Bugged

On Thursday I checked out a copy of The Second Life of Art, a selection of essays by Eugenio Montale, from the Doherty Library at the University of St. Thomas, here in Houston. I’ve read it several times and always find it useful as a supplement to Montale’s principle work, his poetry. What a pleasure watching a great artist work outside his customary bailiwick – imagine Glenn Gould playing the harmonica. I really should buy a copy, and have resolved to do so given what happened that evening.

I took the book from my nightstand and laid on the bed, preparing to browse, when something fell out of the volume onto my chest. It was brown and shiny, the size of an arrowhead, and for some reason I thought of amber – that wondrous fossilized resin that turns hapless insects into works of art. I got the insect part correct: It was a flattened, desiccated cockroach, virtually intact, with legs and antennae in place. I’m not squeamish but my wife is sickened by roaches, so I ran to the bathroom, flushed it away and didn’t tell her about it.

The roach hadn’t bored or burrowed, weevil- or termite-fashion, into the book. Clearly, an earlier reader had slammed the cover shut and left the roach as a bookmark between pages 168 and 169. I know this because of the reddish-yellow stains and scab-like bits of roach-matter left at the middle of each page. That marks the midway point of Montale’s “Chinese Poems 1753 B.C.-1278 A.D.,” first published in 1943 as the introduction to an anthology of Chinese poetry. I see no mention of roaches or other insects in the text, though just below two bits of roach-matter arranged on page 169 like a colon (the mark of punctuation, I mean), I find this phrase: “…these poems of nearly two thousand years leave us with a sensation in which admiration verges on dizziness or seasickness.” This precisely describes my own inordinate admiration for Montale’s poetry.

To my knowledge, there is no Montale concordance, at least in English, but I skimmed all the translations I have – Galassi, Arrowsmith, Harry Thomas’ Montale in English – and found no mention of roaches. However, in 1966, Montale published a poignant elegy, “Xenia I,” to his wife, Drusilla Tanzi, who had died three years earlier. She had the unflattering nickname of Mosca, meaning “fly” (Linnaeus himself named the house fly Musca domestica). Here’s a link to the entire poem, as translated by William Arrowsmith and published in Agni, but let me cite some relevant lines. Here are the first two sections of the 14-section poem:

“Dear little insect
nicknamed Mosca, who knows why,
this evening, when it was nearly dark,
while I was reading Deutero-Isaiah,
you reappeared at my side,
but without your glasses
you couldn’t see me,
and in the blur, without their glitter,
I didn’t know who you were.

Minus glasses and antennae,
poor insect, wingèd
only in imagination,
a beaten-up Bible and none
too plausible either, black night,
a flash of lightning, thunder, and then
not even the storm. Could it be
you left so soon, and without
a word? But it’s crazy, my thinking
you still had lips.”

I’ve seen pictures of Mosca, and her small face and head, and oversized, goggle-like glasses give her a house fly-like appearance. Still, to be named for an insect that moves from dung to birthday cake without blinking its many-lensed eyes cannot have been a comfort. Nor do I know if Montale gave her the nickname or if it came with her, grandfathered in, as it were. Montale’s poem suggests that their relationship (they met in the 1930s but didn’t marry until 1958, after Mosca’s husband died) was complicated and unconventional. Mosca seems to have served as both Muse and anti-Muse. Here’s the concluding section of “Xenia I”:

“They say my poetry is one of non-belonging.
But if it was yours, it was someone’s:
it was yours who are no longer form, but essence.
They say that poetry at its peak
glorifies the All in flight,
they say the tortoise
is no swifter than lightning.
You alone knew
that motion and stasis are one,
that the void is fullness and the clear sky
cloud at its airiest. So your long journey
imprisoned by bandages and casts,
makes better sense to me.
Still, knowing we’re a single thing,
whether one or two, gives me no peace.”

I found passing references to crickets in other Montale poems (“After a Flight,” “Thrust and Riposte”), and ants show up in the latter, but while Montale often used images drawn from nature, especially birds, he largely ignored the order Insecta. Why would a patron of the library at a Catholic university flatten a cockroach in a volume by Montale, then return it with the corpse in situ? To have chosen Montale implies some degree of taste and cosmopolitan literacy. Could this have been a Dada-inspired act of literary criticism, like the time some idiot took a sledge hammer to the Pieta?