Jan Wilm

2024
¡Viva Santa Maddalena! ¡Viva Grisha! ¡Viva Beatrice!

First off, I apologise for the register of encomium, but fuck it. I’m naturally guilty of cliché, when I say how magical my time in Santa Maddalena was. Grisha, the maestro, il miglior fabbro, who shunned and abhorred hackneyed language, Grisha would doubtless disapprove. Maestro, I apologise – again! – because my time in Santa Maddalena was magical. Above all, this was due to you, dear Beatrice, it was due to your hospitality, your ability to connect people, to sit them in front of a plate of delicious steaming pasta and get them talking. Mille grazie, cara Beatrice! But my encomium wouldn’t be complete without thanking the wonderful people with whom you surround yourself: Rasika, Manu, Edoardo, Maria, and of course Nayla, the delightful dragoman of Santa Maddalena. I thank you all wholeheartedly, and because I’d prefer not to be guilty of further cliché, I wish to thank you in my own way, the only way I know how to thank you, with a piece of fiction, a little bit of essayistic narrative, a dash of dreaming and a touch of fancy. With much love and gratitude, here goes:

‘Grișmachine’

It all began on Tibidabo, one of Barcelona’s two city mountains. The year was 1991, before the Olympic Games the following year, before the fateful flood of tourists came and changed the city forever. There is a quaint old amusement park at the top of Tibidabo. Built in 1899, it opened to the public shortly after, at the turn of the century, and it is one of the oldest amusement parks in the world. Back then, I wasn’t interested in the adrenaline-extracting attractions like the swing ride and the roller coaster but rather in the more, well, literary attractions. Because then, as now, I was a reader, regardless of whether I had a book, a person, or a city in front of my eyes.

I had come to this mountain to visit the mysterious hall of mirrors, the hauting house of horrors, and especially the Museu d’Autòmats, which had opened in 1982. There was something spooky about this Automaton Museum. It smelled of rusty metal and metallic dust. The walls, draped in dark blue velvet, swallowed the room’s sounds, which resembled that of an amusement arcade. In front of the velvet walls stood a veritable parade of four or five dozen machines from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Most of these automata consisted of human-sized glass boxes, vertical rectangles encased in a steel geometry, inside of which silent puppets were anxiously waiting for a coin to sing, to dance, to play chess, to foretell the future or simply to tell a story. For the German writer Jean Paul, the narrative machines we call books were simply “printed people”. For me, the automata, these narrative machines, here before me were half-human books. I looked at each of them very carefully, even though I didn’t understand their songs and stories – I didn’t speak Spanish at the time, lo siento mucho.

The last automaton I looked at was the most extraordinary one. Perhaps because it was the last, because I almost overlooked it. As I was to find out much later, the machine that changed my life was quite literally a literary machine, a literature machine. In the last automated glass case before the exit, there sat a magician puppet. He wore a top hat, his torso was dressed in tails, and he had sparkling, contented, slightly closed eyes that seemed deeper and much more real than any of the other automaton puppets’ eyes. A mischievous smile accentuated his mouth, which was adorned with the gray tufted brush line of a mustache; the face was framed by the bookends of cloudy white sideburns. The lower half of the box, which concealed its mechanical interior, was clad in dark steel. On it were three words in heart-red rounded letters: ¡VIVA MARÍA! and next to it DIOGÈNE.

Over the next few months, I developed a peculiar fascination for this machine. I have often speculated that my attraction to this automaton was rooted in its name. For at the top of the glass case there was a metal plate with a strange word written on it in lacquered letters in an Art Nouveau style: GRIȘAUTÒMAT. I was fascinated by the little rose thorn on the bottom of the spiky S and by the little cockscomb accent on the O. What was its pronunciation? Greesautomat? Grissautomat? Grishautomatte? Whatever it was called, I fed it the beautiful 25 Pesetas coins in circulation at the time – the doughnut ones with the hole in the middle – and a magical, almost cosmic process took place right before my eyes.

I heard the coin rolling around in the dark belly of the automaton, and then, for a moment, everything became deathly quiet. It suddenly seemed to me that I was all alone here, surrounded by nothing but darkness and silence. And then I heard a hidden, faint hum, like the ghostly rumble of a distant summer thunderstorm. A faint light flickered and filled the glass case, and the puppet of the GRIȘAUTÒMAT, the magician Diogène, suddenly came to life. His formerly rigid face seemed to smile softly, while a mischievous but firm voice spoke from a tape. To my great surprise, the voice wasn’t speaking Catalan or Spanish, but … German, and it had a slight Austrian accent!

What was going on here? Why was the magician saying the following words, which I listened to with the feverish attention of a child?

Strike up the jukebox and the magic begins! Shove a coin in the stamped-tin slot, give it a push with the ball of your thumb, rough and brutal, and the spirit of the times begins to twang: droning, clanking, blaring, eardrum-bursting, the hand of the times unleashes the din, the hand of a young wildcatter, gas station attendant, or trucker, a boy’s hand but already a workman’s paw, a few grips learned by repetition is all it knows: the grab, the yank, the shove, the twist, the push, ignorant of relaxed, idle fingers, eloquent gestures that remodel a word, make a thought spatial, suggest a caress. The hand of the times, no longer an instrument to initiate sublime events, no longer a hand that paints like Piero della Francesca, not a hand that sets tones singing like the hands of the boy Mozart, not a hand that writes like the poet Eichendorff. A mercenary’s hand, the thumb horny from counting its wages, sliding the bills again and again across an index finger bent from pulling a trigger, smooth from familiarity with the utensils of murder: money-grubbing hand—let the coins begin to jingle, shove them into the stamped-tin slot.

What was this machine doing in this place, how had it gotten here, and why had I stumbled upon it by chance? Coincidence or fate?

I was captivated by this automaton because it spoke of another automaton, because it was aware of its automaton-ness. I made the automaton magician, Diogène, speak his automaton magician monologue over and over again, so often that I was able to write it down and read it out to myself over and over again in the months that followed. But I never learned the monologue’s origin.

I transferred the text into my mind, into my body, I hammered it into my memory. I took it to heart, through the heart and with the heart, learned it by heart, as they say in English and French, though unfortunately not in Spanish and German. Sometimes I imagined that somewhere in the nooks and crannies of that resilient little muscle in my chest, in the chambers and sacs where the blood automatically pulses through time, these words were flowing about, this strangely beautiful flood of language was nourishing and enriching my blood, my body, with poetry. As the text accompanied each of my heartbeats, years passed.

I went into an office and stopped dreaming.

Exactly a decade after my strange machine encounter in Barcelona, I listened to the radio while mindlessly praying the rosary of bureaucracy. On the radio, a literary program was showcasing the book Cain by the writer Gregor von Rezzori, who had died a few years earlier and whose name I didn’t recognize. The radio reviewer praised the book as a great final work of art and noted that in it the author lamented the demystification of art by a world hellbent on consumerism. Then, another voice read from the book: “Strike up the jukebox and the magic begins!”

Surprise, disbelief, enthusiasm, confusion catapulted me out of my chair. “That’s it!” I exclaimed, and my colleagues stared at me, as if I had lost my mind. Well, I had! Finally! I had lost my mind and my understanding of this life I had been born into so defenselessly.

In the following months, I learned that Gregor von Rezzori, who was born in the Bukovina region in 1914 and died in Italy in 1998, had received a special gift in the 1970s. An artist friend had made the GRIȘAUTÒMAT, which I had seen in Barcelona, and presented it to Rezzori for his birthday, in memory of the supporting role of Diogène that Rezzori had played in Louis Malle’s film Viva Maria, alongside Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau.

The S with its thorny llittle tail was a letter of the Romanian alphabet, and while Rezzori wrote in German (and sometimes English) throughout his life, his native Bukovina had become Romanian after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, before becoming part of Ukraine, to which it still belongs today. I also found out that Rezzori was never called Gregor. Those who knew him, liked him, and those he was fond of always called him Grisha. Grisha, that’s enough.

Over the next few years, I immersed myself in Grisha’s work, in his great novels An Ermine in Czernopol, The Death of My Brother Abel, and its posthumously published second part, Cain.

Some reading experiences are life-altering. The reasons why they are differ from person to person, the reasons are rooted in who you are and who you could be, which is why having to describe a reading experience is like having to write an autobiography. Done in earnest, it would take a lifetime. What immediately captured me about Rezzori’s work was the sheer playfulness, the mischievousness with which he tricked his readers, the consistency with which he saw literature – writing and reading – as the greatest game there was. It’s fitting, then, that my first encounter with him was in the form of a slot machine, or a Spielautomat, as my pettifogging compatriots have it, a ‘play automaton’, a gaming machine.

Rezzori – Grisha – wrote about half a dozen autobiographies, all narrating different lives, but all characterized by the lived, sensual, and carnal density of detail that is natural to autobiography. The magician Grisha, whose fictional games are as sophisticated as those of Nabokov, created a unique, fireworks-colored linguistic baroque that sparkles with melancholy, humor, and high comedy. Every page of his multifaceted oeuvre is an invitation to marvel and to play.

In the encrusted phase of my life at that time, I gratefully accepted this invitation and once again recognized the incomparable greatness of literature, the heart-expanding magnitude of reading. Literature is nothing but reading, literature is synonymous with reading.

I am not free in my life, perhaps not even in my writing. I am free only in reading. I often feel like a puppet, trapped in the glass cage of my life. But when I read, I fly out of the limiting geometry of my being and leap into other consciousnesses. I burst and shatter the glass, and I am free, free in the weightless suspension of play. The automaton becomes autonomous. Reading turned the puppet into a real boy, into the child that still lives somewhere inside of me and that I don’t ever want to lose. Reading allows me to play, and I only want to live by playing.

Sometimes you have to climb a mountain to come down a transformed person, and sometimes the most beautiful mountain is neither Mount Olympus nor Tibidabo, but a book’s rustling page at the moment of being turned.