10

WHEN AN AEROPLANE crashes, the first thing people look for is the black box; apparently, the same goes for trains. Everything is recorded in that small space, including all the factors that contributed, however minimally, to the accident – speed, trajectory, human error, indecision, darkness, and so forth – right up to the moment of impact. In people, the equivalent processes are entrusted to the power of recollection. Memory constructs human beings, situating them in their own personal history as well as in that of the world around them, and words are the traces we leave behind.

Words are like the footprints you find on a beach at dawn. During the night, a great multitude of creatures has come and gone among the dunes: foxes, mice, rooks, seagulls, deer, boars, sandpipers, crabs, and also those little black beetles that scamper and dash along the sand like ladies who are forever late. They all pass this way in the darkness and leave their tracks. Some of them meet and sniff one another curiously; others land and then take off again; the least fortunate are devoured, while still others mate or simply stretch their limbs. Crabs build sandcastles as they burrow into the beach. Sandpipers’ tracks last until the next wave wipes them out. The little black beetles leave long, orderly trails behind them on the sand, making it easy to retrace their steps to their lair.

And you, what lair did you emerge from? And where are you going?

However, before asking ourselves where we’re going, we ought to discover where we’ve come from.

If the beetle doesn’t know what species he belongs to, how can he behave properly? How can he know whether he’s supposed to eat dung, pollen, or dead animals?

An animal knows what it was nourished on in the long, drowsy time of its first consciousness; the remembered taste of that food guides it in its choices, and it’s likewise able to recognise its lair and the compelling reason for leaving it. Everything is inscribed in its genes.

In humans, on the other hand, things are more complicated.

We’re alike in our physical functions, but extremely different in all the rest. Every one of us has a history that’s his alone, and its roots go back very far, to grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, and beyond, farther and farther back, until they come to the first man, to the moment when – instead of behaving like beetles – we began to make choices.

What choices did our ancestors make? What burdens did they hand down to us? And why does the weight of those burdens vary so much? Why do some of us stride forth, feather-light, while others can’t manage a single step?

With these thoughts in my head, I climbed back up into the attic. The summer sun had begun to heat the trapped air, and I opened the little window to keep from suffocating. I sat with my legs crossed beside the open suitcase on the floor. There wasn’t very much left in it: some dusty, ageing letters and a small notebook that looked more recent, all of them abandoned like confetti after a carnival celebration. These were the last traces, the ripples in the sand left by the beetle before it reached its lair.

Where would those pages carry me?

I was afraid of being disappointed. Maybe this stuff was just a collection of trite missives sent by my great-grandparents from one thermal spa or other: ‘The treatments are having an effect . . . the food’s good . . . we’ll be back Thursday on the eight o’clock train.’

I carried the letters and notebook downstairs, put them on the table, and arranged them by date, but by then it was late; I didn’t feel like opening them when there was nothing left of the day but its dark edge. I decided to wait for the light of the following morning.

After I went to bed, the music of some summer festival disturbed me, and I couldn’t go to sleep. Around one in the morning, when I looked at the alarm clock, the air was resounding with the strains of the leftist song ‘Bandiera rossa’. Only at three a.m. did silence finally descend on the plateau, broken by the occasional roar of a lorry. I could hear in the distance, although weakly, the twanging of the shrouds on the sailing boats anchored in the harbour. They seemed to be performing a little concerto in the gentle breezes of a light summer bora.

What music is that, I wondered, dozing off at last: the symphony of departure, or the symphony of return?

On the cover of the notebook, a wintry landscape. In the foreground, rabbit tracks across the snow; in the centre, a stand of trees, their branches laden and white; in the background, closing the horizon under a clear, luminous sky, a mountain range glistening with ice. It was a simple notebook, the kind you’d use for Latin exercises or household accounts. Maybe that’s why I opened it carelessly.

But I froze, all carelessness gone, as soon as I recognised my mother’s handwriting.

One word was written on the first page: Poems. I’d perused her diary and read her letter to my father without any sense of embarrassment, but now, with that notebook in front of me, I felt upset and intimidated; I’d never imagined that my mother had a poetic side.

There were several compositions – some of them short, others quite long. I leafed through the notebook, stopping to read a poem here and there.

I’ll Never Be a Flower

I’ll never be a flower

that offers its corolla to the sun in spring.

I’ll never be a flower

because my spirit is more like the grass,

a thin blade equal to a thousand others,

as tall as the others, bowing its head

at the first winter frost.

Fog

The fog wraps up everything, houses and people;

even bicycles stop making noise.

Our world is a world of ghosts

or am I the ghost?

My heart is wrapped up in cotton wool

a precious gift

addressed to no one.

Fear

It’s not monsters that frighten me

nor is it murderers.

I’m not afraid of the dark

or of floods or cataclysms

or punishment or death

or a love that doesn’t exist.

I’m afraid only

of your little hand

groping for mine,

of your gentle gaze

looking up at me and asking, ‘Why?’

My vision blurred; I felt something pressing on the centre of my breastbone. It seemed like a pole of some kind, one of those sharpened stakes used to kill vampires. A hand was thrusting it at me forcefully, trying to split open my rib cage.

It Would Have Been Lovely

How lovely it would have been

had our life been as happy

as a Sanremo Festival song.

You and I, hand in hand,

and on the windowsill a box of lilacs.

How lovely it would have been

to wait for sunset together

and not to fear the night.

How lovely it would have been

to guide our children’s footsteps

with a single hand.

But the ogre came and devoured

the little time we had

leaving only bones and peels on the ground,

the remnants of his obscene feast.

The stake thrust deeper, penetrating my diaphragm; had it turned a bit to the left, it would have perforated my pericardium.

Was this woman my mother? What happened to the troubled, superficial girl of the diary, the confused, desperate woman of the letter? She must have written those poems shortly before she died, but in any case they seemed to record the thoughts of a different person.

I’ve heard it said that when the end is near, everything becomes clearer; it happens even if we don’t know our days are numbered. All of a sudden, a veil is torn away and we see clearly what has, until that moment, remained in darkness.

My mother was entirely a product of her time. She let herself be ferried along by the generational current, never suspecting how close she was to plunging into the abyss. Since she’d grown up without solid roots, the violence of the rapids bowled her over. She wasn’t like a willow, which can be overwhelmed by a flood and still stand its ground; she truly was a humble blade of grass, as she wrote in her poem. The little clod of earth she stood on was swept over the precipice, committing her to solitary navigation. Maybe it was only when she heard the roar of the waterfall, only when she was about to be hurled into the unknown, that she regretted those roots she’d never had.

After all, I thought, the way people are put together isn’t very different from the limestone landscape of the Kras: on the surface, days, months, years, centuries of history in continual transformation succeed one another – carriages or cars pass over it, simple day trippers, defeated armies – while, underneath, its life remains intact and ever the same. There are no fluctuations of light or temperature in its dark caverns, no seasons or changes; the olms splash about happily, rain or shine, and the stalactites keep descending toward the stalagmites, like lovers separated by some perverse divinity. In that water-created world, everything lives and repeats itself in a nearly immutable order.

So in the years of revolution, my mother had lived an ardent life. In order to subscribe to that dream, she’d distorted her own feelings. At the time, they weren’t as important as the approval of the group.

Packed together on the prow of an imaginary icebreaker, they moved forward, breaking the obtuse, frozen crust, their eyes fixed on the luminous horizon of universal justice. If the ship could keep moving, they’d finally reach a new world, a land in which evil would have no more reason to exist and brotherhood would reign supreme. The magnitude of this task permitted no vacillation and no indecision. They had to go forward united, without individualism and without regrets, marching to a single rhythm, like the African ants that can devour an elephant in a few minutes.

At a certain point, however, she must have distanced herself from the group in some way. While many of her companions were literally taking up arms, my mother chose the solitary path of introspection. She was drowning, too fragile and confused to save herself, and then she came across this Mr G., the first buoy she could cling to. He held her up and helped her float, and that must have been more than enough for her. For a little while, the skein of stars allowed her to go on, while patriarchy and capitalism camouflaged the unresolved karmic bonds.

But in reality, below that surface appearance, beneath the hard ideological bark and the confused aspiration towards some abstract universal harmony, there was a young woman who nevertheless, in the most hidden part of her being, dreamed of love.

The river kept flowing in the deep caverns, and its water was the real source of life, with its power to slake, nourish, fertilise, strengthen, and unite human beings in every corner of the earth. But it’s loving and being loved, not revolution, that’s the innermost aspiration of every creature that comes into the world.