A Different Sea

by Magris, Claudio

  No, Enrico has no time either for Socialists or Christians in catacombs. A Buddhist monk with his begging bowl and no shoes is all right; after all, it’s nice to go around with bare feet. But those communes with their hearts on their sleeves must really be the limit, each more intrusive and irritating than the last. What is certain is that they make a great noise about it. What a crazy idea, living squashed altogether and sticking their noses into each others’ affairs. Thank God he realized in time, and is now in Patagonia, not Jasnaja Poljana after helping a few layabouts.

  Admittedly it can be seen as a fine gesture, a real act of largesse – and yet that other gesture, of replying to an impudent boy, is also great, perhaps even as fine as the one the old man expected of him. Sell off everything and give the money to the poor. Is that the true life? Why is it that everyone expects the impossible of him? Better Ibsen, who did not suffer from megalomania. And yet it is true to say Enrico never thinks of his father’s mills in Gorizia, nor knows anything of his share of the inheritance or even how much money his family has.

  Every so often the horses get sick with a fever that affects their lungs. He knows what to do. He opens a vein with his knife at the right place and bleeds it. Then he makes the horses gulp down ginebra or, if that doesn’t do the trick, the whisky he bought off a Welshman, until they get drunk. Their heads droop with lolling tongues and rolling eyes, but then after a few days they recover. Once he finds himself face to face with a puma. His horse shies, and when he whips it furiously and even bites it, it throws and tramples him. For months afterward he pisses blood, until some Indians cure him with a decoction from the bark of certain trees.

  He goes to Bahia Blanca for the big cattle fair. Thousands of animals are herded in from all over the country, and the earth pounded by their hooves is as slimy as grape pulp after the wine-making. The big traders are already there waiting and paying out money in huge wads.

  There are prostitutes too from every corner of the country. For forty-eight hours money floods through the hands of the cattlemen, like the blackberries they used to cram into their mouths by the handful on the wooded slopes of San Valentin, bursting and crushing them with their teeth, careless of the juice running down their chins. Indian women, half-castes, negro girls with big red bows – all crowding round his horse like cows on the prairie, shouting and waving, with flashing eyes and white teeth. As evening comes on, a flask of wine breaks across the sky, spreading everywhere, even to the flushed and excited faces of the crowd.

  The cattlemen throw bags of money into the hands raised and reaching towards them. Enrico does the same, not only for the sake of a barefoot girl with dark braided hair, but also for the sheer happiness of tossing something away, like throwing stones into the Isonzo and making them skip on the surface of the water. All around him is shouting, laughter, the lowing of cattle, the cracking of whips, fireworks going off, pomegranates erupting, their scarlet seeds spraying out into the night sky. With the girl in his saddle he loses himself for a while in the deafening jamboree. But he has soon had as much as he can take of the shouts, the lights, and the crush, and sets off for home. After a few days on the trail he reaches his cabin, moves the rock aside, and lies down to sleep.

  He does not reckon up the days and the weeks. Instead he uses more elastic, indeterminate ways of measuring time – the first flurry of sleet, the grass’s loss of colour, the rutting of the guanacos. There is always a wind, and after a while one learns to distinguish its different moods, from hour to hour and from season to season, a tugging, drawn-out whistle, a dry rasp like a cough. At times the wind seems coloured – golden brown in the scrub, black on the desolate plain.

  Large clouds float by and are gone, a cow tugs free a clump of grass, the earth turns yet also stands still, a daisy lasts a month, a mayfly just one day, the evening star is the morning star. Sometimes the sky opens out like a sphere of blown glass, grows distant and vanishes.

  Enrico fires. The wild duck plummets to the ground, one moment in heraldic flight, the next a piece of rubbish tossed from a window. The law of gravity makes nature clumsy. Only words are protected – such as those printed in the Teubner Greek and Latin texts from Leipzig.

  The shot’s echo dies out among the rocks. Carlo shot himself with Enrico’s pistol. The final curtain has been lowered. There is nothing more to say – for Enrico that is, not for Carlo, over whom that instantaneous gesture can have no power, just as the cerebral haemorrhage has no power over Ibsen, or pneumonia over Tolstoy, or hemlock over Socrates. Carlo is the conscience of his age. Death has power only over the verb “to have” not over the verb “to be”. Enrico has his herds, his horse, and a few books.

  He learned of Carlo’s death a year after it happened, in the September of 1911. The news was waiting for him on his arrival at Puerto Madryn on the coast after a journey of six hundred kilometres. Nino had written to tell him and had enclosed a copy of the poems Carlo had written since Enrico’s departure, in the last year of his life. “I have had the good fortune, denied you, of being close to him, of seeing him, of sharing his life right to the end. Now we are alike, and his death binds us even more closely. What he taught me, you have learned in a different way by yourself. How life seemed then and how it seems now! All that is over, for ever. No life, no joy will ever equal that for which I believed I only had to wait.”

  The rope that binds us also drags us down, thinks Enrico. Carlo did not miss his footing that 17th day of October 1910. No, Carlo is completing the ascent and disappearing on high like a swallow. It is he and Nino who are slipping on a treacherous slope. In his major work, Persuasion and Rhetoric, written in their attic, Carlo states that a weight can only descend or fall. Now Nino’s words weigh on Enrico’s shoulders. “Carlo spoke of you and looked to your life as one entirely worthy of esteem . . . you put his teachings into practice, in every single action of your daily life. For you it is not just a question of having knowledge . . . those close to Carlo think of you as his natural successor.”

  Enrico looks at his saddle, at his shoes that pinch his feet, and at the receipts he has come to cash. If only he had found letters from Nino and Peternel accusing him, as on previous occasions, of reticence, lack of feeling, and of mockery. Such criticisms might be refuted or ignored at will. He flicks through the pages of Carlo’s Dialogue on Health, completed on 7th October, ten days before his death, which Nino had copied out. “What is inscribed here – Nino had added – is the ultimate expression of the written word.” Would it not have been better if they had stayed as they once were in that attic, all together just talking, without any of them, not even Carlo, writing a word?

  The slim dialogue sweeps him along like a wind. Occasionally it clutches at him, and he gasps for air. After drawing a deep breath he scans the pages and notices his own name time and time again. He is the protagonist of the piece – the part of truth, of resolute affirmation, of persuasion, of condemnation of suicide as fear of life and death. In those intense pages Enrico represents the truly free man, of whom it is said “you are”, who enjoys life simply because he exists, demanding and fearing nothing, neither life nor death, fully and always alive – in every instant, including the last.

  Enrico roasts some duck and watches what little smoke there is disperse. For a few moments he is happy, but with a happiness that comes and goes. When it goes, the sky lowers, sluggish and heavy. He tries to recite the words and phrases of the Rico in the dialogue, to hear how they sound. Why hadn’t Carlo reversed the roles, with Nino taking the leading part and he the one who listens and learns? Of course he recognizes himself in the protagonist’s ability to shun the cicada-like chatterers, slaves of a swarming society who flatter themselves with the pretence that they are free. Enrico does not waste his life by attempting to seize it, nor does he destroy his shadow by turning round to look at it. This at least is one lesson he has learned. Carlo can rest assured. The sun can do whatever it wishes with his shadow – lengthen it, shorten it, even distort it – for all he
cares. He plans to let his shadow fend for itself, even to vanish when the sun goes into hiding.

  But why Rico and not Nino? A light burns within him, Carlo’s lamp was extinguished not because the oil ran out but because its wick flooded. He too has an internal flame, but outwardly it splutters unsteadily – flaring up on occasion, but then soon dying down again. The heart beats in the dark, a bird enters the cave where, blinded by the sunlight, it loses its way in the blackness, striking its wings against razor-sharp walls.

  The pages lie on the ground. He places a stone on top of them to prevent their blowing away. Perhaps they ought to disappear in the wind. This mandate from the blue contains a misunderstanding that cannot now be put right. Out here death counts for something. Although powerless over truth, it is nevertheless the inescapable judge of all misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Men do not grieve because of death, Carlo said, they die because of grief.

  He studies the diagram Carlo has drawn to illustrate the text. It consists of four intersecting circles producing sectors in common. To the left, or west as it were, of the circle of happiness, lies the sector of freedom, of “no-need”. Yes, it is here in this white space that Enrico is to be found. But the defining arc sweeps on downwards to form another circle, in the south of the diagram – the circle of death. “No-need” – freedom – appears in both circles: in that of happiness, founded on being and value, which needs nothing – because it exists; and in that of death, which likewise needs nothing – because it does not exist.

  Enrico looks at the curving horizon, the moving but identifiable edge of the herd, the bit of ground which, although roofed over with planks of wood, belongs as much to the open prairie as to the enclosed space of his cabin. Boundaries on all sides both separate and unite so many different things. Perhaps Carlo is wrong: Enrico is at a boundary, as in Gorizia, yet without knowing on which side – or in which circle – he stands. Is he on the south-eastern frontier of happiness, or on death’s north-western border? When walking in the woods in the direction of Friuli they often lost their way, without knowing whether or not they had already crossed the border into Italy. Carlo is now telling him to return, to belong in freedom to the luminous circle – the circle of happiness and of being. Or, rather, he is ordering him to guide the others, to lead them in his name to the other side.

  The investiture both stuns and inebriates him. It also weighs him down, for it is too much – a misunderstanding that strikes him like a stone. He must sort things out, lift this bright but heavy star from his shoulders before it crushes him, and return home to the attic. Why didn’t he sort it all out long before, when there was so much more time? It is impossible now – it is simply too late. No effort can defeat death. Due to death’s cowardice the record can never be put straight. Everyone dies before clarifying something or other. Thus killing is a crime. He regrets shooting that duck flying so fast and straight – perhaps on its way to put something to rights.

  But if Carlo wishes it thus, Enrico will retrace his steps, change circles, and climb up towards the ray of freedom, to the silence enjoyed by the one who is free of all desire, up to the tops of trees warmed in the red of the sunset. Climb that tree aflame with the sun’s rays and flee the evening shadow scaling its trunk. The sky above is the burning light of fire, yet Enrico would prefer to turn and look down at the grass round the base of the tree as it loses its colour in the darkness, to stretch out on the ground below, to sink into the damp turf and then, from that position, to watch the sky gradually drain of colour.

  Carlo should understand that his request, or rather gift, is too much. Even he used to laugh when Enrico recited his favourite poem, a nonsense-rhyme of Panarces: “a man who is a non-man, seeing and not seeing a bird that is a non-bird, perched in a tree that is a non-tree, hits it and does not hit it with a stone that is a non-stone . . .”

  Non, non, dong, dong, the sound of bells. The flesh of the duck is good, although unsalted. He finishes it with care. He likes eating well. Besides, it is manly. Among the gauchos he who eats the most is the most virile. He goes to his cabin, pulls out a Teubner text and sits in the doorway. The moon is bright enough to read by, but he can easily manage without it – he knows those heavily underlined passages by heart. For the first time ever, he feels condemned rather than comforted by Plato’s view that it is to thought that the magnificence and the vision of all time and all being are revealed. For nothing is revealed on that stark plateau. This does not worry him too much, but it is not good enough for Carlo, who wants him really to see that magnificence.

  Enrico looks around, a lump in his throat. He puts away The Republic and reads in turn the Electra, Oedipus the King, and the chorus of the Orestes. “O Night, queen and giver of sleep, rise up from Erebus on your wings, come, we are lost, swallowed in darkness.” He just wants to go to sleep, nothing more, even simply to doze like the animals scattered in the darkness still diluted with light, like coffee with milk.

  He finds himself in this state only once in a while – his soul agitated by a drawn-out dusk, a wild night in his cabin with moonlight filtering between the planks. Such moods are rare. Generally life drags by with empty identical days and months, the years passing or not passing, as in Panarces’ rhyme. To keep in practice he revises Sprechen Sie Attisch?, a conversation guide to ancient Greek, and repeats phrases of every day use: wie lebt es sich in Leipzig?: ? I have a headache: . He is also reading Martin Fierro. He likes the world it evokes, without childhood, where death and murder are unimportant, simply because dying and killing are accepted practice.

  He recalls a story once told him by a gaucho as they sat round a camp fire. Was it one year ago or three? No matter. The gaucho too was no different from any other and played the guitar as they all did. The story concerned a rastreador of the pampas of earlier times, an infallible tracker who could recognize and distinguish every print of man or beast even when the trail was weeks old, pounded by hooves, or criss-crossed by wagon-wheels. They used to hire him to track down a lost bullock, a thief, or an outlaw in hiding. Sooner or later, as surely as night follows day, he found his animal or his man.

  The years passed. The rastreador was now a king of the prairie. But he grew sorrowful and restless and would speak or cry out in fitful sleep. Sometimes he would get up and walk about while still asleep, frightening the horses, but without being woken by their whinnying. One day they called him to search for an unknown person who had murdered a cattle trader. He found the trail and followed it. It was short but involved, twisting back and forth, criss-crossing, and superimposed. Gradually, though, he unravelled it. In the process a great weariness overtook him, for he was old, and it was time he stopped this continual hunt for someone else. But habit and honour and something else compelled him to persevere. He stuck to it like a bloodhound and finally arrived before his own four-plank cabin with torn curtains. Only then did he realize that the tracks were his: the only tracks he had never learned. He must have committed the murder in his sleep on one of those troubled nights. Both conquered and conqueror, he handed himself over to the police.

  The true version of the story, according to others, was that the old man had murdered from greed, and that another, younger and more skilful tracker had uncovered the trail that he had tried, in vain, to conceal. But the gaucho singing in the shadows that night, when the hot wind dried the mouth, would not admit the existence of anyone more skilled. He alone could bring defeat and destruction on himself. Enrico contemplates his own trail from their attic to his cabin, losing himself for a moment on the journey. It is easy enough to put grief on the wrong track and to conceal his footprints from others, but not from himself. His trail is clear, solitary, both behind and in front, leading on inexorably, ever since Carlo first mapped it out. He gazes at the moon rising among the tall black grass, wanting to discard it like a useless old gourd. But there is no rubbish pit.

  The tale of the rastreador is an ancient one, with its origins on the shores of another sea that gave birth to the go
ds and to all stories. Enrico opens Oedipus the King, the Berlin edition of 1865 – text by Nauck and commentary by Schneidewin – its scribbled annotations dating from their time in the attic. In a note on line 1400, the commentator observes that the manuscript reading must result from scribal error, and he suggests an emendation. Enrico takes out his pencil and scribbles an angry comment: “Mierdita, es ist wunderschön richtig – it makes perfect sense!” He stands up, relieved, and goes out to stretch his legs. Anger in the cause of philology is not unenjoyable. The deserted plateau around him is once again as it should be.

  Life has its pressures, but it can sometimes prove generous as well. It may even stop to take a rest instead of always forcing us to do something. Enrico was astounded when Mario appeared. Mario had followed his trail with real skill – across an ocean, no mere stream – a hunt well beyond the capacity of an ordinary bloodhound. He looks just like Carla, his sister – the same high forehead, soft but bold eyes, and rebellious mouth. Enrico watches him emerge, utterly unexpected, from the distance, with Carla’s sky-blue eyes. What we love is not any individual man or woman, he thinks to himself, but a look, the sea within, a smile transcending gender. It is almost laughable – Mario made this whole journey just to relay a message from Carla. Since Enrico never wrote, no one in Gorizia knew his precise whereabouts, and so Carla sent Mario to say that she still loves him but – how could she put it? – in a somewhat different way. Now she wants to marry someone else but would do so only with his consent, for she had pledged herself to him when he left for South America.