When I travel to a city I am fond of, I like to stay in the same hotels and return to the same restaurants. It is not that they are necessarily the best — far from it; my budget keeps me at a respectful distance from the more exclusive establishments — but they possess an unbeatable advantage: they are heavy with memories, some of them deeply cherished.
In his excellent collection of short stories Passeggeri notturni, Gianrico Carofiglio writes about the power of scents to carry us back into the past and allow us, if only for an instant, to communicate with those who are no longer among us. For my part, it is enough to stand looking at an empty armchair in the entrance hall of the Hotel Hossianum, or at a table laid on the terrace of the restaurant Der Pallaro — both in Rome — to find myself in conversation with people very dear to me who now survive only in memory. That is why I return, again and again, to the same places: to greet the concierges and waiters once more, to hear how life has been treating them, to listen to their anecdotes and allow them, in turn, to ask after my own.
Every journey, besides, has its little ritual. I cannot land in Rome without making a beeline for the Feltrinelli bookshop in Largo di Torre Argentina in search of new titles. Among the books I brought back this time was probably Alberto Moravia’s most important novel: The Time of Indifference (Gli indifferenti), published in 1929.
The novel unfolds in the bourgeois Italy of the interwar years. An elegant widow, still beautiful, with two already grown children, strives to keep at her side a wealthy lover whose loans sustain both the family mansion and its social standing. The man himself, not overly burdened by moral scruples, intends to use his wealth to gain access to the widow’s daughter, a young woman who has just turned twenty-four.
So far, nothing resembling a dilemma that literature has not explored countless times before. What made the novel genuinely scandalous in its day was not the intrigue itself, but the moral response of its protagonists to the challenge posed by the scoundrelly lover: no one rebels, no one attempts to find a solution that might allow them to cast off the yoke imposed upon them. Everything consists in temporising, negotiating, adjusting oneself to social conventions until one ends, almost politely, by surrendering to the inevitable.
It is an unforgiving portrait of a social class which, having once promoted the unification of Italy, has lost the moral impulse capable of moving and transforming society. A weary bourgeoisie, devoid of courage or spirit, incapable even of indignation.
And if we were to reverse the roles of the literary drama — do you, perhaps, recognise anything of what is happening in Europe today?
From Rome I travelled on to Verona to attend the Catullo Prize ceremony and greet a number of friends: Muriel, Laura, Stefano, Giovanni…
Lunch at the Osteria degli Angeli — Corso di Porta Nuova, No. 28 — has since fixed itself in my memory as another of those places to which one ought to return, if only to recall the agreeable evening we spent there together. It was special not merely because of the elegant locanda, decorated in that subtly Italo-French style so characteristic of northern Italy, nor because of the paccheri with sea bream, theatrically presented upon the lower skin of the fish itself before finally being heaped inside its head. Yes, all that was very good. But the news they had been keeping for me was better still.
What news? My editor will reveal that in due course.
In Venice I had hoped to stop by Caffè La Serra, in the Castello sestiere, my customary warm refuge on the island. I recommended this charming greenhouse café a year ago and gladly repeat the suggestion. Unfortunately, it was not to be. It was late, and my companions — lulled by the gentle rocking of the vaporetto — had no desire to disembark. I had to content myself with taking a photograph from afar on my mobile.
To return, always to return: that has become the leitmotif of my recent journeys.
In my suitcase travels Embers, a gift from Luis — that small piece of Herend porcelain that is Sándor Márai’s novel. Shortly before the Second World War, in a Hungarian castle, two former friends, officers of the Austro-Hungarian army, meet again in old age after decades without seeing one another. Early in his promising military career, one of them — the one of humbler origin — had abandoned his regiment and his closest friend and, without ever explaining his reasons, departed for Southeast Asia. Apparently nothing had happened that might justify such a radical decision. Now, decades later, before the same fireplace, the same menu and the same wines with which they dined on the eve of that inexplicable departure, they must finally explain themselves.
Stephen Hawking once observed that information cannot be destroyed. The universe, so to speak, remembers everything.
For the rest of us, as time passes, we gradually become libraries of memories — collections each of us must learn to arrange in our own way, yet from which it is never entirely possible to free ourselves.
Or so, at least, the laws of physics would suggest.
José Vicente Rubio Eire
Be First to Comment