She thought she no longer knew why, why! forgetting, in her extreme distress, that a plea, or love, is possible from the charity of the peoples:fn3 she no longer recalled anything: all previous help from her people was long gone, distant. In vain she had given birth to infants, had given them her milk: no one would realize it in the sulphurous glory of the storms, and of the chaos, no one gave it any further thought: other events had fallen across those distant visceral years, across the torment, across the forgotten tenderness: and the clamour of victory, and the rhetoric and the pomp of victory: and, for her, old age: this last solitude to close the final heavens of the spirit.
Molten wax dripped on to her trembling hand, burning it: the icy breath of the storm, from the window of the staircase inflected and laminated the flame, making it flicker over the pool and over the grease of the wax: that glimmer of the wick grew dim, in a deathly farewell.
She no longer saw anything. Everything was horror, hatred. Thunder loomed over everything and electric flashes plummeted in anger, gridded repeatedly by the slats of the closed shutters, high up. And here the scorpion, awake, had moved on, as if to one side, as if to outwit her, and she, trembling, had drawn back inside her lone being, stretching out a gelid and weary hand, as though wanting to stop it. Her hair hung over her brow: she dared not say a thing, with lips dry, bloodless: no one, no one would have heard her, beneath the clamour. And who could she call, in these altered times, when, after so many years, there was now so much hatred towards her? If those same infants, over the years, had been a pointless suffering, pride of cemeteries: lost! … in the vanity of the earth …
Why? Why?
From the dark depth of the staircase she looked up from time to time, and even during those hours, to distinguish silent interludes in the storm, the surprised nullity of the space: and of the intervening evening, from the eaves outside, drops, like tears, or the compassionate silence. She imagined that the sudden thrusts of each blast, having hurtled through each room, had left almost like a tardy tribe to regroup towards the plain and the night, where they rejoined their migrant flock. A shutterfn4 was banging, striking the wall of the house. The trees, outside, she heard, gave off light droplets, towards night-time, cleansed as if from weeping.
No one saw her, in the depth of fear, down there, alone, where the yellow light of the wick flickered, paled into the shadows, from the shelf, slowly dying in its liquefied wax. But if someone had happened to see her, oh! even a landsknecht! he would have felt in his heart that this face looking up, petrified, was not even attempting to plead, from vanished distance. Her loose hair rose from her brow, like a breath of horror. Her face barely emerged from the sombre swathe, her cheeks were a trough to the impossibility of tears. Her hooked fingers of old age seemed to be pressing down, down, into the plasma of the dark, the features of someone drawn to solitude. That face, like a spectre, turned away from the underground darknessfn5 to the supernal society of living beings, looking perhaps, without hope, for some assistance, for the voice of a man, of a son.
This name rested lightly on her mind: and was a cherished presence, a suggestion almost of morning and of a dream, a wing that flew high above, a light. Yes: there was her son, in the time, in the certainty and in the experience of the living: and even after the transformation, after the precipitation of the years. He walked among the living. He walked along the paths of men. Her first son. The one in whose young body she had yearned to see, oh! days!, the proof of nature’s deficiency, a failed experiment of the womb after the accepted fraud of the seed, reluctant to have suffered, to have generated something not its own: in a long and untreatable eclipse of her whole being, in the weariness of the mind, of the womb opened then to the slow disgrace of birth, in the derision of shrewd traffickers and merchants, under the constriction of the duties they impose, so nobly promoting the common good, to the suffering and misery of honest people. And now there was the son: just the one son. He wandered the parched roads along the fleeing elms, after the dust towards the evenings and the trains. Her first son. Oh! Only the raincloud – whistling skies lashing over the bent trees of the countryside – only terror could have separated her in such a way from the truth, from the sound security of memory. Her son: Gonzalo. Gonzalo, no, no!, he had not been awarded the funerary honours of darkness; his mother recoiled at the memory: away, away!, from the empty funeral, the dirges, the vile tears, the wailing: no candles had burnt down from on high, for him, between the pillars of the cold nave and arches darkened by the centuries. When the song of the abyss, among the candles, calls for those sacrificed to go down, down, into the verminous pomp of eternity.
The sound of a horn, from the highway: and emptiness. All went silent, at last. The cats, at the usual time, of course, had come here into the house, from where only they could enter: velvet presences were staring at her from halfway down the staircase, with eyes like topaz in the dark, but cleaved with a cut, their pupils lined with hunger: and, meowing, they gave her a timid greeting, a cry: ‘It’s time’. Domestic order and charity urged her up. And she, forgetting her own suffering, concerned herself immediately, as always, with that of others: she went back upstairs. The clomping stride of the peasant sounded on the brick floor above: back from buying tobacco, and perhaps, she hoped, some salt: he called out to her in the darkness, told her about the provisions and the fire, told her what time it was, how the crops were ruined: he moved around, still jabbering, opening the shutters, the windows. Consoled, once again she saw the sweet and distant resplendence of the village, and those everlasting words blossomed in her sweet memory: ‘Open the balconies – open the family terraces and loggias’: almost as though the reconstituted society of men had reappeared to her after a long night. And the faithful retainer, here, in front of the cats, was moving about the house: from his own hearth to another, so spacious and gelid: carrying flares, thyrsi; and then on the stairs; doors and windows banged behind the quadrupedal flight of clogs. And twigs and branches dropping more or less everywhere along the man’s route. And the wind had lost itself towards the plain, in the direction of Pequeño.
From the terrace, on summer evenings, she could see smoke from the houses on the far horizon, which she imagined populated, each one, with the wife keeping house, the husband in the cattle shed, and the children. Girls were returning, in droves, from the factory, the looms, or winding rooms, or dying-vats at the silk mill: bicycles had brought apprentices back from the anvil: or they had returned behind their father with swaying oxen from the field, and he guiding and controlling his low cart by the shaft: a cart with short, sloping, open sides, with small wheels on slick, silent axles, piled up with implements and with labour, with logs and with hay: on which tired scythes lay, as though forgotten, in the evening shadow.
Rustic offspring back numberless from work to the hearth, to a spoon: to the poor chipped bowls that compensated their day.
Far-off gleams of light, and song, reached her from outside the house. As if a housewife had taken her copper pot outside to dry in the yard, to reflect, glinting, the sunset. Perhaps to greet her, the Señora!, who herself had once, like them, been a woman, a wife and a mother. She envied no one. She wished all of them, all of them, the joy and calm strength of sons, that they would have work, health, peace: good marches in morning where the captain commands them: that they would soon find their bride, once back from the regiment, in the fragrant throng of girls.
And so, each day, she found some reason or excuse to call for the washerwoman, the baker’s daughter, the woman who sold lemons or sometimes a rare Tierra Caliente orange, the retainer’s eighty-six-year-old mother, or the fishmonger’s wife. (She had reason to think the last of these didn’t have a complete set of clothes on her person.) They were poor, dark pikes, whose gloomy noses were pointed with the wants of poor people; pikes that had swum and swum through green dearth towards the silvery flash of Durendal; or tench, large, yellow lake fish with a greasy and vapid slime, which, even with carrots and celery, still had a mu
ddy taste; harpooned up by line from the Seegrün after the hour of sunset, or from that other valley, most sweet in autumn, of the abbé-poet, or that other valley still further away, of the painter disciple, when it mirrors, beneath liquefied clouds, the upturned indentation of the mountain.
With carrots and celery, on a slow flame, in the long pike kettle; she stirred that sludge with a wooden spoon: out of which came something full of bones, of celery, but fairly appetizing. Once cooked, all that remained was to taste it; she was happy, offered it all to the women. The women praised her for her wonderful cooking, repaid her for her kindness.
She envied no one. Perhaps, after so much courage and concern, after having striven and suffered, and having produced her offspring without tears, so that they, the strategists of the republic,fn6 might have her finest blood at their disposal!, to do whatever they commanded; perhaps after the fiery haste of every day, and of the years, tired ellipses, perhaps the time was right: gentle assuager of every sacrifice: oh! it would take her to the place where people forget and are forgotten, beyond the houses and the walls, along the path attended by cypresses.
Rustic progeny, raising perpetual bread: let them grow up, let them love. She considered her story to be at its end. The sacrifice had been performed. In purity; of which God alone is knowledge. She was happy that other men and women might gather the vital sense of the tale, deluded still, with their hot blood, in regarding it as necessary truth. The smoke rose from the houses on the far horizon. No one would have kept her spirit, or her cheer, for so long in the empty days.
But Gonzalo? Oh, the marvel of life! A continuity fulfilled. Once again, from the terrace, she seemed aware of the curve of the world: the sphere of lights, revolving; they vanished in a mist the colour of periwinkle towards the quietness of the night. On the world, bringer of grain, and of song, the tranquil lights of midsummer. She felt herself still watching it, from the terrace of her life, oh! still, for a moment, to be part of the calm evening. A sweet lightness. And, high in the sky, the sapphire of the ocean: which Alvise had contemplated, in trepidation, and Antoniotto of Noli, rounding capes of nameless reality towards the emergent dream of archipelagos. She felt drawn into the event, into the ancient flow of possibility, of continuation: like all, close to all. She had overcome the darkness through her thought, her sons, giving herself: gifts of good works and hopes for the sanctity of the future. Her consummate labour took her back on to the path of souls. She had learned, taught. Late chimes: and silence had drunk the slow-burning wick of the vigils. Dawn crept in between the lines: noble paragraphs! and she, in sleep, repeated its sentence. Generations, chirruping of springtime, game of perpetual life beneath the gaze of the towers. Thoughts had stirred thoughts, souls had stirred souls. Grieving nations ferried them towards the shores of knowledge, ships by the Dark Sea. Perhaps in this way the atrocity of her pain, to God, would not be without purpose.
She put her hands together.
Gonzalo, with his work, made enough to live on. Recently, he had been to Modetia,fn7 the seamstress at Modetia was to make him some plain woven shirts: she had, indeed, written: she would cut them with the greatest care, so obliged she felt, dear Señora, for her kindness and courtesy.
Gonzalo! Her older son had no state pension, except for a trifle, for a paltry medal: the last and most ludicrous of medals. (But this is what the experts might believe, not his mother’s certainty.) There was, in any case, no reason for him to have a state pension. His eardrums were affected, now, by an ailment other than some traumatic wound – ruined, it could be said, by some other tedium that was not the impenetrable mist of deafness. She couldn’t say how he had reappeared to her, oh!, in an ashen dawn: among the commerce and the mire of Pastrufazio, and the indomitable motor cars. He was unscathed, with few years inside the grey epaulettes he wore on his return. Perhaps his war had not been hazardous for him. He told no stories, never: he never spoke about it to anyone: certainly not to the children, when they gathered round him during a moment’s rest, warriors or admirals, grazed, hot, with tin bayonets: nor to the ladies in the villas who were, he said, among the choicest women of Pastrufazio, those most thirsty for epic sagas: and consequently the most enthusiastic imbibers of tall stories.
There again, it seemed he had a loathing for children. A glum severity came over his face on finding even a single one of them in the house, like that poor dimwit – the mother smiled – of the caillou, bijou. Oh! ‘her’ Gonzalo! It was quite obvious that the arsenal of glory had refused to take care of him. In him, Plautus wouldn’t find his character, perhaps Molière. The poor mother, without wishing it, saw once again the distant figures of Le Misanthrope and L’Avare, all lace and frills to the knees, in the old book, in two columns, of her adolescent mornings, of her so fervid wakenings: when the circle of the small oil lamp, on the table, was the orb of thought and clarity in the security of the silence. In the old book, smelling of old French ink, with bonnets, lace and Maître Corbeau.fn8 It was clear. After salvaged victories, the printers of funereal glory no longer had enough of their mortuary wood-cuts for a veteran’s verses without hendecasyllables: funerary lamps and phrases and flames and perennis ardee: all used up for the wood-cuts, on the covers of cadaverous poems. Never, never would he, Gonzalo, have used his dead comrades for such glorious poetizing, his brother, a distant smile! The name, the desperate memory, closed up inside him.
The haberdashers had no frills at any price that they could sell him, nor caballero braid, nor ribbon, nor buckles, for his quiet existence. The hidalgo kept away from salons, from the opinions of patriotic ladies. To weak tea, if that were not enough, he preferred the solitary Recoleta road. After such regrettable observations, serious people began indeed to form the view that he should be avoided. And one fine day, indeed, having completed his courses in humanities, and in engineering, his native city of Pastrufazio couldn’t wait to be rid of him.
But these considerations lay beyond his mother’s love, as also her language: in the misery of her dull days she had never taken part in the conversations, in the tinkling conglomerations of fine society.
She thought sweetly of this elder son of hers, seeing him as a child again, intent and studious. And now already hunched, bored of wandering the footpaths. She returned, from the terrace, into the main room. The flies were back, now that the storm was over, buzzing over the table: where the newspapers lay, with new events, that had given way to others. And likewise from year to year, from day to day; for the whole succession of years, of days. And the pages, soon, turned yellow. When the flies ceased their merry-go-round, for a moment, and even the fat green fly, for an instant; then in the fleeting cosmos of that unexpected suspension she could hear the woodworm more distinctly crunching, crunching laboriously, in short spurts, in the old walnut secrétaire that she could no longer unlock. The key had lost its play over successive attempts, or, perhaps, in the painful shadows of memory. The portrait must be there … the portraits … the mother-of-pearl cufflinks … two letters, perhaps, as well … the last ones! … her work scissors, the black lace fan … The one they’d given her in the marshes, a farewell present from colleagues, from the few girls she had taught … several of them excited, all wanting a kiss from her … but she had no shortage, por suerte, of spare scissors: three pairs, in fact.
And there had been the wedding.
If her thoughts moved down, from the recollection of those two children, to recent years, to today … the cruelty seemed to her too great: akin, savagely, to scorn.
Why? Why? Her face, in those intervals, petrified her in anguish: no stirring of the soul was any longer possible: perhaps she was no longer the mother, as in the distant, lacerated, howls of childbirth: she was no longer a person, but a shadow. She paused like that, in the room, with eyes blind to every compassionate return, fleshless immobility of old age, for long swathes of time. And the cloak of poverty and of old age was like an extreme sign of existence brought before the faces of portraits, where fatuous flying inse
cts, in the emptiness, will orbit inside what is left of tomorrow. Then, almost a seasonal rite, all of a sudden, the hour struck from the tower; liberating its lost, equal chimes into the emptiness. And it seemed to her an unnecessary, cruel reminder. In the finished time of every summer, across the world that had forsaken her in this way. The flies traced a few circles in the main room, in front of the portraits, beneath the horizontal rays of the evening. Then, with one weary hand, she tidied her hair, whitened by the years, spilling over her forehead, unstroked like the hair of King Lear. Survivor of every fate. And now in the silence, as dusk came down, the storms of possibility vanished. She had learned so much, read so many books! By the small oil-lamp, Shakespeare: and she still recited several verses, like forgotten syllables scattered from a shattered stele, once a light of knowledge, and now the horror of the night.
In the sky the vapour, the smoke, had vanished from above the fireplaces, beneath cooking pots, of people’s frugal suppers. They had vanished like a bounty of the earth: towards the evening star, through the bluish September air: up, up, to the golden light, from the black chimneys; which rise with the strength of towers beyond the shadows and the blue-tinted hills, behind trees, above the distant chimney pots of the houses.
She had heard the rolling of the train … the arriving whistle … She would have liked someone to be near, as darkness approached.
But her child appeared only rarely at the doorway of the house.
The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories Page 30