We are a small group of tourists; our guide, a strange woman. During the tour of the house, he wove stories like a cobweb through which our imagination walked. The lobby is as beautiful as you can imagine with its white walls and green roofs surrounded by gardens, hills and forests. Inside, we are greeted by a Steinway piano and a red carpet that descends like two rivers. From the left, in 1945, Humphrey Bogart came down. Right, with a delay that already worried the famous guests at the wedding, Lauren Bacall. We stepped on the ground blessed by these two Hollywood beauties, caressed the beds where they spent their wedding night, took pictures in the corner where they cut the cake.

“There is some kind of aura in each of the houses I have entered, and it is so powerful that I think I am able to perceive many things about its inhabitants in just ten minutes spent within its walls,” admitted the American writer Louis Bromfield, whose house I visited this summer. In the middle of nowhere, deep in Ohio, after living in France and New York, in 1939 he returned to his homeland where he acquired a huge estate whose renovated old farmhouse would become the mythical Malabar Farm Big House: “the most famous farm in America”.

Bromfield’s daughter confirmed that the house today is as it was in her childhood except for one detail: it is clean. It used to be a house that was bustling as if the indomitable heart of the father was beating in it, filling everything with the life force that characterized him. Malabar Farm was a place of unrestrained activity, visitors arrived by every train, the guest rooms were always occupied, cows were milked to the sounds of Brahms and Strauss, children and dogs everywhere, a writer up to his elbows in dung, sailors, trumpeters, mystics and actors under the charm of the place driving tractors and husking corn, dawn found them still whiskey in hand in the great hall, a mirror took up an entire wall multiplying the colors of French lamps, works of art , a collection of stuffed South American birds, poker and chess tables, the most sophisticated stereo and radio of its time, a telephone room designed by the set designer of The Wizard of Oz. It is said that Bromfield did not sleep, that three hours was enough for him, his dog Prince at the foot of his bed, surrounded by his own books and a huge desk, he spent the morning in the fields applying new cultivation techniques so effective that they restored the fertility of land that bad agricultural practices had made barren. His daughter remembers him washing tomatoes on the patio to prepare the sauce that would later be bottled and stored along with the jam and maple syrup they also produced. But the night found him writing.

In 1956, the American and world media mourned the death of the great writer and agricultural reformer Louis Bromfield. Today, hardly anyone knows him, even though in his time his novels sold like wildfire, and he even won the Pulitzer Prize. Bromfield spent half his life writing and the other part healing and preserving the soil that feeds us. (OR)