hoping to be seen by a certain someone
throwing snowballs,
and thinking that sufficed
to place myself in the upper ranks of men.
So many seasons now
have changed the cells and tissues of my body
that I may not persist even in memory.
Only you, only you,
gone off to who knows where (where have you gone?),
as I still find you in the muscle of
my heart,
and with the same amazement as three days
before Christmas.
To this Contained Creature, who was clearly real, I had devoted my three most formative years. Then (where have you gone?) I lost her. And perhaps during the period when I lost my parents and grandfather and was moving to Turin, I decided to put that behind me, as the final two poems suggest. Though they had been slipped into the notebook, they were not handwritten but typed. I doubt we used typewriters in high school. So these final two poetic efforts must have dated from the beginning of my college years. Strange to find them here, since everyone told me I stopped coming to Solara at the very beginning of that period. But perhaps after my grandfather’s death, as my aunt and uncle were settling everything, I had come back to the chapel, to put a final seal on memories I was renouncing, and had left these two pages as a kind of testament and farewell. They sound like a farewell, as if I were settling my accounts, with my poetry and my soft adulteries alike, by leaving everything behind.
The first began:
Oh the pale dames of Renoir
The balcony ladies of Manet
The outdoor tables on the boulevards
And the white parasol in the landau
Faded with the last cattleya
at Bergotte’s final breath…
Let’s look each other in the eyes: Odette de Crecy Was a great whore.
The second was entitled "The Partisans." It was all that remained of my memories from ’43 until the end of the war:
Talino, Gino, Ras, Lupetto, Sciabola
may you come down together some spring day
singing the wind is whistling the storm is howling
for how I long to have them back, those summers
of sudden rifle shots up high in the hills
breaking the silence of the midday sun
of afternoons spent waiting,
of news that made the rounds in quiet voices:
the Decima retreats, the Badogliani
are coming down tomorrow, the roadblock’s gone,
the road to Orbegno is impassable,
they’re carrying the wounded off in gigs,
I saw them going by the Oratorio,
Sergeant Garrani locked himself inside
the City Hall…
Then suddenly the dreadful racket,
the hellish noise, the tapping on the wall
of the house, a voice in the alley…
And the night, silence and occasional shots,
from San Martino, and the final sweeps…
I’d like to dream about those endless summers
that fed on certainty like blood,
about those days in which
Talino, Ras and Gino may have looked
into the face of truth.
But I cannot, for there remains
my own roadblock
on the road to the Gorge.
And so I close the notebook
of memory. By now they’re gone,
the clear nights in which
the Partisan in the woods
watched the little birds so they wouldn’t sing,
so Sleeping Beauty could remain asleep.
These verses remained a puzzle. Evidently I had experienced a period that seemed heroic to me, at least as long as I saw others as the protagonists. While trying to settle all the inquiries into my childhood and adolescence, I had tried, on the threshold of adulthood, to call back certain moments of exaltation and certainty. But I was blocked (the last roadblock of that war fought outside my door) and I had surrendered in the face of-what? Something I could not or would not call back to mind, something that had to do with the Gorge. The Gorge, once again. Had I seen the hellcats there and had that encounter taught me that I must blot out everything? Or, since I was by then aware that I had lost the Contained Creature, had I turned other days, and the Gorge, into an allegory of that loss-thus explaining why I was putting away everything I had been, up to that moment, in the chapel’s inviolable coffer?
Nothing else remained, at least not at Solara. I could only infer that after that renunciation, I had decided to devote myself, already a student, to old books, to turn my attention to someone else’s past, one that would not have anything to do with me.
But who was that Creature who, fleeing, had convinced me to file away both my high school years and my time at Solara? Had I, too, had my pallid little maiden, a sweet girl who lived across the hall on the fifth floor? If that was the case, it was just another song and nothing more, a song everyone has sung at one time or another.
The only person who might have known anything about it was Gianni. If you fall in love, and for the first time, you at least confide in your desk mate.
Some days ago I had not wanted Gianni to clear away the fog of my memories with the calm light of his own, but on this point I could call upon nothing but his memory.
It was already evening when I phoned him, and we talked for several hours. I began in a roundabout way, talking about Chopin, and I learned that in those days the radio really had been our only source for the great music for which we were developing a passion. In the city, it was not until our fifth and final year of high school that a friends-of-music society had been formed: from time to time it offered a violin or piano concert, a trio at most, and in our class there were only four of us who went, almost furtively, because the other rascals, though not yet eighteen, were always trying to get into the brothel, and they looked at us as if we were light in the loafers. Okay, we had shared some thrills, I could risk it. "In the third year of high school, did I start thinking about a girl?"
"So you’ve forgotten about that too, then. Every cloud has a silver lining. Why should you care, so much time has passed… Come on, Yambo, think of your health."
"Don’t be an ass, I’ve discovered certain things here that intrigue me. I have to know."
He seemed to hesitate, then lifted the lid off his memories, growing quite animated, as if he had been the one in love. And indeed that was nearly the case, because (so he told me) up to that time he had remained immune to love’s torments, and my confidences intoxicated him as if the affair had been his own.
"And besides, she really was the most beautiful girl in her class. You had high standards, you did. You fell in love, yes, but only with the most beautiful girl."
"Alors, moi, j’aime qui?… Mais cela va de soi! / J’aime-mais c’est forcé-la plus belle qui soit!"
"What’s that?"
"I don’t know, it came to me. But tell me about her. What was her name?"
"Lila, Lila Saba."
Nice name. I let it melt in my mouth like honey. "Lila. Nice. And so, how did it happen?"