Clean Machine

Dino Buzzati​ ’s novel The Singularity was published in Italian in 1960 but set in 1972. Just a small leap into the future, but far enough for the second date to be that of Buzzati’s death. A coincidence, of course, but one that hints at meaning or design, as coincidences often do. We could say that life, for once, was mildly imitating his fiction, visiting his world of weirdly functional fantasy.

One of the most haunting comic moves in Buzzati’s writing is a sudden switch between one paragraph and the next in a story called ‘The Bogeyman’ (1967). In the first, we see an engineer called Roberto Paudi getting angry with a babysitter because she has told his son that if he doesn’t behave the Bogeyman will get him. Paudi thinks it is ‘intolerable to educate children by continuing to resort to foolish superstitions which could only create painful complexes in their tender psyches’. A faint irony in the presentation of this thought tells us that Paudi may be a bit too correct and modern, and Buzzati later spells out what may be his own point of view, highlighting the ‘irresistible arguments which so-called progress always marshals to dismantle the last fortresses of mystery’. Still, nothing prepares us for the second paragraph, which begins: ‘That very night the Bogeyman, levitating in midair as was his wont, appeared in the room where Paudi slept.’ Amazing what a narrative point of view can do.

The Bogeyman appears as the temporary director of the firm where Paudi works. Here things get a little strange philosophically, though Buzzati’s narrator doesn’t seem worried. Unable to deny the Bogeyman’s existence, Paudi thinks he still might be able to get rid of him as an ancient, unprogressive figure. And he can. Even though (or because) he is not just a figment of cultural imagination, the Bogeyman is mortal and is killed by the machine guns of policemen. The story ends:

He was much more delicate and tender than anyone believed. He was made of that impalpable substance that is commonly called fable or illusion – even if it is real.

Hurry, fantasies that still survive, fly away, hurry. The civil world, eager to exterminate you, follows in hot pursuit. It will never let you rest.

The narrator of ‘The Jacket’ (1962) says he feels he is ‘involved in the plot of a fairy tale, like the ones that are told to children, and no one believes are true’. The tone suggests that we are probably right in our non-belief but we shouldn’t always trust it. The narrator has a new suit made for him. The tailor seemed a bit too congenial and the narrator doesn’t try on the suit until several weeks have gone by. He finds a piece of paper in the jacket pocket – it turns out to be a ten thousand lira note. While he is thinking of notifying the tailor of this unintended gift, he puts his hand in the pocket again and finds another note of the same denomination. This happens repeatedly, and he stops dipping only when his haul has reached 58 million lire – the equivalent of a million pounds or so in today’s money. He loves the thought of easy riches and imagines he will become ‘one of the most powerful men in the world’. Then ‘a singular coincidence’ occurs. A bank’s armoured car is held up by gangsters and a passer-by is killed. The amount stolen is exactly 58 million lire. The narrator is confused by this mathematical meeting but continues diving into his pocket. This time he gets to 135 million, only to learn that a fire has half-destroyed a building where an estate agency kept its cash. Two firemen died, and the total amount missing was more than 130 million lire.

The man decides to get rid of the jacket and burns it in ‘a secluded valley in the Alps’. Of course there is no causal connection between the magically arriving money and the hold-up or the fire. But causality isn’t everything, and there are signals that can’t be ignored. The narrator says he is ‘not superstitious’ but he also knows that when he took money from the jacket, ‘something base and painful happened in the world’. He tries to visit the tailor to find out what he knows, but the man has disappeared. ‘Everything then conspired to show me that without knowing it, I was bound in a pact with the devil.’ Getting rid of the jacket doesn’t bring him peace. He never paid for the suit, and he knows that one day he will meet up with ‘that cursed tailor … asking for the final settling of [his] account’.

In ‘The Ubiquitous’ (also 1962) the fantasy is even more fantastic, but the narrator, who lets slip that he is a journalist called Dino Buzzati, is a little more prepared to deal with it. He has an old book that is supposed to contain magical formulae and he reads a few random lines each night before he goes to bed. One day – he gives us the date, 17 May – he thinks of going from one room to another in his house and finds he has done so. A moment later he thinks of his office at the newspaper, and he is there. He has managed to ‘acquire the legendary gift of omnipresence’. He takes a trip to Shanghai to test out the gift. He thinks of how much it is going to help him in his work as a journalist. He could be in Colorado one minute and at the Kremlin the next. Then he realises he can’t use such a talent. People would hate him for having it. He would ‘end up shuttling between Cape Canaveral, Oran, Moscow, Peking and Buckingham Palace. And they would finally catch me in the act.’ ‘No, when power is exaggerated … it ends up being reduced to nothing: to use it is too risky.’ He decides he is not going to tell his editor anything about it.

Buzzati was born in northern Italy in 1906. He was a painter and poet as well as a journalist and fiction writer. He worked for Corriere della Sera from 1928 until he died. He liked to compare his long spell at the paper with his (or anyone’s) service in the army, but the analogy kept changing its meaning over time. And there is of course the question of how he stayed sane during the manifest horrors of Mussolini’s invasions and proclamations. In this context an assertion of alternative reality might be a subtle form of protest. In a late interview he offered his theory of a secular form of original sin. ‘The human being is a malformation of nature … It is a mistaken creature … unhappy by definition.’ This is a darker, more emphatic view than anything we find in his fiction, and we are perhaps closer to it if we turn to Pascal’s idea that we don’t really live our lives. Pierre Delmas presents the whole sentence as an epigraph to his book Sur les pas de Buzzati: ‘In this way, we never live, we hope to live; and since we are always getting ready to be happy, we undoubtedly never will be.’*

The Stronghold and quite a few of Buzzati’s stories, fifty of which are included in a new selection by Lawrence Venuti, translate this claim into something like a theory of waiting, an almost religious faith in what hasn’t happened. A character in a posthumously published story, Why, defines ‘life in itself’ as ‘the wait for the departure’ and suggests that this condition ‘may be a very important and beautiful thing, if used well’. And in ‘The Walls of Anagoor’ (1954), waiting is treated with an irony and pathos that exclude dogma. Anagoor is a city in the Tibesti mountains that isn’t on the map or recognised by the government. It has many gates but they ‘almost never’ open. ‘It is rumoured,’ we learn, ‘that a few will open. Tonight, or tomorrow, in three months, or fifty years – no one knows. This is precisely the great secret of the city.’ The narrator waits outside the walls for 24 years and then decides to go home. The ‘pilgrims’ who are also waiting shake their heads. ‘Ah friend, how hasty you are!’ they say. ‘You expect too much from life.’

We could think of The Singularity as a reverse parable for all this. It shows us what happens when we don’t wait, and it takes us back to original sin. Its Italian title is Il grande ritratto, ‘The Great Portrait’, and it was first translated, by Henry Reed, as Larger than Life (1962). A group of scientists are at work on a vast computer system spread over a whole row of buildings hidden away in the mountains. One of them describes their creation as both human and a machine, ‘a machine made in our likeness’. His wife asks where the figure’s arms, legs and head are, and the scientist replies: ‘There are no legs … The outer form doesn’t matter.’ A little later, he adds: ‘It doesn’t have to act, it has to think.’

But then the clean machine is contaminated by human mess: another of the scientists has infiltrated the thoughts and habits of his dead wife into the mind of the otherwise impersonal creature. ‘For a moment,’ he says, ‘I confess, I virtually felt like a god. To have succeeded in creating a living being out of nothing, out of dead matter.’ Feeling like a god is not good news. Disaster soon arrives, because the creature can’t bear the strain of having memories relating to physical organs that it does not and cannot possess. ‘I am hell,’ it says. It is now a dangerous machine that must be destroyed. ‘I’m a woman and I’m not a woman … I desire, I yearn, I want clothes, I want a house, I want flesh.’ At one point, the scientist could say that the attraction of the machine was that ‘it isn’t stained with original sin.’ By the time he has granted it what he thinks is true life, the creature’s own desperate view is that ‘he put the dumbest, filthiest things in me. A wealth of original sin is what I have!’

The Stronghold (Il deserto dei Tartari, or ‘The Desert of the Tartars’) was published in 1940. Venuti’s title looks back to Buzzati’s initial preference, ‘La Fortezza’, which his publisher thought sounded too military for a time of war. The novel was first translated into English, by Stuart Hood, in 1952. As Venuti says in the afterword to his own rather different work, Hood’s version was ‘a remarkable accomplishment, not merely readable but evocative enough to have interested several generations of readers’. But it doesn’t respond as it might to what Venuti calls ‘the interpretive occasion’ offered by translation, and it often converts the Italian book into Englishness as well as English. This adoption of another culture and philosophy was the chief general style in translation for a long time and in many languages. Proust had to become English to be read in England. A frequent effect of this requirement was to tone down any wording that sounded too abstract or clinical. In Hood’s translation, for example, what in Italian are manias or obsessions become ‘fancies’, and a meaning in life becomes ‘some significance’. The irreparable flight of time becomes ‘time began to slip by … without recall.’ Rewritings of this kind leave little room for history and, as Venuti says, a translator can recognise a point of origin without sounding alien. This is precisely what Anne Milano Appel does with The Singularity, and the principle is especially important in The Stronghold because its story is, in Venuti’s words, ‘unmoored from a precise time and place’ in a way that its inventor could not be. We need to think of precise dates here. In October 1935 Italy invaded Ethiopia, in October 1936 the Rome-Berlin Axis became a reality, and in October 1940 Italy entered the Second World War by invading Greece. The waiting theory doesn’t disregard reality, it says it wasn’t what we were waiting for. Not a heroic resistance but a resistance all the same.

In Buzzati’s short fictions we have another reason for allowing a little strangeness and abstraction to remain in a translation. Buzzati wants to be caught between dream and deed, both real in their way, and doesn’t want to sell either of them short. This is just what Venuti says, and demonstrates, in relation to translation itself: ‘The test of translation, as of the fantastic, is whether it can unsettle what passes for the foreign, or the real.’

‘Our Moment’, the first story in The Bewitched Bourgeois, was published in 1936 and introduces us to a shadowy precursor of the hero of The Stronghold. He has the same name, Giovanni Drogo, and similar styles of thought, though he’s a clerk rather than a soldier. He works in a ministry copying documents all day and spends the rest of his waking hours trying to do something creative with the legal code. A senior person in the ministry tells him he is wasting his time and that he needs to learn how to wait, because ‘the right moment arrives for every man.’ Sometime later, Drogo’s work on the code is read and admired by the minister himself, and Drogo is promoted to a higher position and a large office. But nobody tells him what his job actually is, and he loses heart. His moment came and went and will not come again. ‘Yes, Fortune had touched him with its white wings, but it had flown away at once, down adventurous streets of dreams.’

But he has another moment, more important perhaps, though he does not see it as such. While he was still learning how to wait, he became ill and saw the door of his room ‘gently open’ to let in ‘a towering figure’. ‘He recognised her immediately. Her face was pure and exceedingly beautiful.’ This is Death. He apologises for the inconvenience he has caused and says he can’t come with her. Death replies that everyone says that, and Drogo makes his case. It is a human right – ridiculous maybe, but a right all the same – that one can’t die before one’s moment arrives or, as he puts it, ‘I can’t die because I haven’t yet lived … To die now would be unjust. What awaits me may not be much … but you cannot deprive me of it.’ The reader is perhaps more surprised than Drogo when Death agrees and says she’ll be back later.

We​ could think of The Stronghold as a brilliant series of replays of this scene without the presence of Death. Whatever is about to happen, either Drogo or the world of his narrative says: ‘Not yet.’ Drogo’s first commission as a newly qualified army lieutenant is to report to the Fortezza Bastiani in the mountains. He regards this move as ‘the start of his true life’ and is also possessed by ‘an insistent thought he couldn’t identify, like a vague presentiment of fatal things, as if he were about to begin a journey from which he would never return’. When he sees the fortress from a distance, he feels it has ‘an inhospitable, sinister air’. Even the wind on the road is ‘baleful’. He doesn’t like the place when he gets there and makes plans to leave as soon as he can: an arrangement can be made. After four months he will have a medical examination and be allowed to leave the fortress.

Drogo is happy to wait, because he is still ‘unacquainted with time’, not attuned to its ‘irreparable flight’. In a marvellous sequence a doctor examines him and says everything is now prepared. He invites Drogo to come with him for the last formality, the collecting of the commanding officer’s signature, but Drogo isn’t listening. He is watching a changing of the guard through the window and sees omens in the cloudy sky. ‘He felt that his own destiny was pressing.’ He turns and tells the doctor that he doesn’t want to leave, can’t leave. The narrator tells us that Drogo was ‘feeling exaltation transform into a strange ache, quite similar to happiness’. He knows, perhaps, that he has arrived at what the story of the Bogeyman will later call one of ‘the last fortresses of mystery’. He has experienced ‘the first visible call of the north country, the legendary kingdom that threatened the Fortezza’. He thinks he has ‘seen that world before’. ‘Had he perhaps experienced it in a dream? Or had he constructed it by reading some ancient fairy tale?’ ‘Confused desires swirled inside him, along with senseless fears.’ Above all, he understands the myth or promise that keeps the soldiers at the fortress. ‘From the northern desert would arrive their fortune, the occasion of their exploits, the miraculous hour that befalls everyone at least once.’ The commanding officer believes the Tartars ‘are out there, a remnant of the old army roving all over the place’. Drogo may not fully believe this but he can’t leave a place where such dreams are so perfectly at home.

Time passes. Drogo keeps looking at the northern plain, enchanted by its desolation and lack of meaning, so much more mysterious than any meaning could be. We learn that he has served at the fortress for four years, then ‘fifteen very long years’. He turns 25, then 54. ‘Until a short while ago he hadn’t changed much; you could say he was young.’ There are incidents, some trivial, some tragic, but none of them is part of the grand, unarriving story. The events include a spectacular false alarm, when some armed men are seen approaching. They are not Tartars, but members of a neighbouring country checking the borderline. The colonel in charge of the fortress tells his soldiers what’s happening, or not happening, and sees ‘a veil of disappointment descend over the officers’ faces’, watches them ‘metamorphose from warriors eager for combat back into humdrum officers in a garrison’. Drogo arrives at the sensible, depressing interpretation of the story, and all but quotes one of its major sources, Cavafy’s poem ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’: ‘It became obvious that the hopes of the past, the soldierly illusions, the expectation of an enemy from the north, were nothing but a pretext to give meaning to life … Those tales seemed like childish obsessions.’

This view may be too confident in its sad certainty. Cavafy is more ironic. His barbarians don’t come and may no longer exist, but it’s not clear how civilisation can do without them: ‘They were, those people, a kind of solution.’ But then, in the end, Buzzati echoes Cavafy’s irony, and The Stronghold has a couple of twists still in store. Facing a rumour that the figures he has been waiting for will finally arrive, Drogo’s hope is that they never will, that ‘the road would be empty, showing no signs of life’. He and his companions have never imagined the arrival of the barbarians as anything other than a romance, a fulfilled dream of military glamour and glory. No one has considered the reality of a war, the possibility that the barbarians might defeat our heroes and take over the fortress. Drogo probably doesn’t think much about this when he hopes the dream will remain a dream, but he does now see the difference between ‘not yet’ and ‘never’ and surely experiences something of the moral relief to be found in the picture of the long illusion as its own reality and nothing else.