Microcosms (Panther)

by Magris, Claudio

  The suds flow down, elongated in dribbling patches and disappear into a gutter at the edge of the Garden and in the meantime from San Giovanni a Vodopivec comes down or goes up into the city and becomes a Bevilacqua. The Patok flows from Slavia into the Mare Nostrum, Italy becomes a crucible for those who come from far away and soon these people feel themselves to be as Italian as those who bear a Venetian or a Friulian surname; the youths who in the Great War go off to be cut down on the Carso in order to unite Trieste with Italy have names like Slataper, Xidias, Brunner, Ananian, Suvich. But the hotch-potch thickens, elements are exchanged and balance one another; the frontier city is threaded and scored with frontiers that sunder it, scars that do not heal, invisible, ineluctable borders between one paving stone and the next, violence that calls forth violence. The water runs reddish in this gutter, history’s menstruation; first my turn then yours, but in any case in that muddy water it is impossible to tell blood from blood.

  The washerwomen see everything, but they are there only to wash, those Moirai with their peeling hands do not weave cloth, they only put it in to soak. They rub and rub at underwear and collars, and the fabric wears out with all the cleaning. The chattering drips as water chatters; from one bank of the Patok to the other it is all an echo of voices and blethering, Judgment Day gurgles in the drain. The stream has been covered since 1863 and now it is Via Giulia, the karstic river has descended into our veins. Giacomo enters the Garden from Via Giulia to play at cops and robbers, and years later to go and collect his children who are playing at cops and robbers. As a child he said his first words in Slovene, with his mother, at San Giovanni, but when he heard in 1945 that the Slavs had killed his father, an Italian, he became and was for many years a neo-Fascist, one of those who, had he been able to, would have forbidden his mother to speak her mother tongue. He loves his mother and she dotes on her grandchildren, and they in their turn know nothing of these stories, which in any case they would not be able to understand, stories which even for him are now lost in the past and almost beyond comprehension.

  Let’s play at being Indians, let us all take all the atavistic rancours, the arrogance of the majority, the resentment of the minority and throw it all in the stream like dirty washing. Gutters and canals lose themselves in the open sea, the ship weighs anchor and the wake is left behind for ever with the rubbish.

  In the Garden it is the cats who hold pride of place. One could easily carry out a reliable census of them, because the feline population of the Garden is stable, intruders are rare and deserters rarer still. The generations are there for the studying, the destinies of the litters, the establishment of new families, the nexus of intermarriages. There is a central multi-branched dynasty founded by a large, black, one-eyed tomcat, who has no need to spit and hiss in order to defend his territory, together with a dull tabby, a scrawny, nervous creature, at odds with everyone. There are a few neurotic specimens around thanks to Luigino; whenever he sees one animal grab another by the scruff of her neck and hold her down miaowing, he thinks they are fighting and separates them just at the crucial moment with buckets of water.

  The cat does nothing, he simply is, like a king. He sits, crouched, lying down. He knows the score, expects nothing, depends on nobody, he’s sufficient to himself. The cat’s time is perfect, it expands and contracts like his pupils, concentric and centripetal, no relentless anxieties to wear him down. His horizontal position has a metaphysical dignity that man has generally unlearned, for the most part. Man lies down to rest, to sleep, to make love, always to do something and he gets up again immediately after; the cat is there simply to be there, as one lies down by the sea simply to be there, in easy abandon. Agod of time, indifferent, unreachable.

  There are dormice and hedgehogs, with their homely friendliness. The birds, so many birds; in the evening their song begins suddenly, all of them together, a wind that rises among the leaves in a deafening rustle which after a while one no longer hears, like the rumble of a waterfall. The occasional gull, coming up from the sea, glides slowly, far from his usual territory. The owl, on that hollow plane tree again, is like an old aunt, a bore when she gets in touch but greatly missed when she keeps herself to herself. Most of all, however, there is the falcon. At least they say it’s there, that it comes down from the Carso to look for prey. Actually they say it’s a kestrel and that they’ve seen it with its bluish-grey head, its yellow breast spotted with black and its white-tipped tail. Someone saw it hanging motionless in the air, like the Holy Ghost, barely moving its wings, and Lucia says that near the lake she saw it dive on a worm so big and fat it looked like a grass snake; the bird tore it up with its beak and devoured it.

  Actually sometimes Lucia says that that worm was eaten up by a fish, in the lake, sucking it up slowly like a piece of spaghetti. Perhaps both things are true, because there are worms enough for fish and birds of prey, even though nobody has ever seen such a big one. Birds of prey don’t live in gardens, says Bruno, maybe just to annoy Lucia because after all what does it take for a falcon to come down here from the Carso? One swoop and that’s it. And then if it really is a kestrel, perhaps it lives nearby, in some old house, or in the Sacred Heart belltower, a stone’s throw away.

  It comes down towards evening and they say it’s the dormouse it’s after. The dormouse is sweet and polite, he ought to be protected from predators. He could easily stick his head out; the kestrel, its sight so sharp, spots him and comes at once, but when you see it circling you throw a stone before it gets its talons on him. Towards evening you take up position. The sky is a deep blue, the sunset runs along the tree-trunks, bloody resin, and there’s a bit of blood on your skinned knees too. A bat flies very close for an instant, while its shadow passes under the lamp that wavers in the avenue, it’s huge, you feel its wing on your face, as big as the night. The night is high and looking up there gives you vertigo, the world is a word repeated until it loses all meaning.

  The forest around you is already dark. A deep breath passes through the leaves, the wood is a den that welcomes and protects, inexhaustible, and it makes you feel that no one is more important and lasting than a rotting leaf or a trampled berry; that scratching, chirping, cracking is an impartial law and there is nothing to worry about if a cricket suddenly falls silent. The forest is all around, but you are not in the forest, invisible thresholds bar the way; there too, sitting in the tall grass under the pine and the elm challenging the ban, chewing and spitting out a bitter leaf that makes your mouth salivate, you are outside, excluded from the wood, which perhaps begins a metre farther on, but you cannot find the entrance that leads to all that gnawing and chattering.

  Perhaps the kestrel is in there too. Nonsense, the kestrel lives up on high, not in the bushes. It’s no wonder it doesn’t come, with all that noise, people on the paths talking, the car horns blaring in Via Marconi, a little girl shouting. You’d have to prepare the ambush carefully, evacuate the Garden and close off the roads running alongside, hide and wait. That way the kestrel would come, big in the sky, you’d see it fly like the Holy Ghost for ages, just as the others have seen it. It’s always other people who see things, all you can do is have them tell you about it and then tell others, until you believe you have seen them.

  But the kestrel isn’t big, it’s small, perhaps it wouldn’t even manage to get the dormouse; maybe it is here, but can’t be seen in this fading light. But then it’s not even the right time, the kestrel isn’t a nocturnal bird of prey. The owl is though, and there is one of them and it goes “tu-whit, tu-whoo”. It must be wonderful to hover motionless up there in the air, almost like managing to enter the wood, right into the thick of it. The hours, the minutes pass, the stars twinkle beyond the branches, candles on the Christmas fir tree, they fall into the black bottomless night. It’s getting on for supper, and time to go home.

  As in all self-respecting parks, the Garden has herms and busts dedicated to the city’s illustrious men, and in a couple of cases their fame has gone beyond the city li
mits and has spread throughout the world. Scattered along the walks, underneath plane and chestnut trees, the solemn heads are a reaffirmation of civitas, noble cultural memory against the indistinct nature of the forest that envelops and entices, even in these reduced dimensions. It is above all the light that dilates space with the variety of its gradations, as though in coming into an open space from a path or coming out of thick vegetation, one crosses a time-band; where the leaves grow thicker it is already evening, while a clearing shines in the morning brightness and under a vault of branches the air is veiled in a glaucous underwater green. To leave the Garden, to emerge in the city, is to resurface out of deep water.

  The busts are peaceful, reassuring; their teacher-like solemnity knows nothing of that suggestion of enigmatic melancholy which normally emanates from even the most commonplace statues in the solitude of parks. But in the Garden, dedicated as it is to childhood and the healthy education of children, there are no silent, awestruck goddesses, sirens of remoteness and the void; instead we have honest busts of worthy citizens, solid examples of virtue for children and adolescents. The marble heads carry a particular authority and dignity. The moustache of Riccardo Pitteri, poet, the hair of Riccardo Zampieri, journalist, the lyre and the laurels of Giuseppe Sinico, musician, these are the image of a paternal nineteenth-century decorum that keeps watch, ensuring that in this realm of childhood and adolescence, everything goes as it should. More recent and more soberly stylized, the bronze heads are even more discreet, they do not sit on an ideal podium to dominate things, but they hide themselves away, like Giotti’s – a slender bird hidden among the leaves, worthy of one of his reticent poems.

  Joyce is there too, with his pince-nez and hat, appropriately positioned behind the screen of the open-air summer cinema, appropriately because of his passion for the cine, acquired here in Trieste together with many others … a passion for the inns and for dialect, so fitting for the interior monologue and the ventriloquist’s murmur of History. Years of Trieste and of Ulysses: the cafés, a mediocre city, impure and full of yearning like life itself, the English lessons given to clerks and merchants unaware that they were providing faces and gestures for a modern Odyssey, his family and the children, the urinal in Piazza delle Poste where the publication of Chamber Music was decided upon. A letter to Svevo of 5 January, 1921, in which he writes of the novel, “Ulysses – a Greek mother, a sea of a book”, in a play on words which constitutes the best definition of the work that summarizes twentieth-century literature and which is in some way connected with the dubious honour of those enterprising women from the Greek colony of Trieste and of more or less all mothers and all seas, Greek or otherwise, promiscuous womb of myth, uterus of civilization from which are born the bastards who criticise one another’s respective ancestry – even Maria Theresa, responsible for the fortune of the Adriatic port into which people of all types arrived to mix and rinse their origins, she too is a Great Mother.

  “And Trieste, ah Trieste ate I my liver!” It is also a city that gnaws at one’s liver, like Ireland, an unbearable and unforgettable Oedipal womb, dangling promises of happiness and disappointing immediately, and leading to the obsession of continually speaking ill of it, but of anyway continually speaking of it. For the English teacher who in the pub of an evening, merry or even rather more than that, says to hell with everything, even the Oedipus complex, Trieste is an anachronism and a nebeneinander, a beach littered with the detritus of History, in which everything and its opposite rub shoulders – Italian nationalism and Hapsburg loyalty, Italian patriotism and German and Slav surnames, Apollo and Mercury. In that cul-de-sac of the Adriatic, History is a tangled skein.

  This contiguity of the seedy and the sublime is life’s hybrid, which eats the liver but also warms the heart, and Joyce becomes the poet of this warm life, a classical and conservative writer – despite the verbal subversion – the heir to a tradition stretching over several centuries which confirms the values, the sacredness of the flesh and its withering, of the nuptial bed and procreation, of the home and the family. If other great bards of the twentieth century – like Svevo – narrate the disturbing odyssey of man as he alters his own thousand-year-old physiognomy, Joyce recounts that of man who remains equal to himself and who at the end of his day returns home, to his same identity. Joyce’s individual words surprise the reader, but his story comforts, fulfils expectations, retells a story that he already knows and which he must listen to again. Even the dirty words of the dialect of Trieste can serve this end to perfection. At least, or rather above all on paper: when Svevo, as he talked, let himself go with some juicy expression, Joyce indignantly rebuked him, saying that such things may be written down, but never uttered.

  Joyce’s bust tips us a wink, probably in appreciation of the fact that the bust of Pietro Kandler, prestigious historian of Hapsburg Trieste, is sited opposite the urinals. Below Giani Stuparich is the inscription, “Gold Medal for Military Valour – Writer”, while under Slataper, curiously, only the Gold Medal is mentioned. Slataper is the soul of Trieste, a soul that he discovered and invented; he dreamed a great aurora of the spirit for the city while it was on its way towards its sunset and he tore from this sunset the light and glow of a true dawning. He founded Trieste’s culture while declaring that Trieste has no cultural tradition; the spiritual act of birth is a diagnosis of death and absence.

  “Triesteness” was born with Slataper, and Triesteness is adolescence, senility and lack of assured maturity; utopia of real life and disenchantment because of the absence of real life, all combined under the dominion of a moral will that imposes a way of living as though the radical experience of civilization’s discontents had never existed. To claim to live is megalomania, says Ibsen, and Slataper, who wrote the great book on Ibsen, decides to be a megalomaniac and dies. War is the future of these youthful lives who dream of life but sacrifice life to its dream and who are ready for sacrifice and self-sacrifice.

  Triesteness – vitality and melancholy, nostalgia for purity that is perfectly aware of all the compromises but even when indulging them does not forget what they are and is not taken in by them. Adolescent need of the real life, senile awareness of the false life; all that’s left is a binge in the pub.

  Busts are not appropriate for Slataper and his generation, but they are the sad truth of that great generation that was burned out in its green youth. Theory is grey, says Mephistopheles, but the tree of life is green. Slataper’s generation created Triesteness by denouncing the reassuring busts, the museum of traditional and systematic knowledge that makes for rigidity and eludes the drama of existence, inserting and neutralizing all phenomena in catalogues and classifications.

  Trieste was even the site of a Nietzschean battle against fossilized culture with a European dimension. Triesteness is also (perhaps it is above all) this green vitality liberated, with all its adolescent bitterness and clumsiness, from the greyness of civilization. This generous, liberating impetuosity is fatal, because it tears from civilization’s discontent the mask of noble decorum that allowed us not to look it in the face and thus discovers that real life – and once looked upon, one is no longer satisfied with the usual lies – real life is inaccessible. Whoever sees this bare truth dies. To come out from the comfortable stuffy atmosphere of the cafés and the libraries – full of smoke, of stale air, of chatter thick as a protective blanket – and to venture into the green, where one’s lungs are not used to breathing, this is lethal.

  The busts and the herms, in the Garden, are funerary statues. Slataper dies, and others with him. The companions who outlive him die in another way; to forget that unbearable revelation they become custodians of the knowledge, of the greyness that they had dreamed of destroying and which they are now trying to rebuild like a wall to protect them from the green. They become high-school principals, experts in classical studies, promoters of admirable and erudite local-history societies, frequenters of museums which tame the disorder of existence; the erstwhile haruspices of unease
grow old dreaming of writing a great book about life, so as then to be able to start living, or covering up the debris of their dream with learned memoirs and bibliographies. Whoever reaches the green dies, like Daphne fleeing from Apollo; whoever manages to pull himself back in time is entrenched in the greyness he once held in contempt. In the meantime the boy, still holding his fish, has gone beyond the busts and is near the lake. The Garden is the promise, but is also the cemetery of real life.

  One day the Garden is empty. The sirens sounded the alarm almost an hour ago and everyone ran into the air-raid shelters. They are bombing Trieste, though without trying too hard. Someone says that the British have had a tip-off from a spy, according to which the Germans have been doing experiments with heavy water at the observatory and they’ve sent the bombers over to stop them making the atomic bomb. But for the boy left alone in those deserted pathways, the only certain thing – although he has an imperfect awareness of it, the fact being as abstract as the pathways from which everything else seems to have been sucked up – is that his parents, from whom he slipped away while they were all going to the air-raid shelter, will be beside themselves as they look for him everywhere.

  This emptiness is different from the one created gradually each evening, when everybody goes. No one has ever come in here, no one has ever seen those trees, those benches, those flowerbeds; an outer envelope has come unstuck from things, like the skin of a fruit or a layer of skin from a face, and those things are there, frozen, the landscape of a planet never seen before, not even with the aid of a telescope. The looks that land on things, like the hands that touch them, leave their mark, they crumple them and consume them, give them alittle heat, just like clothes in being worn: they make them familiar, used, close at hand. Today that reassuring oxidization, which derives from the presence of humans, is not here; it has been scraped away and the Garden is naked. The flowers sit in their beds, stupid, dilated. The branches scratch the sky making black scars. Some conkers fall from the chestnut trees and explode, the air is a pane of glass that breaks because of some unbearable ultrasound, from the sky comes a rumble, the sun is white, wan.