by Oliver Sacks
On the surface, returning to Pontito was not as intense an experience as he had expected—there had been no mystical revelations, no ecstasies on the heights—but neither had he dropped dead from poisoned waters or had a heart attack, as he had also more than half expected. It was when he left that he really felt the impact.
Back in San Francisco, he found himself in a crisis. First, there was an overwhelming sensory confusion: he seemed to see two pictures of Pontito—two “newsreels”, as he put it—running simultaneously in his head, with the more recent, the new, tending to blot out the old. He could do nothing to stop this perceptual conflict, and when he tried to paint Pontito he found that he no longer knew what to do: “I get confused, I see these two pictures at once”, he told me. “I thought I would paint Pontito as it was, but I ‘see’ it as it is now. I thought I would go crazy. What could I do? Maybe I could never paint Pontito again. I got scared. My God, now—start all over again?—It took me ten days to come back.”
It took ten days for the hallucinatorily vivid pictures of the new Pontito to die down, to stop competing with the old Pontito; ten days for the merely sensory conflict to resolve; and, as for his emotions, they were so confused he hardly dared think about them. At this point, almost desperate, he said, “I wish I never went back. I work best with my fantasy. I can’t work now.” It was a month before he started to draw Pontito again. These new drawings and paintings, just a few inches square, took on an unusually tender and intimate quality: corners, nooks where a boy might sit, nooks where he had sat and dreamt as a child. These little scenes, though they did not contain human figures, had an intensely human feel, as if their occupants had just left or were just about to arrive—very different from the idealized yet deserted scenes he had usually painted.
Thinking over the experience, Franco felt that it had been both enjoyable and exhausting, but compromised, at a deeper level, in his three weeks there, because he had had no time to himself—he had been followed and interviewed every day in Pontito and had had no time to sketch or think. He felt a need to go back a second time, to confront the deeper issues, to spend time alone in Pontito.
In March 1991, there was a second exhibit of Franco’s paintings in Italy—this one in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi in Florence—and I accompanied Franco to the exhibit. He was abashed by the splendid surroundings, by seeing his paintings in vast, palatial rooms. “I feel like an intruder”, he said. “They do not belong.” He and his paintings, he feels, are rooted in the hilly Tuscan countryside; he feels uncomfortable in the cosmopolitan grandeur of Florence.
The next morning, Franco and I are off to Pontito; for the first time, we will see his town together. We pass the Duomo and the Baptistry in the center of Florence, pass the old children’s hospital, the Innocenti, driving through the miraculously preserved old city, unspoiled and deserted now, near dawn on a Sunday. Franco, beside me, is rapt, absorbed in his thoughts.
We pass the road for Pistoia and head toward Montecatini, the slopes on either side of us dotted with old hill towns. “There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern or a type of architecture”, G.K. Chesterton wrote. “It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would wish to make or in which he would wish to wander; the strange flora and fauna of his own secret planet.” For Auden, this landscape was limestone and lead mines; for Franco, it is this old, gnarled, unchanging Tuscan landscape.
A sign warning motorists of snow prompts me to ask Franco whether there was ever snow in Pontito, or whether he had ever painted a snow-whitened Pontito. Yes, there was snow, he says, and he once started a snowscape, but almost all his paintings are of Pontito in primavera, in spring.
As we reach Pescia, at the bottom of the mountain, below Pontito, Franco recognizes people and places: the shop where he used to buy paints forty years ago; a subterranean bar. Little has changed in this slow-paced town. He recognizes the mailman from the 1940s: they throw their arms around each other in the street. Everyone is welcoming; there are smiles everywhere for the prodigal son come home once more. We move on to the city hall, where Franco was given the honors of the city during his first visit. A prophet is honored now in his own land. This pleases him, this local fame; he belongs here, as he does not belong in Florence.
From Pescia the road is narrow and steep. We wind up in second gear after nearly ditching ourselves on the first turn, past Pietrabuona, a town named after its fine stone, with its church and oldest buildings perched on its highest hill. We pass its terraced hills, softly lit, with gnarled olive trees and vines upon them; these terraces are ancient, dating from Etruscan times. We wind around past many small villages—Castelvecchio, Stiappa, San Quirico. Finally, we round another bend in the road and catch our first sight of Pontito. “My God, look at it!” Franco exclaims, sotto voce. “Jesus Christ! I can see my home. No, I can’t—This overgrowth is bad, parasites everywhere. Used to be cherry, pear, fruit trees. Chestnuts, grains, corn, lentils.” He tells me how, as a lanky, long-legged youth, he used to stride from one village to another. As we approach Pontito, Franco’s eyes grow moist. He stares intensely and murmurs to himself as he takes everything in. “This is the bridge, the stream where we did the washing. Down the path, here, the women would walk with baskets on their heads.”
We stop the car, and Franco leaps out, seeing and remembering more details all the time. And, along with this pure topographic memory, there is also a cultural one. He describes how the villagers would take hemp and immerse it in the stream for a year, anchored by rocks, and then take it out to be dried and woven into fabric for sheets and towels, and for sacks for chestnuts: a whole local industry, a tradition, now nearly forgotten, except by Franco. Suddenly, indignant at new growth obscuring the path, he tears it out in giant armfuls. Angry at some new building, he tells me in detail exactly how it used to be: “There was a big rock there, the water ran here.” There is no doubt that every stone, every inch, is engraved in his memory.
“Come sta?” Climbing up the steep cobbled street, Franco greets a stout middle-aged man in a green coat. (“His father gave us candies.”) Franco has a bardic memory, but the trivial and the momentous, the personal and the mythic, are indiscriminately mixed. He stops at the house where his mother was born.
“Sabatoni!”
“Franco!” An old man emerges. (“It’s my uncle.”) “You’ve been in America. What brings you back? I heard there was a show in Florence.” The old man mentions the drying of chestnuts. He forgets the details, but Franco does not. The old man points out that the four houses next to his, so full of life once, are now empty. “When I am dead, it will be empty here, too.”
We visit Franco’s sister Caterina. She and her husband have retired to Pontito, and Franco is distressed to see her looking older than he remembers. Caterina feeds us a magnificent Tuscan lunch—cheese, bread, olives, wine, tomatoes preserved from her garden—and then Franco takes me off to look at the church. It is a beautiful spot, atop the hill and overlooking the rest of the village. In the cemetery, Franco points out the graves of his mother, his father, this relative and that. “There are more people in the graveyard than in the town”, he says softly. Franco plans to stay in Pontito for three more weeks, to do some quiet sketching. He says, “I’m going to put my roots back here.” But, as I leave, my final image is of Franco standing by himself in the cemetery, gazing over the depopulated town, alone.
Franco’s three weeks in Pontito seemed to recharge him; at least, he has been incessantly active since his return. His garage-studio is crackling with life. There are pictures everywhere, old and new—the new ones based on sketches he did in March, and the old ones, started in 1987 but left unfinished with Ruth’s death, now being completed in a burst of new decision and energy.
Seeing Franco once again at work, his renewed fury of recollective and creative energy, raises anew all the questions one has about his singular enterprise, the meaning of Pontito for him. His “new” paintings are no
t really new—he may add the new here and there (a fence, a gate, a new tree perhaps), but they remain essentially the same. His project, in a fundamental sense, remains unchanged. When I visited Franco last summer, I saw a pair of sneakers hanging from the rafters of his garage, with an elaborately calligraphed notice tied to them, saying, in Italian, “With these shoes, after 34 years, I first set foot in what had been the Promised land.” Now that he had set foot in it, it had lost some of its glamour, its promise. “Sometimes I wish I never went back”, he said as he saw me looking at the shoes. “Fantasy, memory, that is the most beautiful.” And then he added, musingly, “Art is like dreaming.”
Seeing the current reality of Pontito was very disturbing to Franco, although he was able to recover from the derailment it caused. But it heightened his sense that the Pontito of here and now is a threat to his own vision and showed him that he must ration any further exposure to it. There have been many subsequent invitations, but he has not returned, even for an exhibit of his own work in the streets of Pontito. Other artists now are flocking to Pontito, but for them it is just another charming Tuscan hill town. Franco, fleeing all this, has returned to his garage, returned to the project that has consumed him for twenty-nine years. It is a project that has no end, can never be brought to a conclusion or completion, and he paints now, one sometimes feels, in a sort of frenzy, barely finishing one canvas before moving on to another. He is experimenting with other forms of representation as well: cardboard models of Pontito, which he fashions with his long agile fingers, and videotapes of his paintings (accompanied by music) to simulate a walk through the town. He is fascinated by the idea of computer simulations of Pontito and the thought that one might don helmet and gloves—and not only see, but touch its virtual reality, too.
When I met him originally, Franco was billed as “A Memory Artist”, implying his affinity to Proust, “the poet of memory.” At first I thought there was indeed a similarity—both men, both artists, withdrawing themselves from the world, in order to recapture the lost world of childhood. But now one sees, increasingly with each year, how totally Franco’s project differs from Proust’s. Proust, too, was haunted by the lost, the forgotten past, and his quest was to find if the door to it could be opened. As he succeeded in this, partly through the grace of “involuntary memories”, partly through vast intellectual labor, his work could reach its completion and conclusion (a completion at once psychological and artistic).
But this is not possible for Franco, who instead of achieving a penetration into the inwardness, the “meaning”, of Pontito, makes a vast, even infinite enumeration of all its outward aspects—its buildings, its streets, its stones, its topography—as if these could in some way compensate for the human void within. He half knows this, yet does not know it, and in any case has no choice. He has no time for, no taste for, no power of introspection and may suspect, indeed, that it would be fatal to his art.
Franco feels he has twenty, thirty years of work still ahead of him, for the thousand-odd paintings he has done since 1970 convey only a part of the reality he seeks to portray. He has to have paintings, or simulations, of every detail, from every viewpoint—from the village in the distance, as one drives up to it from Pistoia, to the finest details of the lichened stones in the church. He envisions the building of a museum overlooking the town, which will house a vast archive of Pontito, his Pontito—the thousands of paintings he has made and the thousands more he still intends to make. It will be the culmination of his life’s work, and the redemption of his promise to his mother: “I shall create it again for you.”
6. Prodigies
The Fayetteville Observer of May 19, 1862, contained an unusual letter from its correspondent Long Grabs, stationed in Camp Mangum:
The blind negro Tom has been performing here to a crowded house. He is certainly a wonder—He resembles any ordinary negro boy 13 years old and is perfectly blind and an idiot in everything but music, language, imitation, and perhaps memory. He has never been instructed in music or educated in any way. He learned to play the piano from hearing others, learns airs and tunes from hearing them sung, and can play any piece on first trial as well as the most accomplished performer—One of his most remarkable feats was the performance of three pieces of music at once. He played Fisher’s Hornpipe with one hand and Yankee Doodle with the other and sang Dixie all at once. He also played a piece with his back to the piano and his hands inverted. He performs many pieces of his own conception—one, his “Battle of Manassas”, may be called picturesque and sublime, a true conception of unaided, blind musical genius—This poor blind boy is cursed with but little of human nature,—he seems to be an unconscious agent acting as he is acted on, and his mind a vacant receptacle where Nature stores her jewels to recall them at her pleasure.
We learn more of Blind Tom from Edouard Séguin, the French physician whose 1866 book, Idiocy and Its Treatment by the Psychological Method, contained many penetrating descriptions of individuals later to be termed “idiots savants”; and from an intellectual descendant of Séguin, Darold Treffert, whose book Extraordinary People: Understanding “Idiot Savants” was published in 1989. Born nearly blind, the fourteenth child of a slave, sold to a Colonel Bethune, Tom was, from infancy, Treffert writes, “fascinated by sounds of all sorts—rain on the roof, the grating of corn in the sheller, but most of all music—Tom would listen intensely to the colonel’s daughters practicing their sonatas and minuets on the piano.”
“Till five or six years old”, Séguin writes, “he could not speak, scarce walk, and gave no other sign of intelligence than this everlasting thirst for music. At four years already, if taken out from the corner where he lay dejected, and seated at the piano, he would play beautiful tunes; his little hands having already taken possession of the keys, and his wonderful ear of any combination of notes they had once heard.” At the age of six, Tom started to improvise on his own account. Word of the “blind genius” spread, and at seven Tom gave his first concert—and went on to earn a hundred thousand dollars in his eighth year. At eleven, he played before President Buchanan at the White House. A panel of musicians, who thought that he had tricked the president, tested his memory the following day, playing two entirely new compositions to him, thirteen and twenty pages in length—he reproduced them perfectly and without the least apparent effort.
Séguin, describing Tom listening to a new piece, adds further tantalizing details in regard to his expressions, postures, and movements:
[He] shows his satisfaction by his countenance, a laughing, stooping, with various rubbings of the hand, alternating with an increase of the sideway swinging of his body, and some uncouth smiles. As soon as the new tune begins, Tom takes some ludicrous posture [with one leg outstretched, while he slowly pirouettes on the other]—long gyrations—ornamented with spasmodic movements of the hands.
Although Tom was usually called an idiot or imbecile, such posturing and stereotypes are more characteristic of autism—but autism was only identified in the 1940s and was not a term, or even a concept, in the 1860s.
Autism, clearly, is a condition that has always existed, affecting occasional individuals in every period and culture. It has always attracted in the popular mind an amazed, fearful, or bewildered attention (and perhaps engendered mythical or archetypal figures—the alien, the changeling, the child bewitched). It was medically described, almost simultaneously, in the 1940s, by Leo Kanner in Baltimore and Hans Asperger in Vienna. Both of them, independently, named it “autism.”
Kanner’s and Asperger’s accounts were in many ways strikingly (at times uncannily) similar—a nice example of historical synchronicity. Both emphasized “aloneness”, mental aloneness, as the cardinal feature of autism; this, indeed, was why they called it autism. In Kanner’s words, this aloneness “whenever possible, disregards, ignores, shuts out anything that comes to the child from the outside.” This lack of contact, he felt, was only in regard to people; objects, by contrast, might be normally enjoyed. The oth
er defining feature of autism, for Kanner, was “an obsessive insistence on sameness”, in the form of repetitive, stereotyped movements and noises, or stereotypes, most simply; then in the adoption of elaborate rituals and routines; finally, in the appearance of strange, narrow preoccupations—highly focused, intense fascinations and fixations. The appearance of such fascinations, and the adoption of such rituals, often before the age of five, were not to be seen, Kanner and Asperger thought, in any other condition. Asperger brought out other striking features, stressing:
…they do not make eye contact—they seem to take in things with short, peripheral glances—[there is] a poverty of facial expressions and gestures—the use of language appears abnormal, unnatural—the children follow their own impulses, regardless of the demands of the environment.
Singular talents, usually emerging at a very early age and developing with startling speed, appear in about 10 percent of the autistic (and in a smaller number of the retarded—though many savants are both autistic and retarded). A century before Blind Tom there was Gottfried Mind, a “cretinous imbecile”, born in Berne in 1768, who showed from an early age a striking talent for drawing. He had, according to A.F. Tredgold’s classic 1908 Text-Book of Mental Deficiency, “such a marvellous faculty for drawing pictures of cats that he was known as ‘The Cats’ Raphael” but he also made drawings and water-color sketches of deer, rabbits, bears, and groups of children. He soon acquired fame throughout Europe, and one of his pictures was purchased by George IV.