The Oracle

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  VALERIO MASSIMO MANFREDI

  Translated from the Italian by Christine Feddersen-Manfredi

  PAN BOOKS

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  Endnote

  FOR CHRISTOS AND ALEXANDRA MITROPOULOS

  My name is Nobody: mother, father and friends, everyone calls me Nobody.

  Homer, Odyssey IX, 366–7

  1

  Ephira, north-western Greece, 16 November 1973, 8 p.m.

  THE TIPS OF the fir trees trembled suddenly. The dry oak and plane leaves shuddered, but there was no wind and the distant sea was as cold and still as a slab of slate.

  It seemed to the old scholar as if everything around him had suddenly been silenced – the chirping of the birds and the barking of the dogs and even the voice of the river, as if the water were lapping the banks and the stones on its bed without touching them. As if the earth had been shaken by a dim, deep tremor.

  He ran his hand through his white hair, thin as silk. He touched his forehead and tried to find within himself the courage to face – after thirty years of obstinate, tireless research – the vision he had sought.

  No one was there to share the moment with him. His workers, Yorgo the drunk and Stathis the grumbler, had already left after having put away their tools, their hands deep in their pockets and their collars turned up. Their footsteps on the gravelly road were the only sound to be heard.

  Anguish gripped the old man. ‘Ari!’ he shouted. ‘Ari, are you still there?’

  The foreman rushed over: ‘I’m right here, Professor. What is it?’

  But it was just a moment’s weakness: ‘Ari, I’ve decided to stay a little longer. You go on to town. It’s dinner time, you must be hungry.’

  The foreman looked him over with a mixture of affection and protectiveness: ‘Come with me, Professor. You need to eat something and to rest. It’s getting cold, you’ll catch your death out here.’

  ‘No, I’ll just be a little while, Ari. You go on ahead.’

  The foreman walked off reluctantly, got into the service car and headed down the road to town. Professor Harvatis watched the car’s lights slash the hillside. He then went into the little tool shed, resolutely took a shovel from its hook on the wall, lit a gas lamp and started towards the entrance to the building which housed the ancient Necromantion: the Oracle of the Dead.

  At the end of the long central corridor were the steps that he had unearthed over the last week. He started down, going much deeper than the sacrifice chamber, and ended up in a room still cluttered by the dirt and stones that hadn’t been cleared away. He looked around, sizing up the small space that surrounded him, and then took a few steps towards the western wall until he was in the centre of the room. His shovel scraped away the layer of dirt covering the floor until the tip of the tool hit a hard surface. The old man pushed aside the dirt, uncovering a stone slab. It was engraved with the figure of a serpent, the cold symbol of the other world.

  He took the trowel from his jacket pocket and scraped all around the slab to loosen it. He stuck the tip of the trowel into a crack and prised up the slab by a few centimetres, then flipped it back. An odour of mould and moist earth invaded the small chamber.

  A black hole was open before him, a cold, dark recess never before explored. By anyone. This was the adyton: the chamber of the secret oracle. The place in which only a very few initiates had ever been admitted, with one purpose. To call up the pale larvae of the dead.

  He lowered his lamp and saw yet more stairs. He felt his life quivering within him like the flame of a candle just before it goes out.

  By night

  our ship ran onward towards the Ocean’s bourne,

  the realm and region of the Men of Winter,

  hidden in mist and cloud. Never the flaming

  eye of Helios lights on those men

  at morning, when he climbs the sky of stars,

  nor in descending earthward out of heaven;

  ruinous night being rove over those wretches.

  He recited Homer’s verses under his breath like a prayer: they were the words of the Nekya, the eleventh book of the Odyssey, recounting Odysseus’s journey to the realm of the shades.

  The old man descended to the second underground chamber and raised his lamp to see the walls. His brow wrinkled and beaded up with sweat: the lamplight danced all around him guided by his trembling hand, revealing the scenes of an ancient, terrible rite – the sacrifice of a black ram, blood dripping from his gashed neck into a pit. He stared at the faded figures, eaten away by the damp. He stumbled closer and saw that there were names, people’s names, cut into the wall. Some he recognized, great persons from the distant past, but many were incomprehensible, carved in letters unknown to him. He stepped back and the lamplight returned to the scene of the sacrifice. More words escaped his lips:

  With my drawn blade

  I spaded up the votive pit, and poured

  libations round to it the unnumbered dead:

  sweet milk and honey, then sweet wine, and last

  clear water; and I scattered barley down.

  Then I addressed the blurred and breathless dead . . .

  He walked to the centre of the chamber, knelt down and began to dig with his bare hands. The earth was cold and his fingers numb. He stopped to warm his stiffened hands under his armpits; his breath was fogging up his eyeglass lenses and he had to take them off to dry them. He began digging again, and his fingers found a surface as smooth and cold as a piece of ice; he pulled them back as if he had been bitten by a snake nesting in the mud. His eyes jerked to the wall in front of him; he had the sensation that it was moving. He took a deep breath. He was tired, he hadn’t eaten all day: an illusion, certainly.

  He plunged his hands back into the mud and felt that same surface again. Smooth, perfectly smooth. His fingers ran over it, all around it, clearing off the mud as best he could. He brought the lamp close. Under the brown earth, the cold, pale glitter of gold.

  He dug with fresh energy, and the rim of a vase soon appeared. A Greek crater, incredibly beautiful and minutely crafted, was buried in the dirt at the exact centre of the room.

  His hands moved quickly and expertly and, under the feverish digging of his long, lean fingers, the fabulous vase seemed to emerge from the earth as if animated by an invisible energy. It was very, very ancient, entirely decorated with parallel bands. A large medallion at the centre was engraved with a scene in relief.

  The old man felt tears come to his eyes and emotion overwhelm him: was this the treasure he’d been searching for his whole life? Was this the very core of the world? The hub of the eternal wheel, the centre of the known and the unknown, the repository of light and darkness, gold and blood?

  He put down the lamp and stretched his trembling hands towards the large glittering vase. He closed his hands around it and lifted it up to his face, and his eyes filled with even greater stupor: the medallion at the centre depicted a man on foot armed with a sword, with something raised to his shoulder: a long handle . . . or an oar. Facing him was another man, dressed as a wayfarer, who lifted his hand as if to question him. Between them, an altar, and next to it three animals: a bull, a ram and a boar.

  Great God in heaven! The prophecy of Tiresias engraved in gold before his eyes, the prophecy which announced Odysseus
’s last voyage . . . The voyage that no one had ever described, the story that had never been told. A journey over dry land, an odyssey through mud and dust towards a forgotten land, at a great distance from the sea. To a place where people had never heard of salt, or of ships, where no one would recognize an oar, and could mistake it for a winnow, a fan used for separating the chaff from the grain.

  He turned the great vase over in his hands and saw other scenes; they leapt to life, animated by the lamplight dancing on their surface. Odysseus’s last adventure, cruel and bloody, in fulfilment of a fate he could not escape . . . forced to travel so far from the sea, only to return to the sea . . . to die.

  Periklis Harvatis held the vase against his chest and raised his eyes to the northern wall of the adyton.

  It was open.

  Dumbfounded, he found himself facing a narrow opening, an impossible, absurd gap in the inert stone. It must have always been there, he reasoned, perhaps he just hadn’t noticed it in the wavering light of the lamp. But deep inside, he realized with merciless certainty that he had somehow forced open that dim, threatening aperture. He took a few steps forward, still holding the vase, and picked up a little stone. He threw it into the opening. The stone was swallowed up without making a sound, neither when he hurled it nor after.

  Was the abyss without end?

  He moved forward to put an end to these dark imaginings. ‘No!’ he roared out, with everything he had in him. But his voice did not sound at all. It imploded within him, obliterating every scrap of strength. He felt his legs collapsing as he was invaded by intense cold, overwhelmed by crushing pressure. That hole was stronger than anyone and anything, it would suck up and devour any living energy.

  But how could he turn back now? What meaning would his life have? Hadn’t he been pursuing, for years and years, the proof for his theories, so often ridiculed? He was still in the real world, after all. He would go forward. He held out the lamp with one hand and gripped his treasure to his chest with the other.

  He stepped forward, willing himself to believe that his hand would meet the wall, but he was wrong. His thin fingers stretched into nothingness, the lamplight shrank into a tiny point. That point revealed all that he had vaguely sensed for years and years. And this flash of understanding drained the very life from his veins.

  He shrank back, horrified and weeping, and fumbled for the opening to the tunnel that had brought him to the threshold of the abyss. He dragged himself towards the stairs. The vase had become intolerably heavy but he couldn’t let go. He would rather die clutching it to his chest, go out in glory, have the last laugh.

  He backed up again and stumbled; the wall dissolved in the halo cast by the lamp. As he made his way in its feeble light, he felt his heartbeat weakening, becoming slower and slower. He finally found the bottom step and pulled himself, gasping, to the upper chamber. With immense effort, he pushed the slab back over the opening and covered it with dirt. He picked up the vase and hobbled to the tool shed.

  He couldn’t stand the sight of it an instant longer. He covered it convulsively with a blanket from the cot. Struggling, he found a sheet of paper and a pen and began to write. He put the letter into an envelope, wrote an address and sealed it. He knew he was dying.

  ARI SLOWLY SIPPED his Turkish coffee and smoked a cigarette, tipping the ashes into the remains of his meal still in the dish in front of him. He glanced at the road with each drag. The last diners had gone, and the tavern owner was busy cleaning up. Every now and then he’d walk over to the window and say, ‘Looks like rain tonight.’ He turned the chairs over on to the tables and wiped the floor with a wet rag. The telephone rang, and he set down the broom and picked up the receiver. He paled and gasped with the phone still in his hand, glancing over at Ari, who was smoking. He stuttered: ‘Ari, come quickly . . . O my Lord, O most Holy Virgin . . . get over here, it’s for you.’

  Ari jumped to his feet and picked up the phone: a death wheeze on the other end, pleading interrupted by sobs, the voice – nearly unrecognizable – of Professor Harvatis. He flicked away the cigarette butt burning his fingers and ran to the car. He raced back up towards the excavation tool shed, where he could still see a light on. Wheels skidding as he entered the courtyard, he jumped out, leaving the engine running. He grabbed an axe from the trunk of the car and approached the half-open door, poised to defend himself. He kicked it open and found the professor: curled up in a corner of the room, near the telephone table, with the receiver still swinging next to his head.

  His face was deathly pale and carved by deep wrinkles, his body was shaking uncontrollably. His legs were stretched out on the floor as if paralysed and his hands clutched a shapeless bundle to his chest. His eyes, veiled with tears, flickered back and forth, as if his mind, invaded by panic, could no longer control their movements.

  Ari dropped the axe and knelt down next to him: ‘My God, what has happened? Who did this to you?’ He reached out towards the bundle. ‘Here, let go, give it to me . . . I’m taking you to the hospital in Preveza.’

  But Harvatis clutched the bundle even tighter. ‘No. No.’

  ‘But you’ve been hurt, dear Mother in heaven, come on, in the name of God . . .’

  Harvatis half closed his eyes: ‘Ari, listen, do as I say . . . you have to do as I say, understand? Take me to Athens, right away, now.’

  ‘To Athens? Not over my dead body . . . you should see yourself! Here, let me help you.’

  The old professor’s stare turned suddenly hard, sharp, his voice peremptory: ‘Ari, you must absolutely do as I say. There’s a letter on the table. You must take me to Athens, to the address that’s on the envelope. Ari, I’ve got no one left to me. No family and no friends. What I found under there is killing me. And maybe many others will die this very night, understand? There’s someone I have to see; I must tell him what I’ve discovered. To ask him for help . . . if it’s possible . . . if we’re still in time.’

  Ari looked at him, completely disconcerted: ‘Good God, Professor, what on earth are you saying? . . .’

  ‘Ari, don’t betray me. For whatever in life is dearest to you, Ari, do as I say . . . do as I say.’ The foreman lowered his head, nodding. ‘If I should . . . die before we get there, you deliver the letter.’

  Ari nodded again. ‘Give me that bundle at least, let me put it in the car.’ He shook his head. ‘What is it, anyway?’

  ‘Take it to the storeroom in the basement of the National Museum. The key’s in my jacket pocket.’

  ‘Whatever you say, Professor, don’t worry, I’ll do what you want me to do. Here, let me help you.’ He picked the old man up like a child and eased him on to the back seat of the car. He took a last look before closing the door: the old man would never make it to Athens. He had seen death in the face. A goner if he’d ever seen one.

  He went back to the tool shed, hung up the phone, picked up the letter and took a quick look around. Everything was perfectly in place – there was no hint that anyone had broken in; a familiar smell of onion and olive oil permeated the air. Had the old guy just suddenly gone crazy? And where had he found that thing he wouldn’t let go of? He would have liked to check out the excavation area, but the professor was dying out there in the back seat of his car. He closed the door behind him and went back outside.

  ‘Let’s go, Professor. We’re going to Athens. Try to rest . . . lie down . . . sleep, if you can.’ He put the car into gear. The old man didn’t answer, but Ari could hear his laboured, faltering breathing. And feel his desire to keep an impossible appointment, in Athens.

  The car sped down the deserted streets of the town, and the tavern owner, from behind the dirty windows of his place, saw it shoot by in a cloud of dust down the road to Missolungi. The next day he’d have a strange story to tell his first customer.

  Athens, 16 November, 8.30 p.m.

  ‘Claudio, it’s late. I’m out of here . . . What about you? We could get something to drink at the Plaka before we call it a night. There are these
girls we met . . .’

  ‘No thanks, Michel, I’m not leaving yet. I have to finish up on these files. I’ve got to get this work out of the way.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re missing. Norman and I picked up a couple of Dutch dolls on a tour. We’re going to take them for a drink at Nikos’s and then maybe go to Norman’s place in Kifissìa.’

  ‘Not bad. So how do I fit in anyway – the odd man out?’

  ‘Okay, okay, you’re too much in love to think about having a little fun. What’s up for tomorrow?’

  ‘Oh right, Michel – I’ve heard that tomorrow there’s something going on at the Polytechnic, something big. There’s going to be a huge protest demonstration against the government and the police. The students’ committee is talking about a lock-in. They say that the situation in the university has become impossible. Police infiltration, spies . . . people disappearing and you never find out what happens to them.’

  ‘Who told you, Heleni?’

  ‘Yeah, it was her. But it’s stuff that everyone knows. Why?’

  ‘Nothing. So what are you going to do, go to the Polytechnic yourself?’

  ‘No. Why should I? We don’t have anything to do with it. It’s their thing. But I’m going to hang out here at the Institute tonight anyway. You know Heleni; she won’t let them start anything without her . . .’

  ‘Okay. Well, see you here tomorrow, then. ’Night, Claudio.’

  ‘Goodnight, Michel. Say hi to Norman.’

  His friend left and he could soon hear the sound of his Deux-Chevaux as it coughed its way into motion.