7. A SICK BOY’S WINTER

What happens to one’s sense of time in the mountains? And in an Alpine sanatorium? The mystery of the passing of the hours, which can slow to almost a halt, is at the heart of Thomas Mann’s masterpiece, The Magic Mountain. The mountain transports and transforms, isolating its visitors from the moment they set out along its twisted roads, shaping and altering even one’s memories. Yet there is not only Mann’s Berghof, in which Hans Castorp remains suspended. There is a similar mystery in the pages that Alberto Moravia (1907-1990) wrote about the Istituto Elioterapico Codivilla in Cortina, recalling his own time as a patient. On June 1, 1924, at the age of seventeen and suffering from bone tuberculosis, Moravia was admitted there, remaining for more than a year. In the first two months, due to lack of beds, he shared a room with another patient, an older businessman from Milan, whom he describes as “a very coarse and uneducated man if there ever was one,” who continuously tried to drag the young Alberto into embarrassing confessions about sexual experiences. This encounter would later inspire one of his most acclaimed short stories, A Sick Boy’s Winter (1930). Once moved to a private room, Moravia’s enemy became solitude. “At eight, sun therapy, naked on the terrace with the sun just rising behind the Mount Sorapis. At eleven, I returned to my room, the sun was too strong. At noon, the doctor’s visit. From two to eight, solitude and reading. Then dinner. One day, I wrote with a pencil on the windowpane, alone with the sun.” At Codivilla, Moravia lived almost as if on vacation, taking German and English lessons, meeting with his cousins Carlo and Nello Rosselli, who visited to discuss the assassination of Giacomo Matteotti; watching with envy as skiers passed by the windows, and moreover, contemplating the changing seasons of the Dolomites. In September 1925 he left the sanatorium for Bressanone, where he began The Time of Indifference, his most successful novel. The mountain had not managed to trap him forever.