Cherso, Crepsa, Crexa, Chersinium, Kres, Cres – Latin, Illyrian, Slav, Italian names. The vain search for ethnic purity reaches down to the most ancient roots, brawling over etymologies and writing systems, in a fever to establish the racial origin of the foot that first stepped on the white beach and grazed itself on the thorns of the thick Mediterranean vegetation, as though this were proof of greater authenticity and guaranteed the right to possess these turquoise waters and these perfumes in the wind.
The journey down never reaches a point of arrival or departure, the Origin is never identified. Scratch an Italianized surname and out comes the Slav layer, a Bussani is a Bussanich, but if one continues then sometimes an even more ancient layer appears, a name from the other side of the Adriatic or elsewhere; the names bounce from one shore and from one writing system to another, the ground gives way, the waters of life are a yielding, promiscuous swamp. Losinj is the Croatian rendering of Lussino, or rather of the Venetian Lussin, which perhaps derives from luscinius, “nightingale”, and perhaps from the Croatian luzina, “undergrowth”, or loše, “nasty”, a reference to the rough soil covered with impenetrable bushes, and according to others it comes from loza, “vine”.
Colchidians, Greeks, Romans, Istrians and Liburnians and other Illyrians, Goths, Franks, Byzantines, Slavs, Venetians, Saracens, Croats; the jail at Nerezine named in honour of Lepanto, the Hungarian king Bela who gave his name to Beli when he landed there while fleeing from the Tartars, the people of Cherso who demonstrated in the streets when the flag of the Serenissima was hauled down. French, Austrians, Italians, Germans and Yugoslavs – men and peoples are grain ready to be milled by history, and it hurts at the time and there are bloodstains left on the floor, but then it all dries and the resulting bread is good. The wave that arrives every now and then is a storm that wrecks everything, the annals are numbered in forays, in raids; Ossero was devastated by Saracens, Normans, Uskoks and Genoese. The rumble of one thunderstorm is lost in the next and the sea washes the blood from the shores, but in the shadow someone is keeping the tally and will present the account at the proper time.
In charting these seas, everyone has his own personal toponymy, from the intransigent nationalist who enunciates every name in Italian or in Croatian, implicitly affirming a compact ethnic homogeneity in that world while denying the existence of the others who form part of it, to the inexperienced reporter from Italy who would never dream of saying “London” for “Londra” or “Beograd” for “Belgrado”, but says Rijeka instead of Fiume out of ignorance or fear of being taken for a revanchist. That mosaic is already full of variety and everyone composes the pieces in a way that corresponds to his own experience of that world – saying Ossero instead of Osor or Miholaščica rather than San Michele according to whether, in essence, a place has meant for him a meeting with one civilization or another. “But me, why do I speak Italian?” asks a woman on Cherso, in Italian, unaware of where those words that issue from her lips come from, because for her they are part and parcel with everything else. She is confident that the lecturer from Trieste, who is lodged in her house by the Italian community’s club, will have an answer for her.
The combination of names in the different writing systems and pronunciations is a labyrinth of destinies. A Sintich, at Miholaščica, defies the Croatian nationalist parish priest who will have no truck with Italian being sung in his church; he strikes up with the hymn “Mira il tuo popolo”, and then asks a guest in the nearby pension the meaning of one or two of the words. Fascism imposed the Italianization of surnames and back then at Lubenizze, perched up high in the mountains of Cherso and buffeted by the wind, the mayor – recounts Livio Isaak Sirovich, as he rummages through old papers – informed the Prefect, in an Italian that was not quite Tuscan, that a certain Dlacich, unlike the various Kral who became Re [King] and Smerdel [merda, shit] who became Odoroso [Smelly], would not hear of changing his surname, “and he always will be Dlacich,” he told me angrily, “and you, I don’t care what you do.”
So, Miholaščica, rather than San Michele. Anywhere can be the centre of the world. There is almost nothing at Miholaščica; perhaps it is for this reason that someone can feel it to be the heart of this world made up of great voids and openings, wind and light, violet horizons in which the evening rises slowly like a tide to submerge the profiles of a few islands. The world, in any case, is just a few steps away, in Martinščica, a beguiling place, with its harbour where the white yachts still moor, and the Albanians from Macedonia arrive every year with the fine weather, bringing all that’s necessary to make their popular ice-creams, along with their women who are always kept locked up in the hotel room or at the most are taken out for a walk at dawn, when there’s no one yet around.
In Miholaščica the houses and people serve to ennoble the horizon; rather than arrogantly taking up position in the centre or occupying all of it, they keep themselves to one side, ancillary figures in the grand scenario of clouds and seasons – a boat moored at a jetty, another one immobile out at sea, the changing colours of a sail in the glare. History is eroded and burnished by the water, the summers rise and fall on the beach, superimposed one on the other, mixing over the years like the smooth, white pebbles. Sitting on a stone, Tania plays with the surf that always brings her ball back to her; she’s already almost a girl, a dark, surly roe deer. “Mismo stari,” we’re old, grumbles her uncle, the oldest of her father’s six brothers and sisters, old enough to be her grandfather, as he drinks his early-morning slivovitz. He doesn’t pay much attention to Mr Babić, just arrived from Carlovaz, he too with his slivovitz, as he comments with a satisfied air on one of Tito’s speeches. Francesco and Paolo are on the shore; their childhood is familiarity with this world.
A few houses, which in the summer fill up with holiday-makers and relatives and friends, an inn, a small church kept open on a rota by the neighbours and by the innkeeper; inside there is a painting of Saint Michael, the town’s patron, finishing off the fallen dragon. The archangel’s sword enters the dragon’s jaws, Heaven’s final victory seems certain, but in the meantime the dragon spouts fire and it would be all too easy to get caught in its fangs; in the sea, too, there are fierce jaws that devour smaller fish, each one in the jaws of someone or something, but in his fall the dragon carried with him a piece of heaven – this bay and these incorruptible waters, as they close over silent catastrophes.
All told there are but two or three surnames in the town – Kučić or Saganić. A neighbour tells of how her grandmother gave birth to eighteen children and brought them up, working nights at the loom after putting them to bed. A few decades later the total number of Miholaščica’s inhabitants is much smaller than the number of their descendants. The years come and go like tides. Francesco and Paolo, who for many summers no longer came to Miholaščica with us, start coming back and they too start building a life with those stones on the shore. The wave flows back, and Tania’s ball, thanks to the slivovitz, has outlived her uncle, but Barbara, Tania’s daughter, is less interested in the ball than in a grasshopper she has saved from the sea and holds in her hand. One of the insect’s wings is broken but she is still proud of it – It’s mine and it knows me, she says to Gussar, who has no home and sleeps in the bays, in his untidy boat which he uses for fishing for squid and ferrying the odd tourist about. When a gust of wind carries the grasshopper off and it disappears in the water, the girl starts crying, protesting that it was hers and she wants that one and no other.
My grasshopper, my wave, that very one, with its jagged edge and its white foam, the one at that angle, with the impetus that makes it curve – there is a wave that ought never to break, a face that must never disappear from these waters in which it seems to have always been reflected, from time immemorial and dilated like the summer, embracing all of a shared life. Mrs Babić’s daughters run to the sea, beautiful djevojke laughing and showing their white teeth, they dive into the water, white gulls and spray of foam, the waves break, the girl’s crying is
already mixed up with the backwash and then comes Tania’s voice calling her daughter: it’s lunchtime.
No, that doesn’t figure, it’s easy to get the summers mixed up, with the never-changing light; they must be her granddaughters, because when Nadia, Tania’s sister, celebrated her sixteenth birthday and her father got a bit drunk and started hitting the wrong young man – not the one who was unceremoniously courting his daughter, but another one who had nothing to do with it – that summer the house to the back, behind the mulberry tree with its fruit that the children would eat, staining their faces and their arms with the blood-like juice, that house wasn’t there yet; now his daughter uses it for parties with her friends and her boyfriend who has come back from the war in Krajina. Never mind whether it’s mother, daughter or granddaughter, what counts is that a woman should be like this and this, says Jure, who has been Barbara’s husband for years, as he sketches in the air large breasts and a narrow waist … otherwise, ppprrr, and he concludes with a sort of raspberry, rubbing the back of his hand against his mouth, while Tonko, his neighbour, who came over when he saw we were roasting a lamb on the spit, protests that the rear end shouldn’t be neglected either.
Maria, Mrs Gliha’s mother, who arrives in May with her husband and children from Zagreb and opens up the house where they spend the summers, up until a few months previously had never moved from St Ivan, the small village just down the road. But now she has just come back from New York, where she had been to visit one of her children. Does she like New York? Yes, she replies, graciously, after having had the question repeated because she is hard of hearing … yes, nice, but a bit out of date with those carriages and the horses, and then so few telephones. If you’re out and you have to call someone you have to hunt all over, whereas here in St Ivan there’s a telephone just there in the shop. But it’s a nice city all the same, she repeats, benevolently, even if a bit old fashioned. And she is silent again, paying attention to no one, her eyes fixed somewhere in the evening, which is dark by this time.
At St Ivan there is the cemetery that also takes in the people of Miholaščica and Martinščica. Among the gravestones is one belonging to Velemir Dugina, “Prof. Violine”, who died at the age of twenty-nine. The photograph shows a handsome, open face. Velemir loved these places, he came whenever he could. He composed beautiful songs, one of which is about the sea-green waters of Miholaščica. On coming back from a journey to a distant continent, where he had gone to visit his mother who hadn’t been living with them for some time, he killed himself in a hotel in a big city, leaving a note asking that he be buried not in Trieste, where he lived, but at St Ivan. When they ask her if she knew him, old Maria replies, listlessly, yes.
The evening has fallen, as it has to; so many evenings meld one into the other, the same but different in the flames of the summers and in the faces that are a little more time-worn. The lamb is browning on the fire; Mr Babić, turning the spit and basting with oil, praises the policy of the Croatian government in the war in Bosnia, and Toni the innkeeper throws him a look without saying anything, the same look his dog Max has when studying the hens that he knows he cannot touch. “We fjumanke don’t know much about politics,” says Mrs Gliha, trying to change the subject. The wine is strong and dark, the lamb tender and crisp. “Poor mamma,” says Mrs Gliha, “who knows why she always preferred her lamb without rosemary, but why, Mamma, I was always asking her and she would never tell me why … as stubborn as they come she was.” Jure and Tonko sing tamo daleko, daleko kraj mora, “far away, near the sea”, then they stop. From the garden across the road comes Teodoro, wearing a helmet and a topi on top of that, a stick in his hand and a scythe over his shoulder. Every now and then, for months at a time, he fails to recognize anyone and pisses against the church wall – but not out of contempt, Jure explains, it’s just that he doesn’t think. “The gravy’s finished!” shouts Teodoro as he comes out of the darkness, as the flames reflect brightly on his scythe. And so the fact is that Miholaščica has everything, even the fool who speaks the truth.
Paolo from Canidole has had his day too, and its memory has been preserved among the people of the islands in the stories that hand down his little history, always with the same sentences and in the same words. Canidole – in Croatian Vele Srakane – is an increasingly deserted island covered with cane-brakes, just a few kilometres to the west of Lussino. Some decades ago there were still one hundred and fifty people, who in a few years were reduced to twelve, almost all of them elderly; in the summer, at least back when the terrible Yugoslav war was not threatening to spread to the Quarnero as well, some emigrants from the mainland or America would return to visit relatives, and a few tourist boats would moor for an hour or two.
The other islands around Canidole are either deserted or truly inhabited – they either live the immemorial life of the sea, of the surf and the tides, or they live the holiday season, of hotels and cafés open from May to September. On the other islands either no one lives or, for some months or for the whole year, they are inhabited by people who mesh, like everyone else, into the chain of the material, ordinary world. Canidole has remained out of all this, living its ancient, immutable life, which is burning out. There are no hotels, bars, tourists; the school built some decades ago is in ruin and on the classroom walls, written in Italian and in Croatian by erstwhile pupils, one may read scurrilous names or declarations of love. There are many cane-brakes on Canidole, some fig trees, a few sheep and the odd vine, just enough for the island’s few inhabitants; in the winter, when the Bora blows strong across the Quarnero, they can be cut off from Lussino, the mother island and capital, for two or three weeks at a time, waiting for calm weather and for fresh bread.
The short distance that separates the people of Canidole from Lussino is greater than the hundreds or thousands of kilometres that lie between Lussino and Munich or New York, because this shorter distance involves a temporal remoteness that will soon be wiped out altogether by the total extinction of the island’s inhabitants. Already the neighbouring island, Canidole Piccola (Male Srakane), is deserted. Death will make Canidole an island like the others – wonderful for the indescribable colour of its sea, a tourists’ stopping-off point for a few hours, an island with its place in the organization of the world and of the summer season.
Levrera is the island off Miholaščica, so called because of its invisible wild rabbits, and one July, back in the time of Yugoslavia, during the ferry trip there, a loquacious and sententious boatman told Paolo’s story. In the early Fifties the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which had recently become mistress of these islands that had previously belonged to Italy, called Paolo up for military service. Paolo provided his widowed mother’s only form of support and he already considered the four years spent on the front during the Second World War a form of abuse practised on him for the dubious glory of the Duce and the Empire, thanks to whose initiatives his island had changed flag. He refused to report to the Yugoslav military authorities and stayed at home, helping his elderly mother. The police, when they came to arrest him, drew a blank because he had gone into hiding; and so an army squad came and in vain searched the island’s 1.2 square kilometres while Paolo, submerged in the sea up to his eyes – in December – watched the fruitless operation from the rocks.
The village observed the manhunt in silence, with the instinctive hostility of wild game towards hunters. The primary-school teacher, on being questioned, replied that if he was a teacher then he couldn’t be a policeman as well and this risposte is still quoted, on the islands, with philological precision. On returning to base, the leader of the squad reported that Paolo was not to be found on Canidole, but Paolo sent word to say that he was on the island. Later, but the story gets a little confused at this point, the Yugoslav military authorities, with benevolent sagacity and thanks to the good offices of an understanding lieutenant, came to an honourable compromise with their antagonist, who agreed to a brief period of conscription.
Paolo had stymied the polic
e and the army, an army that had given the Germans a hard time. It was only natural, after hearing his story, to go and call on him a few days later with the first available boat for Canidole. The island was devoid of the usual sounds of life – children’s voices, noises of work. The crumbling houses and their walled-up windows were like tombs. An old man sat immobile on a chair, a flower in his hand; the eyes in his wrinkled face were two oblique fissures, as though they had been screwed up against the sun for many years. On the ground in the shade of a wall a maimed person of indefinable sex sat watching the sea, the arrival and the departure of the odd boat, and responded to a greeting with a whine, waving two deformed arms, and with a grimace which, under the dribble, was a kindly and indeed serene smile. Imperturbable and mythical like the rock of the island, those men were lords compared to the banal visitors, who felt embarrassed in their swimming costumes, in their privilege, in their vacuity.
None of us was wearing a uniform and so it wasn’t difficult to find Paolo among the scattering of houses and people. He was old, much older than his age; he had not shaved for some time and his body trembled and kept shaking; he had only one eye behind his spectacles and with a constant, uncertain gesture he cleaned the weeping from the empty socket. He was kind, contented and indifferent. He told his story in the same words as the boatman, including the famous declaration by the schoolmaster as though he too had heard it from that source and had learned it by heart.
Enveloped in the aura of that remoteness and before that incorruptible sea, one could believe that one was still a god, immortal. In the meantime the hero of Canidole, racked by his trembling, recounted how he had lost his glass eye among the canes and how the sight in his real eye was fading. When asked if he was diabetic, Paolo replied in an encouraging tone, pleased by the shrewd diagnosis: “Yes, that’s it, well done … diabetes, right, well done.” And he reverted to speaking about the fig tree whose roots had damaged the water cistern and which should be cut down.
Microcosms (Panther) Page 17