Una disperata vitalità / A desperate vitality

translated by Pasquale Verdicchio

I

(Draft, in cursus, through the use of current jargon, on a previous occurrence: Fiumicino, the old castle, and a first insight into the reality of death.)

As in a film by Godard: alone
in a car moving along the highways
of Latin neo-capitalism - returning from the airport -
[that's where Moravia remained, pure among his luggage]
alone, "at the wheel of his Alfa Romeo"
beneath a sun so divine
indescribable in non-elegiac rhyme
- the most beautiful sun of the year -
as in a film by Godard:
beneath that unique sun that steadily bled,
the canal of Fiumicino's port
- a motorboat returning un-noticed
- Neapolitan sailors in their woolen rags
- a highway accident with only a small crowd ...
- as in a film by Godard -
rediscovered romanticism contained
in cynical neo-capitalism, and cruelty -
at the wheel
on the road to Fiumicino,

and there is the castle (sweet
mystery, for the French screenwriter,
in the troubled, infinite, secular sun,

this papal beast, with its battlements,
on the hedges and vine rows of the ugly
countryside of peasant serfs) ...

- I am like a cat burned alive,
run over by the wheels of a truck,
hung to a fig tree by boys,

but at least eight of
its nine lives intact;
like a snake reduced to bloody pulp,
a half-eaten eel

- sunken cheeks defining tired eyes,
hair horribly thinned out against the skull,
skinny arms, like those of a child
- Belmondo, a cat that never dies,
“at the wheel of his Alfa Romeo”
in the logic of narcissistic montage,
detaches himself from time, and inserts
Himself:

into images that have nothing to do with
the boredom of progressing hours ...
the slow dying glitter of evening ...

Death lies not
in being unable to communicate,
but in the failure to continue being understood.

And this papal beast, not lacking
grace, - the reminder
of rustic landlord concessions,
innocent, after all,
as was the serfs’ resignation -
in the sun that was,
in the centuries,
for thousands of afternoons,
here, the only guest,
this papal beast, with battlements
crouching amid marsh poplars,
melon fields, banks,

this papal beast protected
- by buttresses of the sweet orange colour
of Rome, ruined
like Roman or Etruscan buildings,

is at the point of no longer being understood.




II


(No fade-out, a clean break, I portray myself in an act - with no historic precedents - of “cultural industry”)


Me, voluntarily martyred ..., and
her across from me, on the soda:
flashes back and forth, between positions,
“You,” - I know what she’s thinking, looking at me,
and more domestic-Italian M.F.
always Godardic - “you, Tennessee type!”,
the cobra in the wool sweater
(with the subordinate cobra
skimming in magnesial silence).
Then loudly: “Will you tell me what you’re writing?”

Verses, verses, I am writing verses!
(damned fool,
verses she is in no position to understand,
having no knowledge of metrics! Verses!)
verses NO LONGER IN TRIPLETS!

Understand?
That is the important thing: no longer in triplets!
I have gone back tout court to magma!
Neo-capitalism has won, I am
out on the street
as a poet, ah [sob]
and as a citizen [another sob].”
And the man-cobra with the pen:
“The title of your work?” “I don’t know ...
[Then he talks in a low tone, fearful, resuming
the accepted role which the conversation imposes
on him: it takes nothing
to discolour
his face
into that of some poor fool condemned to die]
- maybe ... “The Persecution”
or ... “A New Pre-history” (or Pre-history)
or ...
[At this point he becomes angry, regains
the dignity of civil hate]
“Monologue on the Jews” ...
[The dialogue falls
like the weakness of the arsis
of mixed-up octosyllabic verses: magmatic!]
“And what is it about?”
“Well, about my ... His, death.
It is not in the inability to communicate, [death]
but in the inability to be understood ...

(If only the cobra knew
that it is a useless idea
thought up on the way back from Fiumicino!)
They are almost all lyric verses, of which
the composition in time and place
consists, oddly!, of a ride in a car ...
meditations from forty to eighty miles an hour ...
with fast pans and tracking shots
to follow or precede
on significant monuments, or groups
of people, which spurn
an objective love ... of citizen
(or street user) ...”

“Ah, ah - [the she-cobra with the pen laughing] - ...
who is it that does not understand?”
“Those who are no longer with us.”



III


Those who are no longer with us!
Taken, with their innocent youth, by a new breath
of history to other lives!

I remember it being ... for a love
that invaded my brown eyes and honest trousers,
house and countryside, the morning sun and

the evening sun ... during the good Saturdays
of the Friuli, during ... Sundays ... Ah!,
I can’t even pronounce this word

of virgin passions, of my death (seen
in a dry ditch full with primroses,
between vineyards rows stunned by gold, near

farmhouses, dark against a sublime blue).

I remember that in the midst of that monstrous love
I would scream in pain
for the Sundays when it would have to shine

“over the sons of the sons, the sun!”

I cried, on the cot in Casarsa,
in the room that smelled of urine and laundry
while those Sundays shone to their death ...

Incredible tears! Not only for
that which I was losing, in that moment
of wearing immobility of the splendour,

but for that which I would lose! When
other youngsters - of whom I couldn’t even think,
so similar to today’s

wearing white socks and windbreakers,
with flowers in their lapels - or dark material,
for weddings, treated with filial tenderness,

- would populate the Casarsa of the future,
unchanged, with its stones, and the sun
that covered it with a dying golden shower ...

With an epileptic impetus of homicidal pain
I protested,
like one condemned to life imprisonment,
by locking myself into
my room,
without anyone knowing it,
to scream, my mouth
blocked by sheets darkened
by the heat of an iron,
the sheets of my family,
on which I would brood over the flower
of my youth.

And once, after dinner, or maybe it was night,
I ran, screaming
through Sunday streets, after the game
to the old cemetery, behind the train tracks,
to carry out and repeat to the blood,
the sweetest act in life,
alone, or a pile of dirt
from two or three graves
of Italian or German soldiers
with no names on the wooden crosses
- buried there since the other war.

And, that night, amid dry tears,
the bloody bodies of those unknowns
dressed in green-gray rags

came to cluster on my bed,
where I slept naked and empty,
to stain me with blood, till dawn.

I was twenty, not even - eighteen,
nineteen ... and I had been alive for a century,
a whole lifetime

consumed by the pain of the fact
that I would never be able to give my love
if not to my hand, or to the grass of ditches

or maybe to the earth of an unguarded tomb ...
Twenty and, with its human history and its cycle
of poetry, a life had ended.


IV


(Resumption of the interview, and confused explanations on the function of Marxism, etc.)

(Ah, mine is but a visit to this world!)

But let’s get back to reality.

[She is here, face visibly preoccupied but camouflaged by good manners, waiting, in the “gray” frame, in accordance with the good rules of French classicism. A Leger.]

“According to you then - she says, reticent,
biting her pen - what is the function
of a Marxist?” And gets ready to write.

“With ...the delicacy of a bacteriologist ... I would say [overcome by the impetus of death, I stutter] to move masses the size of Napoleonic and Stalinist armies ...
with millions of extensions ...
in such a manner that ...
the masses which consider themselves conservative
[of the past] would lose it:
revolutionary masses would acquire it,
rebuild it through the act of defeating it..
I am a Communist as a result of
the instinct of Preservation!
A shift
on which depend life and death:
in the centuries of the centuries.


To do it very carefully, like when
a bomb-squad captain undoes the safety
from a live bomb and, for a moment
his existence (in a world of modern buildings
in the sun) remains undecided:

an inconceivable disproportion
between the horns!
A shift
to be made slowly, stretching the neck,
bending, tightening one’s stomach,
biting one’s lips or closing one’s eyes
like a lawn bowler
who, when bowling, tried to dominate
the course of his shot, to rectify it
toward a solution
that will designate life through the centuries.”




V


Life, through the centuries ...
That is what it was getting at
last night ...
benumbed in the briefness of its wail -
that distant train ...

That train that wailed
discouraged; as if astonished at its existence,
(and, at the same time, resigned - because every act
of life is a segment extant in a line
that is life itself, clear only in dreams)

that train wailed and its wailing
- unimaginably far, passed the Appias
and the Centocelle of the world -
united itself to another act:
casual union, monstrous, odd
and very privated
that only beyond the line of my perhaps closed eyes
is it possible to know it ...

Mine was an act of love. But lost in the misery
of a body granted by a miracle,
in the exhaustion of hiding, panting
along a dim railroad, stepping in the mud
of a countryside cultivated by giants ...

Life through the centuries ...
like a falling star
beyond the sky of gigantic ruins,
beyond the properties of the Caetani or the Torlonia,
beyond the Tuscolane and the Capannelle of the world -
that mechanical wail said:
life through the centuries ...

And my senses were there, listening.

I was caressing a ruffled and dusty head,
blond, like the colour one needs in life,
of the design of destiny,
and a colt’s body, tender and agile,
with rough canvas clothes knowing of a mother’s care:
I was making love,
but my senses were listening to:

life through the centuries ...

The blond head of destiny disappeared
through a hole,
in the hole was the night sky,
until, against that edge of sky, appeared
another head of hair,
black, or maybe dark brown: and I,
in the cave lost in the heart of the estates
of the Caetani or the Torlonia
among ruins built by giants of the 1600s
during immense carnival days, I,
with my senses, was listening to ...

life through the centuries ...

Again and again, in the hole, against the white
of night losing itself
beyond the Casiline of the world,
the head of destiny appeared and disappeared,
now with the sweetness of a southern mother,
now of an alcoholic father, always the same head,
ruffled and dusty, or already set
in the vanity of everyday youth:
and I,
I was listening with my senses to

the voice of another love
- life through the centuries -
that was rising pure in the sky.








VI


(A fascist victory)

She looks at me in pity.
“And ... but then you ... - [mundane smile, greedy,
conscious of the greed and captivating
obstentatiousness - flaming eyes and teeth -
of a slightly hesitant childish contempt
toward herself] - but then you are very unhappy!”

“Well, Miss, (I have to admit it)
I’m in a state of confusion.

Re-reading my typewritten book
of poetry (this, the one we are talking about)
I had a vision ... oh, if only
just a chaos of contradictions - reassuring
contradictions ... No, it is the vision
of a confused soul ...

Every false sentiment
produces the absolute security of having it.
My false sentiment was that ...
of health. Strange! By telling her
- unsympathetic by definition,
with that lipless doll’s face -
I verified with clinical clarity
the fact
that I had never possessed any clarity.

It is true that at times it is enough
to be sane (and clear)
to believe it ... Nevertheless
(write, write!) my actual confusion
is a consequence
of a fascist victory.
[new, uncontrolled, loyal
death impetii]

A small, secondary victory.
Easy, then. I was alone:
with my bones, a shy frightened
mother, and my will.

The objective was to humiliate one who was
humiliated. I must tell you that they succeeded,
and without much effort. Maybe
if they had known how easy it was they would
not have tried as hard, and in lesser numbers!

(Ah, you see, I talk in a generic plural: They!
with the beckoning love the madman has for his sickness.)

The results of this victory, they too,
then, count very little: one less
authoritative signature in the appeals for peace.
Well, a parte objecti, it is not much.
A parte subjecti ... But let us forget it:
I have described too much,
and never orally,
my pains of squashed worm
that holds up its little head and debates
with repugnant ingenuity, etc.

A fascist victory!
Write, write: they should know that I know:

with the conscience of a wounded bird
that, meekly dying, does not forgive.”
VII


Does not forgive!

There was a soul, among those
that were to descend into life
- many, and all similar, poor souls -
a soul, in whose brown eyes of light,
in the modest wave of hair combed
by a mother’s idea of masculine beauty,
burned the desire to die.

It was instantly seen,
by he who does not forgive.

He took it, called it to his side,
and, like an artisan,
up in the worlds that precede life,
placed his hands on its head
and pronounced the curse.
It was a candid and clean soul,
like a child at his first communion,
wise to the wisdom of his ten years,
dressed in white, of a material
chosen by a mother’s idea of manly grace,
with eyes warm with the desire to die.

Oh, it was instantly seen,
by he who does not forgive.

He was the infinite capacity to obey
and the infinite capacity to rebel
he called it, and worked on it
- while it looked at him with trust
like a lamb looks up at his butcher -
a reverse consecration,
while the light fell from his eyes
and a shadow of pity filled the space.

You shall go into the world,
you shall be candid and gentle, stable and faithful
you shall have an infinite capacity to obey
and an infinite capacity to rebel.
You shall be pure.
Therefore, I curse you.”

I can still see his eyes full of pity
and of the slight horror one feels
for the one who inspires it,
- the stare that follows
one who goes unknowingly to his death
and, out of a necessity which dominates
those who know and those who do not,
says nothing. I still see his stare,
as I moved away - from Eternity -
toward my cradle.



VIII


(Funereal conclusion: with synoptic table - for use by the writer of the “piece” - of my career as poet, and a prophetic look at the sea of future millennia.)


I came into the world at the time
of the Analogic.
Worked
in that field as apprentice.
Then there was the Resistance
and I
fought using poetry as a weapon.
I restored Logic,
and became a civic poet.
Now is the time
of Psychagogy.
I can only write prophecies
within the rapture of Music
resulting from an excess of either sperm or pity.


*


“If now the Analogic survives
and Logic is out of style
(and I with it:
there is no call for my poetry).
Psychagogy
exists
(in spite of Demagogy’s
constant control
of the situation)
And thus
I am able to write Themes and Threnodies
and even Prophecies;
oh, yes, always as a civil poet!


*


“As to the future, listen:
its fascist sons
will sail
toward the worlds of the New Prehistory.
I will be there
like one dreaming of his own damnation,
at the edge of the sea
in which life begins again.
Alone, or almost, on the ancient shore
among the remains of ancient civilizations.
Ravenna
Ostia, or Bombay - it is all the same -
with Gods picking their scabs of old problems
- such as class struggle -
which
dissolve ...
Like a partisan
dead before May 1945,
I will slowly decompose
in the tormenting light of that sea,
a forgotten poet and citizen.”




IX


(Clause)


“My God, but then what assets
do you have? ...”
“Me? - [nefariously stammering,
not having taken my medication,
my sickly boy’s voice trembles] -
Me? A desperate vitality.”