Nicola was the only one who talked to me about the war. He used to tell me these things, stories about when he was young and the war was going on. There was war just as there was the mastriale, drought, a season when tuna didn’t run. There was. A single verb covered all the good and evil that befell human beings. The war lived on in a few odd details that he would relate over and over again: an empty window seen from the street, and behind the window no house, not even a roof, and you could see the sky. Windows are made to see the sky, but not like that. And there was a market square where grass grew because there was nothing to sell and no one ever went there, not even to exchange a few words. Grass can be a sad thing, when it grows between the cobblestones of a market.
Sea of Memory Erri De Luca From the Italian by B. A. Brombert
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The window frames a piece of the sky and allows us to observe it as a work of art.
Nicola was the only one who talked to me about the war. He used to tell me these things, stories about when he was young and the war was going on. There was war just as there was the mastriale, drought, a season when tuna didn’t run. There was. A single verb covered all the good and evil that befell human beings. The war lived on in a few odd details that he would relate over and over again: an empty window seen from the street, and behind the window no house, not even a roof, and you could see the sky. Windows are made to see the sky, but not like that. And there was a market square where grass grew because there was nothing to sell and no one ever went there, not even to exchange a few words. Grass can be a sad thing, when it grows between the cobblestones of a market.
Sea of Memory
Erri De Luca
From the Italian by B. A. Brombert
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