Listen to My Voice by Susanna Tamaro
The image he loved to project, his metaphor for himself, was that of a solitary tree, standing alone in the midst of a clearing, lifting its majestic branches to the sky.
But didn’t his life instead resemble one of those massive plane trees that line urban avenues, heedless of pissing dogs and the waste paper and cigarette butts and tin cans accumulated among its roots, indifferent to the fluorescent spray lovers use to record their names on its trunk, unconcerned by the increasingly vile obscenities carved into its bark?
A tree whose roots can’t breathe, suffocated by asphalt as they are, a tree with greyish leaves and a soot-blackened trunk, a tree exhausted by the vibrations of passing buses, which nevertheless, in spite of everything, maintains its lofty elevation, because like all trees it desires one thing and one thing only: to drink the light. And in order to do so, it must keep growing taller and taller, until it rises past the shadows of the surrounding buildings. Every winter, the Municipal Department of Parks and Recreation cancels out this hard-won victory, polling and pruning until nothing is left of the beautiful branches but tiny stumps. Despite such mutilation, however, the plane tree doesn’t give up; every spring, new shoots arise from its amputated arms and then, from those tender twigs, the first leaves.
It hurts the heart to see a tree reduced to such circumstances, especially if you know how much space it can take up in a clearing. Many of those who don’t have any idea gush in admiration all the same: ‘Look how beautiful it is!’ says the grandfather to his grandson. ‘It’s putting out leaves!’
It never occurs to the old fellow that the haggard apparition before him is the result of a death agony protracted over decades, the song of a dying whale riddled with harpoons and sinking into the sea.
When I was with my father, I felt like a rabbit in a python’s coils; the complexity and boldness of his reasoning took my breath away, made my head spin.
But as soon as I was out of his presence, I thought over what he had said, and then my dizziness turned to impatience, and the image of the plane tree kept recurring in my mind. My father had sought the truth with the same force that drives the tree yearning upward towards the light, but in doing so he rejected life, and in the end all he could do was wrap around himself. He was like a wanderer waiting at a bus stop in the desert, unaware of how many years it’s been since that line was in service.
What would have happened, for example, if he’d accepted his share of the responsibility for my mother’s pregnancy instead of washing his hands of the entire affair, if he’d married her, if he’d maintained his relationships with his father and the other members of his family, and if he’d kept his teaching post at the university and dedicated himself with passionate energy to the formation of his students?
In short, what would his life – and the lives of those around him – have been like had he accepted his responsibilities instead of running away from them?
What’s the relationship between truth and life?
That was the crucial question, the one I repeated to myself over and over during the course of those months. I pondered over it for his sake but also for my own.
Nights were the worst.
Alone in that big house, exasperated by the sound of the wind as it banged the shutters, I was certain that with the passage of time my father’s search for the truth had turned into a big screen, like one of those handsome, handmade, artfully embroidered Chinese screens, but always mounted against a background of heavy cloth, a barrier he could hide behind.
When my thoughts turned to my mother, my anger changed into rage. If she was so guileless, so naive, why abandon her to her fate? Didn’t he feel any remorse? Was I really just the result of a biochemical reaction between two agents otherwise unconnected to each other? Had the March light, by stimulating the hypothalamus and triggering a hormonal storm, compelled my parents’ coupling, whereupon their fluids mingled and that was that?
The same thing happens with toads. In February, they meet in ponds, and in March they go back to the woods, leaving their eggs behind them. But a toad never asks himself: Who am I? Does my life have any meaning?
Was my mother a toad, a porcupine, a grass snake, or was she something different, something in any case unrepeatable? And was her death attributable only to an innate inability to survive in the jungle of life, or were other people partly responsible? Were actions not taken, things not done – or done badly – by those closest to her, whose duty it was to help her, given that they were older and more experienced than she was?
Is it really possible to compare animals to humans?
More than once, in the heart of the night, tangled inextricably in the web of these ratiocinations, I grabbed the telephone, ready to shout in his ear, ‘You disgust me! I hate you! Go to hell!’ But every time, I entered the dialling code and stopped, overcome by an inexplicable fear.
Was I afraid, perhaps, of his mocking voice, of his inevitable crowing, ‘I knew it would end like this’? Or did I fear falling – with no right of appeal – into the mucilaginous mass to which he contemptuously relegated ‘other people’? Other people, normal people, the ones who make the best of their situation, who have neither the intelligence nor the guts to get to their feet and scan the horizon; all the wretches who march in the quotidian parade, banging away like bass drummers, never noticing that life has no meaning.
Normal people like my mother, like his father (with his dark-skinned wife and mulatto kids), like the students who couldn’t stand up to him, like the friends (if he ever had any) or the women who didn’t have the nerve to follow him to his outposts in the void.
And yes, to be honest, my hesitation was also caused by fear of his contempt; I wasn’t ready to undergo any sort of humiliation from him. After all (at least this is what I believed at the time), he was the only relative I had in the world, the person closest to me by blood. For better or worse, I owed fifty per cent of my genes to him.
In those months, I started focusing on the details of what we had in common; the more closely I looked, the more I saw. That’s the reason, I thought, why I can’t bring myself to break off our relationship so abruptly. When the time is right, I’ll go to his house and enumerate for him, calmly and clearly, the reasons for my contempt. I told myself I’d be the one who’d decide to break it off with him, and not vice versa. The last thing I wanted was to wind up like my mother, abandoned along the way like a suitcase with a broken handle.
By the time high summer arrived, all the tribulations of that year – your sickness, your death, meeting my father – had taken their toll on me, and I was as limp and worn out as an old rag. The only thing I wanted to do was to stay by myself, sprawled somewhere, without food, without words, regaining my strength like a plant in winter, or like a marmot waiting for the snow to thaw.
It had been three weeks since my last visit to Grado.
Late one afternoon, the telephone rang. It was him. His voice sounded different – what had happened to all that mocking aloofness? – as he lodged his complaint: ‘What’s the matter? You’re not coming here any more?’
Almost without realising it, I tried to justify myself. ‘I’m not feeling very well. As soon as I’m better, I’ll come.’
Why didn’t I have the presence of mind to say, ‘I’ll come when it suits me,’ or, better yet, ‘if it suits me’? Why did I let myself feel guilty about a person I’d seen maybe ten times, a man who’d never himself felt, I won’t say a sense of guilt, but not even the faintest twinge of remorse, a seducer who’d always behaved as though none of his actions would ever have any consequences?
I didn’t go to Grado the next week or the week after that, even though I was feeling better, nor did I call him. Then the telephone rang at the same time three afternoons in a row, but I didn’t even dream of extending my hand and picking up the handset. Evidently, he was looking for me, without any success. I derived some covert satisfaction from the thought of his anxiety.
On the fourth day, I answered.
There was a hesitation bordering on fear in his voice; he sounded like an old man. Maybe he was a little drunk, because his tone quavered and lurched like a candle flame in a draft.
I was waiting for him to say something to me, to ask how I was doing or whether I was over my illness, but instead, after a heavy sigh, he said, ‘I can’t stay here any more. The whole place has turned into a madhouse. It’s full of crying babies and screaming television sets, the stairs have been invaded by fat women wielding ladles, the men are DIY fanatics with drills and weed whackers; instead of assaulting their wives, they assault their neighbours’ nerves. Do you know what my outpost has turned into? The launching pad for a miniature apocalypse. Every year it’s the same thing, or rather, every year it gets worse. Fortunately, during the summer a friend of mine lets me use his flat in Busto Arsizio, so that becomes my summer outpost. I’m leaving to go there now, but I wanted to give you the address, just in case . . .’
‘What?’
‘Just in case you should feel like paying a visit. I can give you a telephone number, too. Do you have something to write with?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, scribbling the number on the back of an old receipt.
‘But remember to let it ring three times, hang up, and then call again. Otherwise, I won’t answer. I try to stay out of most people’s reach.’
‘I know.’
‘Listen . . .’ His voice took on a fragile note that was almost unsettling. ‘I wanted to tell you something else . . .’
‘Yes?’
He was interrupted by children’s voices, shouting ferociously over the sound of rap music suddenly turned to full volume. ‘I’ll tell you another time,’ he said. ‘I can’t take it any longer . . . I’ve got to get away!’
Thus, with a reference to flight – his preferred activity – he hung up.
When he came out with that ‘I want to tell you something else,’ my heart beat faster; I expected a revelation, an admission, a memory, a sign of contrition, something that would point our relationship in a normal human direction, something that would authorise me to stop calling him Massimo and start calling him Papa.
It’s possible he merely wanted to notify me that he was going away, and wasn’t that very act a first step along the way to capitulation? I’m telling you where I’m going to be because I need you, because I’m waiting for your visit, because I can no longer live without hearing your voice, without seeing your face?
After the phone call, I went out into the garden.
The air was saturated with ozone, and the swift, menacing clouds of a big storm were rolling in from the east, still some way off, but already torn by flashes of lightning that lit up the horizon. A dry wind – which precedes storms – shook the sparse crowns of the black pines and made their branches crackle before swooping down on the golden fruit of the plum tree. The plums fell to earth with the thudding splat of bodies filled with water. In the opposite direction, the sun was already vanishing from the sky, and the light that normal terrestrial rotation had so far spared was swallowed up by the onrushing clouds.
Soon the storm would burst over the upland plain, but in my heart and mind it had already begun, it had knocked down power lines, and electricity was running everywhere, like a sprite dancing for joy.
10
WHEN AN AEROPLANE crashes, the first thing people look for is the black box; apparently, the same goes for trains. Everything is recorded in that small space, including all the factors that contributed, however minimally, to the accident – speed, trajectory, human error, indecision, darkness, and so forth – right up to the moment of impact. In people, the equivalent processes are entrusted to the power of recollection. Memory constructs human beings, situating them in their own personal history as well as in that of the world around them, and words are the traces we leave behind.
Words are like the footprints you find on a beach at dawn. During the night, a great multitude of creatures has come and gone among the dunes: foxes, mice, rooks, seagulls, deer, boars, sandpipers, crabs, and also those little black beetles that scamper and dash along the sand like ladies who are forever late. They all pass this way in the darkness and leave their tracks. Some of them meet and sniff one another curiously; others land and then take off again; the least fortunate are devoured, while still others mate or simply stretch their limbs. Crabs build sandcastles as they burrow into the beach. Sandpipers’ tracks last until the next wave wipes them out. The little black beetles leave long, orderly trails behind them on the sand, making it easy to retrace their steps to their lair.
And you, what lair did you emerge from? And where are you going?
However, before asking ourselves where we’re going, we ought to discover where we’ve come from.
If the beetle doesn’t know what species he belongs to, how can he behave properly? How can he know whether he’s supposed to eat dung, pollen, or dead animals?
An animal knows what it was nourished on in the long, drowsy time of its first consciousness; the remembered taste of that food guides it in its choices, and it’s likewise able to recognise its lair and the compelling reason for leaving it. Everything is inscribed in its genes.
In humans, on the other hand, things are more complicated.
We’re alike in our physical functions, but extremely different in all the rest. Every one of us has a history that’s his alone, and its roots go back very far, to grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, and beyond, farther and farther back, until they come to the first man, to the moment when – instead of behaving like beetles – we began to make choices.
What choices did our ancestors make? What burdens did they hand down to us? And why does the weight of those burdens vary so much? Why do some of us stride forth, feather-light, while others can’t manage a single step?
With these thoughts in my head, I climbed back up into the attic. The summer sun had begun to heat the trapped air, and I opened the little window to keep from suffocating. I sat with my legs crossed beside the open suitcase on the floor. There wasn’t very much left in it: some dusty, ageing letters and a small notebook that looked more recent, all of them abandoned like confetti after a carnival celebration. These were the last traces, the ripples in the sand left by the beetle before it reached its lair.
Where would those pages carry me?
I was afraid of being disappointed. Maybe this stuff was just a collection of trite missives sent by my great-grandparents from one thermal spa or other: ‘The treatments are having an effect . . . the food’s good . . . we’ll be back Thursday on the eight o’clock train.’
I carried the letters and notebook downstairs, put them on the table, and arranged them by date, but by then it was late; I didn’t feel like opening them when there was nothing left of the day but its dark edge. I decided to wait for the light of the following morning.
After I went to bed, the music of some summer festival disturbed me, and I couldn’t go to sleep. Around one in the morning, when I looked at the alarm clock, the air was resounding with the strains of the leftist song ‘Bandiera rossa’. Only at three a.m. did silence finally descend on the plateau, broken by the occasional roar of a lorry. I could hear in the distance, although weakly, the twanging of the shrouds on the sailing boats anchored in the harbour. They seemed to be performing a little concerto in the gentle breezes of a light summer bora.
What music is that, I wondered, dozing off at last: the symphony of departure, or the symphony of return?
On the cover of the notebook, a wintry landscape. In the foreground, rabbit tracks across the snow; in the centre, a stand of trees, their branches laden and white; in the background, closing the horizon under a clear, luminous sky, a mountain range glistening with ice. It was a simple notebook, the kind you’d use for Latin exercises or household accounts. Maybe that’s why I opened it carelessly.
But I froze, all carelessness gone, as soon as I recognised my mothe
One word was written on the first page: Poems. I’d perused her diary and read her letter to my father without any sense of embarrassment, but now, with that notebook in front of me, I felt upset and intimidated; I’d never imagined that my mother had a poetic side.
There were several compositions – some of them short, others quite long. I leafed through the notebook, stopping to read a poem here and there.
I’ll Never Be a Flower
I’ll never be a flower
that offers its corolla to the sun in spring.
I’ll never be a flower
because my spirit is more like the grass,
a thin blade equal to a thousand others,
as tall as the others, bowing its head
at the first winter frost.
Fog
The fog wraps up everything, houses and people;
even bicycles stop making noise.
Our world is a world of ghosts
or am I the ghost?
My heart is wrapped up in cotton wool
a precious gift
addressed to no one.
Fear
It’s not monsters that frighten me
nor is it murderers.
I’m not afraid of the dark
or of floods or cataclysms
or punishment or death
or a love that doesn’t exist.
I’m afraid only
of your little hand
groping for mine,
of your gentle gaze
looking up at me and asking, ‘Why?’
My vision blurred; I felt something pressing on the centre of my breastbone. It seemed like a pole of some kind, one of those sharpened stakes used to kill vampires. A hand was thrusting it at me forcefully, trying to split open my rib cage.