The Tremezzo is a spectacle. A parade of impostors, dazzlers, elegant bon vivants, rendezvous of the nouveau riche, coquettes, travelling salesmen, dandies, lounge lizards, old sacks with young-blooded women, all meticulously staged. Caricatures who distract themselves from death with a lot of money and have forsaken their humanity for the sake of appearance. During those days in the Tremezzo, I thought a lot about wealth and what it does to people, and how it differs. I talked to the governess about men who, even in old age, couldn’t transcend their vanity, I asked the barman if the rich were still any good today or if they only came for the Agnellis and Picassos, I heard from the pool attendant that nobody swims in the lake anymore, and talked to the chauffeur about driving a Ferrari. He says that it’s harder nowadays to drive a Ferrari for the culture and passion behind it, without having to justify oneself to all those who drive Ferraris just to be seen driving one. You have to get used to it, it’s like wearing suits, and the fact that people who drive Ferraris and have young mistresses also wear them. Wanting to breathe and wanting to drive a Ferrari, that’s humanity.
Only when my friend Fabrizio spoke of wealth did I believe it. He was raised in the arms of celebrities who sought refuge from a Ferrari-driving world at his Italian mother’s dinner table. When you break wealth down into its component parts, there are many elements behind it, and behind all of them is a quiet desire for love. We all want something. Fabrizio said it as best he could, and he said it with honest Italian eyes, in that beautiful face he daily moisturized.
We didn’t need a Ferrari to be what they needed a Ferrari for. We drove a Volvo that didn’t pretend to be anything it wasn’t. It was practical and beautiful. You could drive it over a shit-filled cow hoe and pull it up in the Tremezzo. Even after a glass, or two, it drove great. Thanks to the sunroof, it became a very romantic road trip, the end of summer outside of time, when you could eat without getting fat and drive the Volvo after dinner without dying. For dinner, we ordered Lavarello or Bianca Piemontese and she asked me what I would wear with it. I had waited for her at many hotel bars during this trip, smoked, made a few notes, and learned from the barman everything I knew about this or that place. So each could have their own space to do their own thing and no one felt the urge to kill the other at some point. The only problem was when there was no bar or no good bar, which is essentially the same thing. She could then occupy herself with her body forever and so could I, and when she came down the stairs of the lobby in a moment of surprise, with bare shoulders and loose hair, it took on epic dimensions.
We drank aperitifs at the hotel bar or went boating with Ernesto Riva. We did what everyone does when someone’s watching, even when there was no one to watch. In the evening, when the lanterns around the lake lit up, in his old Ferrari, Tommaso showed us the narrow streets of Lenno and Laglio, where Mussolini was shot before being hung upside down in Milan, and where he rolled his first joints. All of this while racing and with squealing tires. Like in a James Bond movie. The lake sparkled in the background and there was often a wavy orange awning in front of us. And at midnight, when everything was asleep and we had each other to ourselves, we thanked God for this life and the bodies he gave us. We felt the height of the mountains and the depth of the lake, lay there for a long time, with the windows open, and looked at the stars. At the top there were many, then just a few, and then there was a lot of black, and then the villages down by the lake, which also looked like stars or like strings of lights thrown into the mountains. It wasn’t about pennies at all, it was about the stars. The colors of the night and the moon shining its white beam across the lake directly at us. You could hear the lake lapping.
Lago di Como! Sometimes memory takes the place of the present and leaves deep traces within us and creates an overall picture of our life, something whole that we can then be happy about if we handle it carefully. In this place, we have left something of ourselves that we only find again when we return to this place. A coastal town in the mountains. Glaciers and ice lying under the southern sun. The weather is never hot and never cold and always pleasant. The man from Zurich said it was because of the Bergell, where the clouds get trapped. Brutal rock, millions of years old. Nowhere else does the Mediterranean clash so violently with the Alpine. You drive through a tunnel and are in the same country of another nation. Gone are the green meadow carpets of Switzerland. The landscape is dominated by cypress trees and the sky is held up by pillars descending into deep water. It is said that there is no redemption for the inhabitants of the lake, no paradise, because they are already allowed to live there.
Everything is green and blue and white and very symmetrical and in beautiful shapes with strong edges and shines in deep transparent colors. In the morning, when the sun falls over the mountains from another tired land and the night still hangs in the forests, you see the sun rising behind the mountains. You don’t see the sun, you only see the lake and the light falling over the mountains into the fog, and you know where the sun is. A setting so beautiful that you can hardly relax. Because you must have seen the lake from the lake, and from the balcony of the Tremezzo, just as Churchill painted it.
