The Road to San Giovanni Read online

  The table where we laid the fruit and vegetables and filled the baskets to take back home was under the fig tree next to the old Cadorso farmhouse where the farm stewards’ family lived and where the faded Masonic emblem that the old Calvinos used to put on their houses was still visible over the door. Our vineyard took up the lower part of the estate, with fruit trees planted between the rows of vines; further up were the grapefruit trees, and above them the olives. And there, in the shade of the tall, green avocado (or aguacate) plants, the apple of my father’s eye, was the house he had built himself, the Villa” where we would live through the worst days of the war; with a model cellar and a stall for white Swiss goats on the ground floor. Our property ended at the piazza with the church of San Giovanni (where they hoisted the Cockaigne pole every twenty-fourth of June and the town band would play), then began again on the other side after a stretch of mule track, taking in a whole small valley which had a plantation of palms for funeral wreaths at the bottom, then fruit and greens further up, with a farmhouse known as Cason Bianco (where we kept sheep for a while), and a spring hidden amongst rocks green with maidenhair fern, and a limestone cavern, and a rock cave, and a fish pond, and other wonders, which were no longer wonders for me but have once again become so, now that in place of all this, stretching away in squalid and ferocious geometry, with neatly squared walls and terraces all at the same inclination, stands a carnation plantation—grey expanse of stalks in a grid of poles and wires, opaque glass of greenhouses, cylindrical cement tanks—and everything that once was is gone, everything that seemed to be there but was already only an illusion, an unaccountable stay of execution.

  Since it was in the shade for part of the day, the valley of San Giovanni was at that time thought to be unsuitable for the mass cultivation of flowers and hence had preserved the traditional look of the countryside. And likewise all the farms my father walked through every morning, as if he had chosen the route on purpose to avoid the uniform, grey expanses of the carnation fields which now hemmed in the city from Poggio to Coldirodi, as if, despite working professionally in the floriculture business himself, he felt secretly remorseful about it, realized that this thing he had hoped and worked for did, yes, mean economic and technical progress for our backward agriculture, but also destruction of wholeness and harmony, loss of variety, subordination to money. And that was why he separated those hours in San Giovanni from the rest of his day, why he tried to set up a modern estate that wouldn’t be hostage to a monoculture, made investments whose recovery was always uncertain, increasing the number of crops, the imported varieties, the irrigation piping, all so as to find some other way forward he could offer, one that would preserve both the spirit of the place and the drive for progress. What he wanted to achieve was a relationship with nature, one of struggle and dominion: to get his hands on nature, to change it, to mould it, while still feeling it alive and whole beneath.

  And me? I imagined my mind was elsewhere. What was nature? Grass, plants, green places, animals. I lived in the midst of it and wanted to be elsewhere. When it came to nature, I was cold, reserved, sometimes hostile. I didn’t realize that I too was seeking a relationship, more fortunate perhaps than my father’s, a relationship that literature would give me, restoring meaning to everything, so that all at once everything would become true and tangible and possessable and perfect, everything in a world that was already lost.

  Where is it my father’s shouting from, telling me to bring the hose and do some watering, with everything so dry? From one strip comes the sound of old Sciaguato’s fork thumping and thumping in the earth. Something is moving up in those trees: Mumina’s girl has climbed up to pick a basket of cherries. I run over with the hose coiled on my shoulder, but I can’t see my father amongst the rows of plants and I get the wrong strip. I have to bring the hook for pulling down the branches of the cherry tree, the sulphate dispenser, the sticky tape for grafting, but I don’t know my own land, I get lost. (Now, from the vantage point of hindsight, I can see every strip, every path, now I could point out the way for myself as I run through the vines, but it’s too late, everybody’s gone now.)

  I wish the baskets were already packed, so that we could get on home and go to the sea. The sea is over there, in a triangular cleft in the valley, V-shaped; but it’s as if it were miles and miles away, the sea alien to my father and to all the people we meet on our morning walks.

  Now we’re walking home. I’m bowed down under my pannier. The sun is high; from the nearest paved road, on San Giacomo Hill, comes the drone of a truck; here in the valley the grey of the olives and the chuckle of the stream deaden colour and sound. On the slope opposite smoke rises from the earth: someone has lit a stubble fire. My father is talking about the way olive trees blossom. I’m not listening. I look at the sea and think I’ll be down on the beach in an hour. On the beach the girls toss balls with their smooth arms, they dive into the sparkle, shout, splash, on scores of canoes and pedal-boats.

  Gennaio, 1962

  A CINEMA-GOER’s AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  There were years when I went to the cinema almost every day and maybe even twice a day, and those were the years between ’36 and the war, the years of my adolescence. It was a time when the cinema became the world for me. A different world from the one around me, but my feeling was that only what I saw on the screen possessed the properties required of a world, the fullness, the necessity, the coherence, while away from the screen were only heterogeneous elements lumped together at random, the materials of a life, mine, which seemed to me utterly formless.

  The cinema as evasion, it’s been said so many times, with the intention of writing the medium off – and certainly evasion was what I got out of the cinema in those years, it satisfied a need for disorientation, for the projection of my attention into a different space, a need which I believe corresponds to a primary function of our assuming our place in the world, an indispensable stage in any character formation. Of course there are other more profitable and personal ways of creating a different space for oneself: the cinema was the easiest and most readily available, and then it was also the one that instantaneously took me further away than any other. Every day, walking up and down the main street of my small town, I’d only have eyes for the cinemas, three that showed new films and changed programmes every Monday and Thursday, and a couple of fleapits with older or trashier films that changed three times a week. I would already know in advance what films were showing in all five theatres, but my eye would be looking for the posters they put up to announce the next film, because that was where the surprise was, the promise, the anticipation that would keep me excited through the days to come.

  I would go to the cinema in the afternoon, slipping out of the house on the sly, or with the excuse that I was going to study with some friend or other, since during the school term my parents allowed me very little freedom. The proof of my passion was my determination to get into the theatre as soon as it opened, at two. Seeing the first showing had a number of advantages: the half-empty theatre, apparently entirely reserved for me, which meant I could lie back in the middle of the third-class seats with my legs stretched out on the back of the seat in front; the hope of getting back home without anybody realizing I’d left, so as then to get permission to go out again (and maybe even see another film); and the slight daze I would be in for the rest of the afternoon, bad for studying but good for daydreaming. Then apart from these motives, none of them things one would really want to confess to, there was a more serious one: getting into the cinema when it opened meant I was sure to enjoy the rare good fortune of seeing the film from the beginning and not from some arbitrary moment near the middle or the end as usually happened when I arrived at the cinema mid-afternoon or early evening.

  Of course arriving when the film had already started was to conform with what is a barbarously common habit among Italian cinema-goers, and one that still persists today. You might say that even in those early days we Italians were looking forward to the mo
re sophisticated narrative techniques of contemporary cinema, breaking up the temporal thread of the narrative and transforming it into a puzzle to be put back together piece by piece or accepted in the form of a fragmentary body. To console ourselves further, I might add that watching the beginning of the film after one had already seen the end offered additional pleasures: that of discovering not the resolution of the films mysteries and dramas, but their genesis; and that of a confused sense of premonition vis-à-vis the characters. Confused: in precisely the way a clairvoyant’s must be, since the reconstruction of the mangled plot was not always easy, and would be even less so if it happened to be a detective story, where the identification first of the murderer and then of the crime left an even murkier area of mystery in the middle. What’s more, there would sometimes be a bit missing between the beginning and the end, since suddenly looking at my watch I’d realize I was late and that if I didn’t want to incur my parents’ wrath I’d have to leave before the sequence I’d come in at reappeared on the screen. So that many films were left with a hole in the middle, and even today, after thirty years – what am I saying? – almost forty, when I find myself watching one of those old films – on television for example – I’ll recognize the moment I walked into the cinema, the scenes I watched without understanding, and I’ll retrieve the lost pieces and complete the puzzle as if I’d left it unfinished only the day before.

  (I’m talking about the films I saw between, let’s say, thirteen and eighteen years old, when the cinema engrossed me to an extent far beyond anything that came before or after; of the films I saw in my infancy I have only confused memories, while the films one sees as an adult are mixed up with so many other impressions and experiences. My memories are those of one who discovered the cinema in adolescence: I had been kept under a tight rein as a child; for as long as she could, my mother tried to keep me from any dealings with the world that didn’t have a planned and obvious purpose; when I was a small boy she rarely took me to the cinema, and then only for films that she felt were “suitable” or “instructive”. I don’t have many memories of silent films, or of the early years of sound: a few Chaplins; a film about Noah’s ark; Ben Hur, with Ramon Navarro; Dirigible, in which a zeppelin crashed at the Pole; the documentary Africa Speaks; a futuristic film about the year 2000; the African adventures of Trader Horn. And if Douglas Fairbanks and Buster Keaton hold places of honour in my mythology it is because years later I introduced them retrospectively into an imaginary childhood they couldn’t be left out of; as a child I knew them only from gazing at the colour posters. Generally I was kept away from films with love stories, which in any case I couldn’t understand since my unfamiliarity with film physiognomy meant I was always getting the actors mixed up, especially if they had moustaches, and the actresses likewise, especially if they were blondes. In the aviation films, which were very popular when I was a child, the male characters were like so many twins, and since the plot was always based on the jealousy between two pilots who as far as I was concerned were the same pilot, I would get extremely confused. In short, my apprenticeship as a cinema-goer was slow work and hard; which is why the passion I’m talking about exploded out of it.)

  When, on the other hand, I went into the cinema at four o’clock or five, what hit me on coming out was the sense of time having passed, the contrast between two different temporal dimensions, inside and outside the film. I had gone in in broad daylight and came out to find it dark, the lamp-lit streets prolonging the black-and-white of the screen. The darkness softened the contrast between the two worlds a little, and sharpened it a little too, because it drew attention to the passing of those two hours that I hadn’t really lived, swallowed up as I was in a suspension of time, or in the duration of an imaginary life, or in a leap backwards to centuries before. Especially exciting was finding that the days had got shorter or longer: the sense of the passing seasons (always bland in the temperate clime we lived in) caught up with me as I came out of the cinema. When it rained in the film, I would listen hard to hear whether it had started raining outside too, whether I had been surprised by a downpour, having left home without an umbrella: it was the only moment when, while still immersed in that other world, I remembered the world outside; and it made me anxious. Even today, rain in films triggers the same reaction, a sense of anxiety.

  If it wasn’t time for dinner yet, I’d join my friends trooping up and down the pavements of the main street. I’d go back past the cinema I’d just come out of and hear lines of dialogue echoing out of the projection room onto the street, and rather than the indentification I’d felt earlier, hearing them now would instill a feeling of unreality, because by now I was firmly in the outside world, and a feeling akin to nostalgia too, as of one who turns back at a frontier.

  I’m thinking of one cinema in particular, the oldest in the town and one connected with my earliest memories of the days of silent films, a cinema that had preserved from those days (and still did so right up until a few years ago) both its liberty-style street sign decorated with medals and the structure of the theatre itself, a long hall sloping downwards flanked by a corridor with columns. The projectionist’s room had a small window that opened onto the main street and would blare out the absurd voices of the film, metallically distorted by the technology of the period, and all the more absurd thanks to the affectations of the Italian dubbing which bore no relation to any language ever spoken, past or future. And yet the very falseness of those voices must have possessed a communicative power all its own, like the sirens’ song, and every time I passed that little window I would sense the call of that other world that was the world.

  The side doors of the theatre opened onto an alleyway; in the intervals the usher with the braiding on her jacket would open the red velvet curtains so that the colour of the air outside appeared discreetly at the threshold, and the passersby and the people sitting in the cinema would look at each other a little uneasily, as though facing an intrusion equally inconvenient to both. The interval between the first and second reel in particular (another strange custom practised only in Italy and inexplicably current even today) would come as a reminder that I was still in this town, on this day at this time: and depending on how I felt, my satisfaction at knowing that in just a moment I’d be plunging back into the China Sea or the San Francisco Earthquake would grow; or alternatively I would be oppressed by this warning not to forget that I was still here, not to lose myself in far-off lands.

  The interruptions in what was then the biggest cinema in the town were not so crude, since here they would change the air by opening a metallic dome at the centre of a vaulted ceiling frescoed with nymphs and centaurs. The sight of the sky in the interval would give pause for thought, with the slow passing of a cloud that might perfectly well have come from other continents, other centuries. On summer evenings the dome would stay open during the film itself; the presence of the firmament enclosed everything remote in a single universe.

  During the summer holidays I could go to the cinema more freely and with less fuss. Most of my schoolfriends left our small town to go to the mountains or the country, and I would be on my own for weeks on end. Every year their departure marked the beginning of the season for hunting out old films, since the cinemas would put on things from years ago, from before the time this omnivorous craving had taken hold of me, so that in those months I could recover lost years, reconstruct a cinema-going maturity I didn’t have. Films in normal commercial distribution, though: I’m not talking about anything else (exploration of the retrospective universe of the cine-club, of history consecrated and contained in the various cinematheques, would mark another phase of my life, relationships with different cities and worlds, a time when the cinema would become part of a more complex experience, of history); but in the meantime I still cherish the emotion I experienced on salvaging a Greta Garbo film that must have been three or four years old at the time but which might have been prehistoric as far as I was concerned, with a very young Clark Gable, wit
hout the moustache. Courtesans it was called – or was that the other? – because there were two Greta Garbo films I added to my collection in that season of revivals, though the pearl of them all was The Blow, with Jean Harlow.

  I haven’t said it yet, though I felt it would be understood, that for me the cinema meant American cinema, the Hollywood production of the time. “My” period goes pretty much from Lives of a Bengal Lancer, with Gary Cooper, and Mutiny on the Bounty, with Charles Laughton and Clark Gable, up to the death of Jean Harlow (something I went through again many years later when Marilyn Monroe died, in a decade more aware of the neurotic charge behind every symbol), with plenty of comedies in between, romantic crime movies with Myrna Loy, William Powell and Asta the dog, the musicals of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the detective stories of Chinese sleuth Charlie Chan, and Boris Karloff’s horror films. I didn’t remember the directors’ names as well as I did the actors’, but there were exceptions, like Frank Capra, Gregory La Cava and Frank Borzage, who used to feature poor people rather than millionaires, using Spencer Tracy more often than not: they were the well-meaning directors of the Roosevelt era; but that was something I discovered later; at the time, I gulped it all down without drawing many distinctions. The American cinema as it was then was composed of a gallery of actors’ faces unparalleled either before or after (at least as I see it) and the plots were simple devices (amorous, character-based, generic) for bringing these faces together in ever changing combinations. Around these conventional stories there was very little flavour of a particular society or period, but that was precisely why what flavour there was struck home without my being able to define what it consisted in. It was (as I would later learn) the mystification of what lay behind that society, but it was a special mystification, unlike the Italian mystification I would be submerged in for the rest of the day. And just as a psychologist is equally interested when his patient lies as when he tells the truth, since either way he reveals something about himself, so I, as a film-goer belonging to another system of mystifications, could learn something both from the very little truth and the great deal of mystification the products of Hollywood offered me. With the result that I bear no rancour towards that false and fabricated image of life; and although I wouldn’t have been able to explain at the time, it seems to me now that I never took it as truth, but just as one of the many artificial images possible.