A Different Sea

by Magris, Claudio

  But one doesn’t laugh or sneer at someone who traverses the ocean. Horses are at pasture on all sides. Carla loves horses and was made to race before the wind. All he did was fire her imagination in Piazza Ginnastica after school with his talk of riding on the open prairies. It is not that she didn’t follow him – thank God she didn’t – but rather it is he, Enrico, who is incapable of following her, as she goes forward fearlessly to face life. For unlike the women of the wagon trains, or even, perhaps, Fulviargiaula, Carla is the child-bearing type; and Enrico can’t stand children.

  Mario is embarrassed at first. Enrico removes his sombrero and lets the wind riffle his hair. Carla’s gaze in Mario’s eyes goes straight to his heart. Then he feels relieved, as light as air. It is a splendid day, and he takes Mario off trout fishing. They sit for hours, smoking and watching the water, as every so often a fish struggles on the hook.

  The outside world often impinges noisily. America is in uproar, he writes to Nino, even though the huge distances of the prairies muffle the din before it filters through to him. The army of President Yrigoyen fires on the chilotes on strike against the estancia owners, and continues shooting even though they surrender on condition that their lives are spared. News reaches him of firing squads, mass graves, torture and murder in the prisons. Once, in the centre of Buenos Aires, he himself witnesses the police open fire on an unarmed crowd and then step up the firing with relish as they stampede, trampling the bodies of the dead and wounded.

  Even before this massacre the city is in a frightful state, with overcrowding, poor housing, and deafening noise. Everything is in utter confusion, as though a crowd were in continuous flight from spraying bullets. Enrico is now in Buenos Aires with scurvy. There was plenty of meat in his cabin but no fruit and vegetables. Better to be a cow or a sheep and feed on grass. Sores appear on his skin, his gums bleed and his cheeks are scabrous.

  As soon as he is cured he flees the noise of Buenos Aires, back to Patagonia. He really must build that corral, get organized, and grow some vegetables. He suffers a relapse, his bones ache too much to stay all day in the saddle. The idea of returning to Buenos Aires, however, appals him. He cannot go on. This chapter of his life is over, and it is best not to dwell on it – just like anything else. He will return to Gorizia. As the ship draws alongside the pier at Trieste, Enrico looks at the shore and, leaning over the side, casts the few remaining pesos from his pockets into the sea.

  III

  His return to Gorizia in 1922, wearing the new clothes his brother made him buy from Beltrame immediately on landing at Trieste, is not so different from those journeys the length and breadth of Patagonia, where the only folk one met belonged to wagon trains going the other way. There, as paths crossed and in the very moment of exchanging greetings, one was already bidding farewell.

  The old Imperial Staatsgymnasium has been renamed Liceo Vittorio Emanuele III, and Schubert-Soldern has left to live as a foreign resident in Austria. Having lost two empires, now that Gorizia is Italian and his native Prague is part of Czechoslovakia, he is reluctant to choose a new identity. Just possibly too he is not discontent with life in the draughty vacuum created by the cyclones and anticyclones of history. He is even able to eke out an existence on a salary arranged by some ingenious bureaucrat of the little new-born state – at least until “his worries ceased” – to use one of his own favourite expressions – on 19th October 1924.

  Enrico’s arrival coincides with the departure of others. His mother died in 1917 at Udine. Nino dies on 19th August 1923. He falls while climbing and lies trapped for hours in the Houcnik Gorge in Val Tribussa up on Mount Poldanovetz. Carlo was wrong. It is Nino who knew how to live a life of persuasion, with no hankering after romantic escapism or any other such foolishness. His was the great-hearted life, lived in love for his wife Pina and their two daughters, lived for his friends, and in the pleasure he took in his bookshop in Piazza Grande. “He used to regard mankind with nobility,” says Marin, one of his friends. Lying there in the coffin, his face shines with the light of their lamp.

  Ervino Pocar, who saw him fall, leaves for Milan. He too learned, after a long, devoted and highly successful study of ancient Greek at his desk in their old school, that virtue brings honour. Ervino understood, in the company of his classmates, that to love means to listen, and that reading is more important than writing. Or, as Nussbaumer taught them, if it is really necessary to take up one’s pen, translation is best. Placing oneself at the service of the great authors is worthier than self-advertisement. Biagio Marin teaches at a secondary school, and when the authorities decide to transfer him, after taking issue with his teaching of St John’s Gospel, he retorts that he is not a piece of luggage, throws it all up and takes himself off to Grado. Others leave as well: Camisi to Egypt, Segalla for the Trentino.

  Enrico is confused. It seems that he has left rather than returned, and is again among the gauchos. When last seen, Felipe Gutierrez was heading for the Cordillera, while José Antonio Pinto was way down south. He spends little time looking at the Carso or the Isonzo, for both have drunk too much blood, as some swamps in South America drink light. And he listens uneasily as his friends speak of their involvement in massacres or attacks and bloody counter-attacks on captured positions.

  Enrico notices another aspect of this tragic war in which his friends were set each against each other, but does not try to understand. He says nothing when they speak of a drink of water given to a wounded man under fire, of a soldier who threatened to shoot his own comrades, brutalized from weeks in the trenches, to prevent them butchering a prisoner. He thinks back with unease to Tolstoy’s letter and rudely leaves the room. Once he even makes a tart comment about the widow of Walter, one of their friends killed on Mount Sabotino. Then he grows irritable, possibly because he is ashamed, but also to make them leave him in peace. Their fraternity and their pious feelings for the enemy are nothing to him. He has no interest in the enemy, in brothers, or in children. Carlo alone might have been a brother.

  Monsignor Fogar, their religious teacher at school, is now Bishop of Trieste and is doing his best to protect the Slavs from fascist terrorism and violence. The Slavs retreat behind an impenetrable wall, making Enrico feel rather in awe of them, although he smarts at the injustices they are suffering. For his boyhood Slovenian, sufficient for friendly games after school at Rubbia or Gorizia, is now like some dead language – inadequate to bridge the gap.

  They used to call him “the prof” even on the pampas, and now he takes a teaching job on a yearly contract. A friend, Don Igino Valdemarin, who was also in Carlo’s class, is now head of a seminary and uses his influence to help him, despite the fact that Enrico is not a Party member. Don Igino is a poet, aware that a class is a communion of souls as indissoluble and as varied as the communion of the Creed. Each morning at the seminary Enrico listens, with bowed head but without crossing himself or moving his lips, as his pupils pray. He then tests their knowledge of conjugations and declensions. But he never discusses the historical or literary value of a text or talks of Achilles’ tears or Ulysses’ yearning for his distant homeland.

  Doubtless they find him dry, but he is not going to put on an act to win them over. He doesn’t approve of seduction. At most he might seduce a woman, but only for as long as it takes: he would never try to win her heart. Even less does he want disciples hanging on his every word and traipsing around behind him, or worse still, following in his footsteps to Patagonia. Adopted children are even more tiresome than one’s own. He can’t abide the class looking at him as he teaches.

  However, no one can complain of dereliction of duty. He teaches according to the rules – Gandino’s Grammatica, the Ausfuhrliche Griechische Grammatik by August Matthild, Leipzig 1835, and the Repetitorium der lateinischen Syntax und Stilistik by Menge – books that have crossed the ocean both ways. And he prepares his lessons and the composition exercises with meticulous care. On the back of the De Bello Gallico, for example, he has noted that there we
re ten cohorts to a legion – the kind of detail he could never remember. After all, he left the country to avoid military service, and he is fed up with hearing about the Great War. What do they expect of him, sitting there at their desks? Let them learn the aorist tense: that is already more than enough.

  In Patagonia he kept in his pocket both the Odyssey and the Agamemnon edited, with commentary in Latin, by Simon Karsten. But a discourse on the fate of the sons of Atreus, or on the suffering of Electra – Carlo liked her best of all – would be out of place in front of these boys. It would be a total farce, like interrupting the paradigm of an irregular verb to gaze out of the window in admiration of the Julian Alps. And anyway, he would only end up making some anti-religious remark in passing, which would be a fine way of thanking those priests for taking him in, and might also give rise to a spot of bother.

  He glances at the mountains. It would be nice to be able to point them out to the boys. People who know how to sing while shaving are fortunate. But in class he keeps to the rules. His pupils once drew a caricature on the blackboard of a gaucho on horseback lassoing a weighty Greek lexicon. “What did he say when he came into the classroom and saw it? – Nothing. He looked straight at the blackboard but said nothing.”

  He exchanges an occasional word in the staff-room with Ceccutti, the only other lay teacher among all the cassocks. He is a good chap and friendly with it. He is always behind or in a hurry and often arrives late without having done his marking. So Enrico gives him a hand in the break between classes – it is no problem for him to spot an error in Greek or Latin. If only Ceccutti would stop killing himself with all that extra private teaching to support his wife and three children, he could correct those exercises in plenty of time and relax a little. A really likeable character, despite being tired and drawn, who can share a good joke and make even Enrico laugh. He always has some story up his sleeve, making his home life sound even more exciting than Patagonia.

  Every so often Ceccutti turns the talk to politics. He is angry with the fascist bully-boys who gave one of his cousins the castor-oil treatment. But worse, in his opinion, are the big estate owners and top civil servants who give the fascists financial support without dirtying their own hands. Enrico agrees, although the , the consortium of evil, comes as no surprise to him: both Carlo and Plato always warned him of it. Ceccutti mentions a couple of names, well-known ones apparently, that appear regularly in the newspapers. But they mean nothing to Enrico. He might have seen one of them, perhaps, while passing some farm or factory, but he could not be sure. A person cannot keep abreast of everything.

  One evening Ceccutti invites him home for dinner. The house is small, and one armchair has the bottom knocked out of it. Marco, their elder son, had used it as a chariot in a re-enactment of the Trojan war and Giorgio, his brother, ran it through with his broom-handle spear. On the wall can be seen a faded “Long live Giovanna” that the boys painted in red for their sister’s birthday, and which their mother has not been able yet completely to clean off. Their habit of all speaking at once during the meal annoys Enrico. Yet he is more tolerant than usual and on his way home he goes for a long walk through the deserted streets, before finally climbing the silent stairs to his flat.

  Enrico also gives private lessons – for exorbitant fees. If they can’t afford it, then that’s their affair. After all, no one is obliged to learn Greek – the fewer the better in Enrico’s view. He uses the banknotes as bookmarks, forgetting them among the pages. He is reading the Cratylus and the Theaetetus in the Teubner edition – a present, with a dedication, from Carlo – and, at the same time, both editions of Persuasion and Rhetoric, the first edited by their friend in Florence, Vladimiro ArangioRuiz, and published in 1913, the second brought out in 1922 by Carlo’s cousin Emilio. He has known that book ever since it started life as Carlo’s degree thesis in Florence. The ivory-coloured cover is edged in a deep black, at times resembling the blue-black of night, with a wave pattern picked out in a lighter hue. Between those covers is the definitive statement, the diagnosis of the sickness eating away at mankind.

  Persuasion, in Carlo’s words, signifies the full ownership, both in and for the present, of one’s self and one’s life. It is the capacity to live each moment fully, without sacrificing it to what is still to come, to something one hopes is just around the corner, thus destroying life by wishing away the present. But civilization is precisely the history of men incapable of living with persuasion. Instead they construct an enormous barrier – rhetoric, society’s way of organizing knowledge and thought – to hide from themselves the reality of their own emptiness. Enrico runs his finger over the border’s wavy crest, looks through the book, and makes notes in Italian and German – in the margins, at the foot of the page, and even between the lines. It is best to write nothing. But if it becomes necessary to express oneself in writing, such pencilled comments are the least offensive and rhetorical method.

  Only a person of stature, such as Carlo, can write a book; not someone like Enrico. Those two short stories he did once churn out are utter rubbish – a romance set in an imaginary medieval Gorizia and an even feebler one located in the Semmering. Not to mention his really pitiable tales of Indians and bear hunters: there is no need to go and live among real Indians to realize what nonsense they are. But at least such attempts convinced him to give up. Once he even commits one of his dreams to paper – how two old women rob him while he stands in some street in Gorizia dressed only in underpants. The Caffe Commercio too comes into it at some point. The very banality of dreams reflects on psychologists and all those others quia nesciunt, quae nesciunt, sibi scire videntur.

  Enrico also thumbs through the pages of the 1922 issue of Convegno, which includes some pieces written by and about Carlo. He makes a few jottings in the margin – lightly, so that they can be easily rubbed out. At whom or at what were those dark eyes smiling? Life, Enrico scribbles in the margin, is not an enjoyable “good”, but pain does cause suffering. It is desire and yearning that consume existence. “Do not project yourself into the future”, he writes on page 362: projection into the future = death. Concentrate on the present, awaken from the mad, destructive dream of longing. Carlo, like Buddha, is the great awoken one.

  The evening descends on Gorizia, the narrow streets disappear in a bruise-grey haze, the wind blows rubbish against the pavement. Enrico detests this dry, biting winter darkness, so different from that darkness they used to watch from the attic, as it settled over the city, soft and empty, like a shell held to the ear. Perhaps it is necessary to eradicate not only the vanity of success but, indeed, every single wish – even that longing for good that was once visible in those dark and smiling eyes; to eradicate even the need of values, since every need harries and pursues the present with fiery breath . . . Why is it up to him to unravel these knots? He is afraid of heights. His idea of happiness is to lie stretched out on the ground, roll a cigarette and smoke it, gazing at the sea. No, not the sea. It too throws up large concerns – the promise of happiness and the search for meaning, which, in the end, like all searches, suffocates happiness. Better the earth, solid beneath the feet.

  It was wrong of Carlo. He ought never to have allowed Enrico a glimpse of something both beyond his reach and almost impossible to live without. Enrico opens the same year’s issue of Ronda, runs through the pages dedicated to Carlo, commenting hurriedly: “total renunciation that knowingly refuses to participate in any value-system.” But who knows whether desire is conquered by this intellectual approach or only by dull, brutish pain? Death resembles too closely the very renunciation needed to conquer it. Enrico has no fear of death, only fear of fearing it, of succumbing one day to the dread of dying.

  He goes out into the street. When, every so often, a car passes, he opens the umbrella he invariably carries, to shield his eyes from the glare of the headlights. There are too many cars, too many blinding lights, and too many car horns – Gorizia has become one big noise. People even greet him in the street, as t
hough they’re all part of one big family – it’s sickening. Let them laugh at his umbrella, perhaps then they won’t keep on buttonholing him, and will come to realize from the burning sensation in their eyes that light damages the sight and causes conjunctivitis. You have to keep on your toes and watch your back.

  He goes to visit Lini. It’s not a serious affair – at least not for him. Perhaps it is for her. Often, deep down, women care more. Love for them is like water for fish: once it’s taken away they writhe all over the place, gulping for air. On the other hand, women can’t be trusted, since they can play some pretty nasty tricks. The fact is they have to stay in the sea, while men just go for a dip as often as it suits them, get out and shake themselves dry. After all, nature has fitted women for reproduction. They have to deal with all those effluents, bulges, pregnant tums, suckling, pap, dribble, potties, wee-wees, wailing – with no chance to open a book.

  Lini, or rather Carolina, is a tall washed-out blonde with an ungainly body and wild, restless, even beautiful, eyes. She says little, asks no questions, is happy when Enrico calls in and even happier when he talks of Carlo. She listens attentively without pretending to understand everything. What does the word “understand” mean anyway? And when he changes the subject, she does not press him. He tires quickly, since women, except for Fulviargiaula, have no gift for philosophy.

  Lini gets up, slides her big feet into slippers, and goes into the kitchen to make some coffee. Enrico stays stretched out on the hard bed – he has removed the mattress – and listens to her bustling around with cups and saucers. She doesn’t step into the future – just from one room to the other – and every so often a spoon falls to the floor. They do not say much to each other. Sometimes she gets upset about a recent act of fascist violence, but Enrico says nothing: he’s reluctant to waste words on what he despises. So they sit at the table in silence. Enrico feels her gaze but avoids it. Then Lini clears away with thin and nervous hands.