The Voice in the Desert E-Book

Valerio Di Stefano

• Herausgeber: Youcanprint
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

The Voice in the Desert, beyond a skillfully written novel, is also a series of notes masterfully expressed by the amazing pen of Valerio Di Stefano. Valerio, already author of several books, all of literary and philanthropic inspiration, is also a philologist, skill perfectly shown in this work. A work that is capable of completely immersing us in the illusory and, at times, oniric universe of Don Fiorentino. This Don is a parish priest of an unknown village who has a great passion: the classics of Italian and foreign literature. The incredible strength of this novel is the alternation of letters that the protagonist forwards to his favorite authors, almost as if he wanted to teach them how to write and to express themselves, by praising some techniques and harshly criticizing others. Valerio's writing is driving, it leads you page after page to discover biblical notes and quotes, always with the clear awareness of broadening your own cultural baggage which, compared to his, appears meager and eternally empty.

Leseprobe

ONE

Don Fiorentino, a tall and robust man, with large bones and granitic muscles, closed the indolent wooden door of the church that creaked on the hinges of its rusty and historic past.

He had just dismissed the funeral of an estimated parishioner, to whom he had administered the holy oil three days earlier. He remembered the sick room perfectly. The totally white sheets of the deathbed, the circumstantial smiles of those who accompanied the last gasps of an old farmer devoured by a merciless disease nestled in the only male organ of which it was compassionate and Christian in order to avoid even mentioning the name and, above all, the insistent and sugary scent of someone who is already drenched, even before she takes him with her, in the mantle of the great consoler.

On the other hand, Don Fiorentino's hydraulic system - and he knew it very well - still worked, even though fifty-five years had now passed for him which did not seem like youth. And, after all, - he thought - it had not been much of a funeral either. The church, now that the thurible had been put away, still retained the fumes of the incense with which it had been at the same time impregnated, pungent and definitive.

He had to hold, in his calloused hands, those with the wrinkled skin of the widow and children of the deceased, sublimating with the smile of the viaticum the painful and embarrassed suffering of those who remained.

And then the words. Always the same of a life of priesthood achieved by consuming modest meals of little nutritional value, to which he had become accustomed, albeit reluctantly, since his seminary days, when hunger could often do much more than as much as they did not study Latin, the saints’ lives and his own worn and pancake-like tunic. The same words that he repeated to everyone at every exit of the coffin carried on the shoulders of the funeral employees. “God calls us to himself”, “Courage... it is the will of the Lord”, “It takes dignity to carry the cross”, “Pray, pray a lot”, “Thank you Bob, thank you Charlie”, “His will, not ours.”

He watched with tears, contemplated lips swollen from constantly kissing the air and applied a script bordering on theatrical representation.

And what were, after all, the ritual, the mass, the Eucharistic sacrifice, if not the living representations of man's fear of leaving for the other world, from which, except mistakes and omissions, no mortal was ever came back to tell us what it was like?

However, Don Fiorentino paid little attention to it.

Instead, he began to think about the theme of the resurrection of the dead in body and soul, just as he had read it in a novel by Tabucchi, in which the protagonist, a journalist from Lisbon, by complaining about his fatness, commented on the inappropriateness that his fat and flaccid flesh came back to Earth in order to make him suffer and become extremely tired. And why on earth, in addition to the pious soul of the old farmer who had accompanied him to the hearse, should his nauseating smell have also resurrected, which he had given up on in the name of that pietas that supports everything and that reduces everything to the secondary appearance of a mystery that he had never managed to penetrate? 

Once he had closed the door, following his skepticism, and left it to the woodworms that devoured it every day, Don Florentino lit a cigar stub, which he had hastily placed among his clothes, which had now imbued with the smell of traditional Tuscan which still retained at the end the blackish mark of the brazier from the first lighting of the morning, the one that he so liked to complete, with two pleased puffs and with the support of the Swedish matches, the ones that made a cheerful and prolonged blaze that he enjoyed extinguishing with the first smoke exhaled from his lungs.

And when he placed the burned wooden remains, now on the ancient and worn piece of furniture in the sacristy, in any improvised ashtray, including the stoup, he looked at them with compassion, tight as they were in the embrace between the life of the still unburned wood and death of the head twisting around itself, as if in a final spasm. 

Don Fiorentino liked two things more than anything: his Tuscan cigars (for nothing in the world would he have given up the pleasant scent that came from that incident of semi-rotten American tobacco, wet and left to dry by the expert hands of the cigar makers) and the books that kept in the sleeping room. They were certainly not books of particular antiquarian value, that much must be said. He was not interested in the object itself, he was not willing to commit crimes to get hold of a very rare first edition of some novel from the past, whether distant or near, as a corrupt mobster close to the Government had done, as he had heard the radio - Because Don Fiorentino did not even want to hear about television. He was a devil tool. However, while for all the other tools of the devil, whether he was called Beelzebul or Satan, he felt an irresistible attraction of knowledge, not considering them harmful to anyone and not seeing anything in them that was not good in and of itself, that convex glass thing bored him to death.

That is what books were like for Don Fiorentino. He could not wait to join them, especially in the evening, when the darkness fell restlessly and humidly over that parish of a village whose name he would have liked not to remember. He distractedly crushed a rosary, satisfied himself with some leftovers from the day before, took a couple more puffs of blond Kentucky tobacco (how could a cigar made in those parts with a name like a mechanical code be called “Tuscan”, Don Fiorentino not had still understood it), he turned on the radio which was broadcasting the Notturno Italiano, tuning it very well to the medium waves and, after having provided for a not embarrassing stripping of his clothes which were unwiedly with fabric and dirt, he finally got into bed and began to read in the long but comforting and productive hours of the night. 

Not the breviary, or the office of the liturgical hours of ordinary time, but rather the volumes that piled up on his bedside table falling, sometimes, now one way and now the other, onto the floor, getting dipped in the ash that fell where deposited in turn, by surrendering to the weight accumulated because of the slow but inexorable combustion of the cigar, now devoid of its periodic puffing and inhalation.

And just as he turned his enormous and slightly curved back to the providential closing of the enormous door (it was written Domus Dei et porta coeli), he remembered Father Fulgenzio, a good Jesuit who knew Latin and Greek, and who night surprised him in the dormitory when, instead of sleeping, he was reading “Dangerous Liaisons” by Chlordelos de Laclos. 

Don Fiorentino had to reconstruct carnal love, that between a man and a woman, starting from that reading, trying to understand, with his limits as a beardless young man from the Church, what were the dark dynamics that made Adam meet Eve. Father Fulgentius was strict but understanding and tolerant. He limited himself to confiscating the obscene publication and, sparing him the ritual lectures, he limited himself to replacing it with a yellowed copy of the “Spiritual Exercises” by Ignatius of Loyola which even the junk dealer would have rejected, who certainly would not have known who to resell it to. For his part, he had purchased a copy in the original French language in a bookshop of Lourdes, during a pilgrimage. An unseemly act, yes, but not a sin. Or, at least, that is not how it appeared to him. 

He would have liked to say, as an adult, to Father Fulgentius, who Solomon also spoke of that carnal love in the Song of Songs: “My beloved slips his hand into my lap, my insides tremble for him. Myrrh flows from my hands, myrrh flows from my fingers onto the latch I hold.” 

However, Father Fulgenzio ended up at the age of eighty-six on a torrid day in the middle of August, suffocated by a fragment of peach stone, the fruit of which he was fond of. They buried him dressed in the cassock, with his face pitifully covered by a white linen cloth embroidered for the occasion, in order to obscure the purple blackness of those dying from lack of air. And he never spoke about it again.

Taken a few steps and came back to the altar, Don Fiorentino stopped to contemplate the wooden crucifix, a work by an unknown person from who knows where, who ended up there by chance or necessity, probably as atonement for the great and many sins committed by the sculptor during his lifetime, a republican of the worst kind. It seemed to Don Fiorentino that the Christ inlaid in the olive tree was looking in different directions depending on the shadow cast on his face. Guareschi's Don Camillo with the crucifix spoke to us, and the latter also responded to him, except when it was the voice of his pride that spoke.