The vendor explained to me that they were testicles: dog, cat, rooster, and some other beast, complete with kidneys and the rest. "Take a look, its all from a scientific laboratory from the nineteenth century. Forty thousand apiece. The containers alone are worth twice that, this stuff is at least a hundred and fifty years old. Four times four is sixteen, Ill give you all four for a hundred and twenty. A bargain."
Those testicles fascinated me. For once, here was something I was not supposed to know about through my semantic memory, nor did it have anything to do with my personal history. Who has ever seen dog testicles in their pure state-I mean, without the dog attached? I rummaged around in my pockets. I had a total of forty thousand, and its not as though a street vendor is going to take a check.
"Ill take the dog ones."
"A mistake to leave the others, you wont get that chance again."
You cannot have everything. I went back home with my dog balls and Paola blanched: "Theyre curious, they really do look like a work of art, but where will we keep them? In the living room, so that every time you offer guests some cashews or some Ascoli olives they can vomit on our carpet? In the bedroom? I think not. You can keep them in your studio, perhaps next to some lovely seventeenth-century book on the natural sciences."
"I thought it was a real find."
"Do you know youre the only man in the world, the only man on the face of the earth from Adam up to now, who when his wife sends him out to buy roses comes home with a pair of dog balls?"
"If nothing else, thats something for the Guinness book of records. And besides, you know, Im a sick man."
"Excuses. You were crazy even before. It was no accident that you asked your sister for a platypus. Once you wanted to bring home a 1960s pinball machine that cost as much as a Matisse painting and made a hellish racket."
But Paola knew that street market already. Indeed, she said I should have known it too: once I found a first edition of Papinis Gog there, original covers, uncut, for ten thousand lire. And so the next Sunday she wanted to go with me: you never know, she said, you might come home with some dinosaur testicles and well have to call a mason to widen the doorway to get them inside.
Stamps and telephone cards did not arouse my interest, but the old newspapers did. Stuff from our childhood, Paola said. "Then forget it," I said. But at a certain point I saw a Mickey Mouse comic book. I picked it up instinctively. It could not have been really old-a 1970s reprint, judging from the back cover and the price. I opened it to the middle: "Its not an original, because those were printed in two colors, with shading from brick red to brown, and this one is printed in white and blue."
"How do you know that?"
"I dont know, I just do."
"But the cover is a reproduction of the original cover. Look at the date and the price: 1936; one and a half lire."
Clarabelles Treasure: the title jumped out from a colorful background. "And they got the wrong tree," I said. "What do you mean?" I flipped quickly through the pages and immediately found the right panels. But it was as if I did not feel like reading what was written in the balloons-as if it were written in some other language or the letters had all been smeared together. Instead I told the story from memory.
"You see, Mickey Mouse and Horace Horsecollar, taking an old map, went in search of a treasure that had been buried by Clarabelle Cows grandfather or great-uncle, and theyre racing against the slimy Eli Squinch and the treacherous Peg-Leg Pete. They come to the place and consult the map. Theyre supposed to start from a big tree, make a line to a smaller tree, then triangulate. They dig and dig but find nothing. Until Mickey has a flash of inspiration: the map is from 1863, more than seventy years have passed, this little tree couldnt possibly have existed at that time, so the tree that now appears big must have been the little one then, and the big one must have fallen, but may have left traces. And indeed they look and look, find a piece of the old trunk, redo the triangulation, start digging again, and there it is, exactly in that spot, the treasure."
"But how do you know all that?"
"Doesnt everyone?"
"No, everyone does not," said Paola, excited. "That isnt semantic memory, thats autobiographical memory. Youre remembering something that made an impression on you as a child! And this cover sparked it."
"No, not the image. If anything the name, Clarabelle." "Rosebud."
Of course we bought the comic book. I spent the evening with that story but got nothing more from it. I knew it, and it was all there, but no mysterious flame.
"Ill never come out of this, Paola. Ill never enter the cavern."
"But you suddenly remembered that business about the two trees."
"Proust at least remembered three. Paper, paper, like all the books in this apartment, or those in my studio. My memory is made of paper."
"Use the paper, then, since madeleines dont tell you anything. So youre not Proust, fine. Zasetsky wasnt either."
"What name, fair lady?"
"I had almost forgotten about him; Gratarolo reminded me. In my line of work I couldnt have helped reading The Man with a Shattered World , a classic case. But I read it a long time ago, and for academic reasons. Today I reread it with a personal interest, its a delicious little book you can skim in a couple of hours. In it, Luria, the great Russian psychologist, presents the case of this man Zasetsky, who during the last world war was hit with a piece of shrapnel that damaged the left occipitoparietal region of his brain. He wakes up, as you did, but in a terrible chaos. He isnt even able to discern the position of his body in space. He sometimes thinks certain of his body parts have changed- that his head has become inordinately large, that his torso is incredibly small, that his legs have moved onto his head."
"That doesnt seem much like my case. Legs on his head? And his penis in place of his nose?"
"Hang on. Never mind about the legs on the head, that happened only occasionally. The worst thing was his memory. Reduced to shreds, as if it had been pulverized-much worse than yours. Like you, he couldnt remember where he was born or the name of his mother-but he could no longer even read or write. Luria begins observing him. Zasetsky has an iron will and relearns how to read and write, and he writes and writes. For twenty-five years he records not only everything he disinters from the devastated caverns of his memory but also everything that happens to him day by day. It was as if his hand, with its automatisms, was able to put in order what his head couldnt. Which is like saying that what he wrote was more intelligent than he was. And thus, on paper, he gradually rediscovered himself. Youre not him, but what struck me is that he reconstructed for himself a memory made of paper. And it took him twenty-five years. You already have plenty of paper here, but evidently it isnt the right paper. Your cavern is in the country house. Ive given it a lot of thought in recent days, you know. All the papers of your childhood and your adolescence-you locked them away too abruptly. Maybe something there will hit home for you. So now, please do me the great favor of going to Solara. Alone, because for one thing I cant get away from work, and for another this is something, as I see it, that you have do by yourself. Just you and your distant past. Stay as long as you need to and see what happens. Youll lose a week at most, maybe two, and youll get some good air, which wont hurt a bit. Ive already phoned Amalia."
"And whos Amalia-Zasetskys wife?"
"Yes, his grandmother. I didnt tell you quite everything about Solara. In your grandfathers time there were tenant farmers, Tommaso, who went by Masulu, and Maria, because in those days the house had quite a bit of land around it, mostly vineyards, and a fair amount of livestock. Maria watched you grow up and loved you with all her heart. As did Amalia, her daughter, whos about ten years older than you and who played the role of your big sister, nanny, everything. You were her idol. When your aunt and uncle sold the lands, including the farm on the hill, there was still a small vineyard left, and the fruit orchard, vegetable garden, pigsty, rabbit hutch, and henhouse. It no longer made sense to speak of tenant terming, so you just left it all to Masulu to use as he liked, with the proviso that his family would take care of the house. Eventually Masulu and Maria passed on, too, and because Amalia never married-she was never a great beauty-shes still there, selling her eggs and chickens in town, the pork butcher comes by when the time is right to kill the pig for her, some cousins help her apply the Bordeaux mixture to the vines and harvest her small crop of grapes; in short, shes content, except she feels a little lonely, so shes happy when the girls visit with the little ones. We pay her for any eggs, chickens, or salami we consume, for fruit and vegetables theres no charge-she says they belong to us. Shes a gem, and youll see what a cook she is. When she heard you might come, she was beside herself-Signorino Yambo this, Signorino Yambo that, how wonderful, youll see, his illness will disappear when I fix him that salad he likes"