Hymn to Old Age Read online

  The old man laughs again

  And life’s long winding lane

  Seems short, and yet the night still lingers

  On and on … And children’s hands

  And young men’s hands, and old men’s hands

  Look just like these when all the sands

  Of time have gone.

  THE LITTLE CHIMNEY SWEEP

  ON SHROVE TUESDAY AFTERNOON my wife had to go to Lugano at very short notice. She tried to persuade me to accompany her, as we could then spend a little time watching people wandering around in their carnival costumes, or we might even watch a parade. I wasn’t exactly in the mood, having been suffering for weeks from pains in all my joints, and in my state of semi-paralysis I jibbed at the very thought of having to put on my coat and get into the car. But after a certain amount of resistance, I finally plucked up some courage and agreed to go. We went down to the landing stage, where my wife dropped me before she drove off to find a parking place, and I waited with Kato, our cook, in watery but still perceptible sunshine in the midst of a gently bustling flood of activity. Even on an ordinary day, Lugano is an extremely cheerful, friendly town, but today every alleyway and every square was laughing at its merriest and most boisterous—the colourful costumes were laughing, the faces were laughing, the windows of the houses on the piazza were overflowing with laughing masks and laughing people, and today even the noise of the town was laughing. It consisted of shouting, waves of laughter and people calling to one another, snatches of music, the funny, echoing boom of a loudspeaker, screeches and screams of mock terror from girls being bombarded by boys with fistfuls of confetti, the obvious main purpose being to try and stuff a load of it into the mouth of the victim. The streets were all covered with these multicoloured scraps, and under the arches you felt as if you were walking on a soft carpet of sand or moss.

  My wife soon returned, and we took up our positions in a corner of the Piazza Riforma. This square seemed to be right at the heart of the festival. The square and the pavements were crowded with people, but in between the bright and noisy groups of standing spectators there was also a continuous coming and going of strolling couples or members of different societies, including lots of children in fancy dress. On the far side of the square a stage had been erected, on which several people performed their lively acts in front of a loudspeaker: an MC, a folk singer with guitar, a vulgar clown and various others. You listened or you didn’t, you understood or you didn’t, but you laughed anyway when the clown hit a familiar nail on its familiar head, actors and audience interacted, with those on- and offstage goading each other on, and there was a continual exchange of goodwill, sparks flying, fun and games and everyone ready to laugh. The MC introduced a youth to his fellow citizens—a young and very gifted amateur artiste, who delighted us with his virtuoso imitations of animal calls and other sounds.

  I’d promised myself that we would only stay for a quarter-of-an-hour at most in the town. However, we stayed for a good half-hour happily watching and listening. For me, stopping in a town in the midst of a crowd—even in a festive town—is highly unusual and half frightening, half intoxicating. I live for weeks and months on end in my studio and my garden, and very rarely rouse myself enough to go as far as the village or even the end of our own plot of land. Now, suddenly, there I was surrounded by crowds of people, in the middle of a laughing, joking town, laughing with them, and enjoying the sight of human faces, so many types, full of changes and surprises, once more one among many, part of the whole, and swimming with the tide. Of course it wouldn’t last for long, and soon my cold aching feet and my tired aching legs would have had enough and would long to go home, and soon too the charming little episode of intoxicating sights and sounds, the vision of these thousand so wonderful, so beautiful, so interesting, so lovable faces, and the hearing of these many voices, these speaking, laughing, screaming, giggling, ordinary, high, deep, warm or harsh human voices would have exhausted me; my cheerful surrender to the rich abundance of visual and aural pleasures would be followed by fatigue and a fear, bordering on vertigo, of this welter of no longer controllable impressions. “I know, I know,” Thomas Mann would say now, quoting Effi Briest’s father. If one took the trouble to think about it for a moment, it wasn’t just the weaknesses of old age that were to blame for this fear of excess, of the world’s abundance, of the dazzling illusions of Maya. Nor, to use the terms of the psychologist, was it simply the introvert’s fear of having to prove himself to the world around him. There were other, to a certain degree better reasons for this gentle, vertigo-like fear and susceptibility to weariness. When I saw my neighbours, who throughout that same half-hour had been standing near me in the Piazza Riforma, it seemed to me that they were like fish in water, at ease, tired but happy, under no sort of pressure; it seemed to me that their eyes took in the images, their ears the sounds, as if behind the eyes there was not a film, not a brain, not a store and an archive, and behind the ears there was not a record or a tape, at every second busy collecting, gathering, recording, duty-bound not only to enjoy but also—and far more importantly—to preserve in order later perhaps to replay, obliged to register everything with the greatest possible degree of precision. In brief, once more I was standing there not as a member of the audience, not as a witness and a listener without responsibility, but as a painter with sketchbook in hand, working, straining every sinew. Because this was our way, the artist’s way, of enjoying and celebrating—it consisted in working, in obligation, and yet all the same it was pleasure, so long as there was still enough strength, so long as the eyes could bear the constant toing and froing between scene and sketchbook, so long as the archive in the brain still had space and the ability to expand. I would never be able to explain this to my neighbours if they were to ask me or if I wished to make the effort myself; they would probably laugh and say:

  “Caro uomo, stop moaning about your job! It’s just a matter of watching and eventually describing funny things, which may seem demanding and hard work to you, whereas as far as you’re concerned the rest of us are enjoying our holiday, gawping and lazing around doing nothing. But we really are on holiday, neighbour, and we’re here to enjoy ourselves, not to do our jobs like you. Only our jobs are not as nice as yours, signore, and if you had to spend a single day like us in our shops or workshops, factories or offices, you’d soon be shattered.”

  He’s right, my neighbour, absolutely right—but it doesn’t help, because I think I’m right too. But we tell each other our truths without any resentment on either side—amicably, and with a bit of a twinkle in the eye, each of us wishing only to justify himself a little, but not wishing to hurt the other’s feelings.

  All the same, the arrival of such thoughts, or simply imagining such conversations and justifications, was enough to set off feelings of renunciation and fatigue—it would soon be time to go home and catch up on the midday rest that I’d missed out on. And alas, how few of the fine images of this half-hour had made their way into the archive to be saved! How many hundreds, maybe of the finest, had passed by my indolent eyes and ears leaving as little trace as in those people I thought myself justified in calling gawpers and holiday-makers!

  One of the thousand images, however, did remain, and is to be recorded for friends in my little sketchbook.

  Standing near me for almost the whole of my stay in the festive piazza was a very still and silent figure; I didn’t hear him say a word throughout the half-hour, and I scarcely saw him move—he just stood there in strange isolation, or reverie, in the midst of the colourful hustle and bustle, as still as a painting and very beautiful. He was a little boy, seven years old at the most, a pretty little fellow with the innocent face of a child—for me the most lovable face of all the hundreds. He was wearing a costume—a black robe, a black top hat, and one arm was thrust through a little ladder; there was a chimney sweep’s brush too, and all of this was carefully and beautifully made, while the dear little face was coloured with a bit of soot or some oth
er black stuff. But he wasn’t aware of any of this. Unlike all the other grown-up Pierrots, Chinese, pirates, Mexicans and Biedermeiers, and in total contrast to the performers on the stage he had no consciousness at all of the fact that he was wearing a costume and represented a chimney sweep, or of the fact that this was something special and funny and suited him so well. No, he just stood there, small and still, in his place, his tiny feet in his tiny brown shoes, his black polished ladder over his shoulder, hemmed in by the crowd and occasionally jostled without even noticing it, with his dreamily enchanted, bright blue eyes staring from his smooth-skinned child’s face with blackened cheeks up at a window in the house before which we were standing. There in the window, a man’s height above our heads, was a jolly collection of children, a bit bigger than him, laughing, shrieking and pushing each other—all of them in bright fancy dress, and from time to time showering us with handfuls or bagfuls of confetti. With a kind of reverent rapture, lost in blissful admiration, the little boy’s eyes gazed upwards, astonished, fascinated, inexhaustibly and magnetically drawn to the sight. There was no longing in his expression, no burning desire, but just total absorption and grateful delight. I couldn’t make out what it was that so amazed this young soul, filling him with the unique joy of watching and being enraptured. It might have been the resplendent colours of the costumes, or a first realisation of the beauty of girls’ faces, or the attentiveness of a lonely child who had no brothers or sisters, listening to the social chatter of the pretty children up above—or perhaps the boy’s eyes were simply bewitched by the magic of the gently drifting shower of colours sinking down every so often from the hands of his idols, collecting in thin layers on the heads and clothes, and more densely on the stone slabs below, which were already covered as if in fine sand.

  And my feelings were like those of the boy. Just as he perceived nothing about himself and the attributes and intentions of his disguise, nothing of the crowd, the clowns on stage and the laughter and applause that rippled through the spectators in throbbing waves, but kept his eyes fixed immovably on the window, so too were my eyes and heart, in the midst of all these urgently competing images, fixed on and devoted to only one image—the child’s face between the black hat and the black robe, his innocence, his sensitivity to beauty, his unselfconscious happiness.

  1953

  THINKING BACK

  The hills are purple with heathery sheen.

  The branches of the brown broom sway.

  But who knows now how rich and green

  The forest was in May?

  Who knows now how blackbirds sang

  And who can hear the cuckoo’s call?

  The sounds that once so sweetly rang

  Are lost beyond recall.

  Above the hills a full round moon

  Midsummer parties in the wood—

  Who captured them, who wrote them down?

  Now they’re gone for good.

  Soon you and I will disappear

  Unknown, we’ll be on no one’s list.

  Others will be living here

  And we shall not be missed.

  We’ll wait for the evening star in the sky

  And the morning mist across the sward

  And we’ll gladly blossom, gladly die

  In the garden of the Lord.

  [CHANGING BACK]

  IT IS PART OF the mood and strange lack of consistency in one’s later years that life loses a lot of its reality, or of its proximity to reality, and that reality, which itself is already a somewhat insecure dimension of life, becomes thinner and more translucent, its claims on us no longer make their presence felt with the same force and relentlessness of earlier times, and it allows us to talk to it, play with it and handle it. Reality for us old people is no longer life but death, and we no longer wait for it as for something external, but we know that it dwells within us; although we resist the pains and problems that its proximity inflicts on us, we do not resist death itself—we have accepted it, and if we care for and coddle ourselves rather more than we did before, we care for and coddle death too, because it is with us and in us, and is our air, our task, our reality.

  What’s more, the world and the realities that were once all around us lose much of their truthfulness and even their probability, for they are no longer obviously and indisputably valid, and we can take them or leave them—we have a certain power over them. Thus everyday life takes on a kind of playful surrealism, because the old fixed systems are not quite so authoritative, aspects and emphases have shifted, the past increases in value compared to the present, and the future is of no serious interest whatever to us. And so our day-to-day conduct, from the standpoint of reason and the old rules, becomes somewhat irresponsible, frivolous, playful—the sort of behaviour that is popularly known as ‘being childish’. There is a lot of truth in that, and I have no doubt that I often innocently and irresistibly react in childish ways to the world around me. But observation teaches me that these reactions are definitely not always so innocent or uncontrolled. Old people can do childish, impractical, unprofitable and playful things with total (or semi-) consciousness, and with the same sort of pleasure as a child feels when it talks to a doll or according to its own mood and imagination magically transforms its mother’s little kitchen garden into a jungle full of tigers, snakes or hostile Indian tribes.

  Here’s an example—it was the hour when after reading the morning post I would go out into the garden. I say ‘garden’, although in fact it’s a pretty steep, very overgrown grassy slope with a few vine-covered terraces that are well cared for by our good old hired hand, while the rest shows a pronounced tendency to change back into virgin forest. Where two years ago we still had a meadow, the grass is now thin and bare, and instead there are flourishing anemones, Solomon’s seal, Paris quadrifolia, bilberries, here and there even a few blackberries and heather, and a lot of woolly moss all over the place. The moss and all its neighbouring plants would have to be grazed by sheep, and the ground trampled on by their hooves, if the meadow was to be saved, but we haven’t got any sheep, we wouldn’t have any manure to fertilise the rescued field, and so year by year the tough roots of the bilberries and their comrades creep deeper and deeper into the grassland, and the earth thus reverts to being a forest floor.

  According to whatever mood I’m in, I see this transformation either with ill humour or with good grace. Sometimes I have a go at a piece of this dying meadow, attack the rampant wild plant life with rake and fingers, mercilessly comb out the mossy upholstery between the endangered bunches of grass, rip out a basketful of bilberry tendrils complete with roots, without believing for one moment that this will do the slightest bit of good, as my gardening in the course of the years has become nothing but a hermit’s pastime without any practical meaning—that is to say, it has a meaning for me alone, which is a matter of personal hygiene and economics. When the pains in my eyes and head become too much for me, I need to change over to some mechanical activity, a physical occupation. The horticultural and charcoal-burning make-believe work that I have devised over the long years not only serves the purpose of this physical change and relaxation, but it also helps me to meditate, to continue spinning threads of fantasy and to concentrate on matters of the soul. And so from time to time I try to make it a bit more difficult for my meadow to turn into forest. At other times, I stop in front of the wall we built up more than twenty years ago on the southern edge of the property—it’s made of earth and the countless stones we dug up when we were making a trench to hold back the neighbouring forest, and once we planted it with raspberry canes. Now this wall is covered with moss, grass, ferns and bilberries, and a few already quite imposing trees, including a shady lime tree, stand as the advance guard of a slowly encroaching forest. On this particular morning, I had no objections to the moss or the undergrowth, or the overgrowth or the forest itself, but I gazed on the world of wild plants with pleasure and admiration. And all over the meadow there were lots of young narcissi, with fleshy
leaves, not quite blooming, their calyxes still closed, not yet white but a gentle yellow, the colour of freesias.

  Anyway, I walked slowly through the garden, looked at the young, reddish-brown rosebushes through which the morning sun was shining, and the bare stems of the newly bedded-out dahlias between which with boundless vitality soared the thick stalks of the Turk’s cap lilies, heard our faithful vine man Lorenzo clattering around further down with his watering cans, and decided to have a chat with him and discuss all sorts of gardening politics. Slowly I went down the slope, terrace by terrace, armed with an implement or two, enjoyed looking at the grape hyacinths in the grass, which many years ago I had scattered in hundreds all over the slope, wondered which bed would be best this year for the zinnias, was delighted to see the wallflowers in bloom, and dismayed to see the gaps and crumbling areas in the fence of latticed branches we’d put round the top compost heap, which was covered in the beautiful red of the fallen camellia blossoms. I climbed all the way down to the level vegetable garden, said hello to Lorenzo, and started off the conversation I’d planned by asking how he and his wife were, and exchanging views on the weather. I thought it was a good thing that there was evidently some rain on the way. Lorenzo, however, who is almost as old as I am, leant on his spade, threw a quick glance up and across at the driving clouds, and shook his grey head. There wouldn’t be any rain today. You never know, surprises can happen, although … and once more he squinted knowingly skywards, shook his head vigorously and ended the rain discussion: “No, signore.”

  Next we talked about vegetables, including the freshly planted onions, and I was full of praise for everything as I guided the conversation round to what I was really after. The fencing round the top compost heap probably wouldn’t last much longer, and I’d advise rebuilding it, although of course not now, when he already had his hands full with so many other things to do, but maybe some time getting towards autumn, or winter even? He agreed, and we decided that when he did get round to this job, it would be best not to renew just the lattice of green chestnut branches but also the posts. Although they might stand up for another year or so, it would be advisable … Yes, I said, and while we were on the subject of the compost heap, I’d also be grateful if in autumn he wouldn’t put all the really good soil on the higher beds again, but would set some aside for my flower terrace—at least a few wheelbarrowfuls. Right? And we shouldn’t forget to increase the strawberries this year, and clear out the lowest strawberry bed down by the hedge, which had been there all these years. And so each of us in turn came up with good and useful ideas for the summer, for September, for the autumn. And after we’d discussed everything, I carried on, while Lorenzo went back to work, and both of us were pleased with the outcome of our conversation.