The Shape of a Pocket

heartless because it was deaf.
    Before, when any order was always shifting and the
only
promise was that contained in a place of shelter, in the time of the
nuraghis
, stones were considered as companions.
    Stones propose another sense of time, whereby the past, the deep past of the planet, proffers a meagre yet massive support to human acts of resistance, as if the veins of metal in rock led to our veins of blood.
    To place a stone upright so that it stands vertical is an act of symbolic recognition: the stone becomes a presence; a dialogue begins. Near the town of Macomer there are six such standing stones summarily carved into ogival forms; three of them, at shoulder-level, have carved breasts. The sculpting is minimal. Not necessarily through lack of means; perhaps through choice. An upright stone then did not depict a companion: it was one. The six bethels are of trachytic rock which is porous. As a result, even under a strong sun, they reach body heat and no more.
    When the rising sun, Sardinia, warms your granite You must give birth to new sons.

    Earlier than the
nuraghi
are the
domus de janas
, which are rooms hollowed out of rock-pediments, and made, it is said, to house the dead.
    This one is made of granite. You have to crawl in, and inside you can sit but not stand. The chamber measures 3 m. by 2. Stuck to its stone are two deserted wasp nests. The silence is less concentrated than in the
nuraghi
and there is more light, for you are less deeply inside; the pocket is nearer to the outside of the coat.
    Here the age of the man-made place is palpable. Not because you calculate … mid-neolithic … calcolithic, but because of the relation between the rock you are in and human touch.
    The granite surface has been made deliberately smooth. Nothing rough or jagged has been left. The tools used were probably of obsidian. The space is corporeal – in that it seems to pulse like an organ in a body. (A little like a kangaroo’s pocket!) And this effect is increased by the remaining soft smears of yellow and reddish ochre where originally the surfaces were painted. The irregularities of the chamber’s shape must have been determined by variations in the rock formation. But more interesting than where they came from is where they are heading.
    You lie in this hiding place, Marcos – there is a faint sweetish almost vanilla smell coming from some herb outside – and you can see in the irregularities the first probings towards the form of a column, the outline of a pilaster or the curves of a cupola – towards the idea of happiness.
    By the foot of the chamber – and there’s no question which way the bodies, either alive or dead, were intended to lie – the rock is curved and concave and on this surface a human hand has chipped distinct radiating ribs as on a scallop shell.
    By the entrance, which is no higher than a small dog, there was a protrusion like a fold in the rock’s natural curtain, and here a human hand tapered and rounded it so that it approached – but did not yet reach – the column.
    All
domus de janas
face east. Through the entrances from the inside you can see the sun rise.
    In a letter from prison in 1931 Gramsci told a story for his two children, the younger of whom, because of his imprisonment, he had never seen. A small boy is asleep with a glass of milk beside his bed on the floor. A mouse drinks the milk, the boy wakes up and finding the glass empty cries. So the mouse goes to the goat to ask for some milk. The goat has no milk, he needs grass. The mouse goes to the field, and the field has no grass because it’s too parched. The mouse goes to the well and the well has no water because it needs repairing. So the mouse goes to the mason who hasn’t exactly the right stones. Then the mouse goes to the mountain and the mountain wants to hear nothing and looks like a skeleton because it has lost its trees. (During the last century Sardinia was drastically deforested to supply railway sleepers for the Italian mainland.) In exchange for your stones, the mouse says to the mountain, the boy, when he grows up, will plant chestnuts and pines on your slopes. Whereupon the mountain agrees to give the stones. Later the boy has so much milk, he washes in it!
    Later still, when he becomes a man, he plants the trees, the erosion stops and the land becomes fertile.
    P.S. In the town of Ghilarza there is a small Gramsci Museum, near the school he attended. Photos. Copies of books. A few letters.