BY JAN HAAG
BOLGHERI
10-7-97
(revised 9-11-99)
(revised again 9-15-99)
(and again...)
"I've been there" --
it's an expression the kids use:
"I've been there!"
Meaning more: "I've experienced that!"
"I know
that feeling," than that one has
bodily been to Bolgheri.
Let the
accents falls where they may,
the meaning remains:
"I've known that
state of being."
However, I did not know
until I got home that year
-- I think it
was 1979 --
that I had been driven down
-- up and down a number of
times --
one of the most famous drives in Italy:
the five miles of
cypress at Bolgheri.
Farm land.
Near Livorno.
"Bolgheri,"
Anna, the friend I visited,
told me,
and Toni, my Italian lover,
later confirmed,
"was one of the great old feudal estates
of
Italy"
-- still owned, I believe,
by the same family [Gherardesca],
at least the central
shrunken
core
where stood the ancient castle
round which we
drove
on our way to Anna's
farm house.
A qualifying mansion in American terms,
was Anna's farm house:
stone
and old, many leveled, high-ceilinged,
it's walls -- like Italian
pottery --
painted with arabesques,
vines, flowers, birds and
bees
hovering humbly above flagstones' clip-clop.
It housed a collection of witty,
sadistic children
of the Italian
jet-set,
cleverer,
more articulate,
more assured
than I
would ever be.
My heart shrank
hour by hour, fearing
that, scenting blood,
I'd be the butt of their next
repartee.
I had caught a cold in
Barcelona.
Ill at ease and out of place, with
glamorousless sniffles, a runny nose,
I felt saggy-cheeked and dour
with Anna and her trim,
sleek, fast-gobbling friends
-- all of whom understood English,
and reverted to Italian
upon
noting her odd, silent,
sniveling American
guest
failed to
join the melee.
After a day or two,
they all went some place Anna was sure
I didn't
want to go.
And I didn't.
I was too afraid I'd say
even less on
a delightful excursion --
even if my nose had been dry.
So they left me with the cook
and children.
The cook, mean or old
or both,
failed,
deliberately or accidentally,
to
understand
that I, too, got hungry.
I had no idea how to boil
water or cook an egg
with one of those
hanging instruments
on the wood stove
in the great stone vault
in
one of the International Set's
modest,play-pen kitchens.
The children taunted their guest,
the concierge's son from
home
(Milano),
and made remarks about how little I ate.
Too shy
in those days,
in the guise of myself, to be enchanting,
I was, in
fact, just beginning to shirk
the burden of being like a movie star:
clever, caustic,
capable of
crucifying any topic
among my own set.
I was not, of course,
like many
a movie star
in the flesh
-- who are, often,
dowdily
just like thee and me --
but as they
are enchantingly displayed
in disguise
on the high, wrap-around
screen
where the gaps in reality find no room.
One ensorceling moment
follows hard
upon another;
one memorable remark
is cloned by its twin;
beautiful angles are
explored:
the eyelashes of the heroine,
fluttering, come to
rest
on the gentle tip of the index
finger of the,
up to that moment, taciturn lover.
Eighteen years after being
driven
up and down, up and down,
the famous
five miles [4.3 km]
of cypress
from Bolgheri to the ocean
and back again and back again,
I saw a movie:
exquisite,
awesome, beautiful,
overwhelming in
its grace,
its evocation of the magic of love,
the wonder of
place,
the sensuousness of restraint.
In its envy-stirring relentlessness
it showed fate stalking the rich,
beautiful and war-torn,
those raised in castles,
reared with
sensitivities
of devotion, joie de vivre,
who bought
aeroplanes
before the war
to roam the world as a playground
-- or a spy --
never having enough money,
though food turned up
and they never had
to work.
They could drop out of the war
in a ruined monastery
and life still came streaming in at the door
as they pushed, pushed to
remain
alone.
Alone.
I am always amazed by biographies
of the famous
loners
who were never alone:
Alexandra David-Neel had her
Yongden,
Rousseau did not acknowledge as a human being:
his wife,
who cooked and ministered to his isolation.
Van Gogh, perhaps,
qualifies.
He seems to have been quite alone
when he sliced off
his ear.
Imagine the pain, the astonishment
of that!
Blood
spurting all over his collar,
down his cheeks, on his hands,
no way to stick the
stiff, bloody thing
back again.
Ah, yes, I have spent my time in monasteries,
full and empty,
the
stone walls resounding
to my singly beating heart,
hearing the coy
noises
of would-be monks and monkesses.
I have been alone most of my
life.
But as I look back now, I see
it may have been along
that five
miles of chiaroscuro
cypress,
from Bolgheri to the sea,
that in the depths
of the
cave that is my soul
I decided
to stop being an imitation movie
star
trying to project enchantment as my life.
I see
that it might have been then
that I decided to acknowledge
that I was just a shy,
awkward, wishful-envier of
all that
beauty,
all that wit,
all that was,
all that would-be.
I was but an imitator of all
that
insoucient behavior.
Somewhere in the bowels of my
heart,
between the shadows cast by the cypress,
and death
acknowledged by the sea --
[One NET reference
says:
despite the 2,500+
cypresses,
which "came from Firenze, Pisa and Ripafratta"
there are no shadows!
*
you "run completely under the
sun"]
Due east -- due west?
In the sun then,
in the equatorial,
unblinking sun,
Between the trees, I made a decision to arrest
the devilishly divine
beauty of the
Italian imagination,
to forswear it
as the model for an American
upstart.
I turned
against the witty, the caustic,
the too glamorous gesture,
the lives of the exquisites
I would
never lead.
I committed
-- it seems --
to bumble through
my
life as me:
stiff, awkward, often tongue-tied,
at times mute,
terrified,
hurting, hidden
-- where had I learned so much pain?
And now, after
eighteen year's absence
from the desire to live my life
like the
stars on the screen,
I have, as me, become witty,
wordful,
full of rare wanderings
on earth, through the soul,
often unconscious of my acts which,
when
I was acting out my life,
I was self-consciously
trying to be
as stunningly
gorgeous as a three hour movie,
full of astonishing
people,
amazing angles,
the lushness of landscapes
shot from a
plane,
the terror of deaths,
experienced but not real,
the agony
of others' sufferings,
the exuberance of the imaginings of
Minghella's, Visconti's
Antonioni's, Bertolluci's minds.
Odd,
isn't it, how
the perceivers of magical beauty
run to the
Italian
-- as if they were all reared
along that same five miles of
cypress
at Bolgheri.
Besides, my friends
who encouraged me in my manque
behavior are all dead, even
the Italian Toni who,
when I said
to him on a starry night in
Hollywood,
"Wouldn't it be lovely to be
on a South Sea Island?"
said: "We're
here."
A slap in the face, meaning:
stop your fantasies,
be
here.
With English as a second language,
he didn't know it
(South-Sea-Island-longing) was
just a manner of speaking
-- or did he.
Some where in those years,
before he died,
I stopped dreaming,
fantasizing,
envying, wanting to be someone
more glamorous.
I
lost the sense of living
life as a series
of scenes,
each
archly acted,
and each re-enacted
as table conversation.
I no
longer wanted to
put on a performance
when I met someone,
to get dressed up,
as a friend insisted,
like a manikin, to charm,
to excite others' envy,
to stir others' wonder.
I backed down
and off,
kept my mouth shut,
changed lives,
changed houses,
changed moods, changed trees
and
ideas, many times,
sat at the edge of parties
with nothing to say,
saying nothing,
and finally stopped going
to parties.
I watched the living and the dead
accumulate in my
life,
and never went to the movies.
But on October 7th, 1997,
I
drove again (on the screen),
between the cypress of Bolgheri.
(Toni had said,
they were as famous in Italy
as Joyce Kilmer's
"Trees" in America.
I thought at the time that his
comparison might
be a little unbalanced.
Now it's hard to remember
which way I
thought the scale was tipped,)
On the screen in a movie,
I drove
between those trees again,
remembering
my life as a manque,
as an envier of light and
shadow manques,
I remembered wanting,
if I could not be them,
to create them,
to make movies,
poignant and beautiful,
movies,
able to bring one to tears...
Oh, Oh, Oh,
the mighty emotions
of the human heart
exploited
best on the movie screen
in light, color, shadow
with not a moment
between the scenes
to eat or shit or just feel bad all the long day,
or to cry for three
years
after saying, like the movies,
a gay and dramatic
"Goodbye."
My Mother once said:
"Of course life is difficult
for you, you think time is like a novel."
I didn't know at that time
that what took moments on the
screen
could take ten years in reality.
But Mother was wrong, too.
Now that I live my own life,
I
find the riches of a single day
can, like Joyce, fill a whole novel.
Maybe not wrong...
She might have known it too well
to say it
aloud to me.
So,
last night,
I looked at the stunning movie,
re-lived my
former life,
my former being, as The English Patient
(who looked
like my father --
recently dying, recently dead)
lived out his inexorable destiny,
and I cried and cried
because
I no longer try to see life
with the eyes
of so much
astonishing
beauty.
At times,
I still do hear the glass beads tinkle,
At times I even
see the cheese-cloth
on the bloody remains of a face,
but structured in time
with the
chaos of life around it,
a stomach pain, a burp, a sprained ankle,
a harassing obligation
blends into a balanced avenue
as
retreating as those
five miles of conical cypress
down which the heroine travels
from
the darkness of Bolgheri
to day.
EPILOGUE
On September 11, 1999
after researching Bolgheri all day
at the
Public Library
I found
the five kilometers of cypress
were
planted in 1801 by Camillo della Gherardesca,
that The English
Patient was filmed elsewhere,
and that Giosue Carducci wrote Davanti San Guido,a solemn,
famous, gloomy, maudlin
poem about those trees, not so different from
my own,
beginning:
"I cipressi che a Bolgheri alti e schietti
Van da San Guido in duplice filar..."
We each have our memories.
THE CYPRESS OF BOLGHERI
*A postcard from
Jennifer Walker
A
Brief History of Bolgheri -- in Italian.
Copyright © 2000 Jan Haag
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Jan Haag may be reached via e-mail: jhaag@u.washington.edu
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