Bells & views

Oh, I’ll miss my study here at the Bellagio Center. Only 3 by 4 meters, its side walls lined with a bookcase and old prints of Roma and Verona, it has a window fronting the desk. When I look up from work, two large trees that tower above this two-story main building of Villa Serbelloni greet my eyes – my binocular vision, as Professors Ono and Wade would say; when I move my head to the left, the view through the window allows a glimpse of russet-colored climbing ivy adorning a high terrace wall, and part of Lake Lecco.

I’ve written chapters of two incipient novels – well, let’s say works-in-progress – in this study, using a Mac G4 courtesy of The Center. The laptop sits on a narrow wooden table, half of which width goes under a larger glass table I can still reach out to – to get sheets coming out of the printer, a fresh music CD, a cup of cappuccino I’ve brought up from the tea room downstairs, or my pack of Camels unfiltered… For that last welcome break I’ll have to stand up and walk to the window to indulge and blow my smoke out, while availing of the small portable ashtray I’ve placed on the wide ledge upon arrival three-and-a-half weeks ago.

Then I get to enjoy a wider view, which now includes the red-tiled roof and terracotta walls of Maranese, a smaller building several levels down but also occupied by resident scholars and artists on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship. More of the lake joins the expanding panorama. If I lean out some more, it includes the olive grove and elegant Italian cypresses below, and even lower, the lakeshore building called Sfondrata with the old stone tower and boathouse beside it. Beyond all these is the dramatic sweep of the Gringean mountains, above which craggy peaks the sun and moon rise, at mid-morning and by late afternoon.

When I get back home this week, or sometime soon after, I may try to replicate this isolation room up in my attic-library in Pasig – something I’ve always planned, if only to forestall further developments that continue to turn it into a dump, with new books piled up everywhere, plus boxes of stuff that spell implacable accumulation. Then too I’ll be out of range of NBA or PBA on TV when a son turns on the set in the family room below, or the missus watching ANC or whatever, or the other son and the daughter arguing over their PC rights for the hour.

If I do succeed eventually, and get to isolate myself in my attic-library – for which effort an aircon unit will become necessary, I will then enjoy a view through a large triangular glass window, of treetops in our backyard and immediate neighborhood. If I stand, head nearly scraping the slanted ceiling, I even get a glimpse of the Philsports football field, and perhaps when the full might of F4 shows up I will catch their Taiwanese muzak lofting well past the floodlights.

But it wouldn’t be the same as writing literature in Bellagio. The four weeks I would have spent here by this midweek have been most profitable indeed, away from Danding vs. Davide and other astrologically fated controversies that will continue rocking our national boat till the year to come, and so on, while Pluto, as I understand it, opposes good ol’ RP’s sun sign.

It is the experience that will prove most profitable, of course: serving up memories for the rest of a lifetime, many new friendships, essential momentum for creativity, poems and poem-ideas, thoughts and insights and questions that may then be converted into future literature.

I ask, for one: when did early settlers anywhere decide to take to heights, away from bodies of water or fertile valleys where the living was easier? Was it just a matter of getting away from a tribe one couldn’t get along with anymore, or for entire tribes to find high ground where rivals wouldn’t follow, thinking them to be fools for a view? Was it for defense purposes – mountain outposts usually turning impregnable? Or was it ever dictated by aesthetic, indeed spiritual, considerations? Were commanding views always held to be enriching, or soulful, or, heh-heh, power-consumptive?

Surely today’s high-rise dwellers feel a surge of command, gratification, or above-it-allness whenever they gaze out for an expansive view and are assured that they’re well above the madding crowd below. That is why CEOs occupy the topmost office floors, and penthouses overlooking the pretty American cemetery in Fort Bonifacio fetch prime rates.

In the Cordilleras many years ago, I asked a native if they had a term for a good mountain view – where you were on a vantage point and indulged in what is usually called a postcard-pretty vista. "Napintas," he said, using the same word they applied to beautiful visual art.

As for the high of the mountain climber, I imagine that this is sourced as much to what will only be an ephemeral view as to the sense of triumph upon completion of much physical effort. Are they fools, too, who distance themselves so remotely from the picayune efforts of the ordinary crowd – those who remain glued to city streets or coastal villages, the plains people?

Here in the mountainous turf of Lombardia, I’ve read, and noticed, how the lofty view can be an end unto itself, just as "holy" sounds can assure gratification and enrich one’s otherwise mundane, quotidian activities.

Crossing Lake Como on a ferry boat, one cannot help but notice how churches had been erected far up on the mountains that dwarf the lakeshore villages. Monks always did this, not so much for isolation, I would think, but for a reach of the spectacular sweep, thus to claim the privilege of a grand spiritual key.

The farther you see, the more you see into yourself.

Then someone struck iron and cast a bell. It became larger through a century. Larger and larger bells were taken up to increasingly towering belfries. As in our coastal villages when the Augustinians and Franciscans embraced townspeople with sweeping, quasi-fatherly arms in the lofty name of faith, the bells served as alarums against marauders, far more effectively than the traditional kuratong or bamboo clappers.

When they weren’t warning about pirates, Christian bells sounded the hours. With each peal the peasant’s ear harked and responded, perhaps with a beating of the fatigued chest, as if in acknowledgment of one’s labors, or as a simple reckoning of how man-made sound can carry across wide lakes and valleys.

Here in Lombardy’s mid-lakes area, after a week or two one settles into the cycle of recognition that at half past the hour those bells in yonder tower would sound the clarion, and on the hour other bells in this or some other village will take their turns.

In Cadennabia across Lake Como we hear the bells of Bellagio sounding us ripe for a late picnic lunch as we rest on a stone bench on the esplanade, under a great oak whose branches droop toward the lakewaters.

In Bellagio as we stride determinedly up stone steps of some narrow salita or alley, the bells of San Giacomo, the Lombardian Romanesque church (meaning it’s also adopted sundry styles such as Baroque and Gothic), circa 1075-1125, ring loud and near as we ascend breathlessly toward Piazza della Chiesa. But sometimes when we’re on a path toward the highest point of Villa Serbelloni, meaning the highest point of Bellagio, we can also hear the bells sounding from San Giorgio (1313) in Varenna, across Lake Como.

Gazing out at those neighboring villages, if across a couple of miles or so of the deepest lakes in Italy, and hearing those sonorous ringing tones, we realize how effectively Roman Catholicism managed to stretch its view of worship as to keep entire countries "under the bells."

Last weekend the moon rose full and luminous over the Grignean peaks, on the eastern side of Lake Lecco, just as the flamboyant sun descended beyond the distant mountains on the border with Switzerland, west of Lake Como.

It’s not every day one is regaled by such a momentary sweep of the sky in full partnership, all from one’s balcony, too. And so I’ll miss the villa – my study, the room with many views, the balcony with a panorama for an ashtray, the company that was as illustrious as it was convivial and much fun (inclusive of a Halloween party where residents and conferees were cast in a whodunit skit titled "Murder in the Villa").

The fellowships are so designed, stretching for 28 days, that one is bound to experience a full moon over Bellagio. I am grateful for this, and doubly so for the conviction that if there were indeed such a thing as "room envy" among the fellows, as Hiro Ono jokingly suggested, then I’d have to take pride of place and claim bragging rights for occupying the corner room (V-19) with the most number of windows and a balcony with the most expansive, gentlest yet most dramatic, view of sunrise, sunset and moonrise. And more, much more.

Before turning in well past midnight sometime last week when the moon was still gibbous, I leaned out of my study window and espied pinpoints of light on the lake. Some fishermen were obviously out there, sitting patiently on motorboats in the moonlit night. The waters that fringed the land contours across were so still that like a moonlit mirror they reflected the lights from Lecco and another lakeshore village.

I can imagine hours turning, till the birds twitter while it’s still very dark, the church bells peal all around the lakes, daybreak assume its gentle composure, and the changing company we keep for a month in our lives assemble for breakfast till 9 a.m.

Then Andrei from Siberia will head out in a polo shirt (in 10° C or less) to the boathouse and beat Nick from Dundee to the rowboat. My life partner will remain frustrated, waiting with Nick for Andrei’s return. But he doesn’t for a couple of hours; he has simply rowed out of sight. So the spouse gives up and trudges back up the terraced levels to urge me to speed up on my work so we can still take a day trip to Menaggio thence Lugano across the Swiss border, or to Lecco thence Bergamo, which turns out to be a fine medieval showcase with its Citta Bassa (Low City) and Citta Alta (High City).

But occasionally she’s stopped on her tracks when she encounters Gwen Nagel on some garden level, who’s filling up paper or canvas with watercolor or oils. They speak of landscapes and herbs, art and beauty. Later in the day I will assure Gwen’s husband, Jim Nagel of the University of Georgia, who’s working on a manuscript titled "The Impressionistic Dimensions of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms," that of course I’ll catch him on the tennis court against his latest victim, and make sure to document the whitewash.

Jim’s 66, well built and stands 6’3". He’s also a natural athlete, having starred as a shooting guard in the same high school team as the celebrated champion coach Phil Jackson. Jim recounts too that after college he was asked to try out with the Lakers, but that since he had to beat out a certain Jerry West for a spot, he had to give up and concentrate on his first love, which is American Literature.

He’s written the screenplay for In Love and War starring Sandra Bullock, based on Hemingway’s youthful exploits during WWI. He regales me with countless anecdotes, about athletes and writers, how Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 had "Catch-18" as its first title, but that Leon Uris had beaten him to the Jewish numerological significance with his own novel Mila 18. Or how JFK had spent the night at Villa Serbelloni (in Room V-6) while waiting for the Pope to return to the Vatican for his audience, but that Dean Rusk, the first director of the Rockefeller Foundation, who had suggested the overnight stay, had himself not been invited due to an oversight, and had to fly back to Washington and back to rejoin his President.

The Bellagio experience is full of such stories, and such newfound friends who come and go. Nick Wade and Hiro Ono, our single-malt whisky buddies, left a week before we did, but not before Nick offered the last of his nightly limericks after dinner, and bequeathed a bottle of Glen Grant for the rest of us to consume in the wake of his departure. He also left us an e-mailed image of the villa’s grounds as shot from that rowboat he had to contend daily for with Andrei.

The music composer William Cobble had to leave with his fresh bride Jenny, too, as well as Reshmi Mitra from Jamshedpur, India, and her late-arriving spouse Sagar. So for a few days we were down to nearly single digits, until fresh conferees came, and a final batch of resident scholars and artists who will stay until Dec. 5, after which the villa closes for winter.

Pliny the Younger (born in Como in 62 AD), who became a much-quoted chronicler of Roman proclivities, is thought to have laid the foundation for what now stands as Villa Serbelloni. That early, he preferred the heights, with the views. People in the village below might have thought him a fool for taking over an entire hilltop where one had to lose one’s breath in having to trudge up.

But Pliny persisted and eventually established what he called his Villa Tragedia (as against his Villa Comedia in nearby Lenno). It is said to have been so named "not only because tragedy was considered a ‘loftier’ art than comedy but because in his day tragic actors wore high heels."

Huh?! The better to assume commanding views, I suppose? And be able to hear the eventual bells more distinctly?

The observation about tragedy vis-à-vis comedy holds to this day, unfortunately. Serious novels impress critics more than funny ones. Perhaps that’s why I’ve started on two, my third and fourth. One will be comic, the other… well, not exactly tragic, but of "high" purpose such as to include political and terrorist scenarios. But hey, can’t that be funny, too?

As for having to wear heels high or stiletto, well, I don’t know. Sometimes one may take exception to having to do in Rome or elsewhere what the Romans or natives do.

What is certain is that Pliny the Younger set out building this haven of a scholar’s and artist’s paradise in the style that eventually turned into the Lombardian way of architecture, one that is said to sacrifice symmetry for practical value – such as having the summer sun occluded from window passage, the same that will allow the winter sun to come through, or when one erects a portico or terrace for southern exposure, or carve out a window through a bathroom wall that will then allow for a loo with a view.

Such as I have, such as I have had, such as I will remember, with pealing bells of other memories still ringing in my golden shower-drenched head.