by Erri De Luca
Then I hear her voice breaking up, like the sounds on the threshold of sleep. I hear her asking me something and a part of me answering. Another part of me, where I am, listens to my voice go off on its own.
I start with music then sentences come to me from a distance and I don’t know how to do anything to stop them.
They’re killing all of us, we members of the rebellion.
We race from one hiding place to another.
We’re wearing the stench of fear on our backs. The dogs can smell it on the street and chase after us.
In escape we seek our revenge.
Argentina tears a whole generation from the world like a madwoman pulling at her hair. It kills its children, wants to be done with them. We’re the last.
I’ve been here for years in order to love a woman and now I’m caught up in a war.
At one roadblock shots ring out. They stop us. We’re armed. There are two of us. My partner wounds a policeman and immediately gunfire goes through his throat and he dies at my feet.
His face is torn open by a bullet. His face gives me energy. I smell the release of his bowels and the stench drives me out.
From behind the car I come out into the open, take aim at the policemen’s barrier. Their guns jam. I’m on top of them, shooting at a body that falls over the other one, who’s wounded. I see the stunned face of a boy, not an enemy. I don’t shoot at him, I flee.
So go the days, in rushes.
Money’s grabbed from a bank to keep running.
Before I stop, I shoot a colonel, a single shot in a crowd on a Sunday sidewalk. Today I still don’t know if he’s alive or dead. Then I go south, where the land narrows, where it’s stupid to flee.
They look for the last of us elsewhere.
I’m at a sailors’ tavern and learn to move in the perpetual chaos of the lower Atlantic wind. It covers, hides, deafens, and doesn’t come to speak.
I’m in no hurry. I wear the clothes of a sailor who waits for a berth and drinks.
The tavern-keeper has an Italian name, grandparents from Otranto, another kind of land’s end surrounded by water. He asks when I’m going. There’s a whaling ship on its way to the Malvinas Islands.
I’m at the bottom of the sack of my life. Any day I could be shaken out of it.
The tavern-keeper wants me to go. Maybe he’s helping me. He arranges a berth for me as a mate on an Irish steamer.
Before climbing aboard I get rid of my guns.
For the first time in years my clothes feel light, my hands absentminded. The wind blows so hard it could take me in its arms. Without weapons, I weigh nothing.
I climb up the ladder, thinking of no one. I’m the last leaf on a tree. I break away without a push.
I don’t think of the girl that I loved, that I followed till I became part of her country.
Now I know that she’s at the bottom of the ocean, thrown into the open sea with her hands tied from a helicopter. She lived for me, died to give her eyes to the fish.
I climb aboard and for two days before departing I have a brush, paint, and wire brush to scrape away the briny rust.
I learn the ten men’s names and their preference for onion. One guy eats them by the bite, like apples.
At the harbor’s outlet the wind is sheer force, shattering waves and drenching beards.
I sleep in a hammock hanging from the beams in the hold, rocking over the engine room.
I’m forty and sleep so heavily you have to kick me to make me stop.
They call me the dead man. No one can sleep where I can.
No one knows how many lives it’s been since I slept.
The voyage is a tenacious storm, the engine on low just to correct the drift.
The fishing is no good, twice as hard. It’s a struggle for the net to snatch the fish from the waves. It tears, depriving sailors of their sleep.
After the wind, the beer tastes sweet.
On Sundays they pray, they’re Catholics. The captain has shrapnel wounds in his face. One of the guys must have fought back before setting out to sea.
They take me with them because I reek of war, too.
I pay for my passage by working, but they don’t need me.
The unspoken agreement is that they’re leaving me on the islands. The only book is the Bible. I read it in bad light, in an iron shell, in the open sea.
I grow fond of David, who lays a single stone before Goliath and a single book, the Psalms, in the mouth of the world.
“I don’t believe the writers but I believe their stories.” That’s my answer to a freckle-faced sailor who asks if I have faith in God.
We work the fish, freeze it, and are at sea a month and a half.
When I disembark on Soledad Island in the Malvinas I can’t walk. Without the sea below me I wobble and miss the wind that would fill my ears until I forgot. I am on English soil.
I stop at a tavern, the woman is a whaler’s widow, Maria, Maria del Sol is her name.
I’m her cook. I tend her garden and keep watch over her wooly sheep.
At night we make noise. Maria’s as strong as a sloop sailing against the sea. I’m standing up and pushing on the oars.
The fishermen laugh and drink a cloudy beer with me at night. Maria insults them but plays along with their jokes. I switch from fish to cheese.
The island is humid, with bogs where coal and plants waste away.
No trees, though. The wind mows them down like a gardener. There’s some short grass and scabs of lichen and moss on the mounds. Scratched earth.
The sheep’s lips are strong enough to tear away the short, tough skin of the pastures.
The fishing birds find a point where they hover, motionless, then break away from the sky’s stillness and jab at a wave.
I wait. I have nothing to ask of time.
There are more animals than men, more women than men, everything is more numerous than men.
And years go by. I work, satisfy Maria, don’t touch a dime, don’t think.
On the radio I hear an Argentinian song again. The invasion is the next day.
Laila’s voice interrupts me, ringing in both parts of my head.
I realize I’ve said a lot, so I drink a glass to slake my thirst and still my tongue.
“It was me,” she says, “I made you speak.”
“You’re good at it,” I say.
“Yes,” she says in a voice, a second voice that comes loose.
“What do you think of my stories?” I ask.
“I love them,” she says. “It’s my job to make men talk, to tease information from their heads. With you I listen freely, I listen and learn to love the life that is written on your face.”
“You’ve got men in the palm of your hand,” I say.
“Yours is the hand I love,” she replies.
“I won’t slap you in the head because I’m nuts about you,” she laughs.
“Don’t extract any more stories from me. If I can’t hold onto them, I’d rather tell you when I’m awake.”
“Tomorrow I have to go,” she says.
“Tomorrow,” I say, “what do I know? Here we’ve got all the today we need.” I stand up, pick her up in my arms and lay her down.
“Hold me, gardener, hold me. It’s everything I need. Hold me. And don’t ask questions.”
“I wouldn’t know what to ask.”
“Do like you did with Maria,” she says.
“And you do like Laila does.”
Now nothing is strong enough to tear us apart.
THEN COME THE DAYS without.
Selim comes to the garden for the mimosas. He also wants to talk a little about his country, where they go barefoot so they can talk more freely.
“With your shoes on you can’t speak, that’s what we think.” Without the naked sole of the foot on the ground, we are isolated, according to his language, that judging from its ringing sound must have a silver fishbone inside.
“It’s the truth,” I say, “the
pure amen.” Our whole history is a shoe separating us from the ground of the world. Shoe is home, car, book. Thinking about it like this makes me smile.
“What are you daydreaming about, gardener?”
I ask him where he lives, with a thought of putting him up. He replies that he stays at an abandoned house, without windows or doors, which he likes.
He says, “Over here you build with water from the earth. You get water from a well, from a fountain, from a river. In my country we build with water from the sky. We collect it and when we have a little, we make our mixture. Our houses are made from rain. They’re more like clouds than houses.”
And Selim laughs, he laughs at the houses of the world.
I feel separated from Laila, not from the earth, which I’m always on top of, always digging into with my hands.
Selim wants to pay, he’s earned something.
“Forget about it. Without you the blossoms would still be here, inside a closed garden. You, instead, do the wind’s work. You scatter them far, pin them to women’s breasts. It would be exploitation if I took a percentage from the wind. Pay for drinks one night when there’s no more yellow to cut.”
He accompanies me to my noontime table and says good-bye. He’s going to Sicily for the harvest of the little tomatoes, the cherry tomatoes.
I tell him he follows the earth.
“I follow your earth,” he says, laughing. “It runs with the seasons while mine stands still.”
In his gray hair there’s a little yellow pollen, the mimosa showing its affection.
And in his hand he has red to drink in a glass cup, set against the white of his fingernails. Selim looks good in the company of colors. I think: this is what elegance is.
Then he dips his bread and says, “Travel overseas has led to good encounters. The American potato found olive oil and the tomato ended up on wheat.”
He chews with relish as I think of his dark back bent over the red-green of the tomato plants, in the sun that rides on your shoulders ten hours a day, earning only half the fair rate. Finally I tell him that it is an honor for me to be at the same table.
I careen back and forth on the evening train, after an afternoon burdened by one glass too many.
At home I bite into raw garlic with tomatoes and a peeled boiled egg glows, for a moment, in the hollow of my hand.
Before my pupils roll back into sleep, I carry a thought to Laila. You eat roughly one spoonful of salt with a person and already you’re in love. But before trusting each other, you should eat a kettleful of salt together.
Being with her is like life in Argentina, without a day after. In her arms I smell again the peat of Soledad Island.
I don’t even know whether they’re still searching for me on account of those years. The toy soldiers are no longer in command, but laws are odd and maybe they forget they’re around, absentmindedly.
Who knows whether Maria has offered a bounty on my scalp or whether she’s happy just to curse me.
I can’t sleep. I get up to make coffee and look at the windows: in the distance, not even ten kilometers away, is the sea.
It was also night when I left Maria’s island, climbing aboard a boat to climb back up to the parallels of return.
I take nothing away, only the money pocketed in exchange for ambergris, which is hidden beneath sheep manure to cover its hint of musk.
I vomit when the first waves hit. This is my only farewell.
We’re working our way toward the equator’s belly. The closer you get the less shadow your body leaves at noon.
I get stuck on a superstition, that a man without a shadow has no past.
For days and days I stand in the sun to watch it disappear.
I start all over again at the line where night is equal to day.
The sailors celebrate the crossing of the zero parallel. Rowdy nights on board, as the sea pushes from the stern into the long waves, the ship starts to descend.
The sailors sweat alcohol from their pores.
I’m a passenger, I mind my own business. But I break the nose of one guy who wants to have his way with the scullery boy, a Creole from the Antilles.
I do the wrong thing. Men should be left to their demons and there are places that aren’t suitable for boys. And there are nights when men without women seek comfort in each other.
The boy races in front of me, the guy chasing him grabs him, he screams, and the only person around is me. That’s how I get caught in the middle. The other guy pulls out a knife. I know what to do. I stick an elbow in his face and he goes down like the night.
So I spend the rest of the trip sleeping by day and staying on my feet at night so that I don’t wake up with my throat cut.
The next day I have the captain give the knife back. He swears at me and grumbles that I shouldn’t interfere.
I’m at a window on the other side of that world and that voyage. Yet just knowing that the straight line through the darkness goes to the sea is enough to give me another taste of Atlantic insomnia.
The first few nights I stay awake on the bridge to see the white of the moon on the water’s smooth surface. If the sailor is thinking of slitting my throat, he’ll wait for the nights when the moon is missing.
For days I cross paths with his glum, hungry face, his nose purple with blood that escaped from his veins.
I show him that I’m on my guard, that I fear him.
A small compensation, a satisfaction. Sometimes that’s enough.
Out of gratitude, the boy wants to stay with me. He knocks on the cabin at night, brings me a slice of cake, a spiced coffee. There are men that lose their minds and their shame over boys. I can understand the men wanting boys, but not the other way around.
He tells me that the cook sold him to the sailor on equator night. And he says that no one has defended his body and his life since he was born. That he owes me everything, even love.
I already feel the air of the North. He is the South to which I had been so close in love, in war, and as a fugitive for twenty years. That South doesn’t exist for me anymore.
I tell him that his attentions are more thanks than I deserve and that love has nothing to do with debts.
He asks if he can come with me when we land in England.
I don’t know what I’ll live on, I don’t know anything about the North, how to get by, but if he’s tired of the sea he can come with me.
He asks to hear a yes.
“Yes.”
Now I’m thinking that Laila and I still don’t have a yes or a no behind us. And you can’t be two without a yes or a no.
After one hundred parallels of latitude, we descend into an upside-down world.
The landing place is London, and we get by. I work at a carpentry shop, he works evenings at a bar. He comes home and I’m asleep. In the morning he gets up to start my coffee, so we can welcome in the day together.
On Sundays we walk in the parks. We hear music from the South.
He asks me, “If I was a woman, would you marry me?”
Some nights he doesn’t come home. He’s started to work at a better bar. He has a proposal from a man to move in with him.
I tell him that the time has come for me to try my hand at Italy again. He accompanies me to the train the night I depart.
For the last time he removes a little sawdust from my head. Only at that point do I realize that I love his attentions to me, that I allow it by leaving in that sprinkle of dust from the shop.
I smile at myself for stopping at the surface of things, for not even understanding my pact with his attentions.
With his thumb he makes the sign of the cross on my forehead and says, “Find love for yourself.”
“And make the men respect you. You’re a loyal boy. You have dark eyes that don’t know how to hide.”
We say good-bye and each of us turns around and slips into the crowd of unknowns that surrounds every farewell.
And now I think I have to stop losing people.
The window mists over from peering into it and I lean my forehead against the touch of his cross from a remote place in the world, more than one year later, I call out wishing him a good night.
DAYS GO BY WITHOUT Laila.
I read a letter from Argentina, a friend got out of prison just recently. The world of my years in the South is cutting its last teeth.
He writes, “I have to learn to walk in a straight line, I have to understand that feet take you away.”
The world mends on one side and on another it creates another twenty years of trouble.
I finish reading his letter at my table in the tavern. I fold it and close my eyes for a while.
“What’s the man doing, sleeping?” Mimmo’s voice opens my eyes. “Welcome back.”
“No, I’m not sleeping, this letter has me thinking. I’ll give it to you.”
He sits down. Behind him is a woman. I only see her now. I apologize, stand up, introduce myself. She smiles and puts a little charm in her voice.
We all sit. He reads. I explain the letter to the woman: the release of a friend from a South American prison.
“Good news,” she says.
Mimmo gives me back the letter. He asks me why I put stones in the vineyard. “What good is a rambling path between the rows?”
“It’s not for walking,” I reply. “The stones absorb sunlight during the day and release it at night. In summer the warmth lifts the night-time dew off the grapes and keeps them from spoiling.”
He asks where I learned that.
“In the Argentina of my youth. The older Italians back then knew how to make wine in the gardens of Argentina. Now there are no longer any old or young Italians. Now they’re all Argentineans.
“An old man, a grandfather without grandchildren, teaches me. He’s been in Argentina ever since they cut down his woods back in the Apennines to make railroad ties. He fled from a world that erases centuries from the mountains to place them under railroad wheels.
“At night he hears the cloven forest crying out to the stars for revenge. When the locomotive boiler explodes they blame the anarchists. He flees from that world. He brings with him a small limestone mortar and a beechwood pestle to make pesto, some basil seeds and a bundle of Erbaluce vines with which he tries to grow a pergola in the humidity of the Palermo quarter in Buenos Aires.”