The carpenter and architect did not need such companions. Wherever he was in the inhabited world, when faced with any questionable phenomenon he could summon and deploy from within himself an entire team, as it were, in which one complemented the other, helped him along, took over his role. If he was constantly talking to himself on his trip to Japan, it was a discussion, usually in question-and-answer form, between not merely a builder and a woodworker but also, for instance, a geologist and a well digger, a teacher and a road builder, a photographer and an ironworker, and, last but not least or in between, an actor and a nobody or a ne’er-do-well. As he learned from unfamiliar objects, he learned from himself.
Yet he accomplished hardly anything, and did not even much care. When he built something, it was almost always without a commission, without a client, for himself, or for no particular reason, on the piece of property he owned, a scruffy savanna on the Italian karst, above Trieste, which he had inherited from his parents, or secretly, on no-man’s — land, especially that of cities — to the extent such a thing could even still be found anywhere nowadays.
That these structures stood there unfinished, one and all, was not his intention, at least not his express intention. As he said, he wanted to leave himself as much time as possible for each, and it did him good, he remarked, to start something new in the meantime, and besides, it was a pleasure to do everything himself. And furthermore, he had no money.
So for a house on his land (he acted as though he did not know whether it was intended for himself), he had dug out a small sinkhole to create a cellar, but since then nothing had been added: only the hemispherical form, hollow, its walls like its rounded floor finished with the local white, gray, and bluish limestone, lay there sunk into the steppe under the open sky, and a spiral staircase built from the wood of the narrow, tough karst oaks, without a railing, stuck up out of the hollowed-out cellar, rose above the earth’s surface, and ended at about the height of a diving board, with a final, thicker, threshold-wide step leading out into space — that was where the entrance level of the house was probably supposed to be, with a round floor plan, eventually or never?
To be sure, he had already erected a doorframe made of the same weather-resistant wood as the staircase, broad like a portal, set into a marble base, but it stood, and apparently not only temporarily, somewhere else entirely on the lot, with nothing else around it, and seemed to belong to a second house or a future courtyard wall; and the ramp of tamped red earth, located somewhere else again, gently mounting into nowhere, was perhaps conceived of as the approach to a barn, or at least such a thought was suggested by the ladder wagon left from his parents’ days that stood there, with stone chucks behind the wheels, the shafts stretched forward as if in anticipation of a new draft animal — though he then put the barn somewhere else entirely, at first nothing but four tall poles set in concrete, topped by the ridgepole and the rafters, uncovered to this day, through all of which the air whistled, except in the entryway built down below, its boards tightly joined, with two completed doors and even a glazed and puttied window, an entryway large enough to sit in — but what did that have to do with a barn?
A trench from the First World War ran right through the builder’s work area; his parents had filled it with rock and especially brush when they cleared the land, and he piled more on top of the juniper, grapevine roots, blackberry bushes, interwove the whole thing, stuffed the interstices with the tough savanna grass, the hard, clumpy red earth, smoothed and rounded the top, creating, along the former trench, the longest, most curving, most elastic bench for sitting on that I have ever encountered, although it was not certain that this structure had been planned as such: would he raise the bench later to the height of a wall, perhaps even studding the top with bottle shards?
At first sight someone might perhaps have mistaken all his piecework for a movie set. But for that the individual elements were too solid. A set designer or builder would never have been capable of designing and devising actually usable nooks like the craftsman and master here. And in distinction to a movie set, with these structures the adventure being played out or the relevant story would remain utterly mysterious, or, on the contrary, would not pose the slightest mystery.
His architectural works outside of the inherited parcel, in hidden no-man’s — lands in the four corners of the globe, stood there unnoticed. Aside from his friends, hardly anyone knew that those mounds that could easily be confused with local piles of rubble and soot were, under their camouflage, bake ovens, cisterns, root cellars, and woodsheds.
This notion stemmed from his childhood on the karst, in a borderland, which additionally had the “Communist threat” on the other side of the border, against which a third of the entire Italian army was massed, with weapons and tanks, all camouflaged under fake woodpiles, from which, when he was on his way to school, he would suddenly see a tank’s gun thrusting, under fake igloos of stone, which would unexpectedly flip open, revealing the nose of a rocket, inside a lone tree of the steppe, from which, through a sliding door, a heavily armed guard would emerge: the architect and carpenter’s later structures were the reverse of all this.
The only money he earned, in addition to that from odd jobs, came from a position at the University of Udine, where, for one hour per week, he taught the architecture of Greece and Rome, and his earnings went almost entirely on his building projects, or, as he called them, “void building,” “memory building,” “attention building.” That he could spend this year in Japan was a birthday present from us, all his friends, and to reciprocate he had promised us a sort of photograph album, with the working title “No-Man’s-Land Strips in Japan.”
Yet up to now, the middle of autumn, he had hardly taken a picture, although the painter had given him a camera that could take pictures with the most accurate long-distance focus, and although, contrary to expectation, here and there among the Japanese subdivisions, which were built up almost solidly, something similar to terrain vague had turned up; he had hardly taken a picture either of the theme of his journey or of anything else typically Far Eastern, but instead perhaps a picture of a motorbike wrapped in a silvery tarpaulin in Yokohama, the hands of three children, one on top of the other, on an umbrella handle on the tiny island of Izu, a wooden rack for drying rice straw, similar to the hayracks in Carinthia and Slovenia, at the turnaround in a field in the north — and that could have been anywhere in the world.
The moment was gradually approaching for fulfilling his promise. But, as he just wrote to me, he still feels reluctant to take pictures. And the photograph he did send along, of the Ryoanshi Temple, which he had just visited for the second time, of the “nothingness” or contentlessness of Kyoto, did not show the famous empty pebble garden with mossy boulders (and in addition perhaps the rake belonging to the monk-gardener), but, as a wobbly snapshot, merely the masses of visitors, sitting head by head on the balustrade around the square, their legs dangling down, apparently talking loudly, laughing, squinting as they faced the expanse of nothingness.
The handwriting in the architect’s letter was certainly not that of a person who had been sitting idle. It was that carpenter’s writing that I take as my model now and then. By that I do not mean the thickness of the carpenter’s pencil, intended for marking and numbering pieces of lumber, but rather the heaviness of the hand, perceptible to the reader, from which I sense: the man who wrote that must have been working just beforehand, using his entire body.