By this time I was at art school and so I mentioned to him that Bologna was the city of Morandi. And no sooner had I said this, than I saw in a flash that he and Morandi could well put on and wear each other’s shoes without either of them noticing the difference! Neither of them were married: both of them had lived at various times with a spinster sister. Their noses and mouths had the same expression of seeking an intimacy that is not carnal. The two of them liked solitary walks and both were continually curious about what they saw as they walked. The difference between them was that Morandi was an obsessional, great artist and my Uncle, who was no artist, was a passionate letter writer.
To have said any of this would have been an impertinence, and so I simply repeated several times that he should look at Morandi’s paintings when he went to Bologna.
He’s a very quiet man Morandi, my Uncle told me on his return.
What do you mean? He’s dead. He died last year.
I know. I only saw his pictures of pots and shells and flowers. Very careful and very quiet. He could have been an architect too, wouldn’t you say?
Yes, an architect.
Or a tailor!
Yes, a tailor. Did you like the city?
It’s red, I’ve never seen a red like Bologna’s. Ah! If we knew the secret of that red ... It’s a city to return to, la proxima volta.
In the Piazza Maggiore some steps lead up to the east face of the Basilica of St Petronius, which, like many of Bologna’s historic buildings is constructed in brick. For centuries people have sat on these steps to watch what’s happening in the square and to notice the minute differences between yesterday and today. I’m sitting on these steps.
No traffic except bicycles. I notice that some people crossing the square, when they are more or less at its centre, pause and lean their backs against an invisible wall of an invisible tower of air, which reaches towards the sky, and there they glance upwards to check the clouds or the sky’s emptiness. In conversations about tomorrow’s weather opinions here continually differ.
Five teenagers are demonstrating their talents with a football, imagining a stadium. An elderly woman, to her evident surprise, meets a five-year-old girl whom she recognizes and who appears to be here alone.
Probably they live in the same district, a bus ride from the centre, a district of worker’s flats like San Donato. The woman buys the girl a helium balloon from a street vendor. The balloon has the body of a tiger, with black and yellow stripes. It slinks along wafting on high above the girl’s head.
A man in his fifties carrying two plastic bags-he has been shopping for his groceries-puts them down, stoops towards me and asks me whether I have a cigarette. I take out a packet and offer him several. He has the eyes of a man more used to reading print, than looking at buildings. Only one! he insists. His canvas shoes are frayed and dusty. He uses his own lighter to light the cigarette.
At the University, ten minutes walk away to the right of where I’m facing-sixty thousand students study today. In medieval times the first secular university in Europe was established here.
The girl, with her tiger, walks towards the shop windows of the Pavaglione. Her steps are as feline as the animal above her. Even life-size tigers look weightless when walking. Way behind the tiger stand two towers, the taller of the two, built in the twelfth century, is almost one hundred metres high. During the Renaissance there were many such towers in the city-each one built by a rivalling mercantile family to demonstrate its wealth and power. One by one they collapsed and within a century you could count on one hand those that remained. After the city was annexed by Rome in the sixteenth century the population suffered from poverty and pestilence. No wages, no work, no outlets. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, thanks to Marconi, the radio, and to light precision engineering, it began to prosper again, and then became a capital of skilled labour.
The girl with her floating tiger is so enchanted that, as she looks up smiling, I imagine her listening to some bars of music. It’s an improbable city, Bologna-like one you might walk through after you have died.
I leave the piazza and wander east towards the university. There are continuous arcades on both sides of the street. People here argue not only about tomorrow’s weather, but about how many kilometres of arcades there are crossing the city.
The tradition of the ‘porticoes’, as the arcades were called, began in the early Middle Ages. Each mansion had before its door a small plot of land which gave on to the street. A number of householders had the idea of roofing over their plots. Like this they could accommodate unforeseen travellers, allow extra servants to sleep overnight, or rent accommodation to poor students from the university. At the same time the public walked from portico to portico, benefiting from the shelter, and leaving the street proper open for wagons, horses and animals. With the passing of time the city persuaded its rich house owners to take a pride in what they were offering the street, whilst imposing a certain standardization. Thus finally the porticoes became arcades.
For those living here, the arcades are a kind of personal agenda, made of stone, brick and cobbles. You can visit your creditors, your secret love, your sworn enemy, your favourite coffee shop, your mother, your dentist, your local office of unemployment, your oldest f riend, or a bench where you regularly sit down utterly alone, adjusting the elastoplast you’ve put over a sore wart on your index finger-you can keep all these rendezvous without ever being exposed to the sky. And what difference does this make to the facts of your life? None. Yet under the arcades the echoes of those facts sound different. And in the evening Pleasure and Desolation take their evening stroll along the arcades and walk hand in hand.
All the windows I pass have awnings and all of them are of the same colour. Red. Many are faded, a few are new, but they are old and young versions of the same colour. Each fits its window exactly on the inside, and its angle is adjustable according to the amount of light desired indoors. They are called tende. The red is not a clay red, it’s not terracotta, it’s a dye red. On the other side of it are bodies and their secrets, which on the other side are not secrets.
I want to buy a length of this red tende linen. I’m not sure what I’ll do with it. Maybe I only need it to make this portrait. Anyway I’ll be able to feel it, scrumble it up, smooth it out, hold it against the sunlight, hang it, fold it, dream of what’s on the other side.
I enquire about a possible shop.
Try Pasquinis, a woman tells me, near the Neptune fountain.
On my way there, in a corner of what was once long ago a pottery market, I pass a long high wall with several thousand black and white photographs, behind glass, displayed on it. Portraits of men and some women, with their names and their dates of birth and death printed across the bottom of their chests, where one might listen to their hearts if one had a stethoscope. They are arranged in alphabetical order. Midtwentieth century. How many foresaw their portraits being placed along with thousands of other martyrs, side by side, row above row, on a public wall in the city centre? More than we might guess. In alphabetical order they knew what was at stake: in this area of Italy one out of every four anti-fascist Partisans was to lose her or his life.
I read some of their names, hearing them spoken out loud. Their faces look confident, most of them, and with the confidence there is pain. Looking at them I vaguely remember something written by Pasolini. And now, whilst writing, I have found the lines I wanted to remember:
……The light
of the future doesn’t cease for even an instant
to wound us: it is here to
brand us in all our daily deeds
with anxiety even in the confidence
that gives us life……
After 1945 and free elections, Bologna became a communist city. And the City Council remained Communist, election following election, during fifty years. It was here that Management was obliged to accept Workers Control committees in the running of their factories. Another consequence (so easy to forget how political practice often operates like a loom, weaving in two directions, the expected and the unexpected) was that Bologna became the best conserved city in Italy, famous for its small luxuries, refinements and calm-and Europe’s favourite host-city for Trade Fairs. (Sports Installations, Fashion Knitwear, Agricultural machinery, Children’s Books, etc.)
The Pasquinis shop is on a corner. From the street you see nothing except the announcement: Tessuti lino, cotone e lana, tendaggi. Inside it looks as though nothing has changed for fifty years. Maybe some of the textiles on sale are 75% acrylic, but you wouldn’t guess it.
There are three high counters, and between and behind them are hundreds of bolts of coloured fabrics, stacked up horizontally from the floor so that they make a wall. You think of a log stockade. A corral for colours.
Behind each counter a man stands in his shirt sleeves, wearing a wide leather belt with a pair of large scissors, a metre rod and a ruler stuck into it. The counters are high so that when one of these men unrolls a bolt of cloth, and, if the customer approves, cuts it with his scissors, he can work standing up, without bending.
There are two women before me. One is touching the velvet, over which she’s hesitating, as if it were her daughter’s just washed hair. The other is counting out loud her steps as she strides across the floorboards, calculating how many metres of a floral calico she will need.
At the end of the shop, near the entrance door, there’s a high podium with a stool, table and cash-till placed on it. Seated on the stool the shop owner oversees every operation taking place. At the moment he’s reading his newspaper.
The light, like the quiet, is diffused, muted, as if all the rolls of cloth had given off, over the years, a very fine, unidentifiable white cotton dust-the same dust that settled on the objects painted by Morandi, who surely knew this shop.
When my turn comes, I explain to the young assistant what I want. Like his two companions he has the air of a rancher rather than a draper. To extract the 2 metre bolt of red linen he shifts with great dexterity several others. Then he places the bolt on the counter and with a flourish unrolls about a metre. I finger the cloth.
It’s a heavy linen, he says.
How much a metre? I ask.
19 euros.
OK. Give me, please，3 metres.
He takes scissors and rod from his belt, looks at me again to check (mistakes can’t be corrected), I nod, and he cuts. Folding the length I’ve bought four times, he slips it into a bag, writes out the bill with a pencil, also attached by a string to his belt, and nods in the direction of the podium.
I pick up the purchase, take out three 20 euro notes from my wallet and go to pay, holding the notes up high, above my head. The owner leans forward and down to take them from me, and our eyes meet. I recognize him. He pretends not to recognize me. His conspiratorial expression is familiar. The last time he put it on was when I had given him his tie and was saying goodbye to him in the hospital. Behind his bifocal glasses the swiftest flicker of one eye (his left) says: I’ll see you round the corner-when the time comes.
I leave the shop without a word, return to the steps in the Piazza Maggiore, and there I look at what I’ve acquired and compare it to the awnings I can see in the top floor windows, surrounding the square.
Time will tell.
I turn things over in my mind. Then I fold the cloth another time, place it on the step beside me, and stretch myself out to lie along the step with my head on it, as if it were a pillow, eyes shut.
We made three voyages together, before I was fourteen years old. One to Normandy, another to Brittany and the third to Belgium and Luxembourg. When we arrived in a town-be it Ghent or Rouen or Carnac-after we found the hotel, booked by him in advance, we had a special procedure. I might say ritual-except that it was so discreet.
We had something light to eat-perhaps a small glass of white wine, and then we followed, street-name by streetname, a trail he had already prepared. Along it were surprises, for me total surprises, for him anticipated ones. Canals like streets. A gallows. A shop window with a display of white lace as fine as the stars in the furthest galaxy.
Sometimes the trail called for a taxi to take us cross-country. To cheer the Tour de France as the riders came in at the finish of the day’s stint. To watch a fisherman’s boat leaving at night a quayside, an oil lamp on its mast, flame flickering and never going out. To search for a megalith one could lie on-like I’m now lying on this step in the Piazza Maggiore.
All these finds which we came upon together, were as secret as wrapped presents. In fact more secret, for, once unwrapped they still remained secrets. He would put his finger with the wart on it to his lips, as a sign to remind me not to tell, to keep it to myself.
Even at that early age I sensed this was something more than a childish game. He had learnt how persistently many people need to look away from, to neutralize, what surrounds them. And one of the frequent devices they use to achieve this is to insist that everything is bound to be ordinary. The advantage of the untold is that it cannot be dismissed as ordinary. God is the unsaid, he murmured to me one evening in St Malo, drinking, before bed, a glass of Benedictine.
In the Via Caprarie we are going to find a kilo of passatelli in a paper bag, that looks as if it was made to hold truffles. After Easter, during the summer heat, the Bolognese stop eating lasagne and tagliatelle which are too heavy, and move on to passatelli, a pasta in brodo. You want the list of ingredients? 400gr. white bread crumbs, 240 gr. Parmesan cheese, 1 teaspoon of flour, 6 eggs, 1 small nutmeg, 50 gr. butter?
Teaspoons fascinated him, and on his travels he collected them. He had half a dozen teaspoons from Dublin which he kept in a flat box, like a box for war medals. Inside it the spoons lay on a dark blue velvet.
In the Via Marsala we’ll eat the best mortadella in the world. Mortadella was invented here at the beginning of the 17th century. Its name comes from the fact that it is seasoned with myrtle berries. When it’s good, it’s eaten in chunks, not thin slices. With it, drink a white wine from Alto Adige. He raises his glass to touch mine.
Now some coffee? A merchant in the Via Porta Nuova. Here, as you see, the coffees are listed with the year of their harvesting, like wines. There are good years and poor ones. Time will tell. Coffees from all over the world, Brasil sul de Minas. Java Wib. India Parchment. Let’s go straight to the best. Blue Mountain from Jamaica. When they receive a new delivery of this coffee, they put it, each night, in the safe along with the bank notes! After drinking it, the taste stays in the mouth for fifty minutes. It keeps the whole brain company.
