The Mountains of Parnassus by Czeslaw Milosz

Author:Czeslaw Milosz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

An Astronaut’s Tale

My real name is Lino Martinez. As I’ve already mentioned, I was a member of the Union for a long time, and I took part in the expedition to Sardion. But just in case, and irrespective of what might still happen, I want to tell the story of how things were with me, and why I’m here. It won’t be easy, so I’ll try to start from the beginning.

I don’t come from the kind of family where you get to go to a Union school as a child, benefiting from the privileges of your parents. I was selected and trained up because my tests were exceptionally good, but it all started rather late. As a child, I was raised by my mother; I never knew my father. At school, I didn’t get along too badly, since I had a strong physique, a love for games, and even some talent for learning. Still, I didn’t escape without the odd complication. At the time, there were still plenty of Christians in my native region of the Andes, and my mother belonged to a church. I say “at the time,” and I should explain that my age is quite different from what you might imagine from my appearance. My mother attached great significance to Christian practices; she forced me into them, with some success, so that for a certain time I believed sincerely—or so it seems to me now—and prayed every day. But the crisis soon came, and it was painful, probably triggered by my aversion for our priest when I discovered that his robes were only a disguise, that he was pretending not to be what he really was. In truth, he was an officer of the Welfare Bureau, overseeing the faithful on the orders of his superiors. The crisis would have come sooner or later, but it’s worth mentioning this detail. Apart from this, I exhibited a morbid timidity entirely unexpected in such a healthy and cheerful young boy, less toward my contemporaries than toward my elders, so that when my mother sent me to the shops I would fight battles with myself, my heart beating violently until I almost fainted, blushing and blanching, before I could even muster up the courage to cross the threshold of the store. This timidity gradually subsided, but it disappeared for good only when the Astronauts took me away to their unit, though I wouldn’t swear that it wasn’t precisely for this reason that they took me in the first place, since this symptom, with the right other factors, can be a variant—in other words, such people can acquire exceptional courage through therapy.

I was a mature adolescent, almost a young man, when my mother died in an accident, and then I lived for a while with distant relatives. This was to be a very important period for me, but I’ll return to it shortly. For now, I want to talk about the training I received from the Astronauts, though only in very general terms.

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