There is a delicate pleasure in identifying the friends of our enemies and making them the secret objectives of revenge. He worked on it for months, years. His enemy’s favourite student had just gone to a university in the north; by one of life’s little coincidences he was in the same field. To find a possible enemy for him was difficult but not impossible; he had only to study the location of various colleagues and the second one he found was a good choice. He didn’t know the man well. He’d met him at some congress or other and was on first name terms. He was a mediocre, arrogant fellow whose writings were marked by awkward syntax and vague conclusions; they extolled second-rate authors in second-rate reviews. But this was not his Achilles’ heel. The weak point of this prospective ally was his wearisome career in the shadow of a pitiless superior who had humiliated him for years as if he were a superfluous object, calling him Smerdyakov, like the servant of the Brothers Karamazov. Here was the weakness to be exploited, not heavy-handedly but with a light touch, which would not threaten blackmail but surreptitiously hint at it in a way possible between congenial spirits. After only a brief conversation the machinery was put in motion and he watched it from the sidelines with deliberately prolonged enjoyment. An enjoyment which followed a set course to the very end, like a symphony. And when it was over he started again and finished with a short, syncopated rondo, which was easier but less gratifying. His second alliance, with an ambitious and spiteful young woman colleague gave him little satisfaction. She was a frank and obvious schemer who had betrayed a friend, usurped her place with the old Professor and installed herself, almost insolently in his department. To have her on his side was actually tedious; privately he called her “the gangster’s moll”.
And the other victories, the official ones. Published books, articles, scholarly meetings. His greatest success came, once more, from the Iberian Peninsula. The dictatorships were over, there were no more limitations, and no one to prevent him from exercising his critical powers on a sixteenth-century courtier-poet, commemorated at a congress of scholars from all over Europe which took place in an aristocratic, baroque country mansion, far from the capital and surrounded by olive trees and vineyards. He had managed to be scheduled near the end, intending to deliver a dry, technical paper, an apparently neutral, rhythmical reading which actually pointed up relentlessly the stylistic wiles of the poet in question, his concealed plagiarism of his great contemporaries. But at one point there was a paper by a Dominican monk, of his own age, a professor of Classics and for years editor of a literary review which, during the superseded government had held to a vaguely liberal and anti-Fascist “cultural” line, with no definite political colouring. Now this champion of vague anti-Fascism spoke in a conciliatory manner of the compromising courtier-poet, in terms of the autonomy of the poetical text, of human weakness and the necessity of putting aside biographical details, because “poets have no biography except in their poetry”, and we must pay due respect to the solitary, mysterious inner Word which dictated the words of their poems. There was intolerable Platonism in this specious and surreptitious allusion, a fuzziness that spilled over into a metaphysical logos, an influence of Spinoza which the speaker gracefully linked with pre-Socratic philosophy but which was actually tied up with Right-wing neo-idealism. And then the monk’s humility, his conciliatory tone, his forgiveness of human weakness in the name of the poetic text, these were a form of subtle arrogance, a reversed censorship, a blackmailing expression of the remission of sins. No, no sin was to be remitted; he would not tolerate such a vision of the world or let himself be trapped by so treacherous a formula.
And so he spoke up as he thought he should under the circumstances. First he apologized for quoting himself, he simply had to do it. Meanwhile he called his hearers’ attention to examples of phonetics, scansion, and vocabulary which he had picked out in order to show the similarities between the poet’s text and those of his manneristic contemporaries. He was perfectly aware of the autonomy of a poetical text, but every text has its place in a context, and the context was here. At this point he unsheathed his long sword. The classicist had used old-fashioned, outdated language — he was not up on contemporary criticism; in short, he was poorly equipped. And so he spoke of Bachtin and the meaning of context within the text; he displayed the gems of his chosen examples against a broad cultural panorama. This allowed for no indulgence or compromise; he left no space for the no-man’s-land of literature shaped by a Platonic canon; he showed them, peremptorily and incontrovertibly, an x-ray labelled literature and life. And he won. Not immediately, of course, because he incurred an aggressive attack on the part of three young intellectuals. But the important thing was that in academic circles he won the reputation of an uncompromising scholar, with a cutting edge like that of a diamond.
And then there were comforting and reassuring domestic victories: an apartment in the centre of the city, a rich library, a study where the photograph of Machado was finally hung in an appropriate setting, near to books that were worthy of him. He transcribed the tercet of the curious poem by Drum-mond de Andrade that he had chosen to analyze, and wondered what title to give to its presentation at a forthcoming congress. He attempted a translation and read it aloud in order to measure the effect it would have on his hearers.
What are our poems made of? And where?
What poisoned dream responds to them?
If the poet is embittered and the rest is clouds?
He rather liked the poet, after all; he was dry and realistic, with clear vision, even if it was, perhaps, veiled by a metaphysical streak which he considered superfluous. On second thoughts there was something querulous in that late-Romantic reference to a vague empyrean where poetical concepts floated in abstract form before descending in the shape of words into such a miserable receptacle as the poet, a mortal man contaminated by sin and embitterment. But perhaps this elegantly melancholy poet was unaware; he was, in his way, a young gentleman who had written these words without understanding their meaning, in the belief that they had mysteriously arisen out of some depth of cosmic space. But for him, as he read them, they held no mystery, they were clear as crystal, he had the key, he could snatch and hold them in the palm of his hand, and play with them as if they were the wooden letters of a child’s alphabet. He smiled and wrote: Bitterness and Clouds. For a rhythmical reading of a twentieth-century poem.
He himself was the true poet, he could feel it.
ISLANDS
Be thought he might put it this way: Dear Maria Assunta, I am well and hope the same is true of you. Here it’s already hot, it’s nearly summer, but with you, on the other hand, good weather perhaps hasn’t yet come; we’re always hearing about smog, and then there’s all that big-city and industrial waste. Anyhow I’m expecting you if you want to come for a holiday, with Giannandrea, too, of course, and God bless you. I want to thank you for his and your invitation, but I’ve decided not to come, because, you know, your mother and I lived here together for thirty-five years. When we first came we felt as if we were in the North, and in fact we were, but now I’ve grown fond of the place and it’s filled with memories. Then, since your mother’s death I’ve grown accustomed to living alone and even if I miss my work I can find a lot of distractions, like looking after the garden, something I’ve always enjoyed doing, and also after the two blackbirds, which keep me company, too, and what would I do in a big city, and so I’ve decided to stay in these four rooms, where I can see the harbour and if I feel like it I can take the ferry to go and visit my old mates and have a game of cards. It’s only a few hours by ferry, and I feel at home on board, because a man misses the place where he has worked all his life, every week for a lifetime.