After the hum of the transatlantic jet
the earthbound jerk and rattle of a train
pulling in and out of small town stations
en route Venezia — Udine —
there’s the heat of the sun high
in a May sky, there’s the haze
of humidity or my sleepless eyes
see now as if submerged
underwater, I understand
nothing, not the time of day,
not the names of towns:
Salice, Pordenone, Vietato —
Vietato, not the name of a town at all,
but a warning sign, Forbidden —
as if this flat and sun-lit terrain could take me
back to the prairie, to Saskatchewan,
where a town called Forbidden
might join one called Forget.
I was bound for Beyond History, a conference at the university in Udine but later I hoped to find a village called Casarsa though I had no idea how to get there, so when I saw Casarsa delle Delizia as one of the stops printed on my train ticket, it felt like a gift. The first of many I was to receive.
•
A beautiful day, full sun, breezes making it feel almost cool, although how can it be cool at 28˚C? I’m now staying at a hotel in Casarsa called Al Posta; it’s near the post office. I take tea in the garden, at a table shaded by a tree. I breathe deeply and the air smells green and tastes almost sweet. I listen.
Your music,
oleander and mosquito,
muted in May.
I would lose the latter part of that duet.
Ah, but what is it if
it cannot pierce, if
it cannot get under your skin?
I hear him whispering,
“Such music’s emasculated.”
(campo santo, Casarsa, Italia)
(Pier Paolo Pasolini 1922–75)
Row upon row of headstones, there’s no green, no grass, just dust and gravel paths around the graves. I walk among them looking for him. Photos of the dead mark most of the graves — their faces, their presence absence. They seem to look out expectantly from the frames. Not forgotten, neither can they forget.
And then there are the graves falling into ruin, the photos, faded and cracked, the images now faint shades of sepia. Are those men and women more than dead, now that even their names are nearly erased? Is the young man whose wreath is still fresh from the funeral, the flowers moist with dew or tears, still alive in comparison?
I cannot find Pasolini. I try again and retrace my steps, walking back up and down the rows under a sun heading into noon’s high heat. He, no not he, I don’t really believe that, not the man, but it, the grave, must be here. Must I go back to the hotel without finding it?
When I finally give up and start to leave, it’s there on the right as I am about to exit the cemetery: two graves side by side,
two flat white marble and matching
stones. A tree grows out of the gravel,
too small to shade them.
His mother, Susanna, is buried beside him. She was not told of her beloved son’s death; she was told that he had gone on a long sea voyage.
•
On the main road leading from the train station to the piazza, the pink house. The stucco and paint were fresh; the building looked new, pristine though flanked by a vacant lot growing weeds and litter. The house had been his mother’s home, not Pasolini’s. As a boy Paolo came here during the summers for long visits, idyllic summers spent running with other boys, the golden-skinned, the sun-kissed sons of peasant farmers he came to love — all he would ever dream of desire. Later, during the war, when he was a university student at Bologna working on his thesis, he came here to get away from the bombing. At first he thought he hated it:
What a hell-hole this is after all. There’s nothing here. It’s dried-up, ugly, peopled by oafish men and shrewish women. The streets are gray dust and bare stones. Eight houses huddled together and called itself a town. And some fascist official listened and gave them the borough they deserved.
Was it really like this all along? Does my memory lie? Where are those green fields I loved as a boy? All year I would dream of returning here to run in the thigh-high grass, to fall again deliciously panting among the primroses, another boy beside me and everything free because everything was hidden by the long grass.
But now I see how shabby everything is, how small the square, how decrepit the houses. How the fields are dank, how the air is rank with the smell of decaying plants and stagnant waters. I came here again to get away from the war and found myself far from everything, on the very edge of existence.
This is the house where he stayed; this pink house was his mother’s house. Here he wrote and self-published his first book of poetry, poems that he would write and rework for all his writing life.[1] But the house was bombed out during the war, reduced to charred rubble. Rebuilt, then neglected again when Pasolini, the young teacher, was fired for public indecency. And so the life in exile began. They left for Rome, Paolo and his mother. In his lifetime he was reviled in the town, and he did not return again except in a coffin.
But now the pink house has been renovated, turned into a museum. Marco S., the director of the centre, was a few minutes late and apologized. It was unusual, this meeting to guide a single traveler. That morning he had led a tour, a group of 50 students from Udine.
•
All night I dreamt of his room; the desk facing the window, the light garish on the red and blue striped wall.
It is the morning of the second day and I return to campo santo. This time I know where he lies. I see the graves of his brother and the father he called the Colonel shielded by a fresco of angel warriors on the other, on the left as you leave the cemetery, where the right and the left have no more significance than to indicate direction.
Two sprigs of lavender for your grave,
scent of old woman’s underwear
musky and sweet, a potpourri in my pocket
releases oily scent. Right for his mother
wrong for him. I should have
broken a branch from the cypress
lining the way to the cemetery,
their smell of green-spiced wood
more apt, more masculine.
(He seems to agree, flexing
his arm to show me the muscle)
Cypress is fiercer than flowers,
more potent than peppery poppies,
than honey-scented clover, or primrose,
or the wild yellow iris rising
from the ditches.
•
There are vineyards all around and in the fields behind the white stucco walls that enclose the cemetery. Such a haze today, blue grey, the horizon darkly smudged, the mountains (I know they’re there, I saw them yesterday) totally obscured.
Old women, old men on their bicycles, make their way along the road to Valvasone, while the young drive by in cars or worse, raucous motor scooters. On a bench shaded by cypress, weeping for a man I have never met, I sit to write these notes and a voice whispers in Italian I don’t know how to write.
Vado fuori dal paese e il cielo è scoperto,
Il mondo più grande che ho pensato,
Dove non c’è nessuno le stelle sono miliardo.
I jot the words down with the voice still sounding in my head. So much of what I’m writing is not writing at all, but dictation:
I leave the city and discover the sky,
The world is bigger than I realized,
Where there’s nobody the stars are myriad.
[1] The poems written in Friulano and their many permutations published in 1975 as La nuova gioventú.