Microcosms (Panther)

by Magris, Claudio

  The hero of Canidole was waiting stolidly for death, and before that blindness would probably come because there was nobody on the island who could give him the necessary insulin injections. An anonymous euthanasia, slow and steady, was taking care of the erstwhile hero, now superfluous. Looking at this old man who had challenged an army and now could not even shave himself, it was easy to understand how we must inevitably forget we were once gods.

  But in his listless resignation to dissolution, there was something regal – the tranquillity. On the frightened face of his wife – she kept well out of the way and offered a jug of fresh water almost in fear and trembling – all that was to be seen was an age-old acceptance of the burden, the blows of life, a kindness all fractured, the wan resignation of a person who has not had her day, who has never had anything at all. A face to belie the harmony of the sea, the perfection of the sky.

  She told of a son who died in infancy; she added only, with a touch of pride, that she had brothers and sisters in America, who every now and then sent some dollars. She had the air of someone who apologises for existing, but she perked up a little as she listened to one of the visitors, who spoke to her with an affectionate and respectful concern, for which, on Judgment Day, much will be forgiven. She was withering alongside her man, the vanquished and fragile hero, placid as a trunk of wood, still majestic as he peacefully faded away. But perhaps the truer crown sat, unseen, on the head of the woman who had no name and no story, because the weight she had carried was more taxing than that of being hunted by an army and the kindness that her face had known how to preserve betokened a majesty even more exalted than that of Paolo, the hero of Canidole.

  *

  Cherso and Lussino, with their archipelago, were also called Absyrtides or Apsyrtides, from the name of Medea’s brother whom the sorceress, out of love for Jason, had lured into a fatal trap in these waters; the islands were born of the pieces of his body that were thrown into the sea. The Argonauts, fleeing from Colchis with the purloined Golden Fleece, had made their way up the Danube, the Sava and other rivers, carrying the vessel on their shoulders until they reached the Adriatic in the Gulf of Quarnero, where the fleet sent by Colchis to chase them was waiting. It was led by Apsyrtus, subsequently killed in treachery at Ossero … Apsirtos … Apsaros.

  The sea is a place of treachery and death and it is on the sea once again that deceit, crime and the help of a woman save Jason, the great thief and great seducer, the uncertain hero who keeps a low profile and almost seems not to be there. We know that he is less valiant than his Argonauts – less skilful than Meleager with the javelin and Phalerus with the bow – but he is very good at setting up the heroic feat, myth and self-advertisement, and very good at seduction, at letting himself be trapped with candid bad faith between the arms of emotional, frenzied women who solve all his problems and sacrifice themselves for him and whom he subsequently abandons with the contrite air of the good boy who fails to understand how such things can happen, but simply surrenders to the contradictions in life and in the heart.

  Myth, with its floodlights and its coloured filters, needs victims, and women, Jason immediately decides, exist for this purpose; he knows how to exploit them to the very bone; in all of her roles, those played on these shores too, Medea is crushed to the point of blood. Tradition has the Argo, the ship, sail across various seas, from the Mediterranean to the Cronian or White Sea to the great western waters of the ocean where the Golden Fleece is the evening glow, but the most convincing mythographers are those who have it sail in the Quarnero, among these islands on which the unbearable otherness of the sea is at thesame time the entirely familiar, the landscape of every return.

  And here is where Robert Graves locates the isle of Circe: “The island is now named Lussino.” The shadow of the laurel darkens the sea purple in front of the goddess’s cave, dogs and pigs root about through the bushes, the trill of the cicadas makes the air tremble through the pine needles, as filaments of light shine, and the goddess weaves her immortal web. Graves loved to succumb to Circe’s power, she who capriciously transformed man into a beast to be ridden or to be made to sit at heel, and perhaps his identification of the island of Eea with Lussino derives from Pseudo Skylax who, in his fourth-century BC Periplus, describes Lussino as an island on which women governed men as they pleased and mated with slaves, turning all of their mates into slaves. Bitter-sweet serfdom of Eros, an animal liberty that Circe’s bed restores to lovers; go down to the sea and climb into the goddess’s bed.

  The legend that has the Danube flow into the Adriatic is an expression of the longing to dissolve the dregs of fear, obsessions, inhibitions, defensive deliriums – with which the continent crossed by the river is so laden – in the great persuasion of the sea, an extended self-abandonment, the pure present moment of life that is enough in itself and does not tire itself out in the rush towards goals to be reached, the anxiety of doing, or of having already done and already lived; rather it is happiness with no object, no torment, the eternity and the self-sufficiency of the moment. The sea runs in the veins, the original water of the species and of the individual, who in the first dawn of existence learns to breathe like a fish and to swim before he walks. Perhaps it is this essential familiarity with the sea that often makes the coastal peoples more open, kinder, more receptive towards the foreigner and to the Other, and on those peoples’ faces it prints a candour and clarity that is so often seen in the eyes of those who come from these islands.

  Around the lamb as it turns on the spit, Miro – back from Arbe where he had taken some tourists on his boat – tells a story that for a long time now has popped up each year, with slight variations: the alleged return in tourist guise of one of the torturers from the concentration camp set up during the Second World War on Arbe, not far from the bay at Kampor. The camp was built by the Italians under General Roatta with the supervision of German officers; many Slavs and Jews, including children, died there.

  Every summer, on Arbe, someone maintains he recognizes in some tourist – almost always German – one of the torturers from those days. Others agree or disagree and after a while all the conjecture boils away into nothing. Time is an expert in maquillage, straightening and touching up features and expressions, and after so many years it is difficult to recognize a face that looked down from above on someone lying on the ground while his or her nails were being ripped off. And murderers generally have an ordinary type of face, they look like anyone else.

  This year’s variation focuses on a German couple staying in a pension kept by two of Miro’s friends, a place he often recommends for a night’s stay to the people he takes around the islands. She was a young, inexpressive girl, always barefoot and with a rosy complexion that was prone to sunburn, he was over sixty with close-cropped hair cut very high at the back and with thin blue eyes behind his almost always half-closed lids. The two of them spent their time on the beach or in the wood; it was a hot, fierce summer, the cicadas scratching the air as though it were glass. They said that every now and then he went for a walk to the Remembrance Cemetery, built where the camp had been; certainly he liked to stretch his legs a lot.

  Once, apparently, he went to buy cigarettes at the supermarket and old Mrs Smilka, who had seen her husband taken to the camp, from which he never returned alive, looked the German in the eyes, which he screwed up, as she gave him his change. “Two slits on an idol’s head,” had commented another of the guests at the pension, Professor Ebner, from Gorizia, who happened to be in the supermarket at that moment. Old Smilka had a strange feeling; she stopped to look at him, while he stared back impassive, just a little tensed, like a cat getting ready to pounce – she thought there was something familiar, and something strange, but at that moment everything around her was strange, even the pink and red oleanders, immobile under the sun at its zenith in the still air: large, unfamiliar blooms, enormous, fleshy and obscene, and she shook herself; she had no taste for the bizarre, nor for strange ideas and so she finished givin
g him his change and he left in silence, smoking.

  When he was with the girl the man spoke very little, she would laugh and he would caress her naked feet and he sometimes slipped a hand under her bathing costume without worrying that there were other people around. Often he got up and signalled to her to come back with him to the room, to the point where Mrs Mila, who kept the pension, said jokingly to her husband that he could learn a lot from their mature yet sprightly guest. But Professor Ebner, they said, had observed that the man, as he petted the girl on the beach, never kissed her on the mouth.

  Once again on Canidole, two years later, to visit Paolo. In the meantime the story of the first meeting had appeared on the features pages of the Corriere della sera. Paolo had been back at home for just a few days after a long stay in the hospital in Lussino; he was a bit older and much the worse for wear, talking about a barley plant that had sprung up by chance and had been pecked at by the birds and was a little suffocated by the stones, just as in the New Testament parable. At a certain point, proudly, he said that he “had appeared in the newspaper”. Evidently some tourists had read the feature and from curiosity had sought him out, bringing the cutting for him. “A fine story … lovely,” said Paolo, ever so pleased, and once again he recounted his famous adventure, but this time using the very words and rhythms as he had read them in the Corriere. The journalist had listened closely and had noted his linguistic idiosyncrasies – a predilection for complicated adverbs and dubious shifts of logic; a fine story, repeated Paolo, praising the article. Eventually the feature writer gave in to vanity and told him that he had actually written the piece. “Bravo, bravo,” replied Paolo, indifferently, and continued the story. He was not struck by the news at all, no more than the author of the article would have been struck on discovering the name of the person at the newspaper who had laid out his copy. The story was his, Paolo’s, because in the world, in reality, he was the one to have written it with his own existence, and it did not really matter who had transcribed it. Ulysses cries at Alcinous’s table when he hears the bard singing of his feats, which no longer belong to him. Paolo was happy, because on Canidole even an old Corriere is something, and he certainly had no fear that that crumpled sheet of paper might purloin his story, his life.

  Capital of the two islands until 1806 and inhabited since the Stone Age – as the Neolithic tools and the Bronze-Age pottery with its cinnabar-red rims confirm – Ossero has been virtually deserted for some time. There are about a hundred people there now, but in the past it was almost a metropolis with 25,000 inhabitants in Roman times and in the Bronze Age the canal was an important point in the amber and tin trades, thanks to which came traffic, riches, distant peoples who in myth became the Argonauts. The amber came down from the Baltic along the Vistula, the Oder and the Danube, reaching the Adriatic at the latitude of Aquileia and through Ossero it went on towards the Aegean and the Mediterranean, to cure fevers and earaches, to bring good luck and for adornment.

  Condensed into a brief tract of the town, between large oleanders that brighten up the narrow streets in white and pink cascades, we find layers of several ancient, important cities. In the clarity of the piazza, where once stood the Roman forum, the cathedral now stands, built in light-coloured stone; it has three naves, a Virgin flanked by San Gaudenzio, the town’s patron, by Titian, an Annunciation by Palma the Younger, a tabernacle attributed to Bernini and the Treasury rich in sacred tapestries, illuminated codexes, monstrances, crosses borne in procession for centuries. In the adjacent mediaeval Town Hall, where on 1 June 1797 the municipal Council of the Serenissima met for the last time, what is to be found, rather, are gravestones, inscriptions, jars, coins, statues.

  What remains concealed in the easy charm of a town in which one tends simply to look at the sea and feel the wind fresh and dry on one’s face is Antiquity in concentrated form. The remains of over twenty churches, the fifteenth-century bishop’s palace, the early-Christian basilica with its seven naves, a wonder of the world in the sixth century, and from its ruins sprang the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, ruins of old convents that passed from one order to another, the ruins of a castle and traces of a ducal palace, remains of a Roman theatre and the intersection of the Roman arterial roads, north–south and east–west, remains of a Romanesque basilica that cover those of a Palaeo-Christian church that in its turn stands on the vestiges of a pagan temple – ruins grow on ruins like the ivy on the walls, and the oleanders, opening up like fireworks, pay homage to time.

  Layers of walls everywhere: megalithic, Illyrian, Roman, Venetian, with a lion of Saint Mark at the western gate and another at the eastern one. The walls say that history and life are above all else a defence and often they perish because they are absorbed and consumed by this obsession with defence. Above all else fortresses and walls rise only to fall – whether demolished or eroded; when it is necessary to build them as protection against some threat it is already too late, meaning that the menace is already too strong to be contained.

  The walls not only failed to protect Ossero from malaria and the plague, but also from the Saracens, the Genoese and the Uskoks, Serbo-Croat refugees who devastated the city in 1544, in 1573, in 1575, in 1606. The story goes, at least along the Adriatic coast, that it was during these attacks that the Uskoks made clothes out of the hides of their skinned victims and coloured their bread with blood, just as when they cut off Cristoforo Veniero’s head under the Morlacca, urged on by vicious words from their women.

  The small town of Ossero is alive, Ossero the city is dead; perhaps every metropolis is a necropolis – trade, ships, temples, forums, palaces, merchants and soldiers are an emblem of mortality, like the hundred elephants that Kipling’s white cobra remembers and vaunts underground amid the buried treasure in the jungle. Over every great city death rises up, on its clouds ride the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Of Ossero’s glories too, as of the great cities sung by Brecht, all that remains is the wind blowing through its narrow streets. But that wind comes off the sea, it is fresh and young like the oleanders. Pestilence, wars, massacres – death and history, once they have passed on, no longer hurt. Ossero remains, airy and light, a white filigree suspended between the two islands, in the great milky blue of the summer.

  Marco told the story of his war during a night’s fishing, after a leisurely day’s sail, setting just a bit of canvas out of respect for the gentle puff of Mistral which served well enough to give the sense of a little breeze on one’s face rather than for propelling the heavy boat. It had set out from Lussino, from the deep-green anchorage at Vallescura, and had wandered easily, following no precise course, towards Ossero and then towards Punta Croce, the extreme rocky point of Cherso, where the anchor had been dropped about midday in a bay of blinding light, of merciless colours: the emerald band along the shore, the turquoise meadows on the white sand and gravel bed with splashes of indigo and violet, and then out to sea the remoteness of the deep blue, the smile of the foam crests. In the water the sun’s rays shivered and broke like lances. The Greeks said that when the gods in play cross swords and beat on their shields, one can behold the blaze of their game and their weapons.

  Then the boat had turned back south, because Marco Radossich, a fisherman, knew precisely where he could and should pay out his big trawling nets. He wanted to pass in front of Oriule, with its red soil, the fig trees, the olive trees and the big brown and gold spiders that wrap them in their vast gossamer webs, imprisoning the island in an enchanted stillness. In the summer, up until a few years ago, old Mr Jovani used to sit outside the only house on Oriule – a corpulent and beaming Silenus who spent his time eating the odd fleshy fig, drinking from a jug of acrid Sansego wine and watching the young women who, every now and then, would arrive by boat and strip off for a few hours to sunbathe. Mr Jovani’s time was marked by these arrivals and departures, the women who undressed, dived, climbed back on the boat and disappeared were the hands of his clock; he watched them arrive and leave while dabbing away the fig juice
from his mouth, gluttonous and satisfied but above all imperturbable, as indifferent to the passing of the hours as the sea there before him. “Were the figs good?” he would ask, deadpan, whenever he saw someone creeping out from behind the house, where his big tree was. That year they had ripened a trifle earlier, and they dissolved sweetly in one’s mouth.

  Marco Radossich is no youngster himself, being almost seventy-five, but for him the sea is not a place of peaceful idleness, it carries the rhythm of work, attention to winds and currents, an eye which does not lose itself in the eternal, but watches the water for sandbanks and rocks, for the right place to anchor or to throw out the nets. His beard and hair are white, his eyes light-coloured and peaceful, the eyes of one who is self-reliant and independent on all fronts; effortlessly he would lift the heavy anchor that others struggled to move. Helped by a Bosnian deckhand, who had difficulty understanding the Venetian sailor’s terms that are used identically in Croatian, Marco threw the nets carefully, sinking down to trawl the seabed and to be brought up much later, around midnight.

  The hours passed by slowly, emptily, time was simply the rising and the setting of the stars, the trajectory of the heavenly bodies that changed the light of the afternoon and the evening. Seagulls hovered about the boat, every now and then swooping down on the water, breaking its surface like sudden gusts of wind. Cormorants swam, lifting up their black necks like the periscope of a submarine, and when the boat came near them they dived underwater, surfacing far off. There were terns, too, snowflakes with their heads stained dark; there were many more of them than the previous year and someone tried to remember in which summers they had seen more and in which less, because the years can be told apart thanks to a graduation, an illness, a death or the abundance or scarcity of a particular animal. Marco decided to land, for half an hour, on a low, circular island, literally at sea level, with a small barrier of stones, soil and canes that made it seem like an atoll. There were scattered bushes of myrtle, tufts of mugwort and wild garlic, strong and good to chew, and its reek tightened one’s mouth and immediately made one want to chew another clove. The sea was as transparent as the air, its floor limpid, an invitation to swim underwater, mouth open, as though to drink it all.