The Cornfield
By Cesare Pavese

The day that I stopped at the foot of a cornfield and heard the rustling of long dry stalks moving in the air, I remembered something that for a long time I had forgotten. Behind the field, an uphill terrain, there was the empty sky. “This is a place I have to come back to,” I said, and I dashed off almost immediately, on my bike, as if I had to bring news to someone who was far away. I was the one who was far away, far away from all of the cornfields and all of the empty skies. That day it was a field; it could have been a rock hanging over a road, a lone tree at the turn of a pass, a vine on the edge of a precipice. Certain remote meetings congeal and harden over time into natural forms. It’s not that I choose these forms: they know how to appear, to find themselves on my path at the right moment, when I least think about it. I have never met anyone who is as tactful as they are.

What the cornfield says to me in those brief moments that I dare to contemplate it, is that which is said by those who have made others wait and without them nothing could be done. “Here I am,” they who made the others wait says simply, but none of the others can tear away the hateful look that is thrown as if towards a master. Instead, to the sky between the low stalks I give a furtive look, like those who look beyond an object almost waiting for it to reveal itself, knowing full well they can’t expect anything that the object does not already contain, and that a too-sudden gesture could make everything pour out terribly. That field owes me nothing, because I can do nothing but keep quiet and let it enter inside me. The field, and the low stalks, little by little they rustle and remain in my heart. No words are needed between us. The words were said many years ago. 

When, truly? I don’t know. And I don’t even know what could have been said, a cornfield and a boy. But certainly one day I had stopped — as if with me time had stopped — and then the day after, and still another, for all of a season and all of a life, in front of a similar field; and that was a limit, a familiar horizon across which the hills, as low as they were remote, showed through like faces at a window. Every time that I dared to step inside the yellow multitude, the field must have welcomed me with its crackling and sunlit voice; and my responses were the cautious gestures, at times brusque, with which I pushed aside the cutting leaves, I stooped down to the bindweed, and beyond the tall stalks I thrust my gaze to the emptiness of the sky. There was in that crackle a deathly silence, of closed and deserted space, that opened in the faraway sky a promise of life unknown, impassable and alluring like the hills.

That time had then stopped, I know because today I find the field again in front of me still in tact. It is a motionless rustle. I understand that I have certainty in front of me, as if I had touched the bottom of a lake that awaited me, eternally the same. The only difference is that back then I dared some sudden gestures, I penetrated the field, crying out to the familiar hills that appeared to have waited for me. I was a child then, and everything is dead of that child now except for this cry. 

The season of that field is autumn, when everything reawakens in the countryside behind the rows of corn. Voices are heard, harvests are made, at night fires are lit. The stillness of the field also contains these things, but as if at a certain distance, like promises glimpsed between the branches. The desiccation of the leaves always opens greater segments in the sky, revealing more nakedly the faraway hills. One thinks also of what is behind there, and of the nocturnal presences on the shoulder of the Forest. Sometimes the crackle of yellow leaves rises in the memory and alarms me, like the bustle of an unknown and feared step, like the struggle of bodies in combat. By now, in the distance, they are a single thing: the nocturnal bonfires on the hills and the dusk between the vague stalks of the field. The only reassuring thing is the thought that he who has thrown himself to the ground to hide is the boy, and that from the stalks hang fat ears of corn that the farmers will come to collect in the morning. And tomorrow the boy will no longer be there. 

These things occur every time that I stop in front of the field that awaits me. It’s as if I spoke with it, even though the conversation happened many years ago and even the words are lost. The furtive look that I mentioned is enough for me, and the empty sky fills up with hills and traces.

Translated by Sean McDonagh