Cesare Pavese

We would go down to the fish market early to cleanse our vision: the fish were silver, and scarlet, and green, and the color of sea. The fish were lovelier than even the sea with its silvery scales. We thought of return. Lovely too the women with jars on their heads, olive-brown clay, shaped softly like thighs: we each thought of our women, their voices, their laughs, the way they walked down the street. And each of us laughed. And it rained on the sea. In vineyards that cling to cracks in the earth, water softens the leaves and the grape-stems. The sky is colored by occasional clouds that redden with pleasure and sun. On earth, flavors and smells; in the sky, color. And we were alone there. We thought of return the way a man thinks of morning after an utterly sleepless night. We took pleasure in the color of fish and the glisten of fruit, all so alive in the musk of the sea. We were drunk on the thought of impending return.

He’s brought me to hear his band. He sits in a corner mouthing his clarinet. A hellish racket begins. Outside, through flashes of lightning, wind gusts and rain whips, knocking the lights out every five minutes. In the dark, their faces give it their all, contorted, as they play a dance tune from memory. Full of energy, my poor friend anchors them all from behind. His clarinet writhes, breaks through the din, passes beyond it, releasing like a lone soul, into a dry, rough silence. The poor pieces of brass have been dented too often: the hands working the stops also work in the fields, and the obstinate brows stay fixed on the ground. Miserable worn-out blood, weakened by too many labors—you can hear it groan in their notes, as my friend struggles to lead them, his own hands hardened from swinging a hammer, from pushing a plane, from scraping a living. He’s lost all his old comrades, and he’s only thirty. Part of the postwar group that grew up on hunger. They all came to Turin, to look for a life, and discovered injustice. He learned, without smiling, how to work in a factory. He learned how to measure the hunger of others with his own fatigue— injustice was everywhere. He tried to find peace by walking, at night, down streets without ends, half-asleep, but found only thousands of streetlamps blazing down on iniquity: hoarse women and drunks, staggering puppets, far from their homes, He came, one winter, to Turin—factory lights, smoke and ash— and he learned what work is. He accepted that work was part of a man’s hard fate; if all men did that, there just might be some justice in this world. And he found new comrades. He suffered their long words, he listened and waited for them to be over. He made them his comrades. Families of them in each house, the city surrounded by them, the face of the world covered with them. And each of them felt desperate enough to conquer the world. They sound harsh tonight, despite all the time he spent coaching each player. He ignores the loud rain and the flickering lights. His face is severe, fixed on some grief, almost biting the mouthpiece. I’ve seen this expression before, one evening, just us and his brother, who’s ten years sadder than him. We were up late in the dim light, the brother studying a lathe he had built that didn’t work right, and my poor friend cursing the fate that kept him there, bound to his hammer and plane, feeding a pair of old people he never asked for. That’s when he yelled that it wasn’t fate that made the world suffer or made the daylight spark blasphemous outbursts: man is the guilty one.If we only could just leave, and be hungry and free, and say no to a life that uses our love and our piety, our families, our patches of dirt, to shackle our hands.

The hard thing’s to sit without being noticed. Everything else will come easy. Three sips and the impulse returns to sit thinking alone. Against the buzzing backdrop of noise everything fades, and it’s suddenly a miracle to be born and to stare at the glass. And work (a man who’s alone can’t not think of work) becomes again the old fate that suffering’s good for focusing thought. And soon the eyes fix on nothing particular, grieved, as if blind. If this man gets up and goes home to sleep, he’ll look like a blind man that’s lost. Anyone could jump out of nowhere to brutally beat him. A woman—beautiful, young—might appear, and lie under a man in the street, and moan, the way a woman once moaned under him. But this man doesn’t see. He heads home to sleep and life becomes nothing but the buzzing of silence. Undressing this man you’d find a body that’s wasted and, here and there, patches of fur. Who’d think, to look at this man, that life once burned in his lukewarm veins? No one would guess that there was a woman, once, who gently touched that body, who kissed that body, which shakes, and wet it with tears, now that the man, having come home to sleep, can’t sleep, only moan.

It’s a fine fact that whenever I sit in a tavern corner sipping a grappa, the pederast’s there, or the kids with their screaming, or the unemployed guy, or some beautiful girl outside—all breaking the thread of my smoke.That’s how it is, kid, I’m telling it straight, I work at Lucento.

I’m eating a little supper by the bright window. The room’s already dark, the sky’s starting to turn. Outside my door, the quiet roads lead, after a short walk, to open fields. I’m eating, watching the sky—who knows how many women are eating now. My body is calm: labor dulls all the senses, and dulls women too. Outside, after supper, the stars will come out to touch the wide plain of the earth. The stars are alive, but not worth these cherries, which I’m eating alone. I look at the sky, know that lights already are shining among rust-red roofs, noises of people beneath them. A gulp of my drink, and my body can taste the life of plants and of rivers. It feels detached from things. A small dose of silence suffices, and everything’s still, in its true place, just like my body is still. All things become islands before my senses, which accept them as a matter of course: a murmur of silence. All things in this darkness—I can know all of them, just as I know that blood flows in my veins. The plain is a great flowing of water through plants, a supper of all things. Each plant, and each stone, lives motionlessly. I hear my food feeding my veins with each living thing that this plain provides. The night doesn’t matter. The square patch of sky whispers all the loud noises to me, and a small star struggles in emptiness, far from all foods, from all houses, alien. It isn’t enough for itself, it needs too many companions. Here in the dark, alone, my body is calm, it feels it’s in charge.

Deola passes her mornings sitting in a cafe, and nobody looks at her. Everyone’s rushing to work, under a sun still fresh with the dawn. Even Deola isn’t looking for anyone: she smokes serenely, breathing the morning. In years past, she slept at this hour to recover her strength: the throw on her bed was black with the boot-prints of soldiers and workers, the backbreaking clients. But now, on her own, it’s different: the work’s more refined, and it’s easier. Like the gentleman yesterday, who woke her up early, kissed her, and took her (I’d stay awhile, dear, in Turin with you, if I could

The big front wall that blocks off the courtyard often catches the newborn light of the sun like the side of a barn. The body awakes in the morning to a room, messy and empty, that smells of the first, clumsy perfume. Even that body, wrapped now in sheets, is the same that it was when it thrilled in discovery. Her body wakes alone to the extended call of morning, the languor of another morning returning in the heavy shadows: the barn of childhood and the heavy tiredness of sun hot in the indolent doorways. A perfume worked itself into the usual sweat of her hair, a smell the animals knew. Her body took secret pleasure in the sun’s suggestive, serene caress—like a real touch. The languor of bed saps the sprawled limbs, still youthful and plump, like a child’s. The clumsy child used to smell the mixed scent of tobacco and hay, used to tremble when touched by the man’s quick hands: she liked playing games. Sometimes she played lying down with the man in the hay, but he wasn’t smelling her hair: he’d find her closed legs in the hay and pry them open, then crush her like he was her father. The perfume was flowers ground upon stones. It often returns, in the slow rise from sleep, that undone aroma of far-off flowers, of barns and of sun. No man can know the subtle caress of that sour memory. No man can see, beyond that sprawled body, that childhood passed in such clumsy anxiety.

Rain will fall again on your smooth pavement, a light rain like a breath or a step. The breeze and the dawn will flourish again when you return, as if beneath your step. Between flowers and sills the cats will know. There will be other days, there will be other voices. You will smile alone. The cats will know. You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday’s parties. You too will make gestures. You’ll answer with words— face of springtime, you too will make gestures. The cats will know, face of springtime; and the light rain and the hyacinth dawn that wrench the heart of him who hopes no more for you— they are the sad smile you smile by yourself. There will be other days, other voices and renewals. Face of springtime, we will suffer at daybreak.

The drunk mechanic is happy to be in the ditch. From the tavern, five minutes through the dark field and you’re home. But first, there’s the cool grass to enjoy, and the mechanic will sleep here till dawn. A few feet away, the red and black sign that rises from the field: if you’re too close, you can’t read it, it’s that big. At this hour, it’s still wet dew. Later, the streets will cover it with dust, as it covers the bushes. The mechanic, beneath it, stretches in sleep. Silence is total. Shortly, in the warmth of the sun, one car after another will pass, waking the dust. At the top of the hill they slow down for the curve, then plunge down the slope. A few of the cars stop at the garage, in the dust, to drink a few liters. At this time of the morning, the mechanics, still dazed, will be sitting on oil drums, waiting for work. It’s a pleasure to spend the morning sitting in the shade, where the stink of oil’s cut with the smell of green, of tobacco, of wine, and where work comes to them, right to the door. Sometimes it’s even amusing: peasants’ wives come to scold them, blaming the garage for the traffic—it frightens the animals and women— and for making their husbands look sullen: quick trips down the hill into Turin that lighten their wallets. Between laughing and selling gas, one of them will pause: these fields, it’s plain to see, are covered with road dust, if you try to sit on the grass, it’ll drive you away. On the hillside, there’s a vineyard he prefers to all others, and in the end he’ll marry that vineyard and the sweet girl who comes with it, and he’ll go out in the sun to work, but now with a hoe, and his neck will turn brown, and he’ll drink wine pressed on fall evenings from his own grapes. Cars pass during the night, too, but more quietly, so quiet the drunk in the ditch hasn’t woken. At night they don’t raise much dust, and the beams of their headlights, as they round the curve, reveal in full the sign in the field. Near dawn, they glide cautiously along, you can’t hear a thing except maybe the breeze, and from the top of the hill they disappear into the plain, sinking in shadows.

And then we cowards who loved the whispering evening, the houses, the paths by the river, the dirty red lights of those places, the sweet soundless sorrow— we reached our hands out toward the living chain in silence, but our heart startled us with blood, and no more sweetness then, no more losing ourselves on the path by the river— no longer slaves, we knew we were alone and alive.