Landscapes of the Heart

by Elizabeth Spencer

  The Nauheim living quarters were more luxurious than one might have expected, and as far as I could see the town had not been bombed. Americans had taken over everything they wanted. The golf course, where the two of them played every spare afternoon, the swimming pools, and tennis courts—all now were for the Americans.

  The Germans themselves were subdued, but their presence was something like a sullen background music, discordant and muffled. They went about on foot or by bicycle, mainly without looking to one side or the other. One heard no laughter and saw no smiles. The vibrations all said hatred and loss, loss and hatred. One of the favorite American sports was driving so close to a German bicyclist he had to get off the pavement or be knocked down.

  We went to a piano concert in another town. The auditorium was only a shell—a stage with a piano, rubble cleared back to the sides, and benches ranked out in the open. But the rapt audience, largely German, were caught up into another world by the music, which I remember as passionate, full of bravura and flourish. Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms. The applause was loud and long. This was the world they still could enter, could feel was their own.

  Socially, the Americans largely grouped together. Fraternizing was frowned on; you could never know what the past record might have been. Attending parties, one felt as if among colonists on an island full of distant natives, who must be off somewhere, saying and doing things we could never know, but who we could be sure held no love for us. Jokes and laughter were strictly American in pitch, but the resonance was lacking.

  The twilights, usually following cloudy cool days, were long but scarcely languorous. There was something monotonous about dusks which night seemed impotent to close. Nerves felt the strain of them.

  Naturally my friends had to work. I was often lonely and took up horseback riding at a local stable, placed, oddly, in the middle of the town. It was run by a friendly, active couple, whose English was fairly good, and a number of people of various sorts went out on the rides. We would pass in file through the town center and soon be into open country laced with trails. It was cloudy and cool most of the time, and the trees seemed everywhere dark. One thought of the Black Forest, and stories from Grimm.

  On one of these rides I met a young Viennese who was at loose ends in Bad Nauheim, waiting for a work visa, as I recall. We talked a good bit and he began to ask me out. He was pleasant and presentable, and I felt fortunate to have found him. In the afternoons we could either ride or go swimming together. He even met me for church services.

  My friends reacted strangely. It said something, not so much about them, I now realize, as about the general atmosphere, still bruised from conflict, not yet ready for healing, charged with suspicion of everything and everyone. “What does he want?” Does he have to “want” something? I wondered. Perhaps he wanted my company. Perhaps he liked me. To them it seemed any such innocent notion as that was ridiculous. Cynicism had grown up like weeds.

  Carolyn and Tom kindly drove me on trips. Once we went up the Rhine, another time into Switzerland. We stayed once at Starnberg, where I felt the essence of what “Bavarian” must always have meant. Its woods and lake had some wordless mystery to tell. The chateau of the “mad king” could be seen across the lake, crowning a promontory. Hadn’t Eliot written of it, too?

  Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

  With a shower of rain …

  I found a stable there, too. To my surprise, the horses had luxurious tiled stalls, left over from prewar days, and the stable-master, doting on them, could still be polished and military in his demeanor around them. I liked the trail riding but when it came to jumping practice in a large enclosed barn, I regularly fell off, not being used to the walls.

  On the trails I rode several times beside a small plump Frenchman, whose reason for being there was not revealed. He rode well. One day he gestured with his crop into some woods along the trail and exclaimed, “Ecureuils!” “Quoi?” In broken English he explained: “In the air, bat. On the ground, mouse. Under the ground, mole. In the tree, ecureuil.” There are worse ways to learn new words, especially as I soon saw squirrels too, racing about among the branches.

  I also met a little blond boy named Peter, whose bright face and blue excited eyes are vivid to me yet. He loved riding, but he also wanted to practice his English. He was the friendliest of all the Germans I remember, and I got a spark of hope for the future from his face and eager talk. “And when, please, Meez Leez, does one say ‘Okay’?”

  Many pleasant things occurred, but on the whole, the visit was not a success. Something about the traditional American viewpoint, which typically comes on smiling with helpful friendliness, had hardened. It had encountered realities so cold nothing could warm them. Americans knew now that human decency not only could vanish in theory, but had vanished in fact.

  It was in this atmosphere, too, that I came to realize an unpleasant truth. What I had hoped still to find in my friendship with Carolyn was no longer there. Perhaps we both tried, but could not bring it to life. Her involvement with Tom, some doubts that were in her mind about it, may have entered more strongly than I knew into her behavior. But I think primarily it was Germany itself, the attitudes one had to acquire in the simple daily course of living there. The person who did not change under these conditions must be extremely rare. Try as my old friend and I might, the past never revived.

  The experience was a lesson in how things are in our present world. It was whispering to me: Relationships do not last. If the same person is in one’s life for many years, that person will have been several other people during those years. It is in the changes that most people find it necessary to drop away, fade, and become a memory. The trick is to know when the time has come either to go or to let go. The person who learns that and acts on it is the one who knows best.

  But I have a heart like a small town, of minimal but treasured population. It was hard for me to learn that friends are not permanent residents. Friendships serve for a time: the time passes. This is also true of family relationships. It is true of marriages. I recently heard a man of this new world, Norman Mailer, speaking on television of his six marriages. He said that marriages were like sojourns in foreign countries—so many years in Egypt, so many in Paris, and so on. The experiences were cultural, he said; one eventually moves on. I would hate to catch myself believing such a thing.

  So out with all the above! I think of the wondrous presence, continuous through the years, of different spirits, who dance to a different measure. They may never get to run the planet, but they make living on it worthwhile.

  Though I always felt warmly toward him, I seldom heard from Edward after that summer, but I knew that he had left off writing for work in New York City, and that in later years he went back to Montgomery, Alabama, his place of birth, where he died. I also learned that Carolyn discovered a late-blooming love of Mississippi and often returns to see what cousins and remnants of family she can find and enjoy.

  The time of my State Department pass to visit in Germany was limited to a month. During the Bad Nauheim stay, I often heard references to Italy, and how wonderful it was to visit, if only simply to see the sun. Why did people speak so warmly of another Axis enemy, surely full of the same feelings remarked in Germany? No, it was different, they said. For one thing, it was not as heavily bombed, except in certain areas; for another, the people had an entirely different character. And furthermore, it was beautiful.

  I found ways of saying goodbye to the Viennese. He wrote and sent photographs. I was a bit sorry for him, as I felt he had been unjustly shunted off.

  Almost, I decided to go back to Paris. But I still had all of August, I had enough money left, and there was an overnight train from Munich to Milan. Thus, unexpectedly, I came to the heart of my summer.

  Arriving in Milan in the wee hours, I took a cab through dimly lighted streets. The hotel was so new, the smell of fresh cement was everywhere in the corridors and the room was sparsely furnished, but I was gl
ad to sleep. Borders and passport checks had left little time for that on the train.

  When I woke sunlight was piercing the cracks in the blinds. I opened the shutters and was instantly drenched in sun from head to foot. I picked up the telephone, but scarcely knew what to say. “Cafe” is pretty nearly universal, so I said it. I got a “subito” in reply, and soon had not only coffee—rich, smooth, and hot—but also croissants with gobs of butter and jam. I opened a window. Singing came up from the streets. What world was this? An illusion, doubtless, soon to vanish. Horrors had happened here, a short time before. The ride from the station had shown me bombed-out buildings—shattered walls, gaping thresholds. Bitterness must lie below the surface.

  Still unbelieving, I went out, found my way to the cathedral, bought a guidebook, wandered, fed pigeons at a cafe in a piazza. I smiled and talked to beautiful, smiling people without knowing a word they said.

  “Americana?” “Si."

  Before me stood three young men, one with a camera. They were taking my photograph. I realized they would want to sell me the pictures. “But I’m leaving soon.” “Va via,” one explained to the others. “We bring to your hotel.” I gave them some money and scribbled the address, thinking never to see them again, but at the hotel that evening, the pictures were waiting. I ran across them again the other day. A thin, dark-haired girl in a skirt and checkered blouse, the cathedral of Milano behind, pigeons and passers-by all in place, as we all were together, that sunny day in August 1949.

  I wandered all day without very well knowing where I was bound. I climbed to the cathedral roof and found a Coca-Cola machine among its myriad statues of saints and angels. The refectory of the former monastery attached to the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie had been just put back together; a bomb had trashed the walls. But—by a miracle, it was strongly suggested— Leonardo’s Last Supper had been left intact. It has faded more than ever now, but perhaps one can still see how much of its enormous quality lies in the perspective—the wall it covers at the end of the oblong room is simply made to vanish, and the viewer feels ready to enter and sit with others at that long-ago table, come to life again. A breathless step into the eternal.

  I also walked to the church of Sant’Ambrogio, and found one of the loveliest and holiest places on earth. Forty-five years later I saw it again and was swept by memory as well as by the sight of it.

  I was leaving it that first time when a car pulled up beside the sidewalk and an elderly man in shorts and an open shirt leaped out, crying “Signorina! Signorina!” Obviously English, he was dripping maps and guides, wanted directions, and had thought me an Italian. I’ve no idea why I remember this except for the curious realization that I did not at all mind being taken for Italian.

  A whole month lay ahead.

  If my friends had been stationed in Italy, I wondered, would things have been different? So pondering, I walked around till a certain truth dawned. I could think whatever I liked about whatever I liked, but everywhere around me, Italy was making its first great statement. Germany had been only a preface to Italy: if it had opened my eyes, it had also bruised my feelings, leaving me, though I was hardly conscious of it, with a heart ready for Italy to impress. And the measure of what Italy can do is infinite, never to be taken.

  From Milan I went to Verona, to another hotel, breakfast, and guidebook—but this time, as I went about the streets of that softly lyrical town, I became at every step more aware of what beauty was being cast up at me, regular and almost as rhythmic as the waves of the sea, on every side, at every turning. And all out in the open! Anyone raised in the Deep South is not apt to be ignorant of architecture, but I had never before thought of statues and fountains as the accepted ornaments of life—its daily dress—to be enjoyed by everyone from moment to moment, mingling with the talk and bargaining and breath of life, with sunshine.

  If you try, even after many years, you can reconstruct a good deal of everything that has happened. (The look of my room in Milan, the smell of recent cement work, the pastry and jam, sunshine and song.) But I cannot reconstruct anything from my first day in Verona except my own dazed feelings. I recall my wanderings of that day as a kind of drunkenness, all this on perhaps one glass of wine at a lunch I cannot remember eating.

  I do know that under orders from my old Baedeker, I trudged to the outskirts of the town to see that (starred and not to be missed) Church of San Zeno Maggiore. I walked across the harsh stones of the old square before the church with its bare upcurving sweep of Romanesque facade, tawny in the fall of the strong afternoon sun, and as anyone would, I felt its nobility. I saw then that what had been kept from me by a too strict Protestant upbringing was true—that art can express religious emotion more truly than any sermon. Years later I saw this very church used as setting for the fatal burial crypt in a fine English film version of Romeo and Juliet. If that story happened at all it would have happened in this place.

  And then … Venice… Florence … Siena … Rome … Memories grow jammed with impressions, and not only of galleries, piazzas, mosaics, and frescoes, but also with people, a montage of remembered faces.

  Florence especially had (in addition to Michelangelo, Botticelli, and all the rest) a free and lively feeling about it that year, an airiness that was all ease and rightness. In recent times when I have returned, tourists seem about to carry it off, like trooping multitudes of ants methodically lifting whole the carcass of a wonderful beast. But not so in that early postwar year. Italians were glad to be alive in a life that was possible to live, and their gladness filled the air and reached out to all comers.

  All the easily made friendships, the dancing and romancing, parties, dates and dinners, meetings by chance, partings forever, may seem frivolous to talk about—though not so much is wrong with frivolity, God knows—but one felt more in the air in France and Italy that summer. These countries had come up out of the inferno; sun, moon, and stars were looking down on a resurrection. The news might never reach Germany. But it had taken up residence in Italy.

  One of my discoveries was opera. The first evening after I reached Florence, I was strolling back along the Arno to the Hotel Berchielli (still there, but infinitely more expensive) when a young American couple stopped me and after some chatter invited me to come with them to the opera.

  To me opera meant dressing up and suffering. I had gone during Belhaven days to a performance of La Traviata, given by a traveling company. Grand opera, they called it back then. I had heard performances from New York on the Saturday-afternoon radio broadcasts, and along with the whole town, had gone up to the Carrollton schoolhouse to see local talent in a production of The Mikado, this being something like opera, though not “grand.” Habitually, when exhausted with summer heat and outdoor play, I with others used to sit around the side porch listening to Lawrence, my poet cousin, bang out some rousing chorus of Verdi on my mother’s old rosewood upright piano with yellow keys, some ivories missing.

  The Jackson La Traviata was supposed to bring us at last to the real thing. A portly Alfredo bellowed his passion, a heavyset Violetta warbled hers also. At the end, the dying lady collapsed, still full of enough energy for prodigious song, into the arms of her lover, singing lustily as well, and the heavy curtain, trying to close, struck both such a blow they all but fell off the stage into the audience.

  When they said to me in Florence, “Come with us to the opera,” I quickly said, “Oh, I’m not dressed.” But neither were they, and I thought they must be joking. The girl was in a skirt and blouse, much like my own, the young man wore neither jacket nor tie. “You don’t have to dress,” the girl said. “Half the auditorium isn’t even repaired. We can buy tickets at the door. Come on—it’s Rigoletto!” Well, why not, I thought, and we trooped off together.

  The auditorium was makeshift, having stood in the part of central Florence along the river that had been badly hit by the retreating Germans. There were boards for seats. Could we have come to the right place? The loud chatter of the Ital
ian crowd, the rustling sense of excitement, the boys who passed with programs to sell and little bags of candy, cigarettes, and the like, put me in mind of a school play at home rather than anything resembling a Verdi masterpiece.

  “Noccioline americane! Noccioline americane!” I’d no Italian to interpret that cry, but looking in the tray that was passing, saw peanuts. We were not even at the schoolhouse; we were practically at the baseball game!

  The curtain swung open to loud, irreverent cheers from a crowd that wanted it, needed it, had come to savor it, enjoy it like sex, consume it like pasta. Ecco Mantua! We were in Italy, where we ought to be. There was the lustful duke, here the mocking hunchback, and soon the clear voice of Gilda. Things began for the first time to be understandable, not only in fact but in feeling. Couldn’t anyone know what they were saying about love—“E il sol dell’anima,” of course—with a little Latin, what’s hard about that? “Caro nome” is certainly “dear name”; a line of cosmetics was called that. And who had not heard the jaunty singing of “La donna è mobile”?

  Cheers at the end of the arias, loud bravos. Some stood and shouted; others threw flowers on the stage.

  It is just as well to discover opera along with Italy. What I had heard before had not been any discovery at all.

  From Florence, I came eventually to Rome, where it seemed natural enough to hear once again, “Would you like to go to the opera?”

  I was eating in a restaurant in the Via Bocca di Leone, talking with a young Canadian. We had struck up an acquaintance some nights before while trying to figure out the menu. This time I saw nothing odd in the invitation and scarcely bothered to think twice. I just said, “Can we get tickets?” He said he thought we could.