Microcosms (Panther)

by Magris, Claudio

  It is best to affirm the objectivity of what is real, in a century of Pirandellian doubt, otherwise things go wrong. Felice Genero, whose name was given to a villa that has become a splendid public park on the Collina, was a banker and member of parliament; he became involved with counterfeiters, pretended to be mad and fetched up in a lunatic asylum. Objects are, thanks be to God; the church is there, in front of one’s eyes, confirmation of the world of created things, like the robust vines grown into the walls of the villas, or like the seductive Lodovica Pasta, whose beauty made the reputation of the Piciotta Fountain at the foot of the Collina, for it was by that fountain that passers-by had the pleasure of catching sight of her.

  The Collina, with its University of Vermouth-makers and Confectioners, is a good school of reality. The unbeliever enters the church of Saint Sebastian, touches the marble of the holy-water stoup and is obliged to change his mind, like Doubting Thomas. In the fresco of the Washing of the Feet, which is fading, there is the face of a woman – beautiful and enigmatic; the mystery is in the reality, in the things that are there, in that unforgettable, unknown face.

  Villa Talucchi is on the left on the way up from San Pietro to Pecetto. The door is submerged in ivy and virginia creeper, in the garden there are palms and magnolias, dominated by a gigantic cedar of Lebanon. Come with me from Lebanon, my spouse. How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince’s daughter! Thy navel is like a round goblet, thy belly like an heap of wheat, thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins … The darkness lightens, the darkness of the paths and the years, at the end there is a face, her face that has not darkened in the presence of death, advancing like a rising dawn – fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army in battle – side by side for ever and more than ever; the night that falls, that has fallen for some time now, can do nothing against that smile, which pervades it like a light, the darkness is very soft, arms tighten against the breast, dark and laughing eyes in which to sink …

  It was worse for Silvio Pellico; sickly as he was he used to come up from his Villa Barolo near Moncalieri, to pay court in vain under that cedar to the actress la Gegia, when she came to stay with her cousin Carlotta Marchionni. She was the leading lady with the Royal Sardinian Company, which created a stir with its productions of Pellico’s Francesca da Rimini, and Gismonda. But the author of My Prisons took no pride in these literary successes; those poems, those tragic gestures, those books that had fired the spirit of liberal patriotism now appeared to him empty or to no purpose, written by another hand. Now he was fleeing from that agitation, he was seeking refuge in the shadows of churches and in prayer that might dowse his heart and his passions, already so weak that to extinguish them required only the draught that came in through the church door, slightly ajar. He was indifferent to the echoes of his fame that crossed the oceans, and perhaps he was even indifferent to la Gegia’s rejections. He enjoyed courting her shyly, but she would have unnerved him had she said yes – a wind too strong for his candle. He felt well when he managed to forget himself reciting the Rosary or annotating entries for his majordomo’s expenses.

  Norberto Bobbio writes that there is the tragedy of the strong and the tragedy of the weak, indicating Pavese as an example of the latter. There is perhaps another one, less straightforward, the one that comes to a final reckoning with one’s own radical weakness, with one’s own inadequacy in the face of life and History, fighting to transform helplessness into dignity; tragedy of silence, of oblivion, of whoever – after having lived a compelling, vital moment – is forced, by others or by himself, to eliminate it and eliminate his own self, dulling it into a lifeless grey, which becomes a refuge.

  Pellico’s last years are a moderate and camouflaged version of that empty, reeling self-dismissal. Pellico could not and would not have anything to do with History and with his ego that had once contributed to the making of it; he worked at the nullification of himself. Perhaps his tepid courtship of la Gegia was a small distraction from this terrible task – like the stroll with which Kafka stretched his legs between chapters of The Trial.

  The villas are often associated with the pastimes of Eros: Madama Reale’s affaires in the Vigna, the cruelties with which Annie Vivanti, when she was writing Naja tripudians at Villa Bergalli, used to torment her secretary-lover Maniscalchi (who enjoyed being tormented), the adroitness with which Cardinal Maurizio di Savoia – who abandoned the purple for reasons of state – used to keep Ludovica, his thirteen-year-old niece and bride in the Queen’s villa. The villas of the Collina have been loved above all by the Germanists: Barbara Allason’s near the Eremo, Arturo Graf’s on the Fenestrelle road, Arturo Farinelli and Leonello Vincenti’s at Cavoretto.

  Italian German studies are at home, indeed were born, amidst these hills and the university at their foot. Arturo Graf nurtured his poetry and his teaching from German sources, Paolo Raffaele Troiano warned, before the event, that Nietzsche worship would take particular hold in Turin. An enthusiastic young Gramsci, just before the First World War, attended lessons given by Farinelli, the founder of German studies in Italy. Although Gramsci later rejected Farinelli’s lyrical rhetoric, at the time the Germanist appeared to him to be like a volcano, an enthusiastic explorer of new cultural continents, leading his pupils to their discovery.

  Farinelli was a slovenly genius, rich in that indomitable vitality which is a priceless gift in life but is often the bane, too, of other people’s lives and of thought itself, when it is induced to deny itself emphatically in the name of thoughtless worldly wisdom. He held the first Italian chair of German literature and had a gift for sweeping through the literary landscape, communicating a sense of the universality of the world of letters, although he was concerned less with philological rigour than he was with his own legend. He once pretended, for example, during an official visit to an Italian Institute somewhere abroad, that he had distractedly thrown his gold watch into the water as he was pensively skimming stones across a lake, so as to have an anecdote to pass down to his descendants.

  A temperament like Farinelli’s was not one to resist the blandishments of Fascism; but out of his school came some of the greatest Italian Germanists, above all Leonello Vincenti, who lived – probably without being too pleased about the fact – alongside him on the Collina, at Cavoretto.

  It is no coincidence that German literature and culture should have been for the most part discovered and transmitted to Italy through Turin. German literature, with its symbiosis of poetry and philosophy, has set itself the most radical questions regarding the individual in modern society, regarding the possibility or impossibility of the individual’s fully realizing himself, of finding a place in the workings of social mechanisms that are ever more complex and depersonalized, mechanisms capable of providing a firm anchorage for the individual in History or of crushing him, a mirage of salvation and the spectre of Medusa. German literature has been unique in taking up the epoch-making character of the modern, its radical transformation of man and the world and what this means for the journey towards the Promised Land or for its disintegration as it comes into sight, for the quest and the exile of real life. Turin – “the modern city of the peninsula” in Gramsci’s words – has been at the core of this modernity and has created a culture rooted in politics, but not subordinated to politics.

  This culture saw its own destiny bound, for better or for worse, with the new industrial reality and its proletariat – the proletariat of Turin, the Italian Detroit or Leningrad – which in Gramsci’s, but also in Gobetti’s view, was supposed to become the class which, as a result of the industrial realities and its own struggles would be the general harbinger of universality.

  To be a Germanist in Turin meant coming to terms with modernity as destiny, with a Germany which had been the cradle of Marxism, the historical and ideological scenario displaying the strengths and the weaknesses of its Utopia. The dream of a Marx who reads Hölderlin – as Thomas Mann put it – or rather the reconciliation of the pro
se of the world, freed from alienation, and the poetry of the heart, this is a lynchpin of modern German literature and in Turin’s culture the dream has been lived to the full. In Giulio Bollati’s opinion such a culture was already dead in the Fifties – crushed by the weight of a historical evolution that differed from the forecasts. If this is true, then its light, which has continued to shine for a long time, is like the light that arrives, aeons later, from a dead star, but Bollati himself – another friend whose absence makes our steps more uncertain – still keeps that light alive with his book that formulates the diagnosis and thus demonstrates that the culture is not necessarily dead after all.

  The present, certainly, seems to have crushed Gobetti’s and Slataper’s hopes of a real life that one carries tucked away in one’s baggage. Utopias that fall, Gates of Eden that everywhere close behind you – ever more, everywhere; so many Adams and Eves who do nothing else but eat the wrong apples and get themselves thrown out of earthly paradises or even out of halfway decent places.

  The double inheritance of Trieste and Turin and their unfulfilled promises can be a heavy one. But, as Frédéric Moreau said, even though in reference only to the waiting room in a brothel, it is the best we’ve had. And so, in spite of everything, one carries on along this road. And anyway the Germanists, notwithstanding those often brick-like tomes they carry about with them, also know how to apply a light touch when required – take Giovanni Vittorio Amoretti for example, also from this area. Susceptible to excessive beauty, frequently exuberant and not particularly controlled in his essays, Amoretti had always improved with the passage of time and, having written for La Stampa in the Twenties, at the age of ninety he became a regular contributor to the Gazzetta di Parma. At ninety-six he was admitted to the Molinette hospital in Turin and wrote a note to a younger, though no longer all that young colleague: “Would I be too forward to ask you, should it prove necessary, for a couple of lines by way of adieu for the Corriere?”

  A few days later those lines appeared in the Corriere. In any case, although facing up to the eventuality that then occurred, that letter showed no sign of distress over death: the conclusion was, “We shall see.” Perhaps those are the words needed when there is too much pathos around regarding an irrevocable end – even the end of Gobetti’s and Gramsci’s dreams, definitively consigned to the tomb. We shall see.

  The Piedmontese made Italy. But nature – wrote Cesare Balbo in 1855, six years before unification – made them “as non-Italian as was possible” and they have found themselves “wishing, wanting, believing […] that we must be, that we are Italian.” All identities, especially national identities, which vaunt themselves as immutable facts of nature, are acts of will, as heroic and artificial as any other peremptory moral imperative. Giovanni Cena spoke of an “Italian mission that we Piedmontese must carry out.”

  If identity is the product of a will, it is the negation of one’s self because it is a gesture made by someone who wants to be something that he evidently is not and who therefore wants to be different from himself, to make himself unnatural, to pollute himself. In Carlo Alberto’s day, Tommaso Vallauri proposed to him that there should be an illustrated version of the literary glories of the “Piedmontese nation”, misunderstood by the “foreign” historiographers such as the Italian Tiraboschi. But Piedmontese identity is no less ideological and precarious than the Italian; each identity is an aggregate and there is little sense in dismantling it so as to reach the supposed indivisible atom. Even to maintain that it is enough to be Piedmontese to be immune from rhetoric, as Thovez suggested, might be an exaggeration.

  The true Piedmontese, from Alfieri onwards – as Carlo Dionisotti reminds us – are those who have been capable of stepping outside of this Piedmontese identity. This capacity to transcend one’s own roots, however much beloved, is also part of that sense of history, of liberty and of Europe that made Piedmont a bastion of anti-Fascism and led Natalino Sapegno more or less to identify Piedmont with anti-Fascism. Today – after so much rhetoric about the Resistance, but also in the face of a suspect revisionism that seeks not so much to re-evaluate myths, reveal truths and understand and respect the enemy, as to place everything on an equal footing, the executioners of Auschwitz and their victims – today we cannot fail to call ourselves Piedmontese. The Collina is also Pian del Lòt, where on 2 April, 1944 twenty-seven people were massacred by the Fascists.

  Baldissero, Pavarolo, Bardassano, Sciolze. The leaves are red and yellow, and behind half-closed eyelids everything is red against the sun; the red advances, extends and darkens, the strident chirping of the cicadas fades into the far-off whine of a trimmer, the geometrical squares of the yellow and brown fields, yet to be harvested or already reaped, shine in the limpid air, heraldic devices on a large shield.

  “The variety of sites to be found in this hilly region is inexpressible.” Davide Bertolotti, 1840. One could even travel around on one’s own; the hills themselves would provide sufficient company, the locust trees that are crowding out the sweet chestnuts and the young oaks, the cypresses that invite one into a perfectly sociable solitude, benevolently open to chatting with whomever one meets along the lanes buried in the green, in the underwater light of the foliage.

  Azure vineyards, yellow and rust-coloured splashes of the fields, which gave Casorati, in his house at Pavarolo, the hues for his paintings. The Collina is a feast of colour. In the 1700s Monsieur de Saussure, of the Turin Academy, who studied mathematics so as to learn the language of reality, had invented the cyanometer, in order to measure the different shades of blue in the sky. On the Maddalena it is intense, almost violet, higher up it fades into a pale sky-blue, the colour of distance, degrees of absence, of that which is missing. A man from Baldissero, who lived near the well, said that there should also be a cyanometer for the colour of eyes, but no one ever did anything about it.

  Bardassano is quiet and sun-drenched. The grass flowers among the tight joints of the fortress, at once masculine and gentle, with its bulwarks high and red in the solitude. The village is empty; two old women appear at a window, they ask something we cannot catch, then disappear.

  They say that the Magistrate lived in one of these quiet houses with his sister who every morning would take him to Turin and in the evening would go to collect him and bring him back to Bardassano. The Magistrate – this at least was the name by which this diligent and kindly man was universally known – used to wander the streets of Turin at all seasons, and especially the corridors of the university, in his overcoat with its leather collar and carrying his bag always bursting with documents. He was always busy, discreet but inexorable, keeping everybody up to date on the workings of the World Committee and the constant thorny problems it was forever resolving happily by general consensus and always for the common good.

  Above all the Magistrate hung around the lecture theatres and the offices of the university. At first he was not noticed amidst the confusion and the crowds, because of his obsequious politeness and reluctance to disturb. Often, as one dashed into the German department to pick up a book needed for a tutorial, one would find him sitting at the lecturer’s place, hunched over the typewriter, but he would always stand up at once, offer a deferential greeting and vacate the chair. He used the desk and the typewriter regularly, but he always left everything tidy and never touched the papers.

  The Magistrate had founded the World Committee and always kept the lecturers informed – at least those he felt he could trust – on the progress of the work that he chaired with much tact and without any tendency towards authoritarianism. The serene and ordered rhythm of the universe depended on this work. He used to meet Johnson, Brezhnev, Mao Tse Tung, the unions, the British prime minister, the anarchists, the Churches, the president of the university principals, underground groups, the boards of directors of many companies, students’ representatives, ministers, news vendors, political parties, sporting groups. The Committee – presumably in permanent session – resolved crises in the Middle East,
the war in Vietnam, the proliferation of nuclear arms, the overcrowding in the universities, the postal strikes, the shortage of lecture halls, the chaos of the traffic.

  The Magistrate was always calm, happy and perfectly at ease in the reality of his Committee; its ideal harmony was never disturbed by the acrid presence of any other reality, the reality in which others lived, where those who wield power never meet unless it is to study the possibility of unleashing a fatal blow on the other; in which there are not enough lecture halls, the traffic is gridlocked and men are tearing one another apart. In the straightforward reality of the Committee, everything was in its axis, was smoothed, was resolved; everyone was fraternally united and evil did not exist. In this harmonious reality the Magistrate did not grow old, he remained ever the same; with his black hair he could have been seventy, or even forty-five, he never had a cold or a bad back, the nervous disorders that thwart and upset the existence of ordinary mortals.

  The Committee had at its disposal, obviously, a World Police Force. But this was simply a superfluous precaution, a mere formality, because, said the Magistrate, it was not necessary. During lessons he would open the door and look in for a few seconds, respectful and reassuring, telling the lecturer that the World Police were ready for any eventuality, but nobody need worry because all was in order and there was no reason to call them in. Unlike so many of his predecessors, who dreamed of universal domination so as to keep an iron grip on a world peopled (in their view) with ne’er-do-wells in need of stiff, tyrannical control, the Magistrate lived in a world populated entirely by men of good will, motivated by the best of intentions.

  The World Committee limited itself to providing sensible advice, with a good-natured and paternal authority deriving from experience and certainly not from spiritual or ideological superiority; the others listened and explained themselves and then decisions were taken for the best. Often he would recount with pained insistence how the World Committee was opposed to the indiscriminate criticism levelled at modern youth – “Come along, we were all young once” – or at the unions’ claims or the iniquity of the times. Rather, during the high school diploma examinations, he would visit all the schools – perhaps being taken for some inspector from the ministry – and sing the praises of the examiners for their attentiveness, the students for their diligence, the school janitors for their zeal.