ON SHROVE TUESDAY AFTERNOON my wife had to go to Lugano at very short notice. She tried to persuade me to accompany her, as we could then spend a little time watching people wandering around in their carnival costumes, or we might even watch a parade. I wasn’t exactly in the mood, having been suffering for weeks from pains in all my joints, and in my state of semi-paralysis I jibbed at the very thought of having to put on my coat and get into the car. But after a certain amount of resistance, I finally plucked up some courage and agreed to go. We went down to the landing stage, where my wife dropped me before she drove off to find a parking place, and I waited with Kato, our cook, in watery but still perceptible sunshine in the midst of a gently bustling flood of activity. Even on an ordinary day, Lugano is an extremely cheerful, friendly town, but today every alleyway and every square was laughing at its merriest and most boisterous—the colourful costumes were laughing, the faces were laughing, the windows of the houses on the piazza were overflowing with laughing masks and laughing people, and today even the noise of the town was laughing. It consisted of shouting, waves of laughter and people calling to one another, snatches of music, the funny, echoing boom of a loudspeaker, screeches and screams of mock terror from girls being bombarded by boys with fistfuls of confetti, the obvious main purpose being to try and stuff a load of it into the mouth of the victim. The streets were all covered with these multicoloured scraps, and under the arches you felt as if you were walking on a soft carpet of sand or moss.
My wife soon returned, and we took up our positions in a corner of the Piazza Riforma. This square seemed to be right at the heart of the festival. The square and the pavements were crowded with people, but in between the bright and noisy groups of standing spectators there was also a continuous coming and going of strolling couples or members of different societies, including lots of children in fancy dress. On the far side of the square a stage had been erected, on which several people performed their lively acts in front of a loudspeaker: an MC, a folk singer with guitar, a vulgar clown and various others. You listened or you didn’t, you understood or you didn’t, but you laughed anyway when the clown hit a familiar nail on its familiar head, actors and audience interacted, with those on- and offstage goading each other on, and there was a continual exchange of goodwill, sparks flying, fun and games and everyone ready to laugh. The MC introduced a youth to his fellow citizens—a young and very gifted amateur artiste, who delighted us with his virtuoso imitations of animal calls and other sounds.
I’d promised myself that we would only stay for a quarter-of-an-hour at most in the town. However, we stayed for a good half-hour happily watching and listening. For me, stopping in a town in the midst of a crowd—even in a festive town—is highly unusual and half frightening, half intoxicating. I live for weeks and months on end in my studio and my garden, and very rarely rouse myself enough to go as far as the village or even the end of our own plot of land. Now, suddenly, there I was surrounded by crowds of people, in the middle of a laughing, joking town, laughing with them, and enjoying the sight of human faces, so many types, full of changes and surprises, once more one among many, part of the whole, and swimming with the tide. Of course it wouldn’t last for long, and soon my cold aching feet and my tired aching legs would have had enough and would long to go home, and soon too the charming little episode of intoxicating sights and sounds, the vision of these thousand so wonderful, so beautiful, so interesting, so lovable faces, and the hearing of these many voices, these speaking, laughing, screaming, giggling, ordinary, high, deep, warm or harsh human voices would have exhausted me; my cheerful surrender to the rich abundance of visual and aural pleasures would be followed by fatigue and a fear, bordering on vertigo, of this welter of no longer controllable impressions. “I know, I know,” Thomas Mann would say now, quoting Effi Briest’s father. If one took the trouble to think about it for a moment, it wasn’t just the weaknesses of old age that were to blame for this fear of excess, of the world’s abundance, of the dazzling illusions of Maya. Nor, to use the terms of the psychologist, was it simply the introvert’s fear of having to prove himself to the world around him. There were other, to a certain degree better reasons for this gentle, vertigo-like fear and susceptibility to weariness. When I saw my neighbours, who throughout that same half-hour had been standing near me in the Piazza Riforma, it seemed to me that they were like fish in water, at ease, tired but happy, under no sort of pressure; it seemed to me that their eyes took in the images, their ears the sounds, as if behind the eyes there was not a film, not a brain, not a store and an archive, and behind the ears there was not a record or a tape, at every second busy collecting, gathering, recording, duty-bound not only to enjoy but also—and far more importantly—to preserve in order later perhaps to replay, obliged to register everything with the greatest possible degree of precision. In brief, once more I was standing there not as a member of the audience, not as a witness and a listener without responsibility, but as a painter with sketchbook in hand, working, straining every sinew. Because this was our way, the artist’s way, of enjoying and celebrating—it consisted in working, in obligation, and yet all the same it was pleasure, so long as there was still enough strength, so long as the eyes could bear the constant toing and froing between scene and sketchbook, so long as the archive in the brain still had space and the ability to expand. I would never be able to explain this to my neighbours if they were to ask me or if I wished to make the effort myself; they would probably laugh and say:
“Caro uomo, stop moaning about your job! It’s just a matter of watching and eventually describing funny things, which may seem demanding and hard work to you, whereas as far as you’re concerned the rest of us are enjoying our holiday, gawping and lazing around doing nothing. But we really are on holiday, neighbour, and we’re here to enjoy ourselves, not to do our jobs like you. Only our jobs are not as nice as yours, signore, and if you had to spend a single day like us in our shops or workshops, factories or offices, you’d soon be shattered.”
He’s right, my neighbour, absolutely right—but it doesn’t help, because I think I’m right too. But we tell each other our truths without any resentment on either side—amicably, and with a bit of a twinkle in the eye, each of us wishing only to justify himself a little, but not wishing to hurt the other’s feelings.
All the same, the arrival of such thoughts, or simply imagining such conversations and justifications, was enough to set off feelings of renunciation and fatigue—it would soon be time to go home and catch up on the midday rest that I’d missed out on. And alas, how few of the fine images of this half-hour had made their way into the archive to be saved! How many hundreds, maybe of the finest, had passed by my indolent eyes and ears leaving as little trace as in those people I thought myself justified in calling gawpers and holiday-makers!
One of the thousand images, however, did remain, and is to be recorded for friends in my little sketchbook.
Standing near me for almost the whole of my stay in the festive piazza was a very still and silent figure; I didn’t hear him say a word throughout the half-hour, and I scarcely saw him move—he just stood there in strange isolation, or reverie, in the midst of the colourful hustle and bustle, as still as a painting and very beautiful. He was a little boy, seven years old at the most, a pretty little fellow with the innocent face of a child—for me the most lovable face of all the hundreds. He was wearing a costume—a black robe, a black top hat, and one arm was thrust through a little ladder; there was a chimney sweep’s brush too, and all of this was carefully and beautifully made, while the dear little face was coloured with a bit of soot or some other black stuff. But he wasn’t aware of any of this. Unlike all the other grown-up Pierrots, Chinese, pirates, Mexicans and Biedermeiers, and in total contrast to the performers on the stage he had no consciousness at all of the fact that he was wearing a costume and represented a chimney sweep, or of the fact that this was something special and funny and suited him so well. No, he just stood there, small and still, in his place, his tiny feet in his tiny brown shoes, his black polished ladder over his shoulder, hemmed in by the crowd and occasionally jostled without even noticing it, with his dreamily enchanted, bright blue eyes staring from his smooth-skinned child’s face with blackened cheeks up at a window in the house before which we were standing. There in the window, a man’s height above our heads, was a jolly collection of children, a bit bigger than him, laughing, shrieking and pushing each other—all of them in bright fancy dress, and from time to time showering us with handfuls or bagfuls of confetti. With a kind of reverent rapture, lost in blissful admiration, the little boy’s eyes gazed upwards, astonished, fascinated, inexhaustibly and magnetically drawn to the sight. There was no longing in his expression, no burning desire, but just total absorption and grateful delight. I couldn’t make out what it was that so amazed this young soul, filling him with the unique joy of watching and being enraptured. It might have been the resplendent colours of the costumes, or a first realisation of the beauty of girls’ faces, or the attentiveness of a lonely child who had no brothers or sisters, listening to the social chatter of the pretty children up above—or perhaps the boy’s eyes were simply bewitched by the magic of the gently drifting shower of colours sinking down every so often from the hands of his idols, collecting in thin layers on the heads and clothes, and more densely on the stone slabs below, which were already covered as if in fine sand.
And my feelings were like those of the boy. Just as he perceived nothing about himself and the attributes and intentions of his disguise, nothing of the crowd, the clowns on stage and the laughter and applause that rippled through the spectators in throbbing waves, but kept his eyes fixed immovably on the window, so too were my eyes and heart, in the midst of all these urgently competing images, fixed on and devoted to only one image—the child’s face between the black hat and the black robe, his innocence, his sensitivity to beauty, his unselfconscious happiness.
1953