by Erri De Luca
“Which south?” she asks.
“The south of the world,” I say. “Sagittarius, Lupus, Centaur, Vela, Southern Cross.”
Do I know the stars? “We’re on a first-name basis, on intimate terms, but I don’t really know them. We’ve only been introduced from afar.”
She laughs. “What were you doing down there?”
“War.”
“Which one?”
“Just one, there’s always one somewhere.”
“Soldiers are a good match for working girls,” she says.
“I wouldn’t know,” I say.
“Your face does,” she says, and touches me with the back of her finger and lets it glide down my face. “Faces are writings.”
“Hands are too,” I say, “and clouds, tiger pelts, pea-pods, and the leaping of tuna on the water’s surface are writings. We learn alphabets and don’t know how to read trees. Oaks are novels, pines are grammar books, grapevines psalms, ramblers proverbs, firs the closing remarks of a defense lawyer. Cypresses are accusations, rosemary a song, laurel a prophecy.”
“All I have to do is read your face,” she says.
“Which page do you prefer?”
“The last, the nape of the neck with my father’s parallel wrinkles. There are men,” she says, “who tell their secrets after they drink. But you’re one of those who only lets something slip on the threshold of sleep.”
Her voice becomes rough, sandpaper rubbing against wood. I feel sleepy but I start talking and realize that I’m falling behind my words, I’m helpless to stop them. I hear myself saying, “There’s something in me that you find in many men of the world: loves, gunshots, thorny sentences and no desire to talk. Dozens of us are like that. Living is what matters, looking at the palm of your hand at night and knowing that tomorrow it will be fresh again, that the seamstress of the night stitches skin, mends scabs, patches rips, and relines exhaustion.”
I hear my words coming to my voice on their own.
Now she apologizes. Her voice is clear again, like water on my face. She hugs me, repeats that she’s sorry, I don’t know what for, I don’t ask, I hold her against my chest until I fall asleep.
I LEAVE WITH THE darkness. In the garden I work quickly to keep warm. I put in a stone walkway next to the grapevine rows.
A tall man, African, older, calls to me from the gate. I go to him, he introduces himself, shakes my hand. He asks how I’m doing, how the work is going. I reply, out of the good habit of making small talk before getting to the main subject.
I don’t know what he has to tell me. In the meantime I let him in and invite him to the toolshed for a coffee that I prepare on a camp burner.
He gladly accepts. He has good teeth for a smile. Here he’s a day laborer, at home he raised livestock. He comes to Italy often, never for more than a year, then he goes back home. In his mouth he’s sucking on something. It’s not a candy, it’s an olive pit. He loves dark olives, the force of the oil embedded in a wood that’s hard to chew. He likes the taste of bone and turns the pit around in his mouth until it’s smooth and the flavor is gone.
“Olives keep me company,” he says.
A handful lasts him all day.
The coffee climbs, gurgles fragrantly in the coffeepot’s throat. Before drinking it he says a prayer of thanks. “You don’t pray?” he asks.
“I don’t.”
“I pray,” he says, “before everything that I bring to my mouth. I pray to connect the day to its support, like a pole and a tomato plant. I bless this coffee of friendship.”
“Maybe for someone from Africa it’s easier to tie the earth to the sky with string.”
He holds the white cup in his stone-gray palm.
We drink sitting next to each other on the bench. I tell him that his Italian is good. He replies that he likes the language better than the rest.
“Hard life here?” I ask.
“No. It’s good. People give you no satisfaction, but life is good. You go out, feel like chewing the fat,” he says, “and nothing—here people don’t answer you. They give you no satisfaction,” he repeats, “but life is good.”
I put the cups away, ask if I can help him with anything. “Yes,” he says, and points to the mimosas. They’re in their first bloom. He asks if he can’t have a bunch to sell in bouquets.
I cut a good armful. He’s happy, asks how much. “Nothing, there’s plenty and it’s good for the plant to lose weight. Come again while they’re still in bloom.” He wants to pay, to owe me nothing.
“So treat me to a bottle of wine when the blossoms are gone, we’ll drink it together.”
He sits down on the ground, pulls out a strong knife and starts making the bouquets. Then he leaves, black filled with yellow. Each color shines in the other’s arms.
The blankets left in the shed remind me of Laila’s bed. My empty stomach makes me think of her embrace.
On the road to the tavern I try to remember. Only the pieces come to me. The last thing I remember is her elbow, surrounded by peach fuzz.
I set the soup between myself and the book leaning against the carafe.
It’s sunny outside and the room is no longer filled with the ice-cold South of yesterday. I eat.
The spoon is a reader’s friend, scooping from the plate almost by itself. The fork requires more attention.
I savor a potato soup peppered with red spice while reading a port adventure seasoned with written smells. I don’t realize that Laila is standing there, waiting for me to look up.
I see her when I turn the page—damn—I jump to my feet, take my glasses off, hold out my hand, move the chair, try to show a little attentiveness to make up for her waiting.
I don’t give out my phone number or address so she has to guess. “Wait for a phone call from me after work?”
“Liar,” she says, sneaks a peek at the book’s title, orders fish.
I look at her, I say: “You’re amazing, Laila, you plant your elbows on the table like a queen who clears a space wherever she rests her weight. You keep your back as straight as the bow of a boat on the water. What are you doing at a table with a gardener?”
“Fishing for a compliment,” she says, then she gets irritated by someone staring at her, so I turn around out of curiosity and a man turns his face the other way. She says, “It’s comfortable being with a man, like a gardener, for example.”
I put the book to one side of the table and think that now it looks like an “equal” sign.
She and I are facing each other like two numbers with that mathematical symbol to the side. I don’t know what kind of operation we are.
“What am I thinking?” I tell her about the black man with the mimosas. She says to save her a branch. She places my palm over her hand. I’m a little embarrassed. She isn’t. She’s the queen of men.
Long fingers, spacious hand that resembles her mouth, a willful wrist. She keeps her hand over mine, says that it’s like holding a stone. She says that she feels like throwing it against a window and running.
I’m not embarrassed. For five minutes I’ve been in love with a woman who goes with men, I love her with an olé in my eyes.
It won’t last. Why should it? It’ll stop where it wants. In the meantime I’ll love her: me, a little daft from surrounding myself with books, nails that are never even, short gray hair that’s almost all in place, wide feet, good teeth, a back thickened like carved wood. I love a woman who has happened to me, a couple of feet straight ahead.
I become absorbed in a kind of geometry: I unite the two points of her eyes, sketch a line that goes up to a painting of mountains and down to a sleeping cat. “Your eyes combine the sleep of the cat and a forest of larches.”
“I don’t understand,” she says.
I explain it to her; she pretends to be upset: “Do you have any other manias?”
“Yes, no matter where I am, even indoors, I need to know where the cardinal points are. The front door,” and I lower my voice as if I were tell
ing a secret, “is to the north.”
She acts as if she’s in on it.
“You’re to the south and I feel like someone who is going back down there.”
I take her to the garden, cut off a branch, now she, too, wears the little yellow pompoms. She asks if I am going to her house afterward.
“Yes.”
I get back to work.
I’m a little tired. The sun is leaning into the earth, so heavily I don’t need to put any energy into the tools to warm up.
I admit that my tiredness comes from the exhausting night and dispel the thought of postponing another visit to Laila’s. I’m sick of saving up.
I loosen the soil around the plants with a hoe, to tuck a little air under the upturned grass.
I remember the days in the south filled with trouble, ruined by death that tears away clumps of us folks, stuffs thousands of the living, freshly plucked, into its sack. Days when love is an exchange of deep hugs, a need for bonding. And behind every finished embrace, behind every giving each other peace, a tough good-bye remains unsaid.
Strange to know you’re lost every day and yet never say farewell to each other.
Today an exchange of farewells would be enough for me. To forget.
I loosen the soil and feel like I’m loosening up names. Here inside Europe, at the antipode of Argentina, time doesn’t dig in its heels like a horse, an applause, a blast of wind. It fans out slowly like a drizzle.
There is nothing of mine to protect here.
I obey your comic urgency, Laila, I think to myself on my way home, surrounded by men on the evening train, disheartened from exhaustion.
We are layered with clothing, eggs packed in crates.
At home under the shower I admit that I’m too hairy to be an egg.
Love returns, so I remember my first love while taking the train.
At twenty I make a few tries at a mediocre love. With one girl I have an urge to go to the movies together, with another to go for a walk in a different city. I look for them, they avoid me, I write them a few letters.
They don’t work out but they don’t stir love.
I forget about them by learning how to climb mountains.
Then I meet Dvora one summer.
There are creatures assigned to each other that never manage to meet and end up adjusting to another person’s love in order to heal the absence. They are wise.
At twenty I have no knowledge of embraces and I decide to wait. I wait for the creature assigned to me. I’m vigilant, I learn to scan the faces in a crowd in a few seconds. There are methods for teaching you how to speed-read a book. I learn how to speed-read a crowd. I sift through it, discard everything, not even a grain of those faces remains on my retina. I always know she isn’t there, she, the one assigned to me.
I don’t have in mind a picture that’s supposed to match a face. The assignment doesn’t depend on the eyes, although I don’t know what it does depend on. I have to wait till I meet her to find out what she looks like.
To wait. This is my verb when I’m twenty, a dry infinitive that doesn’t ooze with anxiety, that doesn’t drool with hope. I wait in vain.
I meet Dvora in the mountains. I’m on the wall of the Tofana di Rozes pillar in the Dolomites. It’s noon and my two-man rope is in the area of the roofs.
Dvora’s climbing a via ferrata opposite the pillar. She pops out from behind and at one point finds herself facing the wall where two guys right in the center are tied to a one-inch-thick rope, which from a distance must look like a clothesline.
My face is up against the rock and I’m scaling the second roof. When I plant my foot on it Dvora lets out a cry of victory, brighter than noontime: “Olè!” Her voice catches me from behind and I recognize it, it’s her, the one assigned to me, I know it right away and I feel like I already know that the sign I am awaiting is not a face but a voice.
I look upward and see only sky and downward I see only the void. From the opposite peak she repeats the trill of her olè and raises an arm and I twist my neck and see a tiny point of life standing straight above an abyss of crumbled rock.
I take the bandana from around my neck and wave it while I’m still on the rope and don’t care whether the other arm has to suffer the pain of working for two and not waving. And I throw the red bandana into the air and it glides and plummets like a wounded wing. And I call out “olè” and my rope partner shouts to hurry up to make it to a berth, but for a minute the only thing I can do and say is “olè,” then I shout the name of the hut where you descend to after climbing the mountain. And I don’t see her anymore.
We touch the peak in two hours, after speeding up our climb. We throw ourselves into the descent like greased lightning and instead it’s still early afternoon and full sun. And we make it to the hut and she’s not there. My partner goes back down. I stay seated, my back to the door, waiting to hear her voice.
And she arrives. Here comes Dvora. I feel bees in my blood, a bear in my heart. Every heartbeat is a paw that crushes the beehive.
She gives me her hand, I know that I’ll never let go.
Dvora, Argentinian, is touring Europe as a graduation prize.
Dvora, light in her old, sun-baked hiking boots, her hands chapped from the ferrata cable, her eyebrows bleached by the salt of her sweat. Her smile is aimed at my hair, ruffled by a secret wind even indoors.
I’m coming with you, Dvora.
She says, “We’re climbing the Tofana di Rozes.”
“Yes, tomorrow morning, by the ferrata that passes through the big explosion room in the Castelletto mine. From the first world war, when soldiers were dispatched to tear away inches of rock through gigantic efforts. Hundreds of yards in a hole that spirals upward. For stretches you need a flashlight on your head like a miner.”
I make the shape of a headlamp with my hands. “Like Moses,” she says, laughs, says “olè.”
We sleep at the hut, stretch out, each in our own sleeping bags, close together. We hold hands and fall asleep in an instant.
The next day we enter the dark silence of a grotto carved in a ceiling.
I tell Dvora about the excavating machines that suck in air and spit out dust.
I tell of the boys sent up here to stumble between crevices and bullets, to hit the ground when a bomb shifts the air, who lived to surrender their eyes to the crows.
Dvora listens, breathes, climbs behind me tied to the other end of a rope. From a few holes chiseled to release the explosion, we measure the altitude we’ve reached and calm our breath.
We come out of the tunnel onto the shaded steps of the western wall and climb back up the intervals with an elastic spring in our legs. The neck seeks the heights after so many yards face down.
We cross rock terraces, passing through the remains of trenches where young men dreamt of growing old with a century that was still new. The way I am now dreaming of growing old with Dvora. War is when young men dream of becoming grandfathers.
There are stones blackened by campfires. We are walking in the footsteps of a younger generation transformed into wood and barbed wire.
We climb the Tofana along the side. Beneath us lies the Travenanzes Valley, illuminated by the white of its stream.
Dvora asks me the names, repeats them with relish, as if she were tasting the first fruit.
The last stretch of the ferrata is a rigged cable that takes you to the base of the final pyramid.
At the summit of the Tofana, Dvora kisses me and calls me novio, boyfriend, and I’m happier than a March hare. She calls me basherte, which in one of her six languages means “person destined for someone.” And I like lovers’ names and call her novia and basherte, too.
We sleep in our sleeping bags, each to his own, but keeping our heads close together. At night we knock heads and are wakened by the “Ouch!” and the laughter that follows.
Married love between us begins in Argentina.
I’m at Laila’s door again with a bottle under my arm and a
thought I blurt out at the entrance. I tell her immediately that it’s the end of February and the apricot tree is already starting to bloom. The cold will dry its sap and it won’t give fruit.
As a joke she asks whether the garden’s owner will mind having no apricots. “No,” I say, “but I can’t stand my powerlessness to restrain the tree. I’m a gardener and I don’t know how to keep it from rushing into bloom when it’s still winter. And then I feel responsible for the garden.”
“You’d think you were Adam,” she says and closes the door.
I give her the bottle, she returns it with a corkscrew, goes to the stove to stir the sauce. A narrow back, backbone curved like a whip, arms and shoulders sprouting from the trunk. “What a beautiful tree you are,” I say, holding her between me and the burner.
“You see branches everywhere,” she says, but doesn’t shake me off. “Are you falling in love, gardener?”
“No, I’m just going crazy.”
“What’s it like?”
“Nice.”
The sauce and a handful of oregano already summon the summer. I hold a pinch and sniff it to notify my senses. Laila lands a cheerful kiss on my lips, with a quick smack. She’s wearing an almond essence on her clothes.
With my nails I mince a tiny red spice, sprinkle it over the plate and ask whether she minds our age difference.
“On the contrary, we’re not far enough apart,” she says. “You bring out the child in me, when I used to hug grown-ups for the joy of squeezing. What about you?”
“I see the pain of miserly love in young people,” I say. “You don’t have that kind of melancholy on your face. But I’m careful not to step on your feet when I speak with you. It’s not like dancing. It’s like a stone walkway with a little grass growing between the cracks. It’s strong but I still try to tread carefully and not ruin it. At Muslim homes you leave your shoes outside. This is how I behave with you.”
We eat slowly, in silence.
Facing a plate of food, my gestures slow down. Laila keeps time and I see her adagio become intense with grace. The desire to touch her grows dense.
