South seas - Poem

Literary Review, Spring, 2002 by Cesare Pavese

South Peas

(to Monti)

Translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock

   We're walking one evening on the flank of a hill
   in silence. In the shadows of dusk
   my cousin's a giant dressed all in white,
   moving serenely, face bronzed by the sun,
   not speaking. We have a talent for silence.
   Some ancestor of ours must have been quite a loner--a
   great man among fools or a crazy old bum--to
   have taught his descendants such silence.

   This evening he spoke. He asked if I'd join him to climb
   to the top of the hill: from there you can see,
   in the distance, on clear nights, the glow
   of Turin. "You, living in Turin," he said,
   "you've got the right idea. Life should be lived
   far from here: make some money, have fun,
   and then, when you come back, like me, at forty,
   it all seems new. These hills will always be waiting."
   He told me all this, not in Italian,
   but in the slow dialect of these parts, which, like the rocks
   right here on this hill, is so rugged and hard
   that two decades of foreign tongues and oceans
   never scratched its surface. And he climbs the steep path
   with that self-contained look I saw as a boy
   on the faces of farmers when they were a little tired.

   For twenty years he wandered the world.
   He left home when I was still being carried by women
   and everyone figured he died. They spoke of him sometimes,
   those women, as if his life were some fable,
   but the men, more serious, simply forgot him.
   One winter a card came for my dead father,
   with a big green stamp showing ships in a port
   and best wishes for the harvest. It was a shock,
   but the boy, who had grown, explained with excitement
   that it came from a place called Tasmania,
   surrounded by the bluest waters, swarming with sharks,
   in the Pacific, south of Australia. The cousin, he added,
   was certainly fishing for pearls. And he peeled off the stamp.
   Everyone had their opinion, but all were agreed
   that if he hadn't died yet, he would soon.
   Then they forgot him again and many years passed.

   Ah, so much time has gone by since we played
   Malay pirates. And since the last time
   I went down to swim in the dangerous waters
   and followed a playmate up into a tree,
   splitting its beautiful branches, and since
   I bashed the head of a rival and got punched--so
   much life has gone by. Other days, other games,
   other spillings of blood in conflicts with rivals
   of a more elusive kind: thoughts and dreams.
   The city taught me an infinite number of fears:
   a crowd or street could make me afraid,
   or sometimes a thought, glimpsed on a face.
   I still see the light from the thousands of streetlamps
   that mocked the great shuffling beneath them.

   After the war, my cousin, larger than life, came home,
   he was one of the few. And now he had money.
   Our relatives muttered: "A year, at the most,
   he'll blow it all, and then take off again.
   Bums live that way till the day they die."
   My cousin's hardheaded. He bought a ground-floor place
   in town, turning it into a concrete garage
   with a gleaming red gas-pump out front
   and over the bridge, at the curve, a big sign.
   Then he hired a mechanic to handle the money
   while he roamed the hills smoking.
   Meanwhile he got married. He picked a girl
   who was slender and blonde like some of the women
   he must have encountered during his travels.

   But still he'd go out by himself. Dressed all in white,
   hands clasped behind him, face bronzed by the sun,
   he'd frequent the fairs in the morning, looking shrewd
   and haggling over horses. He later explained,
   when his scheme had failed, that he wanted to buy
   every horse and ox in the valley, to force people
   to replace them with things that had engines.

   "But I was the real horse's ass," he said,
   "to think it could ever have worked. I forgot
   that folks around here are just like their oxen."

   We've been walking for nearly an hour. Close to the peak,
   the wind begins rustling and whistling around us.
   My cousin stops suddenly and turns: "This year
   I'm making flyers saying: Santo Stefano
   has always put on the best festivals
   in the Belbo valley--even the guys in Canelli
   should have to admit it." Then he keeps walking.
   Around us in the dark the smell of earth and wind,
   a few lights in the distance: farms, cars
   you can barely hear. And I think of the strength
   this man's given me, how it was wrenched from the sea,
   from foreign lands, from silence that endures.
   My cousin won't speak of the places he's been.
   He says drily that he was once here, or once there,
   then he thinks of his engines.

   Only one dream
   has stayed in his blood: once, when he worked
   as a stoker on a Dutch fishing boat, the Cetacean,
   he saw the heavy harpoons sail in the sun,
   and saw the whales as they fled in a frothing of blood
   and the chase and the flukes lifting, fighting the launches.
   Sometimes he mentions it.

   But whenever I tell him
   that he's one of the lucky ones to have seen the sun rise
   over the loveliest islands in the world,
   he smiles at the memory, then says that the sun
   didn't rise till the day for them was already old.