Has he heard right?
The howl is repeated: longer.
It is repeated again: more frequently.
What sort of maw does this howl come from?
To go into the house, to bring help, does not even occur to Signor Dodi.
Signor Dodi looks at the road ahead of him: nobody. He looks in the mirror at the road behind him: nobody.
Signor Dodi ducks down anyway to hide himself, releases the brake, shifts into gear, steps on the accelerator.
Steps harder than necessary. The roar of the engine drowns out the howling.
The exhaust pipe behind the little car going down the hill sends out a cloud of black smoke.
The howls are repeated ever more frequently.
Not from any maw: they come from the mouth of the engineer Ozieri.
The engineer Ozieri is in an armchair: at the far end of the room, in front of the open window, in front of the muslin curtain that flutters a little and then hangs motionless.
Unlike the muslin curtain, the engineer Ozieri is not moving. For five years now, Parkinson’s disease has robbed him of all voluntary movement.
The engineer Carlo Ozieri was strong, vigorous, a ladies’ man. The houses he built, white, tall as towers amidst the old, gray houses of the city, can even be seen from here. And now he is of one body with the armchair.
At the engineer’s first howl, someone usually comes into the room, approaches him, takes him by both hands, and raises his arms in large circular gestures, like an Arab invoking Allah.
This time no one comes into the room.
Why?
Sometimes, at his howl, the engineer’s wife herself—Signora Stella—comes into the room. But rarely.
Signora Stella is gigantic. Her face is broad and lifeless. A sort of corn silk sprouts on top of her head and hangs down in a fringe over her forehead.
Signora Stella is a busy woman. Since the engineer and the armchair became of one body, it is she who has “kept things going.”
Now, too, Signora Stella is traveling around for her import-export business.
Signora Stella is drowning in work. She sleeps very little. When she is not sleeping or working, she practices spiritism: she calls up her son, executed in Forty-three at the age of seventeen.
At the engineer’s howl, it is usually Signora Clelia who comes into the room, takes the engineer’s hands, and raises his arms in big circular gestures, like an Arab invoking Allah.
Now, at the engineer’s repeated howls, no one, not even Signora Clelia, comes into the room.
Why?
In the engineer’s expressionless face, the pupils move anxiously from right to left. What are they searching for?
Even before Signor Dodi drove up the hill in his little convertible, even before he stopped to contemplate the house and from that contemplation drew dreams of conjugal happiness, inside the house, in the bathroom, there was indeed a woman doing her toilette; but it was not his wife, as Signor Dodi thought: it was Signora Clelia.
Signora Clelia heard a knock.
“Who is it?”
From outside the voice of Paolo shouted:
“Quick, Mama! It’s Papa!”
Paolo is Signora Clelia’s son. He is fourteen years old, has straight hair, sturdy bare legs, dirty knees.
Paolo is a little volcano. An “inventive” volcano. He regularly fails his examinations. Not in the subjects of study: in conduct.
Signora Clelia also has a daughter of twenty-three: Celestina. Two years ago Celestina married an engineer, and they left together for South Africa.
Signora Clelia married at the age of twenty. A man younger than herself: a boy. Children were born.
Ten peaceful years.
One day Signora Clelia felt a disturbance. Signora Clelia had read Dostoevsky. She thought: “We must be above that.” Like a mother with her son, she invited her husband to confide in her.
They did not succeed in being above that. An infernal life began. One day Signora Clelia took her son and left the house. Changed cities. Took refuge with her friend Stella. They had been brought up together, like sisters. She helped Stella by dedicating herself to the sick man. Even as she raised the engineer’s arms in large circular gestures, she never stopped thinking of him, over yonder. And she waited. Waited for the black dream to break up all at once.
When?
“Quick, Mama! It’s Papa!”
The bathroom dances around Signora Clelia. The towels dance. Soapy nympheas dance over the water in the bathtub. The faucets dance. The flexible tube of the shower dances. The heart dances in Signora Clelia’s breast.
In the midst of all this dancing, Signora Clelia thinks: “I must do my hair . . . Make myself up a little . . . If he sees me like this . . .”
But she cannot bear it: she slips into her bathrobe and goes flying down the stairs.
Paolo is rolling on the ground. Kicking his sturdy bare legs. Shaking with laughter. He shouts rhythmically: “April fool! April fool!”
Signora Clelia quickly glances around, collapses without a word.
Paolo no longer laughs. He stares wide-eyed at his mother on the ground, at the pinkish foam under her chin. Through the bathrobe, which has fallen open, he tries hard not to look. He repeats softly:
“Why? . . . It’s April first . . . A joke . . . Why? . . .”
Howls come down from the room with the curtain.
That it was April first not even Signor Dodi was aware, absorbed as he was in his projects for conjugal happiness.
At the bottom of the slope, the smoke from the exhaust pipe gradually disperses.
The Feeling of Ravenna
SIGNOR DIDO RACES OVER THE BEAUTIFUL roads of Italy aboard a little car of minimum cylinder capacity. To his right sits Signora Dido.
Race, with regard to Signor Dido’s automobilistic deambulations, is an inappropriate word. Automobilism, in Signor Dido’s vocabulary, does not mean the mania for speed: it means passing in review the spectacles of nature and of human labor while sitting in an armchair which has four wheels under it and moves by its own propulsion.
On overtaking Signor Dido’s little car, other motorists cast a glance at him which has the air of saying: “Why don’t you stay home, old boy, instead of cluttering up the roads with that jalopy?”
These people don’t know.
They don’t know that Signor Dido loves the present more than the past. They don’t know that things in formation attract Signor Dido’s attention more lovingly than things already formed and petrified. They don’t know that living music, even dodecaphonic, a living painter, even abstractionist, arouse Signor Dido’s interest far more than all the madrigalists and ignotes of the fourteenth century put together.
And they—they race at high speed towards death and are already dead, and yet they look at him, Signor Dido, as a dead man!
Yesterday morning Signor Dido was racing along the road that goes from Rimini to Ferrara. He saw to his right a sign that read: Ravenna. He said to Signora Dido: “Let’s stop in Ravenna.” He said it without fervor.
Signor Dido feels himself borne along by the present as by a river. He loves those who share the same river with him, his river companions: he loves them out of solidarity, even those he hates. But does Signor Dido hate anyone? . . . Signor Dido has no time to hate. To hate means to have time to waste.
Signor Dido entered Ravenna. Entered by the Porta Garibaldi. And Ravenna had a strange effect on him.
All cities, even the most bashful, have a point, a marketplace or popular quarter, in which the city’s insides emerge. But not Ravenna. Ravenna is buttoned up to the Adam’s apple in its suit of stone. Or so Signor Dido saw it.
Signor Dido passed right through Ravenna without realizing it. On one street corner he found written: Via Anastagi.
This encounter pleased Signor Dido. It pleased him because it reminded him of Nastagio degli Onesti, the tragic ride through the pinewood of Chiassi, before the young men and women gathered for di
nner.1
Nastagio, or Anastagio, or Anastasio: the Risen One.
To set out all together on the river of the Present: that is life for Signor Dido. And when the river of the Present flows into the tunnel called the Past, to enter all together into death: that is love for Signor Dido.
Signor Dido and Signora Dido went into a restaurant with a hotel above it. Sat at a small table. Foreigners of various races, various sexes, and various ages were sitting at the other tables. They were tugging at spaghetti, lasagna, fettuccine: they diligently introduced it into their mouths, as if setting about to learn Italian by means of food.
A young man in a windbreaker and dark glasses came into the restaurant and said in a loud voice: “Une heure quarante-cinq: visite aux monuments. A quarter to two: visit to the monuments. Altdenkmäln-Besuch um ein viertel vor zwei.”
The foreigners sitting at the tables stood up as one man and filed out to visit the monuments.
Signor Dido thought: “I’ve finished eating: I ought to go and re-evoke the history of Ravenna through its monuments.” And at this thought he felt unhappy.
It’s not that Signor Dido has no love of history: he loves it but prefers to look at it through a keyhole.
Signor Dido looked, while Signora Dido was dexterously flaying a fish for him, looked at the history of Ravenna through a keyhole. He saw a dining room: not the one in which he found himself: another one. The dining room of the emperor Honorius.2 Honorius, too, is sitting at the table, but he has no wife dexterously flaying a fish for him.
A nuncio comes into the room. He is out of breath. He raises his right hand in salute, as seen in films on Roman subjects. He says: “The barbarians have taken Roma!”
Honorius, though weak of character, leaps to his feet.
“Roma? But I fed her with my own hands half an hour ago!”
The nuncio doesn’t understand at first. Then he understands and adds:
“I don’t mean Roma, Your Majesty’s favorite hen. I mean the Urbe.”
“Dimwit!” exclaims the augustus, his face quite reassured, dropping into his chair again and going back to his meal of parrots’ tongues. “You might have told me so at once!”
Signor Dido went from the restaurant to the hotel, had them give him a cool room, took a magnificent nap.
And dreamed. Dreamed of his friend Enrico. And whom else would Signor Dido have dreamed of in Ravenna?
Enrico first saw the light in Ravenna a little less than fifty years ago. His father was a restorer of mosaics. And to Enrico, as the most gifted of his three sons, he thought to hand on the secrets of this difficult and painstaking art.
Father and son would leave by the Porta Garibaldi while it was still night, cross the Canale del Molino Lovatelli, and set out over the fields in the direction of Sant’Apollinare in Classe, where at that time important restoration work was being carried out.
Halfway there they would stop at a tavern. It was an enormous black room, in the middle of which danced the flames of a brazier.
Father and son would sit at a table. The clients brought raw food and cooked it in the common skillet set on the brazier.
Among those morning clients there was also the dogcatcher, who would take a piece of meat from his haversack and toss it into the frying pan; and even the most inexperienced of zoologists would recognize in that piece of meat the haunch of a dog. There was also the snake catcher, but he ate cold. He would take a snake from his shoulder bag, hold it up live and squirming between his fingers, dip the tip into the bowl of salt placed in the middle of the table, bite it off, and chew it.
Enrico passed through childhood, adolescence; he became one of the most gifted adults that Signor Dido has ever known. And variously active: painter, architect, writer, conceiver of infinite plans, but always frowned upon by fate.
Enrico, now, after working so much, after conceiving so much, after planning so much, is poor and sick. He lives in a corridor, under the roof of an old and illustrious Roman palazzo; a corridor which, by means of a play of blankets stretched between the walls, he has turned into a soft labyrinth, a soft and wavering labyrinth, which a little girl crosses and re-crosses like a little dancing light: Donnina, Enrico’s daughter, a child of five for whom, if he had known her, Mozart would have written a little work of his most subtle and scintillating music.
Signor Dido came out of this dream while it was still broad daylight.
“And the monuments?” asked Signora Dido.
“Yes,” replied Signor Dido. “Let’s go to visit Dante’s tomb.”
What is poetry? Signor Dido does not know how to answer this question. But Dante, thinks Signor Dido, Dante is extraordinary above all for this, that he transforms speech into sculpted form. Others model with their hands. Dante models with his tongue and lips, and from his mouth, however pinched and puckered, shaped marble issues in a long ribbon.
Coming from the mouth of Dante, even useless things acquire value. Such as that mountain pointed out as the obstacle that prevented the inhabitants of Pisa and Lucca from looking at each other, when it would have been much more expedient simply to name it.
In order to approach Dante’s tomb, Signor Dido had to get out of the car. Chains hung in festoons from post to post keep vehicles from approaching the tomb of the Most High Poet.
“Dante,” thought Signor Dido, “Dante sleeps here. I, on the other hand, in my ground-floor flat in Rome, not only sleep but also work twelve hours a day. Yet no one even dreams of making the vehicles that go roaring past my windows and addle my brain keep a little farther away.”
On the face of the tomb Signor Dido reads: DANTIS POETAE SEPULCRUM.
Signor Dido reads and is amazed.
Why poetae? And why this Latin?
Dante is the most Italian of poets. He also wrote books in Latin. If he had written only books in Latin, he would be as remembered today as Petrarch is remembered for being the author of the Africa.
“And the musaics?” asked Signora Dido.
It was Signor Dido’s intention to visit the famous mosaics of Ravenna. But Signora Dido did not say mosaics, she said musaics. And certain words act like billiard cushions on Signor Dido.
“What, don’t you like musive art?” Signora Dido added, when she realized that Signor Dido was leaving the city.
Signor Dido accelerated. He left Ravenna without having visited the basilicas, without having visited the mausoleum of Galla Placidia, without so much as a glance at the Guidarello, though the Guidarello is not a musaic, but the masculine pendant of Ilaria del Carretto of Lucca.
“C’est égal,” said Signora Dido, with a touch of bitterness in her voice. “C’est égal: to come to Ravenna and not see Sant’Apollinaire!”
Signora Dido loves the French poets of the last fifty years. The names of French poets of the last fifty years keep running pleasantly through her head.
Five Trees
SIGNOR DIDO IS IN BED.
What woke him up?
Signor Dido reaches his right hand out of bed, feels around for the clock, brings the luminous little quadrant close to his nose: four.
Outside it is still night.
What woke him up?
Signor Dido does not turn on the light. He “feels” that he should not turn it on. The reason that has awakened him so suddenly, but without nudging him, without startling him—does not want to be looked at in the light.
Signor Dido’s bed is beside the window. The windowsill is level with the bed. It is as if Signor Dido is lying on the window-sill. He sees the garden down below him, the hedge at the back, the trees that raise up their slender columns; far away, beyond the foliage, the peaks of the Apuan Alps.
Signor Dido’s country house is low and long. It is a horizontal house. Even the windows are horizontal.
What woke Signor Dido up in the middle of the night?
Signor Dido doesn’t know, but he feels the cause there a few steps away. Alive.
Signora Dido sleeps at the other end of the house
, in the room which, on the architect’s plan, was the conjugal bedroom. But Signor Dido is an artist: he writes, paints, composes music. And artists—so thinks Signora Dido—have need of isolation. She therefore placed Signor Dido’s bed at the far end of the living room.
What woke Signor Dido up in the middle of the night?
Signor Dido turns his head to the left.
The window is a meter and a half from the ground. It is divided into nine rectangles of glass framed in wood. Only the middle rectangle opens.
Signor Dido attaches a moral rather than a practical purpose to work. Before lying down, he opens the middle rectangle and pushes the blinds aside. The daylight wakes him up, and he goes back early to the work interrupted the evening before.
By a high flash of lightning, far away, over the peaks of the Apuans, Signor Dido glimpses the trunks of the trees, each in its proper place.
There are two hundred and fifty-eight trees in the garden.
Signora Dido made this count in the summer of Forty-three. Then, in the summer of Forty-five, when, after a forced absence of two years, Signora Dido returned with some luck to her country house, she thought: “My poor trees! Imagine the slaughter!” She knew that for more than a year the war had settled here and there in the Cinquale. She knew that many pines had been chopped down to clear the way for artillery fire. She knew that, with the war over, the inhabitants of the place had cut down more trees to evaporate sea water and extract the salt from it.
With bated breath, Signora Dido went through the opening where the gate had been. The house was gutted, yes. But the trees? . . . Signora Dido counted them: two hundred and sixty-three. Five extra!
Lightning still flashes over the Apuans, or is it the first glimmer of dawn?
Signor Dido gradually begins to make out the trunks of the trees.
Then he gradually sees that the trunks of the trees are moving.
Does it mean there is a storm outside the window? A silent storm?
One of the trees approaches the window.
“Where have I seen that face before?” Signor Dido asks himself.
He recognizes it. It is that German soldier who came into his house on the thirteenth of September Forty-three, in canvas shorts, bare from the waist up, and waved a hundred-lira bill, and said with the voice of a talking dog: “I do not ropp: I puy your radio.”
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