Microcosms (Panther)

by Magris, Claudio

  Prehistory favours the peaks, while history prefers the valley floors, carved out by the glaciers over time immemorial. Now we are down there and the most we manage is to climb up as far as the Pietra Nera, the Black Stone, an erratic rock thus christened one day by the cotecio players because it stands out dark in the snowfield below the Antholzer Scharte. Since then, because its nomenclator became truly obsessed by it, not only has it become an obligatory destination for a walk between Christmas and New Year (and it has to be reached, even when at each step one sinks into snow up to one’s knees), but it has also entered, albeit unofficially, the local toponymy thanks to the debriefings held by its conquerors on their return to the Stube. For some time now we have all been down here, on the valley floor; even whoever it was who brandished the stone axe found on the right bank of the Antholz stream, near the ruins of the Neurasen fort, or the Iron-Age bowls and knives found in 1961 in a necropolis at Niederrasen, even those peoples were used to looking at the world more or less from our height, from below.

  The river erodes and consumes its bed, history carves the rock and descends ever further, like a blade cutting the furrowed sphere that rotates in space; one fine day the cuts will reach the centre of the earth and each slice of the water melon will fly off on its own. The detritus of time, which fertilizes the valleys and the pastures where the shepherd lives for months with his animals, are ancient bones reconciled together in the humus that melds them, Carantanian Slavs, the Duke of Tassilo’s Bavarians, Franks, Longobards and before them remote peoples, Ligurians, Illyrians, Celts, Rhaeti and others who are pure names, Venosti, Saevantes, Laianci, names that perhaps indicate the same people and their conflicts, their mingling, their destruction and their extinction. At Rasen, writes Müller in his Antholz Village Chronicle, which deals with each and every farm and reconstructs the genealogy of their owners, the ethnic substratum is a Germanic–Romance–Slav mix, while Antholz is an “unsullied German settlement”.

  There are borders running everywhere and one crosses them without realizing: the ancient one between Rhaetia and Noricum, the frontier between Bavarians and Alemanni, between Germans and Latins. All the Tyrol is a frontier, dividing and uniting; the Brenner separates two states and yet lies at the centre of a land that is felt to be a single entity. Names, too, change their meaning. Once Südtirol, a term that appeared only in 1839, indicated Trentino, and the Tyrol was a land that vaunted three nations: German, Italian and Ladin. But the Brenner, geography tells us, is the watershed between the Adriatic and the Black Sea, between the waters that with the Adige run into the sea of every persuasion and those that through the Drava flow into the Danube. Adriatic and Danube, the sea and continental Mitteleuropa, life’s two opposing and complementary scenarios; the border that separates them, and which in the course of a day trip one crosses without realizing it, is a small black hole leading from one universe to another.

  The car that heads for Antholz every year in the days immediately after Christmas comes from the direction of Dobbiaco, and so it enters the valley turning to the right; the front wheel, as it turns, flattens the neat parallel lines at the edge of the road traced by the skis of someone who has come this far down – their trail is clearly visible on the snow – sliding the whole length of the valley.

  The weeks spent at Antholz, which over the years add up to a period of respectable length, are made up only of December and January days, fused together into a single, collected uninterrupted time containing all the faces of the winter: the frosts, the avalanches, the snowfalls, the sharp icicles hanging from the roof and dripping when the Scirocco is in the air. The valley is winter, a place for wintering; sleep and hibernation in which life, freed from the inhibitions and the stress of our usual enforced wakefulness, comes to and relaxes. The Tyrol, said the Emperor Maximilian, whose throne was his saddle, is a rough coat but it keeps one warm. The body stretches under the soft snow jacket, one’s face turns to the sun with eyes half closed and cheeks braced by the fresh snow, worries fly away like birds from a field, chased off by the laughter that in the Stube runs from one to another like wine; sex awakens in a vigorous flux, in the room under the pitched roof the heavy complicated layers of woollen underwear and pullovers come off more easily than jackets and ties.

  Under the snow, weeks and years distil into a single present that preserves them all and from which they reappear like objects returned by the thaw. Time crystallizes in a perennial snowfield, the layers of snow fallen over different years touch each other and are superimposed, one on top of another. Behind the Herberhof, on the nursery slope, Marisa’s hair is dark, on the terrace of the Wildgall hotel near the lake, under the mountain that gives it its name, the white streaks in her hair do not come from the snow, but the painter who has added that new colour comes from a good school and that little touch is the mark of a skilful hand.

  It is curious to know a valley and a life covered with snow, at the most some tuft of withered grass revealed by a wet thaw on a warm day, together with cow dung and mud. The striations of the frozen lake, the trembling of the rigid water that streak it now green now blue, according to its depth and its exposure to the sun, these are the object of an experimental science learned over years of observation: the shadow of the Wildgall that lengthens rapidly over the lake in the early afternoon, darkening the bright sky-blue into a violet blue; the crested edge of the pistes that cut into the lake, frozen lacework in the evening. In the summer those waters are turquoise, at least so suggest the postcards to be found at the bar. Angela is writing one to her boyfriend who has stayed behind in town, while Francesco and Paolo, already at the door with Marianna, tell her to hurry up if she wants to come with them to the firemen’s ball in the Kulturhaus, an institution which bears the name of Haward von Antholz, a mediaeval troubadour from these parts.

  On entering the valley the first village is Niederrasen – Rasun di Sotto – and all the guide books point out that the dialect spoken here carries small but obvious differences, especially in pronunciation, compared with the dialect spoken twelve kilometres away in Antholz. At the village limits, which the car leaves behind and to the right on its way to Antholz, a small monument takes one back to a familiar space – time nexus. A chapel, decorated with images of San Rocco and San Sebastiano, commemorates the year of the plague, 1636. The world of the Danube, which begins just beyond the watershed, is dotted with plague markers, those columns of the Most Holy Trinity erected to the glory and the wretchedness of Creation during times of pestilence; radiating out from the one standing in the Graben in Vienna, they multiply repeatedly throughout Mitteleuropa, right up to its eastern and southern extremities, and give these regions a unifying seal.

  The chapel rather than a column is a trifle irritating, like those small deviations from the mealtime ritual that upset Kant, but the link between the plague and Counter-Reformation compassion is anyway confirmation of an expectation, a habitual reassurance. Nevertheless, Mitteleuropa is Catholic and Jewish and when one of these two elements is missing it is lopsided; the Jewish part is absent in the mountains of the German Tyrol – that symbiosis of restless melancholy and irrepressible vitality which makes the Majesty of the empire and the world picaresque and in its solemn incense gives a hint of the acrid smell of the back alley.

  The Germans without Jews are a body deficient in a substance necessary for the organism; the Jews are more self-sufficient, but in almost every Jew there is something Germanic. Ethnic purity leads to rickets and goitre. Nazism, like all barbarism, was also idiotic and self-destructive; in exterminating millions of Jews it mutilated German civilization and destroyed, perhaps for ever, the civilization of Mitteleuropa.

  Gestorben – “dead”, someone says, tracing a cross over Beppino’s last stake, and having lost that one too, he is out of the game. Beppino stands, picks up his anorak and his leather cap to go for a walk. Jakob is back from the stable and smiles a cunning smile, a look of greed in his eye. The stable is his realm, like the pastures in the summer; in t
he division of labour within the family, he has been entrusted with the job of dealing with the animals, while the others attend to the humans. He milks, grooms, pitches hay with the big fork, empties sacks of steaming manure, which once upon a time in winter the village children would try to get hold of to warm their bare frozen feet in the muck. Jakob is the one who, when the time comes, takes the calf off to the slaughterhouse; he strokes it behind its ears, gives it some moist hay to eat, which is the tastiest type, and pulls it behind him by its halter, whistling contentedly.

  Jakob disappears into the kitchen to eat the left-over soup which has been kept for him. Lisa smokes, watching the streetlamp out in the dark road. Before vanishing into the kitchen, Jakob moves closer to her and tells her something with a chuckle, but she makes no answer. “It’s only gone ten, time never ends,” says Lisa to Beppino as he passes in front of her on his way out. Everything’s changing, have you seen Joseph’s hotel, the one he started when he went into business on his own? A bit of change is a good thing, but not too much. I’ve been to France, Mum took me to the station at Olang, past Niederrasen, hours and hours we had to wait for the train, but at least there, in the station, nothing changed and I was happy to be there with Mum. I was in Paris for two months. Mum came to pick me up at Olang when I came back as well, the train stopped and lots of people got off … lots, too many. Lisa looks at Beppino and her eyes burn with a black fire. Why is there all that running about and shouting in the streets? Outside there is not a soul, the night is empty. From one of the rooms upstairs comes the sound of a newborn baby crying. Lisa climbs the stairs, while in the Stube the man who works with the snowmobile on the lake sniggers, a bit drunk and drowsy.

  Beppino goes out, looks up, recognizes Orion. Gestorben, as Toni used to say it so well, happily tracing the cross on the others’ stakes, because it never happened to him. Once Baron Mattia challenged him to a game of cotecio, their respective living room and dining room at stake: the next day Toni sent a truck to the baron’s villa to load everything up.

  In a brothel not far from here,

  I saw the Baron Mattia,

  With his dick in his handy

  He looked anything but randy

  And out of one eye rolled a tear

  Toni used to recite this, a doggerel rhyme thought up by an imaginative local rhymester who spent his time in the pubs watching and commenting on the players and their game.

  The stars hang in the sky like snowflakes on a Christmas tree, many large twinkling stars, little candles and glass balls lit up among dark branches. One lifts one’s head and at first there is a great blackness powdered with luminous dots, then more and more appear, a dust and a whiteness that flower in the dark, flowers of ice on the windows of the night, ever clearer, ever whiter. A car passes and you move to the edge of the road; you lean over the kerb and disappear in the shining darkness, you fall into the Milky Way, you are already in the midst of its black waters and its white foam.

  Betelgeuse passes through the meridian at midnight exactly on 21 December and its diameter varies in strict relationship with the oscillations in its luminosity. Up there or down here, angles, distances and orbits are rigorously prescribed, one cannot get the game wrong, nor can one change it. Who knows whether the cancer that wrote Toni out of the game, gestorben, is part of the mandatory rules, as in cotecio there is padre Gorna ciapa e torna, “Father Gorna picks up and returns,” picks up and replies with the same suit, so that it will be the other who has to pick up and then fetches up with more points. With Toni Father Gorna’s law never failed. That really was a priest’s joke, which is to say a bad joke, to leave them all in the lurch. Laughter, now, comes a little bit more difficult and laughter is everything; luckily there was a lot of laughter in that Stube, for many years, a capital investment that continues to produce interest, and one laughs again, especially when one thinks about him.

  The barracks to the left of the road are closed, the rolls of barbed wire keep no one out now. The Südtirol bombs no longer explode: pylons, monuments and people are no longer blown sky-high for the liberation of the Tyrol. Antholz always has been quiet, not that this prevented the carabinieri, in 1964, from beating up a few card-carrying members of the Volkspartei in the course of some interrogations and searches. A little farther on, again on the lefthand side of the road, not even the night manages to hide the camouflaged bunkers on the mountainside, the so-called “I don’t trust them” line built by Mussolini along the frontier with his disconcerting German ally.

  Those papier mâché bunkers are the wings, part of the stage set for a comedy of misunderstandings, for the initially haughty and later servile relationship between Fascism and Nazism. In Alto Adige the misunderstanding reached its most grotesque level. Fascism had sought to strip the German population of its sense of nationality and yet it submitted itself to the Reich, which promulgated German domination of the world. The majority of the Südtirolese would have chosen Fascism, would have been glad of Fascist protection against the Bolsheviks, had not Fascism afflicted them, as Germans, with its Italian nationalism. Thus they were often driven to becoming Nazi supporters, in spite of their traditional Catholicism which made them mistrust Hitler’s pagan proclivities. Even at the time of the Axis, recalls Claus Gatterer, in Südtirol the children played at Germans against Italians and, during the Ethiopian campaign, they supported the Negus, the emperor of Ethiopia.

  Hitler, the Führer of the German people and therefore also the guarantor of their Germanness, sacrificed the Südtirol to the alliance with Mussolini; they reached agreement with the famous 1939 operation. Following this the Südtirolese, so tenaciously attached to the unity of their own land and stock, had to accept that precisely land and stock were to be sundered, they had to choose between joining the Italians to remain on their land, or to remain Germans, uprooting themselves from the land and transplanting themselves to Germany; indeed some plans even envisaged their being moved still farther away, to places yet to be incorporated into the Reich, the Crimea for example. The outcome of the Second World War compensated them for this ordeal, since even those few who had left have rightly returned to their homes, where now if anything it is the Italian minority that finds itself in trouble. The abandoned bunkers are still there, an effective stage set for the absurd theatre of the world.

  Another few metres along the road, leaving to one side those mournful and garish relics, we reach the pine tree, it too on the left on the way up the valley, the symbolic limit of Anterselva di Mezzo. Every evening, before going to sleep, one takes a stroll to embrace its trunk. During the first years it was easy, thin as it was. Now the arms that wrap around it cannot join up on the other side. It is good to feel the rough bark on one’s cheek. From the end of the road come voices, a familiar high-pitched laugh, and one can just make out a slender and intrepid figure, someone else a bit behind in the darkness. Beppino buttons up his trousers before the others reach him, spits into the snow the piece of bark that he had in his mouth, sharp and bitter, and goes down to meet them.

  The twelve kilometres between the fork on the road for Brunico and Antholz Mittertal are long, they cross years; the car that travels along them penetrates invisible walls of time. Niederrasen is a hybrid town; the vestiges of its history have been absorbed by the style of the tourism there, a style which as nearby as Oberrasen, Rasun di Sopra, almost disappears, sucked into the long and slow rhythms of the genius loci. The houses are clean and well looked after; the church, rebuilt in 1822 but dating back a thousand years, is decorated inside in a flesh-coloured Baroque marble and has intricately carved wooden pews. Near the entrance there is a female saint in a blue mantle severely applying the scourge to her own body; opposite her, a male saint prays with ecstatic fervour, but he spares himself the flagellation. Even in the exercise of their devotions men have an easier time of it. In the dark green of the Christmas fir-tree, next to the altar and adorned with small red apples, shine stars of light-coloured hay, cottage lights in the dark of the wood, to wh
ich we are drawn like lost children.

  Opposite the church, the rectory with its weather vanes gathering the wind from the Taurus Mountains. From the seventeenth century it was the seat of the Gericht, the tribunal that had been housed up till then in the castle of Altrasen that had fallen into ruin. Its jurisdiction bordered on that of the Antholz tribunal, which the counts of Pustertal had entrusted in the eleventh century to the bishops of Bressanone; these administered justice by means of their judges from Brunico, until secularization in 1803. Like the ski tracks on the snow, ancient borders of territorial competence and various powers intersect over the land, splitting the geopolitical atom of the small, closed valley into an erratic fractal multiplicity, into the tortuous plurality of all feudal macro- or microcosms.

  The foot that moves forward in the snow and the automobile that ascends the valley are the simulation of a Jacobin advance, the battalions of General Broussier on the heels of the Tyrolean patriots in 1809 following the Battle of Brunico. Those who come from the city or the plain unwittingly bring a Napoleonic code with them, along with their skiing gear. But the foot sinks, the car skids; in the maso, that family concern on the side of the mountain, the hereditary succession follows other laws, rooted in centuries of difference and mediaeval tradition rather than in the universal equality of Reason. We are not in the world, but in Tyrol, and as the old saying proudly goes, if the world betrays, the Land, the country, holds good.