War and Turpentine Read online

  On May 2, 1945—four days after Mussolini was publicly lynched, while his mangled body hung like a slaughtered ox next to that of his mistress in the open air next to a gas station in Milan—the Fascist poet was arrested by partisans and taken away from his home in idyllic Rapallo. Before he left, he threw a copy of Confucius and a Chinese dictionary into his travel bag. In an interview just a few days later, he likened Hitler to Joan of Arc and called Il Duce a leader “who lost his head”—you can say that again. Regarded as a genius who had descended into madness, he was penned up in an animal cage near Pisa. Later, back in Rapallo, the old and chastened Pound, ashamed of his anti-Semitic bluster, said to Allen Ginsberg, “I was not a lunatic, I was a moron.”

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  There is no way of telling which of the Cantos’ many cryptic passages about the sea refer to the small town of Rapallo. But standing there, I do know I am in the place where that man, as stubborn and blue-eyed as my grandfather, was eclipsed for a moment by a devout pilgrim in a black fedora with a heavy rock in his bag. They have almost nothing in common, and I assume my grandfather never even heard the name Pound in the course of his long life. Nevertheless, one thing connects them: a fleeting, enigmatic association inspired by the most intangible of relationships, like my association with the photo of Schopenhauer—something that will always be beyond my grasp and pertains to other customs, other morals. People from the age of Europe’s great catastrophes—how much sense can we make of them today? I take another look at the stone, run my fingertip over the meticulous brushstrokes, and realize that nothing ever returns to time unless it is stored in mute, voiceless objects; rocks do tell tales after all. Tracing the brushstrokes, I touch the motion of his fingers on this cold, quiet stone, as years ago I touched his forehead after he died and was seized by the thought: Have I ever felt anything colder than this forehead? Why won’t he open his eyes and speak to me?

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  There are also objects that have disappeared, but which haunt my memory all the more. The one that comes to mind most often, and torments me most, is the golden pocket watch he gave me for my twelfth birthday. As soon as I saw him coming down the stairs into the living room, his face beaming, I knew he had something special in store for me. Open your hand, he said, and he carefully placed the precious gift in it. I thanked him, looked up, and was just about to put my arms around him when the timepiece slid out of my hand and shattered on the tile floor. I have relived the scene countless times in memory: the expression on his face, his shock, the sight of him muttering curses, shaking his head, squeezing his eyes shut, and then the suppressed anger with which he swept up the fallen pieces, shoved them into the pocket of his smock, and went out into the garden, not to return until several hours later. It has often come back to me on sleepless nights, and every time I felt like slapping myself on the forehead, and sometimes I did.

  But now that I have read the true story of this watch in the first notebook, which describes his childhood experiences, I know the debt I incurred to him at that moment can never be repaid.

  The watch had belonged to his father’s grandfather, and whenever the family’s poverty became too oppressive to bear, his father and mother had their son take a few of their valuables to the pawnshop, which bore the impressively cynical name of Mount of Piety—a Christian phrase that brought a touch of grandeur to a mundane operation. The Mount of Piety still stands; the construction of that Baroque pile began in 1620 by order of the sanctimonious monarchs Albert and Isabella and was completed in 1622, in a time when religious wars had led to grinding poverty. The building—now beautifully restored, still bearing the inscription Mons Pietatis on its facade—is on Abrahamstraat, near Gravensteen Castle and the pleasant Prinsenhof district. Since 1930, it has held the city archives. With one of the city’s earliest Baroque facades, the building is somewhat reminiscent of an Italian palazzo. For a working-class boy, it was a long walk from the edge of town into the historic center, and I imagine the building intimidated him.

  One day, his father had reluctantly given him the watch in question, urging him, for God’s sake, not to drop it. He entered the gate beneath the words Mons Pietatis with this treasure clutched in his hand and placed the watch on the table in front of the scowling nun, who in return gave him some money and a receipt, which he took home. In those difficult years, when his father’s bouts of illness grew more and more frequent, he brought to the Mount of Piety his mother’s few French books, her necklace and the ivory cameo of the girl with the ponytail, set in silver, her own mother’s gilt hairpin, silver tableware, and a lace tablecloth in the Bruges style handmade by her grandmother around the mid-nineteenth century. Years later, when Franciscus had saved a little money, he instructed my grandfather to return with the same amount they had received—the Mons Pietatis lent to the poor without charging interest, that too is written on the facade. As he began to rant that those buzzards wouldn’t get away with stealing that blasted watch after all, his wife, who was thinking of her mother’s pawned pearl necklace, said, “Please, Franciscus, it’s not Christian to curse.”

  The watch was reclaimed, and after his father’s premature death, Urbain’s grieving mother placed it in his hands, telling him he was now the man of the house. He put it in his pocket, wore it as a talisman throughout his military training, and kept it with him for all four years of the war. Its delicate mechanism survived the nightmare of Schiplaken and the horror of Sint-Margriete-Houtem; it lasted through the legendary retreat to Jabbeke and Ostend and the hellish years on the Yser front that followed, from Mannekensvere to Stuivekenskerke. It was in his pocket when he crossed to Southampton and thought he would die. It was missed by mere inches when he was shot through the groin while erecting a barbed-wire entanglement on the Yser front. And it met an inglorious death at my clumsy young hands on my twelfth birthday, a day that will always remain burned into my memory. Now that I’m checking the dates, I see it happened only two months before he set to work on his memoirs. Just before he started writing, in other words, his most valuable keepsake slipped out of my hands and was lost forever.

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  On a gray day, I drive to Ghent for the sole purpose of walking aimlessly past that building, turning around, walking past it again, crossing the street, and squinting at the beautifully restored facade. Thoughts hammer in my head: once it was kept here, once he brought it through that door. And I broke it, an heirloom that was nearly an antique when he was young. What could he have done with the shattered pieces? A man walks by with a panting Doberman straining at the leash; I hear pigeons cooing. It’s too late now for the remorse that holds me helpless in its grip.

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  On Sunday afternoons in spring he would take me with him to Kouter, Ghent’s main square—where the weekly flower market was even more modest in size than it is today—and stand with me in the front row, usually by the vaguely Viennese facade of the Handelsbeurs, in a spotless dark blue suit with his cane planted in front of him, just as beneath the canopy the band began to play. He knew their entire repertoire by heart, note for note, and I often saw him humming along or rhythmically nodding his head as they played yet another march or a tune from Bizet’s L’Arlésienne, the wobbly tone of some instruments making it seem as though the oboist, the clarinetists, the buglers, and the red-faced man blowing the bass line on the tuba were crossing an unsteady bridge high above the fast-moving river of the challenging score. He would often say to me, as we walked home in satisfaction, “I once sang in the choir there, conducted by Peter Benoit.”

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  Benoit, the great Flemish bard and composer of an oratorio about the Scheldt River! He won the illustrious Prix de Rome, the highest honor a composer can receive, conducted in Paris, in Jacques Offenbach’s Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, and founded the forerunner of the Flemish Opera. Benoit, invariably referred to by my grandfather as the Flemish Brahms, died in 1901, so my grandfather must have been under the age of ten when he sang in the gala choir. A brief search t
urns up the celebration in question: when Princess Elisabeth, Duchess in Bavaria, and Prince Albert of Belgium visited “the proud City of Ghent” in 1900 as part of the celebration of their recent wedding, a large mixed choir was formed that included a number of carefully selected children’s choirs. It must have been a magnificent event; the orchestra that performed in Kouter was impressive, and undoubtedly suited to the refined musical tastes and enthusiasm of the young princess. Already well known as a music lover, she would later lend her queenly name to one of Europe’s most prestigious musical competitions, the Queen Elisabeth Competition, about which I once, a few years back, heard a famous Flemish conductor ask the king, “Sire, isn’t it time you shut down that old-fashioned circus once and for all?” Upon which King Albert II, the grandson and namesake of the musical Queen Elisabeth’s husband (who died tragically in an accident), winked affably at his dining companions and replied, “You are a little rascal, aren’t you?”

  In any case, the great Flemish composer’s performance in Kouter in Ghent in the year 1900 made a lasting impression on my grandfather; Benoit could wield his authority over the Ghent children’s choirs just by indignantly raising one of his legendary bushy eyebrows. In the well-known portrait by the painter Jan Van Beers Jr., a superb character study, you can still see how impressive those eyebrows were, and how deep the circles under the eyes of the great, exhausted tone poet. A certain likeness to the famous portrait of the aging Brahms cannot be denied, and yet Benoit’s head is far more Brahmsian than that of Brahms himself, so to speak. I later listened to Benoit’s piano concerto, which did sound a lot like Brahms, and it was impossible for me not to picture my grandfather sitting by the radio with his eyes closed and one finger in the air, softly whistling along with the stately melody, which is not easy considering the slow tempo. The whistled tune would sometimes shoot upward just as the music plunged into the depths, but that’s how it goes sometimes when the spirit is profoundly moved.

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  From Kouter, we would go on to Veneziana, the old ice-cream parlor and restaurant near the medieval castle Gravensteen. It was a quaint, old-fashioned establishment, where he always treated me to melon ice cream. Veneziana was an institution. Poets went there for coffee and gossip, and to brag about their secret mistresses in the nostalgic canal houses on the Coupure, read the newspaper, or gripe about the weather. The elderly Ghent composer Louis de Meester, who was affiliated with Schoenberg’s modern school but could nevertheless glare just as impressively as Peter Benoit, often held court there, side by side with his much younger wife, who was said to have once been a waitress at that same cozy ice-cream parlor. Veneziana, a Ghent highlight for several generations of satisfied ice-cream eaters, unfortunately shut its doors in 2006, and I have always suspected the beginning of the end came when its owner, Nikki Zangrando, decided to renovate the interior, remove the brown paneling, and replace the endearing 1930s furniture with soulless modern pieces. Zangrando—who was not precisely Venetian but did come from the Veneto region, near Cortina d’Ampezzo—had apparently underestimated the power of his own invented tradition in the provincial Flemish town, and in retrospect it seems clear that by rashly giving in to the urge for the new that prevailed in those days, he delivered the death blow to an establishment that will forever be linked in my mind to the taste of melon, a fruit then eaten only by the wealthy. Once, when I told my grandfather I didn’t even know what a melon looked like, he led me to the nearby vegetable market and bought two fragrant cantaloupes then and there. When we returned home, Gabrielle said, “Are you out of your mind, Urbain? Who on earth would eat a thing like that?”

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  My grandfather’s love of music usually swept over him like a fit of melancholy. The soaring wind section in Bizet’s lyrical suite L’Arlésienne, the wistful melody from Schubert’s Rosamunde, the notorious chorus of slaves in Verdi’s Nabucco—they all had the same effect: his blue eyes grew moist. Wagner, on the other hand, filled him with anger and disgust. Unbeknownst to him, this feeling was shared by the great philosopher with a hammer; Nietzsche wrote late in life that he preferred Bizet’s southern lightheartedness, his affirmation of love and life, to the Teutonic opium dreams of Wagner’s murky mysticism. Offenbach put my grandfather in a cheerful mood, and military marches lifted his spirits. He knew Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony by heart, especially the movement with the cuckoo calling in the cool Wienerwald; I’ve already described the malodorous details with which, thanks to his stories, my childish imagination embellished that piece. But no other music was as dear to him as the overture to Bizet’s L’Arlésienne, with the infectious rhythm of the March of the Kings, the wistful melody that follows in the wind section, and the dramatic, even tragic, melodic turn, all in such swift succession that it may have been the perfect expression of his whole personality. While listening to it, he would sometimes say, “Oh, the light in the south, you have no idea!” and then sink into rapt, wordless attention. Who knows, maybe he was thinking of the beach at Rapallo. Of course, this Arlésienne, a girl from Arles who causes the death of her admirer, was remarkably similar to the dreaded femme fatale Carmen, from Bizet’s opera of the same name, who calls love a rebellious bird and gives her lover a choice—love me and you’ll have to look out for yourself, or don’t love me and you’ll have to look out for yourself all the more—but given the timid moral climate of Flemish living rooms in those days, he passed over that resemblance in silence. What choice did he have? A life-consuming passion had come close to devouring him, and had burned him badly enough. That much I could sense intuitively during the dark turn in that unforgettable prelude, which contains the force of an entire opera.

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  Places are not just space, they are also time. I look at the city differently now that I carry his memories with me. My thoughts go on circling Kouter, which I have seen ever since my childhood as a place of celebration, associated with Sunday mornings, the fragrance of the cut flowers my parents bought, and the old-fashioned band music performed in the perfectly restored bandstand. But now I am scanning the private language of the facades to find the house where once, for the few months that my grandfather was apprenticed to the Brussels tailor Mr. Tombuy, he would report to work at the door of a Monsieur Carpentier, “garment reseller.” As my grandfather described it, the house was “adjacent to the renowned literary Club des Nobles situated in Kouter.” That’s easy to find; since 1802, the Club des Nobles had been housed in what is known as the Hotel Falligan—a rococo building beautifully restored in a hue approaching the “Maria Theresa yellow” of the Habsburg family—which still stands proudly on that main city square. The facade is flanked by Apollo on the right and Diana on the left, a well-known pair; he represents the arts, and she the hunt—art and hunting, two favorite pursuits of the nobility since time immemorial, chiefly because of their aura of distinction. But I learn from a website that the statues were once “reheaded” in the course of restoration, and funnily enough, Apollo ended up with Diana’s bow, while Diana had to learn to play the harp. This forced exchange of occupations is nothing if not remarkable, and undoubtedly attests to the widening horizons of the city’s cultivated aristocrats. To this very day, the building hosts the meetings of the French-language Falligan Literary Circle, one of the last remnants of Ghent’s moribund Francophone bourgeoisie, an exclusive, nostalgic world chronicled by authors such as Suzanne Lilar in Une enfance gantoise. Lilar was also the author of La confession anonyme, a novella skillfully adapted by André Delvaux into the dark, passionate film Benvenuta, with the unforgettably sensual Fanny Ardant in the lead and an exquisite score by the discerning composer Frédéric Devreese; the beautiful setting is one of the most evocative buildings on the Coupure—a large, mysterious canal house with a walled garden, which I would have loved to purchase if I’d had the money.

  The garment reseller’s house on Kouter is not as easy to identify; was it to the left or right of the Club des Nobles? To the left is a shop that invites me, in eye-catc
hing toxic green letters, not only to step inside, but also to come right back out again with instant internet access. The ground floor has been blemished with some kind of cheap black marble facing in the bad taste that appears to come naturally to retailers all over the world. But the four upper stories, each with a beautiful loggia, still leave no doubt that this is an almost palatial nineteenth-century bourgeois townhouse. To the right is an immense building now owned by a bank. With a frontage of more than ten windows, this building is so large that it may not have been designed as a private dwelling, even if it does date from the years before the Great War, when the blatant display of personal wealth to the hoi polloi in the streets was still considered a sign of a refined moral character. So my money is on the building on the left, and as I visualize how attractive and stylish the now-hideous ground floor must have looked a few years after 1900, I begin to form a picture of the thirteen-year-old kid who, for ten centimes a day, ran from one end of town to the other in his clogs and sagging black stockings with heavy stacks of finished garments, and who came here to ring Monsieur Carpentier’s doorbell. A servant opens the door—a woman, let us suppose. She takes the heavy package from him, thanks him in French with a Ghent accent, and shuts the door—or maybe she slips him an extra centime or two first, I don’t know. The boy runs back to the tailor’s house—the address has been lost—where his employer’s demanding wife makes him split logs, start a fire, and fetch coal, and then runs back to the sewing workshop, where he is scolded for being gone too long and returning with dirty hands. The tailor gruffly sends him off to pick up his son from school. After a while, this becomes a daily routine, and he has to carry the young bourgeois gentleman’s book bag, making sure to stay two steps behind him to avoid being rapped with his walking stick, which the twelve-year-old boy already wields with Proustian panache.