Collection of Sand
Page 22
Who knows whether I could find in Avestan a formula to express these thoughts? For the moment, going back to my Western memory, I find the remark of a poet enough. To whoever asked him this question: ‘If your house was being destroyed by fire, what thing would you rush to save?’ Jean Cocteau replied: ‘The fire.’
The Sculptures and the Nomads
At Persepolis, I find myself going up the monumental staircase along with two lines of people forming two columns: a row of tourists all in groups and a line of dignitaries with curly beards and curly hair, with cylindrical coiffures interwoven with feathers, massive half-moon necklaces around their neck, sandals on their feet underneath their pleated togas, and sometimes a flower in their hand. The first row is made of flesh and blood and sweat, the second of sculpted stone. Allowing the first line to go ahead under the burning sun, I empathize with the uninterrupted gait of those dignified figures on the grey surface of the stone slabs, with that solemn procession which advances wherever one rests one’s gaze on all the stairs of the city, along the base of all the façades, as it flows towards the doors flanked by winged lions and then the hall of a hundred columns. The stone population is of the same size as that of flesh and blood, but is distinguished by its composure and a certain uniform rigidity in lineaments and dress, as though it were the same figure in profile that constantly passed by. Every so often a face looks back at the person behind, a hand is placed on the chest or on the shoulder as if in a gesture of friendship, introducing a note of animation into the ceremonial formality, an animation that is all the warmer the more stereotyped the hieratic nature of the rest of the procession seems.
The palace of the Achaemenid kings at Persepolis is like a container which reproduces on its walls what went on inside it 2,500 years ago. Its architecture was made for displaying a sumptuous procession which could not but reproduce the kind of ceremonies that had always gone on there, in every grouping and in every gesture, in the arrangement and succession of every embassy and every group, in the display of costumes, wealth and weapons: the imperial guard with lances, bows and quivers, the gift-bearers from various nations with precious vases and little bags of gold-dust.
In the bas-relief on the main door, the nations support the imperial throne, but this throne is so light that they can hold it up with their fingertips. Or to be more precise: above the great throne that the ambassadors of the nations raise up, barely touching it underneath its cross-beams, there is a smaller throne, on which sits a little emperor flanked by a slave with a fly-swat, and above him is a canopy, and above that again hovers the emblem of Azura Mazda or of his benediction. Now one begins to understand where all those processions converging on the doors, vestibules and access corridors are going: the more one approaches the centre of power the more one moves from the enormous to the tiny, the reduced; to abstraction, the void. Perhaps this palace is the utopia of the perfect empire: a great empty box ready to receive the shadows of the world, a procession of figures in profile, flat figures, with no depth, around an empty, weightless throne.
Other crowd scenes are on display a few kilometres from here, on a sheer rock in the Naqsh-e Rustam gorge, but these are battle scenes with horses trampling enemies who have been unseated, the threatening armour of warriors lined up on the battlefield, prisoners made slaves and weighed down by chains, triumphs and divisions of spoils. It was the Sassanid kings who had these rocks sculpted to celebrate their own achievements, more than 500 years after the destruction of Persepolis, immediately beneath the tombs of their ancient Achaemenid ancestors: Darius, Artaxerxes, Darius II, buried behind four austere blocks like palace façades sculpted on a high ledge above the cliff. The composed, rapt majesty of Persepolis has disappeared: here what dominates is pride, bellicosity, the affirmation of one’s superiority over the enemy, the ostentation of opulence. It is a humanity on horseback recording its way of life for posterity. It is an epic of attacks at full gallop, the apotheosis of equestrian supremacy, with the din of trumpets, clouds of dust and the echo of hooves on the earth: all this is recorded in the shapes that emerge from the rocks. An elegant Shapur I, all frills and necklaces, lifts his arm and his sword from on top of a powerful horse at whose feet the defeated Roman Emperor Valerian is kneeling, his hands outstretched and trembling, his eyes filled with terror. Even before that Azura Mazda in person offers to Ardashir I the diadem of investiture from which dangle long thin ribbons. For the first time the god is visible: and he is a knight the same size as the Sassanid king, dressed with equal pomp, mounted on a horse that is just as powerful.
On the way back, my route intersects with that of a tribe of nomads on the move. Barefoot women, with garish-coloured clothes, are chasing forward a row of little donkeys, beating them with sticks and yelling. On some donkeys’ backs are balanced a hen, a dog, and a lamb astride the donkey; others have saddlebags from which lambs and new-born babies stick out. The last little donkey trudges along: on its back sits an old witch, roaring, riding side-saddle, with a stick in her hand; all the kinetic energy that pushes the caravan forward seems to emanate from this old woman. This is followed by a herd of goats, then a herd of camels; a little white camel trots in between its mother’s legs. The procession heads towards an encampment of black tents. This is the season when the tribes of these Turkish-speaking nomadic populations cross the steppes of the land of Fars; after wintering on the shores of the Persian Gulf they go back north every year towards the Caspian Sea. Unlike the women, the men are dressed like city-dwellers; they wait at the threshold of their tents, greet foreigners with a Salam! and invite them in to drink tea. At the arrival of these strangers some of the women hide their faces and laugh in the black and white of their eyes; one of them pours water from a goatskin water-bag; another starts to knead the dough. On the ground are the famous carpets woven on their looms. For centuries the nomads have criss-crossed these arid terrains between the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea without leaving any trace of themselves behind apart from their footprints in the dust.
In one single day I have done nothing but meet human crowds on the march crossing my path: rows of people fixed for ever in the rock and other rows of people who are on the move in perpetual transit. Both inhabit different spaces from our own: one lot merges with the compact mineral world, the others barely graze places, ignorant of the names of geography and history, following itineraries that are not marked on any map, like the migrations of birds. If I had to choose between the two ways of being, I would have to weigh up their pros and cons for a long time: either living only in order to leave behind an indelible sign, transforming oneself into one’s own figure engraved on the page of stone, or living by identifying with the cycle of seasons, the growth of the grasses and bushes, with the rhythm of the years that cannot stop because it follows the revolutions of the sun and the stars. In each of these cases what one is trying to escape is death. In each of these cases it is immutability that one is aiming for. For one group death can be accepted as long as what is saved from life is the moment that will last for ever in the uniform time of stone; for the others death disappears in cyclical time and in the eternal repetition of the signs of the zodiac. In each case something holds me back: I cannot find the gap where I could insert myself and join the crowd. Just one thought makes me feel at ease: the carpets. It is in the weave of their carpets that the nomads deposit their wisdom: these variegated, light objects are spread on the bare ground wherever they stop to spend the night, and are rolled up again in the morning so they can carry them away with them along with all their other belongings on the humps of camels.
First U.S. edition
Copyright © 2002 by The Estate of Italo Calvino
English translation and additiona
l editorial material copyright © Martin McLaughlin, 2013
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
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First published in Italy as Collezione di sabbia by Garzanti 1984
This translation first published in the United Kingdom by Penguin Classics, 2013
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Calvino, Italo.
[Collezione di sabbia. English]
Collection of sand / Italo Calvino; translated by Martin McLaughlin.—
First U.S. Edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-544-14646-4 (pbk.)
1. Calvino, Italo—Translations into Spanish. 2. Calvino, Italo—Translations into English. I. McLaughlin, M. L. (Martin L.) translator.
II. Title.
PQ4809.A45C5513 2014
854'.914—dc23 2014001373
eISBN: 978-0-544-23194-8
v1.0914
About the Author
ITALO CALVINO (1923–1985) attained worldwide renown as one of the twentieth century’s greatest storytellers. Born in Cuba, he was raised in San Remo, Italy, and later lived in Turin, Paris, Rome, and elsewhere. Among his many works are Invisible Cities, If on a winter’s night a traveler, The Baron in the Trees, and other novels, as well as numerous collections of fiction, folktales, criticism, and essays. His works have been translated into dozens of languages.
Footnote
* This anonymous note was written by Calvino for the back cover of the first edition of Collezione di sabbia (Milan: Garzanti, 1984).