A Writer's World (49 page)

I made a pilgrimage, all the same, to the grave of Beethoven in the Grove of Honour, at the central cemetery, the Zentralfriedhof. Mozart is commemorated there too, if only retrospectively, his body having unfortunately been dumped in an unmarked pauper’s grave, and Johann Strauss the Elder is lapped by cherubim near by, and Hugo Wolf the
Lieder
writer, than whom no single human being has ever plunged me into profounder despondency, is among the shrubberies round the corner. Beethoven’s tomb was easy enough to find because it had so many wreaths upon it, including one laid that morning, with visiting card attached, by Professor Hisako Kocho, President of the Folk Opera Society of Oita Prefecture (telephone Oita 5386). Yet even this grand sanctuary did not make my heart race, or inspire me to heroic yearnings: for with the gilded lyre upon its headstone, its Old German lettering and its generally metronomic or Edition Peters manner, it reminded me horribly of piano practice.

At night, however, lights are reflected in the overhead wires of the tramcars, and seem to slide eerily around the Ringstrasse of their own accord, like beings in a separate field of animation, lighter, faster, airier, more sly, than any No. 2 to Franz-Josefs Kai. Perhaps that well-known Viennese Herr Professor Freud used to contemplate them, as he strode on his long meditative walks: certainly it was from the generic psyche of Vienna that he drew his definition of the subconscious – that part of every human, every city, which lies concealed beneath the personality, or is revealed only by shimmering glints on street-car wires.

The most celebrated contemporary citizen of Vienna is not an analyst of trauma, but a scourer. Policeman lounging feet-up on the stairs outside, files of data stacked macabre around him, Simon Wiesenthal the Nazi-hunter sits in his office above Salztorstrasse, close to the old Jewish quarter and the Gestapo HQ, endlessly considering the darkest categories of angst. Around him are framed testimonials from grateful institutions – he is an award-winning Nazi-hunter – but few of them come from societies in Vienna. Hundreds of the most virulent Nazis, he says, still live unscathed in these parts – one much-respected builder of churches not only constructed the Auschwitz gas chambers, but
repaired
them, too. Dr Wiesenthal is by no means sufficiently
gemütlich
for the Viennese. There was an attempt on his life not long ago, and the city authorities very much wish, he tells me, that he would go somewhere else: in the meantime they put that slovenly policeman on his door, and another one, toting an automatic rifle, stands just in case outside the Synagogue in Seitenstettengasse.

I have to say that for a few hours after visiting Dr Wiesenthal I saw the face of Eichmann all around me – that peaked but ordinary face which I remember so exactly from the courtroom at Jerusalem years ago, and which Hannah Arendt characterized for ever as expressing ‘the banality of evil’. Nothing could be more unfair, I know, to the people of Vienna. Half of them are too young to remember Nazidom anyway, and the others, though if we are to believe Dr Wiesenthal they include a far higher proportion of war criminals than survive in any German city, were doubtless the victims above all of their
genii
loci
. It was the presence of Vienna, after all, that first incited Adolf Hitler himself to his grandiose dreams of sovereignty – like an enchantment out of the Arabian Nights, he thought the vainglorious horror of the Ringstrasse.

But even if I dismiss from my mind the image of that lady in the brown suit, braided and blonde in those days, greeting the storm troopers with rose petals from the pockets of her dirndl, still I cannot dispel the feeling,
as I walk these streets, that I am promenading one great conglomeration of neurosis. The reasons for it are not hard to conjecture – the crippling social legacies of the monarchy, the relentless pressures of
Gemütlichkeit
, historical humiliation, geographical exposure – drive down Metternich’s Landstrasse now, and in an hour you are on the frontiers of Czechoslovakia or of Hungary, where the sentinels of the Eastern world, weapons over their shoulders, stand with the great steppes at their backs.

No wonder this is a Freudian city in every sense. Not only is Freud’s house in Berggasse maintained as a shrine, where you may buy mounted photographs of his original Couch, or fancy yourself summoning dreams for interpretation in the very room where the Oedipus complex was first isolated. Not only that, but everywhere in the city you feel around you the ideas, the idioms and the subject matter of Freud’s vision: Father Figures tower in royal and apostolic statuary, libidos search for discos or Prater prostitutes, repressions wander arm-in-arm on Sunday afternoons down the beckoning avenues of Zentralfriedhof. It is as though at heart this whole famous metropolis, through its bows, smiles and proprieties, would like nothing so much as to flop down on a sofa in tearful revelation – in the presence, of course, of a properly
gemütlich
and well-qualified Herr Dr Professor.

And the last and most marvellous flowering of the Viennese genius, that surge of styles, ideas and mannerisms which orchestrated the decay and collapse of the Habsburgs, was itself a distinctly neurotic blossoming. No lyric joy of liberation seems to have inspired the new artistic forms by which the architects, the painters and the composers of this city rebelled against the old order of things. The temple of their revolution was the art gallery called the Secession House, built by the architect Josef Olbrich in 1898 and still as good as new: but it was officially opened by the Emperor anyway, and with its squat hunched form and its dome of gilded laurel-leaves looks rather like a mausoleum from that Grove of Honour (though I dare say the Secessionists themselves, whose text was Ver Sacrum, Sacred Spring, thought it looked like a pump room). There was not, it seems, much fine careless rapture to this renaissance, to the venomous furies and gold-encased women of its paintings, to the alternate swirls and severities of its ever more loveless architecture.

But it did have a daemonic fire to it, and this strain of tormented or inverted genius lingers today like a reflected glow of the city’s inner conflicts. I find it more haunting, if less dazzling, than the excesses of Ringstrasse,
for it shows itself more obliquely, in art as in life: a sudden tangle of decoration, a blank façade of concrete, the sunken eye of a man in the subway, a woman’s twisted face – wrenched by stroke? by bitterness? – as she sits alone over her coffee. For all its comfort, for all its beauty, for all its wealth and self-esteem, Vienna does not feel to me a happy city. Its citizens seem to be still working out, in their various ways, the very same doubts and frustrations which those artists expressed with such disturbing power in the last days of the old regime. They often fail. The suicide rate has always been high in Vienna. ‘He died like a tailor’, is supposed to have been Franz Josef’s odious comment on the fate of his son and heir at Mayerling, and so he acknowledged how commonplace, how workaday, was the self-destructive urge among his children the citizens at large. Death is a born Viennese, and nowhere is he more
gemütlich
, as it happens, than in the crypt of the Church of the Capuchins, where the corpses of the Habsburgs themselves are stored: for there is a small workshop down there too, for the restoration of imperial sarcophagi, and if you look through its window you may see a gigantic casket emptied of its contents, having its lid repaired perhaps, or its supporting angels re-capitated, and looking for all the world like a car in for its 6,000-mile service, or a lawnmower parked among the buckets and hose-pipes of the garden shed.

The trams all but killed me once. In some parts of the Ringstrasse they alone run against the flow of the traffic, and looking to the right to make sure I was not run down by an archduke in an Alfa, I was all but squashed by a trolley-car coming up from the left.
‘Achtung! Achtung!
’ screamed several ladies in brown tweed suits, but they forgave me my stupidity – had not Dr Waldheim, they reminded each other, Secretary-General of the United Nations, almost met his end in the very same way, on that very same street?

Inevitably people have seen Freud’s Death-Wish exemplified in this city, so preoccupied with the past, the tomb, and how the mighty fall. It seems to me though that Vienna is adept at transferring that Wish to others. It is fateful not so much to itself as to the rest of us. It prospers well enough in its neuroses – it is we who suffer the traumas! Viennese Modernism hardly touched the surface of Vienna with its shapes, but everywhere else it was to cause a tragic alienation between architecture and public taste. Viennese Atonalism may seldom be heard in Vienna’s own
Musikverein
, but everywhere else it long ago made life’s hard pleasures harder still. Viennese Communalism, expressed in the vast housing estates so dear to
sociologists of the 1930s, turns out to have been a step towards the universal miseries of the Social Security tower block. The anti-Semitism of Vienna pushed us all towards the Final Solution, the Zionism that was born there has left many a young body, Jewish and Gentile too, dead along the path to Israel. Freud himself, though until twenty years ago, I am told, his name was scarcely mentioned at psychiatry seminars in Vienna, long ago left the rest of the world irrevocably addled by his genius.

Is there any city more seminally disturbing? It is as though Vienna has been a laboratory of all our inhibitions, experimenting down the generations in new ways of confusing us. Perhaps rather than all our Death-Wishes it expresses all our schizophrenias? I rather think it may, you know, for as I stepped back from the track that day just in time to avoid extinction – ‘
Achtung! Stop! Comes the tram!
’ – I looked up at the passing streetcar and distinctly saw there, just for a moment, my own face in its slightly steamed-up window. We exchanged distant smiles, between Id and Ego, or dream and wake.

A most unlikely statue greets the seafarer at the small port of Puerto Madryn, on Golfo Nuevo in Argentinian Patagonia – if you can call it greeting, because actually the figure stands with its rump to the sea, on a big concrete plinth like a launching ramp. This being Latin America, you might expect the statue to honour Libertad, or Fidelidad, or at least Simon Bolívar. In fact, it honours Welsh Womanhood.

Welsh
Womanhood
? If you have any doubts, look round that ramp. There, on the front, is a small plaque in that ancient and magically resilient language, Cymraeg – Welsh to the world at large. I come from Wales, and at our great annual festival, the National Eisteddfod, I am always enthralled to see people wandering around who are patently Welsh, but somehow more so, with an extra verve to everything they do. These are the Welsh of Patagonia, whose 163 forebears first went ashore on the site of Puerto Madryn in 1865, and who are commemorated by that image on the waterfront.

They were the original European settlers of Argentinian Patagonia, and they are recognized as the founders of the province of Chubut, which stretches clean across Patagonia from the Atlantic to the Andes. They were not looking for an easy life, or even for profit. They were escaping the oppressive English at home, and hoping to establish here a New Wales of their own, where they could worship as they pleased, order their affairs as they wished and speak their own language. They had chosen a virtually uninhabited destination, ungoverned, no more than technically part of Argentina, and they called it simply Y Wladfa, The Colony.

These were not the boozy, bawdy, lyrical Welsh. These were nineteenth-century chapel Welsh, God-fearing and Bible-loving, and it so happened that almost the moment I arrived I found myself at a full-blown Welsh chapel function – a vestry tea-party for a Welsh preacher returning to Wales. This was jumping into Y Wladfa at the deep end. It was Welshness
in excelsis
. The welcome was fervent – ‘A visitor from Wales! Come in, come in, have some tea, sit down meet Mrs Williams, meet Mrs Jones!’ Not a word was spoken but in Cymraeg, not a face was anything but recognizably Welsh, and among the celebrants was a granddaughter of Lewis Jones, the founding patriarch of The Colony.

Next day a violent wind blew up. Everything banged, everything whistled, dust, paper, bits of trees and tin cans rushed about the streets. Through it all, if I looked through my window, huddled against the blast and half-veiled in dust, I could see Dyffryn Camwy, the valley of the lower Chubut which was the original Y Wladfa. Nowadays the Welsh generally call it just Y Dyffryn, the Valley.

It was not at all what the settlers had been led to expect. It was not a bit like Wales. It was not in the least a land of milk and honey. It was dead flat, it was covered in scrub, it had virtually no trees and the river ran through it muddily, now and then erupting into catastrophic floods. Some of the Welsh understandably returned home again, or went up to Canada, but most of them stuck it out. New migrants arrived from Wales, and in time they made a thriving agricultural colony, forty-odd miles long, irrigated by a complex system of canals, systematically divided among the settler families, and equipped with fourteen thoroughly Welsh chapels. It was a tight-knit, ethnically cohesive society.

By now the original farms of the Valley have mostly been broken up, and its community is largely scattered. The dykes the Welsh built are still at work, but the men you see scything or digging or ploughing by hand are likely to be Bolivian migrants, and in the occasional grocery store, out among the farms, you may find yourself served by wild-looking semi-Indian people.

Here and there, though, all unexpected in little green enclosures, you will come across one of those fourteen chapels. It is probably built of red brick, extremely plain and four-square, but it retains an air of contemplative serenity. Nine chapels are still active in the Valley on and off – when there is a preacher available, or when there is a song festival – and to a Welsh sentimentalist they are almost excruciatingly evocative. Some of them
have graveyards, and these are touching too. Whole families of Joneses, Evanses, Williamses and Morgans lie here, sometimes beneath stones of real Welsh slate, carved by masons far away in Wales with the traditional motifs of Welsh mourning.

There are Welsh people in the Valley, still alive, still very Welsh. The first few doors you knock on will bring only regretful responses in Spanish. Then you strike lucky. ‘D’you speak Welsh, señor?’ you ask for the tenth time, and into a weathered brown face there will come a gleam of welcome. The house will almost certainly be simple. You will be seated at once on a hard-backed chair by the kitchen table, and the kettle will be on the boil for tea. Your conversation will probably be about Roots. Even Patagonian Welsh people who have never been to Wales know its geography well, know which villages their grandparents came from, and very probably know where your own home is on the map. Their Welsh is likely to be slightly rusty and slow, very convenient to somebody like me whose command of the language is at best rough and ready.

It may well be, as legend in Wales habitually has it, that your hosts are living almost exactly as they might be living in Wales today, or at least the day before yesterday: with the same sort of furniture, the same inherited knick-knacks, an upright piano perhaps, a case of books, home-made butter in the refrigerator and a border collie at the door. On the table is likely to be a copy of
Y
Drafod
, the Welsh-language journal which has been published in Patagonia for more than a century, and is now less a newspaper than a kind of family circular. Everything is spick-and-span in such a house, very fresh, very clean, very
taclus
–a Welsh word which, meaning ‘tidy’ in an almost abstract sense, is very popular in Y Wladfa.

But it may be that you hit upon extremely poor Welsh farmers, living in a house of crude brick whose roof may be of mud and wattle, like the houses of medieval Europe. Beneath their bare electric light bulbs these people are living far closer to the soil than ever they would be if their forebears had never left Wales in the first place. The chances are that the family is now half-Hispanic, and that only the father or mother speaks Welsh at all. Another generation, and the language will be lost to this house.

The Valley is hardly an eldorado, anyway, and there were some among the original Welsh who looked further west, into the wide desert plateau that lies beyond. This was the province of the wild beasts and the Tehuelche Indians, and Welshmen from the Dyffryn Camwy were among the first
foreigners to cross it. It is some 450 miles from the Valley to the foothills of the Andes, and in every mile of it I felt the mounting exhilaration that must have animated the young men and women of Y Wladfa, striking west out of the valley into the unknown.

Finally, like them, I saw the land of milk and honey. First, distant snow-ridges of the Andes, then rolling foothills, and lakes, and verdant valleys, and thickets of green trees, and wide farmlands, and horses, and on that brilliant summer day, the sort of glow of fulfilment that allegorical artists used to apply to pictures of theological reassurance. It is a marvellous, spectacular country.

The Welsh were the first Europeans to settle it, and they called it Cwm Hyfryd, Lovely Valley. I felt no tristesse here. The culture of the Welsh is slowly fading here too, but I felt it was going out in style. Here the Welsh farms are scattered in space and liberty against the backdrop of the high mountains, and the little metropolis of the Welsh, Trevelin, seemed full of fun and sunshine. I drove from farm to farm in high spirits, buying cheeses here, discussing the future of the Welsh language there, listening to tales of hard winters and economic hazard – for even in a Promised Land, life is seldom easy. There were horses everywhere, and lovely dogs. A young Welsh farmer called up his dad for me in Welsh on his VHF radio. An old Welsh farmer showed me the house he had built himself with the stone he had quarried, the bricks he had baked, the machinery he had made from old Chevrolet parts – ‘everything home-made, everything my own!’

And in a farm on the outskirts of Trevelin I found my last archetype of Y Wladfa. He was like the smile, as it were, on the face of the Cheshire Cat. My final Patagonian Welshman cheerfully spoke for history. Not a soul in his household understood a word of Welsh beside himself, but they all clustered eagerly around us as we talked – a jolly Argentinian wife, diverse unidentified children and grandchildren, dogs and chickens and a horse tied to the fence; and with his cloth cap tilted on his head, his hands in his pockets, that Welshman of South America touched my heart not with melancholy at all, but with grateful pride to be Welsh myself.