What the Pine Remembers

The stump is still there. Someone has swept the needles into a low brown ridge along the kerb of viale Vittorio Veneto, and the wound in the ground is wider than I expected, a shallow plate of torn earth with roots fanned out like the fingers of a hand that tried to hold on and found nothing to hold. Pines do this. They keep their roots near the surface, under the asphalt, where the water is, and they stand for decades on a grip that is mostly habit.

It came down on Tuesday morning, five days ago, across the carriageway of the northern seafront. A large tree, the paper says, and says nothing more about it. A car with two women inside took the trunk on its bonnet. Two soldiers of the Brigata Pinerolo pulled them out. Both women walked away. The firemen cut the tree into lengths and the traffic police waved the cars around the pieces, and by evening the city had already started forgetting.

I walked here from the inland quarters, three kilometres of pavement that never quite stays level, and my knees know every one of those kilometres now. The sea on my left is the colour of a slate roof. On the other side of the road, the remaining pines lean toward the water at the angle the north wind has been teaching them for a century or near enough. They were planted when this seafront was poured, when the city decided to turn its face to the sea and needed shade to do it in. They look exhausted to me. That may be my own exhaustion, lent to them.

Πίτυς (pitys) is the Greek name of the pine, and it was once a girl's name. The Geoponica, that late Byzantine farm manual where myths sit beside instructions for grafting, keeps the story: Pitys was loved by Pan and by Boreas at once, chose Pan, and the north wind, jealous, threw her against a rock. Earth took pity and made her a tree. Ever since, when Boreas blows, the pine weeps. The resin is the weeping. I have resin on my fingers now; I touched the stump without thinking, the way you touch a bruise to see if it still hurts, and the smell will not leave me. It is the smell of a turpentine rag in a cellar, of a stranger's coat, of something I almost remember and do not want to.

The wind that brought her down was the same wind, more or less. On Monday the rain came sideways and the buses were rerouted. The tree held through the night and let go in the morning, in daylight, with traffic under it, which is the way of things that have been failing slowly. Nothing falls at the moment it decides to fall.

And the men who caught the women came from Pinerolo. I keep returning to this, as the tongue returns to a broken tooth. The town in Piedmont whose name the brigade carries has been explained, by those who like explanations, as pinarolium, a place of pines. I do not trust the etymology and I cannot put it down either. A brigade named for pines, standing on a road lined with pines, lifting two women out from under a pine. The coincidence is too neat and the ground is too uneven. My head swims a little. I sit on the low wall and the stone is cold through the cloth.

Catullus begins his longest poem with trees in the sea: Peliaco quondam prognatae vertice pinus / dicuntur liquidas Neptuni nasse per undas. Pines born once on the summit of Pelion are said to have swum the clear waters of Neptune. He means the Argo, of course, the first ship, built of mountain pine, and he means that the whole catastrophe of the heroic age began when a tree was persuaded to leave the ground. Virgil goes further. In the ninth book of the Aeneid, Cybele, mother of the gods, reminds Jupiter that the ships of Aeneas were cut from her own sacred grove on Ida: pinea silva mihi multos dilecta per annos, a pine wood loved by me for many years. When Turnus comes to burn them, she will not allow it. The ships break their moorings, dive like dolphins, and come up as sea nymphs, swimming away.

So the pine has always wanted the sea. That is what the old poets knew and the town planners forgot. Every pine on this seafront is leaning toward the water because some part of it remembers being a hull. On Tuesday one of them tried to go, and the road was in the way, and a car was on the road, and in the car were two women who had no part in the argument between a tree and its own nature.

I think of them more than of the tree. Of the moment when the windscreen went dark with green. Of the soldier's hand, which for an instant must have seemed to belong to no one, a hand arriving out of the needles. They walked away. The paper says they were in shock and unhurt, as if the two words could stand together. I know that combination. It is the condition of anyone who has been spared by a heavy thing: the body intact and the world rearranged around it, every tree on the walk home suddenly a question.

There is a chainsaw somewhere further along, toward the Fiera. The sound comes to me in pieces over the traffic. In a hotter month, in this same city, I stood and listened to that sound while they took down trees for a bus lane, and the shade went with them, and I swore I would not come back to that grief. Here it is again, smaller, colder, smelling of resin instead of dust. The circle does not close. It only tightens.

The light is going early now. The pines darken before the sea does, and for a few minutes they stand out black against a pale band of water, each one leaning, each one patient, each one a girl who said no to the wind and has been paying for it ever since. I rub my fingers together and the resin has turned tacky, holding a single needle against my thumb. I will carry it home. I will forget to throw it away. In a week it will be in a pocket of a coat I will not remember wearing.

Claudius, il Resinaio