The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana

by Umberto Eco

  Gragnola pulled me aside and rattled off a slew of fine words. That it was for freedom, that it was to save eight poor wretches, that even boys my age could be heroes, that after all I’d climbed the Gorge many times and this time wouldn’t be any different from the others, except there would be eight Cossacks coming down behind me and I would have to be careful not to lose them along the way, that in any case the Germans were way over there waiting at the base of the road like dumb-asses with no idea where the Gorge was, that he would come with me even though he was sick, because you cannot turn your back when duty calls, that we would not go at eleven but rather at midnight, when everyone in my house was already asleep and I could slip out unnoticed, and the next day they would see me back in my bed as if nothing had happened. And so on, hypnotizing me.

  Finally I said yes. After all, it was an adventure I would later be able to tell stories about, a Partisan thing, a coup unlike any of Flash Gordon’s in the forests of Arboria. Unlike any of Tremal-Naik’s in the Black Jungle. Better than Tom Sawyer in the mysterious cave. The Ivory Patrol had never ventured into such a jungle. In short, it would be my moment of glory, and it was for the Fatherland-the right one, not the wrong one. And no peacocking around with a bandolier and a Sten gun, but unarmed and bare-handed like Dick Fulmine. In short, all my reading was coming in handy. And it I did have to die, I would finally see the blades of grass as stakes.

  But since I had a good head on my shoulders, I immediately set a few things straight with Gragnola. He was saying that with eight Cossacks in tow, we risked losing them along the way, and so we should get a nice long rope to tie everyone together, as mountain climbers do, and that way each could follow the next even without seeing where he was going. I said no, if we were roped together like that and the first one fell, he would pull everyone else down with him. What we needed were ten pieces of rope: each of us would hold right to the end of the rope of the person in front of us as well as the end of the rope of the person behind us, and if we felt one of them falling, we would immediately let go of our end, because it was better one should fall than all of us. You’re sharp, Gragnola said.

  I asked him excitedly if he was going to come armed, and he said no, in the first place because he would never hurt a fly, but also because if there were, God forbid, an engagement, the Cossacks were armed, and finally, in the event that he was unlucky enough to get caught, they might not put him up against the wall right away if he were unarmed.

  We went and told the priest we were in agreement, and to have the Cossacks ready by one in the morning.

  I went home for dinner around seven. The rendezvous was for midnight by the little chapel of the Madonna, and it took forty-five minutes of brisk walking to get there. "Do you have a watch?" Gragnola asked. "No, but at eleven, when everyone goes to bed, I’ll wait in the dining room where there’s a clock."

  Dinner at home with my mind aflame, after dinner a show of listening to the radio and looking at my stamps. The trouble was that Papà was there too, because with the fog he had not dared drive back to the city, and was hoping he would be able to leave in the morning. But he went to bed quite early, and Mamma with him. Did my parents still make love in those years, when they were in their forties? I wonder now. I think that the sexuality of our parents remains a mystery for all of us, and that Freud invented the primal scene. I cannot imagine them letting us see them. Though I do recall a conversation my mother had with some of her friends, near the beginning of the war, when she was not much past forty (I once

  heard her say with forced optimism: "Besides, life begins at forty"): "Oh, in his day my Duilio did his part…" When? Until Ada was born? And then they stopped having sex? "Who knows what Duilio’s doing behind my back, alone in the city, with the company secretary," my mother sometimes joked with my grandfather. She was kidding. But might my poor Papà have held someone’s hand during the bombardments, to lift his spirits?

  At eleven, the house was immersed in silence, and I was in the dining room, in the dark. Every now and then I would light a match to check the clock. At 11:15 I slipped out, heading through the fog toward the little chapel of the Madonna.

  Fear grips me. Now or then? I am seeing images that have nothing to do with this. Maybe there really were hellcats. They were waiting for me behind a wispy thicket, which I could not see in the fog: there they were, at first alluring (who said they would be toothless old women? maybe they had slits), but later they were going to point their submachine guns at me and dissolve me in a symphony of reddish holes. I am seeing images that have nothing to do with this…

  Gragnola was there, and complained that I was late. I realized he was trembling. Not I. I was now in my element.

  Gragnola handed me the end of a rope, and we began climbing up the Gorge.

  I had the map in my head, but Gragnola kept saying oh God I’m falling, and I would reassure him. I was the leader. I knew how to make my way through the jungle among Suyodhana’s thugs. I moved my feet as if following the score of a piece of music, that must be how pianists do it-with their hands, I mean, not their feet-and I did not miss a step. But he, even though he was following me, kept stumbling. And coughing. I often had to turn around and pull him by the hand. The fog was thick, but from half a meter away we could see each other. If I pulled the rope, Gragnola would emerge from dense vapors, which seemed to dissipate all at once, and appear suddenly before me, like Lazarus throwing off his shroud.

  The climb lasted a good hour, but that was about average. The only time I warned Gragnola to be careful was when we reached the boulder. If instead of going around it and rejoining the path, you mistakenly went to the left, feeling pebbles beneath your feet, you would end up in the ravine.

  We reached the top, at the gap in the wall, and San Martino was a single invisible mass. We go straight, I told him, down the lane. Count at least twenty steps and we will be at the rectory door.

  We knocked at the door as we had agreed: three knocks, a pause, then three more. The priest came to let us in. He was a dusty pale color, like the clematis along the roads in the summer. The eight Cossacks were there, armed like bandits and scared as children. Gragnola talked with the one who spoke Italian. He spoke it quite well, though with a bizarre accent, but Gragnola, as people do with foreigners, spoke to him in infinitives.

  "You to go ahead of friends and to follow me and child. You to say to your men what I say, and they to do what I say. Understand?"

  "I understand, I understand. We are ready."

  The priest, who was about to piss himself, opened the door and let us out into the lane. And in that very moment we heard, from the end of the village where the road came in, several Teutonic voices and the yelp of a dog.

  "God damn it all to hell," Gragnola said, and the priest did not even blink. "The toadies made it up here, they’ve got dogs, and dogs don’t give a rat’s ass about fog, they go by their noses. What the hell do we do now?"

  The leader of the Cossacks said, "I know how they do. One dog every five men. We go just the same, maybe we meet ones without dog."

  "Rien ne va plus," said Gragnola the learned. "To go slow. And to shoot only if I say. To prepare handkerchiefs or rags, and other ropes." Then he explained to me: "We’ll hurry to the end of the lane and stop at the corner. If no one’s there, we’ll go right over the wall and be gone. If anyone comes and they’ve got dogs, we’re fucked. If it comes to it, we’ll shoot at them and the dogs, but it depends how many they are. If on the other hand they don’t have dogs, we’ll let them pass, come up behind them, bind their hands and stick rags in their mouths, so they can’t yell."

  "And then leave them there?"

  "Yeah, right. No, we take them with us into the Gorge, there’s nothing else for it."

  He quickly explained all that again to the Cossack, who repeated it to his men.

  The priest gave us some rags, and some cords from the holy vestments. Go, go, he was saying, and God protect you.

  We headed down the lane. At th
e corner we heard German voices coming from the left, but no barks or yelps.

  We pressed flat against the wall. We heard two men approaching, talking to each other, probably cursing the fact that they could not see where they were going. "Only two," Gragnola explained with signs. "Let them pass, then on them."

  The two Germans, who had been sent to comb that area while the others took the dogs around the piazza, were going along almost on tiptoe, with their rifles pointed, but they could not even see that a lane was there, and so they passed it. The Cossacks threw themselves on the two shadows and showed that they were good at what they did. In a flash the two men were on the ground with rags in their mouths, each one held by two of those demoniacs, while a third tied their hands behind them.

  "We did it," Gragnola said. "Now you, Yambo, toss their rifles over the wall, and you, to push the Germans behind us two, down where we go."

  I was terrified, and now Gragnola became the leader. Getting through the wall was easy. Gragnola passed out the ropes. The problem was that except for the first and the last in line, each person had to have both hands occupied, one for the front rope and the other for the back rope. But if you have to push two trussed Germans, you cannot hold a rope, and for the first ten steps the group went forward by shoving, until we slipped into the first thickets. At that point Gragnola tried to reorganize the rope system. The two who were leading the Germans each tied his rope to his prisoner’s gun belt. The two who were following each held onto his collar with his right hand, and with his left hand held onto the rope of the man behind him. But just as we were preparing to set off again, one of the Germans tripped and fell onto the guard in front of him, taking the one behind with him, and the chain was broken. The Cossacks hissed things under their breath that must have been curses in their language, but they had the good sense to do so without shouting.

  One German, after the initial fall, tried to get back up and distance himself from the group. Two Cossacks began groping their way after him and might have lost him-except that he did not know where he was going either, and after a few steps he slipped and fell forward, and they had him again. In the confusion his helmet had fallen off. The leader of the Cossacks made it clear that we should not leave it there, because if the dogs came they could follow the scent and would track us down. Only then did we realize that the second German was bareheaded. "God damn those bastards," murmured Gragnola, "his helmet fell off him when we took him in the alley. If they get there with their dogs, they’ll have the scent!"

  Nothing for it. And indeed we had gone only a few meters farther when from above we heard voices, and dogs barking. "They’ve reached the alley, the animals have sniffed the helmet, and they’re saying we’ve come this way. Stay calm and quiet. First, they have to find the gap in the wall, and if you don’t know it, it’s not easy. Second, they have to come down. If their dogs are cautious and go slow, they’ll go slow too. If the dogs go fast, they won’t be able to keep up and will fall on their asses. They don’t have you, Yambo. Go as fast as you can, let’s move."

  "I’ll try, but I’m scared."

  "You’re not scared, just nervous. Take a deep breath and move."

  I was about to piss myself like the priest, but at the same time I knew everything depended on me. My teeth were clenched, and in that moment I would rather have been Giraffone or Jojo than Romano the Legionnaire; Horace Horsecollar or Clarabelle Cow than Mickey Mouse in the House of Seven Ghosts; Signor Pampurio in his apartment than Flash Gordon in the swamps of Arboria, but when you are on the dance floor there is nothing to do but dance. I started down the Gorge as fast as I could, replaying each step in my mind.

  The two prisoners were slowing us down, because with the rags in their mouths they had a hard time breathing and paused every minute. After at least fifteen minutes we came to the boulder, and I was so sure of where it was that I touched it with my outstretched hand before I could even see it. We had to stay close together as we went around it, because if anyone veered right they would come to the ledge and the ravine. The voices above us could still be heard distinctly, but it was unclear whether that was because the Germans were yelling louder to incite their reluctant dogs, or whether they had made it past the wall and were approaching.

  Hearing their comrade’s voices, the two prisoners began trying to jerk away, and when not actually falling they were pretending to fall, trying to roll off to the side, unafraid of injuring themselves. They had realized that we could not shoot them, because of the noise, and that wherever they ended up the dogs would find them. They no longer had anything to lose, and like anyone with nothing to lose, they had become dangerous.

  Suddenly we heard machine-gun fire. Not being able to come down, the Germans had decided to fire. But for one thing, they had almost a hundred and eighty degrees of the Gorge before them and no idea which way we had gone, so they were firing all over the place. For another, they had not realized how steep the Gorge was, and they were firing almost horizontally. When they fired in our direction, we could hear the bullets whistling over our heads.

  "Let’s move, let’s move," Gragnola said, "they still won’t get us."

  But the first Germans must have begun climbing down, getting an idea of the slope of the terrain, and the dogs must have begun heading in a more precise direction. Now they were shooting down, and more or less at us. We heard some bullets murmur through nearby bushes.

  "No fear," said the Cossack, "I know the Reichweite of their Maschinen."

  "The range of those machine guns," Gragnola offered.

  "Yes, that. If they do not come more far down and we go fast, then the bullets will not reach to us anymore. So quick."

  "Gragnola," I said with huge tears in my eyes, longing for Mamma, "I can go quicker but the rest of you can’t. You can’t drag these two with us, there’s no point in me running down like a goat if they keep holding us up. Let’s leave them here, or I swear I’m taking my life in my own hands."

  "If we leave them here they’ll get loose in a flash and call down the others," Gragnola said.

  "I kill them with the butt of machine gun, that makes no noise," hissed the Cossack.

  The idea of killing those two poor men froze me, but I snapped out of it when Gragnola growled: "It’s no good, god-damnit, even if we leave them here dead, the dogs will find them, and the others will know which way we’ve gone," and in the excitement he was no longer speaking in infinitives. "There’s only one thing to do, make them fall in some direction that isn’t ours, so the dogs will go that way and we might gain ten minutes or even more. Yambo, to the right here, isn’t there that false path that leads to the ravine? Good, we’ll push them down there, you said that anyone going that way won’t notice the ledge and will fall easily, then the dogs will lead the Germans to the bottom. Before they can recover from that blow we’re in the valley. A fall from there will kill them, right?"

  "No, I didn’t say that a fall there would definitely kill them. You’ll break bones, if you’re unlucky you might hit your head…"

  "Goddamn you, how come you said one thing and now you’re saying another? So maybe their ropes will come loose as they’re falling, and when they come to a stop they’ll still have enough breath to yell and warn the others to be careful!"

  "Then they must fall when they are already dead," commented the Cossack, who knew how things worked in this dirty world.

  I was right next to Gragnola and could see his face. He had always been pale, but he was paler now. He stood there gazing upward, as if seeking inspiration from the heavens. In that moment, we heard a frr frrr of bullets passing near us at the level of a man’s head. One of the Germans shoved his guard and both fell to the ground, and the Cossack started complaining because the first one was headbutting him in the teeth, gambling everything and trying to make noise. That was when Gragnola made his decision and said, "It’s them or us. Yambo, if I go right, how many steps before the ledge?"

  "Ten steps, ten of mine, maybe eight for you, but if you pu
sh your foot out in front of you you’ll feel it start to slope away, and from that point to the ledge it’s four steps. To be safe take three."

  "Okay," Gragnola said, turning to the Cossack, "I’ll go forward, two of you push these two toadies, hold them tight by the shoulders. Everybody else stays here."

  "What are you going to do?" I asked, my teeth chattering.

  "You shut up. This is war. Wait here with them. That’s an order."

  They disappeared to the right of the boulder, swallowed by the fumifugium. We waited several minutes, heard the skittering of stones and several thuds, then Gragnola and the two Cossacks reappeared, without the Germans. "Let’s move," Gragnola said, "now we can go faster."

  He put a hand on my arm and I could feel him trembling. Now that he was closer I could see him again: he was wearing a sweater that was snug around his neck, and now the lancet case was hanging over his chest, as if he had taken it out. "What did you do with them?" I asked, crying.

  "Don’t think about it, it was the right thing. The dogs will smell the blood and that’s where they’ll lead the others. We’re safe, let’s go."

  And when he saw that my eyes were bulging out: "It was them or us. Two instead of ten. It’s war. Let’s go."

  After nearly half an hour, during which we kept hearing angry shouts and barking from above, but not coming toward us, indeed getting farther away, we reached the bottom of the Gorge, and the road. Gigio’s truck was waiting nearby, in the cluster of trees. Gragnola loaded the Cossacks on it. "I’m going with them, to make sure they reach the Badogliani," he said. He was trying not to look at me, was in a hurry to see me leave. "You go on from here, get back home. You’ve been brave. You deserve a medal. And don’t think about the rest. You did your duty. If anyone is guilty of anything, it’s me only."

  I returned home sweating, despite the cold, and exhausted. I took refuge in my little room and would have been happy to spend a sleepless night, but it was worse than that, I kept dozing off from exhaustion for a few minutes at a time, kept seeing Uncle Gaetanos dancing with their throats cut. Maybe I was running a fever. I have to confess, I have to confess, I kept telling myself.