Microcosms (Panther)

by Magris, Claudio

  Jailed, then freed by his followers, he fought fiercely in these valleys, as ready to wield the scythe in battle as in the harvest. He went on to take refuge in Venetian territory, but was betrayed and killed by one of his followers who cut off his head and sent it to the government at Innsbruck, obtaining in exchange an amnesty and a reward. Gaismair, too, fetched up assassinated with forty-two stab wounds, after extracting considerable concessions from Archduke Ferdinand, who went back on his word as soon as the revolutionary movement began to lose strength.

  While their peasants continued to believe in the legitimacy of the sovereign even during the struggle, attributing the injustices to the perfidy of some individual counsellors, Gaismair and Passler sought to create a new social order. They cannot be reduced to any cramped local framework, being two tragic figures of German and European history and of the contradiction that marks modern life. The modern, in radically changing the world, carries within itself the need for an even more radical change, of Messianic redemption, and at the same time it suffocates at birth the Utopia of social redemption through the very force of its development. The failed peasant revolt, which took place at the beginning of the violent and vital modern transformation, is the mark of this ambivalent destiny of modernity, particularly fatal for Germany; the “German misery”, the political immaturity that was to produce so many catastrophes, was born of this schism between religious and social freedom. Faust, the symbol of the new man, is an apolitical hero; the remoteness of this individual Titan from the German peasant revolt of the 1500s is a symbol of this laceration.

  For centuries the defeat of the peasants and the restoration effected by Ferdinand II made the Tyrol the land of bigoted and conservative loyalism, celebrated bulwark of tradition against modernity (and of the customs and privileges sanctioned by that tradition), against the principles of 1789, the Napoleonic code, liberalism and socialism. In keeping with this approach, the Tyrol, which was devoted to the Hapsburgs (whose fiefdom it was from 1665), opposed the enlightened reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II, defending the privileges of the estates and the entire social order against the modernization proposed by the Hapsburg sovereigns, and resisted their great effort to overcome reactionary feudalism while avoiding revolution.

  Not far from the Altenfischer house is the Wegerhof, whose landlord for a certain time was Josef Leitgeb, the rebel, the martyr – like Andreas Hofer – in the struggle against the French and the Bavarians who invaded the Tyrol in 1809. Leitgeb was shot on 8 January, 1810, at the entrance to the valley, where he is commemorated now in a small niche with an effigy of Jesus. Like Andreas Hofer, Peter Mayr and other patriots – and unlike Gaismair or Passler – Leitgeb was not a revolutionary who subverted the law so as to lay down a new one, but a rebel whose opposition to the new usurping power merely sought to restore the old order. He is a martyr of tradition attacked by the universalism of reason, of ethnicity menaced by the Nation-State.

  Like almost all true rebels, the Tyrolean rebels were betrayed by the princes they fought for and who sacrificed them to reasons of state; it was the armistice of Znaim, concluded by Emperor Francis I of Hapsburg following the defeat at Wagram, that left Hofer, a guerrilla fighter now deprived of all legitimacy, in the hands of the French and Bavarians. Great-power politics penalizes the Tyrol, but then it was for the Tyrol, not for the house of Austria, that Hofer and Leitgeb died. Or rather it was for a part of it, the German part, excluding the Welschtirol or the part which – according to the centuries-old nomenclature, only superseded in recent times – is properly the Südtirol. The champions of Tyrolean freedom sanctioned the division of ancient Tyrol and its unity, which dated back to 1254 and whose cultural fulcrum was in the southern part until the fifteenth century, after which it moved to Innsbruck. The patriots of 1809 split the unity of the Tyrol, separating the German component from its Latin counterpart and were then abandoned or annihilated by the German nation powers, respectively by Austria or Bavaria. As late as the Sixties Südtirolese terrorism would be marked by the contradiction between separatist nationalism and the tie with Austria or Germany.

  Leitgeb fought for ancient liberties, but also for ancient privileges and servitude, against the introduction of the principles of equality and a social mobility capable of offering individuals new possibilities of emancipation. But the Napoleonic model of modernity that invaded the valley of Antholz with General Broussier’s troops was also a totalitarian and levelling violence, which brutally destroyed diversity; in the reactionary resistance of Hofer and Leitgeb, which became the symbol of an uncompromisingly conservative ideology in the Tyrol, there is also the defence of real freedoms threatened by tyrannical projects. Leitgeb is an extra in the drama of modern history that seeks to balance Scylla with Charybdis, the violence of the part and the violence of the uniform whole, an unresolved impasse that still torments Europe and explains many of the ghastly centralizing modernisations and many of the visceral barbaric regressions.

  When Leitgeb died, the third route towards a modern world, the route that the Enlightenment had attempted, was already closed – the enlightened absolutism of Theresa and Joseph, sensitive to diversity even in their projects for unity and respectful of tradition even in their impulse towards innovation; this third road had been vaguely marked out to avoid the Terror and the unbridled accumulation of early capitalism. But the Tyrol rejected Maria Theresa and Joseph II and embraced Kaiser Franz – he who had abandoned Andreas Hofer to his destiny – or in other words the reactionary Hapsburg restoration, antithetic to Theresa’s innovations and responsible for so much of the Tyrol’s ethical–political backwardness. Napoleon, the invader who had for a moment thought of creating a Swiss–Tyrolean confederation or of integrating the Tyrol into the kingdom of Italy, granting it substantial autonomy, had understood the particular nature of the country, even though the borders he imposed are those that divided it, briefly, in the most radical manner.

  Leitgeb is also the name of the sawmill at the beginning of Antholz Mittertal, near the Gruber Stöckl – a little chapel in a greenish colour that makes one think of the sea. The walls are covered with the classic stereotyped images of the Via Crucis, the same first seen in the church of the Sacred Heart in Trieste. The wooden and brachycephalic Christ hanging on the cross is a man from these valleys, his features marked by generations of poverty and inbreeding. The days at Anterselva begin, on the first evening, before this crucifix in the dark and empty chapel; the past year is deposited beneath that wood, like a bunch of flowers or a rucksack taken from one’s shoulders.

  Behind the sawmill the road climbs steeply; from on high one can see the church, dedicated to Saint George, and all the village, with its new houses and roads that have grown clumsily around the Kulturhaus that bears the name of the mediaeval poet. The village is small, but during the evening stroll it dilates in the dark, it loosens into a yielding space. Space, too, not only time, is elastic, it expands and contracts according to what it is holding, because it is time coagulated, like people’s lives. Between the two shops, the one that is also called Leitgeb and Handlung at the end of the village, the snow keeps and restores years and events, layers of time. All straight journeys, with a precise point of arrival, are brief, a few hours by train between Trieste and Milan, or by plane between Milan and New York. The evening stroll with no precise destination loses itself, caught up on half-buried wrecks that trip one up, sends one down paths that have been erased. It is like looking into a face, sinking into the waters of someone’s eyes, being sucked into a mouth. The name Antholz, according to some perhaps debatable etymologies, may mean, “beyond the wood”, the place on the other side of the great woods. Those dark deserted roads in the evening are beyond a forest, the one crossed leaving pieces of oneself among the branches, the thorny bushes, the rotting tree-trunks.

  In 1856, not far from the Gruber chapel, in a house which is now a mere ruin, Lorenz Leitgeb, the Herodotus of the valley, was born. The priesthood took him far away. In the Austri
an monasteries and in his frequent journeys as a missionary, Father Leitgeb was homesick for Antholz, but his superiors wanted him elsewhere. Finally he was able to return to the village of his birth thanks to a soporific sermon given by the Antholz parish priest. One evening, while the latter was preaching, a villager fell asleep and on waking up found himself locked inside the deserted church; to get out he had to let himself down from the belltower holding on to the bellrope, accidentally stopping the clock. Thus the parishioners asked for a preacher who was at least able to keep his congregation awake, and Father Leitgeb, known for his eloquence, was sent for. He spoke from the pulpit with great spirit and enjoyed his return home.

  *

  There is a funeral reception at the Herberhof; one of the valley’s important livestock traders has died, father of ten children and holder of every possible degree of kinship. In the kitchen preparations are underway for lunch, following the set menu for these occasions: broth with sliced beef, wine and water; in the big dining room the tables are being laid. Jakob lords it from behind the bar. He is the master of the hotel, he always has been; even when he was out in the stable, the hand that gripped the pail full of manure kept all his brothers and sisters in order. Two or three of his siblings have gone, one never sees them at the Herberhof. When it came to it he simply left the stable and took his rightful place.

  Exercising his domination openly, rather than in secret, has done him good. He continues to laugh often, but his quiet chuckle has opened up into an affable cheerfulness, into the bonhomie that suits a hotelier; even his movements are more composed, more self-assured. He adds up the bill with exceptional speed, pulling his pencil out from behind his ear. He sleeps in a fine room, with a woman who is from Romania. Lisa has nothing to say, when he speaks to her about it she shrugs. Konrad is almost off to do his military service and Jakob slips him some money, gives him a pat on the back, too, but he pays less attention to him now than he did before, now he makes sure that everything works as it should, especially during the high season. Only some evenings, when his sisters and brothers have already disappeared to their rooms under the stairs, he waits for a while, behind the bar, alone, a glass in his hand and a moist look in his eye. Sooner or later the Romanian will have to go, says Helga, either Jakob marries her or a foreigner can’t stay for ever, and she’s not even Italian, the police wouldn’t allow it. Or perhaps they would? Anyway, it wouldn’t be right.

  The bells toll for the funeral, the coffin – nestling among fir branches and preceded by a big blue and gold standard – arrives from Niedertal on a cart drawn by a horse. There is quite a crowd, the deceased was an important man and death has no power to correct social hierarchies. In Deiner grossen Barmherzigkeit tilge meine Schuld, sing the three priests, “In Your great mercy free me from my guilt.” The bellringer’s sharp face looks out from the belltower, a boy from a painting by Brueghel or Bosch; behind him, way up there, another two or three wooden faces look hungrily at the crowd. Brachycephalic and hyperbrachycephalic Tyroleans, says the old illustrated encyclopaedia of the Hapsburg monarchy sponsored by the Archduke Rudolph – goitre and pellagra handed down through the generations.

  Beyond the windows of the belltower, the sun illuminates the ice on the mountains, gold and blue tongues of fire. The bellringer leans out even more, the body that stretches and bends is the hooked beak of a bird of prey; beneath him the shadow of the big hand of the clock is projected onto the wall like a sundial and it moves slowly, at its tip it is slightly curved, a little scythe. The coffin crosses the cemetery that surrounds the church, wrought iron railings round the tombs, among many German surnames three Italian ones – Scanso, Benato and Amelio. Alois Niederkofler lived for a few hours or a few minutes, he died the same day he was born; Aloisia, his younger sister, was a little girl when she fell into the stream and drowned, 9 June, 1951.

  The hymns and the prayers echo in the church. On the ceiling the dragon lanced by Saint George lies gasping with its tongue hanging out, a dog panting in the heat. Opposite the church is the Wegerhof hotel, which belongs to a Niederkofler. A building adjacent to it, the Weger-Keller, used to connect the hotel directly to the church; now reaching the Weger-Keller is more difficult, by means of a rickety stairway that takes one over wooden trunks and logs. In 1696 the innkeeper Andreas Gruber had the walls frescoed with a Dance of Death. The participants are the Emperor, the peasant, the soldier, the priest, the Pope, the maid, the lawyer, and Death and each one has his or her own line to say: I govern you all, I feed you all, I fight for you all, I pray for you all, I absolve you all, I seduce you all, I defend you all, I make off with you all.

  The room is full of old tools – frying-pans, broken saws, rusty scythes, wooden yokes. No one, says another inscription, knows when this thief will come. Even in this modest reproduction of a stereotype the greatness of the Baroque resounds, its objective sense of the majesty and the nakedness of creation, that universality which recent European culture has made a mess of in the psychological–sentimental miseries of the vain little ego. In that Dance of Death there is the humility and the glory of a common destiny – being born, living and dying. The girl who announces, “I seduce you all,” proclaims the absolute, the vanity of desire, and ignores all bourgeois squeamishness, the erotic Machiavellism, libertine cynicism and the sentimental rhetoric with which – according to his epoch and his social class – the individual who has lost the absolute seeks to replace it with remedies dreamed up out of his own private squalor.

  In that unassuming Dance of Death there is an echo of Baroque music and its broad embrace; we who pass in front of it, skis on our shoulders or books tucked under our arms, we all have parts in the opera and we have to sing, each in our own way according to the whims of ideology or states of mind, some bravura to express the exceptional nature of our hearts. For the Baroque, the world is theatre, we go to the theatre to enjoy ourselves or to receive applause. Broch lamented that for the bourgeoisie the theatre had replaced the cathedral, but the worst thing is that it has also replaced the inn. Or perhaps it comes to the same thing, given that the inn, too, serves bread and wine.

  A few metres farther on, towards Obertal, near Leitgeb’s shop, there is a wood-inlayer’s workshop. Outside the door there is a trunk with a monstrous excrescence, on the other side of which is a crib full of Madonnas, Saint Josephs, animals, a religious humility in wood which domesticates even that evil protuberance. Woodcarving, which reached its height in the sixteenth century, is typical of the Tyrol and it knows nothing of rigid distinctions between sculptor, inlayer and craftsman – art is simply the hand that does a good job.

  There are many guests at the funeral reception; it is all a general greeting and reunion, people have come from the various hamlets in the valley, they have not seen one another for years and they exchange news on families, comings and goings, admissions to hospital, and they sow seeds for a few good deals. Death does not dissolve, rather it binds; it is a rite of social cohesion, a centripetal force. A man who dies is a small star that implodes, acquiring density and mass and attracting to itself other bodies from society. Here and there one can see the centuries-old faces of the valley, cheeks ruddy with wine and toothless gums, but generally the features testify to a settled and continuous civilization, the faces are no longer those of the crowd who scorn Christ in the old altar panels of the valleys, rather they are the faces of a civilized and developed well-being.

  Isidor Thaler moves softly among the tables like a leopard; he is drunk and cannot speak, but he smiles and bows civilly, slipping into the crowd without hurting anyone and without spilling the glass of wine he holds in his unsteady hand. All the village is here and even people from other villages in the valley. Here too is Rudi, with Elisabeth, his pretty wife. Rudi is a postman. As dark as a gipsy, crisp and fast-moving, he was the Adonis of the valley; a southern seductiveness made him irresistible to the pale and rosy little German girls and only his taciturn sobriety, which made him all the more attractive, kept him from ta
king too much advantage, from becoming a little Faust of Antholz – the joy and heartbreak of too many Marguerites.

  He has been married for a few years now and is becoming ever thinner and more drawn. Elisabeth, his wife, has been filling out, her double chin deforms her pouting little mouth into a snout, but then her mouth widens into a look of insolent satisfaction, her eyes shrink between her red apple-cheeks, good enough to eat, her breasts have grown and droop negligently, her puffy hand is imperious as it orders Rudi to go and get her a glass of wine, to fetch her shawl, which she has left in the car, or to take her home. Rudi obeys and keeps his mouth shut; an empty and listless silence, different from the silence there once was. He stares straight ahead, empties his glass without listening to what others say to him, he gets up and follows his wife.

  At the bar Huber, the baker, he too with a level of alcohol in his blood that is clearly over the limit, leans gallantly towards Viviana and tells her that next year Antholz won’t be in Italy any more. In Austria? What do you mean, Austria? In Bavaria. And he fails to pick up on Maria’s provocation when she butts in – ignoring his flattery – and asks if it will therefore be necessary to dig a tunnel running underneath Austria. The most anti-Italian of the Südtirolese look to Bavaria, even though, in the popular comedies that are performed almost everywhere in the valleys – in Niederrasen too – and which celebrate the indivisible nature of the maso, the cheat who pretends to love the beautiful landowning widow often comes from Munich, the metropolis or the heart of big-city corruption, and in the end he is unmasked by a faithful young man who truly loves the widow and ties the knot, thus uniting the ace of hearts with the ace of diamonds and above all else saving the integrity of the land from the speculative clutches of the immoral financial capital.