The passengers crowded around the gangway and Marcel was sucked into the crush. The woman stood apart, holding on to the cable of the railing. I’ll wait for you on the wharf, he shouted, without turning, I’ve got to move with the crowd! He raised an arm above the gaggle of heads, waving his hand. She leaned on the railing and began to gaze at the sea.
Translated by Tim Parks
Yo me enamoré del aire
The taxi stopped in front of a wrought-iron gate painted green. The botanical garden is here, said the driver. He paid and got out. Do you know from which side you might be able to see a building from the twenties? he asked the driver. The man didn’t seem to understand. It has some Art Nouveau friezes on the façade, he explained, it was certainly a building with some architectural value, I doubt they demolished it. The taxi driver shook his head and left. It must have been nearly 11:00 a.m. and he was starting to feel the strain – the trip had been long. The gate was wide open and a sign informed visitors that on Sundays admission was free and the doors closed at 2:00 p.m. He didn’t have much time, then. He started down a driveway lined with tall, thin palm trees topped with meager tufts of green. He thought: so are these the Buritì? At home they always talked of the Buritì palms. At the end of the driveway the garden began, with a paved clearing from which little paths departed for the four cardinal points. A compass rose was designed in the paving stones. He stopped, not sure which direction to take: the botanical garden was large and he’d never find what he was seeking by closing time. He chose south. In his life he’d always looked south, and now that he’d arrived in this southern city he thought it fitting to continue in the same direction. Yet, within, he felt a tramontana breeze. He thought of the winds in life, because there are winds that accompany life: the soft zephyr, the warm wind of youth that later the mistral takes upon itself to cool down, certain southwesterly winds, the sirocco that weakens you, the icy mistral. Air, he thought, life is made of air, a breath and that’s it, and after all we too are nothing but a puff, a breath, then one day the machine stops and that breath ends. He stopped too because he was panting. You’re really short of breath, he told himself. The path climbed steeply toward the terraced land he could just make out beyond the shadows of some enormous magnolias. He sat on a bench and pulled a little notebook from his pocket. He jotted down the names of the countries of origin of the plants around him: the Azores, the Canary Islands, Brazil, Angola. With his pencil he drew some leaves and flowers, then, using the two pages at the center of the notebook, he drew the flower of a tree with a very strange name, which came from Canary-Azores. It was a magnificent giant with long lanceolate leaves and huge swollen flowers shaped like ears of corn, which seemed like fruit. The age of that giant was quite remarkable, he worked it out: at the time of the Paris Commune it must have already been full grown.
He’d caught his breath now, and he took off at a brisk pace down the path. The sun hit him straight on, blinding him. It was hot, yet the breeze from the ocean was fresh. The southern part of the botanical garden ended in that huge terrace that provided a complete panorama of the city: the valley and the old districts with their dense grid of roads and alleys, the buildings mostly white, yellow, and blue. From up there you could embrace the whole horizon, and far off to the right, beyond the port with its cranes, lay the open sea. The terrace was bordered by a low wall, only chest-high, on which the city was depicted in a mosaic of yellow and blue azulejos. He began deciphering the topography, trying to orient himself with that primitive map: the triumphal arch of the lower city from which the three main arteries departed, that Enlightenment architectural style owing to reconstruction after the earthquake; the center, with the two large squares side by side, to the left the rotunda with the huge bronze monument, then the newer zone toward the north, its architecture typical of the fifties and sixties. Why did you come here? he asked himself, what are you looking for? It’s all vanished, everybody evaporated, poof. He realized he’d spoken aloud and laughed at himself. He waved at the city, as if it were a person. In the distance, a bell rang three times. He checked his watch, it was a quarter to noon, he decided to visit a different part of the garden and headed back to another path. At that moment a voice reached him. A woman was singing, but he didn’t know where. He stopped, trying to locate that sound. He went back, leaned over the wall, and looked down. Only then did he realize that to the left, just by the garden’s steep embankment, there was a building. It was old, one side to the botanical garden, but its façade was fully visible, and he could see it was a building from the beginning of the twentieth century, at least judging by the stone cornices and the stucco friezes representing theatrical masks laced with laurel wreaths. On the building’s flat roof was a huge terrace with chimneys jutting up and laundry cords running across it. The woman had her back to him, from behind she seemed a girl, she was hanging sheets but had to stand on tiptoe to reach the cords, her arms raised like a dancer. She was wearing a cotton print dress that outlined her slender body, and was barefoot. The breeze swelled the sheet toward her like a sail, and it seemed she was embracing it. Now she’d stopped singing, she bent over a wicker basket on a stool and pulled out colored garments, shirts it seemed to him, as though trying to decide which to hang first. He realized he was sweating a little. The voice he’d heard and no longer heard wasn’t gone, he could still hear it in his head, as if it had left a continuing echo, and at the same time he felt a strange yearning, a truly curious sensation, as though his body had lost all weight and was now fleeing into the distance, who knows where. Sing again, he murmured, please, sing again. The girl had put on a head scarf, had taken the basket off the stool, and now was sitting on it, trying to find shelter from the sun in the little bit of shade created by the sheets. Her back was to him so she couldn’t see him, but he stared at her, mesmerized, unable to avert his gaze. Sing again, he whispered. He lit a cigarette and realized his hand was trembling. He thought he’d had an auditory hallucination, sometimes we think we hear what we’d like to hear, nobody would sing that song anymore, those who once sang it were all dead, and then what song was it, from what era? It was quite old, from the sixteenth century or earlier, who could say, was it a ballad, a chivalrous song, a song of love, a song of farewell? He’d known it in another time, but that time was no longer his. He searched his memory, and in an instant, as if an instant could swallow up years, he returned to the time when somebody used to call him Migalha. Migalha means crumb, he said to himself, back then you were a crumb. Suddenly there came a strong gust of wind, the sheets snapped in the wind, the woman stood and began to hang colored shirts and a pair of short pants. Sing again, he whispered, please. At that moment the bells of the church nearby began pealing the midday hour and, as though summoned by the sound, a boy leaned out of the little rooftop dormer, where surely there was a set of stairs leading to the terrace, and ran toward her. He must have been four or five, curly-haired, his sandals with two semicircular openings at the toes and his shorts held up by suspenders. The girl put the basket on the ground, crouched down, cried out: Samuele! and opened her arms wide, and the boy dived into them, the girl stood and began spinning around, hugging the boy, they were both spinning like a merry-go-round, the boy’s legs were outstretched, and she was singing, Yo me enamoré del aire, del aire de una mujer, como la mujer era aire, con el aire me quedé.
He let himself slide to the ground, his back against the wall, and he gazed upward. The blue of the sky was a color that painted a wide-open space. He opened his mouth to breathe that blue, to swallow it, and then he embraced it, hugging it to his chest. He was saying: Aire que lleva el aire, aire que el aire la lleva, como tiene tanto rumbo no he podido hablar con ella, como lleva polisón el aire la bambolea.*
Translated by Martha Cooley and Antonio Romani
*A free translation of the two stanzas: “I was in love with the air, / With the air of a woman, / Because the woman was air, / I was left with a handful of air, / Air that car-ries off the
air, / Air that the air carries off, / Because she went so quickly, / I couldn’t talk with her, / As if it were lifting a skirt / The air swayed her.”
Voices
for my friend M.I., who once entrusted me with a secret.
The first call came from a girl who’d phoned for the third time in three days and kept saying over and over that she just couldn’t take it anymore. You have to be careful in these cases, as there’s the risk of psycho-dependence. You have to be kind but cautious; the person calling needs to hear a friend on the other end of the line, not some deus-ex-machina that her life depends upon. But the main rule is that the caller shouldn’t become attached to one particular voice: this can create difficulties. Depressed people slip into this quite easily, they need a confidant, aren’t satisfied with an anonymous voice; it has to be that voice that they desperately cling to. But with a certain kind of depression, for those with a fixed idea they use to wall themselves off, the situation grows even more complicated. Their calls are chilling, and you rarely make a connection. This time, though, it went well, because I was fortunate enough to discover something of interest to her. Another rule that’s valid in a good number of cases: steer the conversation toward a topic of interest to the caller, because deep down, even the most desperate of callers have one thing that interests them, even those callers who are the most cut off from reality. Often it’s a matter of our good will, you might need to resort to little tricks, to ploys; at times I’ve managed to clear up some seemingly impossible situations with a little game involving a glass, establishing some form of communication. Let’s say the phone rings, you answer with the usual stock phrase, or something of the sort, and on the other end, nothing, absolute silence, not even someone breathing. So you insist, trying to be tactful, that you know someone’s listening, so please say something, whatever you want, whatever comes to mind: an absurdity, a curse, a scream, a syllable. Nothing, complete silence. Yet if someone’s called, there is a reason, but you can’t know what that reason is – you don’t know anything – the caller might be foreign, mute, anything. So I pick up a glass and a pencil and say: listen to me, in this world there are millions and millions of us, and yet we two have met, true, it’s only on the phone, we haven’t actually met or seen each other, but we have met, let’s not throw away this meeting, it must mean something – listen to me – let’s play a game, I have a glass here, I’ll tap my pencil on it – ting – do you hear me? If you hear me, do the same, tap twice, or if there’s nothing in front of you, tap the receiver with your nail, like this, tick tick, do you hear me? If so, then please answer, listen to me, I’ll try and name a few things, what comes to mind, and you tell me if you like them, the sea, for instance, do you like the sea? For yes, tap twice, and once means no.
But it’s hard to understand what interests a girl who dials a number, stays quiet for nearly two minutes, then starts in with: I just can’t take it anymore, I just can’t take it anymore, I just can’t take it anymore, I just can’t take it anymore. Like that: over and over. It was just pure luck, because I’d put on a record earlier, thinking that on August 15, the start of Ferragosto, it wouldn’t be busy; and in fact my shift had been going for over two hours with no calls. It was incredibly hot out, the small fan I’d brought provided no relief, the city seemed dead, everyone gone, off on vacation, and I’d settled into an armchair and started to read, but the book dropped onto my chest, I don’t like falling asleep on my watch, my reflexes are slow, and if someone calls, I’m startled for a few seconds, and sometimes it’s these first seconds that count, because the person might hang up and might not have the courage to call again. So I put on Mozart’s “Turkish March,” the volume down, it’s cheerful, stimulating, it keeps up your morale. She phoned while the record was playing and was quiet a long while, then started saying she just couldn’t take it anymore, and I let her say it, because in these cases it’s best to let the caller express herself, say anything she wants and as often as she wants; when I only heard her troubled breathing over the phone, I said: just a minute, all right? and I took off the record, and she said: no, leave it on. Of course, I said, I’d be happy to leave it on, so you like Brahms? I don’t know how I’d sensed the music could provide a possible opening, the trick just came to me, sometimes a small untruth is providential; as for Brahms, probably the suggestion of the title by Sagan had played in my subconscious, a title always lying dormant in one’s memory. That’s not Brahms, she said, it’s Mozart. What do you mean, Mozart? I said. Of course it’s Mozart, she said quickly, it’s the “Turkish March” by Mozart. And thanks to this she started talking about the conservatory where she’d studied before something happened to her, and everything went very well.
Time, then, passed slowly. I heard the bell of San Domenico’s strike seven, and I went to the window, a light haze of heat over the city, a few cars going by on the street. I touched up my mascara, I sometimes feel pretty, and stretched out on the couch by the record player, and I thought about things, about people, life. The phone rang again at seven thirty. I said the usual stock phrase, maybe somewhat tiredly, on the other end came a moment of hesitation, then a voice said: my name is Fernando, but that doesn’t make me an Italian gerund. It’s always best to appreciate a caller’s jokes – they show the desire to make contact – and I laughed. I answered that my grandfather’s name was Andrei, but that didn’t make him an Italian conditional, just Russian, and he laughed a little, too. And then he said that he did have something in common with verbs, though, a particular quality of verbs. He was intransitive. All verbs are useful in the construction of a sentence, I said. It felt like the conversation allowed for a certain allusiveness, plus you always needed to go along with a caller’s chosen register. But I’m deponent, he said. Deponent in what sense, I asked. In the sense that I lay down, he said, I lay down my arms. Perhaps the mistake was thinking that arms shouldn’t be laid down, wasn’t that true? Perhaps we were taught bad grammar, it was better for belligerent people to arm themselves, so many people were unarmed, he certainly would be in good company. He said: could be, and I said our conversation sounded like a verb-conjugation table, and now it was his turn to laugh, a gruff chuckle. And then he asked me if I knew the sound of time. No, I said, I don’t. Well, he said, all you have to do is sit on your bed, at night, when people can’t sleep, just sit there with your eyes open in the dark, and after a little while you’ll hear it, like a distant roar, like the sound of an animal breathing while it devours people. Why not tell me about those nights, there was all the time in the world, I had nothing better to do but sit and listen. But he was already off someplace else, he’d skipped over some crucial connection for me to follow his story; he didn’t need this part, or perhaps wanted to avoid it. I just let him talk – there’s never a reason for interrupting – but I didn’t like his voice, it was a bit shrill, and then at times a whisper. The house is very large, he said, an old house, with furniture that belonged to my ancestors, awful, Empire-style, claw-foot furniture; and threadbare rugs, and paintings of gruff men and proud, unhappy women with slightly drooping lower lips. And why that curious shape to their mouths? – because the bitterness of an entire life outlines a lower lip and makes it droop, these women had spent sleepless nights beside stupid husbands incapable of affection, and these women, they too would lie in the dark, their eyes open and their resentment growing. There are still some of her things in the dressing room off my bedroom, things she left: some withered underclothes on a footstool, a simple gold chain she wore around her wrist, a tortoiseshell barrette. The letter sits on the bureau, beneath the glass bell that once protected a humongous alarm clock from Basel, the alarm clock I broke when I was a boy, one day, when I was sick, and no one came up to see me; I remember like it was yesterday, I got up and took the clock out from under that protective glass, the tick-tock was so scary, and I removed the bottom and methodically took the clock apart until there were tiny gears strewn across the sheet. I can read it to you if you want, the letter,
I mean – no – I can recite it from memory, I read it every night: Fernando, if only you knew how much I’ve hated you all these years…that’s how it starts, the rest you can gather on your own, that glass bell guards a massive, repressed hatred.
And then he skipped over another part, but this time I think I understood the connection, and he said: and little Giacomo? How do you suppose he turned out? He’s a man, somewhere, out in the world. And then I asked if that letter was from August fifteenth – I’d sensed it was – and he said yes, it was the exact anniversary, and he’d celebrate it accordingly, he had his instrument for celebrating all ready to go, it was there, on the table, by the phone.
He was silent, and I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t speak. Then I said: wait another anniversary, Fernando, try to wait one more year. Right away I knew how ridiculous that sounded, but nothing else came to mind, I was talking just to talk, and in the end it’s the idea that mattered. I’ve listened to all sorts of phone calls, to all sorts of people, in the most absurd of situations, and yet this was perhaps the time my normal bravura wavered, and I felt lost as well, like I needed someone else to sit and listen and tell me a few kind words. It was only for a moment, he didn’t answer, and I pulled myself together, now I knew what to say, I could talk about micro-visions, and I talked about micro-perspectives. Because in life there are all kinds of perspectives, so-called broad perspectives that everyone thinks of as fundamental, and those I call micro-perspectives, that I admit are probably insignificant, but if everything is relative, if nature allows for both ants and eagles to exist, then I wonder why can’t we live like ants, through micro-perspectives. Yes, micro-perspectives, I insisted, and he found my definition entertaining, but what do these micro-perspectives consist of, he asked, and I was determined to explain. The micro-perspective is a modus vivendi, let’s say it is, anyway, a means to focus our attention, all our attention, on one small detail of life, the daily grind, as if this detail were the most important thing in the world – but ironically – knowing it’s not even slightly the most important thing in the world, and that everything is relative. Making lists helps, jotting down appointments, following strict schedules, not compromising. The micro-perspective is a concrete way to stick to concrete things.
Message from the Shadows Page 22