Finally sun in Milan. The clear air of the mountains lies in the valley. It gets dark long before the days are over, it gets pleasant on the streets as soon as the last fashion dolls come out of shops in the evening and have their purchases dragged or hauled home. The good Milanese girls are still thin, pale and brown-haired, they work as daughters.
We want to forget Corona now and are doing it. The quiet light of the shop windows falls softly on the pavement and you stroll with your head in your collar, past the shop windows, throwing your luck into the world of dead things. I visited Milan once, a few years ago, on my own. I remember rain and a curtain and a park in the fog that I could see from my hotel window. Today the park shines in the last light. It’s called Giardini Indro Montanelli and we go through it to the square where nobody is at this time of the day, except us and someone who Nothing Else Matters plays – it’s wonderful to be young and in love and to be traveling.
In the morning I go to the Cova and write letters. Lunch: Milanese schnitzel. Emotional situation: tragic, sublime, beautiful heaviness. I no longer reduce the city to people who walk through bad weather well dressed and carry their things around. Milan is more this time, I have Ernest Hemingway’s novel written in 1929 In another country had read.
On a clear day you can see from Milan over the plain to the mountains. I didn’t know that the Alps were so close to the city. The snow mountains of Switzerland sometimes storm the city, like an army of weather, like the end of something, an immense impenetrability that blocks the view of the world, of sun, life, hope. You sit in the train and drive up Lake Maggiore and think how beautiful it is and that there was a war there and nobody went there, as Hemingway wrote.
When I think of Hemingway, I see a sad, broken man who tries to make a happy face and has to drink with everyone. I watched documentaries about him on television. They tell about it. About what was behind the ostentatious masculinity. At least the women who did it say that he wanted to be “pummeled” like a woman in bed. His mother squeezed him into girls’ clothes and called him Ernestine. He has to set himself apart with bullfighting, swordfish and headlines. I see someone who struggles for a lifetime to do justice to a foreign role and in the end fails because of their own ideals.
Northern dreariness
As a young person you still have the strength to meet your expectations, but also the task of overcoming them over time. I see this as a lesson on the horizon of an evening of life. No matter how far I am, with Homer, Holderlin, Horace, although Homer does not read, you just turn the pages, I keep coming back to Hemingway. I hate to admit that, but the fight between inside, outside, muscle and obsessions is too exciting, and I fight it too much myself. He’s never been a role model for me, but a friend who encourages me to write, also with me Muscles, even if manuscripts are sometimes dreadful until they have been properly edited. Hemingway owes its clarity not to itself but to the editor Maxwell Perkins. If you don’t believe that, you should Fiesta read before Max’s turn, right Look home, angel by Thomas Wolfe. Reduction, i.e. the ability to break something down to the core until it is free from vanity and compulsion and thus truer than the reality on which a story is based, is something few authors have.
Our author smoking in front of the hotel
In Hemingways In another country it is about a young American who is stationed as a medical officer in the mountain war between Austria and Italy. Here he meets a nurse with whom he falls in love. After being seriously wounded, he is given a medal and sent as a reward for a few days to the Grand Hotel Des Iles Borromees in Stresa, on Lake Maggiore. Here Hemingway – the story is autobiographical – makes his first contact with Noblesse – and is carried away. This is shown in the book in the scene with Conte Emanuele Greppi. The count lets a couple of bottles jump and you play billiards. From the bar you can see the lake. From here the couple rowed their way to Switzerland one night on the run from the war.
For lovers in autumn 2021, it’s bizarre to spend the end of the season and the end of the world in bed and look out over the lake at the mountains from the balcony. It’s strangely beautiful.
Southern charm
Stresa is like Milan with the sea. Northern dreariness with southern charm. The leaves brown when they are not those of palm trees, a promenade, sleepy mansions in the shade of the conifers. When the sun comes out, it lets everything shine in the colors of things, just like Ferdinand Hodler paints it. There are three signs at the train station, I have to tell you that. One for the bar, one for the toilet and the one that Uscita stands on shows a person sitting and reading. A clock hangs over him. Somehow I think that’s nice. Everything is in order and on time, my friend cannot believe that this is the same country in which Naples is located. 2 p.m. is still a good morning here too. We get there at least as complicated as Hemingway. A missed train later and the wrong transfer, the argument is over. I thought I could read the card better, and then the explosion. You get the feeling that you have when you walk through places that are otherwise very busy. After all, if you are angry, it is easier to drag your luggage to the hotel.
It is the room with a view of the lake that reconciles us. We have already had many such rooms that look out over lakes and seas, have been bringing our love to beautiful places for a long time, so beautiful that we let the expectations of our love take away our beauty. I know the feeling that Hemingway also has. Having to write well and love well, every day. It is not enough to do it a hundred times, you always have to do it a hundred and once, free yourself from this particular feeling, from all doubts, from yourself. Happiness can become a compulsion if you have it and want to keep it. But you don’t really have to hold it to be happy, you can just have it that way.
The truth is, Hemingway never managed to take his beloved nurse to this hotel. In the book, he and Miss Barkley spend wonderful hours here before rowing their way from the war to Switzerland before dawn in a night-and-fog operation. After the war, he never wanted to come back here. Mussolini had banned his books. His broken heart lay here. He doesn’t come back until thirty years later. It’s the same hotel another man comes to, four marriages and three children later. On the evening of their arrival, Mary Hemingway writes in her diary: Thirty years ago “Hem” dreamed of taking his girl here, but he couldn’t. According to their record, 31 years later he “couldn’t do it” and the sight of the mountains did not spark the same feelings in him.
Hemingway’s “In Another Land” takes place in the Grand Hotel on Lake Maggiore
The writer wants a lot. He describes the bartender better than he really gets to know. Today hardly anyone stays in such hotels for so long, the bartender is a marginal figure. Francesco, the mixer, and I spend two evenings together at the bar. I know from him that he limps so much because he fell while picking porcini mushrooms and it takes 45 minutes to drive to work. He has been here for 23 years and the bar has not always been in this place. I could feel it right away because you can’t get into the bar. It stands in the middle of the lobby like a backdrop, a dummy. Nor does she have the view of the boat described in the book and is not as calm as she was before fleeing in the war, not even two days before the end of the season. You can see the jetty and the lake and you see yourself in the mirror, you see yourself sitting at the bar called the Hemingway Bar. It’s terrible that this bar is called that and that a picture of him hangs here. The stools are way too deep and you don’t even dare to write a letter or anything because you degenerate into kitsch.
Francesco says, “come on, I’ll show you where the bar was”. We go into a dark room in the side wing and he stands at the end of the room behind an imaginary bar and I pull on my imaginary drink. This is the room where Frederic Henry plays pool and sees the blender’s boat that will take him away the next day. There is silence in the room. Francesco stands proudly behind the bar and a little sad. There’s thunder. Thunderstorms are nothing normal here in November, he says.
Hemingway is only American at bars around the world. I noticed that in Chicote in Madrid and in Harry’s Venice Bar, such a bastard. 25 euros for a milk glass with martini, 15: 1, Montgomery, I don’t care who drinks it, in no other grand hotel does it cost that much. Francesco laughs. He’s a nice, taciturn man and wants to get basil for my drink tomorrow. For dinner he recommends a small eatery in the center. Just down the street, but always along the promenade. I don’t know why he’s saying that.
The promenade is long and is lit by street lamps. We walk over foliage on long paths, with trees on either side. To the left is the lake, deserted and black and what it does to you and in the mountains the night. Lights twinkle on the other bank. They are the same lights that you have to see a hundred years ago, maybe more, but also a few from before. It’s cold and wet. Tomorrow, after the rain, all the mountains will be white, said Francesco.
After dinner and drinks in the hotel, in our room, with the thunderstorm outside, and us in bed, after the empty corridors, the wet gravel paths, the black of the lake on which the moon shines when the clouds let it and you seeing Isola Bella, which at night looks like Hagia Sofia, and after the stories of Hemingway and in the middle of our own history, one can forget the weight of the sky. Existence, without thinking, without life, without death. Love once, forever.
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