Microcosms (Panther)

by Magris, Claudio

  There is an Italy of the provinces that has no truck with partisan hatreds and is full of life and intelligence, often more so than the so-called metropolitan centres, which think of themselves as première cinemas when sometimes they are nothing but old studios that have had their day. Menocchio also lends his name to the cultural circle in Montereale Valcellina – little more than two thousand inhabitants, some six thousand including all its hamlets – led by Aldo Colonnello. There are those who know how to respect the values of a place while remaining immune to that municipal gut feeling that today often makes the rediscovery of ethnicities and identities throughout present-day Italy, indeed throughout Europe, so obtuse and reactionary. Friuli, too, is often suffocated by “Friulianity”, Trieste by “Triesteness”.

  Friuli, especially following the Second World War, has a considerable tradition in poetry – Pasolini and Turaldo are not isolated peaks – and Montereale, too, is a centre for poets, discreetly tucked away in their little world. For them the Friulian dialect (or rather its several dialects – they vary from valley to valley) is not a mere piece of local colour, it is a source language, at once archaic and contemporary, collective and individually reinvented; a language that finds its level in an alluvial bed of present existence and past history. Te vardi tài óe te bùsse i zinóe, “I look in your eyes I kiss your knees,” sings Beno Fignon, melding the spoken tongues of Montereale and Andreis into a piping music of the valley, and touching on an immemorial, an epic cosmos. A plòuf la vita ta l’erba dei ans goes a line from Rosanna Paroni Bertoja – “Life sinks into the grass of the years.” For the region’s uprooted heirs, the emigrants who don’t know how to speak the language, Friulian is a sort of pre-language, a prenatal murmur that sinks into that which cannot be spoken, as an infant’s face sinks into a large breast. These mountains are breasts that have been squeezed dry, they are milkless, unlike the udders of mother earth in primordial myth. Centuries of poverty have hardened them, but have also rendered them strong: a firm body like the one praised in a colourful local saying about the women of Friuli and which Jacopo da Porcìa celebrated in the women of Montereale in particular.

  Domenico Scandella, Menocchio, was also a poet in his own way. Perhaps his cosmogonic hypotheses were “twaddle”, as some of his townsfolk told him, but certainly no more so than others patented with guaranteed metaphysical or scientific brands. In contrast to his persecutor Odorico, the quarrelsome parish priest who was custodian of orthodoxy and tempter of his daughter, Menocchio knew love, love for his children, the lynchpin of his existence, and for his wife. “She was my helm,” he said, in despair, when she died – words that deserve to be included in a poetic anthology of conjugal love and shared life – an anthology that is so poor and unsubstantial compared to the relevance of its theme, further proof that poetry so often fails to measure up to real life.

  The family no longer owns the fine big house with the huge courtyard, reached from the square by passing under a portico, although it had belonged to them for generations. It was sold many years, indeed many decades ago in order to purchase an extravagant dowry destined to rot and be eaten away by the moths. It was for Aunt Esperia, made ready for her impending marriage with the General, a wedding planned and postponed for years. Perhaps it was all prepared just to gain time and to distract her from the torment of her wait.

  Those who know Esperia from childhood, with her nervous loquacity, remember her as an excitable and submissive child and describe her assiduous diligence at school, her friendship – respectful even in the games she played – with the daughter of the headmaster, her elated and scrupulous adolescence, her constant preoccupation with sin, despite the encouragement of her confessors who invited her to say her morning prayers and to then let herself go, carefree and confident as to whatever the rest of the day would bring.

  As a girl and a young woman Esperia was punctiliously devoted to religion and also to the equally punctilious cultivation of every superstitious practice condemned by the Church. She was for ever washing her hands, she hesitated before posting a letter for fear that she might have unwittingly made some mistake or written some obscenity and, once she’d posted it she worried that perhaps she had not done so, perhaps she’d thrown it away instead. She was a haunted creature; she had not been granted that saving oblivion thanks to which one forgets that death is never far from one’s heels and, that before it catches up, there are other catastrophes.

  With her obsessions, her phobias and her rituals, Esperia had organized a labyrinthine defence, to escape the anxiety that crept in everywhere. She had also decided, and managed to convince herself of it right up to the penultimate stratum of her brittle psyche, that the world was a good place, populated and above all governed by good people. In this way she sought to live without fears, entrusting herself to general goodness and allowing her heart to love those around her – because she really did love them, she was born to love the world, human beings and even animals, despite the fact that not merely insects, but even cats and dogs disgusted her – and she struggled darkly to prevent this fear from suffocating the tenderness that was in her. When her faith in the goodness of life and of people began to waver, deep down, in the depths of her person, she buried the anxiety that came welling up in her throat in a torrent of verbosity; she would talk non-stop about everything and with everyone.

  Towards the end of the Thirties she met, on a train, an officer from Emilia – the man who was to become, for her and for everybody else, the General. Esperia was tall, her hair copper blonde and the officer, inexorably assigned to that particular compartment by the iron chain of circumstance, got talking to her. Respect was important in those days and the officer, an honourable man who would never have set out to delude let alone cheat a woman, would never have thought that such an innocent acquaintance, for which the noun flirtation would have been almost excessive, could ever have been misunderstood. It was almost nothing, but for Esperia it was immediately everything; her fervour bestowed on it a visceral absoluteness, she made it the single, boundless, vital substance of her life. The wretched officer had no intention of marrying her, neither had he done anything that might lead a reasonable person to attribute those intentions to him, but he realised that if he told her so, it would be a tragedy for her. He therefore decided not to decide, to do neither the one thing nor the other, to prolong indefinitely this sort of pre-engagement, which became all the more indissoluble the more it was dragged out.

  Thus began a vague and enervating period of waiting that was to last for years; for him it was a conscious trial, ever more deeply enmeshed as he was in that unbearable situation, but for her it was all unconscious excitement. She did not want to discover the truth and she was increasingly overcome by feverish obsessions, by all-consuming fixations that possessed her actions, making her see nauseating insects in her plate and prolonging her increasingly interminable conversations with relatives and neighbours. The king’s permission was required for career officers who wished to get married, but it simply never came through. He was transferred from one unit to another and the two met briefly between departures, often in railway stations, the perfect setting for that desolation and that nostalgia.

  The cautious temper of the times and Esperia’s own naivety made additional rendezvous unimaginable, fortunately for both of them. In his exasperation, he tormented himself, he confided in Esperia’s brothers, and they understood and supported him; together with them he studied plans of retreat that proved to be ever more unfeasible. She tore herself apart, like a tortured, seething Medea, and savaged her involuntary seduced seducer as well, persecuting him with her pain, which afflicted his conscience. In the meantime to the family she read aloud the letters that came from her General – she always called him so, never used his name – believing that their increasing vagueness was the acme of love, and papering the walls of her room with large photographs of him in uniform. These portrayed a large, mild man, whose uniform and decorations conferred on him an authority and d
ignity without in any way diminishing his good nature. In the meantime her dowry grew with the addition of new elements, and in the end this had required the sale of that family house in Malnisio, much to the chagrin of her brothers, who were sorry for her but above all dreaded the unimaginable consequences were they to refuse to sell; sheets, counterpane and rugs that were stored in trunks and chests of drawers, furniture piled up in the cellar, even a pianoforte.

  To the General’s relief, after years of grey fury came the Second World War and with it the African campaign, the distance, a wound to a lung; the probability that he would die and the fact of being so far from home rendered Esperia’s letters less painful and the possibility that he might not return at all made them almost a comfort, something to cherish. It was their happy, or at least their bearable time, because the collective tragedy of the war and the material impossibility of meeting transformed the torture of delay into a lofty sacrifice. This merciful pause seemed to have finished with the end of the war, but when the General had just come back to Italy and had returned to his small estate in Emilia, before he was able to see Esperia, who had remained in Trieste, he was picked up one night by some armed men – in that chaos and in those places where the Resistance had become corrupted into private and social vendettas – and was shot dead.

  This shed over Esperia the grand, beneficent liberation of a noble grief. From that moment on she was no longer a bride-never-to-be, she was a widow, a woman who had suffered but lived, who had lost her man in a cruel tragedy, but who had possessed him. The General’s many relatives were shocked by his death and welcomed her as though she really were his widow, and so began Esperia’s years of happiness. Freed of all reticence, she went to visit the relatives of the spouse who had passed on to a better world, she visited them in the various cities where they lived; she spent time with brothers- and sisters-in-law and looked after nephews and nieces and great-nephews and great-nieces, she took an interest in christenings, confirmations, school progress, weddings. She was always travelling as she used to, but now the world was friendly and attractive, full of colours, of things, of seasons, supported by memories sad and cheerful.

  She was replete; her figure became more rounded in a reassuring and moderate plumpness, her skin no longer displayed that soft virginal freshness, but was marked by life’s wrinkles with satisfied insouciance. Her obsessions had almost disappeared and when she took her nephews and nieces to the Public Garden she stood out less and less from the other mothers and grandmothers. She even learned, late but very well, to make warm and soft pullovers, for one nephew in particular who was her favourite. She still talked a lot – almost always about the General, who kept her company from many photographs – but with a mellow, relaxed eloquence, free of hysteria.

  Esperia’s first life of restless torment had lasted thirty-five years; her second life, of untroubled serenity, lasted forty-seven. The third one lasted but a month and a half. At the age of eighty-two, when her legs suddenly developed semi-paralysis and she could no longer look after herself, she was put in a rest home in Trieste. After a week she threw herself from a third-floor window. Despite the height the fractures were not serious, but Esperia never got out of her hospital bed. Clinically she was well enough, but her expression had changed, she was laconic now and allusive, replying with a formal smile to the small talk and the encouragement of her relatives. She spoke in hard, dry monosyllables. The photographs of the General had disappeared from her room; she must have got rid of them before she jumped.

  Her nephew went to see her now and then in the hospital, in a rush, as one does. He noticed immediately that she never spoke about the General; throughout that month and a half she never once mentioned him. She must have suddenly opened her eyes to the emptiness of her life, to the lie she had lived, and she had decided to close the account. Six weeks after being admitted she died of one of those vague causes that the medical certificates define as “cardiovascular failure”. In any case her organs were now tired of closing ranks, and her Chief of Staff had ordered her troops to dismiss. After gazing into that void Esperia no longer wanted to live, was no longer capable of doing so. One might term her condition arteriosclerosis, but that’s just another way of saying the same thing, just as H2O indicates the fleeting, indifferent poetry of water.

  It might also be asked when Esperia was actually alive – in the long years of hunger, in those equally long years of replete self-deception, or in the final revelation of nothing. Her nephew, from his point of view, reflects with mild discomfort on the haste of those few visits to the hospital, and about the warmth the pullovers gave him in winter.

  Opposite Ruben’s house, near the old Calle Grande, is the one belonging to Vinicio Ongaro; he lives in Trieste but never misses the fusina and spends a month in Malnisio in the summer. Ongaro is a doctor; his reassuring calm and his mild and firm precision immediately give a sense of relief to the patients who go to him with their anxieties, the ghosts of their insomnia and panic, their compulsive obsessions, the vacuum of a life that seems to be sucked into the darkness. He is accessible, he listens, takes his time; something in his face and his demeanour recalls Freud’s polished rectitude and melancholic goodness, laced with a canny irony. He penetrates into the spirals of anguish with the patient delicacy of a cat; he tests the ground with discreet questions, he suggests a drug without promising miracles, but the feline paw does not let the serpent of anxiety slip past, it makes a grab for it, drags it out and often, with time, the people who were haunted by the demons are capable of living once more.

  Between patients Ongaro sits at the typewriter; sometimes, if the time he has left for himself is too little, he dictates into a tape-recorder. Lines of dialogue, isolated images, sketches for plot and character, the epiphany of an instant, the light of an afternoon or a face, the flash of lightning in the rain, the plume from the fire that rises from the fusina and disappears in the air. Around these sketches a story gradually condenses, a novel is born. Ongaro is a clandestine narrator; one of the most clandestine because he has published books on the sly with small publishing houses that find it impossible to gain access to the cultural circuit. Thus he has received admiration and appreciation, but fame, and an entrance ticket to the officially recognized club, have eluded him while still losing the tantalizing virginity of the typescript in the drawer.

  Ongaro knows nothing of ideological programmes and overt poetics, he simply recounts life, capturing in its opaque flow, as though clouded in an aquarium of thoughts, memories, associations that emerge from the depths and sink back into them once again. He portrays straightforward daily life, no easy thing to narrate – its actions, objects, instants – and especially the grey area of pre-consciousness where the conscious mind is veiled, affording a glimpse of experience as it were in clots, a veiled consciousness, but never extinguished. The protagonist of his novel A Poor Tomorrow is an unforgettable female character, a simple heart à la Flaubert. Who knows if that’s enough to win the laurels.

  Life, sometimes, hurts; it gives headaches even to those who know how to cure others’ headaches. Perhaps for Ongaro life is a migraine, which in his pages becomes a way of being. But there are things there too – offered generously to the senses – the women, the colours of the seasons, the tenderness of affection, the reflection of light in water, those large trees in front of his house in Malnisio. Between writing prescriptions and listening paternally to endless phobias Ongaro writes his stories in pieces and in mouthfuls, fragments with timid irony that gradually resolve themselves into an ordered novel, whose structure and whose sense come to light at the end, as happens in life. Perhaps writing in the shadows is also a form of migraine, but from this one can learn how to understand existence, how to tame it and savour it, benignly independent of the world.

  The real Valcellina in its awesomeness and gentleness, begins beyond the Magredo tunnel, which seems to lead, like those wormholes dreamed up by science (fiction), into another time, remote and static. Until the opening
of the road through the Montereale pass in 1903, the isolation had been centuries old; legend has it that Attila and Napoleon looked in and turned back, perhaps because their lust for conquest saw nothing to conquer in that valley, in which nobody could have been induced to settle were it not for their flight from the Magyars and other barbarians. Up until 1805 even the cartographic representations of the area were uncertain and full of errors.

  The mountain displays its ridges like the folds in a haggard face, mottled by the wine-coloured tufts of purple heather; the soil and the stone are the colour of lead and poverty. In these valleys the people, whom Sgorlon writes about in his books, have lived submerged in the detritus of the river of history, which has passed over them. But even under a sky steeped in mist and rain the Cellina, which runs along the valley floor, has an unalterable luminous transparency, its water-green colour is enough to make the valley bright.

  Andreis is secluded, off to one side, calmly, indeed majestically indifferent; even its dialect has its own autonomous individuality. There are those who carve and weave wooden baskets, and those who carve and weave words. Andreis has two poets who make for an ideal contrast, almost reflecting the confrontation – indeed the harsh clash – between the Friulian Philological Society’s traditionalism and the archaic–revolutionary innovation of Pasolini’s Academiuta. Federico Tavan is the poète maudit, the innocent transgressor, socially offbeat and tedious, marked by alienation and inclined, like many authors of his stamp, to flaunt this quality in his life – this psychological vulnerability can also be an effective shield – but he is capable of plumbing the depths of language and immersing himself in unease. Anc’jò ’e ven jù, “Me too, I’m coming down.” Ugo Piazza, ninety years old, is the feel-good poet of fine words assembled in decorous rhymes. But when he reads one of his poems about a snowflake falling on a lantern and is moved as he does so, one realizes that in poetry’s house, as in our Father’s, there are many mansions. All this even if “everyone wants to write poetry, but Europe needs something firmer and more real than verse”, as Leopardi wrote in 1826, complaining that so many were attracted by “poetry and frivolity”.