Listen to My Voice (18 page)

The only real differences between this place and a campus were the pervasive smell of manure and the presence, in the distance, of several large silos.

Bougainvillea with bracts of every colour, from fuchsia and magenta to yellow and white, adorned practically every wall. The vines spread out exuberantly, almost arrogantly. Large numbers of sparrows flitted among the flowers and leaves.

My young companion indicated that I should wait. I slipped off my backpack and sat down on a bench, looking around uncertainly. I wasn’t completely sure he’d understood who it was I was looking for; maybe I didn’t explain myself very well, I thought. However, after waiting for about fifteen minutes, I saw a white-bearded man of average height detach himself from a small group of people, and I recognised him (thanks to the mysterious laws of genetics) at once and unequivocally as Uncle Gionata.

My uncle was visibly taken by surprise, but he didn’t seem particularly disturbed by my presence. Although his original given name was Gionata, he hadn’t spoken Italian for many years. As far as he was concerned, his name was now Jonathan, but he addressed me in the same rather old-fashioned idiom that you would use every now and then when you were ill.

He insisted that we should go to his house – a squat, prefabricated dwelling facing a small, blooming garden – to have a cup of tea. Despite his age, my uncle maintained a strong, lean physique. His manner of speaking was very direct.

I told him about you – I said you had died about a year ago – about my mother, who’d passed away when I was four years old (I omitted any allusion to the voluntary nature of her death), and finally about my father, a philosophy professor who lived in Grado and who had nothing to do with me when I was growing up.

Uncle Jonathan had recently lost his wife, who’d passed away a couple of months after being diagnosed with what’s become the most common of diseases. Two children had been born of their marriage: the older, Arik, was an engineer living in Arad; his younger sister worked as a psychiatrist in the hospital at Beersheba.

Uncle Jonathan was the proud grandfather of twin girls, Arik’s daughters, now seven years old; both of them had begun playing the violin at a very tender age,
and
thanks to the method invented by the Japanese violinist Shin’ichi Suzuki, they’d already been able to show that they’d inherited in the highest degree the musical talent of two of their great-grandparents, Uncle Ottavio and his harpist wife. Jonathan had recently returned from Arad, where he’d attended, with great emotion, a performance by the two little girls.

Strangely enough, he told me, the music that had nourished his childhood had suddenly disappeared when he left Italy; he’d stopped listening to records and going to concerts. The only music that accompanied his daily life in Israel was the sound of tractors. In fact, from the day he’d moved there, the land had been his sole occupation. It was he who’d planted the long rows of grapefruit trees that extended all the way to the slopes of the hills, and he was also responsible for the avocado orchards.

Before Jonathan and his fellow kibbutzniks arrived, there had been nothing here but rocks and weeds. They’d spent the first years loosening and spading the soil by hand, and then they’d brought in the tractors. Since Jonathan had always been passionate about mechanical things, he’d taken a course in tractor repair. The kibbutzniks wanted to be self-sufficient in everything; this was the philosophy that had inspired them to build their community bit by bit, year by year.

The younger generation no longer cared anything
about
these ancient choices made by their forebears. They wanted everything, right away. They didn’t know how to wait; they weren’t capable of self-sacrifice for the future of the community – or perhaps they didn’t have enough strength of character. ‘That’s why I’m bitter,’ Uncle Jonathan confided to me. ‘And so are the other people of my age. Whose fault was it? Was it our fault, or was it just the times? I shouldn’t take it so hard. Ever since the world began, the young have tended to destroy everything their parents built, and life goes on all the same . . . Ah well, maybe these are just the sad grumblings of an old man.’

He put me up in what he called the ‘guest room’: a narrow space with plywood walls, where there was barely enough room for a chair and a camp bed. A single window framed the aromatic branches of a eucalyptus tree.

I’d never heard hoopoes and turtle-doves sing so ebulliently. It was as if the sun, which beat down on that land with greater intensity, had infused everything with greater vigour. The flowers were bigger and more colourful; the birds sang at a more stirring pitch. Did the same hold true for feelings, perhaps – for love and for hate, for the violent power of memory?

I fell asleep pondering that question.

When I heard knocking at my door, I thought it was still the middle of the night. It was my uncle, wanting
to
have breakfast with me. As it turned out, it was almost five o’clock, and the sun was already high in the sky. When Uncle Jonathan saw my dismayed face, he excused himself, explaining that he had to be in the fields as early as possible, before it became too hot to work.

The big dining room was already filled with people. Their voices mingled and echoed like the chatter of guests at a wedding banquet.

That first morning, I wandered around the kibbutz and didn’t see Uncle Jonathan again until lunchtime. ‘Look at all those blond heads and blue eyes,’ he said, assuming an air of satisfaction as we passed near the nursery schoolyard, which was full of children at play. ‘Hitler would have had a stroke.’

At home, the old, noisy air conditioner was already on. I sat on the narrow sofa in the living room and noticed an old print, a view of Trieste, hanging on the wall across from me. The picture showed a section of the seashore with the Palazzo Carciotti in the background: ladies with umbrellas, gentlemen with walking sticks and top hats, and nurses with baby carriages promenaded along the San Carlo pier (today known as the Audace), while crates of every size were being unloaded from a long line of ships in the Canal Grande.

I walked over to the print and studied it more closely. ‘What were they unloading?’ I asked my uncle.

‘Well . . . coffee, for the most part, but also spices and
fabrics
. You know why I keep that on the wall? Because it makes me think of a time that doesn’t exist any more, a time when you could spend hours and hours passionately discussing a whole range of topics . . . a performance of Bizet’s
Carmen
, for example – whether or not it was better than the one you’d heard last year – or nearly come to blows defending your favourite poet. My wife didn’t like that print. She maintained that the past was past and that we shouldn’t allow it to keep sticking to us, but that picture gave me a kind of . . . I won’t say peace, but at least relief. It was a comfort to me to know that once upon a time, there had been an era – my father’s era – when you could talk about art as though it were the most important thing in the world; a period when horror was still confined to the background. Not that horror didn’t exist – there’s always been horror in the heart of man – but no one talked about it, it couldn’t be seen, and you could still live as though it didn’t exist; it remained compressed within the official spaces of war.

‘You see,’ he went on, ‘my parents were convinced – maybe because they were artists, or maybe because the times were different – that beauty was the light that illuminated the human heart. My father used to tell me, “Music can open any door”; my mother would bring me out into the garden to listen to the ways different leaves rustled.

‘They were idealists, certainly. Had they lived a bit
more
in the real world, maybe they could have avoided at least part of the tragedy, but that was the way they were – they always looked on the bright side of things. They were convinced that beauty and moral probity must go hand in hand. The memories of the years I spent with them in the villa are suffused with a kind of golden light. There were no shadows between them, and nothing clouded their relationship with us. For their time, I think they were pretty unconventional. They played with us children, but our education always came first. The principles they required us to adopt were few, but they had to be respected with the utmost strictness. At the dinner table, any subject was fair game for discussion; no question was dodged.

‘I remember once – I must have been six or seven, the age when you begin to wonder about things – I asked a question, point-blank, at lunch. I said, “So who made the world?”

‘“God created the world,” my father replied.

‘“And after he created it,” my mother added, “he created music, too, so that people could understand it.”

‘Unlike most marriages in those days – and, come to think of it, nowadays – their union wasn’t limited to a physical attraction or an infatuation due to factors that could change. They truly loved each other. I never knew them to speak harshly to each other or to be in a huff. Sometimes they had very lively discussions, but they
never
showed any of the malevolence that comes to the surface when one is tired of life or one feels disappointed.

‘I think a major contributing factor in all of this was the relationship they had with harmony, with music. Once they entered the domain of beauty, they were able to dissolve any conflict.

‘Their naivety was in believing that what had value for them could be valuable to others, that all human beings had in common an interior tension capable of giving things light.

‘I don’t know how often I’ve brooded over this through the years, how many times I’ve deconstructed and reconstructed every hour, every minute, every second of our life together. It was as though I was working on a tractor engine but couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it.

‘You could almost say I lived only half a life. My wife was always asking me, “Where are you? Are you with us, or are you travelling in the time machine?”

‘No, I don’t think I was a good husband or even a good father. I was always only half what I should have been.

‘Besides, I often tell myself, when a life is broken apart it can’t be put back together again. All you can do is fake it, you can put some glue on the fragments, but your repair job will always show. “Broken” means you’ve
got
two or three or four parts inside you that can’t ever be properly repaired. And it means that if you want to go on living, you have to try to put the pieces together so they’ll at least function without audible squeals and squeaks.

‘My parents, constantly wrapped up in the harmony of their music, slipped into the awful conviction that the human heart was fundamentally good, and that the worst, most hardened criminal possessed this goodness, precisely because it was innate. All that was necessary was to awaken the natural goodness inside him – with a smile, with a song, with a flower.

‘They weren’t religious, at least not in the traditional sense. My father’s father had converted to Christianity. I don’t think he was struck down on the road to Damascus – he had his vision on the road to practicality. His family had been agnostics for some time, so crossing over from one side to the other wasn’t a very earth-shaking move.

‘My mother’s family, however, still belonged in name – though not in fact – to the tradition. They went to the synagogue, but only for weddings and circumcisions.

‘I think my mother considered the various customs and practices that had been imposed upon her as a kind of folklore, but she wasn’t an atheist at all, or even an agnostic. She believed in a supreme being, loved to read books on spiritual subjects, and was deeply interested in
the
transmigration of souls – reincarnation, in other words. She followed the ideas of a Russian noblewoman named Blavatsky or something like that.

‘I remember once looking at a hairy caterpillar on a leaf in the garden and saying, “Tomorrow you’ll be a butterfly, but who were you before?”

‘I found it very troubling to think that there could be a reality hidden behind things, which were not, in short, what they appeared to be. I wasn’t a worthy son. I never had much imagination or grand fantasies, and in the end I dedicated myself to motors and not to metaphysics. One day I caught myself thinking, it’s better that they’re dead, because they might have been ashamed of such an ordinary son, and then I was ashamed of having had that thought.

‘Now that I’m alone in the house – it was different when my wife and children were here – and I know I don’t have a lot of time left, I often stay up very late. I listen to the traffic noise as it diminishes, hour by hour, and I hear the jackals. What can their howls be, if not questions addressed to the moon, to the stars, to the sky?

‘As I peer out towards the yelping jackals, I can see the vapours rising from the earth. My mother is in that dense, dark cloud, her essence mixed with thousands of others – her dreams, her talent, her gaze, all ashes scattered on the Vistula, on the trees, on the fields around Birkenau. The potassium from those bodies has made
entire
regions fertile and helped bring to life tall snowdrops, enormous savoy cabbages, apples big as globes.

‘But is my mother really buried in all that, in that triumph of biochemistry, or is that just her hair and her bones? Has her soul really moved into a new body, as she believed, the way you change from one hotel room to another when you’re on a trip? Maybe she’s been reincarnated in Africa or in some remote village in the Andes . . .

‘At night, my thoughts become immense, but in that immensity I never think of Paradise, a place where one can live without guilt, suspended in a lightness with nothing human about it. That would mean someone’s watching over us, and I don’t believe that, not at all. There’s no one who cares about the destiny of the human race, much less about individual humans.

‘In my life, I’ve tried to conduct myself in the best possible way, to be honest, to work, to raise a family and love it according to my capacity, and that’s all; that’s the only thing I have to set upon the scale. A limited offering, no doubt, but as is the case with every limitation, I’m not the one who set it.