No Man Is An Island

Traditionally, stories, long and short, follow a structure—in fact one who veers very far out of this structure risks losing a reader’s attention, conditioned as we are to the familiar. A story is typically about the transformation or failed transformation of a central character who may or may not be the narrator. A story begins with the showing of this character’s existence pre-transformation. A short way in, an event occurs which sets the process of transformation into motion, an event that “hooks” some kind of desire of the character to achieve a goal. The goal is related to the transformation; the character will be aware of the goal but not the transformation. In the bulk of the story, the character struggles to achieve the goal, meeting with many setbacks along the way. Near the end, a climax produces a crisis which may be resolved by the transformation or failure to transform. There are many variations on this structure, and it is all achieved (hopefully) with craft and artistry. It’s interesting to look for these features in the stories we read.

Last time, we left off with the narrator of Cesare Pavese’s 1949 novel, The House on the Hill, going off to see who was singing in the night—also in the middle of a world war, for cryin’ out loud.

“When I came out on the road and stopped to look around, I heard the alarm sounding on the other side of the ridge, almost drowned by the noise of the crickets. I could sense as if I were there the city freezing up, the trample of feet, the slamming of doors, the scared and empty streets. Here the stars poured light.”

This is a wonderful description of the contrast between the city, besieged from the air, and the peace of the countryside. I love “the stars poured light.” It is also the culmination of the first structure described above (and in last week’s post): the showing of what the central character’s life is like before the events of the story. Now we enter the second structure—the precipitating incident that sets the events of the story in motion.

Belbo the dog is no stranger to the singers. “He had found a courtyard and was jumping around some people who had come out of a house…’I thought you were all dancing,’ I ventured. ‘Good idea,’ said the shadow of a young man who had been talking to Belbo before.” This man is identified as Fonso. It is night, and there is no light due to the blackout.

We have some exposition: “The innkeeper, a big old man, poured me a glass (of wine). It was a sort of inn, all of them were more or less related, and they came up from Turin as a group.”

“There was something in these people, the young men, their joking, their easy friendliness of wine and company, that I knew from the city in earlier times, other evenings…old love affairs.”

‘Kay.

“A voice (a woman’s) said to me: ‘And you, what are you doing? On vacation?’”

“I recognized the voice. Now, thinking back, I am sure I did. I recognized it but didn’t ask myself whose it was—a somewhat hoarse, abrupt and challenging voice…”

Here, we get a reminder that the story is being told from the future, looking back—which, among other things, gives us an assurance that the narrator survived the events of the story.

“I said jokingly that I was looking for truffles with my dog. She asked me if they ate truffles at the school where I taught. ‘Who said I was a teacher?’ ‘One can tell,’ she answered out of the darkness.

“There was a trace of mockery in her voice. Or was it the game to pretend that we were masked?”

The all -clear sirens sounds and the group of people are louder now, more boisterous. “She had remained where she was, leaning back against the wall, and when I said: ‘You are Cate. You’re Cate,’ she said nothing.

The narrator returns to the villa where he stays with Elvira and her mother. “As I ate, I thought of the meeting, what had happened. I was more struck by the interval, the years, than by Cate. It was incredible. Eight, ten? I seemed to have re-opened a room, a forgotten cupboard, and to have found another man’s life inside, a futile life, full of risks. It was this that I had forgotten. Not so much Cate, not the poor pleasures of those days, the rash young man who ran away from things thinking they might still happen anyway, who thought of himself as a grown man and was always waiting for his life to begin in earnest, this person amazed me. What did the two of us have in common? What had I done for him? Thos banal, emotional evenings, those easy adventures, those hopes as familiar as a bed or a window—it all seemed like the memory of a distant country, of a life of agitation, thinking back, one wondered how it could have been possibly both to enjoy and betray it in that fashion.”

This is a beautiful statement of memory and of a comparison between an old and current self.

Again, we get some exposition: “The next thing I asked myself was if Cate, the old Cate, had been as deluded as I had been. Eight years ago, what was she like?…She went out with me, went to the movies or out to the fields with me.”

The narrator describes an affair with Cate that he broke off and never thought he’d see her again—and hadn’t for eight years. She lived in a different neighborhood of Turin than he did.

So, because of the war, the narrator leaves his job as a teacher in Turin to go to the countryside for safety. By coincidence, her meets a woman there who he’d had an affair with eight years before. She evidently recognizes him before he recognizes her. The discovery leads him to ruminate over the passage of time and memory, as well as showing how he has avoided intimacy.

So, we have a story about a solitary man who receives a second chance at an old love affair. Now the question becomes: what does he do?    

Let’s pause there. Next time, we’ll look at the next section of structure in the story.

Till then.

#TheHouseOnTheHill #CesarePavese #AlanBray