Cesare Pavese

I’d gotten fresh news about Nuto the musician in America of all places – how many years ago? – I hadn’t yet thought about returning, when I had ditched the railroad crew and, after traveling from station to station, I had arrived in California and upon seeing those long hills under the sun I said: “I’m home.” America also ended at the sea, and this time it had been pointless to set sail again, so I had stopped there among the pines and the vineyards. “Seeing me with a hoe in hand,” I said, “Those back home would laugh.” But you don’t hoe in California. It seems that you’re more likely to be gardeners instead. When I ran into people from Piedmont it annoyed me, it wasn’t worth crossing the whole world to see people just like me, who, moreover, gave me dirty looks. I left the countryside and worked as a milkman in Oakland. At night, across the waters of the bay, you could see the streetlights in San Francisco. I went there, starved for a month, and by the time I left that prison I was on the verge of envying the Chinese. Then I began to wonder if there was anyone worth crossing the world to see. I returned to the hills.

I lived there for a while and I found myself a girlfriend, who I no longer liked since she had begun working with me at the diner on the road to Cerrito. By coming to pick me up at the door, she had gotten herself hired as a cashier, and then she spent the whole day watching me from behind the counter, while I fried lard and filled glasses. In the evenings, when I went out, she would run after me in her heels on the asphalt, take my arm and try to catch a ride to the ocean or to the cinema. As soon as you left the light of the diner, you were alone with the stars and the din of crickets and toads. I would have liked to take her with me into the countryside, between the apple trees and the woods, or even to the short grass of an embankment, throw her to the ground, and make sense of all the noise under the stars. She wouldn’t hear of it. She would scream as women do, she would ask to go to another bar. To let herself be touched – we had a room in an alleyway in Oakland – she needed to be drunk.

It was on one of those nights that I heard about Nuto from a man who came from Bubbio. I knew from his stature and walk before he had even opened his mouth. He was driving a wood truck and while they were filling up his tank, he asked me for a beer.

“A bottle would be better,” I said in dialect, tight-lipped.

His eyes smiled and he looked at me. We talked all evening until the car horns finally gave out from exhaustion. Nora, from the register, pricked up her ears, getting agitated, but she had never been in Alessandrino and she didn’t understand. I even poured my friend a glass of bootleg whisky. He told me that at home he had been a bus driver, about the different places he had travelled, and why he had come to America. “And if I had known that they drank this stuff… That’s not to say, it doesn’t warm you up, but there’s no good table wine…”

“There is nothing,” I told him, “It’s like living on the moon.”

Nora, annoyed, was fixing her hair. She turned her chair and turned on the radio to dance music. My friend shrugged his shoulders, bent over the counter and, pointing behind himself, said: “Do you like these women?”

I wiped down the counter with a rag. “It’s our fault,” I said. “This country is their home.”

He remained silent listening to the radio. Under the music I could still hear the croaking of toads. Standing stiffly Nora glared scornfully at his back.

“It’s like this jingle,” he said. “Is there any comparison? They don’t even know how to play…”

And he told me about a competition in Nice the previous year, when the bands from all the villages from Cortemilia and San Marzano, to Canelli, and Neive had come and played and played until the people couldn’t move anymore. They had to postpone the horse race, even the parish priest was listening to the dance music, they were drinking just to get by. At midnight they were still playing, and Tiberio, the band from Nieve won. But then there was an argument, people fleeing, bottles to the head, and according to him it was Nuto from Salto who had deserved the prize.

“Nuto? I know him.”

And then my friend told me who Nuto was and what he had been doing. He recounted that the same night, to show those ignorant people he set off down the road and he played without stopping until Calamandrana. He had followed them by bicycle, under the moon, and they played so well that the women jumped down from their beds and clapped and then the band would stop and play another piece. Nuto, in the middle, led them with his clarinet.

Nora yelled that I should make them stop the horns. I poured another cup for my friend and I asked him when he would go back to Bubbio.

“Even tomorrow,” he said, “if I could.”

That night before going down to Oakland, I smoked a cigarette on the grass, far from the street where the cars passed, on the empty embankment. There was no moon but a sea of stars, there were as many croaking toads as there were chirping crickets. That night, even if Nora had let herself be thrown to the grass, it wouldn’t have been enough for me. The toads wouldn’t have stopped croaking, neither would the automobiles have stopped racing down the hill accelerating, nor would America have ended with those bright cities down the coast. There in the dark, with the scent of gardens of pine trees, I realized that those stars weren’t mine, and that, like Nora and the customers, they scared me. Eggs cooked in lard, good wages, and oranges as big as watermelons were nothing, they were like those crickets and toads. Had it been worth coming? Should I throw myself off the pier?

Now I understood why every once in a while they would find a girl strangled in a car, or in a room, or at the end of an alley. Maybe they also, these people, had wanted to dive onto the grass, agree with the toads, to own a piece of land the length of a woman, and really sleep there without fear? Still, it was a big country, there was enough for everyone. There were women, there was land, there was money. But nobody ever had enough, nobody would stop with what he had, the country, and even the vineyards seemed like public gardens, fake flowerbeds like those at stations, or uncultivated parched earth, mountains of iron. It wasn’t a country where one could give in, lay down his head and tell others: “For better or worse, you know me. For better or worse, you will let me live.” That was what was so frightening. Not even they knew each other, crossing those mountains you understood at every turn that no one had ever stopped there before, they had never been touched by the hands of man. For this reason, they would give a drunk a beating, put him away, and leave him for dead. As well as this drunkenness, they also had bad women. Then the day would come when someone who wanted to feel something, wanted somebody to know him, strangled a woman, shot her in her sleep, or smashed her head in with a wrench.

Nora called me from the street asking to go to the city. She had a voice which from a distance was like that of a cricket. I burst out laughing at the idea that she had understood what I had been thinking. But you shouldn’t say these things to anyone, there’s no point. One fine morning she wouldn’t see me anymore, that’s all. But where to go? I’d arrived at the top of the world, the final shore, and I’d had enough. Then I began to think that I might cross back over the mountains.

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Several years ago – here at home the war had already begun – I spent a night that comes to mind every time I walk along the railroad tracks. I had already guessed what then happened – the war, internment, the seizure of property – and I was trying to cash out and move to Mexico. It was the nearest border and I had seen enough miserable Mexicans in Fresno to know where I was going. Then I let go of that idea because the Mexicans wouldn’t have known what to do with my crates of liquor, and the war came. I let myself be surprised – I was tired of anticipating and running, and then starting again the following day. Then I had had to start over again last year in Genoa.

The truth is that I knew that it wouldn’t last, and I wanted to do things, to work, to express myself, it was slipping through my fingers. That life and those people I had grown accustomed to over ten years returned to frighten and irritate me. I would drive around in my pickup truck on the state highways, going as far as the desert, as far as Yuma, as far as the cactus forests. I had become restless to see something else that wasn’t the San Joaquin Valley or the usual faces. I already knew that once the war was finished I would have to cross the ocean, the life that I was leading was ugly and temporary.

Then I also quit those forays to the southern road. The country was too big, I’d never be able to get anywhere. I was no longer the young man on the railroad crew who had worked his way to California over eight months. Many towns mean nothing.

That evening my pickup truck broke down on me in the open country. I had worked out that I should arrive at Station 37 by dark and would sleep there. It was cold, a dry and dusty cold and the countryside was empty. Countryside is saying too much. As far as the eye could see, there was an expanse of thorny grey sand and mounds that weren’t quite hills, and poles along the railroad. I messed with the engine – but there was nothing to be done, I didn’t have any spare ignition coils.

I began to get worried. The whole day I hadn’t seen more than two cars: heading for the coast. In my direction, none. I wasn’t on the highway, I had wanted to pass through the county. I told myself: “ Wait. Someone will pass.” No one passed until the following day. Fortunately, I had some blankets to wrap around myself. “And tomorrow?” I asked.

I had time to study the stones of the trackbed, the railroad ties, the tufts of a dry thistle, the fat trunks of two cacti in the basin below the road. The stones of the trackbed had the same burnt color caused by passing trains that they have all over the world. A breeze groaned along the road, carrying the scent of salt. It was as cold as winter. The sun was already down, the desert was disappearing.

I knew that there were poisonous lizards and millipedes running through the burrows of the desert; and there the serpent reigned. The howls of wild dogs began. They weren’t dangerous, but they made me realize that I was at the end of America, in the middle of the desert, three hours by car from the nearest station, and night was coming. The railroad and the lines of telephone poles were the only signs of civilization. If only a train would have passed. I had already leaned against telegraph poles several times listening for the buzz of the electrical current as boys do. That current came from the north and went to the coast. I started to study the map again.

The dogs continued to howl, in the grey sea desert – a cry that broke the air like the rooster’s crowing – it made me shiver with disgust. Fortunately, I had brought a bottle of whisky with me, and I smoked and smoked to calm myself. When it was dark, really dark, I switched on the dashboard lights. I didn’t dare to switch on the headlights. If only a train would pass.

All kinds of stories that could be told came to mind, stories about people who had stood on these streets when there weren’t streets there yet, and they had been found there stretched out in a ditch, bones and clothes, nothing else. Bandits, thirst, sunstroke, snakes. It was easy to realize that there had been a time here when the people killed each other and when no one stopped here unless they planned on staying. That thin thread of the railroad track and road was all the work that they had done here. Was it possible to leave the street, to advance into the valleys and the cacti, under the stars?

The sneeze of a dog, close by, and tumbling stones made me jump. I turned off the dashboard lights; and I immediately turned them back on again. To get over my fear I remembered that in the evening I’d passed some Mexicans in a cart, pulled by a mule, loaded with bundles of clothes, bales of stuff, pots and faces, sticking out the sides of the cart. It must have been a family going off to work for a season in San Bernardino or further north. I’d seen their children’s thin feet and the mule’s hooves dragging along the road. Those dirty ugly white trousers, flapping in the wind, the mule sticking out its neck to pull. Passing them, I thought that these poor wretches would have to make a stop in a ditch – they certainly weren’t going to make it to Station 37 that night.

This lot too, I thought, where’s home for them? Is it possible to be born and live in a country like this? And yet they adapted, they followed the seasons wherever the earth had something to offer, leading a life that left them no peace, half the year in the mines, half the year in the fields. They hadn’t needed to pass by the hospital in Alessandria – the world had come to drive them from their houses with hunger, with the railways, with their revolutions and oil, and now they came and went rolling behind a mule. They were lucky to have a mule. There were those who set out barefoot, without even a woman.

I got down from the pickup and stamped my feet on the road to warm myself up. The desert was lifeless, marked with hazy shadows, at night you could barely see the road. The wind always groaned, freezing on the sand, and now the dogs fell silent; you could hear sighs, hints of voices. I’d drunk enough not to care. I smelt the scent of the dry grass and the salty wind, and I thought of the hills of Fresno.

Then the train came. At first it looked like a horse, a horse and cart on pebbles, and you could already glimpse the lantern. Suddenly I hoped it might be a car, or that cart of Mexicans. Then it filled the whole desert floor with its din, making sparks. “Who knows what the snakes and scorpions will say about it?” I thought. It hurtled straight at me, its windows lighting up me, and the cacti. A small frightened animal fled with small hops. And the train zoomed by rattling, sucking up the air, and slapping me. I’d waited so long for that train, but when darkness fell again, and the sand began to groan again, I realized that even in the desert these people won’t leave you in peace. Maybe tomorrow I would have to run and hide, to avoid being committed, I could already feel the policeman’s hand like the impact of the train. This was America.

I got back in the pickup, wrapped myself in a blanket and tried to nap, like I was parked on the corner in Bellavista. Now I was ruminating on the fact that however clever the Californians were, those four scruffy Mexicans were doing something that none of them would have known how to do. Camping and sleeping in that desert – women and children – in that desert that was their home, where perhaps they had come to an agreement with the serpents. “You need to go to Mexico,” I told myself, “I bet it’s the place for you.”

Later that night a loud din woke me with a start. It seemed like the whole desert was a battlefield, or a yard. There was a reddish light and I got out of the pickup, battered and numb; between the low hanging clouds a sliver of moon was breaking through like a knife wound bleeding over the desert. I stood there watching for quite a while. It truly frightened me.