The snow started to fall again, burying the frozen mud under a new white blanket of feathers and diamonds.
It shyly started to fall last night. It was nothing, actually. Just a thick fog of ice crystals floating in the air.
It has been growing by the hour. Ice crystals slowly turn in little snowflakes, that kind of snow that my ancestors used to call “Cecapecore”, the snow that blinds sheep. The sheep coming down from the land of Abruzzo, from the mountains, to wetlands of Puglia, through the road of the “Tratturo”, the sheep track. Transhumance. A flood of sheep and shepherds that, through the Aragon’s Custom, poured in the agricultural plain to spend the winter. The treasure of the Kingdom of Naples.
Snow is rare in that warm plain, stuck between the Apennines, the sea, and the sacred Gargano rocks.
That is maybe why I love it, as someone can love rare things.
Maybe it is because, when I was a kid, schools used to close when it was snowing. So, snow used to mean vacations.
I remember a winter afternoon spent in my grandmother’s kitchen. Sitting at her table of white laminated plywood, in the weak light of a yellowish neon. I don’t remember anything else: just the table, my grandmother, the weak neon and a strange feeling of warmness, that feeling that only a regular afternoon spent doing homework in a dimly light kitchen with your grandmother can give you.
My grandmother lived right next door, in the other end of the stair landing. Her kitchen had a small glass door that led to the balcony, a regular balcony overlooking the inner courtyard of a regular condominium built around seventies.
It was through that glass door that I saw the snow.
It was not the first time that I saw the snow. It was not even the most impressive snowfall that we had in our city. It was just a regular snowfall as we have almost every year, around march, those snowfalls that never last more than two days. Still, I remember this particular snowfall more of any other.
I don’t remember so much, actually. I just remember the snow outside, beyond that glass door, falling on my grandmother’s geraniums; and I remember that warm feeling of endless safety and unconditional love. I remember that I was happy, and I was even happier because that snow meant that the day after I was not supposed to go to school.
In my city, snow is something rare: it looks like to be unpredictable. No one seems to be ready to face it. Therefore, when it snows, the major commands schools and public offices to close. So, being a kid, that snow meant for me just freedom. Sleeping more in the morning, after watching my cartoons. Staying in my warm bed, with my mother bringing me some tepid milk. Watching the snowflakes falling, or crushing on my window’s glass. And no more homework, for sure.
Even now, years and years after, snow makes me feel the same warmth. Even now that I am supposed to wander those iced streets. Even here, where the world just do not stop for this snow – they just don’t care. They don’t really know which kind of miracle this snow is.
One thing that I remember from that afternoon is my grandmother going outside to collect some freshly fallen snow in a glass. She put on it some Mosto Cotto, the cooked must, a kind of grape syrup that is traditionally done in the end of summer when peasants harvest grapes and bring it in the city with their tractors and trailers to be smash – and the whole city has a particular sour and sweet smell.
The peasant working in my Grandfather’s fields used to bring us some fresh grape juice in the end of august, and my grandmother used to boil it for hours in an old copper pan. As her mother did before her. As vassals of the Prince Di Sangro of the kingdom of Naples did before her, and how subjects of Charles of of Habsburg – Holy Roman Emperor, King of Germany and Italy, Archduke of Austria, Lord of the Netherlands, Duke of Burgundy and King of Spain – did before them, when Spaniards came to take the control of those lands of vineyards, wheat fields and olive trees. As Templars came, sent here by Pope Boniface VIII. As Germans came, leaded by that Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, that loved those lands more than his homeland, and built here castles, and spent time here hunting with falcons, and died here, not so far from my own city. As Normans came before him, and Longobards before them, and Byzantines, back to the romans of the Roman Empire that here, in this land of wine and oil, and land of conquest, used to boil grape juice to obtain the “Defrutum”, as they called the juice boiled until reduce its volume by one third, or the “Sapa”, that was the grape juice boiled until halving its volume.
So, my grandmother poured some Mosto Cotto in that glass of snow and gave it to me. It was sweet and slightly sour, and cold. When my grandmother was young, that was the only kind of ice cream that they had, here, in this land blessed by the sun. It was such a thing when the snow came. When people went to pick some compact snow by the tiles on the roofs to eat it with this kind of syrup.
The snow was collected, and stored in artificial caves. It was the only way to have some ice during the summer – that summer that can reach forty, even forty-five degrees. The richest could afford to buy some ice, then, by a man that was going around the city with some ice on his handcart, and grate the ice to obtain a “Granita”, crushed ice flavoured with cooked must, lemon juice, or coffee.
Here no one eats snow. Maybe it’s because they have too much of it. You can not appreciate something when you have enough of it. It applies to snow, as it applies to love, and everything. Maybe it’s just that they don’t have grapes to boil. That’s why here, in this small room, here, stuck between yesterday’s dirty dishes and tomorrow’s illusions, I had to pour some honey in my glass of snow. The snow keep falling beyond my window glass. It never stopped since yesterday. It continues to fall covering the frozen mud, turning this diverse land in a white desert where the eyes are lost. Trees are now white, roofs are white, and streets are white. The frozen lake is covered with a white layer of fresh snow. During the day, even the sky is white – so that you cannot decide where the land ends and the clouds begin. In the day, though, those streets will became brownish and muddy, as soon as the first cars will start to cross them. So, it’s worthy to stare at this miracle right now, during this sleepless night, in this holy silence, smoking a cigarette in front of this door, wrapped in my blue coat. Now, when the whole world also looks wrapped in a candid duvet.
Tomorrow, as an old Rumanian movie said, everything will be mud again.
During this night, though, magic is still intact. Even if here, in this amazing darkness, the sky is not pink as it usually was when I was a kid. Now I know that it was just due to streetlights reflecting in the clouds, but then, years and years ago, that pink sky was just part of that white miracle falling from the sky.
“Light, lighter than my filthy”
Bardamù’s ghost is always with me during those sleepless nights. He speaks to me about distant lands, and about wars. He’s with me as well as Colonel Aureliano Buendía is.
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice…”
Here, in this frozen land, no one needs to be brought to discover ice. Maybe that is why they don’t eat the snow.
Here, in this small room, assisting to the cold death of universe, in this calm country that lacks of Entropy; here, between my ghosts, in this lack of sleep, in the silence of this house, I can let my mind to freely remember. Memories, like footprints in the fresh snow.
I remember other snows.
I remember the day that I met Jack Kerouack and Bukowski. I was in Bologna, and it was snowing. I was there to meet a girl that didn’t show up. It was snowing, it was cold, and the water in fountains was frozen. I ended up there right before the sunrise. Everything was cold and silent. The only sound that you could hear was the crowing of a homeless man that was wondering in that silent neighbourhood, just in front the central station, screaming like a rooster. I ended up in a Feltrinelli library right at the foot of the two towers, in the centre of Bologna. There I found those books, lying on the same shelve. I never heard about them before, but those titles captured my attention. “On the Road”. “Tales of Ordinary Madness”. I bought them, I bought them only to have something to do while waiting for my bus back.
I ended the books by the end of the day. Those books changed my life forever.
I was almost grateful to that girl for not showing up.
Some meetings are decided by destiny.
Maybe the girl could show up. Maybe I could pick up any other book in that library. Maybe I could just decide to go in a cheap hotel and pass my day there.
Some meetings are decided by destiny.
Was it a miracle of the snow?
I remember more snow. I remember the snow in Cappadocia, drinking shitty turkish wine with a portoguese girl called Bárbara in a fancy winery. I remember a geographer that was there with me and whose mission in life seemed to be explaining to Turks why they weren’t europeans, with some comical effects. I remember that harsh, yellow land covered with ice. I didn’t even know that it could be cold, in Turkey. I remember their mint tea served in rounded glasses by a man with a funny hat and even funnier moustaches, so short that his hat barely reached my shoulder.
”To the Bosphoreion harbour, where
the land fades into the sea becoming little or nothing
and when it become land again, it’s not Occident anymore”
That’s what Guccini sang about Byzantium. Maybe he was right. Maybe that geographer friend of mine was right. It’s not Europe anymore, and yet it is. It’s a suspended land, suspended between the Myth and that yellow dust.
”Hanging between two worlds and two epochs”
I remember the snow in Thessaloniki harbour, drinking that golden miracle called Retsina and taking my grandmother her last photographs, before that chemotherapy took her hairs away.
I remember those days as the coldest dys of my entire life. It was not even close to the cold that we have here, even minus twenty degrees, still two tights under my trouser, three turtleneck and two jackets wasn’t enough to challenge that cald and to wander those streets, between the market with slaughtered ducks hanging upside down, ruins of Turkish baths and ortodox madonnas overlooking by the wood of ten thousand icons. I remember the bed of the hotel, stained of piss, and the sad and extremely cold shared bathroom in the end of the huge aisle with its green paint falling apart. I remember the wind that swept the harbor square and crashed into the White Tower. I remember the girls, rubbing their hands behind the windows of the bars of the waterfront. I remember my Grandmother’s smile. I remember,
I remember a morning spent fighting with snowballs with a girl that I used to love. It was one of the last times that it snowed in my town. We walked around the city for hours, enjoying those small flakes of ice melting on our faces. Slipping at every step. Laughing, and throwing snowballs each other.
What good those memories are? What will I remember in ten years of those lonely, sleepless nights in this exile of ice?
At least we were in Saint Petersburg, we could at least dirty our souls with revolution’s ghosts and Dostoevsky’s books. There were no Dziga Vertov’s movies to narrate this soulless country, nor any Majakovskij to bless this frozen land with his own blood. What good cold is without Russian avant-gardes?
Not that this matters anyhow, anyways.
It’s just that old song, that I continue to listen again and again.
“And my master taught me how difficult it is to find the sunrise in the nightfall”
“And my master taught me how difficult it is to find the sunrise in the nightfall”
It’s four in the morning.
The sunrise shouldn’t be so far anymore.
“And my master taught me how difficult it is to find the sunrise in the nightfall”
// Maurizio, EVS Volunteer in Globala Kronoberg