by Erri De Luca
I’ll tell her about Christmas struffoli, made by a grandmother who late at night rolls thousands of little dough balls to fry and then coat with honey.
About life in the saltworks, the red algae in the purification ponds where the salt forms into crystals and blinds the onlooker. The salt-worker never gazes below the horizon. He stares at the sky, which is less glaring than the ground even at noontime.
At sunset red is everywhere you look. Even the shade is a smattering of rust.
And I’ll stop there. No sense flaunting past history.
It’s dawn on the train taking me into the city. At one point the darkness gives way and fades. A little light to read by. The car is old, it rattles and shakes.
I look at the land, think of my garden. Growing trees gives me satisfaction.
A tree is like a population rather than a person. It struggles to plant itself, it takes root in secret. If it survives, the generations of leaves begin.
Then it is welcomed by the surrounding land and pushed upward.
The earth yearns for tallness, the heavens. It crashes continents into each other to create ridges.
It rummages through the roots so it can expand in the air with the wood.
And if the land turns into a desert, it makes dust so it can escape. Dust is a veil, it migrates, crosses seas. The scirocco wind carries it from Africa, steals spices from markets and seasons the rain.
The world is a master builder!
So go the lurching thoughts of a railroad passenger. With my gardener’s calculations, prunings, seedings, forecasts of blossoming and fruit, I’m like the egg teaching the chicken. Down comes a spit of hail, a pane of frost and consider yourself served, lord of the gardens.
This is how I see it: the hard work is nothing, just a way to make a living. But what matters is living with your head between your feet, your face down to tend the goings-on below. What matters is keeping your neck craned over the ground, caring more about it than about people.
In the time remaining this makes it nice to get involved with other people, to understand each other at a glance, shave for a date with woman, throw yourself bodily against oppression.
I’ve spent more of my life looking at the ground, water, clouds, walls, and tools than at faces. And I like them.
Now I let my mind wander over Laila’s face: cheekbones as shiny as copper, pouting lips, mismatched pieces. Now that I think about it, I can’t remember her whole face.
I’m the last one to get off the train, the grim habit of a man used to making sure he isn’t being followed. After the arrivals swarm away, the end of the platform is empty and you have to be careful. Habits from another lifetime have stayed with me.
In the garden I slip on overalls over my clothes. Jack Frost is in the air to keep the ground hard and make it crunch beneath my shoes.
Below the trunk of the laurel is the pale orange of a robin separated from its branch, fallen from the cold like an open leaf.
The roughness of the North blows in my face. Better to shave not in the morning but at night. I have my razor with me. After work I’m going to Laila’s house. In the toolshed I pack what I need to sleep since there are no more trains after supper.
I loosen the ground below the laurel trees. Their thick evergreen leaves protect the sparrows. At night the birds fight for the warmest spot, close to the trunk. They fight to stay alive. Then they release a sigh of appeasement. I think they’re praying.
I only prune the laurels in spring, when they’re not acting as shelters for the sparrows. I like burning the remains of their branches. They give off a smoke that confounds the senses and reminds you of the deceased. In the midst of that smoke I sit down at noon with my black olives.
On days like this I can see the geometry clearly. The living are not at a ninety-degree angle above the dead. Instead they’re parallel. The sickle is not curved like the moon but like an egg. Bread rises, copying the shape of the baker’s palm. Bringing it to your mouth is like shaking his hand.
If you keep quiet while your body is working, thoughts of swimming and flying come and go at will. From a long-ago April I can see the sky of Jericho, white with storks migrating from Africa to the rooftops of Europe. In front of the tavern-keeper’s soup I finish a story describing the city of Odessa.
Never seen the Black Sea. How can I claim to know the Mediterranean if I don’t know the boundless rivers from the depths of Russia that keep its waters even?
I can hardly keep track of the things I don’t know, but every now and then comes an ignorance that makes me nostalgic.
I browse through pages about a city of figs, bandits, sailors, and Jews.
Meanwhile the tavern is filling up with dark men chilled to the bone. I invite three of them to take the empty seats at my table, order a liter of wine to share, and apologize for going back to my book.
They belong to three different ages and peoples. They eat something plucked from their pockets. Our hands fill the table.
I read about Odessa and listen to the ebb and flow of their breathing.
The cold outside compresses the lungs, which spread to warm the blood once they’ve taken shelter.
The men accept a cup of coffee, then leave together after shaking hands.
That afternoon the holm oak arrives. I arrange the roots in the hole, stake it between three posts, fertilize and water. It’s already a nice little tree, but it’s going to take a lot of effort and danger before it establishes itself as a grownup. Sometimes trees get sad and lose their will to live. I sing as a way of welcoming it. I wrap it to give it strength.
Soon it’s dark. I wash my face, pass the razor over it. I don’t use soap. All I have to do is leave the water on for a minute to moisten the skin and it comes away smooth.
I rub my hands together roughly to remove the shadow of the earth. Then I wrap an old tie around my neck and go.
I come in, give her hand a squeeze and turn around to hang up my coat. While I’m standing with my back to her I feel her finger pass over my neck from one ear to the other. I don’t understand the gesture and turn around slowly. She says I have two parallel wrinkles like her father, two cuts, she says.
I ask whether I look like him from the front, too, but no, she has another thought. She takes my hands, turns them around, says that my palms look like his but not the back of my hands. In other words a wrong side resembles, a right side does not.
She has on a tight dress that touches her body in all the right places and a sweater as white as an almond blossom. In the meantime we’re both still standing at the front door.
She takes me into a big room. I see a kitchen, table that’s been set, chairs, sofa, big paintings. I stop noticing.
I hardly know myself. Without embarrassment I sit down and arrange my pants neatly over my knee and ask where she’s from. Russia and Scotland on her mother’s side, Sicily and Liguria on her father’s.
“You’re a princess, you’ve got geography in your blood.”
Her name comes from a Russian grandmother born on the right bank of the Neva. “Nébo na Névoi,” the Sky Over Neva, is a song, a single strophe left behind on the borders of her childish sleep, where nursery rhymes grow and a grandmother’s voice crackles in dreams.
She asks whether I too am a prince by mixed blood.
“No, my parents are from the same place and so are my grandparents.”
But I invent a hodgepodge of ancestors. “At night I feel a Greek nostalgia for the stars piled high in glossaries, for the calculations of the planets, for the rule of the comets.”
Laila sits on the armrest, so I look at her from below and like it.
I continue. “In the open night I realize that science was moved by beauty, by the desire to understand it.”
Faced by a woman, the Neapolitan in me comes out, the wish to make her laugh.
If you don’t laugh first, kisses are insipid. This is something I don’t tell her.
At work I belong to a sea of sudden squalls, unli
ke the known, forewarned storms of the Atlantic. This is why I take in stride whatever weather may come.
In the mirror I feel a Jewish shudder when I shave below my temples, a French nose before cheese, and with wine in my glass I feel in my palm the tickling of an ancestor tilling the over-grazed terraces of the Piedmont hills.
Laila moves her quick eyes to my face. She’s surveying me. I give her time and continue. Before the sea I feel the prudence of an island peasant who goes down to the marina in winter, when the land has to be abandoned, to try his luck at fishing.
“Do you really know yourself so well or are you making it up?” she asks.
“Some things I concoct, some I glean from my senses, some I thirst for.”
She excuses herself, stands up, and seems much taller—or is it me that’s sunken into the sofa while she’s been on the armrest?
“Wine?” Yes.
“Cheese?” Yes.
I get up, too, take a tinfoil package from my pocket, and open my sage leaves on the table. I tear one into little pieces over a slice.
“It has such a strong smell,” she says.
“It’s an incense that’ll send the devils scurrying,” I say.
She sits close, asks me to mince a leaf over a second slice.
“It takes two hands to make sage into incense,” she says, sniffs, the profile of her nose forming a narrow angle with the plane of the table.
This is how I see angles: if they’re acute they’re good, if they’re obtuse they’re bad and if they’re ninety degrees they’re even.
She makes as if to clink our glasses in a toast. I turn my hand to rub my knuckles against hers. “First you toast with the fingers, then with the glass.” Where did I learn that? In another world, in a time when it was strange to live and find yourself awake the next day, still alive.
“You’ll tell me about it later,” she says.
I shake my head in a minimal no. She doesn’t notice the no.
“You seem like someone who knows a lot,” she says.
I disagree. “I don’t even know which side the bread is buttered on.”
She laughs.
There’s a smile, I think, and I realize how her mouth widens at the sides and her tongue sparkles between her teeth and my nose is itching to lean into her laughter.
She asks what kind of work I do. “I’m a blue-collar gardener. I’m often on my knees. I wear out the knees of my pants and sew them up like new.”
“How’s the soil?” she asks, and expects a joking answer that’s low, too low.
But I don’t. I act serious and say something else. “There are two kinds of soil,” I say and turn toward where she is seated next to me. “One kind has water underneath. You make a hole and it comes up. It’s easy land.”
“The other depends on the sky, its only source. It’s lean, thievish, can steal water from the wind and the night, and as soon as it has a little, it spends it all on colors kept in the marrow of stones, gives energy to the sugars in fruits and brazenly sprinkles aromas everywhere. That’s the kind of soil sage comes from.”
She listens to me, her lips tight, asks if I write these things down.
“No, I write nothing, I read, and happily.”
“What about letters? You know, love letters?”
Her question brings to mind a story rather than an answer. I want to tell it to her, but I’m also hungry, I say.
And we sit down to the plates and she ladles out a good soup of lentils and fava beans. I swallow two spoonfuls, then I speak.
“A woman comes to see me some time ago.
“I open the door, she’s intact, straight out of twenty years’ past, a distance she wears as if it were no more than a streetcar ride.
“She wants to hear some news about me, wants to see if two pieces of time match up. She pulls out my letters. I read through them for the first time. You know, when I write them I don’t reread them. I close and mail them, then as now.
“Beneath the weathered cardboard of my face, I feel the face I used to have, before changing the world, when it still felt like all-purpose dough. I tell her that what she has to do is bring to the boy from the old days the embrace she conceals inside. That she is still whole and can find someone like him again. What I tell her, in other words, is: I’m not me.”
“‘If you’re not you,’ she says, ‘you never were you.’”
“She stands up from the table, puts her coat on, and walks out, calm, splendid, speechless. Today I still don’t know if she’s right.”
I tell this story and Laila asks why.
“I see old poets receiving prizes for verses written in their youth. None of them says, ‘It’s not me.’ I can’t act like them. I have to say, ‘The award you bring by visiting, perpetual teenager of twenty years ago, is being accepted by my uncle. I am the decrepit uncle of the guy that wrote those letters.’
“The only thing I manage to say is, ‘It’s not me,’ and I drink the wine left in the woman’s glass.”
I place my hand over the glass in front of me, which is better than the hand from that earlier time.
“And the letters?” she asks.
“She left them there.”
“Do you still have them?”
I smile. “No.”
With her knuckles, Laila caresses the back of my hand. I don’t feel like making a return gesture. I stay quiet.
“I like the way you’re made,” she says, “like a river stone.”
I look at some points of her face. I feel an impulse to stand up, push the table away, reach her side.
“You like me,” she says. It’s not a question.
How do you answer?
“So do you,” she says.
“Of course I do, not even when I was twenty do I remember being close to such beauty.” But my words are just a reflex.
“You’re lying, but it sounds nice anyway,” she says.
And she stands up and turns on some music and makes me stand. We’re the same height.
“I remember the dances at the village festivals,” I say. “I miss the parties that are good for tapping your feet around a girl.”
I place my arm around her gently. I still feel the shape of her ribs. In my left hand her hand feels like fresh bread, I bring it close to my nose.
I rock back and forth like an autumn branch, I shed leaves. Up close, her face sighs. Rather than confuse, it sweeps away thought.
“What are you thinking of?” she asks.
I look at her hair, recognize the flick of the wrist that arranges it in waves, think that the wood of her hairbrush is like the Atlantic wind plowing long waves.
Our foreheads feel as if they’re getting closer, I hear her describing me now. She says that I’m stubborn and that’s how people give freedom to others. They have no followers so they persist without turning back.
I keep drifting slowly in the music, her soft breathy voice stirs my blood. Not her beauty, not the occasion: her words. And my nose widens when our bodies touch in the middle.
“Are you sniffing?” she asks.
“Yes, I am sniffing your words.”
“Are you stubborn or not?”
Much, much less. “Whatever you may think of me, trim it a little, take it down a peg, and I’ll answer here I am.”
“Here I am,” says Laila.
Her forehead advances, a simmering slowness, leans against mine, a lock of her hair over my short-haired temples and her breath rising into my nostrils and my breathing so I can’t even hear and we’re so near we have to stand still.
With her hand she pushes the nape of my neck so our faces are crushed into the place where our mouths meet.
Now only our noses are breathing.
Then it’s the hands’ turn to move beyond their restlessness.
We say nothing, embarrassed to be holding each other.
I go slowly to keep from hurtling my force against her, to allow her force to grow, too.
She’s on top of me, dealing low bl
ows to my chest. That’s how you cut down trees, one blow to cleave and a twist to free the steel for the impact. Laila taps away at my chest. I proudly resist for a long time, like a tree clamping down on the acidic iron cutting into it. I fall down and so does she.
I notice her caresses drying me off. I sleep for a few breaths.
Then I look for my clothes. I live far away.
“Stay,” she says.
“If you want company, fine. Otherwise I’d rather not get in the way.”
“I want you to get in the way of my sheets,” she says. Then she asks if I want to talk a little.
A little. I ask how it is that she’s alone.
“My job.”
“Do you make a living from solitude?”
“No, from men, I go out with men for money. Not on the streets, on dates.”
I say nothing. It’s not as if she’s handing me the bill.
She asks if I’m repelled by her. “No.”
“Now you know.”
“No,” I say. “Now I know your intention to tell me. This is the really wonderful news. Nothing I say could ever equal this, Laila.”
“You wouldn’t want to,” she says.
“That’s true, too,” I say.
“It doesn’t matter. As long as I don’t repel you.”
We remain stretched out in half an embrace. She says “Hold me” and I take her with my other arm, too, and lay it on top of her. And I squeeze her a little. “Is this all right for a ‘hold me’?” She laughs at herself right behind my ear.
“That’ll make me fall in love with you,” I say. It’s a lie but I say it anyway.
“Men never fall in love with a working girl,” she says.
Maybe her customers don’t, I say, but a ne’er-do-well gardener like me just might.
We’re laying down, she looks at my nose, I stare at the ceiling.
I remember nights without even a leaf between my skull and the sky.
I remember days and moves that passed by like a crack, betting on bad luck to somehow endure.
“A fugitive doesn’t run toward open space but into many barred paths. I drive myself mad with U-turns, detours. At night I seek the open air, I travel by foot, I head south. The world is on my shoulders. Even the stars are dogs at my heels. Now, here with you, I’m waiting for sleep and thinking of the southern sky.”
