Planus (4 page)

' ". . . My father cut the claws off a dead pigeon and pinned them to a board in the required position, then I copied them minutely until he was satisfied with them."

'In the end, Don Jose gave up painting once and for all. And why not? Pablo had replaced him. "So he gave me his brushes and his paints and he never painted again...." '

Yet another of those secret dramas between father and son. I myself, at the age of fourteen, threatened him with a kitchen knife. That was why I started to knock about the world. Yet he was the best father in the world. I did not see him again until sifter my right arm had been amputated. It was during the war. My father must have moved heaven and earth to find out in which military hospital I was being cared for. Sitting beside my bed, he looked at me without saying a word. One large tear ran down, tracing a path among his wrinkles, just one....

What an adventure! It was September 1906. I was in my twentieth year, the age for military service. But that was not the point. For three years I had been travelling in Russia, China and Central Asia, with my boss, Rogovine, who had made me a partner in his jewellery business, and now, in order to hold me by still closer ties, wanted me to marry his only daughter. But I had no more desire to do so than I had to become a businessman or a soldier. However, it was not on his daughter's account that we had fallen out, and I had finally deserted Rogovine in Persia. Esther was only eleven years old, and there was time for Rogovine to change his mind, make other plans for the future, vest his hopes in another salesman and choose a more suitable son-in-law, a neighbour, compatriot or co-religionist, for Rogovine was of the Old Orthodox faith, like most Russian goldsmiths. No, we quarrelled, fell out and parted as enemies not because of Esther, although that question was frequently brought

up and with increasing acrimony, but because of a hollow cane.

But Pasquale's farm no longer existed. In its place stood a block of flats like a barracks, and nobody could tell me what had become of Pasquale and his family. After my father was expropriated, the housing estate on the Vomero prospered and the neighbourhood of the
solfatara
became middle class. Houses with terraces were being built and the whole terrain was divided up into well-tended little properties, planted with fruit trees whose branches were tangled with vine-leaves; between the gleaming leaves of orange and lemon trees, or through stifling masses of oleander, one glimpsed dwellings of the suburban-villa type, simple, pretentious or coy, and most of them with ridiculous names, that had replaced the anonymous country houses formerly occupying this hillside, with their ruined walls, their doorsteps split by the roots of fig trees, their old women sitting at the threshold watching over the children and the chickens, their little saints set in a niche, a mangy ass, or two or three tethered goats, and that good, fat dumpling who is your Neapolitan peasant, Pasquale, Gennaro, Beppino or Gesu, taking a siesta, sprawled on an armful of fresh maize stalks, with his
tagliora,
or flannel waistband, undone, and smiling a hairy smile at the angels while awaiting the return of his wife, who has gone into the town, barefooted, her winnowing baskets balanced on her head, her market-scales in her hand, and shouting her seasonal cry as she sells her vegetables: aubergines, fennel, capsicums, tomatoes, cabbages, broad beans, and her fruit: almonds, grapes, figs, peaches, strawberries, pomegranates, oranges, mandarins, lemons, carobs, and, in the height of the summer, splendid water-melons, which the donkey brings down to Posilippo in the evening, carrying a double cargo in his pack-saddle. These watermelons are piled in pyramids at the side of the road, split and sold in juicy red slices to all the
lazzaroni
who bask in the sun beside the sea, eating hungrily while they make eyes at the women and the plump, laughing girls flaunting themselves on the cushions of the fiacres and carriages passing at a trot, escorted by a swarm of little beggars, boys and girls — the most wretched of whom go completely naked, clothed only in scabs and scrofula! — who turn cartwheels in the dust, run between the legs of the horses, cling on to the carriage doors and sing and plead and make agonized grimaces, one hand over the heart, the other extended :

I am dying of hunger, Signore!

Give me a penny,

Please, kind sir!

Without respite. Until the sun goes down and the moon rises, and the guitars fall silent, and the shopkeepers and the bourgeoisie at last come out of the restaurants by the sea, and the lamps go out, and everyone goes home, to sleep and to be harassed all night long by mosquitoes.

But one should never return to the garden of one's childhood which is paradise lost, a paradise of innocent loves! A few steps farther on, at a turning of the road, I was to learn this bitter lesson,.

I was carrying my Isfahan cane, as you see everyone in Persia carrying one: the mule-driver has his stick, the merchant his cane with gold bands or inlay of silver or mother of pearl, the magistrate or official his rod of ebony or redwood crowned at each end with a knob of ivory, or an amber or cornelian ball; the young people, like myself, carry a wand of wild rosewood in their hands, which is not an accessory of masculine vanity or elegance but a symbol of virility (in Brazil, the Negroes, who were formerly slaves, carry a rolled umbrella on their shoulders, much as the old Roman lictor bore his fasces as a symbol of the authority of the Law!), and this is carried solemnly in front of them, at eye-level, like a bishop's cross, not to say a field-marshal's baton or a sceptre, and is not to be trailed in the dust and mud, nor tapped on the macadam in the frivolous manner of a Frenchman, who sacrilegiously gesticulates with a cane as if it were a walking-stick, or an Englishman who beats time, tries to cover up his nervousness and his awkward gait, and punctuate the instability of his moods, his intimate cares, his repressed desires, yet never succeeds in regulating his headlong career. In Persia, a man has his self-respect, he is calm and dignified, he walks with compunction, each imagining himself to be someone of note. And I began to laugh, not because I had escaped my pursuers nor because I was the happy possessor of such a precious cane and its secret treasure of three marvellous pearls, but because I was aping my noble father so well. I walked on, holding my Isfahan cane in front of me, and I laughed, and I cursed my father for having been the first to think of transforming these agrarian slopes, open to the sky, with one of the loveliest and most human aspects in the world, a site celebrated since the days of antiquity, into a wretched, modern housing estate, hemmed in, behind barbed wire, encircled by high walls, delimited, parcelled up, turned into a prison, and the farther I went — I was descending that sunken path that tumbles down from the heights of the Vomero to Posilippo, following the traces of the old mule-track, and which was but yesterday a place of reverie, where lovers, so the great poets tell us, wandered and thought the world well lost, and which was now, fifteen years after my father had this absurd idea of building a housing estate in such a place of silence and meditation, all rutted by the incessant traffic of the contractors who brought up building materials and took down their rubbish (in places, it still smelled of basil, pine resin, rosemary and the rich odour of trampled dung, and not exclusively of petrol and fuel oil, for it was not yet the epoch of intensive mechanization and row upon row of ferro-concrete buildings, which was soon to follow, in the name of progress!) — and the farther I descended the steep slope, the more the number of gates multiplied, and the walls rose up surrounding smaller and yet smaller gardens, trim, well-raked, full of ornamental potted plants, exotic arborescent shrubs, a pond, an idiotic jet of water, goldfish, rustic charm
de luxe,
a thatched English cottage, a Bavarian villa, a portable American bungalow (already the urbanists were making their shoddy imitations!), the whole thing without rhyme or reason, and the closer I approached to Posilippo, the more I became aware that such a negligible personage as myself, a tattered fugitive, a vagabond, would never succeed in making his way in there and finding solitude, not even a corner to lie down and rest in, and the farther I went the more I laughed at myself and the more I cursed my father, for I saw myself advancing in reverse, as if in a mirror.

Now, the man who curses his father is a devil.

St Cassien's condemnation is categorical. It is also the opinion of the desert Fathers and the first article of faith in theology.

It is the sin of Lucifer.

Pride.

I went on, watching myself as if in a mirror, paying n,o heed to the little outlets running down to the sea, in the shape of a conch shell formed by the coasts of Sorrento, Vesuvius and Ischia at the entrance to the incomparable gulf, where the isle of Capri, afloat in a dazzling mist, hovers like a rosy flamingo hesitating to settle on the blue waters. But everybody knows that view, it has been printed on millions of postcards. I saw myself advancing, as if in a mirror, allowing nothing, not even the grandiose but hackneyed landscape, to distract or absorb my attention, and I was laughing at myself and wondering who I was and what I was doing in the world. I was laughing and I felt like committing suicide. What was the point of living?

The world is a formidable and complex place. It is made up of poor samples of our fellow-beings, of widespread doctrines held in common, generalized and contagious ideologies, persuasions of all kinds against which each individual must battle continuously. Yet how can the heart of man be a battlefield ? Why these intimate and inevitable contradictions which exist in us, which
are,
indeed, ourselves? Is this our primitive condition, or is it to be explained by some initial catastrophe, a downfall, a hidden drama in the origin of our species? Is man insane by nature, or is it the toil, the bread that he must earn by the sweat of his brow, that makes him insane? Is he an energumen, possessed by spirits? A fanatic? A melancholic?

According to Cassien, all beings, apart from God, are necessarily composed, if not of form and matter, at least of essence and existence, potentiality and present action, substance and accidents. God is the unique principle, and everything, without exception, draws its existence, and even possibility of existence, from Him. Only God is perfectly 'simple', compounded of nothing but 'pure spirit', and, as Thomas Aquinas was to say,
pure action.
All other beings need a support for their existence, and this support can only be corporeal matter, more or less tenuous. We call the most tenuous matter spirit:
spiritus.
This word means: wind, or air in motion. Therefore, our soul must be
a kind of air,
certainly not the same as the air we breathe, but far more rarefied still. And the angels, good or bad, must also be
intelligent forces
united to an air that is even more tenuous than the air which constitutes our souls, or at any rate much more intangible than our bodies. . . .

Let us not be too hasty in dismissing this doctrine as childish. The ancients lacked terms of comparison between spiritual energy and physical energy. And do we really know what matter is, and in what way it differs from spirit?

... So God created, long before the beginning of our terrestrial world, spiritual forces. It follows that the angels must have been created since all eternity. The creation of the angels preceded the creation of the human race. It was through their error (the sin of pride) that the devils fell from the rank they occupied in the hierarchy of spirits. . . .

And Abbe Cassien declares: 'Certainly, the law which ordains that we shall eat by the sweat of our brow is a spiritual law, referring
not to that material bread which the rich obtain without any effort on their part
, but that bread which fell from the heavens and which all of us, rich or poor, can acquire only through great efforts. But although this law is spiritual, we ourselves are carnal, since we are "sold into sin" as David says in Palm 51 : "I am flesh, sold into sin!'"

And the great mystic-materialist declares: 'We are right to say that spiritual natures exist, for it is true: there are the angels, archangels and other celestial beings, also our souls and that rarefied air that surrounds us, but we must not imagine that they are incorporeal. They have a body through which they live, although it is much more tenuous than our bodies, as witness the words of the Apostle: "There are celestial bodies and terrestrial bodies." And this : "He is born man and reborn spirit." '

The old dialectician poses the question : 'I ask you, what is it that the soul has in common with the spirits of evil, so closely and so intimately that they can become united as one? For the evil spirits speak to the soul in an imperceptible manner, gliding into its bosom, inspiring it to do whatever they will, inciting it to whatever act they choose, seeing and knowing in detail every thought and every movement. And such is the closeness that exists between the evil spirits and our souls that it is almost impossible, without the grace of God, to distinguish between the evil to which they incite us and that which we commit of our own volition.'

The demonology of beasts, what a revelation for someone like myself, who responds to the call of the virgin forest and who, with the inhuman and unfeeling eye of the camera (which is nevertheless able to record and capture everything, on any scale, by virtue of its graduated lens), has been able to take by surprise savage animals that had never yet smelled a man. The great ant-eater of Brazil, the
tamandu bandeira
or standard-bearer, for example, is a devil such as Brueghel the Elder would not have dared imagine, and the duckbilled platypus of Tasmania is another, a ridiculous creature, dumb with amazement before the egg which it has just laid and which it will breast-feed. But what the devil can they be plotting in their bewildering solitude, in the farthest depths of the jungle, or in the frightful, broiling deserts where those two fiends gasp for breath? And what is one to make of a third villain, that poor devil of a three-toed sloth from the Amazon, which has the imploring eyes of a Mary Magdalen and her mop of hair dangling in its eyes, and hangs head down, clinging on with all four paws to the top of a tree, and lets itself be eaten alive by parasites rather than move one paw and scratch itself (and also out of the goodness of its heart), an,d eats the leaves within reach of its chops, to right and left of its head, but will die of hunger rather than make a movement or change to another branch — to whom does it correspond in Cassien's classification?