Alone
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Norman Douglas >> Alone
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Of course it would be impossible to feel any real fondness for Ramage
before one has discovered his failings and his limitations. Well, he
seems to have taken Pratilli seriously. I like this. A young fellow who,
in 1828, could have guessed Pratilli to have been the arch-forger he
was--such a young fellow would be a freak of learning. He says little of
the great writers of his age; that, too, is a weakness of youth whose
imagination lingers willingly in the past or future, but not in the
present. The Hohenstauffen period does not attract him. He rides close
to the magnificent Castel del Monte but fails to visit the site; he
inspects the castle of Lucera and says never a word about Frederick II
or his Saracens. At Lecce, renowned for its baroque buildings, he finds
"nothing to interest a stranger, except, perhaps, the church of Santa
Croce, which is not a bad specimen of architectural design." True, the
beauty of baroque had not been discovered in his day.
What pleases me less is that there occurs hardly any mention of wild
animals in these pages, and that he seems to enjoy natural scenery in
proportion as it reminds him of some passage in one of those poets whom
he is so fond of quoting. This love of poetic extracts and citations is
a mark of his period. It must have got the upper hand of him in course
of time, for we find, from the title-page of these "Nooks and Byways,"
that he was the author of "Beautiful Thoughts from Greek authors;
Beautiful Thoughts from French and Italian authors, etc."; [29] indeed,
the publication of this particular book, as late as 1868, seems to have
been an afterthought. How greatly one would prefer a few more "Nooks and
By-ways" to all these Beautiful Thoughts! He must have been at home
again, in some bleak Caledonian retreat, when the poetic flowers were
gathered. If only he had lingered longer among the classic remains of
the south, instead of rushing through them like an express train. That
mania of "pressing forward"; that fatal gift of hustle....
His body flits hither and thither, but his mind remains observant,
assimilative. It is only on reading this book carefully that one
realises how full of information it is. Ay, he notices things, does
Ramage--non-antiquarian things as well. He always has time to look
around him. It is his charm. An intelligent interest in the facts of
daily life should be one of the equipments of the touring scholar,
seeing that the present affords a key to the past. Ramage has that gift,
and his zest never degenerates into the fussiness of many modern
travellers. He can talk of sausages and silkworms, and forestry and
agriculture and sheep-grazing, and how they catch porcupines and cure
warts and manufacture manna; he knows about the evil eye and witches and
the fata morgana and the tarantula spider, about figs in ancient and
modern times and the fig-pecker bird--that bird you eat bones and all,
the focetola or beccafico (garden warbler). In fact, he has multifarious
interests and seems to have known several languages besides the
classics. He can hit off a thing neatly, as, when contrasting our
sepulchral epitaphs with those of olden days, he says that the key-note
of ours is Hope, and of theirs, Peace; or "wherever we find a river in
this country (Calabria) we are sure to discover that it is a source of
danger and not of profit." He knew these southern torrents and
river-beds! He garners information about the Jewish and Albanian
colonies of South Italy; he studies Romaic "under one of the few Greeks
who survived the fatal siege of Missolonghi" and collects words of Greek
speech still surviving at Bova and Maratea (Maratea, by the way, has a
Phoenician smack; the Greeks must have arrived later on the scene, as
they did at Marathon itself).
A shrewd book, indeed. Like many of his countrymen, he was specially
bent on economic and social questions; he is driven to the prophetic
conclusion, in 1828, that "the government rests on a very insecure
basis, and the great mass of the intelligence of the country would
gladly welcome a change." Religion and schooling are subjects near his
heart and, in order to obtain a first-hand knowledge of these things in
Italy, he enters upon a friendship, a kind of intellectual flirtation,
with the Jesuits. That is as it should be. Extremes can always respect
one another. The Jesuits, I doubt not, learnt as much from Ramage as he
from them....
I wish I had encountered this book earlier. It would have been useful to
me when writing my own pages on the country it describes. I am always
finding myself in accord with the author's opinions, even in trivial
matters such as the hopeless inadequacy of an Italian breakfast. He was
personally acquainted with several men whose names I have
mentioned--Capialbi, Zicari, Masci; he saw the Purple Codex at Rossano;
in fact, there are numberless points on which I could have quoted him
with profit. And even at an earlier time; for I once claimed to have
discovered the ruins of a Roman palace on the larger of the Siren islets
(the Galli, opposite Positano)--now I find him forestalling me by nearly
a century. It is often thus, with archaeological discoveries.
He saw, near Cotrone, that island of the enchantress Calypso which has
disappeared since his day, and would have sailed there but for the fact
that no boat was procurable. I forget whether Swinburne, who landed
here, found any prehistoric remains on the spot; I should doubt it. On
another Mediterranean island, that of Ponza, I myself detected the
relics of what would formerly have been described as the residence of
that second Homeric witch, Circe. [30]
The mention of discoveries reminds me that I have already, of course,
discovered my ideal family at Alatri. Two ideal families....
One of them dwells in what ought to be called the "Conca d'Oro," that
luxuriant tract of land beyond the monastery where the waters flow--that
verdant dale which supplies Alatri, perched on its stony hill, with
fruit and vegetables of every kind. The man is a market-gardener with
wife and children, a humble serf, Eumaeus-like, steeped in the rich
philosophy of earth and cloud and sunshine. I bring him a cigar in the
cool of the evening and we smoke on the threshold of his two-roomed
abode, or wander about those tiny patches of culture, geometrically
disposed, where he guides the water with cunning hand athwart the roots
of cabbages and salads. He is not prone to talk of his misfortunes;
intuitive civility has taught him to avoid troubling a stranger with
personal concerns.
The mother is more communicative; she suffers more acutely. They are
hopelessly poor, she tells me, and in debt; unlucky, moreover, in their
offspring. Two boys had already died. There are only two left.
"And this one here is in a bad way. He has grown too ill to work. He can
only mope about the place. Nothing stays in his stomach--nothing; not
milk, not an egg. Everything is rejected. The Alatri doctor treated him
for stomach trouble; so did he of Frosinone. It has done no good. Now
there is no more money for doctors. It is hard to see your children
dying before your eyes. Look at him! Just like those two others."
I looked at him.
"You sent him into the plains last summer?" I ventured.
"To Cisterna. One must make a little money, or starve."
"And you expect to keep your children alive if you send them to
Cisterna?"
I was astonished that the local medicine man had not diagnosed malaria.
I undertook that if she would put him into the train when next I went to
Rome, I would have him overhauled by a competent physician and packed
home again with written instructions. (I kept my word, and the good
doctor Salatino of the Via Torino--a Calabrian who knows something about
malaria--wrote out a treatment for this neglected case, no part of
which, I fear, has been observed. Such is the fatalism of the
country-folk that if drugs and injections do not work like magic they
are quietly discarded. This youth may well have gone the way of "those
other two"--who, by the by, were also sent into the Pontine
Marshes--since you cannot reject your food for ever, and grow more
anaemic every day, without producing some such result.)
Meanwhile my friendly offer caused so great a joy in the mother's heart
that I became quite embarrassed. She likened me, among other things, to
her favourite Saint.
All comparisons being odious, I turned the conversation by asking:
"And that last one?"
"Here," she said, pushing open the door of the inner room.
He lay on the couch fast asleep, in a glorious tangle of limbs, the
picture of radiant boyhood.
"This one, I think, has never been to Cisterna."
"No. He goes into the mountains with the woodcutters every morning an
hour before sunrise. It is up beyond Collepardo--seven hours' labour,
and seven hours' march there and back. The rest of the time he sleeps
like a log...."
Children from these hill-places often accompany their parents into the
plains to work; more commonly they go in droves of any number under the
charge of some local man. They are part of that immense army of
hirelings which descends annually, from the uplands of Tuscany to the
very toe of Italy, into these low-lying regions, hardly an inch of which
is fever-free. I do not know even approximately the numbers of these
migratory swarms of all ages and both sexes; let us say, to be on the
safe side, a quarter of a million. They herd down there, in the broiling
heat of summer and autumn, under conditions which are not all that could
be desired. [31] Were they housed in marble palaces and served on
platters of gold, the risk would not be diminished by a hair. How many
return infected? I have no idea. It cannot be less than sixty per cent.
How many of these perish? Perhaps five per cent. A few thousand annual
deaths are not worth talking about. What concerns the country--and what
the country, indeed, has taken seriously in hand--is this impoverishment
of its best blood; this devitalising action of malaria upon unnumbered
multitudes of healthy men, women, and children who do not altogether
succumb to its attacks.
I sometimes recognise them on the platform of Rome station--family
parties whom I have met in their country villages, now bound for
Maccarese or one of those infernal holes in the Campagna, there to earn
a little extra money with hay, or maize, or wheat, or tomatoes, or
whatever the particular crop may be. You chat with the parents; the
youngsters run up to you, all gleeful with the change of scene and the
joy of travelling by railway. I know what they will look like, when they
return to their mountains later on....
And so, discoursing of this and that, one rambles oneself into a
book....
Into half a book; for here--at Alatri, and now--midsummer, I mean to
terminate these non-serious memories and leave unrecorded the no less
insignificant events which followed up to the mornings in October, those
mornings when jackdaws came cawing past my window from the thickly
couched mists of the Borghese Gardens, and the matutinal tub began to
feel more chilly than was altogether pleasant.
Half a book: I perceive it clearly. These pages might be rounded by
another hundred or two. The design is too large for one volume; it
reminds me of those tweed suits we used to buy long ago whose pattern
was so "loud" that it "took two men to show it off." Which proves how a
few months' self-beguilement by the wayside of a beaten track can become
the subject of disquisitions without end. Maybe the very aimlessness of
such loiterings conduces to a like method of narrative. Maybe the tone
of the time fosters a reminiscential and intimately personal mood, by
driving a man for refuge into the only place where peace can still be
found--into himself. What is the use of appealing in objective fashion
to the intelligence of a world gone crazy? Say your say. Go your way.
Let them rave! We shall all be pro-German again to-morrow. [32]
Half a book: it strikes me, on reflection, as curiously appropriate. To
produce something incomplete and imperfect, a torso of a kind--is it not
symbolical of the moment? Is not this an age of torso's? We are
manufacturing them every hour by the score. How many good fellows are
now crawling about mutilated, converted into torso's? There is room for
a book on the same lines....
I glance through what has been written and detect therein an occasional
note of exacerbation and disharmony which amuses me, knowing, as I do,
its transitory nature. Dirty work, touching dirt. One cannot read for
three consecutive years of nothing but poison-gas and blood and
explosives without engendering a corresponding mood--a mood which
expresses itself in every one according to whether he thinks
individually or nationally; whether he cultivates an impartial
conscience or surrenders to that of the crowd. For the man and his race
are everlastingly tugging in different directions, and unreasoning
subservience to race-ideals has clouded many a bright intellect. How
many things a race can do which its component members, taken separately,
would blush to imitate! Our masses are now fighting for commercial
supremacy. The ideal may well be creditable to a nation. It is hardly
good enough for a gentleman. He reacts; he meditates a Gospel of Revolt
against these vulgarities; he catches himself saying, as he reads the
morning paper full of national-flag fetishism and sanguinary nonsense:
"One Beethoven symphony is a greater victory than the greatest of these,
and reasonable folks may live under any rule save that of a wind-fed
herd."
It avails nothing. The day has dawned, the day of those who pull
downwards--stranglers of individualism. Can a man subscribe to the
aspirations of a mob and yet think well of himself? Can he be black and
white? He can be what he is, what most of us are: neutral tint. Look
around you: a haze of cant and catchwords. Such things are employed on
political platforms and by the Press as a kind of pepsine, to aid our
race-stomach in digesting certain heavy doses of irrationalism. The
individual stomach soon discovers their weakening effect....
Looking back upon these months of uneventful wanderings, I became aware
of a singular phenomenon. I find myself, for some obscure reason, always
returning to the same spot. I was nine times in Rome, twice in Florence
and Viareggio and Olevano and Anticoli and Alatri and Licenza and
Soriano, five times at Valmontone, thrice at Orvinio; and if I did not
go a second time to Scanno and other places, there may be a reason for
it. Why this perpetual revisiting? How many new and interesting sites
might have been explored during that period! Adventures and discoveries
might have fallen to my lot, and been duly noted down. As it is, nothing
happened, and nothing was noted down. I have only a diary of dates to go
upon, out of which, with the help of memory and imagination, have been
extracted these pages. For generally, delving down into memory, a man
can bring up at least one clear-cut fragment, something still fervid and
flashing, a remembered voice or glimpse of landscape which helps to
unveil the main features of a scenario already relegated to the
lumber-room. And this detail will unravel the next; the scattered
elements jostle each other into place, as in the final disentangling of
some complicated fugue.
Such things will do for a skeleton. Imagination will kindly provide
flesh and blood, life, movement. Imagination--why not? One suppresses
much; why not add a little? Truth blends well with untruth, and phantasy
has been so sternly banned of late from travellers' tales that I am
growing tender-hearted towards the poor old dame; quite chivalrous, in
fact--especially on those rather frequent occasions when I find myself
unable to dispense with her services.
Yes; truth blends well with untruth. It is one of the maladies of our
age, a sign of sheer nervousness, to profess a frenzied allegiance to
truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where
graver issues are at stake. We cannot lay claim to a truthful state of
mind. In this respect the eighteenth century, for all its foppery, was
ahead of ours. What is the basic note of Horace Walpole's iridescent
worldliness--what about veracity? How one yearns, nowadays, for that
spacious and playful outlook of his; or, better still, for some
altogether Golden Age where everybody is corrupt and delightful and has
nothing whatever to do, and does it well....
My second ideal family at Alatri lives along a side path which diverges
off the main road to Ferentino. They are peasant proprietors, more
wealthy and civilised than those others, but lacking their terrestrial
pathos. They live among their own vines and fruit-trees on the hillside.
The female parent, a massive matron, would certainly never send those
winsome children into the Pontine Marshes, not for a single day, not for
their weight in gold. The father is quite an uncommon creature. I look
at him and ask myself; where have I seen that face before, so classic
and sinewy and versatile? I have seen it on Greek vases, and among the
sailors of the Cyclades and on the Bosphorus. It is a non-Latin face,
with sparkling eyes, brown hair, rounded forehead and crisply curling
beard; a legendary face. How came Odysseus to Alatri?
Not far from this homestead where I have spent sundry pleasant hours
there is a fountain gushing out of a hollow. In olden days it would have
been hung with votive offerings to the nymphs, and rightly. One
appreciates this nature-cult in a dry land. I have worshipped at many
such shrines where the water bounds forth, a living joy, out of the
rocky cleft--unlike those sluggish springs of the North that ooze
regretfully upwards, as though ready to slink home again unless they
were kicked from behind, and then trickle along, with barely perceptible
movement, amid weeds and slime.
Now this particular fountain (I think it is called acqua santa), while
nowise remarkable as regards natural beauty, is renowned for curing
every disease. It is not an ordinary rill; it has medicinal properties.
Hither those two little demons, the younger children, conducted me all
unsuspecting two days ago, desirous that I should taste the far-famed
spring.
"Try it," they said.
I refused at first, since water of every kind has a knack of disagreeing
with my weak digestion. As for them, they gulped down tumblers of it,
being manifestly inured to what I afterwards discovered to be its
catastrophic effects.
"Look at us drinking it," they went on. "Ah, how good! Delicious! It is
like Fiuggi, only better."
"Am I an invalid, to drink Fiuggi water?"
"It is not quite the same as Fiuggi. (True. I was soon wishing it had
been.) How many men would pay dearly for your privilege! Never let it be
said that you went away thirsting from this blessed spot."
"I am not thirsty just now. Not at all thirsty, thank you."
"We have seen you drink without being thirsty. Just one glass," they
pleaded. "It will make you live a hundred years."
"No. Let us talk about something else."
"No? Then what shall we tell our mother? That we brought you here, and
that you were afraid of a little mouthful of acqua santa? We thought you
had more courage. We thought you could strangle a lion."
"Something will happen," I said, as I drained that glass.
Nothing happened for a few hours.
Two days' rest is working wonders....
I profit by the occasion of this slight indisposition to glance
backwards--and forwards.
I am here, at Alatri, on the 22 June: so much is beyond contestation.
A later page of that old diary of dates. August 31: Palombara. Well I
remember the hot walk to Palombara!
August 3: Mons Lucretilis, that classical mountain from whose summit I
gazed at the distant Velino which overtops like a crystal of amethyst
all the other peaks. This was during one of my two visits to Licenza.
Pleasant days at Licenza, duly noting in the house of Horace what I have
noted with Shelley and other bards, namely, that these fellows who sing
so blithely of the simple life yet contrive to possess extremely
commodious residences; pleasant days among those wooded glens, walking
almost every morning in the footsteps of old Ramage up the valley in
whose streamlet the willow-roots sway like branches of coral--aloft
under the wild walnuts to that bubbling fountain where I used to meet my
two friends, Arcadian goat-herds, aboriginal fauns of the thickets, who
told me, amid ribald laughter, a few personal experiences which nothing
would induce me to set down here.
July 26: La Rocca. What happened at La Rocca?
October 2: Florence. What happened at Florence? A good deal, during
those noteworthy twelve hours!
Some memories have grown strangely nebulous; impossible to reconstruct,
for example, what went on during the days of drowsy discomfort at
Montecelio. A lethargy seems to have fallen on me; I lived in a dream
out of which there emerges nothing save the figure of the local
tobacconist, a ruddy type with the face of a Roman farmer, who took me
to booze with him, in broad patriarchal style, every night at a
different friend's house. Those nights at Montecelio! The mosquitoes!
The heat! Could this be the place which was famous in Pliny's day for
its grove of beeches? How I used to envy the old Montecelians their
climate!
July 23: Saracinesca. What happened? I recollect the view over the
sweltering Campagna from the dizzy castle-ruin, in whose garden I see
myself nibbling a black cherry, the very last of the season, plucked
from a tree which grows beside the wall whereon I sat. That suffices: it
gives a key to the situation. I can now conjure up the gaunt and sombre
houses of this thick-clustering stronghold; the Rembrandtesque shadows,
the streets devoid of men, the picture of some martial hero in a
cavern-like recess where I sought shelter from the heat, a black
crucifix planted in the soil below the entrance of the village--my
picture of Saracinesca is complete, in outline.
July 31: Subiaco. Precisely! A week later, then, I walk thirty-two
chilometres along the shadeless high road, an insane thing to do, to
Subiaco and back. There, in the restaurant Aniene, when all the
luncheon-guests have departed for their noonday nap, the cook of the
establishment, one of those glorious old Roman he-cooks, comes up to my
table. Did I like the boiled trout?
Rather flabby, I reply. A little tasteless. Let him try, next time, some
white vinegar in the water and a bay-leaf or two.
He pricks up his ears: we are gens du metier. I invite him to sit down
and inquire: how about a bottle of Cesanese, now that we are alone? An
excellent idea! And he, in his turn, will permit himself to offer me
certain strawberries from his own private store.
"Strawberries?" I ask. "Who ever heard of strawberries in Central Italy
on the 31 July? Why, I devoured the last cherry a week ago, and it was
only alive because it grew above the clouds."
These, he explains mysteriously, are special strawberries, brought down
from near the snow-line by a special goat-boy. They are not for the
guests, but "only for myself." Strawberries are always worth paying for;
they are mildly purging, they go well with the wine. And what a
wonderful scent they have! "You remind me of a certain Lucullo," I said,
"who was also nice about strawberries. In fact, he made a fine art of
eating and drinking."
"Your Lucullo, we may take it, was a Roman?"
"Romano di Roma."
Thus conversing with this rare old ruffian, I forget my intention of
leaving a card on Saint Scolastica. She has waited for me so long. She
can wait a little longer....
August 9: Villa Lante.
August 12: Ferento. What happened at Ferento?
Now what happened at Ferento? Let me try to reconstruct that morning's
visit.
I have clear memories of the walk from Viterbo--it would be eighteen
chilometres there and back, they told me. I had slept well in my quaint
little room with the water rushing under the window, and breakfasted in
receptive and responsive mood. I recall that trudge along the highway
and how I stepped across patches of sunlight from the shade of one
regularly planted tree into that of another. The twelfth of August....
It set me thinking of heathery moorlands and grouse, and of those
legions of flies that settle on one's nose just as one pulls the
trigger. It all seemed dim and distant here, on this parching road,
among southern fields. I was beginning to be lost in a muse as to what
these boreal flies might do with themselves during the long winter
months while all the old women of the place are knitting Shetland
underwear when, suddenly, a little tune came into my ears--a wistful
intermezzo of Brahms. It seemed to spring out of the hot earth. Such a
natural song, elvishly coaxing! Would I ever play it again? Neither
that, nor any other.
It turned my thoughts, as I went along, to Brahms and led me to
understand why no man, who cares only for his fellow-creatures, will
ever relish that music. It is an alien tongue, full of deeps and
rippling shallows uncomprehended of those who know nothing of lonely
places; full of thrills and silences such as are not encountered among
the habitations of men. It echoes the multitudinous voice of nature, and
distils the smiles and tears of things non-human. This man listened, all
alone; he overheard things to which other ears are deaf--things terrible
and sweet; the sigh of some wet Naiad by a reedy lake, the pleadings and
furies of the genii--of those that whisper in woodlands and caverns by
the sea, and ride wailing on thunder-laden clouds, and rock with ripe
laughter in sunny wildernesses. Brahms is the test. Whoso dreads
solitude will likewise dread his elemental humour.
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