Microcosms (Panther)

by Magris, Claudio

  Scattered throughout the garden, the busts are especially concentrated around the lake. The vegetation is thick, tight-knit. Plane trees extend long branches that dip almost to the ground before leaping up again; sombre patches consisting of oak saplings and holm oaks mark the general brightness – a liquid gold that runs down from above the branches and flows into the opaque water. The lake is yellowish, greenish, covered with rust-coloured leaves and lilies, soft as jellyfish; it does not reflect the sky and the world in a mirror purer and more real than reality, as the romantics would have it, rather it tones down the images, clouds them. Muddy water of a childhood that has still not been separated from the womb of things, in which the boy does not yet look at himself and does not feel the pain, the awareness of being sundered from world.

  Walking through the flowerbeds to reach the shore is not allowed, but the sign does not repress the temptation to play with that slimy soil on the banks, to model a tumbledown castle and to sail a paper boat. Big fat goldfish swim amidst the slimy grass and the reeds, a swan glides by regal and unresponsive, mud and sand make the brown water shallow and make it seem deep. Tiny grottoes covered with moss gurgle, trickles of streams flow down through rifts and gorges in miniature. One throws crumbs to the fish, some sticky worms even, and one tries to discover where the croaking of a frog comes from – it is constantly heard, but never seen. Hands linger in the water, yellow with sand and as tepid as milk fresh from the cow. Colour of urine and gold, the slime that creates life in all its warmth; that fluid is not so much different from the blood that absorbs the food digested by the gastric juices, reaches the heart and colours a love-struck face. The world floats on those waters like a spent leaf rich in larvae, sheltered from the storms, because here there is no wind, no swell.

  The boy carrying the bowl has reached the lake. He walks into the flowerbed near the bridge, extends the bowl with the fish over the edge. Perhaps for the first time he is aware of his face reflected in the yellowish water, sees the tears gathering in his eyes. His fish, won in the parish raffle, is ill and it will die in the Little water there is in the bowl, but perhaps, they say, it might get better in the lake. He tips the bowl over, his fish falls into the lake and descends towards the bottom, where one can just make out tufts of grass and pebbles, like the tesserae of a mosaic. The fish wriggles, red, twisting like a wounded, bleeding finger, a farewell is a knife that hurts and splits the world like an apple, the world that will never, be whole again. The boy is here, on this side of the bridge, and the world is over there, on the further side, where his fish has disappeared, to live or to die. There’s a fish in the church of the Sacred Heart, too, drawn on the floor, in a mosaic; it’s swimming and has a name written with strange letters from a strange alphabet … something to do with Jesus and it means saviour, Father Guido explained it. But the other fish, the red one, is lost, for the boy at least; it has gone. A few tears run down his face, he wipes his slightly dirty cheek and spreads more dirt that ends up in his mouth and has a brackish taste.

  In the main open area there is above all else the café and, in the fine season, the cinema. The man who runs the café, Benzini, also takes care of the exhibitions and the meetings of the Trieste Artistic Circle – and the regional grape show held every autumn – as well as the concert evenings, held in the winter in the Circle’s headquarters and in the summer in a bandstand. Franz Lehár comes too, to conduct Smareglia’s Cavalcade of Fire and the Istrian Anthem. In the summer, among all the various bands that come to play, there is one called the “Abandoned and Vagabond Youngsters”.

  The passage of time is marked too by the old cast-off material piled up behind the Circle’s headquarters; among the grass and various old tools, faded rusty signs mention vague and in any case interminable works in progress. At the café mothers sit with their children in prams or on bicycles. The children are nice, but their mothers even more so, especially in the summer, with their arms exposed; the beautiful mouths drinking coffee or eating ice-cream are expert and satisfied. It is other people’s mothers in particular who are beautiful. As a result of going to the Garden every day, throughout the course of a never-ending childhood, the Oedipus complex undergoes a small, precocious change at those tables out in the open. From the mother in the strict sense it is transferred to those additional mothers who sit every day at the same table, bestowing their caresses and confidences as generously on their friends’ children as on their own.

  They pick you up, stroke your face; the hand has long fingers, tender, strong, imperious, the red nails caress the cheek with a teasing threat full of flattery, the wide sleeve slides back from the naked forearm, all unaware. When they kiss a little boy, their mouth passes close to the lips before being planted on the cheek. Mrs Tauber has a pert nose and a slanting look; from the moment when she playfully perches her friend’s son on her shapely thigh, as though he were on a rocking horse, the game’s up, with long-term consequences.

  Fathers and husbands are rarely to be seen, at the most they come to collect their family on their way home from the office at lunchtime. Every now and then some regular from the café comes to sit down, some rather elderly gentleman who savours that feminine fragrance or some slightly pathetic bachelor who gets into coversation with the ladies, trying to show off nonchalantly about some good book he has been reading. Nothing untoward happens in the Garden, no dangerous liaisons are formed, not even potential ones. Whether those things happen elsewhere, no one knows. The mothers are all for their children, especially for other people’s children; the mothers are their harem and each boy is a sultan who passes as whim dictates from one woman to the next. Mrs Tauber is happy to make a present of a chocolate; she unwraps it with her pink nails, gives it a little bite and then puts it in the boy’s mouth, pushing with her finger.

  The adjacent open space cannot boast concerts with Franz Lehár nor other historical memories, but only a stand with bicycles for hire. This stand is very popular and indeed constitutes a sort of wayside station on the itinerary of a sentimental education, between the café’s junior seraglio and the shadow of the bushes or the benches just a littler farther off, where, later, more decisive discoveries are to take place. Elena rides a bike; she has fine, strong, slender legs above her white bobby socks. Her nose is bold, her mouth, wearing a pout more often than not, is a rosebud – a rose with thorns; when you pluck up the courage to ask her to take a ride together on the bikes she will perhaps say yes, but then she turns her head, contemptuously, and sets off alone without another word, her small unripe breasts already hard beneath her blouse. It would be nice to be able to tell her about the fish, perhaps she would feel like crying too and that would be wonderful. But it’s pointless chasing after her, she would get angry and besides, she’s the faster rider.

  Once she says yes, we can go round together, around the central flower bed, but she wants that little tin ring, copper-red, the one in the window of the trinket shop in Via Marconi, just as you come out of the side entrance to the Garden, the shopkeeper is an old man who always wears a beret. When the bicycle wheel gets blocked, she runs out of patience because you don’t know how to mend it, she looks critically at all that vain fussing around the wheel and the hub and off she goes, leaving the bike too; the idea of holding her by the arm and telling her to carry on playing together, even without the bicycle, is too risky – she’s capable even of scratching you.

  She goes off and the bicycle is left there, it really is a disaster not being able to repair it, perhaps all it needs is a bit of oil; if you knew how to sort out that wheel everything would be different, you’d be riding round together and she wouldn’t be disappearing down there, along that avenue. It’s as though they should all stay there for ever, playing in the Garden – even Anna, her friend, a soft and flighty moon of a girl – and then instead they go, they both disappear so quickly and that’s the last you see of them, all you can do is take the bicycle back to the man. Mohammed knows all about it, when he promises celestial pleasures and not on
ly celestial with girls of one’s own age; right from those first preludes girl playmates are the hardest to get through to, the hardest to keep, and their escape is the most painful to bear.

  On summer evenings, in the main open space in front of the café, there is the open-air cinema, run by Mr Voliotis, who, after a few summers, has started running porno cinemas in other neighbourhoods of the city. Of course you have to buy a ticket, but you can also see the films from Via Volta, from just beyond the perimeter of the Garden. When they show Mutiny on the Bounty you can see the sailing ship on the high seas. The film is not in colour, but the immense black sea is blue, deep blue, and the white horses are brilliant white, a far-off smile like those remote islands. The mutineers disembark from the ship, the water breaks white on the sand, a strip of snow. Even though the film is in black and white, near those shores the sea – which farther away, down in the background is a sombre blue – is emerald green, the sea bed is a turquoise prairie marked with patches of indigo. There is no possible doubt, you hear those colours like a music, they arrive on a long breath of wind.

  Even at Barcola – where you go in the morning, every day in the summer, to swim from the rocks – the sea has a deep breath, it is a great blue in which the sun’s rays tremble and bend, spears that snap in the waves, but on that screen you feel the colours even more – the colours of things, of their proximity and their remoteness, of the tangible world that exists out there and benevolently reaches the cerebral cortex, red, blue, yellow, to let itself be seen touched, desired; like a flower, it dresses in loud hues to attract insects. The screen is large; with that ocean swell, waves running wildly into one another, it seems to dilate, to become larger than the Garden.

  Before going home one has something in the café. Mr Voliotis would gladly stop longer, if he were not so busy with the other cinemas, especially the porno ones, which really are a worry because, unlike what you might think, very few people go to them. Anyway, one has to cater for all tastes and not only for the people who come to the cinema in the Garden. Mr Voliotis enjoys a chat; he is already thinking about Christmas and says he would like to spend it on the Nevoso with his children and grandchildren and attend Mass at Ilirska Bistrica, in the chapel at the foot of the mountain. The screen is extinguished, swallowing up the years that slip like a train into a tunnel, and one goes from the Caffè San Marco to the church of the Sacred Heart in Via del Ronco, passing through the Garden for a breath of fresh air, through forests, lagoons, cities, mountains, snows, seas, and it becomes clear that it was all there already, from the beginning, and if later, in some other place, one stopped in a clearing or noticed an effect of the light or a shore, it is because they were recognizable and had already been met with in the Garden.

  From the open space, following the bend of the avenue that drags out like a wave, one goes down towards the side exit that leads on to Via Marconi, to the right for those who come from the café or from the bicycle shed. It’s late, it’s been a long time. Plane and chestnut trees – gradually on getting nearer the gate they become larger, towering arches, even the canes are thicker. Under that vault the boy returns home without his fish, and with nothing else in his hands.

  The Vault

  He wiped his hand over his face, felt it moist with sweat and mechanically dried it with his sleeve. It was hot, unusually so, because the Garden was always cool, even in the summer. A few drops slid onto his shirt and his neck, he lifted his head and realized that it was starting to rain. Big heavy drops from a sultry summer storm; they slapped onto the leaves of the plane tree and the horse chestnuts, exploding loudly near his ears and even the odd chestnut fell too, splitting open with a dull crack. Those blows resounded in his head, he felt the blood beating in his temples; it wasn’t strange, with all that humidity, that he had developed a migraine. His father used to get them often too. The more time went on the more he resembled him, in ailments as well; the moment had come to do as he had done and to follow him, to go over his steps again quickly, yes, to shorten distances visibly.

  He came out through the gate on Via Marconi, slipping on the wet ground and getting back up again. He had always gone through there when leaving the Garden – that was the exit. It was raining hard now, a rain that obscured the houses behind a grey beaded curtain, increasingly thick and dark. He headed towards the church of the Sacred Heart, to wait inside until the storm passed over.

  Outside a small trinket and toy shop the water beat against the window violently and like a glass magnified a small tin ring on a stand, it shone big and golden, a gold the colour of flame. Behind the counter he saw the face of an old man, beret on his head, grinning and making a gesture of invitation, a slightly equivocal one. What an idiot, offering those children’s trinkets to a grown man running soaked to the skin, chilled to the bone. But maybe not, perhaps it was basically just shelter and it would be worthwhile buying something to get out of the rain, that little tin ring, for example, which must cost next to nothing. But his feet were strangely faster than his thoughts, which choked up and remained behind, lost in the water flowing away along the gutter; he had already turned the corner and was in Via del Ronco, in front of the church. The massive, rough walnut door was ajar, the opening just wide enough to squeeze in sideways, with difficulty, and enter.

  The church was dark, half empty, Mr Beniamino was lighting the candles. So he was still alive and did not even seem to have aged much. Perhaps that was because of the life the sacristan lived, a life he had always envied him; actually, maybe he was still young enough, if he sorted out all the other things, to become a sacristan. Freely, just like that, without making any claims and without anyone expecting that he himself should be devout, but simply willing to do all that was necessary for other people’s devotions: preparing the altar, laying out the white cloth and putting water in the ampullae, lighting and putting out the candles, taking the collection and putting up parish notices on the door, and then a drink with someone in the café opposite and off home – what a full, regular, deep life.

  He plunged his hand automatically into the holy water, almost as though washing off that sooty rain which must have gathered up the smog of the entire city as it travelled downwards, because his hands and his clothes were not just wet, but were dirty, blackened, as though spattered with mud. He went towards the lefthand side of the nave, the women’s side, being careful to step in such a way as to place a foot, one after the other, in each square, alternately white and grey, of the chequered floor. The floor was paved in Aurisina marble, the same, he thought, as the family tomb in the cemetery in Sant’Anna. Each step was a letter and the game was to find immediately a word with as many letters as the number of squares to be crossed in order to reach the wall of the nave.

  The distance seemed considerable, he had not been in the church for years and he didn’t remember it being so big and he thought quickly zitolo-zotolo, perhaps because just before he had seen a see-saw in the corner of the Garden reserved for the smaller children, next to the sandpit and the slide, its two extremities going up and down. But he realised that the word was too long and so he tried to find a rule that would establish a correspondence between letters and paving stones, so as to allow him to reach the wall and the end of the word simultaneously. For example three letters might correspond to one square of the pavement or once three and once one, alternately, that too was fair. He was disappointed in the end when faced with the remaining squares, because the word had finished with the previous one and he was left with a sense of disorder, of failure.

  Perhaps it was because he was in the women’s side of the nave and he should have been on the other side, as on Sundays. The niche for the baptismal font, sunk in the shadows, looked like a hollow tree, the cavity of that great plane with its open and empty trunk in which you can curl up and hide, protected by the dark. Outside the leaves rustled; the big tree was diseased, but the water that gathered in the puddle was clear, almost white in the obscurity, and its freshness eased the febrile heat that parched
his lips and his cheeks.

  On the wall the border that delimited the lower band, decorated with geometric figures nestling one into the other – rectangles within diamonds in their turn within circles – was an undulating stripe, a sea wave that flowed towards the altar at the end of the nave and rolled in a curl that fell and then started to flow once more, one wave after another moving and breaking at the foot of the image of the Virgin, protectress of sailors and star of the seas, high above the waters with her ultramarine mantle. He let himself go on that wave, sliding with it along the wall. Outside the storm must have become even more intense, because the noise was louder now, a prolonged and growing thunder roll, almost uninterrupted. Behind the apse windows, with their depictions of the saints, the sky was black; every now and then a livid, scarlet light illuminated one or another of the figures for an instant, and even the red colour in which the interior of the church was painted became darker, extinguished in a burning shadow.

  That wave dragged him but he was also being pushed now by so many people; there was a whole crowd now, evidently they had all come seeking shelter from the storm. In particular there was a crush near the door because those arriving were frightened of being left behind and they pushed those in front of them. Some had brought in big bulky bags, as big as suitcases, and they sought to find room for them between pews or behind columns. In the press he found himself crushed and squeezed from all sides, almost suffocated but at the same time supported, because otherwise, with the weakness making his legs give way and his head spin, he would probably have fallen, just as had happened at the exit from the Garden.