It was a warm, bright evening; there was no one about; but a walled-in dog pound gave forth a tumult as of different pieces of music being played backward; and when birds overflew this spot, they would dart vertically upward. I took my clothes off and waded up to my neck into the muddy-brown water.
After dressing again, I went westward into the village and sat down outside a restaurant, the Trattoria Andes. Situated at the intersection of two surfaced country roads, it is surrounded by a large cornfield; almost every one of the half-grown stalks had a sparrow perched on it. This Indian corn was unknown to Virgil, as were the potato plants in the neighboring field, not to mention the tomatoes and the “robinia with its soft little leaves, which rustle more loudly than those of any other tree” (my naturalist son).
On the way back to Mantua, I set off at random across the fields, which are traversed by a number of bridgeless canals. I jumped across most of them; only one was so wide that I had to swim (making a bundle of my clothes and tossing it ahead of me). The weed that we call bear’s-breech and feed to rabbits proved, on closer scrutiny, to be something much more choice, the “twining acanthus.” The elders here were diminutive. The plane trees, “which lend shade to those who stop to drink,” were clipped hedges along the sides of the road; the dried seedpods from the previous year rattled loudly at every gust of wind.
That night, I dreamed that the village of Andes was on a bay along the seacoast. In another dream, I saw my mother’s empty bed. Her nightgown was spread out on it; it showed the precise imprint of her bruised body.
Next morning, in Milan, I took a plane to Alghero in Sardinia. It was in Sardinia, in two successive summers, that I begot my children, and once from a passing ship I saw Alghero as a white city. Since then, the city has meant to me “not having to say anything,” “the possibility of keeping silent.” During the flight, the vacant sea sparkled, and once two ferries passed each other. After the plane landed, there were light-colored baggage checks fluttering on the loaded baggage trucks in the middle of the cement field.
I spent a whole day by the remote Lago di Barratz. Separated from the sea by an enormous dune, it is the only natural freshwater lake on the island. I was alone there. The only sign of other people were footprints. I stood barefoot in the water, over my ankles in black muck, until a tiny leech chewed itself into me, grew fat, and finally fell off. A grasshopper which was almost as big as a sparrow flew onto my hand and I held it between my fingers until its sawtooth legs began to scratch my skin. The shores of the lake were roofed over by tamarisk stalks the color of asparagus, but much taller; their green was in perfect balance with the rippling blue of the water: “the murmuring tamarisk.” In the background, on a sand-colored high plateau, a dark bull stood motionless for hours. On the way back to the bus stop, I saw the stone I had killed with lying limestone-gray in the red dust; the round holes in it were my finger marks. I was still walking barefoot, and in the village a child called out to me: “You got no shoes on,” and the words became a chorus.
The next day — I should have been back in Salzburg teaching — I passed the home for the so-called retarded in Alghero, which is separated from the sea by a shore road and is called Domus Misericordiae. Nearly all the idiots, young for the most part, were sitting on a long bench in the yard, with their backs to the road; a few sat on the gateposts, looking down at the passersby. One held his fingers to his lips like a Jew’s harp and struck them soundlessly. I ventured a look at him. But the idiot on the gatepost won; I lowered my eyes and went away. Toward evening, I went back and again faced the Jew’sharp player, who hadn’t stirred from the spot. We took each other’s measure at length, impassive but without staring. In the end, there was a blinking behind the fence and my opponent turned away, but with an air of easy indifference, as though nothing had happened, not as one defeated. For the moment, not an idiot, but someone cleverly playing the role. “Ugly fool!” he said.
Next day, on a bus ride to the interior, I tried the same game with a baby. His face propped on the shoulder of a woman sitting in the row ahead of me, he evidently couldn’t take his eyes off me; when I looked back, the baby, as though I had seen through him, finally showed his profile and took refuge in his mother’s neck; yet at the same time he grinned as though relieved to be seen through. Mother and child formed a Janus head. On Sunday morning, on my return to the coast, I passed the home again; Mass was being said in the open, under a canopy of trees. Once, a lizard fell out of a tree and landed on the priest’s shoulder. When he raised the white wafer, it was veined with shadows like a setting sun. During the sermon, the acolyte played with a spider. The idiots waved their arms, clapped loudly, and interrupted with inarticulate gurgling, cackling, grunting, and groaning. A sparrow preening itself in a dusty hollow turned into every conceivable animaclass="underline" a mouse, a crow, a rooster, a lion, a dolphin, a picture puzzle. The sea off Alghero glittered in far-flung arcs, lines, and loops, like longhand script. On a block of salt beside it sat a caged parrot, who didn’t say boo.
It was no dream that, some days late, I reported back to school in Salzburg. My friend in the principal’s office just said: “It doesn’t matter,” took me to my classroom, and opened the door for me. On the way, he had given me a long look, evidently undecided whether to regard me as a lost soul and failure or as a man changed for the better.
The building, formerly an imperial cavalry barracks, is on a bank of the Salzach. The room with its high walls was very bright. I have never seen eyes of so many different colors, and I thought them all beautiful. The class was strangely quiet, until I said: “Why don’t you misbehave? Come on, misbehave a little.” My pupils thought I was creepy, and not for the first time, I imagine.
The whitish steam rising from the chimney of the municipal power plant on the opposite bank showed the direction of the wind. By the sounds on the railroad bridge, one could tell what sort of train was crossing: the passenger trains purred and hummed, the freight trains rumbled, and from time to time one heard the clatter of a shunting engine.
I felt happy to be there; to be there not permanently but for the present. I leaned out of the open window, looked upstream, and saw the spray of an arm of the Alm Canal, which drops like a waterfall into the Salzach. For a moment there was a light over the city, which imparted a pastel hue to all the buildings, even the massive walls of the castle. The whole produced the effect not of a backdrop or façade but of a quiet, festive fairyland. Yet it seemed to me that something was gone forever. A part of me had fallen off the cliff with the stoned man. I was no longer among the players, or else I was playing a different game; or, at best, competing for some consolation prize. Melancholy was in the world; it was the reality which deformed and discolored the world. A monstrous picture from Sardinia came into my mind. A colony named Fertilia, built by the dictator’s henchmen in the years between the wars: today not a single house has a threshold and the doors to the houses are gaping holes. “Stinking rabble!” I said aloud at my table in the faculty room, which had formerly been the guardroom of the barracks. Someone at the next table retorted: “That will do, Loser.” When I looked up, I noticed for the first time that I was one of the older men in the room.
I began my last class of the day by saying: “The Greek word lalein corresponds to the German lallen (to babble, talk inarticulately). But the poet also calls pebbles lallai.” I was standing at the window, I saw the spring flow of the river; the wind had drawn a dense pattern of lengthwise stripes extending to both horizons — a regatta of emptiness. I shall be without love, I thought. Shall I be without love? In any case, I shall never again be secure.