I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore
To someone of my age, who has seen the world and now wants only repose and beauty, Lake Como is the perfect place. I do not know how many times I have visited it in the last two decades, but over 100 watercolours (not counting the ones I have given away or sold) testify to its hold on my affections. Twice a day I walk up from the castle to my painting-tower, whence the whole stupendous panorama of the lake can be seen, pointing to St Moritz mountain in the north, and to the south to Como itself, city of silk. It is quiet up there. You hear, of course, the tinkling of bells round the necks of the semi-tame mountain goats. But they have a cunning way of creeping about when near me, so that their bells do not sound, and silently purloining one of my brushes, spread about on the grass. The first I know of their depredation is the crunching of Winsor & Newton wooden handles, evidently a delicacy to them, in their bearded and powerful jaws. There is a red squirrel who likes the purlieus of the tower, small, wiry, hyperactive, not at all afraid of me, knowing that I keep a few pistachio nuts in my pocket for his delectation. And once I saw a fox, but he is very furtive, creeping low on the ground, hunting the rabbits which abound in these hills.
There is plenty to eat for the wildlife, and for humans too. My friend Carla, who was brought up in the region, was taught by her peasant nurse that one need never go hungry hereabouts, provided you know where to look. In the meadow below the tower there is delicious wild asparagus, and a huge variety of ‘salad stuff’ (to use Jane Austen’s expression) at any season of the year. Some of the more special leaves (the expert knows which) can be gathered and taken down to the cook, who will fry them in batter to make a nectareous titbit, to be nibbled on the terrace before supper. Near the tower, too, are fine wild walnut trees, just coming into season last week, and a splendid fig tree, low and spreading. Its fruits are small and green with just the merest blush of blue in the shade where they grow. But plucked and spread out in the sun, they turn a deep violet almost while you watch, and are refreshing and perfumy to eat. There are wild grapes, too, and mushrooms, berries of every kind, including huge blackberries also coming into season, and fat mountain bilberries much bigger than the ones I used to gather in the hills of Staffordshire over 60 years ago.
There are many berries because there are no birds. There are, I suspect, more small avian creatures in my Somerset garden than in the whole of Lake Como. The Italians shoot and eat them, and have been doing so for generations, so that the poor things go elsewhere to live. Not a lark in the majestic sky to proclaim the glory of God. There are some big birds, though. Last week I saw a heron, and also every day a pair of seaeagles. These are fine creatures, with a powerful wingspan, who hunt the small and delicious flatfish in which the deep lake abounds, and appear regularly on local tables. I watched the heron fish, too, from the top of my tower. It is a delicate, beautiful and slender creature, made to be painted (especially by Carpaccio) or to figure on tapestries and murals in the 16th-century villas which grace these parts. It is also voracious, and a fisher of consummate industry, capable of eating its entire body-weight every day of its existence. So it is the bane of men who live by fishing, not least owners of salmon rivers, who will shoot it furtively and unlawfully if they believe themselves unobserved. I once saw such a deed done, the marksman saying, defensively, ‘Well, it’s my livelihood as well as his.’ The dead bird was a pathetic sight, transformed in a second from a living whirl and flash of white grandeur into a mere bundle of lank feathers and bones, a lifeless nothing. I wondered where all the prime salmon, so greedily gobbled throughout its predatory existence, had gone. But this Como heron, fishing industriously below my tower, is in no danger, I think. I see it catch fish easily, and swallow them, and then make off, only to return soon and recommence. It makes no sound. The sea-eagles, on the other hand, produce periodically a whoopy-barky noise, not unlike the sound of the Somerset buzzards I observe on their morning patrol. They too catch fish swiftly, then soar up to hidden eyries in the giant limestone cliffs above.
The landscape seems changeless, but it is not so. The Romans built holiday villas here, with their small, fine red bricks, covering them in pink, orange and lemon-yellow stucco, and if they were to return they would notice substantial upheavals in the basic limestone ridges of which the land is composed, and even larger modifications of the shoreline. During the periodic storms, vast quantities of rainwater build up behind the cliff-faces, sucked in by the thirsty limestone, and turn what looks like a rock fortress made to last a hundred millennia into an unstable gimcrack prefab. Suddenly, without warning, it comes crashing down, dragging with it a million tons of stones and earth into the lake. The first thing I noticed on this visit was a savage white scar on the opposite shore, a thousand feet long, entirely new, the stigmata of a catastrophe at the end of April that crushed houses on the lakeside and killed four people. If you paint places, with the minute attention to detail in which a good watercolourist delights (when he is not swish-swashing on the washes boldly), you notice all kinds of modifications of the landscape created by wind and weather, torrential downpours and the streams they give birth to in an hour, or even changes in agricultural fashion. Nature is never still, and man is busy too, for better or for worse. Not far from my tower they are driving an immense tunnel straight through the bare mountain, the kind of colossal feat of engineering in which the Italians, true to their Roman forebears, still delight. That will bring many changes, some unforeseen.
Yet the lake does not change in essentials, and has not done so since Roman poets and historians came here 2,000 years ago. It remains a permanent venue of civilised sabbatical. Inventions are calmly absorbed into its routines. From my tower I hear the faint throbbing of the engines of the white ferries which process up and down and across the lake, linking towns with (to me) magic names like Mandello and Colico, Varenna and Cadenabbia, Lecco and Menaggio, and even doleful Dongo, where in 1945 communist gunmen caught the fugitive Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci, shot them, and afterwards hung their bodies obscenely from the roof of a garage in Milan.
The ferries function with absolute regularity and perfect timekeeping from dawn to midnight, coursing the lake like the blood system of the human body, their engines its heartbeats. Save for this dim susurrus, the lake is quiet, until suddenly the silence is shattered by a tremendous metallic din, reverberating thunderously among the limestone cliffs, as a helicopter plunges out of the skies to descend like Jupiter’s thunderbolt on the lake. It is the Anti-Noise Police, come to enforce prescribed decibel levels on the motorboats. Viva l’Italia!
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