The Country Whore

By Cesare Pavese 1908–1950 Cesare Pavese

Translated By Geoffrey Brock

The big front wall that blocks off the courtyard

often catches the newborn light of the sun

like the side of a barn. The body awakes

in the morning to a room, messy and empty,

that smells of the first, clumsy perfume.

Even that body, wrapped now in sheets,

is the same that it was when it thrilled in discovery.

Her body wakes alone to the extended call

of morning, the languor of another morning

returning in the heavy shadows: the barn

of childhood and the heavy tiredness of sun

hot in the indolent doorways. A perfume

worked itself into the usual sweat

of her hair, a smell the animals knew.

Her body took secret pleasure in the sun’s

suggestive, serene caress—like a real touch.

The languor of bed saps the sprawled limbs,

still youthful and plump, like a child’s.

The clumsy child used to smell the mixed scent

of tobacco and hay, used to tremble when touched

by the man’s quick hands: she liked playing games.

Sometimes she played lying down with the man

in the hay, but he wasn’t smelling her hair:

he’d find her closed legs in the hay and pry

them open, then crush her like he was her father.

The perfume was flowers ground upon stones.

It often returns, in the slow rise from sleep,

that undone aroma of far-off flowers,

of barns and of sun. No man can know

the subtle caress of that sour memory.

No man can see, beyond that sprawled body,

that childhood passed in such clumsy anxiety.

“The Country Whore” from Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950 by Cesare Pavese. Published in 2002 by Copper Canyon Press. Used by permission Copper Canyon Press.

Source: Dissaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950 (Copper Canyon Press, 2002)

Biography

Cesare Pavese is widely regarded as one of the foremost men of letters in twentieth-century Italian cultural history, and in particular as an emblematic figure: an earnest writer maimed by fascism and struggling with the modern existentialist dilemma of alienated meaning. Little known in the United States, Pavese was profoundly influenced by American literature, and, when official censorship closed his mouth, he would use his . . .

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