But although I had buried them, I had in fact kept them, so I must have retained some attachment to those poems, even after the acne had passed. As records. Some people who rid themselves of a tapeworm save the head in an alcohol solution and others do likewise with stones removed from their gall bladders.
The first poems were sketches, fleeting revelations in the face of nature’s charms, the sort every budding poet writes: winter mornings that hinted amid the frost at a sly desire for April, jumbles of lyrical reticence about the mysterious color of an August evening, many (too many) moons, and only one moment of humility:
Tell me, moon in the sky, what do you do? I go about my life, my dull, colorless life, because I am a heap of earth, and lifeless valleys, and tedious extinct volcanoes.
By God, perhaps I had not been such a fool after all. Or maybe I had just discovered the Futurists, who wanted to kill off moonlight. But right after that I read a few verses about Chopin, his music and his unhappy life. Think about it, at sixteen no one writes poems about Bach, who lost it only on the day his wife died, telling the vultures, when they asked him what he wanted in the way of obsequies, to ask her. Chopin seems made to order for bringing sixteen-year-olds to tears: his departure from Warsaw with Constantia’s ribbon over his heart, death looming at the Valldemossa monastery. Only when you get older do you realize he wrote some good music, before that you just cry.
The next poems were about memory. With milk still on my lips, I was already worrying about gathering remembrances that had barely had any time to fade. One poem declared:
I build myself memories. I stretch life into this mirage. With every passing moment, with every instant, I gently turn a page with my unsteady hand. And memory is that wave that ripples the waters briefly and disappears.
Very short lines, no doubt I learned that from the Hermetics.
A lot of poems about hourglasses, which spin time into a thin filament and deposit it into the intense granaries of memory, a hymn to Orpheus (!) in which I warned him that you cannot enter twice / the kingdom of remembrance / and hope to find unspoiled / the unexpected freshness / of the first theft. Advice to myself: I should not have wasted / a single moment… Marvelous, all it took was one overflowing artery and I wasted everything. To Africa, to Africa, to run guns.
In addition to the rest of my lyric offal, I was writing love poems. So, I was in love. Or was I rather, as often happens at that age, in love with love? In any case I wrote about a “she,” however impalpable:
Creature contained within that transient mystery that keeps you far from me, perhaps you were born merely to live these verses, yet you do not know it.
Troubadouric enough, and with hindsight equally chauvinist. Why would she have been born merely to live my poor verses? If she did not exist, I was a monogamous pasha turning the fair sex into flesh for my imaginary harem, and that can only be called masturbation, even if one ejaculates with a quill pen. But what if the Contained Creature was real and truly had not known? Then I was a dunce, but who was she?
I saw no images before me, just words, and I felt no mysterious flame, if only because Queen Loana had disappointed me. But I felt something, to the point of being able to anticipate certain lines as I gradually went on reading: one day you will disappear / and perhaps it was a dream. A poetic figment never disappears, you write it down to make it eternal. If I feared she might melt away, it was because the poem was a poor stand-in for something that I had been unable to approach. Incautiously I built / upon the transient sands of moments spent / in the presence of a face, simply a face. / But I do not know if I regret the instant / in which you damned me to construct a world. I was constructing a world for myself, but in order to welcome someone else.
Indeed, I read a description that was too detailed to have referred to a fictional creation:
As she passed blithely by through the May air, her hair in a new style, a student standing near me (older, taller, and blond) said grinning to his friends that the adhesive bandage on his neck covered a syphiloma.
And farther on a yellow jacket appeared, like a vision of the Angel of the Sixth Trumpet. The girl existed, and I could never have invented the syphiloma sleazeball. And what of this one, among the last in the love section?
An evening just like this, three days before Christmas, I was deciphering love for the first time. An evening just like this, the snow crushed flat along the avenues, and I was making noise beneath a window 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
