– Good thing you’re here!
– Me?
– Yes, because of the jar.
The jar, a kilo, a kilo and a half, jostled a little on her thighs, in the girl’s hands, who held it as if she were holding a baby.
– Don’t be scared if I tell you what’s in there. There’s a man’s ashes in there.
The urn almost slipped out of her hands, almost rolled who knows where, to break, to shatter into a million pieces. But on instinct—because she felt like it was not a jar, not an urn, as if her entire womb, still untouched, could feel it—she gripped the urn tighter with both hands.
After a while the man continued:
– They’re a painter’s ashes, but I don’t know anything about art– you?
– Art? I saw the Mona Lisa once, but not actually in real life. I’ve seen lots of ex-votos, I don’t know, is that art?
– This one was a German, but not one of the crazy kind who used to come to Ascona, to Monte Verità. They all went around naked.
Now, however, it was no longer the era of the naked Germans. The Germans had entered Paris armored to the hilt. As for us, the Swiss, it was like the times when that tourist from Prague, Franz Kafka, toured our country, and was struck, especially in Lucerne, by the presence of so many soldiers, and in his diary wrote about his fear that their rifles would start firing.
There’s always a lot of soldiers in Switzerland, so you can imagine what it would be like on a day like July 2, 1940, even if France’s rapid collapse had made the authorities relax a little. It still wasn’t the time to throw down one’s arms and sing of victory “like the blackbird with a little good weather” as Father Dante says, and in fact, the majority of able men in town were crammed into jeeps, helmet to helmet, or were at barracks practicing port arms or running drills, or in the yards in front of the schools eating their ready-meals, or inside bunkers dusting the mouths of cannons, or picking up, with the tips of their bayonets, the paper tossed away by the sowers of discord: the thousand things, in short, that a Swiss soldier does during mobilization. This is why, on the sloping fields south of Ceneri, and especially in the Magadino plain towards Locarno, many women were working. And the car carrying Klee’s ashes crossed Monte Ceneri without a single hitch. That good girl was really a good girl—she held the urn with both hands without allowing herself a break, without letting her back rest against the seat; she held her torso erect like the bathingsuited girls who carry the velvet-lined case with the Olympic medals, gold, silver, and bronze, at the Olympics.
They tilled the land, bent over heads of lettuce, those humbly-dressed women. The day was turning dark, with a sky that promised rain at any moment, but the women wouldn’t stop pulling the weeds from row to row until the first little drops fell, making everyone run under the ledges of the sheds and barns, because in a second it’d be raining buckets. But no one thought that such a dark sky on a day like that was, all things considered, the sky in mourning, since no newspaper in the area had devoted a line to Klee’s death.
No, it wasn’t vacation time. For no one, much less for the internees. They certainly weren’t left to collect mold in barracks or internment camps: the Poles were all or almost all strapping young men, as the girl holding the urn with Paul Klee’s ashes on her thighs agreed—a cousin of hers, actually, having gone for the day to visit relatives up in a little town within the National Redoubt, laid her eyes on of one of those Poles, because he was holding a plow or taking a horse by the reins with gestures so noble that he must have belonged to the fallen Warsavian nobility; but the next day, they had already transferred the Pole to another town, perhaps even in the Val Blenio, and not to buy a sack of chestnuts for me, or for you, or for that old woman who’s about to die, as one of our kids’ songs goes. This cousin, a seventeen year old named Ermengarda, after seeing that Pole, never got her eyes back again.
It’s infinite, the number of things that war does, thought the driver: indeed, it was as if there on the windshield, in two swipes of the wipers, someone had drawn the profile of a blond Pole, his hands, and the eyes of this Ermengarda, and despite the wipers shooting back and forth, the image remained. If she, that unfortunate girl, was an Ermengarde of times past, surely she wouldn’t have fallen for a Pole?
– I don’t even know your name, said the driver to the girl holding the urn on her lap almost as if she were holding a baby, so that it wouldn’t hit the soft spot on its head against the windshield if they suddenly had to brake. Without taking her eyes off the Via Stradonino, since they were coming up on the turn for Locarno, she spoke.
– Giulia, the girl said. Giulia Sismondi.
– That’s a very nice name you have.
He said these words very slowly, with a slowness that was perhaps awkward, yet full of the soft tranquility that mountain women have when they sing “Kyrie eleison” or “Causa nostrae laetitiae” or “Vas insignae devotionis”: – . . . you have! he said, as if to mirror the van’s soft stop with the slowness of his voice—no, the ashes inside that urn wouldn’t suffer any disturbance: actually, if those ashes, for a few minutes, could have returned to life, recomposed into an intellect and a hand that obeyed this intellect, they would have sketched out a perfect drawing of an angel for that Giulia Sismondi. Who said:
– And you?
The driver, having shifted harmoniously from first to second gear, barely taking his eyes off the steering wheel and wagging his index finger back and forth like the windshield wipers, replied:
– Unh-uh, I don’t want to be cremated.
– No, I meant your name.
– Oh, that, Cesare, my name’s Cesare, Cesare Rossi. But I mean, I don’t think I’ll ever change my mind, I don’t want to be cremated. If things get so bad for me that I don’t even have my Sunday best to be buried in, they can go ahead and wrap me in a sheet. Or I’ll do it like Fulberta from Val Canaria, who dressed her dead husband in his army uniform and kept on saying to everyone who came over that he’d loved being a soldier so much, he really loved it. In a sheet, in my wedding clothes, I’m going to have them put me in a casket, same as people have always done. Whereas the Germans . . .
Miss Giulia Sismondi pressed on the urn a little as if she were pressing down on the painter’s head, almost as if he were about to have an operation without anesthesia and she had been asked to act as a kind of aide, to keep his head still, like a dental assistant—yes, if those ashes, for an instant, could have come back to life, Klee would have certainly drawn for her, in two lines, without her knowing, a bird of paradise, its trill cutting through the air.
As they approached Locarno and the houses were closer together—a kid could pop out from any side street without warning, and then there was a group of cyclists in gray-green with helmets on and rifles slung over their shoulders—Cesare Rossi turned all of his concentration to driving the van. After a while, never taking his eyes off the road, he said that they were going to bring the urn where it needed to go and then he would leave her at Piazza Grande or wherever was convenient for her, but first he wanted to stop for a few minutes to have a drink together, it would really be a pleasure—he really didn’t know how he would have done it alone, with that jar.
And if . . . If Der Schöpfer, Le créateur, The Creator (1934), coming out of its 42 x 53.5 square and flapping its wings like an owl, all crimson, with feet that look like flippers, over the Swiss territory of Locarno, if the god of creation, of the big bang, decided to make one of the tires blow? Or by pouring a puddle of oil on a half-curve, as the gods of the past used to do when on a divine whim or with good reason they willed a mortal’s downfall, made the van crash into a wall so that the urn would break into a hundred pieces . . . ? Couldn’t, from the scattering ashes, a piece of that ash, still almost warm, make its way into Giulia Sismondi’s vulva-urn and grow there? The natural humors of the chaste virgin would have brought life to that spermatozoon o
f this lone miracle: like a glob of condensed milk, a piece of ice, falling into a drop of warm water . . . Couldn’t Klee’s Creator bring Klee back to life by fertilizing the girl who carried the painter’s ashes in her lap?
But that dear girl didn’t ask herself absurd complicated questions. She concentrated on holding the urn tight on her lap with its China-blue friezes on grayish-blue. Only one question crossed her mind: how come Signor Cesare Rossi wasn’t at one of the hundred thousand posts guarding the border but instead going around transporting the ashes of, to put it bluntly, Lutherans, from the crematory to who knows where? It would have been simple, she could have just asked, but it seemed indelicate. And? And if he had responded: I only have one lung, I have a heart murmur, I have a herniatied disc, I have tuberculosis: You name it, Miss Health Officer. Insufficient height couldn’t have been the culprit (our nation, like all self-respecting countries, doesn’t want an army of dwarves, of rachitic chimney-sweeps, it’s not the Circus Knie) because Rossi was definitely much taller than the 1.56 meters that get you rejected. Or was it 1.58? Or was it because of flat feet? The army turns away the flat-footed, you know.
Giulia Sismondi’s innocent green eyes, in harmonious unison, at the will of her Will, rolled down: the man had regular sandals, the kind you could trade for a cup of milk, or even less. If Giulia Sismondi could have seen a single drawing by the painter she was carrying in her lap (she handled it with careful fingers—proximal phalange, intermediate phalange, distal phalange, carpal, metacarpal, radius, ulna, humerus, clavicle, and then what—that urn with his ashes inside), why couldn’t she imagine that painter pulling a random piece of paper, a random pencil stump (but, be careful, it might be sharp) out of his pocket and he, the creator, drawing blue, aristocratic sandals for a meticulous, attentive driver like this Cesare Rossi? Who was careful about the potholes at the crossroads: at the bottom of the Ceneri he’d blurted out “Damn this road” that required looking right and left ten times, enough to give you a neckache—and why didn’t they put in a stoplight!—but for some reason she was absorbed in thoughts of Christ on the cross, and yes, it was long past Easter—it was the middle of summer, it was the 2nd of the month of July.
With sandals sketched by Klee, even a Cesare Rossi could have felt like a St. Peter walking on water with the protection and outstretched hand of Christ—
do déda via da tèra
—off the ground, that’s what Angelo the sacristan said when a car, or a truck, stopped to pick him up on that dusty road: off the ground, with those sore feet Angelo had—yet he was singing a vesper divinely—it was heaven. Even Cesare Rossi, with those sandals sketched by Klee, could have walked on air like the eleven-man team of the Holy Sob (free-thinkers and freemasons, without a second thought, would have called them Heaven’s Spew), all headwork, playing in the air:
Baruch
Balak Zadoc
Adramelech Moloch Abimelech
Amalek Habakkuk Melchizedek Walaschek Enoch
– Oh no, f***!—Absalom the Beautiful, in extremis, at the edge of the penalty area, miraculously managed to censor himself after the first letter; even if in heaven, after the Archangel Michael, they’re loath to use red cards. – No! And Achitophel wasn’t about to go back on his bad advice, but in heaven, ever since Lucifer’s times, they tend to let certain things in the eastern ear and out the western ear! Absalom and Achitophel not even considered worthy of the bench, in favor of Sanballat, Abinadab, those two old bumblers! Not even Habakkuk was listening—he was praying for God to make his feet like deer hooves so he could climb steep mountains. Baruch, however, was shaking his head—is it or is it not 1940?—and the wrath of God has brought great misfortune upon us, reducing man to eating the flesh of his own sons and daughters. Even if the lake was completely calm, and a fisherman on his boat asked for the proper silence: Cesare Rossi’s van had reached the end of its trip. One could hear the clear sound of crickets and cicadas in the fields and the vineyards sloping up to the hills and mountains. Stopping in front of a gate, the driver got out and then took the urn with the ashes from the girl’s hands and brought it to Paul Klee’s widow, then went back to get the folder with the documentation: the death confirmation, the death certificate, the record from the crematory, the receipt from the Ticinese Cremation Association, Lugano, on which “the undersigned confirms having personally received the ashes of the deceased Klee Paolo, cremated and released to the Committee. In testimony whereof, Cesare Rossi.”
That was it. Cesare Rossi then decided, on the way to Piazza Grande, not to go to Canetti’s, a wineseller who was also an inspired center forward, an expert in dribbling close to the goal, since it didn’t seem like a time for wine. They decided to go to Planzi’s for frappés, and chatted about their lives for ten minutes or so. The girl was so fully intent on what the man was saying, fully absorbed in saying yes, she understood, he was right, he’d done the right thing, that she didn’t see a miniscule spider, an almost microscopic little dot, moving across the marble table a centimeter away from her glass. Not seeing it, she didn’t have the temptation to crush it, she didn’t wonder things like: what does your glass look like to it? A wandering rock? What about your pinky? One of the enormous highly mobile proboscises of the monstrous saurian that you are? That spider, which takes up no more space than a ground of finely ground coffee, does it have a heart, a sex, a nervous system, what atomic dose of fear could it endure? Klee couldn’t have come to its defense in a world that crushed everything; he would never again depict its right to life, because now Klee was dead. And not even by continuing to develop all the techniques he had made his own and redoubling the frenzied activity of his last months could he have again represented the archeology, the epiphany, the growth and the death of one of the countless leaves that, in spite of Hitler and other obscenities, had bloomed in that 1940 spring: the delicate leaf of a tree, of a flower, that brightens the lives of the birds of God, the flower that blooms again every spring—because Klee would never bloom again. He was dead. And dead along with him, it seemed, now that the beasts of the Generalstaben in Berlin and other capitals were winning, were the cats with their backs made of elastic elasticity, kittens that curl up imploringly, lambs that can trot on grass without trampling it, kitties that sleep with their delicate backs arched, fawns that can sense the ominous air, little ones of different stripes that have survived distant travels: the water-tower bird seemed hopelessly ensnared in the all-seeing eye of 1938; you can only ward off the gaze of the Medusa for so long, and certainly not—fetch Medusa, turn him into stone!—for eternity. Because Paul Klee was dead. And in a letter from April 6, 1978, Dr. Enrico Uehlinger writes despondently: “I asked around at the Sant’Agnese Clinic. Shamefully, I couldn’t find anything of note in the archives, the administrative records, or lab records: date of admittance, death, results of a urine analysis, no description of the illness or the cause of death, which from the literature appears to have been scleroderma. The attending clinicians are dead, the old sister-nurses I consulted only vaguely remembered Klee and his wife Lily who came with him. No one can give me specific information, but it’s possible that the relevant documents were given to other scholars—there’s been mention of a Japanese . . . I’m so sorry (. . .).”
And Walaschek?
It was Snoozy’s granddaughter who jumped up, all red and white in the face, all Swiss, all the colors of our flag, just like Carl Spitteler wanted, and also, all infuriated. She was also mad at Scribe O/17360, chosen—perhaps she didn’t know—by Wille, and who, moreover, had been silent for more than an academic hour, that is, for over forty-five minutes.
– You be quiet, she shouted at the scribe. Be quiet, with those beat-up priest shoes, your black priest raincoat, your priest hat, your priest crewneck. If I had a machine gun I’d kill all the priests and professors like you. Professor of Bullshit!
A juvenile titter broke out in the crowd. The bike repairman nudged the baker,
hissing in his ear:
– Don’t say anything, that’s not really what he’s called, it’s just a generic nickname.
Snoozy’s granddaughter wasn’t backing down:
– What about Walaschek?
One never knows from what deep places, for what cause, hiding in a fold of the intestines, from what scrotum, what ulcer or open sore, comes the hate, so diffuse in the world, which is concentrated within the rings of stadiums.
– Hmpf, goddamned referee.
According to Snoozy’s granddaughter, no one should let a family man be a teacher and a referee. It ruins everything, she said: the game, school, and family, all at the same time. Big-talking windbags who stink to high heaven, they should wipe some of the dust off of their eyes. Screw-ups at home and phonies at school, bigmouth layabouts with their completely ridiculous black shorts clinging to their bums and their tight black jackets sanctimoniously buttoned up with those little whistles in their mouths. Hmpf.
The whistlers in the stadium put their four fingers in their mouths and the entire area around the stadium, for a good distance of streets and streetcorners, filled up with whistles of disapproval.
Scribe O/17360 looked at that insolent granddaughter of Snoozy’s with no sympathy whatsoever. Potato-popping moron in G major, as useless as an apple that falls off the tree too soon. She thinks she can come here and lay down the law. But no more is it the era of the bailiffs nor the times of the strong and free Swiss, who are also, as says the great Francesco, savage and rustic by nature: a horrid, ignorant people. There was nothing to get so worked up about, Walaschek was going back home, unlike Klee on July 2, 1940, in a little terracotta jar—he was in first class on the Bern-Geneva InterCity train. They’d been in Bern celebrating, fifty years later, in honor of that old fox Rappan, inventor of the “bolt”—and how many great memories they shared. The photo display up in the hall, with a big white-crossed red flag behind it that would also have pleased Carl Spitteler, didn’t show Minelli, the captain, great pillar of the defense. And the others? Where is Trello, who died near the end of the war; where Ramseyer, so long ago, and with a name that seemed to belong to the age of the pharaohs; where Pulver, where . . .? And Vernati, the traditional halfback with the name of a great star—Sirio—was the only one wearing a wool vest under his jacket. He must have had a wife who doled out advice fourteen hours out of twenty-four: bundle up! The days when he had to cover the entire midfield and set up his outside forwards were over. Now he too could let loose a little: pinta trahit pintam trahit altera pintula pintam: one pint leads to another.
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