Absurdly, Rodolfo found himself defending the very position he had repeatedly attacked in Ugo’s seminars.
‘You’re confusing the etymology, Dad. The Latin prefix “semi” is derived from the Sanskrit sami, meaning a half or part, whereas semiotics is from the Greek semeion, a sign. It means the study of signs.’
‘Like road signs?’
‘Well, it’s a bit more complex than that. Rightly considered, everything’s a sign.’
There was a resonant thud.
‘This isn’t a sign. It’s a damned table, for the love of God!’
Rodolfo instantly saw the massive scored and scorched surface, as though it were standing before him. But he had been trained by masters.
‘In itself, it’s nothing. Now that you’ve so designated it, then its signifier is indeed “a table” for the purposes of this text.’
‘What do you mean, it’s nothing?’
His father’s voice had now taken on an edge of rage which Rodolfo found only too familiar.
‘I built this bugger with my own hands from timbers I pulled out of the house where I was born! Hard, seasoned holm oak, at least four hundred years old. Christ, I could hardly cut or plane it even with the most powerful equipment. And you’re telling me that it’s nothing?’
‘No word or other sign has any meaning except within the context of a specified discourse. That table is evidently laden with significance for you, given its physical sourcing in the construction material of your natal home, the notion of “the family board”, and by extension the altar in church where communion is taken. But none of these intrinsically or necessarily adhere to the physical object you just struck. Surely that’s obvious.’
His father sighed.
‘All I know is that I built this table, and that my construction company now builds walls, bridges, roads, office blocks, apartment buildings, you name it. They either stay up or they fall down.’
‘That’s not the point. If someone says “This book’s really good”, they’re not referring to an object that weighs so much and is such and such a size. They’re talking about the text, the discourse, and the infinite variety of possible interpretations that it offers.’
‘You and your damn books!’
There was a dry click as the receiver went down.
You and your damn books. Rodolfo surveyed the crowded shelves on his bedroom wall. Yeah well, they were going to have to go. Flavia too, for that matter. Might as well make a clean break. Apart from anything else, his father would go berserk if he learned that his only son had not only been expelled from university but was virtually living with an illegal immigrant from an eastern European country that no one had ever heard of, and whose real name almost certainly wasn’t Flavia.
Which just left Ugo. Ideally he would have liked to draw a line there too, but couldn’t imagine how it could be done. He began lifting the heavy volumes down and stacking them on the bedside table. As he pulled out Umberto Eco’s La struttura assente, he noticed a dull metallic gleam peeking out from behind the next book on the shelf. He gazed at it for a moment, then reached in and removed a semi-automatic pistol. The wooden grip sported an elaborate metallic crest surmounted by a large red star, and the words ‘Tony Speranza’ were engraved on the barrel.
13
The door banged open and her supervisor walked in.
‘So this is where you’ve been hiding!’
‘I’m not hiding,’ Flavia replied calmly. ‘I’m putting away the equipment. My work is over.’
The balding gnome stared at her maliciously. He was sweating, and the array of pores on his nose resembled the backside of a bad cep. Conscious of the unearned superiority afforded by her looks and stature, Flavia felt a certain disinterested pity for him, although she would have killed him without a thought if the need had arisen.
‘No it’s not! The construction crew just finished putting up the set in B1, but everything’s filthy, the event’s at ten tomorrow morning and all the other girls have gone home.’
He put his head in his hands and sighed deeply.
‘God, the day I’ve had! At the very last minute they decide to hold this stupid event, and guess who has to organise everything on less than twenty-four hours’ notice? I managed to beg, borrow or steal the stoves, pans and all the rest of it from the exhibitors here, but then the stoves had to be hooked up and the whole fucking set constructed from scratch in less than eight hours. I’ve been going mad! Anyway, it’s all done now, but the place is a total mess and we’ll have the TV crew in here at crack of dawn tomorrow to set up. So get your illegal arse out there right now,’ he snapped, stomping out, ‘or I’ll have it shipped back to wherever the hell it came from.’
Ruritania, she thought. I am the Princess Flavia, and mine is a Ruritanian arse.
She stacked her mop, pail, rags, bottles of cleanser and other equipment on to the trolley, and pushed it and the vacuum cleaner out into the vast arena, its ceiling festooned with an intricate mass of yellow piping like a giant molecular model. Another half-kilometre past stands displaying every kind of food, wine and kitchen equipment brought her to the double doors of hall B1. She shoved the door open with her Ruritanian arse, moved the gear inside and then turned to survey the extent of the task before her.
Any lingering feelings of self-pity and indignation instantly left her. The vast space was in darkness except for the brilliantly lit stage area, where two kitchens had been constructed, one on each side, with a fake dining room walled off between them. Flavia was instantly enchanted. It looked like a full-sized version of the doll’s house she had played with as a child, before that and all the other family possessions, and indeed the family itself, had been dispersed. She had named it the House of Joy, and then transferred that epithet to the state orphanage to which she had later been sent, as if the concrete walls of that formidable institution could also be folded back and its roof lifted off to reveal a multitude of nooks and crannies where all manner of secrets could be kept accessible but safely out of sight. The memory of the books she had read so many times that she had them by heart, for example. As soon as she discovered the Italian text of one of them at a market stall in Trieste, she realised that it was a key that would unlock this odd dialect of her own sweet tongue. In the event, it had also served as the go-between in her introduction to Rodolfo.
It was, he had told her later, the first time he had ever set foot in La Carrozza, and he had only done so that evening because it had started pouring down with rain, and he was recovering from a bad cold. The arcades had protected him so far, but the next stage of his journey home was in the open and he would have got drenched to the skin if he had continued. Since there was nowhere else free, he had asked the young woman seated alone, who had finished her meal and was reading a book, if she would mind his joining her. The pizzeria was a no-nonsense establishment where questions like this were a mere polite formality, and Flavia had murmured agreement and waved to the empty chair without even looking up. Rodolfo had ordered some olive ascolane and a beer. Flavia was sitting over a cup of mediocre coffee, laboriously picking her way through the battered paperback garishly emblazoned with the title Il Prigioniero di Zenda.
‘Excuse my asking,’ the young man had said at length, ‘but what are you reading?’
‘I am learning Italian,’ she’d replied. ‘This is my textbook.’