The
following is proposed as the basis of the media items - Book,
DVD, film - associated with the Bolzano Gold Stories.
Narrative
In the very last days of the Second World War, Tulse Luper,
calling himself Giacomo Farenti, and dressed as an Italian
cavalry officer, is riding a white horse in Northern Italy
on a journey from Rome back to England. He is distantly pursued
by a German-American ex-lover, Passion Hockmeister, and the
US Military Police who, with reason, connect him with the
death of Julius Lephrenic, an American Mormon Fascist sympathiser
who died in mysterious circumstances connected with uranium
in a hotel bedroom near the Colosseum in Rome.On
a moonlit May night, riding through a pine forest near Bolzano
close to the Austrian border, Luper is the agent of a car
crash. A Mercedes driven by a German Army Officer, swerves
to avoid horse and rider and fatally crashes into a tree.
The driver’s wrist watch is smashed at exactly 2.09 am, 8th
May 1945. Luper is thrown from his horse and the horse becomes
lame.
Luper recognises the driver as a Lieutenant Harpsch, a soldier
he met four years previously at the chateau of Vaux-le-Vicompte,
north of Paris, when it was used as a headquarters and potential
Birth Clinic by the German occupation forces. At that time
Harpsch was developing a passionate and forbidden relationship
with a Jewish cook of the chateaux. Luper was forced to leave
Vaux in a hurry and knows no more of the man’s history, though
a scattering of untidy bills and IOUs and receipts in the
lieutenant’s pockets and in the glove compartments of the
car, might, if examined closely, reveal some clues. Scattered
out of two smashed suitcases in the back of the car, are 92
gold bars, assembled - as can been see by the different stamps
on the gold bars - from all over Germany and Europe, from
everywhere where the influence of German Fascism had been
present.
Deep
in the forest, Luper spends the night with the crashed car,
the corpse, the gold bars and his lame horse, and the following
morning, is surprised and arrested by a party of gun-happy
local hunters who quickly penetrate his assumed disguise.
The party includes an Italian policeman, Arturo Gaetano, an
American serviceman, William Bell, and a cafe proprietor,
Joop Baeler, all of them equivocal in their support of the
new post-war regime.
Luper is held under arrest accused of causing Harpsch’s death,
and being in possession of 92 stolen gold bars. But because
the Italian authorities have their eyes on the gold, and are
anxious to avoid publicity, Luper is held in an Italian restaurant
on a Bolzano town square, and his horse is threatened with
death to be eaten by starving locals. He is forced into the
employment of the cafe-restaurant proprietor who is short
of cafe staff due to the war. This proprietor, a Dutchman,
Joop Baeler, is a stout, loquacious man and a drinker, formerly
a miller from Leiden, who daily dreams of banquets of Italian
food and employs locals to teach him how to cook pasta. His
wife is an Italian Jewess who has remained hidden in the cafe
cellar for three years. Her grandfather owned the cafe before
the war until he was shot by Italian fascists. There is a
melancholic young woman who waits tables at the cafe and assists
the cook in the restaurant kitchens. She has a child, Henri,
and is unhappily married to Thomas Fricka, a local dentist’s
assistant. There is an ex-convict, Rausti, who occasionally
washes-up and who has heard stories of the gold bars and continually
fantasises about them. These characters interweave through
the duration of Luper’s stay at the cafe. Relevant to a local
miller in the 15th century who was tortured and burnt by the
Roman Inquisition, Joop Baeler pretends to believe that the
world is a large cheese inhabited by greater and lesser worms,
the greater are the angels, and the lesser, mankind. He exhibits
a large maggot-ridden Parmesan cheese under glass in his cafe.
Luper accepts his imprisonment for the time being, it is a
refuge in difficult times, and a possible temporary sanctuary
from his distant pursuers, but he plans escape in the long
term. By day, he is a waiter in a smart waiter’s clothes;
he works in the kitchen, on the terrace and in the cellars.
When not needed in the restaurant, he is imprisoned in an
attic bedroom with access to the roof where he can view the
city and its church towers, and look down into the town square.
The gold bars are kept hidden under Luper’s bed, in a conspiracy
between the cafe proprietor, the two hunters and two local
policemen. Luper contemplates the goldbars taken from the
crashed car, and writes a story about each one, trawling for
events and details among his recent experiences - stories
of the war, of Venice, of horses, of the Third Reich’s victimisation
of European Jewry, gypsies and the handicapped. On occasions
when members of the Italian army or the US military police
are in the restaurant, Luper is hustled into the cellar where
the miller’s wife was once kept in secret, a place which still
bears the marks of her imprisonment. Luper’s lame horse is
stabled in the stable-garage at the back of the restaurant.
Luper soon realises that the restaurant cannot cook a good
spaghetti, a fact he uses as a grudging amused disapproval
of his Italian prison. Every story he writes about the gold
bars ends with the same disparagement - a ironic way of getting
back at his captors.Luper is held for eleven weeks before
the Americans drive the last Germans and the last collaborators
north of the Alps. His observations over the eleven weeks
he is imprisoned in the cafe-restaurant give him the opportunity
to write 92 stories. He watches the staff and clientele in
the restaurant itself, at the bar, in the kitchens and the
pantries and in the cellars, and on the terrace and the surrounding
pavements - observing the mixed bag of end-of-the-war cafe-restaurant
clients - Italian refugees, patriots wanting revenge, recently
released concentration-camp jews, disgraced collaborators,
unrepentant traitors, exhausted or guilty Italian soldiers,
German and Austria soldiers abandoned or deserted in Italy,
and civilians and foreigners both outspoken and in disguise
trying to find a way to survive, and, later there are American
soldiers and Italian officious bureaucrats seeking power and
influence in the new order - all of these people give him
ideas for thestories he will write that eventually become
the collection known as the GOLD Stories.
Luper discovers that the war officially ended in Europe at
exactly the time of his crash with the car as witnessed by
Harpsch’s smashed watch - a significant, mysterious, coincidental
circumstance worthmemorialising.The story Luper creates for
Harpsch is that he and his jewess cook lover have a child
- a daughter. Luper christens her Fidelia. The cook is arrested
and sent to a concentration camp, Harpsch is stripped of his
rank and sent to fight in Russia, all the time hoping one
day again to see his daughter who he believes has beensent
out of the country by an adoption society and is probably
living in the Southern Alps - either in
Switzerland,
Austria or Italy, in a child adoption centre. Towards the
end of the war, Harpsch is decorated for bravery, reinstated
in his commission and uses army intelligence to find his daughter’s
whereabouts. He grows to believe she is in care in an institution
near Bolzano. Determined to find her, as Germany collapses,
he plans to steal gold bars from his brother’s bank in Baden-Baden
and with his brother, escape Germany and set out in a stolen
car to find his daughter. The brother dies unexpectedly celebrating
his escape, and Harpsch with 101 gold bars, travels by side-roads,
avoiding military police, foreign soldiers and refugee crowds
who block the road and plead for assistance lifts. He is often
obliged to take extensive detours. On his journey he is forced
to part with nine of the gold bars, for petrol, food, services,
bribes, and for burial services for his brother ina Jewish
cemetery. After a six day journey covering over a thousand
miles, nearing hisdestination,exhausted, he crashes with Luper
and his horse.
Luper
believes that the gold has been stolen from the victims of
the Third Reich, smelted down from their gold possessions.
He provides a story and a case history for each bar, all the
time tracing Harpsch’s car ride - creating his exact journey
from maps discovered in the Bolzano restaurant.The cafe owner
is a renegade and a malcontent fomenting Fascist trouble,
trying illicitly to offload the gold for his own profit. Luper
as he writes a story for each gold bar moves it from one pile
to another on the floor of his attic prison. One of the cafe
customers is Primo Levi returning from his concentration camp
ordeal. He had met him before in Turin and they discuss the
significances of the atomic table - most pertinently with
theelement 92 of uranium.
With the miller betrayed over an infidelity escapade involving
his wife and his daughter, and US military police about to
recover the gold and with the 92 stories finished, Luper,
to his very great surprise - for his reconstruction of Harpsch
and his life and journey is entirely fictitious - discovers
Harpsch’s daughter Fidelia in the cafe - happy and healthy
and well-looked after by a devoted Italian childless couple.
With both her parents dead, Luper reveals nothing of her background,
fact or fiction, and presents her with her father’s mended
watch as a gift. With his business in prophetic fiction completed,
Luper makes his escape on his whitehorse back into the pine
forests and into the mountains.
Resume
There are three layers to the project, like transparent skins
of an onion, lying one on top of the other, each one showing
through the other.1. Luper’s story.The background
and incidents and events of Luper’s imprisonment in the Bolzano
cafe for eleven weeks, from May to August 1945, where he writes
the Gold Bar stories, and invents a fictitious life for Harpsch.
The day by day events of this Luper imprisonment can be related
to an exact calendar of dates, days, weather reports -and
maybe a day-by-day textual and visual account of the events
of the post-war world.2. Harpsch’s story
The story of Harpsch’s life, invented by Luper, most pertinently
an account of Harpsch’s robbery of thegoldbars and subsequent
journey to Bolzano.
3. The 92 Gold Stories.
The 92 stories (plus 9 others) that tell of gold appropriated
by supporters of European Fascism from the ThirdReich’s victims,
mainly jews.
“SETS”There
are many “sets” or ambience/location backgrounds to the narrative,
related, again as above, to the three layers of plotting.
And these can be manufactured by multiple still images manipulated
in verysophisticated ways by Photo-shop techniques, often
simulating movement.
Onto these we will insert pieces of moving film activity,
either to be shot or from the copious materialalready filmed
for the Tulse Luper films.
LUPER
“SETS”The backgrounds to Luper’s adventures and imprisonment
could be the following:
1.
The pine forest of the car crash - by day and night, dawn
and sunset, with sunlight and moonlight streaming through
the trees, recalling magic forests of childhood and the Satanic
forests of German mythology - CasparFrederich, the Seigfried
sagas and Wagernian Romanticism.
2.
The Bolzano cafe terrace cafe - with table umbrellas, tables,
chairs, wine glasses, white tableclothes,flowers, cutlery
etc, and many varied clients.
3.
The interior of the Bolzano restaurant - with spacious, expansive
Italian family meals set on large tables with waiters, wines,
condiments, bread, cutlery, fruit, flowers and copious food
etc
4.
The interior of the Bolzano restaurant large kitchen - gas-ovens,
hanging hams and herbs, saucepans, freshfish, vegetables,
a cornucopia of good food, steam, sunbeams, open windows onto
the noises of the town, running water, etc
5.
Luper’s attic above the restaurant with views of the buildings,
churches, domes of a North Italian city in the mountains.
6.
The hiding place in the restaurant cellar - naked brick and
plastered walls, the scratches on the plaster of an incumbent
passing time, junk, old mattresses, bicycles, wine crates
....7. The restaurant stable/garage - broken rusty cars, horses,
petrol pumps, benches of greasy tools, dirtystraw, riding
gear, etc
8.
The Bolzano cafe used as a location for the town photographer
to make large scale photographs of Bolzano communities.
- a group of war heroes,
- priests and cardinals.
- children,
- private soldiers,
- local footballers,
- whores,
- a street band.
- wedding parties
Amsterdam
2004 Peter Greenaway
The
92 Gold Stories
