Abstract
I had been keeping Ramorra in my soul for a long time.
One day he shows up emerging from the mirror and tells me he wants a novel all for himself.
“And how would I do that?” I tell him. “A novel? It’s easier said …!”
He, Ramorra, kept scrutinizing me, and it struck me that he didn’t bat an eyelid. “Listen,” he said right off, grabbing my shoulder.
“Ehi, Ramorra, what are you saying!” I protested.
He still didn’t bat an eyelid: “I am saying let’s create a mood right away, and let it last a few seconds, like that of a sunset, a dawn. Listen.”
He looked ahead, pushed the curtain of my balcony to one side and opened. The death knell of the bells entered the room: “Listen” he repeated, “it’s all you need.” I stood there listening.
“You don’t know what the bells and the farmhouses say with those knells.” He said, “ you don’t know.”
“I see and hear” I answered “I think I know.”
“Now you do know, plots and characters and settings and costumes have nothing to do with it. Emotions are a fluid. It’s enough for it to flow between us and things. Look, here is the Santabate mountain that you know.” He pointed to it with his hand. “There, on the snaking roadway, is the Santabate mountain, notched by a few trees, taking on a thousand hues every day, with a thousand meanings every time you look back at it: joy and pain and mystery, and you just say what you feel, and that’s it.”
“But?” I asked him in a daze.
“Well, listen, I want a novel from you. I am telling you you can do it, because you know how to receive and preserve in order to strew around later. You have to talk about us, two inseparable friends who no longer remember when our friendship began.”
“But!” I implored him.
He wouldn’t explain himself any further, with a firm gesture he waved off my remaining reservations and said: “I suffer for not having been fined. I stopped at one point. Several roads beckon me. I stand at the crossroads without any intention of taking any of those roads, if first the cycle of my youth is not completed and recorded, glorified. I am suffering, I have suffered. You will give me proof that I have lived, as I told you.”
“Why? One day we will die, Ramorra. Without any regrets for ourselves, no matter what we did in life. Did you hear the bells?”
Ramorra: “So? Living is really the illusion of never dying.”
“I am already dead the way I am. I have no binoculars, the Santabate mountain is the same as always, in the valley lies the cemetery, the bells sound a death knell. Ramorra.”
“Exactly, just so. Think of the dead, think yourself dead, a dead man that can come back to life.”
“Ramorra you’re so good! Then I can hope for my resurrection?”
Having said that, I got started. He rubbed his hands and kept listening
Memory binds us to a worn-out part of our life.
For Ramorra the present itself was already a memory. Maybe, not without reason, he wrote poetry. It is believed that poets make an eternal memory of the present. But the life of a man, if it were nothing but memory, would have to become eternal by limiting, annulling itself in the day, the moment. Little Ramorra has feared all this, he has saved himself from death with the eternal memory of a part of himself already wasted. Now he says he could do battle against life, even if feebly. To be another himself with the mentality of the best. He says one must firmly decide striking the table with a hard fist. His generation boards a train that he too will have to take. It could be the train of the draftees or the one that leads to the door of retirement. He says that what he appears to be is a falsification of himself. Instead he wants to be, all day long, what he promises himself every evening as he sees in a circle of light his father before him, a little sad. This is what he will do: he will be wholly himself, he will obey that voice talking inside, unheeded till now. Wholly himself.
We understand each other.
Ah Ramorra! He looks like he wants to jump in the sea after this breakfast! Now you’d like to have a smoke just to have something to do, but maybe you would prefer to write a letter to a friend. A disagreeable man passes under the window. He is the one who does everything by the book, he thinks, he puts down his cane slowly, looks around the street, finally slips on his gloves! But you! Ah, Ramorra! This morning the sun is choking you and the clouds are but gusts rising from the inertia of the world.
The novel was finished and Ramorra said to me: “I want to leave, I can’t go on here anymore.”
And I, fed up this time, began hard and blunt:
“What's the use of leaving so you can shed tears on the other shore for the sunsets of lost days?” I asked him. “One has to struggle against oneself, despise oneself. You love yourself too much, my friend. And who will shed tears for you, after you have shed so many tears for yourself? Oh heck! You made me turn into a cicada to write about you and you are a fly. Flies are dazed by the heat and killed by winter.”
Ramorra went pale, I had hit a nerve and became stronger than ever.
“And” I went on “if I succeed, as is my intention, in conquering myself, I will no longer feel compassion for you. I will take you and leave you like a nice old song that’s good for digestion and maybe under the moon one night I had not been waiting for it. You will be consumed, you will pine away in isolation like a scorned lover. In the end you will be forgotten.”
“No!” Ramorra implored.
“Yes!” I shouted at him “It’s time for you to go.”
And he: “A bell doesn’t ring if you don’t strike it with a hammer. I am sad. Help me.”
After I gestured I wouldn't and said: “no way!” he said again:
“At least say goodbye to me”
I gave in immediately. After all, I wasn’t supposed to act cruelly.
We said goodbye, shaking hands. He cried.
“I too” I said to comfort him “am happy to have written a novel for you in which I figure.” Then I put a stop to it: “Go away.”
Ramorra shattered into pieces of glass. I was victorious, happy.
It was when they discovered the small problems in filling the wooden slats of the wardrobe with a mirror (I had to make a collection among my relatives and couldn’t tell them that a mirror is of no use to anybody), it was then that I wept bitterly and would have liked to leave with him, follow the fate of dear, small and brief Ramorra, but I couldn’t. I looked around. The four walls of my small room seemed to squeeze in and I pretended to be dying again and, in love and dying, as if I wanted to disclose a distant love at the last moment, I started again: “I had been keeping Ramorra in my soul for a long time …”
One gets distracted at a crossroads, loses himself. Someone says “Go this way” and someone else “Go the other way”.
And one stands there, in a daze. He waits for his legs to move by themselves.
Tricarico, 1942 – November 1943