Microcosms (Panther)

by Magris, Claudio

  Perhaps that vacuum means you have finally entered the Garden, through all those gates that usually bar the entrance to its secret heart. It is not possible to keep count of the laps as you run round the flowerbed, but you must run, run all the way round, forwards and backwards, masters of the Garden; you are master when you are alone, the only one, when there is no one left any more. A cat, in the bushes, looks on listlessly; the slit of its narrowing pupil is the strip of sun that disappears below the horizon. A livid wind beats piles of leaves, the statues have no arms and legs, a people of cripples and mutes. Very high walls surround the Garden and the sky too is a wall against which the branches stand out, cracks appear and spread out in many places, the walls begin to crumble, everything is silent, an enormous collapse. It is so strange, little by little, to hear the usual noises once more, to recognize that that is a bench where many people have sat, to feel remorse and fear for the anxiety of his parents as they search for him. On the way home, even before crossing the gate, one feels that one is once again outside the Garden, that the immense vacuum has collapsed, contracted, has returned like the genie into the magic lamp and has disappeared, a berry buried in the thick of a bush.

  The busts are exposed to the sun and the rain, as they are to the many birds of all kinds, pigeons especially, which leave more visible and lasting traces on them. The effect of this supplementary decoration varies from case to case. On the drawn face of Silvio Benco, in which the sculptor sought to express the fire of a troubled soul, the excremental marks that have rained from on high appear as spiteful vandalism, Nature’s insult to the nobility of the spirit and old age. A few metres away similar signs of the birds’ aerial passage seem less out of place on Umberto Saba’s face, as it directs a lecherous, avid sidelong glance at some appetizing incarnation of the warm life that is presumably passing along the avenue at that moment.

  Familiarity with all the vital bodily fluids, with the slime out of which life is formed and with which children are not afraid to dirty themselves in their games, is appropriate for the poet who had no qualms in expressing the age-old longing, the desire that goes beyond good and evil. Saba is the animal who has little acquaintance with the modesty and the regret of which he himself speaks in a great poem about old age, he is the predator that pounces on its prey, with a greed mingled with tenderness, love, lust, the will to power, and devours it without distinguishing a kiss from a bite. His poetry is great, of an intensity and a fullness that is rare in twentieth-century works, because of its sharp and ruthless transparency that reveals the dark underside of life and its impulses, its grace and its untameable cruelty.

  In Saba there is also ancient pity, sagacity, lucid intelligence, simplicity, painful love of life that make up, in unity and harmony, the “voices vainly discordant” of life itself. That painful love is a relentless affirmation of the pleasure principle despite the inevitable victory, biological and historical, of the death instinct. Saba has the strength of innocence, an innocence at once clear and clouded, tender and cruel, like that of a boy who is enchanted by a flower but squashes an insect; it is the wild innocence of one who accepts life completely in its grace and in its feral nature. In this inextricable vortex of desire, never sublimated nor repressed, love and intimidation co-exist and often coincide, the clearest azure and the dirtiest mud; Eros as dedication and Eros as violence. In the absolute clarity of Mediterranean “reckless love” is painful passion and sordid profanation, moving nostalgia and calculated domination, torment, enchantment and abuse.

  Those marks spurted out by the birds do not disfigure Saba’s bust, which knows not disgust for any vital humour. Like children, Saba is capable of finding pleasure in covering oneself with any slime and extracting from it the purest of pearls. He is beyond that contradiction between green and grey, because he is beyond good and evil – he wallows in life, in its seduction and in its secretions. Unlike the other busts in the Garden, his bust, in its sagacity and lechery, is not a funerary monument.

  The pigeons that besmirch the city’s glory have not escaped the notice of the competent authorities. A city council resolution, distributed in the Eighties to the leaders of the local wards for their consideration as established by Article 17 of the code, suggested culling the local pigeons (Columba livia), given their worrying demographic increase. Making reference to the danger of contagion from infectious diseases transmitted by the pigeons, authoritatively described by a physician from the public hygiene office of New York, the council, “having ascertained … beheld … noted … requested … all that is heretofore stated”, provides for the capture of no fewer than two thousand pigeons and their transportation to outlying areas, naming the company to whom the job is to be entrusted.

  The project receives support from the custodians of local history, upset by the insults heaped upon the busts of illustrious men by the pigeons as they streak through the air, prone as they are to dysentery. The war against the feathered tribe, greeted enthusiastically in the Garden, finds support elsewhere too, for example among the vendors and customers of the city’s large fish market, where the pigeons have excellent nesting positions and love to swoop over the fresh fish stalls, with unpleasant consequences for the produce. Nevertheless, there is strong opposition to the project. Protests come from animal rights’ associations, volunteers who distribute food to flocks of birds, both in the Garden and under the windows of the offices where the repressive initiative was born. Reports from police, their suspicions alerted by the extravagant abundance of the feed, which suggests considerable resources, reveal the existence of wills and donations made in favour of the pigeons.

  The opposition is cock-a-hoop when the results of some bacteriological tests show that the pigeons carry no diseases dangerous for humans and when a University of Rome Professor of Infectious Diseases challenges the opinion of the physician from New York. Mediation between the two opposing groups is attempted, but with poor results; the Trieste section of the Animal Protection League agrees to the destruction of the pigeons’ eggs, but the council is not able to organize a sufficiently large workforce to cover kilometres of roofs, gutters, cornices, dormer windows. In the fish market the application of a coating designed to repel the pigeons without harming them ends in disaster.

  Providential aid then arrives from a town in Calabria, keen to establish a fraternal link with the city dearest to the heart of all Italians: the town asks for a few hundred pigeons to populate its squares and immediately it receives a few thousand, packed with all due care and sent by rail. Soon after, as the thank-you telegram states, and in the presence of the local dignitaries presiding over the ceremony, the pigeons take to the air in a radiant sky – symbol of an ideal twinning.

  But Trieste still has too many pigeons, occasioning a variety of increasingly chaotic initiatives: furtive capture of the birds at dawn, loaded onto a truck and freed on an unidentified “mountain”; a suggestion to move them all to Alto Adige, perhaps in the unconscious and deplorable desire to see them fly over the spick-and-span little houses of the Schützen, leaving traces of their passage on the pretty window-boxes; the suspicious offer from a Piedmontese company to repopulate areas lacking in Columba livia, an initiative that is blocked because of rumours that the company was supplying pigeons to shooting clubs. Even during these phases there was no lack of enterprising underground warfare – automatic nets thrown in the Garden and elsewhere to trap the birds, commando groups to sabotage the nets.

  The story culminates and ends when the council, taking advantage of the decline in the taboo surrounding the contraceptive pill, resolves after much debate to purchase massive stocks of corn treated with hormones for distribution among the feathered population; this despite reservations on the part of certain Public Health officers who fear terrible consequences for anyone who eats a pigeon that is on the pill. A Swiss company, ideally neutral in vexed questions of ethics, is invited to provide the medicated corn; this is duly sent to Trieste, where bureaucracy, with its combination of nit-picki
ng and inefficiency, blocks everything. The product, having come from Switzerland, has to be taxed, but Customs do not know which category it belongs to, whether medicated food or alimentary medicine. The product never manages to clear Customs; thus a procedural quibble interrupts the struggle against the pigeons’ demographic exuberance and allows the birds to continue flying in swarms targeting those below, even the bronze and marble busts in the Garden, a small animal vendetta on the majesty of History, which for the animal kind, even more so than for mankind, is nothing more than a slaughterhouse.

  The large plane tree that forms a triumphal arch opposite the entrance on Via Giulia has a venerable majesty and brings to mind that other ancient plane on whose branches Xerxes hung a precious necklace, in homage to its age and its dignity. When defeated at Salamis, however, the powerful king of the Persians had someone give the sea where he lost the battle a good lashing.

  General D., well read in the classics and therefore well acquainted with those episodes, enjoys walking under those branches out of an instinctive love for anything and everything that evokes glory; his gait is haughty, worthy of an imperious sovereign, but he is more like the king who has the sea whipped rather than the same king who bows before an ancient tree. His carriage never varies, stiff and slow but upright, as those who see him take his daily constitutional always in the same part of the Garden can testify, but it is difficult to say for how much longer it will continue this way. Neither the general nor the doctors know yet with any precision, although the latter have communicated the ultimate verdict directly, with no pretence, in a manner befitting an old soldier who has never really given much weight to others’ lives, nor to his own, and it was anyway the manner in which he himself had asked to be informed.

  General D. learned to love the green, the shade of the trees, way back in his childhood in the sunny Sicilian city in which he was born. Since he retired to Trieste together with his wife, returning just once a year to his lands in Sicily to dress down and browbeat a bailiff or two, he goes to the Garden for his walk every day at the same time. For some time now, in a departure from his usual itinerary, he has occasionally been sitting on a bench, writing on some sheets of paper in a large hand. He is polite, he responds to people’s greetings, but he discourages any attempt at conversation. Even though he talks with almost no one, he is one of the most popular figures in the Garden – perhaps because he is so tall, so unusually haughty, absolutely a-Triestine, so Norman–Sicilian. They say he treated those of inferior rank with harshness and contempt. They also say that he was equally contemptuous of and offensive to the SS officer who came to arrest him in 1943, and who, in view of his response, sent him off to a concentration camp.

  Since the doctors let him know about the cancer and its being at an incurable stage, General D. has not interrupted his walks and neither, for now, has he interrupted any other habits, but he has decided to spend the last months of his life preparing the answers to the condolences his wife will receive on his death, condolences from the highest-ranking officers on the general staff. He works as he walks; he thinks of names, jots down those who suddenly come to mind, carefully reconstructs the shared experiences with each of the future sympathizers, to prevent his wife from making any mistakes. “Your Excellency’s grief at my husband’s passing away – he always recalled the years you spent together at the Academy.… General, Sir, I am touched by your concern for my grief; just a few days before dying, my husband was telling me how during the African campaign your division …”

  Rumour has it that there are already many letters, kept in stringent order, simply awaiting the moment when his wife will have to copy them; by hand, the General has said, and that’s that, wives do not discuss but simply obey, like everyone else. Authority is the true form of goodness, as in this case where the husband, thoughtful beyond death, spares his consort the pain of thinking and composing.

  General D. trusts no one; he wants to manage his own life and even his own death – anyone else would botch it, as usual. The General looks at the old plane tree, but he does not bow to it; he bows to no one, not even to God, who thinks He can frighten him with that inordinate multiplication of cells. He is used to fighting superior forces and he certainly never panics. For as long as he can he gives as good as he gets. That tree too, if he could, some time, he would have it felled. He fully understands those lashes of the whip with which Xerxes punished the sea; a good flogging is never a mistake. Those letters are his whiplashes, the gloves he slaps in God’s and destiny’s face, that way they’ll learn just how a man can thwart all their battle-plans; he always did like Prometheus, who told Zeus where to get off.

  Prometheus, too, he considers, had a bird of prey gnawing at his vitals, but that is no reason to offend him with one’s pity. Just as he never had any pity for others during his lifetime, so now he does not even think of devoting any to himself. Nor indeed to that fish – he sees immediately, one glance is enough, that it’s going to die, he has an eye for death – and certainly none at all for that boy, who sits for a moment on the bench near him, the bowl in his hands.

  On 3 May, 1945 the New Zealanders were in that avenue. They had just arrived in Trieste and the city was drawing breath, although it was not to last long, following the fright of the violent irruption two days earlier of Tito’s IX Corps. The New Zealanders in the Garden were driving about this road in jeeps, throwing oranges and chocolate to the people around them. A memory surfaces, almost certainly false and yet indelibly imprinted on the boy’s mind: in the Garden a New Zealander throws an orange from his jeep and the boy catches it, as if it were a ball. It must be a story someone told him, perhaps one of his schoolmates later on, someone to whom it actually happened or maybe the school-friend had heard about it from someone else. Perhaps on that day his parents did not even let him go to the Garden, because of all the excitement and the tension out on the streets, and anyway he had never managed to catch a ball, not even when playing with his friends. And yet he sees the soldier’s face, the place in the Garden where the event (never) took place, the reddish, spherical orange, a golden apple from the Hesperides. Perhaps we remember not so much the things we live through, as what we are told. It is always to other people that things happen. Memory is also a correction, adjusting the scales, justice giving each his deserts and therefore restoring to us whatever should have been ours by right.

  The most unusual bust in the Garden belongs to Svevo, so fond of those benches and those paths, where Zeno walks with Carla and where Emilio, in As a Man Grows Older, meets Angiolina. Reality and chance display an inventiveness worthy of the great writer according to whom, as he was wont to say, life is original. Svevo is not far from Joyce and from Saba, near the little lake and the silt on its banks. On the marble base is the inscription, “Italo Svevo. Novelist. 1861–1928”, but above the base there is no head, all that is there is the pin which is supposed to support the head, looking like a miniature neck.

  The reason for this acephalous state is not clear. Anyway, it is the third time someone has deprived Svevo of his head: it happened in 1939 and again immediately after the war, when, so the story goes, Cesare Sofianopulo – painter, poet, translator of Baudelaire and devotee of shoreside sunsets, whose angled rays, he said, made women’s dresses transparent – claimed: “This time it was not me.” Whatever the motive behind the mutilation – theft, vandalism, fetishism, restoration – it is most likely that the competent authorities will immediately take steps to remedy the situation and reintroduce the park’s visitors to Italo Svevo, glory of Triestine and universal literature, complete with head. In any case one cannot but admire the genius of chance that, out of all possible candidates, chose not to deprive Pitteri, Zampieri or Cobolli, of their heads, but Svevo, the great, ironic narrator who once said that absence was his destiny.

  That missing head seems to be one of the many misunderstandings, wrong turnings, failures and shocks that litter the life of Svevo, a writer who plumbed depths of ambiguity and emptiness, who gr
asped the extent to which things are not in order and yet continued to live as if they were, who revealed chaos and pretended he had not noticed it, who realized just how little there is to desire and love in life, and yet learned to desire it and love it intensely.

  This genius dug down to reality’s deepest roots, witnessed all identities changing and dissolving, and lived the life of a respectable upper middle-class family man and loving father – but he found things often going awry. He was a schlemiel, the character from Jewish tradition who always finds a spanner in his works; one of those irreducible unfortunates of whom it is said that if they were to set themselves up selling trousers, men would be born without legs, one of those clumsy and intrepid collectors of troubles who pick themselves up, quite unbowed, after each fall.

  Svevo’s story is woven through with tragi-comic incidents: there was the failure of the first novels, his family’s benevolent disregard, for many years at least, for his literary endeavours, there was the card with which one of Trieste’s leading citizens to whom he had sent a copy of La Coscienza di Zeno [The Confessions of Zeno], wrote to thank him for his wonderful novel La coscienza di ferro [The Iron Conscience]; and there were many other misunderstandings, failures to act, funny and sad mix-ups that became proverbial. His work and his existence orbit, without ever losing the capacity to love and to enjoy, around voids, around vertiginous absences concealed with a sphinx-like smile, around daily failures both comic and tragic, around the lack and the nullity of life, around the vanity of intelligence. The acephalous herm is therefore appropriate and it should be left as it is, a worthy monument to one of the great writers of the century, Italo Svevo, the bourgeois Triestine Jew Ettore Schmitz, of whom it is said that an old office colleague, on hearing that he had written some novels, exclaimed surprised, “Who? Not that jerk Schmitz?”