CHAPTER 21. ECHOES OF WAR

April 21, 1965.

On April 21, 1965, fifty-six-year-old Saverio Pasquale was cultivating one of his own fields with special care and diligence on a Lamborghini tractor—in these very minutes, thoughts of the most contradictory properties swirled in his mind and his soul, like a tangle of snakes: he reflected on his own farm, on his pigs, goats, and sheep, on his family, on post-war Italy of which he was a citizen, on his twenty-seven-year-old son, who, in Saverio's opinion, did everything wrong, including his life choices, as well as on that very celebration in honor of the twentieth anniversary of the liberation of Bologna, to which he had so reluctantly, so unwillingly let his "good-for-nothing" son Aureliano Pasquale off from work today—it should be noted that the criterion of "good-for-nothingness" was determined by Saverio only according to whether Aureliano wished to act as his father pleased or not.

Bright thoughts in Saverio Pasquale were replaced by dark, but not black, thoughts, and vice versa—the same thing was happening in his soul. The light furrow after light furrow, which this truly original farmer was so steadily and confidently leaving on one of his many fields, was nothing more than the brightest personification of creating all sorts of inscriptions on the sand of time—with the same constancy and steadfastness, Saverio also entered the days of his earthly life, where the tool was by no means the mechanical creation of Ferruccio Lamborghini, but his own body, his own flesh: each of his days, leaving its own special trace, partially similar to the previous one, was, like that trace, doomed to perish in one way or another—winds, rain, and snow would fulfill their free and involuntary purpose, grass would grow on the previously cultivated place, and nothing more would remind this world that Saverio Pasquale had been in this world and had cultivated its dust...

His son Aureliano was a different matter—he was convinced that only creativity could leave an imperishable trace after us: Saverio laughed at his thoughts, words, and feelings, for he considered him an incorrigible fool—let his creativity, which is his so-called "spiritual food," fill his belly with physical, naturally tangible food. What is his scribbling on paper? Nothing more than a child's prank! It was time to grow up and think about family and procreation: to give birth to the one who will be after us—but for what? For the sake of empty marks and words called "family" and "kin"? In this world, a person has only one family and only one kin—and this family and this kin are inseparably connected with the name of the Almighty. Twenty-seven-year-old Aureliano was perfectly aware of this—fifty-six-year-old Saverio, however, never understood his son: perhaps due to the limitations of his mind and his soul? The unusually rough words that often flew from Saverio's lips to his son could not but torture his hearing, heart, and soul—it must be admitted that he was to a considerable extent patient and morally resilient, for any other person would have long ago replied to his blood offender in the same way. Aureliano did not succumb to the power and influence of the feeling of revenge—he could not say the same about the feeling of resentment. Despite many unsuccessful attempts, Saverio still wanted to subjugate the being of his rebellious son, and therefore in the most clumsy way tried to play on the harpsichord of his soul, without having the slightest musical ear or knowing musical rules and norms: twenty-seven-year-old Aureliano Pasquale, called by his father "one of the echoes of war," daily ate a full plate of truly useless moralizing for breakfast—he was forced to swallow the same amount of insults every evening, like a kind of peculiar pill that was prescribed to him by fifty-six-year-old Saverio when Aureliano was healthier than ever before. The prescription and coercion to take these pills destroyed the trust and respect of the so-called "sick" for his so-called "healer."

At the very hour when Saverio was thinking about whether his son was worthy of such a father, Aureliano was thinking about whether his father was worthy of such a son: at this time, one of them was in the cabin of a Lamborghini tractor, while the other was among the labyrinths of Bologna, dressed in the mantle of a celebration. Continuously creating his traces on the sand of time, Saverio suddenly ignited in his mind the very dialogue that took place this morning between Aureliano and his mother, Frina, Saverio's wife—heavy monotonous work inclines everyone to the awakening of all kinds of memories, thoughts, and feelings:

“'Nothing can be changed...' she told me... 'everything will be the same as last year, and the year before that...' she said it to me with such conviction... to me, who knows that in one second a person's entire life can completely change: be it with the help of rockets someone has launched at you, or because of flowers you have sent to your girlfriend. We are just instruments in this world of great will: what must happen is inevitable, and therefore you need to trust your intuition and act—where it is necessary, sensually and passionately, and where it is required, with a cold, sober calculation...”

“'I see that you are not doing well right now, son...' his mother answered Aureliano, sincerely concerned about his state—'Imagine an ocean with cold water, near you is the place where the Titanic sank a little earlier, darkness reigns everywhere, you are on a small board, no piece of land is visible around, you don't know what to do, whether you will be saved or not, you don't have the slightest hope, this is a situation where you want to shout to someone to let them know you're there, but it's useless, because there is only emptiness around—well, you are not in such a situation right now!...'”