The Twenty Days of Turin

by Giorgio de Maria

  V.

  THE MILLENARISTS

  IN MAYOR BONFANTE, I was drawn to a humaneness touched by sorrow. The post he held, rather than filling him with self-importance, appeared to make him droop: as if the heavy mass of civic duties he’d taken on could flatten him at any moment. How utterly different he was from Mayor Ambesi, who occupied the same chair at the time of the Twenty Days! There, you saw a brash, sanguine face, full of derring-do. Here, you had a pair of sunken cheeks, olive-skinned but pallid, marking a constant inner unrest. Bonfante spoke in a low, measured voice, like someone who put lengthy and agonizing meditation ahead of each action. His sharp ferrety face, when it wasn’t crushed by a bitter wince, seemed lit by a gentle, approachable smile.

  “You’d like to hear something from me about the Library, about its origins,” he told me in his office at the Town Hall, where I’d come, as always, thanks to my friend’s negotiation. “Well, I was a city councillor and I wasn’t nailed then to the nonstop commitments I have now. I had the spare time to follow the life of the city and see how it developed, and I certainly didn’t neglect to delve into the byzantine workings of that institution—now thankfully dead and buried. I don’t think the Library could’ve come to life if it hadn’t found an accepting climate, a moral willingness to latch on to . . . We’ll skip over the widespread tendency of many citizens to confide their worries in newspaper agony aunts and talk radio hosts . . . It’s certain that from those media, things passed into a slimy subsoil, a drainage basin where anyone could tip anything they wanted, all the gunk they kept inside themselves. Have you ever seen something spawned from a garbage dump?”

  “To be honest, no, I haven’t,” I replied. “But isn’t it possible that the Library did reach one of its goals? To bring people closer together?”

  “Oh, it reached goals! Quite a lot of goals!” he said with a dash of sarcasm. “But certainly not the goals you’re talking about! Even those infamous contributions, those dialogues across the ether that were later purged by the Library, helped break that cycle of loneliness in which our citizens were confined. Or rather they helped to furnish the illusion of a relationship with the outside world: a dismal cop-out nourished and centralized by a scornful power bent only on keeping people in their state of continuous isolation. The inventors of the Library knew their trade well!”

  A heavy silence fell between us. It seemed to me as if I could read into him and feel the gnawing anger that he dragged around behind him.

  “So in that whole project you didn’t see any twinkle of hope? Nothing that could have made you say: It was a failure, generally speaking, but in one particular case at least . . . ?”

  “If you’re suggesting a case where nonetheless somebody made a fruitful connection and got to form a friendship . . .” Bonfante leaned toward me, pressing the palms of his hands down on his desk. “Well, it could be that cases like that did arise. But what does it matter in light of everything else? The typical patron of the Library was a shy individual, ready to explore the limits of his own loneliness and to weigh others down with it. This only helped to seal him further in a vicious circle of fear and suspicion, which by long tradition have always hampered our citizens in broadening their horizons and communicating. Care for an example? Very well. Suppose that one Sunday morning a certain Mr. Rossi appears at the Little House of Divine Providence to peruse a manuscript. Having read it, he asks those charming boys who had the idea of founding the Library for the name and address of the author. They give it to him. And what does Mr. Rossi do now? He stands in the square near the house of the author—whom we’ll call Mr. Bianchi—and waits, with the patience of a guard dog, for him to go outside. Mr. Bianchi steps out? Mr. Rossi follows him like a shadow: probably unaware that there’s someone behind him doing the same thing, someone who’s read his diary in the Library. And so, a web of mutual espionage came together piece by piece—malicious and futile. You couldn’t leave the house anymore, take a tram, visit a public place, without sensing the leer of somebody who wanted you to believe he’d soaked up all your deepest secrets. If I’d left any of my confessions in that place, I’d probably have lost sleep too . . .”

  “So you think there’s a relationship between the Library and the insomnia cases?”

  “I never believed anyone who put the insomnia epidemic down to the heat, or the drought, or those toxic, vinegary fumes that were supposedly drifting through the air. If anything, we were the ones going rancid . . . But how?” Fervently, the mayor continued: “Do you think human beings are really like bottomless wells? That we can drain ourselves endlessly without sooner or later finding our souls depleted? In all likelihood, that’s what people did believe, otherwise we would have stopped soon enough; but, unfortunately, we preferred to let the vampires drain everything, with the most extreme consequences. And so we saw!”

  “Even the crimes back then, even the murders, according to you . . .”

  “I can’t give an opinion there . . . On that subject, we have to be very cautious. The one thing I can say is our city needs a total overhaul. It’s a city which suffers from deep imbalances, with a giant, monolithic productive base but a spindly little head; huge lungs to breathe with, but a narrow windpipe which lets in very little air. Only now are we starting to break through a suffocating pall of abstractions, of hypochondria, which until now has formed the ‘disconnect’—if you will—between the means and the ends of what we all hope urban life could be. It’s an extremely difficult task. We have a century and a half of history behind us, from the Albertine Statute onwards, conspiring to quash our initiatives. The dark forces that seek to hold us back are far from vanquished. All the same, we’re beating them! We have optimism, willpower and no shortage of constructive vision on our side.”

  Those last words from the mayor had cheered me up. I was in my car, driving slowly toward the house and taking in a beautiful spring evening freshened by an insistent sirocco breeze. The houses, the trees, even the people, had that clean, slightly immaterial tinge that the wind can lend even to the grayest industrial cities. I drove along Corso Regina Margherita and watched the unusually luminous cityscape that seemed to me like a general forecast of joy. People strode briskly on the sidewalks, though some stood around having avid conversations, gesticulating to one another. I heard laughter. Two kids got in my way on the frontage road, sneering at me. I responded by sticking out my tongue at them. One brat picked a pebble up from the strip and threw it at my windshield. I answered by sounding my horn in a marching rhythm. I asked myself what was motivating me to dig afresh into a past whose footprints, perhaps, truly were disappearing. Would I have been better off joining those forces fighting to give a new face to the city, instead of looking too far back? If I went back to Mayor Bonfante the next day and asked him to give me some task, however modest, that would somehow contribute to the rebirth of Turin, who knows how I might’ve been received . . . You can start close to home, he would’ve told me. Attend your neighborhood committee, ask around, stay informed . . . I bet there’s no shortage of work to be done! Perhaps it would be best after all to continue plumbing the mysteries of the insomnia, the Library, those astounding crimes and that yowling Segre thought he’d heard.

  I saw the Basilica of Our Lady Help of Christians looming to my left, its dome lit by the setting sun. It stood away from the main boulevard, in a sunken piazza at the end of a side street, appearing like a distant theater backdrop. I left the frontage road and turned toward it. This church had been one of the catalysts behind the Library’s expansion. It was in its confessionals—­dedicated to Saint Alphonsus, to Saint Philip, to the Great Mother of God—that invitations were whispered, for the faithful to join the crowd of manuscript-readers as “an act of devotion toward one’s neighbors, a small sacrifice of oneself.” I parked my car near the monument to Saint John Bosco and let myself into the basilica. The place was nearly empty: just a couple of old ladies kneeling before the main altar. In that silence that reeked of wax, where every little soun
d reverberated against the domed ceiling, my footsteps might’ve come from a lumbering colossus: they had a boom of discourtesy. Hands in my pockets, I gazed around as if I’d stumbled into a world completely alien to my usual routine. I was investigating mysteries, and yet the “mystery” that sustains a large part of our national life seemed to me, right then, unworthy of my recognition. I was annoyed simply by its clingy bombasticism. The two faithful old ladies worshipping on their knees were almost insubstantial compared to the statues of martyrs, the blue-and-white Madonnas, the gouged silver hearts, the wax saints in the side chapels, spread out on flower-covered bedding under sarcophaguses of glass. One of the saints, a nun, seemed alive. As I bravely approached her, I got the feeling that her eyes had rolled to meet me with a surly sideward glance.

  I emerged from the church in no great rush, passing the door that led to the Chapel of the Relics, and climbed back into the car. Now I set out for the Little House of Divine Providence. Nothing was left there that spoke of the time when hundreds of people would queue at the entrance to carry out their pious duty as readers and contributors of written matter. Within the sanatorium’s long, bare, prisonlike walls, life had gone back to normal as if nothing strange had ever happened. Moving shadows could be seen through the frosted windowpanes of a bridge that connected the Little House’s two wings. The courtyard gates were already closed. A nun still lingered outside, her arms laden with bedsheets, the last duty she had to do before retiring for the night. I thought of an urban legend that swept through Turin when the victims were piling up at a frightening rate. It was said that the abnormal growth of the Library had forced the sisters to cut back on space for the inmates, to cram them all into fewer rooms, in monstrous amalgamations. In the deepest ward, which the eyes of strangers had never pierced, there lived a tribe of demented giants who were set free at nighttime. They carried out their carnage, then returned at daybreak, appeased . . .

  My mind was flooded with turbid memories, so I decided to cut the detour short and head back to my original route. Coming to the entrance of Via Cigna, at a roundabout where several streets link up, I chanced upon a crowd of people dressed in psychedelic patterns, including some conspicuous youths with long hair and shaggy beards—just like you’d see during the “protest era” thirty years ago. I was curious to know what they were doing. There was an atmosphere of piety; a girl squatted on the ground with a guitar in her lap and sang, backing up her vocals with scattered chords. The tune brought to mind some ancient litany. I parked my car at Corso Valdocco and walked down. Mixed in with the young people were adults who were dressed just as queerly. A woman draped in a turquoise sari waved at me and smiled. I responded to her greeting mechanically, and only when I looked at her better, after she’d already turned sideways, did I recognize her as Bergesio’s sister. While a young man handed out pamphlets, the group of demonstrators made a half circle in front of a monument surrounded by an ornamental garden. They danced and tossed flowers at the lawn with nimble gestures. Pricking my ears to what the young woman was chanting so monotonously, I caught the following:

  Here at Rondò Della Forca,

  Here, at the “roundabout of the gibbet”

  A kindly figure returns:

  The Patron Saint of the Hanged,

  To remind us that human justice

  Is ever in need of Christ’s mercy.

  The meaning of this ritual wasn’t very clear to me. An old man robed in sackcloth who had the air of a biblical patriarch raised his arms toward the monument as if imploring passersby to look at it. Now and again he lowered his head and joined his hands in a gesture of deep devotion. This was a monument showing the “Gallows-Priest,” Saint Joseph Cafasso, giving comfort to a man sentenced to death—who, with his stunned expression and buckling knees, seemed anything but reassured.

  The girl droned on, “. . . like a perfect scaffold between the domes of Our Lady of Consolation and Our Lady Help of Christians, shine the figures of Saint Cottolengo, Saint John Bosco and Saint Joseph Cafasso, who have rendered the name of Turin illustrious throughout the world.”

  I accepted a pamphlet and quit the gathering. This time I was determined to reach my house. The surprise interlude had left me unsettled. It didn’t seem like the “Patron Saint of the Hanged”—as a historical figure—had really been at the center of all that gracious attention. It was the monument itself, rather, that seemed to attract them. Continuing to drive with one hand, I snuck a peek at the pamphlet. It carried the logo of the Millenarists and was full of urgings and rebukes, written in Italian, French and Spanish. Among the cardinal sins, after “sensuality” and “disbelief,” it mentioned an “inattentiveness” toward “that which seems invisible around us, but is no less worthy of our concern.”

  “Take heed!” it said, among other things. “Unless you repent, unless you pay attention not only to yourself but also to what you mightn’t assume to be yourself, the wrath of God, which can express itself through all things, shall newly smite you down! The ‘Twenty Days of Turin’ were the final warning of the LORD!”

  And in Spanish: “¡Escápate por tu vida! ¡Huya de la ira que a de venir! ¡Ahora, o nunca! ¡Ahora, no más tarde!” (“Run for your life! Flee the wrath that is to come! Now or never! Now, not later!”)

  I crumpled the pamphlet into a ball and flung it out the window.

  Having just returned home, I got the sour feeling that I’d neglected some crucial task on my to-do list. But I couldn’t remember what. I needed to eat dinner, smoke a few cigarettes, listen to Mozart’s Flute Concerto No. 1 in G Major on my record player—in short, unwind—before a burst of memory gave me the sudden solution. I still hadn’t read the book Segre the attorney had lent me! I searched in haste for my copy of Musil’s Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, and at last I found it in the most unthinkable place: under the mattress of my bed! Why exactly had I stuck it there? Did objects have a mind of their own? With a sense of foreboding, I perused the titles in the Contents page: “The Flypaper,” “The Monkey Island,” “Fishermen of the Baltic,” “Inflation” . . . And later, under the heading “Unpleasant Considerations,” I found the subsections: “Black Magic,” “Doors and Doorways,” “Monuments” . . .

  At that point, I stopped. The memory of what I’d seen on the way home compelled me to open the book at page seventy-five. And this is what the Viennese author wrote:

  Of all the peculiarities that monuments can claim, one feature stands out for sheer irony: the strangest thing about ­monuments is they’re not at all noticeable! Nothing in the world is more invisible. Even so, there’s no doubt that they’re made to be seen, nay, to draw attention; but at the same time they have something that makes them, so to speak, waterproof. Your attention will run straight over them like drops of water on oilskin clothing, never pausing for an instant. You can walk along a certain street for months and know every address, every window, every beat officer, not escaping even the frequency of fallen pennies on the sidewalk; but you’ll inevitably be very surprised if, one fine day, ogling a winsome female servant as she looks out from the first floor, you find a memorial stone of considerable proportions, on which it’s chiseled—in indelible letters—that THIS HOUSE, FROM 1800 TO 1800-AND-A-BIT, was the home and workplace of the unforgettable WHOEVER-HE-WAS . . .

  Was this the passage that, according to Segre, was supposed to fire up my curiosity? I read the rest of Musil’s “posthumous pages,” but found nothing better to enlighten me. I imagined the attorney’s sarcastic gaze while I pondered what to ask him. Who could guess how many things he knew but didn’t want to tell me! I had a wish to ring him up, but I was too tired, too muddleheaded, to continue a conversation whose nature, by this hour, seemed more burdensome to me than it was enticing. I went to sleep.

  Late in the night, the telephone rang. I reeled to pick up the receiver—“Yes? Hello?”—but no one answered at the other end. Thieves, maybe. Thieves who hoped I wasn’t home so they could come and rob me.

  I ough
t to get the locks upgraded, I thought, going back to bed.

  VI.

  AN INTERLUDE

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, A Sunday, a friend I hadn’t seen for ten years cropped up at my front door. I gave an “Oh!” of wonderment when I found him at the threshold, just as I’d remembered him: the same rosy complexion on his slightly childlike face, the same superfine blond hair, the same waggish blue eyes always seeking some occasion to sparkle with a well-timed joke. And this was an occasion indeed! He’d asked for it, coming to visit me like a meteorite, without a note of warning, which perfectly suited his harlequin ways. He was, after all, a Venetian who spent half his life thinking up funny stories just to tell other people and measuring how long it took for variations to reach his ears.

  Eugenio Ballarin—so my friend was called—made his living as a flautist with the Teatro La Fenice symphony orchestra. Thanks to him, I’d learned the musical basics that allowed me to become an amateur recorder player—which, as yet, I remain. Ballarin had already passed two days in Turin. But as for whoever phoned me the night before, he denied any involvement. That would’ve taken all the fun out of his surprise visit: Didn’t I understand?

  His singsong Venetian accent couldn’t have come at a better time. I loved listening to him describe how he’d spent his last two days in the city: a jumble of details involving our own Teatro Regio, where he was scheduled to perform solo next season, along with some spicy comments about a songstress he’d become acquainted with. “Why—oh, why—don’t you ever come to Venice?” he asked me as we sat in my study. I told him that I fully planned to make a visit once I’d resolved some minor business here in Turin. My friend pulled faces. He didn’t believe me: I’d aired the idea of abandoning my city too many times already. If I hadn’t been successful ten years earlier, when I’d tried to hightail it out of fear, then there was no chance of managing now. I was anchored here until my death! I think I turned pale when I heard his merciless judgment. Perhaps Ballarin noticed, because he broke away from that subject and suggested that we go out for lunch to Maddalena Hill.