A Different Sea

by Magris, Claudio

  Lini scarcely comes into his plans for a trip to the Galapagos Islands, even though she would be happy enough to go. The men will make the decisions – he and Janes. Dr Janes is a friend. He too has read Schopenhauer and agrees that it’s wrong to keep the show going for an indefinite run. Living it up is one thing, procreation another. He does have a conscience, though, and once went to the bother of tracking down some girl he had met on holiday, for fear he had got her pregnant. He was prepared to assume responsibility – even for the unwanted child. Forward planning, he used to say, is the thing, adding that it was one of his strengths. As it turned out, he was lucky that time too: the girl wasn’t pregnant. She was, however, amazed to see him, since usually in such cases the man is never heard of again. But Dr Janes’ hostility to reproduction does not include people who are already alive.

  It would be marvellous to go to the Galapagos Islands. Completely deserted, and thus better than Patagonia, just sand, hot seething mud, clumps of grass, giant lizards and tortoises. They will take a couple of women along – they shouldn’t be hard to find. Then with the Pacific Ocean all around them, immense and admitting no return, they will watch the evening sun sink into the infinite waters to the west, towards other islands even more remote.

  But the Galapagos Islands are for the moment distant. So he and Janes sail along the coast of Istria as far as Pola. Colours absolute, platonic, white stone, red earth, turquoise water flecked in the depths with indigo blue, transparency of the purely present. They drop anchor, swim to shore and stretch out on the rocks or beneath the olive trees. Keeping out to sea they pass Rovigno and the Cathedral of Sant’ Eufemia perched on the cliff-top.

  At Salvore on the tip of Istria he recognizes the white lighthouse, the avenue of figs and olives, the pines filled with blackbirds, the line of sentinel cypresses, the laurel and the chicory’s blue flowers. A boat rocks to and fro below the lighthouse, the sea slapping gently against its side. Chicory’s flowers are blue. Yes, but how long do they last? Perhaps the plant itself lives on while the flower falls – to be reborn later, like hair. If so, the fall is not a fall, and this is the same blue flower that dark-eyed Paula disturbed, as she lay in the grass and nudged its stalk with her knee while gazing at the sky. The stones of the beach covered and uncovered by the tide’s continuous cycle are still there, white and polished, shining in both sun and water.

  This was Carlo’s favourite place, he writes to Gaetano Chiavacci, their other great Florentine friend. Who knows if Arangio-Ruiz and Chiavacci, who are making a profound study of Persuasion and Rhetoric, can ever really understand it without having this reflection in their eyes? A stone falls in the water and ripples spread in ever-widening circles until they eventually disappear or, more precisely, become invisible to our feeble sight. Somewhere they continue to exist. So it is that the sea is ruffled, perhaps even beyond the pillars of Hercules, by Argia diving from that rock over there. Neither do voices die. Paula’s words have now reached the pines across the bay, and her smile is caught there among the branches and the blackbirds’ nests. Every so often he encounters Paula: how obvious it all is and how impossible. Even her mouth resembles Carlo’s.

  The Pensione Predonzani is only a step from the lighthouse. Mulberries and false acacias hide its wrought-iron balcony and ancient well. Enrico knocks at the door to ask for a room. He is barefoot, and his face, shaded by his sombrero, is still scarred from scurvy. Signora Predonzani takes him for a beggar, and her daughter, Anita, gestures to her from behind his back not to take him in. But after a few moments Enrico’s blue eyes, so blue and so clear, and his fair, tousled hair, like a halo in the breeze, work their charm – on Signora Predonzani and, even more so, on her daughter. Enrico settles in immediately. Everything is to his liking – all except for the softness of the bed, which he resolves simply by putting the mattress on the floor.

  The summers are long and still, with incessant chatter of cicadas and passing hours the colour of amber. As soon as the term ends in Gorizia, Enrico boards the steamer for Salvore. Disembarking, he discards his shoes near a bollard on the harbour jetty and finds them there again on his departure two months later. He brings with him a few books and a couple of shirts, but leaves his umbrella in Gorizia – with the traffic. The Pensione is comfortable, and geraniums sparkle in the window boxes. Even the other guests are tolerable, especially those from Graz. For the Austrian heart, longing to escape the oppressive Danubian hinterland and to gaze on the open sea, is seized with nostalgia for Trieste and Istria.

  The Mayor of Graz, a lawyer, a couple of civil servants, and their wives – pretty if over-talkative – make up the company. When in a good mood, Enrico takes charge and teaches them hand-ball. He makes them jog round the garden in single file to get fit. They puff and pant, but the Mayor, laughing boisterously, enters into the spirit of things and forces the others to touch their toes and vault the low hedges – “so . . . so und so, hahaha.” Enrico instructs Signora Predonzani to reduce the size of the helpings, to put less salt in the seasoning, and not to serve a pudding – even if the Austrians complain that they miss their cuguluf and meringue, to say nothing of their Sacher Torte. If they continue stuffing themselves, they will die from heart failure or lose their wits, for salt thickens the arteries and fat dulls the brain. It is crazy to poison oneself with such trash, especially here, where there are so few cars and there’s a chance of staying healthy. Foodstore owners are the real scoundrels.

  But so be it. After all – the planet is already over-populated and all people can think about is having children: Il Duce even rewards them for it. This trend will lead nature to rebel and drive mankind to destruction. Sooner or later we will lose both our sight and hearing, become as blind as bats and as deaf as doorposts, all as a result of believing that we need something extra, like salt in soup, and then slaving away to acquire it. To reduce one’s needs, to be happy in oneself, yes – that’s the solution. “Well, he doesn’t look happy to me,” Lidia, Signora Predonzani’s niece, remarked in his hearing to a teacher from Trieste. But what could that child know? Happiness has nothing to do with words: either you have it or you don’t.

  He condescends to talk about Patagonia only when they really beg him. Collecting his thoughts for a moment he begins to speak, with inspired mien and furrowed brow, softly clicking his tongue. The ocean breakers boom like big guns against the islets off the coast of Desolation. Battalions of birds of prey the size of geese plunge from the craggy heights, the guanayes screech deafeningly. Whales beach on the rocks, their gaping maws big enough to swallow boats; throngs of scarlet-headed vultures flap into the air and obscure the sky. Patagonian hunters club to death condors gorged, till incapable of flight, on sheep carcases left as bait. Guanaco they capture by enmeshing their legs with boleadoras. Araucanian Indians, with strangely gleaming eyes, are quite untameable.

  The ladies listen, giggling, as he describes the Indian women. But no one is more amazed than he to hear the passion and excitement in his voice. All this has nothing to do with his cabin, his horses, or his cows. He is telling stories about things he has never seen and never experienced, just read about in novels – by Salgari and Karl May. He never even went as far south as the tip of Patagonia. But he has no choice. Words can only echo words, not life itself. And his life has been colourless, like water. Yet, just occasionally, one must try to be good company.

  He boasts that he discovered an oil field which he left untapped and unpublicized, to keep the world a cleaner place. It lies somewhere near Los Césares, that mysterious city of gold and diamonds, unlocatable among the deserts and ravines of Patagonia, whose last chief was the Indian rebel Gabriel Condorcanquí, Tupac Amaru II. He likes the city’s imperial-sounding name, gold ringing hollow with empty words, and is only sad that there is no connection with the ancient Caesars, as one legend has it, but was named instead after Francisco César, a common sailor.

  Yet it was there, on a crumbling and rusty rock face, that the Spanish sun had set. The legend of
Los Césares had grown up around Puerto de la Hambre, the city of hunger, squalor and solitude. It had been founded for the glory of Philip II of Spain by Pedro de Sarmiento, who had later reached the Magellan Strait afloat on two planks of wood, battered by the confluence of oceans, wounded, delirious with fever, and hounded by Drake like a wolf by dogs. This last Spaniard from Puerto de la Hambre was finally taken on board the English vessel Delight, after six years in his empty city surrounded by corpses rotting in their cabins, a silent church, a scaffold rising towards heaven, and pearls strewn about by colonists who knew they would never return home.

  That shattered and wretched imperial greatness deserved the name “Caesars” and the mystery of the lost city of gold. The oil field was regal too, since he left it hidden and forgotten. But the City of the Caesars among the mountains had not only never existed, even its name was pure chance, mere coincidence. The foot turns over the shell and exposes the hollowness and silence within.

  Myth means story, but myths are silent. From a distance we seem to hear their voices narrating fabulous stories, but as we approach they fade away. Perhaps after all it was just the wind among the ancient stones, and now even that wind has died. But philologists prattle on, expounding those lost stories and their silences. A commentary on a myth is the fiction of its own inexistence, padded with waffle. And Enrico dislikes fiction, Tolstoy excepted, as so much chit-chat for dinner parties, not worth reading and certainly not worth writing.

  Women, especially, egg him on to invent such bragging tales. And he yields to them – at least for as long as his blue eyes and winning manner prove attractive. But he soon tires. He needs no one, not even women, although if they really insist then he lets things take their course willingly enough. Like with Inge, the long-legged Austrian journalist with the greedy mouth; or soft Violetta, capricious as the moon, from a family of Triestine industrialists, who makes him appreciate, surprisingly, some of rhetoric’s empty concerns – silk stockings, elegant shoes, a scented foulard.

  Enrico discovers he has a talent for avoiding relationships that can trap a man like a fly on flypaper. In fact he never has a “relationship”, nor even knows the meaning of the word. He sleeps with an Inge or a Violetta for one or two summers, but casually almost, with no fuss and no strings attached. He doesn’t even need to break it off. It is they, who, sooner or later, let him go, sadly perhaps, but without anguished reprisals. He tries dutifully to show some regret when it’s over, but then, feeling lighter than before, off he goes out in his boat all day long, silent and at peace.

  He names his boat Maia, a small ten-footer, just big enough to venture out to sea with its white sail – the veil of Maia. The haze shimmering in air and on water on certain afternoons is either the final veil drawn over the pure present of things, or is already perhaps in itself, pure present. The sail glides over the sea, slips through a cleft in the horizon, and falls into a milky blue bound by no shore. Summers open out and solidify. Time rounds out like blown glass in water.

  He occasionally talks to Lini about Carlo, but never to those other women. Even that is not really a relationship: Lini just happens to be there. In ’31 a killer ’flu, known as “pneumonic plague”, strikes down his brother Carlo, their mother’s favourite; he had survived the war, both as an Austrian soldier up on Mount Podgora, and later on the Italian side, on Mount Sabotino. He dies at Gorizia. Shortly afterwards his sister Ortensia dies too. Enrico, who nursed her, takes to his bed immediately after the funeral with a raging fever. He is at Lini’s place, but she is unafraid of contagion.

  They give up all hope, even Janes. But Enrico knows what he must do: the horse-cure he used in Patagonia. He lets almost all of his blood drain out. What a relief to feel so much of oneself flow away, so much of that surplus infected waste. Then he stupefies himself with grappa until he loses consciousness and understands nothing more beyond gulping from the bottle every now and then. A few days later he can again make out the colour of the wall and focus on the table and the chairs. The weakness he still feels is now mild and benign.

  Lini keeps people away. But one day an old lady moves her firmly aside with the words “I am Carlo’s mother”, and enters the room. Those dark eyes, Carlo’s, Paula’s – that crease around the mouth . . . On her way out she places a tall Florentine lamp on his bedside table, the lamp with two hook-shaped burners. It was Carlo’s lamp, the one that flooded with oil and went out. She leaves, and Lini, who goes to show her out, catches sight of Enrico propped up on his pillows gazing at the lamp.

  IV

  On 21st September 1933 Enrico transfers his place of residence from Gorizia to Umago in Istria. This change, recorded in the municipal archives, is one of the few irrefutable proofs of his existence. For there are no records of his flight to Argentina, where the memory of places and the sequence of events fade, making it difficult for him to reconstruct his time there with any precision. The registry records, however, are clear. Umago, of course, means Salvore, which is one of the areas under its administrative control.

  There are a number of entries of interest in the civil and land records at this time. In 1934 Enrico marries the beautiful Anita Predonzani, who is now the postmistress at Salvore. She had always been drawn to him, and expects to be able to use her charm and gentle insistence to domesticate him a little. Emma Luzzatto Michelstaedter, Carlo’s mother, congratulates them, praising the suitability of the marriage in general and of the bride in particular, even if, as she says, “I still can’t get used to the idea of Mreule as a husband.” Paula too is married – to a Swiss called Winteler. It is strange to think of her with someone else’s name.

  Enrico purchases four hectares from the Benedetti family: olives, a few vines, some fruit trees, and the pines along the shore where he, Carlo, Nino and Fulviargiaula spent that evening in August 1909. He brings with him from Gorizia some of the roughest and most worm-eaten pieces of furniture that had been stored in the cellar, and a supply of old clothes so that he would never need to buy any more. There are no clocks in the house, only a sundial attached to the grey exterior wall. Two chairs next to the bed are more than enough for laying out one’s clothes before going to sleep; pleasure comes from being independent of whatever is not absolute – although one should remain indifferent even to necessities. “Nacktes, kahles Selbst,” he writes in his blue notebook, the Self naked and stripped, peace of the will, not even a breath of wind in the heart.

  No electric light, not even a radio. Anita finds him tougher than predicted. Not even the moments between the sheets are of much use in softening his ways. Carlo’s oil lamp is good enough to read by at night. He keeps his books either in a large studded trunk or else under the mattress. When in bed, propped on his pillows, he just feels with his hand and pulls them out. He does not need to look, for he knows the position of each book by heart – the discourses of Buddha or Carlo’s poetry – and in the darkness his hand is never more than five centimetres out. His favourite poem is To Senia: “Of what I have seen on the floor of the sea, I want you alone, Senia, my listener to be.”

  Because Anita works at the post office, Enrico often does the cooking – a sbrodaus, a thick soup, that lasts three days. But on reheating, it often burns, sticks to the bottom and tastes of smoke – because he forgets about it on the wood-fired stove which he stokes with pine cones, collected nearby, that explode in the flames. He cultivates tobacco and makes his own short, stubby cigarettes. If visitors arrive, he escapes to the beach. Dr Janes, who also has a house by the sea, but a little nearer Trieste at Valdoltra, pays them regular visits. The three of them spend happy hours discussing and dreaming of travel. Yet Enrico himself never journeys even as far as Bassanìa, barely a kilometre away, where there is a good little restaurant. And when Anita and Janes insist, he lets them go off by themselves and stays behind, smoking and gazing at the sea beyond the pines.

  The evening is a time of changing colour. It is interesting to focus on the individual breaks in the continuum, on the very moments of
colour change, without ever lifting one’s gaze. From the instant the sun touches that pine over there to the instant it disappears, there are four or perhaps five shifts of colour. The penultimate is the most remarkable: for a moment or two it reverses the process of fading luminosity and, from an almost black, blue-green backcloth, a coin of burning copper emerges, rolls over and vanishes behind a greying curtain.

  Afterwards he strolls as far as Pensione Gamboz or the Pensione owned by Captain Pelizzon on the other side of the cove. Or he chats for a while with Captain Cipolla a little further round. But he grows tired quickly. “Dearest Gaetano – he writes to Chiavacci – it is difficult for us, to whom destiny granted the privilege of friendship with Carlo, to be content with that of others.”

  He re-reads Buddha, the discourses of the last days in which the sublime passes beyond the ultimate limits of perception to the dissolution of the perceptible. He also reads the Regulations Concerning Share-cropping in the Province of Istria, and highlights the clauses that concern him most. Clause 7: “The tenant must abstain from carrying out work, transport, or the performance of any other manual services, or services involving the animals of the farm, for third parties.” Clause 10: “The tenant may raise poultry in numbers not exceeding three birds for every member of his family, excluding the chicks necessary for renewing the brood. He may raise a pig for fattening for the exclusive needs of his family.”

  Enrico does in fact have tenants: a Signor Busdachin, his wife, and – unfortunately – two small children. If they produce a third child, he will send them packing, as he has already warned them fair and square. As for the two already in existence, if they make a noise either in the house or outside, there will be trouble. Their parents will have to teach them not to whine and not to run around in the fields or in the wood. Signor Busdachin is a capable sort, much the same as any other man. But his wife is different. Her steady placid eyes, somewhat narrowed by the wrinkles of her peasant skin, look knowingly at Enrico as though they could read in his face more than he could in hers. She is a woman of broad hips and strong arms – fine arms that sow, reap, cook, polish, wash – Enrico’s clothes as well – solid arms that carry the pitcher of the present.