B007HXL46C EBOK Page 13
Miss Carmen Mariotta (a little girl in June 1940) grew up to be the reincarnation, physically speaking, of Phryne. And on her way home from the Piazza Grande everyone turned to look at her, and she knew it! Like the wisteria, she had the grace and airy yet controlled whimsy, the full sound, low to the ground, of the cello in the moderato of the concerto for cello and orchestra in C major, Hob. VIIb: 1, Haydn.
Klee would never see another bee, a flower, the fish-seller with her beautiful smooth hair. Never again would he play his beloved violin.
He was cured of life. He would never again draw soldiers brusquely awakened at daybreak in that late 1940 June in the barracks, and then led to a pass, with the nausea that comes with the wee hours of the morning, still cold, with a chance of rain or sleet in the mountains, the last burst of spring before it turns to summer. The soldiers sat, jostling, against the back of the truck, as if cataphracted in their oversized gray coats, holding their rifles between their knees, up to their helmets; and in the mouth of the barrel—a nice O—they’ve each put a flock of cotton, like a white flower, so that rain won’t get inside and rust the barrel.
On one of those evenings when the damned spring was sliding into summer, there was one among those soldiers who, they say, had just completed basic training; and on the evening of the dinner for the entire company, as is customarily arranged by command to celebrate those young men’s promotion to the rank of soldier (analogous to confirmation, which promotes the soldiers of Christ), he had accumulated pains that were difficult to endure—not physical pains, but a wave that swelled in his brain, on the verge of overflowing just like a stream in a downpour—bad news from home, his girlfriend with someone else, a future that demoralized him no matter which way he looked at it, examining it like a mason does a misshapen stone; and so during dinner and after he intentionally, immoderately, beyond his limits, drank. So when they brought him back to quarters, amid the smell of old straw, debris from the lanterns, all the noise in the dormitory that, between the drunk and otherwise, couldn’t be too big, as he slipped under his filthy covers he felt a cadenced, progressive crescendo of chaos in his head. In flashes of mad lucidity he felt that his being was coming apart: it wasn’t physical pain, not even in his legs, which were stiff from too much alcohol—it was the pain of being a part of being, immense—a cosmic, catholic, ecumenical hemorrhage. But his den-mate, a Lepontian called Quinto, a skilled handler of the crooked things in life, a great drinker who could always maintain self-control (in part because of his great physical strength), realized what was going on, and with his authority and muscle and expertise gave quick instructions to the two neighbors on either side as to how to assist this needy man who looked like a calf at death’s door, and since he knew that noise in such moments is a lethal additive to alcohol, a poison that goes straight through the middle of the brain and quarters it, he imposed absolute silence on everyone, on each and every one, as if there, at that moment, the culmination of the party, an atom bomb had exploded.
But Klee would no longer be able to draw the miraculous silence of that company of men because Klee was dead. Nor the O of a stadium with so many little Os inside from the open mouths suddenly mute as if at someone’s command to silence them all at once and out of the blue, seized with horror in the face of collective intoxication, the pain having reached a measure beyond measure, and with the even smaller Os of the eyes, cavernous Os in those circles of faces, eighty thousand faces in the stadium stands, in the ring around the field—all of them dumbstruck by what was happening down there, on mother earth in that early July 1940. Because Paul Klee was dead.
On the field, just down below, was a formation like this:
†
† †
† † †
† † † † †
In the middle, at attention, the team of referees: Fate, Wille, and Providence. On the opposite side, the mouths of cannons at the ready:
o o o o o
o o o
o o
o
He would no longer paint the black sky on a blue summer’s night; his painting becomes air, sky, even when he uses black: not one but twenty-seven blacks, I assure you—like Van Gogh said. Now perhaps Klee’s up, up on a little cloud, talking about black and Rembrandt to Van Gogh. Talking about playing with color, making an argument with a line, expressing an idea with a title.
Paul Klee hadn’t been fortunate—if we consider such a thing significant—in the selection of his date of death. Because on June 29th, a Saturday, the feast day of Saints Peter and Paul, the newspapers in ultra-Catholic Italian Switzerland don’t come out. Therefore, we don’t even know what time the sun rose (his last!), though we can infer that it was around 4:32, because on the 28th, St. Irenaeus’s day, it rose at 4:31 and on July 1st, the day of his cremation, at 4:33. When the newspapers were issued again, on Monday July 1st, they had lots of other things to talk about.
Hitler went to Paris, Mussolini visited the Western Front, the Maddalena Pass, the Col de Tende, inspected the grunts and blackshirts (the twenty-eighth type of black, never contemplated by Van Gogh) who took part in the hundred-hours’ battle—not much more, though still more than Germany’s fifteen minutes for Austria—June 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 24th, and a bit of the 25th. The order to cease fire came at thirty-five minutes past midnight; in Germany celebrations broke out, while the entire city of Tripoli was mourning the death of Italo Balbo; like Rome, at Caligula’s death, vasta silentio; like Tarascon at the death (which turned out to be a false alarm) of Tartarin. Having died a day before Klee, at the same clinic in Muralto, Sant’Agnese, Mr. Max Emden, owner of the Brissago Islands—he’d get at least a mention in the news. But unlike Klee, he had bought Ticinese citizenship as well as local residency in Ronco sopra Ascona. Even Karl Knie, business director of the Circus Knie, had made it into the news, having been gravely wounded when the hunting rifle he was cleaning accidentally went off. But no such luck for Klee. If he had lived a few days longer, he would have been able to feverishly draw the Maginot Line visited by Hitler during those days, or the sirens that went off right on the day of his death, June 29th, even if not for him—in fact, there was an announcement in the Friday the 28th paper: “Tomorrow, the last Sunday of the month, the emergency siren test will be conducted”—or the reunion of the generation of 1878 (even that didn’t work out for him, having been born in ’79) for, as the newspaper said, “Everyone born in 1878 in Lugano and environs is invited to attend a meeting at Bar Golf, to discuss their 62nd birthday celebration.” O peuple heureux! If you think about it, Klee was also ineligible due to his geographical coordinates: he wasn’t from Lugano or environs. And then it must also be said, without intending any offense, that the newspaper had lots of other things to print.
To mention one, on June 30th, by beating Lucerne 4-0, Trello and Walaschek’s Servette show themselves to be “abundantly deserving of the championship title of Swiss mobilization” and, to jump from one thing to another, is it or is it not necessary to report the news of an armed revolt “provoked” by Jewish “elements” in Galaz? (Corriere del Ticino, the “bel paese” where Paul Klee had just died). The Romanian Army had to intervene. Violent fighting in the streets. Over a hundred deaths mourned. Were mourned? By whom? Passive voice or adjectival participle? Or neither? In Lugano, where Klee would be cremated on July 1st, and in Locarno, where Klee died on June 29th, nobody was mourning over Galaz. In the beginning of July 1940 everyone was minding his or her own business and the dead in Galaz were no longer mourned due to the simple fact that they were dead: just like Paul Klee. Thus ended his duty toward his adopted country that had had such a hard time adopting him. General Guisan’s order of the day, drawn up and delivered on June 27, 1940 and printed in the papers on July 2nd (precisely, one would say, to circumscribe something like an O around that June 29th, the day of Klee’s passing) concluded merely by saying that “only death frees the Soldier from his duty
towards his Country.” Paul Klee could count himself among the liberated.
Since he wasn’t exactly 100% one of us (even his death certificate lists Germany under “country of origin”), there was no fundamental reason to complain about the paper not announcing his death. On July 1st, the paper had to publish part thirty-eight of a serial novel by one of our writers, or print the fact that one of our fellow citizens, “getting out of bed (. . .) took a serious fall, breaking his leg. He was transported to the Civic Hospital by ambulance by our C.[roce] V.[erde] emergency services.” Nor could one expect that in Bern Klee would get a monument in front of the Federal Building or in Bubenbergplatz (so-called in tribute to Adrian von Bubenberg, a great leader from a great past) as was done for Leonardo da Vinci near La Scala. Klee considered himself an alchemist at best, just as the viticulturist who makes wine is an alchemist (Paracelsus’s word!), as is the baker who makes bread. If a soccer player had died—a Vernati, for example, a great traditional halfback, who also had the name of a great star, Sirio (Sirius)—it would have been another story, because soccer, in the hearts of simple people, is comparable to music, money, and mathematics, the three Ms that are universal languages. Music shares with money the intelligence of rhythm and in the same spirit, on the mathematical level, the precision of its calculations. Exchange is made primordial and if a traditional halfback or forward doesn’t feel it, he doesn’t become a halfback or a forward. The magic moment is rapidly changing the means into the end: scoring. Making a goal. And, as was put so well by Monsieur Philippe, discoursing on sports from St. Augustine to our Olympic games, apparently toward the end of the nineteenth century people realized that, for a myriad of reasons, money couldn’t explain everything. Thus it became necessary to bring back into the system the body, beauty, enthusiasm for physical exertion, hygiene, honor, loyalty, chivalry.
What did Klee think?
Klee didn’t think anything anymore because on July 2, 1940 he was making the trip from the crematory in Lugano to his “resting place” in Locarno-Muralto. Tuesday, July 2nd was the day of the V.(irgin) M.(ary)’s Visitation. The sun (this is in the paper, not the National Zeitung but the Corriere del Ticino, since Lugano and Locarno are in Ticino) rises at 4:33, sets at 8:26. Temperature at seven in the morning (Klee had come out of his death throes): 19° C. Idem, low of 14°. On this day in history: 1714, composer Cristoph Gluck was born. But just two days later the newspaper reported: “We’ve hit summer, you’ll notice muggy heat in upcoming days; but it looks like there will be a repeat of last year’s rainy summer, with periodic storms: at 8 a.m. in the city it was raining.”
Thus July 2nd was a typical July day, and it seemed impossible that elsewhere the air was entirely toxic. In Paris for example. In Vienna the poison had long impregnated people’s clothes, seeped into their hair, stuck to the soles of their shoes, coated the leaves of the trees in the boulevards, soiled the waters of the Danube. Someone would eat a sausage and he’d also consume a quantity of poison that would corrode his colon and make him pass blood; he’d take a few swigs of beer and have a strip of foam containing that poison on his mustache; this is why Sindelar, all other possibilities excluded, chose the gas valve. Without a plume, a thin layer, of smoke. Yet nobody noticed the slender trail of smoke going up (is there?) into the heavens (the heavens?) from the roof of the Lugano crematory on July 1, 1940. It was Klee’s smoke, because Paul Klee was dead.
The man who came from Locarno to Lugano, on commission, to collect Klee’s ashes, didn’t have much difficulty finding the cemetery. But once he was inside, after parking his van by the fence, the paths that cut through the rectangles occupied by graves with so many big funerary monuments testifying to the Helvetic power of the patrician families of Lugano seemed as long as an Easter Mass, including the entire “Passio,” which never seems to end. He heard the singular sound of the tiny bits of gravel under shoes: his. Finally the man, who wasn’t sure he was going the right way to the crematory, heard a sound like a rake on gravel. It was an old groundskeeper whose face had taken on something of the weighty look of the faces effigied on the gravestones. With a slow, almost professorial wave of the arm, he indicated the path, but called the visitor back a second later. He said that the door might be closed, that he should try the side.
So it was. The crematory director listened with religious attention, as he was wont to do, then he took out a form and gave it to the man to sign. And while the director went into the other room, the delivery man, more to pass the time than to figure out what he was signing, read the words that had been penned in response to the printed questions.
Surname: Klee
Name: Paul
Religious denomination: Prot.
Profession: teacher
Country of origin: Germany
Most recent place of residence: Bern
Place of death: Muralto
Date of birth: 1879
Date of death: 29.VI.1940
1. When is cremation scheduled? Date: 7/1/40
Specific time: 16:30
2. Does the body need to be collected at the station? no
3. Would you like undertakers at the station? no
4. Will you be delivering the body to the crematory? yes
5. Will there be any eulogies at the ceremony? no
6. Would you like organ accompaniment? no
7. Would you like a floral decoration in the ceremony room? Selection I, II, III? (a straight horizontal line crossed out I, II, and III)
8. What do you intend to do with the remains? pick them up
9. Is the deceased a member of the Ticino Cremation Association? no. No. of shares: (diagonal dash in pen, at about a 30% incline)
10. To whom should the receipt be addressed? Rossi, Cesare, Locarno.
This form, duly completed and signed, must be immediately sent to TURBA, LUIGI (Gas Co.), Lugano.
City and date: Lugano, 7/1/1940
Signature: Cesare Rossi
This was followed by instructions, the list of fees. No Bach, no Mozart, nothing . . . what would Klee have chosen for himself? What key was he? B minor?
When the director reappeared at the door to that sort of sacristy (he looked like—how can I describe it?—like Louis Jouvet meets Buster Keaton, whom he, Cesare Rossi, at the cinema, tried to never miss), he was holding a kind of amphora, blue-gray in color. It was actually a terracotta jar, the kind they use in the country to store fresh butter for the winter. Buster Keaton led Cesare Rossi to the side door. His “good day” was a slight nod of the head. Right away, without making a sound, he closed the door.
Retracing the same route, between the big patrician family crypts, the delivery man (though now we know his name is Cesare Rossi) carried the jar with both hands nice and tight by the handles. But he was awkward, like at a baptism when they place that puffball of a child or grandchild in the hands of a clumsy father, a construction worker, say, and it seems like it would take no more than a breath to blow the baby out, to break his little bones. Thus Cesare Rossi, carrying Klee’s ashes, couldn’t even nod at the old man who had stopped raking the gravel and was watching him pass by.
He had to watch his step. It’s easy, these days, to trip, to bump into things. The urn would have shattered and the ashes would have scattered over the gravel path and that would be that, it’d be out of his hands!
No, the long walk to the van in front of the cemetery went off without incident. The man set the urn on the sidewalk next to the rear tire with the utmost care, and opened the back door. But he hadn’t thought to bring something to secure the urn. Clearly and audibly he said to himself: Idiot! He couldn’t hold the urn between his knees like a milker in the Alps holds the pail into which he milks. He needed his legs to drive. And with the curves on the Monte Ceneri pass, the urn could slide back and forth like the plates and bowls in that Charlie Chaplin movie, hit the door and
break into little pieces: farewell, my country, farewell.
The man thought enviously of army trucks with soldiers sitting squeezed together on low wooden benches. One of them could even fall asleep, but with his helmet on and a fellow soldier on both sides, he could snooze the entire trip away without any worry. He also thought, again with envy, of the trucks of potatoes from the Honorable Traugott Wahlen’s plan—divine providence kept them all up, each supporting the other; not even the tiniest potato would suffer a bruise or anything of the sort.
But providence also provided for him, Mr. Cesare Rossi. In fact, he was standing there lost in thought when a young woman, perhaps mistaking him for a truck driver, came over: to ask him, well what do you know!, if the station was very far, because she needed to go to Locarno.
– To Locarno? Mr. Cesare Rossi asked, with visible happiness.
– Yes, to Locarno, the girl said, with a flash of suspicion in her eyes.
– Then come with me. In the amount of time it would take you to get to the station I’ll have you in Locarno fresh as a rose, without having to transfer here or there, faster than express delivery. But you have to do something for me. You have to hold this jar.
The girl’s hesitation lasted less than half a second, and not because of the business about the jar. The delivery man was still a stranger, but after all, these were not times to be too fussy, and not a day went by that her grandfather didn’t say “à la guerre comme à la guerre!” Immediately, in a polite voice, she said: – Thank you! She could see right away that he was of a different sort compared to the many truck drivers she’d heard about who only drive with their left hand whereas, with their right, if you yield an inch, well, you’ll end up in the meadow. Pigs. This guy, on the other hand, was a decent sort. He drove carefully, keeping his eyes on the wet road, more than even a student driver would, and every so often swore under his breath at a big pothole he hadn’t been able to avoid—the road was a mess in certain spots, but after all, it was wartime and one can’t have everything. Before they were even outside Lugano, he said to her: