BY JAN HAAG
manqué
BOLGHERI
10-7-97
(revisted 9-11-99)
"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,
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 --
were painted
with arabesques,
vines and flowers,
above flagstone floors.
It housed a collection of witty,
brilliant,
sadistic
children
of the Italian jet-set,
cleverer, more articulate,
more
assured
than I could ever be.
My heart shrank hour by
hour,
fearing,
scenting blood,
I'd be the butt of their
next
repartee.
I had caught a cold in Barcelona.
I was ill at
ease and out of place, with
unglamorous sniffles and a runny
nose
among Anna and her sleek,
slim friends
-- all of whom
understood English,
and reverted to Italian
when her odd, silent,
sniveling American
guest
failed to join the melee
--
who, after a day or two,
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,
either 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 the hanging instruments
on
the wood stove
in the great stone vault
in on 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.
I was too shy in those days,
in the guise
of myself, to be enchanting.
I was, in fact, 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 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,
never having enough money,
though food always turned up
and they never had to work.
They could drop out of the war for an
interval 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 cook 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,
I made a decision to arrest
the
devilishly divine
beauty of the Italian imagination,
to forswear
it
as a 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 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,
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,
arch 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
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 see 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 reality
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 C ----,
that The English Patient was filmed elsewhere,
and that Giosue Carducci wrote a solemn, famous, gloomy
poem about those trees,
beginning:
quote -------------
Copyright © 1999 Jan Haag
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Jan Haag may be reached via e-mail: jhaag@u.washington.edu
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