Listen to My Voice by Susanna Tamaro
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 i
‘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.
‘I came here after the war to escape my memories. No pleasant tie bound me to Europe any more, and I wanted to understand who I was, to rebuild a kind of identity for myself, and I slowly succeeded in doing so.
‘I have no regrets. I wouldn’t go back for anything in the world, but it’s not like I was struck down by some vision. I’m a sceptic, as I always was. A sceptic with good will, but still a sceptic.
‘You see that?’ my uncle continued, pointing at a sort of rectangular box attached to the door. ‘My son put that there. It’s a mezuzah. Arik has always been a very religious boy, even though we never encouraged him in that direction. At home, we confined ourselves to strictly respecting the traditions, but that’s all. Naturally, we didn’t discourage him either, but every now and then his mother and I, together or separately, would look at him as though he were a stranger and wonder, “Where did he come from?”
‘We couldn’t arrive at an answer.
‘Sometimes I found myself thinking that his grandmother’s soul really must have transmigrated into his body. I thought Arik’s deep piety could only be a way for my mother to expiate her passion for Madame Blavatsky and for all the rest of her cockeyed spiritualistic readings.
‘My wife used to say that being born is like getting dropped off the top of a very high building. Therefore, falling is our destiny, and so we must try to hold on to something. One person may cling to a window sill, another to a balcony, another will clutch a shutter, and yet another will manage, at the last possible moment, to grab the edge of the gutter. If you want to live, you have to look for something to hold on to, and it doesn’t much matter what that something is. But my wife saw things differently. She came from an observant family, and she’d never got on with her father, who was a rather rigid man. At bottom, you always want what isn’t in the house, and maybe that was one of the reasons why my wife couldn’t hide her irritation at that son of ours, who was trying to push the traditional ways she’d managed to kick out back in through the window.
‘I, on the other hand, have always been convinced that Arik’s beliefs are truly and deeply held. I remember an episode that goes back to when he was thirteen or fourteen. It was the Sabbath, and at some point he came into the house and found his mother on the telephone with her sister in Tel Aviv. He burst into desperate tears and shouted, “Why can’t you live a holy life?”
‘You see? Human affairs are always extraordinarily complex. That’s why I say that the most important issue is honesty. If you start from there, you can go anywhere.’
Although it was barely six o’clock, night had already fallen, and a light breeze, blowing seaward from the hills, had arisen with the darkness. Outside the window, the bougainvillea moved with a rustle like tissue paper; from the nearby cowsheds came the mooing of a young calf, a desperate appeal to which there was no response. Maybe its mother had already been taken to the slaughterhouse. Uncle Jonathan poured himself a glass of water and drank it down in one breath. The air conditioner was off, and it was very hot. It must have been a long time since my uncle had talked so much; with a sigh, he let himself fall against the back of the sofa and looked at me hard. ‘How about you?’ he asked. ‘What do you believe in?’
14
THE WEIGHT OF night is the weight of unanswerable questions. Night is the time of the sick and the anxious; there’s no escaping its tyranny. You can turn on a light, open a book, search the radio for a comforting voice, but the night still remains, lying in wait for you. We come out of darkness and return to darkness; before the universe was formed, all space was darkness.
Maybe that’s the reason why cities are always bright and filled with distractions: at any hour of the night, if you wish, you can go out to eat, buy something, have a good time. Silence and darkness are relegated to those few hours when you’re about to keel over from exhaustion and need to recuperate a bit before you can go on, but what you fall into isn’t a restless slumber shot through with nagging questions; it’s a faint – that’s the proper word for it – a brief period of time during which the body is compelled to yield to physiology. And then you wake up in front of a bright screen, and the only person who can operate the remote control is you.
My uncle had asked me what I believed in. Surrounded by the nocturnal silence, I twisted and turned in my bed and found no rest. I knew sleep wouldn’t come, but I hoped (in vain) I might at least grow somewhat drowsy. Uncle Jonathan’s question revolved in the air around me, towing in its wake many other questions, chief among them its twin: Why do you live?
What do you believe in? Why do you live? At birth, every child should receive a parchment sheet with those two questions written on it, awaiting answers. Later, when all the actions of his life have been performed, the former child will have that same sheet with him when he presents himself for death.
In fact, if we could cancel out night and silence, then there would be no place left for questions – and so the purpose of the parchment sheet would be to ensure that no child believes himself an object, even the most perfect of objects, and that every former child knows (should he chance to spend a sleepless night in later years) that he’s not being kept awake by a sickness, but by his nature; because man alone, and no other creature, has the ability to ask himself questions.
What do you believe in?
You can believe in so many things, including the first thing you come across. For example, when a child eats his pap, he’s convinced it’s the best in the world, never having tasted any other; if an egg hatches in front of a cat, the newborn chick thinks the feline is its parent and solicits it for food.
You can consent to eat the same pap all your life, or at a certain point you can refuse it, turning your face aside like a child who’s had enough.
Or maybe you can realise that no one’s handing out any food, and after that realisation you’re hungry and thirsty and afflicted with non-stop nervousness. When you’ve reached this point, the only way to calm down is to move, to take a walk, to wander around asking others – and yourself – questions, looking for a knowing face, for someone who can answer them.
So what do you believe in?
I believe in pain, which is the master of my life. Pain is what possesses me from the moment I open my eyes, pervades my body and my mind, electrifies, devastates, deforms; it’s what has made me unfit to live; it’s what has put a ticking time bomb in my heart and set the fuse for a probable explosion.
My first memories are filled with pain instead of joy, with anxiety and fear instead of the tranquil security of belonging. While I prowled around our flat, searching for my mother among people who had passed out from various excesses, while I watched her sleeping beside a companion who was never the same as the last one, how could I feel anything but lost? Even then, I knew instinctively that I was a child begotten not by love but by accident, and this perception, instead of making me bitter or resentful, stirred in me a strange desire to protect my mother. I always detected a hint of sadness under her forced cheer; I felt she was adrift, heading for disaster, and I would have given my life to avoid it.
Where does my soul come from? Was it formed when I was, or does it spring from the mystery of time beyond time? Did it perhaps descend to earth, contravening the laws of nature, in order to help a body that had summoned it inadvertently and thus condemned it to a
Was I, therefore, a daughter of inexorability?
Often, on the nights when the bora is blowing in Trieste, a small crowd of demonstrators gathers in front of the Palazzo di Giustizia, the court, to protest some abuse of power, and inveighs against it with ever-increasing anger until dawn.
Is it fate that’s locked up inside the Palazzo di Giustizia, protected by bars and guards? Is it hiding there because it’s afraid? Must we address our questions to fate? And what should it hide from, if not human questioning? What should shame it, if not the inexorability it’s flung upon the stage of the world, without so much as a hint of explanation?
Fate stayed on my mind, so I decided to get up. It was still dark; the clock radio flashed 3 a.m. In a few houses, the lights were already on. At night, fate has to confront a great many supplicants; every lamp signals some disquiet, some fracture, an incomplete bridge. Every light’s a restless memory, I thought, walking along the perimeter of a citrus orchard.
I reached the far end of the field and sat down on a rock. The night breeze had died down; everything, including noises and smells, was immobile. I felt as though I were in an auditorium before the beginning of a concert; the members of the orchestra were all in position, the conductor was poised on the podium, but his arm had yet to move. Eyes, minds, hearts, muscles – all were standing by, ready to burst into a harmony of sound.
It was still dark when a cock crowed in the Arab village up on the slopes of the hill. A short while later, a glimmer of light began to suffuse the dark vault of the sky.
As I went back into the field, I heard modulated singing coming from one of the cottages. Someone was praying in the solitude of the dawn. Was it a prayer of thanksgiving or a plea? I wondered about that on the way back to my bed. Didn’t all nocturnal questions arise in the same way? Suppose questions were nothing but the only form of prayer that has been granted us?