The Road to San Giovanni by Italo Calvino

Author:Italo Calvino [Calvino, Italo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-01-22T16:00:00+00:00

Memories of a Battle

It’s not true that I’ve forgotten everything, the memories are still there, hidden in the grey tangle of the brain, in the damp bed of sand deposited on the bottom of the stream of thought: assuming it’s true, that is, that every grain of this mental sand preserves a moment of our lives fixed in such a way that it can never be erased yet buried under billions and billions of other grains. I am trying to bring a day, a morning, back to the surface, moments between dark and light at the dawning of that day. It’s years since I stirred up these memories, lurking like eels in the pools of the mind. I was sure that whenever I wanted I had only to poke about in the shallows to see them rise to the surface with a flick of their tails. At most I would have to lift one or two of the big stones that form a barrier between present and past to uncover the little caves behind the forehead where things forgotten lie low. But why that morning? Why not another? Here and there bumps protrude from the sandy bottom, suggesting that a sort of vortex used to whirl around them, and when memories awake after a long sleep it is from the centre of one of those vortices that time’s spiral unravels.

Yet almost thirty years later, now that I’ve finally decided to haul in memory’s nets and see what’s inside, I find myself groping in the dark, as if that morning didn’t want to begin again, as if I were unable to unglue the sleep from my eyes, and perhaps it is precisely this imprecision that guarantees that the memory is precise, what now seems half erased was so then too, that morning they woke us at four, and immediately the Olmo detachment was on the march down through the woods in the dark, almost running through shortcuts where you can’t see where you’re putting your feet, not paths at all perhaps, just steep gorges, beds of dry streams overrun by brambles and ferns, smooth pebbles your hobnail shoes slither on, and we’re still at the beginning of the approach march, just as it’s an approach march I’m trying to make now on the trail of memories that crumble under pressure, not visual memories because it was a moonless starless night, memories of my body slithering in the dark, with half a plate of chestnuts in my stomach that haven’t warmed me up and are just weighing me down like an acid handful of gravel that squeezes and jolts, with the weight of the machine-gun ammunition box banging on my back and every time my foot slips there’s the danger the thing will topple me facedown on the ground or pull me over backwards my back against the stones. Maybe all that’s left in my memory of the whole descent are these falls, which could equally be those of some other night or dawn.

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