by Umberto Eco
"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—it was only in fun—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 could 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—me, 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—or 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 Adelino 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, Adelino 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'è 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.
—Johann Valentin Andreae, Die Chymische Hachzeit 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—the 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."
He gave us a superior look, and said, as if repeating familiar information: "A bombardon is a kind of tuba, a bass horn in E flat. It's the stupidest instrument in the whole band. Most of the time it just goes oompah-oompah-oompah, or—when the beat changes—pa-pah, pa-pah, pa-pah. It's easy to learn, though. Belonging to the brass family, it works more or less like the trumpet. The trumpet demands more breath, and you need an embouchure—you know, that kind of callus on the upper lip, like Louis Armstrong.... Then you get a clear, clean sound, and you
don't hear the blowing. The important thing is not to puff out your cheeks: that only happens in movies, cartoons, or New Orleans brothels."
"What about the trumpet?"
"The trumpet I learned on my own, during those summer afternoons when there was nobody at the parish hall, and I would hide in the seats of the little theater.... But I studied the trumpet for erotic reasons. You see that little villa over there, a kilometer from the hall? That's where Cecilia lived, the daughter of the Salesians' great patroness. So every time the band performed, on holy days of obligation, after the procession, in the yard of the parish hall, and especially in the theater before performances of the amateur dramatic society, Cecilia and her mama were always in the front row, in the place of honor, next to the provost of the cathedral. In the theater the band would begin with a march that was called 'A Good Start.' It opened with trumpets, the trumpets in B flat, gold and silver, carefully polished for the occasion. The trumpets stood up, played by themselves. Then they sat down, and the band began. Playing the trumpet was the only way for me to attract Cecilia's attention."
"The only way?" Lorenza asked, moved.
"There was no other way. First, I was thirteen and she was thirteen and a half, and a girl thirteen and a half is already a woman; a boy at thirteen is a snot-nose kid. Besides, she loved an alto sax, a certain Papi, a mangy horror, he seemed to me, but she only had eyes for him, as he bleated lasciviously, because the saxophone, when it isn't Ornette Coleman's and it's part of a band—and played by the horrendous Papi—is a goatish, guttural instrument, with the voice of, say, a fashion model who's taken to drink and turning tricks...."
"What do you know about models who turn tricks?"
"Anyway, Cecilia didn't even know I existed. Of course, in the evening, when I struggled up the hill to fetch the milk from a farm above us, I invented splendid stories in which she was kidnapped by the Black Brigades and I rushed to save her as the bullets whistled around my head and went chack-chack as they hit the sheaves of wheat. I revealed to her what she couldn't have known: that in my secret identity I headed the Resistance in the whole Monferrato region, and she confessed to me that this was what she had always hoped, and at that point I would feel a guilty flood of honey in my veins—I swear, not even my foreskin got wet; it was something else, something much more awesome and grand—and on coming home, I would go and confess....I believe all sin, love, glory are this: when you slide down the knotted sheets, escaping from Gestapo headquarters, and she hugs you, there, suspended, and she whispers that she's always dreamed of you. The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetuation of the vile species. In short, if I were switched to the trumpet, Cecilia would be unable to ignore me: on my feet, gleaming, while the saxophone sits miserably on his chair. The trumpet is warlike, angelic, apocalyptic, victorious; it sounds the charge. The saxophone plays so that young punks in the slums, their hair slicked down with brilliantine, can dance cheek to cheek with sweating girls. I studied the trumpet like a madman, then went to Don Tico and said: Listen to this. And I was Oscar Levant when he had his first tryout on Broadway with Gene Kelly. Don Tico said: You're a trumpet, all right, but..."
"How dramatic this is," Lorenza said. "Go on. Don't keep us on pins and needles."
"But I had to find somebody to take my place on the bombardon. Work out something, Don Tico said. So I worked out something. Now I must tell you, dear children, that in those days there lived in *** a couple of wretches, classmates of mine, though they were two years older than I, and this fact tells you something about their mental ability. These two brutes were named Annibale Cantalamessa and Pio Bo. Asterisk: Historical fact."
"What?" Lorenza asked.
I explained, smugly: "When Salgari, in his adventure stories, includes a true event, or something he thinks is true—let's say that, after Little Big Horn, Sitting Bull eats General Custer's heart—he always puts an asterisk and a footnote that says: Historical fact."
"Yes, and it's a historical fact that Annibale Cantalamessa and Pio Bo really had those names, but the names were the least of it. A real pair of sneaks: they stole comic books from the newsstand, shell cases from other boys' collections. And they would think nothing of parking their greasy salami sandwich on your prized Christmas book, a deluxe volume of tales of the high seas. Cantalamessa called himself a Communist, Bo, a Fascist, but they were both ready to sell themselves to the enemy for a slingshot. They told stories about their sexual prowess, with erroneous anatomical information, and argued over who had masturbated more the night before. Here were two villains ready for anything; why not the bombardon? So I decided to seduce them. I sang the praises of the band uniform, I took them to public performances, I held out hopes of amatory triumphs with the Daughters of Mary.... They fell for it. I spent my days in the theater with a long stick, as I had seen in illustrated pamphlets about missionaries; I rapped them on the knuckles when they missed a note. The bombardon has only three keys, but it's the embouchure that matters, as I said. I won't bore you any further, my little listeners. The day came, after long sleepless afternoons, when I could introduce to Don Tico two bombardons—I won't say perfect, but at least acceptable. Don Tico was convinced; he put them in uniform and moved me to the trumpet. Within the space of a week, for the feast of Our Lady Help of Christians, for the opening of the theatrical season with They Had to See Paris, there before the curtain, in the presence of the authorities, I was standing to play the opening bars of 'Good Start.'"
"Oh, joyous moment," Lorenza said, making a face of tender jealousy. "And Cecilia?"
"She wasn't there. Maybe she was sick. I don't know. But she wasn't there."
He raised his eyes and surveyed the audience, and at that moment he was bard—or jester. He calculated the pause. "Two davs later, Don Tico sent for me and told me that Annibale Cantalamessa and Pio Bo had ruined the evening. They wouldn't keep time, their minds wandered when they weren't playing, they joked and never came in at the right place. 'The bombardon,' Don Tico said to me, 'is the backbone of the band, its rhythmic conscience, its soul. The band, it is a flock; the instruments are the sheep, the bandmaster the shepherd, but the bombardon is the faithful snarling dog that keeps the flock together. The bandmaster looks first to the bombardon, for if the bombardon follows him, the sheep will follow. Jacopo, my boy, I must ask of you a great sacrifice: to go back to the bombardon. You have a good sense of rhythm, you will keep those other two in time for me. I promise, as soon as they can play on their own, I'll let you play the trumpet.' I owed everything to Don Tico. I said yes. And on the next holy day the trumpets rose to their feet and played the opening of 'Good Start' in front of Cecilia, once more in the first row. But I was in the darkness, a bombardon among bombardons. As for those two wretches, they never were able to play on their own, and I never went back to the trumpet. The war ended, I returned to the city, abandoned music, the brass family, and never even learned Cecilia's last name."
"Poor boy," Lorenza said, hugging him from behind. "But you still have me."
"I thought you liked saxophones," Belbo said. Then he turned and kissed her hand. "But, to work," he said, serious again. "We're here to create a story of the future, not a remembrance of things past."
That evening, the lifting of the ban on alcohol was much celebrated. Jacopo seemed to have forgotten his elegiac mood and competed with Diotallevi in imagining absurd machines—only to discover, each time, that the machines had already been invented. At midnight, after a full day, we all decided it was time to experience what it was like sleeping in the hills.
On my bed the sheets were even damper than they had been in the afternoon. Jacopo had insisted that we use a "priest": an oval frame that kept the covers raised and had a place for a little brazier with embers—he wanted to make sure we tasted all the pleasures of rural life. But when dampness is inherent, a bedwarmer cncourages it: you feel welcome warmth, but the sheets remain humid. Oh, well. I lit a lamp, the kind with a fringed shade, where the mayflies flutter until they die, a
s the poet says, and I tried to make myself sleepy by reading the newspaper.
For an hour or two I heard footsteps in the corridor, an opening and closing of doors, and the last closing was a violent slam. Lorenza Pellegrini putting Belbo's nerves to the test.
I was half-asleep when I heard a scratching at the door, my door. I couldn't tell whether it was an animal or not (I had seen neither dogs nor cats in the house), but I had the impression that it was an invitation, a request, a trap. Maybe Lorenza was doing it because she knew Belbo was spying on her. Maybe not. Until then, I had considered Lorenza Belbo's property—at least as far as I was concerned—and besides, now that I was living with Lia, other women didn't interest me. The sly glances, often conspiratorial, that Lorenza gave me in the office or in a bar when she was teasing Belbo, as if seeking an ally or a witness, were part—I had always thought—of the game she played. Without a doubt, Lorenza had a talent for looking at any man as if challenging his sexual capacity. But it was a curious challenge, as if she were saying: "I want you, but only to show how afraid you really are...." That night, however, hearing her fingernails scrape my door, I felt something different. It was desire: I desired Lorenza.