Microcosms (Panther)

by Magris, Claudio

  Gradually he took de facto control of the German noticeboard, which thus carried his proclamations alongside the lecturer’s notes regarding exam dates or office hours. In these publications he “warmly greeted the entire”, nay the “universal ranks of educators”, or the “university–universal–educators body”; he nominated committees of honour and was especially concerned with protecting freedom, or rather freedoms, like a true disciple of de Tocqueville. Indeed, in his proclamations, which often rambled into interminable parades of enigmatic acronyms or incomprehensible sequences of syllables, he sustained “uninter-ference”, the abolition of “underminers”, the “conjugation of rights, safe, legitimate, generousitive cohabitation, and safeguarding from “remotisms”, “equifiscalization”, “educatorialists’ serenity”, the “gerund of the dialogue”, “universal accessibleness”.

  These cyclostyled proclamations went the rounds of the lecture halls and the corridors. When the Magistrate spoke in the fiery student assemblies of the Seventies, his tranquil voice, rich in terms that suited the lexis of that period (committees, social surrogation, structuralization), took control of the auditorium for some minutes until the inevitable adjective “lunaceous”, proffered sweetly but firmly, disconcerted his listeners.

  He abhorred all forms of insult and all militancy, but was also firm in his rejection of any excessive criticism of them and even expounded his reasoning. All was well with the world, all it needed was a little indulgence in its ordering and above all it needed someone who would say that everything was alright; thus, when he stood in the middle of the road to help in thinning out the traffic or when at the entrance to the theatre he invited the audience to take their seats, he did it above all to soothe the spirit and calm everyone down. He was stern, regretfully stern, only with the alarmists: one newspaper had reported on the crisis in the university, with the exception of one faculty, “the only island of happiness”, and he replied, in a letter, that “all the university, all the world, is an island of happiness”.

  These were the years of lead, of terrorism, of blood in the streets. The Magistrate even addressed a leaflet to the Red Brigade, calling them “O propounders of eternal preludes”, but he felt it was not necessary to call in the World Police, given his reluctance to use force of any kind. Indeed, he refrained from using violence even when he was beaten up by some thugs and then, when asked how he was, he immediately launched into a speech about the Committee with the dignity of one who has no time to concern himself with his own personal condition.

  Who was it who said that in the rationality of Turin there was a hidden element of delirium, and that the checkerboard of her streets favoured the dream of Total Institutions? When all’s said and done that Committee was scarcely more unreal than the United Nations or any other high-ranking organization. Certainly the Magistrate, too, had his prejudices: during a session of the Committee he once observed that there was room for everyone, for Russians and Americans, for Generals and hippies, but, he regretfully added, “If at all possible, basically, we’d prefer to do without the semiotics.”

  It is almost night, even though the embers of the sunset light up the Collina with a glow that appears inextinguishable. “The day, he said, can never die,” thus sang D’Annunzio: but the day does indeed die, even a glorious day, and he knew perfectly well, he had understood everything, the death and the prostitution of beauty, the seduction and the vanity of that rape. When Senator Giovanni Agnelli, owner of FIAT, asked him to use his Muse to christen the Winged Victory statue he’d had built on the heights of the Maddelena, the poet who had created the impossible and immortal language of Undulna promptly delivered the most trite of banalities, “Fiat lux”, as the epigraph says, well knowing that no one would have dared to scrape away that crust of the sublime and to cry out that the king was naked – to have done so would have been in no one’s interests. Money buys poetry, but poetry shows money its rear end.

  And so the day ends – Marisa always knew, but without being afraid of it – and almost everyone goes; beyond Sciolze the Collina drops to the plain. It is time to hurry up, supper must be almost ready and if it’s not too chilly we’ll eat out in the garden. Our hostess will probably already have laid the table under the big trees, she knows the lecturer’s preferences, she knows how much he likes those trees, he’s been coming here to eat for many years – but what does that mean, many years, they are always so few, it has all barely started.

  Someone wanted to stop for a moment at Superga, out of respect for the usual Collina itinerary. But it is not worth arriving late for supper for the sake of that cold and monumental pomp, erected by Victor Amadeus II in thanksgiving for his victory. If one really has to think of that sovereign, it is better to think of him as a miserable old man, a prisoner of his son in the castle at Moncalieri, after losing his throne and his life, rather than as the victor on the hill. As with all victories that victorious basilica is appropriate for death, and there are too many memento mori. It is certainly true that the Torino team whose plane crashed into the Superga would beat any of today’s football clubs. Even the geometry of that basilica, whose curves are praised as being in harmony with those of the Collina, is a monument to Reason, and Reason, we know, often has a disturbing underside. Baruffi recommended that on arriving at Superga one should admire the surrounding view with one’s head down, between one’s open legs. The World is widely known, the Province, however, very little, wrote Amedeo Grossi, Architect, Geometer, and Surveyor, at the end of the eighteenth century, and perhaps for this reason Baruffi sought unusual perspectives for the province, but even the universe, at least every now and then, should be observed from that position.

  Apsyrtides

  Nino is always telling the story of Palazzo Petrina, on Lussingrande, and it is difficult to remember when one heard it for the first time. The story of the palace, but more importantly the story of Captain Pietro, who had it built, and gave it the old family name, which had already been steeped in glory for some time thanks to the services rendered to the Serenissima on the high seas. Pietro Petrina defeated the Algerian pirate Haggi Bechir in the waters off Cyprus, chasing him all the way to the coast of Carmania, suffering little damage in the process – the mainsail riven, the foresail riven. That was how he earned himself the title of Knight of Saint Mark, a gold medal and other coin that went towards the construction of the palace, where he slept just one night. Indeed, he was off again immediately on the Grazia Divina, the same ship that had brought him victory in the battle with Bechir, off to meet death by shipwreck on the Scillies, where the seas foam and seethe on the rocks, one of the most wretched places on earth, where even the ablest sailor can soon come to grief. And the waves had carried the ship’s figurehead off to the other side, to leeward, and it beached on the coast of Tresco, with its violet-blue irises and lilies, where the water breaks white and blue on the granite and shines like gold. But immediately after Captain Pietro the story goes on to speak of his grandson or great-grandson Marco, who lived and died in the same palace, ownership of which in the meantime had passed to the town council, which had turned it into a public almshouse.

  Whenever it was first told, Nino often tells the tale at home, too, in Trieste, and certainly does so every time the boat comes within sight of Lussingrande, having left behind, to starboard, the two islands of Oriule, Greater and Lesser, with their red soil and the fig trees and the night-blue water breaking as white as snow on the rocks. He points his finger towards the belltower of the church on the shore, a great mast standing in the wind, and he indicates the palace, hidden as it is by the houses from which in truth it can barely be distinguished for all its high-flown name.

  It may well be, at least in some moments, that for Nino the story alludes not only to the inconstancy of fortune in general but also, more specifically, to the destiny of the Italians who lived for centuries on these islands: boat-owners who had acquired the habit of bullying the Croats. At the end of the Second World War they were chased out of these
lands which the Slavs in their vengeful uprising tore from the Italian defeat. The exodus crushed and dispersed them in their thousands – like Nino who left his home, his boat and all the rest – while those few who remained at home, which was no longer their home, were harassed and intimidated.

  But every time one comes to the archipelago – rarely by sea, in a boat, but more often by car, catching the ferry at Brestova, on the eastern coast of Istria and disembarking at Porozine, on the island of Cherso – every reference to a History that is present in still-tender scars evaporates, disappears like mist in the reflection of the sun on the sea and the light-coloured Cyclopean ridges to the sides of the road – an epic, Homeric landscape in which there is no place for tortuous psychology and resentment. History is absorbed, like the rain or the hail in the cracks of the rock of the Karst, in that larger and incorruptible time of the summer light, of those blinding white stones; the wounds and the scars of History never become infected, they dry and heal, like scratches on the sole of a bare foot that lands on the island, stepping onto those sharp stones.

  The slopes of the mountain, aflame with flowering broom and covered with blue sage that ripples in the wind, drop steep into the Gulf of Quarnero. The cliff leans over the sea and its trees give shade to the waters, “silvis aequor inumbrat” sang Lucan, aware though he was of the rigours of the winter and the Bora, which assorted better with the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, which was also fought on these waters. Everything seems clear on the road that leads to Cherso, the capital which gives the island its name, between the two seas and beneath the cliffs on either side – on the one hand Istria and on the other the island of Veglia and, beyond that, the Croatian coast. Smell of sage, of myrtle and pine, salt on one’s skin, the wind dry on one’s face, the strident, ceaseless trill of the cicadas, changeless as the yellow noonday light, the honey and the bronze of summer – memory of a childhood more ancient than any already lived or any still to come reaches us from the sea, memory or portent of a grandiose, regal world in which one is at home, like the Knight of Saint Mark in his palace. “Looking at that shifting landscape of bitterness and enchantment, as though in a mirror, it was myself I discovered,” wrote Marisa Madieri in Water-green on seeing the land of her birth for the first time in adulthood and finding in it not a lost, inexistent past, but rather the place of happiness in which to live in the world, that during childhood exists as a promise.

  The promise remains for ever unfulfilled and yet is never disowned, because it is nurtured deep down and is everyone’s deepest truth, everyone’s truest face, the face of childhood not yet stripped of all that life tears away. That face re-emerges from the mirror of the sea: those bays, those waves, the profiles of those ridges are the features of an uncorrupted face that reappears as the rough, patched-up mask of the years dissolves: “I turned and I saw my smile on her lips,” continued Marisa Madieri, reflecting and finding herself in that landscape, as described by Riobaldo in the Grande Sertão by Guimarães Rosa.

  Whoever looks in the mirror of that sea beholds the child of a king and cannot say whether he was unaware of the fact or had simply forgotten it. The high summer inflicts wounds; that gaping horizon holds everything and everything, too, that has ever been lost and all that will continue to be lost. It is so easy – even if there before the sea you cannot understand how it might possibly happen – it is easy to forget you are the child of kings and to go wandering about the world knocking like beggars at strangers’ doors. Even Captain Petrina must have forgotten that the Palace was his; he probably felt like an intruder and immediately slipped away, ending up on the bitter, inhospitable sea.

  Nino, too, the first few times he had set foot again on the island after years of resentful absence, found it absurd to have to show a passport in order to obtain permission to visit his home. Then he became used to feeling like an exile and a foreigner, even there, and therefore everywhere. Sometimes, on returning to the island, one is left thinking that perhaps death, too, is the product of this habit of forgetfulness, that perhaps we die because we forget we are immortal. As the Bull of the Zodiac in Kipling’s story (yoked to the plough and having just been stung by the Scorpion), says to Leo, who is even more afraid of death, “I had forgotten too, but I remember now…. I forgot that I was a God…. And you, brother?” But it is too late to remember and to shake off the yoke. Perhaps the yoke is appropriate, perhaps it is a just punishment for the crime of having known or even simply foretold love and happiness and for having forgotten them; for having held the whole kingdom and yet not realized it. Perhaps the exile that has made foreigners of Nino and his people is a harsh punishment for having initially behaved like foreigners towards those who lived alongside them, those who now live in their turn as conquerors, that is as foreigners, in their own home.

  Cherso is one of the thousand islands in the eastern Adriatic, scrupulously counted by Pliny. As late as 1771 Fortis, the abbot, an enlightened traveller who believed in progress though not without some reservations, defined it as a single island together with Lussino, despite the narrow channel dividing them at Ossero, opened up in the remote past of the first protohistoric settlements. Cherso and Lussino divide the Quarnero vertically and form its heart; beyond the small islands that form a crown on their southern extremity – Ilovik, San Piero in Nembi, the two Oriule – a different sea, another world opens up. The Quarnero is the reflective familiarity of white houses on the shore, it is a conjunction of Venetian levity and Mitteleuropa gravity, the latter flowing out into the Adriatic at Fiume. Beyond the Quarnero wider spaces begin, rocky, marine solitudes or more luxurious vegetation, an East and a South that are more verdant, less temperate than the awkward northern asperity that still resides in the light and the rocks of Istria and the islands of the Quarnero.

  Even the Ossero channel is a lesser threshold between differing landscapes. Cherso is barer, scored by the Bora and the karstic crevasses. Its flowers are sage and broom, its buildings are small and light-coloured fishermen’s houses on the shore or, in town, narrow and decorous Venetian-style buildings. On Lussino there are agaves and palms, purple bougainvilleas and light-coloured yuccas, orange-and lemon-trees, almond trees that blossom as early as January, Austro-Hungarian villas and gardens such as those of the Archduke Charles Stephen of Hapsburg, a Riviera sweetness that once – we learn from Giacomo Scotti in his erratic guide to these islands – was Venus’s preferred wintering place. At the end of the nineteenth century it was a favourite resort of aristocrats and haute bourgeoisie from Vienna and Budapest.

  The goddess of love is unimaginable without the sea from which she was born, fertilized from the genitals of Uranus, who was castrated with a scythe by his son Cronus. It would be nice to think, succumbing to an overly relaxed etymology, that it is Time, Chronos, who mutilates the Sky, the Infinite, making a fragment of it fall into the sea, which together with love is an echo of the infinite and a challenge to time. The etymology is false, because Cronus, the divinity who dethrones his father Uranus, has nothing to do with Chronos, but every now and then it is pleasing to lift a shell to one’s ear and to pretend that the murmur heard in that emptiness is the sea. And after all it is not so empty, all it takes is to lift your eyes up and the sea is there in front of you, inexhaustible and unexplainable. Marisa comes out of the water – the first time, the hundredth time; each summer is unique and unrepeatable, one after another they come like the beads of a rosary, time rounds them like pebbles on the beach, between one and the next an infinity opens up.

  On Cherso the rich – the Petrises, the Patrizis – owned fields; on Lussino – where the celebrated Nautical Schools produced the long-haul captains who soon became masters of all the oceans, the Premudas, the Gladulichs, the Ragusins – the maritime families lorded it, the Cosulichs, the Martinolichs, owners of merchant ships and cutters known in the most distant ports of the world. Cherso has an ancient and illustrious history – a Roman colony and a city of Saint Mark. Lussino – which soon superseded its neighbour
– emerged much later and displays, together with the Venetian and Croatian mark, that of the Austro-Hungarian twin-headed eagle, much less apparent on Cherso.

  Over the centuries and under various dominations – from Venice to Austria, from Italy to Tito’s Yugoslavia – the two islands have maintained their own particular plural identity and their links with Istria. Tudjman’s regime seeks to break this identity and these ties, creating administrative bridges between the islands and various provinces on the mainland, which are historically and culturally unrelated to them. All this to weaken the Adriatic islands’ democratic autonomy, mistrustful as they are of the authoritarian and oppressive centralism of the Croatian government. “The Italian Fascists never managed to wring our necks, and now this lot won’t manage it either,” says Ivo, a Croatian who in his time gave the Blackshirts a run for their money, as he fills his guest’s glass in his inn on a bay opposite Susak – Sansego, the only sandy island in these seas, perhaps made of the silt brought here over millennia by the Po or by mythical underground rivers.

  Ivo empties his glass, fills his customer’s once again. This gesture, repeated every now and then, is the only chore he has; the others – cooking, washing dishes, doing the shopping in Lussino, mending the nets – are all entrusted to his wife. What does he think of Tudjman? “Ah, I’d slaughter ’im,” he replies calmly, with the air of one who quietly considers the work to be done.