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What’s your medium? I asked, oil, water color, drawing?
Oh no, I process my photographs on a computer, I have gallery owners and I exhibit, said the brother of the hospitable hostess, skillfully placing mozzarella and chopped tomatoes onto his bruschetta, then he took out his iPhone and showed me his works, and finally, when we had become sort of close, he complained that he couldn’t find people to cultivate his vineyards on some southern Italian island so I suggested that he should go to the refuge on Lampedusa and employ some of those traumatized, half-dead rescued souls.
The husband of the agreeable hostess is a lawyer in London, where that Italian-French-Spanish family presumably lives for the rest of the year, but the husband of the agreeable hostess does not spend his time in his legal profession, but surfing, because he’s crazy about surfing and surfs all the time, in any water he happens to be near, or to which he travels. Maybe that’s why the husband doesn’t like coming to his Tuscan villa, to his Tuscan olive groves and Tuscan vineyards, but still, that evening it was the most cheering thing I heard, as, even if indirectly, it confirmed that I was not entirely insane. The agreeable hostess and good mother of two twenty-year-olds, who, to my surprise, could cook, was somewhat weaker on literature, because a few days later, when the conversation turned to the Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow, she asked Who’s that? And when that middle-aged woman lacked for a topic of conversation, she went back to already used-up ones, in other words, she repeated herself quite a lot.
I also talked to a middle-aged woman of unspecified origin who lived in Paris. You’re a writer? I asked, because where I was staying there were writers, mostly American, among whom there were some pleasant ones, Oh no, she said, I just have a published collection of interviews with well-known people. I asked this lady which well-known figures had wandered into her book, I’ve forgotten what she said because I hadn’t heard of a single one of those well-known people, which could mean that from a Parisian perspective, and also a global one, I am uninformed. The lady talked to me about some former Yugoslav émigrés, political, it seemed to me, her acquaintances, who were spreading around Paris some fairly controversial, not to say false information about socialist Yugoslavia, Have you met Kiš? I interrupted her, and she asked, Who’s that?
I also met an architect, you could see at once he was a dandy and womanizer, who lived in New York too (Tuscan Italians seem to be mad about the Big Apple, just as Americans are mad about Tuscany), and that architect was then working on the restoration of an Italian castle belonging to an American millionaire, Have you been to Tirana? I asked, No, he said, but I’ve been to Ljubljana and seen Plečnik’s library, fascinating, here he rose a little in my estimation, but he had with him an apparently submissive young Russian woman, forty years younger, although a lover with a mission, a program, a project, that was clear, I’m an architect, she said, but now I’m studying design in Florence, otherwise I live in Moscow, she said. I couldn’t work out how she lived in Moscow, because the snappily dressed architect (68), in an open linen shirt with rolled-up sleeves, listed the virtually uninhabited little Greek islands he had been visiting for several years with that young Russian lover of his and where the two of them bathed naked in blessed quiet, under the Greek sun. Is there any news about Tsipras’ negotiations with the IMF and Central Bank? I asked, and he said, Greece is a beautiful country.
I met a pair of brothers who don’t come into this story, although they live in Tuscany, which could mean, as I know, that there are also people from the present day living in Tuscany. One of the brothers is a well-known (and good) musician and composer, the other is an excellent photographer. Conversation with them, on their Tuscan estate, flowed cheerfully, without misunderstandings, because although the lawns were tended and the little hills green, a provocative chaos reigned all around, someone was baking pizzas, people ate in passing, we were barefoot and the mosquitoes were going nuts.
During the Second World War, Nazis lived in some of the villas belonging to the Italian aristocracy. (They weren’t Nazis, but soldiers of the Wehrmacht, said some former and current owners of those villas, with a dose of irritation in their voices.) Then, during the Second World War, good wine was poured in those villas, people cooked with olive oil, and some staff had managed to stay. Relative calm reigned and undesecrated nature bloomed; members of partisan “bands” attacked SS personnel in little Renaissance towns, they didn’t touch the aristocracy, this was told to me in a steady voice by former landowners, that is, the descendants of former barons and dukes, entirely cynically, without comment. Some of the owners of Tuscan and other Italian villas “found themselves” involved in the humane task of saving Ethiopian cultural treasures during Mussolini’s campaign in Abyssinia, but those times were long since past, so there was no point in wasting words on them. Only, here and there in an album or on a wall, one could see small black-and-white, already yellowing photographs which preserved the memory of the beginning of the decline of the Italian bourgeoisie, whose epigones stubbornly relate fairy tales from a long since buried age.
It was as though, during my stay in Tuscany, I had ended up in an American period drama, but there is no drama. I floated on great, terrifying beauty (la grande bellezza) and cursed Sorrentino and his ghastly film.
Then again I was amused to be a participant in an operetta, whose music I imagined, could hear, but that was inaudible to the people on the estate. Secretly I spent time with Gombrowicz, watching the actors of the Tuscan vaudeville changing their costumes and masks as they acted in the grotesque tragicomedy of the present, like characters from Gombrowicz’s Operetta, those not exactly frivolous entertainments for the mannequin dolls of the past. I observed the way this little closed society did not see the signals being sent to it by a distant lighthouse, or the angel of history, that Angelus Novus of Klee’s, the way they did not know that their operetta was sending out the first (or last) notes of Europe’s funeral march as it is laid to rest.
I brought to the owner of the estate where I was staying, the founder of that altruistic refuge for writers — otherwise well known in Italy as the former owner of one of the most famous Milan galleries of the mid-twentieth century — a Vlado Kristl monograph. And before she had peered into the linen bag of the museum where the book was printed, she asked me, Is it something to eat?
VLADO KRISTL (Zagreb, January 24, 1923–Munich, August 7, 2004) is considered one of the fathers of Croatian abstract art. Kristl’s filmography and biography are well known, but less is known about his painting, particularly after 1962, when Kristl left Croatia (Yugoslavia). Hence it was at the Rijeka exhibition that works from the artistic opus of Vlado Kristl from the period 1959 to 2004 were shown for the first time.
Working in two cultural centers, from the beginning of the 1950s to the beginning of the 1960s in Croatia, and after that for several decades in Germany, a magisterial place for Vlado Kristl has been incontestably established in the art of the second half of the twentieth century. First it was Kristl as a film-maker, whether his animated, experimental, short and feature-length films or video works. Then it was Kristl the painter, poet, man of the theater, writer, thinker, but also typographer and designer. But regardless of the fact that a lot has been written about him as a complete and multifaceted person, Kristl remains an illegal immigrant of European art, an artist always here — present, but not fully discovered, unidentified, understated.
(Jerica Ziherl, from the introduction to the catalogue)
At first, I slept badly. One night I dreamed about a small black horse, rocking in a net hung between two trees. When it stood up, I saw that it was barely fifty centimeters high and about a meter long. I wanted to take that miniature horse in my arms, but I didn’t. I just gazed at it, completely enchanted. Both Jung and Freud had all sorts of things to say about horses that enter dreams. Then I dreamed someone told me my sister Ada had been diagnosed with carcinoma of the kidney, which is known as sedia Turca, and sedia Turca, in
addition to being a comfortable seat, à la chaise longue, can also be a squatting place, that is, somewhere to shit.
The tower in which I was staying was some distance from the main building — the villa — about two hundred meters, across a large (tended) lawn with shrub roses and lavender, some yellow flowers, walnut and olive trees, five dogs that run riot on the meadow, and when they are not running, they're crapping, which can be awkward when one is returning to the tower at night, because the field is not lit, and the dogs hover around the table at dinner time and nuzzle between one’s legs. Two of the dogs are pugs, pugs have trouble breathing, they have squashed faces, short noses, they wheeze, at some point in the course of several centuries of breeding something interfered with their breathing organs and they sound like asthmatics, and since I am asthmatic, and the Tuscan climate is fairly damp, the three of us produced strange noises, the only difference being that I could alleviate my rattling with little pumps, while the pugs couldn’t. When they sleep, pugs snore. They have sensitive, bulging eyes, and if their collar is pulled too tight or they raise their heads too high, their eyes can pop out, then their eyes have to be put back in their sockets, where they belong. So, I found two similarities between myself and the pugs, respiratory and ophthalmological, although pugs are small and I am big. One of them, Lauretta, was thirteen years old, blind and, it seemed to me, senile, because she kept talking to herself, producing terrifying atonal sounds as she roamed the estate. During dinner Lauretta would stick to my leg, snuffling madly. There were also two shaggy mongrels, very distrustful of people, I managed to befriend one of them, Achilleo, because I told him all kinds of things in Croatian, I told him everything that was bothering me, and when he caught sight of me, he would run across the lawn to greet me, he would smile and his ears flapped in the air. With the other shaggy one, Ermelinda, I couldn’t get anywhere. Later I was told that Ermelinda had had a traumatic life, that she was fearful, that she didn’t come near anyone, especially not men, that she never ran, that nothing in life interested or pleased her apart from staring fixedly at the six cats that appeared at the window during dinner. Ermelinda watched them in a trance, fixed them with her big yellow eyes framed by black eyelashes, staring in such a way that some of the household believed she intended to butcher them.
As far as the tower was concerned, until Miguel moved into the attic, it was somewhat spooky to live in it alone, because the tower had a lot of entrances, main and secondary, which weren’t locked, and on the façade were nailed marble memorial plaques dedicated to long and recently departed members of that baronial family, along with two additional plaques for departed dogs, although in the small copse leading toward the swimming pool there is a little obelisk with about twenty names engraved on it. Whose are those names? I asked the baronessa, They’re the names of dogs that lived and died on the estate, she said, and as far as my stay in the tower was concerned, I was not certain whether, beneath the plaques on its façade, they too, those people and those dogs, were buried at the foot of the tower, but even if they weren’t, I somehow felt their presence as though I was among the dead, as though I was in a kind of tomb, even though the tower was airy and spacious. Later, I got used to it.
I got used to all of it. I was tamed.
I began to look into the life of the owner of the estate, and the landowner herself, a well-groomed and well-preserved ninety-year-old, who prided herself on her excellent vision (she’d had cataract operations, which of course she didn’t mention), straight back, so a spine in better shape than mine, with a set of her own teeth, admittedly with slightly impaired hearing and pains in her neck, but, thanks to operations on both knees, of firm and brisk step, I began to see her in a soft light that spread warmth through the end of my stay. From its beginning, wars, murders and persecutions had roared through that life, and of them the Armenian genocide had determined, that is, marked the lives of many families, including, on her mother’s side, her own. Here was a solitary childhood buried in the protocols (and shackles) of the Italian aristocracy, with a certain confusion in connection with her comprehension of the horrors brought by Fascism, there was, later, revolt and a leap, more an attempt at a leap into real life, but in fact flight into a life bounded by high art and members of the upper class. Nevertheless, through that life, through the life of that one-time baroness, walked an army of internationally well-known painters and writers, some of them excellent, and I thought that for some readers, those who were not so preoccupied with the horrors of the present, it would be good if someone, some ghostwriter, could help that woman to collect her recollections, impressions and meetings from the times when capitalism was somewhat healthier and buoyant. Then she, this already fragile woman of still steel will and sharp eye, would be able to consider her past, her life, from the outside, not exactly as a complete, compact work, but as time that keeps flowing and, like everything that moves, bears with it deposits of clean water and silt. So, as I was leaving, with an empathy that surprised me, tinged with sadness even, I embraced and kissed the former baroness.
Then a red light came on in me. Before me stood Luciana Castellina (b. 1929), three years younger than our baronessa, Luciana Castellina with whom, before coming to Tuscany, I had had dinner in Rome, in the ordinary, virtually proletarian trattoria Settimio all’Arancio and, until the wee hours, completely entranced, I listened to the story of a life that was all giving, and still is, which was an idea, a dream, a vision of clear outlines for which it was worth existing. And so, leaving the romantic Tuscan oasis for writers of varied origins and worldviews, I was suddenly overcome by a wave of my politely suppressed irritation, my intolerance burst through, I was overwhelmed by the anger that grows in me when I listen to stubborn denials of what is obvious, unconvincing tales and anecdotes relativizing wars and the horrors wars brought (and still bring) and it all came back to me and swirled up and at least for a moment I breathed, I breathed steadily, deeply and well, driving my asthma into the background. I was going back to my fucking poverty-stricken, unjust world.
Luciana Castellina — writer and political journalist, author of numerous publications, long-term member of the Italian parliament as well as that of the European Union, tireless activist — is one of the most prominent Italian intellectuals of left-wing provenance. The daughter of a highly regarded Milanese businessman and a Jewess from Trieste, Luciana Castellina was educated in Rome and studied law at Sapienza. In 1947 she participated in the First World Festival of Youth and Students in Prague, became a member of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) and came to Yugoslavia with the International Brigades to work on building the Šamac-Sarajevo railway line. There, in that Roman trattoria Settimio all’Arancio, in January 2015, Luciana Castellina took out her badge from that action, laughed, then placed the small object on the table, everyone at the table got up, came round, bent down and touched that forgotten artifact from a buried age. Luciana then talked about Zenica, about Sarajevo during this recent war, and about much else — her life in Rome under Fascism, about the yellow stars on her clothes — Luciana talked firmly, clearly, without pathos, and I felt like stealing her and taking her home. Luciana Castellina, arrested several times for political activities: in 1948, during demonstrations protesting at the failed attempt on the life of Palmiro Togliatti; in 1950 and 1956 in similar circumstances: then in 1963 during a protest connected with Operation Gladio run by the CIA, after which she spent two months in Rome’s Regina Coeli prison. She was driven out of Greece during the military coup there in 1967. Three years later, together with the founders of the monthly magazine Il manifesto, she was expelled from the Communist Party of Italy, after which she participated in founding the Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity. Contributors to Il manifesto were left-oriented journalists ready for a critical evaluation of the Italian Left. In 1971 Il manifesto became and is still today a daily newspaper. Critical of the Communist Party of Italy, Il manifesto had many followers; it was livelier, more vital and more independent than the
Party paper L'unità.
I shall not now sketch the political biography of Luciana Castellina, whoever is interested can look it up and study it. But here, for a start, a conversation with her in 1985, published in the magazine New Left Review: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/03/italian-communism-remembered/
Politics was not Luciana Castellina’s only world. Students, young people, film, art, gender equality, human and civil rights, wherever there was injustice, Luciana was there, loud, passionate and argumentative. Here are her books too: in 2011 she published La scoperta del mondo (The Discovery of the World), in which she describes growing up in Fascist Italy from her fourteenth to her eighteenth year and how she decided to step into the world of politics. It is a book about war, anti-Semitism, resistance to Fascism and belief in social justice. In 2012 she published Siberiana, the mental journey of a stormy political epoch in which she was an active participant.
In April 2015 (aged 85), Luciana Castellina became a member of the National Committee for Another Europe with Tsipras, a coalition of the Italian Left in the European Parliament. With the communist leader Alfredo Reichlin, she has a son and a daughter, both teachers at universities in London and Rome.
I asked our baronessa, of course I did, whether she knew Luciana Castellina. She was very beautiful, said the baronessa, and her husband cheated on her with the mother of my neighbor here. Italy is small, said the baronessa, we all know each other, although we don’t need to think the same way.
Yes, I got used to the servants, to the conversational and mealtime rituals (the shared dinner was compulsory, with a semiformal dress code), to the silverware, the works of art, to the fact that I had nowhere to escape to, that it was two hours’ walk to the nearest village, to being the prisoner of glaring, voracious beauty. And then, when I had got used to all that, I stopped writing.