In the milky fog between sleep and waking the difference between the storm petrel (Pagodroma nivea) and the arctic petrel (Fulmarus glacialoides) was completely clear to her. The former had even put down the small specimen of cod it was carrying in its beak to explain to her in detail the differences between them, and what they had in common.
‘Petrel’ is the common name for several species of Procellariformes birds, which belong to the families of the Hydrobatidae and the Procellariidae, so called for their capacity to withstand the winds of the storms they presage. She knew that the former build their primitive nests on high ground above the ice and snow, the latter in a more protected position among stones or in a hole in the ground.
The man lying next to her wasn’t interested in the details; as a matter of fact, he wasn’t interested in the topic at all, not even in the most elementary notions.
There’d been a time when this indifference had made her suffer. Now she noticed the start of a certain reciprocity, but it was a marginal feeling that she couldn’t investigate. She’d seen a new, sharp-edged world with surfaces that were restful to the eye, and known the first of its inhabitants.
And while his indifference expanded into widening concentric circles, her passion for the creatures of the great cold grew. She started wearing her winter pyjamas again, even though there lacked only a few days to the official start of summer. She brought the padded overalls, the ones she wore indoors during their week-long skiing holiday, down from the attic.
She started eyeing the binoculars in the windows of camera shops, and she fell asleep reading articles about bird-watching. She renewed her membership in the WWF. In the last few years she’d been too distracted or maybe too depressed to pay the dues, despite the repeated invitations which arrived in the post, accompanied by money-order forms. She’d got the e-mail address of a person in the organization who was an expert in arctic ornithology. She sent him her observations and impressions, questions that grew more and more specific, and checked her mail several times a day. Then came the moment when she spent a whole month’s salary on a pair of infrared-ray binoculars.
She went to be early, and each time she prepared herself as though for an expedition: a pair of padded pyjamas worm over another flannel pair, a manual of ornithology of arctic regions, her binoculars on the bedside table. She bought a down jacket, but before deciding which one to buy she made a little opening in the lining while she was trying them on, to check the material used for the padding. She slept with the window wide open. He was absent, distracted, but he made an effort to seem receptive. He made a few comments about all the accessories his wife seemed to need before going to bed, but only because he thought she expected him to.
Autumn and winter went by.
In the spring she started studying the sky even when she was awake, her eyes following the flight of the first birds migrating north. They weren’t petrels, naturally - they didn’t leave their habitat - but she felt a bond of kinship, a very vague involvement with them nevertheless. One evening she made up her sleeping bag on the roof. After that night, she didn’t sleep in the bed with her husband again. She didn’t try to fly: she wasn’t crazy, as some of the neighbours suspected. She didn’t believe she had wings instead of arms. It was just that she’d fallen in love with the cold, with the freezing wind that made her shiver and feel alive. Those storm-bearing winds gave her a sensation of heat and well-being that in the past only the warm, naked skin of another human body beside her could give. And she’d formed new friendships. Friendships with creatures that loved the wind and the storms like her, and always had, and that could share them …
When the sky grew almost black with the passing flocks of birds, she packed her suitcases. She didn’t say the word “separation” or the stronger one, “divorce.” No, those were ideas that were part of another life: she only wanted to move a bit further north.
And perhaps, the following spring, another bit further.
Barbara Pumhösel was born in Neustift bei Scheibbs, in Austria, in 1959. After various jobs and several moves, she got her degree in Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Vienna. Since 1988 she has been living in Bagno a Ripoli (Florence Province), where she contributes to a project aimed at promoting reading in primary and middle schools, and as an editor for the children’s fiction section of a Florentine publishing house. She contributes to various periodicals and has published stories and poems in anthologies in Italy and abroad, as well as in the magazines "L'Area di Broca", "Semicerchio", "Sagaranaonline", "Das Gedicht"(Germany) and "Podium"(Austria). In 2000 and in 2003 she won the Alpi Apuane Prize for unpublished poetry. In 2004 a collection of her verse appeared in the poetry anthology Pulvis, coperta materna, published by Edizioni Gazebo, Florence. In 2005 “Semicerchio” published her bilingual (Italian – German) collection Prugni/Pflaumenbäume. In 2006 she contributed another collection, Simmetrie mancine, to the poetry anthology “Scrivere x scriversi”, published by Masso delle Fate. Also in 2006, she was included among the migrant writers in the anthology edited by Mia Lecomte, Ai confini del verso. Poesia della migrazione in italiano. She has published the children’s books La principessa sabbiadoro (Giunti, Florence, 2007) and the first two volumes of the series La calamitica III E (Edt, Turin, 2007), Amore e pidocchi and Pericoli e pecore; the last two works were written together with the writer Anna Sarfatti.