A Mountain Dream
Yesterday, in the early evening, I sat out on my porch on a red foldable camping chair and gazed out at this foreign city, the city that dons its nighttime robe, the city that, with a heave and a sigh, wakes up as the light fades, and I closed my eyes, inhaled the smoke of at least twelve cigarettes from the street, pricked up my ears to the tune from the street, adolescent shouts, the rumbling scud of cars, the throbbing of bass music (mild at this hour, and then harsher as the night drags on), and I remembered, with some degree of violence and sorrow, that I live on the liveliest street of a wretched city, in an apartment high up above it all, observing the den of iniquity, Split, Croatia. I am old, and my name is Giuseppe.
I could come up with a thousand and one curses to lob at this city, but I will restrain myself, remaining civil, remaining close to the matter at hand, which is, as I am frantic to announce, a personal story, a mystery, an investigation, un’inchiesta into a book: the first volume of Fernand Braudel’s peerless work of history, The Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Last week, I sat and re-read it on this very same veranda beneath an eggshell sky. I forgot where I was, happily lost in Braudel’s measured voice, his lyrical geography. Like no other historian he attends to landscape, the interplay between man and landform, the shape of human activity. His descriptions of the Adriatic nearly inspired me to stroll a nearby beach, to envision the galleons scurrying by, the opulence and despair of the late renaissance; but then again, like an American blues singer, I am always snapped out of my dreams, forced to observe my own sorry lot; at the beach, I would encounter wandering European youths and EDM motifs; I would find myself starved of another silence.
I can’t help but clearly notice Braudel’s feelings about Croatia (termed Dalmatia in the age of Philip II). Of the mountains to the east of the coast he writes, “One could hardly imagine a region more primitive, more patriarchal and, whatever the charms of its civilization, in fact more backward.” These mountain people, their homeland thick with “impenetrable” forests, brutal winters, and drought-stricken summers, must have appeared savage when they turned up in the adjacent lowlands. The Dalmatian coast absorbed them. And Dalmatia, how foul it seems to Braudel’s gaze, an organized society with rigid class distinctions, where the “leisured class of Sjor or Signori” dominated the local proletariat, “humble gardeners and fisherman.” And how about those rude mountainfolk breeding with the members (both high and low) of this austere coastal society? A chaotic mess beside the wine-dark sea. Such is Croatia.
Once I had had enough of the ins and outs of Dalmatia’s rough and anguished history (in the age of Philip II), I turned to lighter subjects, such as Braudel’s treatment of the religious history of Corsica, my mountainous homeland. As he tells it, much of the island was converted to Catholicism by Franciscans around the thirteenth century, but when the Jesuits arrived three hundred years later they found a local population practicing a strange form of Christianity; the priests couldn’t read Latin and lived as laymen, with wives and families. These “Catholics” were ignorant of even the most standard Catholic prayers, many unable to make the sign of the cross. Still, they were also deeply devout in their own way, “capable of great religious outbursts, of spectacular devotion.” They were, as we say today, spiritual. I think of my own dear father, descended from the peasants who lived on the northern side of Monte Cinto, a people who did always have a special intensity, a kind of soul-individuation that sparkled in their eyes, heavy drinkers of fortified wine and mirto, devoutly self-assured like the Basques or the Galicians, and I think of that surreal vigor and roughness that my father projected at all times, even when it clashed with the urbane sensibilities of Ajaccio, Milan, and Rome, the cities we settled in.
At this point, I began to cry as I thought about my long-dead father and his provincial, working-class aura. What would he say about the embarrassment of a life that I’ve led, a life that has landed me here, in this dingy bottom-feeding Balkan metropole, where MDMA is cheap and the soap operas have incomprehensible storylines. I began to think about my father and the way he’d lead his life, his quiet confidence, his espionage work in the Apennines during the Second World War, and, suddenly, I heard his voice calling to me:
“God lives in the mountains, Giu.”
And then, more elaborately:
“La Cisa Pass, Giu. That’s where I met your mother. I stayed there for a short time with the Brazilian Expeditionary Force, stayed in an old church, Madonna della Guardia, and I slept in the bell tower because it was summer and the nights were warm, and I wanted, more than anything, to wake with the sun, to look out over the vastness of the mountains, and down to Cisa pass, where our efforts were focused, where we were trying to keep the Italians from moving into the Ligurian range. During this time, the American diplomat Vernon Walters was staying with us, and he was quiet and serpentine and drank more than any Sardinian, and one day he and I walked all the way to Montelungo, the nearest town, and stopped at a small café, and it was here that I saw your mother for the first time.”
The daydream was potent. My father carried with him a world, a mountainous inner world, and here, although the air was thin and the words were few, he managed to find happiness, or at least satedness, a certain slow joy that lasted him into his later years. Could I be the same way, suffering through each day and night in Split due not only to my ruined marriage but also to insufficient altitude? Yes, I’ll admit that I never quite fit in among the Corsican mountain men, never quite found it in me to withstand their marathon drinking, their laborious hikes and hunting of cignale, wild boar, but still, could it be that my Corsican soul, taken on its own terms, belongs in the high country?
Perhaps. In the meantime, I will cherish my fleeting moments of peace. In the mornings, when the youths toss in their drunken sleep, I can occasionally enjoy the Adriatic air. By my side, dependably, is a friendly voice such as Braudel’s.
For this, I am thankful.
