Turin

I packed a black dress and a book of Pavese poems.

Sometimes a place summons you to it. I spoke no Italian though I had made an effort over the last few weeks to collect fragments. Angelo had taught me a few phrases, had even written some down on the pieces of paper on which he usually wrote the numbers for sandwich orders. I kept these in my purse.

I’d never found anybody who’d been to Turin, though I met people who had never heard of it. ‘Where’s that?’they said. I persuaded an old friend to come with me. I bought two maps, one laminated to withstand the rain I guessed would be falling on the street corners, and a real map, vast, of thin white paper, as easy to fold as dealing with the canvas on a yacht in the wind. In the evenings in the week before going I spent hours looking at the neighbouring valleys and hills with a magnifying glass.

Giving names to streets and piazzas, my brain made an atmosphere of its own for this unmet city; I imagined Pavese sitting in the Cafes Elena and Torino and San Carlo and Flora. I read Primo Levi’s essays and almost learned by heart the one about the pavements, the one in which he describes the lines on the stones in the gateways, etched there to stop the carriage horses’ hooves from slipping. A city where they had worried about things like that seemed worth visiting.

The clocks went back. My English life became two thirds night and one third the steel half-light of November. I locked the tiny black padlock on my case, lest it flew open in some moment of tempest and excitement in the hold of the plane. ‘You’re always too early,’ said John when we met at the airport. It’s true. Always leave time for the disaster which has its eye on you; in providing for it you bore it, and it gives up and shadows someone else, someone less prepared and more entertaining to stalk.

Somewhere, as we flew over Europe, these English anxieties backed off a little in the intense blue of the sky, though as the plane eased into its long gradual sweep down over the autumn slopes and crevasses of the Alps I felt I was cheating, that I had taken a shortcut over what should have been a test of my determination, that I should have walked and struggled to reach here. It was not meant to be this easy.

On the first night we went to the Opera, an English company doing Billy Budd. The Via Roma was lit across from column to column for Christmas; further along a Jenny Holzer poem was moving in ten foot high white letters up and over the mediaeval castle in the central piazza. Time was short, minutes to get into my black dress, a half hour to eat pizza, and drink prosecco, and toast Turin in the cafe next to the Teatro Reggio. Inside was like a shoot in Italian Vogue, dark red walls and carpets and a cloud of glass chandelier¡s and sweeping low aero-curves to the staircases; Carlo Mollino’s risen from the ashes of World War Two theatre, Mollino the mysterious Torinese architect who flew Spitfires and designed a car which won at Le Mans. All the fur coated women dangled Hermes or Chanel handbags. The Hermes shop in the colonnaded Via Roma is the only one in the world to use plain carrier bags - a benchmark of Torinese discretion.

The performance was doomed and sinister. And the hanging at the end seemed to say something about being English. Afterwards in the Cafe Mokita I had a negroni so fragrant with orange peel the smoky intent of the vermouth and campari and gin faded to innocence in the mighty crystalline tumbler. Hungover, I wake the next morning to a cold sunny civic utopia of eighteenth century streets. I try to read La Stampa, which I’d bought at the newstand by the triumphal arch at the end of the Piazza San Carlo, over macchiaoto and brioches in a small, darkly panelled room in the Torino. Making an effort not to stare across at a very old man in an expensive coat, with a wavy haired blonde in her thirties, I bit into a fat dome of pastry, into thickly sweet preserve of some kind in the middle. I could not identify it. Not apricot, not fig. Almost pure honey. My hangover receded.

The centre was still empty of traffic. To the western end of each long Baroque street the Alps rose up, peaks just touched with snow, cinematic, hallucinatory, while behind us to the east the city dropped back down towards the river not encountered yet. Now and then I half saw a dark eyed man in a sand-coloured raincoat, walking fast away from me, an almost smoked cigarette held between the fingers of his left hand. Then, in the shadows of the porticoes, he was gone.

Each evening before falling asleep I read the poems; they made more sense here. There was a huge foxed mirror on the wall to the side of my bed. It had a scrolled broad gilded frame. Looking in it I was surprised to see my hair had stayed straight, the air here was so pure and cold and dry.

From the flats behind the hotel, through the silver grey five o’clocks of all the mornings, came a burst of an Italian song, passionate and heroic, an unlikely connection between opera and rock, at a volume which could only be described as majestic. It would wake me; I’d lie there wondering if I really wanted a pee or not. The fact the I was even thinking this would make me put on my raincoat to pad down the broad hallway to the bathroom. The hotel was the fourth floor of a seventeenth century town palazzo and the graciousness of its dimensions gave the dawns a still seriousness undermined only by the bubbling sound from the huge fishtank in the foyer. When I came in and out during the day I would greet the big goldfish living there with a fingertouch on his glass; he would push his orange O-mouth towards it and circle his pretty pleated fins with excitement or anger or curiosity. Pavese says Turin can be a prison, I’d remember.

Dark yellow, snub-nosed trams made an evocative humming thrum as they cornered or sped up, a backing track to some narrative of European melancholia. In the Cafe Elena we sat in the window, drank coffee, watching them pass busily up and down the Piazza Vittorio Veneto; Pavese must have done so on autumn mornings, the kind of morning he describes in ‘Indian Summer’ flecked with earthbrown foliage. Maybe he met Constance Dowling here, the Hollywood starlet who finally broke his heart.

Turin was presenting its own beautiful edition of autumn, Brilliant sun, icy azure air, bronze and gilded trees, the dry whisper of leaves shifting backwards and forwards under your feet everywhere, the hills opposite on the other bank touched with tawny shadowiness.

By the time I am staring out of the Cafe Elena, worrying as I knew I would about why Pavese killed himself, I feel I have been cheated. Done out of maybe another twenty or thirty years of poems and and novels. Why do writers think they only belong to themselves? I wanted him to walk in and sit down and explain himself. The last poems are sad, yes, and haunting but not truly despairing. Failed love affairs are grist to the mill to a poet, surely, less of a death sentence than a happy marriage. He would have drink espresso, of course, fast at the bar like all the locals, and then swung out into the piazza, raincoat almost catching in the doors.

That afternoon we catch a 35 bus from the Porta Nuova to see at the Lingotto, the 1914 Fiat plant converted into a mall and conference centre and gallery. On the way we walk through the station and read the destination boards: Venice, Milan, Genoa, and the suburban train which sets off six times a day up into the mountains. If we were here longer I’d suggest that we do that, just catch a train up into the Alps. Leave everything behind and throw ourselves up there for the cut of the air and the lightheadedness of climbing higher.

At the Lingotto I walk round the shops while John goes off to the art galleries. I pace up and down the mile long broadwalk and try to imagine this place in the twenties turning out those little cars which were to drive out all the horses and fill the mountains with their chugging engine noise; the men working here, dark men from the south with a different accent, or boys who’d grown up on farms round here but wanted a modern job, who’d abandoned the fields and the hill slopes for Fiat’s wages. The young men who walk the streets of Pavese’s ‘Lavora Stanca’. On the Eastern side the huge windows are filled with a frieze of Alpine peaks. When I glance quickly I think for a second what strange 1950’s wallpaper, and then my mind clicks: no, it’s real. It’s real. Real Alps. The sun is covering some of the peaks with a glow which can only be described with the cliches of cosmetics advertising...blush, peach, rose. I buy a copy of Pavese’s Il Mestiere de vivere...in Italian, the beautiful Einaudi edition with the Francesco Menzio painting on the cover. I tell myself I have both a brain and a dictionary and if it takes the rest of my life I will work my way through it. This feels like a solemn promise but I am not sure who it is made to. I buy a bottle of mineral water in one of the little takeaway shops at the west end and sit down near a children’s area. There are lots of little wooden toys - horses and tiny ladders and chairs - but no children. I take a couple of Nurofen.

That evening we ate at the Cafe Kipling in the Piazza Bodoni. Earlier walking through there music had been coming out of the open window of the Conservatorio Verdi - a trumpet, public and acclamatory. November and yet all the windows open. Over our food we again raise glasses of Prosecco not just to Turin but to Italy and Verdi and music. We wander back to the hotel though the tree filled squares of quiet eighteenth century apartment blocks. The sky is black-ultramarine with a gauzy white perfect half moon stitched lightly to it. But no stars, not one. I cannot work out how that could be. In the square leading to the Piazza Cavour two ten foot high jets of water dance towards the moon. It is very, very cold without being frosty, like the surface of another planet, one further from the sun. Pavese would have walked home fast on nights like this, wearing his leather jacket and his white evening scarf; I imagine he could knock back Vermouth and gin, whatever, you name it, without ill effect. He would have become quieter as he drank, just quieter and even more thoughtful until he pushed back his chair, said goodnight, and headed off though these exquisite and silent piazzas. And then once home, the door shut, his jacket thrown on the back of a chair, he wrote.

On the last day I walk miles on my own from the market in the north of the city down to the Gallery of Contemporary Art. I pass the Fontana Angelica, boarded up to be cleaned for the 2006 Winter Olympics. The guidebook says this is a magic fountain, indeed the gateway itself to infinity. I feel relieved it is inaccessible. I’m not sure I want to risk crossing so far. Maybe another time. Maybe when I come back. This is the first time I have thought this. When I come back.

I walk on, down the Corso Re Umberto, the road where Primo Levi lived. Another day I would look for his apartment block but I was not sure how long it would take me to reach the gallery and I have to be back to meet John at five. In the broad streets there are unused tram lines everywhere. Once the city must have been thronged with the yellow snubnosed trams now left ringing down only on the most central routes. I have learnt to watch as I run across the cobbles, not to catch my foot in the gaps around the rails. They form ghost runs, these tracks, where there is no traffic, nothing but drifting leaves.

There’s an air of an imperial thoroughfare to the Corso Vittorio Emanuele running up from the Porta Nuova, of a nineteenth century Italy, of opera and monuments and unachieved majestic ambition. The gallery, reassuringly, or maybe disconcertingly, like the Hayward, is on the south side. I am led to it by the neon letters six feet high along the edge of the roof declaring All art was contemporary once. In English. In the distance at the steps up to the doors there is a big light brown cat waving his tail and being stroked by visitors. I hurry up so I can meet him too, but by the time I am close enough he has disappeared under the steps and away. The first and only gatto I have spotted in Pavese’s city of all-knowing poetic cats and he has gone. The gallery itself is almost as elusive. The staff don’t speak English. I cause consternation by trying to go in without checking in my bag. Eventually I am let loose in the empty spaces of the twentieth century galley.

I have come here to look for work by the Turin Six, painters working between the wars. They are hung as if a family in a small central room within the gallery. I like them, these landscapes and summer afternoons and interiors, lying about a calm and peace which did not exist. There is a small painting of three windows opening inwards. Hills in the distance. The gauze curtains are fluttering, and there are two chairs. No people. Jessie Boswell. Born Leeds 1881-1943. How on earth did Jessie Boswell get here from Leeds, why has she fetched up here with the Turin Six? Did she ever sit in the Flora or the Elena or the San Carlo with Pavese? Was she one of his lovers? Or a friend’s mistress? The gallery does not overdo information. Only the paintings speak for their makers’ lives and they’re not saying a lot. More opinionated siblings may well be gathering dust in the basement. And while these were being painted Pavese was imprisoned in Brancaleone watching the summers pass and wanting to be back in Turin.

I walk up the tree lined boulevard back toward the Porta Nuova to check the buses for the airport. They are unmissable these buses - bright blue in a world of yellow public transport. One is waiting. The last suitcases are stowed in the side and then it pulls out, signals and turns with an air of finality back down the opposite carriageway away from the heart of the city towards the airport. I cross over to the Piazza Carlo Felice and walk up the porticoes towards the Saturday clamour of the Via Roma. The stately dark wood and gold entrance of the Hotel Roma is open on my left. These are the doors Pavese entered and never came out of again. It must have been hot, a late August day. Easy to imagine how gold and dusty Turin is in the summer, the stone everywhere broiling with the heat. Why did he chose this hotel? The most central? The most anonymous? Or the shrine of particular memories, memories he wanted to wrap round him as the barbiturates took effect? He never left that evening, lighting a cigarette as he must have done on other days maybe after a long afternoon in a darkened bedroom. With some lucky woman who knew his voice and the way he talked and what he worried about. I am jealous. I feel again that irrational fury about losing a poet too young. There’s a list of them, Keats of course and Shelley and Frank O’Hara, Sylvia Plath, Veronica. I have been done out of all those poems. Shortchanged. Poor treatment for a loyal and careful reader like me. With Pavese it’s worse than the others. More intimate, sexual, for it is also his personal glamour, his watchful, clever distanced temperament, his difficult presence which fascinate me.

On the last morning it is still nerve-cleansing Alpine weather. By the time we set off to catch the plane I am laden with bags of hazelnut amoretti and porcini bought by the hundred gram from a market smallholder’s trestle table laden with open sacks of them, smelling of black earth and bark. As the plane banks up over the mountains the sky to the West is crimson-scarlet like the walls of the Teatro Reggio. A horizon like an opera. The city falls back, away into its safe place overshadowed by the peaks. Turin is the most beautiful of all cities, Pavese says in ‘Indian Summer’, Pavese who never left it voluntarily, for whom it was home and workplace and theatre.

Once back I read and read his poems until I could recite them though I would need to knock back a couple of Negronis to do it. He is teaching me Italian. Slowly I pull things together from his words - a dangerous way to learn a language, from a poet. All the winter through I come back to a quiet, empty house, and he is waiting. His raincoat is on the back of the door, and there’s the smell of a dark tobacco in the solitude of the evening air.