The Experience of Pain
Page 23
It curls up – and the coffer opens.
Bright with morning
Vigour: and he chews the bread – or halves it
With his girl, who kisses and caresses him
Between the bicycle and the brambles.
Silent images and distant sweetness
In each new heart, for clear mornings.
Essential Explanations
The dirge (Latin: nenia = funeral song, litany typical of the pagan funeral: Horace, Odes, II, 20, l. 22. Absint inani funere neniae …) surmounts the gate and shield of the manor house (estate). The military conscripts and veterans, being the sturdiest young men and sometimes accustomed with ear and throat to certain melodic sequences (regimental fanfare), strike the bells on the feast day of the patron saint of the village or country district. They do this by banging their closed fists on to a kind of keyboard, which includes so many hammers in sequence as to give at least an octave: the said keyboard is situated in the bell chamber, and by angular levers, wires and pulleys it moves the aforesaid hammers which strike the mouths of generally five but sometimes only three bells. Simple rhythms and melodies, that ring across the valley or hills, vary within the limits of a military-pagan repertoire (pagus = country district = village) on the theme of ‘leaving and coming back to a girlfriend’, himnos de la Independencia, songs from the Alps, or rather from the Maradagalese Andes. Labour is the toil, sweat of the bell-ringer, deafened by his own performance: which surges into his skull, from the mouths of the bells stationary and suspended above him; with bronze vibrations that only youthful daring and the steadfastness of the mountain dweller can tackle with no ill-effect. Gentile means not a strict observing Christian, inasmuch as the theme is ‘garibaldian’. The noun ‘garibaldi’ means rumpus, hubbub, revolt (from the Latin ‘rebellio’) in the spoken dialect of the Maradagalese Sur es decir del Norte. The dirge surmounts (a fancifully heraldic term referring to a motif, a mélode), in other words, it passes over the rusty gate: and being a popular dirge it pokes fun at the Marquis’s coat of arms. A song at times very sad:
When I am – nearer to the village
The bell – I heard it ring
This could be – my beloved
As they take her – to the holy ground.
The chiming bell is immediately perceived as the toll of death, by the soldier coming home on leave. Holy ground is obviously the cemetery. ‘Factory’, name of a village or town built around a single building under construction [the factory], initial place-name of the future municipal district.
THE BEGINNING
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First published as La cognizione del dolore 1963
First published in Penguin Classics 2017
Text copyright © Adelphi Edizioni S.p.A Milano, 2017
Translation copyright © Richard Dixon, 2017
The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted
Cover: Silvana Cenni (detail), 1922 by Felice Casorati © DACS 2017 (Photograph: Bridgeman Images)
ISBN: 978-0-141-39566-1
CHAPTER I
fn1 ‘The Mirabilia of this good Father López, on travelling and discovering those strange customs, seems anxious to give credence to a sort of morality, or ethics, however distant from the usual and endless dispute among philosophers about predestination and free will: and it describes the inner and personal mechanism in the life of everybody. His last chapter, on the approach of death, argues that it is a disconnection or extinction of every accumulation of possibilities forborne: so that it comes up to you in silence, and as though it were walking up to you from behind’ (Bandinelli).
CHAPTER III
fn1 Olea fragrans: botanical name and also the common Lombard name.
CHAPTER IV
fn1 Charge for home visits, according to the rates fixed by the Serruchón Medical Association.
fn2 In reality to the west.
fn3 This word is to be interpreted in its widest sense.
fn4 Chocolates made in Perugia are highly prized in South America; and also Tuscan half-cigars of the Italian State Monopoly, that are exported in hermetically sealed cylindrical containers of fifty, or a hundred. As for the Visiting Committee of Saint John, this is an association or congregation of the most distinguished ladies of Pastrufazio, who concern themselves with all poor and needy hospital patients; and also soldiers who are sick or afflicted by some disease, to whom they bring charitable relief, so far as they are able.
fn5 On top of the bridge built by the Visconti over the Ticino, at Pavia, there is an octagonal chapel from a later period, baroque in style, dedicated to John Nepomucene.
CHAPTER V
fn1 From the district gendarmerie.
fn2 Devoid of sensory apparatus and therefore of sense.
fn3 The word ‘people’, ‘peoples’, is still used today in certain better areas of Lombardy to mean, more or less, ‘civilized progeny, ancestry of Roman origin, community of beings instructed in the Gospel and Roman teachings’. Sometimes ‘good people’ = ‘bona gens’. A reverse process to that for which the Romans and Pagans were called ‘gentiles’, which meant ‘idolatrous foreigners’, by the Hebrews and by Paul: in the somewhat drawling violence with which the word emerges from the throats of fellow countrymen in such a way as to induce a wealth of meanings and a visceral memory of centuries and events long past, and the trauma of a whole Ambrosian-Tridentine ‘civilization’: namely of a conversion, of a collective baptism during the years of Theodelinda, who founded churches and temples dedicated to John the Baptist (Monza, Florence), and of a gradual acquisition of the new language and ritual. The ‘fara’, Lombard family or community established in a specific village or area, gradually becomes ‘gens’, ‘bona gens’.
fn4 Historical note: The house had several windows with ordinary shutters: other windows had shutters ‘à coulisse’.
fn5 The house was built on a slope, where the land falls away: and the foot of the staircase was therefore below the level of the ground above it. See Part One.
fn6 The mother came from a family in which there is a very strong sense of military discipline.
fn7 Founded in 1695 below the last undulating moraines of Mount Serruchón, by several immigrants from Monza; who named the new city with the Latin name of the city they had left behind.
fn8 One volume for Molière and La Fontaine, the other for Corneille and Racine.
CHAPTER VI
fn1 Descartes took the view that the hypophysis (Latin: pituita) is the ‘seat of the soul’. Point of encounter and transferral, in any event, for the movements of the soul and those of the corporeal system.
fn2 The good woman from Corfu, crying with distress, had sold them to her for what was really quite a high price; due to the plight in which she found herself, over the years. Double, perhaps, what they would have cost new. ‘Finally, you’ve managed it, eh!’ Don Gonzalo, then nineteen, had sniggered, ‘having those foisted upon you.’ He needed new soles for his shoes, rather than bent forks: at which point she, his mother, had lied about the price, telling him less: so that she, to avoid the incivility of that wretched son, could follow the great commandment of charity.
fn3 In biological reasoning (species), force and the need for conflict has to be considered at the same time as force and genetic n
eed, constituting a reciprocal limit (a Spinozan ‘mode’). The Greeks, as usual, viewed and expressed these phenomena with wonderful symbols. So that war and peace in Greek mythology brought states of balance between the rival powers of the rival Ascensions (Nùmina).
fn4 This is an anachronistic transposition from the seventeenth century. Leibniz refers to Martin Guerre in his Nouveaux essais. An Italian Martin redivivus was Canella-Bruneri, whose long-disputed identity was the subject of thousands of newspaper columns, and millions of lire: (press, lawyers, appeal courts, etc. etc.) The law, in its rightful scruple, has no concern for expense.
fn5 March forward.
fn6 ‘In foribus pugnam ex auro solidoque elephanto …’ Virgil, Georgics, III, beginning.
fn7 With short legs. ‘Skelic index’, in anthropology, the ratio between the length of legs and the height of a person.
fn8 Meaning the southern hemisphere. The pampero is the wind of the Pampas.
fn9 Unjustified Gallicism for ground nuts, peanuts.
fn10 The Presidente Uguirre School, in the city’s north-eastern districts.
fn11 A wrong and entirely inappropriate quotation from the famous, sublime invocation in ‘Pentecost’. The Poet, addressing the Holy Spirit, asks for joys, in the plural, for the Poor Clares: Send to the hidden virgins – Pure hidden joys; – Anoint the brides – With self-effacing love.
fn12 A pun on the Marquis and Porta’s character Marchionn. The author imagines that the customer’s hormones, delighted by the deference, are enhanced by new, marvellous chemical combinations (enchantments). Dextrorotatory, levorotatory: terms of structural chemistry, geometry and crystallography: and used, generally; for two symmetrical structures, i.e., metrically equal but which cannot be superimposed. (Right screw and left screw).
CHAPTER VII
fn1 (Organic) salts of valerianic acid, formic acid, and caprylic acid.
fn2 Butirro pears, having formed in mid-October, ripen very suddenly, in the course of a night, between 2 and 7 November.
CHAPTER VIII
fn1 Carducci the astronomer, born at Pian Castagnaio, near Castagneto di Bolgheri, a district of Valdicastagna, contrary to Ptolemy, thought the sun could ‘smile sinking’ behind Mount Resegone. He was probably referring to astronomical and geophysical pictures of the southern hemisphere, where we can establish that the sun sets to the left of the person watching it.
fn2 Latin: ficulno: ‘Olim truncus eram ficulnus, inutile lignum’ (Horace, Satires, I, VIII, I).
fn3 There is no explanation for how the variation ‘Beppina’ can exist in Néa Keltiké, when everyone knows that the only words expressed in Keltiké are ‘Peppina’, ‘Peppino’, ‘Peppa’, ‘Pepp’, ‘Pina’, ‘Pino’, ‘Pinin’ and ‘Giiiseppp’, all pronounced with the hard labial p, as well, of course, as ‘Peppatència’†, which then is none other than the queen of spades. It is probably an error or misinterpretation of the philological evidence on the part of the Author. Another very strange circumstance that critics in philology and perhaps also in history and even aesthetics will be required to elucidate is the fact that in South America there are no mushrooms: neither the Boletus appetitoso, nor the soporifero, nor the various and dreaded Micetes.
†Note on the note: Tencia is the fem. of tenc = grime, filth, black, blackish: referring more to an occasional grime, from work: e.g. cont la fàcia tuta tencia de carbon: probably from the Latin tinctus, -a, -um.
fn4 Small as he was: the words of an old nursery rhyme (De piscinin che l’era) by Barbapedana, a popular singer, born two months premature, and a dwarf, who accompanied the song with a slow strum of his battered guitar, heard with ineffable delight by our Author in a trattoria at Gorla on the Naviglio, in 1906: a few kilometres from the Eastern Gate, now called Porta Hènessia: ‘De piscinin che l’era/El balàva volentera/El baiava – in sün quattrin/De tant che l’era piscinin’.
fn5 This comment is to be interpreted in the sense that the Head of the School of Engineering at Pastrufazio was called Colombo and had awarded the honorary degree to the Fallen Son.
fn6 The three all-purpose nouns, for those who don’t know, are: roba (pl. roppp); mestée; de fà de polin: through a skilful manipulation of combinations of these three words, the Pastrufazian woman is able to express any of her twenty-two ideas. Naturally, this great need is assisted by the fact that eighteen of the twenty-two ideas are fixed. The remaining four marvellously articulated.
CHAPTER IX
fn1 Mocoso = moron, in Maradagalese.
fn2 From such strong young men (even after their smuggling of sugar and other spices, however reprehensible) the 1859 war must have drawn its battalions of volunteers from Bergamo and Valcamonica, for night ferrying: where the boat had a most difficult task, and not just for the violence of the River Ticino, which, when it swells and coils, becomes a serpent, most ugly, in these hours. And such fibre was apparent in our young men, almost in anticipation of command, on the mountain, with a cropped feather in their cap, in the midst of gunfire, a grenade in their hand, against the certain wind of eternity. And that notorious fugitive and villain Giuseppe, from Nice, trained his bands of brave and willing men, when, on being greeted as the Hero of Two Worlds, the sword of liberation was brandished throughout Uruguay and Paraguay, and on, on as far as the remote borders of Maradagàl and Parapagàl, where the sun of Charles V never goes down, though that of Charles V himself did go down, thank God.
THE PUBLISHER JUSTIFIES HIS SALVAGING OF THE TEXT REQUESTING THE INTERVENTION OF THE AUTHOR
fn1 Translator’s note: Contini’s introduction appeared in the first incomplete edition of 1963.
fn2 A violoncello is a baroque instrument; a double bass, most of all; a femur, with related prominences, is a baroque bone; likewise a pelvis; the liver gland is a baroque concoction; the backside of the female dummy of the great seamstress Harpalyce is a baroque dummy; the hump of the dromedary is baroque; the bellies of the praetor Mamurra, who was a baroque fatty, were baroque bellies; trombone notes in F (bass key) are baroque notes; beans, pumpkins, oblong watermelons are just as many forays, towards the baroque, of the entelechy of pumpkins and watermelons as nature nonetheless devises for them.
fn3 The Church itself and the Bishop have limited the battle hours of the battles with the tympanic chambers of the faithful. The book of hours described compline at nine o’clock. And the bell of the 1300s, of the 1200s, had a pyriform structure (like certain long, long, sweet pears, grey-green rusty-red in colour, which the market-gardener calls Kaiser … G. is not to blame … ripe in November, in December) and mouth or span quite narrow: and gave a ‘distant peel’ when only lightly struck, almost for an upturned acoustic effect that softens the mild, almost plaintive, chime, subtracting it from the litigious arrogance of the town and providing a source of extra-mural piety. The rotating post-Tridentine bell, arranged vertically, whose barycentric, rotating axis allows it to be controlled by a long rope, pulled from the floor of the church, has two handles, rather like a cannon: their axis is the same barycentric line referred to above. It, the Tridentine bell, rotates like the cannon, requiring no more work than that of the friction on the two pivots. Work = force x radius r x angle α° of rotation expressed in degrees. The substantial thickness, the width of the mouth, the rich alloy (high copper content with ablation of silver released into the fusion from yellow handkerchiefs of the country folk who had gone down to the foundry in heavy boots, consecrated in the stream of fire as it is plunged into the mould) instils and confers a slow, almost timid, undulating vibration, which reaches the peasants and their green wheat with the still-icy gusts of April wind: as in that gentle and pious poem by Giacomo Zanella, which booms out then heads off over the hills of the Veneto and Vicenza to the houses:
loses itself far away
then turns back with the returning wind.
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