Quicksands by Sybille Bedford

Author:Sybille Bedford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2005-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter XII

Cisalpine – A future waif: brief camaraderie – Confusion

and delays – Holding one’s own – A love trap –

An instant of cognition – Naples v. Florence: a novel ecstasy

– An affectionate pact – Financial and other realities –

Houndings – Jacko’s coup – What next? –

Travelling lighter

Having finished writing the previous chapter as I did today, today meaning in the twenty-first century, in my own old age, I am struck by the abrupt finality of the last page. This was indeed the point of no return: my father’s lightning death, my strange, defeated, formal father vanished (I am still trying to understand what he was like), the severance from Germany (that was premature for persons of my situation or birth). So: disconnection of lines and life.

That first Italian journey! Imagination anticipated Florence – the quattrocento, a house with a view, run on Borgman lines by a knowledgeable man, an art historian, not young: the prospective new husband whose presence as well as being a fount of instruction would dilute the perils of living once more with my mother. (There had been much amusement about my late rustic existence expressed in her communications with my father and myself.) More recently though had come a charming olive branch, a copy sent by hand of courier of Goethe’s Italienische Reise graciously inscribed ‘For my daughter, to remind her of her first Italian journey’. The journey, in fact, had not yet begun, indeed turned doubtful to materialize at all. True, when the train had crossed the Alps and engaged its slow descent into a sunlit fruitful valley, I had experienced a state of sheer joy, a fulfilment of a longing that lies dormant in many of us whose birth has been into the rain.

That was good. What was not was the message carried by the alarmingly slim young girl – today we would speak of anorexia – an hotel acquaintance whom my mother had persuaded to meet me at Vipiteno, the little cisalpine frontier post, in replacement of the courier who had been discharged the night before. I was told that we were to get off at Merano – after hardly more than another couple of hours’ ride! – and wait there at an hotel. Wait for what? ‘Your mother. She asked me to look after you, she’s gone away for a few days.’ Gone away why and where? Doris – that was the young girl’s name – did not know.

Merano. A place I had not heard of. A prosperous, soigné resort in a benign climate, surrounded by orchards and vines, with blue skies and a luxuriant vegetation in well-kept parks and gardens with well-dressed middle-aged people on the garden-benches. Paradise? Where was the quattrocento? Officially we were in Italy, in the province of Trentino-Alto Adige, physically we were in a former part of Austria, the Süd-Tyrol, annexed to Italy by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919: road signs, street names in Italian, native voices guttural. For me the great sights were puzzlingly delayed.

Meanwhile

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