Planus (5 page)

But Cassien, would not have been a true son of Marseille if he had not known how to mock and laugh at Lucifer, while doing him the favour of drawing an irreverent and indeed humorous sketch of his offspring and disciples, and Cassien was the founder of the abbey of Saint-Victor, which faces the Old Port! Listen to this delicate satire of the
Bacuceos,
those lackeys of hell or town-hall toadies. Wouldn't you say it was a page straight out of Marcel Pagnol, and a good one at that?

'There are others, commonly called Bacucians, who infect their victims with a foolish pride. They are to be seen, therefore, attempting to make themselves look tall, affecting proud and majestic poses, or, at other times, bending down towards someone in an affable and serene posture in order to appear simple and kindly. Taking themselves for illustrious and worthy personages, we see them at one moment bowing their bodies before the superior powers, at another, believing themselves to be receiving adoration in their turn, they go through all the motions, now humble, now superb, of people who are really in such a situation.'

And turning a page, here is my portrait, just as if it had been taken by Polyfoto, for the automatic and patented machines of today, with their Cassienite names, are also henchmen of Satan:

'We have found other demons who take delight not only in lies, but also in blasphemies, to which they inspire men. We ourselves have witnessed this, for we definitely overheard a demon confessing that it was he who begat an impiety.' (I turned the page and trembled. I was plunged into Migne's Patrologie. This took place in St Petersburg library in the winter of 1945. The great reading- room was as silent as the tomb. Everyone was deeply engrossed. The librarian crept about like a phantom on his rubber-soled shoes. Nothing could be heard but the rustle of turning pages. And there I was! I recognized myself. A mirror was held up to me. My breath blurred it, like frost blurring a win,dow-pane. I felt intense emotion!) 'There is no doubt that there exist, amongst impious spirits, as many diverse tastes as exist amongst men. In fact, amongst them is a type commonly known as Vagabonds —
Pianos
— who are, above all, beguilers and clowns.'

And the scholarly Canon Cristiani added a note, in 1946, at the bottom of this page of his translation: 'The word
planus,
which Pliny uses in the sense of a buffoon, also means vagabond or adventurer.'

I collide with the mirror.

A turning of the road.

I cry out and begin to run!

Though I start to run at the turning, it is not that I am running away. No one is chasing me. I am not being pursued. No one jumps out at me as
my double
might have done, and as certain
Pianos
or Vagabonds do, according to Cassien, who says of them: 'While some confine themselves to passing the night in harmless incubations with men, others are addicted to such fury and truculence that, not content with cruelly tearing the flesh of those they possess, they hurl themselves upon passers-by, even from afar, and perpetrate the most savage acts of violence upon them. The Evangelist has spoken, of such creatures and they are held in such fear that no one dares to walk in their path.'

No, no one is attacking me, quite the contrary! If I start to run at this corner, it is because I am running to meet my childhood.

A little girl....

No, it's not possible! At the turning of the road, I see a door, neither large nor small, still standing. I know it well; it is all patched with bits of wood and pieces cut out of zinc plates stamped with the names of famous photographic products : Lumiere, Pathe, Gaumont, AEG, Zeiss, Agfa, Kodak, Eastman, Edison. This is the door to my paradise. I have only to move the end of a panel which pivots on a nail, slip my hand into the chink thus made, reach the bolt inside, slide it along by twisting my finger round it and at the same time dislocating my wrist, then push with my knee, and the old door yields, swings inwards with a grating sound, and the way is open.

I go in.

It is still the same.

A shock.

Deafening cicadas, heat, green oaks and lentiscus trees. Fragrant clearing, sudden silence, solitude, the enigmatic physical presence of solitude. Mourning. Asparagus. Scanty grass.

Who is watching us? Elena and I were always struck by this half- divined presence. We would stand there frozen, hesitating on the threshold, not daring to enter. To cross the threshold. I would hold the little girl's hand, our hearts beating fast. . ..

I kicked the door shut behind me and it shivered in all its old panels like a funeral drum-roll, while the hinges creaked and I took a few steps forward.

Nothing in the paddock had changed. To the left, like a nest of vipers, a little house invaded by the thorns, the shoots, the tendrils, the thousand stems, the thickly meshed branches, and the thick, fleshy trunk of a rambler rose, drunk with sap and reverting to its wild state, whose inextricably tangled knots fall from the roof and the broken windows in a dark mass, heavy and perfumed, shaking itself loose like a shaggy head of hair over the collapsing balcony, which it crushes with its whole weight before plunging down into a ravine, a green valley flowing right down to the sea. To the right, at the summit of a little slope, a kind of artificial knoll split through by enormous roots which have shifted and unearthed two or three blocks of stone, part of some antique monument hidden in the ground, and a thousand-year-old pine tree, the famous umbrella pine known the world over since it figures in the foreground of that panorama of Naples, the gulf, the islands and Vesuvius, printed on millions and millions of postcards.

God be praised that this immortal spot exists!

Immediately, I set to work, digging, burrowing, making my hole. I measured it with my Isfahan cane. I lay down in it, stretched out on my back. I made it wider and tamped down the bottom with my two hands to make it nice and comfortable. I made myself a pillow of pine-needles and loose soil, as I used to do when I played with Elena, the little girl, who could come and lie beside me, gently, oh, so gently, so as not to frighten away the small birds we had come to watch in the paddock, and we would not stir all afternoon.

Today I needed a cure. My lassitude was too great. Like Kim, I could do no more. I was exhausted. But, before starting on Kim's cure, I went down to Posilippo to plunge into the sea and have a good swim, then I climbed up again with provisions for a week: bread, salami, mortadella, a
cacio cavallo
or horse's bottom, which is a cheese in the shape of a pilgrim's gourd or a double calabash, and a flask of wine as round and heavy as a church bell. My hollow cane was my bourdon. I climbed up to my hermitage full of joy and dying of impatience. I broke bread and gave thanks to God that nothing in the paddock had changed. I settled down to spend my first night in the garden of my childhood, this paradise lost and, tonight, regained.

Like Kim I slept on my back. Like Kim I covered myself with earth up to my chin.

With my head lolling back, my eye climbed the height of the centuries-old bole that sprang perpendicular from the ground at my head, and my memory leaped from branch to branch in its umbel, flitting, alighting, hovering, amusing itself like a goldfinch, a tit, a wagtail, as in Elena's time when we watched the little birds, so rare in the Neapolitan countryside that, when one of them has the misfortune to show himself on a Sunday afternoon, fifty rifle-shots are discharged simultaneously, fired by huntsmen in ambush, all equally savouring the idea of a little bird on a spit to augment their evening meal of polenta. Elena, the little girl, was killed by a rifle-shot one Sunday afternoon in this very paddock, at the foot of this same tree, where we had set a snare, she and I, and were lying in wait in our hole between the roots of the tree, our hearts racing, for the first bird who would fall into it. It was a rifle-shot fired by an invisible huntsman, a bungling fool. I dreamed. My childhood love. . . .

And then it happened that my eye, distracted by melancholy and roving round the paddock as if to gather up all my scattered grief, came to rest on a small board nailed to the trunk of the world- famous umbrella pine. I had not noticed the board when I came in. I got up to see what it was. It bore this stencilled inscription :

FOR SALE

The name of the Agency had been obliterated. FOR SALE.

11.0pt;line-height:normal;text-autospace:none'>   When I played there as a child, with little Elena, the darling, the enclosure belonged to her father, Andrea Ricordi, a Milanese with a great zest for living, who was court photographer by appointment. He had made a tremendous amount of money, not by taking portraits of the King and Queen, the Princesses and the Crown Prince (who was hoping for a son, though in fact this baby was not born until ten years later, at Raconnigi, and whose cradle, donated by the people of Naples, was on exhibition, giving rise to enthusiastic demonstrations of loyalty on the part of the Neapolitans and to festivities which were, for me, unforgettable) — Ricordi, then, had made a tremendous amount of money by photographing that celebrated view, reprinted millions and millions of times on postcards and slipped into pillar-boxes by foreign tourists, especially newly wedded couples, and distributed by the postal services of every country in the world, and it was precisely because of this, because he had made a fortune — and also to cut the ground from under the feet of any rival photographer who might have turned up unannounced — that Ricordi had bought Virgil's Tomb, and had built a wall around it and locked it up behind a battered and patched old door, for the court photographer was close-fisted and did not believe in spending money.

Nevertheless, Ricordi financed my father, and was influential in assisting his career, for the two men were great friends, and Ricordi professed the most fervent admiration for Father when he perfected a photographic colour process, by which it was possible to transfer directly on to watch-cases, pendants, identity discs and other metal or enamel jewellery (whether holy medals or souvenirs for the bazaar) the features of sovereigns, likenesses of the saints, portraits of tourists, marriages, christenings — and the inevitable panorama of Naples, with the peacock-blue sea, blue-black sky, Vesuvius like a cauldron with flashes of fire superimposed with a paintbrush dipped in vermilion (there was also a night view with shells exploding on the sides of the volcano and a plume of smoke hanging over the sea and clouding the darkened moon, a sensational effect!), and before long the 'Quo Vadis' series was on sale, a veritable cinema-show on kitchen pots and pans enamelled in delicate pinks, and this had a tremendous success with its scenes of martyrs, ferocious beasts, gladiators, arenas, games, chariot races, Roman orgies. Equally successful was the 'Museums' series, showing works of Raphael, Michelangelo, antique statuary, the ruins of Rome and Pompeii, monuments, landscapes, the Cathedral of Milan, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, and the canals of Venice in three colours on coffee-pots, trays, bowls and even chamber-pots! Because of his admiration for my father, his recognition of this excellent business deal, which cashed in on bad taste and ugliness, Ricordi sought a closer intimacy, a partnership, an active participation in the multiplicity of business ventures improvised by my father : combines, speculations, inventions, all more or less brilliant, but generally chimerical, since they were conceived in moments of wild inspiration and were too far ahead of their time.

For example: at a time when gas-lighting had not yet been installed in all the towns in Italy, my father was already buying waterfalls in the Alps and dreaming of the electrification of the whole peninsula!

Like the housing estate on the Vomero, many other speculations and inventions were never realized, or were only put into practical effect a quarter of a century later, when other speculators and financiers benefited from them, including the photographer, for my father had long since given up the substance for the shadow.

shudder every time). The base of the triangle was the rectilinear Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, and the two sides were bounded, on the left by the rack-railway of the funicular, bordered by a row of prickly pears, thorn- and sword-cactus, Barbary figs, agaves, and aloes bearing their flowers at the top of a mast that was often broken, and, on the right, by an old wall, very high in places, full of bracken, irises, maidenhair ferns, swarming with lizards which scampered away to hide in the crevices under clusters of little blue flowers that were so fragile one would have thought they were made of porcelain, commonly known as 'Roman ruins'; this wall was crested with broken glass and followed all the twists and turns, the convolutions of the Salita di San-Martino, a swarming hill that led up to the Vomero, reinforced by a kind of buttress of brambles, thorns and bushes, mountains of garbage, broken china, useless pots and pans and other debris which the humble people living on the Salita threw over the wall. Mother was not happy there. She was afraid of thieves. But we children, my brother and sister and the four Ricordi girls — my father had invited his friend to come and live with us, although Mother accepted it with a bad grace, finding the photographer ill-bred, too free and easy in his manners, which in fact he was, but then he was such lively company at the dinner- table, laughing boisterously, as Italians do, unbuttoned and in shirtsleeves, always telling anecdotes about the court and the grand personages he mixed with and, to amuse the girls, acting out all the scenes, gesticulating and waving his arms about — we children, especially Elena and I, who were the youngest and pushed a little to one side (I because Mother was already neurasthenic and weighed down with cares, Elena because her father would have preferred a son, like his master, the King, and his patron, the Crown Prince; the Prince of Naples had already announced that his succession was assured, when the birth of a girl disillusioned him), we children lived in the enchantment of this marvellous garden, whose gates Mother had solemnly forbidden us to pass, for fear of the thieves who, so she said, were lurking everywhere, lying in wait for small children, especially the children of rich foreigners, in order to kidnap them and hold their families up to ransom. I cannot imagine who put these absurd ideas into her head, unless it was Miss Sharp, our English governess, for Lily lived in constant dread of the Black Hand. She collected newspaper cuttings about the Mafia, wrote warning letters to
The Times
and fled from sight if an errand-boy appeared in the garden. If one wished to cripple a child's spirit, one could hardly choose a better person for the job than this stupid governess, an old maid given to migraines, full of prejudice and ridiculous superstitions and forever quivering like an aspen-leaf.