Grado is a literary landscape thanks to the lyrics of Biagio Marin, who made a poetic myth of the city. Before Marin there was very little, almost nothing – the conventional verses of Sebastiano Scaramuzza, more meaningful for the linguist than for the reader – but even this almost-nothing glints with the odd fleck of gold, it can move one just like the inlay on the shell born of almost-nothing. Domenico Marchesini, known as Menego Picolo and who lived between 1850 and 1924, with his Grado poetry and prose will have no place in the memory of his literary descendants, if indeed such exist. But in one of his lines the poor fishermen become comandauri del palù “lords of the marsh”; their hard work out there is touched with the glory of the Serenissima, whose own mother was Grado; but then the poem immediately states that even if their work makes them its lords, the marsh, on which they depend for their sustenance, is their paròn, their master.
A line of poetry is not insignificant, in a life. Neither is it insignificant to set up an inn, like Menego Picolo’s “To the Friends”, which he opened over a century ago after giving up his job as sea captain. This was not a step down socially; in the times of the Serenissima the innkeeper was an authority who dealt directly with the representatives of the Republic and was responsible for the quality of his wine – and his guests’ behaviour. The inn and the church are the two most important places in every human settlement worthy of the name, and on every island too.
The two places are not dissimilar: both are open to travellers passing by and looking to rest for a moment in the shade before some ancient image or a glass of wine, both of which help to keep going. Two openhanded places in which no one asks the visitors where they are from and under which flag or insignia they travel; in church there’s nothing even to pay – lighting a candle is recommended, but is not compulsory. Perhaps today the churches are one of the places in which it is possible to breathe more freely, almost like being out in a boat: one enters when one wants, nobody asks why one doesn’t go to Mass or why the eight o’clock service rather than the one at ten, unlike the organizing committees of cultural events, where one is required to account for each little defence of one’s own liberty, for each guilty desire to go for a walk rather than attending the debate. Social rites are more intransigent and insistent than religious ones; indeed, it is much more difficult to elude them. Posters for parish events do not carry the intimidating R.S.V.P., at the most they ask, quite reasonably, all things considered, to go into church somewhat more completely dressed than out in a boat.
San Pietro d’Orio welcomes us with a sticky, sterile heat: this realm of dried up cuttlefish bones could, at least at this noontime, be one of Melville’s Encantadas. Acrust of mud splits in the sun, a lizard on a rock studies the unwelcome visitors for a long time; it’s a direct gaze, eyeball to eyeball, and one feels inadequate and oafish in front of those age-old pupils; there’s a feeling of relief when the animal disappears under the rock. There are many mosquitoes, canes by the shore and dandelions that cover a field right up to the point where an acacia wood begins; bramble bushes which in just a few weeks will produce blackberries, the bittersweet smell of wormwood, used to flavour grappa.
On this island there used to be a shrine looked after by the Benedictines and, before that, a temple to the god Belenus; later, in accordance with changes in gods and their altars, it housed a German bunker. Between the two wars a man lived on this island with just the coarse grass and his goats for company, stubbornly refusing to travel, neither to the city nor to any inhabited place. He’d probably come to realize that in order to be a little less unbearable life has to be emptied of all possible ballast, especially the ubiquitous human presence. Every act of self-denial has its own grandeur, even if it be naïve or arrogant. In any case on the sea one is never truly alone: the silver lagoon, the continuous, varied background murmur that requires interpreting, imposes a sort of dialogue.
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There are many islands, without counting those surfaces that appear and disappear with the tide; the journey brushes distraitly past them, heedless and superficial like the journeys we make every day, which lead us to the end of our time without ever really having learned the road home. The batela wanders about like a fish, searching for the channels between one shoal and another, where in the duck-hunting season oystercatchers and coots fall plumb into the water; it skirts the nets set for the grey mullet, it passes long, blond seaweed, angled like waving hair, and then over the area near Marina di Macia where every now and then Roman amphorae surface. In ancient times there were probably warehouses here and the sandy bed yields up these beautiful vessels, figures of Eros emerging from the waters of sleep. To “emerge” and “surface” are really euphemisms for the often illicit work of recovering the amphorae, which generally lie at a depth of about a metre and a half beneath the sandy floor. There was a time when some leading families from Grado used to hold seances, ostensibly to discover the location of the much valued relics, but in truth their purpose was thus to avoid having to reveal from which fisherman, more vulnerable to the Law than the deceased, the precious information had come.
Up until a few years ago the now deserted island of Marina di Macia was the realm of the enterprising Papo Slavich, who subsequently sought refuge in Senegal. The island is rugged, a barrier of tamarisks doubled by its reflection in the water, it looks like a tropical rain forest: offshore the tragio spreads out, a wide section of shallow and tepid water, a nursery for fish and their eggs. In the last days of the Second World War the Germans, on their retreat towards Venice, were machine-gunned here by British planes and threw themselves into the water, hoping to escape on foot over the dunes and the marshes, but they became stuck in the silt that can take hold like quicksand, and they drowned in the mud, or were gunned down one by one. For days on end the corpses blocked that part of the lagoon, floating between the shoals and the gulleys. Rumours in the town spoke also of gold ingots abandoned by the Germans, their discovery attributed to some families from Grado who were suddenly well off, murmurings and quarrels that in some cases even ended up in court.
Papo Slavich’s victims, however, were merely oysters. His idea was to replace the native Grado oysters with Portuguese ones – which in fact were Japanese – and he started breeding them in commercial quantities and designed facilities for their cultivation and harvest. On the island the abandoned tanks that have been invaded by the grass, the blocked rinsing pumps, can all be seen, the ruins of a small, fledgling empire. The Portuguese–Japanese oysters have prospered vigorously and cling even to the jetty, suffocating and ruining the Grado oysters. A successful venture then, except for the fact that those exotic fruits of the sea, so it is said, taste of water melon.
Morgo is the most beautiful of the islands, lost in a dream, a place of enchantment. Thick pines, elms, bamboo thickets, tangled bushes and a few agaves block access to the interior; in one section of the wood stand rugged, stripped trunks of trees devoured by the processionary caterpillar; they have a livid look, like survivors of some catastrophe. The water near the shore is all white from the feathers of the stilt-plovers, birds that resemble light-coloured herons and take to the air when the boat comes close, a white cloud in the sky, white foam rocking in the slight movement of the water. On the beach, crabs abandoned by the tide, they too dried out and white, crinkle and disintegrate underfoot like freshly-boiled crab between one’s teeth.
This romantic island, once rich in animals and self-sustaining, has its own romantic story. Up until a few years ago in the depths of the wood in a dark, hidden clearing there was a plinth with an urn. Following the First World War Maria Auchentaller, a Viennese count’s daughter, fell in love with the “little doctor”, an irresistible Don Giovanni who lived in Grado and who even today is remembered by many for his macho boots, accessories that were apparently useful in seduction. Mothers are often more interesting than their daughters and the young countess caught her own in flagrante delicto with her loved one. She returned to Vienna and killed herself; her ashes we
re brought to Morgo and put on a little column in that dark glade. There’s nothing there now. That emptiness suits death, its unimaginable void, more so than tombs and gravestones with their high-flown and uncertain messages of consolation. The boatman doesn’t remember what happened to the mother; a brother who supported the Germans moved to Alto Adige after the Second World War where he slowly drowned himself in drink. There was also a good painter in the family, whose works were in the Viennese Secessionist style, dykes and sea storms; they embellished some hotels in Grado.
“Grado, 26 July, 1962. My Friend, listen to me. I’ve just finished copying your letter into my diary. This morning I’ve been out on the dune … we had luck enough to find a small argonauta, a paper nautilus … the wonderful form was sitting in the palm of my hand in front of me. It does the heart good, it’s such an unusual shell. And here, on coming home, I found your letter which is no less beautiful than the paper nautilus … yesterday was the 19th anniversary of Falco’s death and on the tomb we lit a flame of red roses and carnations. A great big flame. I would have liked you to be here, because you are part of my life … you certainly must return to Grado. I would like you to come one evening with the ferry, that way you’ll be able to come with me out on the dunes in the early morning. You cannot be fond of me if you’ve not been with me on the dunes and in the San Marco pine wood. That way you could stay out on the boat until midday and go swimming with your girlfriend. Or we could go to the San Marco wood in the afternoon, about five o’clock. That way you can see plenty of things in a single day. I’m glad that your friend enjoyed herself at my house and with me … I embrace you and send you greeting; please say hello for me to your mother and father – Biagio Marin.”
With Marin one never wasted time: he had an almost physical aversion to banality, that prevarication which exhausts itself in a vacuum and occasionally offers protection from harsh realities, keeping one from leaning out into the void. He had studied in Vienna and he was masterful in his evocation of the final years of the Hapsburgs, but he certainly had not learned the Austrian art of affable, sardonic reticence, the elusive grace of Hofmannsthal’s “difficult man”. Tactless in his pursuit of essentials, Marin was irascible or genial like a marine deity, but incapable of laughter. He immediately jettisoned the circumstantial and went for the absolute, or at least that which, life being what it is, came close to something absolute. He knew how to teach “how man makes himself eternal”; the gesture with which he resolved some anxiety or darkness that one confided to him – the carefree gesture of a hand dropping dirty linen into the laundry basket – dissolved the psychological misery and helped one confront the shadow and accept one’s own limitations, submit to one’s own rules, proceed along one’s road with fewer fears and fewer idols.
In his vitality, his avid, insatiable vitality, Marin was childishly, sometimes deplorably greedy for recognition, like a child who wants a toy and tears it from another’s grasp. But he recognized that this was simply an appetite that could be indulged but which in itself is of no value and which, if indulged, does not lead to happiness and, if unrequited, does not affect one’s good humour.
Marin had the epic self-sufficiency of children and certain old men, those who simply are, like nature, and do not in any way depend on how others see them. In a rich life, rich even in mistakes and tumbles, he encountered difficulties, want, tragedy in the death of his son Falco, but never unease, that anxiety which makes the hands sweat and enervates more than pain does. Talking with a friend or speaking in a difficult and tense public situation was all the same to him, the concept and the reality of stress were perfectly unknown to him. This was one of the reasons why he lived to ninety-four in perfect lucidity and excellent health.
His vitality was prodigious, demonic; it gave him an unusual multiple personality, abnormal, tumorous, the sort to expand and crush those who were close to him. As Diderot said of Racine, Marin too was a great tree, destined to grow tall and provide life and shade but also destined to crush, in its growth, the plants that grew beside it. Sometimes it seemed as though he contained within himself many people of high and low degree, large-spirited and ravenous. Certainly he was not always able to learn for himself those values that he had an extraordinary gift for imparting to others. “I am ashamed of myself,” he once wrote to Giorgio Voghera. Especially as a young man, but even later, Marin was also a devastating bully; the letters and the diaries of his son Falco, who was as straight as a die, testify heavily against him in their very affection. But his vitality and his overbearing behaviour were also capable of being refined into high spirituality.
Marin felt deeply the tragic conflict inherent in life and its passing, in its birth and its death; he felt it on the philosophical level, on the religious level, on the historical level, even in the drama of eastern and Adriatic Italy, in which he was both witness and participant, from the First World War to the turn towards Fascism, to the Resistance, to the fraught years immediately following the Second World War. “If the Spirit of the World has decided to obliterate the millennial Venetian imprint on the eastern Adriatic world,” he said, “I will bow and I will say fiat voluntas Tua, but then, for my part I will add: Pig …” and the worst possible blasphemy was completed.
Above and beyond all of these conflicts, however painful, Marin said yes, amen to life whole and entire, beyond good and evil. He saw and heard and felt life’s unity everywhere, even in pain and in death, and he possessed this unity with an inebriate and disturbing sensuality that found all things desirable, even death itself – not merely the gulls flying in the summer sky, but even the gulls dead and rotting on the sand: he would pick them up in his hands with something approaching desire. For him the eternity of creatures was their meaning in the life of all things, as it were the crest of a wave, not yet destroyed in its rapid breaking. All of his poetry sings this unity in which single existences flourish and wither, like the plant that dies and is reborn.
For him life, even in its tragedies, was thus part of a song … an affirmation: Marin didn’t know the word for No, the word which, however much one may love people, animals, plants and living things, one sometimes has to be capable of saying to the universe, to the Big Bang and all the bloody carnival that has come after it; one has to if one wants to heed not simply the tears of Achilles, but the despair, too, of all the abject, nameless suffering that cannot even find a voice. But there was nothing edifying in Marin’s love of life; it was a powerful love of the spells that life is rich in, despite everything, and which his poetry captured and recreated with a musical enchantment that seems to rise out of the inchoate murmur of becoming, still short of full articulation – a siren song that came before history, or reason.
That paper nautilus, that shell mentioned in the letter of July 1962, is a symbol of his poetry, a harmony in which, as in a face, the flux of life is given shape. As a youth Marin’s brimming enthusiasm must have been hard to take, but in his poetry, as in his own character, he grew in refinement over the years, as though the years had rarefied his excessive vitality, had given it poise and nobility. The first collections already contain a few masterpieces, but they are scarce and isolated; if Marin had died at sixty or sixty-five, he would have remained on the margins of literature. He wrote his most beautiful poems at the age of seventy, seventy-five, eighty. He would get angry whenever anyone told him that of his potentially endless lyrical production, in its infinitely repeatable variations, only a small part would survive.
But this part, not so little after all, is the work of a true poet. He himself knew that praise was never given to an individual nor to his poetry, with their qualities borrowed like any other item of clothing worn in this life, rather what was praised was that which transcends the individual and his poetry and stretches out towards that transcendence. This lesson is a liberation from petty private fears. So despite his substantial failings one can say thank you to him in the way one thanks one’s father, and at the same time one’s brother, with whom one has travel
led and clashed, and even a son who will outlive us; or just as one would like to thank one of those big, ancient trees that lived so long before our arrival and will continue to live so long after our departure.
Travelling, like storytelling, like living, is omitting. Mere chance leads to one shore and abandons another. On the island of Belli, “Beautiful”, called thus because of the proverbial ugliness of some of its inhabitants, there once lived old Bela, a witch who stirred up the winds and ruined the fishing out of spite for those who were not kind to her, and for similar reasons she seems to have once made a reconnaissance plane fall with a wave of her hand. She was a demonic specimen – the water encourages evil spirits. On the dunes near Grado the people feared the Balarin, a malign goblin, or the errant Jew, and in the howling of the wind and the creaking of the doors on the night of Epiphany one could hear the Varvuole, the furies that came from the sea.
One can imagine old Bela’s face, probably hideous from age and from the insults received out of cruel prejudice, and it is to be hoped that those who called her a jinx really did return home often with empty nets. Travellers are followers of the Enlightenment and when possible they discredit the blind and irrational ferocity of myths; Ulysses too – “he whose inner will is proof against sorcery”, as Circe describes him, dissolves the brute power of witches, giants and sirens. Nastiness towards those branded as jinxes is a kind of racism worse than the rejection of the foreigner, because it is masked, as is every superstition, by a sophisticated vulgarity.
Microcosms (Panther) Page 7