The chestnuts came from the Campo dei Fiori, and the chrysanthemums from Primavalle.23 The air was pure and their fragrance cut through it like a blade, under the steps of the church, which was gray, then rusty-red, and white at the top, where it was touched by the sun. But how far Chieti24 was from here! Here, forgotten, sitting on an old block of stone from the church, with a small stove between his legs, his olive or wood-colored face bent over the dull embers, the boy dreamed in the local dialect of this small city laid out under the sun, between the flanks of the hills. If he stood up, say to put his money in his pocket, you could see that he was tall, despite his little farm-boy face, dark and expressionless as a fruit, a strawberry or an apple. His clothes were too small; his trousers stopped above his ankles, or rather just below his knees, and his jacket, its sleeves curved at the elbows and so short that they left most of his wrists uncovered, revealed the creases in the back of his trousers. He leaned over the stove, lifting the pan with the chestnuts on it and stirring the embers, which looked discolored, bleached, and humiliated in the Saturday morning light. Such a fragrance of chestnuts, from Chieti, where they were harvested in the sun, down to the Campo dei Fiori in the early morning. Perhaps, all told, the young chestnut-seller could remember no more than ten autumns, but his existence was so entwined with that fragrance—of chestnuts and embers—that one could not distinguish one from the other. Where did the boy end and the fragrance of his wares begin? One was built in to the other, solid and alive, a single being.
The chrysanthemums emanated their graveyard fragrance, intermingling with that of the chestnuts, like lace thrown over an old, heavy sideboard, or ivy on a tree trunk. Just as the fragrance of the chestnuts was compact, so that of the chrysanthemums blossomed; the first was planted in the air like a column, the second spread out like a mist of feathers. The first stuck to your chest or throat, trusting and desperate; the second penetrated all the way to your gut: who would have believed that such perfidious and delicate chrysanthemums could come from Primavalle? And that they had not grown on a cloud, or in the bare, washed-out sky near San Lorenzo or above the Campo Verano graveyard on the Esquiline Hill? Belli Capelli25 grew them up in Primavalle, in his wet, dirty flowerbeds behind the shacks, looking out toward the countryside, smooth as oil, not a pine tree in sight, so deserted that one wouldn’t be surprised to suddenly come across a band of cowboys with guns drawn. The fragrance of those chrysanthemums, the freshness of their atoms, did not contain the absence of the dead, but rather the absence of the living. The ferocious melancholy of Primavalle, up above Rome, almost grazing the sky, its houses like purple, rose, and ash colored boxes in art nouveau style, already crumbling and peeling like ruins. Up there, the sun always seemed veiled by a shadow, like a cloud of mosquitoes or disinfectant, even when it was clear and cheerful, in September or in spring, or when the heat peeled the plaster off the walls in August. Unlike the chestnut-seller, how many autumns, Indian summers, and All Saints’ Days lurked in the memory of the old lady from Trastevere who bought her chrysanthemums from Belli Capelli when he came down to Rome with his cart? But she is distinct from their perfume. The words she uses to imagine things no longer have the power to re-create them: her old Roman dialect is arid: mere prose, old age.
The southern dialect of the boy from Chieti has also aged in his heart: just see with what avidity he pockets his money and calculates his profit. In his small blue eyes, which sometimes bring to mind the glimmer of a grape, a single thought is solidifying. It will strip away the mystery that surrounds him and transform him into an adult. He gives way to dishonesty with an innocence that for the time being makes it possible to forgive him. Ten or twelve autumns from now he will be like the old flower-seller: it will not be difficult to condemn him. He will so clearly be a man, so miserably so, so tediously so. But ten, twelve, or one hundred autumns from now one thing will remain the same: the fragrance of the chrysanthemums, and of the chestnuts. A constant, fossilized mystery, a guarantee of immutability. The Species will always be able to find its own lost time in that.
La Libertà d’Italia, Rome, April 3, 1951.