"Then I should have told him that people put bombs on trains because they're looking for God?" "Why not?"
54
The prince of darkness is a gentleman.
¡XShakespeare, King Lear, III, iv
It was autumn. One morning I went to Via Marchese Gualdi, because I had to get Signer Garamond's authorization to order some color photographs from abroad. I glimpsed Aglie in Si-gnora Grazia's office, bent over the file of Manutius authors, but I didn't disturb him, because I was late for my meeting.
When our business was over, I asked Signor Garamond what Aglie was doing in the secretary's office.
"The man's a genius," Garamond said. "An extraordinary mind, keen, learned. The other evening, I took him to dinner with some of our authors, and he made me look great. What conversation! What style! A gentleman of the old school, an aristocrat; they've thrown away the mold. What knowledge, what culture¡Xno, more, what information! He told delightful anecdotes about characters of a century ago, and I swear it was as if he had known them personally. Do you want to hear the idea he gave me as we were going home? He said we shouldn't just sit and wait for Isis Unveiled authors to turn up on their own. It's a waste of time and effort to read when you don't even know whether the authors are willing to underwrite the expenses. Instead, we have a gold mine at our disposal: the list of all the Manutius authors of the last twenty years! You understand? We write to our old, glorious authors, or at least the ones who bought up their remainders, and we say to them: Dear sir, are you aware that we have inaugurated a series of works of erudition, tradition, and the highest spirituality? Would you, as an author of distinction and refinement, be interested in venturing into this terra incognita, et cetera, et cetera? A genius, I tell you. I believe he wants us all to join him Sunday evening. Plans to take us to a castle, a fortress¡Xno, more, a villa in the Turin area. It seems that extraordinary things are to happen there, a rite, a sabbath, where someone will make gold or quicksilver. It's a whole world to be discovered, my dear Casaubon, even if, as you know, I have the greatest respect for science, the science to which you are devoting yourself with such passion. Indeed, I am very, very pleased with your work, and yes, there's that little financial adjustment you mentioned; I haven't forgotten it, and in due course we'll talk about it. Aglie told me the lady will also be there, the beautiful lady¡Xor perhaps not beautiful, but attractive; there's something about her eyes¡Xthat friend of Bel-bo's¡Xwhat's her name¡X?"
"Lorenza Pellegrini."
"Yes. There's something¡Xno?¡Xbetween her and our Belbo."
"I believe they're good friends."
"Ah! A gentleman's answer. Bravo, Casaubon. But I do not inquire out of idle curiosity; the fact is that I feel like a father to all of you and...glissons, a la guerre comme a la guerre...Good-bye, dear boy."
We really did have an appointment with Aglie in the hills near Turin, Belbo told me. A double appointment. The early hours of the evening would be a party in the castle of a very well-to-do Rosicrucian. Then Aglie would take us a few kilometers away, to a place where¡Xat midnight, naturally¡Xsome kind of druidic rite, Belbo wasn't sure what, would be held.
"I was also thinking," Belbo added, "that we should sit down somewhere and give some thought to our history of metals, because here we keep being interrupted. Why don't we leave Saturday and spend a couple of days in my old house in ***? It's a beautiful spot; you'll see, the hills are worth it. Diotallevi is coming, and maybe Lorenza will, too. Of course you can bring along anyone you want."
He didn't know Lia, but he knew I had a companion. I said I'd come alone. Lia and I had quarreled two days before. Nothing serious; it would be forgotten in a few days, but meanwhile I wanted to get away from Milan.
So we all went to ***, the Garamond trio and Lorenza Pellegrini. At our departure, a tense moment. When it came time to get into the car, Lorenza said, "Maybe I'll stay behind, so you three can work in peace. I'll join you later with Simon."
Belbo, both hands on the wheel, locked his elbows, stared straight ahead, and said in a low voice, "Get in." Lorenza got in, and all through the trip, sitting up front, she kept her hand on the back of Belbo's neck as he drove in silence.
* * *
was still the town Belbo had known during the war. But new houses were few, he told us, agriculture was in decline, because the young people had migrated to the city. He pointed to hills, now pasture, that had once been yellow with grain. The town appeared suddenly, after a curve at the foot of the low hill where Belbo's house was. We got a view, beyond it, of the Mon-ferrato plain, covered with a light, luminous mist. As the car climbed, Belbo directed our attention to the hill opposite, almost completely bare: at the top of it, a chapel flanked by two pines. "It's called the Bricco," he said, then added: "It doesn't matter if it has no effect on you. We used to go there for the Angel's lunch on Easter Monday. Now you can reach it in the car in five minutes, but then we went on foot, and it was a pilgrimage."
55
I call a theatre [a place in which] all actions, all words, all particular subjects are shown as in a public theatre, where comedies and tragedies are acted.
¡XRobert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi Historia, Tomi Secundi Tractatus Primi Sectio Secunda, Oppenheim (?), 1620 (?), p. 55
We arrived at the villa. Villa¡Xactually, a large farmhouse, with great cellars on the ground floor, where Adeline Canepa¡Xthe quarrelsome tenant who had denounced Uncle Carlo to the partisans¡Xonce made wine from the vineyards of the Covasso land. It had long been unoccupied.
In a little peasant house nearby Adeline Canepa's aunt still lived¡Xa .very old woman, Belbo told us, who tended a little vegetable garden, kept a few hens and a pig. The others were now long dead, uncle and aunt, the Canepas; only this centenarian remained. The land had been sold years before to pay the inheritance taxes and other debts. Belbo knocked at the door of the little house. The old woman appeared on the threshold, took a while to recognize the visitor, then made a great show of deference, inviting us in, but Belbo, after having embraced and calmed her, cut the meeting short.
We entered the villa, and Lorenza gave cries of joy as she discovered stairways, corridors, shadowy rooms with old furniture. As usual, Belbo played everything down, remarking only that each of us has the Tara he deserves, but he was clearly moved. He continued to visit the house, from time to time, he told us, but not often.
"It's a good place to work: cool in summer, and in winter the thick walls protect you against the cold, and there are stoves everywhere. Naturally, when I was a child, an evacuee, we lived only in two side rooms at the end of the main corridor. Now I've taken possession of my uncle and aunt's wing. I work here, in Uncle Carlo's study." There was a secretaire with little space for a sheet of paper but plenty of small drawers, both visible and concealed. "I couldn't put Abulafia here," Belbo said. "But the rare times I come, I like to write by hand, as I did then." He showed us a majestic cupboard. "When I'm dead, remember this contains all my juvenilia, the poems I wrote when I was sixteen, the sketches for sagas in six volumes made at eighteen, and so on..."
"Let's see! Let's see!" Lorenza cried, clapping her hands and advancing with exaggerated feline tread toward the cupboard.
"Stop right where you are," Belbo said. "There's nothing to see. I don't even look at it myself anymore. And, in any case, when I'm dead, I'll come back and burn everything."
"This place has ghosts, I hope," Lorenza said.
"It does now. In Uncle Carlo's day, no; it was lots of fun then. Georgic. That's why I come. It's wonderful working at night while the dogs bark in the valley."
He showed us the rooms where we would be sleeping: mine, Diotallevi's, Lorenza's. Lorenza looked at her room, touched the old bed and its great white counterpane, sniffed the sheets, said it was like being in one of her grandmother's stories, because everything smelled of lavender. Belbo said it wasn't lavender, it was mildew. Lorenza said it didn't matter, and then, leaning against the wall, her hips thrust forward as if she were at the pinball ma
chine, she asked, "Am I sleeping here by myself?"
Belbo looked away, then at us, then away again. He made as if to leave and said: "We'll talk about it later. In any case, if you want it, you have a refuge all your own." Diotallevi and I moved off, but we heard Lorenza ask Belbo if he was ashamed of her. He said that if he hadn't offered her the room, she would have asked him where she was supposed to sleep. "I made the first move, so you have a choice," he said. "The wily Turk," she said. "In that case, I'll sleep here in my darling little room." "Sleep where you want," Belbo said, irritated. "But the others are here to work. Let's go out on the terrace."
So we set to work on the broad terrace, where a pergola stood, supplied with cold drinks and plenty of coffee. Alcohol forbidden till evening.
From the terrace we could see the Bricco, and below it a large plain building with a yard and a soccer field¡Xall inhabited by multicolored little figures, children, it seemed to me. "It's the Salesian parish hall," Belbo explained. "That's where Don Tico taught me to play. In the band."
I remembered the trumpet Belbo had denied himself after the dream. I asked: "Trumpet or clarinet?"
He had a moment's panic. "How did you...Ah, yes, I told you about the dream, the trumpet. Don Tico taught Tie the trumpet, but in the band I played the bombardon."
"What's a bombardon?"
"Oh, that's all kid stuff. Back to work now."
But as we worked, I noticed that he often glanced at that hall. I had the impression that he talked about other things as an excuse to look at it. For example, he would interrupt our discussion and say:
"Just down there was some of the heaviest shooting at the end of the war. Here in *** there was a kind of tacit agreement between the Fascists and the partisans. Two years in a row the partisans came down from the hills in spring and occupied the town, and the Fascists kept their distance and didn't make trouble. The Fascists weren't from around here; the partisans were all local boys. In the event of a fight, they could move easily; they knew every cornfield and the woods and hedgerows. The Fascists mostly stayed holed up in the town and ventured out only for raids. In winter it was harder for the partisans to stay down in the plain: there was no place to hide, and in the snow they could be seen from a distance and picked off by a machine gun even a kilometer away. So they climbed up into the higher hills. There, too, they knew the passes, the caves, the shelters. The Fascists returned to control the plain. But that spring we were- on the eve of liberation, the Fascists were still here, and they were dubious about going back to the city, sensing that the final blow would be delivered there, as it in fact was, around April 25. I believe there was communication between the Fascists and the partisans. The latter held off, wanting to avoid a clash, sure that something would happen soon. At night Radio London gave more and more reassuring news, the special messages for the Franchi brigade became more frequent: Tomorrow it will rain again; Uncle Pietro has brought the bread¡Xthat sort of thing. Maybe you heard them, Diotallevi...Anyway, there must have been a misunderstanding, because the partisans came down and the Fascists hadn't left.
"One day my sister was here on the terrace, and she came inside and told us there were two men playing tag with guns. We weren't surprised: they were kids, on both sides, whiling away the time with their weapons. Once¡Xit was only in fun¡X two of them really did shoot, and a bullet hit the trunk of a tree in the driveway. My sister was leaning on the tree; she didn't even notice, but the neighbors did, and after that she was told that when she saw men playing with guns, she must go inside. ¡¥They're playing again,' she said, coming in, to show how obedient she was. And at that point we heard the first volley. Then a second, a third, and then the rounds came thick and fast. You cquld hear the bark of the shotguns, the ratatat of the automatic rifles, and a duller sound, maybe hand grenades. Finally, the machine guns. We realized they weren't playing any longer, but we didn't have time to discuss it, because by then we couldn't hear our own voices. Bang, wham, ratatat! We crouched under the sink¡Xme, my sister, and Mama. Then Uncle Carlo arrived, along the corridor, on all fours, to tell us that we were too exposed, we should come over to their wing. We did, and Aunt Caterina was crying because Grandmother was out..."
"Is that when your grandmother found herself facedown in a field, in the cross fire?"
"How did you know about that?"
"You told me in ¡¥73, after the demonstration that day."
"My God, what a memory! A man has to be careful what he says around you...Yes. But my father was also out. As we learned later, he had taken shelter in a doorway in town, and couldn't leave it because of all the shooting back and forth in the street, and from the tower of the town hall a Black Brigade squad was raking the square with a machine gun. The former mayor of the city, a Fascist, was standing in the same doorway. At a certain point, he said he was going to run for it: to get home, all he had to do was reach the corner. He waited for a quiet moment, then flung himself out of the doorway, reached the corner, and was mowed down. But the instinctive reaction of my father, who had also gone through the First World War, was: Stay in the doorway."
"This is a place full of sweet memories," Diotallevi remarked.
"You won't believe it," Belbo said, "but they are sweet. They're the only real things I remember."
The others didn't understand, and I was only beginning to. Now I know for sure. In those months especially, when he was navigating the sea of falsehoods of the Diabolicals, and after years of wrapping his disillusion in the falsehoods of fiction, Belbo remembered his days in *** as a time of clarity: a bullet was a bullet, you ducked or got it, and the two opposing sides were distinct, marked by their colors, red or black, without ambiguities¡Xor at least it had seemed that way to him. A corpse was a corpse was a corpse was a corpse. Not like Colonel Ardenti, with his slippery disappearance. I thought that perhaps I should tell Belbo about synarchy, which in those years was already making inroads. Hadn't the encounter between Uncle Carlo and Mongo been synarchic, really, since both men, on opposing sides, were inspired by the same ideal of chivalry? But why should I deprive Belbo of his Combray? The memories were sweet because they spoke to him of the one truth he had known; doubt would begin only afterward. Though, as he had hinted to me, even in the days of truth he had been a spectator, watching, the birth of other men's memories, the birth of History, or of many histories: all stories that he would not be the one to write.
Or had there been, for him, too, a moment of glory and of choice? Because now he said, "And also, that day I performed the one heroic deed of my life."
"My John Wayne," Lorenza said. "Tell me."
"Oh, it was nothing. After crawling to my uncle's part of the house, I stubbornly insisted on standing up in the corridor. The window was at the end, we were on the upper floor, nobody could hit me, I argued. I felt like a captain standing erect in the center of the battle while the bullets whistle around him. Uncle Carlo became angry, roughly pulled me into the room; I almost started crying because the fun was over, and at that moment we heard three shots, glass shattering, and a kind of ricochet, as if someone were bouncing a tennis ball in the corridor. A bullet had come through the window, glanced off a water pipe, and buried itself in the floor at the very spot where I had been standing. If I had stayed there, I would have been wounded. Maybe."
"My God, I wouldn't want you a cripple," Lorenza said.
"Maybe today I'd be happier," Belbo said.
But the fact was that even in this case he hadn't chosen. He had let his uncle pull him away.
About an hour later, he was again distracted. "Then Adeline Canepa came upstairs. He said we'd all be safer in the cellar. He and my uncle hadn't spoken for years, as I told you. But in this tragic moment, Adeline Canepa had become a human being again, and Uncle even shook his hand. So we spent an hour in the darkness among the barrels, with the smell of countless vintages, which made your head swim a little, not to mention the shooting outside. Then the gunfire died down, became muffled. We realized one side was
retreating, but we didn't know which, until, from a window above our heads, which overlooked a little path, we heard a voice, in dialect: ¡¥Monssu, i'e d'la repubblica bele si?' "
"What does that mean?" Lorenza asked.
"Roughly: Sir, would you be so kind as to inform me if there are still any sustainers of the Italian Social Republic in these parts? Republic, at that time, was a bad word. The voice was a partisan's, asking a passerby or someone at a window, and that meant the Fascists had gone. It was growing dark. After a little while both Papa and Grandmother arrived, and told of their adventures. Mama and Aunt prepared something to eat, while Uncle and Adelino Canepa ceremoniously stopped speaking to each other again. For the rest of the evening we heard shooting in the distance, toward the hills. The partisans were after the fugitives. We had won."
Lorenza kissed Belbo on the head, and he wrinkled his nose. He knew he had won, though with some help from the Fascists. In reality it had been like watching a movie. For a moment, risking the ricocheting bullet, he had entered the action on the screen, but only for a moment, on the run, as in Hellzapoppin, Where the reels get mixed up and an Indian on horseback rides into a ballroom and asks which way did they go. Somebody says, "That way," and the Indian gallops off into another story.
56
He began playing his shining trumpet with such power that the whole mountain rang.
¡XJohann Valentin Andreae, Die Chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosencreutz, Strassburg, Zetzner, 1616, 1, p. 4
We had reached the chapter on the wonders of hydraulic pipes, and a sixteenth-century engraving from the Spiritalia of Heron depicted a kind of altar with a steam-driven apparatus that played a trumpet.
I brought Belbo back to his reminiscing. "How did it go, then, the story of that Don Tycho Brahe, or whatever his name was¡Xthe man who taught you to play the trumpet?"
"Don Tico. I never found out if Tico was a nickname or his last name. I've never gone back to the parish hall. The first time I went there, it was by chance: Mass, catechism, all sorts of games, and if you won, he gave you a little holy card of Blessed Domenico Savio, that adolescent with the wrinkled canvas pants, always hanging on to Don Bosco in the statues, his eyes raised to heaven, not listening to the other boys, who are telling dirty jokes. I learned that Don Tico had formed a band, boys between ten and fourteen. The little ones played toy clarinets, fifes, soprano sax, and the bigger ones carried the tubas and the bass drum. They had uniforms, khaki tunics and blue trousers, and visored caps. A dream, and I wanted to be part of it. Don Tico said he needed a bombardon."
Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum Page 34