1966 Chronicle of a Special Year
1966
Chronicle of a Special Year
Brigitte & Kit
„On ne voit bien qu‘avec le cœur. L‘essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.“ — Le Petit Prince, chap. XXI
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944)
1. January, On the „Fair Sky“
2. February, Italy and Michelangelo
3. March, Swiss Mountains
4. April, Perugia 1
5. May, Perugia 2
6. June, Perugia 3
7. July, The Cave
8. August, Siena 1
9. September, Siena 2 – Zurich
10. October, Vienna
11. November, Zurich
12. December, Paris
13. Epilogue, 1967
1. January: On the “Fair Sky”
A well know New Zealand disease is: “going overseas”, “doing the big trip” or as it was still called in the 60s “visiting the old country” or even “going home” (to Britain). It is a direct consequence of being planted on a couple of islands as remote as is possible from everywhere else in the world. The nearest neighbour, Australia, was in those days to all but the very rich, at least two days sailing away and if you went to the trouble to save enough to “go overseas” then rather a bit more for a bit further and rather not to a country with exactly the same culture and problems as New Zealand.
After four years of teaching mathematics at Linwood High School, I had saved enough to be able to “do the big trip”, but in my case I was determined not to do what everybody else was doing. My aim was to learn more about my main passion: Composition. Although I could have done this very well in “the old country”, I was quite sure I wanted to do it somewhere else — anywhere else, where the culture would be different from everything I knew so far. My mother, Betty, had already done such a trip, a three months course of study at the University for Foreigners (L’Università per stranieri) in Perugia. She had returned from there a few years earlier and had started teaching Italian at Victoria University (in Wellington) and in so doing she was fulfilling a life long dream of involvement in an academic life. As I left the university with my science degree she had started her arts course and her enthusiasm for Italian language and culture had not only given her a first class degree, it had inspired me to learn the language too.
In the middle of December 1965 therefore, I boarded the “Fair Sky” with four hundred pounds in my pocket and a ticket to Italy where I would first extend my basic knowledge of the Italian language and then find an Italian composition teacher. My first choice of teacher was Luciano Berio in Milan, but Berio had already left for foreign shores and was working in America. The fact that I really didn’t know another name in Italy didn’t bother me too much, I was quite sure I would find someone.
On the wharf to see me off were my parents and a few friends:
But yes, it was awful, the departure from Wellington cos a ship goes away much more slowly than a plane. I left it till the very last moment to go on board. All went well and after a while I lost sight of the family and group of friends who were there all together in the middle of the enormous crowd. Then all of a sudden I saw Betty — she was waving her coat or something large. It was very funny and then very sad. I had to cry.
Two days later we reached Sydney and for one day we were allowed to roam the city. I found out that in fact Australia was quite different from New Zealand. It was bigger and hotter and had many more flies and the centre of Sydney was blessed with a most interesting modern architecture — tall buildings on slender supports, something I hadn’t seen in earthquake prone New Zealand.
A few days later we sailed up the Brisbane river and stopped again for a whole day. This time I visited a sort of open zoo and saw my first kangaroos, emus and koalas. The hot dry eucalyptus smell was certainly not like New Zealand bush.
From here the ship travelled further north between the mainland and the Great Barrier Reef, rounded the corner at the top of Australia and headed through tropical waters towards Singapore. I was delighted with shipboard life, we celebrated Christmas, New Year and Crossing the Equator all in quick succession. I found lots of interesting people to talk to, to eat and dance with. Dancing on board was particularly amusing, because if the ship rolled a little all the dancers could find themselves suddenly in a pile on one side of the dance floor.
Since it was an Italian ship there were Italian lessons offered which I was delighted to take part in and I also tried to overhear what the crew members were talking about together. I was bitterly disappointed; I understood not one word. Later I heard that most of the crew were Sicilians and therefore had been speaking their dialect. I also got to know Jenny and Peter Murray who were on their way to Britain to further their studies, Peter as an English doctoral student with special interest in Jonathon Swift and Jenny a historian.
Singapore was the first really foreign port. Everything was different: the climate (unbearably hot and damp), the Chinesey faces, the busy clean look. I joined a tour which took us to the botanic gardens where we were suddenly surprised by monkeys which descended on us out of the trees like trapeze acrobats. These were rhesus monkeys we were told and it was here in Singapore that the original work on blood groups was done with monkeys of this species, which gave its name to the Rh factor.
From Singapore there was now another long sail to Colombo (where I was shocked to see a taxi driver lean out of his car and spit blood red onto the pavement — not knowing it was betel nut, I thought he had some terrible disease!) and a further even longer stretch to Aden, the largest city of Yemen at the foot of the Saudi peninsular. Here we were warned not to go ashore but I was too curious to stay on the ship the whole day. I was fascinated with this poor dry country where people often had their beds on the street and were anxious to sell us the little that they had. There was a very strong military presence and people and cars were often stopped and searched. I returned to the ship in the evening thankful to be still in one piece but delighted with these new experiences. As we sailed away into the Red Sea I looked back on the city with its backdrop of a stone mountain riddled with holes and completely void of green. Here was a culture much older than anything I had seen before but apparently without the barest essentials (vegetation and water) that a culture needed.
The Red Sea although no different in colour from the other seas was comforting in that land was always in sight. It can be very disturbing sailing for weeks without being able to see land and one wonders how our forefathers managed with this problem, who travelled from the “old country” in sailing vessels which took about three times as long as modern ships. No doubt the strict discipline of shipboard life, cleaning, preparing food and taking part in the church services three times a day would have helped to distract them from the psychological stress of the endless ocean.
Before we reached the Suez Canal we were informed that those who wished to visit Cairo could leave the ship at the Port of Suez, travel by bus to Cairo, visit the Pyramids, Sphinx and Cairo Museum and then go on by bus to Port Said to pick up the boat again after its passage through the Canal. It was a difficult decision because, attractive as the trip was, it meant forgoing the experience of the Canal itself. But I decided on Cairo and set out in a full bus through the dry treeless landscape. Next to me sat a girl who after an hour or so confided in me that she needed to go to the lavatory. It was obviously quite urgent or she would never have spoken of such a thing. I offered to go to the driver and ask him to stop. She looked out again at the desert on all sides and it was painfully clear that there was not the slightest shelter for her to relieve herself without being in full view of everyone in the bus. She refused my offer. After that she spoke very little and tried as best she could to bare the pain. Before we arrived in the city, tears were rolling down her cheeks.
Although very commercial the Pyramids were most impressive. The pictures we had seen at school of slaves pulling these massive blocks of stone, rolling them over tree trunks, up slopes of earth that would later be removed, had given me no real idea of the enormity of the task. And about how the blocks were cut in the first place nobody had ever spoken. We were taken as a group into the bowels of one of these World Wonders, a long dark passage with even longer staircases to reach the burial chamber of some long forgotten and long plundered pharaoh. Leaving this chamber and returning down the stairs was (for me at least) a more difficult operation since it had obviously been constructed for much smaller people (which makes the miracle of its construction even greater). There was almost no light and one had to grope as best one could, holding a railing with one hand and feeling for the steps with the feet and at the same time doubled over forwards because of the low ceiling. In this rather uncomfortable attitude I heard something drop very close to me and immediately after noticed something soft on the step I was about to place my foot on. I bent down and picked up the object. It was my own passport which I had fondly imagined to be very safely stored in the inside pocket of my jacket. But because of my bent-over stance it had been free to drop out and lose itself in an Egyptian pyramid had I not by chance felt it with my foot.
After a camel ride we drove off to the city centre to visit the Cairo Museum. At this time it was very difficult to assess what this place had to offer. It promised to offer very much, but it was so badly exhibited that it was almost impossible to see the wood for the trees. If a tenth of the objects had been well set out, one would have come away with a much more positive feeling of having learnt something about ancient Egypt. So we left the museum rather despondently and gathered in a street café where the locals were drinking coffee. One elderly gentleman addressed us in beautiful English and asked where we came from. We were all New Zealanders. “Ah”, he said, “you’re pakeha” (pakeha = non-Maori). To hear this Maori word outside New Zealand was very unexpected. But he went on to explain. The Maori battalion had been stationed in Cairo during the war. From there they left to fight the Germans under the legendary General Rommel, the “Desert Fox”. The Maoris obviously had had the sympathy of the Egyptian people. The elderly man went on to defend them, even although nothing had been levelled against them. We assumed that sometimes their behaviour had been a bit rough, a bit too boisterous for guests in a foreign country. “But if you knew” he went on, “that you may not return from the next battle, you would also want to enjoy your last sure moment of freedom”. We all sat there, admiring his wisdom and being proud to be from the same country as this famous battalion.
Before we left Cairo we were told that the plans had been changed. Since our ship was still waiting in a queue to enter the Suez Canal and we would therefore return to Suez and be on board for the trip through the canal.
I was very excited and was up before dawn keeping watch over every movement the ship made. It was so big and the canal so narrow it was hard to imagine that it could possibly fit. Of course it did, but there was no room for passing or overtaking. For this there were “parking bays” something that looked totally surrealistic: a ship parked in the desert. Alongside the canal there was a narrow strip of green and beyond as far as the eye could see sand and more sand. And then like an apparition with its under parts covered by sand dunes, a waiting ship. The passage took a full day so I was eventually forced to go to bed and when I awoke next morning there were the happy painted cascades of coloured buildings in Port Said. We had entered the Mediterranean.
And we had also entered winter, not bitterly cold but it was the end of the swimming pool on board and the beginning of pullovers and jackets. The ship sailed northwest towards the Straits of Messina and just before Naples there was one last surprise: Stromboli was active: This island volcano was glowing in the night with a stream of lava from the tip down to the sea.
I packed away my few possessions, said goodbye to Jenny and Peter Murray who would disembark in London and arranged to meet them again in Italy. Told the cabin steward that I was not prepared to carry his hubble-bubble through the customs for him and descended onto Italian soil.
2. February, Italy and Michelangelo
On a cold sunny morning in early February I waved goodbye to my friends on board and set out on my own to discover Naples. The city was lively and friendly but it was ugly and poor and the scares of the war were still visible after more than twenty years. Rather than “dying for the sight of Naples” one was reminded of the corruption of this saying that came from the air force bombers of the second world war: “See Naples and dive”. There was hardly a block of the city near the harbour that didn’t still have a ruined building, a bombed out house. But it was the people who caught most of my attention, fishermen for instance who stood at the street corners with big gong shaped dishes of frutta di mare: shellfish, sardines, scampi, whatever was portable and could be kept alive for a few hours in a bowl of water. I was watching such a man standing alongside his wares, talking and gesticulating to a second man and then as I watched he bent down casually and picked up a shrimp and popped it into his own mouth. I had completely overlooked the fact that someone like myself, a fascinated, even a mildly shocked observer, was at least as interesting to him being observed as he was for me. He had seen me and he beckoned me with his finger. As I approached he dipped into his aquarium again and pulled out another shrimp which as I came closer, I could see struggling between his fingers. He motioned to me that I should eat it, and I knew I would have to try. I took it, felt its frightened movement in my mouth, chewed it and swallowed it as quickly as possible. I thanked him and left before he could offer anything else. Both men laughed uproariously and I pondered on having tried my first live scampo but on having absolutely no idea of how it had tasted.
One didn’t need to speak to be spoken to — everywhere I went people approached me and offered help even if it wasn’t required. A man in the vegetable market tried to teach me Italian: arrancia, limone — words I already knew, but he was not to be put off by such a minor detail. During this Italian lesson, I heard a loud noise, which sounded like a carnival and so I left the lesson politely and walked in the direction of these very shrill sounds. Soon I saw a parade of people blowing whistles and shouting. I asked someone what this was: “Oggi è scioppero”, he said. I didn’t know this word scioppero so I looked it up quickly in my dictionary: Strike: “Today is strike”. How curious, almost like saying “today is market day”, something that happens every week — a strike every week?. This was in fact, sadly for Italy, not far from the truth. The word scioppero would be a frequently used part of my Italian vocabulary. What they were striking about I didn’t find out, instead I decided it was urgent for me to deposit my cases somewhere if I was to be able to see any more of the city. I asked a young man where the Youth Hostel was and he replied that he would take me there. This was something that happened a number of times when I asked directions in Naples. People seemed to have time to go on long walks. In this case it was a very long walk because the Youth Hostel was some kilometers away on a headland overlooking the sea and somewhat outside the city centre. We walked and talked, he helped carry my bags and at the end I looked for a coin to give him but this was evidently not what had motivated him to help me. I was later to be stolen from and cheated but there were many more Italians who were kindly just because they enjoyed company and this was evidently one of those. The Youth Hostel was almost empty, in fact I was lucky that it was open at all in mid winter. It was clean and comfortable and so I stayed there a couple of nights.
There were two cultural things I knew to look out for in Naples, one was the city art gallery on Capodimonte (which hill was visible from most parts of the city) and the other was the opera house San Carlo. I decided to look for this. I walked to the place where it should have been and found only a busy looking shopping area. I asked someone: “Dov’è San Carlo?”, “è lì!” he said and pointed into the middle of the busiest throng. I walked to where he had pointed and saw that it was indeed the entrance to the theatre. I enquired what was on today: “Lucrezia Borgia” by Donizetti. I’d never heard of this work although I did know that this lady was the daughter of one of the most infamous popes in the Renaissance. I bought a ticket for a seat in a loggia for that afternoon.
Each loggia had about five or six seats and the loggias themselves formed a large curving wall opposite the stage. This meant that not only the stage was well visible but also the people sitting in the loggias on the other side. I have long since forgotten anything about the action or the music on stage but the action in my loggia was unforgettable. The audience reminded me of a football audience at home. Everything that took place on the stage was followed and commented on with the same precision and passion of a rugby fan in New Zealand. Every aria was greeted with load applause and with shouts of “bravo!” (for male singers), “brava!” (for females) or for groups “bravi!” or even “brave!”. The man sitting next to me was especially excited and especially loud and kept me informed about all his opinions (although I understood very little of what he said). Suddenly after a particularly enthusiastic applause and vocal appraisal he jumped up, left the loggia and was gone for some minutes. When he returned he explained: Someone in a loggia on the other side had called out: “cane!” (dog!) which didn’t agree at all with his assessment of the last aria and so he’d gone to have a private argument — all part of the Neapolitan opera game.
The next station was the art museum Capodimonte. When I now read the catalogue of works from this museum I am struck by what I did not see. But looking at pictures is more difficult than just opening the eyes in front of a picture. In general one sees only what one already knows. What one doesn’t know is therefore invisible. This is the only explanation I have for why I missed seeing works there by Masaccio and Caravaggio, two painters I was later to learn to appreciate greatly. I have had no formal training in art history, but my interest in music history had already widened to include painting and sculpture and before leaving New Zealand I had read Irving Stone’s book about Michelangelo “The Agony and the Ecstacy” which not only made me want to see as much as possible of Michelangelo but also gave me a strong interest in renaissance painting in general. I knew enough before going to this Neapolitan gallery that there would be no Michelangelo here, but I was hoping to see earlier renaissance painters, and of course I did. In fact one picture dominated my visit: It wasn’t even an Italian work, it was Breugel’s “Parable of the Blind Leading the Blind”. Why this should have had such an impact I still don’t know. It is a very fine picture, but there were certainly other good pictures there too. Curious is, that I didn’t know Breugel very well at all and yet I saw it! I did however know the biblical story which is so brilliantly portrayed and this must have helped me to see this work. Another important fact is that the picture is very un-Italian. It must have been very striking by contrast with all the other pictures — its pale sombre colours, its North European landscape and the figures themselves (frighteningly demented faces) are not Italian. Whatever the reason, this picture has remained with me, and all others have faded into obscurity.
The strong association with this picture was strengthened by a copy we had on our dining room wall in Christchurch in the 70s. I still like it very much, even although I now see (having seen much more Breugel in the mean time) that it is quite atypical of his work in general. Here the figures are large and in the foreground, the background of church and fields is relatively unimportant. Although his other more famous works do often have figures in the foreground (the musicians in the “Peasant Wedding” or the ploughman in “Icarus”) they are not the main object of the picture. Here, however, the figures are the picture and they are painted with a remarkable attention to detail giving us a social portrait of the poor people of thepainter’s day. Most have a scull cap as well as a “normal” hat, the men seem to be carrying all their possessions attached to their clothes — one can look into the picture and see more and more. In fact it fulfils one of the main criteria for good art in that one can always find something new in it, one can never know it totally, one can always be surprised by it.
Before leaving Naples I decided to make a trip to Ischia. I had heard of this island in the Bay of Naples because I knew that the English composer Sir William Walton had a villa there. Just before leaving New Zealand I had met the New Zealand composer and harpist Dorothia Franchi who had talked to me about Walton. In the previous year Walton had visited New Zealand to conduct a performance of his “Belshazzar’s Feast”. Dorothia, who had played in the orchestra which he conducted, had given him a copy of the record “Six Carols for Christmas” which contained a work of hers and of mine. I thought, if he has a recording of a work of mine, then surely he would be pleased if I visited him! At the wharf in Ischia I looked around for a taxi, which would take me to Walton’s villa. All I could find was a furgoncino (also called ape = bee), a cross between a motorbike and a delivery van. I squeezed into the only seat alongside the driver whose steering wheel was the handlebar of the motorbike part of this tiny vehicle. We bounced over narrow roads in this precipitous landscape to the side of the island most remote from the harbour. When we arrived at the villa I was surprised to hear the sounds of loud Italian pop music coming out of the garden. I rang the bell at the gate and after a minute a young man with a cultivated British accent opened the gate and greeted me. I knew well enough what Sir William looked like to know that this was not him. He explained that the composer had fallen ill and was in a hospital in London. As the noise from the gardener’s radio continued, he looked apologetically at me and said: These sounds would never be heard if the master were here. And so I climbed back into the furgoncino and wondered if it was not, in fact, a good thing that Sir William and I had not met. What would I have said to him, or asked him? I really hadn’t thought very clearly about what I had hoped to achieve by this visit and I (and he!) had been spared an embarrassing moment.
My next station was Rome, the Eternal City. I was excited to make my first real contact with Michelangelo. I booked into the youth hostel and early next morningset out for the Vatican City. However the first thing was to go the Central Post Office for mail from home. Betty had agreed to write to me here c/o posta restante. But Rome is enormous and a simple operation like going to the post office can take hours. To be sure I was moving in the right direction, I asked a boy on the street and, as I had experienced in Naples, instead of giving me instructions, he said he would show me the way. We walked and walked and I tried to talk to him as best I could. It seemed strange to me that a child of this age would be on the street at all at this time. I asked him why he wasn’t at school: Ho marinato la scuola (literally: I have marinated the school = I’ve wagged school). Like seeing only that which one has learnt to see, one hears only that which one has learnt to hear. No doubt much of what he spoke to me I didn’t hear, but once in my Italian lessons I had come across this curious expression which I was delighted to understand at this moment. Unfortunately I didn’t know enough Italian to ask why, or for how long, that would have to wait until later. He left me at the Post Office where I was rewarded with several letters from home.
From here I found my own way to the Vatican. I knew what I wanted to see most and I was not disappointed: Michelangelo’s “Pietà”. It was a very emotional meeting — the first real contact with a work which I already knew so well from reading and from pictures. It was like finding a long lost friend — tears rolled down my face.
But there was more Michelangelo to be seen — the Sistine Chapel. This was much more difficult to see and consequently a less emotional meeting than with the “Pietà” — all the frescos were so far away. Those on the ceiling were not only very distant, you had to crane your neck backwards to be able to see them at all.
There were mirrors, which solved the neck problem, but then one was seeing a reflection (reversed image) and not the real thing. Some people had binoculars and lay on the pews gazing upwards. The “Last Judgement”, on the wall behind the altar was also wonderful (one single picture instead of a collection of scenes as the ceiling is) and could be seen without lying down or bending over backwards.
I was especially interested by the figure of “Minos” in the bottom right corner and by Bartholomew holding the the skin of Michelangelo. Twenty five years later we visited this chapel again with our children. What a different experience! There were now so many visitors that it was no longer quiet. In fact there was a priest on duty at the front whose sole job was to try to make people be quiet. In order to do this he had to make a louder noise, after which the crowd-noise subdued but then grew louder again until he was forced to call again: priest shouts, quietness and then crescendo, priest shouts again, quietness and then crescendo, and so on.
The following morning I went to see “Moses” in San Pietro in Vincoli. This Michelangelo sculpture shows Moses sitting, with horns like a devil, receiving the Commandments. Apparently the Hebrew was wrongly translated and the description of rays of light (divine inspiration?) that shone onto his head were translated as horns. Throughout the Renaissance he was always portrayed with horns. This is a huge piece and Moses looks truely authoratative, and quite capable of destroying any group of religious extremists being silly enough to worship a golden calf.
I went on to the Galleria Borghese, not being quite sure what to expect. There was a wonderful Caravaggio chiaroscuro of St Jerome whose bald head on one side of the picture is nicely balanced by an inspirational skull on the other.
This was the start of my interest in that controversial of all painters, Caravaggio. Unfortunately I didn’t realise that the works of his I would later admire most (“The Calling of Matthew”, “The Conversion of Paul”) were also here in Rome, so I missed them. The other work here in the Galleria Borghese which I have never forgotten is Bernini’s “David”. I had prepared myself for Michelangelo’s “David” (about to throw the stone) and Donatello’s “David” (standing triumphantly over the severed head of Goliath) in Florence but here in Rome Bernini is showing us a David in full action just after the stone has been set in flight — body twisted round, the hand with the sling behind his right leg which is thrust forward and most memorable of all, his face is grim with tension and concentration and he is biting his lower lip.
The next day I kept away from galleries. I walked to the Coliseum and I walked to the Forum Romanum and I walked to the Pantheon and I was exhausted. About three o’clock I found myself near the Tiber and the Castello Sant’Angelo looking for somewhere to sit down. There was of course nowhere, but then I heard a voice, an American voice, asking if I spoke English. It came from a small Italian car that had pulled up not far away. I wandered over to the car and the man explained his problem: he needed someone who spoke English and Italian — Could I speak Italian? I said I could and he suggested I might like to sit in the back of the car and act as interpreter for him. Never was I so pleased to sit down! He wanted to goto General Motors and he was being driven by an Italian who didn’t understand English — could I tell the driver where he wanted to go? I tried something like Generali Motori and immediately the driver understood and we set off through the winding narrow streets for Generali Motori. We arrived somewhere — I had no idea where — and the American got out of the car and disappeared into the crowd on the footpath. As soon as he was gone the Italian started to explain to me how he came from a town on the coast and every day he went to Fumicino Airport with his tiny car to try to get work as a private taxi driver. In this case he had had the misfortune to be hired by a man he couldn’t understand (all this in good Italian). After about 10 minutes the American returned and said that the General Motors Office was shut and he hadn’t been able to get the money he had hoped to. The problem was that he had been on a trip to South Africa buying diamonds. The plane had stopped in Italy and his diamonds had been confiscated by the authorities and he required about $1000 to get them back. I didn’t really understand all this but then it didn’t concern me, I was just the translator, so I tried to tell the Italian as best I could what the other had said. He was very interested. The American went on to say that fortunately he had three large diamonds on his person, which he had managed to smuggle out and he wondered if the Italian would be interested in giving him the money he needed — he could pay him with these diamonds which were much more valuable. Again I translated and the Italian grew even more interested. The only trouble was that he would have to travel all the way back to the coast and then back to Fumicino by which time the American’s flight would already have left. Then the American turned to me and said that perhaps I could help, did I have any money? If I was prepared to help just until this evening, I could keep the diamonds as security, and the Italian would arrange to meet me later tonight with the money. I didn’t care much about helping the American but the Italian seemed a very nice man and if he was so keen to have these diamonds, I decided I would help him. The American scribbled away on a small block of paper converting pounds to lire to dollars until it seemed in the end that my contribution, together with the little he had himself, would be enough to save the situation. They took me to a bank where I changed NZ£200.- in travellers’ cheques (half my total fortune) into Italian lire. In those days Italian paper money was enormous, one really had the feeling of having a lot of money and I came out and exchanged it for the three large diamonds wrapped loosely in soft paper. The Italian and I agreed to meet between 7 and 8 pm in a nearby restaurant and off the two went waving almost too friendlily.
Although I was far less tired than before, a new discomfort was descending on me, so I walked to the railway station and hired a cabin to take a shower. There in front of the mirror I took out my new diamonds and tested them. I knew that real diamonds were harder than glass and so very discretely I made a tiny scratch on the side of the mirror. The test worked positively. Nevertheless a nagging doubt remained. At 7pm I returned to the meeting place and waited. How long I waited I can’t remember, probably until 9pm but no nice Italian ever showed his face there and so I returned to the Youth Hostel and the next day I left Rome for Florence.
I’ve often thought about this story and about what it should have taught me. There’s no doubt I’m a little more careful now than I was then but in spite of losing half my savings I still believe in people and I still believe in trusting them. What it told me was, that trusting people is important, one cannot do the simplest of operations in our society without trust, but from time to time this trust will be taken advantage of and this will cost me something. But to worry about always being taken advantage of was certainly not what I was going to do, there are many more good people than bad in this world, but curiously it’s the bad that often make it interesting.
At the Rome railway station I met Patrick. He was Chinese but spoke English with an Australian accent. He had trained for the priesthood but had left before taking the final binding vows. Now he was like me, travelling around in the origins of his culture. Although he had rejected much of Catholicism he was steeped in it and was also interested in its impact on the visual and aural arts. I explained that I wanted to study music in Italy but that I would first attend a language course at Perugia University for Foreigners. Since the train to Florence took us past Perugia we stopped and walked up to this lovely ancient town although I knew that the University didn’t open until the beginning of April. It was bitterly cold and even a little unfriendly so we returned to the railway station and continued our journey to Florence.
In many ways Florence was the goal of my travels. Florence for me was the centre of our culture — especially as far as painting and sculpture was concerned, Florence was the city of Michelangelo, the seat of the Medici Family, the home of Masaccio, Donatello, Brunelleschi and Ghiberti, it was the very cradle of the Renaissance. It was however a very different Florence that met my eyes — and nose. There was a strike (ancora uno scioppero!) of the garbage collectors and on every street corner rubbish was piled several metres high. It was fortunate that it was still cold which reduced the danger of infection and contained the evil smell which would otherwisehave been unbearable.
Patrick and I signed into the Florentine Youth Hostel (a rundown Villa from better days) and started discovering the treasures of Florence together. One really has to discover (or uncover) them, with the exception of the fabulous Duomo or the Palazzo Vecchio they do not leap out at you. I was determined to see as much as possible of Michelangelo and so we visited the Accademia (“David” and the magnificent unfinished “Captives”), the Bargello (“Bacchus” and “Brutus”), the Casa Buonarotti (early works including a newly rediscovered wooden crucifix and the “Madonna of the Stairs”), the Uffizzi (the “Tondo”) and the “Pietà” in the Duomo (later moved to the Museo del Duomo).
On the way we discovered unexpected treasures: like Pisano’s delightful hexagonal relief sculptures on the Giotto Campanile and in the Uffizzi Simone Martini’s Annunciation. Here Patrick was ready to make fun of things which during his earlier life as a young priest would have been sacrosanct: Maria is listening very coyly to the message of the archangel telling her that she has been chosen to be Mother of God, to which she seems to be saying incredulously (we decided), “Who? Me!”:
And no visit to Florence would be complete without a visit to Ghiberti’s fabulous Baptistery doors which Michelangelo called la Porta del Paradiso. These works took the artist half a lifetime to complete and the originals were still placed on the Babtistary doors alongside the Duomo (later moved to the Museo del Duomo).
In reading about Michelangelo I had learned of another artist who had influenced him profoundly, Masaccio (1400-1427). In his very short life he made the decisive leap out of the gothic style and with just a few pictures created a new direction which was to be studied by many of the great names of the Renaissance. Most of Masaccio’s work is concentrated in the Brancacci Chapel of a little church, Santa Maria del Carmine, on the “other” side of the river Arno. To get there you cross the Ponte Vecchio and take a right turn down through narrow streets lined with tiny carpentry, upholstery and other one-man businesses until you reach a godforsaken piazza packed with cars and with a very uninteresting looking church on one side of it. Even the inside of the church of Santa Maria del Carmine is no different from thousands of other small churches throughout Italy, only the Brancacci Chapel makes it special and here you can see Masaccio’s “Tribute Money” fresco as Michelangelo and Raphael also saw it over five hundred years ago. It tells the little known story of a visit Jesus and his disciples made to a town where they were asked by a “customs officer” for the tribute money before entering the town. Apparently they had no money because Jesus directs Peter to go to the edge of the nearby lake where a fish will swim up with a coin in its mouth. The painting is like a comic with three episodes in one picture: we see Jesus in the middle surrounded by the apostles and talking to the tribute collector and to Peter. Peter is also on the left removing the coin from the fish’s mouth and again on the right giving it to the collector. Described like this it sounds quaint and certainly not world shattering but the experience of the real thing does “shatter”. All the faces are “real” – obviously Masaccio has had real models. He does bow to tradition with the hallos but these are unobtrusive, and, most remarkable, the (renaissance) building in the background has been drawn in perfect perspective (we know that Masaccio’s friend Filipo Brunneleschi had just discovered the use of a vanishing point in drawing perspective).
Just before leaving New Zealand I had been present at an excellent talk at the Dante Society in which not only the enthusiasm of the speaker for the Brancacci Chappel had impressed me but also the names of the artists: there was Nasty Tom (Masaccio: Tommaso shortened to Maso and then lengthened with the negative suffix -accio) and Nice Little Tom (Masolino). Having seen the work of both Toms I now think that Masolino’s pictures would probably never have been specially noticed had he not had the extraordinary luck to be able to exhibit them alongside Nasty Tom’s frescos. It obviously needed an inspired, clever and determined character (i.e. a rather uncomfortable, “nasty” person) to break with tradition and give the painting world a brand new direction.
After three or four days in Florence I sent a telegram to my friend Luke in Leysin, Switzerland, saying that I would be taking a train the following day to visit him. I said goodbye to Patrick, copied his address into my book, and set off early in the morning on the journey north. Uppermost in my mind was the fact that there was another important Michelangelo which I specially wanted to see in Milan: the last, the “Rondanini Pietà”, an extraordinary work, done when he was very old and still experimenting. This unfinished work is in the Castello Sforzesco and shows the dead body of Christ in greatly elongated (almost El Greco) proportions.
I had worked out that I could leave the train at the Milan Main Station, take a quick look at the façade of the Cathedral, jump onto a tram for the da Vinci “Last Supper” at Santa Maria delle Grazie and onto another for the Castello Sforzesco and the Michelangelo sculpture and then be back at the railway station for the second half of my trip to Switzerland. It is one of the rare times when such a ridiculous schedule actually worked. I saw all three things: the Cathedral rather fleetingly, the da Vinci rather sadly (he had evidently experimented with the colours and the medium is now being attacked by a fungus which seems impossible to halt), and the Michelangelo, not with tears as I had had with his Roman “Pietà” but with quiet fulfilment, with the feeling of having come another step closer to the master.
3. Swiss Mountains
Train journeys in Italy are always entertaining, Italians enjoy talking to their neighbours and don’t seem to worry at all if the neighbour’s Italian isn’t very good. Interesting is that the same train which is so friendly and chaotic in Italy can change abruptly as soon as it crosses the border. Some years later I was to read on a train seat, written in indelible ink by a frustrated Italian travelling in the opposite direction: Perché, che questo treno che funzione nella Svizzera normalmente, appena attraverso la frontiera diventa un treno di merda? (Why is it, that this train, which functions normally in Switzerland, scarcely has it crossed the border, becomes a train of shit?) My train emerged from the Simplon Tunnel into the clean and polished landscape of the Rhone valley and started its well ordered but less friendly journey through Switzerland. It was not far to Aigle where I descended and lugged my suitcases across to the train for Leysin which, in comparison to what I had just left, looked as if made for a model railway. This little train set off, more like a tram, through the streets of Aigle and then halted at the bottom of a slope. There it made a jolt and a clatter and then continued in loud but slow motion. Only then did I realise that it was a rack and pinion system and that the rack had now engaged with the pinion to be able to scale the steep slope up to Leysin.
Although the distance was comparatively short the train took a whole hour to arrive at its destination. At the top I looked out expectantly, descended with my bags and looked around further, but no Luke. I knew that he lived in Club Vagabond which even with my bad French pronunciation was clear enough for someone to tell me the direction to walk in — in fact I soon found that Leysin had such an international clientele in the skiing season (which was still in full swing) that I could easily have used English — or even Italian. Club Vagabond was a cheap hotel for young skiers. Like many buildings in Leysin it had been a Cure Resort for TB patients in the 1930s and had been put out of business by the invention of penicillin. Now it looked somewhat sad and neglected and smelled strongly of heating oil as one entered. However the magnificent view of the mountains on all sides more than made up for the hotel’s run-down look.
I asked at the desk for Luke and in a moment he was there and fell on my neck and made me very welcome. I thought that perhaps he hadn’t received my telegram — he had, I just hadn’t said exactly with which train I would be coming!
I had met Luke first on the Wellington wharves in the late 50s as I was working as a tractor driver during my university holidays and he was also doing a summer job as a tally clerk before the winter when he would return to the mountains as a ski instructor. One day he had greeted me (he later confessed he had mistaken me for someone else whom he didn’t even like very much!) and I had seen him carrying some long playing records (the latest in high fidelity then!) and had asked him what was on them. He was fascinated because most “wharfies” if they asked such a question at all would ask: What’s the rock ‘n roll? He had had among other things Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, of which I’d never heard. So he lent it to me and, during that summer, many other records of music quite new to me so that through him my knowledge of music advanced rapidly. If it rained, then work on the waterfront stopped, and so we could go to his flat near Oriental Bay and listen to music. There I heard Mahler for the first time, a composer who was seldom to be heard on concert programs in New Zealand in the 50s. Luke was a Dutchman (of whom there were many in New Zealand immediately after the war) and had come with a self-paid ticket and not as most had come as assisted immigrants who were being offered a new start in life after the horrors of the Second World War. He was kept in music by record parcels sent to him by his mother, and although this music was his life blood, he could just as easily sell it before the winter to buy new skis and skins (for ski-mountaineering) only to do the same procedure in the other direction before the summer.
One rainy day when I had turned up at his place to talk music with him he tried to explain to me “the other reason” that he had left Europe. To do this he asked me to read a passage in a book by André Gide — something which taxed my school French beyond its limits. But the word for homosexuality is very similar in French and although as an 18 year old I was very ignorant about exactly what this was, I understood enough to realise that he preferred men to women. However, I still didn’t understand why this should have led to his coming to New Zealand, which at that time was every bit as restrictive in its laws against homosexuality as any European country. Curiously I wasn’t in the slightest perturbed that he might have been hoping to seduce me, and this trust was rewarded by a long friendship in which both of us respected the other’s sexuality.
Now ten years later, sitting in his plant filled room in Club Vagabond, we were able to pick up the threads of conversation as if it had been only a few weeks since we last talked together. There was, however, a difference, he now seemed much freer than he had ever been in Wellington. He no longer needed to hide his homosexuality and obviously felt at home in this multilingual environment. Here he would chat to his colleagues and owners of the club (Canadians) in English, to the locals (including the gendarmerie with whom he got on very well) in French, and to his latest boy friend, Horst, in German. He arranged for a small room for me for the month of March, showed me where I could eat and fitted me out with skis and boots –– something which filled me with great apprehension, but he assured me he would have me skiing in next to no time.
The following morning he took me out with this uncomfortable equipment and we went by cable car up to the Berneuse. I was taught to brake and to stem-turn and that was all. We started our descent to Leysin. The weather and view were superb but compensated in no way for the agony I went through. My muscles were not ready for this new exercise and certainly not for this degree of exertion. Later that day in the bar of the Vagabond when people heard what I had done they said: “What, Luke made you ski down from the Berneuse on your very first day on skis? The bastard!” But Luke remained sure that his methods were best and so day after day I went out (usually alone) and subjected myself to this torture. After a week or so a new friend of Luke’s arrived, Bragi (g = gutteral ch), a young Dutchman who had emigrated to the USA only to have been grabbed by the military and did service in Vietnam. Bragi had also never skied before, so we were sent out together to teach each other. I suppose this teaching did work, although I suspect that normal lessons would probably have had the same result much more quickly.
Bragi left after two weeks and in my last week Luke took me on a couple of ski tours in other regions, one to Verbier and an unforgettable visit to Les Diablerets. The plan was to go to the top of the mountain plateau by cable car and then to spend the whole day skiing down again in easy stages. The first stage was, however, quite steep. We stood at the top of the slope where more experienced skiers were zigzagging down and vanishing as tiny points in the distance. Up till this time my technique for negotiating such a slope was to ski along a “zig”, stop, turn round by swinging one ski after the other around my head, and then to ski along the “zag”. Luke decided it was the right moment for me to learn to do a moving turn. He demonstrated it a few times, repeated the rule: “Keep the weight on the lower ski”, (which is not so easy since this very operation requires that one changes which ski is the lower one). But, if he thought I could do it (I reasoned), then I would try. It didn’t work. My weight finished up on neither the left nor the right ski but on my tummy and I was flying down the slope head first. The movement reminded me of Newton’s First Law of Motion: “Every body continues in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line unless acted on by some external force” — but there was no external force except gravity and the reaction of the slope and so I continued on my tummy and along my straight line. I had time to wonder where I was going and why I couldn’t stop and also to think that it was not at all unpleasant, it didn’t hurt, the only problem was the uncertainty of it. After a very long time my uniform motion in a straight line did stop and as I looked up I saw Luke ski up alongside me. He had been collecting my belongings which I had unknowingly left lying in the snow: glasses, camera, cap — my skis were no longer on my boots but the straps had prevented them from leaving my legs. Luke didn’t say much but we continued somewhat more cautiously — he had obviously been forced to accept that my innate lack of coordination had to be taken much more seriously. Shortly before lunch he stopped to talk in French to a colleague and later I heard the following: This colleague had been teaching a rather nervous young woman to ski. Both had seen my fall and both had been aware of something of which I was completely unaware, namely that I had stopped only a few metres away from a precipice. The woman he had been teaching was so shocked she had given up and gone home.
My clumsiness on skis caused another minor accident. While I was out alone one day, I fell forward so that one ski actually drove over my left wrist, cutting it dangerously near to the artery. As soon as I got home Luke sent me off to his doctor who fixed it with two stitches. I had never considered having medical insurance. New Zealanders never needed such a thing in those days, it was all paid for by the “wellfare state”. I never received a bill and didn’t even think to ask Luke what it had cost. Only years later after learning how the Swiss health system works did I realise he must have paid for it himself without ever telling me.
Luke had long been interested in drugs and had read Aldous Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception” in which Huxley describes heightened perception and awareness under the influence of the drug “mescaline”. Luke had discussed this with a member of the club who had promised to bring him some LSD (a similar drug) on his next visit. This he did and for some weeks this sugar cube with impregnated LSD lay open on a saucer in Luke’s room. Not long afterwards he had a visit from the gendarmerie who were concerned that drugs might be coming into Leysin and they asked for his help in reporting anything suspicious to them. Luke was able to tell them that he had indeed heard that LSD was sometimes smuggled in the form of cube sugar and he picked up the piece that lay nearby: “… just like this one”, he said. They thanked him and left oblivious of the fact that they had had some LSD under their very noses.
Luke was anxious that I should sit with him when he tried the drug. He knew enough about LSD to know that it could be dangerous. On his free afternoon I came to his room and sat down opposite him. He swallowed the lump of sugar and set in motion a reel tape recorder, which he had borrowed for the occasion. In the half hour before the drug started to take effect, we talked about all sorts of things: His early life in Indonesia, where his father had been head of a museum and seldom at home. How his education had been largely from his mother with whom he still had a much closer relationship. When the second World War broke out and the land was taken over by the Japanese, he was put in a prisoner of war camp for men and the mother and older sister in a similar one for women. These six years as an adolescent in a society of only men must have been a major reason for his homosexuality, either in forming it or in furthering something that was already latent.
During all this conversation his ability to think straight was not apparently affected but his perception of the world was. Gradually colours became more intense and he had the feeling of being able to fly, that he could have stepped up to the window and walked out. Obviously though, his mental faculties were able to restrain him, because he never left his chair. Before he finally went to sleep he repeated: “This could be very dangerous. This could be very dangerous…” After this he was satisfied that he knew from first hand what LSD was like and as far as I know he had no desire to try it again or indeed any other drugs. Although I had made a small start as a skier, the most memorable times of my visit were the hours of talking with Luke about music, his colourful life and our general philosophising. These conversations didn’t always move very quickly, the problem not being with him who was using a foreign language but with me who often got bogged down searching for the right word only to be helped out by him who seemed to have my language as well as several others at his finger tips. I had told him that after studying music in Italy I wanted to go to Darmstadt, which was the centre for the very latest in New Music — and that meant learning German too. He said jokingly: “I don’t know how you’re going to learn all these languages, you’re not even fluent in English.” He was right — I wasn’t even fluent enough to be able to respond to that challenge, but I think fluency and having something to say are two different things.
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I left for Italy some days before the first of April (the starting date of the new trimestre in Perugia) because I had an appointment with Signorina Monti in Florence. Helena Monti had visited us in New Zealand. She was the closest family member of Betty’s Italian teacher, Dr Sorani at the university in Wellington. She had arrived on Sorani’s doorstep and he had know idea what to do with her. This “piccolo uomo” as Betty used to call him had buried himself in his ivory tower in Wellington and, apart from his few students and the people he met at the Società Dante Alighieri, he knew nobody. His aunt Helena Monti was however quite different. She loved people, she loved travelling and talking and experiencing all things and so when he introduced her to Betty all problems were solved: his and hers and ours, since we now had a contact in our favourite European city. Betty showed her around in New Zealand and then stayed with her in 1963 when she was at Perugia and had now arranged that I could visit her. She lived in the very centre of Florence, just a stone’s throw from the Palazzo Vecchio whose tower you could see from one of her windows. A shaky little lift, like a cage for two people, brought one to her third floor apartment. The floors were marble and were decorated with sculptures, especially of sleeping angels, lying like exhausted babies on it. I assume many of these “artworks” were inherited, because her taste in art and music was excellent — and she seemed to know all the important “art people” in Florence. She knew I was in Italy to learn the language so that I could study composition and so the first thing she told me was how she had attended a recent concert at which Stockhausen had spoken (in Italian!) about his own works. She went on to say that she knew Luigi Dallapiccola and if I wished she would accompany me to visit him and I could show him an example of my work. I was in awe! But the thought of visiting the great pupil of Arnold Schönberg and one of Italy’s most prestigious composers was rather frightening. What would I show him? And what would I ask him? I wasn’t prepared for such a meeting so soon.
The next morning we set out on foot, Signorina Monti with her tiny hand holding on to my arm. The impression I had had that she knew everybody was confirmed as we walked along, time and time again she was greeted by people on the street or in shops near her home. She said: Mi vogliano bene (They like me). As we walked past a flower shop she explained to me that it would be appropriate if I were to buy her a flower for her button hole, which of course I was delighted to do but dreadfully ashamed that the thought of doing so had not occurred to me.
Finally we arrived at our destination — where it was I don’t remember, I assume it was the local conservatory. Dallapiccola was a little man with short grey hair and a friendly look. Throughout the whole time I had been with Signorina Monti I had spoken Italian — she knew that it was more important for me to practise my Italian than for her to improve her English. But I had barely managed to stutter to Dallapiccola “piacere …”, when he burst into English and so we stayed in that language. He looked at the score I had brought with me, my “Concerto for Violin and Orchestra” which had been played at the Cambridge Music School in New Zealand a year before. He said nothing for a couple of minutes and then he closed the score and turned to me and said: “In Ibsen’s famous play, Peer Gynt makes a journey to Egypt to ask advice from the Sphynx. Its advice to him was: Know yourself!” and the same advice he was now offering me. I was speechless. Like any young artist I had been doing the only thing possible, studying the most recent models I had. In my case it had been Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, although I doubt whether that was possible to read from my score. I can only assume that Dallapiccola had seen that the score didn’t show him anything he hadn’t seen before, and he responded with a piece of advice which he had given many times before. Whatever the reason, the advice was by no means bad, and whether or not I have achieved this self knowledge I will probably never know, but I have never forgotten the man who gave it. We parted cordially and he and Helena Monti talked briefly together in Italian, but I was in such a numb state that I couldn’t follow what they said.
The following day I left for Perugia.
4. April: Perugia 1
What a new look Perugia had! The sleepy cold city of a few months ago was warm, alive and bustling, even welcoming. I went straight to the foyer of the University for Foreigners where there was a group of people arranging accommodation for new students. I had already decided I wanted to live with an Italian family and I wanted full board. I accepted the very first offer: Signora Tosti in Corso Garibaldi. How grand it sounded, one could just picture the triumphant leader of the resurgimento with his band of followers parading into the city along this “Corso”. But the wide avenue I had imagined was so narrow you could almost put out both hands and touch the tall buildings on either side. I was soon to learn that there were Corsi and Vie Garibaldi, Manzoni, Cavour, etc in every city of Italy, roads the heroes of the 19th century probably never saw.
Corso Garibaldi was just round the corner from the university and led up a steep hill to a lovely little ancient roman temple, built in the round for some pagan god or gods until it was taken over by the Christians. Half way up this alley (as it would certainly have been called in an English speaking country) was the Casa Tosti. The Signora was very friendly, offered me a tiny room upstairs (almost on the roof) with a fabulous view out over the roofs of Perugia to Assisi in the far distance. Here I was to spend the next three months of my life and I was free to decorate it as I wished: details of Caravaggio’s Calling of Matthew which I pinned to the ceiling so that I could enjoy them lying in bed, and a small goldfish which I bought complete with bowl on a trip to Orvieto some time later. The Signora spoke a good clear Italian and so I was confident I could learn a lot from her. I didn’t realise, however, that I was only one of five foreign students who would all be wanting the same: there was Cambis from Iran, Renato from Brazil and Annemarie and Bernard from Switzerland.
After unpacking my things I went back to the university for my first classes. I was in the Corso Medio (second year because I already knew some Italian) and this in turn was divided into language groups — Sezione Francese, Tedesca, Mista and mine, the Sezione Inglese. We had the same Professoressa which Betty had had some years earlier: Amalia Viscardi. In general we spent the first part of the mornings with her learning grammar and vocabulary and then went to Professore Proscuti for Italian Literature (a huge class for the whole corso medio) and in the afternoons (after the siesta) two other big classes: Italian History and Italian Art. This last also organised guided tours to historical centres within reach of Perugia, such as: Assisi, Spoleto, Orvieto and Rome in the south and to Siena, Florence and Arezzo in the north, and many more.
A normal day for me started with prima colazione; caffe latte and fresh bread rolls which the Signora had already bought before we had stirred. There was also a Signor Tosti whom we saw only occasionally. He was reputed to be a bath-maker by trade, an instrument which the Casa Tosti also possessed but which was always filled with flowers as if a signal warning us away from this tub. There was no shower nor even warm water but I was to learn that one can clean oneself very well with soap and cold water from the hand basin. After breakfast I performed these cool ablutions, gathered up my books (including a huge dictionary which I carried everywhere) and wandered down the Corso Garibaldi to the Università. The English class was a group of about 20 students and we sat in a tiered baroque class room with the Professoressa behind a large box-like desk on a raised platform in front of us. I sat as close to her as possible, not only to hear everything with optimal clarity but also to be able to see every movement of her face and her body language.
This last had fascinated me from the very beginning of my time in Italy. I had been under the mistaken impression that body language was universal but quite early I realised that the Italian body gestures were just as foreign to me as the spoken language. While eating, for example, someone would smile and put his index finger to his cheek and rotate the hand back and forth, which meant, I decided: It tastes good.
Soon after I started my course I met an elderly English woman by chance in the bar of the University. She asked me how old I was. I was 28. “Good”, she said, “still young enough to be able to make the necessary mouth changes.” Up till then I had never realised that every language had its characteristic mouth shape, that in fact all sounds which seemed to be the same as those in one’s own language were slightly different and to be able to pronounce these new sounds as they were in the new language, it was only possible by forcing one’s mouth into the shape used by the speakers of that language. Months later, in Siena, this was made even more clear to me when I was in a class containing Italians, a Frenchman and two Englishmen. When an Italian was looking for a word he would say: “eh”, the Frenchman, “öh” and the Englishman, “ah”. I decided that these sounds probably corresponded the mouth shape of these languages in its “rest position”. Now, here in Perugia, in my Italian class I could see, for instance, how the lips of Amalia Viscardi were thrust forward for the Italian “u” and then stretched almost to a smile for the “e”, both sounds which don’t exist in English.
Professor Prosciuti’s literature class was always interesting and always full. The course started with Dante and Marco Polo and over the months I was there, continued through the centuries touching on Machiavelli, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Michelangelo, and so on up to the present day. He managed to make the subject very moving often through the connections he could draw with other languages and other cultures and also by sometimes inviting good Italian speakers to read; I still hear the lady who read from Jacopone da Todi’s Donna de Paradiso:
O figlio, figlio, figlio!
figlio, amoroso giglio,
figlio, chi dà consiglio
al cor mio angustiato?
O son, son, son,
son, loving lily!
son who gives advice (comfort)
to my anguished heart
(As if spoken by Mary to her son Jesus hanging on the cross. I attach the English for understanding but unfortunately it contains absolutely nothing of the emotional music of the original.)
Before leaving for pranzo there was time to go and check the mail and often there was a letter from home hanging on the wall. Why I never kept these, nor why Betty apparently never kept mine to her, I don’t know. It would have made these lines much easier to write!
The midday meal was always preceded by the call: “gli spaghetti sono pronti!” (The spaghetti are ready!). Spaghetti con sugo was followed by a main course of meat and vegetables, the latter usually lukewarm and swimming in oil — one ate well and copiously at the Casa Tosti. All the other students would be present and talk animatedly about their morning at the Università: Cambis, the Iranian, who should have been at both the Sezione Mista and at the Italian Literature had gone to neither. He spent most of his days playing billiards in the bar. At the end of his stay in Perugia he spoke Italian fluently but ungrammatically. By contrast, I knew what was grammatically correct because I used to spend the siesta time every day doing my home work, but I was not fluent. After some time I realised that I was not making as much progress as I should have been and so I decided to help the signora with the washing up so that I could chat with her. This helped considerably, but I was still not as fluent as Cambis!
After the siesta (until 4pm) there were generally two classes, political history and art history. Both of these had very good lecturers and were therefore well attended. In the first I learnt about the Ostrigoths and Visigoths, the dark ages and then the beginnings of the renaissance through the power of money — people like Cosimo de Medici, who, by collecting papal money and lending it before delivering it, was able to become so rich that he could start a dynasty that was to rule Florence. The lecturer took great delight in explaining how these first bankers were so named because they laid their money out on banks or benches and if one of them was unlucky or stupid enough to lose his money, a state employee would come along with a big axe (and this he mimed with exaggerated movements) and cut the bank in half: hence the word bancorotto (bankrupt).
The art class was taken by Professore Scarpellini, whose special interest was the painter Signorelli and was, in general, an authority on renaissance painting and sculpture. His course also organised the weekly trips to see the original works which he talked about and illustrated with slides in class. Smaller trips were also made on foot on Wednesday afternoons (which were normally free of classes). These trips would be, for example, to see what was in Perugia itself, like the Fontana Maggiore, whose relief sculpture would occupy Scarpellini for an hour or more.
Between the end of the last class (6pm) and the evening meal with the Tostis (7:30) there was time to go shopping or to visit an early concert. Perugia had the support of a benefactor who enabled a series of very attractive concerts with world class artists. In the few months I was there, I heard more interesting music than I did at any other time in that year: Bartók string quartets by the Vegh Quartet, Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, the Berg Violin Concerto, to name but a few works. Cena at the Casa Tosti was also a cooked meal but without spaghetti. It was always punctually served which was good, because there was often another concert at 8:30 or 9 pm. How much I paid for my board and keep I don’t remember, although I do remember thinking it was rather more than other students were paying. But I was happy with the Tostis and later I was to realise that there were other good reasons for staying here. During that first month I had a visit from Luke’s friend Bragi. I introduced him to the Signora and she immediately offered him a bed for the night. The following day we wanted to travel to Sardinia. Although we set out very early there were already two lunches ready to take with us. The same thing happened one other time and I was never expected to pay more than my normal rate. I started to see and love the Italians for their generosity — they would happily steal from you with one hand and pay it back with the other.
The five students at the Casa Tosti got on well together, although we met only at meal times since we were in different groups at the university. One evening we decided to have a party in my room where we all sat on the floor eating snacks and drinking chianti. The evening went very well, even quietly, until Annemarie, who wanted to leave and go to bed, stood up suddenly. Unfortunately someone had been sitting on her rather full skirt and when she stood up, the skirt stayed on the floor. The poor girl was mortified and snatched up her lost skirt and what remained of her self esteem and left as quickly as possible.
The other Swiss, Bernard (from the Suisse romande), told me one day about a film he had seen which impressed him greatly: A young man had trained himself to be a pickpocket. It involved a heightened awareness of every part of his body, knowing at every moment what all his muscles were doing, being conscious of all sounds and smells and above all of everything that he touched or that touched him. Bernard told me how for days after seeing the film he went round trying to feel like the pickpocket and was convinced that he was living more intensively. His description was so graphic that I began to feel like the pickpocket myself and with a concentrated effort I could heighten my own sensitivity.
Professore Prosciuti asked me to a party. Why he should have invited me I don’t know. I was just one of about 100 students who attended his class and I had never even spoken a word to him. I can only think it was because I sat near the front (watching his face as he spoke!) that he asked me. It took place in his garden where he had arranged to have a pig roasted on a spit — porchetta, a speciality of Perugia. The sight of the poor animal being cooked is not beautiful but the taste of the meat, flavoured with rosemary and other herbs is absolutely superb.
5. May: Perugia 2
The Bamfords arrived. They came in their Dormobile, a vehicle which had not only taken them round much of Europe giving them beds for the night, it also had cooking facilities and a lavatory. It was a home on wheels, a part of their family and it was called “Dormouse”. They planned to spend one month in Perugia (attending the Corso Preparatorio) and so for that time they would put the Dormouse out to graze during the week, live in a normal house except at weekends when it could take them visiting the surrounding cities and countryside. And of course I was allowed to travel with them.
It was in the Dormouse that we visited Orvieto, where I bought my gold fish. Art professor Scarpellini had organised a tour of the Cathedral where he showed us Signorelli’s “Resurrection of the Flesh”:
The idea of the perfect naked bodies of the blessed souls being called into heaven from trumpeters on the Last Judgement Day struck me as rather curious to say the least: The Judgement seemed already to have taken place, so there would be no parading of souls before God, no standing before Him and hearing His accusations and His decision to keep them in heaven or send them to hell, because here in this picture (as also in Michelangelo’s) only the blessed are moving up and the trumpeters, which I had thought were announcing the beginning of the Judgement were in fact signalling its end! And yet the remarkable thing was that I was criticising something in this picture (which owes everything to Michelangelo –– the subject and the glorification of the human body), which I had never dreamt of questioning in Michelangelo’s case. Is it possible that the quality of the latter’s work is so overwhelming, that one accepts its message unconditionally, whereas in a second rate painter like Signorelli (being second rate to Michelangelo is surely no disgrace!) one looks at the content much more critically? Perhaps if I had listened more carefully to Scarpellini I would know. As it was he had already started his discourse when we arrived and I was at the back of the crowd of students with no chance of moving forward. So I went outside and was struck by something much more interesting –– a work of art worthy of Michelangelo himself. It was the story of the creation: God had made Adam from a lump of clay and with an incision in his side, had extracted a rib which had miraculously turned into Eve. Here the story is even more far fetched –– why should God go to all the trouble of removing a rib and transforming it into a woman when he’s capable of making a person out of a lump of clay? But such questions are totally irrelevant when the work is good –– and this one is, outstandingly so!
Travelling in the Dormouse I saw a new side of Italy. There were, for instance, numerous level crossings where the road crossed the railway and was controlled by a barrier. We soon learned that to be on the safe side, the barrier was let down at least ten minutes before the train was expected. This meant that we had ample time to make and drink a cup of tea (brewed in the kitchen of the Dormouse) before the train came. Coming home from Orvieto and just after a nice cup of tea at a level crossing, we noticed dramatic storm clouds gathering. Quite soon we saw lightning but were surprised to notice only brilliant flashes among the clouds on the horizon but no sounds of thunder. This “sheet lightning” is of course a common phenomenon in Europe, but for us New Zealanders it was something quite new and we lay down on the beds of the Dormouse and peered out its windows watching this beautiful spectacle.
One day a student asked if I would take part in a scene from Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream” to be presented outside at a school festival. I was to be the chink in the wall for Pyramus and Thisbe to talk through. This involved my making a circle with the finger and thumb of one hand while the two actors brought their mouths and ears as near to it as possible and acted out this wonderful Shakespearian burlesque. All this was part of a gala to celebrate the birthday of a school, which had invited representatives of the many different cultures who were studying Italian at the University for Foreigners. While we three (Pyramus, Thisbe and I, wall) enjoyed our performance fully, it is doubtful if anyone else did. English was not widely spoken in Italy in those days and Shakespearian English would have been totally foreign. We were followed by a group of black people, colourfully dressed and doing an African dance, which was much more enthusiastically accepted and applauded.
My progress in the Italian language was not brilliant but satisfactory. I could make myself understood and in general I felt I understood most of what people spoke to me. What I have already said about seeing and hearing only that which one is trained to see or hear, also applies to languages. One searches for parallels within one’s own language, which are however often not there or, if there, not idiomatically used. Instead of saying that he likes something, the Italian says that it pleases him (mi piace). Also the simple past tense, which is used constantly in spoken and written English and which would correspond to the Italian passato remoto, would be completely out of place since this is used only in the written language. These things are not difficult to learn, they are made clear in most language courses. What is more difficult to deal with are missing words or what I call “holes” in the language: the verb “to wear”, for example, is missing from many European languages, instead they say “to carry” (portare) and so if someone is “carrying a hat” you need to work out from the context if it’s on his head or in his hand. English has many “holes”, some well known and some not. The verb “to dwell”, for example, has all but disappeared leaving a hole which has been replaced with “to live”. When we learn a foreign language therefore, we have to be careful, is it abitare or vivere? Not quite a “hole” but equally problematic is the positive answer to a negative question: “Didn’t you see that?” “Yes I did!” “Non l’hai visto?” “Ma sì!”. (But yes). English has this (for foreigners enormously complicated) process, whereby the person replying must notice which auxilliary verb was used in the question and incorporate it into his answer: “Have you never seen it?” “Yes I have.” Fortunately Italian does not require this: “Non l’hai mai visto?” “Ma sì!”
One of the problems of “hearing only what you already know”, is that from the huge palette of human voice sounds each language chooses just a small selection to work with. We hear these sounds as soon as we are born (or even before!) and we learn to know which sounds are important for communicating. When we hear a foreign language, it seems at first unclear, lacking in the sharp differences of sounds which characterise our mother language. This is because we have not yet learnt to know which sounds are important in the new language and have not yet trained our ears to separate these important sounds from one another. After a while studying a new language it gains contours for our ears, but it never reaches the “sharpness” of the mother tongue. As an example, consider the English words “bad” and “bed”. For an English speaker there is no problem hearing the difference, we can even tell if it’s a British or an American speaker who is using them, so acute is our hearing in this narrow frequency range. Another example came from the Signorina Monti: She wrote down the words “ship” and “sheep” and asked me to pronounce them. I did so and she said: “é lo stesso” (it’s the same). As English speakers, we learn to distinguish between long and short vowels so successfully, that confusion practically never happens. Imagine the “short vowel” versions of “sheet” or “can’t” and consider the terrible misunderstandings it could lead to.
Not only do we separate long and short and closely related frequencies of the formants of our own language, we also have an intonation that is language specific and idiosyncratic. If someone has learnt all the right sounds in the correct order but pronounces them with the “wrong song” –– perhaps with the intonation of his mother language –– he is automatically difficult to understand. This “song” is what children learn first, in the so-called babbling stage. Children with two or more first languages, babble differently depending on which language they are imitating. Curiously, however, the intonation of the language is something which is seldom taught, and if at all, only if the student is prepared to immerse himself completely in the sounds of native speakers. The tragedy is, that the capacity to learn all these things well, diminishes sharply after adolescence and is only to be approached with long and strong discipline. I had therefore to resign myself to the fact that I could never speak this new language perfectly but I was anxious to do it as well as possible.
The Università was always concerned that we learn the best Italian, Tuscan dialect, the language of the great Dante Alighieri who made the first step away from Latin with such brilliance, with such an affinity for human feelings, that he established his dialect as the Italian language. But Italy still has hundreds of dialects, even Perugia (in Umbria) has a dialect although we were well protected from it. The further one travels away from Tuscany (where the “dialect” is the high language) the more difficult these languages are to understand. But even the high language has its “bad” words, although they were not on the curriculum we were studying. One such word, which one heard regularly on the street, was accidenti. According to my dictionary this means “damn” or “good heavens” but according to our professoressa it was molto brutto (very ugly) and not to be used. I was reminded of my own shock when I arrived in Leysin a few months before, where in Club Vagabond the lingua franca was English. The young Europeans who where working or staying there had learnt American slang perfectly and knew that “fuck”, for example, was quite a normal word to be included in any conversation as often as possible. It even sounded cultivated, although quaint, out of these mouths, not like it had sounded on the Wellington wharves where I had spent my summer holidays. It became clear to me that as a foreigner, it is much easier to copy words than to develop a feeling for their “weight”. Even for native speakers this is difficult since “weight” is not a fixed quantity, what was “brutto” yesterday can be acceptable today. But the bad words have a special attraction, and so when Cambis learnt them, he would pass them on to us: chiavare (to fuck) for example. Here my dictionary admits that this word is vulgare — how the professoressa would have reacted to it one dares not even guess. Its metaphoric origin is obvious: to insert a key (chiave) into a lock. In the English of electricity we have a similar expression which we use quite unembarrassedly when we talk about male and female plugs, but the metaphor has, to my knowledge, never been used for the sexual act.
One last example of a “weighty” phrase before I finish this month: Years later, now as a language teacher myself, a young woman came to my English class and made it clear that she already knew a lot of English and was keen to practise it. She talked about her time in London and of an occasion when it had been raining heavily: “It was pissing down” she said. I tried to explain that this expression was not used in normal polite society, that there were more appropriate expressions like “raining cats and dogs” for example. She contradicted me, she had often heard it, everybody used it. What could I say, except beg to disagree? It’s difficult as a teacher not to appear to be moralising, when in fact one only wants to try and make clear what sort of social background the phrase belongs to. The young woman never returned to my class, no doubt convinced that I was totally out of touch with modern English. In her defence, however, I realised much later that a similar expression in Swiss German had made that journey from the vulgar to normal usage. In the nineteenth century, when the chamber pot was commonly used, it became known in student slang as a Schiff by analogy with a ship as a vessel, and the act of using it was to schiffe. This remains as a moderate vulgarism in the modern language. Curiously, the same word, when used for a downpour, is widely used in normal conversation: es schiffet wie verruckt (literally: it’s pissing [down] like mad). Although most Swiss probably do not know the origin of this phrase, it is possible that the young woman did and was not surprised to find the same expression in English.
About this time I was asked if I would like to sing in the church choir at the small church opposite the Università. The music was not specially interesting but it was nearly six months since I had had any contact with music making at all, so I agreed. The group consisted almost entirely of students (including the conductor) and it met once a week to prepare music for the visit of the archbishop, which would take place the following month. There was just a single work on the program, a rather conservative setting of the famous text by St. Francis of Assisi: Il Cantico delle Creature. Progress was very slow, most people were not experienced singers, but the contact with the wonderful Franciscan text made it all worthwhile.
At the Casa Tosti Bernard announced that he was about to have a birthday and that he had met a Swiss girl who had a birthday on exactly the same day. They had therefore decided to celebrate together –– his friends and her friends –– at the Mandorla on June the first.
6. June, Perugia 3
When I look back it’s remarkable how little I remember of the birthday party. All I can recall with any certainty is sitting at a table in the Mandorla and dancing on the tiny space in front of the tables. The one thing that has blotted out all the other memories is the picture of the Swiss girl who was sitting at the same table. Her name was Brigitte and she was from the Sezione Tedesca and she shared a room with Margrit, the other person whose birthday we were celebrating. We talked for a while (in Italian) and then we danced. And that’s all. I remember the feel of her body against mine — a feeling I wanted to continue for a long time. What we ate or drank I have no idea, it didn’t seem important. All I know is that it was suddenly midnight and the Mandorla was going to shut. There was a quick conference about where the party should go and without knowing the decision we were out on the street and following Bernard. What we didn’t know was where the others went who were following Margrit. We searched and called but to no avail. Finally we stopped at a children’s playground, Bernard, Brigitte and I. Bernard had with him a loaf of bread, a bottle of chianti and a big salami. So we had a midnight feast. We swang on the swings and ran after the lucciole (fireflies) and ate more salami until we had gobbled it all up. We were in a state of suspended animation.
Vorgestern wahnsinnig schönes Geburtstagsfest (Geburtstag von Margrit und noch einem lustigen Schweizer) in einem gemütlichen Lokal. Mein ganz stiller Schwarm der Uni (ganz riesengrosser Student aus New Zealand, Neu Seeland (come si scrive?) hat den ganzen Abend mit mir getanzt, geplaudert … etc., es war ein unvergesslicher Abend, und ich bin wieder einmal so ganz unwirklich froh gewesen.… Und morgen? Und übermorgen? Ich weiss es nicht. Es liegen so viele Überraschungen in diesem Land. Doch das gefällt mir.
Und jetzt, mezzanotte, meine Liebsten, gehe ich schlafen, da sonst trübe Gedanken kommen wollen, trübe, weil die ganz schönen Augenblicke so kurz sind, so kurz, dass ich nicht mehr daran glauben kann. Und trotzdem möchte ich sie nicht missen. Trotzdem sind sie schön. Vielleicht um so schöner.
Yesterday a really super birthday party (Margrit’s and an amusing Swiss boy’s birthday) in a cozy restaurant. My very silent crush from the university (a huge student from New Zealand, Neu Seeland — how does one write it?) danced and talked the whole evening with me, an unforgettable evening … And tomorrow? And the day after? I don’t know. There are so many surprises lying in this country. But I like that.
And now, midnight, my dears, it’s off to bed otherwise dark thoughts will want to take over, dark because the beautiful moments are so short, so short, that I can’t believe them any more. But in spite of that I wouldn’t miss them. In spite of that they are beautiful. Perhaps even more beautiful.
Now suddenly the arrangement with the Tostis which had suited me perfectly so far had become somewhat of an encumbrance. I would love to have been free to eat together with Brigitte but I had paid the Signora for full board until the end of the month. I would have to be a bit patient and make the most of the time in between.
We met again for two concerts during the week and then spent a happy afternoon sitting on a wall trying to understand and learn by heart Leopardi’s famous poem Infinito:
Always dear to me was this solitary hill, and this hedgerow, which from so great a part of the farthest horizon excludes the sight. But sitting and gazing, I frame within my thought limitless spaces beyond that [hedge], and superhuman silences, and deepest quiet, so that my heart almost takes fright. And as I hear the wind rustling through these plants, I compare that infinite silence to this voice: and eternity comes over me, and the dead seasons, and the present and living one, and its sound. Thus amid this vastness my thought drowns: and to be shipwrecked is sweet to me in this sea.
I had already decided to take the examination at the end of the trimestre, something Brigitte had no intention of doing, but she was not at all opposed to helping me learn the material, especially the poetry which she loved:
Vorhin sind wir noch rasch auf einem Mäuerchen gesessen und haben Leopardis „Infinito“ auswendig zu lernen versucht, gegenüber etruskische Mauern und über uns die ewig kreisenden plaudernden Schwalben. Dann hat er mir ein violettes Gräslein geschenkt. Vorgestern eine weisse Rose und vor-vorgestern pflückte er Ginster an einem ganz gefährlichen steilen Hang. Ich hätte weinen können. Er heisst Christopher, man nennt ihn auch Kit.
Verzeiht, wenn ich Euch all dies schreibe, lächelt über mich, wenn ihr mich in den Teenager-Stand zurückversetzt glaubt –– doch, Ihr müsst einfach wissen, wie froh ich bin, manchmal …
A while ago we were sitting on a little wall trying to learn Leopardi’s Infinito by heart, opposite the Etruscan wall and and around us the ever circling and chattering swallows. Then he presented me a tiny violet grass. The day before yesterday a white rose and the day before that he picked me some broom from a dangerously steep slope. I could have wept. His name is Christopher, but one also calls him Kit.
Forgive me when I write all this, smile about me if you think I’ve slipped back into the teenage stage –– but you must know how happy I am, sometimes …
Brigitte also joined the church choir. The rehearsals were in the church itself, behind the altar. I have often been surprised by how “unsacred” the practice of religion in Italy is. It was quite possible for us to practise singing while others were praying. Perhaps this is a good thing. Perhaps this underlines that religion is just a normal part of everyday living. And yet, one has the feeling that if a person is busy communicating with God, one may not interrupt. Not so in Italy. Years later we visited Perugia and the surroundings again with Margrit and Antonio (who also had sung in that choir). We were in Assisi visiting the famous Franciscan church and I asked Antonio a question which he couldn’t answer. Automatically he turned to the nearest person who would know, a man on his knees, deep in prayer, and asked him. Without any apology to poor God whom he had evidently left hanging, he (still on his knees) listened to Antonio, gave the answer and then returned to his conversation with God. Brigitte described something similar in a letter home:
Wisst Ihr, dass ich heute in Weihrauch und Kitsch einer hässlichen Kirche eine Messe sang, mit sang? Einige Uni-Studenten, meist Nicht-Katholiken, singen dort. Ich will jetzt auch mitmachen. Hinter der Orgel sind wir gestanden und haben geübt, 4-stimmig. Plötzlich ging ein Geklingel und Gemurmel los, vor uns, im Kirchenschiff, die Messe. Wir übten weiter, bis es dem Priester doch zu viel wurde, vielleicht, weil er seinen Wein nicht in Ruhe geniessen konnte? So zottelten wir weg; Kit und ich verliessen Weihrauch, Geklingel und Gemurmel aus Versehen nicht aus der Seitentür, sondern marschierten mitten in das Messvolk hinein, rasselnde Rosenkränze, hässliche Frauen und hässliche Kopftücher, alt . . . sie starrten mit müden Augen, hinter uns goldener Priester und roter Wein! Nie werde ich dieses Bild der „betenden“ Frauen vergessen können.
Do you know that today amidst incense and kitsch in an ugly little church I took part in a mass, as a singer? A few university students, mostly non-catholics, sing there. I’ve decided to join them. We stood behind the organ and practiced in 4-parts. Suddenly there was a tinkling and a murmuring in front of us in the body of the church, the mass. We continued practising until it was apparently too much for the priest, perhaps because he couldn’t enjoy his wine in peace. So we ambled off. Kit and I left the incense, tinkling and murmuring by mistake not by the side door but marched right into the middle of the congregation, rattling rosaries, ugly women and ugly head scarves, old … they stared with tired eyes, behind us the golden priest and red wine! Never will I be able to forget this picture of “praying” women.
At the weekend there was a Scarpellini tour to Ravenna. Although we were both enrolled for the trip we entered the bus separately and I was near the front and Brigitte towards the rear. Just before we reached our destination there was a call from behind me asking the bus driver to stop: É una signorina ammallata (There’s a sick girl). Brigitte was hushed out of the bus into the fresh air where she could recover from the tortuous road over the Apennines. So it was that the inner workings of her body brought us together again. In Ravenna we were quite overcome by the freshness and brilliance of the mosaics — as if we were looking at art works only just completed. Up till now we had studied paintings on which the scourges of time had often left indelible scares but here were works hundreds of years older than anything we had seen so far which were as lively and vibrant as on the day they were finished.
Although religious images dominated we were constantly delighted by tiny details like the curious fish –– the one that got away! –– in the picture above.
Ravenna. Mosaik, Basiliken, hässliche Häuser, grässlicher Autocar, schreckliche Reisegesichter, Kameras und Reiseführer . . . doch ein wundervoller Begleiter: New Zealand, 1.95 m gross, schön, blond, Mathematiklehrer und Komponist . . . etc. etc. etc. Wieder einmal Stunden, die ich nie vergessen kann. Um Mitternacht sind wir auf einer Mondstrasse durchs Meer spaziert, Motive von Beethoven hat er gesummt, ich musste ihm ein Schweizerlied lernen: „Es Buurebüebli . . . “, im Sand auf einem weissen Schifflein sind wir dann gesessen und haben den Stimmen des Meeres gelauscht…
…Meinen Fehlern an seht ihr, dass ich müde bin, vielleicht noch von Ravenna, denn die Tour war recht anstrengend, doch so vielseitig und interessant! Prof. Scarpellini gibt sich wirklich grosse Mühe, der etwas eigenartigen Studentenschaft etwas zu bieten. Von Dantes Grab bin ich etwas enttäuscht gewesen, dafür haben mich die unheimlich strahlenden Mosaike umso mehr fasziniert und bezaubert, grosse Augen und ganz einfache Linien. Neben dem kühlen runden Mausoleo des Teodorico lag ein feuerrotes Mohnblumenfeld, vor Staunen habe ich mich am Geländer festhalten müssen: Monets Bild ist nichts mehr dagegen!
Ravenna. Mosaics, Basilicas, ugly buildings, ugly busses, terrible tourist faces, cameras and tour-leaders . . . but a wonderful companion: New Zealander, 1.95 m tall, handsome, blond, mathematics teacher and composer . . . etc. etc. etc. Again moments I can never forget. At midnight we were strolling on a moon road through the sea, he singing Beethoven motives and I teaching him “Es Buurebüebli . . .” (Swiss folk song), then we sat on a little white boat in the sand and listened to the voices of the sea…
…You can see from my mistakes that I am tired, perhaps still from Ravenna, because the trip was really strenuous, so much to take in and so interesting! Prof. Scarpellini really goes to a lot of trouble to offer something good to this rather curious group of students. Dante’s grave was disappointing but on the other hand the unbelievable brilliant mosaics fascinated and bewitched me with their huge eyes and very simple lines. Alongside the cool round Mausoleum di Theoderico was a fiery red poppy field, I was so astonished I had to hold the railing very tightly: Monet’s picture is nothing by comparison!
The high day at the church arrived: la visita del archivescovo (the visit of the archbishop). We were told that we should arrive an hour before the service was scheduled to start: per riscaldare delle voci (for warming up the voices). Although this was not something that was done in my earlier choral experience, in the German singing tradition das Einsingen (which we assumed this to mean) was something very important. But we had completely overlooked the alcoholic traditions of the Italian clergy. When we arrived, the three floors of the church hall adjacent to the church were clearly marked: first floor for clerics, second for choir and adult congregation, top floor for children. The two lower floors were already well supplied with bottles of the finest wines from the region. We were quick to adjust to this new custom and warmed our voices with gusto. Then with hot glowing throats we moved across to the church. The two buildings were connected by an underground passage which emerged at a tiny low door at the back of the church (This was the exit we should have taken after the interrupted practice described in Brigitte’s letter). We bent down to pass through the doorway and found ourselves in the familiar place behind the altar. Here we could be heard but not seen and therefore, in spite of the seriousness of the occasion, we had no special robes or fine clothes.
As an erstwhile choir and altar boy in the Anglican church, I was interested in the preparations which were taking place as we waited for the archbishop. I had often had to light candles but never such high ones as these. To solve this problem, the acolyte had threaded a wick through the end of a long bamboo pole. Now as he moved from high candle to high candle, the burning wick got shorter and shorter until suddenly I realised that the stick itself was alight. Although this alarmed me , he seemed unperturbed and the job was completed without serious conflagration and the service began.
How well we sang or the archbishop spoke I no longer remember, but one event remains indelibly in my memory: Part way through the service the tiny door from the underground passage opened and out came a huge man. From his stature and clothing he looked as if he might have been delivering coal and had gone through the wrong door. But he moved his colossal body straight towards the organ which at that very moment started the accompaniment of the Bach/Gounod Ave Maria. Then this “coalman” opened his mouth and what came out left us all speechless. It was a voice that could have filled the Scala in Milan but here it made the whole small church resonate. And it was not just a big sound, it was a beautifully rounded operatic tenor. The intense concentration and the summer heat brought drops of sweat to his dark low brow, but only we saw this, he like us, was invisible from the front. Then the work came to an end and without a moment’s hesitation, he returned to the tiny door, bent into its small space and disappeared. Looking back, it is clear that this performance was minutely rehearsed. He must have known very precisely when he was to appear and what was expected of him. Nevertheless, to have fulfilled this expectation with such bravura and for no applause is remarkable.
Brigitte had a car, an Austin mini called Pü (short for Pylades, the faithful friend of Orestes). We met in front of the Università, from where she had promised to take me to Assisi. She offered me the keys. For the first time since leaving New Zealand I sat in the driver’s seat of a car. In spite of the fact that the steering wheel was on the “wrong” side, I drove instinctively to the left of the road. She (and no doubt the surrounding traffic) was shocked. I had to stop, take stock of the new situation, and then for the next few days, whenever I was allowed to direct Pü, tell myself “drive right”. Perugia is a very old city, a typical Etruscan city on the top of a hill, and its roads and buildings were built for pedestrians and horse traffic. I always maintained that whereas other countries widened streets, Italy made narrower cars, like the Fiat 500 for example, which was so common at this time. This is not entirely true, there were also large coach-type buses on these roads, which in Perugia often had to take two bites at a bend to negotiate a narrow corner. But Pü was ideal for this city and after I had drummed into my head the side of the road I was to drive on, we reached Assisi without further problems.
The first stop was at the church of Santa Chiara, the “girlfriend” of St. Francis, a building whose massive buttresses reach right out onto the main road through Assisi. Since both Francis and Chiara had been dead for about seven centuries, I was not expecting to see them, but Santa Chiara is still there, in a glass case, looking like a figure from a horror film. She is looked after by the sisters of the order she founded, women who swear an oath of silence and who are veiled and float around like ghosts of the past. We left this rather sinister place quickly and moved on to the famous Basilica di San Francesco, a church with two floors and dozens of large frescoes by (among others) Giotto and Simone Martini, and, best of all, no glass box with the body of the saint! The Giotto frescoes, although very satisfying, are not easy to see, they are so high up on the badly-lit walls. The other famous Giottos in Florence (Santa Croce) and in Padua (Scrovegni Chapel) are much nearer to the viewer and leave a more lasting impression. From here we took the mountain path up the hill towards the Rocca Maggiore and stopped at the tree where Francis preached to the birds. How moving to see this tree, which must be at least 700 years old and is held up by numerous iron bars. It made one realise what can be done to preserve a tree when it’s really important. At the same time one wonders why other trees can’t be treated with the same devotion.
Hitze. Blauer Himmel. Durst. Heute wieder einmal Assisi mit meinem grossen Freund. Und als ich da hoch oben von der Rocca aus auf das liebliche Städtlein hinunter sah, weit über das ganz flache umbrische Land, wurde ich ganz traurig. Diese Gegend ist mir zu lieb geworden. Werde ich sie wieder finden dort im bleichen hetzenden Zürich, dort in Häusern, Autos und leeren Herzen?
Inzwischen ist Kit mit langen Beinen Käfern, Schmetterlingen und Eidechsen nachgesprungen –– natürlich auch dem roten Mohn. Doch diese Blumen lassen auch in Italien zu bald die roten Köpflein hangen.
Heat. Blue sky. Thirst. In Assisi again with my tall friend. And as I looked down from high up near the Rocca (Fortress) to the lovely little town below, I became quite sad. This region has become so dear to me. Will I find it again there in the pale nervous Zurich, there in houses, cars and empty hearts?
In the meantime Kit with his long legs has run after beetles, butterflies and lizards –– and of course also the red poppies. But in Italy too these flowers let their red heads hang down too soon.
From time to time Brigitte complained about the unwished-for attention of young Italian males. She had even been stopped in the car by carabinieri whose only motive was to arrange a date. On this occasion, however, she had the active support of her idiosyncratic landlady:
Die Signora Margheritelli ist leider, wie ja all meine Schlummermütter passate, auch etwas verrückt. Immer saust sie auf Blochlumpen durch Gang und Zimmer, über kalte Steinböden, immer auf Lumpen. Man hat sich so nach zwei Monaten an diesen Bloch-Zustand gewöhnt. Und sollte sie einmal ohne Lumpen erscheinen, dann fehlt etwas Wesentliches.
Heute Morgen flüsterte die Signora zur Türe herein: „Es ist einer da. Un giovane. Si chiama Celestino. Was soll ich ihm sagen?“ Besagter Kerl also, den ich nicht mehr ausstehen kann. 60 km von Spoleto kam er angerollt. Und die Signora schwebte zur Türe: „La signorina è andata alla chiesa“. So ratterte der hellblaue Fiat wieder davon, und hinter den Fensterläden haben wir ihm frohlockend nachgeblickt, die Signora und ich.
Signora Margheritelli is, like all my previous landladies, somewhat crazy. She tears over the stone floors with her feet on cleaning rags, through the corridor and rooms, always on rags. And if she ever appears without rags, then something essential is missing.
This morning the Signora whispered at the door: There’s someone here. A young man. Called Celestino. What shall I tell him?” It was that chap I can’t stand any more. He’d driven 60 km from Spoleto. The Signora floated back to the door: “The signorina has gone to church”. So the pale blue Fiat clattered away again, and we watched it joyfully from behind the shutters, the Signora and I.
Brigitte often ran out of money and had to write to her father who had power of attorney over her bank account. Sending money from Switzerland to Italy was done either by cheque or by arrangement with an Italian bank. Both systems were slow which often meant anxious waiting for a week or more. Although I had lost half my money in Rome I seldom worried about money. I had paid for my board and lodgings in advance and needed very little for other expenses. Brigitte on the other hand had only prepaid lodgings and had correspondingly many more daily expenses including petrol for the car. But toward the end of my time in Perugia I too had to be careful:
Margrit ist heute abend nicht da: „Traviata“. Kit und ich haben Geldsorgen. Wir mussten verzichten. Schlechteste Plätze mit Legi 700 Lire! Viel für arme „Studentchen“.
Margrit is not here this evening: “Traviata”. Kit and I have money worries. We had to pass. The worst student-concession seats are 700 Lire! A lot for poor “students”.
Don Giuseppe (at the mere mention of his name Signora Tosti would roll her eyes to heaven and throw up her arms in an act of despair, so many were the stories of his escapades and liaisons), the priest from “our” church, had promised the choir members a bus trip in recognition for our musical contribution to the visit of the archbishop.
Morgen Fahrt nach Fabriano mit dem Studentenchor (Abschied), eingeladen von Don Giuseppe, dem lustigen Padre im flatternden Gewand, der irgendwo zwei Söhne haben soll, vor Lebensfreude fast platzt und ständig Abendmahl-Wein trinkt. Es ist einfach amüsant und komisch, ihm in dem Kirchen-Gemurmel, Mess-Geklingel, Rosenkranz-Klappern und Knie-Knacken von der Orgel aus zuzuhören, zuzusehen, manchmal mit dem Chor zu singen, zwischendurch in die riesigen geschnitzten Chor-Stühle zu sinken, zu träumen oder zu schlafen! Also, morgen werden wir mit Don Giuseppe eine Geldfabrik besichtigen, einige Kirchen werden sinngemäss dazu gehören, er wird uns zum Essen einladen! Ich freue mich. Auch Kit wird dabei sein. Ich hoffe, in der Geldfabrik etwas papierernes Glück zu finden.
Tomorrow is the bus trip to Fabriano with the student choir (farewell), the invitation of Don Giuseppe, the lively Padre with the flowing robes, who has two sons somewhere and who is bursting with vitality and always drinking the communion wine. It is really amusing and strange to watch him from beside the organ amidst the church murmurings, the mass tinklings, the rosary rattlings and knee clickings, sometimes singing with the choir and in between sinking into the huge carved choir pews, dreaming or even sleeping! So, tomorrow we will visit a money factory with Don Giuseppe, a few churches will logically also be included and he will invite us to dinner. I’m looking forward to it! Kit is coming too. I hope we can find some papery happiness in the money factory.
The first thing was to bless the bus: Don Giuseppe sailed down with fluttering cassock and said the magic words, so that God would protect us on our trip, and climbed into the bus where we were all waiting. No sooner was the bus in motion, he regaled us with jokes: “A monkey was given a peach, which it swallowed whole and had terrible trouble passing the stone. But it was a very clever monkey. The next time it had a peach, it broke it in half, took out the stone” — and here Don Giuseppe mimed the monkey poking the stone into his rear — “tested it for size, decided it would fit, put the peach back together and swallowed it whole.” Never were the sublime and the ridiculous so close together.
Travelling by bus with an international group of students was always entertaining. Especially the Swiss students (and they were probably in the majority here) knew so many folk songs. Not just their own ones, also English, French, German and Italian ones. It made the time fly past very quickly. We arrived in Fabriano, which up till then I had only heard of in the name of the early Renaissance artist Gentile di Fabriano. Already in Gentile’s time (14th century) this tiny town was famous for its paper factory and now in the 20th century for its mint, which printed the bank notes of many different European countries. With so much money around the security was ever present. We were checked going in and coming out and allowed only to look, not to touch! That we were allowed in at all now seems rather remarkable.
We drove to a monastery where we were greeted with excellent cool white wine made by the monks and then sat down at an outside table for the promised meal. In the heat of the mid-afternoon that followed, Don Giuseppe tucked in his cassock, put on a cap made from a handkerchief with knotted corners and played football with some of the choir members while others dosed. During this siesta Brigitte and I climbed up a hillside to a field that was buzzing with life. The wild flowers were blooming and had attracted a multitude of insects, in particular beautiful butterflies. But the grasses were also ripe with pollen and suddenly I was struck by a sneezing fit. Although annoying, I had had this all my life and was not surprised by it, but Brigitte had never seen (or heard) such a reaction. Not until we had left this “idyllic” field and returned to the monastery did the sneezing stop.
The Perugia time was drawing to a close. Brigitte and I had met daily over the last few weeks and neither of us wanted this life to finish. She would have to return to Zurich and the Kinderspital (Children’s Hospital) and I had enrolled for a composition course in Siena. But both of these commitments were not until the middle of July. One day she said: “We could spend two weeks together touring Italy in Pü and at the end I could drop you off in Siena.” It seemed an excellent idea, it would put off the terrible moment we were both dreading. But before that there were the exams.
Although Brigitte was not going to take the exams it was still an excuse for us to meet and for her to hear me my Dante, Leopardi, Ungaretti or the wonderful short poem by Salvatore Quasimodo (1901–1968):
Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra trafitto da un raggio di sole: ed è subito sera.
Everyone stands alone at the heart of the earth transfixed by a ray of sun: and it is suddenly evening.
It didn’t quite fit our situation — we were enjoying the “rays of sun” and were determined to put off “evening” for as long as possible — nevertheless the poem impressed us by its extreme compactness and tragically accurate description of human life.
22. Juni 1966
Letzter, allerletzter Uni-Tag. Überall wehmütige traurige Gesichter, Koffer kommen zum Vorschein, Abschiedsszenen nahen . . . Es ist wirklich ganz grässlich, das liebe lustige leichte Perugia verlassen zu müssen!! Wenn ich nicht, haltet euch fest, nächste Woche mit Kit Richtung NAPOLI rollen würde, dann müsste ich bald notfallmässig den höchsten Turm suchen, um nachher … doch so verschiebe ich diese Szene auf Neapel: „Vedere Napoli e poi morire.“ Vedremo si è vero!! Ich freue mich ganz wahnsinnig und beneide mich momentan selber, so froh sein zu können! Voraussichtlich ziehen wir am nächsten Donnerstag los. Noch gar keine weiteren Pläne. Vor allem billig. Jugendherbergen, etc. Ihr werdet dann mittels Postkarten — Regen mitreisen können. — Mitte Juli dann werde ich Kit in Siena zurücklassen müssen, wo er einen 2-monatigen Musik-Kurs besucht. Ich werde mich dann Richtung Kispi durchkämpfen, um am 18. Juli die kalte, harte Schreibmaschine — unvorstellbar — zu begrüssen. Vorher, Vati, werde ich bestimmt in San Gimignano ein Grüsschen von Dir liegen lassen.
Wie geht es euch heute, meine Lieben? Heiss, heisser am heissesten? Meine Zimmerkollegin, die kleine Margrit, läuft seit gestern mit ganz traurigen blauen Augen herum. Liebeskummer. Ich kann nicht helfen. Man kann nicht. Es ist schlimm.
In einer Stunde vor der Uni. Noch einmal werden wir die Scrittori Italiani gemeinsam durchbüffeln, Kit und ich. Glücklicherweise macht er die Prüfung, was mich auch noch ein bisschen „studiare“ macht, ein bisschen das „dolce far niente“ vergessen lässt.
Jetzt gehe ich noch ins Centro, um Reproduktionen von Caravaggio, den ich liebe, zu erstehen. Darum, meine Liebsten, arrivederci. Brigitte.
22. June 1966
The last, the very last Uni-day. Everywhere lugubrious sad faces, suit cases appear, farewell scenes approach . . . it’s really terrible to have to leave this lovely happy light-hearted Perugia!! If it were not for the fact (hold on to yourselves tightly) that next week Kit and I are going to roll down towards NAPOLI, I would have been an emergency case looking for the highest tower to … but now I can move this scene to Naples: “See Naples and die”. We’ll see if this is true. I’m so looking forward to it that I even envy myself at being able to be so happy. We’re expecting to leave next Thursday. No further plans. The main thing is cheap. Youth hostels, etc. In the middle of July I’ll have to leave Kit in Siena where he’s attending a 2-month music course. I’ll battle on direction Children’s Hospital to greet the cold hard typewriter on 18th July — unimaginable. Vati, I’ll definitely leave a greeting from you in San Gimignano. (Father Bänninger had spent some time as a young man in this little town in the province of Siena, famous for its many towers.)
How are you all my dears today? Hot, hotter, hottest? My roommate, wee Margrit, is walking round since yesterday with very sad blue eyes. Lovesickness. I can’t help her. Nobody can. It’s bad.
In an hour in front of the Uni. Once more swotting Italian writers together with Kit. Luckily he’s doing the exam which makes me do it a bit too and makes me forget a bit the “dolce far niente”.
Now I’m off to the centro to buy reproductions of Caravaggio whom I love. Therefore my dears, arrivederci. Brigitte
The exams were quite harmless. Nothing to write, just a conversation with my Professoressa Viscardi and Professore Prosciuti. The Professoressa had brought baci (kisses! — a chocolate speciality of Perugia) to sooth any nervous feelings. It was, curiously (since I had already spent ten years studying at universities in New Zealand), the first time I had sat an oral exam, but with such friendly examiners it was more of a chat than a test. It was this Amalia Viscardi who had made me aware of the Accademia Musicale Chigiana which was to be my next “school” in Siena, and she continued to take an interest in my life in Italy. Now the painful time of packing and saying goodbye to all the friendly Perugians and fellow students was starting. Fortunately I wouldn’t have to farewell Brigitte and Bernard promised to visit me in Siena. Also I would leave a part of my luggage at the Casa Tosti, so saying addio to the Signora could wait till we returned from the south.
28. Juni 1966.
Meine Liebsten Und wieder sitze ich ganz tief in Koffern und Taschen drin: letzter Tag in Perugia, letzte Nacht an der Via S. Siepi, zum letzten Mal habe ich mir an der Pizza die Zunge verbrannt, letztes Lächeln vom Pizza-Mann, zum letzten Mal Kaffee und Gelati mit Margrit in unserer kleinen Bar. Sono molto triste! – Und jetzt sollte ich packen. Ich mag nicht! Ich werde auf unsere Napoli-Meeres-Spritztour nur ganz wenig mitnehmen. Der Koffer bleibt in Perugia. Wir werden noch einmal ganz schnell hier vorbei kommen, auf der Rückreise.
Ich freue mich! Doch ich habe auch Angst, weil alles zu schön ist. Kit ist ein besonderer lieber junger Mann. Stundenlang kann er sich mit Käfern oder Schmetterlingen abgeben, stundenlang aber auch über Lichtwellen und Sternenentfernungen rätseln, dass mir nachher der Kopf vor Anstrengung nur so dröhnt, stundenlang auch philosophieren über Gott und andere Themen. Und all dies auf englisch oder italienisch. Und all dies soll in kleinen 14 Tagen vorbei sein? Darf ich dann stöhnen zu Hause, sag, Mütterchen? Weißt Du, so durchs Telefon!
Doch jetzt muss ich wirklich packen. In einer Stunde treffen wir uns noch einmal vor der Uni: Einkaufen. Notvorrat. Mit Orangen- und Zitronensaft soll der kleine Pü gefüllt werden. Hitze. Kit hat immer Durst.
Wenn ich bloss wüsste, was ich einpacken soll. Da sitze ich verzweifelt in einem billigen, roten, neu erstandenen Leibchen mitten in Hosen, Pullovern, Schlafsäcken und Taschen, und niemand hilft. Aiuto! Niemand kommt. Ich werde weiter rufen und weiter auf Lösungen der ewigen Mitnehm-Probleme hoffen.
Viele fremde Gesichter sind aufgetaucht und tauchen weiter auf. Viele bekannte Gesichter sind bereits verschwunden. Perugia ist mit all den Fremdkörpern plötzlich anders und wehmütig geworden. So viele sind gegangen, so viele gehen.
Jetzt bin ich schon beim Nägelkauen angelangt. Ganz schlimm. Doch packen ohne Nägelkauen geht gar nicht.
Nägelkauend also endet der letzte Brief aus Perugia. Noch nie hat mir das Abschiednehmen aus einer Stadt so weh getan!
My Dears And again I’m sitting deep in suitcases and bags: last day in Perugia, last night at Via Serafina Siepi, for the last time I burnt my tongue on a pizza, last smile from the pizza man, last coffee and ice cream with Margrit in our little bar. I’m very sad! –– And now I should pack. I don’t want to. I’ll take very little for our Naples-Sea-Whirlwind-Tour. The suitcase will stay in Perugia. We’ll come back here briefly on the return journey.
I’m looking forward to it! But I’m also afraid because it’s all so wonderful. Kit is a specially kind young man. He can spend hours observing beetles or butterflies, and hours too puzzling over light waves and star distances so that afterwards my head just buzzes from the effort, hours too philosophising about God and other things. And all this in English or Italian. And all this might be over in 14 little days. Can I complain then at home Mütterchen? You know, like I do on the phone?
But now I really must pack. In one hour we meet at the Uni to go shopping: Provisions. We’ll fill little Pü with orange and lemon juice. Heat. Kit is always thirsty.
If only I knew what I should pack. Here I am sitting desperately in a cheap new red T-shirt among trousers, pullovers, sleeping bags and other bags and nobody helps. Help! Nobody comes. I’ll call again and hope again for solutions to the eternal what- to-take problems.
Lots of foreign faces have turned up and continue to turn up. Many familiar faces have already disappeared. With all these foreign bodies Perugia looks suddenly different and melancholy. So many have gone, so many are going.
Now I’m already at the fingernail-biting stage. Really bad. But packing without nail- biting is impossible.
Nail-biting therefore ends this letter from Perugia. Never has saying goodbye to a city hurt me so much.
On the morning of Thursday, 28th June, Brigitte said farewell to Signora Margheritelli and drove over to the Casa Tosti. Signora Tosti let her in and explained that “Cristofero” was in bed with a high temperature. She came up to my little room with its wonderful view over the Perugian rooftops to Assisi in the distance, its Caravaggio pictures of the “Calling of Matthew”* pinned to the ceiling and the clothes still there on the floor where I had walked out of them, saw me sweating in my bed and agreed that we would have to postpone our departure. She then drove back to Signora Margheritelli, explained the situation to her and was allowed to stay another night in the bed which had already been prepared for the next guest. Never a word from either Signora about paying for an extra night — that was all part of their generocity and their humanity.
The following day, as if by magic, the fever had vanished as fast as it had come. We set off in Pü southwards on the Autostrada del Sole, transfixed, as ever, by a ray of sun.
7. July 1966: Naples, Orbetello, Siena
We went first to Sorrento. It was near the sea and it had a Youth Hostel. This latter had a strict segregation, separate dormitories for men and women, something we found tedious but not altogether unexpected in those days. We left Pü on the street overlooking the Bay of Naples and said goodbye till the morning. The next day was brilliantly sunny and we decided to take a boat trip to Capri. We sat on the edge of the deck right at the front of the tiny vessel and the waves splashed over our legs. Not just our legs, our bottoms were wet but we were gloriously happy. In Capri we swam in the deep blue clear water. The world was a perfect place.
In Perugia Brigitte had bought a book which had been discussed in the literature class: Cristo si è fermato a Eboli. The title suggests that Eboli was far enough from “civilisation” that Christ’s influence never reached it. Since Eboli was not far from Naples, we decided to go there. We arrived at the siesta time and everything was shut, everything except a small bar. We walked in and ordered a small glass of the local wine. There was a friendly lady behind the bar and two or three equally friendly men drinking on our side of the counter. We understood that they were friendly because they smiled broadly but they didn’t speak, instead they made gestures. We knew they could speak because they had been doing so as we came in. We assumed they had recognised that we were foreigners, and were sure that they would not understand our language. So we smiled back and said that they should speak to us in Italian because we understood that language. They continued with their sign language. In between they said something to the signora which we did not understand. Gradually it dawned on us, that they did not speak Tuscan Italian, they knew only their dialect. They had been entirely right with their initial assumption that we had no common language. When we left and wanted to pay for our drinks they made a clear sign that they would pay for them. We were so moved. They seemed so poor and they wanted to share the little they had with us.
Not far from Eboli is Paestum. This rather Latin sounding name is in fact an ancient Greek colony and has some of the best preserved temples of those times. It was another perfect day, a ballerina girl was posing among the ruins and the wardens were walking around the surrounding fields gathering what looked like posies of tiny wild flowers. We asked what they were picking. Oregano! Per la vera pizza napolitana. So we learnt that there are true and (presumably) untrue Neapolitan pizzas.
We returned to Naples, that is for me it was a return, for Brigitte it was the first time. It was lively and bustling but nevertheless a poor city. The ruins from the Second World War which I had seen six months earlier had not changed, but now in this hottest of months the whole population was out on the streets. And among these, many many children. Normally one would be so pleased to see children, but these children were different. We had already heard in Perugia, that many Neapolitan children are sent out onto the streets in the morning and told to come back with full tummies in the evening. Even if this is not true, it is certain that many children are used by criminal bands. When one walked along the street, children would come begging, not in an abject way but very aggressively. They never let go. The more one shooed them away the more obstinately they stayed. This feeling of being dogged was very unpleasant. They could see at a glance that we were foreigners and foreigners had money and they would stay as long as it took till they got some. They had all day if necessary. What happened then was described by Brigitte in a letter home:
4. Juli 1966 „Vedi Napoli e poi muori“! Sie haben uns wirklich den Wagen vollkommen ausgeräumt, die berühmten „Ladri“ aus Napoli: Und nun? Trotzdem sind wir ans Meer gefahren, so ohne Gepäck . . . so ganz arm:
Vorgestern kamen wir in Neapel an. Parkierten den lieben Pü in der Nähe vom Bahnhof, spazierten von dort aus zu Fuss, um uns ein bisschen umzusehen. Wir wurden sofort von hartnäckigen, bettelnden Buben verfolgt, die wir nicht loswerden konnten. Ein mühsamer Zustand, bis sich ein verständnisvoller älterer Herr unser erbarmte und von den Bettlern erlöste. Einige Worte, die wir nicht verstanden, genügten, und die Kerlchen verschwanden so plötzlich wie sie aufgetaucht waren. Freundlich lächelnd verschwand der Retter in der Not ebenfalls, nachdem wir ihm ein dankbares „grazie molto“ zugeworfen hatten.
Wir schlenderten noch ein bisschen weiter, fühlten uns aber irgendwie nicht ganz wohl, sodass wir früher als geplant den geduldig wartenden Pü wieder aufsuchten. Aber wir kamen zu spät. Die berühmten Diebe hatten unseren Wagen bereits elegant aufgebrochen und beide Reisetaschen, Kamera, Kits Traveller Cheques, grössere Kleidungsstücke vom Hintersitz, etc., entwendet. Glücklicherweise fehlte ihnen die Zeit für den Kofferraum: die zwei Schlafsäcke lagen noch unberührt da, was unser grosses Glück war. Und auch an den zahlreich im Auto verstreuten Büchern zeigten sie kein Interesse.
So verbrachten wir anstatt „sightseeing“ recht aufgebracht und aufgeregt den Rest des Nachmittags in einem Polizei-Büro, wo mühsam eine grosse Liste der gestohlenen Habseligkeiten aufgestellt wurde. Mehrere Beamte kümmerten sich um uns, machten klar, dass es schwierig sein werde, die Täter zu finden. Dies sagten sie mit einem süffisanten Lächeln, als ob sie selber Teil solcher Banden wären. Sie notierten unsere Perugia- sowie Schweizer-Adresse und versprachen, uns gegebenenfalls zu kontaktieren. Erschöpft, schweissgebadet und hilflos verliessen wir nach mehreren verlorenen Stunden das Polizeirevier.
Und es gelang uns knapp vor Ladenschluss, noch einige notwendige Kleidungsstücke wie Unterhosen, T-Shirts, Badehosen, sowie einige Esswaren, zu kaufen und dann sofort aus Neapel zu flüchten. Einfach weg Richtung Meer.
4th July 1966 „See Naples and die“! They really emptied our whole car, the famous „Ladri“ (thieves) of Naples: And now? We went on, in spite of everything, to the sea, without luggage . . . and quite impoverished:
The day before yesterday we arrived in Naples. Parked dear Pü close to the railway station and went on foot from there to have a look around. We were immediately followed by obstinate, begging boys whom we couldn’t get rid of. We were finally relieved from this exhausting situation by an understanding elderly man who had pity on us. A few words, which we didn’t understand, were enough and the little rascals disappeared as quickly as they had appeared. Smiling kindly our saviour also disappeared after we had thrown a thankful “grazie molto” to him.
We strolled a bit further but didn’t feel quite comfortable so returned earlier than we planned to patiently waiting Pü. But we came too late. The famous thieves had already elegantly broken in to our car and stolen both our travelling bags, camera, Kit’s travellers cheques, larger clothes from the back seat, etc. Fortunately they had no time for the boot: the two sleeping bags lay there untouched, which was very lucky. And they also had no interest in the numerous books left lying around in the car.
So instead of “sightseeing” we spent the rest of the afternoon enraged and agitated at the police station, where they tediously wrote a long list of all the stolen objects. Several officers dealt with us, making it clear that it would be difficult to find the culprits. They said this with a smug smile as if they themselves were members of such a band. They noted our Perugia and also our Swiss addresses and promised to contact us if they were successful. Exhausted, drenched in sweat and helpless after several lost hours we left the police station.
And shortly before the shops closed we managed to buy a few necessary clothes like underpants, t-shirts, togs and also something to eat and then fled Naples immediately. Just cleared off towards the sea.
We drove north along the coast searching for a quiet place where we could camp and swim and relax, but in July the whole long Italian coast is completely covered with bodies and umbrellas, row upon row of sun hungry people, sometimes dozens of rows of them. We reached Rome and drove further, we searched the whole day for a quiet spot and found nothing. In the evening we changed our search for a sheltered place to sleep. It was already dark when we climbed into our sleeping bags and went to sleep under some trees, not at all sure where exactly we were and whether any man or animal might object. The darkness of the night made the starlight even brighter — an unforgettable spectacle. Next morning we were awakened by cows grazing nearby — fortunately friendly cows, who were not disturbed by our presence!
We continued our quest. But the coast north of Rome was exactly the same. I told Brigitte that what would interest me more than a beach was a rocky coast. If we bought flippers, masks and snorkels we could look underwater and see fish which of course preferred rocks and seaweed, they avoided beaches which people frequented, not only because of the people but because these were underwater deserts.
We kept on driving and searching but such rocky coasts were either very few or not within sight of the route we were driving on. We crossed the provincial border and entered Tuscany. We were now further north than when we had left Perugia. At Orbetello there is an island connected at three places to the mainland making it into a small peninsular with a lagoon between the three arms. Orbetello is on the middle arm and from here we drove south to Port Ercole and further around the peninsula. We were delighted with what we found, the landmass was like an extinct volcano (Monte Argentario) whose edges, where it entered the sea, were definitely rocky. What was less good, was that the road was 40 to 50 meters above sea level and there was no obvious path between road and water. We found a small flat area beside the narrow road and parked Pü. The view was indeed beautiful. Because of the height there was a huge panorama with sea on both sides and a lovely little island in the middle. Since there was no path down to the sea we had to make one, picking our way through the low scrub on the slope and often stepping from one large stone to the next. It took about 20 minutes before we reached the shore. We were delighted to find that it was exactly the sort of rocky coast we had been looking for and that there was also a meter or two of sand or small stones at the water’s edge. We walked (or waded) along this shore to a small point where larger rocks blocked the view of the next bay, climbed over these and found to our surprise that this point was in fact one wall of a tiny cave. Up till this moment we had never given any thought to where we could pass the night, but as soon as we saw this cave we knew that this was where we wanted to spend the next week. It was about two meters from the water — at the moment (we had no idea of what tidal changes could take place) — and the cave itself was about two meters deep with a mixture of sand and stones on its floor. Best of all it was difficult reach, we could be fairly sure that we would be alone here.
Nach einem ersten Übernachten in den geretteten Schlafsäcken unter freiem Himmel fanden wir dann am folgenden Tag den idyllischen Platz an der felsigen Küste am Meer nicht weit von Orbetello, von wo aus ich eben glücklich mit euch plaudere. Wir haben nämlich eine Art Unterschlupf gefunden mit Platz für die Schlafsäcke, eine Kochgelegenheit auch und ein Tischchen (Brett auf Steinen) und unsere Bücher. Im „Cave“, wie wir den Platz nennen, haben wir bereits windgeschützt einmal übernachtet, das Meeresrauschen in uns und zu unseren Füssen, die Sterne samt abnehmendem Mond zum Greifen nahe, die Sonne tagsüber feuerheiss. Ein herrlicher Ort also. Und ganz für uns allein. Ihr seht, es geht uns trotz Dieben gut! Tante belle cose. Brigitte.
The following day after a first night in the open in the rescued sleeping bags we found an idyllic place on a rocky coast by the sea not far from Orbetello, from where I can now chat with you happily. We found a shelter with room for sleeping bags, a fireplace for cooking and also a little table (board on stones) and our books. In the “Cave”, as we call this place, we have already spent one night protected from the wind, the sound of the sea in us and at our feet, the stars and waning moon within reach, the sun by day fiery hot. A magnificent spot. And all for us alone. You see, in spite of thieves we are fine! Tante belle cose (“all good things”). Brigitte.
Only then did we realise that this magnificent spot had one large drawback — there was no fresh water (I was reminded of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner: “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.”). If we were to stay here we would have to buy large bottles for water and they would have to be lugged down the slope from Pü’s parking place. So our first job was to climb back up the slope, drive to Orbetello and buy water bottles, cheap plates and cutlery and matches and cooking utensils (a pot and a pan and oil) and, most important of all, flippers, masks and snorkels for the underwater world.
Thereafter we took daily tips to Orbetello for food, water and (sometimes) candles. Food consisted of bread, wine, spaghetti, tomatoes and cucumbers, the water was filled from the fountain into our two litre glass bottles and the candles stolen from the church (I’m sure God agreed that our need was greater than his). Transporting this material from Pü to the cave, especially the water bottles, was by no means easy, in fact on one occasion Brigitte fell and smashed a bottle full of precious water, but this was the price for our privacy. Throughout the whole week we lived here, this privacy was only once disturbed. It was at the weekend and a group of Italians arrived by boat to “our” beach (about 10 meters away from the cave). They went hunting for sea-eggs (one of the most common species on the sea floor here) brought them back to land where they cut them open and sucked out the insides. This surprised me even more than had the scampi salesman I had met on my very first day in Naples in January but I was careful not to show my curiosity until they were gone. Then I waded out with a knife, detached an unsuspecting creature from its anchorage and took it back to land to try out. The taste was execrable! I had to spend some minutes rinsing out my mouth with seawater to get rid of the awful taste. Perhaps it would have been much wiser to have had instruction from the Italians on how to enjoy this “delicacy” — I may never know.
We learnt to conserve water. Washing ourselves, brushing our teeth and the eating utensils could be done in the sea. Fresh water was only for drinking and cooking. We even tried seawater for the latter: our first pot of spaghetti was however so salty we could hardly eat it. The next time we used a mixture of half fresh and half seawater which was excellent, so good in fact that since then, whenever we are near the sea, we take home a bottle for making spaghetti “al mare”.
We spent many hours in the water, swimming and diving and then sitting in the sun or shade reading before swimming again. It was really the idyll we had longed for. Deep diving was not necessary. One could spend long just floating in shallow water observing the world beneath: sea urchins, tiny fish, anemones, even an octopus which I could almost touch with my face. This was only possible with the snorkel which meant that one could lie relaxed on the surface of the water breathing normally, without the necessity of lifting the head out of the water at every breath. The thought came to me: if I had a very long snorkel I could sit in deeper water on the bottom of the sea and observe a different set of creatures. I even planned in my mind what it would look like, with the mouth at one end and a float at the other — the tube could be 2, 3 or more meters long — so I thought, until I suddenly realised that with a long pipe I would be breathing the same air in and out. How then do animals like the giraffe manage, whose long neck must mean a long wind pipe? This was a question I discussed later with Bamford, one that has never been answered and so has kept us occupied to our life’s end!
One of the objects I had lost in the Naples robbery was my electric razor.. I therefore started to grow a beard which lasted six months till the onset of winter and, with it, a runny nose which I couldn’t reconcile with facial hair.
The weather was kind to us in this week. Only once was there a small storm. It happened in the night and made larger waves which threatened to enter the cave. We moved the sleeping bags as far to the rear as possible and waited anxiously for the wind to abate. Next morning all was back to normal, the lovely swishing of tiny waves moving back and forth on the stones.
The view from the cave was dominated by a small uninhabited island, an elephant-in-a-boa-island as Brigitte explained. She had to teach me the story of “Le petit Prince” by Antoine de Saint- Exupéry. Why I had never heard of the famous story is a mystery, I can only think it took much longer to reach New Zealand than Switzerland (it was first published in the original French in 1943). At the beginning the author tells how he asked grown up people if they were frightened by his picture of a boa constrictor which had swallowed an elephant. But the unimaginative adults replied asking why they should be afraid of a hat?! This “hat” or “elephant in a boa” was the shape of our island.
One day after we had practised sufficiently with the flippers, masks and snorkels we set out to visit this island. It would be a long swim, about an hour we reckoned, and so I bound a cucumber in a net around my waist as provisions and we set sail. Although it was a long way, the time went past very quickly since there was so much to look at: swarms of fish which swam past under us, apparently quite oblivious to our presence, or more likely, they noticed us but judged us to be harmless:
11. Juli 1966?
Mit eingeschlafenem Bein sitze ich auf unserer Insel, auf einem grau-weiss- schwarzen Stein (puh, das Bein kitzelt jämmerlich), versuche, das Datum auf den Brief zu zaubern, doch, es geht nicht – ich weiss bloss, dass heute wahrscheinlich Freitag ist, dass momentan hinter der Insel gegenüber, die ganz komisch fischförmig durch die Wellen zieht, die Sonne dem Meer zu wandert, um bald die letzten Strahlen dem dünn und dünner werdenden Mond zu schenken — ich weiss bloss, dass Kit in unserer Meer-Steinhütte sitzt und eine Geschichte schreibt (vorhin ist er über unserer gemeinsamen Einstein-Lektüre mit roter verbrannter Nase eingeschlafen) — ich weiss bloss, dass ich Hunger habe und mich auf unseren tag-täglichen auf Feuer gekochten Spaghetti-Segen (Spaghetti gestern, heute, morgen und übermorgen …) freue — ich weiss bloss, dass unser so schlimm mit Dieben begonnener Ferientraum zu einem Meerestraum geworden ist, zu schön, vielleicht, um wirklich zu sein! — ich weiss bloss, dass ich Euch mit meinem verzweifelten Geld-Geschrei sicherlich in Unannehmlichkeiten versetzt habe, was mir fest leid tut. Doch, ich konnte nicht anders, Kit wurden neben einem teuren Fotoapparat sämtliche Traveller Cheques im Wert von 200 Pounds gestohlen (einfach alles!). Zum Glück liegt noch viel Gepäck in Perugia. Es waren bloss die Reisetaschen!
Heute sind wir beflosst (Flossen) und bebrillt (Taucherbrillen) durch eigenartige Meereswelten, Fischschwärme und fremde Pflanzen, blau-grün-weisse Wellen, zur kleinen fischförmigen Insel geschwommen, um oben auf dem kleinen mit harten Vulkansteinen bepflasterten Inselberg einen wunderschönen Schwalbenschwanz zu bewundern. Ganz viele kleine gestreifte und getupfte Schneckenhäuslein sind auch dort gewesen.
Wir starren beide vor Dreck, meine Haare sind bald mit einem Salzberg zu verwechseln, von den wenigen Kleidern nicht zu sprechen. Doch, es geht auch so. Was ich ohne Renates Schlafsack tun würde, weiss ich nicht. Die Nächte sind warm, und ich möchte harte Böden, Sterne- und Mondenschein, nicht mehr missen. So ist es billig und geht gut. Und, habt keine Sorgen. Kit ist ein Mann, doch ein guter Mann. Wir träumen beide unsere Nächte für uns allein und sind froh. Nur darum kann es so schön sein!
Achtung, ich glaube, es regt sich hinter den Felsen: Feuer, ergo Spaghetti, ergo Tomatensauce, ergo Essen. Darum erhebe ich mich aus der schmerzvollen halben Rückenlage (Sonnenbrand), um „in the kitchen“ behilflich zu sein.
Ci vediamo la settimana prossima and lots of love. Brigitte.
11th July 1966?
My leg’s gone to sleep, sitting here on our island on a grey-white-black stone (puh, my leg’s tickling terribly). I’m trying to conjure up a date for this letter but it doesn’t work — I just know that today is probably Friday, that at this moment behind the curious fish-shaped island opposite me which draws through the waves, the sun is wandering into the sea and will soon give its last ray to the moon who is getting thin and thinner — I just know that Kit is sitting in our sea stone hut writing a story (before he went to sleep with a red sunburnt nose over our Einstein reading) — I just know that I’m hungry and am looking forward to our daily open-fire cooked spaghetti-blessing (spaghetti yesterday, today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow …) — I just know that our holiday dream which started with thieves so disastrously has become a sea dream, too beautiful, perhaps, to be real! — I just know that I have certainly put you in inconvenience with my desperate money cries, which makes me really sorry. Apart from a very expensive camera Kit was robbed of all his travellers’ cheques, 200 pounds, everything! Fortunately much of our luggage is lying in Perugia, just the travelling bags were stolen.
Today we swam beflipped (flippers) and bemasked (diving masks) through an extraordinary sea-world, schools of fish and foreign plants, blue-green-white waves, to our elephant-in-a-boa island, where we admired on a small hard plastered volcanic stone island hill a swallowtail butterfly. Very many striped and spotted snail-shells were there too.
We are both stiff with dirt, my hair is starting to look like a hill of salt, not to mention our few clothes. But that doesn’t matter. What I would have done without Renate’s sleeping bag I don’t know. The nights are warm and I wouldn’t be without the hard ground, the stars and the moonshine. So it’s cheap and good. And don’t worry. Kit is a man, but a good man. We both dream our nights alone and are contented. Only like that can it be so good! Wait! I believe there is movement behind the rocks: Fire, ergo spaghetti, ergo tomato sauce, ergo food. So I’ll get up from this painful half lying position (sunburn) to help in the “kitchen”.
Ci vediamo la settimana prossima (see you next week) and lots of love. Brigitte.
We often talked about the books or the music we liked. I told her about how reading Aldous Huxley’s “Point Counterpoint” had brought me to listen to Beethoven’s late string quartets: In chapter 37 (I knew the number by heart!) Spandrall says: The Heiliger Dankgesang must be heard, it proves all kinds of things, God, the soul, goodness… I had read this novel on the Wellington waterfront, where I had met Luke. He was delighted when I showed him this passage and came the next day with the LP for me to listen to. This movement from Beethoven’s a minor string quartet (op. 132) became one of the most beautiful things I had ever heard and Huxley’s literary interpretation of it one of the best bits of writing about music I had ever read.
Our time together was drawing to an end. We would say goodbye to the cave, pick up our belongings in Perugia, drive to Siena where my course at the Accademia Chigiana was to start on the 15th –– the “Ides of July”. And then? Brigitte and Pü would return to Switzerland and to her job at the Kinderspital (Children’s Hospital). And then? This was the big question that was occupying us both –– more or less consciously. Instead of talking about it I suppressed it. The question was too big, too difficult and besides, talking about it could spoil our paradise, this Utopia we were living in. Even if I had not suppressed it, what were the possible answers? Separate ways? –– that was definitely not what I wanted. Marriage? –– we had known each other for only six weeks, it was much too soon to make such a proposal. The easiest way seemed to be to say nothing and hope that the question would go away, or somehow answer itself.
Whereas my suppression was successful for me, it did not help Brigitte who was also agonising over the same question. Not only could she not calm herself by similarly ignoring the question, she had noticed a change in me, one that I was completely unaware of myself: I seemed more aloof, less communicative. Added to this, during the cave time we had gradually changed from conversing in Italian to English. I learnt that she had spent a year in England first as an “au pair” then worked as a secretary for a cargo firm in London. In many ways this brought us much closer together and so it was not obvious to me as we were trying to read my Einstein book that this would be so difficult for her. Her English was almost perfect and so it seemed entirely natural that we could study this together. She, on the other hand, had the feeling she was much too dumm and that I would be disappointed in her. I was having problems understanding it myself, it would have surprised me if she were not too, that she should have thought herself “dumm” never entered my head. But I learnt these things much later and so her silent fears that our (up till now) perfect adventure could be about to come to an end –– for ever –– passed me by completely. We arrived in Perugia, went to the Università to collect mail –– the urgently needed money from her father was there and also several letters from Betty. We picked up our suitcases from our signore and booked into a cheap hotel for the night. About this time she wrote in a diary:
Letzte, allerletzte Nacht in Perugia. Pensione Augusta. Traurig. Kit? Wir sind uns fremd und fremder geworden. Doch Kit ist trotz allem wundervoll. Morgen fahren wir nach Siena. Dann bin ich ganz allein. I’ll leave Kit alone. He does not like me any more!
Last, very last night in Perugia. Pensione Augusta. Sad. Kit? We have become more and more foreign for each other. But in spite of this Kit is wunderfull. Tomorrow we drive to Siena. Then I’ll be alone. I’ll leave Kit alone. He does not like me any more!
By the time we reached San Gimignano (the Etruscan town with the many towers) she was feeling more confident again:
Morgen in der Pensione Perla. K. schreibt. Ich bin traurig. Habe Angst. Die grosse Reise naht. Zwei schöne Nächte mit K. Jetzt muss ich mich kämmen und anziehen. Ich glaube, K. ist auch traurig. Er schreibt. Er ist immer so lieb. Frühstück: Brot, Tomaten und Gurken, Salz, alles ans Bett. Der Traum ist zu gross. Sein Bart wächst. Er hat mir einen Korb geschenkt in San Gimignano.
Morning in the Pensione Perla. K. is writing. I’m afraid. The big trip approaches. Two lovely nights with K. Now I must comb my hair and dress. I think K. is sad too. He’s writing. He’s always so kind to me. Breakfast: Bread, tomatoes and cucumbers, salt. All on the bed. The dream is too big. His beard is growing. He gave me a basket in San Gimignano.
The two nights in the Pensione Perla were special and yet difficult. Brigitte wanted to help me find a room for my two months in Siena and for that we needed a hotel for two nights. The Perla was certainly no pearl. It had a dubious looking staff and the customers were no better. They offered us a single room with a single bed, shower and lavatory shared with others on the same floor. We enjoyed the closeness without intimacy but we didn’t find much rest in such tight conditions.
I confirmed my presence at the Accademia Chigiana and they gave us a list of people offering beds for students. This time we chose one without meals — I could eat at the university mensa — and we found a friendly young signora in a house about fifteen minutes walk away, who offered a room and also agreed to do washing for me. Siena was gradually bringing us together again.
To celebrate our “last” day we drank coffee in an expensive restaurant on the Piazza del Campo surrounded on all sides by the incredibly unified and elegant renaissance architecture, and directly in front of the famous Palazzo Pubblico. Brigitte said rather timidly what a beautiful end this was to our magic holiday and I: “Perhaps it’s just a beginning.” Seldom have I ever found exactly the right words!
The next morning the alarm woke us at 5 am and armed with a list of directions for the 700 km drive, a picnic lunch of bread, tomatoes and cucumbers and above all, with my optimistic words still ringing in her ears Brigitte set off for Zurich.
The Accademia Chigiana was founded by Count Guido Chigi Saracini in 1932 as an international centre for advanced musical studies. Count Chigi had died the year before (1965) but the foundation and the school in which he had invested his huge fortune had become world famous and attracted students from all over the world. The composition tutor for this year’s summer school was Goffredo Petrassi, an Italian composer of renown, who also taught at the Santa Cecilia in Rome. He had started writing in a neoclassical style (influenced by Bartók, Stravinsky and Hindemith) and later in a post-Webernian style.
We were a class of eight young men from four countries: Britain, France, Italy and New Zealand. Petrassi’s opening words were: In Siena dovete scoprire Simone Martini. Here was a composition course starting with a sentence about a great medieval painter. Later Petrassi would disappear for weeks on end and I finished up learning more about early Sienese painting than about modern composition.
I had clear expectations of the course I was starting, based on my experiences in New Zealand at the Cambridge Music School, also a summer school but only of two weeks duration. At the Cambridge course the days were spent in class and the evenings were concerts or social events (mostly both!) and the nights often spent writing instrumental parts for orchestral works or revising pieces that were being tried out. The main thing was, there was a lively interchange between instrumental or choral students and composition students. In the whole two months I spent at the Chigiana, there was, with one exception, never any contact with students in other departments. We barely even heard them practising and there was no invitation to meet them. The one exception was when Petrassi invited a colleague, the then famous flautist Severino Gazzalloni, to demonstrate some new techniques on his instrument. Otherwise we just met in our group of eight. At the beginning he taught us the basics of 12-tone composition (something I had learnt very well from Ron Tremain at my first Cambridge Music School) and suggested that we try writing a piece in this style for a chamber ensemble. I had now been away from composition for at least seven months and was finding it very difficult to start again:
It’s all strange here. So much has happened and yet nothing has happened. I still feel the same. No musical ideas. I’m happy to write letters and even to revise my stories, but I have to push myself to write music. And the result is terrible —musically that is. I don’t seem to sense anything much — I seem to wander along in a state of “neutralness” — of limbo…
But I haven’t whistled any new tunes. The Maestro continues to play through the dodecaphonic exercises that we all write and they’re ALL AWFUL. Not that I dislike dodecaphonic music (the Berg Violin Concerto is good — needs at least six listenings before much goodness appears). And other thoughts and stories and numbers are still very jumbled and indistinct.
I’m sad you think you wander along in a state of neutralness. But, don’t forget, this state is necessary to get into another state, in a state of creation. Do wait and be patient with yourself and have faith in yourself. If you lose that, it is bad. But I’m very sure that you won’t!
There was one more exception to this isolation from the other music students: the best of these 12-tone pieces were to be performed by instrumentalists from other departments and prepared by students from the conductors’ course. But that happened much later — towards the end.
Bernard from the Casa Tosti had promised to visit me in Siena but I wasn’t expecting him so soon. He was waiting for me in the foyer as I arrived at the Chigiana in the second week. I was so pleased to see him and immediately arranged to meet him for dinner in the mensa straight after class. He was full of news from a holiday in Greece, from a murderer who had lived at the Casa Tosti and we even found out that we had been in Sorrento together at the same time. After dinner I showed him my favourite places in Siena. We went to the Duomo and separately used my student card to get into the Piccolomini Library. While he was here, admiring the Pinturicchio paintings (based on designs by Raphael) I suddenly realised that here, right near the entrance to the library were three small sculptures by Michelangelo: a statue of St Paul (looking not unlike Michelangelo himself) and of St. Peter and one of Pope Pius II. While these are probably some of the least interesting of all Michelangelo’s work I was delighted to find them, since I had set out to see as many of his works as possible during my stay in Europe.
Afterwards we went to the Basilica di San Domenico and to the House of Santa Caterina of Siena, that 14th century lady who wrote letters to all the most prominent leaders of her time and was instrumental in bringing the Papacy back to Rome from Avignon. There was a nun apparently “on duty” to deal with the tourists and to teach them about the saint –– this was the impression we got as Bernard asked her questions. But then he asked her a special question, a secular question, about the Palio, that famous horse race which takes place each summer, where riders in medieval costume, on horses without saddles speed around the Piazza del Campo. Suddenly her tone changed and the remote religious voice became real, even passionate. She explained how the various sections of the city, the contrade, each contributed one horse, and the how the citizens of each contrada gave their complete support to its rider. It can happen (she continued) that in a family where the husband comes from one contrada and the wife from another, that the two don’t speak to one another during the Palio time. It was clear from the intensity of this woman’s voice, that the Palio was not history being relived for tourists, it was something real, deeply rooted in the hearts of all those born in this city.
I was later to learn this Sienese lesson even more forcibly. But for the moment after saying goodbye to Bernard (sadly for the last time) my main thought was how good he was with this foreign language. He had absolutely no inhibitions about using it. He used the vocabulary he had directly with the people and in so doing he enlarged it. I, on the other hand, had this stupid feeling I should only speak when I could be sure I was saying something grammatically correct. I would have to change. I should take every opportunity I had to talk to the local people –– even ungrammatically!
The first opportunity came already on my way home. I was standing in front of a large poster advertising a concert when a male voice behind me spoke to me. He quickly changed to English but he didn’t understand my English reply so I switched back to Italian. He asked about my health and if my bowels were reacting to the change of food and water and went on to recommend an enema! He told me he was a lawyer and that he collected antiques –– would I like to see them (this sounded like a variant of the old invitation to “come and look at my etchings!)? Normally I am not the slightest interested in antiques but I was curious, here was a Senese I could finally talk to and since I was bigger than him, I saw no need to be afraid. He led me to an old building on the edge of the Piazza del Campo first through a locked door to a courtyard, then through a series of doors each opened and locked with a different key which had to be turned several times as if it were sliding a bolt into place inside the door. We entered his apartment, made a very cursory tour of his antiques (he obviously didn’t care whether I found them interesting or not) and sat down to smoke, drink and talk. He was a man of about 60 with a bent body, almost a hunchback. He had what I think one would call a Roman nose, an almost Dantesque profile and he spoke what seemed to me a very cultured Italian.
He neither told me his name nor asked mine, but he wasted no time in coming to the main point: la omosessualità. He explained: Women were preferable as sexual partners to men, but men were preferable to masturbation, or to nothing. He had noticed that I had a natural curiosity and it was necessary to try all things before saying that you didn’t like them –– exactly the words I had used myself on people who had said they didn’t like raw oysters or classical music. He was quite sure that even although I thought I didn’t want to try it, I really did, there was a little bit of both sexes in all men, especially artists, he quoted Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Benjamin Britten … I told him that I was quite sure that I was heterosexual, that I had no problems with those men who preferred men as sexual partners, indeed I had good friends who were homosexuals and one thing I admired in these men was that they did not expect me to make love with them. We talked and talked and I enlarged my sexual vocabulary but not my desire for him. I told him, I had only spoken to him because I wanted to improve my Italian. Finally he let me go but not before I had agreed to meet him at the same place in the Piazza del Campo the following week.
When I told Brigitte about this encounter she was shocked:
Please Kit, don’t see that man again. You know, there are other people to talk Italian to. People with a healthy and normal mind. Do you really want to learn his abnormal, unhealthy ideas? Are you really so curious? Don’t call on him again, please, he wants to get you. He’d try anything, he’s old and experienced. He won’t let you go next time. They like the kind of young man you are. I’m speaking like your aunt — sorry — but you understand?
In spite of Brigitte’s pleas I went again, the same ritual with the doors, the same excellent brandy, the same talk. I even started to enjoy listening to him and arguing with him, but gradually I got tired of talking about homosexuality and I think he too got tired of making no “progress” with me and so this curious “friendship” ended.
Strangely, my first major work was inspired indirectly from an interest in the way our society used to persecute homosexuals. I had seen an excellent film about the last few years of Oscar Wilde’s life (“The Man with the Green Carnation”). In the late 50s the official verbatim record of the trial in which Wilde was sentenced to four years hard labour (for committing sodomy!) was published and used for at least two films. As a result of this I had started reading Wilde’s work and in particular his “Ballad of Reading Gaol” which left a very strong impression on me. I immediately made a selection of stanzas from this very long poem and set them to music for baritone and orchestra. Although the main theme of the poem is a bid to end capital punishment, it was the intolerance against homosexuality which put Wilde in the situation that gave rise to the ballad. My work was first performed at the Cambridge Music School in 1960 and marked the beginning of my life-long friendship with Nelson Wattie who sang the solo part. Later through the help of Douglas Lilburn (also a homosexual) it was performed for a radio recording by the then New Zealand National Orchestra (conductor John Hopkins and soloist Nelson Wattie). Fortunately Brigitte was soon to meet my friend Luke and so she too could have a positive model to change her sympathy towards these people, who through no personal choice are born with different sexual desires to those of the majority.
A parcel of books arrived from Zurich — The Little Prince and Il piccolo principe, the book which had inspired the name of the island in front of our cave: the elephant- in-a-boa island.
But oh dear Brigitte, it’s so difficult to write music because there are all sorts of other things I need to do and now I need to read “The Little Prince” — grazie, grazie, grazie. Ho già letto due piccoli capitoli e mi sono piaciuti moltissimo (I’ve already read two little chapters and they pleased me greatly) … they have that wonderful sort of Mozartian deceptive simplicity … Later: I’ve gone and read all “The Little Prince” — I should have saved it and savoured it, but instead I’ll read it again. Sometimes, or rather often, my mind wanders back to the phrase in your letter asking if I knew why you were just a little happy when you arrived. I didn’t answer, it would have been so easy to say “yes” but I didn’t know how to. You must try to tame me please — like the fox.
My disappointment with the composition course led me to other activities: I attended Italian lessons for foreigners at the university, I wrote long letters to Brigitte and to my family, and I read about the history of Siena: In the middle ages Florence and Siena were cities of comparable sizes and were often in conflict with one another. This was not just of a military nature, the cities also competed culturally for supremacy. So it was, as Giotto was making Florence famous in the art of painting, artists of a similar calibre were working in Siena: notably Duccio, but also Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti brothers. As Florence was building its famous Duomo, Siena tried to overtrump it with a huge cathedral which was unfortunately never completed. The main reason that Siena lost this culture-race was the Great Plague, the Black Death of 1348, which reduced Siena to about a quarter of its population. By this year only the “transept” and the outline of one wall of the nave of the cathedral was finished, and so it stayed to this day.
Although this “transept” was first conceived as the main nave of the cathedral the plan was revised to make it a transept of a huge building whose main nave (the first two arches of which one sees on the right of the left hand picture above) would extend to the south. This would have made the Siena Duomo the largest cathedral in Christendom. After the plague, however, the nave was never completed and today the one row of arches that was built houses the museum Opera del Duomo, which contains master works from the cathedral.
Jenny and Peter Murray, who I had last seen on the “Fairsky” turned up unexpectedly one day. Among other things we visited the Opera del Duomo, which I had come to admire greatly. One reason for my enthusiasm was that it is small and its main focus is on just one major work: Duccio’s Maestà. This large altarpiece had been painted on a wooden slab, the rear of which was divided into numerous small panels depicting scenes from the life of Christ. In the 20th century art specialists separated the main picture from those on the back and cut the smaller panels into single pictures so that they could be hung separately. Now in this main room of the Opera del Duomo with carpeted floor and curtains on all walls and with lights directed at all pictures one can sit and take in this “Gesamtkunstwerk”: The Maestà in the centre of one wall and all the other smaller pictures hanging in front of the curtains of the three other walls. Not only is it splendid visually but the carpet and curtains create a muted acoustical ambience in which one can concentrate on the magnificent Duccio colours and be transported back into his pre-renaissance world.
Although Duccio lies firmly in the Gothic era (stylised faces and attitudes, golden halos, etc.), the combined use of gold and tempera-colour and the sheer size of the work is for me quite overwhelming.
One day last week some friends came to see me. They’re a super couple, New Zealanders, students, working in London, here on holiday. We went and looked at all good things including the l’Opera del Duomo, which I don’t think you went to –– but I think you bought a card of the Duccio Maestà? Anyway if you didn’t go then you certainly must come straight back and see it. It’s the most beautiful room of a gallery I’ve ever seen. It has dark curtains all the way round and just a few paintings to look at and all lit from concealed lights above. The curtains not only make the room darker and therefore the pictures brighter, but they make the room more silent. It’s really quite hypnotic to go there. Anyway even if you did see it, come and see it again: I’m glad I miss you, I was scared I mightn’t. This is why you must continue to tame me. You see?
Ah, I forgot, I really missed “l’Opera del Duomo”, how very sad, or, how very lucky praps, cos there will be a real reason to come over for ……… you understand?
The lesson of the importance of how a work is exhibited was also taught us in a negative way on one of our trips to Florence. We especially wanted to see the crucifix painting by Cimabue in Santa Croce. We enquired where it was and were led into a dark and dingy little side room where the work hung. In spite of the bad light we were very impressed by the tremendous power of the face of Christ: Cimabue had, within the constraints of the Gothic rules, succeeded in showing an expression of (one might truly say) romantic proportions. Some years later we were again in Florence. In the meantime the terrible floods of 1967 had taken place when the Arno destroyed many art treasures in buildings near the river. Our Cimabue crucifix had been found floating in a mixture of water, mud, pollution and heating oil. In spite of years of restoration the damage was irreparable. Now as we entered the church of Santa Croce we were surprised to see the damaged picture hanging in pride of place between choir and nave and brilliantly lit from several lights. But what a sad picture! Only now that the work was almost destroyed did one evidently learn to appreciate what was lost. Here it was hanging as a warning against indifference and neglect. Had it been exhibited as it now was, it would have survived the terrible floods.
1. The damaged crucifix (detail) by Cimabue in Santa Croce, Florence
2. The almost identical Cimabue crucifix in San Domenica, Arezzo
3. Giotto crucifix in Santa Maria Novella, Florence, showing the change in style from Gothic towards Renaissance (but with loss of expressive power?)
8. August, Siena 1
My money was starting to run out, something which embarrassed me more than worried me. It meant I would either have to ask someone for money or give up the course. I resisted doing this immediately and when I finally spoke to Maestro Petrassi about it, he reprimanded me that I had not told him sooner: there had been possibilities for una borsa da studia (bursary) which were now used up. Nevertheless he promised to ask the school authorities.
5th August (K to B)
I got some money given to me! It’s a strange story — I was very embarrassed. You will remember that I was supposed to keep reminding the Maestro about a “borsa” and of course I didn’t — I couldn’t bear to. But because I hadn’t paid, I didn’t have a tessera which you need to get into orchestral rehearsals (for example): There’s a nasty lady who says “no” with incredible ferocity unless you wave a red card with black numbers on it at her. So I went to the secretary and they said: “no, the Maestro has said nothing to us. You have to pay.” And I said “Oh” and then I left! But I saw the Maestro on the street and we shook hands and talked and walked and drank and then we shook hands again, and the next day …… The next day I waited (you know how I like waiting!) in the secretary’s room while the Maestro went into the director’s room to talk and talk and talk. When he came out he said: “Because you didn’t keep reminding me, I can’t get you a full bursary but a half one might be possible”. I was pleased. The fees are 15’000 lire and I thought that even if they gave me 7’500 lire that would be (as my aunt says) better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Anyway, when I arrived at the Chigiana the next morning there was a notice in the “P” pigeonhole telling me to go to the Artistic Director quanto presto. So I went. And he said all the same things the Maestro had said the day before — Oh, and he offered to speak français or Deutsch — this infuriates me — it’s such a bloody insult if only they realised! Fortunately he couldn’t speak English! He said: Non è possibile darle una borsa normale, è troppo tardi; però possiamo fare così: Io le faccio personalmente una borsa. Hell, I was embarrassed! But he said: Stavo per dare una borsa ad un qualsiasi studente che sia abbastanza bravo. Sono felice che è lei. I felt even worse: it was obviously nothing to do with how ‘bravo’ I was, but just the hard luck story I had told the Maestro. Anyway the Direttore went on: Io posso offrirle lire1’500 al giorno per il mese di agosto. Just imagine 1’500x35 (couple of extra days thrown in) = lire 52’500. I was speechless! He started counting out six 10’000 lire notes, handed them in my direction obviously expecting that I would give him 7’500 back. But I had nothing. And so, with a rather impatient gesture, he pushed the whole bundle of notes into my hand and me out the door.
I’m glad you got all that money! Aren’t you a very lucky Kit? But you deserve it! How are you going to spend it all? Please tell me! Are you going to buy a third pair of pyjamas??
I’ve spent nearly all that money! I don’t know on what? Just food and the Accademia fees of course. I don’t even need any more pyjamas. I haven’t used them the last few nights, it’s been so incredibly hot. I just have a sheet that I get under when I hear a mosquito attack.
Brigitte enquired how my five lines and the round friends (who sit on those lines) were doing:
I think I’m pleased. It’s hard to tell at this stage. I was silly cos I thought I could manage without a piano and when the Maestro tried the things out that I had done, they were not always very good. But now I know where I can use a piano and what’s more, I’ve scrapped what I was doing before and have started afresh. That’s why it’s hard to tell if I’ve really solved all my terrible problems.
A friend in the class, Michael Short, lent me the score of Webern’s “Konzert” Op. 24 which I also studied. All the instrument names and the performing instructions were in German, so I had to ask Brigitte what they all meant: Geige (violin), Bratsche (viola), Posaune (trombone), Dämpfer (mute), etc. Although the Webern was a help for my own attempts at dodecaphony, it was a rather dry and theoretical study, I had no way of knowing if my imagination of Webern’s music was really as it would sound with a real Geige, Bratsche or Posaune. When I left my own rented room, however, the streets were full of music from radios near open windows. It had been the same in Perugia, you could walk along the street and from each house would come the same program so that you could hear, without any breaks, the commentary on the current football match or the latest Beatles song (“I love you, I love you, I love you”). Now, as I sought a relief from my own and Webern’s 12-note music I heard a new pop song, new to me that is, one which was not only lively but strangely unusual, in a minor mode:
I’m just being treated to “La verità mi fa male” (The truth hurts me) from a radio down the road:
Funny, I like it just a wee bit! Specially after Dodecaphony. I’m busy studying Webern in between tunes. It looks most interesting, but I don’t really hear it properly. It has lots of German that I need explaining please:
Dämpfer: I know this means mute, but could you explain these: 1. immer mit Dämpfer
2. Dämpfer aus
3. ohne Dämpfer
There followed a very helpful German lesson, but more interesting was her reaction to the pop-song:
Oh, and thanks for the Verità. Now I must tell you something: I have got the record. I did not tell you. I usually don’t buy records of this sort, but this one, just this one … La Verità mi fa male … I did not tell you because I was ashamed and thought you might laugh, but now I can, and when you wrote me that bit of music, I put the record on and heard the whole piece again — Funny that you just like this very record a wee bit, especially after your dodecaphony.
Preparations for the Palio had started. Loads of earth were brought in and dumped onto the paving stones of the outer ring of the Piazza del Campo and around the edge against the buildings they mounted what looked like mattresses, presumably to soften the fall of riders who might get thrown off from their horses. At the same time the activities in the Contrade became more obvious. Big groups of people would eat at tables set up in the streets. There was often the sound of marching drums and the sight of people in medieval livery. Also the faction rows that the nun had spoken of to Bernard were no exaggeration, these were quite often carried out physically, but such black eyes and thick ears were all part of the excitement, something that even the local police understood well and treated with extreme restraint. Not so, however, the Questura, the state police. These officers are normally given service in a region remote from their place of origin so that they can act impartially. Thus, during the trials in the week before the famous Palio, when a Mossiere, who should set the race in motion, lowered the starting rope too slowly and disadvantaged the jockey from the Contrada Valdimontone, and, in so doing, incited a brawl between two young men, the officers of the Questura could not possibly understand that this was normal behaviour at this time of year in Siena. Instead of turning a blind eye, they clapped the aggressors in gaol, oblivious of the fact that one was the star jockey of the Valdimontone Contrada. This mistake was to have serious consequences.
On Sunday the 16th of August about 60’000 people squeezed themselves into the Piazza del Campo to watch the Palio. I went with Michael Short and his family. There was real excitement in the air, not just an uplifting excitement but also an uneasy feeling. There were so many people in such a small place that one could hardly move, that is, one could only move with the crowd. If such a crowd were to become nervous, the result could be catastrophic.
The famous race is preceded by processions of people, oxen and horses from each of the seventeen Contrade — each looking more splendid that the other in its colourful medieval costumes: the flag bearers, the commanders, the captains, the drummers, the trumpeters and more flag bearers and flag throwers, all in the liveries of their Contrade. The procession starts at the Duomo and moves by a circuitous route and to the accompaniment of trumpets and drums to the Piazza del Campo. After about two hours of processing the Palio-horses were assembled in the courtyard inside the Palazzo Pubblico, were blessed by a priest and prepared for the big race.
Yesterday evening we all jammed ourselves into the Piazzo del Campo for the Palio — I with the Short family. But we didn’t have it. We had a demonstration instead! Seems that two people to do with the racing were put in gaol yesterday for fighting and a large body of the crowd wanted them let out. And so, as the horses trotted out of the Town Hall (!) this group of people poured onto the pista and the horses trotted back! Then the demonstrators paraded around the piazza singing and sat down in front of the television camera and shouted: Fuori, fuori! (out, out). I was a bit scared cos there were so many people in the square that you could hardly move and if they had all gone mad which seemed highly likely …… but no, people just went and so we got out and nothing more happened.
I did see a prova (trial) earlier and I was very excited. They ride bare-back and fast and sometimes fall off. And the whips are not just for the horses!
But the most remarkable thing about this story is that the Palio took place “again” the next day — just for the Sienese. All the thousands of tourists who had come on that Sunday in all the dozens of buses, went home again without seeing the famous horse race. The Sienese couldn’t care less. The Palio was their six hundred year tradition, which they were prepared to share with others if they wished to come, but the business from the tourism was secondary, the main thing was that it took place according to their rules and not those dictated by the Questura. And that’s how it was done: the next day, and with no tourists.
(17. Agosto) It was nearly as bad this day too — sometimes I’m a bit frightened by this excess of excitement. But still, I was thrilled to have seen and experienced it all.
Brigitte wrote that she had bought Huxley’s “Point Counterpoint” and also the record of the Beethoven string quartet Op. 132:
You should be here, dear Kit: I’m in heaven now, in that Lydian heaven …… I’ll send a bit over to you, a bit of that 132, because you need it now. It really is great and I’m hearing it for the very first time. Ah Kit, music can be so wonderful, it can take you away in an indescribable beautiful manner and here Beethoven shows you a bit of heaven, oh no, not only a bit, I think that’s heaven as you would wish it to be. Come over, Kit, and listen, and this will make you happy again …… neue Kraft fühlend (feeling new power) …… that’s what you must feel again.
She had also tried bravely to get some money from the insurance company for the loss of our belongings in Naples. She had bought a coverage of one thousand francs against theft but now when the list of stolen goods added up to two thousand they argued that she was under-insured by one half and agreed to pay only five hundred francs!
… I’ll tell you about it another time, I don’t want to leave this Beethoven heaven, I want to remain here in that “miraculous paradox of life and eternal repose …” And if I close my eyes, I can feel that you are here, and that is good!
I’m so pleased you have the Op. 132 now on a record and even more pleased that you’re thrilled with it. I knew you would but it’s good to have my “know” reinforced even more than I ever expected. And isn’t it all wonderful? Not just that middle movement … Someone commented somewhere on what a stroke of genius it was to follow that tremendously serious movement with that little light march — nothing else would have done. And Spandrell’s right isn’t he? — the heiliger Dankgesang does get better and better towards the end: Listen to that cello stepping slowly down, slowly but deliberately, inexorably to that wonderful series of grinding chords at the end — the cello being a sort of rock-like foundation for the others.
Gradually my 12-note piece was taking shape. Due movementi per quattro strumenti, the “quattro strumenti” (four instruments) being piccolo, clarinet, cello and piano. I had managed to work in the famous B A C H (Bb A C B) motive into the 12-note row which gave it a more obvious contour and also an anchor-point for the ear when this fragment turns up. The Maestro came for one day in the middle of August and was much better pleased with this new piece. To my relief, he said it could be included in the program at the end of the course. He then disappeared saying he would be back at the end of the month. Although I had plenty to do: finish the score, write a fair copy on transparent paper (so that it could be copied) and write the instrumental parts, they were all activities which kept me in my room. With no class at the Chigiana I didn’t even see the other colleagues and my day became rather monotonous: breakfast of dolce and caffellatte on the way to the Chigiana to pick up mail, back to my room until midday, dinner in the mensa, and afternoon and evening in my room again. Even in the mensa I rarely saw anyone I knew, although the cameriere (waiter) often spoke a few friendly words to me. I usually ate pollo (chicken) because it was cheap but also because for me it was something special. During my childhood in New Zealand we had always eaten mutton or beef, sausages (awful sausages!), occasionally pork or fish, sometimes even rabbit, but hardly ever chicken. Not only was the taste new and special, I had no idea how best to eat it. One day when I was attacking a half chicken with knife and fork, the friendly cameriere came to me and said: Il pollo si mangia con le mani (one eats chicken with the hands). I am still, nearly 50 years later, grateful to him for this chicken-eating lesson.
I seldom saw the other inhabitants of the house where I lived. There seemed to be three generations: nonno, nonna, la signora and her husband and two young boys. My room was regularly cleaned, fresh bed linen and personal washing was done every week without my seeing when or how it was done. On one of the rare occasions when I saw the signora, she told me that her husband was an enthusiastic hunter. What exactly he hunted was not clear, I assumed it was small birds which one often saw in the open markets. She said that the activity could be dangerous because one had to lie in the grass waiting for the quarry in regions where poisonous snakes were not uncommon. Because of this the hunters always carried an “antivenom”, a serum which could save their lives. Suddenly I remembered how Brigitte and I had slept under the stars quite oblivious of this danger. For me, coming from a land completely free of such animals, it was a big surprise.
As an only child, being left to my own devices was neither unusual nor bad. But here in Siena, where I had come especially to learn something new, I was doing nothing that I did not already know. The only good thing was that it was confirming that that which I knew was still valid. But was this really true? New Music must surely be more than dodecaphony! I knew that people like Cage were doing other things, which I had hoped to learn about. Once the Maestro had mentioned the word clusters. “These were something important — something to be taken seriously” he had said. But what were they? I never found out here. I had to wait until hearing the lectures of György Ligeti (whom I had not yet heard of) the following year in Darmstadt before knowing what this English word in the musical language meant.
The question of what was to happen after Siena was now looming. One of my major aims was to learn something about that very latest development in New Music: electronic music. Originally I had thought I would like to go to Milan. In 1954 Luciano Berio (and Bruno Maderna) had created Italy’s first studio of electronic music at the RAI Milan headquarters: the Studio di Fonologia Musicale. Here he was able to experiment with the interaction of acoustic instruments and electronically produced sounds. But just before I arrived in Europe Berio had migrated to the USA. There was however another possibility in Florence. Pietro Grossi who had also worked with Berio in Milan had established a Studio di Fonologia Musicale in Florence in 1963, which gave technical support to his courses at the Florence Conservatory (1965–73). I decided this would be a good alternative.
I finished my piece and wrote a fair copy on the parchment-like, transparent paper which the school had asked for, especially so that they could make good copies. But when I saw these copies I was quite shocked:
25. 8. 66 Please dear Brigitte help me. Look at these good notes I’ve written. Can you copy them with your machine? Can you copy them clearly? I’ve just paid 1500 lire for three copies none of which is really good. Just one good copy would be good. If your machine doesn’t deal with this sort of funny paper — non importa. Just send it back to me as it is. Now I must start to make these bad copies clear for use in the mean time…
26. 8. 66 … You see I felt a bit lost this morning. I’ve handed my music in (bad as the printing is — but if your machine is better I’ll swap them when your copy arrives — DON’T WORRY if you haven’t been able to manage a better copy) … anyway after all the intensive work on those few pages over the last few weeks, to be left with nothing is a bit ground-cutting-from-under-the-feet — you see.
29. 8. 66 Here you are, dear Kit! Hope you can use it?! Sorry about p.5 and 13 — didn’t come out too well! I’d like to listen to that music, I’d really love to! Praps one day … ? Do you think … ? Aren’t you very clever to be able to write all these good things? Congratulations! Looking at the manuscript I get very very very very impressed indeed — and very proud to know its author!
Just before the end of the month there was a crisis. The deadline for handing in my piece had been met (although the copies were so bad), and suddenly there was nothing: no classes, no pressure to finish anything and worse still, no mail from Zurich:
25. 8. 66 Ma mia cara Brigitte, che cosa à successo? È già quattro anni da non ti ho sentito niente! Stai ammalata? Non ci spero. Forse una lettera è stata persa — sarebbe meglio che tu fossi ammalata … (But my dear Brigitte, what’s happened? It’s already four years since I’ve heard anything from you! Are you sick? I hope not. Perhaps a letter has got lost — that would be better than your being sick …)
27. 8. 66 (?) I look at your photo and that makes it worse. What it would mean now to see even one word in your writing — one word that I knew you’d just written. There are lots of words in this room that you’ve written, beautiful words, words I treasure, but I need to know that you can still write words. Just one would be enough.
If this is some horrible test that I need you — but I know you wouldn’t want to test me — not like that. It’s just that I don’t know what to think. Sometimes I can think so clearly. But all clear thoughts don’t help now. They tell me you’re very ill or dead — that last word is so hard to even think let alone write but I can’t help it, every day I see: “6 morti, incidenti stradali” — and I think of you and wee Pü jumping out of the way of hedgehogs … And then the doorbell rings and I think you haven’t written because you’re coming — a surprise, a secret, and now you’re here, at the house, at the Accademia — but no! I don’t know where you are or how you are. I just walk and walk and think and try not to think.
Sometimes I wonder if I should go to Zurich and see how you are. Or that I should ring up. If I don’t hear tomorrow, or the next day, if I don’t see a word, I’ll ring the hospital. But I don’t even know where you live in Zurich or in Bülach. But it’s hard to not-think. Even in my book on Signorelli I see so many things that take me back to us with Scarpellini, to us with Pü at Orvieto. And I look out my window and a pipistrella, a Fledermaus flutters by and there we are in Sorrento again … Later: I seem more optimistic: don’t know why. I’ve been out walking — meeting friends. Now I think that perhaps a letter has gone missing and tomorrow will come another. However, if it doesn’t, I’ll ring up because it seems quite easy and I even have your number here on an old letter. A domani.
The following day there was finally a letter from Zurich, a huge letter, also containing the copies of my score:
31. 8. 66 Oh I cried a bit — just to see those words written by Brigitte, dear Brigitte. But praps I brought this awful silence on myself? By letting you think it was a bother to write to you. I only wanted to tell you that sometimes when the music wasn’t going very well I was much happier writing to you — even when there was such a rush, this rush to get the music finished by last Thursday. I didn’t quite make it and nor did any of the other three, we all handed it in on Friday. That rush made me rather anxious I spose. And then when it was all over, I was free but I didn’t know what to do!! I wrote letters, went on a gita, met new friends — all good but I got no letters, that is, none from you. But I really wonder if you wrote another letter, which I didn’t get? This last is started 26. 8. 66, finished and posted on 28. 8. 66 but didn’t get here until 31. 8. 66 (today). Was there one in between — or did you think you were bothering me too much with your letters? But it doesn’t really matter! What matters is that I now know that you are all right because I really thought you were dead.
2. 9. 66 Oh my very dear good Kit — I’m sorry you were so worried about me … I could not help it Kit, I could not write those days — no letter got lost — I just could not. I all of a sudden felt so terribly empty and so terribly lonely — and a great black fear came over me. I was afraid of you and afraid of me and afraid of everything …… Afraid of no love and afraid of love — I was not sure about your feelings — I was not sure of my feelings. Praps he just writes to you and he writes to so many others? Praps he just enjoys having for a wee while a dreaming Swiss friend still believing in love? Praps he’ll very soon stop writing cos there are so many other things to do? Praps he does not like me at all? Praps he is married? Praps somebody is waiting for him in far away New Zealand? Praps? Praps? Praps?
You see, my dear good Kit, there were so many “praps”! Praps you shake your head? Praps you smile? Praps you say what a funny stupid girl, can’t she feel anything? Praps …… ?
It was me now who almost cried when I got that good letter yesterday, when I got that postcard and when I got that letter today. Oh dear good Kit. There was a whole wonderful world in those words — a world that means so very much to me! I’m holding it very tight now, that world of words so as not to lose it again — I’m holding it and feel very happy and very sad at once.
I very often feel like taking little Pü and flying over to you, very quickly — just to say hello — just to see you for one minute, for one hour, for one day …… just to see your eyes, your face, your hands …… just to know that you are still there, that you really exist. And who knows what might happen one day?
My very dear good Kit, good night again — I’ll tell you many things tomorrow and the next day, but today, I just send you all my love! Brigitte
6. 9. 66 My Dear Brigitte, Now it is I who feels both happy and sad. Please trust me when I am vague and absent minded because these are my defects. I always believed that you loved me — that’s why I thought something serious must have happened to you.
But there are always many “praps” when you have known a person for just 3 or 4 months. I think it must take years to know all the little details of someone. And yet I’m not sure, I think you really do know me pretty well — especially now after these two black weeks. And I too know myself much better. I’ve always been a bit suspicious (cautious would be a better word) of my own feelings. You see, I’ve had many girlfriends which were as you described: just someone whose company I’ve enjoyed briefly (and vice versa) — even many whose friendship I still value although it has shifted to a different plane — the plane of a good friend. But you will know by now that your plane is very different. And this is where another of my defects creeps in: I don’t know how to tell you directly, that special position that you occupy in my mind, in my life. I’ve always been wary of the traditional language that accompanies affirmations of love but I haven’t been able to invent a replacement for it. I just want it to be clear to you from the way I share my thoughts with you and the frequency with which you receive these thoughts and of course the terrible state you can put me in by not writing to me, that I do need you very much.
When we went away together I thought I would fall in love with you and all would be wonderful. Fortunately that did not happen. True, it was wonderful — very wonderful. But when I think of the two or three times I’ve been “in love” I realise how dangerous and blind such a state is. So now I’m content to wait for that much more real state of love and understanding and sharing to build up — which it is quite rapidly and wonderfully — don’t you think?
Now I’ll stop and post this and look forward to the many good words you are sending me, writing me. Love from Kit
9. September 1966: Siena, Zurich
My dear Kit, This letter today was the best letter I ever had — all the world is smiling. Yes it’s so silly, why are you there? I do miss you so terribly. But it is good to know you are on that Italian planet …… and when I look at the sky at night, I can find you among all those stars. Oh dear Kit, I feel like embracing the whole world now (but I’d better wait for you, don’t you think?) …… and sing in the meantime that part of Beethoven’s 9th you know: „Seid umschlungen, Millionen, diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt …“
Lots and lots and lots of love, B
With a similarly euphoric feeling I entered the new month. The Short family invited me to midday dinner and Michael and I spent most of the afternoon talking. I learnt interesting things about the American poets: Ezra Pound and e e cummings and then in the evening we attended the first rehearsal of our pieces.
It was so wonderful just to hear the players tuning up. I’ve been away from this sound for so long!! My second movement came off much better than the first (the pianist is very good). By the second movement I was writing what I wanted to write but I don’t regret the first because you have to try new things. And the players are very enthusiastic for all four of our pieces. Michael’s is very good indeed. He has set some Italian verses for soprano, flute, harp, violin and cello, and the Japanese soprano who is learning these difficult songs is really very good. Later: I still haven’t bought that coat, I bought a record instead! That’s not really as naughty as it sounds because, did I tell you? we each get 25’000 lire if our pieces are played here!!
In one day most of my disgruntlement with the course vanished. All the loneliness and feeling of making no progress was suddenly justified. Not only through the success of my own piece, I also learnt so much by listening to and following the works of my colleagues. Michael had, for example, written melodic lines for the soloist, which up till now I would have thought were impossible to sing accurately without direct support from the accompanying instruments. But this soprano could sing them perfectly and because her part was not doubled by an instrument her voice appeared much clearer and the instruments were freer and really independent. That I had needed to learn such an obvious lesson may now seem curious but it shows how inexperienced (and anxious to improve) I was at this time.
In the next days I was often a guest at the Shorts: Michael, Elaine and their two young boys. I bought a protractor and a pair of compasses to be able to show the boys how to make mathematical models out of paper, the so-called Platonic solids: tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron. This activity turned out to be much too difficult for the boys but Michael and I enjoyed it enormously, not least because we saw in it a wonderful opportunity to write “chance music”.
We wrote the names of the 12 semitones on the faces of the dodecahedron and used it as a die. Rhythms were made with the tetrahedron: two faces with a quaver and one each with a crotchet and a minim. Dynamics were found rolling the octahedron: ppp pp p mp mf f ff and fff. Michael wrote down the “piece” and I did the throwing. It was for Flauto contrabasso in E double sharp!
The Shorts were already busy packing to leave Siena. They offered me some books which they couldn’t fit into their luggage. I accepted them gladly without stopping to think if they would fit into mine: one on Siena with beautiful photographs and one on twentieth century composition. Both had been library books and so were not really theirs to give. Both Michael and Elaine were librarians and didn’t seem to be at all averse to appropriating books from their employers.
The concert was on Sunday evening 4th September. Everything went well but without the excitement I had experienced at the first rehearsal. The audience was very generous with its applause, the newspaper critic less so. For my piece:
Abiamo percipeto una atmosfera lucida, rarifatta, talvolta indecisa e un po’ banale. Una personalità più ingegnosa che genial, capace tuttavia di organizzare piacevole il materiale sonoro.
We perceived a lucid and rarefied atmosphere, sometimes indecisive and banal. A personality more ingenuous than genial, nevertheless capable of a pleasant organisation of the sound material. (How the critic was aware of my “personality” remains a mystery!)
After the concert I remained in Siena a week longer. I made some tiny corrections to the score before giving copies to the Accademia, to the conductor and also to two of the players who asked for copies. I also wrote to the Signorina Monti in Florence asking if I could spend a few nights at her apartment until I had cleared up whether I could do a course in electronic music at the Cherubini Conservatory.
From Brigitte came more letters: I had always put too little postage (55 instead of 90 lire) on my letters to her. This was due to false information I had had from the Italian post and to the extreme precision of the Swiss post who had always demanded a surcharge which in turn had delayed my letters and so made an important contribution to our crisis of last month.
She also talked of her reading. She had bought a copy of Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row” (which I had raved about during our time in the cave):
… Steinbeck has already taken me fully into his very deep and very true and very good and very sad human world: that wonderful street described as “a poem, a stink and a grating noise.”
It was also the time of her parents’ birthdays — I sent some “panforte” that speciality of Siena, (made of flour, fruit and honey) — and just before his birthday, her father, the poet Konrad Bänninger, had had an article published in the newspaper:
… it was called “look in the garden”. I especially like the beginning of it, where he speaks of those very special moments (I’m sure you know those moments!), when you suddenly are aware of something, moved by something, struck by something (it’s often a very very short moment, a second, half a second — a glance —) and here it was the wind in the branches of a beautiful tree, with leaves all trembling, all dancing — it must have been a very beautiful and unique moment — and so it goes on.
Later:
You are leaving? You don’t know where? Why don’t you just jump over here? Why not? So I think I’ll have to stop writing letters to the CHIGIANA — and that is sad! Thank you for that good Turner postcard. Of course I saw lots of Turners in London, but at that time I was much more taken by the modern art. When I saw them for the first time, I went with a very good aunt (German sister of my mother’s mother, wife of a professor of arts) and I well remember her pronouncing Turner’s name in that very respectful manner and with great admiration in her voice that you owe to a great artist …… but all the same, his paintings did not really impress me. But now, looking at your postcard, listening to your Debussy “tales”, I’d love to go there very quickly again!
And in case you suddenly feel like coming here:
My address in Zürich (flat):
Wehntalerstrasse 30, 8057 Zürich, Tel. 051. 28. 60. 41
My parents’ home:
Vögeliacher 5, 8180 Bülach, Tel. 051. 96. 12. 30
Tel. of the Kispi: 051. 32. 71. 10
This was hard to resist. Did I really want to go to Florence? Was the study of Electronic Music really so important to me? I started making new plans. I would soon have to find a job, and with Brigitte’s help I could perhaps find some work in Zurich which would allow me to study further. Work was something important but, of course, it wasn’t the main reason I wanted to go to Zurich!
On the Sunday before I left Siena I decided to climb the huge tower of the Palazzo Pubblico.
When I got down again, I remembered that I hadn’t paid for my meal at the restaurant but I was too tired to walk all the way back again and too mean too, because the food wasn’t very good today. This wasn’t the mensa. It was a cheap place at the back of the cathedral. It’s the second time I’ve done that — walked out without paying. The other time I went back again through all the rain and they hadn’t even noticed that I hadn’t paid. The trouble is, I get talking to the people (it’s a very studenty place frequented by people from the university or the Chigiana), and then I just get up, say ciao, and go off in my usual dream.
My last impression of Siena was a linguistic one. The Sienese will always tell you that the “purest” Italian is spoken there. Why this purity should be in Siena and not in Florence where Dante grew up and wrote in his dialect so brilliantly that it became the written language of all Italy is a mystery to me. Nevertheless the Sienese are quite sure that their Italian is better than that of the Florentines, in spite of a very obvious “impurity”: the sound [k] is usually pronounced as a [h] in the italiana senese. On my very last day I said goodbye to the signora and her family and set out, lugging all my belongings towards the railway station. I had not gone far when I heard the sound of running coming up behind me. It was one of the signora’s little boys who said to me in his “purest” Sienese Italian: Dov’è la hiave della hasa? He had to repeat the sentence several times until I realised that I had walked off with the house key in my pocket: Dov’è la chiave della casa? (where is the key of the house)
At the railway station I sent a telegram:
Travelling by train in Italy is always an adventure. Unlike the Swiss who look for a seat where they can be alone, the Italians want to talk and it’s not important to whom or how well you can speak their language. They’re interested in everything you can tell them and if you don’t want to tell them anything, then they’ll go and talk to the neighbour. By this time I was quite ready to talk. I could talk about my fidanzata (any girlfriend is a fidanzata — fiancée!). In my carriage there was, among many other talkative Italians, a strange looking priest who moved from group to group making curious comments. The young man sitting opposite me was, for an Italian, very reticent, and observed the behaviour of the priest with some suspicion: È quasi un finocchio (he’s almost a fennel = he seems to be gay), he said. He started speaking to me, perhaps so that he would be less likely to be disturbed by the gay priest. He was returning (like thousands of other Italians) to his work place in Switzerland. He would be away from his young wife until the end of the year, when he would be able to go home again for Christmas. He had with him a few belongings in a small case (much smaller than mine) and a paper bag with supplies for the next few days: before leaving, his mother-in-law had given him two cooked chickens. But even as he told me this he was overcome by hunger, took one animal out of his bag and tore it apart, offering me half of it. And before we reached Zurich we had eaten the second one too! When I think of this young man and of countless other Italians, I am so moved by their great generosity, especially the poorer people who are so ready to share the little that they have, even with perfect strangers. The last I saw of him, he was helping me carry my heavy luggage along the platform in Zurich but as soon as we noticed a happy smiling Brigitte standing there to meet me, he vanished for ever.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
It was like coming home. Everything was new and yet familiar. Although I was a foreigner in this foreign country, the months of contact with Brigitte had given me the feeling of belonging. Pü took us to her flat at the Wehntalerstrasse, which was to be my home for the next six weeks. She made it clear, however, that the neighbours (her flat was one of about six in the house) would definitely not approve of our living together here. Therefore she would leave me here each evening and go with Pü to Bülach where she could sleep at her parents’ place. I was in a sort of trance and accepted all this gladly — anything that would allow us to be more or less together. So I slept alone in her bed. As soon as she arrived in the morning at the Kinderspital I heard from her by telephone, at lunchtime I took a tram to meet her there, whistling outside her window the opening bars of Beethoven’s 8th symphony which she would answer, much to the delight of Dr Andres Giedion, who recognised the theme:
Then we ate Wähe (Swiss open fruit pie) together and in the evening after work, either I met her again in the city or she and Pü arrived again at the Wehntalerstrasse and we could spend the evening together. Of the neighbours in the flats around hers I hardly ever saw anybody, but Brigitte assured me that they would be observing us through the “spy-holes” in their doors. I did, however, see the caretaker occasionally and I had learned to greet him enthusiastically as one should: “Grüetzi Herr Ledergerber”. His reply was less enthusiastic!
It was now quite clear to me, a life without Brigitte was out of the question. But at the same time it was equally clear that I wanted to return to New Zealand at the end of the following year. Could I really expect her to give up her life in Switzerland where all her family (mother, father, brother and three sisters) lived to follow me round the world to the antipodes? I turned this problem over in my mind for several days, and then finally asked her to marry me. There was no hesitation: Yes, yes of course, she would follow me wherever I wanted to go!
My dazed state increased from trance to a floating dream. In the evening as we sat on the banks of the river Limmat looking at the Fraumünster, Grossmünster, Peter’s Church and all the lights of the business houses reflected in the water tears rolled down my cheeks. This was finally that state togetherness that I had hoped for, even although I had never experienced it before.
Letter to Betty and Hu, 28(?) Sept.
How would you like a specially good daughter? That’s what I’ve found you, you see. I’m sorry you have never seen her, but I know you will both love her and you will be able to see her in 18 months.
Sometimes I feel a bit like a thief because she is part of a very happy and close family — but she wants to come to New Zealand. And these days mails are quick and so it’s not so bad…
… I wonder if all this seems sudden to you? I think you may have read odd things between the lines of my last letter. To me, I seem to have been very slow. I nearly proposed to her months ago when we first arrived in Siena but wasn’t sure enough. But now I’m very sure and very happy.
I don’t know when we’ll marry — the sooner the quicker. But it’ll take three or four weeks for the High Commissioner at Geneva to write to Wellington for them to check that I’m not already married and all that impedimenta…
… This place is very central so we’ll live here for about a year and we can pop round to bits of Europe every now and then. We went to Germany on Sunday — just an hour’s drive. We saw the Rhine and an enormous waterfall on it. And the following day we (Brigitte’s father and I) walked from Bülach to the Rhine and came back again by train. Lots of love from us both.
Konrad Bänninger was already 76. He was a poet and had spent much of his adult life (after training as a teacher) as a free-lance writer. Aged 40 he had married and had five children with his 23 year younger German born wife: three daughters before the second world war (Brigitte was the third) and a girl and a boy after the war. To support the family he had returned to teaching (Brigitte had even been in his class for her secondary schooling) and had continued teaching right up to his 70th birthday. Now he was able to devote himself completely to his favourite occupation, reading and writing. As I met him, his day was well ordered: he spent the morning studying ancient Greek and the afternoon with his own writing: poetry or essays — in the warmer months outside on a bench under a huge oak tree. As a teacher he had taught German, French and History but he was also fluent in English (he had spent a year in Scotland as a young man) and he was passionately interested in English literature — at the time he was reading Yeats. Brigitte’s mother was also very good in English. She had learnt it in a grammar school in Wuppertal and although had never had much opportunity to use it, it now came back. All this meant that I was quickly assimilated into the Bänninger family.
Now we could make plans for our marriage. I apologised to Brigitte that I didn’t have enough money for an engagement ring — Betty had always worn two rings, an expensive diamond engagement ring and a gold wedding ring. But here the custom was different. We bought a pair of simple white gold rings, one for her and one for me. These were engagement and wedding rings. It felt a bit strange to start with, but it made Brigitte very happy.
Dear Betty and dear Hu
Kit told me to call you this: and I’m very proud and pleased to do so! It’s so wonderful to have such good new parents on the other side of our world — on two islands which look so tiny on the map, but which are about the size of Italy. I’m looking forward to seeing you there one day!!
It’s funny in a sot of a way to write to you, since I have never met you. But I think I know you very well, because Kit has told me lots of good things about you. Do you know that I am the happiest girl in the world for having met that dear Kit? You have a most wonderful son!
And do you know? Since yesterday, we are wearing a nice little silvery ring on our left hands. Even Kit wears a ring. Here in Switzerland most men wear rings, and so he does, just to please me. I know he does not like it. But he does it cos I like it — and of course, one day in New Zealand, he’ll take it off. I won’t mind then.
I’m sorry this letter will be very short (I must go on with my work), but it carries best wishes and love and many thanks for your dear words from your daughter
Brigitte
I would have to find work here in Switzerland. With the memory of my student jobs on the Wellington waterfront I was quite optimistic: I could do anything, sweep the streets if necessary. Brigitte was less sure. The thousands of Italians now working in Switzerland were already doing these “menial” jobs. She thought I could perhaps teach English and rang up various language schools. I could go for an interview at the Zurich Berlitz School.
The director of the Berlitz School was an Italian! And since he didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak German the interview was in Italian. First he told me what an excellent school he ran and that this branch of it was famous because James Joyce had taught here in the 1920s. He was pleased that I had already had some teaching experience and also foreign language learning experience, but what pleased him most of all was that I could not speak German. Most of the clientele of the school were German speakers and so my pupils would be forced to learn English to be able to communicate with me. This was the basic philosophy of the Berlitz Schools: native speakers who could not speak the language of the country they were working in — and it functioned — for a short time, until I learnt German!
The only major problem was, and this was a problem for most of their teachers, I would have to have a work permit to teach in Switzerland and the rule was (as in many European countries at the time): one had to apply for a job from outside the country. First, however, I would have to spend a trial period observing and teaching at the school for a couple of weeks and then, if they decided to employ me, I would have to leave the country, apply for the position via the Alien Police who would check my police record and if everything was in order, invite me back into the country.