Microcosms (Panther)

by Magris, Claudio

  Rosarija is proud that Lubenizze has bred so many priests, relatively speaking – three of them – and she is happy to look after the church, to change the water for the flowers, to light the candles. She is also proud of the cards that some tourists, who once came all the way up here, send her every Christmas. Her myopic eyes laugh cheekily in her wrinkled face, she moves quickly. She is petite, light; none of life’s gravity pulls her down. When the time comes she will go to heaven on a puff of air, like a feather.

  At Lubenizze there is wine, cheese, strings of garlic and sheepskins for sale; there is a Golden Fleece hanging from almost every door, even the women dressed in black wear one and in the small square they offer them for sale. An old woman – black headscarf, shawl, skirt, stockings, and a thick and woolly golden fleece under her arm – disappears under a tumbledown portico: a solitary, ancient Medea, unreachable in the mute pain and alienation to which she has been condemned for centuries by Jason’s masculine arrogance.

  Paolo from Canidole is, to the last, a witness in defence of Tito’s Yugoslavia. One summer Paolo was much debilitated and completely disheartened; he still had his pride, but seemed to be actually frightened. After much hesitation, almost ashamed to reveal that he was in trouble, he explained how during the weeks when they were cut off over the winter his neighbour, a younger, sturdier man, had started taking pleasure in tormenting him and his wife, often threatening him and even giving him a severe beating. Rina, his wife, kept quiet; it was clear she was afraid, perhaps exaggeratedly so, but for her it was all a terrible ordeal. A solitary island, an Eden on earth, can become a concentration camp for those who find themselves exposed to brutality with no means of defence.

  Paolo was asked what might be done to help, whether he preferred that his aggressor be confronted or that an admonitory letter be sent from some bigwig in Zagreb. He thought about it for a long time, his head in his hands, and finally the fascination and the authority of the written word won him over and he replied, “No, the letter’s best.”

  Thus a letter was written, in which a precise list of the violence inflicted on Paolo, indicating dates and times, was blended together with a vaguely sinister threat, hinting at the idea of an authority which, though remote, was aware of all transgressions committed in every far-flung corner of the empire and was determined to punish them without recourse. This letter, addressed to the aggressive neighbour, advised him to desist from any further acts of violence, which he could not hope to maintain concealed, if he did not want to be severely punished. The letter was translated into Croatian and sent to a friend, a writer and teacher in Zagreb.

  Although approaching its ever more liberal sunset, the Party still existed and Tito’s portrait still looked out, from all public offices and every shop and café, over the unity and order of Yugoslavia. The friend in Zagreb, after having garnished the letter with stamps, official endorsements and symbols of the Party, transforming it into a message from Authority, signed it and sent it by registered mail to Paolo’s grim persecutor, to whom it was delivered one winter afternoon, and had the dramatic effect of an unusual event for the island. Apparently that winter, Paolo’s last, was a quiet one for the elderly couple, protected as they were by the power which the hero of Canidole had disobeyed so long before, even though that power itself was unaware of the fact.

  Paolo died some years ago. Over past summers, since the beginning of the war between Croatia and Serbia, there has been no news of Rina, perhaps she has gone to live with her sister, in America.

  Eufemia, Nino’s wet nurse, was very old when she died in the hospice on Lussingrande. On 8 March of the previous year, International Women’s Day, she had paid homage to the Director of the hospice with an address, in which she invoked Saint Anthony, venerated in the cathedral by the sea that bears his name. She expressed her hope that Saint Anthony might grant the Director sufficient grace to be able always to provide prompt assistance and to call in the doctors quickly, “God look after they all,” and here she named the others who lived with her in the hospice, “and that theys don’t fall ill.” She had excluded herself, generously, from the list of those who might be in need.

  And so, for her funeral, Nino set foot once again in his ancestral palace, thinking that after all things had not changed so much with that reverse of fortune centuries before, because this is where Eufemia had died, as would certainly have happened if that home had still been the family palace, and seeing those bright rooms, with the oleanders and the laurel through the windows, and those old men and women, somewhat befuddled but happy enough, he felt a little as though he were at home, for the first time since the brutal days of the exodus, and the thought crossed his mind that perhaps it might even be a good thing, everything belonging to everyone in common. But the thought evaporated immediately and in fact during the funeral Nino lost his temper when an acquaintance told him that another lion of Saint Mark had been torn down and the Italian school had been given a hard time.

  Anyway, the palace was well kept, clean and bright and besides, dying did not seem to be such a sad thing. Goodbye, mate, safe journey, say the people on Cherso when a funeral passes through the lanes. Nino is not a church-going man, quite the contrary, but for whoever is born and brought up on the sea every departure is not only the sadness of the farewell, but carries the thought of the return as well. The Lussinians who named the most beautiful bay of their island Čikat, in Italian Cigale, knew this fact; the name comes from the Croatian verb čekati, which means to wait, to wait for relatives who have departed in a boat or on board a ship.

  Cigale is a breast that opens up to the sea and at the same time it encloses the sea, arms that open and close, a circle of the horizon, music of disappearing and reappearing; verses full of sunsets and returns, sang Gottfried Benn, the evanescence of the individual and the permanence of being – eras and millennia that reappear again in words and in the pebbles smoothed by the sea. The shards on the beach are smooth, but the sharp point was rounded recently, perhaps some ten generations ago; the megalithic and Liburnian peoples have disappeared like the light the sea slowly drinks, the sand stirred up by the surf mingles ancient bones. A young foot steps on a shell, the shell breaks and the foot hurts itself on the sharp fragments; it is the blood of life, “Love is like a little walnut / if you don’t break it, you can’t eat it,” goes a song from these islands. The shell is on the beach, open and wounded; the water washes it and wipes out the footprint, the centuries pass on like tides, the shards become rounded, they give way gently beneath another naked foot. Aboat comes back into the bay, it is pulled up onto the shore; someone is returning home.

  On Levrera: myrtle, rosemary, a tangle of bushes block the way, yellow sea poppies on the shore, and behind them the blue deep as the night, and sparkling with light. Behind the barrier of rocks on the beach, the water that has washed over it during the days of wind and breaking waves stagnates in a soft warm mud, teeming with dark germinal life into which the foot happily sinks and wallows. In May, in the nests among the rocks, the seagulls’ eggs hatch. The young, little grey things, run towards the water or hide in the scrub. The gulls hover over the nests, screeching interminably, a deafening and shocking noise in the abounding light; when they dart threateningly alongside the visitor who gets too close to the nest, there is a mean, fixed look in their eye.

  A gull lies on the ground; beating its wings in an attempt to raise itself, it collapses exhausted. The sick bird trembles, soft and fragile between the hands that pick it up. In the beauty of the world, writes Simone Weil, brute necessity becomes an object of love; in the folds that the force of gravity imprints on the waves, which nevertheless swallow up ships and shipwrecked sailors, there is the beauty of obedience to a law. The beauty on Levrera is perfect, but it seeks to be only happiness, freedom from every force of gravity, the wind dissolving the torrid heat and the closeness. Is this absolute beauty harmony with a law or a pardon wrested from every law? Placed on the water, the gull immediately reassumes the dignifie
d position of a bird of its species floating on the waves, its neck held high and its head directed straight out towards the open sea, while the current takes it from the shore. A few minutes later it is already far away, indistinguishable from the other gulls rocking on the water.

  Antholz

  Go easy on those who balance. It is not a binding rule, but is rather a question of style, of gentlemanly conduct which a player of cotecio must always live up to. A real player that is, not one of those good only at dumping or jettisoning their dangerous cards willy-nilly. A player balances when, even though he is in a position to get away with a low card, he plays a high one, thus picking up everything on the table to his own detriment, sacrificing himself, but at the same time preventing another player from twisting. Such a player balances the general situation and pulls the others out of trouble, too, because everybody would lose a point if that twist succeeded. Thus it is a moral obligation to go easy on players who balance, and to avoid dumping on them the worst cards one has in one’s hand.

  In the Stube, the lounge of the Herberhof hotel in Antholz Mittertal, the local patrons, their faces as though carved from ruddy wood, generally concentrate on other games more appropriate to a land which Charles V, referring to the entire county of Tyrol, defined as being vital to the German nation. There is nothing strange in the fact that every year for many years now Hans, sitting with the others at that table near the big tiled stove, decorated with green motifs on an ochre background, has shyly proposed a game of watten. Even the twelve apostles painted on the pine-panelled walls of the Stube support Hans’s suggestion, and just behind the table there is even a tabernacle housing a bottle of Riesling. A German game would be more the thing than a Venetian one in this hotel, which is mentioned in the chronicles from ancient times and which over the centuries has been extended while still preserving its original nucleus. The cotecio of Oderzo or Trieste, so Latin in its expertise in History’s deceit and so aware of the fact that all cards pass from hand to hand, cotecio is a game unbecoming to the deutsche Treue, to German trustworthiness.

  But Hans, who arrives from Vienna between Christmas and New Year, is in a minority in this company, and does not insist. Beneath the portrait of the mustachioed and now defunct Mr Mairgunter, erstwhile landlord of the hotel and father of the seven children who gradually, over those decades, have distanced themselves from the gravitational force of the Herberhof like planets pursuing ever wider orbits – it may well be that unbeknown to the players (themselves the playthings of History’s cunning) the decades of cotecio played at that table constitute an involuntary if marginal chapter in the attempt to Italianize the Südtirol–Alto Adige and to contribute to the transformation of Antholz Mittertal into Anterselva di Mezzo. Or rather, the cotecio players who grow old agreeably at that table represent – at any rate during the days spent in the Stube with the cards in their hands, approximately between Christmas and Epiphany – again unbeknown to themselves, a rearguard action in Italy’s hobbled imperialism. In the progressive Italian retreat from those valleys they too are withdrawing, but they hang on with the odd spot of twisting and perhaps even, when required, dumping.

  Indeed, in playing cotecio, the winner – the one who amasses most cards and earns most points – is the loser. For this reason too, says Toni, the game imitates life, in that it often deceives most when it adds to one’s pile, even attractive things like the ace of diamonds or the king of spades; they seem so light but sooner or later they begin to weigh a ton and drag one down. Unless a win comes every time, gathering up everything, as when one twists, breaking the bank of probability and all the calculations that have existed for ever in the web in the mind of God or in the space–time continuum, in order to ensure that people lose.

  Someone like Toni, for example – even the laws of statistics and Sod’s law find him a tough nut to crack – can easily manage a twist. Even before he pulls the card out you can see it in his eyes, narrowing and imperceptibly grinning and glinting, turning slantwise to the faces of the other players, to the apostle Andrew painted on the wall, the cards spread over the table, the glasses of Terlaner or Fol, in any case always a golden white wine, the same colour as the sand in an hourglass. While the card falls, those eyes look out of the window of the Stube for a moment, into the dark and empty evening, and returning to the table they slide over Lisa’s face, as she stands at the door waiting for someone to order another bottle. That dry, chiselled face, which could belong to a thirty-year-old as it could belong to one of fifty, also carries the bottomless dark of the evening. Toni’s eyes descend into that darkness, for a moment they illuminate it like a candle lit in an empty church; Lisa laughs for no reason, her mouth is young between the early wrinkles and she lights a cigarette, ignoring the drunk who mumbles something as he leans on the bar, opposite the portrait of Mr Mairgunter, father not only to her and her six brothers and sisters, but also to another two children from his first marriage.

  But Isidor Thaler is used to being ignored and doesn’t take it amiss; although his legs can barely hold him, he bows respectfully to Lisa. Every year the alcohol adds another red blotch, just like the circles in the trunk of a tree, but it does not alter the nobility of his face nor the lightness of his loose-limbed gait. He learned some time ago to be ignored, whether in a crowd or alone in his house, a little lower down in the valley in the direction of Anterselva di Sotto, almost opposite the Riepenlift ski-lift, a fine house on three floors with the balconies facing the sun and a fresco depicting the flight into Egypt, all that remains of a much larger patrimony that has passed into other hands. In the summer he works in the reservoirs and in the winter they lay him off, but it makes little difference as far as the solitude goes, and it’s alright that way. To be ignored is a kindness of fate. Mrs Mairgunter, too, from the other side of the bar, her hair combed like a little silver crown and her serious spectacles, pays little heed to him; if he speaks to her she smiles dutifully and looks at Lisa.

  When Jakob, the youngest of the children, comes in and whispers something in Lisa’s ear, Mrs Mairgunter turns her eyes the other way, drums nervously on the bar with her pale, slender fingers, and nods goodbye to Isidor Thaler. He, too, takes his leave and goes out into the night, kindly and silent though unsteady on his feet, while at the cotecio table everyone has dropped a point and Marisa deals again. Her hand is sweet and firm, like her smile, outside it is cold and the dark comes not only at night, but she gives to each his own, as she does at home when she ladles the soup into the plates. Let not your heart be troubled, it is written.

  Irene and Angela were so sleepy they’d started whingeing and Barbara has just sent them to bed, after promising to take them onto the lake tomorrow with the sledge, because they are too young to ski and she says “refo”, “I redo”, because at the beginning of each hand, if one finds oneself with bad cards, one can ask the others to redo, or to shuffle and deal the cards again. But one has to be careful because if instead of saying “refo” Barbara says “mi referìa”, “I might just redo”, then it could simply be a ploy to see whether the others have good or bad cards and it gives her the right, after considering their reactions, to change her mind and stick with the cards she has.

  The Stube is the heart of the Herberhof, as this last is the heart of Antholz Mittertal just as the village in its turn is the heart of the entire Anterselva valley, severely cut off from the rest of the world. To the north it is bounded by the Riesenferner chain and the Stalle pass, always closed in the winter, to the east and the west it nestles between mountains that rise abruptly and to the south there is the clearly defined entrance, a sort of door through which one enters as if the valley were a fortress, through a pass between high golden walls, arranged in several rows to block any advance. A sign saying Holzhof SAS/KG informs that behind that wall is the storeyard of a timber mill. The planks are piled in fixed and regular order, the tawny phalanx shines in the freezing air; the smell of the wood is good and dry, sharp as snow, a light wind scatters a handful of gold
en dust from freshly sawn trunks.

  The road, through the timber, is reached by turning left if coming from Brunico, right if coming from Dobbiaco – in any case one is already in Pusteria, and the Antholzer Tal, with its villages that rise up it towards the pass and the lake – Niederrasen, Oberrasen, Salomonsbrunnen, Antholz Niedertal, Mittertal, Obertal – is a lateral valley of Pusteria, a concentrate on a reduced scale. Pusteria’s original name, Pustrissa, is Slav, but, especially during the years of most bitter conflict with the Italian state, it proved to be a relentless and sometimes ferocious custodian of Tyrolean Germanness, of the uncontaminated Heimat among the mountains. The ancient name might refer to an ethnic substratum, claiming an at least partial Slav character for the territory, but since it means empty and deserted, it might also bring to mind (with some rancour) the devastation that followed the wars with the Slavs, who arrived in that land with the Avars at their heels.

  Closure and intermingling, frontiers marked out and crossed. The Tyrol vaunts an ethnic virginity that is protected by the mountains, a closed endogamy, a family concern, a Germanic pearl locked away in a chest, but it is also a crossing and transit, a bridge between the Latin and the German world. The great Roman road that led to Aquileia came through here on its way to the Brenner and later the Alemannic road, travelled by mediaeval merchants. According to primary school teacher Hubert Müller, historiographer and exhaustive cosmographer of Antholz, as well as frequent patron of the Herberhof, before the great flood there was a road providing a direct link along the summits of the mountain.