Microcosms (Panther)

by Magris, Claudio

  Surrounding the chapel, built where a tree used to provide refuge and shelter to the image brought on the waves, there is a small cemetery. Among the others there lies a Rev. Fr. Mauro Mattessi, “industrious and joyful servant of Maria”, who lived and died in the sanctuary. Literature has long been capable of telling the tales of people who retreat from the world like the reclusive Saint Peter of Orio, of melancholy hermits and refugees who hide themselves away on an island or among the anonymous crowd, stripping themselves of everything and perhaps attaining freedom, but not joy. This last is reserved for the Benedictines or the Franciscans and seems to be denied to modern, lay hermits, who, in a search for life’s essence, make sacrifices more radical than religious vows, so radical indeed as to strip life down to the point of total sterility. Modern civilization is marked by these flights which achieve an absolute that is close on vacuity.

  Another tack and the return is complete. Pampagnola again, with the beached burchi, under a sky that is retreating into the evening. The same images as on the outbound trip, photographs from an album leafed through backwards, towards the point of departure. A journey is always a return, the decisive step is the one that brings the foot back onto land or back home. Augusto Zuberti’s restaurant, where one stops before leaving for Trieste, is almost home and has been so for many years. Here Marin’s birthdays and name days were celebrated with memorable suppers – he didn’t mind these continual celebrations. Each year the appointed orator would extend everyone’s homage to Marin, exorcising with due discretion the shadow of his possible and impending end, while he himself listened without batting an eyelid. The years passed and the orators, they too no longer all that young, passed on to better lives while Marin carried on, prolific with new books, naturally called upon to outlive his commemorators.

  Here one evening he said that he was a gulf, the confluence of other people’s lives. In that gulf all the loved ones were together, companions inseparable from the fabric of one’s own existence, parents, the girlfriend from that day on the dunes and from forever after and, years later, the boys, in the meantime of an age to go out on the dunes with girlfriends of their own. Places and things, too, difficult to separate from loved ones and from the image of the world that envelops them: the sea, the wind in the pines, the chattering of the cicadas, the seagulls, the summer’s amber. A true inn is a gulf too, a seaport welcomed by those who journey and are anxious above all else to come to rest. Marin’s grandfather used to keep an inn, the Three Crowns near the early Christian Basilica of Santa Maria delle Grazie, and perhaps that was the future poet’s true academy.

  Nevoso

  In the beginning was Mr Samec’s voice, low and a bit croaky, with the imperceptible hiss of his Slovene s: “And then I said to him,” he began again, just touching the person next to him with his little finger which mild arthritis, perhaps the result of so many years spent in the damp woods, had curved like a hook, “‘Excuse me, Your Excellency, but with your permission .… ’” In the beginning or almost, because in the forest everything had always already begun and indeed everything was always beginning to end, disintegrating into the soil and sinking into the rust-red layers of so many fallen leaves and years, no longer distinguishable. On entering the forest for the first time, as a boy, one had felt in some way that it was not the first time and that one’s own story must also have begun so long ago, time stored and measured in the circles within the tree-trunks and even farther back than that, and in this awareness there was neither excitement nor melancholy, but simply the silent feeling that this is the way it was and that was enough.

  Mr Samec almost never managed to finish his story, which the others thought they had heard to the very end many times already, because Rudi would start playing “Za kim” or recalling his ancestry, conceivably noble or even imperial, since his grandfather – or was it his father or his great-grandfather? – had been found newborn, crying in a bush in the park at Schönbrunn in Vienna, and so may have been the illicit fruit of sins in very high places. Or, once again at that table in the clearing at Sviščaki opposite the Planinski Dom, the mountain refuge, someone, taking no notice of Mr Samec, preferred to observe the continual improvements and enlargements made to the chalet belonging to Mr Voliotis, who some time previously had celebrated there his silver wedding with his wife, children and grandchildren. This same person remarked that the management of the porno cinemas, which Mr Voliotis had taken on a few years before in Trieste, where he lived, must be more lucrative than the timber trade. Timber had been Mr Voliotis’s earlier line, and he explained that he had switched jobs so as to avoid having to travel and to be able to spend more time with his family. But if Mr Samec’s story was destined to remain unfinished, this was above all thanks to his wife, Mrs Anna, beautiful and unfathomable with her snub-nose and slanting eyes, with a look of tender rapacity in her face marked by the years, as she signalled for him to stand up and take her back to their chalet.

  The Excellency about whom Mr Samec was trying to tell his story was a Fascist Party official from Fiume; he had got into the man’s good books when he accompanied him on a bear hunt and discreetly talked him out of some act of folly that could have been fatal, and as a result – but the narrative became confused at this point because it was here that his listeners’ impatience would get the better of them and the story – it was a gamekeeper or a woodsman, rather, who paid the penalty when his jaw was crushed by a bite from the bear (occasionally a she-bear), so that for the rest of his days the victim had to nourish himself by sucking food and drink through a straw. Not that this tragic element in any way jeopardized the few benefits (the odd permit, a commission here and there) that the Party official’s gratitude ensured for Mr Samec’s big hardware store in Ilirska Bistrica, back then known as Villa del Nevoso.

  Then and now, so that back then it was also Ilirska Bistrica, because names do not disappear as those who move frontiers like to think, rather they live on whenever there is a retelling of the story that happened when that person, that place or that bear was so called – and thus continues to be called so. The forest is pure memory of names: Volk samotar, the lone and uncatchable wolf that terrorized the woods of Mount Snežnik, the Nevoso, the “Snowy Mountain”, between 1921 and 1923; Josef Ronko, the bricklayer, who lived in a small wooden cabin at Prevale after 1903 and who is remembered as if he were the lord of some castle; or Fajstric, the marksman who in 1893 was supposed to protect Prince Hermann von Schönburg-Waldenburg, Lord of the Nevoso, on his first bear hunt and instead ran off up a tree when faced with a wounded bear; it was the prince who had to rescue the marksman.

  Above all the memory of the forest tells of the vanity of possessing it. The deep breath of the forest is a lesson in how to feel life as something impartial, indifferent and yet welcoming and inexhaustible; one knew this feeling from the very first time and meets it again each time one enters these woods. Then one saw the children feel it and they too learned it for ever in their turn, so that in time it was a feeling that everyone considered to have existed always and whose beginning no one could recall, like breathing. The forest, first Austrian, later Italian, Yugoslav and then Slovene, mocked those changes of names and borders, it belonged to no one; if anything it was the people who belonged to the forest, at least to that limited extent to which one can belong to someone or something. Even the forest that has existed for a long time is mortal, like the roebuck that suddenly appears on the grass at daybreak, either in front of the shotgun barrels or in front of no one, and whose life – even the life of his species, so much longer than that of an empire, however revered, or of a fleeting Federal Republic – lasts only a moment. If one turns one’s gaze to the Great Bear or to the morning star that fades in August above a red fir in the Pomočnjaki clearing, it lasts just the moment of the roebuck’s apparition and his leap into the clearing.

  Ilirska Bistrica, the busy and anonymous industrial town at the foot of the Nevoso, is the capital of the wooded mountain that rises immediately towards th
e north-east and descends on the other side, beyond the summit, in one direction towards Mašun and in the other towards Leskova Dolina, the hazelnut valley, and Kozarišče, in the direction of Postumia. Then it extends and thins to the east where it stretches as far as the Slovenia–Croatia border. A wooded lung – predominantly beech, fir and larch – preserved and intact in its green life, cared for civilly and wisely by a forestry administration that has no drive to innovate and to rush things, but respects the trees’ rhythms. Every now and then they open a road in the wood, but in the meantime they wait for others to become harmoniously integrated with the forest, to the point where the roads are almost camouflaged. Some areas are left in peace for years while work goes on in others – protecting the woods and defending them from construction, exploitation, abuse, except perhaps for some indulgence towards hunters, especially if Milanese.

  There are no hotels in the Nevoso’s 227,600 hectares, only a few houses, some chalets and cabins, the ruins of a couple of Italian barracks, a refuge on the summit and one in the clearing at Sviščaki; the Planinski Dom, its three rooms equipped with bunk beds, is the palace and centre of the Snežnik. If the maps – the noblest of which is reproduced on a postcard, and was hand drawn by Professor Drago Karolin, well into his nineties and the tutelary deity of the Nevoso – indicate Mater Dei or Saints Cosmas and Damian, this simply means a stone with the names of the saints or at the most (a recent innovation), a small niche with a Madonna which replaces an earlier dressed stone. The road-building on the Snežnik brings to mind Josef von Obereigner, Prince von Schönburg-Waldenburg’s forestry director. It was he who in the nineteenth century planned and maintained these lanes and paths, giving them name and form. Following 1929 the Italian army contributed to the network with a number of good, still-solid and useable roads, like the one that leads to Orlovica, Monte Aquila. Today the postcard–maps of Drago Karolin are the chart of that universe, in which every least detail is worthy of attention and identity, almost as if the cartographer sought to rescue it from the indistinct mass of the woods.

  The Nevoso’s architecture consists of platforms built in the trees, shaky chairs and solid wooden cabins, their boards fresh and solid or rotten with the years and the damp, hides built for waiting for the animals and, thence, either to kill them, as the legitimate owners of the platforms do, or simply observe them, as the unauthorized users do. The hunters, who pay up to $15,000 to kill a bear, maintain that the smell of the intruding animal-watchers pollutes the forest and scares off the animals, chasing them away from the hides and thus from death.

  But Ilirska Bistrica is only one hurried break along the journey – the Nevoso is halfway between Trieste and Fiume – and it is where one stops merely for fuel or to repair a tyre, inevitably punctured on the rocky roads, rough with all sorts of pointed things. The true capital of the province is Sviščaki, a clearing a little wider than the others, at 1,242 metres above sea level, traditional point of departure for the brief excursion to the summit. Some chalets surround the clearing which orbits around the Planinski Dom, the Slovene Alpine Association’s refuge; not far off stand the recently built small houses of a new Sviščaki: a tasteless huddle, camouflaged by the trees.

  History: even many years after the first encounter with the Nevoso, now that the children travel the world and yet continue to know all there is to know of every valley, every old path swallowed up by that wood, each apparition of that bear, the bigger one with darker fur, the one that everyone had seen, perhaps by chance on arriving at the refuge by car. But we four never did see it, despite the nights and the dawns spent waiting for it motionless in the clearing. History has been cadenced by the summers spent at the Planinski Dom and by the succession of caretakers/hoteliers at the refuge, names learned by heart like those of ruling dynasties.

  Indeed, each change of dynasty was painful, an embarrassment because for the new managers the family were strangers to begin with and it was humiliating to be taken for tourists or ignorant newcomers, to feel oneself being treated like a foreigner in that place which was in fact one’s home and homeland. “Up there I know who I am,” the great Julius Kugy used to say of his Julian Alps, and this was true for us and the Monte Nevoso; but the others, or at least the officials in charge of that refuge, also had to be aware that it was one of our abodes. Thus, when an Ivanka succeeded a Meri or the Pugels followed the Valenčičs, one had Professor Karolin write a letter of recommendation, in Slovene, praising the qualities of the entire family, referring especially to their love for the Snežnik and their adaptability to hardships. That letter was an introduction to the new managers, taken aback at being asked to welcome into the room under the eaves the only family who ever stopped up there for any length of time and who thus enabled the custodians to earn a few dinars that had not yet become thalers.

  The Snežnik, looking like Fujiyama, rises over Sviščaki, above a sea of woods. The house facing the Planinski Dom, on the other side of the clearing, was used almost every year for the holidays of the workers from the timber mills in Ilirska Bistrica. It was managed by Milivoj, a Serb with a long moustache and Mongolian eyes who had been given that safe job, it was said, thanks to his record with the partisans during the war. Even when people did not yet seem to think – or had not yet gone back to thinking – that to be a Slovene or a Croatian or a Serb and Yugoslav was a contradiction to be resolved through bloodshed; even when they seemed if anything to be proud of the red star that had not merely restored the Snežnik to Slavia, as was right, but had even brought excessive wealth to this last of Italy’s lands – even the air was full of suspicion about Milivoj and vague allusions to cruel deeds of his. It is true that some evenings, when he was drunk, he used to shoot into the air and Milka, the custodian at the Planinski Dom, would proudly assert that her husband – “our” husband, she would say – went happily to bed when he got drunk. Anyway Milivoj died before the collapse of the Federal Republic saw these latent contrasts regarding differences between civilizations resolved with shooting that was not into the air and was not limited to merely drunken outbursts. Even the Bosnian woodsmen, who used to work meekly and industriously in the forest, never shooting in the air or anywhere else for that matter, have gone now, while the lynxes flourish.

  A postcard on sale at the Planinski Dom summarizes the history of the refuge from 1907 to 1972, but it says nothing of D’Annunzio’s refuge which was alongside the present-day one and was blown up by the partisans. Until just a few years ago there still was some minimal trace of its existence. It seems the poet never actually set foot there. For D’Annunzio the Nevoso was a word, it was the music and the light of that word, its clarity. Indeed, in 1924, from his Villa “Vittoriale”, on the eve of the unification of Fiume with Italy, he asked for “a token” of recognition for his own merits and suggested being given the title Prince of Mount Nevoso, or Prince of the Adriatic, he did not mind which. But before putting in this request for a D’Annunziesque word, the poet who perhaps more than any other had understood the Odyssean charm of technology, the Medusa and Muse of modern life, had also expressed the wish for a small private airport at Gardone. He had to make do with that melodious trisyllable.

  In the beginning there was no bear, only the story of the bear. The Sviščaki group paid no attention to Mr Samec because long before they came to know Mr Samec himself, they knew that story about the hunter with the smashed face who had to eat through a straw. In the various tellings it is linked to all manner of bears, hunters and places. According to the version set down by the authoritative Drago Karolin, reproduced in the small green volume, Snežnik, published in 1977, the incident occurred on 19 July, 1900 and involved Andrej Znidaršič who was accompanying Duke Heinrich von Mecklenburg, guest of Prince Hermann von Schönburg-Waldenburg. Director Bercè, who from Kozarišče manages and protects the Snežnik forestry reserve with a genial meticulousness, denies this episode, which he claims took place in fact elsewhere; he gives a different version of the duke’s hunt, one no less perilo
us but which concludes happily for the aristocratic cub killer only because maternal love prevailed over the fury of the bear that attacked him, forcing her to concentrate on saving the other cub; anyway, in this version, certainly reliable, there are no smashed jawbones and no straws either.

  These last features recur in other tales and in other places; the most illustrious archetype is certainly Julius Kugy’s story – dating back to 1871 and set in the Val Trenta – where the wounded man is his trusty climbing and hunting companion Antonio Tozbar, a.k.a. Spik, who loses even his tongue and the power of speech. The episode is renowned not only because of Kugy’s fame but also thanks to the authority of Giovanni Gabrielli, prestigious legal expert, who repeated it for years during his trips in the Carso area and in the Vipavo Valley, until even his most tolerant friends obliged him to give over. A variant on this topos is the story of a man who, attacked by the bear or running to help someone who had been attacked, brandishes an axe and in his excitement wounds himself to a greater or lesser degree, hitting his own thigh and cutting his leg off, or inflicting slightly less gory injuries.

  Every two or three summers this story cropped up and was recounted and expanded; on one occasion it took place at Stare ogence, on another at Sladke vode. The bear was always a female defending her cubs, even if there were kinder episodes, such as that of the female bear that fell with one of her cubs into a cistern at Koritnice and was helped out by the lumberjacks, who let down a trunk which she was able to climb up.

  The recurrent motif of the man who injures himself in a fight with a she-bear can also be traced back to an origin, to an event that took place near the Mater Dei and was set in motion by a Magyar count on holiday at Abbazia, who wanted a bear cub and sent someone out to capture one. But the suspicion is that each event, real or invented, is preceded by its story, the fantasy that conjures up the bear by thinking of it, the word that founds and forges reality. In the beginning was the word; the heavens and the earth come after, and even the forests and the bears. The forest has no word, it is the primordial inchoate, that pulls back into its womb all things and all forms, it is Artemis who must not be looked at and whose name must not be spoken; it is Life that dissolves lives and knows not the language wherein the never-ending metamorphosis is articulated. Story lays hold of a form, renders it distinct, retrieves it from the ebb and flow, from oblivion, fixes it: those legends and those fantasies about the bear impose a meaning and an order on the dark beast that moves through the thick of the forest, for civilization they are a squaring of accounts with the darkness of the wood.