Queer, p.16
Queer, page 16
‘Did you see the bed?’
It was a double bed. They sat up in their pyjamas, drinking milk and sharing an orange that Carol was too sleepy to finish. Then Therese set the container of milk on the floor and looked at Carol who was sleeping already, on her stomach, with one arm flung up as she always went to sleep. Therese pulled out the light. Then Carol slipped her arm under her neck, and all the length of their bodies touched, fitting as if something had prearranged it. Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh. She had a vision of a pale white flower, shimmering as if seen in darkness, or through water. Why did people talk of heaven, she wondered.
‘Go to sleep,’ Carol said.
Therese hoped she would not. But when she felt Carol’s hand move on her shoulder, she knew she had been asleep. It was dawn now. Carol’s fingers tightened in her hair, Carol kissed her on the lips, and pleasure leaped in Therese again as if it were only a continuation of the moment when Carol had slipped her arm under her neck last night. I love you, Therese wanted to say again, and then the words were erased by the tingling and terrifying pleasure that spread in waves from Carol’s lips over her neck, her shoulders, that rushed suddenly the length of her body. Her arms were tight around Carol, and she was conscious of Carol and nothing else, of Carol’s hand that slid along her ribs, Carol’s hair that brushed her bare breasts, and then her body too seemed to vanish in widening circles that leaped further and further, beyond where thought could follow. While a thousand memories and moments, words, the first darling, the second time Carol had met her at the store, a thousand memories of Carol’s face, her voice, moments of anger and laughter flashed like the tail of a comet across her brain. And now it was pale blue distance and space, an expanding space in which she took flight suddenly like a long arrow. The arrow seemed to cross an impossibly wide abyss with ease, seemed to arc on and on in space, and not quite to stop. Then she realized that she still clung to Carol, that she trembled violently, and the arrow was herself. She saw Carol’s pale hair across her eyes, and now Carol’s head was close against hers. And she did not have to ask if this was right, no one had to tell her, because this could not have been more right or perfect. She held Carol tighter against her, and felt Carol’s mouth on her own smiling mouth. Therese lay still, looking at her, at Carol’s face only inches away from her, the grey eyes calm as she had never seen them, as if they retained some of the space she had just emerged from. And it seemed strange that it was still Carol’s face, with the freckles, the bending blonde eyebrow that she knew, the mouth now as calm as her eyes, as Therese had seen it many times before.
‘My angel,’ Carol said. ‘Flung out of space.’
Therese looked up at the corners of the room, that were much brighter now, at the bureau with the bulging front and the shield-shaped drawer pulls, at the frameless mirror with the bevelled edge, at the green-patterned curtains that hung straight at the windows, and the two grey tips of buildings that showed just above the sill. She would remember every detail of this room for ever.
‘What town is this?’ she asked.
Carol laughed. ‘This? This is Waterloo.’ She reached for a cigarette. ‘Isn’t that awful.’
Smiling, Therese raised up on her elbow. Carol put a cigarette between her lips. ‘There’s a couple of Waterloos in every state,’ Therese said.
THE CRY OF THE EXCAVATOR
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975)
Born in Bologna, Pasolini was one of the most important – and controversial – figures of 20th century Italian culture – as film director, poet and writer. His work explored the hardships of poverty, corruption, religion and fascism and sexuality. More than thirty lawsuits were brought against him for obscenity, contempt of the state and public outrage. He was brutally murdered at the age of fifty-three in circumstances that remain mysterious.
I
Only loving, only knowing matter.
Not the fact of having loved, or
having known. We become only sadder
living out a love that’s over.
The soul can no longer grow.
And now in the enchanted night, hot
and full, as countless lives still echo
here between the river’s bends
and sleepy visions of a city aglow
with scattered lights, a disaffection,
mystery, and sensual misery
turn me against these reflections
of the world, even though just yesterday
they were my reason for living.
Bored and tired, I head home, making my way
through dark market squares and gloomy streets
around the river’s port, past shacks thrown
together with warehouses in the midst
of the country’s last fields. Here
a deathly silence reigns, but farther down,
on Viale Marconi, or at Trastevere
Station, the evening still looks sweet.
Smiling, unwashed—in overalls or work trousers,
but spurred on by a festive heat—
the young return to their quarters,
their slums, on small motorbikes, friends
seated behind. Here and there,
standing at tables in cafes still bright
but half empty, the evening’s last clients
loudly converse in the night.
Stunning, wretched city,
you’ve taught me what men learn
as children, lighthearted and fierce,
the small things that let one discover
life’s greatness in peace, how
to step hard and ready into the fray
of the streets, to go up to another man
without trembling, how without shame
to examine the change handed lazily back
by the bus’s sweaty ticketman,
as behind him the façades stream by
with the unending colors of summer;
how to defend myself, how to offend,
how to keep the world before my eyes
and not just in my heart; how to realize
that few people know the passions
I have lived—and while they may
not treat me in brotherly fashion
they are my brothers simply because
they have human passions
and, lighthearted, unknowing, and whole,
they thrive on experiences
unknown to me. Stunning, wretched
city, you’ve let me experience
this unknown life—and in the end
let me discover what is
the world in every one of us.
The moon fades in silence, giving life
to the stillness, shining white amid violent
glimmers that dazzle without shedding light
upon an earth in a hush with its fine
avenues, its narrow old streets, as a few
warm banks of cloud on the skyline
cast reflections all over the world.
It’s the most beautiful night of the summer.
Amid a smell of the straw of old stables
and taverns emptied of clientele,
Trastevere is not yet asleep:
the dark corners, placid walls
still echo with magical sounds.
Men and boys are coming home
—under garlands of lights now alone—
to narrow streets choked with darkness
and garbage, walking with the same
soft steps that used to fill my soul
when I truly loved, when
I truly wanted to understand. And they
disappear singing, as they did back then.
II
Poor as a cat in the Colosseum,
I lived in a suburban slum all whitelime
and dust clouds, far from the city,
far from the country, crammed each day
into a wheezing city bus;
and every ride, whether on the way
to work or back, was a nightmare of sweat
and anguish. Long walks in the warm haze,
long twilights in front of papers
piled on my desk, between muddy roads,
low walls, and whitewashed little houses
with no window frames, and curtains for doors…
The olive man and ragman would come
from some other outlying slum
bearing dusty goods that looked as though
stolen, wearing the cruel expression
of youngsters who’d grown old as the vice-
ridden children of a hard, hungry mother.
Renewed by this new world,
and free—a flame, a breath
I can’t explain gave a sense of untroubled
holiness to a reality teeming
humble and dirty, vast and confused
on the city’s southern periphery.
A soul inside me, not only my own,
a little soul was growing in that boundless
world, nourished by the joy of one
who loved, though unrequited.
And all was lit up by this love
—still a boy’s love, perhaps, and heroic,
yet seasoned by the experience
coming to life at history’s feet.
I was at the center of the world,
in a world of sad, bedouin suburbs,
yellow grasslands lashed
by a wind forever restless
either blowing from the warm sea waters
of Fiumicino or from the agro, where
the city disappeared amid the shanties—
in a world over which only
the Penitentiary—square yellow
specter in the yellowy haze,
pierced by a thousand identical
windows with bars—could preside,
between ancient fields and sleepy hamlets.
The waste paper and dust cast about
here and there by the breeze,
the meager, echoless voices
of little women come down from
Sabine hills and Adriatic seas,
and now encamped here, with swarms
of withered, tough little children
screaming in their ragged T-shirts
and their drab, faded shorts,
the African sun, the violent downpours
that turned the streets into rivers
of mud, the city buses foundering
in their corners at the terminus,
between the last strip of white grass
and some acrid, burning garbage heap…
This was the center of the world, just
as my love for it was at the center
of history; and in this ripeness
—which, being newborn,
was still love—everything was
about to become clear—it was
clear! This suburb naked to the wind,
not Roman, not Southern,
not working-class, was life
in its most current light:
life, and life’s light, complete
in a chaos not yet proletarian,
as the crude newssheet
of the local cell, the latest
offset flyer, would have it: backbone
of daily existence,
pure in being all too
near, absolute in being
all too wretchedly human.
III
And now I head home, enriched by times
still so fresh I should never have guessed
I would see them grow old in a soul
now as far from them as from all the past.
I walk up the Janiculum’s avenues, stop
at an Art Nouveau junction, in a piazza
with trees, at a remnant of wall, by now
at the edge of the city, on the plain
rolling down to the sea. And in my soul,
dark and inert as the night giving in
to its fragrance, a seed now too old
to bear fruit germinates again
in the accumulated mass of a life
long since turned weary and bitter…
Here’s Villa Pamphili and, in the light
that quietly makes the new walls glitter,
the street that I live on.
Near my home, on a bit of grass little
more than a dingy froth,
a trickle over chasms freshly
dug out of the tufa—the wrath
of destruction now silent—there rises lifeless
against sundry buildings and shreds of sky,
an excavator…
What is this sorrow that fills me, at the sight
of these tools strewn about here and there
in the mud, and that scrap of red cloth
hung from a trestle in a corner
where the night seems grimmest?
Why, seeing that faded, bloody color,
does my conscience so blindly resist
and take cover, as if distressed
to its core by some wild remorse?
Why do I have the same presentiment
inside, of days forever unfulfilled,
as I sense in the dead firmament
over that sun-whitened excavator?
I undress in one of countless rooms
in Via Fontenaia where people sleep.
Time, you may cut deep into everything—
hopes, passions—but not into these pure
forms of life… They become one
with man himself, when experience
and faith in the world are at their height.
Oh, the days of Rebibbia,
which I had thought lost in a light
of necessity, and which I now know were so free!
Like my heart, which through the difficult
straits that had thrown it off
the path to a human destiny
gained through fervor a clarity
denied, and through naïvety
an unlikely balance—my mind,
too, those days, attained clarity
and balance. And thus blind
regret, the mark of all my
struggles with the world, was kept
at bay by adult but untried ideologies…
The world was becoming a subject
no longer of mystery but of history.
The joy of knowing it—with the humble
knowledge that every man has—
increased a thousandfold.
Marx and Gobetti, Gramsci and Croce
were alive in the experience of life.
The stuff of ten years of obscure
vocation changed, when I strove to bring
to light what seemed like the ideal figure
for an ideal generation;
every page, every line I wrote
during my exile in Rebibbia
displayed this eagerness, this presumption,
this gratitude. I was new
to my new situation
of old labor and old poverty,
and the few friends who called on me
on forgotten mornings and evenings
up by the Penitentiary,
saw me in a brilliant light:
a gentle, violent revolutionary
in heart and language. A man in bloom.
IV
He holds me close to his aging fleece,
which smells of the woods, and places his snout,
with its boarlike tusks or the teeth
of a stray bear with breath like roses,
over my mouth—and the room around me
turns into a glade, and the blanket, corroded
by the last sweats of youth, dances
like a cloud of pollen… Actually
I’m walking down a road that advances
through the first fields of spring
as they vanish in heavenly light…
Carried away by the waves of my footsteps,
what I’m leaving behind me, wretched,
lighthearted, is not Rome’s periphery: everywhere
I see “Viva Mexico!” written in whitewash, or etched
into the ruined temples and decrepit
walls, airy as bones, at the crossroads
and the edges of a burning, shudderless sky.
There, atop a hill, between clouds
and the undulant contours
of an ancient ridge of Apennines,
lies the town, half empty even at this hour
of the morning, when the women go
shopping—or in evening’s golden glow
when children run to their mothers
from the courtyards of the schools.
The streets fill with deep silence,
the slightly disconnected cobbles blur,
old as time, gray as time,
and two long, stone walkways,
shiny, lifeless, flank the streets.
Someone, in the silence, is moving:
an old woman, a little boy
lost in play, who sees perhaps
a charming Cinquecento portal
open gently, or a small well
with little creatures carved along the rim
resting on the meager grass
at some forgotten crossroads or corner.
At the top of the hill, the town’s main square
lies deserted, and between the houses,
behind a low wall and the green
of a great chestnut, you can see the space
of the valley below, but not the valley.
A space that shimmers pale blue
or slightly ashen… But the Corso continues
beyond the familiar piazzetta
suspended in the Apennine sky,
makes its way through huddled houses
and halfway down the slope: farther down
—as the small baroque houses thin out—
one sees, at last, the valley—and the wild.
Take a few more steps toward the bend,
where the road already runs through stark
little meadows, scrubby and steep,
and on the left, against the hillside,
as if a church had collapsed there,
stands an apse full of frescoes
blue and red, scrolls shattered
all along the eroded scars
of the collapse—which only it,
an enormous shell, has survived
to gape against the sky.
And here a wind begins to blow
from the wild beyond the valley, light,
