IN MEMORY OF GIOVANNI BUTTAFAVA
I met you the first time ever in latitudes you’d call foreign.
Your foot never trod that loam; your fame, though, had reached those quarters
where they fashion the fruit habitually out of plaster.
Knee-deep in snow, you loomed there: white, moreover naked,
in the company of one-legged, equally naked trees,
in your part-time capacity as an expert
on low temperatures. “Roman Deity”
proclaimed a badly faded notice,
and to me you were a deity, since you knew
far more of the past than I (the future
for me in those days was of little import).
On the other hand, apple-cheeked and curly-
haired, you might well have been my agemate; and though you knew not a word
of the local dialect, somehow we got to talking.
Initially, I did the chatting. Something about Pomona,
our stubbornly aimless rivers, obstinate foul weather,
the absence of greens and money, leapfrogging seasons
—about things, I thought, that should be up your alley
if not in their essence, then in their common pitch
of lament. Little by little (lament is the universal
ur-tongue; most likely, in the beginning
was either “ouch” or “ai”) you began to respond: to squint,
to blink, to furrow your brow; then the lower part of your oval
sort of melted, and your lips were slowly set in motion.
“Vertumnus,” you squeezed out finally. “I am called Vertumnus.”
It was a wintry, pallid—more exactly, a hueless day.
The limbs, the shoulders, the torso—as we proceeded
from subject to subject—were gradually turning pinkish,
and were draped with fabric: a shirt, a jacket, trousers,
a moss-colored coat, shoes from Balenciaga.
The weather got warmer also, and you, at times falling still,
would listen intently into the park’s soft rustle,
picking up and examining occasionally a gluey leaf
in your search for just the right word, the right expression.
At any rate, if I am not mistaken,
by the time I, now excessively animated,
was holding forth on history, wars, lousy crops,
brutal government, the lilac had already drooped past its bloom,
and you sat on the bench, from a distance looking
like an average citizen, impoverished by the system;
your temperature was ninety-eight point six.
“Let’s go,” you muttered, touching me on the elbow.
“Let’s go. I’ll show you the parts where I was born and grew up.”
The road there led quite naturally through the clouds,
resembling gypsum in color and, later, marble
so much that it crossed my mind that you had in mind precisely
this: washed-out outlines, chaos, the world in ruins—
though this would have signaled the future, while you already
existed. Shortly afterwards, in an empty
café in a drowsy small town fired white-hot by noon,
where someone who dreamt up an arch just couldn’t stop more from coming,
I realized I was wrong when I heard you chatting
with some local crone. The language turned out to be
a mix of the evergreen rustle and the ever-blue bubbling of
waves, and so rapid that in the course of the conversation,
you several times, in front of my eyes, turned into
her. “Who is she?” I asked when we ventured out.
“She?” You just shrugged your shoulders. “No one. To you, a goddess.”
It got a bit colder. We started to chance more often
upon passersby. Some of them would be nodding,
others looked sideways, becoming thus mere profiles.
All of them, however, were noticeably dark-haired.
Each one behind his back had an impeccable perspective,
not excluding the children. As for old men, in their
cases, it coiled like a shell of some snail or other.
Indeed, the past in these parts was much more abundant
than the present! The centuries outnumbered
cars, parked or passing. People and sculpted figures,
as they drew near and as they receded,
neither grew large nor petered out, thus proving
they were, as it were, invariable magnitudes.
It was strange to observe you in your natural circumstances!
Stranger still was the fact that nearly everybody
understood me. This had to do, perhaps,
with the ideal acoustics, caused by the architecture,
or with your intervention—with the basic penchant of an
absolute ear for garbled sounds.
“Don’t be surprised. My field is metamorphosis.
Whomsoever I glance at acquires at once my features.
To you, this may come in handy. You are, after all, abroad.”
A quarter century later I hear your voice, Vertumnus,
uttering these words, and I sense with my skin the steady
stare of your pearl-gray eyes,
odd in a southerner. In the backdrop there are palm trees,
like Chinese characters tousled by the tramontana,
and cypresses like Egyptian obelisks.
Noon; a decrepit balustrade somewhere
in Lombardy; and its sun-splattered mortal visage
of a deity! A provisional one for a
deity, but for me the only
one. With widow’s peak, with mustachio
(à la Maupassant more than Nietzsche),
with a much thickened—for the sake of disguise, no doubt—
torso. On the other hand, it is not
for me to flash my diameter, to mimic Saturn,
to flirt with a telescope. Everything leaves a spoor,
time especially. Our rings are
those of fat trees with their prospective stump,
not the ones of a rustic round dance in the dooryard,
let alone of a hug. To touch you is to touch a truly
astronomical sum of cells,
which fate always finds affordable, but to which
only tenderness is proportionate.
And I have ensconced myself in the world where your word and gesture
were imperative. Mimicry, imitation
were regarded as loyalty. I’ve mastered the art of merging
with the landscape the way one fades into the furniture or the curtains
(which, in the end, influenced my wardrobe).
Now and then in the course of a conversation
the first-person-plural pronoun would start to dribble
off my lips, and my fingers acquired the agility of hedged hawthorn.
Also, I quit glancing back over my padded shoulder. Hearing
footsteps behind me, nowadays I don’t tremble:
as previously a chill in my shoulder blades,
nowadays I sense that behind my back also stretches
a street overgrown with colonnades, that at its far end
also shimmer the turquoise crescents
of the Adriatic. Their total is, clearly,
your present, Vertumnus—small change, if you will; some loose
silver with which, occasionally, rich infinity
showers the temporary. Partly out of superstition,
partly, perhaps, because it alone—
the temporary—is capable of sensation,
of happiness. “In this sense, for the likes of me,”
you would squint, “your brethren are useful.”
With the passage of years I came almost to the conviction
that the joy of life had become, for you, second nature.
I even started to wonder whether joy is indeed that safe
for a deity. Whether it’s not eternity
that a deity pays with in the end for the joy of life.
You’d just brush all this off. But nobody, my Vertumnus,
nobody ever rejoiced so much in the transparent
spurt, in the brick of a basilica, in pine needles,
in wiry handwriting. Much more than we! I even
started to think that you’d gotten infected with
our omnivorousness. Indeed, a view
of a square from a balcony, a clangor of campanili,
a streamlined fish, the tattered coloratura
of a bird seen only in profile, laurels’
applause turning into an ovation
—they can be appreciated only by those who do
remember that, come tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow,
all this will end. It’s precisely from them, perhaps,
that the immortals learn joy, the knack of smiling
(since the immortals are free from all manner of apprehension).
To the likes of you, in this sense our brethren are useful.
Nobody ever knew how you were spending nights.
But then that’s not strange, taking into consideration
your origins. Once, well past midnight, at the hub of the universe,
I bumped into you, chased by a drove of dimming
stars, and you gave me a wink. Secretiveness? But the cosmos
isn’t that secretive. In the cosmos one can see all
things with the naked eye, and they sleep there without blankets.
The intensity of a standard star is such
that its cooling alone can produce an alphabet,
vegetation, sincerity; in the end, ourselves,
with our past, present, future, et cetera—but with the
future especially. We are only
thermometers, brothers and sisters of
ice, not of Betelgeuse. You were made of warmth,
hence your omnipresence. It is difficult to imagine
you in any particular, no matter how shining, dot.
Hence your invisibility. Gods leave no blotches
on a bedsheet, not to mention offspring,
being content with a handmade likeness
in a stony niche, at the end of a garden alley,
happy as a minority; and they are.
An iceberg sails into the tropics. Exhaling smoke, a camel
promotes a pyramid made of concrete, somewhere in the North.
You too, alas, learned to shirk
your immediate duties. To say the least, the four seasons
are more and more one another, eventually getting jumbled
like lire, pounds, dollars, marks, kroner
in a seasoned traveler’s wallet.
The papers mutter “greenhouse effect” and “common market,”
but the bones ache at home and overseas alike.
Just look: even that loafer Christo’s stone-faced precursor,
which for years used to snake through minefields, is crumbling down.
As a result, birds don’t fly away on time
to Africa; characters like myself
less and less often return to the parts they came from;
the rent rises sharply. Apart from having
to exist, one has to pay for that existence monthly.
“The more banal the climate,” you once remarked,
“the faster the future becomes the present.”
On a scorched July dawn, the temperature of a body
plummets, aiming at zero. A horizontal bulk
in the morgue looks like raw material
for garden statuary. Due to a ruptured heart
and immobility. This time around, words
won’t do the trick: to you my tongue
is no longer foreign enough to pay
heed to. Besides, one can’t
step twice into the same cloud. Even
if you are a god. Especially, if you are not.
In winter the globe sort of shrinks, mentally flattens out.
The latitudes crawl, in twilight especially, upon one another.
The Alps for them are no obstacle. It smells of an ice age,
it smells, I would add, of neolith and of paleolith;
to use the vernacular, of the future. Since
an ice age is a category of the future, which is
that time when finally one loves no one,
even oneself. When you put on clothes
without planning to drop them off all of a sudden
in somebody’s parlor. And when you can’t walk out into
the street in your blue shirt alone, not to mention naked.
(I’ve learned quite a bit from you, but not this.) In a certain sense,
the future’s got nobody. In a certain sense,
there is nobody in the future that we’d hold dear.
Of course, there are all those moraines and stalagmites everywhere
looming like louvres and skyscrapers with their meltdown contours.
Of course, something moves there: mammoths, mutant
beetles of pure aluminum, some on skis.
But you were a god of subtropics, with the power of supervision
our mixed forests and the black-earth zone—
that birthplace of the past. In the future it has no place,
and you’ve got nothing to do there. So that’s why it crawls in winter
on the foothills of the Alps, on the sweet Apennines, snatching
now a small meadow with its clear brook, now something
plain evergreen: a magnolia, a bunch of laurels;
and not only in winter. The future always
arrives when somebody dies. Especially
if it’s a man. Moreover, if it’s a god.
A dog painted in bright hues of sunrise
barks at the back of a passerby of midnight color.
In the past those whom you love don’t ever
die. In the past they betray you or peter out into a perspective.
In the past the lapels are narrower, the only pair of loafers
steams by a heater like the ruins of boogie-woogie.
In the past a frozen garden bench
with its surplus of slats resembles
an insane equal sign. In the past the wind
to this day animates the mixture
of Cyrillic and Latin in naked branches:
Ж, Ч, Ш, Щ, plus X, Y, Z,
and your laughter is ringing: “As your head honcho said,
there is nothing that matches abracadabra.”
A quarter century later, a streetcar’s broken
vertebrae strike a spark in the evening yonder
as a civic salute to a forever darkened
window. One Caravaggio equals two Bernini,
turning either into a cashmere scarf
or a night at the opera. Now these cited
metamorphoses, left apparently unattended,
continue by pure inertia. Other objects, however, harden
in the condition you left them in,
thanks to which, from now on, they can be afforded by
no one. Display of loyalty? Plain predilection for
monumentality? Or is it simply the brazen future
barging in through the doors, and a sellout-resistant soul
acquires before our eyes the status
of a classic, of solid mahogany, of a Fabergé
egg? Most likely, the latter, which is also a metamorphosis,
and to your credit as well.
I’ve got nothing to plait a wreath with
so as to adorn your cold brow in proper fashion
at the closure of this extraordinarily dry year.
In a tastelessly furnished but large apartment,
like a cur that’s suddenly lost its shepherd,
I lower myself onto all fours and scratch
the parquet with my claws, as though underneath were hidden—
because it’s from down there that wafts the warmth—
your current existence. At the corridor’s distant end
dishes are rattling. Under the tightly shut door the frigid
air thickens, rubbed by incessantly rustling dresses.
“Vertumnus,” I whisper, pressing my wet check hard
against yellow floorboards. “Return, Vertumnus.”
1990
Translated by the author