Kintsugi

Kintsugi

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of piecing together vases by a golden or silver thread: an art which shows a philosophical background too. The Japanese, in fact, appreciate a lot what is old, scarred, broken: it emanates the scent of deeper life. In this tale, which I sent to a literary competition on February, I connect kintsugi with the subject of ageing: this is particularly worthy of attention in our era, when we are often tempted to reduce everything, even weak human beings, to trash.

Biopsies, blood tests, chemotherapy, vomit; and then, radiotherapy, hormones, nausea, bleeding; and again, bones aches, weakening muscles, impaired sight, collapsing skin. And the solitude of days elapsing in a lonely, pale, hospital room, staring at the ceiling; dejection, grey depression, even despair, exploding suddenly in his heart; or the fear of ache, even more dreadful than ache itself. All of this had become his daily routine since the day when his specialist, with grey, watery eyes, had stared at him and spelled, in a hardly audible voice:

- Carlo, it's prostate cancer. With metastasis in your bones. You might have one year left, more or less.

Since then, he didn't recognize his existence anymore: Carlo, riding a motorcycle and enjoying gymnastics and Nordic walking; Carlo steadily frequenting movies, museums, the theater, libraries, and increasing his collection of history books. He was 67, but still thirsty of life and youth: and now he had almost forgotten how he was just two months before. Years long, in spite of ageing, he had almost persuaded himself that he remained strong, lively, young; and now, he had apparently lost all of his energy, his impassioned zest for life. In the hospital, he lay on his bed, absent-mindedly, just waiting for the next treatment and fit of nausea; at home, he unusually sat round-shouldered in his wonderful, but now dusty, library, full of superb volumes. A relic among relics.

And yet, in spite of this harassing depression, sometimes he still felt a desperate craving for life: when he gazed at the orange-reddish stripes of light expanding over the horizon, just minutes before darkness fell definitively on the rocks of his Liguria, he longed for wedging dozens of activities, one more frantic than the other, in those ephemeral twelve months. But lately, he found no more strength for this. He just lay inertly in his arm-chair. Feeling his face always more wrinkled.

Suddenly, he discovered himself lonely too. Since some years he was divorced - an adventure with a pretty woman, two decades, perhaps, younger than him, had resulted in the brutal collapse of his evanescent marriage; a marriage looking like an empty shell since so much time that he didn't remember when it had started to vanish. His wife had left and built again a life of hers elsewhere, determinedly and aggressively as usual; and the relationship with the younger lover, which had filled him with so much enthusiasm and exuberance at first - well, it dissolved too. Now Edda, his former wife, routinely visited him, with the achromatic solicitude of a governess; as for his grand-children, almost teenagers (Francesco was hardly 15, Martina 10), he had even less to share with them than with his own son, Enzo, often away for work. When he tried to talk with them, they weren't impolite, no, but distracted: their look wandered far away, outside of the window, towards the light of the afternoon; and he felt unable to reach them and their lively daydreaming. Unable to reach that light.

When he experienced some relief thanks to chemotherapy, failing to piece together his schedule again, Carlo found some distraction just on his sleepless nights, in scrolling websites on the Internet: websites dedicated to his, maybe whilom interests - antiques, books, art. He had no time anymore for books, they were too long to read: websites were more synthetic and focused. He passed unnumbered, silent hours before the screen, unable to detach his eyes from it: lest the night, now friendly, could suddenly clutch him with a hostile grip. Sometimes he didn't understand what he read, but those exquisite images - precious books, colorful ceramics, paintings blurred by the patina of time - diverted his thoughts towards a more pleasurable reverie.

In a chat about restoration he had got acquainted with a Japanese lady, Midori, an expert on kintsugi: the art of piecing together broken vases by a thin thread of gold. She still lived in Nagasaki and, since she was only 4, she was a survivor, a hibakusha, of the nuclear explosion: not seldom, she shyly hint to the crushing consequences of it, still lingering on her life like a poisonous cloud. But she enormously loved her job, whose adepts were becoming increasingly rare: and by email she explained techniques, showed him pictures of her tiny masterworks. She had sent him a photo of herself too: a gentle, smiling lady, simply elegant in her traditional kimono, with her hands joined as if she were born to bow.

A delicate friendship had developed; thanks to her, Carlo discovered the beauty of Japanese poetry, so concise and striking: it fitted more his urge to live.

And now, by night, many a time they shared their worries. Her memory was weakening, because of an insidious form of Alzheimer: and while he listed his ailments, depicting a life sliding imperceptibly toward a dark tunnel, she grieved her memory.

- I'll forget, Carlo...And then?

- Strange. Sometimes I'd like to forget. Everything. - He would have added: I'd like falling asleep and not awakening anymore.

- But if I forget, I won't be able to witness, above all in front of young people, nor to forgive...The art of old age is memory...and forgiving.

Her ideal of forgiving looked admirable to Carlo, and he was aware that Midori went on to bear her testimony about the bomb in front of class-rooms and a large audience, relating also her experience of forgiving, shared by her Nagasaki Christian community. But the man considered forgiving abstract, distant, like the moon: finally, he had a good American friend, Bill, a typical, warm-hearted, cheerful inhabitant of the South, met during a stage on finance: and, like many of his fellow-nationals, Bill felt no regret for the atomic bombs. Nor any worry at all for any kind of Japanese forgiving. US had done what was right for the world, full stop. In spite of his perplexity, Carlo had never dared oppose the perspective of his friend, who, after all, was a very nice man.

By the way, Carlo and Bill had heard from each other just a few months before, and he was grieving his wife, Louise, who had suddenly died of a heart attack after 38 years of marriage. Now he felt lost in their large, pretty house on the banks of a wide river, and the sunset never arrived for him sitting alone on the porch. He had started to cherish Louise's dainty belongings and to preserve them like in a small, family museum. He didn't dare leave the house anymore, even for a few hours.

Once, Carlo and Midori discussed about his library. He was reluctant to leave it to his grandson Francesco: he showed no interest in history, nor in books in general, and Carlo was afraid this wonderful collection might go damaged or dispersed. He rather planned to leave it to the local city library.

- Are you sure, Carlo? - Midori replied from the other end of the world; a slight quivering could be guessed in her lines. - Are you sure?

Just this reiterated question aroused his doubts, even if her discretion did not dare advance beyond an invisible line. A week later, Carlo made a try with his grandson:

- See? These books?...I might leave them to you.

Francesco raised his chubby, pinky cheeks towards him with a flabbergasted look:

- Meeee???

- Yes. If you want, all this can be yours. - and, from his worn leather-chair, Carlo raised his hand in a circular, showing gesture.

- Miiiine?!? Wow!!!

Francesco approached a shelf with the veneration of a pilgrim in the cell of a sanctuary: and by a finger he caressed the colored cover of a volume about World War I. It was the first one he asked to read: maybe he was just attracted by the colors of the cover, but he tried. He was discovering himself owner of an extraordinary treasure, a treasure he had too long contemplated from a distance in awe.

This was a first spark in Carlo's now restricted sky: pain and despondency were swallowing the rest. Midori went on to send him detailed pictures of her restored vases, but he was not able to fully appreciate those pieces of brown or grey pottery, encircled by golden threads, sinuous like the tentacles of a silent spider. She tried to explain to him:

- It's our philosophy, wabi-sabi, which appreciates what's broken or worn. We don't throw away what we have used for a long time: waste comes from failed relationships, even with objects...Use makes them more precious, more perfect...

Among the pictures he also noted some expensive artifacts, enveloped as well by those shining meshes.

- How can you accept that a costly piece of porcelain goes broken? It will never be the same anymore, even if you repair it...

- No, it will become more precious. When we love something, we feel compassion for it and accept it changing.

This reminded Carlo again of his friend Bill. After Louise's death, he had religiously kept even the fragments of a precious, pearly vase from Bavaria she had loved a lot. They were still stored in a drawer. When, after a terrible week of bones-aches, he felt a little better, he phoned to his friend in Georgia.

- Bill? Have you still those white pieces?

The shipping and restoration needed some weeks, so much more so as Midori was now working always more slowly: but after two months, an amazed Bill, opening a voluminous, brown package, marked with some incomprehensible signs, discovered, amid a large amount of white paper and styrofoam, a delicate, pearl-white piece of porcelain, embraced by an embroidery of golden and silver lines. He had never got acquainted with any Japanese: and he stared wide-eyed at the horizon, wondering how such beautiful grace could inhabit those people that his father, while in the Pacific Sea, had considered just as cruel enemies.

Bill's joyful exclamations and a sense of quiet gratitude accompanied Carlo's weakening some days long, almost letting him forget that his time was running out: and the little rest of it was always more absorbed by the vapors of morphine. In the pauses among his excruciating tortures, and dulling mist, sitting in his chair, he looked at Francesco, who now frequently attended his library and shuttled almost whimsically from a book to another: but Carlo enjoyed that sight. His grandson even witnessed some of his chats with Midori. When he interfered, telling he had to do a school research about World War the II, the gentle lady, who hid beneath her smile the dread of losing always more fragments of her memory, agreed to recount her past to him. Carlo listened, nodding quietly, while Francesco recorded Midori's narrations on some MP3 files: oddly, she explained, she had never felt compelled to capture her own voice on tape, because she had always believed in the truth gushing from lively sounds. But could that stop, at least for a little time, the inexorable dispersion of images and faces flowing away from her mind like water from a broken piece of pottery? Who knows...

        

On a quiet summer sunset, spreading a golden drape on Liguria rocky coasts, from the silence beyond the horizon Carlo, always more tired, received a Japanese poem:

Ageing means forgiving:
forgiving leaves, as they fall down,
forgiving our body, as it collapses,
forgiving nature, as it abandons us,
forgiving others, as they forget us;
forgiving everything,
because it will go on to exist
also without us...

He read her verses in silence. Fear, an unfathomable fear of anything, still inhabited him, but now he cherished her vases: while sinking in the dark tunnel at the extremity of his life, in that night of senses, he could glimpse a delicate, golden web of loving gestures spreading among continents and generations, thinly, delicately supporting him, in spite of fear and pain, and piecing together the impossible...