Manual of Painting and Calligraphy (12 page)

Someone narrates the life of a person who never existed or did not exist in this way: Defoe invents. Someone narrates a life as if it were his own and trusts in our credulity: Rousseau opens his heart. Someone narrates the life of a historical character: Marguerite Yourcenar writes Hadrian’s memoirs and becomes Hadrian in the memoirs she invents for him. Confronted by these examples, I, H., remain incognito with this initial as I studiously copy out and try to understand, inclined to affirm that all truth is fiction, basing myself on evidence of suspect veracity and convenient falsehood from six witnesses who go by the names of Robinson and Defoe, Hadrian and Yourcenar and Rousseau twice. I am particularly intrigued by the geographical game which jumps from Italica (Spain, near Seville) to Rome, from Rome to London, from London to York, from York to Geneva and from Geneva to the place where Marguerite Yourcenar was born, a place I neither know nor am ever likely to know. Tossing words over centuries and distances inferior to centuries, she herself made Hadrian write: “The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself.” So where was Defoe born? Or Rousseau? Or Yourcenar? Where was I born, painter, calligrapher, stillborn until it was decided where, when and if I had cast an intelligent look over myself? It remains to be seen whether once our place of birth has been discovered, we shall be able to recover and sustain that look of understanding or lose ourselves in new geographical locations. Most likely they are all fictitious: the real life of Hadrian is gradually crushed, pulverized, dissolved and reconstituted in another guise in Marguerite Yourcenar’s fiction. We may confidently wager that something of Hadrian is still missing, perhaps simply because it never occurred to Defoe or to Rousseau to write their own biography of that Roman emperor who was born in Italica but who, according to the official fiction, was born in Rome. If the official fiction is capable of such things, then we can expect something even more extraordinary from individual fictions.

Close observations of these subtleties (do they really exist or only in my head?) make me aware that there is not much difference between words which are often colors and colors which cannot resist the temptation of becoming words. And so my time passes with the time of others and the time invented for others. I write and think: What is time today for Defoe, for Rousseau, for Hadrian? What is time for someone who is dying at this very moment, without ever having discovered where he was born through the knowledge that comes with understanding?

First exercise in biography in the form of a traveler’s tale. Title: Impossible Chronicles.

The very title puts the reader on his guard, a warning not to expect wonders from a narrative which begins so cautiously. It would be quite pretentious to think that a rapid journey through the regions of Italy gave anyone the right to speak of them to anyone other than interested friends, who are sometimes skeptical, never having been there themselves. I am convinced that there are still things to be said about Italy, although little remains for the ordinary traveler armed only with his sensibility and who, because of some avowed partiality, is almost certain to close his eyes before inevitable shadows. For my part, I can say that I shall always visit Italy in a state of total submission, on my knees, as it were, something which escapes most people because it is entirely psychological.

Once having marked out my own little space and prominently displayed the flags indicating the points of departure and arrival, no one can argue that Paul should not write where Peter has written, or that where better eyes have seen, all other eyes must remain closed. Italy must have been (forgive the exaggeration if no one agrees with me) our reward for coming into this world. Some deity or other, solemnly entrusted with distributing justice and not sorrows, and with a profound knowledge of the arts, should whisper into everyone’s ear at least once in his lifetime, “You’re born? Well, go to Italy.” Just as people head for Mecca or less contentious places to ensure the salvation of their souls.

But let us leave these thresholds and enter Milan. For one reason or another Milan had been excluded from my map of Italy, as if two million inhabitants and an area of almost two hundred square kilometers were unimportant. However, it is also true that large cities do not appeal to me very much: there is never enough time to get to know them properly, so that we remember them as if they were tiny boroughs consisting of no more than a square, a cathedral, a museum and a few narrow streets which time has scarcely changed, or we think has scarcely changed, for they are old and silent and we do not live there. Unless the traveler expects from a city what he has found in others he has visited (shops, restaurants, nightclubs), whereby everything becomes even more restricted since he is simply traveling inside a protective sphere and safe from any adventures.

The same is true of me but for different reasons. I limited myself to taking fleeting possession of a tiny section of Milan, a polygon of which the closest apex was the Piazza del Duomo, a cathedral in a flamboyant Gothic style which for all its splendor (or perhaps because of it) leaves me cold. The other apexes of this geometrical figure into which I crammed the whole of Milan were the Brera Gallery, the Castello Sforzesco, the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, and the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana. I doubt whether anyone is expecting me to provide them with a catalogue or guidebook of the city’s art treasures, let alone attempt to confirm or contradict opinions already expressed, directly or indirectly, by others. But a man advances through spaces dictated by the architecture, through rooms crowded with faces and forms, and he certainly does not come out as he went in, otherwise he might as well have kept away. This is what prompts me to run the risk of expressing in plain language what the privileged may have explained in the style of a historical pageant or, more profitably, in the discreet whisperings of a catalogue.

Here in Portugal we visit our castles as if they were national shrines. But our castles are usually empty shells from which every trace of life has been scrupulously removed lest there should be any trace or odor of a human presence. Inside, the Castello Sforzesco is more palace than fortress, but few buildings give such an impression of might and power; few castles are so manifestly warlike. The solid brick walls seem more unassailable than if they had been hewn out of stone. In the vast inner courtyard cavalcades and military parades can be staged and the whole edifice, surrounded by a great tumultuous city, suddenly emerges amid the silence of its other tiny courtyards or apartments transformed into museums, like some paradoxical place of peace. But in one of these rooms, an exhibition of works by the Belgian artist Folon is an insidious tentacle of the octopus outside: men-buildings, men-roads, men-tools advance over barren hills as the skies become covered with curved arrows, crisscrossed and pointing simultaneously in various directions.

But there is also a luminous and strangely terrifying happiness hovering there in the Museum of Ancient Art, installed in the castle’s Sala delle Asse. One enters by a low and narrow arched doorway, and looking straight ahead, all you can see are what look like columns painted all the way around the walls. It is simply another room until you raise your eyes to the ceiling. We pity those visitors who do not feel a sudden shiver go down their spine: they must be blind to beauty. The entire vault is covered with intertwining foliage, forming an inextricable network of trunks, branches and leaves where no birds sing, where only a murmur descends, perhaps the phantom sound of Leonardo da Vinci breathing as he stood on a lofty scaffold to paint a tree-cum-forest. Not even Michelangelo’s
Pietà Rondanini
several rooms further ahead (on which he was still working four days before his death, an unfinished statue which seeks yet shuns our hands) can efface the memory of the paradise created by Leonardo da Vinci.

And now I shall say something about the Brera Gallery, where Raphael’s
Nuptials of the Virgin
is on display and the awesome, rigorously foreshortened
Dead Christ
by Mantegna. But the painter whose work intrigues me most of all in this museum is Ambrogio Lorenzetti, especially his tender
Virgin and Child,
her mantle unexpectedly adorned with stylized flowers. Two remarkable landscapes by the same Ambrogio Lorenzetti can be seen in Siena, “the most exquisite pictures in the world.” I shall return to them when the time comes for Siena to open “the doors of her heart” to me, as she promises all travelers without ever disappointing them.

Then there is the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Alongside, at the spot where the refectory of the Dominican convent stood, is Leonardo’s painting of
The Last Supper,
already doomed to perish as the painter applied the final brushstroke, for the dampness of the site had already begun its work of corrosion. Today, dampness has transformed the figures of Christ and the apostles into wan shadows, has covered them in mist, pitting the picture all over where the paint has peeled, a constellation of dead stars within a luminous space. It is a question of time. Despite all the careful precautions being taken,
The Last Supper
is perishing, and besides the qualities of Leonardo’s incomparable artistry, perhaps it is its encroaching demise which makes this magnificent painting even more precious. As we come away, we feel twice as apprehensive that we may never see it again. Even if there should never be another bombing to demolish the building, reducing it to rubble, protruding beams, debris and bricks pulverized to dust,
The Last Supper
seems inevitably destined for some other fate.

And now before departing, time to visit the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana. By no means large, the museum is half hidden away in the Piazza Pio IX, which, in its turn, could only conjure up a piazza in the Mediterranean mind, but it is here one finds the somewhat rustic profile of Beatrice d’Este (or is she Bianca Maria Sforza?), her hair tucked into a net covered in pearls which any modern hippie might envy. The portrait was painted by Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis, a Milanese artist who lived in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. But the main attraction in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana is the enormous cartoon of the
School of Athens,
which is exhibited in a special room. Lit to perfection, Raphael’s drawing with its spontaneity and almost imponderable lightness of touch, more chiaroscuro than line, foreshadows the wisdom and dignity of the figures in the room of the Vatican, momentarily glimpsed by tourists passing through.

This was what Milan meant for me. And then at night, groups of people in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, youths engaged in heated arguments with their elders, carabinieri keeping a watchful eye, tension in the air. And the walls of the buildings all along the Via Brera, covered with graffiti: “The Struggle Goes On,” “Power to the Workers.” Several days later, when I was already traveling around Tuscany, the police invaded the university. There were scenes of violence; demonstrators were wounded, imprisoned, dispersed with tear gas. And the right-wing press, conservative, fascist, or with fascist sympathies, triumphed.

I
CALLED WHAT
I have just written my (first) exercise in autobiography, and I do not believe I was deceiving myself or deceiving others (strictly speaking, to deceive oneself or deceive others must surely come to the same thing?). After all, Rousseau’s confessions and the fictitious reminiscences or memoirs of Robinson Crusoe or Hadrian respectfully observe the rules of the genre: they all start from a common point which goes by the name “birth,” and if we examine them closely, they are transposed biographies which could just as easily have started off in an even more traditional manner with the words “Once upon a time.” Rejecting the classical method of autobiography, which I personally find dull, I chose to cover my own glasslike transparency with a thousand fragments of circumstance, those particles of dust moving through the atmosphere, the shower of words which, like rainfall, can be enough to inundate everything, quietly seeking out faint stirrings, the first restless movements of my fingers, my response to the sun and the frustration of not being able to throw down firm roots and cling to space. In a word, to conceal in order to discover.