15

AFTER DINNER THAT evening, when I was back in my room, I started reading the Bible. As my education hadn’t prepared me for Bible study, my reading didn’t proceed in any very orderly fashion. I confined myself to opening the volume at random, scanning the text, and then repeating the process, looking for a passage that would resonate. With all the reading that we did together, I wonder why you never suggested the Bible. Were you afraid of influencing me too much? Or did you fear you wouldn’t be able to answer my questions firmly and truly?

And was that the reason why you never spoke to me about Uncle Ottavio?

You probably decided to put off any reference to that subject until I was old enough to understand it; later, when I’d finally reached the appropriate age, you were overwhelmed by how restless and unhappy I was, and soon all that violent emotion was followed by the devastation of your illness, and so the right time for evoking these memories never came.

What roots did you provide me with?

You gave me love, certainly, but what was its foundation, what nourished it, what pushed it beyond natural genetic impulses?

And why weren’t you able to love my mother? What caused you to let her go adrift, like a rudderless boat?

Wasn’t there anything you could have done?

Or does the flow of time, of history, always drag lives along, always carry them away? Was my mother just a daughter of her time, as you were of yours and I am of mine?

And suppose history is indeed a flowing current, I thought, but one that can be resisted, one whose course can be altered? And suppose it’s precisely in history that the mystery of salvation is hidden? Suppose salvation lies in following the luminous path of truth?

But what truth?

Up to that point, all I’d heard was that truth didn’t exist.

‘Truth depends on your point of view,’ my father told me one day. ‘And given that points of view are infinite, there must be an infinite number of truths. Anyone who says he’s holding the truth in one hand already has a knife in the other, ready to defend his truth. Anyone who claims to have God on his side makes the claim so he can kill you later. Remember what the Nazis had engraved on their belt buckles: Gott mit uns, God with us. Remember the stakes where Catholics burned alive the people who didn’t think the way they did. Truth and death always walk hand in hand.’

Spurred on by my Bible reading, that weekend I finally made up my mind to leave the kibbutz and see the country.

I took a bus to Safed. When I got there, I sat down on a low wall to eat some of the provisions I’d taken from the kibbutz kitchens. Thumping music was coming from some nearby tourist bars, while a guide speaking fluent English pointed out the beauties of the place to a small group of tired, bored Americans.

‘In its early centuries, Safed was above all a fortress, a stronghold of the resistance against the Roman invaders. It wasn’t until the sixteenth century that Safed became one of the most important centres of Jewish mysticism. This period also saw the building of the most important synagogues, which can still be admired today.’

His words were punctuated by strange, metallic, repetitive sounds. Not far away, a child, the son of a couple no longer in their first youth, was frantically pressing the buttons of a video game. Three times, his father told him to stop. At the fourth, he snatched the game from the boy’s hands, shouting angrily, in English, ‘These are your roots!’

The hot air bestirred itself and rose from the plain, weakly moving the leaves of various plants. Farther off, two swans – wings spread wide, feet dangling, taking advantage of the rising air currents – flew great circles in the air.

Early in the afternoon, I took a bus down to Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee. I expected a poor fishing village, but instead I landed in a tourist town, part Rimini and part Las Vegas. The dreariness of holiday spots in the low season had settled on the place, lingering in the smell of grease, cooked and cold; glimmering in the bright signs, with half their lights burned out; and permeating the souvenir shop where I bought a postcard.

On the back, I wrote Here’s an outpost that would suit you . . . and sent the card to my father.

I spent that first night in a small hotel in Tiberias. The following day, I set out for the ruins of Capernaum.

The wind had come up, and threatening waves roiled the vast expanse of the lake.

I made a brief detour to visit the archaeological site of Tabgha. There were already three coaches waiting in its parking lot.

As I reached the steps leading to the site, I ran into a variegated crowd of my countrymen, for the most part retired couples whose accents suggested they were from the provinces of the Veneto. They all wore identically coloured scarves around their necks and visor caps. Many of them bore the marks of a lifetime spent working the land. Some of the women were elegantly dressed – skirt, blouse, little cardigan sweater – carrying antiquated purses and sporting permanent waves untouched by the anxieties of the new millennium.

A middle-aged cleric, probably the priest of their parish, accompanied them. He was as anxious as a schoolteacher bringing her small charges on a field trip, and he kept repeating the same directions: ‘Come over here . . . get closer . . . listen . . .’

But apart from the three or four parishioners who didn’t budge from his side, the group seemed to pay him little attention and showed greater interest in the place’s potential as a playground. The boldest of them, in fact, kicked off their shoes and waded into the lake, noisily splashing one another like a bunch of kids.

Scattered persons immortalised the scene with the most sophisticated and technologically advanced systems of visual reproduction. They focused, filmed, and photographed without ever removing their eyes from their cameras.

In the meanwhile, two other coaches had pulled up to the shore of the lake and discharged new waves of pilgrims, this time German and Korean.

‘One of the earliest historical references to this place comes from the pilgrim Egeria,’ said a German guide. She had begun speaking at once, all the while holding aloft a sign with the name of her tour. ‘Here’s what she wrote in the year 394 AD: “Not far from Capernaum can be seen the stone steps where Our Lord stood. There also, above the level of the sea, is a grassy field where many herbs and palm trees grow. Nearby are seven springs, each flowing with abundant water . . .” Look to your left. Under that octagonal construction, you can still see the principal spring. The water – part sulphurous, part salty – flows out at thirty-two degrees Celsius. This is, therefore, a thermal spring.’

The news about the spring’s salubrious qualities seemed to excite the German ladies, who quickly swarmed about searching for a rivulet they could dip a finger into, trying to recapture the same sensations they’d felt in the hot springs of Abano Terme.

The Korean group was more orderly and compact. They all turned their eyes at once to whatever their priest pointed out to them, as if they were part of a single organism.

Finally, the Italian priest’s efforts were rewarded as well. After having gesticulated and raised his voice in vain, with a few blasts on a little whistle – probably the same one he used on the playing fields at the parish recreation centre – he succeeded in gathering his flock around him and read them the Gospel story set in that very place: ‘In those days the multitude being very great, and having nothing to eat, Jesus called his disciples unto him, and saith unto them, “I have compassion on the multitude, because they have now been with me three days, and have nothing to eat. And if I send them away fasting to their own homes, they will faint by the way; for divers of them came from far.” And his disciples say unto him, “Whence should we have so much bread in the wilderness, as to fill so great a multitude?” And Jesus saith unto them, “How many loaves have ye?” And they said, “Seven, and a few little fishes.” And he commanded the multitude to sit down on the ground. And he took the seven loaves and the fishes, and gave thanks, and brake them, and gave to his disciples, and the disciples to the multitude.’

At the end of this passage, the priest raised his eyes from the page and said, ‘How many of us would be capable of following Christ for days without eating? Would we be able to give proof of so much devotion just for the sake of hearing his word? And how many of us would be inclined to accept it? Does his word upset us, or is it a word we can rest upon, the way you rest on a soft pillow?’

At the end of his discourse, he exhorted his audience, saying, ‘So let’s collect our thoughts for a moment of meditation and prayer that may help us understand the underlying meaning of our pilgrimage.’ Some of his parishioners assumed painfully rapt expressions, while others looked around, slightly embarrassed or distracted, as if they were thinking about how long it would be before they could eat their packed lunches.

Meanwhile, the wind coming off the lake had intensified, sending a few visor caps scooting along the ancient stones; scarves flapped like flags, while from the branches of the eucalyptus trees we could hear the dry rustle of the leaves mixed with the passionate chirping of the sparrows.

I sat on the steps of the amphitheatre and attentively scrutinised the faces around me. If they chose to come all the way here, I thought, they must believe in something. Otherwise, they would have preferred to bake in the sun of the Canary Islands.

That morning, while waiting for the bus, I’d read this passage in the Gospel of St Matthew: ‘The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.’

Was there light in those bodies, brightness in those eyes? Or rather conformism, sentimentalism, superstition? I’m doing this because it’s what the others are doing, because I want to be admired for my virtue, because, no matter what, I want to be protected from the powerful forces of evil that dominate the universe, and therefore, instead of a coral horn, I wear a cross around my neck; in fact, just to be sure, I wear two of them, along with a hand of Fatima.

Was this faith, or was it exactly the form of belief that should be rejected? And what relationship was there between faith and religion? Could you practise a religion without having any faith, and vice versa? What was a heavenly gift, and what was human weakness? Where was the line between the truth and the desire for approval?

All the while I sat there, I searched for other eyes that would respond to mine, but it was like slipping on ice or Plexiglas; probably I was the lightless one, but no one in that whole crowd emitted even the tiniest reverberation.

I was on the verge of giving up when a flash met my gaze, shining from the radiant face of a tiny, elderly Korean lady. Her countrymen were already climbing back on their tour bus, but she – who knows why – came up to me with a smile and took my hand between both of hers, squeezing it hard, as if she were trying to tell me, Keep going, don’t stop, and then, after the hint of a bow, she scurried away to the coach with small, quick steps.

Many hours later, I arrived in Capernaum. There, too, I found the usual mass of tourist buses. Guides and travel assistants, speaking various languages, filled the air with explanations, which I grasped in pieces as I moved through the brightly-coloured crowd heading in the direction of the archaeological area.

All that remained of the ancient synagogue were four white limestone columns and, on the ground, some bas-relief fragments covered with carvings of pomegranates and bunches of grapes.

‘The Via Maris passed through Capernaum,’ a man holding a signal paddle was saying. ‘The Via Maris was the ancient road that linked Syria and Mesopotamia to Egypt and Palestine. It was a road travellers were obliged to take, especially the drivers of the long merchant caravans. And it was to this very synagogue that Jesus came to preach after he left Nazareth. Anyone have any idea why?’

‘Because it was like a lorry parking area.’

‘Or a shopping centre.’

‘Exactly! Jesus must have chosen it because it was such a busy place. Later, in 665, the synagogue was destroyed, probably by an earthquake . . .’

The sun was at its zenith, and the temperature was quite hot. Following the stream of people trudging ahead in disorder, some eating sandwiches, some quenching their thirst from small bottles of mineral water, I reached a shady spot in the southernmost part of the excavations and sat down to have a snack myself.

Of the town that had been Simon Peter’s birthplace, nothing was left but the foundations of the houses. I could hear the guides droning on: ‘This is where St Matthew had his tax-collector’s table. This is where Simon lived with his mother-in-law.‘

I was wondering why, when people talk about Simon Peter, they mention only this one relative, and why his wife and children never appear, when my sight was afflicted by a kind of monstrous spaceship, a construction of glass and cement perched on six large iron feet, totally obscuring the view of the lake.

What was it?

At first glance, a low-end dance hall right out of the sixties or some bizarre temple for UFO worshippers.

‘This is the site of Peter’s house,’ the guides kept repeating emphatically, indicating the modest remnants of a wall hidden by the dreary spaceship.

Peter’s mother-in-law would have had good reason to loathe him, I thought, if she’d known he’d cause her family’s memory to be crushed under tons of cement and glass. But maybe it wasn’t Peter’s fault, but rather the obtuse conceit of human beings, who must exhibit the signs of their power everywhere.

Dozens and dozens of coins tossed by tourists glinted on the house’s ancient floor. I couldn’t understand what the sense of this ritual might be. Was the gesture supposed to be propitiatory? Auspicious? Or was it perhaps the far-sighted beginning of a collection taken up to tear down that monster and return Capernaum to its enchantment some happy day not too long from now?

By then, it was late. I’d wanted to go up to the top of the Mount of Beatitudes, but I wasn’t sure I’d have time to get back to the kibbutz, as I’d promised my uncle I would, so I walked back to the bus stop.

Throughout the ride, while the landscape was being gobbled up by the darkness, I reflected on the day I’d just spent. The multitude of the wise is the salvation of the world – I’d read that line in the Bible a short while before. Had I met any of the wise that day, or in years past?

The only priests I’d ever encountered along my way were the ones I saw on television. I don’t remember anything about their sermons, except that they emanated an aura suffused with moralistic sentimentality that failed to open any door in my mind and quite possibly sealed the one to my heart.

What was Wisdom, really? Was it the shooting spinal pains I’d had forever?

So on the shores of this lake, the Sea of Galilee, the Rabbi of Nazareth fed thousands of people. Were there any loaves or fishes left to hand out? And what hunger were they supposed to satisfy? What did modern man hunger for, when he possessed everything except himself? What did the soul hunger for? For glory, triumphs, verdicts, separations? Or simply for the discovery of a threshold it could kneel before?