Microcosms (Panther)

by Magris, Claudio

  Such an authoritative tone, which usually comes from a bed, demands to be obeyed. The washroom is at the end on the right. On the walls a Siamese dancer closes her unfathomable eyes, the sinuous art nouveau lines curve the cruel eyebrows and shameless legs of female figures, a wave finishes in the vortex of the void like Mr Plinio’s waltz, music for a backstage exit. The coffee leaf is repeated in a vegetal proliferation, and the grimace on a Harlequin’s face bespeaks a raw, nameless pain.

  Some paintings have been recovered after being painted over for decency’s sake, so say the scholars of restoration. But it’s difficult, for all one might try, to find anything indecent in them. Anyway it doesn’t hurt to repaint, to cover, to close the hatches. Perhaps writing is covering up too, an accomplished coat of paint applied to one’s own life, so that it assumes a mantle of magnanimity thanks to the skilful display of faults under a pretence of hiding them in a tone of candid self-accusation that makes them seem big-hearted, while the real filth remains below. All saints, that’s what writers are; yes … daredevils, prodigal sons, full of lusty sins shown off with meretricious shame, but still large, beautiful souls. Is it possible that among us there is not a single pig, no truly shabby, mean-spirited swine?

  The washroom is cramped, a reddish trickle runs under the urinals, it clots in lumps, glass from a shattered bottle on the beach. Now and then a jet of clear water comes down. Get washed, a change of underwear. In the face at the mirror something comes undone, as though whatever it was that had held it together up to that moment has started to work loose. The hair is dirty, tangled serpents on a Gorgon’s head that emerges from the depths of Hades. There’s someone smiling on a scrap of newspaper. The washroom is the antechamber before Judgment, an indefinite wait, eternity is the dribble that runs along the urinals. Back to the café, kill time, read the newspapers. A quick rinse has made the face presentable, but the hair’s all sweaty. Go to the washroom and sort oneself out. To plunge into the sea, even just to wash one’s hands in the shallow, tepid water of the lagoon, to put one’s face into the drinking fountain in the nearby Public Garden, as one used to do back then after having run, or in the snow that was so white it seemed blue, and in the small spring in that clearing in the wood where the deer used to go to drink, or in the holy-water stoup in the Sacred Heart church, in Via del Ronco – so fresh. Indeed, it is all so close by, little more than a stone’s throw. For those who want to stretch their legs and take a little tour of the world, the San Marco is in an excellent position. Central, an estate agent would say. To reach the church in Via del Ronco, going through the Garden and all the other necessary places, takes only a few minutes.

  Valcellina

  The fusina always takes place on the last Saturday in August. In Malnisio that’s the name given to the festival of the first corn cobs, grilled in a grassy open space at the foot of Mount Sarodinis and eaten with sorc, a bread made with corn flour. People walk up from the village and come by car from Udine, from Trieste, from even farther away, bringing cheese and wine; people who left these places young, or children and grandchildren of those who left long ago, together with some who have remained. Every journey is above all a return, even if the return, almost always, lasts very little and it’s soon time to leave. In these harsh valleys, once among the poorest of the poor Friuli foothills, the men would emigrate, they would go to dig mines or to build roads and railways in France or in Siberia, and the women, with panniers on their backs full of wooden spoons and ladles, would walk from one village to the next selling their wares from door to door, sleeping in ditches and in haystacks. But the journey’s end, for all of them, always, was the brief return.

  Great-grandmother’s uncle, or great-uncle, an extremely young grenadier in Napoleon’s army, also returned on foot from the Russian campaign after some years as a prisoner and a wanderer, and when he first arrived in Malnisio the villagers did not recognize him. They say that some decades later, during the third war of independence in 1866, when he was very old and very tough-skinned, he recruited a battalion of irregulars to support the Italian army as partisans against the Austrians; but that he’d also had a flag made up with the motto “Become Italian to become French”. The Empereur for whom he had lost his youth in the Russian snows, the hardships and the battles, had left him with a nostalgia for something grand, for revolutionary change in the world. Perhaps this far-off echo is the reason why, despite everything, his grandchildren would always choose the Marseillaise over the Radetzky March.

  Nobody knows the name of that great-great-uncle, the parish registers at Malnisio only go as far back as the generation after his. For many the fusina is also a return. Luciano Daboni, who organizes the event with authority and method, is known for his mathematical studies and his scholarly contribution to probability theory, which gives formal definition to the unpredictability and the randomness of life. Dario Magris, too, Daboni’s worthy deputy, has learned from the Hippocratic art that life and above all death, which he knows how to keep at bay, do not allow for programmes and don’t respect deadlines. But even for these two men of science this Saturday at the end of August is an exception to the chaos that otherwise dominates the universe, an exception to the indeterminate and treacherous nature of things. And it is a certainty beyond debate, an anniversary that obeys a firm necessity, around which time winds and rotates like the earth on its axis.

  It’s not unpleasant to obey the law that prescribes the return to this village, from which grandfather Sebastiano, during the final decades of the last century, left at the age of thirteen for Trieste to initiate a modest bourgeois ascent. His brother, Barba Valentin, stayed in Malnisio until the age of ninety-two to till the fields, and in the evenings – in the stable in winter – to read and reread Les Misérables, The Betrothed, The Wretch Guerino, The French Monarchs and a universal encyclopaedia in two volumes.

  Malnisio has a thousand or so inhabitants who share not many surnames, to which nicknames are often added in order to tell the various families apart; otherwise it would all be confused in an indistinct mass, like curdled milk, out of which – according to Menocchio, the sixteenth-century heretic dairyman from nearby Montereale who was burned at the stake for his metaphors – the universe, man and God Himself were born. Behind Malnisio, towards Aviano and Pordenone, the valley descends and opens out, broad and airy; on the other side, beyond Montereale, the real Valcellina begins, a rugged place carved from the rock. Up until the beginning of the century it was cut off from the world, except for a muletrack along the Croce pass. It took ten hours on foot to carry essential provisions from Maniago to Erto, the last village in the valley.

  Malnisio is set among the fields of maize; in late summer the corn cobs are trophies of barbarian gold, but the village, having almost forgotten a recent century-long poverty, is relaxed and prospering; the ancient curse of tilling the soil has forged solid folk who have overcome it. The countryside may begin just a few metres away, but in fact it is remote – peasant misery has been cleared away like cow dung from the roads. Now it is sight, the noble sense, that captures the reality of the village in the decor of the houses, whereas once it was distinguished in sounds, smells and tastes: a thicket of canes in a lane that used to bend with a swish louder than elsewhere, a road more trampled than others by the animals returning from the pastures, a great heap of cut grass that spread a sharper smell, the hot pulp of the corn cob as it melts in the mouth, the fragrance of the Clinton wine and the slightly harsher taste of the Fragola cut with Bacò, the grapes picked and pressed just behind the house.

  From the square, the centre of the village, and in the direction of Mount Sarodinis, runs the Calle Grande, today’s Via Risorgimento, known in days gone by as “vial major” or “the road above the cortina”. This last was a ditch and a fence behind which the villagers hid whenever there were threats or invasions in the air. The small holdings of the old families of the village – house, stable, a few fields – were grouped around that road.

  The church, in t
he square, is dedicated to Saint John the Baptist and has several centuries’ history of alterations and restorations. Hirsute and clad in the skins of wild beasts, the intractable prophet of the desert does not evoke seraphic, conciliatory feelings; not for nothing was he the Bulgarian Bogomils’ messenger of darkness, while for the Mandaeans, also at odds with the material world in the hands of evil, he was the supreme master, harshly superior to Christ. The church in Malnisio has also seen more of bitterness than of peace; already at the end of the sixteenth century, the cohabitation of Malnisio’s parishioners with those of nearby Grizzo, although equally satisfied at having been freed from the parish of Santa Maria di Montereale, gave rise to resentful fights, and the feast of the irascible patron saint, although lightened by the German zither played by Menocchio and the cakes sold on the streets for the sweet-toothed, could easily degenerate into bloody riots. On 24 June, 1584, for example, the parish priest Odorico, who lived in Grizzo, offended the Malnisians, pronouncing them “cuckolds in word and deed”, and had to defend himself with a dagger and dodge blows from axes and spears. Two centuries later, the procurator fabricario, the administrator Sebastiano Magris, who kept the parish books, complained of the damage caused by the louts who chased one another up onto the roof, breaking the tiles so that the rain came into the nave.

  Inside, the Christ on the Cross, by an anonymous eighteenth-century woodcarver, the very wood suggesting a rugged, painful pity, gives a sudden authority to the dubious idea that every primitive church, in its wretchedness and its abasement, is a refuge for those travelling towards new lands and new skies. Certainly one is curious to know what was wrong with the Resurrection of Christ painted above the right-hand lateral door, to the point where in 1903 the Bishop of Concordia, Francesco Isola, found it “indecent” and had it removed and replaced by today’s San Domenico Guzman Preaching.

  Below the organ loft, two confessionals hark back to models from the Counter-Reformation, with a space designed next to the priest’s cubicle to contain the list of the Casus Reservati, an aide mémoire of the sins that none but the Bishop or even the Pope could absolve. In that confessional, many years ago now, there used to be a mild reception for one’s own run-of-the-mill sins. The priest was a drinker who struggled as he could against that demon. Some of the villagers enjoyed buying him drinks, getting him drunk after midnight and thus causing him to commit sacrilege by celebrating Mass the next day. In the end the battle between him and the wine went the wine’s way and he came to a sticky end. Life often finds a way of beating us, with the means befitting our weaknesses – wine, drugs, ambition, fear, success.

  Of that priest, thus brought low, one remembers with gratitude the words he used to say in the confessional, no less intelligent than many others heard from illustrious pulpits and platforms; and the goodness in his voice comes back. A man enters the empty church; when asked where the parish office is, he doesn’t answer but looks sideways through two bright, sharp slits; he skips towards the first rows of pews, leans over and sniffs one of them meticulously, then out he goes into the square and runs off to disappear behind the houses.

  At Malnisio the Cellina, which just a few kilometres away cuts into the valley in Dantesque circles, is channelled into the large pipes of the old hydroelectric power station dating back to 1903, and now being turned into a museum. Not far away, at Montereale, excavations have brought to light a considerable historic past – the ancient Caelina recalled by Pliny, bronze swords thrown into the water centuries and centuries ago in homage to the gods of the rivers and the fords. But even Industry is of a respectable age and displays, as in this power-station-cum-museum, its own archaeology with gigantic turbines and manometers and solemn photographs of the bearded engineers who tamed the waters; Technology, guarantor of Peace and Progress, is an angel sculpted on a sarcophagus.

  Paolo Bozzi recalls that his uncle was one of those engineers – Francesco Harrauer, specialized in the pressurized ducts that led the waters through the infernal meanders of the valley. He had married a Mreule, a relative of Enrico, the fugitive who had sought real life, true persuasion in solitude and in self-denial. She was a woman with splendid gentian-coloured eyes, which with the years were absorbed by her ever fatter face; while her husband was ever more taken with his pressurized ducts, old age and obesity isolated her from the prolixity of existence. Engineer Harrauer spoke all day about his ducts to his sister and she, a seamstress by trade, divided her interest between these last and her own work, which included the underwear that she stitched charitably for the friars in a nearby monastery, the door of which displayed the Latin motto, àbstine sùstine, and who were indeed abstemious, eating only as much as was necessary to sustain themselves. But in their motto what she read was abstìne sustìne, with a change of stress that rendered this last homonymous word the local dialect term for a stud-type button.

  Baudelaire and Montale are not the only ones who can capture a plurality of meanings in a few condensed, Delphic lines to the delight of the literary interpreters. Engineer Harrauer’s sister managed to concentrate the totality of her existence in a quatrain worthy of structuralist exegesis – absorbed by her brother’s hydraulic obsession, her own cutting and sewing and the contact with the convent, she loved to recite the lines as she worked, forcing them out through her closed lips that held on tightly to needles and pins: Abstìne sustìne / mudande del frate / condotte forzate / orate per me … “Abstain sustain / the friar’s drawers / pressurized ducts / orate for me” … and that final orate probably was not a verb at all, but was an Italian plural noun – sea-bream in English … fine fish to pray for in any language.

  The few surnames in Malnisio – Muran, Borghese, Magris, Ongaro, Favetta – multiply and mingle, each splintering into a wealth of ramifications indicated by differing nicknames; Sior, Brusulata, Del Grillo, Miu, Palazzo, they seem to indicate so many and nobody. And the more one recovers in terms of names, traces and dates, the more one loses in terms of tenderness, insignificance, mysterious origins, memory. Great-grandmother Santina, who looked after her grandchildren when they were orphaned as teenagers, rather lost her marbles when she had passed ninety and completely forgot her husband, the Herculean Favetta the Red, who specialized in taming mad bulls; she’d lived with him for half a century and borne his children, but to her grandchildren she spoke only of her first love, who died in the 1848 war as an Austrian soldier. There are many debatable interpretations of the matter – some more materialistic, others more psychological and less flattering for Great-grandfather Favetta. And yet this illiterate great-grandmother had been endowed with an excellent memory for more than eighteen lustrums and had conveyed to her grandchildren the only episode of history she knew of – the Empress Maria Theresa seeking refuge among the Hungarian nobility, who swear allegiance to her and, in this version, offer her a throne. “Non mi sento … I don’t feel like it,” replied Maria Theresa according to Great-grandmother Santina, but since in dialect sento can mean either “I sit” or “I feel”, she added, “And we’ll never know whether she didn’t feel like it or whether she simply didn’t sit on it.”

  *

  A very elderly woman says, “When I saw you on television I knew you were Duilio’s son. When we were kids we used to go to throw stones at the Grizzo lot – I carried them and he threw them.” In war, too, it is taken for granted that women are given auxiliary, subaltern tasks. That son, who never misses the fusina, can compete with his father’s culture, even if his father read Latin and especially Greek much better than he does, but the son does not have his father’s stone-throwing ability that perhaps left him more relaxed in confronting life as well as the political battles in the bitter moments of the Resistance and the years immediately after the war.

  Grizzo is the neighbouring village, and as far back as 1784 a parish priest complained about its youth’s “bullying” activities. The invisible border runs just beyond the small church of the Salute and the loves that transgressed it resulted in unleashed rivalries, var
iations on Romeo and Juliet. Every identity is also a horror, because it owes its existence to tracing a border and rebuffing whatever is on the other side. Only a greater hatred transcends the smaller hatreds, which come back to life once the common enemy is no longer there. Just before the church there is the cemetery of Malnisio. Of Walter, cousin three times removed, there is only a photograph because, unlike that great-great-uncle, he never came back from Russia. He was last heard of, reported missing, in 1942. Ruben, his father, never tired of searching for him and never gave up; for years, whenever he heard of someone who had come back from Russia, he went to visit him in the hope of news.

  Ruben travelled round these valleys with his cart, pulled by an old donkey, Morro, a wise and fleet-footed beast; whoever spent any length of time with Morro sooner or later realized that they owed him a small part of their vision of the world. Ruben was a peacable, extremely strong man. Once, at the inn, during a heated political discussion, someone said it served him right that he’d lost a son in Russia; Ruben picked the man up by the neck and, since the window was just a metre from the ground, threw him out in the road across the sill, and the next day he went to his house to make up.

  Giulio Trasanna gathered many youngsters around the telescope in Grizzo, attracted there by his personality. Friulian by choice, having found himself in the homeless homeland of the emigrants, Trasanna is a good writer. The precise brushstrokes of his bone-hard, rapid prose capture the changing colours of life, the tragedy of war and the pain of a generation or an evening. He is not unlike his adopted land Friuli, destined to slip by, unobserved, on the margins of history. His legend is alive in the memory of the writers and the artists who met him, but his fragments, flashes and epiphanies do not carry those obvious and facile handles that literary society needs to hold onto in order to ratify the glory of a name; he never wrote any book that – like a successful slogan – constituted a claim to fame. Fame of course is concerned less with the value of a page than with its suitability for being turned into an object of intellectual consumption, an easily digestible formula.