Microcosms (Panther)

by Magris, Claudio

Like the maso and the valley, the Tyrol vaunts its closure, the compact identity of an “us” to the exclusion of all others. “The Viennese, the Czechs and the other Jews,” Claus Gatterer’s godfather used to say contemptuously, including in the list other treacherous outsiders such as the Hapsburgs, the socialists, exponents of international finance, the Hungarians, the Slavs in general, priests (except for those from his valley), the Bolsheviks and the Italian police. Ethnic purity, like all purities, is the result of a subtraction and it is as rigorous as subtraction is radical – true purity would be nothing, absolute zero obtained from a total subtraction.

  Tyrolean autonomous identity, which first asserted itself in 1254 and reappeared in 1919 with a plan for an independent state, has often been based on exclusion. The Tyrol’s fatal dates are those when, time and time again, that autonomy came unstuck: 1363, when the Tyrol became Hapsburg following Margareta Maultasch and lost for ever its chance of becoming a Switzerland; 1806, the Bavarian occupation; 1809, the French invasion; 1918, the separation of the Südtirol annexed by Italy; 1939, the choice between Germany and Italy that left the Südtirolese warped and divided.

  Never realized at the political level, autonomy survives in local prerogatives and idiosyncrasies, in the fabric of existence that lies beneath History, and which at that depth moves more slowly than the dynamic surface, like a geological stratum that remains in place even when the earth above is moved and shovelled away. The key to the Tyrol is the ancient right – sanctioned in 1511 by the Emperor Maximilian’s Landlibell – to use its own territorial militia, the Landwehr and the Landsturm, only within its territory, for the Tyrol and not for any larger nation. The region, not the State – ethnicity, not nationality.

  Up until a few years ago, the standards and the pennants waved by the Schützen seemed to be pathetic old junk, stuffed birds or stags’ antlers nailed to the wall. Now the rosy napes and thighs that stand out between the feathered hats and the leather shorts are a guaranteed hallmark of ethnic purity which, in this Europe of local specialities and chauvinisms, are appreciated once more. History gives the rudder a shove, great empires are undone, the boroughs are called into the limelight; the closed maso survives the Napoleonic prefects and the Communist Internationale, it claims to represent the here and now and the immediate future. In all Europe the fever of local nationalisms is raging, the cult of diversities that are no longer loved as so many concrete expressions of human universality, but rather are idolized now as absolute values, each one rabidly at odds with the rest.

  “Refo,” is what an exponent of the Enlightenment would like to say, knowing that the cards will be shuffled again and the universals of politics, now eclipsed in the postmodern Middle Ages, will sooner or later return to govern a greater game. And thinking of the episode in 1910 when startled horses were about to involve Francis Ferdinand in a fatal accident as they pulled his carriage along the valley, one speculates on what might have come to pass if the accident had happened, thus avoiding Sarajevo and heaven knows what else. But the cotecio-playing exponent of the Enlightenment, perfectly aware of how varied and unpredictable the plot of life is, finds himself in considerable difficulty because of the twist events have taken. What’s more, he knows that even the perfunctory faith in progress, in history and the universals, has much to answer for. Anything but enthusiastic about the cards he has in his hand, he is not so sure he will receive anything better from a future deal, so he lets the others decide – cock-sure and impassioned as they are – whether to redo or not, as indeed is his right under the rules of cotecio: “Indifferent,” he says.

  They’ll end up getting cross, Helga, the big sister, says to Lisa, pointing at Konrad as he nips about on all fours between and under the tables, tugging at the guests’ trousers. Lisa looks at her son, she doesn’t smile but something on her thin lips dissolves, as if she had been kissed. Konrad has curly hair, he has a sweet, intelligent look and when he vanishes under the chairs to escape from those who try to catch him, his laugh is seductive and irresistible. One Christmas there was the sound of a baby crying coming from somewhere; Mrs Mairgunter shook her head, Marisa told her to bring him out so everyone could see him. What do father and mother matter? When a boy is born he is the one who counts; shepherds and kings came to welcome him and never asked a thing, even the ox and the ass set to work warming the newborn in the hay with their breath and they paid no attention to Joseph, nor to Mary.

  Konrad stops, looks at the cat lying near the window. The cat is grey, but its paws have white marks. The snow outside is white too. In the glass there’s another cat, with whiskers too, and two of his uncles have whiskers as well. Muine, ps, ps. Francesco wants to teach him how to say, “kitty kitty”, but Konrad laughs. He knows Italian, but cats are addressed in the dialect of the valley. Sheep, too, Pampa, lock, lock. There are many ways of saying sheep, Görre if it’s a female that has already lambed, Tulle if it’s a ram, Gstraun if it’s been castrated and Killpole if it’s a young female. Konrad laughs, does some acrobatics and blows a kiss towards the window. Lisa almost smiles.

  Uncle Jakob gives him a sweet, strokes his head, Lisa stands and goes to pick the boy up in her arms. Jakob drinks, laughs at a joke cracked by a man sitting in the Stube and gets ready to go to sleep, holding a blanket under his arm. He has a room, but he likes to sleep wherever, even on the bench in the laundry next to the cellar, it’s always nice and warm. It’s good in winter, he says, his voice a bit thick, even before and after the holidays when no one comes, only the drunks from the village. There isn’t much to do and the evenings are long. Even if we often quarrel, especially when we’ve had a bit to drink, we brothers and sisters are all very close. You mustn’t think Lisa’s rude. Lisa’s a good sort. And tears come to his eyes as he chuckles.

  Just once a year the car enters the valley taking a left turn, coming from Brunico, or rather from Schönhuber’s, where we go in the afternoon, Christmas after Christmas, to expand, piece by piece, the Meissen porcelain dinner service. Meissen porcelain, the Zwiebelmuster, is white and cobalt blue. Azure is the colour of the stained glass in churches, high in the nave and far back in the apse; remote heaven of seas and skies above the people kneeling, pushing, praying and growing old in the pews during Mass. Heaven is azure because it is far away. The blue of those plates, tureens, coffee cups and salad bowls is a bit more accessible.

  Each return from Anterselva brings a piece or two more – a cake slice, a vegetable dish. Anniversaries, birthdays of the son of God or of Granny Pia; laying the table is a dress rehearsal for the Promised Land, Marisa dips the ladle into the tureen, and the cobalt flowers sink into the leek velouté while the wine drains from one’s glass. A year later her hand makes the same gesture, simple and unfathomable; there is a new square serving dish and a cheese platter, in partial compensation for someone who has left the table once and for all and as a welcome for the latest arrival who sleeps in the arms of the nearest aunt to hand.

  The Meissen service, calendar and reckoning of the years. We started off with the basic plates, dinner and soup, way back when Paolo first went to nursery school; then, twelve place settings having been reached, came the serving dishes, or at least the essential ones, circular and oval in two sizes; then the triangular vegetable plates – confirmations, a good mark in Latin, the coffee set for twelve with milk jug and sugar pot; the first girls start coming to the house, the sauce boat: before managing to complete the service for sixteen, the Soviet Union has time enough to disappear. Between the purchase of the oval serving dish and a triple candlestick one loses the tempo of the music a couple of times and those inadvertently muffed beats continue to produce, now and then, a few false notes that spoil the party.

  Momentous meals, the wine ordered at Collalbrigo or Isola d’Asti, with due respect to the Mairgunters who always put the wines of the Kalterer See on their table. The film with which food and bottles cloud reality is a benevolent one, it does not remove things from sight, nor the upset they generate, but through it t
hey arrive a little muffled, like noises in the snow, subdued just as much as is necessary to let everyone continue telling stories, sometimes even coarse ones. That buzz of words and laughter does not slow down the rush of time, rather it transcribes its brusque dissonance into a score that is a touch more fluid and listenable:

  Everybody says I’m blonde

  But I’m not blonde at all

  I wear my hair black

  Black in making love to you

  The lunch is over, the table is cleared and the Meissen plates are replaced in the Biedermeier dresser – table, bridal-chamber and tomb.

  The car returns to Antholz with the fruit-salad bowls bought earlier from Schönhuber. As the evening falls the snow at the sides of the road begins to acquire the colour of the swords and the blue pomegranates on the porcelain. At one bend, near a fallen tree, the tracks left that morning by Donatella’s skis can be seen clearly, fixed by the cold. She turned sharply just there, to avoid hitting that trunk, and dug deeper grooves in the snow. At Oberrasen, Francesco and Irene, their skis over their shoulders, are waiting for the bus to return to Antholz for supper. Perhaps Beppino is right to grumble about Irene, saying that she shouldn’t ski; she’s already in her fourth month and has decided to call her unborn daughter Stella Giulia. But Barbara, who does not know the meaning of fear, replies that the slope is so gentle that to fall over would take all of Beppino’s rare skill coupled with those twenty-year-old planks he insists on wearing on his feet.

  The Heufler stands out on the right, at the same level as Oberrasen, an improbable castle with its sloping four-sided roof, towers at each corner and iron grilles at the windows. Built in 1580, it is a hotel now and the bar is in the big dark room where the speck used to be smoked; the ceiling and the walls have been blackened by the centuries, condensed in an ancient smell of ham. On the first floor, in the Hearrnstube, the hexagonal Renaissance ceiling dominates inlaid tabernacles, columns that end in beehive shapes, a splendid stove in green ceramic tiles, and doors with a design that reproduces the entire room, a heraldic algorithm. The furniture is perfectly preserved, but there are signs of woodworm at work. “Allah alone conquers” is written on the walls of the Alhambra, and He, the Inscrutable, can take the form of the worm gnawing away at that precious wood, making it disappear in his black and winding tunnel, the empty riverbed of time.

  The Heufler is a glossy illustration of the Tyrol, evoking family crests, tournaments and manor houses, that mixture of dreamy fantasy and clumsy heaviness that goes to make up German civilization which in the Tyrol advances towards the Latin world. Heufler is the Tyrol to the nth degree and therefore artificial, it is too real and therefore seems false; it already seemed familiar thanks to some animated cartoon and so for years one walked past it without stopping, believing it to be a kitsch reconstruction. Only on learning that the fake castle is real does one go to take a look at it, in homage to learning and history. Perhaps even the woodworm would lose his poignancy if he were inexorably consuming a mere imitation.

  At Bagni di Salomone, Bad Salomonsbrunn, the pine trees are thick and healthy, rich in cones, and they surround the chapel that invokes the Ave Maria, as also the thermal springs celebrated over the centuries for their therapeutic virtues, especially against female sterility. The springs run mild through the snow and the lukewarm moss, like Carducci’s celebrated Clitumno, although in a poorer, German version.

  On these fields Inge, the ski instructor, taught Maïthé to ski, when Toni brought her into the valley for the first time. A few years later she taught Marianna, since that visit was prolonged into an indissoluble marriage till death them do part, and for the past year now she has been teaching Stella Giulia. A little higher up, which is already Antholz Niedertal, is the Obermair farm, with its wooden balcony turned towards the sun, concealing a story worthy of Céline. In May 1945 five French Pétainistes who had been condemned to death were hiding there: a journalist and writer, one of the marshal’s bodyguards, an important functionary from the Vichy government’s propaganda ministry, a woman and a young man of eighteen, who was discovered and shot. They lived hidden away, one in Obermair and others on nearby farms, Unterhauter and Pallhuber and traded jewels for foodstuff. Hunted as they were like wild beasts, they had not made a bad choice for a hideaway in this valley, where people hoped for the Reich’s victory and where there had been no shortage of volunteers for the Wehrmacht and even the SS. If Pétain and his government had sought refuge in the unreal castle at Sigmaringen, these refugees had ended up in a Sigmaringen in miniature, with bales of hay and piles of wood in place of antique gold.

  One of them, for fun, even wrote a book on the Antholz valley and its customs and traditions. Writing has this function, too, it takes one’s mind off death. Pastures, hillocks and slopes are dotted with small-holdings; even the life of all this timber scattered down the mountainsides has its all-encompassing historiographers, warring with time as they record every detail, without neglecting the least old cabin as it slowly rots away. In the footsteps of the first comprehensive chronicler of the valley, the Redemptorist priest Lorenz Leitgeb who described it in meticulous detail in his seminal Mei Hoamat of 1909, Hubert Müller, in recent years, has reconstructed the story of every farm, of the marriages, deaths and successions that have kept them in the family or passed them on into other hands, of the inns and the genealogy of the innkeepers, of old Bruggerwirt by the stream, of Sonnenwirt who sold Mesnerwirt part of the Maishof, and the venerable age that the innkeepers’ widows generally reach (ninety-eight for Rauter-Mütterlein and ninety-seven for Zieles-Barbele), of past unpunished crimes and purported judicial errors, such as the death penalty by strangulation, passed in 1880 on Josef Steiner, owner of the Innersiesslhof; he had been accused (unjustly in the people’s view) of murder and died in jail in Bohemia after having his sentence commuted.

  Müller’s Antholz Village Chronicle is a universal history condensed in a small valley; perhaps the most effective strategy for avoiding the pain of living is to dedicate oneself to exhuming other people’s lives, thus forgetting one’s own, and Hubert Müller, moving between the Stube of the Herberhof and the parish library close by, found his way in the cadenced rhythm of the time that was assigned to him. Under the scholar’s patient gaze, cramped space dilates, the atom splits into a mobile plurality, into a kaleidoscope of names and events: the three Germans on the run in 1945 who throw a crate full of money into the lake; the winter in which a horse sinks into the same lake because the ice gives way under its weight; the first parish priest in 1220 and the first teacher, Johann Messner, in 1832 who, as well as teaching, was also a clockmaker, umbrella repairer, broom-tier, toothpuller, turner, carpenter, and the postmaster.

  Hubert Müller spends his life putting down on paper real events and names, those names that all narrators find it difficult to relinquish, even when discretion and diplomacy require that reality be touched up. Storytelling is a guerrilla war against and a connivance with oblivion; if death did not exist perhaps no one would tell stories. The more humble – physically closer to the earth, humus – the subject of a story is, the more one is aware of the relationship with death. The ups and downs of men, famous and unknown, flow once more into those of the seasons with their rains and snowfalls, into those of the animals and the plants, into the ups and downs of objects as they endure, as they are consumed.

  The annals of Antholz are a grand history, because they recount the species rather than individuals or peoples, and the species includes the entire landscape in which the species moves. The annals mention not only the Russian prisoner found dead at Niedertal and those who returned from the Second World War, but also the changes in the signs that announce the arrival of bad weather; the last bear in the valley, killed in 1790, the last wolf hunted down in 1812, the last lynx perhaps in 1824, the twenty-five-kilogram trout in the lake, the lightning bolt of 2 August, 1712 that hit the belltower and killed a girl, the hailstorm in 1828 and the flood in 1879; the great number of eggs gathered
through-out the village by the Reverend Galler on 13 May, 1908, so as to break and beat them and spread them over the burns suffered by a charcoal burner, Konrad De Colli. The arrival of the Italian troops in 1919 is recorded alongside the great snowfall of the same year.

  History slowly seeps into Geography, into deciphering the tracks and the furrows dug in the soil. The landscape slowly crumbles, the playhouse flats slide about almost as though hit by a small earthquake; close-ups recede and monuments shake, other things pop up and move forward – tools, jackets left hanging in the abandoned farm buildings, crowns painted in the family crests.

  Geographical time is as rectilinear as historical time, because the mountains and the seas are born and die, but its timescale is so big that it curves, like a line traced on the surface of the earth, and establishes a different relationship with space; places are bobbins, where time is wound up upon itself. To write is to unravel these bobbins, to undo, like Penelope, the fabric of history. So it is perhaps not a complete waste of time to try to write something down while sitting in the Stube at the Herberhof, even if Lisa might be right to pull a face as she says, “What … writing again? Always writing, writing … that’s no use. A little bit, yes, but too much, no. You’d be better off writing a bit less and thinking a bit more.”

  Antholz has produced more than the peasants who on 15 April, 1916 mistook the first aeroplane to pass over the valley for a big kite or a buzzard; it has also produced two personages from the big world of politics – a revolutionary and a rebel. Peter Passler, one of the leaders of the 1525 peasant revolt, was born and raised in the Altenfischer house in Anterselva di Mezzo. His father had already been expelled from the village for his ideas on religious and social reform. Peter assumed the leadership of groups of peasants linked to the movement led by Michel Gaismair, the great Tyrolean revolutionary whose back was stooped as a result of nights spent reading and studying, and whom he met at Antholz in 1526. Passler and his men took on princes, bishops and prelates, preaching and fighting for religious freedom, the destruction of ecclesiastical power, the destruction of the walls of all cities, which were to become villages, the collectivization of craftsmen’s work, Anabaptism and price control.