A Different Sea

by Magris, Claudio

  That is the way forward, not the tropical tumescence of this tree. To presume something from life leads to megalomania, as Ibsen said. Even Buddha only started the true life when he ceased to yearn and instead drained the spurting, excess lymph that bloats the heart and glands. Carlo’s smile, however, is as fresh as limpid water. Persuasion should resemble drinking, as Carlo drank from the fountain in the school courtyard, without compulsion – either of burning thirst or surfeit. Let the water flow. Don’t block up the spring. Right now Enrico would like to dry out that drago tree, to drain its veins. Carlo too would dislike such riotous bombastic growth, although in a different way. What his reaction would be, Enrico wasn’t sure. He just knew that it would have taken another form.

  Standing in front of this tree Enrico now thinks he understands Schubert-Soldern and his notorious decision that amazed everyone and eluded all obvious explanation. Whenever they used to put the question to him directly, Schubert-Soldern would reply politely, with vague and incongruous hints about his health. Occasionally he explained to them in class his own theory of gnoseology and solipsism, contained in capacious tomes held by some library or other, according to which the only knowable reality is the knowledge of the knower. He used punctiliously to distinguish this position from the practical solipsism spitefully attributed to him by certain colleagues. But given his view that life is ruled by mutual misunderstanding, he had no need to worry if his audience was either intellectually incapable or unwilling to understand him.

  And right now, back home in Gorizia, Schubert-Soldern would be taking his customary stroll after school along the banks of the Isonzo, watching the river for a while, and then buying two cakes for his wife from a pastry shop in Via Municipio. To reduce, to compact: civilization, like gardening, is the art of pruning. Enrico, however, is disenchanted with civilization. He refused military service not least because he would have had to shave his head. He wants to do his own thing. But something doesn’t quite add up. Where does one have to go to become a Schubert-Soldern? Gorizia or Patagonia? Where is it that nothing happens? It will be easier back on board, where the ship’s steady rolling aids thought. He will write to Carlo, to Nino, and to Paula, to tell them of this afternoon at Las Palmas and to hear their views.

  He lies back on his bunk with relief and stares at the ceiling as he waits for the siren to signal their departure and for sleep to come. The Columbia glides through the billowing sea, the sun rises and the stars set, the ship’s wake is forever erased. The sextant plots their position, the primeval chaos becomes evermore distant, and, after another two or three ports of call, arrival and departure are indistinguishable.

  Enrico writes his first letter, to Carlo naturally, from Neuquen on the Rio Negro, a rough township facing the Andes on the borders of Patagonia. “Just to say hello and to ask you to pass on my good wishes to the family. Affectionately yours, Enrico.”

  II

  There is not much to say about Patagonia. One doesn’t go to listen to the sound of the wind in the thorn bushes just for the sake of the odd anecdote. Not Enrico at any rate. Giving others a guided tour of one’s life, letting them wonder at its marvels or merely at its curiosities – God forbid! Besides, no one ever stops to listen or really tries to understand. Alien faces the lot of them, like those in that train at Bologna. What does it matter if it was only a dream? As if there was any more life in the harsh faces giving him blank stares in that compartment as he awoke.

  No idle chit-chat. Ban poets from the philosopher’s Ideal State, and even from the tent pitched for the night. That band of sycophants who worship reality and cultivate personal misfortune, all of them so proud of their petty feelings and their rhyming skills – “Jack Sprat would eat no fat” – one lot winking knowingly, the other lot listening open-mouthed, pretending to understand. Leopardi was different. He was free of self-love and had even ceased resenting his own unhappiness. On the pampas and afterwards in Patagonia, Enrico gazes at the moon, Leopardi’s Nomadic Shepherd, that asks no questions: it is white and chipped, like a piece of chalk. Carlo too jettisons the ballast. He has no time for endless, head-spinning gossip, malicious rumours, intrigues, insolence, tragedies, confusion. In Carlo’s poetry there is only the open sea, a sea without shores, and without ships. No Aphrodite jumping out of a shell: life is not a circus.

  For a short while Enrico toyed with the idea of teaching at the Dante Alighieri Institute at Bahia Blanca. An Italian from Finale Ligure, a one-time baker, tile-manufacturer, and now successful wine-merchant, tried to persuade him to take up the position, filling Enrico’s head with plausible arguments: Italians in Argentina should stick together in the unstable political climate; everyone was envious of them because they knew how to work, as he did too in his own small way; it was an old story that had been going on for years. Pro Menelik graffiti was one thing, but the bands of Acuña, at Cañada de Gomez, were something else – real thugs, with no sense of gratitude for all the Italians of the Legion Valiente did to free their country. The Italians must get organized now and stick together. The best and only focus was the Dante Alighieri Society, he told Enrico, both non-religious and patriotic. After all, it had been the Freemasons who had made Italy, not those sermon-mumblers and miracle-marvellers of the Association for the Support of Catholic Missionaries.

  But Enrico understood little of these matters. The Masonic King of Italy interested him no more than the Apostolic Emperor whom he had refused to serve. He wanted nothing to do with either the anarchist escapees from Italian prisons or the Salesians who had spread as far as San Nicolas de Los Arroyos. Before this he had taken a job delivering horses to some engineers building a railway in the Cordillera. Enrico owned two horses, first-class animals, as fast and as agile as any guanaco or ostrich. After that he had joined up with two Germans and bought a thousand sheep and several hundred head of cattle and horses. They drove them from one cattle station to another, six hundred kilometres north and south, buying and selling on their own account or for a third party. He also went into business with a cousin of his, but it didn’t work out. Nothing too disastrous or worth complaining about, as he had written to Nino, given the nature of the business and the people involved.

  Seppenhofer, one of his school friends who had gone out there as well, had been unable to cope and had returned home after a few months. Enrico isn’t worried. He feels no sadness or remorse. Every wish destroys true existence. One must be free from vain belief in self. Death kills that belief only, nothing or no one else; to depart is to die a little, and is therefore nothing. Enrico copied out in pencil in his blue notebook a phrase he had written as a sixteen-year-old. Die Freiheit ist im Nichts: freedom exists in nothingness. Imagine being a schoolmaster. Every bit of knowledge is merely rhetoric – teaching it is even worse.

  Instead now he spends all day on horseback, teaching nothing and no one. Occasionally he shouts at the herd to keep it together, but that’s all. They are sturdy animals with warm, brown backs rippling like the sea over the limitless plains; their shoulders rise and fall, panting in unison with motherly breath; he among them, on horseback, lost in the hot flush of evening as it fades slowly but unquenchably. The sun sinks red and warm into the dark silhouette of those backs. The moist warmth of their flanks against the hand feels good. Darkness slides like a thin serpent into the heavens, swallowing clouds, sun and sky and then, dilating and swelling python-like, it coils itself in a pool of shadows to blot out everything but the docile gleam of cows’ eyes. Enrico dismounts, wraps himself in a blanket on the ground and immediately falls asleep.

  Riding gives him pleasure. For one moment, as his boot touches the sweaty flank beneath, he and his horse become one. The erudite centaur, Chiron, had spoken Enrico’s preferred language. In Gorizia he rode whenever he had an opportunity. So it was that his romance with Carla began. Beautiful, haughty, impetuous Carla, with eyes so blue beneath chestnut hair. She is his second cousin and her blue eyes resemble his – perhaps they are too alike, if only in their eyes. Drea
ming of riding across prairies in the wind Carla waits – either to join him or for his return. She waits, her head high, for the true life that waiting destroys.

  When fatigued after hours of riding, Enrico likes to sleep in the saddle. His head resting on his horse’s mane and secured to its neck with the reins, he continues to ride, half asleep, just seeing through half-shut eyes. In this distracted state, thoughts flood in – of soft dark waters, of the sea’s bed, of the opaque swish of underwater weeds and grass, a cradle of long brown hair. Carla’s chestnut hair, Paula’s black hair, Fulviargiaula, three tones of tympano rebounding, muffled, sobbing beneath the water. Paula’s dark and burning eyes, the phosphorescent night sea of August. Things may be neither good nor evil, Carlo, but such indifference carries its own penalty. A stifled smacking sound sank underwater. Farewell Carlo. I should like to find you here when I wake.

  Correspondence is difficult because of the distance and the unreliable poste restante. Some letters addressed to Enrico care of Verzegnassi the chemist in Buenos Aires were sent back again. His mother posted him a cheque without adding a word: he returned it without a reply. Carlo wrote to say that the thought that he would soon have news of Enrico made him feel less miserable. Enrico reads his letter again: “From you we are expecting a most important contribution to our reality.” He puts the letter away and looks at his feet resting on a log next to the fire. For once he is wearing socks, as it is cold. Close by, a calf, its muzzle nearly touching the ground, gives him a blank stare. To graze, to ruminate, to die. It is a relief to lighten the load. His talent is for reducing things, not for increasing them. Why do they expect things from him that he cannot give? He gets to his feet and goes for a walk, paying no attention to the animals that shy nervously away.

  He writes back and a few months later receives another letter from Carlo, puzzled about his reticence which he attributes to the trials and difficulties that his friend is having to endure “out there”. But the fact is that Enrico, “out here”, is doing fine and has all he needs. True, he has left his heart in Gorizia with Carlo, but one can survive well enough without a heart – like having an artificial hand or leg. All it takes is a bit of practice and then one can climb again into the saddle without difficulty. The problem lies only in explaining one’s feelings.

  Carlo’s words arrive, large and peremptory, raining down like arrows in the void. “We have been inevitably drawn to you in our grey lives . . . we have come to understand the meaning of a confident and dignified conscience . . . you give definition to mankind and the material world . . . you, Rico, are a being of superior strength, like a saint, serene and assured in whatever circumstances of life or of death . . . you are showing us the way towards a true valuation of things.” Dated 28th November, as he was leaving. A saint in Patagonia? Enrico lifts his eyes from the page to a large, dense cloud in the sky. It is as though it is his body floating away up there, leaving on its own account, while he himself, half reclining on the earth, is merely an empty form, the imprint of something that has been carried off.

  Carlo wrote those words to him, Enrico. It should have been the other way round. His heart either contracts or swells. He understands little of these cardiac metaphors, but some part of him somewhere is definitely trembling. It isn’t right. Their having been at school together means a great deal – but not everything. One of them is called Carlo, the other Enrico. Were it not for the time he had pointed out that thread of water falling down over the rock, perhaps Carlo would never have written that piece on life, how it flows and then is lost. But you cannot expect someone always to stay on the pedestal you make for him. Nino, too, always feels the need to rush ahead and reach the top of the hill during an otherwise enjoyable walk in the woods, while Enrico is happy enough lying on the grass and watching the daisies grow.

  29th June 1910: “You, Rico, with your self-assurance, live your life ready for anything. Everything, whatever the peril, has a way of turning spontaneously to you. Because you ask for nothing. It is as though you do not notice the passage of time for, by acting in every moment, you are free of it. Thus too every word you utter derives from a life of freedom . . .” Carlo is right, Enrico asks for nothing. He does not even ask why and how it is that everything just seems to come his way – this letter, for instance, which is even, perhaps, too much.

  When he is out riding, with that rush of excitement that brings colour to his cheeks, his troubled thoughts are forgotten. Sometimes after hours in the saddle he grows thirsty. So he lassos a wild horse and then slackens the rope, leaving the animal to lead him to some tiny spring it knows among the rocks with threads of cold, silent rust. At other times he has to kill a horse and drink its blood to quench his thirst.

  He moves a little further south, towards San Carlos de Bariloche. He spends all day and every day in the saddle, careful to keep the herds from straying and getting lost. As soon as he can he will build a large corral, worry less about the animals escaping, and not wake up before they stir at dawn in the cold wind that comes, passing over few living things on its way, from the frozen distant wastes. But obtaining timber and building an enclosure are expensive, and right now he has no money. He must be patient and wait.

  Wagon trains come past every so often. Enrico sells an animal and buys some tobacco, rice, biscuits, and coffee. Occasionally there are women travelling south with the wagons and then back up north, with a view to meeting men of his sort. One can afford to sleep with them for three days on the proceeds from the sale of a horse or calf, if the wagon trains stop that long; otherwise an hour is good enough. The women are fine mounts with strong flanks that know how to carry a good weight. And when minded they can show a bit of unexpected spirit that takes one by surprise. Yet whenever Enrico thinks about them, he can never conjure up any single one in all her particulars. He never remembers which face goes with which oversized breasts or with which gargantuan rump. There was one woman who, immediately it was over, would pull some flat maize bread and lard from her poncho and begin to eat, while he was still caressing her back, thinking it nicer to wind down slowly and not to have it over and done with all at once.

  Occasionally too he sleeps with Indian women, but only rarely. He is stimulated by their harsh, closed faces, something which makes him feel rather ashamed. With them he rushes in like a nervous boy rather than relaxing and enjoying himself like a man. They twist like snakes and mutter incomprehensibly, while with the other women there is an amiable understanding that a poor devil doesn’t have to make an effort to satisfy them. You and she understand and tolerate each other, whereas the Indian woman beneath him is beyond reach. Perhaps she is enjoying it but, if so, it is without noticing him. He might as well not exist: it is as though he simply isn’t there. Only his pestle grinding away on its own account.

  But it doesn’t happen very often. People pass by so rarely. He admires the way the Indian women give birth without fuss. As soon as it is over they get to their feet and, if it’s winter, break the ice of the frozen stream to wash themselves and the baby. If the child is healthy the cold does no harm, and if it dies – well it would not have survived anyway. Enrico doesn’t stop to think about it, not least because he has never been able to endure babies, especially when they scream. The Indians he respects. But then the Indians respect each other. They harm nothing, neither man nor beast, without good reason. They strip life to the bone, like a leg of guanaco. His teacher Schubert-Soldern is an Indian too in his way. At times they defecate like horses, upright, with regal nonchalance, in their rapid stride across the prairie.

  He has built himself a cabin, but just to sleep in, with a plank of wood for a bed. When hungry, he kills a sheep or shoots a rabbit. He has a good aim, and is in general capable and accurate – with horses as with the Greek aorist. Basic skill is only proper, since everything has the right to be treated with due care. It is right to know how to pick a flower without damaging it. To roast a piece of meat one only needs two stones and some firewood. And when it is months since the
last wagon train, and he has run out of salt, he does not waste his meat. Instead he chews it, tasteless though it is, without spoiling it by wishing for the salt he lacks.

  The milk too is good. He drinks it warm, straight from the bucket beneath the cow. He removes his sombrero to scoop out some milk – much easier than drinking from cupped hands. There is no need to lock up his cabin. It’s enough to wedge the door with a stone to keep out the rain and the animals. From the Cordillera to the coast there is talk of outlaws, of Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, or Evans, dead or resurrected. But no one ever passes by his way – for the past two years he hasn’t seen a soul. He has no need of a lock on the door to protect two planks of wood, a couple of blankets, and five or six Teubner classical texts.

  Enrico detests locks, as he does ties. But that does not mean that others could rifle through his kit. Absolutely not. In fact the letter from Tolstoy annoyed him for that reason. The grand old man replied magnanimously and irrevocably to him, an unknown lad from Gorizia, and he kept those four sheets written in German, along with the letters from Carlo, among the pages of Sophocles. Enrico had written to Tolstoy – from the attic, of course. That was where they had read the works of Ibsen and Tolstoy. Those two Atlases who propped up the world had shaken it to its foundations by sundering themselves inexorably from the rhetoric in which they, like all the rest, had their roots. Truth was enshrined in their writing, as in the music of Beethoven. Enrico had written with reckless candour: he had wanted to become a follower, to enter the commune. The grand old man’s reply had been brusque and majestic: he could come but first he should give all that he owned to the poor, as is written in the Gospels. It was easy enough for Tolstoy to give away his wife’s possessions, but that did not go down at all well with Enrico. Better Schopenhauer, who kept a close watch on his purse and his food. Enrico prefers to own nothing, to undress on the banks of the Isonzo, to strip naked and throw himself into the water. But why should someone come along and carry off his rags and get praise for it? It is a senseless, empty gesture, as when his uncle Giuseppe gave away his townhouse in Gradisca and then sponged off his brothers.