Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

It is my story. It’s the story I want to tell, said Zafar.

Zafar never finished telling it, but I found it later in his notebooks, where, he’d said, I could read it if I wanted. I don’t know what to make of it.

I have rather regretted interrupting him. For one thing, it would have been another kind of story to hear it from his own lips, though I’m inclined to think his memory would not have conjured all its detail. But I have assuaged my regret with the thought that if I do not consider the story a piece of the highest sentimentalism, then perhaps it is because in the end it went unsaid, unspoken, as if it were something that remained where it ought to have remained, as if its proper home was the privacy of that recess where decent men tend lost love.

I think now that he was right: He said that it was his story and it was the story he wanted to tell. It seems obvious to me now that every story belongs to its teller. So I include the passages from the relevant notebook here and let them speak for themselves.

Alessandro Moisi Iacoboni was born in 1942 in a village four hours by mule from the town of M___, in a part of Italy where the spoken language is neither Italian nor German but shows the influences of both. Alessandro’s birth came nine months and two weeks after a day in June when an ill-disciplined division of Heeresgruppe C of the German Wehrmacht swept through the village, an incursion that caused a degree of embarrassment in those quarters of Italian society which had enthusiastically supported Mussolini’s alliance with Germany.

Alessandro’s mother died three days after what was by all accounts a terrible labor. It was this mother who might have kindled in little Alessi the fire of the Jewish faith but, as it was, her death cleared the way for the Catholic nuns of Our Lady of Modena, in the village school, whose influence found no resistance in the decreased Iacoboni household. The boy’s father, having barely tolerated his wife’s superstitions and now embittered by the cruelties of war, believed that the God of Abraham, far from deserving of Jacob’s esteem, warranted a good hiding. He would leave Alessi in the care of the good sisters of the Savior, while the villagers attended Sunday mass, and he would make the journey to M___ in order to replenish the stock. Signor Iacoboni was the village grocer.

Young Alessandro might have fallen by the wayside but for that propitious combination of wit and good luck that furnishes as good an account of how a life came to be, such as it was, as is likely ever to be found. At root, an inquisitive nature directed the boy to make capital of his schooling, despite the torments of children (blame for whose racial animosities must be laid at the doors of their parents). His humiliations do not bear repetition, and Alessandro himself, with no mother to soothe him, consigned each episode to the vaults of memory no sooner than they had occurred, throwing the key away, so to speak. In so doing, he grew to believe himself possessed of unusual mastery over his memory.

Away from the classroom, Alessandro helped his father in the shop, but his persistent questions drove his father to distraction. Why, Father, do we have snow shovels in the summer and why are they on show outside? So that when the snow comes, no one will say that we’ve hiked the prices in winter. Why do you bring back so much copper sulfate with you every time you go to M___? Don’t we have a lot in the back already? So that when the time comes there will be enough. When the time comes for what, Father? They use it on the vineyards to protect the grapes. Protect them from fungus and disease. What’s fungus? And so it went on, questions of all kinds. Why do so many animals have four legs? Why not three? Old Nico says the moon can move the ocean. Do you agree, Papa?

His father would inevitably tire, sending Alessi out, which rather suited Alessi, who spent many a happy hour under the hazels, in the vineyards and terraces, under the lime blossom or in the bracken or the reed beds around the watercourses, reading or making up stories, stories of every kind, stories told to a woman he imagined, whom he called My Mama , and when he picked apart plants, to her he described everything he saw. He spied on the peasants and watched old Nico tending his vegetable garden and he learned. In books, too, he found plants, books he came upon at school or books lent to him by the village mayor, a Communist, who, between arranging favors for kinsmen and party faithful, felt moved, it is not hard to imagine, to assist the least of the village (who happened also to own the grocery). Alessi learned how to graft, and there was once an apricot tree that stood for three decades that the child Alessi himself had grafted onto the plum. He saw a picture of a mango in a book, was puzzled to read that mangoes do not grow true to themselves, and looked anew with astonishment at this earth that sprouted such varied fruits.

Word of this peculiar boy circulated, and one day, in Alessi’s twelfth year, his father received a visitor from the household of the Contessa Sylvia di Cossano, the lights of whose eponymous hamlet Alessi had seen through the aspens on clear nights as a nest of stars on the black hills. The emissary explained that her ladyship kindly requested to meet the boy so that his future might be considered. The conclusion was foregone. Alessi was installed in a boarding school in M___, where he would see his father on the grocer’s weekly visit. The boy had not yet the maturity to see that his father’s unhesitating acceptance of the contessa’s proposition marked only what the man had long known: The road leading out of the village had been beckoning his child from the boy’s first utterances. In due course, Alessandro earned a scholarship to study medicine in the university in Bologna. Three days after arriving in the grand city, the young man received word that his father had died.

Although it is true that in the life of Iacoboni, we have few sources upon which to draw, something may be said of it nonetheless, and here the opportunity arises to make a point of more general application. Autobiography, we know, is flawed from the moment the nib of the pen touches the parchment, flawed because it begins and ends with an unfinished work, and flawed because its author himself is the victim of the most cunning deceptions. (It may be argued that the only lives to follow a form with meaning are those of suicides.) But we may go further, for there is a wisdom abroad holding that the records of a life, as drawn on in the course of a biographer’s work, for instance, can illuminate the whole of it, as if the penumbras of light shed by each fragment overlap to cover the entirety, when no reservation is made for the possibility, only too real, that episodes in the course of a life there may be, whose bearing, in the final analysis, far exceeds the barely traceable mark, if any, which they might leave on even the most extensive record. It may even be the case that the bearing of such episodes escaped the sensibilities of the subject himself. Rescue from stalling altogether before the darkness comes only when we accept that we may enter into the void a counsel of honest speculation, brokered by goodwill and the search for the truth. We can only imagine and, with an attitude of respect, are entitled to do so.