Listen to My Voice (6 page)

A noisy group of kids was on the bus. They must have had a lot to drink already; one of them was wearing a Santa hat, and another was masked like a skull with living eyes.

Once I was home, I did nothing but sleep. For three or four days, I slept heavily, dreamlessly. The house was cold, and the sudden gusts of wind made the shutters bang violently against the walls. Every now and then, that sharp, violent sound – it was like a gunshot – jolted me out of sleep.

After I started moving around again, the great absence I felt every day wasn’t yours, but Buck’s. I still talked to him, went looking for him, put leftovers aside for him. I was strongly tempted to go to the dog pound and choose a replacement, but then I became submerged under the infinite amount of paperwork required by the conclusion of a life.

I still couldn’t feel any grief at your not being there.
The
rooms were empty, immersed in silence like a theatre after the performance: no more shuffling, no more footsteps, no more coughing fits.

The part of me that should have abandoned itself to mourning had been prematurely used up, burned away by exasperation and by your brutally abrupt decline. I’d welcomed your passing with a feeling of relief, grateful that your sufferings were finally over.

Only the passage of time allowed your image to re-emerge in my memory, so that I could again see the person who had been so important in my life.

Once all the bureaucratic requirements had been dealt with, I didn’t know what to do. Your illness had drained away all my energy; I could feel no grief, just immense dismay.

Who are you? I asked myself. What will you be when you grow up?

I didn’t have the slightest idea.

The bora blew with extraordinary intensity all January long. It snowed a few times as well – the deer even invaded the garden, looking for shoots to eat.

I stayed curled up in the armchair in front of the fire, beside the table with our books (by then covered with dust), and I could hear your voice telling me the story of the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf. ‘“I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in,” the wolf bellowed though the door.’

‘No wolf can get in here,’ you’d say to reassure me. ‘This is a solid brick house, built not on sand but on the hard rock of the Carso.’

Then you’d add that foundations and roots are in a way the same thing, because they both make it possible to stand firm and not yield to the violence of the wind. In order to give a house stability, you have to dig deep foundations, down and down, just the way the roots of a tree do, year after year, in the darkness of the earth. In America, however – you went on – they set houses directly on the ground, like tents, and that was why a wolf’s huffing and puffing would be enough to eradicate entire cities over there.

Alone in the silence of the house, I wasn’t so sure about your words any more. I had the impression that the wind was hissing through fissures in the window frame, repeating
It’s over, it’s ooooover
, like when I was a little girl and the spinning washing machine would whisper,
Everything’s useless, everything’s doomed
.

In the middle of the night, the front door groaned under the blows of the bora; it really sounded as though someone were outside, shouting
Gestapo!

By day, instead of protecting myself from the wind, I went out to confront it, running against its gusts like Don Quixote charging the windmills.
Kill me, purify me, ravish me, carry me far away, away from here, rip me out of my life
. In my heart, I ceaselessly repeated these words.

I slept little, I ate even less, I saw no one, I had no projects; I felt like a boxer alone in the middle of the ring. I’d warmed up for years, worked on my jab and my uppercut, and skipped rope to prepare myself for the final bout, and then my opponent had suddenly and unexpectedly withdrawn. I kept on hopping about, of course, but the only adversary I faced was my shadow.

Without any opportunities for conflict, my life was like a carrier bag at the mercy of the wind; my movements were determined by its capricious gusts, not by my own will.

I’d never thought about my future.

As a little girl, I’d had a few unfocused dreams about what I wanted to be – a stationmaster (complete with signal paddle and red cap) or a ship’s captain, a circus acrobat or a dog trainer – but they were just that, only dreams, without any practical connection to reality. From the beginning of my teenage years on, I’d had but one occupation: attacking you. Now that you’d abandoned the field in one brilliant move, I walked around the house like Pavlov’s dog, pulling at my chain and baring my teeth, but the bell I so longed to hear never rang.

What meaning did the days of my life have, now that I was alone in the world? Or, for that matter, even when you were still there? And, in general, what was the significance of all human life? Why did people always repeat the same gestures? Out of habit, out of boredom, out
of
an inability to imagine anything different or to question themselves? Or perhaps out of fear, because it’s easier to follow a trail that’s already marked.

Pushing my trolley down the aisles of the supermarket, I looked at the pallid faces under the neon lights and asked myself: What life has meaning? And what’s the meaning of life? Eating? Surviving? Reproducing? Animals do all that, too. Then why do we have two legs to walk on and two hands to use? Why do we write poetry, paint pictures, compose symphonies? Only so our bellies can be full and we can copulate enough to guarantee ourselves descendants?

No human being desires to come into the world. One fine day, without being consulted, we find ourselves shoved out on to the stage; some of us are given leading roles, others are mere extras, and still others exit the scene before the end of the act or prefer to climb down from the stage and enjoy the show from the stalls – to laugh, weep, or grow bored, according to the day’s programme.

In spite of this brutal start, once born into the world, no one wants to leave it. It seemed paradoxical to me: I don’t ask to come here, but once I’m here, I don’t ever want to leave. What’s the meaning of individual responsibility, then? Am I the one who chooses, or am I chosen?

Is the real act of free will, therefore – the one that differentiates men from animals – the decision to leave
for
good? I didn’t choose to come into the world, but I can choose when to bid it farewell; I didn’t come down here of my own free will, but I can go back up whenever I want.

But come down from where? Go back up where? Is there an above and a below? Or just an absolute pneumatic void?

After your death, whenever I thought about the house, the image that came into my mind was the image of a seashell. When I was a little girl, not yet six years old, you bought me one from an old fisherman in Grado. I can still hear your voice as you put the shell over my ear and said, ‘You hear that? It’s the sound of the sea.’

I listened for a while, and then I suddenly burst into one of those intense, unstoppable fits of weeping that irritated and frightened you at the same time. You kept saying, ‘Why are you crying? What’s wrong?’

I couldn’t answer you. I couldn’t tell you that the sound inside the shell wasn’t the roar of the sea but the groans of the dead, that the strange howling I heard was their voice. I couldn’t say that it poured itself into our ears with all the violence of the unspoken, and that from there it went to the heart, crushing it until it exploded. Once upon a time, that seashell had housed a gastropod (just as, for many decades, the house on the Kras Plateau
had
been our family’s protective shell) which some crab or starfish had then devoured, leaving its calcium carbonate exoskeleton empty. The water, entering every recess of the shell, had smoothed and polished it until it shone like mother-of-pearl, and now, deep in its gleaming insides, that sound reverberated endlessly.

The inhabitants of our house had undergone the same fate: They were all dead, and the wind had smoothed down every memory of them. Alone, I wandered through the chambers and spirals, and sometimes I seemed to be lost in a labyrinth. At other times, however, I realised that only by staying in there, only by searching and digging and listening, would I be able to find a way of anchoring myself.

The wind was a voice, too; it carried the sighs of the dead, the sound of their steps, the things that were never said between them.

As I was there alone, in that house whose walls kept getting thinner, more transparent, I began to think about the young woman in the photograph, enveloped in a cloud of smoke. I tried to remember the sound of her voice, the warmth of her hand, something that might have united us before she disappeared. I would have liked to know everything about her, but now there wasn’t anyone I could ask.

How did she look, who was she, what did she like, and – perhaps the most pressing question of all – why did she bring me into the world?

I started calling out to her as I wandered through the empty rooms.

I was ashamed of speaking that name – somehow it seemed as though I were betraying you. Up until that day, I’d always said ‘Grandma’, and now, all at once, all I wanted to say was ‘Mamma’.

Genealogies

6

WHO ARE OUR
parents? What’s behind the faces of the people who begot us? Out of billions of persons, only two; out of hundreds of thousands of spermatozoa, only one. Before we become the children of our mother and father, we’re the result of billions of combinations and choices – both made and not made – but no one’s in a position to shed much light on them. Why that spermatozoon and not this one right next to it? Why does only
that
one contain the characteristics of the necessary person? The unborn child could turn out to be Leonardo da Vinci, or a plumber, or a ruthless murderer.

And if it’s true that everything’s already predetermined, as in a restaurant menu, if Leonardo has to become Leonardo and nobody else and the same with the plumber and the killer, what sense is there to our entire existence? Are we really just put together from
various
parts, like pieces in an assembly kit? Is there a number on each kit that determines the project it contains?

Maybe, up in heaven, someone – like an industrious housewife – is bustling about and deciding: Today we need four hundred plumbers, eighty or so murderers, and forty-two scientists.

Or maybe heaven’s empty, as many people claim, and things go forward in a kind of perpetual motion; matter started to aggregate distant aeons ago, and now it can’t stop; the forms it produces are more and more complex. And it’s exactly this complexity that’s opened the way to the great fiction that would have us believe in the existence of Someone up there in the sky.

Why can two people, a couple who perhaps hadn’t even met until a few hours before, by performing an act that lasts no more than a few minutes, become our parents? Is this our destiny, to be half one and half the other, even if fate decrees that we’re to be adopted and sent to live on the other side of the world?

In any case, we’re part of them, and vice versa.

Part of them, and part of their parents and of their parents’ parents, and so on, farther and farther back, until the whole family tree is covered – one grandfather’s passion for insects, great-grandmother’s love of singing, great-great-grandfather’s flair for business, the other grandfather’s alcoholism, various cousins’ efforts
to
bring the family to ruin, the suicidal instincts of a couple of uncles, a great-aunt’s obsession with the spirit world – all of that is closed up inside us as though in a time bomb. But we don’t set the timer; it’s been set from the beginning, and we know nothing about it. The only wisdom is to be aware that there’s something uncontrolled inside us and that at any moment it could explode.