11

MANY FACTORS CAUSE disease in trees, and even more contribute to the maladies that afflict human beings.

When its sickness has advanced too far, a tree’s chances of survival are slim. Its roots rot, its trunk swells, its metabolic processes are interrupted, and its leaves, starved of sap, fall to the ground.

When a person falls ill, viruses or bacteria are the usual suspects, and justifiably so, but no one asks where they came from, how did they happen to creep inside there, why today and not a month ago, and why this person and not that other, who may well have been much more exposed to the risk of a contagion? When two patients receive the same treatment, why does one recover and the other succumb?

A lightning bolt grazing the bark of an ancient oak can suffice to initiate the process that leads to its destruction:bacteria, funguses, and beetles enter the breach and propagate rapidly, and soon the tree is in peril of its life.

Fruit trees become fragile when they lose their verticality. Even if the wind bends a pine, it can keep growing, but a bent apricot tree cannot; its exact perpendicularity to the ground is what allows the tree to live and bear fruit.

To destroy a human being, to make him sick, what’s required? And what’s needed to heal him? What’s the significance of an illness in the course of a life? Damnation? Bad luck? Or perhaps an unexpected opportunity, a precious gift from heaven?

When someone’s ill, isn’t his lamp turned on?

During the long weeks I spent in the hospital, the image of the lamp kept returning to my mind. I saw myself as a fairytale gnome, lantern in hand, trying to explore an unknown space. I didn’t know where I was going. With fearful steps, I skulked among the robust roots of a centuries-old tree or crept down a mole’s burrow or made my way through the labyrinth of a pyramid. I moved forward cautiously, frightened but also impatient. I guessed that sooner or later I’d come to an unknown door, and the closer I got, the clearer it became that through that door I’d find the treasure. Like the open door Aladdin finds, this one would lead to a room where chests filled with pearls and precious stones and gold ingots were stored and waiting, just for me. I didn’t know who had hidden them there or what his motives had been; my sole desire was to find them, to carry them outside, and to see them shining in the light of the sun.

My mother was dead. For reasons that remained obscure, she’d decided to drive her car into a wall; before executing her plan, however, she’d written me a few lines, signing herself ‘Mamma’ for the first time. Accepting her role and dying had been, for her, the same thing.

My father was pootling around the deserted shopping centres of Busto Arsizio in his clapped-out car, with no comfort other than his thoughts, ever more alone, ever more desperate, enclosed in his intelligence as in a Plexiglas cage.

Not enough time had passed since your death; my childhood image of you was often overlaid by the memory of your face distorted with anger at those intrusive UFOs.

In that deserted house – where the only sound was the echo of my own footsteps – I was having more and more trouble breathing.

One night, I woke suddenly, feeling as if someone were crushing my throat. I gasped for air like a diver who’s been submerged too long. From that day on, it became harder and harder for me to breathe. In my waking hours, I could feel my lungs contracting and popping like a pair of dry sponges; it wouldn’t have taken very much pressure to crumble them to bits.

The dog days of summer were approaching. I sought the explanation for my growing malaise in psychology: I’m having difficulty breathing because I’ve cut the umbilical cord, I told myself.

In September, however, when I realised that I was inhabiting my clothes instead of wearing them, I decided to go to the doctor. And the doctor’s visit led straight to the hospital. A virus had moved into my alveoli, where it was reproducing happily. I had a strain of pneumonia that produced no fever and no coughing but was nevertheless quite capable of causing death.

My hospital stay wasn’t unhappy; there was always someone there to look after me and distract me without ever making me leave the bed. I made friends with a couple of ladies who shared my room. They were amazed that no one ever came to visit me.

The day I left, we exchanged addresses and false promises to see one another again. It was the second week of October. I walked the streets as though in a dream. The violent rush of sound and motion stunned me. I stepped along delicately, hesitantly.

Out in the garden, our rose bush was still in bloom – small, dense flowers, already preparing to face the cold – but the grass was beginning to turn yellow. In Buck’s bowl, which was filled with rainwater, floated the corpses of a few wasps and one hornet. One month’s absence had been enough to allow a stale, damp odour to pervade the house.

Autumn lay ahead of me, and around me, the void. I could sense the bora gathering itself beyond the Carpathians, and I could already feel it bearing down, surrounding me with its whistling, penetrating all the way inside my skull.

I couldn’t face spending another winter here. It seemed to me as though I’d lived twenty years in the space of a few months, and I was too tired to go on.

I could certainly have come up with something to do – find a job, enrol at the university, experiment with love – but I would have done everything with only one hand, only one eye, only half a heart.

The truth, I knew, was that these wouldn’t have been life choices so much as escapes, dodges, lids barely covering a seething pot. One part of me would have remained, reciting my make-believe part, while the other would have continued to wander about the world, moving with a Golem’s hollow footsteps down every road, diving into every abyss, every darkness, waiting with trusting humility before every closed door, like a dog waiting for its as yet unknown master.

I wanted light. I wanted splendour.

I wanted either to discover whether or not truth exists – whether or not everything turns on it, as in a kaleidoscope – or to die.

The morning I went downtown to buy my ticket, I witnessed a strange phenomenon. Although the sea was calm, hundreds and hundreds of sole were moving up the Canal Grande, swimming on the surface of the water like flying carpets. When they reached the end of the canal at the church of Sant’Antonio, they piled up in a huge mass, unable to go any farther.

A small crowd of people gathered on the bridge, curious and astonished as they watched this strange form of mass suicide. There was much speculation. What was going on? Was it a sign from heaven? Had a nuclear submarine exploded? Was some foreign military power testing a new kind of toxic weapon?

A few fishermen started lifting bucketfuls of sole out of the water and dumping them into their boats. ‘Are they safe to eat?’ the people on the bridge whispered. ‘What do we know about what’s really going on in the world?’

Before their eyes, the fish were writhing and dying one after another, in a welter of squirming bellies and tails, while loudly shrieking seagulls darted through the air above them. They came zooming in from all directions, white shapes plunging headlong from rooftops or arriving from the sea in square formations like squads of bombers. The surface of the water vibrated with the energy of death; as soon as a gull ascended with its prey in its beak, the others flung themselves upon it, pursuing it implacably through the air and trying to snatch its prize.

The scene, at first once merely curious, had turned disturbing. Mothers and children stopped lingering on the bridge, and the groups of pensioners broke up.

Meanwhile, the normal, everyday life of the city continued. On the coast road, the usual line of vehicles waited for the green light. In the harbour, a cruise ship towed by a tugboat carried out its routine docking manoeuvres. In Ponterosso, deafening music (coming from a clothing store that catered to a young crowd) accompanied the lazy rituals of a few scattered market stalls.

Heaven’s sending signs, but no one knows how to read them, I thought as I entered the shipping company’s offices, which happened to face the Canal.

The next departure would be in exactly one week. The company official I spoke to told me that booking a cabin wouldn’t be a problem – availability was good. In the modern world, who’s crazy enough to waste five days travelling to a place you can reach in two hours by plane?

I reserved one of the cheapest interior cabins deep in the bowels of the ship.

As I returned home, I noticed I was walking with a lighter step. My decision to leave made me look upon things with detachment, almost with nostalgia. I hadn’t tended the garden in months. The flower beds were filled with weeds, and bushes were growing promiscuously into one another. The hydrangeas and other flowers, dried up and browned by the season, seemed like a gathering of old schoolteachers wearing their mortar boards, while a blanket of leaves covered the garden almost entirely.

Leaves – they were one of your obsessions. Leaves and weeds. We had so many quarrels about leaves and/or weeds! You thought they were nuisances and as such had to be eliminated; I, on the other hand, was convinced that both were necessary. At some point, you’d accuse me of being lazy, and I’d counter by accusing you of knowing nothing about how to treat plants and trees. ‘If leaves fall, there must be a reason,’ I told you. ‘Because nature’s not nearly as stupid as man. And the plants you call weeds don’t know they’re weeds. You may judge them and condemn them, but they think they’re flowers and herbs, as beautiful and important as all the rest.’

One day I shouted at you in exasperation. ‘You don’t see the soul of the garden!’ I said. ‘You don’t see the soul of anything at all!’

I started calmly preparing for my departure. First I went to the bank to exchange some currency, and then I did some laundry and put moth repellent in the wardrobes. To avoid a grub invasion, I stored the rice, flour, and pasta in airtight containers. For a similar reason, I moved all the furniture out of the kitchen, for fear that some bits of food caught in the cracks would lead platoons of black caterpillars to colonise the floor and the ceiling.

During the next few days, I rather meticulously packed a knapsack with clothes and other necessities for my trip. Before closing the pack, I took the old coverless Bible I’d found in the attic and put it on top of everything else.

My father hadn’t contacted me again. The bathing season was over, and he must have gone back to Grado Pineta. I didn’t feel like calling him, so I wrote him a note.

‘Dear Papa’ didn’t seem right, and so I threw away my first attempt. On the second sheet of paper, I wrote simply, ‘I’m going on a trip to the land of your ancestors and mine.’ Below those few words, I added the address of the place where, in all probability, I’d be staying.

The ship sailed in the early evening, after having swallowed up an interminable line of Albanian and Greek lorries. There was no restaurant on board, only a snack bar with plastic fittings and a neon light that gave every face a waxen, deathlike look.

Apart from the truck drivers, my fellow travellers included two busloads of retired Israelis returning from a trip to Europe. I watched them coming up from the belly of the ship, carrying boxes containing their cooking pots and eating utensils.

I went up on deck to look at the city as it disappeared into the distance.

The tugboat drew up alongside in order to take on the pilot. The beam from the lighthouse bounced off the surface of the sea at regular intervals. The black, calm water seemed to be a vast, threatening expanse of ink.

The stars shone above us, the same stars which, twenty years earlier, had shone above my mother and the little life that was growing in her womb. The noise of the powerful engines sounded almost reassuring during the few moments when I managed not to think about what was beneath.

Maybe the stars have eyes and see things as we see them, I thought. Maybe they have mysterious hearts and – as people have always believed – the ability to influence our actions. Maybe, on their white-hot edges, the dead live on, those who are no longer alive on earth, those who have already left behind one of the body’s forms.

When I was very young, before I went to bed, I used to insist on looking out the window and waving to Mamma, who, according to what you’d told me, had gone to live in heaven. On some evenings, if clouds covered the sky, I’d burst into tears. I imagined her as a fairy dressed in a long, light robe of coloured chiffon, wearing a dazzling cone covered with little stars on her head, a serene, slightly amused face, and, where her legs should have been, a single, luminous wake, which trailed out behind her as she followed me, fluttering from star to star.

But in fact, there was probably almost nothing left of her in her zinc coffin; and you, you were also decomposing down there, as I too would decompose one day.

What did our lives mean, then? What was the point of my mother’s dreams for me and yours for her? Were we doomed to follow our destinies into the dark, or was there some meaning beyond the great emptiness?

Why did all of you – you, your mother, my father – abandon your roots? Out of fear, out of laziness, out of convenience? Or perhaps to be modern and free?

When I asked my father that question, he replied that Judaism was really nothing but an accretion of anthropological customs and social glue, and to prove his assertion, he offered the example of his own father, an extremely devout man as long as he was working for his father-in-law in Venice and frequenting his house, but ready to dance the samba without any regrets after burying his wife in Brazil.

And you once told me we had no religion. We weren’t anything at all. When you saw that this worried me, you added, ‘It’s not a bad way to be, you know. In fact, it’s good. It means you’re free, and freedom is the only true wealth a person can have.’

Is this the reason why my soul’s like a dog’s soul? Is this the reason why I’ve always roamed the streets so anxiously, plagued with the ferocious restlessness of those who have no master?