Letter from Mario

How fortunate I am to have lived (and continue to live) in an era where the written word still leaves its mark.

We leave – we are gone. We leave this, or that, we leave a comment or a drawing. We leave our words (an extension of our voice) to fend for themselves for as long as the material on which they are written survives – and we are not gone.

A letter is a view into someone else’s world, a sharing, a revealing.

My husband’s letters, now years later, have left a picture of who he was. An inroad into the cell of his mind.

Letter from Mario (alias D.H.Lawrence), 14 marzo 1957

I’m back from the country. Dead tired. I’ve been hunting for tombs – no luck but I’m still satisfied because as far as I’m concerned, I’m more interested in the living Etruscans, not the dead ones. And of the former, men and women, I’ve met a lot!

I am doing a trial dig in a small valley about 30 chilometers from here. Picture a country road, cut through the rocks widening out at a certain point around an enormous oak. On the right, a water trough, and on the left we are digging in search of a hypothetical tomb (clandestine diggers had previously tried their luck). It is midday and it is already hot. I am stretched out at the base of the oak and the two workmen are around thirty meters inside the hill in the humid cool earth. I feel as if I am about to live a strange adventure – there is something timeless about the atmosphere. It matters little if there is a tomb there – thoughts, gestures, words take on a symbolic and unbelievably important meaning. Sudden unexpected vacations of the spirit, “a void” in the everyday sequence of life, somehow do away with problems that have crowded in.

In the shade of that oak, the problems weighing me down have vanished. Nothing needs to be solved. No negative thoughts. There is no one who might be offended, no one to defend. Any previous hostility has vanished and the spirit is at peace, absolutely no restlessness, only gentle and comforting presences hover in the air.

A black ox with twisted yellow horns appears. He is all by himself. He goes to the trough and golden drops scatter as he laps up the water.  He drinks and then leaves, wild and solitary, slowly disappearing down the road. Then three young women come to fill their copper containers with water and bring us wine, bread and cheese. They stop by the dark entrance to the dig and begin exchanging words with one of the workmen, balancing their copper containers on their heads. Sombre voices answer them from inside the hill. It is a bantering back and forth, not missing a beat, no phrase is obvious, not a cliché. There is something innocent about their conversation, something spontaneous in their witty exchanges.

Had he been here, D. H. Lawrence, for whom the Etruscans were far from the schemes of orthodox archaeology,  would have been delighted by this picture. He would have appreciated, in those peasants, the innocence of their double meanings, even when they unequivocally refer to sex, to physical relationships in everyday life.  But there is never anything vulgar about the dialogue, there is an ancient wisdom reigning over it all that leaves them absolutely free and natural as they kid each other.

Eventually one of the workers emerges, like a dark God of the underworld.  Discouraged, he says: “there’s no tomb here, not even if I were to drop dead right here and now.” He is covered with earth mixed with sweat. Only his eyes are a living sign that brings him out of the reign of the dead.