by Saul Bellow
We are happy to escape again into the great-windowed hall. The guide has gone out on a balcony to sun himself. Joining him, we return to Italy itself and latch onto the sun with gratitude.
We order cappuccino in an open-to-the-weather café. The great espresso machine sizzles and spits, and the cups are served on the enormous polished bar. They lose heat so quickly that you’d better down them before ice forms.
Catering to tourists, the boutiques are nicely heated. We go to a stationery shop and buy a minivolume of Petrarch and other Florentine general-issue items—classy clutter for the apartments of the well traveled. The one prize is a Venetian glass pen from Murano, an iridescent spiral.
In Montalcino I am treated for a sprained shoulder by a local herbal specialist. His nickname is “Il Barba,” and he is an old man of heroic stature, more stubbly than bearded. He became a local hero by playing the part of the brigand Bruscone (popularly known as “Il Barba”) at a party celebrating the new Bruscone dei Barbi wine. Evidently he fell in love with his own portrayal of the legendary bandit. Himself a man of action, he was a resistance fighter, and the walls of the narrow front room of his apartment are hung with medals and certificates of valor. There is also a fine display of guns, for he is a hunter. This giant and his small wife conduct us to the long cupboardlike kitchen, where he seats me on a high stool and like any doctor asks me solicitously how I came by this sprain. I tell him I took a header over the handlebars of a bike last summer in Vermont. It doesn’t make much sense to him that the likes of me should be an intrepid bike rider. He tells me to strip. I take off my shirt, and he examines me. When we have between us located the painful places, he pours his mixture into a small saucepan and heats it on the stove. At all times the old wife is close behind him with her arms folded and held tightly to her body. While she gossips hoarsely with our Italian friends, he rubs my shoulder with his herbal remedy dissolved in olive oil. He applies the hot mixture using his hand like a housepainter’s brush. At a nod from her husband, the wife steps out to the porch to fetch a salve to follow the ointment. Enjoying the massage, I begin to feel that this Barba may cure me. I have a weakness anyway for secret herbal remedies, and the treatment in the kitchen has its occult side. (Special security measures are taken.) I pull on my shirt again, altogether pleased with the occasion. The exertion of getting into my pullover causes no pain, and I tell him he is a wonderful therapist. He bows as though he already knew this. In the parlor he reaches into a cupboard next to the guns and takes down a drawstring sack containing a large number of wild-boar tusks. I should never have guessed that they were so light. Some of these trophies have been tipped with silver, and I suppose necklaces or bracelets can be made of them. Thieves would rather have these than the guns, he says.
The great bandit Barba towers over us, smiling, and holds the door open, refusing payment and telling me to come back tomorrow for another treatment. He is so tall that we don’t have to duck under his arm. We go down the stairs, into the night, very happy.
Further outdoor sightseeing: Habituated to the cold, we no longer shun it. We now prefer outdoor excursions to the inspection of church interiors. There is a charcoal burners’ camp nearby, and an elderly gentleman, Ilio Raffaelli, who was himself, until his twenty-fifth year, a carbonaro, shows us how the workers lived and how the charcoal was made. The camp, which he has reconstructed himself, is extremely primitive. The little dwelling of the burners reminds me of an American sod hut, with soil and grass stuffed into a wooden framework. The place is windowless. The workmen and their families slept on simple wooden frames, which occupied most of the space. One was for man and wife, the other for the children, as many as five or six. All worked in the woods, bringing up water from the spring or, in season, gathering berries and other edibles. There were no metal artifacts except axes and saws. The shovels were wooden, the rakes were skillfully whittled. The burners contracted with the landowners, and they camped for half a year or so till they had cut all the usable wood on the property. Then they moved to another estate, where they built a new sod house. The huts, heated by a small fire, were warm enough at night, said our guide.
Raffaelli is a sturdy short man in a cap and an open jacket. (The afternoon was not particularly warm: our noses and eyes were running; his were dry. He was evidently indurated against natural hardships.) A black thread that had worked loose from the cap hung over his face unnoticed while he gave his explanatory lecture. (With his large objectives, he didn’t notice trifles.) In his description of the charcoalmaking process, he was exceptionally precise: the cutting of the wood into proper lengths, the stacking of it, the layers of leaves and soil piled on the mound, the space at the center for the fire, which had to be stoked day and night. There were wooden ladders leaning on the cone, and screens against the wind, which might drive the blaze too high, endangering the work of months.
So this was how people for many centuries lived upon the land, right on the packed earth, so to speak, so adept in the management of their pots, spoons, axes, and handmade rakes, so resourceful—to see this was a lesson worth a whole shelf of history books. I understood even better what life had been like when our guide said, “Whenever one of our boys in the army sent a letter, we gathered inside the hut and sat on the beds to listen to the reading.” He laughed and added that they had all been sent to the priest to learn their letters.
His little Italian car was parked just at the edge of the woods, and he would get into it at dusk and drive to Montalcino, where he lived. You felt, however, that his real life was here, in this cold clearing. He seemed unwilling to part with the old life and was perhaps not a thorough townsman. A self-taught scholar, he had written a book about the plants and small fauna. Schoolchildren were brought to him for lessons about the woods. He taught them the names of the trees and sang them the charcoal burners’ ballads and reminisced about this vanished trade. He was a modest person, without the legendary airs of Signor Barba, the herbal doctor.
Finally, we go into the woods near San Giovanni d’Asso with two truffle hunters, Ezio Dinetti and Fosco Lorenzetti, and their dogs, Lola, Fiamma, and Iori. On our arrival in San Giovanni we are received by the young dark-haired mayor of the town, Roberto Cappelli, who makes us a little speech of welcome and presents us with a heavy bronze truffle medallion.
The season for truffles is almost over. It has been an unexceptional year—slim pickings. But the dogs are no less keen, rushing from the cars as soon as the doors are opened. There is no breed of truffle hounds. Lola, Fiamma, and lori appear to be ordinary no-account mutts, but they are in fact highly trained specialists, officially listed, with their own photo-ID license cards and tattooed registration numbers. Turn them over and you can see the numerals under the pink skin. The novice Iori, a skinny dark-brown adolescent, is hobbled with a length of chain to prevent his rushing off by himself in his enthusiasm. The added weight gives him a bow-legged gait We set out after the dogs on a path through the poplars, tramping over dry leaves. Hurrying after them, you find yourself breathing deeper, drawing in the pungent winter smells of vegetation and turned-up soil. The experienced hunters work the dogs earnestly, with urgent exclamations and commands: Lola, dai. (Go.) Qui. (Here.) Vieni qui. (Come here.) Giu. (Down.) Dove? (Where?) Piglialo. (Take it.) They cajole, huff, threaten, praise, caution, restrain, interrogate, and reward their dogs. The animals track a distant scent. Though the ground is frozen, they will sniff out a truffle under a foot and a half of earth. Each man has an implement on a leather strap slung over the shoulder, a device about two feet in length with a sharp rectangular blade for digging and sampling the earth. With this vanghetto, the hunters scoop up a clod of beige-brown mud and nose it with intensity. If the soil is saturated with the truffle odor, they halloo the dogs to dig deeper.
Single file, we cross a thin bridge, a couple of logs strapped together over a gully. Lola, the gifted matriarch, has found something, and the dirt near the streambed sprays behind her. Ezio knows exactly where to intervene and
, paying her off with a treat, himself unearths the smallish truffle, a mere nubbin, and slips it into his pocket.
The sun is going down, and we stop more often to chat under the chilly poplars. The afternoon has not been a grand success, for the dogs have turned up only three truffles. Ezio and Fosco insist on our taking them. As we head back through the woods, we hear a dark story. Sporting honor among the hunters is not all that it used to be, they tell us. Jealous competitors have taken to poisoning the more talented dogs, tossing out bits of sausage containing strychnine when they leave the grounds, Ezio says with anger. A promising pup of his was among the six dogs lost to the poisoners last year. Months of training wasted. In the old days it took only a year to break in a dog. Now that there are more hunters and fewer truffles, you need as many as three years of training, so that when a dog dies, the loss is considerable.
The ungloved hands of the hunters when we shake them at parting are warmer than ours, for all our leather and wool and Thinsulate. Driving back to Montalcino, we consider the mystery of the truffle. Why is it so highly prized? We try to. put a name to the musk that fills the car. It is digestive, it is sexual, it is a mortality odor. Having tasted it, I am willing to leave it to the connoisseurs. I shall go on sprinkling grated cheese on my pasta.
Part Five
A FEW FAREWELLS
Issac Rosenfeld
(1956)
Partisan Review, Fall 1956. Reprinted as Foreword to Rosenfeld’s An Age of Enormity: Life and Writting in the Forties and Fifties, ed. Theodore Solotaroff (Cleveland: World, 1962).
Isaac had a round face and yellowish-brown hair, which he combed straight back. He was nearsighted, his eyes pale blue, and he wore round glasses. The space between his large front teeth gave his smile an ingenuous charm. He had a belly laugh. It came on him abruptly and often doubled him up. His smiles, however, kindled slowly. He liked to look with avuncular owlishness over the tops of his specs. His wisecracks were often preceded by the pale-blue glance. He began, he paused, a sort of mild slyness formed about his lips, and then he said something devastating. More seriously, developing an argument, he gestured like a Russian-Jewish intellectual, a cigarette between two fingers. When he was in real earnest, he put aside these mannerisms too. A look of strength, sometimes of angry strength, came into his eyes.
He had a short, broad figure. His chest was large. But he was round rather than burly, and he could move gracefully. His lazy, lounging manner was deceptive. He was quick with his hands and played the flute well, and the recorder superbly. He was haunted, nevertheless, by an obscure sense of physical difficulty or deficiency, a biological torment, a disagreement with his own flesh. He seldom enjoyed good health. His color was generally poor, yellowish. At the University of Chicago during the thirties, this was the preferred intellectual complexion. In the winter, Isaac was often down with the flu or with attacks of pleurisy. He was told that his skin couldn’t bear much exposure to the sun. But during the war, when he was Captain Isaac, the entire crew of a barge in New York Harbor, he had good color. He read Shakespeare and Kierkegaard on the water and found it agreed with him to be in the open air. He had friends on the waterfront. In such circumstances, Isaac would never be the visiting intellectual. He never went slumming. It was impossible not to be attracted by the good nature of his face, and I assume his ineptitude with ropes touched the hearts of the deckhands on the tugboats.
I am among his friends perhaps not the best qualified to speak of him. I loved him, but we were rivals, and I was peculiarly touchy, vulnerable, hard to deal with—at times, as I can see now, insufferable—and not always a constant friend. As for him, his power to attract people might have made more difference to him than it did. He wanted their affection, he wanted also to return it … but then these matters we have learned to speak of so simply have not thereby become simpler.
He had one of those ready, lively, clear minds that see the relevant thing immediately. In logic and metaphysics he was a natural. He had a bent for theology too, which he did everything possible to discourage. His talent for abstraction displeased him; he was afraid it indicated a poverty of his feelings, an emotional sterility. To the overcoming of this supposed sterility, a fault fed by his talents themselves, exaggerated by them, he devoted his best efforts, his strength. He didn’t like to be praised for achievements he regarded as largely mental. Heartless abstraction filled him with dread. Originally, his purpose in coming to New York was to study philosophy. During one of his bouts of pleurisy he went through Melville, and he wrote me that after reading Moby Dick he could no longer be a logical positivist.
There followed a period of exaggerated “feelings.” But whether he gave himself over to the Theory of Signs or exclaimed sentimentally over the poor sprouting onions in an impoverished grocery, Isaac never went very long without laughing.
He was a playful man. He loved hoaxes, mimicry, parody, and surrealist poems. He was a marvelous clown. He imitated steam irons, clocks, airplanes, tugboats, big-game hunters, Russian commissars, Village poets and their girlfriends. He tried on the faces of people in restaurants. He was great as Harry Baur in Crime et Châtiment, the inspector Porfiry Petrovich, smoking cigarettes with an underhand Russian grip. He invented Yiddish proletarian poems, he did a translation of Eliot’s Prufrock, a startling X ray of those hallowed bones, which brings Anglo-Saxons and Jews together in a surrealistic Yiddish unity, a masterpiece of irreverence. With Isaac, the gravest, the most characteristic, the most perfect strokes took a comic slant. In his story “King Solomon,” the magnificence of Jerusalem mingles raggedly with the dinginess of the Lower East Side. The great king, also mortal and slovenly, sits in his undershirt. He fondles children in the park. They sit on his knees and smudge his glasses with their thumbprints.
He preferred to have things about him in a mess. I have an idea that he found good middle-class order devitalizing—a sign of meanness, stinginess, malice, and anality. The sight of one of his rooms with Isaac hard at work, smoking, capably and firmly writing on his yellow second sheets, would have made Hogarth happy. On Seventy-sixth Street there sometimes were cockroaches springing from the toaster with the slices of bread. Smoky, the rakish little short-legged brown dog, was only partly housebroken and chewed books; the shades were always drawn (harmful sunlight!), the ashtrays spilled over. There was no sweeping, dusting, mopping, or laundering. The dirt here was liberating, exciting. Later, downtown, it was a little less gay. In the intricate warren of rooms called the Casbah and on Hudson Street, it was simply grim. Toward the end of his life, on Woodlawn Avenue in Chicago, he settled in a hideous cellar room at Petofsky’s, where he had lived as a student. The sympathetic glamour of the thirties was entirely gone; there was only a squalid stink of toilets and coalbins here. Isaac felt that this was the way he must live. The disorder had ended by becoming a discipline. It had acquired an ascetic significance for him, which, at least to me, he never explained.
By now he had given up the Reichianism which for a time had absorbed us both. He no longer questioned people impulsively about their sexual habits or estimated the amount of character armor they wore. His homemade orgone box did not follow him in his later travels. He had at one time (in Saint Albans) experimented with tomato seeds kept in the orgone accumulator; they produced better fruit, he claimed, than seeds that had not been exposed. Friends with headaches were urged to put on the tin crown or “shooter.” He treated the neighbors’ sick pets in his box. But during the last years of his life, all his quaintness—incomparably charming and accompanied by brilliantly persuasive lectures and arguments—was laid aside. His wit was clearer and sharper, purged of crankiness. There had been a quality in him in earlier days, described by one of his friends as “hard-headed Gemütlichkeit.” For eight or ten years, his mood was anything but gemütlich. He judged people harshly; he was not less harsh with himself.
I am convinced that in his view, the struggle for survival, in the absence of certain qualities of life, was not worth making. Wi
thout heart and without truth there was only a dull, dogged shuffle about things and amusements and successes. Single-mindedly, Isaac was out for the essential qualities. He believed that heart and truth were to be had. He tried to fix them within himself. He seemed occasionally to be trying to achieve by will, by fiat, the openness of heart and devotion to truth without which a human existence must be utterly senseless.
He was perfectly aware that in this America of ours he appeared to be doing something very odd. To appear odd did not bother him at all. Nor did he ever pursue eccentricity for its own sake, for its color. He followed an inner necessity, which led him into difficulty and solitude. During the last years of his life he was solitary, and on Walton Place, in one of his furnished rooms, he died alone.
John Berryman