We saw each other regularly for a while. With her, it was always unconventional, always stimulating. We slept little, and theoretically nothing was out of bounds. One time, she explained the meaning of the motif of hunger in Kafka: it wasn’t hunger in a material or social sense, nor did it have anything to do with desire, desperation or longing, but rather the ‘Hunger Artist’ in Kafka’s famous story of that name was attempting to reinvent himself, to drain his existence, so to speak, so that he might ultimately be able to slough it off like a dead skin.
‘It’s all about self-abandonment as the prerequisite for self-creation. In order to find himself, he must first lose himself. But he can’t do that all of a sudden, just like that – instead, he has to be rid of every atom of his former self, piece by piece. It’s not just a simple dialectical process, you understand. He’s someone who only becomes a person by becoming nothing. Or rather whose existence is sealed by his non-existence, his self-destruction through not eating.’
‘Got it.’
I was at pains to appease her. That night, it had got so late that she’d had to sleep over at my place. Or rather, I’d eventually fallen asleep. In the middle of the night, she swung herself on top of me, straddled my loins and panted in my ear that we should make a baby now, a baby that would release us and become the focus of everything. Drunk with sleep, I managed to talk her out of the baby, though not the idea of release as such.
Even so, that was the only moment when she gave any indication of being delusional or alarming, and her ensuing humili-ation and my resulting caution combined from here on in to create a distance, which had its origin in the moment of greatest intimacy between us. From this point on, we could no longer interact unconventionally. Something had arisen which was genuine, but which was also larger than our messy relationship.
So we drifted apart. I left Vienna, and pretty soon she stopped writing, and because we had no mutual friends, I didn’t hear any news of her either. No trace of her Kafka study ever came to light in the academic world.
Then one evening her father phoned me, which in its own way was awful, since my mental image of him oscillated between the labourer from the Abruzzi and the sexually predatory patriarch. It took him ages to get to the point, though you could tell from the underlying tone of agitation in his voice that his call would take a bad turn, which he was spinning out mainly in order to spare himself.
Clarisse has ruined herself with her Kafka study, he told me. At first, of course, he’d been proud that his daughter would be a dottoressa. He didn’t understand a word of what she was writing, but at some stage things had clearly gone off the rails. She’d given him a volume of Kafka to read, and he’d actually found it ‘interesting’, and sometimes the writer could even be ‘genuinely funny’, but the effect it had on her was …’
‘So what effect did it have?’
Two months ago, it seems, she’d applied to be admitted to a religious order. And indeed, the sisters in the convent did take her in for a probationary period before it gradually dawned on them that she hadn’t joined the convent to serve God but to starve herself to death. Of course, that was completely beyond the pale and so the abbess ruled that Clarisse should be dismissed from the convent. When her father came to pick her up, she was emaciated and utterly deranged.
He couldn’t send her back to the library, and leaving her alone in her flat was too risky, he reckoned, so he’d loaded her into the car and taken her home, to the Abruzzi.
‘You know Lake Fucino, right? Well, on the other side – on the south side of Lake Fucino, that is – Campobasso’s up in the mountains there.’
‘That’s where you’re from, then?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Have you still got family there?’
‘No.’
‘Is that where you’re calling me from?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what do you want me to do?’
‘Can you help us?’
He said ‘us’ – a quite different plural form from ‘our man from Cairo’, whom I should never have heard about again.
When I set off two days later, it was with some very mixed emotions: the father’s voice on the telephone had sounded pitiful, and the thought of leaving Clarisse alone with her father in a village in the Abruzzi was unsettling, but it was also a sense of adventure that impelled me to purchase a railway ticket to Lake Fucino. So, I was driven both by concern and by the idea of seeing a part of the world I’d never been to before.
Lake Fucino was a familiar theme in a body of literature where Italy was still referred to as ‘Arcadia’ and was redolent of lemons and cemetery angels. Wilhelm Waiblinger, the young and disturbed friend of the poet Hölderlin who died in Rome, once wrote in a letter:
What a southerly colour there is to the lake! What a beautiful blue, mixed with violet and greenish hues! What a sensual, magnificent, yearning enchantment in the lovely mountains … You can have no conception of the clarity of this lake. The charming surroundings are reflected in its surface not only as indistinct masses but also in the most delicate outlines, with all their colour tones and details, and rocks and cliffs shimmering in the most delightful way in the still, limpid water. You feel like you’re no longer floating on the water; it seems to be another, much more refined, thinner, more spiritual element, an element akin to light on which you’re being borne, and upon which the reflection of the azure-dark southern sky is resting.
I delved further into the Bavarian state library in Munich in search of more literary vignettes of the lake, and found that other, less rhapsodic writers than the young Waiblinger maintained that no rivers ran into the lake or flowed out of it, and that it drained into subterranean chambers; they also claimed that its vegetation was drab, and that a gloomy tranquility lay heavy over its surface. Sure enough, in watercolours by Edward Lear, it really does look like a pool of water that someone’s just spilt, fascinatingly dead in appearance.
‘Get off at Avezzano,’ the woman at the station ticket booth told me when I bought my ticket. ‘That’s your nearest stop.’
Fine, then – I was off to Avezzano, that unfortunate place which was transformed by an earthquake in January 1915 from a charming mediaeval town into a collection of temporary huts. Of its 13,000 inhabitants, barely 2,000 survived. Then, during the Second World War, the town was bombed by the Allies, who were trying to hit German units. In actual fact, Avezzano had been an important stronghold of Italian partisan resistance. It was razed to the ground by this ‘friendly fire’.
My train made its way across the Brenner Pass, through the countless tunnels of Emilia-Romagna, and across the plains of Tuscany and Umbria. Once the foothills of the Alps were behind us, what a sense of relief there was in the imperceptible, calming transformation of the landscape to a much softer one. Here the terrain mostly comprised round-topped hills, with only the odd cone-shaped prominence, often with its top flattened off, rising up, all on its own, alongside winding river valleys or from desolate hollows. These isolated prominences were like host animals to remote settlements, fortified from ancient times, which clung to their flanks and which for the most part had been hewn from the rock of the hillside. Almost all the old villages here had sited themselves in this way on the summits of hills or the slopes, with only the modern towns – unimpressed by old notions of defence and with their industries dependent upon water – electing to locate themselves by rivers.
The first hint of the Abruzzi Mountains is given by the light they cast – a light that bleaches out the most distant hill ridges to simple outlines, makes the intervening uplands in the middle distance rise up blue from the sfumato of the valley mists, and causes the closest stretch of land to the viewer to appear all the more colourful by contrast. Every zone of this typical terraced landscape, which sometimes displays line upon line of treelined ridges receding into the far distance, has its own colour, its own way of dissolving its complexion in the whitish-blue of the far haze and sky, its own structure. Far-off, all one can
see is a bluish expanse, whereas closer at hand some grey-brown shapes begin to emerge from the green and black of the fields and meadows, and right up close you can make out the rich variety of asymmetrically-shaped cultivated plots, untended tracts of land, interspersed bits of wilderness, and overgrown streambeds overhung with bushes in blossom and willow branches.
But where the table mountains recede, their extended ridges peter out into gently declining slopes, and the wave motion of the hills comes to a stop, then that other form of landscape begins to form in isolated pockets, grandiose in its simplicity: that of the plains and the high plains. Here, a moonscape stretches away on both sides of the lonely roads; it’s got a character all its own and there are virtually no settlements here, in fact it’s almost devoid of any traces of human activity at all. Time and again, we come across fields of thistles and simple saxifrages carpeting mountain passes, and only on the more distant plains, where the gentle folds of the mountain sweep down from its dramatic heights, have farmers planted one or two fields of wheat or corn, which are liberally sprinkled with poppies and cornflowers.
Large tracts of land have remained undeveloped here, or were simply abandoned. The slopes, which look like they’re covered in steppe vegetation, and the distant cornfields lie there so indistinctly in the haze that it’s almost as if the primordial seas still covered this region. Other fields, on the other hand, were actually cut from the wilderness and now sit there as simple geometrical patterns like patches on a landscape that knows of no other such accurate figures.
Over large stretches, this landscape seems to positively suppress all signs that humans were present, but then suddenly an isolated farmstead pops up, or a bar, or a shop, and the alleyways run down between the few houses like open corridors that have been built to link the various different rooms of a single house. For just as the outer suburbs of towns have sometimes pushed outwards into and through villages, so the network of alleys, staircases, and horse stairs in these mountain villages often obliterate the division between public and private space.
While people were safer from attackers up on high ground in former times, nowadays these villages are endangered by their very remoteness and isolation. Yet forms of settlements are also ways of life. For instance, that’s why you’ll encounter more communal festivities among mountain-dwelling people, as well as more communal tasks like baking and washing, carting around burdens on donkeys, or balancing them on one’s head – all habits that have disappeared down in the valleys, thus also causing various forms of conviviality, social intercourse and communal life to become less close and binding there too.
In such landscapes, it’s like you’re stepping into the backgrounds of paintings by Piero della Francesca or Perugino. In the allegorical paintings on the reverse of Piero’s double panel portrait of Federico da Montefeltro and his wife Battista Sforza, just such a richly diverse, almost overemphasized, idealistically elevated landscape appears, with several towering hills, which are so characteristic of the region in which they were created.
And as Perugino’s pictures became more classical and stereotypical, he levelled the richness of these landscape forms to a standard view that he kept on repeating over and over again. In this, two hill ridges, adorned with long-stemmed peonies and alders replete with delicately powdery foliage, run from each side to the middle of the composition, while along the centre line, a sweeping plain meanders its way into the idealistically hazy blue depth of the painting, where you can just about make out a lake, on whose shores people are hunting or working, and where shepherds have their grazing lands or are watering their animals.
The views are still there today, and you can see the same kind of scenery, dominated in the west of the lake by the humpbacks of the sandstone hills, which climb up to the Apennines, while in the east and south the landscape is characterized by the more precipitate contours of the limestone mountains with their terrace and plateau formations. Where the bare rock crags emerge above the green valleys and streams and overhang the wooded slopes, you instantly recognize the uniformly coloured grey stone which is predominant in many of the smaller local settlements and which assimilates the house into the surrounding rocks.
Because many smaller streams flow into the principal river of the region, the Tiber, this has become the main transport artery here. Both the railway and the main highway follow the course of its valley, while smaller routes run alongside the rivers that flow between the reservoirs and the long valleys in the less accessible regions to either side of the main river valley.
I sat in the train and followed the Tiber valley heading south. If the trip had ever had a purpose, it had disappeared in the interim. In the beginning, there had been a motive, nothing more, and at the end there would be a situation, nothing less. In between lay the promise of an experience, which attracted me like the thrill of being fearful. I pictured myself sitting with Clarisse somewhere in the mountains behind Lake Fucino, looking down on the water and thinking over what to do next. But that wasn’t for real.
Instead, Arcadia, the landscape of ancient Italian pastoral idyll, turned out to be real. For this ‘green heart of Italy’, as the poet Carducci called the region in his famous verses, really is still home to sheep farms and shepherds, who drive their now much-reduced flocks from Puglia and Calabria along the legendary ‘tratturi’ – the ancient drovers’ roads.
The Tiber divides the region in a north–south direction. The strips of land along its banks have not remained unaffected by the modern world, and yet through this current landscape shines the ancient one that Pliny the Younger celebrates in his incantatory description of the upper Tiber valley:
The character of the country is exceedingly beautiful. Picture to yourself an immense amphitheatre, such as only nature could create. Before you lies a broad, extended plain bounded by a range of mountains, whose summits are covered with tall and ancient woods, which are stocked with all kinds of game. The descending slopes of the mountains are planted with underwood, among which are a number of little risings with a rich soil, on which hardly a stone is to be found. In fruitfulness they are quite equal to a valley, and though their harvest is rather later, their crops are just as good. At the foot of these, on the mountainside, the eye, wherever it turns, runs along one unbroken stretch of vineyards terminated by a belt of shrubs. Next you have meadows and the open plain. The arable land is so dense that it is necessary to go over it nine times with the biggest oxen and the strongest ploughs. The meadows are bright with flowers, and produce trefoil and other kinds of herbage as fine and tender as if it were but just sprung up, for all the soil is refreshed by never-failing streams. But though there is plenty of water, there are no marshes; for the ground being on a slope, whatever water it receives without absorbing runs off into the Tiber. This river, which winds through the middle of the meadows, is navigable only in the winter and spring, at which seasons it transports the produce of the lands to Rome: but in summer it sinks below its banks; towards the autumn, however, it begins again to regain its strength. You would be delighted by a view of this country from the top of one of our neighbouring mountains, and would fancy that not a real, but some imaginary landscape, painted by the most exquisite pencil, lay before you, such a harmonious variety of beautiful objects meets the eye, whichever way it turns.
I got off the train in Avezzano. It was still early morning, and exactly as one might expect at that time of day: women in curlers were sweeping the pavement while men sat chatting over the pink pages of the Gazzetta dello Sport. At the first bar I came to, in the station concourse, I asked a solitary newspaper reader the way to the lake. He begged my pardon. So I repeated my question: ‘The way to Lake Fucino?’ He folded up his paper and, staring fixedly at me with an amused but good-natured expression, replied:
‘Ci porto io’– ‘I’ll take you there.’
So we ended up chugging up the mountain in his little blue vehicle with the farting exhaust until we came to a large square where the man parked his car
and insisted on accompanying me to the parapet overlooking the valley.
‘Ecco il Lago Fucino,’ he announced with a proprietorial gesture.
And I saw the lake in the subjunctive mood, the lake that could have been; as it was, it lay there like a gigantic piece of marquetry composed of green and brown inlays, with sharply cut parcels of land following the course of paths and broad carpets of scrubland, wheatfields and acreages of vegetables with just the occasional farmhouse on their fringes.
Lake Fucino is no more, ‘non c’é piu il lago,’ said the man standing beside me. Dried out, not by time but by human agency.
I sat for a while on a bench above the valley and surveyed the scene: somewhere, the sun was shining constantly on the plain below, or spots of light flitted across it, and, just as though the valley floor was still water, the fields petered out towards the edges of the depression, giving way to sparse and then denser settlements and finally running out altogether. But when the plain is shrouded in mist, from a distance it can seem as if the lake has returned home, back to its bed.
Over the next few days, I increasingly lost sight of the original purpose of my visit, so fascinated was I by the lake that wasn’t a lake. I visited the local library to read up about Lake Fucino, then went to sit for long hours like a pensioner, staring out over the plain. Apparently when the lake did still cover this area, it was well-stocked with fish, the lake on whose shores the Marsians, and later the Romans, grew olives, vines and fruit. Although its climate was considered quite harsh, before it was drained the lake by all accounts only ever froze over five times, the first of which was in 1167. The way its water level rose and fell baffled both the locals and the historians. In 1752, it was said to have become so shallow that you could make out the foundations of the ancient town of Marruvium, and statues of Claudius and Agrippina were salvaged.
And so now we’re standing on the spot where a dream was realized, that is, where it was buried – a dream that antiquity began to dream and which the modern period brought to fruition. The earliest plan to drain the lake, which had come into existence after a landslip, damming the River Sagittario river over an area of 155 square kilometres, was devised by Julius Caesar, who believed reclamation of the plain would, first and foremost, ensure a huge supply of corn for the booming city of Rome. This plan never got off the ground.
The Ends of the Earth Page 24