Ornela VORPSI
PROSE
THE COUNTRY WHERE NO ONE EVER DIES
Albania is a country where no one
ever dies. Fortified by long hours at the dinner table, irrigated
by raki and disinfected by the hot peppers in the ubiquitous
fat olives, bodies in this country are so robust that nothing
can destroy them.
Spines are made of iron. You can do whatever
you want with them. If they crack, you can repair them. Hearts
for their part can be saturated in fat, suffer necrosis, an infarct,
thrombosis or whatever, but will beat on heroically. We are in
Albania, and let there be no doubt about it.
This country where no one ever dies
is made of clay and dust. It is scorched by the sun to the point
that even the leaves of the grapevines grow rusty and minds begin
to melt. This has one, I fear, inevitable side effect: megalomania,
a condition which sprouts like weeds in this environment. Another
consequence is an absence of fear, although this may be caused
by people's distorted and flattened craniums - the seat of indifference,
or of a downright lack of conscience.
The word fear has no meaning here. Look
an Albanian in the eye and you can tell right away that he's
immortal. Death is something that has nothing to do with him.
Morning raises its head at five o'clock
in the summer. At seven, the old people are already having their
first coffee. The young people sleep in until noon. God decreed
that time in this country should be spent as agreeably as possible,
like a sip of strong espresso on the terrace of a café
around the corner as you stare at a good pair of legs on a girl
who doesn't deign to look back at you.
The steaming coffee seeps slowly down
your throat, warming your tongue, heart and guts. Life, after
all, is not as bad as they say. You savour the bitter black liquid
as the barkeeper, who has just had a fight with her husband,
gives you a ferocious glance.
It's eleven thirty. Thank God you still
have the whole day ahead of you, and lots of time to waste. There
are all sorts of things you could do, thousands of them. Dusk
is nowhere in sight.
Suddenly, Xifo comes in rubbing her chapped
hands and expounding for the umpteenth time on her traumatised
heart and liver, as if it were a legend that had nothing to do
with her. As if it were something very important, but far away.
Everything seems exaggerated and distorted. And then, in a low
conspiratorial voice, she adds:
"Have you heard the news? Our neighbour,
you know, Suzi's father, died in the shower last night. He came
home from work, had dinner, took a shower and kicked the bucket."
"You're kidding! He was so young,
poor guy!"
"Well, what can you do? Life is
full of surprises."
As you can see, it is the others
who die.
This is the way life goes by in a
country in which everything is eternal (with the exception of
things that happen to other people). But there are things
that are even closer to these people than death. It's no exaggeration
to state that one of these things is the quintessence of their
existence.
I'm referring to fornication.
It is a subject they delight in. Their
hearts are set aflame (although they can actually ignite over
nothing at all). They are completely absorbed and begin to hallucinate,
young and old, educated and illiterate.
Certain maxims arise quite naturally
in the way of thinking of a people. They grow like leaves on
a tree. These maxims derive from one universally held supposition:
a good-looking girl is a whore, an ugly one - poor thing - is
not.
In this country, a girl has to pay particular
attention to her immaculate flower. A man can wash with a bar
of soap and be clean, but a girl can never be purified, no matter
how much water she uses - a whole ocean's worth.
Whenever a husband is away on business
or is in prison, people remind his wife that it would be a good
idea for her to sew up the crack, to convince him that she has
waited for him alone because she has missed him so much and his
absence has shrunk the space between her thighs (in this country,
men have a highly developed sense of private property).
Whenever a pretty girl passes by, muffled
sighs rise from the terrace where the men are sitting around
and enjoying the day, sighs that are steamier than the coffee.
"Look who's going by!"
"You're not serious, are you? Do
you know how often she's had herself stitched and unstitched?"
And they go on nostalgically:
"Oh, Ingrid, my Ingrid! Who was
it that broke the stitches between your sweet hot thighs last
night? Come on over here, my beauty. When we're finished, I'll
give you the money to have yourself stitched up again."
Their stares penetrate you on the street
as if your being were transparent. As soon as a stare has penetrated
you, it transfixes you forever.
At home, it's the same story. "Don't
worry now," says my aunt, "we'll take you to the doctor's
to find out if you're a virgin or not."
Her menacing glace lacerates me as
she spits the words from between her teeth, and though I'm only
thirteen and haven't even seen what men have in their trousers
(a secret which has something to do with the fornication), I
already have the feeling that I'm a perfect whore. The stare
of my aunt causes me to blush.
Stiff with fear, I crawl into bed, thinking:
"What if they do send me to the doctor's and he finds out
that I wasn't born a virgin, like those children born with missing
hands, blind, deaf or, worse still, without an innate devotion
to the Party?"
I'm overcome by sleep as I silently beg
my aunt to accept the tragic fate that has befallen our family.
"I swear, auntie, I swear I haven't done anything wrong.
That is the way I was born. Believe me! I swear it!"
In this country, in which no one dies,
my aunt is no exception. She doesn't die either.
I had a recurrent dream (which I never
told anyone about). Before I fell asleep, with my eyes half open,
I had a vision of her funeral.
I saw myself wearing a black scarf (a
nice lace shawl would have suited me better), draped around my
neck as Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina would have worn it. Of
course I was pale and wept a lot because I did love her, yet
my desire to escape her and her outbursts of anger which were
always directed at me, was simply too great.
As I had grown up without a father and
was apparently not bad-looking, I was very soon confronted with
the said subject of fornication.
"Some day, you're going to turn
into a big whore, ya... ya!" The voices of my aunt and my
cousin always quivered, as if they meant to say: "Come on,
we know all about you." They would shake their heads. "There's
nothing we can do about it. We didn't choose to have you. We'll
swallow the shame of it all like bread. What else can we do?
One day, you are going to come home with a swollen belly."
My aunt and my cousin put on a mournful
expression, as if at that very moment they were being forced
to swallow the shame-filled sandwich, while my grandfather silently
rolled himself a cigarette.
The thought of the swollen belly was
terrifying. Do you know the paintings of Bosch? The anguish and
folly on the faces, and the bodies of the fallen, pressed together,
like souls in hell? I could see it clearly. A brownish, dark-red
belly brimming with scraps of organic refuse, and me as its container.
You can't hide a swollen belly, and you can't crawl out of your
skin. You are marked. The swollen belly means that you've
been screwing around in the bushes (from my aunt and cousin I
had learned that fornication took place in the bushes, apparently
the ideal venue for such anonymous undertakings). It meant that
you were feeding the worms of shame, nourishing an embryo that
was to disfigure your body and make it obvious to everyone that
you had been screwing around.
Even today, this vision pursues me. A
pregnant woman is one who has been screwing around in the bushes.
What a longing for tragedy they had!
My whole wonderful country thirsted for tragedy! It created them
out of nothing, just as God created us from a handful of dust.
Whenever I was sick, everyone would
make a fuss over me. They would come into my room and whisper
"my dear" and when they went back out, they murmured
"poor thing."
They would prepare delicious foods for
me without ever considering the possibility that the illness
might have robbed me of my appetite. I stared longingly at the
pots of jam on the night table beside my bed. I exchanged loving
glances with the meatballs, but the sight of such delicacies
that made me nauseous and I had to look away.
My mother, my grandmother and my aunt
suddenly turned into the most affectionate people on God's earth
and I was convinced that, with them at my side, and the solid
predictions they were voicing, I would most certainly not succumb.
I had a great time of it whenever I was
sick. I wasn't scolded, didn't have to bake potatoes after school,
and I could sleep in as long as I wanted. I didn't have to husk
rice, grain by grain. There was no wood to be chopped and, for
some reason, I was no longer a whore... until the day of my recovery,
that accursed day when I had to get out of bed and on which the
scolding and invectives would resume. I was once again a whore
and the pots of jam vanished as a consolation prize to find their
way to the bedsides of other sick children. You only get jam
if you have one foot in the grave. Otherwise, forget it!
In this dear land of ours, in which
one never dies, in which bodies are as heavy as lead, we have
an adage, a profound saying: "Live that I may hate you and
die that I may mourn you."
This adage is the lifeblood of our country.
When you die, no one says another bad word about you. I would
go so far as to say that they no longer even think badly of you.
There is respect for the institution of death.
(It's no easy task to gain the respect
of an Albanian. It increases when you're on your deathbed, and
when the struggle is over, you've finally won it.)
All of a sudden, men are imbued with
the best of qualities and women are exceptionally virtuous. They
weep for you, lamenting about what a wonderful human being you
were. All the wrath evaporates.
I heard my aunt, with profound conviction
and with prophecy in her trembling voice, use another maxim known
to our country: "Your own people (meaning your blood relatives)
will gobble up your flesh, but they will save the bones."
I sensed that my country was in possession
of a sublime truth.
And indeed, my aunt's voice exuded sublime
beauty.
"Auntie," I said to her one
day, "if they eat my flesh, they may as well throw away
the bones. What good will they be?"
She cast me a withering glance, turning
me to ash. I became aware that I was not of the pedigree race
of my mother, but was the result of an accident, that I resembled
him. Her glance said to me: "Shut up, girl of that father!"
I shut my mouth and could hardly wait
to be sick again.
[From the novel Il Paese dove non
si muore mai, Turin, Einaudi 2005. Translated by Robert Elsie] |
Albanian Literature in Translation
Modern
Authors from Albania (late 20th - 21st centuries)
