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«The
island beyond the moon»:
THE DIASPORA
Evening throws the shadow of Montagnola over Peccorini village on the south face,
like a bluish stole. As if to cover up your thoughts. As if to release the eye
from the contemplation of tumbledown ruins, neglected pathways and bitten-down
trees.
The sky seeks its reflection in the puddles on collapsed flat rooftops. And suddenly,
in the lonely alley to the church – where the disabled man sits like a memorial
– you are seized by the hundred-times-over silence of the emigrants, the
great loneliness.
And you have to sit down and stare up, up at the peak. These bands of soil, not
ten meters wide, that rise interminably to the Fossa di Felci like stairs, these
terraces, these millions of stones, which first made it possible to walk across
and live on the island: these you must build again in your imagination, stone
by stone, wall by wall. Until your hands are bloody and your back stiff under
the merciless sun.
What an inconceivable, gigantic piece of work – from the sea to a height
of 700 meters! Impossible to imagine that fertile vines grew in the rubble scree-sides
of the causeway. Impossible to imagine that olive groves stood on the steep slopes
where you stumble over burnt stumps and you can barely walk upright.
Who defied the wilderness to make this land their own? Who brought it to bloom
generation by generation? And who finally gave it all up?
Were they Roman slaves, Greek settlers, or nineteenth-century farmers who completed
the work of their lifetime when they laid the last stone up at the peak? In any
case they were men, as tough as obsidian. Nameless men. You think of them, drinking
the good air in the shimmering light, breathing the evening with the smell of
bread,.
According to the population records, there were 1,547 souls on Filicudi in 1911.
Until then they had lived rather well by exporting capers, olives and their dark
sweet wines. Two world wars thoroughly changed that: the islanders left their
home by the hundred. “To Argentina to live, to America to earn, to Australia
to die”, they used to say as they stood their ground in the New World:
From being a labourer without a word of English, you worked your way up to become
a greengrocer, then a manager running an entire hotel empire. La Mafia? –
No! Il lavoro! Work and then more work – and cooperation. Filicudi is proud
of her famous sons. The island has produced journalists and entrepreneurs overseas,
and one famous man: John Bonica, pioneer of local anesthetics and a world champion
free-style wrestler.
Yet while things were taking off in America, Atlantis, a unique culture in the
Tyrrhenian Sea, was foundering on the other side of the world. Strangers from
the mainland arrived on the island and took possession of the land. In the beginning,
they did not care whether the vines and the olive-trees bore fruit, caught fire
or were eaten by cattle. Wall after wall, terrace after terrace collapsed.
Only recently have the “new Filicudians” developed a sense of nature
and copied from the tourists an appreciation of greenery and gardens. But do they
really understand the voice of the sea, the secret murmurings of ancient cranesbills,
the gospel of the moon?"
In 1993 the author received the literary award of the
City of Berne for this work.
«The author transforms
language into perfumes and sounds, into impressions and landscapes, with intense
and stunnig pictures.»
Literary commission of the City of Berne, on handing over the literary award.
«Distant
islands are as much his domain as the realm of the word or the empire of the inner
self!" B.Häusler, BERNER BäR
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