Sarban, the pilgrim from the heart of darkness

On April 11, 1989, 32 years ago, the English writer John William Wall, better known under the pseudonym of Sarban, one of the few traveling writers of our era, left us. Let's recap two works by him that Adelphi has published in Italian in recent years: the short story β€œZubrowka. A Christmas story ”and the novelβ€œ The call of the horn ”.

di Paul Mathlouthi

Cover: Pieter Bruegel

Lo traveling writer, that is, the one who uses the journey as a starting point to unravel the warp and weft of his very personal storytelling in space and time on the whirlwind events of this vast and strange world of ours, is pervaded, I would say almost possessed, by an airy fever of wind, an ancestral propensity to restlessness that it is impossible not to indulge. As soon as he believes that he has taken root, that he has found a safe haven in which to store the remains of his shipwrecks, immediately the desire to resume the journey grips his heart and presses him, inexorable. Each return brings as a gift the seeds from which he eternally sprouts a new journey, the opportunity for another beginning.

Who has not tasted this sensation of mercurial instability, addicted to the quiet despair he talks about Thoreau in which most of us flounder every day, can't understand. That of narrating pilgrim is a human and literary typology now close to extinction: the advent of Technique, both fetish and damnation of Modernity, has contracted times and spaces, transforming the journey into the simple distance between two places to be consumed as soon as possible, an event anonymous, now completely devoid of that initiatory dimension which, from Homer a Tolkien , has nourished the protean imagination of a lineage of giants with suggestions.

True, some loners like Sylvain Tesson, Paolo Rumiz or Simon Winchester who in their wandering prose still proudly preserve intact the archaic flavor, obsolete of going out and about. Theirs, however, is an aesthetic choice, a courageous but resilient stance, therefore necessarily out of date, contrary to the spirit of the time that moves in forced stages in the opposite direction. Very different in style, sensitivity and cultural coordinates of reference, they are, perhaps in spite of themselves, united by the fact that they are scattered children of an irretrievably lost season, that of great explorations. An epic that began five centuries ago, in an age of adventurers, vagabonds, nostalgic uprooted people which experienced its glorious epicedium in the twentieth century.

A colorful caravanserai that of the pioneers of Elsewhere, a court of miracles in which picaresque characters worthy of Lazarillo de Tormes, convinced that they can obtain a personal redemption from lives studded with failures through desperate enterprises in hostile and unknown lands that have eventually swallowed them , coexist alongside tutelary deities of the caliber of Paul Morand, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Eric Ambler and Henry de Monfreid (just to mention the best known), offspring of the good bourgeoisie or of the declining aristocracy who in the journey glimpse a substitute for action, the last safe conduct granted to escape the tedium of normality and exorcise the nagging that, from incurable narcissists such as without they are doubtful, it consumes them: anonymity, the fear of being forced to take leave of the world without having made a difference, carving a scar on the earth, as Malraux would have said.

John William Wall (1910 - 1989)

I am precisely the love of distance, the irresistible attraction for everything that escapes the ordinary, the spasmodic desire to savor the vertigo of vastness to direct John William Wall (1910 - 1989) towards a diplomatic career, a profession still surrounded, at the beginning of the last century, by an aura of adventurous legend, which derives from the heroic splendor of Kipling and the Great Game. During the years spent in Cambridge, the young and promising student reveals an ear particularly trained in the cryptic sounds of Semitic languages, therefore, when in 1933, although very young, he becomes an official of the Foreign Office, he is placed in the ranks of the Arab Department, the same in the which, some time ago, served Thomas edward lawrence and, after a first mission to Beirut, he is assigned to the consular office in Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia.

Other and more prestigious destinations will follow to that remote destination during an eventful life spent in favor of the Crown, but the encounter with the desert, which as far as the eye can see expands in every direction just beyond the city walls until it touches the horizon, has the effect of a thunderbolt on the future writer: the rapacious magnificence of the endless sea of ​​sand in which, as recites the Koran, the oar does not sink, the deafening, impenetrable silence that surrounds it, the boundless skies that overlook it, are indelibly engraved in his memory. The tormenting awareness of belonging in some way to that desolate solitude matures in him: he chooses for himself the pseudonym of Sarban, who in Parsi means caravan, pilgrim.

The story takes place among the red-hot sands of that outpost located on the edge of the Nothing Zubrowka, of which Adelphi has recently proposed the first Italian translation in the new "Microgrammi" series, which opens his first collection of writings, Ringstones and other curious tales, appeared in 1951 by the publisher Peter Davies, adopted (and unfortunate) son of James M. Barrie, legendary author of "Peter Pan" who, grasping the fabric of a great storyteller that lies behind the shy and riotous nature of the diplomat, he will indulge his temper tantrums and whimsical Saturnians with painstaking patience, often at the expense of his own pockets! The reader, however, should not be deceived by the sunny and sundial atmospheres that in this entertainment they frame the narration. If, as I hope, he will have the willingness to follow me, venturing into the tortuous labyrinth of his cruel fairy tales, he will discover with surprise that Sarban concedes nothing to the taste of the exotic typical of overseas literature. On the contrary, his prose is shadowy, underground, telluric, ghostly, innervated by a sinister creative vein irresistibly seduced by the darkness that eagerly drinks from the source of a magmatic, seething darkness.

Nestled in the lap of a hot and humid Saharan night, Aleksandr Andreevic Masseev, former Tsarist officer fled to Arabia with his wife Lidija under the benevolent protection of His British Majesty to escape the iconoclastic fury of the Revolution, indulges in the flow of memories and entrusts himself to 'Author, who willingly lends himself to the role of confessor and narrator, confidences about a frightening episode which occurred to him during the war. The generous doses of herbal vodka that the two diners swallow regardless of the suffocating climate have the effect of a madeleine: his mind rises from the sandy streets of the casbah hovering to other latitudes and taking him back in time to that distant day in 1917 when, during a reconnaissance flight along the coasts of Siberia, following an engine failure of his seaplane, he is forced to make a crash landing in the covered taiga from a thick blanket of snow. In an attempt, which soon proved futile, to reach the Kamennaja Gora weather station with the help of a compass for assistance, Alksandr and co-pilot Igor Paljaskin are engulfed by the storm. Suddenly they find themselves lost in an alien landscape, with a lunar profile, apparently deserted from any form of humanity:

We could see - reports the Russian soldier in his hallucinated monologue - far and wide the immense and sad taiga, that flat and lonely desert land where every tiny particle of life was immobilized in the terrible grip of the Lord of the Ice, while his lifeless body continued to be stabbed by the bayonets of the arctic wind. And when this stopped we knew that a funeral sheet would come down from the black sky (…), the fog was a ghost that floated astride the wind, hiding that inanimate world here and there with its veil. There was neither darkness nor light, but an indistinguishable mix between the two, as if the approaching night was only that ice dust that now the storm was blowing on us (…). We were able to reach the end of the world with our gaze, because there was nothing in the world but that light that was no longer light, that colorless earth similar to the hair of a corpse. (1)

An immaculate desolation in which the Samoyed hunters seem to be the only ones capable of braving the unknown and snatching shreds of life from the inclemency of an endless winter. Gliding enigmatic and silent on the boundless expanse of snow with the muffled lightness of the foxes, whose footsteps they have learned to imitate, these hides covered in skins, survivors of forgotten eras, suddenly reveal themselves emerging from the eye of the storm in the presence of two stunned unfortunates, offering them help and shelter. The fire in front of which they find refreshment is not enough to dispel the ancestral fears that take possession of them in the abyss of the endless Arctic darkness, on the contrary it amplifies them enormously:

we could almost feel the sap crawl along the little fir trees to the ground - says Aleksandr - and we knew that that night the Ice Lord would come to visit us in the taiga, tie up the river, break the branches of trees and freeze us into stones. (2)

The next morning, while the small squad resumes their march in single file towards their desired destination, the demon summoned in the dark manifests itself in the form of a cyclopean beast of which the wayfarers cannot accurately guess the features that resolutely moves towards them:

the sound we heard shortly afterwards made our blood run cold. In the horrible silence of death we heard something approaching in that desert with no exit (…). What animal could ever embody such strength, such tremendous obstinacy? A being so majestic and powerful that no God had ever created the same dragged himself into the swamp. (3)

A moment before being reached, a providential gash opens in the blanket of ice dragging the monster into the unfathomable underground depths that struggles in vain trying to escape death. A hallucination? A mirage due to the prohibitive climatic conditions? We will never know, even if, taking his leave, Aleksandr admits, staring at the interlocutor in his eyes, that he caught a glimpse of him for a moment.

What is certain is that in Sarban's stories Nature knows no bucolic dimension and offers no reassuring shelter in one's arms. On the contrary it is an impending presence, panic, insinuating, hostile, endowed with a perverse autonomous will. Unbridled and savage divinity, deaf to the tribulations of men, more stepmother than mother, hungry demands tributes of blood, awakening dormant instincts in them and forcing them to a relentless fight to save their lives. A lesson that Alan Querdilion, protagonist of the novel The call of the horn, learn at the expense of your own mental health.

Lieutenant of the Royal Navy in 1941 embarks to go to fight the Germans in the Aegean but his ship is torpedoed off the island of Crete and he, taken prisoner, ends up interned in an Eastern European concentration camp from which however, he fortunately manages to escape, seeking refuge in the thick of the woods by his jailers who with Teutonic meticulousness sift the area inch by inch, following its tracks. Physically exhausted by the long months of imprisonment and the privations suffered, he drags himself for days among the trees that seem to tighten around him. Arriving in a clearing he is hit by a dazzling light and falls to the ground unconscious. Upon awakening he finds himself immersed in the aseptic candor of a hospital room where the nurses, busy and distracted, pay little attention to the few disconnected phrases he uttered in the rare moments of lucidity granted by sedatives. During the endless hours of the night, the muffled silence of the corridors is interrupted by the eerie sound of a hunting horn rising from the intricate forest located at the edge of the clinic:

The horn seemed to roam the woods beating them back and forth, calling out as if searching for something, sometimes with pressing ferocity, sometimes with a long and held note of defeat. The night was full of noises, the forest as sleepless as the ocean. The wind shook the beech trees outside the window, the trees conversed in a multitude of languages; the whole woodland orchestra played and the horn led. I seemed to hear all sorts of voices and instruments in that wild conversation, my imagination could transform the groan of swaying branches into the yelp of hunting dogs, and the sudden, loud rustle of leaves shivering in the wind into the patter of theirs. race. I stood there for a long time, listening, (…) and I felt a strange agitation build up inside me; it was no longer sadness that I felt, but a state of anguish and apprehension, that debilitating sense of danger that one sometimes feels before understanding from which side and from what weapon one is threatened. (4)

A disturbance that is confirmed in the chilling revelations of the primary Wolf von Eichbrunn, who, in the presence of his astonished patient, declares, when he is strong enough to be able to stand on his own legs, that Germany has won the war and a hundred years since that fateful day! After an initial, understandable bewilderment, Alan deduces that he was catapulted by the mysterious luminescence that struck him during the escape from the Offlag XXIX Z in an alternative reality to his, a parallel universe where the SS dominate the world unchallenged. About the origin of the funereal echo that echoes through the blanket of trees at night, the British officer learns from the doctor's ramblings that it is the sound of the horn with which Count Johann Hans von Hecklenberg, Grand Master of the Reich Forest, he calls his illustrious guests to hunt through the immense estate he owns, of which the clinic is also an integral part: a diabolical hunting carousel in which prisoners from subjugated countries, transformed into grotesque zoomorphic hybrids, are used as game ...

Forty years after the first Italian edition, published in 1974 by the publisher Valentino De Carlo with the misleading title of High Hunt, Roberto Calasso has re-proposed what is now considered a sort of book for initiates among lovers of horror literature. A small masterpiece destined to inaugurate a trend, the cruciform dystopia, extremely prolific. Compared to some famous followers such as Fatherland by Robert Harris, Plot against America by Philip Roth o The swastika on the sun by Philip Dick, in which the relevance to the historical references that outline the background of the events told obeys a principle of verisimilitude if not of reality, albeit artfully altered in compliance with the rules that mark the narrative mechanisms of ucronia, in the pages of Sarban one can breathe an air of rarefied timelessness, as if the drama were being consumed outside the bottlenecks imposed by the contingency of becoming.

Indeed, the writer seems to address an eye to the archetypal dimension, to the symbolic and dreamlike implications of the plot, which are for the reader access keys to the unexplored territories of the Invisible. When the protagonist, who in turn will become a prey of the feral Moorish one, is brought before von Hacklenberg, a scene appears before him that could very well find its place in a painting by Pieter Bruegel or Alfred Kubin:

the man who sat there, dominating the table and all that vast hall, had something barbaric in his eyes which I had never seen and which far surpassed my reveries. He belonged neither to my century nor to the doctor's; and he was further away from those vulgar and noisy Nazi politicians around him than they were from me. Their brutality was that of a mass civilization, urban and mechanized, the sordid cruelty of a tyranny of loudspeakers and machine guns. Hans von Hacklenberg belonged to an era in which violence and cruelty were part of the person, when a man's right to command lay in his physical strength; such an intimate ferocity belonged to the time of the Uri, the wild bulls of that ancient and dark Germanic forest which the City had never managed to tame. (5)

With all due respect to those who, often in bad faith, believe that the twentieth century is a cemetery littered with useless wrecks and dead ideas, it is undeniable that the great totalitarianisms of the Short Century were an inexhaustible source of inspiration for the writers who investigated the different aspects of the Fantastic. While the negative utopians grew up in the shadow of the Soviet Moloch such as Yevgeny Zamyatin and Stanislaw Lemm which, animated by a conception de facto progressive history and substantially confident in the possibilities of palingenesis inherent in human nature, they give body and substance to their obsessions by projecting them into futuristic and hyper-technological societies used to explore sidereal spaces, according to the aesthetic dictates of cosmist theories in vogue beyond the Iron Curtain (6), Sarban, being in his heart a radical pessimist to whom the present is tight and expects nothing from the future, to feed his nightmares he draws from the well of a past without memory, goes back to the roots of the Myth. Alan Querdilion attends, in the dual role of spectator and sacrificial victim, an ancestral cannibalistic rite in the course of which the hierarchs offer human libations to the demon who, seated on an oak throne in the impenetrable heart of his arboreal temple, propitiates the invincibility of the Reich. A dark one genius loci which, incidentally, bears the name of one of the numerous personifications of Odin as the Furious Hunter (7)


Note:

[1] Sarban, Zubrowka. A Christmas story, Adelphi, Milan, 2020; page 39 - 40

[2] Ibidem; page 32

[3] Ibidem; page 46

[4] Sarban, The call of the horn, Adelphi, Milan 2015; page 54

[5] Ibidem; page 103

[6] A current of thought born in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century on the wave of the success achieved by the writings of Nikolai Fedorov, Cosmism was a philosophy of self-realization which, reconciling the most futuristic instances of science relating for example to the genetic manipulation of the living with some aspects of orthodox spiritualism, he advocated the regeneration of humanity which, freed from the pangs of death, would later colonize the Universe. A curious synthesis between positivist scientism and Russian traditionalism, an object of particular interest by the Soviet power especially during the period of space exploration, included among its ranks some of the most recognized masters of Russian science fiction, such as Aleksandr Bogdanov. On the subject see George M. Young, The Russian Cosmists, Tre Editori, Rome, 2017.

[7] An ancient Westphalian legend tells of a Count Hans von Hacklenberg forced to wander eternally at the head of an army of restless souls for cursing God shortly before dying from a severe wound inflicted on him by a wild boar during a hunting trip. On the identification of him with Odin see Giorgio de Santillana - Hertha von Dechend, The Mill of Hamlet, Adelphi, Milan, 1983; page 287 Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β  Β 

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