Dino Buzzati
Il colombre

«Strange,» I whisper to myself while touching my cheekbone and looking around.
The sky is almost completely clear; light, white clouds, not at all threatening, far from being able to threaten rain and lightning. My gaze then shifts towards the timer of the irrigation system in the tiny garden but it's absurd because there's still an hour until sunset. Not even the frenzied kids of the neighbors are engaged in some water balloon fight. So then...
«Strange,» I repeat a bit louder as I head home, trying to shrug off a massive sadness and that interrogative point. It takes me a few long seconds to realize that it's not a drop, but rather a tear, that streaked my face. I need that span of time because a man often reluctantly accepts the healthy release of a cry; he considers it akin to a "bug," something that can diminish his masculinity. If then this salty water, of a nature far from marine, originates from an innocent book, it's understandable why I didn’t immediately understand.

For a mountain lover like me, Buzzati is an extremely fascinating figure; writing, reading, and going hiking are three of the things I appreciate most. How much I would have loved to meet this man from Belluno, just to shake his hand or, here I exaggerate, to climb together in the Alps and then have an evening full of chat and red wine at the refuge. I am captivated by his dry, terse, yet poetic way of capturing reality: hard bites to swallow but impossible to refute because living just a little is enough to realize, unfortunately, that he is right and has hit the point that most of us try not to see. It seems to me that he is a writer doomed to give his best when engaged in producing melancholic and somber pieces and in this collection, it's the same.

As in “The Tartar Steppe”, there emerges the regret for what was not done and was procrastinated indefinitely due to fear (cf. the namesake short story “Il colombre“), the struggle against the anonymous routine of city life (cf. “L‘ascensore“); there is room to deal with the sweet and painful coils of lost love (cf. “La barattola”) even through the wonderful description of a sick bulldog in the cold, festive streets of the city during the Christmas period (cf. “Il cane vuoto”); the futile battle against advancing time through a simple yet lethal perspective shift (cf. “Cacciatori di anziani“). There are more cheerful episodes, like the one where a Saint decides to renounce the tedious bliss of paradise just to live once more, differently perhaps, his twenties full of false hopes and illusions (cf. "Il crollo del Santo"), but overall they are less incisive and focused. In a tough and autobiographical story, he almost confesses, admitting to having succeeded by exploiting the pains of others which he merely observed, processed, and wrote about (cf. “Il conto“). He is ruthless in his self-critique: the illness that took him prematurely, (the same as his father's), he must have considered as the price to pay for years of undeserved success. I like his reflectiveness in facing life; I adore the way he can describe pain without beating around the bush; I admire the condemnation of a crazy and envious society down to the bone that cannot even share a child's smile holding a balloon in hand (cf. "Il palloncino").

I collapsed when he put me in front of a scene that, indirectly, I’m living these very days (cf. "I due autisti"). Buzzati captured the situation as if he had been present during that family discussion last week, which ended in a fight, and thus a sadness wrapped around me capable of blocking my airways, squeezing me like a rag and pushing out what I had inside. Through my eyes. Writing in this sublime way is almost illegal. They should write something on the back cover, just like they do on cigarette packs, because certain texts should be handled with care and only when one's state of mind is suited.

In one of the last stories (cf. “Le gobbe in giardino”) Buzzati talks to us about the intrinsic desire in all of us to leave a mark on the people we have known and cared for. He poetically describes death as a dip in the lawn at home. The funeral is, in itself, a mockery because we cannot enjoy the grief of others, but for Buzzati, a life is worth living if at the time of our death we have managed to create a sufficiently large bump to make at least one of our friends still alive stumble and lose their step: in this way, maybe after a curse for the aching leg, they will be forced to glance at the ground and think, at least for an instant, of someone who is no longer there. This author, a native of Belluno and adopted Milanese, by continuously digging and describing reality, has created a Dolomitic mountain so high that even those who did not know him, like me, cannot help but think of him while facing daily life.

The cynical ruthlessness of this collection lies in the fact that these are stories whose warning is completely ineffective on a young person who feels immortal and does not understand all this sad philosophizing. An adult will find much truth in them but will try to deny the fact that these situations are akin to him and will shoo them away like summer mosquitoes; only in old age will we be able to fully appreciate these gems. Exactly like in “Il colombre,” when the protagonist finds his treasure when he's already on the brink of death.