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Authors: Carlo Sgorlon
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voice.
Having approached within a hundred meters of my reef, the boat stopped, the slight hum of the motor ceased completely, and only my mother’s song could be heard. I waited for her to appear, to come out on deck or at least look out of a porthole. Instead nothing. I had to content myself with knowing she was on that boat, but I would never see her face. Once the song ended the boat moved on, sliding over the waves as before, until it became a black speck once again and disappeared over the horizon.
It was the first time I liked something I had written and hence I decided to save it. I hid the sheet of paper in a wooden drawer in the soap- making shed Maddalena never used. But it subsequently got lost simply because I had wanted to find an unusual hiding place. A family of Gypsies set up camp near our house beside the stream and asked Maddalena if they could use the fireplace in that shed. She shrugged her shoulders. They could do whatever they pleased. Thus they used anything they could find as kindling and my story was burned. I didn’t care. I remembered every detail and could rewrite it whenever I might want to. But I didn’t do it. I reflected instead that the dream revealed an anguish that I had had but never noticed until now: the thought that I didn’t possess a photograph of my mother, that perhaps none even existed, and I would never know what she looked like. That was why I hadn’t seen her face but only heard her voice. Maddalena had no photograph of her. My great grandfather’s family had disappeared many years ago, and in his house lived distant relatives who had never cared about me and had allowed me to be brought up by a stranger. The only possibility was that a photo might be hidden in the house among my father’s papers, but I had rummaged through them for years and never found anything. Thus my mother remained a closed door I would never open, or an empty room. Perhaps it was precisely this awareness working within me, beneath my careless serenity, that produced my sensation of not being complete, my desire to search far and wide for who knows what, and this was why my fancy took hold of anything that led me in the strangest possible directions....
----
XI
The Ides of March
I even envied the Gypsies because they roamed the world and when they arrived in our neighborhood I would soon begin to hang around their camp.
At first I didn’t dare approach them, like Luca with Maddalena; then I would pluck up courage and begin to play with the smaller boys until I was ready to try the same thing with the ones my age. But they never really played. They were always looking for things to eat or to wear and as they moved about their eyes glittered as they identified things they might find useful. They seized cats or imprudent hens who had wandered a little too far from the farmyard, and I would say nothing, believing that my
omertà
gave me the right to question them. It didn’t matter a bit to me that they were thieves and that they were always asking me for something in their whining and petulant voices, as long as they told me what I wanted to know, that is, where they came from, where they were going, how they lived and what they were looking for in their constant wanderings.
But I could never get anything out of them. Once they got what they wanted they immediately stopped talking like poor wretches begging to be saved and began laughing, cackling and hissing the shrill sounds of their incomprehensible language. They would answer me distractedly, craftily, with a phrase or two, in no way taking me seriously. “Do you come from Russia? From Hungary? From Slavonia?” I asked, but they replied with the names of nearby villages, totally uninteresting places I had already seen over and over — then they would burst out laughing like maniacs. “Have you ever been in Denmark?” They looked at one another as if they’d never heard the name.
I soon realized it was useless to keep
Having approached within a hundred meters of my reef, the boat stopped, the slight hum of the motor ceased completely, and only my mother’s song could be heard. I waited for her to appear, to come out on deck or at least look out of a porthole. Instead nothing. I had to content myself with knowing she was on that boat, but I would never see her face. Once the song ended the boat moved on, sliding over the waves as before, until it became a black speck once again and disappeared over the horizon.
It was the first time I liked something I had written and hence I decided to save it. I hid the sheet of paper in a wooden drawer in the soap- making shed Maddalena never used. But it subsequently got lost simply because I had wanted to find an unusual hiding place. A family of Gypsies set up camp near our house beside the stream and asked Maddalena if they could use the fireplace in that shed. She shrugged her shoulders. They could do whatever they pleased. Thus they used anything they could find as kindling and my story was burned. I didn’t care. I remembered every detail and could rewrite it whenever I might want to. But I didn’t do it. I reflected instead that the dream revealed an anguish that I had had but never noticed until now: the thought that I didn’t possess a photograph of my mother, that perhaps none even existed, and I would never know what she looked like. That was why I hadn’t seen her face but only heard her voice. Maddalena had no photograph of her. My great grandfather’s family had disappeared many years ago, and in his house lived distant relatives who had never cared about me and had allowed me to be brought up by a stranger. The only possibility was that a photo might be hidden in the house among my father’s papers, but I had rummaged through them for years and never found anything. Thus my mother remained a closed door I would never open, or an empty room. Perhaps it was precisely this awareness working within me, beneath my careless serenity, that produced my sensation of not being complete, my desire to search far and wide for who knows what, and this was why my fancy took hold of anything that led me in the strangest possible directions....
----
XI
The Ides of March
I even envied the Gypsies because they roamed the world and when they arrived in our neighborhood I would soon begin to hang around their camp.
At first I didn’t dare approach them, like Luca with Maddalena; then I would pluck up courage and begin to play with the smaller boys until I was ready to try the same thing with the ones my age. But they never really played. They were always looking for things to eat or to wear and as they moved about their eyes glittered as they identified things they might find useful. They seized cats or imprudent hens who had wandered a little too far from the farmyard, and I would say nothing, believing that my
omertà
gave me the right to question them. It didn’t matter a bit to me that they were thieves and that they were always asking me for something in their whining and petulant voices, as long as they told me what I wanted to know, that is, where they came from, where they were going, how they lived and what they were looking for in their constant wanderings.
But I could never get anything out of them. Once they got what they wanted they immediately stopped talking like poor wretches begging to be saved and began laughing, cackling and hissing the shrill sounds of their incomprehensible language. They would answer me distractedly, craftily, with a phrase or two, in no way taking me seriously. “Do you come from Russia? From Hungary? From Slavonia?” I asked, but they replied with the names of nearby villages, totally uninteresting places I had already seen over and over — then they would burst out laughing like maniacs. “Have you ever been in Denmark?” They looked at one another as if they’d never heard the name.
I soon realized it was useless to keep
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