Microcosms (Panther)

by Magris, Claudio

  Claudio Magris

  MICROCOSMS

  Translated from the Italian by

  Iain Halliday

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781446433768

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  First published with the title Microcosmi in 1997 by Garzanti editore, Milan

  First published in Great Britain in 1999 by The Harvill Press

  This paperback edition first published in 2000 by

  The Harvill Press

  2 Aztec Row, Berners Road, London N1 0PW

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  © Garzanti editore s.p.a., 1997

  English translation © Iain Halliday, 1999

  Claudio Magris asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781860467691

  CONDITIONS OF SALE

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Praise

  About the Auther

  Also by Claudio Magris in English translation

  Caffè San Marco

  Valcellina

  Lagoons

  Nevoso

  Collina

  Apsyrtides

  Antholz

  Public Garden

  The Vault

  To Marisa

  MICROCOSMS

  Winner of the Strega Prize

  “An elusive, sly, witty, sorrowing and wonderful oddity of a book … Microcosms, in its subtly magical blend of the public and the personal, of the inner voice and the voices without, of the café and of the study, of the hearth and of the world, is a unique and beautiful achievement”

  JOHN BANVILLE, New York Review of Books

  “Magris is a splendid writer. His descriptions of the natural world are superb … his vignettes are haunting and evocative … Nothing in this world seems free of associations and resonances reaching back in time to classical antiquity and even beyond”

  ANDREW RIEMER, Sydney Morning Herald

  “A haunting amalgam of travelogue, autobiography and impressionist sketchbook”

  JONATHAN KEATES, Literary Review

  “The beauty of the everyday observations contained in this new book competes with the profundity of historical insight. In common with his fellow intellectual visionary, W. G. Sebald, the author of The Rings of Saturn, Claudio Magris is engaged in a seductively exciting journey of the imagination which enriches and enthrals”

  EILEEN BATTERSBY, Irish Times

  “A prose-poem of reverberating beauty”

  MARCELLA EVARISTI, Herald

  “This is a wonderfully satisfying book that opens windows and doors on to states of being and states of thinking; all the way from the macro level of the province to the micro level of the mind”

  ANTONI JACH, Melbourne Age

  “Magris’s delicate prose cannot have been easy to translate but Iain Halliday has rendered it excellently into English … Magris shows himself to be a European essayist of the highest calibre”

  STUART HOOD, Sunday Herald

  “By the marvellously gifted Claudio Magris … a haunting series of evocations and recollections about different places dear to him – the very antithesis of your run-of-the-mill travel book”

  JAN MORRIS, Observer

  “Audacious, complex and stimulating”

  BARÈT MAGARIAN, Daily Telegraph

  CLAUDIO MAGRIS, scholar and critic, was born in Trieste in 1939. After graduating from the University of Turin, he lectured there in German Language and Literature from 1970 to 1978. He holds a chair in Germanic Studies in the University of Trieste, and was for a period a member of the Italian parliament. He is the author of works of literary criticism and plays and has translated works by Ibsen, Kleist and Schnitzler. He won international acclaim for his remarkable study of middle Europe, Danube. His novel A Different Sea is also published by Harvill.

  IAIN HALLIDAY took a degree in American Studies at the University of Manchester and worked in Italy and London before returning to Sicily where he now teaches at the University of Catania. His translations include Una Peccatrice by the verist writer Giovanni Verga (1840–1922).

  Also by Claudio Magris in English translation

  DANUBE

  Fiction

  A DIFFERENT SEA

  INFERENCES FROM A SABRE

  Even though all the World by now is known, many being the books brought before us which furnish general descriptions of it, when dealing with a single Province a dutiful description is not easily found …

  AMEDEO GROSSI,

  Architect, Geometer, and Surveyor, 1791

  A man determines upon the task of portraying the world. As the years pass he peoples a space with pictures of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, dwellings, instruments, stars, horses and people. Shortly before he dies he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.

  JORGE LUIS BORGES

  Caffè San Marco

  The masks are up on high, above the black inlaid wood counter that comes from the renowned Cante workshop – at least it was renowned once. But prestigious signs and fame last a bit longer at the Caffè San Marco, even the fame of those whose only qualification for being remembered is the simple, but not inconsiderable, fact of having spent years at those little marble tables with their cast-iron legs that flow into a pedestal sitting on lion’s paws, and of having given forth every now and then on the correct pressure of the beer and on the universe.

  The San Marco is a Noah’s Ark, where there’s room for everyone – no one takes precedence, no one is excluded – for every couple seeking shelter in a downpour and even for the partnerless. By the way, I’ve never understood that story about the Flood, observed Mr Schönhut, shammes at the Israelite Temple next door, so someone recalls. The rain was beating against the window-panes and in the Public Garden at the end of Via Battisti, immediately to the left as one leaves the café, the big trees were crashing, soaked heavy in the wind under an iron sky. If it was for the sins of the world, said Mr Schönhut, He might as well have finished it off for once and all, why destroy and then start again? It’s not as if things have gone better since; in fact there’s been no end to blood and cruelty, and yet never another Flood … nay, there was even the promise not to eradicate life on earth.

  Why so much pity for the murderers who came after and none for those before, all drowned like rats? He should have known that together with every being – man or beast – evil entered the Ark. Those He felt compassion for carried w
ithin themselves the germs of every epidemic of hatred and pain that was destined to break out right up to the end of time. And Mr Schönhut drank his beer, confident that the thing went no further, because he could say whatever he liked about the God of Israel, he could really let rip, because it all remained in the family. But for others to say these things would have been indelicate and even, at certain times, strictly below the belt.

  Your hair’s a mess, go to the washroom and sort yourself out, that’s what the old lady said to him, severely, on that occasion. To reach the washroom whoever is in the room where the bar is has to pass under the masks, beneath those eyes that peep out avid and frightened. The background behind those faces is black, a darkness in which Carnival lights up scarlet lips and cheeks; a nose projects lewd and curving, the very hook for grabbing someone standing below and dragging him or her into that dark party. It seems that those faces, or some of them, are the work of Pietro Lucano – the attribution is uncertain, despite the work of scholars who devote as much patience to the San Marco as to an ancient temple. In the church of the Sacred Heart – not too far from the café, just across the Public Garden or back up Via Marconi which runs alongside the park – this painter was responsible for the two angels in the apse that hold up two circles of fire: two acrobats of eternity whose skirts the artist was obliged by the Jesuit fathers to lengthen almost to their ankles, so as not to leave their androgynous legs in view.

  There are those who maintain that some of the masks are by Timmel, who was perhaps responsible for a mask (female) in another room. The hypothesis barely holds up: undoubtedly at that time, towards the end of the Thirties, this “favourite of the road”, as the roving painter loved to define himself – he was born in Vienna and came to Trieste to achieve his self-destruction – undoubtedly contrived some bearable evenings in the cafés to provide himself an hour or two’s distraction from the impossibility of living. He would make a gift of some little masterpiece to one or other of the rich Trieste merchants, patrons for whom an artist was a dancing bear and could be tripped up, in exchange for generous drinking sessions that allowed him to get through an evening and which gradually sent him to the bottom altogether.

  Timmel reinvented his own childhood. The meningitis he’d had as a child, he recounted, was a base lie invented by his parents out of their hatred for him, and while his mind and his memory were unravelling he was writing the Magic Notebook, a mixture of striking lyrical epiphanies and verbal sob-stuff verging on aphasia and rendered crazed by amnesia, which he called nostalgia – the desire to cancel out all the names and signs that enmesh the individual in the world. The wayfaring rebel, fated to end his days in the madhouse, was trying even before reaching that utmost refuge, to escape from the tentacles of reality by closeting himself in an empty, dizzy inertia, “sitting to one side idle and uninterested”, arms crossed, immobile and content just to feel himself rotating together with the planet in its vacuum. He sought passivity and welcomed Fascism, which liberated him from the weight of responsibility and spared him the frustration of pursuing liberty without being able to find it, rather it thrust him back into the submission of infancy: “To achieve beatitude requires absolute dependence.”

  The route through the café and its L-shaped structure, even if only to satisfy what Principal Lunardis could never bring himself to define as anything other than an impulsion, is not straight. Chessplayers love the café – it resembles a chessboard and one moves between its tables like a knight, making a series of right angles and often finding oneself, as in a game of snakes and ladders, back at square one … back at that table where one had studied for the German literature exam and now, many years later, one wrote or responded to yet another interview about Trieste, its Mitteleuropa culture and its decline, while not far away one son is correcting his degree dissertation and another, in the end-room, is playing cards.

  People come and go from the café and behind them the doors continue to swing; a slight breath of air makes the stagnant smoke waver. The swinging loses some of its strength each time, a shorter heartbeat. Strips of luminous dust float in the smoke, serpentine coils that unroll slowly, feeble garlands round the necks of the shipwrecked holding on to their tables. The smoke envelops things in a soft and opaque blanket, a cocoon in which the chrysalis would like to shut itself up indefinitely, sparing itself the pain of being a butterfly. But the scribbling pen bursts the cocoon and frees the butterfly, which flutters its wings in fear.

  Above the French windows the fruit bowls and the bottles of champagne gleam. A red marbled lampshade is an iridescent jellyfish. Up high the chandeliers glow and sway like moons in water. History states that the San Marco opened on 3 January, 1914 – despite resistance put up by a consortium of Trieste café-owners, who in an attempt to obstruct it turned in vain to the Royal Imperial authorities – and immediately it became a meeting place for irredentist youth and a workshop for the production of false passports for anti-Austrian patriots who wanted to escape to Italy. “Those youngsters had an easy time,” grumbled Mr Pichler, ex-Oberleutnant on the Galicia front during the 1916 massacres. “They had great fun with that traffic in cutting and pasting photographs, it was like taking down one of those masks and putting it on, without thinking that those masks can pull you into the darkness and make you disappear, as then happened to many of them and us, in Galicia or on the Carso…. and don’t let’s exaggerate with the famous destruction of the café on 23 May, 1915 by the Austrian pigs … yes, the pigs, that’s the right name for those desk officers and the scum that came after them – of course it was a terrible business, such a beautiful café all smashed up and broken … but Austria, on the whole, was a civilized country. De Frieskene, the governor, even apologised during the war to an irredentist like Silvio Benco for having to keep him under special surveillance, on orders from above. If the Empire existed today everything would still be the same, the world would still be a Caffè San Marco, and don’t you think that’s something, if you take a look out there?”

  The San Marco is a real café – the outskirts of History stamped with the conservative loyalty and the liberal pluralism of its patrons. Those places where just one tribe sets up camp are pseudocafés – never mind whether they are frequented by respectable people, youth most-likely-to, alternative lifestyles or à la page intellectuals. All endogamies are suffocating; colleges too, and university campuses, exclusive clubs, master classes, political meetings and cultural symposia, they are all a negation of life, which is a sea port.

  Variety triumphs, vital and florid, at the San Marco. Old long-haul captains, students revising for exams and planning amorous manoeuvres, chessplayers oblivious to what goes on around them, German tourists curious about the small plaques commemorating small and large literary triumphs whose begetters used to frequent those tables, silent newspaper readers, joyous groups predisposed towards Bavarian beer or verduzzo wine, spirited old men inveighing against the iniquity of the times, know-it-all commentators, misunderstood geniuses, the odd imbecile yuppie, corks that pop like a military salute, especially when Doctor Bradaschia, already under suspicion because of miscellaneous vaunted credits – including his degree – and in trouble with the law, brazenly offers drinks to all within reach, peremptorily instructing the waiter to put it on his account.

  “Basically, I was in love with her, but I didn’t like her, while she liked me, but she wasn’t in love with me,” says Mr Palich, born in Lussino, summing up a tormented marital romance. The café is a buzz of voices, a disconnected and uniform choir, apart from a few exclamations at a table of chessplayers, or, in the evening, Mr Plinio’s piano – sometimes rock, more often popular music from the years between the wars, Love is the sweetest thing … fate advances stepping to a danceable kitsch.

  But what do you mean “for the money”? As if someone like old Weber would let himself be ripped off. In fact she was the one with the money, not he and she knew well enough that he had almost nothing to leave her. For the likes of you and me maybe a litt
le apartment in New York would be a fortune, but for someone like her it wouldn’t even register. He wanted to marry her – his cousin Ettore said so too. They hadn’t been speaking for almost fifty years because of that business over the family tomb in Gorizia, and anyway when Ettore heard that the old man, who in fact was two years younger than him, had only a few months left to live, he got on the plane and went to see him in New York. Almost before inviting Ettore to sit down he told him there was big news, that he was getting married the following week – yes, because, he said, he’d done almost everything in life except get married, and he didn’t want to make his exit without having tried marriage as well. He emphasized marriage, a proper marriage, it was impossible to die without having been married; everyone’s capable of living together, even you, which is saying a lot, he added, giving his cousin a glass of Luxardo maraschino. And so, explained Ettore, having crossed the ocean I had to sample that maraschino which used to turn my stomach when I was a young man, in Zara. Anyway, he died peacefully – now that I’ve filled in the last box in the questionnaire, as he put it – and I have to admit that he wasn’t a trial to anybody, not even during the last days, and here was a man who had always been a royal pain … marriage evidently did him good.

  Voices rise, they blend, they fade, one hears them at one’s shoulder, moving down to the end of the room, the noise of the undertow. The sound waves drift away like circles of smoke, but somewhere continue in existence. They are always there, the world is full of voices, a new Marconi might be able to invent a device capable of picking them all up, an infinite chatter over which death has no dominion; immortal and immaterial souls are stray ultrasounds in the universe. That’s according to Juan Octavio Prenz, who listened to the murmuring at those tables and turned it into a novel in his Fable of Innocent Honest, the Beheaded, a grotesque and surreal story that is ravelled and unravelled by voices that are crossed, are superimposed, are separated and are lost.