It’s not like May, this impure
air
that darkens the foreign garden
already dark, then blinds it
with light
with blinding clarity… this
sky
of foam, above the pale yellow
eaves
that in enormous semicircles
veil
the bends of the Tiber, the
deep blue
mountains of Latium… Spilling
a mortal
peace, estranged from our
destinies,
between the ancient walls,
autumnal
May. In this the grey of the
world,
the end of the decade in which
appears
among ruins the profound,
ingenuous
effort to restore life over;
the silence, rotten and
barren…
You were young, in that May
when the error
was still life, in that
Italian May
when at least passion was
joined to life,
how much less baffled and
impurely sound
than our fathers: not father,
but simply
brother - already with your
skinny hand, you
were outlining the ideal that
illuminates
(but not for us: you, dead,
and us
equally dead, with you, in
this humid
garden) this silence. Can’t
you
see it? - you who rest in this
alien
place, again confined.
Weariness
of nobility surrounds you.
And, faded,
the solitary peal of the anvil
reaches you
from the factories of
Testaccio, lulled
in the evening: amid the
shacks of the poor,
unadorned heaps of tin cans,
old iron, where
singing, dissipated, an
apprentice is ending
his day’s work, at the end of
the rainfall.
II
Between the two worlds, the
respite, in which we are not.
Choices, surrenders… we have
no other sound
by now but this garden of the
wretched
and noble in which,
headstrong, the trick
that deadens life remains in
death.
In the circles of sarcophagi
we do not
reveal the fate of the
survivor,
of secular people, secular
inscriptions
on these grey stones, low,
grand. Again passions
unbridled, free from scandal,
burn
the bones of millionaires from
mightier
nations; buzzing, almost
decomposing,
the ironies of princes, of
pederasts,
their bodies strewn in urns
incinerated, and unchaste.
Death’s silence bears witness
to a civilised silence of men
who remain
men, of a weariness that in
the weariness
of the Park changes
imperceptibly: and the city
indifferent, confines him at
its centre
by hovels and by churches,
their pitiless mercy,
their lost splendour. The
earth,
fertile with nettles and
vegetables,
brings forth these meagre
cypresses, this black
damp that stains the walls
around
the ashen, zigzag boxtree,
that the evening
calm extinguishes into
unadorned
tendrils of seaweed… this
sparse grass
scentless, where one sinks
into the sweet violet
the atmosphere, with a shiver
of mint,
or decomposed hay, then quiet,
foreshadows
the daylight gloom, exhausted
apprehensions of the night.
Harsh
climate, sweet history,
between these walls is a soil
under which
oozes another layer; this damp
which
calls to mind another damp;
and they echo
- intimate with latitudes
and horizons, where English
forests crown
lakes lost in the sky, among
meadows
as green as phosphorescent
billiard tables or
like emeralds: ‘And O ye
Fountains…’ - the pious
invocations…
III
A red rag, like those the
partisans
furled around their throats
and, nearby the urn, in the
waxen soil
differently red, two
geraniums.
Here you lie, exiled, with
cruel Protestant
neatness, listed among the
foreign
dead: Gramsci’s ashes… Between
hope
and my ancient distrust, I
draw near you, happening
by chance on this meagre
greenhouse, in the presence
of your grave, in the presence
of your spirit, afoot,
down here among the free. (Or
is it something
else, perhaps more ecstatic
and even more humble, the
enraptured symbiosis
of the adolescent, of sex and
death…)
And, of this country which
would not let you rest,
I feel this an injustice: your
mental strain
- here among the silences of
the dead - what
reason - our troubled destiny
You would have been inscribing
your final
pages in the days of your
assassination.
Here are the seeds - I testify
-
still undispersed by the
ancient rule,
these dead men chained to
ownership
that over centuries submerges
their shame
and their grandeur: at the
same time, obsessed -
the striking of anvils,
stifled,
quietly grieving - of the
lowly
quarter - attesting to its
end.
And here I am… a poor man,
dressed
in clothes the poor ogle in
store windows
of coarse splendour, that have
faded,
in the filth of more lost
streets,
of streetcar benches, from
which my day
is removed: more and more
rarely
I have these days off from the
torment
of deciding to live; and if it
should happen I
love the world, it’s not with
a violent
and ingenuous sensual love
like I had, a confused
adolescent, a season
I hated; if in it I hurt the
bourgeois
affliction of my bourgeois
self: and now, the world
- with you - cleft, that part
which had the power
doesn’t it seem now an object
of bitterness,
almost mystical contempt?
Yet without your rigour, I
exist
not because I choose to. I
live in the non-will
of postwar decline: loving
the world I hate - in its
distress
contemptuous and lost - in a
dark scandal
of consciousness…
IV
The shame of contradicting
myself, of being
with you and against you; with
you in my heart,
in truth, against you in my
dark inmost feelings;
traitor to my fatherland
-in thought, in a shadow of
action -
I know that I am bound to it,
in the heat
of instinct, of aesthetic
passion
attracted by a proletarian
life -
prior to you - it’s for me a
religion;
this is happiness, not the
millennial
struggle: man’s nature, not
his
conscious mind; it’s the
primal strength
of man, that has been lost in
actions,
that offers this drunken
nostalgia,
and poetic light: beyond that
I don’t know what to say,
would it be
a just, but not pure
abstracted
love, not grieving sympathy…
As poor as the poor, I attach
myself
like them to humble
expectations
like them, I fight each day
to stay alive. But even in my
desolated state,
in my disinherited condition -
I own: the most glorified of
all
bourgeois possessions:
But while I own history,
it owns me; it illumines me
But what use is such a light.
V
I’m not talking about the
individual,
phenomenon of sensual,
sentimental fervour…
he has other vices; his
destiny, his fate
go by another name…
But in him are scrambled
common
innate vices - and also
objective sin! They are not
immune -
those internal and external
acts that
bring him to life - to any of
the religions that exist in
the real world,
mortgaging death, established
to cheat the light, bringing
to light the deception.
His mortal remains are fated
to be interred in Verano; it’s
catholic,
his struggle with them:
Jesuitical
are the manias with which he
regulates his heart;
and even deeper: his
consciousness obtains
Biblical tricks… and ironic
liberal
zealousness… and a coarse
splendour, among the dislikes
of a provincial dandy, of a
provincial
well-being… Even to the basest
details
in which Authority and Anarchy
vanish
into the vulgar deep… well
protected
by unclean virtue and by
drunken sin,
defending an obsessive naïveté
and with what consciousness!
The I lives: I
alive, evading life, within
the breast
the sense of a life that would
be a
grieving, violent oblivion…
Ah, as I realise,
speechless, drenched in the
whispers
of the wind, here where Rome
is silent
among the weary, confused
cypresses,
near you, the spirit whose
graffitto resounds
Shelley… How I understand the
whirlpool
of feeling, the whim (greek,
in the patrician’s
heart, northern summer
visitor)
that swallowed him in the dark
azure of the Tyrrhenian Sea,
the sensual
joy of adventure, aesthetic
and childish: meanwhile Italy,
face-down
as if within the belly of a
giant
cicada; opening wide white
coastlines,
strewn across Latium veiled
throngs of pine,
queer, faded yellowish glades
of garden rocket, where a
young
peasant of the Roman campagna
sleeps
amid rags, his penis erect,
goethian dream.
In the Maremma dark, marvelous
sewers
of spiked grasses, a clear
impression
of the hazelnut tree, along
footpaths the herdsman
fills to overfllowing with his
youth - unaware.
Blindly fragrant in the sharp
curves
of the Versilian coastline, on
the entangled, blind sea, the
bright stuccoes,
delicate marquetry of its
pascual
countryside, quite human, it
unfolds
darkening on the Cinquale
unravelling underneath the
burning Apuan Alps,
glassy blue against rose…
landslides,
overturned rocks, as if
panicked
by a fragrance, on the
Riviera, soft,
steep, where the sun wrestles
the breeze
to offer utmost sweetness to
the oils
of the sea… And all around the
buzz of happiness
the boundless percussion,
drumming
of sex and light: so
accustomed
is Italy to this, she doesn’t
even tremble, as if
dead within her life:
fervently they shout
from hundreds of seaports, the
name
of their comrade, the young
men, wet with sweat,
faces tanned, brown, among the
people
of the Riviera, near
kitchen-gardens of thistles
on foul little beaches…
Will you ask of me, dead man,
unadorned,
that I abandon this hopeless
passion to be in the world?
VI
I’ll take my leave of him. I
leave you in the evening
that however sad, is almost
sweet, falling on
us, living creatures, with its
waxen light
that sets the quarter in
twilight.
And stirs it up. Makes it
larger, emptier
in close, and, at a great
distance, rekindles it
a raving life, that of the
hoarse
rolling racket of the tram, of
human clamour,
dialects, creating a faintly
heard
and positive harmony. And you
feel like those faraway
creatures that in life shout,
laugh
in those vehicles of theirs,
those wretched
apartment blocks, where the
false and
expansive gift of existence is
consumed -
that life is nought but a
shiver;
corporeal, collective
presence;
you feel the absence of any
true
religion; not living, but
surviving
- perhaps more joyous than
living - like
a nation of animals, within
its mysterious
orgasm - there would be no
other longing
than that for daily action,
work:
a humble ardour which lends a
sense of festivity
to humble corruption. How much
more empty
- in this void of history, in
this
humming pause in which
existence holds its tongue -
is each ideal, clearly better
is
the immense, bronzed
voluptuousness,
almost Alexandrian, which
illuminates
and impurely ignites all, when
here
in the world, something
tumbles down, and
the world drags itself along,
in the twilight, coming
home to empty market-places,
to disheartened factories…
Already the lamps are lit,
spangling
Via Zabaglia, Via Franklin,
all of
Testaccio, stripped between
its great
foul mount, the lengths of the
Tiber, the black
back-drop beyond the river,
that Monteverde
amasses or diminishes unseen
in the heavens.
Diadems of light lose
themselves,
dazzling, with a chill of
sadness
almost sea-like… Suppertime is
almost here;
the quarter’s scarce buses
glitter,
with bunches of workers at
their ticket windows.
And groups of soldiers vanish,
languidly,
toward the mount - which at
the centre of
rotten excavations, dry heaps
of filth -
streetwalkers are concealed in
shadow
waiting, enraged, on the
aphrodisiac
filth: and, not far away,
among illegal
shacks clinging to the
mountain, in
palaces, their own worlds,
boys light
as paper play in the breezes,
no longer chill, but
springlike; burning
with the recklessness of
youth, on a
Roman evening in May, dark
adolescents
whistle along the pavements,
in the evening’s
festivity; and the rolling
shutters
of garages roar, and crash,
joyously;
the darkness has surrendered
the night serene,
f
and in the midst of the plane
trees in Piazza Testaccio
the wind falling, quivering
with unexpected disaster
is sweet enough, although
grazing one’s hair
and the porous stones of
Macello, there one becomes
drenched with decomposed
blood, everywhere
the waste and stench of
poverty is stirred up.
It’s a cacophony, this life,
and those lost
in it, lose it cloudlessly, if
their hearts
are filled with it: enjoying
themselves,
behold the wretched, the
evening: powerful
in them, defenceless before
them, the myth
is reborn… But I, with my
aware heart,
which is alive only in
history,
can I ever again act with a
pure love,
if I know that our history is
ended?
