A boy enters, holding a little bowl of water in which a goldfish wriggles. He sets off along the avenue leading to the lake, a name which the pond merits, despite its size, because of the bridge, the swans, the tiny mossy grottoes and the island among the lilies. The boy does not look at the foot, nor at the admonitory notices, perhaps because, judging by the anxious way he peers into the bowl, there must be something wrong with the swollen, bruised fish, something which keeps him from paying attention to anything else. But he, too, pushes on into the intricate order of the pathways, and enters into the wood of injunctions and prohibitions that jump out everywhere from behind the begonias, the pansies and the daisies.
One goes to the Garden for diversion, to sit in the sun or the shade (according to the season), to relax. Even when simply passing through it to get from one place to another, thus avoiding the traffic on the streets – for example going from the Caffè San Marco to the church of the Sacred Heart in Via del Ronco – the ties loosen, walking becomes a toboggan run. On some benches pensioners read the papers, on others the grand manoeuvres of a sentimental education are beginning, just over there mothers are pushing prams, children chase one another along the paths and among the bushes, disappearing into thickets, hiding in a hollow tree, laying ambushes in forests of the great North or on the dry savannahs, they push one another on the swings; beyond the wood a bus goes past along Via Giulia, but the wood is boundless. The swing flies high and the world falls into a bottomless well, sucked down like the blood from one’s face; when it comes back there’s nothing there any more, things have been blown away, swallowed up in a vortex. Even the leaves of the chestnut tree, brushed against just an instant earlier while falling up on high, have disappeared, blended into a shiny milky void.
But the oscillation of the swing obeys the laws of pendular motion; the whole Garden is an initiation into the law and the proliferation of its codicils – even Eros, another science of licences, prohibitions and infractions. In that vortex, that wild flowering, in that breathless running and those whispers in the dark, sections and subsections, meticulous regulations, lie nestling. To play is to obey; you cannot transgress in the way you can out there, where the cars go past, where men fight with no holds barred, anything goes and all the rules are fudged.
In the Garden, on the other hand, when you play at hide-and-seek, you have to count up to sixty or thirty, keeping your eyes tightly closed. The bottle top filled with wax, with Coppi’s or Indurain’s picture on it, has to go back to the start if it comes off the Giro d’Italia bicycle track drawn on the ground in chalk. Playing hopscotch you jump from one square to another on one leg only, at flags you can run only when your opponent has touched the handkerchief. The park keeper, with his uniform, can be eluded, hoodwinked, but his authority and the order towards which it is directed are never up for discussion. It is the gang leader who decides whether or not to go and annoy the couple cuddling near the drinking fountain. The open area with the bikes for hire, next to the café space where there is a cinema on summer evenings, that is the territory of another gang and you don’t set foot in it, you don’t go beyond the border marked by an almost black cypress.
The shade of the Garden, with its multiform spaces enclosed within limited perimeters, is an introduction to the law and its close relationship with mystery. There is a rigour, a dark mystery, an ancient wound even in the law that makes the fish in the bowl lose its scales and gasp. No one – not just the boy who only a few days previously won the fish in the Sacred Heart parish lottery in Via del Ronco and happily took it home – no one really knows why that fish, rather than enjoying the water and life and its bread crumbs, has to be ill and perhaps has to die.
Everywhere in the Garden, Necessity reveals itself. Things are and that’s all there is to it. Elisa I love you, the virtues and the merits of Elisa matter not. The chestnuts fall from the trees, the spiky shells split with a dull crack, the season advances to the drumbeat of war; an old tree leans on another, a wounded warrior who wants to die on his feet. Even Antonio, his smile never changing and always arm-in-arm with his mother, propounds an enigmatic and binding law, and the children, as they come out of school generation after generation and go to play along the pathways, soon learn to look upon him as if he were a warden too, but a guard from a special corps, with secret duties to carry out. And it is this way even if without his mother he would never be able to find the exit from the Garden to return home and neither would he be able to count the change needed to buy a drink.
Certainly, in the beginning the new arrivals do not realize, and they laugh behind his back, sometimes they even throw stones at him and, if his mother is distracted or just out of reach, they grab the little bunch of flowers that he always holds in his hand; but then other children, who initially had done the same things and then they too had learned in their turn from older children who no longer go to the Garden, they explain and the newcomers understand Antonio’s mission once and for all. Even the listless, imperturbable way he lets them tear the flowers from him is a sign of authority. Towards evening when he leaves with his mother to return home, the beardless man with his thin, white hair disappears into the shadow of the pathways in the same way that Father Guido – in the church of the Sacred Heart, where the children are sometimes taken to Vespers as they prepare for Communion – leaves the altar after the blessing and disappears into the sacristy.
Immediately beyond the entrance, the Garden is straightaway a dark forest; among the tree trunks and the branches the roller-skating rink shines white, a remote frozen lake among the mountains – the skates glide and the smooth stone under the rollers slips away with a glitter of snow, the wind blows in one’s face and, even if the circular rink is small and flat, the wind that comes from far away sends one careering into a long, dizzy descent. Sometimes it is as though one were falling on high, as on the swing; the blue beyond the tops of the trees is a dazzling dust cloud, the ground under the skates creaks like the ice on a lake as it breaks, the rink dilates into a bright clearing in the wood.
Some of the trees around are old; a big plane tree sprouts protuberances and warts, sagging breasts, knotty excrescences. Old age is a chaotic exuberance; life grows, destroying its form and dying from excess. Just twenty or so metres from the entrance, to the left, along the path that runs alongside Via Marconi, between a lime tree with its heart-shaped leaves and a young elm, there is a plane tree with an open, hollow trunk – the cavity makes a good hiding place during the games and skirmishes. The tree is diseased, but it is good to be in there, protected from the insidious immensity of the world. The walls inside are damp; it is pleasant to coat one’s hands with that watery soil in the darkness of the hollow tree, like handling sand and mud in making castles or making shapes from moulds. Outside the leaves shimmer, the moisture drips like saliva along the channelled walls and ends up in a small puddle, the drips gather in a clear pool, a baptismal font hidden away in the wood; to touch that freshness with one’s hand, to moisten one’s hot forehead and cheeks is a relief, even some birds come in to quench their thirst and bathe in that font.
A little farther off, in front of the statue of a woman with an eagle on her shoulder, donated XX.3.MCMXXI by the Milanese Honour the Army Committee, there is a bench in a fine sunny position amidst tufts of verbena. This bench warrants attention in as much as it is occupied very nearly every morning during the fine season by Mr C. and his wife, as inseparable from the Garden as the statuary herms scattered along its avenues. The pause on that bench – effected especially, but not only on Sundays – is an interruption in the walk which, having begun relatively early, later on, towards midday, brings Mr and Mrs C. to the other side of the park, to the café in the open space. Here at that time it is certain that someone from the usual crowd will have arrived, and it is therefore possible to sit down without ordering anything and to accept the coffee offered by whoever is already drinking his. The usual company consists of some lawyer or pharmacist and a few ladies who, in their duels
to decide the place and time of a dinner and in their comments on possible matrimonial candidates for Doctor Krainer, a recently widowed notary, display a thirst for domination no less rabid than Lady Macbeth’s.
C.’s vocation for saving money, a result of the poverty of his childhood and of his having survived it so long ago, is a philosophical profession that transcends his persona, to the point where seeing others squander money depresses him; he would never order a second coffee at someone else’s expense. In essence he would be happy if the others simply sat down on that bench with him, where money cannot be spent, and if he goes to join them at the café it is only because he thinks it necessary to frequent society and to maintain appearances, as he has always done. Even in his youth when he worked his fingers to the bone in a hundred different jobs, he would stand and read the newspaper from the copies on display in front of the newsagent’s and deny himself a sandwich, even while buying polish for his shoes so that they shone like mirrors on Sundays and holidays.
At the café or earlier, on the bench, C. exchanges polite banalities with his acquaintances which exhaust his expressive and intellectual faculties: the requisite congratulations for a good school report, remarks regarding obvious meteorological facts or regret for the fine things of yesteryear that are no longer to be found – above all, he says, the porcelain chamber pots that have disappeared from people’s homes, and those fine brass spittoons in offices which unfortunately have not been seen for some time. Every now and then he stops, blinks and looks dully at the verbena or listens to the others, assenting sweetly with the impartial decorum of a public authority during an official ceremony.
Whenever possible, C. tells the story of his party card. He worries not about repeating himself, because the colourless and innocent life that he loves is all repetition – sleeping, getting up, shaving, opening the window, doffing his hat when he meets someone. As an emigrant in America he worked in a factory in the outskirts of Chicago, far from the slum in which he lived and, to save money, he would get up almost in the middle of the night, catch the train without buying a ticket and pretend to have forgotten his wallet when the inspector caught him and made him get off at the next station. Here he would wait for the next train, a slow one that passed every hour and he repeated the same scene until, alighting and reboarding at the three or four intermediate stations, he reached his destination.
C. recounted all these details with indifferent bureaucratic precision, as if recounting someone else’s business, or as if he were the inspector writing up a report on a methodically recidivist passenger, without ever making reference to hardships or exploitation or struggles, words that simply did not exist in his vocabulary, just like the Latin juridical terms with which Doctor Krainer, in the café, loved to flower his discourse.
Returning to Italy after the crash in 1929 and finding himself un-employed, he was told that to get work he needed a Fascist party membership card. He did not have the card for the simple reason that he had left before the advent of the regime, and so he rushed to apply for one, without suspecting – as he fails to suspect even when he tells the story – that the imposition of the membership card was an abuse of power. His acceptance of this situation grew out of a vague but unquestionable respect for all authority that he had held since childhood – perhaps transmitted to him by the Austro-Hungarian empire, which he had neither loved nor hated but had simply accepted as reality. For him this was something that did not exist for people to reflect upon, but was simply there and that was enough. Fascism governed and gave work and therefore it was right that a worker should be Fascist.
He explained his situation in the office concerned, meekly recounting his story in all its details, including the getting up before dawn, to an arrogant functionary and when he was criticized for not having applied for the Fascist Party card in one of the party’s overseas offices he replied, probably with the same uncertain smile and the same blinking of eyelids with which in the Garden he recounts his reply: “Perhaps I haven’t fully explained: I was over there for work, to work, and I worked, I got up at four o’clock every morning and in the winter, but in autumn too, it was so windy and so cold – how could anyone, getting up at four and working all day, go around thinking about stuff like Fascism or membership cards….”
C. is still surprised that anyone could ask such questions and he does not think for a minute that the term “stuff” might have sounded offensive for the Fascist party, which he respected sincerely and as a member of which he was neither happy nor unhappy but thanks to which he had anyway sorted himself out quite well – a modest, satisfactory career in the civil service.
C. grows old on that bench or at that table in the Café, a conventional, magnanimous man, totally unaware of the fact that he is ageing, totally unaware of anything. Around him the Garden withers, loses its leaves, becomes green again and he continues to respect all authority and to praise the government of the day. That pure, quintessential conformism unwittingly takes the mystery out of any conformism of broader scope that tries to pass itself off as something loftier, in the same way as his desire to dress like a gentleman and to frequent respectable society transforms him into an impersonal allegory, into one of those solemn statues with their sightless eyes, spread through the park.
Gardening is the art of harmonizing, of transforming Nature into artifice, taming the chthonic powers into the symmetry of flowerbeds, or into Nature running wild under control. The gardener trims the hedges, a healthy tulip stands out from the green like the handkerchief that C. tucks into his breast pocket. The violets near the bench are dark, the shadows of the cypresses lengthen over those dark patches and over those who walk at their borders, covering the leaves of grass with a Lenten drape. Persephone gathers daffodils, those violet patches on the grass are already the night into which she will soon disappear. But C. sits, a smart, obtuse figure, next to the wife he married late in life, a so-called pleasing woman who in her time, before the marriage, had raised more than a few eyebrows, to the extent that some gossipmongers had expected C., whose passional initiatives as a bachelor had been limited to hygienic encounters with the occasional prostitute, to be unequal to the expert sloth of his attractive consort.
But the fact is they are always together and look perfectly replete, and his wife’s beautiful pouting mouth is ever sweeter, ever kinder; she, too, has learned to bat her eyelids with that look of surprise, she likes to see people pass by and to exchange greetings without asking anything more of life. It’s as if, after the racy tales that had all who knew her nudging and winking, she had learned to listen and to savour the rustle of shared time as it passes. If anyone at the café starts gossiping about failed marriages, marital incidents or new combinations of couples, they both keep quiet. C. is a firm supporter of the indissoluble bond of matrimony, above all because he finds it hard to keep up with the changes and the substitutions, to keep up to date with new pairings and to learn new names, to be careful not to put his foot in it.
C. contributes towards making the Garden reassuring, making one forget the cut flowers, all those shadows in that area. “What a fine goldfish,” he says benevolently to the boy passing by with his goldfish bowl. “Very nice, well done,” without looking at the fish, which is almost belly up in the water, nor at the face of the boy, which gives nothing away.
Dominating the central flowerbed, whose circumference makes it suitable as a unit of measurement for long-distance races, (thirty laps, for example, constitute a considerable run), stands the bust of Muzio de Tommasini, leader and then mayor of Trieste until 1861. He was also the man behind the Paupers’ Hospice and the Natural History Museum, not to mention his illustrious work as a botanist – he discovered more than thirty plants, and in 1854 he created the Public Garden. “In execution of a City Council resolution, and with intent to form a public garden, which is to be of use principally to youngsters of tender age, landowners are invited, if prepared to relinquish their ownership, to make offers of sale, indicating location and
area in square Viennese klafter, asking price, and other relevant conditions. From the Civic Magistrate, Trieste, 25th day of September, 1852.” At the land registry it was called “of the nuns”, because it used to belong to the very reverend Benedictines.
Tommasini’s statue, sculpted by Donato Barcaglia from Pavia, stands among the begonias, tufts of blue ageratum and daisies. In the midst of these plants hens, chicks and roosters scratch away in freedom, having come to prevail over the more prestigious species of birds, thus altering the traditional equilibrium of the Garden’s fauna and maybe pointing towards a mutation of domestic animals, their slow return to the wild state that may well be a prelude to the similar regression of other families that have been laboriously domesticated and civilized. To the right of the flowerbed a plane tree of enormous dimensions, deformed by a gigantic protuberance, extends its branches horizontally to the point where they bend towards the ground; one branch which reaches out farther meets a branch from another plane, forming a triumphal arch opposite the gate leading onto Via Giulia.
When Tommasini negotiated the purchase of the land, Via Giulia was a stream in the midst of rows of mulberry trees; the Patok came down from San Giovanni and was much appreciated by the washerwomen who rinsed their linens on its banks. Patok, Staribrek, today Via dello Scoglio. The stream comes down from the small Slovene quarter and before one can wring out a shirt, at the level of the Garden it has already become an artery in a heart that beats for the Italy of Garibaldi and Mazzini. The water gurgles, carrying away the chatter of the washerwomen as it cracks the skin of their hands, fine robust, reddened hands that know what’s to be squeezed and wrung; those hands deserve other games, but in that dirty freezing water they soon wear out, and yet the washerwomen chatter on and sing lustily, even though the song of the flowing water is always the same and everyone knows how it ends, Why do you betray me? Why do you leave me? Before you loved me you weren’t this way. That water washes away the dust, the sweat, the effluence of the body in its slow dissolution. Life is deposit, oxidization, coagulated grease on plates and blackness under nails, yellow rings on underwear, the sad mark of Eros, and it requires detergent; even the rough soap those girls rub with will do.
Microcosms (Panther) Page 25
