The Mystery of Evil

M. Maggiani - There are no answers to the horror of crime. And what terrifies us is precisely the lack of control

I would like to offer you a poem, its author is Bertolt Brecht, and the title is Jacob Apfelböck or the Lily of the Fields.

Mild was the light as Jakob Apfelboeck

Struck both his father and his mother down

And shut their bodies in the linen press

And hung about the house all on his own.

The clouds went floating past beneath the sky

Around his house the summer winds blew mild

Inside the house he passed the time away

Who just a week before was still a child.

The days went by, the nights went by as well

And nothing changed except a thing or two.

Beside his parents Jakob Apfelboeck

Waited to see what time would find to do.

The woman still delivers milk each day

Sweet thick cool skim milk, left behind the door.

What Jakob doesn't drink he pours away

For Jakob's hardly drinking any more.

The paper man still brings the paper round

He steps up to the house with heavy tread

And stuffs the paper in the letter box

But Jakob Apfelboeck leaves it unread.

And when the smell of corpses filled the house

Jakob felt queasy and began to cry.

Tearfully, Jakob Apfelboeck moved out

And slept henceforward on the balcony.

Up spoke the paper man then on his round:

What is that smell? Something gone off, I'd say.

The light was mild as Jakob Apfelboeck

Said: Just some dirty clothes I shut away.

Up spoke the milk woman then on her round:

What is that smell? I'd say that something's died.

The light was mild as Jakob Apfelboeck

Said: Just some meat that mother put aside.

And when they came to open the press door

Jakob stood by, the light was mild and clear

And when they asked him what he did it for

Said Jakob Apfelboeck: I've no idea.

A few days later the milk woman said

She wondered what would happen by and by:

Would Jakob Apfelboeck, the child, perhaps

Visit the grave where his poor parents lie?

This poem was first published in 1927, a hundred years ago, and it refers to a black, black fact that evidently had greatly affected the playwright. In the same way, the similar fact of the past few days and those of the years just past affected us very much. It affected us very much and much questioned us and still continues to question us.

Evidently much questioned Brecht as well, but of his questions he did not make a play of them, but a poem; and if the theater has always been a powerful answerer, the Athenians made of it an extraordinary instrument for the solution of the most dramatic conflicts, precisely, even the site of a mass psychotherapy, poetry does not, poetry cannot give answers, poetry can only ask questions.

And Brecht, who cannot help but ask questions, accepts the evidence that he cannot give himself answers, he, the creator of the Didactic Theater, or yes, he gives himself an answer, and it is the same as Jacob, I don't know.

We don't accept this, we are torn with anguish in search of an answer, we want to know and understand and we are obsessed with it, we question anyone we deem fit for an answer, psychiatrists, psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, judges and prosecutors, pundits with children and pundits, more fortunate, who have none.

And everyone says their own thing, all interesting and debatable things, but ultimately no real, restful answer, other than the not at all soothing answer of the most sincere, which is the same as Ja-cob and Brecht, I don't know. And that just doesn't go down well with us, because if there is one thing that terrifies us, it is the lack of control.

We inhabit a system of life and relationships that is emphatic with dissenting imbalances, and if we manage to live in it, it is only because we are led to believe that however it is in the end it is all under control. No, it is not all under control, we have littered our lives with millions of cameras, there are at least three smartphone satellites in our pockets that track our movements with the accuracy of half a meter, and still we have not invented a camera good enough to etch into the heart of a teenager, not a satellite good enough to detect the vibrations of his mind.

Not everything is controllable, not everything predictable, not everything governable, not everything decipherable, not even in a perfect totali-tary system; there are depths in the soul of each of us that no camera is capable of exploring, no educational system of col-mating, no spiritual counseling of taming, no police force of preventing.

Abysses unknown to ourselves; the self is not master in its own house, is one of Sigmund Freud's wisest clinical findings, which by the way at the time of the poem practiced not too far from Bertolt Brecht.

In recent days, on one of the rare beautiful mornings of this summer, at a lonely bus stop in a charming Apuan village I met a little boy. He was sitting on the ground, his backpack resting on his feet, his cell phone resting on the asphalt, his head in his hands.

And he was crying, crying with big, ragged sobs, crying without a break to breathe. My wife and I, unmindful of the rules around privacy, approached him and respectfully asked if he needed anything. The little boy was crying, crying to tear your feelings away, and he didn't answer. Do you want some water? The little boy cried, again and again, but finally, without lifting his head from his hands, he whispered, no, thank you. So that we went on our way, because there was nothing we could do, nothing to say, nothing at all.

But on our way that little boy also came, and he is still here, still with us with his weeping, his crying and the immeasurable pain he carried with him, a pain that we could not bring any remedy to, a pain that we had no way of soothing, a pain that nothing we knew about, too great even to imagine, but only to note the irreparable.

We have witnessed it and can only carry it with us, loaded in our hearts, a weight added to the weight of the immeasurable pain we encounter day by day in the images and sounds that come to us from the world.

But with one big difference, that little boy is not an image, he is not a story, albeit a gruesome one, he is flesh that I could have touched with my hands, he is tears that with my hands I would have gladly wiped away had there not been that no, thank you.

And I am that little boy, I am those tears of his and that unknown pain, because there was a time that I too cried in that way, I too felt mortal heartbreak, so abysmal that I can't even remember the precise reason for it, assuming there had been any.

At my stop I got on the bus and came all the way here, to this page, living together with what I was, with my weeping, with my pain. In the meantime, I did not slit my father's throat, my mother's throat, my sister's throat, and I have good statistical reasons to believe that neither will that little boy. But I also know that it could have happened; even if with a slim probability, it could have happened that on the bus I would not have had the strength to get on, that I would not have had the strength to be present in the world enough to answer no, thank you, that my grief would have torn me so much that it would have given me instead the inhuman strength to do the unthinkable and the unspeakable.

Neither I, nor you, nor the little boy are another Jacob lily of the fields, but, and I speak to us adults, to those of us who think we have the keys to all understanding, all containing, all controlling, we are witnesses to and bearers of uncontainable, incomprehensible and uncontrollable abysses of pain. As adults we should at least have the courage and sensitivity, and the common sense, to know how to live with this consciousness. And not place too much trust on cameras and satellites, and, with all due respect, not even on delegates to answers, when the only, reasonable answer is I don't know. -

The author has not revised this translation. It has been published in the Italian newspaper La Stampa (which holds the copyrights along with the author) and is shared here for educational purposes only, to help us better understand and navigate the challenging drama of modernity.