The same vision prompted the emperor Claudius to revive the plan and start to put it into action in ad 44, a massive and onerous undertaking on which, according to the accounts of Roman historians, 30,000 labourers, most of them slaves, were employed excavating subterranean drainage channels.
Eleven years later, the construction work was finished and Claudius and his entire court decamped to the area to inaugurate the grandiose project. Rostra were erected, festivals held, and at the high point of the proceedings the floodgates were opened. Yet all that happened was that a trickle of water started running through the culverts, and the level of the lake fell by only a few centimetres. The emperor and his retinue returned to Rome in great umbrage.
And so work began all over again. When this round of construction was over, even more extravagant festivities and games were laid on. Right at the head of the main drainage culvert, a banquet was set out, once again rostra were put up and decorated, and an orchestra of shawm players clamorously proclaimed to the world the triumph of this new feat of engineering. But when the sluices were opened this time, the weight of water that flowed down the so-called ‘Emissary’ was so great that it washed away the stand where the emperor’s party was sitting, almost drowning Claudius, his wife Agrippina and their son Nero. Lake Fucino came within a hair’s breadth of altering the course of history.
Later, the emperors Trajan and Hadrian renovated and extended the drainage system, which continued to serve its purpose until the sixth century, at least when it wasn’t getting blocked, or vandalized by Barbarian invaders. Thereafter, the princely dynasty of the Colonna, who lived in this region, along with the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and Alfonso I of Aragón, attempted time and again, without success, to clean out the ‘Emissary’ and drain the lake.
The person who finally achieved this feat was the private citizen Alessandro Torlonia in the nineteenth century, who commissioned architects from France and Switzerland to study the old blueprints from the time of Claudius and to try and correct the mistakes that were made. From 1854, new work began on draining the lake, by first locating its deepest point, then lowering the drainage channel by three metres, and finally resiting the mouth of the ‘Emissary’ further to the east and nearer to the lake itself.
To carry out his scheme, Torlonia assembled an army of convicts, casual labourers and local peasants. ‘Either I’ll drain the lake, or it’ll drain me!’ he declared. Contemporaries reported how the workers would stand hip-deep in mud, Stygian figures who looked like they were descending into the pit of hell.
Twenty-one years later, this round of work was finished. In return for his achievement, Torlonia laid claim to the reclaimed land, dividing it up into 497 parcels of 24 hectares apiece, most of which he donated to Abruzzese miners and people from the neighbouring provinces, who thereby suddenly became landowners.
The drainage of the lake profoundly altered this area of central Italy, and it is quite impossible to imagine the kind of landscape that would otherwise be here today, or, as the historian of antiquity Heinrich Nissen put it at the turn of the nineteenth century, namely that it would be inconceivable for anyone to immerse themselves in the natural beauty of this country ‘without at the same time being aware of the deep scars that humanity’s ignorance and rapacity have inflicted upon it’. And so it is perfectly understandable in the light of the draining of Lake Fucino how German historian Ferdinand Gregorovius began to have grave concerns about the survival of the lovely Lake Trasimene: ‘Now they’re trying to ship it off to the sea as well, so that they can reclaim farmland and pasture, and who knows what new murderous capitalists and drainage specialists are creeping around its delightful shores, calculating what it will cost to turn this wonderful piece of natural poetry into industrial prose.’
There’s no denying that reclaimed marshland is, in the main, particularly fertile, and if it’s possible for farmers to engage in a profitable form of agriculture anywhere, then land consolidation, straightening of byways, and the shared deployment of farming machinery make it feasible here. By contrast, up on the lower slopes, or even right up in the mountains, individual fields sometimes lie around like exposed playing cards amid a desolate landscape of scrubland, boulders and isolated trees.
The typical landscape formation in this region is a ridge covered in light, fuzzy vegetation, with translucent cliffs up on high and scrub, boulder fields and patches of pine forest below, and sprinkled with isolated fields cut out of it, which in many cases only grow enough to provide for the needs of the family, and which are often close to the farmstead. Below them stretches the silvery-grey of the olive groves, similar in their flow and colour to the boulder fields, and as they get closer to the valley floor, they’re increasingly interspersed with meadows, colourful fields and moist black tracts of arable land fringed with mighty willows and enclosed watercourses. Finally, in the valley the landscape becomes completely mellow. The fields fit together like pieces of intarsia woodwork, their colour grows more intense, and the paths and roads run straight as a die.
Without more ado, I hitchhiked from the far side of the dried-out lake over to Campobasso. It was easy. In the countryside, people have no qualms about picking up strangers. By the time a couple of kilometres have passed, they aren’t strangers anymore. The last of my lifts dropped me off at the door of the ‘Locanda’, the only house offering ‘bed and breakfast’.
Once upon a time, Campobasso had around 2,000 inhabitants. In the meantime, though, its population dwindled to just the old people. A smaller group had decamped to Rome, while a larger group had emigrated to Canada and the USA. Later, their faces were to gaze out at me from the sepia-toned photos that filled the town’s only guest house. All around the world, the Abruzzese form well-known expatriate communities. This wild province of high mountains, peasants and bears can barely support its population from farming anymore. Those who remain behind form part of a dying community, and into some of these half-abandoned villages, with their tumbledown buildings and farmhouse settlements that are only patchily provided with street lighting, the Vucumprà, refugees from Africa, have now started to move in. They’re called this in unkind mimicry of their accents when they hawk carved wooden elephants from their homeland in the markets hereabouts. So it is that in villages in the Abruzzi, the last of those who stayed behind are encountering the first who manage to effect an escape.
I was walking across the dining room when I spotted Clarisse and her father sitting in the little courtyard behind the house. He rose and morosely shook my hand. When she caught sight of me, Clarisse shot up from her seat, blushing furiously like she was in the middle of an argument, and simply said:
‘At last, you’re here!’
I only had a dim memory of how she’d once looked, but now her complexion was feverish. She’d abandoned her hair to the incipient grey, and her get-up had gone from being simply careless to almost totally shabby. She took hold of my elbow and steered me across the dining room – giving me a conventional but demonstrative peck on the cheek on the way – and out into the open. The guesthouse owner gave us a sullen look as we passed. A dusty reception, I must say! On the narrow street outside, we took a right turn, then right again, virtually covering the whole village in the process.
‘Everyone seems strange to me,’ Clarisse hissed.
‘How do you mean, strange?’
‘You don’t know them. They’re completely different people. You’ve never had to deal with people like them.’
‘Forget them. Then you’ll find some peace and you’ll be able to …’
‘It’s because of the first evening that they’re like this. It’s all down to that first evening.’
On that occasion, apparently, she and her father had gone to the dining room of the ‘Locanda’. She’d greeted a couple of the people there; the atmosphere was tense and embarrassed. Still, she’d managed to pull herself together, curtsied to the landlord and shaken hands with all those present.
‘Right, we’d be
tter get ourselves a room’, her father had announced at length.
‘What room?’ she’d asked.
‘Our room.’
‘But we’ll need two.’
Indignant looks were directed at her from all sides, and people shook their heads quite openly. Coquettishly, the landlord had dangled the room key on its wooden fob in front of her nose. When she made a move to knock it out of his hand, an old man had stepped between them and tried to act as an intermediary. She could give it a go, he suggested, at least for the first night.
‘That’s it, then, is it: just give it a go?!’ she’d shouted, then turned to the room and shrieked at the top of her voice: ‘I am not sleeping in the same room as this man!’
Other people are prone to exaggerating what they supposedly said when they were furious, but if anything, the opposite was the case with Clarisse. You could be sure that her scream would have been piercing, but also that, after her declaration, she’d have cursed them all to hell.
‘What business is it of yours, anyway?’ she’d doubtless yelled at them and then called the landlord a ‘web-footed inbred’ in German, whose ‘rectum’ she hoped would be afflicted by the ‘bloody Lombardy squits’.
I shook my head, but not out of disapproval, nor because I didn’t believe her, but more at the bizarre constellation of events, and the disaster zone that was her father.
But she too misconstrued my head-shaking.
‘What, you think it’s normal too, do you? A grown-up daughter sharing a room with her father, sharing a bed?’
‘No,’ I said, to humour her.
‘They’re all abnormal here. Well, not all of them. But they’re all in each other’s pockets, that’s for sure.’
I couldn’t help but smile again, but this time because of the figure of speech she used.
But she grabbed my hand indignantly and dragged me down the street, with that fanatical look in her eye that I knew of old, accompanied by her necrotic wheezing and bustling. In that instant, I got the feeling that I’d been summoned down here primarily to be the recipient of this outburst of rage. Keeping a tight grip on my arm, she led me across a dirt track to the little village cemetery, the most idyllic spot for miles around, with a fine view of Lake Fucino in the distance. There, she let go of my hand, and gesticulating extravagantly to either side, began to prance down the gravel path between the tomb sculptures, the moss-covered stones and slabs, pointing to this or that head-stone and declaiming:
‘Maria Passa, Francesco Farinello, Pietra Farinello, Sergio Farinello, Guido Passa, Eleonora Passa, Mauro Farinello, Massimiliana Passa, Pippo Farinello, Gloria Farinello …’
She wheeled round to look at me; I was following several paces behind her and reading the names out to myself as she rattled them off:
‘A village of two families, you get the picture now? They’re all related to one another: Farinello, Pass, Passa, Farinello … They’re all here …’
She clutched at her head and made a screwing gesture against her temples with her fingers, in a very Italian-like way.
‘They’re degenerate … loony!’
We sat down on a bench and looked out at Lake Fucino. To be on the safe side, neither of us broached the subject of Kafka. But I remembered how she’d once said that in order to find himself, the writer first had to lose himself. And there in front of us, in all its down-at-heel symbolism, lay the lake that wasn’t a lake anymore, and beside me sat Clarisse, wittering on about there being nowhere anymore, nowhere – no library, no convent, and least of all this village – no place under the sun she’d be able to call home. And I gazed out over the land that the drained lake had uncovered, lying there all meticulously parcelled out, luscious and fertile enough to make you despair at the sight of its beauty.
Clarisse is no longer with us. She finally found a way out after all, an exit from her own life.
Gorée
The Door of No Return
The Isle of the Blessed has a basement. You know this to be the case, but you can see no sign of it as you cast off in a small boat from Dakar harbour and head for this fortress rock just three kilometres offshore, that terrible idyll which was originally simply called Ber and, later, Ila da Palma. Then the British occupiers rechristened it Cape Coast Castle, and finally, it was the French who were ultimately responsible for naming it Gorée, the ‘good harbour’, or Gorée la Joyeuse – ‘Gorée the Fortunate’. However, that was already at a time when the ships with holds full of chained slaves were plying the Atlantic route, and hardly anyone who made it to Gorée considered themselves fortunate.
Nowadays, the ferry from Dakar to Gorée departs every twenty minutes. The women in the boat in their magnificent boubous balance loads of tropical fruit, sugar, sweet potatoes and other produce on their heads. Their destination, this rocky island which once had some fifty thousand people living on it, is now home to only about a thousand. This morning, some of its inhabitants are lazing about in hammocks, while others are strolling down the alleyways under the waving washing, or lying in the meadow above the free-roaming sheep, or just sitting around in an atmosphere filled with the screams of children and seagulls.
This legendary islet at the westernmost tip of Africa measures barely one kilometre long and three hundred metres wide. From the boat, we could easily see the whole of Gorée laid out before us. Greta had the complexion of a Southern European woman, but could trace the roots of her family back to African slaves, so before our visit, she’d been at pains to put me in the picture about the significance of the island.
In 1444, Gorée was occupied by Portugal, and then by France, but subsequently also by the British, the Dutch, the Danes and the Swedes, and then once more by the British, who ran a trading post here for a while. In all, the island changed hands seventeen times; a fort more than a residence, a citadel whose black cannons still loom over Dakar harbour.
The Portuguese took control of the Ila da Palma in the course of searching for the fabled goldfields of West Africa. Barely a hundred years later, a local trade in human trafficking began, and right up to the abolition of slavery in 1848, the island served as a key base for the transportation of slaves to the Americas.
After North America was ‘discovered’ and demand arose for manpower to work the plantations there, as well as in Brazil and on the islands of the West Indies, the slave trade boomed. Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century, a total of twenty million slaves are believed to have been sold and transported from West Africa to the New World. They also disappeared into the silver mines of Mexico and Peru, the tobacco and cotton plantations of North America, and into the sugar cane fields of the Caribbean. The Dutch sent them to their colonies of Surinam, Berbice and Guyana, and the offshore island of Curaçao soon evolved into the most important slave market in the world.
‘Meanwhile, back in Gorée,’ Greta explained, ‘the slaves became a kind of currency. For instance, the price of a house was reckoned in slaves, and a fine Arab horse cost twelve or fifteen of them. But horses were much in demand in times of war, and so many slaves didn’t find themselves caught up in the transatlantic trade, but instead were bartered within Africa.’
‘Was it a lucrative business?’
‘And how! Slaves were the valuables of the age. In Africa, you could get hold of one for a small quantity of brandy and cheap trade goods to the value of five guilders, and then exchange him in South America for ten times that much in sugar. And then you could sell on that sugar for many times that sum again in Europe, where confectionery was by this time no longer a preserve just of the upper classes. Plus, it changed people’s eating habits here completely, and incidentally also gave rise to the dentistry profession. It took no time for the European slavetrading concerns to start establishing their own plantations in Africa.’
But recently several scholars have raised the possibility that the business of supplying the ships in Gorée with victuals and agricultural produce for export was actually a more significant economic activity tha
n trading in relatively cheap slaves. All human life assembled here on this small fortress island: white slavers, prosperous Africans who themselves took part in the slave trade, and even rich slaves who kept slaves of their own years before the first Europeans arrived on the continent. Many slaves at that period quickly converted to Islam, because an edict decreed that no one had the right to enslave a Mohammedan. The fact that today around 80 per cent of Senegalese and 50 per cent of African people as a whole are Muslims reveals quite how intimately and enduringly even religion was bound up with the slave trade in this region.
Our boat was by now entering Gorée Bay. The harbour here consists of little more than an enclosed area of the shore where a boat can put in. In former times, this was also where ships were fitted out for the long transatlantic voyage. Nearby, a market grew up, where gold, ostrich feathers, clothing and wax were traded, and because of the pleasant conditions here, even some freed slaves moved to the island and lived cheek by jowl with their brothers and sisters who were still in bondage.
Many of the ships that unloaded their cargoes here and then took slaves on board came from Liverpool, the European centre of the slave trade. Here, human beings were exchanged for much sought-after European goods, such as textiles, ironware, tools, glass and weapons – all commodities that over time either lost their appeal or prestigious status, with the result that this kind of trade ultimately declined. On the other hand, in certain aristocratic circles, it was deemed a mark of status to own a slave. And then there is the unforgettable story of the Viennese woman from the time of Mozart who had her African husband stuffed when he died and exhibited in a museum – all with his consent.
The Ends of the Earth Page 25