Collection of Sand

by Italo Calvino

  The taxi drives through an endless suburb of parking-lots, supermarkets, warehouses, petrol-pumps (on which well-known brand-names pop up between indecipherable letters), factory sheds, baseball fields, rows of shops, used-car lots, electric pinball arcades. Only the maples that display their red leaves where you would least expect it, only the odd roof with the traditional concave wings, remind us that Japan is a ‘different’ country.

  All of a sudden Mr Fuji gives a start, points to an invisible spot amidst the television aerials and says that on that spot one thousand years ago a palace stood, or a poet walked by the shore of a lake. The abyss that opens up between these scenes that he evokes and what one sees today does not seem to trouble him: the name connects the space with time, that point on a map that has now been abolished remains as the repository of a myth.

  The story he tells me now is about an Emperor who fell in love with a very beautiful but haughty woman who lived over there (see behind that service station?). In order to test him, the lady said that he had to come to her one hundred times and declare his love to her, and only on the hundredth occasion would she consent to be his. The Emperor went to her every day, setting out from his distant palace (see, beyond that gasometer?), and every day he planted a tree in front of the haughty beauty’s house. In this way he ended up planting ninety-nine trees. Just one more visit and the beautiful woman would be his . . .

  At that point, having proved the constancy of his feelings, the Emperor decided to withdraw, to give up, and never appeared again. The trees grew into a wood, the Wood of the Ninety-Nine Trees, as it is called to this day.

  One’s gaze ranges over a horizon of cement and tarmac. But the taxi has turned down a little road amidst courtyards full of crates. Suddenly there’s a tree, an enormous green tree of great height, of an unfamiliar species, but with myriads of tiny leaves. An old signpost states that this is the last surviving specimen from the Wood of the Ninety-Nine Trees, perhaps actually the ninety-ninth, thus proving that yesterday’s geography of the sublime, so dear to Mr Fuji, really does have a link with today’s geography of the prosaic, and that even today the roots planted in a terrain of risky investments with no capital guarantee still nourish the branches that face a world of balance sheets that must all be showing a profit, a world of operations that can never close at a loss.

  Mexico

  The Shape of the Tree

  In Mexico, near Oaxaca, there is a tree that is said to be 2,000 years old. It is known as ‘the Tule tree’. I have just got off a coach crowded with tourists, and, as I approach, even before my eye can make anything out, I am seized by a sense of threat: as though that vegetal cloud or mountain that is now outlined in my field of vision is sending out a warning that here nature, with slow, silent steps, is intent on furthering a plan of her own that has nothing to do with human proportions and dimensions.

  I was just about to utter a cry of amazement, to compare what my eyes were seeing with the concept of tree which hitherto I had used to group together all the actual trees I had encountered, when I realized that what I was looking at was not the famous tree but another one of the same species growing nearby, clearly a bit younger and a bit less gigantic, seeing that the guide did not mention it. I turned round: suddenly I saw the real Tule tree there as though it had popped up just at that point. The impression it conveys is totally different from what I had been expecting. The almost spherical extent of its crown sitting above the gargantuan girth of the trunk makes the tree seem almost squat.

  The Tule tree measures 40 metres in height, according to the guide, and 42 in perimeter. Its botanical name is Taxodium distichum; its Mexican name is the sabino.

  It belongs to the cypress family but does not resemble a cypress at all: it is a bit like a sequoia, if that helps to give some idea. The tree towers above a church from the colonial period, Santa Maria del Tule, which is white with red and blue geometric ornamentation, like something out of a child’s drawing. The church’s foundations risk being undermined by the tree’s roots.

  Visiting Mexico, one finds oneself puzzling every day over pre-Hispanic ruins and statues and bas-reliefs, witnesses of an unimaginable ‘before’, of a world totally ‘other’ than our own. Then suddenly here we have a witness that is still alive today and was already living before the Conquista, in fact even before these plateaux saw the successive waves of Olmecs, Zapotecs, Mixtecs and Aztecs.

  At the Jardin des Plantes in Paris I have always looked with wonder on the cross-section of a sequoia trunk from more or less the same period, which is displayed as though it were a compendium of world history: the great historical events of the last two thousand years are marked on little copper tags that are nailed to the concentric circle in the wood that corresponds to the year in question. But while the Paris tree is the relic of a dead plant, this one, the Tule tree, is a living thing, which barely shows any signs of effort in transporting lymph to its leaves. (In order to compensate for the aridity of the soil, they water the tree with injections of water to its roots.) This is certainly the oldest living thing I have ever come across.

  I avoid the Japanese tourists walking backwards or crouching down, trying to cram this colossus into their lenses. I approach the trunk, and go round it to discover the secret of a living form that can resist time. My first impression is of an absence of form: this is a monster that grows—one might say—according to no plan; the trunk is both one and multiple, it is as if it were girdled by columns of other, smaller trunks that stick out all around the massive central trunk, or that detach themselves from it as if they wanted to make us believe that these are aerial roots descending from the branches like anchors trying to find the earth, whereas in fact they are proliferations of its earthly roots which have grown upwards. The trunk seems to embrace within its current perimeter a long history of uncertainties, repetitions, moments of branching out in different directions. Like boats which can’t get out to sea, what stick out from the trunk are horizontal beams that were truncated a thousand years ago just as they were giving life to the bifurcation of the tree, and have lost all memory of that original intention, and have now just become short, stumpy protuberances. From the elbows and knees of branches which did survive catastrophe in remote times, rigid secondary branches continue to develop in what seems to be highly uncomfortable gesticulation. Knots and wounds in the wood have continued to spread, the former proliferating in bumps and accretions, the latter stretching their lacerated sides, emphasizing their peculiarity, like a sun around which a generation of cells radiates. And above all this, there is the continuity of the bark, which has thickened, developed calluses, grown on top of itself, and which reveals all the weariness of its decrepit skin and at the same time the immortality of something that has reached a condition that has so little life about it that it can no longer die.

  Does that mean that the secret of survival is redundancy? Certainly it is by repeating its own messages countless times that the tree guarantees itself against the constant threat of fatal damage to its individual parts, and thus manages to impose and perpetuate its essential structure, the interdependence of roots, trunk and crown. But here we have gone beyond redundancy. What disturbs me as I go round the Tule tree is the willingness of morphology to change its roles, the disruption of vegetal syntax: roots rising upwards, segments of branches that have become trunk, segments of trunk that have been born from the bud on a branch. And yet the result, seen from a distance, is still always a tree—a super-tree—with its roots, trunk and crown all in the right place—super-roots, super-trunk and super-crown—as though the distorted syntax re-established itself at a higher level.

  Is it through a chaotic waste of matter and forms that the tree manage
s to give itself a shape and maintain it? That means that the transmission of meaning is guaranteed in excessive display, in the profusion of self-expression, in throwing out matter by whatever means. Because of my temperament and upbringing I have always been convinced that the only thing that matters and survives is whatever is focused on one single end. Now the Tule tree proves me wrong, wants to convince me of the opposite.

  My interview with the tree should begin now, but already the Japanese tourists have taken their pointless photographs and stopped swarming round the giant. I too have to take my seat in the coach that is setting off for the Mixtec ruins of Mitla.

  Time and Branches

  Also at Oaxaca, I see another extraordinary Mexican tree, but this time of painted stucco, in a seventeenth-century Dominican church. This is a decoration in relief of the vault of the church of San Domingo, reworking the motif of Christ’s genealogical tree, the tree of Jesse (Jesse, father of David, from whose stock, according to the prophets, the Messiah was to be born). In art history this motif is often identified with that of the Tree of Life (in the latter case it starts with Adam and connects the Fall with the Redemption through the continuity of the wood of the Tree of Life and that of the Cross).

  A thin, twisted trunk emerges from the body of a character lying supine and develops branches that cover the vault in a series of circles and a harmonic tangle of vegetal volutes, from which characters in relief stand out like grape-clusters on a vine branch (the plant also has clusters of real grapes, and vine leaves, which allow us to identify it as a vine). The coloured characters stand out against the white plaster: kings with golden crowns, bishops with mitres, warriors with armour and plumed helmets like Sicilian puppets, gentlemen with broad seventeenth-century collars. Apparently there are only a couple of female figures, one of whom is a nun. The top of the tree, towards which all the branches converge, supports a Madonna and child, surrounded by heads of angels.

  It is not easy identifying the characters: if this really is meant to be a ‘Tree of Jesse’, then perhaps the forefather lying on his back is David, and one of the kings must be Solomon. But the figures are stereotypes and are dressed in a historically unspecific style somewhere between medieval and baroque, and also the order is probably arbitrary: according to the Gospels Christ’s genealogy goes from father to son in a single line, whereas here the twisted trunk directly links the figure at the base with the figure at the top and all the other characters pop up at various heights on the lateral branches like generations of brothers. Unless, of course, the climbing motion of the plant requires us to read the line of succession in a freer way, following a serpentine movement.

  According to some of the guides, however, the figure at the base is Saint Dominic and those on the branches are leading figures of the Dominican order (but in that case should they not all be wearing ecclesiastical garb?) whose faith converges on divine grace. Whatever the exact iconological interpretation might be, the sense of the tree’s design is clear and of immediate visual efficacy: it has to connect a departure point with a point of arrival, both of them sacred and necessary, through an exuberance of forms of life which however also respond to a harmonic design, according to the intention of Divine Providence or of the human art that wants to represent it.

  The baroque profusion of the branches is only apparently superfluous, since the message transmitted lies precisely in this abundance, and no leaf or figure or grape-cluster can be added or taken away. In other words, who the characters are and what they are called matters only up to a point: what counts is what is achieved through them.

  The Tule Tree, a natural product of time, and the Tree of Jesse, a product of the human need to give some finality to time, are only apparently derived from a common scheme. Coming across them on the same day during my tourist journey, I feel that between them stretches the distance between chance and design, probability and determination, entropy and the sense of history.

  A genealogical tree that wanted to render genuinely that process of procreation and death that is human survival should resemble not so much a tree of Jesse as a real tree, with its twisted and unharmonic ramifications, its stumps, its dry and green patches, the pruning that has come about by chance or through history, its waste of living matter. Actually, it ought to resemble the Tule Tree itself, where it is not clear what is root, trunk or branch.

  But genealogical trees are always simplifications after the event, which privilege one particular line, usually a royal title or family name. In the tourist shops of certain French castles, they sell genealogical trees of the French kings, so that the tourists can orientate themselves in the complicated events which those places have witnessed. From the common stock of the Capets descend the lines of the Valois on one side and the Bourbons on the other, with the various Angoulême and Orléans branches as secondary ramifications, in a tree shape that is highly forced and asymmetrical.

  An authentic genealogical tree should extend its own ramifications as much towards the present as towards the past, because at every wedding what should be represented is the joining together of two plants, and this would produce a highly intricate tangle expanding on all sides, and only coming to a halt in the irregular fringes where lines become extinct. It would be a bush whose ramifications at times expand, at times contract, because in a certain geographical area the same families all get mixed up again at each wedding. Would the form of the tree be renewed as one goes back to the roots of the human race, as to Adam and Eve in Christian iconology? For contemporary anthropology these roots are to be sought further and further afield, at a distance of millions of years, and they are scattered throughout the continents. (What seems to be approaching is the end, the severing of all the branches one by one or all together, the looming threat of a catastrophe that is demographic, nutritional, technological . . .)

  The Forest and the Gods

  In Palenque the soaring temples built on steps stand out from the background of the forest that rises above them with dense trees that are even higher than the temples: ficus trees with multiple trunks that look like roots, aguacetes with their shiny leaves, cascades of creepers, dangling plants and lianas. It seems that the forest is about to swallow up these colossal remains of the Mayan civilization; or rather, it swallowed them up many centuries ago, and they would be buried beneath a living and proliferating mountain of green were it not for the sharp blades wielded by men who, from the time those temples were discovered, have been fighting back on a daily basis against the assault of the vegetation to allow the stone constructions to emerge from the suffocating tangle of branches and shoots.

  The bas-reliefs that the ancient Mayans sculpted in their stonework represent, through figures of gods, stars and monsters, the various phases of the plant life cycle of maize. This at least is what is explained in books; what we can ascertain at first sight are sequences of signs in the shape of leaves, flowers or fruits, a vegetation of ornamentation which flourishes around every vaguely anthropomorphic or zoomorphic outline, transforming it into an intricate tangle. Thus, whatever they mean, it was always vegetal forms that the Mayans fixed on their stonework: everything they constructed always came back to the flow of lymph in plants; a relationship that could almost be described as a mirror image has been established between the sculpted stone and the forest. The vegetal jumble becomes even more tangled in my head, which has been stunned by the sun and by the vertigo caused by climbing and descending those steep stairways, and amidst the ramifications of topics every now and again I seem to glimpse a decisive, over-arching reason, which disappears one minute later.

  The bas-reliefs and the forest define and comment on each other in turn; the language of stone recounts and discusses the vital
process that surrounds and determines it. But what sense does it make to say the word ‘forest’ when the actual forest is there, present and looming? If ‘forest’ is the word that is written in the sculpted figures of gods and monsters, then the temples in the forest are nothing but a giant tautology that nature rightly tries to cancel out as superfluous. So things rebel at the destiny of being signified by words, they reject that passive role that the system of signs would like to impose on them, and they recover the space that has been usurped; so they submerge the temples and bas-reliefs; once more they swallow up language, which had tried to assert its own autonomy and to establish its own foundations as though it were a second nature. The bas-reliefs telling stories of serpents, feathers and leaves disappear as they are invaded by nests of serpents and birds and tangles of liana. Language’s dream of turning itself into a system and cosmos has been pointless: the last word belongs to silent nature.

  This would be a neat conclusion, except that the same line of thought could also lead to an opposite inference. The forest can hammer away all it likes at the temples; but the stone does not allow itself to be corroded by the rotting of vegetal mucus; the figures where we can read the names of the gods refuse to be cancelled out by lichens and fungus. Ever since language has existed, nature has been unable to abolish it: it continues to operate despite everything, in its separate realm, which is not even touched by the convulsive attack of things. The names of the gods and the gods without names face up to each other in a war that cannot have either victors or vanquished.