Signor Dido

by Alberto Savinio

I showed the young typist the pages I had typed out myself, destined for recopying by his agile and expert fingers. He looked at them with commiseration. A work written in this fashion! There are no margins. The lines go across and down right to the bottom of the page. The reader has no desire to read. He will get tired and give up reading. The typist, however, will produce a work by the rules of art. Nice margins above, below, and to the sides. Finally, he will give it to his trusted binder for binding.

  I am hushed and admiring. This young typist devotes the same love to his typing as a bibliophile does to his bibliophilia.

  What does a bibliophile feel? . . . I’ll never know. Unless I, too, one day begin to love books not as things to read, but as things to look at. Or rather to look after.

  Before going off, taking my unworthy typescript with him, the young typist leaves me his name and telephone number, which I, as an orderly man, attach with a thumbtack to the doorjamb of my bookcase.

  The name of my young typist is Musa.

  In the afternoon, my friend Fausto came into my studio, saw the name Musa on the doorjamb of the bookcase followed by a telephone number, and said to me: “I see you’re connected with the Muse by telephone. Felicitations.”

  Who thinks of the Muse anymore?

  I ought to be in relations with the Muse. Even if not telephonic. Even with several of the Muses. And maybe with all of them. Except, perhaps, for Urania. Although . . .

  Once the poet received the faculty of poeticizing directly from the Muse, and therefore did not begin a poem without first invoking the Muse. And we have the Menin àeide Theà; we have the Andra moi ennepe Mousa; we have the Tu spira al petto mio celesti ardori.2 Dante himself, at one place in his poem, invokes the dispenser of poetic furor, though in another place he calls the divinities to whom these dispensers belong false and deceitful. But now, silence.

  This, too, is an effect of the displacement of the wellsprings of poetry. Once the poet thought of these wellsprings as very far away from him, and ideally traveled enormous distances in order to drink from them. Now, and precisely from Baudelaire on, the poet knows that he will see nothing outside, and that he can trust only in what he will draw from his own depths.

  The displacement of the wellsprings of poetry that has taken place is far less well known than we think. Many, out of habit, still believe in inspiration. A young doctor, intelligent, cultivated, and moreover given to the study of metaphysics, asked me a few days ago if there is any difference between the way I feel at the moment when I am about to begin a literary work and the state of trance.

  It may be that in other times inspiration warmed the poet like a ray of sunlight. When the poet had well-founded reasons for believing in the actual existence of that warming ray. But now . . .

  Now, waiting for that ray is a waste of time.

  Stendhal, in his Pages d’Italie,3 tells us: “At twenty, I took it into my head to become a writer. Every morning at eight I sat down at my desk, a sheet of blank paper in front of me and a pen in my hand, and waited for inspiration. At noon inspiration had still not come, so I got up and went to have lunch.” Stendhal wrote these things at fifty, when he no longer waited for inspiration and with extraordinary ease filled page after inspired page.

  There has been a profound change in the world: even in the supply centers of poetic furor.

  Don’t forget the change.

  Parents and Children

  TODAY, AT THE TABLE, MY DAUGHTER complained to her mother and me about the antipathy that we, her parents, show towards her friends of both sexes, and had shown to her little playmates when she was still a child. She added: “I make a point of not inviting my friends to the house, knowing so well how badly you’ll treat them.”

  I was about to deny it, but I didn’t. My daughter’s words had enlightened me. They had clarified a feeling in me that until now had been obscure. And what they clarified most of all was the analogy that suddenly appeared to me between this feeling of mine and an identical feeling which for some time I had recognized in my daughter: the antipathy she has for my and her mother’s friends.

  We’re at the table, as a family, united in love, and behind that veil, we are mute enemies on a silent battlefield.

  The reasons for this war are the same: the will to affirm yourself, the will to deny your neighbor and, if possible, to annihilate him. Whoever it may be. Even your own father, even your own child. And if the will to annihilate your own father or your own child rarely reveals itself, that is not because it isn’t there but because it is overlaid by another will: that of affirming yourself through your own father or your own child and, beyond that, through relatives, friends, through all those who are or whom we believe are part of ourselves, an extension of ourselves, a development of our own possibilities.

  At the table, my daughter’s words had revealed this usually hidden and silent will at one stroke.

  Nobody spoke. We all felt the pricking of conscience under our seats.

  Which of us is entirely alone? Each of us has a maniple, or a cohort, or even an army of persons by means of which he reinforces himself, extends himself, expands himself. The force of association is that much greater in the young, the more recent is the discovery in themselves of this force, its usefulness, its possibilities.

  Hence that most strict, most active, most fanatical jealousy that unites my children to their friends (parts of themselves), and to their teachers, and to all that constitutes their “personal” world; hence the jealousy, though more loose, that unites me to my friends—I who also know how to fight alone; I who also know not to fight; I who am also aware of the vanity of fighting.

  There are four of us at the table: a family; and behind each of us a little army is drawn up—invisible.

  Rarely does the presence of this militia manifest itself; rarely does this militia have occasion to manifest itself. So complex, so various, so different, so contrary are the feelings in the heart of a single family: that mess.

  But any reason at all, and the most unexpected at that, can spark a clash or even a most cruel battle. And the invisible troops go into action.

  The most indirect of combats. The armies, here more than elsewhere, are passive—and indifferent—instruments. But this most indirect of combats, fought by invisible armies, is in truth the most direct of combats, fought between the most visible adversaries: husband and wife, parents and children.

  The combat between parents and children is more bitter, because the children bring to it an enormous load of personal interests, a whole future of them; and the parents for their part have to defend themselves, defend the field against the threat of dispossession, against the “humiliating” danger of substitution.

  And if the war between parents and children almost never ends in a fatal way, that is because at a certain point, when the battle is about to get rough, the parents and children separate; the children abandon the parents and go their own way; they understand the uselessness, the absurdity of combat with adversaries with whom, at bottom, they have nothing in common.

  The battle between parents and children—the not always silent battle between parents and children—though ended not by the victory of one of the parties, but by a peaceful abandoning of the field, has its epinicium in a closer, more profound, more passionate union of the parents.

  If silver anniversaries and golden anniversaries are celebrated, with even greater reason we should celebrate the new and more solemn anniversary once the children, having become adult, having left their training period behind, having become conscious of the need for a different strategy, abandon the parents and set out on their own way, towards the only true and fruitful battles, which are those that are fought between people of the same generation.

  Because matrimony, that poetic song of generation (if the pun be permitted), is a pact bound with sacred ties between a man and a woman of the same generation, against other generations, against other people, all of them, including their own children. Once the children leave, the
union between husband and wife is purified of its practical reason (procreation); it withdraws into its own pure reason; it enters into the condition of poetry.

  One point remained obscure to me. Why this antipathy of mine for my daughter’s friends, little men and women whom I do not know and have almost never seen; why this antipathy of my daughter’s for her mother’s friends and mine, men and women whom my daughter rarely sees, and with whom she has no common affections, feelings, tastes, interests?

  I understood.

  Friends, in this case, are a way of playing off the cushions (a term from billiards).

  The empire of the good, in spite of so many transmutations of values, and though the reasons that first established that empire have weakened greatly and are becoming more and more confused—the empire of the good still has so much force, so much authority, that it does not allow a son to say, or even think, “I dislike my father,” nor a father to say, or even think, “I dislike my son.” But there is antipathy between fathers and sons. And even hatred. All the more antipathy, all the more hatred, insofar as the conditions for antipathy and hatred are much more frequent between those who love each other and who are united not only by love but by a common life, by common means, by a common affection for people and things, by common habits. Antipathy and hatred do not exclude sympathy and love, just as sympathy and love do not exclude antipathy and hatred. On the contrary. A strange cohabitation, but cohabitation all the same. And they either alternate, or one gains the upper hand over the other, or one hides the other—hides behind the other, as most often happens, despite the will to the good that we put into it, that we know we should put into it, that we feel a duty to put into it—that we sense the convenience of putting into it. And there is antipathy and hatred—there is “even” antipathy and hatred—of children for parents and parents for children behind love, behind great love, behind the greatest love; but since this antipathy and hatred cannot be given directly and openly to those it is destined for, the antipathy and hatred go, by an automatic transfer, and unbeknownst to the interested parties, to those who represent the “continuation” of the children, the continuation of the parents: to the friends of the children, to the friends of the parents.

  The deepest ground of the drama of passion.

  Family

  WE SIT DOWN AT THE TABLE TO EAT: myself, my wife, my daughter, my son. Tomorrow I will be fifty-eight, on the fifth of this coming September my wife will be fifty, my daughter Angelica will be twenty-one at the end of this month, and my son Ruggero will be fifteen on the twenty-second of this coming December. And we sit down at the table to eat together. The same food . . . Absurd!

  Absurd that individuals of different ages and different generations should eat the same food: absurd first of all that individuals of different ages and different generations should live together. I repeat a figure that has already reached maturity: how can you play Handel’s Largo and a polka at the same time?

  A double absurdity: biological and spiritual.

  Who is surprised at this absurdity? Who cares about it?

  Nobody.

  Nobody is surprised at this absurdity, nobody cares about it, because nobody sees this absurdity. And nobody sees this absurdity, because this absurdity is hidden behind a taboo: the family. And if ever someone—a very rare case—notices this absurdity, he also will not point it out, for fear that, by pointing it out, he will shatter the “unity” of the family.

  But where on earth is this unity?

  Once everything was a unity. The world, a unity, was subdivided into so many lesser unities. And one of those unities, one of the most important, the most faithful to the model, was the family.

  I came in time to know the family as a unity, and as the copy of a greater, an exemplary unity. Unity was respectable then. There was unity then. In reality. But now? . . .

  There was unity in the family insofar as there was a head of the family. There still was. The paterfamilias. Such a head of the family that at one time he had the right of life and death over his own family. But now? . . . Then, little by little, the authority of the head of the family began to wane—along with, and as a reflection of, the waning of other, greater authorities. The head of the family, like the monarch, went from being an absolute head to the condition of a “constitutional” head of the family. And now that constitutional monarchs are also on the wane . . .

  Don’t even speak to me of a family set up as a republic.

  If our epoch has a distinguishing characteristic, it is that it is full of forms that have outlived their own content. One of those forms is the family—“my” family.

  I sit down at the table in the quality of head of the family. A “nominal” quality. Head of the family “on the census form.” No one has taken this quality from me: I have taken it from myself. Like a suit not cut to my measure. Like a “phantasmal” suit.

  What, then, is the use of this shadow of a thing that is no more? What is the use of this reflection of something that is no more? . . . Today, at my table, during the passing of the plates (passing the plates: one of the most repeated forms of “domestic madness,” a sort of “alimentary roulette”), a doubt arose in our midst as to whether the plate should stop first before me, or before my daughter. With my support, the priority of my daughter prevailed—she being a woman. Heureusement que, dans un pays si profondément antiféministe, nous sommes encore quelques-uns à soutenir les droits des femmes.1

  The unity of the family being dead, the “sacredness” of the family being dead, there remains the absurdity of a council of the irreconcilable. The disorder, the annoyance of a simultaneity of different rhythms, of different and often opposed ideas, of words that collide, that clash . . . Like a city street in which the traffic is not regulated, automobiles and hand carts going up and down the same side.

  I’m writing these things at night, while the family sleeps, in silence and solitude: in that sacred silence, in that holy solitude which reconciles the irreconcilable.

  Let us profit from this silence, from this solitude, to listen to the voice of a dead woman, of a great dead woman: Alcestis the daughter of Samuel.2 She will speak of the relations between parents and children and their different destinies.

  “Our children cannot stay with us, and should not. We ourselves cannot stay with our children, and should not. Our pace is different, our rhythm is different . . . In life, children and parents live together. But that is a mistake. An absurdity. Men, up to a certain point, walk the road of life, and living is the only purpose of their walking. Men are then children. That is why children walk and are not aware of walking—are not aware of living. That is why their time is so long. But, from that certain point on, the aim of life is no longer life, but death. We go on walking in life, but what we see in it is no longer life but death. Men are then fathers—they are parents. We then begin to be aware that we are walking—to be aware that we are living. And then we see that our way is short. And becomes ever shorter. At what precise moment does the change of course occur? . . . I do not know. There is no precise moment. But one thing signals the shift from the road of life to the road of death: the birth of our children. In the same moment that we women bring our first child into the world—I say we women, the direct representatives of nature—the light of life ceases to shine at the end of the road before us, and instead the boundless shadow of death appears. Therefore let our children go down their own road. Down that road which we ourselves followed before they came into the world. We have nothing in common with our children. Our roads diverge. We believe we are bound to our children; our children believe they are bound to us; and there are indeed bonds, but created by ourselves, by our morality, our fantasy as parents; and by their morality, their fantasy as children. But let us not despair. One day the children will find their parents again. Will find them again in memory. Then parents and children will be reunited. Will be ‘truly’ reunited. When the children shift in their turn from the path whose goal is life to the path whose goal
is death.”

  A White and Luminous House

  WE HAD COME TO THIS CITY SIX months ago, my wife and I. We had stayed at the house of a friend. A colossal woman, bell-shaped, and just as resounding. A magnificent house. White, smelling of fresh paint. So many rooms and corridors we couldn’t keep count of them, couldn’t find the end of them. But maybe it was a circular house, and therefore infinite. Great brightness everywhere. Great possibilities of brightness, great aptitude for brightness. The same by day as by night. As I went from room to room, the walls around me awoke with light, in luminous homage. Likewise the ceiling, and the floor itself. Where was the source of this light? Besides being infinite, the house was also unfinished. Destined for prolonged construction, like the cathedrals once. From the far depths of the rooms, which I could not manage to reach, came the songs of workers and the thud of hammer blows. I cannot bear noise. Yet those songs, those same hammer blows did not disturb me. Nor, during the white nights of that house, in the white sleep I slept in that house, was I troubled by the gloomy rolling of the tram below in the street. On the contrary. That gloomy rolling wound its way into my sleep; the lullaby of a colossal nanny made of soft iron.

  The staff was invisible. The head of the staff was named Leone. Not just Leone by name, Leone gracefully bore a small lion’s head, and, instead of speaking, emitted minuscule roars. Docile and obsequious.

  A catastrophic din broke the white silence every now and then. It neither surprised nor worried me. I knew. It was our friend’s child. Rosy, blond, a little angel. Children play. Our friend’s son also played. Galloped, shrieking gaily, through the infinite line of rooms, halls, corridors. Took heavy metal objects in his soft hands and threw them at the windows, at the frosted glass of the doors, at the mirrors that prolonged the walls into glittering depths. Windows, frosted glass, mirrors rained down in splinters on the floor, scattering bluish sparks. But, when the smashing was over, they set about reconstituting themselves in their health and wholeness, because the impulse that moved the child’s little hands was a response not to wickedness, but to an innocent need for play. In human operations, what counts is the intention.