by Erri De Luca
FOREWORD
Argentina is a right triangle. The Andes to the west make its vertical leg. The jagged line of the rivers to the north make its horizontal leg. The Atlantic Ocean to the east, its corroded hypotenuse.
Argentina is three thousand, seven hundred kilometers long, and lies between the twenty-first and fifty-third parallels of the Southern latitude. The last clod of American soil, shared with Chile, is only ten degrees away from Graham Land, the horn of the Antarctic continent.
Argentina welcomed about seven million emigrants to its shores before 1939. Almost half of them were Italian.
From 1976 to 1982 Argentina suffered under a military dictatorship that decimated a generation. By the end almost forty thousand people were missing. Almost all of them were young and never received a burial.
The dictatorship collapsed after the failed invasion of the Falkland/Malvinas Islands, half the size of Sicily, more than three hundred kilometers from the coast. It was the spring of 1982.
This immensity of places and events is connected to the accidents that befell people in this story.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Translator’s Afterword
Selected Works by Erri De Luca
Copyright
Castigo para los que no practícan su purezza con ferocidad.
Woe to those who do not practice their purity ferociously.
—MARIO TREJO, Argentina 1926
I ONLY READ USED books.
I lean them up against the bread basket, turn the pages with one finger, and they stay in place, so I can chew and read at the same time.
New books are petulant. The pages don’t stay down after you turn them. They resist and you have to press them flat. Used books have loose bindings. The pages go by without springing back up.
So when I go to the tavern at noon, I sit in the same chair, ask for a soup and some wine, and read. Novels of the sea or mountain adventures—never stories of the city, which already surround me.
I look up when a glint of the sun reflects off the windowpane in the door. Two people come in, she wearing a hint of the wind, he a hint of ash.
I go back to my book about the sea: a storm is brewing, force eight; the young man is eating heartily while his mates lose their lunches. Then he goes out on the bridge to stand tall because he’s young, alone, and exhilarated by the storm.
I look up to sprinkle some raw garlic in my soup. I swallow a spoonful of something bitter, gnarly and red.
I turn docile pages, slow morsels, then I tear my head away from the white of the paper and the tablecloth and follow the line formed by the upper edge of the wall tiles in its tour around the room, passing behind the two black pupils of a woman, which sit on the vector like two notes split apart by the lower line of the pentagram. They’re staring straight at me.
I raise my glass to the same point and hold it steady before drinking. The alignment etches the beginnings of a smile in my cheeks. The geometry of the things around us creates coincidences, intersections.
The woman smiles openly.
From behind her the man intercepts the toast and begins to twist his torso, leading with his elbow. The host dodges him with a shift of the hips while carrying a plate to me. Before the dynamo completes his half-turn I bark out a greeting to the woman as if I know her. She responds in kind while the man glares at me.
I continue drinking and go back to my plate, dividing my time between reading and swallowing. The workers file out of the tavern. I stay a little longer. I don’t have to punch a time card. Today I have to finish pruning and put the branches in a pile. Tomorrow I’ll burn them.
The woman stands up, comes forward and approaches the spot where I’m sitting, fast and direct. I force my eyes to look straight at her nose, where her nostrils expel a little air after her words. “I have a new number. Use this one,” and she leaves her name and a number on the tablecloth. I cover it with my hand, which is almost clean. I don’t waste time washing up for my lunch break.
I see her standing. I get up to match her surprise gesture and say, “It’s always a pleasure to see you.” She puts her two hands around mine. “Say hi to your family.” “Thank you, I’ll tell them.” The guy is at the door. She turns around and I sit back down.
What’s gotten into me? “Thank you, I’ll tell them.” What am I, one of the living dead? Who am I going to tell? I haven’t got anyone.
What does a fine woman like her want from a fifty-year-old gardener sitting in the corner of a tavern? Never met her before. She’s young and I’ve come here after being in South America for twenty years. I’m here by accident. I found a job in a garden at a big house up the hill and I come down here at noon to relax and be around people. This is the first time she’s come by.
I sink into thought. The owner comes by with a half carafe for us to split. “You’re a gentleman,” I tell him, “you have good house wine and a working man doesn’t have to worry about getting heartburn on his afternoon shift.”
“I used to work with my hands, too,” he says.
“You even serve foreigners, and let Africans sit down at a table to eat and leave them alone.”
“It doesn’t cost me anything and my wife doesn’t complain.”
I nod my agreement.
“What’s your story?” he asks. “I like a man who reads.”
“It’s how I keep myself company.”
He looks me in the face, which is a good way to ask a question.
“I’m alone. I was in South America for many years and now I’m back. I don’t know many people. I live in the old part of town.”
To show that I have nothing more to say I lift my glass. “Thanks. To your health!” He’s been seeing me here for a month. Sooner or later he deserves to know something about me. This seems to be good enough for him. He smiles, clinks his glass against mine and we drink.
He’s the same age as me but wears it better.
The first time I came to his place I asked to taste his wine. He gave me a glass and threw in a plate of black olives. “If you don’t like them you don’t have to pay,” he said.
I swish the wine around my mouth, ease it back into my throat. It is good. We make a deal. I come every day and he gives me whatever he’s got, just a soup and some house wine.
“I have some sage in a vase that smells like fresh walnut, I’ll bring it by tomorrow,” I say.
“It’s a long walk from the old part of town.” Yes, I get up at five, but I don’t mind. The smell of the sea comes in on the breeze.
The house creaks in the early morning. Stone, wood, yawning. The house quiets down when it smells the coffee. All it takes to fill a room is a pot of coffee on the stove.
I remember the card in my hand and slip it between the pages of the book. The owner stands up. It’s time for me to go.
I have to dig a hole for an oak tree being delivered tomorrow. I work for a man who films documentaries. I know him from before I went to South America. He’s the son of a Calabrian tailor who moved north to work in a factory, trading the precision of the needle for the slamming of the press against metal.
Craftsmen with good hands whose skills had been honed and then sold, shackled to four exhausting movements.
He leaves me in charge of the garden. He doesn’t want a vegetable garden or livestock, even if there’s enough land for everything. When he was a student and I was a worker, we used to be communists, a word hanging from the coatrack of the past century.
There’s something I like about his face: so many others are embittered but his face still has an air of goodness a
nd a nose as firm as a prow. His name is Mimmo. He enjoys talking about his father, who locked himself away in a factory to give his children a future.
Calabria is filled with the past: the olive trees planted by his grandparents, the house made from raw, rough-hewn stone. At the end of the day there’s always something to put on the table, but there’s no future.
Many of us from the old days are still around. We’ve all broken away from home. Not him. He still does his Sundays, his savings, the bits of advice that make up a family kitchen.
Even now I still see him as a quiet boy staring at the ground with his nose at a ninety-degree angle from the sidewalk while the other kids are talking dirty. I’m from the south, too, and I like people who say no without opening their mouths. They say their no’s without making a big deal about it.
Twenty years later here he is, a filmmaker. Call him lucky. But some luck takes up with the first comer, dumb luck that leaves you high and dry and latches onto the next guy. But there’s smart luck, too, that spots the right person and slowly tries him on.
And the living meet again. He remembers the nights in Turin, the tavern-keeper who puts on my tab the wine the kids used to drink, along with some olives and a few slices of salami. Nights you never want to go to sleep. The tavern-keeper who doesn’t close till the last man gets up to leave.
The last men are still around, but not the tavernkeepers.
He remembers me punching out after the second shift, at around eleven o’clock at night. We’d meet up and talk about how the day went, whether there’d been any fights in the shop, or whether they’d gotten into any trouble at school or on the road.
A new move every day. Turin, a city of pawns rising up against the rest of the chessboard. The gates are never locked. The worker’s brigade won’t allow it. You can’t tell the last from the first, the good-looking from the ugly, the young from the old, the gypsies from the well-heeled. He laughs at the memory. “Back then communism used to be poor kids who knew how to look good.”
It happens then and never again.
It’s also luck, not having a good job, a luck that comes from before, from living in an age that was less unfair to kids. To change the subject I ask, “So, what do you do?” He, king of the narrow face, laughs beneath his massive nose.
“It’s been a while since I’ve heard you say hello,” he says. “What do I do? I do a job where you have to hold together a bunch of people. Make one mistake and they send you packing.”
“What’s the problem?” I ask. “Where could you go wrong? Tell the story of the world, you’ll never go wrong. As long as you love it.”
Then he asks about me, but I don’t dwell on my misadventures in Argentina, the unbridled wrongs, the search for life. He offers me a job and I gladly accept it.
Before saying good-bye I tell him a story. “I’m on a construction site and my helper is a man about my age, under fifty. He’s a Kurd, a former writer, he speaks English. You meet interesting men on construction sites: castaways, drifters, sailors grounded for life. He has scars over one eye.
“‘What happened?’ By way of an answer the Kurd waves his hand toward his back. For us Italians that means water under the bridge. I’m not sure what it means in Kurdish.
“At lunch I ask him if he wants a coffee. He says no. I pour him some from my thermos anyway.
“One day he pulls out a sheet of paper with English writing. It says that the police in a country that shall remain nameless throw him in jail, giving him a daily ration of beatings. They ruin his eyes. One heals. The other doesn’t.
“But a typo turns the word ‘eyes’ into ‘yes.’ His ‘yes’ is ruined by beatings. And the typo is right. All of his yesses are ruined. He hardly ever speaks a dented ‘yes,’ except in exchange for an offer of coffee or a hand in mixing lime.
“The beatings hurt his yesses more than his eyes. Some mistakes contain another truth.”
I say this last part to bring the story to a close.
To keep it going he asks what I have in my pocket. A book, I say. Which one? A used book. I read books that are on their last legs. Why? I’ll tell you another time. His hand goes toward my jacket pocket but not inside. It hangs there.
I read used books because fingerprint-smudged and dog-eared pages are heavier on the eye. Because every book can belong to many lives. Books should be kept in public places and step out with passersby who’ll hold onto them for a spell. Books should die like people, consumed by aches and pains, infected, drowning off a bridge together with the suicides, poked into a potbellied stove, torn apart by children to make paper boats. They should die of anything, in other words, except boredom, as private property condemned to a life sentence on the shelf.
“I’ll tell you another time,” I tell him, on the verge of saying good-bye.
So I find myself spending my days in a garden tending trees and flowers and keeping to myself in more ways than one, lost in passing thoughts, songs, the pause of a cloud that lifts the sun and load from your back.
I walk through the field with a new apple tree to plant.
I set it down, turn it around, examine the nubs of new branches seeking their way in the surrounding space.
A tree needs two things: sustenance in the earth and beauty above it. They are concrete creatures driven by a force of elegance. The beauty they need is wind, light, birds, crickets, ants, and a starry threshold toward which the branches can point their patterns.
Beauty is the engine in the trees that drives their lymph upward. In nature only beauty contradicts gravity. Without beauty the tree can’t manage. So I stop at one spot in the field and ask, “Is this where you want to be?”
I don’t expect the tree to answer, to make a sign in the fist I have wrapped around its trunk, but I like having a word with the tree. It feels the edges, the horizons, and it’s looking for an exact spot to rise. A tree hears comets, planets, masses and swarms. It hears the storms on the sun and the locusts on its back with the same vigilant attention. A tree is a union of the close and the perfect far.
If it comes from a nursery and has to take root in unknown soil, a tree is as confused as a country boy on his first day at the factory. So I take it for a walk before digging a hole for it.
At home I flatten out the page in front of my plate and take a second look at the piece of paper. Her name is Laila, two syllables from a nursery rhyme, an accent sitting atop the first vowel like a bolt of lightning: Làila.
The piece of paper is laying there.
I chew on a slice of cheese and read the book, but I’m distracted by the white patch laying crosswise over the vertical wood-grain of the table.
So I stand up, go out to the street to look for a telephone. I leave everything on the table, even the piece of paper. I realize this in the phone booth.
These setbacks amuse me. During the day the body obeys and obeys everything I ask of it, but once its share is done it balks, tells me to take a hike, sends me packing, chasing the wind, teases me silly. I think it’s right. The body’s a good beast of burden, and when it goes back indoors it wants to stay there.
I go up and down the road and I’m back with the number.
“Laila?”
“Yes?” I hear her voice, like a freshly opened bottle, cheerful and guttural.
“At my fingertips I have the number and name that you decided to give me.”
“I want to see you again.”
“I’m fifty and I’m a gardener.”
“Alright. When?”
“Gardening I do every day, being fifty just recently.”
She snorts, I hope it’s a smile, and tells me that I’ve got good reflexes. She wants to see me again.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to keep her on the phone too long, so I say yes.
“Do you have a telephone?” she asks.
“No. I don’t have a car, a record player or even a washing machine. But I do have a refrigerator.”
“Let me take you out for dinner,” she sa
ys.
“I’m too old to handle a waiter bringing the bill to a woman rather than to me.”
“At my place, then?” I accept.
“Have you got a pen?”
“I wish!”
“So you’ll have to memorize my address.” She tells me the where and when.
“You keep giving me numbers and names. What are you, Laila, a code book?”
“Will you remember them?”
“If I don’t, I’ll call.”
“So we’re on,” she says.
“Listen, Laila, you wouldn’t happen to want my name?”
“Not right away,” she replies.
“Well, it’s not as pretty as yours,” I say.
“You like it?”
“Like the beginning of a song. You learn the music in an instant and the words come later.”
I hang up. At home I eat, read. No more pieces of paper laying crossways between me and my nighttime habits.
What is Laila like. I try to imagine. She’s someone who looks men up and down, a general who from a thousand-soldier formation can pick out the men to raise through the ranks.
They look at her in the streets, but she looks first.
I make things up. Laila weighs you on the scale of her quick eyes and finds you lacking.
What does she see in me? A cardboard face from working outdoors.
Maybe she likes the kind of guy at a tavern who turns pages rather than rolling bread crumbs into balls.
She’s tall, doesn’t wear any trinkets around her fingers or neck.
She speaks with a dark, throaty voice. She has capable hands.
High cheekbones to summon a smile, a nice geometric face, full mouth, healthy bite. It must be nice to watch her eat.
Soft temples hinted at by a lock of hair. Strong nostrils for drawing in air.
I want to bring her a vase of sage from my garden, so I can tell her where it comes from.
I think of the things I won’t tell her, the layers of life to peel away.
I’ll tell her about the sage on Pag Island, a goat pasture that produces the best-smelling cheese in the Mediterranean.
