Life Embitters (54 page)

“His
Letters
are total confirmation of his hopelessness as a man of government. Machiavelli’s politics consisted purely and simply in being anti-Machiavellian. Unless one interprets Machiavelli as a poor, ambitious courtier, his figure is a complete mystery.

“Oh! Even so, the secretary’s goose quill ought to figure on Florence’s coat-of-arms!”

One day Llimona and I were roaming in the vicinity of Santa Maria Novella, very near the central station, when we saw a an old man we thought was Auguste Renoir sitting on the terrace of a small bar in the area. Strangely enough, it was really him. Many years have passed since – so many that
when I try to recall the day precisely I see only a blur in a murky haze. Nevertheless it’s a fact that this slight, rather tired, little old man with a yellowing beard, exhausted, bloodshot eyes, and a straw boater
was
Renoir, the great Impressionist painter.

He’d arrived in Florence only a few days before. He’d fetched up in a cheap inn. He could have afforded something much better because his life of poverty was long past, but the painter maintained his modest habits from those lean times. He’s now come to Italy but he’s no ordinary tourist. A tourist inevitably likes whatever the guidebook recommends. That is: he must like everything. He must be so curious that finally he feels curious about nothing. It’s a path that leads nowhere. When one is lucky enough to have been born with a degree of passion, one must play a card, one must choose a path. Select! That’s the lesson of Florence.

Renoir is staying in Florence. I give him the occasional glance. He looks totally insignificant. He is the typical vine-grower from Languedoc: a rather short, thin, fairish, gray-haired, blue-eyed, pink-skinned fellow with the tired, lethargic ways of an old countryman. He wears a thick shirt and pale blue tie that’s carelessly knotted. He arrived in Florence late that evening at the end of the long summer twilight. He eats a snack and can’t resist the temptation. Who
can
resist the temptation of Florence?

Years ago, in the era of gas lamps and leg-of-mutton sleeves, an acquaintance of ours arrived in Florence from Paris: Don Santiago Russinyol. A friend of his walked by his side: Zuloaga. Like Renoir, these two painters arrived in Florence at dusk. But they too were unable to resist the temptation; after dinner, they penetrated the totally unknown labyrinth of the city. It was a dark, murky night, and lighting must have been deficient. What could they see? As soon as Russinyol returned to his tavern in the early hours, he nevertheless wrote a long, lyrical hymn of praise to Florence.
He described a Florence by night you can read in one of his first books. Which Florence does Russinyol refer to in this piece? The one he couldn’t see because it was submerged in the shadows of night or the one that had been floating in his mind for some time? It doesn’t matter. Illusion is all in life. We could say it
is
almost everything. A dream is as objective a reality as the movement of a pendulum.

Renoir also penetrates the labyrinth of Florence’s streets. He wanders along the pavements, breathes in the air, and peers at the blotches of light the gas lamps project on the walls. He walks at random, with nowhere in particular in mind. Suddenly he is in front of Santa Maria Novella. From the pavement opposite – the famous church is situated in one of the most central areas – he gazes at the vaguely visible façade of that slender building. The façade is covered in black and white marble dice that crisscross geometrically. Renoir feels a strange sensation, as if he isn’t breathing enough air. Initially he feels he is choking. He continues walking along the streets. The black and white marble blocks of Santa Maria become a kind of obsession. He doesn’t dare formulate an opinion. He feels that first choking sensation intensify. But tomorrow is another day. He goes back to his hotel and, worn out, goes to bed.

Early the next morning he is in front of the Galleria degli Uffizi, on the Piazza della Signoria. The museum opens after a while. Renoir is a morning man, a lover of morning light and fresh air. He is the first tourist to go into the museum that day. He doesn’t seem to be carrying any book or paper. But he’s ready to take long, leisurely looks. He scrutinizes the paintings hanging on the wall with the calm gaze of a vine-grower. He scrutinizes them one by one: he looks at them from close-up, from afar, from the right and the left. And walks through several rooms like that. With unexpected physical staying power – museums are tiring, create an unpleasant emptiness
in the stomach and intolerable exhaustion – he scrutinizes the canvasses, the tables, the
afreschi
, as if he’d lost all notion of time. A guard informs him that they must shut for the
colazione
. It’s time for lunch. Everyone else has left the museum. Renoir is the last out, seems edgy and thoughtful. In the afternoon, he’s the first to go into the Uffizi. He’s eaten a quick plate of spaghetti in a nearby trattoria, drunk a coffee standing up and appeared opposite the entrance before opening time. He does exactly the same the following day, morning and afternoon. However, on that genuinely tragic day you notice he doesn’t linger long looking microscopically at the paintings, as on the previous day. He stops in front of a few paintings and looks more attentively. With others he takes a quick glance and walks on. Some produce a sense of revulsion and he turns his back with a flourish he tries to conceal, though it is obvious enough. By late afternoon on that second day, he’s had enough. He seems weary and on edge. Back in his hotel, he consults the train timetable, and asks for the bill. And starts packing his case.

That was when we bumped into him staring at a cup of coffee in that small bar in the vicinity of the Central Station. What ever happened? He himself will tell us later.

“My patience had run out,” he said. “My head kept colliding everywhere, even my elbows clashed with the style. What cold, icy, premeditated painting …! Those crisscross blocks of black and white marble made me dizzy. I was short of air, was choking. While I was in Florence, I felt I was walking over a chessboard, that I was living in a cage, that they’d shut me inside a prison cell. I can’t find the words to describe how I suffered in the Uffizi … I simply fled from Florence.”

Well, it seems a perfectly understandable position: it is a clear, honest position. One must choose in life. Renoir had chosen a path. As I see it, his choice is highly valuable. Degas would say: “They shoot us down and then
turn our pockets out to see if they can find anything else.” Renoir felt choked by all the stasis and fled immediately. Others say they feel choked in a similar way but stay on and turn out their pockets. Renoir follows in the tradition of the great realist painters: Vermeer, Velázquez, and Titian. It is a difficult tradition precisely because it seems so free and energetic – in any case, it is the greatest freedom to which an artist can aspire.

When I arrived in Rome, I went to live in the Pensione Fiorentina, on the recommendation of my friend Spadafora the journalist. The
pensione
was on the Via del Tritone and had an international clientele.

In any other major European city the place would have been a dreadful mistake from the point of view of comfort. It was located in one of the noisiest and most central areas in Rome. You couldn’t possibly imagine enjoying the slightest rest or tranquility there. However, appearances can be deceptive, even in Rome. The boarding house occupied part of the structure of an old palace with enormous rooms and the thickest of walls. The outer forms
of that old bulwark had been removed when it was converted into a modern house, but the old walls survived and isolated the house from the urban hue and cry. It wasn’t the peace you find in provincial cities. A vague and distant singsong hum drifted through the house from nine
A.M.
to eleven
P.M.
But it wasn’t a strident, insoluble noise that attacked the nervous system. The bother was minimal.

A restaurant was on the ground floor and the boarding house occupied the first and fourth floors. A small, narrow cul-de-sac separated it from the house next door. When I arrived, I was allotted bedroom twelve on the first floor. It didn’t look over the street, but over the end of a passageway that led to the back of the building. Full of cheap furniture from the days of Cavour worn threadbare by constant use, it was a dark, gloomy spot. A disjointed gallery – the old palace loggia – meant the bedroom window had no access to the open space at the rear; if a sunbeam ever shone in, it looked like a stray sunbeam that had come from nowhere, of its own volition. The window’s location blocked my view of the bottom of the open area, though I could see the picturesque, very Italian upper reaches. I could see clotheslines strung from one balcony to the next, various chicken coops, huge amounts of old junk, and the branches of a vine the roots of which I never did track down. Decrepit and precariously balanced, everything seemed to hang by a thread, but kept up perfectly. In addition, there was a constant din that sometimes turned into a fierce war of words. An unhappy couple lived in the area – always open to the world – opposite my bedroom window and they engaged in shouting matches that followed on in quick succession. When they started shrieking, other neighbors leaned out of their windows to try to shut them up by bawling wildly. Once the contest had begun, all the children in the vicinity began to cry their hearts out, as if on cue; the dishwashers in the ground-floor restaurant, encouraged by the verbal jousting,
clattered their buckets of dirty crockery, and a Latin teacher, a man with a long beard, wound up by the relentless screaming, and unable to work on his papers, leaned out of his window with a clarinet to his lips and blew at full blast for as long as was necessary. His method usually worked: when that crazy din peaked, the general din began to fade. It was the application of the
similia similibus curantur
of quack medicine to rowdy conjugal tiffs. When the teacher had achieved his aim, he smiled smugly and withdrew, placing his clarinet vertically on the most visible part of his window ledge, both to prompt a general sense of shame and indicate he was ready to repeat the method the moment the row recommenced.

Though these inner exchanges at the Pensione Fiorentina were perhaps not the politest, I found them very helpful in accustoming my ear to the various dialects of the peninsula.

Spadafora’s recommendation turned out to be highly beneficial. The management treated me very kindly and the manager sometimes came into my bedroom to pass the time of day. This gentleman – a German from the south – was in his forties, on the thin side, fair, blue-eyed and sallow-skinned with big, transparent ears that stuck out; his head had been shaved all over, except for over his forehead which was furnished with rather a rakish commercial toupé. He wore the black morning coat and striped trousers managers of such places tend to wear. He spoke very precisely, in a staccato syncopated style to avoid confusion and define the limits of the stream of topics rehearsed. His favorite gesture was to enumerate his statements and arguments by counting them on his fingers and then conclude a subject by moving his hands as if an invisible plumb-line was dangling in front of him. He always held his thumb next to his little finger ready to count and sometimes described a circle in the air, dividing it into angles and sections as if he was slicing a watermelon. Each slice was a topic … His passion for
precision succeeded in giving his trivial conversation a grandiose ring, and among his acquaintances – not to mention his clientele – he was thought to be a man of the golden mean with original opinions. One couldn’t deny that he was strong on method.

As I said, the boarding house was international, though the clientele was essentially German. In my time, however, there were lots of Russian émigrés and the language they spoke – as wistful and sugary as jam – was often to be heard in the small sitting room and dismally dark passageways.

Mommsen the historian figured as the most distinguished occasional lodger in the annals of that boarding house. This fact was the Pensione Fiorentina’s crowning glory. The manager boasted how he tied the great man’s shoelaces one day when the
sirocco
had brought on an attack of rheumatism. After he’d said that, I took the opportunity to put a question to him.

“If you tied his shoelaces,” I said, “you probably noticed his feet. I’ve heard that Mommsen’s feet were huge, very fat and quite extraordinary, the most impressive feet a historian may ever have had. Could you confirm this was in fact true?”

The manager looked at me sternly and refused to answer. I realized that Mommsen was untouchable in that household, that he was a holy of holies, and memories of him were idealized and embellished and simply floated on air.

One day the manager told me an anecdote that highlighted the historian’s character.

When Mommsen was in Rome, he worked in the Vatican Library. One afternoon he was in his usual place in the library when the Pope walked in on the spur of the moment, with none of the rituals of protocol. When his presence was noted, everyone stood up. Only Mommsen remained seated at his table as if nothing had changed. The Pope crossed the vast reading
room and entered the Prefect’s office, keen above all to pass unperceived. Within two hours the whole of Rome was talking about what had happened. The manager’s features glowed with the most ardent admiration, as he asked me: “What do you think? Could one have shown finer mettle, been firmer and more single-minded? Oh, what a man that Mommsen was! A proper German of the old school! Don’t you agree?”

“No, I don’t. I think what he did was quite deplorable, an act of complete discourtesy. One can be as anti-Papist as you like but Mommsen, in the Vatican Library, wasn’t in his own home, and when you are in someone else’s and the master enters, good manners require that you stand up …”

The manager stiffened, glared at me, muttered a few unintelligible words and changed the subject.

A few days later, it became evident that the manager championed imperialist ideas, he spoke admiringly to me about the war.