Signor Dido

by Alberto Savinio

  The German soldier is so close to the window that his white face touches the glass. His lips are moving, but Signor Dido does not hear anything.

  The German’s hand, as white as his face, makes a sign for him to open. Signor Dido opens the middle rectangle.

  “Gut mornink,” says the German.

  “Good morning,” Signor Dido replies from bed. “What brings you to these parts?”

  “These parts? I never left these parts.”

  “Oh, come on!” Signor Dido rather sighs than says out loud.

  “Never left,” repeats the German, “and now your picture is returned to you.”

  “My picture?”

  “The Roman Empire.”

  At that name, a light went on in Signor Dido’s mind.

  In September of Forty-three, when Signor Dido had had to abandon his country house in all haste, because the Germans were camped in his garden and, under the pretext of taking water from the pump and washing their clothes, wandered through the house day and night, he had left the house as it was: furniture, linens, crockery; and six pictures on the walls besides, painted by himself.

  Each of the six pictures had its title: Hector and Andromache, Crete, Orpheus, Vera, Holy Friday, The Roman Empire.

  Except for Vera, which was the portrait of Vera Cacciatore Signorelli,1 they were all pictures with stories.

  Nowadays they say, “Painting is not literature.” But Signor Dido lets them talk, and goes on calmly and faithfully painting pictures suggested to him by his fantasy.

  Orpheus portrayed a man who had a lyre in place of a head. In Holy Friday an enormous black hammer crashed down on the floor of a church filled with vesperal shadow. The picture entitled Crete showed the Minotaur clutching the labyrinth to his breast. In Hector and Andromache the Trojan hero said good-bye to his wife, and though he knew he would lose his hide in the duel with Achilles, revealed in his smile a wall of equine teeth between two protruding lips, formed by four castor oil capsules, two above and two below, reddened with carmine.

  Then, in the summer of Forty-five, when Signor Dido went back to his country house, he found amidst the rubble the punctured, scorched remains of five of his pictures, but of The Roman Empire, which was the biggest of all, and hung alone on the far wall of the living room, he found no trace.

  The surviving pictures, restored as well as possible, Signor Dido had hung back on the walls, like so many relics. The sixth relic was missing.

  “Are you looking for your picture The Roman Empire?” asked the German.

  Signor Dido nodded.

  The German told the following story:

  The German soldiers hardly looked at the other pictures that hung on the walls. But the picture that bore the title of The Roman Empire, plainly visible on a little card attached to the frame, struck the German soldiers so much that they took it down from the wall and carried it to their house in the garden.

  Has Signor Dido seen that big hole in the middle of the garden? That was the underground shelter that the German soldiers had dug for themselves in the depths of the earth, to hide at night from the shells that the American negroes rained down on them from the other side of the Cinquale. Until one night a shell fell directly on the house and . . .

  The Roman Empire was the most beautiful ornament of the house. In the evening, before going to sleep, by the metallic light of acetylene, the German soldiers, wrapped up in their blankets, nearly split their sides laughing at that mounted Roman emperor with a calf’s head, and those togaed senators, some with the heads of buzzards, some with the heads of bulldogs, some with the heads of hyenas.

  “That comical image of your old Roman empire strengthened our faith in the great Germanic empire, which our Hitler was extending across Europe.”

  Signor Dido protested:

  “I didn’t make those animal-headed figures with any satirical intention. Quite the contrary: it’s a psychological accentuation.”

  The German fixed on Signor Dido a blond gaze, which, though meant to be shrewd, was even more porcine than usual.

  “Oh, sie, Spassmacher!”2

  Signor Dido was about to press home his own arguments; but he thought: “The art critics themselves don’t understand the meaning of these hybrid figures of mine; how should they be understood by this German soldier, night-bound, white as the bark of a poplar?”

  “Basta!” snapped the German. “All finished now. Great German empire kaput. Oh, not because Germany lose the war: for cheocraphic reasons. Germany strong, when Germany was heart of Europe and Europe center of the world. Now that Europe no more center of the world . . .”

  The soldier turned towards the back of the garden and fired a sort of command into the darkness: “Los, Jungens! Bringt das Bild von Herrn Dido her!”3

  Four white tree trunks emerged from the darkness carrying The Roman Empire, two on one side and two on the other.

  Signor Dido opened the French window. The four Germans, preceded by the one who had spoken, and who had the rank of corporal, brought the picture into the living room and hung it from the hook that was still there in the middle of the wall.

  Unlike the other “casualties of war,” The Roman Empire was intact.

  The five Germans clicked their heels, saluted militarily, and went back into the night.

  Anyone else would have been robbed of sleep by an adventure of that sort. Signor Dido fell back to sleep at once.

  In the morning Signor Dido is awakened by the daylight. On the far wall there is no trace of the picture entitled The Roman Empire.

  Signor Dido has a little bitch to whom, in spite of her sex, he has given the name of Puck. These days Puck is in such a condition that all the dogs of the neighborhood have surrounded Signor Dido’s house.

  Signor Dido puts the leash on Puck, and they go out together to take a turn around the garden.

  They stop in front of the hole.

  Puck scratches the dirt with her paws, growls, pulls at the leash.

  What are these five trees that rise up tall around the hole? They look like poplars, but are not poplars: their trunks are whiter, slenderer; and the leaves up above, rather than green on one side and silvery on the other, are strangely flesh-colored.

  Are these the five extra trees Signora Dido found?

  Signor Dido takes out a pocketknife, presses the blade against the bark.

  Puck gives a tug at the leash and runs off squealing.

  The leaves of the tree shudder slightly. As if from pain.

  A Villa in Rapallo

  HERE WE ARE IN RAPALLO FOR THE THIRD time in the space of a few weeks.

  The second time was in early August and in full Amphitryonic fervor. This third time summer is going through une seconde jeunesse,1 its fervor slightly cooled and already gilded by autumn.

  The first time was around the twentieth of June. Rapallo was ready for action and very well supplied: it was awaiting the army of bathers.

  Maître d’s in tails and waiters in white jackets stood at attention behind ranks of spotless and deserted tables. The parterres were tilled. The flowerbeds were raked. The meadows were glittering with the best gifts of Flora. The shops were sparkling. The concierges on the doorsteps of the hôtels were prepared to start bowing. The furniture was polished, the curtains were variegated, maids in white crests stood watch, already set in that smile which is an irresistible refutation of the law of the fixed price.

  Directors and managers, eyes to their telescopes, scanned the horizon.

  Where was the army of bathers?

  The fascination of waiting also took hold of me. I also waited. For three days I waited. But at the end of the third day I said to myself: “Who is making you do this?”

  Then I remembered that my friend Pilade, the last time I saw him in Milan, had said to me: “If you pass through Rapallo, go to my villa. Your room is waiting for you. I’ve alerted Ido.”

  “Who is Ido?”

  “The caretaker.”

  I sent the little car up a
steep road, and after a dozen curves stopped at a gate.

  Had I missed the way?

  At the top of two columns, two terracotta dogs perpetuated the image of vigilance and loyalty.

  Ido was about to take my suitcase.

  I stopped him: “No. I’ll just have a quick look at the engineer’s collection of paintings and leave at once. Go on with your gardening. I’ll manage by myself.”

  I went into the villa.

  At that same instant, sixty years of life fell from my shoulders. I found myself a baby again. Smaller than a baby: a newborn. But I saw and reasoned as I see and reason now.

  I easily became accustomed to the darkness preserved by the closed blinds, the locked shutters, the drawn curtains. To me, a child, that darkness was familiar. It was the darkness that lends poetry to a house, that protects it from the enemy sun. From the front hall a big stairway with a red runner opened out like an immense fan, flanked by curving banisters.

  On reaching the upper floor, I opened a door.

  A bedroom, obviously. Thick bed-curtains spilled down from a canopy; in a corner shone one of those big oval mirrors to which the French have given the name of Amor’s lover: Psyché.

  I was about to close the door again: a voice stopped me.

  “Don’t go away.”

  Beyond the bed I made out an armchair with enormous spiral ears. In the armchair something stirred.

  The voice added:

  “Sit down, please. We’ll have a chat.”

  On the right side of the form that had spoken, a sort of arm moved to point me to the offered seat. This seat was half of an immense shell, held up by four arched dolphins, heads on the floor and tails on high.

  “Are you a friend of the engineer’s?”

  “We’ve never met. When the engineer comes to Rapallo, I hide in the cellar. The engineer loves the modern. He bought this villa a couple of years ago, because he could have it at a modest price. I’m afraid that one day or other he’ll throw out the furniture, scrape off the decorations, change everything. Then I’ll have to find other lodgings.”

  Seeing him sunk so deeply in the armchair, I had taken him for a paralytic.

  “So you can move?”

  “Move? Why, I am movement personified.”

  He added more gently: “Ideal movement.”

  The strange personage rose from the chair: to put it better, he loosed upwards the curves, twists, ellipses, spirals, falling petals which together made up his vaguely anthropomorphic shape.

  He went on:

  “Men love movement. To put it better, they feel the universal movement and, in various ways, strive to honor it.

  “Not always. Sometimes, distracted from natural life by various thoughts, man does not feel movement. So it was at the moment of the mosaics of Ravenna. The Renaissance could as well be called the Resuming of Contact with Movement.

  “One must distinguish, however, between the intellectual representation of movement and direct participation in movement: the first is a form worthy of the intellectual animal known as man; the second is the activity of the stupid.

  “The contemplation of movement in its various representations in the Victory of Samothrace, in the twining pictures of Rubens, in the corkscrew meters of Shakespeare, in the egg-whisk sculptures of Bernini, in the flourishes and cadenzas of musicians, while remaining at rest oneself, is for elegant and wise men.

  “Thus one arrives at the Baroque, a most elegant and wise period, in which everything around man—buildings, furniture, art, decoration—is the representation of movement; one arrives at the florid, which, with its volutes, its spirals, its ellipses, was also a grand representation of movement around man at rest because the florid style, as you know, coincides with the acme of capitalist economy, which, for those who benefitted from that economy, was a perfect condition of elegance and wisdom.”

  I was about to contradict the theories of this strange personage; his verbal outpouring prevented me.

  “Here we are on the Riviera,” he continued. “In one of the paradises of the rentiers.2 Look around: it’s all still florid.”

  He was silent for a moment, then went on more gravely:

  “And now? . . . Men, now, are neither elegant nor wise. They do not content themselves with contemplating representations of movement: they participate in movement themselves, and keep running faster and faster.

  “The result? The more a man runs, the more his brain stands still. Never has the world around the running man been so flat, so still, so stupid as now.”

  After all, I thought, this unlikely personage reasons rather well.

  But who is he?

  “I am Mister Liberty.3 The elder of the Liberty brothers.”

  “And from England you’ve turned up here on the Ligurian Riviera?”

  “I find myself at home here. It’s the last refuge of liberty.”

  “And your brother?”

  “He’s here, too. Didn’t you see him? He’ll be on the floor below.”

  I said good-bye to the elder of the Liberties and went downstairs.

  As I passed through the living room, I glimpsed, lying on a bergère that formed an enormous petal, a spiral-shaped personage in every way similar to the personage with whom I had spoken on the floor above.

  He was asleep.

  Contemplating the representations of movement does not suit me after all. I prefer to move myself. I don’t want to be either elegant or wise.

  And I went out on tiptoe.

  The Health Spa

  THIS PAST JULY, SIGNOR AND SIGNORA Dido spent ten days at a famous health spa in the Dolomites.

  A step up in the social life of Signor and Signora Dido.

  One day, on the main street of the famous health spa, Signor Dido ran into Count P. Signor Dido praised the amenity of the place, the majesty of the mountains.

  “We arrived an hour ago by car,” said Count P. “We’re stopping here for lunch and then we go on to Austria. We come here in the winter. To ski.”

  Signor Dido did not bat an eye, but a few analogies flashed through his mind: the difference between coming in the summer to a health spa in the Dolomites and coming in the winter to ski; the difference between swimming from a sandy beach and swimming off the rocks; the difference between hearing the Passion According to Saint Matthew sung in Italian and hearing it sung in German.

  Signora Dido balks at the widespread custom of sending picture postcards to friends from places one happens to be passing through. Nevertheless, having arrived in the famous health spa in the Dolomites, Signora Dido bought many picture postcards, wrote greetings on them, signed them, and sent them to even the most distant and forgotten of her friends.

  A few days later, Signora Dido received a picture postcard in her turn. It was from one of her distant acquaintances, a woman of modest circumstances. “Big kisses” was written on it, and it came from a health spa in the Dolomites no less famous than the one in which Signora Dido found herself.

  An exhibition of paintings opened in the famous health spa.

  Signor Dido went to see it. A few figure paintings, a few landscapes, many abstract paintings.

  Signor Dido thought: “What is this phenomenon? For the Italian man, life is form. The Italian man knows that at the sounding of the sacred trumpets he will find himself back in his own body, and dressed in that body he will present himself before the judgment seat of God. So Luca Signorelli shows it in his fresco in the Duomo of Orvieto,1 so Virgil says to Dante after Ciacco has finished speaking:

  He will take back again his flesh and form.2

  “Do Italian painters, then, no longer believe in the resurrection of the flesh? Has a revolution gone on in the heads of Italian painters similar to that which, more than four centuries ago, went on in the head of Doctor Luther? And what signs, apart from these straight lines, these curved lines, these spirals, these variously colored discs, attest to the actual occurrence of this revolution?”

  Signor Dido did not answer
his own questions. He just said, “Drop it.” So he hears men, women, and children say as they pass by under his ground-floor window in Rome.3

  Signor Dido is an expert in intellectual matters. He can distinguish by smell an intellectual expression moved by profound motives from an intellectual expression moved by nonprofound motives.

  Drop it.

  As Signor Dido passed and repassed in front of these straight lines, these curves, these spirals, these variously colored discs, he happened to cross paths several times with a woman of lofty stature and even loftier bearing.

  And this woman was not abstract.

  Or not entirely. In her eyes, slightly slanting like the eyes of the Sphinx, there was that touch of the abstract that one finds in the look that looks beyond things.

  How did it happen?

  A group formed. Mutual acquaintances got to work. Signor Dido was introduced to the woman with slanting eyes.

  We are creatures of flesh and blood, and at the same time shades. In the woman with slanting eyes, Signor Dido recovered a piece of his own past.

  Between 1916 and 1917. Thirty-four years ago. The woman with slanting eyes may not have come into the world yet, but her father was in the world: a famous psychiatrist who at that time, as a colonel in the medical corps, headed a military hospital some ten kilometers from Ferrara.

  A big, dilapidated building known as the Seminary, from its former function as a school for priests. Hemp fields smoked all around it.

  Art historians say that so-called metaphysical painting was born in that building.4

  They are mistaken.

  Signor Dido has other memories of the Seminary.

  He remembers that soldier sheltered in the basement, who did not walk but advanced by sudden leaps, who did not talk but uttered brief, rolling cries like the gobbling of a turkey. His punctured head had been fitted with a black skullcap.

  He remembers that lieutenant locked up in a little room on the ground floor, who shouted through the door to be let out. No, he wouldn’t go looking for drugs. He was cured now. What? Can’t they see he’s cured?