s always La Paloma – a dove as white as the snow – or perhaps better – as white as the sea – it makes no difference. For the sea turns sparkling white with foam. Sea and snow everywhere are identical. If only everything were identical, like the view on all sides of the ship. Maximilian of Mexico, too, was partial to La Paloma.

  So Petrina’s voice is no more. True, the less we have, the lighter we travel, but it’s still a shame. On board ship people travel light, and there is no need to keep on shifting what little baggage one has, as one does on a train. Cabin class may not be luxury, but it is the very impossibility of action, the very leisure imposed by sea travel, which spins out time and then discards it, that is the real privilege. When he has a moment, he will write to Carlo and the others and send the letters in a batch to Peternel: Josip’s a true friend, he’ll see to their distribution, saving him both effort and money.

  The days overlap, merge and then cancel each other out. He sits for hours just gazing at the ship’s wake – it disperses more quickly here on these choppy waters than in the Adriatic. He plays cards with Vidulich and Gigetto, a businessman travelling first class whom Enrico had known slightly in Gorizia. Always on the move around the globe, he spends most of his time in Africa, trafficking in God knows what with the Berbers. For him, crossing the Atlantic is like crossing a tributary of the Isonzo. What’s more, he is obviously wealthy. Vidulich asks him if it is true that a merchant once, up in the Atlas, made him a gift of a fourteen-year-old slave girl. “I took her out of pity and treated her like a daughter,” Gigetto replies, changing the subject. He is a respectable and dapper man. He tells the story of his rescue by an Austrian warship in the bay of Madagascar – his cousin Francesco happened to be serving on board at the time and, rapt in mathematics and philosophy, had tried to explain to Gigetto his key to the universe, while fixing him with the vacant stare typical of a mind on a different plane. Late in the evening, Vidulich stands them a round at the bar, but Enrico is not much of a drinker. In the darkness words become increasingly infrequent, dying like shooting stars.

  The ship docks for a day and a half at Las Palmas. Enrico goes ashore, although he would just as happily stay on board and view the city from his deckchair. Soon, however, he begins to enjoy himself wandering through the narrow streets, looking at the shops, listening to the Spanish voices, and scrutinizing the terracotta faces. The racial mixture here is different from that in his small corner of the Danubian Empire. Both poorer and nobler, they bear with indifference their inherited conflict of racial origins. Had these varied peoples never come, had the clear-skinned, auburn-haired Guanches been the island’s only denizens, he could have ended his voyage here and now – installed beneath a tree in the garden of the Hesperides, reaching up every so often to pluck a golden apple, letting the sun sink in more western lands.

  He picks his way through red crags to the water’s edge, removes his shoes, and rolls up his trousers. Now and then a wave splashes over him. He enjoys feeling his shirt dry against his skin in the warm wind. The coal-like sand and pebbles on the black beach gleam in the wash of the waves. Every dark shadow has dignity. In Homer, the waters of Ocean are black. Beyond, the rest of the beach is red, like a frozen sunset. Enrico enters a small cave and picks off the shellfish clinging in the crevices. Tiny sea insects spread over the rock like goose flesh; greenish-yellow crabs scuttle away. Wings rustle in the darkness. A wave penetrates deep within the cave. Out to sea the water shines a metallic blue but on entering the cave turns brown and then black, like ink splashed against the glass sides of an inkwell.

  In these caves the Guanches guarded the king’s virgins. Here, revered and fattened, they became soft and huge until they attained sufficient imperious opulence to melt their sovereign. Enrico also is not averse to sinking into vast and yielding bosoms. Every body teaches humility, and Enrico is not a choosy type. Love-making is a tasty snack – quick and uncomplicated, enjoyed and then forgotten. One woman is just like another, each with some small defect but all right as a whole – the Majorcan girl, for instance, he met yesterday in a café just after landing who took him to a house of peeling plaster, blue jacaranda flowers at the windows, and a neo-classical courtyard. At Pirano the girls’ room had adjoined their own. Yet it was more distant than this house with its small peristyle, where he would never again set foot.

  The same girl is available again today. But after only half an hour Enrico does not know what more to do with her. He invents some polite excuse and takes his leave. Wandering along the beach he wonders where it was that centuries ago, according to tradition, two Guanches had found a wooden statue of the Madonna washed up on the shore. They had set it up in a cave where it was revered from time immemorial. Then, one stormy night, the sea had taken it back. Some maintained that the statue was not of the Virgin, but rather a corsair’s figurehead in the likeness of a female prisoner who had thrown herself into the sea, so as not to submit to the pirate captain. He had then commissioned a figurehead in her likeness, with her distant, gentle, but unyielding face. And some time later, when his vessel was sunk in battle, he had cast the figurehead into the sea, to prevent it going down with the ship, and the waves had carried it to land. But centuries later she yearned once more for the open seas and had
summoned the waves to take her back. Others, however, believed it really had been the Virgin, the star of the sea who, disgusted by the degenerate ways of men, despite centuries of prayer and devotion, had abandoned them for the high seas and the fish. For fish sin less than men.

  Both explanations are a little too devoutly Catholic for Enrico’s taste. He is more intrigued by the theory that these islands had originally been part of Atlantis. He pauses in front of an ancient drago tree, possibly even older than the cult of the Madonna. It was not so much its height that fascinated him as its sideways expansion and tangled branches stretching out seemingly without limit. Any moment now it would collapse under its own excessive growth. Proliferation courts disaster. His Austrian education taught Enrico the virtue of cutting back, of doing less. He learned that lesson once and for all and not only from his teacher of philosophy, of the love of wisdom, who sought demotion not promotion. The trunk and branches are split, wrinkled and streaked with oblique gashes; they sprout hoary beards and bushy eyebrows, obscene protuberances and calloused hands. Wounds open, squinting eyes mock, mountainsides slip and rise up again, ravines slash deep into the valleys, mucus oozes from a coarse cleft, buds and moist shoots rip open the decrepit bark.

  With a battered hat on his head and his shirt hanging out of his trousers in the warm December weather, Enrico studies this Silenus tottering beneath the weight of its own vitality, fully expecting a gnarled and over-extended branch to come crashing down. Branches should be pruned. Proliferation is a rhetorical, bubonic swelling to be lanced and cauterized. Shape is achieved by reduction. His teacher, Richard von Schubert-Soldern, a tall, thin man, used to twist a yellow pencil round and round in his fingers as he talked. He would look only at the grey of the walls, never directly at his pupils, and had never been willing to explain his refusal of the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Leipzig. He became a supply teacher at Maribor instead, and later taught history, geography, and philosophy at Enrico’s school in Gorizia.