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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Time runs slowly in a sleepy Tuscan village once renowned for its thermal baths ... until the arrival of Ottone Gattai, a ruthless businessman who has come to this idyllic countryside to revive the legendary baths as an ultra-modern tourist resort. appalled by the transformation of his beloved birthplace, federico, scion of the landowning Cremona family, decides to take action. When peaceful protest proves ineffective, he and his girlfriend Lea launch a guerilla war against the forces of globalisation. This richly satirical first novel by a brilliant young Italian writer is the story of this strange war.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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FILIPPO BOLOGNA
HOW I LOST THE WAR
Translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis
Contents
Negritude begins at the Ombrone River Luciano Bianciardi
ADOG HAD ENDED UP INSIDE.
They had heard it barking for days. Weeks. A heart-rending moan, coming from under the ground. A sound so desperate, it made the night all the colder. It sounded like the weeping of a child walled up in a barrel. Gradually, the barking had grown weaker, until it was almost imperceptible, then had ceased altogether. The old men with faces as cracked as old pottery, cigarettes stuck in the sides of their mouths and ties worn only on Sunday, would say the pit. And they would say it as if uttering a magic word.
A geologist, a small man no bigger than a sparrow, had hauled himself down into it with ropes. He had got to a certain point, then had come up again and said it was impossible to go any further. So they had thrown in a kind of saffron-coloured sulphur powder used as a reactant. There were those who could have sworn blind that the whole of the following day the water from the Ficoncella and Doccia della Testa springs had come out yellow. But there were also those who could have sworn blind that none of this was true.
To get there, you have to climb a road that was asphalted about twenty years ago, though I remember when it was still just rubble. It winds through the scrub, sometimes in wide curves, sometimes in tight bends, like the hem of a quilt, and keeps climbing steadily, never pausing for breath. Where the slope is at its steepest, near the big water tank that serves the village during periods of drought, it takes a sharp turn to the right. At first, the tank was one of our strategic targets, but then we thought better of it, because even if we’d tampered with it, the spa would still have had water, lukewarm water, admittedly, but water nevertheless. And the only ones to lose out would have been the poor devils still living down in the village, with the boilers hissing madly in the cellars like old people with emphysema. In front of the cabin belonging to the road- works company, the red one at the side of the road, there’s a small open space where you can leave your car. Then you can continue on foot. In fact, you have to. You go along a narrow path full of pools and puddles that leads into the woods. The path cuts through a clearing pockmarked with large stones that peek out from the grass like fragments of a meteorite that shattered to pieces millions of years ago. You pass what’s left of an old kiln, of which only the outer walls remain, overrun with brambles. The surface of the path is a bed of dried leaves that crackle underfoot. The path descends along the bank of a dried-up stream filled with crushed stones like the ribs of a fossil. The oak trees crowd in on either side. The branches of the trees intertwine, reaching up into the sky in a great weave of wood and leaves that swallows the light. The juniper bushes give off an intoxicating scent that seeps into the brain and reawakens lost memories. Every now and again the undergrowth rustles. A snake or a lizard slithering behind a rock. Or perhaps a rat. But nothing to be afraid of. You come to a clearing with a large beech tree in the middle. It’s been there for hundreds of years, and has a misshapen trunk which even five men forming a chain would not be able to embrace. It has grown all twisted on that shelf of land, next to a spring. The roots are excrescences covered with moss, exposed nerves that reach down, sinking into the water and the earth. It seems like the ideal place for a witches’ Sabbath. You can almost see the moon high in the sky and the figures of women dancing naked around the beech tree in the flickering light of a bonfire. Halfway along, the path rears up towards the ridge. The tracks of boar and roe deer show you the way. The trunks of the trees are peeled and muddied up to a height of a metre from the ground—the boar roll around in the muddy pools and then clean themselves by rubbing against the bark until it is worn down to the tender sapwood. Once you get to the top of the hill, you can stop and catch your breath. It seems to be a clearing like any other. But it isn’t. Not many people know this place. No one knows—and those who do know don’t want to—what’s beyond it. Where your steps are slowed to a trudge, where even light doesn’t penetrate.
All you can do now is make your way between the thorns and nettles that watch over this place like guardians of a ruined temple.
Rocks and loose earth all around. And in the middle, a hole.
You see me the way I am now
YOU SEE ME the way I am now, but my grandfather whipped the peasants. Although I can’t really see it myself. I still have a photograph in my wallet, a photograph of a distant time, long before things started the way they started and ended the way they ended. It’s an oval photograph, with the grain of the image fading to green, the green of copper roofs when they oxidise. There he is in his shiny boots and his fustian hunting jacket, with his double-barrelled shotgun over his shoulders, his moustaches and his wide-brimmed hat, mounted on a white mare and looking straight in front of him. Without speaking or moving, his belly held in and his chest out, the air trapped in his lungs, eyes full of pride, like a soldier on parade, and I seem to hear the thoughts buzzing angrily in his head as the photographer takes his time before pressing the shutter—Come on, young man, I haven’t got all day.
They called my grandfather Sor Terenzio. I say grandfather, but in reality he was my great-grandfather. They say that, when necessary, he would pull up his sleeves and stir around in the whey to see if his tenant farmer had tried to cheat him by hiding a round of cheese at the bottom of the vat. There never was any, but you never know. My great-grandfather ate priests for breakfast. He ate them up and spat out the cassocks, or rather he cleaned his moustache with the cassocks. It is said that when he was dying, he chased away the priest who wanted to give him the last rites and in a thin voice ad-libbed, Priests and friars are notforgiving, they praise the dead and swindle the living. Those were his very words. Or at least I hope so.
You see me the way I am now, but my great-grandfather whipped the peasants. He was a smart character, my great-grandfather. They had a great deal of respect for him in the village, perhaps because of all those whippings. As I’ve already said, I can’t see it. Though I wouldn’t be willing to bet that it didn’t happen. His initials are still there on a brass plate screwed to the front door—TERENZIO CREMONA. And you have to believe brass plates. The metal, if well polished, withstands the years, unlike men. With the passing of time, that robust, strapping man who went around on horseback and carried a double-barrelled shotgun over his shoulder had given way to an old man with grey drooping moustaches and the sad eyes of a retired champion. On dismounting from his horse, he had lost his proud, masterly bearing, just as he had lost a beautiful wife who had died of peritonitis and a son who, like me, was called Federico Cremona.
Federico had died one summer’s day. He had met with a death that was so stupid that only its banality makes it credible. He was coming home in the still light of sunset after spending the afternoon with his friends. He was fifteen years old, slim, with bright blue eyes. He was holding a ball under one arm and with the other was pushing the bicycle by the handlebars. The ball, held against its will between his arm and his side, rebelled against its master and came free of his grip. Federico made an uncoordinated move, the kind of awkward, innocuous move we all make from time to time. He tried to catch it in flight before it rolled down some steep slope, because then it would take hours to find. He lost his balance and fell. The black bicycle, a large man’s bicycle which he managed to ride even though he was not yet a man, fell with him. And when he fell, his head hit the pavement hard. He lay there on the ground. He had only a small cut on his temple, and all he felt at first was a little nausea. Then he began to feel bad. They carried him into his big house, which had so many rooms, you could lose yourself in it. They put him in a cool dark room with sheets that smelt of lavender and the curtains drawn and the only sounds filtering in being the voices of the children playing down in the street and the cries of swallows chasing each other frenziedly in the evening air. His mother watched over him night and day, day and night, moistening his lips, changing the cool cloths she placed on his forehead. The doctor came and, smoothing an eyebrow, said that he needed to be bled with leeches. His father was shut up in his study, smoking in silence. He didn’t talk to anyone because there was no need to talk, but if he had talked he would have said one word—Why? And Fede’s twin, my grandfather Vanni, had already understood. He had understood from his brother’s increasingly weak voice as he lay delirious in the dimly lit room, from his mother’s weeping, and from his father’s silent smoking in the study, surrounded by dusty papers.
From all these things he had understood that he would have two bicycles, two tennis rackets, two rifles, two suits, two horses, two of everything, one too many and one too few. Two destinies and two lives, one of which was not his own.
He had understood that he would continue to feel his brother the way a disabled man still feels his amputated leg, he would continue to see him, the way an old coat of paint can be seen under a new one, to be aware of him, as we are aware of the void left in a room by a piece of furniture that has been moved.
He decided that he would not cry. He did not even cry on the day of the funeral, the day when the village ground to a halt, transfixed by the lugubrious pealing of the bells, and black-clad people came from all over, so many that they could not all get in the church and crowded onto the steps beneath that leaden early afternoon sun. So many people that when the black head of the procession reached the cemetery, the tail was still in the church.
But Vanni decided, or rather vowed, that he would never again talk about Fede. Never. With anyone. And the only thing stronger than a pact between friends is a pact between twins.
Alive and dead
ON THE DAY of the Dead, when I went with my grandmother to visit my family’s household gods, while she changed the flowers and prayed under her breath, I would anxiously read the inscription on the tomb, which was too rhetorical to be genuinely touching.
FEDERICO CREMONA 1920–1936
Federico flower of strength and youth through a fatal fall you withered on a hot summer afternoon when you were still spreading your fragrance of life you are mourned by your beloved parents and your brother who could not live if not with you
It made quite an impression on me, seeing that tomb with my name on it in the family chapel. I would try not to look at it, making an effort to lose myself in prayer, barely moving my lips behind my grandmother as she intoned the words of the requiem (Eternal rest grant them, O lord, and let perpetual light shine on them, may they rest in peace. Amen) but I couldn’t help myself, the tombstone summoned up distant thoughts that overwhelmed me, plunged into me, deep into my throat, like stones down a well. And the biggest one was the thought of seeing myself dead, walled up inside that furnace of ice-cold marble. And yet I was alive. Even though the stone said I was dead. But I was alive, standing there in front of myself dead. So was I dead or alive? I was both. Alive and dead. Dead and alive.
According to Professor Voinea
ACCORDING TO the work of Professor Voinea of the University of Bucharest, a man who spent his life studying biographical recurrences within generations of the same families, the possibility exists that cases of inter-generational mesmerism can occur. It may well be that, because of mysterious forces which work on the bodily fluids, some ancestors can be reincarnated—partially or totally (the literature is divided on this point)—in their descendants. Again according to the theories of Professor Voinea, there are two types of destiny—the dominant and the recessive. Just like character, human destiny, too, may be transmittable genealogically. And this transmission may be regulated by laws that are still unknown but may not be all that dissimilar from the Mendelian laws that govern heredity. The professor’s team did tests on a family of traditional peasants in the Carpathians going back six generations and observed some astonishing recurrences of the same biographical situations at a distance of decades. For example, if the grandfather in the family had been cuckolded, it was quite likely that his grandson would also be cuckolded, but not the father, this unfortunate circumstance being a recessive characteristic and therefore likely to skip a generation.
Or again, if one of two brothers was destined to be a failure, and the other a success, it was very likely that their grandchildren would get everything from the former rather than the latter, it being established beyond doubt that a predisposition to failure is dominant compared with a predisposition to success.
I found this article in a scientific magazine of my father’s, one of those which are kept in the toilet as a source of inspiration. I’ve read it many times and thought about it a lot. Professor Voinea is a pioneer in this field, and it may be that this particular case study is too limited to be elevated into a law, but I must say that his theory exerts a certain fascination over me, being as I am the scion of an ancient line. And it isn’t just a question of similar names, or tombstones. It’s all about blood, not marble. Because sometimes, especially at night, I can feel my ancestors’ stale blood slowing my circulation, waking me, and summoning me to great enterprises.
I think it’s Federico’s unquiet blood, that dead twin’s degenerate blood, that boils in my veins, urging me to struggle, motivating me towards rebellion, sarcasm and revelry.
The castle
IHAVE TO SAY IT NOW and get out it of the way. I live in a castle. Or rather, I lived in a castle. With its merlons, its tower jutting proudly over the red roofs, its pigeons, its walls and all the minimum requirements a castle has to have to be called a castle. Living in a castle means living in a state of constant anachronism, which cannot be cured by any temporal remission, and which couldn’t help but produce some displacement—however minimal—of my psyche in contrast to the Cartesian axes of history. Being born in a dead place, seeing the light of day in the dark, opening your eyes in an enclosed space, waking up in a sepulchre—that’s what living in a castle means. There’s nothing magical, nothing princely, in the scowling faces of the ancestors who peer down at you from their soot-darkened portraits. Or in being the only male. The last scion, the repository of a name, a history, a tradition. The tenderest shoot at the tip of the branch, the one most susceptible to the cold—all it takes is an April frost, and it’s goodbye harvest. We’re counting on you to perpetuate the race, my forefathers admonish me severely as I hurry down the dark corridors, past galleries of dirt-blackened portraits, with my head lowered to avoid my kinsmen’s inquisitive looks. Please remember, the voice of the flesh of your flesh follows you from room to room, that you have our future in your hands. Not just in my hands, I have your future in my gonads. So don’t count on me.
But how do you get to build a castle in the twentieth century? The century of speed, of the masses, of total war, man walking on the moon and the great leap forward? Only a necrophiliac—or a reactionary—could conceive of a building that was already dead at the dawn of the most modern century in history. Because a castle isn’t only a building, it’s also a concept. A concept that had been dead and gone for centuries, sunk in the recesses of history along with that absurd chivalric society that once inhabited its rooms. Try for a moment to emerge from the pettiness of your apartment blocks, the dreariness of your terraces, the pretentiousness of your detached houses, and imagine living in a castle. There’s nothing romantic, nothing fairytale about it, get that out of your heads. It’s like living in the dried-up cocoon of a chrysalis. It’s horrible. And yet it’s sublime. And there’s no contradiction at all, because you can’t help but feel horror and ecstasy for dying forms. Any painter of still lifes would know what I’m talking about.
I’ve made the most of it, I swear, the most of the least, I agree, but still the most I possibly could. I’m sure you’ll agree with me when I say I could hardly be expected to be a modern man. “You’re a nineteenth-century man!” That was what my girlfriends threw at me when they left me (even when I left them). I can well believe it. And that was fine by me. By rights, I should be a fourteenth-century man, or, worse still, a thirteenth-century man. I’m an avant-garde traditionalist, a progressive conservative, a fashionable reactionary. Well, when you come down to it, it could have been worse.
What I still can’t understand is what was going through my great-grandfather Terenzio’s head when he decided that even if it ruined him he would build a castle. It was he who started the whole thing, who derailed the train of time. And when he had the illusion that he had stopped that train by erecting his castle against the will of history, he of all the passengers was perhaps the most ill at ease. Because a house doesn’t belong to the person who builds it but to those who come after him and live in it for generations. Despite the fact that it had been Terenzio who had wanted this house, wanted it with a feverish determination that consumed him and at the same time kept him alive.
Masons, carpenters and artisans came from all over to build the castle, stonecutters from Rapolano, painters from Siena, decorators from Orvieto, architects from Rome, gardeners from Florence. They worked for years. Twenty, thirty. Maybe more. They worked until the money was all gone and my great-grandfather had squandered all his immense fortune. Even the most impatient creditors had to contain their impatience, out of their old respect—or fear, if you like—for our family and for that proud, strong man who whipped his peasants. And they were all paid, down to the last penny. Until the accounts were settled and the money was gone. The last of the artisans was paid with the last of the cash, and all that was left was an empty bank account and a completed castle. Only then did my great-grandfather Terenzio, who had been dead since Fede had died, feel really free to die. You can judge the result for yourselves. I’m certainly not going to quarrel with it. Architecture is a fact. Or rather, it’s an object. And you can’t quarrel with objects. They either exist or they don’t. They’re there or they’re not. The castle is there, for all to see.
Yes, it’s there, but it wasn’t always there … That’s what many people say, with a wicked little smile. It’s a sensitive, if ultimately futile, question. And it’s kept more than one person awake at night, well, me at least.
Because none of the villagers—the peasants, the artisans, the shopkeepers, the professionals, the small landowners, even my close, or comparatively close, relatives—have ever come to terms with the castle. I’ve thought about that a lot, and have worked out some quite complex theories—too complex, probably, because when you get down to it, it’s actually quite simple.
Envy.
Pure envy.
Of the commonest kind.
In fact if you go to my village and pay attention to what people say, the first thing you’ll hear is:
“The castle’s an imitation.”
“I’m sorry?’
“The castle. It isn’t a genuine medieval building. It’s an imitation.”
“Oh … ”
“Late nineteenth century … ”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
If tourists or strangers arrive, buttonhole some solitary villager who doesn’t really want to chat, and have the misfortune to ask him, “Excuse me, is it possible to visit the castle?” the answer will come—“It’s an imitation.”
If they could, I swear, they’d even have put it on the sign at the entrance to the village:
582 metres above sea level
(THE CASTLE IS AN IMITATION)
So how come that, in all the guides, in all those glossy tourist brochures that are full of mistakes, on every lousy postcard, it’s the slender, imposing outline of the tower that dominates? A TV crew comes to shoot one of those travel features that are really only liked by people who have never been to the places they talk about, and, get this, the feature always begins and ends with the tower. They hold a conference, and what do they stick on the cover of the report of proceedings? The castle.
It’s odd that all this hatred of the castle should become sublimated in the triumph of its iconography. Because, despite the postcards, that’s what it was—hatred. Whenever I was called up to the front of the class, my schoolmistresses would tend to rub it in. “Monuments of note in our village include an early Christian church of great antiquity, the seventeenth-century palace of the Archpriest, visited by Grand Duke Leopoldo in person, a small chapel with a saddle roof known as the Chapel of the Conception, attributed to Niccolò Circignani, known as Il Pomarancio, and next to the high altar the tomb of Beato Pietro who, according to tradition, died there of cold in February 1638 (so says the latest edition of the guide to the village, revised and corrected by God knows who, though I’d love to know). Also of interest is a finely crafted font dating from 1596, and a neo-Gothic castle of no historical or artistic significance, which is … ”
“Cremona, tell me, what is your castle?”
“An imitation, miss!”
“Good. Go back to your seat.”
My classmates at the least sign of an argument during a football game, my classmates’ mothers as they made me jam sandwiches as a snack, my classmates’ friends taking advantage of those rare moments when my mother stepped away from me, leaving me unprotected in the world—in short, everyone, as soon as they had an opportunity, made sure to inform me that the castle in which I lived was an imitation. And to think that I did all I could to downplay it as much as possible. The number of times I heard that fatal question addressed to me by an eager tourist—“Excuse me, whose castle is that?” and I, flying high, very high, a superhero in the clear skies of modesty ever since I was little, would lower my eyes and reply, “ … It’s private.” “But who does it belong to?” the insatiable tourist would insist. “A local family … ” And I would launch my bike at breakneck speed down the slope.
Hardly surprising then, in fact quite understandable, if I had grown up with a complex about this ‘imitation castle’, a taint I carried with me until I was sixteen or seventeen when, after diligent searching in a dusty, authoritative history book, I read the following—“The castle is of Lombard origin, and there is evidence that it dates from as far back as the year 1000.” 1000. One thousand. No more, no less. I can’t tell you the relief!
What my great-grandfather had done was a kind of superfetation, in other words, he had built his neo-Gothic castle on a pre-existing complex. A castle for which there is evidence that it dates from as far back as the year 1000.
But the definitive confirmation of the castle’s authenticity, which helped to dispel any lingering doubts, liberating me for ever from the agonising complex from which I suffered, came a few years later. When my grandfather Vanni, a versatile athlete once legendary as a diver, aviator and sailor, found himself assailed by an incurable disease which transformed him overnight from a decathlete into an old man too weak and proud to drag his tired bones up and down the hundreds of stairs in the castle. The connection between the unacceptable discovery of the disease and the reassuring discovery of the castle’s authenticity may be a tenuous one, but it does exist. Because in a very real, tragic sense, it was my grandfather’s illness which revealed to me the truth about the castle’s origins. No longer able to face the stairs, Vanni, after a meticulous and considered comparison of estimates, finally plumped for a lift. Obviously, the lift would have to be inside the tower. The tower is empty apart from a narrow spiral staircase that climbs all the way to the top until you feel dizzy. Once, on a wild and stormy night, a violent bolt of lightning had struck the top of the structure, gone zigzagging down the stairs and ended its run in the cellar, with a fearful crash that had shut off the current and brought down the bottom of the staircase.
It was from there, at the bottom, where the bolt of lightning had crashed to the ground, that they would have to start in order to install the lift. And it was also there, at the bottom, that confirmation of the castle’s authenticity would come. The company hired for the job arrived, carried out a survey and, after a few days, set to work. The first thing they would have to do would be to drill through the walls of the cellars. These were wonderful spaces with barrel vaults, cool in summer and warm in winter, rooms that for hundreds of years had seethed with the fumes of wine and guarded the acrid odour of cheese left to dry in walnut leaves and the heavy smell of hams hanging from the ceiling. The same cellars that contained enormous oak barrels so big that, during the war, when there was a Fascist raid, people hid in them five at a time, the same cellars where they gave Decio, the cellarman—and there are witnesses—fifty-six glasses of wine one after the other, and he didn’t collapse but walked out on his own two legs, staggering perhaps, but on his own two legs all the same.
Now that agriculture was dead, weeded out by European Community aid, which paid people not to grow crops, now that the vines had shrivelled and the barrels were empty, the cellars had become little more than a storehouse for various pieces of junk accumulated by men in their daily hustle and bustle. The drill they brought in, however, met with an unexpected obstacle. The wall that had to be breached simply couldn’t be breached. It was solid rock reinforced with mortar, and must have been a couple of metres thick. What it was, in fact, was the buttress of the tower. Those medieval architects really knew what they were doing. The drill snorted and hissed, but all to no avail. Finally, after some heart-rending groans, it became blunted and they had to stop the engine twice because they were afraid it would burn up with the effort. “Look, how can you possibly make a hole in this wall?” the worker said, switching off the drill. It’s as hard as Verano stone. It must be at least a thousand years old.” A thousand years old. One thousand. How sweet that number sounded.
And besides, I was in possession of a secret, one that Grandpa Vanni revealed to me before he died. As far as I remember, it was one of the last times, perhaps even the very last now I come to think about it, when he was still up and about before taking to his bed once and for all and giving in to his illness. I was wandering through the cellars looking for the pump, because my bicycle tyres were flat. All at once, I thought I made out my grandfather’s thin, austere figure in the shadows. He was standing in silence in a dark corner, like an animal sensing death.
“Oh, it’s you, Grandpa, you gave me a fright … What are you doing here?”
“I know everything about this house, the layout of the rooms, the weight of the doors, the movements of the handles, the squeak of the hinges, the position of the light switches, the numbers of the steps, the edges of the furniture, the borders of the carpets, the frames of the paintings. If I went blind I’d be able to move around the house without anyone’s help. You too, as the only male heir, ought to know this house as well as I do.”
“But I do know it, Grandpa … ”
“No, you don’t. Come with me.”
Grandpa took me by the hand and limped ahead of me until we reached a large barrel, in front of which he stopped as if in front of an altar. Groaning a little he shifted the heavy lid, which resisted at first then yielded to reveal the dark inside of the barrel.
“Come on, don’t be afraid.”
I summoned my courage and went in after him. At the bottom was a passage, a narrow tunnel, not too low, carved out of the buttress of calcareous rock on which the castle—and, with it, the whole village—was supported. The walls were covered with mould and the floor was sticky. The tunnel sloped sharply downwards. Despite his aching bones, Grandpa advanced without any hesitation. I saw him take something out of his pocket, and a moment later a blue-grey flash lit up our surroundings. He was holding a match with one hand and with the other was shielding the flame from the slight draught that rose from the depths of the tunnel. I followed him, gripping the ribs of his corduroy trousers. All at once, Grandpa came to a halt. The match went out. The darkness echoed with a liquid sound, the kind of sound you might hear in the womb. We were like two strange foetuses waiting to be born.
“Do you hear that?”
“What is it?”
He lit another match, and what I saw in the bluish flash left me speechless. Beneath us was a pit filled with water. From the walls, which were damp with condensation, drops were falling with a dull, regular drip-drip.
“We’re under the well in the village square,” Grandpa said. “When the castle was under siege, this was how they supplied themselves with water without leaving the castle walls.”
I didn’t say anything. There are times when there’s nothing to say.
