Nora Ikstena's "Un Bianco Fazzoletto"

There is a fable by Bechstein called “The Magic Book”. It is only a mental association, but looking at this small object — calling it a book would not convey the idea — hand-sewn with a burgundy thread (the same one which, curiously, is also mentioned in the fairy tale) let us enter in another dimension, that of a cool and windy foreign land.

Damocle edizioni has opened a series, directed by Paolo Pantaleo, entirely dedicated to Latvian literature. These are small pocket gems, bound with a thread that bears the color of the country in question. “Un bianco fazzoletto” is the second release, translated into Italian but with parallel text. The author, Nora Ikstena, born in Riga in 1969, is one of the leading contemporary Latvian writers. “Lakatiņš baltais”, that is a white handkerchief, is part of the Dzīves stāsti Ed. Atēna 2004 collection.

The fresh wind we feel is that of good foreign literature, and it is the wind of Latvia, a land of woods and lakes but here only the land of the heart, of memory, of regret. “What it was was in his head.”

The story tells of an old Latvian who emigrated to America many years ago. His children are far away, they have their own life, his wife is hospitalized in an institution for Alzheimer’s patients. He lives alone with a cat.

All the sehnsucht, all the melancholy, all the yearning, are related to the language. The German wife, married because the only one able to trade her strangeness for his physical impairment, does not communicate in Latvian. His children are now fully American and he is left alone with the voices that speak to him in his mother tongue.

The choice of the parallel text is not accidental, it is not accidental that many passages have been translated only in the notes. Because everything is based on the language, the one that decides the ethnic group one belongs to, that makes a man what he is, beyond any document and beyond the place where he lives. If he cannot communicate in his native language, he gives up on communicating altogether. Thus the protagonist has few human contacts: with the cashier of a shop, with a group of drifters, with an Indian family, not surprisingly also a foreigner in their own home, also with no more authentic roots. But they are laconic relationships, made up of practical and concrete gestures, rather than words. He has no friends and does not want any because they would not be Latvians, they would not share words, customs, knowledge. Even with the cat he speaks in German, as with his wife who is not right in the head, she is already on the paths of another world.

He is alone, of that deep and absolute solitude that speaks to herself, which finds no outlet. Now there is only wind of words in his mind, chains of synonyms, linguistic heritage that must not be lost, the only contact with a distant reality that, perhaps, even no longer exists, beyond the sea. The constant swaying between the present and past conjugation of verbs is a witness to this wind of memories, this attachment to a time and a place that no longer exist.

But a chance encounter with a girl at a bus stop, a girl with a backpack who utters words in the old man’s language, will serve to confirm the existence of the Place, of the Origin of Words. And then he will greet her with a handkerchief, amaze her, thank her for that recognition which is like an authentication, as if he had been granted a certificate of birth, of existence in life, thanks to which his anguish will be alleviated, his loneliness contemplate openings, even an abatement of hatred towards the origins of his wife, a yielding to affection, to contact with reality and with the more recent past. Thus, the confirmation of the place of belonging also makes it possible to detach from it, the identification of his wife as a mūza draugu, “friend of a lifetime”, the rediscovery of love and the possibility of saying goodbye to her and accepting the end. Ar todieviņu, goodbye.