Barzini Jr.

From “Escape to Mongolia”

by Luigi Barzini Jr. - 1939

… Perhaps it is the sky… I’ve never seen such a sky. And in no other part of the world is there one quite like it. Wide open, brimming with light, so that you don’t feel oppressed, standing under it, but free. Perhaps, it is the Mongolians, faithful, silent, strong, enamored of their own freedom, prepared to die for what they consider to be their right.

Perhaps it is the solitude. To be one’s own master, far away from other men, makers of one’s own destiny, in the eye of God, truly alone.

Perhaps I have become Mongolian too, and I love all these things more than life itself, the freedom, the sky, the horses, and I might feel suffocated if I knew that someone had built a house ten kilometers from here.

What do you think, Mrs. Easton?... … Nobody went back to their country, because once you have experienced the joys of an ancient civilization, a smart and comfortable service, a favorable exchange, a country full of able and hardworking artisans, you just cannot accept returning to the faceless mechanical cities, their brutality, that bad cooking and the economics (point of view of an American tourist in Mongolia - 1939). … Perhaps men are forced to emigrate by their thirst for novelty, but they continuously search for places which remind them of home, in order to be happy. The Spanish went to Mexico, which looks like Andalusia, the Italians went to California, which looks like the Apennine range. The Swedish went to Mongolia and Nebraska.

… Mongolians with thick ponytails of greasy hair hanging from their head, their clothes, heavy with dirt, their faces lined by heat and cold, kept their eyes on us, speechless; women with jewel encrusted heads, stray dogs.

A cape-covered rider was galloping, backlit against the reddening sky. He must have been three or four kilometers away, but we could see him as clear-cut as in an old photograph.

The incredulous stillness of the people, the dusk light, it all contributed in giving a bizarre, unreal and higher meaning to everything. In a clearing some youths were wrestling without uttering a word. Their torso was naked and darkened by the sun, wearing their heavily plied undergarments, their upturned pointy boots. They moved wide-legged, their upper body thrust forward, their arms hanging by their sides.

Two of them shared a copper studded leather jerkin, they placed themselves at the centre of the square, one in front of the other, they groped for each other with their hands until they grabbed an edge of the jerkin. All around, huddled on the ground, their elbows on their knees, their companions kept following their every move. Each movement was slow, brimming with a meaning which we could not hope to understand. … but above all, above the men’s breathing, the rustling, the village’s murmuring, the barking of a nearby dog, the galloping of a horse on the grass plains, above all, silence: the silence of millennia, silence of continents, silence shrouding Mongolia, alone, without neighbors, a silence in which history itself dies.

Mongolia: a green and silent sea at sunset. For a moment it truly did seem as if time stood still.

… We had two servants, dark face and dirty as two old pipes, which patiently listened to what was being said, disappeared and then returned without carrying anything.

Tony explained that firstly, they should bring water, lots of water, and they brought a small pail-full, unbelieving that we really did want to rinse. … you should have seen how fun that old Mongolian was, all dressed up in brocade, with his embroidered boots, his mandarin hat featuring the button explaining his rank…. On another occasion, in the Alcazar, he fell in love with one of the Chinese dancing girls and he did not know what to do. He started following her, step after step, along the dancing floor, gazing at her with melancholic eyes and touching her to ascertain if she was at all alive, and finally, unable to resist any further, he lunged at her shouting…. … The men, wearing gold, red and brown colored robes, wonderful colors which were clouded by dirt and filth, had shaved their heads, masculine faces, broad shoulders, mustaches like the ones on Turkish warriors depicted in Venetian art…

…Every now and then we would meet herds of horses carefully watched over by proud mounted Mongolians. Sometimes a lone horse would race along side us for a couple of miles, breathless. These horses have large heads, small, powerful bodies, and they gallop as if they were thoroughbreds. The grey-tent villages were becoming rarer and rarer as we made our way northwards.

We ate breakfast on the car’s footboard. The wind whipped up pieces of paper and tossed them around in the plain. A kicked empty petrol canister

would have travelled for several meters, pushed by the wind. We travelled all afternoon in the lonesome steppe, and just before dusk we met a man on horseback… … “ My wife, Tony said, says that a cigarette, smoked in a ger, in winter around a fire, has a truly unique flavour…” … That night, we slept like logs, snuggled in our blankets, sprawled around the slowly dying embers of our fire. A mere sliver of the Moon shone down from the topmost opening of our tent. Someone passed during the night, he covered the opening with a sudden move, and a thick darkness surrounded us, in which the hot ashes kept sparkling. A little later, the fire itself died out….

… Both temples and houses were built like the lower sections of a pyramid, thinner at the top and wider at the bottom. The windows were also thinner at the top. The walls were white with chalk and live lime; the roofs were lined, as a frieze, with a red band sporting discs of shiny copper, discs which looked like shields or like huge new coins, shining in the sun.

This was an architecture which we had never seen before, which does not exist in China, in Japan nor in Manchuria. … the Mongolians bear some form of terrible weight. The walk in heavy embroidered leather boots, wide-legged, as if they bore the weight of all the continents conquered by their fathers…

The lace used by the Mongolian horse-riding shepherds looks like a fishing pole. It’s a long pole with a thin piece of string attached to one end, like a whip with its end tied to the handle. They grab the head of the horse they want to stop, in the loop formed by this string, then they twist the pole

until the loop becomes small enough that the horse believes he is being strangled, and then it feels a wooden spike jamming itself under its jaw. At this point the Mongolian dismounts and adjusts the halter.

The Mongolian always speaks silently, whispering, decreasing his voice as he reaches the end of his sentence so that the final words are barely audible, no more than an articulated breath….

…the trip to Mongolia was truly over when we saw the Chinese farmer, ploughing bare-chested.

Mongolia’s border, its real border, not the one shown on maps. was the line being cut into the soil by that lone Chinese farmer.

We crossed a village where we stopped to ask for some water to use in the radiator and we were suddenly in China: water carriers with two pails balanced on a yoke suspended from their shoulders, cooks working outside, barefoot children, curious and courteous people, elder women, vegetable stalls, bird cages.

This village’s name was still a Mongolian one, Ulaanhuà, but, nonetheless, it was in China.