Ferreira Gullar, Architect

Portugal and Brazil share the same language, but the scarcity of Brazilian books in our bookstores make the two seem like strangers to each other. I don’t have the ability to assess the popularity of Portuguese writers on the other side of the Atlantic, but I hope it doesn’t mirror what happens here. Putting aside the classical Machado de Assis, the perennially popular Jorge Amado, and the mediocre self-help guru Paulo Coelho, Brazilian literature has trouble finding room in our market. As it tends to happen, prestigious awards, namely the Camões Prize, can make the difference between a writer being discovered or remaining in obscurity. Even though this award tendentiously goes mainly to Portugal and Brazil, as if no other country wrote Portuguese-language literature, thanks to it the books of João Ubaldo Ribeiro and Rubem Fonseca are in our bookstores. Thanks to it I managed to read a book by Ferreira Gullar.

Ferreira Gullar (b. 1930) is a poet, essayist, playwright, and short-story writer. Some will argue he’s the greatest living Brazilian poet, in competition with Manoel de Barros (b. 1916). In 2010 Gullar received the Camões Prize. Since then his work has gained wider visibility in Portugal, with recent releases including Em Alguma Parte Alguma (2010), his latest poetry book, Rabo de foguete - Os anos de exílio (1998), his memoirs of the years in exile, during Brazil’s military dictatorship, and Poema Sujo (1976), his most important poem, exactly written during this exile. Gullar is a poet, then, but today I’m writing about his short-story collection, Cidades Inventadas.

A rare incursion into prose and narrative, Cidades Inventadas (Invented Cities) collects stories about fabulous cities that never existed; Gullar wrote the first story in 1955 and continued to add more stories, each named after a different city, for more than forty years until the book came out in 1997. Similar to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, these stories lack the unifying frame narrative but they’re every bit as fascinating and wondrous.

If there’s something holding the stories together, we could say it’s a theme: the apocalypse of cities, as centres of life and culture. As a whole, the book is an imaginative exercise and a satire about modernity but also the strange predictability of human history. The book’s main thesis is that, no matter how we organize ourselves, we’re fated to disappear. A civilization, it matters not the geographical location, the history, the technological feats, is always at the mercy of Nature, of human barbarism, and of progress which contains in itself, many times, its own destruction. The stories have a cold, analytical tone, of someone narrating distant events. Only one of the stories is narrated in the first person.

The first story, “Odon,” establishes this theme; here we see a city brought low by Nature. “Odon is a collection of old houses in the middle of a desert – the Uz desert. A primary school reading book, adopted some fifty years ago in city’s schools, described it thus: ‘Odon, our progressive city, is on the fertile valley of Uz, on the margin of Gôni.’ In truth this description hadn’t corresponded to reality in, maybe, two, three centuries. The reading manuals today speak differently: ‘Odon, our beloved city, is in the desert of Uz, where once upon a time there was a fertile valley’”

Odon subsisted on its agriculture, and worshipped the tobacco god, Igork, a very profitable crop. But with time the cult of Igork dwindled. Then there was a cataclysm that turned the valley into a desert; some interpreted the catastrophe as Igork’s punishment. Be as it may, the fact is that Nature, in the past the city’s main source of income, turned against it unexpectedly, overnight, leaving it a decrepit city, never to flourish again. This is the power of Nature and the fragility of all human endeavours.

Gullar explains, in the introduction, that the first story was about the past and he decided to write a second one about the future. That is “Ufu,” also the name of a marvellous city, a masterpiece of science and technology, “the vastest city ever built by man, and it continues to grow.” But this miracle of progress contains a threat as dangerous as Nature: oblivion.

Ufu has a history, even if its citizens don’t remember it, being so absorbed in their current life. In some point in the city there’s a building where the Museum of Ufu functions. It’s true that, given the city’s growth, the museum’s services are almost fully devoted to the impossible task of recording its frantic present: electronic devices work tirelessly photographing new documents, computing data and searching for an order capable of keeping the material vestiges of History, which flies feverishly towards forgetfulness. But, in some corner of the museum, one may find a picture of Ufu, when it was a city with just one million inhabitants, fifty years ago – which in Ufu is the same as a very remote time. Some older documents will reveal that the city isn’t even two centuries old and that, underneath the first house, there was just material ground, without myth and memory.

Ufo grows at such a breakneck pace it no longer has history, and its limits expand, without an end in sight. “The closest cities were absorbed by Ufu, they became its suburbs.” Cultivation fields were turned into roads. Distant cities were “murdered by Ufu, which turned them into gigantic farms for the production of cereals, oxen and sheep, eggs and fowl, which it consumed voraciously.” This development is only sustained thanks to the “extermination of the country’s other cities, whose inhabitants flee to Ufu.” This manic growth is a threat that endangers mankind itself, a city that seems to have developed an internal logic of its own, self-aware, following an order its citizens no longer understand or control.  Ufu consumes the resources of other cities and then transforms them into objects the inhabitants “didn’t even think existed or let alone thought they needed.” So it marches on, Ufu, absorbing the world around it, replacing everything, like a consumerist version of Jorge Luis Borges’ Tlön. This is the main axis of the book – Nature and technology/barbarism – and the stories follow one after another with several variations. For instance, the city of Alminta is defeated by “wild grass, rats and bats” after a slave revolt leaves the city ransacked. In “Iscúmbria” (similar to escombros, or debris), a whole city is destroyed as an act of punishment.

The story “Texclx” is a metaphor of the Inca people, or of pre-Columbian civilizations, also decimated by conquerors who “crossed the unknown ocean.” Texclx, like the aforementioned Ufu, is a city that swallows other cities, conquering people, sacrificing them to its gods, until the Europeans arrive and obliterate it. Power is a relative thing in the relationships between peoples and civilizations. A more stringent metaphor about South America’s history is “Fraternópolis,” a satire of USA. Fraternópolis (the city of fraternity?) is an “economic power that, backed by internal development, turned the neighbouring cities into markets for its goods and, at the same time, suppliers of raw matter for its industries. They sold it, at a low price, iron ore, copper, bauxite and oil, and bought from it manufactured goods, at high prices. That way Fraternópolis grew richer while its neighbours grew poorer.” This is basically the history of USA/Latin American relationships, only leaving out the coups and dictators orchestrated and supported by the United States over the decades. It’s worth mentioning once more that Gullar himself had to run into exile from the military dictatorship that counted with the USA’s support. Fraternópolis even has a governor, whose motto is that inequality is the engine of economy, named Rigã, a name whose likeness to a former American president’s requires, I think, no explanations. Many of the cities are victims of the ‘miracle of progress’ which, like destiny, is flexible. Progress can be a blessing or bring new difficulties and challenges a society is not prepared to respond to.

Besides the dangers of progress and technology, another constant threat to cities is Nature and geography, like in the case of Aldrova, home to blacksmiths. “In the glassy and metallic soil, where bushes grew like wires, and flowers had dust for pollen, in the shadow of the dark mountain range, iron through and through, raised up to the clouds like a wall, and down there, in a vast crater, they placed the city, whipped by rays during the storms.” This city also ends up destroyed ands people are made nomads, to wander the desert. Another city ruined by Nature, that scourge, is Minofagasta, which subsists for centuries on whale fishing, until this huge mammal suddenly disappears from its waters. Later, a plague of pelicans, who cover everything in shit, becomes an opportunity to grow rich again when the citizens discover they can extract sodium nitrate from the droppings, a valuable substance they start exporting. But after science discovers a cheaper process to synthesise it, the city enters in economic collapse again.

From reading these stories ones gets the frightening impression that cities exist, are created, to dominate, that that is their only purpose and destiny. Building cities, laying down roots, conquering the fertile soil, and then the neighbours, or to destroyed by nature, external enemies, or its own hubris. Perhaps, we could say, the city exists exactly to be destroyed, that violence is inescapable. One city, Bela (a pun, bela means beautiful in Portuguese but also sounds like the Latin bellum, war), is famous for worshipping war and violence, like ancient Sparta. Ironically, Wen-Fen, besieged by Genghis Khan himself, of all conquerors, is one of the book’s few surviving cities.

Another danger to cities, after nature and technology, is the utopian ideals of its rulers. One of my favourite stories is “Adrixerlinus,” whose government tries to create a city according to the principles of “objectivity, rationality and pragmatism.” Poets, homeless and bachelors are expelled from inside its walls to go live in nearby camps. Similar to Plato’s idealized city, Adrixerlinus becomes an unbearable place to live in and the citizens risk their lives trying to flee it to the join the merrier, more interesting camps with the poets. “Perhaps the mistake,” concludes the narrator, “is in projecting cities instead of letting them be born spontaneously,” and I think we can see here a criticism to urban planners like Le Corbusier, father or modern architecture, inventor of suburbs and chiefly responsible for so many of our modern urban problems, as well as his acolytes, like Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, who planned and built from scratch Brazil’s capital, Brasília, a city reputedly unliveable. Maybe the problem is that these urban centres, instead of growing along the lines of rituals, traditions and the normal necessities of their inhabitants, are planned by architects and urban planners who see only theory, thereby uprooting people from invisible orders that ground their existence in a place they call home.

Other stories are less critical of modern problems. I love for instance “Rti,” the tale of an underground miniature city discovered by an Englishman in India, in 1630. This explorer, one Georges Sams, finds a city whose inhabitants would be four centimeters tall, but were obliterated by some war. However subsequent expeditions fail to find traces of Rti, leading some to believe that Sams’ Rti and the underground civilization is an elaborate hoax, which, nevertheless, inspired future writers like “Swift, Jorge Gorbes, Dub Sert, Wells and Llagur, amongst others.” Gorbes is Borges, of course, and Llagur is Gullar. I’m still trying to identify Dub Sert, it has to be someone!

Another made-up book that relates the existence of a city, Vat Phan, is Storia di cittatti immaginari, written in the 3^rd century but published only in 1702. Its author, the Italian Giuseppe Spudorato, may be a nod to Calvino himself. If these fictional books make the reader automatically think of Borges, I should add most stories are accompanied by end notes that refer to more fictional books, historical dates and cultural information about the cities. Even Peruvian poet César Vallejo is credited with having written Canciones y leyendas del pueblo Siian, a work of reference about Vat Phan. “Aldrova” also has another possible nod to Calvino, when a legend is related about an armour and helmet forged in Aldrova that could move by themselves, without a man inside it, much like the armour in The Non-Existing Knight. Cidades Inventadas would certainly not be out of place in the library of lovers of Borges and Calvino.

This is a small book full of big ideas, very well written, that speaks about modernity and its most pressing questions – dehumanization, globalization, war, barbarism, scientism, the cost of progress itself. Furthermore it’s a remarkable compendium of all the possible ways of destroying a city. One gets the impression the whole of human history is contained in its 130 pages. Not even the atomic bomb fails to make an appearance, as shown in “Mori,” a reflection of Hiroshima. Strangely enough this is one of the most upbeat stories, with due irony, because of the city’s magnificent rise from the ashes. After a fantastic description of the explosion, the narrator says:

But Mori didn’t die. The survivors returned, later, to the city to rebuild it and make it into a centre of peace and culture. Mori today is a tourist attraction centre, where people go to scare themselves with the products of man’s new destructive power: stones that grew wrinkles, steel sheets than turned into lace, bones melted like wax, human skin that strangely unglued itself from the body. In the city’s suburbs, tourists can also admire some specimen of fishes that turned into birds and that now live perched on trees.

I wrote above that forgetfulness was as much a danger as war and nature. This story shows why: from peace centre to tourist attraction, tragedy turned into grotesque entertainment, what do people learn and retain?

Some Carlos Drummond

Things were different with Carlos Drummond. I’ve read him in three big volumes, collecting most of his poetry from Brejo das Almas (1934) to Farewell (1996). Carlos Drummond de Andrade was born in 1902 and died in 1987. Like João Cabral de Melo Neto he is considered one of the greatest and most influential Brazilian poets of the 20^th centry. An important Modernist, if he had written in English he would be as worldwide famous as TS Eliot, Robert Frost, W.B. Yeats or Wallace Stevens.

It’s important to stress that I didn’t care about a lot of the poems comprising the 1360 or so pages of the collection. I particularly liked his earlier poems but think he became more predictable, and too repetitive, with the passing years. Some poets produce poem after poem that leaves me dazzled – Fernando Pessoa, Wislawa Szymborska, Adam Zagajewski, to name just a few. Then there are a few where I have to work hard to squeeze an interesting handful from the vastness of their work. Some, perhaps most, poets just have a few very good poems in them – everything else is a variation of previous successes.

I don’t want to write at length about Drummond’s poetry because a) I don’t presume to know enough about it and b) because I prefer to let his poetry speak for itself. The way I understand it, Drummond was the poet of the bittersweet feeling, of self-deprecation; his tone is melancholy and ironic. His frequent topics include love, friendship, Brazil, loneliness, existentialism.

JOSÉ

What now, José?
The party’s over,
the light’s out,
the people are gone,
the night’s cooler,
what now, José?
what now, You?

you without a name,

mocking others,

you making verses,

loving, protesting?

what now, José?

You’re womanless,

you’re speechless,

you’re tenderless,

you can no longer drink

you can no longer smoke,

spit you no longer can,

the night’s cooler,

the bus didn’t show up,

laughter didn’t show up,

utopia didn’t show up

and everything ended

and everything fled

and everything withered,

what now, José?

What now, José?

your sweet Word,

your moment of fever,

your gluttony and fast,

your library,

your golden harvest,

your glass suit,

your incoherence,

your hatred, - what now?

With key in hand

you want to open the door,

there is no door;

want to die in the sea,

but the sea has dried;

want to go to Minas,

Minas no longer exists.

José, what now?

If you screamed,

if you moaned,

if you touched,

the Vienna waltz,

if you slept,

if you married,

if you died…

But you won’t die,

you’re tough, José!

Alone in the dark

like a wild thing,

no theogony,

no naked wall

to lean against,

no black horse

to flee the trotting,

you march, José!

José, where to?

This was one of the earliest poems (1942) I speak of that immediately carved its own space in my memory. There’s a mixture of sadness but also humour about this poet’s moment of reflection, this evaluating of where his life stands, that reminds me of the similar poems one of my favourite Portuguese poets, Alexandre O’Neill, would write during the ‘50s and ‘60s. The imagined José, perhaps the poet’s alter ego, suffers so much misery it veers on the absurd. I like how his generic problems – no women, no friends, no bus – are interspersed with more ambitious problems, the failed utopia, his inability to make verses; the lack of a theogony is especially delightful, the uprooting is total. Is there a poem more pathetic, in the strict meaning of the word?

LOVE BALLAD THROUGH THE AGES

I love you, you love me

Since times immemorial.

I was Greek, you Trojan,

Trojan but not Helen.

I left the wooden horse

To kill your brother.

I killed, we fought, died.

I turned Roman soldier,

Persecutor of Christians,

In the catacomb’s cave,

I found you again.

But when I saw you naked

Lying in the circus’ sand

And the lion coming,

I jumped desperately

And the lion ate us both.

Then I was a Moorish pirate,

The scourge of Tripoli.

I torched the frigate

Where you hid

From the fury of my vessel.

But when I was going to grab

And make you my slave,

You made the sign of the cross

And slashed your chest with the dagger…

I killed myself too.

Then (more pleasant times)

I was a Versailles courtesan,

Witty and debauched.

You had to be a nun…

I jumped the convent wall

But political complications

Took us to the guillotine.

Today I’m a modern boy,

I row, jump, dance, box,

I have money in the bank.

You’re a notable blonde,

You box, dance, jump, row.

But your dad doesn’t like it,

But after a thousand travails,

I, Paramount hero,

Hug and kiss you and we marry.

Drummond is a storyteller. His poems have a story, a narrative. Unlike João Cabral de Melo Neto, who develops an abstract concept, Drummond tells a situation involving characters, José, the timeless lovers here. Melo Neto is philosophical, concerned with the external world – architecture, time, etc – Drummond, with the interior; the I shows up a lot more in his poems. Also, the humour is a main part of his style: tragic love turns into film love, from Homer to Hollywood in a poem’s span.

LITTLE SONNET OF THE FAKE FERNANDO PESSOA

Where I was born, I died.

Where I died, I exist.

And of the skins I wear

many exist I never saw.

Without me as without you

I can last. I give up

everything mixed up

and that I hated or felt.

Neither Faust nor Mephisto,

to the goddess laughing

at our chatting,

here’s me saying: I live

beyond, nothing, here,

but I’m not me, nor this.

It’s a rite of passage in Portuguese-language poetry, a poet has to write a poem about Fernando Pessoa sooner or later. Perhaps one day I should post all the ones I know. It’s a futile exercise, I mean the poets writing about him not my hypothetical post; Pessoa was the best poet about Pessoa. The fun about the others is seeing from what angle they pick up Pessoa, and how much you’re aware of the in-jokes. For instance, here my attention is taken up by the verse about Faust and Mephisto. Frustrated Pessoa was writing against many geniuses, Luís de Camões, William Shakespeare, and Goethe. So much so that he tried to write his own Faust. This is just Drummond flaunting his knowledge of the poet’s life, and now I’m doing the same. I like the minimalist feeling of the first verse, shades of Alberto Caeiro, a heteronym short on biographical details. The goddess reference may be just a shout-out to Ricardo Reis’ paganism, although the last verses are the opposite of his stoic philosophy; he’d say he lives here and nothing beyond. Perhaps it’s no longer about Reis but Pessoa’s own obscurity in life and posthumous discovery. Everything is symbol. Thinking about it, I think Fernando Pessoa is just the poet Carlos Drummond would like: ironic, self-deprecating, pessimistic, confessional. So far I’ve written about two very different poets, Drummond and Melo Neto. Next time we’ll continue with a poet too, but we’ll try his short-stories instead: Ferreira Gullar.

A needle instant with João Cabral de Melo Neto

I know next to nothing about Brazilian poetry. To date I’ve only read the poems of Carlos Drummond and João Cabral de Melo Neto. Today I’m writing about the latter.

João Cabral de Melo Neto was born in 1920 and in 1990 received the Camões Prize, the highest literary honour in the Portuguese language. By the time he died in 1999 he was considered one of the greatest and most influential Brazilian poets, but since I don’t know anything about Brazilian poetry, that’s meaningless to me. The only book I’ve read is A Educação Pela Pedra (which gives the name to the English-language anthology Education by Stone, translated by Richard Zenith). Although I don’t think it’s a strong book, it contains a handful of poems that I find very well constructed:

Weaving the morning:

A rooster alone doesn’t weave a morning:

he’ll always need other roosters.

Of a rooster to catch that scream he

and throw it to another; of another rooster

that catches the scream a rooster before

and throws it at another one; and other roosters

that with many other roosters cross

the sun strands from their rooster screams,

so that the morning, from a weak web,

weaves itself, between all roosters.

2

And gaining a body, amongst all,

rising as a tent, where all fit,

amusing itself for all, in the awning

(the morning) that soars free of frames.

The morning, awning of so ethereal a fabric

that, woven, lifts itself up: balloon light.

This is a poem that, purely from an architectural sense, is impressive. The first part is built on the repetition of the word rooster, its own form of weaving the verses together. The first part also treats morning like a physical object, and the second one just runs with this metaphor, before returning to its lightlessness in the final image: balloon light is a startling and amusing mental image, the idea that light just goes up like a balloon.

I also like the way he omits two verbs in verses three and five, because the reader can guess what they’d be anyway. This poem’s translation caused some difficulties because it’s extremely alliterative. Rooster and scream, or galo and grito, are highly unlikely to maintain unless with distant substitutes (roar, perhaps?, although a roaring rooster is even more bizarre than a screaming one.) I fared better with the two last verses of the first section. Originally I wrote tenuous web (from teia tênue), but then realized I could keep alliteration with web and weaving using a near synonym. In the second part, the t sound is dominant but I had more difficulties there, particularly because all (todos), awning (toldo), fabric (tecido), and woven (also tecido) don’t have the adequate replacements in English. Especially lost is the wordplay between tecido, in the sense of fabric, and the past participle of the verb tecer, to weave.

I think, however, that the translation maintains the strong images that make it so poignant. Here’s another poem that shows an ordinary concept from a new perspective:

Fable of an architect

Architecture as building doors,

for opening; or as building the open;

building, not as isolating and holding,

nor building as closing secrets;

building open doors, in doors;

house exclusively doors and ceiling.

The architect: the one who opens for man

(everything would heal with open houses)

doors through-where, never doors-against:

through where, free: air light true reason.

2

Until, so many free ones scaring him,

he abdicated to living in the clear and open.

Wherever openings, he started walling up

closing opaques; wherever glass, concrete;

until reclosing man: in the uterus chapel,

with matrix comforts, again foetus.

Clearly Melo Neto loves repetition. Here he keeps repeating door and open, and then he contrasts the first part’s sense of openness with the claustrophobic second one. It’s more basic than in the first poem, but I love how instead of expanding the theme he makes a 180 degree turn. This poem doesn’t make use of alliteration like the other one, but also has unusual images for the mind to take in. I particularly love house exclusively doors and ceiling. Like a penrose triangle or an Escher painting, it’s something hard to imagine in physical terms. I also like the general idea of turning architecture on its head, making it about ‘building the open’ instead of building walls, architecture as freedom and not enclosing. Also, uterus chapel, what are the chances of anyone actually using this in a normal conversation?

Inhabiting time

So as not to kill time, he imagined:

Living it while it happens, live;

In the very fine instant it happens in,

On the needle’s tip and thus accessible;

Living his time: to go living

In a literal desert, or of porches;

In nowheres, so as not to distract from living

The needle of a single instant, fully.

Fully: living it from inside it;

Inhabiting it, in the needle of each instant,

In each needle instant: and inhabiting in it

Everything inhabiting gives in to the inhabitant.

2

And coming back from inhabiting his time:

He runs empty, that live time;

And since beyond empty, transparent,

The instant to inhabit flows invisible.

Therefore: in order not to kill it, to kill it;

To kill time, filling it with things;

Instead of the desert, living in the streets

Where people fill him and kill him;

For as time passes transparent

And only gains body and colour with its inside

(what didn’t pass from what passed it),

To inhabit it: only in the past, dead.

Melo Neto’s poems are labyrinthine and his arguments torturous. His poems are really traps to ensnare the reader. And the way he puts words together: needle instant, who would have thought of that? But poetically it’s so just. It’s curious, I was going to write a single post on Melo Neto and Drummond. It was going to be about how I dislike Melo Neto and loved Drummond. But after re-reading some of the book’s poems I realised they were better and stronger than I imagined them. Perhaps I should continue to read him.

Carlos Drummond is coming next.

De Luca Versus Italian History

The history of Italian detective fiction is no doubt very interesting, and different than the traditional conventions and outcomes of the genre. I think it has to do with the country’s turbulent history in the 20^th century. The uncovering of the Mafia, the Fascist era, the post-war purges, the recrudescence of neo-fascism and its infiltration in national institutions, the explosive period known as the years of lead, the infamous Operation Gladio – NATO’s secret plan to halt communism in Europe – the connections between organised crime and government. Italy is a corrupt, secretive society with wounds still open dating back to many generations, but at the same a society that forgets quickly. Italian detective fiction therefore acts not is not just escapist fiction but often as a form of memory, a repository of the country’s seediest episodes.

Although I wish this were the introduction to my latest review of a Leonardo Sciascia novel, today I’m writing about Carlo Lucarelli and his Commissioner De Luca trilogy. Published between 1990 and 1996, the trilogy follows the travails of an honest, diligent, objective policeman from the final years of World War II to the landmark general elections of 1948.

My edition, an Italian collection of the three volumes, is barely longer than 300 pages. It can safely be said that the first two books – Carte Blanche and The Damned Season – are but novellas, Via delle Oche being the only one long enough to constitute a novel, barely. None of these books does a disservice to the genre. They’re gripping reads, even if pared down to the point one thinks they could have been better developed. This wasn’t the first time I had read Lucarelli. A few years ago I read his Almost Blue, another detective novel, about a woman detective and a young blind man searching for a serial killer in Bologna. I barely understood it so it’s meaningless to say I didn’t enjoy it, I was just learning Italian. What I have retained from it is the conviction that, had it been written in the ‘70s, filmmaker extraordinaire Dario Argento could have made a great giallo out of it. But anyway, a few years later my Italian is much better, and it was much easier to appreciate this trilogy.

Like most detectives, Commissioner De Luca is a bit bland. There are certain things he can’t help being: curious, upright, a workaholic, lacking a social life. These are the conventions, we accept them without passing judgement. Then there are the details that distinguish him from other detectives. De Luca was a venttotista, that is a man who enlisted in the force in 1928, when candidates needn’t have a degree, only pass the exams, which he did with excellent marks. In 1929 he solved the case of Filippo Matera, the Monster of Orvieto. (I googled him to know if he existed, but he appears to be an invention of Lucarelli) Mussolini himself sent him a note of commendation. De Luca was also the youngest agent to become a commissioner. Ironically the fact that he’s not a dottore is something that’s constantly being rubbed in his face in the third volume. In Carte Blanche, chronicling his final days as a cop in the Fascist regime, his colleagues show no class prejudice about his lacking a college degree. De Luca’s having joined the force during the ventennio, that is, the 20 years of the Fascist regime, is a matter that keeps coming back to haunt him. It’s not just that he was a cop during the regime, he was also a member of the Ettore Muti Brigade, a special unit of the Political Police, composed of black shirts and named after a World War I aviator and Fascist hero. This unit was responsible for torturing and killing political opponents, although De Luca vehemently repeats throughout the trilogy that he only did investigative work for there. As Carte Blanche starts, he’s been transferred back to Homicides.

It’s April 1945, De Luca is in Milan, the Northern redoubt of the Fascist regime after the Allied invasion. With his assistant, Pugliese, he investigates the murder of Rehinard Vittorio, a rich citizen and member of the Fascist Republican Party since 1944. He’s found castrated in his apartment. Preliminary investigations show that he had many connections to many influential people, for instance Sonia Tedesco, daughter of Count Tedesco, member of the Diplomatic Corps. Understandably cautious, De Luca is assured by his superiors that he will have no impediments to his investigation, since it must be shown that the law is respected in Fascist Italy.

Of course it’s not that simple. Witnesses disappear only to show up dead in SS headquarters, the Allies are bombing the city, and De Luca discovers that his name is on the list of the National Liberation Committee to be captured and tried for his complicity in Fascist crimes. On top of that, the ruling power, which promised De Luca not to interfere, is really using the investigation to get rid of some political opponents in a power struggle between factions within the party. The mystery, a bit dull and simplistic, is nowhere near as intriguing and exciting as the circumstances surrounding De Luca. Every action he makes serves only to show that he navigates in an environment hostile to the truth. The twist at the end, with its bittersweet irony, more than redeems the book’s weakest parts, and prepares the ground for part two.

In The Damned Season, De Luca is travelling in the Romagna countryside under a false alias. The Fascists have been taken down, but law and order haven’t reached all parts of Italy yet, there are still many pockets of partisans who’ve appointed themselves as the local authority and treat their villages as their own fiefdoms, free to do whatever they want, provided they don’t upset the Allies, the only power they fear. Because of his Fascist ties, De Luca is a wanted man. When a partisan confiscates his papers on the road, he thinks he’s done for. But instead the partisan, called Leonardo, takes him to the site of a mass murder, where a whole family was butchered. De Luca tries to feign indifference and amazement, but instinctively his old curiosity drives him to start asking questions, and he unmasks himself. Leonardo had recognised from the days when he had studied to join the Carabinieri. The partisan policeman is still anxious to be a real policeman one day, so he wants De Luca to help him solve the murder. Unfortunately their investigation leads them into other partisans, war heroes, local bosses, and secrets the partisans want to hide from the Allies.

The murder, again, is not very interesting: someone killed a whole family. At first they think it was to steal something, but later De Luca thinks it was to kill a specific person who had witnessed something dangerous, and he’s sure it has something to do with the execution of a local Count who cavorted with the Fascists. What makes the book interesting is the way the post-war is contrasted with the final days of the regime. And the differences aren’t many, which is what is so provocative. Although De Luca is determined to see the case through, Leonardo starts feeling conflicted when the blame starts pointing in the direction of his fellow partisans and particularly a local war hero called Carnera. The partisans are shown as an unruly and corrupted group, interested only in settling old scores and profiting from dead Fascists. People are already starting to forget the recent past and going back to post-war normalcy, rebuilding their lives and taking advantage of new opportunities. The new era already seems as corrupt as the Fascist one, and if De Luca could at least trust his colleagues in the force, he’s totally alone here.

In the final volume, Via delle Oche, it’s April 1948 and De Luca is back on the police force, seemingly rehabilitated of his past, having survived the Fascists purges. But instead of Homicide he’s put on Vice. Reunited with Pugliese, he investigates the death of a communist homosexual in a brothel that everyone wants to consider was suicide but that De Luca believes was a murder. Shortly after a photographer with communist ties shows up murdered, and De Luca tries to prove the two deaths are connected.

De Luca’s problem is that he’s perpetually in the wrong place at the wrong time. Italy is having general elections in a few days, crucial elections which will decide Italy’s role in the new Cold War world. Either is turns socialist or goes conservative. The Christian Democrats and the Communists are vying for power in post-war Italy, mounting extensive propaganda campaigns and using terrorism even. A revolution is imminent. The Americans are watching, ready to intervene should Italy go red. So when De Luca discovers a sexual scandal involving a famous conservative and a prostitute, he’s ordered to back away. “This country is in need of rebuilding and not destroying,” De Luca’s superior explains to him. But since he didn’t back away for the fascists and the partisans, he’s not going to back away for democratic Italy either. No doubt to make a contrast with the power struggle of the first novel, here De Luca is caught between a power struggle between right and left, one side wanting to hush the scandal, the other wanting to use it to discredit its political opponents in the elections.

Once again the novel ends with an ironic twist for De Luca, who continues to pay a heavy price for being the only person with convictions in the whole of Italy. Or perhaps it’s his lack of conventions that makes him so dangerous. De Luca doesn’t follow any ideology that makes him sympathetic to a specific group, which is a current theme in the trilogy. He’s concerned only with the truth. In this he’s very similar to Inspector Amerigo Rogas, from Leonardo Sciascia’s Equal Danger. I don’t think Lucarelli is as good as Sciascia, but their indignation obviously stems from the same sources that make Italian detective fiction so fascinating.

I like Italian people. I like this bastard, dirty, wonderful people.

The Skin does for Naples what Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt previously did for Europe. Only the subject changes, Malaparte continues to paint a repugnant and satirical picture of moral, physical and intellectual decay, of abject squalor and of a pervasive gloom that hindered Europe’s regeneration in World War II’s aftermath. He does it very well so I have no complaints about the formula. Malaparte clearly wrote the novel to upset readers. He sets the tone of confrontation and polemic even before the first page, when he dedicates the novel to his friends the “honest American soldiers, my companions in arms between 1943 and 1945, uselessly killed for the liberation of Europe.”

At the end of Kaputt Malaparte has arrived in Naples and is preparing to leave to the isle of Capri, where he built his house years before. The Skin finds him back in Naples, serving as a liaison officer to the American army. In the company of American soldiers he walks the streets of the city, observing the people in their heroic struggle to keep misery at bay day by day. Half novel half memoirs, and what is real and fictional isn’t clear, this book is as much a panegyric to Malaparte’s adoptive city as it is a chronicle of the Neapolitan people’s war-inflicted dehumanization. Malaparte remains ambivalent about the citizens throughout the novel, torn between praise for their resourcefulness and censure of their depravity. Malaparte’s feelings are verbalized in Colonel Jack Hamilton’s patronizing encomium. “I like Italian people. I like this bastard, dirty, wonderful people.”

Malaparte is in one of his better days when Colonel Hamilton says this, so he humours the officer. “I know, Jack, that you wish well to this poor, unhappy, wonderful people. No other people on earth have ever suffered as much as the Neapolitans have. It has suffered famine and slavery for twenty centuries, and doesn’t complain. It doesn’t speak ill of anyone, it doesn’t hate anything: not even its misery. Christ was Neapolitan.”

Malaparte is ironic and detached at times, at others very sentimental and unable to disguise his hurting at seeing his people subjugated and humiliated. “If it’s never an honour to lose a war, it was certainly a great honour, for the Neapolitans, and for all the other vanquished people of Europe, to have lost the war against soldiers so courteous, elegant, beautiful, so good and generous.”

There isn’t a plot to speak of. The novel is divided in twelve chapters, each one focusing on a theme or situation or set of characters. Most of the situations serve to illustrate the points, over and over again. Malaparte and his American friends visit Naples’ slums, observing and commenting on the squalor of the Neapolitan people, amidst digressions on European art, culture and history, and differences between America and Europe. These digressions are wholly intentional and essential; they’re there to make a powerful contrast with the pictures of misery. Naples in 1943 was, for a brief time, hell on earth. People are starving, and everything is for sale. For instance, women rent underage children to the soldiers. “Two dollars the boys, three dollars the girls!” the women shout, probably their mothers. Prostitution and human trafficking is a theme the author keeps coming back to as the lowest condition the people have sunk to. At the times the novelist gives room to the journalist with his objective recording of facts:

The prices for the girls and boys, for some weeks now, had fallen, and continued to fall. While the prices for sugar, olive oil, flour, meat, bread, had increased, and continued to go up, the price of human flesh lowered day by day. A girl between twenty and twenty-five years, who a week ago was worth up to ten dollars, now was worth only four dollars, bones included. The reason for such a drop in the price of human flesh on the Neapolitan market was due perhaps to the fact that women arrived to Naples from all parts of middle Italy.

Only the clever, wicked and resourceful succeeded in these circumstances. Everything was acceptable in order to survive, and duping American soldiers was considered fair play. A common scheme used was pushing daughters onto American soldiers and forcing an engagement, making the soldier responsible for taking care of the family and supplying it with goods. This was just another form of prostitution. A different method, for those with the courage and the means, was to steal provisions from the American army. Malaparte, jokingly or not, relates how one night an entire Liberty ship was stolen, it simply vanished from the dock, never to be seen again. Everything had value on the black market.

Malaparte observes without fierce judgments. He says with irony that he’d likely be as corrupt as his countrymen. “Who knows? If I had a boy, perhaps I’d sell him to be able to buy American cigarettes. We have to be a man of our times. When you’re vile, you must be vile all the way.”

Malaparte doesn’t overlook the intelligentsia, a class for which he had a lot of loathing. The novel Kaputt juxtaposed the horrors of the several war fronts and Jewish ghettos with parties attended by important guests, from intellectuals to high-ranking officers. Here he tries to do the same. My immediate impression is that Malaparte raised the bar too high in the previous novel when he used Mussolini’s son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, as a character, and there’s nothing in The Skin in that league. If any of the literati Malaparte lambasts is real, or a real person in disguise, I’m unaware. The sections with the literati are bizarre, and because of the unforeseeable changes of history, may be the most upsetting pages of the book nowadays. Malaparte didn’t take kindly to homosexuals and according to him the whole intellectual class was nothing but a bunch of nihilistic pederasts who took advantage of generalised underage prostitution to sate their lust. It really must be read to be fully taken in. I have no tolerance for intolerance, but in Malaparte’s defence – he was a Fascist sympathiser, it’s not like he has much of a reputation to protect – he was a Christian, with all the cultural strictness of the age. Since, however, I always try to be generous to writers, there’s a passage that I think of interest. This is Malaparte talking with Jean-Louis, one of his despised nihilists:

   “It’s always the same story, after a war. The young react to heroism, to the rhetoric of sacrifice, of heroic death, and react always in the same way. Out of disgust with heroism, with noble ideals, with heroic ideals, do you know what young men like you do? They always choose the easiest revolt, that of vileness, of moral indifference, of narcissism. They think themselves rebels, blasés, affranchis, nihilists, and are nothing but whores.”

   “You don’t have the right to call us whores,” shouted Jean-Louis, “the young deserve respect. You don’t have the right to insult them!”

   “It’s a matter of words. I met thousands like you after the other war, who thought they were Dadaists and surrealists and were nothing but whores. You’ll see, after this war, how many young men will believe to be communists. When the Allies have liberated all Europe, do you know what they’ll find? A mass of disillusioned young men, corrupted, desperate, who’ll play at pederasts as if they were playing at tennis. It’s always the same story after a war. ”

I think this is a very acute observation. The rhetoric of war always looks back to traditional values like heroism, nationalism, sacrifice, and after the war there always tends to be a backlash against its strictness. It leads to developments in the arts, like the dada and surrealism that Malaparte did not approve, and to civil rights movements, but also leads to a disenchantment with life, the feeling that life is meaningless.

To Malaparte, there’s a ‘moral plague’ hovering above Naples, against which there is no defence. In an appendix I discovered that he originally intended to name the novel The Plague, to make a connection with the ancient Greek tragedies, which use plagues to indicate moral decay or guilt over a character. This, of course, makes think of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play The Flies, which also used the plague metaphor. So we have a series of works of literature in the 1940s that had the same idea. Malaparte, however, came up with a different metaphor for his vision of decay. And, I presume, as the Christian he was, he saw the question in terms of matter versus spirit, saving one’s skin versus saving one’s soul:

“You can’t even imagine what a man is capable of, of what infamy and what heroism he’s capable of, to save his skin. This, this filthy skin, see? (And saying that I pinched the skin of the back of my hand between two fingers, and pulled it here and there.) In the past one suffered hunger, torture the most horrible sufferings, one killed and died, one suffered and made one suffer, to save the soul, to save one’s own soul and the soul of others. One was capable of every greatness and every infamy, to save the soul. Not just one’s soul but others’. Nowadays one suffers and makes one to suffer, one kills and dies, one accomplishes wonderful and horrible things, not anymore to save the soul but to save the skin. One believes to be fighting and suffering for the soul itself, but in reality one fights and suffers for the skin, only for one’s own skin. Everything else doesn’t matter. Nowadays one’s a hero for a very poor thing! Look. It’s a disgusting thing. And to think the world is full of heroes ready to sacrifice their own lives for such a similar thing!”

Before the Allies arrived in Naples, the population fought to push the German army out of Naples. Now it’s fighting just to survive:

“It’s a humiliating, horrible thing, it’s a shameful necessity, fighting to live. Only to live. Only to save one’s own skin. It’s no longer the fight against slavery, the fight for freedom, for human dignity, for honour. It’s the fight against hunger. It’s the fight for a piece of bread, for a bit of fire, for a rag with which to cover the kids, for a bit of straw on which to lay down. When men fight to live, everything, even an empty can, a cigar butt, an orange peel, a crumb of dry bread picked up from filth, a stripped bone, everything has for them an enormous value, decisive. Men are capable of any vileness to live: of every infamy, of every felony, to live. For a piece of bread any of us is ready to sell his own wife, his own daughters, to smear his own mother, to sell his brothers and friends, to prostitute himself to another man.”

Malaparte, thanks to his connection with the American army, was spared these deprivations. But what do you do when you survive the war to witness the rest of your people subjugated and humiliated? How do you cope with that? I wonder to what extent his dark humour isn’t a way of masking his shame. Perhaps The Skin is his hymn to his people as a way of making amends with his consciousness. I’m merely speculating, of course. But for whatever motives he wrote this book, it’s one of the most remarkable, gut-wrenching and heartbreaking war novels I’ve ever read.

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge.

Dino Buzzati: An Overview

When you least expect it, you discover that you’ve read more by a writer than you previously imagined. Upon finishing Dino Buzzati’s Poem Strip I started making a list of all the books I’ve read by this Italian writer, and to my surprise it’s eight already, making him one of the most repeated writers in my library. His books have been too pleasurable for me to even notice the time and effort I’ve devoted to them. Outside Italy, where he is very beloved, he’s not well known and it’s doubtable that he’ll ever gain the worldwide status he and his work deserve, even though he was championed by the likes of Jorge Luis Borges. “We can know the ancients, we can know the classics, we can know the writers of the 19^th century and the ones from the beginning of our own, which is ending already,” wrote the Argentinean master. “Far harder is knowing the contemporaries. They’re too many and time hasn’t yet revealed to us its anthology. There are, however, names that future generations will not accept to forget. One of them is, surely, the one of Dino Buzzati.”

Yes and no.

In the English-speaking world Buzzati’s fame rests mainly on his 1940 novel The Tartar Steppe, which Borges included in his list A Personal Library. Here in Portugal, a few years ago, there was a short-lived reawakening of interest in his work that resulted in a series of excellent translations. But apparently the sales weren’t very good. There hasn’t been a new translation since 2010. Although this was the period when I really delved into his work, I had already come across it a few years before at the university, when I was trying to learn Italian. The first book I read was called The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily (1945), a children’s book about a war between men and bears, and a political allegory about the abuse of power, complemented by Buzzati’s wonderfully colourful and cute pictures like this:

Tremble before the Bear King!

Next came the haunting war novel The Tartar Steppe. A young lieutenant, Giovanni Drogo, is assigned to the old Bastiani Fortress, built on the edge of the Tartar desert, which spreads for miles into the horizon until disappearing inside a thick mist. Young Drogo is disheartened because he’s full of ambition and years for action, military glory, and the proverbial heroic death on the battlefield, and yet Bastiani has never seen any action and it’s unlikely an enemy should attack from the desert’s side. Old officers, who have lived their careers in the austere fortress, try to cheer him up with: many years ago the desert had Tartar tribes, they tell, and some believe they’re still there, preparing for war. So they advise Drogo to wait, wait, wait. But perhaps the Tartars are just a fable concocted by officers and soldiers who need something to believe in, to believe that their lives, as the years go by, aren’t being pointlessly wasted. Perhaps nothing will happen in Bastiani at all, ever.

I won’t ruin anyone’s enjoyment of this brilliant novel by saying that this is basically the whole plot of the novel. Not a lot seems to happen in the novel, decades in the characters’ lives go by, and everything remains the same. There’s a constant ebbing and flowing of expectations and doubts and disappointments, and the story happens between Drogo’s dreams and disappointments. In spite of that it’s a very fascinating novel. Buzzati used the army to craft a parable about the squandering of one’s life chasing chimeras. Comparisons with Franz Kafka’s The Castle are not out of place. Whereas Kafka writes in the form of a nightmare, Buzzati writes in the tone of an exuberant elegy. What the novel lacks in action it has in intimate character moments and in pertinent observations about life. Drogo is a vivid creation: like other young officers, he wants to be stationed in the capital, to attend parties and flirt with women. Some veterans even advise him to seek transfer as quickly as possible, lest the desert exert its mysterious influence on him like it does on everyone else after a while. Drogo is confident that won’t happen, but as the years go by, he sinks deeper and deeper into an inextricable routine. The ending is as ironic as it is heartbreaking, and the reader won’t know whether to cheer of lament Drogo’s fate.

After this great novel I discovered Dino Buzzati the short-story writer. I Sette Messaggeri (1942) and Paura alla Scala (1949) are a challenge to categorise. Comedy, existential horror, magical realism, allegories, fables, science-fiction, echoes of Kafka and Edgar Allen Poe, all written in a clear, concise and objective prose that almost banalizes the supernatural in the stories, or perhaps enhances the mundane. It works either way.

In one story, a prince travels for years without ever reaching the limits of his kingdom. There are parodies of old myths: a modern-day group of hunters sets out to kill the last dragon, but all they find is a decrepit creature that can barely defend itself anymore. In another story a man finds mysterious apples in an attic and becomes enchanted by them. A little boy lies when he’s confessing his sins before first communion: when he dies he’s made to wait in dreaded anxiety of not knowing whether he’s going to Heaven or Hell. A guest insults a bizarre pet, with horrible consequences. The quality ratio is quite high for a collection of short-stories.

I read other novels. An early one, Il segreto del Bosco Vecchio (1935), by its simplicity better aimed at young readers. The novel includes anthropomorphic creatures like the talking wind and trees and animals making it a sort of allegorical fable. It’s about Benvenuto, a young boy who lives in a magical forest, and his transition from childhood into adulthood. As a work of children’s literature it’s very good.

Reading Il grande ritratto (1960) was the only time Buzzati’s writing disappointed me. It’s a science-fantasy novel about a group of scientists working on a secret experiment for the government in the middle of nowhere, namely the creation of artificial intelligence; but one of them has programmed the gigantic computer, resting atop a mountain, with his dead wife’s personality. I don’t remember a lot more save for the negative impression it left me with. Most of the novel was told in dialogue, and it all felt superficial and pointless.

So it was a pleasure to read the short-stories of Il Crollo della Baliverna (1954). As great as The Tartar Steppe may be, I believe Buzzati is a better short-story writer than novelist. The humour, the fantasy and irony work better in these small doses. Like in the two other collections, Buzzati slowly peels away the layers of reality from an ordinary object or situation to reveal its irrational and bizarre, or even macabre, side. Other stories give the fantastic an aura of normalcy that convinces the reader of the most unreal of situations. More importantly, Buzzati is such a fine raconteur the reader is inclined to believe anything he narrates.

This collection is one of his best. In the first story, during a family picnic an ordinary man decides to climb the Baliverna, a tower fragilely standing up and harbouring inside the homeless and poor families. Its precarious existence is maintained by a series of iron bolts rammed through its walls, giving it stability. When the man starts climbing the tower and using the bolts for support, he brings down the whole tower, brick by brick, crushing several people inside it. An investigation is started to ascertain responsibilities, and the culprit, hoping that no one saw him climbing but tormented by guilt, starts hallucinating that everyone can see his blame. The other tales equally show how circumstances can swiftly change and doom a man’s life or alter reality. In “The Dog Who Saw God,” a whole corrupt town is coerced to reform its immoral behaviour when a dog, belonging to a dead hermit, is believed to have seen the face of God. In his sad eyes the townspeople constantly see a moral judgment upon them, as if the dog were evaluating their souls. So people slowly change their ways. No one has the courage to kill the mutt, and when it dies no one has the courage to return to their previous vices, for that would akin to admitting that their lives, the entire town, had been changed by a dog.

In the fascinating “Meeting With Einstein,” the famous scientist is visited, still at the beginning of his career, by a mysterious figure that claims to be Death. The scientist, believing that he still has a lot to offer to Mankind, asks Death to delay the sending of his soul to the afterlife, for he’s on the brink of a great discovery. The figure grants him another month, which becomes more months, while it patiently waits for the scientist to finish his discoveries. When the young Einstein finally concludes his grand work, he discovers that the figure isn’t Death after all but a demon sent by the Devil to fool him. Einstein innocently wonders why the Devil would be interested in his scientific breakthroughs. A question for history to answer.

In “Rats,” a husband and wife slowly lose an unequal battle against the thousands of rats living underneath their house’s floorboard, until they become their slaves. The last story in the book uses science-fiction to parody religion: in “The Saucer Has Landed,” a priest receives the unexpected and disconcerting visit of an extraterrestrial saucer, containing – amazing surprise! – the inhabitants of a planet where no one ate from the Tree of Knowledge. The priest, faced with the annoying and smug perfection of these creatures, realizes he much prefers the imperfect humans to them.

Buzzati’s stories tend to converge towards an ambiguous and unsettling ending, not just because of his refusal to pass judgement on the characters but also because of the abrupt interruption of the action when it starts to reach a climax, leaving fates unresolved and inviting the reader to use his imagination to complete them. This is how his stories are, unpredictable and full of ironic humour, founded on a sharp sense of observation and a powerful creativity. I think he is his own category, but in the 20^th century there are no doubt affinities with G. K. Chesterton, Jorge Luis Borges, Giovanni Papini and Italo Calvino.

The latest book I read by him, Poem Strip (1969), shows yet another facet of this talented author: comic books. Well, it’s not really a comic book in the sense of the term as I know it. It’s half picture book half comic book. For me in a comic book the art and words are integrated into a whole. In most of the book’s pages, however, the text is separated from the words, making it more of an illustrated story. Once we get past this caveat, it’s one of his most curious books. Buzzati reinterprets the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as a pop singer, Orfi, teen idol, chasing his beloved, Eura, into the land of the dead to bring her back. Orfi, who lives in a palace that overlooks a mysterious abandoned house, one night sees a taxi stopping in front of it; Eura walks out and passes through its door:

The mysterious house is rumored to change shapes.

Orfi later learns the abandoned house is one of millions that leads into the underworld. Orfi gains access to the underworld and meets an empty coat, the current manager of the underworld:

The Coat. From the English edition.

 

The coat tries to tempt him away from his beloved, but Orfi remains loyal to his Eura:

So the coat promises to help him if he sings a song about all the things the dead miss. He sings the song and is granted twenty-four hours to leave the underworld with Eura. It’s well worth reading if only because of Buzzati’s excellent drawings – he also did the covers for his own books – and because there’s not a lot more available in English. It’s a mystery to me why Buzzati is so badly served by translations. It’s always hard to understand why some writers succeed and others don’t. Why, for instance, Italo Calvino, his contemporary but not his superior, is so well known whereas Buzzati is an oddity. I fear more than talent must be involved in these vicissitudes. Circumstances, timing and no doubt luck play a role, perhaps an even more important role than talent.