Listen to My Voice (15 page)

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.

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.