by W. G. Sebald
first to me, who was rendered speechless by this virtuoso performance, and then to Luciana for signature before endorsing it himself and, by way of completing the business, rubber-stamping it first with a circular and then with a rectangular stamp. When I asked the brigadiere if he were certain that the document he had drawn up would enable me to cross the border he replied, faintly irritated by the doubt implied in my question: Non siamo in Russia, signore.
When I was in the car with Luciana once again, the document in my hand, I felt as if we had just been married by the brigadiere and might now drive off together wherever we desired. But this notion, which filled me with intense pleasure, was short-lived, and once I had recovered my equilibrium I asked Luciana to drop me at the bus stop down the road. There I got out, and, my bag already slung over my shoulder, I exchanged a few more words with her through the open window of the car and belatedly wished her a happy forty-fourth birthday She beamed as if at an unexpected present. Then, her head slightly inclined, she said addio, engaged the gears, and drove off. The Alfa glided slowly down the street and vanished around a bend which seemed to me to lead to another world. It was already midday. The next bus was not due till three o'clock. I went into a bar near the bus stop, ordered an espresso, and soon became so deeply absorbed in recasting my notes that I have not the faintest recollection either of the hours of waiting or of the bus journey to Desenzano. Not until I am on the train to Milan do I become visible again to my mind's eye. Outside, in the slanting sunlight of late afternoon, the poplars and fields of Lombardy went by. Opposite me sat a Franciscan nun of about thirty or thirty-five and a young girl with a colourful patchwork jacket over her shoulders. The girl had got on at Brescia, while the nun had already been on the train at Desenzano. The nun was reading her breviary, and the girl, no less immersed, was reading a photo story. Both were consummately beautiful, both very much present and yet altogether elsewhere. I admired the profound seriousness with which each of them turned the pages. Now the Franciscan nun would turn a page over, now the girl in the colourful jacket, then the girl again and then the Franciscan nun once more. Thus the time passed without my ever being able to exchange a glance with either the one or the other. I therefore tried to practise a like modesty, and took out Der Beredte Italiener, a handbook published in 1878 in Berne, for all who wish to make speedy and assured progress in colloquial Italian. In this little booklet, which had belonged to a maternal great-uncle of
mine, who spent some time working as an office clerk in northern Italy towards the end of the last century, everything seemed arranged in the best of all possible ways, quite as though the world was made up purely of letters and words and as if, through this act of transformation, even the greatest of horrors were safely banished, as if to each dark side there were a redeeming counterpart, to every evil its good, to every pain its pleasure, and to every lie a measure of truth. Soon
the outlying districts of Milan came into view. Satellite developments with twenty-storey residential blocks. Then the suburbs, factory yards and older tenement buildings. The train changed to another track. The low rays of the setting sun passed through the compartment. The girl in the colourful jacket inserted a bookmark into her photo story, and the Franciscan sister also slipped a green ribbon into her breviary. Both now sat leaning back in the fullness of the evening glow, until at length we entered the darkness of the Central Station, and were all changed into amorphous shadows. As the train ground to a halt, the screeching of the brakes reached an excruciating pitch before it finally cut out and gave way to a moment of complete silence into which, almost at once, the heaving noise that prevailed under the great iron vaults flowed back. Filled by a sense of having been abandoned, I remained standing for a while on the platform. The girl in the many-coloured jacket and the Franciscan nun had long since disappeared. What connection could there be, I then wondered and now wonder again, between those two beautiful female readers and this immense railway terminus which, when it was built in 1932, outdid all other train stations in Europe; and what relation was there between the so-called monuments of the past and the vague longing, propagated through our bodies, to people the dust-blown expanses and tidal plains of the future. My bag slung over my shoulder, I strolled down the platform, the last of the passengers, and at a kiosk bought myself a map of the city. How many city maps have I not bought in my time? I always try to find reliable bearings at least in the space that surrounds me. The map of Milan I had purchased seemed a curiously apt choice, because while I was waiting for the quietly rumbling photo-booth where I had had some pictures taken to yield up the prints, I noticed on the front of the map's cardboard cover the black and white image of a labyrinth, and on the back an
affirmation that must seem promising and indeed auspicious for anyone who knows what it is to err on one's way:
I emerged from the station hall into the leaden evening air. Yellow taxis came drifting towards their rank from every quarter, only to set off once again with more weary home-comers in the back. I walked through the colonnades to the eastern side, the wrong side of the station. Under the archway that gives onto the Piazza Savoia was a Hertz advertisement bearing the words LA PROSSIMA COINCIDENZA. I was still gazing up at this message, thinking it might possibly be meant for me, when two young men, talking to each other in a state of great agitation, came straight at me. It was quite impossible to get out of their way: their breath was already upon my face, already I was seeing the knotty scar on the one's cheek and the veins in the other's eye and feeling their hands beneath my jacket, grabbing, tugging and pulling. Not until I turned on my heel and swung the bag off my shoulder into the pair of them did I manage to disengage myself and retreat to one of the pillars in the archway, LA PROSSIMA COINCIDENZA. None of the passers-by had taken any notice of the incident. I, however, watched my two assailants, jerking curiously as if they were out of an early motion picture, vanish in the half-light under the colonnades. In the taxi, I clutched my bag with both hands. To my remark that Milan was dangerous territory, ventured in as casual a tone as I could muster, the driver responded with a gesture of helplessness. His nearside window was protected by a metal grille, and he had a multi-coloured medallion of Our Lady on the dashboard. We drove along the Via N. Torriani, across the Piazza Cincinnato, turned left into the Via San Gregorio and left again into the Via Lodovico, and drew up outside the Hotel Boston, which looked an unprepossessing, ill-omened house. The driver took the fare without a word and the taxi vanished in the distance. Nowhere in all the Via Lodovico was there a living soul to be seen. I climbed the few steps to the unappealing hostelry and waited in the dimly lit hallway until the signora, a wizen-faced creature of some sixty or seventy years, appeared from the television room. Suspiciously she kept her beady eye on me while I explained, in my halting Italian, that I was unable to show any papers because my passport had gone astray and I was in Milan to obtain a new one from the German consulate. As soon as I had finished my sorry tale she called her husband, who answered to the name of Orlando and who now also emerged unsteadily from the television room, where he had languished, like the signora, in something of a stupor. He took what seemed an age to cross the small lobby and take up his position beside his wife behind the reception desk, which came up nearly to their shoulders. When I told my story all over again, it no longer sounded plausible, even to me. Half in pity and half in contempt I was at length handed an old iron key bearing the number 513. The room was right at the top, but the lift, a cramped and clattering metal cage, went only as far as the fourth floor, from where I had to climb up two back stairs. A long corridor, far too long for that narrow building, led past a row of doors barely more than two metres apart down a slight incline, as it seemed to me. Poor travellers, I thought, seeing myself among them: always somewhere else. The key turned in the lock. An oppressive heat that had been building up for days and perhaps even weeks hit me. I pulled up the blinds. There were rooftops as far as the eye could see in the gathering dusk, and a forest of aerials s
tirred faintly in a breeze. Below, a chasm of backyards yawned. I turned away from this view and without undressing lay down on the bed, which was covered with a fringed, floral-patterned, damask spread, folded my arms under my head, and stared up at the ceiling, which appeared to be miles away. Stray voices drifted up from below and came in at the open window. A cry, as from someone swept out to sea, a shrieking laugh in an empty theatre. Time passed and it grew gradually darker. Little by little, the sounds subsided and there was silence. Hours went by, never-ending hours, but rest eluded me. In the middle of the night, or it may even have been towards morning, I got up, undressed and climbed into the shower cabin, which jutted into the room and was concealed behind a mildewed plastic curtain. For a long while I let the water run down me. And then, wet as I was, I lay down again on the fringed bedspread and waited for dawn to touch the tips of the aerials. At last I thought I could make out the first glimmer, I heard the call of a blackbird and shut my eyes. A pulsating glow spread under my lowered lids. Ecco l'arcobaleno. Behold the rainbow in the heavens. Ecco l'arco celeste. Sleep came and I dreamed of a green field of corn and floating above it, with outstretched arms, a convent nun from my childhood, Sister Mauritia, quite as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
At nine next morning I was in the waiting room of the German consulate in the Via Solferino. At that early hour there were already a considerable number of travellers who had been robbed and people with other concerns, among them a family of artistes who seemed to me to belong to an era that ended at least half a century ago. The head of this small troupe — for that was undoubtedly what they were — was wearing a white summer suit and extremely elegant canvas shoes with a brown leather trim. In his hands he was twirling a broad-brimmed straw hat of exquisite form, now clockwise, now anticlockwise. From the precision of his movements one knew that preparing an omelette on the high-wire, that sensational trick performed by the legendary Blondel, would have been mere child's play for this grounded tightrope-walker whose true home, one felt, was the freedom of the air. Next to him sat a remarkably Nordic-looking young woman in a tailor-made suit, she too straight out of the 1930s. She sat quite still and bolt upright, her eyes shut the whole time. Not once did I see her glance up or notice the slightest twitch at the corners of her mouth. She held her head always in the same position and not a hair was out of place in her painstakingly crimped coiffure. With these two somnambulists, whose names proved to be Giorgio and Rosa Santini, there were three girls, all of about the same age, wearing summer frocks of the finest cambric, who resembled each other very closely. Now they would sit quietly, now wander about among the chairs and tables in the waiting room almost as if they were trying to make their meanderings into intricate, beautiful loops. One of them had a brightly coloured whirligig, one a collapsible telescope which she tended to hold to her eye the wrong way round, and the third a parasol. At times all three, with their sundry emblems, would sit at the window and gaze out at the Milanese morning, where the shimmering daylight was breaking through the heavy grey air. Sitting apart from the Santinis, though plainly with them, in her affections and by relation, was the nonna in a black silk dress. She was busy with crocheting and looked up only occasionally to cast what seemed to me a worried look at the silent couple or the three sisters. Although it took a long while until my identity had been established, by several phone calls to the relevant authorities in Germany and London, the time passed lightly in the company of these people. At length, a short, not to say dwarfish consular official settled himself on a sort of bar-stool behind an enormous typing machine in order to enter in dotted letters the details I had given concerning my person into a new passport. Emerging from the consulate building
with this newly issued proof of my freedom to come and go as I pleased in my pocket, I decided to take a stroll around the streets of Milan for an hour or so before travelling on, although of course I might have known that any idea of the kind, in a city so filled with the most appalling traffic, will end in aimless wandering and bouts of distress. On that day, the 4th of August, 1987,1 walked down the Via Moscova, past San Angelo, through the Giardini Pubblici, along the Via Palestro, the Via Marina, the Via Senato, the Via della Spiga, the Via Gesù, into the Via Monte Napoleone and the Via Alessandro Manzoni, by way of which I finally reached the Piazza della Scala, from where I crossed to the cathedral square. Inside the cathedral I sat down for a while, untied my shoe-laces, and, as I still remember with undiminished clarity, all of a sudden no longer had any knowledge of where I was. Despite a great effort to account for the last few days and how I had come to be in this place, I was unable even to determine whether I was in the land of the living or already in another place. Nor did this lapse of memory improve in the slightest after I climbed to the topmost gallery of the cathedral and from there, beset by recurring fits of vertigo, gazed out upon the dusky, hazy panorama of a city now altogether alien to me. Where the word "Milan" ought to have appeared in my mind there was nothing but a painful, inane reflex. A menacing reflection of the darkness spreading within me loomed up in the west where an immense bank of cloud covered half the sky and cast its shadow on the seemingly endless sea of houses. A stiff wind came up, and I had to brace myself so that I could look down to where the people were crossing the piazza, their bodies inclined forwards at an odd angle, as though they were hastening towards their doom - a spectacle which brought back to me an epitaph I had seen years before on a tombstone in the Piedmont. And as I remembered the words Se il vento s'alza, Correte, Correte! Se il vento s'alza, non v'arrestate!, so I knew, in that instant, that the figures hurrying over the cobbles below were none other than the men and women of Milan.
That evening I was on my way to Verona once again. The train raced through the dark countryside at an alarming speed. This time I alighted at my destination without a second thought and, once I had had a double Fernet in the station bar and browsed through the Verona newspapers, I took a taxi to the Golden Dove, where, contrary to all expectation, at the height of the season, a room perfectly suited to my needs was made available and where I was treated with exquisite courtesy, both by the porter, who reminded me of Ferdinand Bruckner, and by the hotel manageress, who seemed to be waiting in the foyer for the express purpose of welcoming me as a long expected guest of honour who had finally arrived. Rather than asking for my passport, she simply handed me the register, and I entered my name as Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, historian, of Landeck, Tyrol. The porter picked up my bag and preceded me to the room, where I gave him a tip that far exceeded my means, at which he left with a deep bow. That night under the roof of the Golden Dove, I felt safe as if under the wing of a bird whose plumage I saw in the finest shades of brown and brick-red, a well-nigh miraculous reprieve, as was the breakfast next morning, which I recall as a very dignified occasion. Confidently, as if from now on I could not put a foot wrong, I set off shortly before ten through the city streets, and soon found myself outside the Biblioteca Civica, where I proposed to spend the day working. A notice on the main entrance advised the public that the library was closed during the holiday period, but the door stood ajar. Inside, it was so gloomy that at first I had to feel my way forwards. In vain I tried a number of door handles, all of which seemed curiously high to me, before at last I found one of the librarians in a reading room flooded with the mild light of the early morning. He was an old gentleman with carefully trimmed hair and beard, who had just settled down to the days task behind his desk. He wore black satin armlets and gold-rimmed half-moon spectacles, and was ruling lines on one sheet of paper after another. Once he had prepared a batch, he looked up from the business in hand and enquired what it was I had come for. Having listened to my protracted explanation, he went to fetch what I wanted and before long I was sitting near one of the windows leafing through the folio volumes in which the Verona newspapers dating from August and September 1913 were bound. The edges were by now so brittle that the pages needed to be turned with much care. All manner of silent movie sce
nes began to be enacted before my eyes. In Via Alberto Mario I beheld divers gentlemen walking up and down and, at the very moment they supposed themselves unobserved, deftly side-stepping, with lightning alacrity, into the doorway of the building that housed the establishment of Dr Ringger, graduate of the medical schools of Paris and Vienna. Each of the many chambers within was
already occupied by an impeccably suited gentleman of the sort that continued to leap in from the street, while Dr Ringger, for his part, was to be seen in the great salon on the mezzanine floor perusing, in preparation for his surgery hours, a range of outsize pictorial reproductions of the inflorescences caused by diseases of the skin, spread out before him on a huge table like the multi-coloured ordnance maps at a war council of the general staff. And then I witnessed Dr Pesavento, whose practice was in the Via Stella, not far from the Biblioteca Civica, performing one of his painless
extractions. The pale countenance of the patient under Dr Pesavento did indeed seem perfectly relaxed, but her body twisted and turned in the dentist's chair as if she were undergoing the most agonising discomforts. There were revelations of a different kind, too, such as the pyramid of ten million bottles of Ferro-China table water (to reconstitute the blood), gleaming and glinting in the sun like a promise of eternal