A poem by Cesare Pavese (from
Lavorare Stanca)
South Seas (I Mari del Sud)
(to Monti)
One evening we're walking up the hill,
silently. In the shade of the late dusk
my cousin is a giant dressed in white
who moves calmly, his face tanned,
taciturn. Keeping quiet is our virtue.
Some of our ancestors must have been so
alone
- great men among idiots or poor fools
-
to teach their people so much silence.
My cousin spoke tonight. He asked me
to go up the hill with him: from the
top, on a clear night,
you can see the reflection of the
distant lights
of Torino. “You live in Torino...”
he said “.. you are right. Life must
be lived
away from the village: you profit, you
enjoy
and then, when you return, like me, at
forty,
you find everything anew. The Langhe
are never lost.”
He said all this to me, and he said it
not in Italian
but slowly in dialect; a dialect that,
like the rocks
of this very same hill, is so tough
that
twenty years of different languages and
oceans
were not able to affect. He went up the
hill
with the same absorbed look I saw, as a
child,
on the farmers' faces when feeling a
little fatigued.
For twenty years he travelled the
world.
When he left I was still a child
carried by women
and they thought him dead. I then heard
the women
talk about him now and again, as in
fairy tales;
but the men, more austere, forgot about
him.
One winter my father, already dead,
received a card
with a large greenish stamp showing
ships in a port
and good wishes for the harvest. It was
a great surprise,
but the grown-up boy explained avidly
that the card came from an island
called Tasmania
surrounded by a light blue ocean,
ferocious with sharks,
in the Pacific, south of Australia. And
he added that surely
the cousin hunted for pearls. He took
the stamp off.
Everyone had different opinions, but
they all concluded
he would die, if he were not dead yet.
Then everyone forgot, and the time
passed.
Oh how much time has passed since I
played
Malay pirates. And since the last time
I swam in dangerous waters
and chased a playmate on a tree,
breaking its nice branches, and gave
him a black eye and got hit,
how much life has passed. Other days,
other games,
other violent shocks in front of more
elusive
opponents: thoughts and dreams.
The city taught me endless fears:
a crowd, a street made me tremble,
a thought, at times, spied on a face.
The mocking lights of the street lamps
are still before my eyes, thousands of
them, on the shuffling noise.
My cousin returned, the war was over,
a giant among few. And he had money.
His family said: “In a year or less,
he will be broke and he'll leave again.
That's how the desperate die.”
My cousin has a resolute face. He
bought an apartment
in town and turned it into a shop made
of cement
and put a brand new gas station in it
and on the bridge by the curve a large
advertising sign.
Then he hired a mechanic to run it
and roamed the Langhe, smoking.
Meanwhile he married, in town. He took
a thin blonde girl like the foreign
women
he surely had met one day somewhere in
the world.
But he still went out alone. Dressed in
white,
his hands behind his back and a tanned
face,
in the morning he hit the fairs and
with a cunning air
haggled over horses. Later, when his
plan failed,
he explained to me that he wanted to
get rid of all the animals in the
valley
and force people to buy motors.
“But I am the real beast” he said
“I who thought
something like that. I should have
known
that here cows and people are all the
same”.
We've been walking more than a half
hour. We are close to the hilltop,
the
whistle and murmur of the wind gets stronger and stronger.
My cousin stops suddenly and turns:
“This year
I'll make billboards saying: - Santo
Stefano
has always been the first to
celebrate the festivals
of the Belbo Valley – whatever
the people of Canelli
say.” Then back to climbing the steep
slope.
A fragrance of earth and wind envelopes
us in the dark,
some distant lights: farms, cars
you can barely hear. And I think of the
power
that brought this man back to me,
driving him away from the sea,
from the distant lands, from the
silence that lasts.
My cousin doesn't talk about his
travelling.
He says briefly he has been to this and
that place
and thinks about his motors.
There is only
one dream
left in his heart: as fireman
on a Dutch fishing boat he once saw the
Cetacean,
and he saw the harpoons fly heavy in
the sun,
the whales being chased and escape
amidst a foam of blood
and lift their tails and fight against
the spears.
He mentions it sometimes.
But when I tell
him
how lucky he is to have seen the break
of dawn over the most beautiful islands
on earth,
he smiles at the memory, and says that
when
the sun rose, the day was no longer
young for them.
- The end -
