Where Time Stops
“The time stops when you step through this door,” Cassiano says when he was about to open the wooden door in front of us. He stuck the key in and turned it four times. The door shrieked as he pushed it inwards. I could see fleck of dust, shone by the sunlight, were flying out. I squinted my eyes as I stepped inside, trying to adjust them with the only transom lights coming in from the right-corner of the room and a small window on my right.
I gazed around, it was an entryway. The interior wall, as its exterior part, was made of stone without any added filler in between, relying on the weight of the stones and gravity. I stepped in deeper and stumbled. I realized the lower surface was all cobblestones that were built unevenly. In a trice, I felt a bit uneasy and something mysterious about the place. Lumbers are piled up in every corner. I reckoned some old tools and appliances were put and arranged orderly, things I might had not had seen before that had me guessing what they were used for. This is a typical peasant medieval home, I figured.
“The house was dated in the fourteenth century. The space had been expanded two times, but it had never really been restructured or renovated even until today,” Cassiano broke my thoughts. He continued, “This is an antique home that is now rare to find. The most modern thing you will see here is the tap water.”
“So this home had been abandoned for long?” I asked.
“Nope, it had been lived until late nineties. A family lived here. The four sisters of Tomè.”
I was taken aback. Living for years in a stone-walled and stone-paved house, without electricity, running water, toilets, and baths, was just insane. Perhaps not if I lived in Andaman Island with the Sentinelese, or in Star Mountains in Papua New Guinea. But this is Switzerland, one of the most advanced economies in the world. They had been using buckets as toilet and emptied them in the river at the start of the day, while right in front of their eyes Poschiavo was developing into modernity.
There is no doubt that they were perceived as looneys by the townsfolk, and some might have rumored that they initiated a cult, that they didn’t let people to come inside. They had been taught that in life, that they only needed to take care of the house and each other. This is practically an ancient concept of peasant’s lives in the middle ages where they worked long hours every day just to ensure that their families had a roof over their head and food to eat. And those were simply what they had been doing during the rest of their lives, with slight social life.
We went up a very tight staircase and it screeched at every little step we took. I had to mind my head because the ceiling was low. I pushed my hand on the stone wall to help with my balance. This peasant house isn’t habitable I thought, it gives an eerie, cold, dark, confined and smoky ambience. On the first floor, we went inside a room on our left and we found a bedroom which served also as a living room, with a square table in the middle surrounded by four chairs. An antique candle holder was in the centre of the table along with pieces of newspapers and an unfolded map. I looked around and my curiosity was drawn to an end table where a black-and-white photo was well-framed next to rosary beads. I wonder if they were actually practicing a certain type of religions or beliefs, and that was probably the reason why they restrained themselves from the world. The photos showed the four sisters dressed in traditional gowns and they actually seemed ordinary.
“Look here, these are their clothes,” Cassiano opened one of the drawers below the wardrobe, took out some of the sister’s clothes and rolled them out on the table. “They never really bought any new clothes. Look at all those mends.” The wool clothes were dull, stained and had patches all over. This was another way they invested their time, spinning and weaving to make clothing for the entire family. The four sisters had to stand on their own feet, especially since their mother had died when they were still young, leaving barely any money.
The house was somehow bigger than I imagined. We went to the kitchen through an archway which was the original medieval features. The first thing I noticed that the walls here particularly were darker than the rest, that it had been blackened by the smoke when they cooked. There were three types of stoves explaining the evolution of their techniques during the time, and two sinks which one is an antique one, made of stone. On one side of the room, there was also the hearth where they baked the bread.
The pantry next to it, connected by some small steps with a floral-patterned curtain, was where they store the food and bread, to preserve them under a controlled humidity. I looked up at the vaulted ceiling and saw typical ring bread from Poschiavo, Brasciadella, were hung. Brasciadella is made with rye instead of wheat. The story began in the past where during winter, people were stuck in the valley and had nowhere else to go. They had to survive and to be auto-sufficient, so rye, which grew in the whole land of Poschiavo, was used as a substitute.
I then followed Cassiano as he showed around the second bedroom and the attic where we could see the dried hay grass were hung just below the roof between some kind of wooden grids, tied on them together, while underneath it there was a barn on the ground floor where they keep the cattle. However the barn, being the warmest place in the house, became as well a corner for them to hang out and spend time, of course, surrounded by cows, hens, and pigs.
Knowing the story of the Tomè sisters who lived in this house until almost the third millennium, while being inside the house and looking at and touching their remnants of things during their lives, give me an awe but at the same time mysterious, strange, and even mystical. Somehow it feels like a time wrap that I could imagine them living in the house. Their particular lives, or even we can say as weird lives in that period, have now turned into a fascinating and valuable story to tell. It gives another perspective of Poschiavo.
This home, Casa Tomè, is the evidence of the past that lives.
