Book 9: La Luna e i Falò (The Moon and the Bonfires, 1950)

"One needs a town, if only for knowing the pleasures of leaving it."

Cesare Pavese is regarded as one of Italy's pre-eminent writers, not just for his novels and poetry, but also for his translations of American authors into Italian, most notably Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. Apparently he never actually set foot in America, a source of utter amazement to me after reading "The Moon and the Bonfires," which contains so many piquant descriptions of life in the States, particularly of California and its "cities sparkling along the coast." The last coast, he calls it, the end of the world.

The novel is about a desperately poor Italian boy, a bastard left at a foundling hospital, who goes to America as a young man. "In America, the beauty of it is, they're all bastards." He makes a fortune there — it's not quite clear how, although bathtub gin is mentioned — and returns in the late 1940s to his rural village in northern Italy. Everything has changed. Even his beloved hazel trees are gone. Mere, and mostly sad, reminders of what used to be are all that remain. The narrator — referred to only as the "eel" or "the American" — has the classic "you can't go home again" realization. "Could I make anyone understand that what I wanted was only to see something I'd seen before? To see carts, to see haylofts, to see a wine tub, an iron fence, a chicory flower, a checked blue handkerchief, a drinking gourd, the handle of a hoe?"

As the novel progresses, it's not clear how much change is from World War II (and Italy being on the wrong side) and how much is a product of the narrator's altered perspective from aging and living abroad.

The change from the war is considerable, almost overwhelming. The narrator observes: "The first thing I said when I got off the boat at Genoa among houses smashed by the war was that every house, every courtyard, every terrace had meant something to someone, and that even more than physical ruin and the dead, you hate to think of so many years of living, so many memories wiped out out like that in one night without leaving a sign."

But then he continues with a sense, born of his time abroad, that such devastation is not determinative: "Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's better that way, better for everything to go up in a bonfire of dry grass and for people to begin again. That's how it was in America — when you were sick of something, a job or a place, you changed it. Over there even whole towns, with taverns, city halls and stores, are as empty now as graveyards."

The landscape, the familiar physical world ("a well-hoed, well-tended vineyard, with the right leaves and that smell of the earth baked by an august sun") are important to a feeling of "home," but it's people, the extremely rare ones who can be counted on, who give life its sense of continuity and solidity.

The narrator finds this with his childhood friend Nuto, now a grown man but with the same heart and charm as when he was a kid.

The narrator had learned a love of knowledge and the value of curiosity from Nuto, who had advised "You'll always be a good-for-nothing if you don't read books."

And he learned humility and quietness: "Nuto: when he said something he'd end with: 'If I'm wrong, let me know.' That's how I began to understand that you don't just talk to talk, to say 'I did this, I did that, I ate and drank,' but you talk to find an idea, to learn how the world works."

It's so simple, but the narrator's description of what it's like to have a best friend is still the best I've ever read: "Just listening to these talks and being Nuto's friend, knowing him so well, was like drinking wine and hearing music played."

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This was Cesare Pavese's last book. I've read that he was in love with the American actress Constance Dowling, at left, with whom he had an affair while she was working in Italy after the war. Her ending the relationship is said to have been the reason for his fatal overdose of sleeping pills in 1950. One of his last poems, eerily, was titled "Death Will Come and Look at Me with Your Eyes."

Less eerie, but crazy beautiful, and relevant to this last novel as a meditation on home and belonging is his poem "Nocturne":

Nocturne

The hill is like night against the clear sky.
Your head framed against it, barely moving,
and moving with the sky. You are like a cloud
seen between branches. In your eyes the laughter
and strangeness of a sky that is not yours.

The hill of earth and leaves halts
your bright gaze with its dark mass,
your mouth has the curve of a gentle hollow
between distant slopes. You seem to play
with the great hill and the clearness of the sky:
to please me you echo the ancient background
and make it purer.

But you live elsewhere.
Your gentle blood came from elsewhere.
The words you say have no meeting-point
with the rugged sadness of this sky.
You are only a white and sweetly gentle cloud
entangled one night among ancient branches.