A prose text of mine, from The Butterfly Cemetery. Selected Prose (2008-2021), translated from the Italian by John Taylor, The Bitter Oleander Press, Fayetteville (NY), 2022. In Italian this prose text appeared in L’Ulisse: Poetiche per il XXI secolo,n. 18, 2015.
Sea, train
A birthplace covered with rubble. The earth doesn’t breathe. It should be the place of an escape. I live there with train schedules in my wallet, between coming and going, and wrenching away, which make you feel how hard a chain is, how well a hook resists. I’ve lived for many years with my eyes closed, as in a childhood game, leaving the door wide open to the other world, touching a handle like a knife, a wall like a face, while others brush up against you, sting you, breathing on your mouth, moving off, then with a leap shaking you and asking who am I who am I. I close my eyes. I open them. I let the rhythm of my footsteps carry me. This is how I head to the sea.
I’m going to flow into the stretch of beach next to the Arzilla stream. Here the Adriatic turns back into a prehistoric lake. Contained by breakwaters, the sea comes in, outlining coves that follow each other in soft sandy basins between Fano and Pesaro. Between the rocks, bright woods rise up like signals for the train passengers coming down from the north and watching over this stretch of sea, the first one to open up after the great plain and the specters of towns chasing each other among the fields, the suburbs, the shapes of factories and shopping malls. I don’t know if these boles have been planted by human hands, as landmarks for fishermen, or by shy strollers in winter, or if they have been raised, instead, by violent waves that have ended up finding a notch, a point of equilibrium, and erected these smoothed stakes like the bones of a large mammal dismembered by the sea. They are monuments of the desert that begins beyond the summer, columns of openness.
There has never been a train that I have taken back up the peninsula without my gazing at this stretch of sea. The distance is covered in ten minutes, from one station to other one, a respite that allows me to sense what is happening, much more than by reading a newspaper. It’s like looking into the eyes of those we have loved, in the interval of time that opens before the farewell: how he is, what is moving across his forehead, what tracks it is leaving. How the sea is breathing today, how many people are touching it by running, how many by walking, in pairs, alone, with a dog at their side. Things you should know every morning.
Just outside of Fano, the beach closes up into a narrow corridor between the line of the rocks and that of the railway. It is a rocky path covered by debris washed up by the coastal storms and passing trains. There is a last remote area made up of brushwood and conduits open like short tunnels. Here at least two lives have obeyed the call and climbed the pebbly bank, amid the electric tremor that runs through the wires before the train arrives. If one drives along this stretch of the Adriatic, one barely makes out, among the bushes, the white gravestones against the fence. At the confines of summer, the low tide brings a few patient clam gatherers: with a stick and a bag they move slowly across the sea bed; every now and then they bend down, caressing the sand, as if turning down a bed sheet.
Photo by Veronica Ujcich