_ AND ANOTHER THING
Feelings of Dantesque joy in a storm to remember
PAUL JOHNSON
The storm which broke over Lake Como at the end of last week was the most spectacular I recall in all the years I have been going there. I like storms. So, I sus- pect, do most people who have a strong roof over their heads and who are not going anywhere, just watching. When I was a boy my big sisters and I relished a storm, espe- cially if our parents were out, thus increas- ing the sense of danger. To improve the effect still further, we would creep into an inner cellar, which ran right under large parts of the house, with only the illumina- tion of a guttering candle. Settled among its dusty beams and rafters, with the muffled thunder bellowing outside, we would tell ghost stories in the delicious apprehension that the candle might suddenly extinguish itself.
One of the most poignant images in liter- ature, to me, is the little cluster of young people gathered on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1816, 'the summer that never was'. At the Villa Diodati were Byron, who had just shaken the dust of England — and marriage — off his feet for ever, Shelley, his mistress-wife Mary, and her half-sister Claire Clairmont, a bold girl who seduced both the young men in turn. The censorious (and, I suspect, envious) Southey called it 'a league of incest'. But it strikes me nowa- days as all pretty innocent. They would have been as genuinely shocked at the goings-on of Bill Clinton as all of us pre- tend to be.
Throughout those sultry weeks, rain and mist were intermittent, punctuated by colossal storms. The quartet would watch them from the villa's terrace overlooking the lake, the wind whipping up the pewter- grey waters into fierce, white crests of foam, while the thunderous crescendos of cataclysm in the mountains rolled towards them. Beethoven was just then pondering his Hammerklavier Sonata, Opus 106, and no wonder. But what most interested these youngsters was the lightning, darting out of the sulphurous clouds in forks of white-hot ice and blinding them with sheets of incan- descence which revealed in startling details every crevice and pinnacle of the entire Alpine massif. It was a time when electricity was novel and voguish. The delight of the new chattering classes, of whom our four were founder-members, was to have them- selves 'electrocuted', as they called it. Watching the powerful bolt from heaven across the lake, the 18-year-old Mary con- ceived the idea of Frankenstein's Monster, exposed on a mountain-top and vivified by a Jovian flash of transcendent energy. She wrote the story immediately, and it still haunts us.
Last week's storm on Como was building up for several days. I became uneasily aware of this as I painted the lake and its surrounding mountains, and some of the sumptuous and charming buildings which adorn both, from various vantage points, especially the Painter's Tower from which I chiefly work. I had a fruitful week too: ten biggish watercolours, of which only one was a real dud (and even that redeemable by legerdemain now I have got it in my stu- dio). Using such a fugitive medium as water-paints, in which exact observation and speed of manual reaction to it are essential, you develop an intense awareness of the weather: of subtle changes in the colour and density of cloud formations, sig- nificant variations in wind currents, the moments when 'light thickens', as Shake- speare put it, and the rise of atmospheric tension. The insects feel these changes too, and come to seek euthanasia in my Prus- sian blue or burnt umber or leave me bliss- fully alone, depending upon whether the weather warns them of danger or opportu- nities.
I know of no place like Como where the visibility, colour, aerial perspectives and visual mood of the mountains mirror so faithfully the meteorological temper. The rock faces are prophetic too, hieroglyphs of doom or sunshine to come. While I painted I noted, almost unconsciously, these fatidi- cal omens, as the humidity rose, visibility decayed and the sky began to frown. We held high revel on Friday evening, but I though of that sibylline 1938 hit: 'There may be trouble ahead . . . Let's face the music, and dance!'
The storm broke in the night and the noise of 'the cataracts and hurricanoes' kept most of us intermittently awake. The tumultuous rain continued for many hours and well into the morning. A mountains system, with its natural roofs, gutters and drainpipes, is a mechanism for the liquefac- tion of aerial moisture and its precipitation into the storage-lakes beneath. A storm shows the thing at work with spectacular clarity, as immense rivers spring into exis- tence, tumbling billions of gallons of white water, plus impressive quantities of dark- brown mountain detritus, into the seething cauldron of the voracious lake. Man's dis- positions, if they impede this frenetic demonstration of Archimedes' Theorem, get short shrift. At breakfast the news reached us that the road to Como had been swept away in two places, carrying with it, we were excitedly told, una carrozza giganU and four macchine (cars). But, per miracolo, no one was in them. This was serious newt to us, as we were returning to London by the afternoon plane. In the event, we were forced to take a detour to the airport via a vertiginous series of hairpin bends, many swept by living sheets of water and fringed by clusters of ecstatic loafers gazing down at wreckage in the abyss below.
I like the response of Italians to such events, a mixture of Dantesque joy in calamity, theatrical pity and stoic insou- ciance. At one point a Jeep bounced off oui back bumper and glued itself onto the wall opposite. Our driver stopped his car, inspected it to see no damage had been done, exchanged a fatalistic shrug with the Jeep's doleful driver (whose fault it clearly was) and drove on at increased speed. We approached the airport in time and in safe- ty, and were soon soaring across the Alps and watching the dying heartbeats of the tempest. God bless nature: that was a storm to remember.
Previous page
