by Erri De Luca
I need to check out the address. I think I’ll go during my break.
Spring is ready. Inside their wood the trees feel the pressure of the roots releasing themselves into sprouts. Only the walnut tree is still waiting.
I cut the lawn with the scythe. I sharpen it, cut, sharpen. The quick swishing of the blade is a short breath.
I like mowing by hand, the stroke from right to left that levels the grass comes to me easily.
Today I feel less like doing work and more like keeping myself busy with work, depending on it to make the hours go by.
The cut grass releases its scent to the sun. I gather it with a rake.
At the gate Selim is cheerful about the warmth and has a new shirt on. “It’s spring, man, you need to wear something new.”
He’s tall and robust, a tree-trunk of a man. He has the money and wants to buy me the promised bottle.
“At noon I have to go somewhere, I’m not going to the tavern,” I tell him.
“I’m coming with you,” he says.
“It would be better if you didn’t, Selim.”
“It would be better if I did, man.”
He says it with such assurance that I shut up.
He helps me to pile up the cuttings then we chew sardines and bread together in the April air.
“Grass is good for animals,” he says. “Mine would have a party with this, a shame to throw it away. My animals are thin but healthy. In a little while they’ll be putting down children and I have to be there.”
I say nothing about the place I’m looking for. He asks nothing.
We go about like two laborers taking a walk on their lunch hour. He gnaws and gnaws on his olive pit.
At the entrance I recognize the car from that morning. We stop to get a good look at it. I enter the small lane that leads to the gate then I return. It’s a new building, not many names on the buzzers.
It’s all residences on the street, only one flower stand.
Selim looks around with his nose in the air, as if he senses rain.
We’re two laborers who have come about a job, we don’t know the exact address. No one walks by, just two elderly people on a stroll, each with a dog.
We circle behind the building. I want to see the sides. I don’t know what to try, but I know that my nerves will teach me on the spot.
We go back without speaking. Selim measures his steps, doesn’t hurry them. He presses his feet on the ground and lifts them a little more than necessary.
He’s already treading his own lands and leading his herd, I think. He gnaws and sucks at an olive pit.
In the garden I start mowing again.
Selim cuts the lavender beds. Then he prepares bouquets with a string, sitting on the ground with his legs crossed.
“Your garden is giving me business.”
From one pocket he takes out his knife, a strong blade more experienced than my scythe. He piles up bouquets to dry.
Without calling my attention I feel as if he is speaking in my direction, but with his eyes on his hands. “You don’t want my money, you don’t want the wine for my debt. That’s how you keep someone tied to you, not set him free. You say no to a man and don’t give him the peace of repayment. I have to honor my pledge. You have to be friends with men and you have to be even.”
I hear him spitting out the olive pit.
I keep working. His words are meant to be understood without the indiscretion of turning toward him.
From the lawn’s edge Selim’s voice interrupts me when the hours are done. He is saying good-bye. I hold my arm out for his hand. He widens his hands and places them on my shoulders. He gives me a toothy, wide-open smile, and hugs me.
His departure is decided. This is our farewell.
There is a bitter pang in my mouth and I feel bad about the promised wine that I don’t allow him to pour.
“The time for wine is over, man. I’m taking away the last bundle of my debt. I will repay you all at once.” And he gives a remote, ancient smile, a breath of Africa, a grain of pollen dropped by the scirocco wind on its journey, a migrating beehive, a whiteness of wings in his mouth that subsides.
He goes to the gate with a bundle of lavender under his arm.
Then I close my eyes behind the back of my hand, against the lost pieces of a single day, and do something stupid. I get down on my knees on the grass and comb through it, search, find the smooth olive pit and plant it in a pot with dark soil.
I should go home and sleep on it then put my hands back in my pockets like before Laila. I knew the evil of killing before her so I can spare her the trouble. I’ll go. I have to be quick. There’s nothing to prepare. I’ll go and pull it off tonight, like Argentina.
All the while my nerves grow tougher. I think I can attack him, knock him down. If he’s carrying a gun he’ll use it, if not I’ll manage.
I feel a reckless force rising from the mouth of my stomach. There’s a calm in my head, which is steadier than it used to be. Argentina doesn’t leave your body. A little skin grows over the ulcer of war and assassins.
And a woman arrives who at first sight knows who I am and isn’t repelled, but she chooses me and sticks me back in the pigeonhole of infamy.
This time I don’t run away, this time I stay.
I bring gloves along.
It’s still light when I leave by the gate, so I can drop by to chat with the tavern-keeper. He’s decanting wine, I give him a hand. Then he frees a table from the chairs on top and brings me a little bit of goat cheese, some dark bread and a carafe of red. He talks about a house by the sea where he wants to retire.
“Me too,” I say, thinking of a house along the coast, a window to the East and a pergola to the South. “For me the West and North belong at my back.”
“For me,” he says, “the West is my father’s back when he leaves for the Americas. I can still see him boarding the ship and disappearing into the West, forever.”
“Our lives are no longer that way. Now we have the lives of other people who come to us at any point except a port. Strange, isn’t it? Even people carrying a passport don’t go through a port.”
“That’s why at my place there’s always a spot and a plate for those lives.”
I chew something and take a couple of sips of wine. The evening is ready and I have to get up.
He asks if I’m going home. “No, I’m not going.”
I don’t know how my reply sounds. The tavern-keeper shakes my hand and with his other hand he touches my arm, which is already tense and bitter.
The road is far, I need to walk it, get my footsteps and blood moving at the same pace.
I listen to my breathing, to my heartbeat.
I calm and harden myself.
In my arms I feel a crushing force, enough to knock the bottom out of a barrel.
On the street I brush by people that come toward me. I’m afraid of bumping into someone and already causing injury this way.
I cross paths with a woman, change sidewalks before she does. A murderer has to be in a void.
I walk and my body gears up.
I take heavier steps. My arms accompany my pace by moving very little, absorbed in this waiting to go off.
My hands hold my fingers outstretched, separate, to keep them from brushing against each other.
The air feels light around my lower legs.
From the edge of my nails and the tips of my hair comes a constant checking of the barbed-wire fence between myself and the world.
My eyes see inside, too. They stare at my heart and its slow, dense beatings. They scan my spinal cord, the stiffened snake inside each man’s skeleton that gives us the erect posture of a reptile about to strike.
And now I know I’m a man because I am the most dangerous animal.
This is not a hunt. It’s an act of destruction.
When this feeling comes to me, I am ready.
So many soldiers fall when they don’t make it to this point.
I was born un
der the sky of Taurus. Through my nostrils you can easily insert a ring to drag me around.
I come to the corner of the street and see a little movement, a cluster of people under a lamp. An accident, I think, and start to walk and the crowd is right at the number that I had checked at noon. And I see policemen and a barrier and I end up pressed against it and a guy in uniform asks me to walk around since I can’t go through there. I ask what’s happening and he hurries me along brusquely with a hand gesture. The gate that I have to walk by is the one with the turmoil. And I’ve been ready for a whole carload of time and I’d even walk on top of them and throw myself on the man and now my arm is tensed like a bow, like a hammer, and I could shoot a hole in the ground if I pointed down. And I can’t just put it in my pocket and go back.
I suddenly turn and think of climbing over that part of the wall and I take two steps and feel a breath of sulfur released by my nose and heat coming out and dripping down my face and I realize that it’s blood. My nostrils are gushing spurts of it on the ground with the beating of my arteries. A man offers me a handkerchief and tells me to hold my head back and I obey and close my eyes and hear a woman’s voice talking about a black man and I think of Selim with his nice new shirt and I lean against a wall and sit down and maybe I sleep.
I open my eyes to the voice of the man with the handkerchief and I don’t know what I’m doing sitting on a sidewalk, leaning against a wall with people around me.
I see blood on my fingers, feel it spread on my face and my strength coming back.
I pull myself to my feet, thank him for the kindness. The group moves away and the man with the handkerchief touches my arm for support. I notice it’s empty, slow, discharged, and I remember.
The man invites me to come in to clean myself off. He’s a doctor and has a walk-in clinic next door. He wants to take my blood pressure.
He asks me things, my job, where, I answer.
He apologizes for speaking, for meddling, but it helps him to check the reflexes and the nervous responses.
I can wash myself at his place. In the mirror I’m a red clown with smudges everywhere.
I wash, rub, and can’t explain an underlying feeling of happiness. The deed decided still has to be done and the wasted time is closing in on Laila. What’s more, my face is known on this street and it’ll be harder to come out unharmed. But the lost blood gives me relief.
I come out of the bathroom feeling more confident. The man has the nice brown bony face of a Southern peasant, fine skin over his bones, like unleavened bread.
A head of thick white hair.
While he fumbles around with my arm he tells me that he’s retiring to his hometown, a place that reminds me of a wine. I realize I only meet people about to leave.
He’s renovating a house and a farm. He wants to set his feet on the ground.
He doesn’t want any more city, any more people with horrible wounds, bullets, drugs, nerves. He wants to treat bones, hearts, old people.
My blood pressure is fine, he advises a glass of wine. Then he thinks of the man over whom he was bent before me and tells me that they killed him the old way, like a field animal, slitting his throat.
Someone, a woman, sees a black man grab a man getting out of the car and cut his throat. And she sees him go away without even a spatter of blood on his shirt.
He runs to the cries in the street, finds a woman shaking with fear and on the ground is a puddle of blood, and not far away is a man stretched out, face down.
He takes his pulse to be on the safe side and goes back in to get a towel to cover at least the face.
“A man dies and his skin loses heat like the sand on a summer evening. It makes you feel like warming him up,” he says.
“He must have almost not noticed. The cut is deep, not jagged, from a very sharp blade. He must have only felt a chill.”
And then along comes me, as if there isn’t enough blood on the street, I add mine, too.
He listens to my chest with the cold ear of an instrument.
While he measures the beats I come to understand Selim’s ashes, his good-bye. I can’t hold back what I understand. The lost blood makes me empty.
The man says my heart muscle is as big as a coconut. At the end he breaks away from the listening.
We leave each other cordially, I thank him, he tells me that he will come by to ask for advice about soil and tools.
I turn my back on the place of the blood.
I go to the station, to a train that sends me back home.
To return, a verb that drives me. I return from the South of an Argentinian hour. I sail the hundred parallels in a night, separate from Laila. I don’t want to think about the friend who redeems a debt with an embrace and a slit throat.
I forbid his name. Just thinking it is a betrayal.
I turn toward the point in the fields where Africa should be.
I stand facing it with my eyes closed, like the blind when they turn toward smiles they can hear.
I have to return, sit in the kitchen, replace blood with wine.
I sit at the window of a train. There are no workers at this hour of the evening, just students and shopgirls.
They return, later than us.
I look at them, they have an urge to laugh with each other, to be cheerful in the little that remains of the day.
They laugh in gales that carry them away, they laugh the way I walk, the way I drink.
I touch the book in my pocket. This will take care of a good stretch of the return. I leave it alone, convalescence for future days.
I touch the spot where the bullet passed without taking me along.
The girls prepare to get off. I follow last.
On the sidewalk I raise my nose to the sky and smell the odor of my dried blood.
There are evenings when the sky is an egg and you can look at it from inside.
A northwest wind carries rust and salt. Iron gets sick here but the basil thrives handsomely.
From the landing I hear its welcome.
I set the table with something, turn off the light, sit down.
I chew in the dark, absorb, listen, swallow.
It’s a clear night, moonless. I scent my fingers with parsley and garlic, a little oil from the bread drips into my palm and I’m happy to be anointed by oil and not blood.
I pass the back of my hand over my brow to wipe away the day.
I’m not innocent. This isn’t relief. It’s just the physical release of a nasal menses.
Another man takes my place as a murderer. He removes not the guilt but the gesture. Now his arm bears a replica of the blow to a throat.
And his arm contracts to vacantly repeat the shape of a gesture until only a hint is left.
An athlete prepares his event though many practices, to train himself. A murderer repeats the movement of death afterward, in his nerves, till he has exhausted it, to tear it off through a reverse training.
I know that he is taking the knife with him to keep cutting bread, making flower bouquets and splitting fruit.
Whoever knows things and the value of using them never abandons them to a last cursed service.
In the darkness of the kitchen my second horse dies.
The people of a year migrate in a day, no more hold-me’s or olive pits.
I stay behind. At least tonight I don’t touch the emptiness they have left.
I fall asleep at the table and wake a little before dawn.
I have to retrain myself to days without opening my mouth.
I take the book stopped at a fold, deliver myself to its pace, to the breathing of the other storyteller. If I am someone else, it’s also because books move men more than journeys and years.
After many pages you end up learning a variant, a different move than the one taken and thought inevitable.
I break away from what I am when I learn to treat my own life differently.
In dim light I shave my damp face and the razor tries to cross my skin in another
direction.
I put the book in my jacket’s inside pocket. I point it toward my chest. Where the gun used to be, now there is its opposite.
TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD
When Erri De Luca published his first novel, Non ora, non qui (Not here, not now) in 1989, he became a young writer at the age of 39. The story he told evoked not only his own youth but also the collective, mythic youth of modern Italy, born on the ruins of the Second World War. A boy comes of age in 1950s Naples, going to school and playing along the docks with the hardscrabble children of the poor. The son of a middle-class family fallen on hard times, he is torn between the exuberance and noise of the streets and the orderly stillness of his home life. When his family’s fortunes improve, the narrator experiences it not as a welcome improvement but as an irremediable loss.
Told entirely in the first person, this aging son’s confession to his estranged mother revisits the archetypal scene of Italian neorealism: the poverty and devastation of southern Italy during and immediately after the war. As emblems of pathos and symbols of hope for a better future, children figure prominently in these circumstances. Nowhere is this more evident than in cinematic masterpieces of the 1940s, from the child partisans in Open City to the street children of Paisà and the doggedly loyal son in The Bicycle Thief. Unlike these resourceful and sometimes heroic children, however, De Luca’s protagonist has his gaze set on a past that he can only recall through a veil of nostalgia and regret. The story he relates is not an external chronicle of survival but rather an interior monologue of surrender, punctuated by fragmentary glimpses of the outside world. The narrator remembers his childhood as a quiet, lonely time, when he suffered from a bad stutter that only came “untangled” when he discovered writing: “Speaking is like walking on a string. Writing, instead, is possessing it, winding it into a ball.”1
De Luca wrote like a man returning from a long exile, breaking his silence in a trickle of spare, carefully pondered words. He was hailed by Raffaele La Capria, a fellow Neapolitan writer from the fabled postwar generation, for “A tone of voice that is unmistakable at first grasp, an integrity of vision that lends the right focus to thoughts and feelings.”2 Non ora, non qui, like De Luca’s subsequent works, is relentlessly autobiographical. The author has admitted to being able to write only of things experienced directly, hence his consistent use of first-person narrative. As he has said in an interview with Silvio Perrella, “Writing is an attempt to create a definitive version—shorter, more brusque and abusive—of the life you’ve lived: Arrested, detained for a spell, fixed inside a container that prevents it from aging.”3