by David Malouf
The body that stands in this relation to a rose thorn or a splinter stands in a different relation to nature as a whole, belongs to an age as remote in its way as that gothic world in which lepers shook their bells in dark alleys and men danced themselves to death with St Anthony’s fire. It is the age before penicillin.
So there it is on two shelves: a bottle of peroxide for applying to spots, warts, whitlows and for removing green from the teeth; a bottle of Solyptol, a few drops of which, as a general protection, go into the bath (it clouds the water like Pernod) and is applied neat to barked shins, grazed knees and cat bites; an embrocation of my father’s own recipe, made up from oil of eucalyptus and metho; a roll of cotton-wool, a roll of lint, a roll of elastoplast; a tin of Goanna Salve (native cure-all); chocolate Laxettes for children and Agarol for the adults; milk of magnesia, castor-oil, cod-liver oil and malt, and a can of antiphloges-tine paste to be boiled, spread on lint and slapped scalding on to the chest. These remedies, which belong as much, some of them, to folk myth as to medicine, go back to my parents’ childhood, and beyond that even into the previous century.
But it isn’t simply another time we are dealing with now, another era; or even, in purely physical terms, another body differently treated. It is a body differently conceived of, differently seen; and the truth is that for all ordinary purposes it is barely seen at all. Full, self-consciousness nakedness is a condition so rare as to be perverse.
Contemporary bodies walk naked, even when they are fully clothed. You see that in the ease with which they present themselves. But the owners of these earlier bodies have no sense of their own nakedness. The body is at a distance behind intricate fastenings, under layer on layer of cloth. Women wear petticoats, panties and corsets of a pink stuff stiffened with bone, a strip of which occasionally protrudes like a secret rib; the lacing is that of an elongated shoe. Even trousers have a system of braces and flybuttons that are not easily negotiated, and undershorts are but-toned not elasticated. It takes time to get into the ‘nuddy’ – a word that is intended to suggest the comic nature of the event, to strip it of eroticism. Nakedness is a condition that even the mind cannot arrive at till it has dealt with an array of inhibiting braces and buttons and straps.
So the body, back there, that stands naked before a glass, having laid aside corsets, spencer, swami-silk panties and lisle stockings (or flannel trousers, singlet and knee-length shorts) has arrived at a different nakedness and by another and slower route. It is a body that accepts itself as imperfect. It has odours and body-hair, shows scars that scarcely matter since they are in places that will never be revealed. It is a sensuous body; all those buttons, straps and laces, those odours, even the scars, constitute a possible and powerful eroticism; but –
And here we come to a limit. That but is a threshold we cannot cross, since even if we could find the door to that room, we cannot now find in ourselves the body, the experiencing mind-in-the-body, to go through. That body is out of reach. And it isn’t simply a matter of its being forgotten in us – of a failure of memory or imagination to summon it up, but of a change in perceiving itself. What moving back into it would demand is an act of un-remembering, a dismantling of the body’s experience that would be a kind of dying, a casting off, one by one, of all the tissues of perception, conscious and not, through which our very notion of body has been remade. We would have to give back to oblivion the antibodies and complex immunity systems that for nearly four decades now have freed us into a lighter being, a safer and more biddable nature; remove from our blood the knowledge it has acquired from all those smokes and acids that, in changing the body’s awareness of reality, have changed it. We would have to cleanse our skin of its contact with nylon and acrylic, and tease out of our sense of how modern buildings smell the sharp, unmistakable odour given off by all those objects and utensils that are made of plastic – toothbrush handles, price tags, the tags on new-born babies’ wrists, waste disposal bags, icecream cartons, toy cars and watches, combs, transfusion drips. We would have to darken on our palate the light of new foods, avocado, muesli, yoghurt, and shake off from our limbs the dance steps, Rock n’ Roll and the Twist, that have taught us a new way of moving. We would have to empty ourselves of the experience of travelling up a lift shaft at twenty-five storeys per second, and the power we feel (to cover distances, to eat up the world) when we are projected horizontally at seven hundred miles an hour over the curve of the earth. Most of all, we would have to step out of the body that has been born in us under the touch (on parts of the old one we barely knew existed) of hands, mouths, tongues – a creature stranger than any sheep-child, and only shyly emergent, but eager already to explore the universe. It has been formed in us by the reorganisation of all the parts of our body in a new order, where mouth for example, after its long re-creation of itself as a speaking organ, has become a finger-pad to test the subtlest texture of things, a third eye for seeing colours the rainbow missed, sighting new horizons –
A limit. A wall we cannot go through. Which is in some ways where we began. Except that memory, in leading us back, has turned us about. It has drawn us through room after room towards a past body, an experience of the world that cannot be entered, only to confront us with a future body that can. Memory is deeper than we are and has longer views. When it pricked and set us on, it was the future it had in mind, and the door our fingertips were seeking was not there because we were looking in the wrong place; it was not that door we were meant to go through. The door was in us. Our actual body is the wall our fingertips come to. We have only to dare one last little blaze of magic to pass through.
A PLACE IN TUSCANY
1
EARLY MAPS SHOW C. as a walled rectangular town laid out along the line of the ridge, with square towers projecting at every fifty metres and the parish church, la Pieve, at the summit.
All the towns in this area sit on high hills. When the Romans left, and their irrigation systems fell into disuse, the great plain of the Maremma reverted to marshy, malarial country, famous like the Camargue for its horses but fatal to men. Exile to the Maremma was used by the Medici and the later Grand Dukes of Tuscany as a delayed death sentence. The place has remained half wild. Cork woods and wild boar abound; ancient cattle of enormous size, and tough squat cowboys are still to be seen in the dune country towards the mouth of the Ombrone; settlements, most of them going back to Etruscan times, are scattered.
C. was once the most important town in the area and is still the centre of a Comune. Most of its walls survive and the houses are built into them. Their thickness can be gauged by the low tunnel-shaped entries that are still in use on the south-west side, where a line of towers, all perfectly intact, look across the plain to the sea. They have long sloping steps, beamed ceilings, and measure six metres from one level to the next. The last of the towers has been converted to a belfry. All summer an intense, half-witted boy who has constituted himself the town firewatcher sits up there with a walkie-talkie set, scanning the plain for flames.
A vast jigsaw of spaces that fit one into another, the village piles century on century and is still in the process of being made. Built of a mixture of granite boulders and tufa, it is grim in winter, but when the stone is touched with sunlight it mellows to a soft gold. Roofs are flat and projecting, and are of corrugated terracotta, blotched with grey-green or yellow lichen and held down against the wind with stones. Every house has dark-green slatted shutters, long windows with varnished frames and inner shutters of solid white. Under each window are rings for flowerpots and a smaller ring for a flag.
One side of the village faces north-east into the wild country towards Siena. It gets no sun after mid-morning and bears the full blast in winter of the tramontana. The other faces the sea. Protected from chill winds, it gets the sun in winter, the sea breeze at five o’clock every summer evening and on clear days the sea itself is a glowing band between the hills. It appears so suddenly at times, when the late sun strikes it, as to make a flash at the
corner of my eye, as I sit working, as if out there somewhere a match had been struck.
At such times the whole plain comes alive in all its detail of fields, pasture, vineyards, olive groves, and the mountains as ridge after ridge of impenetrable macchia.
What are the characteristic sights of this landscape?
In high summer, when the earth is baked hard and everything is yellow-brown after the harvest, gabled ‘houses’, sometimes fifty metres long, appear in the fields. They look like primitive temples and are made of great blocks of hay. Other fields are lined with the giant mill-wheels turned out by another brand of harvester. Only small land-holders make hay in the old way, as a round stack with a conical roof, that is gradually sliced away till it resembles a waisted hourglass.
Very strange they look in late summer moonlight, these impermanent structures – megalithic temples, mill-wheels, hourglasses in the flat fields.
In autumn, when the hills have been ploughed and show their original colours from blond, through all the ochres to black, the strangest sight here, especially on days of frost, is the bare-boughed persimmon with its orange fruit, each one more brilliant than the sun. They look sinister; like witches’ apples, turning transparent as they ripen and rot. Below them, chrysanthemums – white, yellow, pink, rust. They are grown here not as house-flowers, but to be carried, first at All Souls, then each Sunday afterwards, to the cemetery, where every grave has its pot. These are the extravagant, abundant, wonderfully fleshy and long-lasting flowers of the dead.
Spring. Elaborately dressed plastic dolls appear in the boughs of cherry trees, all bows and bonnets like hanged babies. They are meant to scare off birds.
In May, great swarms of fireflies, in such brilliant drifts that on moonless nights you can see your way by them. Nightingales. And from the vineyards the regular boom of the automatic cannon that are used to keep off boar. All night they go boom boom. In poorer vineyards, sleepy children beat saucepans, and all the way into the distance the dogs bark.
Easy to see here how a cuisine comes into existence. It has nothing to do with the refinements of art.
For one whole month there are only artichokes and broad beans; in another tomatoes, runner-beans, zucchini; cherries till you cannot bear the sight of them; later strawberries. Everyone has a brief surplus of everything, to be eaten, given away, pickled, or dried and preserved under oil. There are no luxuries. A luxury is an ordinary commodity available at the wrong time or in the wrong place. Here everything is ordinary and has, prepared in as many different ways as possible, to be eaten till it is used up and the next thing appears. Cuisine makes the necessary palatable.
Every family here eats out of its own orto – seldom bigger than the kitchen, often the size of a kitchen table – where half a dozen artichokes, a row of broad beans, lettuce, tomato, and various kinds of spinach keep a household going throughout the year. Basil and sage grow on windowsills, capers in the crevices of walls, and rosemary, with its pretty blue flower, in unruly six-foot hedges.
All of this speaks for the abundance but also the frugality of Tuscan living. Nothing is wasted. Mealtimes are serious social occasions, prolonged and formal both in shape and in the rituals they follow, but the fare is simple, healthy, boring; coarse unsalted bread is the staple, oil instead of butter, and everything is cooked on top of the stove. My friend Agatina, I notice, uses her oven for storing crockery, and when it is empty and open the cats sleep there.
When I acquired Agatina’s house (as it is still called in the village) I also acquired Agatina, her husband, Ugo, eighty-two, and her sister, Celeste, who died last month at eighty-six. I go to Sunday lunch and sometimes in the late afternoon as well, to sit in the kitchen with the women; drinking sweet tea, watching them do their needlework, and listening to Agatina’s stories. Over the years I have also acquired the history of this family of intelligent, well-to-do contadini (our word, peasant, won’t quite do) who own several houses in the village and many small pieces of land with olives, vines, cherries and figs.
Agatina’s parents and all four of her brothers and sisters once lived in my house. The father, who was lazy and fond of drink, died of a fall at the bottom of my inner staircase; Agatina never fails to sigh over the spot and to warn me against coming down in the dark. (She is too polite to mention drunkenness.)
Her mother, during the six days in which the Germans occupied the village at the end of the war, including the thirty-six hours of the actual battle, sat quietly in a kind of priest’s hole under my bathroom. Celeste sat in the fireplace above. She refused to flee, or to hide like the other villagers in the macchia. Quite un-intimidated by bombardments and falling shells she stayed to defend the family linen. I imagine her sitting upright in the great chimney-place, all in black (she had worn mourning since the death of a favourite brother in the Great War) and imagine her conversations with the old lady below. She must have been in her middle forties then. I have seen photographs of her as an elegant woman of thirty-five or so, sitting in a cane chair beside the sea. Until quite recently she was alert, upright, lucid – she knew the birthdate of every man, woman and child in the village, you had only to mention the name and she would produce it – not at all fierce like Agatina, but with great authority. The family linen, needless to say, was saved.
She never married. As the eldest daughter she brought up all the younger children, and when she died in her sleep recently, after feeling less well than usual, Agatina felt she had lost a mother more than a sister. Celeste, she affirms, was a saint, and Agatina, who is punctiliously observant but not really pious, is furious with God for having taken her. She had asked as a special grace that Celeste should live to ninety and had already bought the candles. For three days during a hot spell she refused to believe that the grace would not be extended.
Agatina, as she would be the first to admit, is not saintlike. Very small and powerfully plain, she is bossy, bad-tempered, humorous, shrewd, a passionate defender of family and of all friends, and in the village much respected and feared.
Her husband, Ugo, comes from a rival place on the other side of the valley. Very tall and handsome, an ex-gamekeeper, he is entirely his own man, but inside the house Agatina rules. He is paid the traditional deference of being asked whether the pasta is cooked, and is always served first: but he suffers, I think, from being an outsider and from having married above himself; Agatina still uses, as many local women do, her family name. The house, both in fact and spirit, is hers. Only in these last days, when he has been too weak to go into the fields, has Ugo ever spent time in the big kitchen, which is the one room of the house in general use. It is sad to see him sitting on a little chair by the window with his stick in his hand and the three cats at his feet.
The kitchen in these houses is the women’s room; men, if they are not eating or sleeping, are expected to be either in the fields or at the bar. It is the largest and warmest room in the house. Here the television stands, playing all through every mealtime – an awesome experience at Agatina’s since, as she often says, ‘two of the three people in this house, and one of the cats, are stone deaf’. Here too, the women gather at the kitchen table, which is spread between meals with a good lace cloth, to gossip, knit, or do their elaborate fancy-work – Agatina with a little wooden footstool because her feet do not reach the floor. This footstool is a relic of the days when, in my tiny sitting-room, she made her living by minding children, thirty at a time, while their mothers were in the fields. It is of thick walnut, about nine inches long and six high, and belonged, forty years ago, to an orphan, now the husband of her favourite niece.
Such details, and many more, Agatina has passed on to me with the absolute assurance that as a writer I will be interested and may one day ‘set it down’. I know now almost every significant event in her life.
The oldest brother, Baldo (Garibaldo), died heroically in the Alps in 1917. He was killed taking rations to a group of his comrades who were isolated under bombardments on a nearby hill, and Agati
na tells the story in the high rhetoric these people reserve for such occasions, and in a language, very close to Dante’s, that has all the flourishes, and tenses, of high literary art.
Baldo had asked an officer if the men on the hill were not to have their rations. Impossible, the officer replied. What, said Baldo, are our comrades to die of hunger as well as from the enemy guns? Are we to stand by and suffer this shame? With that he loaded a mule, set off, delivered the rations, and was killed on the way down. He was just twenty-four. I have seen – one of the treasures in a little museum of photographs and other mementos under the oil-cloth of Agatina’s kitchen table – a letter from this youth to the parents of a fallen friend. Beautifully penned, in the most correct and eloquent Italian, it is full of high feeling and heroic affirmations of patriotism and revenge, and ends with a poem.
Baldo, who had no formal education beyond fifteen, wrote many such letters. He regarded it as his duty. After the war in 1919, Agatina’s uncle, the priest, used these letters to prepare a history of the village fallen and the circumstances of their deaths. It is a slim book, impressive as these things always are, printed at Poggibonsi in a pale green cover with art nouveau lilies. It is called Flowers and Tears. Baldo, in Agatina’s kitchen, after nearly seventy years, is most marvellously alive.
