WHEN, AFTER MONTHS OF absence, I return to my hill in Ticino, I am always surprised and moved by its beauty—then it is not a matter of simply being back home, but first I must transplant myself, sink new roots, rebind old threads, return to old habits, and gradually rediscover feelings of past and home before my southern rural life begins to re-emerge. Not only do the suitcases have to be unpacked, and the country clothes and shoes located again, but I must also find out whether the winter rains have made their mark on the bedroom, whether the neighbours are still alive, and I must enquire what has changed here during my six-month absence, and what advances have been made in the process that is gradually robbing even this beloved place of its long-guarded innocence and is filling it with the blessings of civilisation. Indeed, down in the gorge below another slope has been deforested and a villa is under construction, and on a sharp bend our road has been widened, and an enchanting old garden has been made into an escape route. The last horse-drawn carriages have gone, and have been replaced by cars, but these new automobiles are much too big for our narrow lanes. And so I shall never again see old Piero in his blue postilion’s uniform, with his yellow carriage and two bounding horses, racing down the hill, and I shall never again see him in the Grotto del Pace with his glass of wine, enjoying his little off-duty break. Alas, I shall never again sit at that beautiful forest’s edge above Lugano, my favourite spot for painting—a stranger has bought both forest and field, and fenced it in with wire, and where there were once a few beautiful ash trees, now they’re building a garage.
On the other hand, the grass below the vines is as green as ever, and from beneath the faded leaves scamper the same old blue-green emerald lizards, and the forest is blue and white with evergreens, anemones and strawberry blossoms, and shining up coolly and softly through this verdant forest is the lake …
Anyway, ahead of me lies a whole summer and autumn, and once again I’m hoping for a few good months, enjoying long days out in the open, being free for a while from my gout, playing with my paints, and living a happier, more innocent life than is possible in winter and in the cities. The years pass quickly—the barefooted children I saw going to school in the village when I first moved here are now married, or sitting at typewriters or behind counters in Lugano or Milan, and the elders of the village are dead and buried.
Now I remember Nina—is she still alive? Dear God, why have I not thought of her before? Nina is my friend, one of the few good friends I have in this region. She is seventy-eight years old, and lives in one of the most remote villages in the area, on which modern times have scarcely laid a finger. The path to her place is steep and difficult—I shall have to go down the hill for a few hundred metres in the baking sun, and then climb up again on the other side. But I set out at once, and first go downhill through the vineyards and forest, then across the narrow green valley, then steeply up the slopes which in summer are covered with cyclamen and in winter with Christmas roses. I ask the first child I meet in the village how old Nina is getting on. Oh, I’m told, she still spends her evenings sitting by the church wall taking snuff. Happily I go on my way—so she’s still alive, I haven’t lost her yet, and she’ll give me a warm welcome, and even if she moans and groans a bit, she’ll once more offer me the perfect model of a lonely old woman, stoically and not without humour enduring her gout and her isolation, standing no nonsense and making no concessions to the world, but spitting serenely in its face, and right to the end not bothering either doctor or priest.
I leave the dazzling road and go past the chapel in the shadows of the dark, age-old wall that winds its way defiantly along the rocky ridge and knows no time, no other present than the ever returning sun, no change but that of the seasons. Decade after decade, century after century. One day these old walls will also fall, and these lovely, dark and dirty quarters will be rebuilt with cement, metal, running water, hygiene, gramophones and other cultural artefacts, and over the bones of old Nina they will build a hotel with a French menu, or a Berliner will build himself a summer retreat. But today they are still standing, and I climb over the high stone threshold, mount the curved flight of stone steps and enter the kitchen of my friend Nina. As always it smells of stone and cold and soot and coffee and the intense odour of smoke from unseasoned wood, and on the stone floor in front of the huge fireplace, sitting on her low stool, is old Nina—she has lit a little fire in the fireplace, and the smoke is making her eyes water slightly, and with her brown, arthritic fingers she is pushing bits of wood back into the fire.
“Hello, Nina, do you recognise me?”
“Oh, signor poeta, caro amico, son contento di rivederla!”
She gets up, although I don’t want her to—she stands up, which takes her a while, and then takes a few stiff-legged steps. In her trembling left hand she is holding the wooden snuffbox, and she has a black woollen shawl draped round her bust and back. Her sharp bright eyes gaze with a mixture of sadness and laughter from the beautiful old eagle face. She gazes at me with a teasing but affectionate expression. She knows Steppenwolf, and knows I am a signor and an artist, but that I’m not much good for anything and that I wander round Ticino all on my own, and have found as little happiness as she has, even though both of us have certainly kept an equally sharp lookout for it. What a pity, Nina, that you were born forty years too soon for me. What a pity. It’s true that not everyone thinks you’re beautiful, and some even think you’re an old witch with those fiery eyes, those bent legs, those dirty fingers and that snuff in your nose. But what a nose it is in that wrinkled eagle face! What bearing, once she has pulled herself upright and stands at her full gaunt height! And how intelligent, how proud, how disdainful and yet not wicked is the expression in those finely carved, frank and fearless eyes! Old woman, what a beautiful girl you must have been, and what a beautiful, bold and spirited woman you must have become! Nina reminds me of past summers, of my friends, my sister, my mistress—all of whom she knows. In the meantime, she takes a quick look at the kettle, sees the water boiling, shakes some ground coffee out of the coffee grinder, makes me a cup, offers me some snuff, and then we sit by the fire, drink our coffee, spit into the flames, tell tales, ask questions, gradually fall silent, and say a few words about gout, winter and the uncertainty of life.
“Gout! It’s a whore, a bloody whore! Sporca puttana! The Devil take it! I wish it would go to hell! Ah well, no use swearing. I’m glad you came, very glad. We should stay friends. Not many people come to see you when you’re old. I’m seventy-eight now.”
Once more she struggles to her feet and goes into the next room, where faded photographs are stuck in the mirror. I know she’s now looking for a present to give me. She can’t find anything, and so she offers me one of the old photographs as a gift, and when I refuse to take it, at least I have to have another sniff out of her snuffbox.
My friend’s smoky kitchen is not very clean and is not at all hygienic—the floor is covered in spittle, the wicker from her chair hangs down in threads, and few of you readers would like to drink from her coffee pot, that old metal coffee pot which is black with smoke and grey with ashes, and whose sides are thickly crusted with dried-up coffee accumulated over the years. Life here is remote from the modern world and time, maybe pretty crude and grotty, pretty rundown, and anything but clean, but on the other hand it’s close to the hills and forests, close to the goats and hens (they run clucking round the kitchen), close to witches and to fairy tales. The coffee from the battered old coffee pot smells wonderful—a strong, deep black coffee with a gentle aromatic hint of bitterness from the woodsmoke, and our sitting together drinking coffee, and the curses and the affection, and Nina’s undaunted old face are infinitely more attractive to me than a dozen invitations to a tea dance, a dozen evenings of literary conversation in a circle of famous intellectuals, although of course I should not like to deny these charming occupations their relative value.
Outside, the sun is now setting, Nina’s cat comes in and jumps onto her lap, and the light from the fire glows more warmly on the whitewashed stone walls. How cold, how cruelly cold winter must have been in this high and empty stone cave that contains nothing but the little open fire flickering in the fireplace, and the lonely old woman with gout eating her joints and no other company than the cat and her three chickens.
The cat is chased out. Nina gets up again and stands tall and ghostly in the twilight, a thin, bony figure with a shock of white hair falling over the sharply watchful eagle face. She won’t let me leave yet. She invites me to be her guest for another hour, and goes to fetch bread and wine.
1927