From Andreis a little side track leads to Poffabro in Val Colvera. The village is virtually deserted, the windows empty eye sockets and here and there wooden doors hang rotting. Searching for a craftsman who carves flowers, a man praised for his skill and for the old stories he tells, we ask about him from the only passer-by in the lanes – an elderly man, his face red and opaque from wine. He replies, with dignity, that he doesn’t know and adds that he has lost his memory, placidly dominating just for a moment the void into which he has fallen. Someone, observing the balcony doors inlaid with dark wood, the tidiness of the logs stacked under the stairs, the graceful windows, remarks that the houses are beautiful. “No, they’re not beautiful, come and see how ugly they are inside …” – a woman leans from a window, her hair ruffled. “They’re ugly, come and see just how ugly they are,” she repeats several times, her voice stridulant and too loud, even when the imprudent admirers of the village have turned the corner.
Claut, Cimolais, Erto and Casso come after the Barcis conca, the basin with its lake; the road climbs towards the Vajont through a ferrous and dusty landscape, the sides of the hill that slid during those tragic minutes of 9 October, 1963 display their lesions and bruises, splintered rock like broken teeth come loose from the gum. “We poor subjects of Your Serene Highness,” recite ancient petitions from these villages. Squalor and hardship in hard-pressed Friuli, the desolation of life lost and suffocated by the brutality of survival – Maria Zef, the great and tragic heroine of the great and tragic story by Paola Drigo walks through this mud of history and existence.
The houses in lower Erto and in Casso are empty and falling apart; they look down onto steep, bottomless slopes. These places carry the sadness of Purgatory, so much more difficult to represent than Hell’s. The village has its geometric beauty, worthy of an old painting, in the old houses that face the new ones; the difficulties here, even the earthquakes are shocks that reawaken vital energy. In the old lanes the mud and slime have coagulated in the deserted pigsties; the clay we are made of is not much different, and yet some maintain that it was worthy of the hands of the Creator who modelled it.
In Erto the hands of Mauro Corona know the magic of creating life with things. Corona, who at first glance looks like an eccentric hillsman, is a great sculptor, perhaps not yet fully aware of the fact. His wooden figures carry incredible power together with the painful brittleness of life. Women’s bodies, absolute faces of old people, animals, crucifixions, an olive-trunk transformed into a tragic torso, into a Nike of these valleys, at once age-old and yet bitterly contemporary. When he’s not sculpting, Mauro Corona climbs the arduous faces of various mountains around the world and sells the photographs he takes which publicize sports equipment, for a song almost, to unscrupulous sponsors. His body is wire-taut and his lightning intelligence has the simplicity of the dove in the Gospel. It is necessary to be as sly as a serpent, expert in the evil of the world and aware of just how much acumen it takes to avoid being destroyed by the world’s malice. Who knows if the head, the heart and the hands that create those figures can do without the prudence of the serpent.
On the way back, a break at Barcis. The waters of the artificial lake sparkle emerald green, proving that artifice is no less enchanting than Nature, or rather that there is nothing artificial because it is always Nature who produces and puts on the show, even all the things that seem to contradict her. We ask an old woman, dressed in black, where the mountain community is. “Where else could it be? In the school of course. Once there were children, but nobody has them now, and in the empty schools is where they put all this stuff.” Inside the building it seemed more than legitimate to turn to an assistant and ask whether there are books in the library on the village and its history, in particular the works of Giuseppe Malattia della Vallata, the nineteenth-century rhymester, author of the Songs from the Valcellina and of a Hymn to Matter. “But who do you represent?” asks the assistant in his turn, unable to conceive of the idea that anyone might want to look for a book or simply to wander about off their own bat. It’s a difficult question and not even Marisa and the others, hanging back in bewilderment by the door, know what to say. True, there are many categories that one might legitimately claim to represent: bipeds, teachers, married people, fathers, children, travellers, mortals, motorists, but … Thus the essence of this journey into the land of one’s forbears is the loss of another little piece of individual autonomy, of His Majesty the Ego. One will simply have to get used to the idea of no longer saying, “You don’t know who I am,” but, “You don’t know whom I represent.”
Lagoons
Blackened burchi, flat-bottomed lighters, eaten by the water and here and there stripped to their rusty skeleton, lie grounded since Heaven knows when on the shallow bed of the lagoon, next to the island of Pampagnola. Our boat, a flat-bottomed batela, draws very little and at moments almost slips across a minimal skin of water covering the ground; it has just left Grado behind and is on its way along the Venetian coastal route, the salt-water road that leads to Venice, well marked with red and black poles to either side and on these, at the watery forks, signs indicate directions with their arrows: Aquileia, Venezia, Trieste. On a briccola, a tripod tower of poles, is a white statue of the Madonna, star of the seas and protectress of navigators: on her head sits a seagull, motionless against the large, empty summer brightness.
Immediately after the bridge, the lagoon begins with a cemetery for larger boats. From the side of one an upturned crane protrudes and on deck the capstans are rusted, but the hawsers are still intact and solid. This is a benevolent wreck, the ship rests tired and calm in a shoal after a lifetime of carrying fish and especially sand; and now it awaits its final consummation. Even more devastated is one of the lighters, of which almost nothing but the rib timbers and the keel remain – abstract embroidery of long, stark nails. But the rest are still solid; the wood is hard, the strong bellying form displays all the knowledge of the hands that shaped it, awareness of winds and tides accumulated over generations. Red and blue stripes on the hull are fading, but here and there the colour is still alive and warm.
It will take a long time before the tides, the rain and the wind reduce those boats to pieces and still longer before those pieces rot and disintegrate. The gradual process of death: the tenacious resistance of form to extinction. Travelling is also a futile guerrilla war against oblivion, the rearguard on the march; one stops to observe the figure of a rotten trunk that is still not quite completely gone, the profile of a dune that is crumbling away, traces of lives lived in an old house.
The lagoon is a landscape, a seascape appropriate to this slow, aimless wandering search for signs of metamorphosis, because the mutations, those of both sea and land, are visible and take place before one’s eyes. The sandbank to the left, which holds back the open sea, is the Banco d’Orio and it moved several metres during the two years in which Fabio Zanetti studied it for his degree dissertation, especially towards the west because of an exceptional Bora, a north-east wind. The movement is tangible, like the passing of time on a person’s face. The winds are the inspired architects of the landscape: the Sirocco breaks things up, the Bora sweeps and carries away, the breeze builds and rebuilds.
The batela slides through the seaweed between one shoal and another, and it skirts a tapo, one of the countless islets that only just emerge from the lagoon; little red-headed birds jump among the tufts of grass which just a few metres away become indistinguishable from the seaweed in the water. In the feeble wind the tapo flowers move, a lavender-blue colour. Tapo Flowers was the title of Marin’s first poetry collection, published in 1912. Together with the shells, those flowers are the symbol of his poetry and of the essence that pervades it indefatigably, creation born of the clots and sludge of life. Out of the brackish mud protrudes the slender, delicate stem, the slimy mollusc generates the perfect and iridescent spiral of the shell; this was the psalm of the eternal that Marin heard being sung among the canes and the sea lapping on the
shore, and that he found again in the choirs singing the liturgy in the shadows of Sant’Eufemia, the venerable basilica at Grado.
The tapo is always visible, but the velma is land that appears only at low tide and then returns below, one moment familiar and exposed to full view, the next moment sunk in the mystery of the waters, which even half a metre is enough to create. The veiled and apparently immobile mystery of the depths, of the rocks and the shells on the sea-bed, all so strange and remote when one’s hand dips in even just a few centimetres to violate their spell – the sorcery of undersea cities such as Vineta or Atlantis, whose charm shines forth in even just a little bit of underwater slime.
The tide enters the lagoon through the channels that cut the sandy coastline and through them the big waters of far away penetrate the salty ponds, the gulleys where the farmed fish spend the winter. The slow tranquillity of the lagoon, which in the bad weather the fog and the soft sludge can transform into a dangerous trap, is another of the sea’s faces, its noble indifference. Put on a rock to dry, some shells have a sheen to them – abalones, pink and violet tellins, scallops, bluish limpets.
A cormorant struggles to take to the air, skims the water and, on reaching a deeper channel, dives and disappears; its neck, black as a periscope, re-emerges several metres further on. The island of Ravaiarina is left behind on the right: two boats with black rags hanging from their masts, markers to be left where the lobsterpots are dropped, slip by in silence, suspended between two mirrors. The casoni, the big houses, stand out on the islands; this is the centuries-old building type on the lagoon, functioning as a house and a warehouse for the fishing, made of wood and canes, with the door to the west, the floor made of mud, the hearth, fughèr, in the centre and the mattress stuffed with dried seaweed. There are still a few left, in fact several; television aerials stick out of some of them, others have been restored or transformed. In Porto Buso, where the Grado lagoon ends, there are none left, perhaps because during the Abyssinian war a Fascist party official who was passing through observed that it was outrageous to be off to civilize Africa and yet to tolerate mud huts at home and so he had them demolished, replacing them with little houses of stone.
Once upon a time the casoneri used on occasions to take their fish to Grado; then they would dress up and grease their hair with fried oil, to keep it straight and smooth and when they went to Mass the smell spread throughout the church. Apart from these cosmetic recipes, the lagoon, like all seas, is a great receptacle of water and air that eliminates the usual distinction between clean and dirty. Just a little further away a breath of wind and some currents render it as transparent as an aquamarine, that water-green that is the colour of life, but one’s foot gladly sinks into the sludgy marsh. The turbid colour that clouds the gold of the sand with a dense brown is warm and good, a primordial silt; the silt of life, which is neither dirty nor clean, out of which men are made as are the faces that they love and desire and with which men make sandcastles and the images of their gods.
That mud seems to be dirty but instead it is healthy, like mould on a wound; it’s pleasant to free oneself of it with a stroke of the arm in the clear, deep water, but on landing on some islet one wallows in that mire with an infantile familiarity, too often lost. The sores, on which that broth acts as a salve, like saliva on a scratch, are also the thorns planted every day, every hour in one’s body like darts: the spines that leave their venom in one’s flesh, in one’s soul by virtue of the commands, the prohibitions, the injunctions, the invitations, the appeals, the pressures, the initiatives, ruining all taste for living and increasing one’s anxiety about death.
The lagoon is also peace, slowing down, inertia, lazy and extended abandon, silence in which one slowly learns to distinguish minimal nuances of noise, hours that pass by without purpose or destination like the clouds; therefore it is life, not strangled in the vice of having to do, of having already done and having already lived – barefoot life, the bare feet that gladly feel the heat of the stone that burns and the dampness of the seaweed that rots in the sun. Not even the mosquito bites are annoying; they’re almost pleasant, like the acrid taste of the wild garlic or the salty water.
On a tapo, among the flowers, there is a cross, commemorating someone. Sitting on board the batela, looking at the tufts of tamarisk that hang down over the water like the foam of a wave that breaks over the dune, one is a little less afraid of dying; perhaps one kids oneself that there’s still a lot of time ahead, but above all one worries a little less about this reckoning, in the same way that the children who play caked in mud on the shore don’t worry about it. The boat passes in front of fishing gulleys, in front of farmhouses, in the vicinity of whose drains a type of crab prospers which, in honour of its gastronomic preferences, is called “shit-eater”. It seems that some restaurants serve them up together with granzo poro, another, more dignified local crab, in tasty sauces for the tourists, creating a perfect and vital cycle, recycle even.
The water – sea and lagoon – is life and a threat to life; it erodes, submerges, fertilizes, bathes, abolishes. During the first half of the century, between the Primero channel and Punta Sdobba on the estuary of the Isonzo, the shoreline to the east retreated by 196 metres; to the west the island of San Pietro d’Orio was once connected to Grado. The violent storms that overwhelm the earth- or dune-barriers form the lagoons, which proceed, more silently, to eat into terra firma. The chronicles make reference to battles and plagues, but very often – as in the testimony of Fortunato, the energetic and controversial patriarch of Grado in the times of Charlemagne, or the Chronicon Gradense of the eleventh and twelfth centuries – they mention the aqua granda, the high water that rises and spreads, the sea that enters the church of Saint Agatha to the point of covering the martyrs’ tombs, or goes on to break against the palace of the Count, the seat of Venetian authority. Centuries later Nievo observed that “the sea invests the patriarchal basilica more and more closely every year.”
Besieged as it is by water, the church is both a hard-pressed vessel calling for assistance and a dam or ark that offers help to those who are in peril of drowning. For the fisherman and the sailor, water is life and death, sustenance and menace; it eats away the wood of the ship just as it does the life of a man who ventures out on the treacherous, bitter sea, putting his trust in the fragile board his foot stands on and which is all that keeps him from the abyss. The ship protects from the storms, but she also turns her bow towards the hurricane and shipwreck: beyond this lies the harbour. The sailor, in his affliction, is that much closer to disaster and the shore of the blessed; the waters of the abyss are indeed a great baptismal font.
The mosaic on the floor in Sant’Eufemia, the basilica at Grado, recalls the undulations of the sea floor, the curvilinear patterns that the waves print on the sandy beach and on the surface of the sea. Waves flow towards the shore and towards the altar, they curve, they curl, they break and they start flowing again. The harmony of that wave as it flows and ebbs, eternal in its fluctuating, is taken up in the ancient songs sung beneath the vault of the church; melody, too, is escape and return. Not the tempo of the church and the sea, but the brief, good tempo of life; waves and sand under the feet of those who pull the boat up onto dry land and ask for some mercy from the affliction of living, lava quod est sordidum, riga quod est aridum, sana quod est saucium … “Wash what is unclean, water what is arid, heal what is wounded.”
A fish swims on the bed of the mosaic as out in the lagoon, the symbol of the Lord incarnate in the daily food of those who struggle between land and sea. Sometimes, when the tide goes out, a fish remains stuck in a puddle and the children put it in a bucket; happily they take it in their hands and play with it, but the fish writhes, its gills rise and fall with the effort, nobody has asked him if he feels like playing and even for the child something, for a while at least, changes when the fish stops moving. Hostem repellas longius, pacemque dones protinus … vitemus omne noxium … “Far from us drive the foe we dread, and
grant to us thy peace instead; so shall we not, with Thee for guide, turn from the path of life aside.”
The lagoon, the geologists say, is young. Some say one hundred and twenty centuries, thinking of the far-off origins in the tectonic rise of the Alps and the alluvial material brought by the rivers; others bring its formation even nearer, placing it in history, measurable even by means of man’s short memory. The lagoon’s time mixes history and nature; for the most part its splendour lies in disasters and it matters little whether they be man-made or natural: the Hun invasion that destroyed Aquileia in 452, the fury of the sea in 582, the sack by the Longobards in 586, the flood of 589, the Saracen incursion in 869, the plague of 1237, the fire raised by the English in 1810 –“Attila is God’s scourge / and the English are his brothers” – the sión, a cyclone, the one of 1925 and the one in 1939. Over the centuries and the years the pescadora, the bell on the basilica tower has heralded the storms; processions, rogations and even exorcisms have all been deployed in seeking protection from the calamities, from each high water.
Microcosms (Panther) Page 6