What Hell Is Not

by Alessandro D'Avenia

  But God’s weak omnipotence without man cannot do anything. Man’s freedom is the riverbanks between which God has chosen to confine his omnipotence.

  He hands out the pieces of bread to everyone.

  And then he begins to smile again. From far away, with a light that doesn’t come from the streets of men but from a space that no one can touch. A space that belongs to those who feel at home in the eye of the storm, to those who stand just a meter or two below the stormy surface, where the blue sky is calm and still. His hunger has been relieved and his thirst quenched because he has known hunger and thirst. It’s the joy of the journey for those who have arrived at their destination. To him, God is a never-ending port and man is a Malaspina in search of a place to dock.

  Chapter 45

  ‘This is for you.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A book.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘Petrarch’s Canzoniere. My favorite poet. I actually brought it for you a while ago but then a punch got in my way.’

  Lucia takes the book. She opens it. She smells it. And then she flips through the pages.

  ‘I’ve never read a book of poems before. I mean, a book with only poems.’

  ‘It’s just like other books, but as if the chapters were shorter.’

  ‘Why did you bring this for me?’

  ‘Because I know that you like books, and I have plenty of books. Or maybe I was hoping you would forgive me.’

  ‘Then why this book? I remember Petrarch being pretty boring at school.’

  My hands can’t stop fidgeting and I can feel my face turning red.

  ‘How does it end? I can’t remember.’

  ‘Not so good.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because she dies.’

  ‘And what about him?’

  ‘He keeps on loving her. And he writes about his memory of her.’

  ‘Which poem is your favorite?’

  I leaf through the more worn pages and I hand her the book.

  ‘Read it,’ says Lucia.

  ‘No, I can’t. You read it.’

  ‘You read it. It’s your poem.’

  I take a moment to clear my throat and then I begin to read slowly. I’m a little bit embarrassed.

  I cannot find peace and am not at war

  I feel fear and hope, I burn and am of ice

  I fly over the heavens and lie on Earth

  And I grasp nothing and embrace the entire world.

  One keeps me imprisoned who neither opens nor locks,

  Nor keeps me for herself nor frees my bonds.

  Love neither kills nor does he unchain me.

  He doesn’t kill me but nor will he free me.

  Without eyes or tongue, I see and shout.

  I long to perish and I plead for help.

  I hate myself and I love someone else.

  I graze on pain and laugh as I weep.

  I dislike death as much as life.

  In this state I am my lady because of you.

  ‘The first lines are beautiful. Also because they’re easier to understand. He says that he can’t find peace. But then he says he doesn’t have anything to battle, and it’s full of contradictions. That was about all I understood.’

  ‘I can explain it, if you want.’

  ‘Yes, please. Explain it to me. Who is keeping him locked up in prison?’

  ‘It’s Laura. The woman he’s in love with. It’s like she’s keeping him prisoner even though she isn’t stopping him from leaving. She neither opens nor closes his jail cell. She doesn’t tie him up nor does she set him free. And Love does the same thing to him. See how he writes it with a capital L? Love is a mysterious presence for Petrarch, a kind of shadow that oppresses him, just like when you’re in a dark room but you can still feel the presence of someone there. You’re sure that he’s there but he doesn’t say a word and you are afraid to ask.’

  I can’t muster the courage to look at her while I’m speaking.

  ‘It’s strange because he says things that don’t go together. Tying up and setting free. Closing and opening up. It doesn’t seem possible.’

  ‘They’re poems. Things happen in poems that you can’t explain. He can explain them. He’s someone who’s found the right words to say how he feels like he’s living a dual life. Because of Love, he’s divided into two states at the same time.’

  Lucia smiles as she watches me talk with my hands. My words are like juggling-clubs.

  ‘I get it. Then he says he can yell but has no tongue, right? Then he says he can see but doesn’t have eyes, right?’

  ‘Yes, exactly. They’re called oxymorons. They are words that go together even though they are contradictions.’

  ‘Oxymorons?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I like it. I’ve never heard that word before. It sounds like the name of some kind of fruit. But what does “I plead for help” mean?’

  ‘I ask for help.’

  ‘What about “I graze on pain”?’

  ‘Pain feeds me. Gives me energy.’

  ‘ “I laugh as I weep.” Is that an oxymoron?’

  ‘Yes. It’s the most beautiful one in this poem.’

  ‘Has it ever happened to you?’

  ‘An oxymoron?’

  ‘Yes. I mean, no. Have you ever laughed while you were weeping?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. What about you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘That’s none of your business. You must like words a lot . . .’

  ‘Words are like anchors for me. They help to keep things steady.’

  I look into her eyes.

  ‘Petrarch is more interesting than I thought. Our teacher made him seem so boring. By the way, I’ve been having trouble finishing the script for Little Orlando. It’s not as easy as I thought.’

  ‘I think it’s great.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Some parts could be a lot better. Maybe this book will help me. Thank you,’ says Lucia as she takes the book. ‘But words aren’t enough to make for a great show. It takes time and hard work. It’s not easy to get these kids to focus. That’s why I told you that you need to come to every rehearsal. I need you to help me.’

  ‘I didn’t go to England so that I could be here.’

  Lucia doesn’t say anything. And then she asks me, ‘Why do you want to keep things steady?’

  ‘I get seasick otherwise.’

  I’ve never seen her smile the way she’s smiling now. It’s one of those smiles that makes you lower your guard. It’s as if it were saying to the beholder: If your intention is to hurt me, this is where you need to strike.

  Oxymorons. Contradictions.

  Life itself is a contradiction: To have life, you must lose it first by falling in love.

  Chapter 46

  In port cities, there’s a moment every evening when the sea forgets about the sky and develops its very own color. It’s like the blue in the most beautiful Triumph of Death ever painted. There was a fifteenth-century painter in Palermo who painted such a color. No one knows his name. And so he is known only by the painting’s title.

  The artist must have dipped his brushes directly into the Grim Reaper’s palette: When you see the painting you feel like you are meeting death. Death is riding his galloping charger in the center, slicing diagonally through the scene. The horse looks like an x-ray of itself. It’s as if you could hear its neighing as Death shoots arrows at rich and powerful men who don’t seem to notice its dark presence. A group of poor people implore her to relieve them of their desperation, but she ignores them. The unjust justice of Death.

  Look carefully at this scene before the humidity eats it up, like all beautiful things. There’s just no way around it: Not even beauty is immortal in Palermo. Death has just shot an arrow into the neck of an elegant young blond man dressed in a blue brocade cloak.

  In the opposite corner there are a couple of frightened dogs barking. They will be i
mmortal as long as the painting preserves their pelt. A boy’s eyes are wide open and crazed. He clings to life as he offers his hand to a friend. All that the friend can do is grasp it. Otherwise, there’s no way to avoid sipping from the bitter chalice of complete solitude.

  Removed from its wall, this fresco is now in the same palazzo where Antonello da Messina’s Virgin Annunciate is displayed. Two of the world’s most perfect colors, each preserved under one roof. They represent man’s two callings in life. Death and life. The blue of The Triumph of Death and the blue of the Virgin Annunciate. Colors are the flags that men plant in the realm of light that God has seized from the darkness. The blue serves to take away God’s privilege of knowing the secret of life and of death.

  At that hour of the evening in which, for just a moment, everything is quiet and it appears that life and death will be overcome, two friends stroll along the banks of that blue.

  ‘Why did you say those things, Don Pino?’

  ‘What would you have done?’

  ‘I would have avoided saying something like that.’

  ‘They set people’s doors on fire with gasoline. We will set them on fire with the truth.’

  ‘What truth would that be? Since when is truth spoken in this city? Are you not aware of what happened to Falcone and Borsellino? What good would the truth do?’

  ‘If we keep tucking the truth away in the attic, sooner or later we’ll forget that there ever was truth. The problem in this city is that words mean one thing and the opposite of that thing at the same time.’

  ‘It’s better to live with double meanings than it is not to live.’

  ‘Don’t you understand? I said those things in the name of life, in the name of the neighborhood, the lives of the children, the lives of the women, the lives of the men, life itself! A priest must say these things. The worst thing that could happen is that they kill me. And then what?’

  ‘Please don’t say that. Don’t even joke about it.’

  ‘Mimmo always says that you have to die from something. Hamil, he has a wife and kids. What do I care if they kill me? They’d never kill a priest. No way. They know that all we do is talk, talk, talk. Beyond that, we don’t do much.’

  PART II

  Swooning

  Beyond you, oh sea, is my paradise, where

  I wore life’s pleasures, not its misfortunes.

  (Ibn Hamdis, Songbook II, 20–21)

  And the children in the apple-tree

  Not known, because not looked for

  But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

  Between two waves of the sea.

  Quick now, here, now, always . . .

  (T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, ‘Little Gidding,’ 35–39)

  Chapter 1

  The sunlight’s aggression begins to melt away as the evening arrives over the sea. This is the hour for resisting and standing tall. But how can you stand tall and resist when you live on the edge of the sea? No matter how abundant, brackish water doesn’t quench a burning thirst. And every man is revealed in his bruised mortality.

  The boy longs for everything and nothing at all. Don Pino longs for justice. Lucia longs for the beauty in one of her dreams, still intact. Francesco longs to play games with his father. Maria longs for the tenderness of a man’s touch. Manfredi longs for a brilliant career. Parents long for their children to achieve their potential. The Hunter longs for a happy life for his children. Nuccio longs for his bosses’ approval. Dario longs for a little bit of decency. Totò longs for a conductor’s baton. Riccardo longs for easy money.

  They are all living creatures. All of them kneaded with love and pain. The God of all swooning stirs within them. Such a heart hurls itself into continuous ecstasy and leaves the body behind. This infinite desire forces the heart to break if necessary. Many call it an empty heart and they heal it with love. But in Palermo it has a special name: Swooning, a throbbing pain caused by too much sea to behold and too many voyages to embark upon.

  For those who arrive in Palermo, the city is a never-ending port. But for those who were born here, it’s all about leaving, all about desire, all about flight. Never satisfied in the belief that it won’t happen to them, they are always waiting for what comes next.

  Infinite voyages, real and imagined, originate in the never-ending port. It’s the debt that must be paid to the city. But it’s also part of the city’s delicious charm: The call toward something that always lies beyond the horizon.

  A mmari a nnome ri Ddiu. That’s what the fishermen say when they start their day and throw their nets into the sea. ‘To the sea in the name of God.’ The Mediterranean is the most fertile gift given to us by the continental drift. There is no space more sacred or richer in memory than the sea. Today, it collects the fishermen’s sweat. In another era it was the repository of heroes’ tears.

  In Italian, a mare, meaning ‘to the sea’, and amare, meaning ‘to love’, sound the same. And everything here that is ambiguous is true. The heart longs for life but life will never satisfy its desire.

  The boy suddenly finds himself without his books. He reads directly from the pages of the sea and the horizon appears to him like the last line of a book. His eyes and heart put out to sea: The infinite resides not only in books and libraries. It’s in every neighborhood. It’s in every life that seeks its meaning.

  Later, he leaves the port behind and slowly re-enters the belly of the city, behind the port. In the Kalsa neighborhood: al-Khalisa, Arabic for ‘the chosen one.’ It’s where the sultan lived with his court because the fresh water of the Oreto river runs through it. Once you move beyond what remains of the river, you arrive at what were, once upon a time, the fertile lands of Brancaccio.

  Nearby, there is a market, and the most beautiful palazzo and the museum of Palermo, the botanical gardens, and the Basilica La Magione, the church where his parents were married a long time ago. He heads along Via Romano Giuseppe. Via Santa Teresa. And Via dello Spasimo, ‘Swooning Street.’ Yes, there’s a street near the shore named after the feeling that comes when you turn your back on the sea. There are certain cities where the streets, by their very nature, make the traveler a part of them, whether they like it or not.

  There’s a church on that street. It’s not dedicated to any saint, male or female, but rather to a feeling. Yes, the church is named after the Virgin Mary but no one knows that. Everyone calls it ‘the Spasimo,’ the swooning. It has no ceiling. It looks up at the sky just like the port looks out over the sea.

  And for a moment it seems that God could return anew to the earth through that ceiling that isn’t, just like a sailor who returns to she who longs for him.

  A never-ending port for those who arrive. Never-ending swooning for those who remain. A city built out of a paradox, a city where you are always arriving or waiting to leave.

  The boy sits beneath the patch of sky framed by the walls of the church and he stares into the sunburned blue.

  He knows about the sun. But where love arises, love always changes.

  Does such swooning save all of these lives? Or does it punish them?

  Chapter 2

  ‘Will you lend me your guitar?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m taking it anyway.’

  ‘I’ll set your books on fire.’

  ‘Come on, Manfredi!’

  ‘What do you need it for?’

  ‘There’s this kid who wants to become an orchestra conductor. It’s his dream.’

  ‘That has nothing to do with me.’

  ‘It does have something to do with you. Once you get involved, it’s always going to have something to do with you.’

  ‘Well, what do you need the guitar for?’

  ‘It would be so great if he could learn how to play an instrument. Then he could see if it’s something he really wants to do.’

  ‘And he needs to learn on my guitar?’

  ‘Do you have another solution? Look, I only know how to strum a few chords. Why don’t you come to Branc
accio and give him a lesson or two?’

  ‘What? Do you think I don’t have better things to do?’

  ‘I’m not saying that you have to move to Brancaccio. I’m just asking you to give up an hour or two of your time, in your own city, just a few kilometers from here.’

  ‘I’m not wasting any more time talking about this. I’ll lend you my guitar but you are responsible for it. If you break it, I’ll break you.’

  ‘Just relax. I’ll take good care of it.’

  ‘That’s exactly what worries me. Your ability to break and lose things is legendary.’

  ‘The important thing is not to lose your soul.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘That’s all we need: The bad poet. Make sure my guitar doesn’t get lost in your soul.’

  Chapter 3

  ‘What’s the deal with this bicycle?’

  ‘You need to learn me how to ride it. Damn, I’m the only one who doesn’t know how!’ answers Francesco in a bossy tone.

  A six-year-old boy and a nearly fifty-six-year-old boy stand before one another.

  ‘Right you are. Come on, let’s go. Let’s see what you can do.’

  ‘I’m not scared at all.’

  ‘If you’re not scared, why are you telling me that?’

  ‘Because I’m a little bit scared. But don’t tell anyone that.’

  ‘What’s wrong with being scared?’

  ‘No one respects you when you’re afraid.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with being scared, Francesco.’

  ‘Are you scared?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘High tide.’

  ‘And what else?’

  ‘Of pain.’

  ‘And what else?’

  ‘Of dying.’

  ‘Who would ever want to kill you?’

  ‘Nobody. Nobody at all. That’s not what I meant. What are you scared of?’

  ‘My mom leaving me alone.’