Life Embitters (52 page)

When all was said and done, we stayed faithful to our painters, no doubt as a result of some mysterious, longstanding affection. We stayed with those we considered to be the emblematic painters of the Tuscan school: Paolo Uccello and Masaccio, Piero della Francesca and Benozzo Gozzoli.

Llimona and I always professed undying admiration for the schools of Umbria and Florence. Cimabue, Giotto, and Simone Martini are the grandfathers of European painting. In the course of this last millennium Uccello is the continent’s first painter to paint movement. Massaccio and Piero della Francesca are two fierce, direct, unmediated, gory realists. Whether in San Gimignano or the Palazzo Ricardo, in Florence, Gozzoli is a spring without literary pretensions, a delightful, fresh, free breeze. When we thoughtfully argued these preferences, people were shocked. The Mexican had fits of uncontrollable anger. We tried to understand what we felt was positive and negative in the work of these painters.

“I sometimes get the impression, especially with Masaccio and Uccello, that they were men who suffered from stomach ulcers,” I’d say to Llimona. “They are tetchy. They scowl and aren’t averse to violence.”

“That’s how they are they, what can we can do about that?” replied my friend. “What’s important is that they are painters who aren’t devious; their work, in terms of their era, is entirely genuine. Vasari describes them as being studious, self-absorbed, melancholy, and misanthropic.”

Each age has its sensibility, and we believed we were personally engaging with the pictorial process I have tried to describe. The problems experienced by those remote individuals were perhaps ours too. What Stendhal called
le beau idéal
has little to offer the sensibility of our era. We would feel very happy if we succeeded in capturing the fleeting pulse of the reality of things. Eugeni d’Ors came up with one of the sharpest insights into Pau Picasso when he said that the usual – not Cubist – Picasso, is the last great Italian painter with an Italian perspective in the history of painting. One had to be bold to suggest such an insight in our day and age – I mean ever since Paris has become the center for artistic activity. It is a view that is absolutely right, perfectly judged.

It is quite mistaken to believe, as is often affirmed in so many artistic and literary circles that Italian painting is cold, dead, and academic. Calm down! Take it easy! The worst error by far is to visit this peninsula with preconceived ideas, with other people’s ideas, and not have sufficient strength of mind to cast them to the wind. One must have the strength of will to jettison at the frontier that burden of generally – and sardonically – adverse opinions, usually skillfully expressed to disguise the fact, and released from their burden, decide to see things as they are. Every autumn a host of thinkers and writers visit this country that aspire to have the last word on a world that is certainly small – small in terms of travel nowadays – but one that is
incredibly vast and unfathomable as a concentration of the mind and the spirit. Italy is the European country with the least geography and the most spirit. That’s why even the greatest geniuses have been unable to embrace it and why I would advise everyone to stop reading those rash, pretentious books that Italy inspires, leave them for later, once you have had time to develop a direct, personal vision. Don’t drag clichés and prejudices in your wake when you come to Italy. This is useful advice. The country is so hugely diverse and so rich in surprises that no cliché can be applied generally. On arriving, in Genoa or any other town, buy a Vitruvius for ancient monuments and a Vasari for the painters and sculptors of the long process that was the Renaissance. Throw away the pamphlets that only distort your vision – however handy or abstruse they may be. Set out to see things firsthand, be curious: that’s the way to travel. With that light impedimenta and the information provided by city maps, a journey to Italy can be incalculably rewarding. What other country can you visit that offers the wonders that Italy possesses?

I didn’t live in the Pensione Balestri, but in the evening I’d go and look up my friends. I’d arrive when they’d just finished supper. The windows of the cold, rather dowdy dining room were open. It was summer and you could feel the delectably languid Florentine night beyond. The dining room was oppressive. We quickly went out. If Llimona said by way of farewell as we crossed the threshold, “
Buona sera, banditi!
” you knew dinner had been derisorily meager. We walked across the square and headed towards the Lung’Arno. The headquarters of Florence’s Fascio di Combatimento was in a single-storey house opposite the
pensione
. Shenanigans there were endless night and day. Black-shirted toughs entered the house through the front door carrying pistols, rifles, or iron bars. The fascists called these bars
manganelli
, and we saw so many we finally became used to them. The Mexican was the only one who couldn’t stand them. A simple, passionate man, he bared his teeth when he saw a fascist, snarled like a rabid dog and flashed his eyes. His reactions were so visible that, if he hadn’t had such an exotic face and figure, he might have had a bad time, because castor-oil purges and beatings were handed out with remarkable facility. When the fascist – or fascists – had gone the Mexican spat out a little gob of spit, and muttered nervously, “What this place needs is a Don Pancho,
compadre!
”

I kept telling Llimona he should find a quieter place to live, because there was always such a row in that square, such a hustle and bustle, with a constant flurry of groups that came together and then broke up because they couldn’t pack into the headquarters; it was the place for so many conglomerations of city and country folk and so many speeches and
adunates
, so much singing and military music, that existence there could hardly have been pleasant. The place had seen fierce fighting and shoot-outs; the most punitive expeditions in Tuscany had been organized there; the most incendiary, mendacious harangues had been delivered there, and, if that wasn’t enough, the square acted as a permanent base for the wind section of the Florentine Fascio to rehearse. I imagined that whole political hue-and-cry and lunatic fanaticism was enough to make you want to eat your spaghetti elsewhere, but Llimona would have none of it. As an experienced hunter with sturdy, supple legs he was delighted by the noise of gunfire. My thoughts always pursued the same agenda: “
Andiamo a pigliare un caffè …!
” Llimona would sulk, striding along the Lung’ Arno pavement.

The Arno is a clean, beautiful river that wends elegantly and languidly through Florence. You can see the pink sand under the two feet of water the river carries in summer: its charming waters flow lethargically. At that time on a summer’s night, the luminous dark blue sky seemed to glitter
and swarm on the slowly moving stream. Reflections from the city’s lights streaked the water with silver. A delicious light breeze seemed to pursue the river’s fleeting enchantments, barely ruffling the luminous flow. The banks of the Arno are not a place where townspeople like to go. They are mostly empty, though you sometimes find a loving couple. I’ve spent many hours leaning on the parapet, my mind a blank, devoid of desires or memories, gazing into its waters.

We would walk towards the Ponte Vecchio and upon reaching the angle made by the bridge and the right bank we surveyed the invisible sea and stood in the same spot where Dante first saw Beatrice. It is an important place. The
terzina
from the
Commedia
that recalls the moment is inscribed on marble on the house now occupying that corner. It is the
terzina
that begins:

It was quite late when we reached the bridge, but we’d always find a beggar on the steps leading up – a sight typical of the city at that time. He was a skinny old man who held himself stiff and silent, thought to be blind by many, while others affirmed he could see. The difficulty one had in Italy deciding whether blind beggars could see or not was always a dilemma that was too much for me, to the point that I always decided it was best to imagine it was nonexistent. After all, everyone has the right to make the best possible use of their eyes. A square of cardboard hung on a string over the beggar’s chest. It carried a very amusing inscription, the source of which was the following:

One day a lady walked passed the poor man and, as naturally as could be,
gave him alms of two hundred lire. That was a fabulous amount of money at the time, and the shopkeepers in the small shops by the bridge decided only an American woman could afford to give away such an astonishing sum. Consequently, the poor man had a piece of card made to hang from his neck, where the scene of the elegant lady giving him the notes was painted. The drawing had been childishly colored and was very similar to scenes beggars draw on the pavement to please their customers in the more pleasant parts of London. There was an inscription under the scene that ran: “On December 10 1921, an American lady gave this poor little fellow –
a questo poverello
– alms of 200 lire. Tourists, ladies, gentlemen! Imitate that American lady’s gesture! Imitate her and you will be deemed worthy of being in the city of the great men of the Renaissance!”

If Ràfols the architect had been with us, he’d have been quick to give him alms. He’d gone to live in Fiesole to add a rustic, Franciscan touch to his general compassion, but occasionally came down to Florence and met up with us. It was amazing to see him acting charitably. He went to it with admirable conviction and energy. In this particular case, I don’t think he did so because he wanted to be deemed worthy of the city of the great men of the Renaissance. Not at all. The architect found satisfaction of a higher, ethereal, rarified order, in worldly detachment. If it had been in his power, he’d have given alms to everyone, including the rich and powerful.

On the corner of the Ponte Vecchio, we’d debate which café to head for. Llimona and I argued for a café that wasn’t noisy or particularly pretentious, that allowed you to talk in peace. At that time you could say coffee was higher quality in the whole of Italy, a wondrous miracle of mechanical distillation. The
espresso-raccomandato
coffee-making machines had triumphed, and the peninsula offered the best coffee on the continent. When I think back, I become gloomily nostalgic. However, the Mexican didn’t agree. His
passage through central Europe had accustomed him to cafés with music, to establishments that had at least a quartet, if not a quintet. The beverage on offer was what least interested him – what he really wanted was culture, to grasp every opportunity to deepen his knowledge of culture; as a result, when it was time to drink coffee, he needed to be surrounded by what Latin Americans call
Arte
. Not a single moment could be allowed to pass when he wasn’t surrounded by
Arte
. It was his obsession, his angst. When we pointed out that the café ensembles playing in Florence were nothing out of the ordinary, he’d look at us with the woeful, imploring eyes of a beaten dog. He disarmed us. And the day he disarmed us most quickly was the day when he told us about an especially fraught quintet, an ensemble that included a harpist whose divine touch was so velvety she alone redeemed the fearful stutters and ignorance of her fellow players.

It would have been pleasant and easy from where we were to walk to the Palazzo Pitti and spend a couple of hours among the wonderful cypresses in the gardens of the Boboli palace. We only had to cross the Arno. The royal house of Italy had just given the gardens and palace to the city of Florence, and people were flocking there. On the other hand, it was hot.
Il caldo di Firenze
is humid and sticky and famed throughout Italy for being oppressive. If one place promised a degree of relief it was that concentration of plants and ample grassy slopes. Nevertheless the Mexican’s devilish passion for art, that we didn’t dare oppose, kept us far from such elegant nighttime delights.

So we turned up the Via di Porta Santa Maria, with its intense medieval resonances, walked past the Baptisteri, Campanile, and Santa Maria dei Fiori, namely the city cathedral, crowned by Brunelleschi’s dome, and headed towards the Palazzo Ricardo, where we spent many an hour gazing at the cavalcade of Lorenzo the Magnificent painted by Benozzo Gozzoli.
Then we entered the Via Cavour, where there was the large café enhanced by the quintet that so fascinated the Mexican. It was a roomy establishment, dominated by an extensive terrace and a stage where four pale young men and a slightly hunch-backed young harpist trotted out their music. We could hear the distant scraping of strings in the oppressive heat on the street at that time of night when it was deserted.

The streets in the center of Florence are quite narrow – the widest are the size of Barcelona’s Carrer de Ferran. The general tone of the city is very severe unlike other Italian cities that seem easier going and more affable. There are few arches, porticoes, or columns. The dark, blackened walls of the huge old palaces look like the walls of a fortress. The stone is dense, of an astonishing volume and quality. Possibly no other city in Europe has monuments with such dramatic lines or explicit and dynamic presence as Florence. The city center is severe yet passionate, and enjoys a tension the centuries haven’t been able to tame. It is the place in Italy where longings still reach the highest temperatures.

“
¡Vaya trozo de Mendelssohn!
” exclaimed the Mexican, stirring his spoon in the coffee Ferruccio had just brought us, smirking gleefully under his nose. Ràfols looked at Llimona, Llimona looked at me, and I looked at Ràfols. It was a piece by Liszt that was one of the best known and hackneyed in his repertoire. Our friend never moved beyond the vaguest approximations in music, and always got it wrong. When they played Schubert, he thought he was listening to Schumann.

“
¡Qué adorable y tierno es Schumann!
” he’d remark softly, no doubt wanting to ensure we knew that a soldier who’d fought with wild Pancho Villa could be really sensitive once enlightened and nurtured by culture and art. But his errors eventually irritated, because they were so systematic. His mind was full of nonsense, musically speaking.