Fog, and: History of the Language

Fog, and: History of the Language Fabio Pusterla (bio) Translated by Will Schutt (bio) Fog Now that my friends have gone the house seems empty, silent. ________ Outside, the fog closes in, a mountain fog, a cold, low-slung, humid blanket pressed against the ground. Though you can’t see them, you can sense behind it, above it, back of it, the presence of valleys and peaks — which turn almost threatening at a moment’s notice — there where the eyes can’t get at, the invisible territory somehow reached by gusts of wind, passing clouds, thunderclaps, and most of all the wild, violent, savage waters. This too is a mountain: a life of hardship at the mercy of the elements. A little way off, in my neighbors’ house, a woman is recovering after the death of her father and the unexpected behavior of her sisters, who two hours after began to wrangle over their inheritance. “There’s an element of the patriarchal,” she says, on the verge of tears, “that erupts from generation to generation.” A form of violence in their family, greed that must have been traits of her father and ancestors, which had now resurfaced in two of the three sisters and shocked the third, who is helpless, immune, rattled by her grief and the grief denied her, by the sadness she can’t fully [End Page 375] inhabit because the room for her sadness is filled with their wish to take ownership. For no apparent reason, I recall a poem by Sereni, “Interview with a Suicide,” the extremity of its final disavowals (“nothing no one in no place never”), which seems, in this country — lovely one moment and the next darkened by bad weather and dreadful thoughts — even more comprehensible, even more appalling and true. ________ The bad weather animals: the rook, the crow, the snail, the hundred groggy flies. The black salamander limp on the wet stone outside my house; its small, vertiginous, watery eye. ________ And now a nanny goat, bleating in the nearby field. A small mountain goat — spotted, agile, and quick. There are twelve of them in the paddock, but only one has no horns. They may have been cut to keep her from injuring the others, or because she was jumpy or excitable. She was the one, a few days ago, wandering around in a daze outside the fence. She must have leaped over it. Not without a struggle, I lifted her up and put her back. As I held her in my arms, she kept kicking me in the stomach, but it didn’t hurt me much. Is she eyeing me now as I approach the small flock? And if she really does recognize me, what does she think, if she thinks anything, of my act that was meant to be merciful? [End Page 376] ________ I’m doing, you see, what I usually prohibit myself from doing: writing freely, following no logic, letting the words emerge on their own, almost free, almost beyond my control. Dangerous game, vain maybe, which the fog itself, occluding things, invites me to play. It’s a way to summon what is absent, or, more likely, deceive yourself. ________ Two eagles above a field of marmots, a few days ago, their disquieting, ominous circling. The “terrible world of birds,” as a line of Homer has it; but on another occasion, a titmouse (if it was a titmouse) with a broken wing, hopping away in the pastures, across clumps of succulents, terrorized. Impossible to help it. Maybe the most compassionate thing would have been to kill it immediately. But how do you do that? ________ A clearing in the clouds is enough to change everything, a bit of light to color the world. Enough, is it? [End Page 377] History of the Language1 To Patrizia In Chiasso, in a ho-humcourtyard at the closeof the fifties, childrenmake a game of scalingthe fences to beat rugs —a puff of metal and grass.Eternal, the afternoon. Relentless,the sheep-in-clouds sky.Relentless, the games.They climb up and hooktheir knees over the crossbeam,hanging head down, arms dangling,and in their...