Bolzano 1944-45
“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
P
E T E R G R E E N A W A Y M A S T E R C L A S S
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.
B
O L Z A N O G O L D
1.
The Last Apple.
On the crowded cafe-terrace a young man with good teeth noisily
eats an apple. He is accompanied by his girlfriend who eats
bean soup (Luper brings the soup to their table) and they
are joined by an aggressive-looking young man who orders coffee
in English from Luper - an action that turns heads.
AMBIENCE: 1940s dentist surgery.
4. Butter Crucifix Gold
A group of six small children, wearing crucifixes, drink soda
water with straws out of bottles at a cafe table in the sunshine.
AMBIENCE: 1940s orphanage
5. The Scheherazade Commandant.
Luper serves two deaf mutes wearing Austrian army uniforms.
Their fingers are heavily ringed. One deaf-mute has a party-trick
for the children in story 4 - spinning three coins at once
on the back of a plate.
AMBIENCE: 1940s concentration camp
6. Coat of Yellow Stars.
Every day a writer - a regular - dressed suspiciously like
a writer - floppy black hat, white beard, theatrical coat,
bi-focal spectacles, writes at a corner table with a leaky
fountain-pen on buff paper. He is untidy and the manuscript
papers repeatedly fall to the floor, become ring-stained with
coffee cups or spilt upon with white wine. He flirts with
the cafe female clientele who, cynically, when they humour
him, know that they will be bought drinks. There is one young
woman who makes a genuine fuss of him - his regular and regularly
deceived, mistress. Tulse takes an interest in what the writer
is writing.
AMBIENCE: 1940s Berlin theatre and back-stage
7.
The Biscuit Tin.
A plump moustached elderly German officer entertains three
Italian sisters who nibble biscuits and drink tea nervously.
A rabbit seller - with rabbits caged in a wicker basket on
his bike - stops outside the cafe for an espresso - he leans
his bike close to the sister’s table.
AMBIENCE: 1940s zoo
10.
Peter the Great.
Luper in the kitchen at night - bends over a dirty sink trying
to scrub burnt spaghetti off a large pan. Above the sink someone
has pinned postcards sent from abroad - amongst them, side
by side, grimy with steam and splashed greased, is a postcard
of the Kremlin and a postcard of Dutch windmills.
AMBIENCE: 1940s soviet Russia/Peter the Great’s Dutch collection
of curios.
11. Colosseum Jews.
On a Friday night, Luper lights the terrace cafe-table candles
and looks at the sky to count the three stars that are necessary
to start a Jewish ceremony. He stands by a table where a man
is obscured by his newspaper showing a photograph of the Colosseum
in Rome.
AMBIENCE: history of the Colosseum - ancient and modern
12. The Violin Suitcase.
Regularly, a middle-aged violinist plays on the street corner
for the terrace clientele. He has three children with him,
who sit patiently on the pavement whilst he plays. Luper throws
an occasional tip into his open violin-case.
AMBIENCE: 1940s street musicians
13. The Sausageman.
A night in the kitchen - Luper contemplates the fat-filled
greasy saucepans kept almost permanently on the back rings
of the gas-cooker.
AMBIENCE: 1940s proletariat kitchens
14.
The Goosegirl.
A pale young woman without shoes walks past the cafe every
lunch-time.
AMBIENCE: 1940s riverside landscape
15. Danae.
A smart young woman with an extravagant fashionable coiffeur
and a large gold crucifix around her neck, takes a coffee
every day at the same table, sometimes accompanied by her
Lothario boyfriend.
AMBIENCE: 1940s smart city life
16. Love of Dentistry.
Fidelia, the cafe waitress, like a dreamy automaton, serves
drinks and coffee to seven professional-looking men in suits.
Fidelia alerts Luper to the fact that they are dentists. Luper
tries to catch a glimpse of their teeth. Some indeed have
very artificial looking teeth, but in two cases the teeth
are grey and ill-placed. The dentist will meet regularly at
4 o’clock every afternoon. Occasionally Fidelia’s husband,
the dentist’s general assistant, joins them, to bully and
show off in front of Fidelia.
AMBIENCE: 1940s dentist surgery (same as story 1).
21.
The Golden Weathercock.
Five boisterous, German, blond-headed, young, optimistic soldiers
noisily drink beer.
AMBIENCE: 1940s church tower at night
22. Twelve Days to Christmas.
A quiet, impoverished elderly couple sit timidly in the shade
at a side table drinking tea. They nervously watch the German
soldiers of Story 21.
AMBIENCE: 1940s lower working class kitchen etc
28. The Ring Cycle.
Luper brings assorted ice-creams to a table full of elderly
ladies who all wear large wedding-rings.
AMBIENCE: 1940s trains
30. Gloved in the Bath
A faded woman wearing too many clothes sits alone at a table
and drinks Martinis. She lines the olives up on the table-cloth
to make a necklace.
AMBIENCE: 1940s tenement bathroom
31. The Dolls-House Booty.
A young girl plays with a doll in a wheelbarrow of fish.
AMBIENCE: 1940s children’s dolls-house
32. The Cigar-Box.
A pair of chess players regularly occupy the same table in
the hot afternoons and smoke cigars taken from a Dutch wooden
cigar-box. They sometimes ask Luper for a light and he obliges.
They blow out clouds of blue cigar smoke.
AMBIENCE: 1940s dentist surgery
37. The Three Bears.
A neatly dressed child sitting with her neat parents, clutches
a yellow teddy-bear.
AMBIENCE: 1940s Berlin toy shop windows
38. The Spectacles.
Luper idly counts all the people in the cafe who wear spectacles.
AMBIENCE: 1940s opticians shop
40. Grosz Enthusiasm.
A young German misanthrope student sits at a table criticising
the clientele of the cafe, talking to the amused Luper who
holds a tray. The young man’s viewpoint is taken up by the
camera that picks out satirical details of the customers -
a man grossly picking his teeth, a woman sneezing green catarrh
into a handkerchief, a man scratching his crutch, a woman
changing a baby’s diaper, the writer fumbling a woman’s backside
- items that George Grosz would have satirised.
AMBIENCE: 1940s Grosz drawings
41. The Toothbrush
In the early morning, Luper brushes his teeth in the small
and dingy restaurant toilet - looking at himself in the speckled
mirror. Through the toilet window into the square he can see
pigeons wheeling.
AMBIENCE: 1940s German urban town square
43. The Rabbi Conspiracy
Two greedy middle-aged men are in earnest noisy conversation
- Luper brings then pastrami sandwiches.
AMBIENCE: 1940s bookshop
59 Goebbels’s diary
A fine looking woman smokes at a terrace cafe. She is watched
by two grey-suited officials - one of whom leaps up to light
her cigarette, seeking an opportunity to speak to her.
AMBIENCE: 1940s a german-text diary and small hotel bedroom
and 1940s hollywood-style photographs of females with flickering
cinema projector.
60. Golden gardeners
An elderly couple whisper together over a pot of tea.
AMBIENCE: 1940s zoo acquaria.
62. Frank’s Friends
Three soldiers in Italian uniforms accompanied by an exhausted
and distraught child, bring a fourth soldier into the cafe,
on a stretcher from the river. The fourth soldier looks drowned
and the soldiers try to revive him with cognac and brandy
brought by Luper. The soldier does not survive and they cover
him with table-cloths. The exhausted child falls asleep lying
across the corpse.
AMBIENCE: 1940s ?
brightly polished men’s shoes.
69. The Golden Bullet
An Italian fascist ostentatiously cleans the deconstructed
parts of his army pistol at a cafe table inside the restaurant.
The proprietor’s wife screams at him and the proprietor comes
and firmly collects all the pieces by lifting the table-cloth,
pushing and shoving the man out the back of the restaurant
and hurling the table-cloth of items into the street to set
dogs barking.
AMBIENCE: 1940s military barracks.
75.
Tram Decision
A hungry-looking young man in a long black coat too large
for him, sits huddled over an empty espresso coffee cup at
a table at the edge of the cafe terrace.
AMBIENCE: 1940s trams, tram-sheds.
77. The Golden Film.
A myopic projectionist eats his cheese sandwich between reel
changes at the local cinema. He always - very rapidly - tells
Luper the story of the film now showing.
AMBIENCE: 1940s cinemas, and cinema projection-rooms
79. Train Gold.
In a tip received from two travellers whose language Luper
cannot identify, there are two badly squashed coins - evidence
perhaps of being laid on a train rail.
AMBIENCE: 1940s railways.
91. The Sempstress.
For want of a premises, a handsome woman sews and darns and
mends at a corner table in the afternoons.
AMBIENCE: 1940s gypsies and sempstresses.
92. Harpsch’s Story
Fidelia tells her story of her parents separated because her
father was a Nazi and her mother a Jewess and she was sent
to a Swiss orphanage for adoption. She talks about her mother
who was a cook of considerable reputation. Luper suggests
she too could be a cook and laughingly suggests she should
learn to cook good spaghetti.
AMBIENCE: 1940s swiss sanatoria and kindergarten
95.Barbarossa
A fisherman, sheltering from a mountain storm, wearing an
angler’s many-pocketed canvas waistcoat and jacket and hat,
empties his pockets on the cafe table - hooks, weights, bait,
lines, reels, fish etc.
AMBIENCE: 1940s historical mediaeval cinema film and refugees.
99.
Ventimiglia.
Two suitcases, roped together, are left at a corner table.
The proprieter’s wife thinks they constitute a bomb. Luper
takes the suitcases and they are unlocked and the contents
- men and women’s clothes - are unpacked.
AMBIENCE: 1940s big city railway stations
100.Black gold
A man and a woman, both apparent Italian ex-fascists, sit
at a table and ostentatiously order an expensive meal. Both
of them are wearing excess amounts of jewellery.
AMBIENCE: 1940s busy restaurant
TM
& COPYRIGHT 2004 BY ISTVAN HORKAY +INTUITPICTURES. ALL
RIGHTS RESERVED.
