Three Horses Read online

  The historical context in which De Luca emerged as a writer lends a sense of urgency to his words, and casts a veil of nostalgia over his vision. The 1990s was a decade ushered in by a major break with the past. After the unraveling of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, it no longer made much sense to contrast Western-style capitalism with a functional model of communism. Marxism and its political embodiment in Moscow and Beijing had long been a beacon for Italian writers of the left, who were the dominant force in postwar Italian culture. Consequently, the collapse of Soviet communism and the death of ideology, as it has been called, left many of them adrift. Not only did the battle lines have to be redrawn: the entire map had to be thrown out.

  In Italy, political and cultural discourse have long been intertwined. Artists and writers are expected to comment on public life through columns in the major newspapers, speeches at protest rallies, or even the holding of elective office. Italy has rewarded some of its most prominent men of culture an appointment as senator-for-life (most recently to the poet Mario Luzi). Not everyone in Italy agrees, of course, that the artist or the artwork must necessarily be an instrument of social change. Such a notion was adamantly rejected, in particular, by the neo-avantgarde of the 1960s, out of which grew the postmodernism best known through the novels of Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco. Eco, in particular, helped to create a vogue for erudite disquisition that has been given new impetus today in the works of Roberto Calasso and Guido Ceronetti.

  The world of letters was not immune to the calls for change that rocked Italian politics and society in the 1990s. One of the most refreshing innovations to emerge was freer experimentation with prose. Literary Italian has always been quite forbidding to its acolytes, representing an ideal literary standard rather than an idiom that the majority of people actually speak. Young writers came increasingly to reject the imposition this represented, in favor of a medium that more closely resembled colloquial patterns of speech and the variations in dialect that distinguish one region from the other.

  In this postmodern climate, Erri De Luca was almost an anachronism, more reminiscent of the politically engaged artists of the postwar era than of the new writers. While he is indeed one of the great innovators of contemporary Italian prose, his allegiance to the recent past, both as a writer and as a political activist, places him in a class by himself. He belongs to the generation that had consumed its youth in the political turmoil of 1968, which he has called “the century’s most imprisoned generation.” Unlike the many who have abjured the experience of those years, De Luca makes no apologies about his active participation in the extreme left-wing movements of the ’60s and ’70s. In fact, he places them at the front and center of his curriculum vitae and of his aesthetic creed.

  As the historian Paul Ginsborg describes it: “The Italian protest movement was the most profound and long-lasting in Europe. It spread from the schools and universities into the factories, and then out again into the society as a whole.”4 What had started out as a protest against working conditions at the Fiat factory in Turin in 1969 turned into a nationwide political movement calling for revolutionary change. One of the largest and most charismatic of the various radical factions was “Lotta Continua” (Ongoing Struggle), a coalition of workers and students that grew out of the Fiat assemblies. It would last, growing in influence and militancy, until 1976, when it splintered after the defeat of the Italian Communist Party at the general elections. For De Luca, who describes himself as one of the leaders of Lotta Continua, the story ends in 1980, when the Fiat management announced thousands of layoffs and broke the back of organized labor. He describes this moment in his short story collection, In alto a sinistra (Above, to the left): “In a single night the great factory had gotten rid of twenty-four thousand meals in the cafeteria, and forty-eight thousand hands, perhaps fewer, since people injured on the job were also among the expelled. ‘Go outside to eat,’ they said. And outside we would stay for forty days and forty nights, by fires to keep us warm. No one exited, no one entered the factory we were blockading. In the end we would all remain outside: friends, strangers, defeated.”5

  In its most extreme form, the militancy of the 1970s led to the political assassination of persons who had been deemed enemies of the revolution. So pervasive was the general atmosphere of violence that the decade is remembered in Italian annals as “The Years of Lead.” De Luc a makes no attempt to justify the taking of human life, but he is clearly reluctant to tailor a response for those who would automatically criticize those deeds today. His stance is recorded elliptically in Aceto, arcobaleno (Vinegar, rainbow), where an assassin admits the senselessness of his crimes but adds, “I do not wish to reconstruct the motives for a death sentence against an enemy. I remove that act from any contour that might accommodate it. Instead I speak of its consequences on me.”6

  In the same collection, which forms a fascinating companion piece to Three Horses, De Luca gives a trenchant portrait of the era: “In those years no one wanted to be light. A different gravity impelled that changed the pace of many. When it ended, everyone went about erasing it, putting on sneakers.”7 Once the age of protest was over, De Luca went into an exile of sorts, on the margins of society, his class, and his country, choosing to work as a truck driver, day laborer, and mason in Africa and France. He has called this period a time of “slowness,” when amid the grinding rhythms of manual labor and the silence of the long days, he discovered his dimension as a writer: “It was the just rhythm of heavy labor and its gestures, but it was also a time without revolt in which I felt like a foreigner. In the slowness I learned ancient Hebrew, the language of origin of the Sacred Scriptures, and about the mountains, as a rock climber.”8 Translating the Hebrew Bible and mountain climbing—two of De Luca’s greatest passions—may be strange bedfellows, but they are emblematic of the search for origins and fearlessness that animates his writing.

  It is against this backdrop of political activism, disillusionment, and exile that the story told in Three Horses evolves. The battleground shifts from 1970s Italy to the Argentina of the Dirty War and the thousands of desaparecidos who never received a burial. The title is derived from a nursery rhyme recited in the mountains of the Emilia region: “Tre anni una siepe, tre siepi un cane, tre cani un cavallo, tre cavalli un uomo.” In three years a hedge, three hedges a dog, three dogs a horse, three horses a man. According to this measure, a man’s life lasts as long as that of three horses: twenty-seven times three. Somewhere in Calabria, on the southernmost tip of Italy’s eastern shoreline, a middle-aged man spends his days in solitude, tending a garden, reading used books, and struggling not to remember. He is already on his second life, the first having been extinguished on the plains of Patagonia, during his flight from the military authorities who had murdered his young wife. A woman enters his life, and as he falls in love the memories of this earlier time come flooding back. At the same time he makes a new friend, a migrant worker from Africa, bearing the ancient wisdom of another continent. By the end of the novel the narrator’s second life, too, will have ended, but in the empty space it leaves behind, something new will grow.

  One of the underlying themes of De Luca’s works is the redemptive power of memory, his embrace of it being perhaps the main feature that he shares with other writers of his generation. This theme burns into the pages of Three Horses, where from the start the narrator makes known his preference for used books, since the pages stay in place after you’ve turned them. The narrator’s relationship to the past is fraught, a difficulty he expresses by telling the entire story, including the many flashbacks to his Argentinean years, in the present tense. When his lover, Laila, probes him about this usage, he replies enigmatically. “What do I want with verbal gymnastics? I am not the master of time. I’m its beast of burden.”

  The eternal present of Three Horses is only the most prominent of its many stylistic peculiarities. In this, the most poetic and experimental of De Luca’s novels, the author has distilled the turbulent matter of
his earlier stories into a prose that is rigorously stripped down, essential and concrete. Even basic references to organic functions are replaced by their most material equivalents. There is no eating or drinking in his vocabulary. There is only chewing or swallowing. To dance is to “tap your feet.” To exhale is to “expel air from the nostrils.”

  Here one feels the weight of De Luca’s long apprenticeship as a translator of the Hebrew Bible. Many aspects of his prose are reminiscent of features typical of Biblical prose.9 De Luca operates within a narrow, concrete vocabulary, repeating words, almost obsessively, to amplify their richness and meaning rather than drawing on synonyms. Terra, premura, and mossa are frequent visitors to these pages, creating no small amount of difficulty for translation into English. Terra, for instance, means “earth,” “ground,” “land,” and “soil.” How to choose one word that will render both the metaphysical perspective and the feelings of a gardener crumbling dirt between his fingers?

  The same influence comes to bear on the syntax. Sentences string along in parallel structures, with the conjunction “and” appearing at the beginning and at repeated intervals in the middle. More sophisticated conjunctions such as “although,” “despite” or even “since” are implicitly rejected, as if De Luca wished to strip his prose of the accretions of literary history. His sentences often consist of a series of run-on phrases, held together by serial commas and perhaps, but not always, a common subject. These usages have been slightly attenuated in the English, in order to capture the rhythm of the original.

  It is in the area of style that De Luca steps outside of his normally content-driven aesthetic to engage in what critics call metalinguistics, or language commenting on itself. He has often said that Italian is really his father tongue, quite literally, the language spoken by his father, and by inference, the language of the books in his father’s study. In Montedidio (God’s Mountain), his most successful novel both commercially and critically, the young narrator remarks, “I write in Italian because it is quiet, and into it I can put the events of the day, sheltered from the noise of Neapolitan.”10 The Neapolitan dialect, instead, is his mother tongue, the language spoken to him by his mother, and the language of the streets of his childhood.

  De Luca continues to experiment and explore in his works, most recently by writing a play in dialect (Morso di una luna nuova), but he remains true to the ideals of his youth. His methods may have changed and his voice become more limpid, more articulate, but he still advocates, now as before, a stubborn resistance. The new target of his protest is no longer solely capitalism and consumerism. It is a broader, more metaphysical quest to restore a human dimension to our lives, and reclaim the earthly rhythms of nature for ourselves. His admonition was already clear in his first novel, Non ora, non qui: “If we move constantly, we give a sense, a direction to time. But if we stop, digging in our heels like a donkey in the middle of the trail, if we let ourselves be carried away by daydreams, then time stops and is no longer a burden that weighs on our backs. If we refuse to carry it, it pours out, spilling about like the ink stain that my pen makes balanced upright on the blotter, then falling over, empty.”11

  Michael F. Moore

  New York, March 2005

  1. Erri De Luca, Non ora, non qui (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1989), p. 25.

  2. Ibid., back cover.

  3. Silvio Perrella, “Erri De Luca: Voci di un vocabulario. Un dialogo.” Recorded interview, http://www.feltrinelli.it/IntervistaInterna?id_int=1331.

  4. Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary: Society and Politics, 1943-1988 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 298.

  5. Erri De Luca, “Conversazione di fianco,” in In alto a sinistra (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1994), p. 77.

  6. Erri De Luca, Aceto, arcobaleno (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1992), p. 33.

  7. Ibid., 20.

  8. Erri De Luca. “I tempi della vita,” http://www.educational.rai.it/railibro/intervise.asp?id=118.

  9. For a concise description of the style of biblical Hebrew, see Robert Alter’s “To the Reader” in his translation and commentary of Genesis (New York: Norton, 1996), pp. ix–xlvii.

  10. Erri De Luca, God’s Mountain, trans. by Michael F. Moore (New York: Riverhead Books, 2002).

  11. Non ora, non qui, p. 44.

  Selected works by Erri De Luca

  NOVELS

  Non ora, non qui

  Tu, mio (Sea of Memory, trans. Beth Archer Brombert)

  Montedidio (God’s Mountain, trans. Michael Moore)

  SHORT STORIES

  Aceto, arcobaleno

  In alto a sinistra

  Il contrario di uno

  POETRY

  Opera sull’acqua e altre poesie

  PLAYS

  L’ultimo viaggio di Sinbad

  Morso di una luna nuova

  TRANSLATIONS FROM THE BIBLE

  Esodo / Nomi

  Giona / Ionà

  Kohèlet / Ecclesiaste

  Libro di Rut

  This book was originally published as TRE CAVALLI © 1999 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Rome, Italy.

  The publication of this book has been made possible thanks to a translation grant offered by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

  Translator copyright © 2005 Michael F. Moore

  Production Editor: Mira S. Park

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  De Luca, Erri, 1950-

  [Tre cavalli. English]

  Three horses / by Erri De Luca ; translated by Michael F. Moore.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-59051-427-6

  I. Moore, Michael F. II. Title.

  PQ4864.E5498T7313 2005

  853′.914—dc22

  2004021061

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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