History (89 page)

"Me, too, before," he said, smiling, his forehead half-hidden by his arm. "Years ago, I used to write poems : all poems about politics, or else about love. I didn't have a girl, I didn't even have a beard, but every day I met an average of at least fi or six new girls, most of them strangers, to whom I would have liked to be engaged, since I thought each was more beautiful than the last. But the poems I addressed only to one, known as Beloved, who didn't exist; she was an invention of mine, and she was by far the most beautiful of all. I couldn't even picture her: I knew only that she had to be a virgin, and, preferably, blonde .

444 H I S T O R Y . . . . . . 1 9 4 7

"The political poems, on the other hand, I addressed to every sort of person, past and present. I wrote to Brutus the Elder and Brutus the Younger, to the Tsar, and to Karl Marx : always in verse. Some of those poems, the fi ones especially, come back to me, pounding in my head, mostly on gala days . . . They're schoolboy stuff, beginner's verses . . . I remember one called :

To the comrades

The Revolution, comrades, is not read in the texts of philosophers served at their banquet by slaves or by professors who negotiate at the table

the sweated struggles of the others.

The great Revolution is taught by the air

which
gi
ves itself to all breaths and receives them all. It is sung by the sea, our infi blood,

whose every drop refl the whole sun !

So every human pupil refl the entire light. Comrades, men of all the earth!

We read the word of the revolution

in my-your-our eyes, all born to the light of thought and of the stars!

It is written :

Man : thinking and free!" .

. . . "More!" Useppe said, when the recitation of this poem was over.

Davide smiled, agreeably: "Now," he said, "I'll tell you a love poem. I believe I wrote it about ten years ago! The title is :

Spring

You are like the primroses, still closed, that open in the fi March sun . .

. . . Open, rn beloved! It is time! I am March!

I am April!! I am May!!!

0
shell of the meadow, primrose of the sea, spring is here, and you

are mine . . ."

". . . More!" Useppe demanded, this time too.

"More what?" Davide replied, laughing. "That's the end of the poem.

445

I must have written fi hundred, maybe a thousand, poems, but my mem ory's empty . . ." With this, he thought again : "Maybe," he said, wrin kling his eyelids, "there's one I can remember, the last one! I didn't even wri it down, it's been a long time since I've written any. I only thought it. It's very new. It came into my mind on its own, not many days ago, another gala day, and I think it was a Sunday, like today. I say
I thought it,
but that isn't exactly right. I seemed to be reading it already wri down, I don't know where, like in ideograms, colored fi . . . And I don't even know what it means; in fact, I'd say it doesn't mean anything. It's title is LUMINOUS SHADOWS."

Useppe's feet wriggled in his impatience to hear the poem. Bella raised one ear slightly. And Davide abandoned himself to his recitation with a passive and almost absent voice, as if those irregular verses, short and long, were returning to his memory from a moving, refl scene, the same where he had invented them the fi time:

"Luminous shadows

'And how to recognize him?' I asked.

And they answered me: 'His sign is the LUMINOUS SHADOW.

You can still meet him who bears this sign

which radiates from his body but also confi it hence we say LUMINOUS

but also SHADOW.

Ordinary sense is not enough to perceive him. But how explain a sense? No code exists.

It could be compared to the desire that summons lovers around a girl, irritable, plain, slovenly, but clothed in her own unconscious erotic visions.

Perhaps an example could be found in the tribal favor that consecrates

those born diff from the others, visited by dreams. But examples are of no use.

Perhaps it can be seen perhaps it can be heard perhaps it can be guessed

that sign.

Th are those who await it who precede it who reject it some believe they glimpse it at the moment of dying.

An surely it was for that sign that on the river Jordan amid all the confused anonymous crowd

446 H I S T O R Y
. .
.
. .
.
1 9 47

to
one
the Baptist said : "You are the one

who must baptize me, and ask of me baptism!" '

Shadows shadows shadows luminous luminous lu-mi-nous . . .
"

. . . "More!" Useppe said.

"And he wants
more!"
Davide protested, as he was beginning to drowse. "But you," he asked Useppe then, vaguely curious, "do you under stand these poems?"

"No," Useppe answered sincerely.

"And you like listening to them all the same?"

"Yes," Useppe cried, simply, from the bottom of his heart.

Davide gave a little eccentric laugh : "Just one more, and that's that," he decided, "but by some other Author. Let me think. Maybe a poem like yours, with LIKE in it . . ." "Like! . . . like! . . . LIKE . . ." he began to declaim, as if becoming inspired, and with a joking voice, now almost without breath, lazy.

". . . Like
. . . Ah, I've got it! This is called COMEDY, and it's about Paradise!!"

Useppe prepared to listen, his mouth open. He could hardly believe it was allowed to deal with such a subject!

". . . LIKE a river, light

Streaming a splendor between banks whereon The miracle of the spring was pictured bright. Out of this river living sparkles thrown

Shot everywhere a fi amid the bloom

And there like rubies gold-encrusted shone
". . . more!" Useppe ventured.

"As, with my eyes in shadow, I have seen

A meadow of fl flashed over by the sun, When cloud breaks and a pure ray glides between, Many a clustered splendor, blazed upon

By ardent beams, was to my eyes revealed, Although I saw not whence the blazing shone!

"

". . . more

Davide gave a great yawn of weariness. "No," he protested, "that's enough for now! . . . And you?" he inquired, turn his head towards Useppe, "do you believe in Paradise?"

447

". . . In . . . who?" "In PARADISE!"

". . . I . . . I don't know

"As far as I'm concerned," Davide suddenly declared, "paradise or hell's the same to me. I want God NOT to exist. I want there to be nothing
beyond,
nothing at all. Whatever there might be, it would cause me pain. All things that exist, here, or
beyond,
cause me pain : everything
I
am, everything other people are . . . I want not to be any more."

"Are you sick or something?" Useppe, worried, asked him at this point. In fact, Davide's pallor had become ashen, and his gaze murky, like someone on the brink of sickness, or just emerging from it.

"No, no, I just feel sleepy . . . it's norm !"

Useppe had got down from the chair, and Davide glimpsed the little blue eyes examining him anxiously, and on either side of them, the little head's disheveled locks, so shiny and black they seemed damp.

"Don't you want us to stay here, to keep you company . . . ?"

"No, no . . . I have to be alone," Davide answered, in a restless voice, "we'll see each other again soon . . . another time!" Imitating Useppe, Bella had also risen on her four legs, all ready to follow him, or rather to take him off with her. After a hesitant silence, Davide heard the creak of the lock, which Useppe was struggling to pull with his little hands, then the door being closed with the minimum noise, out of respect for his sleep, and some little murmurs of comment, with a scrape of sandals, moving off Davide was already dozing.

Meanwhile, on the fl above, they had turned on a radio, which was echoed, from other directions, by other radios, with the identical notes. Also shouted names were heard, dogs barking, the muffl clang of some tram, in the distance . . . More than a sleep, Davide's was an exhaustion, involved in a hybrid compound with wakefulness. He dreamed he was where he actually was, on his little bed in the room, and at the same time he was in the street. But his daydream's street displayed a vast and un recognizable area, struck by a dazzling noon sun which, in the excess of its splendor, seemed more blind and mournful than a midnight. Perhaps the place was a station, it was invaded by a din of arrivals and departures, but no one could been seen. Davide had rushed there like the others who were awaiting someone's return or at least had someone to greet . . . But he knew already that for him this was a futile delusion. Suddenly it seems to him that a hand is waving a handkerchief from a window . . . and this is enough to move him infi ely. He waves in reply, but he realizes that handkerchief over there is an ugly, bloodstained rag, and he senses that behind it, half-hidden, there is a horrible smile, of incrimination and irony. "It's a dream," he remembers, to console himself; but still he doesn't