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  • A Youth in the Karst
  • Scipio Slataper (bio)
    Translated by Nicholas Benson

I’d like to tell you that I was born in the Karst, in a hut with a thatched roof blackened by rain and smoke. There was a mangy, raucous dog, two geese spattered [End Page 22] with mud, a spade, a hoe, and, from a dung-heap nearly without straw, brown rivulets that colored the ground after every rain.

I’d like to tell you that I was born in Croatia, in a great oak forest. In winter everything was white with snow, the door would open only a crack, and at night I heard wolves howl. Mamma wrapped my swollen red hands in rags, and I threw myself onto the hearthstones, moaning from the cold.

I’d like to tell you that I was born on the Moravian plain and would run like a hare through the furrows, startling chattering crows in the air above. I threw myself onto the earth on my belly, pulled up a beet root, and nibbled its earthy flesh. Then I came here, tried to tame myself, learned Italian, made friends with the best young people; but I’ll have to return home soon because I’m miserable here.

I’d like to fool you, but you wouldn’t believe me. You are cunning and wise. You’d understand right away that I’m a poor Italian trying to make his solitary solipsisms seem unselfconscious. I should confess to being your brother, even if at times I watch you with a distant, abstracted eye, made timid by your culture and your reasoning. Perhaps I’m afraid of you. Your arguments gradually cage me in as, docile and content, I listen to you, unaware that at every moment you’re reveling in your show of intelligence. Then I turn red and fall silent at a corner of the table, and I think of the consolation of the great trees at the mercy of the wind. I think longingly of the sun on the hills, of ample freedom, and of my real friends, who love me and greet me with a hand-clasp, with a calm, deep laugh. They are strong and good.

It is of my distant unknown origins that I am thinking, of my ancestors tilling the endless field with a plow pulled by four dappled draft horses, or in leather aprons bent over the drop forge of molten glass, and of my enterprising grandfather, who came upon Trieste in the days of the Free Port1; I am thinking of the great faded-green house where I was born and where, inured to suffering, my grandmother still lives.

It was good to see her sitting on our broad terrace against the vast backdrop of mountains and sea, leathery and spry next to my other grandmother, the old Venetian, rosy and carefree—almost eighty, and you could still see her strong blue pulse rise and fall through her skin, which was tender as a leaf. She spoke to me of the siege of Venice, of the potato sack left standing upright in the center of the cantina, of the bomb that shattered part of the house. And she wore a white kerchief over her little remaining fine hair, and she was cheerful. Whenever she came to eat at our place, my father always said: Blessed are the eyes that look upon her.

But I wasn’t interested in all that then. I was running off into the fields to play among the trees.

Our garden was full of trees. There was a big red horse-chestnut with forking limbs where I’d place my foot to climb, and lifting my foot I’d leave the shoe behind. From the highest branches I’d see the red tiles of our roof, full of sunlight and sparrows. There was some kind of evergreen, ancient, with a huge wisteria twining up it like a python, all wrinkles, furls, and twists, magnificent for speedy climbing when playing hide-and-seek. I often hid myself in that old cypress full of dense corners and brush, [End Page 23] and in springtime, while I spied upon the...

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