Microcosms (Panther)

by Magris, Claudio

  In one of his little books of delightful walks, published in 1870, Maurizio Marocco, the clergyman who enjoyed exploring and describing the Collina, suggested crossing it by starting from Turin and climbing up to Pecetto. Others instead suggested following the route of the mediaeval merchants, for whom the Collina, the Hill, was the “mountain” to be crossed from Chieri to Pecetto and the River Po, and then on towards the Alps – a thick wood full of traps and dangers, both barrier and road to France and the world beyond. Now it is fresh green countryside, but in order to enjoy its beauty, even in this the age of disenchantment, it is a good idea to “have suffered some misadventure” – an opinion propounded in 1853 by Giuseppe Filippo Baruffi, professor of positivist philosophy in the Royal University of Turin, priest and great traveller, on foot, throughout Turkey, Persia, Hungary, Egypt, Russia and Turin’s Collina.

  There is no danger that the Collina might find itself lacking in admirers, given the constant ubiquity of trouble. But why should it be necessary to suffer in order to love the light-blue rows of the vines, the undulating lines of the supports that intertwine and fade into the shadows, the brown and gold splashes in the fields, the blue of the sky – sometimes so intense and dark over the hills that it looks almost scarlet? Baruffi had seen the world, the pyramids in the desert and the hostelries of Baldissero, and he must have known that only a very hard heart would ever have need of any such painful initiation before letting its eyes roam agreeably over the glory of these uplands, massed in serried ranks like battalions. Rather perhaps the opposite is true and it takes a strong heart and a clear mind to prevent the impropriety of a mishap or even just a toothache, from ruining the view of a meander of the Po, as sweet as the hips of the one who sleeps beside us. But perhaps, as a priest, Baruffi thought it necessary to lend sense to the cruel chaos that assails us and to pretend that it constitutes a year’s foundation course for the holidays and walks through the Collina.

  Anyway, the person who for years has taken every opportunity to go walking along the highways and byways beyond the Po has certainly never gone looking for troubles, but seeks to forget those already lived through, and to dodge those that lie in wait; he wanders back and forth and takes a detour down the first path that comes along, just to throw the world off the scent for an hour or two and make it that much more difficult for it to catch up with those who are enjoying themselves and empty more horrors from Pandora’s box on their heads.

  The asparagus soup one is entitled to expect on spending an evening at Sciolze – at least that’s how it was last time, the culinary powers of our student, hospitable and indulgent as she is, do not disappoint – that soup is more than tasty and may be fully appreciated without any condiment of mishaps. And if it isn’t asparagus soup, it will be something equally good, especially if her daughter does the cooking, and now it’s almost time for her to graduate. That memorable cotechino sausage, for example, it must have been three years ago. On reaching Sciolze there’s no point worrying about what to do with the others, maybe one or two will be able to come for supper even though they haven’t been invited, the house among the trees has a big terrace, the rest will sort themselves out. At all events, once you’re at Sciolze there’s nothing left but to carry on down a bit and then you’re back on the plain, the trip across the hill is over.

  For the moment it has just begun, near Madonna della Scala. Amidst dilapidated farmhouses, tall poplars that rustle like birds in the evening, maples, acacias and thorny weeds, an old villa confirms Baruffi’s sad observation with its name: Villa Passatempo. That harmonious quadrisyllable – passatempo, pastime – carries echoes of a deep, mortal anxiety. The thick shadow and the tall upright trees must be there to stop time passing or at least to make it slow its pace, golden resin sliding down the trunk and not a gushing cascade. And yet what the name recounts is that in that neoclassical villa, with its double stairway on the façade and the triangular pediment in the imperial style, the two ladies of Verrua wished that time would pass quickly, that it were already past, that it were already near its end.

  Perhaps this is the original sin, the inability to love and be happy, to live time, each instant to the full, without craving to burn it up, to use it all quickly. Incapacity for persuasion, said Michelstaedter. Original sin introduces death, which takes possession of life, making life seem unbearable in every hour it proffers in its passing, forcing the destruction of life’s time, trying to make it pass quickly, like an illness; killing time, a polite form of suicide.

  It is quite right to take one’s hat off to the Baroque and neoclassical villas, to pay due homage to art, but then it’s a good idea to move on and to seek shelter under some inn sign, where it is as though everything’s immobile because there is no need of anything else. The trip through the Collina does not follow time’s rectilinear track and its irreversible arrow, rather it zigzags, sabotaging time, flinging it away and then finding it back in the hand like a yo-yo. One might end up never reaching Cambiano; it’s only a few kilometres from Chieri, but one can never tell because all roads are long and there’s never any shortage of complications. That priest from Cambiano, for example: often during Mass he would have trouble opening the tabernacle to get the wafers, and it was a real torment for him, he used to turn and turn the key, muttering, with the altar boy kneeling behind him, “What the devil’s in here!” and so the Mass, too, became a drawn-out affair.

  One walks here and there, death waits at Samarkand and other such destinations, but for whoever dreams of running off to Samarkand it’s already an achievement if they reach Pecetto; Baruffi, too, after travelling to Samarkand and Trebizond, chose to set course for the Collina.

  One turns for Cambiano. Chieri is left behind with the red of its towers, its palaces and its churches, a red that in nearby Monferrato is even redder still and is the martial, wine colour of Piedmont. From Chieri one leaves with Father Bosco’s blessing – object of a rather excessive personality cult, which in the church of Santa Margherita places him in a privileged position near Jesus and the Madonna while in the cathedral he is flanked, in a Hellzapoppin’ effect, by Pope Woytila. A little farther on a large stone Father Bosco watches and commiserates with San Giuseppe Cottolengo, whose surname entered the Italian language thanks to his work with the severely disabled. Perhaps the idea that God made man in His own image and likeness is not blasphemy and neither is it boasting, because to realize, as Cottolengo did, that monstrousness does not exist but there is only unspeakable suffering that warrants love, is greatness worthy of a God.

  They say he often slept on a chair, moaning in his sleep, and that he loved to take snuff; it seems that this was something of an obstacle to his canonization. It’s not easy to be a saint; not only do you have the whole world and your own self against you, but the Church too. They didn’t want to canonize San Domenico Savio either, revered though he is at the church of Santa Margherita, because it came out that he was afraid of dying. On the cathedral tower there is a sundial that shows not only the solar time of any given moment, but also average solar time. It is not clear what this last means, especially for someone who already has difficulty in understanding whether daylight-saving time means going to bed a bit sooner or a bit later. Those hours, up there, think they’re God’s gift; the sundials, with the obsession of all those high-flown inscriptions that proclaim them ineluctable, inevitable, irrevocable, have made them more than conceited. But all it takes is a cloud to make them disappear and it warms the heart to see that face in shadow, empty, the vacant throne of time deposed.

  Chieri and Asti were the chief contenders for domination of the Collina, in wars, alliances, and volte-faces that involved several large powers and shifted frontiers; all of Piedmont is a frontier along the Alps that gradually becomes a state, a no man’s land that becomes a centripetal and magnetic force. The Arimanni of Cambiano, it is said with pride, have never submitted to Chieri. The entanglements of the frontier, resulting from the intricacies of mediaeval geopolitics, created these com
munities of free men – Arimanni in Cambiano or Kosezi on the Monte Nevoso – in conflict with the regulating power of the state and prepared at most to obey a distant and abstract sovereign such as the Empire, a star still shining, but perhaps dead.

  The sovereigns who forged or invented Piedmont – from Amadeus VIII to Emmanuel Philibert and Victor Amadeus II – were great levellers, and gave order and uniformity to the diversity of the frontier. Amadeus VIII’s statutes even governed clothing, Emmanuel Philibert emphasized his control over the lives of his subjects, Victor Amadeus II created a bureaucratic and enlightened despotism which rather than ratifying the old habits stratified in the variety of the centuries and places, proclaimed laws inspired by the universal principles of Reason.

  The Collina is rolling, varied countryside; the big city at its feet is geometrical, square. Which is more mysterious, order or (at least apparently) disorder? The Collina, too, is organized, and subdivided according to precise rules, but this does not diminish its seductive powers. One can lose oneself there quite happily, aimlessly, but even this sort of wandering is order, conjugation and declension, perhaps irregular and stilted, of the syntax that governs a life and unites it to the other lives that walk alongside it; existences intertwined and distinct like the elements of a theorem or the notes of a song, and so we move on together, obeying a common law, a battalion that finds itself in disarray as a result of the stronger blows, but then its ranks recompose, even if they are thinned. Mysterious passions of order – the rows of vines, the line of march that sets off fraternally towards the inevitable final fiasco – but in the meantime, before reaching the other side, one crosses red hills and pauses awhile under the shelter of trees and inkeepers alike.

  Even if the lives of this and that person criss and cross regularly like the spears in a bronze balustrade, the climbing plants bind themselves around everything and blur the design. And this confusion is beautiful too, with the crinkled leaves, the branches that wind and twist as they will, and the flowers that bloom on the balcony before dropping into the road.

  Piedmont mysterious and geometric, mysterious because geometric, dry and essential like the great style of the epic that reduces life to unity and lends it sense, reduces to the bone the scattered multiplicity of things and unites them in a single breath that pervades them and comes from far away, not from the past but from life itself in its time-less anonymity.

  Perhaps order leads to sulkiness. It is said that it was Emmanuel Philibert who created the Piedmontese devotion to sober duty, while Victor Amadeus II was concerned with purging the rigour of scholarship of all hair-splitting quibbles and other such like frivolities. Even Turin’s architecture, for De Amicis, was “democratic and levelling”. There is in all of this a soldier-like glumness, as of feet keeping in step. Seen from Superga the Piedmontese Alps struck Balbo as a “military panorama” and Piedmont does indeed carry the mark of those engineers – the Papacinos, the Bertola d’Exilles – who planted fortifications throughout those mountains, squat look-out posts destined to redundancy.

  The poetry of discipline and order is the poetry of an order that disintegrates, of a defence that is overrun, just as the old Piedmontese fortresses were overrun by Napoleon in his lightning campaign of 1796, and it is the poetry of resistance to the raids that continually overrun life. The Animula vagula blandula sets off into the dark and entrusts itself to the cardinal virtue of fortitude so as not to be overcome by fear and death, to stand up to the necessity of History – whether understood as the troubled history of salvation or as thoughtless ruin – and to never lose the thread of things, even if, in the disarray of battle, that thread gets tangled and breaks.

  Side by side with modern Piedmont, which attains expression but is also superseded in the realization of Italian unity, there survives a nostalgia for the old Piedmont, more French or Savoyard than Italian, in all its many shadings: the old Piedmont of Costa de Beauregard, Calandra, Carlo Felice, or Solaro della Margherita, wholly resistant to Savoy’s voluntary dissolution within the state of Italy and disdaining the modern trends for rationalizing agriculture, as with the technical innovations of Cavour – modernizing his lands and the whole peninsula – in his estates at Grinzane or Leri.

  Nostalgia for old Piedmont, rekindled during moments of the most violent social transformation, lends support to the possibilities of a different development, latent in History, possibilities crushed by the course of History. But the robust modernization reproached in the name of old Piedmont, is a child of the values and the traditions of that same ancestral Piedmont. The creators of this last – those Piedmontese ministers who were so much more Savoyard than Italian, those military engineers who built fortresses in the Alps, those country squires who as early as 1561 were being taken to task by the mayor of Villarbasse for having worked with hoes and scythes alongside their labourers – these were the very ones to forge those famous, prosaic virtues that enabled Piedmont to transcend itself and create the Italian state. Those qualities were: duty, moderation, patience in the face of history and life.

  Old and new Piedmont are fused together in the grand perspectives of the modern drawn by Gobetti and by Gramsci. The first sees the eighteenth-century Piedmontese monarchy continue and come to fruition in Cavour, in liberal entrepreneurial capitalism, in the workers at FIAT, who were to be its heirs and its fulfilment. The second celebrates in “modern and cyclopic” Turin the “organizability” of a civilized and emancipated Italy, thanks above all to the industrial proletariat and a liberal class open to progress.

  Such perspectives today appear, at least for the moment, to have been defeated by the gelatinous “postmodern”, in which everything is interchangeable with its opposite and the Black Mass and its junk is placed on the same level as Saint Augustine’s thought. It is no mere chance that this triumph of the postmodern coincides with the crisis of Turin’s leadership in Italian culture, a line that starts from Einaudi and Gobetti and Gramsci and reaches Norberto Bobbio. Faced with such an indistinct miasma there seems to be all the greater need for that military virtue of “keeping things meticulously dressed in one’s mind”, praised in Carlo Allioni, eminent botanist of Victor Amadeus II.

  *

  In Cambiano there is a man who is well known because of his longevity. He’ll soon be a hundred and one, but for the past few months he’s been feeling unwell and he is angry because ever since they threw that party and that supper for his century, he hasn’t felt right: he was touched and being touched did him no good at all. One has to be careful with anyone of his age he says, and please don’t let anyone dream of celebrating his one hundred and first birthday. He has no desire to end up like Norberto Rosa, vernacular poet and patriot (“Metternich and his great wig, we’ll send him off to Old Nick”) who had died while writing his little poem, The Elixir of Long Life.

  Some decades ago, on his retirement, the old man went to live with an unmarried daughter in a house belonging to a nephew of his from Chieri, on the tacit understanding that no one would chase him out of there for as long as he lived. This was something that never even crossed his nephew’s mind except that with the passing of the years the old man’s daughter, no longer a spring chicken herself, started feeling guilty about their prolonged occupancy of the house and would say sorry every time the nephew came to visit, as soon as she opened the door to him. “You understand, it’s embarrassing,” the nephew tells everybody, “I won’t go back any more, I don’t know what to say to her; I can’t really tell them to take their time, please, there’s no rush, but then neither can I ask them to hurry up …”

  Cambiano has cultural ambitions: weeks dedicated to roadside art, theatre in the squares, street corners brightened up with the colours of the paintings and special tomatoes on show just a few metres away. In front of the church stands the house where Stefano Jacomuzzi wrote the first draft of his Subtle Wind, a novel of unforgettable intensity: its theme is the evanescence, the vanity and with it the grandeur of life, the seasons’ light, the com
ing of the shadows; it melds charity and disenchantment, a footloose pietas and picaresque irony, into a sense of mankind’s common, epic approach towards the darkness in which “metaphors die”.

  A character in another novel of his, a dying Pope, thinks that “to listen to virtually unknown stories of the life that has passed by alongside us is the happiest way of taking leave of life,” and it is in this sense that the great and fragile mystery of life on earth can flash forth, as for Roth’s holy drinker, a hope of salvation. The narrator knows that everything gets misplaced and is lost, as though it had never been, and that nevertheless it does not have to be only that way; just as Panama Al Brown, the protagonist of Subtle Wind, does not know where to find the sense in the things he cannot grasp: “In the heart, they say, but everything’s all mixed up in there and you can’t trust anything.”