Pathological Dispatch: Ischia
Notes from the field
In 1953, Ingeborg Bachmann traveled to the island of Ischia, off the coast of Naples. While on Ischia, Bachmann lived with composer Hans Werner Henze, whom she had met through Gruppe 47, the German writers association which would award Bachmann its Literature Prize this same year. The two developed a close creative relationship: Henze composed several operas over the subsequent decade with Bachmann as his librettist, including The Idiot, The Prince of Homburg, and The Young Lord. On top of overt collaborations, Bachmann and Henze evidently influenced one another in their independent works and motivated each other’s practices: this Paris Review article notes that
to force Bachmann to complete her daily word count, Henze sometimes locked her in a room, not even letting her out to eat. Still, they were artistic soulmates. “I will believe in you until the end of my life,” she wrote to him in 1956, “and wherever and whenever our paths will cross, there will be a feast, a new idea for a book, poems that I see in front of me…” His letters to her bore a dazzling variety of affectionate salutations: dear nightingale, adorabilissima, my little poor angel, dearest doctor, dearest wanderer.
Last month, being a wanderer and little poor angel, I find myself in Naples, and decide to go to Ischia for a day. I take the ferry around 7:30 am. Ischia is a large island with a handful of different ports; I go to Forio, on the western side, where Bachmann and Henze stayed. The town is opening up as I arrive. I go into the bakery, the bikini shop. There is a market outdoors. I wade through piles of old clothing, try on cheap rings and scarves, buy a two-tone yellow t-shirt and a pair of Allessandro dell’Acqua sunglasses that do little against the glare of day (so they’re good to wear at night).
I put on the t-shirt and the sunglasses. I take the wrong bus. I get off. I take the right bus, followed by a long winding walk downhill, to reach the Baie di Sorgeto, where thermal springs steam the water. Sitting in a small rock pool, an old woman talks to me at length before warning me that the springs are radioactive and absenting herself. It’s true but everything’s fine. I tan on an uneven bed of hot smooth stones until a taxi boat comes into the cove and we sail to Sant’Angelo, the southern point of the island. Onboard, the Germans grumble that the taxi boat is one euro more than they believed it to be. We disembark and I walk around. The Tyrrhenian sea is blue-green and glitters. I buy a postcard with a lipstick kiss in the centre, a hat with an Italian flag and the word Ischia embroidered in cursive. In the sun I can’t tell if it’s black or navy.
My phone is dead. At the tabacchi I ask if they can plug it in behind the counter. Owing to a cough that keeps me up all night I have become addicted to Ricolas; I buy a pack and sit down at a table outside. My waiter is a teenage boy and I ask him whether he likes the limoncello spritz or the bicicletta better. He’s never had either. If he had to choose, he would try the limoncello. The point is to incorporate someone else into the decision. Even the experience: he says to tell him how it is. The waiters here serve all of the customers indiscriminately, without assigned tables. They are all teenage boys. Inadvertently, when referring to any one of them to another, I say not “your coworker” but “your friend.” Other patrons eat ice creams and bowls of peanuts.
It’s about quarter to three, according to the couple I ask. After paying I lie on the nearest beach, where the sand is not beautiful but still inoffensive, and fall asleep for an hour. I wake up and walk up the hill. A man presses me a lemon-orange juice while I wait for the bus, which coils serpentine around the island for an hour more, past cliffside cafés, past Fonte delle Ninfe Nitrodi, supposedly the oldest spa in the world. The Naples Archaeological Museum holds twelve votive tablets, discovered in the 1750s and dating between 1st century BC and 3rd century AD, which give thanks to the Nitrodi nymphs. They depict Apollo and nymphs bearing shells full of therapeutic waters, women freshly healed by the springs. Not long after, on the eastern side of the island, we pass a fire licking up the hillside.
I get off the bus somewhere near the main port, pick a blue flower and put it behind my ear. I see the castle, the fishermen. In a shop that I later realize is a liquor store I try on terrible perfumes in winsome bottles. Slowly, the sun is getting lower in the sky, and I make my way to the port, buy a ticket for the ferry home. The boat doesn’t come for a while. On the ride back I reread a poem by Bachmann, Songs from an Island [Lieder von einer insel], which I had also read on my earlier transit. The poem documents both Bachmann’s impressions of Ischia and, like much (most, maybe all) of Bachmann’s work, shadows of the second World War. As below:
Songs from an Island
by Ingeborg Bachmann, trans. Peter Filkins
Shadow fruit is falling from the walls,
moonlight bathes the house in white, and the ash
of extinct craters is borne in by the sea wind.In the embrace of handsome youths
the coasts are sleeping.
Your flesh remembers mine,
it was already inclined to me,
when the ships
loosened themselves from shore and the cross
of our mortal burden
kept watch in the rigging.Now the execution sites are empty,
they search but cannot find us.***
When you rise from the dead,
when I rise from the dead,
no stone will lie before the gate,
no boat will rest on the sea.Tomorrow the casks will roll
toward Sunday waves,
we come on anointedsoles to the shore, wash
the grapes and stamp
the harvest into wine,
tomorrow, on the shore.When you rise from the dead,
when I rise from the dead,
the hangman will hang at the gate,
the hammer will sink into the sea.***
One day the feast must come!
Saint Anthony, you who have suffered,
Saint Leonard, you who have suffered,
Saint Vitus, you who have suffered.Make way for our prayers, way from the worshippers,
room for music and joy!
We have learned simplicity,
we sing in the choir of cicadas,
we eat and drink,
the lean cats
rub against our table,
until evening mass begins
I hold your hand
with my eyes,
and a quiet, brave heart
sacrifices its wishes to youHoney and nuts for the children,
teeming nets for the fishermen,
fertility for the gardens,
moon for the volcano, moon for the volcano!Our sparks leapt over the borders,
above the night fireworks fanned their
tails, the procession
floats away on dark rafts and gives
time to the primeval world,
to the plodding lizards,
to the carnivorous plant,
to the feverish fish,
to the orgies of wind and the lust
of mountains where a pious
star loses its way, collides with their face
and dissolves into dust.Stand firm, you foolish saints.
Tell the mainland the craters aren’t resting!
Saint Roch, you who have suffered,
oh you who have suffered, Saint Francis.***
When someone departs he must throw his hat,
filled with the mussels he spent the summer
gathering, in the sea
and sail off with his hair in the wind,
he must hurl the table,
set for his love, in the sea,
he must pour the wine,
left in his glass, into the sea,
he must give his bread to the fish
and mix a drop of his blood with the sea,
he must drive his knife deep into the waves
and sink his shoes,
heart, anchor and cross,
and sail off with his hair in the wind.
Then he will return.
When?
Do not ask.***
There is fire under the earth,
and the fire is pure.There is fire under the earth
and molten rock.There is a torrent under the earth,
it will stream into us.There is a torrent under the earth.
it will scorch our bones.A great fire is coming,
a torrent is coming over the earth.We shall be witnesses.
I really relish this poem. “I hold your hand / with my eyes.” “Mountains where a pious / star loses its way.” Amazing. I especially love the stanza that begins, “When someone departs he must throw his hat,” the lines, “he must hurl the table, / set for his love, in the sea” … “he must drive his knife deep into the waves.”
At some point during my remaining time in Naples, I realized I’d lost the hat I bought on Ischia. I had worn it around that day and occasionally looped it to the strap of my bag. I have no memory of setting it down anywhere, on the island or on the evening ferry to the mainland, yet also no memory of wearing it as I walked home to Montesanto that night. When I left Naples, I wrote to my professor with whom I’d stayed in case she should find it somewhere in her apartment. But it seemed that the hat never made it back with me to the city at all. So I guess I threw it into the sea and sailed off with my hair in the wind. “Then he will return.”
On Youtube I found this recording of a 2016 performance of Henze’s Choral Fantasies (1964). This piece adapts Bachmann’s island poem.
Credit to Richard Markus Jr for the upload.
Peace:
PR