Microcosms (Panther)

by Magris, Claudio

  Disenchantment defends an irreducible capacity for being enchanted; the sad awareness of the ambiguity of the heart allows us to preserve the fear and the trembling with which life has to be faced, to love its harrowing errors and to know its prosaic weights, loading them onto one’s shoulders so that they are not too much of a burden for one’s brother.

  Stefano, salt of the earth. With him one felt less alone in the shock and the turbulence of things. Since his passing it has been more difficult for many people to live and to laugh in spite of everything, to savour fully every instant for itself. “What would you do,” [Stefano again] “asked a pious and supercilious relative of San Luigi Gonzaga, in childhood, while at play, if you knew that you were going to die in a few minutes? ‘I would carry on playing,’ replied the child.”

  San Pietro is to Pecetto as Alba Longa is to Rome; when its name was Covaccio, forty-four of its armed men built a new quarter, Pecetto, which in a short space of time became more important than the cradle out of which it sprang. The stream, which was called Canape, took the name of Vajors – the river of bones – because of the many bones buried there following the battle of 23 April, 1345, when the marquis of Monferrato turned its waters red with the blood of the soldiers of Robert d’Anjou. A poet who accompanied the defeated Anjou prince sang of the bloody battle. The ballad’s opening gives no clue of the massacres to follow: “Sur les doux temps, que renverdissent/ toutes choses et bois fleurissent …” But every song begins this way and many of them end badly; playing cops and robbers in childhood gives no hint of the cancer or the car that will cut down the child, neither do a night’s tender manoeuvres presage the rough hands of the doctor who will carry out the abortion or the quarrels that will find their way into court over an apartment bought together as a shared asset. And even when things go better, the finale is anyway a disaster.

  Of a summer evening it is pleasant to lie down in the grass, next to the canes. The night is high, overarching like the apse of a church, a black sky that looks blue; some people’s black hair also seems blue, and sometimes, staring up on high, it is difficult to find a particular star, perhaps it has fallen into the dark, swallowed up by the darkness like a firework. The Milky Way shines, black, luminous waters; there’s no need to worry about falling in there together, as at the seaside, falling up there, down there – even disappearing might be a celebration, like getting lost among the hills that in the evening look like a sea, large and calm waves coming in a long, powerful breath.

  San Felice, not far from Madonna della Scala. The small village is lost amid the greenery; vines and climbing plants, silence, yellow autumn Jerusalem artichokes, further off the tawny towers of Castelvecchio. To stop, to sleep, to disappear. But it is always time to move on. “Gentil galant, faites votre voyage,” says the shepherdess in the ballad.

  Revigliasco, where as a young man D’Azeglio came to blows with his preceptor Don Andreis and later the quadrumvir De Vecchi set himself up in a fine villa. In the village square, named after Don Girotto stands a headless angel near the parish church; he turns his back on the Madonna, evidently reluctant to give her the news that will change the history of the world. But the little bridge, adequate for the modest stream and also named after Don Girotto, has disappeared, having been demolished in the course of progress. Revigliasco is still “a place of the most perfect air”, as defined in a 1760 essay on some Spiritual Exercises, and for this reason too the place flourished; no wonder then that the construction of a wider road eliminated the hapless bridge. History, unfortunately, in order to facilitate access to the new villas on the Collina, also passed carelessly over the plaque that indicated the name of the bridge.

  That plaque – whose existence is confirmed by Mr Felice, carpenter from Revigliasco and enamoured of every stone of his home village – summarized the life of the personage to whom the bridge was dedicated in an epic synthesis, like a gravestone. As Spoon River teaches, the graveyard inscription is the laconic novel of a man’s life, the epitaph that encapsulates its meaning. Probably everyone composes a single poem with the deeds of his or her existence and the gravestone condenses it, transcribes it and entrusts it to that voluminous and interminable Complete Works – the world’s graveyards.

  He must have been an enviable man, the subject of that missing plaque in Revigliasco: Bridge Don Girotto, 1857–1943, Philosopher – Latinist – Oenologist, Archpriest of Revigliasco for 52 years. That trinomial designation (Philosopher – Latinist – Oenologist) is in its concision a yet more expressive monument to Don Girotto than his autobiography and his memorable sayings, collected and published by his successor and very much present, as is his personality, in the memory of the people of the Collina.

  Philosophy, for the archpriest of Revigliasco, seems above all else to have been humour, irony, a sense of the smallness of all finite things – and even of oneself – compared to the big background of the infinite, against which all human experience is set. This feeling prevents one from taking oneself too seriously, and thus is a liberation from the poisons of insecurity and arrogance; but it also prevents one from taking any vaunted greatness all that seriously and thus frees one from fear. Compared with the eternal, each single thing looks tiny, but, in its smallness, shares an equal dignity with the next, even with those that flaunt a menacing power. Irony becomes the bulwark, inflexible yet loving, of every creature, even the weakest and most reclusive, against the vacuous pomp of the world that seeks to trample them underfoot.

  Don Girotto’s anecdotes – his “pleasantries” collected by Don Nicola Cuniberti – describe his good-humoured and biting inventiveness, the blunt and irreverent language of his celebrated bulletin that upset his superiors, his pungent, salacious replies to the Fascist officials, his natural intimacy with the humble, good and intractable reality of the body, of elementary physical life; the devoutness exercised by this kindly and sharp-tongued parish priest was above all else a lack of concern for “what others think”, that religious open-mindedness that is often the antithesis of the spirit of the laity.

  The publisher of his “pleasantries” advised that they should not be read by “persons of delicate conscience” who may well have been scandalized by his witticisms or his story of the accident he had during a pilgrimage to Lourdes when, getting out of his bed because of a spasm in his leg, he slipped on the floor and banged his head twice as he fell.

  Small, thin and unkempt, with a sharp face that could be a portrait of the Piedmontese land and its wine, Don Girotto was worthy of his parishioners, those inhabitants of Revigliasco who are described by Casalis, in his Historical – Geographical Dictionary, as “robust and strong, well-built, healthy, long-living, well-behaved and industrious”. Poet of human existence and a born master of the difficult art of keeping cheerful, the archpriest of Revigliasco was truly a shepherd to his flock throughout those tormented and tumultuous years of social transformation. He was as simple as a dove, but was also as shrewd and sharp as a serpent, because the shepherd, in order to defend his flock, must know that the weak and the poor find themselves in the world as sheep in the midst of wolves, and therefore he must be able to recognize the wolves and must know how to give them, whenever necessary, a good hiding. The villagers remember not only his generosity, but also the paradoxical discretion with which he would disappear when harvest-time came, so that those working the parish land could steal without feeling embarrassed.

  Philosopher, Latinist, Oenologist: his secret perhaps lies in these three words. Even today, in the oratory that carries his name, the shelves and counters bear various bottles of the epic Piedmontese red wines. Probably the trait d’union between the three terms, the link that holds them together, is the word which the ingenious and anonymous author of the plaque placed quite rightly in the middle: Latinist. Latin, for the archpriest, was the scholarly latinorum of the seminary, the language that called the faithful to worship and sent them home at the end of the service; it was above all classic clarity, the syntax that gives a hie
rarchy to the inchoate dust of the world and puts everything in its right place, the subject in the nominative and the object in the accusative; it was the logical and moral order that classifies, identifies, defines, judges, distinguishes venial sins from mortal sins, vague, shadowy notions from definite intentions, actions from ghosts. In that symmetry there was a place for everything, for the revealed truths and for the vintage bottles, for the passing of the seasons and for the mutation of habits and morals, for the edifying episodes in the lives of the saints and for the epic hidden in the kernel of grain of wheat that ripens, for the crystalline geometric structure of a snowflake and its dissolution into nothing.

  That centuries-dead language was also the language of irony, of that which exists only in the word itself and excites love and respect for its gratuitous and pompous unreality, which makes us smile affectionately. The Latinist oenologist probably realized that the smooth surface of that Latin was like the taste of Barbera and Dolcetto, so quick to slide into the glass and down the throat and worthy of all the care and competence that he dedicated to the gifts of the grape, with a symbiosis of theology and oenology that is not rare among these hills, given that already in times long past the theologian Allasia had obtained a royal warrant that gave his wine exclusive access to Piazza Carlina.

  Another unrepentant Piedmontese, the Germanist Giovanni Vittorio Amoretti, used to recount how he completed his secondary education in a private boarding school run by the Scolopi Fathers where only Latin was spoken and a rigid discipline prevailed, although this he eluded by lowering himself out of the window with a sheet to go chasing girls. One evening as he was on his way back, the Father Guardian heard him; in vain he hid behind a bush but he had to come out at the peremptory summons: Amorette, veni foras! On being quizzed – in Latin – by the Father Superior, he fluffed everything because he couldn’t remember the word for “sheet” in the Roman tongue and so the Father Superior inflicted a small punishment on him, not for his escapade – deplorable, but not inexcusable, given his age – but rather for not knowing the Latin name for a sheet, on which his little romp had literally depended: praying is also paying attention to objects, gratitude for created things.

  For Don Girotto the science of Latin and the science of wine became philosophical knowledge, the art of making a genial passage across the planet as a guest. He used to write couplets celebrating the village of his birth, Orbassano, and its polenta; the arcades of Latin syntax, beneath which the realities of life in all their absurdity came together in mischievous innocence, were not unlike the composed, the ineffable objectivity with which Don Cuniberti, Don Girotto’s biographer, wrote his small learned treatise recording the centuries-old rivalry between Revigliasco and neighbouring Pecetto. “This hatred between the two villages,” as the reverend gently put it, “exploded dutifully on the holiest day of the year: after the office of Good Friday the young lads left their respective parish churches and took to the two banks of the Gariglia, where the traditional stone-throwing took place; cuts and contusions resulted on both sides.”

  Oenology and love of Latin, thoughtful charity for others and awareness of the comicality of existence, faith and disenchantment came together in an amiable and robust philosophy. Don Girotto’s “pleasantries” reveal the free spirit of a person who has understood how the differences in greatness or intelligence among men, between a universal genius and a poor devil appear vast, but are in fact tiny in the face of death, of pain, of war and of the fact that even a genius is incapable of predicting and preventing these things, not to mention insomnia, misery, toothache. Faced with the simple reality of living one’s life, the exceptional performance of a genius is like the jump of the proverbial flea compared to the Himalayas.

  With such a philosophy looking death in the face is less arduous. His successor, evidently more inclined to Hamlet and the Baroque, loved the admonitory skull in the garden next to the oratory, which carried this written message for the visitor: “I was like you, you will be like me.” In quite another spirit the eighty-six-year-old Don Girotto, celebrating Mass on All Souls not long before he died, said: “It’s my turn now,” adding however, “but I won’t be offended if anyone wants to go ahead of me.”

  According to its panegyrist Don Nicola Cuniberti, the air in Pecetto, the most famous village on the Collina (the sweetest clime, the most salubrious air, delightful location, purest sky, most fertile soil, the tastiest and the most abundant fruits), guarantees not only a “robust constitution”, but an “open mind” as well. In the atrium of Villa Veglio, now the village hall, the lecturer, as he waits for the others, is reading the timetable for the harvesting of the truffles (black and white). He is too much a follower of logic to hope that one night spent there might be enough to have attained that openness of mind to which all intellectuals aspire. He indeed had only spent one night in the village, although for years he was registered as being officially resident in that white house at 56 Via Mogna, a road named after the Mayor who had taken Giolitti’s advice and populated Pecetto’s hill with its famous cherry trees. But the hagiographer of the place assures us that even the faces of the holiday visitors, the people who spend a few days here in the year, “are pictures of gaiety and loyal friendship” – so there is hope.

  The lanes and the roads of the Collina lead towards the void of the horizon, but the topiarist’s art, for which Pecetto is justly famous, invites one to linger happily beneath those pergolas and those arbours and to proceed with the crossing. The dark falls more quickly than one expects and every now and then someone drops behind, too far behind, perhaps they hear the voices calling but it is late, and something of everyone remains with those who do not come back. The last to go, when the time comes, won’t find it too much of a struggle to leave – they will be as light as a feather, after having buried so many pieces of themselves. But the ranks remain intact, the names are all there, for ever, indeed they grow; the friends, as it should be, haven’t stood twiddling their thumbs throughout all these years, but they have made sure that the shape of a face, a look, an inimitable gesture or the sound of a voice are not lost but are transmitted for God’s greater glory and for the pleasure of future generations.

  With the passing of the years the farewell gun salutes are fired ever more often; it is all a drumroll and one no longer knows whether it’s New Year or a funeral; anyway, in Pecetto even the cemetery is cheerful and neat and its graves, assures Vittorio Benedetto, the theologian, “are much sought after by the new holiday visitors and outsiders.”

  *

  The wolves, we are told by another of the village’s bards, Colonel Capello, disappeared from Pecetto at the beginning of the century; the bears, the deer and boar long before that and, the Colonel continues, the mastodons earlier still. For thousands of years ancient peoples – Celtic – Ligurian, Taurini, Bagienni, Statielli, Eburiati – have been strata of the earth. History is among other things a list of names, peoples and cities, sovereigns and rebels; even the names of wines ring glorious and evanescent like those of ancient dynasties – Cascarolo, Brazolata, Guernazza, Mostoso, Cario, Manzanetto, Avanale, Mausano, Castagnazzo. During the Revolution, when Branda Lucioni arrived in this area to wipe out the Jacobins with his “Christian clout”, he set up a cross, took Communion, requisitioned foodstuffs left and right and then got drunk.

  Marocco, like Baruffi, underlines the merits of this misfortune, “so beneficial for everyone, but above all for the princes.” The latter, however, seem to benefit little from it, or perhaps in order to benefit more they continue to pile it on, spreading war and death. Sometimes it seems strange that death, cultivated with such care and passion, should not have had the last word. Life gives the lie to all the forecasts and every announcement of death, just as it has obviously confounded the smug statement issued by a cleric in 1740 observing that in Pecetto, “the youngsters have completely renounced the practice of lovemaking.”

  Clerics and parish priests above all others have sung the glories of Pecetto and t
he Collina in general, but anticlerical Piedmont has not repaid them in kind. The priests tried as hard as they could, but with little success. Don Perlo, for example, who in 1870 is attacked by a drunk with a pistol; he forgives the man and embraces him, and the drunk goes away but then on second thoughts comes back and has another shot at him – evidently without much success since ten years later Don Perlo, passing by the cemetery in his trap, gets another thirty bullets.

  The Theatrum Statuum Regiae Celsitudinis Sabaudiae Ducis, commissioned by Charles Emmanuel II and printed in Amsterdam in 1682, displays the imposing castle at Pecetto, towering above the village, in an illustration by Giovanni Tomaso Borgonio. The castle, however, was never built and this disparity between reality and its catalogue-entry does not displease those who – coming from that “nowhere” which, in the words of the Hapsburg traveller Hermann Bahr, is Trieste – love things that are not there and, in the tradition of Svevo, find their own destiny in absence. But the Collina, it has been said and said again, is a landscape that gives a sense of physical support and moral certainty and so puts flirtations with the void peremptorily in their place, inviting one not to mistrust reality and the perception that grasps it. Irritated by the uncertainty over the date of construction of the church of Saint Sebastian, Vittorio Benedetto, the priest already mentioned as connoisseur of the holiday visitors’ physiognomies, knows that all uncertainties are contagious, and hastens to ensure that it does not end up jeopardizing the very existence of the venerable building: “It is a fact,” he writes, “that the church of Saint Sebastian at Pecetto Torinese exists, and, at least for as long as the external senses remain the criteria on which truth is based, we can and we must conclude that it was built. As to its existence, therefore, there is no doubt. The great question that is begged regards the precise period in which it was built… .”