Catarsini and San Martino

5 – CATARSINI AND SAN MARTINO

THE NOVEL GIORNI NERI, SET AT SAN MARTINO

««On top of that there was the war and, for all the silence to be felt in the Versilian countryside, the infernal hurricane could not be far off; and so it foretold hard, murky days, without glory for anyone, in which humanity walks blind, hounded or made savage by the weight of a great conflict.»».

A. Catarsini, Giorni neri, p. 23, La Nave di Teseo, 2021

Between 1943 and 1945 Alfredo Catarsini, like a great many others in those difficult years, was evacuated from Viareggio to the hinterland. The railway and the Via Aurelia that crossed Versilia were strategic arteries for communications and for supplying the troops engaged in the world war, and the presence of the Gothic Line not far off made the whole area a dangerous place at risk of bombing, as it proved to be.

Catarsini found refuge in places in the Lucchesia such as the Val Freddana and Monte Magno, which were the scene of atrocities, with mass deportations, killings of hostages and outright massacres. The book Giorni neri, set in those places and in that summer of 1944, was made in 1968 using the illustrations and developing the notes he had taken during that period. It opens with a horse-drawn cart loaded with household goods moving slowly along the road. Venanzio the carter drives the cart laden with the belongings of evacuees bound for the hinterland along a white road, with the sunlit early-summer countryside on either side.

In the book we read…

««Down there were the church of San Martino with its ancient tower, and the mill with its great wheel, by now reduced to silence. Meanwhile the sun beat its last rays on Monte Magno, which the men now saw against the light, while on the seaward side it set the plain of the whole of Versilia ablaze with an aggressive red.».
A. Catarsini, Giorni neri, p. 216, La Nave di Teseo, 2021

In the church of San Martino in Freddana, Catarsini painted marvellous frescoes, of which there is an echo in the novel too. In its pages we read of «a painter», also a refugee, whom the villagers asked — in exchange for flour, oil, bread and a few coins — to beautify their church. And «the painter» in the book does so, having the local people pose (as in fact happened), among them the book’s protagonist, the sailor Nando.

Biography, history and fiction mingle in Giorni neri, which was born as a fictionalised testimony of those moments and sets out from the very notes the author wrote during those long months far from his town and from those he loved — notes that then turned into a story proper, a novel which, from the roots of reality, created fictional characters who nevertheless, embodying universal feelings and emotions in its pages, give us back a truthful fresco of what happened.

The novel is not autobiographical, though: Catarsini speaks of himself only in the third person, identifying himself with «the painter» in a few pages alone — these that follow:

«[…] I have walked enough this morning, and I thought of you too, dear painter, about the business of the flour. The owner of the mill will contribute so that the painting work may be brought to an end; a hundredweight of the white flour and a little oil will be brought to me by the owner of that wood where Nando and Frustino went to cut the holm oaks.

In short, have faith in Providence, which will abandon no one. Meanwhile you work; make a fine thing for the good of our Holy Church.»

And further on:

«[…] The painter stood there a moment, a little confused, came quickly down the ladder and thought that going outside would really not be prudent; so now the two of them were working out how they might somehow hide. They made for the little sacristy door but at once drew back, because the painter guessed it would not lead them anywhere safe. The Rector was away and the housekeeper was quietly doing the washing outside, in the small porch of the presbytery.

Nando, from the middle of the church, was watching the Germans’ movements, even counting the stops they made to look at the countryside.

– — And yet they’re coming here, he said. We’d better see we don’t get trapped, damn it.

– — Trapped? murmured the painter, frowning. Here we are: I’ll bury myself alive, and you, Nando, find yourself a hole where they won’t find you.

– — And where?

– — Look, under the steps of the high altar there’s a trapdoor; lift the lid and slip inside. Nobody will find you there.

The Germans were not at all the same ones who two days earlier had gone to the Rector to find out who had killed their comrade. They walked in jerks, they seemed tired; then they stopped to talk to an old man with a pockmarked face who was there on the edge of his field, where a bit of everything had grown, tall ferns included.

Nando and the painter then moved behind the central door of the church, but could not hear clearly what the old man was saying to the Germans.

They saw him wave his hands about, saw them pat him amiably on the shoulders, then laugh, while showing at the same time a pressing indifference to everything the Germans said, which the poor old man did not understand at all. They came up to the churchyard, climbed the two steps and stopped at the central door, whose brown curtain, moved by the wind at that moment, flapped into the face of one of them. Outside there was a light full of sun, which contrasted with the half-dark that wrapped the interior of the church and made it impossible to see anything.

The Germans came in and, at every step, stopped to dawdle, looking now a little in every direction. In their faces could be found the marks of people used to respecting sacred places. They represented, at least in certain respects, the emanation of the most orthodox Protestantism. They went up near the high altar to get a better look at the unfinished paintings above. They were curious to know what they represented; perhaps in their murmured exchanges they were trying to grasp their true biblical meaning — of which they, more than others, would have understood all the moral worth that resides in every religion.

– — Naturally the Germans are beings inclined to analyse everything, said the painter; that is why they never stop observing everything that comes before their eyes, or turning it over in their hands if it is something they can touch.

While they were about to climb onto the scaffold to look at the painted «piece», along came Berta, who knelt before the Blessed Sacrament. It gave her a start to see the two Germans on the ladder near the altar, but then again, as a woman, she could say nothing to them, because silence and a tongue held between the lips were truly the best safety. Berta made the sign of the cross and coughed a couple of times. One of the two Germans, coming down from the ladder, came over at once to say something to her. He did not speak Italian perfectly, but Berta understood very well that he had said something about her cough.

– — I have a cold, the woman answered, straightening her apron at her waist.

The two Germans looked on with a certain wariness; they seemed afraid, and after Berta had withdrawn they climbed the ladder again, drawn by the painter’s work, which this time they could look at at their ease.

They touched the painted plaster with evident pleasure, they talked and laughed, and one of them suddenly felt the wish to take up a brush and put his name on that part of the plaster still left rough. The other comrade, who held an unlit cigarette between his lips, took the brush from his companion’s hand and began to sketch, in his own way, a Stuka in flight dropping bombs in all directions.

They were two big young men of simple, if you like even dazed, appearance, who evidently took everything at that moment as a game, a pastime, while keeping due respect for the work already finished, which was substantially beautiful with its strong colours.

Every so often Berta spied from the sacristy door; she then saw them come down the ladder and heard one of them sneeze loudly. She heard them talking again, gesturing with their arms but in an orderly, composed way, then stopping before the wooden Crucifix, black and smoked like a herring, which must have recalled to them a certain Friday in April of the year thirty, fixed there on the wall for over a century with all the weight of His Cross. One

of them took a chair and climbed on it for a better look. He touched it with his white, pale hand, altogether pleased, as though he felt a private tactile delight in it. Then he moved the chair away and signalled to his comrade to look at it too from a certain distance.»

Further on we read again:

– «Do you know the painter? The one working in the church? Well, when you see him tell him not to go on painting the war on the walls of a church, but to come and make it here with us. I know you’ve been his sentry without a sentry-box, ready and set for any appearance of the Germans. But he’s a good man, even if he paints tanks. And if instead of angels he has Spitfires flying.»

And further:

«They all came into the village from the church side, whose small side door was ajar; someone put his head in but saw nobody, only a couple of candles above the high altar guttering a faint light up on the painter’s unfinished fresco.»

Nando and Frustino, but also Delta, the painter and the rector, are some of the protagonists, and they are so real in their descriptions, their actions and the places they inhabit as to seem true. True is the luxuriant wood of an intense green that opens the heart to hope; true is the red light of the sunset over the sea that spreads out beyond the heights.

Being the painter he is, Catarsini paints with words, and as the chapters run by it is the images that fix themselves in the reader’s mind and stay there; faces and places come alive as in a fresco.

There are the small great stories; there are the men and women who, uprooted from their land, found themselves with their few belongings in an elsewhere they had not sought, full of grief and fear.

Vivid characters, intense, harsh dialogues that tell us perhaps the hardest part of our history.

Giorni neri, reissued by La Nave di Teseo in 2021, is also, thanks to a recording made by the Tuscan branch of the UICI, an audiobook for the partially sighted.

It is a complete novel open to many readings, among them the intense and absorbing one given by Cristina Acidini in her short essay Giorni Neri by Alfredo Catarsini: colour denied published in the catalogue of the exhibition «Alfredo Catarsini dalla Darsena alla Linea Gotica 1917–1945», Maria Pacini Fazzi Editore, 2022. As an art critic, Acidini rereads the book in pictorial terms: «If Giorni neri were a painting,» she writes, «it would be a severe monochrome, run through by subtle tonal vibrations and dotted with the most measured notes of ringing colour, green or red. […] It is a post-Macchiaioli little picture that opens the first page. A horse with foam «white as soapsuds», a cart, the road itself white under the mild sun, the few shadows between wheat and vines: the midday light conveys, through even so brief a turn of phrase, an impression of brightness, but the rustic serenity is only an appearance destined to last a short while.»

Cristina Acidini, «Giorni neri by Alfredo Catarsini: colour denied»

The title of the novel by the painter and writer contains, from its title onwards, a colour.

But it is in reality an absence of colour, from which all hues have vanished, cancelled by the «subtractive synthesis» — that is the technical definition — whose result is the total lack of light, absolute dark, fearful gloom. An ancestral metaphor for inner darkness and therefore for Evil.

The «black days» are indeed those of the Second World War in the terrible last times of the armistice, of the passing of the front, of the partisan resistance, described by Catarsini in the form of a novel and drawing on his own experience as an evacuee in the Val Freddana: an industrious evacuee, who painted on the scaffolding of the apse of the church of San Martino the frescoes still visible there. From this observatory enclosed within the short compass of a few mountains and knolls, studded with small churches and cottages, woods and farms, paths and streams, symbolically converging around a Spinning Mill never described but feared — we know of it only that it is ringed by a wall of red brick (p. 300) — where the German soldiers are quartered.

One might think that, having laid down the painter’s brush, Catarsini dipped the pen of the memoirist and novelist into the same palette of dazzling hues. Instead, in his plain prose, in which the dialogue between the main and minor characters prevails, colours are evoked sparingly, the hues are austere, the tones shadowy, save for a few exceptions, few but full of meaning. As though the houses, the people and nature itself, under the permanent shadow of the storm of fear and grief gathered over the places and in the hearts, went progressively fading towards the livid, the dark, and at last towards black. «Their tragic world» — writes Catarsini, contemplating his protagonists with pity — «grew ever more closed, more darkened»(p. 49); and in those restless days even the sunlight became«turbid»(p. 87). «Painful, hard, black days» is the phrase that gives the book its title (p. 166); «black and hard» (p. 216) are the hardest moments of the small local story, which inserts itself into the great history under way like the small but no less necessary tessera of a wider mosaic.

If Giorni neri were a painting, it would be a severe monochrome, run through by subtle tonal vibrations and dotted with the most measured notes of ringing colour, green or red. Barely — but only barely — livelier than Guernica, the masterpiece in black and white shaded with grey and sand with which Pablo Picasso commemorated the tragedies of the Spanish Civil War. Let us see, then, some examples of this verbal dosing of colour, so sparing as to surprise in an artist like Catarsini, used to expressing himself in painting with vivid, full-bodied chromatic ranges.

It is a post-Macchiaioli little picture that opens the first page. A horse with foam «white as soapsuds», a cart, the road itself white under the mild sun, between wheat and vines, the few shadows: the midday light conveys, through even so brief a turn of phrase, an impression of brightness, but the rustic serenity is only an appearance destined to last a short while. Only much later shall we find a Macchiaioli situation again, in a rare pause of contemplative serenity: «in the wood […] the sun was beginning to filter through, at times laying out bright patches of light that they trod underfoot » (p. 316).

Instead, from the very first pages the alternation of white and black asserts itself as the dominant motif, which in countless variations expresses itself as the opposition of light and shade, of day and night. Under the watch of the majestic Apuan mountains «rich in white marbles» (p. 16) gathers the wretched, grieving humanity of the evacuees, which meets the no less wretched and grieving humanity of the local people, in a passage of troops of every side by now flattened and anonymous, so as to be swiftly sketched as «black masses of men» (p. 19). And at once the contrast returns on a small scale, with the «black nostrils» and the «whitish humours» of the horse’s muzzle. The mongrel dog too is black and white (p. 32). The clouds are white (p. 33), the Fascists’ shirts are black (p. 40), the earth of a clearing is black (p. 51), black is the stinking smoke of a wretched cigarette (p. 55). Black are the wooden crucifixes dimmed by time, smoke-darkened, perhaps patinated by the passing of devout hands over generations (pp. 173, 270); black the velvet church hanging (p. 175).

All the more, then, does the vivid brushstroke of a good-natured face stand out — that of Venanzio — «coloured like a lobster» (p. 21), and shortly after the «face lacquered pink» of a German soldier (p. 28): two ringing notes that break into the monochrome scene with differently grotesque effects, the red of the old evacuee likened to a crustacean, the pink of the foreign soldier probably suggested by a pig. Of an old man a singular two-colour scheme is described: «an earthen brow, a face scorched by the sun» (p. 129). The fair-haired SS soldiers are «rosy as an apple» (p. 197), and one even red, he too, «as a lobster» (p. 275). Another German soldier’s hand is «white, pale» (p. 173). Sad, instead, the «cyanotic» complexion of a scrawny young man (p. 33); tragic the «livid» colouring of a hanged man (p. 223). Even the face of the stars is «sickly» (p. 305).

The hair of the former allies, become enemies after 8 September, is of an «Aryan» blond (p. 174); a young lieutenant’s is «like tow» (p. 260).

It is a stiffened humanity, crippled to the edge of caricature, that files past Catarsini’s eyes — whether with features deformed by the ancestral poverty of mountain and sea people, or presenting the barbaric physiognomy of the northern peoples, cold of skin, of eye and of hair, and icy of heart. The very colours that mark it, as the story goes on, become uncertain and turbid: bluish the eyes, whitish the skin.

He, the writer, looks at that grieving humanity as a painter, slipping into the weave an anonymous version of himself in rare appearances, true «cameos» in which he is evoked as «the one who makes the pictures» and climbs the scaffolding to fresco in the church.

The properly artistic part of Giorni neri, Catarsini expresses in the graphic plates that punctuate the text. With broken, tangled lines like ill-treated wire, he builds powerful images of men, women (and a few beasts) impoverished and tried, but not tamed. A sack, a knapsack, a rifle are the only goods they have been able to keep. Beside the farmers and the evacuees, with a nervous, sure hand, the painter sets the soldiers, no less shaken than the civilians, and the pathetic silhouettes of the hanged men dangling. On the cover, a wild-eyed post-Cubist face in black and white announces the two-colour scheme that prevails in the book.

It is with the appearance of Delta, a young partisan, that notes of grace ring out — if a fleeting grace, held in a look, a movement, an accessory barely feminine. Delta is greeted with an unexpected trio of decided colours: brown her hair, grey her blouse and red the kerchief she wears at her neck (p. 54). Other kerchiefs will wave, with the vigour of bright, brilliant patches able to light the ever darker scenes: «white from the wash» (p. 80), «white with little red flowers» (p. 244), white as a sign of surrender (p. 341); but only Delta’s red kerchief is a symbol of political allegiance and of courageous militancy. Her hair of a deep black, «like pitch» (p. 215), becomes the thread of an opposition between harmonious Mediterranean beauty and the by turns washed-out or congested colours of the invaders from beyond the Alps. Moral judgement too passes through the application of an aesthetic canon, according to the Greek principle of kalokagathía — the coexistence of beauty and goodness — deeply rooted in Italian culture.

The scene goes on offering monochrome pictures, such as a morning «veiled, half-grey» (p. 195), or a «dust whitening in the greyness of evening» (p. 289), with the occasional relief of dark patches: black the lips steeped in blackberry juice (p. 178), black the new patent shoes of Delta dressed to seduce (p. 291), black a bottle mysteriously walled into a chimney pot (p. 289). The «thick and gloomy shadows of the night» loom threatening (p. 300).

White, though, the dusty roads; snow-white «a little church that seemed made of ricotta, so white was it», which stands out — surprisingly — from the night’s darkness (p. 108): we imagine it painted with a full-bodied, luminous impasto, laid with strokes of the palette knife on the darkened canvas. And a swift geometric vision of the road, appearing before the small band of partisans, has the austere power of an old woodcut: «The main road […] was white as death. Along its sides ran dark ditches that gave a sense of mourning» (p. 263).

And the surrounding nature? After a pleasant «meadow of intense green» at the beginning (p. 33), the setting too, mainly mountainous and wooded, progressively darkens. Cypresses wrapped in shadow, woods forming dense patches of deep green, a holm oak with a «superb, eternally dark crown» (p. 122), another that is «black as night» (p. 238). «Nature looked like a dying woman», the painter-writer will declare further on, observing the chestnut trees «with their fronds prematurely withered, of a pale, faded colour» (p. 346). The parched meadows are «almost yellow» (p. 363).

Without the comparison being pressed too far, Catarsini’s imaginary palette has something in common with the range of colours and tones evoked by Dante Alighieri in leading the reader of the Divina Commedia through the anguished stages of the first canticle, devoted to the Inferno. The menacing green of the dense wood wrapped in night, the rising of the sun, and then the gradual descent into the infernal journey with the disappearance of light and the aggressive prevalence of darkness. Rare the restoring pauses, such as the meadow enamelled with grasses around the castle of the Great Spirits — here, the opening «meadow of intense green» (p. 33) — or the dewy little flowers that greet the morning: here the «little daisies, yellow, white, pink» (p. 217). Soon enough, instead, the itinerary descends towards circles and rings of growing gloom, painted in words by Dante with every tone of black, grey and brown, down to the dull pallor of Lucifer’s ice. In Dante’s Inferno, the red light that tears the darkness is that of the everlasting flames: here, that of fleeting weather.

For, in search of a less oppressive air, nothing is left to the artist but to turn to the sky, where phantasmagorias of light play out, supremely indifferent to the affairs of men. And if even a dawn may appear «timid, silent, perhaps sullen» (p. 305), more often the daybreak is sweet, and «tinges the valleys with pink» (p. 276), while the supreme glory of sunset expresses itself in a triumph of red. Thus Catarsini reveals himself, by the device of a paper written by the evacuated painter which one of the protagonists, Nando, reads aloud to the others: «… I see the sun when it peeps out behind the mountain and when at evening it goes down towards the sea»; and the spectacle of the sunset had appeared to him that evening «burning and full of fire, like the sun going away into another world» (p. 233). Compared with this view, which the painter enjoys from a small west-facing window of his, still vaster and more glowing is the image caught from above, where the eye travels from the valley to the far horizon, beyond the black mountain profiles: « Down there were the church of San Martino with its ancient tower, and the mill with its great wheel, by now reduced to silence. Meanwhile the sun beat its last rays on Monte Magno, which the men now saw against the light, while on the seaward side it set the plain of the whole of Versilia ablaze with an aggressive red» (p. 216). It is to that shore, kindly set aflame by the sunset, that the eye of the painter-writer runs, and still more his heart, full of aching longing.

With his lexical palette — severe, but capable of lightning kindlings — Catarsini was able to «paint» in his own way the states of mind and the atmospheres of that terrible juncture, leaving the novel suspended and almost unfinished. Perhaps so that this warning of his against the horrors of war may go on echoing indefinitely in the consciences of us, his contemporaries.