Translation: Alberto Moravia, The Disobedience

The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymous Bosch, 1490-1500

This is Bora Mici's original Italian to English translation of an excerpt from Alberto Moravia's novella La disubbidienza, or The Disobedience in English. An adolescent boy goes through a crisis of metamorphosis that leads to a prolonged period of convalescence. Luca slowly rejects everything he has been given and taught by his parents and his teachers only to be reborn and to relearn to live through an acceptance and a newfound sense of belonging. His morose dejection and symbolic suicide, which he initially conceives as a game of progressive material renunciation, give way to a transformation in which he learns to trust and take pleasure in life. It's interesting to me that Moravia devotes the greatest part of his text to the unraveling of his character, describing it in great symbolic detail through his rejection of the rituals of the everyday life of a schoolboy, born into a well-to-do, loving, bourgeois family. The end of the novella, when the character finally begins to experience the joy of being alive, reads more as a resolution than as an important step in Luca's transformation journey, even though the author does stop to examine it over a few pages. I think it's important to describe what makes for a happy existence in just as much detail as what causes internal crises because both are significant and real parts of life. Is beautifully rendered suffering the only realm of great literature, leaving the rest to self-help books and religion? Or can literature reinvent itself to incorporate these other aspects of being in this world more than just symbolically or momentarily?         

It was the beginning of December. One afternoon, Luca left home carrying all the money he had in his coat pockets, silver coins and small bills. The rain had stopped after many days. The sky was clean but dark, a smoky and even color, as if the usual blue had been replaced not by the shifting gray clouds that liquefy themselves into rain or are pushed away by the wind, but by another, more still, and gloomier hue that would last forever. There was that sense of depletion that follows storms in the fresh, windless air; but crows were flying low, seemingly warning with their aquatic caws, that it would rain again. Looking up a the sky and fiddling around with the money in his pocket, Luca headed toward the public garden, located not too far from his home. He knew that at that hour no one would be there and that he could carry out his plan without worrying about being observed. He went through the gate and started making his way into the garden. He knew where he was headed, a place which was tied to a kind of childhood obsession in his memory. It was a small plaza surrounded by tall leafy oak trees on three sides and, on the fourth, by an ornate wall with nooks, columns and and roman epitaphs. On the other side of the wall stretched out the zoo, and the roaring of the hungry beasts could often be heard. When he was a child, his governesses had frequently brought Luca to walk in that melancholy and lonely plaza, with white gravel framed by the dark fronds of the bronzy oak trees. While his governess sat on an overturned capital and read a book, Luca climbed all the way to the iron grille of the fake windows and tried to look down at the zoo. Otherwise, he thoroughly searched the wooded area at the margins of the plaza; it was very shady, with its blanket of many layers of dead leaves on the surface, shiny and wet underneath; here and there grew nettle bushes that seemed to nourish their light green color with all that rotting stuff, which filled Luca with a great disgust. One day, at his house, the governess and the maid had begun discussing a crime. A young man had been killed, and his body had not been found; but some bloody clothes and and the place where they had been located made people think that the dead body had been buried in one of the many gardens in the city. Luca had listened to the maid’s comments for a long time without saying anything, pretending to play, and finally had asked her: “Why did they kill him?” The woman had responded in a sententious and bitter tone: “Because he was nice and good…that’s why…because he was not made for this world.” And since this phrase had made an impression on him, Luca asked nothing further. But later, he could not tell why, he had gotten it into his head that the young man’s dead body had been buried in that same plaza where he went walking so often with his governess. This conclusion did not have any basis in reality, not even a far-fetched or tiny one; but maybe, it was precisely because of that that it seemed irrefutable. His mind fixated on this terrible but fascinating secret, and as he walked around the plaza, he liked being able to look at the precise place where the dead body was decomposing underground. It was a corner between the ornate wall and the woods at the foot of a tall oak tree; and Luca would often stop to look at that place, searching with his foot through the dead leaves or digging up the soft dirt with a stick. He knew that the dead man lay under there and would not have given up his conviction for anything. On the other hand, by turning it over in his mind, he had reconstructed the crime in his own fashion and had even imagined what the victim and the killers looked like. The former must have been a nice and good young man, just like the woman had said, but of a special kind of goodness and niceness, which were not at all ostentatious but secret, invisible to most; as for the latter, Luca saw them exactly in the same way he saw the people on the street, normal and anonymous pedestrians. Maybe they had killed him to steal his possessions, as the newspapers wrote; but in reality, according to what the woman had said, it had been because of his goodness and niceness, in order to remove him from this world, to which he did not belong. Thinking about the young man and his death, he felt a horrifying attraction and a great pity at the same time. Then, with the passage of time and nearly without realizing it, he had imagined that he was the victim and that the body buried under the oak tree was his own. This doubling, inspired by an unknown fantastical infatuation for the person and destiny of the victim, seemed natural to him and was not the first. At other moments, while reading adventure books, he had dreamed of being a heroic and fortunate character. What was exceptional was that this was the first time he had fallen in love with such a lugubrious fate; and he darkly sensed that, unlike in other similar doublings, this was due to deep reasons, to an obsession that expressed everything to which his life was devoted. As often happens, such an obsession had gradually become lighter over the years, just like the fog that dissipates in the sun, and had changed into a desolate memory that had finally vanished into forgetfulness.

But now, having gone back to the plaza, the obsession was coming back, though in a different way. He knew now that no one had ever been buried in the plaza; but sacralized in his imagination, the plaza still remained that place where something dead had to be buried. He would bury his money in the very place where he had once thought the victim lay; and in burying the money, in a certain way, he would also bury himself; or at least that part of himself that was attached to money. Also, memories of buried treasure in adventurous settings combined themselves vaguely with these more grave resolutions, echoes of the things he’d read in early adolescence.

He mainly had in mind The Gold-Bug by Poe. But as a kind of alibi, destined to remove any tragedy from the sacrifice, and keep it within the limits of the game. Besides the money, he had also brought with him a little blue glass bottle, inside of which he had placed a map with the directions for finding his small buried treasure. Not knowing much about cryptography, Luca had contented himself with writing the directions in academic jargon, adding an f to every syllable. Just like in the short story, he would hide this vial in the hollow of one of the oak trees that surrounded the plaza.

Looking ahead, he crossed a big square meadow. The oak trees in the wooded area swayed back and forth at the end of this opening, their dark trunks resembling a crowd about to go into a panic, undulating before dispersing. Beyond the oak trees, in the pale whiteness of the gravel coursed by the daylight, you could glimpse the plaza with the decorative wall. He entered the wooded area, enjoying walking on the upright layer of dead leaves. In the underwood’s silence, he heard a subtle bird’s call; and then, turning around, he saw the bird itself, big and black, jumping up and down on the ground and then taking flight to hide among the leaves. He even noticed that, while he was making his way through the woods, he felt a sense of liberty; and he thought that it was nice to be able to act, even if it meant destroying his own life; this is precisely what acting meant; doing things according to our ideas rather than out of necessity.

There was no one in the plaza. He walked up and down it for a while thinking about the time when he had been certain about the buried dead man, and it seemed to him that the lonely and slightly sinister atmosphere that had seduced him when he was a child was intact again. There was the decorative wall with its empty nooks, the broken epitaphs, the cornices that were coming apart. There were the large windows, with their alcoves, and the big iron bars. He climbed up to one of those windows and looked at the other side into the zoo. He saw the thick foliage of a bay leaf bush, but through the leaves, it seemed to him to glimpse the green and golden plumage of a large exotic bird. A faraway roar startled him; then, as always, the beasts were hungry. He climbed down from the window and approached the designated place. The same oak tree was still there, old, hollowed out with a gaping hole, with the main branch hanging out over the plaza and leaning onto a brick support wall, like the arm of a cripple leans on a crutch. The dead man lay under the oak tree. All of a sudden, the cruel and pathetic sentiment of having been buried himself came back to him, him, killed without any pity.

He went on his knees under the tree and started digging a hole with his pocketknife. Under the dead leaves, the ground was light and wet, full of rotting pieces of bark. He displaced the dirt and then removed it with his hand and put it to the side in a small hill. When he had finished digging the hole, he slowly removed the bills from his pocket and started tearing them one by one, letting the pieces fall to the bottom of the hole. He realized that he felt a deep hatred for that money, like you hate someone who has oppressed you, and against whom you have rebelled. The idea that his parents had so much respect for money and that, without knowing it, for so many years, he had prayed in front of a safe full of that money, also contributed to his resentment. He felt that he was vindicated for all those prayers in tearing up the money, making reparations. But money was sacred too; even if in an entirely different way from the sacred image it was hiding behind while he was praying. It was sacred because of those royal effigies and those symbols that guaranteed its value; and it was sacred because it could have meant happiness for so many people. For example, for the poor man on the street, who always extended his hand toward him when he was going to school in the morning. But giving it to a poor man would have ultimately meant respecting it, reaffirming its value. And instead, Luca really wanted to destroy it, not just in his own desires, but also in reality. Loathed idol, as he felt, nothing further was necessary beyond that degrading tearing up to desacralize it forever.

When he had finished ripping up the bills, he mixed up the pieces and then, he pulled an envelope full of silver coins out of his pocket and shoved it at the bottom of the hole on top of the bills. He carried out these actions with a sense of grave and aware rigor, even if tinged by a mortal sadness. The man who had been killed and buried came back to his mind and once again that strange pity for himself overcame him. In the meantime, he filled the hole with dirt. When he was finished, he evened out the ground and covered everything with the carpet of dead leaves.

He stood up, cleaning his wet and dirty knees, and then he remembered the turquoise glass bottle and Poe’s short story. But this time, he did not have the courage to carry out that part of the plan. He felt a lugubrious and enchanted sadness, and he could understand that, after all, it had not been a game. He was not the bloodthirsty and insensitive pirate at the end of a life of adventure and freedom; that plaza was not the deserted coastline of a savage land; ultimately, no one would have ever discovered his meagre treasure of torn up bills and coins with joy. His own mediocrity, that of the place and of the treasure, all of a sudden seemed to him like the best proof of the strenuous seriousness of what he was doing and of the impossibility to delude himself by attributing to it the value of a game. He took the little bottle out of his pocket, opened it, took out the piece of paper and tore it into tiny pieces. He crushed the bottle under his heel. As he was leaving, it seemed to him that he had acted like a madman, he was just unable to understand it out yet.

….

The train lunged forward, and this thrust seemed to him like a delightful contrast to his own inertia. What else was the train to him but that which had a direction, a goal, a will, just like the nurses’s passion and his parents’ concern? All of a sudden, he thought that it would have been nice to keep going like this for all of his life. Greater, if not more mysterious forces would have followed the train, the nurse, his parents, and he would have believed in them with the same trust and the same delight. He saw himself as a soldier in torn up clothes, wounded and hungry, part of an army, whose leaders and whose war, he knew nothing about, a beggar thrust into a poverty he was neither responsible for nor aware of; rich of a wealth of which he had not earned a single penny; elevated to a power he had not sought out; a priest in a church whose rites he did not know; dead in the end because of a catastrophe he had neither foreseen nor wanted to avoid. The noisy shifting of the train on the switches, the regular and fast beating of the wheels, the whistle that tore through the silence of the countryside, the very landscape fleeting backwards on the other side of the glass windows, stimulated the rhythm of his thoughts. Yes, now he had become part of a vast, whirling and powerful current in which he was just a blade of grass that could do nothing but allow itself to be dragged along, barely hoping to float all the way to the end. And he abandoned himself to it trustingly, with his eyes closed, like he had abandoned himself a few days ago into the nurse’s arms.
….

But the train, always following the slope, came out into an opening and, at the bottom of the gorge, above two smaller mountains completely covered by forests, Luca saw the towering summit of a mountain, snow white, that seemed very tall to him. The clouds had dissipated in the sky, and the sun was shining on that faraway snow making it glow. At that time, he did not even know why, at the sight of that intact whiteness, majestic and solitary, a sudden exaltation took over him. The idea of being transported and allowing himself to be transported trustingly toward an unknown destination came back to him; but this time, it was partially modified by the new sense of being transported and allowing himself to be transported toward that snow that was so high and so white. He started looking at the mountain with his eyes wide open; and the more he looked at it, the more he felt grow in him that trusting drunken exaltation. He understood that there was no objective reason to feel so happy just because he could see the snowcapped summit of a mountain; and yet, he could not help but realize that it was precisely that view that was putting into motion the mechanism of his deepest hope, which had been blocked for so long. Almost without intending, he turned to his mother and asked, “And the nurse?”
….

Luca closed his eyes. At that same instant, the train entered into a tunnel, letting out a long mournful whistle. When Luca reopened his eyes, he only saw darkness, while a wet wind blew into his face from the tenebrous walls, mixed with spraying water and vapor clouds. Echoing in the tunnel’s vault, the clanging of the wheels seemed to him like a monotonous and exalted voice that was always repeating the same words. It also seemed to him that he could make out these words. They were the same ones, full of hope, that had accompanied him day after day in his slow healing after he had woken up from his delirium; and he understood that, from now on, not just the bustling of a train in a tunnel or the whiteness of the snow on top of a mountain, but all things, would have a meaning for him and would speak to him in their mute language. Then, with another whistle, the train reemerged into the light of day.