ONE THOUSAND YEARS OF SOLITUDE

UNDER THE WHITE, leathery heat, the rock hills of Sardinia are like the spine of an antediluvian lizard. In the first sun, the air shimmers and smokes off the dead shale. By noon, it is motionless but cuts like a barb. Even the sea is silent. Inland, the light hammers at the sudden gaps of black shadow between the shuttered, tightfisted houses. The heat seeps into the shadows. Where one of the spines is sharpest perches the town of Nuoro. Still higher, up a cindery and twisting road, lies Orgosolo, known to this day for its merciless banditry and the serpentine interminability of its blood feuds. My wife and I never made it to that famed aerie. When we stepped out of the rented car in Nuoro, we choked on the heat, in the still furnace of noontime. And it was only June.

There is a bookstore in Nuoro. Most of its stock is current pulp and vaguely garish magazines. But there is at the back a wistful corner of older books, among them early editions of Grazia Deledda, whose stately, romanticized fictions of Sardinian life won the Nobel Prize in 1926. What I had come for was a rarer item. On May 18, 1979, there took place in a café in Nuoro a dibattito, a round-table discussion of a book: Salvatore Satta’s “Il Giorno del Giudizio.” Leonardo Sole, Maria Giacobbe, and Father Giovanni Marchesi, S.J., presented their readings of different aspects of the work. From the floor, Natalion Piras expounded una lettura altra, “a different reading.” These several texts were published in a brochure of twenty-nine pages for the local library, named in honor of another member of the Satta family. Surprised at my inquiry, the owner of the bookstore produced, dusted off, and sold me what seemed to be about the last remaining copy.

Waiting for the heat to lose at least something of its rank, deadening edge, my wife and I went to see the café (called Tettamanzi in the book), and the Corso, and the cemetery, on its twisted spur of bleached rock. We stood in the Piazza S. Satta, with its assemblage of prehistoric cairns. The breath that comes out of the furnace door of day is that of silence. When late afternoon releases the shadows, these move, Satta wrote, “as does a dream in that burnt land.” The trip there is a blank and parching one; Nuoro is a shut place. But there is truly no way of visualizing fully except by visiting Nuoro one of the masterpieces of solitude in modern literature, perhaps in all literature, and of sensing its bone structure. Patrick Creagh’s translation, “The Day of Judgment” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $19.95), does not to my mind and ear altogether capture the genius of Satta’s prose—its marmoreal ferocity, the slow fire inside the stone. Tacitus’ Latin and the style of Hobbes come nearest. The availability in English of “Il Giorno del Giudizio” is nonetheless ground for celebration and thanks. A major chord is added to the register of our recognitions.

The resemblance to Tacitus and to Hobbes is no accident. Salvatore Satta (1902–75) spent most of his life teaching law and jurisprudence in Rome, and his sensibility was schooled in the harsh, lapidary Latinity of Roman historians and Roman law. His “Commentario al Codice di Procedura Civile” is a monumental work, and a standard one in Italian legal teaching. His De Profundis,” a laconic, harrowing recollection of wartime experiences, which Satta published in 1948, is instinct with Latinity and with the high sorrow of Tacitus’ image of human political folly. Satta appears to have carried inside himself for half a century the material for and the design of a book about his native Nuoro and a sclerotic, somnambular epilogue to its ancient ways. Time and again, he put the work to one side and pursued his academic career. “Il Giorno” was published only in 1979. It is posthumous not only in that it appeared after Satta’s death but also in that it is in many respects a book of and for the dead. For a Sardinian, for a Nuorese, only one lodging can admit to its own wealth: the cemetery.

“Il Giorno” is a difficult book to describe. The stoic voice of the chronicler intervenes, and inquires of itself whether the incidents, gestures, dramatis personae of pre- and post-First World War Nuoro ought to be summoned back to spectral presence—whether the dead should not, as Christ has it in one of the most enigmatic, dismissive of his biddings, be charged with burying the dead. Satta mocks the vanity of his enterprise, its pretense of resurrection. At the same time, he acknowledges the claims upon remembrance—the gentle but insistent calling of the departed on the recollection of the living. No remembrancer save Walter Benjamin conveys more poignantly than Salvatore Satta (note the omen in his first name) the right of the defeated, the ridiculous, and the outwardly insignificant to be precisely recalled. In northern climes, the leaf-blown murmur of their coming is allowed once a year, on All Hallows’ Eve. In Nuoro, that night stretches through the year. The departed are perennially in reach, begging, soliciting the alms of memory. Satta’s responses are teasing: “I am writing these pages that no one will read, because I hope to be lucid enough to destroy them before I die.” For whom, then, is he writing them? For the dead, the palpable density of whose audience gives to Satta an at-homeness in time and in the charred land which no individual in a traditional communitas can, or would seek to, attain for himself.

The composition of the text, at once episodic and internally close-woven, recalls, distantly, that of the “Spoon River Anthology;” there are moments of vivid social satire, voices in pomp or tumult, of the kind heard in “Under Milk Wood.” But neither Edgar Lee Masters nor Dylan Thomas has the philosophical intelligence, the patience of feeling which enable Satta to produce a well-nigh flawless form. Painters afford a better analogy. The effects achieved in “Il Giorno” possess the mysterious authority that inhabits the grain of things in a Chardin, the opaque luminosity that comes at us from the human bodies in La Tour.

The house and family of Don Sebastiano Sanna Carboni provide the axis of Satta’s “romanzo antropologico” (the classification of the book offered by Italian critics, but accurate only if we take “anthropology” to include a fundamental and philosophical account of the condition of naked man). The family, or clan, is a large one: we hear of seven sons. But a loud, acrid silence obtains between Don Sebastiano and his wife, Donna Vincenza. Family dinners cause the master of the house to suffer dizzy spells. He eats alone, in the upstairs room where he pursues the tenacious, spidery arts of legal consultation and advocacy. His sons’ unending studies, the immemorial Nuorese inertia that seems to lie in their bones infuriate Don Sebastiano. Do the children of millionaires in distant, phantasmagoric America not earn a youthful living selling newspapers? Donna Vincenza, goaded past martyrdom by her husband’s cold anger, by the pressures upon her sere frame of housework, cloistered monotony, and carnal disappointments as numbing as old dreams, protests. People in America “have every comfort,” she says. “They’re not like us.” Her husband’s reply is one of the most savage sentences in literature—it is, literally, a death sentence: “Tu stai al mondo soltanto perchè c’è posto.” Creagh’s translation—“You’re only in this world because there’s room for you”—is more or less exact, but falls short. The Italian connotes an obscure, predestined niche in which insignificant, captive lives are inserted and from which there is no escape. And it is just this lack of escape that gives to such lives their utterly humiliating contingent rationale.

There is a sense in which the entirety of the work spirals out of this chilling verdict. In Nuoro, it can be said of almost all men, women, and beasts that they are on this incinerated native ground solely because there was some passing entry for them in the Doomsday Book of works and days. Maestro Fadda, with the dolorous features of an Etruscan king, is there to teach the fourth and fifth grades in the Nuoro school and to amuse the idlers at the café. Chischeddu “was one of those wrecks who for some unknown reason drift into churches, and are allowed by God or the vicar to take part in the life of the spirit as vergers or sacristans.” Fileddu, the half-wit, is the licensed jester when the winds blow like banked fires out of Africa. Do any of these bespoken lives have reality? Take Pietro Catte:

There is not the least doubt that Pietro Catte in the abstract has no reality, any more than any other man on the face of the earth. But the fact remains that he was born and that he died, as those irrefutable certificates prove. And this endows him with reality in actual fact, because birth and death are the two moments at which the infinite becomes finite; and the infinite can have no being except through the finite. Pietro Catte attempted to escape from reality by hanging himself on that tree at Biscollai, but his was a vain hope, because one cannot erase one’s own birth. This is why I say that Pietro Catte, like all the hapless characters in this story, is important, and ought to be interesting to everyone: if he does not exist, then none of us exist.

The unbidden imperative of existence is borne, certainly in the world before 1914, almost timelessly. For the hill shepherds and sharecroppers, there is neither past nor future, only the coercion of custom. Insights and joys have the depthless patience of an order of things before literacy. Satta is innovative and convincing in his implicit analysis of the ways in which illiteracy and preliteracy relate to timelessness:

Donna Vincenza was highly intelligent, even though she scarcely knew how to read and write, and for this reason she overflowed with love, without knowing it. She loved the humble furniture in her house, the embroidery on the pillowcases, which she used to work on with her mother all day. . . . She loved the cortita of the house, with figs and tomatoes laid out on boards to dry amid the eager buzzing of bees and wasps. And above all, she loved the garden, where she still went to pick flowers and fruit, even though her swollen legs bore her up less and less well. And she had loved Don Sebastiano, the man who had come to ask for her hand and was destined to take her to live in another house.

Even for the highly literate, such as Don Sebastiano’s boys and the canons or lawyers, texts do not, as for us, entail a forward motion. Old books, obsolete pandects, wormholed commentaries retain their authority in a dusty present. The bells, which play a fascinating role in the architecture of “Il Giorno,” chime an unchangingness. The engagement between Ludovico and Celestina lasts twelve years. It ends in parting. Chastity modulates, imperceptibly, into the plenitude and comforts of bereavement.

Yet the narrative teems with actions: stately, comical, and violent. There is suicide and murder. The newly harvested grapes come into Don Sebastiano’s courtyard in October—one of “waves of memories rolling in one upon the other in absurd disorder, as if the whole of existence had taken place in a single instant.” The gates are flung wide “in austere expectancy” (a characteristic Satta phrase). The oxen lumber as if their great eyes were truly blind. Crushed by the rollers in the cavernous vat, the grapes pour their heady perfume into the nocturnal house:

But in that many-colored mass there is a hidden god, for not many hours will pass before a liquid purple fringe will appear all around the edge, and then the mass will heave up as if taking a giant breath, and will lose its innocence, and a low gurgling sound will betray the fire that is devouring it. . . . Everything happens at night, because both life and death are daughters of night.

The allusion is an exact one: it points to preclassical Greek and Mediterranean cosmogony. The rites of Nuorese existence are at least as antique as Homer. But when Satta tells of how an artifice of self-declared poverty builds barriers against the natural opulence and generosity of the world, the intonation, the ironies are those of the Roman satirists and of the moderns.

Another bravura chapter tells of the coming to Nuoro of electric lighting, on one freezing October evening. The whole town has gathered, suspicious, vaguely resentful, even hoping for the worst:

And all of a sudden, as in an aurora borealis, the candles did light up, and light flooded every street, all the way from San Pictro to Sèuna, a river of light between the houses, which remained immersed in darkness. An enormous shout rose all over the town, which in some mysterious way felt that it had entered history. Then, chilled through and with eyes weary from staring, people gradually drifted back to their houses or their hovels. The light stayed on to no purpose. The north wind had risen, and the bulbs hanging in their shade in the Corso began to sway sadly, light and shadow, shadow and light, making the nighttime nervous. This had not happened with the oil lamps.

An even more penetrating passage follows. The now unwanted but regretted oil lamps of Nuoro are sold to Oliena, a village across the valley. When the evening falls, the Nuorese turn out to see Oliena light up “one lamp after another, so that one could count them,” Satta writes. “And who knows whether the children didn’t run after the lamplighter there as well, picking up the spent matchsticks.” Only in Joyce’s “The Dead” is the tread of spent time as poignant.

The temptation to quote—from con-brio chapters on ecclesiastical imbroglios and reclusive, unforgiving deaths, from one on political oratory and elections in Nuoro, from analyses of the transformations brought on by those who returned from the fronts and cities of 1914–18—is difficult to resist. But the text should be savored as a whole, and no first reading comes near to plumbing its laughter or its desolation. More often than not, these two are inseparable. Dying, Father Porcu has strength for one last prayer in God’s house. He can scarcely master the flagstoned slope of the Corso. Stares of curiosity follow his spectral sortie. Then his voice resounds in the stillness: “Lord, you see how old I am and ill. Take me to you. I can no longer say Mass to you, as I can’t stay on my feet. Lord, take me to you. And for the good of the Church, take Canon Floris as well. Then all will be at peace.” The counterpoint of the original is unrecapturable: “Prendetevi anche l’arciprete. Costì tutto sarà pace.”

The best introduction to this masterpiece is Salvatore Satta’s own:

As in one of those absurd processions in Dante’s Paradiso, but without either choruses or candelabra, the men of my people file by in an endless parade. They all appeal to me, they all want to place the burden of their lives in my hands, the story, which is no story, of their having been. Words of supplication or anger whisper with the wind through the thyme bushes. An iron wreath dangles from a broken cross. And maybe while I think of their lives, because I am writing their lives, they think of me as some ridiculous god, who has summoned them together for the day of judgment, to free them forever from their memory.

The reader will not find such liberation easy, nor will he wish for it.