Listen to My Voice

  In the meantime, a pensioner and his two poodles had appeared on the beach. He threw a coloured ball into the air, and the dogs chased after it, barking happily. I can’t even kill myself, I thought, putting the revolver back in my pocket.

  A few hours later, the shutter repairman arrived and brought light into my room. That afternoon, I went to Monfalcone to do a bit of shopping. Life goes on, I don’t know for how much longer, but it goes on, I thought as I dropped the revolver into a drawer. I’ll wait until fate runs its course.

  In the evening, I stood on the little kitchen balcony. The temperature was almost summery, warm enough to ferment the algae in the lagoon and saturate the air with briny vapours. The lights were on in a flat in the building across from mine; a woman with an apron and a bucket was giving the place a thorough clean, getting ready for the imminent tourist season.

  I was going back inside when a sudden brightness caught my eye among the unkempt shrubs that divide the two buildings. Fireflies. It had been years since I’d seen fireflies. They were dancing between the ground and the bushes, stitching the air with their intermittent glow. Just the previous day, I would have smiled at the cunning of nature’s reproductive strategies; what else could that light be but an extraordinary stratagem for engaging in copulation?

  But that evening, all at once, everything seemed different. I no longer felt irritated at the housewife who was cleaning her floors; I no longer saw the fireflies’ little ignis fatuus as part of a mechanical process.

  There’s no cunning in that light, but rather wisdom, I said to myself, and I began to cry. Nearly sixty years had passed since the last time I’d done that, on the ship that was taking us to Brazil.

  I wept slowly, in silence, without sobs; I wept for those little sparks, enveloped in the tyranny of night, and for their unsteady motion, because suddenly it was clear to me that in every darkness there lives, compressed, a fragment of light.

  Am I making you laugh? Do I seem pathetic? Maybe so. These words will probably aggravate the unextinguished rage of your youth, but I’ve reached the point where nothing matters any more. And so I’ll cover myself with even more ridicule by telling you that throughout these past months, I’ve lived with the hope of seeing you again.

  You know I’ve always followed a policy of honesty (even though it has sometimes done me harm). In these present days, in the remaining time that fate has granted me, I’ve freed myself from my pride, and I have the possibility of reflecting on things without fear, because basically, I’m already dead; I can feel the sheet on my body and the moist earth covering me. Precisely because I’m in the beyond (and no longer afraid of ridicule), I can tell you that it was fear that determined my days; what I called boldness was actually nothing but panic. I was afraid that things wouldn’t go the way I’d decided they should. I was afraid of passing some limit – not a mental limit, but a limit of the heart. I was afraid of loving and of not being loved in return.

  In the end, that’s man’s only real terror, and it’s the reason why he gives himself over to pettiness.

  Love, like a bridge suspended over the void . . .

  Out of fear, we complicate simple things. In order to follow the phantoms of our minds, we transform a straight path into a labyrinth we don’t know how to escape.

  It’s so difficult to accept the rigours of simplicity, the humility of trusting.

  What else have I done my whole life long besides this: run away from myself, run away from responsibilities, wound others before they could wound me?

  When you read these lines (and I’m in a refrigerated room or the cold ground), know that in my last days I was inhabited by a feeling of sadness – a melancholy sadness, without anger, and perhaps for that reason even more painful.

  Pride, humility; in the end, those are the only two things being weighed in the balance. I don’t know what their specific weights are, so I can’t say whether or not a day of humility can suffice to redeem a life of pride.

  It would have been wonderful to be able to give you a hug, little time bomb, who turned up by surprise (and too late) to ravage my life. Even if this doesn’t make up for anything, I wanted to hold you one last time, long and hard, and inside that embrace there would have been all the hugs I never gave you, the ones from when you were born and when you were little and when you were growing up, and the ones you’ll need when I’m not around any more.

  Forgive the obtuseness of the sneering man who brought you into the world.

  Papa

  The funeral took place a week later, in the Jewish cemetery in Trieste. Aside from the members of the minyan and the rabbi, I was the only one there. The recital of the Kaddish was barely over when the noon siren went off, very loudly, in the nearby shipyards.

  There weren’t many people in the graveyard on that hot summer day. Instead of going home, I walked up to the Catholic cemetery. I stopped at the stalls by the entrance before I went in and bought a bunch of pretty sunflowers.

  During the winter, the bora had carried many leaves, together with various advertising flyers, into our little family mortuary chapel, now long neglected. The air inside was suffocating, and there was an odour of damp and mildew; it had been years since anyone had done any cleaning in there. I opened the door wide and set off to buy a broom and a cloth. When the job was done, I put the flowers in the vase and sat down to keep you company for a while.

  Who can tell where you were and how you were? Maybe, at least on the other side, you and my mother had met; maybe you two had finally managed to dispel the shadows that kept you from having a serene relationship. Maybe you and she could see me from up there, sitting on your tomb on a summer afternoon. Maybe it’s true that the dead have the power to stand beside the living and protect them without ever letting them out of their sight. Or is that just a wish of ours, one of our all-too-human hopes? Is it true that on the other side there really is a judgement, with the light-fingered archangel Michael holding up the delicate scales? And how are the units of measurement established? Is the specific weight the same for every act? Are there only two categories – good and evil – or are the listings a bit more complex? How much do the sufferings of an innocent weigh? Is the violent death of a just man worth the same as the passing of an evil man who dies full of days? Why do the wicked often enjoy long, untroubled lives – as if someone were protecting them – while the gentle must endure insults and adversity? The longevity granted to unscrupulous men – could that be a sign of divine mercy, which allows them to live so long in order to have more time to repent and convert their hearts?

  And sorrow, what’s the weight of sorrow?

  My mother’s sorrow, my father’s, yours, Uncle Ottavio’s, and mine (when I die) – what happens to all that sorrow? Does it turn to inert dust, or nourishment? Wouldn’t it be better if one could lead a carefree life, no questions asked? What becomes of the man who never interrogates himself, who has no doubts?

  Arik spoke to me about the inclination to good and evil that’s in every one of us, of the struggle that’s constantly taking place in our heart. To live a life of inertia, no questions asked – isn’t that tantamount to giving yourself over to the banal mechanics of existence, to the inexorable law of gravity, always and forever dragging us down? Don’t doubts and questions arise from nostalgia? As the apical cells always and forever drive plants upward, searching for light, so must questions drive us humans towards heaven. Sorrow, confusion, the devastation of evil – couldn’t they be, perhaps, the consequences of our veering off course?

  One of the people I met in Israel was Miriam, a French survivor of Auschwitz, who oversaw the kibbutz’s little library. On one arm, she wore several jangling bracelets, and on the other, the violet tattoo of her number. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

  ‘Does it upset you?’ she asked me.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, frankly and honestly.

  On the basis of that reciprocal openness, we formed a friendship. At the outbreak of the war, she said, she was a twe
nty-two-year-old biology student, one year away from her degree. ‘My father was a man with very advanced ideas for those times. He was rather old when I was born, but healthy. He was a doctor, and he always encouraged my curiosity. To his great joy, I was fascinated by living things right from the start, beginning when I was a little girl. I loved to observe, question, experiment. While my schoolmates were losing themselves in boring fairytales, I was off on a solitary voyage among mitochondria and enzymes; their processes were the only magic that took my breath away. My idol was Madame Curie; I knew every passage of her biography by heart. I wanted to become someone like her and put my intellect at the service of humanity. I always had a passion for analysing and discussing things. As a student – inflamed by the atmosphere that prevailed in those days – I loved to expose the senselessness and folly of the world.

  ‘History, however, gave me a brutal push in a completely different direction. I saw my mother and my father on their way to death; we gazed into one another’s eyes for the last time before they disappeared into the building where the “showers” were. A few months later, I was supposed to die, too, in the reprisals for an escape attempt, but someone stepped forward and took my place, a man who opposed his serenity to my girlish terror.

  ‘I’m here because he went up in smoke. What else could I be but a witness, someone who has never stopped thinking about that step? All the questions are contained in those modest thirty centimetres: one step taken, another held back.’

  We’d sit in the coolest corner of the library and talk for hours about death, about how the heart of Europe was turned to ashes in only six years.

  ‘Everyone says, where was God? Why didn’t he put an end to the slaughter with a flick of his finger? Why didn’t he send a rain of fire and brimstone down upon the evildoers?’ Miriam often repeated those questions, and her answer was, ‘But I say, Where was man? Where was the creature fashioned “a little below the angels”? Because men built the gas chambers; in order to optimise the time factor, specialist engineers calculated the exact angle at which the rail carts delivering bodies to the ovens should turn; nothing could interrupt the rhythms of disposal. They made their calculations while the wife was knitting in the living room and the kids were in their flannel pyjamas, asleep in their little beds, clutching teddy bears. It was men who went from house to house, rousting people out, dislodging them from the most hidden places. It was men who drenched their hands in blood, kicked newborn babies to death, slaughtered old people. Men who had the power to choose and had not chosen. Men who, instead of seeing other men as people, saw them only as objects.’

  Another time, as she was dusting the library’s tiny book collection with the kind of tenderness one shows towards children, Miriam said, ‘You know what the biggest trap is? Everyone’s convinced the Holocaust is a phenomenon circumscribed by time. People are continually having ceremonies where they repeat in chorus, with proper firmness, “Never again! Never again will such a horror descend on the earth!” But when the buboes of the plague appear, what happens? Does the sick person get well and the epidemic abruptly stop? Or does it spread, becoming more and more virulent, producing the bacteria that will eventually carry the contagion everywhere?

  ‘Instead of “Never again”, we must have the courage to say, “Still and always!” Because still and always, under the appearance of normality, the miasma of those years pollutes our days, preparing us for a holocaust of cosmic dimensions. And society is the place to exercise technical perfection.

  ‘In Auschwitz, nothing was left to chance, there was no wastage and no lost time. The pure mechanism was all that existed. The central organisation took care of everything. At the end of this meticulous programming, the perfect man would finally be born, the only one capable of dominating the world and the only one worthy of living in it.

  ‘Things don’t change that much. Aren’t there people now, trying to convince us that our society can become as perfect as ant society? Are bees and ants really the models we ought to use? Do we have antennae or little feelers or prismatic eyes?

  ‘The flames of communism’s funeral pyre aren’t completely extinguished yet, nor are its wounds completely healed, when already we’re hearing about the prospect of a new paradise on earth: a world without disease or death, without deformities or imperfections.

  ‘The paradise of the apprentice wizards. “We’ve got everything under control,” they shout on the world’s televisions and in the world’s newspapers, when anybody who stops and thinks, if only for a moment, knows that we control nothing. Neither the possibility of being born nor the moment of death (unless you inflict it on yourself). Neither the water that comes down from the sky nor the quakes that split the earth.

  ‘These complexities escape the apprentice wizards, shut up inside their sanitised chambers as they are, and convinced that the universe consists of the microns of reality that dominate their thoughts. That’s why they can so merrily mix up the genetic patrimonies of different species in the name of progress (which is visible only to them and to the multinational companies that sign their patents) and why they can clone flowers and animals. And surely, in the obscure secrecy of some laboratory, they’re already cloning humans. After all, it would be so convenient to have a copy of yourself at your disposal – in case of breakdowns, you could use it for spare parts.

  ‘The wizards’ weapon is altruistic persuasion. They manipulate people’s good faith by convincing them that all this devastation is carried out exclusively for humanitarian motives. How will the world’s billions of poor eat without the new seeds invented by man for man? But I say what about the seeds invented by God? Aren’t they enough? Hasn’t an extraordinary complexity already been put at our service? And isn’t it, just maybe, our inability to see this complexity that drives us to seek new horizons that are actually horizons of death?

  ‘When man dreams about making a world without pain, without imperfections, in reality he’s already rolling out the barbed wire and dividing the world into the suitable and the unsuitable, a world in which the members of that second group are hardly different from ballast, something that will need to be cast off along the way.

  ‘Naturally, I believe what Madame Curie believed – man’s mission is to care for his neighbour in need – but when the care turns into a delirium of omnipotence, when it gets tangled up with the struggle for billion-dollar patents, then it turns into something very different from the proper aspirations of the human race. Instead of applauding the grand promises of science, we should have the courage to ask questions, even if they make us as unpopular as Jeremiah: Without disease, without fragility, without uncertainty, what does man turn into? And what becomes of his neighbour? Are we perfectible machines or troubled creatures in exile? Can our ultimate meaning be found in omnipotence, or in the acceptance of our precariousness? Out of precariousness, questions arise; a sense of mystery and wonder can grow from questions, but what can omnipotence and certainty generate?

  ‘Aren’t they trying to turn the human race into a multitude of omnivorous, perennially unsatisfied consumers? I buy, therefore I am. This is the horizon we’re all moving towards, as docile as lambs, except that our goal isn’t the sheepfold; it’s the abyss. And idolatry lies sleeping, always ready to awaken, in the heart of man.

  ‘Unimaginable catastrophes are waiting for us just around the corner. How is it possible to think we can touch the core of the atom, manipulate DNA, and still keep going forward? While everyone’s dancing with their headphones on and their eyes closed in artificial ecstasy, I see the flashes of the coming end, getting closer and closer every day.’

  We watched a hoopoe walk past the window, shaking its crest.

  ‘Can’t anything be done?’ I asked.

  Miriam turned toward me and stared at me for a long time in silence – what depths did the light of her eyes come from? – and then she said, ‘Of course. We must repent and open our hearts and minds to His word. Chase away the gods who’ve been carousing in our hear
ts for too long. Instead of the law of ego, we’d have to observe the law of the covenant.’

  ‘But isn’t the law a cage?’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said with a smile. ‘The law’s the only place where love can grow . . .’

  A meow interrupted my memories. An extremely thin cat was at the chapel door, looking in. Her tail was as skinny as a pencil. I called her and she came in. She even let me scratch her under her chin, purring all the while with a look of ecstasy on her face.

  Outside the sun had passed its highest point, and the air in the chapel was stifling hot. Before leaving, I gently touched the stone where your name’s engraved. Then I passed on to Mamma’s, with her two dates recording the brief span of her years.

  For a while, the cat followed me as I walked to the cemetery entrance, but then she disappeared behind a stone. The only flowers that stood with dignity in their vases were made of plastic; all the others drooped heavily, exhausted by the great heat. Dozens of wasps were buzzing around a tap, colliding furiously with one another while hopefully waiting for a drop of water.

  Before I left the cemetery, I turned around to contemplate its grounds (which also contained the Jewish and Turkish cemeteries) one last time. All of you – you, my mother, my father – were there while the unknown spaces of life were opening up before me; for better or worse, all of you taught me a great deal; and somehow, your mistakes had provided me with a treasure.

  I went back home and returned to my cleaning.

  I opened all the windows to let out the closed-in smell; the summer light streamed in forcefully, illuminating the darkest corners. I went into your room to get some clean sheets. The linen cupboard was in perfect order; for some reason, it had escaped the fury of your disease. The little sachets of lavender I saw you make up, most skilfully, so many times were still scattered here and there. When I reached for some sheets, the ones with the embroidered monogram, I saw a big yellow envelope lying on top of them. You’d written on it, in an unsteady hand, For you.