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  Or is it the O of horror, of fire? A cannon placed in the middle of the square, instead of the usual horse, the usual hero: a howitzer, ornament and splendor of our age; an otolaryngologist looks deep down into the cannon’s throat and bursts out with the joy of someone who feels like rejoicing thus:

  Oooooooooooooh

  – No, try to say ah—I can see better that way.

  In his generosity, Klee showed great pity on the poor scribe. Amicably, he put his hand on his shoulder and walked with him under the plane tree on the square.

  – My friend, don’t wear yourself out. You don’t have to explain my O. The greatest fortune that can befall an author is not to be read, a painter not to be seen, or to be seen with haste, like on those horrendous group museum tours: as long as the work is talked about, obviously. Or, if they see you, if they read you, you’re fortunate to be misunderstood. If they understand you, no one will think you’re right; if they don’t understand you, everyone will project onto you their inchoate desires, their secret dreams. And your success is assured. You have to be mysterious, like a witch or an astrologer, people have always had a need for magicians and sorcerers. He paused briefly and said: Diesseitig bin ich gar nicht fassbar. No, I truly cannot be grasped. How can one make the masses understand the combination of the physis of the Greeks, the psyche of Christianity, and your tiny self? I too have a bit of the obscurity of my luminous contemporary—Einstein, I mean.

  – So your O is everything and nothing?

  Klee opened his arms. Clever and honest as he was, he said:

  – Sometimes I envy Mondrian—the ascetic, the pure, the geometry of his straight lines. What does it mean? people say, bending over the placard while the sweat-soaked paterfamilias searches in the catalog purchased at the entrance. Mondrian uses titles like Landscape, Reclining (or standing) Nude, Meditation I or two or twenty-seven thousand, or Himalaya. As long as he doesn’t put cretin pig illiterate imbecile idiot pinhead in ecstasy, since the viewer wants to know exactly what our friend Adolf wanted to know during his tour of the Uffizi in the spring of ’38—he asks, like a police officer, like a guard, for the generalities—and if the painting says: “Our Adolf, Pinhead in Ecstasy,” he would take offense. Someone from the bench against the back wall asked:

  – And what about Walaschek, didn’t he ever ask you anything?

  Klee knit his brow. Scribe O/17360 replied, serious and sure:

  – No, he ever asked me anything.

  On the way back to Geneva from Bern (the party in honor of Karl Rappan, inventor of the “bolt” strategy and coach for the national team that beat Hitler’s Germany in Paris in ’38, a half century later, had been wonderful: they all posed instinctively, several times, in various positions, for photographers and TV cameras, six of them standing with folded arms and the other five squatting in front), Walaschek had closed his eyes to rest his head and to enjoy the grace with which the InterCity train raced from Bern through the domestic Fribourg plains, the vineyards over Laussane. He opened them every now and then “to see where we are,” just as in life he liked to have a proper view of the game (also known as philosophy). On a little field outside Fribourg two teams of men were playing. White jerseys and yellow jerseys. The train, going along at full speed, had allowed him to see only little, but in that little he had immediately spotted a flaw: they were all chasing after the ball too much. They lacked a coach’s hand, a midfielder’s brain, a midfielder like Sirio Vernati, shining with bright light, or, modesty aside, an inside forward like him, Walaschek: an inside forward who was of the old school, à la Vonlanthen, alla volante, at the wheel, weaving patterns and spreading wings, freeing the divine Sindelar with a long pass: he, the forward, changes the game, seeming to run and run only because, in the air, he makes the ball fly.

  In any case, tomorrow he’ll buy the newspapers and in the evening he’ll watch the TV—maybe it’ll just be on for a minute, but one can’t expect too much. They said all kinds of things. The German-speakers, during their toasts, spoke in Swiss-German and went on and on about why Swiss-German is spoken in German Switzerland and not Germany. The Swiss-Frenchman spoke about the hardships of the Swiss-French threatened by the Swiss-Germans. The most optimistic player present was the one who spoke the third national language, Italian. He said, citing a poet, that “the dark days are passed.” Carducci!

  – Carducci? Who was that?

  Scribe O/17360 prompted, under his breath: He’s the Lion of the Maremma, Bolognese by election, decorated—just think!—with the Nobel in literature. It would be like mentioning the name Colaussi (actually Colausig), Serantoni, those dazzling Petronians—i.e,. Bolognese—two-time world champions on Vittorio Pozzo’s lucky team. Yet just try and ask a young person today who Colaussi/Colausig was. Ignoramuses, asses of the new Arcadia, who are in need of—if you’ll allow me to again cite Carducci, and as you can see, by memory—threshing-thrashings in the morning, noon, afternoon, and night. The dark days are passed.

  The one snickering this time was Marc Vuilleumier, who knew all about the negotiations with the German authorities regarding the letter J to be stamped on non-Aryans’ passports. But Vuilleumier, who at one time could have testified on this matter for hours and hours, was intent on specifying that just because things were different, that didn’t mean we could just sanctify ourselves with a few swings of the thurible. Scribe O/17360 was called to testify: he had the floor.

  Scribe O/17360 just wanted to add that even long after the war, Erasmus and Montaigne—and not only those two—would have been appalled to see what was happening on the frontiers of the nations of Europe. That the shutters on every shop were closed from ’39 to ’45 could serve as additional proof for the residents of Lugano and environs of the felicitous choice of their most intelligent forefathers of 1798, patria est ubicumque est bene: a farmer from Ponte Tresa, Switzerland could look after his vineyard, and the farmer a few meters away, from Ponte Tresa, Italy, after going to Eritrea and Somalia, could end up in Albania, to be a Cyrenian in Cyrene, in Ukraine, could go to the devil, could wind up yawning out his soul in Buchenwald at the feet of rotten gods. But that’s later. Let me tell you, the scribe said, about the cows of Pedrinate.

  In the twentieth century, the cows of the civilized world, and not only those in Pedrinate—even though men continue to shrewdly exploit them—should have learned to consult an atlas. They should have learned to read a book on rhetoric, something by Lausberg, acquaint themselves a little with the meaning of symbols: what is a chain-link fence? It can be a physical thing or a metaphysical thing. And anyone who illegally crosses a chain-link fence, the “metal net” (it could also be barbed wire), is either a “metal-muncher,” i.e., an immigrant fresh over the fence, or a smuggler, a deserter, a snitch, a spy, some kind of shirker, someone to subject to a hundredth-degree interrogation, imprisonment, someone to send off to a forced labor camp. But the cows of Pedrinate hadn’t read a single text by Hoepli or Treccani or Lausberg, nothing. Thus on the night between the 29th and 30th of May 1983, nice and easy—or as Erasmus (who was horrified by borders) would say, gradatim, paulatim, pedetentim—they crossed the border. You should know, my dear fellows, that Pedrinate is a small village where Little Red Riding Hood’s mother could have lived. Pedrinate is the name of the southernmost town in Switzerland. It lies on the border with Italy. It’s right above Chiasso. And as a few local newspapers mention (here, we’ll take the Gazzetta Ticinese from June 2, 1983), and as a letter from the City of Chiasso dated October 17, 1989 confirms, there was, that night, an “illegal entry” in Pedrinate.

  So during the night between May 29th and 30th of 1983, in the full bloom of spring, “four young cows (heifers) and two young bulls crossed over from Italy.” Those crazy kids! one might think, to avert the association of vacche—cows—with whores, prostitutes, when everybody knows or should know that real cows only couple with males once a year, purely for reproductive purposes,
if they’re not artificially inseminated! in homage to a horrid (to no one) zootechnical racism (and if nonetheless this point bothers anyone, remember ad abundantiam that in the kingdom of heaven we’ll be preceded by publicans and prostitutes anyway). But to abolish on the spot all syllogism, or rather, enthymeme, the news column reports the cause: “Four cows (mooo moooo) and two bulls, residents of Parè (Italy), were found on the fields of Pedrinate (Switzerland) grazing with relish on the first fruits of the vines and various crops” (the italics are Scribe O/17360’s, to emphasize the fact that “residents” is typically used to denominate the border-dwellers who cross over for work, and who are supported and coveted by the economy; that the sinful and illicit lust in the world is incommensurable—it affects animals too); and it carries, most importantly, certain consequences: “A walk in the countryside that cost the owner a thousand francs for the customs fine alone” (this the newspaper’s version). The newspaper concludes: “One is most astonished by the complete absence of border patrols in the area,” whereas the official version—that is, the only completely reliable one—from the City of Chiasso, Switzerland, says that the owner “paid a fee of 1200 francs to cover the damages reported by the owners of crops and vineyards, customs fees, and transport costs.” All things considered, for a local, paying 1200 francs in fines is as easy as going from Pescarenico (Como) to Rimini on foot: and that’s quite a walk! With that, the six daredevils (if you’ll allow a half-juvenile, half-animal metaphor, at any rate antipodean to reasonable adults) “sheltered in the stables of the city butcher’s in Chiasso (. . .) with the assistance of one of the offended parties” could be loaded onto a trailer. Thus the owner “had them cross the border via the same route they’d come by.”

  Nothing is said in the news summary or the official report about the breed of the six bovine masterminds, nor whether among the fruit grazed upon “with relish” there were forbidden herbs. Were they the brown Schwyz (from the very heart of Switzerland), or black (like the Haute-Valaisians) or spotted—whether white and red as in Emmental, or black and white as in Gruyère, or scrawny-dirty-white as in the Maremma? Undoubtedly the farmer from Parè was cut from the same cloth as the farmer from Pedrinate. But the names of the animals from Parè were perhaps more imaginative than those from Pedrinate, because a farmer loves to give his animals—when they must be “christened,” that is—names that might evoke essential moments in his own life. The life of a farmer from Parè has different coordinates from those of a farmer from Pedrinate. Thus it is not impossible to venture that with the six names of the six metal-munching animals one could have made not an entire team but half a team, as if split by Paul Klee’s paintbrush, of what they call a defensive line:

  Mersa Matrouh

  Guadalquivir Croatia

  Tripoli Al-Jaghbub Tobruk

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Now almost everyone was laughing a little, except for Asshat with his military wedge cap, and everyone seemed to be imploring Scribe O/17360 not to spread too much (negative) publicity about the cows from Pedrinate, otherwise that sort of clandestine border crossing could catch on—birds, snakes, flies, badgers, hares, worms, all pretending to be ignorant of the particularities of customs regulations.

  – Noooo! That can’t be true!

  There goes old Can’t-Be-True, Giuseppe, Sepp, a.k.a. Can’t-Be-True, because he’d spent his entire life in astonishment at everything, and his ninetieth birthday was just around the corner. Someone would mention something that was going on in the world, something out of the paper, and he’d put his hand behind his right ear (he didn’t trust the left) and yell through his thick white beard: – Noooo! That can’t be true.

  – Listen to this one, the first thumbsucker said, listen to this, Giuseppe:

  There’s a peasant woman who needs to give birth and, to help her body along, she goes up the mountain and comes back down with a load of ninety kilos, and that same night, ninety divided by thirty, she brings into the world, in half an hour, three big babies, all boys, one after the other, in a row, one, two, three . . .

  – No, it can’t be!

  – How ’bout this one? You know how long it took Hitler to take over Austria?

  – How long, tell me!

  – Fifteen minutes!

  – No, I don’t believe it.

  – What do you mean you don’t believe it. Look at this. He pointed to the newspaper.

  – Impossible.

  They told him that in the next World Cup there was going to be a Mediterranean team made up of all women.

  – No, impossible.

  – What’s that supposed to mean, impossible? You think I’d tell you something that wasn’t true? The stopper, the center back, will be Phryne.

  – Phryne?

  – What world do you live in, Giuseppe? Don’t you read the newspaper? They were about to convict her in court, and her lawyer, seeing the wanton woman hopeless, tore her misfortunes clean off her body. She was left completely naked and nobody wanted to convict her. Free, a clam at sea.

  – Nooo, that doesn’t even sound a little true.

  He ran his tongue over his dry lips, his moustache.

  – They’re going to have cyclamen-violet jerseys and the flag of Cyprus. It’s the Venus team, listen up:

  Lilith

  Nefertiti Judith

  Ipsitilla Phryne Iphigenia

  Myrrha Lesbia Tamar Phaedra Yael

  A few of them looked perplexed. A Judith, a Yael, would be capable of sending you to whichever Holofernes happens to be on hand strutting around by the corner flag, of sending you to Beelzebub’s infirmary after five minutes of play. Either way, it’s pitch invasion.

  – I’d like to see that, said Can’t-Be-True. I won’t miss it on TV. What’d you say the name was of that one who plays buck naked?

  They were all cracking up, save Klee, because Klee had been dead for a while: since 1940. He died on the 29th of the month of June, at 7:30 A.M., “due to heart disease (myocarditis). Burial may be permitted, 24 hours having passed since death. Staff Physician Dr. H. Bodmer.”

  Klee would no longer draw the interminable, the radiant, that which is irreducible to a prime number; vertiginous, a cavity-unfathomability-hiding place for the innocent, before or after the devastations of life, to play hide-and-seek in; that softest, most delicate, heavenly spiral: Phryne’s navel. Epicenter of the world. Give me a place to stand, Phryne’s navel, and I can move the world!

  He would no longer be able to draw an entire family of worms on the way to Mass in single file with all their little Catholic wormlings, or like so many little Jews, ornate kippahs on their little heads. Like an ensemble of acrobats, clowns, like marines or little kittens sliding under the chain-link fence in Pedrinate that neatly separates Switzerland and Italy, in single file, one by one, they invade the holy land of the Ticino. Not the wild rabbits, hares, nor foxes, nor the badger that, like a smuggler, passes through the holes made by the smugglers, nor an “enterprising animal” (Unternehmendes Tier, 1940) breaking through the breach that’s like the Dutch sea after the Dutch blew up the dams at the Nazis’ approach.

  Klee was dead. He had not seen the early nor the late sun on that July 29th, nor the camellias oblivious to the war, nor the violet of the wisteria creeping up the walls in the country and up toward the hills in Brione all the way down to Mergoscia—where the people still lived a life which, in the account of His Majesty’s acolyte Sir Thomas Hobbes, was: nasty, brutish, and short; people who, before dinner on spring-summer evenings, sat on their stone steps in droves, like bees out for air, their stingers at rest—or at windows climbing over thin walls up to a balcony with laundry out to dry, up to a roof on top of which, perhaps, waves one of the innocent flags Klee was so fond of; that lavish violet wisteria of Locarno, Muralto, Burbaglio, where
a fisherman’s daughter lived, la pessàta, the fish-seller. Oh, if only Klee could have gone back to Burbaglio ten years later, in 1950, to see la pessàta in all her sixteen years, and so could have reproduced an April in Burbaglio, Spring in the center with a poignant gait making her way toward the Piazza Grande, and everyone turning to look at her—and she knew it, walking like a queen who has the whole city at her feet. Klee would no longer be able to put in his painting in emulation of Sandro Botticelli contra Botticelli the girl from Burbaglio with her Olympic step, smooth hair, firm breasts, her sex still like a wren or a robin hopping and disappearing into the branches on the shore of the lake, still a shore to all, by waters still limpid for all. With her own mortal name. She was the striking Carmen Mariotta, and surrounding her were the three graces, Miss Ilaria Crivelli, Miss Silvana Gianola, and Miss Elena Reggiori, and even when they were sitting in a boat they were tall and svelte; but Klee, in the last spring of his life, his last stay in the Burbaglio light, was only able to draw the supine, submerged, as if dead, Kranker im Boot, a 1940 sick man in the boat of 1940.