The Earth is Falling E-Book

Carmen Pellegrino

• Herausgeber: Prototype Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 279

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

The Earth is Falling is a haunting and magical novel based around the existence of an abandoned village outside Naples. The deserted houses that still stand there are peopled with ghosts who live in a perpetual present from which time has effectively been abolished. The village appears to be semi-alive; the landslide which ominously awaits and which will eventually lead to the abandonment of the place has yet to arrive (yet its rumbles are heard). Pellegrino peoples Alento with eccentrics, luminaries, an eternally optimistic town crier. In the closing pages, the narrator Estella summons the remaining ghosts for a final dinner. The overall effect is unsettling, haunting and uncanny, the trapped souls doomed to repeat their circumscribed daily life for ever, cut off from the world but dimly aware of its continued presence outside.

Leseprobe

Carmen Pellegrino is an Italian historian and writer. An eclectic scholar, her research focuses on collective movements of dissidence, racism, social exclusion and the exploitation of migrants (including the essay ‘The Hours of my Day’, published in the anthology Qui and Fatigue: Stories, Tales and Reportage from the World of Work, 2010, winner of the Reportage Napoli Monitor award). Co-author of various collective works, in 2011 she co-edited the volume Not a Country for Women: Stories of Extraordinary Normality, which included her essay on Matilde Sorrentino. Among her recent central themes of investigation is the study of uninhabited villages and the ruins of ancient settlements, through which she has laid the foundations for a science of abandonment as a form of recovering awareness of the historical experience of places. In addition to The Earth is Falling (Cade la terra, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Campiello Prize, Pellegrino is the author of the novels If I Came Back This Evening Next (Se mi tornassi questa sera accanto, 2017) and The Happiness of Others (La felicità degli altri, 2021), also shortlisted for the Campiello Prize).

Shaun Whiteside is an award-winning translator from Italian, French, German and Dutch. Originally from Northern Ireland, he has translated many works of fiction and non-fiction, as well as classical and philosophical texts, notably works by Freud and Nietzsche in Penguin Classics. His translation of To Die in Spring by Ralf Rothmann won the Sharpe Books HWA Gold Crown for History Writing in 2018 and his translation from the French of Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq was long-listed for the International Man Booker Prize in 2021. His reviews have appeared in the TLS, New Statesman, Guardian, Observer, Irish Times and Literary Review.

The Earth is Falling

Carmen Pellegrino

Translated from the Italian

by Shaun Whiteside

To Gerardo and Maria Pellegrino

in memoriam

The Earth is Falling

The room will be warm and filled with the smell of fried food. They will all come, in their party clothes and their shoes freshened with a quick brush.

They will come at nine and, one after the other, take their seats around the table. They won’t bring presents, they never do, but it doesn’t matter: I’ve got some of my own ready for them, presents that will make their eyes gape, though I’ll be looking elsewhere.

As they come in, they won’t greet one another, and they won’t greet me, but they will gradually make themselves at ease among the freshly caned chairs, around the macramé tablecloth that I use only once a year. They will look around, studying the silent house; then they will yield to the impulse to sniff the air and frown: they haven’t come to eat, so why are they here? Then they will sit down and wait. I will bring ricotta ravioli to the table, followed by chestnut dumplings – the chestnuts have been good this year – and last of all dried figs that I have carefully stuffed with walnuts.

For the occasion I have donned my party dress, a fashionable velvet dress … all right, then, fashionable a hundred years ago. During the first evenings of autumn, in fact, I returned to my lacemaking work and made a white collar that I fixed in place with hidden stitches. Having an abundance of thread, I also made a smaller one – tiny, in fact – from which I hung a little bell, an attachment that makes the most delicate of sounds; it would suit my cat to a T, if I had a cat.

Instead I have a dog, Gideon, who is outside whining ceaselessly. At this time every year, at around dinner time, he starts making tearful eyes and wailing, splitting the silence to which I have grown accustomed. I will have to tell him to stop it, tell him that he can’t go on annoying me like this, like a river wind, a wind of premonitions, and besides we both know that the sight of them is all it will take to calm him down.

In the dark days I prepared the room, restoring a little order to the chaos. I polished the old dresser, which roused itself from its torpor with a groan like the sound of glass shattering, and now, to me at least, it has a majestic, imposing appearance. The iron-framed niche on the wall, on the other hand, shrank almost irritably when I slipped my mother’s portrait into it: once a year, whether it wants to or not, it’s going to have to look after it.

In the middle of the wall overlooking the square there is still an iron grille, even though rust has consumed it from within as worms devour children’s bellies. For the moment, I am keeping the curtains open, but later I will need to pull them half-closed, even though my guests will take offence and look at me askance because the window provides their only view of the elm tree. Still, I am forced to do it: if the curtains are drawn, they will not see their faces reflected in the glass; they will not start to tremble.

They never go into the other rooms. And besides, they are closed, the shutters have fallen off, the chairs are covered with little cracks. Every now and again, startled by little bangs, they will glance at one another; then they will give me commiserating looks, and I will do the same, but in this contest of glances I will be the loser. A few hours ago I went to the new town to invite Marcello to dinner, but as usual he didn’t seem to hear when I called up from below, asking him to join us, saying we would all be fine together, that we would eat and chat. He greeted me with an offensive gesture from behind his window. I know, though, that he will look at me from behind the smeared glass, then turn up unannounced, saying, ‘Here I am again’ in that parrot voice of his.

Part One

The House of the Elm Tree

Tornerà, tornerà,

d’un balzo il cuore

desto

avrà parole?

Chiamerà le cose le luci, ivivi?

I morti, i vinti, chi li desterà?

Will it return, will it return,

with a start will the awakened

heart

have words?

Will it summon things, to lights, to the living?

The dead, the defeated, who will awaken them?

Alfonso Gatto, Amore della vita

(Love of Life)

Estella

I was about eighteen when I started working in the de Paolis house. Where I came from and why, years before, I left my village, needs no recounting here.

It was February and it was snowing the day I came back, an early morning snow that, joining forces with the wind, struck me full in the face in gusts that came and went. Apart from that, silence. I had come back convinced that I could move into the old house where I had lived with my mother until a certain point in time, but I found nothing there. The cottage had succumbed to the soft soil and delivered itself to the earth, adding fresh material to its flourishing anthology of death.

It was cold, but I wanted to see the village again, convince myself that it was not dead, because it could be, I had said to myself as I returned, it could now be dust. I walked along, prey to a fixed idea: was everything I saw really there? Gideon was no help to me; he was shivering with cold and wailing and in a hurry to find shelter. So, to please him, when evening fell – the darkness here has always come quickly – I forced the door of the church, not difficult, rotten as it was. The next day, at break of dawn, they came from Naples to take back my nun’s habit, perhaps at the request of the parish priest; they came specifically to rip it from my back, and I was left naked in the churchyard, with the dog doing his best to keep the passers-by from seeing my shame. I remained in that state until I was approached by an old woman dressed in black, who, seeing my sorry state, made no gesture of horror and didn’t bring her hands to her eyes, saying ‘Lord a-mercy!’ as the others had done. She slowly set down the conical basket that she was carrying on her back and with her little wrinkled hands drew out a light, floral-patterned dress of the kind that women wear in the countryside; with a delicate gesture, she brushed away the dust and reached out to give it to me. I immediately put it on as if it were a lambskin blanket, but I didn’t have time to thank her, because a moment later the old woman was already far away, swallowed up by the road, with her basket on her back again. I started to walk through the village, leaning from time to time against a little tree which, bruised as I was by the cold, afforded me some modest protection. Very slowly – with Gideon leaping the ditches with the agility of a hunting dog – I dragged myself to the twisted alleyway where the climb to the mountain began, and as I glanced down below everything unwound, everything was clear to me. The village, which had always been on the move, now seemed to have moved even further in its blanket of mud, its inhabitants having retreated northwards to a less tremulous patch of land. There was a strong smell of newly baked bread where there had never been ovens; there were chimneys smoking in alleyways where no one had lived. The tangle of alleyways at the bottom of the hill was in constant retreat – this was also apparent from the discoloured signs of workshops and forges rattling in the wind, and the front doors opening up on to courtyards, these empty too – while people had moved to the streets at the top. I was aware of a touch of regret at having left precisely when the village, as if through some mysterious covenant with death, must have started moving again, battling once more against the stagnant soil, the humps of gravel and red clay. I was discomposed by an unexpected sensation, which I had not yet come to understand. It took a gust of wind to bring me back to where I was, in a mess, with the mountains on all sides, incorruptible guardians of a hole where people went to die, never to be born.

I went back down to the valley via a little passageway, where I observed that life went on as it could, particularly in the square in front of the church to which the old women, drenched from the damp nights, dragged themselves at dawn.

I was cold and hungry – I had eaten perhaps two biscuits in three days – but I managed to summon the strength to introduce myself to the de Paolis family, having read in an advertisement that they were looking for a teacher, to whom they would offer in perpetuity food, lodging and a decent wage.

The house – not far from the centre of the village, facing the elm-tree square – seemed so enchanted to me as to be dreamlike. Two storeys tall, unfenced, it had a small courtyard on which so much snow had fallen that one could barely discern the shapes of a swing and a garden table. I would go on to discover a rocky garden to the rear, with an avenue of pines arranged like sentries, and a little stone fountain, topped when the season was right by amorous turtle doves. I looked at the house in awe for a long time. I couldn’t remember there having been such a beautiful thing in the village but concluded that it must have been renovated during the years of my absence.

Struck by a sunless light – a light like the shimmer of the snow – the house quietly dominated the surrounding space, so much so that the village itself, helped by the motions of the landslide, seemed to be shaped around its skeleton. It would soon be morning, but the house seemed to have been awake for hours, as one could tell not least from the carpets that had already been beaten and put out to air on the balconies. I tried to imagine it wrapped in ivy, like the facades of the houses I often saw when wandering aimlessly as a child, before I entered the cloister. I stopped to look at them; houses with balconies that seemed to be supported only by the ivy that held them on either side, the proud ivy that grows wild. I saw women coming out on to the balconies and talking to themselves. But they weren’t talking to themselves, they were talking to the ivy, shaking their heads as if in refusal: no, don’t do that. Then calming down and allowing themselves a smile beneath their deep-ringed eyes – they hadn’t slept, those women never did. Once, I impetuously asked one of those baggy-eyed ladies a question. I said, ‘Madam, how is the ivy this morning?’

‘It is flowering,’ she replied, ‘or rather it is flowering again. In spite of the frost at night.’

‘The frost, you say?’

‘The frost, yes, that devours it. But then the dawn comes and renews it all.’

‘Madam,’ I said, ‘you know that I have seen green ivy, so green, on houses that were completely black inside?’

‘Don’t look inside the houses,’ she said, as if she knew what I was referring to, ‘Look at them from the outside, look at the ivy. Can’t you see that it’s like running water?’

Approaching the de Paolis house I saw that the door was wooden with large, delicate-looking glass panels. I turned around and saw the elm tree, standing in lonely isolation, its leaves still intact even though it was wintertime. It looked like a monument, a large statue, although it lacked a statue’s stillness. It seemed to me, in fact, that it was unlike its reputation, that there was nothing lethargic about it, that it bore no resemblance to those trees that for years moved not at all or barely, broadly speaking. The elm tree, I concluded, was of the clumsy kind, a little tipsy, with roots that seemed to flee the ground with stray ramifications that went where they didn’t need to go, the earth having fallen, the stars having fallen. I couldn’t have said where that thought came from. I tried to pay it no heed, but the more I thought of it, the more that thought struck me as obvious, almost necessary. The elm tree clearly believed in the benign and illumined force that came from movement, from not keeping everything to oneself. It didn’t hold back; it had no interest in conservation. That big tree of sleepless sleep, that clumsy, generous being with its humble scent, believed in the joy that comes from giving oneself, like falling fruit, happy to fall because death comes only to those things that do not give themselves.

Then I heard the sweet music of a radio coming from inside the house, even though the notes were drowned by the hiss of steam from the boiler, which, along with the fireplaces, warmed the dwelling. I decided to knock, and after a moment, as if someone had been keeping an eye on me, the door opened; from behind the door a tall, fat woman appeared, wearing a solemn black dress with a white apron and a white maid’s cap, which tilted noticeably to one side.

‘Follow me,’ she said, with no further formalities, walking ahead of me with a slow, clip-clopping gait.

I would learn that this tall woman was Peppa, the cook and energetic factotum, but above all the most faithful guardian of the walls. The de Paolis family did not ask for references, which was lucky since I had none; they asked no questions, nor were they surprised by my light clothing, unsuited to snowy days. They took me in on that very day because they needed someone to look after their son.

The house’s interior was enchanting too: the dining room, in which a clock ticked incessantly, was on the ground floor; next came two drawing rooms, the library and, to the rear, on the other side of the corridor, an airy kitchen with open brick walls and a radio continuously broadcasting gentle music. The bedrooms were on the first floor, while the cellars and the laundry were in the basement, although only Peppa had access to them. I was given a light-drenched room not far from the bedroom belonging to Marcello, the little boy to whom I would be tending. I could not have known it, but the house I was entering was the one in which I would spend the rest of my life, accompanied by fleeting memories and the books that I would peruse over and over again.

According to our agreement, I was to occupy myself solely with the boy’s instruction, particularly encouraging him in the study of literature and history, in which I had had the opportunity to immerse myself during my years away. In fact, though, I took him to my heart. He was sixteen years old and extremely thin, his skin taut, his nerves visible. From time to time, talking to Signora de Paolis, I told her that the boy needed robust food to strengthen him – meat stews, potatoes baked in ashes, thick grape syrup, like the one that Peppa made for the adults – but Ada would not hear of the idea of forcing him, adding that a little leanness had never hurt anyone: ‘Not even you yourself have any flesh on you,’ she said to me, stressing her words by glancing up and down at my bones.

I nonetheless decided to do things in my own way. On the day on which I began my lessons I prepared a cream with egg yolks and sugar, adding a drop of marsala to boost the blood. Then I approached the boy without looking at him and, humming a nursery rhyme to myself, tried to bring a spoonful of the cream to his lips. But at once he flung the cup from my hand and, striking his head with his fists and tearfully crying ‘Go away’, immediately hurled himself on the floor. I watched him writhing there like one about to suffer grievous torments, while his face, that handsome face of his, contorted into a grimace.

Ada came fearfully running in. Never had she seen him reduced to such a state, she told me, pressing her hands to her face.

‘Help me carry him outside,’ she said. We struggled to lift him from the floor because Marcello, scrawny though he may have been, was relatively tall. We walked all the way to the square and set him down beneath the elm tree. But just as suddenly he recovered, leaping to his feet like a soldier on parade. He looked at me and smiled, as if he had just played the best trick of the day on me; then he slipped behind the elm tree and lay there on the ground, his body calm, even luminescent.

But I wasn’t tricked, not least because the more I looked at him – pale, with a hint of death in his eyes – the more convinced I was that only robust food could save him.

So it was that, some time later, I made my mind up. Early one Monday – the cock had not yet crowed, not least because we didn’t have a cock – I took a bowl decorated with ferns painted in verdigris and prepared a zabaglione with six egg yolks, marsala and sugar. When the time came to wake Marcello, I didn’t shake his chest as I usually did but tried to sit him up to restore his colour, sleep having left him deathly pale. I laid him on one side – his eyes filled with sleep – and slipped into his mouth a funnel of the kind used in cellars to transfer wine from barrel to bottle. Holding his hands in place firmly beneath my knee, I began to pour the cream down his throat, even hearing a faint glugging sound. Eventually I worried that he might be choking, and was aware of a little shudder, but I didn’t stop because I knew the ploys of which he was capable. Once the concoction was gone, I wasn’t so foolish as to remove the funnel immediately, because had I done so he would have surely vomited. Instead, I kept it in place even when I was sure it had all gone down, and it was not until he turned purple that I removed the funnel from his mouth, now stained with the yellow cream mixed with the mucus that had somehow flowed from his nose. There was also a stream of blood, but I didn’t worry about that. In the effort to recover his breath, with a greed I hadn’t expected, Marcello gave no thought to the mixture he had just swallowed, and he didn’t vomit. In fact, from the happy regurgitation that rang out across the room I concluded that the method had been the right one. So it was that I began every Monday, at dawn, to pour six fresh egg yolks down his throat, because six would be enough for the whole week. I am sure that it was only in this way that Marcello managed to grow, I would not say strong – because he was never strong – but healthy at the very least.

Marcello

I will go. I will go to dinner. She wants me to go and I will go, if only to see her in that velvet dress that must be a hundred years old.

This morning, as soon as I had awoken, I discovered that her house could no longer be seen from my window. I looked in all directions: it wasn’t there. A clear sign that the village is still in motion. This means that I will no longer be able to spy on her. I must tell her that the next house to collapse will be hers, that she will be left underneath it if she doesn’t leave. But there is no point, because she won’t leave that ditch so skilfully adorned with mist, with all its grass and marshland.

From here, the dead land appears to oscillate like a ship in a storm with all its convex mass, and the prow can no longer be seen from the stern. The foliage that until yesterday hung slackly from the trees has now fallen into the street. The pipistrelles are swiftly reappearing, slipping hither and thither and darting among the ruins. Something always happens with the coming of November: night falls in an instant and nothing can be seen. I know she is in that darkness; I know they are too, darting among the alleyways, whirling together, wandering from party to party, lunch to lunch. I don’t understand why they come back.

The room that will house them is not without its charms: the walls retain traces of red paint; there is a big table in the middle, some shelving, a little hearth. In a niche there will be the portrait of a lady in an antique dress from Alento that Estella says is her mother but which might equally be an old newspaper cutting. I am right to believe that Estella identifies it as a portrait of her mother only to prove her Alentese origins, which I refuse to acknowledge. Another of her many lies. She enjoys living a lie. For example, she conceals her vice of smoking, but I know that she toys with a pipe. Every year, on the mantelpiece of the little fireplace, I find tobacco dust, piles of tapped-out ash. ‘I have no idea how it got there,’ she says, scratching her nose when I point to the tobacco. ‘Reality is never unambiguous,’ she adds, ‘there are dozens and dozens of answers, rebuttals, devastating rejoinders and the like.’

She is joking, she only ever jokes with me, but I will destroy everything that reminds me of her, I will liberate myself from her, that lascivious creature filled only with self-love. She has been like that from the very beginning, since she first entered my life with the fury of a curse. How life is … You might say that my real life lasted for about four years, and the rest I would put down to persistence. I experienced those four years of incinerating beauty when I stopped going to school, at the age of about twelve. One day it was decided that I no longer needed to study with the others, that I was no longer to leave the house. But most importantly, Estella had not yet appeared, which is why I can say with certainty that that was the finest time of my life. But since my happiness was not meant to last, after a sequence of tutors who each arrived and resigned within a month, my parents decided to put their trust in an advertisement:

Governess sought for a lively and intelligent young boy. Food and lodging and a decent wage. For life.

She presented herself with the advertisement in one hand and a string bag in the other.

I would like to describe her as an ugly person, a toad, especially since she was dressed in rags. She wasn’t, though. Although she was thin, she wasn’t ugly or old: her eyes, staring like an owl’s, were blue, a real splash of turquoise, accentuated by the blonde hair that fell to her shoulders. She arrived with a dog, Gideon, a mad, great thing that I never heard barking; it merely whined if it was discontented, and pissed on the gatepost if it was cheerful. When it died, Estella expressed the wish that it be cremated and the remains deposited in a crack in the elm tree; obviously she was indulged, as she would so often be. No one ever asked if I, the future master of the house, wanted her around or not, so dangerously blonde, so pointlessly welcoming. She appeared in my life and my nerves were put sorely to the test; I sulked a little, but to no avail. Besides, her duties were never clear to me: she had been taken on as a teacher, but she soon took an interest in what I ate and in the clothes I wore. It was impossible to understand a thing in that insulting confusion of roles. I knew only that she would always be there with that foxy nose of hers, those eyes that settled on me, making my heart race unexpectedly.

Some mornings she came into my room at dawn without knocking. She would part the curtains and open the window, even if I was sleeping, even if it was stormy. At her touch the shutters squeaked like ducks in flight; she opened and closed them, opened them again and closed them once more so that I would hear the squeak – she wanted me to hear it. In fact she laughed as I turned over in bed. I told her to stop it but she pretended she couldn’t hear me. She wanted a fight, that much was clear. When she was done with the shutters, she would come over to me and gaze at me. I would leap out of bed and try to grab her by an arm, but by then she would have turned around and left.

She reappeared when it was time for lessons, which obviously I didn’t follow because I cared nothing for any of that wretchedness; it would all have happened even if I hadn’t been there. I lived in Alento, amidst ruins, surrounded by hayseeds and a pungent smell of rotting meat.

Towards evening she would come back with a steaming plate, set it down in front of me and stay there, watching me like an owl. Then, from a sleeve, she would take a handkerchief and wipe my nose, in order, she said, to prevent a stray drop falling into the dish, even if there was no drop.

‘Swallow your broth, it will do you good,’ she said and stared me in the eye.

I took the dish only on the understanding that she would go away; she did, and went and sat beside the hearth. Meanwhile I gulped down the thin brew while spying on her slyly coquettish expression. I spied on her eyes, two glass marbles, and it seemed to me that her eyelids never closed to moisten them; I spied on her stiff mouth, the mouth of someone who has never been kissed; and her hair, yellow as an ear of wheat, which fell to her shoulders, cut into a short tuft over her forehead: she must have had something similar on her unpenetrated quim!

When my father died, I told my mother that to save money we would have to do without Estella, and that she and I would be better off on our own. That’s exactly what I said to her, looking her in the eyes so that she would understand that from now on I was the man of the house. She paid me no heed. It was clear that Estella had bewitched her, subjugating poor mother with some sort of spell. And subjugating me too, in one way or another.

At any rate it was the least one could expect from a troubled woman who had entered a convent at a very young age and escaped one night two years later, wearing her nun’s habit. They came from Naples to get it back and ripped it off her in front of the church, heedless of the madwoman that she was, leaving her stark naked, her breast covered only by her hair, left long because no one had managed to cut it. Passers-by were left dumbfounded by the spectacle: old men hurried to take pictures of the uncanny sight to tickle their equipment into action when they got home; old women hastily crossed themselves, crying out, ‘Lord-a-mercy! She’s a mad one!’

Estella

‘The dead don’t need to be put to bed.’ Ada de Paolis said this regularly and with slight concern when anyone came to visit her. Over the years I never saw her withhold her help from anyone, in spite of certain painful consequences – for her son, for example, himself already bereft. In any case, her terrible ministry began only after the death of her husband.

No less than his wife, Giorgio de Paolis was well-liked in the village, so much so that the people of Alento raised their hats when they saw him passing. The poor creatures came to his notary’s office, and Giorgio never took their money and, as soon as he saw them rummaging in their pockets for a spare coin, he would show them out with a great wave of his hand. The next day they would come back with baskets full of potatoes, fresh eggs, white flour, and Peppa would take them and thank them as if we were in terrible need of these provisions; they would take off their hats and crumple them in their hands.