Microcosms (Panther)

by Magris, Claudio

  Being a Slovene raised in old Hapsburg Austria, “Professor” Karolin always spoke a ceremonious and old-fashioned German, favouring the use of indirect forms: “I told my wife,” he said for example, as we cautiously entered a clearing frequented by wild boars, “Ask our most esteemed friend, that is your good self, if his respected consort prefers her gubanica with grappa or without….”

  Once, on hearing he was ill, we paid him a visit. Ninety-two years of age, he had been in bed for a few weeks because of circulation problems that also affected his speech; he was sweating, feverish, exhausted, but in his eyes there was the same vivacity and kindness as ever, the same tenderness that the decades had sculpted into an expression of stern authority. Next to his bed there were some parcels and crates into which his wife, adhering to his wishes that he expressed with difficulty but still in the usual tone that brooked no contradiction, had the task of collecting and sorting his things – the books, the weirdly shaped roots, a stag’s head, a stuffed marten, paintings, drawings and photographs of the mountain, letters, documents and relics – thus to proceed then with their elimination.

  He was packing up his existence, emptying it of the things he loved and had collected with pedantic passion; he meant to tidy up his life and relinquish all that had adorned it, just as the Hapsburg emperors in the Baroque ritual had to strip themselves of their titles and all insignias of their glory before being accepted into the Capuchin crypt.

  On saying goodbye Karolin had made a present to the visitors of a postcard of the Nevoso, on the back of which were printed – in Slovene naturally – a few lines of his poetry. Raising himself on the pillow with his wife’s help and making use of two enormous lenses, he had translated these into German in a large, trembling hand.

  That card with its four lines in German seemed to constitute a testament, a definitive seal. But some time later a letter arrived, in German of course. The large uncertain characters on the envelope immediately revealed who the sender was, but they gave no clue as to the firm yet dissatisfied precision expressed in that venerable hand, shaky yet rigorous in its sequence of logic and syntax, in its punctuation and spelling, in its spacing, its line-breaks. “Most esteemed friend, last time, when you came to visit us with your dear Wife, I gave you some of my verses, which I translated into German. My Wife, watching beside me as I wrote, maintains that I wrote das Berg, instead of der Berg (“the mountain”). If it is so, I beg you to correct this disgraceful error and to forgive me. I have had various circulatory disturbances, with some momentary amnesia, and if I committed such an error it was certainly done under such circumstances. I am better now, I have been on my feet, I have taken a brief stroll on the edge of the wood.”

  It was unthinkable that Professor Karolin might go leaving the mistake uncorrected or before he had clarified, for himself and for everyone else, all doubt regarding it. He must have spent some weeks mulling it over, trying to remember if he’d really used das, the neutral article, instead of the masculine, or whether this was just his wife’s false impression, and he must have nagged her considerably on the topic. Passion is born out of vitality, but it also stimulates vitality and thus, thanks to his torment over a grammatical error, the professor had found once more a little piece of his forest, the world, life.

  Correct usage is a premise for moral clarity and honesty. Many a dirty trick and violent abuse of power arise when grammar and syntax are messed up and the subject is expressed in the accusative or the object in the nominative, mixing up the cards and exchanging roles between victim and perpetrator, altering the order of things and attributing events to causes or players not effectively responsible, abolishing distinctions and hierarchies in a beguiling heap of concepts and feelings, deforming the truth.

  This, indeed, is why a single misplaced comma can result in disasters, can cause fires that destroy the woods on this Earth. But Professor Karolin’s story seems to say that by respecting language, or the truth, one reinforces life itself, one’s legs become that bit stronger and one is all the more capable of taking a stroll and enjoying the world, with that sensual vitality that is loose-limbed in proportion to how free it is of the tangles of deceit and self-deception. Who knows how many things, how many cherished pleasures and joys are owed, all unwittingly, to the schoolteachers’ red pencils.

  The chronicle of the faithful Schollmayer, which begins with an invocation to Clio, summarizes the entire history of the Schneeberg, but it is dedicated to the “Nevoso, owned by the princely Schönburg family.” Over the course of the centuries and events, the castle and the mountain passed from one family to another, but the one most clearly identified with them is certainly the house of Schönburg-Waldenburg, who had acquired them in 1853 and held them right up until nationalization in 1945. They were the last of the feudal lords, Germans who were used to centuries of contact with the Slav world – with the Czechs in Bohemia and the Sorbs in Saxony – and have left a good memory behind them. While the first lord, His Highness Anton Viktor, who owned some thirty castles, never set foot there, Prince Georg, apart from organizing schools for the woodsmen’s children, instituted rudimentary social security and founded the first Slovene forestry school, while Hermann restocked the forest with animals, which the peasants had massacred in the 1848 uprisings.

  Prince Hermann was the lord of the Nevoso par excellence. He was German and lived near Dresden, but he spent many months of the year in the castle at Kozarišče, where the oriental room, the Venetian and the Egyptian rooms are still to be seen intact, together with the library, rich in literary and legal works not to mention bound volumes of Jagdzeitung, the huntsman’s magazine, and an eighteenth-century Universal History in twenty volumes. In those feudal rooms the lineage takes precedence over the individual and his own sentiments. “Günther arrived at twelve and at a quarter past twelve we were betrothed,” thus the Princess Anna Luise von Schönburg-Waldenburg summarized in her diary the meeting and the courtship that determined her love-life once and for all. The portraits of Prince Hermann show a drawn, melancholic face, a bourgeois introspection more reminiscent of Chekhov or Schnitzler than of aristocratic vitality. Vinko Sterle, hunter and descendant of a mythical family of hunters in the prince’s service, as well as bard of the deeds of times gone by, has handed down testimony of the kindness of the lord of the Nevoso towards his subordinates and his strictness with his grandson who once wanted to shoot a stag in the back and was prevented from doing so by a sharp movement by one of his men, Matja Martinčič, who forced down the barrel of the shotgun.

  The Nevoso’s legendary head huntsman was Franc Sterle, Vinko’s grandfather, whose role entitled him, when in the woods, to sleep in the cabin with his master. On one occasion, undressing on the eve of a grouse hunt, Franc, who was wearing excellent, and recently purchased thick flannel underwear, observed that the prince’s drawers were a miscellany of darning and patches in ten places and said to His Highness that he could surely afford better underwear. “Oh Franc,” grumbled His Highness, “you’re just like my housekeepers – they won’t wash or sew and would throw away a shirt rather than darn it.”

  The prince bagged his first bear on 16 May, 1893, a 220-kilogram beast that today stands erect, stuffed, in the atrium of the castle. Rather than climb up into the safe hide among the branches, he waited for the bear face to face, because – according to Vinko – this test of his courage was a moral confirmation of his right to be lord of the woods. Despite his introverted gaze, the feudal legacy had probably left him with the atavistic superstition which says that blood is a necessary baptism, killing is a way of loving and death is communion between victim and killer. But on one occasion he must have opened his eyes to the paltry deceit of this glorification that seeks to confer nobility on the suffering of life and death. He was old and was hunting a stag with Lojze Sterle, Vinko’s uncle, another master of the Nevoso, who had even been given an education in languages. The prince’s shot had found its mark and he had gone into the thick where the animal lay. Lojze wa
nted to go with him, but the prince shouted that he was to remain where he was; he waited for some time until, out of curiosity and anxiety, he went in through the bushes. The old prince was crouched down, holding the dead stag by the antlers and crying.

  Perhaps it was not just pity; in that moment he must have seen the vanity of what he was doing and of everything else – as if on shooting and entering the thick of the wood he had stepped into reality through the back door and seen the stereotype from backstage. Those antlers would become yet another trophy, idiotically fixed to the wall; those hunting trophies all piled and lined up on the walls and on the stairs – birds with glass eyes, awkward bears grimacing like clowns, rugs that terminated in wolves’ heads like threadbare rag balls – a vulgar and inevitable parade, the destiny of every life which charms for a moment but all it takes is a little powder and a well oiled barrel to take it apart and undo it into straw, springs and buttons, like a stuffed animal.

  The prince carried on shooting. But a small wedge of the void the prince met in the thick beside the dead stag penetrates the endless hunting stories recounted passionately by Vinko Sterle. As when Franc, near the Gašperjev hrib, follows and wounds a wolf, killing it with the stock of his shotgun in mortal combat only to realize that it was a female with four cubs that sit there looking around; or Matja’s hunt for the much-feared lone wolf in 1923 – hours and hours over the snow in the moonlight, obsessively tracking it down, even though he is no less exhausted than his quarry, moving forward almost without realizing where he was putting his feet, until he shoots at something behind a bush and hits the wolf. The exhausted beast is sleeping and fails to wake up, not even to die.

  These stories tell of the elusiveness of the forest, which draws back inaccessible, and does not allow itself to be caught, but lays false trails and pitfalls along its paths, clumsy misunderstandings akin to the accidents that befall the weekend hunters, who regularly fill each other with lead. And even if every day tractors and concrete annex a little more of the forest, rendering it no longer threatening but threatened, in some way it does evade everyone’s grip and one understands that despite the love-drunk butterflies on the Peklo road that let themselves be picked up delicately between one’s fingers, or Rina, the red bitch who once chased a marten for a whole afternoon yapping and howling as she vanished deep in the trees, there is something missing every summer: like the bear that one never managed to see, or Mr Samec’s voice that died away before he finished his story, left caught up in the trees of the forest somewhere, suspended and unfinished, “‘Excuse me, Your Excellency,’ I said to him, ‘but with your permission …’”

  Collina

  “That’s right … that’s where it is, near the well at Madonna della Scala, one of the most beautiful places on the Collina,” Piero had said once when he was on the night shift and was trying to keep everyone up for as long possible, playing with the room keys before handing them over to the guests as they came in, or at any rate to the regulars, the ones he knew. “I’d really like to take you there one day.” They used to arrive around the mid-August holiday, he continued, all three of them together from Cambiano, just a couple of kilometres away and they would stop for four or five days, a week at the most. They pitched the tent, put down the barrel of marinated anchovies and tench next to the well and a bit farther away the bottles, covered with a cloth. They’d spend the whole day there, pulling out the tench and the anchovies, playing cards, emptying the bottles of Freisa, every now and then taking a sip of water or, when their hair and shirts were sticky with the humidity, pulling up a bucketful from the well and tipping it over their heads. Everything was still, only the stars trembled in the bucket as it came up out of the black hole of the well – a porthole to another universe, but it was not a good idea to look out on the other side to find oneself heaven knows where, at least not during the week’s holiday.

  It was so good sitting there on the grass, especially in the evening when it was a bit cooler and they would let me sit a while with them, if I happened by, even though I’m not from Cambiano, only San Pietro, he would add. The water in the well was dark as wine, a beautiful deep demijohn, and no one wanted to sit there thinking about what was down there or up on the face of the moon, things we’ll never see anyway, and if it was decided that these things can’t be seen, then that’s the way it has to be.

  Drinking, munching, dealing the cards, but most of all discussing politics and their respective wives and families left behind in Cambiano. Backbiting, rather – certainly there was never any shortage of material. Or they would drag up old gory tales from the area: that tart with her throat cut in the acacia and poplar thicket, or Hanged Man Wood, so called because of the stranger found there dangling from a large plane tree, swaying in the evening wind as if busy in a slow dance. Minot was obsessed with the murder in Valle San Pietro: at the front of the house the only footprints were those of someone entering, the man had been killed with an axe that couldn’t be found and which they thought might have been hidden in one of the barrels, so the carabinieri broached them all looking for it and ended up drinking a bit more than they should have done.

  And so, said Piero sitting down on the sofa in front of the mirror that doubled the small hotel lobby, they purged themselves of all the year’s poison and a week later home they went, at peace with their spouses and ready to get down to work. One of them died a few years ago. He had been losing more and more blood for months, but he kept saying he wasn’t bothered about haemorrhoids, and when he did finally go to see someone about them, it was already more of a job for Father Brin than for Doctor Beraudo.

  Father Brin heard his confession, knowing full well that his only sin was the curse he came out with every time he banged his finger in the timber yard; certainly he was always banging it. He gave him his blessing too and noticed his stunned face, damp with sweat and holy water, looking up at him with an air of doubt, as if urging him not to spin too many tales and to stop pretending to know everything about the dark side of the moon. So the priest gave him a pat on the shoulder and said, “You’re thick as two planks,” and the other man was left with his mouth open and stopped breathing. But he’d drunk his wine, the Freisa and the Barbera, right up until a few days before, despite the nausea in his mouth – like chewing iron, he said – and everything (or nothing, since he’d almost stopped eating) kept coming up in retches and belches. And so he went down through the well. At least he had enjoyed those holidays over so many years. “Well,” Piero concluded, “I’m sure that once you’ve had days like that, like those at the well at Madonna della Scala, with the cards the bottles the tench etcetera, then you’ve had your life and you can’t complain.”

  Piero tried to drag things out with this and other stories, because the hours never finish in a hotel like that where there aren’t many distractions and the only things that might happen in the thick of the night are a few unpleasant events – unforeseen, but never too much of a surprise – in that area near the Porta Nuova station. Like the guy that time who came rushing in holding his belly in his hands and when he put them on the counter they were covered with the blood that was even coming out of his trousers – he must have been stabbed from the bottom up by someone who knew what he was doing. But gradually even the guests who stopped for a chat said goodnight and disappeared. The last to go up to her room was the Countess, always half asleep under the big hat pulled down over her face, but awake just as much as was necessary. Whenever possible she found some way of mentioning Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, so as to make a good impression on some well-read guest, he too at home in that hotel; but it was said that when she went ten-pin bowling with two commercial travellers, occasional guests, her language was far from irreproachable.

  The Countess had lived in the hotel for many years; she was on her own and above and beyond bed and breakfast, the modest monthly rate guaranteed some company which kept her mind off the idea of a family. “You see, Professor, I was married at twenty-two and widowed at thirt
y-one, now I’m eighty-three and – how shall I put it? I don’t want you to misunderstand me, I have no criticism to make of my poor husband but … let’s say that the experience left me with no desire to repeat it.”

  Old single ladies were a mainstay of the hotel’s clientele; apart from the Countess, there were retired teachers, widows of high-ranking officers, especially Air Force, a time-weathered woman with a mad glint in her eye, always dressed in green, the heels of her shoes always worn, who used to write feverishly, filling sheet after sheet and every now and then asking whoever was nearest to hand if in their opinion the President of the United States and the Commander of the Nato troops in Verona – the two of them spoke on the phone every evening, she explained, at seven o’clock, Italian time – had received her manuscript, the one that provided once-and-for-all solutions to the world’s and everybody’s problems. It was essential that they read it, she added, for the sake of universal good and salvation, but when once she was asked in which language she wrote to the President of the United States, she replied that she wrote to him in Italian of course, because he had plenty of translators at the White House and anyway, “I tell you, when it comes down to it … let him sort it out.”

  Let him sort it out – perhaps that was the right answer to all the brazen demands with which the world ensnares and makes mincemeat of any poor devil, if he’s so inexpert as to make himself the least bit available. Go up to the room and leave the world to sort itself out, while the evenings and the years mingle and fall into the black opening of the elevator, sleep’s antechamber. And the porticoes too, the ones crossed before entering the hotel are archways of sleep, geometry of things that become ever more equal and regular under the eyelids until all differences are extinguished. Falling asleep – there’s nothing to it: but when it doesn’t happen any more, only then do you realize what it means. Those three around the well at Madonna della Scala used to fall asleep quickly, sometimes when in the dark one could still just make out the red of the evening, a sombre red, dark as blood. Perhaps it is true that they were happy back then. Anyway, Piero’s right, it is a place that should be seen – like all the Collina, of course, which Rousseau considered the finest painting that a human eye could ever meet, while Cesare Balbo went so far as to call it an earthly paradise, quite forgetting that (very Piedmontese) advice about not exaggerating.