Microcosms (Panther)

by Magris, Claudio

  In this prose Voghera writes out his kaleidoscope, celebrating the useless virtues of a white-collar universe – methodical precision and assiduous effort dedicated to nothing. He describes the process of ethical reverse selection that inevitably brings the worst onto the bridge of society and history. He reviews the sciences that venture into the meanders of the soul, those like psychoanalysis that reveal tortuous truths that soon become banalities, cruel misunderstandings in the comedy of existence. He re-evokes the years of exile and the war in Palestine, a war that for him was above all a solemn labour of patience. He gazes with disenchantment and compassion on the world, as though viewing it from another planet; the contemplation of chaos does away with trust and illusion but not with good manners, a pure style and that melancholy nineteenth-century respect that is one manifestation of goodness.

  “I know, I know that everyone has so much to do in this world,” Voghera murmurs, as though he himself does not belong to it. Often, despite the aches and pains and the years, and there are many of them by now, he goes to visit a venerable and despotic authoress, forgotten by everyone; she keeps him for hours, hassling him and tearing him apart because he’s the only victim she has left. “Well, what am I to say?” he explains, almost apologetically, “I know what loneliness is, to be alone and forgotten … and then she was kind to my parents, once, although in truth … well, it doesn’t matter. But above all it’s because if I don’t call on her she phones me up and bends my ear relentlessly, which is much more tiring.” Every now and then, at night, in the Jewish rest home where he lives, an addled old woman from a neighbouring room makes a mistake, comes in and sits on his bed, for hours sometimes. “Even if it had happened fifty years ago,” he says, “it wouldn’t have made any difference …”

  God continues to inflict sores on Job and Voghera keeps the record. Our Lady Death, a questionable but unforgettable book, is the diary of the bereavements he’s been through: his father, his mother, Aunt Letizia, Uncle Giuseppe, Aunt Olga, his friend Paolo, his cousin Cecilia. Jewish Trieste, to which he bears witness and of which he is perhaps the last chronicler, exits from the stage. One by one the bit players disappear, in the final hours of his many characters, whose agony also includes the bureaucratic processes to be gone through, the emergency hospital admissions, the vesical haemorrhages, the smells of old age and illness, the red tape for hospital in-patients, the arteriosclerosis, the tyrannical manias of the ill and the egoism of their carers, the wiles, the pains and the great detachment of those who suffer and die.

  The archivist of the end neglects no detail of the disintegration, nor of the squalor that accompanies it – the vomit choking the breath, and the rude arrogance of the switchboard operator at the emergency unit. He’s like a beast of burden, beneath his pack and the blows – he absorbs it all, patient and helpless, but he lifts his eyes and repeats: “Now mind, because I’m noting it all down.” Those hospital admissions and those deaths pursuing one another from chapter to chapter produce in the end an involuntarily comic result, just like any exaggerated sequence of tragedies that initially awakes compassion but then, beyond a certain point, provokes hilarity in the observer. This irresistible comic quality of tribulations brings out the extreme weakness of the human condition, which under an overload of misery is robbed even of its decorum, exposed to ridicule and reduced to waste and refuse.

  In a certain sense Voghera rewrites the Book of Job, but with himself taking the part of Job’s first sons and daughters, who, during their father’s trials, perish in the ruins of the house, decimated like the flocks by the wind in the desert, and in the happy ending they are replaced just like the flocks and the camels, so that their memory will not disturb Job’s late and happy years. Job is protagonist of a terrible story, but one which is set in motion in order to make him stand out; from his point of view, from the perspective of a man to whom the Lord and his Opponent dedicate much attention, it is easier to acknowledge that life, despite its tragedies, has a sense. Nobody wonders, even, whether and how Job’s first children, crushed under the rubble, accepted their fate as mere extras brought in to glorify Job. If one identifies with them, with their nameless destiny, it’s more difficult to praise the order of things.

  Voghera adopts the point of view of those creatures who have been devastated, overlooked, the viewpoint of the stone which the builders rejected, mindful and perhaps mistrustful of the Lord’s promise to use it as the cornerstone of His house. His objective and fastidious prose is a great memorial to the vanquished. But something blocks and dilutes, the watery gaze clouds over, the goodness darkens, perhaps becomes polluted. Whether or not he is the author of the splendid Secret, it anyway couldn’t have been easy to be its protagonist, the bitter hero of a mania and an inhibition, which in stories are transformed into magic, into love’s abandonment, but in real life leave scars that rarely heal – all the more so if the author of that great book was (as he maintains without letting anyone know what it is he really wants us to believe) his father, Guido Voghera, in an improper, almost incestuous profanation of the deep and heartbreaking unhappiness of his son.

  His crystalline style and his preferred topics – love’s enchantment, life’s failure – sometimes seem to come from a page of Secret, but often they are weakened and watered down in mere fastidious verbiage; straightforward, charming simplicity slides away into banality, and humility dissolves into a questionable submissiveness. Perhaps anyway Voghera is a plaster saint, a man who had to master the lessons of life’s meanness and perhaps did not mind doing so. When his writing is praised he retires shyly and blushes, saying that the true writers in his family are his father, his uncle and his cousin. But in the myopic eyes as they look past his interlocutor, there is perhaps a glint of malice, if he gets the impression you might just end up believing him.

  Doctor Velicogna sits near the counter where the newspapers are; he’s not interested in reading them because they all say the same things, but he likes to hold them, the stick in his left hand while he leafs through with his right. The world is there, in his hands, threatening disasters with enormous black headlines, but one has the sense of keeping it at bay. Doctor Velicogna has a theory, founded on personal experience, about the best ways of saving a marriage: mine, for example, he blethers in front of his beer – draught, naturally, bottled beer’s not for him because pressure and temperature are crucial and the head has to be just right, not that stuff that comes out when you take the cap off, which looks like a syrup shaken before use – mine was saved thanks to that stunt of spending the whole night out, a couple of times; that way I opened my eyes and I understood. Even the most irreproachable can find himself, without quite knowing how, caught up in some little affair and to begin with it’s not even unpleasant. But often, almost from the start, she asks you to stay over at her place for the night and, who knows, maybe it seems more decorous and besides, despite all the complications and the manoeuvres to be set in motion, how do you say no? I at all events always felt surprised and grateful if a woman was attracted to me and it seemed all wrong not to be kind.

  It’s true that kindness and courtesy pay, continues Doctor Velicogna, still holding the newspaper stick. Thanks to that kindness the whole show soon came apart; soon enough, anyway, before anyone got hurt. Because after a while, in bed, what are you supposed to do? It’s not your woman, the one who goes with you through all the business and the strife of living – she’s the one you never tire of, never tire of simply being close to her and doing nothing, just feeling her shoulder and her breath.

  Now when you’re with another woman – she might even be a better woman and warrant all the respect in the world – after a while you’re lying there and you don’t even have the courage to get up and go and read a book – all right, you can go to the bathroom and stay in there a while, but only once, at the most twice. You can sleep a bit, but even falling asleep too quickly doesn’t do, it’s not polite. And so I used to lie in bed, hoping she’d fall asleep. When I heard the first
trams I was relieved and the Municipal Transport Authority shot up in my esteem as their pre-dawn heralds announced the imminent end of my embarrassment. A couple more hours and leaving would no longer be a discourtesy, indeed it was a duty, a delicate gesture given that they, too, had to go out to work.

  That’s how I understood that sleeping together – not just sleeping, but being close together in the dark, living even, and I don’t mean anything special but just chatting, sharing a few laughs, a few anxieties, going to the cinema or to the sea for the last swim at the end of October, on the rocks between Barcola and Miramare – you can only do that with the woman of your life. And I understood all that because I stayed over and slept with another woman and the next morning it was all over without a word spoken. Otherwise I would have carried on for who knows how long and with who knows what complications, songs and dances, mix-ups and upsets for everyone. I’ll have to tell all this to Father Guido, he might come today as well, he likes his beer and the Sacred Heart church is just down the road. He might be able to work it up into a fine topic for a sermon on marriage. On the supremacy of marriage, I mean. And perhaps he could spare a thought for those fine girls – one or two at most, for someone like me that’s more than enough – who lead us back onto the straight and narrow and to the knowledge of ourselves. For them, too, it was a good thing not to have me hanging around any more.

  At the table of Voghera and cousins, the memoirs of his uncle, Giuseppe Fano, are doing the rounds in typescript. He’d started writing them just before he died, in 1972, at the age of ninety-one. He could have recounted an active, colourful life in this work: already a merchant before the Great War, he’d then taken on the leadership of an Italian committee for aid to Jewish emigrants and in this role he had carried out an epic job, with imperturbable calm and stolid fidelity to his daily habits, chartering ships for voyages to Palestine, collecting donations with persistent tenacity and organizing services, helping refugees from all over the world, doing all he could for others and trying, whenever possible, to stay in bed with his skullcap on his head in order to save his strength and reach old age.

  The memoirs carry barely more than an echo of these risky and charitable deeds; what chiefly comes across is the worry about punctiliously recovering the energy so generously expended in the doing of them. The protagonists of the memoirs are colds and draughts, which bothered Fano more than any other disaster, to the point where he wore, even in summer, several pullovers one on top of another, and Saba used to tell him that it took an iron constitution like his to bear the measures he took to protect it, measures that would have given anyone else pneumonia. So as not to abandon those who needed him, he’d stayed in Trieste even during the German occupation, despite the risk of being deported; one September or October day while going round the Nazi-controlled city in a fur greatcoat that made him look as though he’d just come out of a Polish ghetto, he observed with relief, in German, that luckily the cold of the past few days had relented. The entire Third Reich was completely powerless to make him budge from his habits; Hitler could make him risk death, but not a cold.

  With his Central European discretion, Fano almost never speaks of himself, in his memoirs, but of others; he, the narrative I, is simply the connecting thread. He does not permit himself to alter nor to colour events unduly and neither does he evaluate them subjectively, but depicts the world as it is, with God’s eye, which sees everything and its opposite. He does not select things, neither does he eliminate incoherent data, because he claims no right to establish hierarchies of importance or the authority of the demiurge who sets reality aside or corrects it. He admires, venerates Saba and recounts how in Milan in 1914 the poet begged him, when he had to return to Trieste, “To take the fate of his mother and his aunt to heart, and to make sure that his aunt’s will was in his favour, thus avoiding the loss of the little nest-egg she had. Back in Trieste I kept the promise scrupulously and visited the dear old ladies if not every day, at least three times a week.… I took the aunt to the solicitor and she, willingly, happily, made out her will in favour of her nephew.”

  In Fano’s testimony there is no trace of derision, no debunking. The comedy, never provoked, never repressed, is born out of faithfulness to reality, which brings out the foolishness, the incoherence but also the picaresque adventure of life, the family epic lived day by day with loved ones. The details, entertaining or embarrassing, are recorded with an entomologist’s precision. During his adolescence when his father suggested cold showers for quenching the fires of puberty, Fano naturally heeded the advice: “I got up warm from my bed, and went into the freezing kitchen. To the water tap I applied a rubber hose that terminated in a coneshaped funnel with holes (like a rose on a watering can) … This treatment was useless for my neurosis, but it strengthened my lungs and protected me from colds.”

  The size of his family is suggested indirectly by some marginalia: “I can’t remember which newborn it was, but Mother was exhausted and Father …” Order is defended punctiliously: a distant relative is one of the first young women to receive educational qualifications in nineteenth-century Trieste; when she turns to an aunt who was most involved with numerous charity committees and specialized in aid for prostitutes and their rehabilitation in society, hoping that this aunt, thanks to her contacts, might find her a job, the latter regretfully replies that she would be only too pleased to but she cannot, “because we only help whores”, and if one starts mixing things up there’s no telling how it all might end.

  The nineteenth-century positivist intelligence is too honest to attempt any synthesis of the random multiplicity of what is real – this would be too presumptuous. “Compromise as much as you like, but for God’s sake no syntheses!” warned Guido Voghera, presumed anonymous author of Secret. Objects exist and they demand loyalty, even at the cost of ridiculousness. For Fano there are no data to be removed because they are incoherent or contradictory in relation to the picture one wants to offer or because they are at variance with an image – even one’s own – that is now accepted. Fano does not even worry about the coherence of his memoirs, which he dictated from his bed, sometimes renarrating entire episodes that he had forgotten he had already recounted; he would repeat them once more in his pages because, when the typist told him she had already set them down, he told her not to give it a thought, since it was none of her business, and to keep going.

  Every life, like Fano’s pages, repeats itself many times, in its passions, in its acts and in its whims. His autobiography has the coherence of its fragmentary nature, there is no pretence at a conclusion and it interrupts itself in homage to reality, which remains unfinished and inconclusive. So be it even for the pen that means to recount it all and snaps in two while it attends to this heroic-comic task. Whatever happens, respect for others, even for things, remains paramount. “May I have your revered telephone number?” Fano would ask if he thought he might need to call someone.

  In the medallions on the walls – accredited to illustrious artists but not always confirmed, certainly to Napoleone Cozzi (climber, decorator, writer and irredentist), possibly to Ugo Flumiani, painter of foam-flecked waters – the nudes represent the rivers which “from the Italian peninsula, from Friuli, from Istria and from Dalmatia flow into the Adriatic, into the sea of Saint Mark”. That apotheosis of Mare Nostrum, of Our Sea, which was supposed to be Italic on both shores, is toned down in the amber glaze of the decor, an evening of gold verging on russet. The estuary looks like a highly decorated exit leading into a larger room. In the aisle near Via Battisti, the characters in the Offerers by Giuseppe Barison – who also painted the allegories of Electricity and Geography in the railway station café – parade with gifts in their arms, to propitiate unknown gods; a red glow illuminates the greys, the ochre, the brown of the figures. Flumiani’s seascapes and lagoon paintings, in the wing nearest the synagogue, are bright; sails and water, sand and mud, too, gleam in the sparkle of the midday sun. Oh to leave the ark, to plunge and disappear into tha
t water gilded by the sunset; even just to paddle in the lagoon, to squeeze and splatter the mud that glitters with nuggets.

  “Your hair’s a mess, go to the washroom and sort yourself out.” With the authority that normally derives from a physical intimacy, the old lady that time brooked no nonsense. Since then, whenever he goes to the washroom, he feels as though he’s obeying that injunction, the conclusion of their vapid dialogue. “Well done, what a worker … bravo!” she had said to him when once she was left sitting alone at the table next to his. Perhaps the compliments were a peace offering after her tirade against modern times and the youth of today, which had developed out of her chat with her friend and now, seeing that he had stopped writing and was looking around vacantly, she wanted to repair the damage. “Bravo! … what a worker!” He sketched an embarrassed smile. “And what’s your area of interest?” “Well … let’s see … German literature.” “Splendid … the most beautiful literature, most interesting, most spiritual … bravo!” With each reply his smile became progressively more inane. “But you’re already wearing a wedding ring, and you being so young … how old are you? Really, I’d never have guessed. You look much younger … well done, you’ve done the right thing, marriage is the most important thing. No children yet though, I imagine. Yes? Congratulations! That’s really important. One? Oh … two! You really are very lucky … the right number. Boy and a girl? Oh … two boys. The best thing. You’ll see what it means to them, in life, to have a brother.… Glad you married so young?”

  The affirmative response to this last question, that involuntary final touch to the portrait of perfection – husband, father, worker and what’s more young and replete – was followed by a long silence, which he had turned to account by starting to write again until, after a few minutes, she leaned over him and, crossing that distance between two faces and two bodies that is only ever crossed under special circumstances, whispered angrily because of the single blemish on the general perfection: “Your hair’s a mess, go to the washroom and sort yourself out!”