Epiphanies – watching Toto

The four days in Bagnena were the combination of extended Christmas magic, complete relaxation, oblivion and peculiar epiphanic experiences. As the New Year nights got longer, days grew shorter; densely packed with festive events they seemed refreshing and fulfilling. Unexpectedly, Bagnena had its rare moments of winter business, much of which focused simply on warming the place up. The thick stone walls, so blessed in summer, now made us all do the jobs some of us had never had a chance to try – chopping wood, keeping the fire alive and, since the bedrooms had no heating, preparing hot water bottles for the night. Lodged in one of the south-west bedrooms, I enjoyed all benefits of it. The sun woke me the moment it rose over the hills and kept warming the room for most of the day so the pile of heavy bedding on the king-sized antique bed always seemed to retain some warmth from the previous night. The walk to the bathroom, however, promptly reminded me of the true character of winter in Italian countryside. Typically, the first of us to enter the kitchen cum lounge had to make the fire and prepare coffee for those who had a lie-in, and over the next hour, joined in one by one, wrapped up in sweaters and scarves. Soon, by one o’clock, the temperature outside was high enough to allow an al fresco lunch on the terrace with the spectacular backdrop of gold-coloured slopes and snowy peaks beyond. That white-washed kitchen and the music room were the places where we huddled round fireplaces to start and end each day with drinks, roast almonds and chestnuts we had brought from walks in the surrounding wood, stories told, stories listened to …

… and stories watched. Today, in retrospect, watching a film story on the only idle day of the whole holiday, bears more significance than any highlight on other days. Late in the New Year’s afternoon we were all in the lounge, recovering after the Tuscan-style party at the inn down the valley – it was local to the bone, gluttonous, loud, dizzy-fizzy. Sipping our herbal teas, we planned the next day’s trip to Florence; an insanely ill-fitted episode of Little England that someone had dragged from London was flickering in the background. It must have been bossy Esther who stopped it and shoved into the player another disc from the stack on the coffee table. There was a bit of booing when two or three in the bunch saw the opening scene of Cinema Paradiso. ‘To travel to Italy and watch a piece of Italian cinema kitch of the 90s?’ The half-hearted protests subsided though. The dusk fell. Someone made another round of tea. As the story unfolded, heavy silence in the room become almost tactile, the evidence of cinema’s powerful grip. The evidence of being there, in the world behind the screen. And here, at Bagnena. The very fact of watching that Sicilian saga in the midst of winter in Tuscany, with Rome in between, bridged all my images of Italy, past and present. And the story itself, an epic cut through the post-war history, three European generations, incorporated, I knew it, also my own history. Never before had I felt time and space bound together so tight. Well, perhaps in an altered state. As a matter of fact, it was the altered state for all of us, man and women alike. In the corner of the eye I first noticed the Brazilian openly wiping a tear or two. But the two Swiss followed shamelessly? And the German, and all Britons, and the Pole. ‘It’s unbelievable,’ sobbed the American. What was going on? Then, as Morricone’s almost suffocating music became more prominent, we realised we were watching the three-hour long director’s alternative version of the film and there was another climax to come, and another one. So the mesmerizing, spellbinding torture and weeping continued. It felt as if we were telling ourselves that our grief is not an illusion, tears were signs, forming our internal stories. When the closing credits stopped I felt light and clean. The gift of tears.

The epiphany – Words, what are they? The truest messages are those of our bodies, not of speech.