An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) (24 page)

But if his sense of touch was perfectly preserved, there were, it was evident, just sparks from his retinas—rare, momentary sparks, from retinas that now seemed to be 99 percent dead. Bob Wasserman, too, who had not seen Virgil since our visit to Oklahoma, was appalled at the degradation of vision and wanted to re-examine the retinas. When he did so, they looked exactly as before—piebald, with areas of increased and decreased pigmentation. There was no evidence of any new disease. Yet the functioning of even the preserved areas of retina had fallen to almost zero. Electroretinograms, designed to record the retina’s electrical activity when stimulated by light, were completely flat, and visual evoked potentials, designed to show activity in the visual parts of the brain, were absent, too—there was no longer anything, electrically, going on in either the retinas or the brain that could be recorded. (There may have been rare, momentary sparks of activity, but if so, we failed to catch these in our recordings.) This inactivity could not be attributed to the original disease, retinitis, which had long been inactive. Something else had emerged in the past year and had, in effect, extinguished his remaining retinal function.

We remembered how Virgil had constantly complained of glare, even on relatively dull, overcast days—how glare seemed to blind him sometimes, so that he needed the darkest glasses. Was it possible (as my friend Kevin Halligan suggested) that with the removal of his cataracts—cataracts that had perhaps shielded his fragile retinas for decades—the ordinary light of day had proved lethal, burnt out his retinas? It is said that patients with other retinal problems, like macular degeneration, may be exceedingly intolerant of light—not merely ultraviolet but light of all wavelengths—and that light may hasten the degeneration of their retinas. Was this what had happened with Virgil? It was one possibility. Should we have foreseen it and rationed Virgil’s sight, or the ambient light, in some way?

Another possibility—a likelier one—related to Virgil’s continuing hypoxia, the fact that he had not had properly oxygenated blood for a year. We had clear accounts of his vision waxing and waning in the hospital as his blood gases went up and down. Could the repeated, or continuing, oxygen-starving of his retinas (and perhaps also of the visual areas of his cortex) have been the factor that did them in? It was wondered, at this point, whether raising blood oxygenation to 100 percent (which would have required sustained artificial respiration with pure oxygen) might restore some retinal or cerebral function. But it was decided that this procedure would be too risky, since it might cause long-term or permanent depression of the brain’s respiratory center.

This, then, is Virgil’s story, the story of a “miraculous” restoration of sight to a blind man, a story basically similar to that of Cheselden’s young patient in 1728, and of a handful of others over the past three centuries—but with a bizarre and ironic twist at the end. Gregory’s patient, so well adapted to blindness before his operation, was first delighted with seeing, but soon encountered intolerable stresses and difficulties, found the “gift” transformed to a curse, became deeply depressed, and soon after died. Almost all the earlier patients, indeed, after their initial euphoria, were overwhelmed by the enormous difficulties of adapting to a new sense, though a very few, as Valvo stresses, have adapted and done well. Could Virgil have surmounted these difficulties and adapted to seeing where so many others had foundered on the way?

We shall never know, for the business of adaptation—and, indeed, of life as he knew it—was suddenly cut across by a gratuitous blow of fate: an illness that, at a single stroke, deprived him of job, house, health, and independence, leaving him a gravely sick man, unable to fend for himself. For Amy, who incited the surgery in the first place, and who was so passionately invested in Virgil’s seeing, it was a miracle that misfired, a calamity. Virgil, for his part, maintains philosophically, “These things happen.” But he has been shattered by this blow, has given vent to outbursts of rage: rage at his helplessness and sickness; rage at the smashing of a promise and a dream; and beneath this, most fundamental of all, a rage that had been smoldering in him almost from the beginning—rage at being thrust into a battle he could neither renounce nor win. At the beginning, there was certainly amazement, wonder, and sometimes joy. There was also, of course, great courage. It was an adventure, an excursion into a new world, the like of which is given to few. But then came the problems, the conflicts, of seeing but not seeing, not being able to make a visual world, and at the same time being forced to give up his own. He found himself between two worlds, at home in neither—a torment from which no escape seemed possible. But then, paradoxically, a release was given, in the form of a second and now final blindness—a blindness he received as a gift. Now, at last, Virgil is allowed to not see, allowed to escape from the glaring, confusing world of sight and space, and to return to his own true being, the intimate, concentrated world of the other senses that had been his home for almost fifty years.

I
first met Franco Magnani in the summer of 1988, when the Exploratorium in San Francisco held a symposium and an exhibit on memory. The exhibit included fifty paintings and drawings by him—all of Pontito, the little Tuscan hill town where he was born but had not seen for more than thirty years. Next to them, in astounding apposition, were photographs of Pontito taken by the Exploratorium’s photographer, Susan Schwartzenberg, from exactly the same viewpoints as Magnani’s, wherever possible. (This was not always possible, because Magnani sometimes visualized and painted Pontito from an imaginary aerial viewpoint fifty or five hundred feet above the ground; Schwartzenberg sometimes had to hoist her camera aloft on a pole and at one point thought of hiring a helicopter or a balloon.) Magnani was billed as “A Memory Artist”, and one had only to glance at the exhibit to see that he indeed possessed a prodigious memory—a memory that could seemingly reproduce with almost photographic accuracy every building, every street, every stone of Pontito, far away, close up, from any possible angle. It was as if Magnani held in his head an infinitely detailed three-dimensional model of his village, which he could turn around and examine, or explore mentally, and then reproduce on canvas with total fidelity.

My first thought when I saw the resemblance between the paintings and the photographs was that here was that rare phenomenon, an eidetic artist: an artist able to hold in memory, for hours or days (perhaps for years), an entire scene that has been glimpsed in a flash; the commander (or slave) of a prodigious native power of imagery and memory. But an eidetic artist would scarcely confine himself to a single theme or subject; on the contrary, he would exploit his memory, or display it, in a huge range of subjects, to show that nothing lay beyond its grasp—whereas Magnani seemingly wanted to concentrate it exclusively upon Pontito. This, then, was an exhibit not of “pure” memory but of memory harnessed to a single, overwhelming motive: the recollection of his childhood village. And, I now realized, it was not just an exercise in memory; it was, equally, an exercise in nostalgia—and not just an exercise but a compulsion, and an art.

A few days later, I spoke to Franco and arranged to meet him at his house. He lives in a small community a few miles outside San Francisco. Once I had found his street, I did not need to look for his house number, because his house stood out immediately from its neighbors. In the small front yard was a low stone wall, resembling those in his paintings of Pontito; his car, an aging sedan with vanity plates (“Pontito”), was parked in the street; the garage had been converted into a studio, and its door was wide open, revealing the artist himself, intently at work.

Franco was tall and slim, with enormous horn-rimmed glasses that magnified his eyes. He had thick brown hair, carefully parted on one side; a springy stride; and an air of great exuberance and vitality—he was fifty-four but seemed much younger. He invited me in and showed me around his home. Every room had paintings on every wall, and every drawer and closet seemed stacked full of paintings—it was less like a house than a museum or archive, totally devoted to the recollection, the reproduction, of Pontito.

As we walked through the house, each painting arrested his attention, aroused a flood of reminiscence: what happened here, what there, and how so-and-so stood there once. “Look at this wall here—that’s where the priest, he caught me climbing into the garden behind the church. He chase me all the way down the street. Oh, he always chase all the kids away from there.” Each reminiscence triggered others, and these still others, so that within minutes we were engulfed in a flood, without any clear direction or center, but all relating to his early life—to Pontito as he had experienced it as a child. He leapt from one story to another, without any connection that I could discern. This sort of rambling—single-minded and intense but incoherent and unfocused—seemed characteristic of Franco: it showed the quality of his obsession, the fact that he thought of Pontito day and night, to the exclusion of all else.

As Franco talked, I had the impression that his reminiscences were taking him over, that these upsurging memories drove him, dominated him, exerted a huge, irresistible force. He would gesture; he would mime; he would breathe heavily; he would glare—he seemed to be completely transported. Then, with a start, he would come back, smile a little embarrassedly, and say, “That’s how it was.”

This nonstop verbosity, this reminiscence of concrete episodes, seemed to be in a quite different mode from his painting. When he was alone, he said, the yammer and clatter of memories would die down, and he would get a calm impression of Pontito: a Pontito without people, without incidents, without temporality; a Pontito at peace, suspended in a timeless “once”, the “once” of allegory, fantasy, myth, and fairy tale.

By midmorning, I had been enthralled again by Franco’s paintings but had had enough of his reminiscences. He had one subject only—could talk of nothing else. What could be more sterile, more boring? Yet out of this obsession he could create a lovely, real, and tranquil art. What was it that served to transform his memories—to remove them from the sphere of the personal, the trivial, the temporal, and bring them into the realm of the universal, the sacred? One encounters boring talkers, reminiscers, by the score, and not one of them will be a true artist, like Franco. Thus it was not just his vast memory or his obsession that was crucial in making him an artist but, rather, something much deeper.

Franco was born in Pontito in 1934. A village of some five hundred souls, it was nestled in the hills of Castelvecchio, in the province of Pistoia, about forty miles west of Florence. Like all Tuscan hill villages, it had an ancient lineage and still had an abundance of Etruscan tombs, as well as traditional patterns of farming, terracing, and olive and vine growing, going back more than two thousand years. Its stone buildings, its steep, winding streets, traversable only by trim mountain donkeys or human feet, had not changed in centuries, nor had the simple, orderly life of its residents. The village was dominated, at its highest point, by the spire of its ancient church, and Franco’s house was next to the church—indeed, as a child, he could nearly touch its roof if he leaned far enough out of his bedroom window. Somewhat isolated and inbred, the villagers formed almost a single large family: the Magnanis, the Papis, the Vanuccis, the Tamburis, the Sarpis, were all related. The village’s greatest eminence was Lazzaro Papi, an eighteenth-century commentator on the French Revolution; a monument to him still stands in the central square.

Isolated, unchanging, traditional, Pontito was a citadel against the flux of change and time. The earth was fertile, the inhabitants industrious; their farms and orchards sustained them without luxury or want. Life was good, and secure, for Franco, for all the villagers, until the outbreak of the war.

But then came horrors and troubles of every kind. Franco’s father died in an accident in 1942, and the following year saw the entry of the Nazis, who took over the village and evicted the townspeople. When the villagers came back, many of their houses had been defaced. Life was never the same after this. The town had been despoiled, the fields and the orchards had been ruined, and, perhaps most important, the old patterns and mores disturbed. Pontito gathered itself together and tried gallantly to recoup after the war, but it failed to recover fully.

It has been in a slow decline ever since. Its orchards and fields, its agrarian economy, were never fully restored; it ceased to be self-sufficient economically, and its young men and women had to leave and go elsewhere. The once-thriving village, which had five hundred people before the war, has only seventy people now, all elderly or retired. There are no longer any children, and there are few working adults. The once vital town is depopulated and dying.

All of Franco’s paintings represent Pontito, and his life there, prior to 1943; they are all recollections of his childhood, of the place where he lived and played and grew up, before his father was killed, before the Germans came, before the occupation of the village and the ruination of its fields.

Franco lived in Pontito until he was twelve, in 1946, when he went to school in Lucca. In 1949, he went on to Montepulciano, as an apprentice furniture maker. He was remarkable for his “photographic” memory even before this (as were his mother and one of his sisters, to a lesser degree): he could remember a page after a single reading or the lesson in church after a single hearing; he could remember all the inscriptions on the gravestones in the cemetery; he could remember (and add up) long lists of figures at a glance. But it was only in Lucca, away from home for the first time, and markedly homesick, that he started to experience another sort of memory: images that darted suddenly into his mind-images of great personal resonance and intensity, sharp with pleasure or pain. These images were quite different from the “rote” memory that had distinguished him thus far; they were involuntary and sudden, flashlike and imperative—hallucinatory, almost, in their sound, their texture, their smell, and their feel. This new kind of memory was, above all, experiential or autobiographical, for every image came with its proper personal context and affect. Each image was a scene, a flashback, from his life. “He painfully missed Pontito”, his sister told me. “It was the church, the street, the fields, that he would ‘see’—but as yet he had no impulse to draw.”